Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics

Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics Jesse Norman Longlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction; both conservative and subversive, Burke’s beliefs have never been more relevant, as MP Jesse Norman explains.Philosopher, statesman, and founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke is both the greatest and most under-rated political thinker of the past three-hundred years. Born in Ireland in 1729, and greatly affected by its bigotry and extremes, his career constituted a lifelong struggle against the abuse of power.Amid the 18th century’s golden generation that included his companions Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon, Burke’s controversial mixture of conservative and subversive theories made him first a marginal figure, and finally a revered theorist – a hero of the Romantics. He warned of the effects of British rule in Ireland, the loss of the American colonies, and most famously, he foresaw the disastrous consequences of revolution in France. This he predicted, would trigger extremism, terror and the atomisation of society – a profound analysis that continues to resonate today.In this absorbing new biography Conservative MP Jesse Norman gives us Burke anew, vividly depicting his dazzling intellect, imagination and empathy against the rich tapestry of 18th century Europe. Burke’s wisdom, Norman shows, applies well beyond the times of empire to the conventional democratic politics practised in Britain and America today. We cannot understand the defects of the modern world, or modern politics, without him. EDMUND BURKE The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics JESSE NORMAN Contents Cover (#ucfade81f-176b-5595-8567-8c73fbd3e1a4) Title Page (#u6ea50fb6-830c-577c-9ef9-5406743ffb0f) List of Illustrations (#u2566e4e4-5506-5f9f-aea4-7b48023499c3) Introduction (#ucc7ecab6-9e48-5223-8c6b-591b7bdf055b) PART ONE: LIFE (#uf96da8c7-f7a2-5294-8be1-4053f2fed36e) 1. An Irishman Abroad, 1730–1759 (#uf4d9fa59-52b4-5c31-85d3-eb5f83dfec6e) 2. In and Out of Power, 1759–1774 (#u01ded0fc-1667-5e13-b30e-943304877482) 3. Ireland, America and King Mob, 1774–1780 (#u90051724-1905-5e4f-bd4e-d897b4896285) 4. India, Economical Reform and the King’s Madness, 1780–1789 (#litres_trial_promo) 5. Reflecting on Revolution, 1789–1797 (#litres_trial_promo) PART TWO: THOUGHT (#litres_trial_promo) 6. Reputation, Reason and the Enlightenment Project (#litres_trial_promo) 7. The Social Self (#litres_trial_promo) 8. Forging Modern Politics (#litres_trial_promo) 9. The Rise of Liberal Individualism (#litres_trial_promo) 10. The Recovery of Value (#litres_trial_promo) Conclusion: Burke Today (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) List of Illustrations 1 (#ulink_8f782c29-b061-5e20-bc85-b7cd25a9013d): Gin Lane, by William Hogarth, etching and engraving, published 1 February 1751 © The Trustees of the British Museum 2 (#ulink_6d87d322-0b7d-55ed-b598-e6334c951bae): Idol-Worship or the way to preferment, anonymous, etching, 1740 © The Trustees of the British Museum 3 (#ulink_96bbe273-3aad-5989-bec1-5f319a7ae603): A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s, by D. George Thompson, after James William Edmund Doyle, stipple and line engraving, published by Owen Bailey 1 October 1851 © National Portrait Gallery, London 4 (#ulink_e5024ab3-9f1a-509e-9c43-d97eb704fcf4): The House of Commons 1793–94, by Karl Anton Hickel, oil on canvas, 1793–1795 © National Portrait Gallery, London 5 (#ulink_149ce706-9d1d-538e-ad80-d1c0796298e8): Portrait of Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, feigned oval, circa 1768 © National Portrait Gallery, London 6 (#ulink_44075d45-c809-5d95-8720-aaea84c59880): Portrait of John Wilkes, by James Watson, after Robert Edge Pine, mezzotint, published 1764 © National Portrait Gallery, London 7 (#litres_trial_promo): Portrait of Charles James Fox, by Karl Anton Hickel, oil on canvas, 1794 © National Portrait Gallery, London 8 (#litres_trial_promo): Portrait of Edmund Burke, studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, circa 1769 or later © National Portrait Gallery, London 9 (#litres_trial_promo): Map of India in the time of Clive, in Charles Colbeck (ed.), The Public Schools Historical Atlas, Longmans, Green & Co. (London, 1905) 10 (#litres_trial_promo): Concerto coalitionale, by James Sayers, etching, published by Thomas Cornell 7 June 1785 © National Portrait Gallery, London 11 (#litres_trial_promo): The political-banditti assailing the saviour of India, by James Gillray, published by William Holland, hand-coloured etching, published by William Holland 11 May 1786 © The Trustees of the British Museum 12 (#litres_trial_promo): Portrait of Warren Hastings, by John Henry Robinson, after Lemuel Francis Abbott, engraving, 1832 © Getty Images 13 (#litres_trial_promo): A View of the Tryal of Warren Hastings Esqr. before the Court of Peers, in Westminster Hall, by Robert Pollard (etching) and Francis Jukes (aquatint), after Edward Dayes, etching and aquatint, published by Robert Pollard 3 January 1789 © Getty Images 14 (#litres_trial_promo): Smelling out a Rat, by James Gillray, hand-coloured etching, published by Hannah Humphrey 3 December 1790 © The Trustees of the British Museum 15 (#litres_trial_promo): Portrait of Richard Burke, by James Ward, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, mezzotint, published by James Ward 5 July 1800 © National Portrait Gallery, London 16 (#litres_trial_promo): Thoughts on a Regicide Peace, by James Sayers, etching, published by Hannah Humphrey 14 October 1796 © National Portrait Gallery, London 17 (#litres_trial_promo): Promis’d Horrors of the French Invasion, by James Gillray, hand-coloured etching and aquatint, published by Hannah Humphrey 20 October 1796 © National Portrait Gallery, London 18 (#litres_trial_promo): Portrait of Edmund Burke, by James Barry, oil on canvas, circa 1771, reproduced by kind permission from the Board of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Introduction EDMUND BURKE IS BOTH the greatest and the most underrated political thinker of the past 300 years. Born in 1730, he came from an extraordinary period in British history, the age of Samuel Johnson, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and David Hume, all of whom were his friends. Burke was a philosopher-statesman of the first rank, a lifelong campaigner against arbitrary power and injustice, and a fierce champion of fundamental rights and the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. Endlessly lampooned in this, the golden age of caricature, he is nevertheless a figure for the ages. Some understood his greatness at the time: Dr Johnson once remarked that he did not begrudge Burke’s being the first man in the House of Commons, for he would be the first man everywhere. Burke has been all but ignored in recent years, or reduced to a clutch of standard clich?s and soundbites. Yet we cannot understand the defects of the modern world today, or modern politics, without him. He is the first great theorist of political parties and representative government, and the first great modern theorist of totalitarian thought. More widely, he offers a compelling critique of what has become known as liberal individualism, and the idea that human well-being is just a matter of satisfying individual wants. To this he joins a perspective with profound implications for many issues now facing policymakers across the globe, including the rise of religious extremism and terror, the atomization of society and loss of social cohesion, the emergence of the corporate state, challenges to the international rule of law, and the nature of revolution itself. Over his long career Burke fought five great political battles: for more equal treatment of Catholics in Ireland; against British oppression of the thirteen American colonies; for constitutional restraints on executive power and royal patronage; against the corporate power of the East India Company in India; and most famously, against the influence and dogma of the French revolution. Their common theme – the inspiration for what W. B. Yeats described in his poem ‘The Seven Sages’ as Burke’s Great Melody – is his detestation of injustice and the abuse of power. In these battles his record of practical achievement was mixed. He often overreached himself, he rarely exercised real political power, and he was variously denounced as vainglorious, a blowhard and an irrelevance. His private life was blighted by debt, which he was unwilling to relieve by the means of self-enrichment usual for the time. He offended King George III by his severe criticisms of royal influence, and by his support for a regency during the King’s period of madness. A man of enormous personal warmth and good humour, he lost friends and supporters by his near-obsessive insistence on the campaigns of the moment. Yet in intellectual terms the extraordinary fact is not that Burke was occasionally wrong, but that he was so often right. Not only that, he was right for the right reasons – not through luck but because his powers of analysis, imagination and empathy gave him an extraordinary gift of prophecy. Thus he anticipated many of the effects of British rule in Ireland; the loss of the American colonies; the overreach of the East India Company; and the disastrous consequences of revolution in France. Modern conceptions of social capital and human well-being have their proper place within his thought, and his vision of community, free institutions and civic virtue still has profound and unrecognized implications for politicians today. Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, once summarized Disraeli’s life as ‘Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph.’ The same might be said of Edmund Burke. There are many reasons for the recent neglect of Burke. He is not an executive politician, like a Pitt or a Peel, and his story is more one of intellect and imagination than of political achievement. His thought is multifarious and scattered across a vast array of pamphlets, speeches and letters, from which it must be quarried by the patient scholar. He is a master of English prose but remains somewhat alienated from current literary or academic debates, in part because he was a working politician, and so perhaps a victim of the distaste that politics often inspires. And he deliberately withholds himself: as he wrote at the age of sixteen to his best friend Richard Shackleton, ‘We live in a world in which everyone is on the catch, and the only way to be safe is to be silent, silent in any affair of consequence, and I think it would not be a bad rule for every man to keep within what he thinks of others, of himself, and of his own affairs.’ Burke’s speeches, his writings and even his letters are notably short on confidences, gossip or personal colour. This is far removed from the modern confessional style. Moreover, although few more quotable writers have ever existed, Burke himself and his ideas resist brief summary. Even sympathetic readers have seen him as an enigma or a contradiction. They have struggled to understand how he could be both a supporter of the American colonists and a critic of the French revolution; how he could staunchly argue for the established order, yet defend dissenters and Catholics and alienate the Crown; how he could both dismiss abstract rights and insist upon the importance of rights within the rule of law. For their part, his many critics have accused him of incoherence, hypocrisy, even madness. In particular, for Thomas Paine, and then Karl Marx, Burke is a placeman, a paid propagandist and an apologist for aristocracy and privilege. Such claims were echoed in the twentieth century by the influential historian Lewis Namier and his followers, who generally took a narrow and cynical view of Burke’s achievements as a thinker and statesman. Even today, it is striking how much the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, owes intellectually to Burke, even while he belittles Burke’s ideas. Those who attend to Burke’s life often detect inconsistency, because they ignore the deeper consistency of his thought. But on the other side of the argument such has been Burke’s status, especially among conservatives, that his life has regularly been co-opted for political purposes. In the 1830s Disraeli claimed to identify a Tory line of succession including Burke and culminating by implication in himself, only to exclude Burke (and Peel) after he was refused office by Peel in 1841. In the USA, Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were happy to count Burke their ally, as did a generation of anti-communists during the Cold War and again after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And at a far less exalted level, one way to read the present book is as a modern Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs (sic). Burke has been well served by his biographers over the years, including James Prior and John Morley in the nineteenth century; Philip Magnus, Carl Cone, Russell Kirk, Stanley Ayling and Conor Cruise O’Brien in the twentieth; and most recently F. P. Lock. To them the present volume owes an enormous debt of gratitude, and to Lock’s authoritative two-volume study of 1998–2006 in particular. The same is true of the work of many scholars listed in the Acknowledgements, Notes and Bibliography. This book is not a work of primary research, though it incorporates some important recent discoveries. Rather, it is a personal interpretation of Burke’s life and thought, which draws heavily on my own background in philosophy and experience as a working politician. It seeks not merely to present Edmund Burke as a man, and to trace his life against the astonishingly rich tapestry of eighteenth-century society, but to make the case for him as a statesman and thinker. It is short and inevitably selective, and this risks underplaying both conflict and development in Burke’s ideas; but its argument is for a deeper coherence. Somewhat unusually, the book is structured in two parts, Life and Thought, so that the interested reader can enjoy his life for its own sake, and engage with Burke’s thought with the wider context of his life and society already in hand. My hope is to start to do for Edmund Burke what others have done for Adam Smith over the past thirty years: to recognize him publicly as one of the seminal thinkers of the present age. The political theorist Harold Laski once said of Burke: He brought to the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political complexity … He wrote what constitutes the supreme analysis of the statesman’s art. The purpose of this book is to explain how he came to write it, why it is, and why he and it matter today. PART ONE ONE An Irishman Abroad,1730–1759 IN THE YEAR 1729 THERE appeared in the city of Dublin a rather curious publication, by an anonymous author. It did not have the snappiest of titles: A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. But, its title apart, in many ways A Modest Proposal was the prototype of the modern policy pamphlet, of a type familiar from present-day think tanks the world over. The pamphlet proceeded in the most measured language from diagnosis to statistical analysis to policy recommendation. Ireland was then subject to very serious poverty and malnutrition, the author noted. Careful calculation revealed that the number of new births far exceeded the level required to replenish the population. No work existed in handcrafts or agriculture for the mothers, with the result that the traveller to Dublin found: the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants: who as they grow up either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country. But, the author said, there was a ready-made solution, then as often now imported from America: ‘I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.’ Not only were one-year-old children good food; they had other uses as well: ‘Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which artificially dressed will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.’ Jonathan Swift’s pamphlet is one of the most brilliant sustained satires in the English language, a masterpiece of moral indignation which effortlessly ridiculed targets ranging from the new vogue for statistics to contemporary attitudes towards the poor. But the economic and social facts he described have never been questioned. This was, precisely, the Ireland into which Edmund Burke was born, on Arran Quay by the River Liffey in Dublin, on New Year’s Day 1730. Dublin then was a place of extremes, in which enormous wealth coexisted with desperate poverty and, frequently, starvation. Nor were these evils confined to the city. In an essay of 1748, Burke and some friends indignantly described the condition of the rural poor at that time: ‘Money is a stranger to them … as for their food, it is notorious they seldom taste bread or meat; their diet, in summer, is potatoes and sour milk; in winter … they are still worse, living on the same root, made palatable by a little salt, and accompanied by water.’ As for what they wore: ‘their clothes so ragged … nay, it is no uncommon sight to see half a dozen children run quite naked out of a cabin, scarcely distinguishable from a dunghill.’ Fortunately the Burkes themselves lived somewhat more comfortably. Edmund was the third of four surviving children, a sometimes neglected position in a family. It may have been so here, for his brothers Garrett and Richard were eldest and youngest, while his elder sister Juliana was the only girl. The Burkes were likely of Anglo-Norman ‘Old English’ extraction, originally Catholic and not part of the New English ascendancy which took control of Ireland in the seventeenth century. Edmund’s father Richard, probably born in County Cork in the south-west, had long since left the land for the city. He was an attorney, a Protestant and a self-made man who had risen in the law through hard work, described by Edmund’s friend Richard Shackleton as ‘of middling circumstances, fretful temper and punctual honesty’. His wife Mary Nagle was also from County Cork. But otherwise she could hardly have been more different: a Catholic countrywoman from a genteel but much reduced family of landowners. The Nagles were not merely Catholics but Jacobites, who had supported the claims to the throne of James II and his successors after the revolution of 1688, which brought the Protestant William of Orange to the throne as William III. Forty years later most of their land, and much of their dignity, had gone. By the 1720s Ireland was in name a country, indeed a kingdom, but in reality an English dominion. The functions of state were controlled by Protestants, generally Englishmen, and directed from London. Access to education and opportunities for advancement were similarly restricted. Catholics were barred from the professions, from jury service and from exercising the vote. A host of other laws oppressed them, from owning firearms to controls on inheritance and land ownership. Much of their land had been taken over by Protestant nobility and gentry, who were not offset in influence by a class of yeoman farmers as in England. The result was huge inequalities of wealth and well-being, compounding and in turn compounded by religious hatred and political instability. Some have suggested that Richard Burke himself was an apostate, one of many who converted in order to get on. But whether or not it was Richard or one of his forebears who converted, it is evident that Edmund grew up as the product of a marriage mixed not merely by religion but by trajectory and class. He and his brothers Garrett and Richard were raised as Protestants, Juliana as a Catholic. Protestantism, the city and social aspiration, it seemed, belonged to the future; Catholicism and rural life to the past. Loyalties must, then, be divided. This may be one reason why Burke was to develop such an extraordinary moral imagination, able to reach out at once in all directions, to comprehend aristocrat and revolutionary, Catholic and Protestant, underclass and hierarchy alike. Home life was not easy, for Richard Burke appears to have been a man of rigid and unyielding disposition. The will he left at his death is a mass of small-minded bequests and instructions, almost designed to split the estate and set family members against each other. He also had a foul temper. ‘My dear friend Burke leads a very unhappy life from his father’s temper,’ Richard Shackleton reported in 1747. ‘… He must not stir out at night by any means, and if he stays at home there is some new subject for abuse.’ Luckily, here too Mary Burke was quite different from her husband. Little is known about her. But, as scholars have noted, Burke’s references to his mother are always warm and affectionate, to his father never so. In adult life Burke notably combined high principle and personal probity with an open, trusting and generous disposition towards others, though he also knew how to bear a grudge. Without diving too deep into psychological speculation, it is not hard to see his father on the one side, his mother on the other. As a child Burke spent some time recuperating from illness with his Nagle cousins in the Blackwater Valley in County Cork, and studied at a rural ‘hedge school’ in Ballyduff. The Valley was beautiful country, which made a profound impression on him; it may also have laid the foundations for his understanding of Gaelic culture, and his lifelong sympathy with the plight of the Irish Catholics under the penal laws. In May 1741 Edmund, then aged eleven, Garrett (fifteen) and Richard (seven) were sent away to school. Juliana (thirteen) was kept at home with her parents. Edmund had left Dublin previously, to stay with his mother’s family in County Cork and get away from the damp and disease of the city. Now he went for an education. His destination was a small non-denominational boarding school in the village of Ballitore, about thirty miles south-west of Dublin. It was run by Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker and the father of Richard Shackleton, who was to become Burke’s greatest early friend. Abraham Shackleton was a remarkable man, who had taught himself Latin at the age of twenty in order to become a schoolmaster. The curriculum was a traditional one, with a strong emphasis on classical languages and literature, and work was taken seriously. Yet it is clear that Burke quickly settled in, and that Shackleton’s influence was a sympathetic one, as much moral as intellectual. In 1757, when Burke had moved to London and was building an early reputation as a writer, he thanked his former schoolmaster, saying ‘I received the education, that, if I am anything, has made me so.’ Still more strikingly, in a poem on Ballitore, Burke paid generous tribute to the older man: ‘Whose breast all virtues long have made their home / where Courtesy’s stream doth without flattery flow / and the just use of Wealth without the show’. The warmth of these words vividly contrasts with the extant references to Burke’s own father, and there is perhaps even a touch of reproof to his father’s temper in the second line. As a non-denominational school run by Quakers, Ballitore was itself a minor study in contrasts. Its influence on Burke was profound. Not in point of doctrine: the Quakers were dissenters, pacifists and abstainers from alcohol, which Burke never was. But he evidently appreciated the plainspokenness and straight dealing he experienced. The egalitarian ethos of the Quakers may also have left its mark with him in later life: in his support for the underdog, in his lifelong willingness to engage intellectually with others, in his hatred of arbitrary power, in his belief that the social order should benefit all. The mature Burke admired the Quakers’ commitment to good and active citizenship. While he did not share their opposition to religious hierarchy and priesthood, his arguments for the established Church were notably based more on institutional authority than on revelation to the elect. When Burke came to consider the American revolution in the 1770s, its values and history were things to which he was already instinctively sympathetic. In 1744 Burke left Ballitore for Trinity College Dublin. Trinity College was then the only institution of higher learning in Ireland, an avowedly Protestant establishment founded by Elizabeth I in 1592 to train clergy for the Church of Ireland. It was smaller than even the smallest universities today, with between 300 and 500 students, more of them headed into the Church than any other profession. The curriculum, based on the medieval trivium and quadrivium, was divided into ‘humanity’ (Latin and Greek texts) and ‘science’ (including mathematics, astronomy, geography and physics, and finally metaphysics and ethics). There were no facilities for social activities or sports within the college. The average age at entry was sixteen, so that when Burke entered at age fourteen he was among the youngest students in the college. Academically, he performed well but not consistently so. Awarded a scholarship in 1746 after two days of examination on Greek and Latin authors, he was nevertheless ranked only in the top half of the class overall. For assiduity and diligence, he was ranked in the bottom quarter. The reason why is fairly evident: Burke was not happy either at home or at college. Going to Trinity meant, first of all, leaving the Shackletons and returning to the family home, to foul city air and his father’s angry moods. In the classroom, he was younger than his fellows, and obviously bored by the often laborious and pedantic teaching. Matters were made worse by his reliance on his father for financial support, support tied to a legal career which held few attractions for him. Many people make the greatest friendships of their lives at university; of the forty or so of Burke’s contemporaries who we know studied with him for four years, it seems that none became a good friend while there. Burke found his outlets elsewhere, in vast amounts of reading, in friendships outside the classroom, and in writing. His sixty surviving undergraduate letters, all to Richard Shackleton, attest to the breadth of his social and literary interests, as well as to his habit of spending three hours a day in the public library. Burke at this time had been seized by what he called a poetical madness or furor poeticus. He wanted to become a poet, and seems to have made his literary debut with a satirical poem, probably published in 1747. But he was an omnivorous autodidact, and he used his letters to experiment with new ideas and topics and literary forms, as well as in-jokes, banter and self-analysis, with Richard as a private and supportive audience. This instinct for self-improvement also led Burke to play a part in setting up two societies at Trinity. Each combined drinking and conviviality with a serious purpose. The first had four members, and focused on the writing of burlesques or parodies, a very popular genre of the time; the second, named absurdly the Academy of Belles Lettres, had seven members and focused on rhetoric and debate. Neither lasted more than a few months. Both evinced Burke’s lifelong clubbability, as well as a restless ambition to spread his wings. Altogether more serious was the Reformer. This was a periodical, which ran weekly for thirteen issues in early 1748. Produced by a circle of friends including Burke, it combined essays on diverse topics with articles about the theatre – and in particular the rather controversial local Smock Alley Theatre, which was run by Thomas Sheridan, father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright and Burke’s later parliamentary colleague and rival. The essays are unsigned except for the teasing initials B, S, U and ?. But two contributions by ? are sometimes thought to possess the stamp of the young Burke. One is devoted to the idea of public spirit, and includes a call for more generous patronage of poetry. The second is a vigorous analysis of rural poverty, which highlights and criticizes the extreme inequality of the age, and insists that the landowning aristocracy must discharge the responsibilities that come with property. These were, and would remain, characteristically Burkean themes. Burke graduated from Trinity in February 1748. After that we know little of his activities for two years or so. Still under intense pressure to pursue a legal career, he may very well have worked in his father’s office, which will have done nothing to relieve his spirits. He may also have been sucked into local politics, and in particular into a fierce controversy stirred up by Charles Lucas, a radical who stood unsuccessfully in a highly contentious by-election to the Irish House of Commons. But we simply do not know for sure. What we do know is that Burke went to London in 1750, aged twenty; and that for him, as for Samuel Johnson and so many others, this was a crucial turning point. Ireland was his birthplace. One way or another, Ireland would always be in his thoughts. But Burke had never felt the joy of a settled life there: not with his family, not at school in Ballitore, not at Trinity. He never lost his Irish accent. But he returned to Ireland only three times over the next forty-seven years. London, and England, marked a new beginning. The London that Burke encountered was by far the largest city in the British Isles. Its population of more than 600,000 people in 1750 was roughly one-tenth that of England as a whole, and ten times that of the next-largest city, Bristol. It was a place of squalor and stench, with huge overcrowding and only the most rudimentary sanitation. Pigs and fowl often lived in urban cellars. Diseases such as smallpox, typhoid fever and dysentery were rampant, with periodic outbreaks of influenza. The results were death and deformity, which hit the urban poor the hardest but left no family untouched. Barely one child in three survived childhood. By way of antidote, people turned to gambling, cockfighting and the like, and above all to drinking gin. The latter, mixed with fruit cordials, was embraced on such an epic scale that the average annual consumption across the whole of England in 1743 was well over two gallons a head. When Burke arrived in London memories were still fresh of the notorious Judith Defour and, thanks to William Hogarth’s print Gin Lane (see following page/s), would remain so. It was she who in 1734 had strangled her own two-year-old daughter and sold the new petticoat the girl had been given at the parish workhouse in order to pay for gin. Five Acts of Parliament were required to bring the craze under control. There was no established police force, and though a widely admired new system of street lighting had been introduced two decades earlier, it was only partially effective. It is not surprising, then, that crime and petty disorder were widespread, arson and looting not unusual. Riots were sometimes seen as a means for an urban underclass to even the score, and could offer rich pickings to people in desperate poverty. Violence lay everywhere below the social surface. And yet, and yet. Britain was then undergoing what has been called the first sexual revolution, as public and official attitudes softened towards such matters as premarital sex, adultery and prostitution, and new norms of behaviour emerged. In the 1650s barely 1 per cent of births had been outside marriage. By 1800, however, a quarter of first-born children were illegitimate. It was an age of remarkable sexual freedom, and London in 1750 was at the centre of it. In part as a result, the capital saw a burst of sustained population growth that would double its population in three generations. People did not go to London without good reason, for the city was a place of excitement, wealth and opportunity. It was the metropolis for an early trading empire stretching from Barbados and Boston to Bengal. It was a financial centre that supplied capital and liquidity at low interest rates to Britain’s fast-growing entrepreneurial, industrial and commercial classes. It was a crucible of new ideas, and political controversy fuelled by newspaper and pamphlet wars. And like the country as a whole, it was celebrated on the continent as the home of the liberty of the individual, the land of the theatre and the pub, a place where monarchical authority had been made subject to law and freethinkers could dissent without the endless fear of reprisal. Voltaire had famously asked, ‘Why can’t the laws that guarantee British liberties be adopted elsewhere?’ Why indeed? The contrast with the absolute monarchy and social and religious hierarchies of France was manifest. 1 (#ulink_dd1f3e09-471f-5723-976d-30240e627c4d). Gin Lane Above all, as it grew richer London was ever more a centre for the arts and culture. The British Museum was founded in 1753 as the world’s first ‘universal museum’: a national institution, owned by neither Church nor monarch, open to all at no charge, and dedicated not merely to Britain but to human culture and the world as such. Paintings too were starting to find their way out of the great houses and into the public realm. In 1746 the Foundling Hospital began to show works by contemporary artists, though it would be twenty-three more years before the new Royal Academy could emulate the Paris Salons with its first Summer Exhibition. Handel’s late oratorios date from this period, and his Music for the Royal Fireworks, written to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, had its first performance in 1749 in Green Park with 12,000 in attendance. The celebrated actor David Garrick took over the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1747, and made it one of the greatest theatres in Europe. Poems and plays coursed through the city, many of them moralizing parodies and satires, which were enormously popular. The novel, then in its infancy, had recently been galvanized as a literary genre by Pamela and Clarissa, two works of Samuel Richardson, who had come to London from Derbyshire in 1736; and still more by Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, a tale which combined acid social commentary with a self-aware assertion of the value of fiction itself. Nothing, then, was impossible in London. It was filled at that time with a spaciousness, a sheer energy in human ambition that is hard to imagine even today. The effect on the young Burke, far from home for the first time, must have been overwhelming and electric. Burke enrolled in the Middle Temple in May 1750. At that time the four Inns of Court were colleges-cum-professional associations, where would-be barristers received instruction in the law. They were a necessary entry-point to a career at both the Irish and the English Bar, and most Irish students opted for the Middle Temple, composing roughly a quarter of its total numbers. The demands were not onerous, and no examination was required to be called to the Bar. Instead, the students needed to eat dinners for eight terms and one vacation, and complete nine exercises, from which they could pay to buy their way out. Most did. It was a narrow, dry and practical education, requiring scrupulous attention to precedents, and Burke seems to have hated it. A few years afterwards he wrote, ‘He that lives in a college, after his mind is sufficiently stocked with learning, is like a man, who having built, rigged, and victualled, a ship, should lock her up in a dry dock.’ In a later unfinished essay on the laws of England, he said, ‘the study of our jurisprudence presented to liberal and well-educated minds, even in the best authors, hardly anything but barbarous terms, ill explained; a coarse but not a plain expression; an indigested method; and a species of reasoning, the very refuse of the schools’. Nothing could be further removed from his own belief in extensive learning – or from the bustle and energy of the city outside. But there were three serious drawbacks to his hostility. For the young man with ambition the law was itself a well-trodden path to fame, fortune and social advancement. Moreover, without a legal qualification Burke had no professional direction, or practical means to provide for himself. And finally, a decision to give it up would put him on an emotional and financial collision course with his father. Whatever the tensions between them, Richard Burke had been more than good to his son. He had paid Edmund’s way through four years of Trinity College, though this was not strictly necessary for the Bar, and then a further five years in London. He was, in the most literal sense, heavily invested in his son. And what to do instead? Little wonder, then, that Burke seems from his letters and poems to have had bouts of recurrent ill-health in 1750–2. He recuperated, avoided the big question and saved money by going on extended journeys with a new friend, William Burke. ‘Cousin Will’ had the same surname as Edmund, but may in fact have been little or no relation at all. He was perhaps a little younger, and had been educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, before heading to the Middle Temple and the Bar. Twenty-five years later Burke described Will as someone whom he ‘tenderly loved, highly valued, and continually lived with, in an union not to be expressed, quite since our boyish years’. Will was to prove a lifelong friend to Burke, but in many ways a disastrous one: a boon companion and a route to preferment, but also an adventurer, a financial burden and a source of embarrassment and scandal. All this lay in the future, however. For now, Edmund’s travels took him to Bath, then a highly fashionable resort whose spa waters were a magnet for the infirm and well connected, and to Dr Christopher Nugent. Nugent had been an early acquaintance, an Irish Catholic with a medical degree whom Burke may originally have consulted on medical grounds. Like Abraham Shackleton, he was both wise and sympathetic: there is a magnificent painting by James Barry of Nugent as an older man, in which he somehow comes across as at once modest, intensely reflective and yet non-judgemental. Like Shackleton, he exercised a profound and lasting influence on the young Burke, who explicitly credited him as the cause of his recovery in a poem: ‘’Tis now two autumns since he chanced to find / a youth of body broke, infirm of mind / he gave him all that man can ask or give / restored his life and taught him how to live.’ ‘Taught him how to live’ – best of all, Nugent had a daughter in her late teens, Jane, who quickly caught the young man’s fancy. Burke was an Irish transplant with literary ambitions, then in the process of alienating his only source of financial support. By no stretch of the imagination could he be described as a catch, not least since Jane was herself a Catholic. He was no Adonis, either, to judge by later pictures; and had no known patrons or social advantages. What he did have was warmth, energy and talent, albeit a talent then confined to his personality, private letters and occasional writings. The beautiful thing is that this was all she needed. It was a love match, and would remain so over forty years of marriage. Jane herself is hard to glimpse in her own right, then or later. Abraham Shackleton described her rather prosaically as ‘a genteel, well-bred woman of the Romish faith [whom Burke married] neither for her religion nor her money, but from the natural impulse of youthful affection and inclination, which guided his choice to an agreeable object, with whom he promised himself happiness in a married state’. Burke himself begins with effortless condescension, in a passage from a eulogy written while they were still courting: ‘her stature is not tall. She is not made to be the admiration of everybody, but the happiness of one.’ But he soon yields to unfettered admiration: ‘She has all the delicacy that does not exclude firmness. She has all the softness that does not imply weakness … her voice is a low soft music … To describe her body, describes her mind: one is the transcript of the other …’ And he ends, rather piteously, ‘Who can know her, and himself, and entertain much hope? Who can see and know such a creature, and not love her to distraction?’ Even by the ironic standards of the time, this is the language of true love. In 1755 Burke took the momentous decision not to pursue a career at the Bar, deepening the breach with his father, who had supported him quite handsomely to that end. Richard Burke’s sense of moral and financial injury was evidently fanned by his son’s continuing lack of direction in life. Edmund wrote to his father, ‘it grieves me deeply to think that … your suffering should be at all increased by anything which looks ill-judged in my conduct … In real truth in all my designs I shall have nothing more at heart than to show myself to you and my mother a dutiful, affectionate and obliged son.’ Instead he threw himself into writing and thinking, and into forming the social connections necessary to get on in life. He had written essays and perhaps journalism on his long retreats with Will. Now he produced four substantial works in quick succession. It is not given to us to predict the course of our own existence on Earth; we are forever groping forward. We may look back at our past lives with a clarity that is unachievable in earlier moments, and still more is this true for the biographer, who has the mixed blessing of hindsight. Nevertheless, though Burke can hardly have suspected it, these four early works start to lay out the deep framework within which his later thought takes shape. Each deserves a close examination. The first of them was A Vindication of Natural Society, orA View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from Every Species of Artificial Society, in a Letter to Lord ******** by a late Noble Writer, published in May 1756. Sometimes ignored or written off as a piece of late juvenilia, the Vindication was in every way an extraordinary debut. It was written anonymously, with the goal of attacking the religious ideas of Lord Bolingbroke, whose posthumous collected works had recently appeared. Bolingbroke had been a Secretary of State under Queen Anne, and had negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, ending the War of the Spanish Succession, in which the Duke of Marlborough had curbed the territorial ambitions of the French in northern Europe. Notoriously, he was a ‘deist’ who dismissed claims of religious revelation as mere superstition and regarded the clergy as charlatans. Instead, he argued in favour of ‘natural’ religion, to which all rational people could in principle have access and without the need for any Church hierarchy. Burke profoundly disagreed with these views. But rather than confront them openly, he does so indirectly and through irony. On its face, the Vindication is a staunch defence of Bolingbroke; underneath, it ridicules his views. Civilization is overrated, the argument ostensibly goes. So-called civilized society has really meant vast slaughter by humans of humans throughout history, the abuse of power, and slavery for the poor and weak. We would, then, be better off as a society in a ‘state of nature’, without a sovereign authority or civil institutions. As in politics, so in religion: better a return to a pure and natural religion than the dishonesty and exploitation induced by religious sophistication and mysticism. To these Bolingbrokian themes, Burke added a pitch-perfect impersonation of Bolingbroke’s imperious authorial voice. Coming at a time when the British constitution and British society were widely admired across Europe, it must have seemed obvious to Burke that readers would get the joke. Except that many of them didn’t. The Vindication was generally well received, but some critics thought its arguments entirely sincere. Worse, some saw it as a lost work by Bolingbroke himself; this view was especially popular in America. The misunderstanding was sufficiently marked that Burke felt compelled to add a preface of explanation to the second edition the following year, which made clear that the work was meant ironically. Yet the illusion persisted: even as late as the 1790s, the work was being cast back in his teeth as evidence of inconsistency, while social criticisms that he regarded as fanciful were being taken quite seriously by radical writers. Nevertheless, the Vindication is a remarkable work. It is no more than an extended essay in length. Yet it combines sweeping history with political analysis of despotism, aristocracy and democracy, and mordant satire with vigorous and heartfelt condemnation of social evils. Though it slightly misses its target, it is marked throughout by enormous stylistic flair. Its themes – distrust of abstract thought, celebration of human history and civilization, belief in established institutions – remained with Burke to the end of his life. And as we shall see, its deepest targets were yet to be revealed. This, then, is no mere piece of juvenilia. The Vindication also marked the beginning of a relationship that was to prove very important to the young Burke, with the London bookseller and publisher Robert Dodsley. Dodsley had risen through his writings from domestic service as a footman to become one of the foremost publishers of the day, with a wide circle of friends which included Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray and Samuel Johnson, whose famous Dictionary he had helped to finance. He gave Burke a modest fee income from writing, as well as a degree of access to literary London; in return Burke offered him all of his early literary projects, and continued the relationship with his brother James after Dodsley himself retired in 1759. The next of these projects was to make Burke’s early reputation. Again, its title did not spare the typesetter: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. But in other ways it was a very different work from the Vindication. The Enquiry is a study in aesthetics and psychology. What is the source of our emotions, or ‘passions’? Why do certain works of art or nature elicit in us the feelings that they do? Questions of taste, indeed of what if anything ‘taste’ itself was, fed into and in turn were fed by the rapid spread of British commerce in the early eighteenth century, and the growing international trade in works of art. First debated in ancient times, they had been squarely placed in the public mind by a provocative set of articles by Joseph Addison in 1712 in his influential periodical, the Spectator. In the previous year Lord Shaftesbury had argued that taste was a kind of internal sense, which operated as naturally and immediately as the external sense of sight: it was impossible to see something beautiful and not see it, naturally and immediately, as beautiful. Addison took the opposite tack. For him taste was the result of judging what arises in the imagination, for example when seeing material objects such as landscapes or human bodies. The effect of these contrasting views is that Shaftesbury has difficulty explaining how material objects can be beautiful in themselves, independently of any mind to judge them so. In contrast, Addison struggles to show why, if material objects are beautiful, the imagination is necessary for them to be seen as such. In the following decade these questions were taken up by the great Irish-Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, who defended and extended a version of Shaftesbury’s theory of inner sense. Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson … these were no inconsiderable figures. And as even these brief descriptions hint, aesthetics is a notoriously difficult and slippery subject, beset by conceptual ambiguity and by the simple fact that different people often have different tastes, and that these can change over time: in the words of the late, great S. J. Perelman, ‘de gustibus … ain’t what dey used to be’. So it was brave in the extreme for Burke at the age of twenty-seven to venture into print on this topic. Still more so when one reflects that the work had apparently been completed four years earlier, at the tender age of twenty-three. The Enquiry is not a deeply philosophical work. But it had great influence at the time, has been widely read ever since, and develops themes that last long in Burke’s own thought. In tone, the work is quite unlike the Vindication. Gone is the mock-ironic, the hint of sneer. Instead we have Burke speaking directly to us, in a measured, engaging and sometimes intimate way. He proceeds from common experience, offering conclusions in a semi-scientific spirit, diffidently or confidently as evidence and intuition demand. He offers, not a rehash of previous work, but a positive theory of his own. And there is the occasional moment of (possibly inadvertent) humour: one of the book’s many sections is magnificently entitled ‘Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in Vegetables’. Overall, the tone is quietly assured. It is evident to Burke that humans have a certain nature of their own, for they are commonly struck in the same circumstances by the same pains or pleasures, the same ‘passions’, feelings and emotions. They take pleasure alike in the smell of a rose, or feel pain from a violent blow, for example. Central to aesthetic judgements and the feelings that accompany them, for Burke as for Addison, is the recreative imagination: the imagination that allows its owner to re-experience all the feelings of a moment, or to extend experience into an understanding of new things and places and people. But Burke does not restrict the imagination to visible objects, and so sidesteps the earlier objection to Addison’s account: on the contrary, he is keenly aware of the functioning of the different senses, of touch and smell and taste as well as sight and hearing, and deliberately goes beyond the visual arts to discuss poetry and music, for example. Burke also improves on Addison by focusing on just two great types of passion: the sublime and the beautiful. These are grounded respectively for him in two basic human instincts, given by God through the workings of providence: the instinct for self-preservation, and the instinct for love. The sublime is what elicits awe or terror or fear. Its marks include enormity, infinity and indistinctness, but also power and the capacity to inflict pain. When humans encounter the sublime directly, be it in an earthquake or a snake, they naturally turn away and seek refuge. But when they encounter it indirectly or at a distance, as in a work of art or in imagination, they can be amazed and delighted. They can be astonished, or aroused to action, by language, poetry and rhetoric. If the sublime intimidates, the beautiful attracts. Beauty is described by Burke as ‘a social quality’; it is not simply what elicits lust between the sexes, but the expression of a social preference for a relationship with a particular mate. More widely, it includes the emotions and instincts that bring people together in general society: these are sympathy, imitation and ambition, again implanted by providence in order to bring human capacities to their fullest expression. Much of this is speculative and tendentious, to say the least. But through it we can clearly glimpse the writer himself. It would be hard to miss a young man’s yearning in passages like this: ‘Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness … the deceitful maze through which the eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.’ Or later, in considering how the body is physically affected by love: The head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the object, the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a little sigh: the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides. All this is accompanied with an inward sense of melting and languor. This reads more like an erotic novel than a work of philosophy. It is little surprise that the book was later attacked by Mary Wollstonecraft, the great eighteenth-century feminist, for perpetuating a weak and feeble stereotype of women. The Enquiry was published anonymously in 1757, and sold well enough in the right circles for Burke to become quickly and widely known as its author. It became something of a text on the sublime, in succession to the ancient critic Longinus. As a work of aesthetics it impressed one of the great intellectuals and critics of the eighteenth-century, Gotthold Lessing, and two of the greatest thinkers of all time, Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. It may also have partly provoked William Gilpin into developing his own notion of the picturesque, which combined the sublime and the beautiful in art and nature, an idea which became wildly fashionable later in the century. But what is perhaps still more striking is that even at this very early stage the Enquiry again lays out in embryo an array of themes always later to be identified with Burke. Humans have a distinctive nature, which is not purely subjective but governed by certain general laws; indeed, they are social animals heavily driven by instinct and emotion. The testimony of ordinary people is often of greater value than that of experts. Human passions are guided by empathy and imagination. Human well-being is grounded in a social order whose values are given by divine providence. Human reason is limited in scope, and insufficient as a basis for public morality. There may also be a hint here that, in the words of the American thinker Leo Strauss, ‘good order or the rational is the result of forces which do not lend themselves to good order or the rational’. People cannot reason themselves into a good society, for a good society is rooted not merely in reason but in the sentiments and the emotions; this was to prove a crucial precursor to Burke’s critique of the French revolution in the 1790s. Overall, then, a coherent, persuasive and strikingly modern set of ideas is already taking shape. The years 1756–9 were a time in which Burke poured forth a profusion of different writings, mostly unfinished, under his developing relationship with Robert Dodsley. Despite some missed deadlines, these mark his transition from a writer from inspiration to a writer from demand, from something of an intellectual dilettante to a seasoned professional able to master a body of knowledge and set down his views quickly and cogently. They also required prodigious amounts of reading and reflection, deepening an already capacious personal reservoir of knowledge which was to serve Burke well in future years. It has been rightly said that political parties are elected when they are full of ideas, and turned out of office when those ideas run out. In Burke’s case, though he was only twice briefly in office, the ideas never did run out. The next of his early works was AnAccount of the European Settlements in America (1757), in collaboration with his friend Will Burke. This was history and polemic, with a highly topical purpose. British foreign policy since time immemorial could be summarized as the desire to inhibit the emergence and restrain the actions of successive superpowers in mainland Europe, in particular Spain and latterly France under Louis XIV and his successors. Throughout the century the French and British had repeatedly clashed in their colonial expansions, from India to the West Indies to North America. In 1755 the uneasy peace of Aix-la-Chapelle broke down entirely, with the disastrous failure of an expedition by the British commander-in-chief General Braddock to capture Fort Duquesne, in modern-day Pittsburgh. In May of the following year war was formally declared between France and Britain. It would shortly spread across the globe, in what became known as the Seven Years War. The Account summarized the prevailing state of knowledge about the European colonies in North America, covering their history, ethnography, geography, differing cultures and economic conditions. Inevitably, it was a compendium. But it also made an argument: well-regulated colonies mattered to Britain, and by implication were worth fighting for. Not only that: the fading Spanish Empire was less to be feared than French ambition and expansionism. Indeed the fate of the Dutch and Spanish empires gave, the authors held, an object lesson in what not to do. Having taken control of vast swathes of South America, the Dutch and Spanish had largely milked their territories for cash, extracting their immediate mineral resources rather than building sustainable colonies with proper infrastructure and orderly relations with local people. Their leaders had grossly abused their powers through self-enrichment. The result was colossal short-term wealth, followed by odium, failure and decline. Overall, the policy was trenchantly dismissed: ‘In government, tyranny; in religion, bigotry; in trade, monopoly.’ The Burkes’ own position combined free trade with a belief in the social order and an emphasis on institution-building. Monopolies were to be avoided and oligopoly discouraged. Regulation and economic incentives should be set to enhance the public good over the long term. Promising infant industries could properly be supported by public subsidy while they were being established. The colonies should be encouraged to specialize, and develop competitive advantage where they could; and they should be allowed to export in their own right to foreign markets. But they should continue to be prevented from importing, in order to protect Britain’s status as the source of higher-value finished goods. We do not know the exact division of labour of the Account. It has been suggested that most of the hard work, and in particular that of compilation and summary, was done by Will, while its intellectual thrust, shape and power of generalization came from Edmund. But this may well be unfair, since Will was evidently no intellectual slouch. What we can say is that it too contributes to the body of Burkean ideas so far advanced in the Vindication and Enquiry. We have a common human nature, the Account avers; peoples differ crucially in their history, character and manners; what institutions and culture they develop make a huge difference to their well-being and success; the Christian religion is generally a civilizing force; great leaders are marked by their capacity for hard work and unselfish public service; divine providence creates opportunity, and the chance for failure to redeem itself. The Account was a success. It ran through several editions and was translated into Italian, French and German. It also gave William a start in life, and he was appointed in 1759 to the British administration in the recently captured island of Guadeloupe, where he began an ill-starred and occasionally illegal career as a fortune-hunter. Edmund, meanwhile, had moved on to the last of his early literary projects for the Dodsleys. Having demonstrated a talent for historical writing in the Vindication and the Account, he now aspired to write nothing less than a short history of England – in under two years. The first half of the century had seen at least five multi-volume narrative histories of England. Yet the feeling persisted that genius was somewhat lacking in this area, especially compared to the French and Italian masters, and that what was needed was a shorter treatment combining depth and accuracy. The philosopher David Hume – later well known to Burke – had started to meet the first requirement in 1754, and would soon be acclaimed for it. But his History was a massive affair in six volumes. Burke now proposed something radically different: just one-quarter as long, balancing narrative with analysis, and eschewing vast reams of scholarly research on the one hand and Bolingbrokian speculation on the other. In this, as in much else, he was heavily influenced by the French thinker Montesquieu, in his words ‘the greatest genius, which has enlightened this age’. Montesquieu argued that history was governed by general causes, constrained by ‘the nature of things’, be that physical geography or human custom and law. The result was an approach which emphasized key themes working themselves out through time, illuminated by carefully chosen examples. The experimental nature of Burke’s work may be hinted at in its title, An Essay towards an Abridgement of English History. But the book was never completed. It extends only as far as 1216, the passage of Magna Carta and the death of King John; and it was not published until 1812, some time after Burke’s death. Even so, the History is of great interest and value in understanding Burke. Its shape is broadly chronological, surveying in turn the ancient Britons, the Romans, Saxons and Normans. Each of them is treated in terms of their distinctive institutions and character or ‘genius’. This gives the work an occasional touch of 1066 and All That, of post-hoc-propter-hoc-ism in which historical contingency and luck are downplayed in favour of predestination and ‘the English story’. But the History is kept from this, or, worse, from the trite or pedestrian, by its many saving graces. One grace lies in its stylistic brio, starting from the opening chapter, which sweeps the reader majestically across the main facts of Europe’s geography and their relation to its history. Another lies in Burke’s flair for journalistic colour and the telling detail. A third lies in its deep engagement and sympathy with the cultures under examination, including those underplayed by others; thus Burke discusses at length the customs and institutions of the ancient Britons, paying particular attention to the Druids, ‘the priests, lawgivers, and physicians of their nation’. Infusing the whole is a dynamic, emergent Whiggish sense of liberty. And it is extraordinary to record that, even at this early stage, Burke is already exploring ideas about political parties in the History that he does not publish until 1770, as we shall see. The History is also marked by Burke’s insistence once again on the importance of providence, allowing him to avoid the intellectual trap of treating Montesquieu’s historical laws as deterministic certainties. And then there is the sheer persuasiveness of the book’s deeper argument. English history, English culture and English law did not begin with the Normans, the rest being dark ages; nor indeed with the Romans; the English are thus a heterogeneous and mixed people; in general, institutions matter more than individuals; custom, habit and manners are distinct from law, and often superior to reason; the present and future are conditioned, though not determined, by the past. These are, already, familiar and distinctively Burkean themes. In the Enquiry, Burke had written, ‘Those which engage our hearts, which impress us with a sense of loveliness, are the softer virtues; easiness of temper, compassion, kindness and liberality; though certainly these are of less immediate and momentous concern to society, and of less dignity. But it is for that reason that they are so amiable.’ This is Jane Nugent to the life, as one might expect in an essay on beauty and the emotions, written in early courtship. Edmund and Jane had married in March 1757. Jane’s Catholicism cannot have pleased Edmund’s father, but the couple adopted the Anglican rites for the marriage ceremony. In the following year, the Burkes had two children, Richard in February and Christopher in December. Christopher’s namesake Dr Nugent had decided to move to London, and this probably helped them to establish a home together – first in Battersea, in those days a village on the southern outskirts of London, and then on Wimpole Street. Wimpole Street now lies in the centre of London. At that time it was on the northern edge, with open fields beyond. Burke always loved the countryside, and may have deemed it healthier for his young children. The household waxed and waned. As well as immediate family, for several years it included Dr Nugent and his son Jack. Edmund’s brother Richard also lived for long periods with him and Jane, as did Will Burke between his travels. There was, in addition, a never-ending stream of visitors and house guests. Burke now had a wife, a family, a home, and a burgeoning literary reputation. What he did not have was an income. The Vindication and the Enquiry attracted modest fees; he and Will shared ?50 for the copyright of the Account; and the History would have earned ?300 if it had been completed (though in fact the project petered out in 1762). But these were small sums, at a time when a gentleman aspired to live on not less that ?300 a year. More was needed, and rapidly. Accordingly, he turned in two directions: to journalism and, less directly, to public life. In April 1758 Burke contracted with the Dodsleys to edit, write for and produce the Annual Register. Over the previous decades there had been an explosion in newspapers and print journalism, first dailies and more recently monthlies with the launch of the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine in the 1730s. Various annuals had also been published, epitomizing each year’s events. The Annual Register attempted something new: not merely to be an authoritative and highly readable account of the year, but to add to that documentary record a wide range of other material of general interest. Its first part thus comprised a long piece of instant history, describing the main events of the year and placing them in a wider context, and a diary containing factual material culled from the newspapers, including births and deaths, speeches by the King, summaries of Acts of Parliament, and human-interest stories. The distinctive second part was more lively. It included scientific reports, reviews, essays, poetry, history, health and how-to tips, recent discoveries, archaeology and ‘Characters’ – character sketches of contemporary and historical figures, short biographies and anecdotes. Controversy was not sought out, but there was no attempt at balance for the sake of it. Some of the new material may not have been by Burke himself, but as editor he controlled the whole. The Register was, and was intended to be, thought-provoking, eclectic, lively and extremely wide-ranging – an extension of Burke’s own mind. It was a success from the first. Despite some gaps, and even a period with two competing versions, it is still published today. For Burke himself, however, the Register was a mixed blessing. It paid a salary of ?100 a year, which was badly needed, but not enough for any real security. It gave him editorial experience, and a position, but not one of any great public dignity or status. And it immersed him in current events, though it proved to be hard work over the seven years in which he was operationally in charge. Yet it had other clear virtues. It allowed him to build up a small team of friends and supporters, including in later years Walker King and French Laurence, who became his editors and literary executors. It enabled him to spread his ever-expanding moral and intellectual sensibility over a vast range of British and European thought, including Samuel Johnson, Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, Rousseau, Voltaire and his beloved Montesquieu, as well as a host of lesser names. And finally it gave him further modest currency within literary, and in time polite, society. It was at about this time, probably in 1759, that Burke took his first tentative steps towards the world of politics. His entr?e was via an introduction to William Gerard Hamilton. Hamilton was just a year older than Burke. Educated at Harrow, Oriel College Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn, he had inherited a large fortune and been elected to Parliament for Petersfield in 1754. He has gone down in parliamentary lore as ‘single-speech’ Hamilton, after his maiden speech in 1755 on the Address, the speech from the throne which always opens a new session of Parliament. But this epithet does Hamilton an injustice: he in fact made a second speech, his last, the following year. In an age where the parliamentary gene pool was small and social position much admired, Hamilton had successfully attached himself to Henry Fox, who had hugely enriched himself as Paymaster of the Forces. Through Fox, Hamilton was quickly appointed to serve under Lord Halifax at the Board of Trade. An ambitious man, he was looking for a secretary and personal assistant, and engaged Burke to that end, probably on a salary of ?300 or so a year. That was three times Burke’s salary from the Register. At a stroke, then, the arrangement provided a good income and insight into the heart of government. All was set fair; the storms were to follow. TWO In and Out of Power,1759–1774 THE BRITAIN TOWARDS WHOSE SUMMIT Burke now set his course was a country in a state of extraordinary excitement. Politically, it had enjoyed a remarkable degree of stability for over forty years, stability established and personified in the formidable figure of Sir Robert Walpole, now generally regarded as its first Prime Minister, and sustained by his immediate successors. Walpole was a Whig: that is, one of those who supported the constitutional monarchy established after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, in which the Catholic James II had fled into exile, and Parliament had confirmed William of Orange from the Netherlands as King William III. On the other side of the political divide were the Tories, the landowners who supported James II and his successors, and who generally defended the prerogative rights of the Crown. Personal pre-eminence in Westminster was nothing new, but in Sir Robert Walpole it found perhaps its greatest ever exponent. He was a man of enormous political subtlety and energy, a master of detail dedicated to three simple ends: the extension of British trading influence and economic strength; his own complete control of the different organs of government; and the continued political defeat of the Tories. These three goals Walpole amply achieved. War was in general avoided, the national debt reduced, taxes kept low and colonial trade managed to the benefit of the mother country. After the death of Queen Anne in 1714 Toryism went into a long decline; discredited by the Jacobite rebellion of the following year, it started to collapse, yielding to what came to be known as the Whig supremacy, a process only enhanced by a second failed rebellion in 1745. It was far from inactive, bubbling away in town and country, in the constituencies and in Parliament. But only in 1760 did it start to reappear in government. In 1720 the South Sea Company, which held the monopoly of trade with South America, collapsed amid a frenzy of financial speculation. In the aftermath it became clear that there had been rampant bribery and insider trading in its shares. Many establishment figures were touched by the scandal, which extended to members of the Cabinet; Walpole himself had invested latterly with reckless enthusiasm, but had managed to escape censure and financial ruin. Having served a few years earlier as First Lord of the Treasury, ultimately in charge of the nation’s finances, he was appointed to that post again in April 1721 and set about consolidating his personal power. Supported by the immense wealth of the Duke of Newcastle, he was able to place himself at the centre of a vast network of influence stretching from King George I – and his mistresses – to the Church of England, the City of London and many of the great families. This influence was maintained after the accession of George II in 1727. Walpole made it his settled principle that every appointment to Church or state, however insignificant, should be conditional on loyalty to Walpole himself. Where patronage did not suffice, bribes and electoral sweeteners were deployed instead, on a prodigious scale. A famous caricature of the period, Idol-worship, or the Way to Preferment (see following page/s), shows him astride a great gateway and baring a pair of enormous buttocks, which men line up to kiss before going through. There was no need even to show Walpole’s face, so clear was the inference. 2 (#ulink_ed0df014-a7f6-5080-b851-62bae4e93c5f). Idol-Worship or the way to preferment Walpole did not cease to exercise political influence after he left office in 1742; his machine lived on through Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham. But the increasing need for vigorous leadership in the Commons brought an energetic Whig politician, William Pitt, to the fore. Unlike those of Walpole and his successors, Pitt’s family connections were only distantly aristocratic. The family fortune had been made with the East India Company by his grandfather, Thomas Pitt, a governor of Madras whose discovery and sale of an enormous diamond caused him to be known as ‘Diamond’ Pitt. William was close to his grandfather, and imbibed from him the lessons that Britain’s greatness relied on aggression in controlling overseas trade and colonial expansion, and that nothing was impossible to an individual of outstanding personality and energy. Over time, and despite frequent bouts of illness, Pitt made himself into such an individual: an orator of extraordinary power able to instil in his audience, and in the country at large, the conviction that his was the voice of destiny. Reckless, insecure, bombastic, capable of manic bouts of work lapsing into frequent periods of lassitude, Pitt was determined to exercise power not through any faction or network, but in his own name and through sheer force of personality. Pitt joined the government in 1746, over the deep objections of George II, and in due course became an ostentatiously upright Paymaster General. His moment came in 1756, when the calamitous early stages of the Seven Years War, and in particular the loss of Minorca to the French, thrust him to centre stage. His famous, and utterly characteristic, remark to the Duke of Devonshire dates from this time: ‘My Lord, I am sure that I can save this country, and that no-one else can.’ Astonishingly, Pitt made good this claim. He took personal control of the war, targeting overseas trade, and French trade in particular, across four theatres: the West Indies, North America, Africa and India. Each saw vigorous action. An alliance with Prussia on the European mainland freed up British troops to support the navy in Pitt’s ‘blue water’ strategy. French plans to invade Britain were cut off by a blockade of their fleets in Brest and Toulon. The year 1759 proved to be one colossal triumph after another, for Britain and for the Great Commoner, as Pitt was now known. Guadeloupe was captured, and Dakar. French Canada fell to General James Wolfe after a brilliant night attack on Quebec. Sweetest of all, the French navy was at last forced to put to sea. The Toulon fleet was destroyed by Admiral Boscawen, that of Brest by Admiral Hawke off Quiberon. The country rejoiced. ‘Our bells are quite worn threadbare from ringing for victories,’ wrote Horace Walpole, son of Sir Robert and man of letters, late in the year. Pitt, it seemed, could do no wrong. But military triumph was succeeded by political instability. In 1760 King George II died, and – his son Frederick having died unexpectedly in 1751 – his grandson ascended the throne as George III. The new King was young, restless, highly judgemental and widely suspected of being under the malign influence of the Earl of Bute. He shared with Pitt a desire to govern without the need for party or faction. But the two men had fallen out some time earlier, and it was only a matter of time before Pitt departed, as he did in 1761. Nine further years of political turmoil and turnover in government were to follow. Among the King’s early changes, Lord Halifax was moved from the Board of Trade and sent to Dublin as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. William Hamilton accompanied him, now promoted to Chief Secretary; and with him went Burke, leaving the family to follow later. It was Burke’s first trip home since leaving Ireland in 1750, and he cannot have relished seeing his father again. To soften the blow, he sent him a copy of the Enquiry via an intermediary, and received back a message of thanks and forgiveness, and even a remittance. But the wound was never to heal fully, for Richard Burke died before seeing his son again. It was a sad ending to their relationship, but perhaps a relief as well. Burke’s stay in Dublin was unremarkable, except for an outbreak of rural terrorism by a group known as the Whiteboys, after their white smocks. These protests arose from poverty and protest at high rents and arbitrary evictions. Initially non-violent, Whiteboy tactics were hardened by the scale and savagery of the response by Protestant landlords and the Dublin authorities, which sent in a force of militiamen. This killed some protesters and captured others. It was followed by what was widely seen as the judicial murder of the main suspects by hanging. This was Burke’s first exposure to organized protest and its violent suppression, and his sympathies were heavily on the side of the Catholic underclass. All the more so since the victims included Father Nicholas Sheehy, an opponent of the penal laws and relative of Burke’s by marriage, who was tried three times in relation to the Whiteboys and finally hanged, drawn and quartered in 1766. In 1763 Hamilton was promoted again, this time to the valuable sinecure of Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland. For his part Burke accepted a grant, or ‘pension’, of ?300. His feelings were equivocal, however, combining gratitude to Hamilton with a chafing desire to maintain a degree of independence. Pensions were common, but almost always regarded as the result of political corruption and patronage, still more so since the jobbery of Walpole (one of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary definitions of a pensioner is ‘a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey his master’). What made things worse was that Burke’s pension was on the Irish Exchequer, not the English, at a time when such pensions were a particular focus of grievance among Irish politicians, including some of his own friends. Burke knew well how little his countrymen could afford him; and claims of undue Irish influence, indeed of popery and Jesuitry, were to dog him later in public life. In retrospect, it was inevitable that Burke and Hamilton would split. Their personalities were quite different: Burke passionate, committed and warm, Hamilton cool, indolent and sarcastic. Burke was blossoming, Hamilton controlling. Matters were not helped when Hamilton fell out with his new Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Northumberland, and was dismissed in May 1764. On returning to Ireland he appears to have sought to retain Burke under an exclusive lifetime contract of service. Burke, who had greatly disapproved of Hamilton’s conduct in Ireland, rejected the offer as ‘a sort of domestic situation’ and resigned his pension. Nothing could be more rebarbative than such a role to his free-ranging mind, need for self-expression and nascent political ambitions. By February 1765, amid some rancour, they had parted. Always prickly about his personal integrity, after the breach with Hamilton Burke felt it necessary to circulate a note among his friends clearing himself of any fault, but setting terms for them as well: ‘I never can … submit to any sort of compromise on my Character; and I shall never therefore look upon those, who after hearing the whole story, do not think me perfectly in the right, and do not consider Hamilton as an infamous scoundrel, to be in the smallest degree my friends.’ At a time when personal reputation counted for much, laying out the facts may have seemed only prudent. It had a theoretical basis too, in Burke’s developing view that party and political leadership were properly anchored in good character. But it was also unfair to Hamilton, neurotic and alienating. As he grew older, Burke’s own essential goodness would shine through on many occasions. But under pressure of events his belief in it would harden into unconquerable self-righteousness, and occasionally self-deception. He gained devotees, but lost many would-be friends and political allies as a result. All this was in the future, however. For the most part, Burke’s friendships at this time were flourishing. Ability and luck had brought him to the very heart of one of the greatest gatherings of talent ever witnessed. This included the Scottish philosopher, historian and notorious infidel David Hume, who on a visit to London gave Burke a copy of the Theory of Moral Sentiments by his friend Adam Smith. Burke responded with a letter of thanks to Smith and published a very favourable review in the Annual Register, leading to an acquaintance. Then there was the painter Joshua Reynolds, later to found the Royal Academy, who was an intimate of Burke’s for more than three decades. He in turn presented Burke with a portrait of their close mutual friend, the actor David Garrick, then leading a revolution to replace bombast and declamation in the theatre with more realistic styles of acting. But the centre of literary debate would in time become Dr Johnson’s Club, or simply ‘the Club’. In general, it has been well said that the eighteenth century was the age of the club. There were clubs to meet almost every conceivable social need, personal interest or human contingency. If Joseph Addison is to be believed, they included clubs for the surly, the ugly and the flatulent; and even a Lunatick Club set up by a group of Essex farmers, which met at the full moon. And there was a roster of clubs catering to aristocratic debauch. One such was the infamous Hellfire Club, another ‘the Most Ancient and Most Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland, Anstruther’, an all-male sex club much patronized by the lawyers, businessmen and clergy of Fife, and in particular by the Earls of Kellie. The clue is in the title, ‘Merryland’ being a popular codeword for the female body. Despite its perennial association with Dr Johnson, the Club seems in fact to have been the inspiration of Reynolds. Founded in early 1764, it was devoted to conversation, and met originally every two weeks at the Turk’s Head tavern in Soho, in the centre of London. Its nine founding members spanned the arts and included, as well as Burke and Reynolds (known as ‘Romulus’, after the founder of Rome), Burke’s congenial father-in-law Dr Nugent, the Irish playwright and fellow Trinity alumnus Oliver Goldsmith, the music critic Charles Burney, the classical scholar Bennet Langton and of course Samuel Johnson himself. A print by George Thompson (after James William Edmund Doyle; see following page/s) of a literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house in 1781 doubtless conveys something of the atmosphere: Johnson is holding forth to Burke, watched by Reynolds and Garrick. Burney and the Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli look on. Boswell, Goldsmith and the poet Thomas Warton have been relegated to the background. 3 (#ulink_79a67f59-3d12-5a8b-8e27-f4bd931600c7). A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Even among the members of the Club, Johnson was a towering figure, in height and presence and accomplishment. The self-made son of a Lichfield bookseller, he had survived low birth weight, scrofula, smallpox and tuberculosis – maladies which scarred his features, left him partially deaf and blind and gave him a disturbing array of tics and convulsive gestures – to become one of the greatest men of letters of that or any age. There are, it has been noted, few literary genres to which Johnson did not make a foundational contribution, including journalism, fiction, poetry, criticism, satire, biography, the essay, travel writing and, of course, lexicography. But it was the publication of his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 that turned him into a nationally celebrated figure. Johnson had met Burke some years later, and clearly enjoyed the latter’s flood of conversation, saying ‘he does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full’. The relationship matured over time, so much so that Johnson was apt to repeat that ‘If a man were to go by chance at the same time with Burke, under a shed, to shun a shower, he would say: “This is an extraordinary man.” If Burke should go into a stable to see his horse dressed, the ostler would say, “we have had an extraordinary man here.”’ It was a handsome tribute, especially since Johnson was no flatterer. Nevertheless, the relationship between Johnson and Burke was never an entirely easy one. It was not helped by political differences – Johnson was a devout Tory, Burke a Whig – or by the sometimes scheming James Boswell, who oscillated between the quest for political favours from Burke and the gossip’s tendency to retail Johnson’s occasionally cutting private remarks. No, the two men had different styles: Johnson possessed of a lapidary wit and a natural genius for quotation, Burke more prolix, carefully building up comic or tragic detail in his speeches to devastating effect. And as so often with two big beasts at the table, there was perhaps an undercurrent of competition. As an out-of-sorts Johnson once said, ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.’ But Burke’s connections were increasingly social and political, as well as literary. They included several opposition Whig politicians, including William Fitzherbert and Lord John Cavendish, the charismatic Charles Townshend and the Buckinghamshire landowner Lord Verney, to whom Will Burke had become very close. In 1763 an ill-starred ministry led by the Earl of Bute had finally fallen, over the supposedly concessionary terms of the Peace of Paris which ended the Seven Years War, and George III was forced to treat with two men he detested, George Grenville and the Duke of Bedford. Two years later the political merry-go-round took another turn, and they too left office. For his part, Pitt remained disenchanted and aloof. The King then asked the Marquis of Rockingham, as leader of a large parliamentary faction, to form an administration, with Newcastle alongside him and the Duke of Cumberland acting as the King’s ?minence grise. Burke must have been at a low ebb at this time, for his second son Christopher died between the ages of five and six, probably in 1764. We know virtually nothing about the circumstances of his death, but its effect can only have been to focus Burke’s love and attention on his surviving boy, Richard. Still more so if, as seems possible from Burke’s letters, Jane then had a miscarriage, and perhaps even another. The couple may have been coming to the very sad conclusion that there would be no more children. But the effect of Rockingham’s elevation was to hand Burke the first of two huge strokes of luck. Rockingham had only just engaged him as his private secretary, despite the protestations of the aged Duke of Newcastle, who denounced Burke in soon-to-be familiar terms as a closet Catholic and a Jacobite. But Rockingham ignored the Duke, and Burke was thus catapulted from near-obscurity into the very cockpit of power. The new administration took office on 15 July 1765, and Burke started work the following day. The second bit of luck was better still, for Will generously waived his own political ambitions temporarily and persuaded Lord Verney to allow Edmund to stand for Parliament for Wendover, a ‘pocket borough’ in Verney’s personal gift. For Burke, the way was now clear to a political career. The new government’s first priority concerned the American colonies. For decades, these had been allowed to prosper in an atmosphere – it would be too much to call it a policy – of more or less benign neglect. The exception was trade. Colonial affairs, in America as elsewhere, were managed along strictly mercantile lines: the colonies existed to generate raw materials and import finished goods, the mother country to manufacture those finished goods and derive the extra value thereby added, the goods themselves always to be carried in British ships. The counterpart of this trade was that American merchants were perennially short of hard currency, and so perennially indebted to financiers in the City of London. From a British perspective, it was an immensely convenient and lucrative arrangement, sustained by each side’s general ignorance of the other. But events now conspired to change this. Over the course of the century, the modest American colonial population of some 200,000 had doubled, then doubled again, and again. By 1765 it stood at not quite 2,000,000. It had been swelled by immigration, much of which was not English, but Scottish, Irish, French and German, to say nothing of those at the margins of society seeking to escape the law or gain a new life. Thomas Paine would later be one of these, emigrating to America in 1774. Many of the new immigrants felt no great love for the Westminster Parliament. The Seven Years War had ended in triumph for Britain, and the further extension of its early colonial empire around the world. In the long term, this would bring vast profits. But the war’s immediate effect was a drastic depletion of the Treasury. The national debt nearly doubled, from ?70 million to ?130 million. Taxes, totalling some 15 per cent on a country gentleman’s estate, were regarded as unfeasibly high. Something had to be done. Grenville’s response was to limit expense by restraining westward expansion and seeking to end the long-running border war with the American Indians; to enforce the Navigation Acts, limiting foreign trade competition and forcing the colonies to pay higher prices, especially for sugar; and to raise revenue directly from the Americans, via a new Stamp Act on legal transactions, passed in 1764. Within the increasingly fractious colonies, the result was uproar, resistance and the first signs of rebellion. The urgent question for the new government in 1765 was, therefore, what to do about the Stamp Act. To enforce it would be ruinously expensive, while compromise would likely please no one. Rockingham therefore opted for outright repeal, a view in which he may have been influenced by Burke, whose memorandum urging repeal has survived. To save face and give itself a measure of political cover, the ministry added a Declaratory Act, which insisted on Britain’s right in principle to tax the colonies, even if that right was not exercised. The move worked, and both Acts were voted through. But it proved to be a short-term expedient; the colonists had been informed that the Declaratory Act would not be exercised, and their reaction later to further taxes was to prove extreme. Meanwhile, Burke needed to get elected and take his seat in Parliament. Wendover at that time had just 250 electors – the modern constituency has around 70,000 – most of whom were Lord Verney’s tenants and therefore disposed to vote as instructed. The sitting member was induced to retire, but there was still the formality of election. In keeping with the time, this was accompanied by an extended bout of mass inebriation. It was not to Burke’s taste, but he got the job done. As he wrote to his Irish friend and mentor Charles O’Hara on Christmas Eve of 1765, ‘Yesterday I was elected for Wendover, got very drunk, and this day have an heavy cold.’ Facing the chamber of the House of Commons itself was another matter, however. The chamber itself has been rebuilt twice since Burke’s time, once after the great fire of 1834 and then after bomb damage sustained in the Second World War. On the latter occasion, at the specific insistence of Sir Winston Churchill, care was again taken to make it too small for the membership. In Churchill’s words, ‘The essence of good House of Commons speaking is the conversational style, the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges … [This] requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency … a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House.’ The chamber thus measures a rather modest 68 feet by 46 feet, and contains only 427 places for 650 MPs. Yet the eighteenth-century chamber was smaller still, at about 58 feet by 33 feet or 300 to 350 places for 558 MPs, an even smaller percentage. It functioned effectively simply because many county members only rarely attended. The sense of enclosure was increased after 1707, when Sir Christopher Wren remodelled the chamber, bringing the ceiling down and installing galleries supported by columns along both sides. Then as now, such a confined space is infinitely removed from the empty caverns of the great modern democracies. In it politics becomes, literally, hot and personal. Today the chamber of the House of Commons is the only air-conditioned public space in the Palace of Westminster, and a blessed refuge from a steamy summer day. In Burke’s time it must have been stifling. Then as now, the members faced each other. The seating reflected the institution’s earliest origins in St Stephen’s Chapel; for in an English chapel the congregants look across the aisle, not towards the altar as in a church. The Speaker and clerks sat, wigged and gowned, at the east end beneath three high windows. Senior ministers wore full court dress, with swords; the sartorial contrast with backbenchers was such that it caused something of a stir when large numbers of them lost office in 1782 and the Rockinghamites appeared in the Commons from court, bedecked in blue, with swords, lace and hair powder. But, ministers apart, there was no dress code as such: members wore hats, boots, sometimes spurs, and often carried sticks. They talked among themselves, ate fruit or nuts, and not infrequently slept in the chamber; but they were forbidden to smoke or read. Without the microphones and tiny speakers dotted around the modern chamber, members needed formidable powers of vocal projection if they were to make themselves heard. Since Walpole’s time the modern custom had arisen that government ministers would sit on the front bench on the Speaker’s right, and by the 1770s senior opposition figures sat on the bench directly facing them. But – there being as yet no political parties in the modern sense – other members sat individually or in groups as they chose. Burke normally sat, with other Rockinghamites, on the third row behind the opposition front bench, close to a pillar and not far from the Speaker’s chair. That was close enough to be fully engaged in the cut and thrust of debate, but distant enough to underline the group’s independence in opposition. There followed the awful initiation of a maiden speech. Some of life’s terrors are inevitable, others self-inflicted, and among the latter there are few to compare with the task of making a maiden speech in the House of Commons. To dull the pain, both for the speaker and their audience, the convention has arisen in recent times that maiden speeches should be short, pleasant and uncontroversial. They often take place late at night, in minor debates, when few MPs are present and the chamber is becalmed. The new member sings the praises of their predecessor, however evil or incompetent, and takes those present on a light and ideally brief tour of the constituency, before identifying some worthy cause as their one true political ambition. Rare and brave is the MP who deviates from this primrose path. Things were very different in Burke’s day. A maiden speech was a political statement, of course; but it was also a social one, in which the ambitious novice sought to cut a certain figure, regardless of his – and it was always ‘his’, until the twentieth century – personal origins. Most importantly, it was a first presentation of political force. In the days before round-the-clock media coverage, political debate focused on the chamber of the House of Commons. Moreover, a really controversial Bill hugely increased attendance, from 200–300 members to over 400, most of the extra being county members, of more independent mind. There being relatively little ‘whipping’ or party discipline to speak of, none of the present party lines to take and no national political organizations to take them, effective oratory could make a huge difference. Careerists heeded the MP Hans Stanley’s advice: ‘Get into Parliament, make tiresome speeches; you will have great offers; do not accept them at first, then do: then make great provision for yourself and family, and then call yourself an independent country gentleman.’ But, given the stakes, many MPs simply could not bring themselves to make a maiden speech at all. The great historian Edward Gibbon was one such, in a political career of nine years; the poet Andrew Marvell was another, a century earlier. More than half the 558 members never spoke at all on public matters. Burke took the plunge on 17 January 1766. This was no primrose path. The occasion was the stormy debate on repeal of the Stamp Act, the chamber packed and rancorous – Karl Anton Hickel’s painting of Pitt addressing the Commons after news of the French declaration of war in 1793 conveys something of the atmosphere (see following page/s). But not only did Burke speak once; he spoke again, and once more, and then frequently on subsequent days. There were no official, full or accurate records of debates at that time; the great crisis of whether or not the Commons would permit public reporting of debates only occurred in 1771. But even so it is clear that Burke was extremely effective. No less an authority than the Great Commoner himself weighed in: after a speech in February it was remarked that Burke ‘received such compliments on his performance from Mr Pitt as to any other man would have been fulsome, but applied to him were literally true and just’. 4 (#ulink_38a06b7e-abed-5976-996b-b61d668f79ed). The House of Commons 1793–94 Under other circumstances this might have been the beginning of a long friendship between the older and the younger man. In fact the opposite was the case. Shortly afterwards Burke went on a mission to see Pitt at his house in Kent. He sought to persuade the older man of the merits of a free port in Dominica, but also to ask on Rockingham’s behalf whether and how Pitt might be prepared to return to government. The mission underlined the fragility of Rockingham’s government, and his increasing reliance on his secretary. But in hindsight it was exceedingly ill judged, for even the most cursory understanding of Pitt’s character would have made clear that this supreme egoist was not about to discuss such issues with a mere parliamentary whippersnapper. Pitt dismissed Burke in the most cutting terms, and sent him away with a flea in his ear. The result was to create bad feeling between them, magnified by Burke’s increasing view that Pitt was in fact a bombast who lacked any real intellectual substance. When the Younger Pitt took office some fifteen years later, Burke’s view of him may already have been coloured by a degree of familial antipathy. The Rockingham administration fell in July 1766, after little more than a year. It was undermined by the inexperience and incompetence of its ministers, by Rockingham’s unwillingness to treat with the followers of Bute, whom he regarded as mere placemen for the King, and most of all by the opposition of Pitt. Pitt had denounced the Stamp Act as unconstitutional, as asserting a right to tax colonists who were not represented in the Commons, a position which earned him wild popularity in America. Now he turned around and distanced himself from Rockingham and his followers, through a general denunciation of political parties and factions as such. The King, who similarly despised parties, took the hint and invited Pitt himself to form a government. This Pitt did from the House of Lords as the newly ennobled Lord Chatham, a transformation from Great Commoner to Noble Lord which earned him enormous public ridicule and opprobrium. Burke’s reaction, as so often, was to turn to his pen. The result was A Short Account of a Late Short Administration. At just 750 words, it was less a political pamphlet than a squib, a brief piece of instant history designed to present a favourable image of the departed ministry’s year in office and its achievements. The Rockingham administration had brought calm to the Empire, the argument went, and placed British trade upon a settled basis. It had preserved the constitution, and enhanced the liberties of the subject through a prohibition on general warrants and against the seizure of personal papers. In particular, Burke was at pains to contrast the Rockinghamites’ uprightness with the forces ranged against them: ‘With the Earl of Bute they had no personal connection … They neither courted nor persecuted him. They practised no corruption … They sold no offices. They obtained no reversions or pensions … for themselves, their families, or their dependents [sic]. In the prosecution of their measures, they were traversed by an opposition of a new and singular character; an opposition of placemen and pensioners.’ These were not purely personal remarks; they gave a glimpse of a new conception of the very idea of a political party. Burke had hopes of being given a position within the new administration, but these were ended by Chatham himself. The experience strengthened his conviction that his future belonged with Rockingham, whether in opposition or in government. Chatham was visibly ageing; it could surely only be a matter of time before Burke and his patron were back in office. But while his personal influence had grown with Rockingham, a huge social gulf still separated the two men. Rockingham was one of the very wealthiest men in England. Rich in his own right, he had married an heiress and inherited Wentworth House, now Wentworth Woodhouse, a home of such stateliness that it has 365 rooms (more or less; no one has ever succeeded in counting them definitively) and, at 606 feet, an east front with the longest fa?ade of any house in Europe. He had large properties in Northamptonshire and County Wicklow, as well as vast family estates in Yorkshire. Burke, by contrast, was struggling to maintain a modest household in London. At first glance, it is easy to see Rockingham himself just as a dilettante given over to racing and gambling, the twin passions of the day, and he was often so described. But in fact he was rather more than this. A retiring man, he was no public speaker and was plagued by illness, including a debilitating venereal disease picked up on a visit to Italy, which may have rendered him sterile; there was no third Marquis. But he had great personal charm, a certain personal nobility – to be seen in his portrait, after Reynolds (see following page/s) – and a remarkable capacity to inspire loyalty in his followers, who included great Whig aristocrats such as the Dukes of Richmond and of Portland in the Lords, and fifty or so MPs in the Commons. He began to set a pattern among his political set, combining moral principle with a consistent adherence to a set of core policies, and political patronage and financial support. Burke was a mere salaried secretary. But over time he assumed a crucial role within the Rockingham Whigs, moving them away from factional politics and shaping them organizationally and intellectually into the prototype of the modern political party. In the meantime, Burke continued to yearn for financial security and social status. He had always been close to Will Burke, regarding him as a member of his household. These ties had been deepened still further by Will’s magnanimity in securing Edmund a seat in Parliament from his friend Lord Verney. Now they extended into financial speculation. Will had started to invest ‘on margin’, using money borrowed from Verney, in shares in the East India Company. Immense sums were involved – as much as ?49,000 at one point. There is no evidence that Edmund was aware of the details of Will’s scheme, or had any direct involvement. But they and his brother Richard had long had a ‘common purse’, whereby they shared mutually in each other’s gains and losses. So Edmund was seriously exposed to Will’s financial dealings. 5 (#ulink_327df03c-2871-511c-9d72-60a2ce75d446). Portrait of Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham For a while, all went well. In May 1767, the East India Company raised its dividend, for the second time in eight months, to the giddy heights of 12.5 per cent. In the previous year Will had estimated his own gains at more than ?12,000. So Edmund may have felt few qualms in purchasing Gregories, a handsome Palladian country house with an estate of some 600 acres of mixed land near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. Its cost was ?20,000, almost entirely funded by loans and mortgages, including a loan of ?6,000 from the ever-willing Lord Verney, again arranged by Will. Given Burke’s background and evidently slender means, the purchase was a source of wonderment to his friends, and of gossip and slander to his enemies. But he loved the countryside, and now set himself to become a successful farmer on scientific principles. The house also brought with it a magnificent collection of paintings and sculpture. Boswell noted seven landscapes by Poussin on a visit, and a sale catalogue of the estate in 1812 included sixty-four paintings – including four by Titian, five by Reynolds and one by Leonardo da Vinci – fifty marbles and twelve drawings. Some of these works were added by Burke, including most likely the Reynoldses and a large Poussin sent by his prot?g? James Barry from Rome. The new property was close to London, a crucial merit for the working politician of the day. But best of all it would give him the respect then accorded to men of property. As one admirer remarked, ‘An Irishman, one Mr Burke, is sprung up in the House of Commons, who has astonished every body with the power of his eloquence, his comprehensive knowledge in all our exterior and internal politics and commercial interests. He wants nothing but that sort of dignity annexed to rank, and property in England, to make him the most considerable man in the Lower House.’ That was precisely the point. Gregories would make Burke a gentleman. But his new status came at a high cost. Mortgages at that time could be called in at six months’ notice, the estate was far from paying its own way, and the Burkes did not live frugally. Moreover, through the common purse, they were acutely exposed to changes in the value of East India Company shares. Nemesis inevitably followed. There had been stock market tremors, notably in 1766 when Chatham announced a parliamentary inquiry which was seen as a transparent attempt by government to annex a portion of the company’s profits. But three years later events in India caused a sudden panic, and the price of East India Company shares fell 13 per cent. The effect on the over-extended Will Burke was catastrophic: from being handsomely ahead, he and Verney now faced a joint debt of ?47,000, and were themselves the hapless creditors of other East India speculators whose holdings had crashed. Richard faced similar ruin. Despite – sometimes because of – numerous other money-making schemes over the years, the two adventurers would die in debt. For his part, Edmund Burke would spend the rest of his life with money troubles. Members of Parliament could not be arrested for failure to pay their debts; but failure to get re-elected carried with it the imminent possibility of debtors’ prison. The Chatham administration started badly and ended worse, having dragged on despite parliamentary defeat and the chronic illness of its principal; its parting gesture was to pass the Townshend duties on American imports of items such as paint, paper and tea, which only stoked the fires of rebellion among the colonists still further. The government was taken over by the Duke of Grafton, only to be reconstructed yet again under pressure from the Rockinghamites … in collaboration with none other than Chatham himself. With these endless changes, the country seemed close to being ungovernable, all the more so as a tide of radical petitions flooded in complaining bitterly of parliamentary corruption, incompetence and the growing subordination of ministers to the King. Burke was indefatigable throughout. In addition to his secretarial duties, he was writing, canvassing for petitions and speaking in Parliament wherever possible. It has been estimated that over the period 1768–74 he was the third most active speaker in the House, rising more than 400 times on a wide range of topics, especially on trade policy and his growing concern at the abuse of the King’s prerogative powers. Around him, the Rockinghamites and their leader were reluctantly having to acknowledge, and even embrace, the fact that theirs might be a protracted parliamentary exile. Radicalism was in the air. But in the 1760s it also had a specific cause c?l?bre: the case of John Wilkes. In giving him a vicious squint and a prognathous jaw, nature had not been kind to Wilkes (see following page/s). But he had overcome these impediments to procure himself a notorious reputation as a hell-raiser and philanderer; he boasted that it ‘took him only half an hour to talk away his face’ with a woman. He also had a positive genius for constitutionally valuable mischief-making, a vaulting ambition frustrated by lack of patronage, and a great hatred for the Earl of Bute. In 1763, now an MP, Wilkes obtained an advance copy of the King’s Speech, and he denounced it and its presumed author Bute in his radical (and violently anti-Scottish) weekly, the North Briton. He had previously accused the Archbishop of Canterbury of buggery, and called the Bishop of Gloucester’s wife a professional prostitute. He had even suggested that Bute’s influence extended to taking George III’s mother as his mistress. This, however, was the final straw. The King’s response was to instigate a criminal charge of seditious libel, and have the government issue general warrants in which Wilkes and his collaborators were not named. Forty-nine people were arrested, including Wilkes himself. He was sent to the Tower of London, his home ransacked for incriminating materials, and papers removed. He then counter-sued for trespass and to secure his own immunity as an MP to libel claims under parliamentary privilege. Both actions were successful. Over a series of cases, Wilkes was able to establish both the illegality of general warrants and the now basic principle that the English courts were under no obligation to defer in law to so-called ‘reasons of state’, advanced by government in the cause of political expediency. 6 (#ulink_466612d1-191d-5293-9e78-6a65ec585655). Portrait of John Wilkes Wilkes, however, was only just getting into his stride. In the same year, his political enemies published an erotic burlesque of Pope’s Essay on Man attributed to him called An Essay on Woman. Among other things, the poem neatly summarized what seems to have been Wilkes’s own personal credo: ‘Life can little more supply / Than just a few good fucks, and then we die.’ It was condemned as blasphemous and obscene by the House of Lords, and Wilkes, who had been wounded in a duel, escaped to Paris to recover and avoid imprisonment. He was convicted in absentia of obscene and seditious libels early in 1764, and declared an outlaw. Four years later, however, and under some pressure from his French creditors, Wilkes made a dramatic return to England and was elected to Parliament for Middlesex, amid wild scenes of mob hysteria and rejoicing. He surrendered himself, waived parliamentary privilege and was sent to jail, whereupon some of his supporters were killed by troops at a riot in St George’s Fields, on the site of the present Waterloo Station, not far from Parliament. As if this was not enough, a succession of expulsions from and re-elections to Parliament now followed, which only succeeded in embarrassing the authorities still further and cementing the words ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ into the popular mind. Even then Wilkes was not finished. As an MP, he burnished his radical credentials by denouncing British policy in America, and in 1771 fought a successful campaign to prevent the suppression of reports on parliamentary debates. The loss of trust in our ancient institutions, and specifically in Parliament, is often regarded as a modern phenomenon. But Wilkes reminds us that this is not so. In less than a decade, he had almost single-handedly thrown Parliament into grave disrepute, shining a searching light on its corruption, authoritarianism, dependence on the Crown and willingness to suppress the common-law freedoms of the citizen. He had galvanized the press, organized political societies and mobilized the mob. To Burke, Wilkes was at best a mixed blessing. Personally, he found him ‘a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no principles’. There was little in common between them temperamentally, or much politically, since Burke was no radical. In many ways Wilkes was an embarrassment and, worse, a highly effective one. The Rockingham Whigs shared his criticisms of overreaching Crown prerogative and British policy towards America, and during their brief year in power Parliament had banned both general warrants and the arbitrary seizure of personal papers. But they were deeply uncomfortable about any alliance with such a notorious blasphemer and libertine. Burke himself deplored the use of general warrants, and pressed in the public interest for three years for a parliamentary inquiry into the killings in the St George’s Fields. But nothing could have been more hostile to his developing conception of principled political opposition, or to his deep belief in the value of the social order, than Wilkes’s willingness to whip up crowd hysteria and pander to the mob. That way led to revolution. It was in this context that Burke framed one of his most famous and enduring essays. In 1768–9 he had written – perhaps with William Dowdeswell, the Rockinghamites’ leader in the Commons – Observations on a Late Publication Entitled ‘The Present State of the Nation’. Two years later he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The first is a long and carefully argued pamphlet, now somewhat unjustly ignored; the second is a classic of political thought, which has been rightly read and re-read by succeeding generations. Together, they mark Burke’s transition to political maturity. The Observations is Burke’s first real political pamphlet. In purpose, it is a counter-attack. In late 1768 William Knox, a follower of Grenville, had published The Present State of the Nation, which set out a vigorous defence of Grenville’s trade policy, and an attack on Rockingham and his followers for betraying that policy and the interests of the nation. In response, Burke does not simply resort to the political stock-in-trade of deflection, denial and insult. Rather, he makes a lengthy argument on the merits, backed up with a host of detail, statistical tables and evidence. The subtext was clear. The Rockinghamites were right on the facts and right on the principle, and they stood ready to serve when the ministry collapsed, as it surely would. But more than that: as a party they had the capacity to articulate policy based on fundamental political principle, which could as a result outlast the vagaries of the moment, and become the basis for loyal and yet energetic opposition. Much of the Observations is dry stuff indeed, though towards the end it moves from evidence and rebuttal to a vigorous defence of the Rockingham ministry along the lines of the Short Account. Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific detail with Olympian generalization. Thus a discussion of imports from Jamaica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that ‘politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part’. Or take Burke’s magisterial repudiation of Grenville’s proposal for the American colonists to be enfranchised and their representatives sent 3,000 miles to London. This he denounces as constitutional folly, in terms that have resonance today: ‘Has he well considered what an immense operation any change in our constitution is? How many discussions, parties and passions it will necessarily excite; and when you open it to inquiry in one part, where the inquiry will stop?’ In a favourite metaphor, Burke likens the British constitution to an old building, which ‘stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then it may come down upon our heads altogether, in much uniformity of ruin; and great will be the ruin thereof.’ In its scepticism about human reason, and its respect for tradition, for what is given, the thought is deeply conservative. In language, it is biblical. In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, published anonymously in April 1770, Burke turns from economic to social disorder. The return of Wilkes in 1768 had spread panic in official circles, generated huge public excitement and cast the authorities generally in the worst possible light. But Burke does not analyse popular grievances simply in their own terms. Rather, he develops an elaborate conspiracy theory, in which their ultimate cause is to be found in the extension and consolidation of royal power. This was potentially dangerous territory, even for someone protected by parliamentary privilege, and Burke prudently follows the convention of the time that the King can do no wrong. Instead he attributes to the ‘King’s Friends’, an alleged Court faction of shadowy advisers, the importation from France to Britain of a Double Cabinet: a parallel administration designed to control the workings of government from the inside. This has as its counterpart an attack on other sources of power; notably, he accuses the Court faction of seeking to destroy potential opposition within Parliament through patronage, and by constant changes of administration. Given all these offices and pensions, it was little wonder that the Crown could not live within the ample financial means voted to it by Parliament. Rhetorically, Burke’s argument was highly ingenious. It allowed him to retell recent political history as an unconstitutional attempt by George III to escape the constraints imposed by the Glorious Revolution in 1688–9 and accepted by monarchs thereafter. It offered a delicious hint of foreign intrigue, reminiscent of the influence of Louis XIV over Charles II and James II. And its analysis had a plausible and deeply satisfying twist in the tail. Far from being unwelcome to the King’s friends, Burke argues, the advent of Wilkes offered them an extraordinary opportunity, for it actively assisted their project of undermining Parliament, and securing more power for themselves in the ensuing crackdown. The Thoughts thus contained an elaborate conspiracy theory. One might think this a thin rationale for political immortality, especially since the theory of the Double Cabinet has since been largely exploded by historical research. How, then, has it achieved its status as a classic of political thought? As in the Observations, the reason lies in the final third of the book. Formally, Burke dismisses radical solutions like shorter parliaments and a ‘place bill’, which would remedy excesses of patronage by excluding holders of lucrative offices or pensions from the Commons. He also disavows specific remedies of his own. In fact, however, he has nothing less than a complete re-engineering of party politics in mind. He insists that power can never be properly exercised by an individual, however distinguished, for any great length of time. Practically, then, the only solution is a principled assertion of the power of the House of Commons, through political parties: ‘Government may in a great measure be restored, if any considerable body of men have honesty and resolution enough never to accept Administration, unless this garrison of King’s men, which is stationed, as in a citadel, to control and enslave it, be entirely broken and disbanded, and every work they have thrown up be levelled with the ground.’ In other words, parliamentarians should band together on principle to destroy what Burke insisted was the King’s network of patronage. If that fails, then the only backstop can be at the ballot box: I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the Representatives, but [by] the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that these Representatives are going to over-leap the fences of the law, and to introduce an arbitrary power … nothing else can hold the constitution to its true principles. In a mixed constitution, then, all sources of power are constrained: MPs hold the government to account, but they must themselves be held accountable by the people if the constitution is to work its magic. But, Burke argues in a brilliant move, this balance in turn rests on a crucial distinction. For faction is not party. Factions are groupings of the moment, which exist to take power and to exercise it. Those forming Burke’s ‘considerable body of men’ are not a faction. No, they are a political party; that is, they are ‘united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some political principle in which they are all agreed’. The test comes when such a group is evicted from office. Founded on self-interest, factions will tend to disperse. Parties, however, will sustain themselves and their membership – on principle and shared values, on mutual commitments and on personal loyalties and friendship – until the opportunity to exercise power returns. There is a risk of circularity here: to the conspiracy theorist, lack of success can itself be a form of self-justification, and an excuse for inertia. Nevertheless, it was a matter of deep political principle that the Rockinghamites should be able to sustain themselves as a party in opposition, and they had learned how to do this, with some difficulty, since 1766. So it was not surprising that they saw themselves as almost the sole repository of political virtue, and came to refer to the Thoughts as ‘our political creed’. The Thoughts was a significant succ?s d’estime. It quickly ran through four editions, and made Burke, now forty years of age, into a national figure. More than 3,000 copies were printed, and it was widely debated in the press. As a political call to action it was a failure: too intricate and theoretical to be really effective, it was neutered when publication coincided with a rare lull in Wilkes-related scandal. As a basic credo for the Rockingham Whigs, it was a vital statement of shared belief. As political analysis, it remains of enduring importance today. But by mid-1770 Burke’s own mind was elsewhere. Jane had fallen ill and was confined to her bed for two months, perhaps as a result of a miscarriage. Worse, just as the Thoughts was published there had also appeared a detailed, accurate and highly personal article about him in the London Evening Post. In general Burke accepted public scrutiny; he could do no less. But this was different: ‘Hitherto, much as I have been abused, my table and my bed were left sacred, but since it has so unfortunately happened, that my wife, a quiet woman, confined to her family cares and affections, has been dragged into a newspaper, I own I feel a little hurt.’ What made it worse was that the original source was a well-meaning account by his oldest friend, Richard Shackleton, which had fallen into the wrong hands. In it Shackleton had claimed that Burke was ‘made easy by patronage’, unintentionally inflicting a wound; and what was worse, he had revealed that both Burke’s mother and wife were Roman Catholics. Coming at a time when Irish grievances were rapidly on the rise, this could only excite and succour Burke’s political opponents. In other ways, this period was more hopeful. In December 1770 Burke was chosen by the Assembly of the colony of New York to act as their agent in London, a role which paid well – ?500 a year, or roughly that of a middle-ranking official – and kept him closely in touch with colonial affairs and issues relating to trade with America. He expanded the farm at Gregories, and invested money he did not have in new techniques and experiments under the influence of the agriculturalist Arthur Young. He also made a very happy visit to France in 1773, travelling to Auxerre with his son Richard, then fifteen, placing the boy with a local family named Parisot in order to teach him some French, and also establishing a lasting link which would feed Burke much useful information in due course about the first years of the revolution. Returning via Paris, Burke visited Versailles, where he saw the young Dauphine, Marie Antoinette, an experience which would later be immortalized in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. However, it was with revolution in America that the government, and Burke, were to be increasingly concerned. The Rockinghamites had learned to survive in opposition during the Chatham and Grafton ministries. But their morale was sustained by the regular change in administration, and by hopes of a return. In January 1770, however, George III had after ten years at last discovered in the Tory Lord North a Prime Minister in whom he could repose his trust. It was a fateful choice. North was likeable, flexible, deferential, a patriot and a moralist in his private life, all high recommendations to the King. What he was not was a great leader. In 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company, which had built up a vast surplus of tea in Britain, to export tea to America for the first time. At North’s insistence this tea bore a symbolic tax of three pence per pound, a last remnant of the highly unpopular and now discarded Townshend duties, left in part specifically to remind the American colonies of Britain’s right to tax them. Even including this tax, however, East India Company tea was cheaper than other imported tea, and cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea. The effect of the new Act, then, was immediate and comprehensive: at a single stroke it united all sections of American opinion, nationalist and loyalist, commercial and illicit, against the new imports. On 16 December, after a lengthy stand-off in Boston harbour with the colonial authorities, and a raucous meeting of some 7,000 local citizens, rebels disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three ships at night – all of which were American, not owned by the East India Company – and dumped 342 cases of tea from them into the harbour. The ‘Boston tea party’ scandalized Parliament and British public opinion alike. With feelings running high both in the country and on the backbenches, Lord North and his ministers prepared draconian measures to crack down on the colony of Massachusetts and the port of Boston, and reassert their control. Both in principle and in his well-remunerated role as the British agent of the New York Assembly, Burke’s sympathies lay with the colonists. As the storm clouds of revolution gathered, in April 1774 he made the first of two great speeches designed to bring Parliament back to its senses, to vindicate – yet again – the policy of the Rockingham government, and to set out a proper long-term basis for relations between Britain and America. Burke devoted enormous time and trouble to his ‘Speech on American Taxation’,anticipating its later publication. In it he traces the odious tea tax back through a tortuous history of varied and sometimes contradictory policy: imposition of the Stamp Act by Grenville; its repeal under Rockingham; renewed taxation via the Townshend duties, passed during the chaos induced by Chatham’s temporary absence from politics; and their partial withdrawal in turn under North, leaving only the odious tea tax behind. Describing his opponents in the most generous terms, he is nonetheless perfectly clear in attributing to them the blame for Britain’s ugly predicament, in terms at once impassioned, ironic and magisterial. Though he does not say as much, the whole episode amounts for him to a case history in which failed policy derives from a failed approach to government itself. Experience and not abstract ideas, Burke insists, is what counts: Lord North asserts, that retrospect is not wise; and the proper, the only proper subject of inquiry, is ‘not how we got into this difficulty, but how we are to get out of it.’ In other words, we are, according to him, to consult our invention, and reject our experience. The mode of deliberation he recommends is diametrically opposite to every rule of reason and every principle of good sense established amongst mankind. The Stamp Act marks a profound and disastrous shift in policy, Burke argues, in attempting for the first time to derive revenue from America itself, over and above the revenue naturally deriving from its growth and Britain’s control of trade through the Navigation Acts. America could never be governed effectively without a recognition that Americans were freeborn Englishmen abroad, to whom the tea tax was a grave insult: ‘No man ever doubted that the commodity of tea could bear an imposition of three pence. But no commodity will bear three pence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are irritated, and when two millions of men are resolved not to pay.’ The only solution was to build ‘a rampart against the speculations of innovators’, embrace ‘a spirit of practicability, of moderation and mutual convenience’, and repeal the tea tax. But this in turn required Britain to return to an earlier and fundamentally different conception of empire: as non-coercive, commercial and based on shared interests and identity, not on attempts at control and retribution. Only thus, and through a far more selective exercise of national power, could Britain reconcile imperial sovereignty with imperial dominion. But without such a shift, Burke predicts, there will be disaster in the American colonies. ‘Will they be content in such a state of slavery? If not, look to the consequences. Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not … such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun.’ It was an early demonstration of his gift of prophecy. The ‘Taxation’ speech signally failed to secure the repeal of the tea tax. Published in January 1775, it and its sister speech on ‘Conciliation’ with America are gems of historical analysis and statesmanship. But they also marked a small but important watershed in political communication. Speeches by parliamentarians had been published before, but these were some of the earliest occasions on which they had been self-consciously used to build a basis of knowledge and shared education within politics, a reputation outside Parliament and indeed – such was the interest that they attracted in America – a degree of international renown. This was all to the good. But in April 1774 Burke was having difficulty in securing a platform even in his own country. A general election was imminent, but his patron Lord Verney had been all but destroyed financially by his speculations in the East India Company. Verney’s pocket borough at Wendover was a valuable asset, which would undoubtedly be put out to bid. The result was that Burke had nowhere to stand for Parliament. Disaster stared him in the face. THREE Ireland, America and King Mob,1774–1780 IN EARLY 1774 EDMUND BURKE was facing an imminent and enforced departure from the House of Commons. But characteristically his first reaction was to think not of himself but of William. Thanks to his ever-generous patron Lord Verney, William Burke had been elected for Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire in 1766. But Lord Verney’s finances were now such that this seat too would be lost; and as William had graciously given way to Edmund in 1765, so he should have the priority now. All the more so since no seat meant no immunity from prosecution, and so no protection from his numerous and pressing creditors. At Burke’s urging William was duly enabled to stand for Haslemere in Surrey, but was defeated. Judgements were soon filed against him in the Court of King’s Bench. For Burke himself the parliamentary landscape was considerably more complicated than it had been in 1765. In the modern era, it is a truism that no two constituencies are quite alike. Various in their political geography and party affiliation, constituencies also widely differ in the volunteer associations which select and adopt candidates, and then – it is hoped – campaign for them to win office. Surprisingly often the result is to form a long-term bond of loyalty and affection, which ties MP and constituency together through political thick and thin. Sometimes, however, the counterpart of a ‘safe’ seat, with a solid majority already in place, is a constituency association only too aware of its power to choose the MP – and willing to choose another if the current incumbent does not toe the line on its favoured issues. Eighteenth-century constituencies were quite different, owing far more to individual patronage and informal groups of supporters than to local party organization. The most famous of them today are perhaps the ‘rotten boroughs’ such as Dunwich, which had fallen into the sea, or Old Sarum, long owned by the Pitt family, which had three houses, seven voters – and two MPs. But this caricature does a disservice to the fantastical complexity of the electoral structure that had grown up by the 1770s. At that time Parliament had 558 members, comprising 489 from England, 45 from Scotland and the balance of 24 from Wales. Ireland had its own Parliament until 1800 so there were no Irish seats at Westminster, though some MPs with Irish connections sat in both places. The English seats were heavily weighted towards the south and south-west, especially sea ports: Cornwall alone had forty-four Members of Parliament, and it and its four neighbouring counties of Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire contained roughly a quarter of the seats. London, by contrast, had 10 per cent of the whole population, but only ten seats; Nottingham and Newcastle, then both large and important towns, had just two seats each. Birmingham and Manchester had none. The most important English constituencies were the forty counties, which returned two members each, chosen by ‘forty-shilling freeholders’, or those with freehold property worth ?2 or forty shillings per year. The property qualification had originally been introduced in 1430, but three and a half centuries of inflation and exception-making had reduced the effective threshold and so greatly enlarged the voting population. However, the counties, while prestigious, were vastly outnumbered by the 203 cities and boroughs, from which a total of 405 MPs were elected (there were also four university seats). These city and borough seats ranged from near-universal male franchise through those controlled by local corporations to ‘burgage’ boroughs, where votes were attached to local properties, known as burgages, which could be bought and sold in order to achieve electoral control. At a time when voting was by open ballot, corruption was less than is often portrayed but nonetheless endemic by modern standards, and it varied by seat: undue influence could be exercised by landlords instructing tenant voters, by bribing a local corporation or simply by owning or controlling enough burgages. For Burke, then, the options were limited. A county seat was out of the question for the son of a Dublin attorney, which was lucky because the generally wide franchises made elections, especially contested elections, prohibitively expensive to all but those with the wealthiest supporters. At the very least, voters expected to be lavishly wined and dined, or ‘treated’, by the different candidates. Treating remains an electoral offence today, but only if alcohol and meat are involved – it is an oddity of English law that vegetarians and teetotallers cannot be treated. In the eighteenth century, however, treating was endemic, and since elections often took weeks to conclude, the cost could be ruinous. In fighting for Chester in 1784 the Grosvenor family paid for 1,187 barrels of ale, 3,756 gallons of rum and brandy, and over 27,000 bottles of wine. These were pretty heroic numbers for a seat with just 1,500 voters. An inebriated electorate was pliable in other ways too, albeit sometimes with disastrous results. George Selwyn, MP for Gloucester, wrote in 1761 that: Two of my voters were murdered yesterday by an experiment which we call shopping, that is, locking them up and keeping them dead drunk to the day of election. Mr Snell’s agents forced two single Selwyns into a post chaise, where, being suffocated with the brandy that was given them and a very fat man that had the custody of them, they were taken out stone dead. The most famous example of electoral expense is perhaps that of Yorkshire, where William Wilberforce’s two opponents in the bitterly contested election of 1807 each reputedly spent ?100,000, or more than ?6 million today; Wilberforce topped the poll, but out of a total of nearly 24,000 votes only 850 finally separated the three candidates. By comparison, the average election budget allowed by law for a parliamentary candidate in the final month of the 2010 general election, including all staff, office and equipment costs, campaign literature, merchandise and advertising, was approximately ?12,000 – less than the cost of a single TV advertisement in a US congressional election. At the local level at least, there is extraordinarily little ‘money power’ in modern British politics. To return: matters were further complicated from 1707 until the early twentieth century by a law which required those accepting an office of profit from the Crown to resign and fight a by-election. The principle was clear: ministerial office rewarded an MP personally and would likely distract him from the zealous duty of care owed to his constituents, so they were entitled to refuse him leave to accept. In practice, however, this discouraged good MPs in marginal seats from accepting office, and occasionally unhorsed those who did accept, as Winston Churchill found to his cost in 1908. It also all but ruled out those in county seats from doing so, since a by-election meant another round of enormous electoral expense. The result was that county seats were rarely contested, often divided up by agreement between prominent local families, and occupied by landed gentlemen with decidedly independent views. This only added to their prestige. A ‘pocket’ borough, however – not quite ‘rotten’, but with a small enough number of votes to be effectively controlled by a local landowner or magnate – hardly offered a legitimate platform for someone who aspired to be a statesman. So in the face of an imminent general election, it was with some reluctance that Burke approached his patron Rockingham, and then at Rockingham’s behest was elected for the borough of Malton in Yorkshire on 11 October 1774. However, on the very same day he was summoned post-haste to stand for Bristol, where one of the declared candidates had suddenly withdrawn. Unlike Malton, Bristol was a huge prize: the second city in Britain, an economic powerhouse and an ‘open borough’ whose wide franchise would confer legitimacy and independent authority. It was rich, and dominated not by a leisured gentry but by merchants who had made their money in trading with Ireland and America. For a politician like Burke, deeply engaged in trade issues and already vociferously opposed to taxing the American colonies, it seemed a perfect fit. So thought Richard Champion, a porcelain manufacturer and one of Bristol’s many influential Quakers, who had become his campaign manager. After a bitter and personal three-way fight lasting twenty-three bibulous days, in which Burke was denounced as a stooge, a papist and a friend to aristocratic tyranny, he was elected on 3 November as one of two members behind Henry Cruger, a radical. It was as the member for Bristol, and not for Malton, that Burke was returned to Parliament in 1774. Burke’s victory speech was expected to be formal, deferential and platitudinous; instead he turned his ‘Address to the Electors of Bristol’ into what has become a hallowed account of political representation itself. Over the previous century the idea had sprung up in radical circles that Members of Parliament could and should be bound by instructions from electors as to how to vote. For how else could electors know that their wishes were being heeded? What was to prevent an MP, having been elected, from doing exactly as he pleased? The same cry is frequently heard today. Speaking first, Cruger pledged himself to be guided by his constituents’ instructions. Burke, however, simply destroyed the idea at source, in words that have resounded down the ages. Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence and the most unreserved communication with his constituents … It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures … to theirs; and above all, ever and in all cases to prefer their own interest to his own. Yet deference could go only so far; indeed, too much would be self-defeating. Burke continued: But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. In the interests of their constituents, then, Members of Parliament must have, and must be allowed to have, independent minds: ‘Authoritative instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey … these are things utterly unknown to the laws of the land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution.’ MPs, then, should not be held hostage simply to advocates of particular issues or interests. Moreover, such an approach to politics mistook the character of Parliament itself: Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests … Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament. These were stern, even foolhardy, words from a newly elected MP to an electorate tempted by radicalism, and they carried with them a hint of trouble to come. But the present moment carried troubles of its own. Lord North had been vindicated at the election with a comfortable majority, reflecting the popularity of his harder attitude towards America. Rockingham’s followers, in contrast, are estimated to have fallen in number from fifty-five to forty-three MPs. Amid allegations of divided loyalty and even betrayal they were increasingly stigmatized as ‘friends of America’, as relations with the colonies further deteriorated. Rockingham himself was becoming withdrawn, while his group was further undermined by the death in February 1775 of William Dowdeswell, its leader in the Commons and in-house expert on financial matters. The wider opposition was split, with Chatham as erratic and uncooperative as ever in the Lords. Burke chafed at the enforced inactivity. Lacking the position to lead his party or his nation, his reaction was again to quarry out from within himself the intellectual leadership that the situation demanded, and offer it to those in authority. The result was his ‘Speech on Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies’, delivered on 22 March 1775. Its message was plain and bold: The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord … [or] to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions … It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jesse-norman/edmund-burke-the-visionary-who-invented-modern-politics/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.