John Arbuthnot Spanish Succession. The war had profited John and Sarah Churchill, and the Tory ministry sought to end it by withdrawing from all England's alliances and negotiating directly with France. Swift wrote "The Conduct of the Allies," and Arbuthnot wrote a series of five pamphlets featuring John Bull. The first of these, "Law Is a Bottomless Pit" (1712), introduced a simple allegory to explain the war. John Bull (England) is suing Louis Baboon (i.e. Louis Bourbon, or Louis XIV of France) over the estate of the dead Lord Strutt (Charles II of Spain). Bull's lawyer is the one who really enjoys
John Arbuthnot awarded the doctorate. He first wrote satire in 1697, when he answered Dr John Woodward's "An essay towards a natural history of the earth and terrestrial bodies, especially minerals..." with "An Examination of Dr Woodward's Account &c." He poked fun at the arrogance of the work and Woodward's misguided, Aristotelian insistence that what is theoretically attractive must be actually true. In 1701, Arbuthnot wrote another mathematical work, "An essay on the usefulness of mathematical learning, in a letter from a gentleman in the city to his friend in Oxford." The work was moderately successful, and Arbuthnot praises mathematics as a