Edmund Burke, Volume I: 1730-1784

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preface

EDMUND BURKE * * * Volume 1

i

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preface

EDMUND BURKE * * * VOLUME I, 1730–1784 F. P. LOCK

OXFORD · CLARENDON PRESS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Saõ Paolo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © F. P. Lock 1998 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First published 1998 First published in paperback 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lock, F.P. Edmund Burke/F.P. Lock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. 1730–1784– ISBN 0-19-820676-3 (v. 1) 1. Burke, Edmund, 1730–1797. 2. Great Britain—Politics and government—18th century. 3. Political scientists—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Statesmen—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title. DA506.B9L54 1998 941.07′3′092–dc21 [B] 98-7147 CIP ISBN 978-0-19-820676-3 (Hbk.) 978-0-19-922663-4 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Preface When Sir Walter Elliot, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, decides to let his ancestral home and retire to a more economical life at Bath, he is gratified that his prospective tenant is an admiral. No friend to the carrière ouverte aux talents, Sir Walter dislikes the Navy for bringing ‘persons of obscure birth’ into ‘undue distinction’. Yet to be able to say ‘I have let my house to Admiral Croft,’ he reflects, ‘would sound extremely well; very much better than to any mere Mr ——; a Mr (save, perhaps, some half dozen in the nation,) always needs a note of explanation. An admiral speaks his own consequence, and, at the same time, can never make a baronet look small.’ Although much had changed in the twenty years between Burke’s death and the publication of Persuasion, the England in which the novel is set remains recognizably Burke’s world. Political power and social prestige are still largely the preserve of the landed gentry. A baronet outranks an admiral, and a ‘new man’ is still held in disdain by the likes of Sir Walter. Most of those ‘persons of obscure birth’ who achieved distinction in the eighteenth century rose, like Admiral Croft, through one of the professions: through the Army or the Navy, the law or the Church. Some of these ‘new men’, chiefly the lawyers, even worked their way into Parliament. Burke’s career was unusual even among these exceptional few. Almost alone of the ‘new men’ of his age who achieved political prominence, he owed his rise not to professional success but to the force of his mind and his eloquence. Burke’s life falls naturally into three periods, dividing at 1765, and at 1782 or 1784. Until 1765, the surviving evidence is scanty; in the tenvolume edition of his letters, 1765 is reached half-way through volume i. Even so, by digging in the archives (especially the student records at Trinity College, Dublin) I have been able to treat Burke’s early years more fully than previous biographers have done. Before 1766, Burke was known, if at all, as an author. Yet only one of his early writings, the Philosophical Enquiry, is familiar today. I have tried to redress the balance by treating at length two works hitherto neglected: the Account of the European Settlements in America (written in collaboration with William Burke) and his unfinished ‘History of England’. In July 1765, Burke became private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, himself just appointed First Lord of the Treasury; in December, he was elected to Parliament. Within a few months, he had established himself as one of the handful of leading speakers in the Commons, with the embryo of a national reputation. Though Rockingham’s secretary for only a year, Burke remained tied to the marquis until his death in July 1782. Rockingham headed the small but influential party named after him; Burke

vi preface was one of its most prominent members. During these years with Rockingham, Burke was concerned with an extraordinary variety of political questions. The biographical problem is to select from the increasingly abundant evidence so as to achieve coherence without misrepresentation. Burke was never wholly occupied with the great issues of the day. Much of his time and energy was devoted to local and temporary questions, and I have used some of these to give a fuller and more varied account of his parliamentary career. Rockingham’s death changed Burke’s life, both liberating him and cutting him adrift. I have chosen to take the story to 1784 in this volume, because the general election of 1784 marks an even more decisive break between Burke’s middle and later career. Burke is now chiefly remembered for the cause of his last decade, his crusade against the French Revolution and its principles. This will be the leading theme of my second volume. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is a classic of English literature, of historiography, and of political thought. This eloquent masterpiece, Burke’s greatest legacy to humanity, though written in less than a year, was the product of a lifetime’s reading, thought, and observation. To aid an understanding of the man who wrote it, to illuminate his remarkable mind, and to trace his ideas to their roots in his life, is the purpose of this biography. Any biography of Burke must depend heavily on the splendid edition of his Correspondence, edited by Thomas W. Copeland and others. This has been my constant resource, as has the edition of the Writings and Speeches edited by Paul Langford and his team. I would also like to record my debt to the many Burke scholars, dix-huitiémistes, and writers on the numerous ancillary subjects which I have investigated in the course of researching this book. I have learned much more from them than the specific indebtednesses recorded in the notes. Nor could this volume have been written without drawing on the resources of many libraries and other institutions. To all of them, and to the members of their staffs who have helped me in so many ways, I am most grateful, and especially for permisison to quote from manuscripts or reproduce illustrations. In London: the British Library, the British Museum, Dr Williams’s Library, Drummond’s Bank, the Guildhall Library, Harrow School Archives Room, the Institute of Historical Research, the London Metropolitan Archives, the Middle Temple Library, the National Portrait Gallery, the Public Record Office, St Mary’s Battersea, the Westminster Abbey Muniment Room (and the Dean and Chapter of Westminster), the City of Westminster Archives, and the Westminster Diocesan Archives. Outside London: the Buckinghamshire Record Office, Aylesbury; the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; the Birmingham Central Library; the Bristol Reference Library, the Bristol Record Office, and the University of Bristol

preface vii Library; the Suffolk Record Office at Bury St Edmunds; the Cambridge University Library; Churchill College, Cambridge; the Fitzwilliam Museum; the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection; the Claydon House Trust (and Sir Ralph Verney); the Derby Central Library; the Northamptonshire Record Office; the University of Nottingham Library; the Nottinghamshire Archives (and the Principal Archivist); the Bodleian Library, and Christ Church, Oxford; the Sheffield City Archives (and the Trustees of Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement and the Director of Libraries and Information Services). In Scotland: the National Library of Scotland, the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, the Royal Museum of Scotland, the Scottish Record Office, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the Glasgow University Archives. In Ireland: Trinity College, Dublin (and the Board of Trinity College); the National Archives, the National Library of Ireland, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, the Representative Church Body Library, the Dublin City Library; and the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork. In Canada: the libraries of Queen’s University at Kingston and of the University of Toronto. In the United States: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the James M. and Marie Louise Osborn Collection, Yale University; the Yale Center for British Art; the Lewis Walpole Library at Farmington; the Harvard University Library; the library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; and the Tulane University Law Library. For financial assistance, I am grateful to the University of Queensland; Queen’s University; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and the Marguerite Eyre Wilbur Foundation. Special thanks are due to the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, the Rt. Hon. Lord Polwarth of Harden, the Hon. Lady Hastings, Dr J. A. Perkins, and Dr Lars E. Troide. For reading early drafts and making valuable suggestions, I would like to thank Dr Paula Backscheider, Dr Vincent Carretta, and Dr Peter Sabor. At a later stage, Dr J. A. W. Gunn kindly read the entire typescript. My greatest debt, however, is to my wife, Margaret, for her constant help, advice, and encouragement.


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Contents List of Plates List of Figures List of Abbreviations

xi xiii xiv

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

1 29 64 91 125 165 209 259 298 349 400 443 492

Growing Up Irish, 1730–1744 From a Boy to a Man, 1744–1750 Getting Started, 1750–1757 A Philosophical Enquiry, 1757 Maps of Mankind, 1756–1758 Journalist and Jackal, 1758–1765 Gleams of Prosperity, 1765–1768 Present Discontents, 1768–1770 Squalls and Stagnation, 1770–1773 America and Bristol, 1774–1776 Waiting on Events, 1776–1779 Shears or Hatchets, 1779–1781 Paradise Lost, 1781–1784

Index

545


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Plates 1. Burke’s Dublin. Detail from Charles Brooking, A Map of the City and Suburbs of Dublin (Dublin, 1728). 25 ⫻ 58.2 cm. The Board of Trinity College, Dublin 2. A Prospect of the Library of Trinity College Dublin (1753), one of ‘Six Views of Dublin’ engraved after Joseph Tudor. 22.2 ⫻ 37.4 cm. The Board of Trinity College, Dublin 3. Burke’s first publication: Punch’s Petition to Mr. S———n to Be Admitted to the Theatre Royal (Dublin, 1748). Broadside. 30.4 ⫻ 17.9 cm. By permission of the British Library. 1890.e.5(152) 4. Burke’s London. Detail from A New and Exact Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster . . . with the Additional Buildings to the Year 1756 (published as frontispiece to John Strype’s edition of Stow’s Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, 1754–5). 32 ⫻ 71.6 cm. Queen’s University Library 5. A View of the Fountain in the Temple (1753). Engraving by Henry Fletcher after an oil painting by Joseph Nichols. 30.5 ⫻ 44.5 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 6. James Barry, Christopher Nugent, M.D. (1772). Oil on canvas. 76 ⫻ 63.5 cm. Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and North East Somerset Council 7. Electioneering: A D[evonshir]e Rout; or, Reynard in His Element (26 April 1784: BMC 6555). Anonymous engraving. 22.9 ⫻ 34.1 cm. British Museum 8. A satire on Irish pensions: The Irish Stubble, alias Bubble Goose (November 1763: BMC 4068). Anonymous engraving. 30.5 ⫻ 24.8 cm. British Museum 9. A satire on the first Rockingham Ministry: The State Nursery (1765: BMC 4133). Anonymous engraving. 31.8 ⫻ 20.9 cm. British Museum 10. Satirical view of the inside of the House of Commons: Vox Populi, Vox Dei (BMC 4429; from the London Museum, 1770). Anonymous engraving. 11.7 ⫻ 10.5 cm. British Museum 11. Joshua Reynolds, Lord Rockingham and his Secretary, Edmund Burke (1766?). Oil on canvas. 145.4 ⫻ 159.1 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 12. Burke’s house: Gregories, Beaconsfield. Front (north) elevation and plan, drawn by Colen Campbell, and engraved for Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, ii (London, 1717), plate 47. 25 ⫻ 38.5 cm. Queen’s University Library 13. ‘The Seat of the Late Edmund Burke Esqr. at Beaconsfield, Bucks.’. Etching by R. Howlett after Charles Joseph Harford, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 84 (September 1814). 9.5 ⫻ 15.5 cm. Queen’s University Library 14. Gregories, from the north. Pen-and-wash drawing by Abraham Shackleton the younger, 1769. 23.4 ⫻ 36.6 cm. James M. and Marie Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn Files, 34. 360

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15. T. H. Shepherd, The Continuation of Fludyer Street (1859). Drawing. 23.7 ⫻ 18.2 cm. London Metropolitan Archives, EG3/5813/1559 16. Part of Burke’s estate. Detail from R. Stratford, Part of an Estate . . . Belonging to James DuPre, Esquire (1813). Drawing, coloured. 228.6 ⫻ 134.6 cm. Buckinghamshire Record Office, Ma/14/1R 17. Remains of the Westminster Gatehouse. Watercolour by William Capon (1822), after a drawing of 1808. 24 ⫻ 20 cm. Society of Antiquaries, London 18. ‘A Plan of the Intended Navigable Canal from Leeds to Selby’, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1774. 19.1 ⫻ 34 cm. Queen’s University Library 19. James Barry, Edmund Burke (c.1771). Oil on canvas. 76 ⫻ 63.5 cm. Provost’s House. The Board of Trinity College, Dublin 20. Copy after James Barry, Edmund Burke. Oil on canvas. 127 ⫻ 99 cm. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland 21. Burke as Ulysses. James Barry, Portraits in the Character of Ulysses and His Companions Escaping from the Cave of Polypheme (1776). Oil on canvas. 127 ⫻ 102 cm. Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork 22. James Barry, The Conversion of Polemon (1778). Etching and aquatint. 56.8 ⫻ 74.3 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 23. Teapot from service manufactured by Richard Champion at Bristol, and presented to Jane Burke, 1775. 17 cm (height). © Trustees of the Royal Museum of Scotland, 1998 24. George Romney, Charles Lennox, Third Duke of Richmond (1775). Oil on canvas. 74.9 ⫻ 61 cm. Trustees of the Goodwood Collection 25. John Maurer, A Perspective View of Whitehall (1753). Engraving. 21 ⫻ 40.6 cm. Westminster City Archives 26. James Gillray, Coalition Dance (5 April 1783: BMC 6205). Engraving. 22.6 ⫻ 32.2 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University 27. William Dent, A Learned Coalition (11 July 1783: BMC 6249). Engraving. 20.6 ⫻ 15.9 cm. British Museum 28. James Gillray, Cincinnatus in Retirement (23 August 1782: BMC 6026). Engraving, 22.9 ⫻ 32.7 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University 29. Burke blowing Fox’s trumpet: James Sayers, Carlo Khan’s Triumphant Entry into Leadenhall Street (5 December 1783: BMC 6276). Engraving. 28.6 ⫻ 22.6 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University 30. J. Boyne, The Retreat of Carlo Khan from Leadenhall Street (24 December 1783: BMC 6285). Engraving. 31.3 ⫻ 22.9 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University 31. Burke and Fox expelled from Paradise after the Death of Rockingham. James Sayers, Paradise Lost (17 July 1782: BMC 6011). Engraving. 24.5 ⫻ 22.5 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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Figures 1. Detail from John Rocque, An Exact Survey of the City and Suburbs of Dublin (Dublin, 1756). The Board of Trinity College, Dublin 2. Detail from John Rocque, A Plan of London, with All the New Streets, Lanes, Roads, &c (London, 1769). Queen’s University Library 3. Colen Campbell, plan of Gregories, from Vitruvius Britannicus; detail of Plate 12. Queen’s University Library 4. Detail from Richard Horwood, Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (London, 1792–9). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

19 196 255 327

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Abbreviations Quotations from, and references to, the following editions are identified as follows: C Correspondence, ed. Thomas W. Copeland and others, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1958–78). W Works, 8 vols., Bohn’s British Classics (London, 1854– 89). Used for texts that have not yet appeared in WS. WS Writings and Speeches, ed. Paul Langford and others, 7 vols. to date (i–iii, v–vi, viii–ix). (Oxford, 1981– ). Successive references within a paragraph or note omit the letter and volume number when they are the same as the preceding. The following additional abbreviations and short titles are used in the notes: E.B. Edmund Burke J.B. Jane Burke (E.B.’s wife) R.B. Jr. Richard Burke (E.B.’s son) R.B. Sr. Richard Burke (E.B.’s brother) W.B. William Burke (E.B.’s friend and cousin) Almon The Parliamentary Register; or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons . . . 1774–1780, 17 vols. (London: John Almon, 1775–80). BL British Library, London. BMC F. G. Stephens and M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols. (London, 1870–1954). References are to catalogue numbers. Bodl. Bodleian Library CJ Journals of the House of Commons. Corr.(1844) Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir Richard Bourke, 4 vols. (London, 1844). Debrett The Parliamentary Register; or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons . . . 1780–1796, 45 vols. (London: J. Debrett, 1781–96). HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission. Note-Book A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, ed. H. V. F. Somerset (Cambridge, 1957). NRO Northamptonshire Record Office. All references are to the Fitzwilliam (Burke) papers.

NUL PDNA PH

PRO Sale Catalogue

TCD Todd

WWM YB YWC

preface abbreviations xv Nottingham University Library Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, ed. R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, 6 vols to date (Millwood, NY, 1982– ). The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1806–20). Used chiefly to provide references to a readily available source. Public Record Office, Kew Catalogue of the Library of the Late Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, 1833); repr. in Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. viii: Politicans, ed. Seamus Deane (London, 1973). References are to lot numbers. Trinity College, Dublin. William B. Todd, A Bibliography of Edmund Burke, Soho Bibliographies (London, 1964); repr. with addenda, (Godalming, 1982). References are to entries unless pages are specified. Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments. References are to either the Burke Papers (BkP) or the Rockingham Papers (R). Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (OF ⫽ Osborn Files). Horace Walpole, Correspondence, Yale Edition, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven, 1937–83).


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1 Growing Up Irish, 1730–1744

1 About a year before Burke was born, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) wrote his most memorable exposure of the social and economic ills of his native Ireland. ‘It is a melancholly Object to those, who walk through this great Town, or travel in the Country’, he observes, adopting the persona of a concerned citizen, to ‘see the Streets, the Roads, and Cabbin-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’. Their mothers, ‘instead of being able to work for their honest Livelyhood, are forced to employ all their Time in stroling 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, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.’ To remedy this shocking state of affairs, the philanthropic author proposes to convert the surplus children into a new, expensive delicacy, ‘very proper for Landlords; who, as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children’.1 Even modern readers of A Modest Proposal sense the savage indignation that burns behind the screen of Swift’s irony. As in many of his Irish pamphlets, Swift’s wrath was especially directed at the irresponsible selfishness of the Irish landlords, nominally Protestant in their religion though scarcely Christian in their hearts. In October 1729, when A Modest Proposal was published, a meagre harvest had turned endemic poverty into widespread famine. In a naturally fertile country, people were starving. Yet the legislature, dominated by landlords, was offering tax incentives to convert arable land into pasture. Burke was born in Dublin, Swift’s ‘great Town’, about three months after the publication of A Modest Proposal. He grew up in the shadow of the conditions that Swift described. The experience might have turned him into an ardent nationalist, or into a revolutionary. Instead, he became his generation’s most eloquent spokesman for the rights of property. He would never concede that the poor had a ‘right’ to more than the 1

112.

A Modest Proposal (1729); repr. in Prose Writings, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1939–68), xii. 109,

2 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 charity of the rich. This apparent paradox illustrates the complexity and ambivalence of Burke’s Irish heritage. He left Ireland in 1750, at the age of 20. During the remaining forty-seven years of his life, he returned to Ireland only four times, for a total of about eighteen months.2 Yet his Irish upbringing conditioned in important ways the development of his mind and ideas. Growing up in Ireland, his earliest impressions of human life and society were far removed from those he would have absorbed in England or in Scotland. Just as he never lost his Irish accent, he never forgot his Irishness. Eighteenth-century Ireland was a divided society. Political, social, religious, and economic fissures ran deeper than in England. In name, Ireland was a kingdom; in fact a British colony. The Irish Parliament, Church, legal system, and all the trappings of statehood were managed from London. Most of the important posts were held by Englishmen, sent over to maintain the ‘English interest’. English control was maintained through the cooperation of the largely Protestant landed gentry. This class differed in important respects from its English counterpart. Its tenure was recent; the proportion of resident gentry was smaller; and it was more sharply distinguished from the tenants (overwhelmingly Catholic) who worked the land. Ireland was poorer than England, and its wealth more unequally divided. Substantial yeoman-farmers, traditionally regarded as the backbone of English society, were rare in Ireland. Economic inequalities were reinforced by religious hatreds. In England, the religious passions of the seventeenth century had largely subsided. In Ireland, they remained strong and divisive. The bulk of the population remained Catholic, yet the Catholic Church was not recognized by the law. The Church of Ireland was a political creation, the Church of the English gentry and their dependants. Successive wars and confiscations had robbed most of the old Catholic gentry of their land. Legal difficulties effectively prohibited Catholics from acquiring land, or from engaging in trade. Growing up in the 1730s and 1740s, Burke not only read about Ireland’s problems and heard them talked about; he saw real poverty. In 1748, shortly after graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he collaborated with two friends on a periodical paper. One of the essays they published was a plea for a more enlightened attitude to the poor. This closely observed vignette of rural poverty was written either by Burke or by one of his friends: Let any one take a Survey of their Cabins, and then say, whether such a Residence be worthy any thing that challenges the Title of a human Creature. You enter, or rather creep in, at a Door of Hurdles plaistered with Dirt, of which the Inhabitant is generally the Fabricator; within-side you see (if the Smoke will permit you) the 2 E.B. spent six to eight months in Ireland in each of two Parliament winters, 1761–2 and 1763–4; and made shorter visits of about three months in 1766 and three weeks in 1786.


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Men, Women, Children, Dogs, and Swine lying promiscuously; for their Opulence is such that they cannot have a separate House for their Cattle, as it would take too much from the Garden, whose produce is their only Support. Their Furniture is much fitter to be lamented than described, such as a Pot, a Stool, a few wooden Vessels, and a broken Bottle.3

Few of Burke’s English contemporaries had seen people living in such degradation. English visitors to Ireland were invariably shocked by what they saw.4 Like Swift, Burke hated the oppressive landlords. He advocated many of the same remedies. Yet his attitude was complicated by the divided loyalties engendered by his birth and upbringing, which made him far more sympathetic to the Catholic majority. Though born into the privileged minority, Burke was a marginal member, the son of a mixed marriage. As the son of an attorney, educational and career opportunities were open to him that were denied to his Catholic cousins. Yet these opportunities did not guarantee an assured future. His father, though professionally successful, neither inherited nor acquired a fortune. A man of no family, and married to a Catholic, his place was on the fringe of the Irish Establishment. Richard Burke (d. 1761) was a man of obscure, and therefore probably humble, background.5 He was born in the province of Munster, perhaps in Shanballyduff, County Cork.6 The date of his birth, the first name of either parent and his mother’s maiden name, whether he had siblings, all these are unknown. Yet the mystery that surrounds him is probably the accidental result of careless record-keeping. When he qualified as an attorney, much information about his family and background was recorded in one or other of the five papers required by the process of admission to the Society of King’s Inns (the professional association to which both barristers and attorneys belonged). In Richard Burke’s case, none of these survives. Yet this loss is not unusual, for the extant records are far from complete.7 The Reformer, no. 7 (10 Mar. 1748). No. 7 is one of the essays signed Æ, probably E.B.’s signature. Mary Delany to Anne Granville, 12 June 1732, in Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, ed. Lady Llanover (London, 1861), i. 353. Even in the 1770s, when material conditions had improved, an English visitor was repelled by the ‘beastly’ way in which husband, wife, and children were ‘all huddled together upon straw or rushes, with the cow, the calf, the pig’; Thomas Campbell, A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland, in a Series of Letters (London, 1777), 144–5. On 30 Aug. 1781, Philip Yorke sent Lord Hardwicke a similar account; BL Add. MS 35380, fos. 79–81. 5 Basil O’Connell, ‘The Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (1729–1797): A Basis for a Pedigree’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 60 (1955), 69–74; 61 (1956), 115–22. 6 In his marriage licence bond, he is described as ‘of’ Shanballyduff. This may, however, imply residence rather than birth. No documentary evidence supports the tradition (O’Connell, ‘Basis for a Pedigree’, 74, 115) that E.B.’s father was born at Bruff, County Limerick. O’Connell cites Peter Burke’s Public and Domestic Life of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1854), which says only that Richard Burke ‘resided for some time in Limerick’ (3). Peter Burke probably copied this statement from Robert Bisset, The Life of Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1800), i. 18. 7 In 1804, the admission papers were moved in open carts from the Tholsel to the new King’s Inns building, and many were lost in transit; King’s Inns Admission Papers, 1607–1867, ed. Edward Keane, 3 4

4

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 Little is known about Richard Burke’s professional activities. He was an attorney of the Court of Exchequer. (As in England, attorneys did not plead at the Bar, which was the exclusive province of barristers.) The Exchequer was one of the ‘Four Courts’ of the Dublin legal establishment. His affiliation may, however, have no particular significance, since attorneys of one court could be admitted to practise in the others. His principal business was probably conveyancing, probate, and other legal work for landowners. For example, he served as agent to the Damer family of Tipperary.8 Though he did not amass a fortune, he died worth between £2,000 (a figure suggested by a reading of his will) and £6,000 (Burke’s own estimate, probably inflated; C i. 274). To be admitted as an attorney required an apprenticeship of four years. Richard Burke’s master is not known, nor when he was admitted to practise. Legally, only Anglicans could qualify, though Catholic ‘converts’ were said to be numerous among Irish lawyers. In 1728, Hugh Boulter (1672–1742), Archbishop of Armagh, complained that ‘the practice of the law, from the top to the bottom, is at present mostly in the hands of new converts’, who were required only to produce a certificate of having (once) received Anglican communion; ‘several of them have popish wives and mass said in their houses, and breed up their children papists’.9 Admittedly, Boulter was strongly anti-Catholic and prejudiced against the native Irish. He owed his appointment to the English ministry, and was expected to promote the ‘English’ interest in Ireland. He exaggerated the number of cryptoCatholics feigning conversion to qualify as lawyers. By 1765, though the actual number of converts had increased since Boulter’s time, no more than 10 per cent of the lawyers practising in Dublin were converts.10 Was Burke’s father one of Boulter’s new converts? Richard Burke had married a Catholic, and his only surviving daughter was brought up as a Catholic. A Richard Burke conformed to the Church of Ireland in March 1722. He could have been Edmund’s father. If correct, this identification P. Beryl Phair, and Thomas U. Sadleir (Dublin, 1982), p. viii. The papers of E.B.’s elder brother Garrett, who qualified in 1749, have also been lost. 8 Michael Kearney to Edmond Malone, 12 Jan. 1799, Bodl. MS Malone 39, fo. 24. O’Connell, ‘Basis for a Pedigree’, 115, cites a sale of property in which Richard Burke acted as agent for the Damers, and a deed witnessed by him. Like other agents, Richard Burke advanced money to his employer. In 1766, a sum was still owed to E.B.’s mother by Joseph Damer (1718–98; created Lord Milton in 1753); John Ridge to E.B., 8 July [1766], NRO A. viii. 6. 9 Boulter to the Duke of Newcastle, 7 Mar. 1728, in Letters Written by His Excellency Hugh Boulter (Oxford, 1769–70), i. 226. The letter continues with an outline of a bill to restrict the practice of law by recent converts. Boulter sent a similar letter to Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. 10 The precise figures are 31 barristers out of 331 (9.4 per cent), and 75 attorneys out of 680 (11 per cent); Colum Kenny, ‘The Exclusion of Catholics from the Legal Profession in Ireland, 1537–1829’, Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1987), 337–57.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 5 11 would have important biographical implications. Burke’s undoubted Catholic proclivities would be doubly rooted in his ancestry. The idea that Burke was a crypto-papist, a charge made so often in his lifetime by his enemies, would gain more credence. Even Lord Charlemont (1728–99), a friend of Burke but no sympathizer with Catholicism, observed that his ‘early habits and connections . . . had given his mind an almost constitutional bent towards the Popish party’.12 Richard Burke’s conversion would explain some of the tension in the family home, between a father who had cut himself off from his friends and relatives, and a mother who remained loyal to ancestral pieties. Yet the balance of the evidence is against it. ‘Burke’ (and its variants) is an exceedingly common name in Ireland.13 Nor is ‘Richard’ unusual. Between 1717 and 1727, thirteen male Burkes appear on the convert rolls. The Richard Burke who conformed did so in the diocese of Dublin, which ought (legally) to have been his normal place of residence. This only appears to strengthen the case, for many converts conformed in Dublin to avoid publicity. Nine of the Burkes either described themselves as ‘of Dublin’, or conformed in that diocese.14 Conformation was a public act. Conversion was attested by a certificate from a bishop. These certificates had to be lodged with the Court of Chancery, where they were open to public inspection. Indeed, in 1732 a list of those who had conformed was published in a pamphlet.15 The Dublin legal world was a small place. Had Richard Burke been a convert, the fact would have been common knowledge. At some point in Burke’s public career, his enemies would have discovered it. Instead of relying on gossip and innuendo about his Catholic background, they would gleefully have trumpeted such an authenticated matter of record. They never did. Another piece of negative evidence counts strongly against Burke’s father being a convert. Responding to an enquiry in which he was specifically asked about Burke’s 11 The Convert Rolls, ed. Eileen O’Byrne (Dublin, 1981), 31. The originals were destroyed in 1922; the edition is based on surviving calendars and transcripts. The identification was proposed by Basil O’Connell, ‘Basis for a Pedigree’, and accepted by Copeland (C i. 274 n. 1). In a letter to Conor Cruise O’Brien of 25 Apr. 1968, however, Copeland was more cautious: ‘Some Richard Burke conformed then [in 1722] and it may have been he. But Richard Burke’s not an uncommon name and the Conformity Rolls are our only evidence’; quoted in O’Brien’s edition of E.B.’s Reflections (Harmondsworth, 1968), 81. In The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago, 1992), 3–13, O’Brien accepts the identification of E.B.’s father as a convert and attaches considerable significance to it. 12 Charlemont’s ‘Memoirs’ (written in the 1780s), HMC Charlemont, i. 149. Charlemont first met E.B. in London in the late 1750s, and knew much about his ‘early habits and connections’ that is now obscure. 13 The King’s Inns Admission Papers records almost as many Burkes (92) as Smiths (98); more, if the 30 Bourkes are included. 14 The Convert Rolls, 28–31; and O’Byrne’s introduction, p. x. 15 An Exact List of All Such Persons Who Have Conformed to the Church of Ireland from the Popish Religion and Enrolled Their Certificates (Dublin, 1732).

6 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 religion, Richard Shackleton (1726–92), who knew the family intimately, described Richard Burke as ‘a protestant . . . more concerned to promote his Children’s Interest in the world, than to trouble himself about controverted points of Religion; therefore brought his Sons up in the Profession of that which he thought the most publick road to preferment, the religion of the Country established by Law’.16 Shackleton was a conscientious Quaker, unlikely to lie, misrepresent, or palliate, least of all where religion was concerned.17 He does not say that Richard Burke was a convert. Yet no better evidence could have been adduced of Richard Burke’s worldly attitude to religion than his conversion. Shackleton’s silence on the subject has therefore great evidential value. His unqualified statements of fact deserve credit. From such a scrupulous witness, Shackleton’s statement that ‘Richard was a protestant’ must mean that he was born and brought up as one. Other documents may refer to the Richard Burke who was Edmund’s father. In no case, however, is the identification certain. The records must relate to at least two Richards, and may each refer to a different person.18 The most intriguing possibility is that Burke’s father was the Richard Burke to whom James Cotter (1689–1720) addressed a series of brief letters in 1719.19 A Catholic landowner with Jacobite sympathies, Cotter was charged with the abduction of a Quaker girl. Cotter’s real offence was his Jacobitism. Probably politically inspired from the beginning, the case soon became a political cause célèbre. Cotter addresses Burke as an inferior agent, not as a confidential legal adviser. This Burke need not even have been an attorney. From a man in danger of being tried for his life (Cotter was actually executed in 1720), a certain querulousness of tone is to be expected. Even allowing for this, Cotter is short, critical, and peremptory. He complains that Burke’s letters are inadequately informative; lectures him on the legal 16 YB OF 5. 332; Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 1923), 402. 17 Mary Shackleton (later Leadbeater) attests the strict adherence to truth that was inculcated in the family; The Leadbeater Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbeater (2nd edn. London, 1862), i. 129. 18 (1) A Richard Burke certified an apprentice attorney’s service in 1723; exchequer petition in an unnumbered bundle in the National Archives, Dublin. This Richard must be a different man from the convert. Since in 1723 the apprentice had served him for three years, he must himself have been admitted to practise no later than 1720. If a convert, he must have confirmed earlier than the Richard recorded in the Convert Rolls. (2) A Richard Burke served as executor to two uncles (another Richard Burke and a Walter Burke) in wills proved in 1724 and 1727 respectively. In both cases, the executor is described as nephew of the testator; testator Richard has a daughter ‘Honor’, Walter has a niece ‘Honora’. The probability is that the testators were brothers (O’Connell, ‘Basis for a Pedigree’, 72). The wills themselves do not survive, only skeleton lists of the persons named in them. One of the sons mentioned had married a Nagle, as E.B.’s father had. This may be mere coincidence, however, for Nagle and Burke are common names in the district. 19 William Hogan and Líam Ó Buachalla, ‘The Letters and Papers of James Cotter Junior, 1689– 1720’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 68 (1963), 66–95; the letters to Richard Burke are on 75–7. The editors assume that this Richard was E.B.’s father.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 7 points in question (with which Cotter seems the more conversant); rejects his draft of a public statement; and accuses him of bungling the publication of a newspaper advertisement. In normal times, to work for a known Jacobite might not be particularly noteworthy. In 1719, however, a wave of antiJacobite hysteria had been prompted by a threatened invasion of England to restore the Pretender. To have worked for Cotter at such a time implies a degree of personal commitment to, or at least sympathy for, the Jacobite cause. There is, however, no certainty that this Richard Burke was Edmund’s father. Richard Burke’s character is less doubtful than his religion or his political sympathies. The most revealing evidence comes from his will. Such a document does not disclose the whole person, but can throw certain traits of character into sharp relief. In this case, the will illustrates a phrase used by Shackleton: ‘punctual honesty’.20 The phrase is significant, because the passage on Richard Burke conveys a chill not felt elsewhere in Shackleton’s sketch, which is written in an open, affectionate manner. The words suggest a cold and formal correctness, a small-minded punctiliousness without warmth or generosity. This impression is confirmed by the main provisions of Richard Burke’s will. The unexpired portion of the lease of his house, and its contents, are to be auctioned within a month of his death. His wife, Mary (c.1702–70), is to receive the interest on an outstanding loan of £600 (probably about £30 a year), plus £20 from the arrears of interest due on the same loan, £5 for mourning, her own clothing and some silver, and the right to dispose of £100 of the £600 among the children as she pleases. On her death, the remaining £500 is to be divided between the sons equally (three were alive when the will was made). If Mary has not disposed of the £100 left to her option, it is to go to Richard (the youngest, and his father’s favourite).21 His daughter Juliana (1728–90) is to receive £600 as her marriage portion. If she does not marry, she is to receive the interest, and is given the power to dispose of £100 to her favourite brother. In addition, she receives (like her mother), £20, plus £5 for mourning, and some small valuables. Edmund and Richard (1733–94), already ‘provided for’, receive only £20 and £10 respectively for mourning. Edmund’s children receive £10 each. Garrett, the eldest son (c.1725–65), is the residuary legatee.22 Richard Burke’s character speaks eloquently through these provisions. He orders the peremptory break-up of the household. His wife’s provision YB OF 5. 332; Samuels, Early Life, 402. Further evidence that Richard was the favourite is E.B.’s explanation of their father’s abruptly withdrawing Richard from Ballitore school: ‘a desire of having Dick with him and My Mother in town for really he is fonder of him than he will own’. A tactful parenthesis in this letter confirms that Burke and his father were not on close terms: ‘(for you know I am not his privy-councellor)’ (1 June 1746: C i. 66). 22 From the will printed in Samuels, Early Life, 405–7. The original was destroyed in the fire at the Dublin Public Record Office in 1922. 20 21

8 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 is secured on a fund, the interest on which he expected to be at least £20 (nearly a year) in arrears. The provisions allowing wife and daughter testamentary control of one-sixth of the funds in which they have a life-interest imply a habit of using small financial inducements and incentives as a species of emotional blackmail. Legal scrupulosity may account for the pedantic bequest to Mary of her own clothes: ‘punctual honesty’ indeed. Even so, the document confirms the impression given in Burke’s undergraduate letters, that his father was a morose and peevish domestic tyrant. Other evidence confirms his ill temper. ‘My dear friend Burke leads a very unhappy life from his father’s temper,’ Shackleton heard in 1747, ‘and what is worse, there is no prospect of bettering it. He must not stir out at night by any means, and if he stays at home there is some new subject for abuse.’23 Burke himself told Shackleton in July 1744 that he was ‘perfectly easy on that Score’ (his father’s temper) and received ‘very few set downs’. Shackleton was worried that one of his letters might fall into the hands of Burke’s father and provoke an angry outburst. Burke averted the danger by burning the incriminating document (C i. 26). Such was the home in which he grew up. To some of Burke’s later admirers, his lack of a distinguished pedigree was an embarrassment. Biographers obligingly produced one for him. Robert Bisset (1759–1805) heard that ‘Burke’s grandfather possessed an estate of three thousand-a-year, near Limerick, which was confiscated.’24 James Prior (1790?–1869) followed Bisset in speaking of ‘a considerable estate’ in County Limerick, lost during the ‘civil convulsions’ of the 1640s and 1650s, and reported a tradition that Burke was descended from a mayor of Limerick active in the royal cause in 1646. Prior further denied that the Burkes were ‘a mere Irish family’. They were, he asserted, ‘descended from the Norman Burghs, or De Burghs . . . who went thither as adventurers under Strongbow, in the Reign of Henry II’.25 A modern writer has conjecturally extended the Burke pedigree as far back as Charlemagne.26 Some of these stories derive from Burke himself. His literary executors, in the 23 Quoted in James Prior, Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (5th edn. London, 1854), 32 (C i. 66 n. 2). The original is untraced. 24 Life of Edmund Burke, i. 39. Though Bisset’s source was ‘Dr Lawrence’, presumably French Laurence, one of E.B.’s executors, little trust can be placed in his statements even when he names so respectable a witness. He garbled material supplied by Philip Francis; letter from Francis to Walker King (?), copy endorsed 27 May 1812, WWM BkP 31/16. 25 Prior, Life of Burke, 1–2. ‘Mere Irish’ originally meant ‘wholly Irish’, as opposed to those partly civilized by contact with the English invaders; Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam, 1986), 39. Prior was followed by Peter Burke, The Public and Domestic Life of Edmund Burke, 1–2. George Croly was exceptional in admitting that E.B. was ‘of humble extraction; the son of an Irish attorney’; A Memoir of the Political Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, 1840), i. 3. 26 Eamonn Bourke, Burke People and Places (Whitegate, County Clare, 1984), 4.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 9 preface to an edition of two posthumous pamphlets, assert that ‘he did not tell, what he had in his hands the means of substantiating, that he was sprung from a family anciently ennobled in several of its branches, and possessing an ample estate, which his grandfather had actually enjoyed’.27 This sounds like a conflation of the Burke and Nagle pedigrees. If Burke believed that he was related to the ennobled Bourkes or de Burghs, he did not know how. In private, Burke may have recounted misty family legends about vanished splendours, confiscated estates, and noble relations, without taking them at all seriously. In public, and on several occasions, far from claiming descent from Charlemagne, the de Burghs, or even the mayor of Limerick, he always confessed himself a ‘new man’. On his admission to Trinity College, Burke described his father as ‘generosus’ (‘gentleman’). This term, used by most students, meant little. Students whose fathers were men of property used ‘armiger’. When Burke had been an undergraduate for about two months, his friend Richard Shackleton addressed a letter to him as ‘Esquire’, the English equivalent to ‘armiger’. Probably Shackleton, whether seriously or in jest, thought the appellation appropriate to Burke’s new dignity as a college student, a recognition that his 14-year-old friend was now an honorary adult. Burke noticed the compliment (or joke), and in reply disclaimed the distinction in one of the more successful of his youthful attempts at humour: Honest Dick That Letter of yours came by post to my hands, and if I could spare time on such business I don’t know but I might answer it particularly, but as I have affairs of much consequence to trouble me As you know being wholly taken up with attending one thing or other (which it is not material to tell you) since my Election, it were needless to inform you of more than that I am well as are all here, and that I desire you to be Diligent in your Business, take care not to let people lavish my substance, mind the Hay, and inform me how the Harvest goes on, whether they will be well able to pay the Rents this year, and whether your wife spins better, for the Last I received was extraordinary ill. (C i. 19)

Good-humoured as it is, the parody also suggests that Burke already felt a keen sense of resentment at the condescending behaviour of purse-proud social superiors. Though he usually concealed this behind a show of deference, it sometimes broke out. On occasion, it exploded. Burke never attempted to deny his social origin. Nor could he easily have done so. Indeed, when the strategy offered rhetorical advantages, he was sometimes willing to parade his humble extraction. The most striking example is his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). In this vituperative pamphlet, Burke develops a series of contrasts between himself and the fifth Duke of 27 Preface to Two Letters on the Conduct of Our Domestic Parties with Regard to French Politics (London, 1797), p. xxiii (Todd, 70).

10 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 Bedford (1765–1802), a prominent radical. Burke characterizes himself as talented, public-spirited, and industrious. He excoriates the duke as a pitiful nonentity who has done nothing to earn or deserve the vast wealth and influence that he has inherited from one of Henry VIII’s vilest sycophants (WS ix. 166–9). Burke always admitted to being a ‘new man’, sometimes flaunting a defiant pride in it. In 1770, for example, in a heated debate in the House of Commons, he confessed himself a ‘Novus Homo’ obnoxious to ‘the envy attending that Character’. ‘We know not’, he added in a characteristic flourish, ‘in what mountain of Scotland, what bog of Ireland, or what wild in America that Genius may be now rising who shall save this country.’28 Burke was in no sense the denizen of an Irish bog, though his ill-wishers liked to use such disparaging phrases about him. ‘And there’s Burke the Irishman,’ sneered one coffee-house politician as late as 1790; ‘what stake has he in the country? what cares he whether the ship sinks [or] swims? a fellow come out of an irish bog.’29 Yet Burke’s extraction from the urban professional class of Dublin was humbling enough in an age when a man’s birth and pedigree were his passport to the world of politics. ‘I have great merit in being zealous for subordination and the honours of birth,’ Samuel Johnson (1709–84) congratulated himself, ‘for I can hardly tell who was my grandfather.’30 Burke might have made the same claim. Little as Burke may have known of his father’s family, he did not entirely share Johnson’s robust indifference to his origins. Willing to admit that he was of humble extraction, he was averse to particulars becoming public knowledge. The sore point, however, was his father’s profession. An illuminating incident of 1766 shows his extreme sensitivity. Richard Shackleton received a mysterious enquiry about ‘the family Connections Religion (if any) and General Character’ of his now famous friend.31 Shackleton responded with a biographical sketch of great interest and value.32 He describes Burke’s father as ‘an Attorney at Law, of middling Circumstances, fretful Temper, & punctual honesty . . . a protestant; originally from the province of Munster in Ireland, & married a Wife from thence’.33 Shackleton was in a position to know, and his veracity is beyond question. 28 E.B., speaking in Parliament on 2 Apr. 1770, reported in W.B. to William Dennis, 3–6 Apr. (C ii. 128–9). The use of the Latin phrase suggests that E.B. may consciously have identified himself with Cicero, another proud ‘novus homo’. 29 Mr Barlow of Leadenhall Street, in conversation with James Boswell, at the London Tavern (?) on 21 Nov. 1790, YB Boswell Papers, M197. 30 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), ii. 261 (10 May 1773). The passage records a remark heard on an earlier occasion. No mystery surrounds Johnson’s paternal grandfather. He was ‘William Johnson, late of Lichfield, yeoman’; Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings (privately printed, 1909–52), iii. 3–8. 31 Postscript dated 15 May 1766 to unsigned letter to Shackleton (endorsed as from R. Pike), YB OF 31. 100. 32 Quotations are from the transcript of the sketch in YB OF 5. 332. It differs slightly from the version printed in the London Evening Post in 1770, and reprinted in Samuels, Early Life, 402–4. 33 YB OF 5. 332; the printed text omits the phrase ‘fretful Temper’.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 11 No other evidence contradicts, and much confirms, what he says. Some of his remarks touched Burke to the quick, yet in neither of his two letters on the subject, one of them angry and intemperate, did he charge Shackleton with factual errors or inaccuracies. Rather, he was annoyed at his friend’s indiscretion. What Shackleton had said was true, but (especially the prominence given to religion) liable to be misconstrued. Burke was also hurt by what he read as a slur on his father’s professional standing. ‘You say’, he remonstrates, that ‘he was an Attorney of the Province of Munster in moderate Circumstances; and this (from the Evident Partiality which reigns in the whole account, and which seems to soften every thing) will be saying, he was an hedge Country Attorney of little practice.’ On the contrary, Burke insists that his father ‘never did practice in the Country, but always in the superior Courts; that he was for many years not only in the first Rank, but the very first man of his profession in point of practice and Credit’ (28 Oct. 1766: C i. 274). Burke’s objection is hardly reasonable. Shackleton neither said nor implied that Richard Burke was a ‘hedge Country Attorney’. He stated that Richard Burke came from Munster, not that he practised there. The misreading shows that Burke read the sketch only cursorily, and perhaps reacted as much to what he feared might be said, as to what Shackleton had actually written. ‘Of middling circumstances’ is, so far as the evidence goes, an accurate assessment of Richard Burke’s socioeconomic standing. Burke’s over-reaction, however, is revealing. By repudiating so violently the unspoken charge that his father was a ‘hedge Country Attorney’, Burke shows where he is most vulnerable.34 In the eighteenth century, ‘attorney’ was a term of abuse, nearly synonymous with rogue and cheat, a byword for sharp practice, pettifogging, and chicanery.35 While Burke himself claimed that ‘the upper part of this profession is very reputable’, he conceded that the lower is ‘absolutely otherwise’ (C i. 274). Since they so often acted as agents for unbusinesslike landowners, attorneys had ample opportunity to profit at the expense of their employers. In the Persian Letters (1735) of Lord Lyttelton (1709–73), Selim repeats to his friend at Ispahan a common charge: ‘Thou wouldst know if property be so safely guarded as is generally believed. It is certain, that the whole power of a king of England cannot force an acre of land from the weakest of his subjects; but a knavish attorney will take away his whole estate by those very laws which were designed for its security.’36 34 E.B. was even more distressed and annoyed when the sketch found its way into the London Evening Post in 1770. His anger exploded in a hasty and ill-tempered letter to Shackleton, 19 Apr. (C ii. 129–31). 35 Robert Robson, The Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1960), 134–45. Recent research presents a more favourable picture: Albert J. Smith, ‘The Smiths of Horbling: Country Attorneys’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 54 (1991), 143–76. Whatever the reality, in the popular imagination attorneys were untrustworthy rogues. 36 Persian Letters, Letter VII; repr. in Works, ed. George Edward Ayscough (3rd edn. London, 1776), i. 154. Such examples could be multiplied.

12 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 Shackleton’s phrase ‘punctual honesty’, an unexpected quality in an attorney, shows that Richard Burke was too conscientious to enrich himself in such unscrupulous dealings. He never became rich, and did not acquire land. A different accusation often levelled at attorneys was that they encouraged a spirit of petty litigiousness. A classic expression of this charge is Burke’s own fulmination against French ‘hedge’ attorneys in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which exploits the contempt he expected his readers to feel for such men. The context is a sketch of the large body of lawyers elected to the Estates-General in 1789. This was composed, he asserts, ‘not of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in universities’. With a few exceptions, it was drawn from ‘the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession’, the common herd of ‘obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomentors and conductors of the petty war of village vexation’ (WS viii. 93). Even more pertinent is a passage in one of Burke’s early poems. In these lines, addressed to the Muse Calliope (the poem is full of mythological machinery), Hermes, patron of cheats, reflects with satisfaction on the homage paid him by a degenerate son of a prominent Ballitore family: Know’st thou not that to me he always pray’d? To me his promis’d vows he sometimes pay’d. The prudent youth implor’d me not for sense, For this he knew grows with increasing pence, My other arts with studious care he sought, And ev’ry subtle Sleight of Gain I taught, To trick, to over-reach, deceive, & cheat, To swear, to lie, & last—to be ingrate, Then bade him an Attorney be compleat. 37

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These are strange lines from the pen of an attorney’s son. Richard Burke’s ‘punctual honesty’ surely prevented his tricking, deceiving, or cheating his clients. Such an honest attorney was a rarity. Richard Burke thus put his son in an unenviable position, entailing on him all the opprobrium that went with such a dishonourable profession, with none of the advantages that illgotten wealth would have procured. Burke’s hostility to his father was a complex bundle of emotions. While he contemned his father as a common 37 Untitled poem on Ballitore, YB OF 10. 204. Dated 1745, the poem is the joint work of E.B. and Richard Shackleton. Marginal initials assign passages to the two authors; these lines are from a section attributed to E.B. A later transcript of the poem, called ‘Panegyrick on Ballitore’ (OF 5. 341), omits the passage.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 13 attorney, Burke felt compelled to defend his professional standing against the contempt of others. Temperamental opposites though they were, Burke and his father shared certain qualities. Richard Burke was a self-made man. In a world of inherited rank, privilege, and wealth, he raised himself, by hard work and determination, from obscurity to professional respectability. Edmund’s career in turn followed a similar course, though he started from a more favourable position and made a larger social leap. Yet relations between the two were never easy. Determined that his clever son should do well, Richard Burke propelled him along the shortest route to worldly success. To the son, who espoused different values, his father appeared a harsh and arbitrary tyrant. He therefore reacted strongly against his father’s standards. In his writings and speeches, he frequently sets the ‘narrow’ or the ‘confined’ against the ‘liberal’ or the ‘enlarged’. The primary force of this contrast is intellectual. In his Speech on American Taxation (1774), Burke described the late George Grenville (1712–70; author of the ill-fated Stamp Act of 1765) in words that reflect the way he felt about his father: He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences; a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding, than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion. Passing from that study he did not go very largely into the world; but plunged into business; I mean into the business of office; and the limited and fixed methods and forms established there. . . . men too much conversant in office, are rarely minds of remarkable enlargement. Their habits of office are apt to give them a turn to think the substance of business not to be much more important than the forms in which it is conducted. (WS ii. 432)

Time and again, Burke protests vehemently against the narrow, illiberal way of thinking characteristic of the legal mind. His own determination to take the largest and most extended view of any question can be traced to a dislike of his father’s cramped mental world. Burke found in ideas and intellectual loyalties the ancestors his humble genealogy denied him. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, prejudice and tradition become the ‘canonized forefathers’ who bequeath ‘the idea of a liberal descent’ (viii. 85). Late in 1724, Richard Burke married Mary Nagle, daughter of an impoverished family of the landowning class.38 Burke was thus the child of a social as well as a religious mésalliance. Mary Burke is a shadowy presence in her son’s life, for her personality has left less mark than her husband’s. Her family, however, is better documented. Several branches have been traced 38 The marriage licence bond is dated 21 Oct. 1724; Samuels, Early Life, 2. The original was destroyed in 1922.

14 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 in considerable detail, though not the one to which Mary immediately belonged.39 Burke’s Nagle relatives lived in reduced circumstances. Having for more than a century been on the losing side in the Irish civil wars, they had by 1700 lost most of their land. The plight of aristocrats or decayed gentlefolk living in reduced circumstances always exerted a powerful emotional appeal on Burke. The Nagles first impressed this idea on his mind. He served the impoverished or dispossessed nobility of India and France chiefly through his writings and speeches. Nagle relatives, humbler exemplars of misfortune, he could help in more practical ways. Several instances are recorded in his letters.40 The Nagles were Catholics and Jacobites. For generations, they had opposed the English interest. In 1604, David Nagle, Mary’s greatgrandfather, was fined £500, then a huge sum, for refusing to bring in the verdict the government wanted at a treason trial.41 Garrett Nagle, her father, fought for James II. He retained his property by taking advantage of the terms offered to the defeated Jacobites in 1691 by the treaties of Limerick and Galway.42 Mary Burke was one of seven or more children. Of the seven whose names are known, she was the fourth child and eldest daughter, probably born about 1702. Illness is a recurrent theme in Burke’s casual, scattered references to his mother, unsurprisingly in view of her frequent pregnancies, perhaps as many as fifteen in about twenty years.43 Only four of her children survived into adulthood. The James Burke and Edmund ‘Bourke’ buried in St James’s in 1728 and 1729 were probably her sons. The five children, certainly hers, baptized in St Michan’s between 1735 and 1744 all died in infancy. Perhaps her health began to deteriorate about 1735. In a letter of 12 July 1746, Burke refers to her recent ‘most dangerous illness’. That she was ‘beginning to relapse into her old disorder’ suggests a chronic complaint (C i. 67). Its precise nature is unknown. In 1762, she was ‘in a very declining way under a very cruel nervous disorder’. In 1764, she looked ‘but ghostly’.44 Yet she survived until 1770. Another source of stress, illness, and unhappiness in the Burke home was their life in a damp house in an unhealthy city. For reasons of health, Edmund was sent away for long periods to his mother’s family in County Cork. His mother was a countrywoman at heart. In 1766, her daughter married Patrick William French of Loughrea, near Galway. Faced with the 39 In articles by Basil O’Connell in the Irish Genealogist, 2 (1954–5), 337–48, 377–84; and 3 (1956–7), 17–24, 67–73. 40 C ii. 211, 313 (job for a Nagle); iii. 415 (generosity to tenants); viii. 409–10 (Army commission for a Nagle). 41 HMC Egmont, i. i. 28–9. 42 J. G. Simms, The Williamite Confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 (London, 1956), 46. 43 Prior, Life of Burke, says ‘fourteen or fifteen children’ (2). The names of eleven are listed in O’Connell, ‘Basis for a Pedigree’, 116–17. These include the two boys buried in St James’s, whose parentage is uncertain. 44 E.B. to Charles O’Hara, 30 Oct. 1762 (C i. 153); David Murphy to E.B., 16 Aug. 1764, NRO A. viii. 3.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 15 prospect of returning to Dublin after an extended visit to them, she regretted the ‘great change’ from ‘a very good table here—two courses; abroad, a coach and six to take the air; to return to a leg of mutton, and good strong boxes to walk in. However, I will be as content with the latter as the former; and will think myself very happy, if it pleases God to preserve me the few children I have alive and well.’45 Forty years after her marriage, she had not forgotten the world of the country gentry (however impoverished) that she had left when she married a Dublin attorney. This letter, the most substantial record of her personality, was written at a time of great rejoicing and excitement. Edmund, the laurels earned in his first session in Parliament still fresh, was rounding off a triumphal tour of Ireland. Most recently, he had been voted the freedom of Galway. The letter as a whole does not give the impression of a woman whom life has defeated. Perhaps she possessed or developed a flexibility of disposition, an ability (which her husband lacked) to take life as it came. This was not achieved without cost. Having suffered a long and debilitating illness, she does not gloss over unpleasant memories: ‘I am much obliged to you for your desire of seeing me in your country [neighbourhood], which I believe will never be. . . . I am now very sensible how exceedingly troublesome I was, for the very long time that I was in a very poor way amongst you all, which makes me shudder as often as I think of it, and I believe it has been worse with me than I can recollect.’46 This account confirms the earlier hints of a chronic but intermittent nervous complaint. Burke’s few references to his mother are all affectionate. Of his father, he speaks with duty, respect, and obligation; never with a trace of warmth or affection. He loved his mother. ‘There will I fear one of my strongest links to Ireland be snapped off,’ he wrote in 1762 when her death seemed imminent (C i. 153). Yet this bond was much weaker than the antipathy Burke felt towards his father. His failure to revisit Ireland between 1750 and 1761 cannot otherwise be explained. Nor did he write to his mother regularly, or even on special occasions, such as his election to Parliament in 1765. ‘Let my mother and Julia [Juliana] know this piece of News,’ comes at the end of a letter to his friend John Ridge (c.1728–76), almost as an afterthought (225). This letter was dashed off on Christmas Eve; Parliament would not meet until 14 January. Even so, he neither promises to write to his mother, nor apologizes for not doing so. The sympathy between them was felt rather than expressed. Burke thought of man as pre-eminently a sociable animal, happiest and best able to fulfil his nature in groups: in families, in extended kinship networks, in larger national and religious loyalties. The open, emotional, expressive side of his nature, his abiding interest in and concern for others, and his religious nature, all came from his mother. 45 46

Mary Burke to Ellen Hennessy, 25 Oct. 1766, in Corr. (1844), i. 113. Corr. (1844), i. 112.

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2 Burke’s childhood is poorly documented, though not unusually so for a boy of his time and social origin. The exact year of his birth is one of the notorious puzzles of his biography: 1728, 1729, and 1730 have all been proposed. Life was less heavily bureaucratized in the eighteenth century, and people were not so frequently reminded of their date of birth by having constantly to write it on forms. Conflicting evidence about Oliver Goldsmith’s birth, for example, has put it in every year between 1727 and 1731. Goldsmith may himself have forgotten the precise date, which was unknown to his London friends at the time of his death in 1774.47 In his letters, Burke more than once refers to his birthday, but only obliquely alludes to the year of his birth. Nor has any documentary evidence, such as a baptismal record, been found. He celebrated his birthday on 12 January. Allowing for the eleven days lost in 1752, when England and Ireland adopted the Gregorian calendar, he would have been born on 1 January by the old Julian calendar.48 The year of his birth is harder to fix. Modern biographies and reference works give 1729 (sometimes qualified with a question mark), a date supported by two important though not unimpeachable sources. The register of Trinity College, Dublin, records Burke’s admission on 14 April 1744, ‘annum agens 16’ (in his sixteenth year; by the modern way of reckoning, fifteen years old).49 In the Beaconsfield parish register, he is described as ‘aged 68’ at the time of his death (on 9 July 1797). The memorial tablet in the parish church gives the same age.50 This date must represent the belief of Burke’s widow and executors. They, however, had no certain evidence. When French Laurence (1757–1809), collecting material for a biography of his old friend and mentor, saw a packet of letters written by the young Burke, he noted with interest that ‘One of the letters ascertains his age. He writes on the 5th of January 1748, that he was then twenty.’51 This remark only makes sense if Laurence had previously been in 47 Arthur Friedman, ‘The Year of Oliver Goldsmith’s Birth’, Notes and Queries, 196 (1951), 388–9; K. Balderston, The History and Sources of Percy’s Memoir of Goldsmith (Cambridge, 1926), 11. 48 Letters of 12 Jan. 1775 and 1792 confirm that E.B. celebrated his birthday on that day (C iii. 99, vii. 22). R.B. Sr. gave E.B. a prayer-book on 1 Jan. 1752, presumably as a birthday gift; Dixon Wecter, ‘Burke’s Birthday’, Notes and Queries, 172 (1937), 441. Wecter was unable to examine the book itself, nor have I been able to trace it beyond its sale by Maggs of London, who bought it at Sotheby’s on 28 Jan. 1946 (lot 2189). 49 The TCD admissions register is Mun/V/23/3; E.B.’s entry is printed in Samuels, Early Life, 20. The register was written up from slips by the senior lecturer, and is thus liable to error; E.B., for example, is described as ‘Filius Johannis’. In the register, E.B.’s admission is recorded under 14 Apr. ‘1743’; this is one source for 1728 as the year of his birth. Admissions, however, were recorded by academic, not calendar, years. By this reckoning, ‘1743’ ran from 9 July 1743 to 8 July 1744; E.B. was therefore admitted in calendar year 1744. 50 Beaconsfield Parish Register, Burials, 1678–1784, Buckinghamshire Record Office, PR/14/20 (Micro. M13/24), in The Beaconsfield Parish Register, 1660 to 1837 (Beaconsfield, 1973). 51 French Laurence to J.B., 27 July 1799, WWM BkP 28/9 (quoted in C i. 102–3). The authority of the tablet is further undermined by its misstating R.B. Jr.’s age as 35. He was actually 36 when he died.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 17 doubt. There are other compelling reasons for rejecting 1729 as the year of Burke’s birth. His elder sister Juliana, on the evidence of a contemporary entry in the parish register of Castletownroche, County Cork, was baptized on 1 December or 1 January ‘1728’. Since dates in the register were reckoned according to the old legal year (in which ‘1728’ extended from 25 March 1728 to 24 March 1729), this means 1 December 1728 or 1 January 1729. Children were usually baptized within a few days of birth, so Juliana was probably born in late November or late December 1728. In either case, Edmund cannot have been born in January 1729.52 The correct year must be 1730, though the letter of 5 January ‘1748’ is hard to reconcile with that date. Possibly Laurence misunderstood what he read: he was shown the letters, but not allowed to take them away. In any case, a lost letter cannot outweigh the testimony of the Castletownroche parish register, the most authoritative of the available sources. The case for 1730 is supported by two further considerations. Neither might on its own overturn the accepted date. Together with Juliana’s baptismal entry, however, their combined force is formidable. A James Burke was buried in St James’s, Dublin, on 25 April 1728, and an ‘Edmund Bourke’ on 7 March 1729. In his will, Richard Burke asked to be buried ‘in St James’s Church yard, Dublin . . . as near the place where my Children are buried as may be guessed’. The James and Edmund whose burials are recorded could have belonged to a different family, but the probability is that Burke was named Edmund after the son who had died in infancy in March 1729. Later, in 1735 and 1737, the Burkes baptized two successive daughters Mary (both died in infancy).53 Further evidence comes from Burke himself. In the postscript to a letter to Lord Rockingham (1730–82), he wrote on 12 January 1775: ‘My birth-day; I need not say how long ago’ (C iii. 99). Since Rockingham was born in 1730, this is as much as to say, ‘because you were born in the same year’.54 52

The Castletownroche parish register is in the National Archives, Dublin. Samuels printed the relevant entry (Early Life, 3), but overlooked the significance of the register’s use of the legal year. Only the last letter of the month is now decipherable; I read it as ‘c’, and infer the month as December. In 1912, the younger Samuels read the month as ‘Jan’. This is puzzling, and I thought at first that subsequent crumbling of the margin had resulted in loss of text. In 1842, however, C. A. Maginn, the Rector of Castletownroche, replying to an enquiry from Sir Richard Bourke, came to the same conclusion as I did (letters of 1 Aug. and 17 Dec. 1842, YB OF 4. 233.) ‘Jan’ must have been a guess by the younger Samuels. The difference does not affect the argument. 53 Samuels, Early Life, 3 (burials), 405–7 (Richard Burke’s will), 4 (St Michan’s register). The originals were all destroyed in 1922. 54 George Guttridge makes this point in a note on the letter, but defers to the evidence in favour of 1729 (C iii. 99 n. 6). One other statement made by E.B. deserves consideration, the marginal comment on a passage in his ‘Epistle to Dr Nugent’: ‘Then nineteen his studies had nearly destroyed him’ (NoteBook, 38). The dates in the Note-Book are mostly unreliable. But having assigned the ‘Epistle’ (wrongly) to 1751, and therefore his breakdown to 1749, E.B. might have remembered how old he had been in 1749. Some early biographers give 1730, as does Basil O’Connell, ‘Basis for a Pedigree’, 116. O’Connell does not explain his reasons for rejecting 1729.

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growing up irish, 1730‒1744 Burke was born in Dublin. The Trinity College register describes him as ‘natus Dublinii’. In this case, its evidence is supported by a direct statement by Burke himself. In 1767, he accepted the freedom of Dublin as an honour conferred by his ‘Native City’ (C i. 295).55 Almost certainly, Burke was born at home. The Burkes, however, moved house several times, and their address when Edmund was born is not known. About 1728–9, they were living south of the river, in St James’s parish; by 18 December 1733, when Burke’s brother Richard was baptized, they had moved north to St Michan’s.56 (The relevant parish boundaries, and other places of Burkean interest, are indicated on Plate 1.) Between 1735 and 1746, they occupied a house on Arran Quay; they may have taken it as early as 1730, so it may have been Burke’s birthplace. In December 1746, they moved east to Lower Ormond Quay, in St Mary’s (73).57 Special interest attaches to the house on Arran Quay, the only one that is documented. If Burke was not born in it, he certainly lived there for several years. Arran Quay, which faces south directly onto the river Liffey, extends for three blocks from Queen Street to Church Street. Laid out in the 1680s, in Burke’s day it was still on the outskirts of the urban area. John Rocque’s detailed survey (taken about 1750) shows that the western and central blocks each consisted of twelve substantial town houses, with rear access to individual stables at the end of long back gardens (Fig. 1). The eastern block, in contrast, was a row of over twenty smaller properties, with tiny back yards giving onto a lane. Arran Lane, the part nearest to Church Street, was even less attractive. The street narrowed and twisted to accommodate a huddle of buildings that cut off the view to the river. The precise site of the Burkes’ house may be of no more than antiquarian interest. Whether they lived in one of the larger or smaller houses is significant. Fortunately, the cess applotment books for the parish of St Michan’s for the years 1735–48 have been preserved.58 They record, for 55 O’Connell was convinced that E.B. was born in County Limerick; ‘Basis for a Pedigree’, 73. The only source he cites (a newspaper report of 1786) is too slight to disturb the evidence in favour of Dublin. 56 The baptismal entry is quoted from the original register (since destroyed) in Samuels, Early Life, 4. 57 Prior, Life of Burke, 2, gives Richard Burke’s first address in Dublin as on Bachelor’s Walk (also in St Mary’s). Prior’s sequence of addresses (Bachelor’s Walk, Arran Quay, Ormond Quay) cannot be complete, for it does not allow for a period of residence in St James’s parish. 58 In the Representative Church Body Library, Rathfarnham, Dublin. The ‘cess’ was a tax on property levied by the parish. These books were searched by J. H. Monahan, the incumbent of St Michan’s, for Sir Joseph Napier, who published his conclusions in an appendix to his Edmund Burke: A Lecture (Dublin, 1862); repr. in his Lectures, Essays, and Letters (Dublin, 1888), 203–11. Napier correctly located the Burke house in the eastern block, but mistook the exact site as a result of confusion about the parish boundary. A tradition that the Burke home was no. 33 (or 34), in the western block, was reported by Edward Evans in an instalment of his ‘History of the Dublin Hospitals and Infirmaries from 1188 to the Present Time’ (The Irish Builder, 15 Dec. 1897, 239). Both houses, however, are in St Paul’s parish, not St Michan’s.


Fig. 1. Arran Quay; detail from John Rocque’s An Exact Survey of . . . Dublin (1756)

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20 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 each house, the name of the taxpayer and the sum at which the house was rated. Arran Quay is the first street listed. Richard Burke appears at ‘No. 7’, and therefore occupied the seventh house on that part of Arran Quay which was within the parish of St Michan’s. Charles Brooking’s map shows the parish boundary slightly west of Pudding Lane (now Lincoln Lane). Since the first house in the applotment books is rated at twice the value of the next several, ‘No. 1’ can be identified as the single house in the parish west of Pudding Lane. ‘No. 7’ was therefore the sixth house from the west in the eastern block. ‘No. 1’ was rated at £1; the houses in the east block varied between 3s. and 10s. Richard Burke was rated at 10s., which means that he occupied one of its best houses. Though rated at half or less of those in the more desirable central and western blocks, his house was assessed at more than three times the value of the cheapest. This confirms Shackleton’s phrase ‘middling circumstances’. Burke grew up neither in a mansion nor in a slum. A recurrent theme in Burke’s life is the contrast between the country and the city. His first extant letter, to Richard Shackleton, opens with an allusion to Horace’s invitation to Maecenas to quit the ‘fumum et opes strepitumque Romae’: ‘condemnd to noise smoak and Dublin town’, he recalls ‘the sweet hours that I spent in Ballitore in your Conversation’ (C i. 1). In Burke’s case, this theme was more than a classical commonplace. His life would indeed be divided between the business of the city and the leisure of the country. His time at Ballitore school was the second rural interlude in his life. In the 1750s, he regularly spent the summer in rural seclusion. In 1768, he acquired as a permanent retreat his own country estate in Beaconsfield (in Buckinghamshire, within easy reach of London), where he would spend such time as he could spare from the activity, the excitement, and the vexations of the political world. Burke’s first country sojourn, perhaps as long as five years, was spent with his mother’s relations near Cork. Ill health was the main reason for his being sent away from the smoke of Dublin and the dampness of Arran Quay. Perhaps he was thought to be consumptive. Burke probably stayed with Patrick Nagle (d. 1768), one of his uncles, with whom he maintained an affectionate correspondence. Memories of these years, overlaid with those of summer visits in the 1740s, contributed to a poem on the River Blackwater (C i. 79–80). The Blackwater flows through a fertile valley framed by rolling hills, its air of placid remoteness undisturbed by any thoroughfare. Over thirty miles from Cork and more than 120 from Dublin, Ballyduff was not on the way to anywhere. The hills to the south are called the Nagles Mountains, which may have reinforced Burke’s sense that the country properly ‘belonged’ to his family, a feeling strengthened by the many Nagles who lived in the area. The valley also had literary associations. Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99), to whom Burke was related on his mother’s

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 21 59 side, had lived there and celebrated the scene. As a child, Burke could have visited the ruins of the poet’s home, Kilcolman Castle, only a few miles north-west of Ballyduff. By the 1740s, the Spenser connection was already attracting tourists.60 Small wonder that, writing to his Uncle Patrick in 1759, Burke looked back on the green and pleasant valley of the Blackwater with nostalgic affection (135). In the eighteenth century, the education of children was left entirely to the discretion of their parents. Commonly it began at home, and with the mother. According to tradition, Burke’s mother taught him to read.61 His first formal schooling was at a dame-school, kept by an ill-tempered mistress.62 Dame-schools provided only the most elementary teaching, some reading and writing with simple religious instruction. Serious education began with Latin, which was taught at schools kept by men. Burke began to learn Latin while staying with his mother’s relatives near Cork. Prior was told of a schoolmaster called O’Halloran, who boasted that ‘he was the first who had put a Latin grammar into the hands of Edmund Burke’. Goldsmith was sent to a similar village school about the age of 6.63 Burke may subsequently have attended a day-school in Dublin.64 In May 1741 began the first stage of Burke’s education that can be documented. Richard Burke sent his three sons to the same boardingschool. Garrett was about 15, Edmund 11, Richard only 7. The decision to send three boys of such different ages away at the same time may have been prompted by a domestic crisis. Perhaps Mary Burke’s health worsened. For Edmund, the move may have coincided with another rite of passage. Ten or 11 was an age at which boys often had their hair cut close or shaved and began wearing a wig.65 The school chosen was within a day’s ride of Dublin, 59 E.B. knew Spenser’s poems as early as 1744, for he quotes two lines in one of his own poems (C i. 7). 60 A Tour through Ireland. In Several Entertaining Letters, ‘By two English Gentlemen’ (London, 1748), 119–21. The Tour is by William Rufus Chetwood (d. 1766). 61 James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1826), i. 8; probably copying from Charles Henry Wilson’s anonymous (and unreliable) compilation, The Beauties of the Late Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, 1798), vol. i, p. i. 62 So I deduce from an anecdote told by Mary Shackleton, presumably on the authority of her father: that the three Burke brothers were made so miserable by the dame that one holiday they set out to kill her (Leadbeater Papers, i. 46). The anecdote cannot be literally true. The Burke boys were too far apart in age to have attended a dame school together. 63 Prior, Memoir of Burke, i. 8–9; Prior, The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, MB, from a Variety of Original Sources (London, 1837), i. 23. 64 Michael Kearney told Malone that ‘Burke was at the school of one Burnet before he went to Ballitore’; letter of 12 Jan. 1799, Bodl. MS Malone 39, fo. 23. In a less reliable source, Burke is said to have attended the school of James Fitzgerald, in Smithfield (just north of Arran Quay); ‘Sketch of the Life’ prefaced to Wilson’s Beauties of Burke, vol. i, p. vii, and probably thence copied in Prior, Life of Burke, 7. 65 Thomas Percy to his wife, 9 Mar. 1799, BL Add. MS 32335, fo. 143; Phillis Cunnington and Anne Buck, Children’s Costume in England from the Fourteenth to the End of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1965), 118.

22 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 and its master was a Quaker, Abraham Shackleton (1696–1771). The Burkes were enrolled on 26 May 1741.66 Forty years later, Edmund could still recall the weather and his own grumpy mood, sulking and reluctant to dismount. Even when the master’s son was sent out to break the ice, the Burke boys remained ‘very sour & grum’.67 This sullenness did not last. For Edmund at least the choice proved happy, and for his biographers fortunate. Richard Shackleton, his best friend at the school, was unusually meticulous about preserving letters and papers. ‘If thou hast occasion to carry any Let[ters in thy] pocket,’ he taught his daughter Mary (1758– 1826), ‘either put them in a pocket-book, or Letter-case, or wrap them up in paper, to prevent their b[ein]g sullied or worn.’68 The letters preserved by this family habit are the most important source for Burke’s undergraduate years (1744–7). Ballitore is a village in County Kildare, established in the late seventeenth century by a group of Quakers. About thirty miles south-west of Dublin, and just off the main road to Carlow, it possessed an idyllic charm. An observer in the 1740s was charmed with the sweetest Bottom [valley], where, through the lofty Trees, we beheld a Variety of pleasant Dwellings. Through a Road that looked like a fine Terrace-Walk, we turned down to view this lovely Vale, where Nature, assisted by Art, gave us the utmost Contentment. . . . The Griss winds its Streams very near the Houses; and the Buildings, Orchards, and Gardens, shew a Neatness peculiar to that People [the Quakers]. Their Burying-Ground, near the Road, is surrounded with different Trees, whose Verdure made us imagine it was a beautiful Garden, till better informed. The Hedges that inclose their Meadows and Fields are Quickset, kept of an equal Height, and about every ten Yards have Trees regularly planted, which, in a few Years, will form a beautiful Grove, of a large Extent. Industry seems to reign amongst them, and all their Works executed with a thriving Hand.69

A later and more prosaic account by Mary Shackleton describes the village as a single street, with about ten buildings substantial enough to deserve individual notice.70 Ballitore and Ballyduff were alike in being tiny, selfcontained communities in which everyone knew everyone. 66 The date as given in the Leadbeater Papers (i. 434) is ‘5 26’ 1741. Copeland makes the point that, until 1752, ‘First Month’ in Quaker usage should have meant March (C i. 1 n. 5). By this reckoning, ‘5 26’ would be 26 July. The Ballitore list, however, records an admission on ‘31 12’ 1740, which can only mean 31 Dec. So when the Burkes were admitted on ‘26 5’ following, the date intended must be 26 May 1741. 67 Mary Shackleton’s Diary, 13 June 1784, National Library of Ireland, MS 9310, p. 124. 68 Letter of 15 Aug. 1779, YB Osborn Shelves, Ballitore Boxes. 69 Chetwood, A Tour through Ireland, 231–2. 70 Leadbeater Papers, i. 13–15. E.B. and Richard Shackleton collaborated on a verse ‘Panegyrick on Ballitore’. Y.B. has drafts (OF 10. 204) and a fair copy (OF 5. 341); extracts are printed in Samuels, Early Life, 156–9.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 23 The school at Ballitore was founded in 1726. A remarkable Yorkshireman who learned Latin at the late age of 20 in order to qualify himself as a schoolmaster, Abraham Shackleton came to Ireland at the invitation of a group of fellow Quakers, initially as a private tutor.71 The school he opened at Ballitore was non-denominational and attracted many non-Quakers. This ecumenism was partly a question of economics. Even in England, the demand for exclusively Quaker schools was limited. Liberality of outlook also played a part.72 The atmosphere, though not sectarian, was serious. Shackleton made his boys work hard, harder than some found agreeable. One ex-Ballitore boy, Eusby Stratford, predicted that Shackleton would lose his pupils to a rival master who gave ‘abundance of play’. This appealed to Stratford, who remembered being treated at Ballitore ‘like gally-slaves by heavns—book—book book’.73 Plagued with childhood illnesses, Burke had fallen behind with his studies. He needed to work hard to catch up, and was lucky that his master made that hard work a pleasure. In Burke’s day, between ten and twenty boys entered Ballitore each year, and the total enrolment was about fifty.74 Most of the boys at Ballitore were destined for a career in some branch of trade or commerce. Newcomen Herbert, for example, was apprenticed to a grocer before the depressed state of the trade determined him to seek his fortune in the service of the East India Company. Richard Burke was likewise destined to commerce. Other boys became attorneys (like Garrett Burke), or physicians, like Richard Brocklesby (1722–97) and Joseph Fenn Sleigh (1733–70).75 Since the minimum fees were ‘twenty four pound a year two Guineas entrance and a Couple o’ pieces of Plate’ (C i. 52), only the sons of the better-off could attend.76 When he entered his three boys at Ballitore, Richard Burke had no thought of sending Ned to college. Some schools specialized in preparing boys for the university (that is, for Trinity College, Dublin), as the early education of the Goldsmith brothers illustrates. Charles Goldsmith (c.1690–1747), a country clergyman with a living of about £200 a year, was Leadbeater Papers (the principal source for the early years of the school), i. 27. In 1765, Richard Shackleton was asked to undertake an exclusively Quaker school. His reasons for declining, expressed in a letter of 3 Mar. 1765, were not primarily financial; Michael Quane, ‘Ballitore School’, Journal of the County Kildare Archaeological Society, 14 (1966–7), 174–209. I infer that he inherited this attitude from his father. 73 Conversation reported in E.B. to Shackleton, 1 June 1746. ‘All this seriously’, E.B. commented, ‘from another it might seem ironical’ (C i. 66). Eusby Stratford entered Ballitore in 1742. 74 Mary Leadbeater says ‘fifty, and sometimes sixty boarders, besides day-scholars’; Leadbeater Papers, i. 42. 75 Brocklesby entered the school in 1734, and later practised in London, where he became a friend of E.B. Sleigh entered the school in 1745, took his medical degree at Edinburgh (where he met Goldsmith), and practised at Cork. 76 Comparable fees were charged at Mr Thompson’s school at Leixlip in 1745, when George Macartney paid £3 3s. for admission, and a basic £23 a year for school and board. Extras (writingmaster, barber, washing, tailor, and French) amounted to £6 11s. a year; Helen H. Robbins, Our First Ambassador to China: An Account of the Life of George, Earl of Macartney (London, 1908), 6. 71 72

24 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 rather poorer than Richard Burke. He sent his eldest son, Henry (1723?– 68), to be prepared for the college. Unable to send two sons to college, he at first intended to set up the younger, Oliver, in trade. Since Oliver was his mother’s favourite, she ‘proposed giving him a liberal Education for a tradesman’. When the parents decided to send Oliver to college after all, they moved him to another school.77 Ballitore was not primarily a precollege school.78 Apart from Burke, only one other boy who entered between 1739 and 1743 is known to have proceeded to Trinity College: Michael Kearney (1734–1814), later a fellow of the college.79 Even so, Shackleton gave his ablest pupils a solid grounding in the classics, and Burke was rightly proud of the compliment, paid at his admission, of being ‘more fit for the Colledge than three parts of my Class’ (2). In Burke’s case, recognition of his superior intellectual gifts, and the suggestion that he should be sent to college, may have originated with Abraham Shackleton. Burke was never particularly forceful or eager about advancing his own prospects. Only a series of contingencies gave him the opportunity to exhibit his talents on the great stage of English politics. Ballitore was his first stroke of good fortune. The curriculum at Ballitore was conventional. Though few of the boys were preparing to enter a learned profession, Latin was the staple subject of study. Some of the English dissenting academies taught a more modern range of subjects, with less emphasis on the classical languages. Ballitore was more traditional. When Newcomen Herbert decided to seek a career with the East India Company, he had to make special arrangements to pick up the necessary French and mathematics. He had learned neither at Ballitore.80 (French may have been available as an extra.) The same inference may be drawn from a remark of Burke’s. ‘You have confined your Study to that part of learning they Call humanity,’ he wrote to Shackleton 77 ‘Mrs Hodson’s Narrative’, in Goldsmith, Collected Letters, ed. Katherine C. Balderston (Cambridge, 1928), 165, 166. Catherine Hodson was Goldsmith’s sister. 78 A persistent mistake about Ballitore should be corrected. Richard Shackleton took over the school in 1756, and his son (another Abraham) in 1779. The younger Abraham closed the school to nonQuakers in 1789, which resulted in a marked decline in numbers (Leadbeater Papers, i. 175). He warned prospective patrons that he refused to teach those authors (required for entrance to TCD) who ‘recommend in seducing language, the illusions of love, and the abominable trade of war’. This advertisement was reprinted as a curiosity in the Monthly Magazine, 2 (Aug. 1797), 94. Charles Wilson in turn reprinted it (without acknowledgement) in the life prefaced to The Beauties of Burke, as though it were the work of the elder Abraham, and therefore described the curriculum in E.B.’s time. Later writers have repeated this error; Samuels, Early Life, 13; Quane, ‘Ballitore School’, 176. 79 Based on the Ballitore school list (printed in Leadbeater Papers, i. 434–5), checked against Alumni Dublinenses. Two other Ballitore boys were admitted to TCD, but not directly. In 1758, Richard Shackleton wrote to William Dennis for advice on preparing a ‘hopeful’ (promising) boy for Trinity College, which confirms that such boys remained unusual at Ballitore. This letter is lost, but Dennis’s reply (undated, but endorsed Apr. 1758) is in YB OF 10. 214. 80 Herbert to Shackleton, 11 Feb. 1743, YB OF 17. 278.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 25 in 1746, assuming that this (Latin and Greek) is exactly what his ‘office of a Schoolmaster’ requires (C i. 69). Shackleton had been educated at the school and trained to succeed his father. Though the school gave no formal instruction in ‘modern’ subjects, boys were encouraged to develop such interests on their own. Shackleton and Herbert took up astronomy with a seriousness that Burke found slightly comic.81 Life at Ballitore was not all work. Burke belonged to a small clique of boys with a well-developed sense of their own intellectual superiority. This sense was often expressed in parody and ridicule, particularly of boys outside their own set. Though no letters to or from Burke have been preserved from the years he spent at Ballitore, the gap can partly be filled from the thirty surviving letters from Herbert to Shackleton, for Burke, Shackleton, and Herbert were three of a kind.82 A recurrent theme in these letters is the epistolary ineptitude of another ex-Ballitore boy, John Deaver. Herbert ridicules the style of Deaver’s ‘Elegant Epis[tle]’, with its ‘I am well. I hope you are well.’ On another occasion, he transcribes for Shackleton’s delectation all six lines of Deaver’s poorly spelled and pedestrian letter.83 Unaware of being the butt of Herbert’s ridicule, Deaver generously sent him a present of 600 apples. Reporting this gift, Herbert affects to revise his opinion of Deaver’s style. Now ‘no Oration in Cicero is half so eloquent’ as Deaver’s letter: ‘600 Plump, Rosy, Juicy Beauties, diffuse themselves throughout the whole discourse.’84 Burke enjoyed fun of this kind. Prone to divide the world into friends and enemies, he loved to be part of an exclusive set. Though Burke spent only three years at Ballitore, the school affected him more deeply than Trinity College would. No one at Trinity inspired the veneration that he retained for Abraham Shackleton, and no college friendship proved as durable as that with Richard Shackleton. In 1757, when Michael Kearney obtained the coveted prize of a college fellowship, Burke congratulated Shackleton on the honour thus conferred on his old school, where, he added, ‘I received the Education, that, if I am any thing, has made me so’ (C i. 124). A small school could minister to a boy’s individual character, temperament, and needs. The college was large and impersonal. Goldsmith, who was much unhappier at Trinity than Burke, remembered with similar affection Patrick Hughes, the master who prepared him for the college. At his school, Goldsmith ‘profited more than any where, as the Master conversed with him on a footing very diff[eren]t from that of a 81 Herbert to Shackleton, 24 Jan. 1743, 29 Apr. 1744, 2, 4–9 Feb. 1745, YB OF 17. 277, 291, 285, 286. E.B. to Shackleton, c.14 June 1744 (C i. 18), shows a philosophical rather than an astronomical appreciation of the heavens. 82 YB OF 17. 268–96; the letters range in date from Feb. 1742 to Oct. 1745. 83 Herbert to Shackleton, 24 July and 10 Aug. 1742, YB OF 17. 271, 273. 84 Herbert to Shackleton, 7 Jan. 1743, YB OF 17. 280.

26 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 85 young Scholar’. Goldsmith, even in later life, was often treated as a figure of fun, a natural butt for ridicule. Hughes took him seriously, as Abraham Shackleton did Burke. The self-confidence and self-esteem that the boys learned at these schools proved more valuable than Latin or Greek. Abraham Shackleton was the first important influence on Burke’s mind. A sympathetic authority-figure, he was amiable and understanding as Burke’s own father was not. In the poem on Ballitore, Burke paid this tribute to his master: Whose breast all virtues long have made their home, Where Courtesy’s stream does without flattery flow, And the just use of Wealth without the show; Who to Man’s vices tho’ he ne’er was thrall Pities as much as he had felt them all, And in a word such Cares his hours engage, As fits the planter of the future age.86

The contrast could hardly be stronger between the feeling of this passage and Burke’s references to his father. As these lines suggest, Abraham Shackleton’s influence was moral rather than intellectual. Burke did not imbibe from him specific ideas, least of all distinctively Quaker ideas or attitudes. Indeed, Abraham Shackleton’s most famous pupil came to represent much that is antithetical to Quaker ideas and ideals. Quakers are pacifists. In the 1790s, no one called more loudly than did Burke for a ‘long war’ to extirpate the menace of Jacobinism (WS ix. 229). The Quaker style is plain. No style could be more ornate than Burke at his most Burkean. The Quaker ethos is egalitarian. Burke became the age’s foremost apologist for aristocracy, hierarchy, and inherited privileges and inequalities. Quakers have no separate priesthood. Burke came to believe that civilization depended on religion, and religion on a priesthood to teach and maintain it. Quakers believe in an ‘inner light’. Burke distrusted claims to personal inspiration. He admired and venerated his old master not for his ideas but for his character. For Burke, moral qualities were more important than abstract ideas or political theories. In his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he repudiated the specious slogan ‘measures, not men’ as absurd and pernicious. Against the pseudo-rationalizing of the French revolutionaries, he maintained the same creed. ‘Never wholly seperate in your Mind’, he advised the young Frenchman to whom he would address his Reflections on the Revolution in France, ‘the merits of any Political Question from the Men who are concerned in it’ (Nov. 1789: C vi. 47). This lesson Burke learned 85 Goldsmith’s ‘Memoir’, dictated to Thomas Percy on 28 Apr. 1773, in Balderston, The History and Sources of Percy’s Memoir of Goldsmith, 14. 86 YB OF 10. 204.

growing up irish, 1730‒1744 27 early, perhaps first from Abraham Shackleton. After 1784, when he became increasingly hostile to the Dissenters in general, he excepted Quakers. In a speech against the Unitarians on 11 May 1792, to show that he did not disapprove of all dissent, he contrasted that sect with the Quakers. ‘Quakerism’, he asserted, ‘is strict, methodical, in its nature highly aristocratical, and so regular that it has brought the whole community to the condition of one family; but it does not actually interfere with the government’ (W vi. 125). Burke here selects the elements of Quakerism most congruent with his own ideas. The immediate point is the contrast with the Unitarians, whom he believed to be working to overthrow the existing establishment. Quaker quietism made good citizens, not revolutionaries. Not that Burke himself was a quietist. By temperament and conviction he was drawn to the stoic ideal of active citizenship. Indeed, in public life, he was a gadfly whose compulsive hyperactivity did not always meet with the approval of his more sedate aristocratic associates. Much would happen, to Burke and to the world, between his leaving Ballitore in 1744 and his delivery of that speech in 1792. That his admiration for the Quaker ideal, an admiration not diminished by its distance from the life he had himself lived, survived the personal and political turbulence of the intervening years testifies to the abiding influence of Ballitore. Burke’s early years were unusual. He experienced the life and culture of each of Ireland’s chief religious groups: the Anglicans, the Catholics, and the Protestant Dissenters (represented by the Quakers). Such an upbringing is the stuff of fiction. In Susanna Centlivre’s comedy A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), for example, the heroine is placed under the care of an improbable quartet of guardians: an old beau, a foolish scientist, a stockjobber, and a Quaker tradesman. Frances Burney (1752–1840) employed the same device more seriously in her novel Cecilia (1782), where the guardians are an extravagant man of fashion, a stiff-necked scion of the old nobility, and a penny-pinching businessman. Such extreme contrasts of character and setting are apt to appear exaggerated and artificial, improbable literary devices rather than reflections of reality. For Burke, they were actual and palpable. This may explain why he enjoyed the novel so much, reading it virtually non-stop over three days.87 Innumerable differences, great and small, distinguished the modes of life of the various religious groups. Doctrinal divides were reinforced by variations in economic circumstances, cultural traditions, and manners, even in dress, household furniture, and decoration. Burke experienced this as he moved between Dublin, the Nagles, and Ballitore. The Nagles lived in a pleasant, pastoral world. They were people to love, but they belonged to the past, and their way of life offered no hope for an ambitious young man. Ballitore was another world 87

141.

Fanny Burney, Diary & Letters, ed. Charlotte Barrett and Austin Dobson (London, 1904–5), ii.

28 growing up irish, 1730‒1744 again. Prosperous, orderly, and peaceful, to the young Burke it was a refuge from the smoke of Dublin and the fury of his father’s temper. Did Burke ever feel really at home as a child? Though with the Nagles and the Shackletons he was no more than a transient, a guest or a boarder, he was happier with them than at ‘home’ in Dublin. No wonder that he searched so desperately for a sense of belonging, or that he developed an unusual imaginative sympathy for the dispossessed. ‘We have just Religion enough to make us hate,’ Swift observed, ‘but not enough to make us love one another.’88 Burke knew this better than most English boys of his age. English visitors habitually noticed sharper contrasts in Ireland: between the imposing new buildings of Dublin and its slums; between the mansions in which landlords lived luxuriously and the bare subsistence eked out by the poor in their hovels. Ireland was indeed a more rigidly segregated and stratified society than England. Landlords and peasants faced each other in hereditary hostility. Religion and the right to property were inseparable issues. Burke’s character and ideas cannot be understood without reference to his Irishness and the complex conflicts of loyalty which he inherited. Not their least legacy was his yearning for a home, somewhere he could finally, as he told Shackleton in 1768, ‘cast a little root’ (C i. 351). 88

‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’, in Prose Writings, i. 241.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750

29

2 From a Boy to a Man, 1744–1750

1 In Burke’s day, college or university was, for a fortunate few, an optional stage sandwiched between school and the grand tour of Europe, part of an educational progress that they might take as seriously or as lightly as they pleased. Such students, possessed of or heirs to property and an assured rank in life, rarely took a degree. The experience of Edward Gibbon (1737– 94), sent to Oxford at 14 (the same age as Burke entered college), was typical of this class. Gibbon recalled the feeling of being ‘suddenly raised from a boy to a man’.1 As the heir of a landed gentleman, Gibbon entered Magdalen College with the superior status of a ‘gentleman commoner’. Treated with deference and enjoying an ample allowance, he was not required to attend classes or to perform irksome scholastic exercises. Even for Gibbon, however, the sense of emancipation was illusory. As he discovered when he announced his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he remained subject to his father’s will and pleasure. Burke, who did not belong to the gilded minority, could not mistake college life for independence. He was one of the many students who attended college in order to smooth their entry into one of the learned professions. Most were destined for the Church; some, like Burke, for the law; a few, for medicine. Burke’s experience was different from Gibbon’s in other ways. He lived at home, under his father’s tyrannical eye. Trinity College, Dublin imposed an onerous programme of classes, exercises, and examinations. At college, Burke probably felt more like a boy than he had at Ballitore. Indeed, not until about 1755, when he finally broke with his father, was he wholly his own man. Yet financial dependence did not stunt his intellectual development. In 1744, his first extant letter reveals a diffident schoolboy overawed by the three grand rooms of his college tutor. By 1748, he and two friends were writing a periodical paper designed to raise the standard of taste in what they perceived as a second-rate, provincial metropolis. Burke had outgrown Dublin, though he did not leave it until 1750. Trinity College was founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1592, to train 1

Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), 46.

30 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 clergy for the Church of Ireland. By Burke’s time, though it remained Ireland’s only institution of higher education, its character had changed.2 Its students included not only aspiring clerics, but sons of the landed gentry and of the urban professional class. The curriculum, however, remained at heart the old medieval arts course, and more students entered the Church than any other profession.3 After graduation, intending ordinands continued in residence to study for the MA and were lectured on divinity, Hebrew, and oratory (for the pulpit).4 For some, whose fathers were men of landed property, the college served as a finishing-school. They usually entered as ‘fellow commoners’, paying double fees. They enjoyed certain privileges (they could graduate after three years instead of the normal four), but they were not exempt from the quarterly examinations. As at Oxford and Cambridge, such students were often more interested in drinking and socializing than in their studies. For less fortunate students, doing well in college was important, perhaps their best chance of getting ahead in life. This was especially true of the poor boys admitted as ‘sizars’ (equivalent to the ‘servitors’ at Oxford). They paid no fees, but were required to perform certain menial services such as waiting on the fellows at dinner. Fellow commoners and sizars represented the extremes of the social spectrum.5 In between, the majority of students entered as ‘pensioners’, paying the standard fees. They came from a range of social backgrounds, but the mix is not easy to analyse. Most students (forty-six of the eighty-four admitted during the same year as Burke) described their fathers simply as ‘generosus’ (gentleman). The only other common descriptions are ‘clericus’ and ‘armiger’ (the latter used mainly by students entering as fellow commoners). Of the students admitted in 1743/4 (Burke’s year), thirteen claimed superior social status (father described as ‘nobilis’, ‘baronettus’, ‘equester’, or ‘armiger’). Five students were sons of bishops, fourteen sons of the lower clergy. Two students described their fathers as ‘colonus’, one as ‘medicinae doctoris’. 2 R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 1592–1952: An Academic History (Cambridge, 1982); John William Stubbs, The History of the University of Dublin, from its Foundation to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1889). Much detail is also preserved in the unpublished ‘Essay towards a History of Trinity College Dublin’, compiled by John Hely Hutchinson in the 1780s (TCD MSS 1770–4b). 3 Of the forty students in E.B.’s graduating class, eleven stayed on to take an MA, a degree chiefly of value to an aspiring cleric. Six are known to have been called to the Irish Bar, and two to have practised medicine. These are minimum figures, since the information available is far from complete. 4 T. McLoughlin, ‘Edmund Burke: The Post-Graduate Years, 1748–1750’, Studies in Burke and his Time, 10 (1968), 1035–40, speculates that E.B. might have attended these lectures on oratory after his graduation. This is unlikely. A cross against E.B.’s name in the bursar’s book (TCD Mun/V/52/39a) at 19–25 June 1748, and the subsequent omission of his name from the list of students, indicates that he ceased to attend the college about this time. 5 These distinctions provide only a rough indication of a student’s social background. Often an eldest son would enter as a fellow-commoner, his younger brothers as pensioners. Henry Goldsmith entered TCD as a pensioner in 1741; straitened circumstances constrained his father to enrol the younger brother, Oliver, as a sizar.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 31 Only one student described his father as ‘jurisperitus’: John Stannard, whose father was Recorder of Dublin.6 No student described his father as an attorney. Burke was not alone, however; some half-dozen of his classmates were probably also sons of attorneys.7 Described in its charter as ‘juxta’ (near) Dublin, Trinity College was in Burke’s day no longer separate from it. So close to the hazards and temptations of a big city, the college faced severe problems in controlling its mainly teenaged students. In some respects, it was more like a modern high school than a university. The median age of entrance was about 16. At 14, Burke was one of the youngest in his class.8 Many of the college regulations were archaic. The statutes assumed a student body resident within the college walls: able, for example, to attend chapel at 6 a.m. In Burke’s day, the college was overcrowded, and only a minority of students lived in. Contemporary estimates put the number of students as high as five or six hundred.9 The college records suggest a much smaller number, for Burke’s period of residence at least: fewer than 300 undergraduates, not all of them working towards a degree.10 In 1751, the college successfully petitioned the Irish Parliament for funds for a programme of new buildings. So extensive was this rebuilding that little of the college remains as Burke knew it.11 In the 1740s, it consisted of two squares. The imposing main entrance (since rebuilt) was from College Green, opposite the Parliament House (now the Bank of Ireland), where the equestrian statue of William III symbolized the Protestant Ascendancy. The chapel and the dining-hall were in this front court. The second, or Library Court, was dominated by the impressive new library, completed in 1732, which was as splendid as any at Oxford or Cambridge (Plate 2). Rooms for the fellows and for those students who lived in, however, took up the greater part of both courts. There was no 6

Information compiled from TCD Mun/V/23/3 and Alumni Dublinenses. The names of six of the fathers of E.B.’s classmates can be found among the attorneys listed in the King’s Inns Admission Papers, 1607–1867, ed. Edward Keane, P. Beryl Phair, and Thomas U. Sadleir (Dublin, 1982). This may be an underestimate, since the Admission Papers provides only an incomplete record of attorneys. On the other hand, identity of name does not guarantee that the attorney was actually the father of the student in question. One error is certain, and is unlikely to be the only one: E.B.’s father’s name is incorrectly given as John in the TCD Register (TCD Mun/V/23/3). Richard Burke is thus not one of the six identified from the records. 8 The ages recorded in the register of admissions (TCD Mun/V/23/3) for the 84 students admitted in E.B.’s year (1743/4) range from 14 to 20. The commonest ages were 16 (27 students) and 17 (32 students). 9 The estimate of ‘5 or 600 young men’ is from A Letter to G—— W—— Esq., Concerning the Present Condition of the College of Dublin ([Dublin], 1734), 8, 10. A Description of the City of Dublin in Ireland (London, 1732), puts the number at ‘never less than 600’ (16). 10 The register of admissions (TCD Mun/V/23/3) records 76 entrants for 1742/3, 84 for 1743/4 (E.B.’s year), and 70 for 1744/5. If all students had stayed the full four years (which many did not), the number of undergraduates would still not have exceeded 300. 11 Stubbs, History of the University of Dublin, 188–90; McDowell and Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 50. Stubbs prints a plan of the college in 1750, redrawn from Rocque’s survey and showing the dates of the various buildings (191). 7

32 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 student common room, and no provision in the college itself for student social life or non-academic activities, unless walking in the college park, which Burke describes in a letter (C i. 23), is to be counted as such. The lack of recreational facilities within the college meant that extracurricular life and activities centred on the town. Rowdyism was endemic. In 1734, a riot led to the death of a fellow who had made himself particularly obnoxious to the students, though by Burke’s time such episodes were less frequent.12 In 1747, however, students were on two occasions responsible for serious breaches of the peace. The ‘Kelly’ riots of January 1747 take their name from the drunken playgoer whose indecent behaviour provoked them. Many students were regular playgoers and sprang to the defence of the manager of the theatre, Thomas Sheridan (1719–88), a former scholar of the college. Burke took only a slight part, and at a late stage in the proceedings. Arriving about ten one morning, he found the college in an uproar. A body of students had assembled to punish the ringleaders of the anti-Sheridan forces that had disrupted the previous night’s performance. Burke joined the sport. The posse found the ‘principal offender’ in bed, abducted him, and forced him to make a public apology on his knees. A larger band of students (now about 100, including Burke), ‘well arm’d’, went to seize another culprit. Denied admission at his lodgings, they broke in through a window, and forced this victim in turn to a public humiliation at the college.13 Violence erupted again in May 1747, when students rescued one of their number who had been arrested, in violation (as they thought) of the sanctuary of the college. They then attacked the ‘Black Dog’ prison (hence this is known as the ‘Black Dog’ riot), and lives are said to have been lost. In the aftermath, five students were expelled and another five (including Oliver Goldsmith) reprimanded.14 Once begun, such disturbances easily became uncontrollable. Neither the college nor the city authorities were eager to request military intervention (the only effective police force available), except as a last resort. The government’s response to the Kelly riots was to send a letter to the students, ‘desiring in a very polite manner we should not go out in Large Bodies’ (C i. 84). Despite such extraordinary incidents, the Dublin college enjoyed a reputation for a ‘much stricter discipline’ than either Oxford or Cambridge.15 How far was this character deserved? A higher proportion of entrants took 12 Stubbs, History of the University of Dublin, 160–3. According to the college records, ‘expulsions, gatings and censures’ are plentiful ‘up to about 1740’ (McDowell and Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 38). 13 E.B. to Shackleton, 21 Feb. 1747 (C i. 82–4), written to correct unfavourable representations of the episode; Esther K. Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley (Princeton, 1964), 82–104. 14 Dennis to Shackleton, 29 May 1747, in Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 1923), 142 (this portion omitted from the text printed in C i. 94). 15 Jonathan Swift to Lord Peterborough, 28 Apr. 1726, in Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1963–5), iii. 133. Swift’s testimony carries weight, for he had no reason to love his Alma Mater.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 33 a degree than at Oxford: between 1730 and 1749, 68.4 against 52.3 per cent.16 Since the BA degree was most useful as a propaedeutic for a clerical career, this difference suggests that more of the Dublin students had their way to make in the world, especially in the clerical world. The Oxford and Cambridge colleges varied considerably in the importance they attached to undergraduate teaching. At one extreme, Edward Gibbon at Magdalen received almost no instruction or advice. At the other, Christ Church provided its students with a comprehensive programme of study, based on individually assigned readings, carefully supervised and examined.17 At Dublin, with many more students than any single college at Oxford or Cambridge, greater reliance was placed on formal, public instruction. All undergraduates read the same texts, attended the same daily lectures, and took the same quarterly examinations. In such a system, there was little room for attention to individuals or the development of original thinkers or unconventional minds. The academic staff of Trinity College comprised a Provost and twenty fellows. The Provost was normally appointed from among the fellows, who were in turn recruited from the college’s own graduates. The college was thus a self-perpetuating hierarchy. The Provost in Burke’s time was Richard Baldwin (c.1668–1758), who had been appointed in 1717 for his political reliability. The Provost’s powers were large, and Baldwin, an arbitrary and high-handed man, exerted them to the full. By Burke’s time, however, he had mellowed. To the young Burke, introduced to him on admission, he appeared only ‘an old sickly looking man’ (C i. 2). The fellows were almost all clergymen or clerics-to-be. The college statutes required them to take holy orders within three years of election, and to remain celibate.18 Some fellows spent most of their careers in the college. Most regarded the fellowship as a step towards advancement in the Church, marriage, and retirement to the otium cum dignitate of the country clergyman. For the younger fellows, teaching duties were onerous: a daily grind of repetitive lectures, and a weekly pile of exercises to correct. They did not specialize, and could expect during their tenure to lecture and tutor all the subjects offered. Year after year they would have to trudge through the same classical authors that they had read as students, and expound the elements of the same branches of philosophy and science. Nor were they 16 The figure for Dublin is based on the table of entrants and degrees in Stubbs, History of the University of Dublin, 316–17. The figure for Oxford is from Lawrence Stone, ‘The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body, 1580–1910’, in Stone (ed.), The University in Society (Princeton, 1974), i. 3–110, table 4. 17 Gibbon, Memoirs, 54–7; E. G. W. Bill, Education at Christ Church, Oxford, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1988). 18 At any one time, two fellows were allowed to claim exemption from the obligation to take orders: one to study law, the other medicine. The celibacy statute was enforced with varying degrees of strictness.

34 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 encouraged or expected to undertake original research. The fellows of Burke’s day were not active scholars: between 1722 and 1753, no fellow of the college published anything during the tenure of his fellowship.19 Election to a fellowship was by the Provost and seven senior fellows, after a public examination. An element of merit was thereby injected into the system. The Provost could, however, nominate in opposition to the wishes of all the senior fellows. His support was thus always crucial, though instances of gross favouritism appear to have been rare. A more fundamental objection to the examination was that it tested factual knowledge rather than quality of mind. Preserved among the papers of Richard Shackleton is a draft essay on education that, if it does not represent Burke’s views, expresses opinions that were current in his circle. Its author unsparingly condemns the fellowship examinations, ‘that so much boasted Trial of Skill . . . in which we are said to excell the whole world’: I could not forbear pitying the candidates if they had any true Genius or if they had not . . . such an indignity nothing but absolute want of Bread could bring a truly learned man to bear[,] where points of the greatest moment which cannot be resolved without much thought & canvast in Question & Answer, when men of judgement . . . see the prize run away with for want of flippant tongues ready memory & impudence . . . for if any should make an answer as (suppose in Physicks) learned from Experience Contrary to the System or should prefer one System to the other it is given to the next who is more credulous . . . indeed tho the examiner were a man of the best sense it is no time or place for Examination of opinions perhaps never started before nor will decency suffer the Candidate by dispute to maintain his proposition. the like accident happens in all the Sciences in w[hi]ch if the Candidate reads a different Book all is lost . . . the Ex[aminer] reads a Book from w[hi]ch he takes his Question & consequently the answer. thus this method is [in] its Nature a very unfit way to try the Talents as indeed all the College Course seems no way calculated for the advancement of knowledge or improvement of taste.20

These objections target more than the fellowship examinations. They cut to the heart of the system, which was designed to transmit received ideas, not to stimulate habits of intellectual enquiry. Burke’s tutor was John Pellissier (c.1704–81), the son of a Huguenot army officer.21 He was a graduate of the college, but had been absent for the period immediately before the controversial election of 1727 at which Baldwin nominated him to a fellowship against the opposition of five of the McDowell and Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 39. YB OF 34. 374, 376; partly written on the backs of student exercises, one of which is dated Dec. 1748. 21 David C. A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France, Chiefly in the Reign of Louis XIV (3rd edn. privately printed, 1886), lists a Major Abel Pelissier and his six children by his second (1698) marriage. The second son, Alexandre (b. 1701), was a merchant in Dublin. E.B.’s tutor was the third son, ‘Jean’. The spelling of ‘Pellissier’ varies. 19 20

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 35 seven senior fellows. This nomination provoked a small paper war, and the services of Jonathan Swift were enlisted in an attempt to have the matter taken up by the college’s Chancellor.22 Baldwin won the battle. Indeed, he may actually have provoked it to demonstrate his mastery of the college. The senior fellows protested against Pellissier’s nomination. Pellissier answered the largest number of questions, they conceded, but often ‘ignorantly, injudiciously, or by guess’. To give him the preference would be to reward ‘Giddiness and Confidence’ over ‘Modesty and sound Judgement’. Since Pellissier answered every question ‘with the same calmness and selfcomplacence’, they suspected that he answered correctly as often from guesswork as from knowledge.23 Having obtained his fellowship through Baldwin’s favour, Pellissier remained his faithful henchman, the typical academic time-server. In 1747, Baldwin appointed him Vice-Provost, in which capacity he served until 1753. In that year, probably recognizing that he lacked the political influence to succeed the ailing Baldwin, he resigned to accept a lucrative living in County Tyrone. To the local magnate he was decribed as ‘no very great genius but I believe will make a regular clergyman, but preaches so ill that it were to be wish’d he wou’d never attempt it’. This assessment was made by Edward Hudson (c.1703–57), who as a colleague of Pellissier’s from 1728 to 1739 was in a position to know.24 A 14-year-old boy is unlikely to see through his tutor at once. Burke heard that Pellissier was ‘accounted one of the most Learned in the University’. His own first impression was ‘an exceeding good humour’d cleanly civil Fellow’ (C i. 2). In July 1745, he was still sufficiently happy with his tutor to be ‘afraid’ that Pellissier would accept a fat college living that had fallen vacant (52). According to a later source, Burke owed Pellissier ‘few obligations, except, as it is said, having recommended to him the acquisition of multiform knowledge, rather than to devote his attention to any particular branch’.25 Such sage counsel was commonplace. Another future polymath, Samuel Johnson, was given the same advice by a mentor.26 Burke took courses in two groups of subjects, ‘humanity’ (the Greek and Latin classics) and ‘science’.27 The Latin authors read were (roughly in the 22 A Short History of the Eight Philosophers of the Island Cos (Dublin, 1727); An Humble Remonstrance in the Name of All the Lads in All the Schools of Ireland, where Latin and Greek Are Taught (Dublin, 1728). Swift to Thomas Sheridan, 24 June and 1 July 1727; in Correspondence, ed. Williams, iii. 218, 221. 23 The protest of the senior fellows; Stubbs, History of the University of Dublin, 416–19, from An Humble Remonstrance. 24 Hudson to the Earl of Abercorn, 22 Oct. 1751, in An Introduction to the Abercorn Letters, as Relating to Ireland, 1736–1816, ed. John H. Gebbie (Omagh, 1972), 38. 25 James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1826) i. 20; Prior, Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (5th edn. London, 1854) omits the anecdote. 26 Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi), ed. Katherine C. Balderston (2nd edn. Oxford, 1951), i. 171. 27 Stubbs, History of the University of Dublin, 199–200; McDowell and Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 45–9. A few minor changes to the classical texts were made the year E.B. entered, according to the list

36 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 following order) Virgil, Terence, Juvenal, Caesar, Justin (the epitome of Trogus), Horace, Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus. Virgil became one of his favourite authors. Charles Butler (1750–1832), who knew Burke in the 1780s, observed his affection for a ‘ragged Delphin Virgil’ which Burke told him was ‘a book he always had within his reach’.28 The ‘Delphin’ edition was one of the most commonly used student texts of Virgil. Burke was examined from one when he was admitted to the college (C i. 2). The ‘ragged’ copy that Butler saw may have been a survivor from college, or even from Ballitore. The Greek texts on Burke’s course included the Iliad, Xenophon (the Memorabilia and Cyropedia), Epictetus and the Tabula of Cebes, two plays of Sophocles, selections from Lucian, some speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes, and the treatise On the Sublime attributed to Longinus. Burke forgot most of his Greek. Charles James Fox (1749–1806), who never allowed his own interest in the language to lapse, judged that Burke ‘knew of Greek as much, or more than persons usually do, who have neglected it since their leaving school, or college’.29 Two of the Greek texts, however, impressed Burke strongly. Longinus stimulated an interest in the sublime that led in due course to the writing of the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). In 1789, Burke told his friend Edmond Malone (1741–1812) that he had ‘been used from the time he was in college’ to speculate on the subject.30 Longinus remains a classic of literary criticism. The Tabula of Cebes was almost as well known in Burke’s day, though it has since fallen into obscurity. Pellissier recommended it as ‘a very fine picture of human Life’ (4). Burke in turn advised Shackleton to read it ‘with abundance of Care’ (69). The inclusion of the Tabula, ‘the Pilgrim’s Progress of antiquity’, was no quirk of local taste.31 Calculated to appeal to those who elect the straight and narrow (precisely Burke’s type), it depicts the ascent to true happiness through virtue and right education. The Greek and Latin writers whom Burke studied are still familiar names today. Not so the authors of the texts set for the ‘science’ side of the of ‘Books in Humanity to be Read for ye Publick Examinations’, dated 20 Nov. 1743 (TCD Mun/V/ 27/1, fo. 90b), on which my account is based. The record contains no corresponding list for the ‘science’ texts; perhaps no changes had been made. 28 Reminiscences (London, 1822–7), ii. 97–8. 29 Fox to Antony Robinson, n.d., quoted in The Athenaeum, 3 Dec. 1853, 1447; repr. in Charles Wentworth Dilke, The Papers of a Critic (London, 1875), ii. 311. Robinson (1762–1827) may have been gathering material for a biographical dictionary; Claire Tomalin, ‘Publisher in Prison’, Times Literary Supplement, 2 Dec. 1994, 15. 30 Malone’s diary, 28 July 1789, in James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare (London, 1860), 154. Letters to Shackleton attest to the impression that Longinus made at the time (24 Jan. and c.5 Mar. 1747: C i. 78, 86). 31 Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), 34; Earl R. Wasserman, ‘Johnson’s Rasselas: Implicit Contexts’, JEGP 74 (1975), 1–25.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 37 course, whose works are now little known except to historians of education. The first two years were devoted to logic. Most students hated it. Textbooks had long lives in Burke’s day: his first-year logic text was over 100 years old. Burke added his voice to the chorus of execration with which generations of freshmen had reviled the Institutiones logicae of Franco Burgersdijck (first published in 1626). ‘I am now’, he told Shackleton, ‘sitting at my own Bureau with Oh! hideous, Burgersdiscius.’ Reading such a ‘hoard of exploded nonsense, the Scum of Pedantry, and the refuse of the Boghouse school-Philosophy’ made him ‘stink of that Crabbed stuff as much as any vile fresh in the Uni’ (24 May 1744: C i. 7–9). After the dry desert of logic, the third-year subjects were a relief: astronomy, geography, and physics. These subjects must have been hurried through, but they provided a basic exposition of the ‘scientific’ model of the universe. The ‘science’ subjects studied in the fourth year were metaphysics and ethics. The ethics text stands out as the single work on the ‘science’ side of the course that is still read: Samuel Pufendorf’s De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem (1673; translated as The Whole Duty of Man, 1691), Pufendorf’s own epitome of his De jure naturae et gentium (1672). The ‘small Pufendorf’ (as the Dublin list calls it) introduced generations of students to the concept of a ‘natural law’ of universal obligation which might serve instead of theological dogma as a foundation for human values and actions. Pufendorf taught Burke to test local laws and customs against standards of universal and unchanging validity. The daily routine of the college and the framework of its undergraduate course were century-old traditions in Burke’s day. Both remained faithful to the statutes imposed by Archbishop Laud in 1637.32 Students were expected to attend three or four classes each day. Lectures, conducted in Latin, followed an unusual format which appears to have been peculiar to the college. John Lawson (1712–59), preparatory to explaining his own decision to use a different method in his postgraduate course on rhetoric, describes the standard procedure. Prior to each class, students were assigned a portion of a set text for study. During the class, they were asked questions designed to test their knowledge and understanding of the text. Lawson claimed that this method achieved a ‘lasting Comprehension of what is learned’.33 The author of the essay on education preserved among the Shackleton papers did not think so. Scathing about ‘what are so absurdly called Lectures’, he thought them no more than ‘a jabber of question & answer learned by rote, which as it is none of their own but fills 32 The main provisions of the Laudian statutes (summarized in Stubbs, History of the University of Dublin, 139–40) remained in force in the 1780s, when Provost Hely Hutchinson wrote his ‘History’ (TCD MSS 1770–4a). 33 John Lawson, Lectures Concerning Oratory (Dublin, 1758), ed. E. Neal Claussen and Karl R. Wallace (Carbondale, Ill., 1972), p. x.

38 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 the head like so much Lumber’. Students were required only to demonstrate that they had read the set text. Tutors seldom probed further than this, ‘much less starting any Doubts which is the way to exercise mans reason the only use I know for learning’.34 Who was right? As an innovator, Lawson was understandably cautious in his account of the method he was discarding, the standard teaching medium of all his colleagues. He describes the system as it might ideally work. The critic probably gives a better idea of how it worked in practice, a ‘jabber’ of hastily digested knowledge carried in the head for a few hours. As in the fellowship exams, mere memory supplied the place of thought. Burke was probably thinking of his fellow students when he wrote that ‘in the little Course of my own experience, I have always observed of your prodigious and ostentatious memories that they served for little else than prodigy and ostentation’.35 Students were required to attend two courses of such lectures each term. The first, called ‘morning lecture’, and given each weekday after the 6 a.m. chapel, covered the ‘science’ part of the course. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, this was followed, at either 7 or 9 a.m., by lectures on the Greek authors set for the term. After the 10 a.m. chapel, and again after the 4 p.m. service, students were supposed to attend classes (called ‘lectures’) by their tutors. The whole college, including the fellows, dined in hall at midday. Information about the twice-daily tutorial lectures is scanty. Laborious and time-consuming, tutoring was largely delegated to the junior fellows. In the 1780s, Provost John Hely Hutchinson (1724–94) described the tutorial lectures as classes ‘in which the Students are prepared for most of the others’.36 In addition, they provided the only instruction in the Latin authors. Since all tutors taught the entire curriculum, their knowledge can rarely have gone much beyond what they had learned while cramming for the fellowship examination. Much of their time was spent on the elementary task of helping students construe their texts. Students wrote their assignments in Latin, which remained the main language of instruction. Burke describes his difficulties with Latin prose with an allusion to the Dunciad: ‘’tis prose on Stilts or poetry falln lame’ (25 July 1746: C i. 69). The Laudian statutes prescribed written work to be submitted weekly both to the tutor (a Latin theme, or a translation into Latin) and to the lecturers (a commentary on the subject of the lectures). These Latin themes and commentaries remained the staple of a student’s weekly workload. In 1750, a former student complained that he had spent eight years at the college without having to read or write English. In 1758, YB OF 34. 374. ‘Several Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning Collected Here from My Papers’, in Note-Book, 82–3. 36 TCD MS 1774a, fo. 199. By Hely Hutchinson’s time, the afternoon tutorial lectures were moribund or defunct; he quarrelled with the tutors in an attempt to revive them. 34 35

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 39 John Lawson regarded an explanation as necessary for his decision to break with tradition and give his postgraduate lectures in oratory in English.37 Except for first-year students, regular declamations and disputations in the medieval tradition were also prescribed. These disputations were still being performed in the 1740s.38 Attendance at chapel, and at morning and Greek lectures, was checked by ‘roll-keepers’, students who received a small stipend for the task. Fines for non-attendance are recorded in the bursars’ books.39 The recording of attendance was more than a matter of form. At the end of each term, a list of those students who either ‘received the thanks of the house’ for diligence or who were ‘cautioned for neglecting’ lectures was read out in hall.40 Burke’s name occurs only infrequently in the records. Admitted on 14 April 1744, in July he received the ‘thanks of the house’ for his diligence at Greek lecture. In July 1745, he won a ‘premium’ or prize. In 1746, he was elected a scholar. In April 1747, he was cautioned for neglect of morning lecture. He graduated on 23 February 1748. Taken in isolation, such facts mean little. Only by examining the records of Burke’s class as a whole can his performance be meaningfully evaluated. The most informative source is the Senior Lecturer’s book.41 The ‘Senior Lecturer’ was a position that rotated among the fellows. How the register was kept varies from year to year. For some terms a particular list is missing. Further, it records only the prizes given for the termly examinations, and diligent or delinquent attendance at lectures. Middling performance (the commonest) is unremarked. Not all students intended to take a degree, and the point at which a student effectively dropped out is often unclear. Students with the same name are not always consistently distinguished. Nevertheless, allowing for all these difficulties, a reasonably reliable picture of Burke’s performance relative to that of his classmates can be constructed. In no sense does this provide a measure of Burke’s mind. His later career amply demonstrated intellectual gifts and powers possessed by none of his fellow students. These records are strictly concerned with his performance in the required academic routine. 37 Robert Hellen (?), Papers Selected from the Censor (London, 1750), preface, 5; Lawson, Lectures Concerning Oratory, 21. Lawson was appointed professor of oratory in 1750. Some instruction, most likely the tutorial lectures, may have been given in English as early as E.B.’s time. At Glasgow, Francis Hutcheson ‘inaugurated a new method of lecturing in English’ in 1730; William Robert Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1900), 63. 38 An elaborate schedule of disputations for 1743/4, rostering about thirty students each week, is entered in TCD Mun/V/27/1, fo. 94a. The high proportion of students marked as having missed their turn suggests an attempt to revive a moribund practice. E.B., then in his first year, would not have taken part in these exercises. No corresponding schedule for his later years is extant. 39 For E.B.’s period of residence, TCD Mun/V/52/35–9a. 40 Recorded in the Senior Lecturer’s Book (TCD Mun/V/27/1). 41 The following account is based on an analysis of the relevant information in the Senior Lecturer’s Book (TCD Mun/V/27/1).

40

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 The academic year was divided into four terms. At the beginning of each, students were examined in the work of the previous term. The examination took place over two days, and comprised four two-hour sessions. Each of the four classes, divided into sections if their size required it, was examined in both science and humanity by one of the fellows. In Burke’s time, the usual size of a section was about twelve students.42 An element of chance was thereby introduced, and there was scope for favouritism and discrimination. In July 1745, when Burke won his only premium, his examiner was Theaker Wilder (c.1717–77), a notoriously captious and ill-tempered fellow whom Goldsmith remembered with visceral loathing. Burke claimed that he would have answered better to anyone else (C i. 51). As with the fellowship examination (though perhaps with more justification), the method tested strength of memory and readiness of recall, rather than critical acumen or power of independent thought. Even so, to be awarded a premium was regarded as a real achievement. The prize was taken in the form of books, chosen from a short list.43 No student was allowed to take more than one premium each year. A student thereby debarred from a second award received a certificate instead, and the premium went to the next-best answerer. Unsatisfactory performance at an examination might result in a ‘censure’, a severe and rare reprimand. No student in Burke’s class received one. These carrots and sticks did not operate on all students equally. For many well-to-do students, the fellow commoners and others with an assured career or station in life, they meant little. Yet some students from privileged backgrounds worked as hard as any. Richard Boyle (1728–1807), son of the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and later second Earl of Shannon, entered as a fellow commoner in October 1744, a few months after Burke. He availed himself of the fellow commoner’s privilege of graduating after three years instead of the usual four; but during those years his record was among the best.44 For less fortunate students, a reputation for industry and ability, and the favour of the college authorities, would be valuable assets. For those without connections who wished to enter the Church, for example, an obvious route was through a college fellowship. The college itself disposed of a number of Church livings, and gave first refusal to its own fellows. 42 E.B.’s first examination was on 30–1 May 1744, when 12 fellows examined 149 students; on 12–13 Oct. 1744, 16 fellows examined 187 students. 43 E.B. asked Shackleton’s advice whether to choose ‘the Modern History, or the Spectator and Rollin’ (C i. 52): Thomas Salmon’s Modern History; or, The Present State of All Nations (London, 1717– 38) or the Spectator and (probably) Charles Rollin’s Ancient History (1730–8 in French; Eng. trans. 1734–9). All three were popular works often reprinted. James Prior reports having seen one of E.B.’s ‘prize volumes’, but does not give the title (Life of Burke, 14). The undated, broken set of the Spectator in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue (no. 499) may have been part of the premium. 44 He won three premiums and tied for a fourth, received the ‘thanks of the house’ eight times, and was never cautioned (TCD Mun/V/27/1).

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 41 Burke was one of about eighty students admitted in 1743/4 (9 July 1743– 8 July 1744). Thirty-nine of these took their degree with him in February 1748.45 Of the half who never graduated, some never intended to take a degree. Others were forced to quit, like Samuel Johnson at Oxford, because their funds ran out. Others again, probably the smallest group, dropped out because of their poor performance. Burke mentions a student (not in his class) who disappeared after receiving the equivalent of a failing grade (19 Mar. 1745: C i. 49). The standard of achievement required was not formidably high: in practice, those who lasted the course were allowed to graduate. Since Burke meant to graduate, the graduating, rather than the entering class, is the appropriate group within which to evaluate his record. (His record would look better if the entering class were taken as the peer group.) The outstanding student in Burke’s class was Thomas Wilson (c.1727– 99), the one member of the class subsequently (1753) elected to a college fellowship. He managed to win the remarkable number of twelve premiums and certificates: one almost every term. Wilson’s subsequent career was conventional. After holding various college offices, he retired to a country living, Ardstraw, where Pellissier too had spent his declining years. Apart from the exceptional Wilson, nine other students were awarded three or more premiums, and five students obtained two. Burke, and five others, each won a single prize. Twenty missed the distinction altogether. By this measure, Burke was just in the top half of the class. In May 1746, he was elected to a scholarship. These awards were made after a two-day public examination, similar to the term examinations but wider-ranging: covering ‘all the Roman and Greek authors of note’ (C i. 66). Burke was one of twenty scholars elected. This distinction, too, puts him in the upper half.46 Some lecturers were more liberal than others in awarding the ‘thanks of the house’. The Greek lecturers were usually more generous than the morning lecturers. They sometimes ‘thanked’ as much as half the class.47 Notice was sometimes taken of what students said as well their mere presence, for a student was occasionally commended for ‘good answering’. Moses Collins was the most diligent attender, with nineteen ‘thanks’. One of the twenty who never obtained a premium, he fits the stereotype of the hardworking plodder. Twenty-nine students were commended twice or 45 As did eight fellow-commoners who (like Richard Boyle) had entered during the following year; I have not counted these as part of E.B.’s class. 46 E.B. held the scholarship only for a year. From June 1747, he received instead £2 per quarter as an Erasmus Smith exhibitioner (TCD Mun/V/57/3). The most likely explanation is that his father wanted him to live at home again, whereas scholars were expected to reside in the college. 47 In July 1744, the morning lecturer awarded ‘thanks’ to 7 students, the Greek lecturer to 28 (including E.B.). The disparity was not usually so great. A rare occasion on which the morning lecturer was the more generous was July 1746, when he gave 9 against the Greek lecturer’s 6 (examples from TCD Mun/V/27/1).

42 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 more; fifteen of them, five times or more. Burke and three others received a single ‘thanks’. Only seven students never did. For diligence, then, Burke was in the bottom quarter of his class. Cautions were much rarer than ‘thanks’. Only ten students were ever so reprimanded, none more than four times. Burke was one of five students who were cautioned once. This measure, too, puts him in the bottom quarter. Burke’s undergraduate record was thus not exceptional. He ranked among the better students (though only just), but not with the outstandingly proficient, and certainly not with the most assiduous. Several reasons can be suggested for Burke’s undistinguished performance as a student. His dislike of a set task; the aridity of the courses and the large part played by rote learning; and the unhappiness of his home life: all these help to explain his mediocre record. The course of study at Dublin was rigidly prescribed and lacked options. At Oxford and Cambridge, readings varied between colleges and from one tutor to another. Professors at Edinburgh, each specializing in a particular subject, offered a range of courses from which students might select according to their needs and interests.48 Looking back on his college experience, Burke noted a pattern with which many will empathize: First I was greatly taken with natural philosophy which while I should have given my mind to Logic, employd me incessently[.] this I call my furor Mathematicus, but this worked off as soon as I begun to read it in the College [in third year], as men by repletion cast all off their Stomachs all they have eat[.] then I turned back to logic and Metaphysicks here I remaind a good while and with much pleasure. And this was my furor logicus. (21 Mar. 1747: C i. 89)

This self-analysis rings true, for all its obvious rationalization of his poor showing in the college examinations. Burke needed an intense personal commitment to a task or cause to motivate him. Another hindrance was the unhappiness of his home life. In 1747, he confessed to his friend William Dennis (c.1726–74) that he lacked ‘that jewel of life, “Peace of mind;” and his trouble was so great that he often forms desperate resolutions’.49 Such a state of mind was hardly conducive to the close and constant application required for success in the college exercises. Despite the dull teaching and his own mediocre performance, Burke enjoyed the classical authors he read at college, recommending some of the texts to Shackleton for pleasure as well as for improvement. In March 1747, for example, he praises Sallust for his style, his vivid characterization, and especially for his ‘diversified narration mixt with reflections moral and 48

Bill, Education at Christ Church; John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion, and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), 149–78; Sir Alexander Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh during its First Three Hundred Years (London, 1884), i. 264–5. 49 Dennis to Shackleton (?), 1747, in Prior, Life of Burke, 32 (C i. 66 n. 2).

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 43 political’. Such commentary, when ‘neither very trite and obvious nor out of the way and abstract’, made ‘the true beauty of Historical observation’ (C i. 89). Similar judicious reflections are a marked feature of the ‘History of England’ that Burke wrote about 1757–8. As early as 1746, he had come to value ideas above expression, and was accordingly critical of the way classical authors were taught. Remarking on the ‘very strange inversion’ of reading the best authors ‘barely to learn the language they are written in’ instead of for ‘the excellent things which are wrapt up in em’, he admonished Shackleton to be ‘less inquisitive about the grammatical part of the authors than you have been’ (69). At a time when classical philology was a gentlemanly recreation, Burke’s attitude was unusual. Thus Charles James Fox, himself a connoisseur of the finer points of Latin and Greek, defending Burke against the charge of ‘ignorance of Greek, and superficial knowledge of Latin’ had to admit that ‘he had not any very nice critical knowledge even of Latin, and less of Greek, nor were grammatical enquiries in general much in his way’.50 For Burke, education was for use, though his notion of utility was liberal. Eloquence and poetry, for example, he considered not merely ornamental but useful, serving to ‘implant an elegant disposition into the mind and manners and to root out of them everything sordid, base or illiberal’.51 This is one of his many criticisms of the narrowness of the education provided at Trinity. From his observation of fellows like the obnoxious Theaker Wilder, he deduced that ‘whoever has a sour, splenetick, unsocial, malevolent Temper; who is haughty in his own acquirements and contemptuous of others; ostentatious of his knowledge, positive in his Tenets, and abusive to those who differ from him; he may be a Scholar . . . but sure he is not a man of learning, nor a philosopher’.52

2 Burke’s sixty surviving undergraduate letters supply a fuller portrait than the student records. Even so, the picture remains incomplete. All the letters are to a single correspondent, Richard Shackleton. Some of Burke’s letters are lost, as are all Shackleton’s replies. The extant letters are unevenly distributed, with gaps of several months. Though Shackleton was living at Ballitore, he often visited Dublin, where he could talk to Burke. Their letters were thus never intended as more than occasional substitutes for conversation. With all these reservations, the letters, written to an intimate friend in a partially coded language, are a rich and revealing source. They 50 Fox to Anthony Robinson, n.d., in The Athenaeum, 3 Dec. 1853, 1447 (Dilke, Papers of a Critic, ii. 311–12). 51 Note-Book, 87. 52 Ibid. 85–6.

44 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 record much about Burke’s daily life, especially about his extra-curricular activities. Burke sometimes wrote when he had little to say, and such letters often provide sidelights on his state of mind or habits of thought. An early letter (9 June 1744) contains a verse account of a day in Burke’s life. It describes a long walk before breakfast, and another in the evening, along the bank of the Liffey with Newcomen Herbert, in Shackleton’s absence Burke’s ‘sole companion’. At the college gates, inspiration fails: ‘here the Muse nor can nor will declare | What is my work and what my Studies there’ (C i. 13). Another letter records an idle moment in the students’ day: ‘after morning Lecture as its my Custom I walk with two or 3 of my acquaintance in the College Park’ (23). Burke chooses his words carefully: Herbert, his old Ballitore friend, is his ‘companion’; the boys he meets at the college are ‘acquaintance’. Of the forty-odd students in his class who lasted the four years with him, not one became a friend. (His best college friend, William Dennis, was a year ahead of him.) Burke also read a good deal, especially books not set for his courses. In July 1746, though he had ‘got a good many new acquaintance’, he spent ‘three hours almost every day in the publick Library where there is a fine Collection of Books—the best way in the world of killing thought’ (C i. 67– 8). The college library was open from eight to ten in the morning and from two to four in the afternoon.53 Burke’s chosen subject was the history of Ireland, ‘our own poor Country’. Reading about the troubles of the past allowed him to escape from unpleasant thoughts about his own uncertain future. Ireland offered few opportunities for an educated man without means or connections, and Burke had no enthusiasm for the law, to which his father had destined him. To this period, when he wanted to kill thought and annihilate time, may belong his reading of the old chivalric romances like Don Bellianis and Palmerin of England. Such romances make ideal escapist reading. Burke enjoyed and contemned them at the same time, much as a modern reader may regard detective fiction. An early letter contains a clumsy parody of the extravagant plots of such romances (5 July 1744: 25–6). Thirty years later, he still remembered reading them with pleasure.54 Some of Burke’s letters read like drafts for essays. In the absence of news, the two friends often used the post to continue their friendly arguments.55 Examples are the discussions of religious toleration (15 Oct. 1744: C i. 33) and of whether animals have souls (Mar. 1745: 45–6). The first of these 53 By the college statutes (TCD, Library Statutes, c. 3), admission to the library was restricted to graduates. This rule appears not to have been enforced. 54 Speech on the Hessian Subsidy, 5 Dec. 1787, in Debrett, xxiii. 56 (PH xxvi. 1276). 55 Shackleton and Herbert also used their correspondence to exchange ideas and practise writing. Shackleton wrote to Herbert describing two species of busybody; Herbert’s reply added a third, and suggested avarice and prodigality as their next subject. Shackleton obliged with an essay, on which Herbert duly commented; Herbert to Shackleton, 20 Feb. and 22 Mar. 1743, YB OF 17. 269–70.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 45 reads as if written in all seriousness; not so the second. Dated ‘Feb 30’ (lest the humour be missed?), it begins in an archly stilted manner. The argument itself is conducted in a ponderous and pedantic style. This longwinded apology for venturing a heterodox opinion is typical: tis true most people of Late are of that opinion for all the Books I have read which touch on the Subject are on your Side of the Question, yet we are not blindly to follow the Common opinion of the world which is often the most false as is evident from a thousand examples, how justly do we admire at the Credulity and Sottishness of mankind who for many ages without further Examination swallowed down all the Errors and absurdities of Aristotle, and those not the mean and vulgar but even the greatest and Wisest men. (45)

Is Burke in earnest? There is so much (often unsignalled) burlesque in the letters that he could well be poking fun at the plodding earnestness of some dullard’s style. When Burke has least to say, he sometimes reveals the most. Style and tone express mood, and the letter functions as an escape-valve for the pressures of home life. The letters are full of hints, allusions, and private jokes. Examples are the occasional use of words transliterated into Greek, an unexplained reference to Rabelais (C i. 92), and the repeated use of the stock phrase ‘agreeable favour’ for letter (24, 26). Sometimes Burke signals the end of a joke with ‘to be serious’ (63). Shackleton’s letters were certainly not all solemn. In February 1746, Burke regretted that ‘instead of jests, merriment and Congratulations now they are filled with nothing but the narration of misfortunes and Condolements for them’ (61). In March 1747, he pretended to wonder whether a letter of Shackleton’s was a burlesque or written while under the influence of alcohol (85). Later the same month, another of Shackleton’s letters was in parts ‘so dark as to oblige me to read it over three or four times’. One allusion remained impenetrable: ‘I dont yet very well understand “it was imported hither from the Country of Job alias the Land of uz.” To mention more would be to show my own Stupidity tho’ I have now come to the understanding of all the rest’ (88). Burke’s half of the correspondence contains its own puzzles, such as the references to Apollo and Midas in the letter of 21 November 1747 (100). The allegory is unintelligible today, and perhaps Shackleton found it as opaque as Burke did his reference to Job. Parody is a frequent device in these early letters. Sometimes it is no more than light-hearted banter. For example, Burke’s letter of 25 July 1746 opens with what he later identifies as ‘an essay in the Cullenian Stile’. Its target is the diffuse, banal style of their friend Matthew Cullen: ‘Could this tongue the poor representative of my generous Soul, could this pen even faintly express half what I feel, it would assure you how passionately I have Lamented the bitter absence which tore one Soul in two and hinderd that

46 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 Charming, that transcendently divine and transporting pleasure (transporting to round the period) of Communicating every thought and movement of our Breasts’ (C i. 68). Here the parenthesis draws attention to the comic intention. Other examples are a parody of legal jargon (43) in which Burke replies to a charge that he has purloined a book; and a mock-heroic description of bad weather (53). Sometimes the parody cuts deeper than absurdities of style. Unhappy at home and in college, Burke used his letters to Shackleton as a lifeline to the more congenial world of Ballitore. A sense of ‘paradise lost’ pervades the hackneyed quatrains of a poem of May 1744 (5– 7). Such feelings are more successfully expressed when refracted through ridicule. Literary conventions are a frequent target. In a letter of May 1744, Burke parodies an emotive over-reaction to a disappointment (4). A subtler example is the mock-sentimental style of a letter of November 1745. The context is a complaint that Shackleton has not written. ‘I beleive I have discoverd it at length,’ Burke moans, ‘palld with the long and insipid Converse of a person with all whose inmost thoughts you are acquainted, the Depth of whose notions you have tried, the fund of whose knowledge you have exhausted’ (56). Out of context, the passage might be taken as a genuine cri de cœur. Yet the headlong, gushing style reads so like the parody of Cullen that this letter, too, is probably ironic. The object of Burke’s parody is sometimes social rather than literary. The first half of a letter of 21 June 1744 is addressed to ‘Honest Dick’, as though from a haughty employer condescending to a menial (C i. 19). Burke explains the joke in the second half of the letter. Lighter in touch is the letter of 5 February 1745 about Elizabeth Thornton, accused of fornication (41). In form a mock-heroic tribute to ‘miss Bess’, the real object of the satire is the incongruity between Thornton’s trivial misdemeanour and the heinousness with which it is treated by a society which elevates war as heroic. Another example makes the same point more pithily: ‘There was a young fellow hanged here yesterday for robbing his master of a few guineas. A few days before another was pardoned for the murder of five men. Was not that justice?’ (100). Here the irony serves to sharpen a sense of exclusion, of baffled incomprehension of the upside-down world of social power. Philosophical portentousness is another of Burke’s targets, for example the moralizing of Epictetus (8). The death of a dog becomes an occasion for a mock meditation on the theme of mutability (10–11). Confined at home by the flooding of the Liffey, Burke begins a burlesque meditation by comparing it to the inundation of the Nile (39). In both cases, his point is the ease with which poverty of thought is covered by copiousness of language. These examples show the need, in interpreting Burke’s early letters, to be alert to indirection. Among the most revealing passages in the letters are Burke’s attempts at self-analysis. One prominent theme is his ‘unpardonable Laziness’, his

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 47 ‘simple sloth’ (C i. 30, 63). He values diligence, but is unable to practise it. ‘I am too giddy,’ he admits in an early letter (Oct. 1744); ‘this is the bane of my Life, it hurries me from my Studies to triffles and I am afraid it will hinder me from knowing any thing thoroughly. I have a Superficial knowledge of many things but Scarce the bottom of any’ (32). Looking back in March 1747, he confesses that ‘all my Studies have rather proceeded from Sallies of passion than from the preference of sound reason and like the nature of all other natural apetites have been very violent for a Season and very soon cooled’ (89). The discourse on whether animals have souls begins with a generalization that quickly becomes autobiographical: There is implanted in man (Doubtless for a good end) an insatiable Desire of truth we spare no pains in search of it, and when have found it (or at least its appearance) we are again as uneasy to communicate the fruit of our Labours to others, there is no one more troubled with this failing than myself, it is against my Nature to see people in an opinion I think wrong without endeavouring to undeceive ’em, I’d willingly win the whole world to my own way of thinking. (Mar. 1745; 44–5)

This letter anticipates psychological insights later developed in the Philosophical Enquiry. Burke reconciles Lockean psychology with his religious beliefs by positing a two-level model of the mind. Psychological needs are determined by a wise providence, working, however, through secondary, physiological means. We are ‘uneasy’ until we have communicated our opinion; the metaphor of ‘unburdening’ the mind is almost literalized.56 More than fifty years later, the idea that ‘the social nature of man impels him to propagate his principles, as much as physical impulses urge him to propagate his kind’ helped Burke interpret the French Revolution (Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1796: WS ix. 278). Burke recognized the essentially emotive nature of the workings of his own mind. ‘What multitudes of things conspire to deceive, and Blindfold a Person in the pursuit of truth!’ he exclaims: ‘He imbibes prejudice with his milk[,] those he converses with impose on him, his Parents, and the very Books he reads, (which should be the repository of truth and reason when banishd from the rest of the world) all join to hoodwink his reason and make him see with eyes not his own.’ The worst enemy, however, is self-love: ‘how fond are we of our own opinions of our own reasonings, purely because they are ours, the product the Children of our own Brain!’ (C i. 50). This passage, only partly in jest, is prophetic of the mature Burke, a zealous defender of opinions avowedly founded on emotion and prejudice. In later life, he became a firm asserter of the social and political value of inherited ideas. A notable example is the defence of ‘just prejudice’ in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (WS viii. 138). 56 Relevant passages in the Philosophical Enquiry are i. xiv. 46, xvii. 50, xix. 52–3, and iv. vi. 134–5.

48


3 Throughout his life, Burke sought to belong and to be accepted. Never a loner, he elevated friendship and connection to a social principle. ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society,’ he would write in his Reflections, ‘is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections’ (WS viii. 97). His first platoon was the school at Ballitore. The shift from school to college, which most boys find liberating and enabling, was not so for Burke. What he left was the idyllic charm of a school with fifty students (of whom he was probably the brightest), where he was the favourite of the master and the friend of the master’s son. The move to college meant returning to unhealthy Dublin and his father’s bad temper. Trinity College was larger and more impersonal than Ballitore. Many students were more proficient at their studies than he was. Burke had no special relationship with his tutor and at first no friends. No wonder that he never looked back on the college with the affection that Ballitore had inspired. Instead of seeking society among his fellow students, Burke tried to form a tiny platoon of his own. The idea of a group of a few sympathetic intimates, perhaps no more than three or four, is first mentioned in a letter of 24 November 1744: ‘The Society if you remember we had thoughts of erecting goes on but slowly . . . members for our purpose are very scarce’ (C i. 37–8). By February 1745, the society was already in decline. ‘We have slept too long come and rouse us,’ he told Shackleton; ‘you see how essential you are to our happiness’ (44). What did this club do? To judge by a letter of 16 July 1744, it combined drinking with the writing of burlesques, reminiscent of the Scriblerus Club of Pope, Swift, and their friends (52– 4).57 The four members were Burke, Shackleton, Newcomen Herbert, and Richard Sisson (d. 1767), an apprentice painter from whom Burke later commissioned a portrait of Shackleton.58 Of the four, only Burke was a Trinity student. The activities of a second club, or ‘Academy of Belles Lettres’ as it grandly styled itself, are better documented, thanks to the chance survival of a manuscript. ‘The Proceedings of the Club’ records, often in considerable detail, over thirty meetings between 21 April and 10 July 1747.59 This club met two or three times a week in a hired room (probably in a tavern) in George’s Lane (now South Great George’s Street). The total membership was seven. Its twin pillars were Burke himself and his friend William 57 The Freshman’s Entry into the University, a Satyr (Dublin, 1736), describing the riotous lives of TCD students, features a dining-and-debating club. 58 The Leadbeater Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbeater (2nd edn. London, 1862), i. 49. The portrait is reproduced in Samuels, Early Life, pl. ii. 59 TCD Mun/Soc/Hist/81, in Samuels, Early Life, 226–95.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 49 Dennis. Though, like Burke, Dennis had poetic ambitions, the career he pursued was the Church. While waiting for preferment, he opened a school in the country. His most distinguished pupil was George (later Lord) Macartney (1737–1806), whose career crossed Burke’s at several points.60 Burke and Dennis were the only members who attended all thirty-two meetings of the club and completed its cursus honorum, serving in turn as president, vice-president, secretary, and censor. Two other members were also active: Andrew Buck (c.1724–1801; recorded as attending eighteen meetings) and Joseph Hamilton (present at twenty-six). Buck had taken his BA at Trinity in 1746, and was at this time preparing for his MA (which he received in 1749). He was later ordained, and opened a school in Dublin. Unlike Dennis, he made the school (the Hibernian Academy) his main career, and a successful one.61 Joseph Hamilton (not a Trinity student) may be the friend whose career Burke was later able to advance in a small way.62 The three other members played only minor roles. Shackleton attended two meetings (on 14 and 15 May) and submitted some written compositions. Matthew Mohun (not otherwise identified) attended seven of the first eight meetings. The last was on 14 May, when Mohun, Buck, and Hamilton were all tried for various breaches of the rules. The others took the mock-judicial business in good part. Mohun, however, was either too serious or not serious enough, for on 18 May he was solemnly expelled from the society. The seventh member was Abraham Ardesoif, the son of an army officer and another non-student. He attended four meetings between 14 and 26 May, then lost interest. His last appearance was on 5 June, when he arrived late, though it was his turn to preside.63 The club’s main activity was the practice of rhetoric. Members made extempore speeches on given subjects, or delivered orations carefully prepared in advance. Sometimes model speeches from famous authors would be rehearsed, at others a subject would be debated in a parliamentary manner. Proceedings were governed by an elaborately formal set of rules. Laws and by-laws were solemnly enacted, and a system of thanks (grand and minor), censures, and fines was instituted. This club, more obviously so than the earlier one with Herbert and Sisson, had a self-educational purpose: to provide training in public speaking and communication. Some of the forms were similar to college exercises (especially the declamations), with English in place of Latin and with more varied subject-matter. In a lighter vein, the club also provided a forum for comic role-playing. A strongly marked parodic element pervades its activities, and especially the Macartney of Lisanoure, 1737–1806: Essays in Biography, ed. Peter Roebuck (Belfast, 1983), 10. Joseph Hamilton to E.B., 13 Nov. 1784, NRO A. vii. 33. His reference to ‘my much lamented Friend Dr Dennis’ makes his identification with the club member probable. 62 Samuels, Early Life, 207–8. 63 Ibid. 208. Ardesoif and Hamilton both subscribed to Poems on Several Occasions (Dublin, 1748), which suggests that they remained on good terms with E.B. and his friends. 60 61

50 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 formal structures which regulated them. The system of thanks, fines, and censures has an elaboration which mocks the corresponding machinery at Trinity. In the debates themselves, ironic and burlesque notes are often heard. On 22 June, for example, Dennis compared the chaos into which the club has fallen in the absence of its president to the crisis that destroyed the Roman empire.64 The stormy meeting of 26 May illustrates the element of role-playing and make-believe in the club’s activities. Towards the end of the meeting, Dennis ‘behaved very ill continually contradicting the President declaring he was injur’d, & affronting the members nor could he be quieted but declared he valued not the censure’. He was censured by the president (Hamilton), and further criminated by Burke; his trial was fixed for a committee meeting on the following Saturday. Meanwhile, Burke and Dennis remained the best of friends. Burke began a letter to Shackleton on 28 May, dated from ‘The Club-room’, in which he solemnly describes Dennis as accused of ‘no less than an attempt to overturn this Society, by an insolent behaviour to the President and Society. I am the accuser, and when you know that, you will tremble for him’ (C i. 91). In the middle of this letter, Dennis takes over and gives his account: ‘now for my good services, I am threatened with expulsion by Burke, who is a terrible fellow, and is very active (at getting me punish’d,) in the Club, though I have hitherto shewn myself a good member, I’m now accused of a design of destroying the Club, (thus modern patriots urge every thing an introduction to popery and slavery, which they don’t like,) when, alas! no one has a greater desire to preserve it’ (93). Was the whole incident a charade? The Burke–Dennis letter suggests as much. Or had tempers really been heated on the 26th? The trial itself, on the 30th, was a model of due process.65 For Burke at least, the experience was a valuable preparation for the ritualized aggression of public life. The minute-book also gives a foretaste of the obstinate and violent manner in which Burke would sometimes debate in Parliament. At the first meeting, he pertinaciously refused to accept the president’s ruling on a point of order. On another occasion, his own conduct as president provoked a revolt and the accusation that he was ‘damnd absolute’. Much of all this was undoubtedly role-playing, at which Burke was more adept than most of the members. His father was intolerant of what Dennis called ‘all the little oddities which are found in men of genius and are below their care’ (C i. 66 n. 2). Burke was under constant pressure to conceal his natural feelings and suppress his personal idiosyncrasies. At the college, he had to conform to a different set of social and behavioural codes. Through parody, he found an outlet for the aggression he could not direct at the hated authority-figures in 64

Samuels, Early Life, 256.

65

Ibid. 250, 252–4.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 51 his life. At the same time, playing a part within his small circle, a part which would be incomprehensible to outsiders, contributed to the sense of belonging for which he yearned. At a committee meeting on 8 May, Buck, who was two or three years older than Burke, proposed a ‘law to restrain us from throwing any personal reflection on each other’. Burke opposed this, on the ground that ‘we act here not in our real but certain personated characters, & that any reflection on Mr Buck of this Society does not hurt him as Mr Buck of the ——’. Burke’s superior rhetorical sophistication emerges from another occasion, when he submitted a paper on malice, the irony of which was missed by the other members.66 The irony of his first book, the Vindication of Natural Society (1756), was likewise missed by some readers; Burke added an explanatory preface to the second edition. Play-acting and roleplaying, a delight in impersonation, a taste for the dramatic and the melodramatic; these anticipate the histrionic qualities that characterize some of Burke’s parliamentary performances. The club debated a great variety of questions. Some were drawn from classical history or mythology, and could have been college exercises. An example (inspired by Plutarch) is whether Alcibiades or Coriolanus was the greater man. Others were drawn from contemporary events, or from topical issues in politics or economics. Subjects of Irish interest included the likely comparative benefits of developing the linen or the woollen industries, the question of free trade, and the evils of absentee landlords. On the larger theatre of Europe, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8) was drawing to its close. Several debates canvassed the latest developments as they occurred. Burke’s early letters rarely refer to current events. These debates show that he followed them attentively. Moral questions were not neglected. Burke declaimed against the passions, and submitted a paper in praise of piety.67 In 1766, after just one session in Parliament, Burke was thought ‘the readiest man upon all points perhaps in the House’.68 As early as 1747, he was laying in his stock of general information and practising its deployment in debate. In one of his letters, Burke mentions reading a good deal of natural philosophy (C i. 89). The informed part he took in a lengthy discussion of the shape of the earth’s orbit and its influence on climate and geography illustrates this interest.69 Rhetorical education has always stressed the need to be able to speak on both sides of a question. In keeping with this tradition, the club’s president assigned the parts that members were to take. Thus on 19 May Burke spoke vehemently against clemency to the defeated Jacobite rebels.70 Yet in a letter Ibid. 226, 239, 237, 275–6. Ibid. 230, 233–6, 251–2, 243. 68 Duke of Grafton to the Earl of Chatham, 17 Oct. 1766, in Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle (London, 1838–40), iii. 110. 69 Samuels, Early Life, 257–62. 70 Ibid. 244. 66 67

52 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 of 26 April 1746 he had expressed sympathy for the plight of those who had taken up arms in what they believed a just cause. (Already, Burke was most concerned for the ‘unhappy gentlemen’. While the rest lost ‘but their lives’, the gentlemen ‘have thrown away their lives and fortunes and destroy’d their families for ever’; C i. 63.) Burke’s heart had not hardened. He was making the best case he could for the position he had been given to defend. The minute-book records Burke’s knowledge and debating skills, not his opinions. The last entry in the minute-book is dated 10 July. No further record of the club has survived; probably it was never reconvened. Burke spent part of the summer in and around Cork, and by the end of the year a new triumvirate had formed. Though two of its members (Burke and Dennis) were old friends from the club, the driving force was Beaumont Brenan (d. 1761), an aspiring dramatist. In January 1747, at the time of the Kelly riots, Burke had not been a regular playgoer, nor had the club taken any interest in the drama. For the winter of 1747–8, Brenan made the theatre an important part of Burke’s life.

4 The young Burke wanted above all to be a poet. ‘Poetry, Sir, nothing but Poetry could go down with me—tho I have read more than wrote.’ This ‘furor poeticus’ or ‘poeticall madness’ was the last of those ‘Sallies of passion’ to which he attributed the various intellectual enthusiasms of his student days (C i. 89). Poetry predominates in the extra-curricular reading mentioned in the undergraduate letters. Pope is the favourite; the others are Shakespeare, Denham, and Waller.71 Poetry was a further bond between Burke and Shackleton; they sent each other work in progress for comment and advice. Such of Burke’s work as survives is depressingly conventional. In a poem on the River Blackwater, for example, ‘beauteous Nymphs’ live in a ‘dusky wood’ that shades a ‘Christal flood’; the river god is a ‘hoary Sire’ whom the poet hopes will ‘all my breast inspire’ (Feb. 1747: 79–80). Burke’s real inspiration was the tradition exemplified by Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642) and Pope’s Windsor Forest (1713), in which passages of description are diversified with moral and historical reflections. Just as in Windsor Forest Pope had expressed his nostalgia for the vanished glories of the Catholic past, Burke might have used stories of Spenser and 71 Of the dozen quotations from (or allusions to) Pope in E.B.’s undergraduate letters, five are to the Dunciad, the four-book version of which (1743) was a new poem when E.B. was writing (C i. 13, 26, 69, 74, 87). Quotations from Shakespeare (70, 97), Denham (95), and Waller (74–5) preserve chance examples of E.B.’s reading. His taste for Milton is attested by his spirited rendering of Moloch’s speech in book ii of Paradise Lost, highly applauded by the other members of the club (Samuels, Early Life, 266).

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 53 his time to contrast an ideal ‘age of chivalry’ with the present degenerate times, a theme treated in a poem on Ballitore written in collaboration with Shackleton.72 Burke was even capable of writing a poem in so hackneyed a genre as a Pindaric ode on the king’s birthday. Such poems had been a standing joke since at least 1730, when the actor and dramatist Colley Cibber (1671–1757) had been appointed Poet Laureate. Cibber’s odes were regularly burlesqued. Given Burke’s penchant for parody, something of the kind might have been expected from him. Yet in October 1747, he wrote a birthday ode in all solemnity.73 The poem is chiefly remarkable as evidence of how much in earnest Burke was as a poet. Of the surviving poems, the most successful is a translation. Book 2 of Virgil’s Georgics concludes with a famous panegyric on the joys and virtues of country life. In translating this passage, Burke was challenging comparison with Dryden’s, the classic English version of Virgil. Burke’s is in one respect superior to Dryden’s: he follows Virgil more closely. Dryden often deviates, especially when he sees an opportunity to make an oblique thrust against the post-1688 regime. One example will suffice. Virgil contrasts the happiness of country life with the folly of those who seek public applause, whether in politics or in the theatre: hic stupet attonitus rostris, hunc plausus hiantem per cuneos geminatus enim plebisque patrumque corripuit. (Georgics, 2. 508–10)

Dryden omits the theatrical reference and expands the political point: Some Patriot Fools to pop’lar Praise aspire, By Publick Speeches, which worse Fools admire: While from both Benches, with redoubl’d Sounds, Th’Applause of Lords and Commoners abounds. (2. 730–3)

Burke manages to retain both objects of Virgil’s scorn, while introducing a happy allusion to a modern custom, by which the dramatist received the profits of the third performance of a new play: ‘Some in the Rostrum fix their sole Delight, | Some in th’Applauses of a rich third Night.’ Burke’s translation was printed (anonymously) in Dublin in 1748, in a volume of Poems on Several Occasions.74 The collection was compiled by Mary 72 YB OF 10. 204. The version printed in Samuels includes the passage on the decline of the times (Early Life, 156). 73 ‘An Ode on the Birth-Day of His Majesty King George the Second’, Bodl. MS Eng. misc. b. 169, fos. 35–8. E.B.’s authorship is confirmed by the listing of a ‘Birth day ode in Dublin 1749’ in a page of notes on his early poems (WWM BkP 34/13). In the Bodl. MS, the poem is dated 1747, which is correct. The poem anticipates a further campaign against the French, which fits 1747 but not 1749. 74 Todd, 2. E.B.’s Virgil translation is on 15–22; repr. in Prior, Memoir of Burke, i. 25–8. Poems on Several Occasions (Dublin, 1748) also includes a slighter piece by E.B., poking fun at his friend William Dennis: ‘On a bad Poet’s turning Critick’ (96–7). E.B.’s authorship is attested by a manuscript among the Ballitore papers, from which it is printed in Samuels, Early Life, 132.

54 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 Goddard (1717–52), the widow of a poor clergyman.75 Not having enough poems of her own to fill a volume, she invited contributions from her friends, among them Burke, Dennis, and Shackleton. Burke’s letters also refer to a mysterious literary project, perhaps a poem. ‘I have myself almost finished a piece—an odd one;’ he half confided to Shackleton, ‘but you shall not see it until it comes out, if ever’ (28 May 1747: C i. 92). In his continuation of the same letter, Dennis added: ‘Ned thought it preposterous to be threshing his brains for you when he is writing for the public: pray laugh heartily now lest you should split when you see the subject he has chosen and the manner he has treated it’ (93). The unnamed work has often, though for no good reason, been identified as an early version of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757).76 Dennis’s tone suggests, however, a surprising manner of treating the subject: probably, therefore, a parody or burlesque. For all his poetic aspirations, Burke’s first known appearance in print was a short squib in prose, published anonymously in the form of a handbill. Punch’s Petition to Mr S[herida]n to be Admitted to the Theatre Royal (Plate 3) illustrates the delight in impersonation seen earlier in the proceedings of the 1747 club.77 Written as a private jeu d’esprit with no thought of publication, Punch’s Petition became the first shot in a paper war. In 1745, Thomas Sheridan, the son of Swift’s friend of the same name, who had taken to the stage as an actor and then actor-manager, leased Dublin’s Smock Alley theatre. In his third year (1747–8), having emerged with credit from the Kelly riots that had marred the previous season, he introduced some reforms designed to improve the decorum of the theatre. These were generally welcomed. Like his London counterparts, however, Sheridan was reluctant to stage new plays. There were good economic reasons for this. A new play, especially by an unknown author, was risky. If it failed, the time invested in rehearsal and possibly in new scenery and costumes would be lost. Even a success was a dubious financial benefit for the manager, for the profits of certain nights (in London, the third, sixth, and ninth) were assigned to the author. Sheridan occasionally put on a new play that had already succeeded in London, for example Edward Moore’s The Foundling 75 Michael Kearney to Edmond Malone, 12 Jan. 1799; Bodl. MS Malone 39, fo. 23; A. C. Elias, Jr., ‘Male Hormones and Women’s Wit: The Sex Appeal of Mary Goddard and Laetitia Pilkington’, Swift Studies, 9 (1994), 5–16. 76 Samuels, Early Life, 141 n. 1; C i. 92 n. 6; Philosophical Enquiry, ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1958), introduction, p. xviii. 77 From the (only surviving?) copy in the BL (1890. e. 5 [152]). Despite the date of 1758 assigned in the BL catalogue, this is undoubtedly E.B.’s piece. That E.B. published such a squib was known from Dennis’s letter to Shackleton, 14 Jan. 1748; James Prior, Life of Oliver Goldsmith, MB, from a Variety of Original Sources (London, 1837), ii. 316–17. Todd lists it as a lost work (p. 261). Esther K. Sheldon found Punch’s Petition in the BL and dated it correctly, but failed to connect it with E.B.; Thomas Sheridan, 127 n. 74.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 55 in April 1748. A comedy by the inexperienced Brenan was more of a gamble. Brenan was a member of the Burke circle by November 1746, when he and Burke were expected to visit Ballitore together (C i. 72). A friendly critic of Shackleton’s poetry (78), Brenan too was an aspiring author. His most ambitious piece to date was a comedy, ‘The Lawsuit’.78 Its theme was congenial to Burke: the plot turned on ‘an iniquitous suit’ conducted against ‘a rich avaricious usurer’ by ‘low necessitous Lawyers of bad character, and profligates of desperate fortune’ (WS i. 560). After promising to stage it, Sheridan delayed and prevaricated. At first the play was to come on ‘before Christmas’ 1747 (98); then it was postponed to March 1748. As Brenan and his friends became impatient, they determined to force Sheridan to put the comedy on the boards. Their strategy was to write and publish a co-ordinated series of pamphlets and squibs. ‘We the triumvirate’, Dennis reported to Shackleton, ‘talk of nothing but the subversion of the present theatrical tyranny.’ Burke had already written Punch’s Petition, not for publication but for private circulation among the friends who haunted the coffee-house in Skinner Row above the shop of Joseph Cotter (d. 1750), printer, publisher, and bookseller. An older member of the group, Paul Hiffernan (1719–77), a doctor turned journalist, persuaded Cotter to print the piece, which thus became Burke’s first publication.79 The mock petition was a familiar satiric subgenre. Most commonly, as with Burke’s Punch, the petition purports to come from some comic or lowlife source. Swift’s mock petition on behalf of the footmen of Dublin is an example that Burke would have known.80 Punch’s ‘petition’ is to be employed by Sheridan, whose ‘improvement’ of the stage has made it so like Punch’s as to draw away his audience. ‘Burke’s paper has paved the way,’ Dennis reported to Shackleton, crowing triumphantly that ‘three hundred were sold yesterday’. The next strikes were already planned: ‘On Monday Hiffernan in an expostulation from Punch displays Mr Sheridan in a ridiculous but true light, which will take three papers. Next comes Brennan with a grave inquiry into the behaviour of the manager, which will be backed by Ned and I; and thus will we persecute him daily from different printers till the plot is ripe, and we have established liberty on the stage, and taste among the people.’81 This ‘grave inquiry’ was a periodical, the Reformer, the first important literary venture to which Burke contributed. 78

Never performed or printed, ‘The Lawsuit’ remains untraced. Dennis to Shackleton, 14 Jan. 1748, in Prior, Life of Goldsmith, ii. 316–17. ‘The Humble Petition of the Footmen in and about the City of Dublin’ (1732), in Prose Writings, ed. Herbert Davis, (Oxford, 1939–68), xii. 235–7. 81 Dennis to Shackleton, 14 Jan. 1748, in Prior, Life of Goldsmith, ii. 315–18. Despite Dennis’s reference to ‘different printers’, The Reformer, like Punch’s Petition, was printed by Cotter. Hiffernan’s three papers (which I have not been able to identify) may have come from another shop. 79 80

56

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 The Reformer ran for thirteen weekly issues, from 28 January to 21 April 1748. Although ‘near 1000’ of the first number and at least 500 of the second are said to have been sold, only one set is known to survive.82 Burke scholars have too readily supposed that, because Burke was concerned with the Reformer, he must have been chiefly responsible for it.83 This assumption goes against all the evidence. Burke himself speaks of the Reformer as a cooperative venture. In his letter of 2 February 1748, he refers consistently to ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘our’ paper (C i. 102). Most of the individual papers are, according to a common practice of the time, signed with different letters: four papers are signed B, four Æ, two U, and one S. Contributions from readers (real or fictitious) are variously signed. From the first, the practice of signing periodical papers with initials had been used to provoke rather than satisfy curiosity. In the first series of the Spectator (nos. 1–555, 1711– 12), Steele signed his papers R or T; Addison used one of four letters (C, L, I, or O). The letters X, Z, and Q were assigned to other contributors, and a few papers were left unsigned.84 In the Reformer, a poem printed in no. 13 is signed B.B., probably to make Brenan look like an outside contributor. There is, however, no reason to distrust the tripartite division of authorship suggested by ten of the thirteen papers being signed either B, Æ, or U. In 1801, French Laurence, collecting material for a biography of Burke, wrote to John Kearney (1741–1813), then Provost of Trinity College. Kearney found five numbers of the Reformer. Initially, he was tempted to attribute those signed ‘B’ to Burke. From his elder brother Michael, however, a closer contemporary of Burke, he learned that ‘the papers mark’d B were written by a Mr Beaumont Brennan’.85 Burke was friendly with the Kearneys at the time. In October 1747, he had talked about ‘The Lawsuit’ with Mrs Kearney (98). There is therefore every reason to accept Kearney’s statement, consistent as it is with Dennis’s attribution to Brenan of ‘the grave inquiry into the behaviour of the manager’. To disguise the paper’s 82 Sales figures from Dennis to Shackleton, 4 Feb. 1748, in Prior, Life of Goldsmith, ii. 318. The surviving set (of which I have used a microfiche) is at the Pearse Street Branch of the Dublin Public Library. The reprint in Samuels, Early Life, 297–329, omits no. 9 (which Samuels thought was by Shackleton) and nearly all the advertisements and other filler. 83 Samuels assumed that it was ‘managed, edited, and almost entirely written by Edmund Burke’ (Early Life, 160). All later commentary on The Reformer has proceeded on this assumption: most recently, T. O. McLoughlin, ‘The Context of Edmund Burke’s The Reformer’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 2 (1987), 37–55. 84 The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965), introduction, pp. xliv–v. In The Connoisseur, no. 140 (30 Sept. 1756; the last number), George Colman and Bonnell Thornton revealed that the letters T, O, and W were ‘annexed to different papers at random, and sometimes omitted, on purpose to put the sagacious reader on a wrong scent’. 85 John Kearney to French Laurence, 21 Dec. 1801, YB OF 20. 26. Kearney had earlier given Edmond Malone substantially the same information; letters of 3 May and 21 Sept. 1799, Bodl. MS Malone 39, fos. 29, 32. The relevant portions of these letters are printed in T. O. McLoughlin, ‘Did Burke Write The Reformer?’, Notes and Queries, 237 (1992), 472–7. McLoughlin, believing that E.B. wrote most of The Reformer, is inclined to doubt Kearney’s evidence. I find the contemporary testimony for divided authorship persuasive.

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 57 real agenda, Brenan’s inquisition was to be ‘backed’ by papers on other subjects by Dennis and Burke. Burke in turn asked Shackleton, on 2 February 1748 (just after the second number had appeared), ‘to send us some Essays on useful subjects or bare hints or whatever you please’ (102).86 Even if Burke wrote only a few papers, the Reformer deserves attention as the product of his circle. After an introductory paper (signed B) setting out the paper’s aim, later numbers are about evenly divided between theatrical and non-theatrical subjects. No. 2 (B) attacks Sheridan’s choice of plays and bemoans the low state of modern drama. This is supplemented by an unsigned critique of Edward Moore’s The Foundling (a recent popular success) in no. 10.87 The depraved taste of Dublin theatregoers is the subject of no. 3 (Æ). In no. 5 (B), the Reformer gives a satiric account of his making a round of the coffee-houses to hear what the town says about his paper. No. 8 (B) ridicules Sheridan and Foote as rivals in ‘new-fangled folly’. The first half of no. 13 (unsigned) is a mock recommendation of ‘The Foolish Miscellany’, which is also advertised in nos. 12 and 13. This was to collect ‘Play-house Puffs, Panegyricks on Thomas Sheridan, Esq; Epigrams on Lap-Dogs, Funeral verses on deceas’d Monkeys, and other important Subjects’. Possibly the triumvirate really intended to make Sheridan look foolish by publishing such an anthology. The signed papers can plausibly be divided among the three known authors. Brenan, according to Dennis, wrote the ‘grave inquiry’. The paper which best fits that description is no. 2, signed B. All four of B’s papers are about the theatre, Brenan’s main interest. The non-theatrical papers are the work of Æ, U, and the occasional contributors. Their subject-matter is diverse.88 The two papers signed U are about public spirit (no. 4) and the religious basis of morality (no. 11). Their only mention of the theatre is a forced reference in no. 4 to Sheridan’s hiring foreign dancers. The lack of encouragement in Dublin for local talent is also the theme of no. 6 (Æ). Poverty is the subject of two strikingly different papers. No. 7 (Æ) is a sympathetic account of the plight of the rural poor, squarely charged to the account of the upside-down Irish economic system. Part of no. 9 (S) is a 86 Dennis too called the Reformer ‘our’ paper when he asked Shackleton to contribute; Prior, Life of Goldsmith, ii. 318. 87 First performed at Drury Lane on 13 Feb., The Foundling was in print by the end of the month (British Magazine, Feb. 1747, 96). The critique in The Reformer appeared on 31 Mar., well ahead of the first performance at Smock Alley on 28 Apr. 88 This hampers stylometric analysis, for few variables are sufficiently independent of content to permit valid testing of such short texts on different topics. For example, B has a strikingly higher rate than Æ or U of first-person pronouns and adjectives. But much of the discrepancy is accounted for by no. 5, The Reformer’s first-person account of his search for what people thought about the paper. Another problem is the paucity of material: the total length of the Reformer papers is about 17,000 words; individual essays are under 2,000 words. Some of the essays may be joint productions. Most seriously, no suitable control samples are available for any of the three members of the triumvirate. While they do not preclude stylometric analysis, these considerations greatly reduce the persuasive value of the results obtained.

58 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 savage and mocking attack on able-bodied urban beggar-thieves, cast in the form of a description of a strange species, rather in the manner of Swift. No. 12 (Æ) ridicules pretenders to criticism and their over-use of the critical term ‘spirit’. In a similar vein, the second half of no. 13 (unsigned) exposes the use of dashes, italics, capitals, and other such devices as substitutes for wit and thought. This paper may also have been inspired by Swift, particularly by his On Poetry: A Rhapsody (1733). One of U’s papers is religious in subject-matter, and both are earnest. Dennis, the son of a clergyman and himself destined for the Church, is a more likely candidate for these than Burke. Æ is therefore probably Burke’s signature. His single theatrical paper (no. 3) moves from a critique of a performance of Macbeth (probably the current Smock Alley production) to general recommendations for theatrical reform. More in the spirit of French neo-classicism than of the English theatrical tradition, Æ is particularly critical of the debasement, through bawdy jests and buffoonery, of the scenes with the witches.89 His ideal theatre is a school of public education, not a place of mere show or entertainment. These opinions are consistent with those expressed in Burke’s unfinished ‘Hints for an Essay on the Drama’.90 Burke’s ambitions at this time were poetic. In no. 6, Æ’s essay on public spirit turns into a call for more generous patronage of poetry. There are parallels between this number and a letter to Shackleton of March 1747 (C i. 86). Similarly, the dissection in no. 12 of ‘spirit’ as a critical cliché can be linked with a fragmentary essay on the same topic in one of his early notebooks.91 The most interesting of Æ’s essays, however, is no. 7. This offers an incisive analysis of the social structure of rural society, and a poignant account of the degradation in which the very poor live. While Æ defends the unequal distribution of property, he insists that property is a trust that entails responsibility: I fancy, many of our fine Gentlemen’s Pageantry would be greatly tarnished, were their gilt Coaches to be preceded and followed by the miserable Wretches, whose Labour supports them. That some should live in a more sumptuous manner than others, is very allowable; but sure it is hard, that those who cultivate the Soil, should have so small a Part of its Fruits; and that among Creatures of the same Kind there should be such a Disproportion in their manner of living; it is a kind of Blasphemy on Providence . . . Our modern Systems hold, that the Riches and 89 Æ’s account sounds like that of an eyewitness. Macbeth was performed on 14 Dec. 1747 and again on 1 Jan. (Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan, 436). Sheridan probably used the text recently ‘restored’ by Garrick from Davenant’s operatic version. 90 Part of a surviving draft is written on the back of a letter of 1761, the year of Brenan’s death. This, and the references in the ‘Hints’ to ‘The Lawsuit’, may mean that the essay was intended to introduce a posthumous edition of the play (Copeland’s suggestion; C i. 143 n. 1). Kearney says that E.B. solicited subscriptions for such an edition; to French Laurence, 21 Dec. 1801, YB OF 20. 26. If so, the project was abandoned. E.B.’s unfinished essay was posthumously published in 1812 (WS i. 554–63). 91 Note-Book, 63–4.


59

Power of Kings are by no means their Property, but a Depositum in their Hands, for the Use of the People: And if we consider the natural Equality of Mankind, we shall believe the same of the Estates of Gentlemen, bestowed on them at the first Distribution of Properties, for promoting the Public Good: And when, by the Use they make of their Fortunes, they thwart that End, they are liable to the same or a greater Reproach than a Prince who abuses his Power.

These radical thoughts, however, do not lead to radical conclusions. Æ’s answer to the country’s economic ills, benevolent paternalism on the part of landlords, is tamely conventional and quintessentially Burkean. All Æ’s essays express a sense of otherness and alienation, and a resentment at the cultural cringe towards England that permeated every aspect of Irish life. Ireland neglects its local amenities, resources, and talents, in favour of English imports, however inferior in quality. Such criticisms were not new. They are found again and again in the writings of reformers such as Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley (1685–1753), and Samuel Madden (1686–1765).92 Had Burke remained in Ireland, he would most likely have become active in some nationalist cause. Yet having left Ireland, ostensibly to study, he did not return. The passages in the Reformer that bemoan the fate of talent in Ireland explain why not.

5 Burke’s last two years in Ireland, from May 1748 to April 1750, are poorly documented. He graduated in February 1748, and a few weeks later his name disappears from the college records. The extant letters decrease in frequency. After November 1747, only one actual letter (of February 1748) survives, and the few short quotations that have been preserved from lost letters end in May 1748. This lacuna is probably the result of chance, for three or four letters of 1748 to Shackleton, and a whole series to Dennis ‘from an early period’ to 1770, were extant in 1799.93 Shackleton’s marriage in February 1749 (celebrated by Burke in a poem) would naturally make him a less frequent correspondent.94 This gap in the epistolary record (which extends to February 1751) is particularly tantalizing because it occludes an episode of great interest, Burke’s first foray into politics. The controversy was provoked by Charles Lucas (1713–71), apothecary and political radical. Though often dubbed ‘the Irish Wilkes’, Lucas was 92 Representative texts include Swift’s Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (Dublin, 1720), Berkeley’s The Querist (Dublin, 1735–7), and Madden’s Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (Dublin, 1738). 93 French Laurence to J.B., 27 July 1799 (WWM BkP 28/9). 94 ‘To Richard Shackleton, Esq.: on his Marriage’ eventually found its way into print in A Collection of Poems, Mostly Original, ed. Joshua Edkins (Dublin, 1789), 220–2 (Todd, 51); repr. in Prior, Memoir of Burke, i. 29–30.

60 from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 older and earlier in the field than the Englishman (John Wilkes, 1725–97) whose fame has eclipsed his. Since the early 1740s, Lucas had been stirring the torpid pool of Dublin politics. The municipal government was dominated by an oligarchy of aldermen. Posing as the champion of traditional liberties against aldermanic tyranny, Lucas sought to increase the power of the Common Council, which was more representative of the poorer and middling tradesmen. His opponents loathed him as an unscrupulous, selfseeking demagogue. In 1748, on the death of one of the members for the city of Dublin, Lucas, seizing the chance to enter national politics, declared himself a candidate. General elections were infrequent in Ireland. In England, the Septennial Act of 1717 limited the duration of a Parliament to seven years. In Ireland (prior to the Octennial Act of 1768), Parliament was automatically dissolved only on the death of the sovereign. A single Parliament sat for the entire reign (1727–60) of George II. In addition, patrons controlled a higher proportion of Irish constituencies than they did in England. A by-election in an ‘open’ constituency like the city of Dublin thus had the potential to generate an intense burst of political consciousness. Lucas’s election campaign became the most contentious issue in Irish politics between Wood’s Halfpence in 1724 and the Money Bill of 1753. It lasted eighteen months and spawned hundreds of pamphlets, broadsides, and newspaper articles.95 Lucas was not elected. Instead, he was prosecuted for seditious libel and forced to flee the country. In exile in England, he practised successfully as a physician for several years before returning to Dublin to stand at the general election of 1761. This time he was elected, and remained a leading ‘patriot’ politician until his death. Which side did Burke take in 1749? Two early biographers asserted that Burke wrote against Lucas.96 Modern scholars have been divided on the issue.97 While direct evidence is lacking, the available sources support the 95 Sean Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas and the Dublin Election of 1748–1749’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983), 93–111. 96 According to Bisset, E.B. wrote ‘several essays in the style of Lucas’, exposing ‘the absurdity of democratical innovations’; Life of Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1800), i. 28. Bisset cites neither his source, nor the titles of any of these essays. Prior credited E.B. with ‘some letters against Mr Henry Brooke’ (a supporter of Lucas), whom he ‘ridiculed for his patriotic pretensions under the name, as it is said, of Diabetes’. Lucas himself was the object of Burke’s ‘sarcastic wit’, satirized as ‘Epaminondas’ and ridiculed by ‘pushing his political doctrines to their ultimate results’ (Memoir of Burke, i. 32–3). The names Epaminondas and Diabetes occur in the Censor Extraordinary, no. 13 (19–21 Aug. 1749), though they do not appear to refer to Lucas or Brooke; and no. 21 (14–16 Oct.) contains a letter to ‘the Farmer’, an alias used by Brooke. So Prior’s information, though garbled, has some support. 97 Samuels, Early Life, 180–202, identified a dozen pamphlets and five pro-Lucas essays as E.B.’s, and printed selections from them (331–95). His attributions were challenged by Gaetano L. Vincitorio, ‘Edmund Burke and Charles Lucas’, PMLA 68 (1953), 1047–55. Sean Murphy, ‘Burke and Lucas: An Authorship Problem Re-examined’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1 (1986), 143–56, while admitting the force of most of Vincitorio’s arguments, maintains E.B.’s responsibility for the five papers signed ‘B’ in the pro-Lucas Censor. How Burke came to be enlisted on Lucas’s side has its own interest. In 1910, Arthur P. I. Samuels was elected ‘Auditor’ (president) of the College Historical Society, a debating club which traced its ancestry back to E.B.’s 1747 club. Samuels began a study of E.B.’s early years, and had

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 61 anti-Lucas position. John Kearney told French Laurence that Burke contributed to ‘a Paper call’d the Censor Extraordinary, written in ridicule of Dr Lucas, and in imitation of his style’. Kearney obtained a few numbers, though not the one which (so his elder brother Michael recalled) contained Burke’s ‘ludicrous parallel between the bodies corporal and natural, comparing the Friends of Doctor Lucas, the Common Council of the City of Dublin, to the toes, &c of the Body’. Of the numbers in his possession, no more than one could even tentatively be attributed to Burke.98 Michael Kearney was 16 in 1749; old enough, certainly, to have taken an interest in the Lucas controversy. If after fifty years he could still remember a particular squib, he can be trusted on the matter of which side Burke took. By 1801, Lucas had long been metamorphosed from a demagogue into a national hero. His statue had been set up in the Tholsel (town hall). So Kearney had no reason to fear that linking Burke with Lucas would be regarded as discreditable. If anything, the temptation would have been to enlist Burke on Lucas’s side, thereby illustrating his prescience. For all these reasons, Kearney’s evidence carries conviction. One other consideration supports it. Paul Hiffernan, who persuaded Cotter to print Punch’s Petition, and who assisted the triumvirate in their struggle against the theatrical tyranny of Sheridan, was a leading anti-Lucas journalist.99 He may have drawn Burke into the controversy. The Censor; or, the Citizens Journal was the weekly organ of the Lucas campaign. It appeared each Saturday from 3 June to 11 November 1749.100 Its format was that of a newspaper, four folio pages. Each issue contained a leading article of two or three pages, the remaining space being filled with news reports (slanted to the Lucas point of view) and advertisements. The contents, themes, and tone of Lucas’s Censor are of a piece with his and his allies’ other writings. The Censor applies to Ireland many of the arguments and tropes that had been developed in England in the 1730s by the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). If the general tone is strident and inflammatory, a loftier note is sometimes struck. Five papers signed ‘B’, which make extensive use of parallels from classical history, have been attributed to Burke, precisely because of their more statesmanlike air.101 access to documents (since destroyed) in the Dublin Public Record Office. After his death in the First World War, his research was continued by his father, a high-court judge and himself a TCD alumnus. The elder Samuels made important discoveries, including the unique run of The Reformer. Reading pamphlets in the Haliday collection in the Royal Irish Academy, he thought he recognized E.B.’s voice in some of the more stylish pieces written during the Lucas controversy. 98 21 Dec. 1801, YB OF 20. 26. 99 After three papers attacking Sheridan (nos. 1–3, 18 Feb.–3 Mar. 1748), Hiffernan turned The Tickler on Lucas with no. 4 (11 Mar.). 100 When Lucas fled to England, publication was suspended. Four further issues appeared in 1750. 101 These are the five, later reprinted in pamphlet form as Papers Selected from the Censor (London, 1750), attributed to E.B. by Murphy, ‘Burke and Lucas’, 150–4. The case for E.B.’s authorship is tenuous, while positive evidence connects them with Robert Hellen (or Hellon; 1725–93). On the

62

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 Most eighteenth-century newspapers were published two or three times a week. If important news arrived which would be stale before their next scheduled issue, they sometimes published an ‘Extraordinary’ number. This practice was exploited by the authors of the Censor Extraordinary, which was designed to look as much like Lucas’s Censor as possible. No. 13 (19–21 Aug.) even carries a deceptive colophon: ‘DUBLIN: The former Numbers to be had at James Esdall’s on Cork-Hill, where Advertisements, Letters, Essays, &c. are taken in’. Esdall (d. 1755) was the printer of the original Censor, and of numerous pro-Lucas pamphlets.102 Some readers probably bought copies of the Censor Extraordinary under the impression that it was a genuine Lucas production. Only five numbers of the Censor Extraordinary are extant.103 They are so different from each other as to suggest that two or more authors were concerned. The only humourless paper is no. 16 (9–15 Sept). Much the dullest, it runs to four pages, filled with a long essay signed ‘Historicus’. The other four, each filling only a single folio sheet of two pages, are primarily parodic in the manner of the piece described by Kearney. They burlesque Lucas’s extravagant libertarian rhetoric, exaggerate his over-use of capitals and italics for emphasis, and ridicule his use of parallel history. By magnifying trivial grievances and treating them with mock ponderousness, the authors of the Censor Extraordinary belittle Lucas’s attempt to create a mood of crisis. This element strengthens the plausibility of the connection with Burke, whose early writings are rich in parody. One employs the same imagery as Burke’s lost piece. Signed ‘Philo-Cephalus’, it starts from the premiss of ‘the Head being look’d on as the noblest Part both of the Body Politick and Body natural’. Philo-Cephalus then draws the Censor’s attention to the knavish practices of the city’s hatters.104 The satire is not particularly sharp or effective, but it may have inspired Burke’s untraced piece on the toes of the body politic. title-page of the London reprint, the author’s name is given as ‘—— H.’. In the preface, the author complains of having ‘finished a Course of eight Years Study in the University without being obliged either to write or read his own Language’. These indications better fit Robert Hellen, who was admitted to TCD in 1742, and took his BA in 1746 and his LL B in 1749. The complaint about the neglect of English at TCD is echoed in Letters from an Armenian (1757), which has also been attributed to Hellen. Further, Hellen is known to have been a supporter of Lucas. The copy of Papers Selected from the Censor in the Cambridge University Library (Acton. d. 25. 1066) is bound in a volume with several other pamphlets of the years 1741–54. While the binding is later (c.1800?), the MS table of contents on the front pastedown may have been copied from an earlier list. It describes the tract as ‘Censors wrote by Coun[sello]r Hellen’. 102 Nos. 21 (14–16 Oct.) and 23 (21–5 Oct.) carry the genuine imprint of Thomas Knowles, who printed only for the anti-Lucas forces. By then the attempt to deceive had been abandoned. 103 Nos. 11, 13, 16, 21, and 23 (7 Aug.–25 Oct. 1749). All are in the Cambridge University Library (Hib. 3. 749. [2]). These numbers need not mean that as many as twenty-three papers were published; the numeration was probably part of the strategy of mystification. 104 Censor Extraordinary, no. 11 (5–7 Aug. 1749).

from a boy to a man, 1744‒1750 63 Burke always distrusted populist politics. He opposed extending political power or influence to the uneducated or half-educated, and he was habitually sceptical of the motives of demagogues such as Lucas and Wilkes. In 1761, when Lucas returned to Ireland in triumph, Burke dismissed him as a ‘Mountebank’ (C i. 139–40). In the later 1760s, though Burke (for tactical reasons) supported Wilkes as a victim of ministerial tyranny, he consistently opposed Wilkite agitation for constitutional reform. Burke was not indifferent to Irish nationalist aspirations. Indeed, the Reformer preaches both economic and cultural nationalism. The nationalism of the Reformer, however, assumes a hierarchical and paternalistic model of society, in which a more enlightened gentry will initiate the necessary reforms.105 In Burke’s view, the real victims in Ireland were the impoverished Catholic peasantry, not the Dublin artisans from whom Lucas drew his main support. The Censor Extraordinary cannot have occupied Burke’s whole time in 1749. What else was he doing? He may have worked for a time in his father’s office. Such experience was a normal part of a barrister’s training. Perhaps he adopted the strategy of another reluctant law student, David Hume (1711–76), who allowed his family to think he was ‘poring upon Voet and Vinnius’ while he was ‘secretly devouring’ Cicero and Virgil.106 Whatever precisely Burke was doing, these last two years in Dublin were empty and depressing. They may have cast a gloom on his spirits that even his escape to London in 1750 could not immediately lift. 105 As Samuel Madden advocated in his Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, where the ‘Gentleman, who sets up a large Manufacture’ to provide employment (44) is the prototype of the exemplary landowner described in Æ’s Reformer, no. 7. 106 ‘My Own Life’ (1776), in Letters, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), i. 1. Paulus Voet (1619–67) and Arnoldus Vinnius (1588–1657) were Dutch jurists.

64

getting started, 1750‒1757

3 Getting Started, 1750–1757

1 Burke left Ireland in 1750 to study law at the Middle Temple in London. The next seven years were a long, slow, and often painful struggle for independence, for a new home, and for a more congenial mission in life. These have been called Burke’s ‘missing years’.1 The surviving evidence is much scantier than for 1744–8, and such paucity sometimes conceals a painful experience. For example, almost nothing is known of Samuel Johnson for the two years after his premature departure from Oxford in December 1729. In his case, the blank conceals a psychological crisis, attested by later evidence.2 Nothing of the kind need be inferred about Burke. Even longer gaps are common in the biographical records of his contemporaries. Denis Diderot (1713–84) arrived in Paris in 1729. Thirteen almost ‘missing years’ separate this event from the beginning of more abundant records about 1742.3 In Burke’s case, no year is an absolute blank. Though few personal letters are extant, the fortunate preservation of a notebook into which Burke copied poems, essays, and other jottings between about 1752 and 1756 partly compensates for the deficiency.4 As Burke left Dublin on the most momentous journey of his life, his feelings were probably a mixture of relief and regret. Though anxious to escape from his father, and eager for the opportunities that London afforded, he was also leaving all those he knew and loved: his mother, his brothers, and his sister; his intimate friends, and his casual, coffee-house acquaintance; perhaps even some romantic attachment. The journey itself was long and tiring. Travellers were faced with a choice of evils. If they sailed to Holyhead, the shorter sea-crossing, they had to endure the execraDixon Wecter, ‘The Missing Years in Edmund Burke’s Biography’, PMLA 53 (1938), 1102–25. Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings (privately printed, 1909–52), x. 86; W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1977), 115–29. 3 Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York, 1972), 24–36. 4 WWM BkP 40, ed. by H. V. F. Somerset as A Note-Book of Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 1957). Another notebook (WWM BkP 43) has the following inscription: ‘amongst the infinite number of political & moral Sketches written early by W. Burke I keep these from the flames as being most brought into form. E.B.—fatal August 1794. written from 1754 to 1759’. The dates and attributions that have been added to BkP 40 were probably made by E.B. at about the same time. This explains why some of the dates are unreliable and the attributions incomplete. 1 2

getting started, 1750‒1757 65 ble roads of north Wales. These could be avoided by sailing to Parkgate, the port just north of Chester; but only at the price of spending much longer at sea. Either way, the journey took at least a week, longer if bad weather delayed the sea-crossing. Since Dublin was larger than any English provincial city, the sheer size of London was less intimidating than it appeared to many newcomers from the country. Even so, with a population well over 500,000, London was several times larger than Dublin. The built-up area was about three miles across, from Hyde Park on the west to Stepney in the east. Nowhere had development extended further than a mile north of the Thames, so that open fields were still everywhere within walking distance. The surrounding countryside was not a uniform scene of rural charm, however. Many ‘fields’ housed squatters’ shacks, or were used as refuse tips or as thieves’ hideaways.5 Enough Irish students entered the Middle Temple for Burke to have felt reasonably at home there. In the wider world of London beyond the Temple, his Irish accent and manners are likely to have been a source of embarrassment and ridicule. London was swamped with poor Irish immigrants, who filled many of the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Though socially and economically far removed from the world of Irish day-labourers and prostitutes, he could hardly escape the sneering contempt to which the Irish as a nation were subject.6 In the vast anonymity of London, he had at first few friends or connections, no proper ‘home’, no supportive group with which he could identify. Small wonder that his first intimate London friend, William Burke (1728–98), inspired a lasting and affectionate regard. The date of Burke’s departure from Dublin is not known. He arrived in London sometime before 3 May 1750, when he paid £1 19s. in fees at the Middle Temple.7 His only known connection in London was John Burke (d. 1764), an attorney with whom his father ‘did sometimes call Cousins’.8 Their exact relationship remains mysterious. John Burke’s son William (usually called Will) quickly became Edmund’s best friend. Perhaps as early as the summer of 1750, and certainly by the following year, the two were spending long vacations in the country together. From 1752, when Will left Oxford for the Middle Temple, they were almost constantly together.9 Will proved a failure in later life, and to Edmund a heavy burden. In 1750, M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925; Harmondsworth, 1966), 105–7. Ibid. 120–31. 7 Middle Temple Library, Students’ Ledger. The amount was for the thirteen terms since his nominal admission on 23 Apr. 1747. 8 So E.B. deposed in a chancery suit, Verney v. Burke, in 1783; PRO C. 12/2132/21. 9 W.B. matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1747, and regularly spent term-time at Oxford until the end of June 1751 (Battels Books at Christ Church, x. c.177–84). The Students’ Ledger, Middle Temple Library, records his payment of £1 4s. (for fees due since his admission on 26 May 1750) on 23 Jan. 1752, also the date of his bond and probably about the time he settled in London. 5 6

66 getting started, 1750‒1757 however, he was a promising young man. Though his father’s circumstances were moderate rather than affluent, he had received a good education, at Westminster School (1743–7) and at Christ Church, Oxford (1747–52). Destined for the law, he was called to the Bar in 1755. Ten years later, when both Burkes were offered positions under the Rockingham ministry, Will’s appointment, as Under-Secretary of State, was the more prestigious. Only after the financial disaster of 1769 did his fortunes suffer an irreversible decline. In 1750, meeting him seemed a great stroke of fortune. Looking back nearly thirty years later, Burke spoke of Will as ‘a friend, whom I have tenderly loved, highly valued, and continually lived with, in an union not to be expressed, quite since our boyish years’ (9 June 1777: C iii. 348). Will did much for Burke, introducing him to the world of politics, and speeding his entry into Parliament at a crucial moment. Burke was not blind to his friend’s faults. He wrote a surprisingly critical character sketch of Will, under the name ‘Phidippus’. He depicts Will as emotional, impulsive, unstable, governed by ‘Taste’ (meaning an intuitive aesthetic response, to people as well as things), and deficient in judgement. This character is of special interest because it is indirectly autobiographical. Edmund and Will were both emotional and intuitive. The values and attitudes that they shared are embodied in the pair of contrasting characters of the ‘wise’ man and the ‘good’ man. Though neither is avowedly personal, both are indirectly revealing. In the character of the worldly-wise man, Burke sketched his own antitype: prudent, steady of purpose, calculating. The deficiencies of the ‘wise’ man are no less telling: he lacks imagination, eloquence, good nature, and religion.10 Some of these traits, most notably the subordination of religion to worldly advancement, recall Shackleton’s account of Burke’s father as ‘more concerned to promote his Children’s Interest in the world, than to trouble himself about controverted points of Religion’.11 The ‘good’ man, by contrast, is impulsive, good-natured, unsuspecting, imprudent—and unfortunate. In other important respects Edmund and Will were temperamental opposites. Edmund proved the harder worker, more determined to force himself on the world. Will was a drone, ready enough to accept the gifts of fortune that fell into his lap. Incapable of sustained or disciplined effort, he fell prey to successive schemes that promised riches without labour. The four London Inns of Court controlled access to the Irish as well as the English Bar. To practise in Ireland, a barrister needed to have kept eight terms at one of the London Inns.12 The Middle Temple was the usual Note-Book, 57–9 (Phidippus), 8–18 (‘wise’ and ‘good’ men). YB OF 5. 332, in Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 1923), 402. 12 King’s Inns Admission Papers, 1607–1867, ed. Edward Keane, P. Beryl Phair, and Thomas U. Sadleir (Dublin, 1982), introduction, p. viii. There were four terms in the legal year. 10 11

getting started, 1750‒1757 67 choice of Irish students. In Burke’s time, about a quarter of the students admitted were Irish.13 No onerous reading or examination was needed to be called to the Bar. A student had only to be of six years’ standing. This accounts for the common practice of entering a student’s name on the books of an Inn in advance of actual residence. Burke’s, for example, was entered at the Middle Temple as early as 1747. During these six years, a student had only to ‘keep commons’ (eat dinners) for eight terms (not necessarily consecutive) and one vacation, and to perform nine exercises.14 Even these minimal requirements could be commuted to money payments. In practice, the exercises were falling into disuse, and most students paid to avoid performing them. William Cowper (1731–1800; the poet), for example, called to the Bar in 1754, compounded for most of the requirements.15 Burke probably rented rooms in the neighbourhood of the Temple. The Inns of Court were built just west of the old city walls, in a district which joined the commercial East End to the fashionable West End of London. (Places associated with Burke are indicated on Plate 4.) The Middle Temple was sandwiched between bustling Fleet Street and the river. In a densely populated area, its spacious gardens and courts gave it something of the character of rus in urbe. The country-loving Cowper retained pleasant memories of the peaceful seclusion.16 Something of this atmosphere is captured in an engraving after Joseph Nichols (Plate 5). The building on the right is the Middle Temple Hall, where Burke ate the required dinners. The Temple was also rich in historical associations. Parts of the Temple church, modelled on the building erected by the crusaders over the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, were as old as 1185. The Middle Temple Hall, with its sixteenth-century hammer-beam roof and richly carved oak screen, preserved the atmosphere of a late medieval or Renaissance college. The Library, enlarged and redecorated in 1697, though small compared to that of Trinity College, Dublin, was not narrowly professional. Yet a few steps from these buildings were two of the busiest arteries of the modern world, Fleet Street and the River Thames, then the capital’s principal thoroughfare for goods and people alike. In such a neighbourhood, Burke could readily imbibe the idea that continuity and change, the ancient and the modern, were not opposites but parts of the seamless fabric of human existence. The neighbourhood of the Temple was home to many types: 13 Irish students comprised 195 of 727 admissions between 1737 and 1749, or 26.8 per cent; figures compiled from H. A. C. Sturgess, Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple from the Fifteenth Century to the Year 1944 (London, 1949), i. 321–41. 14 Arthur Robert Ingpen, introduction to Master Worsley’s Book on the History and Constitution of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple (London, 1910), 29. 15 Charles Ryskamp, William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq.: A Study of his Life and Works to the Year 1768 (Cambridge, 1959), 65. (A student at the Middle Temple, Cowper moved to the Inner Temple after being called to the Bar.) 16 Cowper to Samuel Rose, 20 June 1789, in Letters and Prose Writings, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford, 1979–86), iii. 298.

68 getting started, 1750‒1757 tradesmen, lawyers, writers such as Johnson and Goldsmith. London was not segregated into residential and business districts, and many shopkeepers and small tradesmen lived above their premises and rented out their spare rooms. Since Burke spent the vacations in the country, he probably did not remain long at one address. His only recorded abode during these years dates from about 1755, when he had an ‘apartment, up two pair of stairs, at the sign of Pope’s Head, at a bookseller’s near the Temple’.17 Burke was not living in poverty. The cheapest rooms were in garrets, up three or more ‘pair of stairs’. Burke’s rooms, on the second floor, were respectable enough to receive a stranger. Until about 1755, Burke was financially dependent on his father. Richard Burke, whatever his failings of temper and affection, had been in some respects a generous parent. He had supported Burke for four years at Trinity College, which was not an essential preliminary to a legal training. Burke was intended by his father for the Bar, the more prestigious branch of the profession. Barristers did not have to be graduates, though a liberal, university education was often recommended as a valuable propaedeutic to the law. The disadvantage was that to acquire such an education added about four years to the time taken to qualify. That Richard Burke, recognizing his son’s superior intellectual capacities, was willing to maintain him for so much longer should be remembered to his credit. He apprenticed his eldest son to an attorney, and prepared his youngest (and favourite) for a career in commerce. Edmund received by far the best and most expensive education, supported in London on a scale that could not be regarded as niggardly. In 1766, he told Shackleton that his father had spent ‘a thousand pound or thereabouts’ on his education at the Middle Temple (C i. 274). Over a period of five or six years (1750–5), this would mean between £160 and £200 a year.18 Burke never faced financial distress during his years as a law student. Richard Burke continued to support him long after he had kept the eight terms needed for admission to the Irish Bar. This suggests that the English Bar may have been his intended profession from the first.19 A sense of gratitude and obligation would have both prevented open rebellion and prompted inner feelings of guilt. While Burke was nominally studying the 17 Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 1726–1809, Written by Himself, ed. Amy Apcar (Calcutta, 1918), 50. The entry in Bryan Lillywhite, London Signs: A Reference Book of London Signs from the Earliest Times to about the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London, 1972), 416, is copied from Emin. In the longer typescript version of the work, Lillywhite conjecturally identifies the bookseller’s with the Pope’s Head Tavern in Chancery Lane (Guildhall Library, London, S.L. 86. 1). 18 This figure is consistent with the £178 17s. that, in 1720, Charles Sanderson told a correspondent would be needed to maintain a student at the Middle Temple; Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century: The North East, 1700–1750 (London, 1952), 82. 19 Yet in 1755, E.B. wrote to his father that he was ready ‘to go to Ireland when you think proper and the End for which you desire I should go can be answerd’ (C i. 120). This is puzzling, since he had already kept enough terms at the Temple to have been called to either the Irish or the English Bar. What other ‘End’ could his father have had in mind?

getting started, 1750‒1757 69 law, he never gave it the energy and the devotion that, in his conscience, would have justified his continued acceptance of his father’s financial support. The legal education of Burke’s day was unstructured in form and severely practical in aim. Dry and ill adapted to appeal to an emotional and imaginative nature like Burke’s, the study of the law required constant application, and minute attention to forms, details, and precedents. Originality, speculative thought, breadth of interest and vision, the qualities so marked in Burke even in his early years, were not valued. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Inns of Court had been active educational institutions, comparable to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Many sons of the gentry and even of the nobility had attended, seeking not a professional qualification but a liberal education. This was no longer the case. In 1758, William Blackstone (1723–80), professor of law at Oxford, lamented that ‘few gentlemen now resort to the inns of court, but such for whom the knowledge of practice is absolutely necessary; such, I mean, as are intended for the profession’.20 ‘Few men’, Edward Gibbon likewise observed, ‘without the spur of necessity have resolution to force their way through the thorns and thickets of that gloomy labyrinth.’21 The Inns themselves provided little or no instruction. Students acquired the knowledge and expertise needed to practise law largely through a process of self-education. Some students were fortunate enough to find a practising lawyer to act as mentor and adviser, but this was not easy or usual. There were not even any legal textbooks in the modern sense until Blackstone, the first volume of whose Commentaries on the Laws of England appeared in 1765. Three activities were enjoined on the student: reading law books and reports; taking notes and making abstracts; and attendance at the courts.22 Such study required considerable powers of concentration and self-discipline, even on the part of students more committed to the law than Burke. The diary of Dudley Ryder (1691–1756) provides an unusually full account of a year in the life of an eighteenth-century law student. Like Burke, Ryder was a sober-minded and ambitious young man with literary interests. Though much had changed between the year it covers (1715–16) and Burke’s time at the Middle Temple, legal education followed the same patterns. Ryder’s diary can therefore in some measure supply the lack of direct evidence about Burke’s legal studies. The activity mentioned most 20 ‘On the Study of the Law’ (inaugural lecture delivered at Oxford on 25 Oct. 1758), in Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1765–9), i. 3–37; quotation from 26. Blackstone was the first professor of English law. 21 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), 92. 22 Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London, 1922–72), xii. 77–101; David Lemmings, Gentlemen and Barristers: The Inns of Court and the English Bar, 1680–1730 (Oxford, 1990), 98–109.

70 getting started, 1750‒1757 often is reading law cases, frequently in Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes (of which the first part, known as ‘Coke upon Littleton’, was a standard introductory text). On at least one occasion Ryder was ‘tired with one long case’ which he ‘could not well comprehend’.23 No tutorial help was available to clarify such difficulties. What little contact he had with the official Reader at the Middle Temple was chiefly about the farce of the formal exercises. Though a conscientious student, Ryder did not scruple to use an answer prepared for him.24 Discussion with fellow students was an important element in Ryder’s training. He had friends with whom he canvassed legal questions, and attended several clubs. One of these sounds like Burke’s club of 1747; another was devoted to civil law. More exclusive was a professional club which Ryder was not invited to join, despite angling for admission.25 Finally, Ryder often attended the lawcourts, then held in Westminster Hall.26 Ryder was, in the main, happy with his choice of profession, though in some moods he despaired of making any great figure in it. He persisted, and rose to a chief justiceship. His diary helps explain how easily a less motivated student, such as Burke, could lose interest in a study at once so vast and so pathless. The rebarbative nature of contemporary legal education was conceded by Blackstone, a former student at the Middle Temple. Burke might have sat for Blackstone’s grim picture of the young law student: A raw and unexperienced youth, in the most dangerous season of life, is transplanted on a sudden into the midst of allurements to pleasure, without any restraint or check but what his own prudence can suggest; with no public direction in what course to pursue his enquiries; no private assistance to remove the distresses and difficulties, which will always embarass a beginner. In this situation he is expected to sequester himself from the world, and by a tedious lonely process to extract the theory of the law from a mass of undigested learning; or else by an assiduous attendance on the courts to pick up theory and practice together, sufficient to qualify him for the ordinary run of business. How little therefore is it to be wondered at, that we hear of so frequent miscarriages; that so many gentlemen of bright imaginations grow weary of so unpromising a search, and addict themselves wholly to amusements, or other less innocent pursuits.27

Burke confirms Blackstone’s account: ‘the study of our jurisprudence presented to liberal and well-educated minds, even in the best Authors, hardly 23 The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–16, ed. William Matthews (London, 1939), 49, 91, 114, 147, 181, 184. A stained copy of parts 3 and 4 of Coke’s Institutes, probably a relic of his student days, is listed in the Sale Catalogue of E.B.’s library (no. 214). 24 Diary, 258. The Reader gave some advice about law books (230), but Ryder thought him a ‘very dull fellow’ (258). 25 Ibid. 80, 223–4 (friends); 200, 206, 214 (literary club like E.B.’s); 165, 190, 207, etc (civil law club); 364 (exclusive club). 26 Ibid. 125, 133, 137, etc. The law students sat together in reserved sections. 27 ‘On the Study of the Law’, 31.

getting started, 1750‒1757 71 any thing 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’. No wonder many of its students felt only ‘an incurable, and if we regard the manner of handling rather than the substance, a very well-founded disgust’ (WS i 323–4). This passage, from an unfinished ‘Essay towards an History of the Laws of England’, though describing the seventeenth century, was clearly inspired by his own experience.28 On 31 August 1751, when he had been in England well over a year, Burke wrote to Shackleton that he was ‘but just beginning to know something of what I am about, which till very lately I did not’ (C i. 111). As a law student, Dudley Ryder quickly discovered that ‘it is not the way to get business and have the character of a good lawyer to seem acquainted much with other things’.29 Burke always lamented this narrow professionalism. Scottish law, which drew more heavily on Roman jurisprudence and appealed to principle rather than precedent, was a more humane and liberal study. Scottish judges were often scholars and men of letters as well as jurists. An eminent example was Lord Hailes (Sir David Dalrymple, 1726– 92). In 1791, thanking him for a presentation copy of his translation of one of Tertullian’s minor works, Burke remarked: ‘I never think of some of you Scotch Gentlemen of the Robe without being a little ashamed for England. Our Barr does not abound in general Erudition—and I am every day more and more convinced that they are not the better professional men for not being more extensively learned’ (16 Dec. 1791: C vi. 466). The ‘general Erudition’ that made a man ‘extensively learned’ was Burke’s personal ideal. Broader than the solid knowledge of particular subjects built up by the professed scholar, such erudition was useful as well as valuable for its own sake. Burke sought knowledge that would qualify him for life as well as stock his mind: ‘When a man is conversant in all the variety of Arts and Sciences, in the Stories, opinions, Customs, manners, atchievements of all ages and all nations, it must by a sure consequence wear away those little prejudices of little parties that Cause such heats and animosities amongst mankind.’30 This contempt for the ‘little prejudices of little parties’, founded on his Irish experiences, expresses Burke’s temperamental preference for taking the global view. Eager to study the whole of what he called ‘the Great Map of Mankind’ (C iii. 351), he achieved a sympathy rare in his time for customs and manners far removed from European norms. ‘To attempt a general knowledge’ he thought not ‘too bold an undertaking; to have many things in hand will rather advance us in Each, whilst they relieve 28 This fragment was posthumously published in 1812 as part of E.B.’s ‘Essay towards an Abridgment of the English History’ (WS i. 321–31). The opening passage, however, shows that E.B. planned it as a separate work. 29 Diary, 182. 30 Note-Book, 85.

72 getting started, 1750‒1757 one another; and prevent that satiety which arises from a confined application’.31 Burke’s legal studies offered only the ‘confined application’ that led to repletion and nausea. Yet the Bar was a prestigious and powerful profession, the most eligible avenue to fortune and distinction.32 Respect for property rights as defined by the law was one of the period’s most fundamental beliefs.33 The neglect into which legal education had fallen is the more surprising, since of all the learned professions, the law was the one in which abilities counted for most. It therefore offered the surest route to public life and social advancement for men, like Burke, who lacked access to patronage. The law provided a competence for many, and great wealth for a few. All governments needed legal talent, and the law was a recognized avenue into politics. At each general election between 1754 and 1790, about thirty practising barristers were elected to the Commons. Most of the men of humble origin who attained Cabinet rank in the eighteenth century rose through their legal abilities.34 One of the great legal luminaries of the century, Philip Yorke (1690–1764), was the son of a country attorney.35 He rose to be Lord Chancellor (1737–56), Earl of Hardwicke, and an influential Cabinet minister. Samuel Johnson, the son of a provincial bookseller, was credibly flattered that, had he followed the law, he might have become Lord Chancellor and taken his title from his native Lichfield.36 Hardwicke was exceptional. Yet for scores of ambitious lawyers, their profession was a ladder to wealth and renown, if not power. Burke was well aware of this. Thirty years later, in conversation with another reluctant student of the law, James Boswell (1740–95), he castigated contemporary legal education as a poor preparation for political eminence. Worst of all was ‘to put a young gentleman who was to follow the law first to an attorney’. This was to risk giving ‘narrow and contracted notions to men who might one day decide upon the lives and properties of the subjects of this country, nay, arrive at the highest honours and have a great sway in the state’. Only after a student Note-Book, 86. Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982), 115–65. 33 Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991). 34 Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790 (London, 1964), i. 126; Lemmings, Gentlemen and Barristers, 178–234. Only 23 of the 229 new peerages created in the 18th century went to men with no connections to the peerage; John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984), 24–5. About half of these were lawyers: 11, plus Nathaniel Ryder, whose claim rested partly on his father’s legal distinction (Dudley Ryder died of apoplexy the day his peerage was approved, before the patent was made out). 35 Horace Walpole always thought this good for a sneer; Memoirs of King George II, ed. John Brooke (New Haven, 1985), i. 62, 104 n. 1. Walpole hated Hardwicke, but the references show that he expected others to share his social prejudice against attorneys. 36 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), iii. 309–10 (17 Apr. 1778). The title ‘Earl of Lichfield’ became extinct on the death of the fifth earl in 1776. 31 32

getting started, 1750‒1757 73 had his ‘habits formed liberally’ should he ‘go for some time into an attorney’s office and perfect himself in forms’.37 Burke retained an invincible repugnance to his father’s profession. The law provided fame and fortune only for a few. To many more, however, it offered an honest competence consistent with gentility, and even modest opulence. Besides private practice, numerous posts in the government bureaucracy were open to men with legal qualifications. In 1737, when the Licensing Act closed his career as a dramatic satirist, Henry Fielding (1707–54) turned to the law to support himself. Not an outstandingly successful barrister, Fielding found a comfortable enough berth as a London magistrate.38 In 1757, Arthur Murphy (1727–1805) likewise turned to the law from the precarious livelihood of acting and writing. Called to the Bar in 1762, he managed to combine private legal practice with an official position as a commissioner of bankruptcy (obtained in 1765).39 Both were able to pursue their literary avocations in tandem with their legal careers. Why did Burke find the prospect of such a course so distasteful? Even if he cared little for the personal rewards it might bring, the law promised to make him a useful member of society. Unable to make a firm decision about his future, Burke took refuge in two strategies of avoidance. He became, as he told Shackleton, ‘an invalid and a traveller’ (31 Aug. 1751: C i. 111). Burke’s illness was in part psychosomatic. For about two years he was unable to concentrate, debilitated in body and mind by the strain of release after a period of hard work and the trauma of moving into a new world. Conscious of superior powers, he was unable to exert them or even to understand his own paralysis.40 Invalidism gave Burke some excuse to seek distraction in a nomadic life. This pattern was probably begun in 1750 with a summer visit to the West Country, for there was nothing to keep him in London. In a letter of September 1752, Burke reports having spent ‘part of the Winter that is the Term time in London, and part in Croydon’ (then an outlying village), and of having gone to Bristol in the summer for his health (112). Will accompanied him on most of these summer rambles. This annual migration (winter in or near London, summer in the country) was the normal routine of those who could afford it. Samuel Johnson ridiculed its absurdity, while conceding that some few 37 Journal, 22 Apr. 1788, in Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785–1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1986), 216. 38 Fielding had readier access to patronage than E.B. Thanks to his uncle’s influence, he was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple less than three years after his admission; his appointment as a Middlesex magistrate he owed to the Duke of Bedford. Martin C. and Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London, 1989), 271, 440, 448–50. 39 John Pike Emery, Arthur Murphy: An Eminent English Dramatist of the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1946), 85–6. Unlike Fielding, Murphy had to wait the usual five years before being called to the Bar. 40 Several passages from his poems illustrate the problem: ‘The Muse Divorced’ (1750: C i. 105); ‘An Epistle to Dr Nugent’ (1752: 118).

74 getting started, 1750‒1757 people really needed to get away from the bustle of London life. Among the latter, he included ‘men wholly engrossed by speculative sciences’, on the ground that ‘the reasoner could adjust his systems only where his mind was free from the intrusion of outward objects’.41 Burke could have pleaded this excuse for his rambles, for his Philosophical Enquiry was probably written mainly during his rural retreats. In 1756, during the last of them, he and Will worked on their Account of the European Settlements in America. Apart from offering this freedom from distraction, the country was also healthier and cheaper than London. In June 1753, Will was ‘not a little pestered’ by his creditors, so a summer spent in country lodgings could serve several purposes at once.42 Sooner or later, ‘an invalid and a traveller’ like Burke would visit Bath, England’s most fashionable resort for the ill and the idle. Mineral springs, the ostensible attraction of Bath, were credited with a variety of medicinal and curative properties. Burke, for one, believed in them. He told Shackleton that the waters at Clifton, near Bristol, had done him good (28 Sept. 1752: C i. 112). Bath, however, was the great social magnet. There, probably as early as the autumn of 1750, Burke met his future father-in-law. Christopher Nugent (1698–1775) was an Irish Catholic with a French medical degree, then practising at Bath.43 Nugent inspired love and respect in all who knew him.44 Nugent’s personality is captured in the excellent portrait (Plate 6) by James Barry (1741–1806). Barry’s portrait was a labour of love. Though it depicts an older man than Burke met in 1750 (it was painted in 1772), Barry’s image helps to explain the affectionate regard in which Nugent was held, and the influence he exerted on Burke in the early 1750s. The unconventional pose distances the portrait from the flattering, fashionable images (which Barry detested) of society painters. Nugent is endowed with a timeless dignity suggestive of an antique Roman bust, yet the treatment of the flesh and the hair adds a sense of warmth and humanity. His gesture indicates the reflection, possibly melancholy, of a thoughtful and intelligent, deeply caring man. Despite the expanse of back turned towards the viewer, Nugent would not resent interruption, but sits ready to turn from reading to a problem of real life. The back view deflects attention The Rambler, no. 135 (2 July 1751); repr. in Works (New Haven, 1958– ), iv. 349–54. W.B., ‘The Pillow’, dated Oxford, June 1753, in Note-Book, 28–9. This date is probably correct; W.B. was in Oxford from Apr. to June 1753 (Christ Church, Battels Books, x. c. 188). 43 He published an Essay on the Hydrophobia (London, 1753), and left a ‘Treatise on Digestion’ in MS at his death (E.B.’s Sale Catalogue, no. 584). 44 Samuel Johnson wrote a moving letter of condolence to J.B. on her father’s death (C iii. 236–7). On another occasion, remembering how often he had joined Nugent in abstaining from meat on a Friday, he exclaimed ‘Ah, my poor dear friend! I shall never eat omelet with thee again!’ This story is recorded in Hester Thrale’s Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786), ed. Arthur Sherbo (with William Shaw’s Memoirs; London, 1974), 101. 41 42

getting started, 1750‒1757 75 from the clothes (so prominent in most contemporary portraits) to the man, focusing attention on the intensely sympathetic face.45 Nugent proved to be the ‘guide, philosopher, and friend’ that Burke needed. In a verse ‘Epistle to Doctor Nugent’, he invited the doctor (then in Bath) to join him and Will at nearby Turlaine, where they were enjoying a quiet holiday.46 From the story (borrowed from Rabelais) of a ‘grave Philosopher’ who can concentrate neither in the city nor in the country, Burke draws the familiar moral: ‘In vain we fly from place to place to find | What not in place consists, but in the mind’ (C i. 116).47 From the false philosopher whom happiness eludes, he turns to Nugent: I knew a man, who to th’extreme had brought, The strictest Virtue, and the deepest thought Who science lov’d, and yet had only trod— The Path of Science, as a road to God. The Arts and Virtues join’d, his soul possess’d, And Taste diffused a Sunshine o’er the rest But Art and Taste and Learning only stood, To fill the time, he breath’d from doing good. This man so grac’d, so little was allie’d, Or to the Courtly or pedantick pride, His temper cheerfull, innocent, and free Could stoop to all things;—he could stoop to me— (117)

These lines recall the eulogy of Abraham Shackleton in the poem on Ballitore. Nugent likewise served as a surrogate father, a figure of authority who could direct and advise but also encourage, love, and nurture. The panegyric leads to the story of the doctor’s finding ‘a youth of Body broke, infirm of mind’. Nugent ‘restor’d his Life, and taught him how to Live’ (117). What did Burke mean by ‘of Body broke’? His own belief was that he had collapsed from studying too hard.48 His resort to waters at Clifton (112) may mean that he was thought to be consumptive. Burke’s psychological state is easier to diagnose. The phrase ‘infirm of mind’ suggests lack of resolution, weakness of will, inability to plan and execute a course of action. As late as 1757, he described his life as ‘checquerd with various designs’ (C i. 123). Many years later, Burke confessed to Charles Butler that ‘at one time, for want of a distinct object, to 45 Barry took the pose from the figure of St Paul in Raphael’s St Cecilia Altarpiece in Bologna, a painting that he greatly admired; Genial Company: The Theme of Genius in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture (Nottingham, 1987). 46 Though dated ‘Sepr 1751’, the poem was probably written at least a year later (C i. 118). 47 E.B.’s version of Horace’s ‘caelum, non animum, mutant qui trans mare currunt’ (Epistles, 1. 11. 27). 48 Against the line ‘ ’Tis now two Autumns’, Burke later (perhaps as late as 1794) added the marginal note: ‘Then nineteen his studies had nearly destroyed him’ (Note-Book, 38).

76 getting started, 1750‒1757 which he might direct his studies, his mind became perfectly inactive, and reading was an unpleasant exertion to him’. ‘After the first years of youth are past,’ Burke supposed, ‘the mind requires more substantial food than mere reading; so that, to call forth literary application, it is necessary to superadd the stimulus of an ardent wish to attain a particular object.’49 Between 1729 and 1733, David Hume suffered debilitating physical and psychological ailments. His case, recorded in considerable detail in a remarkable letter to an unknown physician, presents some suggestive parallels to Burke’s.50 Hume’s illness, like Burke’s, followed a period of intense application to study. Hume had determined to abandon the law for philosophy; Burke yearned to escape from the law. Both cases may have been partly psychosomatic, since the physical symptoms disappeared with psychological recovery. By late 1752, Burke was beginning to mend. His letter to Shackleton of 28 September 1752, describing a summer in the country with Will, is the longest and most forthcoming of the uninformative letters of the 1750s. The tone is less gloomy than the letters of 1751. The Burkes were staying near Bath, at Turlaine, close to Bradford-on-Avon, a centre for the cloth trade. Master clothiers, based in Bradford, sent out wool to be spun in the nearby villages. Burke celebrates the prosperity of the district in terms that modern readers may find strange: ‘the Country is very populous, and it is the only one, I ever saw where children are really an advantage to their parents for I have seen little Girls of 6 or 7 years old at the wheel and I am told they can earn 3s. 6d. a week each, which is more than their keeping can amount to’ (C i. 114).51 Burke, like most of his contemporaries, took for granted an economic system that gave the bulk of mankind at best a precarious subsistence. For the poor, children were a heavy burden. The sooner they could contribute to their own and their family’s support, the better for themselves and the family. In 1697, as part of an elaborate scheme to reform the Poor Law, John Locke (1632–1704) proposed ‘working schools’ for children between the ages of 4 and 13. Except where some local manufacture appeared more advantageous, these schools were to teach ‘spinning or knitting, or some other part of the woollen manufacture’.52 Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) likewise rejoiced that (in Norfolk) ‘the very Children after four or five Years of Age, could every one earn their own bread’.53 To Burke, as 49 Charles Butler, Reminiscences (London, 1822–7), ii. 101–2. In Sept. 1751, E.B. told Shackleton that ‘I read as much as I can (which is however but a little)’ (C i. 111). 50 Mar. 1734, in Letters, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), i. 12–18. 51 From the statistics collected in J. de L. Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640 to 1880 (Oxford, 1971), 103–5, 322–7, 3s. 6d. seems high; yet E.B. was told that ‘formerly they had greater prices’ (C i. 114). 52 Report prepared for the Board of Trade, of which Locke was a member; printed in H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke (London, 1876), ii. 377–90; quotation from 385. 53 A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–7), ed. G. D. H. Cole (London, 1927), i. 62.

getting started, 1750‒1757 77 to Locke and Defoe, a system which allowed small children to earn their keep was much preferable to one which condemned them to a life of certain poverty and possible starvation. The second fate was all too common in Ireland.

2 Burke was hardly unusual in preferring the muse to his law books. The character of the would-be poet compelled to drudge at the law is a type that is at least as old as Ovid.54 As early as 1747, he heard that in London ‘a man who writes, can’t miss there of getting some bread, and possibly good’ (C i. 101). Many ambitious young men arrived in London with high poetic hopes before dwindling into journalists. Samuel Johnson is the pre-eminent example.55 Journalism paid better than poetry. In 1749, for example, Johnson received only fifteen guineas for The Vanity of Human Wishes. The authors of The World (1753–6), one of the most successful imitations of the Spectator, were paid three guineas for each paper.56 Burke may indeed have written some journalism which cannot now be identified. In 1758, William Dennis speculated that Burke wrote ‘Pamphlets for the great ones’ (124 n. 5). An unfinished draft, preserved in a notebook containing mainly Will Burke’s writings, shows that Burke at least tried his hand at pamphleteering.57 Brief as it is (only about 1,200 words), the draft has an importance as Burke’s earliest political essay. The fully developed opening analyses the English national character. A list of ‘Grievances’ and possible reforms follows, each topic evidently intended for expansion. The remainder of the draft treats only one of these topics, the old question of whether parliamentary elections should be held more frequently. Since the passing of the Septennial Act in 1717, which had extended the maximum duration of a parliament from three to seven years, ‘shorter parliaments’ had been a perennial rallying-cry for oppositions. In 1758, when a bill to repeal the Septennial Act was easily defeated on its first reading, Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) described the measure as ‘a popular squib let off’.58 ‘Grievances’, Burke wrote, are best cured during ‘an unsuccessful War’. This points to a period of composition about 1757–8, when the early failures of 54 Tristia, 4. 10. 25–6. Eighteenth-century examples include the Templar in the Spectator; Wilding, the title character in Fielding’s The Temple Beau (1730); the clerk in Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735); and Tom Riot in the Connoisseur, no. 133 (12 Aug. 1756). 55 Thomas Kaminski, The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (New York, 1987), 3–23. 56 Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733–1764, ed. James E. Tierney (Cambridge, 1988), 518, 521. 57 WWM BkP 41, fos. 91–5. The authorship is attested by a later note in E.B.’s hand: ‘this to the End of the part ab[ou]t short Parl[iamen]ts are of Edm Burke about 1755’. 58 To his son, 24 Feb. 1758, in Letters, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London, 1932), v. 2288.

78 getting started, 1750‒1757 the Seven Years War made the public receptive to political jeremiads. The most successful was the Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757–8) by John Brown (1715–66), which offers a gloomy prognostic of national degeneration and decline.59 Burke articulates a more optimistic view. He argues that Britain, like ancient Rome, owed its greatness to ‘the Genius of the People’ rather than to the achievements of individuals. Possessed of ‘an haughty Spirit, an Idea of their own Superiority, & a stediness even to obstinacy in the Pursuit of their Designs’, on this ‘wild stock’ some of their ‘Noblest Virtues have been engrafted’. This spirit can easily survive temporary set-backs (such as Britain was then experiencing?). The Athenians and Thebans, by contrast, depended more for their successes on the qualities of individual leaders. Burke’s argument from ‘the Genius of the People’ suggests the influence of the French jurist Montesquieu (1689–1755), one of whose leading ideas is the notion of a national ‘esprit général’. L’Esprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu’s masterly philosophical analysis of ‘law’ in the broadest sense, and indeed of much else, had been at once translated into English (as The Spirit of Laws, 1750). Burke became a lifelong admirer of Montesquieu, the philosophe whose ideas he found most congenial, calling him ‘the greatest genius, which has enlightened this age’ (WS i. 445). The eagerness with which he devoured the Esprit, so different in outlook and perspective from the repulsive English law texts, is easily imagined. In an essay written in 1754, Will refers casually to Montesquieu’s theory of climate.60 Perhaps the two friends read the great work together during one of their summer rambles. In the essay on shorter parliaments, one of Burke’s arguments may also owe something to Montesquieu’s belief in the value of oligarchic institutions (such as the French parlements) as valuable checks on the despotic tendencies of monarchs. A common objection to long parliaments was that ministers could more easily corrupt and control them. Burke answers that ‘when a Parliament sits a long time it becomes more of the Nature of a Senate: it begins to have an Interest of its own as a Body: & all Men are more tenacious & jealous of such an Interest, than when they act as procurators for others, however honest & well meaning they may be’. An independent senate will oppose the designs of an ‘ambitious Prince or Minister’ and in doing so will espouse the interest of the people as a whole.61 Burke often defends the oligarchic element in the British constitution in such terms. Admittedly, there were many sources for such ideas besides Montesquieu. What Burke learned from the philosophe was rather the analytical method and wide perspective that enabled him to rescue the study of the law, considered as the framework of society, from the narrow legalism of its practitioners. 59 60

E.B. reviewed the second part of Brown’s Estimate in the Annual Register (1758), 444–52. 61 Note-Book, 32. WWM BkP 41, fos. 91–4.

getting started, 1750‒1757 79 Further evidence of the Burkes’ journalistic ambitions comes from another notebook, which contains three pieces in virtually publishable form. All are satiric. Though disappointing in literary quality, Burke’s two (the third is by Will) reveal much about his priorities and values. The ‘Letter to Sir James Lowther’, for example, embodies a promising idea: a shameless young man writes a begging letter to a miserly millionaire. The execution is not unskilful. Its exuberance recalls Punch’s Petition. Burke uses the mask of the impudent, brazen self-seeker to express his contempt for money and material success.62 The theme of shameless self-advertising is also prominent in the satirical ‘Funeral Oration on the Inspector’. If published, this would have been a sniper shot in the paper war being waged between John Hill (1714–75), who wrote as ‘The Inspector’, and a group of antagonists which included Henry Fielding and Christopher Smart (1722–71), another poet turned journalist.63 These pieces were evidently written for publication in one of the newspapers or magazines. The less topical pieces in the Note-Book might have been intended for a volume of original essays. A recurrent theme is ‘the way of the world’, the qualities that make for success in contemporary society. Burke sees through the showy and superficial qualities of the ‘fine gentleman’ and the wordly ‘wise man’. These perceptions do not lead, as might have been expected, to cynicism, to despair, or even to satire. Instead, following such optimistic social critics as Pope in his Essay on Man, Burke retains a faith in the general justness of things. Providence disposes people to do the right thing, though often by circuitous means. Burke puts his trust in instinct and feeling, which cannot err, rather than in reason, which too plainly can and does. This preference remained with him throughout life. Some of the serious essays attempt to resolve a question much on Burke’s mind. Why had he made less mark on the world than others no more gifted or meritorious? His answer is that most people judge only by appearances. They are too easily impressed by the ‘man of spirit’, the false ‘genius’ whose self-advertising claims are allowed on little or no evidence. Most patrons prefer to reward and surround themselves with inferiors, who pose no threat and whose inferiority feeds their sense of self-importance. Success is the reward of those who can manipulate popular opinion and prejudices. The really ‘good man’ is perpetually the dupe of his own good nature, as well as of the schemes of the unscrupulous. Like many moralists, Burke 62 Note-Book, 49–52. The miser was Sir James Lowther of Whitehaven (1673–1755); J. V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1981), 16–19. 63 Note-Book, 42–5. Though dated ‘1751’, it refers to Mountefort Browne’s assault on Hill on 6 May 1752. Since it is called a ‘Funeral Oration’, it was probably written soon after 7 July 1753, when the last of Hill’s ‘Inspector’ papers appeared; Betty Rizzo, ‘Notes on the War between Henry Fielding and John Hill, 1752–53’, The Library, 7 (1985), 338–53; and The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, 1714–75, ed. G. S. Rousseau (New York, 1982).

80 getting started, 1750‒1757 uses this familiar disproportion between virtue and its rewards as an argument for a more just dispensation in a future life.64 Two related essays on religion are among the most revealing. The first, ‘Religion of No Efficacy Considered as a State Engine’, exposes the fallacy of treating religion as a social and political instrument. Convinced that only strong opinion can influence action, Burke argues that religion can be of no effect unless people are persuaded of its truth. Religion cannot be rationalized or secularized without destroying its force: ‘as we confine the Ends of Religion to this world, we naturally annihilate its Operation, which must wholly depend upon the Consideration of another’. This anticipates his later objection to the kind of demystified state religion instituted by the French revolutionaries. The second piece, headed simply ‘Religion’, takes the form of a skeleton argument, set out as a series of logical propositions, such as might have been expanded into a philosophical essay. What, Burke asks, are our deepest instinctive feelings about God, about free will, about the immortality of the soul? Assuming that these feelings are a truer guide than any rational propositions could be, he makes a sequence of logical deductions from them. Thus he begs all the main questions: ‘Man has Ideas of Immortality, and wishes for it; he does not think he has Ideas and Wishes, for no End. Hence he presumes he may be Immortal.’ Since ‘this Notion is favourable to the performance of all his Duties’, it should be accepted as true, for ‘in disputed Questions those Notions that tend to make him better and happier, to bind him to his fellow Creatures, and to his Creator and to make him a more excellent Creature, are true rather than the Contrary’. Natural feelings are a more reliable guide than reason. Ideas are to be judged by their moral utility, which makes them true.65 Burke would always deprecate abstract enquiries, whether theological, philosophical, or political, which tended to question and therefore to unsettle established ‘truths’ of proven social and moral value. In a long sorites, Burke deduces from the existence of God the need for established churches. If God exists, he reasons, and has revealed his will and our duties, to preserve this revealed knowledge ‘there must be Men appointed to teach . . . and Books written to record’. The teachers should be formed into a distinct order, subject to discipline.66 For Burke, a religion must be organized rather than individualistic. It needs articles of belief, sacred texts, and a separate priesthood. The venerable religions of Asia fulfil these conditions as well as Judaism or Christianity. They exclude deism, any kind of ‘natural religion’, and the little dissenting sects set up by egotists dissatisfied with the system established by the State. Burke placed a high value on religion, convinced that it was necessary to restrain man’s unruly passions and appetites. Hume, for all his scepticism, 64

Note-Book, 63–4, 60–2, 117, 72.

65

Ibid. 67–75.

66

Ibid. 74–5.

getting started, 1750‒1757 81 67 valued reason as humanity’s best instrument for coping with life. Burke enjoyed no such faith. Nor could he ever accept Hume’s distinction, developed at the beginning of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), between the two species of moral philosophy. One kind of philosopher, Hume argued, seeks to recommend and inculcate virtue; but equally legitimate is the more abstract and speculative enquiry that seeks to uncover the real principles of human motives and actions, wherever such enquiries may lead and however unpalatable to conventional morality their conclusions may be. Such philosophy, he admitted, belonged in the study, not in the street.68 Burke, to whom Hume’s philosophic detachment was foreign, could never allow that there might be a philosophical sphere which did not impinge on the social.

3 By 1754, Burke had decided to seek other means of livelihood than the law. He applied for an administrative post in the colonies. Such an attempt, and there may have been several, provoked an angry response from his father. So much is clear from Burke’s penitent letter of 11 March 1755, the only extant one between them (C i. 119–20). Its abject expressions of submission confirm his continued financial dependence. He may even have persuaded himself, temporarily at least, to do his father’s bidding. Later in 1755, he performed two vacation exercises at the Middle Temple, with a fellow student who (with Will Burke, among others) was called to the Bar in November.69 Burke would hardly have performed these exercises if he had already decided to abandon the law. He could, indeed, have been called at the same time, had he chosen to go through the formalities. His decision not to do so was a conscious gesture of independence, intended to mark his break with his father. Richard Burke must at some point have lost patience with his son and discontinued his financial support. Perhaps Burke received the same kind as threat as Diderot, another nominal law student who spent his time reading and studying subjects more to his taste. Faced with his father’s ultimatum to decide on a profession or support himself, Diderot chose independence, perhaps with no clearer idea than Burke how he would achieve it.70 67 ‘We have . . . no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all’; A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), i. iv. 7, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn. rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978), 268. 68 i. i; Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edn. rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 5–16. 69 Middle Temple Library, Moote Book, 1748–63, ‘Vacation Exercise. Trinity 1755’. The other student was Francis Filmer, younger son of Sir Edward Filmer. In 1750, E.B. had performed vacation exercises with George Bruce, son of the Dean of Kilfenora, in Ireland. Bruce had been admitted to the Middle Temple in 1746 (Sturgess, Register of Admissions, i. 336) and was called to the Bar in Dublin in 1751 (King’s Inns Admission Papers, 58). 70 Mme de Vandeul (Diderot’s daughter), ‘Mémoires’, in Diderot’s Œuvres complètes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann (Paris, 1975– ), i. 12.

82

getting started, 1750‒1757 About 1756, Burke met Joseph Emin (1726–1809). An ethnic Armenian born at Hamadan (then part of the Ottoman empire) but forced to flee with his family to India, Emin formed the heroic ambition of freeing Armenia from Turkish rule. Observing the superior discipline of the British forces in India, he decided to make his way to London to acquire the military expertise that he would need to train his countrymen. The story of this chance meeting, recounted many years later by Emin in his autobiography, provides a rare glimpse of Burke at this period. Walking in St James’s Park one Sunday afternoon, Emin saw Burke in the company of a Mr Bodley, a lawyer whom he recognized from Calcutta. He introduced himself, and the three walked and talked together. After Bodley left them, Burke invited Emin to his lodging. Burke described himself as ‘a runaway son from a father, as you are’. He offered to lend Emin money, and later employed him as a copyist.71 Such an immediate, warm-hearted, intuitive response is characteristic of a new Burke, safely emerged from the years of paralysis, uncertainty, and self-doubt. He could recognize, in Emin, his own recent self and situation: an outsider, ambitious but friendless. In 1750, Burke had needed a helping hand from Nugent. Now he could extend one to the young Armenian. One of the works which Burke set Emin to copy was his first book, the Vindication of Natural Society. This was published on 18 May 1756, by Robert Dodsley (1703–64), one of London’s leading literary ‘booksellers’ (as publishers were then called; most, including Dodsley, were also booksellers in the modern sense).72 From humble origins (he had been a footman), Dodsley had established himself as a poet and dramatist as well as a bookseller. Many of the authors whom he published became friends, as Burke did. The connection proved enduring. Burke offered all five of his early literary projects to Dodsley, and when Robert retired, Burke continued to entrust most of his publications to to his younger brother James (1724–97). The Vindication was written to ridicule and refute the specious deism of Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). Bolingbroke’s ‘philosophical’ works were mostly written in the 1730s and circulated in manuscript among some of his friends. Their posthumous publication was entrusted to David Mallet (c.1705–65). The first to appear, and the primary target of Burke’s satire, was the Letters on the Study and Use of History (1752). This was later reprinted in the collected edition of Bolingbroke’s Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 49–53. Todd, 3. Dodsley paid £6 6s. for the first edition of 500 copies, and agreed to pay as much again for a second edition, which appeared in Dec. 1757 (Todd, 3b). The first payment was actually made to W.B. Tierney interprets the small sums as evidence that E.B. was ‘financially pressed’ (Dodsley, Correspondence, 420). Six guineas was not so slight a payment for a pamphlet. The modest sums suggest rather that E.B.’s motive in finally breaking into print was not primarily financial. He sought the recognition of his talents that would lead to patronage. 71 72

getting started, 1750‒1757 83 73 Works which appeared in March 1754. The publication of this pompous set of five quarto volumes was probably what provoked Burke to write the Vindication. Burke was not Bolingbroke’s only antagonist. Of the several pamphlets directed against the posthumous works, Reflections on the Late Lord Bolingbroke’s ‘Letters on the Study and Use of History’ (1753) deserves particular notice. Its author was John Leland (1691–1766), a dissenting minister. At a time when he was anxious to make common cause with the moderate Dissenters, Burke described Leland’s View of the Principal Deistic Writers (1755–6), a larger work into which the Reflections on Bolingbroke had been incorporated, as the best defence of Christianity against the deists (Speech on the Toleration Bill, 17 Mar. 1773: WS ii. 387). Another of Bolingbroke’s posthumous antagonists was his old enemy William Warburton (1698–1779). Clerics such as Leland and Warburton had vested interests at stake.74 Even a moderate philosophe such as Montesquieu, however, with no professional or personal commitment to Christianity, could deplore Bolingbroke’s attack on religion. Thanking Warburton for a copy of his View of Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophy, he asked: ‘Quel peut être le motif d’attaquer la religion révélée en Angleterre? On l’y a tellement purgée de tout préjugé destructeur qu’elle n’y peut faire de mal & qu’elle y peut faire, au contraire, une infinité de biens.’ Why destroy these useful by-products of religion merely to establish ‘une vérité purement spéculative’?75 For Burke, as for Montesquieu, the practical good of society counted for far more than any merely speculative truth. Burke’s was the only attack on Bolingbroke to use irony and imitation.76 He parodies instead of arguing; and rather than meeting Bolingbroke directly, he transfers the argument from religion to society. As a deist, Bolingbroke believed in a ‘natural’ religion, accessible to reason and available to all peoples. ‘Revealed’ religions he regarded as so many cheats and impostures. Bolingbroke consistently portrays priests as self-interested exploiters of human credulity. In the Vindication, Burke pretends to argue the superiority of ‘natural’ to ‘artificial’ society, turning on society the invective that Bolingbroke had directed against religion. The evils of ‘Political Society’ are placed in a far worse light than the inconveniences of the 73 H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London, 1970), 297–308; Bolingbroke’s Works is no. 123 in the Sale Catalogue of E.B.’s library. 74 Warburton’s reply is A View of Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophy (London, 1754–5). Another clerical antagonist was Charles Bulkley (1719–97), a Baptist minister, whose Notes on the Philosophical Writings of Lord Bolingbroke (London, 1755) also appears in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue (no. 41). 75 Montesquieu to Warburton, May 1754 (?), in Œuvres complètes, ed. André Masson (Paris, 1950–5), iii. 1509–10. E.B. reprinted an English translation of this letter in the Annual Register (1760), 189 bis. 76 One other pamphleteer used a fictional device. In the anonymous Admonitions from the Dead, in Epistles to the Living (London, 1754), the first two letters purport to be from Bolingbroke to Hume. No attempt is made to imitate Bolingbroke’s style.

84 getting started, 1750‒1757 ‘State of Nature’. Kings, conquerors, politicians, and lawyers: all are savaged as the parasites of civil society. In hardly more than a hundred pages, the pseudo-Bolingbroke manages a breathless survey of world history, a critical analysis of the different forms of government, a biting indictment of the perversities of the law, and a withering exposure of the social inequalities of wealth and power. Bolingbroke addressed his Letters on the Study and Use of History to a young nobleman. The epistolary form is not, however, used to create a sense of intimate conversation. The manner is authoritative, the point of view Olympian. Letters I–V outline his philosophy of history; Letters VI– VIII survey European history since the sixteenth century. Burke imitated both the form and the tone. The title-page of the first edition of the Vindication proclaimed it to be ‘a letter to Lord **** by a Late Noble Writer’. The fiction was continued in a prefatory ‘Advertisement’. This pretence of authenticity parodies a device often used by the writers of epistolary novels: a claim that a collection of letters has come into the hands of their ‘editor’, in more or less mysterious circumstances, a device popularized by the success of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). According to the Critical Review, the Vindication was much talked about, and the pretence that it really was Bolingbroke’s gained some credence.77 The style mimics what, in the preface to the second edition, Burke called ‘that rapid Torrent of an impetuous and overbearing Eloquence, and the Variety of rich Imagery for which that Writer is justly admired’ (WS i. 136). Here is a sample of Burke’s parody: I need not enlarge on these Torrents of silent and inglorious Blood which have glutted the thirsty Sands of Afric, or discoloured the polar Snow, or fed the savage Forests of America for so many Ages of continual War . . . shall I inflame the Account by these general Massacres which have devoured whole Cities and Nations; these wasting Pestilences, those consuming Famines, and all those Furies that follow in the Train of War? I have no need to exaggerate; and I have purposely avoided a Parade of Eloquence on this Occasion. (150‒1)

Some passages read so much like Bolingbroke that, in isolation, they might easily be mistaken for his. Especially convincing is the histrionic leave-taking: You are, my LORD, but just entering into the World; I am going out of it. I have played long enough to be heartily tired of the Drama. . . . I quit it without a Sigh, and submit to the Sovereign Order without murmuring. The nearer we approach to the Goal of Life, the better we begin to understand the true Value of our Existence, and the real Weight of our Opinions. We set out much in love with both; but we leave much behind us as we advance. We first throw away the Tales along with the Rattles of our Nurses; those of the Priest keep their Hold a little longer; 77

Critical Review, 1 (June 1756), 420.

getting started, 1750‒1757

85

those of our Governors the longest of all. But the Passions which prop these Opinions are withdrawn one after another; and the cool Light of Reason at the Setting of our Life, shews us what a false Splendor played upon these Objects during our more sanguine Seasons. (183–4)

This eloquent peroration catches the authentic note of Bolingbroke’s pose of lofty philosophical detachment.78 The anonymous Vindication was well received. All the reviews were positive, especially about the quality of the writing. Not all understood Burke’s intentions. The Monthly Review recognized the ‘real design’.79 The Critical Review saw the parody but was uncertain about the book’s purpose.80 The Gentleman’s Magazine, however, missed the irony, as did the reviewer in the Journal encyclopédique.81 No wonder that, in America, the Vindication was at first believed to be an authentic work of Bolingbroke.82 Enough readers missed the point for Burke to explain the irony in a preface added to the second edition (1757), much as Swift had done in the ‘Apology’ prefixed to the fifth edition of A Tale of a Tub (1710). Readers who missed the irony were not as obtuse as may be thought. Burke’s imitation of Bolingbroke was so close as almost to defeat his purpose. Richard Hurd (1720–1808) expressed this view in a letter to a fellow clergyman. An ironist, he argued, ‘should take care by a constant exaggeration to make the ridicule shine through the Imitation. Whereas this Vindication is everywhere enforc’d, not only in the language, and on the principles of L. Bol., but with so apparent, or rather so real an earnestness, that half his purpose is sacrificed to the other.’83 Hurd was right to be disturbed. Daniel Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) vexed many of his fellow Nonconformists, who misunderstood the irony. The protean Defoe could enter so completely into the mind and rhetoric of a High-Church extremist as to create an all-too-convincing imitation. Burke thought the arguments advanced by his pseudo-Bolingbroke patently absurd. Others took them in deadly earnest. By the 1790s, William Godwin (1756–1836) could warm to the heady rhetoric, though perfectly aware that Burke had meant the tract ironically: ‘the evils of the existing political institutions are displayed with 78 Typical of Bolingbroke’s Senecan pose are passages in the ‘Reflections upon Exile’ and ‘A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism’; repr. in Works (London, 1844), i. 181–200, ii. 352–71. 79 Monthly Review, 15 (July 1756), 18–22. The reviewer was John Ward (1679?–1758), Dissenter and an antiquarian; Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review, First Series, 1749–1789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford, 1934). 80 Critical Review, 1 (June 1756), 420–6. The reviewer was Thomas Francklin (1721–84), professor of Greek at Cambridge; Derek Roper, ‘Smollett’s “Four Gentlemen”: The First Contributors to the Critical Review’, Review of English Studies, 10 (1959), 38–44. 81 Gentleman’s Magazine, 26 (May 1756), 253–4; Journal encyclopédique (1756), 1: 75–83. 82 So Thomas Hutchinson recalled, on 27 Nov. 1776; Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, ed. Peter Orlando Hutchinson (London, 1883–6), ii. 118. 83 Hurd to William Mason, 16 June 1756, in Correspondence of Richard Hurd and William Mason, ed. Leonard Whibley (Cambridge, 1932), 28–30.

86 getting started, 1750‒1757 incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence, while the intention of the author was to show that these evils were to be considered as trivial’.84 In 1796, when Burke was a vehement advocate of all-out war against Jacobin France, the Vindication was reprinted to embarrass him, with a preface lamenting that ‘a man who once could feel the agonizing horrors which attend on War, and feeling, could describe them with so rich and masterly a pencil’ should now ‘contribute to swell this mighty sea of slaughter’.85 Godwin and the author of the 1796 preface had in mind such passages as this: I suppose that there are in Great-Britain upwards of an hundred thousand People employed in Lead, Tin, Iron, Copper, and Coal Mines; these unhappy Wretches scarce ever see the Light of the Sun; they are buried in the Bowels of the Earth; there they work at a severe and dismal Task, without the least Prospect of being delivered from it; they subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of Fare; they have their Health miserably impaired, and their Lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close Vapour of these malignant Minerals. (WS i. 177)

Here indeed are ‘evils’ exposed with all the ‘lustre of eloquence’. Burke relies on his readers sharing his belief that such inequalities are part of the ineluctable nature of things. In the 1750s, most did. By the 1790s, however, with the spread of more egalitarian notions about social justice, the passage could easily be read as a persuasive plea for workers’ rights.86 The Vindication is reminiscent of Swift as well as Defoe. As in Gulliver’s Travels, the irony is shifting and variable. Sometimes the pseudoBolingbroke persona voices the precise opposite of Burke’s view. An example is scornful rejection of the ‘argument from consequences’: ‘Error, and not Truth of any kind, is dangerous . . . to know whether any Proposition be true or false, it is a preposterous Method to examine it by its apparent Consequences’ (WS i. 137). Only ‘Bigots and Enthusiasts . . . argue against a fair Discussion of popular Prejudices, because, say they, tho’ they would be found without any reasonable Support, yet the Discovery might be productive of the most dangerous Consequences’ (139). This is exactly Montesquieu’s objection to Bolingbroke. Such arguments from consequence as are here ironically decried would be powerful weapons in Burke’s rhetorical armoury. He often seeks to cast (in a favourite metaphor) a ‘politic, well-wrought veil’ over subjects where the naked truth might be prejudicial to the public good (Reflections: viii. 69). Elsewhere in the Vindication, the persona voices Burke’s own indignation. The satire on the law is 84 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), ed. F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto, 1946), i. 13 n. 85 A Vindication of Natural Society (London, [1796]), pp. iii–v. Todd, 3k. 86 Its continuing intellectual vitality is attested by the recent Russian translation (with Robert Wallace’s Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence, 1761) in a volume of Egalitaristskie pamflety v Anglii serediny XVIII v. (Moscow, 1991).

getting started, 1750‒1757 87 an example (i. 172–7). Like Swift (as in Gulliver’s Travels, iv. v), Burke targets the absurd forms and technicalities of the law, the superstitious reverence for formal minutiae above substantive justice. Though the chief target of the Vindication is Bolingbroke, Burke alludes in the preface to others who have been ‘pleased to dignify with the Name of Philosophy’ and to deliver ‘in a specious Manner, and in a Stile above the common’ ideas of the same kind (WS i. 134). Rousseau (1712–78) and Voltaire (1694–1778) are the most eminent culprits. In 1756, Burke could hardly have written an ironic panegyric on the ‘state of nature’ without glancing at Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1755).87 The construction of an outrageously paradoxical argument in favour of an obvious absurdity parodies Rousseau. In the grand and confident sweep of some of the narrative passages, Burke mimics the rapid movement, Olympian point of view, and dogmatic judgement characteristic of Voltaire as a historian, and especially of the early chapters of the work now known as the Essai sur les mœurs. In the last item in the Note-Book, Burke had already questioned Voltaire’s credentials as a historian, singling out his habitual pose in the Essai of omniscience about the most doubtful or obscure events or periods.88 Burke’s view of history was close to that of Montesquieu, whose Enlightened conservatism represented much that he valued: reverence for tradition, critical analysis restrained within salutary limits, an appreciation of the variety and complexity of human nature and human societies. Montesquieu’s was the Enlightenment creed to which Burke could subscribe with fewest reservations. Rousseau and Voltaire, on the other hand, lacked respect for the opinions or values of others, and saw only the dead weight of the past, not its wisdom. The Vindication is prescient of Burke’s lifelong antagonism towards any attempt to remake the fabric of human nature and society without regard to history and tradition. Seen from a different perspective, it is the culmination of his youthful delight in parody. The last of his juvenilia, the Vindication is also the first shot in his long campaign on behalf of religion and civilization. Burke’s most ambitious literary project of these years was his Philosophical Enquiry. Though not published until 1757, according to his own account it was finished in 1753. A passage describing the physiology of love may derive directly from his own experience: ‘The head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently 87 Richard B. Sewall, ‘Rousseau’s Second Discourse in England from 1755 to 1762’, Philological Quarterly, 17 (1938), 97–114. 88 Note-Book, 118–20. Voltaire’s Essai has a complicated publishing history. The two passages singled out for criticism in E.B.’s Note-Book are from ‘De la Chine’, first printed as part of a ‘Nouveau plan d’une histoire de l’esprit humain’, in the Mercure de France, Apr. 1745. E.B. probably read the ‘Nouveau plan’ in one of the several English printings between 1752 and 1755; Georges Bengesco, Voltaire: Bibliographie de ses œuvres (Paris, 1882–5), i. 327–31.

88 getting started, 1750‒1757 with an inclination to the object, the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a low 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.’89 The passage illustrates Burke’s theory that ‘beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system’. Anticipating scepticism, he admits that these are the symptoms of an extreme conjunction of love and beauty. Yet his confident denial that the picture is overdrawn, and the account of the ‘inward sense of melting and languor’, strongly suggest experience rather than observation. When Burke met the Nugents, the doctor’s daughter Jane (1734–1812) was 17 or 18, Burke about 22.90 Nothing is known of when they fell in love or about their courtship. Indeed, Jane Burke is one of the enigmas of her husband’s life. Though their marriage lasted for forty years, they were rarely apart, and so almost never wrote to each other. Their private life remains inviolate. Jane was omnipresent but unobtrusive. So far as the record goes, she appears to have been content with the subordinate, domestic role assigned to women in a long tradition that extends from Pericles to the nineteenth century. According to Pericles, the greatest glory that a woman could achieve was to have neither good things nor bad ones said about her. In this view, ‘the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history’.91 In 1766, Burke described her as ‘a quiet woman, confined to her family Cares and affections’ (C ii. 130). Burke’s marriage was a love match. Shackleton described Jane 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 & inclination, which guided his choice to an agreeable Object, with whom he promised himself happiness in a married State’.92 Burke was not a particularly eligible bachelor. He was not handsome, had no visible means of supporting a wife, no obvious sources of patronage, and only the most uncertain prospects. His personality must have won her, as hers captivated him. The qualities that made her so attractive are partly recorded in two pen-portraits written before the marriage. One is by Edmund, the other by Will.93 These pieces, though indispensable, need careful sifting and interpretation. Lovers are not reliable delineators of their loved ones, and their best friends are hardly more so. Both portraits are highly idealized, manifestly literary exercises in the tradition of formal ‘character’ writing. In this tradition, general, ‘typical’ features receive more Philosophical Enquiry, iv. xix. 149. Nugent also had a son, John (1737–1813; usually called ‘Jack’), who became a Surveyor of Customs in London and remained on the fringe of the extended Burke family. 91 Thucydides, 2. 45; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), book 6, ch. 3. 92 YB OF 5. 332; Samuels, Early Life, 404. 93 ‘The Character of ——’ (by E.B.; Note-Book, 52–4); ‘A Character of the Same Lady Drawn by a Friend’ (55–7). 89 90

getting started, 1750‒1757 89 attention than individualizing particularities. Moreover, certain qualities were conventionally ascribed to women, who were commonly described either as the type of the ‘good’ woman (quiet and submissive) or as her antitype, the noisy, domineering ‘bad’ woman. The portraits of Jane are both idealized depictions of the ‘good’. With these caveats, however, some general features of Jane’s character can be deduced even through what Johnson called ‘the mist of panegyrick’.94 Jane was neither a conventional beauty nor an intellectual. The beauty that Burke saw in her came from ‘sweetness of Temper, Benevolence, Innocence and Sensibility’. Her features were animated and expressive rather than regular. Nothing is said about her reading or knowledge. The strength of her understanding was evidenced by her not saying foolish things, rather than by saying witty or wise ones. She possessed an intuitive critical faculty, ‘a certain sagacity’, rather than stores of information. More positively, she was demure, even grave, retiring and quiet, formed ‘not to be the admiration of everybody, but the happiness of one’. With a ‘steady and firm mind’ directed by ‘the goodness of her heart’, her character was genuine, not put on for show, with a ‘Steddiness in her heart’ that might be mistaken for stubbornness. These are the qualities, the strength and the depth of character, that sustained her through forty difficult years of marriage to a highly emotional and volatile public man who was not infrequently the butt of ridicule and contempt. Though no talker, she was a good listener, especially when the conversation turned to ‘such serious Topicks as most women think exclude them the Company’.95 Burke needed an intelligent companion who could share his ideas and enthusiasms, listen to his talk, and be willing to submerge her identity in his. If not an intellectual, Jane was highly competent in managing more than domestic business. In later years, she would keep Burke’s voluminous papers in order, and on her devolved much of the responsibility for the family finances. With her, he could talk about all his multifarious interests and concerns, confident of a sympathetic and intelligent response yet certain not to be contradicted. The length of the courtship is unknown. Burke ends his sketch with a despairing flourish: ‘Who can know her, and himself, and entertain much hope?’96 If this is more than a rhetorical convention, it suggests a courtship of some duration, if not as long as the five years or so that the couple had known each other when they were finally married. The ceremony was celebrated on 12 March 1757.97 Burke’s marriage, and his close friendships 94 ‘Life of Cowley’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), i. 1. Johnson was criticizing the generality of Thomas Sprat’s ‘character’ of Cowley, an example of the tradition in which E.B. and W.B. were writing. 95 All quotations in this paragraph are from the two sketches in Note-Book, 52–7. 96 Ibid. 54. 97 The date is known from the inscription on Jane’s wedding-ring. Reported by its then owner, I. Moreton Wood, to Notes and Queries, 6th ser. 5 (8 Apr. 1882), 274–5. No record of the wedding has been

90 getting started, 1750‒1757 with his father-in-law and with Will, gave him the family that his emotional nature demanded. In 1758, the domestic circle was enlarged and enlivened by the birth of two children, Richard (1758–94) on 9 February and Christopher (1758–62?) on 14 December.98 Meanwhile, less than a month after the marriage appeared the book which established Burke’s reputation in the literary world: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke cannot have expected to support a wife on the proceeds of such writing. He had, however, other prospects. He had already (in February 1757) signed a contract for a history of England; the plan of the Annual Register may also have been formed. Even so, what enabled the couple to marry was probably Dr Nugent’s decision to move from Bath to London, a migration that may have been undertaken to provide a home which Jane and Edmund could share. Home life and domestic comfort would always be important to Burke. At home, whether in London or at the country estate which he acquired in 1768, he was always assured of a refuge from the vexations and frustrations of public life. found, though in the same issue of Notes and Queries, R. E. Peach claimed that ‘The marriage, in fact, took place in London, and I have amongst my notes a record of when and at what church, but at this moment I cannot lay my hand on it’ (274). Other correspondents (Henry G. Hope and Moreton Wood, 274–5) proposed Bath. Basil O’Connell reported a family tradition that the marriage took place in Paris; Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 61 (1956), 117. Paris is most unlikely. The journey would have been a needless expense, while in a letter to E.B. of 25 Sept. 1768, W.B. describes Paris as though E.B. had never been there (NRO A. xiii. 10). 98 Their dates of birth were recorded in a family Bible (C i. 136 n. 1).

A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY ,

1757

91

4 A Philosophical Enquiry, 1757

1 Burke’s earliest ambitions were literary. Of the various projects that he undertook during the 1750s, by far the most important is the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Having established his reputation, for several years it constituted his chief claim to distinction. Despite the neglect of professional philosophers, the Enquiry has always attracted the ‘common reader’. If subsequently overshadowed by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, it remains the next most widely read of Burke’s writings and his most substantial achievement outside politics.1 Though a youthful work, it was neither rapidly written nor rushed into print. In 1789, Burke told Edmond Malone that the subject ‘had been long rolling in his thoughts before he wrote his book, having been used from the time he was in college to speculate on the topics which form the subjects of it’.2 Several passages in the undergraduate letters confirm this. After spending part of a vacation with Shackleton, Burke explained his feelings on parting: ‘I cant call what I then felt and do in part feel now, directly grief. It was rather A kind of melting tenderness tinged with sorrow’ (Feb. 1747: C i. 78–9). In the Enquiry, he likewise distinguishes ‘grief’ from pain on the grounds that it is willingly endured and can even be mildly pleasurable (i. v. 37). In 1745, Burke attended a course of public lectures by John Taylor the oculist (1703–72).3 Though he thought Taylor ‘an arrant Quack’ (C i. 40), these lectures could have started him thinking about the physiology of perception, and about the experiences of the blind, which provide important evidence for his theory (v. v. 168–9). One of the more technical 1 The best modern edition of the Enquiry is by J. T. Boulton (London, 1958; reprinted with revised but abbreviated introduction, Oxford, 1987). Boulton’s critical apparatus makes E.B.’s changes and additions easy to identify. In this chapter, references to the body of the Philosophical Enquiry are given in the text, indicating the part, chapter, and page number in Boulton’s edition. Quotations from the 1757 and 1759 prefaces are so identified; the ‘Introduction on Taste’ is cited as ‘Taste’, with page references to Boulton. The French translation by Baldine Saint Girons, Recherche philosophique sur l’origine de nos idées du sublime et du beau (Paris, 1990), also has valuable notes. 2 James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare (London, 1860), 154. 3 Taylor was much ridiculed in Dublin. E.B. wrote an ironic panegyric of him in verse, ‘On Doctor Taylor’ (Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 1923), 85–7).

92 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 passages in the Enquiry is an account of how the eye sees (iv. xvi. 145–6). Another early stimulus was the Greek treatise On the Sublime, then attributed to Longinus, which Burke read in college. Too impatient to share his enthusiasm to wait for a second-hand copy, Burke bought a new one to send to Shackleton (Jan. and Mar. 1747: C i. 78, 86). The actual writing of the Enquiry probably began in London. Neither Dennis nor Shackleton, his closest Dublin friends, was acquainted with the book before it came out.4 Burke told his readers that ‘it is four years now since this enquiry was finished’ (1757 preface), that is, in 1753.5 A passage that draws on a book published in November 1754 is explicitly identified as an addition (v. v. 168). Burke wanted to assert his independence of two or three recent works on allied subjects which would have been known to many of his readers. One was the Analysis of Beauty, Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (1753) by William Hogarth (1697– 1764). Burke added a passage to the second edition of the Enquiry in which he both claims support from, and disagrees with, Hogarth (iii. xv. 115–16). Letters Concerning Taste (1755), by John Gilbert Cooper (1723–69), though written with the gusto of the enthusiast rather than in the spirit of philosophical enquiry, also has points of contact with Burke’s work. The Traité des sensations (1754) by the abbé de Condillac (1715–80), which advances an even more sensationist model of the mind than Burke’s, was not yet available in English. A summary of its argument, however, was prefixed to An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1756), the translation of Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Paris, 1746). The seminal work in the philosophical tradition to which Burke’s Enquiry belongs is John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke sought to explain, in an empirical yet systematic way, how the human mind works. His key term is ‘ideas’. These ideas are both the objects of perception (or the means by which the mind derives its knowledge of external reality) and the units on which the mind performs its operations. No ideas are innate.6 All derive ultimately from sense impressions, more or less modified by the internal processes of the mind. Locke’s Essay, and especially its denial of innate ideas, aroused controversy and opposition in 4 E.B.’s letter of 10 Aug. 1757, sent with a presentation copy of the book, implies this (C i. 123), as does Dennis’s letter to Shackleton of Mar. 1758 (YB OF 10. 213). This evidence counts against the conjectural identification of either of two of E.B.’s lost student compositions as early drafts of the Enquiry. (1) ‘my own Scheme’, mentioned on 21 Feb. 1747 (82), and linked to the Enquiry by Samuels (Early Life, 115) and by Boulton (introduction, p. xviii) is more likely a poem; Copeland (82 n. 1) identifies it with the lost poem on the Blackwater. (2) ‘a piece—an odd one’ mentioned in the joint letter of E.B. and Dennis to Shackleton (29 May 1747; 92) sounds comic or burlesque rather than philosophical, though Samuels (Early Life, 141) and Copeland (92 n. 6) both connect it with the Enquiry. 5 To Shackleton, E.B. wrote more vaguely that ‘it lay by me for a good while, and I at last ventured it out’ (10 Aug. 1757: C i. 123). 6 E.B. accepted this in principle, though in his ‘History of England’ he speaks of the idea of the immortality of the soul as ‘in a manner inherent in our nature’ (WS i. 352).


1757 93 the 1690s. By Burke’s time, its principles had been absorbed into the body of received opinion. Later writers might disagree with Locke in detail, but they built on his foundation. The problem Burke set himself was to explain how the mind receives and responds to the categories of ideas that he calls ‘the sublime’ and ‘the beautiful’. Though he never offers a formal account of human cognition, and his use of technical terms is far from rigorous or consistent, a reasonably coherent picture of his model of the mind emerges. His psychology is recognizably Lockean. The initially unstocked human mind is furnished by the senses, through which knowledge of external reality is obtained. They give rise to ‘ideas’ in the mind, and these ideas are in turn capable of exciting ‘passions’. This process, from stimulus to idea to passion, operates with a high degree of uniformity in all human minds. But within the mind itself, ‘imagination’ and ‘judgement’ are also at work. Their operations, much less regular than those of the senses, also give rise to passions, and are responsible for most variation in aesthetic response. Burke was familiar with Locke’s Essay from his student days. Michael Kearney heard from a classmate that Burke ‘always answered remarkably well in Locke’.7 Other influences can be traced, though Burke is sparing of references and makes no parade of his reading. Occasionally, he acknowledges the borrowing of an anecdote or an example (iv. iv. 132–4, xv. 144). When he differs on a point of detail with a writer with whom he is in general agreement, he names the author as a gesture of respect. Thus Locke, the authority most frequently cited, is mentioned just four times, twice to dissent from him.8 Despite acknowledging Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1670– 1742) as an ‘excellent judge’ (ii. iv. 61), Burke cites him only when they differ. More fundamental disagreements are unreferenced. For example, Burke rejects association as the primary principle of aesthetic response (iv. ii. 130–1), without naming either Hume or David Hartley (1705–57), the most prominent members of the school. Burke’s use of his predecessors is thus not always easy to trace.9 The difficulty of identifying Burke’s ‘sources’ is illustrated by the case of Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). In a letter of 1744, Burke echoes Michael Kearney to Edmond Malone, 12 Jan. 1799; Bodl. MS Malone 39, fo. 23. Since Locke’s Essay was not a set text for undergraduates in E.B.’s day, the reference is probably to Jean Le Clerc’s Logica, sive ars ratiocinandi (1692), one of the second-year logic texts. William Molyneaux told Locke that Le Clerc’s Logica ‘has little Extraordinary but what he borrows from you’; 22 Dec. 1692, in Locke, Correspondence, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford, 1976–89), iv. 601. David Berman places E.B. at the end of an Irish philosophical tradition that developed from Locke; ‘Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Irish Philosophy’ and ‘The Culmination and Causation of Irish Philosophy’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 64 (1982), 148–65, 257–79. 8 i. iii. 34 and iv. xiv. 143 (dissenting); ‘Taste’, 17, and v. iii. 165 (in support). 9 E.B.’s Sale Catalogue offers only limited help. It includes the 1753 edition of Locke’s Essay (no. 294), and the three-volume 1751 edition of Locke’s Works (no. 413). The only Hutcheson title is the System of Moral Philosophy (1755; no. 339). Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749) is no. 265. Nothing by Berkeley is listed, and no philosophical work by Hume. 7

94 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 Hutcheson’s definition of ‘beauty’, which ‘consists in Variety and uniformity and is that not abundantly shewn in the Motion and form of the Heavnly Bodies? What grander Idea can the mind of man form to itself . . . ?’ (June 1744: C i. 18).10 The passage confirms how early Burke had begun to ‘speculate’ on the subject. By the time he came to write the Enquiry, however, in which beauty and grandeur are opposites, Burke had rejected both Hutcheson’s notion of beauty and the ‘internal senses’ which Hutcheson posited to explain moral and aesthetic responses. Yet Burke follows him on two important questions: final causes and the association of ideas. Attributing final causes (for which Locke had little use) to various specific elements of human consciousness, Hutcheson saw purpose in the passions. ‘If we have selfish Passions for our own Preservation’, he argued, ‘we have also publick Passions which may engage us into vigorous and laborious Services to Offspring, Friends, Communities, Countries.’11 Burke uses the same taxonomy (i. vi. 38). He also followed Hutcheson on the question of association. Hutcheson regarded association as a secondary principle, and thought that associations could be unlearned.12 Other philosophers, notably Hume and Hartley, placed greater and more positive emphasis on the role of association. For Hume, indeed, association was the mind’s typical method of transition from one idea to another. Burke could not altogether avoid appealing to association.13 Like Hutcheson, however, he sought to minimize its importance by stressing associations that operate uniformly rather than those that are peculiar to an individual. Thus Locke had argued that darkness is not terrible in itself, but only becomes so by association. Children, for example, are conditioned to fear the dark by hearing stories about hobgoblins and other creatures that the dark conceals.14 Burke, on the contrary, derives the association from a real and universal experience. Darkness is a state of perpetual danger and insecurity, in which we feel vulnerable and therefore fearful (iv. xiv. 143). He also advances a physiological explanation: that darkness is painful in itself, because of the way the eyes react to it (iv. xvi. 145–6). The Enquiry is far from a synthesis of earlier ideas. An avowed empiri10 Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725; 2nd edn. London, 1726), 20–1, is the probable source of E.B.’s remarks. The idea of beauty as ‘variety in uniformity’ is a leitmotiv in Hutcheson’s Inquiry. E.B.’s letter continues in a rhapsodic style that may be intended as a parody of Shaftesbury. Whether meant seriously or not, the letter shows E.B.’s familiarity with current modes of aesthetic discourse. 11 An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (London, 1728), 54, 5–6. 12 An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 74–5, 83–5, 93–4. 13 Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England: A History of a Psychological Method in English Criticism (The Hague, 1970), 135–49. Boulton notes a probable unacknowledged borrowing from Hartley (ii. viii. 73 n. 28). 14 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ii. xxxiii. 10, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 397–8. This example was disseminated through Addison’s use of it in the Spectator, no. 110 (6 July 1711), ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965), i. 453–6.


1757 95 cist, Burke took many current psychological and aesthetic notions, tested them against his own experience and observation, fashioned them into a new explanatory hypothesis, extended the theory as far as he could, and marshalled the evidence in its favour. In principle at least, the method of the Enquiry is scientific. Burke offers his theory as a working hypothesis, opens it to challenge, and claims at least the merit of posing problems, if not solving them. Such studies have their value, he asserts, even if they are not successful. If enquiry ‘does not make us knowing, it may make us modest’, he affirms in the preface to the second edition: ‘by looking into physical causes our minds are opened and enlarged; and in this pursuit whether we take or whether we lose our game, the chace is certainly of service’. Burke based his Enquiry on his observation and experience as well as on his reading. Noting the lack of ‘any thing like an exact theory of our passions, or a knowledge of their genuine sources’, he outlines what he takes to be the proper sources for such a theory. ‘From a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions; and from a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body’, careful investigation should discover the sources of those human passions (1757 preface). The principles that govern the whole Enquiry are here adumbrated. Burke sought to found his philosophy, as Montesquieu had done, on (in a favourite phrase) ‘la nature des choses’.15 This respect for the actual, for the present as the product of the past, divides conservatives such as Montesquieu and Burke from their liberal and radical opponents. ‘Commençons donc par écarter tous les faits,’ Rousseau urged, ‘car ils ne touchent point à la question.’16 In the 1770s and later, Burke deprecated enquiries into origins as at best unnecessary and at worst destructive. In the 1750s, ‘philosophical’ enquiry was still untainted with revolutionary politics. Burke’s mind was formed at a time when the empirical method was still thought capable of reinforcing, rather than undercutting, traditional beliefs. A scientific world-picture could still sit comfortably within a theological framework. With an a priori belief that the world made sense, he thought that empirical investigation would help to explain the details of the mechanism. For all his avowed empiricism, Burke took for granted the uniformity of the ‘laws of nature’ and of the human passions they governed. The hypothesis of uniformity is crucial to his theory. He speaks with respect of the ‘universal voice of mankind’ (iv. xix. 150). The ‘we’ of the Enquiry is thus 15 L’Esprit des lois, preface, i. i, and passim. E.B. to Sir Charles Bingham, 30 Oct. 1773 (C ii. 475); E.B. to Charles O’Hara, 26 July 1775 (iii. 181–2). The Reflections affords several examples (WS viii. 94, 259, 280). 16 Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755); Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris, 1959–95), iii. 132.

96 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 more than a rhetorical device to forge a bond between author and audience. It signals an appeal to common experience as a surer guide to the workings of the human mind than the sophisticated response of the educated élite. Far from claiming unique or special status for his own experiences, Burke expects readers to recognize them as similar to theirs. Only so far as his readers empathize with them do his first-person statements validate his theory, grounded as it is on ordinary experience rather than abstract ratiocination. Burke cast the Enquiry into the philosophical form promised by its title. Following the conventions of the genre, he divided his text into numbered parts and subsections, and supplied recapitulations, source citations, and cross-references. Yet the paraphernalia of structural divisions and didactic iteration do not make the Enquiry an impersonal book. For the first time, Burke wrote without a persona, and made direct use of his personal experience. His earlier works, from Punch’s Petition to the Vindication of Natural Society, had all been written from behind a mask. For the most part, however, Burke’s first-person statements are meant to provide evidence for his system, not to illustrate the quirks or oddities of his own mind. Thus he sometimes reports the results of introspection, inviting the reader to replicate the experiment: ‘Nor is it either in real or fictitious distresses, our immunity from them which produces our delight; in my own mind I can discover nothing like it’ (i. xv. 48). Only a few of Burke’s first-person statements invite biographical speculation. In one passage, Burke seems to recall his first, depressing years in London: ‘I remember to have frequented a certain place, every day for a long time together; and I may truly say, that so far from finding pleasure in it, I was affected with a sort of weariness and disgust; I came, I went, I returned without pleasure; yet if by any means I passed by the usual time of my going thither, I was remarkably uneasy, and was not quiet till I had got into my old track’ (iii. v. 103). Was this some coffee-house, perhaps the Grecian, close to the Temple, which he used as a postal address in 1757, and where he habitually sought to kill time and thought?17 A passage about fathers and grandfathers (iii. x. 111), which would be revealing if autobiographical, is explicitly attributed to ‘an ingenious friend’ (Will Burke?). Having lived with Catholics, Anglicans, and Quakers, Burke knew better than most the difficulty of distinguishing ‘natural’ from learned responses. This experience might have led him to a theory of extreme relativism, such as Hume’s. Instead, and perhaps in conscious reaction to the diversity, he sought some principle of underlying uniformity. In part, this reflects his search for origins. Locke had foreseen that anthropology might help to explain the origins of government and society, for once ‘all the World was 17 The conjecture is Dixon Wecter’s; ‘The Missing Years in Edmund Burke’s Biography’, PMLA 53 (1938), 1119 n. 48.


1757 97 America, and more so than it is now’. Burke likewise thought that to penetrate beneath the layers of acquired and learned responses was the way to uncover the ‘natural’ workings of the mind. The reactions of the uneducated provide crucial evidence for his theories. His belief in the affective power of poetry, for example, was founded on his observation of its greater popular appeal (ii. iv. 61). The idea that something is ‘natural’ plays an important part not only in the Enquiry, but in Burke’s later political writings. The Reflections provides notable examples (WS viii. 125, 131). Burke regarded untutored feelings as, in general, a more reliable guide than abstract thought. A man whose ‘mind is elevated above the vulgar’, he confided to a notebook, ‘knows his reason very well and therefore he is suspicious of it. He trusts his passions more on some occasions; he reins them, but does not fetter them. A man who considers his nature rightly will be diffident of any reasonings that carry him out of the ordinary roads of Life; Custom is to be regarded with great deference especially if it be an universal Custom; even popular notions are not always to be laughed at.’19 Thus ‘ignorant country people and barbarous nations’, relying upon experience rather than theories, are often good judges of natural phenomena such as the weather.20 ‘A man is never in greater danger of being wholly wrong’, Burke concludes, ‘than when he advances far in the road of refinement.’21 In the Enquiry, however far he travels along that road, his frequent appeals to the opinions of ‘the vulgar’ show that their support was more than a rhetorical affectation. The Enquiry illustrates Burke’s respect for the ‘natural’, uncultivated responses of ordinary people. Feeling is more reliable than reason: ‘It is, I own, not uncommon to be wrong in theory and right in practice; and we are happy that it is so. Men often act right from their feelings, who afterwards reason but ill on them from principle’ (i. xix. 53). This is a characteristic Burkean theme. In his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), for example, he notes that ‘it is very rare indeed for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their speculation upon the cause of it’ (WS ii. 256). The escape clause allows Burke to explain away the errors and delusions of ‘the people’, when their speculations did not coincide with his own. By the 1790s, he had developed his early insight into a philosophy of political conservatism that valued feeling and instinct above reason and calculation. He never lost his faith in custom or his distrust of theory. Burke differs his predecessors in founding his theory on a theological belief. ‘Whenever the wisdom of our Creator intended that we should be 18

18 19 20 21

Two Treatises of Government (1690), ii. 49, ed. Peter Laslett (2nd edn. Cambridge, 1967), 319. Note-Book, 90. Account of the European Settlements in America (London, 1757), ii. 94. Note-Book, 90.

98 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 affected with any thing,’ he asserts, ‘he did not confide the execution of his design to the languid and precarious operation of our reason; but he endued it with powers and properties that prevent the understanding, and even the will, which seizing upon the senses and imagination is ready either to join with them or to oppose them’ (iii. vii. 107). His purpose in the Enquiry was to discover the laws that govern the operations of the mind. His fear was that subjective theories, such as those of Hutcheson and Hume, would lead to moral relativism and so undermine religion. The Enquiry is at bottom a theological work. Burke’s primary interest was not in art, but in how certain ideas are raised in the human mind. These ideas are uniform, he argues, because they reflect providential design. Taste in art varies over time and from one culture to another, so Burke sought more universal sources, such as mountains and darkness. In detecting ‘final causes’ in the natural world and in reading them as evidence of providential design, Burke was following a long tradition. The idea of a ‘final cause’ or the end or purpose for which something is done or made is Aristotelian. In the natural theology of Burke’s day, the recognition of final causes, usually exemplified in more exact correspondences between means and ends than could be expected from chance, provided important evidence for the ‘argument from design’ for the existence of God. Hutcheson, for example, in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, frequently employs this argument. John Gilbert Cooper, writing for a general audience, treats final causes as axiomatic.22 The hypothesis of ‘final causes’ was especially useful to Burke, since it allowed him to incorporate physiological, materialist explanations within a providential framework. Acutely conscious of cultural diversity, Burke was not worried that human morality and values are variable and often subjective. Societies can lose, or retain only faint impressions of, what Providence implanted in their minds. Yet he refused to accept that ‘nature’ could be morally neutral, rather than a wisely ordained system. Here he parts company with Hume, in whose Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (written in the 1750s; posthumously published in 1779), Cleanthes, who articulates a position close to Burke’s, is clearly worsted by the sceptical Philo. Burke’s belief in providential order was a cherished, lifelong conviction. The references to Providence in the Enquiry show him bending his argument to accommodate a favourite thesis. It marks the limits of his empiricism, and provides insights into the workings of his own mind. Thus he interprets the variation of animal anatomy within a basic pattern as evidence of the care with which God designed the universe: ‘Providence to provide in the best manner for their several wants, and to display the riches of his wisdom and goodness in his creation, has worked out of these few and 22 Cooper, Letters Concerning Taste (1755; 3rd edn. London, 1757), 7, 160. A typical passage in Hutcheson is Inquiry, 47–71.


1757 99 similar organs, and members, a diversity hardly short of infinite in their disposition, measures, and relation’ (iii. iv. 98–9). Observing the lack of correlation between the usefulness of an animal and its beauty, Burke accepts the anomaly as inscrutable, speculating that ‘providence did not make even this distinction, but with a view to some great end, though we cannot perceive distinctly what it is, as his wisdom is not our wisdom, nor his ways our ways’ (i. x. 43). This is the spirit in which Burke undertakes his ‘enquiry’. ‘If a discourse on the use of the parts of the body may be considered as an hymn to the Creator,’ he argues, alluding to a well-known Spectator paper, a disquisition on ‘the use of the passions, which are the organs of the mind, cannot be barren of praise to him’ (i. xix. 52).23 Thus by studying the passions, ‘we may be admitted, if I may dare to say so, into the counsels of the Almighty by a consideration of his works’ (i. xix. 52–3). Michael Kearney remembered Burke’s ‘fondness for those writers that deduce the existence & attributes of a supreme being from the works of nature’.24 The validity of this popular ‘argument from design’ was rarely questioned in Burke’s day.25 Burke saw the hand of Providence acting in conformity with his own theory. The symmetry between end and affect proves design: ‘as our Creator has designed we should be united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a proportionable delight’ (i. xiv. 46). In other passages, Burke reads his own active, restless, ambitious nature into the providentially ordained human condition. ‘Imitation’, he argues, ‘is one of the great instruments used by providence in bringing our nature towards its perfection.’ Yet a more powerful principle is required, or mankind would, like the animals, remain doomed to repeat unending and unvarying behavioural cycles. God has accordingly ‘planted in man a sense of ambition, and a satisfaction arising from the contemplation of his excelling his fellows in something deemed valuable amongst them’ (i. xvii. 50). This is not an ‘internal sense’ such as Hutcheson posited. Burke followed Locke’s argument that God had ‘fitted Men with faculties and means, to discover, receive, and retain Truths, according as they are employ’d’.26 Providence, Burke argues, ‘has so ordered it, that a state of rest and inaction, however it may flatter our indolence, should be productive of many inconveniencies’. Indeed, an excess of rest ‘takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is 23 E.B. perhaps had in mind Addison’s Spectator, no. 543 (22 Nov. 1712, ed. Bond, iv. 441–4), though the theme was common. 24 Michael Kearney to Edmond Malone, 3 May 1799, Bodl. MS Malone 39, fo. 29. 25 Hume is an exception. He demolishes the argument in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), i. xi; ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edn. rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 132–48, and (more comprehensively) in his posthumous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779). Despite Hume, the ‘argument from design’ remained popular and respectable well beyond E.B.’s lifetime. William Paley restated it as late as his Natural Theology (1802). 26 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, i. iv. 22, p. 99.

100 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions’, besides rendering the nerves ‘liable to the most horrid convulsions ’ (iv. vi. 134–5). Remembering the miseries of his own first years in England, Burke makes activity a universal therapy. The theological purpose of the Enquiry was noted approvingly by William Dennis. Shackleton, who had not read the Enquiry (though Burke had sent him a copy), asked Dennis how it differed from Hutcheson’s Inquiry. Dennis had read Burke’s book twice and thought it ‘a masterly performance and in a manner entirely new’, a ‘critical’ book that ‘enlarges the Understanding’. Hutcheson’s ‘moral’ (more properly, immoral) book, Dennis explained, founding ethics on ‘the Beauty, Order, fitness and Rectitude of Actions . . . indirectly saps Religion by representing Virtue independant of it’.27 This was a standard objection to the system expounded in the Characteristics (1711) of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713).28 In the seventeenth century, most philosophers (with the notable exception of Hobbes) had argued, and most of their readers had agreed, that the obligations of morality derived from God. In the eighteenth century, as belief in God weakened, philosophers sought alternative foundations for morality. The most influential system was the Characteristics; Hutcheson was one of several later writers who, while plainly influenced by Shaftesbury (a notorious deist), nevertheless regarded themselves as Christians. How far they really were, or could be so, was endlessly debated, as was the more general question of whether morality needed to be based on religion. Dennis plainly regarded Hutcheson as deistic, as Burke did. Without naming Hutcheson, Burke deplores his ‘beauty of virtue’ ethics (iii. xi. 112). Unlike the leaders of the Enlightenment, he remained convinced that religion was a necessary sanction for morality and the firmest foundation on which social order could be built. A mystical passage in the Reflections (WS viii. 148) is his most eloquent expression of this belief.

2 The central argument of Burke’s Enquiry derives from the taxonomy of human ‘passions’ that he outlines in part i. In eighteenth-century usage, a ‘passion’ might be a ‘violent commotion of the Mind’, but in philosophical writing especially it meant more generally an ‘effect caused by external agency’ or ‘susceptibility of effect from external action’.29 Burke thought that the ‘passions’ operated with a high degree of uniformity. He distinDennis to Shackleton, endorsed Mar. 1758, YB OF 10. 213. A recent example at the time of E.B.’s writing was the character ‘Spumosius’, satirized in the Adventurer, no. 129 (29 Jan. 1754), an admirer of Shaftesbury and ‘the beauty of virtue’, who believes that ‘so excellent a creature as man might be kept in order by the silken cords of delicacy and decorum’. 29 These definitions are taken from Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755). 27 28


1757 101 guished between those that are concerned with self-preservation (fear and its cognates), and the more positive emotions (such as love) which make man a social animal. The division into passions of pleasure and passions of pain was a commonplace. Yet not only poets could speak of these mighty opposites as sometimes closely intertwined, as in the Petrarchan paradox of the ‘icy fire’ of love. Locke, for example, had argued that a reduction in pain is pleasant, and a diminution in pleasure painful.30 Burke’s distinctive contribution to the debate was to reject this continuum, and to separate pain and pleasure by a state of ‘indifference’ (i. ii–iv. 32–6). With each of the two now highly differentiated categories of passion, Burke associates a corresponding aesthetic experience. The distinctness of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘beautiful’ is fundamental to his theory. The ‘sublime’ is Burke’s term for whatever excites ideas of pain, danger, or terror (i. vii. 39). When their source is real or imminent, these ideas are actually painful and trigger a response that tends to self-preservation, for example running away. When their source is distanced or imaginary, however, and therefore poses no real threat, the same ideas can cause delight. Examples include imaginative responses to natural objects (such as mountains, or the ocean) or to artistic representations. The ‘beautiful’, on the other hand, evokes ‘social’ passions, which Burke again divides into two kinds. One concerns the ‘society of the sexes’. In animals, this is a simple matter of sexual appetite, for Burke does not suppose that animals have any sense of beauty that makes them prefer one mate to another. In humans, the element of sexual attraction is compounded with a desire for beauty, which leads a man to prefer one woman to another. (Throughout, Burke writes from a male point of view.) The other kind concerns ‘general society’. These are the passions that make us social beings: sympathy, that makes us feel for others (and explains why we enjoy tragedy); imitation, that makes us follow the lead of others; and ambition, that makes us want to enjoy the good opinion of others. In part ii, Burke offers a detailed analysis of the causes of fear and terror. These are also the sources of his sublime: obscurity, vastness, privation, and infinity are the most important. (In the second edition, Burke added ‘power’ to the list; ii. v. 64–70.) Part iii analyses what we perceive as beauty. This part, however, is more negative. Proportion, fitness, and perfection, he argues, have been wrongly regarded as elements of the beautiful. In their place, he identifies smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, and delicacy, as its true components. In part iv, he considers the various means by which the sources of the sublime and the beautiful produce their effects. For example, he explains why a succession of identical columns is perceived as sublime, and why smoothness is perceived as beautiful. 30

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ii. xx. 16, p. 232.

102 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 So far Burke has been mainly concerned with nature and the visual arts. In part v, he turns to words and their affective power. Words, he suggests, have three ways of affecting their hearers: through sound; through evoking a picture of what the sound is taken to represent; and through ‘the affection of the soul produced by one or both of the foregoing’ (v. iv. 166). As in part iii, much of the argument is negative. While sceptical of the conventional notion that words exert their power by evoking mental images, Burke does not explain exactly how they produce an ‘affection of the soul’. Not, certainly, by their sound alone, a notion that he had earlier rejected when he distinguished between sounds and words (ii. xvii. 82). His point is that, however they operate, words evoke images much less commonly than is usually supposed. Poetry is more analogous to music than to painting. The poet moves through words that convey emotions, without necessarily evoking mental images. Throughout the Enquiry, Burke searches for explanations that do not require the exercise of reason or reflection. Thus he rejects two of the standard explanations for the pleasure people take in tragedy: ‘the comfort we receive in considering that so melancholy a story is no more than a fiction; and . . . the contemplation of our own freedom from the evils which we see represented’. He argues instead that such feelings ‘merely arise from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from the natural frame and constitution of our minds’, and that, in general, ‘the influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed’ (i. xiii. 44–5). Where Locke and Hutcheson had imagined the mind as a placid and orderly operation, controlled by the reason, Burke follows Hume in conceiving a more turbulent, emotional mindscape. ‘We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason,’ Hume had argued; ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’31 Burke agrees with Hume that the passions are more powerful than reason, and are commonly raised by ideas without the intervention of reason. Yet he boggles at Hume’s subjectivism, preferring to believe that ideas in the mind have direct and uniform relations with external reality. In Burke’s theory, all human minds respond in nearly the same ways to the same objects and stimuli. Burke seeks the affective power of the passions not in associations generated within the individual mind, but in physiological causes operating with a high degree of uniformity. Thus Burke traces the sublime to sources that affect the educated and the unlettered alike. This leads him to redefine the term. In the neo-classical tradition, the primary connotation of the sublime had been elevation of thought combined with dignity of style: ‘the Sublime in Writing rises either 31 A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ii. iii. 3, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn. rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978), 415.


1757 103 from the Nobleness of the Thought, the Magnificence of the Words, or the harmonious and lively Turn of the Phrase . . . the perfect Sublime arises from all these three in Conjunction together’.32 This quotation, in which the influential critic Joseph Addison (1672–1719) adds his stamp of approval to Boileau’s approbation of Longinus, exemplifies the neo-classical sublime: objective, intellectual, and moral. Burke breaks with this tradition. John Dennis (1657–1734) is the critic who most closely anticipates his account of the sublime. For Dennis, the sublime evokes a passionate, emotional response. The feelings produced, however, are uplifting and elevating: admiration and wonder rather than Burke’s fear or terror.33 Hume in his turn echoed the traditional concept: ‘Who is not struck with any signal instance of greatness of mind or dignity of character; with elevation of sentiment, disdain of slavery, and with that noble pride and spirit, which arises from conscious virtue? The sublime, says Longinus, is often nothing but the echo or image of magnanimity.’ Hume’s examples are all taken from classical literary sources.34 Rejecting such grandiosities, Burke identifies the sublime with a strong sensory and emotive experience. ‘The mind is so entirely filled with its object,’ he infers, ‘that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force’ (ii. i. 57). For Burke, the sublime causes not elevation but fear or abasement. Confronted with vastness, obscurity, infinity, or with any great unknown, we are made terrifyingly aware of our own insignificance and vulnerability. Samuel Johnson read the Enquiry soon after publication, for in Rasselas (1759) he paraphrased one of Burke’s main ideas. ‘Whatever is beautiful, and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination,’ says Imlac in describing the education of the poet, who ‘must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little’.35 Johnson’s use of ‘dreadful’ rather than ‘sublime’ suggests that he preferred to retain for the latter its Longinian sense. His comment on the poet Gray, that ‘the obscurity in which he has involved himself will not persuade us that he is sublime’, is likewise an oblique rejection of Burke’s theory.36 When he revised his Dictionary for the fourth 32 Guardian, no. 117 (25 July 1713), ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington, Ky., 1982), 394. In his Dictionary, Johnson cites Addison’s quotation to illustrate ‘the sublime’ in the sense of ‘grand or lofty style’. None of Johnson’s examples includes any idea of fear or terror. 33 Enquiry, introduction, pp. xlviii–ix; John Dennis, Remarks on . . . Prince Arthur (1696); repr. in Critical Works, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, 1939–43), i. 46–7. 34 Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), vii. 204, in Enquiries, 252. 35 Works (New Haven, 1958– ), xvi. 42; Geoffrey Tillotson, ‘Imlac and the Business of the Poet’, in Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (eds.), Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800: Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk (Minneapolis, 1967), 296–314. 36 Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), i. 402–3 (25 June 1763).

104 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 edition (1773), though he made minor changes to the entries for ‘sublime’ and its cognates, he took no account of the newer, Burkean sense. Indeed, Burke himself retained the old usage when (writing about 1758) he celebrated King Alfred for uniting the most opposite qualities, being ‘at the same time sublime and minute’ (WS i. 413). Just as he traces the experience of the sublime to universal, uniform causes, Burke looks for physiological principles to explain the effects of the beautiful (iii. xii. 112). Proportion and fitness, he argues, belong to the province of the understanding. They are therefore perceived but by few (iii. ii–vii. 92–109).37 Beauty strikes the senses and moves the passions of all. Against the theorists, Burke appeals to experience. Proportion, he argues, ‘relates almost wholly to convenience, as every idea of order seems to do; and it must therefore be considered as a creature of the understanding, rather than a primary cause acting on the senses and imagination’. Nor is beauty discovered by ‘long attention and enquiry . . . even the will is unconcerned; the appearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of love in us, as the application of ice or fire produces the ideas of heat or cold’ (iii. ii. 92). Burke’s theory of words likewise attributes their affective power to their capacity to excite the passions directly. He therefore believed that poetry exerted ‘a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions’ than painting could (ii. iv. 61). The relative merits of the two ‘sister arts’ was an old controversy. A recent champion of painting was the abbé Dubos, a psychological critic whom Burke respected. In his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), Dubos awards the palm to painting on two grounds. Sight, he argues, the most powerful of the senses, is therefore the most affecting: ‘l’œuil est plus près de l’âme que l’oreille’. He gives two examples of its superior power: the effect of Caesar’s bloody robe on the Roman crowd, assembled after his assassination; and beggars who carry a picture as more likely to move pity than a verbal recital.38 Burke retorts with the observation that ‘among the common sort of people, I never could perceive that painting had much influence on their passions’; yet they are ‘strongly roused’ by ‘fanatic’ preachers, as well as by ballads and popular songs (ii. iv. 61). A second argument for painting’s superior affective power was its ability to depict reality more directly: painting uses readily recognizable representations, whereas poetry employs a system of arbitrary signs, and is consequently less universal and more 37 Hume regarded proportion and utility as elements of beauty: Treatise, ii. i. 8, p. 299; Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, app. i. iii, p. 291. So also ‘Sir Harry Beaumont’ [Joseph Spence], Crito; or, A Dialogue on Beauty (London, 1752), 12, 47. 38 Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (4th edn. Paris, 1740), i. 376, 382–3, trans. Thomas Nugent as Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music (London, 1748), i. 322, 327–8. (Nugent translated from the fourth edition, which was revised by Dubos.)


1757 105 dependent on education. Burke controverts this contention in part v of the Enquiry, where (drawing partly on the experiences of the blind) he denies that words evoke mental images. Burke’s theory of words was not new. Berkeley and Condillac had advanced similar arguments.40 The prevailing view, however, was that words represent reality through mental images.41 Burke’s thesis that words like ‘honour’ operate through the senses rather than on the understanding is the most radical and potentially subversive doctrine of the Enquiry.42 Burke was acutely conscious how little the power of words depends on their meaning or appeal to the understanding. He was especially sensitive to the way words become political shibboleths. Writing in 1792, soon after the term ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ came into vogue as a catchword in Irish politics, he observed wrily that ‘the poor word ascendancy, so soft and melodious in its sound, so lenitive and emollient in its first usage, is now employed to cover to the world, the most rigid and perhaps not the most wise of all plans of policy’. ‘A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world’, he generalized, ‘arises from words. People soon forget the meaning, but the impression and the passion remain.’43 As he had argued in the Enquiry, through repetition and association, a word may acquire a power to bewitch without conveying an idea. Poetry was the art that moved Burke most. He therefore drew chiefly on poetry to illustrate the principles of the Enquiry, especially on Homer, Virgil, and Milton; and (in the second edition) the Old Testament. Burke’s 39

39 ‘Les signes que la peinture employe pour nous parler ne sont pas de signes arbitraires & instituez tels que sont les mots dont la poësie se sert. La peinture emploïe des signes naturels dont l’énergie ne dépend pas de l’éducation’ (Réflexions critiques, i. 376: Critical Reflections, i. 322). Arthur Murphy, while granting poetry greater affective power, thought that painting had the advantage of being ‘universally understood’ (Gray’s Inn Journal, no. 19, 24 Feb. 1752). Dubos and Murphy, like most 18th-century critics, underestimate the role of convention in painting, and the extent to which appreciation of it is learned. 40 Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), introduction, sects. 19– 20; repr. in Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London, 1948–57), ii. 37–8. Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. Thomas Nugent (London, 1756), i. iii. 5, ii. i. 9–11, 105–6, 237– 64. 41 Addison, Spectator, no. 416 (27 June 1712, ed. Bond, iii. 560–1). Joseph Spence wrote that ‘the most distinguishing character of poetry, is to be descriptive; and it is this which gives the very near relation that there is between poetry and painting’; ‘Account’ prefaced to Thomas Blacklock’s Poems (2nd edn. London, 1756), p. xxv. 42 Dixon Wecter, ‘Burke’s Theory of Words, Images, and Emotions’, PMLA 55 (1940), 167–81. Jean H. Hagstrum calls E.B.’s ‘absolute disjunction’ of words and images ‘nothing short of revolutionary’; The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), 153. John Gilbert Cooper, for example, argues that poetry has ‘several adventitious Aids which maintain her Superiority over the other Art’, but does not deny poetry’s pictorial qualities; Letters Concerning Taste, 41–8. 43 ‘Letter to Richard Burke’ (1792: WS ix. 644, 647). Never finished, the ‘Letter’ was posthumously published in 1812. The phrase ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ dates from about 1782; W. J. McCormack, ‘Vision and Revision in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Irish Parliamentary Rhetoric’, EighteenthCentury Ireland, 2 (1987), 7–35.

106 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 knowledge of painting and sculpture was limited. Neither London nor Dublin boasted a public art gallery, though access could be had to some private collections.44 Nor did he know many artists. With the exception of Sisson, his early friends were aspiring writers. His friendships with such artists as Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) and James Barry post-date the writing of the Enquiry. Art, accordingly, figures only occasionally in its pages. Burke rarely refers to painting or sculpture, and then more often to genres and types than to individual works. Examples are still life (i. xvi. 49–50), depictions of hell, and the temptation of St Anthony (ii. iv. 63–4). The Venus de’ Medici is likewise cited as a type of female beauty (iii. xxii. 119). Nor, in discussing architecture, does Burke refer to particular buildings. Stonehenge is an exception (ii. xii. 77); more typical is the vague reference to ‘many of our own old cathedrals’ (ii. ix. 75). Burke was writing a work of theory rather than connoisseurship. This made his restricted first-hand knowledge of art less of a handicap. His arguments never depend on particular works of art. The theory of beauty developed in Joseph Spence’s Crito, on the other hand, derives from the analysis of acknowledged masterpieces. In the course of a short book, Spence (1699–1768), who had travelled extensively in France and Italy, refers to some fifteen identifiable works of art. Like most of his contemporaries who had not made the ‘grand tour’, Burke knew antique sculpture and the paintings of the old masters chiefly from prints. Connoisseurs happily wrote about things of which they had seen only reproductions. Cooper, for example, enthuses for several pages over the ruins of Palmyra, known to him only through the engravings in Robert Wood’s book.45 To Burke’s credit, nowhere in the Enquiry does he depend on such secondhand knowledge. In London, for example, he might have seen a copy by Joseph Wilton (1722–1800) of the Venus de’ Medici, the only identifiable work of art to which he refers.46 Architecture, too, he could see for himself. In keeping with his empirical method, he relied as much as practicable on first-hand experience and observation. Many years later, though now possessed of a substantial art collection that he acquired with his country house, he still ‘avowed he knew little of art, though he admired it and knew many of its professors’.47 In 1792, he again claimed to know ‘nothing of the Arts, 44 The Foundling Hospital was a partial exception. Its collection of works by contemporary British artists was open to the public; R. H. Nichols and F. A. Wray, The History of the Foundling Hospital (London, 1935), 251–2. Access to private collections was difficult; Ian Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768 (New Haven, 1988), 174–9. 45 Letters Concerning Taste, 76–81. Wood’s Ruins of Palmyra (London, 1753) was also in E.B.’s library (Sale Catalogue, no. 659), with many other such volumes. When he acquired them is unknown. 46 Wilton executed marble copies of a number of famous statues while studying in Italy. These could be seen in his studio after his return to London in 1755. A Venus de’ Medici is mentioned in the brief notice under ‘Sculpture’ in the Critical Review, 1 (May 1756), 387. 47 Recorded by Edmond Malone (c.1786); Prior, Life of Malone, 370.


1757 107 but what I may possibly have endeavourd to know concerning the Philosophy of them’ (C vii. 322). Burke was exaggerating, pleading ignorance in order to evade an unpleasant and unwelcome task. Lady Inchiquin (1751– 1820; formerly Mary Palmer), Sir Joshua Reynolds’s niece, was badgering him to write up her uncle’s art collection. Even so, Burke was correct to identify himself as an aesthetician, not a connoisseur. The evidence of the Enquiry confirms this. In three passages where Burke discusses colour, the only reference to art is to drapery in history painting (ii. xvi. 82). Peacocks and drakes (iii. xvii. 117), and glass bottles (iv. xxv. 159), receive more attention. The Enquiry was never intended either as a connoisseur’s vade-mecum or as a practitioner’s handbook. William Dennis, indeed, thought that an artist might learn from it. ‘Our friend’, he told Shackleton, ‘anatomizes our Passions and the objects of them, and thus teaches on sound logical principles how the Arts are to be judged and how the Artist or Writer is to operate if he would affect the Soul with Sublimity or Beauty. A work indeed immaterial to the Crowd but highly valuable to men of Taste.’48 Poets, perhaps, could learn more easily than painters. Thoroughly anti-pictorial, the Enquiry is a discouraging book for the visual artist, though later critics have detected its influence on particular paintings.49 The Burkean sublime is obscure, evocative, emotional. Milton’s Paradise Lost is its pre-eminent exemplar. Knowing no visual art that had moved him as Milton had, Burke doubted whether the sublime could be painted: ‘To represent an angel in a picture, you can only draw a beautiful young man winged; but what painting can furnish out any thing so grand as the addition of one word, “the angel of the Lord?” It is true, I have no clear idea, but these words affect the mind more than the sensible image did’ (v. vii. 174). This pronouncement confirms the strongly verbal bias of his imagination.50 Yet even a professional painter such as Reynolds conceded that, without Michelangelo, ‘we never could have been convinced, that Painting was capable of producing an adequate representation of the persons and actions of the heroes of the Iliad’.51 The sublimity of Michelangelo owes nothing to the obscure. The artist whose work comes most readily to mind in the search for a visual representation of the Burkean sublime is J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). Dennis to Shackleton, endorsed Mar. 1758, YB OF 10. 213. Perhaps the most plausible case is James Barry. William L. Pressly argues that in Philoctetes (1770) Barry ‘consciously followed Burke’s dictums for the sublime’ and that Venus Rising from the Sea (1772) is ‘a textbook illustration’ of E.B.’s beautiful; The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven, 1981), 25, 33. 50 Grose Evans speculates that one of West’s angels was painted ‘to refute Burke’s charge’; Benjamin West and the Taste of his Times (Carbondale, Ill., 1959), 60. The painting is A Mighty Angel Standeth upon the Land and the Sea (c.1797); no. 404 in Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven, 1986). 51 Discourse xv (1790), in Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven, 1975), 275. 48 49

108 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 Like Reynolds, Turner was a highly literate artist. He may have read Burke’s Enquiry, and he was fond of stressing the ‘sister arts’ theme by writing or quoting short passages of poetry to ‘illustrate’ his paintings. Fear and power are prominent elements in his sublime, as in Burke’s. His Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812), for example, can readily be appreciated in terms of the Burkean sublime. When the painting was first exhibited, one reviewer commented on Turner’s use of ‘that principle of the sublime which arises from obscurity’ and on the ‘terrible splendour’ of the shining sun.52 Burkean affinities have also been detected in a wholly different style of painting. Belshazzar’s Feast (1821), a history painting by John Martin (1789–1854), has been called an ‘almost perfect example’ of the Burkean sublime.53 The architecture is vast and magnificent. The viewer is struck by the difficulty and expense of creating such enormous and costly structures, by the power of the king who lives in such a setting, and by the greater power of God manifested in Belshazzar’s imminent destruction. The rows of receding columns create Burke’s ‘artificial infinity’ (ii. ix. 75). Even the colours are consistent with Burke’s precepts (ii. xvi. 81–2). One element is conspicuously absent: obscurity. From the banquet laid out in the foreground to the Tower of Babel in the distance, every detail is rendered with minuteness and clarity. Is the total effect sublime, or does the painting have all the archaeological pedantry of a nineteenth-century stage set? Opinions at the time were divided. The painting was popular with the public, but not with the critics.54 From Charles Lamb (1775–1834), it provoked a vigorous protest, in terms that Burke might have used, against the ‘Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art’ (1833). Lamb complains that Martin’s meticulous rendering of the details of the scene leaves nothing to the viewer’s imagination.55 This pictorial clarity is the opposite of the obscurity that is the most potent source of the Burkean sublime. That artists as different as Turner and Martin have been thought to exemplify the Burkean sublime suggests that his ideas about the psychology of art, no less than his political principles, possess a protean quality that enables them to bear multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations. 52 Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner (rev. edn. New Haven, 1984), i. 90; colour reproduction, vol. ii, pl. 131. Affinity is easier to demonstrate than influence; Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (London, 1980). There is no evidence that Turner read the Enquiry, which is not one of the books he is known to have owned; ‘Turner’s Library’, 246–67 in Andrew Wilton, Turner in his Time (London, 1987). 53 Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven, 1986), 132. My comments are based on the small-scale version now in the Yale Center for British Art; this is reproduced in Paley (colour pl. vi). There is no evidence that Martin read the Enquiry, which is not among the ‘chief books’ he is known to have owned; ‘Martin’s Library’, in Thomas Balston, John Martin, 1789–1854: His Life and Works (London, 1947), 267–8. 54 Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, 133–5. 55 Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London, 1912), ii. 256–66.


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109

3 After a long period of gestation, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was finally published, without Burke’s name, on 21 April 1757.56 Philosophical works were often published anonymously in order to secure a more impartial reception. Notable examples include Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–4) and Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). The Enquiry was favourably if not uncritically received. In 1757, two English monthly journals were devoted to reviewing books. The senior was the Monthly Review, established in 1749 by Ralph Griffiths (1728–1803). Its rival was the Critical Review, founded in 1756 by Tobias Smollett (1721–71). In addition, the short-lived Literary Magazine (1756– 8) allotted considerable space to reviews. Burke’s Enquiry received long notices in all three. Though all reviews were published anonymously, their authors can often be identified. Two of the reviews of the Enquiry were by established writers: Oliver Goldsmith’s in the Monthly, and Arthur Murphy’s in the Literary Magazine. The Critical reviewer remains unknown.57 All three gave the Enquiry a mixed welcome. Responding to a powerful mind at work, and to the pleasing elegance of the book’s style, they admired the clarity and ingenuity with which Burke worked out his system, while dissenting from his main conclusions. Burke advanced his theory with a parade of tentativeness, ‘proposing his notions as probable conjectures, not as things certain and indisputable’ (1757 preface). The criticisms of the reviewers, however, did not lead him to make ‘any material change’ in his theory. Instead, he added passages intended to ‘explain, illustrate and enforce it’ (1759 preface). Such a riposte was typical of Burke, who liked a truce as little as a retreat. ‘It is against my Nature’, he wrote in an early letter, and not wholly in jest, ‘to see people in an opinion I think wrong without endeavouring to undeceive ’em, I’d willingly win the whole world to my own way of thinking’ (Mar. 1745: C i. 45). Later in life, Burke mellowed on the subject of the Enquiry. Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824) recalled that, in conversation (probably in the 1780s), Burke had ‘very candidly owned his errors, and laughed at them with much good humour’.58 Burke’s immediate reaction, however, was to stand his ground. Although he neither attempted to answer every objection, nor limited his changes to the challenges of the reviewers, the congruence 56 Todd, 5. E.B. received twenty guineas, with a further ten to be paid if the work reached a third edition, as it did in 1761; Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733–1764, ed. James E. Tierney (Cambridge, 1988), 510. 57 Monthly Review, 16 (May 1757), 473–80; Literary Magazine, 2 (1757), 182–9; Critical Review, 3 (Apr. 1757), 361–74. Goldsmith’s review is reprinted in his Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford, 1966), i. 27–35. 58 Knight to Samuel Parr, 20 June 1805; Parr’s Works (London, 1828), vii. 309–10. Knight made the same claim in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London, 1805; 4th edn. 1808), 28.

110 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 between their criticisms and what he added to ‘explain, illustrate and enforce’ his theory shows that answering them was his principal purpose.59 Since the Enquiry is the only work which Burke revised significantly in response to criticism, his changes merit careful attention. The foundation of Burke’s theory is the distinctness of pain and pleasure, and consequently of the sublime and the beautiful. None of the reviewers accepted the validity of this categorical separation. Murphy, following Locke, argued that the removal of pain is pleasurable. In one of his weakest responses, Burke asserts that, because such pleasure is caused by a privation, it may reasonably be distinguished from pleasures that result from positive stimuli. Yet he concedes that such a pleasure ‘is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it’ (i. iv. 36). More convincingly, he added two passages on the effect of custom in producing indifference (iii. v. 103, 104). These strengthen his hypothesis of a ‘state of indifference’ separating pain from pleasure, that, in one of his explicit disagreements with Locke, he had posited in the first edition (i. ii–iii. 32–5). These passages also serve to support his argument that association cannot explain aesthetic response. Burke had to answer two main criticisms of his theory of beauty. One was that, instead of relaxing, as it ought according to Burke’s theory, beauty often excites. In reply, Burke strengthened his distinction between sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure, confining his theory to the latter (iii. i. 91).60 In another passage, he appealed to the general usage of such metaphors as ‘melting with pleasure’ (iv. xix. 150). To support his idea of the sublime, he likewise cites several languages that use the same word for astonishment and terror (ii. ii. 58). Yet he is prepared to reject common usage when it runs counter to his argument, for example on whether the removal of pain is pleasurable (i. iv. 36). The other main point of contention was Burke’s scotching the conventional notions that utility and proportion contribute to beauty. Here Burke’s response foregrounds the anti-rational element in his theory. While prepared to admit that some shapes or (in part following Hogarth) curves may be perceived as beautiful, he enforces his original argument that proportion, which requires calculation, can make no part of beauty.61 In a long passage ridiculing the supposed connections between beauty and geometry or mathematical proportion, Burke is especially withering on the fancy that ‘the proportions of building have been taken from 59 Herbert A. Wichelns, ‘Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and its Reviewers’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 21 (1922), 645–61. 60 In this passage, E.B. invokes a concept which Jerome Stolnitz traces to Addison and Shaftesbury: ‘On the Origins of “Aesthetic Disinterestedness” ’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20 (1961), 131–43. More commonly, E.B. uses the idea of ‘distance’ to distinguish (for example) the sublime from actual terror. E.B. does not regularly distinguish what would now be called ‘aesthetic objects’ from other sources of the sublime or the beautiful. 61 iii. ii–vi. 92–4, 96–103, 105–6. One reader at least agreed with E.B. on this point. Edward Gibbon noted approvingly that E.B. had ‘exploded’ the connection between proportion and beauty. Gibbon read the Enquiry in Nov. 1762; Journal to January 28th, 1763, ed. D. M. Low (London, 1929), 179–81.


1757 111 those of the human body. To make this forced analogy complete, they represent a man with his arms raised and extended at full length, and then describe a sort of square, as it is formed by passing lines along the extremities of this strange figure’ (iii. iv. 100). These canons of proportion derive from Vitruvius (De architectura, 3. 1. 2–4), and in several editions of his work are illustrated by such a figure as Burke describes. Burke gives several reasons for rejecting the notion, which he attributes to mankind’s ‘unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views, and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever’ (iii. iv. 101).62 The attack on anthropocentrism reduces man to a more modest place in the providential scheme of things. On a related point, Burke argues that, since only some useful animals are beautiful, utility as such can have nothing to do with beauty (iii. vi. 105–6). Convinced that only some universal principle can account for the perception of beauty, Burke maintains his stand against utility and proportion (which need to be calculated) and in favour of his own list of qualities that strike the senses immediately: smallness, softness, and delicacy. This element of Burke’s theory was often ridiculed. Francis Plumer (d. 1784), for example, jokingly speculated that Burke’s ‘Taste for Women’ was for ‘some little Woman with little Eyes’.63 A more serious charge was later preferred by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97). In the course of a pamphlet attacking Burke’s Reflections, Wollstonecraft stigmatized his account of beauty in the Enquiry as calculated to perpetuate male domination by encouraging a stereotype of women as weak and helpless.64 Her criticism is in two respects rather strained. She takes ‘weakness’ out of its context in a section on delicacy and fragility that is chiefly about flowers (iii. xvi. 116), and she forgets that Burke’s ‘beauty’ is for admiration, not desire. Accordingly, she is hardly candid in accusing Burke of encouraging women to cultivate beauty rather than virtue or more useful qualities. Even so, her comments are a useful reminder that, for all its parade of dealing with universal experiences, the Enquiry is the work of a man and sometimes reveals a patently male perspective. Richard Payne Knight, too, thought that Burke’s theory was influenced by ‘a certain degree of false delicacy and affected timidity’ that, in the 1750s, women were expected to show.65 His theory of beauty, where this bias is most evident, has indeed proved less durable than his treatment of the sublime. Not that Burke’s theory of the sublime convinced the reviewers. All three 62 An example of the prevalence of this prejudice is Joseph Spence’s argument that ‘a Peach or a Pineapple are in their highest Beauty, just at the time that they should be eat’ and that Nature made the animals that we see more beautiful than those ‘which live chiefly out of our Sight’; Crito, 43, 56–7. 63 A Letter from a Gentleman to his Nephew at Oxford (privately printed, London, 1772; repr. New York, 1972), 13–15. 64 A Vindication of the Rights of Men (London, 1790), 111–16. 65 Analytical Inquiry, 354.

112 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 disagreed with the idea that fear or terror is at the root of all experience of the sublime. Goldsmith, for example, argued that ‘we can have the most sublime ideas of the Deity, without imagining him a God of terror. Whatever raises our esteem of an object described, must be a powerful source of sublimity; and esteem is a passion nearly allied to love: Our astonishment at the sublime as often proceeds from an increased love, as from an increased fear.’66 This, if true, would undermine Burke’s entire theory. His rejoinder, besides explaining his idea of God, reinforces another theme of the Enquiry, that imaginative response is primarily emotive, not intellectual. ‘Whilst we consider the Godhead merely as he is an object of the understanding,’ he concedes, ‘which forms a complex idea of power, wisdom, justice, goodness, all stretched to a degree far exceeding the bounds of our comprehension . . . the imagination and passions are little or nothing affected.’ Only ‘through the medium of sensible images’ can the idea of God affect the imagination. The images of God received through the senses are far more powerful than any ideas of the deity constructed by reason and reflection. Though ‘in a just idea of the Deity, perhaps none of his attributes are predominant, yet to our imagination, his power is by far the most striking’. God’s benevolent qualities are apprehended through the understanding. His power strikes directly through the senses: ‘whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him’ (ii. iv. 68). Intellectually, Burke’s God was a benevolent providence, typical of the rationalist tendencies of his day. Imaginatively, his God remained the terrible Jehovah of the Old Testament.67 The obscure as a source of the sublime was a favourite idea of Burke’s. Since both Goldsmith and Murphy rejected it, Burke added several passages to reinforce it, including the longest single addition to the body of the Enquiry, an entirely new section on ‘Power’ (ii. v. 64–70). This theme is a leitmotiv in the Enquiry. ‘A clear idea’, he asserts in an added passage, is ‘another name for a little idea’ (ii. iv. 63). To give a sublime idea of magnificence, he argues, objects should be described with disordered profusion. Passages from Shakespeare and the Bible demonstrate the effect of a jumbled list, in which images are poured out in such rapid succession that none can be visualized for long (ii. xiii. 78). Explaining how words can operate without evoking images, Burke adds a distinction between a ‘clear’ expression, which ‘regards the understanding’; and a ‘strong’ one, which 66 Collected Works, i. 29. So also Murphy, Literary Magazine, 2. 185; and the anonymous reviewer in the Critical Review, 3. 369. 67 In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part 12, Hume likewise distinguishes the abstract, philosophical idea of God, and the materialist caricatures which actually take possession of men’s minds; ed. John Valdimir Price (with Hume’s Natural History of Religion, ed. A. Wayne Colver; Oxford, 1976), 259–60.


1757 113 ‘belongs to the passions’ (v. vii. 175). These pages enlarge on a cluster of Burke’s leading ideas: that obscurity and ‘power’ produce fear, and fear the sublime; that poetry can consequently be sublime without evoking clear or defined ideas. To illustrate them, Burke draws on a source that he had not exploited in the first edition of the Enquiry: the poetic books of the Old Testament, especially Job and the Psalms. His choice of passages and his commentary on them have a double interest. They exemplify the kind of poetry that moved him; and they provide further insight into his idea of God. The affective power of the poetry of the Old Testament had long been recognized, notably by Addison in an influential paper in the Spectator.68 In the 1750s, however, appreciation of the poetry of the Old Testament was significantly enhanced thanks to the work of Robert Lowth (1710–87). Between 1741 and 1750, as professor of poetry at Oxford, Lowth delivered a series of lectures on the subject. Though Lowth lectured in Latin, and his lectures were not translated into English until 1787, others took up his ideas and rapidly disseminated them beyond their original learned audience.69 Whether or not he read the full text of the Praelectiones, Burke was aware of Lowth’s main arguments. Lowth associated the sublime with anything that, commonly though not invariably uniting ‘perspicuity and elevation’, overpowers the mind. Fear need not be evoked.70 He attributes the strength of biblical poetry to its simplicity and its passionate enthusiasm. Citing Aristotle’s precept that the language of poetry should be clear without being mean or commonplace, elevated without becoming opaque (Poetics, ch. 22), Lowth celebrates Hebrew poetry for just such an achievement of sublimity without obscurity. Important devices that contribute to this sublime perspicuity are personification and images drawn from everyday life and ordinary experience. Both techniques are highly visual. Personification makes concrete the abstract and indefinite. God is figured as a man waking in anger from a drunken sleep; he destroys his enemies ‘as a man wipeth a dish’.71 Such imagery appeared strange to readers conditioned, as Burke and his contemporaries were, by neo-classical ideas of decorum. To take a nonbiblical example, Samuel Johnson found risible the following lines from Macbeth: 68 No. 357 (19 Apr. 1712, ed. Bond, iii. 331), where Addison draws parallels between Paradise Lost and poetic passages in the Old Testament. 69 De sacra poesi Hebraeorum praelectiones (Oxford, 1753), trans. George Gregory as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (London, 1787). Examples of early dissemination are the two papers contributed by Joseph and Thomas Warton to the Adventurer (nos. 51 and 57, 1 and 22 May 1753); the review in the Monthly Review, 8 (June 1753), 401–13; and articles by Christopher Smart in the Universal Visiter and Memorialist, 1 (Jan., Feb. 1756), 25–7, 73–4. 70 Praelectiones, 125: Lectures, i. 307. 71 Ps. 78; 2 Kgs. 21: 13. Praelectiones, 152, 62: Lectures, i. 363, 154–5.

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Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife sees not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’ (i. v. 50–4)

For Johnson, such words as ‘dunnest’, ‘knife’, and ‘blanket’ precluded sublimity. ‘We do not immediately conceive’, he observed, ‘that any crime of importance is to be committed with a knife; or who does not, at last, from the long habit of connecting a knife with sordid offices, feel aversion rather than terror.’ Likewise, he thought ‘dun’ belonged to the stable, and ‘blanket’ too mean a word to evoke terror.72 Johnson was expressing the common view of his day. Burke shared it, praising Virgil for conjoining images of privation ‘of a tremendous dignity’ in his description of the entrance to the underworld (ii. vi. 71). In rehabilitating the ‘low’ images in the poetic books of the Old Testament, Lowth was conscious of doing something new. He explains that the extreme indecorum of such tropes effectively forces the mind to move away from the literal towards the figurative meaning.73 Lowth’s appreciation of biblical poetry has points of contact with Burke’s. Both cite the powerful image of the war-horse in Job (39: 19–24). Yet they admire it for different reasons. Lowth praises its descriptive quality, its ‘striking resemblance of reality’.74 For Burke, the image is sublime precisely because it does not remind the reader of actual horses, but conjures up fearful emotions (ii. v. 65–6). Burke’s imagination was unvisual, responding to the obscure and the impalpable. Lowth dwells on the pictorial imagery of the biblical poets, who drew largely on the objects of daily life, familiar to their auditors.75 Burke searches for examples that support his theory: ‘In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, fear came upon me and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face. The hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.’ The ‘sublimity’ of this description (from Job 4: 13–17), he comments, ‘is principally due to the terrible uncertainty of the thing described’ (ii. iv. 63). Burke further quotes two passages from the Psalms that evoke God as an illdefined, fearful presence (ii. v. 69). The power of such images leads him to consider the role of fear in religion. Even true religion, he argues, must have a ‘large mixture of salutary fear’. Though Christianity has ‘humanized the idea of the divinity’, only through ‘long habits of piety and contemplation’ can an ‘entire love and devotion to the Deity’ be attained (ii. v. 70). A more characteristic eighteenth-century view of the power of God is expressed in the hymn ‘The spacious firmament on high’, in which Joseph Addison 72 73 74

Rambler, no. 168 (26 Oct. 1751); repr. in Works, v. 127–8. Praelectiones, 151–3: Lectures, i. 359–64. 75 Praelectiones, 340: Lectures, ii. 428–9. Praelectiones, 58–67: Lectures, i. 144–66.


1757 115 employs pleasing images of the blue sky, the stars, and the sun to create a sense of God’s aloof benevolence.76 This is a view to which Burke gave intellectual assent, as several passages in the Enquiry illustrate.77 His imagination was more powerfully stirred by the fearful tyrant of the Old Testament. Not all the changes Burke made to the second edition of the Enquiry were motivated by the reviewers. Some continued a dialogue with his predecessors.78 By far the most important addition, however, was a wholly new ‘Introduction on Taste’, far longer than any of the passages added to the body of the discourse. The subject of this new essay was far from novel. Addison had established ‘taste’ as a serious critical term, indeed as a ‘faculty of the soul’. As with other faculties, individuals were gifted with it in different degrees. Addison believed in an objective standard of taste. His ideal ‘man of taste’ has cultivated his superior natural endowment by assiduous study of the most approved models, and is therefore not only pleased with the best authors, but for the right reasons. For Addison, an inability to appreciate Virgil for his distinguishing excellences shows a lack of taste. He laughs at the mathematician whose greatest pleasure in the Aeneid came from following the story on a map.79 Addison’s paper on taste introduced a whole series on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (nos. 411– 21, 21 June to 3 July 1712). In these essays, he lectures his readers on what they should admire, and why. The same thread runs through all his critical papers in the Spectator. Addison exerted an extraordinary influence on the history of ‘taste’ in England. His pronouncements were quoted and echoed throughout the century, while his personal prestige as an embodiment of his own ideal served to transmit many of his critical judgements to later generations. Yet his loose and general account of taste left plenty of scope for later critics. Whether taste was a separate faculty, how it operated, how far it could be acquired or improved, whether it was subjective or uniform; such questions were endlessly debated and variously answered. Between Addison and Burke, the subject of ‘taste’ was taken up by three kinds of writer: the philosopher, the connoisseur, and the satirist. Philosophers were primarily concerned with understanding and explaining its processes. Thus Hutcheson posited what he called an ‘internal sense’ capable of appreciating beauty.80 (Burke rejected this theory as an unnecessary Spectator, no. 465 (23 Aug. 1712, ed. Bond, iv. 144). i. x. 43, i. xiv. 46, i. xvii. 50, i. xix. 52–3. Cleanthes articulates a similar view in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 78 One added passage gives qualified approval to Hogarth’s idea of a ‘line of beauty’ (iii. xv. 115–16). Another reinforces his opposition to Hutcheson’s ‘beauty of virtue’ theory (iii. xi. 112). 79 Spectator, no. 409 (19 June 1712, ed. Bond, iii. 529). 80 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 8–9. Hutcheson hypothesized other ‘internal senses’ for other kinds of perception. Hume, too, described taste as a kind of faculty, and used the term ‘moral sense’; Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, app. i; Enquiries, 294. 76 77

116 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 multiplication of senses; ‘Taste’, 26–7.) Connoisseurs were less analytical and more subjective. For Cooper, good taste was an immediate and intuitive response to proper objects, and he followed Hutcheson in applying the term also to moral perceptions.81 The overwritten and self-regarding raptures of Cooper and his like presented easy targets for the satirist. ‘Taste’ and pretenders to taste are common themes in the periodical papers of the day.82 Taste was also regarded as a suitable subject for serious philosophical discourse. In 1755, the newly formed Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture in Scotland offered its first gold medals for ‘the best discovery in Sciences’, ‘the best essay on Taste’, and ‘the best dissertation on Vegetation, and the principles of Agriculture’.83 In the Encyclopédie, ‘goût’ receives a lengthy composite article incorporating essays by Montesquieu and Voltaire.84 The essay uppermost in Burke’s mind was David Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, first published in his Four Dissertations (1757).85 Hume attempts to reconcile two conflicting allegiances: to his own theory of the mind, and to classical canons of criticism, exemplified by Voltaire’s article in the Encyclopédie. In the arts, Voltaire had argued, there are ‘des beautés réelles’ which a good taste will appreciate and a bad one miss. For all his theoretical appreciation of cultural diversity, Voltaire continued to believe in the universality of classical values. Taste, he concluded, ‘n’a été le partage que de quelques peuples de l’Europe’.86 Hume begins from a more liberal starting-point. ‘All sentiment is right’, he argues, ‘because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it.’ This appears to preclude any ‘standard of taste’. Hume rejects Voltaire’s ‘real beauties’, since ‘a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right: Because no sentiment represents what is really in the object’. Beauty is no more than ‘a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind’. Each mind therefore ‘perceives a different beauty’. Hume’s theory is equally incompatible with Burke’s hypothesis that each mind responds nearly uniformly to the objects that we perceive as ‘beautiful’. If Hume’s principle be Letters Concerning Taste, 3, 6, 13, 27–8, for ‘taste’ as an internal sense. Examples that combine satire with serious exposition include Fielding’s Covent-Garden Journal, no. 10 (4 Feb. 1752) and The World, no. 26 (28 June 1753), by Joseph Warton. John Armstrong’s poem Taste (London, 1753) is mainly satiric. 83 Scots Magazine, 17 (Mar. 1755), 129. The prize was won by Alexander Gerard, whose Essay on Taste was published in 1759, too late to have influenced E.B. Gerard, in any case, follows Hutcheson and Hartley, whose theories Burke had already rejected. 84 Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (Paris, 1751–72), vii. 758–70 (vol. vii appeared in 1757). E.B. reprinted an English translation of Montesquieu’s unfinished ‘Essai sur le goût’ in the Annual Register (1758), 311–18. 85 Subsequently incorporated in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, 1758). References are to Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (rev. edn. Indianapolis, 1987), 226–49. 86 Encyclopédie, vii. 761. 81 82


1757 117 admitted, there can indeed be no useful disputing about tastes. Yet in practice, Hume was no more prepared than Burke to accept the corollaries of his proposition. He dismisses as absurd ‘an equality of genius and elegance’ between (say) Milton and Bunyan. In the end, Hume’s position is virtually indistinguishable from that of Addison and Voltaire: there is a standard of taste, defined by the responses of men such as themselves.87 Against Hume’s contention that each mind perceives a different beauty, Burke begins from the premiss that sense impressions affect all people nearly uniformly. This is consistent with his general theory. Unless, he argues, ‘the standard both of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures’, the investigation of aesthetic response would be ‘an useless, if not an absurd undertaking’ (‘Taste’, 11–12). So far as the senses are concerned, therefore, ‘taste’ should not vary much except in the case of those whose organs are defective or impaired. ‘Taste’, however, is a complex phenomenon in which imagination and judgement, as well as the senses, are concerned. The human mind will therefore delight in seemingly opposite kinds of aesthetic experience, if differently endowed with those faculties. Properly understood, however, its responses are uniform in principle, though operating at different levels of rational and imaginative sophistication: one man is charmed with Don Bellianis, and reads Virgil coldly; whilst another is transported with the Eneid, and leaves Don Bellianis to children. These two men seem to have a Taste very different from each other; but in fact they differ very little. In both these pieces, which inspire such opposite sentiments, a tale exciting admiration is told; both are full of action, both are passionate, in both are voyages, battles, triumphs, and continual changes of fortune. The admirer of Don Bellianis perhaps does not understand the refined language of the Eneid, who if it was degraded into the style of the Pilgrim’s Progress, might feel it in all its energy, on the same principle which made him an admirer of Don Bellianis. (‘Taste’, 20–1)

One of the numerous chivalric romances written in imitation of Amadis de Gaul, now best remembered for having inspired Don Quixote’s knighterrantry, Don Bellianis has usually been regarded as one of the better examples of the genre. When the curate inspects Don Quixote’s library, and condemns most of its contents to the flames, Don Bellianis is one of the few that he spares.88 While Burke outgrew the old romances, he never forgot Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 230–4; Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Hume’s “Of Criticism” ’, in Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (eds.), Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800: Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk (Minneapolis, 1967), 232–48. 88 Don Quixote, part i, ch. 6. The Spanish original, Don Belianis de Grecia, by Geronimo Fernandez, appeared in four parts between 1547 and 1579. Part i was translated into English (from an Italian version) as The Honour of Chiualrie (1598). E.B. probably read Don Bellianis in the edition printed in Dublin by Luke Dillon (c.1720–30) as The Honour of Chivalry. This version of the romance (first published in 1683) was abridged by John Shirley from Francis Kirkman’s translation of the original part i, to which Kirkman had added his own continuation. 87

118 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 the enthusiasm with which he had devoured them as an adolescent (‘Taste’, 25). Burke has taken a different route, but his conclusion is nearly the same as Hume’s. ‘Whilst we consider Taste, merely according to its nature and species,’ he argues, ‘we shall find its principles entirely uniform; but the degree in which these principles prevail in the several individuals of mankind, is altogether as different as the principles themselves are similar. For sensibility and judgment, which are the qualities that compose what we commonly call a Taste, vary exceedingly in various people’ (‘Taste’, 23). While some people may be rarely or slightly moved by ‘the delicate and refined play of the imagination’, if they ever are so moved, and by whatever objects, ‘they are moved upon the same principle’ as the more sensitive (24). Although ‘sensibility’ and ‘judgment’ are confined to differences of degree, they allow Burke to reconcile his belief in the superiority of educated taste to that of the uncultivated. No more than Hume can he accept that the difference between Don Bellianis and Virgil may be no more than a matter of individual preference.

4 The Philosophical Enquiry is a remarkable book. Wide-ranging in its scope, undogmatic in its method, pleasingly counter-intuitive in some of its conclusions, clearly written and arranged, it has always found an audience among general readers, however little respect professional philosophers have paid to it. Several reasons can be advanced to explain this popularity. The style is lucid, the argument vigorous and illustrated with a multitude of often homely examples. Typical of Burke’s brisk, no-nonsense approach is his treatment of pleasure, pain, and indifference (i. ii–iii. 32–5). The rhetorical stance is inviting: the crisp, authoritative manner is didactic but friendly, betokening an author who knows what he is talking about, yet who usually takes the side of common sense and everyday experience against the subtle and rarified abstractions of the professional philosophers. Burke wrote for the intelligent amateur who wanted a good but easy read. His ideal reader is exemplified by the poet, gardener, and amateur of taste William Shenstone (1714–63). ‘Of all books whatever’, he advised his friend Richard Graves (1715–1805) in an enthusiastic fit, ‘read Burke (second edit.) “Of the Sublime and Beautiful”.’89 After reading the more rigorously philosophical Essay on Taste (1759) by Alexander Gerard (1728–95), Shenstone acknowledged that it was ‘learned, and on a pleasing subject’, yet 89 3 Oct. 1759, in Letters, ed. Duncan Mallam (Minneapolis, 1939), 376. Shenstone had compared the two editions, as his annotated copy of the first attests (now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University; *EC7. Sh466. Zz757b). Shenstone disagreed with E.B. on many points of detail.


1757 119 doubted ‘whether it will give you that amusement which Burke’s has done’. Three years later, he bought Elements of Criticism (1762) by Lord Kames (1696–1782), hoping for ‘some Entertainment on acc[oun]t of his Subjects’. But when he began reading, perhaps not in the right mood, he ‘found the introductory part too abstracted for the then state of my Brain’.90 Hume likewise thought Kames’s book ‘too abstruse & crabbed ever to take with the Public’.91 Not that for Hume, to ‘take with the public’ was unmixed praise. His own Treatise of Human Nature had not taken. Thus when he called Burke’s Enquiry ‘a very pretty Treatise’, he meant that he thought it lightweight.92 Shortly after the book’s publication, Burke told Shackleton that it had ‘not been ill received, so far as a matter on so abstracted a subject meets with readers’ (10 Aug. 1757: C i. 123–4). The spring of 1757 was an inauspicious moment to publish such a book. Public attention was engrossed by the war against France. Even so, sales of the Enquiry were steady if not spectacular. The first edition of about 500 copies sold out in less than two years. A seventh edition (though still of only 756 copies) was needed by 1773. Between three and four thousand copies were thus sold in about seventeen years; nearly the same number as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work of comparable length, of which about 3,500 copies were printed between 1759 and 1774.93 Anonymity enabled a diffident author to wait until success was assured before acknowledging a book. The favourable reviews, however, did not lead Burke formally to avow his authorship. An open secret by 1759, it remained unacknowledged on the title-page of the second edition, and indeed through several subsequent printings.94 Nor did Burke take advantage of any of these reprints to make further revisions. The Enquiry therefore fell further and further behind current thinking. Yet it maintained its popularity until about 1830. Another dozen editions appeared between 1773 and 1800, and about sixteen more between 1801 and 1827. Thereafter interest declined, and only since 1958 has it again been continuously in print.95 The currency of the Enquiry was not limited to the English-speaking Shenstone to Graves, 26 Oct. 1759, and to Thomas Percy, early 1762 and 16 May 1762, both in Letters, 378, 442, 443. 91 Hume to Andrew Millar, 15 Mar. 1762, in Letters, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), i. 352. 92 Hume to Adam Smith, 12 Apr. 1759, in New Letters, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford, 1954), 51. 93 Todd, pp. 34, 36; Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1995), 426. 94 E.B.’s name appears on the title-page of the French translation of 1765 (Todd, 5kk), over which he had no control. Not until 1796 was the book printed in England under his name (Todd, 5t). 95 Todd, 5b–jj (editions to 1827). On the evidence of the British Library Catalogue to 1975 and the National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints, only three English and about eight American editions were printed between 1828 and 1900. In addition, the Enquiry was included in all the numerous editions of Burke’s Works. Separate editions, however, provide a more accurate reflection of the actual demand for a particular text. 90

120 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 world. It was translated into French (1765), German (1773), Italian (1804), and Spanish (1807).96 Paris being the philosophical capital of Europe, by far the most important of these was the French. Even in English, the Enquiry had attracted some notice in France.97 By the 1750s, thanks in part to Montesquieu and Voltaire, English ideas and philosophy enjoyed a considerable vogue in France. The English language itself, however, was not widely read. The publication in 1765 of a French translation of the Enquiry, with Burke’s name on the title-page, marks the true beginning of his European reputation. The translator, the abbé Louis-Antoine Desfrançois (1728–?; not otherwise known as an author), sent Burke a copy with a rather apologetic letter asking him to point out any errors (6 Mar. 1765: C i. 187– 8).98 Desfrançois dedicated the translation to the Earl of Hertford (1718– 94), then British ambassador at Paris. Desfrançois avowed that he undertook the translation ‘par les conseils d’un jeune Seigneur Anglois’, identified in one of the reviews as Lord Beauchamp (1743–1822), Hertford’s son. Beauchamp in turn may have been prompted by David Hume, then serving in Paris as secretary to the embassy.99 The French translation of the Enquiry was favourably received. Indeed, the French reviewers were less critical than their English counterparts had been. The Journal des sçavans objected to Burke’s definition of the sublime as too restrictive, while the Gazette littéraire found fault with his treatment of beauty. L’Année littéraire detected an occasional ‘sécheresse métaphysique’, and would have liked more ‘images’ (examples?). The general tone, however, was respectful and sympathetic. The Gazette even hailed Burke’s discovery of obscurity as a source of the sublime as the revelation of ‘un des grands secrets de la Poésie’.100 This favourite idea of Burke’s (which had found no favour with the English reviewers) also impressed Denis Diderot. Though he never wrote directly about the Enquiry, his Salon de 1767, a review of the biennial Paris art exhibition, shows unmistakable signs of his reading of Burke.101 The number of editions and translations attests to the Enquiry’s status of a ‘standard’ text or modern classic. Yet many of the books which (in the Todd, 5kk–pp. Journal encyclopédique (1757), 5/1 (1 July), 3–18. The review, though largely a synopsis, is favourable in tone. 98 Recherches philosophiques sur l’origine des idées que nous avons du beau & du sublime, précédées d’une dissertation sur le gout (Paris, 1765); Todd, 5kk. A copy of the translation, presumably the one sent by Desfrançois, is listed in the Sale Catalogue of E.B.’s library (no. 52). 99 The speculation is Copeland’s (C i. 188 n. 1). Hume’s letters of the period, however, which often refer to his encouraging translations from and into French, make no mention of Desfrançois. 100 Journal des sçavans, Paris 4to edn. (May 1767), 331–4; Gazette littéraire de l’Europe, no. 58 (30 Jan. 1765), 206–8; L’Année littéraire (1765), i. 198–212. 101 Diderot, Salon de 1767; repr. in Œuvres complètes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann (Paris, 1975– ), xvi. 174–237 (the most striking borrowing on 234–5); Gita May, ‘Diderot and Burke: A Study in Aesthetic Affinity’, PMLA 75 (1960), 527–39. 96 97


1757 121 jargon of the book trade) ‘no gentleman’s library should be without’ gathered dust on the shelves.102 Was this true of the Enquiry? By 1770, its leading ideas (especially about the sublime) had passed into common currency, though as philosophy it had been superseded by more elaborate treatises.103 Far from founding an aesthetic school, Burke provoked most subsequent writers on the subject to disagreement. Even those who regarded themselves as in some sense his disciples, Uvedale Price (1747–1829) and William Gilpin (1762–1843), by adding a third category (the ‘picturesque’) effectively undermined Burke’s entire system.104 Many more readers knew the title of the Enquiry, and had some general knowledge of its subjectmatter, than had read the book itself. Of those who actually read it, some were drawn to it by the oddity of a book by a politician on an unpolitical subject. Reasons for Burke’s lack of influence on later writers are not far to seek. While subsequent critics shared his psychological orientation, for the most part they adopted association as the basis of their theories, rejecting Burke’s uniformity of response in favour of a more subjective method of explaining aesthetic response. Hutcheson, Hume, and Hartley point the way to romantic theories of art. Burke opposed association as an aesthetic principle precisely because it led to subjectivity in morality and religion. Not all Burke’s ideas fell on stony ground. The Enquiry exerted a considerable influence on popular ideas of the ‘sublime’. Burke did not originate the link between the sublime and the ideas of terror and the infinite, nor did the idea of the sublime as fearful entirely supersede the older idea of the sublime as elevating and uplifting.105 The Enquiry contributed, however, to promote the ‘sublime’ as a critical term connoting a species of emotional and psychological experience.106 The success of this part of Burke’s theory is easy to understand, for it relates the sublime directly to the emotional and instinctive responses dear to the romantic sensibility. His theory of beauty was less fortunate. By debunking proportion, it offended conventional, neoclassical critics; its reductive sensationism alienated the more Romantic. No wonder it was ridiculed or ignored. The Enquiry is different in kind from Burke’s later writings. ‘Philosophical’ in the sense that it represents the conclusions of a disinterested investigation of its subject, apolitical in treating what Burke took to be universal 102 Charles Lamb, ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ (1822), in Works, ii. 196. Lamb’s list of the great unread comprises Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, Josephus, and Paley. 103 Gerard, An Essay on Taste; Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762); Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1763). 104 Walter John Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, Ill., 1957), 83–98, 202–23. 105 Richard Payne Knight refers to ‘those exalted or enthusiastic sentiments, which are called sublime’ and quotes approvingly ‘Longinus observes that the effect of the sublime is to lift up the soul’; Analytical Inquiry, 320, 336. 106 Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1935), 99.

122 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 human experience, nothing in the book belies his account of its origin in genuine intellectual curiosity (1757 and 1759 prefaces). Once he entered politics, Burke became a rhetorician. Designed to persuade, his later writings and speeches subordinate other considerations to that one great end. Caution is therefore needed in tracing links, as many modern critics have done, between the Enquiry and the later political writings.107 In retrospect, admittedly, Burke’s Enquiry is readily assigned to what John Stuart Mill (1806–73) called the school of ‘Intuition’ rather than that of ‘Experience and Association’. Mill posited a ‘natural hostility’ between the ‘practical reformer’ and a philosophy (such as Burke’s) ‘which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human nature’.108 To infer, however, that Burke opposed association in order to support the existing social order is to credit him with an anachronistic consciousness of relations between psychology and politics. Hume did not believe that, in explaining mental activity through association, he was loosening the bonds of civil society. No more did Burke imagine that his speculations would or could do more than promote an understanding of (in his favourite phrase) ‘the nature of things’. Burke’s contemporaries did not read the Enquiry as a political book, at least not until the 1790s. Samuel Johnson is typical in this respect. Contrasting the Enquiry with the recent Essay on Shakespeare (1769) by Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800), he praised it as ‘an example of true criticism’. Though Johnson proposed no formal definition of the true function of criticism, his ideal is clear from the qualities he commends in the writers he singles out as examples. Three of the four are psychological critics: Kames, Burke, and Dubos. He condemns Montagu for merely ‘telling how many plays have ghosts in them, and how this ghost is better than that’. Burke is commended for showing ‘how terrour is impressed on the human heart’. Johnson requires that ‘true criticism’ be psychological in approach and universal in its application. The true critic must penetrate the human heart.109 This praise of the Enquiry derives special significance from its occasion, for in 1769 Johnson had good reason to be annoyed with Burke. 107 Several recent scholars have pursued this connection. Examples include Neal Wood, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension in Burke’s Political Thought’, Journal of British Studies, 4 (1964), 41–64; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven, 1983), 57–73; and Frans De Bruyn, ‘Edmund Burke’s Natural Aristocrat: The “Man of Taste” as a Political Ideal’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 11 (1987), 41–60. The most determinedly ‘political’ reading of the Enquiry is that of Tom Furniss in Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge, 1993). Furniss interprets the Enquiry as ‘a contribution to the hegemonic struggle of the rising middle class in the first half of the eighteenth century’ (1). Such a reading, unhistorical as it is, attests the continuing intellectual vitality of the Enquiry. 108 Autobiography (1873); repr. in Collected Works, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto, 1963–91), i. 269– 70. (Mill does not make the application to E.B.) 109 Life of Johnson, ii. 90 (16 Oct. 1769).


1757 123 The two were implacably opposed on the most divisive political question of the day, the Middlesex election. To resolve the stalemate created by the repeated expulsion and re-election of the notorious John Wilkes, the Commons declared him incapable of sitting in the present Parliament, and awarded his seat to his opponent as the only qualified candidate. Johnson approved this incapacitation; Burke opposed it as a flagrant breach of constitutional rights. The subject came up in conversation that evening, though Burke’s name is not mentioned in Boswell’s record. If the authorship of the Enquiry by Burke the politician was noticed or remarked on, the common reaction was to ridicule the idea of the speculative philosopher meddling with politics. His reputation as ‘the Author of a Book somewhat metaphysical’ allowed his enemies to criticize his parliamentary speeches as ‘abstracted and subtile’ (1–4 Mar. 1766: C i. 241).110 Thereafter, journalists found in the title and subject of the Enquiry a stock theme with which to enliven their abuse of Burke the politician. He is ‘the sublime and beautiful Orator’, so obsessed with his ‘favourite theory’ that ‘he brings it forward to view even in his political pursuits’, alarming ‘the minds of his auditors with dangers which have no existence in truth, only to sublime them into his ethereal opinions’.111 The same theme is prominent in the caricatures. Before a convention became established of representing Burke as a Jesuit, he is sometimes identified by an allusion to the Enquiry. In a print of about 1780, in which six opposition politicians are playing ball with the body of the Prime Minister, Burke is recognizable only by his comment ‘This is sublime & Beautiful.’ In another print, dating from after the fall of the Coalition in December 1783, Burke, literally falling from power and again not otherwise individualized, holds a paper inscribed ‘Fall of Longinus the Sublim[e]’.112 More substantive use of the incongruity between the sublime philosopher and the crawling politician was made in a particularly scurrilous print of 1784, A D[evonshir]e Rout (Plate 7). The primary targets are Fox, canvassing for Westminster, and his aristocratic ally Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806). The duchess’s willingness to descend to the lowest arts of vote-getting drew much unfavourable comment at the time. By 1784, Burke was a much-caricatured politician, readily recognizable by his long nose and spectacles. Here he is shown in a most undignified situation, on his hands and knees, in a posture 110 Hume provides a useful gloss on what E.B. meant by this phrase. ‘By metaphysical reasonings’, he says, they (including those ‘who profess themselves scholars’) ‘do not understand those on any particular branch of science, but every kind of argument, which is any way abstruse, and requires some attention to be comprehended’ (Treatise of Human Nature, introduction, p. xiv). 111 ‘Gulliver’, in the Public Advertiser, 20 Jan. 1770; The Reformer, ‘by an independent freeholder’ (London, 1780), 45–6. 112 The Thing in a Nasty Situation (BMC 5709; c.1780); To Day Disliked, and Yet Perhaps Tomorrow again in Favour (BMC 6291; after 18 Dec. 1783). In James Gillray’s A Block for the Wigs (BMC 6227; May 1783), E.B. (here dressed as a Jesuit) is further identified by his reading a book inscribed ‘Sublime & Beautiful’.

124 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY , 1757 more suggestive of an animal than a human, peeping up the duchess’s skirts, and exclaiming ‘heavens how happily the principels of the Sublime & Butiful are blended’. By commending the duchess, and taking part in the charade of electioneering, Burke is literally lowering himself. The Enquiry is the most sustained product of the mind of the younger Burke. Never again did he give so loose a rein to the speculative and enquiring side of his mind, though in 1773 he agreed to contribute an ‘abstract’ of his Enquiry, together with ‘a paper on the Philosophy of Bishop Berkeley’, to a ‘Dictionary of Arts and Sciences’ projected by Oliver Goldsmith but aborted by his death.113 In July 1789, Edmond Malone entreated him to revise the Enquiry, incorporating such insights as thirty years’ experience of the world had furnished. Burke replied that ‘the train of his thoughts had gone another way, and the whole bent of his mind turned from such subjects; that he was much fitter for such speculations at the time he published that book . . . than now’.114 Burke’s instinctive rejection of the idea was sound. In 1795, soon after he retired from Parliament, he turned to ‘those studies which I had begun to cultivate early in Life’, only to find that ‘they require a force of mind in the former train. The thread of speculative Science once broken is not easily spliced again’ (C viii. 364–5). The politician had long since triumphed over the philosopher. For all this, no radical discontinuity separates the old politician from the young philosopher. The Enquiry amply demonstrates Burke’s early understanding of a truth he never forgot, the essentially emotive nature of the workings of the human mind. James Prior, The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, MB, from a Variety of Original Sources (London, 1837), ii. 428, on the authority of Malone. 114 Prior, Life of Malone, 154. 113

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758

125

5 Maps of Mankind, 1756–1758

1 Even before the Philosophical Enquiry was published, Burke had turned to other subjects. During the summer of 1756, he collaborated with Will Burke on an Account of the European Settlements in America. In February 1757, he signed a contract for a short ‘History of England’, of which he wrote about a third before abandoning the project. Burke lived in an age before specialization. Even so, the ease with which he moved from psychology to history and political economy proves him a ‘true Genius’ in Johnson’s definition: ‘a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction’.1 All three projects, however, can be regarded as ‘philosophical’ as Burke understood the term, for each contributed to an understanding of human nature. ‘History’, in his old antagonist Bolingbroke’s aphorism, ‘is philosophy teaching by examples.’2 The Account, the ‘History’, and the Enquiry are all philosophical in this sense. The inconclusive Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, while ending overt hostilities between the European powers, left several long-standing conflicts unresolved. Britain and France still contended for colonial supremacy: in India, in the West Indies, and in North America. In 1755, this endemic rivalry erupted into violence when a French force ambushed the British troops under General Braddock (1695–1755), whose own object was to attack Fort Duquesne. In May 1756, hostilities began in Europe, and a global conflict appeared imminent. An Account of the European Settlements in America was therefore a topical book, written to capitalize upon the increased public interest in the colonies that followed the outbreak of war. The Dodsleys paid £50 for the copyright.3 Anxious to publish the book before the end of the parliamentary session, after which London would rapidly empty, they rushed it into print.4 The two octavo volumes ‘Life of Cowley’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), i. 2. Letters on the Study and Use of History, Letter II, citing the Ars rhetorica (11. 2) then attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus; repr. in Works (1844), ii. 177. 3 Todd, 4. The receipt (dated 5 Jan. 1757) was signed by E.B. 4 The preface contains a conventional apology for the ‘errors of the press’ occasioned by the author’s absence; eighteen errata are listed. Three leaves contained errors gross enough to justify cancellation and 1 2

126 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 appeared on 1 April 1757. ‘The war we now carry on’, the Burkes declared, expressing the British point of view, ‘principally regards our colonies’ (A ii. 46).5 A striking proof of the timeliness of the Account is that in May 1757 the Universal Magazine borrowed several pages (without acknowledgement) to substantiate its editorial call for vigorous action against France.6 The Burkes were alert to the opportunities that the colonies offered to impecunious young men. Rapid fortunes could be made in India or in the West Indies, but the risks were correspondingly great. The climates were unhealthy for Europeans; many died, or returned home poor and broken in health. A relation of Will’s father, for example, died on a return voyage from Jamaica, leaving only debts. His effects were seized for unpaid rent by his London landlord.7 A career in the colonial administration promised a more certain competence, at the cost of a longer and more laborious exile. In August 1757, describing ‘my manner of Life, checquerd with various designs’, Burke expected ‘shortly please God, to be in America’ (C i. 123). His precise ‘design’ in America is not known. One possibility is that he was offered a grant of land.8 The rapidly growing colonies offered many other opportunities to ambitious young men. In 1774, Thomas Paine (1737–1809) sailed westward to seek his fortune, trusting to his native wit and a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Burke might likewise have found employment as a journalist and hack writer. Whatever it was, Burke’s purpose was thwarted by the outbreak of the war.9 An oblique reference in a letter of 10 July 1761 implies that the idea still retained a wistful attractiveness (141). By the time the war ended, however, Burke was otherwise engaged. Will Burke’s designs are less doubtful. He wanted to make a quick fortune. Appointed in 1759 to the temporary British administration of reprinting. The most serious (i. 49) is a passage meant for insertion, wrongly printed as a footnote. (Neither cancels nor errata were needed for the Vindication of Natural Society or the Philosophical Enquiry.) In 1756, the session had ended on 27 May; in 1757, Parliament was not actually prorogued until 4 July, later than usual. Robert Dodsley to Thomas Warton, 20 Jan. 1755, illustrates the importance that a publisher attached to a book’s appearance before the town emptied; Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733–1764, ed. James E. Tierney (Cambridge, 1988), 191. 5 In this chapter, references to the Account of the European Settlements in America (London, 1757) (A) are given in the text. Consecutive references within a paragraph or note are abbreviated in the same way as C, W, and WS references. 6 Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, 20 (May 1757), 193–202. 7 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 9 Dec. 1752, in Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, ed. Lady Llanover (London, 1861), iii. 180. 8 According to Michael Kearney, E.B. was ‘not long after his arrival in London patronised by Earl Granville, & if I recollect rightly, had an offer of land in Carolina from him’; to Edmond Malone, 12 Jan. 1799, Bodl. MS Malone 39, fo. 24. Dennis, too, heard that E.B. was ‘well known to Lord Granville’; to Shackleton, 1757, YB OF 10. 212. Granville (1690–1763) is better known under his earlier title, Viscount Carteret. 9 Dennis reports from a lost letter that E.B.’s ‘purpose for America holds when the present Troubles admit him’; to Shackleton, 30 July, 5 Aug. 1757, YB OF 10. 211.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 127 Guadeloupe (captured from the French in May), he used the position to engage in a series of speculations of doubtful legality.10 Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the Account, given the importance of Burke’s great speeches on America. For the Account contains the germ of these speeches, and his earliest recorded ideas about colonial policy. Written in collaboration with Will Burke, and in large part a digest rather than a work of original observation or research, the Account has never been accepted as part of the Burke œuvre.11 Yet it deserves at least semicanonical status. Burke spoke of his share in the Account to at least two people. To Boswell, he admitted that he knew the author, whose identity he was ‘upon honour’ to conceal, and acknowledged that he had contributed to and ‘revised’ the book.12 To Malone, he was less reserved, admitting that the Account ‘was written by Will. Burke’.13 His denial did not convince Boswell, who thought ‘it is every where evident that Burke himself has contributed a great deal to it’.14 Will Burke’s later writings, all topical pamphlets, exhibit little power of generalization.15 In the Account, the exposition is enriched with the general remarks and appeals to first principles so characteristic of Edmund. Since his was undoubtedly the more powerful intellect, there is thus some justification for attributing chiefly to him, as Boswell did, any remark of superior insight. Further, many of Burke’s later ideas are foreshadowed in the Account. His part in writing the Account helps to explain why William Markham (1719–1807), an early patron, could confidently recommend him in 1759 as someone whose ‘chief application has been to the knowledge of public business, and our commercial interests’.16 10 R.B. Sr. likewise used his appointment as Collector of Customs in Grenada (in 1763) to engage in illegal land speculations. The dealings of both W.B. and R.B. Sr. are traced in Dixon Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen: A Study of the Statesman’s Financial Integrity and Private Relationships, University of Colorado Studies, ser. b, Studies in the Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1 (Boulder, Colo., 1939). 11 Wecter is typical in dismissing it as ‘a piece of pedestrian hack-writing, with its facts gleaned from a variety of earlier books’; ibid. 17 n. 69. 12 Boswell’s Journal, 5 May 1776, in Private Papers (privately printed, 1928–34), xi. 268–9. 13 So Malone told Boswell; Boswell to Temple, 28 Nov. 1789, in Letters, ed. Chauncey Brewster Tinker (Oxford, 1924), ii. 387. 14 To Temple, 28 Nov. 1789, in Letters, ii. 387. Others have thought the same. James Prior asserted that ‘there is . . . no question but that he wrote, if not the whole of it, at least by far the greater part’ (Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1826), i. 66). Prior did not know of the disclaimers contained in Boswell’s letters to Temple, which were first printed in 1856. Thomas Macknight, aware of this evidence, remained convinced that ‘much, if not all, is indisputably his [E.B.’s] composition’; History of the Life and Times of Edmund Burke (London, 1858–60), i. 105. 15 The other writings attributed to W.B. are: (1) Remarks on the Letter Addressed to Two Great Men (London, 1760) and An Examination of the Commercial Principles of the Late Negotiation between Great Britain and France (London, 1761). (2) Some of The Letters of Valens (London, 1777: Todd, 26); repr. from the London Evening Post, 1775–6. (3) An Enquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans in India (London, 1779). The attribution of the Remarks is uncertain, as is W.B.’s share in Valens. The Enquiry into the Policy (WS v. 41–124) is at least in part E.B.’s. 16 Markham to the Duchess of Queensbury, 25 Sept. 1759, in Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle (London, 1838–40), i. 432.

128 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 The Account was published anonymously. In this case, the anonymity was intended to create an air of impersonal authority, appropriate for a work of information and reference. Though written for a purpose, the Account takes the form of an impartial compendium of facts. Thus the favourable account of the Jesuit settlement in Paraguay is said to be based on ‘the particulars which seem best agreed upon by both sides’ (A i. 272). Even admissions of ignorance contribute to the rhetorical stance of informed impartiality. Thus the Burkes admit that they have been able to ascertain neither the population of Quito nor the basis of its economy: ‘we have none of those data which are necessary to ground such a calculation’ (258). This honesty is meant to create confidence in such information as they have garnered. The Account is a work of intelligent compilation. The most important single source was an earlier digest, Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca, or A Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels, edited by John Campbell (1708–75). This was published in 143 numbers between 1744 and 1749, the whole work forming two massive folio volumes.17 Campbell’s work purports to be a revision of an earlier compilation (1705) by John Harris (1666?–1719), whose name (but not Campbell’s) appears on the titlepage. In fact, Campbell’s is a new work, one of three large collections published in the 1740s, all in weekly numbers to reach a wide audience.18 Campbell was a member of the Dodsley circle. He edited the ‘Historical Memoirs’ section of Dodsley’s short-lived periodical, The Museum; or, the Literary and Historical Register (1746–7), one of the precursors of Burke’s own Annual Register. In 1748, Campbell proposed to write for Dodsley a ‘Geography, Natural History, and Antiquities Of England’.19 The Burkes respected his anonymity, referring obliquely to ‘a late very judicious collector of voyages’ (A i. 212). Acknowledging their debt to Campbell in the preface, they refer to ‘the judicious collection called Harris’s voyages’, commending its ‘striking and deep’ commentary and its ‘endeavouring every where with so much good sense and eloquence to rouze that spirit of generous enterprize, that can alone make any nation powerful or glorious’. This was the Burkes’ purpose, too. When they venture to disagree with Campbell, they do so with deference (212–13, ii. 21). With that ‘reciprocal civility of authors’ which Samuel Johnson identified as ‘one of the most 17 Two examples will illustrate the Burkes’ method. Their account of the Dutch occupation of Brazil (A i. 293–4) is abridged from the much fuller version in Campbell, Complete Collection of Voyages, ii. 174–81. Their description of the method of cultivating tobacco (A ii. 207–8) is virtually paraphrased from Campbell, Complete Collection of Voyages, ii. 229–30. 18 G. R. Crone and R. A. Skelton, ‘English Collections of Voyages and Travels, 1625–1846’, in Edward Lynam (ed.), Richard Hakluyt and his Successors (London, 1946), 93–8; R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge, 1957), 334–40. 19 Dodsley, Correspondence, 511.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 129 risible scenes in the farce of life’, Campbell in turn wrote a favourable review of the Account.20 Though ‘Harris’s voyages’ is the only source acknowledged in the preface, others are cited in the body of the Account. These references are often cryptic, and are given haphazardly. Authorities are sometimes credited for population figures, trade statistics, and descriptions of exotic flora and fauna.21 Other such material, however, is unreferenced. Random as they are, the citations of sources give some idea of the Burkes’ range of reading. Those named include French and Spanish, as well as English authors, though with one exception all were available in English.22 After Campbell’s Collection, the Burkes made most use of Amédée-François Frézier’s Voyage to the South-Sea (1717; first published in French, 1716). Frézier supplied most of their information about the west coast of South America.23 A tract for the times, the Account was written to raise public awareness of the importance to British prosperity of well-regulated colonies. Too often, politicians and even ministers were ignorant of commercial questions and paid insufficient regard to them in the ‘cutting and shuffling of a treaty of peace’ (A ii. 22–3). (The Burkes found this still true in 1762, when they tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Lord Bute that Guadeloupe was a more important conquest than Canada; C i. 152.) A secondary purpose was less altruistic, to further the careers of its authors. Its authorship, disclosed privately to a potential patron, would strengthen their claim to be well informed and articulate, and therefore employable. The Account was largely written during the summer of 1756, which the Burkes spent in Wales, taking with them the books they would need.24 Will 20 Monthly Review, 17 (Dec. 1757), 537–48. The authorship is known from a marked file; Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review, First Series, 1749–1789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford, 1934). Johnson’s remark is from his ‘Life’, prefaced to the second edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals (London, 1756). 21 Examples are: William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the . . . British Settlements in North-America (Boston, 1749–51); Gerónimo de Uztáriz, The Theory and Practice of Commerce and Maritime Affairs (London, 1751; 1st printed in Spanish, 1724); and Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (London, 1731–48). 22 The exception is Joseph-François Lafitau’s Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains (Paris, 1724), to which part ii of the Account is heavily indebted. Lafitau was not translated into English until 1974. 23 Other minor sources cited include the account of George Anson’s circumnavigation, A Voyage round the World (London, 1748; usually attributed to his chaplain, Richard Walter); Charles-Marie de la Condamine’s Succinct Abridgement of a Voyage Made within the Inland Parts of South America (London, 1747; 1st pub. in French, 1745); and an article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 18 (1694), 78–100 (for an account of an earthquake in Jamaica). La Condamine is no. 92 in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue. 24 The year is ascertained by the references to ‘the war we now carry on’ (A ii. 46) and to the ‘twentyfour years’ since the ‘first settlement’ of Georgia (265; calculating from the charter of 1732 rather than Oglethorpe’s arrival in 1733). Todd’s suggestion of 1751 as the date of composition (p. 28 n. 2) illustrates how little the Account has been read. Malone is the authority for Wales as the place of composition; reported in Boswell to Temple, 28 Nov. 1789, in Letters, ii. 387.

130 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 did most of the work of abridging and paraphrasing. Edmund ‘revised’ it and added some passages. The exact nature of his contribution is impossible to ascertain. The two probably talked it over every day, with Edmund correcting his friend’s work as it was written. Accordingly, the Account is best treated as a joint work, for however few pages Burke actually wrote, the whole owes much to his mind. Sometimes, indeed, two narrative voices can be distinguished. The regulations for the establishment of Georgia, for example, are criticized for being ‘made without sufficiently consulting the nature of the country, or the disposition of the people which they regarded’ (A ii. 258–9). Likewise, neither the laws derived from the Old Testament which the Puritans sought to implement, nor the English common law which has since been introduced, is at all suited to conditions in New England (142, 295–7). Such passages of analysis in the manner of Montesquieu transcend the Account’s polemic purpose.25 Elsewhere, a more pedestrian voice is heard, capable of stating fairly both sides of a case (for example, that of the sugar-planters of the West Indies; 106–12), but showing less interest in generalization. Source-criticism is also uneven. The alleged responsibility of Cortés for the deaths of 4 million Indians is treated as a probable exaggeration (i. 123). Yet the paving of Lima with silver for the arrival of a viceroy, and the use of gold and silver in Chile for common kitchen utensils, are reported as matters of fact (255, 262).26 Knowing the two authors, Edmund is readily (if perhaps unfairly) identified as the more philosophical and sceptical voice, Will as the more pragmatic and credulous. The Account was meant to be more than a compendium. The book has too readily been assumed to deserve Johnson’s strictures on ‘those who fill the world with books’, who ‘have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new materials of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied’.27 If they had little in the way of ‘new materials’, they were not deficient in judgement. Even the reviewer in the Critical, who objected to the ‘interspersed’ reflections, admitted that ‘many of them even bear the marks of superior penetration’.28 They aimed to instil ‘a just notion of America’ into readers too indolent to digest such bulky 25 Another instance of neglect is that C. P. Courtney found nothing in the Account relevant to his Montesquieu and Burke (Oxford, 1963). 26 The paving of Lima comes from Frézier, Voyage to the South-Sea, and along the Coasts of Chili and Peru, in the Years 1712, 1713, and 1714 (London, 1717), 218. I have not found a source for the kitchen utensils, though John Campbell, A Concise History of the Spanish America (London, 1741), mentions exaggerated reports of the wealth of Santiago (261). 27 Idler, no. 85 (1 Dec. 1759); repr. in Works (New Haven, 1958– ), ii. 264–5. 28 Critical Review, 4 (July 1757), 18–22. The review may be by Smollett, though it is not among those in vol. 4 attributed to him by James G. Basker, Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist (Newark, 1988), 223–4. The objection to the discursive reflections recalls a point made by Smollett in his review of Hume’s History in the Critical Review, 2 (Dec. 1756), 386.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 131 tomes as Campbell’s Complete Collection. Into about 600 octavo pages the Burkes compressed a historical account of the main European discoveries, conquests, and settlements in the Americas; an ethnographic account of the native people; and a geographical survey from Hudson Bay to Patagonia, noting climate, natural features, economic resources, and future prospects; the whole interspersed with moral and political observations.29 The point of view is unashamedly British and expansionist. Taking for granted the continuing exploitation of the Americas for the benefit of Europe, the Burkes’ chief concern is that Britain should increase its share, though with as much regard for the well-being of the natives and slaves as is consistent with the national interest. Such a book, short, lucidly written, and for the most part flattering to national pride and prejudices, was calculated to be popular. It reached a sixth edition in 1777, not counting two unauthorized reprints, and was translated into Italian (1763), twice into French (1767 and 1780), and into German (1778).30 The second French translation was meant to satisfy the public interest in America stimulated by France’s intervention (in 1778) in the colonies’ war for independence. Despite the availability of more recent, more voluminous, and more thoroughly researched works, and despite the bad translation, the Journal encyclopédique recommended the Account as an informative and intelligent treatment of the topic.31 As late as 1789, when information about America was far more abundant, Boswell still regarded the book as an ‘admirable compend’.32 Dugald Stewart (1753– 1808), who held a professional philosopher’s typically low opinion of Burke’s Enquiry, thought the Account ‘a very masterly sketch’.33 The Account was intended to influence colonial policy-making. French expansionism, the Burkes argue, poses a far greater threat to British interests than the vast but declining Spanish empire. If the French should gain the entire possession of Hispaniola, they would be more formidable rivals than the indolent Spaniards (A ii. 22–3). The French might improve New Orleans as a port, opening easier communications between Louisiana and Canada (37–8). To counteract such threats, Britain should do more to foster the development and prosperity of its colonies. In many respects, French policies deserve imitation. For example, while exclusive monopolies discourage trade, liberal regulation, on the French model, can encourage the 29 To give an idea of the scale of the abridgement: the account of the Spanish conquests, which in Campbell occupies 166 double-column folio pages (about 250,000 words), is reduced in the Account to 168 octavo pages (about 40,000 words). 30 Todd, 4b–g, 4k–p. The 1808 printings (4h–j) were meant for purchasers of sets of Burke’s Works (from which the Account was excluded), and do not reflect demand for the Account itself. 31 Journal encyclopédique (1780), 7: 407–43. The translator was Paul-Jérémie Bitaubé (1732–1808), who also translated Homer and (later) Goethe. 32 Boswell to Temple, 28 Nov. 1789, in Letters, ii. 387. 33 ‘Account of the Life and Writings of William Robertson’ (1801), in Stewart’s Works (Cambridge, 1829), vii. 145. The context is Stewart’s quotation of E.B.’s letter to Robertson of 9 June 1777 (C iii. 350–2) thanking him for the gift of his History of America.

132 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 growth of economic activity to the benefit of both the home country and the colonies. Britain, inferior to France in territory and population, can only maintain the balance of political power through its manifest economic superiority (i. 309). A war to maintain this dominance, such as had just begun, was therefore justified. War was also, in itself, a powerful economic stimulus. The Burkes attribute the decline of the Dutch economy to the stagnation induced by long a period of peace (ii. 16–17). In the longer term, however, any gains achieved by war needed to be maintained by the pursuit of enlightened policies. The Dutch, having wrested Brazil from the Portuguese in 1633, lost what might have become an inexhaustible source of wealth through the pursuit of narrow and shortsighted views. They invested too little in infrastructure, failed to develop good relations with the natives, and squeezed too much too quickly (A i. 293–4). Similar lessons about what to avoid could be drawn from the Spaniards. True, they had extracted untold quantities of precious metals from America, though at the cost of rendering the natives implacably hostile and the cause of religion and civilization odious. Yet they had derived no solid advantage from their colonies. Despite the possession of a vast empire for over two centuries, they had declined in wealth and power. Their system provides a perfect lesson in impolicy: ‘In government, tyranny; in religion, bigotry; in trade, monopoly’ (286). Chiefly to blame for the ‘tyranny’ was the constant succession of shortterm governors and officials, an unending series of ‘bloodsuckers’, each intent on extracting the maximum advantage from his limited period in office. Thus ‘this enslaved people has not the power of putting in use the fox’s policy, of letting the first swarm of bloodsuckers stay on, but is obliged to submit to be drained by a constant succession of hungry and impatient harpies’ (A i. 236). This striking image is surely Edmund’s rather than Will’s. The homely fable of the fox plagued by fleas is Aesopic. When a hedgehog offers to remove the fleas, the fox prefers to let them stay rather than expose himself to the attack of a new set of hungry ones. The harpies, ravenous birds with the faces of women, are mythological creatures from the epic world of Apollonius Rhodius and Virgil. The fusion of the two is a bold discordia concors characteristic of Burke’s style.34 The single exception to the record of Spanish misrule is ‘that extraordinary species of commonwealth’ in Paraguay (A i. 269). There, the Jesuits appear to have found ‘that difficult, but happy way, that grand desideratum in politicks, of uniting a perfect subjection to an entire content and satisfaction of the people’ (276). The formula expresses what the Burkes sought in colonial policy: a balance between the seemingly opposite interests of 34 The substantive point (though not the image) is commonplace: Frézier, Voyage to the South-Sea, 220; Campbell, Concise History, 180. The oft-told fable of the fox and the hedgehog is credited to Aesop by Aristotle (Rhetoric, 2. 20. 6).

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 133 colonizer and colonized, an economic relationship of harmony and equilibrium. Conditions in the British colonies were too different for Paraguay to offer a model for imitation. Yet a lesson could be taken from the Jesuits in their more humane treatment of the natives (234). Even in strictly economic terms, the Burkes argue, such a policy would justify itself. In Canada, for example, they attribute French success to the cultivation of better relations with the natives (ii. 27–8, 30, 270). The Burkes accept slavery as an economic necessity, the evils of which can and ought to be mitigated. Indeed, they make a purely economic case for the more humane treatment of slaves: less brutally treated, slaves would be happier and their work more productive. In addition, the Burkes propose the creation of a state of semi-freedom in which former slaves would be given the opportunity to work for themselves, and therefore harder (A ii. 120–7). Though critical of the mercenary Spanish priests who prey on the ignorance and superstition of the Indians, they except the Jesuits, who ‘bring the Indians and blacks into some knowledge of religion’ (i. 234). The theme of religious ‘bigotry’ is also prominent in the account of North America. The Burkes remark the intolerant and persecuting spirit of the Puritans who settled New England. ‘Persecution’, they note, is a word used to describe what is suffered, never what is inflicted on others (ii. 146–8, 225). A lengthy account of the Salem witch trials (149–56) balances the description of the Indians’ torture of captives (i. 189–93).35 Colonies which tolerate religious differences are commended for this enlightened policy: Pennsylvania (ii. 191, 193–4), Maryland (223–5), and Carolina (232). Burke has often been regarded as an advocate of free trade, and as a precursor of Adam Smith.36 The Account offers little support for this view. The Burkes certainly oppose ‘monopoly’ in the form of exclusive trading companies and restrictive practices. Monopolies are inequitable because they tend to ‘aim at great profits from a comparatively little produce’. Free trade allows more participants to achieve smaller profits on a larger overall volume, thereby generating more economic activity and so increasing general prosperity (A ii. 119). Such anti-monopolistic sentiments are expressed elsewhere in the Account (8, 133). On these principles, the Burkes condemn the monopoly granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company (280–2), and applaud the King of Denmark (Frederick V; 1723–66) for buying out the rights of an exclusive company and opening his country’s trade with the West Indies to all Danish subjects (53–4). They accept, however, that every 35 Daniel Neal, The History of New-England, Containing an Impartial Account of the Civil and Ecclesiastical Affairs of the Country, to . . . 1700 (2nd edn. London, 1747), was probably the Burkes’ main source for the Salem trials. 36 ‘Most scholars have identified his economic theory as similar or identical with that of Adam Smith’; Clara I. Gandy and Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke: A Bibliography of Secondary Studies to 1982 (New York, 1983), 213. The most substantial challenge to this orthodoxy is Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1995).

134 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 trading nation will try to secure a monopoly of commerce with its own colonies. They advocate neither ‘free trade’ nor complete reliance on the mechanisms of the market. Left to themselves, people will pursue their own short-term advantage. Economic enterprise therefore needs to be regulated, chiefly through appropriate incentives, for the long-term public good. For the advantage of the British imperial system as a whole, each colony should be encouraged to specialize in its own staple, one that competes neither with a British product nor with that of another colony. The colonies should be allowed to export directly to foreign markets, though not to import directly from them (176). At their inception, useful industries may need to be supported by public subsidy. An example is the silk manufacture in the Carolinas (255). The interest of society as a whole also requires some restraints on individual enterprise. Thus in the West Indies, where vast and rapid profits are made in the sugar plantations (100), the massive capital investment required leads to an undesirable oligopoly. Crops and products that yield only slower and smaller profits need to be encouraged and protected to create a class analogous to the small, independent farmers of England. The government should promote the cultivation of such crops as indigo, which require only a modest initial outlay (117–19). This proposal reflects Burke’s belief in the value of a social hierarchy with numerous small gradations, not an impassable gulf between rich and poor. The British did not commonly regard the French as a people from whom to learn the art of government. The superiority of British institutions was an article of faith shared even by some French thinkers, for example by Montesquieu. The early disasters of the Seven Years War, culminating in the loss of Minorca to the French in June 1756, made 1757 an auspicious year in which to attack such national complacency.37 The Burkes justify their long account of French colonial policy in part as rendering ‘due honour to all those, who advance the intercourse of mankind, the peopling of the earth, and the advantage of their country by wise and effectual regulations’. More immediately, such regulations provide a model for emulation which they hope may ‘help to rouse us out of that languor into which we seem to be fallen’ (A ii. 46). This passage illustrates the mix of idealism and self-interest characteristic of the Account. To promote ‘the intercourse of mankind’ and ‘the advantage of their country’ are taken to be virtually the same. For all the concern that they express for more humane treatment of natives and slaves, the Burkes never doubt that European economic exploitation is (or would be, if properly regulated) for the benefit of all. Few would share this optimism today. The reference to the ‘languor into which we seem to be fallen’ hints at a theme developed forcefully and at great length by John Brown in his famous Estimate: fear of national 37 In Great Britain’s True System (London, 1757), Malachy Postlethwayt, like the Burkes, draws attention to aspects of French commercial policy that deserve imitation (240–304).

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 135 decay. Brown argued that, beyond a certain point (which Britain had passed), increased trade and commerce led only to luxury and decadence. The thirst for wealth and luxury had infected even the nobility, now grown too enervated to provide proper examples of national virtue. Though the French, too, had become wealthier, their more rigidly stratified social system gave them an important advantage over the British. The French nobles, largely excluded from commerce, had preserved more of their old martial spirit.39 Burke never sympathized with such jeremiads. In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he laughs at the notion that Britain’s ills could be traced to an excess of material prosperity (WS ii. 254). Far from sharing Brown’s ideal of a nobility uncontaminated by contact with commerce, in the Reflections Burke identifies the divide between the nobility and the moneyed interest as one of the economic causes of the French Revolution (viii. 158–9). The Burkes looked favourably on the growth of ‘luxury’, believing that its benefits filtered down the social scale to improve, in due course, the quality of life even of the poor. Too long a period of peace, they thought, led to economic stagnation (A i. 61, ii. 17). Likewise, a sense of struggle was needed to animate men who would otherwise languish slothfully content with their present state. Rivalry with France, therefore, served as a powerful and healthy stimulus to national enterprise. In what respects did the French deserve imitation? Noting that British achievements have been the work of private initiatives, the Burkes argue that intelligent regulation on the French model would provide more favourable conditions and encourage greater investment of money and energy (A ii. 38–48). They commend the supervisory role of the French Conseil de commerce, a far more powerful body than the English Board of Trade; the separation of powers between governor, intendant, and council; and the practice of examining returning ships and forwarding reports to the authorities. The French lay no taxes on their colonies, and only low import duties. By paying for the colonial establishment from France, they inject funds that encourage local enterprise. By compelling the transport of indentured servants, they help maintain a more even balance between white colonists and black slaves. The Code noir ensures a better treatment of their slaves.40 Richelieu (1585–1642) and Colbert (1619–83), the great French ministers of the previous century, are commended for their far-sighted and statesmanlike attention to trade (i. 62–3, ii. 38

38 An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (5th edn. London, 1757). Published on 31 Mar., the Estimate was nearly contemporary with the Burkes’ Account. 39 Ibid. 205. 40 Postlethwayt, Great Britain’s True System, makes most of these points (247–9, 267–8). The most notable difference is that he says nothing about the French treatment of slaves.

136 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 41 4–5). No English minister receives such an accolade. The attitude to Colbert is noteworthy, since the new school of French economists, the ‘physiocrats’, had turned away from the dirigisme that he represented.

2 The Account is more than a polemic. Its ‘matter’, as the Burkes observe in their preface, is ‘very curious in itself’, besides being ‘extremely interesting to us as a trading people’. Among the most ‘curious’ matter in the book is the ethnographic account of the native Americans in part ii (A i. 161–94). In Burke’s day, the lessons that could be learned from comparative anthropology were giving a new dimension to the old idea of history as a ‘school of prudence’. Thanking William Robertson (1709–94) for a presentation copy of his History of America (1777), Burke wrote: ‘The part which I read with the greatest pleasure is the discussion on the Manners and character of the Inhabitants of that new World. I have always thought with you, that we possess at this time very great advantages towards the knowledge of human Nature.’ Thanks to the exploration of the world beyond Europe, ‘now the Great Map of Mankind is unrolld at once; and there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under our View’ (9 June 1777: C iii. 350–1). Though Robertson’s History is based on far greater reading and research than the Burkes’ Account, both works are informed by a belief that a study of its varieties would help illuminate that common human nature (however modified by local customs) in which most eighteenth-century thinkers believed. The Account is itself a contribution towards the project of mapping mankind. The description of the ‘Manners and character’ of the Americans in part ii corresponds to what Burke found most interesting in Robertson’s History. Given the different outlooks of Edmund and Will, the one philosophical, the other preoccupied with economic exploitation, it can confidently be ascribed to Edmund. The material is largely abridged and paraphrased from the Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains, comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724) by Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746), a Jesuit who had lived for about five years (1712–17) with the Iroquois near Montreal. Burke refers to it as ‘a work which deserves to be read amongst us much more than I find it is’ (A i. 161). Lafitau’s book is the Burkes’ only demonstrable source not available 41 In the same spirit, ‘a certain Statesman’ in Campbell (Complete Collection of Voyages, ii. 186–7) becomes in the Account ‘a minister of great sagacity’ for advising Pedro II of Portugal (1648–1706) to turn his attention to Brazil (A i. 300). Neither names the minister, who was Luiz de Menezes, conde da Ericeira (1632–90), ‘o Colbert portuguez’.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 137 43 in English. Indeed, this appears to be the first use of it in England. Burke was both fascinated and repelled by the otherness of Indian life. The two customs that he describes in detail are the torture of war captives and the ‘feast of souls’ or ceremonial reburying of the dead (189–93, 177–9). Lafitau was probably the first work of anthropology that Burke read. Although Montesquieu makes some use of ‘savage’ customs, nothing in L’Esprit des lois corresponds to what would now be called the ‘thick description’ in Lafitau, who conveys the actuality of Indian life with the vividness of long and intense observation. Burke’s use of Lafitau was not uncritical. For example, he rejected the Jesuit’s laborious attempts to prove that the Americans possessed a ‘religion’ as then understood in Europe. In doing so, he reveals his own prejudices. ‘A people who live by hunting, who inhabit mean cottages, and are given to change the place of their habitation,’ he asserts, ‘are seldom very religious.’ What evidence supports this generalization? ‘The Americans have scarce any temples’ (A i. 166).44 Where Lafitau saw religion, Burke saw only ‘superstitions’, the remnants of a lost religion: ‘they make a sort of oblation of their first fruits; observe certain ceremonies at the full moon, and have in their festivals many things that very probably came from a religious origin, though they perform them as things handed down to them from their ancestors, without knowing or enquiring about the reason’ (167). Burke tests Indian religious practices against his European paradigm, and finds them wanting. They have no temples, and no liturgy; therefore they have no religion. So too in politics, he struggles to assimilate the political structure of Indian societies to the categories of Aristotle. Some have ‘an head whom we call a king’, but whose ‘power is rather persuasive than coercive’. Others ‘may be considered as a sort of aristocracies’, despite there being ‘no other qualification absolutely necessary for their head men, but age, with experience and ability in their affairs’ (170). A memorable passage describes how the Americans slowly tortured to death. A few lines will convey its gruesome quality: 42

They begin at the extremities of his body, and gradually approach the trunk. One plucks out his nails by the roots, one by one; another takes a finger into his mouth, 42 The use of Lafitau is the first unequivocal evidence that E.B. could read French (Dubos, Montesquieu, and Voltaire were available in English). How and when he learned it are not known; he may have taught himself, which would explain his failure to acquire oral facility. 43 Lafitau’s editors cite Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) as the earliest example of his influence on an English-language author; Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, ed. and trans. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore (Toronto, 1974), vol. i, pp. ciii–v. 44 E.B. excepts the Mexicans and the Peruvians. Following Lafitau, he saw little ethnic diversity among the native Americans (A i. 161, ii. 284). Everything borrowed from Lafitau relates to the Indians of north-eastern North America, yet part ii is sandwiched between the accounts of the Spanish (part i) and the Portuguese (part iii) conquests.

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and tears off the flesh with his teeth; a third thrusts the finger, mangled as it is, into the bole of a pipe made red hot, which he smoakes like tobacco. Then they pound his toes and fingers to pieces between two stones; they cut circles about his joints, and gashes in the fleshy parts of his limbs, which they sear immediately with redhot irons, cutting and searing alternately; they pull off this flesh, thus mangled and roasted, bit by bit, devouring it with greediness, and smearing their faces with the blood, in an enthusiasm of horror and fury. (A i. 189–90).45

Burke explains that he dwells at length on such horrors in order to show ‘in the strongest light, to what an inconceivable degree of barbarity the passions of men let loose will carry them’. To learn of such practices ‘will point out to us the advantages of a religion that teaches a compassion to our enemies’ and ought to ‘make us more sensible than some appear to be, of the value of commerce, the arts of a civilized life, and the lights of literature; which, if they have abated the force of some of the natural virtues by the luxury which attends them, have taken out likewise the sting of our natural vices, and softened the ferocity of the human race without enervating their courage’ (192–3). The lesson inculated with elaborate irony in the Vindication of Natural Society is here made manifest. ‘Civilization’ is not the enemy, as Rousseau would have it; nor is organized religion the ‘infâme’ against which Voltaire crusaded. ‘Natural’ society, painted in its true colours, is a state no one would voluntarily choose. Christianity, as Burke argues elsewhere, humanizes the terrible face of the divine.46 In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke recurs to the notion of religion as a great civilizing force (WS viii. 130, 141–2). The cannibal imagery with which he denounces the revolutionaries, and which is apt to appear exaggerated, derives in part from this early reading of Lafitau and the deep impression Indian ‘barbarity’ made on his mind.47 The account of the Iroquois illuminates a dark spot on the ‘great Map of Mankind’. Elsewhere, in several scattered passages, the Burkes single out for praise those individuals who ‘have brought into the pale of civility and religion, these rude and uncultivated parts of the globe’ (A ii. 215). They do not exclude the conquistadors from their idea of a ‘great man’. Great enterprises often require men with ‘fiery, restless tempers, willing to undertake the severest labour, provided it promises but a short continuance, who love risk and hazard’ (102). Examples are Cortés (1485–1547; i. 104–5), Pizarro (c.1476–1541; 151–2), and Sir Walter Ralegh (1552?–1618; ii. 211). One characteristic shared by both kinds of ‘great’ men, by Columbus (1451–1506) as well as Cortés, was the ability to take advantage of chance occurrences. Thus Columbus used his knowledge of an approaching eclipse The account derives from Mœurs, ii. 277–81 (ii. 155–8 in the translation). Philosophical Enquiry, ii. v. 70. E.B. extends ‘cannibalism’ to ‘all their nameless, unmanly, and abominable insults on the bodies of those they slaughter’; Letters on a Regicide Peace, I (WS ix. 246). 45 46 47

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 139 to terrify the natives (i. 59–60). Cortés, faced with the choice of attacking Mexico City by day or by night, made (or pretended to make) the decision in favour of night in accord with a superstition. In their source for this episode, the idea is treated with ridicule.48 For the Burkes, to determine an indifferent matter by respecting a superstition was a masterstroke of policy, inspiring those who took part with a notion that their enterprise would be divinely favoured (95). The characters whom the Burkes most admire, however, are not the likes of Cortés. Unwearied and unselfish diligence in a good cause is the quality that they most respect and revere. Their pantheon is remarkably cosmopolitan: Columbus; two Spanish colonial administrators, Cristóbal Vaca de Castro (1492–1566) and Pedro de la Gasca (c.1485–1567?); one Frenchman, Philippe de Lonvilliers de Poincy (1584–1660); and three English founding fathers: Lord De La Warr (1577–1618), the third Lord Baltimore (1637– 1715), and William Penn (1644–1718). In the Burkes’ comments on these men (A ii. 215–16) one quality stands out: disinterestedness.49 They all worked for the benefit of mankind without enriching themselves, some even impairing their fortunes. Will Burke did not belong to this type. In all his colonial enterprises, whether in the West Indies or later in India, his motives were mercenary.50 Indeed, one of the ironies of the Account is the frequency with which the authors condemn the greed of those who seek fortunes in the colonies (i. 20–1, 46–7, 294; ii. 58, 117–18). This ideal of disinterest can safely be attributed to Edmund. Thus Vaca de Castro was a lawyer who ‘through a more rigid adherence to the strictest ideas of right and justice than is suitable to the coarseness of practice . . . did not make that figure in his profession to which his great capacity entitled him’ (i. 153).51 Such integrity might have blighted Burke’s own career, had he pursued the law. Gasca, with ‘a milder and more insinuating behaviour’ than Vaca de Castro, possessed ‘the same love of justice, the same greatness of soul, and the same disinterested spirit’ (157). Returning home after a laborious term of office, he ‘sate down as poor in Spain as he had left it’ (160). Lord De La Warr gained ‘no other reward than that retired and inward satisfaction, which a good mind feels in indulging it’s own propensity to virtue, and the prospect of those just honours which the latest posterity will take a pleasure in bestowing upon those, who prefer the interest of posterity to their own’ (ii. 213). Burke himself would receive no Campbell, Complete Collection of Voyages, ii. 111. A Portuguese and a Dutchman are elsewhere praised for the same virtues: Dom Marcos Teixeira (d. 1624), Bishop of Bahia, for taking up arms against the Dutch invasion of Brazil; and Prince John Maurice of Nassau (1604–79) for his prudent administration of Brazil during the Dutch occupation (1636–43). 50 C i. 148 n. 2; Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen, 88–91. 51 When James Boswell, another lawyer of more capacity than success, read the Account in 1789, he remarked on the ‘fine character’ of Vaca de Castro (YB Boswell Papers, M225. 2). 48 49

140 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 other reward. William Penn, who deserved to be ranked with Lycurgus and Solon, ‘died in the Fleet prison’ (191). In 1795, after thirty years’ service to the public, so far from having enriched himself, Burke, nearly overwhelmed with debt, was haunted by the spectre of ending his days in a debtors’ prison (C viii. 280). Lists of personal heroes are often revealing. The sextumvirate of splendid failures conjured up for Gulliver by the magician in Glubbdubdrib, for example, illustrates Swift’s belief that a man of strict integrity was almost sure to fail in terms of worldly success.52 Burke was more optimistic. His heroes were not martyrs to lost causes. Men of vision and action, they accomplished great things, however little personal advantage they gained. Vaca de Castro and Gasca brought some order to the administration of Spanish America. De La Warr, Baltimore, and Penn all founded colonies that flourished. Burke, too, wanted achievement. As he told O’Hara in 1766, ‘opposition never was to me a desirable thing; because I like to see some effect of what I am doing’ (C i. 285). Circumstances more than temperament condemned him to a career almost entirely in opposition. Burke’s optimism was founded on his belief in providence. Columbus, the victim of a ‘shameful instance of human ingratitude’, was saved from a storm which destroyed his ungrateful enemies (A i. 50–1). Providence is another leitmotiv that the Account shares with Philosophical Enquiry and Burke’s ‘History of England’. Providence, the Burkes argue, distributes its gifts equitably. In the West Indies, the tropical heat is rendered tolerable by the wind and the rain (ii. 90–1). In the Arctic, the fur of native animals turns white in winter; dogs imported from England are able to grow longer and thicker coats to enable them to withstand the severity of the climate (283–4).53 The various European nations have taken possession of those parts of the Americas best suited to their national characters (55–6). Providence even provides for the rehabilitation of the criminal and the failure. Just as ‘there is no soil or climate which will not shew itself grateful to culture’, there is likewise ‘no disposition, no character in mankind, which may not be turned with dextrous management to the public advantage’ (105). In the West Indies, men ruined by imprudence, folly, or crime can begin afresh in a society in which they have many fellow outcasts. Instead of sinking deeper into iniquity and disgrace in England, they have a chance of making a fortune and returning almost in triumph (102–4). The opportunity was not always successfully improved, as Will’s experience would show. 52 Gulliver’s Travels, iii. vii; repr. in Prose Writings, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1939–68), xi. 196; M. M. Kelsall, ‘Iterum Houyhnhnm: Swift’s Sextumvirate and the Horses’, Essays in Criticism, 19 (1969), 35–45. 53 These examples parallel several passages in the Philosophical Enquiry: i. x. 43, xiv. 46, xix. 52–3, iii. iv. 98–9.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 141 Though he never saw America, Burke had many opportunities to use his knowledge of its history and conditions. In 1766, when he entered Parliament, the most urgent political question was whether to repeal Grenville’s Stamp Act. Between 1773 and 1783, the dispute over taxation, and the supervening war, kept America in the foreground of political consciousness. The experience of working on the Account had, however, a more immediate value. Even before it was published, Burke had signed a contract for a short history of England. This required several of the same skills as the Account: an ability to digest and select from a vast body of raw source material; clear and incisive exposition; and the gift of shaping narrative and description, history and analysis into a coherent and convincing whole.

3 The poverty of English historical writing was a common complaint. In 1719, Swift was only echoing received opinion when he lamented the lack of a good general history of England, of the kind ‘most wanted by foreigners, and gentlemen of our own country; not a voluminous work, nor properly an abridgment, but an exact relation of the most important affairs and events, without any regard to the rest’.54 When Swift wrote, ‘voluminous’ histories were standard. The History of England (1707–18) by Laurence Echard (1670?–1730) and the Complete History of England (1706) edited by John Oldmixon (1673–1742) each filled three ample folio volumes. Swift himself began a history of the kind he thought was needed, but made little progress. The gap remained unfilled, while the tradition of large-scale narratives continued. Between Swift’s complaint and Burke’s undertaking, three further massive histories of England were published. The most highly regarded of these was the Histoire d’Angleterre (1724–36) of Paul de Rapin de Thoyras (1671–1725), a Huguenot refugee who came to England with William of Orange and lived there for several years. In the translation and continuation by Nicholas Tindal (1688–1774), The History of England, as Well Ecclesiastical as Civil (1725–45), it was often reprinted. That the standard history of England should be a translation from French was regarded as a blot on the national honour. Thomas Carte (1686–1754), a nonjuring clergyman, entered the lists with a four-volume General History of England (1747–55). His was a work of formidable research, seemingly ill calculated to reach a popular audience. Yet such was the expected demand for even an expensive folio of English history that 3,000 copies of the first volume were printed.55 54 55

Dedication of Swift’s (unfinished) ‘History of England’, in Prose Writings, v. 11. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812–15), i. 191 n.

142 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 In 1751, Samuel Johnson repeated, if only to refute, the old reproach that ‘our nation, which has produced so many authors eminent for almost every other species of literary excellence, has been hitherto remarkably barren of historical genius; and so far has this defect raised prejudices against us, that some have doubted, whether an Englishman can stop at that mediocrity of stile, or confine his mind to that even tenour of imagination, which narrative requires’. Johnson opposed the received opinion on two grounds. Implacably hostile to determinism, he argued that if the English have not yet succeeded, this is because ‘history has not hitherto been diligently cultivated’. Further, he cited three historians ‘whom we may venture to place in comparison with any that the neighbouring nations can produce’: Ralegh, Clarendon, and Knolles. Yet Johnson was forced to concede that Ralegh lacks the majesty of history, that Clarendon is too circumstantial and a bad stylist, while Knolles chose a barren subject.56 Hume aspired to fill the vacant throne. He had long meditated the composition of a historical work as a labour for his maturity, when his appointment in 1752 as Keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh gave him convenient access to a collection of 30,000 volumes. ‘There is no post of honour in the English Parnassus more vacant than that of History,’ he observed: ‘Style, judgement, impartiality, care—everything is wanting to our historians.’ Even the best, Rapin, was ‘extremely deficient’ for the seventeenth century, then as now the great battleground of English historiography.57 Hume’s history, in six volumes, was published between 1754 and 1761. The first volume to appear (covering the controversial early Stuart period) was much abused. After weathering this initial storm, however, Hume’s History quickly became a modern classic, a status it retained for several generations. Reviewing the last two volumes in 1761, Burke began by echoing the old charge: ‘Our writers had commonly so ill succeeded in history, the Italians and even the French had so long continued our acknowledged superiors, that it was almost feared that the British genius, which had so happily displayed itself in every other kind of writing, and had gained the prize in most, yet could not enter the lists in this.’ Hume first ‘discharged our country from this opprobrium’.58 Of all the eighteenthcentury histories of England, Hume’s remains the most widely read and studied.59 His victory was not won without rivals. Working with almost 56 Rambler, no. 122 (18 May 1751); repr. in Works, iv. 288–90. The works cited are: Sir Walter Ralegh, History of the World (1614); Clarendon, History of the Rebellion (1702–4); Richard Knolles, General History of the Turks (1604). 57 Hume to James Oswald, 29 Jan. 1748, and to John Clephane, Jan. 1753, in Letters, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), i. 109, 170. Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (2nd edn. Oxford, 1980), 249–53. 58 Annual Register (1761), 301–4 bis. The attribution of the review to E.B. is only presumptive. 59 Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture from Clarendon to Hume (Basingstoke, 1996), 170.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 143 incredible speed, Tobias Smollett began after Hume, but finished earlier. The first three volumes of his Complete History of England appeared in 1757, the fourth and last (taking the story to 1748) in 1758. Smollett, too, enjoyed a contemporary success, such was the public’s appetite for English history, though his work proved less durable. With Hume’s History in progress and Smollett’s in prospect, Burke was entering a crowded market. Apart from their competition, his decision to write a history of England was a bold one. By 1750, a vast mass of printed source material was available. More than mere information, however, was now required. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke had pioneered a new kind of ‘philosophical’ history.60 Burke shared some of their aims. Aspiring to found his own ‘philosophical’ history on a secure empirical base, he sought a medium between the vast bodies of antiquarian research, undigested, underinterpreted, and unreadable, and the tendentious, overspeculative ‘philosophical’ history which he had earlier parodied in his Vindication of Natural Society. His success in finding such a medium is one of the outstanding merits of his ‘History’. A second difficulty faced the writer of English history: party bias. As late as the 1750s, rival ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ interpretations of events as far back as the Tudors still aroused passions, as Hume discovered. Finally, to reach his intended audience, Burke had to emulate Hume’s stylishness. Burke signed a contract for a ‘history of England from the time of Julius Caesar to the end of the reign of Queen Anne’ on 25 February 1757. The agreement was with Robert Dodsley, who had published his earlier books.61 No one believed more strongly than Hume that to attract readers history needed to be concise, and that his own was a model in this respect.62 Yet Burke proposed to cover a longer period than Hume (from the beginning to 1714) in less than a fourth of the space: about eighty quarto sheets (640 pages), or under 400,000 words.63 Burke was to submit the manuscript by 25 December 1758, and agreed to put his name to the work. The second stipulation is significant, for his earlier books had been published 60 Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des romains et de leur décadence (1734); Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) and Essai sur les mœurs (early versions, 1752–3); Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History (1752). 61 Transcript in Isaac Reed’s ‘Memoranda from Mr Dodsley’s Papers which I received this day 29th April 1797 from the Ex[ecu]tors’, New College Library, University of Edinburgh. The main provisions are summarized in Dodsley, Correspondence, 510. 62 Hume to the abbé Le Blanc, 12 Sept. 1754, in Letters, i. 193. Hume later attributed the failure of Thomas Leland’s History of Philip, King of Macedon (1758) to its scale. ‘I have not read the book,’ he confessed to William Robertson, ‘but by the size, I should judge it to be too particular. It is a pretty large quarto. I think a book of that size sufficient for the whole History of Greece till the death of Philip’ (summer 1759, in Letters, i. 315). 63 E.B.’s contract specified ‘not less than 80 sheets printed in the manner of Jarvis’s 4to Ed[itio]n of Don Quixote’ (Reed transcript in Edinburgh University Library). The 1756 quarto edition of Jervais’s Don Quixote contains about 575 words per page. Eighty sheets would thus contain about 368,000 words.

144 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 anonymously. Burke was now well enough known as an author for his name to be a selling-point. Dodsley agreed to pay £300 in instalments for a first edition of 1,500 copies, with an option on future rights. The extant portion of the work, which extends to 1216, would fill about thirty sheets of the projected eighty. To have compressed the period from 1216 to 1714 into another fifty sheets would have been a triumph of brevity. Christmas 1758 passed without Burke having submitted the manuscript. Dodsley, however, did not abandon hope easily. Burke delivered some copy, for about 1760, fifteen sheets of the book were set in type, and six actually printed.64 Dodsley was taking a risk in beginning to print an unfinished work, for paper was expensive.65 The practice was, however, surprisingly common.66 Perhaps he thought that seeing the first chapters in print would galvanize Burke into renewed activity. If so, the ruse failed, though as late as March 1763 Burke still wanted to return to it. Explaining to William Gerard Hamilton (1729–96) his need to keep some time for his own purposes, he spoke of ‘a sort of rent charge on my thoughts’, most likely his ‘History’ (C i. 164). Burke’s engagement in Hamilton’s service first slowed and then stopped work on the project. The sheets gathered dust in the printer’s warehouse. Eventually, most must have been sold as waste paper, though a few sets survive.67 Not until 1812 did Burke’s unfinished ‘History’, with other posthumous writings, make a belated appearance. The fragment attracted almost no attention. In 1943, it was still so little studied or even read that it could be dismissed by a distinguished historian, G. M. Young (1882–1959), as ‘demonstrably a translation from the French’.68 Young wanted to minimize Burke’s knowledge of history in order to trace the source of his ‘passion for the historic order’ to ‘somewhere in the depths 64 John Hughs (the printer) to James Dodsley, 11 Mar. 1769, transcript by Isaac Reed, YB Boswell Papers, C 1561. 65 The size of Dodsley’s investment in paper and printing can be estimated from the figures and examples cited in Patricia Hernlund, ‘William Strahan’s Ledgers’, Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), 89–111, 22 (1969), 179–95. To print 1,500 copies of six sheets would have required about eighteen reams of paper. At a medium price of £1 7s. per ream, the paper would have cost £24 6s. Typesetting was probably charged at about £1 3s. per sheet, or £10 7s. for nine sheets. Dodsley’s costs thus amounted to about £34 13s. 66 Two hundred pages of the second volume of Joseph Warton’s Essay on Pope were printed in 1760. These sheets were stored until the book was finished and published in 1782; David Fairer, ‘The Writing and Printing of Joseph Warton’s Essay on Pope’, Studies in Bibliography, 30 (1977), 211–19. In 1773, William Jones began a short ‘History of the Turks’. Five sheets were printed before he abandoned the project; Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge, 1990), 45. Eleven sheets (eighty-eight pages) of the unfinished fourth volume of Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry were printed about 1782; Rodney M. Baine, introduction to Thomas Warton, A History of English Poetry: An Unpublished Continuation (Los Angeles, 1953). Several of Thomas Percy’s projects also languished half-printed for decades. 67 Todd, 6. 68 ‘Burke’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 29 (1943), 19–36. Young had earlier made the charge in the Times Literary Supplement, 3 Aug. 1940, 375; he was supported by E.B.’s then most recent biographer, Philip Magnus (10 Aug., 387). No one demurred. Only much later did the TLS publish a defence of the book’s authenticity, by John C. Weston (17 May 1957, 305).

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 145 of his being’. Such an antithesis is misleading. Burke’s ‘passion’ was strengthened by his extensive knowledge of history. History was the basis of Burke’s thought, and his only formal historical work deserves to be better known.69 To write even a short history of England is no unambitious task. That Burke allowed himself less than two years may be taken to imply that he intended only a hasty digest. He was not, however, attempting to compete with Carte, Hume, or Smollett. The title, ‘An Essay Towards an Abridgment of the English History’, was intended to signal the experimental, innovative, and provisional nature of the work.70 His ‘History’ was conceived not only on a smaller scale, but with a greater proportion of analysis to narrative. Montesquieu had sought to explain the course of history through the discovery of uniformly operating general causes, and Burke was the first historian of England to follow his method.71 This approach requires not a detailed narrative, but an analysis of selected themes. Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des romains et de leur décadence (1734) is perhaps the closest precedent. Hence Burke’s choice of scale: an ‘abridgment’ could most effectively highlight the leading themes. The narrative is artfully interwoven with passages of background description and thematic analysis. Burke also paid careful attention to structure. Where Hume often ends his chapters with the ‘miscellaneous transactions’ of a reign, Burke creates a more satisfying sense of closure, usually with a significant anecdote or moral. Burke intended more than a work of compilation. London had then no public research library, as Hume and others had often lamented.72 He could, however, use the library of the Middle Temple, which if not large (about 4,000 volumes in 1739), was rich in the standard sources for medieval English history.73 Some books he owned himself.74 Others he could borrow. 69 T. O. McLoughlin, ‘Edmund Burke’s Abridgment of English History’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 5 (1990), 45–59, is the first serious study. 70 This title is found at the head of the text as printed in 1760, though not in the original contract. John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668), a massive folio of over 600 pages, launched the fashion for titles beginning ‘An Essay Towards’. The latest at the time of E.B.’s writing was John Dalrymple, An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (London, 1757), a modest octavo. This was in E.B.’s library (Sale Catalogue, no. 105). 71 Courtney, Montesquieu and Burke, 13, 46–57. 72 Hume to Strahan, 25 May 1757, in Letters, i. 251. The deficiency was partly remedied with the opening of the British Museum Library in Jan. 1759, too late for E.B. to have used it for his ‘History’. E.B. was admitted on 15 June 1771; ‘Persons admitted to Reading Room Jan 12th 1762 to March 2d 1781’, BL Add. MS 45869, fo. 44. 73 The estimate of its size (3,982 volumes) is from William Maitland, The History of London from its Foundation by the Romans to the Present Time (London, 1739), 656. Its holdings are listed in Catalogus librorum bibliothecae Honorabilis Societatis Medii Templi Londini (London, 1734). 74 The Sale Catalogue of E.B.’s library lists several modern histories: the 1719 edition of the Complete History edited by Oldmixon (no. 414; called Kennett’s); an octavo reprint of Tindal’s translation of Rapin (no. 464); and Oldmixon’s own History (no. 589). E.B. owned few editions of medieval sources.

146 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 To estimate the extent of the research Burke undertook is not easy, for he provides many fewer source references than either Hume or Smollett. His notes are unevenly distributed, and therefore record only a random sample of his reading. Even so, the evidence is fuller than for the Philosophical Enquiry or the Account of the European Settlements. Some examples will illustrate the range, if not the quantity, of the research that went into his ‘Abridgment’. His primary sources included the classical authors who provided important material for the Roman period: principally Caesar and Tacitus, but also Cicero, Vitruvius, and Justinian. For the Saxon and later periods, besides the standard histories and chronicles (such as Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), Burke made extensive use of the surviving law codes. These he read in the edition by David Wilkins, Leges AngloSaxonicae ecclesiasticae et civiles (1721).75 Burke used a wide range of secondary sources. He cites chiefly seventeenth-century legal and antiquarian writers, such as Selden, Spelman, Dugdale, and Brady.76 His use of more modern authorities is harder to assess, since he names few of them. Burke names no historian more recent than Rapin, though he sometimes uses a phrase like ‘some authors’, typically as a prelude to disagreement. Such judgements are usually enforced by reference to some decisive piece of primary evidence. Rapin is cited once: ‘The Irish language is not different from that of all other nations, as Temple and Rapin, from ignorance of it, have asserted; on the contrary, many of its words bear a remarkable resemblance not only to those of the Welsh and Armorick [Breton], but also to the Greek and Latin’ (WS i. 510).77 Burke was no philologist. His knowledge probably derived from the comparative vocabularies and glossaries in Edward Lhuyd’s Archaeologica Britannica (1707). Irish, however, was widely spoken in his day, and Burke may have acquired a smattering of it.78 The most recent source cited, Frederick Norden’s Travels in Egypt and Nubia (1757), illustrates his interest in comparative anthropology. Such ethnographic material (usually unreferenced) was a feature of ‘philosophical’ history, popularized 75 Copy in the Middle Temple Library; not in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue. E.B. probably read Wilkins’s Latin translations rather than the Old English originals. 76 Examples include John Selden, The Historie of Tithes (1618), on the secular offices filled by the clergy (WS i. 501); Henry Spelman’s Concilia (1639–64), on the willingness of the early Church to alienate lands to purchase manumissions (396); William Dugdale, The History of St Paul’s Cathedral (1658), on the survival of a pagan ritual (395); and Robert Brady, Introduction to the Old English History (1684), on the Saxon method of swearing an oath (449). All four works appear in the Catalogus of the Middle Temple Library; none in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue. 77 The passages to which E.B. took exception are Sir William Temple, Introduction to the History of England (1695); repr. in Works (London, 1814), iii. 83; and Rapin, History of England (8vo edn. London, 1728), iii. 56. Elsewhere E.B. uses the evidence of the relationship between the Celtic languages and Latin and Greek to argue a common origin (WS i. 339). This was not yet an accepted theory. The concept of an ‘Indo-European’ group of languages was not advanced in print until 1767; J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London, 1989), 9–11. 78 So R. B. McDowell speculates (WS ix. 391). Lhuyd’s book is no. 417 in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 147 by Montesquieu in L’Esprit des lois. From Norden, Burke took a modern analogue to the Druids’ worship of serpents (355‒6).79 Similarly, John Scheffer’s History of Lapland (1673) supplies a parallel to their stone idols (356). Thus Burke uses what is known about modern ‘savage’ nations to illuminate the conditions of ancient Britain.80

4 Burke’s ‘History’ is not primarily a narrative, as a brief synopsis will indicate. The extant portion is divided into three books. Book i begins with an introductory chapter in the manner of Montesquieu, relating the general course of European history to the continent’s chief geographical features. Burke then explains Julius Caesar’s reasons for invading Britain, setting British history in the larger pattern of the expansion of Roman power. For Hume, the early period was a disagreeable prologue to be hurried over, since it could afford ‘little or no entertainment to men born in a more cultivated age’.81 Burke treats the ancient Britons as interesting in their own right. In chapter ii, he pauses to give an ethnographic account of their society, paying particular attention to their famous priesthood, the Druids. In chapter iii, a brief account of the Roman conquest under Claudius precedes a much longer description of the characteristic institutions which the Romans imposed on their provinces. Chapter iv takes the narrative from Hadrian to the end of the Roman occupation of Britain. The Saxon period is the subject of book ii. Chapter i describes the invasions of the Saxons and their conversion to Christianity. Intent on defining the ‘genius’ of their institutions, in chapter ii Burke pauses to explore the growth of monasticism in England and its influence on the development of English society. Violent and volatile, the Saxon character could equally find expression in the bloodthirsty warrior and the saintly monk. This chapter parallels chapter ii of book i. In both, Burke shows not only the important role of religion in cultural evolution, but how each society develops a religion suited to its ‘genius’ and mores. Chapter iii provides a narrative history from Ethelbert of Kent to Alfred. The first English monarch whose character has left a strong impression on the historical record, Alfred is treated at length in chapter iv. Chapter v takes the 79 Frederick Lewis Norden, Travels in Egypt and Nubia, trans. Peter Templeman (London, 1757), ii. 28–30 (folio edn.). The folio edition is no. 585 in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue. In the same spirit as E.B., in a footnote Norden draws a parallel between this Egyptian serpent cult and the vulgar Roman belief that Aesculapius was transformed into a serpent. 80 WS i. 342–3 (lack of respect for treaty obligations); 352 (migration natural to hunter societies); 199 (Peruvian analogue to the European megaliths); 355 (use of herbal medicines). 81 The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (Indianapolis, 1983–5), i. 3. (This edition is based on that of 1778, the last revised by Hume.)

148 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 story from the death of Alfred to the Norman invasion. In chapter vi, Burke provides a retrospective account of Saxon laws and institutions, placing this chapter (much the longest in book ii) at the end to help explain why William conquered England so much more easily than the Romans had done. Book iii begins with an introductory survey of the state of Europe at the time of the Norman invasion. After the relatively insular Saxon period, this serves to broaden the focus as England becomes again closely linked to the Continent. It also introduces the ‘genius’ of the Normans, conditioned by highly un-English institutions: feudalism, the empire, and the papacy. The following chapters (ii to viii) follow the convention of treating each successive reign as a unit. Yet at several points, Burke interrupts the narrative to consider some important theme: the crusades, for example, in the chapter on William II (WS i. 481–3). The narrative ends at the death of King John in 1216, a logical terminal date for a volume. To all appearance, Burke had written a publishable unit. Why he and Dodsley chose not to publish it is a mystery. The thematic quality of Burke’s ‘History’ is evident even from this outline. His focus is on institutions rather than individuals, as he analyses the ‘genius’ of the races which have in turn occupied England: the British, savage but partly kept in check by the awe in which they held the Druids; the Saxons, brutal warriors gradually humanized by Christianity; the Normans, a military caste with a more hierarchical ‘genius’, and who made the Church an order in the State. ‘The changes, which have happened in the manners, opinions, and sciences of men’, Burke thought ‘as worthy of regard as the fortune of wars, and the revolutions of kingdoms’ (WS i. 358). He was accordingly prepared to abandon narrative for description and analysis. Brevity alone was not enough. Burke needed to convince readers that his ‘History’ contained the quintessence of bulky folios. An important element of his strategy is the achievement of an appropriate narrative voice. Burke tries to sound authoritative but not pedantic, free of prejudice and preconception yet aware of the difficulties that stand in the way of historical objectivity. References to unnamed ‘authors’ contribute to the creation of this judicious voice. An example is the fate of the ancient Britons. According to some historians, those who did not flee were extirpated by the Saxons; according to others, they were merely reduced to slavery.82 Burke argues that both sides are wrong. The Saxon invaders could not have repopulated the country so quickly on their own, he argues; therefore the Britons cannot have been entirely wiped out. Yet their language contributed 82 E.B. may have had in mind Samuel Daniel, in A Complete History of England, with the Lives of All the Kings and Queens Thereof (London, 1706), i. 88–9; and Temple, Introduction to the History of England, 96–7. The second was the more usual opinion: Laurence Echard, The History of England from the First Entrance of Julius Caesar and the Romans (London, 1707–18), i. 44; Rapin, History of England, i. 41.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 149 little to English, and their religion was entirely lost; so they must have suffered more severely than the continental victims of the Saxon invasions. He clinches the point with a reference to a law code, which shows that the legal status of the Britons was a lesser kind of citizenship, not slavery (WS i. 388–9). Another example is ‘the controversy, which has been managed with such heat, whether in the Saxon times the crown was hereditary or elective’ (433). Burke’s judicial determination ‘in some degree, favourably for the litigants on either side’ was hardly new. Rapin had anticipated it, though Carte (unsurprisingly for a Jacobite) remained a strong advocate for the hereditary principle.83 Burke constructs a fictitious polarity to give his own position an appearance of judicious balance. Another strategy that Burke employs to establish an authoritative voice is the detection of anachronism. Even the admired Montesquieu, ‘the greatest genius, which has enlightened this age’, is taken to task for an anachronistic interpretation of trial by ordeal. Montesquieu saw the trial as a test of physical prowess. Burke interprets the practice in terms of superstition, and accounts for its survival into Christian times (WS i. 445–7).84 The example enforces the importance Burke attached to religion as a shaping force in human societies. Before the advent of modern statistics, numbers were often exaggerated and copied uncritically by one author from another. In the Account of the European Settlements, the Burkes had shown the received estimates of the numbers massacred by Cortés, the Spanish revenue from Mexico, and the produce of the French West Indies, all to be grossly overstated (A i. 123, 212–14; ii. 21). Burke was no less critical in his ‘History’. The chronicler Ordericus Vitalis estimated William the Conqueror’s revenue at about £400,000 per annum, or (as Burke estimated) about £12 million in eighteenth-century money.85 This figure was widely accepted. Carte and Smollett build estimates of William’s resources on it. Burke shows it to be impossibly large (WS i. 466), just as Hume would recognize the sum as ‘wholly incredible’86 These, however, are matters of detail. Burke also trained his sceptical eye on one of the most cherished 83 Rapin, History of England, i. 158–9; Thomas Carte, A General History of England from the Earliest Times (London, 1747–55), i. 365. Hume, History of England, i. 161–2, later made the same point as Rapin and E.B. 84 The reference is to L’Esprit des lois, xviii. 17. John Dalrymple acknowledged his debt to Montesquieu in similar terms (‘the greatest genius of our age’) in his Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain, pp. iii–iv. 85 Ecclesiastical History, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1969–80), ii. 266. Chibnall notes that the figure is ‘approximately ten times the likely number’ (267). 86 Rapin, History of England, i. 177; Carte, General History, i. 423; Tobias Smollett, A Complete History of England, Deduced for the Descent of Julius Caesar to the Treaty of Aix La Chapelle, i. 228; Hume, History of England, i. 122. The historicity of King Arthur is another question on which E.B. (WS i. 389‒90) and Hume (History of England, i. 22) agree. While neither absolutely rejects Arthur as a real figure, both eschew the detailed narrative of his exploits offered by Rapin (History of England, i. 35–9), Carte (General History, i. 201–4), and Smollett (Complete History, i. 74–6).

150 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 English historical myths, the ‘ancient constitution’ inherited from the Saxons.87 Following Montesquieu, Burke affirms that legal institutions inevitably change with the societies in which they operate. He derides as ‘visionary’ any attempt to ‘settle the ancient Constitution in the most remote times exactly in the same form, in which we enjoy it at this day; not considering that such mighty changes in manners, during so many ages, always must produce a considerable change in laws, and in the forms as well as the powers of all governments’ (WS i. 443). Burke also ridicules such pious but bogus legal antiquarianism in his introduction to a projected history of English law.88 To write a history of English law required ‘less sagacity than candour’. All the evidence was there, waiting for an interpreter blinded neither by the insular outlook of the lawyers nor by the party bias of the historians. The lawyers would allow neither that the English law had a history, nor that it had ever been contaminated by foreign sources. Tory historians argued that the rights and liberties of the subject derived from the grants of the post-Conquest kings; their Whig counterparts, no less absurdly, traced these privileges and immunities back to Saxon times (324– 5). The truth is more complex. ‘The present system of our Laws,’ Burke argues, ‘like our language and our learning, is a very mixed and heterogeneous mass; in some respects our own; in more borrowed from the policy of foreign nations; and compounded, altered, and variously modified, according to the various necessities, which the manners, the religion, and the commerce of the people, have at different times imposed’ (325). He speaks in a similar vein of the Bible: ‘the Scripture is by no means an irrelative system of moral and divine truths; but it stands connected with so many histories, and with the laws, opinions and manners of so many various sorts of people, and in such different times, that it is altogether impossible to arrive to any tolerable knowledge of it without having recourse to much exteriour inquiry’ (398). Burke’s purpose was not to debunk the idea of an ‘ancient constitution’, still less to undermine the authority of the Bible. He valued both: not, however, as timeless absolutes but as repositories of the wisdom of the ages. Rightly considered, their historicity proves their validity. Burke was not immune to the appeal of the myth of the ‘ancient constitution’. In the Reflections, he gives it classic expression: 87 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957; new edn. 1987); and ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution’ (1960), in his Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London, 1972), 202– 32. 88 ‘Fragment.—An Essay towards an History of the Laws of England’ (WS i. 322–31); posthumously published in 1812 as ch. ix of book iii of the ‘History’, though evidently intended as a separate work.


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Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone, are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavour to prove, that the antient charter, the Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another positive charter from Henry I, and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a re-affirmance of the still more antient standing law of the kingdom. In the matter of fact, for the greater part, these authors appear to be in the right; perhaps not always: but if the lawyers mistake in some particulars, it proves my position still the more strongly; because it demonstrates the powerful prepossession towards antiquity, with which the minds of all our lawyers and legislators, and of all the people whom they wish to influence, have been always filled; and the stationary policy of this kingdom in considering their most sacred rights and franchises as an inheritance. (WS viii. 81–2)

Here Burke boldly turns the unhistorical character of the myth to its advantage. By 1790, the idea that the English constitution was immemorial or wholly indigenous, as some seventeenth-century writers had argued, had become untenable. Now everyone knew that the Saxons and Normans had sucessively introduced new systems, which later centuries had in turn modified. In the passage from the Reflections, Burke’s strictly historical argument goes no further back than Magna Charta, just as in his ‘History’ he perceived that Magna Charta presupposed feudal institutions, and therefore could not be a ‘renewal’ of anything Saxon.89 The lawyers may be wrong in part and in detail, Burke concedes, grounding his chief claim for the ‘ancient constitution’ less on history than on psychology. That so many men over so long a period have wanted to make their ‘rights’ an ‘inheritance’ shows how much more powerful a sway custom exerts over men’s minds than reason. Reasonings are too variable and individual to trust the preservation of rights to their custody. Custom provides a surer protection. By 1790, the constitution of 1689 was itself venerable. Burke did not to need to pretend that it was immemorial or unchanging. To lay bare its history was not to uncover its nakedness, but to reveal its ‘latent wisdom’. The constitution would continue to develop, almost insensibly, as manners and society changed. To act in the spirit of Coke demanded that the constitution be defended against ill-judged attempts to rationalize it on the new French model. But such a defence was not incompatible with, indeed could be reinforced by, the spirit of Montesquieu’s historical enquiry. An open-minded and eclectic historian, Burke was the prisoner of no single method or theory. Montesquieu was his master. Time and again, Burke invokes geography, climate, and the ‘genius’ of a people or 89 ‘The constitutions of Magna Charta are by no means a renewal of the laws of St Edward, or the ancient Saxon laws; as our historians and law writers generally, though very groundlessly, assert’ (WS i. 544).

152 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 90 institution. Yet this allegiance did not preclude the use of other, even seemingly incompatible ideas. His most significant disagreement with Montesquieu was on the question of Providence, for which Montesquieu’s material causes left little room. Burke’s belief in Providence, amply evidenced in the Philosophical Enquiry and the Account of the European Settlements, also informs his ‘History’. In the Enquiry, he supposes that the human mind is providentially endowed with responses adapted to selfinterest and social advantage.91 In his ‘History’, Burke notes that ‘by a wonderful disposition of the Divine Providence’, the way of life of the earliest men, hunters and warriors, served to spread them rapidly over the whole earth (WS i. 346–7). Likewise, the desire to go on pilgrimages is implanted by Providence to promote ‘the continual intermixture of mankind’ (399). (The Account offers several parallels to these ideas: A ii. 55–6, 90–1, 105, 283–4.) Not all the workings of Providence are so transparent. Burke is constrained to agree with the old chroniclers in acknowledging ‘the hand of God in those immense revolutions, by which, at certain periods, he so signally asserts his supreme dominion, and brings about that great system of change, which is perhaps as necessary to the moral as it is found to be in the natural world’ (WS i. 388). This anticipates his reaction to the French Revolution, a great catastrophe which he could not comprehend. ‘It seems as if it were Gods will’, he wrote to an émigré clergyman in 1796, ‘that the present order of things is to be destroyed’ (C viii. 412). How the ‘earthquakes, and hurricanes, and floods’ unleashed by the French Revolution contributed to ‘the well-being of things’, he did not profess to understand, but he retained his faith in the inscrutable wisdom of Providence. Burke saw Providence working, for the most part, through secondary means, as had most providentialists since Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681).92 Yet Burke did not exclude an occasional direct intervention on the part of Providence. Unlike Hume, for example, he does not reject out of hand the frequent miracles recorded by Bede and other historians. ‘It is by no means impossible’, he speculates, ‘that, for an end so worthy [the conversion of the Saxons], Providence, on some occasions, might directly have interposed.’ The chronicles, he concedes, are ‘little else than a narrative of miracles; frequently, however, with such apparent marks of weakness or design, that they afford little encouragement to insist on them’. Even so, the ‘blind credulity’ with which they were at first received should not give way to ‘as undistinguishing a disregard’ (WS i. 393). Burke probably had in mind not the philosophical arguments mounted by Hume 90 E.B.’s translation of Montesquieu’s ‘esprit’. Thus he speaks of the ‘genius of the Scythian manners’, and of the ‘genius of the feudal tenure’ (WS i. 450, 452). 91 Philosophical Enquiry, i. xiv. 46, xvii. 50. 92 Bossuet, Discours, especially iii. i and viii, in Œuvres complètes (Lyons, 1879), viii. 242–3, 271–2.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 153 in ‘Of Miracles’, but the historical scepticism of Conyers Middleton (1683– 1750). Although Hume’s work is the better known today, Middleton’s had at first the greater impact.93 Hume’s scepticism was, in one way, too radical to require refutation. Since he effectively denied credence to any miracles, believers could dismiss him as simply bigoted to incredulity. Middleton posed a subtler challenge to orthodoxy. Professing to accept the miracles recounted in the New Testament, he rejected those of any later date. This was no mere academic debate. An issue of particular concern to Protestants was, when had miracles ceased? In 1753, Edward Gibbon’s reading of Middleton’s Free Inquiry led to his temporary conversion to Catholicism. Perceiving the difficulty of dividing a miraculous from a post-miraculous age, Gibbon at first concluded that, if miracles had ever been wrought on behalf of Christianity, the Catholic Church could best lay claim to continuity with the Church of the first centuries.94 Later he drew a different conclusion, and in chapter 15 of his History wrote an irreverent account of the controversy. Noting that ‘the conversion of Constantine is the aera which is most usually fixed by Protestants’ as the end of the age of miracles, he observed that ‘the more rational divines are unwilling to admit the miracles of the fourth, whilst the more credulous are unwilling to reject those of the fifth, century’.95 On this scale, Burke was a most credulous Protestant, reluctant wholly to dismiss miracles as late as the sixth and seventh centuries. Some allowance has to be made for Burke’s rhetorical strategy. In the ‘History’, he habitually defines his position as equidistant from opposite extremes. Yet in 1757, to assert that the truth of the Saxon miracles could not be proven or disproven was to take a theological position which many contemporaries would have identified as crypto-Catholic. Less contentiously, Burke argues that a belief in the truth of these miracles (whether they were genuine or not) greatly facilitated the conversion of the English. Even Hume could have agreed with that. For all Burke’s critical acumen and sense of anachronism, he remains firmly within the humanist tradition that regarded history as ‘philosophy teaching by examples’. The death of Richard I provides an apt illustration. One of Richard’s French subjects found some buried treasure and refused to hand it over to the king: Enraged at the disappointment, Richard relinquished the important affairs, in which he was engaged, and laid siege to this castle with all the eagerness of a man, 93 Middleton first published an Introductory Discourse (1747), reprinted in his A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, which Are Supposed to Have Subsisted in the Christian Church (1749), of which his Vindication was posthumously published in 1751. Hume’s ‘Of Miracles’ was first published in his Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1748). 94 Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), 58–9. 95 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, i (1776), ed. J. B. Bury (London, 1909), ii. 33 n. 84. Middleton makes the same point more diffusely in his Free Enquiry, pp. xlvi–li, lxx–v.

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who has his heart set upon a trifle. In this siege he received a wound from an arrow, and it proved mortal; but in the last, as in all the other acts of his life, something truly noble shone out amidst the rash and irregular motions of his mind. The castle was taken before he died. The man, from whom Richard had received the wound, was brought before him. Being asked, why he levelled his arrow at the king, he answered, with an undaunted countenance, ‘That the king with his own hand had slain his two brothers; that he thanked God, who gave him an opportunity to revenge their deaths, even with the certainty of his own.’ Richard, more touched with the magnanimity of the man than offended at the injury he had received, or the boldness of the answer, ordered that his life should be spared. (WS i. 526)

Burke improves the anecdote by two omissions. According to the sources, the wound was fatal only because Richard’s surgeon botched his job; and after Richard’s death (which immediately follows this incident), his lieutenant disregarded his pardon and had the brave man flayed and hanged.96 Burke sharpens the moral of the story at the expense of its historical veracity. Burke closes the chapter with a parallel between Richard I and Charles XII of Sweden (1682–1718). This device illustrates even more forcibly his loyalty to the humanist tradition of moral historiography. Such a procedure depends on taking the two characters wholly out of context.97 Burke temporarily forgets that behaviour that might be expected, or excused, in a medieval monarch would be grotesquely inappropriate for a modern king. The comparison illustrates his belief in ‘universal’ moral values and an unchanging human nature that transcends time and place. An even bolder unrolling of the ‘great map of mankind’ in the Account of the European Settlements led Burke to draw a parallel between Tigranes, King of Armenia (c.100–56 bc) and the Aztec emperor Montezuma (ruled c.1502–20). Half the globe and fifteen centuries separate them. Yet Burke confidently offers the same psychological explanation for the contrast between youthful intrepidity and later weakness. ‘It is natural,’ he explains, ‘whilst we are raising ourselves, and contending against difficulties, to have our minds, as it were, strung, and our faculties intent and constantly awake. The necessity of our affairs obliges us to a continual exercise of whatever talents we possess. . . . But when we are come to the summit of our desires, the mind suffers itself to relax’ (A i. 92). The passage shows how closely linked in Burke’s mind 96 E.B.’s primary source for the incident was probably Roger of Howden, whose chronicle was printed in Sir Henry Savile’s Rerum Anglicarum scriptores post Bedam praecipui (London, 1596; Frankfurt, 1601); Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, Rolls series, ed. William Stubbs (London, 1868–71), iii. 82–4. All E.B.’s contemporaries retain the details that he omits: Rapin, History of England, i. 256; Carte, General History, i. 778–9; Hume, History of England, i. 402–3; Smollett, Complete History, i. 410. 97 E.B.’s character of Charles XII may be indebted to Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII (1732), especially to the summary character of the king; Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Moland (Paris, 1883–5), xvi. 350–1.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 155 were the purposes of his ‘History’ and the Philosophical Enquiry. For all the particularizing tendency of his theory of history, which sought to explain events as the products of unique sets of causes, Burke remained convinced of the existence of general truths, accessible to philosophical enquiry, and in particular of the existence of a universal and (in important respects) unvarying human nature. This belief, crucial to the Enquiry, leads him in his ‘History’ to attribute the strength of feudal relations to their appeal to ‘two principles in our nature,—ambition . . . and admiration . . . a sort of secondary ambition, one of the most universal passions among men’ (WS i. 431). For Burke, Richard I and Charles XII, Tigranes and Montezuma, all share a common human nature. Burke assigns to individual actors only secondary roles in the drama of history, while his belief in Providence limits what he is willing to attribute to chance. General principles explain more than particular incidents. Man is everywhere the same psychological being, with the same passions. But in different parts of the world, these passions have taken different turns according to local conditions. Thus human ‘civilization’ or ‘culture’ has developed differently in Europe, in America, in India. In Europe, Burke saw a gradual but slow and interrupted progress from barbarism to modern civilization. He attributed this to ‘two principles’ in particular. His interpretation of European history did not alter significantly in later years. Parts of his ‘History’ serve as a prescient commentary on a remark made almost in passing in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. There he asserts that ‘our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion’ (WS viii. 130). ‘Religion’ here, as so often in Burke’s writings, refers to the institution rather than the personal experience, and especially to the role of ‘religion’ in preserving culture, learning, and education. One subtext of his ‘History’ is a defence of ‘civilization’ as he conceived it, and especially of the religion on which that civilization was based. This theme, religion as the basis of civilization, provides an element of continuity across Burke’s entire writing life, the more remarkable as it runs counter to the general and increasing secularism of the century.98 In the Reflections, Burke defines man as ‘by his constitution a religious animal’ (142). Religion and religious institutions, he thought, did more for society than law or learning, and their contribution was often undervalued or neglected. Burke devotes an entire chapter (book ii, chapter ii) to the good effects of monasticism on English society. Most English writers of the time were 98 Hume’s long footnote in ‘Of National Characters’, glossing Dryden’s aphorism ‘Priests of all Religions are the same’ (Absalom and Achitophel, line 99), is a classic exposition; Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (rev. edn. Indianapolis, 1987), 199–201.

156 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 hostile to monks and monasticism, while ‘monkish’ was synonymous with barbarous, ignorant, and obscurantist. Monks were unpopular for a variety of reasons. Carte, for example, a conservative cleric, reviled them as ‘the Puritans of those days, full of the same conceited, arrogant, and furious spirit, which dictated the many virulent and abusive libels that flowed from the pens of those so called in this country in the last two centuries’.99 More predictably, anticlerical historians such as Hume and Smollett (and later Gibbon) regularly portrayed monks as drones or parasites. Burke was consistently favourable to them, from his ‘History’ to his defence of the French religious orders in the 1790s. In Burke’s view, even the apparent absurdities and abuses of religion and religious establishments contributed to the growth of civilization. A notable example is the liturgical use of Latin, which helped transmit Latin culture across a difficult period generally unfavourable to the preservation of learning (WS i. 397–8). This is a theme to which Burke recurs in the Reflections, where he defends the much-abused monks of the Gallican Church as patrons, preservers, and transmitters of art and culture (viii. 210). Another is the diffusion of knowledge and culture through the habit of pilgrimage (i. 398–9). In the ‘History’, while Burke minimizes the scientific accomplishments of the Druids, he pays tribute to their role as civilizers. Likewise, he celebrates the conversion of the Saxons to Christianity as incidentally leading to the spread of the amenities of civilized life; Bishop Wilfred, for example, taught them how to fish (396). What did Burke mean by ‘the spirit of a gentleman’, and how did it promote ‘all the good things’ of society? His idea of a ‘gentleman’ is harder to understand than his idea of ‘religion’, for it is more bound up with the social structures and assumptions of his own day. ‘Spirit’ is an important component of the idea. Burke’s ‘gentlemen’ are men of enlarged minds capable of preferring the public good to their private advantage, and willing to act on that principle. This enlightenment may derive from birth, from education, from nature, or from all three. Such men are important to society out of all proportion to their numbers. In the Middle Ages, this ‘spirit’ expressed itself in the chivalric ideal that softened the harshness of feudal life. In ‘those barbarous times . . . some gallant spirits, struck with a generous indignation at the tyranny of these miscreants [the wicked barons], blessed solemnly by the Bishop, and followed by the praises and vows of the people, sallied forth to vindicate the chastity of women, and to redress the wrongs of travellers and peaceable men. The adventurous humour, inspired by the Crusade, heightened and extended this spirit; and thus the idea of knight errantry was formed’ (WS i. 495). This is one of the more romantic passages in the ‘History’. Perhaps inspired as much by Burke’s reading of 99

General History, i. 324.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 157 romances like Don Bellianis as by his knowledge of the past, it anticipates the famous lament for the ‘age of chivalry’ in the Reflections, where he bemoans the humiliation of Marie Antoinette and the failure of ‘ten thousand swords’ to ‘have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult’ (viii. 126–7). Burke’s ‘ten thousand’ is more than a hyperbole. When he invokes chivalric and aristocratic ideals, he has in mind a numerous class of ‘gentlemen’, not a closed oligarchy. Such an order serves to strengthen the social fabric. The Romans found England hard to subdue, because a strong native aristocracy was firmly in possession. During the Roman occupation, the British nobility withered away. Consequently, when the Saxons invaded, there was no noble cadre to assume leadership. The Saxons accordingly met no effective resistance (WS i. 384–5).100 The Saxons in turn fell an easy prey to William the Conqueror, because too much power had passed away from the lesser and middling gentry to a few territorial magnates (427–8). When Burke characterizes a ‘feudal aristocracy’ as the ‘worst imaginable government’ (547), or uses ‘aristocratic’ in a pejorative sense, he has in mind such an exclusive oligarchy.101 Burke did not regard the rational ‘Enlightenment’ expounded by the philosophes as a universally valid standard against which other societies were to be judged, and towards which they ought to progress. With wider historical sympathies, and especially a feel for the value and power of religion, he could treat the Middle Ages with greater understanding and empathy. Yet he was no romantic medievalist. The passage about the birth of ‘knight errantry’ follows a graphic account of the endemic lawlessness of the feudal warlords in the anarchy of Stephen’s reign. His overall picture of the Middle Ages is remarkably even-handed.

5 Burke’s ‘History’ is a rich source for the study of his ideas and ideals, the more valuable for being written before he entered politics. Three examples from different periods will illustrate some of the ways in which it embodies his values: his excursus on the ancient British Druids, his treatment of King Alfred, and his account of the struggle between Henry II and Thomas Becket. All these subjects stirred his historical imagination without numbing his analytical power. 100 The Account again provides a parallel. The death of Don Sebastian (1554–78), King of Portugal (1557–78), at the Battle of Alcazarquivir is described as ‘one of those incidents, that at one blow, in a critical time, decides the fate of kingdoms’ (A i. 291). Many of the Portuguese nobility died in the battle, and Portugal passed under Spanish rule. 101 The context for the remark is the clause in Magna Charta (no. 60 in modern editions) which bound the tenants-in-chief to observe its provisions in relations with their tenants.

158 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 Burke was fascinated by the Druids. They receive far more attention than any other aspect of pre-Roman Britain.102 Attitudes to the Druids, whether in the ancient sources or in modern studies, can be classified as either ‘hard’ (objective) or ‘soft’ (idealizing).103 Burke is in general a sceptical historian, habitually critical of his sources. This inclines him, for the most part, to a ‘hard’ interpretation of the Druids. For example, he questions Caesar’s explicit statement (De bello Gallico, 6. 13) that the ‘disciplina’ of the Druids originated in Britain, and that many who wanted to study it still went to Britain to do so. Burke rejects the idea as most improbable, thinking the more civilized Gauls unlikely to have been willing to learn from the more barbarous Britons (350). He also questions the scientific expertise attributed to the Druids, whether by ancient sources or modern historians. Caesar (De bello Gallico, 6. 14) and other classical authorities credit them with considerable skill in astronomical and calendrical computation. Though he mentions no modern writer by name, one of the ‘authors’ whom Burke berates for speaking in ‘a very exaggerated strain’ of Druidic science (351–2) was undoubtedly Thomas Carte.104 Carte interpreted a passage in Diodorus Siculus (2. 47) as evidence that the Druids had invented the telescope. William Stukeley (1687–1765), antiquary and archaeologist, thought they knew the use of the magnetic compass.105 Burke grants them only ‘some elemental knowledge’. Arguing that their reliance on rote learning was ‘rather calculated to preserve with accuracy a few plain maxims of traditionary science, than to improve and extend it’, he concludes that ‘among them learning had advanced no further than its infancy’ (351). Burke’s attitude to the megalithic monuments is indicative. The classical texts associate the Druids only with groves and such natural places of worship. Burke nevertheless accepts the connection first made by John Aubrey (1626–97) between the Druids and such monuments as Stonehenge and Avebury.106 At the same time, Burke rejects the fantastic interpretations which had since been placed, principally by Stukeley, on the megalithic sites. Stukeley (who, unlike Burke, had studied the monuments at first WS i. 349–59, 390–1, 396, 434, 439, 443 n., 446, 510; Philosophical Enquiry, ii. iii. 59. Stuart Piggott, The Druids (new edn. London, 1975), 92. T. D. Kendrick, The Druids: A Study in Keltic Prehistory (London, 1927), reprints the chief classical sources. 104 General History, i. 27–71. Others probably included William Stukeley, Stonehenge, a Temple Restor’d to the British Druids (London, 1740), and Abury, a Temple of the British Druids (London, 1743); John Wood, An Essay towards a Description of the City of Bath (Bath, 1742–3); William Cooke, An Enquiry into the Patriarchal and Druidical Religion, Temples, &c. (London, 1752); and William Borlase, Observations on the Antiquities, Historical and Monumental, of the County of Cornwall (Oxford, 1754). 105 Carte, General History, i. 31 (general estimate), 54 (telescope); Stukeley, Stonehenge, 57. 106 Aubrey never finished his ‘Monumenta Britannica’, but his ideas passed into currency through citations in Edmund Gibson’s edition of Camden’s Britannia (London, 1695), 618, 637. Aubrey’s original material can now be studied in Monumenta Britannica; or, A Miscellany of British Antiquities, ed. Rodney Legg and others (Sherborne, 1990). Aubrey was wrong. Stonehenge is now thought to date from c.1800–1400 bc, some thousand years earlier than the Celtic culture to which the Druids belonged. 102 103

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 159 hand) thought they displayed ‘a notorious grandeur of taste, a justness of plan, an apparent symmetry and a sufficient niceness in the execution’.107 Burke was not convinced. In his view, Stonehenge and Avebury were ‘piles of rude magnificence’ which required no mathematical abilities to construct, ‘vast structures’ which ‘have nothing, which can be admired, but the greatness of the work’. As so often, Burke draws an analogy from modern ethnography: ‘they are not the only instances of the great things, which the mere labour of many hands united, and persevering in their purpose, may accomplish with very little help from mechanicks. This may be evinced by the immense buildings, and the low state of the sciences among the original Peruvians’ (WS i. 352). In the Enquiry, Burke had grudgingly acknowledged Stonehenge’s kind of ‘greatness’ as a source of the sublime: ‘Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has any thing admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. Nay the rudeness of the work increases this cause of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art, and contrivance; for dexterity produces another sort of effect which is different enough from this.’108 Though this reads like an eyewitness account (Stonehenge is less than twenty-five miles from Turlaine, where Burke spent several summers in the 1750s), the description must actually have derived from engravings, such as those in Stukeley’s Stonehenge. Not until 1783 did Burke visit the monument.109 Burke was no less sceptical about Druidic theology and philosophy. Here again he was writing against a tide of admiration. Carte and Stukeley interpreted the Druids’ religion as monotheistic and even (in Stukeley’s case) trinitarian.110 Carte and others attributed to them a sophisticated Pythagorean concept of the soul and even a belief in metempsychosis.111 Burke argues that the early Britons were polytheistic, and points to their confused notions of immortality and the afterlife (WS i. 352–6). In religion and philosophy as in science, Burke allows the Druids only such notions as are commonly found in primitive societies. On only one topic does Burke succomb to the Druid myth. He follows Carte in attributing to them a highly developed institutional organization.112 The role of the Druids as an aristocratic, priestly caste appealed to one of his Abury, 49. Philosophical Enquiry, ii. xii. 77. 109 ‘Two nights ago Mr Burke sat with me a long time; he seems much pleased with his Journey. We had both seen Stonehenge this summer for the first time’; Samuel Johnson to Hester Thrale, 9 Oct. 1783, in Letters, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton, 1992–4), iv. 221. Apart from visits in 1752 and 1754, E.B. visited Turlaine in 1758 (C i. 112 n. 1), about the time he was working on the ‘History’. 110 Carte, General History, i. 39. Stukeley, Stonehenge, 2, and Abury, 6, 85–90; Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley, an Eighteenth-Century Antiquary (1950; New York, 1985), 97–104. 111 Carte, General History, i. 38–9. 112 Ibid. i. 70. Caesar (De bello Gallico, 6. 13) provides some support for the idea. 107 108

160 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 most cherished prejudices. Burke notes approvingly their high social standing, their recruitment from the upper ranks of society, their separateness as an order, their secular functions, and their responsible and beneficent exercise of those functions (WS i. 350–1). Such a religious patriciate was eminently suited to be the harbinger of civilization. ‘The first openings of civility’, he generalizes, ‘have been every where made by religion’ (349). The elder Pliny (who regarded them as frauds) placed the Druids among the pretended magicians whose influence was so great because they united the practice of medicine, superstition, and astrology.113 Burke transmutes Pliny’s account into an altogether more attractive picture of an idealized priesthood: ‘They prescribed medicine; they formed the youth; they paid the last honours to the dead; they foretold events; they exercised themselves in magick.’ Being ‘at once, the priests, law-givers, and physicians of their nation’, they ‘concentered in themselves all that respect, that men have diffusively for those, who heal their diseases, protect their property, or reconcile them to the Divinity’ (350). To enforce the theme of the civilizing power of religion, Burke concludes his account of the Druids by drawing a series of analogies with other priesthoods (358–9). This generalization gives the chapter a satisfying sense of closure. Nearly a thousand years separate the Druids from the reign of King Alfred (871–99). About the time of St Augustine’s mission to Kent (in 597), thanks to clerical historians and chroniclers such as Bede, England emerges from prehistory. The historical sources, however, remain meagre, fragmentary, and often enigmatic. This hampers Burke less than historians such as Hume, who tried to construct detailed narratives. Burke’s main purpose was to capture the esprit of Anglo-Saxon history and society. In chapter ii of part ii, for example, he uses a mosaic of scattered evidence to construct a coherent account of English religious institutions. Burke devotes only about 2,500 words to Alfred’s reign. This is about half the length of the next shortest contemporary account (Smollett’s) and no more than a fifth of the longest (Carte’s). Burke achieves this brevity by a drastic compression of the narrative. He condenses the confused military history of the reign into a generalized sketch of Alfred’s struggle against the Danish invaders. A significant historiographical comment shows that this procedure was in part determined by the unsatisfactory nature of the extant source materials. He regrets that Alfred, ‘a character, so formed to interest all men, involved in reverses of fortune, that make the most agreeable and useful part of history, should be only celebrated by pens so little suitable to the dignity of the subject’. So meagre are the sources ‘that we neither can perceive distinctly the causes, which sunk him, nor those, which again 113 Natural History, 30. 1. Carte’s interpretation of this passage (General History, i. 28) partly anticipates E.B.’s.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 161 raised him to power’ (WS i. 410). Because ‘a few naked facts are all our stock’, the unfolding of events remains mysterious. Burke therefore concentrates on Alfred’s character and achievements. The personality of no other Saxon monarch is so fully preserved, thanks largely to the contemporary biography by Bishop Asser. Yet Alfred was also the subject of many legends.114 Even modern historians are not agreed in dividing the genuine from the spurious. Alfred therefore provides a good test of Burke’s critical acumen. As in the case of the Druids, Burke shows a keen (though not infallible) sense of anachronism. He rejects the attribution to Alfred both of the jury system and of the division of England into counties. Juries, he asserts, were never a Saxon institution; while the shire divisions must have evolved over time and not according to a single plan (WS i. 411).115 Not to exaggerate Burke’s sagacity, he accepted the myth that Alfred founded a university at Oxford and the authenticity of the ‘Roll of Winton’, the supposed prototype of Domesday Book. On these points he trusted his sources too implicitly.116 Burke is generally sparing in the use of anecdotes, as indeed his brevity requires. He omits two popular stories recounted by Rapin, Hume, and Smollett: Alfred’s burning of the cakes (still the best-known story about him) and his entering the Danish camp to spy, disguised as a minstrel. Apart from Burke, only Carte omits these pleasing fables.117 Particular significance therefore attaches to the single anecdote about Alfred that Burke includes: ‘It is pleasant to trace a genius even in its smallest exertions; in measuring and allotting his time for the variety of business he was engaged in. According to his severe and methodical custom, he had a sort of wax candles, made of different colours in different proportions, according 114 The main sources are reprinted in translation in Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (eds.), Alfred the Great: Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983). Alfred P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995), argues that Asser’s Life is a fabrication. In E.B.’s time, however, its authenticity was unquestioned. 115 Both Rapin (History of England, i. 95) and Smollett (Complete History, i. 147) accept Alfred as the author of the jury system. Carte (General History, i. 316) suggests that Alfred was the first to extend trial by jury from criminal to civil cases. Hume (History of England, i. 77) is the most sceptical, seeing only the ‘origin’ of juries in Alfred’s compurgators. Rapin (History of England, i. 95), Carte (General History, i. 310), Hume (History of England, i. 76), and Smollett (Complete History, i. 147) all accept the shire divisions as Alfred’s, though in a note Rapin cites Spelman’s opinion that Alfred only regulated an existing system. 116 Alfred as the founder of Oxford derives from an interpolation in the text of Asser unsuspected in E.B.’s time; all the historians repeat it (Rapin, History of England, i. 95–6; Carte, General History, i. 303– 4; Hume, History of England, i. 79; Smollett, Complete History, i. 145). The source for the ‘Roll of Winton’ is the chronicle of ‘Ingulf’, regarded as genuine in E.B.’s day though since exposed as a fabrication. Carte (General History, i. 310) and Hume (History of England, i. 221) both mention the ‘Roll’. 117 Rapin, History of England, i. 92; Hume, History of England, i. 67–8; Smollett, Complete History, i. 142–3. The burning of the cakes was interpolated into the text of Asser by Archbishop Parker; Keynes and Lapidge (eds.), Alfred the Great, 197–202. The minstrel story comes from William of Malmesbury (ii. iv).

162 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 to the time he allotted to each particular affair; as he carried these about with him wherever he went, to make them burn evenly, he invented horn lanthorns’ (WS i. 413).118 Burke’s use of the anecdote shows that he did not regard the new ‘philosophical’ history as incompatible with the moralizing tendency of the older humanist tradition. Suetonius and Plutarch, and their Renaissance followers, had delighted in just such characteristic anecdotes (of which Burke’s account of the death of Richard I is another example). More than any other medieval king, Alfred captured Burke’s imagination. The evidence of the ‘History’ lends credibility to the tradition that he began work on a play about Alfred.119 The dramatist can take liberties denied to the historian. Burke, with his exceptional sympathy for the Middle Ages, might have succeeded where other eighteenth-century dramatists failed. Henry II came to the throne in 1154, about 250 years after the death of Alfred. Yet the differences between their two worlds is hardly less than that between Alfred and the Druids. The Norman Conquest had introduced as thorough a revolution in government and society as had the Roman and Saxon invasions. The Norman period in general was far more abundantly documented. Henry’s reign was long and interesting. Apart from being King of England, Henry was feudal overlord of most of western France. During a reign of thirty-five years, he was involved in almost constant struggles to assert and maintain his authority against his vassals; against his nominal superiors, the King of France and the Pope; and finally, against his own rebellious family. Accordingly, Rapin devoted about 27,000 words to his reign; Carte 50,000; Hume 28,500; and Smollett 42,000. Burke’s brevity is remarkable: at just under 9,000 words, his account is only a third of the length of Rapin’s, the next shortest. Such compression shows that, even when fuller sources became available, Burke continued to aim at a genuine ‘abridgment’. His method required even more ruthless omissions than were needed with Alfred. Having selected his leading themes (the king’s struggle with Becket, and the invasion of Ireland), Burke sets each in context with a broad survey of the historical background. These topics occupy nearly three-quarters of the chapter. Burke gives only a cursory account of Henry’s activities in France (where he spent over half his reign), only a passing mention to Scotland and none to Wales. Henry’s administrative reforms and innovations, the primary interest of his reign for modern historians, receive only a few hundred words. 118 The main source is Asser, Life, ch. 104, in Keynes and Lapidge (eds.), Alfred the Great, 108–9. The different colours are an embellishment from another source, perhaps a faulty recollection of Rapin, who says that the candles were ‘marked with circular lines of divers Colours, which served as so many Hour-lines’ (History of England, i. 96). 119 James Prior lists ‘Several Scenes of a Play, on the Subject of Alfred the Great’ among E.B.’s early poems (Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1826), i, p. xxvii). Though Prior’s source is unknown, it appears reliable. Of the six titles cited, three are extant, as is a fragment of a fourth.

maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 163 All the historians make the struggle between Henry and Becket a leading theme of the reign. Burke’s treatment is distinctive in two main ways. He traces the secular power of the clergy back to the first ages of the Church, when Christians voluntarily submitted themselves to the authority of their local bishop, and shows how the feudal system, by making the clergy an estate of the realm, inextricably intertwined their clerical and secular functions. While all the historians recognized that important issues of principle reinforced the personal quarrel, Burke went furthest in treating the dispute as, fundamentally, a conflict between institutions and jurisdictions rather than personalities. Here his debt to Montesquieu is evident.120 The other historians place the onus of blame on Becket, whom they portray as egotistical, power-hungry, and ambitious. His defence of clerical immunity and papal power did not seem a heroic cause in eighteenth-century England. Hume’s hostility to Becket was predictable, but even Carte is unsympathetic.121 Burke is more even-handed. Without seeking to exculpate Becket, or to excuse his personal arrogance and intransigence, he takes unusual pains to prove that Becket had a strong case. The authorities he cites to support the recognition of clerical immunity from lay jurisdiction make it one of the best-documented points in the whole history (WS i. 503).122 Becket is justified, even commended, for his staunch defence of the rights of the institution entrusted to his care. Burke in turn became a pertinacious defender of what he regarded as sacred causes. The likelihood that Burke identified with Becket as a man after his own heart is strengthened by the instances in the Account of the European Settlements where he lauds men of his own stamp (A i. 153, 157, 160; ii. 213). Whether or not such an element of psychological identification was involved, Burke undoubtedly depersonalized the struggle to a greater extent than any of the other historians. He shows Henry and Becket fighting battles that are larger than either knew. Without minimizing the role of individuals, Burke shows how they are constrained by the same general causes that shape their institutional environments. This gives the episode a double focus: on the actors, each with his own aims and point of view; and on the larger issues which make the conflict an important stage in the gradual secularization of society. Nor is the outcome a simple victory for the king. Ecclesiastical pretensions have been checked, only to revive in succeeding reigns, especially under the weak and incompetent John. Burke suspended work on his ‘History’ about 1760, soon after he entered Courtney, Montesquieu and Burke, 50–1. Carte, General History, i. 575–636. Hume (History of England, i. 309–38) presents the dispute as an episode in the perennial contest between the secular authority and the encroaching, usurping clergy. 122 E.B. cites the law codes of Ethelred, Cnut, and Henry I (all probably from Wilkins’s Leges AngloSaxonicae); the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum (from Spelman’s Concilia); and the ‘Leges ecclesiasticae Edwardi senioris’ (now usually called the ‘Laws of Edward and Guthrun’) from Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (London, 1737), i. 202–4. 120 121

164 maps of mankind, 1756‒1758 Hamilton’s service. This abandonment was a great loss for Burke personally, and for English historiography. The literary reputation that the work would have earned was ill exchanged for the six years of servitude that he spent with Hamilton. Contemporary readers would have enjoyed a succinct account of the course of English history, unusually free of pious, nationalist antiquarianism. The intrinsic historiographical interest of the work is attested by the distinguished modern historians who have valued it highly: Lord Acton (1834–1902), Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954), and Herbert Butterfield (1900–79). All commend Burke’s sympathetic understanding, exceptional in his time, for the Middle Ages.123 The time spent on the ‘History’ was not entirely lost, either to Burke or to the public. In his political speeches and writings, he makes frequent and effective use of the material he had garnered and the lessons he had learned. This respect for history, Acton later lamented, hindered Burke from being ‘an entire liberal’.124 The ‘History’ adumbrates some of Burke’s most cherished ideas and beliefs: that human experience is to be understood in historical terms; that neither individuals nor societies can forget their past or escape its legacy. Burke often uses arguments from history in ways that appear opportunistic and rhetorical, and to support policies and decisions arrived at for different reasons. This makes the ‘History’ a valuable record, free of the partisanship of his later writings and speeches, of his deeply held conviction of the inescapably historical nature of human experience. Acton, Essays on Church and State, ed. Douglas Woodruff (London, 1952), 455; Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich, 1936), i. 288–304, trans. J. E. Anderson as Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (London, 1972), 219–32; Herbert Butterfield, Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1955), 68–70. E.B.’s influence on Acton has been much studied: Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The American Revolution in the Political Theory of Lord Acton’, Journal of Modern History, 21 (1949), 293–312; Seamus F. Deane, ‘Lord Acton and Edmund Burke’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 33 (1972), 325–35. Many of Acton’s manuscript jottings on E.B. (preserved in the Cambridge University Library) are printed in G. E. Fasnacht, Acton’s Political Philosophy: An Analysis (London, 1952). 124 Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 4967, card 76. 123

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765

165

6 Journalist and Jackal, 1758–1765

1 In 1755, Burke had been an unknown Irish law student living in the vast anonymity of London. By 1758, an established author, he was beginning to know and be known in the London literary world. Publication of his ‘History’ would have consolidated his reputation. Instead, his time and energies were diverted as, faced with the need to support a family, he turned to journalism. About the same time, alert to the value of a patron, he engaged himself as informal secretary and factotum to William Gerard Hamilton, a rising politician of his own generation. The connection proved, in the longer run, frustrating and unhappy. For about six years, he was tied to two taskmasters, Hamilton and the Annual Register. Burke’s commitment to his ‘History’ did not deter him from embarking on another time-consuming project. In April 1758, he contracted with the Dodsleys to ‘write collect & compile from such materials as may arise a work entitled the Annual register or Retrospections on men & things for the year 1758 to be printed in octavo in the manner of Millers Kalender 8vo. & to make not less than thirty sheets nor more than thirty four, according to a plan agreed upon’. The Dodsleys undertook to provide ‘all books & Pamphlets necessary’ for the work. Burke agreed to give three months’ notice if ‘he should find reason to discontinue his writing the said work’. The Dodsleys would give the same if they decided either to cease publication, or to employ another editor. Burke was to receive £100 for each volume, in two instalments.1 His main motive was financial. Such a task, while it would add nothing to his literary reputation, provided a muchneeded income, modest but regular. The usual pay for reviewers was two guineas per sheet (sixteen octavo pages; about 6,000 words).2 For thirty-two sheets, Burke would thus receive about half as much again as the £67 4s. that he would have expected for the same quantity of routine journalism. While such remuneration hardly appears generous, £100 was more than three times as much as he had received for the Philosophical Enquiry. 1 The full agreement, dated 24 Apr. 1758, is printed in Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher & Playwright (London, 1910), 257–8. I have corrected ‘800’ (which makes no sense) to ‘8vo’. 2 James G. Basker, Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist (Newark, 1988), 49.

166 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Besides, editing his own publication was more satisfying than mere reviewing. In common with most eighteenth-century periodicals, the Annual Register was edited anonymously. This anonymity was preserved for at least two different reasons. The ideal of the gentleman-amateur remained strong, reinforced by class prejudice against writing for money, and especially against journalism.3 Burke could publish a work such as the Philosophical Enquiry without derogating from his status as a gentleman. To edit the Annual Register was a more equivocal activity. Anonymity had a further advantage, even for writers less sensitive about their social status: it helped create an air of editorial impartiality. Burke’s editorship of the Annual Register was not a matter of common public knowledge. Indeed, the length and extent of his association with it have been much disputed. The available evidence suggests that he edited the first seven years of the Register (for 1758–64), and that the volume for 1764 (which appeared in 1765) was the last for which he was responsible.4 Burke’s immediate motive for relinquishing the task was probably his appointment in July 1765 as private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, the beginning of his political career. His successor was his friend Thomas English (c.1725–98), who ‘conducted’ the Register until at least 1795.5 English was at various times assisted by other friends and followers of Burke, while Burke himself was occasionally consulted. Accordingly, even after 1765, the work continued to reflect his interests and point of view.6 Though responsible for the first seven volumes of the Annual Register, Burke may not have written all the original material. In 1766, for example, when English was probably in charge, the book reviews were farmed out to 3 James Ralph’s Case of Authors by Profession or Trade (London, 1758) is an eloquent protest against this attitude. E.B. reprinted an extract in the Annual Register (1762), 174–9 bis. 4 In this conclusion, I follow Bertram D. Sarason, ‘Edmund Burke and the Two Annual Registers’, PMLA 68 (1953), 496–508; and ‘Editorial Mannerisms in the Early Annual Register’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 52 (1958), 131–3; and John Charles Weston, Jr., ‘Burke’s Authorship of the “Historical Articles” in Dodsley’s Annual Register’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 51 (1957), 244–9. Two other scholars take nearly the same view, extending E.B.’s responsibility a further year, to the volume for 1765: Carl B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution (Lexington, Ky., 1957), 112–13, 121–2; and Todd, p. 44. In July 1765, however, E.B. was appointed secretary to Lord Rockingham. He would expect to be busiest during the parliamentary session (Nov. to May), the months he usually devoted to the Annual Register. He therefore had every incentive to divest himself of the burden of compiling the volume for 1765. T. O. McLoughlin, Edmund Burke and the First Ten Years of the ‘Annual Register’ (Salisbury, Rhodesia, 1975), argues that E.B. was responsible for the 1767 volume and probably later ones. 5 Gentleman’s Magazine, 65 (July 1795), 540–2; Sarason, ‘Edmund Burke and the Two Annual Registers’. 6 Corrected drafts of passages from the volumes for 1784–5 and 1787, perhaps submitted to E.B. for his approval or revision, survive among his papers; Donald C. Bryant, ‘New Light on Burke’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 39 (1953), 351–2. Thomas W. Copeland suggests that E.B. may have made ‘occasional contributions and suggestions’ after relinquishing the editorship in 1766; ‘Edmund Burke’s Friends and the Annual Register’, The Library, 18 (1963), 29–39.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 167 7 John Hawkesworth (1720–73). Burke too may have had assistance, although none is provided for in the contract. Since Dodsley did not increase Burke’s salary, despite the popular success of the venture, he may instead have allowed Burke to hire assistants. This possibility suggests caution in extrapolating Burke’s interests and opinions from the contents of the Annual Register. Nor was Burke selecting to please himself. His aim was to satisfy a broad readership. Even so, used with care, the Annual Register can provide some biographical illumination. Burke could not have edited it for several years without revealing, if only unconsciously, something of himself. In addition, the Annual Register records some of his reading during these years. To compile it, he needed to keep up with the flow of current affairs and the flood of new publications. Unlikely as Burke is to have read every word of every book that he reviewed or excerpted, the contents of the Register reflect, in a general way, the variety and diversity of his reading and interests. By temperament, he was a generalist, who valued breadth of knowledge as more useful than depth. Tiresome as the routine might become, his editorship of the Annual Register was a task well suited to one who believed that ‘to attempt a general knowledge ought not to be thought too bold an undertaking’.8 The purpose and intended audience of the Annual Register are set out in the preface to the first volume. The aim was to provide information and entertainment for a middle range of readers, those who without aspiring to ‘solid erudition’ were nevertheless desirous of keeping up with the topics of the day. To ‘steal some moments from the round of dissipation and pleasure’, ‘relieve the minds of men of business’, and ‘preserve the strenuous idleness of many from a worse employment’, Burke proposed to leaven the more serious parts of the work with ‘matters of a lighter nature, but pleasing even by their levity, by their variety, and their aptitude to enter into common conversation’.9 During the course of the eighteenth century, the English became ‘a nation of readers’.10 At least, they became a nation of newspaper-readers. Journalism, a small-scale, marginal activity in 1700, had by 1750 become the staple fare of most readers and provided the main financial support of many writers.11 The first English daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, began publication in 1702. Soon, many more newspapers 7 James E. Tierney, ‘Edmund Burke, John Hawkesworth, the Annual Register, and the Gentleman’s Magazine’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 42 (1978), 57–72. 8 Note-Book, 86. 9 Annual Register (1758), p. iii. E.B.’s preface is conventional, even stereotypical. Johnson outlined the aims of the Literary Magazine (the first number of which appeared in May 1756) in much the same terms; ‘To the Public’, in Allen T. Hazen, Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces and Dedications (New Haven, 1937), 128–31. 10 The phrase is Johnson’s; Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), iii. 19. 11 Michael Harris, ‘Journalism as a Profession or Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Author–Publisher Relations during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1983), 37–62.

168 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 and journals were published than anyone could read. A digest was needed. In 1731, Edward Cave (1691–1754) founded the Gentleman’s Magazine, the first and longest running of the monthly miscellanies. Cave’s venture had many imitators, of which the London Magazine (begun in 1732) was the most successful. These all followed his format in size, contents, and price, and in combining new and reprinted material. Their scope was dictated by their readers’ presumed interests: news reports; essays on a wide range of subjects; poems; lists of, and extracts from, new books; announcements of births, deaths, marriages, and appointments; stock prices; letters from readers. Book reviews were chiefly confined to specialist journals, of which the most important in 1758 were the Monthly Review and the Critical Review. Both aimed at comprehensive coverage by reviewing a few books at length each month, and dispatching the remainder with short notices, often of only a few lines. By 1758, even keeping up with the monthlies was time-consuming. Burke (or Dodsley) sensed that the time was ripe for a third-order publication, epitomizing the digests. Earlier annuals had been largely confined to providing a historical record. The main novelty of the Annual Register was to combine this function with a wider range of material.12 Thus Burke defined his aim as ‘uniting the plan of the Magazines with that of the Reviews’.13 Reprinting was endemic in contemporary journalism. Although the copyright of book-length texts was generally respected, newspapers and magazines did not scruple to plunder their competitors, usually without acknowledgement. Though much of the Annual Register was reprinted, Burke also followed the usual practice of soliciting contributions from readers, and a few such can be identified.14 The Annual Register was published in the spring to provide a record of the preceding year.15 Burke had two main tasks: to construct a coherent narrative of the year’s events, and to supplement the historical record with miscellaneous reading matter drawn largely from current publications. In order to publish as early as possible, he compiled the second part (the reprinted essays and extracts) first. From 1760, the second part was printed first and separately paginated.16 12 John C. Weston, Jr., ‘Predecessors to Burke’s and Dodsley’s Annual Register’, Studies in Bibliography, 17 (1964), 215–20. 13 Annual Register (1758), p. vi. 14 Annual Register (1759), p. vii. E.B. asked for submissions before Nov., presumably the month in which he finalized his selection. Edward Watkinson (d. 1767), a clergyman and a regular contributor to the magazines, sent biographical sketches of several English bishops; Annual Register (1762), 6–9 bis; (1763), 8–13 bis. A letter signed S.C. (1761, 275–6 bis) attests that ‘The Rainbow. A Fable’ (1761, 256– 66 bis) was an original contribution. The letter records the untimely death of the author, John Norris (1738–62), a student at the Temple. 15 E.B. always managed this, though under his successors publication fell further and further behind schedule; Thomas W. Copeland, Edmund Burke: Six Essays (London, 1950), 117 n. 37. 16 Confusingly, each volume has thus two sequences of page numbers. In the original printings, page numbers in the first sequence are placed within square brackets. For greater clarity, I have instead added bis to references to the second pagination.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 169 The material in the first part or ‘Historical Article’, as it came to be called, was divided into three sections. The principal themes and events of the year were woven into a continuous narrative, and supplemented by a ‘Chronicle’ (arranged in diary format) and an appendix of documents. The narrative (‘The History of the Present War’; from 1763, ‘The History of Europe’), though compiled from newspapers and other printed sources, had the advantage of hindsight. Nor did Burke rigidly constrain the account within the calendar year. In the first volume, he reached back to the outbreak of the war; in the volume for 1762, he continued the military narrative up to the peace. The time was propitious for the launch of such a venture. The war was a subject of intense public interest. By relegating other events to the ‘Chronicle’, Burke could construct a readable narrative of each year and provide readers with instant history in the form of a compendium of current events. The reference value was an important element in the success of the Register. The narrative averaged about sixty pages during the war years, contracting to about forty-five after the peace. The ‘Chronicle’, which usually filled about 150 pages, was drawn mainly from the newspapers. Most items were strictly factual: reports of births, marriages, official appointments and promotions, and deaths. Others were human-interest stories. All were short, rarely more than a paragraph. Longer accounts were placed in an ‘appendix’ to the main chronology. Some of these were regular features, such as the summary of the taxes and expenditures approved in the annual parliamentary budget. Others recorded important events unrelated to the main themes of the year: in 1761, for example, the transit of Venus, and the king’s marriage and coronation. Occasionally a human-interest story was treated at greater length, such as the account in the 1761 volume of the ill-treatment, starvation, and death of an apprentice girl.17 ‘State Papers’, the third division of the ‘Historical Article’, averaged seventy pages. Burke regularly reprinted the king’s speeches from the throne and the addresses in reply; declarations of war and treaties of peace; and the substance of important (usually controversial) Acts of Parliament. Compiling this part of the Register was the least rewarding task of Burke’s editorship, though it kept him well-informed about current affairs. The second part of the Register (never given a formal title) provided scope for more creative editing. Burke arranged his material under seven broad headings: ‘Characters’, ‘Natural History’, ‘Useful Projects’, ‘Antiquities’, ‘Literary and Miscellaneous Articles’, ‘Poetry’, and ‘An Account of Books Published in the Year’.18 These categories overlap, and the placement Annual Register (1761), 192–8; (1762), 205–35. This is the pattern established in 1759. In 1758, E.B. used only five categories: ‘Characters’, ‘Extraordinary Adventures’ (dropped in 1759), ‘Literary and Miscellaneous Essays’, ‘Poetry’, and an ‘Account of Remarkable Books’. 17 18

170 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 of an article sometimes appears anomalous or arbitrary. Even so, a brief survey of each of these departments will illustrate the richness and variety with which Burke filled this part of the Register, and the different kinds of information and entertainment that he provided for the tastes and interests of its readers. Burke always gave ‘Characters’ the most space. ‘We know no kind of reading’, he averred, ‘that can be at once more useful and more agreeable.’19 Burke selected not only formal character sketches, but revealing anecdotes, characteristic documents, and short biographies. Ranging widely in time and place, they serve to illustrate the infinite diversity of human nature. Most of the individuals treated were famous; a few were obscure, others infamous. No contemporaries aroused more intense public interest than Voltaire, Rousseau, and Frederick the Great. Of these three, Frederick (1712–86) was the most favourably represented. Burke reprinted a highly eulogistic formal character of Frederick by Maupertuis (1698–1759), the mathematician whom the king had engaged to head the Academy of Science at Berlin; an admiring day-in-the-life account; and an unusual verbatim record of his meeting with Christian Gellert (1715–69), an eminent poet and professor. In the 1760s, royal conversation was rarely published. This piece is an early example of the kind of journalism intended to make a remote public figure appear human and likeable. In other sections, Burke reprinted several of Frederick’s own compositions and a flattering poem addressed to him by Voltaire before the two quarrelled. These selections complement the generally admiring treatment of Frederick’s military and political actions in the ‘Historical Article’.20 Voltaire is treated more severely. Burke reprinted Frederick’s caustic character sketch (written after their quarrel); an extract from a hostile pamphlet; and exchanges of letters in which Voltaire appears vain, prickly, and petty.21 Rousseau is more ambiguously presented. A mocking satire on his inconsistencies (attributed to Voltaire) is balanced by a characteristic Rousseau self-portrait.22 Burke also reviewed two of Rousseau’s books: the Lettre à d’Alembert and Émile. (He reviewed nothing by Voltaire.) A passage from his review of Émile illustrates both his attitude to Rousseau and the rhetorical even-handedness characteristic of Burke’s early writings: 19

Annual Register (1759), p. v. Annual Register (1758), 235–7 (Maupertuis); (1759), 278–81 (day-in-the-life); (1762), 35–7 bis (Gellert); (1758), 405–6, 410–14; (1761), 184–6 bis (literary works); (1758), 403–5 (Voltaire’s poem). 21 Annual Register (1758), 237–9 (Frederick); (1762), 209–13 bis (pamphlet); (1761), 31–6 bis (letters). In other sections, E.B. was kinder to Voltaire the writer and wit, reprinting ‘A Discourse Addressed to the Welches’ (1764), 209–13 bis, and excerpts from new editions of the Essai sur les mœurs (1760), 176– 8 bis; (1764), 167–72 bis. 22 Annual Register (1761), 208–10 bis; (1763), 5–8 bis. The satire is abbreviated from Prophétie, published as ‘Par M. de V * * * *’ (Geneva, 1761; with Eng. trans.); the self-portrait, from Rousseau’s Lettre . . . à Monsieur de Beaumont, archevêque de Paris, trans. as An Expostulatory Letter (London, 1763). 20


171

In this System of Education there are some very considerable parts that are impracticable, others that are chimerical; and not a few highly blameable, and dangerous both to piety and morals. It is easy to discern how it has happened, that this book should be censured as well at Geneva as in Paris. However, with those faults in the design, with the whimsies into which his paradoxical genius continually hurries him, there are a thousand noble hints relative to his subject, grounded on a profound knowledge of the human mind, and the order of its operations. There are many others, which, though they have little relation to the subject, are admirable on their own account; and even, in his wildest sallies, we now and then discover strokes of the most solid sense, and instructions of the most useful nature.23

Burke had a practical interest in education at this time, for he had a son about 4 years old. For Rousseau’s ‘System’, he has nothing good to say. Though the review does not particularize them, among the ‘thousand noble hints’ that Burke approved were probably the two extracts from Émile that he reprinted elsewhere in the Register: the parallel between Christ and Socrates, and a passage on the educational value of fables.24 The first testifies to Burke’s philosophical ecumenism; the second to the love of fables evident from his speeches. After the French Revolution, Burke came to regard Rousseau as one of the writers chiefly responsible for laying its intellectual foundations. The more balanced treatment of Rousseau in the Annual Register provides a useful corrective. Always aware of Rousseau’s failings and absurdities, Burke was at first more appreciative of his greatness. The selection of ‘Characters’ also reflected Burke’s historical interests. He reprinted King Alfred’s ‘Preface’ to Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care; and an analysis of the mœurs of the ancient Spartans from Goguet’s The Origin of Laws, Arts, and Sciences (1758), one of the earliest French versions of the ‘four-stage’ theory of the evolution of human society.25 Characters from the Renaissance and later predominate, however, with contemporary publications providing the richest sources for the ‘character’ as a formal genre. From Swift’s posthumous History of the Four Last Years of the Queen (1758), Burke reprinted the venomous portraits of Lord Somers and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Swift’s masterpiece in this genre, his Short Character of the Earl of Wharton (1710), was later excerpted from a new edition of his Works.26 The first Earl of Clarendon (1609–74) was another master of the genre. From his Life, an autobiographical volume of Annual Register (1762), 227–39 bis. The review of the Lettre appeared in (1759), 479–84. Annual Register (1762), 160–2 bis, 169–74 bis. Annual Register (1763), 32–3 bis (Alfred); (1760), 1–9 bis (Goguet). Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), 94–8. 26 Annual Register (1758), 256–62 (Four Last Years); (1762), 40–3 bis (Wharton). E.B. wrote a critical headnote to the extracts from the Four Last Years that is longer than some of his reviews. He also reprinted some anecdotes about Swift (1759, 325–58) and excerpted two shorter works under ‘Essays’ (1762, 162–9 bis). 23 24 25

172 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 material not used in his History of the Rebellion, Burke selected a dozen classic ‘characters’.27 The ‘characters’ of Clarendon and Swift provide vivid if prejudiced portraits of their contemporaries. Burke also appreciated the value and interest of original documents, not only to convey the subject’s own personality and point of view, but to illustrate the manners of the time. Notable examples include a letter from Mary Queen of Scots to Elizabeth I; a peremptory note from Elizabeth to a refractory bishop; and several Cromwellian documents.28 Burke chose other extracts to illustrate more general changes in modes of life. An example is the memorable eyewitness record of the court of Elizabeth I by the German traveller Paul Hentzner, whose Journey into England had recently been printed by Horace Walpole (1717–97) on his private press at Strawberry Hill.29 Other selections illuminated more distant or obscure parts of ‘the great Map of Mankind’. Burke reprinted modern first-hand accounts of the Athenians, the Canadians, the Kamchatkans, and the Laplanders.30 Such extracts testify to Burke’s continuing interest in ethnographic material such as he had used in the Account of the European Settlements in America. Most of the individuals represented were famous. The inclusion of someone obscure is probably an indication of a special interest or fellowfeeling on Burke’s part. An example is a poor but happy and contented clergyman, a real-life Parson Adams.31 The prominence of autodidacts suggests that Burke felt a special sympathy for men from humble backgrounds whose thirst and aptitude for abstruse learning could overcome the most formidable obstacles.32 Finally, Burke did not neglect readers who wanted something shocking. In addition to brief notices in the ‘Historical Article’, in the second part of the Register he usually reprinted reports of two or three of the more sensational criminal trials of the year. One of the murderers was also a self-taught pioneer in comparative philology: Eugene Aram (1704–59).33 Aram was a schoolmaster; others of the autodidacts also became teachers. Their careers, devoted not to self-promotion but to passAnnual Register (1759), 302–23. E.B. reviewed the Life in the same volume (464–8). Annual Register (1759), 323–5; repr. from the Burleigh State Papers via the London Magazine, 28 (1759), 78–9; (1761), 15 bis; (1758), 267–8; (1761), 49–51 bis, reprinted from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 31 (1761), 225, 277; (1762), 43–8 bis. 29 Annual Register (1758), 262–6. Typically, E.B. reprinted extracts that had already been excerpted; in this case, from the London Magazine, 26 (1757), 595–6, 631–2. 30 Annual Register (1763), 1–2 bis, from Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens; (1761), 10–12 bis, from Charlevoix’s Journal of a Voyage to North-America; (1764), 1–22 bis, from Krasheninnikov’s History of Kamschatka; the account of the Laplanders (1759), 328–41, from the Journal œconomique. 31 Annual Register (1760), 19–22 bis; from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 30 (1760), 317–18. 32 Annual Register (1758), 247–53 (John Ludwig, 1715–?, a German peasant whose passion was mathematics); (1759), 293–7 (Robert Hill, 1699–1777, the learned tailor); (1761), 27–9 bis (Valentin Jamerai Du Val, 1695–1775, a peasant who rose to teach at the Lunéville academy); (1764), 29–38 bis (Thomas Simpson, 1710–61, who taught mathematics at the Woolwich naval academy). 33 Annual Register (1759), 351–65. Aram is still remembered as the protagonist of Edward BulwerLytton’s novel, Eugene Aram (1832). 27 28

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 173 ing on to others the learning they had so laboriously acquired themselves, parallel that of Abraham Shackleton, who taught himself Latin in order to set up a school. Burke always admired the type. ‘Natural History’ ranged over the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Burke’s main sources for this section were the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and the extracts from its European counterparts published in the English magazines. Science was not yet the preserve of trained specialists. Many amateur observers and experimenters were active in the Royal Society and contributed to its Transactions. Burke reprinted accounts of exotic animals, plants, and materials; unusual natural phenomena, from earthquakes and typhoons to the freezing of mercury; and travels to the remoter parts of the globe. The outlandish predominates. Most of the extracts chosen are descriptive, though Burke included a few essays of a more speculative cast. A letter warning of the dangers of leadsmelting near populous areas is an early example of concern for environmental pollution.34 Human health features more prominently in ‘Useful Projects’. Under this heading Burke reprinted methods for resuscitating the nearly drowned, cures for epilepsy and gout, and claims for the medicinal virtues of hemlock.35 Economic projects range from large-scale ventures such as canal-building and coal-mining, to improved methods of destroying pests.36 Not all projects are so utilitarian. Burke found a place for articles on preserving plants and on Japanese paper-making; on how to make elm resemble mahogany and how to mix the most brilliant Prussian blue.37 A more accurate method of determining the longitude at sea and a perpetualmotion machine are examples of projects that illustrate how ill-defined in Burke’s day was the borderline between the Royal Society and the Academy of Lagado.38 A project to encourage the manufacture of linen, plausible enough to secure parliamentary sanction, but more probably a cover for a smuggling operation, also found a niche in Burke’s pages.39 Burke regarded ‘the love and study of antiquities’ as ‘one of the most prevailing tastes of this age’. By ‘Antiquities’, he understood both the material relics of the past, such as were being unearthed by the early Annual Register (1761), 87–8 bis; from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 31 (1761), 341–2. Annual Register (1759), 420–1; (1762), 100–2 bis; (1763), 130–1 bis; (1761), 120–1 bis, 123–4 bis; (1760), 105–12 bis; (1761), 112–20 bis. 36 Annual Register (1760), 142–8 bis; (1763), 99–100 bis; (1764), 141–2 bis; (1760), 148 bis; (1763), 109, 132 bis; (1764), 151 bis. 37 Annual Register (1763), 106–7 bis; (1762), 87–90 bis; (1764), 140–1 bis; (1762), 96–7 bis. 38 Annual Register (1761), 137–8 bis; (1763), 126–30 bis. 39 Annual Register (1763), 100–3 bis. In ‘The Rise of Protection and the English Linen Trade’, in N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (eds.), Textile History and Economic History: Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann (Manchester, 1973), 74–112, Harte concludes that there is ‘little doubt of the basic fraudulence of this enterprise’ (84 n. 47). 34 35

174 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 archaeologists, and texts that changes in taste had rendered quaint, obsolete, or incomprehensible.40 Archaeology in the modern sense is represented by accounts of coins and of such monuments as the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens.41 The section also included essays illustrating social and cultural history, and such antiquarian topics as the use of glass in windows and ways of measuring time.42 The more ‘philosophical’ kind of social history is represented by Voltaire on the origin of chivalry, Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, and the ‘Dissertation Concerning the Antiquity of the Poems of Ossian’ by James Macpherson (1736–92), their ‘translator’.43 To judge by the space alloted to it, Burke took a special interest in the expedition to India undertaken by Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). Duperron spent several years in India, searching for Parsee texts, before the defeat of the French forced him to return to Paris. Always interested in non-Christian religions, especially those (such as Zoroastrianism) that had both sacred texts and a separate priesthood, Burke reprinted accounts of Duperron’s journey and of some of his most important discoveries.44 Burke drew his ‘Literary and Miscellaneous Articles’ from two main sources, recent books and current periodicals. This section was not confined to ‘literature’ in the modern sense, but embraced philosophy and religion, history and economics. Burke’s personal interests can be recognized in many of the selections. The excerpts from Montesquieu’s essay on taste and Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind relate to the subject of his own Philosophical Enquiry. The account of the Jesuits in Paraguay served partly to confirm the Burkes’ own description in their Account of the European Settlements.45 Yet other points of view were also represented. For example, Burke reprinted eight of Johnson’s Idler essays (far more than from any other series), among them the fable of the vultures. In this anti-war parable, the mother vulture concludes that human warfare is contrived by a benevolent providence for the better supply of vultures with food.46 Burke was no pacifist, and approved of the Seven Years War. His reprinting a fine essay so out of keeping with his own ideas cautions against using the contents of Annual Register (1760), 253 bis (review of Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry). Annual Register (1760), 168–60 bis (Stukeley’s account of the coins of Carausius); (1760), 159–62 bis (Athens). 42 Annual Register (1761), 153–5 bis; (1761), 156–7 bis; (1759), 410–13. 43 Annual Register (1760), 176–8 bis (Voltaire); (1762), 134–8 bis (Hurd); (1761), 158–67 bis (Macpherson). 44 Annual Register (1762), 103–12 bis, 112–29 bis. In his ‘History of England’, E.B. notices the analogy between the magi and the Druids (WS i. 358). 45 Annual Register (1758), 311–18 (Montesquieu); (1764), 190–4 bis (Reid); (1758), 362–7 (Paraguay; from Ulloa’s Voyage to South America). 46 Idler, no. 22 (9 Sept. 1758). E.B.’s was the fifth reprint of this classic anti-war parable, which Johnson omitted from the collected edition of the essays; Works (New Haven, 1958– ), ii. 317. E.B. also reprinted the bitterly anti-colonialist no. 81 (3 Nov. 1759); Annual Register (1759), 435–6. 40 41

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 175 the Annual Register as a source for his opinions. Thus the reprinting of an article arguing for freedom of trade need not represent his views.47 Dodsley, the publisher of the Register, was himself a poet and an anthologist, his Collection of Poems, by Several Hands (1748–58) being among the most popular and influential of its time. Poetry is accordingly well represented. The poems chosen are mostly short, though a few longer poems are excerpted. Over 200 pieces were printed during Burke’s editorship, and they range over most of the popular genres and types of the day: odes (mostly Horatian), elegies, and fables; epigrams, epistles, and epitaphs; and poems on every occasion, serious and comic. Goldsmith and Smart are among the poets still read, Lord Lyttelton and William Mason (1729–97) among those whose names at least are still remembered. The two poets best represented illustrate Burke’s attempt to cater to a variety of tastes, in poetry as in the Register as a whole. Regularly included were the odes for the king’s birthday and the new year by the Poet Laureate, William Whitehead (1715–85). From the other end of the spectrum, Burke reprinted generous selections from the scurrilous satires of Charles Churchill (1731–64). Burke also culled much anonymous verse from the magazines.48 Not all the poems were new. The few older pieces reprinted included Thomas Parnell’s The Horse and the Olive, written in 1713 to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht. The prospect of peace in 1762 gave this poem a new topicality.49 An ‘Account of New Books’ was the last section of the Register. Burke’s avowed aim was to select for notice only books that were worthy of praise, while admitting that he had not room for ‘all that are praise-worthy’.50 Such a policy avoided the dyspeptic, querulous tone too frequent among professional reviewers of books. This does not mean that Burke is never critical, but he avoids the ‘trash with which the press now groans’ species of cant. Never merely dismissive, where he cannot wholly approve, he treats his authors with respect. Eighteenth-century reviews were expected to provide a sample as much as a critique, the selection of characteristic passages being regarded as an important part of the reviewer’s task. Burke follows this pattern. In most instances a short general comment (usually under 500 words) introduces several columns of extracts. Only once does Burke depart significantly from this procedure. The exception is his review of Fingal, the fabrication which James Macpherson published as a translation of an original poem by the Gaelic bard Ossian. Annual Register (1762), 179–82 bis; trans. from the Journal œconomique. In 1759, for example (461–3), E.B. reprinted the same excerpts from The Beldames: A Poem as had appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine, 29 (1759), 86–7. In 1762, of the twenty-eight poems or extracts, eleven were taken from the Gentleman’s Magazine (including the identical passage from Churchill’s The Ghost). 49 Annual Register (1762), 183–4 bis; repr. from the London Magazine, 31 (1762), 671. 50 Annual Register (1758), pp. vi–vii. 47 48

176 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Initially, Burke was captivated by the Ossianic poetry and reluctant to suspect its authenticity. In 1787, he told Boswell that ‘when the fragments came out, he could not say whether they were ancient or not, but when there was a mass of it, he saw clearly’.51 Welcoming Macpherson’s first instalment, Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), Burke observed that ‘there is far less doubt of the merit, than of the authenticity, of these pieces’. Reviewing Fingal (1761), however, Burke was less cautious, accepting Macpherson’s claim that the poem was a translation of a work by Ossian, son of Finn, and therefore contemporary with the events it records (usually put in the third century ad).52 Admittedly, two voices can be heard in the review of Fingal. The enthusiastic, however, drowns out the still, small voice of scepticism. The review burns with the contagious enthusiasm of one who has just discovered a wonderful new author. Burke relishes the ‘inestimable relicks of the genuine spirit of poetry’ which even in translation retain ‘the majestick air, and native simplicity of a sublime original’. The objections he tries to answer are those advanced by Ferdinando Warner (1703–68): anachronisms that led Warner to argue that Fingal was a later Scottish redaction of garbled Irish originals. Warner did not regard Ossian as a fabrication.53 Already, however, more fundamental objections had been raised. Some critics, for example, were suspicious of the parallels between Fingal and Homer (and, even more damning, Milton). Too close to be coincidental, these appeared evidence of modern forgery. Burke was most reluctant to concede this possibility. He argues that ‘with great geniuses, similar grand occasions will often excite the like sublime conceptions, and call forth the same enthusiastic expressions’. This accords with the theory of the Philosophical Enquiry, where he traces the sublime to a few elemental stimuli.54 In this view, for Homer, Ossian, and Milton to have responded in nearly the same way to similar sights or happenings would not be surprising. Indirectly, Burke’s enthusiasm attests his supreme veneration for Homer and his loyalty to classical canons. For all his admiration of ‘their Celtic Homer’, he scotches the notion that Fingal can bear comparison with the Iliad, ‘the more consummate work of the father of epic poetry . . . which for its superior excellence was, at its first appearance in the world, deemed rather a divine than human composition’. Burke was not alone in admiring, with an extravagance which came to seem embarrassing, a work calculated to appeal to the age’s thirst for ‘that 51 Boswell’s Journal, 29 Oct. 1787, in Boswell: The English Experiment 1785–1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1986), 150. 52 Annual Register (1760), 253–6 bis; (1761), 276–82 bis. 53 Warner, Remarks on the History of Fingal and Other Poems of Ossian (London, 1762). Warner’s pamphlet was published in Feb.; the Annual Register on 13 May. E.B.’s familiarity with so recent a source attests the interest he took in the controversy. 54 Macpherson may actually have been influenced by E.B.’s theory; Larry L. Stewart, ‘Ossian, Burke, and the “Joy of Grief” ’, English Language Notes, 15 (1977–8), 29–32.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 177 native simplicity, that wild luxuriance, that romantic air’, a taste which contemporary poetry was just learning to satisfy. By 1772 at the latest, Burke was convinced that Ossian’s poems were ‘forgeries’. The subject was canvassed at a dinner-party hosted by Sir Joshua Reynolds on 21 March. One of the other guests was Thomas Percy (1729–1811), a prominent antiquarian whose initial scepticism had been converted to a belief in Ossian’s genuineness. Writing to Percy a few days later, Burke could still not give a precise reference for some French ‘Dissertations’ that he had cited. But he reiterated his by now firm conviction. ‘Nothing can be more obvious’, he averred, ‘than that Fingal &c have been written originally in English’.55 Between 1762 and 1772, Burke probably went through the same gradual process of doubt as David Hume, his initial will to believe gradually worn down by a growing sense of the improbability of such a large body of work surviving through oral transmission.56 The number of books reviewed in the Register was never large: between four (1762 and 1764) and seven (1759) each year. Only thirty-seven books in all were reviewed in the first seven volumes. To put this figure in perspective, in 1756 the Critical Review noticed over 245 books, and the Monthly about 455.57 Even excluding the numerous shorter notices, each of the two principal journals reviewed between six and ten books at length each month, more than Burke did each year. With such a high degree of selectivity, the choice can reasonably be taken as largely Burke’s own. Two caveats should, however, be entered. Burke was not immune to the pressure, felt by all editors, to review books written by friends or by the friends of friends. An example is the History of the Life and Reign of Philip, King of Macedon by Thomas Leland (1722–85), a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and a personal friend. The only scientific work reviewed was Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physic, translated from Linnaeus’ Amoenitates Academicae by Benjamin Stillingfleet (1702–71). In a tone too redolent of puffery, Burke calls Stillingfleet’s preface ‘such a piece of writing as, we believe, will make every body wish that learned author otherwise employed than in translation’.58 Stillingfleet’s Miscellaneous Tracts is an important book. His preface contains the first extensive account in English of Linnaeus’ system of classification. Burke, however, neither alludes to nor reprints that part of the preface. He probably reviewed the book because Stillingfleet, a grandson of the famous bishop, was a habitué of 55 Percy’s diary, 21 Mar. 1772, BL Add. MS 32336, fo. 160; Bertram H. Davis, Thomas Percy: A Scholar-Cleric in the Age of Johnson (Philadelphia, 1989), 148–9; E.B. to Percy, [24 Mar. 1772], YB Osborn Collection. 56 David Raynor, ‘Ossian and Hume’, in Howard Gaskill (ed.), Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh, 1991), 147–63. 57 Basker, Tobias Smollett, 61. 58 Annual Register (1758), 459–63 (Leland); (1759), 472–7 (Stillingfleet). E.B. later reprinted a passage on augury from Stillingfleet’s Calendar of Flora; (1761), 180–1 bis.

178 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Elizabeth Montagu’s salon. Montagu is flattered more directly in Burke’s review of Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead, of which she had written three.59 Nor is the space devoted to a book always proportional to Burke’s estimate of its importance. The last section in the volume, and comprising mainly reprinted extracts, the reviews could readily be expanded or contracted. The space devoted to reviews during these years varied between twenty-five pages (1760) and sixty-one (1763). The twenty-five pages allotted to a collection of Restoration parliamentary debates, as much space as was given to the whole section in 1760, looks suspiciously like filler.60 These reservations counsel caution, without precluding a search for Burke’s own ideas and interests. In the reviews, more directly than anywhere else in the Register, he could ventilate his own opinions. The subjects certainly reflect Burke’s own interests more clearly than do the contents of the Register as a whole. About half the books reviewed are broadly historical. Some were obvious choices: Robertson’s History of Scotland and the final instalment of Hume’s History of England.61 Others are of less general interest: Ferdinando Warner’s History of Ireland, the Clarendon State Papers (which relate chiefly to the second earl’s term as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland), and George Wallace’s System of the Principles of the Laws of Scotland.62 Burke chose mainly serious, lengthy works. The two pamphlets that are the chief exceptions to this rule were both of special interest to Burke. He seized the opportunity provided by the appearance of part ii of John Brown’s Estimate to record his disagreement with the analysis of national decay expressed in the first part, published just before the inception of Register. In Blackstone’s inaugural lecture, Burke recognized many of his own criticisms of contemporary legal education.63 Burke reviewed few works of imaginative literature. Three are now classics of fiction: Rasselas, Tristram Shandy, and Émile. His comments on them are disappointingly conventional.64 The Annual Register is a rich but frustrating source. Burke surely chose many pieces because he liked or agreed with them, but particular instances are hard to identify with confidence. Taking his editorial responsibilities seriously, he provided his readers with a varied choice of reading. The success of the enterprise is beyond doubt, though Burke must share the credit for it with Dodsley. The Register filled a need and rapidly acquired a reference value, as is attested by the frequency with which the early volumes were reprinted to provide complete sets.65 In 1789, Lady Anne 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Annual Register (1760), 253–6 bis. Annual Register (1763), 264–90 bis. Annual Register (1759), 489–94; (1761), 301–4 bis. Annual Register (1763), 257–64 bis (Warner), 250–6 bis (Clarendon); (1760), 263–5 bis (Wallace). Annual Register (1758), 445–53 (Brown), 453–9 (Blackstone). Annual Register (1759), 477–9; (1760), 247–9 bis; (1762), 227–39 bis. The first volume had been reprinted about ten times by 1800; Todd, pp. 46–8.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 179 Lindsay (1750–1825) excused herself from giving any account of the debates on the Regency crisis in her memoirs ‘when the annual Register is to be found in every circulating Library’.66 Indeed, the volumes have lost neither their usefulness nor their entertainment value. A detailed narrative of the events of a particular year is nowhere more conveniently available than in its ‘Historical Article’. The second part remains a browser’s delight. In May 1765, Horace Walpole took the latest volume with him to read as his coach rumbled from Twickenham to London, and was inspired to write a poem by the account he read of the ‘fountain-tree’ supposed to grow in the Canary Islands.67 Modern readers should not be deterred from turning the pages of the Register by the mistaken notion that its only interest is historical.

2 ‘There is’, as Boswell remarks of Johnson, ‘something pleasingly interesting, to many, in tracing so great a man through all his different habitations.’ To the severe, indeed, ‘this minute attention may appear trifling; but when we consider the punctilious exactness with which the different houses in which Milton resided have been traced by the writers of his life, a similar enthusiasm may be pardoned in the biographer of Johnson’.68 With such precedents, the biographer of Burke may regret that no Boswell sought to recover the sequence of his moves from his arrival in London to 1757. Burke’s first known home after his marriage in March 1757 was in Battersea, then a small country village separated from London by open countryside. His friend John Ridge, who was keeping terms at the Middle Temple prior to returning to Ireland to practise law, also lived there. On 4 October 1757, Ridge was married at Battersea Church, with Edmund and William Burke as his witnesses.69 With its green fields and market gardens, Battersea was a pleasant retreat for the summer. For Burke, who aspired to public life and who enjoyed company, it was no place to spend the winter. Jane, however, may have chosen it for her lying-in, for Richard, her first child, was born there on 9 February 1758. Later in 1758, the Burkes moved to Marylebone, where they lived in a small house taken by Dr Nugent in Wimpole Street, part of a new development on the Harley estate around 66 Lady Anne Lindsay, ‘Memoirs’, National Library of Scotland, Crawford MSS (Acc. 9769), 27/4/ 13, iv. 121. 67 Walpole to George Montagu, 26 May 1765, in YWC x. 155; Annual Register (1764), 115–18 bis. 68 Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), i. 111 (1737). 69 Marriage Register Book, St Mary’s, Battersea, 1754–1803. Ridge and his wife (Catherine Somner Sedley) are both described as ‘of this parish’.

180 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Cavendish Square.70 Their second son, Christopher (named after the doctor), was born on 14 December 1758. In 1758, Wimpole Street marked the northern edge of the urban area, terminating in open fields and an uninterrupted prospect of Hampstead and Islington (Plate 4). As late as the 1750s, though not for much longer, the parish of Marylebone was predominantly rural. In the eighteenth century, the parish was the basic unit of local government, and many important functions (including the raising of local taxes) were the responsibility of the parish meeting or ‘vestry’. Marylebone at this time had an ‘open’ vestry, which (in principle at least) all inhabitants might attend. In practice, most such vestries were controlled by local oligarchies. Marylebone in the 1760s, however, was growing well beyond the capacity of an open vestry to govern. The area just north of Oxford Street around Foley House was becoming a fashionable new residential area. Its proximity to the open country made it a natural choice for someone who, as Burke did, relished a whiff of country air. Marylebone, with its pleasure gardens, was one of the more salubrious suburbs. Though many of the inhabitants of the old ‘village’ resented the new arrivals and fought to maintain the old character of the parish, they could not halt the gradual building-up of the district. In 1767, the process of gentrification was completed when the ‘new’ residents obtained an Act of Parliament to suppress the open vestry. Henceforth the parish was administered by a self-perpetuating oligarchy, a body of a hundred or so named in the Act and with the power of filling vacancies by co-optation. This was a victory for the likes of the Burkes, who lived in the new streets and squares, and who dominated the new system.71 Burke himself, however, had by then moved on. For an MP, Marylebone was less convenient than Westminster. In 1758, however, Wimpole Street was a respectable address for a young author just emerging from obscurity. The Philosophical Enquiry, the second edition of which was published on 9 January 1759, gave him an entrée to literary circles. Yet the biographical record remains patchy and uneven. Though many more letters are extant for the period 1757–64 (about thirty, against the five for 1750–6), no letter survives for 1758, and only one for 1760. No family letters have been preserved, though many were written, for in 1759 both Richard (who had joined Edmund in London by August 1757; C i. 124) and Will went out to the West Indies. Nor do the extant letters throw much light on the extent of Burke’s acquaintance in the London worlds of politics, polite society, and literature. This needs to be reconstructed from scattered references, and often inferred from later evidence. 70 According to the St Marylebone rate books in the City of Westminster Archives, between 1756 and 1759 Wimpole Street contained only eight modest properties rated between £7 and £15. 71 F. H. W. Sheppard, Local Government in St Marylebone, 1688–1835: A Study of the Vestry and the Turnpike Trust (London, 1958).

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 181 The growth of Burke’s circle of friends is accordingly not easy to document. Only Joseph Emin’s incidental reference preserves the ‘Mr Bodley’, a lawyer who had lived in Calcutta, with whom Burke was walking in the park one Sunday afternoon. In a letter of 1759, Burke refers to a ‘Mr Frampton’, a clergyman (c.1719–69?), as ‘a very particular friend of Mine’ (128). Nothing else is known about their friendship, though it lasted at least until 1768.72 The centre of the Burke circle, ‘our little Sett’ (C i. 125), was always the family. This comprised Burke, his wife, and two sons; Dr Nugent and (for a time) his son Jack; and (while they were in England) Edmund’s brother Richard and cousin Will. These were the people who were most important to Burke, yet little is known about their life together. For example, Burke’s second son Christopher is known only to have ‘died an Infant’.73 The loss of one of only two children was serious. Though he idolized Richard, Burke never refers to his younger son. Perhaps the circumstances of his death were too painful to recall. Little evidence survives about Burke’s family life. Best preserved is his public career and persona, the thoughts and ideas recorded in speeches and in letters designed to inform or persuade rather than reveal. To read Burke, even to read his letters, is to be admitted to a performance, to hear a confident public voice. Outside his small domestic circle, he was habitually reticent about himself and his innermost thoughts and feelings. Because he was so rarely apart from them, his feelings for those he loved best were rarely committed to paper. His hatreds, however, are amply documented. The result is an unbalanced record, in which Burke the affectionate husband and playful father rarely appears. Beyond the family circle, Burke’s acquaintance can be divided into two overlapping groups: one Irish, the other literary. Some of the Irish had come to London, as Burke had, to seek their fortune. Others were men of rank and property in Ireland, whose means allowed them to spend some months of each year in London. Of the adventurers, the most pathetic case is that of Beaumont Brenan, drawn to London by his literary ambitions. In August 1761, Burke reported to Shackleton that Brenan had ‘died of a very long and painful illness, in which however he was exposed to no want, and which he bore with constancy. Sure he was a man of first rate Genius, thrown away and lost to the world’ (C i. 142–3). Many talented individuals In a letter of 7 Apr. 1768, Matthew Frampton asked Garrick to give E.B. ‘my most affectionately respectful compliments’; Private Correspondence of David Garrick with the Most Celebrated Persons of his Time (London, 1831–2), i. 298. Frampton was rector of Langridge, north of Bath, from 1750 to 1769. Probably he and E.B. met at Bath during the early 1750s. 73 Quoted from a family Bible by I. Moreton Wood in Notes and Queries, 6th ser. 5 (8 Apr. 1882), 274– 75. Christopher was alive in Nov. 1761, when E.B.’s father made his will. He died within the next year, for W.B. to O’Hara, 20 Nov. 1762, refers to ‘their little boy ; Ross J. S. Hoffman, Edmund Burke, New York Agent: with his Letters to the New York Assembly and Intimate Correspondence with Charles O’Hara, 1761–1776 (Philadelphia, 1956), 292. 72

182 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 were less fortunate, the tragedy of early death exacerbated by poverty and degradation.74 Brenan’s fate showed Burke what he himself might have suffered. Paul Hiffernan, who had helped Burke break into print, also came to London, where he survived longer than Brenan and sank not quite without trace. Oliver Goldsmith provides another instructive example. Though he entered Trinity College only a year after Burke, on 11 June 1745, no evidence suggests that they knew each other as students. Probably they were introduced in London by Joseph Fenn Sleigh. After studying medicine at Edinburgh (where he met Sleigh) and Leiden, and making an extensive tour of the Continent, Goldsmith arrived in London in February 1756. Failing to establish himself in medical practice, he turned to writing for the booksellers. Far more productive than Brenan, despite undoubted successes in every genre he tried (essays, poetry, novel, comedy, history, and biography), Goldsmith never quite obtained the distinction he so desperately sought. In Goldsmith as in Brenan, Burke saw genius frustrated. He needed to avoid their fate. Less gifted than Goldsmith, Arthur Murphy possessed a greater share of wordly wisdom. His career illustrates another direction that Burke’s might have taken. Murphy’s chequered childhood gave him much the same experience of multiple outsiderhood as Burke. After the death of his father (in 1729), his mother moved to London, but sent him to school in France. He attended the Jesuit school at St Omer’s, where many Irish Catholic boys were sent. (Burke himself was often charged with having been educated there.) After leaving St Omer’s, Murphy was placed by his uncle in a humble clerical job in Cork (1747–9). When ordered to Jamaica, however, he rebelled. Having thereby lost his uncle’s favour, he came to London to seek his fortune. For about two years (1750–1) he worked as a bookkeeper, but was unable to resist the enticements of the world of theatre, journalism, and writing. He may have introduced Burke to his publisher, Robert Dodsley.75 Murphy made a faster start than Burke: in 1752 he was already conducting his own periodical, the Gray’s Inn Journal. Luckier than Brenan, Hiffernan, and many others, he escaped sinking permanently into Grub Street. After qualifying as a barrister, he secured an appointment as a commissioner of bankruptcy. Like Henry Fielding, whose life he would write, he was able to combine writing with a legal career. Murphy was one of the many friends and acquaintance with whom Burke was frequently in company during the London winter, yet with whom he exchanged few letters. Murphy’s dedication to Burke of his translation of 74 Samuel Boyse (1708–49) is an example, reduced to pawn his shirts and the sheets on his bed. E.B. reprinted ‘An Account of the Life of Mr Samuel Boyse’ in the Annual Register (1764), 54–8 bis. 75 Straus, Robert Dodsley, 254. Straus says ‘probably’ and may simply have been guessing. He puts their meeting in 1752, again without any evidence.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 183 Tacitus (1793) is a tribute to a long-standing friendship that has left few other traces.76 Charles O’Hara (1715?–76) and Lord Charlemont were the Irishmen of property whom Burke knew most intimately. The O’Haras, whose property was in County Sligo, were a family with Gaelic roots which by 1700 had been assimilated into the Protestant establishment. A generation older than Burke, O’Hara was to some degree (as Dr Nugent was) a surrogate fatherfigure.77 As with Nugent, the basis of the friendship was instinctive and emotional. An extrovert, fond of horse-racing and gambling, O’Hara was not particularly learned or intellectual. Though a member of the Irish Parliament for many years, he was an unambitious observer of the political scene whose aspirations were satisfied by a lucrative place. Burke’s letters to him are unusually frank and unreserved, and among the few that he wrote for the pleasure of keeping up a friendship rather than for business or duty. O’Hara’s death in 1776 impoverishes the biographical record, for Burke had no other correspondent to whom he wrote so freely. Lord Charlemont came from a different background. Descended from an officer who settled in Ireland as part of the occupying army in the reign of Elizabeth I, of all Burke’s Irish friends he was the most hostile to Catholicism. He played an important part in Irish public life, and became a notable patron of the arts. Unusually for a man of his generation, he visited Greece as well as Italy. Since he travelled extensively in Europe between 1746 and 1754, he probably made Burke’s acquaintance about 1755. Writing to their common friend Edmond Malone after Burke’s death, Charlemont lamented the loss of ‘one of my oldest and best acquaintances and friends! I knew him intimately, long before he was a politician, and when, without a crown in his pocket, he was a happy man.’78 The social distance between them, however, and perhaps Charlemont’s militant Protestantism, prevented him from becoming really intimate with Burke. Writing to Charlemont, as to most of his correspondents, Burke always remained on guard. To O’Hara he wrote from the heart. Burke’s London acquaintance was not limited to Irishmen. The guest list of a dinner-party which Robert Dodsley hosted in January 1758 provides a cross-section of his literary friends.79 Of the nine guests, only Bennet Langton (1737–1801) had not written a book. Most familiar today from the Jessé Foot, The Life of Arthur Murphy, Esq. (London, 1811); John Pike Emery, Arthur Murphy: An Eminent English Dramatist of the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1946). 77 Thomas Bartlett, ‘The O’Haras of Annaghmore c.1600–c.1800: Survival and Revival’, Irish Economic and Social History, 9 (1982), 34–52. The exact date of O’ Hara’s birth is uncertain. Bartlett places it closer to 1705 than to 1715, the previously accepted date (34 n. 4). If so, O’Hara was about twentyfive years older than E.B., not fifteen. Yet E.B.’s letter to O’Hara of 4 July 1765 implies that O’Hara was then only fifty (C i. 206). 78 Charlemont to Malone, 19 Aug. 1797, HMC Charlemont, ii. 281. 79 Robert Dodsley to Richard Berenger, 10 Jan. 1758, in Correspondence, 330. 76

184 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 pages of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Langton enjoyed a considerable reputation in his own time as an amateur classical scholar. Five of the guests had written works of aesthetics or literary criticism: Burke himself, Joseph Spence, John Gilbert Cooper, and the Warton brothers, Joseph (1722– 1800) and Thomas (1728–90). Spence, who had been a friend of Pope, was a well-beneficed clergyman with literary interests. Now remembered for his Anecdotes of Pope, Burke met him as the author of Polymetis (1747), a pioneer attempt to use classical sculpture to elucidate poetry and mythology. His most recent publication was the short Account of the blind poet Blacklock (1754), to which Burke refers respectfully in his Philosophical Enquiry.80 Burke remembered Cooper, author of Letters Concerning Taste, a rhapsody in the manner of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, as ‘an insufferable coxcomb’.81 Spence and Cooper were relics of the previous generation. Burke was closer in age and outlook to the Wartons. Dodsley’s other guests were also literary men. Robert Bedingfield (1720?–68?) was a fellow of Hart Hall, Oxford, and a minor poet.82 David Garrick (1717–79), actor and dramatist, may have introduced Burke to Samuel Johnson. He became a valued friend, sympathetic and understanding enough to allow Burke to fall behind with interest payments on a loan of £1,000.83 Thomas Gataker (1718–68) was a surgeon and writer on medicine. In March 1759, Burke and Gataker jointly exercised a moderating influence on Garrick, on the occasion of his quarrel with John Hill.84 In 1766, Gataker treated Burke for a fish-bone lodged in his throat (C i. 251). No Boswell was at hand to record Burke’s first meeting with Johnson. According to Arthur Murphy, writing long after the event (in 1792), they met for the first time at Garrick’s, ‘several years’ before the foundation of the Literary Club in 1764. Murphy was not present at the meeting itself, but heard from Johnson the next day that Burke had made a favourable impression.85 What struck Johnson at this first meeting was probably Burke’s copious and well-informed talk. Johnson was at no time inclined to flatter. When he knew Burke better, and differed sharply from him in politics, Johnson paid him this remarkable tribute: ‘if a man were to go by Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966); Polymetis is no. 618 in the Sale Catalogue of E.B.’s library. Philosophical Enquiry, v. iv. 168; Austin Wright, Joseph Spence: A Critical Biography (Chicago, 1950), 84–112, 149–57. 81 James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare (London, 1860), 427–8. 82 William Prideaux Courtney, Dodsley’s Collection of Poetry: Its Contents and Contributors (Oxford, 1910), 75–6. 83 E.B. obtained the loan in 1769 (C ii. 31–3); by 1773 the interest was over £100 in arrears (438). 84 David Garrick, Letters, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), i. 302–3. 85 ‘An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson’, prefaced to Johnson’s Works (London, 1792), i. 98. Another anecdote told by Bisset, on the authority of Murphy, records an encounter between E.B. and Johnson at Garrick’s on Christmas Day, 1758; Robert Bisset, Life of Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1800) i. 63–4. Though often repeated, the story has several hallmarks of the apocryphal. 80

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 185 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 drest, the ostler would say—we have had an extraordinary man here.’86 Extroverted, sociable, and gregarious, Burke was never inclined to stand on his dignity. Willing to impress ordinary people by meeting them on their own ground, he knew about horses, farming, and the weather as well as about history, politics, and literature. He did not reserve himself for people who mattered or for important occasions. Bursting with information and ideas, he was ready to share them with the most casual companion. His abundant mental energy made indolence irksome, and enforced inactivity frustrating. Johnson seasoned his tribute with a dash of criticism. His remark hints at the histrionic quality of Burke’s public life. A compulsive performer, Burke was driven by a need to show off his knowledge and his eloquence, habitually turning the most casual social encounter or business transaction into an opportunity for ostentation. Nor did Burke know when to leave off. If the shower turned into a rainstorm, he would talk it out. Unfortunately for posterity, since Burke’s style was diffuse and rambling, not given to the striking aphorisms that made Johnson’s talk so memorable, little of his conversation has been preserved. By 1758, Burke knew many other contemporaries who were or would become famous. In that year, he probably met Joshua Reynolds. The careful Malone recorded that, at the time of Reynolds’s death in 1792, he and Burke had ‘lived in great intimacy’ for thirty-four years.87 With Reynolds there were no political differences to prevent the development of a warmer friendship than Burke ever enjoyed with Johnson. Two of Burke’s friendships are thus commemorated in the portrait of Garrick in the role of Kiteley by Reynolds (painted 1767–8), said to have been presented to Burke by the artist. This is one of the few paintings owned by Burke which can be identified.88 Burke’s other acquaintance ranged from Elizabeth Montagu to David Hume. Montagu characterized Burke as ‘in conversation and writing an ingenious and ingenuous man, modest and delicate, and on great and serious subjects full of that respect and veneration which a good mind and a great one is sure to feel, while fools mock behind the altar, at which wise men kneel and pay mysterious reverence’.89 Burke would always kneel before the altar, rather than mock behind it. In Montagu’s drawing-room, Boswell, Life of Johnson, iv. 275–6 (15 May 1784). Johnson was fond of this idea, for he repeated it, with variations, many times; Thomas W. Copeland, ‘Johnson and Burke’, in Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley, and P. G. M. Dickson (eds.), Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), 289–303. 87 Prior, Life of Malone, 434. 88 Reynolds, ed. Nicholas Penny (London, 1986), 236. The painting was bought at E.B.’s sale (1812) for the Prince Regent, and remains in the royal collection. 89 To Elizabeth Carter, 24 Jan. 1759, in Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blue-Stockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, ed. Emily J. Climenson (New York, 1906), ii. 159–60. 86

186 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Burke mixed with people of wealth and fashion far above the professional and literary worlds represented at Dodsley’s dinner-party. Indeed, the social distance prevented Burke from being entirely at ease with her, as his letters testify. An example is the elaborate letter of compliment of 29 July 1763 (C i. 170–3). In this letter, Burke is plainly on his best behaviour, as he was in the Montagu drawing-room. Most of those present were there by the privilege of their birth. Conscious that, as the son of an Irish attorney, he owed his entrée to such august gatherings to his talents, Burke could never joke with Montagu as he did with O’Hara. For all his propensity to ‘mysterious reverence’, Burke was also on good terms (initially at least) with one of those most inclined to ‘mock behind the altar’. Burke probably met ‘the Great Infidel’ about September 1758, when Hume arrived in London to see through the press the Tudor volumes of his History. In the eighteenth century, Scots were proverbially given to pushing the interests of their fellow countrymen. Hume was no exception. While in London, eager to promote the success of The Theory of Moral Sentiments by his friend Adam Smith (1723–90), he distributed copies to five men of influence. One was the old Duke of Argyll (1682–1761), the political boss of Scotland. The others were socially prominent men of letters: Lord Lyttelton; Soame Jenyns (1704–87), politician and author; Horace Walpole; and Burke. This was distinguished company. Burke was the only one whom Hume needed to identify, as ‘an Irish Gentleman, who wrote lately a very pretty Treatise on the Sublime’.90 Hume may have known of Burke’s editorship of the Annual Register, though the first volume had not yet appeared. If so, Hume’s plot succeeded, and Burke duly wrote a laudatory review of Smith’s book, reprinting as a sample the first chapter, ‘Of Sympathy’, the corner-stone of Smith’s system.91 More interesting than the review, however, are the comments that Burke made in a letter to Smith, for Hume told Burke that the book was a present from the author. To Smith, Burke wrote the first surviving example of a kind of letter in which he would excel. He praises the Theory for its unusual combination of truth and originality. The implied contrast, made explicit in Burke’s review, is with Rousseau and his ‘tendency to paradox’. In one of his favourite architectural metaphors, Burke contrasts Smith’s theory, ‘founded on the Nature of man, which is always the same’, with those of earlier writers whom he compares to ‘those Gothic Architects who were fond of turning great Vaults upon a single slender Pillar’. In a characteristic rhetorical strategy, Burke turns even ‘a sort of Fault’ into a topic of praise. ‘You are in some few Places’, he reproves Smith, ‘what Mr Locke is in most of his writings, rather a little too diffuse. This is however a fault of the generous kind, and infinitely prefer90 Hume to Adam Smith, 12 Apr. 1759, in New Letters, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford, 1954), 51. 91 Annual Register (1759), 484–9.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 187 able to the dry sterile manner, which those of dull imaginations are apt to fall into’ (10 Sept. 1759: C i. 129–30). Burke concludes with the hope that they will meet when Smith comes to London. They subsequently became acquainted, though never intimate. By 1784, on his first visit to Scotland, Burke had come to speak ‘coldly’ of the Theory of Moral Sentiments.92 Perhaps twenty-five years in politics had dimmed his faith in a theory founded on sympathy. By 1759, Hume claimed to know Burke ‘very well’. Burke later said the same about Hume, and told Malone that he and Hume were friends until the flattery to which Hume was exposed while acting as secretary to the British embassy in Paris made him a ‘literary coxcomb’.93 In 1776, he told Boswell that ‘keeping company with David Hume, in a strict light is hardly defensible’ though ‘in the present state of society’ he mixed with all men.94 This cannot be the whole story, for in 1758 Hume was already notoriously an infidel. An intriguing possibility (for which direct evidence, however, is lacking) is that their estrangement was precipitated by a violent disagreement on a question of Irish historiography. In 1641, the government of Charles I, faced with mounting opposition in England and Scotland, seemed to be losing its grip on Ireland. According to the Protestant version of what happened, the dispossessed Catholic landowners, sensing a favourable opportunity, plotted a general massacre of Protestants. A rebellion broke out, the scale and brutality of which were much exaggerated. A hundred years later the episode still aroused fierce passions. Hume’s account in his History (based mainly on Protestant sources) is slanted against the Irish, whom he presents as brutal savages.95 Burke always took the Catholic side on this question, arguing that the ‘massacre’ was virtually invented by the Protestants as an excuse for retaliation and confiscation. This was one issue on which Hume’s boasted philosophic phlegm failed him. Provoked at the gallant attempt by William Tytler (1711–92) to rehabilitate the reputation of Mary Queen of Scots, Hume added a note to his History of England which ends: ‘There are indeed three events in our history, which may be regarded as touchstones of partymen. An English Whig, who asserts the reality of the popish plot, an Irish Catholic, who denies the massacre in 1641, and a Scotch Jacobite, who maintains the innocence of queen Mary, must be considered as men beyond the reach of argument or reason, and must be left to their prejudices.’96 Memorandum by Dugald Stewart, Edinburgh University Library, Dc. 6. 11. Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (2nd edn. Oxford, 1980), 390–4; Prior, Life of Malone, 368. 94 Boswell’s Journal, 5 May 1776, in Private Papers (privately printed, 1928–34), xi. 268. 95 The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (Indianapolis, 1983–5), v. 338–47 (ch. 55). 96 Ibid., iv. 395 (ch. 39, note m); David Berman, ‘David Hume and the 1641 Rebellion in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 65 (1976), 101–12. 92 93

188 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Burke was stung by this note, for two of the three clauses applied to him. Not only was he an Irishman who denied the 1641 massacre, he was inclined to sympathize with Mary, as appears from his favourable review of Tytler’s book in the Annual Register. As late as 1796, when his mind was almost wholly engrossed by the French Revolution, Hume’s offensive note was still a vivid memory.97 Burke and Hume were equally and oppositely prejudiced. Opinions remain divided about Mary. On the 1641 rebellion, Burke’s prejudice has worn better. Though some atrocities were undoubtedly committed, Hume’s version has been discredited.98 Burke’s early connections were chiefly literary rather than political. This hampered the search for a career that would enable him to drop such a dull duty as editing the Annual Register. In 1759, he tried to obtain the position of consul at Madrid, but was unable to exert sufficient influence (C i. 131– 4). This proved fortunate in the long term, for he might easily have been buried in an unspectacular career in the consular service, his greatest talents unsuspected and therefore unexerted. His first step towards the political career on which his fame now rests came with his introduction to William Gerard Hamilton, the evil genius of the next six years of his life. In 1759, Hamilton was a young man (only a year older than Burke) with every prospect of making a distinguished career in English politics. The son of a well-to-do barrister, he was educated at Harrow, Oriel College, Oxford, and Lincoln’s Inn. As befitted a man of independent means, he neither took a degree nor was called to the Bar. His father died in 1754, leaving him an ample fortune. The same year he was elected to Parliament for the pocket borough of Petersfield in Hampshire. On 13 November 1755, he delivered his maiden speech, which was extravagantly admired. He did not become a regular speaker, though in March 1756 his second (and last) speech also won high praise.99 He attached himself to Henry Fox (1705–74), one of the least principled politicians of the day. Through Fox’s influence, in April 1756 he was appointed to the Board of Trade, a typical first step on the ladder of preferment. To meet such a man, and to be employed by him, opened exciting prospects.100 When, where, and how Burke was introduced to Hamilton are mysteries. After their rupture early in 1765, he twice referred bitterly to Hamilton as having taken ‘six of the best years of my Life’ (C i. 196, 200). So they probably met about 1759. Hamilton credited Joseph Warton with having 97 E.B.’s conversations with James Mackintosh, recorded in Bisset, Life of Edmund Burke, ii. 426; Annual Register (1761), 305–16 bis. 98 William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (new edn. London, 1892), i. 46–99. Lecky’s assessment is endorsed by Patrick J. Corish in T. W. Moody and others (eds.), A New History of Ireland, iii: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976), 291. 99 Horace Walpole to Henry Seymour Conway, 15 Nov. 1755 and 4 Mar. 1756, in YWC xxxvii. 416, 444. 100 Thomas W. Copeland, ‘Burke’s First Patron’, History Today, 2 (1952), 394–9.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 189 101 been ‘so kind as to recommend Mr Burke to my attention’. Warton, then second master at Winchester, had a network of connections at both Oxford and London. He knew many talented young men such as Hamilton sought. Warton had known Burke at least since January 1758, when they had dined together at Dodsley’s. Lord Charlemont, however, also claimed to have been the ‘first who introduced to his knowledge my wonderful countryman Burke’.102 To have heard of Burke from both Warton and Charlemont, and to have given each the impression that he had made the introduction, would have been characteristic of Hamilton’s duplicity. Their meeting was probably stage-managed to conceal from Burke the pre-arrangement. Hamilton went through such a manœuvre in 1765 when looking for Burke’s replacement. Warton recommended Robert Chambers (1737–1803), then Vinerian Fellow in law at Oxford. Hamilton asked Warton to arrange an accidental meeting, since ‘any proposal which might afterwards be made would come much more acceptably if it seemed to arise from an opinion I had conceived of his talents in consequence of an accidental acquaintance; rather than from the information of others, and from a plan which had been previously adjusted’.103 Such dissimulation was typical of Hamilton. Somehow Chambers escaped the net. Instead, in 1766 he succeeded Blackstone as Vinerian Professor, and later served as a judge in India. Hamilton wanted a bright but docile research assistant: well-informed, intelligent, and industrious; but unassuming, dependent, and entirely without ambitions of his own. Burke himself used the phrase ‘companion of your studies’ to describe their relationship. In a memorandum drawn up after their quarrel, Hamilton wrote ‘Took Mr: B: up, unknown’ and ‘dung Hill’ (C i. 189, 191). Though the social and financial inequalities between them naturally struck Hamilton the more forcibly, Burke was not quite ‘unknown’ in 1759. For Burke, the connection offered both immediate advantages and long-term prospects. He urgently needed to supplement the £100 he received for editing the Annual Register. The figure ‘£2,000’ in Hamilton’s memorandum may refer to the total of his payments to Burke. If so, the rate of remuneration was just over £300 per annum, by no means a miserly stipend. In the longer term, Burke must have hoped, through Hamilton, for some independent provision. The flaw in the arrangement was that while Burke saw Hamilton’s service as a stepping-stone, Hamilton wanted a permanent subordinate. For about three years all went reasonably well, but conflict between their different expectations could not be postponed indefinitely. Burke’s duties, apart from attendance, probably included reading and sifting papers on trade and other policy issues, and 101 Hamilton to Warton, 12 Feb. 1765, in John Wooll, Biographical Memoirs of the Late Revd. Joseph Warton (London, 1806), 299. 102 ‘Memoirs’, HMC Charlemont, i. 146. 103 Hamilton to Warton, 16 Apr. 1765, in Wooll, Biographical Memoirs, 304–5.

190 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 presenting the ambitious but indolent Hamilton with digests of information and opinions he could repeat as his own.

3 Hamilton did not at first engross all Burke’s time or energies. Burke still cherished hopes of completing his ‘History’, for six sheets of it were printed about 1760.104 He continued to work on the Annual Register, the second volume of which (for 1759) came out in May 1760. Otherwise, little is known about what he was doing. A ten-month gap in the surviving letters between September 1760 and July 1761 leaves that winter almost a blank, apart from work on the third volume of the Annual Register, published on 25 April 1761. Burke’s life was settling into an annual routine, divided between Hamilton and the Annual Register. Meanwhile, a new political era was inaugurated. George II died on 25 October 1760, and was succeeded by his grandson, George III (1738–1820). His accession marked an era, for the political world in general and for Burke in particular. In contrast to the domestic quiet, even somnolence, of the 1750s, the 1760s were to prove a decade of political instability. The young king, supposedly under the malign influence of his former tutor, the Earl of Bute (1713–92), was repeatedly accused, over the next few years, of attempting to introduce a sinister system of government, a species of ‘new Toryism’. In his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), Burke would give this interpretation of events memorable expression and long currency. At the time, however, he shared the mood of optimism which the young reign induced. Introducing a favourable review in the Annual Register of a book defending Mary Queen of Scots, Burke welcomed the new age in terms that echoed royal propaganda.105 The accession of George III had a more immediate impact on Burke’s life. In the earliest of many ministerial reshuffles in the first decade of the new reign, the Earl of Halifax (1716–71), Hamilton’s chief at the Board of Trade, was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. When Halifax went to Dublin, he took Hamilton with him as Chief Secretary; and Hamilton took Burke as his own private secretary. At this period, the Lord-Lieutenant resided in Ireland only during the sessions of the Irish Parliament, which typically met for about six months in alternate winters. (During his absence, John Hughs to James Dodsley, 11 Mar. 1769 (transcript in YB Boswell Papers, C 1561). ‘One piece of her [Mary’s] good fortune was reserved for this age, when time, experience, and a succession of good princes, and most of all, the virtues of a king, a native of the country he governs, has united all sects and all parties, religious and civil, in the one wish of continuing the government in him and his family’; Annual Register (1761), 305 bis. 104 105

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 191 Lords Justices were appointed: usually the Archbishop of Armagh, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker of the House of Commons.) Though appointed in April 1761, Halifax did not travel to Dublin until October, in time to open the new session of Parliament. Burke spent part of the summer of 1761 with Hamilton at Hampton Court. Hamilton’s villa was close to the palace, with a private gate leading to the royal garden. When the weather was good, the scene was idyllic. Horace Walpole, dining with them one day in July, was reminded of Marly, the retreat built by Louis XIV as an escape from the formal splendours of Versailles. Walpole’s first impression of Burke was ‘a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet—and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers and to be one’.106 Hampton, had, however, one grave disadvantage for Burke. He was separated from his family. Hamilton never married, and had no relish for domestic life. The Hampton Court villa was a bachelor’s world, to which only men were invited. When Walpole dined there, for example, the other guest was David Garrick, without his wife. Burke was happiest in his family circle. Late in August 1761, Burke left for Dublin, where he was soon joined by Jane and their two sons. In Dublin, he was assigned apartments in the Castle (which housed the administration) which would accommodate his wife and children. When the Shackletons visited him there, they found him ‘seated on the floor playing with his two little boys’.107 This was Burke’s first visit to Ireland since 1750. Old friendships with Shackleton, Dennis, and Sisson were renewed (C i. 143–4). A family quarrel was also laid to rest, outwardly at least. Burke had sent his father, perhaps through Agmondesham Vesey (c.1708–95), a copy of the second edition of his Philosophical Enquiry.108 An Irish landowner and MP, Vesey spent much time in London, where his wife Elizabeth (c.1715–91) was a prominent ‘bluestocking’ hostess. Burke had known the Veseys since at least 1748.109 Burke’s father responded with uncharacteristic generosity, accepting the proferred olive branch and sending in return not only his forgiveness but a ‘remittance’. Nevertheless, some awkwardness remained. Father and son were still not in direct communication; even the present was transmitted through an intermediary. As the prospect of returning to Dublin loomed, 106 Walpole to George Montagu, 22 July 1761, in YWC ix. 380; the dinner was on the 21st. The ‘private door into the Royal garden’ is mentioned in Edward Gibbon to Dorothea Gibbon, 14 Sept. 1782; Letters, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), ii. 306. 107 The Leadbeater Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbeater (2nd edn. London, 1862), i. 48–9. The reference to the two children dates the occasion to E.B.’s 1761–2 visit, since Christopher died before 1763. 108 Earlier accounts of this episode are corrected by Basil O’Connell, ‘Burke’s Reconciliation with his Father’, Burke Newsletter, 8 (1967), 714–15. 109 Nine Veseys (including Agmondesham and his wife, Elizabeth) subscribed to Poems on Several Occasions (Dublin, 1748).

192 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Burke commissioned O’Hara to smooth the way for a meeting (3 July 1761; 139–40). The strength of the reconciliation was never put to the test. In November, the elder Burke died. A few days before his death, he signed a new will. Though Edmund is left only £20 for mourning, the smallness of the bequest is explained by his being ‘already provided for’.110 No respect for his father’s memory prevented Burke from habitually recurring to the attorney as the embodiment of narrow-minded legalism, the antitype of his own liberal values. Halifax opened the Irish parliamentary session on 22 October 1761. His main tasks were to secure approval of the budget and to defuse opposition attacks on excessive grants of pensions on the Irish Establishment.111 Hamilton is reported to have spoken ‘extremely well’ on the money bill.112 Supplies were duly granted, and the attack on pensions smothered. A more contentious issue was a bill designed to allow the Portuguese (allies in the Seven Years War against France) to recruit Catholics in Ireland. Despite ‘a torrent of eloquence’ on Hamilton’s part, the measure provoked considerable opposition from anti-Catholic groups, and was dropped.113 Burke’s activities have left little trace. He was remembered as Hamilton’s ‘jackal’.114 The term connoted an underling entrusted with unpleasant and demeaning tasks: ‘to Jackalls (as ’tis averr’d) | Some lions have their pow’r transferr’d: | As if the parts of pimps and spies | To govern forests could suffice’.115 The services Burke rendered Hamilton as his ‘jackal’, the petty intrigues that centred on the Castle and its pork-barrel politics, insignificant in themselves, were personally demeaning and served as constant reminders of the corruption and inequity of Irish politics. When Burke returned to England, Irish problems continued to trouble his conscience. His latent sense of the injustice of the Irish system had been roused by an outbreak of rural terrorism, the work of the ‘Whiteboys’, so called from the white over-garments they wore as a disguise. Burke was outraged by the way the Protestant landlords reacted to these disturbances, 110

Each grandson is left £20; this is the last reference to Christopher. The will (witnessed by E.B.) is printed in Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 1923), 405–7. 111 Robert Blackey, ‘A Politician in Ireland: The Lord Lieutenancy of the Earl of Halifax, 1761– 1763’, Eire-Ireland, 14 (1979), 65–82. 112 George Montagu to Horace Walpole, 17 Nov. 1761, in YWC ix. 402. Hamilton’s speech is printed in the posthumous selection from his papers edited by Edmond Malone, Parliamentary Logick (London, 1808), 137–60. 113 Lord Charlemont (whose phrase is quoted) thought the bill would have passed had the government pressed it more firmly; ‘Memoirs’, HMC Charlemont, i. 18–20. 114 Thomas Waite to Robert Wilmot, 20 Nov. 1764; Derby Central Library, Wilmot-Horton Papers. Waite was a Dublin civil servant, Wilmot the Lord-Lieutenant’s permanent secretary in London. The same letter mentions an irregular pardon that E.B. obtained for a French officer, probably an illegal recruiting officer. 115 John Gay, ‘The Jackall, Leopard, and Other Beasts’, lines 66–9, in Fables (1738). Horace Walpole described Welbore Ellis as Henry Fox’s ‘jackal’; to George Montagu, 16 June 1763, in YWC x. 83.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 193 which had begun about 1760. Whiteboy violence was fuelled not by political discontent, but by poverty, especially by the unemployment caused by the shift from tillage towards pasturage. Obsessive anti-Catholicism magnified and distorted Whiteboy activities (which were to a degree co-ordinated) into a Catholic–Jacobite plot on the scale of the alleged massacre of 1641. Burke regarded the plot as imaginary and the Whiteboy grievances as well founded.116 He always loathed oppression disguised behind the mask of religious bigotry. The strength of his feelings found vent in a letter of about August 1762, shortly after his return to England. In a (lost) letter, O’Hara had described a small group of native Irish found living a wild or ‘natural’ life on a remote little island off the west coast. O’Hara’s account moved Burke to contrast the idyllic life of these islanders with that of the Catholics unfortunate enough to live on the mainland. Many of the Whiteboys had been hanged on the ‘Munster Circuit’ to which Burke refers: Happy and wise are these poor Natives in avoiding your great World; that they are yet unacquainted with the unfeeling Tyranny of a mungril Irish Landlord, or with the Horrors of a Munster Circuit. I have avoided this subject whenever I wrote to you; and I shall now say no more of it; because it is impossible to preserve ones Temper on the view of so detestable a scene. God save me from the power, (I shall take care to keep myself from the society) of such monsters of Inhumanity. An old acquaintance of mine at the Temple, a man formerly of integrity and good nature, had by living some years in Corke, contracted such horrible habits, that I think, whilst he talked on these late Disturbances, none but hang men could have had any pleasure in his company. (C i. 147–8)

Burke was sickened by what he took to be a recurrent theme in Irish history, the exploitation of imaginary Catholic misdeeds to justify ever more oppressive treatment of the Catholic underclass.117 This revulsion found expression in two literary projects. The first, probably never taken beyond the planning stage, was a history of Ireland. Burke’s interest in Irish history, and his passionate concern to correct Protestant misrepresentations of key episodes, were lifelong. His plan to write a historical narrative was probably a transitory idea inspired by the Whiteboy episode.118 Burke soon abandoned the project, perhaps when he learned that Ferdinando Warner was already engaged on such a history. When Warner’s first volume appeared in 1763, Burke gave it a generous if not uncritical welcome in the Annual Register.119 Though he abandoned the A view confimed by James S. Donnelly, ‘The Whiteboy Movement, 1761–1765’, Irish Historical Studies, 21 (1978), 20–54. 117 Several years later (about 1769), E.B. began a corrective account of the Whiteboy episode in a selfconsciously restrained style; WWM BkP 8/1, in Corr. (1844), i. 41–5. 118 E.B. talked about it at a dinner in Oct. 1761; his plan was reported by George Montagu to Horace Walpole, 27 Nov. 1761, in YWC ix. 405. 119 A History of Ireland, i (London, 1763); Annual Register (1763), 257–64 bis. Disappointed by the lack of public support for his large-scale project, Warner discontinued it, though he later published a History of the Rebellion and Civil War in Ireland (1767). 116

194 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 field himself, he maintained an interest in Irish history and historiography, and encouraged others in their research and writing.120 Burke’s second project was taken further. Though never finished, what he wrote was posthumously published as ‘Fragments of a Tract on the Popery Laws’.121 The ‘Tract’ was probably begun in 1762, while Burke’s memories of Ireland were still vivid. It breathes the same hatred of the grasping Protestant landlords as the letters to O’Hara of that year.122 Burke planned the ‘Tract’ in five chapters: an introduction, a survey of the penal laws, a critique of their actual operation, a consideration of their ‘impolicy’ from the point of view of ‘national security’, and a refutation of the arguments usually advanced in their support. Even in its fragmentary state (the first and last chapters are missing, while chapters 3 and 4 are incomplete), the ‘Tract’ is a powerful expression of Burke’s passionate sympathy for the dispossessed Irish Catholics. Chapter 2 is a masterpiece of controlled indignation. A bare recital of the laws is enough to condemn their inhumanity. The ‘Tract’ has a further interest. Burke’s use of natural-law arguments supplies some of the strongest evidence for the ‘natural-law interpretation’ of his thought.123 Such arguments suited Burke’s needs in the ‘Tract’, for he could not dispute the legality (as opposed to the equity or the wisdom) of the penal laws without impugning the entire Williamite settlement of Ireland.124 This constrains him to appeal to a higher kind of justice, a universal ‘law of nature’ that supersedes local enactments. At the same time, Burke does not eschew utilitarian arguments where they serve his purpose. As in his later political writings and speeches, he employs whatever arguments he can find with more regard to their probable rhetorical effectiveness than to their philosophical coherence or logical consistency. While in Dublin, Burke had also been working on the Annual Register, the fourth volume of which was published on 13 May 1762. Though he was probably back in London by then, he remained at Hamilton’s beck and 120 John C. Weston, Jr., ‘Edmund Burke’s Irish History: A Hypothesis’, PMLA 77 (1962), 397–403; Walter D. Love, ‘Edmund Burke, Charles Vallancey, and the Sebright Manuscripts’, Hermathena, 95 (1961), 21–35; and ‘Edmund Burke and an Irish Historiographical Controversy’, History and Theory, 2 (1962), 180–98. 121 Works (4to edn.), v (London, 1812), 232–80. The title is not E.B.’s. His executors called it ‘Fragments of a Tract on the Popery Laws’, while listing it in the table of contents (p. xv) as ‘An Unfinished Tract on the Popery Laws’ among a group of ‘Tracts and Letters Relative to the Laws against Popery in Ireland’ (a title often applied erroneously to the principal ‘Tract’). Though the manuscript from which the 1812 text was printed does not survive, ‘A View of the Penal Laws of Ireland in the affair of Religion’ (WWM R103) is a transcript of a revised version of ch. 2, probably prepared by E.B. for independent circulation. In 1780, for example, Lord Kenmare thanked E.B. for sending an ‘Elegant Abstract of our Penal Statutes’ (C iv. 203–4), probably a manuscript similar to the ‘View’. 122 E.B.’s executors dated the ‘Tract’ ‘soon after the year 1765’ (WS ix. 434), which is clearly wrong. 123 Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1958), 43–5. 124 T. O. McLoughlin, ‘Burke’s Dualistic Vision in the Tracts on the Popery Laws’, Études anglaises, 34 (1981), 180–91.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 195 call. John Monck Mason (1726–1809), an Irish MP, dined with them at Hamilton’s Hampton Court retreat on 15 July.125 Mason had overlapped with Burke at Trinity College, graduating in 1746. Called to the Irish Bar in 1752, in 1761 he was elected to the Irish Parliament. He shared Burke’s abhorrence of the penal laws; in the session just passed, he had introduced a bill (subsequently rejected by the Privy Council in London) that would have permitted Catholics to invest in mortgages on land. Mason was forging ahead in public life; Burke was kept permanently in the shadows as Hamilton’s ‘jackal’. ‘By degrees’, he would complain in 1765, Hamilton ‘engrossed his whole time’ (C i. 184). This left him with no interval to relax with his family or to pursue his literary ambitions. Nor, because the encroachment took place ‘by degrees’, was there a moment to take a firm stand. Next week, or next month, Hamilton was always promising, Burke would have leisure enough. Meanwhile, some urgent business or pleasure of Hamilton’s own must take priority.

4 Burke now spent about eighteen months in England, for the Irish Parliament would not meet during the winter of 1762–3. At the end of October 1762, he and his family (together with Dr Nugent) moved house, to Queen Anne Street, a new development off Cavendish Square and not far from Wimpole Street. Rocque’s map of 1769 (Fig. 2) shows how rapidly Marylebone had been urbanized since 1756 (Plate 4). The Burkes lived in Queen Anne Street West (in Fig. 2, the part that runs west from Foley House). This time Burke, not Dr Nugent, assumed the dignity of householder, his name appearing in the rate books. The house itself represented a significant increment in the family’s standing or at least aspirations. The most expensive house in Wimpole Street was rated at only £15. Burke’s house in Queen Anne Street was assessed at £37.126 ‘I have at last got an house,’ he reported to O’Hara, ‘pretty dear, very good, and extremely remote. I know you play Cards some times near Cavendish Square, and we may expect to see you (when you happen to break up early) about twelve; and whenever you have ill luck, you need not fear a Robbery. If you had not the management to bear that ill luck tolerably, we should have the misforHamilton to John Hely Hutchinson, 15 July 1762, HMC Donoughmore, 233. Queen Anne Street first appears in the rate books in 1759, with a single ratepayer; in 1763, twentyseven are listed, including E.B. Apart from Lord Foley’s mansion (assessed at £200), and one other rated at £80, the houses in Queen Anne Street ranged from gentlemen’s residences (rated between £35 and £50) to more modest premises, some of them probably lodging-houses (rated between £15 and £18). Information from City of Westminster Archives, St Marylebone Rate Books, Poor Rates, 1759–63. 125 126

196


Fig. 2 The growth of Marylebone; detail from John Rocque’s Plan of London (1769)

tune of never seeing you, but in an ill humour: for when you were winner you could not be rash enough to attempt Queen anne street so it will be called—nunc sunt sine nomine Terrae’ (30 Oct. 1762: C i. 152). For Burke, this is an intimate letter. With few correspondents did he permit himself to joke or be playful. In a mock-heroic vein, he borrows the words that Anchises uses in the Aeneid (6. 776) to prophesy the future greatness of places that do not yet exist. The possibility that O’Hara might be robbed on his way to the Burkes, however, was real enough. A contemporary newspaper reported that ‘the Houses of several Gentlemen and others in the Neighbourhood of Cavendish-Square, have of late been broke open and robbed of great Quantities of Plate and other Effects; on which Account a Patrole, consisting of a Number of Peace Officers, has for this Fortnight past been fixed in those Parts, to patrole in the Night, for the Security of the

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 197 Inhabitants’. These ‘great Quantities of Plate’ testify to the type of resident that Marylebone was now attracting. Despite Burke’s protestation of remoteness, by 1764 the neighbourhood was busy enough for him to complain to the local vestry of the congestion caused by parked carts.128 In November 1762, the main topic of public debate was the treaty of peace being negotiated at Paris. The ministry, now headed by Lord Bute, was anxious to bring the war to an end; so anxious, its opponents charged, that they allowed the French too favourable terms. Burke’s views were probably much influenced by how the peace would affect Will, now back in London after serving briefly as Secretary and Registrar of Guadeloupe. A series of letters to O’Hara from October to December 1762 shows that the Burkes followed the negotiations closely and often attended the debates in the Commons. Initially, Burke expected the opposition to do well, and he was disappointed with the poor showing that they made. The Burkes were chiefly interested in the fate of Guadeloupe. If the island, captured in 1759, were returned to France, Will would lose his official position. His hopes of profiteering from some private speculations (of which the Governor disapproved) would also be frustrated. Will had written a pamphlet arguing for the retention of Guadeloupe, which he jestingly called ‘my last effort to save my country’. Richard Burke, also returned from the West Indies, even persuaded the merchants of Liverpool to petition against returning the island to the French.129 Will and Richard were adventurers who hoped to make a quick fortune by some lucky investment. Not over-scrupulous about legality or ethics, they sought government positions in the colonies, not because they were interested in administrative careers, but for opportunities such posts offered for private speculation. In 1756, for example, William Knox (1732–1810), later Burke’s antagonist in a skirmish of pamphlets, had been appointed Provost-Marshal of Georgia at a salary of £100 a year plus fees. The son of an Irish clergyman, Knox came from a social background similar to Burke’s. His career illustrates how Burke’s might have developed, had he obtained a colonial position in the 1750s or early 1760s. During a residence of only five years in Georgia (1757–62), he acquired substantial property there. He returned to London to serve as the colony’s agent, and later found an opening as Under-Secretary in the 127

127 Newspaper clipping, endorsed ‘1762’, pasted into an extra-illustrated copy of Thomas Smith, A Topographical and Historical Account of the Parish of St Mary-le-bone (London, 1833), in the City of Westminster Archives. 128 City of Westminster Archives, St Marylebone Vestry Committee Minutes, vol. v, pp. 58–9 (6 Nov. 1764). 129 W.B. to O’Hara, 9 Oct. 1762 (Hoffman, New York Agent, 286); E.B. to O’Hara, late Aug. and 30 Oct. 1762 (C i. 148, 152). W.B.’s ‘last effort’ was An Examination of the Commercial Principles of the Late Negotiation between Great Britain and France (London, 1761).

198 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 American department. He never sat in Parliament.130 Appointment even to a minor post required influence, as Burke had found when he sought a consulship. Accordingly, the Burkes needed to find and cultivate someone in power. An obvious choice was Henry Fox, Hamilton’s patron, now the leading minister in the House of Commons, charged with securing its approval of the treaty of peace. Will had somehow gained the absolute trust of Ralph, Earl Verney (c.1712–91). How he secured this confidence is unknown, as indeed is the origin of their friendship. A man of long lineage and great property, chiefly in Buckinghamshire, Verney had been an MP since 1761 (his peerage was Irish, and so did not exclude him from the British House of Commons). In addition, he controlled both seats at one borough (Wendover) and one seat at another (Great Bedwyn). In order to ingratiate himself with Fox, Will persuaded Verney and his dependants to vote for the peace. With the combined backing of Verney (who could bring him into Parliament) and Fox, Will could reasonably expect such an appointment as he coveted.131 The peace was duly approved, but an unexpected development blighted the Burkes’ hopes. On 8 April 1763, Lord Bute resigned as First Lord of the Treasury.132 The Burkes obtained one crumb. Shortly before his resignation, Bute had approved Richard Burke’s appointment as Collector of Customs for Grenada and the Grenadine islands. Further soliciting and letter-writing secured him the additional post of Receiver-General of internal revenues (C i. 174). The Burkes had greater expectations, and if Henry Fox had succeeded Bute at the Treasury they might have been fulfilled. Instead, the position went to George Grenville. The Grenvilles and the Verneys were hereditary rivals in Buckinghamshire. Fox was relegated to the Lords (as Lord Holland), his influence much reduced. This was the worst possible outcome for the Burkes. With Guadeloupe returned to the French, Will lost his job. Fox’s semi-retirement dimmed hopes of future patronage. Hamilton was more fortunate. He was appointed to the lucrative sinecure of Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland, and on unusually favourable terms. Normally the office was granted ‘during pleasure’. Its tenure was therefore contingent on the holder retaining the favour of successive British ministries. Contrary to recent precedents, Hamilton obtained the appointment for life.133 Burke too was rewarded, with a pension 130

Leland J. Bellott, William Knox: The Life and Thought of an Eighteenth-Century Imperialist (Austin, Tex., 1977). 131 W.B. to Charles O’Hara, 9 Oct. and 20 Nov. 1762, in Hoffman, New York Agent, 286, 296. 132 E.B. described the resignation as ‘unexpected’ in the Annual Register (1763), 38, and this appears to have been the general reaction. 133 Hamilton’s patent (18 Apr. 1763) followed seven successive appointments ‘during pleasure’. Precedents for life patents (1535, 1612) were exceptional; Rowley Lascelles, Liber munerum publicorum Hiberniae (London, 1852), part 2, 49. The sinecure was valued at £1,800 a year; ‘A Computation of the Value of certain Places in Ireland’ (19 Aug. 1765); Derby Central Library, Wilmot-Horton Papers.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 199 of £300 per annum (‘during pleasure’, not for life) on the Irish Establishment.134 The sum was neither penurious nor munificent. To put it in perspective, in 1711, a House of Commons anxious to exclude adventurers from their number had fixed on £300 as an appropriate minimum property qualification for an MP representing a borough, and inflation had not significantly eroded its value. Burke had only a small family. A more careful manager would have been able to live modestly, perhaps comfortably on it. Frugality, however, formed no part of Burke’s character. By temperament, he was generous and free-spending, optimistic that money would always be found from somewhere. In 1763, there was some justification for such an attitude. Hamilton’s service still seemed a ladder of opportunity rather than a dead-end or a prison. An income that would enable him to live in style seemed within reach. The word ‘pension’ immediately conjures up the figure of Samuel Johnson, the most famous ‘pensioner’ of the century. In July 1762, Johnson was awarded a pension of £300, the acceptance of which exposed him to much abuse.135 Johnson’s pension was controversial for several reasons. Though none applied to Burke’s case, they serve to illustrate why ‘pension’ in Burke’s day was an equivocal, if not always a discreditable, term. ‘Pension’ is one of the half-dozen notoriously idiosyncratic entries in Johnson’s Dictionary: ‘An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.’ One of Johnson’s definitions of ‘pensioner’ was ‘a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey his master’. These words were hostages to fortune, and were not forgotten when Johnson himself became a ‘pensioner’. Though not a politician, his alleged Jacobite sympathies were notorious. In 1762, Jacobitism was hardly a live issue, but his acceptance of a pension from a Hanoverian usurper was too piquant an irony for his political enemies to ignore. Finally, the award was made on the recommendation of Lord Bute, the highly unpopular Prime Minister. Bute’s patronage of his fellow Scotsmen was bitterly resented by the English. Johnson’s anti-Scottish sentiments, as notorious as his Jacobitism, provided a further twist to the irony. Johnson himself thought freedom from financial worry cheaply bought at the price of a few sneers and jibes.136 Johnson reviled pensions and pensioners because, as every Tory knew, they were part of the machinery of Whig corruption perfected by Sir Robert Walpole. His definitions would have warmed the heart of any opposition 134 Calendar of Home Office Papers of the Reign of George III, 1760 (25 October)–1765, ed. Joseph Redington (London, 1878), 374. E.B.’s was one of twelve pensions for which warrants were signed on 19 Apr. 1763. One other was worth £300 p.a.: granted to Lady Barbara Montagu, Halifax’s sister. The remainder ranged from £200 to £30. 135 Boswell, Life of Johnson, i. 372–7 (1762); James L. Clifford, Dictionary Johnson: The Middle Years of Samuel Johnson (London, 1979), 262–77. 136 Boswell, Life of Johnson, i. 429 (14 July 1763).

200 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 politician from the age of Walpole (when Johnson’s political opinions had been formed), Whig as well as Tory. Sir Robert had corrupted and controlled successive parliaments, so the case went, by the lavish distribution of places, pensions, and bribes. Walpole had been ousted from power in 1742, and had died in 1745. By 1755, the date of Johnson’s definitions, the overheated atmosphere of the struggle against Walpole had cooled. Even under Walpole, pensions had been more commonly used to reward retiring politicians than to retain the support of active ones. By the 1750s, the pension list had become a largely above-board and uncontroversial way of assisting men and women who, for a variety of reasons, were thought to have a claim on the public purse. ‘Poor lords’, for example, who had inherited titles but not the estates suitable to their rank, were often given pensions to enable them to attend Parliament (and support the ministry). Other pensions were the equivalent of modern retirement or superannuation schemes, supporting former civil servants or their dependants.137 To be a ‘pensioner’ was thus not in itself disgraceful, though the word retained pejorative connotations. A pension rarely attracted public attention unless the recipient was, for other reasons (usually political), the subject of controversy. Another notorious case was that of William Pitt (1708–78). After decades of ostentatious scorn of the normal rewards of political life, on his resignation in October 1761 Pitt accepted a peerage for his wife and a pension of £3,000 per annum. Few denied that Pitt had amply earned a reward for his service as a war minister. The extent to which his acceptance of a pension shocked contemporaries, and weakened his standing in the popular estimation, is eloquent testimony to the opprobrium attaching to the word ‘pension’.138 Burke’s case was different in another way. His pension was paid not from the English Exchequer, but was charged to the Irish Establishment. Ireland, nominally a separate kingdom, had its own civil list. Pensions paid from this fund were an old grievance. English ministers routinely burdened the Irish exchequer with grants to people who had no connection with Ireland. Such pensions were obnoxious to English and Irish ‘patriots’ alike. About a year before accepting his own pension, Pitt had virtuously and haughtily declined to assist his unmarried sister (Anne Pitt, 1712–81; a former royal servant) to obtain some provision for her old age. When, through other means, she was awarded a pension on the Irish Establishment, Pitt congratulated her with an odious display of self-righteousness: ‘Accept sincere felicitations from Lady Hester and me . . . on your account, I rejoice at an Sir Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (2nd edn. London, 1957), 173–96, 427–82; Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790 (London, 1964), i. 124–5. 138 Marie Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1980), 205–26. 137

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 201 addition of income so agreeable to your turn of life, whatever repugnancy I find, at the same time, to see my Name placed on the Pensions of Ireland. unmixt as I am in this whole transaction, I will not doubt that you will take care to have it thoroughly understood.’ Anne Pitt’s dignified reply shows that Irish pensions were not universally regarded as disreputable: ‘I very sincerely think it an honour that is very flattering to me, to have received so precious a mark of the Royal favour, and to have my Name upon the same List not only with some of the highest and the most deserving persons in England, but even with some of the greatest and most glorious names in Europe.’139 Opinions differed. What would not disgrace an elderly, unmarried woman might appear more demeaning when the object of bounty was an aspiring young man, eligible for active employment. A second circumstance made Irish pensions suspect. The jobbery and corruption with which Walpole had been charged remained endemic in Ireland, where the government, or the ‘undertakers’ on its behalf, secured its majority and silenced its critics through a more overt system of patronage. For these reasons, in 1763 Johnson’s definition of a pensioner was more relevant to Ireland, where (from the ‘patriot’ point of view) men were regularly hired to betray their country. Burke could accept an Irish pension with a clearer conscience than most. Though not resident, he had been born and educated in Ireland and had served there in a semi-official capacity. Even so, he would surely have preferred a different mode of reward. With no intention of remaining in Ireland, he cannot have relished the thought of living in England at the ultimate expense of his overburdened fellow countrymen. A more acceptable, and more dignified reward would have been a government post or sinecure. That would not have suited Hamilton, who wanted to retain Burke’s services, while shifting the expense to the Irish taxpayer. Before accepting the pension, Burke wrote a long letter to Hamilton outlining the conditions on which he wished to receive it (Mar. 1763: C i. 164–6). Grateful but firm, the letter shows that relations between the two were already strained. Burke chose to write because he found the subject embarrassing to talk about. While grateful to Hamilton for obtaining the pension for him, he declined to be relieved of the ‘rent charge’ of a ‘little work’ on which he had been engaged. This probably refers to his dormant ‘History of England’. Hamilton had presumably offered to repay the money advanced by the Dodsleys.140 Burke explains that he still wants to finish the work; maintaining his literary reputation is important to him. Even the William Pitt to Anne Pitt, 30 Dec. 1760, and undated reply, in Lord Rosebery, Lord Chatham: His Early Life and Connections (New York, 1910), 112–13. 140 John C. Weston, Jr., identifies this ‘little work’ with his projected Irish history; ‘Edmund Burke’s Irish History’, 397. This is improbable. E.B. could simply have dropped his Irish history; he had accepted an advance for his ‘History of England’. 139

202 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 pension he can only accept if he is allowed ‘some short time at convenient intervals and especially at the dead time of the year’ to pursue his writing. Since Burke accepted the pension, Hamilton must somehow have satisfied him on this point. Two years later, however, Burke would charge that Hamilton had ‘not justly fullfilled one of his engagements to me’ (18 May 1765: 192). One such ‘engagement’ may have been the exchange of his pension for a more creditable employment, as a remark in a letter to Shackleton of April 1763 implies (167). The ministerial shuffle that followed the resignation of Bute affected Burke in other ways. Halifax moved to the Admiralty, and the Earl of Northumberland (1715–86) was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Each Lord-Lieutenant normally took as Chief Secretary someone in his personal confidence. On this occasion, Hamilton continued in office, with unfortunate results. Burke probably returned to Dublin with the official party in September 1763, when Northumberland arrived to open the new session of the Irish Parliament. Hamilton was soon at odds with his new chief. His motives and intentions are not easy to unravel. According to his own account, the ‘undertakers’, the Irish politicians responsible for the government’s majority in Parliament, poisoned Northumberland’s mind against him.141 Having lost Northumberland’s confidence, for whatever reason, the dignified course for him was resignation and return to England. Instead, he hung on, despite attempts to humiliate him into resigning. Finally, in May 1764, at the end of the session, Northumberland dismissed him. No wonder Burke was disgusted, exposed to obloquy for the misdeeds of a patron whose conduct he reprobated. A year later, he described Hamilton’s ‘conduct in publick affairs’ as ‘for a Long time directly contrary to my opinion, very reproachful to himself, and extremely disgustful to me’ (C i. 192). One issue raised during the session of 1763–4 was especially ‘disgustful’ to Burke. This was a call for an enquiry into the granting of pensions on the Irish Establishment. Exploiting a standard opposition grievance, the move was meant to embarrass the government and to provide an opportunity for the display of patriotic rhetoric. No real expectations of curtailing the abuse were entertained.142 The call for an enquiry put the newly pensioned Burke in an invidious position. Some indication of the publicity the issue received is that in November 1763 the Gentleman’s Magazine reprinted the list of pensioners tabled in the Irish House of Commons. The roll is revealingly 141 Hamilton to Thomas Waite, 10 Nov. 1763 (Derby Central Library, Wilmot-Horton Papers). Hamilton to James Oswald, 5 Dec. 1763, 10 and 11 Jan. 1764, in Memorials of the Public Life and Character of the Right Hon. James Oswald, of Dunnikier (Edinburgh, 1825), 450–72. 142 Lengthy debates on pensions were held on 8 Nov., when a hostile address on the subject was rejected ‘by a small Majority’, and on 24 Nov.; Debates Relative to the Affairs of Ireland, in the Years 1763 and 1764, ‘Taken by a Military Officer’ [James Caldwell] (London, 1766), i. 206–65, ii. 475–510.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 203 and ambiguously miscellaneous. Among ‘some of the highest and the most deserving persons in England’, in Anne Pitt’s phrase, are Lady Yarmouth (1704–65), George II’s mistress (£4,000), and Princess Amelia (1711–86), one of his daughters (£1,000). At the other end of the scale are numerous small pensions (mostly under £100) to widows and children. At £300, Burke’s was in the middle range.143 To appear in such company was not inescapably disgraceful. Yet in a caricature published about this time, The Irish Stubble, alias Bubble Goose (Plate 8), the pensions are feathers plucked from a blindfolded and nearly naked goose. Johnson the arch-pensioner presides, his apostasy underlined by quotations from London and from his Dictionary. The goose is being plucked by Lord Bute (centre, wearing a Scottish bonnet) and Henry Fox (left). Fox has used some of the feathers to bribe the foreigners standing behind him to agree to the terms of the peace. English pensioners, feathers stuck in the hats or wigs, crowd the rear right. Northumberland, who in order to defuse the issue had promised that no further pensions for life or a term of years would be granted, incurs Bute’s displeasure by trying to remove the goose’s blindfold. Burke can hardly have relished being lumped with the crowd of pensioners depicted in the print. Besides serving as Hamilton’s jackal, Burke undertook one task on his own account. Eager as ever to forward the cause of the Irish Catholics, he drew up a petition to be presented to the Lord-Lieutenant, covering some of the same ground as his unfinished ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’. Nothing came of this initiative, the Catholic leaders fearing that such a move would be premature. Not until the more favourable climate of 1778 was the petition finally presented. Burke’s text thus played a belated part in securing the relaxation of the penal laws.144 Meanwhile, however, Burke was frustrated to find his best efforts to promote a good cause thwarted by the timidity of others. Yet the winter was not one of unrelieved discontent. Burke had again old friendships to renew. In addition, he made the aquaintance of James Barry, an ambitious young painter from Cork. Burke and Barry had much in common, in background and character. Each was the child of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. Both fathers were tyrannical and intolerant; both sons, stubborn and self-willed. Late in 1763, Barry came to Dublin to exhibit his first history painting, The Baptism of the King of Cashel by St 143 A List of All the Pensions Now in Being on the Civil Establishment ([Dublin, 1763]); Gentleman’s Magazine, 33 (1763), 539–41. 144 A. Paul Levack, ‘Edmund Burke, his Friends, and the Dawn of Irish Catholic Emancipation’, Catholic Historical Review, 37 (1952), 385–414. The petition was printed in the enlarged edition of John Curry’s An Historical and Critical Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland (London, 1786), ii. 287–93; repr. as ‘Address and Petition of the Irish Catholics’, in WS ix. 429–34. E.B.’s authorship is acknowledged in Curry’s letter of thanks of 18 Aug. 1778, in Corr. (1844), ii. 237–8.

204 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Patrick. Burke admired the painting and was introduced to the artist.145 He encouraged Barry first to come to London, and then to travel to Paris and Italy, to study for several years (1765–71) at his and Will’s expense. Burke’s willingness to help Barry make his way in the world shows the generous side of his nature. Where Hamilton sought to retain Burke in a situation of permanent clientage, the Burkes set Barry on the road to independence. Hamilton’s return to England was anything but a triumph. Yet ensconced in the comfort of his paternal fortune, his seat in the British Parliament, and his Irish sinecure, he was still enviably placed, and might have recovered from his faux pas of 1763–4. Burke’s position was outwardly less favourable. His pension was precarious. Relations with Hamilton were strained, yet Burke remained tied to him, without the time and freedom necessary to prosecute his literary plans. These untoward circumstances were deceptive. Hamilton’s career had already peaked. Though he remained an MP until nearly the end of his life, he never again held office and never made another speech. The sobriquet ‘Single-Speech’ Hamilton commemorates an early brilliance which came to nothing.146 Burke was about to stumble on his true métier. About February 1764, one of the most celebrated of all clubs was founded in London. Known initially as ‘the Club’, later as ‘the Literary Club’, its first members included Dr Nugent, and four friends whom Burke had known since at least 1758: Goldsmith, Johnson, Langton, and Reynolds. Burke, though away in Dublin, was chosen one of their number. Since the Club began as a small, intimate coterie (though it grew into a less homogeneous group), Burke probably knew the other founding members. Topham Beauclerk (1739–80) was a young man of taste and fashion, now chiefly remembered as a friend of Samuel Johnson. Anthony Chamier (1725–80) was a financier and later a civil servant; in 1778 he entered Parliament. John Hawkins (1719–89), trained as an attorney, wrote a history of music, and served for many years as chairman of the Middlesex Quarter Sessions. He later wrote the first full-length Life of Johnson (1787). None of these three became a close friend. Indeed, Hawkins was soon an enemy. Boswell records that ‘he one evening attacked Mr Burke, in so rude a manner, that all the company testified their displeasure; and at their next meeting his reception was such, that he never came again’.147 Burke was not invariably a model of tactful forbearance. He was too fond of dominating the conversation. William L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven, 1981), 1–4. Writing to Malone on 20 Aug. 1792 (soon after Hamilton suffered a stroke), Charlemont assessed him as ‘a man whose talents were equal to every undertaking, and yet from indolence, or from a too fastidious vanity, or from what other cause I know not, he has done nothing’; HMC Charlemont, ii. 198. 147 Boswell, Life of Johnson, i. 479–80 (Feb. 1764). Bertram H. Davis, A Proof of Eminence: The Life of Sir John Hawkins (Bloomington, Ind., 1973), 98–9, accepts Boswell’s version against the story told by Hawkins himself of his ‘withdrawal’ from the Club. 145 146

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 205 Hawkins must have behaved in a manner singularly offensive for everyone else to have taken Burke’s side. The bitterness created between the two lasted a lifetime. Hawkins introduced a gratuitous aspersion on the Burkes as ‘persons of desperate fortunes’ into his Life of Johnson.148 Membership in the Club provided Burke with welcome opportunities for convivial conversation. His Irish pension and the £100 from the Annual Register were enough to live one. In addition, he may have received occasional sums from Hamilton, even after the award of the pension. Burke, however, wanted independence. In December 1764, probably with a view of liberating himself from his irksome bondage to Hamilton, he sought the position of London agent for the British West Indian islands (C i. 177). Soon his simmering discontent boiled over. The exact date of the rupture is not known, but by 12 February 1765 it was beyond repair, for on that date Hamilton asked Joseph Warton to recommend a replacement.149 The root cause of the break is plain. Burke wanted his freedom. The immediate provocation was an ill-judged attempt to force Burke into a strange contract for life, a demand that Burke interpreted as virtual slavery. Exactly how Burke was to bind himself is unclear. Since Hamilton was an experienced man of the world, his clumsy mishandling of Burke calls for explanation. He was not the slave-master of Burke’s nightmare. Rather, his was the more dependent personality. Behind his surface arrogance lurked a sense of insecurity. By seeking to make assurance doubly sure, to regulate human relations with formal contractual agreements, to treat Burke as a possession that he could secure for life, he defeated himself. Nor did he learn from his mistake with Burke. Indeed, a later episode illuminates their breach. In 1784, the Earl of Pembroke (1734–94), a supporter of William Pitt the younger (1759–1806), returned Hamilton for his pocket borough of Wilton. In 1789, when another election was in prospect, Hamilton wrote to Pembroke (then living in Italy), asking for renomination, but omitting to mention his having deserted Pitt for the opposition. The question was canvassed between Pembroke and his son, Lord Herbert (1759–1827), and between Herbert and Hamilton. ‘I cannot fully give credit to what Hamilton seemed to insinuate,’ Herbert reported to his father, ‘that there was no period fixed for the termination of the agreement, for if so, it can be broke but by the death of one or the other, or at least the total impracticability of getting Hamilton elected at Wilton.’150 If Hamilton conceived of election arrangements as so binding, he might take conventional protestations of lifelong devotion literally, and imagine that Burke had engaged himself for life. 148 149 150

Life of Samuel Johnson (2nd edn. London, 1787), 231. Wooll, Biographical Memoirs, 299–300. Pembroke Papers, 1780–1794, ed. Lord Herbert (London, 1950), 422.

206 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 Burke and Hamilton were temperamental opposites, as the letters and notes written when they were no longer on speaking terms testify. Hamilton writes with a dry and repellent sarcasm: My Servant has this Moment inform’d me of your Kindness in calling upon me, for which I consider myself as extremely oblig’d to you. I am perswaded you will do me the Justice to believe me, when I assure you most sincerely, and upon my Honour, that my wishing, (independent of very particular Business) to decline the pleasure of seeing you this Morning, is founded upon reasons, which tho extremely mortifying to myself, are in no way dis-resspectfull to you. The lively Sense I entertain of your Unkindness, and the very humble one which I entertain of my own Command of Temper, make me unwilling to hazard ev’n a Possibility that any thing may pass between us, which would endanger a Friendship, I have for many reasons look’d upon as so very valuable, and particularly, because I concluded it would be so very lasting. (C i. 178)

Burke replies with a directness unlike his usual epistolary style: With regard to the present, what is that unkindness and misbehaviour, of which you complain? My heart is full of friendship to you . . . What you blame is only this: That I will not consent to bind myself to you for no less a term than my whole life: in a sort of domestick situation, for a consideration to be taken out of your private fortune, that is, to circumscribe my hopes, to give up even the possibility of liberty, and absolutely to annihilate myself for ever. I beseech you, is the demand, or the refusal the act of unkindness. (180)

Both were deeply hurt. Hamilton affected a display of haughty disdain; Burke burst out with an uncharacteristic show of feeling. The break with Hamilton confirms how important to Burke was a sense of unimpeachable personal integrity. He needed to be, and to be seen to be, in the right. He therefore drew up a formal statement of his case to be circulated among his friends and well-wishers (C i. 183–6).151 To free himself from the taint of any residual obligation to Hamilton, he also resigned his pension. This was not as quixotic a gesture as it may appear. The pension was incompatible with a seat in the English Parliament. By 1765, Burke may have entertained hopes of obtaining a seat there, through Will’s friend Lord Verney. His main motive, however, was undoubtedly to put himself as much in the right as possible. Writing to thank John Monck Mason for a letter approving his conduct, Burke explained his need for unequivocal approbation: ‘I never can, (knowing, as I do, the principles upon which I always endeavour to act) submit to any sort of compromise on my Character; and I shall never therefore look upon those, who after 151 The affair made a good deal of noise in Ireland. Michael Kearney remembered that self-justifying letters from E.B. to John Ridge, and letters between E.B. and Hamilton were ‘handed about’ and ‘generally seen’ in Dublin at the time; Kearney to Edmond Malone, 12 Jan. 1799 and 21 Feb. 1807, Bodl. MS Malone 39, fos. 24, 66.

journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 207 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’ (195–6). This unshakeable conviction of his own integrity was one of Burke’s lifelong comforts in adversity or defeat. Objective assessment does not invariably confirm Burke’s version of events. He was not always a model of disinterested rectitude, nor were his ‘enemies’ always as black as he conceived them. In this case, Burke exaggerated less than usual. His professions of everlasting obligation were mere cant, which most patrons would have taken as no more than verbal incense. Hamilton was foolish to treat them as legally enforceable; and unrealistic to expect a man of superior abilities to remain content with being his private assistant. Even so, Hamilton was hardly the ‘infamous Scoundrel’ of Burke’s imagination. He retained the lifelong respect and affection of men of the calibre of Samuel Johnson and Edmond Malone (who acted as his literary executor).152 Burke found a prospective new ‘patron’ quickly enough: Charles Townshend (1725–67). Famous both as a witty conversationalist and as a brilliant parliamentary speaker, Townshend was also a byword for unreliability.153 How Burke met him is uncertain. Richard Brocklesby, a former Ballitore pupil now practising medicine in London, may have introduced them.154 In 1764, Townshend proposed a plan for energizing the parliamentary opposition by (among other measures) starting a daily paper which would carry well-written articles reflecting the opinions of the opposition leaders.155 For this he needed ‘two good Pens’, one of which, had the plan been pursued, might have been Burke’s. The party leaders, however, disliked the idea, and it was not adopted. In June 1765, Burke and Townshend exchanged letters that imply a degree of confidence (C i. 204– 6). Burke hoped that Townshend would join the new or restructured ministry that was daily expected, and that was actually formed in July. Had Townshend accepted a responsible post, Burke’s career might have developed quite differently. Townshend, however, preferred to remain in the lucrative but subordinate office of Paymaster-General. As on other occasions, chance determined the direction Burke’s life would take. Burke was at first disappointed (C i. 209). Compared to the charismatic Townshend, the Marquis of Rockingham, whose service Burke entered 152 Boswell, Life of Johnson, i. 490 (1765). According to Malone, Johnson ‘entered into some engagement with Mr Hamilton, occasionally to furnish him with his sentiments on the great political topicks that should be considered in Parliament’; introduction to Hamilton’s Parliamentary Logick, p. ix. 153 Like E.B., Townshend had a difficult relationship with a domineering and demanding father. Their letters are just such as E.B. and his father might have exchanged; Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, Charles Townshend (London, 1964), 4–25. 154 Brocklesby entered the school in 1734 (Leadbeater Papers, i. 433), so is unlikely to have overlapped with E.B. More probably, as with Sleigh, E.B. met him in London. 155 Townshend to the Duke of Newcastle, 30 Apr. 1764, HMC Townshend, 398–401.

208 journalist and jackal, 1758‒1765 instead, was a dull and unpromising patron. Yet in retrospect, Townshend’s holding back was a great stroke of good fortune for Burke. One of the leading orators of the day, Townshend sat in the Commons and could speak for himself. Rockingham, a lord and a poor speaker, would need a spokesman in the lower house, though initially he had no reason to suppose that Burke was the right man for the job. In 1765, Burke’s remarkable oratorical powers were undiscovered. He was propelled into Parliament by another chance. Will had been promised a seat in Parliament by Lord Verney. By generously waiving this claim in his friend’s favour, Will indirectly launched him on his great career. Burke never forgot this gesture of magnanimity.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768

209

7 Gleams of Prosperity, 1765–1768

1 On 10 July 1765, the Marquis of Rockingham took office as First Lord of the Treasury. Burke started work as his private secretary on the following day. At 35, he was finally launched on his political career. After so many false starts, he could not be sure that this too would not prove a blind alley. Against the odds, Burke’s connection with Rockingham lasted for seventeen years, dissolved only by Rockingham’s death. What kind of man was Rockingham, and how was he able to inspire such loyalty in Burke? Rockingham’s property is easier to describe than his personality. He inherited a vast landed estate, with holdings in his native Yorkshire, centred on his palatial house, Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham; in Northamptonshire; and in County Wicklow in Ireland. The rent-roll of the estate was estimated in 1750 at £20,000.1 In addition, he owned a mansion in Grosvenor Square, one of the most prestigious addresses in London; and maintained stables at Newmarket. He also inherited much, though not all, of his politics. His most famous ancestor was Thomas Wentworth (1593– 1641), created Earl of Strafford by Charles I. The grandson of Strafford’s daughter, Rockingham succeeded to his property, but not to his title (which died with his son). Annoyingly, in 1711 the earldom was revived in the person of Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby (1672–1739), who belonged to a rival branch of the family. The new Strafford was a Tory, whose claim to fame was his part in negotiating the Peace of Utrecht. In 1714, when George I (who disapproved of the peace) came to the throne, he fell out of favour. The way was open for Rockingham’s father (Thomas WatsonWentworth; 1693–1750) to eclipse his cousin. For supporting the Whig ministers of the new Hanoverian regime, he obtained a succession of peerages, culminating in 1746 with a much-coveted marquisate. Only George II’s parsimony with titles prevented his achieving a dukedom. In addition, Rockingham père began to rebuild and enlarge Wentworth Woodhouse, expressly to dwarf Strafford’s Wentworth Castle. This 1

10.

Ross J. S. Hoffman, The Marquis: A Study of Lord Rockingham, 1730–1782 (New York, 1973),

210 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 programme, left unfinished at his death, was completed by his son, so that Wentworth became one of the largest country houses in England.2 The first marquis transmitted to his son his loyalty to the Whig regime under which he had prospered. In 1751, the year after he came into his estate, Rockingham was appointed a lord of the bedchamber to George II. Since he had not displayed any conspicuous ability, he seemed destined for a conventional career as a courtier. To commemorate George III’s accession, Rockingham even commissioned from George Stubbs (1724–1806) an equestrian portrait of the new king, mounted on Whistlejacket, one of Rockingham’s favourite horses. Before the painting was finished, however, he had broken with the court. When the Duke of Devonshire (1720–64) was dismissed for refusing to support the peace negotiations (in November 1762), Rockingham resigned in sympathy. The painting was left incomplete, the exquisitely rendered riderless horse rearing out of a stark butterscotch background.3 Henceforth, Rockingham’s line in politics was determined. He remained true to his father’s Whig principles. Under George III, however, those principles led him away from his father’s ‘court Whiggism’ to systematic opposition to the king and the ‘king’s friends’. For Rockingham, politics was a duty, inherited with his property. His great passion was for horses, which he bred and raced with an enthusiasm he never felt for politics. His horses inspired some of the affection that a father might have felt for his children; he had several of them painted by Stubbs. Rockingham’s wife (née Mary Bright, 1735–1804; an heiress who brought him £60,000) was a lively and intelligent woman who took an interest in politics; but they had no children. Rockingham was also a keen experimental farmer.4 This was an activity closer to Burke’s heart. He had already dabbled a little in farm management to help some family friends of the Nugents (C ii. 548–9), and in 1768 he acquired an estate of his own. (He cared nothing for racing.) Rockingham was dogged by chronic ill health, which often left him listless and exhausted. The hurry and bustle of London, exacerbated by the frustrations of politics, made him spend as little time there as possible. At Wentworth, indeed, he enjoyed entertaining the county gentry, much as it fatigued him. At Wentworth, he was the cynosure. To imagine the frail marquis against the background of his Brobdingnagian house brings to mind the satirical character of Timon, in Pope’s Epistle to Burlington (1731), ‘a puny insect, shiv’ring at a breeze’, for Wentworth Woodhouse could have served as a model for Timon’s town-sized ‘villa’. Rockingham was some2 Christopher Hussey, ‘The Wentworths: The Old Rivalry of Two Great Yorkshire Houses’, Country Life, 76 (8 Sept. 1934), 248–54. 3 Basil Taylor, Stubbs (London, 1971), 205–6. 4 In 1770, Rockingham had 2,000 acres in hand; Arthur Young, A Six Months Tour through the North of England (London, 1770), i. 307–38. Newspaper satirists were fond of advising him to stick to his turnips and leave politics alone (Public Advertiser, 24 Jan., 1 and 9 Feb., 14 Apr., 13 Sept. 1770).

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 211 what dwarfed by his great possessions and the burdens they imposed. Yet he was no nonentity. He built up a considerable personal ascendancy among the Yorkshire gentry, greater than his property alone guaranteed. After only a brief period in office, Rockingham maintained a respectable following through sixteen long years of dispiriting opposition. His inability to reward his followers, paradoxically, would strengthen his hold over Burke. For Burke needed to demonstrate that he was no Irish adventurer seeking advancement, but a man of principle and integrity. In 1765, of course, Burke did not know how long his connection with Rockingham would last, or where it would take him. Only gradually did Rockingham come to embody his ideal of disinterested statesmanship. Rockingham, and Burke with him, achieved prominence by a series of accidents. Politically, he belonged to the small group of Whig magnates, followers of the old Duke of Newcastle (1693–1768), whose power and influence George III sought to reduce. No one denied the king’s prerogative of choosing his own ministers, subject to their retaining the confidence of Parliament. Yet George II’s choice had in practice been severely constrained. George III’s desire to assert what he took to be his proper constitutional powers produced a decade of political instability. His first choice, the Earl of Bute, proved inept and unprecedentedly unpopular. Even so, George Grenville, installed at the Treasury by Bute on his resignation in 1763, might have established a stable and long-lasting administration, acceptable to both king and Parliament. Instead, the maladroit and inflexible Grenville alienated the monarch. In near desperation, by 1765 the king was ready to turn to the arrogant and domineering William Pitt, whose resignation he had engineered in 1761. Four years, however, had not softened Pitt’s resentment. Convinced of his own indispensability, he determined to stand aloof. After two negotiations with Pitt had broken down, the king commissioned his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland (1721–65), to form a ministry, any ministry, that would rid him of Grenville. In such inauspicious circumstances was the first Rockingham administration born. Rockingham was not an obvious candidate for the Treasury. Just two months earlier, during the May 1765 negotiations for a new ministry, he was considered for Lord Chamberlain, a court office of no political significance. In June, rumours named him First Lord of the Admiralty, or LordLieutenant of Ireland.5 Rockingham’s position was unusual in another way. While there was no official ‘Prime Minister’ in the eighteenth century, the First Lord of the Treasury was normally so regarded, in fact if not in name. 5 Draft list of possible appointments (15 May 1765), in Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December 1783, ed. Sir John Fortescue (London, 1927–8), i. 92. In Dublin, Sir William Meredith heard that Rockingham was to be Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and wrote a letter congratulating him (29 June 1765, WWM R1/454). Peter Burrell reported to Charles Townshend that, having refused the Lord-Lieutenancy, Rockingam was to go the Admiralty; 24 June 1765 (William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; Charles Townshend Papers, 295/1/32).

212 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 Yet until his death on 31 October, the Duke of Cumberland, maker of the ministry, was also, without holding any office, its effective head. Had Cumberland lived, Rockingham might never have emerged from the shadows. An anonymous print, The State Nursery (Plate 9), provides a telling illustration of the incredulity which greeted the formation of the Rockingham ministry. Rockingham himself is relegated to the background and drawn on a diminutive scale. Despite his cry ‘Ge up to the Treasury’ (alluding to his reputation as a horse-breeder and patron of the turf), he is riding a rocking-horse and obviously going nowhere. The toy whip that he brandishes serves to emphasize his impotence. Real power is wielded by Henry Fox, riding on the shoulders of Lord Bute. (Contemporaries were reluctant to believe that Bute had genuinely withdrawn from politics. Successive ministries, however hard they tried to avoid the imputation, were regularly lampooned as Bute’s tools.) In the foreground, the infant king (or the State) sleeps in his cradle, oblivious of the incompetence of his ministers. The most prominent is the Duke of Newcastle (often derided as an ‘old woman’), ridiculed in the text as ‘Gammer Fiddle Faddle’. The irresponsible Charles Townshend, with a weathercock on his hat, holds a toy in his hand to pacify the royal infant. He appears the readiest to do Fox’s bidding. Somewhat to the side is William Dowdeswell (1721–75), the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. A Worcestershire country gentleman, Dowdeswell had sat in Parliament since 1747, since 1761 as one of the county members. Worcester was one of the ‘cider counties’, where cider rather than beer was the popular drink. Dowdeswell was best known for his opposition in 1763 to the cider excise, an imposition greatly resented by cider-drinkers. Sticking out of his pocket in the print is a plan (duly executed in 1766) to repeal this excise. Dowdeswell’s promotion was exceptional. County members rarely took office, while Chancellor of the Exchequer was an unusual first appointment. The caricaturist equates inexperience with incompetence. A man who cannot slice an apple without cutting himself hardly seems qualified for the Exchequer. The print captures the scepticism with which Rockingham’s ministry was greeted. Few expected it to last. Most prospective first lords already had in their employ a ‘man of business’ capable and trustworthy enough to serve as private political secretary. Rockingham, with no expectation of such high office, was unprovided. Hence the lucky vacancy for Burke, happily disengaged. The post was unofficial, and carried no regular salary; Burke’s remuneration was at Rockingham’s discretion. Will’s position as Under-Secretary to Henry Seymour Conway (1719–95), one of the two Secretaries of State (who combined the functions later divided between the Foreign and Home Secretaries), seemed at first ‘a better thing’. Will received a salary of £500 a

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 213 year. Burke did not know Rockingham personally. To O’Hara, he could only report his reputation as ‘a man of honour and integrity; and with whom, they say, it is not difficult to live’ (C i. 211). The Burkes were recommended to the new ministers by William Fitzherbert (1712–72) and Lord John Cavendish (1732–96), who themselves took office with Rockingham as junior lords at the Board of Trade and the Treasury respectively. Expressions of gratitude in Burke’s letters (207, 210) point to Fitzherbert as the more active friend. A landed gentleman, his main estate was in Derbyshire. In 1762, with the backing of the powerful Cavendish family, he was elected to Parliament for Derby. How did he meet the Burkes? He owned property in the West Indies, which might have brought him into contact with Will. He was also at home in the literary world, and might have met Edmund through shared literary friends such as Dr Johnson. The chance of neighbourhood may have played a part. By 1765, and perhaps earlier, Fitzherbert’s London residence was on Queen Anne Street, where the Burkes lived.6 Unambitious himself, Fitzherbert was just the man to push forward the talented but diffident Burke. In 1766, he would not resign with Rockingham. Not a party man, he typified the innocuous office-holder who provided lobby-fodder for successive ministries. This explains why Burke’s friendship with Fitzherbert withered, while that with Lord John developed into something like intimacy. The fourth son of the third Duke of Devonshire, Lord John had assumed political leadership of the Cavendish interest when his eldest brother (the fourth duke) died in 1764. Though never a vigorous or whole-hearted politician, preferring the pleasures of fox-hunting to the duties of Parliament, he was by temperament a partisan. The two shared a strong sense of party loyalty. Both liked best to work with a small group of sympathetic comrades. If Burke had friends to push his interests, he had likewise enemies. At least, he had one enemy. According to Lord Charlemont, who knew all the parties, the Duke of Newcastle (who wanted to insinuate his own candidate into the position) sought to discredit Burke with Rockingham by accusing him of being a Catholic and a Jacobite.7 Burke felt the threat keenly. His heated imagination magnified Newcastle’s routine manœuvre into a sinister web of intrigue. Thanking David Garrick for his good wishes on ‘this little gleam of prosperity which has at length fallen on my fortune’, he hinted darkly at the machinations of unnamed ‘Enemies’ who had ‘not long since made a desperate Stroke at my Fortune, my Liberty, and my reputation 6 In 1765, Fitzherbert occupied a house rated at £50; E.B.’s was rated at £37. Fitzherbert probably moved to Queen Anne Street during 1764, since by Dec. he was active in the parish vestry. Information from St Marylebone rate books and vestry minutes, City of Westminster Archives. 7 Charlemont, ‘Memoirs’, HMC Charlemont, i. 148–9. Newcastle’s attempt to supplant E.B. is confirmed by his letter to Rockingham of 12 July 1765 (after E.B. had already taken up his duties), recommending an ex-secretary of his own, James Royer (WWM R1/465). This letter, however, does not refer to E.B.

214 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 . . . (all! Hell kite! all at a Swoop,)’. Macduff’s cry on learning that his wife and children have been murdered (Macbeth iv. iii. 217–19) did not express more than he felt. Happily, their ‘implacable and unprovoked malice’ was frustrated (16 July 1765: C i. 211). Such language recalls Burke’s explosive quarrel with Hamilton, whom Burke probably suspected of intriguing against him. Burke did not quickly forget the episode. Two years later, he was still reminding O’Hara of ‘the attempts, made to ruin me when I first began to meddle in Business’ (11 Dec. 1767: 340). In the event, Newcastle’s intervention did Burke an unwitting service, for Rockingham resented the duke’s constant nagging. Though Burke described his employment as Rockingham’s secretary as ‘humble enough’, he recognized that it might be ‘worked into some sort of consideration, or at least advantage’ (211). At 35, he could ill afford to let another opportunity come to nothing. Determined to spare no effort to make himself indispensable, he was fortunate that events soon gave him his chance to show what he could do. Burke’s secretarial appointment was an important first step, but did not itself guarantee his further rise. Private secretaries rarely sat in Parliament. Burke was indebted for his seat in the Commons, his second and more crucial piece of good fortune, not to Rockingham but to the combined generosity of Lord Verney and Will Burke. Verney was a man of wealth and taste, but extravagant, unbusinesslike, and personally unostentatious. Will described him as ‘a Man not much heard of and not at all known’.8 Certainly, he never achieved the public standing to which his inheritance entitled him. The scion of an old-established and distinguished Buckinghamshire family, he aspired to a leading position in the county. He spent untold thousands on a grandiose project to rebuild his house at Claydon, partly to his own designs, on a scale that would rival the palatial mansion of the Grenville family at Stowe. Election as one of the county members (which he achieved in 1768) meant much to him, more than political ideas ever did. Despite his large income, he was soon in debt. Ill-judged attempts to recover his fortunes by speculating on the stock market only completed his ruin. Relations with the Burkes were later clouded by unpleasant recriminations about money. In 1784, he claimed that they owed him £31,000.9 Verney’s property allowed him virtually to nominate both members at Wendover, and gave him a strong claim to one seat at Great Bedwyn.10 As W.B. to George Macartney, 13 June 1766, YB OF 6. 45. Verney Letters of the Eighteenth Century from the MSS at Claydon House, ed. Margaret Maria, Lady Verney (London, 1930), ii. 278. 10 In 1766, he sold his interest in Great Bedwyn to Lord Bruce, the other main proprietor. They agreed that Verney would fill the impending vacancy. At the next general election, Verney and Bruce would each nominate one member. (On both occasions Verney nominated W.B.) Bruce would control both seats thereafter. Verney also tried (unsuccessfully) to establish a permanent interest in the Welsh borough of Carmarthen, for which he sat from 1761 to 1768. The details of his connection with this 8 9

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 215 early as December 1763, he had wanted to bring Will into Parliament for Wendover. In 1765, he revived the plan, asking one of the sitting members, his cousin Verney Lovett (1705–71), to retire. Lovett obliged.11 Will then persuaded Verney to offer the seat to Edmund instead. His own prospects were not thereby much delayed: a few months later he was returned, on Verney’s interest, for Great Bedwyn. For Edmund this act of generosity was crucial. Taking his seat in the Commons when Parliament resumed in January 1766, he made his debut at a time of political crisis. The proposed repeal of the Stamp Act was highly controversial. Rhetorical skill was an asset of immediate value and utility. Wendover was a small town, hardly more than a village, about ten miles south of Verney’s great house at Claydon. The right of election in the borough was in the resident householders, of whom there were some 250. They were mostly Verney’s tenants, hence his control of the borough.12 If not the most prestigious type of constituency, boroughs such as Wendover required little from their members. As Burke found to his cost in 1774, when he was elected for the ‘open’ constituency of Bristol, to represent a populous trading city was onerous and irksome. Eighteenth-century elections were usually excuses for orgies of drunkenness. Burke’s at Wendover was no exception. The ‘extraordinary Melange’ was recorded by Lauchlin Macleane (c.1728–78), a confidence man much in the Burkes’ company at this time. Amidst ‘Empty Bottles, broken Glasses, Rivers of Wine Brooks of Brandy’, the toasts ‘Wilkes and Liberty, Burke and Wilkes, Freedom and Wendover’ were pledged by those capable of articulate speech. The scene dissolved into chaos as ‘Chairs overturned, with the Men that sat in them; while others in rising from their Knees fell under the Table, there to lie till the Heroes of the Day should be sober enough to lift Them.’13 Writing to constituency are obscure; Glyn Roberts, ‘Political Affairs from 1536 to 1900’, in Sir John E. Lloyd (ed.), A History of Carmarthenshire (Cardiff, 1935–9), ii. 32–44. On 8 Mar. 1770, when the petition of Verney’s candidate for Carmarthen came before the Commons, E.B. took Verney’s part in a violent altercation with Richard Rigby. 11 In 1763, Verney tried to obtain a sinecure office from Grenville as a compensation for Lovett (Verney to Grenville, 17 Dec. 1763, BL Add. MS 57821, fo. 153). In Apr. 1764, W.B. himself wrote to Grenville asking on Lovett’s behalf a place (capable of being executed by deputy) in the newly conquered islands; BL Add. MS 57822, fo. 100. How Lovett was indemnified in 1765 is not known. 12 In Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989), Frank O’Gorman classes Wendover as a ‘proprietorial’ borough, in which ‘the vote was treated as a form of property and the voting process as a transaction in property relationships’ (31–2). O’Gorman shows that such boroughs were not always easy to control. Verney, as E.B. complained, was a poor manager of his electoral interests (to O’Hara, 9 Aug. 1770: C ii. 148). In 1768, one candidate was returned against his interest. 13 Macleane to Wilkes, 24 Dec. 1765, BL Add. MS 30868, fos. 221–2, in James N. M. Maclean, Reward is Secondary: The Life of a Political Adventurer and an Inquiry into the Mystery of Junius (London, 1963), 135–6. The son of an Irish clergyman, Macleane entered TCD in 1746. He and E.B. might have met then. More probably their acquaintance dates from the early 1760s, when Macleane was engaged in West Indies land speculations. William Fitzherbert knew them both.

216 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 John Wilkes, Macleane exaggerated the Wilkite element in the proceedings. ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ had been a popular slogan since 1763, when Wilkes was prosecuted for writing the North Briton, no. 45. The inebriation, however, was real. To O’Hara, Burke reported more concisely: ‘yesterday I was elected for Wendover, got very drunk, and this day have an heavy cold’ (24 Dec. 1765: C i. 223). Since the summer was a dead time in British politics, Burke’s duties as Rockingham’s secretary were for some months routine. No business of importance surfaced until October 1765, when the extent of colonial resistance to Grenville’s Stamp Act became apparent.14 In November, Barlow Trecothick (c.1718–75), a prominent London merchant with extensive American connections, proposed to Rockingham the repeal of the obnoxious Stamp Act. Initially, Rockingham hoped that modification would be sufficient to quiet the Americans. Though not reluctant to rescind any measure of Grenville’s, he had no wish to be seen tamely giving in to American demands. Between them, Rockingham and Trecothick hit upon a strategy that would enable concessions to be made without ignominy. The plan survives in a memorandum in Burke’s hand and preserved among his papers. While Burke obviously did not originate the scheme, the significant part that he played in carrying it out was his first important political task. A committee of London merchants was formed, which would open correspondence with like-minded counterparts in other places where the American trade was important. When the time was ripe, they would initiate and co-ordinate petitions to Parliament complaining of the adverse effects on British trade of the Grenville legislation and calling for redress.15 Since the petitions were intended to appear spontaneous, Burke needed to play his part with the utmost discretion. Accordingly, Rockingham’s payments to Burke ‘for obtaining various informations & material relative to the Trade & Manufactures’ were charged to the secret service fund.16 Nevertheless, scattered pieces of evidence attest his activities in promoting petitions, lobbying MPs, and organizing the evidence to be presented to the Commons’ committee. From Glasgow, he received a copy of the memorial drawn up by the merchants of Glasgow ‘shewing the alarming situation they are reduced to in consequence of the Stamp Act’, as well as a copy of a more detailed letter sent by one of their number to an MP.17 Early in January 1766, Burke complained to his brother of the time spent in ‘making 14 P. D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975). 15 NRO A. xxvii. 81; John L. Bullion, ‘British Ministers and American Resistance to the Stamp Act, October–December 1765’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 49 (1992), 98–107. 16 Rockingham’s account books, WWM R15/1–4. The payments recorded (amounting to £400) were made on 25 Nov. 1765, 21 Jan. and 19 Apr. 1766; they may have been Rockingham’s method of paying E.B. a salary. 17 Archibald Henderson to E.B., 9 Feb. 1766, WWM BkP 1/84.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 217 cursed necessary Visits’, probably to MPs (C i. 230). On one occasion, Burke invited a deputation of Glasgow merchants, headed by Sir Alexander Gilmour (c.1736–92), to a working breakfast (235). On another, he dashed off a letter to O’Hara in a moment snatched from a meeting at Gilmour’s house (11 Mar. 1766: 245). Glasgow is the best-documented example of Burke’s activity. He was also in touch with the merchants of Lancaster, where his correspondent was Abraham Rawlinson (1709–80). At the end of the session, Rawlinson and seventy other merchants of the town sent Burke a formal letter of thanks for ‘the great Attention you have given to the Commerical Int’rest of Great Britain and her Colonies, during the last long & laborious Session of Parliament’.18 A list of ‘Names to the Birmingham Petition’ found among Burke’s papers suggests that he helped promote that petition too.19 Rockingham’s purpose in encouraging the petitions was to influence parliamentary opinion. Unwilling to appear to be cravenly bowing to pressure from the colonies, he wanted to show that Grenville’s Stamp Act had been inimical to British interests. Opinions on what to do were divided, even within the ministerial ranks. Each of the three options, enforcement, repeal, or modification of the Act, had its difficulties. To enforce the Act would require the use of military force, at an expense far greater than any revenue the stamped paper would generate. Repeal, however, might appear pusillanimous, would certainly render the collection of any revenue in the colonies more difficult for the future, and was likely to encourage the colonies to further assertions of independence. As with any compromise, modification might prove acceptable to neither side. Burke determined to support repeal even before it became ministerial policy. On 31 December, he wrote to O’Hara that ‘with regard to myself and my private opinion, my resolution is taken’, though the ministers had ‘not yet conclusively (I imagine) fixed upon their plan in this respect’ (C i. 229). This was correct. A few days after Burke’s letter, Rockingham’s assessment was that ‘All would agree to various Amendments & Curtailings of the Act—some as yet not very many to a Suspension & Very Few to a Repeal.’20 Converting these ‘Very Few’ into a majority in favour of repeal was the Rockingham ministry’s most important achievement. Though Burke is unlikely, this early, to have been consulted on the development of policy, with constant access to Rockingham and his usual eagerness to proselytize, he may have exerted some influence on the decision to repeal. The great stage on which the question would be debated was the floor of 18 Merchants of Lancaster to E.B., 12 June 1766, WWM BkP 1/115, in Corr. (1844), i. 104. The extant letters from Rawlinson to E.B. (11 and 23 May 1766, WWM BkP 1/110, 112) concern the proposal to open free ports in the West Indies. 19 NRO A. xxv. 79. The Birmingham Petition was presented on 20 Jan. 1766 (PDNA ii. 100). 20 Rockingham to Newcastle, 2 Jan. 1766, BL Add. MS 32973, fo. 11.

218 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 the House of Commons. Parliament typically sat for about six months of the year, from late November to May. Attendance was thin at the beginning and towards the end of a session, so that most important business was transacted between Christmas and Easter. In 1765, there was another reason for postponing consideration of the Stamp Act until January. MPs who had accepted positions in the new ministry automatically vacated their seats and had to offer themselves for re-election. Since the writs could not be issued until Parliament met, they could not take part in the short preChristmas session. Burke therefore missed little by not taking his seat until January. The eighteenth-century House of Commons was a small chamber, converted from a monastic chapel, about fifty-eight foot by thirty-three. A satirical print of 1770 (Plate 10) gives a livelier impression of the scene than more dignified representations. The Speaker sat in a chair of state on a dais at one end. The benches could not comfortably accommodate all 558 members who might, in theory, attend. A gallery around three sides of the chamber provided additional seating for members and (unless they were excluded) for visitors. Most debates, of course, attracted much less than a full house. A respectable attendance on an issue of importance was about 300.21 Only at a time of crisis did numbers reach 400, when the atmosphere would literally become heated in the confined space. During Burke’s first session, the best-attended debate was in the American committee on 21 February 1766, when 446 members took part in the division on whether to ‘repeal’ or only ‘explain and amend’ the Stamp Act.22 Even with no more than 300 members present, however, the chamber could become oppressively crowded and stifling. To deliver a speech in such conditions was an intimidating prospect. While Burke did not know whether he would succeed, he recognized the opportunity to make his name and determined to seize it. The session resumed on 14 January. The following day Burke was named to his first committee, appointed to consider a petition from the inhabitants of Southwark for a bill to empower them to levy a rate for road improvements. One of the other members of the committee was Henry Thrale (1728?–80), a wealthy brewer newly elected MP for Southwark.23 Thrale’s wife, Hester (1741–1821), was an ambitious hostess. Since Thrale was initially a Rockingham supporter, he must soon have got to know Burke and introduced him to Hester. Whether Burke ever attended the Southwark committee is not known. Such business was usually left to those who had a 21 No lists or figures were compiled for attendance. The number of members present can only be inferred from figures for divisions; P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971), 1–5, 105–37. 22 The voting was 275 to 167, to which four tellers should be added; Ryder’s Diary, in PDNA ii. 287. 23 15 Jan. 1766, CJ xxx. 454.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 219 direct interest in it. For Thrale, as MP for Southwark, to secure the passage of such legislation was important. For Burke, the committee was no more than a routine chore. Burke found the opening he wanted two days later, on 17 January, when Sir William Meredith (c.1725–90), MP for Liverpool, asked him to present the Manchester petition in favour of repeal of the Stamp Act. Burke ‘plunged in’, as he reported to O’Hara: I know not what struck me, but I took a sudden resolution to say something about it, though I had got it but that moment, and had scarcely time to read it, short as it was; I did say something; what it was, I know not upon my honour; I felt like a man drunk. Lord Frederick Campbell made me some answer to which I replied; ill enough too; but I was by this time pretty well on my Legs; Mr Grenville answerd; and I was now heated, and could have been much better, but Sr G. Saville caught the Speakers eye before me; and it was then thought better not to proceed further, as it would keep off the business of the day. However I had now grown a little stouter, though still giddy, and affected with a swimming in my head; So that I ventured up again on the motion, and spoke some minutes, poorly, but not quite so ill as before. All I hoped was to plunge in, and get off the first horrors; I had no hopes of making a figure. I find my Voice not strong enough to fill the house; but I shall endeavour to raise it as high as it will bear. (C i. 232–3)

Burke was wise to ‘plunge in, and get off the first horrors’. Most members never did. Gibbon, elected in 1774 and ambitious to make a figure, spent hours with experts on American affairs to prime himself with information. Yet ‘I am still a Mute,’ he confessed after several weeks, ‘it is more tremendous than I imagined; the great speakers fill me with despair, the bad ones with terror.’24 Though he did not abandon Parliament until 1783, Gibbon never did ‘plunge in’. Nor was his silence exceptional. Fewer than half of the 558 members of the House of Commons ever spoke on public business. Most members were ‘amateurs’, country gentlemen of independent means. Men of assured social standing and usually of inherited property, they could watch the more professional politicians with a degree of detachment. Capable of taking a decisive role at a time of crisis, in normal times they were content to listen and vote, and inclined by instinct on most issues to support the government rather than the opposition. Most of the ‘professional’ politicians, the active men who held or were candidates for office, were also men of property. With neither pedigree nor property, Burke needed to demonstrate abilities of a high order to overbalance prejudice against him as an unknown Irish adventurer. No more than about forty members were regular speakers. Many debates were concluded with a dozen or so speeches, though on occasions of exceptional significance the number would reach twenty or thirty. Throughout 24

Gibbon to John Baker Holroyd, 25 Feb. 1775, in Letters, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), ii. 61.

220 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 his long career, Burke was one of the most active debaters. During the Parliament of 1768–74, he was the third most frequent speaker. He rose more than 400 times, a tally exceeded only by the Prime Minister, Lord North (1732–92), and by William Dowdeswell, leader of the Rockingham party.25 Burke is remembered as a parliamentary speaker chiefly for his long set speeches. These were rare efforts for special occasions. His readiness in debate was more useful than his ability to deliver a Ciceronian oration, for it was more often needed. Highly articulate and formidably well-informed, he could answer fluently and forcefully. Nor did he give in easily; he was a persistent and stubborn opponent. No official or verbatim record of debates was maintained in Burke’s day. The clerks who sat at the table in front of the Speaker produced only a dry, formal record of the business transacted. To publish a report of any debate was a breach of a tenaciously maintained parliamentary privilege. In 1732, when the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole intensified public interest in the debates, lengthy reports began to appear in the monthly magazines. These sought to evade prosecution through the use of some subterfuge or fictional device. Thus the Gentleman’s Magazine purported to publish ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’, of which the best known are those contributed between 1741 and 1743 by Samuel Johnson. After the fall of Walpole in 1742, parliamentary debates lost much of their excitement, and press reporting lapsed until about 1768.26 A few members kept private diaries, and brief accounts can often be gleaned from the personal correspondence of members and their friends. For Burke’s first two sessions, such reports are short and scanty.27 Even without full texts, the surviving reports and comments convey some idea of the qualities of Burke’s first efforts. On the great topic of the day, the repeal of the Stamp Act, he proved himself an able and indefatigable debater. Two of his speeches merit particular attention, his contributions to the debates on 3 and 21 February 1766. Taken together, these speeches illustrate two characteristic qualities: generalization of argument and solidity of specification. Equally in command of the principle and the detail, in his best speeches he combines the two. His preference was to appeal to general principles rather than to narrow, legal precedents, yet to ground those principles on a firm empirical base. On 3 February, he made 25 I count as ‘regular’ speakers those recorded to have spoken over 100 times; Peter D. G. Thomas, ‘Check List of M.P.s Speaking in the House of Commons, 1768 to 1774’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 35 (1962), 220–6. W.B. too was a frequent speaker. Thomas credits him with 173 speeches, against E.B.’s 432. 26 Benjamin Beard Hoover, Samuel Johnson’s Parliamentary Reporting: Debates in the Senate of Lilliput (Berkeley, 1953), 1–32; Fredrick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control (Urbana, Ill., 1952), 346–63. 27 The main source for E.B.’s speeches in his first two sessions is the highly selective diary, chiefly concerned with American business, kept by Nathaniel Ryder; ‘Parliamentary Diaries of Nathaniel Ryder, 1764–1767’, ed. P. D. G. Thomas, Camden Miscellany, 23 (1969), 229–351.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 221 his first important speech. The subject was a resolution, later embodied in the Declaratory Act, asserting parliamentary authority over the colonies ‘in all cases whatsoever’. He advanced the confusing but characteristic doctrine of a right that ought not to be exercised. ‘Practical Exertions of clear rights’, he argued ‘may by difference in Circumstances come to Clash with the Genius of the Constitution’ (WS ii. 46). Such a fine distinction was perhaps responsible for the opinion, which he reported to O’Hara, that he was too ‘abstracted and subtile’. Burke attributed this criticism to being ‘known to be the Author of a Book somewhat metaphysical’ (C i. 241). On 21 February, in the crucial debate in the American committee that decided the fate of the Stamp Act, he again appealed to first principles, this time supporting them with a barrage of facts and figures about the tobacco and molasses trades (WS ii. 53–4). Praise came from men as eminent as Pitt and Charles Townshend. ‘The only man who could keep up the attention of the House on a subject already threadbare’, 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.’28 By early March, his success was a talking-point in Ireland.29 While he was establishing his reputation as a debater, Burke had also to find time for his secretarial work. Much of this concerned minor patronage, the staple of any eighteenth-century politician’s post-bag. A few examples from his papers will illustrate the range of small matters with which he had constantly to deal, while simultaneously engaged in preserving the empire. Grenville had rewarded his secretary, Charles Lloyd (1735–73), with the post of Receiver of the Revenues of Gibraltar. Dismissed by Rockingham, Lloyd was afraid that he might also lose his position as Paymaster of the Gentleman Pensioners. Burke wrote him a bland letter of tepid reassurance. The captain of a French ship, stranded and plundered on the coast of Cornwall, had petitioned for redress. Burke directed one of the official Treasury Secretaries that Rockingham wanted General Conway’s department to deal with the case. To Rockingham himself, Burke sent news of a suspicious meeting between Grenville and some friends of Lord Bute. To an unidentified correspondent, he sent the result of a key division in a committee. Sir George Savile (1726–84), one of Rockingham’s most trusted allies, was concerned about the dismissal of a customs official at Hull. Burke wrote to assure him (and in contrast to the letter to Lloyd, the assurance is meant to be real) that the proper procedures were being followed with all 28 William Baker to William Talbot, 25 Feb. 1766; D. H. Watson, ‘William Baker’s Account of the Debate on the Repeal of the Stamp Act’, William and Mary Quarterly, 26 (1969), 259–65. 29 John Ridge to E.B. and W.B., Mar. 1766 (C i. 243). Thomas Leland to Lord Charlemont, 11 Mar. 1766, HMC Charlemont, i. 278. Other early references are collected in Donald Cross Bryant, ‘The Contemporary Reception of Edmund Burke’s Speaking’ (1942); in Raymond F. Howes (ed.), Historical Study of Rhetoric and Rhetoricians (Ithaca, NY, 1961), 271–93, 413–16.

222 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 convenient speed. By an Irish sinecurist, Burke was asked to use his influence to secure the speedy confirmation of a grant.30 Such were some of Burke’s day-to-day concerns. One awkward business was more demanding. John Wilkes, the popular hero of 1763, had fled to France to escape prosecution. Hoping for more favourable treatment from the new ministry, in May 1766 he returned to England in quest of pardon and indeed reward. In opposition, Rockingham and his friends had been willing enough to make political capital out of the heavy-handed prosecution of Wilkes. ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ was often a mere shibboleth, or (as at Burke’s election) no more than an excuse for deep potations. In office, the new ministers went some way to redress the grievances that his case had raised. The Commons passed resolutions condemning general warrants and the indiscriminate seizure of papers. To take a stand on such issues of principle was perfectly consistent with finding Wilkes, as a person, unsavoury. Indeed, as an ally he was an embarrassment. The ministers wanted to keep him out of the country. Burke and Fitzherbert were therefore entrusted with the delicate task of inducing him to return quietly to France. This they accomplished. Though Wilkes professed himself satisfied, the guarded tone of the letters that he and Burke exchanged suggests that they never warmed to one another (C i. 256–7, 259). Indeed, they were temperamental opposites. Wilkes, ever the opportunist, was eager to seize any issue that promised to inflate his own importance. Burke pursued principle even at the cost of personal disadvantage. The successful passage of the repeal of the Stamp Act did not materially lessen the burden of Burke’s parliamentary work, though its nature changed. The ministry planned and partly executed a more general reform of imperial economic regulations.31 Burke described the plan to O’Hara as ‘a compleat revision of all the Commercial Laws, which regard our own or the foreign Plantations, from the act of Navigation downwards’, and expected to be kept as busy as before (C i. 239–40). Espousing the cause of reform with characteristic ardour and enthusiasm, Burke seriously overworked himself. When the session began, he was still suffering from the ‘heavy cold’ caught at the Wendover election. Late sittings took a further toll. On 6 February, Jane reported to her sister-in-law that Burke was ‘so taken up that he has scarce time to eat, drink, or sleep; he has not been in bed this week until three or four o’clock in the morning’ (236). On 1 March, Burke himself told O’Hara that he had been ‘extremely ill of a flux, which was relieved by violent sweats’ and had lost a good deal of weight (239). Letters of 1 Oct. and 10 Dec. 1765, c.27 Jan., 7 Feb., and 16 June 1766 (C i. 214–15, 219, 234–5, 237, 258); Robert Fitzgerald to E.B., 20 Mar. 1766, NRO A. viii. 10. 31 P. Langford, The First Rockingham Administration, 1765–1766 (London, 1973), 119–31; Frances Armytage, The Free Port System in the British West Indies: A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766–1822 (London, 1953), 28–51. 30

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 223 Nevertheless, he persevered in his task of analysing ‘the whole commercial, financial, constitutional and foreign interests’ of Britain and its empire. No wonder he suffered nervous exhaustion and felt, as he recalled in his Letter to a Noble Lord, ‘very near death’ (WS ix. 159). Fortunately he recovered, to enjoy the reputation of knowing ‘more of American affairs than anybody’.32 Despite Burke’s efforts, the ‘regular and digested scheme’ that he hoped to bring before Parliament was never completed. Its main aims, however, are clear. Grenville’s pedantic adherence to the letter of the Navigation Acts, and his attempt to raise a colonial revenue, were both to be abandoned. The plan was not, on the other hand, intended to promote a general freedom of trade. Exceptions to the principle of monopoly were to be allowed, but only where their effects were likely to benefit the imperial system. Examples were the proposals to allow Spanish vessels to trade with the British West Indies, provided that they either paid for their purchases in bullion or with commodities that did not compete with British products; and to allow the import of French sugar into British North America, since the British sugar islands could not satisfy the colonial as well as the home market. Burke even hoped that Ireland could somehow be ‘hooked’ into this new system. The philosophy behind the scheme, in Burke’s mind at least, anticipates his attitude to American taxation in the 1770s. Direct impositions, offensive to American susceptibilities and expensive to collect, were to be avoided. The best way to take advantage of the colonies was not to impose Grenville’s petty duties, but to encourage their economic growth and manage it for the ultimate benefit of the home country. At first, all went well. Representatives of the North American and West Indian merchants, usually at loggerheads, reached an agreement on 10 March. Its main points were the admission of French sugar into British North America at the same reduced (1d.) duty as British, in exchange for concessions on trade between the Spaniards and the British West Indies. British sugar, however, was to retain its protected position in the home market.33 This compromise was overturned by the demand, first raised by Bristol and taken up by other ports and manufacturing centres, for a free port in Dominica. Such a port would provide British manufacturers with access to cheap foreign raw materials, especially cotton.34 Burke supported the proposal, for his connections were chiefly with the manufacturers who would benefit from it. Pitt, influenced by William Beckford (1709–70), a West Indian sugar-planter, was known to oppose it. Burke was accordingly 32 Joseph Yorke to Lord Hardwicke, 15 Apr. 1766, reporting the opinion of Sir James Porter, BL Add. MS 35368, fo. 40. 33 Lillian M. Penson, The Colonial Agents of the British West Indies: A Study in Colonial Administration Mainly in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1924), 284–5. 34 Petitions for a free port were received from Bristol, Lancaster, and Liverpool on 7 Apr., and from Manchester on the 8th (PDNA ii. 366–7).

224 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 sent on a mission to convince him of the scheme’s soundness. Accompanied by a merchant from Lancaster, one of the towns which had petitioned, Burke made an expedition to Pitt’s country house at Hayes, in Kent. The interview was highly unsatisfactory. Burke thought Pitt prejudiced and unwilling to listen (C i. 251–2). Pitt, whose economic ideas were oldfashioned, retained his faith in mercantilist principles.35 He had earned a reputation as a champion of colonial liberties by denying the right of Parliament to impose taxes on the unrepresented colonies. Yet his liberalism was political, not economic. Though the Declaratory Act was anathema to him, he believed that the British Parliament was competent to regulate the trade of the colonies. His distinction between the power to regulate and the power to tax was about as commonsensical as Burke’s notion of a power that ought not to be exercised. Rockingham, aware that his administration needed strengthening, had a further purpose in sending Burke to Pitt: to raise the question of ‘upon what Conditions He would come into The King’s Service’. Burke was severely snubbed: ‘Mr Burke, I wonder, you should make that Proposition, when I have given it under my Hand, in a Letter to My Lord Rockingham, That I will open myself, upon that Point, to Nobody, but to the King Himself.’36 With such a rebuke, delivered in Pitt’s most pompous style, ringing in his ears, no wonder Burke left the meeting incensed against Pitt’s ‘peevish and perverse opposition to so salutary and unexceptionable a measure’ (251). The incident showed how irrational and erratic Pitt could be. His praise of Burke’s speech of 21 February was forgotten. The unhappy episode deepened Burke’s dislike and mistrust of the great man, feelings which soon hardened into hatred. Burke’s ardour for the free-port scheme burned the more fiercely for Pitt’s opposition. He was therefore doubly chagrined when, partly in fear of Pitt, the ministry wavered in its commitment to the idea. With obvious annoyance, he reported to O’Hara that in a Cabinet meeting ‘the old Stagers fritterd it down to an address to the King for the opinion of the boards on the matter’, the equivalent of shelving the project for the year (23 Apr. 1766: C i. 251). Unexpectedly, however, Pitt abandoned his opposition. On 8 May, the West Indian merchants drew up a compromise proposal which proved acceptable to their North American rivals. This provided something for everyone: free ports both in Jamaica and in Dominica; cheap sugar imports for the North American colonies; and a continued monopoly of the home market for the British sugar islands.37 Bills based on this agreement passed quickly through both houses. 35 Pitt to Thomas Nuthall, 11 May 1766, in Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle (London, 1838–40), ii. 420–1. Nuthall, a follower of Pitt, was solicitor to the Treasury. 36 Report by Thomas Walpole, recorded by the Duke of Newcastle, and endorsed 18 Apr. 1766, BL Add. MS 32974, fo. 421. 37 ‘Agreement of the West Indian Committee’, 8 May 1766; L. Stuart Sutherland, ‘Edmund Burke and the First Rockingham Ministry’, English Historical Review, 47 (1932), 46–72.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 225 Nearer to Burke’s heart than the West Indies was Ireland. Ireland’s economic grievances included many restrictions imposed on its trade by British legislation. Even before his election to Parliament, Burke had been attentive to Irish interests. In May 1765, working through Charles Townshend, he had helped defeat a proposal to place further restrictions on the export of Irish wool (C i. 193). In March 1766, when the bill was revived, he successfully opposed it from the floor of the house.38 Burke sought not merely to defend Irish commercial privileges, but to extend them. He promoted two initiatives which, small as they were, were meant to be the harbingers of greater concessions to come. One would have allowed the direct import into Ireland of sugar from the West Indies, the other the direct export of soap. Early in March he asked O’Hara for evidence to support the sugar proposal (240). West Indian and Irish interests had long sought to open a direct trade in sugar. In the Account of the European Settlements in America, one of the grievances put into the mouth of a West Indian is the prohibition of direct exports to Ireland. In 1765, two Irish petitions were submitted to the Treasury, asking to be allowed to import sugar directly from the West Indies.39 Burke soon discovered, however, that the English merchants selling sugar to Ireland would oppose any such concession (247).40 He therefore concentrated on the soap export, which on 15 May he defended with his usual pertinacity: The last thing I did in the house was to make a Battle, and I made a strenuous, though an unsuccessfull one, for the Irish Sope Bill. The season was far advanced, the house thin, the proposition (as they said) new and serious. The Treasury Bench gave way under me; I debated alone for near an hour, with some sharp antagonists; I grew warm; and had a mind to divide the house on it; but as I saw myself unsupported, and that a Negative might affect the proposition essentially, I escaped over a Bridge which Oswald laid for me; who pressed me, in very flattering Terms to withdraw my Motion, and make it early in the Next Session. (to O’Hara, 24 May 1766: 254–5)

Though he never reintroduced his soap bill, Burke continued to champion Irish economic interests. When trade concessions to the Irish were proposed in 1778 and granted in 1779, he supported them at the cost of alienating many of his Bristol constituents. This unpopular stand contributed to his defeat at the 1780 election. The brush with Oswald has a further resonance. Though Burke’s bill was not a measure to which the ministry was committed, he probably viewed 38 Charlemont to Henry Flood, n.d. [13 Mar. 1766?], BL Add. MS 22930, fo. 21. This letter is a fragment; the opening is missing. In Original Letters . . . to the Right Hon. H. Flood (London, 1820), 40, the fragment is printed as a continuation of Charlemont to Flood, 9 Apr. 1767. 39 Account of the European Settlements in America (London, 1757), ii. 111; Thomas M. Truxes, IrishAmerican Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988), 228, 397. 40 A summary of their objections is preserved among E.B.’s papers: ‘On the Plan of Importing Sugars Directly into Ireland’, NRO A. xxv. 28.

226 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 Oswald’s opposition to it (however mollified by that flattering invitation to reintroduce the measure) in a sinister light. James Oswald (1715–69) held the sinecure office of joint Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, having previously served at the Board of Trade (1751–59) and at the Treasury (1759–63). He was one of the group of office-holding ‘king’s friends’ who had opposed the repeal of the Stamp Act. Rockingham unsuccessfully pressed the king for their dismissal, and interpreted the king’s refusal as part of the web of ‘secret influence’ with which he and Burke became obsessed. Their behaviour provided Burke with the basis for the ‘double cabinet’ theory advanced in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). Yet neither on the repeal of the Stamp Act nor on the Irish Soap Bill is there reason to doubt the sincerity of Oswald’s views. David Hume and Adam Smith both treated his views on economics with respect.41 Burke was now poised for a conventional career as a government ‘man of business’. An informed and respected defender of government policies in the Commons, he could have expected an initial appointment to the Board of Trade, followed by such promotion as merit or patronage might bring. The career of Grey Cooper (c.1726–1801), a competent ‘man of business’ whose parliamentary abilities were incomparably inferior to Burke’s, shows how Burke’s might have developed. The son of a Newcastle doctor, Cooper attended the Middle Temple and was called to the Bar in 1751. By 1765, his practice brought in £1,000 a year. After writing a couple of pamphlets on the new ministry’s behalf, in October 1765 he accepted the position of joint Secretary to the Treasury.42 So little did he trust to the permanence of the administration that he wheedled a deferred annuity of £600 a year as a compensation for giving up his legal career.43 Though not all Treasury Secretaries sat in Parliament, Cooper persuaded Rockingham to bring him in for the borough of Rochester, where the Admiralty could exert considerable influence. Such haggling for personal advantage was anathema to Burke, as was Cooper’s willingness to shift loyalties. By staying in office when Rockingham went out, and subsequently attaching himself to Lord North, Cooper retained his secretaryship (worth some £3,000 a year) until 1782.

41 Hume to Oswald, 1 Nov. 1750, in Letters, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), i. 142–4; Memorials of the Public Life and Character of the Right Hon. James Oswald, of Dunnikier (Edinburgh, 1825), 122. 42 Cooper’s pamphlets (both published anonymously) were A Pair of Spectacles for ShortSighted Politicians (London, 1765) and The Merits of the New Administration Truly Stated (London, 1765). Like E.B., Cooper was appointed by Rockingham against the recommendation of the Duke of Newcastle, who wanted the job to go to James West; Langford, First Rockingham Administration, 36–7. 43 Cooper to Rockingham, 18 Sept. 1765, WWM R1/495. The annuity was payable on his removal from office.


227

2 In July 1765, Burke had been a lapsed author ‘tagging at the heels of factions’. Writing to O’Hara, he ranked Will and himself among ‘the honest Necessitous’, not the ‘ambitious’ (9 July 1765: C i. 210). A year later he was a public figure of some standing. Though still ‘Necessitous’, he had undoubtedly taken his place among the ‘ambitious’, who aimed higher than under-secretaryships. In one respect, though, 1765–6 proved another false start, for it did not lead Burke to the career in administration that his friends anticipated. ‘We have less of Burke’s company since he has been engaged in publick business,’ Johnson told fellow Club member Bennet Langton, ‘in which he has ever gained more reputation than perhaps any man at his appearance ever gained before.’ Burke’s speeches on the Stamp Act had ‘filled the town with wonder’; Johnson expected him ‘soon to attain civil greatness’.44 Johnson was wrong: loyalty to Rockingham would not make Burke’s fortune. Rockingham gave Burke what he valued more: a cause to believe in and fight for. Success, as the world reckoned it, he would always sacrifice to his sense of being right. Rockingham’s ministry had never been expected to last. The general opinion was that the ministers were too weak, inexperienced, and incompetent to deal with the challenges they faced. Initially, they were helped by an erroneous belief that they enjoyed at least Pitt’s tacit support. As the great man’s actual hostility became evident, a new ministry, headed by Pitt himself, was widely anticipated. Yet Rockingham’s fall was not inevitable. He could readily have strengthened his ministry by enlarging its base of support, most easily by taking in some of the ‘king’s friends’, men like James Oswald, who would support any ministry that enjoyed the king’s confidence. A year earlier, Burke himself had pointed out this obvious strategy in a letter to Charles O’Hara (4 July 1765: C i. 208). He had not then shared the prevalent anti-Bute prejudice. Rockingham, however, could not bear the idea of an alliance with the followers of Bute, as he regarded the ‘king’s friends’. Like many contemporaries, he thought that Bute was still active behind the scenes. While not true, this belief was widely shared.45 Dread of Bute’s ‘secret influence’ (which Burke learned from him) made Rockingham reject the notion of looking to the ‘king’s friends’.46 Nor was he willing to form an alliance with any other political group. Firmly convinced of the moral superiority of his own connection, he Johnson to Langton, 8 Mar. 1766, in Letters, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton, 1992–4), i. 264–5. John Brewer, ‘The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case-Study in Eighteenth-Century Political Argument and Public Opinion’, Historical Journal, 16 (1973), 3–43. 46 Other politicians failed to understand Rockingham’s reluctance to come to terms with the ‘king’s friends’: Lord Egmont to the king, 1 May 1766, in Correspondence of King George the Third, i. 298, and Lord Holland to the Duke of Richmond, 4 May, in Earl of Ilchester, Henry Fox, First Lord Holland (London, 1920), ii. 308–9. 44 45

228 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 could see in other factions only the most ignoble motives. All were tainted. Repelled by the messy compromises of coalition, indifferent (as he could afford to be) to the emoluments of office, weary of the burdensome routine of government, he retired willingly and even with relief. Rockingham was happiest leading a small group of like-minded, right-thinking followers, into the wilderness if necessary. He attracted those, like Burke, who preferred a sense of being right to the grosser rewards of success. Such a following would never be numerous.47 Rockingham’s real enemy was not Bute but Pitt. Bute had proved an inept politician with neither the nerves nor the stamina to carry out George III’s avowed programme of breaking all parties, factions, and connections. The king’s ideal was a ministry composed of able and virtuous individuals, whose first loyalty was to him rather than to any party.48 In July 1766, the king found a tougher ally in Pitt, who shared his detestation of parties and factions. On 24 April, Pitt had made what Burke described to O’Hara as ‘a fine flaming patriotick Speech, chiefly against any sort of personal connections; he means with any besides himself. It was a speech too virtuous to be honest’ (24 Apr.: C i. 252). Rockingham’s dismissal opened the way for the king to commission Pitt, raised to the peerage as Earl of Chatham, to form a ministry on avowedly anti-party principles. Chatham, with his characteristic pose of aloof inaccessibility, took the usually honorific office of Lord Privy Seal, intending to dictate policy while remaining free from departmental responsibilities. Rockingham’s ministry effectively ended on 9 July 1766.49 Burke’s position ended with it. Among those who remained in office, the most important was Conway, whom Will Burke continued to serve as Under-Secretary. Fitzherbert, too, stayed on. Nor did Rockingham himself, at first, propose to take up active opposition. His followers did not resign en bloc. Lord John Cavendish quit his place at the Treasury board, partly from personal dislike of the Duke of Grafton (1735–1811), Rockingham’s successor. When Burke heard (wrongly) that Admiral Sir Charles Saunders (c.1713–75) had resigned from the Admiralty board, he expressed surprise. ‘I thought it was a settled point’, he told Rockingham, ‘that none should go out without the concurrence of the party’ (21 Aug. 1766: 266). Though Burke credited the ‘party’ with greater unity and discipline than it possessed, his comment shows that he did not initially regard serving under Chatham as incompatible with loyalty to Rockingham. 47 John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), 77–95, traces the triumph of the ‘little-endians’ in the party over those who favoured coalition with other groups. 48 The theme is a leitmotiv in the royal correspondence. For example, on 29 July 1766 the king told Pitt of his desire of ‘destroying all party distinctions’; Chatham, Correspondence, iii. 21. 49 The date on which the king told Rockingham that Pitt had agreed to form a new ministry; the king to Bute, 12 July 1766, in Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766, ed. Romney Sedgwick (London, 1939), 253. The new ministry was not formally inaugurated until the end of the month.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 229 Indeed, he entertained hopes (not finally abandoned until November) of being offered a position himself. Burke commemorated the late ministry in his first political pamphlet. A Short Account of a Late Short Administration (WS ii. 54–7) was published on 4 August 1766.50 In about 750 words, Burke summarized the achievements and virtues of the Rockingham ministry. The effectiveness of the Short Account derives more from its lofty tone and the image it creates of disinterested rectitude than from its list of the ministry’s achievements. The record was largely negative: the repeal of the Stamp Act and Grenville’s other colonial duties; at home, the repeal of the cider tax and the resolutions against general warrants and the seizure of papers. The most important positive achievement was the Declaratory Act, passed to facilitate the repeal of the Stamp Act. Burke also described their virtues in negative terms: they refrained from enriching themselves at the public’s expense, and they had no truck with Lord Bute. Written with a disarming disingenuousness, the Account disguises an ex parte case as a plain statement of facts. Burke exaggerates the achievements of the Rockingham ministry, giving them credit they did not deserve and magnifying the importance of what they had accomplished.51 Rockingham was by temperament drawn to the ‘country’ rather than the ‘court’ pole of eighteenth-century politics, and he drew Burke after him.52 ‘Country’ politicians were intensely suspicious of the ‘court’, which they regarded as the great source of corruption, encouraging men to subordinate the public good to private interests. In the 1760s, this fixation usually took the form of suspicion of Bute and his malign influence. This ‘country’ ideology found its natural expression in opposition. Indeed, a ‘country’ government is almost a contradiction in terms. George III was baffled and displeased at Rockingham and his colleagues ‘still imbibing those strange ideas in government, that they addopted whilst in opposition’. Lord Egmont (1711–70), a member of Rockingham’s Cabinet, likewise lamented to the king ‘the Imprudence . . . of having moved many unnecessary Matters upon vain Notions of Consistency & Popularity’.53 Rockingham 50 The Short Account was published both as a broadside and as a small pamphlet (Todd, 15 and p. 301). The broadside is reproduced in Frederick O. Waage, Jr., ‘Burke’s Short Account and its “Answer” ’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 36 (1973), 255–66. Waage’s attribution to E.B. of the ironic ‘Answer’ (first published in the Public Advertiser) is not convincing. 51 Charles Lloyd scored some palpable hits in his rebuttal, A True History of a Late Short Administration (London, 1766; published anonymously). 52 Warren M. Elofson, ‘The Rockingham Whigs and the Country Tradition’, Parliamentary History, 8 (1989), 90–115. In ‘The Origin of Burke’s Ideas Revisited’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (1984), 57– 71, Reed Browning traces some of E.B.’s leading ideas to what he calls the ‘court whig’ tradition. ‘Court’ and ‘country’ interpretations of E.B. are not incompatible. E.B.’s rhetorical task often required him to combine a defence of the established order with criticism of the incompetent hands into which it had fallen. 53 The king to Lord Bute, 10 Jan. 1766, in Letters from George III to Bute, 242; Egmont to the king, 18 May 1766, in Correspondence of King George the Third, i. 309.

230 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 (for whom farming was no metaphor) relished the role of a Cincinnatus called from the plough to save the State, and willing to return to his farm when the work was done. ‘The Removal of that Administration from Power, is not to them premature’, Burke loftily declared, ‘since they were in Office long enough to accomplish many Plans of public Utility; and by their Perseverance and Resolution, rendered the Way smooth and easy to their Successors; having left their King and their Country in a much better Condition than they found them’ (WS ii. 57). ‘Consistency & Popularity’ mattered more to Rockingham and his party than returning to office. Rather than strengthening their position through alliances with other groups (as Burke himself had envisaged in June 1765), they preferred to appeal to public opinion with an image of ostentatious integrity. Not that Rockingham was in any sense a populist; the ‘Popularity’ that he and Burke sought was the approval of the independent property-owners, not the support of the shopkeepers, small tradesmen, and artisans from whom Wilkes and the urban radicals drew their support. The high-minded purity of the Short Account was no pose. In a letter to Charles O’Hara, Burke explained his preference for the politics of principle to the mere scramble for office: The view [of returning to office] is dim and remote; and we do nothing in the world to bring it nearer, or to make it more certain. This disposition, which is become the principle of our party, I confess, from constitution and opinion, I like: Not that I am enamourd of adversity, or that I love opposition. On the contrary it would be convenient enough to get into office; and opposition never was to me a desirable thing; because I like to see some effect of what I am doing, and this method however pleasant is barren and unproductive, and at best, but preventive of mischief; but then the walk is certain; there are no contradictions to reconcile; no cross points of honour or interest to adjust; all is clear and open; and the wear and tear of mind, which is saved by keeping aloof from crooked politicks, is a consideration absolutely inestimable. Believe me, I who lived with your friend [Hamilton] so many years feel it so; and bless Providence every day and every hour to find myself deliverd from thoughts and from Characters of that kind. (23 Dec. 1766: C i. 285)

Burke followed Rockingham into the wilderness of opposition, ‘barren and unproductive’ as the prospect was, because Rockingham personified integrity and rectitude. Since Rockingham had no gift for expression, his ideas are now chiefly remembered through Burke’s writings and speeches. In later years, Burke became a valued confidential adviser, though the social and economic distance between them kept the relationship unequal. Nor was Burke ever Rockingham’s chief adviser. Because he was the most articulate member of the circle, his importance within it is easily overestimated. His relation to Rockingham in its early stages, and to some degree throughout, is aptly captured in the (unfinished) double portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (Plate

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 231 11), begun about this time. The painting was probably commissioned as a companion piece to one already in Rockingham’s collection, Anthony Van Dyck’s double portrait of Rockingham’s ancestor, the first Earl of Strafford, and his secretary.54 Rockingham is a less forceful presence in this painting than is Strafford in the prototype, yet his hand firmly placed on the papers on the table sufficiently establishes his dominance. This is reinforced by the viewer’s unobstructed sight of his whole figure, the frontal position of his head, and his enthronement in the richly upholstered chair. Burke looks up expectantly, his pen poised to record Rockingham’s decision or instruction. Rockingham is thinking out the problem; Burke is there to record his answer. The painting is a more accurate representation of the relationship between the two than the description of Burke as not ‘Lord Rockingham’s Right hand only but both his hands’.55 An apposite illustration of Burke’s subordinate position is a note that Rockingham sent him on 9 April 1766. Rockingham was at dinner when he received a few lines from Burke, reporting a rumour about Pitt. In reply, Rockingham confirmed the truth of the intelligence, concluding ‘I wish you would call here this Evening.’56 The casualness of the expression indicates that Burke is his secretary, to be summoned at will. Burke was Rockingham’s ‘hands’ only in the sense of being his instrument, as in the painting. Freed from his secretarial and parliamentary labours, Burke now took a holiday of several weeks in Ireland. Planned before Rockingham’s dismissal, the trip combined business with pleasure. Burke had many friends and relations to visit. Having left Ireland in 1764 under something of the cloud that covered the odious Hamilton, to return with a reputation of his own was obviously gratifying. On this visit, he saw his mother and his sister for the last time. Mary Burke was pardonably proud: As soon as they got into Galway, the bells rang for them. The Monday following, the corporation met and voted the freedom of that city to be sent to Ned in a silver box. . . . I believe you will think me very vain; but as you are a mother, I hope you will excuse it. I assure you that it’s no honour that is done him that makes me vain of him, but the goodness of his heart, which I believe no man living has a better; and sure there can’t be a better son, nor can there be a better daughter-in-law than his wife.57

With every allowance for a mother’s partiality to a newly famous son, the letter suggests that time and absence had not diminished the sympathy that had united them in Burke’s youth. 54 This composition derives in turn from a painting by Titian, familiar to Reynolds and perhaps to Rockingham, since the original and several copies were available in England; Michael Jaffé, ‘The Picture of the Secretary of Titian’, Burlington Magazine, 108 (1966), 114–26. 55 Earl of Buckinghamshire to George Grenville, 11 June 1766, BL Add. MS 22358, fo. 35. 56 Rockingham to E.B., ‘Wednesday night’, WWM BkP 1/104. 57 Mary Burke to Ellen Hennessy, 25 Oct. 1766, in Corr. (1844), i. 112.

232 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 Burke had another reason for visiting Ireland. His brother Garrett had died in 1765, leaving the bulk of his property to Edmund.58 The most important legacy was an estate at Clogher in County Cork, which Garrett had acquired from some Nagle relatives.59 The circumstances in which he did so are obscure. Under the Irish penal laws, Catholics could not acquire land on longer leases than thirty-one years. The same laws (summarized with indignant eloquence in Burke’s ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’; WS ix. 437–43) sought to encourage conversions by allowing a Protestant son to claim the property of a Catholic father. To escape the domestic strife which the laws fomented, some families went through a collusive legal process. A friendly Protestant relative would act as ‘discoverer’, who as plaintiff would file a bill of ‘discovery’ against the defendant, the Catholic owner. The court would award the estate to the discoverer. Having gained the title, he would hold the property in trust for the ‘real’ owners, precluding a similar action by a hostile discoverer. Garrett Burke may have entered into an arrangement of this kind, though he was not the original discoverer. (This was a John Read, who subsequently transferred his interest to Garrett.) Indeed, in the action which ultimately led to his possession of the property, Garrett acted for the Nagles against the Protestant discoverer. Richard Burke (father of Garrett and Edmund) acted for the discoverer, John Read, against the Nagles. That father and son represented opposite sides is the strongest piece of evidence that the action was collusive.60 Yet in his will, Garrett treats the property as his own. Bequeathing it to his brother, he assumes that Edmund will want to sell it. For sentimental reasons, he appeals to Edmund to keep part at least in the family: ‘as to the lower part occupied by me only, on account of some improvements and planting several trees thereon, I beg he may not sell the same’. Anticipating, however, that Edmund may find the property ‘inconvenient to hold at the distance he 58 Garrett Burke died on 27 Apr. 1765. His will, dated 26 Apr., was destroyed in the fire at the Dublin Public Record Office in 1922. Thanks to Sir Joseph Napier, who first investigated this episode, some of its provisions are known. Napier obtained a copy of the will (since lost), from which he quotes the part relating to the Clogher estate in Edmund Burke: A Lecture (Dublin, 1862); repr. in his Lectures, Essays and Letters (Dublin, 1888). 59 Garrett describes the estate as ‘the lands of Clogher Shanagh and Killevulling which I hold under Lord Doneraile for a long term of years’ (Napier, Lectures, 154). E.B. usually refers to it simply as Clogher (or Clohir). This Clogher is about four miles north-west of Castletownroche, where Juliana Burke was baptized. (The more famous Clogher, an episcopal see, is in County Tyrone.) Shanagh is about a mile north of Clogher; ‘Killevulling’ is Killavullen, some five miles to the south. E.B. also inherited £550 invested in a mortgage (John Ridge to E.B., 8 July 1766, NRO A. viii. 6; and Ridge to W.B., Feb. 1767, A. i. 42 and A. xxviii. 104). 60 Napier (Lectures, 153–8) assumed rather than demonstrated that Garrett acquired the property through a collusive action. Most later writers have followed his account. An exception was Charles Wentworth Dilke, writing under the initials J.R.T., in Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. 2 (26 July 1862), 61– 2; repr. in Papers of a Critic (London, 1875). Though the episode remains shrouded in some mystery, the research of John A. Woods, incorporated in the notes to E.B.’s ostensible letter to Garrett Nagle of 9 Dec. 1777 (C iii. 411–16) supports Napier rather than Dilke.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 233 lives’, to prevent him from being cheated, Garrett records that he had been ‘offered a guinea an acre for them, which are computed to contain fortynine acres and upwards’.61 This is not property held in trust. Garrett may have bought the property simply as a way of investing some of his professional earnings while helping some needy relatives.62 Yet some aspect of the transaction embarrassed Burke. In 1777, when his possession was challenged, he wrote an untypically defensive account of his title. Unusually, he insists on the legality of his position, not on its moral rectitude (C iii. 412–16). The Clogher estate was Burke’s first real property. Its value is estimated at £500 a year in contemporary lists of estates held by absentees.63 Burke’s net income from it was rather less than this. The property was not freehold, but held on a 999-year lease. An annual rent of £116 was payable to the head landlord (C iii. 413 n. 3). In addition, Burke was a generous landlord, and often directed small charities to be paid out of his rents. On 26 October 1777, he acknowledged receipt of £51, perhaps a quarter’s remittance (391). Even such small sums were welcome in Burke’s state of chronic financial exigency. Other references show that payments were irregular and often in arrears. On 6 May 1771, Burke asked Garrett Nagle (d. 1791?) of nearby Ballyduff, who managed the estate for him, to ‘quicken the Gentry at Clohir’, expressing surprise at their being behindhand in paying such moderate rents (ii. 212). Once a year or so, Burke took the trouble to write a long letter to Nagle. In these letters, Burke often describes his latest experiments, for Nagle too was a keen farmer.64

3 Burke returned to London in October 1766. Despite what he had resented as slights in the early summer (C i. 264), he had not given up hope of a position in the new ministry. The Duke of Grafton, the new First Lord of the Treasury, seeking permission to offer Burke a seat at the Board of Trade, described him to Chatham as ‘the readiest man upon all points perhaps in the whole House’.65 Conceding that Burke was indeed ‘a man of parts, and an ingenious speaker’, Chatham pretended to reject him on Napier, Lectures, 154. In 1790, E.B. sold the property back to a Nagle, Edmund Nagle of Clogher, for £3,000; Napier, Lectures, 203. 63 Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland (1776–1779) (1780), ed. Arthur Wollaston Hutton (London, 1892), ii. 116; A List of the Absentees of Ireland and the Yearly Value of their Estates (Dublin, 1783), 8. The List, originally compiled by Thomas Prior, was first published in 1729. The 1769 edition, the first in which E.B. could have appeared, lists no estate under £600; the 1783 edition lists estates as small as £300. 64 Examples are 23 Aug. 1771, 12 July 1772, 3 Sept. 1777 (C ii. 231–5, 313–15, iii. 370–1). 65 Grafton to Chatham, 17 Oct. 1766, in Chatham, Correspondence, iii. 110. 61 62

234 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 account of his economic ideas. ‘Nothing’ he told Grafton, ‘can be more unsound and more repugnant to every true principle of manufacture and commerce, than the rendering so noble a branch as the Cottons, dependant for the first material upon the produce of French and Danish Islands, instead of British.’66 On that fateful visit to Hayes in April, when Burke had tried to secure Chatham’s support for the free ports, he had argued against the great man too forcefully. Chatham wanted visitors to consult him as an oracle. Nothing else can account for his dredging up the question of the free ports, rather than citing their far more important difference of opinion on the principle of the Declaratory Act. Chatham further claimed that he had promised the next vacancy at the Board of Trade to Lord Lisburne (c.1730– 1800). These sound like mere pretexts.67 The real motivation for his rejection of Burke must be sought elsewhere. Chatham liked obedient and deferential subordinates, not men who presumed to have ideas of their own. Burke’s loyalty to Rockingham (whom Chatham despised) was another, and perhaps the principal charge against him, as it was against Dowdeswell.68 However, so erratic and arbitrary was Chatham at this time that his rejection of Burke may have been simple contrariness. The new session opened on 11 November 1766. Since Burke had missed the opening of the previous session, he now took part for the first time in the annual opening rituals. He attended the meetings held to brief government supporters on the speech from the throne, the more select gathering of the ‘men of business’ as well as the open forum. Each session opened with a speech from the throne, delivered by the king but known to be ministerial. The first debate in each house was on an address of thanks for the speech, in effect a motion of confidence in the ministry. An amendment, designed to rally opposition, would be proposed. If a respectable minority appeared likely, a division would be called for. A weak opposition would not press its amendment to a division. The situation in November 1766 was unusual. Since the Rockingham group was not yet in formal opposition, it did not support the amendments moved by George Grenville, the leading member in avowed opposition. Indeed, one of Grenville’s amendments provoked Burke to argue a principle to which he retained a lifelong commitment. Grenville proposed to 66 Chatham to Grafton, 19 Oct. 1766, in Grafton, Autobiography and Political Correspondence, ed. Sir William R. Anson (London, 1898), 108. 67 Chatham moved men like pieces on a chess-board when it suited his whim or convenience. In Oct. 1766, to move Lord Hillsborough from the Board of Trade would be ‘unfixing the most critical office in the kingdom’. In Dec., Chatham transferred him to the Post Office; John Brooke, The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768 (London, 1956), 37. 68 Vacillating about whether to accept the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Townshend used an unlucky phrase: that ‘Ld. Rockingham’s being quiet’ would depend on Dowdeswell remaining in that office. The king reported this to Pitt, who ordered Dowdeswell’s immediate dismissal to demonstrate his contempt for Rockingham; 25 July 1766, in Correspondence of King George the Third, i. 380–1. The example discredits Pitt’s boasted concern with policies rather than personalities.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 235 authorize the government to subsidize food for the consumption of the poor.69 This bid for easy popularity came with peculiar ill grace from an ex-minister known for his parsimony when in office. Burke was annoyed that none of the leading ministerial members would come out against it, attributing their pusillanimity to their fear of what Chatham’s attitude might be. Burke’s opposition was not merely personal. Convinced of the necessity for a free market in food, he consistently opposed such specious initiatives.70 About the same time Burke’s future course was decided. Conway sent for him and sought to enlist him. In August, Burke had been mortified by Conway’s stand-offishness. Now he felt able to resist Conway’s blandishments, as he proudly reported to O’Hara: I had begun with this party [Rockingham’s], That it was now divided in situation, though I hoped not in opinions or inclinations; that the point of honour lay with that division which was out of power [those who had resigned with Rockingham]; and that if the place which should be offerd, should prove in itself never so acceptable, I could take it only on condition that, in accepting it, and in holding it, I must be understood to belong not to the administration, but to those who were out; and that therefore if ever they should set up a standard, though spread for direct and personal opposition, I must be revocable into their party, and join it. But would act fairly and give due notice. He told me, he feard that this condition might frustrate the whole—(Nov. 1766: C i. 279)

Burke can hardly have expected to be offered a position on these terms. What induced him to take such a stand was the prospect of financial independence which Will’s share in Verney’s East India speculations held out. Though this proved a mirage, for the moment it enabled Burke to indulge his temperamental preference for the lofty and disinterested gesture. The main business of the session was to be the regulation of the East India Company.71 By a parliamentary charter (first granted in 1600, and requiring periodic renewal) the company enjoyed a legal monopoly of trade between Britain and the Far East. Between 1689 and 1709 two rival companies had operated. Their merger inaugurated a period of unspectacular prosperity. East India stock, paying a regular dividend of 6 per cent, and nearly as secure as bank or government loan stock, provided a convenient and popular investment. Its market price became a leading economic indicator. This quiet period ended about 1757, when the company’s importance CJ xxxi: 4; Conway to the king, 11 Nov. 1766, Correspondence of King George the Third, i. 415–16. E.B.’s speech was not reported, and is known only from his letter to O’Hara of Nov. 1766 (C i. 278– 9). His most considered treatment of the subject is ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’ (1795: WS ix. 119–45). 71 E.B. spoke in at least twenty debates during this session, of which twelve were concerned with East India business (WS ii. 477–8). Few of his speeches were reported at length. 69 70

236 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 was greatly enhanced by events in India during and after the Seven Years War. Military successes against the French and their local allies had raised the company to a position of unprecedented power. This received formal recognition in 1765, when the Mogul emperor, nominal overlord of the subcontinent, bestowed on the company the diwani or revenue administration of Bengal. Now the effective ruler of an independent state larger than England, the company began the most controversial phase of its history.72 The revenue of Bengal was estimated at about £2 million a year, and wild notions were entertained that sums of this order would flow into the company’s coffers. Financially pressed by the greatly increased level of the national debt (the legacy of the Seven Years War), Chatham’s ministry turned to the company with the same expectations that Grenville had turned to America. Chatham wanted a parliamentary investigation of the company, leading to a substantial contribution from its coffers to the public purse. This ‘enquiry’ would have been a farce, since its conclusion was known in advance. Chatham pretended that Parliament was ‘where the question of right can alone be decided’, but prejudged the outcome by declaring in advance against the company.73 He meant to impose his own terms. Such a course was calculated to appeal to many MPs, alarmed at the influx of wealthy ‘nabobs’, company servants who returned from India with large personal fortunes which enabled them to buy their way into English society and politics. Robert Clive (1725–74), the victor of Plassey, was only the most prominent. Returning to England with a fortune reputed to be over £200,000, he rapidly acquired an Irish peerage, substantial landed property, and political influence.74 Chatham’s confrontational tactics were not universally approved. Two Cabinet ministers, Townshend and Conway, favoured a more conciliatory approach. Rockingham’s followers opposed the enquiry as an unwarranted invasion of chartered property rights. Since respect for such rights was a popular topic in the eighteenth century, the issue promised to attract independent support. Townshend’s motives in opposing the enquiry (though not Conway’s) were suspect. He speculated in East India stock. Of course, many MPs owned stock, and the line between legitimate investment and speculation was not always easy to draw.75 Though Burke was not a 72 Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952), 138– 76; H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773 (Cambridge, 1991). 73 Chatham to Grafton, 10 Jan. 1767, in Grafton, Autobiography, 112. Philip Lawson, ‘Parliament and the First East India Enquiry, 1767’, Parliamentary History, 1 (1982), 99–114; Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 48–66. 74 Dread of their power increased after the 1768 election, which saw the first large influx of nabobs into Parliament; Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790 (London, 1964), i. 150–6. 75 Huw V. Bowen, ‘ “Dipped in the Traffic”: East India Stockholders in the House of Commons, 1768–1774’, Parliamentary History, 5 (1986), 39–53.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 237 shareholder in the company, he stood to benefit from Will’s share in Verney’s large-scale speculations. These dealings are shrouded in some obscurity. In the summer of 1766, not content with having brought both Burkes into Parliament, Verney embarked on a scheme that (if successful) would have made them financially independent. The plan was to speculate in East India stock, which was expected to rise in value.76 Who originated the idea is uncertain. In October 1766, while Edmund was still in Ireland, Will described the project to Charles O’Hara: our fortunes are in a condition to second our views of Independency . . . in this we have no division of our Obligations, all this, Like as the all before we owe to Lord Verneys wonderful goodness and friendship; in one word the necessary rise of value of East India stock was foreseen, before the price rose or an increased dividend was talked of, but . . . no one could with safety venture on buying with safety but those who could actually pay down their money . . . This Lord Verny could you know easily do . . . he considered this as an oportunity of making us independent, and actually paid down of his own above £9000 and engaged for above forty more for me. . . . I may within compass say that I have made £12000 at least. It would be idle to use words to express what we owe to this Mans disinterested unaffected worth and goodness to us. (C i. 269–70)

This letter confirms the Burkes’ ‘common purse’.77 They aimed at ‘independency’, though by a circuitous route that proved delusive. Verney had not, as Will’s letter implies, bought £49,000 of stock with a view to selling when the price rose. He was speculating in ‘differences’ (margins). The £12,000 that Will ‘made’ in the transaction described would have bought a modest estate or provided a secure annual income of about £400. Instead of realizing this substantial gain, Will and Verney plunged into even largerscale and riskier speculations. When the market crashed in 1769, they were left with massive debts. Burke’s involvement was indirect. Although he was not a partner in the speculations, the ‘common purse’ effectively saddled him with responsibility for Will and his debts. Burke’s motives in opposing ministerial interference in the affairs of the East India Company were thus mixed. Important principles were at stake, but so was Will’s paper fortune. Burke’s opposition to the Dividend Bill, in particular, shows him at his worst, magniloquently endowing disreputable stock-market speculators with sacred property rights. On 6 May 1767, the Court of Proprietors voted (against the advice of the directors) to raise the 76 Lucy S. Sutherland and John A. Woods, ‘The East India Speculations of William Burke’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, 11 (1966), 183– 216. 77 ‘They have long made one common purse’; Elizabeth Vesey to Elizabeth Montagu, 28 May 1777, in Mrs Montagu, ‘Queen of the Blues’, Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800, ed. Reginald Blunt (London, 1923), ii. 23. The Veseys had known the Burkes since the 1750s.

238 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 1 dividend to 12 –2 per cent, patently in excess of what the company’s situation justified. The increase was intended to maintain the price of the company’s stock for the benefit of speculators. Its irresponsibility demonstrated the need for closer government regulation. Although in theory a private trading company operating under a royal charter, there were limits beyond which this legal fiction could not be pressed. The Dividend Bill imposed a temporary moratorium on any increase in the company’s dividend. Such a salutary and indeed necessary measure was widely approved. Burke was not deterred from opposing it, straining even hyperbole to magnify its wickedness. ‘You are going’, he warned, ‘to restrict by a positive arbitrary Regulation the enjoyment of the profits which should be made in Commerce. I suppose there is nothing like this to be found in the Code of Laws in any Civilised Country upon Earth—you are going to cancel the great line which distinguishes free Government.’ In this alarmist rant, Burke exaggerated a modest degree of government regulation into a breach of ‘what distinguishd Law and Freedom from Violence and Slavery’ (26 May 1767: WS ii. 65). Few can have been convinced by such wild overstatements. If Burke thought that he was defending chartered property rights, he deceived himself. The pressure to raise the dividend came from speculators, not from genuine proprietors. Such dealing was as old as the stock market itself, and had always been regarded with distaste. Contemporaries made a firm distinction between bona fide investment and the stockjobbing in which Verney and Will engaged.78 Burke was oddly obtuse not to be aware of this. The episode shows his extraordinary powers of self-deception where his friends and relatives were concerned. Two years later, in his Observations on a Late State of the Nation, he wrote a highly biased account of the episode, portraying the proposed enquiry as a sinister plot on the part of the ‘king’s friends’ (WS ii. 171–4). Few ministries were inaugurated with higher hopes or more sanguine expectations than Chatham’s. The mere presence of the Great Man, the national saviour of the Seven Years War, was expected to work wonders. The reality was more prosaic. In his attempt to extirpate party, Chatham put together what Burke in his Speech on American Taxation (1774) would ridicule as a ‘checkered and speckled’ administration, ‘a tesselated pavement without cement’ (WS ii. 450). Within months the mosaic began to disintegrate. Chatham had always cultivated an aloof, distant style, affecting reserve and inaccessibility. Now he became wholly incapable of attending to business. Prostrated by a mysterious malady, and withdrawing into complete seclusion, he would neither see his colleagues, nor write to them, not even to tell them what to do. For months he would not even communicate with the men left by default in charge of the government. The nature of his 78

Sutherland and Woods, ‘East India Speculations’, 191.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 239 incapacity mystified contemporaries, and remains ill understood. Opinions ranged from madness to malingering. In a debate on the East India enquiry on 9 December 1766, Burke ridiculed Chatham’s seclusion: After pointing out the ill effects which so violent a measure might have on the public credit,—‘But perhaps,’ said he, ‘this house is not the place where our reasons can be of any avail: the great person who is to determine on this question may be a being far above our view; one so immeasurably high, that the greatest abilities (pointing to Mr Townshend), or the most amiable dispositions that are to be found in this house (pointing to Mr Conway), may not gain access to him; a being before whom “thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers (waving his hand all this time over the treasury-bench, which he sat behind), all veil their faces with their wings:” but though our arguments may not reach him, probably our prayers may!’ He then apostrophised into a solemn prayer to the Great Minister above, that rules and governs over all, to have mercy upon us, and not to destroy the work of his own hands; to have mercy on the public credit, of which he had made so free and large a use. ‘Doom not to perdition that vast public debt, a mass seventy millions of which thou hast employed in rearing a pedestal for thy own statue.’79

This flow of wit was unluckily interrupted by a call to order. The ridicule enforced a serious point. Thoroughly convinced of the absurdity of Chatham’s slogan ‘measures, not men’, Burke believed that the selection of good men was vital for the public service. Moral qualities and good intentions were more important than the unique, transcendent abilities Chatham was supposed to possess. Burke agreed with the Lilliputians that ‘Providence never intended to make the Management of publick Affairs a Mystery, to be comprehended only by a few Persons of sublime Genius, of which there seldom are three born in an Age.’80 Chatham was in his own conceit such a ‘sublime Genius’. Burke preferred the well-meaning mediocrity of men like Rockingham and Dowdeswell. The speech of 9 December was a premeditated set piece. Burke could be just as effective when speaking extempore. About this time, Lord George Sackville (1716–85; later Germain), who had sat in the Commons since 1741, described Burke as ‘the most ingenious debater I ever heard, and at least as strong in the reply as in the opening’.81 A striking example of his inventiveness and readiness in reply is an unrehearsed exchange between himself and Conway in the debate on the Navy estimates on 10 February 1767: 79 Sir Matthew Fetherstonehaugh to Lord Clive, 30 Dec. 1766, in Chatham, Correspondence, iii. 145 n.–146 n. The allusions are to Paradise Lost, v. 601, 772, and x. 460 (the roll-call of the angels, itself alluding to Col. 1: 16); and iii. 382 (where the angels veil their eyes). Horace Walpole confirms the substance of the report; Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (London, 1894), ii. 288–9. E.B. sent O’Hara a brief account (23 Dec.: C i. 286). 80 Gulliver’s Travels, i. vi, in Prose Writings, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1939–68), xi. 59. 81 To General Irwin, 2 Mar. 1767, HMC Stopford-Sackville, 26.

240


Bourke yesterday gave the great man [Chatham] a dressing . . . he happend to mention some things a little reflecting on some others of rather too tame submission—in the Course happend to compare the state to a building—The only Great man [minister] who chose to say any thing [Conway] . . . amongst other very ingenious thoughts took up the simile of the building & told B[urke] he rememberd him a pillar of that state but B[urke] had the best of the battle, on explanation pursuing the architecture compared himself in humble wise to rubbish w[hi]ch if thrown properly into the foundation however insignificant in itself might have some small share in supporting even the most sumptuous superstructure—that he rememberd C[onway] not a pillar of the state but such a one as revived the Idea of the most polished Column of Grecian & should be unhappy to find such Columns reduced to the situation of the reverend remains found in the East without Entabliture frise or Cornish & its Ancient beautiful Capitall coverd with the Turban of a Basha [Chatham] or its foundation in danger of being undermind by Mahometan ignorance of such valuable beauties[.]82

This passage illustrates Burke’s ability to convert a well-worn metaphor into an expressive vehicle for his own ideas. The idea of the State as a building was a commonplace.83 Burke invigorates it through the image of the classical ruin, familiar to his contemporaries either directly from the Grand Tour or through books of engravings. Palmyra, renowned for its lavish displays of Corinthian columns, an oasis of Greek civilization destroyed by Turkish barbarity, may have been Burke’s particular inspiration.84 Such a scene could inspire various sentiments. Burke uses it to express his aristocratic ideal. His apparent self-abasement before mediocre aristocrats like Conway, his image of himself as ‘rubbish’ good only to fill in a foundation, is apt to grate on modern ears. Such deference was in part real, in part assumed. At times it masked his natural aggressiveness, at others it expressed criticism in disguise. Burke’s praise of aristocracy is often exhortation rather than description, what Francis Bacon in his essay ‘Of Praise’ calls ‘Laudando praecipere; When by telling Men, what they are, they represent to them, what they should be’. In this case the polished compliment covers a damning indictment. Burke reproves Conway for his failure to live up to the responsibilities of being a column in the temple of State, for weakly demeaning himself before Chatham’s personal despotism. Burke followed Montesquieu in believing that despotism was inimical to John Hewett to Sir George Savile, 11 Feb. 1767, Nottinghamshire Archives Office, Savile of Rufford Archives, DDSR/221/100. Hewett (c.1721–87) was no impressionable newcomer, having sat in the Commons since 1747. 83 Notable examples include Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), lines 801–6; and Swift, A Project for the Advancement of Religion (1709), in Prose Writings, ii. 63. Paul Fussell speculates that ‘the general conservative sensibility tends to express its moral and artistic ideas through motifs of architecture’; The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford, 1965), 174–5. 84 Palmyra was familiar from the engravings in Robert Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart (London, 1753); no. 659 in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue. 82

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 241 aristocracy. Montesquieu had cited Turkey as a prime example of a despotic state in which no aristocratic class could flourish.85 Burke’s architectural metaphor has a further interest. A system of government, like a building, is a contrivance of human wisdom, consciously planned and executed by design. The use of classical architecture, the embodiment of order and balance, reinforces this aspect of the image. The image of Conway as a forlorn column was possibly the first of the memorable architectural metaphors that are scattered through Burke’s writings and speeches.86 On other occasions Burke describes the State as an organism. The apparent inconsistency is no more than a rhetorical choice. Burke’s metaphors were intended to persuade, not designed to express a political theory. Chatham’s abdication forced the king to attempt yet another strengthening or reconstruction of his ministry. The ensuing negotiations (begun soon after the long session ended on 2 July 1767) were complex and tortuous. Burke followed them closely and attended some party meetings.87 From Dublin, John Hely Hutchinson, ever alert for the main chance, sent Burke a letter that began: ‘Are you yet able to make an irish Chancellor?’88 Burke was not, nor would he ever be. Though the negotiations failed, they had important consequences beyond keeping Rockingham and his followers in opposition. They revealed a split within the party about the terms on which it should accept office. Dowdeswell was convinced that Rockingham had been right to reject the terms offered. He drew up a memorandum that anticipates many of the themes of Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. He calls for a ministry strong enough to be able to resist the court, and uncompromisingly hostile to the so-called ‘king’s friends’. While paying lip-service to the ideal of a ‘comprehensive’ ministry, he argues for one in practice dominated by party. Men, he stresses, are more important than measures.89 Dowdeswell represented only one shade of opinion within the party. Others were more concerned with the loaves and fishes, or (in Burke’s tactful phrasing) ‘not without a strong feeling of the inconveniencies attending a protracted opposition from the craving demands of friends and dependents; who will very little enter into the motives L’Esprit des lois, ii. iv. E.B. makes a similar point in the Thoughts (WS ii. 259–60). The earliest example cited in Fussell’s discussion of E.B.’s architectural imagery (Rhetorical World, 202–10) is from the Speech on American Taxation (1774). 87 E.B. to Rockingham, 16 July 1767 (C i. 315–16); Portland to Newcastle, 8 July 1767, BL Add. MS 32983, fos. 149–50. On 8 July, E.B. was the most junior of the eight present, and the only ‘mere Mr’. The fullest account is Brooke, Chatham Administration, 162–217. 88 Hely Hutchinson to E.B., 28 July 1767, NRO A. viii. 18. 89 ‘Thoughts on the Present State of Publick Affairs and the Propriety of our Accepting or Declining Administration’ (23–4 July 1767), WWM R1/842, in M. Francis de Sales Boran, ‘William Dowdeswell’s “Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs [etc.]” ’, in Gaetano L. Vincitorio (ed.), Crisis in the ‘Great Republic’: Essays Presented to Ross J. S. Hoffman (New York, 1969), 1–13. 85 86

242 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 to a conduct, which stands between them and all their wants and expectations’. Even the Duke of Richmond (1735–1806), a loyal supporter, was apprehensive, so Burke told Rockingham, that ‘the Corps, which will neither unite with the other Squadrons in opposition, nor accept the offers made by administration must in the nature of things be dissolved very speedily, and perhaps not very reputably’ (18 Aug. 1767: C i. 320–1).90 For once, ‘the nature of things’ proved an unreliable guide to human motivation. Richmond underestimated the number of those who, like Dowdeswell and Burke, preferred righteousness even in the wilderness to gratifying their ‘wants and expectations’. The failure of the negotiations of July 1767, rather than the dismissal of Rockingham a year earlier, closed off Burke’s avenue to a career as a placeman. Henceforth he was committed to Rockingham and a long course of opposition.

4 In mid-November 1767, Burke took a house in Charles Street (now Charles II Street), off St James’s Square (C i. 335).91 The move was both practical and symbolic. Charles Street (Plate 4) was closer to Parliament than Marylebone.92 For the first time, the Burkes had their own establishment. Dr Nugent remained in their old house in Queen Anne Street. The move was not particularly extravagant, since Burke rented the house, furnished, only for the season (ii. 8). The size and cost of the house can be inferred from a report made to Sir William Lee (1726–99), a Buckinghamshire gentleman, by his house-hunter in 1765. The agent described ‘a good House’ in Charles Street, with ‘a good fore Parlour and back Parlour, a House Keepers Room behind the Hall’. Lately vacated by an Irish bishop who paid £200 a year, the asking price was £7 17s. 6d. a week for a fivemonth lease.93 The Burkes’ house was probably similar: narrow-fronted, with two good rooms on each floor and a third, smaller one at the back suitable for a study or dressing-room. In Charles Street, the Burkes had ‘a good deal more elbow room’; the house on Queen Anne Street seemed a mere ‘tenement’ in comparison.94 90 Richmond expressed his criticisms more tartly in a letter to Rockingham, 4 Oct. 1767 (WWM R1/ 863), in Earl of Albemarle, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and his Contemporaries (London, 1852), ii. 59–63. 91 The precise house E.B. occupied cannot be determined, as his name does not appear in the rate books during this period of residence. In 1780, he occupied a house rated at £50; in 1767, too, he probably lived at the expensive end (west of St Alban’s Street), where houses were rated between £22 and £90, rather than at the east end, where the range was £8 to £23. Information from rate books, City of Westminster Archives. 92 E.B. returned to Charles Street, probably taking the same house, for the winter of 1768–9. 93 George Marshall to Sir William Lee, 31 Dec. 1765, Buckinghamshire Record Office, D/LE/D7/ 29. 94 Nugent to O’Hara, 26 Nov. 1767, National Library of Ireland, MS 16886, no. 38.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 243 The new session opened on 24 November, with Burke comfortably ensconced in Charles Street. A second indication of his enhanced standing is that his speech in the opening debate was reported at length, his first to be so distinguished.95 This speech is remarkable chiefly as an illustration of Burke’s ability to make a little matter go a long way. The king’s speech from the throne was bland, offering little scope for attack. Nevertheless, Dowdeswell moved the usual opposition amendment, on this occasion hardly more than a ritual gesture. Without much of substance to work on, Burke could only castigate the government for whatever they had done or left undone (WS ii. 68–73). One passage, however, stands out: an attack on General Conway, now an arch-fiend in Burke’s demonology. A poor harvest had driven up the price of food. Local shortages, though less severe than in 1766, were enough to provoke widespread unrest and even rioting. Defending ministerial inaction, Conway made the lame excuse that Charles Townshend (who had died suddenly and unexpectedly on 4 September) had ‘engaged himself to prepare a plan to be submitted to Parliament, for the effectual relief of the poor in the article of provisions’, but that the great scheme had died with him.96 Burke was withering about Townshend’s wonderful project.97 Later in the debate, an assault by George Grenville on the Rockingham party’s American policy brought Burke, angry and agitated, to his feet for a second time. A friend, he confessed to O’Hara, had to restrain him from speaking without consulting ‘the heads of the party’. The incident illustrates not only Burke’s impulsiveness, but also his readiness in debate. Few members could rise to deliver an extempore fighting speech. Burke took his postponed revenge on Grenville the following day. After a solemn party conclave, ‘we went down to the house, and in our Turn, in the strongest Terms, renounced him [Grenville] and all his Works’ (27 Nov. 1767: C i. 336). The echo of the phrase from the Anglican baptismal service (in which the godparents on the child’s behalf promise to ‘renounce the devil and all his works’) is typical of Burke’s demonization of opponents. Loyal and devoted friendship, or bitter, implacable enmity: those were his modes. Indifference, or an amicable agreement to differ, was not in his nature. Burke did not care that the display of such open disunity within the opposition was ‘to the great Triumph of the Ministry’ (336). More important was the satisfaction of belonging to the small and exclusive company of 95 An abbreviated version appeared in the Public Advertiser on 5 Dec. 1767, a fuller one in the Political Register, 2 (1768), 259–64 (PH xvi. 386–92). According to Horace Walpole, this speech received ‘great and deserved applause’ (Memoirs of George III, iii. 81). 96 Political Register, 2 (1768), 259 (PH xvi. 386). 97 Townshend had given the problem some thought. Among his surviving papers are (1) a detailed proposal dated Apr. 1766, which includes the novel idea of a bounty on imports of corn; and (2) the titles of two parliamentary bills intended to regulate the internal and external trade in grain, with draft preambles but no details of the measures proposed (William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Charles Townshend Papers, 8/14/34, 8/26/2–3).

244 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 the virtuous, the disinterested, and the right-thinking: the Rockingham party. Burke soon had more substantial material to work on than the barren topics canvassed in the debate on the address. After the Christmas recess a new and promising issue surfaced. The ‘Nullum Tempus’ controversy proved an ideal topic for the Rockingham party: a constitutional question on which to rally independent opinion; a question of landed property rights, dear to the hearts of the gentlemen of the House of Commons; while as a bonus, the enemy was the son-in-law of the hated Bute. These features of the controversy allowed Burke to transform partisan rivalries and personal conflicts into public questions of great moment. The background to the case involved complex legal questions. Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705; Charles II’s queen) had been granted for life certain Crown lands in Cumberland. In 1696, William III gave the reversion of these to one of his Dutch favourites, Willem Bentinck, first Earl of Portland (1649–1709). Portland took possession on the death of the dowager queen in 1705. By 1768, they had passed to his descendant, the third Duke of Portland (1738– 1809). At issue in 1768 was whether the ‘Honour’ (royal manor) of Penrith ‘and its appurtenances’ included part or all of Inglewood Forest, the socage manor of Carlisle, and the lordship of the castle of Carlisle. The Portland family had enjoyed possession of these since 1705, though they were not mentioned in King William’s grant.98 In 1767, this omission was discovered by Sir James Lowther (1736–1802).99 The importance of these lordships was electoral. In county elections, all freeholders with property of an annual value of forty shillings or more could vote. Inflation had greatly eroded the value of this qualification, unchanged since 1430. Numerous small freeholders rented additional land from magnates such as Portland and Lowther. By convention, tenants were expected to bestow one of their votes to the candidate recommended by their landlord. (Each county returned two members, so each freeholder had two votes.) Their second vote was usually left at their own disposal. If the lands in question were transferred from Portland to Lowther, three or four hundred freeholders would become his tenants and therefore subject to his influence. Lowther secured a grant to himself of the lands and rights which (he alleged) Portland had misappropriated. Such a grant, conditional on Lowther establishing the validity of his claim in the courts, was normal practice. The case took its name from the legal maxim nullum tempus occurrit regi, ‘time does not run against (and therefore bar the claims of) the Crown’. 98 R. B. Levis, ‘Sir James Lowther and the Political Tactics of the Cumberland Election of 1768’, Northern History, 19 (1983), 108–27. 99 Sir James Lowther of Maulds Meaburn, later (1784) first Earl of Lonsdale. A distant relative, he had inherited the estates of his miserly namesake satirized by E.B. in ‘An Epistle to Sir James Lowther’; Note-Book, 49–52.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 245 Against Lowther, Portland could have pleaded prescription and long possession as a bar to an action for recovery. This plea could not be entered against a claim of the Crown. Whatever the legal niceties of the case, an apparent attack on the sacred rights of property was likely to arouse strong feelings in a House of Commons dominated by the landed interest. Many families held land that had once belonged to the Crown. If long possession was no defence, the prospect of vexatious litigation, if not actual loss of property, became genuinely alarming. For once, Burke’s arguments from remote consequences struck a responsive chord in his audience’s imagination.100 Lowther was, personally, one of the most obnoxious men of the age. In addition, he was the son-in-law of the hated Earl of Bute. Any odious action of his could therefore be plausibly presented as a tentacle of the ‘system of favouritism’ for which Bute was held responsible. Though the eighteenth century was an age of deference, freeholders were not retainers. Landlords who wanted the votes of their tenants needed to treat them with a degree of tact and graciousness. To maintain their interest and influence, they were expected to be generous and understanding landlords, and to pump money into the local economy: to provide or subsidize local amenities; to distribute regular charity; and at election times, to supply unlimited quantities of free food and drink. Voters were taken to the poll at the candidates’ expense, and innumerable petty douceurs were distributed.101 Incapable of acting such a part, Lowther relied instead on bullying and strong-arm tactics. In addition, he tried to control both county seats, not just one, in ‘his’ two counties, Cumberland and Westmorland. Lowther was the type who brought the power of property into disrepute.102 The Nullum Tempus Bill was introduced by Sir George Savile, the wealthy and respected member for the county of Yorkshire. The narrow margin by which his bill was lost (114 to 134) shows how strongly the issue appealed to the independent country gentlemen.103 Burke supported it with all his energy. Besides his efforts in the Commons, in order to gain support ‘out of doors’ for the measure, he wrote three letters for publication in the press.104 Burke’s speeches and letters on the Nullum Tempus Bill illustrate 100 Paul Lucas, ‘On Edmund Burke’s Doctrine of Prescription; or, An Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers’, Historical Journal, 11 (1968), 35–63, while mainly concerned with E.B.’s later writings, refers briefly to the Nullum Tempus case. 101 O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties, 225–44. 102 The most vivid account of Lowther in action is James Boswell’s record of the indignities and humiliations Lonsdale (as he had become) inflicted on him in 1787–8; Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785–1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1986), 161–85. 103 17 Feb. 1768; E.B. describes the debate in a letter to O’Hara, 20 Feb. (C i. 344–5). A similar bill passed into law in 1769, but was not retrospective. The struggle between Lowther and Portland dragged through the courts for several years, until in 1776 Portland finally established his claims; A. S. Turberville, A History of Welbeck Abbey and its Owners (London, 1938–9), ii. 101–35; and Brian Bonsall, Sir James Lowther and Cumberland and Westmorland Elections, 1754–1775 (Manchester, 1960). 104 Two letters to the Public Advertiser (24 Feb. and 4 Mar.) are reprinted in WS ii. 75–83. A third

246 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 his mastery of rhetorical argument. He dwells on the strong points of his case, playing on the fears and uncertainties of his audience. Unable to say much to counter the legal arguments of his antagonists, for Lowther had a good legal case, he grounds his argument instead on natural equity: what the law ought to be, not what it is. While he deploys different arguments for different audiences, speeches and letters alike are characterized by typical Burkean strategies: generalization, exaggeration, and the drawing out of remote causes and consequences; high-minded appeals to principle concealing personal partisanship; and a bold use of metaphor. A powerful argument to use in the Commons, where a majority of members were landowners who sought to exercise a degree of political influence over their tenants, was that tenants will not know how to vote if they do not know who their real landlord is. This part of the speech expounds what Burke saw as the natural operation of the electoral system: when the Freeholder comes to vote for that family interest, under which he has lived time out of memory & under wch he & his family have been cherished for Generations up starts an informer with his Patent in his Pocket . . . vote from your natural connection at your peril; here I come armd with the rights of the Crown to drive you & your Landlord from your possessions; look before you; & vote from your fear & not your Gratitude; Here are all the sacred Bands that hold the Nation together broken in a moment, & another inexhaustible source of influence opend to the Crown[.] Terrors held over perhaps half the Landed property of the Kingdom.105

In his letters to the press, Burke naturally used more populist arguments. In the third letter, for example, he raised the spectre of infinitely complex legal proceedings affecting the most ‘innocent and simple Souls’. All three letters are alarmist. The principle of ‘nullum tempus’ is said to threaten ‘a shock to the whole landed property of england’; and the Surveyor-General is credited with despotic, inquisitorial powers (WS ii. 78, 81–2). The fertility of Burke’s imagination makes his office ‘a dark Cavern in which materials ferment to explode at some unlookd for hour to shake the firmness of your Landed property & to burn the Battlements of your proudest Castles to the ground’.106 In a characteristic move, Burke enlists the poor as allies of the rich by arguing that all property stands on the same security. Portland’s vast estate, and the right of the poor widow to gather firewood, stand or fall together. Both depend on ‘no other Title, than antient undisturbed possession of letter, not published in 1768, is there printed from E.B.’s draft (83–6). David Hartley, Jr., who acted as Portland’s chef de propagande, arranged for separate reprints of the first two letters, to be sent to Carlisle for local distribution, and planned also to reprint the third; Hartley to Portland, 9 Mar. 1768 (NUL PwF/4845). 105 WWM BkP 11/1; a draft for E.B.’s main speech, on 17 Feb. 1768. 106 WWM BkP 11/15.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 247 their forefathers’ (WS ii. 85). A firm believer in the social utility of prescription, Burke would always argue that, however property originated (and he conceded that its origin was commonly usurpation), to respect prescriptive rights was in the universal interest of mankind, of the poor as well as of the rich. ‘If prescription be once shaken,’ he argues in the Reflections, ‘no species of property is secure.’ In England, ‘the tenant-right of a cabbagegarden, a year’s interest in a hovel, the good-will of an alehouse, or a baker’s shop, the very shadow of a constructive property’ are treated, and rightly treated, with more respect than the National Assembly in France accorded to the vast and ancient estates of the Church (viii. 200–1). Thus the interests of the rich and the poor, truly understood, are not opposed but inseparable. When the old Parliament was dissolved on 11 March 1768, the Nullum Tempus dispute did not become a national issue. Nor had the imposition of the Townshend duties, the last important Act of the old Parliament, yet provoked much reaction, either at home or in the colonies. Though more constituencies were contested than in the previous election, local rivalries predominated. The election did not greatly affect the balance of forces in the Commons. The Rockingham party emerged with a nucleus of about forty members and a dozen or so fellow-travellers.107 Burke was one of the first to be re-elected. The householders of Wendover reaffirmed their confidence in him on 17 March.108 Will Burke was again returned for Great Bedwyn. In historical significance, one contest in the 1768 election eclipsed all others. John Wilkes returned from his sojourn in Paris in order to seize the chance of standing for Parliament. Though he failed in the city of London, he headed the poll in the county of Middlesex. Alone of the county constituencies, Middlesex was not dominated by the landed interest. Though large tracts of the county were still rural, it was dominated by London. Middlesex had one of the most numerous electorates. It was therefore promising territory for a radical demagogue. As an outlaw, Wilkes was ineligible to stand. His candidacy became a cause célèbre, provoking demonstrations and riots more serious than the usual orgies of drunkenness that marked elections in the larger constituencies. When the validity of his 107 Frank O’Gorman counts 38 members and 19 independent supporters; The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975), 227. 108 Some mystery surrounds the election, against Verney’s nominee, of the second member for Wendover: Sir Robert Darling (d. 1770), a wealthy city merchant and government contractor. T. H. B. Oldfield gave a circumstantial account of Darling’s election, naming the ringleader of the anti-Verney faction as ‘Mr Atkins, a considerable lace-manufacturer’ of Wendover; An Entire and Complete History, Political and Personal, of the Boroughs of Great Britain (London, 1792; published anonymously), i. 40– 1. Though no contemporary account of the election is known, E.B.’s letter of 9 Aug. 1770 confirms the main point: ‘The other day we lost my Collegue . . . or rather acquired an opportunity of regaining the Borough; which Lord Verney formerly lost by our own egregious neglects’ (C ii. 148).

248 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 election was challenged, for two or three years Wilkes contrived to keep himself at the centre of political debate and agitation. Two new members of the Parliament elected in 1768 deserve mention. Both kept parliamentary diaries that provide the first adequate records of Burke as a speaker. For the next six years Henry Cavendish (1732–1804) made a heroic effort to record all important debates in shorthand. His reports provide a valuable source for Burke’s speeches, though sometimes only tantalizing fragments can be recovered from his over-ambitious attempt to record speeches verbatim. Matthew Brickdale (1735–1831), member for Bristol, attempted no more than a précis or synopsis of the main arguments of a speech. His reports are accordingly more coherent, though they rarely preserve the flashes of wit or metaphor that shine out from Cavendish’s record.109 The new Parliament met for only a brief session (10 May to 21 June) before the summer prorogation. The main subject of controversy was the popular disturbances which had accompanied the election of Wilkes. The worst incident was the so-called Massacre of St George’s Fields (10 May), when the troops were called in and opened fire, killing several people. For three years, Burke pressed unsuccessfully for a proper enquiry into the incident.110 More immediately, he worked the episode into his general analysis of the ills of the day. On 13 May, the Commons debated an address to the king, thanking him for his proclamation against the recent riots and promising to uphold it. Burke spoke twice. In his main speech, he urged the need for a deeper inquiry into the causes of the riots, which he attributed to the decay of subordination. No society could function properly, he argued, with ‘all the middle parts being gone between the Sovereign, & the Mob’.111 When Conway ventured to add the prevalence of faction as one of the evils of the day, Burke rejoined with a defence of government by party as ‘an isthmus between arbitrary power, and anarchy’. Only a ministry composed of ‘those who have an unanimity, & connexion with one another’ could give the country the government it deserved.112 This speech is a link in the chain that leads from Burke’s attacks on Chatham as dictator in 1766–7 to the elaborate defences of party expounded in his Observations on a Late State of the Nation and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. 109 Cavendish’s diaries, together with a contemporary longhand transcript, are now BL Egerton MSS 215–63, 263*, 3711. Selections, edited by John Wright, were published in 1839 and 1841–3. Brickdale’s notebooks are now on deposit in the Bristol University Library. The American debates from both diaries have been printed in PDNA. For other debates, quotations and citations from Cavendish are from the longhand transcripts; from Brickdale, from the original notebooks. 110 George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962), 37–56. E.B.’s main speeches on the subject were delivered on 23 Nov. 1768 (BL Egerton MS 215, fos. 228–9); 8 Mar. 1769 (WS ii. 223–8); and 25 Apr. 1771 (Egerton MS 230, fos. 143–64). 111 BL Egerton MS 215, fo. 41. In his ‘History of England’, E.B. twice links a period of national weakness to the decline of the nobility (WS i. 384, 427). 112 BL Egerton MS 215, fo. 43 (Conway); fos. 43–4 (E.B.).


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5 ‘A man who has not been in Italy’, Samuel Johnson confessed, ‘is always conscious of an inferiority . . . The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.’113 The Burkes agreed. They had already sent James Barry to study in Rome at their expense. In April 1768, they planned to join him there as part of an Italian tour. Travelling was expensive in the eighteenth century, at least as English gentlemen travelled. The confidence to undertake such a trip was probably based on Will’s delusive East India fortune. Neither Burke nor Johnson was destined to achieve the ‘grand object of travelling’. Johnson was disappointed when the Thrales abandoned their journey to Italy on the death of their son. In Burke’s case, the project was superseded by an even more ambitious enterprise. ‘I have made a push’, he told Shackleton, ‘with all I could collect of my own, and the aid of my friends to cast a little root in this Country. I have purchased an house, with an Estate of about 600 acres of Land in Buckinghamshire 24 Miles from London; where I now am; It is a place exceedingly pleasant; and I propose, God willing, to become a farmer in good earnest’ (C i. 351). The purchase did more than provide Burke with a pleasant country retreat and the opportunity to experiment in farming, agreeable as such amenities were. A landed estate was a mark of social standing and (in theory at least) a guarantee of political integrity. Property, and especially landed property, legitimized power. The Parliamentary Qualification Act of 1711 (9 Anne, c. 5) required MPs to swear to the possession of an unencumbered freehold estate worth £600 a year in the case of a county member, or £300 a year for a borough member. Jonathan Swift, a firm believer in landed property as the safest basis for political power, welcomed this Act as ‘perhaps the greatest Security that ever was contrived for preserving the Constitution’.114 Swift did not foresee the ease with which the law would be circumvented by fictitious legal qualifications.115 Members were required to swear to their qualification and to deposit with the clerk a signed statement describing the property. There were a few exceptions, none of which applied to Burke. Nor, since land in Ireland did not qualify, could he have used his Clogher estate. In 1765 and 1768, Verney probably provided Burke with the fictitious property qualification he needed.116 Though such evasion was tolerated in practice, the 113 Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), iii. 36 (11 Apr. 1776). 114 Swift, Examiner, no. 44 (7 June 1711); also no. 34 (29 Mar. 1711); in Prose Writings, iii. 169, 119; Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), 288–95. 115 Various measures were enacted to prevent evasion, the most recent in 1760 (33 George II, c.20); Helen E. Witmer, The Property Qualifications of Members of Parliament (New York, 1943), 80–91. 116 Because E.B.’s estate was encumbered, Verney continued to provide part of E.B.’s qualification even after the purchase of Gregories. One of the certificates subscribed by E.B. (undated, but perhaps

250 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 theory behind the Act enshrined one of the most prevalent ideas in eighteenth-century politics. Legislators should be men whose landed property gave them a real stake in the country. Burke’s deficiency in this respect was marked even by those who admired his talents. ‘An Irishman, one Mr Burke,’ reported a sympathetic observer, ‘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.’117 Such dignity could not be attained overnight. The acquisition of a small estate was the necessary foundation on which later generations could build. The purchase of a country estate was therefore a natural aspiration for professional and business men. Indeed, so great was the demand for land for the purpose of acquiring ‘landed’ status that it often sold for more than its strictly economic value would justify. Typically, a merchant who made a fortune would not invest the whole proceeds in land. Instead, he would acquire an estate large enough to demonstrate his landed status, reserving the remainder of his capital for more profitable investment elsewhere. Burke’s estate at Beaconsfield was called Gregories, or Butler’s Court, after two of its earlier owners.118 Burke bought the property from William Lloyd (d. 1768), who had purchased it in 1757 for about £13,000. Improvident and debt-ridden, Lloyd had encumbered the estate with heavy mortgages. Negotiations for the sale to Burke had begun by November 1767, and were completed with unexpected rapidity in April 1768. In the middle of that month Burke still expected to visit Italy; by the end he was in possession of the property (C i. 349–51). He agreed to pay £20,000 for the estate, including Lloyd’s art collection (valued at £2,800). The estate itself was therefore valued at £17,200. Burke was buying at a time of high land prices. The capital value of land was usually reckoned by multiplying the annual rental, and quoted at so many years’ ‘purchase’. Between 1760 and 1779, land was commonly sold at twenty-nine years’ purchase, the highest point after the 1774 election), reads ‘The Lands Tenements & Hereditaments whereby I make out my Qualification to serve as a Burgess in the present Parliament do lie in the Parishes of Hogshaw, Steeple Claydon Biddlesden & Beaconsfield in the County of Bucks and I do declare my Estate in the same to be of the Annual Value of three hundred pounds above Reprizes’ (Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am. 1622[23]). E.B. never owned land in the first three parishes. 117 Charles Lee to Prince Czartoryski, 25 Dec. 1767, in The Lee Papers, i: 1754–1776, Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1871 (New York, 1872), 61. 118 E.B. relished the idea of owning what he thought had been the ‘seat’ of one of his favourite poets, Edmund Waller (C i. 351). The estate was owned by Wallers from 1624 to 1731, though only briefly (1624–7) by the poet, whose seat was nearby Hall Barn; Victoria History of the County of Buckingham, ed. William Page (London, 1905–28), iii. 161.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 251 119 it reached between 1660 and 1814. Burke himself valued the estate at about £500 a year.120 This is consistent with Lloyd’s purchase price of £13,000. In 1757, land had been selling at twenty-seven or twenty-eight years’ purchase, which would suggest an annual value around £470. Land had advanced in price by 1768, but not enough to justify a price of £17,200. Even at thirty years’ purchase, an estate valued at £500 a year should have cost no more than £15,000. In 1766, the admittedly tight-fisted George Grenville was prepared to offer only up to twenty-eight years’ purchase even for two small properties in his own neighbourhood.121 Burke paid 34.4 years’ purchase. This price was not necessarily extravagant. Burke was one of many for whom proximity to London was important. Estates in the home counties were accordingly more expensive than their rental value alone justified. Gregories was conveniently situated just off the main road from London to Oxford. London was within a few hours’ ride or drive. Buckinghamshire had the further attraction of being Verney’s county. Owning land in Buckinghamshire would legitimize Burke’s position as MP for Wendover, making him appear less like a carpet-bagger. His folly was not the inflated price he paid, but borrowing so heavily to finance it. Such a purchase was risky, and in the event it compromised the independence it was meant to assert. His personal resources (‘all I could collect of my own’) were negligible. Indeed, the entire purchase price was probably borrowed. In April 1768, he took possession of the estate, but without paying any cash down. Payment was conditional on Lloyd making out a good title, for which he was allowed a year. Then in June, Lloyd died, heavily in debt. His heir was a minor, and the agreement went to Chancery. Burke was accused of unwillingness to complete the purchase, which he denied. With the estate so encumbered, he may well have been cautious of paying any money to Lloyd’s executors until they had proved a clear title. The court ruled, on 14 February 1769, that the sale should proceed; that Burke should clear two outstanding mortgages amounting to £6,600; and that he should pay the balance of £13,366 2s. 6d. in trust to the court.122 Burke discharged these old mortgages immediately (on 20 and 21 February). The rapidity with which he paid off the mortgages (within days of the decree) suggests that he had the money in hand, or could raise it without 119 Christopher Clay, ‘The Price of Freehold Land in the Later Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review, 27 (1974), 173–89. Clay gives median figures for decennial averages: 29 for 1760–9, 29 –34 for 1765–74, and 29 for 1770–9 (174). 120 PRO C. 12/2132/21, Verney v. Burke, E.B.’s reply (26 Nov. 1783). 121 Grenville to Charles Lloyd, 10 July 1766, BL Add. MS 57818, fo. 72. 122 Dixon Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen: A Study of the Statesman’s Financial Integrity and Private Relationships, University of Colorado Studies, ser. b, Studies in the Humanities, vol. i, no. 1 (Boulder, Colo., 1939), 26–48. Some of the documents are abstracted in Dilke, Papers of a Critic, ii. 367– 70.

252 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 difficulty. That payment, however, exhausted his immediate resources. In November 1769, ten months after the decree, by which time the patience of the Lloyd trustees had been sorely tried, Burke still had £14,000 to find. Potential lenders were willing to advance no more than £10,000 on the estate. Burke therefore turned to other possible sources. He and Will had both inherited small claims on the estate of Sir Duke Gifford (d. 1798), an Irish landowner whose estates were heavily encumbered.123 On 28 August 1769, Edmund wrote to Charles O’Hara, asking him to borrow £1,000, or at least £700, on the strength of these claims (C ii. 58). Nothing came of this. To complete the purchase Burke borrowed £10,000 (the sum he had been assured of earlier) from Caroline Williams (later Armstrong) and £4,000 from Admiral Sir Charles Saunders. Since mortgage rates fluctuated about 1 per cent above the yield on government securities (about 3 –12 per cent at this time), Burke probably paid about 4 –21 per cent on these two mortgages. Williams had no other connection with Burke. Her loan, probably arranged through a mortgage broker, was a straightforward investment on her part.124 Saunders was an MP and a member of the Rockingham party. He was doing Burke a kindness in lending money on an estate already encumbered with a large mortgage. If land fell below twenty-eight years’ purchase, the sale of Gregories would barely liquidate mortgages of £14,000. The source of the initial payment of £6,600 remains unclear. In 1783, as part of a scheme to recover some of the mountain of debt allegedly owing to him, Verney sued Burke in Chancery for £6,000 that he paid on 14 March 1769 to the account of Joseph Hickey (c.1714–94; Burke’s attorney) at Drummond’s Bank.125 Will Burke had asked Verney for the money, which was to be used for the purchase of Gregories, on which it would be secured.126 Unbusinesslike as ever, Verney failed to obtain any record of the transaction. In 1783, Will Burke was in India. Verney therefore sought repayment from Edmund, though unable to prove his connection with the loan. Burke denied receiving the money. Admitting his need for £6,000 at that time, he claimed to have obtained it from ‘the voluntary Offer of another friend’ (unnamed).127 This ‘friend’ can only have been Will. If Will 123 E.B.’s father and brother Garrett appear to have loaned him money without realizing the extent to which his estate was already mortgaged. John Ridge to E.B., 28 Jan. 1772, in Ross J. S. Hoffman, Edmund Burke, New York Agent: with his Letters to the New York Assembly and Intimate Correspondence with Charles O’Hara, 1761–1776 (Philadelphia, 1956), 509–10. 124 She outlived E.B. Her will, dated 5 Nov. 1811, was proved on 15 Jan. 1812; PRO PROB.11/1529, 5–6. 125 The payment is confirmed by Drummond’s Customer Account Ledger, Messrs Drummond, Charing Cross, London. 126 Verney later claimed that the loan from Saunders was conditional ‘on Lord Verney’s consenting that the same sho[ul]d be secured upon the Gregories Estate prior to his £6,000’; untitled memorandum, n.d. (c.1788?), Verney Papers, Claydon House. If so, E.B. can hardly have been ignorant of the fact. 127 PRO C.12/2132/21, Verney v. Burke, E.B.’s reply.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 253 was in a position to advance £6,000, this was, as Edmund well knew, chiefly thanks to Verney. Yet Burke managed to convince himself that the £6,000 he borrowed was in some sense Will’s own. Incensed by Shackleton’s statement that he was comfortably off, thanks to his patrons, Burke denied that he had received any ‘advantage, except my Seat in Parliament, from the Patronage of any man; Whatever advantages I have had, have been from friends on my own Level’ (19 Apr. 1770: C ii. 131). Possibly Will borrowed the money from Verney while allowing Edmund to believe that it was his own, hoping that his East India speculations would soon enable him to repay it. Yet to suppose that, at the time of the Chancery suit in 1783, Burke was still not aware that the money had come from Verney strains credulity. Even if what he deposed was literally true, Burke can hardly be acquitted of having evaded his moral responsibility for a sum of money which had been put to his use.128 However he paid for it, Burke was now in possession of a splendid estate. For the son of an Irish attorney it was magnificent indeed. Landed estates in eighteenth-century England were distributed in a finely graded hierarchy. Burke firmly believed that this pyramidal structure contributed greatly to social stability and economic prosperity. ‘The security, as well as the solid wealth of every nation,’ the Burkes had declared in their Account of the European Settlements, ‘consists principally in the number of low and middling men of a free condition, and that beautiful gradation from the highest to the lowest, where the transitions all the way are almost imperceptible. To produce this ought to be the aim and mark of every well regulated commonwealth, and none has ever flourished upon other principles.’129 Estates came in every size and value. A few great landlords possessed rent-rolls in the tens of thousands of pounds; uncounted small freeholders farmed their own small properties. In between were the ‘gentry’, the class which Burke aspired to enter. At the top of this class, owners of estates worth several thousand pounds a year approached the status of the great landowners. Verney, for example, whose rent-roll of about £10,000 a year made him the third largest landowner in Buckinghamshire, was in this category.130 At the bottom, a gentleman of about £300 a year and farming some of his own land was hardly distinguishable from the better-off freeholders.131 Burke’s position was towards the lower end of the gentry class, but securely within it. 128 Lucy S. Sutherland seeks to exculpate E.B. from what she admits to be a ‘particularly discreditable and distasteful charge’ (C ii. 549–51). Her analysis, based on a careful investigation of the Chancery papers, commands respect. The chief improbability is her supposition that E.B. was able to raise two large sums (£2,000 and £4,000) from unknown sources. That W.B. borrowed £6,000 from the gullible Verney is more credible. 129 Account of the European Settlements in America, ii. 114. 130 Sutherland and Woods, ‘East India Speculations’, 215; Langford, Public Life, 64. 131 G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), 19–26.

254 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 Though he farmed the greater part of his estate himself, his house was unambiguously the seat of a gentleman. Gregories burned down in 1813. Its outward appearance, however, is recorded in several contemporary representations. Built in 1712, the house was sufficiently noteworthy to be included in Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus. Campbell illustrated the north façde and the ground plan (Plate 12). A ‘sketch’ of the house from the garden, by Charles Joseph Harford (1764–1830), son of one of Burke’s Bristol supporters, was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1814 (Plate 13). Nothing is known about the architect, Thomas Milner.132 The correct but derivative style suggests that he was an amateur, perhaps a local gentleman, and a friend of the John Waller (d. 1726) for whom the house was built. The plan, a central block linked by colonnades to flanking pavilions, derives ultimately from Palladio. The first known English example dates from about 1630; many examples survive from the 1690s. Milner probably knew Winslow Hall in Buckinghamshire, built for William Lowndes (1652–1724) in 1699–1702.133 The main difference is in the proportions. Winslow Hall, with its prominent attic storey, is more vertical, giving the building a slightly Dutch look. Gregories has more conventional Palladian proportions. The close correspondence between Campbell’s illustration and a pen-and-wash drawing by Abraham Shackleton, Jr. (1752–1818), sketched while on a visit to Beaconsfield in 1769 (Plate 14), shows that the building was unaltered in Burke’s time. The rooms on the main floor, as shown in Campbell’s plan, can be identified (Fig. 3). Visitors were received in the large central hall, which was ‘set round with busts of marble or porphyry’. To the left of the entrance was the library, on the right the main stairs and the housekeeper’s apartment. Ahead, a door led to the formal drawing-room, which overlooked the garden (to which a short flight of steps gave direct access; Plate 13). To the right of the drawing-room was the dining-room; both were hung with large paintings. To the left of the drawing-room was the breakfast-parlour (where tea and coffee were served after dinner). This was decorated with small objects: impressions of seals, ivories, and prints. The back stairs (on the left) 132 Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 (3rd edn. New Haven, 1995), 658. Two drawings of the house, then in the possession of Lord Burnham of nearby Hall Barn, are reproduced in Viola Gerard Garvin, ‘Gregories, Buckinghamshire, the House of J. L. Garvin, Esq.’, Architectural Review, 67 (1930), 169–74. (The Garvins lived in a home converted from what had been farm buildings in E.B.’s day.) They may be preliminary designs by Milner, since the elevation of the south (garden) front shows a cupola which was never built. 133 Stoke Park, Northamptonshire, is the earliest example; Oliver Hill and John Cornforth, English Country Houses: Caroline, 1625–1685 (London, 1966), 61–4. This was a much grander building than Gregories. Winslow Hall (closer to Gregories in scale) is illustrated in James Lees-Milne, English Country Houses: Baroque, 1685–1715 (London, 1970), 31–4.


255

Fig. 3 Gregories, the arrangement of rooms on the main floor; based on the plan in Plate 12

led down to the kitchen in the basement. Family and guest bedrooms were on the first floor. The servants probably slept in a low attic storey, not visible in the drawings. Colonnades joined the house to two service blocks. The left wing (painted with a figure of Ceres) housed the bakehouse and the brew-house. The right wing housed the stables, appropriately decorated with an image of Bucephalas.134 The feature of the house that drew most comment from visitors was the art collection. Burke himself described the house as ‘hung, from Top to 134 Quotations from Mary Shackleton’s Diary (11–12 June 1784), National Library of Ireland, MS 9310, pp. 115–24 (the most informative source). Other details come from two letters of 1777 printed in Hugh Owen, Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol, Being a History of ‘the True Porcelain’ by Richard Champion (London, 1873), 218, 221.

256 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 bottom with Pictures’ (C ii. 8). The paintings were mainly French and Italian of the seventeenth century.135 Arthur Young (1741–1820), who visited Gregories in 1770, primarily to see Burke’s farm, listed about thirty of the paintings, chiefly mythological and religious subjects, and landscapes.136 Though Young did not particularize any of the sculpture, several of Lloyd’s pieces can be identified, thanks to their acquisition by the British Museum. Four are on permanent display: a head of Augustus, and busts of Heracles, Tiberius (?), and a Greek lady.137 If these were representative, the collection was of excellent quality. Altogether the place was, as Burke acknowledged to O’Hara, ‘rather superb for us’ (9 June 1768: i. 353). Burke paid a high price for this ‘superb’ home: lifelong financial insecurity. Meeting the interest payments on the mortgages was a continual worry. Assuming an interest rate of 4 –21 per cent, he was saddled with annual payments of about £450 and £180: £630 in all, well in excess of the annual value of the estate (about £500). Eighteenth-century mortgages were interest-only investment loans. Unlike the modern home mortgage, they were not designed to be amortized. Instead, the entire sum was subject to recall, usually at six months’ notice. Jane Burke was threatened with this prospect in 1801. The mortgagee, she was told (admittedly by someone anxious to persuade her to sell the estate), was ‘aged & infirm and in case of her death the £10,000 will be immediately called in & distributed agreeable to the directions of her Will’.138 In normal times mortgage funds were readily available. War, however, or the threat of war, reduced the price of government securities and (since they were at fixed interest rates) made them more attractive to investors. Mortgages on land became correspondingly harder to find. The art collection, too, might prove difficult to sell at a such a time. No wonder that Burke spoke as he did about his finances. ‘My affairs were always in a State of embarrassment and confusion,’ he confessed in 1794. Only thanks to his wife and son intercepting ‘every thing that was fretful, teizing and disgusting’ had he been able to play his part in public life (C vii. 591). The purchase of such a large estate on credit was imprudent. With his 135 A Catalogue of the Very Valuable Collection of Highly Interesting Antique Statues, and Other Marbles, and Capital Italian Pictures . . . [London, 1812]; several priced copies survive. Carl B. Cone, ‘Edmund Burke’s Art Collection’, Art Bulletin, 29 (1947), 126–31, includes an annotated listing, based on the catalogue. 136 Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (London, 1771), iv. 84–8. 137 A. H. Smith, A Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum (London, 1892–1904), nos. 1877, 1735, 1880, and 1925; Augustus (pl. xv), Heracles (Fig. 14), and the lady (pl. xvii) are illustrated. The museum has three other pieces in storage. Of the seven, four (including 1877, 1880, and 1925) were acquired at the sale in 1812 (a fifth, noted in the catalogue as sold to the museum, was never registered). The other three came to the museum with the collections of Richard Payne Knight, who bought them in 1812. 138 D. Walker to J.B., 20 Dec. 1801, NRO A. vi. 55.

gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 257 habitual optimism or carelessness about money matters, Burke probably expected before long to be able to redeem or at least reduce the mortgages. Or, he may have hoped that land prices would continue to rise, which would at least have made the mortgages less burdensome. This did not happen in his own lifetime. In 1802, five years after his death, Jane Burke put the estate on the market at an asking price of £25,000.139 This figure (at which it failed to sell) shows that it had not greatly appreciated in value since 1768. Then, during the Napoleonic wars, land prices increased substantially. In 1811, Jane sold the reversion (retaining possession for her lifetime) for about £40,000 (C vii. 551 n. 2). Had Burke’s son lived, he would have enjoyed a property much enhanced in value. Far from being able to reduce the heavy encumbrances on the estate, in 1778 Burke was forced to take out a further small mortgage of £500 (at 5 per cent interest).140 When awarded a pension in 1795, he was almost overwhelmed by other debts, estimated at about £30,000 (C viii. 292). This was despite generous loans and gifts from various sources. Where did the money go? Though Burke, like many of his contemporaries, lived in a style that was well beyond his income, this alone can hardly account for the mountain of debt that had accumulated by 1795. The answer may be the ‘common purse’, the Burkes’ pooling of their financial resources (and liabilities). In 1768, this worked to Edmund’s advantage, for Will’s schemes seemed to be prospering. If they had succeeded, the mortgages on Gregories might have been cleared. Burke might indeed have enjoyed the good life of a country gentleman of modest but independent means. The East India Company crash of 1769 destroyed this hope. Will was thereafter a drain on the ‘common purse’. Richard Burke’s speculations also turned out badly. Edmund’s indebtedness was much increased by his generous but ill-judged attempts to assist Will and Richard in their plausible but unsuccessful designs. In 1780, Will confessed to Portland that ‘part of the Incumbrances on his Estate, have been applied to my unfortunate purposes’ (iv. 292).141 In 1787, Burke’s brother Richard was forced to flee to France to escape his creditors (v. 359). Will and Richard both died deeply in debt.142 Little as he could afford such loyalty and generosity, prudence and calculation were alien to Burke’s nature. Imprudent as the puchase of Gregories was, the 139 This was to include ‘land, house, busts, pictures & furniture, except some beds & few pictures’; the timber was to be valued separately (J.B. to Richard Troward, 27 May 1802, NRO A. vi. 56). 140 WWM BkP 48/3. 141 The editor (C iv. 292 n. 1) refers this to the £500 raised through the 1778 mortgage, but W.B.’s tone implies a much larger sum. 142 In 1784, Verney claimed that W.B. owed him £20,000, besides an additional £40,000 for which he had ‘no Security excepting Honour’; Claydon House, Verney Papers, ‘2nd Earl Verney, Letters from Friends & Creditors, 1770–89’. In her will (drawn up in 1811), J.B. left a sum not to exceed £500 towards payment of R.B. Sr.’s outstanding debts (NRO A. v. 35).

258 gleams of prosperity, 1765‒1768 financial anxieties that came with it were outweighed by the pleasures and satisfactions that Burke derived from it. Gregories provided, like Sir Walter Elliot’s Baronetage, ‘occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one’.

present discontents, 1768‒1770

259

8 Present Discontents, 1768–1770

i In 1768, Burke was a promising ‘man of business’ with a reputation as a forceful and eloquent speaker. Over the next two years he consolidated his position both within the Rockingham party and in the larger political world. In 1769, he published his first substantial political pamphlet, Observations on a Late State of the Nation. This was followed in 1770 by Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, an unofficial manifesto which established him as his party’s most articulate spokesman. While explaining and justifying its attitudes and actions, Burke incidentally developed a general defence of party that has proved a classic of political thought. For all this, his own prospects were no brighter. With Rockingham’s return to the Treasury increasingly improbable, Burke’s commitment to opposition was confirmed. These years set the pattern that his life followed until 1782. In the summer of 1768, the ministry headed by the Duke of Grafton, weak and divided, appeared unequal to the challenges facing it both at home and in the colonies. The controversy surrounding the Middlesex election would not surface until the meeting of Parliament in November. Meanwhile, news of American resistance to the Townshend duties presented a more immediate threat. In Chatham’s absence, Grafton led an uneasy amalgam of fissiparous groups and individuals. Rumours of an impending change of ministry were greedily swallowed. Grenville’s subalterns assured him that the public demanded his return to office. Burke flattered Rockingham in similar terms.1 Prospects for a united opposition were brighter than in 1767. The place-hungry Bedford party had deserted to the court, leaving only Rockingham and Grenville to adjust their differences. This was easier than before, since Rockingham was no less committed than Grenville to the assertion of Britain’s constitutional rights over the colonies. The repeal of the Stamp Act had divided them; the Declaratory Act now united them. As in 1767, the stumbling-block was not measures but men. Neither 1 Thomas Whately to Grenville, 4 June 1768, and Thomas Pownall to Grenville, 14 July 1768, in The Grenville Papers, ed. William James Smith (London, 1852–3), iv. 299–300, 313. E.B. to Rockingham, 18 July 1768 (C ii. 3–6).

260 present discontents, 1768‒1770 leader would willingly concede the Treasury to the other. Yet even Burke now spoke more favourably of Grenville, as least in conversation with one of Grenville’s adherents, the ambitious Scottish lawyer and MP Alexander Wedderburn (1733–1805): Wedderburn has had a long conversation with Mr Burke, whose language with respect to you, he observed, was very different from any he had ever heard from that quarter. Mr Burke took notice that the language which he heard you held, was that of a very wise man; the particular topic to which he alluded was, that no Minister could be safe, or be active, who was not sure of the King, and of the persons with whom he was connected, which he had been told had been a principle you had much insisted on lately: he added, that you were certainly a most excellent party-man . . . that you would not desert those who would abide by you, and were steady to all your purposes; that it was pleasant to be connected with such a man, and the party would act with confidence who acted under him.2

Burke’s highest praise is ‘a most excellent party-man’. Co-operation with Grenville was now possible, in Burke’s view, because Grenville had adopted the Rockingham creed. Any prospective ministry must be ‘sure of the King’, and there must be no independent ‘king’s friends’ to make mischief as they had under the earlier Grenville and Rockingham ministries. The goodwill generated by these contacts was soon dissipated, however. On 19 October 1768 appeared an anonymous pamphlet, immediately attributed to Grenville himself: The Present State of the Nation: Particularly with Respect to Its Trade, Finances, &c. &c. Grenville had indeed read and corrected it before publication, and it was rightly perceived as his manifesto. Its actual author, however, was William Knox, who after a brief career as a colonial administrator had enlisted under Grenville as a free-lance pamphleteer. In the Present State, Knox argues that the British victory in the late war was delusive. In reality, the peace of 1763 left the country in a far worse situation than commonly thought: saddled with an enormously inflated national debt, which would require a continuing high level of taxation even to service. France, less burdened with debt, was more favourably placed for economic recovery. For two years after the end of the war, the wise and prudent measures of the Grenville administration had set the nation on the right road. The ill-advised reversal of Grenville’s policies by succeeding ministries had aborted the process, and Britain was now sinking further into debt. Only the recall of Grenville, and a return to responsible fiscal management, offered any hope for national recovery. Knox forthrightly condemned the repeal of the Stamp Act and the cider excise, and accused the Rockingham ministry of cravenly giving in to pressure groups. A firm hand, Grenville’s, was needed. Knox advocated the revival and extension of Grenville’s scheme of colonial taxation. He estimated that, to help reduce 2 Reported in Thomas Whately to Grenville, 12 July 1768, in Grenville Papers, iv. 311. As Secretary to the Treasury (1763–5), Whately had been responsible for the preparation of the Stamp Act.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 261 the burden of the national debt, a revenue of £200,000 a year could be raised from America, and £100,000 from Ireland. In return, he proposed that the American colonies should send representatives to Westminster; Ireland should be compensated with trade concessions.3 A gloomy picture of national decline demanding the recall to the helm of a great man, Knox’s Present State recalls John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757–8). Writing at the opening of an initially unsuccessful war, Brown had the easier task. Knox needed ingenuity to argue that Britain had been enfeebled by its course of victories, France strengthened by its defeats. Not that Knox was merely repeating Brown’s jeremiad. A moralist rather than an economist, Brown traced the sources of national decay to general causes rather than particular grievances, and sought national salvation in moral regeneration. His hero was Pitt, the disinterested patriot minister. Knox approached government with the mentality of an accountant. He prescribed a course of stringent national economy. Though loaded with indigestible tables of figures, and lacking the literary qualities that made Brown’s book so readable, the Present State enjoyed a considerable success. Three editions were called for within two weeks of publication, and the reviews were enthusiastic.4 Rockingham had so far shown little interest in the press as an engine of propaganda. ‘I do not like your Lordships method of putting your popularity into your Cabinet like a curious medal,’ Burke had chided him. ‘It is current coin, or it is nothing’ (21 Aug. 1766: C i. 267). Earlier Grenvillite pamphlets, such as Considerations on the Trade and Finances of this Kingdom (1766) by Thomas Whately (c.1728–72), had been left unanswered. In January 1767, Dowdeswell had lamented that ‘We suffer much at present for want of our tale being told’ and had begun a ‘state of the case’ which should be ‘well considered, examined, & corrected by Others’ before being published as a party manifesto.5 Nothing had come of this initiative. The appearance of the Present State, however, convinced even Rockingham that mere virtue was not enough. A refutation of Knox was called for, and Burke was commissioned to write it. The decision to publish a reply to Knox was taken almost at once. Newspaper advertisements, promising imminent publication of the Observations, appeared as early as 24 October.6 These were no more than a statement of intent, a warning that the Present State would not pass unchallenged. Burke can scarcely have begun work on his pamphlet. The Observations develops a long and complex argument. On the minutiae of finance, Burke received material assistance from Dowdeswell, who The Present State of the Nation (London, 1768), 34, 36–8. Knox to Grenville, 1 Nov. 1768, in Grenville Papers, iv. 395. Critical Review, 26 (Oct. 1768), 301– 11; London Magazine, 37 (Oct. 1768), 554–6; Gentleman’s Magazine, 38 (Nov. 1768), 529–32; Monthly Review, 39 (Nov. 1768), 388–98. 5 Dowdeswell to E.B., 4 Jan. 1767 (misdated 1766), and Dowdeswell to Rockingham, 10 Jan. 1767, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Dowdeswell Papers. 6 Public Advertiser, 24 Oct.; repeated on the 27th and 31st, and in other newspapers. 3 4

262 present discontents, 1768‒1770 supplied some of the more technical criticisms of Knox’s misuse of evidence.7 The literary qualities and rhetorical skill are Burke’s own. The Observations on a Late State of the Nation is a substantial pamphlet of over 50,000 words, about twice the length of the Present State. Burke worked hard over the Christmas recess, and the Observations was published on 8 February 1769.8 The Observations is not one of Burke’s better-known writings. Burke did what he could to generalize the argument. Yet long stretches depend on the interpretation of statistical evidence, and the pamphlet as a whole was soon eclipsed by the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, in which some of the general points made in the Observations are more strikingly elaborated. Even so, the Observations is a considerable achievement. Among the season’s crop of pamphlets, it stands out for its clear and careful organization, its moderate tone, and the flashes of wit that occasionally brighten the dry financial discourse.9 Burke begins the Observations by occupying the high moral ground. Public spirit and moderation have hitherto kept ‘the friends of a very respectable party’ silent under the barrage of abuse that has been levelled at them. The point has now been reached at which ‘forbearance ceases to be a virtue’ (WS ii. 111). Private insults may be ignored, but public injuries call for retaliation. Burke stands forth to vindicate not just the merits of the Rockingham administration, but the health and strength of the country as a whole, depicted in the Present State as in so parlous a condition. About two-thirds of the Observations is devoted to a detailed refutation of the arguments of the Present State. Burke corrects Knox’s egregious misrepresentations and exposes his ignorance of both English and French finances. Knox, he shows, exaggerates the English debt and (confusing loans with taxes) understates its French counterpart. Deploying an impressively detailed knowledge of French fiscal practices, Burke forecasts ‘some extraordinary convulsion in that whole system’ (151), a prophecy amply if belatedly fulfilled. He then turns to Knox’s principal recommendations: increased but more equitably distributed taxation, with contributions from Ireland and America; a reformed representation in Parliament, to include members from the colonies; and strict enforcement of the Navigation Acts. Two characteristic themes underlie the critique of these proposals. One 7 Dowdeswell to E.B., 4 Jan. 1769, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Dowdeswell Papers, provided material for one passage (WS ii. 131–6). E.B. was likewise indebted to Sir George Macartney for a passage on the Anglo-Russian treaty of commerce (204–5). 8 Todd, 16. The numbers printed are known from the Bowyer ledgers: 500 for the first edition (in quarto), 750 for the second (published 23 Feb.), and 500 for the third (16 Mar.). The second and third editions were printed in the cheaper octavo format to reach a wider audience. 9 An example is E.B.’s ridicule of Knox’s inept metaphor of a refracting mirror (Present State, 46: WS ii. 206).

present discontents, 1768‒1770 263 is Burke’s habitual contrast between narrow views and enlarged principles. Grenville and Knox are skilled in the ‘little tricks of finance’, the ‘little arts of great statesmen’, addicted to ‘regulation and restriction’ of the dependent parts of the empire, yet oblivious of ‘their ancient customs, their opinions, their circumstances, or their affections’ (WS ii. 130, 163, 182, 165). Such a legalistic mentality is prone to devise projects that are specious in theory but pernicious in practice, to agitate questions that belong more properly to metaphysics than to politics (188).10 Here Burke anticipates his attack on the political theorists of the French Revolution. Particularly prophetic is an image of the constitution as an irregular but venerable building: ‘The old building stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, and part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then it may come down upon our heads all together in much uniformity of ruin; and great will be the fall thereof’ (175).11 Burke always reprobated the rage for uniformity. In the Reflections, he uses the same contrasting images. The French constitution was ‘a noble and venerable castle’, dilapidated but not beyond repair (viii. 85). Instead of repairing the old walls and building on the old foundations, the French, possessed by the demon spirit of uniformity, have levelled the ground, dividing their country into exact administrative squares, as though it were a formal garden (220–1). In the last third of the Observations, Burke turns from refutation of Knox to a spirited vindication of the Rockingham party. This defence is largely an elaboration of the Short Account of 1766. At the end of the Present State, in one of his more ambitious rhetorical flights, Knox had developed a comparison between Grenville and the duc de Sully (1559–1641), the minister of Henri IV. Such was his reputation as a profound economist and prudent financier that a reforming minister in eighteenth-century France was conventionally hailed as a new Sully.12 Sully was no less highly regarded in England. The translation of his Memoirs (1756) by Charlotte Lennox (1720–1804) was her most popular work. In the dedication to the Duke of Newcastle (then First Lord of the Treasury) which Samuel Johnson wrote for her, he praised Sully for having ‘saved a Nation, by bringing method and order into every branch of her revenues, and administering the whole 10 E.B. made the same criticism of Thomas Pownall’s The Administration of the Colonies, Wherein their Rights and Constitution Are Discussed and Stated (4th edn. London, 1768). To the question ‘what is the true, legal, and constitutional mode of administration by which those colonies are to be governed’ (45), E.B. wrote in the margin of his copy (BL C. 60. i. 9): ‘There is very little dispute ab[ou]t ye legal Gov[ernmen]t of ye Colonies. The great question is concerning the wisest method of governing them, upon w[hi]ch the authour throws very little light.’ 11 The allusion is to the man who built his house upon sand (Matt. 7: 26–7). Defending the apparently absurd survival of feudal legal forms, Blackstone had recently characterized the English law as ‘an old Gothic castle’, some features of which were ‘magnificent and venerable, but useless’; Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1765–9), iii. 268. In the same vein as Burke, Blackstone argues that to sweep away such anachronisms would be fraught with unsuspected dangers. 12 D. J. Buisseret, ‘The Legend of Sully’, Historical Journal, 5 (1962), 181–8.

264 present discontents, 1768‒1770 with economy’. Lord Bute was thought to have ‘a confused notion of rivalling the Duc de Sully’.13 Burke deflated the image of Grenville as a new Sully, scotching the notion that Britain in 1768 at all resembled the warravaged France of Henri IV. Knox did not concede defeat. In An Appendix to ‘The Present State of the Nation’, Containing a Reply to the ‘Observations’ on that Pamphlet (London, 1769), he was constrained to admit some of the errors that Burke had detected. Yet he gave as little ground as he could, claiming in some cases to have discovered an error himself and in others maintaining the validity of his argument. Burke did not trouble to reply.14 Public attention was by then riveted on John Wilkes and the controversy generated by the ministry’s determination to keep him out of Parliament.

2 When the new session of Parliament opened on 8 November 1768, however, Wilkes was not at first the leading issue. Though hard at work on his Observations, Burke attended and spoke with his usual assiduity. Apologizing to Garrett Nagle for delay in answering a letter, well might he describe himself as ‘very much hurried, more so than I have ever been in my life’ (27 Dec. 1768: C ii. 19). Corsica and America were expected to provoke the fiercest debates. The British government had protested, but not as vigorously as many wanted, against the French annexation of Corsica. Feelings in England were stirred by a publicity campaign, spearheaded by James Boswell (who had visited the island in 1765) on behalf of the Corsican independence movement.15 The opposition sought to condemn the ministry for not resisting French expansionism more strongly. Public sympathy for the Corsicans, however, did not extend to declaring war with France on their behalf. The American crisis proved more exploitable. News of American resistance to the Townshend duties had been arriving throughout the summer, and the ministry’s handling of America was the subject of a series of debates.16 Even America, however, was pushed into the background by John Wilkes. On 23 November, from the King’s Bench prison where he was 13 Allen T. Hazen, Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces and Dedications (New Haven, 1937), 110–16. The comment on Bute is by Shelburne, from a later memorandum on the events of 1762; Lord Fitzmaurice, Life of William, Earl of Shelburne, Afterwards First Marquess of Lansdowne (2nd edn. London, 1912), i. 111. 14 The Appendix was advertised ‘This Day is published’ in the Public Advertiser on 10 and 13 Mar. An unknown writer came to E.B.’s defence with Remarks on the ‘Appendix to the Present State of the Nation’ (London, 1769); advertised ‘This Day is published’, Public Advertiser, 19 Apr. The author pays E.B. several compliments (14, 19, 22, 58). 15 Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The Earlier Years (New York, 1966), 390, 394–7. 16 Peter D. G. Thomas, The Townshend Duties Crisis: The Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767–1773 (Oxford, 1987), 86–120.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 265 serving his sentence for libel, Wilkes submitted his first petition for the redress of his various grievances. Wilkes provided the opposition with questions on which they could sink past differences and unite in a fight for constitutional principles. Three times expelled from Parliament, he was reelected after each expulsion. After the second re-election he was declared incapable of being elected to the present Parliament; after the third, his opponent (Henry Lawes Luttrell; c.1737–1821) was declared duly elected in his place. Wilkes succeeded in turning himself into a constitutional principle, though many thought his cause both factious and factitious.17 Burke spoke in at least thirty-eight debates during the session.18 His speeches were planned, in outline at least. His surviving notes and drafts often consist of a fully worked-out opening, followed by a sequence of headings, developed to different degrees. An example is the draft for a speech (delivered on 8 March 1769) on the Massacre of St George’s Fields.19 The number of surviving drafts suggests that Burke found a wellprepared exordium helpful in getting into his stride: ‘Much is said of Lenient, much of vigorous measures; nothing is said of the Necessity of wise measures. Lenity or rigour what do these words mean? Abstracted [from] circumstances, without time, management, sagacity & dexterity in the application [they] are idle unmeaning words, which may serve to furnish specious common places & to adorn a pompous declamation, but will never be of the least use or Effect in Government.’20 Typical of Burke is the appeal to practice and circumstance against theory and abstraction. Such a preface would serve to introduce many subjects. Burke spoke as a member of a team. William Dowdeswell usually opened for the Rockingham party. A solid if unexciting speaker, Dowdeswell was capable of clear and straightforward exposition, without pretending to flights of oratorical fancy. Those were Burke’s province. Normally speaking late, when the main arguments had become tediously familiar, Burke needed to infuse novelty and vigour into the debate. Some of this he supplied by rebuttals of earlier speakers. He specialized in making the arguments of his opponents appear ridiculous, illogical, and absurd. 17 George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962); Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760–1785 (London, 1962); John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976); and Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford, 1996). 18 The number listed in WS ii. 479–81; a minimum figure, since many debates were not reported. 19 WS ii. 224–8. Another example is a draft on the Nullum Tempus Bill (WWM BkP 11/7; probably for E.B.’s speech on 17 Feb. 1768), in which a series of headings is set out and then renumbered in a more suitable order for presentation. Christopher Reid, Edmund Burke and the Practice of Political Writing (Dublin, 1985), 108–18, compares E.B.’s drafts for his speech on 9 May 1770 with Cavendish’s report. 20 NRO A. xxvii. 33; related by Langford (WS ii. 480) to E.B.’s speech on 26 Jan. 1769. Other examples include: NRO A. xxvii. 49 (where the antithesis is between ‘liberal’ and ‘narrow’); WWM BkP 9/3 (an elaborate modesty topos); BkP 9/49 (for an alarmist speech); and NRO A. xxvii. 10 (for a speech on America).

266 present discontents, 1768‒1770 Though the patchwork is sometimes visible, he was adept at weaving extempore reply into the fabric of the arguments he had prepared. Burke’s habit of speaking towards the end of a debate also accounts in part for his frequent strategy of arguing from remote and seemingly improbable consequences. He needed to put the subject in a new light. In most cases, he was also articulating a minority position. To present his hearers with new and unexpected arguments might shake their preconceived ideas. An example is his speech in the American committee on 26 January 1769. American juries were thought to be too biased in favour of Americans to be trusted in trials where Britain’s authority over the colonies was at stake. One solution proposed was to invoke the Treason Act (35 Henry VIII, c.2), which authorized the removal to England for trial of persons accused of acts of treason, even if committed outside the realm. This was an odious measure, open to various objections. Dowdeswell, speaking first for the opposition, questioned whether the Act could fairly be applied to colonies which did not exist at the time it was passed. The Crown law officers asserted that it could. Burke condemned the proposal as not only objectionable in itself, but likely to lead to further erosion of cherished liberties. ‘You relax the principle of vicinage in the cases of smuggling, and excise: by and by high treason will be alleged for taking away the privilege of a jury.’ By English common law, juries were required to be drawn from the ‘vicinage’ or neighbourhood of the accused.21 To try American offenders in England, Burke claimed, would be a far more dangerous breach of the principle than was tolerated in the case of smuggling. Any encroachment by the Crown on the right of trial by jury could eventually so weaken the right that it might be lost altogether. Henry VIII’s reign was an ominous source for precedents. Burke raised the spectre of a revival of the despotism of the Tudors and the Stuarts, or worse: ‘The resolutions are the scaffolding, the Address the building, all the traverses in their places; I see a Bastille behind them.’22 In the same vein, Burke argued that the French occupation of Corsica would infallibly lead to French domination of Europe (8 Nov. 1768: WS ii. 98–9). The Wilkes case was particularly suitable for such arguments. Burke could hardly defend the ‘obscene and impious libels’ (found among his papers), authorship of which was one of the charges against Wilkes. Instead, he deflected attention away from Wilkes to the general question of freedom of expression. ‘Is any man certain,’ he asked, ‘when he takes up his pen, that the day may not come, when he may wish to be a Member of Parliament? When any persons censure in the mildest manner an act of Administration, 21 In E.B.’s time, this was interpreted to mean from the same county; Blackstone, Commentaries, iii. 359–60. 22 PDNA iii. 66–80 (from Cavendish).

present discontents, 1768‒1770 267 they may be punished for it. This will put the last hand to the liberty of the press.’23 On another occasion, urging an enquiry into the Massacre of St George’s Fields, Burke argued that, for a civil magistrate to call in the troops in such circumstances amounted to the establishment of military government (8 Mar. 1769: WS ii. 226). No wonder that Lord North, wearied with Burke’s perpetual alarmism, compared him to the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ too often.24 Not every feature of Burke’s speaking was determined by the constraints of his role and situation. A characteristic personal style is also evident, wellinformed, closely argued, yet often carried away on a gust of passion. He was not always master of himself. Though many of his speeches are goodhumoured, enlivened by a remarkable flow of wit, metaphor and imagery, and allusion, in the heat of debate he was frequently carried away by his feelings and his loyalties, indulging in personal abuse that did nothing to advance his arguments. Even on so dry a subject as the debts of the Civil List, Burke might suddenly become uncontrollably emotive. On 28 February 1769, for example, accused by Richard Rigby (1722–88) of being selfinterested and subservient, he was stung into a passionate self-defence. The first charge he repudiated. He followed Rockingham, he insisted, ‘because I know his virtues’. Subservience, however, he avowed. ‘I am connected,’ he acknowledged. ‘I glory in such connexion, I ever shall do . . . when I find good men, I shall cling to them, adhere to them, follow them in, & out. Wash the very feet they stand on. I will wash their feet, & be subservient, not from interest, but from principle.’25 Rigby, who provoked this outburst, was Bedford’s ‘man of business’, as Burke was Rockingham’s.26 There, however, the resemblance ended. The type of the unprincipled placeman, greedy for the emoluments of office, ready to support any ministry, Rigby personified the politics of self-interest. He and Burke loathed each other, their irreconcilable hostility founded on differences both of principle and of personality. Since the failure of the negotiations between Bedford and Rockingham in the summer of 1767, and especially after Rigby took office as Paymaster-General in June 1768, they habitually exchanged abuse on the floor of the Commons. Rigby constantly needled and harassed Burke. On 17 November 1768, he complained of the irrelevance of Burke’s ‘rapsodical history of Europe’. On 27 January 1769, he referred ironically to Burke’s BL Egerton MS 217, fo. 231, 3 Feb. 1769. BL Egerton MS 217, fo. 238, 3 Feb. 1769. This species of argument remained a favourite with E.B. On 27 Nov. 1777, Welbore Ellis objected to the remote consequences E.B. drew from the continued suspension of Habeas Corpus; Almon, viii. 58–9 (PH xix. 465–6). 25 BL Egerton MS 218, fos. 221–2; alluding to Luke 7: 38. The language of this passage, probably unpremeditated, is far more emotional than the temperate avowal of loyalty in the Observations (WS ii. 209). 26 John Brooke, The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768 (London, 1956), ‘237’ (recte 235). 23 24

268 present discontents, 1768‒1770 ‘wit, and ingenuity’. On 28 February, he accused Burke of lacking ‘candour’ and jibed that ‘when his friend was in he was not trusted’.27 The pressure of this constant sniping was more than Burke could bear, and he exploded into the intemperate avowal of his willingness to wash Rockingham’s feet. Burke used metaphor and allusion for both serious and ludicrous effects. Speaking against the motion to restrict Wilkes’s counsel to two narrow points of appeal, he described Wilkes as ‘a man who comes to you for redress . . . he calls for bread, you give him a stone, he asks for fish you give him a serpent’.28 In a debate on the debts of the Civil List, he applied to Lord North the parable of the unjust steward.29 Opposing the motion to expel Wilkes, he compared the cumulative charge against Wilkes (which the ministry had refused to divide into separate items to be voted on individually) to a feast: ‘some will eat of one dish, some of another . . . Some will like the strong, solid roast beef of the blasphemous libel.’ When candles were lit, to allow the debate to continue after dark, he compared the House to a theatre, the debate to ‘the last act of a tragi-comedy, acted by his Majesty’s Servants, by desire of several persons of distinction, for the benefit of Mr Wilkes, at the expence of the Constitution’. The government’s majority was a ‘fair flower’ which ‘flourishes in the morning’ but which may be ‘blasted before night’.30 Quotation can give only a faint idea of the abundance and variety of Burke’s store of imagery and range of allusion. James Boswell’s tribute will stand for many: ‘all kinds of figures of speech crowded upon him. He was like a man in an orchard where boughs loaded with fruit hung around him, and he pulled apples as fast as he pleased and pelted the Ministry’.31 When Shackleton knew him, Burke had argued ‘with an irresistible cogency, yet with a modesty & gentleness, which is more persuasive than any Argument’.32 Politics had roughened his style. ‘It is but too well known,’ he acknowledged, ‘that I debate with great Vehemence and asperity and with little management either of the opinions or persons of many of my adversaries. They deserve not much Quarter, and I give and receive but very little’ (19 Apr. 1770: C ii. 130). This notorious ‘Vehemence and asperity’ helps explain why contemporaries were so ready to believe that Burke was ‘Junius’, the author of a series of vitriolic letters that appeared in the Public Advertiser between 21 January 1769 and 21 January BL Egerton MSS 215, fo. 192; 216, fo. 211; 218, fos. 187–8. BL Egerton MS 216, fo. 208, 27 Jan. 1769 (alluding to Matt. 7: 10). 29 BL Egerton MS 218, fos. 276–7, 1 Mar. 1769 (alluding to Luke 16: 1–8). 30 BL Egerton MS 217, fos. 227, 228, 234, 3 Feb. 1769. The second quotation parodies a standard formula advertising a play for an actor’s benefit; the third alludes to Ps. 90: 6. 31 Journal, 5 Apr. 1773, in Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Frederick A. Pottle (London, 1960), 169. 32 YB OF 5. 332; Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 1923), 403. 27 28

present discontents, 1768‒1770 269 1771. In an age not squeamish about the abuse heaped on public figures, the Letters of Junius were as remarkable for their malignity as for the polish of the style. No one now attributes them to Burke, but in 1769 he was one of the first to be identified as Junius. Those who wanted to believe the worst of Burke were glad to attribute the Letters to him. His authorship of the Letters served in turn to justify their believing the worst. Contemporaries found the identification plausible because Burke had gained a reputation as an unsparing antagonist. When only two of the letters had appeared, Philip Francis (1708?–73) asked ‘who is this Devil Junius, or rather Legion of Devils’? His own conjecture was ‘B[ur]k’s pen dipp’d in the Gall of Sa[vi]ll’s heart?’34 By a strange irony, Francis put the question to the probable author of the letters, his son and namesake (1740–1818), who became a friend and ally of Burke in the 1780s. The elder Francis was not alone in his guess. Even people who had known Burke well for many years suspected him. Only a spontaneous denial convinced Samuel Johnson that Burke was not Junius.35 The contemporary identification is the more remarkable, because in retrospect Burke and Junius appear so opposite. Though they share a loftiness of tone, Junius displays a haughty personal arrogance quite different from Burke’s high ground, which is always a matter of principle. The style of Junius has an ostentatious, disciplined correctness, laboured and self-conscious. Burke writes more naturally and more carelessly, even in his most formal moments sustaining the illusion of a speaking voice. When Burke is indignant, he usually carries conviction; the emotions of Junius often appear studied and manufactured. Burke was a good hater, but passionate rather than malignant in the cold, sneering manner of Junius. Junius is a highly disciplined writer, with a strong sense of relevance and an ability to keep to the point. Burke can rarely resist overburdening his arguments with a superfluity of support and elaboration, delighting in ‘episodes, illustrations, ramifications, general reflections, various lights, remote and indirect consequences’.36 Hindsight makes such contrasts easy to draw. Contemporaries were less sure. Burke’s habitual ‘Vehemence and asperity’ in debate made him a plausible candidate for the authorship of the Junius letters. Soon after the end of the exciting but frustrating session of 1768–9, Burke retreated to the peace of Gregories. The previous summer, his first as 33

33 An earlier letter of 21 Nov. 1768 attracted little attention and was omitted from the authorized collection. References are to The Letters of Junius, ed. John Cannon (Oxford, 1978). 34 Revd Philip Francis to Philip Francis, 11 Feb. 1769; Joseph Parkes and Herman Merivale, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, KCB, with Correspondence and Journals (London, 1867), i. 228–9. 35 Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), iii. 376 (26 Mar. 1779). William Markham refused to believe even E.B.’s denial (C ii. 251). 36 William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (new edn. London, 1892), iii. 452.

270 present discontents, 1768‒1770 a country gentleman, he had leavened a letter to Rockingham with news of the weather and his farming (18 July 1768: C ii. 6). On 31 May 1769, he wrote to O’Hara in a more philosophical vein: We are now quite ready for you; serene and quiet at Gregories; still and calm as if debate, dissention, and the rage of Party never had an existence. It is all done away; and I feel, something, I suppose, like Souls who have just escaped from the bustle of a tumultuous world into the regions of peace; and have left all the Business and passions of feverish mortality behind them; and have lost almost, the memory of that troublesome period of their existence. In reality I thank God I never was better in health, nor on the whole more easy in Mind; not that all things, either publick or private are exactly as I wish; But I who am so eager and anxious about some things in the detail of Life, never was so about the Sum total; and I grow rather less than more so, since I have cut so deep into Life. This is not Philosophy; but the Effect of Habit. My own endeavours have been of so little service to me in my Life, I am so much the Creature of Providence, in every good Event that has befallen me, that I have grown into perfect resignation in every thing, but the Virtue of that Temper. Will and Dick are just gone to Town . . . (26)

This is an extraordinary letter. O’Hara was an old friend, who knew the Burkes intimately. Burke’s letters to him are unusually frank and unreserved. What Burke wrote to him cannot be dismissed as mere posturing. He was therefore genuinely unaware of the magnitude of the financial crisis that had taken Will and Richard to town. East India stock had fallen alarmingly, and the Burkes were threatened with imminent and complete ruin. Just a day later, on 1 June, Burke wrote again to O’Hara. This time he wrote from London, and in a quite different frame of mind: ‘My dear friend, I cannot be easy from the Letter which I wrote to you a day or two ago, and the flattering impression it must naturally have left upon your mind. I wrote indeed in much security, and in the greatest Tranquility of heart that can be conceived; not at all apprehending the ruin of our Situation in the light, I now see and feel it but too distinctly’ (29). That Burke could have been quite so unmindful of the impending disaster appears incredible. Yet he had no motive to keep his worries from O’Hara. His degree of unpreparedness would be astonishing, if other evidence did not confirm his accustomed ignorance and neglect of matters of personal finance, and his unlimited capacity for self-deception.37 The rapid fall in the value of East India stock was the result of panic selling, precipitated by news from India that threatened war and disruption, and therefore the company’s prosperity.38 Burke suffered only indirectly. 37 Dixon Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen: A Study of the Statesman’s Financial Integrity and Private Relationships, University of Colorado Studies ser. b, Studies in the Humanities, vol. i, no. 1 (Boulder, Colo., 1939), 24–6, 44, 47–8. 38 Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952), 190–4.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 271 Encouraged by Will’s prospects of financial independence, he had borrowed heavily to finance the purchase of Gregories. Such a crisis would have induced a more worldly-wise man to make himself less obnoxious to the court and ministry, and to put prudence before principle. Burke, of course, did nothing of the kind. Instead, he threw himself with redoubled ardour into the opposition campaign, which at least promised distraction from financial worries. For Burke, ideas and principles were more real than money. Concentration on politics could numb any consciousness of unpleasant transactions which he preferred to ignore. The last business of the 1768–9 session of Parliament was a debate on a resolution affirming, against a petition from the freeholders of Middlesex, that Luttrell had been ‘duly elected’.39 To cement solidarity and concert measures against what they saw as a dangerous violation of the rights of electors, many opposition members dined together at the Thatched House tavern on 9 May.40 This meeting, and the petition which the Commons had just rejected, provided the impetus for the ‘petitioning movement’. Over the next few months, about thirty petitions to the king were circulated, and signed by large numbers. Counter-petitions, or addresses, thanking the king for his stand in defence of the constitution were also procured.41 The cohesion of this ‘movement’ is easily exaggerated. Its supporters were an uneasy coalition of urban radicals and rival opposition groups. Rockingham was initially lukewarm about encouraging petitions, preferring the milder course of thanking the members who had opposed the seating of Luttrell.42 Once converted to the propriety of petitioning, he worked to have the petitions limited to a single grievance: the violation of the rights of the freeholders of Middlesex. Thanks to his influence, the Yorkshire petition was confined to this one topic. In Buckinghamshire, where the campaign was organized by Earl Temple (1711–79; George Grenville’s elder brother), the petition was similarly restricted. The Middlesex petition, on the other hand, inspired by the London radicals, contains a mass of miscellaneous complaint and voices more general constitutional demands.43 The petitioning movement was hardly so spontaneous an expression of popular opinion as its promoters claimed.44 The history of the 39 The debate began on 8 May and ended at 2 a.m. on the 9th with a ministerial majority of 221 to 152. E.B. sent an account to Lord Charlemont (C ii. 23–4). 40 Dinners at the Thatched House became an opposition custom, held regularly at the opening of a session; P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971), 113. 41 Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 105–48. 42 Rockingham to E.B., 29 June 1769 (C ii. 37–9). Frank O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975), 243–52. 43 Representative addresses and petitions (including those from Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Middlesex) are reprinted in the Annual Register (1769), 192–206. 44 Much of the evidence is ambiguous. Rudé, for example, cites ‘those forty petitioners of Padbury in Buckinghamshire, who signed their names, somewhat unsteadily for the most part, alongside those of their parson and curate’ as evidence that the ‘petty freeholders’ supported the movement (Wilkes and

272 present discontents, 1768‒1770 Buckinghamshire petition was typical. It was written by Earl Temple, who also stage-managed its adoption. As late as 7 September, Temple admitted, as Burke reported to Rockingham, that the freeholders were ‘in general totally ignorant of the Question, and but very little affected with it’ (9 Sept. 1769: C ii. 76). Yet only four days later, on 11 September, a county meeting endorsed the petition. This event was more a sparring match between rival politicians, anxious to exploit it for their own ends, than a genuine expression of popular feeling. Burke, anxious to promote his own nostrum, objected to Temple’s insinuating ‘a Great deal of Grenvillism into the meeting’ (13 Sept.: 79). Who was the more successful is hard to say, for the meeting was variously reported. According to one account, Burke ‘spoke for near an Hour, in a pure, eloquent and rhetorical Manner, truly Ciceronian’.45 Temple’s version, highlighting his own role, exudes the ‘Grenvillism’ to which Burke took exception. Burke is accorded only a passing mention, fourth in a list of five speakers.46 A third report was written from a ministerial point of view. Thomas Bradshaw (1733–74), Secretary to the Treasury, forwarded a summary to Caleb Whitefoord (1734–1810), who regularly wrote ministerial propaganda for the newspapers. Bradshaw suggested that Whitefoord ‘turn it into ridicule’, attacking the Burkes as ‘ new Men who have just acquired (God knows how) a small property in the County, and . . . have disgraced themselves by their transactions in India Stock’. Whitefoord took the hint, and wrote a sharp attack on ‘these Hibernian Patriots’.47 Another ministerialist asserted that ‘if Liberty is the Topic, you hear nothing but the uncouth Croaking of a White Boy, a Native of a Bog in Ireland . . . The Cicero of the insular Beotia has I find been busy with his Eloquence, where, to my certain Knowledge, he has not the Worth of a Six-pence of property.’48 Burke had to inure himself to a constant barrage of such abuse. The activities of politicians such as Temple and Burke in inflaming the discontents and encouraging the petitions did not escape censure. Their most trenchant critic was Samuel Johnson. In The False Alarm, Johnson denies the reality of the grievances complained of, and savages the movement with a satirical narration of ‘the progress of a petition’. Since ‘meat and drink are plentifully provided, a crowd is easily brought together . . . Ale and clamour unite their powers, the crowd, condensed and heated, Liberty, 146). Perhaps so. Yet they may equally have been bribed or dragooned into signing by the parson on behalf of his patron. 45 ‘Extract of a Letter from Aylesbury, Sept. 11’, Public Advertiser, 15 Sept. 1769. 46 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 18 Sept. 1769; Middlesex Journal, 16–19 Sept. 1769; also printed in Grenville Papers, iv. 455. 47 ‘Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman at Aylesbury’, Public Advertiser, 27 Sept. 1769. Bradshaw’s letter (23 Sept. 1769) is in The Whitefoord Papers, ed. W. A. S. Hewins (Oxford, 1898), 146. 48 Letter from ‘Pericles’, Public Advertiser, 21 Sept. 1769.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 273 begins to ferment with the leven of sedition.’ After a speech by ‘the Cicero of the day’, the petition is read and applauded. Finally, ‘those who are sober enough to write add their names, and the rest would sign if they could’.49 Though he might act the part of a ‘Cicero of the day’, Burke was no demagogue. Knowing the dangers of fomenting popular agitation, he sought an appearance of popular support, not genuine participation. Much less did he favour an extension of the franchise. Yet the practice of petitioning could in the long run only help the radicals and undermine the aristocratic paternalism of Rockingham and Burke. ‘It is the duty of men like you,’ Johnson admonished the gentlemen of the opposition, ‘who have leisure for enquiry, to lead back the people to their honest labour; to tell them, that submission is the duty of the ignorant, and content the virtue of the poor; that they have no skill in the art of government, nor any interest in the dissentions of the great.’ In his heart, Burke agreed with Johnson. Expediency, more than conviction, drew him into the petitioning movement. Once engaged, Burke promoted the cause with characteristic energy, if only to satisfy his own craving for activity. In the summer and autumn of 1769, he travelled about more than usual. On Rockingham’s behalf he went to London to consult Sir Anthony Abdy (c.1720–75), an MP much in Rockingham’s confidence at this period (C ii. 74–5). At Aylesbury (the county town), Burke attended the races (which were often used for informal political canvassing) and the meeting called to support the county petition. Visiting Lord Temple to concert measures for the Buckinghamshire petition, Burke saw for the first time the famous gardens at Stowe. Disliking Temple, Burke expected to find his gardens ‘Grand and extensive but insipid’. He was impressed against his will (104–5). A longer journey was to Yorkshire, to confer with Rockingham and to attend that county’s meeting (85–6). In one of his more philosophical moods, Burke saw clearly enough the futility of such manœuvrings, and even warned others against making life a constant battle. ‘Nothing can be so unworthy of a well composed Soul’, he advised the quarrel-prone Barry, ‘as to pass away Life in bickerings and Litigations: in snarling, and scuffling with every one about us. Again, and again, Dear Barry, we must be at peace with our Species; if not for their sakes, yet very much for our own’ (16 Sept. 1769: 82). Such counsel was lost on Barry, nor did Burke pay much heed to his own precept. He might write to O’Hara of the quiet enjoyed by ‘Souls who have just escaped from the bustle of a tumultuous world into the regions of peace’. The tranquillity of the ‘well composed Soul’ was not his. His nature demanded the excitement and even the vexations of ‘the bustle of a tumultuous world’ (26). 49 Written at great speed and published on 17 Jan. 1770, The False Alarm reached a fourth printing by 12 Mar.; Works (New Haven, 1958– ), x. 317–45 (quotations from 336–7 and 338–9).

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3 Though the discordant opposition groups had joined forces to promote the petitioning movement, they remained suspicious and distrustful of each other. The Rockingham party found the Grenville–Temple connection awkward enough to work with. The London radicals were even less welcome allies. Not surprisingly, when Burke came to compose a political manifesto, he sought to distance his party as much from the other opposition groups as from the ministers.50 The Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, his party’s ‘Creed’, as he described it to O’Hara (21 May 1770: C ii. 139), was conceived and largely written in 1769. It was not published until 23 April 1770.51 The delay was unfortunate, for the political situation changed rapidly in the first months of 1770, so that the pamphlet missed its immediate aim. Burke’s larger purpose, however, was amply fulfilled. The Thoughts remains the classic statement of the principles of the Rockingham party.52 The Thoughts was Burke’s initiative. Though the letter in which Burke outlined his plan has been lost, its purport can be inferred from Rockingham’s reply. ‘I am exceeding glad you have begun to look over the Papers of the system of the last 9 years,’ he told Burke, ‘that indeed would be at this time a most useful work and would do more good in giving right Ideas to the Publick—than all the proceedings have done hitherto of late’ (29 June 1769: C ii. 39–40). By the recent ‘proceedings’ Rockingham meant the petitioning movement, about which he had grave reservations. He liked neither the radical demands for constitutional reform, nor the unleashing of mass political activity. Far more to his taste was Burke’s proposal for a combination of history and party manifesto: an enquiry into the political instability of the 1760s, coupled with ‘right Ideas’ about how to end it. Based on the Rockingham party’s experience since 1765, the pamphlet was in part a restatement of ideas that had already been expressed, publicly in Burke’s own Observations and privately in the memorandum that Dowdeswell drew up in July 1767.53 In other respects, especially in its elaborate deployment of ‘secret history’, the Thoughts broke new ground. The Thoughts was written for a double audience, for the Rockingham party itself and for potential converts and independent supporters. For the party itself, the Thoughts served as a testament of faith, embodying their E.B. to Rockingham, 6 Sept., 9 and 29 Oct. 1769 (C ii. 72–3, 88, 101). Todd, 17. 52 Interpretive studies include Donald C. Bryant, ‘Burke’s Present Discontents: The Rhetorical Genesis of a Party Testament’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 42 (1956), 115–26; John Brewer, ‘Party and the Double Cabinet: Two Facets of Burke’s Thoughts’, Historical Journal, 14 (1971), 479–501; Reid, Edmund Burke and the Practice of Political Writing, 186–214; and Stephen H. Browne, Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue (Tuscaloosa, 1993), 11–26. 53 WWM R1/842, dated 23–4 July 1767. M. Francis de Sales Boran, ‘William Dowdeswell’s “Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs [etc.]” ’, in Gaetano L. Vincitorio (ed.), Crisis in the ‘Great Republic’: Essays Presented to Ross J. S. Hoffman (New York, 1969), 1–13. 50 51

present discontents, 1768‒1770 275 interpretation of recent history and their principles of future action. Drafts were circulated to selected friends and sympathizers, and the text revised to satisfy some (but not all) of their objections. Burke showed the first draft to Rockingham on a visit to Wentworth in September, and sent him part of a later draft in November (C ii. 92, 108). Dowdeswell, Portland, Savile, O’Hara, and others also read the pamphlet in manuscript. Portland and Savile both realized that it would make more enemies than friends. Portland, who wanted to flatter and deceive the other opposition groups into supporting a Rockingham-led opposition, found Burke’s treatment of them too severe. Savile thought the handling of the king unduly offensive, and advised against publication.54 On his own initiative, Burke dropped a section attacking Chatham, to avoid, as he told Rockingham, ‘the Cry of the world upon us—as if we meant directly to quarrel with all mankind’ (Nov. 1769: 109). He also adopted some of O’Hara’s suggestions.55 To the criticisms of Portland and Savile he paid less heed, for the pamphlet as published remains open to most of their objections. Despite its dutiful circulation among the party chiefs, the Thoughts remained Burke’s own work, ‘every word bad & good his own’.56 The Thoughts was intended to reach beyond the party faithful. Anxious to expedite publication, Rockingham wanted the pamphlet to be ‘read by all the members of Parliament—and by all the politicians in town and country prior to the meeting of Parliament’. If he were ever to form a ministry on his own plan, Rockingham would need the support of independent members. He rejected the notion that his party should form a closer connection with the groups associated with Grenville, Temple, and Chatham, let alone form a ‘conjunct administration’ with them. What he sought was ‘the appearance of a thorough union in all the Parties now in opposition’. Such an ‘appearance’ would strengthen his hand in any negotiation. His aim, which the Thoughts was intended to foster, was to ‘form and unite a party upon real and well-founded principles—which would in the end prevail and re’establish order and Government in this country’ (15 Oct. 1769: C ii. 91–2).57 This was a long-term strategy. Rockingham was prepared to wait, and Burke had perforce to wait with him. In 1769, the possibility of 54 Portland to Rockingham, 3 Dec. 1769, WWM R1/1250, and Rockingham to Dowdeswell, 23 Dec., R1/1254, both printed in Earl of Albemarle, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and his Contemporaries, (London, 1852), ii. 144–7. Savile to Rockingham, Dec. 1769 (C ii. 118–21). 55 On reading the published text, O’Hara told E.B. that ‘everything that I disliked in it is omitted, and one passage also, which I much liked’; 10 May 1770, WWM BkP 1/299, in Ross J. S. Hoffman, Edmund Burke, New York Agent: with his Letters to the New York Assembly and Intimate Correspondence with Charles O’Hara, 1761–1776 (Philadelphia, 1956), 462. 56 E.B.’s comment on the suspicion expressed by Thomas Leland that the pamphlet contained ‘some insertions from other hands’; Leland to E.B., 11 June 1770, WWM BkP 1/305, printed (without E.B.’s comment) in Corr. (1844), i. 225–8. 57 Portland likewise envisaged the Thoughts ‘holding out a Banner’ to attract ‘the young men of property, & independent people in both Houses’; to Rockingham, 3 Dec. 1769, WWM R1/1250, in Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 147.

276 present discontents, 1768‒1770 Rockingham being invited to form a ministry on the pattern recommended in the Thoughts was remote indeed. Burke knew this. In letters of 9 July and 29 October 1769, he acknowledged the inveterate hostility of the court to the Rockingham party and their principles (43, 102). If they were to enter government, which they would do only on their own terms, it must be against the king’s will: in the contemporary phrase, by ‘storming the closet’.58 Most independent members reprobated ministers who thus imposed themselves upon an unwilling king. They respected the royal prerogative of choosing ministers, subject to their retaining the confidence of Parliament. Burke needed to make ‘storming the closet’ seem less odious. To appeal to the uncommitted and the independent, Burke stakes out a middle ground between the court and the radicals. Affecting to be nonpartisan, a historian and an analyst, his mind unbiased by self-interest and unclouded by visionary schemes, he establishes a detached, dispassionate tone. The Thoughts is restrained in its use of the emotive appeal, and temperate in language and expression. Burke eschews personal abuse. With the advantage of anonymity, he develops a fictive voice that sounds aloof, impartial, and disinterested. He first planned the pamphlet in the form of a letter addressed to John White (1699–1769), a veteran ‘old Whig’ MP (C ii. 52). Though Burke later used the epistolary form to great advantage, he was right to reject it for the Thoughts. The aloof impartiality of the ‘enquiry’ mode suits the purpose of the Thoughts better than the more personal genre of the epistle.59 The Thoughts is carefully and self-consciously structured. In the manner of a classical oration, it has a perceptible framework of introduction, refutation, and proof. The complex argument is clearly articulated. Digressions are signposted, and pauses made to answer anticipated objections. The development of the argument is highly self-conscious, with paragraphs of summary (WS ii. 266, 282) and transition (262, 291, 308). Few would deny, Burke argues, that the present is a time of crisis. After briefly refuting the ministerial analysis, he turns to what he identifies as the real cause of the ‘present discontents’: the plan of a group calling itself the ‘king’s friends’ to destroy the substance of the constitution while maintaining its forms. Burke first outlines this plot, then traces it in greater detail. The scheme of these ‘king’s friends’, he argues, is likely to prove fatal to the constitution. Indeed, its ill effects have already been felt, even by the king himself, by whose 58 Portland was not worried that E.B.’s Thoughts might give offence to the king, because the king ‘never will like you ’till he sees he cant go on without you’; to Rockingham, 3 Dec. 1769, WWM R1/ 1250, in Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 146–7. 59 White died on 7 Sept. 1769, while E.B. was working on the Thoughts. Since there were other possible recipients, the decision to abandon the epistolary form was probably made on rhetorical grounds.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 277 supposed ‘friends’ the project was initiated. This section offers a wideranging analysis of recent history, all the ills of which are attributed to the evil ‘system of favouritism’. Turning from cause to cure, after a brief consideration of some radical remedies, Burke advances his own: government not by back-stairs favouritism, but by a strong and united ‘party’ of virtuous and public-spirited men of property. Burke needed to develop different arguments against the various competing interpretations of the cause of the ‘discontents’. Ministerial supporters denied the reality of the ‘discontents’ and accused the opposition of fomenting popular grievances. The radical opposition allowed that the ‘present discontents’ were real, but attributed them to deeply rooted social and political problems. They called for far-reaching constitutional reforms, all of which were anathema to Burke. Shorter parliaments, the elimination of ‘rotten’ and ‘pocket’ boroughs, and a wider and more equal franchise were among the measures proposed, though Burke considers only shorter parliaments and the exclusion of placemen from the Commons (WS ii. 308– 11). At the opposite end of the spectrum of opinion were conservative moralists such as John Brown, who traced the ‘discontents’ to a social problem of a different kind: the growth of ‘luxury’ and corruption, fuelled by the growth of trade and consumption, and the influx of wealth from India.60 This critique was old-fashioned by 1770.61 Burke could therefore dismiss it with scornful brevity (254). The core of the Thoughts is the long central section in which Burke develops his own diagnosis of the nation’s discontents (WS ii. 258–308). Having rejected the ‘general causes’ thesis, he blames instead the arbitrary designs of a shadowy and sinister group, whom he calls the ‘king’s friends’, who have arrogated real power and influence to themselves, while leaving the ostensible ministers with official responsibility. Rumours of ‘secret influence’ and the machinations of Lord Bute and his henchmen had been in circulation for nearly a decade. Burke gave the inchoate mass a shape and even a name, claiming that the ‘system, comprehending the exterior and interior Administrations, is commonly called, in the technical language of the Court, Double Cabinet; in French or English, as you choose to pronounce it’ (274). This wholly imaginary ‘system’ is blandly presented as common knowledge, in court circles at least. It derives credibility from being placed in the context of a brief sketch of English history since 1688 and a more detailed analysis of the period since 1760. He contrasts the palmy days of political stability and national happiness under George II and the Whigs with the nearly annual turnover of ministries under George III 60 John Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, on Licentiousness, and Faction (London, 1765), 58, 149–50, 152, repeating a leading theme of his Estimate (1757–8). Horace Walpole, for one, agreed; to Sir Horace Mann, 6 Nov. 1769, YWC xxiii. 151. 61 John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977), 110–27.

278 present discontents, 1768‒1770 and the neo-Toryism of the ‘king’s friends’.62 Burke did not invent the ‘conspiracy’ of the new Tories. His distinctive contribution to the myth was separating it from the person of Lord Bute. To exclude Bute himself, Burke argues, is not enough. The whole ‘system of favouritism’ must be destroyed. Already, its baneful influence has been felt: in the conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, by the king himself, and finally in Parliament. Consideration of Parliament introduces two important topical issues: the rights of electors, called into question by the government’s handling of Wilkes and the Middlesex election; and the payment without previous enquiry of the debts of the Civil List. Having analysed the cause of the discontents, Burke turns to their cure. First he briefly controverts the radical case for shorter parliaments, the exclusion of more office-holders from Parliament, and such measures. Identifying the root of the evil as the ‘king’s friends’ and their ‘system’ allows Burke to dismiss the need for radical changes to the constitution. His diagnosis calls for restoration, not innovation; in particular, for the return to power and influence of the men whose position entitles them to exercise it and who can be trusted to exercise it responsibly. During the 1730s, the slogan ‘measures, not men’ had been popularized by the opponents of Sir Robert Walpole as a means of legitimizing their opposition. They claimed to be concerned with Walpole’s policies, not with the merely personal question of who was in place and power. The slogan was later appropriated by William Pitt and his followers.63 By the 1760s, it was a commonplace. To invert it was therefore a bold stroke on Burke’s part, so unexpected that Horace Walpole thought it an ‘incredible . . . folly’.64 Burke argues that the existing system needs only good and disinterested men in place of selfseeking knaves. He had recently said as much in the Commons, calling ‘not men but measures . . . an insignificant maxim’.65 Burke successfully elevates and generalizes the debate. His avowal of ‘men, not measures’ made this particularly necessary. He needed to raise the argument above a mere recommendation of the Rockingham party as the most proper to form a ministry. Eighteenth-century oppositions were 62 The debate has been continued by modern historians. An interpretation close to E.B.’s is W. R. Fryer, ‘King George III: His Political Character and Conduct, 1760–1784. A New Whig Interpretation’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 6 (1962), 68–101. Defences of the king include Richard Pares, George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953); and Ian R. Christie, ‘Was there a “New Toryism” in the Earlier Part of George III’s Reign?’ (1965); repr. in his Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London, 1970), 196–213. 63 Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, 119, 124; Michael C. McGee, ‘ “Not Men, but Measures”: The Origins and Import of an Ideological Principle’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 64 (1978), 141–54. 64 Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (London, 1894), iv. 87. E.B. was not, however, the first to do so. Grey Cooper, for example, anticipates E.B.’s argument in A Pair of Spectacles for Short-Sighted Politicians (London, 1765), a pamphlet written in defence of the Rockingham ministry. 65 Debate on the Debts on the Civil List, 28 Feb. 1769, BL Egerton MS 218, fo. 221.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 279 always charged (often justly) with self-interested motives. Sir George Savile commented on a passage in Burke’s unpublished draft: ‘Towards the end of [section] c’, he told Rockingham, ‘one begins to see where the shoe pinches, and whoever answers it would say its all about who shall be in and who shall be out’ (Dec. 1769: C ii. 120). Burke could not entirely avoid this imputation. He minimizes its force by writing in a lofty tone that suggests a disinterested spectator rather than an aspirant panting for office. The Thoughts accordingly lacks the intensity of the letters of Junius or of Johnson’s False Alarm. Both Junius and Johnson aim knock-out blows. Burke’s pamphlet operates more slowly, by a patient accumulation of evidence and arguments, advanced dispassionately, not with the cold malignity of Junius or the exasperated anger of Johnson. This quality contributed to the pamphlet’s long afterlife as a manual of wise statesmanship. Political writing in the 1760s had become bitterly personal. Bute had been abused with a virulence unknown since the fall of Sir Robert Walpole. Not even the king was exempt. The unprecedented audacity of North Briton no. 45 had been outdone in Junius’ letter to the king of 19 December 1769.66 Against this background, Burke’s handling of personalities was remarkably restrained. A typical pamphleteer blamed Bute for ‘all the divisions and distractions into which this unhappy kingdom has been plunged’ and asserted that ‘if no such man as the Earl of B. had been in Existence, when the late King died, not one of those evils would have happened’.67 Burke’s target was not individuals but the whole ‘system of favouritism’. ‘We should have been tried with it,’ he asserts, ‘if the Earl of Bute had never existed’ (WS ii. 276). This strategy offered two advantages. It elevated patronage into principle. In the longer term, it provided a sinister but intangible target and a frame of interpretation which could never be disproved. Thus in December 1770, Burke was convinced that Bute’s ‘System is got into firmer and abler hands’ (C ii. 176). The Rockingham party clung to this idée fixe for many years, long after it had lost all plausibility.68 Perhaps it was too subtle a strategy, for it was widely misunderstood, by friend and foe alike. Portland could not understand why Bute was let off so lightly, while hostile reviewers accused Burke of leaving a door open to a Bute alliance.69 The Wilkes case was awkward for the Rockingham party. Champions of virtue and principle, they did not relish defending such a scandalous Letter xxxv, in Letters of Junius, 159–73. [John Almon], The History of the Late Minority (London, 1766), 10. Christie, Myth and Reality, 42–4, exposes the unreality of the ‘myth’. Contemporaries, however, believed it: Political Register, 5 (Aug. 1769), 55–69; (Sept. 1769), 161–3; 6 (May 1770), frontispiece; (June 1770), 315–18; David Hume to William Strahan, 25 June 1771, in Letters, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), ii. 245. These are all non-Rockingham sources. 69 Portland to Rockingham, 3 Dec. 1769, WWM R1/1250, in Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 146; Political Register, 6 (June 1770), 357–9; London Chronicle, 1–3 May 1770. 66 67 68

280 present discontents, 1768‒1770 character, an avowed rake and a blasphemer.70 Many saw in his political manœuvres nothing more than opportunism and self-aggrandizement. His chief supporters, the urban radicals, were unwelcome allies for the conservative, aristocratic Rockingham party. For all this, Wilkes provided too good an issue not to exploit. As with Bute, Burke’s strategy was to generalize the constitutional debate. He was as eager as Johnson to deflate the heroic status Wilkes had achieved in the popular mind, and more successful. Johnson’s blustering depreciation leaves Wilkes at the centre of the storm.71 Burke chose to say little about Wilkes, and in that little to present him as only one among many victims of the ‘system of favouritism’ (WS ii. 295–6). The Thoughts was written at a time of popular agitation, which Burke was himself helping to manage. At such a juncture, he might have been expected to advocate populist reforms. On the contrary, in the Thoughts he explicitly rejects the idea of more frequent elections, and passes over in silence the other reforms that were being canvassed, such as an increase in the number of county members or an extension of the franchise. When Burke speaks darkly but approvingly of the possible ‘interposition of the body of the people itself ’ (WS ii. 311), the phrase is easily taken to mean more than he intended. He neither advocated nor approved any kind of popular direct action. He meant only that ‘the people’ should sign the petitions that were being circulated by the Rockingham party and other groups of notables. Burke limited the role of ‘the people’ to little more than electing representatives and signing approved petitions. The leaders of the Rockingham party promoted the petitions to create an impression of popular support for their policies. They were averse to allowing ‘the people’ a free hand in stating their own grievances. Implicit in the Thoughts is Burke’s belief that an MP must act in the interests of the people, not follow their dictates. ‘Get the thanks of the people by serving them,’ he urged his fellow members, ‘not by doing what they desire of us.’72 Fearful of the potentially destructive role of ‘the people’, Burke was always hesitant about encouraging popular participation in politics. The king proved an even more awkward topic than Wilkes. By convention, ‘the king can do no wrong’, being supposed to act, in his political capacity, on the advice of his ministers. To attack the king himself was therefore constitutionally improper as well as personally offensive. In a manifesto representing a party that aspired to office, Burke could not avail himself of the freedom that anonymous pamphleteers and visual satirists 70 Dowdeswell, however, who had known Wilkes as a student at Leiden, told E.B. that ‘Men are inclined to think much worse [of Wilkes’s character] than it really deserves’ (5 Sept. 1769: C ii. 70). 71 Johnson, The False Alarm (1770); repr. in Works, x. 317–45. 72 Debate on the Linen Bill, 2 May 1770, BL Egerton MS 222, fo. 63. The context is a discussion of bounties on the production of linen. E.B.’s classic expression of this doctrine is his Bristol ‘Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll’, 3 Nov. 1774 (WS iii. 64–70).

present discontents, 1768‒1770 281 took. Though the pretence is thin at times, Burke respected the convention that the king was blameless but ill advised. Indeed, he developed this constitutional maxim in order to circumscribe the king’s role in politics. Burke sought to relegate the monarch to a mainly ceremonial role. At times, his description could be that of a modern constitutional monarch, ‘a representative of the national dignity’ (WS ii. 287). Distinguishing ‘the Crown’ from ‘the King’, Burke made the Crown effectively the executive instrument of the legislature, the king a figurehead. In Burke’s time, this idea did not win general acceptance, as it would during the course of the nineteenth century. Contemporaries expected the king to play a more active role in politics than envisaged in Burke’s theory, and regarded the choice of ministers, within restrictions, as a legitimate royal prerogative. In July 1782 and again in December 1783, George III exercised what Burke and his friends regarded as an unconstitutional choice. Burke was bitterly disappointed when Pitt’s victory in the election of 1784 appeared to endorse the king’s interpretation of his prerogative. Another of Burke’s strategies in the Thoughts was to appeal to general principles, avoiding a tedious parade of legal precedents. These weigh down other moderate opposition pamphlets on the Middlesex election.74 Instead, he prefers to reason from some maxim or axiom. Thus he argues that the executive and legislative branches of a government must be mutually compatible, and he develops a theoretical analysis of the characteristics of arbitrary and quasi-democratic governments. Unable to show that the king has broken the letter of any law, Burke accuses him (through the ‘king’s friends’) of having violated the ‘spirit’ of the constitution. By the ‘spirit’ of the constitution, Burke meant a return to the ascendancy of the old Whigs who had ruled the country under George II. Veneration for the ‘ancient constitution’, the numinous, timeless entity prominent in his later writings and speeches, is little in evidence. In the Thoughts, the precedents he cites are chiefly post-1688. A bold combination of metaphors naturalizes recent innovations into the constitution they have modified: ‘some part of that influence which would otherwise have been possessed [by the Crown] as in a sort of mortmain and unalienable domain, returned again to the great ocean from whence it arose, and circulated among the people’ (WS ii. 259).75 The middle ground that Burke claimed to occupy in the Thoughts represented a genuine belief as well as a rhetorical stance. Writing to Rockingham 73

Vincent Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens, Ga., 1990), 41–98. William Dowdeswell, The Sentiments of an English Freeholder (London, 1769); Sir William Meredith, The Question Stated (London, 1769); Reid, Edmund Burke and the Practice of Political Writing, 166–85. 75 This is a more dynamic view of the constitution than E.B. would take in the Reflections, where he uses the metaphor of mortmain to deny that inherited liberties can be lost (WS viii. 84). 73 74

282 present discontents, 1768‒1770 in September 1770, he spoke of the ‘vast resemblance in Character’ between the ‘king’s friends’ and the city radicals: ‘they feel, that if they had equal Spirit and industry, they would in the same situation act the very same part’ (C ii. 157). The delicate ‘balance’ of the British constitution had long been a commonplace, an idea to which Charles I and his opponents could both appeal. Burke and his contemporaries continued to classify governments, according to Aristotle’s scheme, as monarchies, aristocracies, or democracies, or as some blend of the three. A cherished article of faith was the belief that the British constitution happily combined and qualified the best elements of each.76 There agreement ended. How this balance could best be maintained, and what corrections were needed, had been perennial topics of controversy. In the 1750s and 1760s, several pamphleteers had called for a strengthening of royal authority against the Whig oligarchy that had dominated the country under the first two Georges.77 The 1760s had also seen a surge of radical agitation, fuelled by but not limited to the Wilkes affair. This polarization allowed Burke to define his own position as moderating between ‘the people’ and ‘those in power’ (WS ii. 252). He warns of the need to steer carefully between ‘steep precipices, and deep waters’ (311). Burke sought to recommend the beneficent role of the aristocratic element in the constitution, as the best safeguard against the opposite evils of royal despotism and radical anarchy. Burke’s idea of the constitution was essentially aristocratic. The word itself he abjured, for it had pejorative connotations. ‘Aristocratic’ constitutions were generally perceived as corrupt and oppressive, enslaving the many for the selfish advantage of a haughty and domineering few. The oligarchic constitutions of Sweden, Poland, and Venice were regarded as among the worst in Europe. Venice, perhaps because of its prominence on the Grand Tour, was the most often cited. Since the Revolution of 1688, Venice was regularly invoked by those who feared, or affected to fear, that Britain too might decline into such an oligarchy. In 1719, Robert Walpole had exploited such fears to defeat the Peerage Bill, a measure which would have created a closed aristocracy on the Venetian model.78 In 1770, the fear of aristocracy remained potent.79 That Burke should feel obliged to protest 76 Blackstone, Commentaries, i. 149–51. Earlier examples range from Charles I’s ‘Answer to the Nineteen Propositions’ (18 June 1642) to Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, xi. vi. 77 Brown’s Estimate; [Owen Ruffhead], Ministerial Usurpation Displayed, and the Prerogatives of the Crown, with the Rights of Parliament and of the Privy Council, Considered (London, 1760); [John Douglas], Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the Present Important Crisis of a New Reign and a New Parliament (London, 1761). 78 The British Aristocracy and the Peerage Bill of 1719, ed. John F. Naylor (New York, 1968). 79 Charles Churchill, The Farewell (1764), lines 339–68; Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World (1760), Letter lvi, The Traveller (1764), lines 375–92, and The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), ch. 19; ‘An Essay on the British Government; Shewing that it Tends Immediately Neither to a Republic nor an Absolute Monarchy, but to an Aristocracy’, Political Register, 1 (July 1767), 141–4.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 283 that ‘I am no friend to aristocracy’ therefore comes as no surprise. Yet his repudiation of the aristocratic principle is no more than a rhetorical concession to contemporary prejudice, for he added the important qualification, ‘in the sense at least in which that word is usually understood’, that is, as an ‘austere and insolent domination’ (WS ii. 268). Burke assumed that the House of Commons would always be dominated by independent landed gentlemen, and he approved of this preponderance. No party, in such conditions, would be numerous enough to ‘win’ an election or control the Commons. The aim of the Rockingham party, an aristocracy of birth, virtue, and talent, was to provide the necessary leadership, by gaining the confidence of the independents. Burke observes that the health of the constitution depends more on convention and practice than on positive laws, which ‘reach but a very little way’ (WS ii. 277). Discretionary powers, he argues, are more safely entrusted to a select few, than either to an individual or to the many. The question is therefore which of the competing parties can the independent members (and behind them the electorate itself ) most safely trust. The obsequious courtiers or ‘king’s friends’ are out of the question, as are political mavericks such as Chatham. Self-serving factions such as the Bedford party are eager only for the emoluments of office. The unpropertied radicals lack the stake in the social order that is the best guarantee of responsibility. The men who can best be trusted are the natural leaders of society, the men of large property who have little to gain personally from holding office, and much to lose from dangerous innovations.80 By arguing that power should be lodged in such hands, in a responsible group of like-minded oligarchs on whom the people can rely (in short, the Rockingham party), Burke pre-empts discussion of particular issues and problems. This belief in ‘men, not measures’ remained a firm article of his creed. He never subscribed to anything approaching a ‘great man’ theory of history; he distrusted ‘great men’ such as Chatham. In the Observations, he countered Knox’s call for Grenville’s return to power with the argument that Britain needed, not another Sully, but a party of men ‘of an unshaken adherence to principle, and attachment to connexion, against every allurement of interest’ (209). ‘Party divisions,’ he had observed, ‘whether on the whole operating for good or evil, are things inseparable from free government’ (110).81 In the Thoughts, the defence of party adumbrated in the Observations is greatly extended and refined. 80 In ‘Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies of the Eighteenth Century’ (1965); repr. in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London, 1972), 104–47, J. G. A. Pocock traces the idea back to the ‘classical republicans’. E.B., however, differs from such writers as Harrington and Swift, who champion the rights and virtues of the smaller freeholders, in approving the influence exercised by the great landowners. 81 James Burgh called this notion (‘That opposition and party are necessary in a free state’) ‘an old and vulgar error’; Political Disquisitions (London, 1774–5), iii. 331. Though he does not name E.B., he may have had this passage in the Observations (as well as E.B.’s Thoughts) in mind.

284 present discontents, 1768‒1770 ‘Party’ has, since Burke’s time, become a neutral word to describe a political association. Before Burke, the common view was that political parties were (at best) necessary evils. Early defences of party are mostly apologetic.82 An all-party administration was ‘pleasing enough in theory’, one pamphleteer wrote, but impracticable: ‘as things are now constituted, a government by party, how ever imperfect and partial it may seem in speculation, is the only one likely to act with strength and consistency’.83 Since party was ‘the natural attendant on power and riches’, another argued, ‘parties are not only natural, but even necessary, in free governments; like storms in the natural world, they serve to disperse the ill humours that are collected in it’.84 Burke boldly advanced an altogether more positive defence of party. Burke attached no special significance to the term ‘party’. In the Thoughts, indeed, he uses the word in his celebrated definition of ‘party’ as ‘a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed’ (WS ii. 317). Yet elsewhere ‘party’ is almost synonymous with ‘connection’, and even with ‘faction’. The section of the Thoughts that defends ‘party’ actually begins with a defence of connections, reprobating the ‘doctrine’ that ‘all political connexions are in their nature factious’, that ‘Connexion and Faction are equivalent terms’ (314).85 The word ‘party’ had no mystique for Burke. He applies it even to so obnoxious a group as the ‘king’s friends’ (269, 275). The Whigs and the Tories, he explains, the ‘great parties which formerly divided and agitated the kingdom’, are now ‘in a manner entirely dissolved’ (253). The ‘parties’ or ‘connexions’ that had taken their place were small groups of politicians, usually headed by an influential nobleman, and held together by personal loyalty. The Bedford ‘party’, led by the fourth Duke of Bedford (1710–71), exemplified this type. Burke pointedly distinguished the Rockingham party from such groups. He divided the opposition into virtuous and factious components, identifying the Rockingham party as the proper home of virtue. He needed to explain why the Rockingham party was so reluctant to re-enter government except on its own terms, terms which were widely regarded as unreasonable. When he began work on the Thoughts, he expected the king to ask Chatham (or perhaps Temple or Grenville) to form a new ministry, or to 82 Caroline Robbins, ‘ “Discordant Parties”: A Study of the Acceptance of Party by Englishmen’, Political Science Quarterly, 73 (1958), 505–29. 83 A Letter to His Grace the Duke of Grafton, on the Present Situation of Public Affairs (London, 1768), 10–11. Attributed to Lord Temple in Grenville Papers, vol. iii, p. cli; the subtext of the pamphlet is a call for Grenville’s return to office. 84 Considerations on the Times (London, 1769), 31; other examples in Factions no More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. J. A. W. Gunn (London, 1972). 85 E.B.’s defence of party exemplifies what Brewer calls the ‘honourable connections’ argument; Party Ideology and Popular Politics, 65–74.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 285 strengthen the existing one by taking in new allies (9 July 1769: C ii. 43). As part of such an arrangement, Rockingham and some of his followers would at best be offered subordinate positions. These they would be obliged to reject, and their refusal would need to be justified. In the Thoughts, Burke argues that no party of men of virtue and integrity should lend itself to a ministry which it does not control. Few contemporaries appreciated or accepted this claim to a virtual monopoly of political virtue, and therefore of power. Burke’s character of the Rockingham party was hardly impartial. Two of his claims for it can, however, be accepted. Its members were unusually concerned with acting consistently and from principle.86 Second, the Rockingham party was ostentatiously indifferent to office. Their reputation for principle and consistency allowed Burke to characterize the Rockingham Whigs as the natural home of political virtue. Burke recognized that there would always be several ‘parties’ at a given time, each competing for the support of independent members, each appealing to public opinion, and each pretending to virtue and public spirit. In reality, however, there will be only one ‘good’ party, to which all men of virtue will naturally gravitate.87 Such a party will be united on general principles and in moral sympathy. ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate’ (WS ii. 315). Burke conceived of such a party as a virtuous opposition seeking to wrest power from the wicked and unscrupulous hands into which it had fallen. This party of good men had no need of a ‘programme’ in the modern sense. Its purpose was to restore rule by the men of virtue and integrity.88 As the Duke of Richmond tried to explain to Chatham, ‘the larger our Party was the better it would answer to our idea of what a party should be, but we look’d upon ourselves as the only Party at present subsisting. That we should be happy to rekon Lord Chatham amongst us, and as many more as would act with us upon our own principles.’89 The Rockingham party’s singular virtue justified its seeking control of the commanding heights of government.

4 To minimize the expense of a second household, many MPs rented a London house for as short a period as possible. Burke was so often called to 86

88.

87

This is a leitmotiv in Rockingham’s correspondence; Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics,

The notion that a plurality of equally legitimate parties is politically healthy originated with John Shute Barrington (1678–1734), not with E.B.; J. A. W. Gunn, ‘Party before Burke: Shute Barrington’, Government and Opposition, 3 (1968), 223–40. 88 O’Gorman, Rise of Party, 267–9, stresses the moral aspect of E.B.’s concept of party. 89 Reported in Richmond to Rockingham, 12 Feb. 1771, in Alison Gilbert Olson, The Radical Duke: Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, Third Duke of Richmond (London, 1961), 142.

286 present discontents, 1768‒1770 London on business that he needed a base there for most of the year. In 1769, he therefore took a house as early as September, though the new session of Parliament was not expected to begin before Christmas. Instead of returning to Charles Street, he took a house in Fludyer Street, even closer to the Palace of Westminster (Plate 4). Fludyer Street was a new development, immediately south of and parallel to Downing Street, built about 1767. Burke’s house was smaller than the one on Charles Street. Instead of the usual three rooms on a floor, it had only two, the larger one eighteen foot square. Burke probably lived at the end of the street that overlooked the park.90 Shortly before Fludyer Street was demolished to clear the site for the new Foreign Office, its appearance, probably little altered since Burke’s time, was recorded by T. H. Shepherd (1793–1864). Though Burke’s actual house cannot be identified, Shepherd’s drawing captures the ambience of the street (Plate 15). Except for its proximity to the park, the terrace is typical of the streetscapes in which Burke lived. The new session of Parliament opened on 9 January 1770. The opposition groups entered the fray with high hopes, for the petitioning movement had scored some notable successes. The grievances and discontents on which they had sought to capitalize were in part real. Grafton was widely perceived as weak and incompetent, and his ministry’s days seem numbered. These hopes were disappointed. For Burke and the Rockingham party, the session was another dismal failure. The petitions they had worked so hard to organize were simply ignored. For a few days, indeed, the ministry was near collapse. Lord Chancellor Camden (1714–94) had long been at odds with his Cabinet colleagues. After his open support for Chatham’s censure motions in the Lords on 9 January, Grafton sought to replace him with Charles Yorke (1722–70). The son of a Lord Chancellor, Yorke had long coveted the office. The precarious state of the ministry can be judged from Yorke’s indecision. He was pressured by the king to accept; by his friends in the Rockingham party, promising a more secure tenure of the Woolsack if they came to power, to refuse. After several oscillations, Yorke accepted, only to die three days later. Rumour attributed his death to suicide. Grafton, thoroughly demoralized, resigned. In October 1769, Rockingham had speculated that, in such an event, the king would ask either Chatham, Grenville, or himself to form a new ministry, and had pondered what he should do in each case (C ii. 91–3). Against the odds, however, Grafton’s resignation did not herald the dissolution of the ministry. Rockingham had underestimated both the king’s political shrewdness and his hostility to the opposition. Instead of turning to them, the king 90 Henry B. Wheatley, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions (London, 1891), ii. 66. W.B. to O’Hara, 1 Oct. 1769, National Library of Ireland, MS 16886, no. 51. Assessments in Fludyer Street ranged from £21 to £68. E.B. was rated at £45. City of Westminster Archives, Rate Books, St Margaret’s Parish, Grand Ward, 1769–70.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 287 asked Lord North to take the Treasury. Since Charles Townshend’s death in 1767, North had been Chancellor of the Exchequer and the leading minister in the Commons. Popular and respected, North was what is called ‘a good House of Commons man’. Such men made the best, or at least the longest-lasting, ministers. North’s promotion evoked some initial scepticism about his staying-power. The opposition hoped, and therefore believed, that the new ministry could not last. By the end of the session, if few would have predicted that North would hold office for twelve years, all could see that the prospects of the opposition were much dimmer than they had been in January. Burke’s pamphlet was a casualty of the January crisis. In October, Rockingham had wanted it published in time to influence the forthcoming session.91 On 23 December, he still urged its early appearance, while uncomfortably aware that his own dilatoriness was largely to blame for the delay.92 The crisis precipitated by Camden’s resignation may have persuaded him to hold the Thoughts back, for the pamphlet drew attention to the divisions within the opposition. Its appearance while Rockingham was trying to put together a ministry from the different opposition groups would be unhelpful. This delay meant that the Thoughts was not published until 23 April, towards the end of the session it was meant to influence. Meanwhile Burke was active in Parliament, speaking in at least twentythree debates.93 The king opened the session on 9 January with what became known as the ‘Horned Cattle’ speech, from the prominence it gave to the threat of an outbreak of ‘Distemper among the Horned Cattle’. On the issues raised by the Middlesex election, the speech was silent. Only in the final paragraph, recommending the avoidance of all ‘Heats and Animosities’, did the king even distantly allude to the petitioning movement. In the Commons debate on the usual address of thanks, Dowdeswell moved an amendment promising an enquiry into ‘the Causes of the unhappy Discontents which at present prevail in every Part of His Majesty’s Dominions’.94 Burke resisted the temptation to anticipate the main points of his still-unpublished Thoughts, though he touched on some of its themes. His speech was a characteristic mixture of the alarmist and the comic, the extempore and the premeditated. The ridicule of Lord North’s unwieldy bulk, and the satire on the bad grammar of Lord Botetourt (1717?–70), the new Governor of Virginia, were probably prepared in advance. Burke was also ready to answer those who either denied the reality of the popular discontents, or dismissed the petitions as factiously manufactured by 91 Portland also wanted the pamphlet to appear ‘if possible before the meeting’; to Rockingham, 3 Dec. 1769, WWM R1/1250. 92 Rockingham to E.B., 15 Oct. 1769 (C ii. 92); to Dowdeswell, 23 Dec., WWM R1/1254, in Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 144–5. 93 The number listed in WS ii. 482–3, again a minimum figure. 94 CJ xxxii. 455–6.

288 present discontents, 1768‒1770 self-seeking politicians cynically exploiting the ignorance of the uneducated. Burke came to the rescue of the unrepresented, developing a parallel with the 1640s. The ministers of Charles I, he argued, had assured him that his subjects’ ‘grievances’ were imaginary, inflamed by a few malcontents. The result had been a subversion of the whole social order. When ‘the Gentlemen deserted the freeholders’, the freeholders revolted and ‘the Gentlemen were trampled down. they were made slaves to draymen & brewers.’95 Even as Burke affirms the right of the meanest freeholder to petition, he shows that he is no populist. In his view, by ignoring the petitions, the ministers are creating conditions favourable to revolution. Redress of popular grievances is in the best interests of the gentlemen and the social hierarchy on which their privileged position depends. One measure passed during the session of 1770 shows that the House of Commons, corrupt as Burke thought it, was capable of independent action. George Grenville’s Controverted Elections Act aimed to correct an abuse of long standing. Disputed elections were determined not according to the merits of the case or by precedent, but by the parliamentary majority, and therefore usually in favour of the friends of the ministry. The bill proposed to remove decisions on disputed returns from committees of the whole house to select committees chosen by ballot.96 A recent instance of the partisanship the bill sought to eliminate had provoked an unseemly altercation between Burke and his usual sparring partner, Rigby. The dispute concerned Carmarthen, a borough fought over for many years by two rival corporations.97 In 1761, Lord Verney had been returned. In 1768, when Verney was elected for Buckinghamshire, he tried to bring in his friend Joseph Bullock (1731–1808) for Carmarthen. The dispute did not come before the Commons until 8 March 1770. At issue was the validity of twenty votes which would have turned the scale in Bullock’s favour.98 Even such a technicality could arouse strong passions. ‘Very high words . . . exceedingly gross on both sides’ were spoken. Burke used ‘better language’. Rigby was less restrained, calling Burke ‘a scoundrel’ who ‘had been kicked downstairs’.99 BL Egerton MS 3711, fos. 58–60, 62–5. Two contemporary reports (from the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine) are reprinted in PH xvi. 668–727. 96 Philip Lawson, ‘Grenville’s Election Act, 1770’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 53 (1980), 218–28. 97 Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790 (London, 1964), i. 462–3. 98 Petitions from Bullock and the excluded voters were presented on 18 Nov. 1768 (CJ xxxii. 44). Consideration of them was repeatedly deferred. The dry record of the proceedings of 8 Mar. (CJ xxxii. 762–3) gives no notion of the drama of the occasion, and the debate was not reported. 99 Thomas Allan to Sir George Macartney, Mar. 1770, in Helen H. Robbins, Our First Ambassador to China: An Account of the Life of George, Earl of Macartney (London, 1908), 74. According to another version, ‘Burke and Rigby had a fierce scolding match in the House: scoundrell and lyer went as bard and jo’; Eliza McDowell to Baron Mure, Mar. 1770, in Selections from the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell (1496–1853) (Glasgow, 1854), ii/2. 171. 95

present discontents, 1768‒1770 289 Burke sought a denial of the story from the man alleged to have kicked him downstairs (whose identity is not known). Lord John Cavendish undertook a late-night expedition to obtain it. Finding him in bed, Lord John reported Rigby’s story, which he was reassured was ‘absolutely false’. When he delivered Burke’s request for a formal disavowal, however, he was told that it ‘contained so direct a menace, that it was a meanness He could not submit to under those circumstances’. Lord John, who had been ‘in too much agitation to mind the wording of your letter’, agreed. A meeting was arranged for the following morning. ‘For Gods sake consider and do not be in the wrong,’ Lord John urged Burke. ‘I beg you would be here before eight, but do think and be calm’ (C ii. 124–5). That Lord John was prepared to take such a part testifies to the affectionate if not uncritical regard in which he held Burke. This parliamentary flyting achieved considerable notoriety. It was reported in a Boston newspaper, and the incident was still providing material for anti-Burke squibs in the English press as late as August.100 The Carmarthen election was no more than a pretext for this verbal brawl, which vented animosities that had been seething since about 1767. The exchanges between Burke and Conway never degenerated into such personal abuse. Conway was too aloof and gentlemanlike. Rigby was as irascible as Burke and as good a hater. In Burke, Rigby saw only an unsuccessful version of himself: an adventurer, dependent on his patrons. Who was Burke to affect airs of principle and moral superiority? Conversely, Burke saw in Rigby an unscrupulous, self-serving placeman, indifferent to principle and interested only in the enjoyment of the emoluments and amenities of office. Burke needed to demonstrate, over and over again, to himself more than to the world, that he was not in politics for its material rewards. Of the world’s opinion, indeed, he was apt to be careless and contemptuous. Rigby’s version of the fracas of 8 March was industriously circulated as far as Dublin, where Burke’s friends were at a loss to know how to counter it.101 Burke would not deign to defend his conduct to those who thought it needed defence. Though Grenville’s reform was enacted against the strenuous efforts of the ministry, it was not an opposition triumph. The bill was passed because, for once, the independent members sided with the opposition. They did so reluctantly. The debates show how suspicious the independent members were of the opposition groups. Some country gentlemen, even while supporting the bill, pointedly dissociated themselves from the motives of the opposition and affirmed their continued confidence in the ministry. Prominent among them was Sir William Bagot (1728–98), MP for Staffordshire from 1754 until awarded a peerage in 1780. On 30 March, determined ‘to 100 101

Boston Chronicle, 31 May–4 June 1770; ‘Cinna’, in the Public Advertiser, 27 Aug. 1770. Thomas Leland to E.B., 22 Mar. 1770, in Corr. (1844), i. 221–2.

290 present discontents, 1768‒1770 distinguish, by very strong marking of party, his and their friends opposition in this case, from that systematical opposition of gentlemen of a quite contrary description’, he declared that ‘he and his friends kept their attention solely to measures, and not to men’. Gratuitously, he added that ‘the business of Parliament might, very well, and quietly, and perhaps to better purpose, be conducted without so much learning and so much oratory as the House abounded with at present’.102 No one could mistake who was meant. Burke could not ignore the challenge. Though they were in agreement about Grenville’s bill, Burke, as much as Bagot, needed to define and defend his motives. In reply to Bagot’s insinuations, he vindicated the propriety of opposition and argued that abilities as well as acres should be represented in Parliament. Anticipating the still-unpublished Thoughts, he made an ‘excellent distinction between faction and the opposition of party founded on principle’.103 This was on Friday. On the following Monday, 2 April, Bagot returned to the attack with ‘a long and vehement invective’, denouncing Burke as ‘a Black Jesuit, educated at St Omer’s, fit to be secretary to an inquisition for burning hereticks’.104 Burke rose to reply. Before he could begin, Lord John Cavendish took up his defence in ‘the best [speech] he ever made’.105 Bagot now ‘began to feel himself wrong’. To mollify Burke, he alluded to the Philosophical Enquiry, saying that he ‘admired beyond description his writing upon a subject so abstruse, that he hardly thought any but himself could have exprest it at all’. Spurning the olive branch, Burke hit back hard: Ned arose and examined His [Bagot’s] pretensions to the Character of a goodnatured Man; a good-natured Man wou’d not load one man with the offence of others, a good-natured Man wou’d not invent Calumnies, a good-natured Man would not sit quiet, when the Injury was given and brooding three days over his resentment, at last bring it out without provocation. . . . He then gave an account of his own education. He took to himself the appellation of a Novus Homo. He knew the envy attending that Character . . . but as he knew the envy, he knew the duty of the Novus homo. He then, valuing himself only on his Industry, not his Abilities, shewed he had performed that Duty in endeavouring to know the Commerce, the finances, and constitution of his country. (C ii. 128) 102 John Almon, The Debates and Proceedings of the British House of Commons from 1743 to 1774 (London, 1766–75), viii. 306–7 (PH xvi. 919–20). Bagot’s support was regarded as crucial to the passage of the bill; Lawson, ‘Grenville’s Election Act’, 225. 103 Almon, Debates, viii. 308–9 (PH xvi. 920–1). The reporter had a nose for good copy. He recorded at length E.B.’s reply to Bagot but passed briefly over his ‘detailed discussion’ of the bill itself. 104 Almon, Debates, viii. 312 (PH xvi. 924). 105 W.B. to William Dennis, 3 and 6 Apr. 1770 (C ii. 126–9). According to W.B., Lord John said that E.B. ‘had taken just offence, but yet treated the offence with good manners and good temper’ (127). Lord John could see faults in a friend, as his mediation in the quarrel with Rigby showed. His siding with E.B. on this occasion suggests that E.B.’s speech on the previous Friday was not intemperate.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 291 This report (by Will) catches the vehemence and the asperity characteristic of Burke when his personal integrity is questioned. Starting a theme that finds its fullest expression in A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), Burke argues for a society in which the talents and abilities of ‘new men’ are justly rewarded. If denied ‘just and constitutional roads to Ambition’, they may be provoked to subvert the hierarchy that excludes them, as had happened in the 1640s, when men of property had been oppressed by ‘Brewers, and low Mechanicks’. ‘All wise governments’, Burke concludes, ‘have encouraged rising merit, as useful and necessary’ (128–9). Burke could never suffer in silence the slightest imputation on his character or conduct. He was under an inner compulsion to explain why he was ‘perfectly in the right’. He endured a good deal of abuse, in the press and in Parliament. For a time he could suppress his burgeoning anger, but eventually, as in the altercations with Rigby and Bagot, it burst out with a violence out of all proportion to the immediate provocation. Needing to show that he was uncowed by the brush with Bagot, Burke was stimulated to make his greatest effort of the session, a long speech (two and a quarter hours) on American affairs.106 News of the ‘Boston Massacre’ of 5 March, which reached London in late April, gave a new urgency to the American question. Though the session was nearly over, on 9 May the opposition orchestrated a debate to demonstrate its unity. For once, Burke took the lead, moving a series of eight resolutions critical of ministerial policy towards the colonies. By pre-arrangement, a Grenville supporter seconded him. Burke’s was a rousing opposition speech, witheringly critical of the twists and turns of government policy since 1767, oscillating between firm stands and conciliatory gestures. Yet Burke had no tertium quid of his own to offer. His resolutions were easily negatived: the second (as a test) by 199 to 79, the rest without divisions. This was a poor showing, even for so late in the season. Though making few or no converts, on 9 May Burke was heard with respectful attention. He could not always command such an audience, as an earlier incident shows. On 26 December 1769, Lord Townshend (1724– 1807), the first Lord-Lieutenant to reside in Ireland throughout his term of office, had unexpectedly prorogued the Irish Parliament. This unusual action was a move in the power struggle that was developing between Townshend and the ‘undertakers’ whose dominance was threatened by a resident Lord-Lieutenant.107 Irish politics were of limited interest at Westminster. After Townshend had kept the Parliament prorogued for some months, however, Robert Boyle Walsingham (1736–80), a younger son of 106 Three versions of this speech are available: one, based on E.B.’s drafts (and reprinting the resolutions), is WS ii. 324–33; two contemporary reports are reprinted in PDNA iii. 299–307. 107 R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution (Oxford, 1979), 225–6.

292 present discontents, 1768‒1770 one of the ‘undertakers’ threatened by Townshend, raised the issue at Westminster with a motion for papers. Burke supported him in a long, rambling speech of insufferable tedium to the members who had slipped out to dine and who now wanted to vote. Provoked at their noisy re-entry, with heavy irony, Burke justified a long speech late in the debate as meant for the benefit of ‘several Gentlemen who are just come into the House, & are to vote’ and ended with sarcastic thanks to ‘those Gentlemen who have attended to me after dinner’.108 The contrast between this humiliation and the triumph of the American speech shows the volatility of Burke’s audience, and how little he was able to judge it. Burke’s speeches were always performances. Sometimes the House was willing to be entertained, and Burke enjoyed the triumph of the successful orator. On a later occasion, Boswell made the perceptive comment that ‘his oratory rather tended to distinguish himself than to assist his cause. There was amusement instead of persuasion.’109 Two letters of the period illustrate Burke’s power of self-deception. The first, written to Garrett Nagle on 8 February 1770, breathed confidence and optimism. ‘Our Minority gets strength daily’, he wrote, ‘and uses it hitherto with Spirit . . . Lord Chatham has appeared again and with as much splendour as ever. All the parts of the opposition are well united, and go on in concert’ (C ii. 123). This was far from true. A united opposition was always a mirage. Each of its subdivisions was more intent on promoting its own agenda than on making common cause. Blind to what he did not want to see, Burke overestimated the strength and cohesiveness of the opposition. By May, he was completely disillusioned. Critical of the conduct of the opposition, he had persuaded himself that he had prophesied its failure. ‘Our Session’, he observed sagely to O’Hara, ‘from which many sanguine people expected so much ended just as I thought it would.’ His own earlier optimism was forgotten. ‘For my own part,’ he assured O’Hara, ‘you know I had always a most contemptible opinion of the Effect of an opposition in Parliament.’ Convinced that the ministry’s majority was bought, Burke was unwilling to accept its verdict. For the first time, he advocated a formal secession from Parliament, which he thought would have a considerable effect on public opinion (21 May: 137–8). When such a secession was finally tried, in 1777, it proved a dismal failure. Burke’s judgement was often clouded by his inability to accept an adverse verdict. If Parliament is against him, he appeals to ‘the people’. In 1784, when ‘the people’ had a rare chance to pass judgement on a constitutional issue between the king and the opposition, Burke was devastated by their siding with the king (v. 154). 108 109

3 May 1770; BL Egerton MS 222, fos. 99–104. Journal, 5 Apr. 1773, in Boswell for the Defence, 169.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 293 Disappointing as it proved, the session of 1770 was not devoid of all comfort. On one issue that cut across the usual party lines, the Linen Bill, he was even in the majority. The English linen industry was highly protected: since 1690 by import duties, and since 1743 by export bounties.110 The purpose of the 1770 bill was to extend the bounty to checked and striped linens, in order (as was argued) to make British linen competitive with Dutch in the West Indian market. Burke opposed the extension, believing that an ‘artificial encouragement’ to one trade was likely to hurt another. ‘To make a manufacture rise from the Treasury, & not from the market, is a bad principle.’ Ideally, there should be no bounty at all. In economic matters, however, Burke was habitually readier to compromise than on political questions. If there had to be a bounty, the smaller the better. When the size of the bounty (–21 d. or 1d. per yard) was warmly debated at the committee stage, Burke spoke strongly in favour of –21 d. For once, his was the prevailing opinion. The –21 d. bounty was carried 63– 24.111 All was not lost. With studied understatement, he told O’Hara that ‘the malice of my Enemies has not overpowerd me . . . The American day [9 May] did me no discredit; and the Pamphlet, which contains our Creed [the Thoughts] has been received by the publick beyond my Expectations’ (21 May: C ii. 139). Burke’s authorship, though not acknowledged on the titlepage, was immediately known. A new mark of recognition of his standing as a national figure was the publication (on 20 June) of an engraved portrait, based on a painting by Reynolds.112 The Thoughts went through four editions within a few months.113 Over 3,000 copies were printed, double the run of the Observations on a Late State of the Nation. Widely reviewed and discussed in the press, it provoked two pamphlet-length replies. Proministerial opinion is typified by two letters that appeared in the Gazetteer. Both wrote from the same authoritarian point of view as Johnson in The False Alarm. ‘Old Sly-Boots’ identifies the author as ‘Phelim O’Junius, a poor Irishman’ and dismisses the ‘secret influence’ theory as a cover for the opposition’s own discontent at being out of place. The nation’s real grievances are social insubordination, the licentiousness of the press, contempt for legal authority, the audacity of the rabble, and the fury of faction. In a similar vein, ‘Veteranus’ attributes the country’s disorders to ‘the seditious machinations of faction, and the want of power or inclination in government 110 N. B. Harte, ‘The Rise of Protection and the English Linen Trade, 1690–1790’, in N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (eds.), Textile History and Economic History: Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann (Manchester, 1973), 74–112. 111 2 May 1770, BL Egerton MS 222, fos. 60, 63. 112 The print is a mezzotint, by James Watson; repr. in Nicholas Penny (ed.), Reynolds (London, 1986), 238. 113 Todd, 17. In bibliographical terms, the third and fourth ‘editions’ are reimpressions of the second.

294 present discontents, 1768‒1770 114 to protect them’. Burke heard that in ministerial circles the Thoughts was regarded benignly as ‘a piece of Gentlemanlike Hostility’ (139). This may explain why the ministry did not commission a full-scale reply. Burke’s real enemies were the radicals, two of whom were provoked to write pamphlet-length rebuttals. The more substantial was the work of Catherine Macaulay (1731–91). The first four volumes (1763–8) of her History of Great Britain had established her as a prominent radical intellectual. In 1770, she was at the height of her reputation. Written at great speed, Macaulay’s Observations on a Pamphlet, Entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents was in print within two weeks of the appearance of Burke’s pamphlet.115 Glowing with the intensity of rapid composition, her Observations is a trenchant exposure of the aristocratic subtext of Burke’s Thoughts. On the surface, the intent of ‘this pernicious work’ was ‘to expose the dangerous designs of a profligate junto of courtiers, supported by the mere authority of the crown, against the liberties of the constitution’. So far Macaulay approved. The more insidious intent of the pamphlet, however, was ‘to mislead the people on the subject of the more complicated and specious, though no less dangerous, manœuvres of Aristocratic faction and party, founded on and supported by the corrupt principle of self-interest, and to guard against the possible consequence of an effectual reformation in the vitiated parts of our constitution and government’.116 Anticipating the critique of the Revolution of 1688 that she would offer in the final volume of her History (1783), Macaulay condemned the Whigs of 1688 as false friends of liberty, intent only on power and self-aggrandizement.117 Her remedies are the usual radical measures that Burke had deprecated: shorter parliaments, a place bill, and an extension of the franchise. Burke despised Macaulay. Her pamphlet, he told Shackleton, ‘was what I expected; there are however none of that set who can do better; the Amazon is the greatest champion amongst them . . . no heroine in Billingsgate can go beyond the patriotick scolding of our republican Virago’ (Aug. 1770: C ii. 150).118 Burke 114 The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 1 May 1770 (Old Sly-Boots), 31 May (Veteranus; his letter is dated 18 May). ‘Old Sly Boots’ was James Scott, one of the most prolific ministerial pens. The Gazetteer was not a ministerial organ. On 12 and 21 May, it published essays in a series called ‘The Constitutionalist’ attacking the Thoughts from the radical side. According to Andrew Kippis, these essays were written by James Burgh; Biographia Britannica (2nd edn. London, 1778–93), iii. 13–16. 115 An excerpt was printed in the London Chronicle, 3–5 May, and the ‘second edition, corrected’ advertised on 5–8 May and 10–12 May. Unusually for the time, the Observations carried the author’s name on the title-page. The second pamphlet, An Analysis of the ‘Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’ and of the ‘Observations’ on the Same, was published about 26 June (London Chronicle, 23–6 June). Much inferior to Macaulay in style and structure, it made little impact. 116 Observations on a Pamphlet (London, 1770), 6. 117 Jabez Hirons (1728–1812), a dissenting minister, reviewing the Thoughts in the Monthly Review, 42 (May 1770), 379–89, advanced a similar critique of E.B.’s interpretation of post-1688 history. 118 E.B.’s phrase has been adopted by Macaulay’s biographer: Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992).

present discontents, 1768‒1770 295 had never relished the alliance with the radicals into which the petitioning movement had drawn his party. Macaulay’s ‘declaring open War upon all our connection’ was accordingly a relief. The delay in publication deadened the immediate impact of the Thoughts. Nor did the pamphlet exert much influence in the following decades, since the political instability which it analysed came to an end with the appointment of Lord North as Prime Minister. Later, however, and especially in the nineteenth century, the Thoughts enjoyed a posthumous vogue as a manual of statesmanship. Its lofty generalizations, avoidance of personalities, and most of all its elevated defence of the role and value of party in politics appealed even to liberals who disagreed with Burke on the French Revolution. Charles M’Cormick (1755?–1807) praised the Thoughts as ‘among the best political tracts that have ever appeared in the English language’.119 M’Cormick’s sincerity is questionable, since the main purpose of his book was to attack Burke’s post-1789 writings. Genuine or not, M’Cormick’s eulogy set a pattern that lasted for more than a century. In 1818, Henry Brougham (1778–1868), then a rising MP of liberal views, identified the Thoughts as ‘the most temperate, elaborate, and deeply weighed’ of Burke’s political writings, supporting this judgement with a long extract on the virtues of party.120 The Thoughts was regularly cited as a source of timeless constitutional wisdom. John Morley (1838–1923) called it ‘not the ephemeral diatribe of a faction, but one of the monumental pieces of political literature’.121 To a modern historian, more conscious than Morley of the pamphlet’s original polemical intent, it still appeared ‘rich in political philosophy and in the wisdom which observes eternal principles underlying ephemeral events’.122 Historians and political scientists continue to find Burke’s Thoughts worthy of extended explication, analysis, and interpretation. To abstract from the Thoughts a ‘theory of party’ is to pay Burke a high compliment, for it elevates a topical pamphlet into a work of philosophy.123 These commendations, from such a range of sources, attest the vitality of his ideas and the strength of his writing. Yet they impede an understanding of what Burke was seeking to achieve in the Thoughts. Burke Memoirs of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1798), 101, 117. Edinburgh Review, 30 (June 1818), 190–1. The passage quoted is ‘That Connexion and Faction are equivalent terms . . . virtuous habitudes’ (WS ii. 314–16). 121 John Morley, Burke, English Men of Letters (London, 1879), 47–58. 122 D. A. Winstanley, Lord Chatham and the Whig Opposition (Cambridge, 1912), 361. In the same vein, even John Brooke (an inveterate depreciator of E.B.) ended an unfavourable paragraph on the Thoughts with the concession ‘in all Burke’s political writings, despite their propagandist purposes, there are generalizations on human conduct of lasting value’ (Namier and Brooke, House of Commons, ii. 148). 123 Harvey Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (Chicago, 1965), is the most elaborate reading of this kind. Even O’Gorman, normally sceptical of attempts to elevate E.B. into a philosopher, accepts Mansfield’s views on this point (Rise of Party, 263–71). 119 120

296 present discontents, 1768‒1770 had no ‘theory of party’.124 Nor did he envisage anything approaching the party ‘system’ that developed in nineteenth-century Britain.125 For Burke, parties were a fact of political life in free governments, an unfortunate byproduct of the eternal struggle between the good and the bad. There would always be, not (as in classical liberal theory) a number of competing parties offering alternative visions of the good society, but a single party of virtue fighting against several factions of unprincipled knaves. Burke could not know that the political instability which the Thoughts undertook to cure had just ended. He grasped eagerly at rumours of further ministerial reshuffling. A letter to O’Hara of 20 June shows him determinedly clinging to his ‘double cabinet’ myth (C ii. 144–5). ‘The Court is fully resolved to adhere to its present System,’ he assured Rockingham in September (157). Burke was as fully resolved to adhere to his. As late as 1779, he remained convinced that the king’s ‘System’ was ‘far nearer and dearer to him’ than the welfare of his kingdom (iv. 156). Unaware that his analysis was obsolete, and far from being discouraged by his pamphlet’s lack of effect, he prescribed more of the same. ‘We lost much of the advantage of the Last pamphlet,’ he told Rockingham, ‘because the Idea was not kept up by a continued succession of papers, seconding and enforcing the same principle. For want of something of this Kind, every thing you have done or sufferd in the common Cause, had perishd as Soon as it is known; and however it may have served the Nation, certainly operates nothing at all in favour of the party’ (29 Dec. 1770: ii. 175). Sir George Savile was a sceptic. ‘Some think Pamphlets do everything,’ he told Rockingham. ‘I perhaps do not allow them weight enough.’126 In the short view, Savile was right. The time and energy that Burke lavished on the Thoughts were without immediate effect. Burke was disappointed by his pamphlet’s failure. Nor did the summer bring much consolation. Jane was ill, and probably suffered a miscarriage.127 His brother Richard was forced by the unfeeling lords of the Treasury to return to his post in the West Indies. This was scarcely the diabolical persecution that Burke imagined. After serving for about a year, Richard had been on leave with salary (paying a deputy) since 1765.128 Even the elements turned against the Burkes: ‘Poor Dick is gone—the weather ex124 To speak of E.B.’s ‘theory of party’ is to fall into what Quentin Skinner calls the ‘mythology of doctrines’; ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ (1969); repr. in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Oxford, 1988), 32–8. 125 Mansfield calls E.B. the ‘first partisan of the two-party (or multi-party) system’; Statesmanship and Party Government, 183. This is anachronistic, for, as O’Gorman insists, E.B. did not think ‘in terms of a party system’; Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (London, 1973), 32. 126 Savile to Rockingham, Dec. 1769, WWM R1/1249. 127 Thomas Leland to E.B., 11 June 1770, in Corr. (1844), i. 226. E.B. to Shackleton, Aug. 1770, specifies only ‘a slow fever’ (C ii. 149). 128 Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen, 52–6; C ii. 109 n. 2.

present discontents, 1768‒1770 297 tremely stormy ever since’ (C ii. 144). Burke had one consolation, his estate. ‘Mais cultivons Notre Jardin’, he advised O’Hara on 20 June, echoing Candide’s precept: ‘my field Cabbages promise tolerably, though I am as yet far from sure, that I have got the right sort. The Horse hoe, for all sorts of Garden Crops that you bring into the field, is a glorious thing; and Cabbages, Beans &c. will be infinitely benefitted by this practice; besides the advantage of preparing a Charming clean and vigorous fallow for the Grain which ought to succeed to them’ (143–4).129 To seek solace for the frustrations of politics in the farm or the garden was a conventional topos. Burke probably had in mind the famous anecdote told of the emperor Diocletian after his abdication. Pressed to return to power, he replied that he preferred the pleasure of planting cabbages.130 The Duke of Richmond agreed: ‘the Farm is smiling, amidst the Frowns and gloomy aspect of Politicks. After all tis the best Trade to stick to’ (10 June 1770: 143). Burke’s interest in farming was genuine. As he walked among his horse-hoed cabbages, Burke might imagine that he had cleared his mind of politics as completely as the letter to O’Hara suggests. Yet to remain disengaged for long was not in his character. Soon he would return to the fight. 129 The horse-hoe was an implement to sow seeds in rows instead of broadcast. The distance between rows could be adjusted, allowing for easier weeding. There were many versions; G. E. Fussell, The Farmer’s Tools, 1500–1900: The History of British Farm Implements, Tools, and Machinery before the Tractor Came (London, 1952), 101–3. 130 Aurelius Victor, Epitome, c. 39; often retold.

298

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773

9 Squalls and Stagnation, 1770–1773

1 In the summer of 1770, the political world sank into torpor. The ferment raised by Wilkes and the Middlesex election, which had animated the petitioning movement and the hopes of the opposition, subsided. So bleak did the prospect appear that, before each of the next three sessions, the leaders of the Rockingham party needed to convince themselves that even to attend Parliament was worth while. For Burke, to endure three years of political stagnation would have been painful indeed. Happily, the calm was punctuated with ‘equinoctial Squalls’ (C ii. 305), and in default of greater battles, Burke joined eagerly in such light skirmishes as offered. He could not take a mild interest in a question, or give a cause lukewarm support. Investing his side with a monopoly of virtue and integrity, he acted as though all were at stake. Constant struggle and constant failure, the themes of these years, exacted their psychological penalty. Frustration hardened Burke’s heart. Accumulated grievances and disappointments made him an increasingly acrimonious controversialist, imprisoned within his own distorted view of the world. The new session of Parliament opened on 13 November 1770, with the opposition weakened and divided. George Grenville died that day, and his followers began to drift back to the ministerial ranks. Grenville’s removal did not even unite the remaining opposition groups. The Rockingham party remained intensely suspicious both of Chatham and his followers, and of the London radicals. Long after Bute himself had ceased to be a credible bogy, the evils of his ‘system’ provided the Rockingham party with a comforting conspiracy thesis that could never be disproved. Such a belief made them unwilling allies, ever suspicious of other groups as either the tools or the dupes of the court.1 Yet on their own they could accomplish little. Persistent defeat reinforced their self-image as the virtuous victims of an evil conspiracy. Anxious to articulate and promote a distinctive philosophy of opposition, Burke wanted the party to proselytize more actively. 1 Rockingham to E.B., 15 Oct. 1769 (C ii. 91–4); Richmond to Rockingham, 12 Feb. 1771 (Alison Gilbert Olson, The Radical Duke: Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, Third Duke of Richmond (London, 1961), 140–4).

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 299 Writing to Rockingham on 29 December 1770, he proposed either ‘a total Secession’ or ‘something of constant and systematical writing’. Neither offered much prospect of success, though both ministered to Burke’s desire to be active. For him, ‘total Secession’ meant an ostentatious withdrawal, not indolent non-attendance. (This plan was tried, and failed, in 1777.) Burke’s second and more constructive suggestion was ‘systematical writing’. With success against the ‘mischievous System’ of the court out of the question, all that could be hoped for was the comfort of not having left untried ‘any one justifiable or rational attempt to destroy it’ (C ii. 175–6). A paper devoted to propagating the party’s principles would achieve just this. Rockingham did not relish the proposal. More phlegmatic than the mercurial Burke, he was content to let time and events convince the public of the rightness of his actions and opinions. The session of 1770–1 was dominated by three issues: the Falkland Islands, the power of juries in trials for libel, and the legality of reporting parliamentary debates. The Falklands crisis was the most hopeful for the opposition, for the prospect of war usually led to calls for the return to power of Chatham. A single unsuccessful campaign might have driven North from office, as the loss of Minorca in 1756 had toppled Newcastle’s ministry. Not that the Falklands possessed the strategic importance of Minorca. Though sighted by Europeans as early as the sixteenth century, their remote situation and inhospitable climate had preserved them from permanent settlement, if not from conflicting claims of sovereignty. Only in the 1760s did Spain and Britain each decide to establish a presence on the islands. Although there was ample room for two outposts of empire, national dignity demanded sole possession. Spain sent the larger force, and in June 1770 forcibly expelled the small British garrison from Port Egmont. The incident precipitated a diplomatic crisis, and nearly a war.2 The ministry’s slow and uncertain response to Spanish aggression provoked demands for a tougher stand. Throughout the crisis, the Falklands served as scarcely more than a pretext for vigorous attacks on ministerial incompetence and pusillanimity. Burke’s speeches were typical of the occasions. The first, on 13 November 1770, provoked a paper skirmish. Burke spoke for an hour (much longer than any other member), and a reporter derided his speech as ‘violent; rambling; flimsy; figurative; laboured’.3 ‘An Impartial Hearer’ came to his defence with a long vindication, refuting each of the adjectives in turn. Rejecting the charge of violence, ‘Impartial’ repeats Burke’s claim that he had ‘kept himself more aloof than perhaps he ought to have done, from every thing that looked like following the people’. As for ‘rambling’, only 2 Julius Goebel, Jr., The Struggle for the Falkland Islands: A Study in Legal and Diplomatic History (New Haven, 1927). 3 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 17 Nov. 1770.

300 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 ‘shallow or inattentive hearers’ could apply the word to Burke’s ‘large and extensive . . . line of argument’. The charge of being ‘laboured’ is converted into an encomium: Mr B—ke has laboured all his life. It is not by intuition that knowledge is attained. I have heard that whether the business be of manufacturers, of commerce, of finance, of domestick import, or of foreign concern, Mr B—ke’s manner of speaking proves that he has thought deeply on all these subjects and knows them well. It is by assuidity, industry and labour only that ever his abilities could have attained so extensive and various a knowledge.4

This last point echoes Burke’s self-defence against Sir William Bagot on 2 April 1770. Indeed, ‘Impartial’ sounds so like Burke that he was suspected of writing his own panegyric.5 Such a charge is easily dismissed. Burke was never a self-promoter. ‘Impartial’ was probably a friend intimately acquainted with his self-image. To acquit Burke of puffing himself is easier than to acknowledge the justice of the defence presented by ‘Impartial’. Burke’s speeches were sometimes ‘violent; rambling; flimsy; figurative; laboured’. The first two epithets certainly describe his second Falklands speech, on 22 November. During the course of the debate, Conway, while conceding that unanimity in politics was ‘a vain imagination’, expressed the hope that ‘with a very few, & very contemptible exceptions indeed’, and despite ‘all the factious arguments, that have been used to inculcate the contrary’, the House would support the stand taken by the ministry.6 Burke interpreted Conway’s remarks as impugning the motives of the Rockingham party. As one reporter observed, whenever ‘that beloved act, the repeal of the stamp act, is objected to, or his own or his party’s intentions traduced, it seems to rouse his whole soul’.7 Losing sight of the topic, Burke launched into a spirited defence of his party: ‘one of the first virtues that I admire, is the unaltered tenaciousness to live, & die by the principles of that opposition. no tumult of the people, no powers of the Ministry shall make them go one step faster, or slower. deliberately, & systematically, they will adhere to it.’ In explanation, Conway claimed that by ‘contemptible exceptions’, he had meant the Wilkite radicals, not the parliamentary opposition.8 While Burke’s interpretation of Conway’s remarks was not unreasonable, the vehemence of his reaction, part of a larger pattern of attacks on Conway, suggests that their mere political differences, real as those were, were exacerbated by deep personal resentment. Conway was a simple character, anxious to do the right thing; a dependent personality, whose changes of mind reflected 4 5 6 7 8

‘An Impartial Hearer’, Gazetteer, 20 Nov. 1770. ‘Democritus’, Gazetteer, 5 Dec. 1770. BL Egerton MS 222, fo. 299. Gazetteer, 26 Nov. 1770 (PH xvi. 1124). BL Egerton MS 222, fos. 328 (E.B.), 329–30 (Conway).

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 301 genuine uncertainties. When in doubt (as he often was), he turned to Horace Walpole to tell him what to do.9 Burke misunderstood and misjudged Conway, disbelieving his protestations of independence. To Burke, a man who professed to judge individual questions on their merits rather than act with a party on principle could only be a knave or the dupe of knaves. During the Christmas recess, the ministry’s position was strengthened by an extraordinary stroke of luck. At a crucial moment, and for reasons unconnected with the Falklands, the duc de Choiseul (1719–85) fell from power. Since Choiseul had been chiefly responsible for French bellicosity, his dismissal led to a more conciliatory policy at Versailles, and consequently at Madrid. A face-saving formula was devised that averted the threat of war and satisfied British public opinion. Baulked of its prey, the opposition demanded an enquiry into the ministry’s handling of the crisis. To those who were relieved that hostilities had been avoided, the manœuvre appeared factious. The debate on 25 January 1771 was therefore illtempered. Burke could hardly obtain a hearing. When one of his standard openings failed to quiet the House, which was ‘very noisy’, he was forced to sit down. Quickly recovering his aplomb, however, he rose again. ‘I desire to be heard,’ he insisted; ‘no treachery of any person shall intimidate us.’10 Burke stigmatized the government’s supporters for their unquestioning servility, their ready support of any ministerial measure. As so often, he sought to draw out remote consequences: ‘the first injury may be insignificant, and the consequence very expensive. I say, it is in the power of Spain to undo this Crown, it is in the power of the meanest savage nation of America to destroy this nation’ (WS ii. 342–3). Such hyperbole was easily dismissed. Weak as the speech is in argument, its extended metaphors and allusions illustrate the fertility of Burke’s imagination. Charging the ministry with having used the pretence of negotiations as a screen or ‘solemn ministerial canvass’, he developed the image at some length: ‘Behind this canvass you found, that a scaffold was erected, hammers beating, to make a great fabrick for the honour of this nation. When the canvas was drawn up, and the scaffold taken away, what did you see? Vanbrugh’s House is nothing to it, you found a dirt pye, a goose pye’ (WS ii. 341). Burke alludes to the small, squat house which Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) built for himself in Whitehall. In a well-known squib, Swift had compared it to a goose pie. The house was only a few hundred yards from the House of Commons; many members would be familiar with it, as well as with Swift’s 9 The Last Journals of Horace Walpole during the Reign of George III from 1771–1783, ed. A. Francis Steuart (London, 1910), i. 36, 52 These references are to Feb. and Mar. 1772. 10 WS ii. 340 (from Cavendish). The noise and disorder are confirmed by the account in the General Evening Post, 24–6 Jan. 1771 (PH xvi. 1346).

302 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 11 poem. A few minutes later, Burke turned to industry for a metaphor to ridicule the disproportion between the bustle of diplomatic activity and the paltry treaty that emerged. He meant to allude to Matthew Boulton’s button manufactory in Birmingham, one of the most famous of the new industrial enterprises. In the heat of the moment he blundered: ‘it puts me in mind, that it is made like a Manchester button which passes through 20 hands, and is then sold for 3 pence a dozen (somebody having said privately, Birmingham buttons, Mr Burke said) Birmingham buttons, they are both done upon the same principle of manufactures’ (341). Burke was not apt to bear contradiction, even on so trifling a slip of the tongue.12 Drawing to a close, Burke turned to the Bible. Introducing another argument from consequences, he drew on the book of Job (1: 21) to characterize the insignificance of Port Egmont: ‘naked it came into the world, naked it will go out of the world; naked it was taken, naked it was restor’d’ (342). Neither Burke’s arguments nor his figures caught the mood of the House, which, unruly and impatient, would not hear him out.13 The censure motion was effectively neutralized through a ministerial amendment, carried without a division. Port Egmont was not worth a war. The Falklands crisis shows the opposition in a factious light, fomenting a war on the chance that it might bring them into office. On the Jury Bill, their conduct was more defensible. The question turned on a point of law. In trials for libel, was the jury entitled to give a ‘general’ verdict on the substance of the charge; or was it to judge only the fact of publication and the meaning of any innuendoes? Each opinion had its defenders.14 The argument (which was not new) was revived by a spate of cases in 1770. John Almon (1737–1805) was convicted of selling copies of Junius’ notorious ‘Letter to the King’.15 Similar prosecutions against two other printers failed.16 All three cases were tried before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield (1705–93), champion of the narrow interpretation of the jury’s role, which a modern authority has called the ‘historically correct’ state of the law.17 The opposition entertained great hopes of the controversy. By treating Mansfield’s doctrine of libel as ministerial policy, they could pose as de11 Swift’s poem is ‘Vanbrug’s House, Built from the Ruins of Whitehall that Was Burnt’ (c.1708–9). In 1771, the house was still occupied by Vanbrugh’s widow. 12 E.B.’s draft (NRO A. xxvii. 35) has ‘Birmingham’. Buttons were manufactured in Manchester: four specialist button-makers are listed in Elizabeth Raffald’s Manchester Directory (Manchester, 1773). Some of the smallware manufactures listed would also have made buttons. Birmingham buttons, however, were already proverbial. 13 Gentleman’s Magazine, 41 (1771, suppl.), 579. 14 Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London, 1922–72), x. 672–88. 15 Part of Letter xxxv (19 Dec. 1769), in The Letters of Junius, ed. John Cannon (Oxford, 1978), 159– 73. 16 Henry Sampson Woodfall (1739–1805) was tried on 13 June. The jury brought in a verdict of ‘guilty of printing and publishing only’. John Miller was acquitted on 18 July 1770. 17 Holdsworth, History of English Law, x. 680.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 303 fenders of the rights of the people against a conspiracy to subvert traditional liberties. As late as the seventeenth century, the traditional notion that affairs of state (and especially foreign policy) were the business of the king and his ministers, not of Parliament and much less of the people, was still widely accepted. After the Revolution of 1688, the balance of power shifted away from the executive and towards Parliament and public opinion. Though the law was slow to recognize this shift, Lord Camden’s judgment in Entick v. Carrington (1765) marked the effective end of arguments from ‘reason of state’ or ‘state necessity’ being used to legitimize executive action.18 By 1770, every measure of government was regarded as public property, and Mansfield’s attempt to restrict the jury’s role appeared an anachronistic relic of Stuart despotism. The power of juries was therefore a promising topic, if the opposition groups could have agreed among themselves. Union, however, proved as elusive as ever. The Rockingham party, respectful of the law as it stood, wanted to pass an enacting bill that would settle the law for the future. Chatham demanded a ‘declaratory’ bill that would affirm what the law always had been, and so convict Mansfield of judicial error. Despite his much-vaunted concern with ‘measures, not men’, Chatham’s motive was to humiliate Mansfield, against whom he had long nourished a bitter hatred. Burke spoke in both main debates on the subject. The first, on 6 December 1770, on a motion for an enquiry, offered an orderly contrast to the rambling and acrimonious Falklands debates. The mood of the House was calm, allowing the complex legal points to be fully and fairly aired. Burke skilfully articulated a middle position. Pointedly dissenting from the ground taken by the Chathamites, he conceded that Mansfield’s opinion was supported by good precedents. Yet the question, he argued, was too important to be left to the lawyers: ‘the wisdom of the whole nation can see farther than the sages of Westminster-hall. In a constitutional point, like this, the collective knowledge and penetration of the people at large are more to be depended on than the boasted discernment of all the bar.’ This part of his argument was in reply to Charles Fox, who had maintained that the sense of the people could only be collected from the House of Commons. Burke was convinced of its incorrigible venality. From his recent experience of the petitioning movement, he did not despair that public opinion might prove a salutary corrective. ‘The people have a voice of their own,’ he asserted, which ‘must, nay it will be sooner or later heard; and I, as in duty bound, will always exert every nerve, and every power, of which I am master, to hasten the completion of so desirable an event’.19 Though Burke was always ready to accuse the lawyers of obscurantism, he was not always so anxious as this to forward the popular will. 18

Ibid. 668–72.

19

PH xvi. 1267–8, 1264, 1269.

304 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 Few of Burke’s speeches rely on argument alone. Even on this occasion, when the subject was a legal technicality and the dominant note of his own speech was moderate statesmanship (he argued that an enquiry would vindicate the judges, who were not at fault for applying the law as it stood), he could not resist an emotive peroration. ‘Are not their temples profaned?’ he asked, imaging the judges as a legal priesthood. ‘Are not the priests suspected of being no better than those of Bel and the Dragon, or rather of being worse than those of Baal? And has not, therefore, the fire of the people’s wrath almost consumed them? The lightning has pierced the sanctuary, and rent the veil of their temple from the top even unto the bottom. . . . The ark of the covenant is lost, and passed into the hands of the uncircumcised.’20 Once warmed to his theme, Burke did not know when to stop. Allusions and metaphors crowded into his mind, and he lacked the restraint to repress his own exuberance. Sometimes, however, Burke could discipline himself. For the debate on 7 March 1771, when Dowdeswell introduced his enacting bill, Burke made comprehensive abstracts of the history of the law of libel and of the institution of the jury. His usual fault was over-use of such historical and illustrative material. On this occasion, however, he kept closely to the point, concentrating on the advantages of an enacting rather than a declaratory measure.21 Since the Chathamites would not accept an enacting measure, Dowdeswell’s bill was soundly defeated. Opposition groups so jealous of each other posed little threat to the ministry. Unexpectedly, the morale of the opposition was given a much-needed boost by an ill-judged attempt to suppress the reporting of parliamentary debates. Freedom of the press was a popular theme on which the opposition could unite. To report debates was technically a breach of the standing orders of the House of Commons. The original purpose of this rule was to secure freedom of speech. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, members had needed protection against what they said being reported to the monarch and held against them. By Burke’s day, the Crown no longer posed a threat to freedom of debate. Members were more concerned about how what they said was reported (or misreported) in the press. This was a contentious subject. Many members, including Burke, accepted that the public had a right to know what was said in Parliament. By 1771, indeed, most members had probably come to accept press reporting as an unpleasant but unavoidable fact of modern life. Public interest in the proceedings of Parliament could no longer be ignored or stifled. Others, 20 PH xvi. 1270 The passage is a pastiche of biblical phrases, chiefly from Bel and the Dragon (in the Apocrypha) and the Gospel accounts of the rending of the veil of the Temple on the death of Christ (Matt. 27: 51, Mark 15: 38). 21 NRO A. xxxvi. 16 (E.B.’s drafts); WS ii. 344–9 prints those parts that (on the evidence of Brickdale and Cavendish) E.B. actually delivered. A longer version of E.B.’s drafts is printed in W vi. 154–65.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 305 however, believed that the printing of debates was a bar to freedom of discussion. On 8 February 1771, Colonel George Onslow (1731–92) complained of debates printed in two newspapers. The nephew of a former Speaker, Onslow was a stickler for parliamentary privilege. As always, Burke was quick to detect an insidious tentacle of the ‘court conspiracy’. He therefore jumped to the conclusion that, since Onslow was a ministerialist, another court plot must be afoot. Burke’s suspicions were unreasonable, for Onslow was supported by independent members as well as by ministerial troops. The House was tenacious of its privileges, and the complaint of a breach normally took precedence over other business.22 At first, Burke concentrated on the substantive question. As a frequent speaker, he had suffered more than most from abuse and misreporting in the press (C ii. 130, 178). Nevertheless, he argued that to enforce the standing orders against the printing of debates would be unwise. The public interest was best served by a free press, even at the cost of much libellous misrepresentation.23 This counsel of wisdom did not prevail. The offending printers were summoned to attend the House. When the Lord Mayor (Brass Crosby; 1725–93) asserted that the Speaker’s warrant could only be served in the City of London by the city authorities, the primary question was lost to sight in an unseemly jurisdictional battle. This dispute was eagerly exploited by the London radicals. The defiance of the Commons by the printers was encouraged and concerted by Wilkes and his allies. Between 12 and 27 March, a series of warmly contested debates served to exhaust the arguments on both sides and to polarize opinion. Repeatedly outvoted, the opposition refused to accept defeat. Sitting after sitting lasted into the small hours, spun out by repeated adjournment motions, vexatious amendments, and the demand for a division on every motion. On 12 March, for example, the House divided twenty-three times, sitting until 5 a.m. The final division was 72–10. Both Burkes were among the tiny band of opposition die-hards who stayed to the end. During this marathon debate, Edmund spoke at least ten times.24 Behind Onslow’s move, he now saw ‘a manifest design to destroy the Liberty of the press on one side and to encourage the most flagitious Licence on the other’ (WS ii. 355). Opposition writers were to be muzzled; a stable of ministerial hacks would be maintained to traduce and vilify the opposition. While such a systematic plot was a figment of Burke’s imagination, individual ministers did employ writers to blacken their opponents. James Scott (1733–1814), P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971), 11–12. BL Egerton MS 224, fos. 85–7. 24 CJ xxxiii. 249–51; E.B. to O’Hara, 2 Apr. 1771 (C ii. 208–9); BL Egerton MS 226, fos. 2–43; Almon, ix. 231–4 (PH xvii. 75–83); Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (London, 1894), iv. 190. 22 23

306 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 for example, to whom Burke alluded in his speech (356), was the hired pen of Lord Sandwich (1718–92).25 The prosecution of the printers gave the opposition a good cause. Yet to champion liberty without fomenting radicalism was not easy. When the Lord Mayor appeared before the House of Commons on 27 March, charged with breach of privilege, he was accompanied by a mob of supporters from the city. North and other members were threatened; North’s carriage was actually broken to pieces. Such riot and civil commotion made genteel opposition on the Rockingham model difficult. Arriving early at the House for the debate which was expected to order the Lord Mayor’s commitment to the Tower, Burke dispatched two notes to Rockingham, asking him to muster supporters. ‘The Mob is grown very riotous,’ he wrote in the second. ‘Very few friends of ours here. It is impossible to know what to do. For Gods sake Let Dowdeswell and Lord J. Cavendish come down. I am monstrously vexed at our Confusion. Use of this Mob may be made by the Ministry. As many friends as possible.’ Rockingham was unforthcoming. Both he and Dowdeswell relished the sight of the ministers embroiled in a battle begun by one of their own mercenaries (27 Mar. 1771: C ii. 204–5). Burke thought differently. Anxious to defend the isthmus between ministerial tyranny and mob rule, he was determined that the voice of reason should at least be heard. Far from withdrawing, he was one of a small band of opposition MPs who went out to try to reason with the crowd.26 He would show the same personal courage during the Gordon Riots in 1780. The episode marked a moral victory for the opposition. Though the standing order against reporting debates was not repealed, it was never again enforced. From about this time, newspaper reports become fuller and more reliable, though still highly selective.27 The triumph was not complete. On particular occasions, the galleries were still cleared of strangers. For such debates, reporters had to piece together whatever scraps they could pick up from members. In 1772, for example, strangers were excluded from debates on the Royal Marriage Bill. During the American war, the ministry often resorted to the same tactic to deny publicity to opposition speakers. Such exceptions apart, Burke knew that, on any subject of public interest, some account of his speech, more or less garbled, would quickly (often the following day) reach a varied and scattered public. Burke’s support of the Jury Bill and his stand against the prosecution of the printers show him in a progressive light, willing to modify the law and Robert R. Rea, The English Press in Politics, 1760–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1963), 116–67. Sandwich procured a lucrative crown living for Scott. 26 Public Advertiser, 28 Mar. 1771. 27 Peter D. G. Thomas, ‘The Beginning of Parliamentary Reporting in Newspapers, 1768–1774’, English Historical Review, 74 (1959), 623–36. 25

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 307 waive traditional parliamentary privileges to suit changed social conditions. On these topics, to take the ‘liberal’ position perfectly suited the need of the opposition to oppose and embarrass the ministry. His attitude to divorce shows that, on a question that cut across partisan lines, he could be as conservative and unbending a moralist as George III. Indeed, divorce was, in 1771, perhaps the only subject on which Burke and the king agreed. Whereas most Protestant countries had liberalized their divorce laws, in England the bonds of wedlock remained nearly as strong as before the Reformation. A valid marriage could only be dissolved through a lengthy and expensive series of actions, beginning with a separation obtained in an ecclesiastical court and ending with a private Act of Parliament. Only three or four such Acts a year were passed. In 1769, the Duke of Grafton divorced his wife, who promptly married her lover. Instead of being punished for her adultery, the duchess appeared to have been rewarded by being allowed to escape from a disagreeable husband to marry a man more to her liking.28 Because Grafton was Prime Minister, the case became a cause célèbre. Moralists were worried that divorces were becoming too easy to obtain, and a tightening of the law was mooted. The House of Lords approved a bill to prohibit the remarriage of adulterous wives. Rumour credited the measure to the king himself, ‘desirous that something shou’d be thought of that might be likely to prevent the very bad conduct among the Ladys, of which there had been so many instances lately’.29 This line of argument is typical. Because the process was expensive, divorce was the preserve of the well-todo, if not of the aristocracy. Discussion of divorce was therefore always in terms of the probable effect of any change in the law on the upper reaches of society. Only men could petition for divorce, and only on the ground of adultery. Legally, therefore, the guilty party was always the wife (whether or not the husband had also been adulterous), and the problem always appeared in the guise of ‘bad conduct among the Ladys’. Debate accordingly concentrated on how any change in the law would affect the behaviour of women. This bill was one of four similar measures introduced between 1771 and 1809. All passed the Lords only to be lost in the Commons.30 In 1771, the reform was supported chiefly on the ground that it would make divorce (and thus indirectly adultery) less attractive. It was opposed as aggravating the position of the divorced wife, who, if prohibited from marrying her lover, would face social ostracism.31 28

61.

Lawrence Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660–1857 (Oxford, 1993), 139–

Lady Mary Coke, diary entries for 30 Mar. and 1 Apr. 1769, in Letters and Journals, ed. J. A. Home (Edinburgh, 1889–96), iii. 52–3. 30 Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce (Oxford, 1990), 335–9. Divorce bills, and bills to amend the divorce law, always originated in the House of Lords. 31 29–30 Apr.; John Almon, The Debates and Proceedings of the British House of Commons from 1743 to 1774 (London, 1766–75), ix. 301–2, 303 (PH xvii. 185–6). 29

308 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 Burke’s speech in favour of the bill, delivered on 29 April 1771, provides both a forthright statement of his views on divorce and a typical example of his debating style (WS ii. 357–8). It employs two of his favourite strategies, hyperbole and remote consequences, and it exhibits his habitual tendency to generalize. ‘The foundation of all the Order, harmony Tranquility and even civilization that is amongst us’, he asserts, ‘turns upon two things[:] the Indissolubility of Marriage and the freedom of the Female sex.’ (By ‘freedom’, Burke means not sexual freedom but freedom of movement. In this sense, English women enjoyed much greater ‘freedom’ than did women in countries where they were virtually immured.) Parliamentary divorce, at first rare, had become ‘a thing of Course’. Unless the rules are tightened, therefore, it will ‘lead step by Step to divorces on other Principles’. Burke does not oppose divorce on religious grounds. Marriage for him is sacred not because it is a sacrament, but because it is a pillar of the social order. If the indissolubility of marriage were not ‘a fundamental precept of the Christian religion’, it should still be ‘a fundamental Law of the State’. To the strength of the marriage tie and ‘the freedom of the Female sex’, Burke traces ‘every advantage that Europe has over every state in the World’. He concedes that the existing law enshrines a double standard, which the new bill would aggravate. The usual justification for the double standard was that a wife’s infidelity threatened to impose a spurious heir on her husband; a husband’s adultery had no such dire consequence.32 Burke takes this as axiomatic. Women ‘must live by an hard Law. They are out on bail, on the security of their own sense of honour; This tye must therefore be made very strong—else the Sex must forfeit their Liberty.’ ‘Comfortable’ (domestic) and ‘polished’ (fashionable) society depends on the ‘Liberty’ which European women enjoy, and which makes them intelligent companions as well as wives and mothers. This ‘Liberty’, however, is in turn founded on a system of restraints. In the 1770s, Burke’s ideas were far from anachronistic. As late as the 1820s, Lord Chancellor Eldon (1751–1838) was still trying, with considerable success, to prevent divorce bills from passing as a matter of form. Not until 1857 was the first measure passed that significantly liberalized the English divorce law. In the same year, Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–62) published the first volume of a History of Civilization in England, in which he hailed Burke as ‘so far . . . in advance of his contemporaries, that there are few of the great measures of the present generation which he did not anticipate and zealously defend’.33 Divorce is a conspicuous absentee from Buckle’s list of such reforms. Burke’s stand on divorce illustrates the conservative, anti-libertarian strain in his thought. 32 Samuel Johnson; reported in Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), ii. 55–6 (Spring 1768) and iii. 406 (10 Oct. 1779). 33 History of Civilization in England (London, 1857–61), i. 419–22.


309

2 When Burke left London for Beaconsfield at the end of the session, he had an important batch of letters to write before he could relax and enjoy the pleasures of summer in the country. Some six months earlier, on 21 December 1770, he had been elected by the New York Assembly to serve as their agent in London. Since mail took about seven weeks to reach England from New York, formal notification probably reached him towards the end of February.34 The previous agent, Robert Charles (c.1700–70), had served since 1748.35 He had not given entire satisfaction, and several attempts had been made to replace him. On 20 December 1769, for example, the appointment of Stephen Sayre (1736–1818) as joint agent was moved. When this was defeated, Burke was nominated to replace Charles as sole agent. This motion was repeatedly deferred and eventually dropped.36 Both proposals foundered on factional opposition. Then, in May 1770, Charles committed suicide. His death cleared the way for Burke’s appointment, which was engineered by James De Lancey, Jr. (1732–1800), whose father, James De Lancey (1703–60), Chief Justice of of the province from 1733 to his death, had been one of the most powerful men in New York.37 The De Lanceys belonged to the New York urban patriciate, though they also owned land. The younger De Lancey had been educated in England and served in the British Army. He may have met Burke during his long visit to England in 1767–8. He certainly knew Rockingham, whose passion for the turf he shared. Burke was hardly a household name in New York, though his part in the repeal of the Stamp Act was remembered, and his speeches were often reported, sometimes prominently, in the local newspapers.38 He owed his nomination to De Lancey’s perception of the Rockingham party as ‘the only real Friends of the Colonies’.39 In De Lancey’s mind, Rockingham occupied the position more generally accorded to Chatham, whose denial of the right of the British Parliament to tax the unrepresented colonies had given him an undeserved reputation as a champion of colonial liberties. De Lancey was right. Internal taxation excepted, Chatham was the stronger 34 Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of New-York . . . 1770 . . . 1771 (New York, 1771), 18. The news had reached London by 26 Feb., when the General Evening Post (23–6 Feb.) reported that E.B. had declined the position. 35 Nicholas Varga, ‘Robert Charles: New York Agent, 1748–1770’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 18 (1961), 211–35. The surviving Charles correspondence relates to 1748–60, and thus does not illuminate the decade before E.B.’s appointment. 36 Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of NewYork . . . 1769 . . . 1770 (New York, 1770), 50–1, 57, 67, 80. 37 Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 140–78. 38 New York Gazette, 26 Mar. 1770 (E.B. toasted at dinner celebrating the repeal of the Stamp Act). Reports of speeches: New York Gazette, 6 Feb., 17 Nov. 1769, 30 Apr., 2 July 1770; New York Journal, 3 May, 5 July 1770. 39 De Lancey to Rockingham, n.d. (after 20 Dec. 1770), WWM R1/1343.

310 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 upholder of British supremacy over the colonies. Rockingham, while in theory committed to the parliamentary supremacy asserted by his 1766 Declaratory Act, was never prepared to use force to maintain it.40 The colonial agents were a diverse group.41 They ranged from Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), the most famous American of his time, to obscure men whose activities have left little trace. The nature of agency business also varied from one colony to another. Some agents acted for the colony as a whole; others (like Burke) for the popular branch of the legislature. Some agents interpreted their job narrowly, acting only as and when instructed. Others, pre-eminently Franklin, acted almost as unofficial ambassadors. Ideally, in Franklin’s opinion, a colony needed two agents in London. One should be an MP of ‘Weight and Influence with the ministry’. Such an MP, while pleased to be ‘consider’d as the Patron of a great Province’ would hardly care ‘to submit to the Drudgery of running about and attending the Offices with every little Solicitation’. For this subordinate purpose, an assistant agent was needed.42 A colonial agency was thus no sinecure. In 1769, when Burke was mentioned as a possible agent for Massachusetts, he was reported to have ‘too much business on his hands to undertake an Agency’.43 Apart from the drudgery, any dispute between the colonies and the home country placed an English agent in an invidious situation, as Burke found to his cost. Burke’s intention to accept the position was known in New York by late March.44 The bustle of the parliamentary session, however, prevented his writing a letter of formal acceptance until 9 June. Without suggesting either reluctance or hesitation, Burke’s first letter to the Speaker of the Assembly, John Cruger (1710–91), carries a hint of the difficulties which he foresaw. Burke probably had more serious misgivings than he voiced. Though several MPs had acted as colonial agents, he was the first front-rank oppositionist to accept such a position. As an opposition MP, he had to maintain complete independence of the ministry. Indeed, he would not have accepted had the Governor (and thus indirectly the British govern40 Paul Langford identifies this unwillingness to use force as the party’s only claim to be regarded as ‘Friends of the Colonies’; ‘The Rockingham Whigs and America, 1767–1773’, in Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley, and P. G. M. Dickson (eds.), Statesmen, Scholars & Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), 135–52. 41 Michael G. Kammen, A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1968); Ross J. S. Hoffman, Edmund Burke, New York Agent : with his Letters to the New York Assembly and Intimate Correspondence with Charles O’Hara, 1761–1776 (Philadelphia, 1956), 15–193. 42 Franklin to Joseph Galloway, 7 Apr. 1759; Papers, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven, 1959– ), viii. 309–10. 43 Dennys de Berdt to Edward Sheafe, 11 Sept. 1769; ‘Letters of Dennys de Berdt, 1757–1770’, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 13 (1912), 293–461 (quotation from 377–8). 44 E.B. to Robert R. Livingston, 9 June 1771 (C ii. 214), in reply to a letter (not extant) of 2 Apr., probably written soon after Livingston heard of his acceptance.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 311 ment) had any say in his appointment. The home government disliked the practice of an assembly maintaining its own agent. From time to time, an officious minister would put pressure on aberrant colonies such as New York to appoint an agent to represent all branches of the legislature.45 Such an agent would be, in effect, a British placeman. Burke warned the Assembly that he could not serve under such circumstances. Since the Assembly successfully resisted any encroachment on its power over the agent, this problem never arose. More serious was the potential conflict between an agent’s service to his colonial employers and an MP’s loyalty to British imperial interests. In the eighteenth-century House of Commons, a member’s arguments, and even his vote, carried more weight if they were known to be independent and disinterested. Thus the support of the ‘country gentlemen’, the supposedly independent part of the House, was regarded by both sides as important. When Burke accepted the agency, the danger appeared remote. In the comparative calm that characterized AngloAmerican relations between the repeal of the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party, a state which Burke hoped to help maintain, he could serve two masters without appearing to sacrifice the interests of either. Only when he opposed the ministry’s coercive measures in the spring of 1774 did Burke’s New York agency become a political liability. As late as 1782, several years after he had ceased to represent New York, he could still be ‘supposed to act under circumstances not perfectly independent’.46 The imputation persisted. Karl Marx (1818–83) would charge that Burke had ‘played the liberal against the English oligarchy’ only because he was ‘in the pay of the North American colonies’.47 Burke’s main motive in accepting the agency was financial. The pay, £500 a year, was equivalent to the salary of a middle-ranking government official, such as an Under-Secretary of State. It would pay the interest on the larger of the two mortgages on the Beaconsfield estate. Welcome as it was, the salary was also an embarrassment, for it compromised his independence. Eighteenth-century MPs were supposed, in theory at least, to be free agents, whose property gave them a tangible stake in the national interest and guaranteed their integrity. Though the reality was rather different, gentlemanly etiquette required Burke to profess indifference to the remuneration. Responding to a (lost) letter in which De Lancey advised him to inflate his expense account, Burke replied loftily that ‘with regard to the Bills of contingent and extra expenses I cannot prevail upon myself to make them out further than my actual expenditure’. He would not, Kammen, Rope of Sand, 67, 153–5. Sir Harry Hoghton (1728–95), in a Commons debate on 8 Mar. 1782; Debrett, vi. 38 (PH xxii. 1134). 47 Capital, vol. i, bk. 1, pt. 7, ch. 24, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London, 1974), 843. The context is a diatribe against Burke’s attitude to the poor. 45 46

312 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 therefore, consult the former agent’s brother, as De Lancey had advised. Even the salary was ‘a small object’, which he accepted ‘solely lest, I should hurt the delicacy of any Gentleman who might succeed to the Office, by putting him under difficulties in accepting of that emollument which another had declined’ (20 Aug. 1772: C ii. 329–30). Credat Judaeus Apella: Burke needed the money. Far from being indifferent to the salary, Burke actually asked for an additional allowance of £80 a year to cover the cost of a clerk. This was Clement Nevill Zouch (d. 1792), an ex-Ballitore boy whom Burke had employed as a secretary for some years.48 The Assembly eventually allowed Burke an additional £140 a year for ‘contingent charges’.49 Burke had been provoked to the display of prickly self-righteousness on the subject of his salary by a hint from the Committee of Correspondence. Unhappy with his infrequent letters confined to official agency business, they wanted him to write more often and more in the style of a political newsletter. For Burke, the implication that he was a hackney journalist was even more demeaning than the suggestion that he should inflate his expense account. He repudiated it in the strongest terms: ‘In my situation nothing can be so contrary to all decorum and all attention to my own Character as to commit myself in such Letters for opinions of Men . . . My Letters to the Committee of Correspondence must continue to be merely Official; though such Letters must be dry and unpleasant enough by their own Nature even in better hands than mine.’ As so often when touched on a tender spot, Burke overreacts: ‘Neither will the same Sense of propriety suffer me to write more frequently than Business requires . . . if my Notions on this Subject should be different from theirs, and that they think this mode of acting does not come up to what they look for from the person they honour with their confidence here, I shall wish them to employ a person more pleasing to them’ (C ii. 328–9). The committee did not press the point. Burke’s work as New York agent followed an annual cycle. Since New York was a royal colony, its legislation required confirmation by the Privy Council. In practice, this meant the approval of the Board of Trade, for the Council normally accepted its recommendations. The New York Assembly met each winter, usually for about two months, typically from January to March. After the end of each session, its Acts were transmitted to the Board of Trade in London. Copies would also be sent to Burke, sometimes with instructions about particular Acts. In 1771, for example, he was asked to expedite passage of the Boundary Act, which gave legislative sanction to the findings of a commission appointed to determine the boundary between New York and New Jersey. Burke immediately took the matter up with the 48

E.B. first made the request in the same letter to De Lancey in which he disclaimed interest in the salary (20 Aug. 1772: C ii. 330). He repeated it in a letter to the Committee itself (16 Apr. 1773: 432) and again in a letter to De Lancey (5 Jan. 1774: 507). 49 Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of New-York . . . 1774 (New York, 1774), 51.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 313 officials at the Board of Trade. Nothing, however, could be done during the summer. Then, because the commission’s report had not been formally transmitted to the Board, the Act was recommended for disallowance. The difficulty was not cleared up until 1773 (C ii. 228–30). When colonial Acts were received, the Board referred them en bloc to its counsel for reports. During Burke’s tenure, the counsel was Richard Jackson (c.1721–87), an MP and a former colonial agent. Burke knew him well enough to have consulted him before accepting the agency (329). Jackson’s reports took several months to prepare. In 1771, for example, the forty-four New York Acts of the 1770–1 session were formally submitted to the Board on 22 August. Jackson reported on them on 29 April 1772. Thirty-nine Acts were recommended for approval, three for disallowance, and two to be ‘laid by’ for further consideration. The Board accepted Jackson’s recommendations.50 Indeed, the volume of business dispatched shows clearly that, on such matters, the counsel’s report was decisive. Once the legislation had thus passed the Board, Burke in turn reported back to the Assembly. In letters to the Committee of Correspondence, he summarized the grounds on which any bill had been disallowed or ‘laid by’ (6 May 1772, 2 July 1773: C ii. 302–3, 442). A few cases were more complicated. If a petition were lodged against a bill, for example, Burke might attend the Board himself or ask to be heard by counsel.51 Otherwise, he would have little further to do than wait for the next year’s crop of legislation. Not all Burke’s New York business was related to the annual legislative cycle. The most difficult case was that of the French land claims. These were grants, made by the former French administration in Quebec, of territory now part of New York and over which (as New York asserted) the French had never possessed any legal authority. As a further complication, part of the land was also claimed by New Hampshire. This intractable problem was still unsolved in 1775.52 On occasion, Burke was asked to procure a personal favour. In 1773, for example, Henry Cruger (d. 1780) wanted to resign from the (appointed) Legislative Council in favour of his son. Such arrangements were, officially at least, frowned on. Cruger’s previous application had failed. Burke, dealing with a more amenable American secretary, obtained the boon with gratifying speed.53 Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations (London, 1920–38), xiii. 266, 298–9. An example is the Wawayanda Act (1773), which adjusted disputed land claims. On 26 Oct., consideration was deferred to permit a memorial against it to be heard. When the petitioner did not appear, the Act was recommended for confirmation (Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, xiii. 369–70, 381). E.B. was active in minimizing the delay caused by what he regarded as a vexatious petition (to the Committee, 2 Aug. and 7 Dec. 1773: C ii. 448, 493). Among E.B.’s papers is a copy of Jackson’s report to the Board of Trade on this Act (NRO A. xxvi. 8). 52 E.B. to the Committee, 6 May and 31 Dec. 1772, 2 July 1773, 7 June 1775 (C ii. 303–4, 396, 440– 1; iii. 167). 53 John Cruger to E.B., 2 Feb. 1773, WWM BkP 1/426; E.B. to Cruger, 16 Apr. (C ii. 428); Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, xiii. 353, 354. 50 51

314 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 When Burke undertook the New York agency, he envisaged playing an advisory role. He could be most useful to the Assembly, he told De Lancey, in giving them ‘hints’ that he might derive from being ‘near to the scene where your Business is finally transacted’ and ‘knowing something of the Temper, the disposition, and the Politicks of the people here; and not being so deeply and warmly engaged as yourselves’. If disputes such as those concerning the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties recurred, he might help persuade New York to accept the Rockingham compromise: imperial supremacy in theory, virtual colonial independence in practice. For the routine part of the business, he admitted, ‘any Merchant in the City, or any active Clerk that can rummage publick Offices, and wait in the Antichambers of Ministers, may be more serviceable to you than ten such people as I am’ (9 June 1771: C ii. 215–16). To recur to Franklin’s distinction, Burke was happy to be ‘consider’d as the Patron of a great Province’ but did not ‘care to submit to the Drudgery of running about and attending the Offices’. Zouch, however, would relieve him of most of the legwork. As the letter to De Lancey indicates, Burke was unsuited to the role of agent. Knowing better than his nominal principals, he was readier to instruct them than to carry out their instructions. His worst experience was with the demands of his Bristol constituents, during the six unhappy years that he represented that city in Parliament (1774–80). The New York agency was nothing like so demanding or vexatious. New Yorkers were at a safe distance, several weeks away by packet-boat. Burke was not teased to visit and canvass, and was handsomely remunerated for his trouble. Burke’s first New York business was a controverted election. The De Lanceys, his patrons, were leaders of one New York political party. Having gained control of the Assembly at the 1769 election, like other groups in the same situation they sought to extrude as many of their opponents as possible. One member they tried to unseat was Robert R. Livingston (1718– 75), on the ground that his seat on the Supreme Court disqualified him. This was a mere pretext, for judges had previously sat in the Assembly. The Livingstons were the De Lanceys’ chief rivals in New York politics. Depriving the judge of his seat had everything to do with power politics, nothing to do with principle. Soon after hearing that Burke had accepted the agency, Livingston sent him a state of his case. De Lancey may also have written to Burke on the subject. To his credit, Burke supported the judge. Though his actual reply to Livingston was a rather cool refusal to intervene (C ii. 214), to De Lancey he wrote a long letter demolishing the De Lancey case. Of all Burke’s New York letters, this shows him at his best. After a brief historical disquisition on why the English judges are excluded from the Commons, he shows that the case of the New York Assembly is not analogous, and advises against pursuing a vendetta that no one in England is likely to support (216–18). Burke’s wise counsel was ignored. Livingston

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 315 was twice more re-elected and declared disqualified before the family agreed to nominate another member.54 During the first three years of his agency, Burke was not called upon to do much more than attend to the passage of New York legislation. The next significant Anglo-American conflict, provoked by the Boston Tea Party, quickly outgrew the capacity of any agent to moderate. Burke’s New York agency must therefore be judged a misapplication of effort and energy. Nothing he did could not have been done as well by one of the smaller fry who made up the majority of the colonial agents. Even his salary, though he did not have to work hard for it, was dearly earned at the price of compromising his independence. The most significant legacy of Burke’s agency was probably the low opinion he formed of the utility and effectiveness of the Board of Trade. In his Economical Reform Bill of 1780, he proposed its abolition. When the Rockingham party returned to power in 1782, the Board was suppressed and its business transferred to a committee of the Privy Council.

3 In 1771, when Burke accepted the New York agency, the brief triumph of 1782 was more than a decade away. He had spent five years in dispiriting opposition, with no better prospect in sight. The Rockingham party had not even the balm of popularity. ‘The Country is dead,’ Burke lamented to O’Hara. ‘No spirit of any kind remains’ ( July 1771: C ii. 222). As soon as his New York letters were written, for consolation he once again turned to his farm. In September, Arthur Young sent Burke a copy of his latest publication, which included a laudatory account of Burke’s farm and experiments.55 An indefatigable promoter of new ideas, Young traversed large tracts of England as a self-appointed inspector of agriculture. To spread information and publicize his findings, he wrote up his journals as a series of ‘tours’. In 1770, on one of these tours, he had visited Beaconsfield. Though Burke had then been farming for only three years, he had already undertaken a number of trials and experiments. Young heartily approved of gentleman farmers of Burke’s type, whose example would diffuse new practices at first to their tenants and then to the less enlightened gentry. On most controverted topics, too, they agreed. Burke therefore features prominently in Young’s book as an example of the new, progressive, ‘spirited’ (not easily discouraged) type of farmer. 54 Cynthia A. Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675–1790 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 196–7. 55 The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (London, 1771). The main account of E.B.’s farm is in vol. iv, pp. 76–84; E.B. also figures in some of the summaries. E.B. corrected some minor misapprehensions in his letter of thanks to Young for a copy of the book (C ii. 238–40).

316 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 Shortly after taking possession of the Gregories estate on Jane Burke’s death in 1812, James Du Pré (1778–1870) commissioned a survey of his enlarged holdings around Beaconsfield. Before the large-scale Ordnance Survey maps made private ones redundant, estate maps were often intended to be pleasing as well as informative. Du Pré’s is a splendid example of the genre. Measuring over seven foot by four, it shows every field, copse, and pond. Du Pré’s property is coloured: arable land, brown; meadows and woods, green; ponds, blue. Ploughed fields are marked with furrows; tiny trees are drawn to indicate woods and even clumps. Apart from connecting roads, all else is shown as white or void. As he unrolled the map, Du Pré could visualize his property and enjoy its representation in miniature. While the precise extent of the Burke property cannot be determined, the map permits an imaginative reconstruction of some of the vistas from the house (Plate 16). Immediately to the north, beyond the orchard were fields, and beyond them, wooded hills. To the south were the pleasure-grounds, the park, and Walk Wood. Of Burke’s 600 acres, ninety were wooded. Though most of the estate is now covered by suburban housing, Walk Wood has been preserved. Of all the sites associated with Burke, this is where the imaginative pilgrim can most easily shut out the twentieth century and retrace the steps of Burke and his friends. When the Shackletons visited Beaconsfield in 1784, after dinner they walked in and out of the wood, enjoying the play of the light on the trees. One shady recess reminded Mary Shackleton of Burke’s translation of the passage from the Georgics where the poet imagines a ‘cool retreat, | Where oaks and laurels guard the sacred ground, | And with their ample foliage shade me round’. At the far end of the wood was a rustic tea-house, equipped with a small kitchen and with an ice-house beneath.56 Of the productive land, Burke farmed 410 acres himself. This was reckoned a ‘large’ farm.57 The remainder was let out to tenants in small farms, for a total annual rental of £250. The land he farmed himself was divided equally between grass and arable (160 acres each). The pasture maintained 6 horses, 14 cows, 6 young cattle, and 40 swine, besides oxen and sheep. On his arable land, Burke employed the now well-established ‘alternate’ husbandry, in which grass and grain crops are rotated, thus obviating the need to leave fields fallow for a year. In 1770, Burke had sown ninety-one acres of grain: wheat (40 acres), barley (25), and oats (16). Slightly less ground (seventy-nine acres) was devoted to a variety of fodder crops: peas (16), turnips (25), clover (25), carrots (2), cabbages (1), potatoes (2), and vetch (8). To work his farm, Burke employed a bailiff, six labourers, and two boys, besides seasonal help as needed. 56

24.

Mary Shackleton’s Diary, 11–12 June 1784, National Library of Ireland, MS 9310, pp. 115–

A farm under 100 acres was commonly regarded as ‘small’, a farm over 300 acres as ‘large’; G. E. Mingay, ‘The Size of Farms in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 14 (1962), 469–88. 57

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 317 Young commended several of Burke’s practices. One chiefly indicates his willingness to invest in his farm. In a part of the country where (in Young’s opinion) ‘they know nothing of draining’, Burke had undertaken substantial drainage works.58 Though the value of drains was universally recognized, the heavy initial expense was a deterrent. Burke also experimented with different fodder crops. The commonest were turnips and clover, which Burke grew on a large scale. Turnips, however, were liable to rot in a succession of alternate thaws and sharp frosts. Burke tried, with varying success, beans, carrots, and cabbages. The beans were the least successful. Though the soil was improved, the crop itself was of little value. Cabbages, which Burke fed to his cows, proved more valuable. In 1771, he was experimenting with a different variety. Carrots, however, were his great success story. A market garden rather than a farm crop, carrots were not normally grown for fodder. Burke sent his best-looking ones to Covent Garden. The remainder he used for fodder. As an experiment, he fed one group of swine on boiled carrots, another on barley meal. According to Young, after three weeks, the carrot-feeders had gained no weight. Young was pleased that Burke (as usual) did not give up easily. Despite a similar failure the previous year, Burke intended to ‘renew the trials, until success attends them; or a clear knowledge is gained, why it cannot be expected’.59 Such tenacity is characteristic of Burke. Not that he regarded the experiment as a failure. Conceding that his ‘Hogs’ (the older, castrated males) had not fattened on the carrots, he claimed that the ‘pigs’ (the younger ones) ‘grew wonderfully and lookd remarkably sleek’ (C ii. 239). Another of Burke’s practices, the use of oxen for ploughing, depended more on a priori reasoning than on experiment. Over the centuries, the horse had largely replaced the ox as a draught animal. Then, when ploughing with oxen had nearly disappeared, the practice enjoyed first a theoretical then a practical revival. The argument was simple. Plough horses were expensive to feed and depreciated in value. Since the English would not eat horse meat, their carcasses were nearly a dead loss. The ox, on the other hand, properly harnessed rather than yoked, could plough nearly as well as a horse (albeit more slowly), and appreciated over time to produce marketable beef. Most of the agricultural writers, including both Arthur Young and William Marshall (1745–1818), advocated the use of oxen. In 1770, this line of reasoning was novel.60 Burke, ploughing with oxen as early as 1770, Farmer’s Tour, iv. 73, 83–4. Ibid. 78 Earlier on the same tour, Young met a Nottinghamshire farmer who believed that ‘no food will carry a hog on quicker, or fat him better’ than carrots (i. 137). 60 Young, A Six Months Tour through the North of England (London, 1770), iv. 293–7; The Farmer’s Letters to the People of England (London, 1771), i. 164–77. In 1768, a time of acute food shortage, ‘Marcus Aurelius’ (in the Gazetteer, 13 Jan. 1768) advocated a tax on horses to encourage farmers to plough with oxen instead, thus allowing the ‘many millions of bushels of oats’ consumed by horses to be fed to the poor. The argument is based on social justice; the writer (whose ideas are strongly dirigiste) does not suggest that ox ploughing is itself economical. 58 59

318 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 was an early exponent of the revival. Despite the various theoretical arguments in its favour, the use of oxen in the plough did not become common until the 1780s. Only during the war years of 1793–1815, when vast numbers of horses were diverted to military purposes, was it at all general. That a practice so advantageous on paper should only be adopted under the pressure of necessity suggests that the benefits were more specious than real.61 Young approved of all Burke’s practices but one. While conceding that farmers in general did not plough deeply enough (four inches was a common depth), Young thought that between six and eight inches was sufficient. Burke ploughed to a depth of ten to twelve inches (about double the local average), which Young thought required more labour and manure than any improved yield would justify.62 Burke was not afraid to dispute with the expert. About October 1771, he began a longer letter to Young, of which only a draft or copy of the first pages survives. Its expository and didactic tone suggests that Burke was writing for eventual publication: ‘In order to know how we ought to plough, we ought to know, what end it is we propose to ourselves in that operation. The first and instrumental End, is to divide the soil; the last and ultimate End, so far as regards the plants, is to facilitate the pushing of the blade upwards, and the shooting of the roots in all the inferior directions; There is further proposed, a more ready admission of external influences’ (C ii. 247). An elaborate summary follows of the various objections that have been advanced against deep ploughing. Frustratingly, the manuscript breaks off before they are answered. The generalization contrasts with the personal, particularizing letter in which Burke had thanked Young for a copy of his Tour. In the later letter, Young is only the nominal recipient. Burke was evidently writing for a larger, less personal audience. Perhaps he intended the letter for some periodical. Many journals published such contributions. Although Burke never wrote a formal treatise on farming, the scattered remarks and observations in his letters show that he had thought long and carefully about what he was doing. On the subject of politics, his judgement was often clouded by wishful thinking; realism characterizes his opinions about farming. As a farmer, he never attributes his ill success to a sinister conspiracy on the part of the forces of nature. Typical of his common sense is a letter to Garrett Nagle (23 Aug. 1771: C ii. 231–5). Confined indoors on a rainy day, Burke took the opportunity to write an essay of over 2,000 words on the merits of the new turnip husbandry. Consciously reacting against the facile optimism of the typical improver’s manual, he paints a most discouraging picture of the trouble and expense: ‘you must begin your 61 J. A. Perkins, The Ox, the Horse, and English Farming, 1750–1850, University of New South Wales, Department of Economic History, Working Paper no. 3 (1975). 62 Farmer’s Tour, iv. 79–80, 255–60.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 319 operation with a clean fallow effected by at least three good plowings and as many harrowings . . . If your ground be not in very good heart you must dress it well besides before the last plowing. When the Turnips come up in full leaf you must have them hoed; which is done with us by the piece, and costs five shillings an acre.’ Worse is to come. The turnip is ‘the most precarious of all Crops . . . the Fly attacks it very frequently the moment the soft leaf appears above Ground’ (231–2). The advantages are substantial and certain, he argues, but only in the medium to long term, and then not in the crop itself but in the improved fertility of the soil. Burke was a greater realist than many gentleman farmers. Writing to O’Hara about a year later, he criticized the Dublin Society for offering a prize for drilled turnips (planted with a seed-drill, instead of being broadcast), a refinement suited only to gentleman experimenters. The society ought rather to encourage ordinary farmers to plant large areas of turnips as part of a regular rotation of crops (30 Sept. 1772: 338). This concern with the utilitarian is typical of Burke’s attitude to farming. He warned O’Hara, as he had Nagle, not to expect turnips to be immediately profitable. When O’Hara replied that his had proved so, Burke scotched the claim, suggesting (probably rightly) that O’Hara’s accounting was at fault.63 He had come a long way in a few years. Inviting O’Hara to Beaconsfield in 1768, Burke asked him to ‘go round with us, and put us right in our original plan’ (1 Sept. 1768: 13). By 1772, this diffidence had disappeared. For Burke, farming was more than a hobby, a distraction, and a small source of income, though it was all these. ‘These occupations,’ he wrote, ‘if they do not totally banish from my Mind, they suspend many Cares, sorrows, and anxieties. They are my dearest pleasures; they would be so in a State of the greatest prosperity; and they have something soothing to a mind that is sore, and sick of many Griefs.’ Farming was also an elemental activity, possessing symbolic value. ‘I do not know how,’ he told O’Hara, ‘but they bring one nearer, and by a gradual slope down to our Natural repose; and our Grave is thus gently prepared for us, like one of the trenches into which we throw our grain in the hope of resurrection.’ This meditation leads to the inevitable contrast with politics, ‘one of the worst’ of human follies (10 Sept. 1771: C ii. 237). Burke might turn to farming to forget, temporarily at least, the frustrations of politics. Yet when he returned to politics, he did not forget that he was a farmer. Like other farmers, he tended to identify what was good for farmers with what was good for the nation. In Burke’s day, the grain trade was regulated according to principles established by a series of Acts passed between 1663 and 1689 and since 63 E.B. to O’Hara, July 1771 (C ii. 223); O’Hara to E.B., 30 Aug. (New York Agent, 499); E.B. to O’Hara, 10 Sept. (236).

320 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 amended, known collectively as the Corn Laws.64 Everyone recognized that the price of grain would fluctuate from one year to another. The aim of the Corn Laws was to stabilize these fluctuations around a notional ‘fair’ price that would be equitable to both consumers and producers. When home prices were low, the import of grain was discouraged by high duties. To encourage production, a bounty on grain exported was paid while home prices were low or moderate. This bounty ceased at a level where its further operation was thought likely to create scarcity at home. When prices reached scarcity levels, export was prohibited. In practice, these rules favoured the producer. From 1689 to about 1750, however, their effect was disguised by a general increase in agricultural productivity. Grain prices actually fell, and fell considerably against prices in general. Many contemporaries credited the bounties with keeping prices down by encouraging production, and therefore defended them as a mainstay of national prosperity. In the 1750s, however, they came under attack from two different quarters. Until about 1750, when grain prices were generally low, much of the increased home production was exported. The export bounties, financed from general taxation, became an invidious drain on the public purse. Manufacturers began to complain that the bounties served Britain’s competitors by providing them with cheap food, and therefore low wages, thus enabling them to undersell British products. About the same time, a series of bad harvests (1756–7, 1766–7, 1770–4) led consumers (especially the urban poor) to demand the abolition of the bounties and even the prohibition of exports. High prices often led to food riots. In response, the government passed a series of temporary Acts suspending the exportation of grain and even limiting its use in distilling.65 By 1772, the need for a more permanent measure was widely recognized. A bill was introduced by Thomas Pownall (1722–1805), a former colonial governor who had made himself an expert on economic questions.66 His bill attracted bipartisan support, and easily passed the Commons. The Lords, however, struck out the export bounty. In other circumstances, the Commons might simply have insisted on its restoration. For about eighteen months, however, the two Houses had been at odds. On 10 December 1770, in the course of a disorderly debate in the Lords, some members of the Commons had, with other strangers, been ejected. This affront made the Commons exceptionally sensitive to the least suspicion of any encroachment by the Lords on their privileges.67 The Commons claimed an exclu64 In British usage, ‘corn’ means wheat, not maize. The ‘Corn Laws’, however, applied to all grains, of which wheat was the most important. 65 Donald Grove Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws from 1660–1846 (London, 1930), 24–45. 66 John A. Schutz, Thomas Pownall, British Defender of American Liberty: A Study of Anglo-American Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Glendale, Calif., 1951). 67 PH xvi. 1318–27; Walpole, Memoirs of George III, iv. 145–6.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 321 sive right to originate money bills, which the Lords might reject but not amend. Until 1779, the definition of a ‘money bill’ was not fixed; any bill imposing a tax or duty might be so regarded.68 Pursuing their vendetta with the Lords, the Commons chose to treat Pownall’s as such. In keeping with their usual practice, they indignantly rejected the amended bill. Burke both exaggerated the heinousness of the Lords’ offence and interpreted it as part of the usual plot. ‘Can liberty exist a moment,’ he asked, ‘if we allow them to lay their sacrilegious hands upon this holy of holies, the palladium of the constitution? . . . among the various attempts made by administration to overturn the constitution, that of taking from the people the power of taxing themselves would not be the least.’69 Burke is often, and rightly, praised for his power of generalization. Rarely can he have so misused that power as on this occasion. Only when determined to quarrel with the Lords did the Commons choose to extend the definition of a money bill so wide as to include a measure like the Corn Bill. If, as Adam Smith argued, the export bounty served to keep up the price of corn for the benefit of the landed interest, the Lords were on this occasion the true friends of ‘the people’. Burke was perfectly well aware that the bounty was unpopular. Not long before, when Herbert Mackworth (1737–91), an independent country gentleman, proposed that the Corn Bill should be printed, to permit public opinion to be heard, but taken no further, Burke had argued that no question was less amenable to popular consideration. Consumers wanted cheap corn, producers wanted high prices. Where opposite interests and passions were involved, the wisdom of the legislature must decide.70 In the following session, when tempers had cooled, a nearly identical bill passed both Houses without difficulty. Pownall’s Act made several concessions to consumers. Previously, the export bounty had been paid until the price of wheat reached 48s. per quarter; now, the bounty was discontinued and export prohibited when the price exceeded 44s. When the price reached 48s., import was permitted on payment of lower duties than before. Grain could be imported at any time duty-free, if bonded. If the price rose, the grain could be sold on payment of the duty ruling at the time of sale rather than of import. If prices did not rise, the grain could be re-exported without payment of duty. This provision was meant to encourage speculative imports and ensure that an increased demand for imported grain could be met more quickly.71 In theory at least, Burke favoured a free market in grain. On 16 November 1770, he argued forcefully against renewing the prohibition on the export of grain. ‘There are no such things’, he argued, ‘as a high, & a low Thomas, House of Commons, 65–8. Debate on the Lords’ Amendments to the Corn Bill, 3 June 1772, London Magazine, 41 (1772, app.), 613–14 (PH xvii. 513–14). 70 71 14 Apr. 1772, BL Egerton MS 241, fos. 29–34. 13 George III, c. 43. 68 69

322 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 price that is encouraging, & discouraging; there is nothing but a natural price, which grain brings at an universal market.’ Though aware that he enjoyed little support, Burke felt this so strongly that he insisted on dividing the House. The continued prohibition was carried by 155 to 16.72 In 1772, while Pownall’s bill was passing through the Commons, Burke moved a bill to repeal various old laws, chiefly dating from the sixteenth century, against dealers in corn. In times of scarcity, dealers and middlemen were popular scapegoats for high prices. As late as 1787, responding to a petition calling for the re-enactment of such laws, Burke proudly described himself as ‘the humble instrument’ of their repeal.73 Invincible popular ignorance and prejudice, however, prevented the creation of a free market. Burke therefore gave Pownall’s bill his reluctant support: ‘the people will have it so, and it is not for their representatives to say nay’.74 Burke objected to ‘the general principles of policy’ on which Pownall’s bill was based, the idea that legislation can and should control the price of foodstuffs. Burke always regarded the desire to subsidize food prices as sentimental in inspiration, pernicious in the attempt, and certain to fail in practice. His speeches on corn in 1770–2, though only imperfectly reported, show that he had already reached the conclusions set out in ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’, written in 1795 in response to the food crisis of that year (WS ix. 120–45). Governments, in his view, cannot provide the poor with cheap food and ought not to interfere with the free market in provisions. Burke’s commitment to this free market, however, always excepted the export bounty. On 28 March 1770, in an earlier debate on whether to lift temporary prohibition on the export of corn, he contrived both to demonstrate ‘the policy of our laws for the bounty, which had rendered in effect corn cheaper’ and to argue that the export prohibition was ‘contrary to the spirit of commerce’.75 During the debates on Pownall’s 1772 bill, Burke again argued that the bounty really benefited the poor. In the longer run, he claimed, the interests even of consumers are better served by high prices, which encourage farmers to grow more. Greater productivity will ultimately lead to cheaper food.76 Since the institution of the bounty in 1689, grain prices had generally fallen. Burke, in common with many others, attributed this fall to the operation of the bounty.77 To discontinue it, in 72 BL Egerton MS 222, fo. 261; Thomas Bradshaw to the Duke of Grafton, 16 Nov. 1770, Suffolk Record Office (Bury), Ac. 423/622. 73 Debate on the London Petition against Forestallers and Regrators, 16 May 1787, Debrett, xxii. 367–8 (PH xxvi. 1169). E.B.’s 1772 measure was 12 George III, c. 71. 74 Committee on Corn, 4 May 1772 (PH xvii. 480). 75 Almon, Debates, viii. 301–2. The prohibition was continued. 76 30 Apr. 1772, Bristol University Library, Brickdale’s Parliamentary Diary, vi. 13–14. 77 Adam Smith refuted this argument, pointing out that the price had also fallen in France, where export had been prohibited until 1764. Smith thought that, without the bounty, the price of corn would have fallen even further; Wealth of Nations, iv. v. a. 4–15.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 323 their view, would discourage production, leading inevitably to more frequent scarcities and higher prices. Burke also argued that to give in to popular demands for the abolition of the export bounty would delude people into thinking that Parliament could control the price of food. Burke knew better: ‘I would have the people of this island know that, if they would be relieved, they must relieve themselves by an increase of industry. . . . Let us not, however, open our hands precipitately or indiscreetly, and endeavour to persuade them that we can give a relief, which is actually out of our power.’78 Burke was not the only farmer to convince himself that, while no legislation could reduce the price of grain, grain prices were lower as a result of the export bounty.

4 So somnolent was the political situation in the second half of 1771 that Parliament was not recalled until after Christmas. For Burke, however, the last months of the year were embittered by an unpleasant quarrel with William Markham, an old friend from the 1750s, now Bishop of Chester. Though his family was English, Markham was born in Ireland, where his father was serving with the Army. Burke met him through Will, probably about 1754, for in 1771 Burke called him ‘my seventeen years friend’ (C ii. 257). According to family tradition, Markham read Burke’s Enquiry in manuscript.79 In 1758, he stood godfather to Burke’s son Richard (257). The following year he recommended Burke for a colonial appointment.80 He felt a friendly concern about Burke’s parliamentary debut, as an anxious letter to Will Burke testifies (29 Dec. 1765: i. 226). Soon after, however, relations began to cool. Markham was a courtier; Burke went into opposition. These political differences were exacerbated by temperamental incompatibility. Markham was by nature combative, hot-tempered, and intolerant. After his promotion to the see of York, Horace Walpole described him to one of his clerical subalterns as ‘your warlike metropolitan Archbishop Turpin’, alluding to the martial prelate in the Chanson de Roland.81 Walpole was no friend to turbulent priests, but in this case even family tradition gives Markham the same character: more suited to the Army than to the Church.82 Ruthless in pursuit of his own advancement, he could not Committee on Corn, 4 May 1772 (PH xvii. 480–1). Captain John Markham to his wife, 21 Feb. 1800, in Sir Clements Markham, A Memoir of Archbishop Markham, 1719–1807 (Oxford, 1906), 13. 80 Markham to the Duchess of Queensbury, 25 Sept. 1759 (Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle (London, 1838–40), i. 430–3). 81 Walpole to William Mason, 10 Sept. 1777, YWC xxviii. 313. 82 Markham Memorials, ed. Sir Clements Markham (London, 1913), ii. 5. 78 79

324 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 understand Burke’s preference for being in the right. When Burke followed Rockingham into opposition in 1766, Markham strongly disapproved. In 1769, he unsuccessfully advised Burke to moderate his opposition to the payment of the debts incurred on the Civil List (C ii. 254). He then gave Burke up as a hopeless case, though there was no overt quarrel. The explosion came late in 1771. On 15 October, a letter signed ‘Zeno’ appeared in the Public Advertiser, defending Lord Mansfield against the charges made by Junius in his letter of 5 October. Identifying Burke (‘Edmund the Jesuit of St Omer’s’) as Junius, Zeno denounced him as ‘a public defamer of every respectable character in the nation’ who had ‘carried the license of the press beyond the bounds not only of decency and humanity, but even of human conception’.83 Burke was exasperated by the persistence of the charge that he was Junius, convinced that it was maliciously circulated by his enemies (249–50). Zeno’s letter was particularly galling to Burke because, in the debates on the Jury Bill, he had spoken respectfully of Mansfield. The personal attacks had emanated from the Chathamite wing of the opposition. Burke believed that Zeno and others wrote with at least the tacit approval of Mansfield, whom he therefore credited with the power to silence them. Markham was a close friend of Mansfield, to whom he was reported to owe his mitre.84 Burke therefore sought to use him as an intermediary. His first appeal, at an acrimonious meeting on 7 November, failed even to convince Markham that he was not Junius. Perhaps injudiciously, Burke repeated the request in a letter (9 Nov.: 250–2). A quarrel between two such choleric and self-righteous adversaries could not long be kept within bounds. On this occasion, Markham was the first to lose his self-control, reviling Burke in a letter couched in the most intemperate and offensive language. This letter has not survived. Its contents and tone, however, can be deduced from Burke’s lengthy reply (C ii. 253–86), which even quotes some of the most provocative phrases. The charges included arrogance, excessive pretensions, ‘Mad Ambition’ (269), and a refusal to listen to criticism or advice. Damning the Rockingham party as a wicked faction, Markham accused Burke of vicious and over-violent attacks on his opponents, probably meaning his parliamentary duels with Rigby and Bagot, as well as his supposed authorship of the Junius letters. Burke was the profligate tool of a knot of factious knaves, his household a ‘Hole of adders’ (268), his rhetoric the language of the ‘Bear Garden’ (263). Some of Markham’s accusations were groundless. Burke was not Junius. Other charges were crimes only in the code of a ministerial bishop. Burke often attacked men and measures 83 Zeno’s letter is reprinted in a footnote to the Bohn edition: Junius: Including Letters by the Same Writer under Other Signatures, ed. John Wade (London, 1853), ii. 421–5. The letter to which Zeno took exception is no. lix in the collected edition; Letters of Junius, 295–6. 84 ‘Lord Mansfield has made Markham a bishop’; Calcraft to Chatham, 14 Jan. 1771, in Chatham, Correspondence, iv. 66.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 325 that Markham supported. Yet he was not an especially violent or abusive speaker, and by no means the worst offender. With some justice and heavy irony he could refer to the ‘Known Urbanity’ of Richard Rigby’s debating style (265). Nor was Markham’s own language, to judge by Burke’s quotations, a model of moderation and episcopal charity.85 The charge of ‘Mad Ambition’ was hardly fair. Far from having excessive pretensions, Burke was over-diffident about pressing his claims to office and emolument. Had Burke been more self-interested, he could easily have secured some permanent provision from Rockingham in 1766. When Rockingham returned to office in 1782, Burke was again self-consciously unthrustful (iv. 424). Nor would he have been much blamed (least of all by Markham) for accepting Conway’s overture in 1766, or for subsequently offering his services to Grafton or to North. The high road of ambition was (as Markham’s career evinced) through the court. A would-be courtier might advertise his talents through his nuisance value in a short course of opposition. Sincere opposition was never the short or the sure road to advancement. Another man in Burke’s position might have treated Markham’s letter with silent contempt, or have written a short, dignified reply. Always prone to over-react, Burke was enraged to compose a remarkable document in the form of a letter to Markham. This ‘letter’, which runs to about 15,000 words, survives as a rough draft in the hands of three amanuenses, corrected by Burke himself. Untold hours and energy were lavished on this composition, a discordant amalgam of raw feeling and rhetorical art. Burke gave his feelings free rein, as he had in April 1770, when Shackleton’s biographical sketch was printed in a London newspaper (C ii. 129–31). Just as Burke had then discharged at Shackleton all his pent-up anger and frustration, now his target was Markham. This extraordinary composition does not read like a private letter. Its great length, the elaborate parade of deference and courtesy, and the care taken to summarize Markham’s charges all suggest that Burke had a wider audience in mind. Though he can hardly have meant to print the letter, he may have considered circulating it in manuscript. Despite its intolerable prolixity, the letter has great value as a record of Burke’s own interpretation of his political career. As a defence of his character, it is a complete failure, too tediously self-pitying to engage an impartial reader’s sympathy. Burke’s obsessive need to prove himself ‘perfectly in the right’ unwittingly confirms Markham’s charge that he would not listen to advice or reproof. Burke comes across as tetchy, prickly, unable to bear the slightest provocation; totally humourless and with no sense of self-criticism. Burke was sometimes like this. His more amiable qualities, 85 Some idea of the style of Markham’s letter can be gained from the letter (not now attributed to Bacon) to which E.B. compared it: ‘Sir Francis Bacon to Sir Edward Coke, after Lord Chief Justice, and in Disgrace’, in Cabala, sive scrinia sacra: Mysteries of State and Government (3rd edn. London, 1691), part 1, 86–9.

326 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 his magnanimity, his playful imagination, and his exuberant invention find no place in a letter which reveals him, at more than full length, at his worst. By 8 December, tempers had cooled sufficiently for a meeting of reconciliation to be arranged, through the good offices of John Skynner (1724– 1805), lawyer and MP (C ii. 294).86 Both parties agreed to return the offensive letters and not to keep copies. (Burke’s preservation of his draft appears to be a violation of the spirit, if not the letter of this provision.) After such an episode, reconciliation could hardly be more than superficial. Cordial relations were maintained for a time, outwardly at least. In December 1772, Markham (who retained his Oxford deanery while Bishop of Chester) nominated Richard Burke, Jr., to a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford.87 The rapprochement did not last long. A firm asserter of British supremacy over the colonies, Markham regarded the advocates of conciliation as little better than traitors. This led to a final break with Burke.

5 When the Burkes returned to London for the 1772 session of Parliament, they moved to larger quarters. The house was one they already knew, having once been occupied by the Markham family. Will Burke praised it as ‘convenient for the House of Commons, airy in itself and very roomy’. Jane had ‘her two rooms, and Ned his study all upon the one floor’.88 The Burkes rented this house until 1779, when they moved back to Charles Street. Though Burke dated his letters only ‘Broad Sanctuary’, other evidence shows that he lived at the west end of Westminster Abbey, in the larger of a pair of modern houses built on the site of what had once been the Bishop of London’s prison for clerics (Fig. 4).89 According to tradition, Burke’s house was the one that abutted on the gatehouse (demolished about 1778– 9) of the old monastery. This is the house on the left in the watercolour (Plate 17), which is based on a drawing of 1808. The Burkes may actually have occupied the house nearer the abbey. Even so, the view provides a picturesque record of the neighbourhood in his day, a huddle of narrow and irregular streets, before it was taken over by tourism and traffic.90 This was 86 Skynner had known E.B. since at least 1765 (C i. 226). In 1773, E.B. retained him on behalf of the New York Assembly (ii. 441). 87 C ii. 393–4; E. G. W. Bill, Education at Christ Church, Oxford, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1988), 107–11. As a further favour, Markham allowed R.B. Jr. a generous leave of absence before coming into residence. 88 W.B. to O’Hara, 2 Feb. 1772, in Hoffman, New York Agent, 513. 89 The site of E.B.’s house can be identified from a street improvement Act (17 George III, c. 61), which describes two houses ‘now or lately’ in the possession of E.B. and Captain Jekyll. According to the rate books, E.B. was assessed at £45 and Jekyll at £38; City of Westminster Archives, Rate Books, St Margaret’s, Grand Ward, 1773–9. 90 William Bardwell, Westminster Improvements: A Brief Account of Ancient and Modern Westminster (London, 1839), 55.


327

Fig. 4 Broad Sanctuary; detail from Richard Horwood’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (1792‒9). The demolished gatehouse (of which the remains can be seen in Plate 17) controlled entry from Broad Sanctuary into Dean’s Yard. Burke lived in one of the two houses immediately to the east of the site of the gatehouse

328 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 as close as Burke ever lived to the House of Commons, a short walk away through St Margaret’s Churchyard and Old Palace Yard. Parliament did not meet until 21 January 1772. With no great question in prospect, the new session promised little excitement.91 Lacking a popular cause, and conscious of their numerical weakness, the Rockingham party once again considered, if only to reject, a formal secession.92 Imprisoned in the fantasy world of ‘secret influence’, Burke still sought to assimilate whatever happened to the theory of the ‘double cabinet’ advanced in his Thoughts. ‘It costs nothing to the people who direct all,’ he told O’Hara, ‘to have Government disgraced, provided those who are employd in it are humbled; If I do not greatly mistake, their wish is to see Ministers of all sorts subsisting in defiance of publick opinion’ (18 Dec. 1771: C ii. 296). The most contentious measure of the 1772 session illustrates this obsession. Provoked by the mésalliance of one of his younger brothers, the king sought the power to prevent such matches.93 Any measure that strengthened the king’s prerogative was liable to partisan misconstruction. In a dearth of controversy, the bill was manna to the hungry opposition. Having passed the Lords on 3 March, it was given its first reading in the Commons on the next day. Only on the 24th, and after seven acrimonious and gruelling debates, some lasting into the small hours, and to all of which Burke contributed, was it finally passed.94 As with the Jury Bill of the previous session, the opposition was divided. Some opposed the bill in principle, as an unwarrantable interference with freedom of marriage. Others (including Burke) were prepared to allow the king some power over royal marriages, but sought to narrow the scope of the bill. These differences were exacerbated by mutual suspicions and personal rivalries, which often crowded out the points of substance. Burke was always bitter towards deserters. Sir William Meredith, who had begun 91 Though E.B. described the session as ‘inactive’ (to Sir George Macartney, 19 Feb. 1772: C ii. 301), during its brief course he spoke in at least thirty-five debates (WS ii. 486–9). Frank O’Gorman calls the session ‘one of the quietest of the eighteenth century’; The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975), 289. 92 Duke of Manchester to Rockingham, 10 Dec. 1771, and Rockingham to Dowdeswell, 19 Dec., in Earl of Albemarle, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and his Contemporaries, (London, 1852), ii. 210–11, 212–14. 93 The Duke of Cumberland (1745–90) married Anne Horton (née Luttrell; 1743–1803) on 2 Oct. 1771. Another brother, the Duke of Gloucester (1743–1805) had in 1766 contracted a clandestine marriage with the dowager Lady Waldegrave (1736–1807). This marriage was not known to the king until Sept. 1772, after the passage of the Royal Marriage Act; John Brooke, King George III (London, 1972), 277. 94 The main debates were held between 9 and 23 Mar. Because of the sensitivity of the subject, strangers (and therefore the newspaper reporters) were excluded. The most usable record of the debates is that compiled by Horace Walpole, and published in his Last Journals, i. 40–69. Though he did not attend the debates, Walpole had good sources of information, including his cousin General Conway. Walpole had a special interest in the question, for Lady Waldegrave was the natural daughter of his elder brother. Cavendish’s diary provides the lengthiest first-hand account (BL Egerton MSS 236–8). Perhaps because the debates were so disorderly, his reports are unusually incoherent.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 329 to act independently of the Rockingham party, was suspected of being ready to make his peace with the court. Burke interpreted his frontal assault on the Royal Marriage Bill as an invitation to be bought off. On 11 March, a heated debate on a procedural motion divided the opposition. Some were opposed to the principle of the bill; others were prepared to compromise, and therefore voted with the ministry to send the bill to a committee. Meredith, who was for rejecting the bill, likened sending it to a committee to ‘marrying and taking to their arms a diseased prostitute, in order to reclaim her’. Burke hurled all his scorn at the suspected deserter: He [Burke] would not take a strumpet in his arms, but before he turned her adrift in the street, he would endeavour to persuade her to the asylum. He showed the propriety of making the stand in the committee. . . . Meredith was mounted on a fine stately steed; he was a poor man content to walk afoot, but could wish that while they travelled the same road, the man on the fine steed would not bespatter him. . . . He had observed in his barn that when a gentleman took up the flail, he could in 1/2 an hour do as much as the poor thresher would do in an hour, and the reason was plain; the gentleman meant to work but 1/2 an hour, the thresher was to work all day.95

Few members would have missed the point of the parable, or have failed to enjoy Burke’s play of wit, though the rumours that Meredith was going over to the court proved premature.96 A standard charge against eighteenthcentury opposition members was that they were playing to be bought off. Often enough, they were. To emphasize the disinterestedness of the Rockingham party, and to distance themselves from the unprincipled placeseeker masquerading as an oppositionist, Burke and his friends reserved a special scorn for renegades. A year later, when another member defected, Dowdeswell vaunted the old Rockingham doctrine, ‘our indifference to the emoluments of office except when they may be accompanied also by the honours of it our steady & temperate adherence to our own principles’.97 One other of Burke’s speeches on the Royal Marriage Bill deserves notice, less for its argument than for its imagery. On 16 March, in a debate that lasted until 2 a.m., Burke spoke five times. His main speech began with a humorous allusion to Don Quixote and rose to a fine frenzied peroration. Conjuring up the image of the childless Lord Mansfield, generally credited with having drafted the bill, he cried out: ‘He has no child who first formed 95 W.B. to O’Hara, 13 Mar. 1772, in Hoffman, New York Agent, 519–20. Horace Walpole’s account of this speech (Last Journals, i. 45–6) does not include the image of the thresher. 96 W.B. reported one such rumour to Rockingham as early as 12 July 1771 (WWM R1/1381). As late as Feb. 1773, however, North still classified him as ‘Con’ rather than one of the many ‘Friends con’ who defeated him on the petition of the half-pay officers (Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December 1783, ed Sir John Fortescue (London, 1927–8), ii. 450). Meredith did not accept a place at court until Mar. 1774 97 Dowdeswell to Rockingham, 18 July 1773, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Dowdeswell Papers.

330 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 this bill! He was no judge of the crime of following Nature!’ The apostrophe confirms the special power that Macbeth exercised on Burke’s imagination.98 The speech as a whole illustrates his characteristic oscillation between the comic and the pathetic. The session of 1772 was remarkable for several questions that divided friends and united enemies. The Royal Marriage Act was one. Three others concerned the privileged status of the Established Church.99 From a modern perspective, each is apt to be seen as a battle between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ forces. Yet few members voted consistently according to such a pattern, though (none of the questions being ministerial) they were free to vote according to conviction. In his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, Burke had claimed that ‘political connexion’ does not imply ‘that you are blindly to follow the opinions of your party, when in direct opposition to your own clear ideas’ (WS ii. 319). Now he proved his independence. The question on which he found himself in ‘direct opposition’ to his party was the Feathers Tavern Petition, so called from the tavern where its framers met. Sponsored by a group of ordained clergy who wished to be relieved of the obligation to sign the Thirty-nine Articles, the petition was a move to liberalize the Anglican Church from within. On 6 February, Burke spoke against the petition and voted with a large majority (217 to 71) not to receive it. He joined the majority, as he told Lady Huntingdon (1707–91), ‘in opposition to the opinions of nearly all my own party’ (C ii. 299). For once, he found himself on the same side as Sir Roger Newdigate (1719–1806), one of the last of the old Tories. As member for the University of Oxford (1751–80), Sir Roger consistently opposed any measure that could be construed as detrimental to the interests or privileges of the Established Church. Not that Burke was content to echo Sir Roger. Just as on the Jury Bill he had carefully distinguished between his position and that of the Chathamites, so now he began by demolishing what he regarded as bad reasons for opposing the measure. Newdigate had argued that to relax the terms of subscription would be contrary to the king’s coronation oath to maintain the Church establishment and would violate the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, ‘an irreversible decree, binding at all times and in all circumstances, like the laws of the Medes and the 98 Walpole, Last Journals, i. 55; the allusion is to Macbeth, v. iii. 216. According to Cavendish, E.B.’s words were ‘he had no Children th[at] first put this into execution’, then a little later ‘you are going to reverse the order of nature’ (BL Egerton MS 237, fos. 204–5). Cavendish’s report of the speech as a whole (fos. 192–208), while incoherent and fragmentary, confirms the substantial accuracy of Walpole’s account. 99 G. M. Ditchfield, ‘The Subscription Issue in British Parliamentary Politics, 1772–1779’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), 45–80.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 331 Persians’. Burke contended that there could be no immutable laws. The supreme legislature of a state must have power to amend or repeal what it has enacted, though that power must be exercised with prudence and responsibility.101 The king’s oath only bound him to maintain what the legislature established. To require or dispense with subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was undoubtedly within the competence of the legislature. Burke opposed the change not because it was ultra vires, but because it was neither expedient nor desirable. The clergy of the Established Church are entitled to the same freedom of thought as others. As teachers paid to inculcate the doctrines of the Church, however, they must, in public, subscribe to those doctrines. ‘It was thought unreasonable,’ Burke reported to John Cruger, ‘that the publick should contribute to the Maintenance of a Clergy without knowing any thing of their doctrine’ (C ii. 309–10). Burke dismissed the suggestion that the Bible should replace the articles as the standard of faith. The Bible, he argued, ‘one of the most miscellaneous books in the world’ (WS ii. 362), was wholly unsuitable for such a purpose, being ‘a most Venerable but most multifarious collection of cosmogony, Theology, History, prophecy, psalmody, morality, apologue, allegory, Legislation, Ethics . . . by different authors, at different ages, for different Ends & purposes’. To interpret the Bible required an ability ‘to sort out what is intended for example what only as Narrative; what is to be understood Literally; what figuratively—where one precept is to be controlled & modified by another—what is used directly, & what only as an argument ad hominem—what is temporary, & what of perpetual obligation —what appropriated to one state & to one set of men, & what the general duty of all Christians’.102 To prevent the chaos that would ensue if every clergyman were at liberty to promote his own brand of Christianity, based on his own selection from or interpretation of the Bible, ‘some regular system of subscription’ was needed. Such a requirement was a matter of civil prudence. Burke commended the Romans, who ‘had their college of priests, who superintended religious matters, consulted the stars, and the flight of birds, took care of the sacred geese and chickens, opened the Sybilline books and explained their meaning. Yet who were more religious 100

100 Middlesex Journal, 8–11 Feb. 1772 (PH xvii. 252). North, casting about for a suitable pretext on which to reject the petition, accepted the argument about the inviolability of the Act of Union; Middlesex Journal, 22–5 Feb. (PH xvii. 272). Blackstone had argued that any alteration to the constitution or liturgy of the Church of England would ‘greatly endanger the union’; Commentaries, i. 97–8. 101 E.B. expresses this reservation more strongly in the Reflections, where he distinguishes between ‘the mere [absolute] abstract competence of the supreme power’ and the ‘moral competence’ which subordinates ‘occasional will to permanent reason’ (WS viii. 71). This passage, even more than that from the 1772 speech, is typical of E.B.’s habit of clogging generalizations with indefinite qualifications. 102 NRO A. xxxvi. 26d; edited version printed in W vi. 91–102.

332 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 than the Romans, who were more tolerating? Methinks we would do well to attend to their institutions’ (363). These arguments reveal the influence of Montesquieu’s sociology of religion. Systems are judged not in terms of their truth or validity but relative to the societies which they help to structure. Burke’s contemporaries were more likely to see his insistence on the historicity of the Bible as popery in disguise. Thus Theophilus Lindsey (1723–1808), a Unitarian and one of the promoters of the petition, wrote to a friend that ‘Burke declaimed most violently against us in a long speech, but entirely like a Jesuit, and full of Popish ideas—the multifarious, strange compound of the Book called the Scriptures—the uncertainty of what were the Scriptures—the necessity of a priesthood.’103 This is a strained interpretation of Burke’s speech. For Burke, the ecclesiastical establishment was the creation of the civil power, not co-ordinate with it, still less independent of it. Burke commended the priesthood as a salaried teaching order, its function secular rather than sacerdotal. Burke supported the historic compromise of 1689. ‘Toleration’ was extended to the Dissenters, but the measure of ‘comprehension’, which would have enlarged the terms of communion of the Church itself, was rejected.104 Burke remained loyal to this compromise, though as the threat from atheism and crypto-atheists increased, he would emphasize more strongly the need to protect the Church. This threat was already perceptible in 1772. Lord John Cavendish and Sir George Savile both employed the figure of the Church as a house whose doors should be as wide and as open as possible.105 Instead, Burke pictured the Church as a fort or a castle, whose walls he wished (as he told Lady Huntingdon) to see ‘raised on the foundation laid in the volume of divine truth, that she may crush the conspiracy of Atheism’ (Feb. 1772: C ii. 298–9). The Feathers Tavern Petition separated Burke from his usual associates. On two other cognate questions, he spoke and voted with them. The Church Nullum Tempus Bill proposed to make long possession an effective bar to claims by or on behalf of the Church, as Savile’s measure (enacted in 1769) had done against the dormant claims of the Crown. Leave to introduce such a bill was sought on 17 February. Burke could be relied on to support any measure that strengthened the security of landed property. Yet he was also a firm advocate of an endowed national Church. ‘There ought to be a symmetry between all the parts and orders of a State,’ he argued: ‘a poor Clergy in an opulent nation can have little correspondence with the body it 103 Lindsey to William Turner, [7 Feb. 1772], Dr Williams’s Library, MS 12. 44. 2; in H. McLachlan, Letters of Theophilus Lindsey (Manchester, 1920), 44. 104 Norman Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660–1768 (Cambridge, 1959), 68–104. 105 Lord John was reported in the Middlesex Journal, 18–20 Feb. 1772 (PH xvii. 271); Savile’s speech is printed in PH xvii. 289–93, from a manuscript source.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 333 106 is to instruct’ (WS ii. 365). To reconcile his support for the bill and his belief in a propertied Church, he argued that the Church was in so flourishing a state as not to need the protection of the nullum tempus principle (365–7). Leave to introduce the bill was denied by 141 to 117.107 Burke was one of many members who supported it, despite having voted against receiving the Feathers Tavern Petition. On the third question, Burke and his friends were in the majority. The Dissenters’ Relief Bill would have relieved dissenting schoolmasters of the statutory (if unenforced) requirement to subscribe most of the Thirtynine Articles.108 Its passage through the Commons was a charade. Although the king wanted the ministry to oppose the bill, North knew that many members would be reluctant to disoblige their dissenting constituents. He therefore allowed the bill to pass the Commons, preferring to have it rejected by the Lords.109 North stayed away from the debate on 3 April, a diplomatic absence which exposed him to Burke’s ridicule (WS ii. 368–9). Burke grounded his support of the bill on the same principles that had led him to oppose the Feathers Tavern Petition. Though opposed to schemes of ‘comprehension’ (which he regarded as chimerical), he favoured ‘toleration’. ‘Christian charity’, he argued, ‘consists in allowing others a latitude of opinion . . . and in not suffering the zeal of the Lord’s House [the Established Church] absolutely to eat you up. The Dissenters do not desire to partake of the emoluments of the Church. Their sole aim is to procure liberty of conscience’ (370). As his arguments in the debates on these questions testify, for Burke, the importance of ‘the Church’ was social rather than theological. Every society needed a national Church, embodying whatever religion had come to represent the consensus of the nation, whether Druidism, Roman paganism, or Roman Catholicism. By the end of April, the pressure of parliamentary business had slackened sufficiently to allow Burke to catch up with his New York correspondence. On 6 May he wrote a business letter to the Assembly, reporting on the fates of the various Acts that had been transmitted for approval (C ii. 302–4). Having dispatched this chore, Burke repaired to a convivial dinner at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s, where the other guests included Topham Beauclerk, Oliver Goldsmith, and James Boswell, whom he now met for the first time. Boswell, who loved a pun, recorded two of Burke’s, as well as his willingness to believe in the force of imagination in pregnant women. Though Burke was never Boswell’s primary interest, for the next two decades his E.B. advances a similar argument from ‘symmetry’ in the Reflections (WS viii. 152–3). CJ xxxiii. 482. 108 The Toleration Act of 1689 (1 William & Mary, c. 18) exempted Protestant Dissenters from subscribing articles 34–6 and part of article 20. 109 Lord North to the king, 3 Apr. 1772 (Correspondence of King George the Third, ii. 335–6). 106 107

334 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 journals preserve valuable if haphazard snatches, fragmentary but copious, of Burke’s conversation.110 Unsuccessful as the session had proved from the opposition’s point of view, Burke could find even in repeated defeat a kind of moral triumph. Writing to John Cruger, he claimed that only ‘to those who consider things but superficially’ did the opposition appear weak and impotent. ‘The strength of Opposition’, he comforted himself, ‘remains nearly the same as ever; unexerted indeed, but unimpaired.’ Their strength was unexerted, because the ‘determined, Systematical, and considerable majority in both houses in favour of the Court Scheme’ made regular opposition futile. Instead, they confined themselves to questions ‘where the advantage of situation might supply the want of Numbers, or where, tho’ without hope of Victory, you could not decline the combat without disgrace’ (C ii. 309). So Burke cocooned himself from reality. Burke’s loyalty to his leader was subjected to a severe test this summer. Faced with a serious financial crisis, and with the threat of government intervention, the East India Company made some timid moves to put its own house in order. One proposal was to send out supervisors to India, charged with implementing much-needed administrative, judicial, and financial reforms. Early in August, Burke was offered a position on this commission. The prospect was not without its attractions, principally the large salary. Other considerations counted against acceptance. The Indian climate often proved fatal to Europeans. Of the Englishmen who went out to India in the service of the East India Company, about half died there.111 A more remote danger was loss at sea, though this had happened to the commissioners sent out in 1769. The most powerful deterrent, however, was the prospect of cutting himself off, for some years if not for ever, from his political, social, and intellectual world. That Burke declined is not surprising. That he should have considered the offer at all seriously testifies to the low state of his fortunes. What hurt most was that Rockingham remained coldly aloof. Writing to the Duke of Richmond, he sought to convince himself that Rockingham’s silence had arisen ‘solely from a delicacy in giving advice where a mans Interest was concerned. This is your Graces opinion, and I think I have frequently observed his reserve in similar circumstances; which, where my own affections were less concerned, I have very much commended, as a conduct full of dignity and prudence.’ Yet Burke was chagrined that Rockingham had not shown more concern, even at the expense of ‘dignity 110 YB Boswell Papers, J25, p. 6 (6 May 1772). E.B. is a more lively presence in Boswell’s journals than in his Life of Johnson; Thomas W. Copeland, ‘Boswell’s Portrait of Burke’, Edmund Burke: Six Essays (London, 1950), 11–35. 111 P. J. Marshall, East India Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976), 217–19. The proportion was higher earlier in the century, slightly lower by the 1770s.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 335 and prudence’. With difficulty, he came to accept that ‘the rule ought to have no exceptions, and that this reserve was merely prudential, not blended with any Share of that Neglect and coldness towards me which if real would, I confess it give a deep and lasting wound to my peace of mind’ (4 Aug. 1772: C ii. 320–1). Rockingham’s indolent valetudinarianism made him insensitive to the psychological needs of others. A flattering letter, telling Burke how desperately he was needed in England, indeed insisting on his remaining at his post, would have given a much-needed boost to his morale without unduly taxing Rockingham’s energies. Surely Burke deserved as much for following Rockingham into the political wilderness. Political gloom and personal disappointment could give a sharper edge to Burke’s sense of humour. Gorges Edmond Howard (1715–86), a Dublin solicitor with literary ambitions and an old friend of Burke, asked him to recommend two plays to David Garrick, manager of Drury Lane theatre in London. Garrick pronounced the plays ‘wholly unfit for Representation’.112 The covering letter which Burke sent with the plays affords a favorable specimen of his wit. Howard had offered to donate his profits to a charity of Garrick’s choosing. Burke (perfectly aware that the plays are unactable) pretends to advise him on the choice. Broad hints early in the letter establish Burke’s ironic purpose. His usual complimentary style flows with only the slightest touches of exaggeration: I would thus early take the Liberty of suggesting to you, that although Mr Howard leaves this matter, in the handsomest way, to your own discretion, it is in some sort equitable to Let Ireland have the preference; and it would be handsome upon your side, to appropriate the Benefits, of one Night at least, to Swifts Hospital [for the insane] in Dublin; that such an useful Charity, hitherto not endowed in a manner suitable to the demands upon it, may owe its chief support to the successive Liberalities of men of Genius; and the rather as Mr Howard is a great admirer of Dr Swift, and in his Youth had the pleasure of knowing him. (5 Sept. 1772: C ii. 333–4)

Burke had frequently to write letters of empty compliment; here he takes his revenge on the genre. To express his feelings directly in a letter was not Burke’s way. His state of mind can often be inferred, though rarely is unexpressed meaning so transparent as in the letter to Garrick. Harder to interpret is his long and wide-ranging letter to O’Hara of 30 September 1772 (C ii. 334–9). The letter begins in a sombre, elegiac vein, with a generous tribute to the character of a late friend. Samuel Dyer (1725–72), a long-standing friend of 112 Garrick to E.B., 21 Sept. 1772, Letters, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), ii. 819. The plays (neither of which was ever staged) were The Siege of Tamor (1773) and The Female Gamester (1778). Both were reprinted in Howard’s Miscellaneous Works (Dublin, 1782), to which E.B. and W.B. subscribed. E.B. may have known Howard as early as 1748, when Howard subscribed to Poems on Several Occasions, in which E.B.’s first poems appeared.

336 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 the Burkes, had died on 15 September. This part of the letter reads like a formal obituary.113 One comment on Dyer’s character has a personal resonance. ‘I do not know’, he muses, ‘that I ought to consider it as one of his Virtues, the Little display he made of his extraordinary parts of learning; but if that be a fault, as in him I rather think it was, It was the only fault I could ever discover in him’ (335). Convinced that talents were given to be employed, and determined to make his own serve what he took to be the public good, Burke nevertheless respected men who were content to pass quietly through the world. Richard Shackleton was one; Dyer was another. From Dyer, Burke turns to a highly prejudiced analysis of English and Irish politics, much like that sent to Cruger in June. Then, suddenly, he stops short. ‘I do not know how I came to run on so much about politicks,’ he pretends, warning O’Hara not to ‘imagine from this that my thoughts or conversation take that turn. Indeed they do not—You can conceive nothing more concentrated within ourselves and our own concerns, than we are every one of us in this House’ (337). Burke protests too much. Indeed, he soon reverts to politics, with some sharp remarks on recent East India measures. Finally, forgetting politics in earnest, he turns to farming. As if to convince O’Hara that he cares as much, or rather more, about turnips than about politics, the tone continues bleak and querulous. Burke condemns the Dublin Society for offering a prize for drilled turnips. They ought rather to offer premiums for hand-sown turnips, a method better suited to the ordinary farmer. Burke takes O’Hara himself severely to task for obstinately preferring potatoes as a crop to turnips. Burke always poured all his passion into the cause of the moment. Probably, as he wrote to O’Hara, turnips really appeared to merit the energy of language and intensity of conviction with which he preached their virtues. The variety of subjects and styles make this one of Burke’s most conversational letters, reflecting his turbulence of mind, in which public and private concerns, friends, politics, and farming, all jostled for place. Even the posturing, the pretence of not caring about politics, was a genuine part of his self-image, and therefore of his self. Rarely do his letters so nearly conform to the eighteenth-century ideal of the letter as ‘talking on paper’.114

6 When Parliament was recalled to meet on 26 November 1772, the main business was expected to be the troubled East India Company. The need for 113 E.B. wrote a formal obituary of Dyer, published in the Public Advertiser on 17 Sept. 1772. The authority for attributing it to E.B. is Malone; James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare (London, 1860), 424 A portrait of Dyer by Reynolds, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1771, passed into E.B.’s collection. 114 Alexander Pope to John Caryll, 31 July 1710, in Correspondence, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), i. 94.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 337 closer parliamentary supervision of the company, for stricter regulation and reform in India as well as in England, was widely recognized. The Rockingham party was almost alone in opposing, as they had in 1767, any invasion of the company’s chartered rights. They remained obsessed with the baleful influence of the Crown and the prospect of its extension through Leadenhall Street to India (C ii. 383–5). At the same time, they were not immune to the spreading concern for India itself and for the welfare of its peoples. Public opinion was now better informed about conditions in India than it had been in 1767, and was shocked by much of what it learned. Burke was not slow to recognize the evils of British rule. In March 1772, he had opposed the East India Judicature Bill. One of his grounds was predictable: the bill’s tendency to increase the influence of the Crown. The other reflected a new concern with conditions in India. He reprobated the introduction of English law to the alien world of Bengal.115 Burke’s ideas about India were changing, but he had yet to arrive at his later convictions about the evils of British misgovernment. Writing to John Stewart (d. 1778), who had recently gone to seek his fortune in India, he admitted diffidently that ‘we entertain, perhaps erroneously, an opinion, that there have been great mistakes and mismanagement’ (30 Oct. 1772: 358–9).116 Though affected by the ‘dismal accounts of rapine and oppression in the Company’s servants in Bengal’, Rockingham’s main worry remained that such news strengthened the hands of the court, providing a pretext for the extension of the influence of the Crown (24–8 Oct.: 344–5). The Rockingham party was virtually alone in its uncompromising opposition to government intervention. The state of the company’s finances and the reports of abuses in India combined to secure broad support for parliamentary regulation. The ministry’s proposals, amended in detail but not in substance, went through without serious challenge.117 These measures were, by later standards, only mildly interventionist. To make the company easier to manage, the qualification for a vote in the General Court was raised from £500 to £1,000, and directors were to be elected for four-year instead of one-year terms. To ease the company’s financial difficulties, the ministry forced acceptance of a loan and imposed various restrictions on the dividend that might be declared. A Supreme Court was established in Calcutta, its members appointed by the Crown. Impartially considered, these were sensible, moderate measures. Burke thought they paved the way to control of the company and its patronage by the Crown. Men sent out to India had 115 Debate on 30 Mar. 1772, BL Egerton MS 239, fos. 265–75. Though the bill was lost, its main provisions were incorporated in North’s Regulating Act in 1773. 116 Stewart had been concerned with W.B. in stock-market speculations. More recently, E.B. had supported his unsuccessful application for the position of secretary of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (20 Oct. 1769: C ii. 95–6). 117 Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952), 240– 68; H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773 (Cambridge, 1991), 130–86.

338 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 a fair chance of returning (if they returned) with a fortune. Many families could be kept in dependence by the prospect of a ticket in this lottery. Unable to deny the need for reform, yet unwilling to countenance any increase in ministerial control over the company, Burke relied more on wit than on argument to oppose North’s measures. True to the opinions he had voiced in 1767, on 7 December 1772 he condemned them as ‘a direct invasion of the Company’s charter . . . a Bill to suspend the law of the land . . . to rob them of their charter, and overthrow their constitution’. Their enactment would signal ‘an end to confidence and public faith’.118 Unprovided with any constructive alternative, Burke sported with North’s use of a ‘secret’ committee to frame his proposals. In the previous session, an open, ‘select’ committee had been appointed. It had delivered a voluminous report, but nothing had been done. Then, in November, when the need for action became urgent, North appointed a new, ‘secret’ committee, which produced an almost instant report. Likening the ministry to a polygamous patriarch, Burke described the select committee as ‘the first, the great wife, the grand, stately Juno’, who ‘brought a considerable fortune’ but (like Sarah) proved barren. The secret committee (like Hagar) was ‘an easy wife of the left hand . . . her hands hardened with all work, a bond woman, fit for secret service, and sure to breed’. From the indecent haste with which its report was produced, ‘the scandalous will be apt to imagine that the Lady was pregnant before the ceremony was performed’.119 This highly inventive passage illustrates why Burke’s speeches often entertained but failed to persuade. A few days later, Burke again pilloried the ministers for their unwarranted invasion of chartered property rights. Again, the wit is more memorable than the argument: I know, indeed, that the same qualifications now a-days make a good member of parliament that formerly made a good monk. ‘Tria faciunt monachum—Bene loqui de superiore—Legere breviarum taliter qualiter—Et sine res vadere ut vadunt.’ In English, ‘Speak well of the minister—Read the lesson he sets you, taliter qualiter, and let the state take care of itself—Sine res vadere ut vadunt.’120

For all his wit, Burke had little of substance to urge. The bill was approved by 153 to 28.121 Such small minorities rarely chose to divide the House. For Burke and his friends, the gesture was a determined assertion of principle. ‘The Battle for power is over,’ he lamented to Rockingham; ‘nothing now London Evening Post, 8 Dec. 1772 (PH xvii. 567–8). BL Egerton MS 242, fos. 97–8. The select committee was appointed on 13 Apr. 1772 and reported on 26 May; the secret committee was appointed on 26 Nov. and reported on 7 Dec. (CJ xxxiii. 691, 792– 944; xxxiv. 4, 27). 120 London Magazine, 42 (June 1773), 273–6 (PH xvii. 668–73). The passage quoted is not found in the report of the speech prepared by E.B. himself (WWM BkP 9/11–13) and printed in WS ii. 377–81. 121 CJ xxxiv. 43. 118 119

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 339 remains but to preserve consistency and Dignity’ (7 Jan. 1773: C ii. 403). This would be the party’s main concern for most of the next decade. Indeed, at the opening of the session Rockingham had been dispirited enough to revive the idea of a formal secession. Burke, too, was in a grim mood. Recommending the proposal to Dowdeswell, he wrote one of his most eloquent descriptions of the futility of opposition: I am tired of hearing, as an answer to all argument ‘You want our places.’ The determined Majority within doors, which, supporting no Minister, is blindly devoted to the Court; The Treachery of our Allies in opposition; and the unsystematick Conduct of many of our friends, otherwise excellent and sensible men, makes the situation of active persons on our side of the question very humiliating and vexatious. Abroad things are not a jot better. The people have fallen into a total indifference to any matters of publick concern. I do not suppose that there was ever any thing like this Stupor in any period of our history. In this condition there is no dignity in carrying on a teizing and vexatious sort of debate, without any other Effect, than fretting Ministers now and then, and keeping honest Gentlemen from their dinners; while we make triffling and ineffectual Divisions in the house, and the Nation quietly acquiesces in those measures which we agitate with so much eagerness. (27 Oct. 1772: C ii. 351–2).

Burke always overestimated the effect that a theatrical gesture such as an opposition walk-out would have on the public. Rockingham wavered. At one point, he supposed that ‘Constituents in general will rather incline that their Representatives should try to thwart bad measures & bad Ministers even tho’ they were almost alone.’ Two weeks later, he was looking for a ‘middle Way’ between attendance and secession. In the event, the consensus was against secession.122 Never sanguine about ‘the people’, Burke looked to the aristocracy for the country’s political salvation. Writing to the Duke of Richmond, he developed a striking metaphor to express his vision of the political duties and responsibilities, and the advantages to a state, of a hereditary nobility: You people of great families and hereditary Trusts and fortunes are not like such as I am, who whatever we may be by the Rapidity of our growth and of the fruit we bear, flatter ourselves that while we creep on the Ground we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our Season and leave no sort of Traces behind us. You if you are what you ought to be are the great Oaks that shade a Country and perpetuate your benefits from Generation to Generation. (Nov. 1772: C ii. 377)

Modern readers may be repelled by the apparent servility of this passage. Yet the flattery had a purpose. Richmond’s sense of his political responsibilities was erratic. Sometimes he would take umbrage and stay at home in 122 Rockingham to Dowdeswell, 30 Oct., 17 Nov. 1772, WWM R1/1409, 1412. Several other letters on the topic passed between Rockingham, E.B., and Dowdeswell (C ii. 343, 351–2, 354, 362–7).

340 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 the country instead of attending Parliament. In the summer of 1769, instead of helping to promote the petitions, he went off to France for a holiday (66– 8). Even when his interest was aroused, he was prone to short fits of enthusiasm and energy rather than the steady pursuit of a long-term strategy. Burke had to remind him of his responsibilities: ‘if you are what you ought to be’ is an important qualification. The oak symbolized family longevity. In the eighteenth century, owners of large estates tried to perpetuate them from generation to generation by means of primogeniture and the strict entail.123 Burke approved this system, for he thought that too rapid a circulation of property would lead to social instability. Large, entailed estates provided a vital element of continuity. Only on such estates would oaks have the chance to grow into useful timber. Its primary use was in the construction of warships for the Royal Navy, on which the security of Britain depended. Hence the oak became a national symbol, as in William Boyce’s patriotic song ‘Heart of Oak’, written to celebrate 1759, Britain’s ‘year of victories’. The oak reappears as an image of stability in Burke’s Reflections. The noisy radicals, men of no property, are ‘half a dozen grasshoppers’ making a noise while ‘thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak’ chew the cud in silence (WS viii. 136). The lesser landowners (the ‘great cattle’) are protected, not oppressed by the great hereditary estates. Burke was not reluctant to publish his poor opinion of ‘the people’. Speaking in the Commons, he was no less forthright in his condemnation than in his letter to Dowdeswell of 27 October. Reprobating North’s East India proposals, he deplored ‘the total want of principle so observable amongst all ranks and degrees of people’. Ministerial corruption fed on popular indifference: ‘there was no proposal, how destructive soever to the liberties of the kingdom, which a Ministry could make, but what the people would readily comply with’. Such a ‘servile degenerate herd, destitute of capacity to distinguish, or virtue to relish, what was good’ made Burke despair (5 Apr. 1773: WS ii. 392). The spectre of an unholy alliance between the king and the people against the aristocracy (guardians of ‘the liberties of the kingdom’) became especially alarming to Burke about this time. Two seemingly unrelated events of 1772 fuelled his fears. The first was the coup d’état engineered by the King of Sweden, Gustavus III (1746–92; succeeded 1771) in August. Exploiting popular discontent with a constitution dominated by the aristocracy, Gustavus used a show of force to impose a new, absolutist constitution. Popular support was secured partly by the distribution of free food to the poor. Reports that George III approved the Swedish 123 Lawrence and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984), 69– 79; John Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership, 1650–1950 (Oxford, 1994).

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 341 124 revolution soon led to fears that he intended to imitate it. On 30 September, Burke told O’Hara of his fear that ‘the Court may assume as uncontrolled a power in this Country as the King of Sweden has done in his’ (C ii. 336). Against this background, an apparently innocuous passage in the king’s speech from the throne at the opening of the session took on a sinister significance. Towards the end of the speech, the king expressed ‘the most real Concern, That the Produce of the late Harvest has not given Us the Relief which We had hoped for, in respect to the Dearness of Corn. As far as Human Wisdom can provide for alleviating the Distresses of the Poor, I am persuaded, your Attention will not be wanting.’125 Bland and unexceptionable as this might sound, to Burke it was a tocsin. In November 1767, he had reacted with immediate and withering scorn to a similar sentiment in a speech from the throne (WS ii. 71–2). In 1772, he did not speak in the opening debate, probably because the idea of a formal secession had not yet been ruled out. Yet the passage remained in the back of his mind. Near the end of the session, on 26 March 1773, when Pownall’s Corn Bill was again under discussion, Burke recurred to the king’s speech. As in the previous year, he withheld his approbation from the bill, accepting it only grudgingly as the best that could reasonably be hoped for. Now, however, his imagination fired by recent events in Sweden, he recalled the innocent-sounding recommendation from the throne and interpreted it as the latest strategem in the court’s conspiracy to extinguish British liberties: The King of Sweden sent orders to the Dyet to lower the high price of provisions. He knew it was impossible. Our king indeed was imposed upon, and thought the Commons could lower the price. The Dyet, like us, obliged to obey, could do nothing. The people became alarmed and enraged. ‘What! (said they) do you betray us? (for they also knew better) The King ordered you to lower the price of provisions, and you refuse’. Advantage was immediately taken. The passions of the people were favourable at that instant to the designs of the tyrant. A peck of meal was distributed to every House; the Dyet was turned out; despotism was established; and in one moment their liberties were irretrievably lost! I hope to God, Sir, no such design is formed against us. . . . The multitude are incapable of judging from their ignorance. Let us not deceive them, but meet them upon fair and honest ground. Bravely oppose their passions, and tell them we cannot relieve you; that we cannot alter the decrees of Providence, notwithstanding you have been told the contrary in a cajoling speech from the throne.126

As fantastic as the ‘double cabinet’ conspiracy sketched in the Thoughts, the idea of George III distributing sacks of flour as a prelude to establishing a London Evening Post, 19–22 Sept., 6–8 Oct. 1772, 15–17 Apr. 1773. 26 Nov. 1772: CJ xxxiv. 3–4. London Evening Post, 25–7 Mar. 1773. E.B.’s speech made a considerable impression, being the only one reported at length. 124 125 126

342 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 personal despotism is easily dismissed as the product of Burke’s overheated imagination. Yet to understand Burke’s mind, his fantasies have to be taken seriously. His belief in these plots and conspiracies was genuine. Such a faith was consoling, for it allowed him to attribute the unpopularity of the opposition to the debauching of the people by the court. By interpreting every event in terms of the court conspiracy, however, Burke increasingly cut himself off from reality. Indeed, it would take the French Revolution to cure him of the delusion that George III was a Gustavus III biding his time. Only after 1789 did he come to perceive democratic anarchy as the main threat. In the 1770s, royal absolutism appeared the greater menace. Glad to escape from from the indifference of the people and the futility of opposition, for the only time in his parliamentary career Burke took a holiday during the session.127 This was not for mere pleasure, but to establish his son Richard (just turned 15) in a good French home where he might learn to speak the language fluently. Burke was painfully aware of the inadequacy of his own spoken French (C ii. 401, 409). The Burkes left London on 10 January 1773. After a rough passage, they arrived at Calais on the 12th (413). Burke was keen to get as much first-hand knowledge of the country as the shortness of his time would permit. A few miles out of Calais they ‘got out of the chaise at a farm house’, Richard reported to his mother, ‘where my Papa inquired about payments of labourers, & other farm business’.128 On the 16th, the party arrived in Paris, where they made a round of some of the usual tourist sights (415, 417–18). Burke’s original intention had been to settle Richard at Blois, but changed his mind on hearing that there were several English living there. He did not want his son to spend his time with other Englishmen, to the detriment of his French. Auxerre, near Dijon, was recommended as an alternative. After about a week’s sightseeing in Paris they left for Auxerre on 27 January. Auxerre in 1773 remained a small town, still almost medieval in appearance. Its skyline was dominated by the cathedral, and it owed much of its importance to being the seat of a bishop.129 Burke might have been comfortably reminded of one of the sleepier English cathedral cities. Richard was placed in the household of Jean-Baptiste-François-Pierre Parisot (c.1730–1812), a local landowner who managed the bishop’s estate (422). Burke himself was back in Paris on 2 February, and stayed there for the rest of the month. Visiting Versailles on the 15th, he saw Marie Antoinette (1755–93), an experience subsequently immortalized in the Reflections: ‘It is now [1790] sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which 127 Even so, between 27 Nov. and 18 Dec., and between 9 Mar. and 10 June, E.B. spoke in at least twenty debates (WS ii. 489–90). 128 R.B. Jr. to J.B., 17 Jan. 1773, NRO A. xii. 16. 129 Histoire d’Auxerre, des origines à nos jours, ed. Jean-Pierre Rocher (Roanne-Le Coteau, 1984).

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 343 she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy’ (WS viii. 126). Imaginative and rhetorical as it is, this description incorporates an element of memory. In 1790, when the Reflections was published and the description of Marie Antoinette much ridiculed, Horace Walpole defended its verisimilitude. ‘It paints her exactly as she appeared to me’, he assured a friend, ‘the first time I saw her when Dauphiness [in 1771]. She was going after the late King to chapel, and shot through the room like an aëriel being, all brightness and grace and without seeming to touch earth.’130 Burke could have idealized Marie Antoinette without having seen her. This short stay in France, probably his only one, influenced him in more important ways.131 The Parisots, with whom Richard boarded in Auxerre, were among his main sources of information during the early stages of the Revolution.132 In Auxerre, too, he formed the favourable impression of the French provincial clergy from which he generalized in the Reflections (194–5). Burke’s shock at the avowed atheism of the Paris salons had more immediate consequences. Speaking on 17 March, soon after his return to England, in support of the Dissenters’ Relief Bill, he argued that man was ‘a religious animal’, and that any religion was better than none: ‘Let it be but a serious religion, natural or revealed take what you can get. Lay hold cherish blow up the slightest spark’ (WS ii. 388–9).133 Burke drew a firm line between atheism and any ‘serious religion’. Although he would maintain this distinction, what he regarded as ‘serious’ changed as (especially after 1789) the political threat from dissent grew more serious. In May 1792, he denied to Socinians, Unitarians, and other such sects the status of a ‘serious religion’ and treated them as atheists lightly disguised (W vi. 113–26). Burke’s political opinions are abundantly documented. The records of his social life are far sparser. One such is the diary kept by James Beattie (1735–1803) during his visit to London in 1773. Beattie, professor of moral philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, was the author of two successful books: an Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), an attempt to refute Hume; and a mildly romantic poem, The Minstrel (book i, 1771). The Essay on Truth gave Beattie a reputation as a champion of Walpole to Lady Upper Ossory, 1 Dec. 1790, YWC xxxiv. 97–8. The 1773 visit is E.B.’s only documented one. In 1757, he wrote to Shackleton of his ‘various designs . . . sometimes in France’ (C i. 123). These designs were perhaps never executed, for W.B.’s letter to E.B. of 25 Sept. 1768 (NRO A. xiii. 10) describes Paris in a way that suggests E.B. had never seen it. In 1773, E.B. told O’Hara that ‘the thing was new to me’ (26 Mar.: ii. 425). 132 Examples include Madame Parisot to R.B. Jr., 14 Sept. 1789 (C vi. 16–20); 10 June 1790, NRO A. v. 5. 133 E.B. repeats the idea that ‘man is by his constitution a religious animal’ in the Reflections (WS viii. 142). 130 131

344 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 religion against atheism.134 In 1773, he journeyed to London in pursuit of a government pension, hopes of which had previously been held out to him. Beattie naturally sought out politicians and Churchmen who might exert influence on his behalf. Yet he did not shun the opposition, for his pension was not a political issue. Introduced to Burke on 14 May, Beattie saw him at his best: ‘Mr Burke gave me as kind a reception as I ever received from any body, and paid me many compliments in the genteelest manner. Says that my post-script is one of the most manly & most masterly pieces of eloquence he has ever seen.’ Small wonder that Beattie thought Burke ‘one of the most agreable men I have ever seen’. Beattie was disposed to be pleased with everything. The memory of his frosty reception by Lord North made Burke’s geniality doubly gratifying.135 Even so, his testimony shows that Burke could make a gracious impression on a man whom he had no reason to cultivate. Two other events recorded in Beattie’s diary also catch Burke in a happy moment. On 23 May, Beattie and his wife supped at Elizabeth Vesey’s. The company was literary rather than political. Besides Burke, two of his earliest eminent acquaintances were there, Elizabeth Montagu and Lord Lyttelton. This was perhaps the last occasion on which Burke met Lyttelton, who died on 22 August. His death elicited one of Burke’s most moving letters of condolence (4 Sept. 1773: C ii. 454–6). On 14 June, the Beatties dined with Sir Joshua Reynolds at his villa in Richmond. After dinner, Burke and Beattie took a walk together in Richmond Park. The talk was mainly literary: ‘He praises Dr Robertson’s style, but says he writes like a man who composes in a dead language, which he understands but cannot speak: Mr Hume’s he thinks more easy and flowing, but blames it for being too much frenchified, not only in particular phrases, but also in its general structure.’136 Such records of Burke’s talk are rare. Because his conversation was not aphoristic in Johnson’s manner, it was much harder to remember. Before Boswell, few people tried to record entire conversations rather than the pithy sayings which dominate most early collections of ‘table-talk’.137 Parliament was prorogued on 1 July 1773. For the opposition, thin and disunited, the session had been another dismal failure. Burke was again close to despair. ‘An universal deadness has fallen upon all things,’ he moaned to O’Hara, ‘and my mind has got a blow from the same petrific mace. Want of any pleasing hope, want of Object, want of pursuit, inaction without repose, has thrown me into such a troubled sort of sleep for a long 134 According to Robert Bisset, during his visit to Paris E.B. had defended Beattie’s Essay on Truth against the philosophes; Life of Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1800), i. 262–3. 135 James Beattie, London Diary, 1773, ed. Ralph S. Walker (Aberdeen, 1946), 33, 37–8. 136 Ibid. 39–40 (23 May), 54–5 (14 June). 137 Coleridge contrasted Johnson’s ‘bow-wow manner’, full of ‘sharp short things . . . which are so much more easy to carry off’ with Burke’s ‘discursive and continuous’ conversation; Table Talk, 1 July 1833, ed. Carl Woodring (London, 1990), i. 405.

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 345 time past that I grow forgetful of the Offices of friendship, because, in Truth, I grow, as I wish to grow, forgetful of myself ’ (20 Aug. 1773: C ii. 451). Burke exaggerates. He was not long returned from the Aylesbury races, whither politics rather than sport had taken him. Nor, even as he writes to O’Hara, can he keep himself from deviating into politics. After a sharp critique of ministerial policy on India, he pulls himself up short (‘I do not know how I have come to wander into this discourse’) only to turn instead to Irish politics (452–3). Ireland indeed provided Burke with just the ‘Object’ and ‘Pursuit’ that he lacked. Many Irish landowners were absentees who spent their rents in England. A tax on absentees would either persuade them to live in Ireland, and spend their rents there, or at least force them to contribute something to the economy from which they drew their incomes. Such a tax had long been a standard part of the ‘patriot’ programme. In A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift placed it first among the common-sense measures which he despaired of seeing adopted: ‘Therefore, let no man talk to me of other Expedients: Of taxing our Absentees at five Shillings a Pound.’138 In 1773 the idea came not from an Irish patriot, but from Colonel John Blaquiere (1732–1812), Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Harcourt (1714–77).139 Blaquiere proposed to tax absentees at the modest rate of two shillings in the pound (10 per cent), the money to be applied to the discharge of the Irish national debt. (In England, the land tax was now usually levied, even in peacetime, at four shillings in the pound. Since the valuation on which it was assessed was as old as 1696, however, the real burden was much less than the nominal rate.) The measure was part of a package which included a reduction of the corn bounties, from which most resident landowners benefited. In context, the absentee tax was more equitable than it appeared in isolation.140 The proposed tax drew a predictably vigorous response from the absentees whose rents it threatened, among them Rockingham and Burke, whose Irish estates were estimated at £14,000 and £500 a year respectively.141 Rockingham showed uncharacteristic energy and activity in this 138 Prose Writings, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1939–68), xii. 116. E.B.’s Dublin club had debated such a measure on 29 May 1747; Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 1923), 251–2. 139 Thomas F. Moriarty, ‘The Irish Absentee Tax Controversy of 1773: A Study in Anglo-Irish Politics on the Eve of the American Revolution’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 118 (1974), 370–408. 140 Blaquiere hoped that Irish members would accept the reduction in the bounties, if the English ministry conceded the tax on absentees. From the outset, the English ministers made their approval conditional on the Irish Parliament accepting the entire package: North to Harcourt, 29 Oct. and 23 Nov. 1773; The Harcourt Papers, ed. Edward William Harcourt (Oxford, [1876–1905]), ix. 82, 104–6. Blaquiere’s political misjudgement was to press for the absentee tax on its own, after opposition in Ireland had forced the abandonment of the plan to reduce the bounties. 141 Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland (1776–1779) (1780), ed. Arthur Wollaston Hutton (London, 1892), ii. 115–16.

346 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 cause. With Burke’s help, prominent absentees were alerted, meetings organized, and petitions circulated, signed, and delivered. Burke’s most substantive contribution to the debate was a long private letter (30 Oct. 1773: C ii. 474–81) to Sir Charles Bingham (1735–99), an Irish MP. Bingham used some of Burke’s arguments when he spoke against the tax in the Irish House of Commons. For once Burke influenced opinion, if only at second hand. ‘I had the Pleasure to hear from many Gentlemen,’ Bingham reported, ‘that my Arguments had the greatest weight with them, as they came undecided into the House’ (26 Nov.: 481). Burke’s letter advances two main arguments. First, the absentee tax is anti-British, and ultimately anti-imperial. In the long run, Ireland stands to gain from cultivating the British connection rather than antagonizing the imperial power. The absentee tax is therefore not in Ireland’s own best interests. Second, the tax will place unacceptable restrictions on freedom of movement and residence. Adept at drawing out remote consequences, Burke imagines that other legislatures will follow the Irish example. If this happens, the position of a man with property in three or more places will be pitiable indeed: After the poor distracted citizen of the whole empire has, in compliance with your partial law, removed his family, bid adieu to his connexions, and settled himself quietly and snug in a pretty box [villa] by the Liffey, he hears that the parliament of Great Britain is of opinion that all English estates ought to be spent in England . . . that a law is transmitted from Jamaica, and another from Pennsylvania, to tax absentees . . . How is he to escape this ricochet cross-firing of so many opposite batteries of police and regulation? (478)

This second argument appears strained and sophistical. Burke’s stand against the absentee tax is therefore easy to dismiss as insincere, a sacrifice of common sense and his Irish patriotism to protect the rent-roll of his patron Rockingham. Arguments from remote consequences are, however, impossible to judge fairly with hindsight. If the dire predictions are fulfilled, their author is rewarded with a reputation for prophesy. This, however, can happen only rarely. More commonly, the remote consequences do not follow, and their prediction appears in retrospect alarmist. In the case of the absentee tax, Bingham’s evidence is that Burke’s arguments carried weight. Sincerity is hard to prove. Yet much evidence can be adduced to suggest that Burke’s opposition to the absentee tax was based on a genuine conviction that its purpose was to weaken the independent landed interest. Although he favoured easing restrictions on Irish trade, he believed (with most contemporary Englishmen) that the prosperity of the empire depended on the exercise by Great Britain of a superintending authority. He never willingly conceded colonial independence. To that extent, his oppo-

squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 347 sition to the absentee tax can be seen as an example of his concern for the imperial system.142 The best evidence of Burke’s sincerity, however, is his letter to Rockingham of 29 September 1773 (C ii. 465–6). This letter shows how apt Burke was to impute the worst motives to those with whom he disagreed. The ministry has adopted the tax in a sly and underhand way, in order to throw the ‘odium’ of resisting a popular measure on the opposition. Irish ‘patriots’ will support it to buy some cheap popularity. As for the people, ‘there is a superficial appearance of Equity in this Tax, which cannot fail to captivate almost all those who are not led by some immediate Interest to an attentive examination of its intrinsick merits’. The notion that ‘some immediate Interest’ is likely to lead to a sharper appreciation of the ‘intrinsick merit’ of a measure sounds paradoxical to modern readers, accustomed to view self-interest as leading to blindness rather than insight. Burke and his contemporaries, however, were much more ready to accept that the pursuit of individual self-interest conduced to the good of society as a whole: that, in Pope’s words, ‘God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame, | And bade Self-love and Social be the same’ (Essay on Man, iii. 317–18). Eighteenth-century respect for the rights of property meant that public and private interests were not regarded as necessarily antithetical or incompatible. As the popular slogan ‘Liberty and Property’ attests, the protection of property and material interests was regarded as a legitimate political object, even as a principal end of government and of civil society itself. ‘The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government,’ Locke had argued, ‘is the Preservation of their Property.’143 No one thought that a defence of legitimate property interests derogated from a politician’s integrity. On the contrary, the Duke of Richmond declined to join the campaign against the tax because, having no property in Ireland, his taking part would appear merely factious.144 Not all oppositionists came out against the tax. Chatham, with no Irish land, and his follower Lord Shelburne (1737–1805), with vast holdings, both stood aloof. Among Rockingham’s usual supporters, not only Richmond but Sir George Savile (who did own property in Ireland) declined to protest strongly against the tax. Conversely, some ministerialists with estates in Ireland were prepared to oppose it. Examples include Welbore Ellis (1713–1802) and the Earl of Hertford: two prominent ‘king’s friends’, and therefore men who ought, if Burke’s conspiracy theory were correct, to be 142 Carl B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution (Lexington, Ky., 1957), 247–51; and Thomas H. D. Mahoney, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 51–9. 143 Two Treatises of Government (1690), ii. ix. 124, ed. Peter Laslett (2nd edn. Cambridge, 1967), 368– 9. Locke’s idea of ‘property’ was broad, including each individual’s ‘Property in his own Person’ (ii. v. 27). In practice, governments were concerned chiefly with the protection of property in the usual sense. 144 Richmond to Rockingham, 31 Oct. 1773, in Radical Duke, 157–9.

348 squalls and stagnation, 1770‒1773 deepest in the plot.145 Nor did the tax emanate from the royal closet, as Burke imagined. The king actually regarded it, divorced from the proposed reduction of the corn bounty, as in itself ‘a very objectionable tax’. He was pleased when it was rejected.146 The defeat of the absentee tax should have convinced Burke that the theory was a fantasy. If ‘king’s friends’ such as Ellis and Hertford supported Rockingham, on whom could the king rely? This lesson was lost on Rockingham and Burke. The existence of the court plot remained an article of faith beyond reason or evidence. 145 Savile to Rockingham, 5 Nov. 1773, in Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 231–4. Savile’s Irish estates were estimated at £2,000 a year, Hertford’s at £14,000, and Ellis’s at £2,000; Young, Tour in Ireland, ii. 115–16. 146 The king to Lord North, 23 Nov. 1773 (Correspondence of King George the Third, iii. 36); North to Harcourt, 20 Nov., in Harcourt Papers, ix. 97–8.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776

349

10 America and Bristol, 1774–1776

1 The Boston Tea Party provoked a surge of anti-American feeling in England. What might have been a quiet session of Parliament was dominated by the ministry’s determination to reassert British authority over the colonies. Their resolve was widely approved, as was (initially at least) the war that soon became necessary to enforce it.1 Difficult as these years were for those in opposition, they brought out the best in Burke. In 1774, and again in each of the following two sessions, he delivered lengthy speeches on American policy, advocating conciliation and concession. Two of them were polished for publication and, in their printed form, achieved unprecedented diffusion. While such oratory is now less highly valued, and ‘statesmanship’ commonly regarded as a cloak for cynical self-interest, these speeches remain classics of parliamentary eloquence. Writing to the New York Assembly on 5 January 1774, just a week before the opening of Parliament, Burke could only guess what measures were in the offing. He anticipated a further tightening of ministerial control over the East India Company, and some response to the disputes in Massachusetts and South Carolina between the Governor and the Assembly (C ii. 503). Nor, when the session opened on 13 January, was the king’s speech forthcoming. Its only recommendation was to complete the recoinage of the gold currency, begun by an Act of the previous session. This was an important but uncontroversial reform.2 As late as 1 February, Burke remained unsure whether more contentious business would be introduced (518). Whatever was planned was upstaged by reports of the Boston Tea Party, which reached London on 19 January.3 Rockingham’s instinctive reaction was to blame the ministry. ‘The conduct of the American’s can not be justified,’ he admitted to Burke on 30 January, ‘but the folly and impolicy of the provocation deserves the fullest arraignments, and notwithstanding 1 Peter D. G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773– 1776 (Oxford, 1991). 2 CJ xxxiv. 391–2. Adam Smith repeatedly extolled it: Wealth of Nations, i. v. 29, xi. g. 6; iv. vi. 18. 3 The king to Lord Dartmouth, 19 Jan. 1774, HMC Dartmouth, Supplementary, 499.

350 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 all that has passed, I can never give my assent to proceeding to actual force against the Colonies’ (516). Burke was no readier to justify or palliate American resistance. To the New York Assembly, he explained the ground taken by the opponents of the Boston Port Bill, the first of the ministry’s retaliatory measures: The Gentlemen who spoke against the Bill rejected that State of the question by which it was invidiously presumed, that those who opposed the Bill were for giving up the constitutional superiority of this Country. That imputation will always be cast off with disdain by every good Englishman. . . . all the true friends to the Colonies, the only true friends they have had, or ever can have in England have laid and will lay down the proper subordination of America, as a fundamental, incontrovertible Maxim, in the Government of this Empire. This Idea, to which they tenaciously adhere in the full extent of the proposition, they are of opinion is nothing derogatory to the real essential Rights of mankind. (C ii. 528–9)

This is what Burke meant by being a ‘true friend’ of America. ‘Misunderstandings and heats’ had arisen, in his view, because on neither side of the Atlantic had sufficient heed been paid to the opinions of ‘Temperate Men’, exemplified in Britain by the Rockingham party (529). With his usual faith in the ability of men of goodwill to solve the most intractable-seeming problems, his prescription for peace is unchanged from 1766: theoretical loyalty to the parliamentary sovereignty ‘in all cases whatsoever’ asserted in the Declaratory Act, qualified by a prudent reluctance to assert that sovereignty in cases likely to offend colonial susceptibilities. Public and parliamentary opinion ran strongly against the Americans. Burke was one of the few members who opposed the ministry’s plans from the outset, indeed almost before they were known. The first American debate took place on 7 March. A royal message, accompanied by copies of over a hundred papers and documents, recommended the subject to the consideration of Parliament. Ministers moved an address in reply, promising in clear but general terms to secure the enforcement of the laws and the subordination of the colonies. Opposition was so weak that the address was approved without a division.4 Not that Burke allowed it to pass unchallenged, couched as it was in terms that made opposition difficult. Rejecting the call for unanimity in the face of American violence and intransigence, and asserting the value, indeed the necessity, of opposition to bad measures, he adumbrated several of what would become his main themes in the debates ahead. Defending the wisdom of the repeal of the Stamp Act, he attributed the American discontents to the vacillating policies pursued by successive ministries since Rockingham’s. He deprecated the unnecessary agitation of questions of abstract right. Anticipating that the government 4

CJ xxxiv. 541–3.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 351 planned military action against Boston, he denied that such action could ever cure civil discontents.5 Burke saw clearly that the ministry’s strategy was misguided. Practical alternatives likely to command much support were harder to find. Indeed, the retaliatory measures, when announced, were so popular that the opposition offered only token dissent. No real challenge to the Boston Port Bill, the first of the ‘Coercive’ or ‘Intolerable’ Acts, was mustered until its third reading, on 25 March. Even then, Burke spoke not to persuade but to warn. Aware that the ministry was set on an unalterable couse, he felt impelled to record his protest against their folly. Insisting on the injustice of criminating an entire town for the deeds of a few, and on the impolicy of singling out Boston for exemplary punishment when the discontents were widespread, he warned of the dire consequences that would follow if the measures failed. The ‘vexatious abortive experiment’ of drawing a revenue from America should be laid aside in favour of the ‘ancient policy’ of no taxation.6 The passage of the Coercive Acts was never in doubt. Some members, however, felt that their rigour should be accompanied with a measure of concession or compromise. Accordingly, Rose Fuller (c.1708–77) gave notice that, on 19 April, he would move for a committee to consider the repeal of the obnoxious duty on tea. Besides substantial landed property in Sussex, Fuller owned plantations in Jamaica. An MP since 1756, he had often championed colonial interests. In 1766, for example, he had been active in promoting the repeal of the Stamp Act. His motion for a committee provided the occasion for Burke’s greatest rhetorical effort of the session. Speaking for over two hours, to the admiration even of those who did not share his views, he scored a notable personal triumph. When Burke rose to his feet on 19 April 1774, he knew how the debate would end. His minority might be smaller or larger, but he had no chance of persuading the House to reverse the logic of its earlier decisions. Yet he had devoted untold hours and effort to the preparation of his speech. He did so not merely to enjoy the admiration and applause of those who nevertheless voted against him (gratifying as this was), nor with a eye to what posterity might read, for when he spoke, he had no intention of printing the speech. His purpose was to justify the Rockingham ministry’s Declaratory Act and their repeal of the Stamp Act. His alternative to coercion was a return to the compromise of 1766. This simple aim was both an advantage and an impediment. The measures of 1766 could be presented as a model of wise moderation, departure from which had led to the present troubles. Yet a return to the world of 1766 was impossible. Attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic had hardened. The popular mood in England was against 5 6

PDNA iv. 41–4 (from Cavendish), 48–9 (from Brickdale). PDNA iv. 123–7 (from Cavendish).

352 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 concessions to the colonists, ‘rebellious children’ as the king called them.7 The general belief was that responsible people in the colonies accepted British sovereignty; that the disturbances in America were the work of a small minority of trouble-makers; and that American resistance would collapse, if confronted with a show of force. If a war proved necessary, Britain would win it quickly and easily. None of these articles of faith proved well founded. In America, the coercive measures worked to unite the colonies and to embolden the radical element that sought independence. Burke concentrated his fire on the errors and follies of the ministries that had succeeded Rockingham’s. His strategy was not to prescribe an alternative course of action, but to promote a more constructive approach. As in the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, his message is that right measures will follow naturally from putting matters in the hands of the right men. He constructs a set of contrasts between the men on either side. The ministers have taken a narrow, simplified view of the problem. Ignoring history and experience, they have lurched from crisis to crisis without formulating, still less pursuing, any coherent plan. The Rockingham party has consistently taken the larger view, sensitive to the many complexities of the situation, and with due regard to inherited susceptibilities. This is Burke’s characteristic constellation of values: enlarged minds, holding liberal principles, and with the moral courage to apply them consistently. A sequence of images contrasts the Rockingham and North ministries in terms of dignity and buffoonery. The latter was forced ‘meanly to sneak out of difficulties, into which they had proudly strutted . . . to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act, which they had not the generous courage . . . honourably and fairly to disclaim’ (WS ii. 415). They ‘blustered like tragic tyrants here; and then went mumping with a fore leg in America, canting, and whining’ (423). The use of such ‘low’ words (sneak, pilfer, mumping) to give vigour and variety is a striking feature of Burke’s speeches.8 Though he prepared outlines and some passages in detail, he improvised most of the actual wording. Drawing on a vast reservoir of ideas and expressions, he spoke at the prompting of his natural exuberance, with little attention to starched notions of ‘correctness’ or the dignity of the occasion. Indeed, he often enlivened his speeches with a dash of coarse or crude wit. Such broad humour served to give a long speech the varied tone and pace needed to retain the interest and attention of his audience. A favourite Burkean metaphor is the image of the constitution as a venerable castle, strong but threatened both by external forces and by a weak and corrupt garrison. Military metaphors run through the Speech on The king to Lord Dartmouth, 10 June 1775, HMC Dartmouth, Supplementary, 502. According to Johnson, to ‘mump’ in the sense of ‘to go a begging’ was ‘cant language’ or slang; Dictionary of the English Language (4th edn. London, 1773). ‘Sneak’ and ‘pilfer’, expressive of mean actions, are ‘low’ words in the rhetorical context. 7 8

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 353 American Taxation. At the time of the repeal of the Stamp Act, he recalls, ‘the household troops openly revolted . . . Every thing, upon every side, was full of traps and mines . . . in the midst of this chaos of plots and counter-plots . . . this complicated warfare against public opposition and private treachery’, Rockingham stood firm against ‘all the old mercenary Swiss of state . . . in defiance of all the whole embattled legion of veteran pensioners and practised instruments of a court’. Since then, ‘the antient household troops of that side of the House’ have been strengthened by ‘new recruits’ from the opposition. After years of misrule, ‘this House, the ground and pillar of freedom, is itself held up only by the treacherous under-pinning and clumsy buttresses of arbitrary power’. From outside, ‘by the battery of such questions’ as the imposition of the Townshend duties provoked, the Americans ‘have shaken the solid structure of this Empire to its deepest foundations’. Trifling taxes have ‘shaken the pillars of a Commercial Empire that circled the whole globe’; in the staterooms ministerial impolicy ‘has thrown open folding-doors to contraband’. What should be done? ‘Oppose the ancient policy and practice of the empire, as a rampart against the speculations of innovators on both sides; and you will stand on great, manly, and sure ground.’9 Burke was eager to discriminate between the repeal of the Stamp Act and the partial repeal of the Townshend duties. Needing to argue that the first was a masterpiece of statesmanship, the second an unsatisfactory halfmeasure, he devised a striking series of images to distinguish between a middle course that combined the best of two alternatives, and one that achieved neither. First, he associates ‘modification’, the policy that in 1766 the king had favoured, with the later partial repeal of the Townshend duties. ‘A modification’, he asserts, ‘is the constant resource of weak undeciding minds’ (WS ii. 440). The principle on which the Stamp Act was repealed was different in kind from the pusillanimous compromise of 1770, repeal of all the duties except that on tea, the ‘measure of an administration, that, having no scheme of their own, took a middle line, pilfered a bit from one side and a bit from the other’. The Rockingham ministry ‘took no middle lines. They differed fundamentally from the schemes of both parties; but they preserved the objects of both’ (443). This logic-chopping did not prevent the speech, when published, from being attacked from both sides. John Shebbeare (1709–88), a ministerial pamphleteer, accused Burke of being an abettor of American ‘ingratitude and treason’. The radical John Cartwright (1740–1824) attacked him for upholding ‘the tyrannical and absurd declaratory act of 1766’.10 The Rockingham compromise satisfied few outside the party. Quotations from WS ii. 442, 440, 413, 422, 411, 416, 456. John Shebbeare, An Answer to the Printed Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq. (London, 1775), 222; ‘Constitutio’ [John Cartwright], A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq. (London, 1775), 25. 9

10

354 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 Among the most memorable passages in the Speech on American Taxation are the character sketches of three prominent politicians.11 They serve to illustrate one of Burke’s favourite political maxims, that ‘men, not measures’ are what matter. In this speech, he comes closer than usual to a ‘great man’ theory of history. ‘In this eventful history of the revolutions of America,’ he reflects, ‘the characters of such men are of much importance. Great men are the guide-posts and land-marks in the state. The credit of such men at court, or in the nation, is the sole cause of all the publick measures’ (WS ii. 452). Burke singles out two of these ‘great men’ for opposite but equally unfortunate qualities: George Grenville for his unimaginative legalism; and Charles Townshend for his irresolution. A lawyer and a bureaucrat, Grenville typifies those whose training and background ‘give them a turn to think the substance of business not to be much more important than the forms in which it is conducted’ (432). If scrupulous but unimaginative application of the rules was Grenville’s ‘ruling passion’, constant craving for popularity was the opposite fault of the volatile Charles Townshend. In describing Townshend, Burke created an antitype of his own self-image. Townshend was not one to persist in an unpopular course merely because it was right. Observing that ‘among vices, there is none, which the house [of Commons] abhors in the same degree with obstinacy’, Burke concedes, with some irony, that it is indeed ‘a great vice; and in the changeful state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great mischief’. Obstinacy, however, is also a virtue: ‘almost the whole line of the great and masculine virtues, constancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firmness, are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which you have so just an abhorrence’. Townshend, craving public applause, was the last man to persist in ‘that vice which is the most disgustful to you’ (453). No one was more apt than Burke to disgust the House of Commons with obstinacy, none readier to persist, on questions of procedure as well as on matters of substance, with a doggedness that sorely tried the patience of his auditors. Grenville and Townshend were both dead. A third ‘great man’ whose character had influenced the course of American policy was alive: Chatham, whose collapse in 1766 had allowed Townshend, in his quest for applause, to impose his fateful duties. Burke ridicules Chatham’s ministry in one of his most brilliant passages: ‘He made an administration, so checkered and speckled; he put together a piece of joinery, so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed; a cabinet so variously inlaid; such a piece of diversified Mosaic; such a tesselated pavement without cement; here a bit of black stone, there a bit of white.’ This ministry, composed of ‘patriots and courtiers, kings friends and republicans; whigs and tories; treacherous 11 Dennis R. Bormann, ‘Portraits of Politicians: An Analysis of Three Character Sketches in Burke’s Speech “On American Taxation” ’, Dalhousie Review, 56 (1976), 35–51.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 355 friends and open enemies’, provided ‘a very curious show; but utterly unsafe to touch, and unsure to stand on’ (WS ii. 450). In keeping with other oxymoronic images, Chatham is presented as a paradox, half hero and half charlatan: ‘When his face was hid but for a moment, his whole system was on a wide sea, without chart or compass’ (451). Unlike God, however, whose face was hidden only ‘for a small moment’ (Isaiah 54: 8), Chatham did not return to establish righteousness. Thus, in keeping with his belief in the importance of the actions of individuals, Burke attributes colonial unrest at least in part to the different failings of three ‘great men’. Yet individuals could also exert a benign influence on events. Burke describes Rockingham, somewhat obliquely, in terms intended to suggest a contrast between his ‘enlarged’ frame of mind and concern for ‘equity’ and the contracted notions attributed to Grenville (WS ii. 438). For tactical reasons, however, he portrayed Conway, who in 1766 had moved the repeal of the Stamp Act, as the hero of his Speech on American Taxation. Conway was widely respected, a minister, and a supporter of strong measures against the colonies. If such a man had once thought so differently as to have introduced the repeal of the Stamp Act, repeal of the obnoxious tea duty could hardly be dismissed as impolitic weakness. Since Burke had been sniping at Conway ever since their ways parted in 1767, his praise of Conway now appeared all the more disinterested. The image of Conway at the moment of triumph, the decisive vote on the repeal of the Stamp Act, has an extraordinary intensity. ‘They jumped upon him like children on a long absent father’, Burke recalled, ‘they clung about him as captives about their redeemer. All England, all America joined to his applause . . . Hope elevated and joy brightened his crest. I stood near him; and his face, to use the expression of the Scripture of the first martyr, “his face was as if it had been the face of an angel”.’12 Times have changed. The camaraderie engendered by working together for the repeal has melted, ‘with other pleasing visions . . . long since vanished’ (443). Though such emotive passages are the most memorable, the Speech is not devoid of serious argument. Burke appeals constantly to history and to experience, asserting that America would have continued quiet had not the Townshend duties been injudiciously imposed and then ineptly halfwithdrawn. Against those who sought to raise a substantive revenue from the colonies, he argues that the restrictions imposed by the Navigation Acts are a sufficient mode of imperial control; to impose taxes in addition would be inequitable. Burke’s scheme was chimerical. To restore the status quo ante was impossible. The Americans had long evaded the Navigation Acts; 12 The second allusion (to Acts 6: 15) is straightforward. In Paradise Lost, however, the crest that is elevated and brightened is Satan’s, as his plot to seduce Eve begins to work (x. 633–4). Had the phrase become entirely detached from its context, or did E.B. mean his hearers to think of Conway as a fallen angel?

356 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 increasingly, they now objected to them even in principle. Burke offers no solution to the problem of financing the British military presence in America, or of resolving disputes between Britain and the colonies. His argument hardly amounts to more than a call for men of good will to exercise restraint. Lord North put the opposite case. ‘Convince your colonies that you are able and not afraid to controul them,’ he urged, ‘and depend upon it, obedience in them will be the result of your deliberation; and let us conduct ourselves with firmness and resolution throughout the whole of these measures, and there is no doubt but peace and quietude will soon be restored.’13 North was no prophet. His opinion was, however, widely shared. The British cause was just and would prevail; firmness was needed, not concession or conciliation.14 Burke’s great speech, though universally admired, had no practical effect, failing even to rally a respectable minority. Fuller’s motion was defeated by 182 to 49. The rejection of Fuller’s initiative did not signal the abandonment of all opposition to the ministry’s measures. On 2 May, Burke again spoke at length (from shortly before midnight until about 2 a.m.) on the third reading of the Massachusetts Government Bill. This occasion was a sad contrast to the triumph of 19 April, when the House had been willing to listen and be entertained. By 2 May, the subject was exhausted, and the House impatient to initiate some action. Small wonder Burke had to struggle to obtain a hearing. Yet struggle he did. Admitting that his ideas were not widely shared, he again argued the virtue of even a hopeless opposition and the folly of a false unanimity; and again he raised the spectre of military rule.15 Burke spoke against the current of public opinion, which held that the united front of the colonies could be broken (singling out Massachusetts was intended to achieve this), and that Britain would easily win any war that might ensue. Against such beliefs (unfounded as they proved), Burke’s was a voice crying in the wilderness. With the Coercive Acts comfortably passed, the ministry could turn to another colonial problem: Quebec. Because the Quebec Act followed the others so closely, it was naturally interpreted as part of the same sinister plot to establish a system of despotism. In truth, however, the timing was coincidental, for the legislation had been in preparation long before the resistance to the Tea Act was known. Some such measure had been needed since the formal British assumption of responsibility for Quebec in 1763. PDNA iv. 240 (from Cavendish). In Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Macon, Ga., 1986), James E. Bradley argues that the American war was far less popular than is usually supposed. E.B. and his friends, however, who had every reason to exaggerate the degree of popular opposition to the war, in order to validate their stand against it in Parliament, never seriously disputed the ministry’s claim that it enjoyed popular support. Thus on 22 Jan. 1778, when Lord North claimed that ‘the American war was . . . a popular war’, E.B., who spoke next in the debate, allowed this claim to pass unchallenged; Almon, viii. 259, 261 (PH xix. 615–20). 15 PDNA iv. 365–70 (from Cavendish). Though often incoherent, this report is fuller than the summary reprinted in WS ii. 463–5 from the London Evening Post. 13 14

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 357 The Act even embodied some proposals that had been considered by the Rockingham ministry as far back as 1766. If no longer revered as a model of enlightened statesmanship, the Quebec Act can still be regarded as an honest attempt to solve the practical problems of governing a difficult territory. Quebec in 1774 was sparsely inhabited, while in the settled portions French-speaking Catholics outnumbered English-speaking Protestants by perhaps 60,000 to 500.16 The heated atmosphere of the early months of 1774 meant that any measure respecting North America was certain to provoke acrimonious opposition. In the debates on Quebec, the real issue was often not the ostensible subject but the ministry’s repressive actions against the other colonies. The Quebec Bill was denounced as part of the same design to subvert liberty in America as a prelude to destroying it at home. Burke drew his usual remote consequences. ‘When we are sowing the seeds of despotism here,’ he warned, ‘it is the growth that afterward may extend to others.’17 The misfortune of the Quebec Act was that its main provisions could plausibly be interpreted as part of such a deep-laid plot. The bill provided for a governor and an appointed council, but no popularly elected assembly. The Catholic Church was given legal recognition and privileges that went beyond the minimum guaranteed by the Peace of Paris. The province’s legal system was to combine the English criminal law with the existing French civil law. These provisions, while contentious, were not significant departures from what had earlier been proposed. A boundary clause, however, added to the bill at a late stage, extended the territory of Quebec south to the Ohio, west to the Mississippi, and north to the frontier of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This enabled opponents of the bill to charge, not only that it established popery and arbitrary power in the old colony of Quebec, but that it extended this abhorrent dominion over a vast new extent of land.18 Burke’s position on the bill was complicated by two factors. As agent for the New York Assembly, he was alarmed by the implications of the boundary clause, which could be construed to the disadvantage of New York. As an Irishman and a Catholic sympathizer, he welcomed the religious settlement, which was far more generous than that imposed on the Irish Catholics.19 On the boundary question, the ministry proved conciliatory. In committee, North at first proposed a commission to settle the boundary. Burke Sir Reginald Coupland, The Quebec Act: A Study in Statesmanship (Oxford, 1925); Philip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Great Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal, 1989); Thomas, Tea Party to Independence, 88–117. 17 31 May 1774, in PDNA iv. 492 (from Cavendish). 18 Chatham in the Lords, 17 June, in PDNA v. 230 (from the report printed in PH xvii. 1402–4). 19 Francis Maseres later claimed that E.B. influenced the Rockingham ministry’s decision in 1766 to connive at the appointment of a Catholic bishop to Quebec; Occasional Essays on Various Subjects, Chiefly Political and Historical (London, 1809), 369–70. Maseres (1731–1824), Attorney-General of Quebec from 1766 to 1769, cites as his source Fowler Walker, London agent for the merchants of Quebec. 16

358 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 opposed this as likely to prejudice New York, and North accepted his amendment. When the bill was reported, and objections were again raised to the boundary clause, North agreed to suspend business for half an hour while an informal committee of Burke and three others thrashed out a compromise in an upstairs committee room.20 Such complaisance failed to convince Burke of the ministry’s bona fides. His habitual suspicion of any discretionary power entrusted to the Crown seized on the provision that Protestants should pay their tithes not to the Catholic clergy, but to the administration, the money to be used to maintain Protestant clergy. Burke therefore proposed an amendment to divert the tithes to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The issue was symbolic rather than practical, for the sums in question were derisory.21 Protracted debates on such details naturally generated rancour and shortened tempers. About midnight on 7 June, Burke and Lord John Cavendish walked out in protest when Lord North refused to allow an adjournment. The next day, business was delayed by a heated three-hour inquest into the propriety of the previous evening’s proceedings. These debates do not make edifying reading. The fierce partisanship which by now clouded any American issue precluded the ministry’s Quebec policy from being debated on its merits. To appeal beyond the prejudice and venality of the ministerial benches, Burke determined, for the first time in his career, to print one of his speeches. Working from the shorthand report taken down by Henry Cavendish, he prepared for the press a text of his speech of 19 April. This, however, was the work of several months: the speech was not published until 10 January 1775.22 In its printed form, Burke’s Speech on American Taxation was long admired, especially in the nineteenth century, as a model of far-sighted and statesmanlike wisdom. Nor was this reputation undeserved. Coercion was so dismal a failure that the conciliation advocated by Burke could hardly have led to a worse result. An expensive and wasteful war might have been averted. Connivance at American evasion of imperial regulation might have led insensibly to colonial emancipation. In 1774, however, few people in England regarded such a development as either inevitable or desirable.

2 While colonial problems dominated the session of 1774, they did not wholly engross it. Burke spoke in debates on many other subjects. One topic of 6 and 10 June 1774, in PDNA v. 70–96, 180 (from Cavendish). 7 June, in PDNA v. 131–3 (from Cavendish). 22 Todd, 24. The printed version of the speech was an immediate success. Four London editions were printed within three months, besides cheap reprints in Bristol and Dublin. The Speech was the first of E.B.’s works to be printed in America (Todd, 24j–k). 20 21

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 359 perennial concern was the plight of the poor. This had been an intermittent worry of the legislature since the end of the sixteenth century. The principles established by the Elizabethan Poor Law remained in force, though later legislation had modified their operation. The poor (those unable to support themselves) were entitled to be maintained at the expense of the better off, but only in the parish in which they had been born or otherwise acquired a ‘settlement’. The laws defining ‘settlement’ were complex and gave rise to much dispute.23 Parish overseers could seek removal orders against anyone without a ‘settlement’ in the parish whom they thought likely to become a burden on the rates. The 1774 bill sought to restrict this power of removal to paupers who had actually become chargeable. Its intent was to encourage the mobility of labour. Without the threat of arbitrary removal by suspicious parish officials, people would be encouraged to seek out employment. The measure was supported by manufacturers, who stood to benefit from a more mobile labour force. Opposition came chiefly from country gentlemen who feared an influx of potentially chargeable poor into their own district. Burke approved the bill as a step in the right direction, though he insisted that more radical reform was needed. He did not share Samuel Johnson’s belief that ‘a decent provision for the poor, is the true test of civilization’, and that the English system was the best in Europe for a country of its size.24 In Burke’s view, the Poor Law was founded on a mistaken principle. By converting ‘the voluntary, free duty of Charity’ into ‘a tax for the poor’, instead of ‘compassion’, people felt ‘abhorrence, and dread’. Thanks to the ill-judged settlement laws, ‘ten thousand parishes have been making war upon each other’.25 Burke used the occasion of this modest proposal (which was defeated) to excoriate the laws of settlement in general. In a characteristic hyperbole, he shifted the level of debate from ‘the minutiae of small objections’ to ‘the outline of first and great principles’. He denounced the laws of settlement as ‘the essence of slavery’, defining ‘slavery’ as ‘there being any where a power to destroy the freedom of a man’s will—if you will not let me live where I please, which necessarily implies in it, where I can best maintain and support myself, I am a slave’ (WS ii. 402).26 Burke’s attitude may appear harsh to modern readers habituated to ‘taxes for the poor’ on a scale undreamed of in his day. His preference for charity rather Adam Smith summarizes these laws in The Wealth of Nations, i. x. c. 45–59. They were in practice less strictly enforced than Smith implies: Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Social and Administrative History (London, 1926); and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law History, part 1: The Old Poor Law (London, 1927). 24 Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), ii. 130 (from Johnsoniana supplied by William Maxwell, and arbitrarily placed by Boswell under 1770). 25 Debate on Poor Removals Bill, 2 Mar. 1774, BL Egerton MS 253, fo. 64. 26 Arthur Young, too, regarded the settlement laws as a species of ‘slavery’ and advocated their abolition; Political Arithmetic (London, 1774), 93–6, 331–5. 23

360 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 than taxation derived from a more general distrust of attempts, however well meant, to better the lot of the poor. To provide food for the people was, in his view, beyond the power of any government. For Burke, as for most of his contemporaries, poverty was not, as it became in the nineteenth century, a social problem to be solved, but ‘part of the natural order of things’.27 A standard argument against the laws of settlement was that they discouraged the growth of population. They inhibited men from moving to find the work which would enable them to support a family. This effect (whether real or imaginary) worried those who believed that the population of England was declining, thanks to increasing wealth and luxury.28 Burke was never reluctant to demolish what he thought bad arguments, even when they were advanced to maintain causes he approved. When Lord Clare (1709–88) raised the spectre of depopulation as a reason for supporting the Poor Removals Bill, Burke launched a vigorous attack on such a mistaken ground.29 ‘The population of this kingdom has not declined,’ he argued, ‘for we raise more food than ever, and while we raise it, most certainly it will be eaten.’ Burke gave members a short lesson on ‘the principles of population’, explaining that the emigration of surplus labour was no cause for concern. So long as the constitution protected the fruits of industry, labour would never be lacking, and the population would never decline (WS ii. 403). Burke was right, about the fact at least. Modern studies indicate that the population of England began to rise sharply about 1730.30 Burke never advocated an entirely deregulated economy. For all his theoretical faith in freedom of enterprise, respect for vested interests and existing property rights often led him to countenance exceptions. A striking example is his opposition to the Selby Canal Bill of 1774, which he helped to defeat. The Aire and Calder Navigation, established as early as 1699, enjoyed a profitable monopoly in the transport of goods (chiefly textiles) from around Leeds and Wakefield to the mouth of the Humber. By 1770, the tidal part of the Aire had become a bottle-neck. A new canal was accordingly proposed, to connect Leeds with the Humber at Selby (Plate 18). Such a canal would have diverted much of the traffic from the Aire and Calder Navigation, whose proprietors therefore protested vigorously. They Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984), 41. Goldsmith helped popularize the theme in The Deserted Village (1770), a poem based (as he explains in the dedication) on his ‘country excursions, for these four or five years past’. Richard Price’s ‘Observations on the Expectations of Lives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 59 (1769), 89–125, was the most recent argument based on statistics. Arthur Young wrote a brief refutation in a letter to the St James’s Chronicle, 28 Mar. 1772; repr. in his Political Arithmetic, 322–31. Both pieces are reprinted in the Population Controversy, ed. D. V. Glass (Farnborough, 1973). The arguments are summarized in Glass’s Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Farnborough, 1973), 53–7. 29 Clare’s speech is reported in the Middlesex Journal, 1–3 Mar. 1774. 30 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (London, 1981), 403. 27 28

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 361 did not, however, deny the existence of the problem, but proposed a much shorter canal, from Haddesley to Selby, bypassing the tidal section of the Aire but retaining the greater part of the existing waterway.31 The debate on 3 March 1774, on the motion to commit the bill for the new canal, was surprisingly humorous. One of the canal’s proponents was Charles Turner (1727–83), the independent and eccentric MP for York. Turner spoke jestingly of the opposition that had organized against the bill. ‘I am sure there has been canvassing enough for votes,’ he asserted. ‘It got among the assemblies of the Ladies;—I was canvassed, and for the first time did not regret being 47;—for the first time I found the possibility of refusing the fair sex.’32 Burke, enlisted against the bill by one of its opponents, turned Turner’s joke against him with a witty allusion to Horace: I can’t help congratulating my honourable friend on the other side, that he is now delivered from the tender passions, that he is now freed from the tender Emotions the Fair Sex occasion, & whose canvassing ever pleads strongly in their favour, that he is become this day an upright Senator, for—he is now forty seven, this day he sees his fortyseventh year, & this day he rejoices, this day he exults that—he is no longer susceptible to the tender passions.—I must also congratulate my Country, thro the honourable Gentleman, that we, enervated as we may appear to be, retain the tender passions longer than the Great Poet Horace who says, Octavum trepidavit aetas claudere lustrum, but ours last till the fortyseventh year, seven years longer than Horace himself.

Burke did not rely entirely on wit. He also advanced several serious arguments. One was an eloquent plea, phrased with some irony, for rivers, neglected and despised since the rage for canals. Rivers, he argues, are ‘designed by an allwise Providence for great and good purposes’. A river ‘invades no Man’s Property, It destroys not the Cottages of the Poor; It does not lay waste the Labours of the Industrious, nor is an Alarm to the Freeholder—because its Streams are as old as the Creation—are natural, and the Land that it covers actually no Ones property.’ Rivers, he grants, may properly be made more navigable. Yet such improvements ought only to be undertaken when the ‘public advantages’ outweigh the ‘hurt done to private Property’.33 This speech is a lively example of Burke’s ability to turn the defence of a vested interest into a plausible and humorous argument. He ‘kept the House in a continual laugh during the whole of his speech’.34 Thanks to some influential depreciations, notably Samuel Johnson’s, 31 This alternative was subsequently approved, and opened in 1778; Baron F. Duckham, ‘Selby and the Aire & Calder Navigation, 1774–1826’, Journal of Transport History, 7 (1965–6), 87–95. 32 Middlesex Journal, 3–5 Mar. 1774. 33 ‘An Attempt of E. Burke’s Speech against the Selby Canal’, YB OF 5. 349. The reference to Horace is to Odes, ii. iv. 23–4 (‘at forty, I no longer feel passion’). The motion to commit the bill was lost by 105 to 33 (CJ xxxiv. 533). 34 General Evening Post, 3–5 Mar. 1774.

362 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 Burke’s wit has been undervalued.35 In the Commons, where debate on local legislation was often wearisome and technical, members welcomed his sallies of humour. A second vested interest defended by Burke’s rhetorical skill and argumentative force was the Booksellers’ Bill. The Copyright Act of 1709, the first English legislation on the subject, gave statutory protection for an initial period of fourteen years, with an extension of a further fourteen years if the author were still alive at the end of the first term. Most authors sold their copyrights, as Burke had, to a ‘bookseller’ (‘publisher’ in modern parlance, though many were also retail booksellers). A small group of these booksellers dominated the London and therefore the English publishing trade. By keeping copyrights within their own circle, and by agreeing not to invade each other’s property, they established a virtual monopoly in perpetuity. This was maintained through Chancery injunctions and other intimidatory tactics, without the right ever being legally determined. In 1774, however, the House of Lords in its judicial capacity overturned a 1769 ruling. The booksellers immediately petitioned for parliamentary relief, and a committee was appointed to consider their case. A bill was brought in to mitigate the effect of the Lords’ decision by extending a further fourteen years’ statutory protection to books which the outlawing of ‘perpetual’ copyright had thrown into the public domain. The controversy occasioned a short but intense paper war.36 The booksellers argued that perpetual copyright was in the interest of authors, and therefore in that of the public. Though they enlisted the support of some prominent authors, their evidence must be treated with caution. David Hume, for example, wrote ‘an ostensible Letter’ in support of the booksellers, but privately admitted the weakness of their case. Samuel Johnson was an open opponent of perpetual copyright.37 The Booksellers’ Bill was not a party issue, though Burke sought to enlist Rockingham on its behalf. He may have been influenced by the friendly relations that he had always enjoyed with the Dodsleys. The booksellers posed as the injured party, innocently relying on an unquestioned common-law right. Theirs, 35 Two corrective accounts are John C. Weston, Jr., ‘Edmund Burke’s Wit’, Review of English Literature, 4/3 (July 1963), 95–107; and James F. Davidson, ‘Wit and Politics: Edmund Burke’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 9 (1964), 63–70. 36 About thirty pamphlets on the subject are bound up in two volumes in the British Library (215. i. 4 and 21. b. 18). This collection is by no means complete. The episode has been much studied: Augustine Birrell, Seven Lectures on the Law and History of Copyright in Books (London, 1899); A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson: Being a Study of the Relation between Author, Patron, Publisher, and Public, 1726–1780 (London, 1927); Gwyn Walters, ‘The Booksellers in 1759 and 1774: the Battle for Literary Property’, The Library, 29 (1974), 287–311; and Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). 37 Hume to William Strahan, Mar. 1774, in Letters, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), ii. 288. Johnson to Strahan, 7 Mar. 1774, in Letters, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton, 1992–4), ii. 129–31; and Edward A. Bloom, Samuel Johnson in Grub Street (Providence, RI, 1957), 207–32.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 363 they claimed, was the cause of learning and literature. Their real concern was the preservation of the more lucrative copyrights (which were mostly held by the wealthier booksellers) from outside competition. The bill would have given statutory protection to a virtual monopoly. Burke’s support for it, like his opposition to the Selby–Leeds Canal, shows that on occasion he valued the protection of existing property rights above the creation of a free market. Burke advanced arguments of various kinds on the booksellers’ behalf. He was especially concerned to counter the charge that the booksellers were monopolists, and therefore odious. He conceded that monopolies, truly such, were against the public interest. Some apparently monopolistic practices, however, were really incentives to enterprise. Far from being reprehensible, these were in the public interest.38 He cited three examples: copyright protection for authors, patent protection for inventors, and the closed market which might be allowed to the undertaker of a particularly risky business or speculation. Among these he made an important distinction in favour of copyright. A book, he argued, was ‘an invention which taken in the whole it is not probable that any other man in the world but the individual authour could have supplied’. In the case of mechanical inventions, on the other hand, ‘it is not improbable that many men may hit on a contrivance in all respects the same without communication—& it has so happend’. Such contrivances, therefore, did not deserve the reward of a perpetual monopoly. As for the third category, where ‘not the invention, but the risque gives a sort of Title to Monopoly’, the duration ought to be in proportion to the risk, but never perpetual.39 In insisting that authors are more original than inventors, and therefore deserve stronger legal protection for the ‘property’ they created, Burke was appealing to the increasing respect that creative ‘originality’ was commanding, a trend exemplified in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759).40 Burke buttressed his argument from property rights with more pragmatic considerations. Writers could be supported in one of two ways. Traditional patronage entailed ‘dependence—meanness—flattery’. The commercialization of literature was at least a more ‘democratick principle’, for the limits and failings of which ‘the publick is to blame’. For this principle to operate, authors must be enabled to sell their writings. For this purpose, they must have ‘an entire property’, that is perpetual copyright. Booksellers are likely to give a better price for the entire property of a book 38 Even Adam Smith admitted some exceptions (perpetual copyright not among them) to his general disapproval of monopolies; Wealth of Nations, v. i. e. 30. 39 WWM BkP 27/210, in Corr. (1844), iv. 459–62. Adam Smith rejected this distinction in favour of authors. He regarded an exclusive right for fourteen years as an adequate reward for authors and inventors; Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), a. ii. 31–3. 40 Rose, Authors and Owners, 117–22.

364 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 than for a term of years limited by legislation or judicial decision.41 These arguments are powerful appeals to two deeply held prejudices shared by many members of the Commons: dislike of aristocratic influence, and respect for property rights of any kind. Nor was Burke’s argument entirely specious. While many inventors were engaged in trade or business, and could therefore market their inventions or improvements themselves, few authors could successfully publish their own books. In practice, most needed to sell their property to a bookseller. Burke’s eloquence may have swayed opinion in the Commons, which passed the bill, though only after heated debates. The Lords, however, rejected it, reaffirming their earlier repudiation of perpetual copyright.

3 The parliamentary session ended on 22 June 1774. With rumours of an early dissolution already in the air, attention turned to the forthcoming election. Burke was in a wretchedly uncertain position. Verney, financially pressed, could no longer provide him with a seat at Wendover gratis. Relations between them remained friendly, however, and Burke canvassed for Verney in the county election. Burke himself was in no position to buy a seat. After eight years in the Commons, his reputation as one of its leading speakers confirmed by his Speech on American Taxation, he could not be certain of re-election. Yet he tried to keep his mind unsoured by anxiety about his future or resentment at the dependence to which the want of a few thousand pounds reduced him. Writing to the New York Assembly on 2 August, he summarized with admirable objectivity the controversial legislation which he had so vehemently opposed. Omitting any mention of his own Speech on American Taxation, he dwelt instead on his efforts to have the boundary clause of the Quebec Act amended in New York’s favour. The letter conveys little sense of the heated atmosphere of the session, and his summary of the ministerial point of view is not unfair (C iii. 14–21). The anxieties and frustrations that Burke could so convincingly conceal were liable nevertheless to find a vent. The painter James Barry, whom in happier days the Burkes had enabled to study in Italy, had returned to England determined to force himself on the world of art on his own terms. Richard Brocklesby, probably intending a favour to Barry, had commissioned from him a portrait of Burke. Instead of declining the unwelcome task, Barry expressed his distaste for portraiture and his dislike of patronage through a repeated refusal to work on it without longer notice than Burke could conveniently give. Another man might have taken the hint, and let the 41

13 May 1774; WWM BkP 27/112.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 365 matter drop. Not Burke. Instead, he wrote a letter of ironical apology which served to vent his frustrations with more than the unfortunate painter: Sir, I ought to apologise to you for the liberty I have presumed to take of troubling you with what I find an unseasonable visit. I humbly beg your pardon for the intrusion. . . . I waited on you exactly half an hour after eleven, and had the pleasure of finding you at home; but as usual, so employed as not to permit you to undertake this disagreeable business. I have troubled you with this letter, as I think it necessary to make an excuse for so frequent and importunate intrusions. Much as it might flatter my vanity to be painted by so eminent an artist, I assure you that, knowing I had no title to that honour, it was only in compliance with the desire (often repeated) of our common friend, that I have been so troublesome. You, who know the value of friendship, and the duties of it, I dare say, will have the goodness to excuse me on this plea. On no other should I deserve it, for intruding on you at other times than those you should please to order. (9 July 1774: C iii. 4–5)

If Burke hoped to sting Barry, he succeeded. ‘It is some time’, Barry retorted, ‘since I have found it necessary to train myself in such dispositions and habits of mind as were in my judgement best calculated to carry me with quiet and ease through a situation every way encompassed with thorns and difficulties.’ Bitter experience, he had fondly supposed, had by now enabled him ‘to meet any attack upon my quiet with a proportionable degree of patience and serenity of mind’. Not so: ‘I have been mistaken; for your letter has vexed me, it has exceedingly vexed me’ (11 July: 6). Barry was not in the least disposed to offer apology or concession. With a sense of his own rectitude that equalled Burke’s, frankly and firmly, he declined to paint Burke without a day’s notice. Now it was Burke’s turn to be ‘exceedingly vexed’. He composed a second letter of exculpation, nearly three times the length of his first. Some demon drove Burke to persist in justifying himself, though he retained sufficient self-control to resist charging Barry with ingratitude. Burke rarely supplies unnecessary autobiographical information in his letters. His doing so here shows how keenly he felt the provocation: I have been painted in my life five times; twice in little, and three times in large. The late Mr Spencer, and the late Mr Sisson painted the miniatures. Mr Worlidge and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted the rest.42 I assure you upon my honour, I never gave any of these gentlemen any regular previous notice whatsoever. 42 Sisson was a friend of E.B.’s in Dublin in the 1740s; Gervase Spencer (d. 1763) was an English miniaturist. Their portraits of E.B. are lost, unless the miniature in the National Gallery of Ireland attributed to Nathaniel Hone is really by one of them. The portrait by Thomas Worlidge (1700–66) has been conjecturally identified with that reproduced as frontispiece to C i. Those by Reynolds are probably the double portrait with Rockingham (Plate 11) and the half-length reproduced in Ellis K. Waterhouse, Reynolds (London, 1941), 119, of which there is a copy in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The portrait ‘now painting’ for Henry Thrale (reproduced in C iii, facing p. xi) is now in the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland.

366


They condescended to live with me without ceremony; and they painted me, when my friends desired it, at such times as I casually went to admire their performances, and, just as it mutually suited us. A picture of me is now painting for Mr Thrale by Sir Joshua Reynolds; and in this manner; and this only. I will not presume to say, that the condescension of some men forms a rule for others. I know that extraordinary civility cannot be claimed as a matter of strict justice. In that view possibly you may be right. (13 July 1774: C iii. 8–9)

The reference to Reynolds, whom Barry despised as a successful society portraitist, was provocative. Barry, however, did not immediately rise to the bait. Yet he nursed a sense of grievance, for he preserved the letters and left them for posthumous publication.43 Was the troublesome commission ever executed? Barry produced at least three portraits of Burke. While none is entirely successful, they provide a valuable record of Burke as he appeared to an artist who knew him well. The earliest (c.1771; Plate 19) is an idealized portrait similar in format to Barry’s Nugent (Plate 6). Comparing the two helps elucidate Barry’s image of Burke. Burke’s face has a harder, masklike quality, self-sufficient and purposeful. The hand holding the pen is the servant of an aloof, forcible intellect. The conventional pose depicts Burke as an author, a powerful mind rather than (as Nugent is portrayed) a human being to whom to turn in distress or affliction. Looking over Nugent’s shoulder, the viewer does not feel excluded. In the portrait of Burke, the barrier of the back isolates the sitter in his own mental world. Barry’s second portrait (c.1774) is harder to judge, since it survives only in a copy (Plate 20). This Burke is less calm, less heroic, less detached; defiant yet pessimistic. The pose suggests impatience, even some tension between sitter and artist. The face has the countenance of an alderman rather than a philosopher. This is the portrait most plausibly identified as that painted for Brocklesby, for it has every appearance of having been painted against the grain. Barry was not apt to forget slights or forgive injuries. In January 1775, he sent Burke a copy of his Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England, which combined art theory and social criticism with some highly personal reflections on artists of whom he disapproved. The Inquiry is particularly critical of Reynolds, one of Burke’s oldest and closest friends.44 Barry perhaps wanted to remind Burke of the higher ideals they had once shared. A more emollient personality would have sent Barry a non-committal note of thanks. Instead, Burke read the Inquiry carefully enough to make detailed criticisms of its argument and organization. When writing about a book to its author, Burke habitually Barry, Works (London, 1809), vol. i, pp. v, 231–8. Barry’s Inquiry is reprinted in his Works, ii. 169–299. Passages aimed at Reynolds include 225, 248, and 255. 43 44

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 367 45 refers any fault he finds to an excess of some positive quality. He is nearly always polite in disagreement, even when the subject is political.46 On this occasion, he wrote with an unusual acerbity, and in the formal third person (15 Jan. 1775: C iii. 99–100). Barry’s next move was to incorporate Burke into a history painting, Portraits in the Character of Ulysses and His Companions Escaping from the Cave of Polypheme (Plate 21). This was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1776. Burke’s face derives from the earlier, idealized portrait. The subject, however, is decidedly ambiguous. The scene depicts an incident in book 9 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus has just, by a clever strategem, contrived to escape with most of his crew from the cave of Polyphemus. He was, however, responsible for their being trapped there in the first place; and several of his men have been killed and eaten by the giant. Nor are they yet safe. Barry (who has portrayed himself in the figure to the left of Burke) is sweating with fright. In Homer, when they reach the safety of their boat, the vainglorious Odysseus cannot resist taunting the blind Polyphemus. The giant throws a vast rock which narrowly misses the vessel, curses the crew, and calls on Neptune to destroy them. Of all the men, only Odysseus himself will reach home safely, and only after many wanderings. Just how much of the story Barry wanted the viewer to apply to the interpretation of the painting is uncertain. Yet the episode hardly seems calculated, as has been suggested, to portray Burke as ‘a good shepherd leading his flock from danger’.47 The figure running with outstretched arms and flowing cloak towards the light may represent Barry’s sense of liberation from the narrow world of Cork, and the enlightenment he derived (thanks to Burke) from his experiece of Italy and Italian painting. The diaphanous garments of the runner form a strong contrast to the heavy drapery with which Burke and Barry are encumbered. No wonder Barry is sweating, oppressed by at least two layers of heavy clothing and terrified at the prospect of being eaten by the giant. Burke, wearing armour and sword under a cloak of heavy brocade, and enjoining silence, is a figure of stern authority. Perhaps Barry is representing his reluctance to remain under his tutelage, if that means wasting his talent on portraits (such as the Brocklesby commission) rather than the history painting to which his ambition prompted him. Despite their estrangement, Burke continued to haunt Barry. Indeed, without the strain of a personal relationship, Barry could more easily appreciate Burke as a symbolic figure. In 1777, he inscribed to Burke his print of Job, and sent a present of five copies to Burke’s son. Though the figure of Job is not a portrait of Burke, Barry meant the dedication as a gesture 45 46 47

E.B. to Adam Smith, 10 Sept. 1759 (C i. 130); to Arthur Young, 10 Sept. 1771 (ii. 238). E.B. to Francis Maseres, 1776 (C iii. 307–8); to John Cartwright, Feb. 1777 (329). William L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven, 1981), 75.

368 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 of sympathy with a man whose years of public-spirited opposition might be likened to the sufferings of Job. Barry even went so far as to ask Burke’s advice on a large project he was planning. Burke, however, was not mollified. He replied, but again in the third person. As a gratuitous insult, he affects to apologize that ‘being obliged to go out in great haste, after having been engaged in business for the whole morning, he is under the necessity of dictating this note while he is dressing’ (2 May 1777: C iii. 336–7). Far from taking offence at this rebuff, however, in 1778 Barry produced his most eloquent tribute to Burke, though not in the form of a conventional portrait. The Conversion of Polemon (Plate 22), one of his finest prints, illustrates an anecdote told by Valerius Maximus. Polemon, a debauched Athenian youth, passing the door of Xenocrates, interrupts the philosopher’s lesson. Such is the charisma of Xenocrates, however, that the rake is converted to a life of philosophy. According to Barry’s own explanation, Polemon represents Fox; Xenocrates is Burke.48 Some of Barry’s friends, radicals and Dissenters, were deterred from supporting Fox politically by their distaste for his ostentatiously dissolute personal life. Barry wanted to convince them that Fox would outgrow what Barry regarded as mere youthful follies. Here, then, Barry depicts Burke not (as in Ulysses) as a symbol of repression but as a sage whose words can even reclaim a young libertine. Barry again puts himself in the picture, though less prominently: he is the middle figure of the three to the left of the philosopher’s waist. He now acknowledges himself as one of the disciples. The print is an act of homage to Burke, the more remarkable after their quarrel, and a moving expression of regret for a lost leader. An exchange of letters with the Duke of Richmond provides a second illustration of Burke’s personal touchiness, exacerbated at this time by his anxiety about the coming election. Canvassing for Verney’s re-election for Buckinghamshire, Burke sought to enlist Richmond’s aid. The duke politely declined. Acknowledging ‘some remains of old family Acquaintance’ with Lord Temple, who was sponsoring his nephew against Verney, Richmond was unwilling ‘to oppose a Family Interest’. Not knowing Verney, and having ‘no other Reason to wish him better than Lord Temple except his Friendship for You’, Richmond declined to intervene. He softened the blow by assuring Burke that ‘it is impossible to love or Esteem You more than I do, so pray dont look upon this Letter as any want of Friendship for You’ (26 Sept. 1774: C iii. 37). Burke overestimated both the strength and the cohesiveness of the Rockingham party. Richmond, a ‘capital ornament’ of the party (as Burke called him) neither knew Verney, nor cared on his behalf to offend even so remote a relation as Lord Temple, the head of the rival Grenville faction. 48

Pressly, 81.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 369 Perhaps only in Burke’s imagination was Verney a member of the Rockingham party. Whether reasonably or not, however, Burke resented Richmond for putting family before party. Unable to express his indignation openly, neither could he take the rebuff in good part. Instead, he interpreted it as a rebuke, and replied with a letter of apology (or rather selfjustification) in his most verbose and long-winded manner. Burke shrouds his wound with a transparent show of deference, affecting to attribute his ‘presumption’ in writing to Richmond’s ‘extraordinary and unmerited indulgence . . . which sometimes makes us forget ourselves’. His ‘thorough consciousness, that on my part I have been at all hours and without any sort of reserve at your Graces Devotion’ is ‘such a very triffle, and has been so much overpaid in acceptance, that it can hardly be reckond as among my excuses for the attempt’ (Oct. 1774: C iii. 39). Behind the verbiage lurks an ill-concealed sense of resentment. Burke devoted much time and energy to the wording of this letter. The numerous small corrections on the surviving draft (plainly not the first) polish the style without altering the substance.49 Such attention to detail appears almost pathological. Slighted as he felt himself, he could neither ignore the incident nor take it calmly. Instead, he allowed the wound to fester, brooding on it for days, and expended many hours producing an elaborate epistle that (as a model of style) might illustrate a letter-writing manual. Perhaps the composition of such letters was cathartic, the care expended on the expression serving to numb his sense of injury.

4 Burke’s querulousness was aggravated by anxiety about his own position. Unable to contest a seat at his own expense, he was diffident about turning to Rockingham, for he wanted, if possible, to maintain his independence. The best way of achieving this was to stand in one of the few ‘open’ boroughs. Two such opportunities presented themselves, Westminster and Bristol. Westminster never offered more than a remote chance. With one of the largest electorates (about 12,000), it was among the most open and volatile constituencies, and one of the most ruinously expensive to contest. The ministerial interest, backed by the large landlords, was strong; but by 1774 so was that of the growing radical movement. Burke’s only chance, as he told Rockingham, was as a compromise choice (18 Sept. 1774: C iii. 31– 2). This possibility vanished when each camp decided to field two candidates. Bristol did not at first look more hopeful. As early as July, Thomas Wilson (1703–84), a London clergyman with radical sympathies and Bristol 49

WWM BkP 1/538.

370 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 connections, had sounded Burke about his willingness to stand. Burke’s reply had been reserved and non-committal, emphasizing that he had no money for a contest (9 July: 3–4). So he spent the summer in a state of suspense. At the end of September, the Burkes entertained Samuel Johnson and the Thrales on their return from a tour of Wales. The visitors were hospitably received, until ‘Mr Burke himself was obliged to go out somewhere about Election matters. . . . Lord Verney and Edmund came home at night very much flustered with liquor.’ After spending ‘three months from home among dunces of all ranks and sorts’, Hester Thrale censoriously remarked, she ‘had never seen a man drunk till I came among the Wits’.50 The scene was characteristic of election time, not of the Burke household. Burke disliked as much as anyone the prolonged potations that electioneering required, even in Buckinghamshire. On 30 September, when news of the dissolution arrived, the Thrales had to leave for Southwark. When they parted, Johnson was torn between his personal regard for Burke and his detestation of Burke’s politics. Hester remembered his valediction: ‘Farewel my dear Sir, and remember that I wish you all the success which ought to be wished you, which can possibly be wished you indeed—by an honest man.’51 The best gloss on Johnson’s equivocal expression is the short pamphlet he wrote on his return to London. Written at great speed and published as early as 12 October, The Patriot is a strong condemnation not only of Wilkes and all his works, but of opposition in general. For Johnson, as for George III, opposition was faction. One paragraph is especially pertinent to Burke: ‘A man sometimes starts up a Patriot, only by disseminating discontent and propagating reports of secret influence, of dangerous counsels, of violated rights and encroaching usurpation.’52 Burke was not the only such ‘patriot’, but his image was in Johnson’s mind as he wrote those words. Burke did not remain long at Beaconsfield. Soon he too was in the thick of electioneering. With Rockingham still in Yorkshire, Burke consulted the Duke of Portland about his own and Will’s prospects.53 On 7 October, as he admitted to Portland, he was forced to abandon his last faint hope of being returned for Westminster (C iii. 58–9). Meanwhile (on the 4th) he had received a long and confidential letter from a stranger, Richard Champion (1743–91), a Quaker merchant and porcelain manufacturer of Bristol. 50 A. M. Broadley, Doctor Johnson and Mrs Thrale, Including Mrs Thrale’s Unpublished Journal of the Welsh Tour Made in 1774 (London, 1910), 217–18. 51 Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786), ed. Arthur Sherbo (London, 1974), 140. 52 Works (New Haven, 1958– ), x. 389–400. 53 Verney’s interest in Great Bedwyn expired with the Parliament elected in 1768. W.B. was standing, with Portland’s backing, for Haslemere. He lost the election, and his petition against the return was also unsuccessful. He never sat in Parliament again. E.B. felt his exclusion severely: to Rockingham, 18 Sept. 1774 (C iii. 35); to Portland, c. 4 Oct. (53).

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 371 Champion outlined the confused political situation in the city, encouraged Burke to consider standing, and proposed a meeting at Bath (43–7). Burke set off at once, travelled overnight, and arrived early the following morning. Meanwhile, the volatile politics of Bristol had taken another turn, unfavourable to Burke’s prospects. After conferring with Champion and his ally Joseph Harford (1741–1802), instead of proceeding to Bristol to open his campaign, Burke returned glumly to London with his hopes dashed. Consolation came from Rockingham. As early as 2 October, the marquis had expressed the hope of being able to offer Burke a seat. On the 5th he confirmed that he had ‘sent off an express to Malton to desire my friends there to chuse you one of their members’. Always attentive to what was expected by the most biddable electors, Rockingham hinted that ‘it would give much pleasure at Malton, if you could get there before the election’ (C iii. 56). Burke duly set off on Friday the 7th. Passing across Finchley Common (the northern counterpart of Hounslow Heath, the more famous haunt of highwaymen to the west of London), Burke was robbed. Such an ‘accident’ was so common that, telling Rockingham of the adventure, Burke sounds almost surprised that it was his first. Luckily, he had only about ten guineas on him (9 Oct.: 61). Without further incident, he reached Malton late on Sunday night. On the following Tuesday, Lord Rockingham’s friends duly elected Burke and Savile Finch (c.1736–88), a Yorkshire gentleman who had sat for Malton since 1761. The same day, Burke received an express from Bristol, urgently requiring his presence there. To represent Bristol, even at the expense of a long and fatiguing contest, was so much preferable to sitting for Malton, that he set off immediately.54 Burke’s connection with Bristol dominated the next six years of his life.55 Though his victory there was a triumph, he would have been happier as a member for Malton. The campaign itself was purgatorial, for he disliked the glad-handing that was necessary. He knew that representing the city would prove burdensome, for Bristol (unlike Wendover or Malton) would expect attentive nursing. What induced him, securely elected for Malton, to travel post-haste to Bristol for an arduous and unpleasant ordeal, the result of which was far from certain, was the prestige that election for an ‘open’ borough would confer. He would speak with greater authority as member for one of the few boroughs in which the opinions (or at least the votes) of ‘the people’ were decisive. This was better than being returned (in the phrase attributed to Sir George Savile) ‘in Lord Rockingham’s dining54 After E.B.’s election at Bristol was confirmed, Rockingham offered the seat at Malton to William Weddell (1736–92), a relation by marriage, who had been defeated at Hull. 55 Peter Thomas Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke as Member of Parliament for Bristol’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1955; Ernest Barker, ‘Burke and his Bristol Constituents, 1774–1780’, in his Essays on Government (2nd edn. Oxford, 1951), 154–204.

372 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 56 room’. Burke probably entertained visions of building an independent political base in Bristol. Though he failed to spend the time in the city that the creation of such an interest would have required, he may at first have hoped to maintain one, as Clare had done, chiefly by proxy.57 Finally, Burke throve on bustle and activity. Risking nothing, for he was secure at Malton, here was a chance to engage in an exhilarating and energizing struggle. The situation at Bristol had been transformed by the surprise withdrawal of one of the declared candidates. At the outset, a three-cornered contest appeared likely. Both incumbents were standing for re-election: Lord Clare, and Matthew Brickdale, a retired local merchant (and parliamentary diarist). Brickdale was a comparative nonentity. The son of a clothier, he inherited a fortune that enabled him to devote himself to politics. Though he never became much known outside Bristol, he enjoyed a considerable local following, as his re-election in 1780 testifies. Dissatisfaction with the sitting members came chiefly from the radical faction, who determined to stand a candidate of their own. Their choice was Henry Cruger (1739– 1827), an American who had moved to Bristol in 1757 to set up a business and married into a local merchant family.58 He was the nephew of John Cruger, Speaker of the New York Assembly and Burke’s principal correspondent on agency business. The poll opened at the Guildhall on Friday 7 October, though only for an hour. Each candidate polled one ‘tally’, the unit (usually ten or twelve) in which organized voters were brought to the poll. Clare (who had counted on an uncontested election) was so discouraged by his reception that, later that night, he announced his withdrawal. Clare’s unwillingness to endure the demeaning fatigue of an election campaign is easy to understand. Born into a wealthy Catholic family with connections to the peerage, he determined to make his way into public life. He therefore renounced his faith and (with his second wife) acquired both a pleasant country estate in Essex and a controlling interest in a Cornish borough, St Mawes. This desirable constituency had about twenty-five voters, mostly Clare’s tenants. Clare sat for the borough himself from 1741 to 1754, and again (after his withdrawal from Bristol) from 1774 to 1784. A frequent speaker in the Commons, articulate if not eloquent, he made himself useful enough to successive ministries to secure two Irish peerages and several profitable sinecures. He never held high or responsible office. A man of some culture and a bon viveur, he was a poet and the friend of poets. 56 ‘Hitherto I have been elected in Lord Rockingam’s dining-room—now I am returned by my constituents.’ Savile is said to have made the remark at the 1780 election; Robert Isaac and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), i. 56–7. I have been unable to trace an earlier source. 57 Clare appears not to have visited Bristol between 1768 and 1774 (Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, MP’, 25–6). 58 Henry C. van Schaak, Henry Cruger: The Colleague of Edmund Burke in the British Parliament (New York, 1859).

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 373 Clare achieved the material success that eluded Burke. His appetite for the good things of life was uncomplicated by loyalties to higher ideals.59 Clare’s unexpected retreat gave Burke his chance. After some hurried consultation, Champion immediately sent for him and, when the poll reopened on the Saturday morning, nominated him in his absence. Brickdale raised a procedural objection to a nomination after polling had begun, and the sheriffs adjourned the poll to Monday. When Champion’s message reached London, Burke was in Yorkshire. His brother Richard set off for Bristol at once, acting as locum tenens until Burke’s arrival on Thursday the 13th. As soon as he reached the city, Burke made a short speech at the Guildhall (WS iii. 58–60). Expecting the American crisis to be the most important issue, he made America his main theme, pledging himself to maintain the constitutional superiority of Great Britain while respecting the legitimate rights and liberties of the colonies. More generally, and inevitably in a commercial city, he professed that commerce had ‘ever been a very particular and a very favorite object of my study, in its principles, and in its details’ (59–60).60 Burke could make such a claim with perfect truth and sincerity. When Richard Jackson, MP and counsel to the Board of Trade, wanted to compliment Samuel Johnson on his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), he told him, ‘there was more good sense upon trade in it, than he should hear in the House of Commons in a year, except from Burke’.61 Nor was Burke an entire stranger to Bristol. He had visited the city more than once in the 1750s. If he had no personal acquaintance there, he knew its commercial character and importance. Though tiny compared to London and considerably smaller than Dublin, Bristol was usually reputed the second city of England.62 Yet its population in 1774 may have been as little as 38,000; Liverpool’s may already have been greater. By 1800, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham had all overtaken it. Not that Bristol declined or stagnated; it simply grew more slowly than the industrial centres of the north.63 In 1774, the economic strength of Bristol derived chiefly from its geographical position. Manufacturing took second place to its role as an entrepôt. As a port, it was ideally sited for trade with Ireland and America; while a network of canals and roads made it the hub of the west of England. Commerce dominated the city. Bristol lacked the leisured, pseudo-gentry Claud Nugent, Memoir of Robert, Earl Nugent, with Letters, Poems, and Appendices (London, 1898). The speech was immediately printed (Todd, 18). 61 Boswell, Life of Johnson, iii. 137 (15 Sept. 1777). 62 Thomas Wilson calls it ‘the second city in the kingdom’ in his letter to E.B. of 28 June 1774 (Corr. (1844), i. 465). E.B. uses the same phrase to his sister on 2 Nov. 1774 (C iii. 73). 63 The population of the city is estimated at 35,440 in Sketchley’s Bristol Directory 1775 (repr. Bath, 1971), 120. Modern studies include: W. E. Minchinton, ‘Bristol: Metropolis of the West in the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4 (1954), 69–89; and Peter T. Marcy, Eighteenth Century Views of Bristol and Bristolians (Bristol, 1966). 59 60

374 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 class that set the tone in other provincial centres such as York. A recurrent theme in visitors’ comments on Bristol is the lack of culture and the narrowly commercial outlook of even its prosperous citizens: ‘As to the people or inhabitants, their souls are engrossed by lucre, and [they] are very expert in affairs of merchandise; but as to politeness, it is a thing banished from their republic as a contagious distemper.’64 Burke would often find occasion to complain of the narrow-mindedness of his constituents. By another, more objective measure which has been used as an index of ‘politeness’, Bristol ranked indisputably as England’s second city. In 1757, it contained 790 households sufficiently prosperous and genteel to pay the duty on silver plate. Norwich was next with 245, and among the industrial centres Manchester ranked highest with a mere 198.65 Though ownership of plate is an imperfect index of ‘politeness’, such figures testify to Bristol’s opulence. Bristol had a large electorate. The right to vote extended to forty-shilling freeholders (the standard county franchise), which in practice meant virtually any property-owner; and to ‘freemen’ of the city. This freedom could be acquired in various ways, and freemen did not need to be resident in order to vote. The number of qualified voters was about 5,000, of whom perhaps 1,000 lived away from Bristol.66 Election agents were needed to reach these numerous ‘out-voters’. Many lived in London, where committees were established to organize support for individual candidates. Election agents were also active in tracing those entitled to take out their freedom, and in persuading them to do so. Freedom conferred an immediate right to vote, but could only be taken out in Bristol. Large sums were expended to bring the ‘out-voters’ to the city, besides the usual costs of free drink and other ‘treating’.67 Contests were so expensive that candidates had every incentive to avoid them. The voters, on the other hand, especially those at the lower end of the social scale, revelled in the free drink and flattery that they brought. In 1761 and again in 1768, compromises between the two main interests, each nominating one member, had been successfully negotiated. In 1768, Lord Clare had been the ‘Whig’ candidate, Brickdale the ‘Tory’. These old labels were still in use in Bristol, though both members had supported the North ministry.68 64 Narrative of the Journey of an Irish Gentleman through England in the Year 1752, ed. Henry Huth (London, 1869), 151. The Irishman was annoyed at being detained in Bristol because his ship was delayed. His comment, however, is typical. 65 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford, 1989), 402. 66 Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, MP’, 3. 67 According to Thomas Mullett, E.B.’s campaign cost nearly £10,000 (14 Apr. 1775: C iii. 149). 68 E.B. had no doubt that there were ‘Tories’ in Bristol (C iii. 318, 333) and he saw symptoms of ‘the resurrection of the Tory party’ nationally (C iii. 382–3). His usage justifies calling Brickdale and his supporters Tories, without prejudice to the modern historiographical controversy about whether, and in what sense, there was a national ‘Tory party’ at this time; Ian R. Christie, ‘Party in Politics in the Age of Lord North’s Administration’, Parliamentary History, 6 (1987), 47–68.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 375 By 1774, the old basis for compromise had been eroded. The ‘Whig’ interest was itself divided, with a new, radical wing determined to assert itself. Even so, the prospect of a contest was so alarming that even the radical Cruger was prepared to join forces with the Tory Brickdale in order to avoid one. Champion was likewise prepared to support a joint Burke– Clare ticket, if such a junction appeared strong enough to force Brickdale and Cruger to withdraw. (Bristol, like nearly all constituencies, returned two members; each elector therefore had two votes.) Since Clare’s withdrawal left only two declared candidates, Brickdale and Cruger, Burke’s intrusion robbed Cruger of an uncontested victory. This was hardly likely to endear him to Cruger or his supporters. Even so, Champion initially hoped to persuade Cruger to stand on a joint ticket with Burke. Cruger, with nothing to lose, professed himself willing. His supporters proved less amenable. Burke was no more acceptable to the Bristol radicals than to those of Westminster. The election thus continued, as it had begun, a three-way contest, though now with Burke in the third corner. Dissatisfaction with Brickdale, Clare’s withdrawal, and his own well-organized campaign combined to give Cruger an early lead which he never lost. The poll was drawn out to an extraordinary twenty-three days by a struggle between Brickdale and Burke for second place. Excitement was maintained by the printing of daily closeof-poll figures.69 For three weeks, Burke had to submit to an exhausting daily grind. His personal canvass was supported by a well-orchestrated press campaign. In addition to reportage in the newspapers, about 100 separate handbills were printed. Most are single sheets, printed in large type on one side only. The larger ones (typically 12 ⫻ 8 in.) served primarily as posters, the smaller (about 4 ⫻ 6 in.) as handbills.70 Since Cruger’s election was virtually certain, his supporters made little use of the press. The majority of the surviving pieces are Burke’s, for he was the candidate least known to the voters. Their influence is hard to estimate, but they record the main charges against him, and his response to them. The principal articles against Burke were endlessly repeated. They are epitomized in one of the later broadsides: ‘Mr B—ke, a Pensioner of the Rockinghams—an Agent for New-York—One, who if not a Papist, can have no Dislike to Popery, as he cannot deny, he married a rigid Roman Catholic. He is a Friend to Aristocratic Tyranny—an enemy to general 69 G. E. Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol, from 1774 till 1780; with a Prefatory Memoir (Bristol, 1894); P. T. Underdown, ‘Henry Cruger and Edmund Burke: Colleagues and Rivals at the Bristol Election of 1774’, William and Mary Quarterly, 15 (1958), 14–34. 70 Todd (pp. 76–7) lists forty-six. To these must be added others that do not mention Burke, the daily close-of-poll counts, and an allowance for pieces which have not survived. Copies of nearly all the broadsides are preserved in two volumes in the Bristol Reference Library: ‘Bristol Election, 1774’ (B 18197) and ‘Bristol Elections, 1774–1790’ (B 6979). Many are reprinted in Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol.

376 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 Freedom—neither short Parliaments nor Place-Bills are among his political Articles of Faith.’71 That Burke was a Catholic or a crypto-Catholic was the most frequently repeated charge. His having married a Catholic was the prime evidence, though some broadsides repeated the old canard that he had been educated at St Omer’s.72 Burke’s association with Rockingham was also held again him. Sometimes he was accused of being Rockingham’s pensioner; a figure of £800 a year was even quoted. More generally (and chiefly on the evidence of the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents), he was represented as the tool of overbearing aristocrats. The Thoughts was likewise cited to prove his hostility to shorter parliaments and place bills.73 The point of this charge was to deter Cruger supporters from giving their second vote to Burke. From Brickdale’s point of view, a ‘plumper’ (a vote for one candidate only) for Cruger would help keep Burke out. Burke’s supporters countered with the argument, addressed to the Crugerites, that a plumper for Cruger was in effect a vote for Brickdale.74 Other scores on which Burke was, objectively speaking, more vulnerable, were brought up only infrequently: that he was a stranger to Bristol; and that, as an opposition member, he would not be well placed to obtain favours from the ministry.75 Contrary to Burke’s expectation, the American question aroused little interest.76 So far as the evidence of the broadsides goes, the campaign was conducted in terms of personalities and prejudices rather than issues. Cruger, for example, was denounced as ‘a Wild dissipated uncultivated American’.77 When the poll finally closed on 2 November, the sheriffs declared Cruger and Burke duly elected. The final voting figures were: Cruger 3,565, Burke 2,707, Brickdale 2,456, Clare 283.78 Nearly all the votes for Clare were cast after his withdrawal, suggesting that he still commanded significant support. Had he stayed in the race, he need only have taken 300 votes from 71 ‘To the Citizens of Bristol’, signed ‘Old England for Ever’, Bristol Reference Library, B 18197, 74, in Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol, 72. 72 ‘Westminster. Extract from the Public Ledger’, Bristol Reference Library, B 6979, 34; ‘Mr B****’, signed ‘Modestus’, 20 Oct., B 18197, 68, in Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol, 60. 73 ‘Queries Addressed to Mr Burke’, signed ‘Modestus’, 20 Oct., Bristol Reference Library, B 6979, 122, in Weare, Edmund Burke’s Cannection with Bristol, 56; ‘Mr B****’, B 18197, 68, in Weare, 60. ‘A Card’, B 18197, 36. ‘To the Citizens of Bristol’, signed ‘Caution’, 13 Oct., B 6979, 97, in Weare, 45; ‘Philo-Veritas’, signed ‘Tribunus’, 24 Oct., B 6979, 137, in Weare, 65–6. 74 ‘To the Citizens of Bristol’, Bristol Reference Library, B 6979, 73; ‘To Such of the Electors’, signed ‘Many Stedfast Friends of Mr Cruger’, B 6979, 113; ‘A Caution to the Freemen in Mr Cruger’s Interest’, signed ‘The Plain Truth’, 12 Oct., B 6979, 87. 75 ‘To the Corporation’, signed ‘Test’, B 6979, 105; ‘Queries Addressed to Mr Burke’, in Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol, 56. 76 E.B. arranged a reprint of his Short Account of a Late Short Administration, as ‘A Word in Season’, Bristol Reference Library, B 6979, 117. It provoked only a single reply, which begins ‘Mr Word in Season’, B 18197, 72. Both are reprinted in Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol, 53–5. 77 ‘Wanted Immediately’, signed ‘Civis’, 4 Oct. Bristol Reference Library, B 6979, 33. 78 Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol, 73.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 377 Burke to have nudged Brickdale into second place. His withdrawal was therefore crucial to Burke’s election. According to custom, the successful candidates delivered victory speeches. Cruger repeated his pledge to support certain measures of reform, and professed himself bound to vote in accordance with the declared wishes of his constituents. ‘It has ever been my opinion that the electors have a right to instruct their members,’ he grovelled; ‘for my part, I shall always think it my duty in Parliament to be guided by your counsels and instructions.’79 Burke’s speech (WS iii. 64–70) was anything but subservient. Knowing that Brickdale intended to petition against the result, he briefly vindicated the conduct of the election. More important, however, and the part of the speech which is most often quoted, is Burke’s analysis of the nature of political representation.80 Repudiating Cruger’s avowed subservience to the ‘counsels and instructions’ of his constituents, Burke asserted the independence of the representative: 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. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and, above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any sett 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. (WS iii. 68–9)

Burke likewise rejected the notion that a member should regard only the interests of his particular constituency. Parliament, he told his new constituents, ‘is not a Congress of Ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an Agent and Advocate, against other Agents and Advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative Assembly of one Nation, with one Interest, that of the whole’. In Parliament, ‘not local Purposes, not local Prejudices ought to guide, but the general Good, resulting from the general Reason of the whole. You chuse a Member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not Member of Bristol, but he is a Member of Parliament’ (69). Such forthright declarations, in a victory 79 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 5 Nov. 1774; repr. in Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol, 78–9. 80 Lucy S. Sutherland, ‘Edmund Burke and the Relations between Members of Parliament and their Constituents’, Studies in Burke and his Time, 10 (1968), 1005–21; Paul Kelly, ‘Constituents’ Instructions to Members of Parliament in the Eighteenth Century’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Party and Management in Parliament, 1660–1784 (Leicester, 1984), 169–89.

378 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 speech on the hustings, evince greater moral courage than political prudence. Burke could have said nothing, or taken refuge in bland commonplaces. Typical of his intellectual and moral self-assurance and of his pugnacity was his instinctive decision to meet Cruger’s challenge at once and in public. Nor was his vaunted independence merely theoretical, for over the next six years he consciously flouted the opinions of his constituents on several issues. These would provide heavy charges against him at the 1780 election. Exhausted as he was, Burke summoned enough energy to write to O’Hara, and (perhaps for the first time since 1766) to his sister. ‘I am elected by a Majority of 251 after one of the longest and warmest contests that has been rememberd,’ he told Juliana with pardonable pride; ‘this is the second City in the Kingdom; and to be invited, and chosen for it without any request of mine, at no expense to myself, but with much charge and trouble to many publick spirited Gentlemen, is an honour to which we ought not to be insensible’.81 He then left for home, making a brief stop at Oxford, where Richard, fresh from his sojourn in France, had taken up his studentship at Christ Church. Back at Beaconsfield, Burke had less than a month to recuperate from the gruelling fatigue of the election, for the new Parliament was scheduled to meet on 29 November.

5 Lord North had good reason to be pleased with the election results. With a secure majority in the Commons, and his American policy popular in the country at large, he could face the new Parliament with confidence. North hoped that colonial resistance would crumble and vindicate the ministry’s firm stand. Rockingham had little cause for comfort. His following in the Commons was reduced by the election, while public opinion remained hostile to the ‘friends’ of America.82 Rockingham was disposed to withdraw into his shell, to register protests but do no more until the public was jolted out of its calamitous complacency.83 2 Nov. 1774 (C iii. 73–4); to O’Hara, 2 Nov. (72–3). Frank O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975), 315–24, calculates that Rockingham’s following dropped from 55 to 43. 83 Rockingham could ‘protest’ in a technical sense as well as the more general one. In the House of Lords, peers who dissented from a resolution could enter a formal protest in the journal, and these protests were often published in the newspapers as opposition manifestos. Beginning in 1770, the Rockingham party made increasing use of the device. The session of 1774–5 proved its zenith; thereafter, its impact declined from over-use; William C. Lowe, ‘The House of Lords, Party, and Public Opinion: Opposition Use of the Protest, 1760–1782’, Albion, 11 (1979), 143–56. E.B. was often called upon to compose these protests for the Rockingham peers: draft protest for 30 Nov. 1774 (WS iii. 72– 3); Richmond to E.B., 8 Feb. 1775 (C iii. 110); Richmond to Rockingham, 12 Mar. 1775, WWM R1/ 1559. 81 82

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 379 Burke was by temperament unsuited to such a waiting game. Nor did he relish the constituency business that he now found himself expected to transact. Instead of seizing the opportunity to establish an independent power-base by an assiduous nurturing of his constituency through frequent visits and diligent attention to local interests, Burke found in his Bristol business nothing but trouble and vexation. Two reasons can be advanced to explain this neglect. Though sociable and gregarious, and fond of the company of those he knew and liked, he hated the forced bonhomie expected of a candidate. Soliciting the suffrages of ignorant tradesmen in the back streets of Bristol was demeaning. Though capable of intense effort and unremitting application to business, Burke needed a good cause to inspire him. In 1774, he thought the struggle over America was the overriding question of public interest. He wanted to throw himself whole-heartedly into opposition to the ministry’s measures. While eager to mobilize Bristol opinion on behalf of that cause, he showed little enthusiasm for the purely local matters that, however vital to the interests of his constituents, were not of imperial proportions. With the right kind of colleague, this would not have mattered. Burke could have concentrated on the larger issues, and left the other member to look after local matters. Cruger, however, had no intention of playing such a role. Relations between Burke and Cruger, and between their respective supporters, soon deteriorated into open hostility. When Brickdale’s petition against Cruger and Burke was rejected by the Commons committee, a triumphal entry into Bristol was planned to celebrate the confirmation of their victory. Cruger was in his element on such occasions. Burke called it a ‘foolish Piece of Pageantry’ and refused to attend (C iii. 116–17). This unwillingness to sacrifice a day or two to the expectations of his constituents was a portent of worse friction to come. The Bristolians most in his confidence, however, supported his stand. John Noble (1743–1828), a kindred spirit, would have nothing to do with Cruger’s ‘most worthy Committee’, who were not ‘Gentlemen’. Champion shared his distaste. Persuading the generality of Burke’s supporters to forgo a day’s free entertainment was less easy. Burke’s election had been managed by a committee named for the Bush Tavern, where it met. After the election, to keep Burke’s supporters together (and to maintain an interest distinct from Cruger’s), Champion founded a club at the Bell, which soon attracted more than 100 members. At a meeting of this club on 23 February, when Burke’s refusal to attend the parade was announced, ‘the Children of six feet high who wanted a Holiday’ were disappointed, but ‘every one who had the faculty of thinking’ approved. After a warm debate, the thinkers outvoted the children by 43 to 30. The Bush committee, however, which met the next day, proved less amenable to Champion’s persuasion. More concerned to maintain cordial relations with Cruger’s committee, they voted to attend his entry. Noble and

380 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 Champion, however, boycotted it. The rift among Burke’s supporters was manifest, and was never entirely repaired.84 Champion preferred a more genteel way of commemorating Burke’s victory. He and his wife (Judith; d. 1790) presented Jane with an elaborately decorated tea-service of his own manufacture. The larger pieces are painted with the Burke and Nugent arms, supported by Liberty and Plenty (Plate 23). Such a gift was in keeping with Burke’s idea of ‘liberty’ as ‘a noble freedom’, possessed of ‘an imposing and majestic aspect’, together with ‘its bearings and its ensigns armorial’ (Reflections: WS viii. 85). This was the ‘liberty’ Burke cherished. Sensing that his electoral triumph had already turned to ashes, Burke lost weight, and became unhappy, testy, and frustrated. Even to Rockingham, his letters barely conceal his simmering discontent (24 Jan. 1775: C iii. 106– 8). Piqued by complaints that he had cold-shouldered Cruger, he wrote a long letter to Champion, intended to be shown about, detailing his conduct towards Cruger with the minuteness typical of his self-justifications (5 Jan.: 84–6). He was especially irked by the suggestion that he had been elected on Cruger’s coat-tails. An ‘impartial narrative’ of the election from the Cruger point of view was prefaced to one of the printed lists of those who had voted at the 1774 Bristol election.85 When the author of the narrative, Thomas Mullett (1745–1815), rather provocatively sent him a copy, Burke returned it with an indignant third-person note (13 Apr.: 147–8). Mullett was one of the ‘children’ who, at the Bell on 23 February, had proposed sending two members to urge Burke to attend the public entry. Worse, he had industriously spread word that there was no important business in the House to prevent his coming. Three further sharp missives passed between them over the next two days (148–51). Incapable of throwing the offending pamphlet into the fire and dismissing it from his mind, Burke as usual felt compelled to demonstrate the rectitude of his conduct. Nor was Mullett more disposed than Barry, Burke’s last antagonist, to give in easily. Behind their disagreement were two incompatible interpretations of Bristol politics. Mullett saw two parties, Whigs and Tories, and thought that Burke, like Cruger, had been elected by the Whigs. Burke saw three: the Tories, the true Whigs (his supporters), and the radical or Crugerite Whigs. Burke was right in perceiving a cleavage between his own and Cruger’s supporters, though he misjudged their relative strengths. When Parliament met, the Rockingham party was without its leader in the lower house. Dowdeswell had left for the South of France in the vain 84 Noble to Champion, 19 Feb. 1775; Champion to E.B., 23 Feb. and 25 Feb.; Champion to R.B. Sr., 4 Mar.; Bristol Record Office, 38083(4), pp. 48–52, 29–35, 110–18, 104–10. 85 The Bristol Poll-Book: Being a List of the Freeholders and Freedmen who Voted at the General Election (Bristol: W. Pine, [1775]). The other list, The Bristol Poll Book, Being a List of Persons Who Voted at the General Election (no publisher or date), has no prefatory narrative. The Guildhall Library has copies of both.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 381 hope of recovering his health in a warmer climate. In his absence, the leadership was assumed by Lord John Cavendish. Though Burke’s parliamentary talents were incomparably superior to Lord John’s, he lacked the requisite social standing. Burke was keenly aware of Lord John’s shortcomings as a party leader. He was reluctant to come to town earlier than absolutely necessary. ‘Lord John ought not to be sufferd to plead any sort of Excuse,’ Burke admonished Rockingham; ‘He ought to be allowed a certain decent and reasonable portion of Foxhunting to put him into wind for the Parliamentary Race he is to run—but any thing more is intollerable. . . . he must shew a degree of regular attendance on Business’ (5 Jan. 1775: C iii. 88–9). For Lord John, amiable and indolent, politics was a duty rather than a pleasure. Dowdeswell’s death (at Nice, on 6 February 1775) was a crippling loss to the Rockingham party, and to their pretensions to leadership of the opposition. Though lacking charisma, Dowdeswell had been conscientious and hard-working, and the party’s financial expert. Burke wrote a long epitaph for a memorial, in which he skilfully combines praise of his personal and moral qualities with a Rockinghamite interpretation of the events of the last twenty years: ‘he was a perfect master of the law of Parliament, and attached to its privileges until [by the incapacitation of Wilkes] they were set up against the rights of the people’. The epitaph is tactfully silent on Dowdeswell’s religion. Dowdeswell’s ‘only weakness’, Burke later admitted, ‘was that he was always talking Atheism’.86 Always on the alert for opportunities to advance his protégés, Burke secured the commission for the Dowdeswell monument for John Hickey (1751–95), an Irish sculptor whose career he was eager to promote (242).87 America was the main theme of the session. Though little business was transacted before the Christmas recess, the debate on 5 December 1774 on the speech from the throne provided a foretaste of what was to come. The king’s speech had been kept studiously vague. To rally the opposition, Lord John Cavendish moved an amendment asking for ‘all the Accounts received from America to be laid before the house’. Burke’s speech was not reported at length, though Gibbon described it as ‘a water mill of words and images’.88 Charles Van (d. 1778), an intransigent anti-American, made a short speech that caught the mood of the house better than Burke’s copia. ‘I have no flowers [of rhetoric] Mr Speaker to strew,’ he declared (alluding to Burke); ‘all I have to say is, that I think the Americans are a rebellious and most ungrateful people, and I am for assuring the King that we will support 86 E.B. in conversation in 1784, recorded by Dugald Stewart; Edinburgh University Library, MS Dc. 6. 111. 87 The memorial was erected in Bushley Church, Worcestershire, and subsequently moved to the new church, where it remains. The full text of E.B.’s epitaph is printed in James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1826), i. 317–18. 88 Gibbon to John Baker Holroyd, 7–12 Dec. 1774, in Letters, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), ii. 45.

382 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 him in such measures as will be effectual to reduce them.’ Van’s singular bluntness was reported to have ‘set the whole House into a halloo! and answered Burke better than Cicero could have done with all his eloquence’.89 Van’s simple faith in the rightness and practicability of coercion was widely shared. The amendment was defeated by 73 to 264, a massive majority which the opposition was never able to erode.90 The ministry’s task was made easier by divisions within the opposition. Chatham, as usual, refused to consult or even to inform potential supporters of his intentions. As though purposely to alienate the Rockingham group, he included their Declaratory Act among the obnoxious measures to be repealed. If he expected to be swept to power on a wave of popular support, as in 1757, he miscalculated. His motions in the Lords, on 20 January and 1 February, were easily negatived. The ministry’s own proposals, which combined coercion with concession, were outlined on 2 February. The punitive measures were easily approved. North had a rougher ride with his conciliatory gestures, debated on 20 February. Some of his own supporters (notably Welbore Ellis) thought them too generous, though they were finally approved by 274 to 88 (about the usual majority). A sinister feature of the debate was that Sir Gilbert Elliot (1722–77), one of the ‘king’s friends’ demonized by the Rockingham party, seemed to have more effect in rallying support for the ministry than North himself.91 This small incident confirmed the worst suspicions of Burke and his friends, and breathed new life into the old ‘double cabinet’ myth. In language reminiscent of the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, Burke told Champion that Elliot had ‘given the signal of union from powers higher than Ministry’ (21 Feb. 1775: C iii. 118). Such skirmishes were but a prelude to Burke’s main effort of the session, delivered on 22 March 1775 and known since its publication (on 22 May) as his Speech on Conciliation.92 The celebrity of his great speech of the previous session, renewed by its recent publication (on 10 January), meant that expectations were high. Careful to avoid a reworking of the earlier speech, which had been mainly concerned with a historical analysis of the colonial problem, Burke built the Speech on Conciliation on a series of specific proposals. He had been badgering Rockingham since at least 5 January to take a more positive stand on America. Not until both North and Chatham had put forward their proposals did Rockingham agree. Burke’s propositions (the fifteen specific motions embodied in the speech, and moved 89 Thomas Hutchinson, Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, ed. Peter Orlando Hutchinson (London, 1883–6), i. 316–17. Hutchinson received the report from an MP who was present. 90 PDNA v. 239–42. 91 Almon, i. 195–214 (PH xviii. 319–38). Towards the end of the debate, Dunning drew attention to the remarkable effect of Elliot’s speech. 92 Todd, 25; published on 22 May 1775. The full title is The Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq. on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775. A third edition was called for by June.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 383 separately at its conclusion) were circulated among Rockingham’s friends and even among other members of the opposition.93 Burke spoke for about two and a half hours.94 His main point is simple: ‘the proposition is Peace’ (WS iii. 108). Peace, he concedes, is only to be bought by concession; but concession is preferable to the civil war which coercion is likely to provoke. Before detailing his concessions, Burke pauses to remind his audience of the flourishing state of the colonies: their large and growing population, their extensive and rapidly increasing commerce, their rich and abundant agriculture. Against the works of ‘generous nature’ (118), the use of force is made to appear almost sacrilegious. Worse, the success of war is less certain than the destruction it inevitably brings. Against the common opinion that resistance would crumble before a disciplined army, Burke warns that the Americans may prove unexpectedly tenacious. Descended in large part from the liberty-loving English, living under institutions that are in great measure democratic, and actuated by the spirit of Puritan independence in the northern colonies and by the pride of the slave-owner in the southern, the Americans are predisposed to resist oppression, a disposition powerfully reinforced by the smattering of knowledge of the law and legal rights that education has diffused throughout the colonies. Finally, at a distance of 3,000 miles, what government can enforce its laws against a hostile people? For all these reasons, the British may not have the easy victory that many expect. After briefly reviewing the fluctuations of British colonial policy over recent decades, Burke identifies four ways of dealing with the apparently intractable spirit of the Americans. To change it, he argues, is impossible; to prosecute it, hardly less so. ‘I do not know’, he confesses, ‘the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people’ (WS iii. 132). Dismissing out of hand the proposal to sever all connection with the colonies, Burke offers his own solution: comply with the spirit of America, allow them the liberty they love. Not until this point, when he has created a highly favourable image of America and the Americans, does he reveal the substance of his proposal: an explicit transfer of the power of internal taxation to the colonial assemblies, and the repeal of the Coercive Acts. The Navigation Acts would remain in force, and Parliament would retain a numinous superintending power. Such a bald summary does little to suggest why the speech received such a chorus of praise, even from many who disagreed with its conclusions. Studiously moderate in tone, rich but not over-luxuriant in style, carefully organized and structured, with transitions, recapitulations, and all the paraphernalia of formal rhetoric, despite its length, the speech made easy and 93 Rockingham to Savile, 7 Mar. 1775, WWM R1/1558, in Earl of Albemarle, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and his Contemporaries (London, 1852), ii. 272–3. 94 From 3.30 to 6.00, according to R.B. Sr. who was hovering in the lobby (R.B. Sr. to Champion, 22 Mar. 1775: C iii. 139–40).

384 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 enjoyable listening. Two memorable passages may be instanced. The first is the device of the angel who reveals to Lord Bathurst the future growth and greatness of the colonies. Allen Bathurst (1684–1775), one of the twelve lords created by Queen Anne to pass the Peace of Utrecht, was a relic of the age before last. Burke imagines an angel prophesying to him, in 1704, not only the future commercial prosperity of England, but the almost miraculous growth of America: ‘Young man, There is America—which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, shew itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.’ What England has taken seventeen centuries to achieve, America will equal in a single lifespan (WS iii. 115). This angel’s prophecy, happily imagined and nobly expressed, was much admired. Samuel Johnson was so annoyed by hearing it continually praised, that he was moved to an extempore parody, in which the devil appears to a young Whig and prophesies that Whiggism will soon poison even the paradise of America. Alluding to Burke’s New York agency, the devil reveals that future Americans will ‘fee their vile Agents in the house of Parliament, there to sow the seeds of Sedition’.95 Another bravura passage is Burke’s virtuoso depiction of the American whale fishery: Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay, and Davis’s Streights, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the Antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them, than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. (WS iii. 117)

Nor are these passages merely rhetorical. They exemplify the Olympian point of view Burke wished his hearers to adopt. Eschewing narrow views and legalistic notions, legislators should make the imaginative leap to view the empire as the angel saw it and as the whalers traverse it. Disposed as they were to appreciate and admire Burke’s speech, few members shared his vision. Charles Jenkinson (1729–1808), a ‘king’s friend’, was typical. He cited the Declaration of Rights (1689) as the basis for Parliament’s competence to tax; claimed that taxation was an inherent 95 Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi), ed. Katherine C. Balderston (2nd edn. Oxford, 1951), i. 194.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 385 right of sovereignty; and compared the colonial assemblies to the corporations of English towns. Most ominously, he cited the example of the French government’s use of the army to compel the recalcitrant estates of Languedoc to levy the taxes mandated by the central authority.96 Such arguments missed the whole point of Burke’s speech. Burke had avowedly set aside all questions of law and right, for he knew that they were against him. The right to tax he did not dispute, only the expediency of enforcing it in the face of implacable colonial opposition. This is the old Rockingham formula of 1766: repeal of the Stamp Act, with no surrender of the abstract right. The first, descriptive part of the speech was not irrelevant to Burke’s persuasive purpose, nor mere rhetorical decoration. He hoped to convince his audience that times had changed since Lord Bathurst’s youth. No regulations could be enforced against the concerted will of the Americans themselves. He failed, because most MPs still regarded the colonies as refractory children to be beaten into obedience. They sought both to tax the Americans and to punish them. Thus John Lewis (1738–97), waving a copy of the newly published Speech on American Taxation in his hand as the butt of his argument, ‘spoke of the relation of parent and child that subsisted between the countries; supposed ingratitude in the child, and wished for its chastisement’.97 Burke’s proposals seemed to reward rebellion. Burke entertained no illusions of success. North’s far less generous proposals had been given a stormy enough reception. Burke’s first resolution, an innocuous enough statement of fact, was negatived on the previous question by 78 to 270. Having thus tested opinion, he did not again divide the house. The remaining resolutions were defeated on the voices.98 Burke did not lose heart, for he had not spoken only for the occasion. The speech was intended to reach a wider audience among the reading public, to whom Burke sought to expound and defend the Rockingham party’s stand on America. The Speech on Conciliation was a labour of love as well as the discharge of a public duty. Grudging the time and energy diverted into the petty business of his constituents, Burke willingly devoted unlimited effort to his great speeches. Why he found such tasks pleasanter and more satisfying is not far to seek. Apart from the obvious gratification that the delivery of a successful speech brought, Burke’s deeper psychological needs were also met. Chafing against the inglorious ease imposed by Rockingham’s determined inactivity, Burke found in the composition of the Speech a welcome outlet for his restless drive to be active. For Burke, the knowledge that he was articulating an unpopular, minority opinion was always bracing. His sense of righteousness likewise sharpened the edge of his rhetoric. Active on 96 97 98

Almon, i. 368–9 (PH xviii. 539). 26 Jan. 1775; in Almon, i. 119 (PH xviii. 187). PDNA v. 590–4.

386 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 behalf of a small group fighting for what was right against the superior forces of darkness and oppression, Burke was in his element. Yet the Speech on Conciliation is more than a party manifesto. Burke used it to give expression to some of his favourite notions. One is the superiority of practice to theory. ‘I never ask what Government may do in Theory,’ he told O’Hara, ‘except Theory be the Object; When one talks of Practice they must act according to circumstances.’ This principle he identified as the ‘Key’ to the Speech on Conciliation (26 July 1775: C iii. 181–2). In the Speech itself he sets ‘profitable experience’ against ‘a mischievous theory’, ‘happy citizens’ against ‘subtle disputants’ (WS iii. 152, 157). Unwilling to risk what is good for the theoretical possibility of what is better, he invokes the authority of Aristotle against acting on the basis of mere ‘metaphysical speculations’: to seek ‘delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments’ is ‘the most fallacious of all sophistry’ (157). Burke was always suspicious of such abstract rights, which, if exercised ‘under certain circumstances’, were liable to become ‘the most odious of all wrongs, and the most vexatious of all injustice’ (133). In a passage of remarkable dexterity, he reverses the normal connotations of ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’: I am resolved this day to have nothing at all to do with the question of the right of taxation. Some gentlemen startle—but it is true: I put it totally out of the question. It is less than nothing in my consideration. I do not indeed wonder, nor will you, Sir, that gentlemen of profound learning are fond of displaying it on this profound subject. But my consideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the Policy of the question. I do not examine, whether the giving away a man’s money be a power excepted and reserved out of the general trust of Government; and how far all mankind, in all forms of Polity, are entitled to an exercise of that Right by the Charter of Nature. Or whether, on the contrary, a Right of Taxation is necessarily involved in the general principle of Legislation, and inseparable from the ordinary Supreme Power? (135)

‘Narrow’ and ‘confined’ are ordinarily pejorative terms in his vocabulary. Here, exceptionally, he inverts his usual antithesis to reprobate the canvassing of such ‘deep questions’. The rejection of the question of ‘right’ enables him to construct a middle position between two sets of doctrinaire extremists.99 Burke was genuinely fearful of what would happen if old political truths were exposed to trial. ‘Our late experience’, he lamented in the Speech on Conciliation, ‘has taught us, that many of those fundamental principles, formerly believed infallible, are either not of the importance they were 99

Chatham had espoused the first, the argument now generally known as ‘no taxation without representation’: most recently, in conversation (Rockingham to E.B., 7 Jan. 1775: C iii. 91–2); and in the Lords on 1 Feb. (PDNA v. 329–30; PH xviii. 203–4). Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny (published 8 Mar. 1775) was the latest exposition of the view that taxation is an inherent power of all government; Works, x. 411–55.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 387 imagined to be; or that we have not at all adverted to some other far more important, and far more powerful principles, which entirely over-rule those we had considered as omnipotent.’ He accordingly remonstrated against ‘any further experiments, which tend to put to the proof any more of these allowed opinions, which contribute so much to the public tranquillity’ (WS iii. 127). In politics, Burke looked for guidance to the practice of the past: to ‘the wisdom of our ancestors’ and ‘the genius of the English constitution’ (139). In the eighteenth century, to search the records of the past for solutions to present problems was not regarded as eccentric antiquarianism. Respect for precedent was shared by MPs of all shades of opinion. To justify granting fiscal autonomy to the colonial legislatures, Burke cited a range of precedents relating to the separate jurisdictions of Ireland, Wales, Chester, and Durham (139–44). The ministry’s scheme, by contrast, was a ‘meer project’. Then a strong term that connoted wild and sometimes shady speculation, a ‘project’ was at best ‘a thing new; unheard of; supported by no experience; justified by no analogy; without example of our ancestors, or root in the constitution’ (159). Such language allows Burke to cast North as a dangerous innovator, and to invest himself with the mantle of constitutional conservatism. This stance was a matter of genuine personal conviction as well as rhetorical convenience. For Burke, America showed the work of Providence unimpeded by the clumsy hand of man: ‘through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection’. No ‘presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances’ should be allowed to interfere with nature’s handiwork (118). Though confident that the eternal laws of nature could not be broken, Burke feared the ill effects of any attempt to evade them. One of his favourite appeals is to ‘the nature of things’. ‘Who are you,’ he asks, ‘that should fret and rage, and bite the chains of nature?—Nothing worse happens to you, than does to all Nations, who have extensive Empire . . . the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. . . . This is the immutable condition; the eternal Law, of extensive and detached Empire’ (WS iii. 124–5). Even in neighbouring Wales, the use of force had to be renounced in favour of conquest by assimilation and extension of privileges. In the case of Wales, the English took two centuries to discover the ‘eternal law’ by which Providence had ‘decreed vexation to violence; and poverty to rapine’ (142). The laws of nature may lie long undiscovered, but are ignored at great peril. Rejecting the proposal to admit colonial members at Westminster, Burke again invoked nature: ‘Opposuit natura—I cannot remove the eternal barriers of the creation’ (145). The Latin phrase is a quotation from Juvenal (Satires, 10. 152). Members who picked up the allusion (as many would, for it comes from a famous passage) would have been reminded of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who defied the mountains and the snows that nature put in his path to inflict on

388 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 the Romans one of the most crushing defeats in their history. The moral is that victories obtained in spite of nature are short-lived. Political wisdom co-operates with the eternal laws of nature rather than defying them. The strongest response to the Speech on Conciliation took the form of A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq.100 Its author was Josiah Tucker (1713–99), Dean of Gloucester, who had two personal reasons for writing against Burke. Before his promotion to his deanery, Tucker had served for many years (1737–58) in Bristol, where he had been an active supporter of Lord Clare. Naturally he resented what he saw as Bristol’s ingratitude to Clare, and regarded Burke as an unworthy intruder. In his Speech on American Taxation, Burke had referred contemptuously to Tucker as a dean writing for the court in the expectation of a bishopric (WS ii. 446). Tucker reciprocated, impugning Burke’s motives and charging him with disingenuousness, insincerity, and exploiting the American issue to attain place and profit.101 He took care that Burke’s New York agency was prominently displayed on the title-page of his Letter. Such personal reflections only added venom to a genuine and fundamental difference of outlook.102 Tucker anticipated one of Adam Smith’s shrewdest insights, that regulations and restrictions impede commerce rather than protecting it. For Tucker, imperialism was uneconomic. Slave labour was wasteful and unproductive; the decline of Spain illustrated the impoverishing effects of a slave-based empire. The only true foundation for commerce is self-interest. Let the Americans be independent, and they will continue to trade with Britain as along as British goods are competitive. Thus Tucker, like Smith, denied the economic value conventionally attributed to the possession of colonies. Burke disagreed, for he was prepared to make almost any political concession in order to retain even a nominal sovereignty over the colonies. Opponents of the Declaratory Act were fond of questioning the paradox of ‘rights’ that were never to be exercised. Such rights served, in his view, to keep the colonies within the imperial orbit. In the 1770s, he still held to the mercantilist belief that exclusive or preferential trade with its colonies benefits the home country. 100 Tucker’s pamphlet (Gloucester, 1775) reached a second edition and was reprinted in Dublin; Josiah Tucker, A Selection from his Economic and Political Writings, ed. Robert Livingston Schuyler (New York, 1931), 375–401. The only other pamphlet reply to E.B.’s speech was in an appendix (193– 212) to John Shebbeare’s An Essay on the Origin, Progress and Establishment of National Society (London, 1776). Shebbeare’s main target was Richard Price. 101 A Letter to Edmund Burke, in Schuyler’s Selection, 375, 379–80. 102 George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (London, 1981); and J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Paine: A Study in the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Conservatism’, in his Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 157–91.


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6 Burke could not devote the whole of his parliamentary energies to the great crisis. For the first time, he was forced to pay attention to the interests and business of his constituents.103 Sometimes no more was required than shepherding through the House an uncontroversial bill. By an oversight, Indian corn (maize) had been left out of Pownall’s Act of 1773. Burke helped secure the passage of an amending Act. Champion thought it sufficiently important to mention in several letters to his Philadelphia correspondent.104 Burke was apt to forget that the profitability of a trade might depend on a small difference in a duty or a regulation. The neglect of such measures, trivial in Burke’s estimation but important to his constituents, was ill taken. A series of temporary Acts, annually renewed, permitted the duty-free import into England of certain provisions from Ireland. This was of particular, though not exclusive, interest to Bristol, which enjoyed a large share of the trade with Ireland. Lord Clare had regularly taken responsibility for securing these renewals.105 In 1775, perhaps in pique at being rejected by his old constituency, he neglected to do so. Burke failed to discover this in time to secure its immediate renewal, though once apprised of its importance he managed the business with expedition. No one at Bristol was impressed with his excuse, that parliamentary etiquette was to leave such renewals to their regular sponsor. The Collector of Customs at Bristol, who owed his position to Clare, was quick to foment ill feeling against Burke by refusing to permit the landing of cargoes pending the renewed bill receiving the royal assent. Just a day or two after the delivery of his great Speech on Conciliation, he received an anxious letter from Champion about several ‘parcels of Butter & bakon’ that were being held up and becoming daily less saleable.106 To Burke, the transition from saving an empire to the fate of a few pounds of butter and bacon was painful and humiliating. Yet he mishandled the business in two ways. A member more anxious to please would have been eager to take charge of such measures, and more apologetic about any oversight. Constitutionally unable to admit that he was in the wrong, Burke was meanly evasive in attempting to inculpate the customs officer 103 P. T. Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, the Commissary of his Bristol Constituents, 1774–1780’, English Historical Review, 73 (1958), 252–69. 104 The American Correspondence of a Bristol Merchant, 1766–1776: Letters of Richard Champion, ed. G. H. Guttridge (Berkeley, 1934), 35–40. The Act was 15 George III, c. 1. 105 Rarely as Clare had visited Bristol, he had been attentive to the stomachs of his constituents. An undated election broadside issued just before he withdrew in 1774, purportedly by ‘a Kings-Wood Collier’, disclaims any knowledge of high politics but praises Clare for supporting measures tending to keep down the price of food; ‘The Merits of Lord Clare Brought to the Test’ (Bristol Reference Library, ‘Bristol Election, 1774’, B 18197, 16). 106 Champion to E.B., 22 Mar. 1775, Bristol Record Office, 38083(4), pp. 150–4.

390 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 responsible for enforcing the law as it stood.107 Burke learned the lesson, though he found it no easier to practise. In January, he had referred slightingly to ‘my Little share in the Little Bill’ permitting the import of Indian corn (C iii. 96). In March, on securing the renewal of the Irish Provisions Act, he asked Champion to ‘take care that this service be well puffed’ (132). The import bills at least reached the statute book. While an uncontentious local measure needed only an attentive MP to ensure its passage, in a crowded parliamentary session many private bills failed to clear all the procedural hurdles. Nor were all local measures uncontroversial, witness the Selby–Leeds Canal Bill. An MP for a popular constituencey was expected to secure the enactment of local legislation. Burke’s record on this was mixed. When Richard Champion, his most devoted local supporter, sought an extension of his patent on a new type of ceramic manufacture, Burke worked against both time and the powerful interest of Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) to secure a private Act before the end of the session.108 One of his failures was a bill to strengthen the laws against the plundering of wrecked ships. The main provision of the bill was to make the hundred on whose coast the ship was wrecked liable for any depredation, thereby encouraging the local gentry to be more vigilant in prevention.109 Feeling in Bristol ran high, particularly against a man convicted of plundering a Bristol ship wrecked on the Welsh coast, and sentenced to be hanged, but granted a stay of execution. On his constituents’ behalf, Burke dutifully protested. Yet far from sharing their thirst for revenge, he was embarrassed at having to represent so sanguinary a request. ‘If there be the least Ground’, he pleaded to the minister responsible, ‘for imagining any defect of Evidence against the unhappy Convict; or if the Judge, who tried the Cause, be for any reason dissatisfied with the Verdict, or that any subsequent matter whatsoever has appeard which may induce a belief in your Lordship that the person under sentence is innocent, I beg you will suppose that I make no sort of application against this mans pardon.’ If there were such mitigating circumstances, he would be happy to report them (16 Sept. 1775: C iii. 212–13). This letter does credit to Burke’s own humanitarian instincts. His constituents, who wanted an example as a 107 E.B. to Champion, 9 Mar. 1775 (C iii. 132); to Robert Smith, 24 Mar. (141); to Champion, 24 and 29 Mar. (143, 144–5); Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, the Commissary’, 254–6. 108 E.B. to Champion, 9 Mar. 1775 (C iii. 131); to Adam Smith, 1 May (153); from and to William Eden, 12 and 21 May (156–8); to Rockingham, 22 May (158–9); Hugh Owen, Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol, Being a History of ‘the True Porcelain’ by Richard Champion (London, 1873), 113–44. 109 E.B. to Robert Smith, 24 Mar. 1775 (C iii. 140–1); to Champion, 29 Mar. (145). Leave was given to bring in the bill on 17 Mar. Towards the end of the session E.B. tried to hurry it through, but it died when Parliament was prorogued on 26 May (CJ xxxv. 204, 390–1, 393). The text of the bill is reprinted in House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sheila Lambert (Wilmington, 1975– 6), xxvii. 107–9.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 391 deterrent, would have been better pleased by a tougher stand. Burke reintroduced his bill in the following session, but with no better success.110 Though he spent as much time as he could at Beaconsfield, Burke did not mix much in local society. In 1774, however, a lawsuit with his neighbour Edmund Waller over a disputed boundary brought him more into contact with other local landowners. In 1775, apparently as a goodwill gesture on their part, he was invited to act as steward at the Aylesbury races. With little interest in the turf, Burke’s instinctive reaction was to decline. Happily for local harmony, a friend (Murrough O’Brien, later Earl of Inchiquin; 1726– 1808) was at hand who ‘kicked his shins till he made him accept it’. Apt to appear aloof to strangers, Burke had little in common with the typical local squire. ‘People say they did not know him,’ Will reported to O’Hara, ‘as indeed I believe there is not in the world a man less understood. A goodhumoured booby squire speaking of us both to some women of our acquaintance allowed me willingly enough all the idle merit of companionability, but “by G— that t’other Burke man,” says he, “I should not like to drink a bottle with him at all.” ’111 Will was better suited to the harddrinking life of the country squire of the time. Though Burke was now little concerned with Ireland, he was occasionally reminded of his roots there. In 1774, John Hely Hutchinson, an ambitious Irish lawyer and politician whom Burke had known for many years, was named Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. The appointment was part of a complicated piece of jobbery. The college statutes required the Provost to be unmarried and in holy orders. In addition, the recent practice had been to promote one of the senior fellows to the provostship. Hutchinson received a royal dispensation from the statutory requirements, but no dispensation could blunt the resentment felt in the college at the intrusion of an outsider.112 Burke had supported the candidature of his friend Thomas Leland, a senior fellow in holy orders, who had devoted his life to the college.113 Energetic and opinionated, Hutchinson determined to infuse a new vigour into the somnolent institution committed to his care. He aimed to make the course of study more relevant to the requirements of aspiring 110 E.B. asked Champion to collect ‘all the most affecting & distressing circumstances’ surrounding the plundering of the Bristol ship William, which had provoked particular indignation; R.B. Sr. to Champion, endorsed ‘Mar 76’, NRO A. xvi. 25. A deposition from the ship’s master is preserved among E.B.’s papers (A. xxv. 24). On 27 Mar. 1776, E.B. obtained leave to bring in a revised bill (reprinted in House of Commons Sessional Papers, xxvii. 281–5) only to see it defeated on the second reading on 30 Apr. (WS iii. 225–8). 111 2 Sept. 1774, in Ross J. S. Hoffman, Edmund Burke, New York Agent: with his Letters to the New York Assembly and Intimate Correspondence with Charles O’Hara, 1761–1776 (Philadelphia, 1956), 568. 112 R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin 1592–1952: An Academic History (Cambridge, 1982), 53–6. 113 E.B. to William Markham, 20 June 1774 (C ii. 541–3). Leland sent E.B. four letters asking for his help: on 14 June (not extant); and on 15, 26, and 27 June 1774, WWM BkP 1/518, 521, 522. The two last are printed in Corr. (1844), i. 459–64.

392 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 men of the world of his own type. Although many of his ideas were in themselves admirable, his high-handed and tactless manner provoked bitter opposition. Early in 1775, he printed a few copies of a pamphlet in defence of his reforms.114 He sent one to Burke, who thanked him with polite irony: I never entertained the least doubt that you would seek and find reputation everywhere. But when you had chosen academic ground, I was greatly apprehensive that your choice would produce far more benefit to the education of youth, than repose and tranquility to your own mind. It seemed to me impossible, that the animosities and emulation which must ever attend the great and conspicuous part you have acted in public life [first as a ‘patriot’, until bought by the Castle], should not follow you into your learned retreat [Hutchinson remained active both at the Bar and in politics] where they would be more permanently felt, and would of course greatly disquiet a man of your tender and exquisite sensibility. . . . I had always thought that this office is best suited to a man of the ecclesiastical gown, and a mere academic. I am not altered in my opinion by the present exception, for every layman, and every man of business is not an Hutchinson. (20 Jan. 1775: C iii. 104)

The irony was lost on Hutchinson, who replied in all seriousness. The disclaimer printed in italic is a modest afterthought: ‘a College in a great & turbulent Metropolis requires a firmer & steadier hand than such an ecclesiastick usually possesses, the Government of this place shou’d be upon a great Noble & enlarg’d plan, & consequently (tho’ I feel every defect while I say so), by a man of liberal sentiments, of extensive & various views of life, capable of bold & strenuous Exertions to call forth the Genius of Ireland’.115 Hutchinson typified the successful self-promoter, voracious in his appetite for places and sinecures, shameless in seeking them. Though Burke had chosen another road, the easy worldly success of men such as Hely Hutchinson was no less galling. Irony was a weapon which he could safely and successfully wield against them. Much as Burke enjoyed the quiet retirement of Beaconsfield, he could never forget politics or public affairs for long. In 1775, his letters to O’Hara lack even the usual pretence of disengagement. They are full of politics and America (26 July and 17 Aug.: C iii. 181–2, 185–8). An unexpected letter from a retired Dutch physician served as a reminder of a world he had lost. Pieter Camper (1722–89) wrote to him not as a politician, but as the author of the Philosophical Enquiry. Burke sent a friendly reply.116 When Count Patrick Darcy (1725–79), an Irish émigré serving in the French army, sent Burke a present of seeds for his garden, Burke jestingly interpreted the gift 114 An Account of Some Regulations Made in Trinity College, Dublin, since the Appointment of the Present Provost (Dublin, 1775). 115 Hutchinson to E.B., 25 Mar. 1775, WWM BkP 1/673. 116 18 July 1775 (C iii. 178–9); C. P. Courtney, ‘Edmund Burke and Petrus Camper’, English Studies, 43 (1962), 467–75.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 393 as a tactful lesson. ‘I ought to remember’, he wrote, ‘that your present of Garden Seeds was intended to instruct as well as to feed me, “Cultivons notre Jardin”. This is your advice conveyd in a parcel of Celeri’ (5 Oct. 1775: 228). Burke saw the wisdom of Candide’s counsel, but could never practise it. Burke’s inability to disengage himself from politics cut him off from most of his close political associates, who all too easily found distraction from the unpleasant realities of political life in the amenities of their rural retreats. A recurrent theme in his letters is his unremitting effort to infuse action and vigour into Rockingham and his party. This year was no exception. About the end of August 1775, he spent a week at Bristol. There he learned, to his unwelcome surprise, that ‘even in the most quiet times’ his constituents expected ‘an annual complimentary Visit’. Yet he did not take advantage of the opportunity to enquire into local concerns or grievances. Instead, he was preoccupied with promoting a petition against the American war. To this end, a ‘secret Committee’ was formed to concert the petition while preserving an appearance of a spontaneous expression of popular opinion (14 Sept.: C iii. 207–11).117 This was Burke’s idea of serving his constituents. Rockingham was lukewarm. Two exchanges of letters failed to shake his conviction that nothing useful could be attempted before the opening of Parliament, and that any effort to rouse the deluded people might even be counter-productive.118 ‘I would wish also to keep my mind as free as possible from being irritated,’ he hinted to Burke in September (215). Burke found this impossible. Reading Rockingham’s letter as a personal rebuke, he felt constrained to apologize for and justify his unseasonable activity (1 Oct.: 223–4). Rockingham’s paralysis is understandable. He and his party were awkwardly placed. Their commitment to the Declaratory Act meant that they could neither propose the substantive concessions to American opinion that might once have produced conciliation, nor co-operate heartily with the Chathamites. The American cause and its sympathizers were thoroughly unpopular in England. Even the merchants, who had been so eager for the repeal of the Stamp Act, now failed to come forward. Burke condemned their selfish, narrow views. The Americans, too, as he complained to Rockingham, remained unable to distinguish who were their true friends in England, stubbornly looking to Chatham (22 Aug.: C iii. 191, 195). Rockingham and Burke were both living partly in the past, and partly in the imaginary world of the Present Discontents. Not only were they unwilling to repudiate the Declaratory Act, they persisted in interpreting every move or 117 James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in EighteenthCentury Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990), 330–5. 118 E.B. to and from Rockingham, 22–3 Aug., 11, 14, and 24 Sept. 1775 (C iii. 189–96, 203–11, 214– 17).

394 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 measure of the ministry in terms of ‘secret influence’ and the sinister designs of the ‘king’s friends’, though by now Charles Jenkinson had replaced Bute as the éminence grise.119 After a decade of the best efforts of the party, ‘the people’ remained obstinately blind or deluded. Burke begins to sound the note of John Brown’s Estimate: ‘As to the good people of England, they seem to partake every day more and more of the Character of that administration which they have been induced to tolerate. I am satisfied, that within a few years there has been a great Change in the National Character. We seem no longer that eager, inquisitive, jealous, fiery people, which we have been formerly.’ Where Rockingham fondly supposed that time and events would rouse the people from their lethargy, Burke advocated activity. ‘I do not think’, he warned, ‘that Weeks, or even Months, or years, will bring the Monarch, the Ministers, or the people, to feeling.’ The people must be managed: ‘All direction of publick humour and opinion must originate in a few. Perhaps a great deal of that humour and opinion themselves must be owing to such direction. Events supply materials. Times furnish dispositions; but Conduct alone can bring them to bear to any useful purpose’ (22–3 Aug. 1775: C iii. 190–1).120 Almost in despair at Rockingham’s inertia, Burke turned to the Duke of Richmond. In personality, Richmond was the closest to Burke of the Rockingham party grandees. Though he lacked Burke’s tenaciousness of purpose, being given rather to short bursts of intense activity, like Burke he was obstinate and opinionated.121 Richmond’s instructions for a portrait of Burke that he commissioned in 1775 show that he recognized and shared Burke’s dislike of imposed inactivity: if I wait for my Picture till you have nothing to do, I am likely to go without it. In the midst of Business a little Relaxation is of use, but I have thought of a method even to reconcile Your Business with this sitting, which is by having Mr Romney take Your Portrait while You are writing or Reading whichever you like best. . . . Romney has half finished one for me which for my own Conveniency I chose to have reading . . . I think a Portrait of You, merely looking one in the Face and doing nothing can never be like as it must give a Representation so different from Your real nature. I wish therefore to have You painted doing something. . . . Writing, will, I think, do very well, and will suit you exceedingly. (25 Nov. 1775: C iii. 238)

Such a portrait of Burke ‘doing something’, if only reading or writing, might have been as successful as the portrait of Richmond on which George 119 ‘I have great reason to suspect that Jenkinson governs every thing’, E.B. told Rockingham (5 Jan. 1775: C iii. 89). In the Commons, E.B. accused Jenkinson of being ‘the real minister’ (8 Nov. 1775: PDNA vi. 198). 120 E.B. would say much the same to Fox on 8 Oct. 1777 (C iii. 380–4). 121 E.B. to Rockingham, 18 Aug. 1767 (C i. 321); Richmond to E.B., 15 Nov. 1772, and E.B.’s reply (ii. 371–3).

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 395 Romney (1734–1802) was then engaged (Plate 24). Richmond’s intentness as he pores on his book suggests a powerful and active mind. The serious portraits of Burke ‘merely looking one in the Face’ are indeed lifeless compared to the animated caricatures that capture his intense personality. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not clear, when Burke sat for Romney (in April 1776), the artist ignored Richmond’s suggestion and painted Burke ‘doing nothing’.122 To Richmond as to Rockingham, Burke emphasized the passive quality of ‘the people’. Their ‘present supine acquiescence’ he excused, for ‘God and nature never made them to think or to Act without Guidance and direction’. They have taken their opinions from the ministry; the opposition has been at fault for not promoting its case with sufficient vigour. Only when the people ‘resist such endeavours as ought to be used, by those who by their Rank and fortune in the Country, by the goodness of their Characters, and their experience in their affairs are their Natural Leaders’ will despair be in order (26 Sept. 1775: C iii. 218). Such a time came at the general election of 1784, when ‘the people’ refuted Burke’s theory so forcibly that even he could not mistake their meaning (v. 154). Burke never forgave ‘the people’ for hearkening to the ministry, or to such selfish demagogues as Wilkes, rather than their ‘Natural Leaders’. He was thus not displeased when the radical factions fell out among themselves, as they did when Wilkes (breaking a self-denying pledge) sought the lucrative position of Chamberlain of the City of London.123 Burke offered this sage advice to an idealistic young man hovering on the threshold of a possible career in politics. Drawing ‘an useful lesson from the unprincipled behaviour of a corrupt and Licentious people’, he advised his young friend ‘never to sacrifice his principles to the hope of obtaining their affections’. To ‘Love and serve’ the people was a public man’s instinct and duty; but they are as little to be trusted as princes. ‘For what inward rescource has he, when turned out of Courts or hissed out of Townhalls, who has made their opinions the only standard of what is right; and their favour the sole means of his happiness?’124 Burke’s ‘inward rescource’ was the unshakable conviction of the rightness of his opinions and principles that he maintained without fear or any expectation of favour and against any degree of obloquy, ridicule, or abuse. 122 Humphry Ward and W. Roberts, Romney (London, 1904), ii. 22. The original painting is lost, as is a copy commissioned in 1786 for Ernst Brandes (1758–1810) of Hanover. Another copy, of uncertain provenance, is now at Churchill College, Cambridge. It corresponds with the engraving (reproduced in C v, facing p. xi) made about 1786, and known to have been taken from Richmond’s original, for Samuel Parr’s edition of Bellenden. 123 Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford, 1996), 156–8. Wilkes made the pledge in a letter to John Horne, 28 May 1771, printed in the Gazetteer, 30 May 1771. 124 E.B. to John Bourke, 11 July 1776 (C iii. 281). In a note on the letter (280 n. 1), the editor suggests that the ‘young friend’ was George Shee (1754–1825), John Bourke’s nephew.

396 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 Meanwhile, Parliament reassembled on 26 October 1775 with ‘the people’ no better informed or better disposed. The opposition’s usual amendment to the address was defeated by 278 to 108.125 Independent support for the ministry’s firm stand was dispiriting. Nor could Burke deny that public opinion was strongly anti-American. The opposition was divided as well as weak. When John Dunning (1731–83), an eminent barrister, Recorder of Bristol and a follower of Chatham, came to the city for the assizes, he contrived to introduce into his speech some anti-ministerial comments on America. Yet Dunning, as Burke indignantly complained to Rockingham, would do nothing to help him consolidate his position in the constituency (14 Sept. 1775: C iii. 209). By March 1776, even two of Burke’s most loyal supporters, Richard Champion and Paul Farr (d. 1794), could not travel together from London to Bristol without quarrelling over the Declaratory Act (253–5). From such an opposition, Lord North had nothing to fear. On 16 November 1775, Burke delivered his third great oration on America, embodying his second set of proposals for conciliation. The longest of the three (three and a half hours), it rallied a larger minority, 105 to 210, than either Fuller’s motion in 1774 (49 to 182) or Burke’s own propositions of 22 March (78 to 270).126 Burke thought at one time of revising it for publication, describing it to O’Hara as ‘my best in that way of proposition’ (7 Jan. 1776: C iii. 246). Since he never prepared a full text, the speech is known only from drafts and reports, the longest of which is about 5,000 words. This provides a coherent account of the structure and the arguments, but conveys no sense of rhetoric or style.127 In the absence of any chorus of praise such as greeted the earlier speeches, Horace Walpole’s report that Burke spoke ‘in general ill’ may express the common opinion. Burke had indeed little new to offer, hardly more than a réchauffé of familiar Rockinghamite nostrums: repeal of the tea duty and the Coercive Acts; a formal abrogation of the right of levying internal taxes, though not of the power to impose commercial regulations. Nor did Burke propose to repeal the Quebec Act, an omission which Walpole interpreted as ‘another symptom of his old popery’.128 True to the Rockingham faith, Burke explicitly refused to repeal the Declaratory Act, professing to regard its repeal as impossible as well as impolitic, thus forfeiting the potential support of the Chathamites. New elements in response to recent developments included 125 CJ xxxv. 399. The ‘amendment’ was to replace the substantive part of the address with a call for an enquiry and a fresh approach to the American problem. 126 CJ xxxiv. 658 (19 Apr. 1774); xxxv. 217 (22 Mar. 1775); xxxv. 447–8 (16 Nov. 1775). 127 WS iii. 185–97 (reports); 201–20 (drafts). In 1788, a shorthand writer told Gibbon that ‘a ready and rapid Orator’ would speak at a rate between 7,000 and 7,500 words per hour; Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), 192. At this rate, E.B.’s speech would have exceeded 25,000 words. 128 The Last Journals of Horace Walpole during the Reign of George III from 1771–1783, ed. A. Francis Steuart (London, 1910), i. 494.

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 397 approval for the calling of a common colonial assembly (but not recognition of the existing Congress) and an amnesty for offences already committed. Denying that many Americans really wanted independence, he claimed that his bill offered a prospect of restoring peace and harmony. Burke was still living in the world of 1766. Burke liked to innovate by precedent. Parliament, he argued, taking his cue from a distinction made by Lord John Cavendish, was not the ‘representative’ but the ‘sovereign’ of America. Sovereignty ‘was not in its nature an idea of abstract unity; but was capable of great complexity and infinite modifications’. Edward I had renounced his power to tax without the consent of Parliament.129 By analogy, Parliament could delegate its right of taxing the colonies without derogating from its supremacy as affirmed in the Declaratory Act (WS iii. 193–4). This ingenious attempt to salvage the Declaratory Act went too far for British opinion and not far enough for the Americans. The Rockingham party remained imprisoned in its own past. On 20 November 1775, just a few days after the rejection of Burke’s bill, Lord North introduced and gained ready approval for the Prohibitory Bill, the ministry’s chief new proposal. While consolidating and extending some of the provisions of the earlier Coercive Acts, it also provided for the appointment of a peace commission which might suspend these provisions. To Champion, Burke denounced ‘the sweeping and comprehensive ruin of this most wicked and sacrilegious of all measures’ (15 Dec. 1775: C iii. 239).130 At the urging of his Bristol constituents, however, he persuaded the ministry to accept amendments on points of detail.131 Burke also secured the passage of two other pieces of legislation of special interest to Bristol. One was uncontentious, providing for improvements to the city’s docks.132 The other was a more controversial proposal to make the river Stroudwater navigable from the Severn to Wallbridge (near the town of Stroud). This project elicited an unusually clear demonstration of Burke’s ability to reverse his arguments. Several petitions were received against it. Burke ridiculed some of their arguments through a parodic paraphrase: ‘1. That it will cost those who engage in it a great deal of their own money. 2. That an inland Canal cannot be made without cutting through Land. 3. That it cannot be filled without Water. 4. That water is liquid, & when it oozes through the banks will wet the adjoining grounds.’ If such objections were 129 The statute of 34 Edward I, de tallagio non concedendo, was familiar from its citation in the preamble to the Petition of Right of 1628. 130 Thomas, Tea Party to Independence, 297–300, argues that the bill was more conciliatory than has been allowed; E.B.’s reaction does not support this interpretation. 131 Paul Farr to E.B., 11 Dec. 1775, WWM BkP 1/790; Merchants of Bristol to E.B., 12 Dec., BkP 1/791; E.B. to Champion, 15 Dec. (C iii. 239); Grey Cooper to E.B., n.d., BkP 1/793. The amendments were accepted in the Lords on 19 Dec. (PDNA vi. 373–5). 132 Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, the Commissary’, 257–8.

398 america and bristol, 1774‒1776 allowed, he asserted, no canal could ever have been constructed.133 Yet Burke had himself urged similar arguments against the Selby Canal in 1774: its unnecessary expense, its destruction of land, and the drainage problems it would create.134 In both cases, Burke was arguing like a lawyer from his brief, rather than expressing his own opinions. Other constituency business entangled Burke in a labyrinthine negotiation with the bureaucracy of the Treasury. Bristol merchants were concerned that their London counterparts obtained more advantageous terms from the customs when they claimed remission of the duty paid on imported raisins and currants found to have been damaged. Burke had to confess to Champion that ‘Last year I was Master of that Business—but as these Matters go out of my head in the intervals of Parliament, I must beg you to refresh my memory with the chief points in the Case’ (8 Feb. 1776: C iii. 247). A further complication was that the Bristolians wanted Burke to secure the concession for themselves, without alerting the Liverpool merchants. This required finesse on Burke’s part, and with the natural dilatoriness of administration and other urgent matters taking up time and attention, the business dragged on into 1777.135 More vexing than the time which such business engrossed was the awkward duality of roles which Burke had to combine. On national issues he was one of the ministers’ most unsparing critics, yet he had frequently to process their good offices on behalf of his Bristol constituents. Though he usually obtained the favour, he found the process demeaning. ‘We are a people who have just lost an Empire,’ Burke lamented to Champion soon after the end of what had been a long and frustrating session (30 May 1776: C iii. 269). He had suffered personal losses as well as political defeats. Dr Nugent died on 12 November 1775. Nugent was one of the few whom Burke both loved and respected. In the new year, he lost two valued Irish friends of long standing: Charles O’Hara in February, and John Ridge in March.136 Burke’s long and intimate letters to O’Hara are among his most open and revealing. Ridge, too, was a trusted confidant whom he had known since the 1740s. Burke did not make friends easily, nor could he co-operate cordially with people he disliked. Politics and personalities were thus always inseparable for him. Of his strongest supporters at Bristol, the four men who have been called his ‘Bristol cabinet’, only two became personal friends. With Champion and Noble, who were implacably hostile to Cruger, Burke was soon at ease. Their personalities, prejudices, and 133 NRO A. xxvii. 72. The petitions parodied by E.B. are those from a group of local property-owners and from the city of Gloucester (CJ xxxv. 512). The most likely date for E.B.’s speech is 12 Feb. 1776, when counsel were heard and the bill committed after what the London Evening Post (10–13 Feb.) called ‘a warm debate’. The bill was enacted as 16 George III, c. 21. 134 3 Mar. 1774, YB OF 5. 349; Middlesex Journal, 3–5 Mar. 1774. 135 Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, the Commissary’, 264. 136 W.B. to Rockingham, 25 Mar. 1776 (C iii. 255).

america and bristol, 1774‒1776 399 politics all matched. With Paul Farr and Joseph Harford, who were inclined to make common cause with Cruger and his rabble, Burke never achieved the same intimacy.137 The loss of O’Hara and Ridge coincided with a political disappointment in Ireland. Burke had hoped that the Irish Parliament would act as an umpire or intermediary between Britain and America. He was bitterly chagrined that instead it tamely echoed its British counterpart. When Arthur Young, planning a tour of Ireland to study the state of its agriculture, asked him for introductions, Burke replied sourly that ‘his acquaintance there is almost worn out’ (May 1776: C iii. 270). An exception was his old friend Lord Charlemont.138 Writing to him on Young’s behalf, Burke divided his letter between praise of Young’s enterprise and censure of Ireland’s failure to seize the ‘glorious opportunity . . . of being the safe and certain mediatour in the quarrels of a great Empire’ (4 June: 271). These quarrels were soon put beyond such mediation by the Declaration of Independence, news of which reached Burke about 10 August.139 The Declaration was as unwelcome to him as to anyone. At first, he hoped that the Americans could be induced to rescind it, for it undermined his contention that they would willingly abide by the compromise of 1766, and he shared the prevailing view that the colonies were vital to British prosperity. ‘We are deeply in blood,’ he lamented to Shackleton. ‘I do not know how to wish success to those whose Victory is to seperate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression and aburdity’ (11 Aug. 1776: 286). This would be his dilemma for the next several years. 137 The ‘Bristol cabinet’ is P. T. Underdown’s phrase; ‘Burke’s Bristol Friends’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 77 (1958), 127–50. 138 Charlemont is among those whom Young thanked in the preface to the Tour in Ireland (London, 1780), in which he published his findings. 139 The Declaration was reported in the London Evening Post, 8–10 Aug. 1776; the full text was published in the issue of 15–17 Aug.

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waiting on events, 1776‒1779

11 Waiting on Events, 1776–1779 1 These were among the most dispiriting years of Burke’s public life. Unwilling to abandon the Declaratory Act yet opposed to the use of force, the Rockingham party watched helplessly as Britain and the American colonies fought a destructive yet inconclusive war. The role of a wartime opposition is never easy. In this instance, its discomfort was aggravated by the initial popularity of the war. The king, the ministry, and public opinion were convinced not only that Parliament had a right to tax the colonies, but that its right should be exercised. Burke could make no headway against this delusion. The strain of constant but futile attempts, repeated over three parliamentary sessions, to awaken his countrymen from their dreams of coercion took its toll. Burke often appears at his worst: peevish, selfrighteous, living in the nightmare world of his own heated imagination. Bristol depended on the Atlantic trade, which suffered severely from the effects of the war.1 The Common Council of the city and the Society of Merchant Venturers (usually called Merchants’ Hall; the principal commercial organization) were two powerful bodies accustomed to lobby the government on issues that affected their interests. Burke wanted Bristol to petition against the war. He was bitterly disappointed when, far from providing him with the strong support he needed, opinion in the city proved divided. Burke was embarrassed by the strong and well-organized anti-American lobby, which undermined his claim to speak for Bristol. By spending more time in the city, he could have helped animate and articulate the anti-war forces. Instead, he preferred to direct them from London through the efforts of such friends as Champion. Distance was not the problem. Bristol was no more than a long day’s coach journey from Beaconsfield.2 His reluctance was psychological, and cost him dear. In August 1776, Burke paid his second and last visit to Bristol between the 1774 and 1780 elections. He was most unwilling to make it, despite the The average annual volume of incoming transatlantic shipping fell from 21,202 tons in 1773–7 to 12,326 tons in 1778–80; Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 25. 2 In Apr. 1775, a ‘flying’ coach began to make the journey from London to Bristol in one day; a more leisurely two-day service continued to operate. Lloyd’s Evening Post, 24–7 Mar. 1775. 1

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 401 badgering of his friends and supporters. ‘It is certainly very inconvenient for me to go to Bristol at this particular time,’ he told Champion, adding, to prevent further importunity, that ‘no other, in this summer, is perfectly easy’ (C iii. 289). When he finally capitulated, he did so not to canvass but for a more limited purpose. John Noble urged him to come, if only for two days, to persuade Paul Farr to stand for the Common Council, the body that controlled Bristol’s municipal affairs. The corporation was a selfperpetuating oligarchy, headed by a mayor, elected annually from the twelve aldermen (chosen for life), a body recruited in turn from the thirty common councillors (who also served for life). Membership of the council conferred status and prestige. The price, however, was filling the burdensome office of sheriff for a year. This thankless task was usually imposed on the two junior councillors; hence Paul Farr’s reluctance to stand. ‘All our Authority Consequence Weight & every other Necessity’, so Noble assured Burke, depended on their friends’ filling both vacant seats.3 Such an appeal even Burke could not resist. Arriving on 17 August, he made his visit as short as he decently could. His original mission was a failure: Paul Farr could not be persuaded to stand. Fortunately, his brother John Farr (d. 1797) and another sympathizer, John Harris (c.1726–1801), proved more amenable. Duly elected to the Common Council at the end of the month, they were the sheriffs to whom Burke would address his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. Burke’s other activities have left little trace. He attended a meeting of the Herefordshire Society, and contributed five guineas to a society for the release of imprisoned debtors.4 He failed to do much canvassing, however, for his visit passed unnoticed in the Bristol newspapers. After a meeting of his supporters at Champion’s on the 22nd, he left with a sense of immediate relief but foreboding for his future as member for the city. From his brief visit to Bristol, Burke hastened to Yorkshire, where a solemn conclave of Rockingham’s followers was gathering at Wentworth. The meeting was primarily concerned with strategy. Should the party continue its fruitless opposition? As on earlier occasions, they debated the possibility of a formal, well-publicized secession from Parliament. Though opinions were as various as ever, a tentative decision was made in favour of a withdrawal. News of a British victory on Long Island precipitated a change of mind.5 The new session opened on 31 October 1776 with the Rockingham party in attendance. Lord John Cavendish moved the customary amendment to the address. Drawn up by Burke, an ‘amendment’ only in name, this proposed to replace the substance of the address with an Noble to E.B., 10 Aug. 1776, NUL PwF/2086. G. E. Weare, Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol, from 1774 till 1780; with a Prefatory Memoir (Bristol, 1894), 133. 5 Fox to Rockingham, 13 Oct. 1776, WWM R1/1686, in Earl of Albemarle, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and his Contemporaries (London, 1852), ii. 297–8. 3 4

402 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 indictment of ministerial policy on America about twice the length of the original.6 For once, Burke did not speak. Waiting for one of the law officers to rehearse the usual legal arguments against the Americans, and prepared to elaborate one of his stock themes, setting their narrow legalism against his own enlarged statesmanship, he was disappointed when neither of them gave him the opening he wanted (C iii. 299). The amendment was lost by 87 to 242. Burke made his first important speech of the session on 6 November, when Lord John moved for a committee to consider the Americans’ grievances. After a spirited personal attack on Wedderburn (the SolicitorGeneral), probably prepared for the previous debate, he developed a more general critique of ministerial policy. The Americans, he maintained, had not wanted to declare their independence. They had been goaded into doing so, ‘not as a matter of choice, but necessity’. From a wide-ranging historical disquisition, he concluded that no despot or tyrant, not Philip II of Spain, had ever treated or even threatened to treat their most refractory subjects as the ministers had treated the colonies (WS iii. 252–6).7 As this speech illustrates, Burke was one prominent politician who actually read some of the books that strangers sent him. In his remarks on Philip II, he drew on the forthcoming History of the Reign of Philip the Second by Robert Watson (1730?–81), professor at the University of St Andrews. Watson came to London in the summer of 1776, to see his book through the press. Though armed with an introduction to Burke, either from timidity or because he really was fully engaged with correcting proofs, he did not use it. Instead, he wrote to Burke after his return to Scotland, and arranged for the dispatch of an advance copy of his History.8 After the defeat of Lord John’s motion, the idea of secession was revived. The Rockingham party began a partial boycott of public business, and during the Christmas recess a more formal withdrawal was again mooted. Still there was no consensus. Burke argued strongly in favour of seceding, provided that certain stringent conditions were met. As he explained in a long letter to Rockingham, merely ceasing to attend was not enough. To have any effect, secession should be accompanied by a public manifesto. He reprobated those who supported the plan only because ‘it promised to emancipate them from the servitude of irksome Business, and to afford them an opportunity of retiring to ease and Tranquility’. To be effective, the gesture needed to be dramatic. ‘To pursue violent measures with langour and irresolution’, he told Rockingam, ‘is not very consistent in The amendment was lost by 87 to 242 (CJ xxxvi. 4–5). E.B.’s authorship is attested by a draft in his hand (WS iii. 247–51). The debate is reported in Almon, vi. 6–47 (PH xviii. 1397–1431). 7 The motion was defeated by 47 to 109 (CJ xxxvi. 14). 8 George Dempster to E.B., 8 June 1776, WWM BkP 1/864; Watson to E.B., 28 Oct. 1776, BkP 1/ 889. E.B.’s copy of Watson’s History (London, 1777) is no. 581 in his Sale Catalogue. 6

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 403 Speculation; and it is not more reputable or safe in practice.’ Unless the party acted ‘with their whole hearts . . . with a certain degree of Zeal, and even warmth and indignation’, they had better not attempt it (6 Jan. 1777: C iii. 311–12). Burke, as usual, was burning with such zeal; too many of the others were but Laodiceans. Burke thought that the party should publish a pièce justificative in defence of the secession. For this purpose, he drafted an ‘Address to the King’ (WS iii. 259–76).9 Taking its cue from the legal fiction that ‘the king can do no wrong’, this verbose document pretends that the king, misled by his wicked ministers, is unaware of the true state of affairs. The ‘Address’ purports to inform him of the true history and state of the dispute with the colonies. The device is clumsy, for the fulsome and deferential style of a royal address is at odds with the stringent criticisms of ministerial (and royal) policy that the document contains. Burke hoped great things from this ‘Address’, overestimating its likely effects in a way that evinces the overheated state of his mind. Modern readers smile at Macaulay’s description of the Rockingham party as ‘men worthy to have charged by the side of Hampden at Chalgrove, or to have exchanged the last embrace with Russell on the scaffold in Lincoln’s Inn Fields’.10 Developing alarmist fantasies that anticipate his response to Jacobinism in the 1790s, Burke imagined them in just such a heroic posture. He recalled some of the more violent measures of the early years of the century, the impeachment of Henry Sacheverell in 1710 and the exile of Francis Atterbury in 1722. ‘None of these Methods is impossible,’ he told Rockingham: ‘the Court may select three or four of the most distinguished among you for the Victims . . . you have all of you, as principals or auxiliaries, a much hotter and more dangerous conflict in all probability to undergo than any you have been yet engaged in’ (6 Jan. 1777: C iii. 313). Burke composed his ‘Address to the King’ in just such a mood. ‘On our parts,’ he asserted, ‘we should think ourselves unworthy of Life, which we only value for the means of spending it in honour and virtue, if we ever submitted to Taxes, to which we did not consent, either directly, or by a representation satisfactory to the body of the people.’ More moderate counsels within the party dampened his ardour, and the passage was amended to read: ‘on our part we shou’d think ourselves unjustifiable as good Citizens, and not influenced by the true spirit of Englishmen, if, with any effectual means of prevention in our hands, we were to submit to Taxes to which we did not consent either directly; or by a representation of the 9 Though not published in 1777, the ‘Address’ eventually found its way into print (from an early draft) in the Monthly Magazine, 4 (July 1797), 19–25. In 1812, E.B.’s executors published an authorized text from a revised version. 10 Edinburgh Review, 80 (1844), 571; repr. in Critical and Historical Essays, ed. F. C. Montague (London, 1903), iii. 451. John Hampden (1594–1643) was mortally wounded in a skirmish with royalist forces at Chalgrove Field; William, Lord Russell (1639–83) was executed on the charge of complicity in the Rye House Plot. Both were Whig heroes.

404 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 People, securing to us the substantial benefit of an absolutely free disposition of our own property in that important case’ (WS iii. 263). The substance is not much different, but the changes show why Burke was continually chafing at the party’s timidity. Burke was not the only one losing touch with reality. The Duke of Richmond, after Burke the party’s most mercurial spirit, spent most of 1776 in France, engaged in the time-consuming process of registering his French peerage. Justifying his absence from England at such a critical time, Richmond professed to fear that George III could as easily establish despotism in England as Gustavus III had in Sweden.11 If a bloody contest ensued, ‘I or mine may be concerned, & among the proscribed.’ In such a contingency, his French property would provide a retreat, and his French title have practical value.12 Not everyone was so apprehensive. Sir George Savile, ever prone to pour cold water on Burke and his imaginings, advised Rockingham: ‘Impatience always solicits to move when one is in pain, for there is no rule of acting so false as that one must always do something.’ True or false, Burke usually followed this rule. While approving Burke’s ‘Address’ as a record of the party’s views, Savile harboured no illusions that it would have the slightest influence on public opinion. Nor was he afraid that signing it might cost him his head.13 Rockingham proved even less enthusiastic, and the ‘Address’ was consigned to oblivion. Burke, however, remained convinced of its value. ‘We shall publish no declaration,’ he lamented to Champion; ‘I am sorry for it, though many are of opinion that the time does not serve’ (21 Feb. 1777: C iii. 330). Though the idea of an address was dropped, the secession went ahead. Its effectiveness was undermined from the outset by lack of unanimity, even within the Rockingham camp. When the ministry introduced its most controversial measure, a bill for the partial suspension of Habeas Corpus, Savile and Fox both determined to attend the House to fight it. The partial secession thus exposed the embarrassing disunity of the opposition. Burke was placed in a particularly awkward position, for his enemies in Bristol exploited his non-attendance as part of a campaign to discredit him.14 Criticism, as usual, stung him into elaborate self-justification. ‘Many ask why I did not attend the Habeas Corpus,’ he acknowledged to Champion, to whom he confided his thought of writing a public apologia (21 Feb. 1777: C iii. 330). Thus was conceived his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol. Begun as a defence of the secession, it soon outgrew this purpose. Indeed, even before the Letter was published, Burke had returned to public business. Yet so much wider-ranging had the Letter become that only one or two pages 11 12 13 14

A fear anticipated by E.B. in a letter to O Hara of 30 Sept. 1772 (C ii. 336). Richmond to E.B., 26 Aug. 1776, WWM BkP 1/880. Savile to Rockingham, 15 Jan. 1777, WWM R1/1705, in Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 304–6. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 22 Feb. 1777.

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 405 needed to be rewritten (334). The composition of the ‘Address’ proved cathartic. His ill humours purged, he could now compose the Letter in a calmer, more elegiac mood. Not for the only time, a pamphlet written for a particular occasion grew into a handbook of political wisdom. Combining the topical and the timeless, the Letter expresses, concisely and forthrightly, many of Burke’s leading ideas. While Burke broadened the purpose of the Letter, he maintained the epistolary fiction. The text of the Letter was sent in manuscript to the sheriffs, and transmitted by them to the press. It was printed in Bristol, and first published there on 5 May 1777.15 The epistolary form was admirably suited to its purpose. Not a harangue delivered in the emotionally charged atmosphere of a parliamentary debate, the Letter is a temperate argument for diffidence in politics, for prudence in execution rather than perfection in design. It takes the form of a covering letter sent with the two latest antiAmerican measures, the Letters of Marque Act and the American Treasons Act. He explains that he refused to oppose the latter because no amendments could, in his view, make it less mischievous. This in turn leads to a short justification of the secession, the original purpose of the pamphlet (WS iii. 296–9). By making this passage brief and almost incidental, he avoids appearing defensive or apologetic. Yet these early pages are the least convincing part of the Letter, their arguments somewhat strained and sophistical. Only when he turns from particular measures to a comprehensive critique of the wisdom and policy of the American war does Burke move into his element. Eschewing the detailed narrative of the dispute with the colonies that makes the abortive ‘Address’ such tedious reading, he appeals instead to first principles. Defending the Declaratory Act, the palladium of Rockingham’s American policy, he argues that, far from being absurd (as often objected), a right normally unexercised may prove a valuable latent power in some future crisis of the constitution. He instances the king’s power to veto legislation, long disused in practice but wisely held in reserve for some unsuspected emergency (315–16). From such passages, Horace Walpole inferred that Burke ‘was always tinged with monarchic and high ecclesiastic principles, and always reserved loop-holes for displaying his real principles, if ever he should become a minister of the Crown’.16 Walpole’s insinuation was wide of the mark. Burke always meant the royal prerogative to be exercised by responsible ministers. Political theory, Burke insists, should not be allowed to determine practice. His argument against theory anticipates his attitude to the utopian 15 Todd, 28; WS iii. 289–330. The full title is A Letter from Edmund Burke, Esq., One of the Representatives in Parliament for the City of Bristol, to John Farr and John Harris, Esqrs, Sheriffs of that City, on the Affairs of America. The Letter was immediately reprinted in London. 16 The Last Journals of Horace Walpole during the Reign of George III from 1771–1783, ed. A. Francis Steuart (London, 1910), ii. 43.

406 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 ideas of the French revolutionaries. Rather than ‘troubling our understandings with speculations concerning the unity of empire, and the identity or distinction of legislative powers, and inflaming our passions with the heat and pride of controversy’, the business of Parliament was ‘to conform our Government to the character and circumstances of the several people who compose this mighty and strangely diversified mass’ (WS iii. 316). As so often, Burke deprecates the intrusion of theory into real life. Government is ‘a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity, to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians’. These ‘speculatists’ were of two species. The first were prone to treat political questions in the abstract, and not as ‘a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling’ (317). An example would be John Shebbeare.17 Their insistence on enforcing the theory of unlimited imperial supremacy provoked the conflict. In reaction to such refining away of the ‘rights of nature’, others have indulged ‘speculations . . . as destructive to all authority, as the former are to all freedom’ (318). Here the target is such pamphleteers as the dissenting minister Richard Price (1723–91), whose Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty was reprinted a dozen times in the year of publication.18 The ‘visionary politicians’ are not the only ones at fault. Their follies have been compounded by the myopia of the lawyers, men as rule-bound as the visionaries are detached from reality. ‘Legislators ought to do what lawyers cannot’, Burke argues, ‘for they have no other rules to bind them, but the great principles of reason and equity, and the general sense of mankind.’ They ought ‘rather to enlarge and enlighten law by the liberality of legislative reason, than to fetter and bind their higher capacity by the narrow constructions of subordinate artificial justice’ (295). Burke’s attempt to define a middle course between the visionaries and the legalists exposed him to attack from both. George Chalmers (1742–1825), a lawyer, wrote an Answer to Burke that typified the narrowly legalistic approach which Burke had deplored.19 Missing the whole point of the Letter, Chalmers assumes that he can refute Burke by citing chapter and verse of the relevant statutes. The mentality is that of an administrator oblivious that passions and prejudices do not always respect the letter or even the spirit of the law. Long-winded and meticulous, Chalmers filled ninety densely packed octavo pages. Eschewing the finer legal points as befitted an officer of the guards and a fashionable man-about-town, Edward Topham An Essay on the Origin, Progress and Establishment of National Society [etc.] (London, 1776). Price’s Observations is reprinted in Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution: Selections from his Pamphlets, ed. Bernard Peach (Durham, NC, 1979); 82–3 for what E.B. called Price’s ‘railing’ at the Act (C iii. 254). 19 An Answer from the Electors of Bristol, to the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq., on the Affairs of America (London, 1777), published anonymously. Born and educated in Scotland, Chalmers practised law in Baltimore for several years before returning to England on the outbreak of hostilities. 17 18

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 407 (1751–1820) took only twenty-seven quarto pages (generously spaced for gentlemanly reading) for a bluffer and breezier reply. Topham’s message is simple. The Americans are rebels, and should be treated as such; to be proAmerican is unpatriotic.20 A third, anonymous Answer, more readable than Chalmers and more substantial than Topham, covered much the same ground, charging Burke with factiousness and disloyalty, and challenging some of his legal arguments.21 None of these pamphlets caused him much unease. The reply that hurt came not from an open enemy but from a treacherous friend. Willoughby Bertie, fourth Earl of Abingdon (1740–99), was an aristocratic radical, a paradoxical character that Burke always detested. Abingdon had imbibed his radicalism in Geneva in the 1760s. Though independent to the point of eccentricity, Abingdon had supported Rockingham often enough for Burke to regard him as at least a fellowtraveller. Burke was accordingly ‘a good deal surprized’ to see a newspaper advertisement for a forthcoming pamphlet by Abingdon on the subject of his Letter. He therefore wrote to Abingdon, lamenting the public airing of differences between those who supported the same cause (26 Aug. 1777: C iii. 369–70). If Burke hoped to induce Abingdon to suppress his pamphlet, he was disappointed. Abingdon retorted that Burke’s Letter passed an indirect censure on those (of whom he was one) who had opposed the passage of the American Treasons Act, and claimed an equal right with Burke to publish his opinions.22 Abingdon’s pamphlet was the most successful of the replies.23 Horace Walpole was delighted that it ‘puffed away Burke’s sophistries’.24 The sophistry in question was Burke’s attempt to mount a pro-American argument on ‘ancient principles’. Abingdon denied the supremacy of Parliament over the colonies, denouncing Rockingham’s Declaratory Act as ‘subversive of the Constitution’. Parliaments, he argued, are only ‘the Deputies, the Agents, or Appointees of the People’, entrusted with legislative power ‘for the purpose of preserving (and not of destroying) the established Rights of the Constitution’.25 The Americans, having 20 An Address to Edmund Burke, Esq., on his Late Letter Relative to the Affairs of America (London, 1777). 21 An Answer to the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq. (London, 1777). The second edition has a preface signed ‘H.C.’. 22 Abingdon to E.B., 28 Aug. 1777, WWM BkP 1/988, in Corr. (1844), ii. 177–8. 23 Thoughts on the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq.; to the Sheriffs of Bristol, on the Affairs of America (Oxford, [1777]). Several editions were printed in 1777. Abingdon in his turn was attacked from both sides: by George Chalmers (anonymously) for the ministry in Second Thoughts; or, Observations upon Lord Abingdon’s ‘Thoughts’ (London, 1777); and by John Cartwright in A Letter to the Earl of Abingdon (London, 1778). 24 Walpole to William Mason, 21 Sept. 1777, YWC xxviii. 330. Walpole, who did not share E.B.’s idea of empire, was strongly pro-American; to Sir Horace Mann, 7 Sept. 1775, YWC xxiv. 124. 25 Thoughts on the Letter, 29. Other passages on the power of Parliament and the Declaratory Act are on 47, 51–3.

408 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 declared themselves independent, have the right to form a new constitution for themselves.26 This was an argument that George III could understand. Either the colonies were dependent, or they were not: ‘the dye is now cast, the Colonies must either submit or triumph’.27 Burke’s faith in the possibility of an imperial relationship based on mutual forbearance and good will was not widely shared. He never understood why the war was popular, even among the merchants of Bristol who had so much to lose by it. Ministerial supporters called a public meeting for 14 January 1777, which voted a loyal address in support of coercion. The Common Council and Merchants’ Hall voted similar addresses.28 Burke found these moves highly embarrassing, since they undermined his credibility as a representative of Bristol opinion. He urged his friends in Bristol to organize pro-conciliation petitions as a counter-measure. Though the secession removed any excuse that he could not leave London, Burke was not prepared to canvass in person, and his supporters allowed the idea to drop (C iii. 317–21). Burke therefore took the opportunity of his Letter to the Sheriffs to castigate the belligerence of the addresses (WS iii. 299–301). The political climate in Bristol was further embittered, and opposition to the war made to appear even more grotesquely unpatriotic, by the activities of a pro-American arsonist. On 15 January 1777, ‘John the Painter’ (James Aitken; 1752–77), who was in the pay of the Americans, tried to burn three ships in Bristol harbour. Two days later he managed to set on fire two warehouses in the city.29 Aitken was soon arrested, tried on 6 March, and executed on the 10th. Ministerial supporters exploited the incident to insinuate that all pro-Americans were incendiaries in their hearts.30 Burke was furious and (before Aitken was arrested) wrote to the Mayor of Bristol, offering an additional reward of £50 from his own pocket for the apprehension of the criminal.31 In the Commons, he introduced a bill to strengthen the law against dockyard sabotage.32 A visit might have done more to counteract the ill-feelings that the arson attempts had generated. An earlier missed opportunity was the fast day proclaimed for 13 December 1776. 26 Ibid. 35. In the Reflections, E.B. refutes a similar claim by Richard Price that England had been in such a position in 1688 (WS viii. 66–76). 27 The king to Lord North, 11 Sept. 1774, in Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December 1783, ed. Sir John Fortescue (London, 1927–8), iii. 131. 28 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 25 Jan. 1777; Politics and the Port of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century: The Petitions of the Society of Merchant Venturers, 1698–1803, ed. W. E. Minchinton (Bristol, 1963), 141–2. 29 William Bell Clark, ‘John the Painter’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 63 (1939), 1–23. 30 Bristol Gazette, 30 Jan., 13 Feb. 1777; and a cutting from ‘the Bristol paper of this Evening’ enclosed with Sir Abraham Elton’s letter to E.B. of 22 Jan. (WWM BkP 1/922). 31 R.B. Sr. to Champion, c.22 Jan. 1777 (C ii. 321). 32 13 Mar. 1777, CJ xxxvi. 267; St James’s Chronicle, 13–15 Mar. 1777.

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 409 Royal proclamations for such a fast or day of national mourning were often issued during a war as a way of promoting national unity. This one had the opposite effect. Disapproving of the fast, Burke arranged for Champion to host a dinner on that day as a protest. He was willing to pay for the entertainment, but not to be present. Since only sympathizers would have attended, his reluctance is difficult to understand.33 Letting such occasions slip allowed his enemies to represent him as neglectful of the city. When he returned to Bristol just before the 1780 election, he delivered a comprehensive defence of his record as the city’s MP. The excuses he gave for his failure to visit the constituency form the weakest passage in an otherwise cogent speech (WS iii. 628–9). The real reason for his staying away, which he could not avow, was his ‘Coriolanus complex’, an invincible repugnance to canvassing. Like the Roman hero, Burke was lacking neither in personal bravery nor in the courage of his convictions. What he found intolerably demeaning was the farce of soliciting his inferiors for their suffrages.

2 Irksome as he found most Bristol business, Burke could be attentive when his personal friends were concerned. In October 1776, for example, to secure the remission of duty on a cargo of tobacco for Champion, he made a special trip to London and spent several hours negotiating with the bureaucracy of the customs (C iii. 292–3). Once, on the Birmingham Playhouse Bill, he even ‘yielded his own opinion’ and voted ‘against . . . his own Conscience’ to please Champion and his Quaker friends.34 This issue produced an unusual conflict of loyalties. Unlicensed theatres had been operating in Birmingham since 1740. Technically illegal, they were subject to harassment by local magistrates. The manager of one of the theatres, veteran actor Richard Yates (c.1706–96), therefore determined to apply to Parliament for a licence. On 10 February 1777, Yates submitted a petition, and the committee to which it was referred quickly prepared a draft bill.35 A similar bill to license a theatre in Bristol had recently been defeated, thanks in large part to the determined opposition of a group of Quakers, including Champion. They feared that, if a playhouse were licensed in Birmingham, the precedent would be used to legalize the Bristol theatre. 33 E.B. to Champion, 9 Dec. 1776 (C iii. 302–4); Champion to E.B., in Hugh Owen, Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol, Being a History of ‘the True Porcelain’ by Richard Champion (London, 1873), 179. E.B. gave a dinner at Beaconsfield on the same occasion. 34 W.B. to Champion, 29 Apr. 1777, NRO, A. viii. 70. 35 P. T. Underdown, ‘Religious Opposition to Licensing the Bristol and Birmingham Theatres’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 6 (1957–8), 149–60.

410 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 Burke therefore received ‘a very powerful recommendation of some of my own constituents’ against the bill. In its favour, he was canvassed by his friend David Garrick (336). Burke himself approved the bill, and his conviction was strengthened by its chief opponent being his old antagonist Sir William Bagot. Since their memorable clash in 1770, when Bagot had branded Burke as a ‘black Jesuit’, the two had often crossed swords on local issues.36 In addition, Bagot was a firm supporter of North and the American war. Any measure he opposed was likely to commend itself to Burke. Speaking against the first reading of the Birmingham Playhouse Bill, Bagot mixed some irony and sarcasm with his serious moral and social objections.37 Burke retorted with a witty speech in which he defended theatres as, if not ‘Schools of Virtue’, at least the most innocent of the ‘Nurseries of Idleness’. Lauding Birmingham as ‘the great Toy Shop of Europe’, he argued that a single licensed playhouse was preferable to two illegal ones (WS iii. 287–8). Nevertheless, when the bill came up for a second reading on 29 April, he reversed his stand. The opposition was again led by Bagot, who enlarged on an argument drawn from Roman history. Alluding to the familiar ‘bread and circuses’ theme, Bagot asserted that ‘the giving Theatres was the cause of the decline of the State’. Though he would vote with Bagot, Burke devoted most of his speech to a refutation of his arguments. In defending the theatre in general, he went well beyond the guarded approval that he had expressed in the earlier debate. Now he praised acting as a ‘liberal and noble’ profession, actors as ‘men who essentially contributed to the reformation of manners, and to the rational entertainment of the publick’. Correcting Bagot’s bad history, he denied that the theatres were a product of Roman decadence. Nor could he resist mixing in a little opposition politics. Birmingham, though a large town, was still unincorporated. Responding to Bagot’s wish that it might remain in this ‘village’ state, and alluding to the boast of Themistocles that, while unable to play an instrument, he could make a small city great, he ‘took notice of the politics of the times, which he feared would gratify the hon. gentleman’s wishes; for instead of improving villages, and converting them into large towns, the wretched measures we had been pursuing for some time past, it was to be feared would soon reduce our great trading towns to obscure villages. Birmingham might very soon have no theatre, no manufactures, no magistrates.’ Burke justified his volteface on the ground that he was now convinced that most of the inhabitants of Birmingham were against the bill. Much as he personally enjoyed the theatre, ‘he thought it extremely hard to measure other men’s inclinations 36 For example, 27 Jan. and 1 Feb. 1775, on the Birmingham petitions; 11 May 1775, on Champion’s Porcelain Bill (Morning Post, 28 Jan., 2, 3 Feb., and 12 May 1775). 37 Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 31 Mar. 1777.

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 411 38 by his own habits and passions’. The Birmingham Playhouse Bill was of no great concern to Bristolians in general. Burke voted against it in response to pressure from Champion and his friends, not to curry favour with the body of his constituents. To Champion, indeed, Burke lamented ‘how very little the local constituent attends to the general publick line of Conduct observed by their Member. They judge of him solely by his merits as their special Agent.’ This taught Burke ‘how much a constitution in Fact, differs from a constitution on Paper’. For an opposition member, the lesson was especially discouraging, since ‘almost all small services to individuals and even to corporations’ depended on the favour of the ministers (26 June 1777: C iii. 356). Burke’s own letters do not entirely support this claim. Distasteful as he found asking for favours, his requests for them were often successful.39 Responding to ‘Admonitions kind and useful’ from Champion, Burke claimed that he paid greater attention to the ‘small Tithes’ of constituency matters than was usual with MPs who ‘do not neglect the weightier matters of the Law’ (356). Yet in response to Champion’s letter, he made at least one gesture towards developing closer links with his constituents. At the end of the session, he forwarded copies of the principal Acts passed to Henry Garnett (d. 1785), Master of Merchants’ Hall, with a long letter explaining some of their most relevant provisions (3 July: 357–61). Burke was hurt and vexed that people at Bristol were readier to find fault than to appreciate the hard work he devoted to parliamentary business. What they wanted more than statesmanship was punctual attention to whatever affected, or might affect, their business, the ‘small Tithes’ that Burke treated so lightly. He never came to terms with this unpalatable fact. The soap-makers provide an inglorious but instructive example. Burke failed them twice, once in 1775 and again in 1777. On the first occasion, he was asked to obtain a copy of a memorial submitted to the Treasury by the London soap-makers, petitioning for changes in the way the duty on soap was assessed and collected. Their Bristol rivals suspected that the proposal would adversely affect them. The Board of Excise, to whom it was referred, agreed, reporting against it as unduly favouring the larger (London) manufacturers.40 Though the threat was thus averted, Burke’s sluggish response was held against him.41 38 A Full and Authentic Account of What Passed in the House of Commons on the Second Reading of the Birmingham Playhouse Bill, Tuesday, April 29, 1777 ([Birmingham, 1777]), 12–15 (PH xix. 198–205); WS iii. 337–8. 39 E.B. to Henry Garnett, 16 Nov. 1776, 21 Sept. 1777 (C iii. 301–2, 376). 40 PRO T. 29/44, fo. 80; CUST. 48/19, pp. 71–3, 74–6. The London soap-boilers made a similar application in 1776; CUST. 48/19, pp. 171–8. 41 John Woodward to E.B., 12 Jan. ‘1776’ [1775], WWM BkP 1/614; Joseph Fry to E.B., 17 Mar. 1775, BkP 1/667; Champion to E.B., 4 Apr., Bristol Record Office, 38083(4), pp. 232–41; Woodward to E.B. and Cruger, 26 Apr., BkP 1/686.

412 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 In 1777, the London soap-makers renewed their efforts. In a letter of 19 February, Burke was warned that a new bill was in preparation. Since the Rockingham party was then boycotting public business, he had more time than usual to attend to such matters. Nevertheless, when the bill revising the soap duties was introduced on 15 May, it passed all its stages within two weeks and without a single division. Burke at no stage opposed or sought to amend it. Indeed, rumours reached Bristol that he had actually supported the measure.42 Always loath to admit himself in the wrong, Burke took refuge in the weak excuse that he had been ‘deceivd’ about the soap business by the usually reliable clerks of the House. ‘I work a great deal in the Business of the House’, he assured Champion, ‘but some things will of course escape me. People so much in affairs will neglect every now and then, this thing, and that person, and this will create ill blood and destroy an Interest, if a favourable construction is not ready to be given, no man can serve with any success, those, who do not look upon him with some degree of partiality.’ This is as near as Burke can bring himself to an admission of culpability. Almost at once, he deflects the blame onto his ill-wishers. ‘I see that any mistake or Neglect of mine is so heavily taken,’ he complains, ‘and any service so coldly regarded, so soon forgotten, or even so totally misconceivd, that I am most perfectly convinced, that unless I can contrive to apply to the Interests of individuals, Bristol is for some more fortunate person at the next Election’ (9 July 1777: C iii. 361–2). Burke was by temperament unsuited to representing Bristol. Though proud of his status as member for a great commercial city, local concerns never engaged his interest. Less squeamishness about asking ministers for favours, more frequent visits, less telling people what they ought to think and more listening; everything that would have helped establish a personal interest there, would have made him a different person. Even as Burke was writing his Letter to the Sheriffs to justify the secession, its failure became manifest. By the time the Letter was published, Burke had returned to public business. Chastened by the fiasco, he now professed a belief in the utility of seemingly futile opposition. On 3 April 1777, at a dinner of the Literary Club, he was asked why he spent so much effort on speeches which he knew would not gain a single vote. ‘A good speech has its effect,’ he replied; ‘though an act which has been ably opposed passes into a law, yet in its progress it is modelled, it is softened in such a manner, that we see plainly the Minister has been told, that the members attached to him are so sensible of its injustice or absurdity from what they have heard, that it must be altered.’43 This was the argument 42 Fry, Fripp, & Co. to E.B., 19 Feb. 1777, WWM BkP 1/932; Sam Worrall to E.B., 26 June 1777, BkP 1/980. CJ xxxvi. 510–29 (15–28 May 1777); the bill was enacted as 17 George III, c. 52. 43 Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–64), iii. 233– 4 (3 Apr. 1778).

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 413 advanced by those who opposed the suspension of the Habeas Corpus instead of seceding. Impossible to reconcile with the doctrine of the Letter to the Sheriffs, it shows that Burke, like Johnson, could occasionally (in Boswell’s phrase) ‘vary from himself’. The first subject debated after Burke’s return to Parliament provided a congenial theme for his rhetoric. The king’s failure to keep his expenses within the Civil List as fixed at the beginning of his reign was an old issue.44 Burke had made much of it in the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (WS ii. 303–8). The topic promised well for the opposition. Allegations of the waste and profusion of public money appealed to the instincts and suspicions of the country gentlemen, and were free of the unpatriotic odour that clung to opposition to the war. Particularly damaging was the accusation that much of the debt had been incurred for corrupt practices, especially secret pensions for MPs.45 Two debates on the debts were held, on 16 and 18 April 1777. On the 16th, Burke charged that they must have been incurred ‘in ways not fit to be avowed by ministry, and therefore very fit to be inquired into by this House’ (iii. 333). Two days later, when John Sawbridge (1732–95), the radical MP for London, caused an uproar by directly accusing the ministry of corrupting members, Burke intervened with an ironic explanation that Sawbridge’s ‘corruption’ was only (in the politer language of the court) ‘influence’ (334). For all the display of virtuous indignation on the ministerial bench, the opposition was on the right scent. Such pensions were being paid. Burke’s colleague Henry Cruger was probably already drawing a pension of £500 a year from the Secret Service for supplying information about America.46 Such pensions were, however, well-kept secrets. With the opposition unable to substantiate its charges, the ministry’s majorities remained well over 100.47 Late in the session, the state of the Africa Company and the East India Company came before Parliament. A staunch champion of the independence of the chartered companies, Burke was quick to suspect sinister designs on the part of the ministry. The Africa Company controlled the trade between Britain and the west coast of Africa. Concerned largely with the export of slaves from West Africa to the sugar islands of the British West Indies, the company was an uneasy coalition of merchants from Bristol and Liverpool as well as London. Burke was familiar with the company and its 44

18.

E. A. Reitan, ‘Edmund Burke and the Civil List, 1769–1782’, Burke Newsletter, 8 (1966), 604–

45 This was an old ‘country’ opposition theme, dating back to the ‘Cavalier’ Parliament in the 1670s. Pensioners were excluded from the Commons by the Act of Settlement (12 & 13 William III, c. 2). 46 ‘You have been peculiarly obliging to me,’ Cruger told Robinson on 11 May 1777. ‘I am sensibly grateful, and such is my natural turn of mind, I shall always remain so’ (BL Add. MS 38209, fo. 120). The reference is probably to Cruger’s pension. This was discontinued when he lost his seat in 1780; Parliamentary Papers of John Robinson, 1774–1784, ed. William Thomas Laprade (London, 1922), 50. 47 On 16 Apr., 281 to 114; on the 18th, 231 to 109 (CJ xxxvi. 405, 417).

414 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 problems. In 1772, he had defended it against a plan, endorsed by the traders of Bristol, to restrict its membership.48 In 1777, his opposition to ministerial intervention was supported by most of the company’s Bristol members. Burke’s fear was that, as had happened with the East India Company, parliamentary interference ‘would probably only terminate in government jobs, and putting the trade upon a still worse footing’.49 As so often, Burke had also a personal motive. John Bourke (c.1722–1806), a friend and perhaps a kinsman, had at this time a substantial investment in the Africa trade.50 Having agreed to present a petition from the company, Burke was furious when the more timid merchants hesitated about the inclusion in the draft of ‘some supposed recrimination on the Board of Trade’ (21 May 1777: C iii. 341). Burke could never understand that men whose business might depend on a favourable recommendation from the board would naturally prefer not to offend it. Similarly, he failed to appreciate that many of his Bristol constituents wanted to keep politics out of business.51 The government provided a small grant to maintain forts on the coast of Africa, and the company did not want to lose it. To Burke, who liked to stand boldly on the righteousness of his conduct, such timidity betokened a guilty conscience. ‘I shall be ashamed to appear for any man’, he admonished them through John Bourke, ‘who Scruples to tell a false accuser, that he injures him; and shall suspect, that he has done something, or fears he shall do something hereafter, to subject him to that power, which is this day his accuser, and the next may be his Judge’ (342). Temporizing was not in Burke’s character. The more flexible mind which might regard ‘favours or expectations from the Board of Trade’ as an ‘indemnity’ for public accusation (341) was beyond his comprehension. This episode ended happily. Lord North agreed to renew the grant and to postpone further investigation. India presented vaster and less tractable problems. In 1777, the East India Company claimed a large share of parliamentary attention for the first time since North’s Regulating Act of 1773. On this occasion, attention was focused on Madras rather than Bengal. As Mogul authority in southern India declined, the company was increasingly drawn into the politics of the successor states. During the Seven Years War, the company successfully sponsored the succession of Muhammad Ali Khan (d. 1795) as Nawab of the Carnatic, against a rival candidate supported by the French. The new nawab (known in England as ‘the Nabob of Arcot’, after his capital city) 20 May 1772; London Magazine, 41 (Dec. 1772), 567–8 (PH xvii. 507–9). 2 June 1777; Almon, vii. 260 (PH xix. 313). 50 Dennis Stephen Klinge, ‘Edmund Burke, Economical Reform, and the Board of Trade, 1777– 1780’, Journal of Modern History, 51 (1979), D1185–1200. 51 P. T. Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, the Commissary of his Bristol Constituents, 1774–1780’, English Historical Review, 73 (1958), 257–8. 48 49

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 415 secured his position at the expense of incurring huge debts both to the company and to individual Englishmen living in Madras.52 In order to increase his revenues and reduce his indebtedness, he intrigued (again with English help) to annex Tanjore, a small but prosperous semi-autonomous state south of Madras, ruled by a Hindu raja (Tuljaji, d. 1787). In 1773, with the help of the company’s army, the nawab occupied Tanjore and seized control of its revenues. His victory proved short-lived, however. When news reached the directors in London, they disavowed the action and sent out a new governor to restore the raja. The man appointed was Lord Pigot (1719–77), an associate of the Rockingham party. Pigot reached Madras in 1775, and duly restored the raja. So serious was the loss of the Tanjore revenues to the nawab, however, that he and his English creditors plotted to reverse the restoration. Some high-handed behaviour on Pigot’s part gave his opponents on the Madras council a pretext to depose him as governor (in August 1776). This, like the annexation of Tanjore, proved counterproductive. Back in London, pro-nawab forces (headed by Lauchlin Macleane, a friend of the Burkes before the 1769 crash in East India stock) had persuaded the ministry to recall Pigot. Macleane’s plan was aborted by the sense of outrage which greeted news of Pigot’s deposition. Over the next few months, however, as the initial pro-Pigot sympathy subsided, the plan to recall him was revived.53 In Indian affairs, Burke generally took the side of what he imagined to be the Hindu ‘ancient constitution’ displaced by the Muslim invaders. On this question, his sympathies were further engaged by Pigot’s Rockingham connection. He was therefore soon active on Tanjore’s behalf, helping to whip in support for Pigot among the proprietors of India stock. When the matter came before Parliament, he made a strong plea on behalf of Pigot and the raja, roundly condemning both the nawab and his English creditors. On 22 May 1777, George Johnstone (1730–87), at this time a supporter of Rockingham, moved a series of resolutions aimed at reversing the company’s actions and restoring Pigot. Burke prepared a detailed speech in support of Johnstone’s motions. Gaining the floor late in the debate, however, instead of using his notes he concentrated on replying to the arguments advanced by earlier speakers.54 After the ministry defeated the call for an 52 These ‘debts’, allegedly owed by the nawab to English creditors, would become the subject of one of E.B.’s great orations, his Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts, delivered on 28 Feb. 1785 (WS v. 485– 552). In 1778, E.B. may have contributed to a pamphlet on the subject written mainly by W.B.; George C. McElroy, ‘Edmund, William, and Richard Burke’s First Attack on Indian Misrule, 1778’, Bodleian Library Record, 13 (1988), 52–65. 53 Jim Phillips, ‘A Successor to the Moguls: The Nawab of the Carnatic and the East India Company, 1763–1785’, International History Review, 7 (1985), 364–89; and ‘Private Profit and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Southern India: The Tanjore Revenue Dispute, 1775–1777’, South Asia, 9/2 (Dec. 1986), 1–16. 54 WS v. 36–40 prints E.B.’s notes; his speech is reported in Almon, vii. 230–2 (PH xix. 284–6).

416 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 enquiry, public interest in the issue evaporated. Pigot was spared the humiliation of recall, for he died before the decision reached Madras. Tanjore, however, was not handed back to the nawab; the raja was left in possession. Quickly as it faded from public consciousness, on Burke the controversy left an indelible impression. Since the ministerial policy was supported by some of the London friends and associates of Paul Benfield (1741–1810) and Warren Hastings (1732–1818), Burke came to interpret the incident as part of an intricate web of influence and peculation designed to plunder India in order to finance bribery at home. The East India Company as an engine of political influence and corruption had, until now, been his main concern. From 1777, he began to pay more attention to conditions and events in India itself. Within a few years, these would excite his imagination so powerfully as to become one of the great causes of his life. More immediately, his interest in India was stimulated by Will’s actually making an expedition there. The Burkes were in worse financial straits than ever. Will was especially vulnerable. No longer in Parliament, he had lost his immunity from arrest for debt. In desperation, he seized the chance of going out to India as a confidential courier. His real hope was to find a quick way to make a fortune. Burke wrote a moving letter of recommendation to Philip Francis, then a member of the Bengal Supreme Council at Calcutta, where he was engaged in a bitter feud with the Governor-General, Warren Hastings. Describing Will as ‘a friend, whom I have tenderly loved, highly valued, and continually lived with, in an union not to be expressed, quite since our boyish years’, he implored Francis to ‘bring him home with you an obliged person and at his ease, under the protection of your opulence’. Oblivious of the unsavoury reputation that Will’s stockjobbing had earned him, Burke saw him as the victim of men less scrupulous than himself. ‘You know what his situation has been, and what things he might have surely kept, and infinitely increased,’ he told Francis, ‘if he had not those feelings which make a man worthy of fortune, but do not put him in the way of securing it’ (9 June 1777: C iii. 348). This image, of a man too scrupulous and honourable to have achieved success in a corrupt world, fits Burke himself better than Will. Francis proved unable to help, and Will was too impatient to stay long in India. Instead, he obtained a semi-official commission to represent in London the interests of the Raja of Tanjore, as Benfield had worked for the nawab. Such an employment would hardly be onerous, and Will hoped to be well paid for his pains. Like all Will’s projects, the Tanjore agency proved less remunerative than expected. On Edmund, however, it had the effect of cementing his conviction that the raja embodied tradition and virtue oppressed by the evil nawab. About this time, Burke acquired as a neighbour a man who exemplified the success that eluded Will. Josias Du Pré (c.1726–80), the son of an East

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 417 India Company home administrator, went out to Madras in 1752. Passing through the usual gradations, he eventually (after spending a few years in England in the 1760s) rose to serve a term as governor of Madras (1770–3; his term of office preceded the annexation of Tanjore). After his final return to England, he began to look for a suitable country retreat. In 1777, he bought the Wilton Park estate, a property adjacent to Burke’s, for £37,000. This purchase did not exhaust his resources, for he continued to hold other investments, including £10,000 in India stock. His son, James Du Pré, who bought the Burke estate from Jane, sat in Parliament (1800–12) and founded a respectable ‘county’ family. Josias is one of many company servants who, surviving the Indian climate, returned home with a substantial if not spectacular fortune, acquired without egregious corruption or peculation.55 Du Pré’s was amassed by steady effort over two decades, not by the delusive get-rich-quick schemes that bewitched Will. Will’s connection with Tanjore exposed Edmund to the same suspicions that his own agency for New York had brought him. Though not himself a shareholder, his close association with Will, Verney, and others known to have been heavy speculators in East India stock allowed his enemies to represent his concern with India as self-interested. In part, this was because his frenetic energy seemed to require some special explanation. Contemporaries were quick to infer the worst. ‘I remember some years ago,’ Burke told Fox, ‘when I was pressing some points with much eagerness and anxiety, and complaining with great vexation to the Duke of Richmond of the little progress I made, he told me kindly and I believe very truly, that, tho he was far from thinking so himself, other people could not be persuaded, I had not some latent private Interest in pushing these matters.’ Only self-interest, in their view, could account for ‘an earnestness so extreme, and so much approaching to passion’ (8 Oct. 1777: C iii. 384). Burke was in truth rather neglectful of his ‘private Interest’. He had deliberately chosen the hard road of opposition rather than the smooth path that led to a comfortable sinecure. After more than a decade in politics, fortune and independence were as far away as ever. The extent of his distress for money can be gauged from a letter to Christopher Hargrave (c.1710–87), who had earlier been concerned with Will and Verney in stockjobbing. The letter paints a grim picture of the Burke finances. ‘I have no rescources,’ he told Hargrave, having lately parted with ‘the last monied Stake I had in the world’ to help satisfy the demands of Will and Hargrave himself. The utmost he could offer was a bond payable in three years’ time. By then, he hoped with his usual optimism on the subject, Will would be 55 Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800 (London, 1913), iii. 1–3. BL (Oriental and India Office Collections), MS L/AG/14/5/20, fo. 250. Buckinghamshire Record Office, Du Pré Deeds (D69), box 3. Love gives Du Pré’s date of birth as 1721; according to the memorial tablet in Beaconsfield Church, he was 54 on his death in 1780.

418 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 back from India and ‘at his ease’. To engage for more would only lead to his ‘instant disgrace and ruin without any possible benefit to yourself’. Hargrave was pacified with bonds to the amount of £1,050.56 Burke’s estate, though fully mortgaged and therefore not a financial resource, was a haven where he and his family could forget politics, enjoy bucolic peace, and entertain their friends. The summer of 1777 was wet, with mixed results from the farm. Burke’s clover, beans, and oats did well, he reported to Garrett Nagle, but he was unable to plant his turnips in time, and would therefore be short of fodder for the winter. A new project was to improve the breed of his sheep (3 Sept.: C iii. 371). Among the guests at Beaconsfield were Richard and Judith Champion, who came for two weeks in August. Unfortunately, no gossipy letters survive to tell what staying with the Burkes was like. On 30 August, Judith Champion told her sister that she could not ‘attempt to describe them in any other way, than, that as far as the most engaging qualities can reach, they fully possess them. It is beyond me to say more.’57 The best evidence of the intimacy that had developed between the two families comes from the letters that passed between the two Richards. Richard Burke wrote in an unaffected, chatty style that conveys both a sense of the speaking voice and an unaffected spontaneity.58 Edmund’s letters, even those to Richard Champion, are never so unbuttoned. A fuller account of a day at the Burkes’ is preserved in a letter from a more casual visitor, a Bristol businessman travelling in company with Joseph Fry (1730–89), best known to Burke at this time as a soap-boiler. ‘They have no form about them,’ he remarked; ‘every one is at liberty to do as he pleases, and you may be as free and easy as in your own house.’ The guests, arriving about 11 a.m., when the family was at breakfast, were invited to stay for dinner. ‘The time before dinner was employed by conversation, in which’, the guest thought worth notice, ‘Mrs Burke took part.’ The dinner comprised two ‘courses’. The first included ‘a boil’d turkey, roast beef, soup, calves-head, cow-heel, &c.’ The table was then cleared for the second course, of ‘woodcock, hare, tarts, asparagus, &c.’ The meal was served by three manservants. After dinner, the women retired and the men sat over wine, until it was time to join the ladies again for tea and coffee. The guests did not leave until about 7 p.m.59 The weather must have been poor that day, or Burke would have given them a tour of his grounds. The bonds were dated 5 and 10 Sept. 1777; the letter was sent a little earlier (C iii. 372–4). Judith Champion to Mary Lloyd, in Owen, Two Centuries of Ceramic Art, 221. This is especially true of his letters to Champion. When Sir Richard Bourke examined a bundle of these (now NRO A. xvi. 1–38) to select letters for Corr. (1844), he wrote on a cover that ‘these are for the most part very agreeable familiar letters . . . [R.B. Sr.] was a better writer of familiar letters than his Brother’. 59 Owen, Two Centuries of Ceramic Art, 217–18. Owen neither identifies the writer (except as a friend of Champion), nor dates the letter, though he places it with others of 1777. 56 57 58

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 419 When the rain kept him indoors and he had no visitors to entertain, Burke would sometimes catch up on his reading. He received a stream of presentation copies, from strangers as well as from friends. Two letters that he wrote in June 1777 show that he often read them with genuine interest. One was to William Robertson, Principal of the University of Edinburgh, whose History of America appeared in May. This is the letter in which Burke speaks of anthropology as unrolling ‘the Great Map of Mankind’ (C iii. 351). Burke reciprocated with a copy of his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, which he called a ‘triffling temporary production, made for the occasion of a day, and to perish with it, in return for your immortal Work’ (352). Burke was unduly modest. Though Robertson’s History was translated into several languages and frequently reprinted over the next fifty years, Burke’s ‘temporary production’ has proved the more durable. About the same time, Burke received two books from another Scottish author, William Richardson (1743–1814), professor of humanity (Latin) at Glasgow: a volume of poems and A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare’s Remarkable Characters.60 Burke thought of Shakespeare as above all a great moral poet, who had ‘entered the most deeply perhaps of all the poets into human nature’. He therefore responded warmly to Richardson’s analyses of Shakespeare’s characters as moral agents. Yet his love of Shakespeare remained ‘this side idolatry’. He even ventured to suggest that ‘an indiscriminate admiration’ had ‘done something towards hurting our taste in England’, and recommended Shakespeare’s ‘faults’ as worthy of a critic’s attention (18 June 1777: C iii. 353–6). Richardson took up this hint, adding ‘An Essay on the Faults of Shakespeare’ to his Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters (London, 1783). Burke’s letter to Richardson has a further interest. Perhaps provoked by a temporary revulsion against the frustrations of politics, he wrote an eloquent tribute to the contemplative life. ‘I look with a degree of admiration not wholly unmixed with envy, on the course of life you have chosen,’ he confessed. ‘The contemplative virtue is in the order of things above the active; at least I have always thought it so. It has as great a degree of perfection and independence as any thing given to man can have.’ In public life, as Burke knew only too well, a man was ‘constantly dependent; frequently defeated; always obstructed’. Such a life ‘carries with it, even when most successful, such manifest debility and imperfection, as gives daily and hourly cause of disgust to any one who has but the faintest ideas of what excellence is’ (C iii. 355). How seriously did Burke mean this to be taken? His graceful and flattering letters to the authors who sent him their books often suggest a wistful nostalgia for the world of learning and literature. In 60

Both first published in 1774; neither is in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue.

420 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 the summer of 1777, with the ministry secure, the Rockingham party still smarting from the failure of the secession, and Burke himself almost afraid to visit his constituency, the contemplative life of a professor of Latin appeared more than usually appealing.

3 Against a futile but popular war, the opposition could do little but wait. A military defeat might shake confidence in the ministry; victory would certainly strengthen it. Much therefore depended on the outcome of the ambitious campaign of 1777, in which Sir William Howe (1729–1814), after taking Philadelphia, was to turn north to join forces at Albany with John Burgoyne (1723–92), marching from Canada. Rockingham was happy to play a waiting game. As a leader of Yorkshire society, he saw and talked to more people, and a greater variety of people, than Burke met. A less fluent talker, he was a better listener. Accordingly, he saw more clearly the need for caution, and the danger of appearing unpatriotic. ‘We have pressed and sollicited the publick to think for their own sakes,’ he warned Burke; ‘they were led to believe by the artifices of many, that it was merely our own interest which we were so warmly pursuing’. To vindicate their disinterestedness, the opposition should wait for people to draw their own conclusions from events, and not be ‘too eager in calling for a sudden acknowledgement of the change of their opinions’ (26 Oct. 1777: C iii. 392). Not being ‘too eager’ suited his own temperament more than Burke’s. Burke pretended to agree with Rockingham ‘in every particular’ (5 Nov. 1777: C iii. 399). His real sentiments can be collected from an exchange of letters with Fox. From Chatsworth, where he was visiting the Cavendishes, Fox reported that ‘the opinion of every body’ was ‘that one must wait for events, to form a plan of operations’. Fox deplored this as ‘the resource of all indolent people’. The Cavendishes, alas, were ‘very pleasant and very aimiable people; but altogether as unfit to storm a citadel, as they would be proper for the defence of it’.61 Sensing that Fox was more amenable to prodding than Rockingham, Burke sent him a long and carefully considered letter. ‘I have ever wishd a settled plan of our own,’ he confided, ‘founded in the very essence of the American Business, wholly unconnected with the Events of the war.’ What ‘long and somewhat vexatious experience’ had taught him was that nothing of the kind was practicable. The ‘faults’ of their friends were ‘intimately connected with honest disinterested intentions, plentiful fortunes, assured rank, and quiet homes’. From such men, ‘a great deal of activity and enterprize’ was hardly to be expected. Burke wanted the 61

Fox to E.B., 8 Sept. 1777, in Corr. (1844), ii. 182.

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 421 Rockingham party to ‘guide and direct’ public opinion, not wait for it to catch up with them. Unable to believe that ‘the people’ can really support the ministry, he interprets their attitude as ‘an heavy lumpish acquiescence’ (8 Oct.: 381). The hopelessness of opposition might tempt an able and ambitious young man such as Fox into taking the side of the court. Indeed, Fox had begun his career on the ministerial benches. The American question had driven him into opposition, where Burke wanted to keep him. Warning Fox that he was not ‘formed for acquiring real interior favour’ at court, Burke advised him to join the Rockingham party as the best basis for achieving ‘a firm ground in the Country’ (385). Fox possessed several qualifications for leadership: assured social position, charismatic personality, rhetorical skill. Like Burke, he loved activity, and was capable of throwing himself heart and soul into a cause that he espoused. No wonder Burke wanted to attach him to the party. To complain of Rockingham’s inactivity was easier than to frame a constructive alternative. In his clearer moments, even Burke recognized that until ‘events supply occasions’ little could be done. For once, he found himself receiving the kind of advice he usually dispensed. ‘I do not remember to have found myself at a loss in my own Mind about our Conduct, until now,’ he confessed to William Baker (1743–1814), a Rockinghamite MP. ‘I do not know how to push others to resolution, whilst I am unresolved myself.’ Burke felt ‘like a dried spunge, I have nothing in me, and am ready to drink up a great deal. In War, Events do every thing. Ones principles ought not to be led by them; but I fear ones conduct must.’ Without popular support, the opposition could do little, and public opinion was ‘wholly governed by the last Flanders Mail or New York Pacquet’ (12 Oct. 1777: C iii. 389). Baker (who had returned to Parliament in March 1777, after being out for three years) was not satisfied. He was eager for the fray. ‘We submit, for a time, to Events which we cannot Controul,’ he conceded, ‘but if we are guided by them, we shall have little Reason to Value ourselves on our Principles.’62 In one of his more fatalistic moods, Burke demurred: ‘we must be governd by Events. They are the strong hand of Nature, which we must obey whether we will or not’ (9 Nov.: 401). Events soon confirmed Burke’s worst fears. The ‘wild tumult of Joy’ that greeted the news of Howe’s victory at the Battle of Brandywine (which reached London on 2 November) revealed plainly enough, as he complained to Rockingham, that there was ‘nothing right’ in the ‘Character and disposition’ of the people (5 Nov.: 399). To adapt an idea from Burke’s Thoughts (WS ii. 254), ‘we have a very good Opposition, but we are a very bad people’. Burke could hardly avow such a doctrine. For public consumption, he composed an eloquent exposition of his theory of democracy. Unwilling to 62

Baker to E.B., 22 Oct. 1777, WWM BkP 1/1001.

422 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 visit Bristol for the dinner held on 4 November to celebrate the anniversary of his election, he sent a letter to be read in absentia and published in the newspapers.63 For this, he wrote a short account of the nature of political representation. Protesting against the cant that all public men are corrupt, he insists as ever that the choice of men matters: ‘When you find men that you ought to trust, you must give them support.’ To judge public men is not so difficult. Do they act ‘an uniform, clear, manly part in their station’; is the ‘main drift of their Counsels . . . wise or foolish’; do ‘things go well or ill in their hands’? There should be no presumption in favour of the ministry. People should ‘not listen to those who tell you, that these matters are above you and ought to be left entirely to those into whose hands the King has put them. . . . In a free Country, every man thinks he has a concern in all publick matters; that he has a right to form, and a right to deliver an opinion upon them.’ People ‘sift, examine, and discuss’ public affairs; and thus ‘vast numbers contract a very tolerable knowledge of them’ (1 Nov. 1777: C iii. 397). Britain was unusual in this respect, as most foreign visitors remarked.64 For reasons that are not clear, Burke omitted these reflections from the version of the letter that he sent to Bristol. Perhaps the draft seemed too long; perhaps the passage was cancelled as too preachy or didactic. Whatever the reason, the sentiments are characteristic of Burke, expressing more confidence in the theory of democracy than in the reality. The chief business of the session of 1777–8 was again the American war. The campaign had failed to achieve its objective; Howe and Burgoyne had not been able to join forces. Reports of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga reached London on 3 December, damping the enthusiasm generated by the news of Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia. The opposition’s task was not thereby lightened, however, for France now signed treaties with the Americans that led inexorably to hostilities with England. The opposition would be constrained to give at least token support to a war against France. With such a war in prospect, North proposed more generous terms of reconciliation. These included an explicit renunciation of the right of parliamentary taxation, a virtual confession that coercion had failed. The Cabinet remained weak and divided, and rumours were rife of a reshuffle or even a new ministry.65 In such circumstances, the substantive issues were occluded by recriminations and the jostle for places in any new arrangement. Tempers were short and debates more than usually liable to degenerate into Printed in the Bristol Gazette, 6 Nov. 1777. In Idler, no. 7 (27 May 1758), Johnson treats it as a commonplace; Works (New Haven, 1958– ), ii. 22–6. Even so, E.B. may have modelled his formulation on a famous passage from Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Thucydides (2. 6. 40). 65 Frank O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975), 360–76. 63 64

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 423 personalities. Opposing a long adjournment over Christmas, Burke suggested that the Americans might be disinclined to negotiate with the present ministry, whatever terms it might offer. Fox made the same point more strongly.66 Such declarations opened the opposition to the charge of being concerned chiefly to force themselves into office. Rockingham had warned against such over-eagerness (26 Oct. 1777: C iii. 392–3). Since 1774, Burke had been reiterating the impolicy and imprudence of the American war. The subject was now exhausted. Even his fertile invention was hard pressed to find suitable material. On 4 December 1777, the dry details of the ordnance estimates provided the pretext for an unconvincing, histrionic performance. Why, he asked, working himself up into a passion, were ‘such quantities of ordnance, and such numbers of men’ wanted? Some minister ‘must, shall inform me. I will not leave this seat, nor depart from this House, till I am satisfied. I think I shall be excused by my country, if I speak again and again on the subject—if I transgress the point of order, and urge my suit by many repetitions. . . . I promise you, Mr Speaker, I will not go to supper, nor regard order, till I am satisfied.’67 Though the ordnance estimates were indeed higher than in 1759, when many more troops had been employed, the ministry had an explanation which Burke was constrained tamely to accept. This was one occasion when Burke’s behaviour justified Johnson’s image of him as ‘a lion, who lashes himself into Fury with his own Tail’.68 Burke was not always so feeble. For his greatest effort of the session he worked up a subject more susceptible of rhetorical ornament and exaggeration, the employment of American Indians as auxiliaries. The Indians’ barbarous manner of fighting and cruelty to prisoners had caught his imagination when he read Lafitau’s graphic account in the 1750s.69 On 6 February 1778, he moved for papers relating to the Indian allies to be laid before the house. (In effect a call for an enquiry, a motion for papers was a standard opposition procedure, designed to attract support from members who would be chary of a direct motion of censure.) In an oration lasting over three hours, he detailed the habitual savagery of the Indians, expatiating on scalpings, massacres, and other atrocities. Not that Burke relied entirely on an emotional appeal. He also mounted a carefully articulated attack on the reasons that the ministry had advanced for employing Indians. As so often, Burke was affecting but unconvincing. His speech ‘drew tears from the whole house’ and was ‘universally thought the very best Mr Burke had ever delivered’. The division told a different story. Burke’s motion for papers 10 Dec. 1777; Almon, viii. 156–60 (PH xix. 590–2). Almon, viii. 113 (PH xix. 548). 68 Recorded by Lady Anne Lindsay from a conversation of Nov. 1773; ‘Memoirs’, National Library of Scotland, Crawford MSS (Acc. 9769), 27/4/13, ii. 120. 69 Account of the European Settlements in America (London, 1757), i. 181–94. 66 67

424 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 was lost by 137 to 223.70 Burke squeezed a few last drops out of the subject on 26 March, when he moved to deduct from the army extraordinaries the sums he claimed had been expended on ‘hatchets, tomahawks, scalpingknives, razors, spurs, &c. for the savages of America, to butcher, torture, scalp, and massacre old men, women, children, and infants at the breast’.71 Such rhetoric made good parliamentary theatre, but did not endanger the ministry. Easier than to defeat the ministry was to ridicule the minister. North was a frequent target of Burke’s wit. Thanks to the common culture shared by his listeners, Burke could be inventively abusive, drawing on sources as various as Cervantes, Plutarch, Virgil, and Cicero. On 2 December 1777, North professed himself willing ‘to grant every reasonable information in his power; but he could not consent that discoveries should be made prejudicial to the true interests of the country’. Burke retorted with a parable drawn from a famous incident in Don Quixote (part ii, ch. 47). When Sancho Panza arrived at the island he is to govern, he ‘sat down to a table covered with profusion, and abounding with every dainty and delicacy that art, nature, and a provident steward could furnish’. But before he could eat, ‘a pigmy Physician’ (North), pretending concern for Sancho’s health, ‘excepted to one dish because it was disagreeable; to another because it was hard of digestion; to a third because it was unhealthy; and in this progressive mode robbed the Governor of every dish on table, and left him without a dinner’ (WS iii. 344). In a more serious vein, on 22 January 1778, opposing the raising of troops by voluntary subscriptions, Burke compared North to Pericles in his last days, when ‘exhausted with misfortune, wasted with disease, and lingering with pain, [he] walked abroad, bedecked with amulets, charms, and saws of old women’. The allegory mystified his hearers. ‘The loan now unfilled up and unpaid’. Burke had to explain, ‘was his disease; and the charitable contributions of his friends were his amulets and charms’ (348). The allusion to Pericles was too obscure to be effective.72 On 6 May, Burke scored a more palpable hit when he enforced his charge that ministers had culpably failed to send the fleet out in time against the French with a variation on an old metaphor, the ‘ship of State’: ‘Alas! the rudder was lashed, and Palinurus gone to sleep!’73 Everyone had read the Aeneid. 70 Strangers were excluded from the gallery, and no full text of E.B.’s speech is known; WS iii. 355– 67; W. Moore to his father, 9 Feb. [1778], HMC Le Fleming, 359; CJ xxxvi. 686. 71 Almon, ix. 87 (PH xix. 972). 72 The ultimate source of this anecdote is a lost work of Theophrastus, cited in Plutarch, ‘Pericles’, 38. 2. E.B.’s version is so different in tone and moral from Plutarch as to suggest that he was using a later source. 73 Almon, ix. 173 (PH xix. 1136). Palinurus, the helmsman of Aeneas, overcome by the god of sleep, fell overboard, and was murdered on the shore where he was washed up (Aeneid, 5–6). The image had long been a commonplace: Edward Young complimented Sir Robert Walpole as a Palinurus who ‘slept not at the helm’ (Satires, 7. 225).

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 425 Burke enlivened the metaphor by gesturing towards the somnolent North, who, suffering from weak eyesight, was in the habit of closing his eyes while listening to debates or (as the opposition alleged) sleeping through them.74 North usually took such jokes in good part. On one occasion, indeed, so the story goes, he may have turned the tables on Burke. On 15 December 1779, when Burke quoted Cicero’s aphorism ‘Magnum vectigal est parsimonia’, mispronouncing ‘vectigal’ with a short ‘i’, the apparently sleeping North corrected him.75 Not all ministers were so placid or so philosophical as North. Another frequent target of Burke’s sniping was the irascible Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn, an able and ambitious lawyer who had trimmed his politics to advance his legal career.76 One exchange with Burke nearly led to a duel. The occasion was the debate of 3 December 1777 on the army estimates, when Germain was forced to admit that Burgoyne was reported to have surrendered. Though aimed chiefly at Germain, Burke’s speech concluded with ‘a few words on the Solicitor-General, whom he called the council to the noble lord’. The sting was that, while lawyers were avowedly paid to argue a case, MPs were supposed to act from conviction. Wedderburn interpreted Burke’s remark as an accusation that he had been bought by the ministry, and rose in wrathful indignation to assert his political integrity and independence.77 While Wedderburn was speaking, Burke ‘burst into one of his loud hysterical laughs’. A moment of silence made it audible to all. Wedderburn was furious, threatening ‘that if that gentleman did not know manners, he as an individual would teach them to him; that he had not the good will of that gentleman, and did not wish for it; but he was ambitious of having even his respect, and would force it from him’.78 Burke interpreted this as a threat, stormed out of the House, and penned a challenge: ‘Mr Burke presents his Compliments to Mr Sollicitour General and, though not conscious to himself of wanting them, is perfectly willing to receive from Mr Sollicitour those lessons of good manners which he promised, whenever Mr Sollicitor shall appoint, and at what place he thinks fit. He will bring a friend with him. Mr Burke will also have a friend’ (C iii. 406). Before this could be sent, Fox and other friends had caught up with Burke and persuaded him to substitute a less offensive note. ‘Sir,’ it begins, ‘As there was something in your manner of promising to instruct me P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971), 221–2. James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (2nd edn. London, 1826), i. 355. E.B.’s quotation (from Paradoxa stoicorum, 6. 49) appears in contemporary reports (PH xx. 1296). North’s riposte, which does not, may be apocryphal. 76 On 3 Nov. 1775, E.B. had likened Wedderburn’s arguments to an ‘Egyptian corpse’; Almon, iii. 122 (PH xviii. 836). On 6 Nov. 1776, he compared Wedderburn to Milton’s Satan (WS iii. 252). 77 Almon, viii. 101–3 (PH xix. 539). 78 John Crauford to Lord Upper Ossory, 4 Dec. 1777, in Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed. Lord John Russell (London, 1853–7), i. 162. 74 75

426 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 in good manners, which seemd to me to imply more than the words directly expressed, I conceive I am justified in desiring an explanation, so far as to let me know whether by those words you meant to convey a menace.’ Wedderburn, whose temper was back under control, denied that he had intended ‘to convey any menace’ (407). By midnight the danger had been averted. Rockingham wrote with the eloquence of feeling: ‘My dear Burke | My heart is at ease | Ever yours | Most affectionately | Rockingham’ (408). A tough and formidable barrister, Wedderburn was at home in the brutal world of politics. Unscrupulous about pushing his claims for preferment at a time of national crisis, undue sensitivity was not his failing. Only in a highly charged atmosphere would he have reacted as he did to Burke’s hysterical laugh. At such a moment of unusual tension, the rhetorical games played by the government and opposition could suddenly turn into deadly earnest. On 26 May 1778, for example, an altercation between Temple Simon Luttrell (c.1738–1803) and Lord George Germain nearly ended in a duel.79 On 13 February, in a debate on the Navy estimates, ‘in the warmth of his indignation’ Burke threw the book of estimates at the Treasury bench.80 Burke was prone to indulge in such dramatic effects, and the genuineness of his indignation on this occasion may be doubted. Members on both sides usually sensed what was political theatre and what was earnest. Burke was not always the aggressor. Provocative and violent rhetoric was also heard from the ministerial benches. On 27 January 1778, after Fox had moved for copies of the instructions given to Burgoyne, Henry Lawes Luttrell denounced the opposition in singularly offensive terms. ‘Placemen without places,’ he taunted them; ‘orators who spent their time in studying inflammatory speeches, and expending their incomes in having them published in the news-papers; rhetoricians, who got their livelihood by publishing their speeches in Parliament; abettors of treason and rebellion, combined purposely for the ruin of their Country’.81 Burke was one of those aimed at, in the ‘rhetoricians’ clause especially. Yet two days later, when Luttrell gave notice that he intended to have the gallery cleared of strangers, Burke opposed him, not with the fire and rancour that might have been predicted, but in a speech of remarkable good humour. The gallery should be kept open, he argued, for constituents to listen to their members; for the instruction of young men; and for the information and entertainment of the ladies. This speech succeeded where Burke’s longest and most studied orations had failed. It persuaded. Influenced (as he acknowledged) by Burke’s arguments, Luttrell withdrew his motion.82 79 80 81

Alan Valentine, Lord George Germain (Oxford, 1962), 296–7. Almon, viii. 374 (PH xix. 730). 82 Almon, viii. 317–18 (PH xix. 645). Almon, viii. 323–6 (PH xix. 647–50).

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 427 The opponents of the war were wracked by internal dissensions. Widely (if wrongly, in Burke’s view) regarded as America’s best ‘friend’, Chatham denied Parliament’s right to tax America yet was implacably opposed to any recognition of American independence. Convinced of the folly of the war and of the incapacity of the ministry, he obstinately refused to make common cause with the Rockingham party. Instead, he waited until he should be called to save the country single-handed. In February and March 1778, he was widely regarded as the nation’s best hope. Lord North even advised his recall.83 In better health, Chatham might indeed have infused greater vigour into the ministry. The king wanted an energetic prosecution of the war, but not at the price of making Chatham dictator. He had forgotten neither the failure of the last Chatham ministry nor Chatham’s subsequent captious opposition. Nor had Burke. One of the few subjects on which Burke and George III agreed was Chatham, whom both loathed. Burke had many reasons for his hatred, personal and political. Chatham had destroyed the Rockingham ministry in 1766; more recently, his egotism had prevented the forging of a united opposition to the American war. Chatham’s last speech, delivered in the House of Lords on 7 April, was a virulent attack not on the ministry but on the Duke of Richmond’s proposal to recognize American independence.84 After having (in Burke’s phrase) ‘spit his last Venom’ (C. iii. 427), he collapsed. On 11 May he died. Implacable as Burke, the king took the proposal to accord him a state funeral as a personal affront.85 Burke, more magnanimous or to make a show of opposition unity, agreed to act as a pallbearer.86 Chatham’s death removed one obstacle to opposition unity only to create another. His following was inherited by the devious Earl of Shelburne. Instead of an open and contemptuous enemy, the Rockingham party had now to contend with a smooth but treacherous ally. The Irish economy, like that of Bristol, was hard hit by the effects of the American war. To defuse the discontents which this fuelled, officials and politicians in England and Ireland proposed to relax some of the restrictions on Irish trade. One of those responsible was Charles Jenkinson, whom Burke had come to regard as the chief of the infamous ‘king’s friends’ and perhaps the real minister (C ii. 209; iii. 89). Jenkinson’s part in this episode shows how egregiously Burke misjudged him. The subject was brought before the Commons by Lord Nugent (the former Lord Clare, promoted in 1776 to an Irish earldom). On 2 April 1778, he moved for a committee to consider the laws relating to Irish trade. Burke spoke briefly in support, and 83 Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London, 1913), ii. 326–7. Williams exaggerates the unanimity of pro-Chatham sentiment. 84 Almon, x. 369–70 (PH xix. 1022–3; another version, 1023–6). 85 The king to Lord North, 12 May 1778 (Correspondence of King George the Third, iv. 139–40). 86 The others were Savile, Dunning, and Thomas Townshend; Annual Register (1778), 243.

428 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 the motion was carried without opposition.87 When specific proposals were announced, however, a vocal opposition was heard, principally from English manufacturers fearful of competition. Jealousy of Ireland was deeply rooted at Bristol, which therefore squealed among the loudest.88 To Burke, these protests revealed not only a narrow and selfish outlook, but a weak grasp of economics. In his first substantive statement on the question, a letter of 9 April, addressed to Samuel Span (d. 1795), Master of Merchants’ Hall, he advanced the arguments that he would reiterate over the course of the next two months (426). The concessions proposed were slight: of little economic value, they served chiefly as an earnest of good will, evidence of a disposition not to alienate another province of the empire.89 Since Britain was Ireland’s most important source of imported goods, any increase in Irish prosperity would benefit British manufacturers. To loosen the fetters on Irish trade was therefore in Britain’s own interest. Burke elaborated these points in two open letters (published first in the Bristol press and then as a pamphlet) and in a series of speeches in the Commons.90 Together these statements amount to an eloquent plea for free trade as the surest route to economic growth and prosperity. The concessions proposed, he argues, are not the award of a privilege but the removal of a grievance. Far from giving Ireland unfair advantages, they will hardly do more than allow her to limp a little less slowly behind. Britain is so much more highly developed, and commands such incomparably vaster resources, that Ireland can never pose a threat. Opponents claim that, with low taxation and low labour costs, Ireland will be able to undersell British products. Not so, Burke retorts. Ireland is overtaxed in proportion to its wealth. Wages are low, because the country is backward; they will rise in step with development, for high wages are a sign of a dynamic, thriving economy.91 An incident in Parliament illustrated how imaginary and irrational were English fears of Irish competition. In the committee, Burke proposed to allow the duty-free import from Ireland of sailcloth and cordage. Petitions against the concession alleged that it would ruin the English trade. In fact, as Burke subsequently discovered, the importation was already permitted.92 ‘It is but too natural for us to see our own certain ruin, Almon, ix. 97 (PH xix. 1100–6). Opposition was widespread: between 29 Apr. and 5 May 1778, over forty petitions were received against the proposals (CJ xxxvi. 939–58), including three from Bristol (4 May: CJ xxxvi. 947–8). 89 To Champion, E.B. bluntly described the concessions as ‘frivolous’, offered only ‘to keep Ireland from diverting you with another rebellion’ (11 Apr. 1778: C iii. 427). 90 E.B. to Span, 23 Apr. 1778 (C iii. 431–6); E.B. to Harford, Cowles, & Co., 2 May (C iii. 440–4); printed in Sarah Farley’s Bristol Journal, 9 and 16 May, and as Two Letters on the Trade of Ireland (Todd, 29; text in WS ix. 507–17). In the Commons, E.B. spoke in seven debates on the subject between 2 Apr. and 19 May; the most important were those of 6 and 19 May (519–27). 91 E.B. here follows Adam Smith; Wealth of Nations, i. viii. 17–22, 35–42. 92 Debate on Irish Trade, 4 May 1778 (WS ix. 518). Thomas H. D. Mahoney speculates that E.B.’s proposal was ‘a trap for the narrow-minded opponents of Irish commercial privilege’; Edmund Burke and 87 88

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 429 in the possible prosperity of other people,’ he admonished his constituents. ‘It is hard to persuade us, that every thing which is got by another is not taken from ourselves.’ For Burke, freedom of trade was more than an economic question; he invested it with a philosophical and even a religious aspect. ‘We should form to ourselves’, he exhorted Bristolians, ‘a way of thinking, more rational, more just, and more religious. Trade is not a limited thing; as if the objects of mutual demand and consumption, could not stretch beyond the bounds of our Jealousies. God has given the Earth to the Children of Man; and . . . not a scanty, but a most liberal provision for them all.’ This is Adam Smith’s vision ‘Of the Natural Progress of Opulence’, given a more providential cast.93 Aware how little such principles were understood or accepted in Bristol, Burke ended his speech of 6 May by making a virtue of acting ‘contrary to the wishes, but not, he was sensible, to the interests of his constituents’. Fortified by the ‘conviction of his being in the right’, he gloried in daring ‘to oppose his constituents when his judgment assured him they were in the wrong’ (WS ix. 523). Avowing such sentiments, no wonder Burke was reluctant to visit Bristol. Burke’s constituents were not the only ones to remain unconvinced. Pressure from commercial lobbies, while unable to block the concessions entirely, significantly curtailed their scope and thereby eroded their value as a good-will gesture.94 Burke continued to regard them, even as truncated, as a valuable first step. ‘It is a great deal to have broken up the frozen Ground,’ he assured Edmund Sexton Pery (1719–1806), Speaker of the Irish House of Commons.95 In supporting the Irish trade bills, Burke departed for once from his usual loyalty to men rather than measures. ‘The propositions in question did not originate from me, or from my particular friends,’ he told Span, but ‘when things are so right in themselves, I hold it my duty, not to inquire from what hands they come’ (23 April: C iii. 432). On the day the compromise was settled in the committee (19 May), he even dined with Lord Nugent (449). This bipartisanship did not last. Early in 1779, when Lord North proposed far more sweeping trade concessions for Ireland, Burke and his friends reverted to their old suspicion of any measure that emanated from the ministry. Ireland had religious as well as commercial grievances. Earlier in the century, war with France and the prospect of war with Spain would have been most unpropitious circumstances in which to propose relaxation of the penal laws against Catholics. On the contrary, some of their more Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 77–8. Such a stratagem would have been out of character. E.B. was not omniscient, and his bent, like Milton’s Moloch, was for ‘open war’ rather than ‘wiles more inexpert’. 93 Wealth of Nations, iii. i, iv. i and iii. c. 94 R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979), 251–3. 95 E.B. made the same point in the Commons on 19 May (WS ix. 524).

430 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 draconian, unenforced provisions were often given token execution on such occasions. By 1778, Catholicism was no longer regarded as a real threat, in England at least. When Sir George Savile and Lord Richard Cavendish (1752–81) moved the repeal of parts of the penal laws that restricted Catholic ownership of property, there was no public outcry such as the Irish trade proposals had provoked. These bills applied only to England, but the movers intended them to encourage the Irish Parliament to enact similar concessions. Early in the process, the Catholic Association of Ireland dusted off Burke’s petition of 1764, and presented it to the Lord-Lieutenant for transmission to the king.96 Burke maintained a discreet silence during the easy passage of the English bills. Privately, though, he was active. When approached by the Catholic committee, he supplied them with an address to the king, which they adopted with little alteration. He also drew up a draft preamble for the Act itself. Though described as ‘ingenious’, this was disliked and not used.97 Burke also worked to smooth the passage of the Irish bill. Permitting Catholics to acquire property and hold it securely was a cause he passionately believed in. His efforts on behalf of the Irish Catholics can be reconstructed from a series of letters that he wrote to Speaker Pery.98 He prepared detailed memorandums and canvassed the question at length with North, Thurlow, and Wedderburn. On this subject, Burke was not suspected of factious or self-interested views. Wedderburn, indeed, with whom Burke had nearly fought a duel in December, actually asked him for information on a number of specific points, confident that he could rely on the answers.99 From Lord Chancellor Thurlow (1731–1806), Burke extorted this remarkable tribute: ‘I am ashamed to confess how much emotion Your display of the Popery Law in Ireland raised and how much it unfitted me to form any judgement upon them.’100 Burke’s letters to Pery illustrate his conception of the proper relation of Church to State. North had expressed concern that, if the clause repealing the sacramental test were approved, a move to repeal it in England would follow. While admitting that he would support any such repeal, Burke repudiated any argument from the analogy with Ireland.101 Presbyterianism 96 John Curry to E.B., 18 Aug. 1778, in Corr. (1844), ii. 237–8. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism, 189–90. 97 William Sheldon, ‘Minutes Relating to the Bill of 1778’, Westminster Diocesan Archives, AAW/ A. xli, 175; Nigel Abercrombie, ‘The First Relief Act’, Challoner and his Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England, ed. Eamon Duffy (London, 1981), 174–93. The petition was published in the London Gazette, 28 Apr.–2 May 1778. 98 E.B. to Pery, between 19 May and 18 July 1778 (C iii. 448–65, iv. 3–10). 99 Wedderburn to E.B., 2 July 1778, in Corr. (1844), ii. 226–7. 100 Thurlow to E.B., endorsed ‘June 1778’; WWM BkP 1/1075. Thurlow added a stern warning (in legal Latin) against allowing judgement to be biased by emotion. 101 Conversation with North, reported in E.B. to Pery, 18 July 1778 (C iv. 7–8).

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 431 was established in Scotland, Catholicism (by North’s own Act) in Quebec. ‘These things were governed,’ he told Pery on 18 July 1778, ‘not by general maxims, but by their own local and peculiar circumstances’ (C iv. 8). In an earlier letter (16 June), Burke developed this theme further than his purpose in canvassing North had required. As he had in his ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’, he condemns the penal laws for ‘promoting the purity of religion by the corruption of Morality’. The ‘Sole Business’ of the ‘Governing power’ ought to be ‘to make his people happy and prosperous, and not to convert them to any System of Theology’ (iii. 457–8). Following Montesquieu, Burke believed that the religion of a country must be adapted to its geography, civil constitution, and national character, and be rooted in its traditions.102 He was therefore no proselytizer. People should be left in the religion in which Providence had placed them. India provided an apposite example. Burke was horrified to imagine ‘what havock should we make, if we were to set about Laws to prevent the further growth of Braminism, to destroy the Casts, and to subtract Wives and children from the rule of their Husbands and fathers? Common Sense dictates to us, that in India we have got a Pagan and a Mohammedan Country to govern; and as a Mohammedan and a pagan Country we ought to make the most of it, for the Benefit of the people and our own’ (458). The logic of this argument points to governing Ireland as a Catholic country, with a Catholic establishment. This was too heterodox a notion for Burke to advocate it openly. Support of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ remained the unquestioned basis of English policy towards Ireland. Irish unrest was a less immediate threat than the French fleet in the Channel. With Augustus Keppel (1725–86), a follower of Rockingham, in command of the channel fleet, the opposition could sincerely support one part of the country’s war effort. Keppel sailed on 9 July 1778. On the 27th, he engaged the superior French fleet at the indecisive Battle of Ushant. For reasons that were later controverted, he failed, or was unable, to prevent the escape of the French into Brest harbour. The engagement had political repercussions. Sir Hugh Palliser (1723–96), the subordinate whom Keppel later blamed for the failure to pursue the French, was a protégé of Lord Sandwich, the much-reviled First Lord of the Admiralty. Writing to congratulate Keppel on his ‘victory’, Burke referred to ‘the disciplined mob of court runners’ who had already begun a smear campaign to discredit the hero (Aug. 1778: C iv. 13). Early in 1779, Palliser’s ill-advised attempt to vindicate himself by impeaching Keppel would lead to the opposition’s most heartening victory for many years. 102

L’ Esprit des lois, xxiv–v.

432

waiting on events, 1776‒1779

4 At the beginning of the war, Burke’s chief fear had been an English victory leading to the establishment of the ‘court system’. By late 1778, enough reverses had accumulated to have shaken public confidence and to quicken hopes that the eyes of the people would at length be opened to the evils of that system. The ministry remained riven by internal dissensions. Germain and Sandwich, the ministers most directly responsible for the conduct of the war, were highly unpopular. Even North recognized that the government needed strengthening. ‘The people are angry with the ministry,’ Burke observed to Champion; ‘they condemn the Ministry; but they do not look to the opposition’ (9 Oct. 1778: C iv. 25). An unsuccessful war usually precipitated demands for scapegoats to appease the public wrath. Why had this not happened in 1777 or 1778? Burke thought he knew the answer. The iniquitous ‘doctrine of the equality of all men . . . preached by Knavery, and so greedily adopted by Malice, Envy, and low Cunning, has left the people no rescource’ (C iv. 25). The people had been deluded into believing that no party or set of men were more virtuous or more capable than another. Burke’s sense of the opposition’s unpopularity was accurate, though his diagnosis was incomplete. He ignored some of the less palatable reasons for their unpopularity. Partly from national pride, and partly from the orthodox mercantilist belief in the economic value of colonies, people in Britain were most reluctant to accept the fact of American independence. Burke himself was slow to do so. The ministry was blamed for the misconduct of the war, but the opposition was held responsible for encouraging, if not aiding and abetting, the rebels. Also, fear of aristocratic domination meant that the Rockingham party was widely distrusted as an exclusive clique determined to impose its will on the king. Fox, the party’s latest recruit, was a brilliant debater but in other respects a doubtful asset. Capable of inspiring unlimited affection and devotion from friends and followers, in others his dissipated manner of life induced distrust. Few shared the faith of James Barry, expressed in his print The Conversion of Polemon (Plate 22), that Fox would grow out of his youthful follies. For a time, indeed, Burke did exercise something of a sobering influence on Fox. In 1775, he was reported to have ‘left off all his fine acquaintances . . . and lived quite with Mr Burke’. This ‘fit’ was not expected to last.103 In the longer term, Burke had neither the social standing nor the personality to dominate Fox. Such was Fox’s charisma that, when the two disagreed about the French Revolution, the majority of the party at first sided (some against their better judgement) with Fox. Nor did Fox at 103 Lady Sarah Lennox to the Duchess of Leinster, 23 Oct. 1776, in The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, 1745–1826, ed. Countess of Ilchester and Lord Stavordale (London, 1901), 204.

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 433 first accept every article in the Rockingham creed. As a party, they appeared determined to stay out of office, excluded by their insistence on complete control of any administration of which they formed part. This dogma, formed in the aftermath of their experience in 1765–6, was a virtual guarantee of permanent exclusion. Although Burke had ridiculed Chatham’s ‘mosaic’ ministry, all ministries of the period were constructed from more or less disparate elements. The Rockingham doctrine, as propounded in Burke’s Thoughts, advanced two contentious demands. One was the need for a ministry dominated by a single party (themselves). The other, required to achieve the first, was a virtual elimination of the king’s power to select ministers. Perhaps because he had not been in Parliament for the formative year of 1765-6, Fox did not understand the necessity for these pre-conditions. He was therefore prepared to countenance the heresy of a mixed or coalition ministry. ‘You think you can best serve the country by continuing in a fruitless opposition,’ he explained to Rockingham. ‘I think it impossible to serve it at all but by coming into power.’ To declare ‘that you will never have any thing to do with any Ministry that is not entirely of your own framing’ was tantamount to perpetual self-exclusion.104 He wrote to Burke in the same vein. Undoubtedly, he admitted, ‘without Lord Rockingham and his friends being in power, this country can never be upon the best possible footing’. Yet their insistence on such terms as ‘amount nearly to an impossibility’ discouraged potential allies and followers. Rockingham’s intransigence appeared to mean that ‘because we can not have the best possible system, we will have the worst possible’ (24 Jan. 1779: C iv. 39–40). This letter was sent to Portsmouth, where Burke was attending the trial of Admiral Keppel. Burke began a reply, which he discontinued on Fox’s arrival. Then, during ‘a long discourse in a Night walk on the ramparts’, he convinced Fox ‘that we were not mistaken in our Ideas’ (41). News of Fox’s wavering reached the Duke of Richmond, who sent him a long letter justifying the party’s stand. The king’s strategy would be to ‘stipulate to have in each board and department some one man of apparently inoffensive manners, but who from his connections we could but look upon as a spy’. The party would know what was intended, ‘and yet, would it not be difficult, and certainly invidious, to say we broke off precisely because such or such a private gentleman was not turned out of office?’105 This is the lesson of 1766, reinforced by the doctrine of Burke’s Thoughts (WS ii. 273– 4). Burke and Richmond were still living in the world of the 1760s, afraid of taking office lest they be again undermined by ‘secret influence’. Burke’s idea of party still aroused distrust and incomprehension. In 1777 and 1779, he had to defend it against the suspicions of his Bristol 104

24 Jan. 1779; Memorials of Fox, i. 207–8.

105

7 Feb. 1779; ibid. 217–18.

434 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 constituents and explain it to his old friend Richard Shackleton. In his Letter to the Sheriffs, replying to the charge of being ‘called in reproach a party man’, he maintained that ‘an habit of life and communication of councils with the most virtuous and public-spirited men of the age you live in’ was the best antidote to ‘the corruption of nature and example’ (WS iii. 324–5). Announcing his retirement from the school in favour of his son, Shackleton expressed the hope that Burke’s son (now studying law at the Middle Temple) should ‘as much as possible stand disengaged from all party-prejudices, and be attached in his mind only to the good and worthy of every class’ (10 Apr. 1779: C iv. 58). Burke could not let the implied rebuke pass without challenge. Parties, he retorted, ‘have always existed and always will’. Only three species of men eschew them: the nakedly ambitious, who attach themselves solely to those in power; unprincipled men like Chatham, who make use of parties to further their own ends; and ‘four or five Country Gentlemen of little Efficiency in publick Business’. Faced on his entry into public life with ‘two very distinct Systems’, he made his choice and has remained faithful to it (25 May: 79–80). For Burke, the ‘good and worthy’ were not to be found in every party. Burke had not abandoned all hope. ‘The nation may at length awake,’ he confided to Champion, but ‘the dread is, lest if they call on any one to assist them, it may be just the worst man, that is the greatest Boaster and promiser, in the Society’ (9 Oct. 1778: C iv. 25). A year earlier this would have meant Chatham. Since his death, Shelburne had taken his place as Burke’s pet aversion. The spectre of an alliance between the court and the people, managed by Shelburne and cemented by an annihilation of the aristocratic and propertied interests, continued to haunt him. The Rockingham party’s stiff terms for entering office seemed to doom them to permanent self-exclusion. Burke, however, was never one to abandon the fight merely because it was patently futile. Parliament reassembled on 26 November 1778. Unusually, Burke did not speak in the opening debate.106 Perhaps he wanted to avoid comparison with the speech printed as his in Anticipation. This was a satirical pamphlet by Richard Tickell (1751–93), parodying the styles of the leading speakers; it had been entertaining the town since the 23rd. According to Gibbon, Burke was ‘pleased’ by the speech attributed to him, which is elegant and hardly overdrawn. The main joke is his predictability.107 Burke was not long silent, however, speaking on 4 December and frequently thereafter. Though Tickell had put in his mouth a réchauffé of old ideas, Burke in fact modified his strategy to take account of recent events. Accepting the loss of America as irreversible, he argued that the war should be directed exclusively against Almon, xi. 1–105 (PH xix. 1321–65). Anticipation (pub. 23 Nov. 1778), ed. L. H. Butterfield (New York, 1942); E.B.’s speech is on 42–5. Gibbon to Holroyd, 24 Nov. 1778, in Letters, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), ii. 196. 106 107

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 435 France. Increasingly, he concentrated on the incompetent conduct of the war and on the ruinous costs incurred. Having failed to convince members that the war was wrong, he might persuade them that it was an expensive mistake. Burke’s chief statements on America in 1778–9 were accordingly made in debates on finance. On 14 December 1778, for example, in a debate on the Army estimates, he gave one of his most pragmatic speeches (WS iii. 393–7). For the first time, and only as ‘a matter of necessity’, he accepted the independence of America.108 Delusions of reconquering the colonies must be abandoned, national honour and dignity laid aside, and the depleted national resources concentrated against France. Thirty millions had already been wasted; to squander more in a vain attempt to recover the colonies was the folly of a gamester. Everyone recognized that the situation was critical. Opinions still differed about what should be done. Some, who had earlier favoured conciliation, now supported a war to keep America out of the orbit of France. The most prominent of these was William Pulteney (1729–1805). In 1778, he had published a pamphlet proposing more generous concessions than Burke’s: repeal of the Declaratory Act and the Quebec Act, and even modification of the Navigation Acts.109 Now, however, convinced by Congress’s rejection of the terms offered by the 1778 peace commission and alliance with France that they did not represent the true sentiments of America, Pulteney advocated a vigorous war against Congress to break the French connection and secure a federal union between Britain and the former colonies. To allay fears that a debt-burdened Britain was unequal to such a struggle, he argued that, for two years at least, the cost of the war could be met without further increasing the debt. He proposed instead a one-time capital levy. Far-fetched as it appeared, North toyed with the idea in his 1779 budget speeches, perhaps only as a morale-booster.110 Burke scotched the project as delusive. Characteristically, he reasoned against it from first principles, adumbrating a general theory of economic behaviour. Most people spend or save for one of three purposes: ‘gratifications, avarice, or making a provision for one’s family or posterity’. Since most people also live up to (or beyond) their income, and cannot readily realize capital, a levy on wealth will in practice be paid out of income by economizing on other expenditures. Such economies will reduce the yield from the various taxes on consumption.111 108 On 2 Dec. 1777, E.B. had referred to America as ‘de facto’ independent (Almon, viii. 78; PH xix. 516). Yet as late as 6 Apr. 1778, he still hoped for reconciliation without the repeal of the Declaratory Act (PH xix. 1012). 109 Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs with America, and the Means of Conciliation (London, 1778). 110 Pulteney, Considerations on the Present State of Public Affairs, and the Means of Raising the Necessary Supplies (London, 1779). Lord North, 24 Feb. and 1 Mar. 1779; Almon, xii. 3, 13–14 (PH xx. 159, 164–5). 111 1 Mar. 1779; Almon, xii. 17–18, 21 (PH xx. 168–9, 172).

436 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 Burke returned to the attack in the committee of supply on 31 May. After pointing out that the ministry’s own military experts had testified that America was unrecoverable, he shifted his argument from the futility of the war to its high cost. Even the reduced naval strategy that the ministry claimed to have adopted would add £10 million to the national debt for every campaign, or £500,000 to the annual interest payment. In an emotive passage, he excoriated the government contractors who were the main beneficiaries of the war. When North had recommended that the American war be ‘moderately fed’, who had applauded most loudly? The ‘twenty fat contractors at his Lordship’s back’, who ‘cried out with one voice, some in hoarser, some in more sonorous accents, feed! feed! feed!’ Like ‘so many ravens and birds of prey’, the contractors cared nothing for the country, avid only ‘to suck her inmost vitals, to feast on her entrails, and finally glut their all-devouring maws on her lifeless cadaver’ (WS iii. 441). The contractors were an easy target, an unpopular group whose exclusion from the Commons had often been urged.112 Burke’s attack on them as ravenous predators was the emotional highlight of an otherwise sober speech. Reviewing the various expedients whereby, North had claimed, another campaign could be mounted without placing an excessive burden on the taxpayer, Burke demolished each in turn. He was especially withering on North’s plan to extract additional revenue from the East India Company, a reprise of the same folly that had lost America. India can contribute only ‘certain advantages, in commerce and military strength, to this country; and no more’ (441–2). Yet all was not lost. ‘If the confidence of the people was restored,’ he concluded, ‘if a dangerous Court system was broken; if the influence of the Crown was regulated and limited within its due and constitutional bounds, we should have no reason to despair’ (444). This is his old nostrum, familiar since the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. In the Thoughts, Burke had developed the paradox ‘that Government is at once dreaded and contemned’ (WS ii. 253). In 1770, government had been ‘dreaded’ for particular acts of arbitrary power and ‘contemned’ for its inconsistent and vacillating reactions to popular agitation. To bring the nominal ministry into such contempt had been one of the grand aims of the ‘interior cabinet’ or ‘king’s friends’. In 1779, Burke still firmly believed in the conspiracy thesis sketched in the Thoughts. The court martial of Admiral Keppel was a new instance of the exertion of arbitrary power. The 112 Of the forty-six men who held supply contracts during the American war, eighteen were MPs, five were close relatives and two were ‘connections’ of MPs, and a further eleven were partners of such members. Thus only ten contractors had no link to the parliamentary patronage network; Norman Baker, Government and Contractors: The British Treasury and War Supplies, 1775–1783 (London, 1971), 216–17. On 12 Feb. 1779, Sir Philip Jennings Clerke successfully moved for leave to bring in a bill to exclude contractors from the Commons; Almon, xi. 235–7 (PH xx. 124–6). The bill itself, however, was lost. A similar measure was enacted under the Rockingham ministry in 1782.

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 437 abandonment of plans to relax the Scottish penal laws against Catholics showed contemptible pusillanimity in the face of popular prejudice. Like the Duke of Portland, Augustus Keppel was descended from one of William III’s Dutch confidants. His grandfather was Arnold Joost van Keppel (1670–1718), created Earl of Albemarle. As one of the hereditary pillars of the Whig establishment, Burke regarded him as a natural target for the cabal of court conspirators. The dispute that led to his trial was first made public in a report in an opposition newspaper. Only Palliser’s backwardness, the writer claimed, had prevented Keppel from obtaining a complete victory. Palliser imprudently published a letter in his own defence, demanding exoneration from Keppel. Driven by a Burkean determination to vindicate the rectitude of his own conduct, Palliser then preferred charges against Keppel before the Admiralty, which ordered a court martial. Both admirals sat in the Commons, where the affair was aired soon after the newspaper report appeared.113 Though convinced of Keppel’s innocence, Burke at first expected that court influence would secure his conviction and disgrace (C iv. 37). Burke’s heated imagination may have pictured Keppel being shot on the deck of his flagship, a scapegoat for the incompetence of ministers, the fate of Admiral Byng in 1757. A manifestly unfair conviction by a packed court would have been the best possible evidence for the court-inspired conspiracy against all men of independence or integrity, and for the power of ‘secret influence’. On this occasion, however, public feeling ran as strongly in Keppel’s favour as it had against Byng. The court martial was held at the naval base of Portsmouth. Proceedings began on 7 January 1779, with Rockingham, Burke, and other prominent opposition politicians in attendance to give moral support. Keppel was defended by the leading opposition lawyers; Burke helped to draft his opening speech.114 Palliser failed to substantiate his allegations. On 11 February, Keppel was acquitted, and the charges against him branded as not only false but malicious. Keppel enjoyed a brief season as a popular hero. Yet the victory was personal rather than political. As the opposition sought unsuccessfully to make capital out of the affair, the debates degenerated into legal quibbles and personal recriminations.115 The plight of the Scottish Catholics touched Burke at a deeper emotive level than the trial of Keppel. The ministry had promised to extend to Scotland the relief given to English Catholics. On 14 May 1778, Henry 11 Dec. 1778; Almon, xi. 131–52 (PH xx. 53–73). WS iii. 397–419. Some of E.B.’s papers relating to the trial of Keppel are preserved in WWM BkP 13. Modern studies include J. H. Broomfield, ‘The Keppel–Palliser Affair, 1778–79’, Mariner’s Mirror, 47 (1961), 195–207; and Michel Fuchs, ‘Edmund Burke et Augustus Keppel’, Études anglaises, 18 (1965), 18–26. 115 The main debates were on 19 Feb., 15 Mar., and 13 May; Almon, xi. 249–52, xii. 143–69, xiii. 73– 87 (PH xx. 144–8, 282–305, 623–35). E.B.’s most notable contribution was on 15 Mar.; Almon, xii. 159– 62 (PH xx. 295–300). 113 114

438 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 Dundas (1742–1811), the minister responsible for Scotland, undertook to introduce such a bill during the next session.116 News of this pledge provoked violent protests in Scotland. In February 1779, rioters destroyed the homes and businesses of some Catholic tradesmen. Cravenly, as Burke thought, the ministry dropped the proposal. James Boswell, who supported the measure in principle, but thought it untimely in the inflamed state of public feeling, asked Burke for an assurance that the opposition would not introduce it (22 Feb. 1779: C iv. 44). Burke replied in a vein of heavy irony. Scottish opinion had run strongly against the rebellious colonies. At least, the ministry had been able to procure addresses from Scotland in support of coercion. Alluding to these addresses, Burke affected surprise. ‘I did not expect’, he pretended, ‘that our dear Sister, who in the rigour of her Prudery, had shewn such outrageous Zeal, and decreed such severe penances against other frail and offending parts of the houshold, should make such a slip herself as to give her a fair Title to the Stool and white Sheet.’ (In Presbyterian churches, penitents, especially sexual offenders, were obliged to sit, dressed in a white sheet, on a conspicuous ‘stool of repentance’.) Of the two grievances, Burke regarded the American as the more reasonable. ‘It would hurt me rather more’, he told Boswell, ‘to have the Excise in my own house, than the Mass in my Neighbours.’ Burke could never comprehend the mean-spirited bigotry that induced people to ‘burn mens houses and to despoil them of their Goods, because somebody is supposed to intend them an Act of Kindness’ (1 Mar.: 44–6). In Ireland, anti-Catholic sentiment was at least explicable in terms of narrow Protestant self-interest. In Scotland, where Catholics were too few to present any threat to Presbyterian domination, anti-Catholicism was harder to understand or to believe sincere.117 Burke was never reluctant to take an unpopular stand. On this issue, he risked further offending his Bristol constituents, among whom antiCatholic feeling was strong. Nor had he close friends or connections among the Scottish Catholics.118 Even so, he agreed to present a petition for compensation from the Catholics whose property had been destroyed or damaged. The occasion was memorable for one of his most amusing jests at the expense of Lord North. On 18 March 1779, after the petition was read, Burke expatiated on the subject for well over an hour, providing a detailed résumé of the Scottish penal laws. North dozed off. Calling for action to compensate the victims of the riots, Burke expressed the hope ‘that government was not dead, but only asleep’. Turning to North, he added ‘Brother Sheldon, ‘Minutes Relating to the Bill of 1778’, Westminster Diocesan Archives, AAW/A. xli; PH xix. 1142. 117 Robert Kent Donovan, No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland, 1778–1782 (New York, 1987). 118 E.B. told Patrick Bowie that he knew only two (31 Mar. 1779: C iv. 56). 116

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 439 Lazareth is not dead, but sleepeth’. The allusion (to John 11: 11) produced general laughter. Woken by the noise, North took the joke in good part.119 On the main point, Burke was in deadly earnest. He was especially critical of the Edinburgh-based ‘Friends of the Protestant Interest’, which he accused of fomenting the riots. A report of his speech in the Scottish press drew him into correspondence with two opponents of Catholic relief. Burke’s replies, one of which runs to over 2,000 words, illustrate his readiness to devote considerable time and energy to explaining and defending his views to complete strangers. Patrick Bowie, a member of the committee of the ‘Friends’, disclaimed responsibility for a pamphlet which Burke had attributed to them, enclosing one which represented their true views.120 Burke began his reply with one of his many disavowals of the reports of his speeches in the newspapers. In 1770, he had described them as ‘monstrous things’ with little resemblance to what he had said (C ii. 178). By 1779, the standard of newspaper reporting had improved. Now, Burke impugned the verbal accuracy of the reports, but did not deny their substance. ‘The expressions in the Newspaper to which you allude are (as usual) the News Writers own,’ he told Bowie. ‘Very little that appears there has the smallest resemblance to my Mode of expression, or to my manner of stating facts and Arguments’ (31 Mar. 1779: iv. 53–4).121 As for the official pamphlet which Bowie had forwarded on the committee’s behalf, Burke found it no less objectionable than the other. Without accusing the committee of fomenting the violence, he warned how easily ‘Zeal’ degenerates into ‘Malignity and a spirit of oppression’ (55). Charging Bowie with bigotry founded on ignorance, Burke pleaded for greater mutual understanding and tolerance. ‘There is so much good in mankind at large’, he maintained, ‘that one of the main causes of the mutual hatred in parties is our mutual ignorance of each other. Let us take care on our part, that our speaking so ill of our Adversaries does not give them occasion to conceive ill of ourselves’ (55–6). Though Bowie responded with a lengthy justification of his fear of Catholicism, Burke declined to be drawn into further discussion with a man for whom he felt only contempt.122 Burke evinced greater respect for the views of John Erskine (1721–1803), a leading Edinburgh clergyman. Erskine had written pamphlets espousing the American cause, which may have induced Burke to treat him more as an errant friend than an adversary. Erskine wrote to Burke on 24 April 1779 (C 119 Almon, xii. 172–7; A Summary of the Proceedings in the House of Commons, on the Petition of the Roman Catholics in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and of the Debates which Took Place on that Affair (London, 1779) has a longer account of E.B.’s speech. 120 Bowie to E.B., 25 Mar. 1779, WWM BkP 1/1143; in Corr. (1844), ii. 253–5. 121 Bowie read the report of E.B.’s speech in the Caledonian Mercury, 24 Mar. 1779 (repr. from the Public Advertiser of 19 Mar.: WS iii. 426). 122 Bowie to E.B., 13 Apr.; printed (with the earlier exchange between them) in the Scots Magazine, 41 (Mar. 1779), 135–40. Bowie to E.B., 24 Apr. and 8 June 1779, WWM BkP 1/1156, 1171.

440 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 iv. 63–4). Burke replied on 12 June with a revealing letter in which two distinct voices can be heard. One speaks respectfully ‘of the whole and of all the considerable parts of those who profess our common Hope’, and indeed of ‘all other religions, even for those who have nothing better than mere human Reason, or the unregulated instincts of human Nature, for their Basis’. In this ecumenical view, neither ‘the Synagogue, the Mosque or the Pogoda’ deserves the language which Scottish pulpits ‘lavish upon a great part of the Christian world’ (85). A shriller note is heard when Burke turns to the anti-Catholic sermons, ‘sanguinary invectives’ that provoke ‘the blind fury of the Multitude’, ‘a furious and bigotted set of Miscreants’ to rob innocent and inoffensive men of their goods and burn their houses (85– 6). This passage is expressed with an uncharacteristic bluntness. Such phrases signal the breakdown of the rhetoric of containment that habitually masks Burke’s deeper feelings.123 Writing this letter allowed Burke to vent feelings that might not otherwise have found an outlet. Burke’s letter to Erskine was written from a new address, Charles Street, off St James’s Square. The house he took was assessed at £50 (as compared to £45 for the house near the abbey).124 Mary Shackleton, who visited the Burkes there in 1784, described the house as ‘genteel’ and ‘elegant’, though it was not so ‘grand’ as she had expected a man of such eminence to inhabit.125 She enjoyed looking out from the bow window in the drawingroom on the first floor (such as can be seen in one of the houses in Fludyer Street in Plate 15). This commanded a view not only of Charles Street but of fashionable St James’s Square with its circular pond and fountain. The house in Charles Street remained the Burkes’ London base until about April 1785. Local vexations were as capable of stirring Burke as great issues of moral principle such as religious toleration. An example was the Buckinghamshire by-election of 1779. A newcomer to the county, and possessing only a small estate, Burke was normally diffident about taking too forward a part in its politics. The reasons for his making an exception of the 1779 by-election are politically and psychologically revealing. Most county electorates were large (Buckinghamshire had about 4,000 voters), and contests expensive. Opposing interests therefore had every incentive to reach a compromise; in Buckinghamshire, the last contest had been in 1734. The second Earl Temple, one of the county magnates, died on 12 September 1779. His title and estates passed to his nephew George Grenville (1753–1813; son of the author of the Stamp Act), who thereby became one of the wealthiest 123 An early example is ‘the unfeeling Tyranny of a mungril Irish Landlord’ (to O’Hara, Aug. 1762: C i. 147). 124 City of Westminster Archives, Rate Books, Parish of St James, Piccadilly, D101 (1780). E.B.’s name does not appear in the rate books for his earlier period of residence in Charles Street (1767–9). 125 Mary Shackleton’s Diary, 1784, National Library of Ireland, MS 9310, p. 107.

waiting on events, 1776‒1779 441 men in England. Grenville, elevated to the House of Lords, thereby vacated his seat for the county. He wished to be succeeded in the Commons by his younger brother Thomas (1755–1846; the bibliophile). According to the ideas of the time, for a man of Temple’s property and standing to sponsor a son or brother for one of the county seats was not thought unreasonable. Burke himself regarded such claims as, in general, natural and proper. The Grenvilles, however, were obnoxious to him on many counts, personal and political, local and national. Any move to shut out a Grenville was therefore sure of his support. A credible anti-Grenville candidate, however, was not easy to find. Burke’s friend Murrough O’Brien, now Lord Inchiquin (his peerage was Irish, leaving him eligible to sit in the English Commons), was eager to stand, but could not afford a contest. Thomas Hampden (1746–1824) was willing, but was not an ideal choice. His main family property was in Sussex, not Buckinghamshire. The eldest son of a peer, on the death of his father (who was 73) he would be called to the House of Lords, and the county representation be once again thrown open. Nevertheless, he was the only alternative to Grenville, and Burke agreed to canvass on his behalf. Soon, however, he was aghast to discover that the Duke of Portland’s local agent was promoting Grenville’s candidacy. Burke felt obliged to explain to Portland why he was opposing it. Giving a new turn to one of his favourite metaphors, he defended the search for a candidate whose family ‘did not cast such deep Roots in it as to starve and stunt every thing that grew near him’ (24 Sept. 1779: C iv. 130). Gratitude to Verney and dislike of the imperious Grenvilles induced him to support Hampden. Portland could not understand Burke’s objections to Grenville. The logic of his commonsensical reply (29 Sept.: 136–8) exposes the essentially emotive basis of Burke’s decision. Verney’s interests, Portland pointed out, would be best served by allowing Grenville to take the seat. Grenville would thereafter have every incentive to avoid a contest and maintain the existing representation. Were not the Grenvilles as much entitled to a seat in Buckinghamshire as the Cavendishes in Derbyshire? Burke was not convinced, but the battle was lost. A county meeting on 4 October revealed that Hampden stood no chance. Burke attributed the pro-Grenville appearance to bribery, coercion, and intimidation, for (to his mind) no independent man would freely choose a Grenville. Nothing could shake his conviction that Hampden had ‘undoubtedly a vast Majority in his favour’ (148). Nor could Burke let the matter rest, though for once he attempted only a partial vindication of his conduct. Admitting that Portland was right in principle, he even confesses himself ‘very far from being sure’ that Portland did not see more clearly into ‘this Case which is so remote from the decision 126

126

E.B. estimated Temple’s fortune at £14,000 a year in land and £170,000 in the funds (C iv. 132).

442 waiting on events, 1776‒1779 of your immediate Eye’ than those who were ‘so near the matter and as it were in the midst of it’ (16 Oct.: C iv. 150). For Burke, this is going pretty far. Yet he remained unconvinced. The Grenvilles, he explains, are objectionable personally, not on principle. Far from meaning ‘to exclude the younger Branches of illustrious families . . . from popular Trusts and favour’, Burke insists that he regards such families as ‘the permanent substantial parts, the Bones and sinews of every free commonwealth’. Nevertheless, there were decorums to be observed. When the Grenvilles appear to demand one of the county seats as a right rather than as a favour and a privilege, ‘the dread of great family powers, sustaind with haughtiness, and seeming to be borne out by power of purse, will always be natural objects of fear and apprehension’ (152–3). Retraction never came easily to Burke. This rare instance of his even pretending to concede gracefully is a tribute to his affectionate respect for Portland.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781

443

12 Shears or Hatchets, 1779–1781 1 In October 1779, Burke looked forward to the approaching session of Parliament with an uneasy mixture of hope and dread, expectation and despair. He took heart from a growing sense of national crisis, not confined to the Rockingham party. The Duke of Grafton, ‘in a perfect foam of politicks’, was convinced that, as Burke reported to Lady Rockingham, only drastic new measures could ‘pluck the Nation from the brink of that Gulph of Perdition into which it was about to plunge headlong’ (C iv. 141). The American colonies were as far as ever from being coerced into submission. For the second summer in succession, Britain had itself been threatened with an invasion by the combined fleets of France and Spain. The French were reported to be financing their war effort with few or no new taxes, while Britain was sinking ever deeper into debt. Ireland was seething in a state of incipient rebellion, with 25,000 Volunteers in arms. As the war dragged on so dismally, in England popular discontent burgeoned. Rumours of a new or remodelled ministry were eagerly repeated.1 These were all hopeful signs for the opposition. Other circumstances were less promising. The king remained implacable, devoted to ‘his System’, which Burke assured Rockingham was ‘far nearer and dearer to him’ than the welfare of his kingdom. The ministers, lost to any sense of shame or dignity, were intent only on keeping their places and profits (17 Oct.: 156). The opposition remained unpopular and disunited. By the people, Burke acknowledged to Lady Rockingham, they were ‘lookd upon with an evil Eye for the obstructions they are supposed to have thrown in the way of Government, and the encouragement which their writings, speeches, and parliamentary Enquiries had given to rebels and Enemies’ (3 Oct.: 141). Among themselves, narrow views and selfish aims were all too prevalent. The Buckinghamshire by-election had shown that Lord Temple was more concerned to aggrandize his family than to support the common cause. W.B. to Portland, 9 Oct. 1779 (C iv. 146); E.B. to Portland, 16 Oct. (154–5); E.B. to Rockingham, 17 Oct. (158). In July 1779, when Rockingham had some expectation of being asked to return to administration, E.B. drew up a combined apologia and manifesto for him to deliver to the king; ‘Thoughts in July 1779 from E.B.’ (WS iii. 448–54) and ‘A Sketch also of an Address’, WWM R 155/1. 1

444 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 Burke did not exempt even the Rockingham party from censure. ‘There is a real fault more in our power to amend,’ he hinted to Portland. ‘I mean a little dilatoriness; and a missing of opportunities for action, from the want of a spirit of adventure, and from fear of discovering a weakness’ (16 Oct. 1779: C iv. 153). To Lord Upper Ossory (1745–1818) he complained more openly, comparing the frustrations of opposition to ‘the torture of Sysiphus in Hell’. The opposition was partly to blame for its own ineffectiveness: ‘The same force better directed, that trundles the stone within six Inches of the Top of the Mountain, would throw it clean over.’ At the least, ‘we should vary our own labour (which by the way is a sort of rest) and we should attract the publick attention much more effectually by altering our plan and not continuing in the dull routine in which we have jogged on for so many years and with so little effect’ (25 Sept.: 136). Burke is beginning to sound like one of the devils in Milton’s Hell, seeking ‘where he may likeliest find | Truce to his restless thoughts’, oblivion in activity, however futile. Despite being ‘almost afraid of renewing the disagreeable office of remembrancer’, Burke continued to prod his leaders. He reported to Portland the general opinion that ‘something ought to be Speedily resolved upon’, something ‘very different from the ordinary routine of opposition’ (C iv. 155). To Rockingham, he repeated the refrain: ‘something ought to be done’ (157). But what? Only stale or impracticable ideas presented themselves. Burke had earlier advocated impeachment of the obnoxious ministers. Such a move would fail, of course. Its purpose, he avowed, was to provide the occasion for a well-publicized secession (3 Oct.: 142). Burke had a taste for such political theatre. Eager for the change of work in which he found rest, he drew up a comprehensive indictment of ministerial failures and neglects in the form of ‘Articles of Impeachment’ (WS iii. 455– 63). The plan did not find favour with the leadership, however, and was dropped. Burke was reduced to urging Rockingham to come to London as early as possible to convene a party meeting (C iv. 157–8). The new session promised to be another labour of Sisyphus, another routine trundling the same stone up the same hill. Parliament reassembled on 25 November 1779. The leading theme of the king’s speech was the need for unanimity at home to ‘prosecute the War with Vigour’ against the combined enemies. A secondary theme was the recommendation of (unspecified) trade concessions to Ireland. In the debate on the address, Lord John Cavendish moved the opposition amendment, calling for a removal of the ministers who had led the country into disaster. Suffering from ‘a violent cold and hoarseness’, Burke was able to speak only briefly. Even so, he managed a witty mock-logical dissection of the previous speaker (Henry Dundas) and some remarks on the Irish

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 445 question. By 6 December, when the opposition moved to censure the ministry for its neglect of Irish grievances, he had recovered. For the ministry, Lord Beauchamp admitted that ‘Ireland was in a distressed condition’, yet denied that the ministers were at fault. The concessions proposed in the previous two sessions had been defeated by public opinion exerted on the House, not by the ministry. In any case, an ‘equality of trade’ would soon be proposed. Burke, speaking next, again showed his agility in ridiculing the previous speaker, likening Beauchamp to an Irish lawyer who in a suit for divorce had defended the wife in one court and the husband in another. These witty openings were more than comic preludes to serious arguments. Burke sought to undermine the credibility of the ministers by convicting them of inconsistency and absurdity. Substantive opposition to the Irish proposals, however, could hardly begin until they were announced. This made debate on the censure motion of 6 December somewhat artificial.3 North’s Irish propositions, announced briefly on 9 December and explained at greater length on the 13th, proved unexpectedly generous. The prohibitions on the export of wool and (less importantly) glass were to be lifted, and Ireland was to be allowed direct and equal access to trade with the colonies. The opposition could neither praise nor blame. Fox was hesitant and reserved judgement until he knew whether the Irish themselves were satisfied. Burke said nothing.4 His silence was misconstrued as disapprobation, in Ireland at least. On 20 December, however, in the Irish House of Commons, his old friend Henry Flood (1732–91) came to his defence against the imputation of being ‘an enemy to the interests of Ireland’. The attacks and Flood’s defence were both reported to Burke by another Irish MP, Thomas Burgh (1754–1832).5 Burke was exasperated at the ingratitude of the Irish. Earlier, he had incurred odium with his Bristol constituents for what they regarded as his culpable partiality to Ireland. In 1778 and 1779, Merchants’ Hall had lobbied against the trifling concessions offered to Ireland as highly detrimental to the interests of the city. Now, when North proposed a far more sweeping liberalization, the same body tamely resolved that the proposals were unexceptionable.6 Burke had stood 2

2 CJ xxxvii. 461–2; Almon, xvi. 1–59 (PH xx. 1091–1150). WS ix. 532–5 omits E.B.’s opening riposte to Dundas. 3 Almon, xvi. 99–146 (PH xx. 1197–1241); E.B.’s speech in WS ix. 535–42. 4 Almon, xvi. 174–87 (PH xx. 1272–85). 5 Burgh to E.B., ‘Monday night’ [20 Dec. 1779]; NRO A. i. 30. The reports of the debate of 20 Dec. that appeared in the English papers (29 and 30 Dec.) only mention Flood’s speech. The Morning Chronicle of 27 Jan. 1780, however, carries a supplementary report, mainly devoted to Flood’s speech, and including the passage in vindication of E.B. This was perhaps a belated act of justice inspired by E.B.’s Irish friends. 6 21 Dec. 1779; Politics and the Port of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century: The Petitions of the Society of Merchant Venturers, 1698–1803, ed. W. E. Minchinton (Bristol, 1963), 149.

446 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 the heat of the battle; North reaped the fruits of victory. After all this, to be stigmatized as an enemy to Ireland was intolerable. The charge, even reported indirectly and accompanied as it was with the assurance of Flood’s satisfactory rebuttal, evoked Burke’s characteristic reponse to criticism. He wrote a long letter (some 8,000 words) to prove himself ‘perfectly in the right’. As so often, he found the act of composition therapeutic. Written in a fury of indignation, his reply was finished by 1 January 1780, though he can hardly have received Burgh’s letter earlier than 27 December.7 Nominally addressed to Burgh, the reply was intended to be shown to a few friends. Burke did not authorize publication, but can hardly have been surprised when his letter found its way back to England and into print. Though published anonymously, A Letter from a Gentleman in the English House of Commons, in Vindication of his Conduct with Regard to the Affairs of Ireland (1780) was readily identified as his.8 The Letter in Vindication covers some of the same ground as Burke’s speeches of 25 November and 6 December. It reiterates the contrast between his consistent and principled support for trade concessions to Ireland, and the weak tergiversations of Lord North. Anger at the ingratitude of the Irish gives a savage, ironic edge to the retelling. Burke’s anger boils into self-righteousness, fortified by the confidence that he and his friends are the country’s only hope. ‘These principles of the opposition’, he assures Burgh, ‘are the only thing which preserves a single symptom of life in the nation. That opposition is composed of the far greater part of the independent property and independent rank in the kingdom; of whatever is most untainted in character; of whatever ability remains unextinguished in the people’ (WS ix. 547). This sounds the mere cant of a disappointed politician. Burke was firmly convinced of its truth. With perfect sincerity, he could attribute the nation’s disasters to the systematic exclusion from office for the past thirteen years of the country’s best men. This sense of mission sustained Burke through many a dark period. Just as George III, conscious of his own good intentions, could not understand how anyone but a factious knave could oppose his ministers or his policies, Burke imputed the worst motives to the ministerial hirelings. Neither the king nor Burke could understand how honourable men might think differently on great public issues. The letter to Burgh is the more remarkable for having been written not at a season of leisure but while Burke was framing his first important legislative proposal. Even before the Irish fiasco, the opposition had a new and promising theme, or at least slogan: ‘economical reform’, the topic 7 When his anger had cooled, E.B. also wrote a short, temperate letter to Flood (5 Jan. 1780: C iv. 181–2). 8 Todd, 34; WS ix. 544–63. Published about June 1780; brief notice in the Monthly Review, 62 (June 1780), 485–6.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 447 which dominated the remainder of the session. Several years of high taxation to fund the loans raised to finance an unsuccessful war had intensified and made more credible the perennial charges of government waste, extravagance, and corruption. In France, the financial reforms initiated by Jacques Necker (1732–1804) showed what could be done. Since 1776, Necker had been struggling to introduce more economical methods into a system that was a byword for prodigality and profusion.9 In England, ‘economy’ was a catchword that different groups sought to exploit for their own purposes. A few felt a disinterested concern for the reduction of the burden of taxation and for economy for its own sake. One such was Thomas Gilbert (c.1719–98). Though himself a placeman, in 1778 he had proposed a tax on places and pensions.10 More numerous were those for whom ‘economical reform’ was no more than a useful first step. Christopher Wyvill (1740–1822) was the first to popularize the idea for this purpose. A clergyman who had inherited large estates in Yorkshire, Wyvill belonged to the old ‘country’ tradition in politics. Distrusting the professional politicians, the opposition leaders as much as the ministers, he sought to create an independent movement to lobby first for economical reform and then (in a purified Parliament) for more radical constitutional changes. Wyvill himself was a liberal clergyman who subsequently became a Unitarian. His movement, however, was by no means radical. It attracted the support of men of independent property and even of many Churchmen. In these respects, it differed from the London societies for political reform, which drew mainly on Dissenters and the unpropertied. In late November 1779, Wyvill floated the idea of a county meeting of Yorkshire freeholders to petition Parliament for economical reform. Rockingham reciprocated Wyvill’s suspicions, for Wyvill’s movement threatened his own influence in Yorkshire. Rockingham valued economical reform chiefly as a means of reducing the corrupt influence of the crown. ‘It matters not’, he told Burke, ‘whether it has as yet been declared at the Market Cross in every Town in England, that the System of Government has misled, and that the corrupt Influence of the Crown has enabled the Ministers to carry into execution the Measures by which this Country has been ruin’d.’ Rockingham had persuaded himself that such was now ‘the general Predominant opinion of the Nation’. Accordingly, ‘the Means of power, and the means of corrupt influence in the Crown must soon submit to be shorn. NB I must prefer the shears to the Hatchets’ (3 Nov. 1779: C iv. 163). Rockingham knew that ‘hatchets’ were being sharpened, and that they J. F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1970), 142– 65; Robert D. Harris, Necker, Reform Statesman of the Ancien Régime (Berkeley, 1979), 84–116. 10 Gilbert’s idea was approved in the committee of supply on 9 Mar. 1778, but rejected by the House the following day; Almon, ix. 6–7 (PH xix. 872–3). E.B. spoke but did not vote against it (WS iii. 373). 9

448 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 might be wielded against other targets besides the influence of the Crown. Thus, far from being monolithic, the reform movement was an uneasy amalgam of groups with different, even incompatible aims.11 Each sought to exploit the others. The Rockingham party’s scheme was directed as much against Wyvill’s hatchet as against secret influence itself. News of Wyvill’s initiative reached London in early December. The topic received its first parliamentary airing on 7 December, when the impetuous Duke of Richmond, without much consultation, moved an address to the king for a voluntary reduction in the Civil List.12 Soon competing schemes were being mooted. In a move characteristic of the fissiparous opposition, Lord Shelburne, who inherited his mentor Chatham’s hostility to the Rockingham party, accused Burke of stealing his ideas. Burke indignantly denied the charge. With a lukewarm gesture towards co-operation, he offered to show Shelburne his ‘proposition’, which he claimed to have ‘long digested’ (C iv. 174). Burke can have felt no compunction about equivocating with a man of Shelburne’s reputation for duplicity. His scheme, only a week or two old, was far from ‘digested’.13 Shelburne need not have taken umbrage. Though both were concerned with the influence of the Crown, Shelburne concentrated on the award of Army contracts, a subject untouched by Burke.14 Burke’s scheme was wider-ranging and altogether more ambitious, a complicated and miscellaneous measure which could not be assembled in a few days. Accordingly, he gave notice that he would explain its principles on 15 December, reserving the details until after the Christmas recess. On the 15th, he drew an ouline of his scheme (WS iii. 467–76). Repeating the thesis of his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, he traced ‘the whole of our grievances’ to ‘the fatal and overgrown influence of the Crown; and that influence itself to our enormous prodigality’. Formerly, this baleful influence had ‘only touched the higher orders of the State’. Now, thanks to the unexampled growth in public expenditure and the bureaucratic apparatus of government, it has ‘insinuated itself into every creek and cranny in the kingdom. There is scarce a family so hidden and lost in the obscurest recesses of the community, which does not feel that it has something to keep or to get, to hope or to fear, from the favour or displeasure of the Crown’ 11 Eugene Charleton Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization, 1769– 1793 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 37–61. 12 Almon, xv. 102–15 (PH xx. 1255–66). The motion was lost by 36 to 77. 13 E.B.’s ‘Thoughts in July 1779’ refers only briefly to the need for economy (WS iii. 454). This count’s against the editor’s suggestion that July 1780 is ‘at least as likely a date’ for the ‘Thoughts’ as July 1779 (448). Such a document drawn up in July 1780 would have given much greater prominence to the need for economical reformation, as does the memorandum E.B. drew up for Rockingham in Mar. 1782 (C iv. 424). 14 Shelburne made his motion (which called for a check on the alarming growth in the army extraordinaries) on 15 Dec. 1779, the same day as E.B. foreshadowed his scheme; Almon, xv. 119–28 (PH xx. 1285–93).

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 449 (471). Admitting that his proposals were only a ‘basis’ for further action, Burke claimed that his scheme would nevertheless result in a saving of £200,000 a year and abolish ‘a quantity of influence equal to the places of fifty members of Parliament’. To put this figure in perspective, the number of MPs thought to be susceptible to ministerial or court influence was usually put at about 200.16 To alleviate fears of sweeping and indiscriminate cuts, he promised that his axe would fall only on the unearned wages of political corruption (475). In an orchestrated sequence, Burke was supported by Lord John Cavendish, Fox, and others. Employing a tactic that was still unusual, their speeches were rushed into print as a pamphlet.17 Over the Christmas recess, Burke busied himself about his plan and the great speech with which he determined to launch it. Parliament resumed on 24 January 1780. On the 28th, Burke was sufficiently prepared to give notice that on 11 February he would seek leave to bring in his bill. As a prelude, beginning on 8 February the petitions in support of economical reform began to be presented. The first were those from Yorkshire, York, Bristol, and Nottingham. Debating them, Lord North insinuated that they were not genuine expressions of public concern but a concerted campaign masterminded by opposition politicians. In reply, Burke denied that he knew more than the general contents of the Bristol petition before receiving it from his constituents. This was not strictly true. He had received a copy of the proposed petition from Champion, and returned it with ‘such corrections as occurred to me to be any way Necessary’ before it was approved by the Common Council of the city.18 When the great day arrived, expectations were so high that the House was more crowded than it had been for some years. Burke did not disappoint, speaking for three hours and twenty minutes to a highly appreciative audience.19 The speech is one of his best. Conscious that some of his propositions would prove unpopular, Burke opened with a long and elaborate exordium designed to obviate any appearance of parsimony or cheeseparing. By temperament, he confessed, he was neither an economist nor a reformer. His primary aim was to curb the corrupt influence of the 15

15 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1765–9), i. 324–6, has a striking anticipation of this observation. 16 Over 200 such members are identified in A Correct List of the Members of the Last House of Commons, Distinguished According to their Votes in Certain Late Public Questions, in which the Rights and Liberties of the People Were Essentially Concerned (London, 1780), a broadside published to influence the 1780 election. The figure is much higher than modern historians would accept, but represents the scale of ‘influence’ as perceived by contemporaries. 17 Substance of the Speeches Made in the House of Commons, on Wednesday, the 15th of December 1779 (London, 1779). Todd, 31; published 29 Dec. 18 CJ xxxvii. 581; PH xx. 1370–83. E.B. to Champion, 24 Jan. 1780 (C iv. 199–200). Further petitions were presented on 10 and 11 Feb.; CJ xxxvii. 586–7, 590–3. 19 Morning Chronicle, 12 Feb. 1780; London Evening Post, 10–12 Feb. Cuthbert Allanson to Sir Bellingham Graham, 21 Feb. 1780, HMC Graham, 341–2.

450 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 crown. Economy was only a means to that end. To justify his measures, he referred to the popular demand for economy and reform in England, and the example of Necker’s reforms in France. In his speech on 15 December, Burke had cited Necker’s success in producing a nearly balanced budget. Since then, Necker had tackled the problem of central control over government expenditure, a reform which resembled one of Burke’s own proposals, the elimination of subordinate treasuries.20 He therefore acknowledged Necker’s example, which helped mute the anti-monarchical appearance of his own plan (WS iii. 487–9).21 Adopting the stance of a prudent conservative, he averred that only the exigencies of the times had convinced him that change was needed. An early reform was most likely to prove both temperate and permanent. To give his scheme an appearance of system, he enunciated ‘seven fundamental rules’. Jurisdictions that serve chiefly as sources of corruption and influence ought to be eliminated. The landed estates of the Crown, another source of malign influence, should be sold. Offices of more expense than use ought to be suppressed, as should those that obstruct a unified control of public expenditure. Payments ought to be made in a predetermined order, not at the discretion of a minister. Departmental expenditure should be more strictly controlled, and subordinate treasuries abolished. Underlying these rules is the belief, inherited from Rockingham’s experience in 1766, that the king had devised a ‘system’ of corrupt influence, operated chiefly through the holders of subordinate offices. That belief, rather than any concern for saving money, was the driving force behind Burke’s scheme. In the body of his speech, Burke outlined a variety of measures designed to curb the influence of the Crown and incidentally to save money. The first was the abolition of some venerable medieval survivals, the separate legal and judicial establishments of Wales, Chester, Cornwall, and Lancaster. These subordinate jurisdictions harboured many jobs and sinecures used to reward MPs or their dependants. Burke probably put them first because they lent themselves to ridicule: Cross a brook, and you lose the king of England; but you have some comfort in coming again under his majesty, though ‘shorn of his beams,’ and no more than Prince of Wales. Go to the north, and you find him dwindled to a Duke of Lancaster; turn to the west of that north, and he pops upon you in the humble character of Earl of Chester. Travel a few miles on, the Earl of Chester disappears; and the king surprises you again as Count Palatine of Lancaster. If you travel beyond Mount Edgecombe, you find him once more in his incognito, and He is Duke of Cornwall. So that, quite fatigued and satiated with this dull variety, you are infinitely refreshed when you return to the sphere of his proper splendor, and 20

18.

21

The decree of 29 Jan. 1780 is reprinted in Necker’s Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1820–1), iii. 211– Necker sent E.B. a short note of appreciation for these flattering references (5 May 1780: C iv. 233).

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781

451

behold your amiable sovereign in his true, simple, undisguised, native character of majesty. (WS iii. 497–8)

This passage is typical of Burke’s playful humour. These separate jurisdictions, however, were not entirely the empty pageant that Burke painted them. William Jones (1746–94), a rising lawyer and oriental scholar who both knew and admired Burke, and whose political opinions were in general more radical, was quick to come to the defence of the Welsh judiciary. Jones had actually travelled the Welsh circuits. In his view, Burke’s proposal would greatly increase the cost of obtaining justice in Wales and leave ‘many industrious tenants . . . greater slaves than they are even now to the tyrannical agents and stewards of indolent gentlemen’.22 Jones need not have worried; these parts of the bill never reached the statute book, even when the Rockingham party came to power in 1782. Having sported with the king’s multiple personalities, Burke next proposed to sell the remaining Crown lands and to suppress the office of Surveyor-General.23 The sinister part played, as Burke thought, by the Surveyor-General in aiding and abetting Lowther against Portland in 1767 had shown how mischievous his office could prove. In the royal household itself, Burke likewise proposed to eliminate various medieval survivals: the Board of Green Cloth, the Great Wardrobe, the Jewel Office, the Treasurer of the Household, the Cofferer and Treasurer of the Chamber. All provided sinecures to reward docile MPs for their servile support of the ministry.24 Burke further proposed that the royal household should be served by contract, as some of the more frugal European courts already were. This proposal proved so unpopular that Burke agreed to drop it.25 Turning from the royal household to the machinery of government, Burke proposed three reforms. His first object was an abuse that had long been the subject of complaint. Both the Paymaster-General of the Forces and the Treasurer of the Navy could draw money from the Treasury at their discretion. This practice permitted them to draw large sums before they were needed and profit from lending the money out at interest. A profitable office at any time, a paymastership was exceptionally lucrative during a war. Henry Fox had amassed a vast fortune as Paymaster during the Seven Years War. The 22 Jones to Lord Althorp, 26 Mar. 1780, in Letters, ed. Garland Cannon (Oxford, 1970), i. 354. Jones felt strongly on the subject; he had made the same point in two earlier letters (18 Feb., 12 Mar. in Letters, i. 346, 351). 23 Sale of the remaining Crown lands had recently been advocated by Adam Smith; Wealth of Nations, v. ii. a. 19–20. 24 In reality, as Ian R. Christie has shown, the number of MPs holding such offices had declined since 1761; ‘Economical Reform and the “Influence of the Crown”, 1780’ (1956), in his Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London, 1970), 296–310. The popular perception, however, was that the influence of the Crown was considerable and increasing. 25 On 20 Mar. 1780; Almon, xvii. 378 (PH xxi. 302). Catering by contract is one of the practices at the court of Frederick II of Prussia lauded in the report reprinted in the Annual Register (1759), 278–81.

452 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 present incumbent was Burke’s old enemy Richard Rigby. Burke also proposed to abolish the office of the third Secretary of State (commonly called the American Secretary) and the Board of Trade, arguing that they were useless except as sources of patronage. Other obvious targets for economical reform were pensions and the patent places in the Exchequer. With these Burke showed himself a more cautious reformer. He proposed to limit pensions to a total of £60,000 a year. Estimating that over £100,000 a year was currently spent, he claimed an eventual saving of over £40,000. This saving was to accrue as pensions fell in; no existing pension was to be discontinued. The patent places in the Exchequer were an obvious anachronism that cried out for reform. The well-paid functionaries, the ‘Clerk of the Pells’ and others whose titles were redolent of the accounting methods of the Middle Ages, were sinecurists. Their duties were performed by deputies, who were paid small stipends. The greater part of the income of these Exchequer places came from fees and perquisites. As the volume of government expenditure and business increased, so did these fees. The Exchequer patentees, like the PaymasterGeneral, therefore did particularly well in wartime.26 On the same principle as he spared existing pensions, Burke proposed to reduce the patent places in the Exchequer to fixed salaries, but only on the extinction of the existing holders and reversions. He reasoned that, being held for life, these places were virtual property; and he professed an unwillingness to interfere with the rights of property. More positively, Burke argued that the State must possess the means of rewarding eminent service to the public. Sharing his age’s respect for the hereditary principle, he thought that these rewards should be heritable. Such honours were the best, ‘indeed the only genuine unadulterated origin of nobility’. To eliminate these ‘incitements to a virtuous ambition, and the just rewards of public service’ was a false economy. The Crown, besides the means of paying for present services, ‘ought to have in its hands also the means for the repose of public labour . . . There is a time, when the weather-beaten vessels of the state, ought to come into harbour’ (WS iii. 528). This passage shows how little Burke was concerned to reduce the actual cost of government. His target was improper influence. Nor can he have been unmindful of his own situation, or of others like him. His own political career had been driven by ‘a virtuous ambition’. The State needed constantly, if sparingly, to recruit talent from sources outside the existing landed élite, both for immediate service and to invigorate the aristocracy itself. Ambitious ‘new men’ of ability would naturally look to the professions (and especially to the law) as the means of making their fortune and establishing a family. Without the possibility of some reward, only the most 26

J. E. D. Binney, British Public Finance and Administration, 1774–92 (Oxford, 1958), 183–233.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 453 altruistic of them would devote themselves to the public service. Burke certainly did not want to open the door to ‘new men’ too wide. He perceived, however, the dangers of government service becoming too exclusively the preserve of a closed élite. Burke rejected the call, voiced in several of the petitions, for the reduction of the ‘exorbitant emoluments’ attached to certain places. Avowing that he did not regard any of the efficient offices of government as overpaid, he asserted the justice of rewarding public service. He likewise defended the minor places about court, such as the lords and gentlemen of the bedchamber. These, he noted, were hardly overpaid for the time and expense they required. Without such baits to vanity, the nobility would hardly be induced to frequent the court, leaving the king surrounded by adventurers and sycophants. ‘Kings’, he asserted, ‘are naturally lovers of low company’ (WS iii. 532). Obsessed by the supposed ‘secret influence’ of men such as Charles Jenkinson, Burke wanted to fill the court with respectable aristocrats who could resist the despotic inclinations of the king.27 These fears, expressed at length in the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, had been given greater plausibility by Gustavus III’s coup d’état in Sweden. Besides abolishing the subordinate treasuries, Burke proposed that the Treasury itself should be required to make payments according to a predetermined order. To give the Lords of the Treasury an interest in economy, their own salaries were to be paid last. The penultimate class to be paid was the court lords. In a mock-heroic passage balancing the comic description of the king in his various guises, Burke imagines the revolt that any defalcation would provoke. ‘A rebellion of the thirteen lords of the bedchamber would be far more terrible to a minister, and would probably affect his power more to the quick, than a revolt of thirteen colonies.’ Playfully, Burke pictures such an insurrection, with the insignia of court offices and orders of chivalry converted into offensive weapons: ‘What petitions, and committees, and associations, would it not produce! Bless me! what a clattering of white sticks and yellow sticks would be about his head . . . what a shower of Georges, and Thistles, and medals, and collars of S[piritus] S[anctus] would assail him at his first entrance into the antechamber, after an insolvent Christmas quarter’ (WS iii. 544). Since deficiencies were not to be carried forward, an improvident First Lord of the Treasury would be permanently without salary. Burke did not pretend that his were the only reforms needed. At the close 27 E.B.’s gibe maligns George III, whose favourites were never ‘low company’. Yet the generalization retained its sting. Gibbon, noting that ‘a weak prince will always be governed by his domestics’, conceded that ‘there is a chance [but only a chance] that a modern favourite may be a gentleman’; The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776‒88), ch. 3, ed. J. B. Bury (London, 1909), i. 75 n. 26.

454 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 of his speech he adverted to a range of others: regulation of the patent places in the Customs and Excise; the exclusion of contractors from the Commons; the disfranchisement of revenue officers; more stringent checks on military expenditure (Shelburne’s special interest); and controls on election expenses (WS iii. 547–8).28 He was significantly silent on the more radical measures endorsed by Wyvill’s movement: additional country MPs and shorter parliaments. Yet even as a measure of economical reform, Burke’s bill fell far short of what other members thought was necessary.29 Economy was no more than a secondary concern, as appears from the victims he spared. No pension, however unmerited, was to be struck off. On this point, Burke parted company with Sir George Savile, who sought the discontinuance of ‘unmerited pensions’.30 The patent offices, even after their distant reform, remained obvious anomalies. Burke reduced no ‘exorbitant emolument’ and left plenty of drones about the court. Drawn up in haste without detailed knowledge of the working of many parts of the system, the plan was imperfect. As a measure of economy, it would probably have achieved much less than he claimed for it. For its primary purpose, however, to reduce the patronage available to influence MPs, the bill was ably framed. Even the truncated version enacted in 1782 had an effect. ‘Burke’s foolish bill’, complained one place-seeker, ‘has made it a very difficult task for any set of men either to form or maintain an Administration.’31 Whatever the failings or limitations of Burke’s plan, his speech amply fulfilled the expectations that had crowded the House. Clearly and cogently laid out, and with more wit and pleasantry than commonly introduce schemes of financial regulation, his speech earned a chorus of praise, even from those who disapproved of its principles. North, chief wielder of the influence Burke’s bill was intended to diminish, called the speech ‘one of the most able he had ever heard’. When the proposals were debated in detail, opponents regularly paid tribute to Burke’s ‘great and masterly speech’, as Wedderburn called it.32 On 11 February, Lord George Gordon 28 The patent places in the customs are included in an early draft of E.B.’s proposals: WWM BkP 14/ 32–4, in Corr. (1844), ii. 321–32. They subsequently came under Shelburne’s scrutiny; Sir William Musgrave to Shelburne, 10 Dec. 1782, lists them (Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December 1783, ed. Sir John Fortescue (London, 1927–8), vi. 176–80). 29 On 8 Mar., for example, before the bill went into committee, Lord George Gordon moved to instruct the committee to consider the abolition of the Exchequer sinecures; Almon, xvi. 228–37 (PH xxi. 171–2). 30 Ian R. Christie, ‘Sir George Savile, Edmund Burke, and the Yorkshire Reform Programme, February 1780’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 40 (1959–62), 205–8. 31 William Eden to Lord Loughborough, 24 July 1782, in Lord Auckland (formerly Eden), Journal and Correspondence (London, 1861–2), i. 12. In 1783, the Coalition ministry was faced with ‘a double list of candidates . . . impatient and clamorous for half the number of desirable places’; Gibbon to Lord Sheffield, 10 July 1783, in Letters, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), ii. 341. 32 North made his remark on 11 Feb., Wedderburn on the 21st; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 12 Feb., 1 Mar. (PH xxi. 72, 96).

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 455 (1751–93), soon to achieve notoriety as an agitator, struck the single note of discord. In an eccentric gesture typical of his disregard for decorum, he insisted on dividing the House against granting leave for Burke to bring in his bill. Unable to find a second teller, he was left in a minority of one.33 Such was the public interest generated by Burke’s speech that a pirated edition was on sale by 17 February. The authorized version appeared on 6 March. The rapidity with which Burke printed his speech, following the publication of the debate of 15 December, shows that he intended it, from the first, to do double duty as a public manifesto. The wording of its cumbersome title is significant: Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq., Member of Parliament for the City of Bristol, on Presenting to the House of Commons (on the 11th of February, 1780) a Plan for the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament, and the Oeconomical Reformation of the Civil and Other Establishments.34 The full title foregrounds Burke’s standing as MP for Bristol, and his primary aim as ‘the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament’. As member for Lord Verney’s pocket borough of Wendover, Burke could hardly have championed the ‘Independence of Parliament’ with any credibility. The short-title by which the speech is usually known, the Speech on Economical Reformation, is thus misleading. ‘Economical reformation’ was Burke’s means, not his end. Burke’s proposals were to be embodied in five bills. Technically, his speech on 11 February introduced a series of motions for leave to bring in these bills. North raised no objection to the first, the Civil Establishment Bill, for which leave was granted with only Lord George Gordon’s dissent. Then, however, North began his campaign of attrition, arguing that the bills relating to the Crown lands and the subordinate jurisdictions ought, for form’s sake, to be introduced with the king’s approbation. Burke accordingly agreed (reluctantly) to postpone his other motions until the 14th, when he obtained leave to bring in three further bills.35 Not until 23 February was the Civil Establishment Bill introduced and given its first reading. Burke then argued for a second reading on the 29th, but was constrained to accept North’s preferred date of 2 March. On the 2nd, North again chose not to oppose the bill directly. When Burke moved to go into a committee on the following day, Lord Beauchamp (at the king’s suggestion) proposed the 8th instead. Such apparently trivial procedural motions were often used as tests of strength. In the first serious division on his measure, after a CJ xxxvii. 593; Morning Chronicle, 12 Feb. 1780 (PH xxi. 73). Todd, 33b; the pirated edition is 33a. Five authorized printings and a Dublin reprint suggest total sales of over 5,000 copies. 35 Morning Chronicle, 12 Feb. (PH xxi. 72–3). CJ xxxvii. 598; Morning Chronicle, 15 Feb. (PH xxi. 73–4). E.B. reluctantly agreed to postpone the remaining bill (relating to Cornwall) when the steward of the duchy asserted the impropriety of moving such a measure during the minority of the Prince of Wales (who, as Duke of Cornwall, received the revenues). 33 34

456 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 wrangle of three hours, Burke was defeated by 195 to 210.36 Thus the first substantive debate on the first bill was delayed until 8 March, nearly a month after Burke’s great speech. The Civil Establishment Bill was the ground on which economical reform was fought. The struggle was extended over four long and exciting debates.37 The first clause to be considered, on 8 March, was the abolition of the third Secretary of State. This was one of Burke’s shrewdest proposals. The office clearly belonged to the ministry rather than to the royal household. The unpopular incumbent, Lord George Germain, personified the unsuccessful conduct of the American war. Nor could the ministry credibly argue that three Secretaries were needed. One of Germain’s colleagues, the Earl of Suffolk (1739–79), had been unable to transact business for the last months of his life; while for political reasons his position remained unfilled for nearly a year after his death. The chief argument used against the proposal was the impropriety of subjecting the executive to legislative control, merely for the sake of economy. Parliament, Lord Beauchamp asserted, was not competent to meddle with the Civil List, which had been granted to the king for life. Even if gross abuse were proven, the proper course was to recommend appropriate measures to the king.38 To refute this contention, Burke distinguished between the judicial and the legislative functions of Parliament. In their judicial capacity, he admitted, ‘they were without doubt to proceed in all cases upon legal evidence’. As legislators, however, they had both a right and a duty to make ‘whatever regulations they judged necessary for the preservation of the constitution’. To justify the principle of his reform, Burke argued that the king was no more than ‘a trustee for the public . . . the servant, the creature of the people’. Grants made to him by the people remained within the power of the people to resume.39 This was not a novel theory. Burke himself had earlier propounded it, more decorously phrased, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (WS ii. 292). To apply it to practice, however, represented a significant extension of legislative control over the executive. Remarkably, Burke almost succeeded. Though the abolition of the third secretaryship was lost, the margin (201 to 208) was small enough to constitute a moral victory. In the second debate, on 13 March, Burke achieved his single majority, 36 Almon, xvii. 156–8, 195–200 (PH xxi. 135–7, 150–4); CJ xxxvii. 687. Writing to North on 3 Mar., the king speaks of the idea of dividing on the date as his own (Correspondence of King George the Third, v. 25). 37 On 8, 13, and 20 Mar., and 28 Apr. Three later debates, on 18 and 23 May and 23 June, aroused little interest. With the bill’s defeat a foregone conclusion, they were only briefly reported. 38 Almon, xvii. 255 (PH xxi. 194). Germain said much the same; Almon, xvii. 269 (PH xxi. 208). 39 Almon, xvii. 265 (PH xxi. 204); variant report in WS iii. 554–8. Later in the debate, Fox made the same point in still stronger terms; Almon, xvii. 271 (PH xxi. 210).

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 457 40 on the clause to abolish the Board of Trade. The board was a vulnerable target. A parliamentary creation, dating only from 1696, its suppression did not encroach on the royal prerogative. Though neither as useless nor as inactive as Burke charged, the well-remunerated board was an acknowledged haven for sinecurists. One of these, William Eden (1744–1814), made a gallant attempt to defend it. To prove the board’s industry, Eden referred to the 2,300 folio volumes of its reports; as proof of their wisdom, he flourished a muster-roll of the eminent literati who, over the years, had dignified it.41 Adept at seizing the weak side of a speaker’s arguments, Burke sported with Eden’s defence ‘in a succession of images full of wit and abounding in ridicule’, playing on the incongruity between the ‘dull, senseless, sluggish contents of 2,300 volumes in folio’ and the ‘transcendent talents, solid knowledge, and exalted characters of those great and wise men’ supposed to have produced them. The Board of Trade, as a department of government, was ‘useless, idle, and expensive’, and ought to be abolished. Eden had not mentioned that five of the eight current members of the board were authors, or at least had published books, a circumstance with which Burke now sported. Considered in a different light, ‘as an academy of Belles Lettres, into which it was now converted’, he ‘was willing to bow his head in reverence to the great and shining talents of its several members. Every department of literature, the solid and the entertaining, the instructive and the amusing, has its separate professor.’ Burke paid tribute to the works of the various ‘professors’ who graced the current board: ‘the historian’s labours, the wise and salutary result of deep religious researches, the essence of epistolary correspondence, and the great fund of legal and political knowledge . . . the poetical accomplishments of a fifth’.42 From Eden’s ‘essence of epistolary correspondence’ (a pamphlet in the form of letters), Burke quoted the ambitious young man’s complaint of being (though a member of the Board of Trade) ‘unemployed in any active line of business’.43 Gibbon, whose expensive lifestyle required some supplement to augment his paternal inheritance, had been appointed to the board in 1779. By his own account, he received between £700 and £800 a year and ‘enjoyed many days and weeks of repose without being called away from my 40 Almon, xvii. 295–337 (PH xxi. 233–78). E.B.’s animus against the board can be traced back to the part it played in the affairs of the Africa Company in 1777; Dennis Stephen Klinge, ‘Edmund Burke, Economical Reform, and the Board of Trade, 1777–1780’, Journal of Modern History, 51 (1979), D1185– 1200. 41 In its early days, the board was not the exclusive preserve of MPs or a haven for sinecurists. Locke (a member from 1696 to 1700) never sat in Parliament, and was an expert on trade. 42 Almon, xvii. 297‒8 (PH xxi. 237–8). The ‘professors’ alluded to are (in order) Edward Gibbon, Soame Jenyns (the reference is to his book on the problem of evil), Eden himself, Andrew Stuart (1725– 1801; author of a book on the Douglas Case), and the Earl of Carlisle (minor poet). 43 Almon, xvii. 307 (PH xxi. 246–7); the reference is to Eden’s Four Letters to the Earl of Carlisle (London, 1779), 2. Eden had sent E.B. a copy of this pamphlet (E.B. to Eden, 23 Nov. 1779: C iv. 170).

458 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 library to the office’. Men such as Eden and Gibbon were the prime target of Burke’s bill. Yet Gibbon could recall ‘the delight with which that diffusive and ingenious Orator was heard by all sides of the house, and even by those whose existence he proscribed. The Lords of Trade blushed at their own insignificancy, and Mr Eden’s appeal to the two thousand five hundred volumes of our reports served only to excite a general laugh.’44 Gibbon could laugh as well as blush because he recognized that the debate was a piece of political theatre unlikely to impinge on reality. As he assured his stepmother, the bill would ‘probably be rejected by the House of Lords’; if not, he expected to receive some ‘equivalent’ in compensation.45 After a long sitting which began in good humour but degenerated into acrimonious exchanges of personal abuse, the committee divided at 2.15 a.m. By the narrow margin of 207 to 199, they voted to abolish the Board of Trade. This was the high point of the bill’s fortune. Burke was conspicuously less successful when he approached the royal household with his pruning-shears. On 13 March, Thomas Pownall had distinguished between the Board of Trade, a proper object of parliamentary regulation, and the royal household, which should be sacrosanct.46 His distinction was echoed by several speakers on 20 March, when the abolition of the subordinate treasuries was debated. This clause was rejected by the large margin of 158 to 211. Professing to regard it as the ‘pith and marrow’ of his bill, after its defeat Burke declared his indifference to the fate of the remaining clauses. This, however, was no more than a momentary fit of pique. Criticized by Wedderburn for a doggedly all-or-nothing attitude to a highly miscellaneous bill of which members might reasonably approve some parts but not others, and urged on by Fox, Burke consented to resume the struggle.47 The committee stage of the bill was accordingly reopened on 28 April. Success was now out of the question, for towards the end of a session opposition members melted away far more quickly than the betterdisciplined ministerial forces. Burke soldiered on. He may even have found the impossibility of success liberating. Failure would vindicate his belief that secret influence was allpowerful; and he could give free play to his wit. On 28 April, the subject was the abolition of the Great Wardrobe and the Board of Works. The Great Wardrobe was defended by its comptroller, Thomas Gilbert. No enemy to reform, Gilbert claimed to have personally effected an annual saving of £900 in his department. Though he agreed that further economies might be made, ‘he did not think it proper to have them regulated by act of ParliaMemoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), 161, 173. Gibbon to Dorothea Gibbon, 18 Mar. 1780, in Letters, ii. 239. 46 Almon, xvii. 309–10 (PH xxi. 249). Sir Fletcher Norton made the same point; Almon, xvii. 321– 4 (PH xxi. 262–4). 47 Almon, xvii. 378–86 (PH xxi. 301–9). 44 45

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 459 ment; rather wishing his Majesty would be pleased to make the necessary reformations in all offices within his household, by his own authority’. Gilbert may have spoken sincerely, for he was a well-intentioned believer in parsimony for its own sake. Burke suspected that many members used this respectable-sounding argument to screen their reluctance to dismantle any of the machinery of corruption. He turned on Gilbert’s account of the Great Wardrobe with all the force of weeks of frustration, exasperation, and spleen. On the spur of the moment, he was inspired to turn Gilbert’s ‘very absurd speech’ into ‘a subject of infinite ridicule’. Nor did the defeat (by 162 to 210) make Burke sour or sulky. He returned immediately to the attack, turning his pulverizing wit on the Board of Works.48 According to one reporter, Burke had ‘not made so agreeable a figure in the House of Commons for many years as on this evening’. Uninhibited by the need to persuade, Burke could play with the remaining clauses ‘with all that ready wit, pleasantry, and good humour’ which ‘the violence of party passion’ had latterly obscured.49 The separate jurisdictions over which Burke had made so merry on 11 February were never debated. The bills relating to Cornwall, Lancaster, and the Crown lands were never even introduced. Yet Burke determined to make a final quixotic gesture. On 5 July, knowing full well that the session was about to end, he belatedly introduced his bill relating to Wales and Chester.50 Three days later, Parliament was prorogued and the bill died.

2 In trying to stake out a course of moderate reform, Burke went too far for some, and not far enough for others. Lord Nugent, for example, stigmatized his bill as ‘an attempt to reform, alter, and correct the constitution’. In language and imagery such as Burke would employ in the 1790s, Nugent lauded the British constitution as a ‘work of the old school, the work of those masters, whose universal excellence and skill had been established by the sanction and approbation of admiring ages’, which ‘however mellowed by the hand of time, had not lost its original beauty’. Reform was perilous: ‘the rude hand of a modern reformer, might, under the notion of correcting and improving, spoil the piece altogether’.51 In 1780, Burke could still argue (as he did on 11 February) that ‘when the reason of old establishments is 48 Lord John Cavendish to Lady Spencer, 29 Apr. 1780; BL Althorp Papers, F121. The debate is reported in Almon, xvii. 588–602 (PH xxi. 538–52). According to Almon, the Board of Works was saved by 118 to 203; Lord John gives the minority figure as 188. 49 Political Magazine, 1 (July 1780), 473. 50 CJ xxxvii. 936; Almon, xvii. 756. The text of the bill is reprinted in House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sheila Lambert (Wilmington, 1975–6), xxix. 507–18. 51 28 Apr. 1780, Almon, xvii. 591 (PH xxi. 541).

460 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 gone . . . to preserve nothing but the burthen of them’ was ‘superstitiously to embalm a carcass not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to preserve it’ (WS iii. 510). In 1791, Thomas Paine would wield such images against Burke, charging that he ‘pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird’.52 Shelburne and his followers professed to regard Burke’s reforms as too timid. They therefore sought to upstage them. Their first move, sponsored by Isaac Barré (1726–1802), was to propose a committee of accounts.53 This committee, on the model that Shelburne had advocated in the Lords, would have been chiefly concerned with reducing expenditure. While opposed to constitutional innovation, North was not blind to the need for greater administrative efficiency. He therefore welcomed the suggestion. At the same time, he adroitly neutralized Barré’s intentions by proposing independent commissioners rather than a parliamentary committee.54 North’s scheme was approved, and the results vindicated his approach. The commissioners, working outside the pressure of the parliamentary timetable and the heat of partisan strife, produced a series of detailed reports and recommendations that initiated important reforms: reforms, that, unlike Burke’s, were genuinely economical.55 The Shelburne group’s next initiative was undertaken by John Dunning. His strategy was the opposite of Burke’s. Instead of introducing a complicated but practical measure, he began by moving a series of abstract propositions, with the intent of later embodying them in specific proposals. On 6 April, he moved the first and most famous of these, which has become known as ‘Dunning’s motion’: ‘that the Influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’. This generated a long and exciting debate, and its passage at midnight by 233 to 215 seemed at first a great victory.56 With an election in prospect, many members were willing to support such a popular bromide. Translating this ‘metaphysical proposition’ into practice proved more difficult. ‘A number of Persons like to vote in a popular theoretick Question,’ Sir George Savile drily observed, ‘provided it lead to no unmannerly effective consequences.’ They ‘love wellsounding and constitutional maxims but hang an A[rse] at action’.57 Savile’s observation was verified on 10 April, when Dunning moved that several places in the royal household (all of which Burke’s bill would have Rights of Man, part i (1791), ed. Gregory Claeys (Indianapolis, 1992), 24. 14 Feb. 1780, Almon, xvi. 117–18 (PH xxi. 74–5). 54 13 Mar. 1780, Almon, xvii. 281–92 (PH xxi. 278–85). E.B. spoke against North’s proposal; Almon, xvii. 284 (PH xxi. 280). 55 Binney, British Public Finance, 262–6. 56 CJ xxxvii. 763; Almon, xvii. 447–73 (PH xxi. 340–68). E.B. did not speak in the main debate. 57 To Christopher Wyvill, 23 Dec. 1780, 24 Aug. 1781; printed in Wyvill’s Political Papers, Chiefly Respecting the Attempt of the County of York . . . to Effect a Reformation of the Parliament of Great Britain (York, [1794–1804]), iii. 238–9, 328. To ‘hang an arse’ is to show reluctance. 52 53

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 461 abolished) should be rendered incompatible with a seat in the Commons. Burke supported the motion. Henry Dundas used the occasion to mount an ironic attack on him for having deserted his declared principles. Rather than put forward his own ‘crude and undigested thoughts’ on place bills, Dundas declared that he would quote ‘the elegant and forcible language of another person, who had ten years ago treated on the topics then under discussion with such a depth of philosophical reasoning, with so much true political knowledge, and so large a share of solid and convincing argument’. He then quoted the passage against place bills from Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (WS ii. 310–11). Burke was furious, for to impugn his consistency was to attack what he held most dear. Jumping to his feet the moment Dundas had finished, he insisted that, while circumstances had changed since 1770, his opinions most certainly had not. In the Thoughts, he had argued against a general place bill. This was perfectly consistent with voting for Dunning’s proposal for the exclusion of a few particular officers from the Commons (iii. 582–3). Dunning’s motion was carried, though only by 215 to 213.58 Support for even the most moderate reform was waning. On 13 April, a bill to disfranchise revenue officers was lost by 195 by 224.59 While Burke was blunting his shears in the Commons, the radicals had been sharpening their hatchets. The success of the Yorkshire meeting on 30 December 1779 emboldened Wyvill to enlarge his avowed aims. He now proposed that the association should campaign for specific reforms (shorter parliaments and a more equal representation) and for candidates willing to pledge themselves to support them in Parliament. Burke was dismayed. Not only did he disapprove of these reforms in themselves; he objected to the principle of asking candidates to take pledges. In his view, members should be free to exercise their judgement and discretion according to circumstances. Burke was not alone. During the early months of 1780, battles raged in several counties between those who welcomed the new terms of association, and those who (like Burke) wanted to confine the movement to the single issue of economical reform. This was a reprise of the struggle of 1769, when the Rockingham party had resisted attempts to widen the scope of the petitioning movement. Burke’s own county was divided between moderate and radical reformers, a division which cut across some longer-standing local rivalries. Burke was even brought into temporary alliance with Lord Temple, whom he had opposed so vehemently at the recent county by-election. Against the strenuous efforts of Lord Mahon (1753–1816; later third Earl Stanhope) to secure the adoption of the expanded Yorkshire programme, on 26 February a meeting of Buckinghamshire freeholders voted to adopt a petition 58

Morning Chronicle, 11 Apr. 1780 (PH xxi. 374–86).

59

CJ xxxvii. 788; PH xxi. 403–14.

462 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 confined to economical reform. When delegates from the various county associations met in London in March, the two Buckinghamshire delegates, true to the spirit of their county meeting, voted in the minority to confine the association to economy. Determined to bring Buckinghamshire into the fold, Lord Mahon secured a second county meeting. Unable to attend, Burke sent the chairman a letter strongly opposing any move to enlarge the aim of the association (12 Apr. 1780: C iv. 226–9). To Mahon’s chagrin, this second meeting (on 13 April) reaffirmed the decision taken in February to support economical reform only. Nothing daunted, Mahon marshalled his forces for a third gathering, held on 27 May. Opinions on this occasion were more evenly divided, and both sides claimed majority support. Thereafter, Buckinghamshire had two rival associations, each claiming to represent the true sense of the county.60 Burke’s letter to the Buckinghamshire meeting articulates some of the leading articles of his political creed. One is his opposition to speculative reform. Conceding that the British constitution is not perfect, he distinguishes between real faults, the ‘distresses which we felt’, and defects perceived only in theory. Attempts to correct the latter are dangerous: ‘It is not everything which appears at first view to be faulty in such a complicated plan that is to be determined to be so in reality. To enable us to correct the constitution, the whole constitution must be viewed together; and it must be compared with the actual state of the people, and the circumstances of the time’ (C iv. 226–7). This generalization, typical of Burke, allows him to draw a plausible line between the reforms he advocates and those he dislikes. A second characteristic theme is Burke’s distrust of popular opinion. He always paid more regard to the feelings of the people than to their sagacity. In the Thoughts, he had argued that while men were rarely wrong ‘in their feelings concerning public misconduct’, they were as seldom right ‘in their speculation upon the cause of it’ (WS ii. 256). This distinction between ‘feelings’ and ‘speculation’ allows Burke to assume the role of interpreter of the popular will. He accepts the theory of popular sovereignty. When ‘the deliberate sense of the kingdom’ on the subject of parliamentary reform is known, ‘it must be prevalent’. No power could or should resist ‘its unanimous desire, or even the desire of any very great and decided majority of the people. The people may be deceived in their choice of an object. But I can scarcely conceive any choice they can make so very mischievous as the existence of any human force capable of resisting it’ (C iv. 228). Indeed, economical reform was intended to reduce the ‘force’ Burke at this juncture thought most capable of resisting the will of the people: the influence of the Crown. 60 London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 28 Feb. 1780. Wyvill, Political Papers, i. 116–28. H. Butterfield, George III, Lord North, and the People, 1779–1780 (London, 1949), 384–7.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 463 How to collect ‘the deliberate sense of the kingdom’ was the problem. Burke did not believe that ‘the people’ were capable of independent thought. This inclined him to dismiss popular opinion when it did not coincide with his own. Naturally, he did not say as much in the letter to the Buckinghamshire meeting. His real views, however, can be collected from the friends who learned their politics from him, such as the young clergyman Walker King (1751–1827). King approved of the associations because ‘nothing would be so likely to make the People, what one cannot say they have hitherto in the smallest degree been, a part of Opposition: It is a sort of appeal to their Judgement that flatters their vanity, and gives them, together with a strong desire of proselytizing, all the Ardour of selfconsequence, and the strength of Connection’ (5 Nov. 1779: C iv. 167). Will Burke wrote to Portland in the same vein: ‘Ned had rather encouraged the Idea of leaving such people [the “hot headed and heavy Men”] to stirr and bustle, in the hopes that when they had gathered the people together, and warmed their Imaginations, they might be taught wisdom and discretion by sober Men’ (9 Oct.: 146). This is Burke’s consistent attitude to ‘the people’. Incapable of thinking correctly for themselves, they need the guidance of ‘sober Men’. In his Speech on Economical Reformation, he urges members not to act ‘in the spirit of literal obedience’ to the expressed wishes of the people, but to consult their real good and act in their best real interest (WS iii. 493). The successes of Wyvill’s association were doubly distressing to Burke. Their radical proposals, mischievous in themselves, served to alienate moderate opinion from his own more temperate reforms. Burke therefore opposed them as strenuously as he could. On 8 May 1780, Sawbridge moved for a committee to consider shortening the duration of parliaments. He had first sponsored such a motion on 26 April 1771. Repeated every session since, it had become an annual ritual, languidly debated and routinely defeated. In 1780, the agitation for parliamentary reform, culminating in the general meeting of deputies in London during March, gave the question an unusual urgency. The debate itself was enlivened by memorable speeches from both Fox and Burke, speaking for once on opposite sides of the question. Fox, who had previously opposed Sawbridge’s motions, now supported him with the zeal of the convert. In February 1780, Fox had decided that at the forthcoming election he would contest the constituency of Westminster. With about 12,000 electors, many of them tradesmen and artisans, Westminster was a stronghold of the incipient radical movement. In preparation for the election, Fox began to remake his image in a more popular mould. At a meeting of Westminster freeholders held on 2 February, for the first time he embraced radical reform.61 For Burke too, the 61

Reported at length in the newspapers: London Courant, 3 Feb. 1780; London Evening Post, 1–3 Feb.

464 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 temptation to abandon his old principles was strong. Since the motion was sure to be negatived, a member could court a little popularity by supporting it. Bristol was another constituency where support for shorter parliaments would be popular with the electorate. Rumours of an early dissolution made such a vote-catching speech all the more eligible. Fox even provided Burke with a plausible rationalization. Shorter parliaments, he argued, would reduce the baleful influence of the Crown.62 Burke, however, remained loyal to the Septennial Act. Unlike Fox, he was immune to the temptation of popularity. Nor was his willingness to incur odium by speaking out against popular prejudice confined to political issues. He did not shrink from espousing causes certain to make him unpopular and from which he could derive no benefit. On 11 April 1780, for example, he drew the attention of the Commons to the maltreatment in the pillory of two men convicted of attempted sodomy (WS iii. 584–6). One had died, the other appeared past recovery.63 Homophobia was powerful and prevalent in eighteenth-century England.64 Even condemning the mob’s brutality exposed Burke to much obloquy. Not that he condoned sodomy, as an incident of 1772 shows. Robert Jones, a lieutenant of artillery, had been convicted of sodomy on the sole evidence of the alleged victim, a boy of 13. The penalty was death. Burke wrote to one of the Secretaries of State and to the Attorney-General, requesting a stay of execution. He argued that the punishment was in excess, not of what the crime deserved, but of what the nature of the evidence in this instance justified: ‘the evidence of a boy of thirteen years of age who does not know how to estimate life, to value character, or fear punishment, here, or hereafter, single and unsupported by other positive testimony, by character and general opinion, or by circumstances strong and violent, is not in my poor opinion, sufficient to justify a sentence of death’ (Aug. 1772: C ii. 324). Burke may have convinced the authorities, for despite a campaign of vilification in the newspapers, Jones was reprieved and later pardoned (conditionally on leaving the country). Burke knew neither Jones, nor the men who were pilloried in 1780. His willingness to speak on their behalf implies no sympathy for their sexual orientation.65 Rather, it testifies to the nobler side of his selfrighteousness. No one who took up the cause of a convicted sodomite could be suspected of seeking popularity or personal advantage. 8 May 1780, Almon, xvii. 677–9 (PH xxi. 598–600). E.B. obtained a pension of £36 a year for the widow of the man who died in the pillory; Grey Cooper to E.B., 14 Apr. 1782, WWM BkP 1/1595. 64 Randolph Trumbach, ‘London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Social History, 11 (1977–8), 1–33. 65 Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York, 1977) cites the Jones episode to support his interpretation of E.B.’s sexual ambivalence (83–4). I find Kramnick’s argument unpersuasive, based as it is on the application of Freudian dogma to a biographical vacuum. 62 63

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 465 Indifferent to popularity, Burke resisted the temptation to join Fox in support of parliamentary reform. Shorter parliaments had always been his aversion. One of his earliest political essays was a sketch of the arguments against them.66 He remained true to this persuasion, though on 8 May 1780 it meant voting with North, Nugent, and Rigby against most of his usual friends. Lord John Cavendish praised Burke’s superior integrity. Burke’s speech, he confided to a friend, ‘will probably gett him much abused out of doors, in the house it got him infinite honour: He certainly did much more reputably to adhere to his old opinion & practise in a manly manner, than Townshend & I & some others did, when we made a paltry excuse for voting with Sawbridge to bring in the bill’. Lord John was convinced that most MPs agreed with Burke, though they were reluctant to say as much in public; and that responsible opinion generally concurred.67 Burke was prepared to repudiate what Lord John was too timid to admit: the fallacy of the democratic principle. Popular elections, Burke avowed, are ‘a mighty Evil’. They are a necessary evil, unfortunately, for they provide the only practical means of governing ‘according to the Sense and agreeably to the interests of the People’ (WS iii. 590). Governments must govern, however, by leading the people, not by following them. Burke’s model of democracy is paternalistic. Members of Parliament ought to be ‘faithful watchmen . . . over the Rights and privileges of the people. But our Duty if we are qualified for it as we ought is to give them information and not to receive it from them.’ MPs ‘are not to go to School to them to learn the principles of Law and Government’ (591–2). Burke’s stand against shorter parliaments was unpopular in Bristol.68 Nothing obliged him to speak out so plainly and forcefully on the subject; interest and prudence counselled caution or silence. His provocative speech goes far to explain his failure to gain the affection or retain the support of the Bristol electorate. Unlike Fox, he would neither flatter his constituents nor get drunk with them. Burke disliked referring practical problems to political theories. Admitting that any constitutional change requires ‘resort to the Theory of your Government’, he warned against the chimera of the theoretical model: ‘he thinks weakly and delusively of any contrivance of human Wisdom, who believes that it can make any sort of approach to perfection’ (WS iii. 589). In the case of elections, in particular, the ‘perfect cure’ is ‘impracticable; because the disorder [corruption] is dear to those from whom alone the cure can possibly be derived’ (590). The politician must compromise between incompatible ideals. In theory, every general election is ‘to the Representative a day of Judgment’. In reality, it would be so only if the constituents were ‘enlightend, and uncorruptible’. This is not the case: ‘the practice and 66 67 68

WWM BkP 41 (a notebook of about 1756–7, containing mainly W.B.’s writings), fos. 91–5. 13 May 1780, BL, Althorp Papers, F121. Richard Champion to the Duke of Portland, 29 May 1780, NUL PwF/2751.

466 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 knowledge of the world will not suffer us to be ignorant, that the constitution on Paper is one thing and in fact and experience is another’ (594). Bristol, as Burke ruefully admitted to Champion, had taught him this lesson (26 June 1777: C iii. 356). More frequent elections might be desirable if the electors were able and willing to distinguish the ‘tools of a Court’ from the ‘honest Servants’ of the people (WS iii. 592). As things stand, more frequent elections will not abridge but extend the influence of the Crown. In the long run, the Crown, with unlimited public money at its disposal, can outbid the independent gentlemen. Large constituencies are no less corruptible than small ones. Every political unit has ‘some leading man, some agitator, some wealthy merchant or considerable manufacturer, some active attorney, some popular preacher, some Money-Lender, &c. &c., who is followed by the whole Flock’ (593). In such conditions, no candidate can afford to trust to ‘the Testimony of his Behaviour in Parliament’. Instead, he must bring the more convincing evidence of ‘a large sum of Money; the Capacity of Liberal expence in entertainments; the power of serving and obliging the Rulers of Corporations; of winning over the popular Leaders of Political Clubs, associations, and neighbourhoods’ (594). Thus a large and in theory ‘open’ constituency like Bristol will in practice elect either demagogues like Cruger, or court candidates like Clare with access to government money and patronage. The man of integrity who has conscientiously performed his duty in Parliament, as Burke had, is likely to be excluded. Burke regarded Fox as a brilliant but wayward child who would soon recover from his radical fit. The defection of the Duke of Richmond was altogether more painful. Burke had heard of Richmond’s conversion to a radical reform of the constitution from Walker King, to whom the duke had outlined his ideas (5 Nov. 1779: C iv. 165–8). Richmond’s plan was not original. Its main provisions were annual parliaments, adult male suffrage, and equal electoral districts.69 Richmond did not immediately espouse it in public. Only after the debate on Sawbridge’s motion did he approach Burke to ask (with extraordinary insensitivity) for a summary of his speech, the better to refute his arguments. Burke had once entertained great hopes of Richmond as a leader of the aristocratic interest, a man of the right principles and of greater energy and activity than Rockingham. In 1772, Richmond had been the recipient of one of Burke’s most eloquent defences of the political and social value of an aristocracy (ii. 372–8). His desertion therefore cut deep. Burke wrote a pained letter in which deferential apology barely disguises the accusation that Richmond had abandoned his princi69 Richmond’s chief sources were James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions (1774–5), Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), and John Cartwright’s Take Your Choice (1776); Alison Gilbert Olson, The Radical Duke: Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, Third Duke of Richmond (London, 1961), 48–63.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 467 ples (May 1780: iv. 235–8). Instead of an abstract of his speech of 8 May, Burke enclosed a copy of his recent letter to the chairman of the Buckinghamshire committee, and referred Richmond to his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (which the duke had once called his ‘Creed’). The implication is clear. Burke has remained faithful; Richmond is the apostate. Unabashed, Richmond pressed on. No proposal for an extension of the franchise could have been worse timed. As the duke rose in the House of Lords on 2 June 1780, Palace Yard was thronged with an ugly and violent mob. Several of the lords in his audience showed signs of having been roughly handled as they struggled through the crowd into the refuge of the chamber. Undeterred, Richmond opened his case for manhood suffrage. His speech was interrupted by a plea to rescue a lord in danger of being massacred by the mob.70

3 The modest measure of relief offered to English Catholics by Sir George Savile’s Catholic Relief Act of 1778 made little stir. Only when a bill to relax the Scottish penal statutes was proposed in 1779 did opposition become vocal, indeed strong enough to force its abandonment. Emboldened by this victory, the anti-Catholic forces, now embodied as the Protestant Association, determined to seek the repeal of Savile’s Act. To the surprise of those who thought fanaticism a thing of the past, the Protestant Association attracted mass support. Lord George Gordon proved to be a leader with remarkable powers of demagogy. He now organized a petition to Parliament, demanding the repeal of Savile’s Act. On 2 June 1780, the day Richmond called for annual parliaments and adult male suffrage, a large gathering of his supporters met in St George’s Fields, just south of the Thames. Their number was about 60,000.71 After a harangue from Gordon, the multitude proceeded in reasonable order to Westminster, where he was to present the petition (to which 100,000 signatures were appended) to the Commons. Having agreed to receive it, the Commons began to debate when to take it into consideration. Meanwhile, from time to time Gordon went out to address the assembled mob, reporting what had been said and identifying those members who declared their opposition to any repeal. Burke Almon, xv. 359–66 (PH xxi. 664–72). J. Paul de Castro, The Gordon Riots (London, 1926), 29. Quoting numerous eyewitness reports, de Castro’s remains the most vivid account. Other studies include George Rudé, ‘The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters and their Victims’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 6 (1956), 93– 114; and Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1714–1780: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993), 208–44. 70 71

468 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 was one of those stigmatized.72 Only the arrival of troops allowed members to leave in safety. That night the mob destroyed the chapel of the Sardinian ambassador. After a weekend of comparative peace, on the Monday the rioters targeted the houses of some prominent politicians. Sir George Savile was their first victim. His house was attacked and looted. Rumour reached Burke that his would be next. He managed to remove his important papers to safety, only to find that the government had sent a detachment of sixteen soldiers to protect his house. Jane Burke took refuge with General Burgoyne. The following day, after arranging the removal of his furniture, Burke dismissed the soldiers to release them for more important duties. Neither ashamed nor afraid, he plunged into what he called ‘this wild assembly’, some of whom, as he later told Shackleton, were ‘malignant and fanatical’, but most ‘rather dissolute and unruly, than very illdisposed’. Though friends tried to persuade him to leave town, he took the view that, ‘if my Liberty was once gone, and that I could not walk the Streets of this Town with tranquility, I was in no condition to perform the duties for which I ought alone to wish for Life’. He therefore determined to identify himself to the crowd, to demonstrate that he was ‘neither to be forced nor intimidated from the strait line of what was right’ (13 June 1780: C iv. 245–6). Confident of the rightness of his cause, he preferred an aggressive defiance to skulking behind the barricades. Such behaviour earned him the reputation of a Don Quixote madly determined to rid the world of the blue cockades which were the badge of the Protestant Association. Walking about in search of adventure, ‘he spied a Hackney Coach, whose driver had one of these horrid Badges in his Hat’. Assuming that the passengers must also be sympathizers, ‘in a Paroxysm of rage & Eloquence’ Burke chastised ‘a poor country parson who had come on a visit to Town’, unaware of what the ribbon meant, or even that his driver was wearing one. Great therefore was his surprise ‘to be attacked as a Contemner of Religion & Morality, a sower of sedition, a persecutor & God knows what, by a man he had never seen, & who to all appearance was out of his senses’.73 This anecdote, related as one of many ‘ridiculous stories’ told about the opposition leaders, illustrates a new theme in the popular image of Burke. Hitherto he had been pilloried as an Irishman, an adventurer, a stockjobber, a Jesuit; to these was now added the character of a madman. Absurd as the accusation was, Burke never quite shook it off.74 Lord Frederick Cavendish to Lady Spencer, [2 June 1780], BL, Althorp Papers, F121. Lord Polwarth to Hugh Scott, 17 July 1780, Scottish Record Office, GD157/2914/13. 74 The earliest caricature in which E.B. is depicted as an emaciated knight in armour is Gillray’s The Political-Banditti Assailing the Saviour of India (11 May 1786: BMC 6955). The image was popularized by The Knight of the Woful Countenance Going to Extirpate the National Assembly (15 Nov. 1790: BMC 7678), attributed to Frederick George Byron. Both are reproduced in colour in Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, 1996), 91, 142. 72 73

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 469 Eighteenth-century London had no effective police force. Primary responsibility for the maintenance of law and order remained with the local parish. If this proved inadequate, the only resource available to the authorities was the Army. Long-standing mistrust of the military, shared by all classes, made the authorities reluctant to call on its assistance. In such conditions, what began as an orderly political demonstration quickly erupted into a week of mob rule, pillage, and looting. Over 300 lives were lost, while damage to property exceeded £100,000. On 8 June, the Commons met only to adjourn until the 19th. The initiative was seized by the king, who insisted on bringing in the military. By the weekend of 10–11 June, order was restored. On Monday the 12th, all Burke’s furniture was back in place, and Jane slept at home for the first time since the 5th. The Gordon Riots were the most extraordinary outbreak of mob violence that Burke would ever experience. Their causes are not well understood even today. To Burke they were wholly inexplicable. What he found most disheartening was the bitter realization that a lifetime of public service counted for nothing. ‘We have all served this Country for several years,’ he lamented to Shackleton, ‘some of us for near thirty, with fidelity, labour, and affection—and we are obliged to put ourselves under military protection for our houses and persons!’ (13 June 1780: C iv. 247). The Gordon Riots gave Burke a living and searing experience of the irrationality of mob behaviour. A painful reminder of the fragility of civilized life, they would return to haunt his imagination during the early stages of the French Revolution.75 Burke was not vindictive, however. Aware that only a few of the rioters, and probably none of the fomentors or ringleaders, would be prosecuted or convicted, he argued for a policy of general clemency. Some executions were necessary; they should be so conducted as to maximize their deterrent value. Burke suggested that no executions should take place before all the rioters had been tried, and that no more than six should be selected for solemn, public hanging, simultaneously at strategic locations. Such a display of judicial theatre would demonstrate the restoration of the strength and majesty of the law.76 His idea was not adopted, perhaps because the authorities were more anxious to restore a sense of normality than to stage a public expiation of collective guilt. Perhaps for the same reason, the episode did not lead to any reform of the capital’s system of maintaining public order. Shelburne’s sensible proposal (made in the Lords on 3 June) 75 Iain McCalman, ‘Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), 343–67. 76 ‘Some Thoughts on the Approaching Executions’ and ‘Additional Reflexions on the Executions’ (WS iii. 612–18). E.B. sent copies to several men of influence (C iv. 254–8).

470 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 to establish a Westminster police force, modelled on that of the City of London, was not taken up.77 The ministry reaped a windfall of popularity from the Gordon Riots. Responsible opinion turned to the government as the guardian and embodiment of social stability against lawlessness and disorder. The task of honourable opposition was made more difficult. The fright made responsible opinion less willing to distinguish between Rockingham’s shears and the hatchets of the mob. In the aftermath of the riots, and encouraged by the strong stand that many members of the opposition, including Burke, had taken in support of law and order, Lord North explored the possibility of reconstructing the ministry on a broader base. These negotiations came to nothing. Unbridgeable differences on policy were compounded by the king’s personal dislike of most of the opposition leaders. Surprisingly, Burke was one of those least obnoxious to the king, who thought that Thomas Townshend (1733–1800; later Lord Sydney) and Burke ‘would be real acquisitions’.78 Probably Burke’s implacable opposition to parliamentary reform counted more with the king than his economical measures. Since the first coincided with his own opinion, he could more easily believe in its sincerity. The negotiations having petered out, North proceeded with plans for an early election. This had been under consideration since March.79 Public reaction to the riots made it an even more eligible option. To reap the full benefit, however, the ministry needed to take the opposition by surprise. During August, therefore, care was taken to create an impression that the idea had been dropped, so that the dissolution on 1 September caught the opposition ill prepared. (Since the Septennial Act of 1717, parliaments had generally be allowed to run to nearly their maximum legal duration. If this convention had been followed, the Parliament elected in 1774 would have sat until the spring of 1781.) Burke was in an unenviable situation. Alienated from the court, and unwilling to pursue popularity, his political future looked bleak. Only if the American war became so unpopular as to force the king to turn to the opposition could Burke hope for office. In the spring of 1780, the news that British forces had taken Charleston made this prospect as remote as ever. Burke’s seat in Parliament was precarious. He had some good and loyal friends in Bristol, but no effective grass-roots organization. He had not visited the city since 1776. Though Bristol can rarely have been out of his thoughts, as late as April, when electioneering 77 PH xxi. 681. London’s first police force of the modern kind was not established until 1829, the same year in which Catholic emancipation was finally conceded. 78 The king to Lord North, 3 July 1780 (Correspondence of King George the Third, v. 97); Ian R. Christie, ‘The Marquis of Rockingham and Lord North’s Offer of a Coalition, June–July 1780’ (1954), in Myth and Reality, 109–32. 79 Ian R. Christie, The End of North’s Ministry, 1780–82 (London, 1958), 20–3.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 471 began, he had not formally declared his candidacy. In January, Champion had been ‘positively told by our principal friends, that the fear of Expence keeps them and many back’. If, however, there was ‘a Sum ascertained to be in readiness’, Burke’s success would be assured. Champion hoped that Rockingham would guarantee such a sum. Embarrassed about raising the matter with Burke, he sent Portland a letter to be forwarded to Rockingham, if Portland approved.80 Nothing came of this initiative. By April, Burke felt obliged at least to deny malicious reports that he did not intend to stand again. In a low-key letter to Joseph Harford, he admitted that he had no ‘natural’ interest in the city and that he had been remiss in cultivating one. More to the point, he did not have the money needed for a contest. Even so, he would offer himself for re-election if his friends so desired (4 Apr.: C iv. 221–2). Burke probably hoped to galvanize them into action. If so, his ruse failed. Conscious they would have to pay the bills, they remained supine. Burke himself was slow to take any further steps, perhaps because he hoped the election was still a year away. Money was the main problem. Not until June was a conclave of his friends summoned. Determined to oust Cruger, they decided to support Burke either as a single candidate or as part of a compromise ticket agreed with the Tories. Funds, as Noble confessed, would be difficult to raise (8 June: C iv. 243–5). Only in August was Burke’s candidature publicly announced.81 Not until the 18th did he finally arrive in Bristol, after an absence a few days short of four years. Less than two weeks later, the surprise dissolution of Parliament compelled an instant decision. Money was still not forthcoming. ‘Every one seems to fear’, Champion lamented to Portland, ‘that those who appear first, will be answerable for the Expence, because it was so at the last Election.’82 Since Burke’s 1774 campaign was reputed to have cost £10,000, this reluctance is hardly surprising. On 3 September, he wrote a long letter to the Duke of Portland, outlining the political situation in Bristol and his own chances as he then assessed them (267–75). He probably chose to write to Portland rather than Rockingham in order to avoid the humiliation of asking Rockingham to find him a seat. For the gist of the letter was that he stood no chance at Bristol, unless he were to be returned as the ‘Whig’ candidate in a compromise with the ‘Tories’. Such an agreement had been reached in 1761 and again in 1768. Cruger’s nomination against Lord Clare in 1774 had broken the pact, and circumstances for its renewal were unpropitious. The Tories had been canvassing since the last election, and (as Noble had admitted) had the tide of public opinion running in their favour (18 June: 251–3). Some of the Champion to Portland, 8 Jan. 1780, NUL PwF/2749. Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal, 5 Aug. 1780. The notice is dated 3 Aug. and was probably distributed first as a handbill. 82 1 Sept. 1780, NUL PwF/2753. 80 81

472 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 most ‘considerable’ of the Tories were prepared to consider a compromise with Burke, but not ‘the most active and efficient’, confident as they were of winning both seats. The Tories had two strong candidates: Matthew Brickdale, whom Burke had defeated in 1774; and Richard Combe (c.1728–80). Brickdale was a man of means, and prepared to spend lavishly. Combe’s personal fortune was not so large, but as a reward for supporting the ministry in the last Parliament, he had been appointed Treasurer of the Ordnance (a post that Burke’s economical reform would have abolished).83 He could trade on the expectation of having patronage to bestow. More immediately, he received £1,000 from the Secret Service fund for his election expenses.84 Thus the Tories were united behind two local candidates with ample resources at their disposal. The Whigs were divided and impoverished. ‘The most opulent, the most sober, the most understanding part’ were for Burke. ‘If the Whigg Merchants could make a Member,’ he assured Portland, ‘I should be chosen without all doubt or controversy.’ Only the ‘lower Voters’, who dreaded nothing more than the ‘prospect of stopping the Aletap’ were for Cruger and against any compromise (C iv. 268–9). Burke at first hoped that the expense of a contest would dispose the leaders on all sides to come to an understanding. This was never likely. Cruger’s party had already rejected an offer to pay him to find a seat elsewhere; nor was either of the Tory candidates disposed to withdraw. Brickdale was popular; Combe enjoyed ministerial backing. If the outside chance of a compromise came to nothing, Burke was determined to withdraw. Burke was a habitual generalizer. Now, as so often, he developed his own experience into a general principle. ‘I have a notion’, he confided to Portland, ‘that men who take an enlarged line on publick Business, and upon Grounds of some depth, and that require at every instant, the appearance of doing something, in appearance wrong, in order to do what is really and substantially right, ought not to sit for these great busy places.’ The electors of Bristol were exigent and unenlightened. Their ‘local agency’ was ‘vexatious, and sometimes humiliating’. Their ‘humours’, improperly called ‘opinions’, were more erratic and wrong-headed even than those of the courtiers (3 Sept. 1780: C iv. 273–4). Burke’s theory of representation, expounded in the Commons on 8 May, repudiated the idea that members should take their opinions from their constituents (WS iii. 592). Such a theory was unlikely to be popular in Bristol, where expectations of ‘local agency’ were high. Completely alienated from his constituents, Burke describes ‘the Crowd’ as ‘naturally proud, tyrannical, and ignorant; bad schol83 To illustrate the web of influence and patronage, Combe sat for Aldburgh, a borough controlled by the Fonnereau family, who subscribed largely to government loans. 84 Parliamentary Papers of John Robinson 1774–1784, ed. William Thomas Laprade (London, 1922), 57.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 473 ars and worse Masters’ (C iv. 274). In such a mood, with little hope of a compromise, and with neither the stomach nor the money for a fight, Burke obviously hoped that Portland or Rockingham or some other patron would come forward with the offer of a seat. None did. The Tories having rejected the proposed compact, Burke’s friends advised withdrawal. A meeting for the purpose was called for 6 September. On the morning of that day a renewed optimism in the mood of his friends revived his candidacy. As they assembled to accompany Burke to the Guildhall, he reported to Rockingham, they felt ‘ashamed of the indolence and timidity which had destroyd their natural consequence. In a sudden Enthusiasm, that caught from the young to the old, they determined unanimously, that we should alter our whole Scheme.’ Instead of announcing his withdrawal, therefore, they processed to the Guildhall to declare his candidacy. From the Guildhall, they marched to the Exchange, and then began an immediate canvass ‘from Club to Club, and house to House’ (7 Sept.; C iv. 276). A principal reason for this change of heart, as Burke acknowledged, was the news that Combe was dying. This renewed the prospect of a pact with the Tories, to keep Cruger out. The ‘sudden Enthusiasm’ was catching. At the Guildhall, eager to boost his friends’ morale, Burke made one of his best speeches. This Guildhall speech, delivered on 6 September 1780, is Burke’s most eloquent exposition of the duties and responsibilities of a Member of Parliament (WS iii. 623–63). Only in form is it a defence or apologia. With great skill Burke turns all the charges levelled at him into topics of commendation. ‘I come to claim your approbation,’ he announced sanguinely. A confident, even aggressive tone was needed to animate them. The speech flatters its auditors that they are above the petty prejudices and littlenesses too prevalent among the electorate as a whole. The personal interest of an MP, he argues, will always lead him to support the ministry of the day. Ministers control patronage. If a popular constituency wishes its members to serve their interest rather than that of the court or ministry, it must retain their loyalty by allowing and encouraging them to act on liberal and enlarged principles. They must choose representatives whom they can trust to pursue their real, long-term interests, not the popular whims and fancies of the moment. Having chosen, they must trust their members, not instruct them. On the subject of Irish trade, for example, he boldly confesses that he did not ‘obey your instructions: No. I conformed to the instructions of truth and nature, and maintained your interest, against your opinions, with a constancy that became me.’ Using one of his architectural metaphors, he glories in having been elected ‘to be a pillar of the state, and not a weathercock on the top of the edifice, exalted for my levity and versatility, and of no use but to indicate the shiftings of every fashionable gale’ (634). This speech was intended to inspire the faithful, not to woo his enemies or even to

474 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 appeal to the uncommitted. Its immediate publication would hardly have endeared him to the generality of the voters. Burke therefore refrained from printing it until November.85 The Guildhall speech is carefully structured. The introduction outlines Burke’s general concept of how an independent MP should behave. The body of the speech comprises detailed rebuttals of each of the main complaints: neglect of his constituents, and the support of three measures obnoxious to them: trade concessions to Ireland, Beauchamp’s bill in favour of insolvent debtors, and Savile’s Catholic Relief Act. The short but highly emotive peroration is an unrepentant declaration that he will not repurchase his seat at the expense of his judgement. In reply to the first accusation, neglect, Burke makes a merit of the real, substantive services he has performed for Bristol. ‘My canvass of you’, he insists, ‘was not on the Change, nor in the county meetings, nor in the clubs of this city. It was in the House of Commons; it was at the Customhouse, it was at the Council; it was at the Treasury; it was at the Admiralty. I canvassed you through your affairs, and not your persons.’ Even his failures prove his good intentions: ‘If some lesser matters have slipped through my fingers, it was because I filled my hands too full; and, in my eagerness to serve you, took in more than any hands could grasp’ (WS iii. 627). Though his letters show that he was not as eager to undertake Bristol business as he here pretends, he had undoubtedly worked hard for his constituents.86 Less cogent was his contention that a visit would have been unseasonable while Bristol opinion ran in favour of the American war, and equally so when his opposition to it was more widely shared (628–9). This is the weak point in his defence. Burke could neither avow his dislike of canvassing, nor find any plausible pretext for having stayed away. The remaining imputations concerned Burke’s support of measures unpopular in Bristol. On these he is completely unapologetic, repudiating each in turn, and arguing that he had on each question been right. To avoid too ostentatious a parade of his own personal merit, however, he plays down his own role and cites other public figures who sided with him. Defending his stand on Irish trade, he points out that Lord North later made much more generous concessions. On Lord Beauchamp’s bill to relieve insolvent debtors, which Burke calls ‘the most prevalent of all’ the charges (WS iii. 634), he is equally unrepentant. The measure was good, he argues, though too limited; opposition to it was based on misconceptions. He had secured 85

A Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq., at the Guildhall, in Bristol, Previous to the Late Election in that City, upon Certain Points Relative to his Parliamentary Conduct (London, 1780); published 6 Nov. (Todd, 39a). 86 P. T. Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, the Commissary of his Bristol Constituents, 1774–1780’, English Historical Review, 73 (1958), 252–69.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 475 amendments to obviate the fears and objections which had any substance.87 Expatiating on the folly of imprisoning men for petty debts, Burke warms to a panegyric on the researches and travels of John Howard (1726–90), the prison reformer, who had travelled all over Europe, not for pleasure but ‘to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gage and dimensions of misery, depression and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries’ (638). Thus Burke justifies his stand by linking it to the work of a widely respected humanitarian. The high style enforces his appeal to his constituents to choose members of whom they can be proud, members capable of rising above narrow-minded local interests. On the final indictment, his support for Catholic relief, Burke likewise stresses the virtual unanimity of civilized opinion on the subject. In a dramatic gesture, he dared any religious bigots in the audience to identify themselves. Of course, no one did. The measure had been moved by Sir George Savile, one of the most respected public figures of the day, and not suspected of leaning to popery; and seconded by John Dunning, the Recorder of Bristol. What odium could attach to a member for supporting a measure brought in under such auspices, and approved by almost everyone? Despite acknowledging support of Beauchamp’s bill as the ‘most prevalent’ charge, Burke spent far longer on the Catholic question, the cause closer to his own heart.88 Burke loathed ignorant, bigoted ‘Protestantism’, whether in the shape of an Irish landlord or an English mob. He was especially scornful of the idea that persecution of Catholics was motivated and justified not by their religious but by their political creed. This argument had been advanced by John Erskine, when he wrote to Burke justifying his opposition to relief for Scottish Catholics (16 July 1779: C iv. 102–3). Burke dismissed it as a mere pretext. No one in 1780 could lend credence to the idea of the Pope deposing a Protestant king. Addressing the argument that ‘this is not a religious persecution’, Burke turns savagely on those who pretend that their motivation is political, not religious. ‘Very fine indeed!’ he exclaims, ‘let it be so; they are not persecutors; they are only tyrants. With all my heart. I am perfectly indifferent concerning the pretexts upon which we torment one another’ (WS iii. 660). Burke attributes the spirit of persecution to a base ‘desire of having some one below them’ to which ‘those who are the 87 Two versions of Beauchamp’s Insolvent Debtors Bill were printed: as introduced, and as amended in committee (House of Commons Sessional Papers, xxix. 325–32, 335–59). The amended bill is more than three times as long as the original. No particular amendments can be traced to E.B. 88 E.B. to Job Watts (a Bristol elector) and to John Noble (10 and 11 Aug. 1780: C iv. 260–4).

476 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 very lowest of all’ are especially prone. A Protestant cobbler, he speculates, ‘debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling church, feels a pride in knowing, it is by his generosity alone, that the peer, whose footman’s instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true source of the passion, which many men in very humble life, have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America; our colonies; our dependants’ (659). Typically, Burke identifies himself and his opinions with the cause of enlightenment, justice, and humanity. His opponents and calumniators are exposed as ignorant, selfish, bigots. The cobbler passage brings out most nakedly the class appeal in the speech. Burke’s supporters were chiefly the middling and better sorts; most of the cobblers were for Cruger. The Guildhall speech shows Burke at his best. Such principles, eloquence, and elevation of mind ought to have swept all before them. Yet neither for the first time in Burke’s experience nor for the last, the prize did not go to the just, for the electors of Bristol wanted something else, a personal canvass of the kind Burke found demeaning. ‘My feet are sore with beating on our bad pavement,’ he groaned to Rockingham on the 7th, the day after his Guildhall speech. Combe was ‘hors de Combat, with only the preliminary dinners’. Brickdale, too, had been taken ill, and Burke expected to follow him to hospital. However ill he might feel, he was obliged to act the part of ‘one of the jolliest fellows in the world’ (7 Sept.: C iv. 278). Electioneering was indeed a health hazard, as the orgy of eating and drinking depicted in Hogarth’s An Election Entertainment (1755) was acted out in a hundred constituencies.89 Combe died the following day, shortly before the poll opened. The Tories, scenting victory, instantly nominated another candidate, and the mirage of a compromise dissolved. On the 9th Burke withdrew, making a short but dignified speech that forms a sad pendant to his great oration of the 6th (WS iii. 666–7).90 Writing to the Duke of Portland soon afterwards, Champion movingly described the procession that accompanied Burke back to the Guildhall as that of ‘a suffering People, bewailing the Loss of their best friend’, and paid a personal tribute to Burke for having extended his mental horizons so far beyond the cramped world of the typical Bristol merchant.91 Burke’s Guildhall speech is an example of what Champion meant. Yet its uncompromising self-righteousness helps to explain why the voters of Bristol elected nonentities instead of ‘their best friend’. 89 In 1770, for example, George Cockburne, a candidate for Scarborough, was obliged to drink so much that he suffered a stroke of apoplexy from which he never recovered; Thomas Bradshaw to the Duke of Grafton, 24 July 1770, Suffolk Record Office (Bury), Ac. 423/615. 90 Unlike the Guildhall speech, this was immediately printed as a broadside (Todd, 37). E.B. also published a short address (Todd, 38; WS iii. 668). 91 Champion to Portland, 14 Sept. 1780, NUL PwF/2756.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 477 Burke was not wont to give up easily. Left to himself, he would probably have battled on. The humiliation of coming bottom of the poll would not have worried him. What he lacked was not determination but the financial resources to continue his campaign. Yet he did not leave Bristol in high dudgeon, as Clare had done in 1774 and as Fox expected (C iv. 282). Instead, he stayed on at Bristol, helping his friends to consolidate their interest in a refounded Union Club.92 For the moment, he wanted distraction rather than rest. Activity of any kind was a therapy. When he eventually left Bristol, rather than retire to Beaconsfield, he threw himself into another battle, helping Fox with his canvass at Westminster. Differences on constitutional reform had not yet clouded their friendship. Burke was defeated at Bristol by a combination of circumstances, no one of which need have been decisive. He had no ‘natural’ interest. He did not live in the vicinity, and had no network of friends and relations to maintain an unremitting canvass on his behalf. The other candidates all had strong local connections. Alone of the four, Burke had no organization. He had the least financial resources, and he had not visited the city since 1776. As late as 13 June 1780, Noble had lamented the backwardness of Burke’s friends in subscribing money (C iv. 245). Burke himself loathed canvassing. Despite the effort he had undoubtedly put into his commissary work, he had taken several unpopular stands and was unrepentant about them. Again, the animosity between Burke and Cruger and between their followers made cordial co-operation impossible, even when it finally became their common interest.93 No precise weighting can be given to these different factors. Probably his most crippling handicap was the lack of an efficient organization and a well-filled campaign chest. His ‘Army of Officers’, he confessed to Rockingham, would always be ‘caught unprepared’, however long they had to make ready (7 Sept.: 277). ‘The most opulent, the most sober, and most understanding’ were for Burke (268). This was some consolation for their being too few in themselves, and unable to deliver the numbers he needed. These considerations, taken together, made a compromise Burke’s only hope. Such an agreement was never likely. The ‘natural’ compromise would have been Brickdale and Cruger, the more electable candidates of their respective sides. This explains why Cruger’s supporters sought initially to undermine Burke’s interest. If Cruger were once established as the more credible Whig candidate, he would be the choice in any compromise. The death of Combe appeared to work to Burke’s advantage, since many Tories 92 Champion to Rockingham, 11 Sept. 1780, WWM R140/87; E.B. to Lady Rockingham, 27–8 Sept. (C iv. 299–300). 93 I. R. Christie argues that their enmity was the most important factor in E.B.’s defeat; ‘Henry Cruger and the End of Edmund Burke’s Connection with Bristol’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 74 (1955), 153–70.

478 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 would prefer him to Cruger. This hope was dashed by the ebullient mood of the Tory organization, confident of carrying a second member, even one nominated at short notice. Once a compromise between Brickdale and one of the Whig candidates had been ruled out, the best hope for both Burke and Cruger was a joint ticket. Plumping was not popular; most voters liked to use both their votes.94 (After Burke’s withdrawal, Cruger had his fatherin-law nominated, merely to stem the loss of second votes.) By now, however, the Burke and Cruger camps could not unite even in their own self-interest. Cruger having spoiled Burke’s chances, many of Burke’s supporters refused to vote for Cruger. Thanks in part to their abstention, the two Tories were elected by a margin of about two to one.95 Burke was left out in the cold. His speech of 8 May had repudiated the notion that ‘the people’ could or should take the lead in politics. Within months this conviction was powerfully reinforced by two traumatic experiences: the Gordon Riots in June, and his humiliating withdrawal from the Bristol election in September. The man whose speech of 11 February had been widely hailed as one of the best ever heard in the Commons, on 9 September was doubtful whether he would resume his seat in the next Parliament. Any expectations of being invited to stand elsewhere evaporated. He heard nothing from Rockingham. ‘It is too unpleasant a Task to write Letters of Condolences to others,’ Rockingham bleated, ‘when one’s own Mind is broke to Pieces.’96 The disagreeable business therefore devolved on Lady Rockingham, who invited Burke to Wentworth for ‘a great deal of conversation with you about your own concerns’ (17 Sept.: C iv. 285). Was this a coded message that a seat would be found for him? Rockingham had told Portland that he ‘had in his own Mind made an arrangement for Burke’. Portland had passed this hint on to Will, but Rockingham did not tell Burke so directly. Rockingham’s treatment of Burke on this occasion was unfeeling and inconsiderate. Will imputed the worst motives to him. ‘Our dear friend is the Dupe of his own Worth,’ he told Champion; ‘that Man [Rockingham] means him no good, He has not magnanimity enough to look in the face & see the blackness of his own conduct. But his little mind will be gratifyed to see that Great Man thrown into the dark.’97 Will’s indignation was natural, as was the cousinly perspective in which Burke rather than Rockingham was the ‘Great Man’. On 1 September, Rockingham still entertained hopes that the sudden dissolution would work in Burke’s favour, and that Bristol might yet re-elect him.98 94 John A. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters, and Straights (Princeton, 1982), 135, 213–14, 220–6. The incidence of plumping varied greatly. 95 The poll was closed on 20 Sept., when Cruger conceded defeat. Final figures were Brickdale 2,771, Lippincott 2,518, Cruger 1,271, Peach 788, Burke 18. 96 Rockingham to Portland, 22 Sept. 1780, NUL PwF/9144. 97 W.B. to Portland, 23 Sept. 1780 (C iv. 290); W.B. to Champion, 17 Nov. 1780, NRO A. ii. 2. 98 Rockingham to Portland, 1 Sept. 1780, NUL PwF/9140.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 479 Possibly Rockingham did feel some jealousy or resentment that, combined with his indolence, made him slight Burke. ‘Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis’, according to La Rochefoucauld’s notorious maxim, ‘nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplaît pas.’ Burke, on his part, was both proud and diffident. He was proud that since 1766 he had sat in the Commons as an independent member, for he did not regard Verney’s patronage as compromising his freedom of action. He was diffident about drawing attention to his own claims, for he hated to be branded an adventurer or place-hunter. He wanted reward to come unasked as the recognition of his disinterested public service. Such an attitude was naïve perhaps, but not dishonourable. Burke was also eager to maintain his independence, notional as it might appear to others. So instead of posting off to Yorkshire on receipt of Lady Rockingham’s letter, he declined the invitation, pretending to be almost glad to be relieved of the fatigue and frustration of public life (27–8 Sept. 1780: C iv. 299–302). In reality, idleness was abhorrent to him. Retirement would not have suited him at all. Happily, he was spared its privations, for though culpably slow to say so, Rockingham had determined to bring him back into the Commons.99 In the end, he overcame his reluctance to disturb existing arrangements, and asked Savile Finch to vacate the seat for Malton that he had held since 1761. Nothing could be done before Parliament met on 31 October, however, for MPs could not resign. A member who wished to retire asked to be appointed to a nominal ‘office of profit under the Crown’, acceptance of which would vacate his seat. Finch was accordingly appointed to a sinecure, and a writ for a new election at Malton was ordered on 28 November 1780.100 Burke was duly elected on 7 December. This arrangement, though awkwardly and tardily executed on Rockingham’s part, at least gave Burke security of tenure. Free from the importunities of exigent constituents, he represented Malton until he retired from Parliament in 1794. ‘What Shadows we are, and what Shadows we pursue’ (WS iii. 667). So Burke had reflected in his withdrawal speech, alluding to the death of Richard Combe. Some constitutions could survive the rigours of Bristol electioneering: Cruger lasted until 1827, Brickdale until 1831. Not Sir Henry Lippincott (1737–81), Combe’s replacement: he enjoyed his triumph only a few months, and died on 1 January 1781. Burke’s friends naturally wished to nominate him again. Though the memory of his humiliation was still fresh, and the vexations of the previous six years were deeply etched on his consciousness, Burke did not quite reject the idea out of 99 Rockingham told Portland of his plans before E.B. knew of them, in a letter of 14 Oct. 1780, NUL PwF/9145. 100 Finch was appointed steward of East Hendred (CJ xxxviii. 93). The modern practice of using the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds had not yet hardened into a convention; Betty Kemp, ‘The Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds’, in Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (eds.), Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier (London, 1956), 204–26.

480 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 101 hand. This shows the prestige attached to sitting for Bristol rather than Malton. At first, a compromise with the Tories that would have lasted beyond the next election seemed a possibility. When the Tories rejected the idea, Cruger was again nominated and again defeated, though by a much smaller margin than at the general election. In 1784, after another expensive contest, he and Brickdale were returned. Burke’s hope of establishing a proper ‘Whig’ interest in Bristol had failed.

4 The general election of 1780 did not significantly alter the balance of forces in the Commons. The ministry failed to make the gains it expected from the early dissolution; the opposition emerged only a little stronger.102 The most reliable numerical estimate is probably the division on the amendment to the address, which was defeated by 212 to 130.103 As these figures show, the independent members remained firmly behind North and the war. Many might vote against him on a particular issue, as they had on economical reform and on Dunning’s motion of 6 April 1780. They would not lightly endanger the ministry. Only after Yorktown did their desertion bring Lord North’s long tenure of the Treasury to an inglorious end. Meanwhile, the ministry was secure, bolstered by the reaction of propertied opinion to the horrors of the Gordon Riots. The movements for reform lost ground. Lacking a new issue, the opposition could only continue to criticize the conduct of the war (always an invidious topic) and reintroduce economical reform. After the drama and excitement of the previous year, the session of 1780–1 proved frustrating and disappointing. Burke missed the short pre-Christmas session. When he resumed his duties in January 1781 as member for Malton, he was at least freed from the vexations of local agency, though he continued to seek favours for his personal friends. In April, for example, he secured permission for John Noble to export salt directly from New York to Newfoundland for his fishery business (9 Mar., 2 Apr. 1781: C iv. 342, 347–8). At first, as he confessed to Lady Rockingham, he feared that his re-entry through one of the ‘little posterns or sallyports of the constitution’ would disable him from taking a leading part, especially in reform (27 Sept. 1780: 302). Such qualms soon evaporated, and Burke resumed his place as a leading speaker. The reintroduction of economical reform, however, was a half-hearted 101 So E.B.’s letter to Noble of 2 Jan. 1781 suggests (C iv. 325); the letter he wrote to Champion about the same time is missing. 102 Christie, End of North’s Ministry, 161; Frank O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975), 426–35. 103 6 Nov. 1780, CJ xxxviii. 9–10.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 481 affair. Burke did not bother to revise the bill, though he might have drawn on the experience of the previous session to make it more palatable to independent opinion. Even the unpopular clause for serving the king’s table by contract, which he had previously agreed to drop, was unaccountably left in, an oversight for which he apologized.104 His speech on 15 February 1781, moving for leave to bring in the bill, was deliberately muted in tone, a striking contrast to the rhetorical tour de force of the previous session. Yet it reveals his state of mind in the aftermath of his defeat at Bristol. Impelled to undergo a form of public penance or self-flagellation, Burke confronted the question of whether, as member for a pocket borough, he could speak for ‘the people’. ‘A fine mover of a popular bill’, he imagines Lord North taunting him, ‘you who were rejected by your old constituents, and by all the people of England at a general election, and who owe your seat to my courtesy; you, to be sure, must be a fine mover of a popular bill!’105 (Burke owed his seat to North’s ‘courtesy’, because North could have blocked his election by refusing to appoint Finch to an ‘office of profit’.) Burke was humbled and hurt by his defeat at Bristol, and disappointed not to have been asked to stand elsewhere. If he retained his faith in his bill, he harboured no illusion that it might meet a more favourable reception in the Commons. Towards the end of his speech, he turned to Lord North. If the ministry is predetermined against his bill, he pleaded, dispatch it at once. Plainly Burke had no stomach for a repetition of the long-drawn out, clauseby-clause struggles of the previous session. North declined to oblige. Burke therefore reintroduced his bill on 19 February. This time there was only one substantive debate. On 26 February, the motion for a second reading was defeated by 233 to 190. The occasion was chiefly memorable for the much-admired maiden speech of the younger William Pitt. Pitt supported the bill. Thereafter, he and Burke would take opposite sides on most questions. Another new member gave a foretaste of the baiting that Burke would endure for the rest of his parliamentary career from the young bloods. John Courtenay (1738–1816) was a ministerial supporter who soon became a frequent and fluent speaker. He developed a distinctive style, treating every subject in a vein of irony and ridicule. In a speech laced with sarcasm at the expense of the pretended ‘patriotism’ of the opposition, he affected to compliment Burke. ‘It would argue want of taste in those who differed most from the honourable gentlemen in the fleeting politics of the day’, he sneered, ‘not to set a just estimation on his singular and shining abilities. Posterity would do them justice, and admire the man who had infused a spirit of Attic elegance into British oratory, and whose classical compositions would be read with delight by the scholar, the philosopher, and the statesman.’ Courtenay’s jest proved prophetic. 104 105

26 Feb. 1781, Debrett, ii. 1 (PH xxi. 1244). Debrett, i. 482–99 (PH xxi. 1223–40).

482 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 Posterity has done Burke the justice denied him by his contemporaries. A more amiable opponent than Courtenay was Lord Nugent, perhaps moved by fellow-feeling, for he too had suffered from the ingratitude of the Bristolians. Liking economical reform as little as Courtenay, Nugent paid tribute to Burke’s integrity by comparing his plan to the utopias of Plato and Sir Thomas More, schemes rendered impracticable by their virtues.106 His bill lost, Burke used other occasions to air its themes. On 8 March, in a debate on the budget, he seasoned his criticisms of the unfavourable terms on which North had negotiated the year’s loan with a palpable image of parliamentary corruption. Regretting ‘that opulence was to be acquired by getting into parliament’, and alluding to Horace’s retelling of an Aesopic fable, Burke likened some members to ‘the tenuis vulpecula, or the weazel, which being slender, crept into the cupboard; but eat so much there, that it could not get out: so with members of Parliament, they got in sleek and slender, and afterwards being gorged with places, pensions and douceurs, got [such] an enormous belly, that they were scarcely able to get out again’. Burke raised a laugh (in which North himself joined) by alluding to the contrast between his own lean figure and North’s ‘fair round belly, with good capon lined’.107 Another occasion confirmed that Burke’s concern was the reduction of influence, not economy as such. On 21 May, in a committee of supply, he ridiculed, in the manner of his previous year’s speeches on economical reform, the Board of Works (which he had sought to abolish) and its invisible but expensive operations. In the same debate he showed that parsimony was not his object. Thomas Townshend condemned the excessive cost of the government offices being built on the site of Somerset House. Burke defended the project as a proper use of public money. ‘For a great kingdom to adorn its metropolis with magnificent buildings’, he argued, was ‘at all times wise and justifiable.’ The new Somerset House was ‘not among the deeds of the board of works that he should disapprove of, when he saw value for the public money; when there was so much national grandeur and magnificence, for so many guineas he would never complain. It was their invisible works to which he objected: works which were never discovered, nor discoverable, except in the estimates of expense, which they laid upon that table.’108 London lagged behind the great capitals of Europe, 106 CJ xxxviii. 231; Debrett, ii. 1–48 (PH xxi. 1244–92). Courtenay’s ironic intention is plain from the speech as a whole. Nugent’s sympathy can be inferred from his letter to E.B. of 18 Sept. 1780 (WWM BkP 1/1360). 107 Debrett, ii. 208–14 (PH xxi. 1343–49). The allusion to Horace is to Epistles, 1. 7. 29–34; the quotation is from As You Like It, ii. vii. 154. 108 Debrett, iii. 364–7 (PH xxii. 295–8). Nevertheless, one of the pamphlets attacking his plan of economical reform drew attention to the incongruity of ‘this man of oeconomy’ proudly voting a million pounds for an unnecessary building when the country was engaged in a costly war; The Constitution; or, A Full Answer to Mr Edmund Burke’s Anti-Constitutional Plan of Reform (London, 1781), 93–4.

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 483 even behind Dublin, in grand public buildings. The new Somerset House was a worthy addition to the stock of public magnificence in which, so Burke would argue in his Reflections, defending a degree of splendour in the fabric and service of the Established Church, ‘even the poorest man finds his own importance and dignity’ (WS viii. 148–9). In 1775, when the rebuilding of Somerset House was first mooted, Burke and Townshend had differed on the quality of building needed. Burke wanted ‘Splendor’; Townshend, ‘economy’.109 Burke’s stand is the more remarkable as the architect, Sir William Chambers (1726–96), was a royal protégé. For once, personal considerations did not cloud Burke’s judgement. Chambers was grateful. Somerset House was ‘a Child of your own’, he told Burke.110 The reign of George III was not rich in public buildings. Thanks in part to Burke’s vision, one of its grandest monuments was not scanted by parliamentary parsimony. Just as Burke believed that public splendour benefited the poor as well as the rich, so he regarded the maintenance of a social hierarchy as in the general interest. Though a Whig, he was always averse to ‘Whiggery’ in the sense in which W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) hailed him as one of Ireland’s ‘four great minds that hated Whiggery’: a mean-spirited ‘levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind’ that sought to level privilege and inequality.111 This belief in hierarchy exposed him to accusations of being ‘a man of aristocratic principles’ (W vi. 170). The charge was preferred not only by political enemies, but by people who knew and liked him.112 Indeed, Burke, the son of an Irish attorney, was more aristocratic in some of his views than his friend Fox, in whose veins ran the blood of Henri IV and Charles II. An issue which surfaced soon after the debate about Somerset House provides an apposite illustration. One of the most notorious pieces of ‘aristocratic’ legislation in the eighteenth century was Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753.113 Its main aim was to prevent clandestine and runaway marriages. Fox’s father had made such a marriage, with a daughter of the second Duke of Richmond. From his father, Fox might therefore be said to have inherited a ‘hereditary hatred’ of the Act.114 In May 1781, he moved its nearly total repeal. The main debate took place on 15 June.115 On religion, marriage, and divorce, Burke often spoke and voted contrary to his usual associates. On this occasion, his speech (W vi. 168–72) proved the most stalwart defence of the Lord North to the king, 28 Apr. 1775, in Correspondence of King George the Third, iii. 208. Chambers to E.B., [1775], WWM BkP 1/802; John Harris, Sir William Chambers, Knight of the Polar Star (London, 1970), 96–8. WS iii. 169–171. 111 ‘The Seven Sages’ (1931), one of several poems in which Yeats expresses an affinity with E.B. 112 William Jones to Lord Althorp, 29 June 1781, in Letters, ii. 479. 113 26 George II, c. 33; R. B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500–1850 (London, 1995), 75–121. 114 Henry Dundas, on 28 May 1781, Debrett, iii. 428 (PH xxii. 374). 115 Debrett, iii. 608–33 (PH xxii. 384–413). 109 110

484 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 Marriage Act. Though he denied holding ‘aristocratic principles’, if by that was meant toadying to the peerage, or taking the side of the rich against the poor, he affirmed his opposition to social levelling and his determination to protect the rights of the few, if attacked by ‘a multitude of the profligate and ferocious’. The laws that protect the poor must also be allowed to protect the rich. Critics of Hardwicke’s Act charged that it ‘tends to accumulate, to keep up the power of great families, and to add wealth to wealth’. Burke did not deny this. Instead, he argued that ‘it is impossible that any principle of law or government useful to the community should be established without an advantage to those who have the greatest stake in the country’ (171). If the protection of those ‘who have the greatest stake in the country’ was an ‘aristocratic’ principle, then Burke avowed himself ‘a man of aristocratic principles’. Hardwicke’s Act set 21 as the minimum age for a valid marriage without parental consent. Fox sought to modify this provision. Burke defended it on two grounds, social utility and parental authority. Since most men are physically able to propagate before they are able to provide for their offspring, the State wisely restrains them from producing children that will become a burden on others. Twenty-one, the age of majority for legal purposes, is the proper one at which to terminate this restraint. Second, parental authority will in general be exercised wisely and in the interests of the children. Sometimes, indeed, it will be abused. More commonly, it will prove a salutary protection against fortune-hunters and degrading matches. Burke assumes that not only peers but ‘the mass of citizens’ will want to protect their children from unsuitable matches (W vi. 171). The ‘aristocratic’ or (more properly) hereditary principle is deeply woven into the fabric of human nature. Few of his hearers were convinced. So powerful was jealousy of the aristocratic tendency of the Act that Burke’s defence could only muster a minority of 27 to 90.116

5 Since the passage of North’s Regulating Act in 1773, India had only intermittently engaged the attention of English politicians. The Tanjore crisis of 1775–7 was soon forgotten. From 1781, however, India remained almost continuously on the agenda. North’s Act had been a stopgap measure. Almost at once, junior ministers had begun work on a more permanent settlement. North’s constitutional indolence and preoccupation with the American war, however, prevented his devoting much time or thought to 116 CJ xxxviii. 520. The bill passed the Commons on 27 June (CJ xxxviii. 546), only to be rejected by the Lords on 12 July (Journals of the House of Lords, xxxvi. 356).

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 485 117 India. Temporary renewing Acts were passed in 1779 and 1780. Burke’s interest in India had been kept alive by his perennial fear of the sinister political influence that he attributed to the East India Company, as well as by more personal considerations. On one contentious issue, these concerns intertwined. The Nawab of the Carnatic had not abandoned his hopes of once again seizing the revenues of the Raja of Tanjore, whom Will represented. The nawab’s claims were pressed by a group of his English ‘creditors’ (headed by Paul Benfield, one of the least reputable East India Company adventurers), who sought to appropriate the Tanjore revenues to the repayment of the ‘debts’ supposedly owed them by the nawab. In September 1780, Will undertook a second journey to India, nominally carrying dispatches for the raja (C iv. 292). His real motive was the same as before: to find a scheme that would restore the paper fortune that he had lost in 1769. Within days of Will’s departure, Burke thought he had discovered a plot to discredit him and his mission, and to hand back the Tanjore revenues to the nawab. Desperately afraid that Will would arrive in India only to find himself disgraced by the machinations of his rivals, Burke fired off a salvo of letters to different ministers. Still smarting from his defeat at Bristol and uncertain about his future, he used these letters as a vent for his spleen. All share the same tone of shrill outrage, his language when his emotions are out of control.118 On 17 October, in order to take a more active part in the business of the East India Company, Burke acquired the £1,000 worth of stock that entitled him to speak and vote in the company’s General Court.119 The first important business was the appointment of a new governor of Madras. The ministerial nominee was Lord Macartney, a former friend of the Burkes. Since Macartney was also supported by Benfield and his cronies, Burke jumped to the conclusion that his appointment was part of a plot to return the Tanjore revenues to the nawab and thus in effect to the ‘creditors’.120 When the appointment was debated in the General Court on 23 November, he therefore spoke strongly against Macartney.121 By the time of his next speech, however, on 20 December, he had been convinced that his suspicions were unfounded. He accordingly turned his fire on Benfield, and expatiated on the ‘very great mismanagements’ of the company’s servants in 117

53.

Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952), 337–

118 E.B. to Jenkinson, 30 Sept. and 2 Oct. 1780; to Hillsborough and Stormont, 3 Oct.; to Stormont, 3 and 4 Oct. (C iv. 304–12). 119 On 17 Oct. 1780; he sold it on 23 Feb. 1782. East India Company Stock Ledger, 1774–83, BL (Oriental and India Office Collections), MS L/AG/14/5/20, fo. 120. 120 L. S. Sutherland, ‘Lord Macartney’s Appointment as Governor of Madras, 1780: The Treasury in East India Company Elections’, English Historical Review, 90 (1975), 523–35. 121 London Evening Post, 23–5 Nov. 1780.

486 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 122 India. In 1779, Benfield had returned to London in semi-disgrace; now he was intriguing to be sent back to Madras. Burke determined to prevent this, and on 17 January 1781 presented detailed charges against him to the General Court.123 By then, however, he had resumed his seat in Parliament. With more important calls on his time, he allowed his crusade against Benfield to lapse. He resumed it in 1785, in his Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts, in which Benfield figures as a principal villain. India did not fade from Burke’s consciousness when he returned to Parliament. Indeed, the various Indian measures which came before the Commons in 1781 laid the foundation for a greater depth of commitment to India. John Robinson (1727–1802), Secretary to the Treasury, was one of the junior ministers who had been trying to overcome North’s inertia. In January 1781, he arranged a meeting with Burke to discuss the bill being drafted. Some of Burke’s ideas were adopted.124 Even Burke now acknowledged the need for stricter governmental inspection and control. Describing the passage of the new Regulating Act to Macartney, he stressed that ‘the opposition concurred with the Ministry in almost all particulars relative to it . . . None of us opposed that Measure of power to Ministry as we had done on the former occasion’ (15 Oct. 1781: C x. 11). This was a significant change of heart. One necessary reform, left out of the new Regulating Act to be embodied in separate legislation, attracted Burke’s particular interest. North’s 1773 Act had set up a Supreme Court to replace the old Mayor’s Court of Calcutta. The new court was staffed by English judges appointed by the Crown. Its mandate was to apply English law to the cases that came before it, which for the most part concerned Englishmen or their property. The Act failed, however, to define the relationship between the new court and the Supreme Council of Bengal. This soon led to friction. A second source of complaint was its controversial application of English laws and procedures to cases where Bengalis were concerned. The most notorious was the trial and execution for forgery of Maharaja Nandakumar in 1775.125 Petitions of complaint were received from a group of British subjects in Bengal, from the Supreme Council, and from the East India Company.126 On 12 February 1781, Richard Smith (1734–1803) moved for a select committee 122 London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 21 Dec. 1780. On 20 Dec., Loughborough wrote to assure E.B. that Macartney’s appointment could produce ‘no such dreadfull consequences as you apprehend’ (C iv. 323). Though this letter probably reached E.B. too late to influence his speech, similar assurance may have come through another channel. 123 ‘Heads of Objections to Benfield’ (WS v. 125–31; Todd, 40). 124 The meeting (on 12 Jan.) was arranged through Loughborough (C iv. 327–8). Robinson’s notes are in BL Add. MS 38405, fo. 10. 125 ‘Nundcomar’ was the commonest form of his name current in England. Smith outlined this and other cases of alleged injustice on 12 Feb. 1781; Debrett, i. 434–43 (PH xxi. 1182–91). Nandakumar’s ‘murder’ became a controversial charge against Hastings. 126 4 Dec. 1780, 1 Feb., and 9 Mar. 1781 (CJ xxxviii. 97–9, 159–62, 278–80).

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 487 to take them into consideration. The ministry did not object, nor did Lord North trouble to secure the election of ministerial nominees. Indeed, few members bothered to vote. Smith headed the ballot with 92 votes. Burke was placed fifth, with 77; the last members elected received only 43 each. Thanks to North’s inattention, Smith’s committee was dominated by opposition and independent members.127 Smith was an improbable ally for Burke. A man of obscure origins, he went to India in the company’s army, rising to the rank of general. Serving at a time when vast fortunes were easily made, he returned to England in 1770 with a fortune reputed to be in excess of £200,000. Immediately, he began to act the nouveau riche nabob: so convincingly, that he was identified as the original of Sir Matthew Mite, the title character in Samuel Foote’s farce The Nabob (1772). Clumsily and shamelessly, Smith tried to buy himself into Parliament. His first attempt, at New Shoreham in 1770, was at a by-election so notoriously corrupt that Parliament was shamed into reforming the borough’s franchise. After the Hindon election of 1774, he was convicted of vote-buying. At the same place in 1776, he was elected but unseated for corrupt practices. Tired of such constituencies, in 1780 he bought Lord Verney’s interest at Wendover, returning himself and his son. Such was Burke’s fellow reformer of the Bengal judiciary. Yet Smith was well informed about India, able, capable of intense application, and a forceful speaker in the Commons. His influence on Burke was considerable. Burke’s election to the select committee provided him with a timely new focus for his energies. In January 1781, towards the end of his burst of activity in the General Court, an unsympathetic observer wrote disparagingly to Warren Hastings that ‘Burk the great orator’ was meddling but ‘hath not yet got knowledge sufficient of Indian affairs’.128 Burke rapidly acquired knowledge more than sufficient. Over the next few years, the select committee produced a series of reports, several of them detailed and lengthy. Working on these reports, hearing and sifting through voluminous oral and written evidence, gave Burke an encyclopaedic knowledge of British India and convinced him of the need for a complete reform of its government. Nor did these reports merely gather dust on the shelf. They served to raise parliamentary consciousness about India, and indirectly to create a more informed public opinion on the subject. Burke also gained a new friend through his work on the committee. Sir Gilbert Elliot (1751– 1814) was the son of the prominent ‘king’s friend’ of the same name. Elected to Parliament in 1776, he had at first supported North. By 1781, he had lost faith in the ministry, and was ripe for opposition. Two years later, Elliot wrote that he entertained ‘a warm affection’ for Burke after being 127 CJ xxxviii. 202–3; Morning Herald, 13 Feb. 1781 (PH xxi. 1182–1209). The result of the ballot was reported on 15 Feb. (CJ xxxviii. 211). 128 Samuel Pechel to Hastings, 8 Jan. 1781, BL Add. MS 29147, fo. 24.

488 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 brought ‘much into his society for these two years past’.129 Though never an uncritical admirer or disciple, Elliot became a close and lifelong friend. That their friendship should have ripened over the committee table shows that Burke on India was not invariably a monomaniacal bore. The select committee’s initial brief was limited to the issues raised by the petitions against the Supreme Court. After hearing numerous witnesses, mostly Englishmen who had served in India but including one brahmin, the committee submitted its report, which runs to nearly 400 double-column folio pages, on 8 May.130 Its recommendations were embodied in the Bengal Judicature Bill, which passed rapidly through the Commons.131 Smith credited the bill, ‘except some local knowledge’, to Burke.132 Its main administrative provisions, defining the relationship between the Supreme Court and the Supreme Council, were largely what the council had asked for. Burke’s hand, however, is evident in the detailed code prescribed in the draft for cases relating to Muslims and Hindus. Burke sought assistance from William Jones (the foremost English oriental scholar of the day, soon to go out to Calcutta as a judge), though he did not always accept Jones’s suggestions.133 Burke was far more sympathetic to the Hindu caste system than were most Europeans, and more respectful of the minute punctilios of the higher-caste Hindus. He had an unusual opportunity to observe these in August 1781, when he entertained a brahmin (Humund Rao) at Beaconsfield (C iv. 367–8). Humund Rao made a lasting impression. Three years later, Burke was still showing visitors the garden-house where he had eaten and recounting his manner of preparing his meals.134 The Bengal Judicature Bill prohibited most of the practices to which the Hindus had objected. Arrests were to be made, and processes served, with regard to ‘the Privileges of Persons or Casts hitherto enjoyed by Law, Usage, or general Allowance and Indulgence’. Officers were not to enter the women’s apartments, nor any place of religious worship if they would be ‘deemed to prophane the same’. Yet Burke’s relativism had its limits. Maiming (a usual punishment in Muslim law) was too barbaric to countenance. Where local custom would have imposed it, the court was to substitute some other. Murder was to be a capital crime, for which the penalty was not to be commuted to a fine. In deference to Hindu susceptibilities, however, beheading, rather than hanging, was the prescribed mode of execution.135 When the Bengal Judicature Bill reached the Upper House, Elliot to William Eden, 8 Mar. 1782, BL Add. MS 34418, fo. 346. Report from the Committee on the Petitions . . . Relative to the Administration of Justice, &c. in India, House of Commons Sessional Papers, 1st ser., v. 3–375 (ed. Lambert, cxxxviii). 131 13–28 June 1781 (CJ xxxviii. 514–50). 132 In a debate on Fox’s India Bill, 20 Nov. 1783, Debrett, xii. 82 (PH xxiii. 1238). 133 Jones to Lord Althorp, 29 June 1781, in Letters, ii. 478. 134 Mary Shackleton’s Diary, 1784, National Library of Ireland, MS 9310, p. 116. 135 These provisions appear in both versions of the bill (as first presented and after amendment in 129 130

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 489 Lord Chancellor Thurlow objected to many of its provisions. They were too often inspired, he thought, by ‘personal disputes and political Interests’. Burke was particularly distressed that he struck out the entire code regulating the trials of Bengalis, substituting two enabling clauses to permit the Supreme Council to issue such a code, subject to the approval of the ministry in London. This was sensible, though Burke thought it ‘destroyd the regularity and system of the whole’ (C x. 12). Nevertheless, when the amended bill came back from the Lords, he did not press the point.136 The same desire for ‘regularity and system’ that inspired Burke’s judicial code for Bengal is also evident in another legislative proposal that he drafted about this time. In 1792, when the abolition of the slave-trade had become an important issue, and when opinions were divided between immediate and gradual abolition, Burke sent Henry Dundas a copy of what he called ‘my old African Code’, written ‘near twelve years ago’ (9 Apr. 1792: C vii. 122). This ‘Sketch of a Negro Code’ (WS iii. 563–81) cannot be more precisely dated. Its genesis is probably to be traced to Burke’s concern with the affairs of the Africa Company in 1777–9, from which he had learned a great deal about the trade. The actual writing, if the implied date of 1780 is correct, may have served to distract Burke from some of the unpleasant political realities that he faced between the defeat of economical reform and his absorption by the problems of India. Since the ‘Code’ presupposes the abolition of the Board of Trade, one of the chief targets of the economical reform bill, it may have been intended as a pendant to that measure. Drawn up before abolition became a serious possibility, it assumes the continuation of the slave-trade and tries to mitigate its evils by regulation.137 The ‘Code’ is composed in parliamentary form, and sets out minutely detailed rules both for the conduct of the slave-trade on the African coast and for the treatment of slaves in the West Indies. ‘Its whole value (if it has any)’, Burke told Dundas, ‘is the coherence and mutual dependency of parts in the scheme’ (C vii. 125). An obvious defect of the ‘Code’ is the lack of any effective machinery of enforcement. As in his Civil Establishment Bill, Burke imagines a self-regulating system with insufficient regard to how it would operate in the real world. Regulation of the slave-trade would, at best, mitigate an evil. In India, committee) printed during its passage through the Commons (repr. in House of Commons Sessional Papers, ed. Lambert, xxxiii. 263–305). A brahmin in England on a diplomatic mission (Humund Rao, later E.B.’s guest at Beaconsfield) explained to the committee various Hindu customs and taboos; House of Commons Sessional Papers, 1st ser., v. 39–40 (ed. Lambert, cxxxviii). In the report, his name appears as Honwontrow. 136 Thurlow’s objections can be inferred from E.B.’s letter and from the debate of 11 July (Debrett, iv. 398–400). The amended bill was enacted as 21 George III, c. 70. 137 The incipient anti-slavery movement ‘faltered’ during the period of the American war; Paul Thomas, ‘Changing Attitudes in an Expanding Empire: The Anti-Slavery Movement, 1760–1783’, Slavery & Abolition, 5 (1984), 50–72.

490 shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 Burke saw a field for more positive action, a great civilization under threat but not past hope of recovery. To save India from further devastation at the hands of the English became one of his great causes. Burke respected Indian practices for reasons that reflect the influence of his master Montesquieu. Against the advocates of a more thoroughgoing imposition of the principles and practices of English law, Burke argued that ‘the genius of a people is to be consulted in the laws which are imposed upon them’. Such laws should be ‘adapted to the spirit, the temper, the constitution, the habits, and the manners of the people’. The British constitution, while ‘the best and most beautiful fabric of government in Europe’, was not suitable for India. The Indians were ‘familiarized to a system of rule more despotic, and familiarity had rendered it congenial’. If they ‘love their old constitution, arbitrary and despotic as it is, better than the beautiful and the free system of British legislation, what must be done?’ Impose the British system, superior but alien? No: ‘men must be governed by those laws which they love’. Burke knew that to relieve the ‘mental slavery’ of the Bengalis was impracticable. Only a tiny minority of them ever came into contact with European ideas or values. He did not, however, take his respect for Indian values so far as to advocate a British withdrawal. The possibility is phrased as a rhetorical question: ‘must we abandon the government of the country rather than agree to rule over them by laws inimical to ourselves?’ (27 June 1781: WS v. 140–1). Burke thought British rule compatible with the preservation of Indian, especially Hindu, customs and institutions. He fondly imagined that enlightened British rule could maintain the traditional fabric of Indian society while directing its economy in the British interest. The weakness of his scheme was the difficulty of defining the ‘ancient constitution’ to be restored. Burke’s vision was utopian. More practical minds saw the difficulty. As Wedderburn (now Lord Loughborough) explained to Burke, given the many conflicting claims for which a historical case could be argued, no consensus was likely about which land rights and tenures should be restored (20 Dec. 1780: C iv. 324). Burke never came to terms with the inescapably historical dimension of the Indian problem. There was no ‘ancient constitution’ to restore. Nor, if there had been one, was restoration compatible with the European presence. Burke was trapped in a contradiction. He wanted to intervene in India, in order to undo the ill effects of previous intervention. India provided a subject on which Burke could co-operate with the ministry and play a constructive role in the framing of legislation. Unhappily, not all questions about India were treated with bipartisan statesmanship. The opposition was still ready to exploit bad news from India to discredit the ministry. In 1780, Haidar Ali (c.1722–82), the ruler of Mysore, took advantage of the East India Company’s war with the Marathas to invade the Carnatic. His early successes threatened the company’s hold on

shears or hatchets, 1779‒1781 491 Madras and the surrounding territory. The loss of Madras would have been a crippling blow to a ministry already struggling with an unsuccessful war in America. On 30 April 1781, North proposed an investigation by a ‘secret’ committee, meaning to ensure that only ministerial members were elected to it. (A ‘committee of secrecy’ differed from other ‘select’ committees in that its proceedings were held in camera and could be kept confidential.) Burke opposed a secret committee with an eloquent plea for open government. Secrecy was always odious, he argued, citing the Spanish Inquisition and the general practices of despotic states. ‘In all justice, as in all government,’ he asserted, ‘the best and surest test of excellence, is the publicity of its administration; for, whenever there is secrecy, there is implied injustice.’ North, however, took this problem more seriously than the complaints about the Supreme Court in Calcutta, and insisted on a secret committee.138 Two rival committees were thus established. In practice, they managed to work in parallel with reasonable success. Burke’s Speech on Economical Reformation ranks with his best. Economical reform, however, proved no more than a temporary issue. In retrospect, the most important legacy of these years is the changed nature of Burke’s interest in India. No longer a defender of the East India Company against ministerial intervention, Burke emerges with the passionate concern for India itself and its peoples that marks the second half of his career, in which India is a theme that not even the French Revolution can eclipse. 138

Debrett, iii. 179–96 (PH xxii. 119–38); E.B.’s speeches are reprinted in WS v. 135–9.

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13 Paradise Lost, 1781–1784

1 Like any public man, Burke was importuned for help and favour by complete strangers as well as by his numerous friends and relations. Though never wealthy, he often responded with remarkable generosity to such appeals. This instinctive humanity is one of his most sympathetic traits. In 1756, he offered his last half-guinea to Joseph Emin, recognizing in the Armenian refugee another ‘runaway son from a father’. In 1768, for an epileptic and simple-minded cousin, James Nagle, he was prepared to buy ‘some little furniture, and a couple of cows’, and provide a small annual stipend to allow the man and his wife to eke out a life of minimal human decency. This was more than the unfortunate man’s brother was prepared to do.1 In 1779, David Brown Dignan (c.1755–80), sentenced to five years’ hard labour for fraud, sent Burke a state of his case so ably penned that he wrote to a junior minister asking for the remission of ‘the most severe parts’ of Dignan’s punishment. Burke did not believe that Dignan was innocent, or that his sentence was unjust. Yet he was moved by the plight of a man, ‘Liberally educated’, condemned to ‘Spend his Youth wheeling a barrow of Gravel at Woolwich amidst the outcasts of Society’.2 In 1781, the American painter John Trumbull (1756–1843) came to London to study, only to find himself arrested on suspicion of treason. Burke, to whom he was previously unknown, helped secure his release.3 Such examples could be multiplied. Yet Burke’s charity was not always disinterested. In two causes that he took up in 1781, philanthropy was strongly tinged with politics. Henry Laurens (1724–92), a South Carolina merchant and planter, was a prominent American ‘rebel’ and a former president (1777–8) of the Continental Congress. In 1780, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to France. Captured off Newfoundland and brought to England, Laurens was treated not as a prisoner of war but as a rebel. Charged with high treason, he was 1 E.B. to Garrett Nagle, 27 Dec. 1768 (C ii. 20–1). Not until 1777 was James Nagle satisfactorily ‘settled’ (iii. 370). 2 E.B. to William Eden, 29 Sept. 1779 (C x. 5–6). The appeal from Dignan which so impressed E.B., dated 16 Sept. 1779, is at NRO (A. viii. 86); E.B. replied on 25 Sept. (iv. 133–5). 3 Trumbull to E.B., 10 May and 25 June 1781, NRO A. ii. 9, 13, in Autobiography, ed. Theodore Sizer (New Haven, 1953), 71–2.

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 493 4 imprisoned in the Tower of London. Burke espoused his case when it offered an opportunity of helping a new ally and attacking the ministry. General Burgoyne, back in England on parole after his surrender at Saratoga, had joined the opposition. Burke came to regard him as an innocent scapegoat for ministerial incompetence. For his part in helping to discredit the illusions formerly cherished of the number and strength of the loyalists, ‘impostures’ which only the ministry’s hirelings now pretended to believe, Burgoyne had earned the ‘implacable enmity’ of the ministers.5 In August 1781, alarmed at a rumour that Burgoyne’s parole would be revoked, forcing him to return to America, Burke asked Benjamin Franklin (the American representative in Paris) to intervene (15 Aug. 1781: C iv. 362–5). Franklin did not respond until October. With his reply, he enclosed a copy of a congressional resolution authorizing him to offer Burgoyne’s formal release in exchange for Laurens. Since Franklin had no direct communication with the British ministry, he asked Burke to conduct the negotiation (15 Oct.: C iv. 378). Not content, however, to secure the exchange, Burke sought to make political capital out of the ill-treatment that Laurens was alleged to have received during his incarceration. If the ministers refused the exchange, he would have demonstrated not only their ‘implacable enmity’ to Burgoyne, but the inhumanity with which they treated prisoners. These aims were hard to pursue in tandem. To attack the ministers for inhumanity was not the best way of predisposing them to agree to the exchange. Rightly suspecting ulterior motives, Laurens, without declining his aid, refused to put himself wholly in Burke’s hands. Burke handled the business ineptly. On 3 December 1781, having given notice that he would move a motion on the subject, he arrived at the House of Commons late and had to apologize and ask for more time.6 Burke was rarely so ill-prepared. The miscarriage gave credibility to malicious rumours (circulated, as he suspected, by ministerialists) that his concern for Laurens was based ‘upon mere newspaper information’.7 On 17 December, he repaired some of the damage done on the 3rd. Foreshadowing his intention to move for a bill to facilitate the exchange of prisoners of war, he used the occasion to publicize Laurens’s plight. With typical exaggeration, he charged the minsters with being less humane than ‘the Turk, the savage Arab, the cruel Tartar, or the piratical Algerine’. Unable to accuse them of illegality, he drew one of his habitual contrasts between the ‘wisdom and 4 David Duncan Wallace, The Life of Henry Laurens, with a Sketch of the Life of Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens (New York, 1915), 355–89. 5 To James Bourdieu, 16 Dec. 1781 (C iv. 392). Bourdieu (1715–1804), a wealthy merchant with proAmerican sympathies, acted as an intermediary between E.B. and Laurens. 6 Debrett, v. 82–3 (PH xxii. 766–7). 7 E.B. to Bourdieu, 6 Dec. 1781, and to Lord North, 14 Dec. (C iv. 388, 389).

494 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 justice’ which ought to motivate ‘great statesmen’ and the ‘narrow scale which a Middlesex magistrate, a Westminster trading justice, an Old Bailey solicitor, or a bailiff’s follower, would hold themselves tied down to’.8 On 20 December, when Burke presented a petition from Laurens, North retorted that his detention was legal and in accordance with established usage. Unable to deny this, Burke was forced again to appeal from the law to ‘prudence and humanity’. ‘A matter might be lawful,’ he asserted, ‘but not, therefore, expedient’. The petition was ordered to ‘lie on the table’, a formula of polite rejection.9 After Christmas, the affair was allowed to drop. Laurens was released from the Tower on 31 December. He and Burgoyne were eventually exchanged, though not for each other and not through Burke’s efforts. Taking up the cause of a ‘rebel’ such as Laurens exposed Burke to much obloquy. In the Commons, when he read from the letter he had received from Franklin, Lord Newhaven (1722–94) declared that he deserved to join Laurens in the Tower for corresponding with ‘an open and avowed rebel’.10 Burke courted such unpopularity. Because he believed that the worst outcome for Britain would be to win the war in America, he could regret victory and rejoice in defeat. Every success, as he warned Portland, merely prolonged the delusion that would lead the nation to its ruin (Oct. 1781: C iv. 380). His championing of Samuel Hoheb is an example of his determination to find something to censure in every national success. Towards the end of 1780, Britain had acquired a new enemy. When the Dutch persistently ignored British protests against their aiding and abetting the American rebels, the British ambassador at the Hague presented an ultimatum requiring speedy satisfaction. The Dutch reply to this memorial was taken as a virtual declaration of war. In retaliation, Admiral Sir George Rodney (1719–92), commander of the British fleet in the West Indies, was instructed to attack the Dutch islands. Rodney was both fiercely antiAmerican and eager for plunder. An excellent and innovative admiral, his professional reputation was tarnished by the unscrupulous and undisguised avidity with which he sought to line his pockets. Heavily in debt, when he lost his seat in Parliament in 1774, he had fled to France to escape his creditors. Though he had been jockeying for a command since 1776, his equivocal reputation delayed his re-employment until August 1779. After some early successes in European waters, he was sent to the West Indies. On 3 February 1781, he captured St Eustatius, an important entrepôt. A small, barren island, equipped with only token defences, St Eustatius surrendered without a shot being fired. Eager to wreak revenge on the Dutch for trading with the rebels, and oblivious of legal niceties, Rodney 8 9 10

Debrett, v. 184–92 (PH xxii. 853–65). Debrett, v. 224–8 (PH xxii. 874–8). 17 Dec., Debrett, v. 194–5 (PH xxii. 864).

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 495 confiscated a great mass of private property and put most of it up for sale.11 News of the capture reached London on 13 March.12 Rodney’s friends were ecstatic at the ‘most glorious & sublime News’. With the booty estimated at £3,000,000, Rodney’s share was expected to make him ‘the Richest & most fortunate Man in England’.13 Even Burke could not censure the taking of St Eustatius. Rodney was, however, vulnerable to criticism for his conduct after the capture, particularly for his seizure of private property (much of which belonged to British and neutral merchants) and for his treatment of the Jews. On 14 May 1781, Burke moved for a committee of enquiry. His speech, timed at three and a half hours, was a characteristic mixture of emotive and rational arguments, combining narrative pathos with topics drawn from the theory of international law. He opened with a sarcastic narrative of the taking of the defenceless island and an affecting description of the sufferings of its unfortunate inhabitants. Burke dwelt particularly on Rodney’s harsh and arbitrary treatment of the Jews. Many of these were wealthy merchants, reduced by Rodney’s brutality to beggary and near starvation. As on other occasions, the pitch of Burke’s eloquence was raised not so much by slaughter or massacre as by the sufferings of opulence reduced to penury. Burke never relied wholly on such material. On this occasion, he buttressed his emotional appeal with an elaborate disquisition on international law, arguing that Rodney had violated the unwritten ‘law of nations’ that governs even war. This passage illustrates his habit, when statute law did not serve his turn, of appealing to higher principles that may be thought to supersede enacted law. Conceding that there is ‘no positive law of nations; no general established laws framed, and settled by acts in which every nation had a voice’, he argued that the ‘law of nations’ was to be sought not in the statute book but ‘in the heart’. He rested his case chiefly on general grounds: on reason, on general consent, on convention. Admitting that ‘the authority of books’ was ‘the weakest part of the argument’, he cited only one, the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel (1714–67), as ‘the latest and best, and whose testimony he preferred; because being a modern writer, he expressed the sense of the day in which we live’.14 Although writing within the ‘natural law’ tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf, Vattel is more empiri11 J. Franklin Jameson, ‘St Eustatius in the American Revolution’, American Historical Review, 8 (1902–3), 683–708; David Spinney, Rodney (London, 1969), 356–77; Ronald Hurst, The Golden Rock: An Episode of the American War of Independence, 1775–1783 (London, 1996). 12 E.B. wrote a telegraphic account as a postscript to J.B.’s letter to Judith Champion of that date (C iv. 343). 13 Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 13 Mar. 1781, BL (Oriental and India Office Collections), MS Eur. C. 307/4, fo. 169. 14 Debrett, iii. 309–11 (PH xxii. 228–31). Vattel’s Le Droit des gens (1758) and the English translation (Law of Nations, 1760) are both listed in E.B.’s Sale Catalogue (no. 574).

496 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 cal. In part a codification of current practice, his theory of international law reflects the more humanitarian values of its time.15 Burke was attracted by the idea of a ‘law of nations’ that is both universal and variable. When Burke made his original motion, Rodney was still on active service. Nor had his victims had time to seek legal redress. With such plausible grounds for opposing it as premature, the motion was easily defeated, though only after a long and animated debate.16 Never one to give up easily, early in the following session Burke renewed his call for an enquiry. On 4 December 1781, he gave the subject a second full-dress treatment in another speech that lasted well over three hours.17 To judge from the brief reports, Burke traversed much the same ground as he had covered in May. He had, however, some new material. The Jews on St Eustatius, he argued, had been especially badly treated, because no reprisals could be expected from any power on their behalf. Among these Jews, he highlighted the misfortunes of Samuel Hoheb, ‘a venerable old gentleman, of near 70 years of age’ who had been subjected to the indignity of having his clothes searched. When he was discovered to have concealed thirty-six shillings in his coat (to enable him to purchase provisions), he and the other Jews were treated even more rigorously. Burke waved a piece of the very ‘bit of linen’ in which the money had been secreted, and offered to produce the whole coat and Hoheb himself as a witness. Now followed a characteristic Burkean moment. Having reached a pitch of emotional intensity with the theatrical gesture of holding up the scrap of linen, Burke descended abruptly from the pathetic to the ludicrous: This treatment brought to his mind a story of an Irish gentleman, who, finding his wife indulging a little too freely in the follies and amusements of London, carried her over to a venerable old castle he had in Ireland: the lady’s acquaintance in London were much offended at this step, and their expressions of disapprobation reached the gentleman’s ear: upon this he said the world dealt whimsically by him; ‘for, said he, if I had run away with another man’s wife, I should have been applauded, as a fashionable man; but because I ran away with my own wife, I am censured by the world.’ So with the Jew—he was ill-treated because he had endeavoured to carry away some of his own money.18

Such sudden shifts, frequent in Burke’s speeches, violate the neo-classical principle that contraries counteract each other. They can be explained as part of a conscious strategy of providing comic relief. A century earlier, Dryden had defended English tragi-comedy on the ground that ‘a continued gravity keeps the spirit too much bent; we must refresh it sometimes, as 15 Francis Stephen Ruddy, International Law in the Enlightenment: The Background of Emmerich de Vattel’s ‘Le Droit des gens’ (Dobbs Ferry, NY, 1975). 16 Debrett, iii. 299–342 (PH xxii. 218–62); the division was 86 to 160 (CJ xxxviii. 461). 17 E.B. to James Bourdieu, 5 Dec. 1781 (C iv. 387); Debrett, v. 83–90 (PH xxii. 770–8). 18 Debrett, v. 87 (PH xxii. 775).

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 497 we bait in a journey, that we may go on with greater ease. A Scene of mirth mix’d with Tragedy has the same effect upon us which our musick has betwixt the Acts.’19 On the other hand, Burke’s shifts often appear less deliberate than the spontaneous overflowings of a rich but undisciplined imagination. William Warburton, who like Burke had a mind stocked with much miscellaneous knowledge, was often criticized for such lapses. He would quote a comic passage from Shakespeare in a sermon that veered from sublime to the ludicrous; or enliven a discourse with a story (which sounds like Burke’s) of ‘some charitable monks who had robbed their own begging-boxes’.20 Contemporaries were divided in their assessment of Burke’s mixed mode. One reporter compared his ‘purple robes’ to ‘a patched garment’, complaining that Burke ‘often debases the sublimest thought by the coarsest allusion; and mingles the vulgarity of idiom with the most delicate graces of expression’.21 James Boswell, on the other hand, compared Burke’s mind to ‘animated Nature’, in which puns, wordplay, and various ‘sportive sallies and tricks’ corresponded to such creatures as squirrels and butterflies. His ‘Grand thoughts & noble expressions’ were like ‘the Elephant and the oak & other magnificent forms’. Better, Boswell thought, these ‘innumerable diversities’ than ‘mere dead Matter’.22 Even more valuable is the testimony of a political opponent, Nathaniel Wraxall (1751–1831). In his Memoirs, he recalls Burke as ‘during the same evening, often within the space of a few minutes, pathetic and humorous, acrimonious and conciliating, now giving loose to his indignation or severity, and then, almost in the same breath, calling to his assistance wit and ridicule’. Wraxall could have had Burke’s speech on Hoheb in his mind as he wrote this account.23 His comments also show how much more easily rhetoric could dazzle than persuade. Though Burke’s philippic against Rodney of 14 May impressed him with ‘a splendour of description and a blaze of eloquence which I have scarcely ever known exceeded even by him’, Wraxall voted against the motion for an enquiry.24 Despite Burke’s extraordinary speech on 4 December, his motion for an enquiry was again negatived, by about the same majority as in May.25 Undeterred, Burke returned to the attack in the new year, presenting a 19 Of Dramatic Poesy (1667); repr. in Works (Berkeley, 1956– ), xvii. 46. Johnson makes a similar point in his preface to Shakespeare; Works (New Haven, 1958– ), vii. 67. 20 J. Cradock, Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs (London, 1828), i. 186; A. W. Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians: A Study in Some Eighteenth-Century Controversies (London, 1932), 136–7. 21 ‘Character of Mr Burke’, Political Magazine, 1 (Oct. 1780), 643. 22 ‘Occasional Thoughts in London 1781’, YB Boswell Papers, M207. 1; c.12 Apr. 1781. 23 Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London, 1884), ii. 31. Wraxall does not mention E.B.’s speech of 4 Dec., though he attended the Commons assiduously at the time (ii. 150–9). 24 Ibid. ii. 115–17. 25 By 89 to 163 (CJ xxxviii. 600).

498 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 petition from Hoheb on 4 February 1782. This was at least referred to a committee. At the end of March, with the fall of the North ministry, Hoheb’s prospects brightened. Rodney was recalled. Embarrassingly for the new ministers, however, before the news of his recall reached him, he had (on 12 April) won a decisive victory over the French at the Battle of the Saints. Now a popular hero, any thought of bringing him to book for St Eustatius had to be abandoned. When the committee reported on 14 May, its report was ordered to lie on the table.26 Nothing further was done, though as late as 1784, Hoheb was still hoping to reanimate Burke’s interest.27 By then, however, Burke was preoccupied with other and larger injustices. Neither Laurens nor Hoheb benefited from Burke’s efforts. His confrontational tactics may even have hindered Laurens’s release. Burke demanded recognition of the rightness of his cause. He could not bear to suspend hostilities to negotiate. The enemy must acknowledge their guilt and capitulate. From a weak position, such as his usually was, such a strategy is unlikely to work. Success, however, was not always his aim. In one sense, indeed, his purpose was better answered by failure. If the ministry had released Laurens, or compensated Hoheb, his picture of their unrelieved wickedness might have needed rethinking. Their intransigence confirmed it. The most disinterested of Burke’s philanthropic enterprises of 1781 was also the most successful. Politics played no part. George Crabbe (1754– 1832), the son of an exciseman, was brought up in the harsh landscape of the Suffolk coast. When his father’s ambitions to establish him as a physician or apothecary came to nothing, he left for London with a sheaf of poems in his pocket from which he hoped both to earn a living and to establish a reputation. The common experience followed. His money exhausted, he was reduced to near despair. In vain he applied to Lord North and Lord Chancellor Thurlow. His last hope was to address an appeal to Burke, to whom he was quite unknown. In this letter, probably written about February or March 1781, Crabbe set out frankly his hopes and his disappointments. Describing himself as ‘one of those outcasts on the World who are without a Friend without Employment & without Bread’, he confessed that ‘poetical Vanity’ had deluded him. Having delivered the letter, he spent an agitated night walking back and forth across Westminster Bridge.28 Perhaps he actually contemplated the suicide to which he alludes in his letter. That night proved the nadir of his misery. CJ xxxviii. 672–3 (4 Feb.), 1005–6 (14 May). Hoheb to E.B., 13 Feb. 1784, WWM BkP 1/1861. 28 Crabbe to E.B., n.d., in Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner (Oxford, 1985), 3– 5; also in C iv. 337–9. J. G. Lockhart to George Crabbe, Jr., 26 Dec. 1833, quoted in the ‘Life’ by George Crabbe, Jr. prefaced to Crabbe’s Poetical Works (London, 1834), i. 281. 26 27

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 499 When he called on Burke the following morning, Crabbe received both money and encouragement. From the drafts and fragments which Crabbe showed him, Burke selected The Library as the most promising poem. Failing to persuade his own publisher, James Dodsley, to undertake the expense of publication, Burke underwrote the cost himself.29 Published on 24 July 1781, The Library achieved a modest success. Nor, having rescued Crabbe from the depths, was Burke content to let him flounder in the shallows of Grub Street. At Burke’s invitation, Crabbe spent about two months at Beaconsfield as a member of the family. There he worked on The Village, the best of his early poems, which was ‘corrected, and a considerable portion of it written’ while staying with the Burkes.30 Thanks to Burke’s patronage, Crabbe no longer needed to rush into print. The Village, an ambitious poem that challenges Goldsmith’s popular but sentimental Deserted Village (1770), was not published until May 1783. Its success justified Burke’s judgement that Crabbe possessed both ‘a Talent for Poetry’ and ‘a power both of thinking and inventing’.31 Burke knew, however, that poetry would not provide Crabbe with a livelihood. Learning that he was ambitious to enter holy orders, for which his lack of formal education was a barrier, Burke helped him secure ordination (C iv. 373–4). Generous and compassionate, Burke might have made a present of a few guineas to any aspiring young poet in distress. Crabbe was much more to him than an object of such passing charity. A clue to what engaged him so earnestly is the passage from The Village which (so Crabbe thought) first satisfied Burke that he was ‘a true poet’. This describes his search among the ‘frowning fields’ for the ‘simple life’ of Nature. Instead, he finds the coast inhabited by ‘a bold, artful, surly, savage race’, fishermen who supplement their meagre catch by plundering wrecks. The most moving lines are those in which the poet takes his leave of the desolate scene: As on their neighbouring beach yon swallows stand, And wait for favouring winds to leave the land; While still for flight the ready wing is spread: So waited I the favouring hour, and fled; Fled from these shores where guilt and famine reign, And cry’d, Ah! hapless they who still remain; Who still remain to hear the ocean roar, Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore; Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway, 29 So Crabbe’s editors suggest, on the evidence that Dodsley wrote to E.B., not to Crabbe, when the first printing of The Library was sold out; Complete Poetical Works, ed. Norma Dalrymple-Champneys and Arthur Pollard (Oxford, 1988), i. 647. 30 ‘Biographical Account of the Rev George Crabbe, LL B’, New Monthly Magazine, 4 (Jan. 1816), 511–17. 31 E.B. to William Eden and to Alexander Henry Haliday, both 28 July 1781 (C iv. 359, 361); contemporary reviews in Crabbe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Arthur Pollard (London, 1972), 40–4.

500

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away; When the sad tenant weeps from door to door, And begs a poor protection from the poor.32

This passage may have rekindled Burke’s memory of his feelings on leaving Ireland, another land of ‘guilt and famine’. The earnest young poet may have reminded him of his own poetic dreams, when as a law student in London he had written ‘Satire, rough indeed but true’.33 Burke sometimes expressed a wistful longing for a life of study and retirement. Crabbe actually chose such a course. Once he had obtained the modest clerical preferment that allowed him to marry, he settled contentedly into the life of a country parson. He dropped out of Burke’s circle, and passed up the patronage opportunities to which his appointment in 1782 as chaplain to the Duke of Rutland (1754–87) might have led. To Thurlow, indeed, he appeared an incarnation of the unworldly Parson Adams of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.34 In The Newspaper (1785), the last poem that he published in Burke’s lifetime, Crabbe expressed his disgust at the ‘party rage’ that seemed to be tearing society apart and at the preoccupation with the topical rather than the permanent that made newspapers the most popular form of reading. Though he sent Burke a copy, Crabbe can hardly have expected him to relish the moral of the poem.35 Though they had only been close for a short time in 1781–2, Crabbe retained a lively sense of gratitude to his early mentor. In 1807, when he published his first new poems since 1785, in the preface he paid a noble tribute to Burke. In 1816, he still remembered Burke as his ‘father, guide, and friend’.36

2 Crabbe’s sojourn at Beaconsfield provided a pleasant interlude in an otherwise gloomy few months. Lord Richard Cavendish, one of the rising generation of Whig aristocrats on whom (in Burke’s mind) the future of the country depended, died in September 1781 at the age of 29. Burke wrote a moving tribute in a letter to the Duke of Portland, Lord Richard’s brotherin-law (Oct. 1781: C iv. 375–6). Lord Richard had been a friend of Richard Burke, Jr., to whom he bequeathed the ‘Vatican Virgil’ that became one of The Village, i. 109–30. Crabbe’s comment is recorded in the ‘Life’ prefaced to Poetical Works, i. 46. W.B.’s description of a lost poem by E.B., in Note-Book, 27. George Crabbe, Jr.’s ‘Life’, in Poetical Works, i. 123. 35 Crabbe to E.B., 9 Mar. 1785 (C v. 208). As late as 1789, Crabbe consulted R.B. Jr. on a point of law; R.B. Jr. to Crabbe, 3 Mar. 1789, quoted in René Huchon, George Crabbe and his Times, 1754–1832: A Critical and Biographical Study, trans. Frederick Clarke (London, 1907), 201 n. 3. 36 Preface to Poems (1807); repr. in Complete Poetical Works, i. 201–2; ‘Biographical Account’, New Monthly Magazine, 514. Crabbe’s phrase alludes to the Prayer Book version of Ps. 55: 14. 32 33 34

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 501 37 his most cherished possessions. Burke had other worries. His own son, now 23, was not robust. Called to the Bar in November 1780, the young Richard now needed to gain some practical legal experience. Each year the English judges travelled on circuits, holding assizes at important cities and towns around the provinces. A newly qualified barrister would follow one of these circuits, as Richard did in 1781. His mother proudly reported to the Champions that, on his first circuit, he had earned three guineas, ‘very well for the first’.38 In the eighteenth century, change of air was regarded as a great restorative. Burke hoped that, by following a summer circuit, Richard would gain in health as much as professional experience.39 Will Burke was another source of anxiety. Returning to India in pursuit of a fortune, he was forced to spend several weeks in the unhealthy port of Basra, thanks to the unremitting hostility of one of their old enemies, Paul Benfield (379). With these family troubles adding to his political frustrations, by November 1781 Burke was deep in despair. When Rockingham reported that the tide of opinion in Yorkshire was at last turning against the war, Burke was incredulous. ‘I saw very few Symptoms of any such thing in London,’ he told Portland, ‘and on the best Enquiry I could make into the Temper of Loyds Coffeehouse, I had no reason to think the Merchants were made a whit more reasonable, or better disposed.’ Without ‘a very signal Change in the National Temper’, Burke was adamant, ‘this people cannot be saved’ (12 Nov.: C iv. 382). In this mood, Burke learned that Lord Cornwallis (1738–1805) had surrendered. The capitulation at Yorktown was the decisive event that convinced all but the king and a few die-hards of the impracticabilty of imposing British suzerainty over the former colonies. The news reached London on 25 November, just two days before the new session of Parliament was scheduled to open. To gain time, the ministers kept the speech from the throne vague. It foreshadowed no more than a continued defence of ‘those essential Rights and permanent Interests, upon the Maintenance and Preservation of which, the future Strength and Security of this Country must ever principally depend’. North affected to interpret the speech literally. Saying nothing about the American war, it pledged only vigorous action in support of the country’s ‘essential Rights and permanent Interests’. Burke brushed aside North’s gloss, reading into the speech what the king certainly intended, a determination to continue the war for America. Such blind persistence in folly ‘froze up his blood, and harrowed up his soul’. Refusing to believe that any change of policy was intended, he launched an emotive attack on the folly of the war. The ministers had learned nothing from the disasters they R.B. Jr. in turn bequeathed it to Walker King (C vii. 600). J.B. to Richard and Judith Champion, 25 Apr. 1781, NRO A. ii. 12. E.B. to Champion, 2 Sept. 1781 (C iv. 369); E.B. received some reassurance in a letter from Lord Bessborough of 17 Sept. (WWM BkP 1/1469). 37 38 39

502 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 had brought upon the country. Like Shylock, they were animated by a spirit of mean revenge. ‘We must risk every thing,’ Burke imagines them arguing; ‘we will forfeit every thing, we will think of no consequences, we will take no consideration into our view but our right, we will consult no ability, we will not measure our right with our power, but we will have our right, we will have our bond: America, give us our bond; next your heart we will have it: the pound of flesh is ours, and we will have it.’ From Shakespeare, Burke turned to a fable of his own invention. ‘Oh! says a silly man, full of his prerogative of dominion over a few beasts of the field, there is excellent wool on the back of a wolf, and therefore he must be sheared. What! shear a wolf? yes. But will he comply? have you considered the trouble? how will you get this wool? Oh, I have considered nothing, and I will consider nothing, but my right: a wolf is an animal that has wool; all animals that have wool are to be shorn, and therefore I will shear the wolf.’ Nathaniel Wraxall (an MP from 1780 to 1794) remembered this fable as ‘one of the most impressive and convincing that I ever heard pronounced during the whole time that I remained in the House of Commons’. Even ministerial members acknowledged its aptness.40 They were not yet ready to declare so in public. Despite the disaster at Yorktown, the opposition amendment calling for ‘a total Change of System’ was defeated by 218 to 129.41 Burke was confirmed in his belief that ‘this people cannot be saved’. Many members who did not want a ‘total Change of System’ were nevertheless weary of the war. A hopeful first sign of the ‘very signal Change’ of which Burke had despaired came on 12 December, when Sir James Lowther moved what was in effect a censure motion. Instead of straining to put a direct negative on it, North adroitly moved the previous question. Even with this manœuvre, his majority was halved. Lowther’s motion was rejected by only 220 to 179.42 After the Christmas recess, the ministry was palpably on the defensive. Indeed, the ministers themselves were losing heart. During February and March, North’s majority melted away as independent members reluctantly recognized that the struggle with the colonies, however just, had been lost.43 Only the king, with a Burkean obstinacy that defeat could not dent, remained determined to defend what he took to be the country’s ‘essential Rights and permanent Interests’. Burke was no more pliable. Repudiating healing or conciliatory measures, he continued to demand recognition that the war had been wrong from the beginning. Its authors must be not only removed from office but brought to 40 Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, ii. 145. ‘There is no more welcome gift to men than a new symbol,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson would observe, citing this passage as an example; ‘Poetry and Imagination’ (1872), in Complete Works (Boston, 1903–4), viii. 13–14. If E.B. had published the speech, the phrase might have become proverbial. 41 CJ xxxviii. 567–8. Debrett, v. 1–47 (PH xxii. 679–729); E.B.’s speech, v. 35–41 (PH xxii. 717–23). 42 CJ xxxviii. 616; Debrett, v. 117–49 (PH xxii. 802–31). E.B. spoke only briefly. 43 Ian R. Christie, The End of North’s Ministry (London, 1958), 299–369.

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 503 justice. The evil ‘system’ of corruption must be rooted out. Furious at the prospect that the ministers who had wickedly instigated and incompetently conducted the war might escape condign punishment, he singled out for attack Welbore Ellis. On Germain’s retirement in February 1782, Ellis agreed to succeed him as American Secretary. A ‘king’s friend’, personal loyalty to the king had induced Ellis to make the quixotic gesture of joining North’s visibly sinking ministry. Burke, who attributed all the evils of the reign to such men, taunted him mercilessly as one who ‘had for a long time, in an inferior order of ministerial existence, crawled upon the leaves of the American system’. Now, ‘like the caterpiller, he had left the chressilis state, his wings had broke from their foldings’, and he sat, Germain’s ‘effigy’, in Germain’s old seat, giving ‘a new name to the old story’, obstinately persisting in the old folly.44 North, however, if not the king, accepted defeat. Hoping to avert an opposition motion calling for his removal, on 20 March he came down to the Commons to announce the demise of his long ministry. What had promised to be a great debate on a motion of censure dwindled into a procedural wrangle about who should speak first. Burke spoke towards the end of the proceedings, after the points of order had been settled and North had made his statement. For Burke, North’s resignation was only a necessary first step. The evil ‘system’ remained to be eradicated. In a speech of studied moderation, wholly different in tone from his acerbic attacks on Ellis in the earlier debates, he expressed his hopes and his fears for the future. Imagining that they were now convinced of the error of their ways, he admonished those who had ‘seen for a length of years the system of corruption’ but who had been ‘erroneously and criminally negligent’ in not opposing it. The ‘greatest virtues’, he admitted, ‘were generally accompanied with very great defects; independence and public spirit were attended with indolence and supineness’. (These qualities were exemplified in many of his own associates, too, though Burke did not say so.) The ministers who had resorted to corruption were less to be blamed than ‘the independent gentlemen who suffered them to do it’. This system of corruption and influence had been overthrown. In its place, Burke looked forward to a new mode of government which ‘by its purity, wisdom, and success’ would deserve ‘the love and support of the virtuous and independent’.45 This speech reveals his complete misreading of the motives and attitudes of the independent members. As the next two years would show, they were by no means ready to accept his doctrine or to support a new ‘system’. The eighteenth-century constitution operated most smoothly when a minister enjoyed the support of both the monarch and the Commons, as 44 22 Feb. 1782, Debrett, vi. 267–73 (PH xxii. 1035–41). E.B. launched an even more withering attack on Ellis on 8 Mar.; Debrett, vi. 393–4 (PH xxii. 1130–3). 45 Debrett, vi. 501–3 (PH xxii. 1224–6).

504 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 North had until early 1782. Indeed, had the king been prepared to abandon the American war, North might in January have been able to form a ministry more palatable to the king than the one forced on him in March. The crisis was provoked by the king’s refusal to accept defeat, and North lacked the will to impose unpleasant realities on his master. Impervious selfrighteousness was as prominent a part of the king’s character as of Burke’s. For the king, only some species of witchcraft or delusion could have turned the majority in the Commons against a cause so self-evidently right as the American war. For Burke, only the wages of corruption could have made men pretend to support a policy so plainly unwise and impracticable. The king could not accept the simple truth that, in North’s calm appraisal, ‘the Parliament have altered their sentiments, and . . . their sentiments whether just or erroneous, must ultimately prevail’.46 The king was no more prepared than Burke to bow to the wishes of a mistaken majority. The second Rockingham ministry was thus born in most unpropitious circumstances. The king, without whose good will no administration could be secure, was implacably hostile. Far from attempting to win over the king (not an impossible task), the new ministers exacerbated his hatred by making clear their determination to destroy what they imagined to be his ‘system’. Burke wanted to put into practice the constitutional theory adumbrated in his Thoughts. ‘I never was more pleased with any thing’, he told Rockingham, ‘than your resolution of forming a Cabinet on a New System; I mean the Cabinet you propose for your own particular advice and support. . . . It is on that Cabinet you must rely for the utter destruction of the Cabinet that has destroyd every thing else.’ Burke is not advocating a new ‘double cabinet’ system, with real power removed from the ostensible Cabinet to Rockingham’s private one, but a temporary phalanx formed to ‘storm the closet’ as a collective. Rockingham is not to bargain with the king. Backed by his colleagues, he must present the king with an ultimatum to be accepted or rejected, confident that the support he has in Parliament and in public opinion will force the king’s acquiescence. ‘Stand firm on your ground,’ Burke exhorted him: ‘But one Ministry.—I trust and hope, that your Lordship will not let one, even but one branch of the State—neither army, Navy, Finance, Church, Law, or any thing else, out of your own hands, or those which you can entirely rely on’ (22 Mar. 1782: C iv. 422–3). Only if he can nominate the entire Cabinet should Rockingham agree to form a ministry. This Cabinet must be the sole source of power. Burke had enunciated this doctrine as long ago as 1769, when he had asserted in his Observations on a Late State of the Nation, ‘the necessity of having the great strong holds of government in well-united hands, in order to secure 46 North to the king, 18 Mar. 1782, in Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December 1783, ed. Sir John Fortescue (London, 1927–8), v. 395.

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 505 the predominance of right and uniform principles’ (WS ii. 210). There must be no coalition, no comprehension, no ‘broadbottom’. This demand that the king give carte blanche to a single minister to nominate the entire ministry, as Burke wanted, was in 1782 as much of a constitutional innovation as it had been in 1769. Nor did the balance of forces in the Commons, where the Rockingham party did not command a majority, give it even a pragmatic sanction. Neither custom nor numbers justified Burke’s theory. Burke wanted to humiliate the king and demonstrate that the old ‘system’ was dead. Far from being able to insist on such stiff terms, however, Rockingham was not even permitted to negotiate directly with the king. Using Shelburne as his intermediary, the king contrived not only to resist the idea of a ‘party’ ministry, but even to deny Rockingham a majority in the Cabinet.47 Far from placing ‘the great strong holds of government in wellunited hands’, Rockingham returned to power in 1782 on terms no more favourable than those he had rejected in 1767. Burke’s vision of government by the party of virtue had to be laid aside. Burke had served Rockingham faithfully for sixteen years, and for nearly as long had been one of the leading debaters in the Commons. Yet he was not offered a seat in the Cabinet. Several reasons have been advanced for his exclusion: the reputation of ‘the Burkes’ for questionable financial transactions, some of which rubbed off on Edmund; his Irish background and modest social origins; his difficult personality, ill adapted to compromise or to working in a team; his temper and lack of self-control.48 Such personal considerations on their own could never have kept Burke out. Irish birth excepted, men sat in George III’s Cabinets who shared all the other disqualifications in at least as great a measure. Thurlow is the prime example, a difficult, cantankerous man and an impossible colleague. Contemporaries did not regard Burke as disqualified for the Cabinet. On 20 March 1782, Conway, who had often felt the sting of Burke’s tongue, spoke of him as likely to become ‘one of those ministers to whom the country looked up for its salvation’. Burke replied, with characteristic self-abasement, that he ‘had no such views, nor had he a right to have any such. The thing was not within probability’. Conway, whose ‘rank and pretensions naturally pointed to that elevation’ was more likely to become a minister. Burke himself had neither ‘pretensions to it from rank in the country, or from fortune’, nor 47 After Rockingham’s death, Fox counted ‘the four friends of Lord Rockingham’ in the Cabinet as himself, Richmond, Lord John Cavendish, and Keppel; reported by Earl Temple to Thomas Grenville, 4 July 1782; Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, from Original Family Documents, ed. Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (2nd edn. London 1853–5), i. 50. Rockingham could thus count on five members of a Cabinet of eleven. 48 Augustine Birrell, ‘Edmund Burke’, in Obiter Dicta, 2nd ser. (1887); Collected Essays (London, 1899), i. 245–54; Thomas H. D. Mahoney, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 122.

506 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 was one who ‘aspired to it from ambition’.49 Such professions are never to be taken literally. Unwillingness to assume the burdens of office is part of the cant of politicians of all ages. Burke was burning with ideas, particularly with relation to India, that he was eager to translate into policies. He would have relished being a Cabinet minister. His appointment to the second-rank position of Paymaster-General of the Forces was therefore a disappointment. By 1782, the Cabinet had evolved into a body of about eight or nine ministers. The usual membership was the First Lord of the Treasury, the Secretaries of State, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord President of the Council, and the Lord Privy Seal, together with the heads of the Army and the Navy. Other politicians were included by virtue of their personal standing rather than the offices they held. The Cabinet was, admittedly, the almost exclusive preserve of peers and sons of peers.50 Yet talent was never so abundant in the ruling élite that a ‘new man’ of ability could not find a place. If Rockingham had been able to nominate the entire Cabinet, according to Burke’s plan, Burke would have been included. Even in the coalition Cabinet that Rockingham was forced to accept as a pis aller, room might have been found for him. Burke was perhaps his own worst enemy, laying claim (in a private note to Rockingham) to no more than ‘second rate pretensions’, asking only ‘not to be put below others in that line’ (C iv. 424). Shelburne’s protégé Dunning wrote to his chief in the same vein, asking him to ‘have it believed and not imputed to a silly affectation, that instead of desiring I have a dread of any office of any sort’. He was especially resolved not to accept the sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which would be to receive ‘a pension under another name’.51 Shelburne treated such protestations as the humbug they were. Advanced to the Cabinet and rewarded with a peerage, Dunning was forced to overcome his dread of a sinecure and pocket a virtual pension of £4,000 a year. Burke had done more for Rockingham, yet Rockingham failed to press his promotion. Burke’s claim to Cabinet rank was superior to Dunning’s. What kept him out was probably not so much Shelburne’s enmity (implacable as that was) as Rockingham’s lukewarmness. As late as 1780, Rockingham would have fought harder for Burke, if only to assert himself against Shelburne. In 1782, he insisted on a peerage for Sir Fletcher Norton (1716–89) to balance the one that Shelburne obtained for Dunning. Yet Norton was a late convert to the opposition, and had done nothing for the Rockingham party.52 Burke and Rockingham were not as close as formerly. Debrett, vi. 504–6 (PH xxii. 1227–8). John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984), 116–17. 51 Dunning to Shelburne, 25 Mar. 1782, in Lord Fitzmaurice, Life of William, Earl of Shelburne, Afterwards First Marquess of Lansdowne (2nd edn. London, 1912), ii. 90. 52 Frank O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975), 452–3. 49 50

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 507 Rockingham’s tardiness in assuring Burke a seat in 1780 created an awkwardness between them that was never entirely removed. They ceased to exchange long, confidential letters. The last from Rockingham to Burke is dated 6 January 1780 (C iv. 183–7). Burke’s last to Rockingham was written from Bristol on 7 and 8 September 1780, his last to Lady Rockingham later the same month (275–8, 299–302). The latter contains unmistakable hints that Burke felt himself badly treated. No letters between them are extant for 1781. Rockingham was not politician enough to push the interests of subordinates, especially one such as Burke who professed to set so modest a valuation on his own talents. Nor was Burke one to drive a hard bargain for a reward that should come unsought if it came at all. Between Shelburne’s animosity, Rockingham’s apathy, and his own diffidence, Burke lost the chance of the seat in the Cabinet to which his talents and his labours entitled him. Though not advanced to the Cabinet, Burke was admitted to the Privy Council, the body from which the Cabinet had evolved. Since the late seventeenth century, the Privy Council had become (to use Bagehot’s distinction) a ‘dignified’ rather than an ‘efficient’ part of the constitution.53 It was still occasionally convened for solemn purposes. On 29 January 1774, for example, consideration of the petition from Massachusetts for the removal of Governor Thomas Hutchinson (1711–80) was deliberately staged as a piece of political theatre. Burke, who attended, described the meeting, with thirty-five lords present, as ‘the fullest of any in our Memory’, plainly convoked ‘to give all possible weight and solemnity’ to the decision to reject the petition. For once, the council chamber was as thronged as the House of Commons for a great debate.54 Such occasions were exceptional. Six councillors formed a quorum, and most of the routine business was dispatched by a small core of members who were also ministers. Until its abolition by Burke’s Act, for example, the Board of Trade reported to the council. In nearly every case, ratification was automatic. As an honorary rather than effective body, the council gradually expanded. In 1760, membership stood at 75; by 1782, it had climbed to 106. Even so, it remained an exclusive body, smaller than the peerage, which rose from about 181 in 1760 to 189 in 1780.55 Even peers, therefore, coveted the distinction. In 1780, when the young Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825) applied, he was told that he must wait until he had ‘the claim which an office to which that Honour is ever attendant falls to his Share’. (Paymaster-General was such an office.) The Privy Council, the king thought, was already ‘too numerous’ and would ‘lose its dignity if 53

Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867); repr. in Collected Works, ed. Norman St JohnStevas (London, 1965– ), v. 206. 54 E.B. to Charles Lee, 1 Feb. 1774, and to the New York Assembly, 2 Feb. (C ii. 518, 521–2). 55 Edward Raymond Turner, The Privy Council in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1603– 1784 (Baltimore, 1927–8), ii. 21–2; Cannon, Aristocratic Century, 15.

508 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 prostituted on every occasion’ to the importunity of ambitious peers.56 For a commoner, membership was a rare accolade. In 1782, in a Privy Council of over 100, only about a dozen were (in Sir Walter Eliot’s phrase) ‘mere Mr ——’.57 Though in common parlance he remained ‘Mr Burke’, properly and formally as a privy councillor he was now ‘The Right Honourable Edmund Burke’. He attended his first meeting on 27 March, when he was sworn in. Thereafter, of the thirty meetings held during the Rockingham ministry, he attended only three. On 10 April, he was one of twenty-four councillors present for the solemn swearing-in of the Duke of Portland as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. On 13 April and 14 May, he was one of six members summoned to make a quorum.58 The Privy Council was an honour. Burke’s substantive reward for sixteen years’ loyal opposition was the position of Paymaster-General of the Forces. He was appointed on the understanding that he would reform the department in accordance with his earlier proposals. Since this would abolish the Paymaster’s chief perquisite, the use of the outstanding balances, the salary was increased to £4,000 a year. He also had the use of an official residence in Whitehall. The Paymaster’s house, with its five bays topped by a pediment (the building on the right in Plate 25), was far more splendid than the cramped terraced houses that were Burke’s usual town quarters.59 The print (c.1750) shows a quieter Whitehall than Burke knew. In 1759, the ‘Holbein’ Gate in the centre (formerly the entrance to the royal palace) was demolished to ease traffic congestion. Since Burke’s time, Whitehall has changed almost beyond recognition. The façade of the Pay Office (restored after damage in the Second World War), however, survives, as does Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House (visible in the distance on the right of the print). Had Mary Shackleton visited Burke during one of his tenures of the Pay Office, she would not have been surprised at the modesty of his abode. The kitchen, he joked, while suited to his predecessor’s tastes (Rigby was a gourmet, known for his lavish dinners), was too large for his modest needs.60 Surprisingly, however, there were no bookshelves until Burke had some installed.61 The residence was a pleasant perquisite of office. Burke’s appointment as Paymaster offered the prospect, in the longer term, of clearing his load of debts. Immediately, he was enabled to provide for some of his friends and relatives. He appointed his son and Richard Champion as his joint deputies in London (at £500 a year each). For Will, a new post was created, Deputy Paymaster in India, with an allowance of £5 The king to Lord North, 18 Sept. 1780, in Correspondence of King George the Third, v. 124. Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series (London, 1908–12), v. 769–73. E.B. also attended a committee meeting on 26 June; PRO PC. 2/127, pp. 254–424. 59 Survey of London, xvi (London, 1935), 17–23 and pls. 31–44. 60 Morning Herald, 20 Apr. 1782. 61 Boswell’s Journal, 29 May 1783, in Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London, 1982), 155. 56 57 58

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 509 per day. For his brother Richard, he obtained the position of Secretary to the Treasury (£3,000 a year). Walker King was installed as Rockingham’s private secretary, the post that had been Burke’s own stepping-stone in 1765. For himself and his immediate entourage, Burke thus secured salaries totalling over £9,000. These appointments did not escape criticism. His enemies exaggerated the emoluments and gleefully exploited the apparent incongruity of an economical reformer providing so profusely for his own dependants. This objection was specious but hardly just, for Burke had always professed that ‘economical reform’ was meant to curtail secret influence, not the rewards available for public service. The Burkes’ good fortune was in fact precarious. Even if he did not foresee that the new ministry would be in office for only a few months, Burke was well aware of the plight in which his death would leave his family. He therefore obtained from Rockingham a promise of ‘something considerable’ as a secure provision for Jane and Richard (C iv. 430). Nothing, however, was done. As soon as he was perceived to have influence, Burke was inundated with requests for favours. The most egregiously shameless came from Charles Dillon Lee (1745–1813), whom he later characterized as ‘the lowest, the most lying and every way the most contemptible wretch in Ireland’ (16 May 1797: C ix. 345). ‘You will I fear think me Indiscreet,’ Dillon Lee began, ‘if at this early Period I make an application to you, and that consideration made me hesitate; but when I reflected that others might not have the same delicacy, the fear of prior engagements proving an obstacle to my wishes determined me to proceed.’ He wanted a diplomatic post. Other requests came from a naval chaplain anxious to gain admission to Greenwich Hospital, and from an excise officer in Edinburgh afraid that he might lose his position as paymaster of Chelsea out-pensioners in Scotland.62 One of the frankest place-hunters was James Boswell, anxious to obtain the supplementary income that would enable him to live in London. Scenting the imminent demise of the North ministry, on 18 March he asked Burke: ‘How shall I contrive to get £600 from government?’ Receiving no reply, on 18 April he wrote again. Although hurt by Burke’s neglect, he determined not to let ‘the pride of an old Baron’ prevent him from soliciting the post of Judge Advocate in Scotland, vacant since the death of the incumbent on the 16th. Burke dutifully recommended Boswell to Conway, the minister responsible. Boswell did not get the job.63 These are no more than chance survivals from Burke’s patronage post-bag. Burke felt keenly his exclusion from the inner circle. ‘I make no part of the Ministereal arrangement,’ he told a hopeful Irish place-seeker: 62 Charles Dillon Lee to E.B., 2 Apr. 1782, NRO A. ii. 34; Hugh O’Donel to E.B., 3 Apr., WWM BkP 1/1566; Adam Pearson to E.B., 1 Apr., BkP 1/1559. 63 The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, ed. Frank Brady and others (London, 1986), 114–25.

510 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 ‘Something in the Official Line may possibly be thought fit for my Measure’ (25 Mar 1782: C iv. 426). To Hely Hutchinson, he described himself as ‘a placeman of some rank’ with ‘no share whatsoever, except what belongs to me as a Member of Parliament, in the Conduct of publick affairs. In times of no small difficulty, those affairs stand in need of abilities far greater than mine, and I am sure the state has at present the enjoyment of such abilities’ (Apr.: 440). Rarely was Burke’s resentment so ill concealed by a parade of deference. He was especially vexed not to be consulted about Ireland. On 4 February 1782, Lord Kenmare (1726–95), an Irish Catholic peer with whom he had been in friendly contact during the 1778–9 agitation for free trade and relaxation of the penal laws, asked his views of a new proposal for Catholic relief (400–2). Burke was so revolted by what he read that he immediately struck off a long and elaborate indictment of the thinking behind it (21 Feb.: 405–18).64 Parts of the letter are written in a sober and rational style, for example the acute analysis of the different educations required for the Catholic and Protestant priesthoods (412–14). Elsewhere the tone is more like the barely controlled indignation of the ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’. ‘To look at the Bill in the abstract,’ he fulminated, ‘it is neither more nor less than a renewd act of universal, unmitigated, indispensible, exceptionless, disqualification. One would imagine, that a Bill inflicting such a multitude of incapacities, had followd on the heels of a conquest made by a very fierce Enemy under the impression of recent animosity and resentment’ (407). The writing of so long a letter (nearly 6,000 words) at a time of impending crisis was therapeutic, enabling Burke to discharge some of his pent-up exasperation at the ingratitude of the Irish. Affecting an inability to form a correct judgement, because wholly ignorant of the mood and feelings prevalent in Ireland, he protests that his ‘correspondence with men of publick importance in Ireland has for some time totally ceased’ (406). With such strong feelings on the Irish question, no wonder he resented not being consulted by the new ministers. To Portland, the new Lord-Lieutenant, he grumbled testily at being ‘more compleatly uninformed about every thing that is going on, than I thought it was possible for one that lived in London to be’ (25 May: 454). A further source of frustration was Burke’s inability to force Rockingham to pay any attention to his other special interest, India. His last letter to Rockingham, written on 27 April, took the marquis to task for this neglect (C iv. 448–50). Formerly, he would not have needed to write such a letter while they were both in London. Now, press of business compounded by ill health made Rockingham virtually inaccessible. Indeed, his time was past. Burke would have to work the salvation of India through Fox, not Rockingham. 64 A pirated text of the letter found its way into print as A Letter from a Distinguished English Commoner, to a Peer of Ireland, on the Penal Laws against Irish Catholics (Dublin, 1783) (Todd, 42).

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 511 In normal times, the Paymaster’s job was a lucrative sinecure. Such otium cum dignitate could never have kept Burke happy for long. Occupation was provided by responsibility for two pieces of legislation. The first concerned the Pay Office itself. As proposed in Burke’s 1780 plan of economical reform, Paymasters were no longer to be permitted to draw from the Treasury at their discretion. For the future, money requested from the Treasury was to be paid into the Bank of England, thence to be drawn on for specific purposes. The Treasury was to receive monthly statements of the balance in the Paymaster’s account at the bank. Other provisions were intended to speed up the settling of accounts. Burke deserves credit for correcting an abuse that had been tolerated for generations.65 One of the conditions on which Rockingham had accepted office was the king’s agreement to a truncated version of economical reform. This was the second measure for which Burke took responsibility. Aided by Shelburne, however, the king fought a strong and partly successful rearguard action against it.66 Not until 13 June was Burke able to reintroduce his bill, more modest in scope but now assured of success. The German traveller Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93), who sat in the strangers’ gallery, described Burke as ‘a well-built man, tall and straight but already looking somewhat elderly’.67 Burke was only 52; perhaps he was tired that day. The avowed purpose of his new bill was to enable the king ‘to discharge the debt contracted upon his Civil List revenues’. (In this guise, as a money bill, it could not be amended by the Lords.) Nothing was said about preserving the independence of Parliament. Its main provisions, however, derived from Burke’s plan of 1780. Many of the same useless offices were to be abolished: the third Secretary of State, the Board of Trade, some household sinecures. Pensions were to be limited and regulated. A prescribed order of payments was imposed on the Treasury. The debt was to be funded by Exchequer bills, to be gradually redeemed as savings accrued. Detailed implementation (especially the reorganization of the royal household) was left to the Treasury. The Mint and the Ordnance, however, were spared, as were the separate establishments of Wales, Cornwall, Lancaster, and Chester. Since the passage of the bill was not in doubt, its progress was not marked by long or lively debates. Burke’s main speech in its favour is chiefly remarkable as an illustration of his unwillingness to recant. The clause for serving the king’s table by contract, which he had agreed to drop in 1780, he 65 Admittedly, E.B.’s Act was hurriedly drawn up, and needed to be amended the following session. J. E. D. Binney exaggerates its imperfections when he claims that the Act was so unworkable that it needed to be repealed and replaced with a new one; British Public Finance and Administration (Oxford, 1958), 272. The same principles governed both Acts. Indeed, most of the 1782 Act (22 George III, c. 81) was repeated verbatim in 1783 (23 George III, c. 50). 66 John Norris, Shelburne and Reform (London, 1963), 155–8. 67 Debrett, vii. 229 (PH xxiii. 121). Moritz, Journeys of a German in England in 1782, trans. Reginald Nettel (London, 1965), 53.

512 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 even now abandoned only ‘reluctantly’, surprised that ‘few or none seemed to relish it’. Likewise, while still convinced that the elimination of the Welsh judges ‘would be productive of great national utility’, he had shelved the plan as it ‘did not appear agreeable to the people of Wales’. He still hoped, however, that the Welsh would in time see the wisdom of his proposal.68 The more limited measure now enacted was projected to save only £72,368 a year.69 This was a sad shrinkage from the savings of £200,000 a year that Burke had claimed for his 1780 scheme. Burke’s bill did not receive the royal assent until 11 July, after Rockingham’s death. It was therefore implemented under the aegis of Shelburne, and Burke cannot be wholly blamed for its failure. Indeed, he pointedly dissociated himself from the cheeseparing spirit in which his principles were put into practice.70 Far from achieving a surplus with which to pay off the old debt, the scheme failed to prevent further indebtedness. Whether Burke could have managed better is doubtful. The rise in government expenditure proved impossible to reverse, while his prescribed order of payment made no provision for miscellaneous disbursements, which proved unexpectedly numerous. Nor was the bill more effective in its primary aim, the reduction of the ‘influence’ of the Crown.71 Burke was mistaken in his belief that large sums of money were spent on ‘corruption’. Most of the king’s ‘influence’ had been at the disposal of the ministry. Burke’s economies therefore recoiled on his friends when they returned to government in 1783, to find their sources of patronage much reduced. On the positive side, the long struggle for ‘economical reform’ helped establish the principle that the Civil List was subject to parliamentary scrutiny. In the medieval and Tudor periods, the king’s household had not been clearly distinguished from the national government. By the nineteenth century, the two were wholly distinct. Economical reform, the one genuinely innovatory cause in which Burke took a leading part, was an important episode in the slow evolution from personal to constitutional monarchy.

3 A chronic valetudinarian, Rockingham had never been robust. Complaints of ill health form a leitmotiv in his correspondence. After the unpleasant and exhausting negotiations to form a ministry, he showed little energy. As 14 June 1782, Debrett, vii. 230–1 (PH xxiii. 122–3). The bill was enacted as 22 George III, c. 82. Lord John Cavendish, 2 May 1782, Debrett, vii. 107–8 (PH xxii. 1395–6). 70 5 Dec. 1782, Debrett, ix. 42 (PH xxiii. 263–4). 71 In 1797 (after E.B. and Fox had quarrelled), Fox belittled the measures of 1782. E.B. retorted that Fox had once attributed to those Acts both the defeat of Shelburne’s peace preliminaries and the defeat of his own India Bill (to French Laurence, 16 Mar. 1797: C ix. 286). 68 69

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 513 the Duke of Portland later admitted, Rockingham was ‘worn out, before his Return to Power’.72 Though he recovered from a short indisposition in May, towards the end of June he again fell ill.73 Conscious of the approaching end, on 29 June he added a fourth codicil to his will, cancelling Burke’s debts (C v. 8). On 1 July he died. For Burke, his death severed a connection that had lasted seventeen years. They had never been intimate. The social distance between them, and Rockingham’s reserved and aloof personality, were too inhibiting. Yet this distance allowed Rockingham to restrain Burke as no one else could, and restraint was often what Burke needed. Rockingham also embodied Burke’s aristocratic ideal more completely than any of the party’s other leaders. With his death, Burke lost both his sense of belonging (for after Rockingham’s death, the party was never the same) and the only authority that could curb his emotional impulsiveness. Henceforth, the irrational vehemence of the outbursts with which he embarrassed his friends and associates became more pronounced and more frequent. Deeply as Burke felt Rockingham’s loss, the letter of condolence that he sent to Earl Fitzwilliam (1748–1833), Rockingham’s nephew and heir, is inexpressive. ‘If you felt only common grief on the late melancholy Event’, he began, ‘I should offer you common consolation. But there is something so very right, and so perfectly honourable to you, and so very much your own, in your feelings, that though I wish to mitigate any excess there may be in them, I am far from desiring to remove those sensations wholly from your Mind.’ Burke uses the occasion to lecture Fitzwilliam on his duties: ‘You have his place to fill and his example to follow; and you are the only man in the world to whom this would not be a work of the greatest difficulty. But to you it is so natural, that it is only going on in your own Course, and inclining with the bent of your ordinary dispositions’ (3 July 1782: C v. 6). This letter is unexpectedly impersonal, even manipulative. Burke’s thoughts are already on the public world, and are phrased in the cadences of public prose. Though written at a moment of great stress and anxiety, the letter is quite unemotional. This formality is his usual mode. Fitzwilliam’s reply, though also concerned with the political repercussions of Rockingham’s death, is more palpably heartfelt. Punctuated mainly with dashes, it was written hurriedly and spontaneously (7–8). Burke never wrote like this. Rockingham’s death suited the king perfectly. Within hours, he offered the Treasury to Shelburne. Rockingham’s friends were caught in an awkward position. While loath to serve under Shelburne, they could not argue that his appointment was unconstitutional. Nor had they a candidate for the Treasury who was conspicuously better qualified. The Duke of Portland, Lord Hardwicke to Philip Yorke, 3 Oct. 1783, BL Add. MS 35381, fo. 141. His illness remains mysterious; Marjorie Bloy, ‘In Spite of Medical Help: The Puzzle of an Eighteenth-Century Prime Minister’s Illness’, Medical History, 34 (1990), 178–84. 72 73

514 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 the party’s nominee (then in Dublin as Lord-Lieutenant), would have been a mere figurehead, leaving effective leadership in the hands of Fox, the party’s most forceful personality. (Fox was too disreputable a character to aspire to the Treasury.) If they resigned immediately, their behaviour would appear factious, motivated by personal resentment against Shelburne. Yet if they clung to office, waiting for a substantive issue on which to resign, they risked becoming the victims or the unwitting accomplices of his habitual duplicity. Burke was at first against immediate resignation. Their strength, as he reminded Fox, lay in Parliament. There, the war against Shelburne could be more effectively waged from the Treasury benches than from the other side (2, 3 July: C v. 4–6). Within a day or two, however, Burke reversed his position. On 5 July, though neither had yet formally resigned, he and Fox sat on the opposition benches.74 On 6 July, Fitzwilliam hosted a party conclave that proved gruelling and tempestuous. Burke delivered a long diatribe against Shelburne and advocated immediate resignation.75 Richmond argued as strongly in favour of remaining in office. Henceforth, the breach between him and Burke was irreparable. Burke’s uncharacteristic volte-face calls for explanation. On Rockingham’s death, he still had no permanent provision. To retain the Pay Office even for six months would put several thousand pounds into the Burkes’ ‘common purse.’ At the same time, he needed, as always, to appear disinterested. By the meeting on 6 July, the psychological demand was paramount. What would so effectively silence the critics who had accused him of lining the Burke pockets so lavishly as to resign for a principle? With ‘a large family and but little fortune’, he confessed to the Commons, ‘he liked his present office. The House and all its appendages, to a man of his taste, could not be disagreeable. All this he relinquished not, the House might well conceive, without regret; for the welfare of his family was very dear to him.’76 The gesture of sacrifice was intended as a guarantee of his integrity. Yet Burke could not face the prospect of a return to insolvency with complete philosophic detachment. On Sunday 7 July, the morning after the stormy meeting at Fitzwilliam’s, he sent Horace Walpole a note asking to see him as soon as possible. He outlined to Walpole an extraordinary proposal that helped convince Walpole that ‘his intellects and sensations had mutually overheated each other’.77 Walpole’s elder brother, Sir Edward (1706–84), enjoyed one of the most lucrative of the Exchequer sinecures, Clerk of the Pells. Burke proposed that Sir Edward should resign the Public Advertiser, 8 July 1782. According to one report, ‘Burke spoke two hours, and it is said made the best speech he ever was heard to utter’; Lord Carlisle to Lord Gower, 8 July 1782, HMC Carlisle, 632–3. This sounds like an exaggeration, since no other account of the meeting particularizes E.B.’s role. 76 9 July 1782, Debrett, vii. 314 (PH xxiii. 182). 77 The Last Journals of Horace Walpole during the Reign of George III from 1771–1783, ed. A. Francis Steuart (London, 1910), ii. 453. 74 75

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 515 patent, being guaranteed the full value for his life (he was then 75). Burke would then secure the Pells for his son Richard. Until a new First Lord was formally appointed, Lord John Cavendish and his colleagues at the Treasury board had the disposal of such offices as fell vacant. The whole scheme had thus to be effected within a day or two. Walpole was understandably cool, but offered to transmit the proposal to his brother. Later the same day, Burke sent his son to press the scheme. Not finding Walpole at home, Richard put it in writing. Calling again the following day, he was persuaded of its impracticality. Ingenuously, Richard confided that his father had omitted the Clerk of the Pells from his economical reform bills in order to secure it for him. In his journal, Walpole, ever willing to impute the least creditable motives, put the worst construction on Burke’s, sneering at ‘a reformer of abuses reserving the second greatest abuse for himself’.78 This is a wilful misrepresentation. Burke sought to reduce ‘secret influence’, particularly that exercised through places that were granted during pleasure. Patent offices, such as those in the Exchequer, were normally granted for life. They could not be used to buy political subserviency. Burke always defended the propriety of using them as rewards for service. Even so, such an undignified scramble for a sinecure to soften the hardship that resignation would entail was unworthy (and characteristic) of Burke. The resignation of Burke, Fox, and their friends was an emotive overreaction to the crisis precipitated by Rockingham’s death. It had no constitutional justification, and made no sense politically. Even Lord John Cavendish could not deny that the king’s prerogative entitled him ‘to frame the new Administration as his Majesty should think most proper’.79 By the notions of the time, the king’s appointment of Shelburne was unexceptionable. Fox’s claim, that the Cabinet had the right to nominate Rockingham’s successor, was the innovation.80 To resign on the propriety of Shelburne’s appointment was a tactical blunder. Only if Shelburne proved unable to secure the confidence of the House of Commons would his position become untenable. In proscribing Shelburne in advance, Fox was arrogating to himself the function of Parliament. Conway told the Commons on 9 July that, since none of the policy commitments which had been agreed in March had been broken, he saw no reason to resign. True to his old belief, ‘he looked to measures only, and not to men’.81 To Burke, this maxim remained anathema. Formerly it had cloaked Chatham’s evil designs, now it was serving Shelburne’s turn. Burke saw 78 E.B. and R.B. Jr. to Horace Walpole, 7 July 1782; ‘Copy of Mr Burke’s Proposal’, with Walpole’s notes; both in C v. 10–14 and YWC xlii. 23–8; Walpole, Last Journals, ii. 453–6. 79 15 Mar. 1782, Debrett, vi. 473 (PH xxii. 1197). 80 O’Gorman, Rise of Party, 465–8. L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party, 1782–1794 (London, 1971), 24–31, defends Fox’s conduct, but not its constitutional propriety. 81 Debrett, vii. 297–300 (PH xxiii. 165–8).

516 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 Shelburne as resurrecting the old ‘king’s friends’ system against which he had been fighting for seventeen years and against which battle would now have to be renewed. To give an adequate idea of Shelburne’s wickedness, he ranged from the nursery to the library. ‘He had read when young’, he warned, ‘of a wolf which was mistook by a simple shepherdess, because dressed like her grand-mother.’ To the wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, he added Catiline and Cesare Borgia.82 To the conventionally educated eighteenth-century mind, to yoke Red Riding Hood and Catiline was a ludicrous breach of decorum. Burke accordingly suffered much ridicule on the score. Indeed, so egregious was Burke’s lapse of taste that a year later caricaturists were still exploiting it. After the formation of the Fox–North Coalition, the memory of Burke’s speech was revived as a metaphor for the union of opposites that expressed the unnaturalness of the Coalition itself. In one caricature, Burke is shown holding a copy of the story (Plate 26). In another, he is shown hugging Red Riding Hood herself (Plate 27). The garb in which Burke is depicted in these caricatures, with sandals, monkish robe, and biretta, and with crucifix and rosary as emblems of superstition, was by 1783 a recent but established convention. It was begun by James Gillray (1757–1815), whose Cincinnatus in Retirement (23 August 1782; Plate 28) satirized Burke’s quixotic resignation. Gillray combines the themes of Burke’s Irishness, his poverty, and his alleged Catholicism. Burke, dressed as a monk, dines on a meal of potatoes boiled in a chamberpot used by St Peter. A crucifix standing on a cask of whiskey is another image of incongruity. These were old jokes, here given classic visual expression. In 1779, John Wilkes had decried Burke’s ‘wild Irish eloquence’ as nourished on ‘potatoes and whisky’.83 Burke’s Catholic sympathies or proclivities had been held against him for as long as he had been in politics. Burke formally resigned on 11 July, in company with Fox, Lord John Cavendish, and a few others. On the same day, Parliament was prorogued, and would not meet again until November or December. In the interim, the opposition could do little but wait, plan, and exchange gossip. Burke was condemned to several months of frustrating inaction. Three short letters, all written in the second half of July 1782, show him struggling to present a brave face to the post-Rockingham world. The first was written on 17 July, just a week after his resignation, to Alexander Wedderburn, now Lord Loughborough, replying to a letter of commiseration on Rockingham’s death. Burke and Wedderburn had known each other since the 1750s. Debrett, vii. 315 (PH xxiii. 180–3). The story of Little Red Riding Hood (‘Le petit chaperon rouge’) was first printed in Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697). The first English translation was Histories or Tales of Past Times (London, 1729). 83 In conversation with James Boswell, 21 Apr. 1779; Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck: 1778–1782, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1977), 96–7. 82

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 517 Politically, they had followed different paths; in 1777, they had narrowly avoided fighting a duel. Wedderburn had since achieved a peerage and a chief justiceship; Burke, though famous, was still ‘Mr Burke’. On circuit, Lough-borough was staying with Sir John Sebright (1725–94), in whose library Burke had in 1765 discovered some manuscripts in Old Irish.84 He recalls the circumstance to remind Burke of happier days ‘when we used to be better amused than I have ever been with publick business in the Library where I am now writing’ (C v. 15). In his reply, Burke disguises neither his distress at Rockingham’s death, nor his anger at the king’s appointment of Shelburne. Yet he distances his personal feelings by placing them, quite self-consciously, within a providential framework. He quotes Seneca, only to mock his own sententiousness: ‘Your Lordship sees, that like Hudibras discomfited and laid in the Stocks, that I ‘comfort myself with ends of verse | and sayings of Philosophers’. I wish you heartily a pleasant Circuit, moderate litigation and as little hanging as possible’ (21). Like Loughborough’s own reference to being ‘better amused’ in private study than in public business, Burke’s pose of detachment and philosophical resignation is no more than a ritual gesture towards a conventional ideal. He was not earnestly contemplating retirement. The following day, 18 July, Burke wrote an equally self-conscious letter to the new Lords of the Treasury. They had refused to authorize certain payments until he had submitted a statement of his balances as Paymaster. This may have been a deliberate attempt by the new administration to needle Burke, for they subsequently retracted the demand. What made the request peculiarly offensive was that the power to require such an account derived from Burke’s own Pay Office Act. To be accused of not complying with his own regulation was intolerable. If the demand was meant to provoke Burke, it succeeded. His reply bristles with the virtuous indignation of calumniated integrity. ‘Having acted in a manner perfectly justifiable, and perfectly official,’ he insists, ‘having done, not only what I had a right to do, but what I was indispensibly bound to do, your Lordships will have the goodness to excuse me, if I decline to take any Step, whatsoever, which by my altering or adding to my act, may admit directly, or indirectly, that it was not originally such in all respects as my Duty required’ (C v. 22). This is Burke at his worst: prickly, verbose, and self-righteous. Burke appears to greater advantage in a letter he wrote to Frances Burney, whom he met for the first time in June 1782, at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s villa at Richmond.85 Soon after their meeting, Burney published her second novel, Cecilia, and Burke wrote to congratulate her. He excelled 84 Walter D. Love, ‘Edmund Burke, Charles Vallancey, and the Sebright Manuscripts’, Hermathena, 95 (1961), 21–35. 85 Diary & Letters, ed. Charlotte Barrett and Austin Dobson (London, 1904–5), ii. 86–92. Cecilia was published on 12 July 1782.

518 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 at such letters, and this is one of his best. ‘I might trespass on your delicacy’, he fears, ‘if I should fill my Letter to you with what I fill my conversation to others. I should be troublesome to you alone, if I should tell you all I feel and think, on the natural vein of humour, the tender pathetick, the comprehensive and noble moral, and the sagacious observation, that appear quite throughout that extraordinary performance.’ Avoiding the fulsome, Burke hints (as he often does to authors) at the pleasing fault of over-abundant creativity: ‘Justly as your Characters are drawn, perhaps they are too numerous,—but I beg pardon; I fear it is quite in vain to preach oeconomy to those who are come young to excessive and sudden opulence’ (29 July: C v. 26). Writing to her sister Susanna (1755–1800), Burney referred to this as ‘Mr Burke’s Letter of Letters’, which had spoiled her for the common run of epistolary praise.86 ‘For elegance of praise’, she thought, ‘no such a one was ever written before.’ Amazed that ‘at a Time of Business, disappointment, care & occupation’, Burke could have found ‘leisure to read with such attention, & to commend with such good nature, a Work so totally foreign to every thing that just now can come Home to his Business & bosom’, she thought him ‘a delightful creature, & as sweet in his disposition as he is rare in his abilities’.87 In his youth, Burke had devoured the old chivalric romances. In 1778, he was reported to have sat up all night to finish Burney’s first novel, Evelina.88 In July 1782, the appeal of Cecilia was precisely its unreality. Plunging into its world of romance and melodrama, he could forget the vexations of politics. Nor had Burke merely skimmed Cecilia. He had read the novel carefully enough to be able to give Burney a lucid account of its ‘faults’ when, months later, he unexpectedly found himself in her company.89 Even allowing for Burney’s bias, her epithet ‘sweet’ (not a word that comes readily to mind in describing Burke) shows that, away from politics, he could be a pleasing companion. Knowing Burke only through his writings, his speeches, his character, and his fame, for four years she had been ‘wishing fruitlessly to see him’. Who could live up to such expectations? Yet when they met, he was all she had imagined, and more: ‘in high Health, spirits & good humour, exhilarated, but not intoxicated by sudden power,—he seemed all that could be wished or imagined for perfection of agreeability. He has the fire & enthusiasm of Mr Young, the social sweetness & manners of my Father, the humour, spirit & action of Garrick, & the manly superiority to all affectation & trick of my Chessington Daddy.’90 24 Aug. 1782, in Early Journals and Letters, ed. Lars E. Troide (Oxford, 1988– ), v (forthcoming). Frances Burney to Dr Charles Burney, 4 Aug. 1782, BL Egerton MS 3690, fo. 15. So Mary Palmer told Burney; Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, Sept. 1778, in Early Journals and Letters, iii. 142. 89 8 Dec. 1782, in Diary & Letters, ii. 139–41. 90 Burney to Samuel Crisp (her ‘Chessington Daddy’), 5 Aug. 1782, in Early Journals and Letters, v. ‘Mr Young’ is the agriculturalist. 86 87 88

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 519 Burney saw the Burke that Beattie had glimpsed, the private man whose personal charm and good humour had been all but occluded by his public persona. Where politics was concerned, Burke remained as irascible and inflexible as ever. During the autumn, he paid a long visit to Yorkshire, spending a few days at Malton and several weeks at Wentworth Woodhouse, helping Walker King sort out Rockingham’s papers. Plans were also laid for a monument to Rockingham, for which Burke in due course wrote an inscription.91 As Rockingham’s heir, Fitzwilliam was now the master of Wentworth and the patron of Malton. He did not, however, inherit the personal influence in the county that Rockingham had exercised. This visit to Yorkshire was embittered by the evidence which Burke saw of growing support for parliamentary reform among the Yorkshire gentlemen. William Mason (admittedly an inveterate anti-Rockinghamite) thought that Burke had alienated several of Fitzwilliam’s visitors by ‘wrangling’ with them on the topic.92 On his way back to Beaconsfield, Burke called on the dissenting scientist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) at Birmingham and witnessed some of his experiments. An index of the pessimism with which Burke viewed the political scene is that the occasion inspired him with a momentary yearning for the philosophical life. Priestley he described as ‘the most happy of men and most to be envied’.93

4 As Burke approached the capital, the fumes of politics quickly overpowered the lure of philosophy. The peace treaties, negotiated during the second half of the year, would provide the ostensible ground for an attack on Shelburne when Parliament reassembled. The king’s speech from the throne was unprecedentedly long, verbose, and ambiguous. Shelburne deliberately kept it vague on key points. On 6 December 1782, in a debate on the address of thanks, Burke gave a vintage performance, ridiculing its high-sounding platitudes and empty phrases. One of Shelburne’s more vacuous paragraphs reads: ‘It is the fixed Object of My Heart to make the general Good, and the true Spirit of the Constitution, the invariable Rule of My Conduct, and on all Occasions to advance and reward Merit in every Profession.’ Burke seized on the last phrase, which he interpreted as ‘a bait, 91 E.B. to R.B. Jr., 12 Sept., and to Lady Rockingham, 20 Nov. (C v. 35–6, 45–6). The monument was completed in 1788. Lady Rockingham moved to a house at Hillingdon, not far from the Burkes at Beaconsfield; they continued on friendly terms. 92 E.B. to William Wedell, 12 Oct. 1782 (C v. 38–40). William Mason to Horace Walpole, 18 Jan. 1783, YWC xxix. 281. 93 Theophilus Lindsey to William Turner, 1 Sept. 1783, Dr Williams’s Library, MS 12. 44. 38.

520 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 particularly for such gentlemen in that House as wore black gowns [lawyers]; it was directly fishing for black gowns; they might see a proof of it, that one of their corps [Dunning] had been raised to a peerage, and complimented with a pension of 4,000l . . . others might take a hint from this, how they might obtain proper rewards’. Burke kept the House in a continuous ‘burst of laughter’, though the priggish Pitt was not amused and reprobated ‘the indiscretion of that wit which so unseasonably ran away with the good sense and sober judgment of the honourable gentleman’.94 Pitt was right. Shelburne would not be jested out of office. On 18 December, dividing on a question on which North and his followers supported the ministry, Fox was humiliatingly defeated by 219 to 46.95 By temperament a minority man, Burke shared Lord John Cavendish’s preference for a ‘snug chaste corps’ of high-principled, like-minded individuals.96 He could therefore convince himself that the defeat had been a moral victory. ‘Perhaps,’ he acknowledged to Burgoyne, absent in Ireland, ‘with the few forces we could collect, it would have been as well not to try the question at all; but, having once proposed it, I was as clear as I ever was of anything in my life that it was proper to have a division.’ Victory was not worth the price of a discreditable alliance. Better, he thought, ‘to appear a small power than no distinct power at all’. The ministers were the true losers, Burke convinced himself: ‘Nothing could be so disgraceful to the gentlemen who act as ministers as the victory obtained for them by Lord North. They looked, I assure you, more like captives led before the conqueror than parties in the triumph.’ In Burke’s imagination, Fox’s party was (‘on paper’ at least) ‘the strongest of all, but we can never appear with true numbers. Our people act from principle, and, of course, very irregularly, and many of them very feebly’.97 Seeing only what he wanted to see, Burke predicted what he most wanted to happen: that North and some of his followers would join Shelburne, with the neglected remainder joining the opposition from ‘mere resentment’ (24 Dec. 1782: C v. 55–7). This would have been a comforting return to the old dispensation. The pre-Christmas debates were no more than skirmishes. Serious consideration of the peace preliminaries, on which Shelburne’s fate depended, did not begin until 17 February. The pace of rumour, intrigue, and negotiation quickened. Though various arrangements were proposed, they resolved into two alternatives. Either Shelburne must secure additional CJ xxxix. 3–5; Debrett, ix. 54–63 (PH xxiii. 266–72). Debrett, ix. 112–25 (PH xxii. 311–22); CJ xxxix. 29. The phrase is quoted as Lord John’s in W.B. to the Duke of Portland, Sept. 1779, NUL PwF/ 2162. Horace Walpole sneered at Lord John’s ‘favourite empire’ of ‘about half a dozen’ (to Lord Holland, 10 Feb. 1767, YWC xxx. 240). 97 A more realistic estimate of the strengths of the respective groups was William Eden’s: Shelburne 140, Fox 90, North 120; reported in Gibbon to Lord Sheffield, 14 Oct. 1782, in Letters, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), ii. 311. 94 95 96

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 521 support from one of the two main opposition groups (Fox’s or North’s); or Fox and North must combine. Burke was not in the innermost circle of the opposition, though Portland kept him informed of the course of negotiations.98 The search was for minimum incompatibility. In the end, the mutual aversion between Pitt and Fox, Pitt’s hostility to North and Fox’s to Shelburne, proved more powerful than the old enmity between Fox and North. On 14 February, the much-execrated ‘Fox–North Coalition’ was cemented. On the 18th, after an all-night debate, their forces joined to defeat the peace preliminaries. The king was so hostile to the politicians who were trying to ‘storm the closet’ that the crisis was not resolved for an exhausting five weeks. During these anxious weeks of waiting, Burke received a remarkable tribute from a French jurist. Antoine-François Prost de Royer (1729–84) was a lawyer by profession who had spent most of his career in the royal administration. Dismissed from his post in 1780, he turned to writing, and began work on a vast Dictionnaire de jurisprudence et des arrêts.99 At the time of his letter to Burke (5 March 1783), the first two volumes (1781–2) had appeared. Prost de Royer followed political events in England closely, but was no uncritical Anglophile. In his article ‘action’, he questions whether the much-vaunted English ‘liberty’ is not rendered nugatory by the arcane legal forms and procedures that surround it. He concludes with an appeal to Burke: J’adresse ces doutes modestes au Demosthene Anglois, à l’homme qui, ayant présenté aux Communes un plan d’économie, l’a appuyé d’un example rare, laissant au trésor public les neuf dixiemes des revenues de l’office de trésorier général des troupes. Je parle à l’orateur sublime, qui, dans ce plan d’économie, n’a comparé, comme Blackstone, la législation britannique à un vieux château, que pour en conclure différement, qu’il falloit y porter la hâche de la réforme.100

Earlier, Prost de Royer had quoted Blackstone’s image of the English law as an ‘old gothic castle’ of which the ‘rooms of convenience’ are ‘chearful and commodious’ though rendered difficult of access by the obsolete Gothic defences.101 Blackstone’s image anticipates Burke’s comparison, in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), of the British constitution to Windsor Castle (WS ix. 172). In 1780, however, Burke was a reformer. In another article, Prost de Royer cites approvingly the passage in the Speech on Economical Reformation 98 Portland to E.B., Mar.–Apr. 1783 (C v. 73–85); John Cannon, The Fox–North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782–1784 (Cambridge, 1969), 38–81. 99 Dictionnaire de jurisprudence et des arrêts, 7 vols. (Lyons, 1781–8; completed after Prost de Royer’s death by J.-F.-A. Riolz). 100 Ibid. ii. 696; Prost de Royer quotes the passage in his letter to E.B. of 5 Mar. 1783 (NRO A. xvii. 34). 101 Dictionnaire, ii. 693–4; the reference is to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1765–9), iii. 265–8.

522 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 in which Burke compares ‘certains établissemens antiques & ruineux, qui inspirent un stupide respect, à des cadavres qu’on embaume superstitieusement, & qui ne valent pas les parfums employés pour les conserver’. Prost de Royer saw Burke as a bold reformer, with the rare courage to advocate ‘l’abrogation de quelques parties du droit criminel qui déshonorent le reste’ (probably the Irish penal laws).102 If Fox’s India Bill had been enacted, and Burke had died before 1790, he might have been remembered as a forward-looking innovator willing to tackle head-on such venerable absurdities as the royal household and such powerful vested interests as the East India Company. Indeed, this is how Victorian liberals such as Henry Thomas Buckle would remember him.103 Another instance of Burke being more honoured at a distance comes from Edinburgh. On 21 March, when the interministerium had lasted a month, the distinguished physician Sir Alexander Dick (1703–85) wrote that ‘if ever there was a time for employing a Dictator as in Old Rome, now is the time’. Dick proposed a dictatorial triumvirate consisting of the king, ‘Mr Burke, who should be made a Peer to represent the Peers’, and Pitt, to represent the Commons.104 If this was hardly practical politics, the notion of Burke, plus aristocrate que les aristocrates, representing the peerage, reflects a nearer knowledge of English politics than Prost de Royer could gain in Lyons. Having tried every possible alternative, in private even threatening to abdicate, on 2 April the king was forced to surrender to the Coalition. Fox and North, the two old antagonists, under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Portland as First Lord of the Treasury, returned to office as Secretaries of State. Burke resumed his former post of Paymaster-General. The Coalition was subjected to a virulent barrage of abuse, in Parliament and in the press. Though eighteenth-century ministries were often heterogeneous, the Fox–North Coalition was exceptional. For the better part of a decade, Fox and Burke had been loading North with the most opprobrious epithets they could command.105 In 1779, Burke had even drawn up articles of impeachment against him (WS iii. 455–63). The Rockingham party had always prided itself on its purity and its adherence to principle, reprobating the pragmatic alliances of greedy office-seeking groups. Fox’s alliance with North was a clear breach of this tradition. Sending his brother a list of the new Cabinet, William Wyndham Grenville (1759–1834) advised him with heavy irony that ‘it having thus been made a sine quâ non condition, that all Dictionnaire, ii. 852–3, 696; the passage to which Prost de Royer alludes is in WS iii. 510. History of Civilization in England, (London, 1857–61) i. 414–33. Sir Alexander Dick to James Boswell, 21 Mar. 1783, YB Boswell Papers, C980. 105 Two anthologies of this abuse were later published in order to discredit the Coalition: The Beauties of Fox, North, and Burke, Selected from their Speeches (Todd, 43) and The Deformities of Fox and Burke, Faithfully Selected from their Speeches (Todd, 45). Published on 10 Jan. and 11 Feb. 1784 respectively; later reprinted together. 102 103 104

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 523 the powers of Government should be solely vested in those who have the advantage of being denominated the friends of the late Lord Rockingham, and this determination having been adhered to’, he should pay no regard to any ‘false accounts’ of ‘the late junction’.106 Grenville’s sarcasm parodies Burke’s prescription for party government, as expressed in his Thoughts and in his advice to Rockingham in March 1782 (C iv. 422–3). Burke’s second tenure of the Pay Office was marred by one of the unhappiest episodes of his career. Because of the extreme slowness with which accounts were audited and cleared, in 1782 the balances of the late Lord Holland (Henry Fox), who had left the office in 1765, were still outstanding. Partly as a result of the investigations of the commissioners of accounts whose work Burke so despised, late in 1782 deficiencies of about £45,000 were discovered. Various sums due had been withheld by Charles Bembridge (d. 1794), and the defalcations connived at by John Powell (d. 1783). Bembridge and Powell had worked in the office since Holland’s time; in 1782 they were accountant and cashier respectively. They helped Burke with his reform of the office.107 On 22 February 1783, on receipt of a report from the Treasury which left little doubt of their guilt, Isaac Barré, Burke’s successor, dismissed them. Prosecutions were also instituted. Swayed by gratitude for their co-operation with his reforms, and perhaps by a desire to rescind the decision of a rival, on his return to office, Burke restored both men to their old jobs, pending the outcome of the legal proceedings. Justice, he thought, required that they be treated as innocent until proven guilty (17 April: C v. 87–9). This misjudgement was eagerly exploited by the enemies of the Coalition, hunting for weak points to attack. They represented Burke as restoring known embezzlers. On 24 April, Lord Newhaven, a former adherent of Lord North, raised the matter in the Commons, moving for a copy of the Treasury minutes inculpating Bembridge and Powell.108 During a subsequent discussion, on 2 May, Burke exploded when his restoration of the two men was described as a ‘gross and daring insult to the public’. Such language and worse Burke had directed at the ministry for years; he did not relish receiving it. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), the dramatist, elected to Parliament in 1780 and a junior minister in the Coalition, had forcibly to restrain him ‘lest his heat should betray him into some intemperate expressions’.109 The younger Sheridan (son of the theatre manager whom Burke had ridiculed in Punch’s Petition in 1748) was ambitious, impecunious, and a talented orator. 106

204.

Grenville to Lord Temple, 21 Mar. 1783, in Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George III, i.

On 19 May 1783, E.B. paid tribute to their help; Debrett, x. 50–1 (PH xxiii. 916–17). CJ xxxix. 393, Debrett, ix. 649. Copies of the Treasury minutes (15 and 22 Feb. 1783) were forwarded to Barré as Paymaster; PRO T. 29/53, fos. 77–9. 109 Debrett, ix. 678–83 (PH xxiii. 801–5). 107 108

524 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 Though he and Burke were embarked in the same cause, jealousy would soon poison their relations. In 1783, however, Sheridan was not yet a rival. The subject of Bembridge and Powell was raised again on 19 May. Two weeks had barely cooled Burke’s temper. Though he pretended to apologize, he gave no ground. Reflection had not dimmed the ‘sunshine of content in his mind’ on the subject. A motion to discharge the order for the Treasury minute (in effect, to exonerate Burke) was passed only by 161 to 137. So respectable a minority indicates substantial support from independent members.110 Still Burke would concede nothing. A further informal discussion was initiated on 21 May by a hostile question from John Rolle (1756–1842). Burke made a long, desultory, ineffective speech in defence of his political career, and of his economical reform programme in particular. Though he sensed that Bembridge and Powell were no more than pretexts, Burke mistook Rolle’s real target, which was the Coalition, not economical reform.111 An independent country gentleman, Rolle was the type of member whose support the Coalition needed to legitimize its claim to represent the political nation against the old court ‘system’. His antagonism was therefore embarrassing. On 26 May, Powell committed suicide. Giving evidence at the inquest, Burke deposed that for some time he had regarded Powell as ‘incapable of acting rationally in any one concern in life’. At the time of his restoration to office, he ‘seemed very much declined in his Faculties . . . and his Discourse even on Matters which had no relation to his Misfortune was extreamly confused and Contradictory’.112 To restore a man in such a state to responsible office does more credit to Burke’s compassion than to his political sense. After Powell’s suicide, Burke was virtually compelled to suspend Bembridge.113 Yet on 2 June, when Rolle returned to the attack, Burke refused, obstinately and inexplicably, to admit as much in public. His right to refuse to answer such a question was supported by an unwelcome ally, his old enemy Richard Rigby. Though ‘question time’ was not yet a recognized part of the parliamentary day, by 1770 the practice of putting questions to ministers had become a common opposition tactic. Some of the debates on Bembridge and Powell had been initiated by such questions. During North’s ministry, Rigby had often protested against this as an unparliamentary innovation. On 2 June, he made one of the last attempts to rule the procedure out of order.114 To be hounded by Rolle and rescued by Rigby was humiliating indeed. North had endured the abuse, invective, and CJ xxxix. 427, Debrett, x. 33–44 (PH xxiii. 900–10). Debrett, x. 45–58 (PH xxiii. 911–26). ‘Inquisition on the Body of John Powell Esqr. in the Parish of St George Hanover Square, 26 May 1783’, Westminster Abbey Muniments. 113 Bembridge was subsequently tried and convicted; Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1809–28), xxii. 1–160; Binney, British Public Finance, 153–5. 114 Debrett, x. 101–2 (PH xxiii. 924–5); P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971), 32–6. 110 111 112

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 525 satire of the opposition for years, his habitual imperturbability only rarely ruffled. Ready enough to impugn the motives of others, Burke could not bear the slightest imputation on his own. The episode illustrates some of the less attractive features of his character: extreme sensitivity to criticism, inflexibility, and a testy maladroitness that prevented him from beating a graceful retreat from an untenable position. Burke could never admit that he had been wrong. Burke’s behaviour during the Bembridge and Powell controversy fuelled malicious gossip that he was mad. ‘They represent him as actually mad,’ Boswell told Johnson. ‘If a man will appear extravagant, as he does, and cry,’ Johnson replied sternly, ‘can he wonder that he is represented as mad?’ After leaving Johnson, Boswell spent most of the rest of the day (29 May) with Burke, whom he expected to find in an ‘uneasy state of mind’ on account of Powell’s recent suicide. On the contrary, Burke was in great good humour and showed no symptoms of insanity or even extravagant behaviour. While they were chatting in the library, Boswell took off the shelf Patrick Delany’s Historical Account of the Life and Reign of David, King of Israel (1740–2), an eccentric work of biblical scholarship. Burke admitted having ‘laughed more reading Delany’s King David than ever he did in his life’, and repeated a joke that Dowdeswell had made about it.115 Burke and Boswell then drove together to Chelsea Hospital, of which Burke as Paymaster was ex-officio treasurer, for the annual dinner to commemorate the restoration of Charles II. As the talk flowed, Burke expatiated on suicide (hardly a tactful topic for Boswell to have raised), on duelling, on works of supererogation, and on the eternity of future punishments.116 Boswell’s account records Burke at his best, an entertaining and informative conversationalist, able to articulate intelligent, considered opinions on a range of subjects, with no trace of the man whose irascible antics in the Commons had delighted his enemies and embarrassed his friends. Burke’s ‘madness’ was no more than a tendency to emotive reaction, a liability to flare up at what others considered slight or no provovation. Such outbursts were as short as they were sudden. Soon, as Boswell’s journal shows, Burke was his better self again.

5 Rarely could Burke have felt such a sense of relief at the end of a session as in 1783. When Parliament was prorogued on 16 July, he could forget the 115 E.B. was fond of this joke, for Boswell had previously heard it on 13 Apr. 1779 (Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 78). E.B.’s Sale Catalogue lists a broken set of ‘Delany’s Works’, vols. i–iv and vii only (no. 95), probably the binder’s title on a made-up set; no collected edition of Delany’s Works was ever published. 116 Boswell’s Journal, 29 May 1783, in Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 153–7.

526 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 hateful business of Bembridge and Powell in the excitement of a new mission. Spared the irksome idleness of opposition, Burke was fully occupied with drafting what he hoped would become the Magna Charta of Bengal, the ill-starred measure known as Fox’s India Bill. The need to reform the East India Company had been widely recognized since about 1778. Action had been delayed, first by the more pressing problem of the American war and then by the political instability that followed the defeat of North’s ministry. By 1783, the company’s worsening financial state made immediate action imperative. Under Shelburne, India was the province of Henry Dundas, the leading member of North’s secret committee. His package of reforms was a casualty of Shelburne’s fall.117 When the Coalition took office, Fox’s preoccupation with the peace negotiations allowed Burke to seize the initiative on India. The system set up by North’s Regulating Act of 1773, and since amended only in detail, had not worked well. In London, relations between the directors, the Court of Proprietors, and the ministry had often been hostile. In Bengal, the Supreme Council had been riven by faction, and Governor-General Hastings had repeatedly ignored the instructions of the directors. A new administrative order was needed. Two opposite solutions were mooted. Dundas favoured strengthening the power of the Governor-General and of the ministry. Burke at first advocated no more than ‘a Change of Men’, the replacement of Hastings by Philip Francis.118 Francis, with whom Burke had been slightly acquainted prior to his departure for India in 1774, had spent his term on the Supreme Council in Calcutta in bickering with Hastings. He arrived back in England in December 1781 with strong opinions about how British India should be governed and an ambition to return as Governor-General. Over the next few years, Burke would be much influenced by what he learned from Francis. Burke had become increasingly preoccupied with India since his election in 1781 to the select committee. Its first task had been the Bengal Judicature Bill. On 4 December 1781, it was reappointed with wider terms of reference: to enquire ‘how the British Possessions in The East Indies may be held and governed with the greatest Security and Advantage to this Country, and by what Means the Happiness of the Native Inhabitants may be best promoted’.119 During its second incarnation, the committee produced a series of eleven reports.120 The first six were submitted between 5 February 117 Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952), 374– 5, 391–3. Dundas obtained leave to bring in his bill on 14 Apr., after the Coalition had taken office. E.B. spoke against it; Debrett, ix. 613 (PH xxiii. 762). The bill died at the end of the session. 118 E.B.’s speech of 14 Apr. 1783, reported in Scott to Hastings, 18 Apr., BL Add. MS 29159, fo. 47. 119 CJ xxxviii. 599–600. The committee’s membership was also enlarged. E.B.’s friend William Baker was one of five new members. 120 Repr. in House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sheila Lambert (Wilmington, 1975–6), cxxxviii–xli.

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 527 and 11 July 1782. The most important was the first, to which Burke contributed ‘Observations’ (WS v. 145–89). Its subject was the appointment of Sir Elijah Impey (1732–1809) as judge of the Sadr Diwani Adalat (higher civil court), set up by the company in October 1780. Select committee reports were usually dry and documentary minutes of evidence. Impey’s acceptance of this appointment was open to the objection that it compromised his independence as a judge in the Supreme Court (which was concerned with criminal cases). Burke’s ‘Observations’ are highly polemical, charging Hastings with having made the appointment to buy off an awkward enemy. Burke was also at least partly responsible for the Third Report (submitted on 12 June 1782).121 This was primarily concerned with the appointment in 1781 of John Macpherson (c.1745–1821) as a member of the Supreme Council of Bengal. Macpherson was an old antagonist. In the 1770s, his intrigues on behalf of the Nawab of the Carnatic had led to his dismissal by Lord Pigot. With James Macpherson (author of the Ossianic poems), he wrote Considerations on the Conquest of Tanjore (1779), to which the Burkes’ Enquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans (WS v. 43–124) was a reply. Macpherson owed his appointment (which Burke regarded as a disgrace) to the support of the North ministry. Burke thus had a double motive for exposing its impropriety: against Macpherson as an agent of the nawab, and against the court ‘system’ that had appointed him over the heads of conspicuously better-qualified candidates. Rockingham’s untimely death prevented the preparation of any proposals based on these early reports. After Burke returned to office in April 1783, the select committee submitted a further five reports. Two of these, the ninth and the eleventh, again departed from the usual style. Both were primarily Burke’s work. The Ninth Report (25 June 1783) is a wide-ranging analysis of the problems that British rule had brought to Bengal (WS v. 196–333). A masterpiece of tendentious exposition, dense with facts and amply documented, it eschews the rhetoric which Burke would employ so dramatically in his great speech of 1 December 1783. Instead, by the patient accumulation of evidence and example, he builds up a formidable case against every aspect of British rule in Bengal. The government of Bengal, vested by Parliament in a Supreme Council answerable to the East India Company and ultimately to Parliament, has been seized and subverted by a gang of corrupt peculators, only nominally the ‘servants’ of the company. Bent only on enriching themselves, they have systematically evaded or ignored every instruction, regulation, and law that stood in their way. The prime culprit is the Governor-General, Warren Hastings. Under his rule, the natives of Bengal 121 Evidence for E.B.’s authorship is a partial draft in his hand (Harrow School Archives, Autograph Collection).

528 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 and the company itself have been impoverished for the benefit of himself, his protégés, and his cronies. Burke supports this contention by first outlining how the machinery of government and administration (in London and in India) is supposed to function, then describing its operation in practice. The Court of Directors has lost its authority; Hastings and other ‘servants’ have defied it with impunity, and have even been rewarded for doing so. In India, the Supreme Court set up by the Bengal Judicature Act has failed in its purpose of extending protection to natives oppressed by company servants. The Supreme Council has been brought into disrepute by faction, intrigue, and corruption. Under this regime, Burke argues, trade has suffered and with it the prosperity both of Bengal and of the company itself. Since assuming effective sovereignty over Bengal, the company has misapplied its revenues from taxation to subsidize its increasingly unprofitable trade and to enrich individuals. The result has been an annual drain of money from Bengal to England. Coerced by European monopolists, native producers are forced to accept low prices. Loaded with the exorbitant profits of these middlemen, the goods are shipped to Europe where their high prices make them difficult or unprofitable to sell. Even worse are the monopolies of opium, salt, and saltpetre, corruptly farmed to favoured individuals to enable them to make vast and rapid fortunes at the expense of suppliers and consumers alike. Burke’s account, with its plethora of names and dates, facts and figures, that no synopsis can reproduce, makes compelling reading. His conclusion, however, is comparatively tame. Adam Smith and others had argued for a complete deregulation of the trade of Bengal, with the company becoming either the governing body (relinquishing its commercial activities) or a trading company competing with others on an open market (and with its political functions undertaken by an agency of the British State). For Smith, the functions of government and trade were incompatible and could never be successfully combined.122 Burke was unwilling to go so far. His solution, as so often, is a return to a pre-lapsarian state. The company must somehow be put back on its old commercial footing; the authority of the directors at home over recalcitrant servants in India must be restored. The Ninth Report was intended to reach a wider audience than the House of Commons, to which it was submitted on 25 June. Within a month, and unusually for such documents, it was reprinted for public sale.123 Burke meant it to prepare public opinion for the Coalition’s Indian reforms. The Coalition’s policy on India was largely drafted by Burke during the summer recess. By 20 August, the main provision, the appointment of commissioners with ‘very extensive powers’, had been decided. Everything Wealth of Nations, v. i. e. 26–30. Todd, 41d(9); Morning Herald, 14 July 1783. E.B. denied that he was responsible for the publication (PH xxiv. 1262–3). 122 123

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 529 else was ‘very much afloat’. Burke was to ‘draw out on paper some sort of plan’ for Fox to consider.124 Thus Burke had a significant share in what became known as Fox’s India Bill. The plan was eventually embodied in two bills. One provided a framework for the administration of British India. The second, and by far the more controversial, vested control of the company in special commissioners. Effective power was to be transferred from Calcutta to London, and supervision from the ministry to Parliament. In eighteenth-century conditions, when an exchange of letters between India and London often took well over a year, direction from London would have proved cumbersome and ineffective. Impracticability, however, was not the principal objection to the scheme. Its most exceptionable feature was the power given to the commissioners, who were to be named in the bill and to hold office during good behaviour for a period of four years. The avowed intention was to ensure continuity of direction. The provision was also susceptible to a more cynical interpretation, as an attempt by Fox and his friends to seize control of the company’s patronage. The security of tenure given to the commissioners was a tactical blunder. Without it, the case against the Coalition as violators of the constitution would have been much weaker. Even within the Coalition, opinions were divided on how best to present the measure. Feelers that were put out to friends of Hastings, and even to Pitt, suggest an initial attempt to secure bipartisan support.125 If so, the plan was dropped or failed. By the time that Fox moved for leave to bring in his bills, an orchestrated campaign against them was well under way.126 To counter it, and to convince the House of the wisdom and necessity of the Coalition’s India bills, on 18 November the select committee submitted its (or rather Burke’s) Eleventh Report, timed to coincide with Fox’s motion. Narrower in scope than the Ninth Report, it concentrates on the (illegal) practice of British administrators accepting ‘gifts’ or ‘presents’ from Indian rulers (WS v. 334–78). Burke made his main contribution to the debates on 1 December, technically on the motion to go into a committee on the bill.127 Speaking for about two hours, he delivered one of his grandest orations. Memorably evoking the idealized India of his imagination, replete with generalizations 124

10.

Sir Gilbert to Lady Elliot, 20 Aug. 1783, National Library of Scotland, MS 11044, fos. 109–

P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London, 1965), 21. CJ xxxix. 731. The vesting bill was given its first reading on 20 Nov. (CJ xxxix. 733). The following day, the directors of the East India Company carried a motion against it. Petitions against the bill were presented on 24, 25, and 27 Nov. (CJ xxxix. 739–40, 742). 127 The motion was carried by 217 to 103 (CJ xxxix. 753); Debrett, xii. 204–314 (PH xxiii. 1306– 1434). E.B.’s speech was quickly published (on 22 Jan. 1784), as Mr Burke’s Speech, on the 1st December 1783, upon the Question for the Speaker’s Leaving the Chair, in Order for the House to Resolve Itself into a Committee on Mr Fox’s East India Bill (Todd, 44a). 125 126

530 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 and embellished with all the resources of his rhetoric, the speech is a rich and instructive quarry of Burkean wisdom (WS v. 380–451). As so often, Burke begins with a modesty topos, speaking as one who has ‘supplied a mediocrity of talents by the extreme of diligence, and who has thought himself obliged, by the research of years, to wind himself into the inmost recesses and labyrinths of the Indian detail’ (WS v. 382). The body of the speech is organized as a demolition of the four main objections that have been made to the bill. The first, that the bill infringes the charter of the East India Company and therefore indirectly threatens all charters, is treated at much the greatest length (383–440). As Lord North had pointed out in a previous debate, successive Acts since his own of 1773 all curtailed the company’s independence.128 Fox’s bill, however, went beyond anything previously attempted. Burke opens his case with a dissection of the phrase ‘the chartered rights of men’, distinguishing between ‘the natural rights of mankind’, which are prior to but can be protected by legislative enactments such as Magna Charta; and charters such as that of the East India Company, a private monopoly granted by Parliament and therefore revocable by Parliament (383–4). Such charters are trusts, liable to forfeiture if abused. Seeking to steal a rhetorical phrase from his opponents, he dubbs Fox’s bill ‘the Magna Charta of Hindostan’ (386). He even poses as the company’s defender against those (such as Adam Smith) who had argued that it was incapable of exercising political power and should be confined to its old commercial concerns. He professes to reject so drastic a measure from ‘an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government, upon a theory, however plausible it may be’ (387). This is a characteristic Burkean theme. The invasion of chartered rights was an especially sensitive point for Burke, for the Rockingham party had previously defended the company against ministerial interference. This was not forgotten. ‘One can’t expect Consistency in Politicians,’ exclaimed Lord Hardwicke (1720–90) in disgust, ‘else I remember the Aera when a certain Party (the R————m) w[oul]d have Kecked at a quarter of such a Plan as the present.’129 The charge is not entirely fair, for the Rockingham party had lately modified its stand, as Burke explained to Lord Macartney (15 Oct. 1781: C x. 11). Even so, to justify so drastic a measure as was now proposed, Burke needed to demonstrate that the abuses in the company’s rule in India had indeed been gigantic and habitual. First, however, he drew a ‘map’ of the British dominions in India, comparing them to the Holy Roman Empire, to demonstrate their importance: 27 Nov. 1783, Debrett, xii. 180–1 (PH xxiii. 1283–5). Earl of Hardwicke to Philip Yorke, 25 Nov., 7 Dec. 1783, BL Add. MS 35381, fos. 165–6, 176. Hardwicke was sympathetic to the principle of the bill, acknowledging that an ‘Encrease of Influence somewhere’ was unavoidable. 128 129


531

This multitude of men does not consist of an abject and barbarous populace; much less of gangs of savages, like the Guaranies and Chiquitos, who wander on the waste borders of the river of Amazons, or the Plate; but a people for ages civilized and cultivated; cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods. There, have been (and still the skeletons remain) princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence. There, are to be found the chiefs of tribes and nations. There is to be found an antient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning, and history, the guides of the people whilst living, and their consolation in death; a nobility of great antiquity and renown; a multitude of cities, not exceeded in population and trade by those of the first class in Europe; merchants and bankers, individual houses of whom have once vied in capital with the Bank of England; whose credit had often supported a tottering state, and preserved their governments in the midst of war and desolation; millions of ingenious manufacturers and mechanicks; millions of the most diligent, and not the least intelligent, tillers of the earth. (WS v. 389–90)

This is less a description than an imaginative construction: an ancient civilization; stable, harmonious, and hierarchical; preserved by a learned priesthood and a hereditary nobility. Burke’s ideal India enshrined his own most cherished values. The idealized portrait of India before the advent of the British sets the scene for Burke’s dissection of the company’s record. Outlining an elaborate and self-conscious plan, he divides his subject into their political and commercial activities, and further subdivides their politics into their external affairs (their dealings with other powers) and their internal (further divided into relations with their clients and dependants, and their treatment of the territories under their own rule). Again, he offers to prove certain propositions: that the company has betrayed its every ally, broken every treaty, and ruined every friendly power. Between the consideration of external and internal relations, he interposes a short digression (WS v. 401– 4) comparing the East India Company with previous invaders. The company’s incursions have been the worst of all. The Moguls conquered but stayed; they accordingly acquired an interest in the prosperity of their country. The East India Company sends out an endless succession of young men from England, each bent on returning home as quickly as possible with as large a share as he can get of the spoils of the country. Thus the British occupation has drained the country of its wealth and resources, as no earlier conquest had done. From this digression, Burke returns to the company’s relations with its client states. Here he draws on examples already treated at length in the reports of the select committee, some of which would later figure prominently in the charges of impeachment against Hastings: the deposition in 1781 of Chait Singh, Raja of Benares; and the barbaric ill-treatment of the Begums of Oudh. Turning to the largest territory directly administered by

532 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 the company, Burke notes that ‘Bengal, and the provinces that are united to it, are larger than the kingdom of France; and once contained, as France does contain, a great and independent landed interest, composed of princes, of great lords, of a numerous nobility and gentry, of freeholders, of lower tenants, of religious communities, and public foundations’ (WS v. 425). Influenced in part by the doctrinaire ideas of Philip Francis, Burke had come to accept a simplified idea of the Indian system of land tenure as virtually identical to the European concept of ownership. He therefore thought that, by opening the revenue farming to competitive bids in 1772, Hastings had virtually destroyed the old ‘landed interest’ of Bengal. To Burke, who regarded the zemindars, or land-holders, as proprietors in the European sense, Hastings had ‘set up to public auction’ the lands of ‘the whole nobility, gentry, and freeholders’. In this competition, the ‘ancient proprietors’ were forced to ‘bid against every usurer, every temporary adventurer, every jobber and schemer, every servant of every European, or they were obliged to content themselves, in lieu of their extensive domains, with a house, and such a pension as the state auctioneers thought fit to assign’. As a consequence, ‘the menial servants of Englishmen, persons (to use the emphatical phrase of a ruined and patient Eastern chief) “whose fathers they would not have set with the dogs of their flock,” entered into their patrimonial lands’ (426). The allusion (to Job 30: 1) associates the dispossessed zemindars with the virtuous and long-suffering Job, tormented by Satan in the guise of Warren Hastings. Burke has been called ‘the real champion of Bengal’s downtrodden millions’.130 The chief objects of his pathos, however, are not those millions but the displaced zemindars. A graphic example is ‘a Zemindar in Bengal (I forget his name) that, on the threat of an invasion, supplied the Soubah of these provinces with the loan of a million sterling. The family this day wants credit for a breakfast at the bazar’ (427).131 The anonymity makes the case appear unexceptional, a casual example among many. The sympathy for the impoverished zemindars anticipates Burke’s laments for the aristocrats whom the French Revolution would likewise plunge into unwonted indigence. For much of the remainder of his speech, Burke was covering familiar ground and could be comparatively brief. The disastrous effects of the company’s neglect of commerce in pursuit of territorial expansion were widely acknowledged. Because Fox had already explained and justified the provisions of the bill, and particularly the nomination of the commissioners, Burke treated these only in passing. His brief was to stimulate a groundswell of feeling against the company and its manifold iniquities. For the theme of his peroration, Burke chose a panegyric of Fox. This 130

Holden Furber (C v, p. xv). Possibly the old Raja of Nadia, whose story E.B. might have heard from Francis; Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris, 1963), 121. 131

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 533 was a bold move. The most plausible objection to the bill was its concentration of power and patronage in the hands of Fox and his cronies. In one of the caricatures, Fox is depicted as Carlo Khan, riding into Leadenhall Street (headquarters of the East India Company) on a triumphal elephant. Burke is blowing his trumpet (Plate 29). The caricature literalizes what Burke does in the speech. In a daring hyperbole, he elevates Fox above Henri IV, famous for his wish ‘that he might live to see a fowl in the pot of every peasant in the kingdom’, a ‘sentiment of homely benevolence . . . worth all the splendid sayings that are recorded of kings’. The king’s wish remained unrealized. Fox, ‘a subject’ (though descended from Henri IV), can with truth make a more modest claim, ‘that he secures the rice in his pot to every man in India’. For another hyperbole, Burke turns to a Roman poet. Paying homage to Cicero, Silius Italicus had prophesied that the fame of his eloquence would reach the Ganges. Burke asserts that the poet’s exaggeration will prove true of Fox: ‘There is not a tongue, a nation, or religion in India, which will not bless the presiding care and manly beneficence of this House, and of him who proposes to you this great work’ (WS v. 450). Fox’s motives were more mixed than Burke allows, though only the most cynical would deny the genuineness of his concern for the welfare of the peoples of India.132 Burke exaggerated to make a fitting end to an oration dominated by stark contrasts between good and evil. Burke spoke to a crowded house. ‘Many hundreds’ were reported to have been turned away.133 One man sat in the gallery with the deliberate intention of controverting whatever Burke might say. This was John Scott (1747– 1819), usually called ‘Major Scott’, from his rank in the army of the East India Company. Scott had served the company since 1766, latterly as aidede-camp to Hastings. In 1781, he had returned to England as his chief’s London agent. Scott was a zealous and indefatigable champion, if not always a judicious one. By December 1783, he had already published several pamphlets in defence of Hastings, some of them also attacking Burke and the select committee.134 Drawing on his own memory and a newspaper report, Scott rushed his first reply into print within a few days. When Burke published his speech, Scott replied again at greater length.135 By then, however, the king’s dismissal of the Coalition had engulfed the merits and demerits of Fox’s bill in a deeper constitutional conflict. 132 In an undated letter to Elizabeth Armistead (his mistress, to whom he wrote spontaneously and sincerely), Fox wrote that ‘when the happiness of so many millions is at stake’ he felt morally bound to risk ‘my power & that of my friends’ (BL Add. MS 47570, fo. 153). 133 Morning Herald, 2 Dec. 1783. 134 A Letter to the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke in Reply to the Insinuations in the Ninth Report of the Select Committee, which Affect the Character of Mr Hastings (London, 1783); A Second Letter [etc.] (London, 1783). 135 A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Paymaster General of His Majesty’s Forces (London, 1783; subscribed 6 Dec.); A Reply to Mr Burke’s Speech of the First of December 1783, on Mr Fox’s East-India Bill (London, 1784; subscribed 31 Jan.).

534


6 Fox was confident that the ease with which his India bills had passed the Commons would assure their approval by the Lords. In normal times, ministries enjoyed a built-in majority in the Upper House. The king, however, remained implacably hostile to the Coalition. Biding his time for a plausible issue on which to dismiss them, he found in Fox’s India Bill the pretext he needed. In one of the most controversial acts of his long reign, he allowed Lord Temple to foment opposition to it, quoting his explicit declaration that ‘whoever voted for the India Bill, were not only not his friends, but he should consider them as his enemies’.136 The Coalition was weak in the Lords, where its opponents, emboldened by the king’s declaration, rejected the vesting bill on 17 December. On the 19th, the king dismissed the Coalition. Burke’s last act as Paymaster was to appoint his friend Dr Charles Burney (1726–1814), musicologist and father of the novelist, to the post of organist of Chelsea Hospital, with a salary increased from £20 to £50 a year.137 Modest as the appointment appeared, it provided Burney with a welcome refuge for his old age. The king’s bold stroke brought the constitutional conflict out into the open. At first, an immediate dissolution of Parliament was expected. When this was deferred, Temple, appointed Secretary of State on 19 December, resigned, either to avoid impeachment by a hostile Commons or to make the new ministry less vulnerable. Burke kept the curt letter in which Temple, on the 19th, had notified him of his dismissal, subsequently adding in derision: ‘Receivd from Ld Temple the 19th day of Dec. 1783 being the 1st of his administration which lasted till the 22 of the same month’.138 Pitt’s nerves proved stronger. In the Commons, the Coalition at first retained its majority. Pitt’s position as leader of a minority government was anomalous and (so Burke and Fox thought) unconstitutional. The Christmas recess provided a respite, of which Pitt made the better use. Fox’s confidence that he could force Pitt out of office as he had ousted Shelburne proved misplaced. Between 12 January and 9 March, Pitt conducted a skilful campaign that gradually eroded Fox’s majority. As the parliamentary war became a gladiatorial contest between the two mighty opposites, Burke was relegated to the sidelines. As Pitt outmanœuvred his rival, the chance of Burke’s early return to office dimmed. Yet the the bleak prospect of another long period of oppoThe king’s words to Temple, as quoted by Fox on 17 Dec., Debrett, xii. 430 (PH xxiv. 207). E.B. to Burney, 19 Dec. 1783 (C v. 120); Roger Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (Oxford, 1965), 295–6. Burney’s acquaintance with E.B. began some time after 1773; ibid. 122. 138 NRO A. ii. 89 (C v. 119). Paul Kelly, ‘The Pitt–Temple Administration: 19–22 December 1783’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974), 157–61. 136 137

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 535 sition did not make him unmindful of others still less fortunate. In June 1782, he had appointed George Barret (c.1728–84) to the vacant post of Painter to Chelsea Hospital. This position (unlike that of Organist) did not carry a salary, nor was it a sinecure. The Painter was one of the ‘artificers’ (others included a smith, a joiner, a bricklayer, a plumber, and a slater) whom the hospital employed to maintain and repair the fabric. Their income derived from the profit on the work they undertook for the hospital. Barret, an Irish landscape painter whom Burke had known for many years, was successful but improvident. Burke intended the Chelsea appointment to serve as a provision for Barret’s old age and family. Now, however, in March 1784, Barret seemed on the point of death, with his large family unprovided for. Burke therefore overcame his reluctance to ask favours from the usurping ministers, and wrote to William Wyndham Grenville, his successor as Paymaster, asking him to continue the charity to the family by appointing Barret’s son and brother jointly as his successor. Barret died a few days later. In June, his son was appointed Painter.139 The delay was caused in part by the dissolution of Parliament on 25 March. Fortified by the upsurge of public opinion against Fox and the Coalition, Pitt was now sure of victory.140 For the next few weeks, the attention and energies of the political world were absorbed by the election. Burke’s position was unenviable. No one was more closely identifed with the India Bill which had been the Coalition’s undoing, and which provided Pitt with his best propaganda weapon. Burke is especially prominent in the caricatures, often depicted with Fox and North as the third in an unholy trinity. In Gillray’s Coalition Dance (Plate 26), Fox, North, and Burke dance to the music of a devil. Burke, dressed as a Jesuit, holds a copy of Little Red Riding Hood instead of a Prayer Book. His thin figure forms a striking contrast to the corpulence of North and Fox. In The Retreat of Carlo Khan from Leadenhall Street, Burke is shown barefooted and bareheaded in the garb of a monk, walking penitently after Fox (now humbly riding an ass instead of the elephant of Carlo Khan’s Triumph) and reading a ‘Sinners’ Guide’ (Plate 30).141 Burke was now indubitably one of the half dozen ‘mere Mr’s’ whose name required no explanation. His image, with its thin figure, spectacles prominent on his pointed nose, and usually dressed in monkish robes, was instantly recognizable. 139 E.B. to William Wyndham Grenville, 6 Mar. 1784, BL Add. MS 69038, fos. 185–6, in F. P. Lock, ‘Unpublished Burke Letters, 1783–96’, English Historical Review, 112 (1997), 119–41. 140 Paul Kelly, ‘British Politics, 1783–4: The Emergence and Triumph of the Younger Pitt’s Administration’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 54 (1981), 62–78. 141 In Two new Sliders for the State Magic Lantern, perhaps by Thomas Rowlandson (29 Dec. 1783: BMC 6287), Fox, North, and Burke are carted together to be hanged on the same gallows, and subsequently tormented together in hell. Other examples of the triumvirate are illustrated in Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, 1996), 45, 47, 55, 60.

536 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 In Yorkshire, as in the country at large, popular opinion ran strongly against the Coalition. Sir George Savile had retired from Parliament in November 1783, after representing the county for twenty-five years. (He died in January 1784.) Francis Foljambe (1750–1814), his nephew and successor, elected as recently as 1 January 1784, was forced in March to withdraw before the poll began. Lord John Cavendish lost his seat at York. Burke, happily, was in no such danger. At Malton, Fitzwilliam remained firmly in control. Leaving London soon after the dissolution, Burke was duly re-elected on 1 April. From Malton, Burke proceeded not back to London but north to Scotland. Shortly before delivering his speech on Fox’s India Bill, he had received an unusual accolade from an unexpected quarter. On 15 November 1783, the University of Glasgow elected him Lord Rector. The electorate was the body of matriculated students, voting in the four ‘nations’ into which (following the medieval custom) they were divided. In practice, the professors exerted considerable influence on the choice, and when they were agreed their candidate was assured of election. The most likely promoter of Burke’s candidacy was Professor William Richardson, who in 1777 had sent Burke two of his books (C iii. 353–6). The Rector was elected for a year, with re-election for a second term virtually automatic. The position, largely honorific, was usually conferred on a distinguished or politically influential Scot. The choice of a non-Scot was unprecedented. Burke’s immediate predecessor was Henry Dundas, elected in 1781 when Lord Advocate and head of the ministry’s Scottish patronage network. Burke had been nominated in 1781, when one of the four nations had voted for him. His election in 1783 was probably the result of a reciprocal arrangement in which his backers agreed to support another candidate at a future election.142 Burke was informed of his election by the Principal, William Leechman (1705–85).143 He was not expected to visit Glasgow for his formal installation until the end of the parliamentary session (C v. 117–18). In most years, this would have meant June or July. Thanks to the political crisis and the premature dissolution of Parliament, Burke’s Scottish trip took place in April and provided a refreshing interlude in an otherwise painful six months. Burke arrived in Edinburgh on Monday, 5 April. The next ten days were a triumphal progress, gratifying if exhausting. On Tuesday, he 142 Such a system is implied by John Millar’s letter to E.B. of 13 Nov. 1785 (WWM BkP 1/2007). E.B. wanted his friend William Windham to succeed him as Lord Rector. Millar replied that this was impracticable, because ‘there are individuals who have a claim to be gratified with respect to their private connexions, in return for their having indulged their colleagues on former occasions’. 143 Leechman was appointed to write on 15 Nov. 1783, and E.B.’s reply was read to the Senate on 4 Dec.; Glasgow University Archives, vol. 71 (Minutes of Senate Meetings, 1771–87), p. 280. Neither letter is extant. Most of the references to E.B. in the archives are printed in James Coutts, A History of the University of Glasgow, from its Foundation in 1451 to 1909 (Glasgow, 1909).

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 537 dined with Adam Smith and a few friends. On Wednesday, the Bank of Scotland regaled him with a large public dinner. On Thursday, he left the city for Hatton, home of Lord Maitland (1759–1839), one of the rising stars of opposition politics. The party also included Adam Smith, Andrew Dalzel (1742–1806), professor of Greek at Edinburgh, and Dugald Stewart, subsequently professor of moral philosophy. Stewart recorded some of Burke’s table-talk. The conversation turned much on the Pitt family. Burke was ‘fond of coming on the subject of Chatham’, whom he believed ‘one of the most unprincipled Men that ever lived’. Burke was equally severe on the younger Pitt, comparing him to the odious hypocrite Blifil in Tom Jones.144 Yet Dalzel, who was often in Burke’s company during his stay in Scotland, described him as ‘the most agreeable and entertaining man in conversation I ever met with . . . He has a fluency of expression, and a luxuriance of imagination that are delightful.’145 Dalzel’s impression is further evidence that, even at a time of political crisis, Burke could be be a congenial companion. From Hatton, Burke and his entourage proceeded to Glasgow, where on 9 April he dined with Professor John Millar (1735–1801). On Saturday morning, the day of the installation, an unexpected visitor arrived while he was at breakfast: the egregious James Boswell. Worried that Burke was offended with him for having written a pamphlet against Fox’s East India Bill, he sent a propitiatory note craving forgiveness (C v. 138–9). Burke asked him in to breakfast, but evaded Boswell’s invitation to visit his country estate at Auchinleck. Boswell had certainly been tactless in sending Burke a copy of his pamphlet. Professing ‘not to regard men, but measures’, Boswell had denounced the India Bill as an ‘alarming attempt . . . to destroy the security of private property, and annihilate the constitutional monarchy of these kingdoms’. Defending even Temple’s role in the defeat of the bill, Boswell’s pamphlet expressed the high Tory exaltation of the royal prerogative that Burke detested.146 Burke, however, was not apt to take Boswell over-seriously. The Coalition had fallen to more formidable adversaries than the Laird of Auchinleck. Later that day, Burke was installed as Lord Rector. The irrepressible Boswell was in the audience, and thought he ‘looked exceedingly well in the Lord Rector’s gown’. Mixing a little opposition politics into his speech, Burke described his election as ‘By much the greatest honour I ever 144 Stewart’s ‘Memorandum Written the Day after Being at Hatton’, Edinburgh University Library, MS Dc. 6. 111, fos. 17–21. 145 Dalzel to Robert Liston, 20 Apr. 1784; printed in the memoir prefaced to Dalzel’s History of the University of Edinburgh from its Foundation (Edinburgh, 1862), i. 42–3. This letter is the main source for E.B.’s itinerary. 146 A Letter to the People of Scotland, on the Present State of the Nation (Edinburgh, 1783), 8, 21. Boswell sent E.B. a copy on 3 Jan. 1784; in Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, 140–1.

538 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 received. On a very different principle from what honours [are] usually bestowed [on]. If you have done right, [you have] done a very important act. Youth may see how endeavours, faithful indeed in public service but weak and imperfect, [may be] rewarded.’147 As a good Tory, Boswell suppressed the politics in the report he wrote for the newspapers. This mentions only the ‘excellent speech’ in which Burke declared that ‘he had that day received by much the greatest honour he ever had in his life’.148 The installation was followed by a banquet. The business over, Burke could enjoy some sightseeing. He was taken to see Loch Lomond, and on his way back to Edinburgh was given a tour of the renowned ironworks at Carron. After a farewell dinner with Adam Smith, on Friday morning Burke set out for England. The holiday had proved a tonic and a triumph. By the time Burke began his return journey, the magnitude of the Coalition’s defeat was clear. Buckinghamshire was typical. The county meeting on 20 March had given an unpleasant foretaste of the national mood. Burke could hardly gain a hearing, until Lord Mahon, an opponent, begged one for him. Unabashed and unrepentant, Burke had the courage or the folly to tell the assembled freeholders that ‘it would always be his maxim to pursue the good of the people without regard to their smiles or frowns’. Parliament was the proper forum in which to discuss complex measures like the India Bill: ‘the people were not competent to decide on such points: they had approved of the American War in the same senseless manner they now disapproved of the India Bill: they had not capacity to comprehend it’.149 In the county election that followed, Lord Verney narrowly lost the seat that he had held since 1768. His association with the Coalition (tenuous as it was) was probably the deciding factor against him.150 In all, about 100 MPs who had supported the Coalition were unseated. Dubbed ‘Fox’s martyrs’ in ironic allusion to the victims of Mary I’s attempt to restore Catholicism, the appellation was appropriate, though many had been followers of North. In all the propaganda, Fox, not North, was depicted as the threat to the constitution. Fox’s unpopularity cost them their seats.151 The election thus decided in the king’s favour the constitutional conflict that had raged since Boswell, Journal for 10 Apr. 1784, and rough notes of E.B.’s speech; Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 204–5. Since the Lord Rector was expected to use his influence with government on the university’s behalf, an opposition MP was not an ideal choice. E.B. would hardly have been chosen had the fall of the Coalition been foreseen. Thus in June 1784, when a favour was sought, Leechman wrote to Henry Dundas and the Marquis of Graham (both ministerialists) as well as to E.B. (C v. 156–7). 148 Caledonian Mercury, 12 Apr. 1784; the reprint in Edinburgh Advertiser, 13 Apr., is attributed to Boswell in Frederick Albert Pottle, The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq (Oxford, 1929), 253. 149 Public Advertiser, 23 Mar. 1784. 150 Richard W. Davis, Political Change and Continuity, 1760–1885: A Buckinghamshire Study (Newton Abbot, 1972), 33–7. 151 Mrs Eric George, ‘Fox’s Martyrs: The General Election of 1784’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser. 21 (1939), 133–68; N. C. Phillips, Yorkshire and English National Politics, 1783–1784 (Christchurch, NZ, 1961). 147

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 539 March 1782. The royal prerogative of choosing ministers was vindicated against Fox’s novel doctrine that ministries should be made as well as unmade in the House of Commons. Burke, too, was one of ‘Fox’s martyrs’. Although he retained his seat, his political career had been blasted by Fox’s disastrous misjudgements. Fox was a poor substitute for Rockingham. In a contemporary caricature published soon after Rockingham’s death, Paradise Lost by James Sayers (1748– 1825), Burke and Fox are shown as Adam and Eve, expelled from paradise, which is guarded by a high stone wall (Plate 31). The closed gate is surmounted by an arch decorated with a sinister head of Shelburne. The image is haunting. Yet Paradise Lost more truly expresses Burke’s plight in 1784 than 1782. When Burke and Fox resigned on Shelburne’s elevation to the Treasury, they did not meekly accept their exclusion from office. They hoped to use public opinion to oust Shelburne, as they had North. In 1784, that resource failed them. ‘The people did not like our work,’ Burke confessed to William Baker, ‘and they joind the Court to pull it down’ (22 June 1784: C v. 154). Now, the malignant guardian of the gate of paradise was not Shelburne, but Pitt, a far more adroit politician. The 1784 election inaugurated a new political era. For the remainder of Burke’s life and beyond, the great divide would be between the supporters of Pitt and the followers of Fox. The American question was now history. Many of the men with whom he had entered politics had passed away. Rockingham, Dowdeswell, and Savile were dead. Verney and Lord John Cavendish were out of the new Parliament. Richmond had thrown in his lot with Pitt. Fox alone survived, hardly a leader after Burke’s own heart. Burke therefore faced a bleak future. ‘The humour (for I must not call it madness) of the people’, he admitted to William Eden, a junior member of North’s wing of the Coalition, ‘has much exceeded my apprehensions.’ Such a defeat could only have been inflicted by bribery or misrepresentation. Burke was therefore unrepentant. ‘I despair totally of anything which can be done in future,’ he warned Eden, ‘if we do not commence our proceedings by a strong defence of our past conduct, and by as strong a crimination of those who have caballed you out of your power, and have libelled you out of your reputation’ (17 May 1784: C v. 150–1). When the new Parliament met on 18 May, Burke was isolated. Yet he remained determined to renew the fight. The opposition made a poor showing at the opening of the new session. After a lacklustre debate, their amendment to the address was defeated by 282 to 114. Burke did not speak.152 Perhaps to make up for this dereliction, on 31 May he gave notice that he would make a motion embodying three criticisms of the address: its approval of the premature dissolution, the 152

CJ xl. 10; Debrett, xv. 25–39 (PH xxiv. 829–43).

540 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 implied criticism of Fox’s India Bill, and its comment on the necessary ‘balance’ of the constitution. Pitt pointed out, reasonably enough, that the time for such a motion had passed. Quick to take offence, Burke interpreted Pitt’s supercilious manner as ‘a sneer at his insignificance’.153 On 8 June, towards the end of a long and exhausting debate, Burke provoked some jibe from the Treasury bench which he returned by saying that ‘he little minded the ill treatment of a parcel of boys’. Called to order, Burke pretended to apologize but repeated his phrase, applying it more directly to the ministers and their lack of respect for his ‘grey hairs’.154 A visit from Richard Shackleton and his daughter Mary provided a welcome respite from the parliamentary baiting to which Burke was now subject. On 10 June, the Shackletons came to breakfast, and Mary met the great man about whom she had heard so much. Like Frances Burney, she was captivated. Burke, who ‘outshone every thing about him’, she described as ‘not corpulent nor thin but quite stately in his port, nay majestick, & wonderfully graceful in his person—his complexion has the ruddiness of temperance & health, his features fine, his teeth good, & a wonderful expression in his countenance’. After breakfast, the Shackletons went off on a round of sightseeing. They returned to dinner. After the meal, even Burke’s way of lolling on a chair seemed ‘classical’, just as ‘one who seems to belong to the classical age’ ought to recline. The following day, the Shackletons were to go with the Burkes to Beaconsfield for the weekend. After a late breakfast, they set off about noon. On the way, Burke pointed out the various sights, even sitting Mary (who was 26) on his knee to give her a better view of the Duchess of Portland’s grounds. They reached Beaconsfield for a late dinner and a tour of the estate. Mary’s bedroom not only had a bed and dressing-tables but was ‘decorated with pieces of furniture which I did not understand, & was afraid of doing mischief by endeavouring to explain’. In the morning, the Shackletons were sent off in the chaise to see Cliveden and Windsor. After dinner, Burke read more of Mary’s verses and suggested corrections. At supper, there was gooseberry fool, and Burke explained (ingeniously but incorrectly) that ‘fool’ was derived from French ‘fouler’. To Mary, he seemd to have ‘an universal knowledge, & let him speak on what subject he will one would think that subject his forte’.155 Even during the busiest time of the year Burke, spent many such weekends away from the bustle and vexations of London. Mary Shackleton was completely unaware of what was most on Burke’s mind that weekend, the Representation to the king which he moved on the day after their return to London. Perhaps, for two days, he was able to relegate it to the back of his consciousness. The episode illustrates his 153 154 155

Debrett, xv. 49–52 (PH xxiv. 940–3). Debrett, xv. 140–1 (PH xxiv. 939–40). Mary Shackleton’s Diary, 1784, National Library of Ireland, MS 9310, pp. 104–25.

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 541 extreme perturbation of mind at this time and confirms the disregard into which he had fallen. On 14 June, he moved what was in essence a motion of protest against the premature dissolution as unconstitutional in spirit if not in form. Long-winded even for Burke (over 6,000 words), awkwardly expressed in the language of humble supplication, and employing the threadbare fiction (repeated from the ‘Address to the King’ of 1777) that the king is unaware of the true state of affairs, the Representation shows him at his worst. His friends were embarrassed. Fortunately, a new disciple was prepared to support even so eccentric a motion of the master. William Windham (1750–1810) was a Norfolk squire of uncommon intellectual gifts and great personal charm. His great failing was chronic indecision. Since at least 1777, he had been ambitious of entering Parliament. His acquaintance with Burke probably dates from about that time. Yet not until the election of 1784 did he contest a seat. Despite standing as a Foxite, he was elected, though only after a closely fought campaign. When he seconded Burke’s motion, he was thus a new member of a few weeks’ standing. Yet his admiration for Burke was genuine, as a later serio-comic incident shows. Ballooning had captured the public imagination since the first successful ascent (in France) in December 1783. On 5 May 1785, after much characteristic hesitation, Windham become one of the first Englishmen to take to the air. Before venturing, he made a will, leaving his property for life to George Cholmondeley (1752–1830), the best friend of his Oxford days, then to any children Cholmondeley might have by the woman whom Windham thought he ought to marry, and in default of such issue, to Burke.156 Such a gesture suggests that, in agreeing to second Burke’s motion, he was not merely humouring a crazy old man. No one else, however, was prepared to stand forth, and Burke’s motion was negatived without a division.157 Another of ‘Fox’s martyrs’ at the recent election was William Baker, who lost his seat at Hertford. A political friend of longer standing than Windham, when he read in the newspapers about the débâcle of 14 June, he wrote to ask Burke ‘Why it was not made more of a Party Concern’ (20 June 1784: C v. 153). Burke began his reply with a far more pessimistic appraisal of the election than he had sent Eden a month earlier: ‘I consider the House of Commons as something worse than extinguished. We have been labouring for near twenty years to make it independent; and as soon as we had accomplished what we had in View, we found that its independence led to its destruction.’ Rebuilding would be the work of another generation. For Burke ‘to look forward to the Event of another twenty years toil’ would be ‘quite ridiculous’ (154). Mistreatment by the ‘parcel of boys’ in the new 156 Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, The Early Life and Diaries of William Windham (London, 1930), 284. 157 CJ xl. 198–204; repr. (with E.B.’s introductory speech) in Debrett, xv. 151–74.

542 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 House had soured and embittered him. During the American war, he had convinced himself that the people were deluded. That illusion was no longer credible. Turning to the party’s failure to support his motion, Burke admits that he made it against their advice: I was resolved to take my own way, and to leave them to take theirs. So I made the motion; and the Event is such as you have seen. I am happy to find you think me in the Right: I am sure I should not have slept as well as I have done since that time, if I had been persuaded to omit a protest against the doctrines in the Speech from the Throne . . . I was thoroughly convinced, not only of the rectitude, but of the prudence and propriety of the act; and I am so little ashamed of the reception which my Motion met with (which was indeed with apparent uneasiness on our side, and with all kind of Boyish petulance and insolence on the other) that I am resolved to reprint it in a seperate Pamphlet with Notes and references; and to send it to every part of the Kingdom; and to get it translated into French, and to circulate it in every Country in Europe. (155–6)

Burke duly published the pamphlet, though the planned French translation never materialized.158 Indeed, the form of the motion rendered it virtually unintelligible outside Britain. Rarely had Burke shown such unshakeable confidence in his own rectitude. Repudiated by the people and unsupported even by his own party, he determines to appeal to Europe and to posterity. The Representation marks a new development. Unwilling to defer to Fox as he had to Rockingham, Burke increasingly struck out on his own, impatient of what the party leaders wanted, even deliberately courting isolation. Though he did not break with Fox until 1791, in 1784 he was already unhappy with the direction in which Fox had taken the old Rockingham party. The Representation, considered as a political gesture, is inexplicable. Only in psychological terms, as a declaration of personal independence, as a way of purging the discontents that had been festering in his mind, does it make sense. Burke suffered a second self-induced humiliation on 30 July, when he moved for a series of papers relative to Almas Ali Khan (d. 1808), a high official in the state of Oudh, for whose (reported) death he believed Hastings to have been responsible. This motion was ostentatiously seconded by his enemy Major Scott, who averred that Hastings had nothing to hide. Burke spoke again, and the papers were ordered without a division. Burke then rose yet again to make another motion for papers, this time relative to the case of the Begums of Oudh, the two Indian princesses who became 158 A Representation to His Majesty, Moved in the House of Commons [etc.] (London, 1784). Todd, 45a; pub. 5 July (W ii. 249–76; PH xxiv. 943–75). Evidence of E.B.’s determined ‘circulation’ of the pamphlet is the survival of a presentation copy to so slight an acquaintance as Lord Daer (1763–94; son of the Earl of Selkirk). Daer was one of the party that accompanied E.B. from Edinburgh to Glasgow (Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 204). Later owned by Dugald Stewart, Daer’s copy is now in the Edinburgh University Library (D. S. 1. 13 20/1).

paradise lost, 1781‒1784 543 household names in 1787, when their ill-treatment was made the subject of the second article of impeachment against Hastings (WS vi. 147–56). Called to order by Pitt, Burke launched into a long, rambling speech against Hastings. George Dempster (1732–1818) spoke briefly in his defence. When Burke rose again (for the fifth time) he was greeted with ‘a loud and continued clamour’. William Wyndham Grenville objected to his monopolizing the floor. Burke rose again in explanation, but the order of the day was called for and a motion made that the speaker should leave the chair, the formal preliminary to the House going into committee. Burke thereupon rose yet again, claiming the right to speak on this new motion. Wholly unabashed by the obvious impatience of his audience, he not only defended himself but read the ‘long string of motions’ which Grenville’s interruption had prevented him making, promising to bring them forward later. Meanwhile, he pledged himself in a theatrical gesture. Brandishing a volume of the reports of the select committee as though it were a Bible, he swore ‘that the wrongs done to humanity in the eastern world, shall be avenged on those who have inflicted them: they will find, when the measure of their iniquity is full, that Providence was not asleep. The wrath of Heaven would sooner or later fall upon a nation, that suffers, with impunity, its rulers thus to oppress the weak and innocent.’159 Thus was foreshadowed, in language as well as in substance, Burke’s crusade to bring Hastings to justice. The House received an ominous foretaste of the pertinacity with which, undeterred by the laughs or jeers of ‘juvenile statesmen’, he would pursue Hastings and force the affairs of India on a reluctant Parliament. As a prominent member of the discredited Coalition, Burke might prudently have avoided obtruding himself on the new House of Commons. Such cowardice was foreign to his nature. Though his great set speeches had always drawn crowded benches, and he had often amused or diverted the House when he could not convince or persuade, Burke had occasionally experienced difficulty in gaining a hearing.160 As early as 1774, Goldsmith had jibed that Burke ‘thought of convincing, while they thought of dining’. In 1778, however, in Richard Tickell’s satire Anticipation, which parodies the regular speakers, David Hartley (c.1730–1813) is the bore whose rise provokes the instant retreat of ‘the dinner troop’.161 Burke’s reputation as the ‘dinner-bell’ of the House dates from about 1783. Major Scott, wishing to denigrate Burke’s great speech of 1 December 1783, referred to the ‘members who retired to dinner when you got up’, confident that they had WS v. 460–78 (E.B.’s speeches); Debrett, xvi. 289–311 (PH xxiv. 1252–3). An early example is the debate on the prorogation of the Irish Parliament, 3 May 1770; BL Egerton MS 222, fos. 99–104. 161 Goldsmith, Retaliation, line 36; Richard Tickell, Anticipation, ed. L. H. Butterfield (New York, 1942), 29–30. 159 160

544 paradise lost, 1781‒1784 ‘full two hours of spare time’.162 When Hartley lost his seat at the 1784 election, the ‘dinner-bell’ sobriquet was easily transferred to Burke. At 54, he was made more acutely conscious of his age by the supercilious treatment he received from new, young members who had not heard his great speeches and for whom he was only a laughable old bore. On 16 June, he stormed out of the chamber after being denied a hearing in a debate on parliamentary reform.163 An American loyalist, hearing of Burke’s discomfiture, reported that ‘the St Omer’s hero hath been hissed out of the House’.164 These incidents illustrate one of Burke’s more heroic qualities, in the words of Milton’s Satan, ‘the unconquerable will . . . and courage never to submit or yield’. Still possessed of vast energies of mind and capable of intense application, once recovered from the shock of the 1784 election, he would find new causes to champion. The ageing firebrand Wilkes would soon confess himself ‘a Volcano burnt out’.165 Burke’s old age proved anything but anticlimactic. One great crusade he had already undertaken, the fight to obtain justice against Warren Hastings. A second would come with the French Revolution. The last thirteen years would prove the fullest, the most exciting, and the most controversial of Burke’s life. Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Paymaster General, 5. Debrett, xv. 207–8 (PH xxiv. 1000–1). Thomas Orde to the Duke of Rutland, 17 June 1784, HMC Rutland, iii. 110. 164 Peter Oliver to Elisha Hutchinson, 8 Jul. 1784, in Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, ed. Peter Orlando Hutchinson (London, 1883–6), ii. 407. 165 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 3 Apr. 1788; other versions of the anecdote are recorded in Horace Bleackley, Life of John Wilkes (London, 1917), 315. 162 163

index

545

Index Abdy, Sir Anthony 273 Abingdon, Willoughby Bertie, Earl of 407–8 Academy of Belles Lettres 48–52, 345 n. Account of the European Settlements in America 125–41, 174 authorship 74, 127, 130, 132 date of composition 129–30 economic ideas 133–4, 225, 253 ethnographic material 97, 136–8, 172, 423 individuals in 130–40, 154, 163 sources and source criticism 128–9, 130, 136–8, 149 topicality 125–6, 129, 131–2, 133–6 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord 164 Addison, Joseph 56, 94 n., 110 n., 113 religious ideas 99, 114–15 on the sublime 103 on taste 115, 117 on words 105 n. ‘Additional Reflexions on the Executions’ 469 ‘Address to the King’ 403–4, 405, 541 Aeschines 36 Aesop 132, 482 Africa Company 413–14, 457 n., 489 Aitken, James 408 Alfred, King of England 104, 147, 157, 160–2, 171 E.B.’s play about 162 Almas Ali Khan 542 Almon, John 302 Amelia, Princess 203 America: in Account of the European Settlements 125–41 Georgia 129 n., 130, 197 Jesuits in Paraguay 128, 132–3, 174 Salem trials 133 American colonies, Britain and: Boston Massacre 291 Boston Tea Party 315, 349 Coercive Acts 350–1, 356, 383, 396, 397 Declaration of Independence 399 taxation of 260–1, 262 Townshend duties 247, 259, 264, 314, 353 Treason Act applied to 266 war with, popularity of 356 n., 378, 393, 538 see also Stamp Act, repeal of American Treasons Act 405, 407 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 146 animals, souls of 44–5, 47 Annual Register 90, 165–79, 189, 190, 194, 205 analysis of contents 169–78

authorship 166 biographical value 167, 172–3, 174–5, 178 contract for 165 pagination, note on 168 n. precursors 128, 168 readership 167–8, 178–9 reviews in 142, 175–8, 186, 188, 193 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham-Hyacinthe 174 Anson, George 129 n. Apollonius Rhodius 132 Aram, Eugene 172 Arcot, Nabob of, see Carnatic, Nawab of the Ardesoif, Abraham 49 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, Duke of 186 aristocracy 157, 248 n., 282–3, 446, 452–3, 483–4 fear of 294, 432, 483–4 ‘great oaks’ image 339–40 and literary patronage 363–4 Aristotle 45, 132 n., 137, 282, 386 Armstrong, John 116 n. Arthur, King 149 n. ‘Articles of Impeachment’ 444, 522 Asser, Bishop 161 Atterbury, Francis 403 Aubrey, John 158 Auxerre 342–3 Avebury 158–9 Bacon, Francis 240 Bagehot, Walter 507 Bagot, Sir William 289–91, 300, 324, 410–11 Baker, William 221 n., 421, 539, 541–2 Baldwin, Richard 33, 34–5 Ballitore, EB’s poem on 12, 26, 75 School 7 n., 20, 22–3, 25, 26, 48 Baltimore, Charles Calvert, Lord 139–40 Barré, Isaac 460, 523 Barret, George 535 Barrington, Shute 285 n. Barry, James 106 assisted by E.B. and W.B. 203–4, 249 and Fox 368, 432, pl. 22 Philosophical Enquiry, influence on 107 n. portrait of Nugent 74, pl. 6 portraits of, and quarrel with, E.B. 364–8, pls. 19–22 Bath 74, 371 Bathurst, Allen, Lord 384 Battersea 179 Beaconsfield (E.B.’s estate) 249–58, 297, 418, 540, pl. 16

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Beaconsfield (E.B.’s estate) (cont.) art collection 106, 255–6 farm and farming 233, 249, 270, 297, 315–19, 336, 418 house 254–5, pls. 12–14, fig. 3 visitors 255–6, 370, 418, 488, 540–1 Waller, dispute with 391 Beattie, James 343–4 Beauchamp, Francis Seymour Conway, styled Viscount 120, 445, 456, 474–5 Beauclerk, Topham 204, 333 Becket, Thomas 157, 163 Beckford, William 223 Bede 146, 152, 160 Bedford, Francis Russell, 5th Duke of 9–10 Bedford, John Russell, 4th Duke of 267, 283, 284 Bedingfield, Robert 184 Bembridge, Charles 523–5 Benfield, Paul 416, 485–6, 501 Bengal Judicature Act 488–9, 526, 528 Berkeley, George 59, 105, 124 Bible 105, 112–13, 150, 331–2 Genesis 338, 539 2 Kings 113 Job 45, 113, 114, 302, 367–8, 532 Psalms 113, 268 Isaiah 355 Bel and the Dragon 304 Matthew 263, 268, 304 Mark 304 Luke 267, 268 John 439 Acts 355 Bingham, Sir Charles 346 Birmingham Playhouse Bill 409–11 Bisset, Robert 8 Bitaubé, Paul-Jérémie 131 n. Blacklock, Thomas 184 Blackstone, William: on the constitution 151, 282 n., 331 on the law 263, 521 on legal education 69, 70 Blackwater, E.B.’s poem on 52, 92 n. Blaquiere, John 345 Board of Trade 135, 188, 507, 511 and Africa Co. 414, 489 and economical reform 452, 457–8 and New York legislation 312–13, 315 Bodley, Mr 82, 181 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 103 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount 82–5, 125, 143 Booksellers’ Bill 362–4 Borgia, Cesare 516 Borlase, William 158 n. Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 152

Boswell, James 123, 179, 204, 525 and Account of the European Settlements 127, 131, 139 n. conversations with E.B. 72, 187, 333–4, 525 on E.B. as speaker 268, 292, 497 on Fox’s India Bill 537 at Glasgow 537–8 patronage requests 509 on Scottish Catholics 438 Botetourt, Norborne Berkeley, Lord 287 Boulter, Hugh 4 Boulton, Matthew 302 Bourdieu, James 493 n. Bourke, Edmund 14, 17 Bourke, John 414 Bowie, Patrick 439 Boyce, William 340 Boyle, Richard 40 Braddock, Edward 125 Bradshaw, Thomas 272 Brady, Robert 146 Brenan, Beaumont 52, 55–7, 181–2 Brickdale, Matthew 479, 480 E.B.’s opponent at Bristol 372, 374–7, 379, 472, 476–8 parliamentary diarist 248 Bristol 215, 371–8, 396, 479–80 and America 373, 376, 393, 397, 400, 474 anti-Catholicism at 438, 475–6 character of the city 373–4 Common Council 400, 401, 408, 449 electorate 374, 472, 476 and economical reform 449 and Irish trade 225, 428–9, 445, 473, 474 Merchants’ Hall (Society of Merchant Venturers) 400, 408, 411, 428, 445 parliamentary reform popular at 464, 465 soap makers 411–12, 418 theatres, opposition to 409–10 Whigs and Tories at 374–5, 380, 471–2, 473, 476, 477–8, 480 Bristol, E.B. and: dinners given by 408–9, 421–2 1774 election 369–70, 370–1, 373, 375–8, 471 1780 election 225, 476–7, 481 1781 election 479–80 Letter to the Sheriffs 404–6 local business 379, 385, 389–91, 397–8 reluctance to visit 401, 409, 429, 474 triumphal entry 379–80 visits 393, 400–1 Bristol, E.B.’s speeches at: on arrival (13 Oct. 1774) 373 at close of poll (3 Nov. 1774) 280 n., 377–8 Guildhall speech (6 Sept. 1780) 473–6 on withdrawal (9 Sept. 1780) 476 Brocklesby, Richard 23, 207, 364

index Brougham, Henry 295 Brown, John 78, 134–5, 178, 261, 277, 282 n., 394 Bruce, George 81 n. Bruce, Thomas Brudenell, Lord 214 n. Buck, Andrew 49, 51 Buckinghamshire politics 271–2, 273, 368, 461– 2 county elections 440–2, 443, 538 E.B.’s letter to the county meeting (1780) 462–3, 467 Buckle, Henry Thomas 308, 522 Bulkley, Charles 83 n. Bullock, Joseph 288 Bunyan, John 117 Burgersdijck, Franco 37 Burgh, James 283 n., 294 n., 466 n. Burgh, Thomas 445–6 Burgoyne, John 520 in America 420, 422, 425, 426 exchange with Laurens proposed 493–4 refuge for J.B. 468 Burke, Christopher 90, 180, 181, 191, 192 n. Burke, Edmund, biographical outline: family background 3–15, 20–1 birth 16–18 early education 21–7 Trinity College, Dublin (1744–8) 29–43 debating club (1747) 48–52 mystery project (1747) 54, 92 n. move to London (1750) 64–8 law student 65, 66–73 early writings 77–80 marriage (1757) 89–90 ‘design’ in America (1757) 126 seeks Madrid consulship (1759) 188, 198 secretary to W. G. Hamilton (1759) 188–90, 191 in Dublin (1761–2) 191–2 pension (1763) 198–202, 205, 206 in Dublin (1763–4) 202 seeks agency for West Indies (1764) 205 private secretary to Lord Rockingham (1765) 209, 212–14 elected MP for Wendover (1765) 15, 215–16 visits Ireland (1766) 15, 231–2 agent for New York Assembly (1770) 309 offered position on East India Company commission 334–5 visits France (1773) 342–3 elected MP for Bristol (1774) 376 elected MP for Malton (1780) 479 Paymaster-General and Privy Councillor (1782) 507–9, 511–12 resignation 514 Paymaster-General (1783) 522, 523–5, 534

547

elected Lord Rector of University of Glasgow (1783) and visits Scotland (1784) 536–8 Burke, Edmund, calumny and abuse: aristocratic tendencies 294, 375–6, 483–4 crypto-Catholic 213, 324, 332, 375–6, 396, 516, 535 educated at St Omer’s 182, 290, 324, 376 inconsistencies 461, 482 n., 509, 515 Irishman 10, 272, 293, 516 Jesuit 123, 290, 324, 332, 535 Junius 269, 293, 324 madman 468, 514, 525 ‘new man’ 10, 272, 290–1 New York agent 311, 375, 384, 388, 417 speculator in stocks 272, 417 ‘sublime and beautiful’ 123 Burke, Edmund, caricatures 123, 468 n., 516, 533, 535, 539, pls. 7, 26–31 Burke, Edmund, finances: bequest from father 192 Clerk of the Pells incident 514–15 Clogher, income from 232–3, 345 the ‘common purse’ 237, 257 debts 140, 214, 252, 257, 417–18, 513 farms, rental of 316 Gregories, purchase of 250–3, 256, 271 loan from Garrick 184 mortgage (1778) 257 New York Assembly, salary from 311–12 Paymaster-General, emoluments 508–9 payments for writings 82 n., 90, 109 n., 125, 144, 165 payments from Hamilton 189 payments from Rockingham 216 n. pension (1763) 198–9, 206 Burke, Edmund, portraits 230–1, 293, 364–8, 394–5 Burke, Edmund, speeches in Parliament: 17 Jan. 1766 (Stamp Act) 219 3 Feb. 1766 (Stamp Act) 220–1 21 Feb. 1766 (Stamp Act) 221 15 May 1766 (Irish soap) 225 11 Nov. 1766 (provisions) 234–5 9 Dec. 1766 (East India Co.) 239 10 Feb. 1767 (Navy estimates) 239–40 26 May 1767 (Dividend Bill) 238 24 Nov. 1767 (address) 243, 341 25 Nov. 1767 (Grenville) 243 17 Feb. 1768 (Nullum Tempus) 245, 246, 265 n. 13 May 1768 (riots) 248 8 Nov. 1768 (Corsica) 266 23 Nov. 1768 (St George’s Fields) 248 n. 26 Jan. 1769 (America) 265 n., 266 27 Jan. 1769 (Wilkes) 268 3 Feb. 1769 (Wilkes) 268 28 Feb. 1769 (Civil List) 267, 278 n.

548

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Burke, Edmund, speeches in Parliament: (cont.) 1 Mar. 1769 (Civil List) 268 8 Mar. 1769 (St George’s Fields) 248 n., 265, 267 8 May 1769 (Wilkes) 271 9 Jan. 1770 (Address) 287 8 Mar. 1770 (Carmarthen) 215 n., 288–9 28 Mar. 1770 (corn) 322 30 Mar. 1770 (Bagot) 290 2 Apr. 1770 (Bagot) 10, 290–1, 300 2 May 1770 (linen) 280, 293 3 May 1770 (Irish prorogation) 292, 543 n. 9 May 1770 (America) 265 n., 291, 293 13 Nov. 1770 (Falklands) 299–300 16 Nov. 1770 (corn) 321–2 22 Nov. 1770 (Falklands) 300–1 6 Dec. 1770 (juries) 303–4 25 Jan. 1771 (Falklands) 301–2 7 Mar. 1771 (juries) 304 12 Mar. 1771 (printers) 305–6 27 Mar. 1771 (printers) 306 25 Apr. 1771 (St George’s Fields) 248 n. 6 Feb. 1772 (Feathers Tavern) 330–1 17 Feb. 1772 (Church Nullum Tempus Bill) 332–3 11 Mar. 1772 (Royal Marriage Bill) 329 16 Mar. 1772 (Royal Marriage Bill) 329–30 30 Mar. 1772 (East India Judicature) 337 3 Apr. 1772 (Dissenters) 333 14 Apr. 1772 (corn) 321 30 Apr. 1772 (corn) 322 4 May 1772 (corn) 322, 323 20 May 1772 (Africa Co.) 414 3 June 1772 (Lords’ amendments) 321 7 Dec. 1772 (East India Co.) 338 18 Dec. 1772 (East India Co.) 338 17 Mar. 1773 (Dissenters) 83, 343 26 Mar. 1773 (corn) 341 5 Apr. 1773 (‘the people’) 340 2 Mar. 1774 (Poor Law) 359–60 3 Mar. 1774 (Selby Canal) 361, 398 7 Mar. 1774 (America) 350–1 25 Mar. 1774 (America) 351 19 Apr. 1774 see Speech on American Taxation 2 May 1774 (America) 356 13 May 1774 (Booksellers’ Bill) 363–4 31 May 1774 (Quebec Bill) 357 6 June 1774 (Quebec Bill) 358 7 June 1774 (Quebec Bill) 358 10 June 1774 (Quebec Bill) 358 5 Dec. 1774 (America) 381 27 Jan. 1775 (Birmingham Petition) 410 n. 1 Feb. 1775 (Birmingham Petition) 410 n. 22 Mar. 1775 see Speech on Conciliation 28 Apr. 1775 (Somerset House) 483 11 May 1775 (Champion’s patent) 410 n. 3 Nov. 1775 (America) 425 n.

8 Nov. 1775 (Army estimates) 394 n. 16 Nov. 1775 (America) 396–7 12 Feb. 1776 (Stroudwater Navigation) 397– 8 27 Mar. 1776 (plundering of wrecks) 391 n. 30 Apr. 1776 (plundering of wrecks) 391 n. 6 Nov. 1776 (America) 402, 425 n. 26 Mar. 1777 (Birmingham Playhouse) 410 16 Apr. 1777 (Civil List) 413 18 Apr. 1777 (Civil List) 413 29 Apr. 1777 (Birmingham Playhouse) 410–11 22 May 1777 (East India Co.) 415 2 June 1777 (Africa Co.) 414 2 Dec. 1777 (motion for papers) 424, 435 n. 3 Dec. 1777 (Army estimates) 425 4 Dec. 1777 (America) 423 10 Dec. 1777 (America) 423 22 Jan. 1778 (voluntary subscriptions) 356, 424 29 Jan. 1778 (clearing of gallery) 426 6 Feb. 1778 (Indian allies) 423–4 13 Feb. 1778 (Navy estimates) 426 9 Mar. 1778 (tax on places) 447 n. 26 Mar. 1778 (Indian allies) 424 2 Apr. 1778 (Irish trade) 427–8 6 Apr. 1778 (America) 435 n. 4 May 1778 (Irish trade) 428 6 May 1778 (vote of credit) 424–5 6 May 1778 (Irish trade) 428 n., 429 19 May 1778 (Irish trade) 429 n. 4 Dec. 1778 (America) 434–5 14 Dec. 1778 (Army estimates) 435 1 Mar. 1779 (budget) 435 15 Mar. 1779 (Keppel) 437 n. 18 Mar. 1779 (Scottish Catholics) 438–9 31 May 1779 (supply) 436 25 Nov. 1779 (address) 444–5 6 Dec. 1779 (Irish trade) 445 15 Dec. 1779 (economical reform) 425, 448– 9, 450 28 Jan. 1780 (economical reform) 449 8 Feb. 1780 (Bristol petition) 449 11 Feb. 1780 see Speech on Economical Reformation 23 Feb. 1780 (economical reform) 455 2 Mar. 1780 (economical reform) 455–6 8 Mar. 1780 (third Secretary of State) 456 13 Mar. 1780 (commission of accounts) 460 n. 13 Mar. 1780 (Board of Trade) 456–8 20 Mar. (subordinate treasuries) 458 10 Apr. 1780 (placemen) 460–1 11 Apr. 1780 (pillory) 464 28 Apr. 1780 (economical reform) 458–9 8 May 1780 (shorter parliaments) 465–6, 472, 478

index 2 June 1780 (Gordon’s petition) 467–8 5 July 1780 (Wales and Chester) 459 15 Feb. 1781 (economical reform) 481 26 Feb. 1781 (economical reform) 481–2 8 Mar. 1781 (budget) 482 30 Apr. 1781 (India) 491 14 May 1781 (St Eustatius) 495–6, 497 21 May 1781 (Board of Works) 482 15 June 1781 (Marriage Act) 483–4 27 June 1781 (Bengal Judicature Bill) 490 27 Nov. 1781 (address) 501–2 3 Dec. 1781 (Laurens) 493 4 Dec. 1781 (St Eustatius) 496–7 12 Dec. 1781 (America) 502 n. 17 Dec. 1781 (Laurens) 493–4 20 Dec. 1781 (Laurens) 494 4 Feb. 1782 (Hoheb) 498 22 Feb. 1782 (Ellis) 503 n. 8 Mar. 1782 (Ellis) 503 n. 20 Mar. 1782 (North’s resignation) 503, 505–6 13 June 1782 (economical reform) 511 14 June 1782 (economical reform) 511–12 9 July 1782 (resignation) 514, 516 5 Dec. 1782 (economical reform) 512 6 Dec. 1782 (address) 519–20 14 Apr. 1783 (East India Co.) 526 2 May 1783 (Bembridge and Powell) 523 19 May 1783 (Bembridge and Powell) 524 21 May 1783 (Bembridge and Powell) 524 2 June 1783 (Bembridge and Powell) 524 1 Dec. 1783 see Speech on Fox’s India Bill 31 May 1784 (address) 539–40 8 June 1784 (Westminster scrutiny) 540 14 June 1784 see A Representation to His Majesty 16 June 1784 (parliamentary reform) 544 30 July 1784 (Almas Ali Khan) 542–3 28 Feb. 1785 see Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts 16 May 1787 (corn) 322 11 May 1792 (Unitarians) 27, 343 Burke, Edmund, writings and published speeches, see under titles Burke, Garrett 7, 21, 68, 232–3, 252 Burke, James 14, 17 Burke, Jane 296, 380, 468, 469, 501, 509 character 88–9 home life 181, 191, 326, 418 marriage and children 89–90, 179 widowhood 256, 257, 316, 417 Burke, John 65 Burke, Juliana 7, 17, 378 Burke, Mary (E.B.’s mother) 7, 13–15, 21, 231 Burke, Mary (daughter of preceding) 17 Burke, Richard (E.B.’s father) 3–8, 21, 65, 232, 252

549

Arran Quay, house on 18–20 attorney 3–4, 11–13 background 3, 10–11 character 7–8, 13, 50 marriage 13 relations with E.B. 13, 15, 26, 68, 81–2, 191 religion 4–6, 66 will 7–8, 17 Burke, Richard, Sr. (E.B.’s brother) 7, 16 n., 181, 270, 418, 509 education 7 n., 21, 68 and West Indies 127 n., 180, 197, 198, 257, 296–7 Burke, Richard, Jr. (E.B.’s son) 181, 191, 323, 500–1, 508, 514–15 birth 90, 179 education 326, 378, 501 France, visit to 342 Burke, William 81, 96, 227, 252, 370, 391 and Account of the European Settlements 74, 125–7, 129–30 character of J.B. by 88–9 Deputy Paymaster in India 508–9 East India speculations 235, 237–8, 249, 253, 257, 270–1, 417 E.B., friendship with 65–6, 90, 179, 181, 323 E.B., summer rambles with 73–4, 75, 76, 78 and Guadeloupe 126–7, 180, 197, 213 in Parliament 215, 220 n., 305 on Rockingham and E.B. 478 sketch of, by E.B. 66 Under-Secretary of State 66, 212, 228 and Tanjore 416, 417, 485, 501 and Lord Verney 198, 208, 214–15, 253 writings by 79, 127 n., 197 n., 415 n., 527 Burney, Charles 58, 534 Burney, Frances 27, 517–19 Bute, John Stuart, Earl of 199, 211, 228, 229, 264, 279 caricatured 203, 212, pls. 8–9 and ‘new Toryism’ 190 and Peace of Paris 129, 197 resignation 198, 202 ‘secret influence’ of 212, 221, 227, 229, 245 in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 277–8 see also ‘system of favouritism’ Butler, Charles 36, 75 Butler, Samuel 517 Butler’s Court, see Beaconsfield Butterfield, Herbert 164 Byng, John 437 Byron, Frederick George 468 n. Cabinet, the 72, 505–6 Caesar, Julius 36, 104, 146, 147, 158, 159 n. Cambridge, University of 30, 32–3, 42

550

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Camden, Charles Pratt, Lord 286, 287, 303 Campbell, Colen 254, pl. 12 Campbell, Lord Frederick 219 Campbell, John 128–9, 130 n., 131 Camper, Pieter 392 Carlisle, Frederick Howard, Earl of 457 n., 507 Carmarthen 214–15 n., 288–9 Carnatic, Nawab of the (‘Nabob of Arcot’) 414– 16, 485, 527 Carte, Thomas: General History of England 141, 145 compared with E.B.’s 149, 154 n., 156, 158– 63 Cartwright, John 353, 367 n., 407 n., 466 n. Catesby, Mark 129 n. Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England 244 Catiline 516 Cave, Edward 168 Cavendish family 420–1, 441 Cavendish, Henry 248 Cavendish, Lord John 228, 306, 449, 505 n., 516, 536, 539 on America 397 and E.B. 213, 289, 290 on reform of Parliament 465 Rockingham party, leader of 381, 401, 402, 444 on royal prerogative 515 and ‘snug chaste corps’ 520 on toleration 332 Cavendish, Lord Richard 430, 500 Cebes 36 Censor Extraordinary 61–2, 63 Centlivre, Susanna 27 Cervantes 117, 143 n., 329, 424, 468 Chait Singh, Raja of Benares 531 Chalmers, George 406–7 Chambers, Robert 189 Chamier, Anthony 204 Champion, Judith 380, 418 Champion, Richard 396, 400, 508 Beaconsfield, guest at 418 and Bristol elections 370–1, 373, 375, 471, 476 and Bristol local business 389–90 Cruger, dislike of 379–80, 398 personal favours from E.B. 390, 409, 411 tea-service presented to J.B. 380, pl. 23 ‘Character of [Jane Nugent], The’ 88 ‘Character of the Same Lady Drawn by a Friend, A’ 88 Charlemont, James Caulfeild, Earl of 5, 183, 189, 213 Charles I, King of England 282, 288 Charles XII, King of Sweden 154 Charles, Robert 309

Chatham, William Pitt, later Earl of 211, 284, 285, 298, 299, 347 and America 309–10, 382, 386 n., 393, 427 death and funeral 427 on East India Co. 236 on E.B. 221, 233–4 and free ports 223–4, 234 on Jury Bill 303 and ‘measures, not men’ 234 n., 239, 278, 303, 434, 515 ministry (1766) and breakdown 238–9, 241, 354, 427, 433 peerage 228 and pensions 200–1 return to politics (1770) 286, 292 E.B. on 238–9, 240, 275, 283, 354–5, 537 and Rockingham ministry and party 227, 228, 231, 298, 448 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of 77 Choiseul, Étienne-François, duc de 301 Cholmondeley, George 541 Churchill, Charles 175, 282 n. Cibber, Colley 53 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 10 n., 36, 63, 146, 424, 425, 533 Civil List 267, 268, 448 and economical reform 456, 512 in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 278, 413 Clare, Robert Nugent, Viscount; later Earl Nugent 466, 471 and Bristol 372, 374, 375, 388, 389, 477 career 372–3 and Irish trade 427, 429 on the Poor Law 360 reform, opposition to 459, 465, 482 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of 142, 171–2 Clarendon, Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of 178 Clerke, Sir Philip Jennings 436 n. Clifton 74, 75 Clive, Robert, Viscount 236 Clogher 232–3, 249, 345 clubs: Academy of Belles Lettres 48–52, 345 n. Literary Club 204–5, 412 Coalition, the Fox–North 520–1, 522–3, 524, 533–5, 537, 543 caricatured 123, 516, 535 Cockburne, George, 476 n. Coke, Sir Edward 70 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 135–6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 344 n. Collins, Moses 41 Columbus, Christopher 138–9 Combe, Richard 472, 473, 476, 479

index Condamine, Charles-Marie de la 129 n. Condillac, Étienne, abbé de 92, 105 contractors, government 436 Controverted Elections Act (Grenville’s) 288–9 Conway, Henry Seymour 212, 221, 228, 509 attacked by E.B. 239–40, 248, 289, 300–1 and East India Co. 236 on E.B.’s prospect of the Cabinet 505 on ‘measures, not men’ 515 and repeal of the Stamp Act 355 seeks to recruit E.B. 235, 325 Cooke, William 158 n. Cooper, Sir Grey 226, 278 n. Cooper, John Gilbert 92, 98, 105 n., 106, 116, 184 Cornwallis, Charles, Earl 501 Corsica 264, 266 Cortés, Hernán 130, 138–9, 149 Cotter, James 6–7 Cotter, Joseph 55 Courtenay, John 481–2 Cowper, William 67 Crabbe, George 498–500 Crisp, Samuel 518 Critical Review 168, 177 Cromwell, Oliver 172 Crosby, Brass 305, 306 Crown, the: constitutional role of 59, 281, 452, 456, 537 economical reform and the influence of 447, 448–52, 454, 462, 512 influence of 337, 436, 464, 466 legislative veto 405 prerogative of appointing ministers 211, 281, 433, 504–5, 515, 538–9 ‘storming the closet’ 276, 504–5, 521 Cruger, Henry (d. 1780) 313 Cruger, Henry (1739–1827) 466, 479–80 and Bristol elections 372, 375–8, 471, 473 pension 413 relations with E.B. and his supporters 379, 380, 398–9, 477 Cruger, John 310, 372 Cullen, Matthew 45–6 Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke of 211– 12 Daer, Basil William Douglas, styled Lord 542 n. Daily Courant 167 Dalrymple, John 145 n., 149 n. Dalzel, Andrew 537 Damer family 4 Daniel, Samuel 148 n. Darcy, Patrick 392–3 Darling, Sir Robert 247 n. De La Warr, Thomas West, Lord 139–40

551

De Lancey, James (1703–60) 309 De Lancey, James (1732–1800) 309, 311–12, 314 Deaver, John 25 Declaration of Rights 384 Declaratory Act: E.B. anticipates 221 E.B. supports 350, 351, 388, 396, 397, 405 opposition to 224, 234, 382, 396, 407, 435 Rockingham party’s commitment to 229, 259, 310, 393, 400, 405 Defoe, Daniel 76, 85 Delany, Patrick 525 Demosthenes 36 Dempster, George 543 Denham, John 52 Dennis, John 103 Dennis, William 191 early friend of E.B. 42, 44, 49–50, 53 n., 54, 55, 92 lost letters to 59 on the Philosophical Enquiry 100, 107 and the Reformer 56–8 suspects E.B. of writing pamphlets 77 Depont, Charles-Jean-François 26 Desfrançois, Louis-Antoine 120 Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of 123, pl. 7 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of 213 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 4th Duke of 210, 213 Dick, Sir Alexander 522 Diderot, Denis 64, 81, 120 Dignan, David Brown 492 Dillon Lee, Charles 509 Diocletian 297 Diodorus Siculus 158 divorce 307–8 Dodsley, James 82, 499 Dodsley, Robert 175, 182 and Annual Register 128, 165, 167, 168, 175, 178 and E.B.’s ‘History of England’ 143–4, 148, 201 literary dinner 183–4, 186 publisher of E.B.’s early works 82, 109 n., 125 Douglass, William 129 n. Dowdeswell, William 234, 239, 242, 306, 525, 539 Chancellor of the Exchequer 212 illness, death, and E.B.’s epitaph on 380–1 indifference to office 329 and Observations on a Late State of the Nation 261–2 in Parliament 220, 243, 265, 266, 287, 304 and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 275

552

index

Dowdeswell, William (cont.) his ‘Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs’ 241, 274 on Wilkes 280 n. Druids 147, 156, 157–60, 174 n., 333 Dryden, John 53, 155 n., 240, 496–7 Dublin 18, 60–2, 483 Arran Quay 19–20 Dublin Society 319, 336 see also Trinity College, Dublin Dubos, Jean-Baptiste 93, 104–5, 122 Dugdale, William 146 Dundas, Henry 483, 489 exchanges with E.B. in Parliament 444, 461 and India 526 and Scottish Catholics 437–8 and University of Glasgow 536, 538 n. Dunning, John 396, 427 n., 460–1, 475, 506, 520 his motion (6 Apr. 1780) 460, 480 Du Pré, James 316, 417 Du Pré, Josias 416–17 Duperron, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil- 174 Dyer, Samuel 335–6 East India Company 235–8, 336–7, 349, 436 Dividend Bill 237–8 E.B. acquires stock qualification 485 E.B. offered position as supervisor 334 General Court, E.B.’s speeches in 485–6 Judicature Bill (1772) 337–8 Judicature Bill (1781) 488–9 North’s Act (1773) 337–8, 340, 484, 486, 526, 530 parliamentary committees (1772) 338 Regulating Act (1781) 486 secret committee (1781) 491 select committee (1781) and its reports 486– 8, 526–8, 529, 543 speculations in stock 236–8, 253, 270 Tanjore dispute 414–16, 485 Echard, Laurence 141, 148 n. economical reform 446–59, 462, 480–3, 509, 515 Burke’s Act 507, 511–12, 524 see also Speech on Economical Reformation economics: canals 360–1, 397–8 capital levy 435 child labour 76–7 cloth trade 76 colonies, value of 126, 129, 131–6, 388, 399, 432 copyright 362–4 Corn Laws 319–23, 389–90 debtors, insolvent 474–5 free ports 217 n., 223–4, 234

freedom of trade 133–4, 175, 293, 428–9 linen 173, 293 luxury 135, 138, 277, 360 monopolies 131, 133, 363, 528, 530 population 360 property 58–9, 249–50, 253, 347, 452 recoinage 349 see also Board of Trade; Ireland, economics; and poverty and the poor Eden, William 454 n., 457–8, 539 Edinburgh: E.B. visits 536–7, 538 Select Society 116 University 42 Edward I, King of England 397 Egmont, John Perceval, Earl of 229 Eldon, John Scott, Earl of 308 elections and electioneering 60–1, 205, 214–16, 465–6, pl. 7 elections, general: (1768) 247 (1774) 364, 368–78 (1780) 470–9 (1784) 292, 395, 535–6, 538–9 Eliot, George 88 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 172 Elliot, Sir Gilbert (1722–77) 382, 487 Elliot, Sir Gilbert (1751–1814) 487–8 Ellis, Welbore 347–8, 382, 503 Emin, Joseph 82, 181, 492 English, Thomas 166 Enquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans, An 127 n., 527 Entick v. Carrington 303 Epictetus 36, 46 ‘Epistle to Dr Nugent’ 75 Ericeira, Luiz de Menezes, conde da 136 n. Erskine, John 439–40, 475 Esdall, James 62 ‘Essay towards an History of the Laws of England’ 71, 150 Falkland Islands 299, 301–2 Farr, John 401 Farr, Paul 396, 399, 401 Ferguson, Adam 137 n. Fernandez, Geronimo 44, 117–18, 157 Fielding, Henry 73, 79, 116 n., 182, 500, 537 Filmer, Francis 81 n. Finch, Savile 371, 479 Fitzgerald, Robert 222 n. Fitzherbert, William 213, 215 n., 222, 228 Fitzwilliam, William, Earl 513, 514, 519, 536 Flood, Henry 445–6 Foljambe, Francis 536 Foote, Samuel 57, 487 Fox, Charles James 425, 449, 458, 466, 505 n.

index and America 404, 423, 426 break with E.B. after French Revolution 432, 512 n. in caricatures 123 (pl. 7), 533 (pl. 29), 535 (pls. 26, 30), 539 (pl. 31) E.B.’s disenchantment with 542 Greek, on EB’s knowledge of 36, 43 and India 529, 532–3 and Marriage Act 483–4 on petitioning movement 303 as Polemon 368, 432, pl. 22 on reform of Parliament 463–4, 465 resignation (1782) 516 Rockingham party, early relations with 404, 420–1, 432–3 Rockingham party, leadership of 514, 520, 522, 534, 535, 539 on royal prerogative 456 n., 515, 539 and Westminster 463–4, 477 see also Fox’s India Bill Fox, Henry, later Lord Holland 483 in caricatures 203 (pl. 8), 212 (pl. 9) and patronage 188, 198 as Paymaster 451, 523 Fox’s India Bill 512 n., 522, 526, 528–34 attacks on 535, 537 E.B. defends 538, 540, pls. 29–30 see also Speech on Fox’s India Bill ‘Fox’s martyrs’ 538–9, 541 Frampton, Matthew 181 France: colonial rivalry with Britain 125, 131–2, 134– 6 E.B. visits 342–3 financial reforms 447, 450 nobility and the moneyed interest 135 state of (1769) 260, 261, 262 taxes enforced by military 385 war with (1778–83) 131, 422, 435, 443 see also French Revolution Francis, Philip (1708?–73) 269 Francis, Philip (1740–1818; later Sir Philip) 269, 416, 526, 532 Franklin, Benjamin 126, 310, 314, 493, 494 Frederick II, King of Prussia 170, 451 n. Frederick V, King of Denmark 133 French, Patrick William 14 French Revolution 47, 152, 263, 343, 405–6, 544 economic causes 135 Rousseau and 171 Frézier, Amédée-François 129, 130 n. Fry, Joseph 418 Fuller, Rose 351, 356 ‘Funeral Oration on the Inspector, A’ 79 Garnett, Henry 411

553

Garrick, David 184, 185, 191, 213, 342–3, 410, 518 Gasca, Pedro de la 139–40 Gataker, Thomas 184 Gay, John 192 Gellert, Christian 170 Gentleman’s Magazine 168 George II, King of England 53, 190, 209, 211, 227, 281 George III, King of England 190, 210, 286, 370, 427, 446 on absentee tax 280–1 and America 352, 353, 408, 501, 504 in Annual Register 169 and the Coalition 521, 522, 533, 534 on divorce 307 on E.B. 470 and economical reform 453, 456, 511 and Gustavus III 341–2, 404, 453 parties, hostility to 228 on the Privy Council 507–8 Shelburne, appointment of 513 in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 277–8, 280–1 on toleration 333 Whigs, hostility to 211, 229 see also the Crown and ‘system of favouritism’ Gerard, Alexander 116 n., 118–19, 121 n. Germain, Lord George, formerly Sackville 239, 425, 426, 432, 456, 503 Gibbon, Edward 156, 381, 434, 453 n., 454 n., 457–8 on legal education 69 as MP 219 at Oxford 29, 33 on Philosophical Enquiry 110 n. Gifford, Sir Duke 252 Gilbert, Thomas 447, 458–9 Gillray, James 123 n., 468 n., 516, 535 Gilmour, Sir Alexander 217 Gilpin, William 121 Glasgow 536–8 E.B.’s speech at 537–8 Godwin, William 85–6 Goguet, Antoine-Yves 171 Goldsmith, Charles 23–4 Goldsmith, Henry 24 Goldsmith, Oliver 68, 175, 182, 204, 333, 499 on aristocracy 282 n. date of birth 16 ‘Dictionary of Arts and Sciences’ projected 124 on E.B. 543 on luxury and depopulation 360 n. Philosophical Enquiry, review of 109, 112 schooling 21, 24, 25–6 at TCD 32, 40, 182

554

index

Gordon, Lord George 454–5, 467–8 Gordon Riots 306, 467–70, 478, 480 Grafton, Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of 228, 259, 286, 325, 443 divorce 307 seeks to recruit E.B. 233–4 Graham, James, styled Marquis of 538 n. Granville, John Carteret, Earl 126 n. Graves, Richard 118 Gray, Thomas 103 Gregories, see Beaconsfield Gregory I, Pope 171 Grenville, George 215 n., 221, 236, 251, 284, 286 and America 216, 243, 354, 355 death 298 Elections Act 288–9 legalism 13, 223, 354 and Observations on a Late State of the Nation 260, 263, 264, 283 in opposition 259–60, 275 Prime Minister 198, 211 on provisions for the poor 234–5 Grenville, Thomas 441–2 Grenville, William Wyndham 522–3, 535, 543 Griffiths, Ralph 109 Grotius, Hugo 495 Guadeloupe 127, 129, 197, 198 Gustavus III, King of Sweden 340–2, 404, 453 Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill 404, 413 Haidar Ali 490–1 Hailes, Sir David Dalrymple, styled Lord 71 Halifax, George Montagu Dunk, Earl of 190–1, 192, 203 Hamilton, Joseph 49 Hamilton, William Gerard 192, 198, 202, 214 break with E.B. 205–7 E.B. his secretary 144, 164, 165, 188–91, 194–5, 204 and E.B.’s pension 201–2 Hampden, John 403 Hampden, Thomas 441 Hannibal 387–8 Harcourt, Simon, Earl 345 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of 72, 286 his Marriage Act 483–4 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, 2nd Earl of 530 Harford, Charles Joseph 254, pl. 13 Harford, Joseph 371, 399, 471 Hargrave, Christopher 417–18 Harrington, James 283 n. Harris, John 128, 129 Hartley, David (1705–57) 93, 94, 116 n., 121 Hartley, David (c.1730–1813) 246 n., 543–4

Hastings, Warren 416, 486 n., 526, 533, 544 E.B.’s attacks on 527–8, 532, 542–3 Hawkesworth, John 167 Hawkins, Sir John 204–5 ‘Heads of Objections to Benfield’ 486 Hellen, Robert 61–2 n. Henderson, Archibald 216 Henri IV, King of France 263–4, 533 Henry II, King of England 157, 162–3 Henry VIII, King of England 266 Hentzner, Paul 172 Herbert, George Augustus, styled Lord 205 Herbert, Newcomen 24–5, 44, 48, 49 Hertford, Francis Seymour Conway, Earl of 120, 347 Hewett, John 240 n. Hickey, Joseph 252 Hiffernan, Paul 55, 61, 182 Hill, John 79, 184 ‘Hints for an Essay on the Drama’ 58 Hirons, Jabez 294 n. ‘History of England’ (E.B.’s) 43, 141–64, 201, 248 n. contract 125, 143–4 moral elements 153–5, 161–2 part printed 144, 190 Providence in 140, 152–3 religious themes 92 n., 155–6, 157–60, 163, 174 n. sources 145–7, 148–50 synopsis 147–8 Hobbes, Thomas 100 Hogarth, William 92, 110, 115 n., 476 Hoghton, Sir Harry 311 n. Hoheb, Samuel 494, 496, 497, 498 Holland, Lord, see Fox, Henry Homer 36, 105, 176, 367 Horace 20, 36, 75, 361, 482 Howard, Gorges Edmond 335 Howard, John 475 Howe, Sir William 420, 421, 422 Hudson, Edward 35 Hughes, Patrick 25–6 Hume, David 63, 109, 123 n., 186–8, 226, 362 on association of ideas 93, 94, 121 breakdown 76 E.B. on 178, 187, 344 as historian 130 n., 142–3, 145, 152–3, 178, 187–8 his History and E.B’s 145, 146, 149, 154 n., 155 n., 160–2 on Ossian 177 and Philosophical Enquiry 103, 116–18, 119, 120 philosophical ideas 80–1, 96, 102 scepticism 98, 99 n., 155 n., 156

index Humund Rao 488, 489 n. Hurd, Richard 85, 174 Hutcheson, Francis 39 n., 93–4, 100, 102, 121 on final causes 94, 98 internal senses 94, 99, 115–16 Hutchinson, John Hely 38, 241, 391–2, 510 Hutchinson, Thomas 507 Impey, Sir Elijah 527 Inchiquin, Mary (Palmer), Countess of 107 Inchiquin, Murrough O’Brien, Earl of 391, 441 India 337 ‘ancient constitution’ 415, 490 E.B.’s knowledge and vision of 416, 487, 490–1, 529–31 land tenure 532 Madras 414–16, 417, 485 nabobs 236, 277 Supreme Court (Calcutta) 337, 486–9, 527, 528 Tanjore 415, 484–5 see also East India Company Insolvent Debtors Bill 474–5 Ireland, economics 1–3, 57–8, 58–9, 223, 225 absentees 51, 233, 345–8 Irish Provisions Act 390 revenue proposed from 261, 262 sugar and soap 225 trade concessions 427–9, 429, 444–6 Whiteboys 192–3 Ireland, history and historiography 178, 187, 193–4, 517 1641 rebellion 187 E.B’s projected history 193, 201 n. Ireland, politics 2, 49–63, 192 and American dispute 399 pensions 192, 198–9, 200–1, pl. 8 prorogation of Parliament (1769) 291–2 Ireland, religion 2–3, 5, 27–8 anti-Catholicism 192–3 converts 4–6 E.B.’s Catholic petition (1764) 203, 430 penal laws 195, 232, 429–31, 510, 522 ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ 105, 431 Irish language 146 Italy, E.B.’s proposed visit 249, 250 Jacobite rebels 51–2 Jackson, Richard 313, 373 Jenkinson, Charles, 384–5, 394, 427, 453 Jenyns, Soame 186, 457 n. John, King of England 163 John Maurice of Nassau, Prince 139 n. ‘John the Painter’ 408 Johnson, Samuel 179, 207, 220, 344, 373, 497 n.

555

in Annual Register 174, 178 on authors and readers 128–9, 130, 167, 362 early life 10, 35, 41, 64, 68, 72, 77 on E.B. 184–5, 227, 361, 423, 525 E.B., personal relations with 159 n., 184, 204, 269, 370 on English historians 142 genius, definition of 125 on Italy 249 pension 199–200, 203, pl. 8 and Philosophical Enquiry 73–4, 100, 103–4, 113–14, 122 politics 272–3, 279, 280, 370, 384, 386 n. on the poor 359 on sexual morality 308 on Sully 263–4 Jones, Inigo 508 Jones, Robert 464 Jones, William 144 n., 451, 488 Junius 268–9, 279, 293, 302, 324 Justin 36 Justinian 146 Juvenal 36, 387 Kames, Henry Home, styled Lord 119, 121 n., 122 Kearney, John 56, 61 Kearney, Michael 25, 56, 61, 93, 99 Kearney, Mrs (mother of preceding) 56 Kelly Riots 32, 52, 54 Kenmare, Thomas Browne, Viscount 194 n., 510 Keppel, Arnold Joost van, Earl of Albemarle 437 Keppel, Augustus 431, 433, 436–7, 505 n. King, Walker 463, 466, 501 n., 509, 519 ‘king’s friends’ (and their ‘secret influence’) 227, 241, 260, 382, 394, 433, 453 and absentee tax 347–8 in Observations on a Late State of the Nation 238 and repeal of the Stamp Act 226, 353 in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 276, 277–8, 281, 282, 283, 436 Knight, Richard Payne 109, 111, 121 n., 256 n. Knolles, Richard 142 Knox, William 197–8, 260–4, 283 Lafitau, Joseph-François 129 n., 136–8, 423 Lamb, Charles 108, 121 Langton, Bennet 183–4, 204 La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de 479 Laud, William 37 Laurence, French 16–17, 56, 61 Laurens, Henry 492–3, 498

556

index

law and lawyers: in American colonies 130, 383 attorneys 4, 11–12, 31, 72–3, 192 E.B.’s projected ‘History of English Law’ 71, 150 immutability of laws 330–1 juries 161, 266, 299, 302–4, 324 lawyers, narrow-mindedness of 13, 406 legal education 63, 66–7, 68–73, 178 libel 302–4 natural law 37, 194, 495–6 Nullum Tempus 244–7, 332–3 Lawson, John 37–8, 39 Le Clerc, Jean 93 n. Lee, Charles Dillon 509 Lee, Sir William 242 Leechman, William 536, 538 n. Leland, John 83, 391 Leland, Thomas 143 n., 177, 275 n., 391 Lennox, Charlotte 263 Letter from a Distinguished English Commoner, to a Peer of Ireland, A (Letter to Lord Kenmare) 510 Letter from a Gentleman in the English House of Commons, in Vindication of his Conduct, A (Letter to Burgh) 446 Letter to a Noble Lord, A 9–10, 223, 521 ‘Letter to Richard Burke’ 105 ‘Letter to Sir James Lowther, A’ 79, 244 n. Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, A 401, 404–6, 408, 412–13, 419, 434 attacks on 406–8 Letters of Marque Act 405 Letters on a Regicide Peace 26, 47 Lewis, John 385 Lhuyd, Edward 146 Lindsay, Lady Anne 178–9 Lindsey, Theophilus 332 Linnaeus, Carolus 177 Lippincott, Sir Henry 479 Lisburne, Wilmot Vaughan, Viscount 234 Literary Club 204–5, 412 Livingston, Robert R. 314–15 Livy 36 Lloyd, Charles 221, 229 n. Lloyd, William 250–1 Locke, John 47, 96–7, 186, 457 n. and Philosophical Enquiry 92–3, 99, 101, 102, 110 on Poor Law 76 on property 347 London 65, 469–70, pl. 4 British Museum 256 British Museum Library 145 n. Chelsea Hospital 525, 534, 535 Foundling Hospital 106 n. Grecian coffee-house 96

libraries 145 Marylebone 179–80, 195–7, fig. 2 Middle Temple 65, 66–8, 81, 179, 434 Middle Temple Library 145, 146 n. Somerset House 482–3 London, E.B.’s residences: Broad Sanctuary 326, pl. 17, fig. 4 Charles Street 242–3, 286, 326, 440 Fludyer Street 286, 440, pl. 15 Paymaster’s House 508, pl. 25 ‘Pope’s Head, at the sign of’ 68 Queen Anne Street 195–6, 213, 242 Wimpole Street 179–80, 195 London Magazine 168 Longinus 36, 92, 103 Lonvilliers de Poincy, Philippe de 139 Loughborough, Lord, see Wedderburn, Alexander Lovett, Verney 215 Lowndes, William 254 Lowth, Robert 113–14 Lowther, Sir James (1673–1755) 79 Lowther, Sir James, later Earl of Lonsdale (1736–1802) 244–5, 451, 502 Lucas, Charles 59–63 Lucian 36 Luttrell, Henry Lawes 265, 271, 426 Luttrell, Temple Simon 426 Lyttelton, George, Lord 11, 175, 178, 186 Macartney, George, later Lord 49, 262 n., 485, 486 n. Macaulay, Catherine 294–5 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 403 M’Cormick, Charles 295 Mackintosh, James 188 n. Mackworth, Herbert 321 Macleane, Lauchlin 215–16, 415 Macpherson, James 174, 175–7, 527 Macpherson, John 527 Madden, Samuel 59, 63 n. Magna Charta 151, 157 n. Mahon, Charles Stanhope, styled Viscount 461–2, 538 Maitland, James, styled Viscount 537 Mallet, David 82 Malone, Edmond 183, 185, 207 conversations with E.B. 36, 91, 124, 127, 187 Malton 371, 479–80, 519, 536 Mansfield, William Murray, Earl of 302–3, 324, 329–30 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France 157 Markham, William 127, 269 n., 323–6, 391 n. Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of 171 Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of 171 Marshall, William 317 Martin, John 108

index Marx, Karl 311 Mary, Queen of Scots 172, 187–8, 190 Mary I, Queen of England 538 Maseres, Francis 357, 367 n. Mason, John Monck 195, 206 Mason, William 175, 519 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de 170 ‘measures, not men’ 241, 278, 515, 537 Chatham and 234 n., 239, 303 E.B. controverts 26, 239, 278, 283, 352, 354 E.B. invokes 429 Meinecke, Friedrich 164 Meredith, Sir William 219, 328–9 Michelangelo 107 Middlesex election, see Wilkes, John Middleton, Conyers 153 Mill, John Stuart 122 Millar, John 536 n., 537 Miller, John 302 n. Milner, Thomas 254 Milton, John 113 n., 117, 176, 179, 539 E.B.’s recitation of Moloch’s speech 52 n. in Philosophical Enquiry 105, 107 allusions in E.B.’s speeches 239, 355, 425 n. Mohun, Matthew 49 Montagu, Elizabeth 122, 178, 185, 344 Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de 78, 87, 95, 137, 143 and Account of the European Settlements 130 Anglophilia 120, 134, 282 n. in Annual Register 83 n., 116 n. on aristocracy 240–1 and E.B.’s ‘History of England’ 145, 147, 149, 150, 151–2, 163 on religion 83, 332, 431 on taste 116, 174 Montezuma 154 Monthly Review 168, 177 Moore, Edward 54, 57 More, Sir Thomas 482 Moritz, Karl Philipp 511 Morley, John 295 Muhammad Ali Khan, see Carnatic, Nawab of the Mullett, Thomas 374 n., 380 Murphy, Arthur 73, 109, 110, 112, 182–3, 184 Nagle, David 14 Nagle, Garrett (E.B.’s Clogher agent) 233 Nagle, Garrett (E.B.’s maternal grandfather) 14 Nagle, James 492 Nagle, Patrick 20 Nandakumar, Maharaja 486 Navigation Acts 222, 223, 262, 355, 383, 435 Necker, Jacques 447, 450 New York Assembly 309–15, 357–8, 375, 384, 388, 417

557

Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of 211, 212, 213, 214, 226 n., 263 Newdigate, Sir Roger 330 Newhaven, Willliam Mayne, Lord 494, 523 Nichols, Joseph 67, pl. 5 Noble, John 379–80, 398, 401, 471, 477, 480 Norden, Frederick 146–7 Norris, John 168 n. North, Frederick, styled Lord 226, 299, 306, 325, 344, 539 and Africa Co. 414 and America 356, 397, 494, 501–2, 520 American conciliation proposals 382, 385, 397, 422 attacks on, by E.B. 268, 387, 424–5, 438–9, 522 Chatham, advises recall of 427 and Coalition 521, 522, 535, pl. 26 compares E.B. to the boy who cried ‘wolf!’ 267 on Dissenters 331 n., 333 on East India Co. 338, 487, 530 and economical reform 454, 455, 481 and elections 378, 470, 480 financial measures 435, 436, 460, 482 and Ireland 429, 430, 445–6, 474 his ministry 352, 432, 470, 498, 527 parliaments, opposes shorter 465 as Prime Minister 220, 287, 295, 503–4, 524–5 Northumberland, Hugh Smithson Percy, Earl of 202, 203 Norton, Sir Fletcher 458 n., 506 Nugent, Christopher 74–5, 242, 366, 398, pl. 6 London, moves to 90 member of E.B’s family circle 179, 181, 183, 195 member of Literary Club 204 Nugent, Jane, see Burke, Jane Nugent, John 88 n., 181 Nugent, Robert, Earl, see Clare, Viscount Nullum Tempus 244–7, 332–3 O’Brien, Murrough, later Earl of Inchiquin 391, 441 Observations on a Late State of the Nation 259, 261–4 East India Co. in 238 party in 248, 262, 263, 267 n., 283, 504–5 and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 274, 293 ‘Observations’ on the First Report of the Select Committee 527 ‘Ode on the Birth-Day of His Majesty King George the Second’ 53 O’Halloran (schoolmaster) 21

558

index

O’Hara, Charles 183, 186, 252, 270, 335–6, 398 account of happy native Irish 193 as farmer 319, 336 intermediary with E.B.’s father 192 and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 275 Oldmixon, John 141, 145 n. Onslow, George 305 Ordericus Vitalis 149 Ossian 174, 175–7 Oswald, James 225–6, 227 Oudh, Begums of 531, 542 Ovid 77 Oxford, University of 29–30, 32–3, 42, 161 Paine, Thomas 126, 460 Paley, William 99 n. Palinurus 424–5 Palliser, Sir Hugh 431, 437 Palmer, Mary, later Countess of Inchiquin 107 Paris, Peace of 197, 357 Parisot, Jean-Baptiste-François-Pierre 342–3 Parliament, House of Commons 218, 283, 328, pl. 10 the ‘dinner bell’ and ‘dinner troop’ 292, 339, 543–4 frequent speakers 219–20 ‘question time’ 524 reporting of debates 220, 299, 304–6, 439 Parliament, House of Lords 320–1, 378 n., 534 Parliament, Members of: relations with constituents 280, 377–8, 429, 461, 465, 472, 473–6 eligibility of judges 314 property qualifications 199, 249–50 parliamentary reform 277–8, 294, 454, 463, 519 shorter parliaments 77–8, 277–8, 280, 294, 454, 464, 465–6 colonial members 261, 262 Parnell, Thomas 175 parties (Whigs and Tories) 284 new Tories and neo-Toryism 190, 278, 537 old Whigs 28 ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ historiography 143, 150, 187 see also Rockingham Party and Bristol, Whigs and Tories at party and parties (in general) 71, 241–2, 283–4, 433–4, 500 E.B. defends in Parliament 248, 267 in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 259, 277, 283–4, 295–6, 330 see also ‘measures, not men’ Paymaster-General 451, 507, 511, 523, 535 E.B. as Paymaster 506, 508–9, 522, 523–5, 534

Pay Office Act (E.B.’s) 511, 517 Pedro II, King of Portugal 136 n. Peerage Bill 282 Pellissier, John 34–5, 41 Pembroke, Henry Herbert, Earl of 205 Penn, William 139–40 ‘people, the’ 339, 396 E.B’s attitude 340, 394–5, 421–2, 462–3, 465–6, 538 support the Court (in 1784) 292, 395, 539 in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 97, 280, 282, 462 Percy, Thomas 144 n., 177 Pericles 88, 422 n., 424 Perrault, Charles 516 n. Pery, Edmund Sexton 429, 430 petitioning movement (1769) 271–4, 287–8, 298, 303, 461 ‘Phidippus, The Character of ’ 66 Philip II, King of Spain 402 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 47, 90, 91–124, 165, 166, 180 argument summarized 100–2 anonymity 109 art and artists in 106–7, 107–8 association of ideas in 94, 110, 121, 122 autobiographical elements 87–8, 96, 100 beauty 104, 110–11 the blind in 91, 105, 184 composition 36, 54, 74, 91–2, 323 empiricism 94–6, 97 final causes 94, 98 poetry in 97, 102, 105, 107, 113–14 politics of 122–4 Providence in 98–100 religious elements 97–8, 112, 114–5, 138, 158 n. reputation and influence 118–21, 131, 186, 221, 290 reviews and E.B.’s response 109–13 sources 92–4, 146 the sublime 36, 102–4, 111–13, 121, 159, 176 taste, introduction on 115–18 tragedy, pleasure taken in 102 words, theory of 102, 104–5, 112–13 Pigot, George, Lord 415–16, 527 Pitt, Anne 200–1, 203 Pitt, William (1708–78), see Chatham, Earl of Pitt, William (1759–1806) 205, 522, 529 E.B. on 537 and economical reform 481 rebukes E.B. in Parliament 520, 540, 543 Prime Minister 534 victory in 1784 election 281, 539 Pizarro, Francisco 138

index Plato 482 Pliny the elder 160 Plumer, Francis 111 Plutarch 51, 162, 424 poems (by E.B.) 44, 46, 53, 91 n., 500 on Ballitore 12, 26, 75 on the Blackwater 52, 92 n. Poems on Several Occasions (1748) 48 n., 53–4, 191 n., 335 n. Polemon 368, pl. 22 Pope, Alexander 48, 109, 184, 210, 336 E.B. quotes or alludes to 38, 52 his optimism 79, 347 Popish Plot 187 Portland, Willem Bentinck, Earl of 244 Portland, William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, Duke of 471, 473, 478, 513 and Buckinghamshire election 441–2 and Coalition 521, 522 Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland 508, 510 ‘Nullum Tempus’ dispute with Lowther 244–5, 451 and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 275, 279 Postlethwayt, Malachy 134 n., 135 n. poverty and the poor 76–7, 135, 311 n. food subsidies for the poor 234–5, 243, 341 in Ireland 1–3, 57–8, 58–9 rich and poor, identity of interests 246–7 Powell, John 523–5 Pownall, Thomas 263 n., 320, 458 his Act 321, 341, 389 Price, Richard 360 n., 406, 466 n. Price, Uvedale 121 Priestley, Joseph 519 Prior, James 8, 21, 162 n. Privy Council 312, 315, 507–8 Prohibitory Bill 397 Prost de Royer, Antoine-François 521–2 Providence 58 and climate 140 and economic progress 387, 429 in history 152, 517 and human psychology 47, 79 and India 543 in Philosophical Enquiry 98–100 and religion 431 Public Advertiser, E.B.’s letters in 245–6 Pufendorf, Samuel 37, 495 Pulteney, William 435 Punch’s Petition 54–5, 61, 79, 96, 523, pl. 3 Quebec Act 356–8, 364, 396, 431, 435 Rabelais, François 45, 75 Ralegh, Sir Walter 138, 142 Ralph, James 166 n.

559

Rapin de Thoyras, Paul de, Histoire d’Angleterre 141, 142, 146 E.B.’s copy 145 n. and E.B.’s ‘History’ 148 n., 149, 161, 162 Rawlinson, Abraham 217 Read, John 232 Reflections on the Revolution in France 12, 135, 150–1, 156, 483 imagery in 263, 281 n. legislative supremacy in 331 n. ‘liberal descent’ 13, 380 ‘little platoon’ 48 Marie Antoinette in 157, 342–3 nature, arguments from 95 n., 97 ‘politic, well-wrought veil’ 86 prejudice defended 47 prescription and property 247 religion and the social order 138, 155–6, 333 n. the ‘spirit of a gentleman’ 155, 156–7 Reformer, The 2–3, 55–9, 63 Reid, Thomas 121 n., 174 religion 80–1, 114–15, 147 of American Indians 137–8 in Annual Register 174 any better than none 343 Catholic Church 153 Catholic Church in Quebec 357–8 Catholics in Scotland 437–40, 467 Church and State 163, 430–1 Church Nullum Tempus Bill 332–3 as civilizing force 136, 138, 149, 155, 160 crusades 148, 156 Dissenters 27, 332, 333, 343 Established Church 330–3 Feathers Tavern Petition 330–2, 333 miracles 152–3 monks and monasticism 155–6 pilgrimage 152, 156 Puritan intolerance 133 Quakers 22–3, 26–7, 409 the ‘spirit of religion’ 155 Thirty-nine Articles 330–1, 333 toleration 44, 83, 133, 332, 439 Unitarians 27, 343 see also Ireland, religion; and Providence ‘Religion’ and ‘Religion of No Efficacy as a State Engine’ (essays in Note-Book) 80 Representation to His Majesty, A (14 June 1784) 540–2 Revolution (of 1688) 294 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 106, 107, 185, 204 portrait of E.B. and Rockingham 230–1, 365 n., pl. 11 portraits of E.B. 293, 365–6 social occasions 177, 333, 344, 517 Richard I, King of England 153–4

560

index

Richardson, Samuel 84 Richardson, William 419, 536 Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de 135 Richmond, Charles Lennox, Duke of 334, 339– 40, 417, 505 n., 539 on absentee tax 347 on America 427 and Buckinghamshire election 368–9 Civil List, proposes reduction of 448 conversion to radical reforms 466–7 on farming 297 France, visits to 340, 404 on the ‘king’s friends’ 433 and Rockingham party 242, 285, 368–9, 433, 514 portrait of 394–5, pl. 24 portrait of E.B., commissions 394–5 Ridge, John 15, 179, 398–9 Rigby, Richard 465 altercations with E.B. 215 n., 267–8, 288–9, 291, 324–5 E.B. defended by 524 Paymaster-General 452, 508 Robertson, William 131 n., 136, 344, 419 Robinson, John 486 Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of 17, 286, 362, 437, 539 and absentee tax 345–8 on America 310, 349–50, 382–3, 405, 420, 501 ancestry and property 209–12 Bristol, and E.B. at 376, 471, 473, 478–9 debts, cancels E.B.’s 513 duel, on E.B’s averted 426 and East India Co. 337, 415, 510 as farmer 210, 229–30 final illness and death 512–13 inactivity 306, 378, 385, 393–4, 420–1, 423 and ‘king’s friends’ 226, 227, 353 Malton, nominates E.B. at 371, 479 negotiations (of 1767) 241–2, 267 papers and monument 519 patronage relations with E.B. 325, 334–5, 369, 506–7, 509 and petitioning movement 271, 273, 461 portrait of 230–1, pl. 11 press, neglectful of 261, 299 Prime Minister 209, 212–13, 505 private secretary, E.B. as his 166, 207–9, 213–14, 221–2, 224, 331–2 on Stamp Act 216–17 symbol of political virtue 227–8, 267 and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 274, 275, 285, 287 Wyvill and his movement, distrust of 447–8 see also Rockingham ministry and Rockingham party

Rockingham, Mary (Bright), Marchioness of 210, 478, 479, 480, 507 Rockingham, Thomas Watson-Wentworth, 1st Marquis of 209–10 Rockingham ministry (1765–6) 212–28, 229–30, 427 attacked by Knox 260 caricatured 212, pl. 9 defended by E.B. 262, 351, 352, 353 and Quebec 357 Rockingham ministry (1782) 315, 436 n., 504– 12 E.B.’s advice on its formation 504–5, 523 Rockingham party 228, 300, 324, 329, 368–9, 378, 505 and absentee tax 347 and America 309–10, 350–2, 397, 400, 401–2, 427 aristocratic character 432 and East India Co. 337, 510, 530 inactivity 393, 402–3, 420–1, 444 and Jury Bill 303–4 in Observations on a Late State of the Nation 259, 261–2, 263 radical reformers, relations with 274, 279–80, 298, 448 after Rockingham’s death 513, 514, 522, 539, 542 secession attempted (1777) 401, 402–3, 404– 5, 412, 420 secession proposed 292, 298, 328, 339, 444 and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 259, 274–6, 283–5, 293, 433, 467 Rocque, John 18, 195, fig. 2 Rodney, Sir George Brydges 494–8 Roger of Howden 154 n. Rolle, John 524 Romney, George 394–5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 87, 95, 138, 170–1, 178 Rowlandson, Thomas 535 n. Royal Marriage Act 306, 328–30 Russell, William, Lord 403 Rutland, Charles Manners, Duke of 500 Ryder, Dudley 69–71 Sacheverell, Henry 403 St Eustatius 494–8 St George’s Fields, ‘Massacre’ of 248, 265, 267 St Omer’s 182, 290, 376, 544 Sackville, Lord George, see Germain, Lord George Sallust 42–3 Sandwich, John Montagu, Earl of 306, 431, 432 Saunders, Sir Charles 228, 252 Savile, Sir George 219, 221, 371–2, 404, 427 n.

index and absentee tax 347–8 and Catholic Relief Act 430, 467–8, 475 and Nullum Tempus 245, 332 on pamphlets 296 on reform 454, 460 retirement and death 536, 539 and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 275, 279 on toleration 332 Sawbridge, John 413, 463, 465 Sayers, James 539 Sayre, Stephen 309 Scheffer, John 147 Scott, James 294 n., 305–6 Scott, John (Major) 533, 542, 543–4 Sebastian, King of Portugal 157 n. Sebright, Sir John 517 Selby Canal 360–1, 363, 390, 398, pl. 18 Selden, John 146 Seneca 517 Septennial Act 60, 77–8, 464, 470 Shackleton, Abraham 22–3, 25, 26–7, 75, 173 Shackleton, Abraham, Jr. 254, 434, pl. 14 Shackleton, Mary (later Leadbeater) 22, 254–5, 316, 440, 508, 540 Shackleton, Richard 191, 316, 336, 434, 540 Academy of Belles Lettres, attends 49 classical studies and reading 24–5, 36, 43, 92 E.B.’s early letters to 20, 22, 43–7, 48, 91 lost letters from 9, 43, 45, 46, 59 marriage, and E.B.’s poem on 59 poetry 52–3, 54, 55 portrait of, E.B. commissions 48 and Philosophical Enquiry 100, 107, 119 and the Reformer 56 n., 57 sketch of E.B. (1766) 6, 10, 66, 88, 253, 268, 325 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of 94 n., 100, 110 n., 184 Shakespeare, William 52, 58, 112, 113–14, 497 n. E.B. quotes 214, 329–30, 482, 502 Shakespeare’s ‘faults’ 419 Shebbeare, John 353, 388 n., 406 Shelburne, William Petty, Earl of 534 and absentee tax 347 in caricature 539, pl. 31 Chatham’s heir 427, 448 E.B.’s hatred of 434, 514, 515–16, 517 and economical reform 448, 454, 460, 511– 12 and formation of the second Rockingham ministry 505–7 his ministry 513–14, 519–21 police force for Westminster, proposes 469– 70 Shenstone, William 118

561

Shepherd, T. H. 286 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 523–4 Sheridan, Thomas 32, 54–5, 57, 523 Short Account of a Late Short Administration, A 229, 230, 263, 376 n. Silius Italicus 533 Sisson, Richard 48, 49, 191, 365 ‘Sketch also of an Address, A’ 443 n. ‘Sketch of a Negro Code’ 489 Skynner, John 326 slavery and the slave trade 133, 135, 388, 489 Sleigh, Joseph Fenn 23, 182 Smart, Christopher 79, 113 n., 175 Smith, Adam 186–7, 226, 537–8 Theory of Moral Sentiments 119, 186–7, 367 n. Wealth of Nations and economic ideas: Corn Laws 321–2 East India Co. 528, 530 freedom of trade 133, 388, 429 monopolies 363 n. Poor Law 359 n. recoinage 349 n. sale of Crown lands 451 n. wage theory 428 n. Smith, Richard 486–8 Smollett, Tobias: Complete History of England 143, 145 compared with E.B.’s ‘History’ 146, 149, 154 n. 160–2 Critical Review 109, 130 n. ‘Some Thoughts on the Approaching Executions’ 469 Somers, John, Lord 171 Sophocles 36 Southwark 218 Span, Samuel 428–9 Speech on American Taxation (19 Apr. 1774) 13, 238, 351–6, 364, 382, 385, 396 imagery 241 n., 352–3, 354–5 Speech on Conciliation (22 Mar. 1775) 382–8, 389, 396 attacks on 388 Speech on Economical Reformation (11 Feb. 1780) 449–55, 459–60, 463, 478, 491, 521–2 attack on 482 n. Speech on Fox’s India Bill (1 Dec. 1783) 529– 33 attacks on 533, 535, 537 Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts (28 Feb. 1785) 415 n., 486 Spelman, Henry 146, 163 n. Spence, Joseph 104 n., 105 n., 106, 111 n., 184 Spencer, Gervase 365 Spenser, Edmund 20–1

562

index

Stamp Act, repeal of 216–18, 219, 220–1, 229, 259, 393 condemned by Knox 260 defended by E.B. 300, 309, 350–3, 355, 385 opposed by ‘king’s friends’ 226, 353 Stannard, John 31 State Nursery, The 212 Steele, Sir Richard 56 Sterne, Laurence 178 Stewart, Dugald 131, 537, 542 n. Stewart, John 337 Stillingfleet, Benjamin 177 Stonehenge 106, 158–9 Strafford, Thomas, Earl of (1593–1641) 209, 231 Strafford, Thomas, Lord Raby, later Earl of (1672–1739) 209 Stratford, Eusby 23 Stroudwater Navigation 397–8 Stuart, Andrew 457 n. Stubbs, George 210 Stukeley, William 158–9 Suetonius 162 Suffolk, Henry Howard, Earl of 456 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de 263–4, 283 Swift, Jonathan 48, 58, 240 n., 301–2, 335 in Annual Register 171–2 on ‘great men’ 140, 239 ‘History of England’ 141 and Ireland 1, 59, 345 irony and parody 55, 85, 86 on law 87 on property and political power 249, 283 n. on religion 28 and TCD 32 n., 35 ‘system of favouritism’ (or ‘court system’) 245, 296, 298–9, 328, 393–4, 432, 436, 443, 503–4 and East India Co. 527 and economical reform 450, 524 roots (in 1766) 226, 450 in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 277–8, 279 see also Bute, Earl of; and ‘king’s friends’ Tacitus 36, 146, 183 Taylor, John 91 Teixeira, Dom Marcos 139 n. Temple, George Grenville, 3rd Earl 440–2, 443, 461, 534, 537 Temple, Richard Grenville, 2nd Earl 271–2, 273, 275, 284, 368, 440 Temple, Sir William 146, 148 n. Terence 36 Tertullian 71

Thornton, Elizabeth 46 ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’ 235 n., 322 ‘Thoughts in July 1779 from E.B.’ 443 n., 448 n. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 190, 274–85, 421, 453 argument 277–81 attacked as aristocratic 294–5, 376 audience 274–6 circulation of drafts 275, 279 Civil List, debts of the 278, 413 ‘our Creed’ 293, 467 Crown, role and influence of the 280–1, 448, 456 ‘double cabinet’ 226, 277–8, 279, 504 Dowdeswell and 241, 274–5 luxury thesis rejected 135, 277 ‘measures, not men’ repudiated 26, 278, 283, 352 ‘party’ in 248, 259, 283–5, 330, 523 ‘the people’ in 97, 280, 462 on place bills 277, 461 rhetoric 276, 279, 281 structure 276–7 Thrale, Henry 218–19, 249, 365–6 Thrale, Hester Lynch 218, 249 Thucydides 88, 422 n. Thurlow, Edward, Lord 430, 489, 498, 500, 505 Tickell, Richard 434, 543 Tigranes, King of Armenia 154 Tindal, Nicholas 141, 145 n. Topham, Edward 406–7 Tories, see parties (Whigs and Tories) Townshend, Charles 207–8, 212, 234 n., 287 and East India Co. 236 plan for the relief of the poor 243 popularity, craving for 354 praises E.B.’s first speeches 221 see also Townshend duties Townshend, George, Viscount 291 Townshend, Thomas 427 n., 465, 470, 482–3 Townshend duties 247, 259, 264, 314, 353 ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’ 194, 203, 431, 510 Treason Act 266 Trecothick, Barlow 216 Trinity College, Dublin 9, 16, 29–43, 62 n., 391–2 library 31, 44, 67 Trogus, Pompeius 36 Trumbull, John 492 Tucker, Josiah 388 Tuljaji, Raja of Tanjore 415–16, 485 Turlaine 75, 76, 159 Turner, Charles 361 Turner, J. M. W. 107–8

index Two Letters on the Trade of Ireland 428–9 Tytler, William 187–8 Union, Act of 330–1 Universal Magazine 126 Upper Ossory, Richard Fitzpatrick, Earl of 444 Uztáriz, Gerónimo 129 n. Vaca de Castro, Cristóbal 139–40 Valerius Maximus 368 Van, Charles 381–2 Vanbrugh, Sir John 301–2 Van Dyck, Anthony 231 Vattel, Emer de 495–6 Venus de’ Medici 106 Verney, Ralph, Earl 364, 479, 487, 539 and Carmarthan 214–15 n., 288 East India Co. speculations 214, 235, 237–8, 417 MP for Buckinghamshire 214, 288, 368, 441, 538 property qualification for E.B. 249–50 sues E.B. 252–3 W.B. and 198, 206, 208 Wendover, nominates E.B. at 214–15 Vesey, Agmondesham 191 Vesey, Elizabeth 191, 237 n., 344 Vindication of Natural Society, A 51, 82–7, 96, 138, 143 Vinnius, Arnoldus 63 Virgil 63, 115, 132, 500–1 E.B.’s affection for 36 his translation of 53, 316 in Philosophical Enquiry 105, 114, 117–18 E.B. quotes 196, 424 Vitruvius 111, 146 Voet, Paulus 63 Voltaire 120, 138, 297, 393 in Annual Register 170, 174 as historian 87, 143, 154 n. on taste 116, 117 Wallace, George 178 Waller, Edmund (E.B.’s neighbour) 391 Waller, Edmund (the poet) 52, 250 Waller, John 254 Walpole, Sir Edward 514–15 Walpole, Horace 172, 179, 186, 301, 323, 328 n. and Clerk of the Pells incident 514–15 on E.B.’s writings and speeches 278, 396, 405, 407 first impression of E.B. 191 on Marie Antoinette 343 Walpole, Sir Robert 61, 199–200, 201, 282, 424 n. Walter, Richard 129 n.

563

Walsingham, Robert Boyle 291–2 Warburton, William 83, 497 Warner, Ferdinando 176, 178, 193 Warton, Joseph 113 n., 116 n., 144 n., 184, 188–9, 205 Warton, Thomas 113 n., 144 n., 184 Watkinson, Edward 168 n. Watson, James 293 Watson, Robert 402 Wawayanda Act 313 n. Weddell, William 371 n. Wedderburn, Alexander, later Lord Loughborough 260, 430 E.B. attacks 402, 425 E.B. challenges 425–6 and economical reform 454, 458 on India 486 n., 490 nostalgia 516–17 Wedgwood, Josiah 390 Wendover 198, 214–15, 247, 251, 364, 455 Wentworth, Thomas see Strafford West, Benjamin 107 Westminster 369, 370, 463, 470, 477 Wharton, Thomas, Earl of 171 Whately, Thomas 261 Whigs, see parties (Whigs and Tories) White, John 276 Whiteboys 192–3 Whitefoord, Caleb 272 Whitehead, William 175 Wilder, Theaker 40, 43 Wilfred, Bishop 156 Wilkes, John 60, 305, 370, 395, 544 E.B. persuades to return to France 222 on E.B.’s ‘wild Irish eloquence’ 516 and Middlesex election 123, 247–8, 264–5, 266–7, 268, 287, 298, 381 in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 278, 279–80, 281 ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ at Wendover 215–16 Wilkins, David 146, 163 n. Wilkins, John 145 n. Willliam I, King of England 148, 149, 157 William III, King of England 31, 244 Williams, Caroline (later Armstrong) 252 Wilson, Thomas (E.B.’s classmate) 41 Wilson, Thomas (radical clergyman) 369–70, 373 n. Wilton, John 106 Windham, William 536 n., 541 Wollstonecraft, Mary 111 Wood, John 158 n. Wood, Robert 106, 240 Woodfall, Henry Sampson 302 n. World, The 77

564

index

Worlidge, Thomas 365 Wraxall, Nathaniel 497, 502 Wyvill, Christopher 447–8, 454, 461–2, 463 Xenocrates 368 Xenophon 36 Yarmouth, Amalie Sophie Marianne, Countess of 203 Yates, Richard 409

Yeats, W. B. 483 Yorke, Charles 286 Young, Arthur 256, 367 n., 399, 518 on E.B.’s farming 315, 317–18 on the Poor Law 359 n. on population 360 n. Young, Edward 363, 424 n. Young, G. M. 144 Zouch, Clement Nevill 312, 314

Edmund Burke, Volume I: 1730-1784

Edmund Burke (Political Thinkers)

Edmund Burke: Volume II: 1784-1797 (Writings & Speeches of Edmund Burke)

The Metaphysics of Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue

Edmund Burke and the discourse of virtue

Edmund Burke and the Natural Law

Edmund Burke, 1729-1797: A Bibliography

Burke

Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke

The Useful Cobbler: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Progress

Darcy Burke

Edmund Barton

Burke W.L

Volume I

Volume I

Volume I

Volume I

That Burke Man

That Burke Man

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies)

The Political Economy of Edmund Burke: The Role of Property in His Thought

Flood (A Burke Novel)

That Burke Man

La Vendetta Di Burke

Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet

Edmund Spenser -EPITHALAMION

Edmund Burke, Volume I: 1730-1784

Edmund Burke (Political Thinkers)

Edmund Burke: Volume II: 1784-1797 (Writings & Speeches of Edmund Burke)

The Metaphysics of Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue

Edmund Burke and the discourse of virtue

Edmund Burke and the Natural Law

Edmund Burke, 1729-1797: A Bibliography

Burke

Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke

The Useful Cobbler: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Progress

Darcy Burke

Edmund Barton

Burke W.L

Volume I

Volume I

Volume I

Volume I

That Burke Man

That Burke Man

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies)

The Political Economy of Edmund Burke: The Role of Property in His Thought

Flood (A Burke Novel)

That Burke Man

La Vendetta Di Burke

Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet

Edmund Spenser -EPITHALAMION

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