About the Author
----------------
EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797) was an Irish statesman,
author, orator, political theorist and philosopher, who, after
moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons
of Great Britain as a member of the Whig Party.
JESSE NORMAN is a British Conservative politician who is the
Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire. Before
that he was a director at Barclays before leaving to research and
teach philosophy at University College London. He is the author
of Compassionate Conservatism, Living for the City, The Big
Society, and the biography Edmund Burke: Politician, Philosopher,
Prophet, which was longlisted for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize
for Non-Fiction.
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
--------------------------------------------------------
Lord Randolph Churchill, her of Winston, once
summarized Benjamin Disraeli’s life as ‘Failure, failure,
failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete
triumph’. The same might be said of the great eighteenth-century
philosopherstatesman Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke was born, probably in 1730, on the banks of the
Liffey in Dublin, the third of four children. His her was a
solicitor, a difficult man described in an age before class
analysis as of ‘the middling sort’, who practised in the superior
courts, and a Protestant. His mother was calmer and kinder, and a
Catholic. She came from a distinguished family, the Nagles of
County Cork, Jacobites who had supported the cls of James II
and his successors after the so-called Glorious Revolution of
1688–9, in which James went into exile and William III came to
the throne amid a new constitutional settlement – a cause which
had cost them both lands and grandeur.
Ireland at that time was in name a Kingdom, but in reality an
English and Protestant dominion, in which the rights of Catholics
were severely curtailed by the so-called Popery Laws. It was a
place of huge disparities of wealth and wellbeing, compounding
and in turn compounded by intense religious hatreds and political
instability. It offered rich material for Burke’s vivid moral and
literary imagination, and for what proved to be his lifelong
detestation of injustice.
Burke was educated first at a non-denominational school outside
Dublin (1741–4), and then at Trinity College Dublin (1744–8). At
school he was inspired by the intellectual and moral example of
his schoolmaster, Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker and the her of
his first great friend and early correspondent, Richard
Shackleton. He was less enthused by Trinity, it seems, finding
the teaching laborious and pedantic; his outlets lay elsewhere,
in two short-lived literary societies which he helped to found,
in three hours a day in the public library, and in poetry and
other writing.
We know relatively little of Burke over the following seven
years. He seems to have worked in his her’s office, before
arriving at the Middle Temple in London in May 1750 to read for
the Bar, aged twenty. He had a year or two of ill- and low
spirits, which he sought to cure through extended journeys with
his friend (but not it seems, relative) Will Burke. In 1755, to
his her’s apparent displeasure, he took the momentous decision
to leave the law and try to live by his pen.
There followed an extraordinary burst of writing, sustained by
the financial support and literary access given to Burke by
Robert Dodsley, a noted publisher and bookseller. His wideranging
early works included an almost too sophisticated parody, the
literary polemic A Vindication of Natural Society; a highly
influential work of aesthetics, A Philosophical Inquiry into the
Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; a social and
historical survey, An Account of the European Settlements in
America in collaboration with Will Burke; and An Essay towards an
Abridgment of the English History, which broke off with Magna
Carta in 1215 and was never completed.
By 1759 Burke had become the editor of Dodsley’s new periodical,
the Annual Register, and was married to Jane Nugent, with two
infant sons, Richard and Christopher (the latter died in early
youth). He was making a name for himself in literary circles, and
in 1764 became a founder member of Dr Johnson’s Club, alongside
Johnson himself, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith and others. He
had also taken his first steps into politics, as secretary to
William Gerard Hamilton, whom he followed from the Board of Trade
to Ireland, where Hamilton became Chancellor of the Exchequer in
1763. But Burke found himself impossibly constricted by
Hamilton’s demands, and by early 1765 they had parted.
Burke now had an extraordinary turn of luck. He was introduced
to the Marquis of Rockingham, possibly the richest man in England
and the leader of an important group of Whigs in Parliament.
Britain had been wrestling with the financial aftereffects of the
Seven Years’ War (1756–63), and its attempts to raise new
revenues were proving highly controversial in the colonies.
Moreover, George III, who had succeeded to the throne in 1760,
saw his Hanoverian predecessors as having handed over the conduct
of politics to Parliament, and sought to reassert the informal
and prerogative rights of the Crown. The result was a political
merry-go-round, in which a succession of administrations
attempted to reconcile financial prudence and colonial management
with parliamentary politics and the demands of the new monarch.
By 1765, after several failed administrations, the King was
reluctantly persuaded to approach Rockingham. Burke thus became
private secretary to the new Prime Minister, and shortly
afterwards a Member of Parliament, for the ‘pocket borough’ of
Wendover, in his own right.
Rockingham’s administration was short-lived; but Burke was an
immediate success in Parliament, quickly gaining a formidable
reputation for his speeches and skill in debate. He also
developed a role over time as a party manager, helping to shape
the Rockinghamites into what we can now see as the first genuine
forerunner to the political parties of today. In 1770 he
published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,
notable today because it drew a crucial distinction between mere
factions and parties which are ‘united, for promoting by their
joint endeavours the national interest, upon some political
principle in which they are all agreed’. The test comes when such
a group is evicted from office. Founded on self-interest,
factions will tend to disperse. Parties, however, will sustain
themselves and their membership – on principle and shared values,
on mutual commitments and on personal loyalties and friendship–
until the rtunity to take power returns.
For many years this distinction, and the Thoughts itself, was
denounced in some quarters as an apologia for the political power
exercised by Rockingham and other great Whig magnates. However,
recent research has demonstrated that Burke had formulated the
key ideas in a hitherto unattributed essay of 1757, reproduced in
this collection for the first time outside the scholarly
journals.
The Rockinghamites had to wait until 1782 before they could
resume office. The intervening sixteen years were a torrid time
for them, a period dominated by Lord North’s mishandling of the
American colonies, by the long run-up to war, by war itself, and
by their continuing attempts to restrain Crown influence and
political patronage. Burke was active throughout, on issues
ranging from political reform to religious matters to for
Ireland, and in particular delivered two extraordinary speeches
in 1774–5 on American Taxation and on Conciliation with America.
Both are gems of political analysis and statesmanship. But they
were also notable as some of the earliest occasions on which
speeches had been published from a deliberate desire to build not
merely a shared public understanding, but a degree of national
and indeed international renown.
By 1774 Burke’s political reputation was such that, with
Wendover no longer available, he was elected as the MP for
Bristol, then the second city of Britain. His backers doubtless
expected the usual trite formulas of thanks, and perhaps a pledge
by Burke to follow his constituents’ instructions. But in his
Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll at Bristol, Burke simply
destroyed that radical idea at source, and gave what has become
the classic statement of the duties of the political
representative:
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 . . . but his
unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened
conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to
any set of men living . . . Your representative owes you, not his
industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of
serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Alas, by 1780 Burke himself had failed to build a political base
in Bristol, and indeed had alienated many former supporters by
refusing to support the government on the American war, and by
favouring trade with Ireland and measures of for Catholics
– the latter a cause which he pursued steadily, though at some
cost, throughout his political career. But Rockingham eventually
came to his aid, and installed him in a parliamentary seat at
Malton in December 1780. There he remained until he left
Parliament in 1794.
In 1780 Burke was fifty years of age, and at the height of his
powers. We can catch glimpses of him in private: of the
bespectacled Irishman with his wig off, who kept his red hair for
many years and always spoke with an accent ‘as strong as if he
had never quitted the banks of the Shannon’; of the Christian
Latitudinarian and respecter of dissent; of the husband, ‘Ned’,
as Jane called him at home, who addressed his wife with the
utmost tenderness as ‘My dearest Jane’, ‘My dearest love’, and
‘My ever dear Jane’; of the her, whom one son’s death had left
almost too fond of the other, and who adored the company of
children; of the host, never free of house guests but always
entertaining with an open hand; of the patron, who knew the value
of help to a young man, and who supported talented outsiders such
as the painter James Barry and the poet George Crabbe; of the
clubbable fellow who enjoyed puns and low jokes and conversation,
but never quite mastered the art of wit or repartee; of the
countryman, who loved nature and rejoiced in his vegetable garden
and in ‘scientific agriculture’; of the solitary thinker, who did
not make close friends easily, who chafed at idleness and was
prone to fits of melancholy.
As the war ground on, Burke’s attention was increasingly drawn
to two further issues, both of which he made into great personal
causes. The first was ‘economical reform’: the attempt to control
the spending and financial patronage of the Crown, and so push
the monarchy back towards the settlement of 1688, long venerated
by Whigs. This culminated in a great speech of 1780 in which
Burke spoke for over three hours, laying out seven fundamental
rules of good government, and a package of measures which
included reforms to the office of Paymaster General, long used as
a source of personal enrichment, and the abolition of the Board
of Trade. But pioneering as they were, his proposals had few
immediate practical consequences.
The other great cause was India. Since its foundation in 1600,
the East India Company had grown from a trading enterprise to an
instrument of empire, exercising political control over the whole
of the Indian subcontinent. This raised profound moral questions.
Revenue from mutually beneficial trade was being replaced by
revenue from tribute and tax. Robert Clive, ‘Clive of India’, had
been a brilliant commander, but he had not hesitated to bribe,
coerce and where necessary deceive Indian nobles and merchants in
order to achieve his goals. And such was its wealth and influence
that the Company also exercised formidable political power at
home. Initially Burke had sed the measures of reform
introduced by Lord North’s government, seeing them as covert
attacks on the institution of private property and an attempt to
increase the Court’s powers of patronage. He now threw himself
into Indian affairs, becoming their acknowledged master in the
Commons.
In 1782, the exhausted and discredited Lord North finally left
office. The King cast about for alternatives, and at last
reluctantly settled again onRockingham. Politically, this was a
highly equivocal victory, especially since Rockingham lacked an
unfettered power to select his own cabinet. But it marked an
extraordinary moment in the political history not merely of
Britain but of the world.
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )