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Edmund Burke: Volume II: 1784-1797 (Writings & Speeches of Edmund Burke)
EDMUND BURKE * * * Volume This page intentionally left blank EDMUND BURKE * * * VOLUME II, ‒ F. P. LOC
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EDMUND BURKE * * * Volume
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EDMUND BURKE *
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VOLUME II, ‒ F. P. LOCK
OXFORD ⭈ CLARENDON PRESS
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © F. P. Lock The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 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, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN ‒‒‒
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Preface ‘Nature does not make such a Man once in a Century.’ This tribute to Burke was paid by Elizabeth Montagu in , during the Gordon Riots, when she heard that his life was in danger from the mob. Had Burke indeed fallen victim to the rioters, her remark would have seemed no more than the pardonable hyperbole of a friend. Burke would have been remembered as the author of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (), and as a distinguished parliamentary speaker, but hardly as deserving Montagu’s accolade. When Burke died in , William Godwin was correcting the sheets of the third edition of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. No book could be more antithetical to everything that Burke represented and championed. Even so, Godwin (whose judgement, unlike Montagu’s, cannot be discounted as emanating from personal regard) inserted a footnote to celebrate Burke as ‘the inferior of no man that ever adorned the face of the earth’, possessed of ‘the noblest faculties’ (though Godwin thought he had misapplied them) ‘that have yet been exhibited to the observation of the world’. In , when this volume begins, Montagu’s comment would have appeared a grotesque overestimate of a discredited politician, for Burke’s reputation had fallen since . Over the next three years, however, he worked intensely and unremittingly to achieve one of his greatest triumphs: persuading the House of Commons to impeach Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal. Then, in the winter of –, during the Regency Crisis precipitated by the king’s illness, Burke lost most of the respect that he had thus recovered. Yet within little more than a year, thanks to the outbreak of the French Revolution, of which he was one of the first and most vocal antagonists, his stature began again to rise. His Reflections on the Revolution in France () remains the most enduring book about one of the most significant events in modern history, and has achieved the status of a classic of political thought. When the Revolution became violent and tyrannical, disappointing its early admirers, Burke’s warnings came to seem prophetic. Nor did his anti-revolutionary efforts stop with the Reflections. With his usual energy, he began a campaign to promote a counter-revolution, a commitment that ended only with his life. When he died in , no one was more completely identified with the counter-revolutionary cause. Yet Godwin could pay him a tribute more extravagant even than Montagu’s. A measure of Burke’s greatness is his capacity to elicit such praise and admiration from opponents. Dominated by Burke’s two great causes or crusades, the impeachment of Hastings and the struggle to maintain an anti-revolutionary spirit in Britain,
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this volume has greater thematic unity than its predecessor. Both main subjects, however, are vast in scope and defy brevity. The trial of Hastings, which opened in , lasted days over seven years, ending in an acquittal in . This was a disappointing end to what Burke regarded as the great cause of his life. Since the proceedings of the entire trial were recorded in shorthand, Burke’s role can be studied in much greater detail than can his speaking in Parliament, preserved mainly in press reports. A full study of the trial would require a volume much larger than this one. Even so, I have given more space than have previous biographers to the actual trial, no day-by-day account of which has been attempted since The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (). I found the court-room battles about evidence absorbing, and I hope to have conveyed something of their fascination. The French Revolution is an even larger subject. To place Burke’s contribution to the conflict between Britain and revolutionary France fully in context would require another large volume. Nor was Burke’s life wholly engrossed by these two great themes. To give some sense of the range of Burke’s interests and the variety of his avocations, I have had to find space for his family and friends, and for numerous episodes or events which, if of more local or temporary interest than India or France, are nevertheless often indicative or significant for an understanding of his life and character. Burke never reserved his energies for great occasions or affairs. This volume, no less than its predecessor, depends heavily on the excellent edition of Burke’s 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. Again I would like to acknowledge a debt, greater that the notes can record, to those who have written on Burke, on his times, or on one of the many subjects that intersect with his career, and whose work has informed my understanding and interpretation of Burke and his life. 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 assisted me in many ways, I am most grateful, and particularly for permission to quote from manuscripts and reproduce illustrations. In London: the British Library, the British Museum, the National Archives, the Institute of Historical Research, the Guildhall Library, the House of Lords Record Office, the National Portrait Gallery, Lambeth Palace Library, Lincoln’s Inn Library, Dr Williams’s Library, the City of Westminster Archives, and the Westminster Diocesan Archives. Outside London: the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, Aylesbury; the Cambridge University Library, Churchill College, and the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge; the Devon Record Office, Exeter; St Deniol’s Library, Hawarden; the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone; the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester; the Northamptonshire Record Office
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(items from the Fitzwilliam Archives are reproduced courtesy of Sir Philip Naylor-Leyland Bt. and Milton (Peterborough) Estates Company); Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the Lancashire Record Office, Preston; the Sheffield City Archives (and the Head of Sheffield Libraries, Archives, and Information; the Wentworth Woodhouse manuscripts have been accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government and allocated to Sheffield City Council); the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester. In Scotland: the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, the Scottish Record Office, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the William Ramsay Henderson Trust. In Ireland: the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives, Trinity College Library (and the Board of Trinity College), and the Royal Irish Academy. In Canada: Queen’s University at Kingston; McMaster University, Hamilton; and the University of Toronto. In the United States: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the James M. and Marie Osborn Collection, and the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University; the Yale Center for British Art; the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Bridgeman Art Library, New York; the Harvard University Library; the library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the library of Duke University, Durham, NC; the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC; the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; and Brigham Young University Library. For financial assistance, I am grateful to Queen’s University; to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, for the award of a fellowship. Particular thanks are due to Andrew S. Cook, Jane Dormer, Jacalyn Duffin, R. D. S. Head, M. H. Kaufman, M. E. Subtelny, and G. M. Wickens. Professor P. J. Marshall kindly read the entire typescript, and made many valuable suggestions. My greatest debt, however, is again to my wife, Margaret, for her help, advice, and encouragement while living with a project that has extended over more than two decades.
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Contents List of Plates List of Figures List of Abbreviations
x xii xiii
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Picking up the Pieces, ‒ A Pledge Redeemed, – In the Name of the Commons, – A Boundless Object, – Madness and Discord, – The Making of the Reflections, – Reflections on the Revolution in France, Triumph and Tribulation, – A Uniform Whig, – Chained to an Oar, – A Withered Stump, – An Old Oak, – Sublime and Minute, –
Index
Plates . [James Gillray], The Political-Banditti Assailing the Saviour of India ( May : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [ John Boyne], Cicero against Verres ( Feb. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . J. Breun, Gerrard or Macclesfield House ( May , from a sketch taken May ). Watercolour. . ⫻ . cm. City of Westminster City Archives Centre . John Crowther, Interior View of the Staircase at Macclesfield House (). Watercolour. ⫻ . cm. Guildhall Library, Corporation of London . R. G. Pollard, after E. Dayes, The Trial of Warren Hastings Esqr. before the Court of Peers in Westminster Hall (London, ). Aquatint. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . Detail from Explanatory References to the Print of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), reproduced in Diary & Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett and Austin Dobson (London, –). Queen’s University Library . James Nixon, The Trial of Warren Hastings (): a gallery scene. Watercolour. Private collection (Bridgeman Art Library) . James Nixon, The Trial of Warren Hastings (): the Speaker and other MPs. Watercolour. Private collection (Bridgeman Art Library) . (a) [James Sayers], For the Trial of Warren Ha[stings] (Feb. : BMC ). . ⫻ . cm. (b) [ James Gillray], Impeachment Ticket. For the Trial of W— rr—n H—st—ngs Esqr (Feb. : BMC ). . ⫻ cm. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (John Johnson Collection, Tickets /, /) . Detail from A Map of the East India Company’s Lands on the Coast of Choromandel, Based on an Actual Survey . . . by Thomas Barnard (London, ). . ⫻ cm. (original size of detail, ⫻ cm.). By permission of the British Library (*/) . [James Sayers], A Reverie of Prince Demetrius Cantemir ( Apr. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . James Nixon, The Trial of Warren Hastings (): Nathaniel Middleton in the witness box. Watercolour. Private collection (Bridgeman Art Library) . [William Dent], The Raree Show ( Feb. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Thomas Rowlandson], Doctor Lasts Examination ( Feb. ). Engraving. . ⫻ cm. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Peel Collection, No. . [Thomas Rowlandson], Neddy’s Black Box ( Jan. : BMC ). Engraving. ⫻ cm. © Trustees of the British Museum
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. [ James Gillray], Cooling the Brain ( May : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Isaac Cruikshank], The Doctor Indulged with his Favourite Scene ( Dec. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Frederick George Byron (?)], Frontispiece to Reflections on the French Revolution ( Nov. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Frederick George Byron (?)], Don Dismallo, after an Absence of Sixteen Years, Embracing his Beautiful Vision ( Nov. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Frederick George Byron (?)], The Knight of the Woful Countenance Going to Extirpate the National Assembly ( Nov. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [ James Gillray], Smelling out a Rat ( Dec. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Isaac Cruikshank], Frith the Madman Hurling Treason at the King ( Jan. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Isaac Cruikshank], The Aristocratic Crusade, or Chivalry Revived by Don Quixote de St Omer & his Friend Sancho ( Jan. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [ John Nixon after another artist (?)], The Wrangling Friends, or Opposition in Disorder ( May : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Frederick George Byron (?)], The Volcano of Opposition ( May : BMC ). Engraving. ⫻ cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [ James Gillray], A Uniform Whig ( Nov. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . Michele Benedetti after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Right Hon[oura]ble Edmund Burke []. Aquatint (original state before the lines from Milton were erased). ⫻ . cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection . James Gillray, The Dagger Scene, or the Plot Discover’d ( Dec. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Isaac Cruikshank], Reflections on the French Revolution ( Jan. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [ James Sayers], The Last Scene of the Managers Farce ( May : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . [Isaac Cruikshank], The Modern Leviathan!! ( Mar. : BMC ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. © Trustees of the British Museum . Death mask of Edmund Burke. Plaster cast. . cm. (height, including socle). Courtesy of the William Ramsay Henderson Trust
Figures . Candlemas Pond. Detail from R. Stratford, Part of an Estate . . . Belonging to James DuPre, Esquire (). Drawing. . x . cm. Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies . Gerrard Street. Detail from Richard Horwood, Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (London, –). Queen’s University Library . Ticket for the trial of Warren Hastings, Sixty-Ninth Day ( May ). Engraving. . ⫻ . cm. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (John Johnson Collection, Tickets, /) . Cromwell House, Old Brompton. From Peter Burke, The Public and Domestic Life of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (nd edn. London, ), . Queen’s University Library
Abbreviations Quotations from, and references to, the following editions are identified as follows: C Correspondence, ed. Thomas W. Copeland and others, vols. (Cambridge, –). R Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, Calif., 2001). Page numbers (enclosed in square brackets) refer to the pagination of the first edition, as indicated in Clark’s text. W Works, vols., Bohn’s British Classics (London, –). Used for texts that have not yet appeared in WS. WS Writings and Speeches, ed. Paul Langford et al., vols. to date (i–iii, v–ix) (Oxford, – ). 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) 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, vols. (London, –). References are to catalogue numbers. Bodl. Bodleian Library. Bond Speeches of the Managers and Counsel at the Trial of Warren Hastings, ed. E. A. Bond, vols. (London, –). CJ Journals of the House of Commons. Corr. () Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir Richard Bourke, vols. (London, ). Debrett The Parliamentary Register: or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons . . . –, vols. (London, –). HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission. Lambert House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sheila Lambert, vols. (Wilmington, Del., –).
xiv LJ Minutes
NA NLS NRO
NUL PH Sale Catalogue
Todd
UBL WWM YB YWC
Journals of the House of Lords. Minutes of the Evidence Taken at the Trial of Warren Hastings . . . at the Bar of the House of Lords ([London, –]); repr. in vols. in House of Lords Sessional Papers, Session –, ed. William Torrington, vols. (Dobbs Ferry, NY, ). National Archives, Kew (formerly the Public Record Office). National Library of Scotland. Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton. Except as indicated, all references are to the Fitzwilliam (Burke) Papers; FC ⫽ Fitzwilliam Correspondence (the year serves as a reference). Nottingham University Library. The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year , vols. (London, –). Catalogue of the Library of the Late Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, ); repr. in Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons. vol. viii: Politicians, ed. Seamus Deane (London, ). References are to lot numbers. William B. Todd, A Bibliography of Edmund Burke, Soho Bibliographies (London, ); repr. with addenda (Godalming, ). References are to entries unless pages are specified. F. P. Lock, ‘Unpublished Burke Letters’, English Historical Review, (), – (I); (), – (II); (), – (III). Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments. Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (OF ⫽ Osborn Files). Horace Walpole, Correspondence,Yale Edition, ed. W. S. Lewis, vols. (New Haven, –).
Picking up the Pieces, ‒
In the summer of , Burke’s political career seemed to be sputtering to an inglorious close. In , at the late age of , he had entered English politics as private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham (–), who had just been unexpectedly elevated to high office as First Lord of the Treasury. A year later, when Rockingham went into opposition, Burke followed him, serving as his faithful subordinate and spokesman through a long and dispiriting sojourn in the political wilderness. By , when Rockingham finally returned to office, Burke’s character had hardened, making him increasingly testy, inflexible, and self-righteous. Partly thanks to his difficult personality, instead of receiving the Cabinet position which his service had earned and his abilities deserved, his reward was the lucrative but subordinate post of Paymaster-General of the Forces. Then, on July, after only three months in office, Rockingham died. Burke lost the patron who embodied his ideal of political virtue, and the hopes and expectations which had consoled him through those long years of opposition were blasted. Burke tried hard to adjust. At first, indeed, some features of the political landscape appeared depressingly familiar. On Rockingham’s death, George III (–) offered the Treasury to the Earl of Shelburne (–), who had returned to office with Rockingham in an uneasy alliance. For Burke and his friends, the royal choice represented an attempt to revive the king’s old ‘system’, based on ‘secret influence’, which Rockingham and his friends thought they had destroyed. Unwilling to serve under a minister whom they distrusted, they resigned. At least Shelburne, formerly a treacherous colleague, was now exposed as an open enemy. After several months of instability and intrigue, Shelburne’s ministry was defeated in the House of Commons. Burke’s party, led now by Charles James Fox (–), returned to office in April , in a pragmatic (and, as many thought, unscrupulous) alliance with their old antagonist Lord North (–). Again excluded from the Cabinet, Burke was re-appointed
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Paymaster. In one respect, at least, this second period of office was more rewarding, for he was chiefly responsible for an important piece of legislation, the controversial measure known as Fox’s India Bill. In its defence, on December , Burke delivered one of the finest of his formal speeches. Had Fox’s bill been enacted, Burke might have been remembered as the architect of what he grandiloquently styled the ‘Magna Charta of Hindostan’ (WS v. ). But the Fox–North Coalition, lacking royal confidence, was built on weak foundations. Taking advantage of the India Bill’s unpopularity, on December, the king, having unscrupulously engineered the bill’s defeat, dismissed the Coalition and appointed the young William Pitt (–) to the Treasury. Convinced that this move was unconstitutional, Fox, Burke, and their friends fought a long parliamentary battle to oust Pitt and recapture the government, even against the king’s antagonism. Only after the general election of March did Burke realize that public opinion, so far as it found expression through the electoral system, was unmistakably against them. Over a hundred of Fox’s supporters (dubbed ‘Fox’s martyrs’) lost their seats. Pitt would remain Prime Minister for the remainder of Burke’s life, and beyond. Burke had to digest an unpalatable reality. ‘The people did not like our work’, he confessed to his friend William Baker (–; one of ‘Fox’s martyrs’), ‘and they joind the Court to pull it down’ ( June : C v. ). This was a bitter admission for one who, since his entry into politics, had consistently championed the rights and interests (if not always the temporary opinions) of ‘the people’ against ‘the court’, the king and those unscrupulous politicians who sought to extend and exalt the royal prerogative (the ‘king’s friends’ of Burke’s pamphlet Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents). Such a defeat would have prompted many a politician to re-examine his principles and the articles of his faith. On Burke, its effect was the opposite. For him, it only reconfirmed the lesson he had learned from his first session in Parliament, in : distrust of the ‘secret influence’ of the Crown. To this capacious conspiracy theory Burke had repeatedly appealed to explain the unpopularity of his own party and the aristocratic politics that it represented. In the s, the sinister influence of Lord Bute (–) and the ‘king’s friends’ had been the object of his hatred and mistrust. Now, refurbishing his theory, Burke simply replaced the ‘king’s friends’ by another shadowy entity, the ‘Bengal squad’. Pitt owed his victory in the election, so Burke believed, in large part to the money, influence, and propaganda mobilized by this group against the Coalition and its India Bill. Having pillaged India, they were now corruptly using part of their spoils to
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purchase immunity to continue their depredations.¹ This nightmare never lost its grip on his imagination.² Burke was therefore ready and eager to continue the fight against Pitt, as he had earlier battled North and Shelburne. But since the death of Rockingham his importance in his party had waned, and his opinions were less regarded by the younger men who (on both sides of the Commons) had now taken the lead. A new generation now dominated the Commons: Pitt, on the Treasury bench, supported by William Wyndham Grenville (–), and Henry Dundas (–); on the opposition side, Fox, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (–), another Irish adventurer and Burke’s rival for the palm of parliamentary oratory. At , Burke seemed an old man, a veteran lagging superfluously on the stage. The first session after the election exposed Burke to a series of humiliations. On June, when he moved a gargantuan resolution embodying a comprehensive defence of the measures of the Coalition, the quixotic gesture embarrassed even his own party. On June, he left the chamber in high dudgeon after failing to gain a hearing in the debate on parliamentary reform. He was repeatedly baited by the younger members: a ‘parcel of boys’, as he called them.³ Representative of the abusive contempt heaped on Burke is a satirical poem in ridicule of his long motion of June. Once a parliamentary Mercutio, the ‘gay enlivener of each dull debate’, Burke has sunk into a Thersites, his impotent speeches the ‘rank effusion of a canker’d heart’: Why, like old Priam, wilt thou Pyrrhus fight With arms unequal, with unequal might? Like feeble Priam’s spear too weak to wound, Thy bolt of slander tumbles to the ground.
Burke should retire rather than ‘thus disgrace thy age | In puny wrangling and ignoble rage’.⁴ Stung by such taunts, Burke voiced a reluctance to continue the unequal struggle. To William Baker, he averred that ‘for me to ¹ In the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts ( Feb. ), E.B. charged Richard Atkinson (–), with keeping ‘a sort of public office or counting-house, where the whole business of the last general election was managed’ (WS v. ). Atkinson (who made his fortune as a government contractor during the American war) took a leading part in the opposition to Fox’s India Bills and was himself elected to Parliament in (at a by-election; he was defeated at the general election). Belief in an ‘Arcot squad’ or ‘Bengal squad’ of MPs was not confined to E.B. In , William Pitt claimed that ‘it was a fact pretty well known, and generally understood, that the nabob of Arcot had no less than seven or eight members in that House’ ( May : PH xxii. ). While the number of MPs with Indian connections increased after the election, from in the Parliament of – to in that of –, these MPs did not form a bloc or ‘squad’ (Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, – (London, ), i. –). ² R []; E.B. to Fitzwilliam, June (C vii. ); to Sir Hercules Langrishe, May (viii. ). ³ June ; Debrett, xv. – (PH xxiv. –). ⁴ ‘Causidicus’, ‘On a Late Excentric Motion’ (Public Advertiser, July ).
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look forward to the Event of another twenty years toil—it is quite ridiculous’ (C v. ). Yet his actions belied this professed pessimism. Toil, not repose, was his element. He soon resumed an active and energetic political life, devoted to the causes and values in which he so fervently believed. If not ready to retire, Burke was certainly glad of a temporary retreat to his country estate at Beaconsfield. Shortly after the fiasco of his motion of June, he left London, although the session had more than two months to run.⁵ Beaconsfield offered many consolations besides escape from the mortifications of Westminster. Its attractions are admiringly if conventionally conveyed in a poem by the daughter of Richard Shackleton (–), Burke’s oldest friend. When the Shackletons visited Beaconsfield in June, Mary (–) had been captivated by the estate and its master. During the summer, she expressed her homage in a topographical poem in the tradition of Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ (c.). In Mary’s vision, the imposing house, the wooded walks and the lush pastures, the arable fields and the growing plantations, the rustic tea-house and the neat farmstead, form an idyllic landscape, a fit setting for the principal figure, a man at once dignified and benevolent, of infinite versatility and abilities, who can turn from the weightiest problems of empire to compound pills for the poor.⁶ Tardy in responding to this effusion, Burke made up for the delay with a graceful letter of compliment, a genre at which he excelled. ‘You great artists’, he observed, ‘never draw what is before you, but improve it up to the Standard of perfection in your own Minds. In this description I know nothing of myself; but what is better, and may be of more use, I know, what a good Judge thinks I ought to be.’ As usual, he injected a little mild criticism in order to preserve his praise from sounding fulsome ( Dec. : C v. –). Granting that Mary idealizes, the core of her poem captures an important truth. Burke’s range of interests and activities was remarkable, and he did literally dispense medicines for the poor as well as champion the oppressed millions of Bengal.⁷ The pleasure Burke took in country life and in the supervision of his farm was unaffected. But Beaconsfield was no Eden. Despite his professions to the contrary, even there Burke could never quite forget the tumults and the anxieties of political life. More palpable vexations were also liable to intrude. In , these included a lawsuit, ‘a deluge of rain’ at harvest time ( Aug.: C v. ), and a robbery. The lawsuit was a libel case against a newspaper, in which, though technically victorious, Burke was awarded derisory damages ⁵ E.B. returned for a few days at the end of July, to oppose Pitt’s India Bill and to move for some papers relating to Hastings (WS v. –). ⁶ ‘Beaconsfield, the Seat of Edmund Burke’; Mary Leadbeater (she married in ), Poems (Dublin, ), –. The copy sent to E.B. in is at NRO (A. XXIV. ). ⁷ Mary ‘saw this famous Senator . . . mixing with his own hands pills for the sick Poor’ (extract from a letter of Sept. to an unknown correspondent; YB Osborn Shelves, Ballitore Boxes). E.B.’s most recent effort on behalf of the oppressed millions was his Speech on Fox’s India Bill of Dec. .
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of £ instead of the £, he had sought.⁸The rain was the easiest to bear, for even Burke could not take it personally. Then, on September, while the Burkes were out, a highly professional team of criminals, dressed as gentlemen and servants, drove up to the house in broad daylight and made off with about ounces of plate. Though observed, they were presumed to be legitimate visitors.⁹ The thieves were never found, nor the plate recovered. Burke’s wife Jane (–) noted ruefully that their friends would now have to bring their own cutlery, in the French fashion. She consoled herself with the thought that ‘if we are poor, we are honest’.¹⁰ This consolation was pleasantly reinforced by Mary Shackleton’s poem (which probably reached the Burkes soon after the robbery), which depicts Beaconsfield as an island of virtue and benevolence in a wicked world. The contents of the post were not always so agreeable. On the heels of the poem came a letter from Charles Bembridge (d. ), one of the two accountants in the Pay Office, suspended on suspicion of peculation, whom Burke had generously but unwisely reinstated soon after returning to office in April . Unluckily for Burke, both men were indeed guilty. The second clerk, John Powell, committed suicide in May. Bembridge was later convicted, and sentenced to a fine and six months’ imprisonment. This débâcle proved the worst embarrassment of Burke’s short ministerial career. Reviving such unpleasant memories, no letter from Bembridge could have been other than unwelcome. The one Burke received on October (C v. ), was doubly so, for it carried another and more wounding sting, revealing the apparent perfidy of Richard Champion (–), the first and closest of his political friends at Bristol. In order to help him, after Champion’s porcelain manufactory had ended in bankruptcy, when Burke was appointed Paymaster, on each occasion he had named Champion as his deputy. In , with Burke out of office and no other prospect of patronage in England, Champion decided to emigrate to America. When Bembridge reported to Burke his ‘great Astonishment’ on hearing of Champion’s imminent departure, Burke inferred that some discreditable financial transaction between them was about to be revealed. If so, Burke himself would not escape blame. Writing to his son Richard (–), he called Bembridge ‘a wild, precipitate senseless, and now desperate wretch’. To Bembridge himself, he protested his ignorance of any dealings between him and Champion, and affirmed his resolve not to interfere. ‘I scarcely remember a troublesome affair in my life which has not arisen from a single cause’, he groaned: ‘the active part I have taken in other peoples concerns, where no advantage could possibly arise to myself, but where the business has subjected me to obloquy and misrepresentation’ ⁸ E.B. sued the Public Advertiser for libels published in . The case was tried on July (C v. ). ⁹ Morning Herald, Oct. ; Whitehall Evening Post, Oct.; Annual Register (–), . ¹⁰ J.B. to Walker King, Nov. (WWM BkP /).
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( Oct.: ). To Champion, he wrote at greater length and with more bitterness, while trying to sound sorry rather than angry. ‘All this I can break my Mind to’, he bleated, after reviewing the episode, ‘But new disputes and scuffles are too much for me; when I want repose as much as meat and drink’ (). Burke’s letter did not reach Champion before he sailed, and was not forwarded; nor did the two ever correspond again.¹¹ The ending of their friendship was the greater loss, because both Champion and his wife had been friends of the whole Burke family. Their affectionate intimacy is amply documented in the series of chatty letters that Burke’s brother Richard (–) wrote to Champion.¹² That such a friend should have ‘less considerd my being than his own temporary convenience’ ( Oct.: C v. ) was the more wounding for being so unexpected. To his son, Burke lamented, as he had to Bembridge, ‘having been brought by my kindness to many people into more trouble than I can or will in future attempt to go through with’ (). Yet he did not long keep this resolution. To the end of his life, he continued to entangle himself in beneficent schemes that often caused him more annoyance and frustration than satisfaction. Though he claimed to ‘want repose as much as meat and drink’, activity and business, however unrewarding, even ‘disputes and scuffles’, were the true nutriment of his soul. Burke’s temper was easily ignited by a letter, especially one that called into question his own conduct or opinions. Nor, once engaged, could he easily let a matter rest. Though he had once professed not to understand the pleasure that the old Duke of Newcastle (–) seemed to take in a voluminous and time-consuming correspondence, Burke too came to find such activity ‘a sort of recreation’ (C ii. ). Burke was an obsessive straightener of the record, a trait which makes his letters sometimes reveal more than he intended. A striking example is the case of Catherine Ridge (c.-c.), which surfaced about two weeks after the Bembridge affair. Catherine was the eldest daughter of John Ridge (c.–), one of Burke’s oldest Irish friends. In , newly married himself, Burke had witnessed Ridge’s marriage. In , on his last visit to London, Ridge had brought Catherine with him. The Burkes were delighted with her, and to keep her memory green, Ridge presented them with her portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (–).¹³ Shortly thereafter, Ridge died, leaving six children without provision, though with some expectations from an uncle in the West Indies.¹⁴ Through the good offices of the Chief Secretary, Sir John Blaquiere (–), ¹¹ R.B. Jr. to R.B. Sr., n.d. (NRO A. XII. ; C v. ); E.B. to Bembridge, Aug. (vi. –). W.B. occasionally wrote to Champion from India. ¹² Most of R.B. Sr.’s letters to Champion are in NRO A. XVI. –. ¹³ Catherine Ridge sat for Reynolds in December ; Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, ), ii. . The portrait is reproduced in David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings (New Haven, ), ii. . ¹⁴ James Ridge, a sugar planter in Jamaica, died on Mar. . E.B. was one of his executors, and in consequence a trustee for John Ridge, Jr., the principal beneficiary. The younger Ridge was a refractory
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Burke obtained for Catherine a pension of £ a year on the Irish establishment. To make the application, he had swallowed his pride and overcome his rooted dislike of asking for favours from those to whom, politically, he was in declared opposition. In , Blaquiere had been the chief proponent of an Irish Absentee Tax. Opposition to it was fuelled from England, principally by Rockingham and Burke, and they managed to force its withdrawal. This willingness to expose himself to a rebuff for the child of his late friend shows Burke at his disinterested best. Blaquiere, in turn, evinced magnanimity in supporting such a request from a political opponent, when he had numerous dependants and expectants of his own.¹⁵ As with Burke’s restoration of Bembridge, however, this charitable impulse brought more vexation than satisfaction. In this case, Catherine’s pension excited or exacerbated family feuds and tensions. These erupted in , when the younger sisters, blind Sarah (c.-c.) and Ann (c.–?), demanded that the pension be shared with them, claiming that this had been the original intention of the grant. The sisters appealed to Blaquiere, who was sympathetic, but initially unwilling to take action without consulting Burke. Explaining that he had envisaged the pension as a kind of marriage portion, Burke took Catherine’s part, opposed the redistribution, and accused the younger sisters of exaggerating their poverty and of fomenting family discord. If they needed assistance, their brother, who had inherited about £, a year from his uncle, was better able to assist them than Catherine ( Oct. : C v. –). In response, while professing that Burke’s opinion was ‘Law and Gospel’ to him on the subject, Blaquiere sought to engage his sympathies for the younger sisters: if You had seen as I did last week in Dublin, and I never saw either of them before, the two Younger Sisters, both pretty, one of em even handsome, Leading the Elder, Stone blind, thro the Streets, with elegant deportments, but tatterd rags, seeking almost for bread, Your heart woud have yarned, and You woud have been a Stronger advocate for something compulsatory upon Miss Ridge than even I am at this moment—( Nov.: )
Burke was himself a master of pathos. Lachrymose scenes such as this can be found in some of his speeches.¹⁶ Accustomed to deploy affective rhetoric, he was the less likely to fall prey to it himself, or to respond to such sentimentality. Far from converting Burke, Blaquiere’s appeal provoked him (as teenager, and the trusteeship brought E.B. much vexation (E.B. to Charles O’Hara, Jr., June, July, and Nov. : C v. –, –, –). ¹⁵ In his letter to E.B. of June , Blaquiere asked him to maintain a discreet silence about his part in obtaining the pension, ‘circumstanced as we awkwardly stand together in our politicks’ (NRO A. VIII. ). ¹⁶ An example is E.B.’s speech of Feb. , attacking the use of Indian auxiliaries (WS iii. –). Contemporary comments singled out as especially affecting a passage on the murder, on her wedding day, of a Miss McCrea ().
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opposition usually did) to a lengthier and more elaborately argued restatement of his original position. The incomplete copy that survives extends to about , words (–); the entire letter might have been twice as long. Even the extant portion illustrates Burke’s rhetorical versatility. As if in implied criticism of Blaquiere’s emotive appeal, he argued his case drily with legal precision, adducing the wills and the known or presumed intentions of the deceased parties. The sisters’ odyssey to Dublin he dismissed as a publicity-seeking charade, more deserving of censure than sympathy. Blaquiere, in turn, was no more willing than Burke to relinquish his own judgement. While conceding that he had misunderstood Burke’s intentions, he affirmed that the Lord-Lieutenant had meant the pension to be shared among the three sisters, and recommended that it should be so divided. The Irish government naturally accepted his advice.¹⁷ Burke was chagrined. Venting his spleen in a letter to Michael Ridge (d. c.; John’s surviving brother), he expatiated on the family’s ingratitude more freely than he had in writing to Blaquiere (C v. –). Nevertheless, he continued his efforts to improve Catherine’s marriageability, and in she finally found a husband.¹⁸ Slight in itself, the episode exemplifies several facets of Burke’s character. He was capable of active and disinterested benevolence. At no point did he stand to gain, personally or politically. Equally in evidence is his prickly self-righteousness. Most tellingly, once embarked, he could not disengage himself. Disagreement, as always, provoked him not to compromise or concession (he might, for example, have accepted Blaquiere’s suggestion that, as the eldest, Catherine should receive £, and her sisters £ each), but to a deeper self-entrenchment. Two months after the squabble among the Ridge sisters revived memories of one old friendship, another (though rivalship might be the more appropriate term) was severed when Samuel Johnson (–) died on December. Burke had known Johnson since about . Intimate they had never been, both being too possessed by an urge to dominate. Politics kept them further part. Johnson had vehemently condemned the Seven Years War as a quarrel between robbers about possessions to which neither had any just claim.¹⁹ Burke spent the summer of helping his cousin William Burke (–) with the Account of the European Settlements in America (), which vindicates British colonial ambitions. Burke’s election to Parliament deepened the divide, leaving him less time for his old literary friends and multiplying the subjects about which he and Johnson disagreed. On successive political controversies, the two took opposite sides. Each of Johnson’s four political pamphlets of – attacks a cause that Burke championed in Parliament.²⁰ ¹⁷ Blaquiere to E.B., April (NRO A. II. ); Blaquiere to Thomas Orde, Aug. (cited C v. ). ¹⁸ Lord Earlsfort to E.B., Jan. (WWM BkP /); C v. . ¹⁹ ‘Observations on the Present State of Affairs’ (), in Works (New Haven, – ), x. –. ²⁰ The False Alarm () defends the seating of Luttrell in place of Wilkes, declared incapable of election. Thoughts on Falkland’s Islands () deflates the importance of the dispute with Spain, and
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No wonder that, to preserve civility, they had to avoid politics. ‘I can live very well with Burke,’ Johnson claimed: ‘I love his knowledge, his genius, his diffusion, and affluence of conversation; but I would not talk to him of the Rockingham party.’²¹ Yet during those years Burke was a politician to the marrow. To keep the peace, they sharpened their wits on safer questions, such as the comparative merits of Homer and Virgil.²² Johnson and Burke respected each other’s abilities. On occasion, they spent a pleasant evening together, discussing an academic topic such as the antiquity of Stonehenge. More commonly, they met in public as intellectual gladiators. Once, towards midnight, they fought a battle of wits so absorbing that one of the ladies in the audience exclaimed, ‘there is no rising unless somebody will cry fire’.²³ Politics, too, remained an insuperable barrier to true friendship. Johnson’s reiterated insistence on Burke being ‘an extraordinary man’ sounds like a determined attempt to be fair to an enemy.²⁴ Burke was less generous, his mind more warped by partisan prejudices. In , when Johnson was attacked by name in the Commons, and opprobriously linked with the scurrilous pamphleteer John Shebbeare (–), Burke did not rise to his defence.²⁵ Two years after Johnson’s death, he could still be savage where Johnson’s politics was concerned.²⁶ Not until did he deliver a public tribute that reciprocated the many encomiums he had received from Johnson.²⁷ In retrospect, both Johnson and Burke are readily perceived as champions of what are now termed ‘conservative’ values. Both upheld the prescriptive rights of property, the utility of the social hierarchy, and the restriction of political rights to the educated minority. Johnson was the more backward argues against a war. The Patriot () exposes the false ‘patriotism’ of the opposition at the time of the election. Taxation No Tyranny () supports the right of the British Parliament to impose taxes on the American colonies. ²¹ Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, –), ii. ( Apr. ). ²² Ibid. iii. n. (an undated contribution from Bennet Langton). ²³ Johnson to Hester Thrale, Oct. (Stonehenge), May (‘no rising’); in Letters, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton, –), iv. , iii. . ²⁴ Thomas W. Copeland, ‘Johnson and Burke’, in Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants, ed. Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley, and P. G. M. Dickson (Oxford, ), –; Elizabeth R. Lambert, ‘Johnson on Friendship: The Example of Burke’, in Johnson after Two Hundred Years, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia, ), –. ²⁵ On Mar. , Thomas Townshend linked Johnson and Shebbeare as scurrilous pamphleteers. E.B. spoke next, but said nothing about Johnson. William Fitzherbert came to his defence, calling him ‘a pattern of morality’ (BL Egerton MS , fos. –). E.B. may not have been present on Feb. , when Fox vindicated Johnson against another attack by Townshend (Egerton MS , fos. –; PH xvii. ). ²⁶ On Nov. , at a dinner given by Sir Joshua Reynolds, E.B. was ‘intemperately abusive to a departed great man’ on subjects as obsolete as the Falklands crisis; Boswell’s Journal, in Boswell: The English Experiment, –, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, ), –. ²⁷ On Dec. , E.B. called Johnson ‘a great and a good man’ whose ‘virtues were equal to his transcendent talents’ and whose ‘friendship he valued as the greatest consolation and happiness of his life’ (Debrett, xxxiv. ; PH xxx. ).
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looking. While acknowledging that social mobility was inevitable in a modern, commercial society such as Britain, he frequently lamented the decay of social subordination, and the supersession of inherited distinctions by the power of mere wealth, with an ardour not found in Burke before the s.²⁸ Even so, Johnson and Burke can fairly be placed, on general and philosophical grounds, in the same camp. Both were hostile to the ideas and writings from which the modern ‘liberal’ tradition descends. Since such philosophical questions are what chiefly interest posterity, opinions on them are apt to appear most characteristic. Differences on the local and temporary controversies of the day are easily minimized, demoted to an admittedly ‘intense disagreement on factional political issues’.²⁹ Neither Burke nor Johnson, however, regarded the questions on which they disagreed as merely factional. From his entry into Parliament until nearly the end of Johnson’s life, Burke had elevated ‘party’ as the foundation of political virtue. Johnson shared George III’s belief that ‘party’ was synonymous with factious selfinterest. Johnson was a firm upholder of royal authority; Burke’s politics were aristocratic. On religion, they agreed more closely than on most ‘factional’ issues. Both, for example, showed an unusual respect for Roman Catholicism. Yet closer consideration reveals significant differences. For Johnson, theological beliefs remained of paramount importance, and he was deeply convinced of the exclusive truth of Christian doctrine. Burke cared less for speculative theology. His veneration of Hinduism may even have disposed him to regard Christianity as one of a number of ‘true’ religions that Providence had introduced into the world. The line he drew was between religion (any religion) and atheism, which he thought undermined the basis of society.³⁰ In part, these differences reflect disparities of background and generation. Johnson grew up in an English cathedral city; Burke, in a society where ‘religion’ was too often a shibboleth for privilege. In politics, too, their opinions were much influenced by early experiences. Johnson, born in , was a full generation older. Arriving in London in , he learned his politics during the last, turbulent years of the Walpole ministry, when most writers were ‘patriots’ and most ‘patriots’ in opposition. Once he had outgrown ²⁸ Review of Soame Jenyns, A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (); Johnson’s Works, xvii. ‒. Boswell noted that subordination was Johnson’s ‘favourite subject’; Life of Johnson, ii. ( Feb. ). ²⁹ James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.‒ (Cambridge, ), . ³⁰ Speech on Toleration Bill ( Mar. ), WS ii. –, esp. ; E.B. to John Erskine, June (C iv. –). J. C. D. Clark, ‘Religious Affiliation and Dynastic Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century England: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Samuel Johnson’, ELH (), –; F. P. Lock, ‘Burke and Religion’, in An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke, ed. Ian Crowe (Columbia, Mo., ), –.
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this accidental, youthful predilection, he came to value order and authority (and therefore, in practice, the royal prerogative), and conversely to distrust the factitious, self-interested complaints of the politicians who, out of power, wanted above all to achieve office. Burke arrived in London in at a time of political stability, even torpor, based on a near-monopoly of power in the hands of a Whig oligarchy. He distrusted the royal prerogative because he associated it with its exercise by George III in the s, when it produced political instability and a succession of short-lived ministries. Thus what Johnson saw as a factious challenge to lawful authority, Burke perceived as a legitimate contention to re-establish the balance of power necessary for the health of the body politic. Burke’s last meeting with Johnson was recorded by Bennet Langton (c.–), who found Burke sitting with four or five other friends of the dying sage: Mr Burke said to him, ‘I am afraid, Sir, such a number of us may be oppressive to you.’—‘No, Sir, (said Johnson,) it is not so; and I must be in a wretched state, indeed, when your company would not be a delight to me.’ Mr Burke, in a tremulous voice, expressive of being very tenderly affected, replied, ‘My dear Sir, you have always been too good to me.’ Immediately afterwards he went away.³¹
Temporarily at least, Burke could overlook their political differences and even recognize that the balance of magnanimity had been on Johnson’s side. Friends of both men were well apprised of the ambiguity of their relations. Telling evidence is the oddly offhand tone in which Sir Joshua Reynolds phrased his request that Burke should act as a pall-bearer at Johnson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey: If I thought this Letter was to be paid for, I really believe it would have stopt my writing, as I have not any thing to say worth twopence. We can scarce expect you would come to town on purpose to attend the Funeral. If you think of doing Dr Johnsons memory that honour, we have fixed on you as the first Pall Bearer with Mr Fox. (C v. )
Reynolds would hardly have written thus unless he had been in some doubt about Burke’s acceptance. Burke’s reply does not survive, but he made the journey for the funeral, which took place on December.³² Johnson was buried near David Garrick (–) and the monument to Shakespeare, in what had already become ‘Poets’ Corner’. Most observers would have understood Reynolds’s diffidence. In , Johnson and Burke seemed ‘mighty opposites’. The last decade of Burke’s life would make him increasingly ³¹ Boswell, Life of Johnson, iv. (Dec. ). ³² Gentleman’s Magazine, (Dec. ), . The account of Johnson’s funeral was supplied by Sir John Hawkins.
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Johnsonian: a passionate defender of monarchy, hierarchy, and the Established Church. From the vexations which had accumulated since June, the approaching session of Parliament promised Burke at least the relief of activity and business. Activity, even without the prospect of success, was for him both therapeutic and energizing. ‘The more one has to do, the more one is capable of doing even beyond our direct Task,’ he told Mary Shackleton, to explain why, having neglected to write when he had ample leisure, he did so when ‘I never was more Busy in my Life’ ( Dec. : C v. ). Burke, however, was unusual in this respect. For the most part, the opposition was content to drift. To William Windham (–), the loyal disciple who had seconded his quixotic motion of June , he could be openly critical. Inviting him to Beaconsfield to dine with the Duke of Portland (–; the party’s nominal leader), Burke commented bitterly on the opposition’s lack of a strategy: I have been in Town for a day or two. I dined at Foxes anniversary. The meeting was numerous; and they were very steady, and in very good humour with one another, with him, and with their Cause. As to any plan of Conduct in our Leaders there are not the faintest Traces of it—nor does it seem to occur to them that any such thing is necessary. Accordingly every thing is left to accidents; and I thought Fox had great Faith in the Chapter of that Scripture. ( Oct. : )
This letter exposes the gulf between Burke’s conception of politics and Fox’s. The fault-line of the rift that led to their break in is already perceptible. Fox relished the personal side of politics, for it ministered to his own kind of egotism (as did canvassing, which Burke loathed). A remarkable extemporizer who could deliver a spellbinding oration after a hard ride from Newmarket or an all-night gambling session, Fox did not share Burke’s belief in the need for planning, preparation, and systematic study.³³ Initially, Burke had been dazzled by Fox’s abilities and charisma. Yet Fox had never been a true believer in the Rockingham creed. As early as , Burke had been obliged to wean him from his eagerness to get into office at any price and with any colleagues.³⁴ Since Rockingham’s death, and Fox’s assumption of effective leadership, the party had lost touch with its principles, as set out ³³ Horace Walpole was fond of anecdotes about Fox’s rapid transitions from dissipation to business: to Sir Horace Mann, Feb. , Apr. , May (YWC xxiii. –, –; xxv. ). Fox could make himself master of complex material at short notice, but he lacked E.B.’s habit of systematic study. ³⁴ Fox to Rockingham, Jan. , in Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed. Lord John Russell (London, –), i. –; Fox to E.B., Jan., and E.B.’s endorsement (C iv. –).
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in its manifesto, Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (). In , by entering into an opportunistic alliance with their erstwhile antagonist North, Fox had quickly shown how unfitted he was to head the old Rockingham party. The hunger for power exposed by this manœuvre had enabled the king to exploit popular outrage against the Coalition to defeat its great measure of reform, Fox’s India Bill. In the session of , Pitt had, with little opposition, enacted a bill in substance if not in appearance hardly less draconian than Fox’s. Pitt’s majority, as Fox himself ruefully noted, was ‘much more against us than for the ministry’; Pitt’s India Bill ‘had begun to excite much discontent till I opposed it’.³⁵ Fox was thus the party’s gravest liability as well as its most powerful loadstone. Burke wanted a plan: a strategy that would, ultimately, convince responsible public opinion (chiefly the independent MPs) that a new system was needed. Their programme should be built not on personalities but on principles. To the exaltation of the royal prerogative, it should oppose a party of disinterested virtue. This was the lesson of : the Rockingham legacy, to which Burke remained true. For the first time in a decade, Parliament did not meet before Christmas. This marked the return of politics to something like the stability of the early years of North’s ministry. Now, in , the session opened as late as January. Pitt kept the speech from the throne unusually brief. Apart from the standard paragraph on the raising of supplies, and an ambiguous allusion to securing ‘the true Principles of the Constitution’, the king’s speech mentioned only three subjects: commercial relations with Ireland; continued action to reduce smuggling; and the latest recommendations of the Commissioners of Public Accounts.³⁶ The opening debate in the Commons began with a hallowed routine. Two ministerial members moved and seconded an address in reply, dutifully echoing each element in the speech from the throne. Usually, an opposition member would then propose an amendment as a test of strength. The failure of the first opposition speaker, Lord Surrey (–), to move such an amendment was therefore a tacit confession of opposition weakness. Burke, however, determined not to let the address pass unchallenged. When Burke had spoken as part of an opposition team, he had typically waited until late in the debate. Now something of an outsider, he spoke early. In a manner happily reminiscent of his speeches of the s and s, he opened with a witty prelude. Contrasting Pitt’s brevity with Shelburne’s unprecedentedly long and verbose throne speech of December ,³⁷ he likened Shelburne’s to a ‘large pye’, Pitt’s to a ‘petty patty’. More prescient of ³⁵ Fox to the Duke of Portland, July (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ³⁶ CJ xl. –. The speech is about words. ³⁷ CJ xxxix. –. Even Philip Yorke, the ministerialist chosen to move the address in reply, thought the speech ‘too long’ (to Lord Hardwicke, [ Dec. ]; BL Add. MS , fo. ).
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the new Burke was the gravamen of his indictment, to which he devoted the greater part of his speech: the ominous absence of any reference to India. To prove that India was in need of more urgent attention than Ireland, he quoted extracts from a letter of Warren Hastings (–), Governor-General of Bengal, describing the ravaged state of Bengal and Oudh. He then moved an amendment to the speech, promising an enquiry into ‘all waste of the public treasure in the East Indies’ and every effort to ‘bring to condign punishment, the authors of such misdemeanors, if they shall be found to exist’.³⁸ Though he did not name Hastings in the amendment, in the body of his speech Burke had explicitly blamed him for the miseries of British India. The occasion thus marked another step towards the impeachment that Burke had meditated since and would initiate in . Pitt repaid Burke’s sarcasm. Burke, of all men, he taunted, was ‘the best qualified to judge of the comparison between a very short and a very long speech’, and reminded him of ‘the longest composition ever moved in that House’, Burke’s abortive motion of June , which had taken four hours to read. The grievances which Burke had described ‘with all the flowers of imagination’ no longer existed. His own India Act of had eliminated them. Now, therefore, ‘the business was ended’.³⁹ Pitt was wrong: the business was hardly begun. Burke would devote much of the next ten years to an uphill struggle to bring Hastings to ‘condign punishment’. Yet Major John Scott (–), Hastings’s over-zealous agent, exaggerated less than usual when he reported to his principal that Burke ‘made so violent, & so ridiculous a Speech, that there was not a Member in the House, who did not pronounce him to be absolutely mad’.⁴⁰ At least, most members probably thought or hoped that Pitt was right, and that the subject of India had been shelved. Burke’s amendment was rejected without a division, and the address itself likewise approved. But the false security engendered by Scott’s representation of Burke as a madman fallen into universal contempt would cost Hastings dear. Burke would soon prove himself a formidable, tenacious, and sometimes persuasive opponent. The easy passage of the address with only token opposition did not, as might have been expected, lead to a smooth and uneventful session. Instead, Pitt suffered three humiliating reverses. Yet these triumphs offered no satisfaction to the opposition. Rather, they confirmed Pitt’s ascendancy. While members might refuse to follow him on a particular issue, they emphatically did not want to replace him with Fox. The first of Pitt’s defeats was the most personal. In the election, Fox had stood for Westminster; but as an insurance policy, he had also been returned for the pocket constituency of ³⁸ Debrett, xvii. – (PH xxiv. –). ³⁹ PH xxiv. –. E.B. spoke again, briefly, in response to Pitt’s twisting of his remarks on Ireland (PH, xxiv. ). ⁴⁰ Scott to Hastings, Feb. (BL Add. MS , fo. ).
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Tain Burghs in Scotland. When the poll closed at Westminster (which, like most constituencies, returned two members), Fox stood second, and should therefore have been declared elected. Yet when Sir Cecil Wray (–), the defeated ministerial candidate, demanded a scrutiny, the High Bailiff (the returning officer) decided to make no return, pending its outcome. In a constituency with so many electors, a scrutiny would be a lengthy procedure. In the session of , when the propriety of the scrutiny was questioned, Pitt had supported it, patently with a view to humiliating Fox into sitting as the member for Tain Burghs. In the partisan atmosphere of the day, he had easily carried the House with him. Now, however, when most feelings (though not Pitt’s vindictiveness) had cooled, support for the scrutiny (and, in effect, the disfranchisement of Westminster) gradually fell. Much against his will, Pitt was eventually forced to drop the scrutiny and allow Fox’s return for Westminster. In –, Burke had been one of the most vocal opponents of the North ministry’s attempts to keep John Wilkes (–) out of Parliament. The Westminster scrutiny was a parallel case: the government appeared to be seeking to control the membership of the Commons. The debates on the Westminster scrutiny offered ample opportunity for a display of Burke’s alarmist rhetoric of . Yet he was almost silent.⁴¹ Apart from asking a few questions when the High Bailiff was examined, he spoke only once, and then not on the merits of the case. The one occasion when Burke felt impelled to intervene was on February, on a motion to postpone the examination of the High Bailiff until Fox (who had strained an Achilles tendon) could be present. Pitt agreed, but could not resist a snide comment that responsibility for protracting the proceedings (a charge which the opposition had levelled against Pitt) would now rest with the other side.⁴² Offended by the sarcasm of Pitt’s speech, Burke charged him with illiberality: when two persons were in a state of hostility, or, to use a milder expression, in a state of competition or rivalship, there was a certain degree of delicacy to be observed by both towards each other; there was a decorum, that could not be transgressed by either, without dishonour. If two generals, rivals for fame, commanded opposite armies in time of war, which was the most hostile kind of competition, and one of them was wounded in an engagement, the other would certainly pass for a man of no elevated mind, who could treat with levity the wounds of his rival.
This is a familiar Burkean stance, seizing the moral high ground and stigmatizing his opponent as small-minded. Yet the image of the two rival generals reveals a dissatisfaction, which he could not articulate more openly, about the reduction of politics, since the dismissal of the Coalition in December , ⁴¹ On Feb., when witnesses were examined, E.B. put a question to the High Bailiff (PH xxv. ). He made no contribution to the debates on , , and Feb., and on and Mar. John Ehrman concedes that Pitt was in the wrong (The Younger Pitt (London, –), i. –). ⁴² PH xxv. –.
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to a duel between Pitt and Fox. Towards the end of his speech, Burke spoke feelingly of Fox’s inability to walk without assistance. Send for the surgeon, he dared Pitt, if you do not believe me.⁴³ Though willing enough to score a debating point, Pitt had not seriously accused Fox of malingering. Burke’s outburst protests too much. The resentment that he directed against Pitt also, in some measure, encompassed Fox himself. Why did Burke take such a minuscule part in this cause célèbre? His unusual reticence probably reflects his dissatisfaction with Fox, and his disapproval of Fox’s decision to stand for Westminster. During the election campaign, he had complained that Fox, preoccupied with Westminster, could spare little time or attention to the party’s overall strategy.⁴⁴ In Burke’s view, the county contests provided the most reliable indicator of public opinion in a general election, for the only opinion that he valued was that of the educated, independent elector, epitomized by the county freeholder. A contest for Westminster, with twelve thousand electors drawn chiefly from the lower ranks of society, could only degenerate into a popularity contest of the kind that Burke himself had found so demeaning at Bristol. In , eager to capture Fox for the Rockingham party, Burke had warned him that he was not formed to acquire ‘real interior favour’ at court. He should accordingly abandon any thought of fulfilling his political ambitions through the royal favour. ‘Lay your foundations deep in public opinion’, Burke advised, ‘and I do not know so firm and sound a bottom to build on as our party’ ( Oct. : C iii. ). But for Burke, ‘public opinion’ was to be gathered not from the large urban constituencies, with their poorly informed, uneducated electorates, but from the counties, where the voice of property prevailed. For Fox to represent Westminster was thus, for Burke, not so much a triumph as a betrayal. He could therefore give only lukewarm support to the Westminster scrutiny. Though he hated Pitt and feared the power of the royal prerogative as much as did Fox, Burke could never become a Foxite. Further, Burke always distrusted the ‘great man’ in politics. In the s, William Pitt the elder (–) had affected the colossus. Now, Fox and the younger Pitt were competing for the mantle. Burke continued to co-operate with Fox, but the two were already drifting apart. Pitt’s main legislative initiative of , known as his ‘Irish Propositions’, was intended to provide an equitable and permanent basis for future commercial relations between Britain and Ireland. Since , successive ministries had promoted piecemeal dismantling of the machinery of British domination imposed in the aftermath of the Williamite conquest. They had ⁴³ PH xxv. –. ⁴⁴ E.B. to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Mar. (C v. ). In , when the opposition contested a byelection at Westminster, E.B. again complained that the money poured into the Westminster contests (which he estimated at over £,) ‘would have brought in ten Members for an whole Parliament at the highest price’ ().
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conceded partial free trade, greater religious toleration, and even legislative independence. Pitt’s aim was to remove most of the remaining trade barriers between the two countries. In return, Ireland was to pledge a contribution to imperial defence that would increase in step with the economic growth that free trade was expected to bring. The Irish hereditary revenue, chiefly derived from the customs and excise duties (granted in perpetuity at the Restoration) provided a reliable index of national prosperity. As the economy expanded, the yield from these duties would rise. The surplus above a defined sum would be assigned to help defray the costs of imperial defence. The plan was plausible but unpopular. In Ireland, many feared that the bargain would prove on balance disadvantageous, while in Britain many manufacturers were sincerely if self-interestedly afraid of being undersold by competition from Ireland (where labour costs were lower). In both countries, opposition politicians were eager to exploit local fears and prejudices and to foment objections.⁴⁵ Pitt’s propositions placed Burke in a quandry. In principle, he favoured imperial free trade, and he had consistently championed it in practice. In his first sesssion in Parliament, when the Rockingham ministry contemplated a comprehensive revision of the trade laws, Burke had sought to ‘hook’ Ireland into a new imperial system. When the scheme was dropped, he personally sponsored a measure to allow the import of Irish soap.⁴⁶ More recently, when trade concessions to Ireland were mooted in , he had incurred much odium by courageously supporting them against what he regarded as the myopic opposition of his Bristol constituents. At that time, he had countered the fears of the British manufacturers by arguing that the Irish economy was so much less developed that it could not, for many years, pose any real threat to British interests.⁴⁷ For all these reasons, Burke should have welcomed Pitt’s proposals. Two considerations prevented him. First, he was deeply suspicious of, and therefore almost automatically opposed, any measure emanating from Pitt. Second, he now regarded Ireland with a jaundiced eye, vexed that the Irish had shown no gratitude for the efforts that he and his friends had made on their behalf in –. Nor did he approve of the legislative independence that had been conceded to Ireland (without consulting him) in , for he did not trust the Irish Parliament to act in the best interests of the nation as a whole.⁴⁸ As with the ⁴⁵ Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, – (London, –), i. –; Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, i. –; Paul Kelly, ‘British and Irish Politics in ’, English Historical Review, (), –; David R. Schweitzer, ‘The Failure of Pitt’s Irish Trade Propositions, ’, Parliamentary History, (), –. ⁴⁶ E.B. to Charles O’Hara, , , and Mar., and May (C i. –, –, –). ⁴⁷ Two Letters on the Trade of Ireland (: WS ix. –); and speeches of and May (–). ⁴⁸ The subtext of E.B.’s letter to Charlemont, June , which ostensibly congratulates him on the achievement of legislative independence, hints at E.B.’s disapproval (C iv. –). E.B. to Fitzwilliam, Nov. , explicitly condemns it (ix. ).
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Westminster scrutiny, he was torn between his rational convictions and his emotional resentments. Burke was initially so eager to controvert Pitt’s propositions that he attacked them even before they had been formally opened. On February, the day before Pitt was scheduled to reveal his propositions, Burke requested a postponement (which Pitt of course refused), transparently to provide himself with an excuse for a speech. Genuinely apprehensive about the scheme, and sceptical that the hereditary revenue would ever produce the expected surplus, he feared that the Irish Parliament, intoxicated with its new independence, would nevertheless, from motives of jobbery, burden the people with such expensive folies de grandeur as an independent Irish navy. Yet his speech also voiced his sense of injured virtue, his chagrin at having been unjustly vilified on both sides of the Irish Sea for having conscientiously performed his double duty to both countries.⁴⁹ The following day, in a speech lasting over two hours, Pitt outlined his propositions. Anxious not to proceed too precipitately, he ended by moving that consideration of them should be deferred to a future occasion. As soon as Pitt had finished, Burke rose to speak, as did Charles Marsham (–), MP for Kent. Since his entry into Parliament, Burke had been an acknowledged expert on economic subjects. Marsham certainly was not. Yet members called loudly for Marsham, seemingly fearful that Burke ‘would enter largely into the question at that time’. Marsham, an opposition supporter, gracefully gave way. Burke, however, was stunned. Instead of delivering the expected speech, he merely ‘begged that gentlemen would not be under any apprehension that he would tire their patience with a long speech, for he would say very little; an uninformed man, as he was, could throw but little light on the subject; and perhaps, during the whole progress of the business, he would not trouble them with a single speech’. Lamely, he ended by asking the chairman to read the resolution, wanting to be sure that it contained the phrase ‘in time of PEACE’. The chairman read the resolution, which indeed contained the words.⁵⁰ But Burke did not rise again. Marsham spoke briefly, asking for more time and information, but clearly expecting to be against the measure. Next, Lord North rose. No one objected to his making a substantial speech. Though the motion before the house was merely to defer consideration of the propositions, and most speakers professed to need more details before they could make up their minds, the battle lines were drawn and a full debate ensued.⁵¹ For Burke, the incident was another humiliation, worse than those of the previous session because the subject was not India. Even on Ireland, members did not want to hear him. Burke was not ‘an uninformed man’ on the subject of Anglo-Irish trade. His sarcastic self-abasement is measure of how deeply he felt the mortification. ⁴⁹ Morning Herald, Feb. ; WS ix. –. ⁵¹ Ibid. (PH xxv. –).
⁵⁰ Morning Herald, Feb. .
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During the next two debates on the propositions (on and March), Burke said nothing.⁵² Meanwhile, Pitt’s plan had provoked so much opposition in both countries that he was obliged to delay its further consideration until after the Easter recess. During May, four further debates were held.⁵³ Burke spoke only in the second, on the th. William Wyndham Grenville, son of the George Grenville (–) who had imposed the ill-fated Stamp Act in , gave him the excuse he needed to break his rash, self-imposed pledge of silence.⁵⁴ Grenville ended his speech with a reference to Ireland making ‘a contribution to the support of the navy, by which the trade, to a share of which she was to be now admitted, would be protected’. This led Burke to accuse the ministers of repeating the folly that had had provoked the American war and the loss of the colonies. In reply, Pitt denied that his scheme bore any analogy to the admittedly ill-judged attempt to tax America, and superciliously expressed the hope that Burke’s alarmist comparison ‘would not be carried over to his native country’ without his own reply.⁵⁵ The allusion to his Irishness stung Burke into a second and longer speech. After an emotive response to Pitt’s sneer at his nationality, explaining his notion of the duties he owed to Ireland and Britain respectively, he launched into a more detailed analysis of the Irish hereditary revenue than he had offered in February. This somewhat dry material was enlivened with a playful passage, pleasantly reminiscent of his speeches on Economical Reformation in (and welcome evidence that he had not entirely lost his sense of humour), repeating his fears of the extravagance in which the spendthrift Irish Parliament was likely to indulge: a Navy would lead to a board of Admiralty; then would come a Navy-Office, a PayOffice, and a Victualling Office; then there must be Dock-yards; then Fortifications to defend them; then there must be an Ordnance to furnish those Fortifications; next a Board of ordnance, with a Master-General, and all the other Officers; then he supposed it would be necessary every now and then to send the said MasterGeneral, and all his friends, down to look at his own fortification, and to see whether he did his duty.⁵⁶
From his entry into Parliament, Burke had often employed such arguments from remote consequences. In this instance, determined to attack the propositions, yet unwilling to use the most persuasive argument against them, that they would hurt Britain, he squared his Irish patriotism with his loathing of Pitt by imagining the ruinous consequences which the proposals would in time produce. Long years of habitual opposition meant that Burke ⁵² PH xxv. –. ⁵³ On , , , and May (PH xxv. –). ⁵⁴ E.B. mounted a coded attack on Pitt’s propositions in the debate on a collateral issue, a petition presented on Mar. (PH xxv. –). ⁵⁵ Morning Herald, May; WS ix. –. PH xxv. – has a variant report. ⁵⁶ WS ix. n. (from the Morning Chronicle). The choice of the Ordnance as an instance of jobbing extravagance was meant to satirize the fortifications proposed in England by the Duke of Richmond.
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was never unprovided with an argument. Yet factious as his opposition to Pitt’s propositions might be, Burke was genuinely concerned that the Irish Parliament, dominated by the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ that he hated, would seize the opportunity to impose extra and unnecessary taxes on the Catholic majority to provide lucrative jobs for themselves and their friends. These fears were never realized. Though the British Parliament approved Pitt’s plan, even as amended it proved so unpopular in Ireland that the Irish government withdrew it. This reverse gave Burke the double comfort of humiliating Pitt while saving the Irish from their own follies. Pitt’s third defeat of the session was on parliamentary reform. His new scheme (his third and last), unveiled on April , was so cautious and moderate that his hopes, and those of his supporters, were high. Up to thirtysix ‘rotten’ or ‘pocket’ boroughs were to be disfranchised, and their representation transferred to the most populous of the counties. The process was to be voluntary: in effect, those borough proprietors who were willing to sell would be bought out. If any boroughs beyond the thirty-six chose to surrender their representation, their seats would be allocated to the largest unrepresented towns (such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Sheffield).⁵⁷ Parliamentary reform was a question that cut across the usual loyalties. Fox (converted to the cause in ) supported it, but many of those who normally followed Pitt were opposed. Burke had always reprobated parliamentary reform of any kind, even when token approval of a measure certain to be defeated would have safely purchased him a little cheap popularity.⁵⁸ Regarding the composition of Parliament as answering every practical purpose, Burke always discountenanced any attempt to tinker or tamper with it. Here was an opportunity for a statesmanlike speech, rising above the petty animosities of the day. Burke failed to take it, instead delivering the weakest of his speeches on the topic. Beginning by ridiculing Dundas for his unprincipled conversion, since his junction with Pitt, to the cause of reform, Burke spent more time on personal attacks than on considerations of principle. Indeed, he used the occasion chiefly to strike at some of his most hated bêtes noires: Pitt himself; the proponents of more extensive reforms, such as Christopher Wyvill (–) and the Duke of Richmond (–); and the borough-mongers ennobled by Pitt as a reward for their support at the last election. Fortunately for the cause, other members, most notably Lord North, mounted a more reasoned case against reform. North spoke for the majority. Pitt’s measure, modest as it was, was rejected by to .⁵⁹ In terms of a parliamentary vote, this was the apogee of support for reform in Burke’s lifetime. When next introduced into Parliament (in ), events in revolutionary France had made the idea of ⁵⁷ Morning Chronicle, Apr. (PH xxv. –). ⁵⁸ Lord John Cavendish to Lady Spencer, May , commending E.B. for a courageous speech against shorter parliaments (BL Althorp Papers F ). ⁵⁹ Morning Chronicle, Apr. (PH xxv. –).
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reform so suspect that even advocates such as Fox acknowledged that it did not command widespread support.⁶⁰ Not until did the Old Sarums of the system Burke revered lose their representation. These three defeats were exceptional. Most of Pitt’s ministerial measures were passed without difficulty. An example is the Offices Reform Bill, part of his plan to increase the efficiency of the civil service. The bill was hardly controversial, though its appointment of commissioners of enquiry with extensive powers gave a handle to the opposition. One debate (on March) is of particular interest, because Burke’s speech offers a representative sample of his style, and a contrast with Sheridan’s. Sheridan spoke first. While employing some hyperbole and one striking image (he called it ‘a rat-catching bill, instituted for the purpose of prying into vermin abuses’), he concentrated on the bill itself and the minutiae of its provisions. Burke’s speech illustrates the digressive richness with which he could treat the most mundane topics. In a characteristic opening, dignifying the subject by appealing to the loftiest constitutional authority, he called for the reading of a clause from Magna Charta. When this drew a laugh from the Treasury bench, he accused ministers of treating Magna Charta as contemptuously as they would an old ballad. Seizing on phrases used by previous speakers, he once more demonstrated his talent for extemporization. Taking up Sheridan’s ‘vermin abuses’, he compared Pitt to Edgar in King Lear, feeding (in his guise as Mad Tom) on ‘Rats and mice, and such small deer’. The bill might be a reptile, but it would be found ‘to bite hard where the constitution ought not to be lacerated’. Drawing on his own stock of metaphor, Burke noted that most schools of art were known by some characteristic, such as excellence of colouring or design. Pitt’s bill had ‘an obvious tinge’ of the school in which he had been trained (Shelburne’s), ‘the school of large promise and little performance’. Thus Burke contrived to attack the bill from opposite angles, first as a daring violation of the constitution, then as a nugatory exercise unlikely to have much practical impact.⁶¹ The second criticism proved the more prophetic. Modern authorities agree that, despite the draconian powers given to the commissioners, the bill did not result in significant reform.⁶² Despite the reverence for the constitution that led him to oppose parliamentary reform, and the partisanship that made him oppose almost any reform proposed by Pitt, Burke was no complacent defender of every aspect of the ⁶⁰ Mar. (PH xxviii. –). ⁶¹ Morning Chronicle, Mar. (PH xxv. –). E.B. drafted, but appears not to have used, a passage deploring the effects of the bill on the morale of the civil service (transcript in WWM BkP /). ⁶² J. E. D. Binney, British Public Finance and Administration, – (Oxford, ), –, , ; Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, i. –.
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status quo. Though he wanted to give ‘the currency of a proverb’ to his maxim ‘To innovate is not to reform’ (Letter to a Noble Lord, : WS ix. ), reform, he acknowledged, was sometimes necessary. For example, he was often critical of the state of the criminal law, and supported moves to correct or mitigate what he and many contemporaries recognized as its excessive rigour. A notorious development in English law during the eighteenth century was the multiplication of capital offences, as the legislature repeatedly resorted to the death penalty as a deterrent. In , for example, to uproot a tree or plant during the night was made a felony, and therefore in theory a capital crime.⁶³ This Act was typical of such legislation, which to modern sensibilities is likely to appear overprotective of private property and careless of human life. In , however, some market gardeners thought that the law of provided insufficient protection. They therefore persuaded William Mainwaring (–), who as an active Middlesex magistrate often sponsored such legislation, to introduce a bill to extend the felony to daytime uprooting. Concern for the security of property triumphed, and the bill easily passed the Commons.⁶⁴ Respect for the sanctity of property rights was always a leading article in Burke’s political creed. Nevertheless, he was one of the minority that opposed the bill as an unnecessary and repugnant addition to an already excessive array of capital crimes. This stand may surprise those who know him chiefly as the author of the Reflections, as the defender of the inherited inequalities and iniquities of the ancien régime. Yet it was consistent with his attitude to a range of similar questions, on which he took what in retrospect seems the more ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ side. The bill provoked one of his most vehement calls for reform. Reprobating ‘the whole system of the penal laws in this country’ as ‘radically defective’, he advocated ‘a revision of the whole criminal law, which, in its present state, he thought abominable’.⁶⁵ From Burke, this was a remarkable declaration. Since Burke left no comprehensive or systematic speech or essay on the subject of crime and punishment, his views have to be collected from occasional statements on such questions as happened to engage his attention. An example is his support in of a measure, promoted by Lord Beauchamp (–), to amend the harsh provisions of the law on insolvent debtors. Mercantile interests invariably opposed any attempt to weaken the sanctions against bankrupts. Burke’s courageous and principled stand was unpopular ⁶³ According to William Blackstone, statutory offences were felonies without benefit of clergy (and therefore liable to the death penalty); Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, –), iv. . The Act was George III, c. . ⁶⁴ The bill to amend the Act was brought in on May and passed on June (CJ xliv. , ). It was rejected in the Lords on July (LJ xxxviii. ). Windham, who on May had spoken against leave to bring in the bill (PH xxviii. –), may have kindled E.B.’s interest in the issue. ⁶⁵ May ; PH xxviii. –.
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at Bristol, and became ‘rather the most prevalent’ of all the charges made against him at the election.⁶⁶ In , another question surfaced which provides an illuminating comment on Burke’s opposition to parliamentary reform, since it shows that his dislike of innovation was not always motivated by a concern for the entrenched powers and privileges of the propertied élite. He was equally prepared to oppose a rash project that threatened even such pariahs of society as convicted criminals. The English criminal law of Burke’s day was more draconian on paper than in practice. Death was the prescribed penalty for felony, which embraced a multitude of crimes, including ‘grand larceny’, the theft of property worth over one shilling. The disproportion between the pettiness of the crime and the severity of the punishment was often condemned.⁶⁷ What kept the death penalty on the statute book for so many offences, and even extended it to new ones, was the belief in its deterrent force. Yet in practice, the law was often mitigated. In capital cases, juries were sometimes reluctant to convict for small offences. Some offenders escaped on a technicality; many (chiefly those able to mobilize influence) obtained pardons. Beginning in the s, numerous criminals condemned to death were so pardoned, conditionally on their agreeing to be transported to the American colonies. From , transportation could be imposed directly by the courts for particular criminal offences. By the s, more than , criminals were transported every year.⁶⁸ This traffic was interrupted in by the war with the colonies. Existing prisons were already overcrowded, so that any increase in long-term imprisonment as a punishment would require an extensive programme of construction.⁶⁹ An alternative expedient was devised by William Eden (–), MP and Under-Secretary of State. Eden was the author of Principles of Penal Law (), which argues (inter alia) that the death penalty is too severe for most crimes against property, and advocates forced labour as a punishment preferable to death or transportation.⁷⁰ The American war gave him an ⁶⁶ Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election ( Sept. : WS iii. –). The English translator of Beccaria, anticipating the objection that ‘a treatise of this kind is useless in England, where, from the excellence of our laws and government, no examples of cruelty or oppression are to be found’, places imprisonment for debt at the head of his list of four desirable reforms; An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (nd edn. London, ), pp. vii–viii. ⁶⁷ Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. ( Apr. : Works, iv. –); Dr Primrose, in Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (), ch. ; Blackstone, Commentaries, iv. –, –. William Paley, however, defended the number of capital offences on the ground that, since few are actually executed (‘scarcely once in ten’), the deterrence of the death penalty operated without requiring excessive severity in practice (Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (rd edn. London, ), –). ⁶⁸ William Eden to E.B., Mar. (C iii. ). ⁶⁹ Simon Devereaux, ‘The Making of the Penitentiary Act, –’, Historical Journal, (), –. ⁷⁰ Principles of Penal Law (London, ), –, –.
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opportunity to test his speculations. He proposed, as a temporary measure, to house convicts in hulks moored on the banks of the Thames, and to employ them in dredging and cleaning the river. Although Burke was a leading member of the opposition, Eden sent him a copy of his plan at an early stage ( Mar. : C iii. –), a tribute to his reputation as a philanthropist. Burke’s response was lukewarm. Capital punishment, he agreed, was cruel. Founded on ‘humane and equitable principles’, Eden’s proposal made ‘an happy exchange, if there be no other, for the Butchery which we call justice’. Yet Burke remained convinced that, if a suitable destination could be found, transportation, which at least avoided the danger of ‘letting wicked people loose upon the publick’, would be preferable. Eden’s scheme to make the criminal positively useful to society, he feared, would be a matter of ‘infinite charge and difficulty’ (–). When Eden’s Hulks Bill was introduced into Parliament, Burke therefore opposed it.⁷¹ Yet he was prepared to support a more carefully considered experiment in penology. He joined with Eden in sponsoring a bipartisan bill to authorize the construction of penitentiaries designed for the incarceration of prisoners condemned to hard labour. This bill was introduced on the last day of the session, being intended to do no more than ventilate the idea.⁷² The Hulks Bill, a government measure, became law, and by August convicts were at work on the Thames. The hulks were managed by a private contractor with experience of transporting felons, Duncan Campbell (–). Conditions on the hulks were at first extremely unhealthy, and the mortality of prisoners was high. Adverse publicity led to some improvements, and in July Burke was one of a number of MPs invited by Campbell to inspect conditions.⁷³ When the Hulks Act was reviewed in , Burke (who may in the interim have visited the hulks) again advocated the resumption of transportation. He proposed Canada, Nova Scotia, or Florida as possible destinations.⁷⁴ As no such alternative was immediately available, the Act was renewed, again for a limited time, pending the search for a permanent solution. In , a ministerial committee considered West Africa, and Botany Bay, on the newly charted east coast of Australia, as possible sites for a penal colony. In , an Act was passed to permit convicts to be transported to any destination, but for lack of a suitable site nothing was done.⁷⁵ Burke’s interest in the subject was rekindled when, in March , he heard that a shipload of convicts was on the point of being sent to Gambia. Immediately, he raised the matter in ⁷¹ May ; Almon, Parliamentary Register . . . – (London, –), iv. –. ⁷² On May , leave was given to bring in a bill ‘to authorize the Punishment by hard Labour of Offenders . . . liable to be transported . . . and to establish proper Places for the Reception of such Offenders’. E.B. was one of ten members named to prepare it. William Eden, whose brainchild it was, presented the bill on May, the day of prorogation (CJ xxxv. , ). A similar bill was enacted in ( George III, c. ). ⁷³ E.B. to Campbell, August (UBL (III), –). ⁷⁴ General Evening Post, – Mar. (PH xix. –). ⁷⁵ Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire: A Naval Question, – (Melbourne, ), –.
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Parliament, arguing that transportation to Gambia was a deferred but hardly less certain sentence of death. On being assured that no contract had yet been signed, he agreed to postpone his intended motions.⁷⁶ News that Burke had spoken on their behalf soon reached the convicts, and he received several letters on the subject.⁷⁷ With Burke and the ministers otherwise preoccupied, the matter was allowed to rest until April, when Lord Beauchamp (another opposition member) reopened it. Burke again condemned the plan to send convicts to West Africa. Pitt’s reply was evasive.⁷⁸Two orders for transporting felons to West Africa had been signed as early as March, though they were not made public until April. Beauchamp’s initiative forced the suspension of these orders (though more were signed on May), and a Commons committee, under his aegis, was appointed on April. Burke was an active member, attending six of ten recorded meetings held between April and May. Evidence vindicated Burke’s earlier claims about the unhealthiness of Gambia. The committee’s final recommendation (the result, as Beauchamp insinuated, of ministerial pressure) was a penal colony at Angra das Voltas (now Alexander Bay, at the mouth of the Orange River). On further investigation, however, this site too was deemed unsuitable, and in August Botany Bay was finally selected as the site for the experiment.⁷⁹ Although the First Fleet did not sail for Australia until May , the image of a colony of convicts proved an immediate gift to satirists. In November , a pair of caricatures by John Boyne (c.–) depicts the leaders of the opposition, bankrupt financially and by extension politically, embarking for, and landing at, Botany Bay. Burke is prominent in both, dressed as the bishop of the new colony. The casting acknowledges that, among the opposition leaders, Burke enjoyed a certain moral superiority.⁸⁰ Boyne would have been surprised to learn that Burke actually imagined being sent to New South Wales, not of course as convict-bishop, but as Governor. In , after the resignation of Governor Arthur Phillip (–), when his friend Captain Woodford (d. ?) sought the post, Burke spoke on his behalf to Henry Dundas, the Secretary of State ⁷⁶ Mar. ; PH xxv. –. A memorandum about a contract to ship convicts to Gambia, probably sent to E.B. at this time, emphasizes the unhealthy climate and the hostility of the inhabitants (NRO A. XXIV. ). ⁷⁷ C. Peat to E.B., from Newgate, and expecting to be sent on the first ship to Gambia, Mar. (WWM BkP /); Herbert Keeling to E.B., Mar. (NRO A. II.); Eugene Keeling to E.B., Apr. (BkP /). Eugene Keeling had two sons (Herbert and Charles) awaiting transportation. ⁷⁸ Morning Chronicle, Apr. (PH xxv. –). ⁷⁹ Frost, Convicts and Empire, –. ‘Minutes of Committee of House of Commons Respecting a Plan for Transporting Felons’ (NA HO. /). ⁸⁰ Non Commission Officers Embarking for Botany Bay ( Nov. : BMC ); Landing at Botany Bay ( Nov. : BMC ); both attributed to John Boyne. BMC is reproduced in Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, ), . In the same vein, on Dec. a paragraph in The Times suggested that ‘patriots’ of various nationalities (E.B. and Sheridan from England) should be sent to Botany Bay.
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responsible. Writing on the same subject to another friend, John King (–), the Under-Secretary, he made this curious comment: ‘I confess, if I were young myself, I should like this Employment. To turn what is dangerous to society to its advantage is a great, and if it is managed with ability, an honourable Task.’⁸¹ Given a second chance, men might not only erase the stain of their criminality, but acquire independence and even affluence. Burke, of course, thought primarily in terms of allowing men from the middle ranks of society to redeem themselves. As early as the Account of the European Settlements, he had likewise seen the West Indies as a place of redemptive exile.⁸² Burke took an interest in particular cases as well as general principles. The case of James George Semple (c.–?) provides an apt illustration of his belief in the restorative possibilities of transportation.⁸³ A plausible rogue, after a long if chequered career as a confidence man, in Semple was sentenced to transportation for the theft of a muslin shirt.⁸⁴ He appealed to Burke, as so many in distress had done. Burke’s response to his plight is recorded in two letters (neither to Semple) written about a week apart and strikingly different in tone. The first, to an acquaintance who was trying to obtain a pardon for Semple, is typical of his letters of its kind: cogently reasoned, carefully composed, and relating the particular question to general principles. Declining to support the request for a pardon, Burke argued that transportation was in Semple’s own best interest. Allowed to remain in England, with his reputation blasted, he would most probably repeat his offences and bring himself to the gallows. Transportation would provide an opportunity to make a new start in ‘a place where he is not oppressed by the judgment he has suffered; and where none but honest ways of life are open to him’. In New South Wales, ‘the climate is good, the soil is not unfavourable. There is even some choice in the society’ (to J. E. Devereux, Oct. : C viii. –).⁸⁵ With characteristic generosity, Burke offered to contribute ‘my mite’ to a collection for Semple (a complete stranger), and to recommend ⁸¹ E.B. to John King, Oct. (C ix. ; complete text of letter, BL Department of Manuscripts, M.). The appointment was given to John Hunter (–). ⁸² Account of the European Settlements in America (London, ), ii. –. ⁸³ E.B. was not alone in succumbing to Semple’s charm. On Mar. , Boswell heard a long story from the ‘wife of a stablekeeper’ about ‘how she had been swindled by Major Semple’; Boswell: The Great Biographer, ed. Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady (New York, ), –. In addition, Boswell had probably read some of the numerous unfavourable paragraphs about Semple that had appeared in the newspapers since his arrest in January. Yet only a few days later, he responded to an appeal from Semple, then in prison, and subsequently wrote several letters on his behalf (YB Boswell Papers C– and L, –; Mar–Apr. ). ⁸⁴ Newgate Register, – (NA HO. /, fos. –); The History of the Swindling and Amorous Adventures of James George Semple ([London, ]), –. Semple’s own version of events is recorded in The Life of Major J. G. Semple Lisle . . . Written by Himself (London, ). ⁸⁵ Though admitting ‘want of Management’, E.B. remained optimistic about Botany Bay. The government ought to have provided about , ‘good young Women among the lower Classes’ to ‘soften the
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him, through his friend the Under-Secretary, for favourable treatment by the governor of the colony. Burke’s sympathies stemmed from his belief that ‘they who have suffered, and even deservedly suffered, by the sentence of the law, are very far from the worst or most disagreeable men in the world’ (). ‘Think whom we send out with disgrace & receive with Triumph’, he had once admonished the Commons; to whom do ‘we throw open the folding doors of this house & conduct between two of the antient Gent[leme]n of the Land to y[ou]r Table to shake your Land’.⁸⁶ Indian delinquents, the ravagers of provinces and the scourge of humanity, were more proper objects of punishment than such petty criminals as Semple. Far from being punished, they could use their spoils to buy their way into Parliament. Yet this disturbing paradox never led Burke to question the wisdom of the system that permitted the open purchase of seats, still less to countenance its reform. A week later, Burke wrote a second letter on Semple’s behalf. A less studied document, it is more emotive and bears witness to his mixed feelings. Burke came closer to supporting the request for a pardon, asking for ‘a Respite of the Sentence till the next embarkation, and until the full extent and true Nature of the Offence are ascertained and compared with the Rigour of the Sentence’ (to John King, Oct. : C viii. ). Revealingly, he digressed into a paragraph on the legal wisdom of his late brother. On Richard’s authority, he reprobated the tendency to treat and prosecute frauds as felonies.⁸⁷ By blurring this distinction, Burke argued, the law itself became the malefactor: The Law ought as religiously to prevent one Crime from being punished as Another, as it ought to save innocence from being punishd at all. The Law itself getting into this Crookedness, becomes the Swindler, and gets the blood of Men under false Pretences—much worse it is than under false Pretences obtaining their Money. (–)
By thus shifting the blame onto the law, Burke half convinced himself that Semple was an innocent victim. The weakness of the argument betrays its emotional origin. What caused Burke’s change of heart? The letter to King Manners and mend the Morals of the Colony’. Most of the convicts, he still believed ‘would make good Husbands & Parents when living under a new state of Society’ (‘Extracts from Mr Burke’s Table-Talk, at Crewe Hall. Written down by Mrs Crewe’, Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society, (–), pt. , –.) These remarks probably date from early . E.B. had evidently heard some of the early criticisms of the colony. ⁸⁶ Draft for a speech against transportation to Africa (YB OF .; partly transcribed in WWM BkP /). ⁸⁷ This was no mere technicality. At his trial (for stealing ‘one yard of muslin, two yards of calico, and one linen shirt), Semple’s counsel argued that the evidence, if true, amounted to no more than ‘obtaining goods under false pretences’, a fraud, not a felony. Explaining the point of law to the jury, Mr Justice Buller agreed with regard to the muslin and calico. With regard to the shirt, however, since no price had been fixed (Semple claimed to have taken it as a sample to show his sister), no credit had been given. If the jury were convinced that Semple removed it, not intending to return it, they should convict him of theft (and therefore felony). After some hesitation, the jury so convicted, and Semple was sentenced to fourteen years’
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was written under the immediate influence of a packet of papers from Semple, which moved him deeply. The case provides a revealing instance of his feelings at work. Burke’s opinions on many social issues (such as poor relief ) were those of his day, and are therefore liable to appear repellently severe to a modern sensibility, shaped by a more egalitarian and compassionate ethos. His views on crime and punishment are an exception. Thus he describes convicts as: the diseased & infirm part of our Country; which we must treat with harshness indeed but with all the tenderness in our power. They are under Cure; & that is a state w[hi]ch calls for tenderness & diligence & great consideration. We are in a great Hospital & it ill becomes us to be angry with our Patients.⁸⁸
Only the word ‘harshness’ reminds the reader that this is a voice of the eighteenth century. The idea of crime as sickness, commonplace today, was not so in Burke’s time. Although many contemporaries shared his revulsion against the ferocity of the criminal law, theirs remained a minority opinion. Not until did the tide turn, and Parliament began to reduce the number of crimes for which the death penalty might be imposed.⁸⁹ Yet the ‘progressive’ element in Burke’s attitude to criminality should not be exaggerated. He did not regard the death penalty as wrong in itself. Rather, his objection to its excessive use was grounded on social utility. A life should be saved if it could be made useful to society. The death penalty was ‘cutting the Gordian Knot’, an admission of defeat on the part of society. Little as he liked forced labour as a punishment, it was preferable to death: having ‘no great Idea of the Benefit of such Labour: but if I can save Life— every thing which is not lost is to be computed for gain’.⁹⁰Yet keenly as he perceived what was amiss with society, Burke was not, at heart, an active reformer. In an early essay, while he denounced excessive economic inequalities as ‘a kind of Blasphemy on Providence’, he advocated no more radical remedy than a more caring paternalism on the part of the rich.⁹¹ Likewise, he retreated from any practical application of his idea of the convict as in need of cure rather than punishment: ‘My Plan. I have no plan, but to choose proper Magistrates. To give them proper means. & to punish them severely if they do not use them. This age is sick of plans. No plan can give knowledge integrity transportation (The History of the Swindling and Amorous Adventures of James George Semple (London, []), –). ⁸⁸ YB OF .. ⁸⁹ In , Sir Samuel Romilly secured the repeal of a single, obsolete statute imposing the death penalty. The pace of reform quickened following the report of a parliamentary enquiry held in ; Sir William Holdsworth, History of English Law (London, –), xiii. –. ⁹⁰ Draft for a speech supporting forced labour as preferable to the death penalty (National Library of Ireland, MS , no. ; partly transcribed in WWM BkP /). ⁹¹ Reformer, No. ( Mar. ; WS i. ). The essay is subscribed Æ, which was probably E.B.’s signature (supra, i. –)
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vigilance, & modesty.’⁹² This is Burke’s habitual remedy: put men of virtue in charge, and leave the problem in their hands. The counterpart of Burke’s faith in the efficacy of appointing ‘proper Magistrates’ was the removal and punishment of those who betrayed or abused their trust. For Burke, the pre-eminent example of such a magistrate was Warren Hastings, whose punishment Burke sought relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, for fifteen years. His prosecution, or persecution, of Hastings remains one of the most controversial episodes of his career. Viewed in isolation, it can appear, as many contemporaries saw it, as the vindictive pursuit of a heroic figure by a disappointed and embittered man. Seen against a broader background, Burke’s actions and attitudes assume a different character. Though Hastings became the focus of his attention, his real concern was with the government of British India. When accused of exploiting India for the purposes of party, he denied the charge. ‘I have no party in this Business, my dear Miss Palmer [Mary, –, niece of Sir Joshua Reynolds], but among a set of people, who have none of your Lillies and Roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you and I’ ( Jan. : C v. ). In truth, Burke’s motives were mixed. What cannot be denied is that he pursued at considerable personal and political cost what he thought was the cause of millions of people on the other side of the globe. In the conduct of his great crusade, he often displayed some of the worst traits of his character, yet he never lost sight of his grand object. To understand how Burke’s concern for British India seemingly narrowed into the prosecution of Warren Hastings, some consideration needs to be given to the history of British involvement in India, as well as to the evolution of Burke’s own views. Following the death of Aurangzeb (–), the central authority of the Mogul Empire, already severely strained by decades of continuous warfare, rapidly collapsed. In the resulting power vacuum, ambitious satraps, such as Alivardi Khan (c.–) in Bengal, established their independence, while the colonial powers, principally Britain and France, sought to expand their commercial activities. During the War of the Austrian Succession (–), India became a subsidiary theatre of war between them. Both powers sought allies among the local princes. This rivalry intensified after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, setting the stage for India to become an important site of conflict during the Seven Years War (–). Britain and France were accordingly drawn more deeply into Indian politics. In , Siraj al-Daula (d. ), Nawab of Bengal, made an ⁹² YB OF ..
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unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the British from their foothold in his province. The British victory secured for the East India Company effective control of Bengal, larger and more populous than Britain itself. In retrospect, British rule over Bengal appears the harbinger of later imperial ambitions. Contemporaries, however, anticipated no such outcome. Indeed, the East India Company prohibited any further territorial expansion. Instead, it sought (if ineffectually) to turn to commercial advantage the accident of war that had given it possession of Bengal. The context of Burke’s interest in India is thus not the imperialism, political and cultural, of the nineteenth century. When Thomas Babington Macaulay (–) went to India in as a member of the Supreme Council, the problems were larger but (in his view at least) simpler. Convinced of the superiority of European institutions and culture, he had no hesitation about imposing them on India.⁹³ Burke and his contemporaries enjoyed no such confidence, and were not driven by missionary zeal for their own cultural practices. They wrestled with a smaller but still intractable problem: how to reconcile the mercantile role of the East India Company with its new, unprecedented, and (as many thought) incompatible function as a ruling power. All wanted to draw economic advantages from India. Some sought to do this while minimizing the damage to Indian society and institutions, and without imposing undue burdens on the native population. Both Burke and Hastings dreamed of achieving these impossibilities. In , when Burke was still a schoolboy at Ballitore, his friend Newcomen Herbert decided to seek his fortune in India. His plan probably first brought India into Burke’s ken. To qualify himself, Herbert, previously apprenticed to a grocer, had first to learn French and accounting. Not until about October did he leave for India. This was hardly a propitious moment for such a voyage, since Britain and France were at war. Herbert’s ship was actually captured by the French, though subsequently retaken. Herbert himself died soon afterwards, either on the resumed voyage to India or shortly after his arrival.⁹⁴ His fate was not unusual: about half those who went out to India in the eighteenth century died there.⁹⁵ An intriguing speculation suggests itself. In , the young Warren Hastings went out to India, in similar circumstances to Herbert. What if Hastings had died, and Herbert survived? On such contingencies can the course of history depend. ⁹³ John Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (London, ), –, –. ⁹⁴ Herbert to Shackleton, Feb. , Oct. (YB OF ., ); E.B. to Shackleton, Feb. (C i. ). The fact of Herbert’s death is recorded in a poem drafted on the MS of his last letter to Shackleton ( Oct. ). The poem itself is deliberately uninformative, asking the reader not to enquire about Herbert’s end, on which ‘Oblivion’s shadow lies’ (YB OF ). ⁹⁵ P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, ), –.
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In the East India Company (first chartered in ) remained primarily a commercial enterprise. The British presence in India was still minuscule, confined to small areas around the three principal trading stations at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The company’s importance in the British economy, and in British politics, however, was already considerable. It was a growing and profitable importer and exporter, one of whose imports (tea) was an article of nearly universal consumption. Its stocks and bonds provided a safe and convenient investment. It contributed largely to government revenue. It provided career opportunities that made it part of the intricate network of political patronage.⁹⁶ The Battle of Plassey () marked, or rather symbolized, a new phase in the company’s history. The defeat of Siraj al-Daula by the company’s forces under Robert Clive (–) led first to de facto control of Bengal under puppet nawabs. This was legitimated in by the ‘grant’ from the Mogul Emperor of the diwani (revenue administration).⁹⁷ This grant secured to the company the tax revenue of a country with a population of between and million. As a result, vast sums (sometimes estimated as high as £ million a year) were expected to flow into the company’s coffers, while little account was taken of the expense of defending and administering Bengal. The prospect of increased dividends triggered a speculative boom in the company’s stock.⁹⁸ One of those who invested largely, beginning about June , was Lord Verney (–), Burke’s patron at Wendover; and Verney took Will Burke into partnership.⁹⁹ Burke had followed events in India closely, partly in order to report them in the Annual Register. Now, however, he became more closely and ambiguously involved, as the company attracted not only speculators but political scrutiny. In July , when William Pitt, ennobled as Earl of Chatham, returned to office, he proposed an enquiry into the legitimacy of the company’s territorial acquisitions, the source of its new wealth. He knew what this investigation should find: that the company had no right, and should compound for possession by making a large annual payment to the Treasury. This contribution would help finance the huge debt accumulated during the Seven Years War. Since what the Treasury gained would be lost to the shareholders, any such enquiry was anathema to the speculators.¹⁰⁰ ⁹⁶ H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, – (Cambridge, ). ⁹⁷ The grant of the diwani extended to Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, the three provinces under the aegis of the Nawab of Bengal. Orissa, however, had effectively been ceded to the Marathas in . ‘Bengal’ is used loosely to refer to the territory, including Bihar, administered by the company from Calcutta. ⁹⁸ Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, ), –; Bowen, Revenue and Reform, –. ⁹⁹ 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), (–), –. ¹⁰⁰ Sutherland, East India Company, –; Philip Lawson, ‘Parliament and the First East India Enquiry, ’, Parliamentary History, (), –.
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Burke’s first parliamentary speech on India, delivered on November , was directed against the projected inquisition.¹⁰¹ His position was influenced by several factors. Any proposition emanating from Chatham, whom Burke loathed, was sure to incur his antagonism. Will Burke expected to gain substantially if the company kept the lion’s share of the newly acquired revenues. Independently of these considerations, Burke may genuinely have disapproved of the measure as an unjustified interference in the company’s affairs, as did many MPs with no personal motives. This mixture of personal and political motives is characteristic, for Burke always denied that measures could be separated from the men who proposed or were to implement them. Burke opposed first the enquiry, and then every stage of the bill to limit the dividend that the company might declare. The main ground of his objection was the unwarranted invasion of the rights of private property. Absent from this episode is any concern for the natives of Bengal, or for the drain of money from the province, prominent themes in his later speeches on India. Indeed, he welcomed the prospect of a thousand East India Company proprietors each drawing an additional £, a year from Bengal and spending it in Britain, ‘animating your arts & manufactures & encreasing the produce of every one of y[ou]r inland Duties’.¹⁰² Chatham’s withdrawal (when he was incapacitated by some mysterious illness) facilitated the negotiation of a compromise. The company agreed to make an annual contribution of £, to the Exchequer, while the question of its right was shelved. A limitation of its dividend to per cent was, however, imposed.¹⁰³ This settlement represented a severe setback for the speculators. Worse, Bengal did not generate the vast surpluses so confidently expected. Instead, the company’s expenditure rose to meet income. In the speculative boom collapsed, and Will was left irredeemably in debt to Verney.¹⁰⁴ In , the contest was between the government and the company. No one had expressed much concern for the inhabitants of Bengal. This indifference changed, as information flowed into Britain about India itself, and particularly about the effects of British rule in Bengal. The company came under increasing criticism for sanctioning, if not itself practising, rapacity and oppression. In March , Horace Walpole (–) recorded the ‘great clamour’ raised in England against ‘the oppressions in India . . . under the rapine and cruelty of the servants of the Company’.¹⁰⁵ Yet in April, when ¹⁰¹ E.B. told Charles O’Hara that he ‘jumped up instantly’ on the motion for an enquiry and ‘took my own Ground, I think very cautiously, lest they [the other factions in opposition] should give us a ground on which we should not be able to act’ ( Nov. : C i. ). The debate was not fully reported, and the precise nature of this ‘ground’ is uncertain. ¹⁰² Draft for a speech on the East India enquiry or the Dividend Bill (WWM BkP /). Reports for this session of Parliament being scanty, E.B.’s draft cannot be assigned to a particular debate. ¹⁰³ Sutherland, East India Company, –. ¹⁰⁴ In , W.B. owed Verney £, (Sutherland and Woods, ‘East India Speculations’, ). ¹⁰⁵ The Last Journals of Horace Walpole during the Reign of George III from –, ed. A. Francis Steuart (London, ), i. ( Mar. ).
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a parliamentary committee of enquiry was instituted, Burke spoke against its formation, defending the company’s independence as stoutly as he had in . Once more, he argued that ‘the Charter ought to be held inviolable’, and he blamed the ministry for not preventing whatever ‘enormities’ had been committed.¹⁰⁶ As earlier, his attitude was partly determined by his being in opposition. Lord North could do no right. In response to this unwelcome scrutiny, and with a view to averting further ministerial meddling, the East India Company proposed to send out a team of three supervisors to reform the administration of Bengal. As the most prominent independent politician to have taken a sympathetic interest in the company, Burke was asked to head this commission.¹⁰⁷ By now, even Burke could no longer claim that all was well. Yet writing to John Stewart (d. ), a friend who had lately joined the company’s service in Bengal, he still expressed himself only diffidently about abuses in the company’s rule. ‘We entertain,’ he wrote, ‘perhaps erroneously, an opinion, that there have been great mistakes and mismanagement’ ( Oct. : C ii. ). In the context of the charges that were being levelled against the company, this was mild language indeed. During the session of –, however, when there was widespread agreement that greater ministerial control over the company was needed, Burke remained more concerned with ‘secret influence’ than with India. He therefore opposed North’s Regulating Bill to the last, arguing that abuses in India were being exaggerated to provide a pretext for an extension of ministerial influence and patronage. Left to itself, he claimed, the company was capable of reforming ‘every capital disorder’ in India, and of creating ‘a system one of the most beautiful ever seen established in any place’.¹⁰⁸ Between and , Burke completely lost his faith in the company’s ability to reform itself, and became one of its harshest critics. This shift was largely the result of fuller information about the reality of the company’s rule. Burke was soon convinced that, not only were the company’s own territories misgoverned, but that its baleful influence spread devastation and oppression well beyond its boundaries. Two episodes were particularly important in effecting this conversion. The first to surface was the dispute between the Nawab of the Carnatic and the Raja of Tanjore, which came to the attention of Parliament in . Burke became deeply involved, partly as a result of Will Burke making a voyage to India and returning to London as agent for the ¹⁰⁶ Apr. (WS ii. –). ¹⁰⁷ E.B. to Richmond, Aug. (C ii. –); W.B. to Charles O’Hara, n.d. (National Library of Ireland, MS , no. ). ¹⁰⁸ June (BL Egerton MS , fos. –). The idea, but not the wording, is found in the report reprinted in WS ii. – from the London Evening Post. E.B. probably had in mind the company’s method of recording all consultations in writing, which at the opening of the impeachment he called ‘a constitution . . . so great, so excellent, so perfect, that I will venture to say that human wisdom has never exceeded it’ ( Feb. : WS vi. ). He would repeatedly accuse Hastings of subverting or circumventing this system.
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raja. For the first time, the protection of India itself against the company and its rapacious officials became his theme.¹⁰⁹ The second episode was an indirect and unforeseen result of the operation of North’s Regulating Act. This Act left the powers of the Supreme Court vague on crucial points: on its relation to the Supreme Council, and on who was subject to its jurisdiction. Determined to assert its own interpretation of its authority, the court made itself generally unpopular. The council petitioned the Commons, complaining of the court’s undue extension of its powers. Another petition, advancing similar charges from a different point of view, was signed by many of the British inhabitants of Calcutta.¹¹⁰ These petitions, received in , were referred to a Select Committee. Preoccupied with the American war, Lord North took little interest in the question, and allowed the committee to be dominated by members of the opposition. Burke was one of those elected. This committee produced a bill, enacted (after drastic modifications in the Lords) as the Bengal Judicature Act of , which stands as one of Burke’s few legislative achievements in a parliamentary career largely devoted to opposition.¹¹¹ Work on the committee laid the foundation of Burke’s detailed knowledge of British India. It also brought him into contact with a high-caste Hindu, probably the only one to visit England in the eighteenth century. In , Raghunath Rao (d. ), deposed Peshwa (chief ) of the Marathas, sent agents to London to petition the British government to assist his restoration. One of these agents, Humund Rao, gave evidence to the Select Committee about Hindu caste practices.¹¹² Burke later invited him to Beaconsfield. The visit impressed Burke deeply, and he was fond of talking about it. In , when Mary Shackleton was shown the estate, she received and recorded the full story: He shewed us a flag on which a Bramin, who . . . was two days at Butler’s Court, used to dress his dinner; he would eat in no house which was not his own, so they had given him this [a greenhouse]. Tho’ he had a servant he prepared his own dinner, using I think neither animal food or wine, eating off the ground stripped from his waist up & throwing away his dinner if any one came within a certain distance from him.¹¹³
Burke was unusual in treating with respect Hindu practices generally regarded as, at best, absurd superstitions. The encounter became sufficiently ¹⁰⁹ Supra, i. –. ¹¹⁰ The petitions were received on Dec. and Feb. . A third petition, from the East India Company, was received on Mar. (CJ xxxviii. –, –, –). The petition of the British residents was taken to England by William Hickey (–; the memoirist), son of Joseph Hickey (c.–), Burke’s friend and legal adviser. Hickey himself gave evidence before the committee, and wrote a graphic (if probably overdrawn) account of E.B. in action; Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spencer (London, –), ii. –. ¹¹¹ Supra, i. –. ¹¹² Lambert, cxxxviii. –. ¹¹³ Mary Shackleton’s Diary, June (National Library of Ireland, MS , p. ).
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notorious for Ralph Broome (d. ) to ridicule it in one of his lampoons on the Hastings trial.¹¹⁴ Investigation of the complaints against the Supreme Court completed Burke’s conversion from a defender to a critic of the East India Company. This conviction was reinforced by a concurrent development. The petitions from Calcutta arrived at nearly the same time as news of the invasion of the Carnatic by Haidar Ali (c.–) of Mysore. This mattered, and in response North secured a Secret Committee composed of ministerial nominees, chaired by Henry Dundas. Burke opposed the secrecy, but accepted the committee’s conclusion: the need for greater ministerial control of the company.¹¹⁵ Speaking of the Regulating Act of , which extended ministerial control over the company, he acknowledged to Lord Macartney (–), an old friend who was now Governor of Madras, that ‘None of us opposed that Measure of power to Ministry as we had done on the former occasion [in ]’ ( Oct. : C x. ). From Burke, normally a stickler for his own consistency, and unaccustomed to agree with Lord North on any subject, such an avowal that he had changed his mind is a remarkable testimony to the strength of his new conviction. The Select Committee was reconstituted in December with a more extensive brief. Burke became its most forceful and energetic member. Between February and November , it produced eleven reports.¹¹⁶ The first led to a resolution in the Commons for the recall of Sir Elijah Impey (–), the unpopular Chief Justice. Since Impey was a Crown appointee, a ministerial order ensured his recall.¹¹⁷ Subsequently, Dundas, as Chairman of the ministerial Secret Committee, moved a string of resolutions based on its reports, including one for the recall of Hastings. Hastings, however, though appointed by an Act of Parliament, was an employee of the company, not subject to recall by the Crown. The directors voted to comply with the vote of the Commons, but the Court of Proprietors reversed the order.¹¹⁸ In calmer times, a determined ministry would have been able to impose its will on the company, by legislation if necessary. In the confused political situation of , however, ministries had more urgent priorities. ¹¹⁴ ‘A Story. Burke—The Bramin—and the Hot-House’; Letters of Simpkin the Second . . . (London, ), –. ¹¹⁵ The six reports of the Secret Committee, submitted between June and Mar. , are reprinted in Lambert, cxlxii–cxlv. They are the ‘six great chopping bastards’ ridiculed in the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts (WS v. ). E.B.’s annotated set of the originals is now in BL (.d.). His notes are mostly summaries of the text, probably intended as location aids. E.B.’s speech against the appointment of a secret committee ( Apr. : WS v. –) is an eloquent plea for open government. ¹¹⁶ Reprinted in Lambert, cxxxviii–cxli. E.B.s ‘Observations’ on the First Report, and the texts of the Ninth and Eleventh (minus the appendices), are in WS v. –, –. ¹¹⁷ CJ xxxviii. ; PH xxii. – ( May ). ¹¹⁸ CJ xxxviii. ; Debrett, vii. – ( May ). The resolution also demanded the recall of William Hornby, President of the Bombay Council. Sutherland, East India Company, –.
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To Burke, naturally, this defiance of the legislature became further proof of ‘secret influence’ at work to counteract the responsible constitutional power. When the Fox–North Coalition took office in April , there was general agreement that the East India Company, and therefore its territories in India, should be subject to closer parliamentary supervision. As the Coalition’s acknowledged expert on the subject, Burke could now give practical effect to some of his ideas about British India. These views are eloquently expressed in two of the reports of the Select Committee, the ninth and the eleventh. The Ninth Report describes the control and systematic exploitation of Bengal by a gang of criminals, with Hastings as their chief ( June : WS v. –). The Eleventh Report concentrates on the scandalous extortion practised by British officials under the pretence of accepting ‘presents’ for the company’s use ( Nov. : –). The Coalition embodied its plans for reform in two bills. One, concerned with the administration of British India, reflects the evidence and conclusions of the reports, prohibiting many of the abuses they identified. More controversial, however, were the provisions of a second bill, not adumbrated in the reports, for vesting control of the company in a board of commissioners appointed by Parliament for a fixed term. This was the proposal, excoriated as an unscrupulous invasion of the company’s property and patronage, which enabled the king to exploit underhand means to defeat it, gambling on its unpopularity.¹¹⁹ To Burke, the king’s action was another manifestation of what he later identified as ‘Indianism’, the old ‘secret influence’ in a new guise. Returned ‘nabobs’ were deploying their ill-gotten wealth, squeezed out of India, to thwart the elected legislature of Britain. Burke now had an explanatory framework, or perhaps rather a distorting lens, through which he saw Indian issues. So vehemently had the East India Company opposed Fox’s bills that it naturally looked to Pitt as its saviour. Yet Pitt was no less determined on reform than Fox, though the means he chose were more devious. His India Act, while ostentatiously leaving the company its commercial independence, on political questions effectively subordinated it to a ministerial Board of Control.¹²⁰ Burke, however, obsessed by his dread of ‘secret influence’, saw Pitt not as a dispassionate reformer but as a screener of delinquents. He therefore interpreted Pitt’s Act not as a measure to impose ministerial control on a recalcitrant company, but as a victory for the company over the principles of Fox’s India Bill. Convinced that Pitt’s victory in the election had been materially aided by the ‘Bengal squad’, Burke impugned Pitt’s Act as the payoff for their support. On July, despite his earlier humiliations on ¹¹⁹ Fox’s proposals were contained in two bills. E.B.’s speech of Dec. was in support of the Vesting Bill, by far the more controversial, which was defeated in the Lords on Dec. ¹²⁰ Formally, the Board of Control was a subcommittee of the Privy Council. The first president was Lord Sydney, the Home Secretary, but Dundas dominated it from the outset, becoming virtually minister for India.
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the floor of the Commons, he returned briefly to London to argue against the bill’s third reading. This was an unusual stage at which to oppose a measure. Regretting his earlier silence, Burke resolved to denounce not merely the bill itself (about which he said little) but the collusion he suspected between the Bengal squad and the ministry (WS v. –). Re-energized by his attack on Pitt, Burke determined to launch his own initiative, despite the lateness of the season. On July, he therefore made a series of motions for papers, papers intended to criminate Hastings and lead to his recall and prosecution. Not content simply to move for the papers, Burke spoke at length to explain their importance. At the third motion, his patience exhausted, Pitt called Burke to order. When Burke refused to yield the floor, the occasion degenerated into an undignified squabble.¹²¹ Pitt’s impatience is easy to understand. Even impartial members were probably puzzled by Burke’s rambling vehemence. As a reasoned, coherently argued exposition of Burke’s ideas, his Speech on Fox’s India Bill of is much superior. The interest of Burke’s speeches of July is that they are rhetorically less ‘well behaved’, less structured and more passionate. At moments, Burke assumes the mantle of an Old Testament prophet, denouncing ‘the righteous judgement of God’ against ‘oppression, peculation, rapine, and even murder’ (WS v. , ). To Burke’s auditors, the biblical allusions and language, the frequent bursts of hyperbole, and the reliance on generalization rather than detail, probably undermined the persuasive effect of his speeches. Indeed, Burke was manifestly near the limit of his self-control. But perhaps nowhere else is the sincerity of his feelings more evident, the depth of his concern for ‘millions of hopeless individuals’ (), and his rage that others seemed determined to ignore the crimes against humanity committed by the company’s officers. Yet there was just enough absurdity about Burke’s message to taint the whole. Who could credit the suggestion that the defeat of the Coalition was one of the first marks of ‘a dissolution at hand’, of ‘that aweful and irreversible verdict which is registered in Heaven against us’ ()? The impression of mental unbalance was reinforced by the repeated oscillation (especially after Pitt called him to order) between passages of high moral outrage and descents into rancorous personalities. During the course of his speeches on July, Burke became increasingly outspoken in making Hastings his chief culprit, ‘the scourge of India’. In Burke’s imagination, Hastings had become a ‘dreadful Colossus . . . not to be shaken by any individual’ who ‘lorded it over every thing that was great and powerful and good in India, and in England’ (WS v. ). While not wholly without foundation (principally the company’s failure to recall him in response to the resolutions of the Commons), this was a wildly exaggerated notion. Hastings had many enemies, and considerably less political influence ¹²¹ PH xxiv. –; WS v. – (E.B.’s speeches).
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in England than Burke supposed. Nevertheless, the belief warped Burke’s proceedings. Having convinced himself that Hastings was personally responsible for all the ills of India (and again, Hastings’s long tenure in office lent the idea some credibility), Burke pursued him to the exclusion of any more general investigation into the system. Hence the redress of ‘the grievances of many millions of people’ () came to depend on the prosecution and conviction of one man, Warren Hastings. Burke might have resumed his crusade against Hastings in the session of Parliament, had the unexpected resurfacing of an old problem not temporarily diverted his attention. That question was the repayment of the debts of the Nawab of the Carnatic (usually known as the ‘Nabob of Arcot’, after his capital). The Carnatic was one of the independent states carved out of the ruins of the Mogul Empire. After the Seven Years War, it was ruled by a nawab installed by the British, Muhammad Ali Khan (d. ), who managed to retain much greater political independence than did the titular nawabs of Bengal. But thanks to the war and his subsequent attempts to expand his territory, the nawab had incurred vast debts. Some of his debt was to the company itself, principally for military assistance during the war. The company’s official policy was to oppose the nawab’s expansionist ambitions. The private creditors whose loans were at risk unless his revenues could be increased, however, encouraged him.¹²² In particular, they hoped to transfer to the nawab control of Tanjore, a wealthy, semi-independent state to the south, ruled by a Hindu raja (Tuljaji, d. ). In , the company’s troops occupied Tanjore and placed it in the hands of the nawab. This episode, and particularly the use of the company’s forces, incurred the disapproval of the directors in London. They therefore dispatched a new governor to Madras, Lord Pigot (–), with instructions to restore Tanjore to its raja. In , Pigot did so, only to be himself deposed (on the pretext of having exceeded his powers) by a majority of the Madras council. The real motive behind this coup was to return Tanjore to the nawab, and thus to recommit its revenues to the liquidation of his debts.¹²³ News of these events provoked an acrimonious controversy in England. Since Pigot was an ally of Rockingham, the dispute became a party issue.
¹²² Jim Phillips, ‘A Successor to the Moguls: the Nawab of the Carnatic and the East India Company, –’, International History Review, (), –. ¹²³ Jim Phillips, ‘Private Profit and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Southern India: The Tanjore Revenue Dispute, –’, South Asia, NS / (), –.
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Will Burke now re-enters the story. Having lost his seat in Parliament at the election, he was unemployed and in need of a fortune to recoup his losses of . Since India still appeared a land where wealth might be acquired rapidly and without much effort, Will accepted with alacrity even the humble role of a courier, carrying dispatches to Pigot. This was a desperate move, for he had been unable to secure an official position with the company, and the richest pickings in India were largely the preserve of company servants. He had, however, some hopes of an appointment as agent for the raja. Agents for the nawab had been active in London for some time. By the time Will reached Madras, his dispatches were useless. Pigot had died in prison, adding an extra twist to the scandal. Will did, however, secure the Tanjore agency. Without actually visiting Tanjore or meeting the raja, he at once returned to London.¹²⁴ Back in England, he communicated to Burke his enthusiasm for the raja’s cause. Tanjore became the prototype of Burke’s vision of the indigenous Indian state.¹²⁵ Will Burke wrote two pamphlets on behalf of Tanjore. The first, ‘Reflexions on the Nabobs Debts’ (), was probably intended only for private circulation. Burke undoubtedly read it, for he jotted a query in the margin of a fair copy. He may even have helped write it. One passage that sounds Burkean describes the plight of a Hindu prince, a former ally of the British, now ‘a miserable fugitive in a Village near Madrass, in a state next to absolute beggary; and indeed in a Condition to affect the feelings of all those whose Sensibility is not rendered wholly callous by Tyranny and Avarice’.¹²⁶ The pathos of the ancient Hindu nobility reduced to indigence is a recurrent motif in Burke’s later speeches on India. Burke certainly contributed to Will’s second and much longer pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans (: WS v. –). In this case, several passages in Burke’s hand confirm his share in the composition. These include a paragraph which decries the nawab’s government as a ‘Mahometan tyranny’ and contrasts it with the benevolent paternalism of Hindu princes (). Will Burke’s Tanjore agency created an unfortunate appearance, exploited by his enemies, that Burke’s opinions on India were mercenary, and should therefore be discounted. Independence was a highly valued quality in the eighteenth-century House of Commons. Burke’s New York agency had ¹²⁴ W.B. left London in June ; travelling overland, he reached Madras on Aug. Departing in late October, he was back in London in May . ¹²⁵ E.B. paints an idealized picture of Tanjore in his Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts (WS v. ). The reality was rather different. In his letter of Jan. to R.B. Jr., W.B. gives an unfavourable account of the government of Tanjore (NA PRO. //, fos. –). ¹²⁶ ‘Reflexions on the Nabobs Debts written in the year . By W.B.’ (Bodl. MS Eng. hist. c. , fos. –; quotation from fo. ). If this passage is by E.B., it forms a piquant contrast to his brusque rejection of Blaquiere’s sentimental picture of the Ridge sisters (C v. , –), and exemplifies Frances Crewe’s observation that ‘Those who had known Luxury and were reduced met with most of his Compassion’ (‘Extracts from Mr Burke’s Table-Talk, at Crewe Hall’, ).
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allowed his enemies to impute unworthy motives to his stand on America. The charge that Burke was biased by Will’s Tanjore agency was kept alive long after that agency had ceased, and indeed when his views on India by no means coincided with Will’s.¹²⁷ By , while the debts remained unpaid and unfunded, they appeared to have become less contentious. Fox’s India Bill had provided for a full enquiry before payment of any of the private debts. Pitt’s Act made a similar provision.¹²⁸ In a pamphlet written to explain and defend this Act, William Wyndham Grenville, a member of Pitt’s Board of Control, claimed that the payment of the nawab’s debts, ‘discriminating . . . those which have been justly incurred, from those which have been forced upon him by the injustice and extortion of English oppressors’ was one point ‘upon which all men are agreed’ and which Pitt’s Act settled.¹²⁹ In , Henry Dundas had acknowledged that ‘the greatest part’ of the debts were ‘debts of corruption’.¹³⁰ During the second half of , however, Dundas, now in effect Pitt’s minister for India, was intensively and successfully lobbied by representatives of the creditors.¹³¹ Accordingly, when the directors submitted a dispatch ordering an enquiry into the debts (as mandated by Pitt’s Act, and as Dundas himself had proposed in ), to their dismay, Dundas used the Board of Control’s power (given by Pitt’s Act) to rewrite the paragraphs relating to the debts, ordering their payment in full, without any further enquiry.¹³² Word of this reversal reached Burke about October .¹³³ Even more alarming than the initial news was the gloss on it placed in a letter of November from another informant with inside knowledge. This reported not only the return to the nawab of the sequestrated lands (in effect, giving him the resources with which to repay the private debts), but the removal of a clause which would have required Hastings to leave India within a year of the arrival of his successor. In consequence, ‘the Governor General still stands possessed of a Grant of the empire of the East in perpetuity’.¹³⁴ This insinuation fuelled Burke’s belief that Pitt and Dundas were deeply implicated in a plot to screen and abet both Hastings and the Arcot creditors. This was far ¹²⁷ On Feb. , Major Scott accused E.B. of being virtually an agent for the Raja of Tanjore, and W.B. of being ‘actually in that character at the present moment’ (Morning Chronicle, Feb.; Debrett, xvii. ). W.B. seems, however, to have ceased to act for the raja in , when he became Deputy Paymaster. ¹²⁸ Fox’s Bill, in Lambert, xxxv. ; Pitt’s Act ( George III, c. ), clause . ¹²⁹ Thoughts on the Present East India Bill, Passed into a Law, August (London, ), –. Published anonymously. ¹³⁰ Apr. (PH xxiii. ). ¹³¹ John Call to Dundas, Oct., Nov. , Jan. , ‘Thursday morning’ (BL (OIOC) IOR H/, pp. –; H/, pp. –, ; H/, pp. –). ¹³² The texts of the original and amended dispatches are printed in Original Papers Relative to the Rights and Pretensions of the Nabob of Arcot and the Rajah of Tanjore (London, ). On the territorial dispute between Arcot and Tanjore, Dundas also reversed the directors’ decision, which had favoured Tanjore. E.B. deals only briefly with this secondary issue (WS v. ). ¹³³ Stephen Thurston Adey to E.B., Oct. (NRO A. II. ). ¹³⁴ Unknown to E.B., Nov. (NRO A. II. ). The letter was signed, but the signature has been torn off.
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from the truth. Neither Pitt nor Dundas wanted Hastings to continue in Bengal. Indeed, unknown to Burke, Hastings was about to quit Calcutta of his own accord, chagrined not to have been asked to stay on with the more extensive powers that he believed he needed to consolidate British power in India.¹³⁵ Far-fetched as collusion between Dundas and Hastings appears in hindsight, Burke’s belief in it was not entirely implausible. Hastings was not himself an Arcot creditor, nor had he been at all closely connected with the nawab’s creditors. Yet he had thwarted Lord Macartney, who as Governor of Madras had been inveterately hostile to the claims of the creditors. During the war, the company had assumed the revenue administration of parts of the nawab’s dominions, in order to guarantee funds with which to defray their military expenses. Macartney had proposed to retain these after the peace, until the nawab’s debt to the company should be liquidated. Hastings, as Governor-General, overruled this plan.¹³⁶ This decision was consistent with his declared policy of minimizing direct British control of the internal affairs of the dependent states (such as Oudh and the Carnatic), and relying on the operation of indirect influence. Burke, however, interpreted his action (which certainly facilitated repayment of the private debts) as giving carte blanche to the creditors to continue their oppression of an already war-ravaged and overburdened country. The episode also strengthened Burke’s misconstruction of Hastings as primarily motivated by greed for money. Outraged as he was by Dundas’s action, Burke could not immediately raise the matter in Parliament, which was not expected to convene until after Christmas. He therefore decided to approach Pitt. Given Burke’s intemperate abuse of Pitt in the previous session, this was a desperate move. His willingness to make it evinces the genuineness of his concern. The interview, at which Burke was accompanied by Dudley Long (–; one of his colleagues on the Select Committee of –), began inauspiciously. Pitt declared that he had to leave almost at once, perhaps an instinctive defence against Burke’s habitual prolixity. Burke therefore confined himself to a request for a copy of a letter recently received from Hastings, which (so he had heard) spoke disrespectfully of the reports of the Select Committee. The weightier matter of the Arcot debts he proposed to defer until Pitt had more leisure. Pitt agreed to a second meeting, which probably took place on December, with Burke accompanied by William Windham as well as by Long. Pitt was icy and unaccommodating. By refusing a second request for a copy of the letter, he unwittingly confirmed Burke’s (unfounded) conviction that he and Hastings were acting collusively. Turning to the Arcot debts, ¹³⁵ Hastings to Marian Hastings, Sept., Dec. ; Letters of Warren Hastings to his Wife, ed. Sydney C. Grier (Edinburgh, ), –, . ¹³⁶ T. G. Fraser, ‘India, –’, in Macartney of Lisanoure, –: Essays in Biography, ed. Peter Roebuck (Belfast, ), –, esp. –, –, –.
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Burke asked whether the matter was quite settled, or whether the ministers were open to persuasion. Stopping just short of a decisive negative, Pitt replied that only new information could induce him to reopen the question. Burke parried by suggesting that Pitt had made up his mind prematurely, after hearing only the point of view of the creditors. Pitt closed the interview by reaffirming his confidence that ‘the Business had been fully enquired into’. Thinking as he then did of Pitt, Burke can have entertained no expectation of a change of heart. Indeed, his taking detailed minutes of the interviews suggests as much: that he wanted to record Pitt’s intransigence and refusal to listen.¹³⁷ Burke’s next move was to approach the Lord Chancellor, Lord Thurlow (–). A most unco-operative colleague, Thurlow disliked Pitt as much as Burke did, and was the leading troublemaker in the cabinet. Yet except for this well-known hostility to Pitt, Thurlow was not a promising ally, since he was a professed admirer of Hastings. Sharing Burke’s taste for homely expressions of contempt, he had dismissed the reports of the Select Committee as no more worthy of credit than Robinson Crusoe.¹³⁸ Even so, convinced that Dundas’s action was actually illegal, being in contravention of Pitt’s Act, Burke hoped that Thurlow, who relished throwing legal obstacles in the way of his colleagues, might be sympathetic to the strictly legal aspect of the controversy. Accordingly, when Burke wrote to him, the day after his second interview with Pitt, he presented the dispute as ‘rather a judicial determination on property than a mere matter of State’ ( Dec. : C v. ). Thurlow invited Burke to dinner on the th to explain the business. From this meeting, Burke formed the impression that Thurlow agreed with him about the debts.¹³⁹ This promising start came to nothing, perhaps because Thurlow found that the strictly legal case against Dundas was weaker than Burke had led him to hope. Whatever his motives, Thurlow was playing a double game. At the same time as he was encouraging Burke, he was telling Major Scott that ‘we shall be held contemptible through Europe
¹³⁷ ‘Conversation with Mr Pitt respecting some documents against Mr Hastings on Friday’ [ Dec. ?] (WWM BkP /–). The letter in question, from Hastings to the directors, was dated Lucknow, April , with a long postscript dated May (BL (OIOC) IOR E//). Scott printed it, but Pitt, having ‘refused a Sight of it to Burke’, asked that publication be suspended (Scott to Hastings, Jan. : BL Add. MS , fo. ). It was subsequently printed in the Morning Chronicle, and Jan. , and in pamphlet form as A Letter from the Honourable Warren Hastings, Esq. Governor-General of Bengal, to the Honourable the Court of Directors of the East-India Company (London, n.d.). To the pamphlet text, Scott added an appendix, in which he called E.B.’s Speech on Fox’s India Bill ‘the ingenious Novel published by Mr. Dodsley, under the Title of Mr. Burke’s Speech’ () ¹³⁸ Dec ; PH xxiv. , –. In his speech on July , E.B. attributes to Thurlow the phrase ‘mere fables’ (WS v. ). ¹³⁹ Thurlow to E.B., [ Dec. ] (WWM BkP /). Philip Francis, commonplace book, entry for Dec. (BL (OIOC) MS Eur. D. , p. ). Thurlow may have offered some opposition to Dundas’s proposals (Thomas Orde to the Duke of Rutland, Dec. , in HMC (Rutland), iii. ).
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if you [Hastings] are not supported and honoured.’ Scott in turn led Hastings to expect a peerage on his return, not an impeachment.¹⁴⁰ Faced with this second rebuff from a minister, Burke determined to take his case to Parliament. With Pitt and Thurlow, Burke had tried to keep the Arcot debts outside the arena of partisan politics. Raising the matter in the Commons meant abandoning that ground. Burke knew that the ministry was unlikely to yield. The iniquitous debts would be paid. His aim now was to convict the ministry before the court of public opinion. The parliamentary occasion was therefore hardly more than a pretext for a lengthy speech which could be published as a pamphlet. Instead of mounting a direct assault on the ministry, however, Burke and his allies decided to make a motion for papers. This was rather an artificial ploy, for the relevant papers had already been published as a pamphlet.¹⁴¹ Its purpose was to attract independents, who might be reluctant to support a direct motion of censure. Fox introduced the motion on February with a speech of studied moderation. He stressed the previous unanimity on the subject of the debts. Pitt’s Act, as well as his own bill, and the bill introduced in by Dundas, had all provided for an enquiry. The ministry was therefore reneging on its own undertaking. Instead of condemning the debts as altogether or largely fraudulent, he simply asked for an enquiry, to which no legitimate creditor should object. Generalizing his argument, Fox warned against the ill consequences of implicit faith in, and blind obedience to, ministerial diktats. He alluded to the Westminster scrutiny as a point on which the House had lately asserted its independence. Dundas countered with three principal arguments. By a strained interpretation of the wording of Pitt’s Act, he was able to claim that the decision to bypass an enquiry did not infringe the letter of the law. Second, without asserting that no particle of the debts was above suspicion, he argued that, for the most part, the debts were genuine, and that delay in payment would impose hardship on the creditors. Finally, and most compellingly, he made the issue one of confidence in the ministry. The Board of Control had not acted lightly or without full information and long cogitation. If their actions did not meet with approval, they should be not merely censured but replaced. Was Pitt, or Fox, the more worthy of belief?¹⁴² This reduced the debate to a question that everyone could understand, and since, of all subjects, India was the one on which Fox least inspired trust, it was a powerful argument. As far as the outcome was concerned, the vote might as well have been taken before Burke spoke as after. ¹⁴⁰ Scott to Hastings, Dec. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). The terms in which, in his letter to E.B. of [ Dec.], Thurlow expressed his predilection for Hastings were misleading if not duplicitous (C v. ). ¹⁴¹ Original Papers Relative to the Rights and Pretensions of the Nabob of Arcot and the Rajah of Tanjore (London, ). ¹⁴² PH xxv. – (Fox), – (Dundas).
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Burke, however, was never deterred by the impossibility of success. He had prepared a long and elaborate speech, and he delivered it, speaking for about four hours.¹⁴³ Opening with a witty dissection of Dundas’s self-defence, he showed that he had lost none of his ability to extemporize (WS v. –). Then followed his prepared exordium, a demolition of Pitt’s reputation as an economist. Meanly economical at home, as evidenced in his cheese-paring Offices Reform Bill, Pitt was profuse and profligate in India, squandering the resources of the Carnatic to satisfy his corrupt supporters (–). Turning to the debts themselves, Burke developed a masterly narrative, replete with detail but clear in outline, of the growth of the debts. Highlighting the manifest presumptions of fraud in the creation of the debts, and in the exorbitant rates of interest that had swelled them to so monstrous a bulk, he traced them to collusion between the nawab, eager to enlist the British military power in his schemes of conquest, and the creditors, a knot of rapacious bloodsuckers. The directors had repeatedly discountenanced these ‘debts’. Having no official standing, they did not merit the protection of Parliament. Nor, after the ravages of the recent wars, could the Carnatic afford the burden of their repayment (–). Towards the end of his speech, Burke returned to the British aspect of the case, charging a corrupt connection between Pitt and the creditors and their agents. For Burke, the leading villain was the notorious Paul Benfield (–), whom he had attacked as early as (WS v. –). Burke thus advanced two grounds for investigating the Arcot debts: justice to the Carnatic (for once, he foregrounds the plight of the Indian peasant, rather than the misfortunes of the formerly opulent), and corruption at home. Even members who cared nothing for the Carnatic, he argued, should be concerned at the creation of a fund for political bribery larger than any previously known, enough to purchase a phalanx of dependent MPs. The gravamen of Burke’s charge was not that Dundas and Pitt had corruptly received money themselves. Indeed, he conceded that they had not. Rather, they had benefited from its corrupt use on their behalf. Far more dangerous, Burke argued, than to bribe a minister, is to enable a minister to bribe others. The existence of such a ‘corrupt and destructive system’ (–), a chimera of Burke’s imagination, had been an article of faith since his entry into politics. On this favourite subject he never tired. Many an inward groan must have greeted his avowal, a little before a.m., that ‘the more material half of the subject has hardly been touched on’ (). But after four hours, even Burke was flagging, and he concluded without going deeply into the detested ‘system’. ¹⁴³ At the Hastings trial, Joseph Gurney, the most proficient shorthand reporter of the day, told Gibbon that a ready orator would speak at the rate of , to , words per hour; Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, ), . The printed text of the speech (which E.B. is more likely to have expanded than abbreviated) is about , words, and so would have taken about four hours to deliver. Wraxall probably exaggerated when he timed E.B.’s speech at ‘nearly five hours’ (Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London, ), iv. ).
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This speech has garnered some remarkable encomiums. No one can have been less disposed to admire or praise than Nathaniel Wraxall (–), a close friend of Benfield, the bête noire of the speech. Wraxall’s letters to Benfield are filled with references to Burke as ‘the cursed Paddy’. Yet Wraxall, admittedly in his later Memoirs, conceded ‘the mass of knowledge’ which Burke displayed in the speech, and doubted whether Demosthenes or Cicero could have delivered it with greater ‘energy, eloquence, or animation’.¹⁴⁴ Many passages as eloquent and enjoyable as any in Burke’s earlier speeches could be cited in vindication of what may appear a hyperbolical judgement. The witty opening is one example. Another is the characterization of the ministry’s inconsistencies as ‘true to itself, and faithful to its own perverted order’. Penurious in public, prodigal in secret, the ministers are flagellants who ‘whip their own enormities on the vicarious back of every small offender’ (WS v. –). A third is the evocative description of the Carnatic (–), which shows Burke’s imaginative empathy for a country that he had never seen. His imagery and metaphors are as inventive and varied as ever, ranging from the comic picture of Dundas and the reports of his Secret Committee as a bashful bride with ‘six great chopping bastards’ () to the powerful figure of the election as a tornado (). To look beyond particular passages, the whole speech is a remarkable fusion of two seemingly incompatible elements: a mass of financial detail is expounded with passion and energy. Yet there are good reasons why the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts has fallen into neglect. Its recondite, topical subject matter is only the most obvious. The argument relies heavily on the kinds of proof that Aristotle called atechnoi (inartificial), pre-existing ‘factual’ evidence rather than arguments conceived or ‘invented’ by the art of the speaker.¹⁴⁵There are few of the maxims or appeals to general principle which make Burke’s writings and speeches such rich quarries for quotation. Further, the rhetorical persona is less engaging. The tone is often shrill, angry, and rancorous. The reader misses the voice of wise and moderate statesmanship characteristic of Burke’s great American speeches of –. Burke always sought to occupy the moral high ground. In the earlier speeches, this stance is accompanied by a becoming diffidence. The Arcot speech is more overtly and gratingly selfrighteous. Burke’s speeches on America were delivered knowing that he would not actually persuade his audience. Yet they are energized by his maintaining the fiction that his hearers were open to conviction. This rhetorical optimism is absent from the Arcot speech. Its peroration, indeed, is an implicit admission of defeat: ‘Let who will shrink back, I shall be found at my ¹⁴⁴ Wraxall, Memoirs, iv. . Nearly every letter that Wraxall wrote to Benfield in contains a brief and contemptuous reference to ‘the cursed Paddy’ or ‘the damned Paddy’ (BL (OIOC) MS Eur. C. /). Thomas Moore also praised the speech extravagantly (Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, ), ). A modern critic has even called it ‘arguably Burke’s greatest speech’ (Regina Janes, ‘ “In Florid Impotence He Spoke”: Edmund Burke and the Nawab of Arcot’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, (), –). ¹⁴⁵ Aristotle, Rhetoric, b.
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post. Baffled, discountenanced, subdued, discredited, as the cause of justice and humanity is, it will be only the dearer to me’ (WS v. ). This self-image as a lonely, embattled soldier would return with increasing force and frequency. In one sense, indeed, Burke needed to be defeated. Pitt’s victory would signally confirm Burke’s belief in the prevalence of the evil tentacles of the Indian conspiracy. Had members shown their independence and voted for an enquiry, his thesis would have been disproved. Other features of the Arcot speech that make it a more sombre and less agreeable read than its predecessors reflect a generic difference. The earlier speeches were all deliberative. Each sought to influence a decision about a future course of action. The Arcot speech was judicial, and therefore retrospective.¹⁴⁶ Burke had no occasion to express a positive vision, as he did so memorably in his Speech on Fox’s India Bill. Making a judicial case, he emphasized facts and figures, and often sought to let the facts speak for themselves. Further, a judicial case requires one or more culprits. Consequently, there is much ad hominem material in the Arcot speech. In the heat of debate, Burke had often indulged in personal abuse of his opponents. But in his more considered efforts, such as Speech on American Taxation and the Speech on Conciliation, he had practised greater restraint. In the Speech on American Taxation, for example, George Grenville is not demonized, but treated respectfully as a statesman whose virtues and talents were unsuited to the role in which circumstances cast him.¹⁴⁷ In the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts, on the other hand, Pitt and Dundas are coarsely and brutally pilloried. Sometimes, indeed, Burke brilliantly succeeds in turning personal invective into wit. The best example is the narrative of Benfield’s career of electoral bribery, which Burke treats with irony to make Benfield a parliamentary reformer (WS v. ). Too often, however, Burke’s invective is merely abusive and repulsively gross. An example is the image of the debts as a mass of ‘foul putrid mucus’ (). Judicial rhetoric naturally emphasizes the enormity of the crimes committed. Burke’s hyperboles of crimination, however, while often affecting, are open to the charge of irrelevance. The description of the atrocities committed by Haidar Ali is an instance (–). Burke indeed links them to the activities of the nawab and his creditors, but the chain is so long as to weaken their force and to create an appearance of sensationalizing. The effect of the speech is thus diminished by a discordance between the factual arguments and the hyperbole. Rhetorically, an argument of financial detail requires a calm and neutral presentation, and this is how Burke presents it. His hyperboles, in such passages as that describing the atrocities, are at once a strength and a weakness. They energize and enliven the speech, ¹⁴⁶ Aristotle, Rhetoric, b. ¹⁴⁷ Apr. . E.B. may have softened the passage on Grenville when he printed the speech (WS ii. –). But even in Brickdale’s report (quoted, n. ), E.B. does not approach the vehemence of the attack on Benfiefld in the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts.
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but they expose him to the charge that his ‘facts’ too are caricatured or invented. All these features of the Arcot speech reappear, in more exaggerated forms, in his speeches at the trial of Hastings. Burke advanced a cogent case for Fox’s motion: that enquiry should precede payment of the nawab’s ‘private’ creditors. The most unexceptionable testimony to its force comes from Lord Cornwallis (–), whom Pitt and Dundas had sent to Bengal as Governor-General with a mandate to retrench profusion and check corruption. In a private letter, Cornwallis called the debts ‘fraudulent and infamous’, and assumed that Dundas had agreed to their payment ‘because you could not help it’. In reply, Dundas claimed that ‘every consideration of wisdom and policy, suggested the propriety of the arrangement’. ‘Wisdom and policy’ can here be translated as ‘political expediency’.¹⁴⁸The best defence of Pitt’s acquiescence that his most authoritative biographer can muster is that India was ‘an explosive and intricate subject’ which inspired in him only ‘a bored distaste’. His approval of the payment of the Arcot debts is excused as ‘typical of his behaviour when he was embarrassed and his attention was not really engaged’.¹⁴⁹ In other words, he held his nose and looked the other way. There could hardly be a more complete confirmation of the truth of Burke’s charges. Compelling as its argument appears in retrospect, Burke’s speech did not, at a.m. on February , seem to require refutation. Fox’s motion was defeated by to .¹⁵⁰ For Burke, of course, this vote merely confirmed his interpretation of the corrupt influence of the ‘Arcot squad’. As late as , he remained convinced that the House of Commons elected in had been ‘chosen for the express purpose of discrediting the last’ (that is, the Commons of –, which had defeated North and Shelburne, and defied Pitt; C v. ). Burke much exaggerated its subservience. In this session (), it refused to follow Pitt’s lead on three important questions: the Westminster scrutiny, his Irish Propositions, and parliamentary reform. The defeat of Fox’s motion cannot be attributed solely to ministerial influence. Admittedly, the question was not decided on its merits. Few questions were. What Burke could not overcome was prejudice against the opposition on questions relating to India, the legacy of Fox’s India Bills of . On February, in a debate on a motion for papers on India, Fox himself acknowledged this, giving as one reason for obtaining the papers that he was ‘convinced the more the real state of the Company’s affairs became known, the less unpopular would be his Bill’. On February, another debate on India papers degenerated into acrimonious personalities.¹⁵¹ On both ¹⁴⁸ Cornwallis to Dundas, Nov. , in Correspondence, ed. Charles Ross (London, ), i. . Dundas to Cornwallis, Apr. (NLS MS , p. ). Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh, ), concedes that the episode was ‘certainly not creditable’ (). ¹⁴⁹ Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, i. . ¹⁵⁰ CJ xl. . ¹⁵¹ PH xxv. –.
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occasions, to independent members with no particular interest in India, the opposition appeared obstinately preoccupied with refighting lost battles. More generally, and especially on financial questions, Pitt enjoyed a reputation for integrity and probity, where Fox was mistrusted. Thus Wraxall asserted that Pitt did not need to reply to ‘allegations which his character sufficiently repelled’.¹⁵² When Pitt appeared meanly vindictive, as he did about the Westminster scrutiny; when powerful vested interests clamoured against him, as they did against the Irish propositions; or when a cherished constitutional principle was at stake, as in the case of parliamentary reform, his usual supporters were prepared to desert him. On so arcane a subject as the Arcot debts, which few members understood, they were not. Nothing daunted by defeat, Burke determined to take his case to a wider public by printing his speech. He had done as much before, most recently with his Speech on Fox’s India Bill. In one respect, however, publication of the Arcot speech broke new ground. Not only did he circulate the text in manuscript for comment and correction, he added a substantial appendix of documents. In the printed text, these documents occupy nearly as many pages as the speech itself.¹⁵³ Burke wanted to provide irrefutable evidence that he was not inventing or exaggerating. Yet even with this massive buttressing, the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts provoked no pamphlet debate.¹⁵⁴ None of his earlier published speeches had been greeted with such silence. Burke had yet to convince his opponents that his case was plausible enough to require refutation. The episode of the Arcot debts deepened Burke’s suspicions of Pitt and Dundas. This distrust in turn influenced the strategy of his impeachment of Hastings. Had Burke come to regard them as potential allies, rather than implacable antagonists, he might have sought, and perhaps even obtained, a greater measure of ministerial co-operation and support. More generally, what Burke attributed to the machinations of the ‘Bengal squad’ renewed and reinforced his perennial conviction that ‘secret influence’ was at work. Thus in July , on hearing that Will’s position as Deputy Paymaster in India was threatened with suppression, Burke at once concluded that Will was a mere stalking-horse for himself, and that his old enemies were at work: I am utterly without rescourse. Such is the result of my near twenty years endeavours; endeavours carried on, without interruption of more than two or three years together in that period,—to cure the disorders, and to bring to justice the Villians, who in the India house and in India, have been labouring for the destruction of so large a part of Mankind. The result is that the worst of these miscreants have not ¹⁵² Wraxall, Memoirs, iv. . ¹⁵³ E.B. to George Leonard Staunton, June (C v. ); Windham to E.B., Aug. (–). In the pamphlet version of the Speech, the speech itself extends to pages, the appendix to . ¹⁵⁴ Newspapers first reported that both Scott and Wraxall were preparing replies, then denied that Scott was (Public Advertiser, , Sept. ; Daily Universal Register, Sept.).
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only escaped punishment but are settled in power, and furnishd with means, to wreak their Malice upon the head of every man who has attempted to bring them to justice. (C v. –)
This passage, as sincere as it is self-deluding, is the product of a selective memory that has mentally rewritten the story of his concern with India. On India, Burke was increasingly losing touch with reality, and incapable of expressing himself except in the strident superlatives of self-righteous moral outrage. The plan to abolish Will’s position (which was eventually dropped) was probably no more than one of the petty economies which Pitt was pursuing about this time. Burke refused to acknowledge that his appointment of Will, who received £ a day for duties that were hardly onerous, was itself widely perceived as a flagrant case of nepotism.¹⁵⁵ Nor had hostile observers forgotten Will’s earlier stockjobbing, Richard Sr.’s land speculations in Grenada,¹⁵⁶ or Burke’s own restoration of Powell and Bembridge. Such episodes had tarnished his reputation for financial probity, and their memory undermined his credibility as a critic of Pitt’s. ¹⁵⁵ Cornwallis called it ‘a most unnecessary job . . . a great embarrassment to us, and a material hindrance to the public business’ (to Lord Rawdon, Dec. , in Correspondence, ed. Ross, i. ). ¹⁵⁶ Dixon Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen: A Study of the Statesman’s Financial Integrity and Private Relationships (Boulder, Colo., ), –.
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Burke was never an avid ‘tourist’, a word coined about to describe a growing phenomenon, the recreational traveller.¹ In the s, he spent several summers in the country with his cousin Will. But their aim was an inexpensive villeggiatura that would allow them to read, study, write, and enjoy the country air. They did not do much sightseeing. Though in at least two summers they stayed within twenty miles of Stonehenge, they never visited the monument. In , Burke evaded the invitation of the Duke of Dorset (–) to visit Knole. The trip would have combined business with pleasure, for Burke wanted to introduce one of his émigré friends to the duke. Within an easy day’s journey of London, Knole (near Sevenoaks, in Kent) was among the grandest surviving monuments of the English Renaissance. Indeed, professing himself ‘something of a lover of all antiquities’, Burke called it ‘the most interesting thing in England’ ( Sept. : C vi. –). Yet he did not go. In the s and early s, cost was a deterrent, for the Burkes were impecunious, and travel was expensive. In , when Will acquired a paper fortune through speculations in East India stock, one of the first extravagances planned by the nouveaux riches Burkes was a trip to Italy. This was perhaps more Will’s idea than Edmund’s, for whom a higher priority than travel was a landed estate. When he bought his estate at Beaconsfield in , the trip to Italy was postponed. In , Will lost his fortune when East India stock crashed, and the Burkes were never again in a position to revive the project, though the idea retained a certain wistful appeal.² Thereafter, Burke usually spent the summer at Beaconsfield, farming, reading, and recuperating. He often made short journeys for political purposes, ¹ The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the preface to an anonymous poem, Ode to the Genius of the Lakes in the North of England (). The author professes to write only for ‘actual tourists’, as opposed to critics, who might judge the piece harshly as a poem. ² In , E.B. still ‘wished to travel’; Boswell’s Journal, Mar. (Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, ), ). In , E.B. told F. L. W. Meyer that ‘I do exceedingly long to see the Country you have just traversed [Italy]. It is a sort of Native land to us all; as our earliest Ideas are from the antient Italy, and some of our pleasantest amusements from the modern’ (C vi. ).
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either to London or to the country houses of his political associates. But he rarely travelled for pleasure. Exceptionally, in Burke made his only documented journey to the Continent: to Paris and Auxerre to settle his son Richard in a French family to learn the language. This trip was taken in the middle of a parliamentary session, as though to give himself an excuse for not spending longer away than was absolutely necessary.³ Not until did the Burkes take their first ‘holiday’ in the modern sense of a pleasure trip with no ulterior purpose. They visited Weymouth and Devon, and Burke at last saw Stonehenge, about which he had so confidently pronounced in his Philosophical Enquiry in .⁴ In November , he was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. This was a largely honorific position, but it required him to visit the city to be formally installed. Instead of using the occasion as the basis for a family holiday in the summer, when he had plenty of time, Burke made a short excursion to Glasgow after his re-election at Malton. Though he then spent a week at Edinburgh, the impression remains (as with his French journey) that he was glad to have an excuse to hasten home.⁵ Burke was elected Lord Rector when in office as Paymaster-General in the Coalition ministry. The dismissal of the Coalition a few weeks after his election was thus something of an embarrassment to the university, for the Lord Rector was expected to use his influence with the government on the university’s behalf. This awkward situation was compounded by the convention that a Lord Rector was re-elected for a second year. When Burke was duly re-elected, one of the professors wrote privately to him, urging his acceptance, lest a refusal should give his initial election the appearance of a political gesture.⁶ Burke obliged, and made no difficulty about soliciting the government on the university’s behalf.⁷ Re-elected on November , Burke could easily once again have made the required visit at a time when he could not stay long. On this occasion, however, he treated his reappointment as an excuse for a holiday. This second trip to Scotland was much longer and more carefully planned.⁸ Even so, Jane did not accompany him. She seems to have been a stay-at-home who liked travel even less than her husband did. ³ E.B. left London on Jan. , and Paris on Mar. (C ii. ). ⁴ R.B. Sr. to Champion, Sept. (C v. ). Samuel Johnson to Hester Thrale, Sept. and Oct. (Letters, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton, –), iv. , ). An engraving must have inspired his comment in the Philosophical Enquiry (WS i. ). ⁵ E.B. arrived in Edinburgh on Apr. , was installed at Glasgow on th, and left Edinburgh for London on the th (C v. –, ). ⁶ John Millar to E.B., Nov. , in William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, –: His Life and Thought and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge, ), . ⁷ William Leechman to E.B., June (WWM BkP /); E.B. to Lord Sydney, July (C v. –). Leechman also took the precaution of writing to Henry Dundas (Treasurer of the Navy) and the Marquis of Graham (a junior Lord of the Treasury). ⁸ Leechman to E.B., Nov. (C v. –). E.B. was away from Aug. to about Sept., nearly the same time as he had devoted to France in .
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Burke took with him as far as Edinburgh his son Richard (who was thence to take ship for Holland on an excursion of his own). For the entire journey, he was accompanied by his political disciple William Windham. Elected to Parliament in , one of the few supporters of the Coalition to win a contest in an open constituency (Norwich), he was a promising recruit to the opposition. Burke hoped that Windham (who had spent a year at the University of Glasgow before moving to Oxford) would be elected as his successor as Lord Rector.⁹ The party set out from London on August . Instead of taking the shortest route to Glasgow, they meandered to make a series of political visits, first to the two grand houses (Milton, near Peterborough; and Wentworth Woodhouse, near Sheffield) of Earl Fitzwilliam (–), Rockingham’s nephew and successor as Burke’s patron. (Burke sat for Malton, one of Fitzwilliam’s pocket boroughs.) After Wentworth, they called on John Lee (–), an old Rockinghamite, at his seat at Staindrop, County Durham. After crossing the border, they spent a few days (–August) with Sir Gilbert Elliot (–), whose seat was at Minto, near Jedburgh. Since serving with Burke on the Select Committee on India of –, Elliot had become one of his chief disciples. Though currently out of Parliament (one of ‘Fox’s martyrs’ at the election), he would return in . During a week at Edinburgh, Burke renewed his acquaintance with Adam Smith (–) and William Robertson (–; historian and Principal of the University). Richard now embarked at Leith for Holland. Burke and Windham proceeded to Glasgow. The final stage of the journey was broken by an overnight stay at Hatton, the seat of the Earl of Lauderdale (–). His son and heir, Lord Maitland (–), was another leading young oppositionist. Like Windham and Sir Gilbert, Maitland served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Warren Hastings.¹⁰ Burke’s party (now including Maitland) arrived at Glasgow on August. The next day Burke was installed. Burke did not make a speech, as he had the previous year. An unexpected absentee, present in , was James Boswell (–), who was in London seeing through the press his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. After the ceremony, a celebratory dinner was attended by most of the professors. A list of those present serves as a reminder that this was the golden age of the Scottish Enlightenment: eight of the nine professors present are enshrined in the Dictionary of National Biography.¹¹ After dinner, a deputation of weavers came to thank Lord ⁹ John Millar to E.B., Nov. (WWM BkP /), in response to a missing letter. Millar explains that, having recently received favours from the ministry, so prominent a member of the opposition as Windham would be an impolitic choice. ¹⁰ The Diary of the Right Hon. William Windham, to , ed. Mrs Henry Baring (London, ), –. Windham’s Diary is the main source for the details of E.B.’s tour. ¹¹ Windham, Diary, –. The eight professors were Archibald Arthur (assistant, moral philosophy), William Hamilton (anatomy), William Irvine (chemistry), John Millar (law), Thomas Reid (moral philosophy), William Richardson (humanity), Alexander Wilson (practical astronomy), and John Young (Greek).
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Maitland for his opposition to Pitt’s Irish Propositions. Windham, prodded by Burke (who wished to bring him forward), addressed them briefly, if not much to his own satisfaction. The visitors were then conducted by torchlight to supper at the house of Alexander Stevenson (–), professor of the practice of medicine, the only professor to miss inclusion in the DNB.¹² On September, Burke and Windham left Glasgow for a short tour of the southern Highlands, a popular tourist destination since about . They followed the standard ‘short’ itinerary for those who lacked the time or the inclination to visit the more remote parts.¹³ At Inverary, the Duke of Argyle (–) invited them to breakfast and showed them his castle and grounds. After Inverary, the country at last became ‘magnificently wild’, and a cottage supplied a ‘good specimen of Highland living’. Their northern apogee was Blair Athol. Turning south from Blair, for a few particularly picturesque miles beyond Dunkeld the travellers alighted from their post-chaise and walked. They did this on the advice of John Sinclair (–; later Sir John, and author of the pioneering Statistical Account of Scotland), whom they had met at Adam Smith’s in Edinburgh. What then happened reads like an episode from a novel: Burke and I were strolling through the woods, about ten miles from Dunkeld, when we saw a young female sitting under a tree reading. Burke immediately exclaimed, Let us have a little conversation with this solitary damsel, and see what she is about. We accosted her accordingly, and found that she was reading a recent novel from the London press. We asked her how she came to read novels? how she got such books at so great a distance from the metropolis; and more especially one so recently published? She answered, That she had been educated at a boarding-school at Perth, where novels might be had from the circulating library, and that she still procured them through the same channel. We carried on the conversation for some time, in the course of which she displayed a great deal of smartness and talent; and at last we were obliged, very reluctantly, to leave her, and proceed on our journey.¹⁴
¹² Ibid. . On Mar. , E.B. presented a petition from the Scottish (mainly Glasgow) weavers, asking that entry into the trade should be more strictly controlled (CJ xlii. –; Daily Universal Register, Mar.). E.B. did not strongly endorse the petition, on which no action was taken. Yet his willingness to present it is a further piece of evidence that he was no doctrinaire disciple of Adam Smith. Stevenson is memorialized as a member of the Select Society in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, ), xlix. –), but still does not rate an individual entry. ¹³ Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics, and Tourism in Britain, – (Aldershot, ), . In , Hastings and his wife made nearly the same circular tour, but travelling counter-clockwise (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹⁴ Windham, in conversation with Sir John Sinclair, ‘about three years later’, recorded in Sinclair’s Correspondence (London, ), i. . According to Sinclair, Windham asked him to enquire about the girl, particularly whether she was still unmarried. Sinclair duly sent him an account of ‘the Atholl Shepherdess, who made such an impression on Mr Burke and you’: she had lately married a Dr Macnab and gone with him to Bengal ( June : BL Add. MS , fos. –). The date of this letter suggests that the conversation took place much later than Sinclair remembered, probably early in .
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Like Dr Johnson before them, Burke and Windham were surprised and disappointed to find that the paraphernalia of modern life, such as boarding-schools and circulating libraries, had penetrated as far as the Highlands.¹⁵ Leaving the solitary highland lass to her novel, Burke and Windham continued via Perth to Edinburgh, where they loitered for a few days (– September) and again saw much of Adam Smith. From Edinburgh, they revisited the Elliots at Minto before returning, by way of a diversion through the Lake District, back to Wentworth, which they reached on September. Burke was much distressed at receiving no letter from his son, his fears exacerbated by the reports of stormy weather in the North Sea. Such was his anxiety, that Lord Fitzwilliam wrote to Richard Burke, Sr., asking him to be at Beaconsfield to comfort his brother on his return home (C v. ). Strangely, Windham left Wentworth on the th, a day ahead of Burke. His destination was Oxford, and for most of the way his road would be the same as Burke’s.¹⁶ Since Windham was indecisive by temperament and a chronic procrastinator, some compelling motive hurried him away from Wentworth. Uncharitable as the speculation may appear, he may have been suffering from a surfeit of Burke’s company. Even in conversation with friends, Burke could be an irritating know-all. Worse, his information was not always correct. Windham’s diary, thin as it is as a source for this trip, provides some telling evidence. On one occasion, Burke cited theVenerable Bede as evidence on a disputed point of Irish history, probably one of Bede’s references to Ireland’s early cultural superiority. On another, he proposed what Windham thought a far-fetched interpretation of the word gratiosus in a passage in Cicero. At Wentworth, they adjourned to Lord Fitzwilliam’s library to settle the two disputes. Burke found the passages in Bede, but Windham thought them ‘far, however, from supporting Mr. B.’s opinion to the extent in which he stated it’. On the meaning of gratiosus, consulting Aulus Gellius and Stephanus’s dictionary proved that Burke was simply ‘wrong’.¹⁷ Burke probably knew more about Irish history than Windham; Windham was certainly the superior classical scholar. Burke’s cocksureness annoyed Windham sufficiently for him to take the first opportunity to refute him, and then to record the incident at length in a rather sparse diary. Burke would have benefited from being more often in the company of men who, like Windham, were more nearly his intellectual equals and who were willing to challenge him. Burke was too habituated to being uncontradicted. Perhaps, however, after the hostile arena of politics, he needed the comfort of being the cynosure and oracle of a cosy domestic circle. ¹⁵ Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (), ed. J. D. Fleeman (Oxford, ), (Anoch), (Coriatachan in Skye). ¹⁶ Windham, Diary, –. ¹⁷ Ibid. –.
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Windham recorded only a few scraps of Burke’s conversation, mostly remarks on literary subjects and all decontextualized.¹⁸ Hardly longer, but preserved with more sense of the occasion, are the fragments minuted by Thomas Somerville (–; minister of Jedburgh), invited by his patron Sir Gilbert Elliot to meet Burke at Minto. This was a favourable opportunity to see Burke in congenial surroundings and at leisure. Somerville was duly impressed by the range of Burke’s conversation: ‘During the few days I thus spent in his company, all sorts of subjects—politics, criticism, theology— were introduced in the course of our conversation; and I was astonished with the richness and brilliancy of his language, and the universality of his knowledge.’ At the same time, Burke again displayed the overbearing side of his personality. After professing himself ‘a firm believer in the divine authority of the Gospel’, he was tactless enough, in a Presbyterian country and to a Presbyterian minister, to display ‘an illiberal and exclusive partiality to the Episcopalian government and forms of worship’. This was Burke at his most intolerantly Johnsonian. Nor, in the presence of Admiral John Elliot (–; Sir Gilbert’s uncle), who had served against the Americans, was George Washington (–) the happiest subject for a panegyric.¹⁹ After the conclusion of the Treaty of Versailles in , Burke rarely had occasion to speak in Parliament on American affairs.²⁰ Yet at Minto the topic was canvassed at length, and Burke’s remarks show that he continued to follow events in America. Somerville was surprised at the ‘contemptuous terms’ in which he spoke of the Americans, given the eulogies he had pronounced on them in Parliament. Burke expressed his doubts about the permanency of the Union, evidently sharing the common view that, once the external threat was removed, the states would revert to the pursuit of their individual interests. In , the form of a permanent constitution was still being debated. Burke was apprehensive that ‘the democratic party threatened to overpower the interests of the Federalists, to whom he gave full credit for wisdom and patriotism’ (hence the praise of Washington). The conversations at Minto, sketchy as Somerville’s record of them is, confirm that Burke did not welcome the American Revolution as wholeheartedly as Thomas Paine (–) later claimed.²¹ As late as , the durability of the American constitution was doubtful. The possibility that it might degenerate into a democracy provided an awful warning, not an example of successful, moderate revolution. ¹⁸ Ibid. . ¹⁹ Thomas Somerville, My Own Life and Times, – (Edinburgh, ), –. This is not a contemporary record: it was written in –, and subsequently revised. ²⁰ In the debate on the Quebec Bill on May , E.B. praised the Americans for establishing a constitution ‘as well adapted to their circumstances as they could’ (PH xxvii. ). ²¹ Somerville, My Own Life and Times, –; Paine, Rights of Man (), in Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, ), .
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When Burke reached Beaconsfield from Wentworth, about September , his fears for his son were alleviated. Foul weather had so delayed Richard’s ship that he decided to abandon the Dutch part of his tour. He was therefore put ashore on the Norfolk coast, and after a brief visit to Beaconsfield set off for Paris.²² Burke was now so eminent a public figure that scraps of gossip about him (often inaccurate or invented) appeared frequently in the newspapers. On this occasion, they reported Richard’s death and Burke’s own dangerous illness brought on by his grief.²³ Disbelieving, but anxious to allay his daughter’s fears, Richard Shackleton wrote from Ballitore to enquire about the truth of these rumours. Burke responded reassuringly, while admitting that he had indeed been more anxious than ‘the principles of reason and Religion’ could justify.²⁴ Still smarting from this exposure of his private feelings in the newspapers, he had at once to face a further and larger dose of unwelcome publicity. On October, just a few days after Burke’s return home, appeared James Boswell’s much-heralded Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Boswell’s Tour, a daily record of Johnson’s visit to Scotland in , differs from the conventional travel book of the day in its neglect of the topographical and the instructive. Instead, the Tour supplies a copious and fascinating record of Johnson’s trenchant, uninhibited conversation. Boswell had long meditated a large-scale life of Johnson. The Tour, based chiefly on Boswell’s travel journal, was intended as an appetizer. An agreeable mélange of Johnsonian wisdom and Boswellian egotism, this entertaining confection was an immediate success, widely reviewed and much discussed.²⁵ Boswell did not send Burke a copy of the Tour, as he had some of his earlier publications.²⁶ But the book could not long have escaped Burke’s notice. Nearly everyone was reading it, and the schadenfreude of some kind friend would soon have drawn it ²² E.B. to Richard Shackleton, Oct. ; to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Oct. (C v. , ). ²³ London Chronicle, Sept.– Oct. ; Morning Post, Oct. A denial appeared in the Daily Universal Register, Oct. Mary Shackleton was even more alarmed by what she read as a report of E.B.’s death, but which proved to refer to another ‘Mr. Burke’. Richard Shackleton to E.B., Oct. (The Leadbeater Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbeater (nd edn. London, ), i. , ii. –). ²⁴ Shackleton to E.B., Oct. (NRO A. . ). E.B. to T. L. O’Beirne, Oct. (in reply to a missing letter); and to Shackleton, Oct. (C v. , ). ²⁵ Selections from the reviews are reprinted in Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, –, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London, ), –. The passage beginning with Johnson’s denial of E.B.’s wit was among those excerpted in the Gentleman’s Magazine, (Nov. ), –, and was also reprinted in the European Magazine, (Dec. ), . ²⁶ Boswell sent E.B. copies of his Letter to Lord Braxfield () and his first Letter to the People of Scotland (); Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, ed. Frank Brady et al. (London, ), , –. Probably he also sent his second Letter to the People of Scotland (), since he hoped to persuade E.B. to oppose the Diminishing Bill, against which the pamphlet was directed.
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to his attention. Burke was neither the only living victim of Johnson’s tongue, nor the most tartly treated.²⁷ Nor are all the references to him unfavourable. On the contrary, Boswell records one of Johnson’s many extravagant tributes to Burke, as ‘the first man every where’.²⁸ Nevertheless, the two lengthy denigrations of Burke’s wit recorded in the Tour could hardly have been other than vexing. The first forms part of an after-dinner conversation at Edinburgh on August , when Johnson lauded Burke’s ‘great variety of knowledge, store of imagery, copiousness of language’. Principal Robertson added: ‘He has wit too.’ This was no eccentric or aberrant opinion. Burke’s parliamentary speeches were often praised for their wit.²⁹ But Johnson (who had never heard Burke speak in Parliament) applied Robertson’s remark to Burke’s private conversation, and immediately countered: ‘No, sir; he never succeeds there. ’Tis low; ’tis conceit. I used to say, Burke never once made a good joke.’ When Boswell ventured to opine that Burke could listen as well as hold forth, Johnson again demurred: ‘No; I cannot say he is good at that. So desirous is he to talk, that, if one is speaking at this end of the table, he’ll speak to somebody at the other end.’ Perhaps sensing that he had been unduly censorious, Johnson then expiated with one version of his remark that five minutes in Burke’s company were enough to prove him ‘an extraordinary man’.³⁰ The merit of Burke’s wit resurfaced on September at Dunvegan, on the Isle of Skye. This time the prompt came from Boswell himself. To entertain Johnson on a rainy day, Boswell persuaded him to peruse what he hoped would impress him as a favourable specimen of Scottish Latinity, ‘Characteres quorundam apud Scotos advocatorum’, a posthumously published essay of Sir George Mackenzie (c.–), jurist and Jacobite. Discussing the sketch, Boswell applied Mackenzie’s character of Sir George Nicholson to Burke: ‘in omnes lusos & jocos se saepe resolvebat’. ‘No, sir,’ Johnson again retorted, ‘I never heard Burke make a good joke in my life.’ In compensation, he was prepared to concede other, more solid qualities in abundance. Asked by their host to define ‘the particular excellence of Burke’s eloquence’, he replied: ‘Copiousness and fertility of allusion; a power of diversifying his matter, by placing it in various relations . . . great information, and great command of language; though, in my opinion, it has not in every respect the highest elegance.’³¹ This is no niggardly tribute from a man ²⁷ Frank Brady, James Boswell: The Later Years, – (London, ), –. ²⁸ Sept. ( Journal of a Tour, in Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, –), v. ). ²⁹ E.B.’s speech of Dec. , for example, was reported to exhibit ‘a vein of wit, argument, and satire, so finely blended and so strongly carried on, that the House was kept in a burst of laughter the whole time’ (PH xxiii. ). ³⁰ Journal of a Tour, in Life of Johnson, v. –. Other evidence that Burke was overbearing in conversation is collected in Donald C. Bryant, ‘Edmund Burke’s Conversation’, Studies in Speech and Drama in Honor of Alexander M. Drummond (Ithaca, NY, ), –. ³¹ Journal of a Tour, in Life of Johnson, v. –.
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of Johnson’s stature, standards, and powers of discrimination. Yet Boswell, who may still have entertained hopes of political patronage from Burke, sensed that the disparagement of his wit would rankle. Preparing his journal for publication, he therefore sought to soften the blow. He added a long footnote to Johnson’s first denial of Burke’s wit, arguing that upon this subject Johnson was ‘strangely heterodox’. Adducing evidence in support, the note begins with praise of Burke’s speeches in Parliament as ‘strewed’ with ‘surprising allusions, brilliant sallies of vivacity, and pleasant conceits’, instancing the Speech on Economical Reformation of . At this point, however, the note goes awry. Instead of citing examples from that speech, which would have been easy enough, for it is Burke’s wittiest, Boswell devotes the rest of the note to some feeble examples of wit from Burke’s conversation. Boswell’s egotism then supervenes. Over half the note consists of Boswell’s own definition of man (‘a Cooking Animal’), supposedly cited as a feed for Burke’s remark on it. More generally, the note shows Boswell moving with ease and assurance among such luminaries as John Wilkes, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Burke himself. As a defence of Burke’s wit, it is singularly inept.³² Boswell returned to Scotland immediately after the publication of the Tour. When the first edition sold out in three weeks, and a second was immediately called for, its preparation devolved on his (and Burke’s) friend Edmond Malone (–), the Shakespeare scholar. Several good judges, he reported to Boswell, ‘talk loudly that the specimens you have given of Burke’s wit are not good ones, that they have more of pun and conceit than of wit in them.’³³ Among other corrections and revisions, many designed to palliate the offence that the indiscretions in the first edition had given, Malone doubled the length of the footnote about Burke’s wit. In the second edition of the Tour, Malone accordingly conceded that ‘some persons’ have objected to the instances cited as showing ‘more of conceit than real wit, and being merely sportive sallies of the moment, not justifying the encomium which they think with me, he undoubtedly merits’. But instead of supplying more apposite examples, he retained the old ones, adding by way of explanation another two hundred words on the difficulty of capturing wit and the superabundance of Burke’s. The claim that all his friends can so testify is unsupported by a single illustration. The effect of Malone’s note is to compound the damage rather than repair it.³⁴ ³² Journal of a Tour, in Life of Johnson, v. – n. . Even his friend and disciple French Laurence conceded that E.B. ‘had not so much wit or humour as a certain sportive vivacity’; in conversation with Boswell, Nov. , in Boswell: The English Experiment, –, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, ), . Other contemporary opinions are sifted in James F. Davidson, ‘Wit and Politics: Edmund Burke’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, (), –; and John C. Weston, Jr., ‘Edmund Burke’s Wit’, Review of English Literature, / (), –. ³³ Malone to Boswell, Oct. (Correspondence of Boswell, ). ³⁴ Journal of a Tour, in Life of Johnson, v. – n. .
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While this new edition was in the press, Boswell returned briefly to London. His chief preoccupation was with Lord Macdonald (c.–; Sir Alexander at the time of Johnson’s visit), who had taken such offence at the account in the Tour of his parsimonious hospitality that Boswell nervously expected to be challenged to a duel. At some point during this visit (between November and December), Boswell met Burke, who ‘fell hard upon him for the absurdities’ in the Tour. (Exactly what these were is not recorded.) After listening patiently for some time, Boswell ventured to suggest that Burke had himself been ‘guilty of as great’. ‘Never’, replied Burke, unwilling as always to confess himself in the wrong. Boswell had his wits about him. What of the time, he reminded Burke, when you spoke of a message from ‘the Best of Kings to the most grateful of people’? This was a palpable hit, and for once Burke was abashed: ‘that indeed I own . . . was an absurdity & the greatest I was ever guilty of ’.³⁵ Such a ready concession on Burke’s part is unparalleled. Boswell sent Burke an advance copy of the second edition of his Tour (published on December), together with a rather awkward letter referring to the extended note.³⁶ Burke was not apt to suffer in silence. When stung, he usually struck back hard, though often in the transparent guise of a willingness to kiss the rod. So he did on this occasion. Disclaiming having ever pretended to wit, he directed his irony at the clumsy defence with which Boswell and Malone had encumbered him: I shall be well content to pass down to a long posterity in Doctor Johnsons authentick Judgment, and in your permanent record, as a dull fellow and a tiresome companion, when it shall be known through the same long period, that I have had such men as Mr Boswell and Mr Malone as my friendly counsel in the Cause which I have lost . . . It will be thought that the body of the place was of some value, when Engineers of their Skill, were so earnest to defend a small, and, I fear untenable, outwork of my reputation . . . I ought not to take this publick reprimand amiss . . . I ought therefore to thank you for informing the World of this censure of our deceasd friend, that I may regulate myself accordingly. ( Jan. : C v. –)
After such a caustic rebuke, anyone but Boswell would have exercised uncommon caution in dealing with Burke. Boswell, however, was irrepressible. About a month after receiving Burke’s sarcastic letter, he called on him and ‘imprudently touched on a calumny against Mr Burke, in order to be enabled to refute it’. Having recently experienced Boswell’s talents as an engineer in defence of the outworks of a friend’s reputation, Burke lost his temper at this ³⁵ Michael Lort to Hester Lynch Piozzi, Dec. (Manchester, John Rylands University Library, English MS , no. ). The reference is to E.B.’s speech of Apr. , on the king’s message recommending economical reform: ‘the best of messages to the best of people from the best of kings’ (PH xxii. ). Boswell was in Edinburgh at the time, but (hoping to secure a place through E.B.) following events in London closely. ³⁶ Boswell to E.B., Dec. (Correspondence of Boswell, –).
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prospect. As Boswell ruefully noted, they ‘parted on sad terms. I was very uneasy’. Boswell immediately drafted a letter of abject apology; Burke sent a curt note requesting a meeting. These notes crossed, and Boswell was out when Burke called, so that the éclaircissement was eventually effected by letter.³⁷ Burke assured Boswell ‘for your own private satisfaction, and for that only’ that the ‘Calumny’ (the nature of which remains unknown) was ‘absolutely false’. Asking Boswell to ‘leave me undefended’, he observes that ‘one of the most known and most successful ways of circulating slander is by stating charges, and anticipating defences, where nothing can come to proof . . . and where every man credits and carries away what he pleases, and according to the measure of his Malice’. Acquitting Boswell of any evil intention, he warns that ‘hasty friendship sometimes produces the effect of Enmity’ ( Feb. : –). Burke had by now regained his composure, and the two resumed a semblance of normal relations. Burke’s reactions to the passages in Boswell’s Tour, and to Boswell’s interrogation about the ‘Calumny’, may appear out of proportion to the provocation. As with earlier incidents of the same kind, however, such as his quarrel with William Markham (–) in , Burke was responding to more than the immediate sting. He had known Boswell since about , finding him a pleasant companion without paying much regard to his politics. In , when the Rockingham party came to power, Boswell had been an annoyingly importunate place-hunter, though no more persistent than others. Burke could even forgive, or ignore, Boswell’s pamphlet against Fox’s India Bill.³⁸ Yet Boswell was sometimes socially inept (and not only when he was drunk), as his own journals and even his Life of Johnson testify. He provoked Johnson, with whom he enjoyed a far more intimate friendship than with Burke, to some memorable chastisements.³⁹ Where Johnson vented his anger in a sudden outburst on the spot, Burke was apt rather to suppress his resentment until, having reached some invisible limit, it erupted with unexpected violence. Boswell did not appreciate the value to public men of keeping their private lives private. Hungry for publicity himself, he could not understand that others felt differently. Many politicians, even the glacial Pitt, liked to unbend in private.⁴⁰ They did not want gossip about themselves in the newspapers. ³⁷ Boswell: The English Experiment, . Boswell to E.B., Feb.; E.B. to Boswell, , Feb.; Boswell to E.B., Feb. (Correspondence of Boswell, –). ³⁸ When E.B. visited Glasgow in Apr. , Boswell was afraid that E.B. resented his Letter to the People of Scotland (). E.B.’s response suggests that he did not take Boswell seriously as a politician (Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, –). ³⁹ Examples from the journals include: Apr., in Boswell for the Defence, –, ed. Wiliam K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Frederick A. Pottle (London, ), ; and May , in Boswell in Extremes, –, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, ), ; and from the Life of Johnson, iii. , –, –; , Apr. , Apr. . ⁴⁰ John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, –), i. –.
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Boswell had an annoying habit of getting not only himself but his ‘friends’ into paragraphs. In July , for example, when Peter Shaw was hanged for theft and arson, Boswell informed the world that he was ‘some time servant to Mr Burke, of whom he spoke to Mr Boswell with great regard’.⁴¹ The following month, Boswell sent another paragraph to the same paper, recording a dinner party given by John Courtenay (–), MP and wit, which he and Burke attended.⁴² So Burke’s anxiety about a likely series of newspaper paragraphs, purportedly defending him against some calumny, but actually spreading it, is understandable. He was abused often enough by his avowed enemies. In Boswell’s Tour itself, one passage stands out as even more offensive to Burke than the disparagement of his wit. Soon after the dissection of Burke’s wit on the evening of August, Johnson reprobated ‘a certain eminent political friend of ours’ (not named, but any informed reader would recognize that Burke was meant) for ‘his maxim of sticking to a certain set of men on all occasions’. Johnson could approve loyalty to the principles of a party, in the sense of being either a Whig or a Tory, but not ‘to bind one’s self to one man, or one set of men, (who may be right to-day and wrong to-morrow,) without any general preference of system’.⁴³ Johnson here controverts the theory of party developed in Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (). In Burke’s view, if one bound oneself to the right set of men (the party of virtue and integrity), there was no likelihood of such inconsistency (WS ii. –). Johnson, like George III, equated ‘party’ with self-interested faction.⁴⁴ As with the denigration of Burke’s ‘wit’, the offence was exacerbated by an injudicious footnote. Quite gratuitously, Boswell adduced an attack on ‘parties’ from a sermon by Archbishop William Markham (Burke’s former friend), delivered on February (over three years after Johnson’s remarks). Markham’s ire had been directed against opponents of the American war, and the Rockingham party in particular.⁴⁵ Now Boswell revived the affront, linking Johnson and Markham as ‘two such great and luminous minds’, while conceding that each was ‘dark in one corner’ (both were violently anti-American).⁴⁶ In his forays into politics, Boswell liked to present himself as an independent, non-party man.⁴⁷ Such professions were agreeable neither to patrons who wanted reliable lobby-fodder, nor to men ⁴¹ Shaw was hanged at Newgate on July . Boswell’s paragraph appeared in the Public Advertiser on July (Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, ). ⁴² Public Advertiser, Aug. . ⁴³ Journal of a Tour ( Aug. ), in Life of Johnson, v. . ⁴⁴ George III to William Pitt, July, Nov., [ Dec.] (Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle (London, –), iii. , , ). ⁴⁵ A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, ), p. xxi. ⁴⁶ Journal of a Tour, in Life of Johnson, v. – n. . ⁴⁷ A Letter to the People of Scotland, on the Present State of the Nation (London, ), –; A Letter to the People of Scotland, on the Alarming Attempt to Infringe the Union (London, ), , –.
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such as Burke who believed that detachment from party was a sign not of virtue but of self-seeking opportunism.⁴⁸ Burke could accept being attacked in print as a party man. More exasperating were Boswell’s clumsy oscillations between courting patronage and demonstrating his own independence. Boswell, in turn, appears never to have appreciated an elementary fact of eighteenth-century politics: that someone in his position needed to find a powerful patron, and earn his favour. Priding himself on his independence, he nevertheless expected the rewards of subservience. An undisciplined character who relished variety and the social incongruities recorded so proudly in his journals, he convinced himself that the ordinary rules need not constrain his own mercurial spirit. Over the years, despite his undoubted charm, good humour, and social talents, he failed to secure the entry into Parliament that he so craved. Yet he was unprepared, even surprised and affronted, to suffer the neglect that his maverick behaviour induced. The earnestness and application which Burke devoted to politics was foreign to Boswell, who admired uncomprehendingly when he saw Burke ‘study Acts of Parliament’.⁴⁹ Strangely obtuse about how or why he offended Burke, Boswell repeated his provocations in his Life of Johnson (), publication of which precipitated the final break between them.⁵⁰ Burke’s crusade against Warren Hastings, which became one of the consuming passions of his life, originated from the patient study of an accumulation of evidence, partial as his reading of that evidence was. As late as March , he spoke of Hastings as a ‘respectable person’ whose talents commanded admiration. While admitting that he held Hastings responsible for the Rohilla War and for the Maratha War, and that he condemned both, he nevertheless denied ‘the smallest degree of prejudice or personal animosity’ against him (to Sir Thomas Rumbold, Mar. : C iv. –). Nor did work on the Select Committee that framed the Bengal Judicature Bill change his views. Indeed, far from displaying any animus against Hastings, the committee supported his views on the relationship between the Supreme Council and the Supreme Court.⁵¹ By March , however, Burke had come to believe that Hastings personified, and was largely responsible for, the ⁴⁸ One passage in the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (WS ii. ) was directed particularly at the elder Pitt. ⁴⁹ Journal, Apr. , in Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, . ⁵⁰ Boswell’s relations with E.B. have been much studied. Recent accounts include Frank Brady, in Correspondence of Boswell, –; and Elizabeth Lambert, ‘Boswell’s Burke: The Literary Consequences of Ambivalence’, The Age of Johnson, (), –. ⁵¹ The Act ( George III, c. ) exempted the Supreme Council from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
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oppression and peculation prevalent in Bengal under the company’s aegis. Hence his campaign to reform and regenerate the governance of British India took the form of a criminal prosecution against Hastings. This development can be traced in part to the influence of Philip Francis (–). After six years in India as a member of the Supreme Council, Francis returned to England, embittered by his failure to thwart Hastings. Francis determined to discredit his antagonist at home and, if possible, to return as GovernorGeneral to put into practice his own ideas about how Bengal should be ruled. Arriving in London in October , he was coldly received by the ministry. He therefore turned to the opposition and the Select Committee, which proved a more sympathetic audience.⁵² Francis found a particularly eager and active ally in Burke, who was always disposed to read politics in terms of personalities.⁵³ In converting Burke to his view of Hastings, Francis was fortunate in his timing. He brought with him from Bengal the first news of the establishment by Hastings of a new court, and his appointment to it, at a generous salary, of Sir Elijah Impey. By this transaction, Hastings could plausibly be presented as having bought off a troublesome opponent, and to have exempted his own iniquities from any further judicial control. This collusive and corrupt bargain lent credibility to Francis’s interpretation of Hastings’s character and administration. In February , in its first report after its re-constitution in December , the Select Committee scathingly condemned both the new court and Impey’s appointment.⁵⁴ This episode marked a turning-point in Burke’s attitude to Hastings. Soon after, when Lord North’s ministry fell and Burke and his party took office, Burke declared his intention of moving to recall Hastings.⁵⁵At first, the recall appeared to command bipartisan support. On April , Burke confidently anticipated ‘the determination of parliament’ to punish those whose malpractices in India had brought British rule into ‘such disgrace’.⁵⁶ On April, Henry Dundas, the chairman of North’s Secret Committee, moved forty-five resolutions on the subject of India, many of them condemning Hastings’s dealings with Indian states. Burke spoke forcefully in support.⁵⁷ On May, when Dundas moved to recall Hastings, Burke demanded that such Indian delinquents should appear ‘at the bar of that House face to face, that their conduct might be fully investigated, and punishment inflicted, proportionate to their several crimes’.⁵⁸ ⁵² T. H. Bowyer, ‘Philip Francis and the Government of Bengal: Parliament and Personality in the Frustration of an Ambition’, Parliamentary History, (), –. ⁵³ E.B. to Francis, Mar. , shows how quickly he came to accept Francis as an expert guide to the interpretation of evidence (C iv. –). ⁵⁴ Lambert, cxxxviii. –; the ‘Observations’, for which E.B. was chiefly responsible, are repr. in WS v. –. ⁵⁵ Scott to Hastings, [ Mar. ] (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ⁵⁶ PH xxii. . ⁵⁷ Morning Chronicle, Apr. ; WS v. –. The resolutions are repr. in PH xxii. –. ⁵⁸ Debrett, vii. –.
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Convinced that ‘investigation’ would reveal crimes which deserved punishment, Burke had come to a conclusion from which he never wavered. An intensification of Burke’s animus against Hastings was apparent by December , when Dundas took the first step to compel the East India Company to recall Hastings. Rising several times in support of Dundas’s motion, Burke was notably more personal, rancorous, and abusive than in his speeches of the previous session, not only against Hastings himself, but against his defender, Thomas Pitt (–; the minister’s cousin). Displaying ‘the strongest Marks of Passion in his Countenance’, Burke seemed to have been drawn into a personal vendetta.⁵⁹ On April , soon after the Coalition came to power, Burke ‘pledged himself to God, to his country, to that House, and to the unfortunate and plundered inhabitants of India, that he would bring to justice, as far as in him lay, the greatest delinquent that India ever saw’.⁶⁰ Before Hastings could be brought to justice, however, he had to be brought to England. If the Coalition had remained in office, Hastings would certainly have been recalled. Indeed, recall might have been unnecessary, since as early as March , exasperated by what he thought ill-informed censure not only from the House of Commons but from the directors of the East India Company, Hastings had professed his intention to resign.⁶¹ As an earnest of his departure, his wife Marian (–) left Calcutta in January . Yet sorely as he missed her, on successive pretexts Hastings procrastinated. As late as November , he still cherished hopes of being asked to remain in India, and even of receiving the more extensive powers which (in his opinion) his position demanded. The arrival of Pitt’s Act, which he interpreted as a personal affront, finally dispelled this fantasy. On February , he presided over his last meeting of the Supreme Council and took his leave of Calcutta. On June he landed at Plymouth, and on the th he reached London.⁶² Although the parliamentary session was drawing to a close, Burke determined to issue a challenge. Demanding an enquiry into ‘the conduct of certain persons, lately returned from India’, he gave notice that ‘if no other person undertook the business, he himself would’ ( June : WS v. ). This ominous pledge was Burke’s last reported speech of the session. Soon afterwards, he retired to Beaconsfield for the summer. On February , nearly four years after his first declaration of intent, Burke finally redeemed his pledge to bring Hastings to justice. In so doing, he announced to the Commons the process he meant to initiate: an ⁵⁹ Morning Chronicle, Dec. ; WS v. –. Scott to Hastings, Dec. (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ⁶⁰ PH xxiii. (misdated Apr.). ⁶¹ Hastings to the Directors, Mar. (G. R. Gleig, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Hon. Warren Hastings (London, ), iii. –). ⁶² Hastings to Marian Hastings, Sept., Nov., Dec. (Letters of Warren Hastings to his Wife, ed. Sydney C. Grier (Edinburgh, ), –, , ); Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS ).
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impeachment. There were, he acknowledged, alternatives. One was an address to the king, to direct the Attorney-General to prosecute Hastings in the Court of King’s Bench. The present Attorney-General (Richard Pepper Arden; –), however, had shown little zeal for this particular cause. (In fact, he was a known supporter of Hastings.) In any case, the magnitude of the subject demanded a proceeding of greater dignity and weight than a common prosecution in an ordinary court. A second method was a Bill of Pains and Penalties, which would both criminate and punish. This, however, appeared a harsh and inequitable proceeding, in which the Commons would act as judges as well as prosecutors. Impeachment, an ‘ancient and constitutional’ procedure, was therefore his preferred course (WS vi. –). Burke might have added, what most of his audience knew, that both of his rejected methods had recently been invoked against Indian delinquents, and in substance had failed. In , the four members of the Madras Council who in had deposed Lord Pigot had been tried in the King’s Bench. Though duly convicted, they had received only derisory sentences: each had been fined £,.⁶³An even worse offender, Sir Thomas Rumbold (–), had evaded justice entirely. In , after only two years as governor, he abandoned Madras, leaving it threatened by, yet unprepared to resist, the invasion of Haidar Ali of Mysore (whose repeated incursions into the Carnatic spread desolation and famine). Rumbold sailed home with a fortune rumoured (probably with much exaggeration) at £,. After an investigation by the Secret Committee, Henry Dundas had proceeded against him by means of a Bill of Pains and Penalties. For a variety of reasons, among them objections to the process as arbitrary and inconsistent with current notions of judicial equity, the bill was eventually dropped.⁶⁴An impeachment offered the advantages of being at once more solemn and parliamentary than a trial in a lower court, and less objectionable than a Bill of Pains and Penalties. In an impeachment, the House of Commons collectively, acting as ‘the grand inquest of the nation’, charges and prosecutes an individual before the House of Lords, acting in its judicial capacity. The Commons takes no part in judging the case.⁶⁵ Impeachment was indeed ‘ancient’, dating from as far back as .⁶⁶ By , however, it was obsolescent, if not quite obsolete. The last had taken place in . Burke’s management of the procedure led to a trial lasting days over seven years, itself a cruel and unusual punishment, and commonly ⁶³ Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howells (London, –), xxi. –. ⁶⁴ Jim Phillips, ‘Parliament and Southern India, –: The Secret Committee of Enquiry and the Prosecution of Sir Thomas Rumbold’, Parliamentary History, (), –. ⁶⁵ Blackstone characterizes an impeachment as ‘a presentment to the most high and supreme court of criminal jurisdiction by the most solemn grand inquest of the whole kingdom’ (Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, –), iv. , citing and in part quoting Sir Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae, ii. *). ⁶⁶ Maude Violet Clarke, ‘The Origin of Impeachment’, in her Fourteenth-Century Studies, ed. L. S. Sutherland and M. McKisack (Oxford, ), –.
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regarded, then and since, as a failure if not a travesty of justice. Yet Burke’s choice of weapon should not be judged only with hindsight. Though in Britain the process has been used only once since (in ), an eminent legal historian has regretted its desuetude.⁶⁷ In many other countries, such as the United States, some form of impeachment is still used. In Britain in , impeachment as a political weapon had indeed dwindled to a rhetorical threat. But no one could confidently have predicted that its regeneration was impossible, given the long and chequered history of the procedure and the respect for precedents enshrined in the British constitution and shared by most of Burke’s contemporaries. Impeachment had been revived before, and might again have been resuscitated. In proceeding against Hastings, Burke faced a task for which the English legal system was acknowledged to be ill equipped. For example, to obtain evidence from India that would be admissible in an English court was virtually impossible.⁶⁸ Pitt’s solution to the general problem was to set up a parliamentary court, with new rules, to try offences committed in India. An avowed reformer, Pitt had no qualms about innovation. But he was respectful enough of legal principles to give his court no power of retrospection. Its jurisdiction was accordingly confined to offences committed after March .⁶⁹ Burke was at least as keen as Pitt to bring the pillagers of India within the ambit of the law. Nevertheless, he strenuously opposed Pitt’s bill as setting up a power ‘unknown to the constitution’ and as taking away from the Commons its ‘ancient inquisitorial powers’.⁷⁰ Faith in the ‘ancient constitution’ made Burke averse to innovation (which he distinguished from ‘reform’), and especially to ‘reform’ of its central institution, Parliament.⁷¹ In special circumstances, of which Economical Reformation in – is the most prominent example, he was prepared to suppress medieval survivals: but then only to restore the purity of a more essential element in the constitution. In most cases, he preferred to reform by precedent. On November , for example, he adduced the statute de tallagio non concedendo () as a precedent for Parliament renouncing its power to tax the American colonies (WS iii. , ). Indeed, in one respect Burke went further than Sir William Blackstone (–), who likened legal fictions designed to circumvent ⁶⁷ Holdsworth, History of English Law, i (th edn. London, ), . ⁶⁸ Philip Francis, for example, while opposing Pitt’s creation of a special tribunal to try offenders, acknowledged that the law as it stood was inadequate. His solution was to extend the powers of the King’s Bench ( July ; PH xiv. –). ⁶⁹ Pitt’s India Act ( George III, st. , c. ), clauses –. ⁷⁰ July (WS v. ). E.B. again attacked the new court on Feb. (Debrett, xvii. ), and in his letter of Jan. to Mary Palmer (C v. ). ⁷¹ In his fragmentary ‘Essay towards a History of the Laws of England’ (?), E.B. ridiculed the unhistorical piety of legal historians (WS i. –). After entering politics, he became more respectful of such legal and constitutional myths (J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution’, Historical Journal, (), –).
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obsolete laws to the ‘moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls’ of ‘an old Gothic castle . . . magnificent and venerable, but useless’. In Burke’s view, one of the ramparts, towers, and halls of the constitution, disused powers and institutions that had never been formally abrogated (such as the royal veto, and the Convocation of the Clergy) might ‘be the means of saving the constitution itself, on an occasion worthy of bringing it forth’.⁷² Respect for the ‘ancient constitution’ was widespread, but not universal. Its enemies included political theorists, such as Jeremy Bentham (–), who was eager to emancipate both politics and jurisprudence from the dead weight of tradition and precedent, and to rebuild them from first principles, from a ‘fundamental axiom’.⁷³ Politicians, such as Pitt, needed to be more cautious. In his speech on parliamentary reform, he spoke respectfully of those whose ‘superstitious awe’ for the constitution made them reluctant to ‘suffer a reformer, with unhallowed hands, to repair the injuries which it suffered from time’. His proposal, he assured them, was in keeping with the spirit of the ‘venerable fabric’.⁷⁴ In the modern world, Bentham’s approach has triumphed. To understand Burke’s mentality, his recourse to the past for a solution to a new problem, thus requires an act of historical imagination. In practice, most accounts of the ‘ancient constitution’ and the immemorial common law acknowledged elements of change and development. Sir Matthew Hale (–), for example, thought that the common law had evolved, to reach its most perfect form under Edward I.⁷⁵ In the same way, Burke reconciled his faith in the ‘ancient constitution’ with his knowledge of history by identifying the Revolution of – as the point at which the most judicious balance had been achieved between the contending interests and powers. This was a tenable position. Since , while practice had changed, the forms remained nearly the same, thereby demonstrating the capacity of the constitution to be at once alter et idem. All the latent powers which Burke cherished had been active in . Queen Anne had exercised the royal veto in . The Convocation met for business until . Impeachments had been frequent until , though rare thereafter. Even the Septennial Act of , an apparent constitutional innovation, could be interpreted as a partial return to earlier practice, for the Triennial Act which it abrogated dated only from . Impeachment thus admirably exemplified ⁷² Blackstone, Commentaries, iii. ; Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (: WS iii. –). ⁷³ A Fragment on Government (), Preface; in ‘A Comment upon the Commentaries’ and ‘A Fragment on Government’, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London, ), . Against E.B.’s maxim ‘Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement’ (Speech on Economical Reformation: WS iii. ), Bentham wrote in his copy ‘Fallacy—Improvement should be gradual’ (rd edn. London, ; BL .dd.[]). ⁷⁴ Apr. (PH xxv. –). ⁷⁵ Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England, ed. Charles M. Gray (Chicago, ), –; echoed by Blackstone, Commentaries, iv. –.
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the remarkable capacity of the constitution to change while remaining the same. In its origin, impeachment was a weapon of the legislature against executive tyranny. The weakness of Edward III in his last years and Richard II had allowed Parliament to assume powers, such as impeachment, which in other circumstances might have been vigorously contested. Under the Tudors, as the executive secured firmer control over Parliament, impeachment disappeared. After a dormancy of a hundred and fifty years, it was revived by a House of Commons, newly self-confident and aggressive, yet imbued with respect for the constitution it believed itself to be defending against ministerial encroachment. In February , the Commons was proceeding against monopolists. After passing one hasty unilateral judgement, its propriety was questioned. Two members, accordingly, were appointed to search the records. There were, they reported, no precedents for the Commons alone passing criminal judgments. Instead, they advised following medieval practice, and appealing for judgment to the Lords.⁷⁶ Burke’s revival of impeachment would be in the same spirit: innovation by precedent. As revived in , impeachment proved a powerful weapon. Between and , and again between and , some of the most powerful men in the country were impeached: Lord Chancellor Bacon (–); the Duke of Buckingham (–), the king’s favourite; the Earl of Strafford (–), Lord Deputy of Ireland; and William Laud (–), Archbishop of Canterbury. Their trials were great historical dramas, and made impeachment a procedure familiar to all readers of English history. These early Stuart impeachments, however, differed in one crucial respect from their medieval predecessors. Few of them resulted in convictions (of the four just instanced, only Bacon’s). This was partly because, between and , the Long Parliament initiated no fewer than ninety-eight impeachments, many of them with no intention to prosecute. Impeachment became a political weapon rather than a judicial process. Yet legal standards were not abandoned. Even the two impeachments that were most vigorously prosecuted, those of Strafford and Laud, failed on legal grounds. In neither case could the Commons produce convincing legal proof of treason. It was accordingly constrained to abandon impeachment in favour of an Act of Attainder.⁷⁷ These technical failures, however, actually helped to preserve impeachment as a process available to later generations. Impeachment had established itself as a legitimate ‘due process’, untainted by the odium that attached to an Act of Attainder. In time, respect for ‘due process’ made even a ⁷⁶ C. G. C. Tite, Impeachment and Parliamentary Judicature in Early Stuart England (London, ), –. ⁷⁷ Clayton Roberts, The Growth of Responsible Government in Stuart England (Cambridge, ), esp. , , –, .
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Bill of Pains and Penalties appear harsh and inequitable, which in part accounts for the failure to secure one in Rumbold’s case.⁷⁸ Though Burke was reported at one time to have meditated such a bill against Hastings, he wisely preferred impeachment as the less objectionable process.⁷⁹ During the Commonwealth, there were no impeachments. After the Restoration, however, the procedure was revived, again as an opposition tactic. Its most eminent victims were the Earl of Clarendon (–) and (on three separate occasions) the Earl of Danby (–). The last actions of this kind, of ministers or officials prosecuted by a hostile House of Commons, were initiated in , against the Whig lords whom the Tory-dominated Commons blamed for the Second Partition Treaty. This episode provoked Jonathan Swift (–) to write a brilliant if partisan historical allegory, condemning the impeachments as arbitrary and unwarranted, an example of popular tyranny that he compared to the practice of ostracism in Athens.⁸⁰ Though technically failures, since they did not lead to convictions, these impeachments, like those of Clarendon and Danby, helped enforce the ascendancy of the Commons over the ministers of the Crown. Impeachment did not become the weapon subsequently used to enforce that ascendancy. Once the principle was established, a vote of no confidence sufficed. Impeachment was no longer necessary, and the cumbersome procedure succumbed to its own success.⁸¹ Soon afterwards, as a result of a change in political culture, even a highly unpopular minister, such as Sir Robert Walpole (–), was not pursued so vindictively as his predecessors had been. During his long tenure of office, Walpole was often threatened with impeachment, but after his fall from power none ever materialized. Even so, the possibility remained that the rusty weapon might one day be unsheathed. In , Earl Temple (–), who had advised the king to encourage individual lords to vote against Fox’s India Bill, resigned office after only three days, reportedly unwilling to face a hostile Commons and become a sacrifice to party rage, ‘the Lord Strafford of the day’.⁸² After , while the threat of impeachment survived as a topic of opposition rhetoric, all the impeachments actually moved were initiated by ministers as ‘show trials’ or political theatre. Its first use for this purpose was in –, when the Whig ministry impeached Henry Sacheverell (–), a Tory clergyman, for the alleged crypto-Jacobitism of his ⁷⁸ In the debate on Rumbold on June , for example, the procedure of a Bill of Pains and Penalties was attacked as ‘cruel’, ‘unconstitutional’, and even ‘illegal’ (PH xxiii. –). ⁷⁹ In Feb. , James Macpherson heard that E.B. intended to ‘bring in a bill of Pains & penalties’; to Hastings, Feb. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ⁸⁰ A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome [etc.] (), ed. Frank H. Ellis (Oxford, ). ⁸¹ Roberts, Growth of Responsible Government, . ⁸² Lord Camelford to George Hardinge, Dec. (John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London, –), vi. ).
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sermon The Perils of False Brethren (). The Sacheverell case was unusual in that, while the Whigs obtained a conviction, the sentence pronounced was derisory, and the Tory revanche that drove them from office was in part fuelled by what was perceived as their persecution of Sacheverell.⁸³ Yet in the Whigs again resorted to impeachment, this time to discredit the leading Tories of Queen Anne’s last ministry. This time they gained their object, though none of the ministers was actually convicted. The Duke of Ormonde (–) and Viscount Bolingbroke (–) fled the country. The Earl of Oxford (–) and the Earl of Strafford (–) stood their ground. Unable to prove their guilt, the Whig-dominated Commons failed to appear to present its case, and so Oxford and Strafford were eventually acquitted. But they had been sufficiently tainted with Jacobitism to exclude them permanently from political life.⁸⁴These impeachments inspired the most memorable literary satire on the process, the episode in Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver is impeached by the ungrateful Lilliputians.⁸⁵ In , Lord Chancellor Macclesfield (–) was impeached for corruption in office. After so many politically motivated impeachments, this represented a return to the original spirit of the procedure: the prosecution of an official for abuse of power. Macclesfield could have been tried in the King’s Bench. The decision to impeach seems to have been determined by a desire to give the proceedings additional solemnity and to allow the Whigs to appear as champions of official purity. Finally, in , Lord Lovat (c.–), one of the Jacobite rebels, was impeached for high treason. The others were tried in the King’s Bench. Lovat was impeached because he had committed no overt act which could be the subject of an indictment by a grand jury.⁸⁶ Burke was a student in Dublin at the time of Lovat’s trial, and followed the proceedings closely. At his club, his friend William Dennis (c.–) gave a summary speech which members voted superior to that delivered by Lord Chancellor Hardwicke (–), who presided at the trial.⁸⁷ Lovat’s was the last impeachment before that of Hastings. By the s, when Burke’s political ideas were developing, impeachment had thus ceased to be a means of attacking unpopular ministers. Instead, the ⁸³ Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, ). ⁸⁴ Roberts, Growth of Responsible Government, –. ⁸⁵ Gulliver’s Travels (), part I, ch. vii, where the four articles are printed. On Aug. , George Nesbitt Thompson wrote to Hastings that ‘The Articles of Impeachment more than equal the Redicule of those exhibited against Gulliver—When Macpherson was lamenting their Excellence, and deprecating their dreadful Consequences—I told him that they served to remind me only of those far more rational Ones drawn by Swift’ (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ⁸⁶ Philip C. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke (Cambridge, ), i. . In addition, as the law then stood (it was changed in ), in impeachments for high treason, the accused was not allowed counsel, except on points of law. ⁸⁷ Minute-book ( Apr. ), in Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, ), .
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process had been captured by the executive it was supposed to control. This seizure, however, was a post-Revolution phenomenon, and so could be interpreted as a corruption of true constitutional practice which ought, if possible, to be restored. This was exactly Burke’s view, though in keeping with his general interpretation of eighteenth-century history, he placed the corruption after rather than before. In the s, so Burke argued in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (), the constitutional balance achieved by the Revolution Settlement, and maintained between and under Whig domination, came under threat from a ‘new Toryism’ promoted by George III, aided and abetted by a sinister group of ‘king’s friends’.⁸⁸ Thanks to the malign ‘secret influence’ of this group, Parliament, instead of exercising its constitutional duty to inspect and criticize the conduct of ministers, had become the subservient instrument of the court. In the Thoughts, Burke lamented that ‘Impeachment, that great guardian of the purity of the Constitution, is in danger of being lost, even to the idea of it’ (WS ii. ). His first opportunity to revive the practice came with the growing unpopularity of the American War. In , he actually drew up articles of impeachment against Lord North and other ministers (iii. –). The initiative appears to have been his own, and did not find favour with the party leadership.⁸⁹ In , then, impeachment was a hallowed parliamentary procedure, disused but not forgotten. Over four hundred years, it had repeatedly proved its value and its versatility. The weapon wielded against the corrupt and tyrannical servants of Richard II might yet be refurbished for use against the peculation and oppression of the former Governor-General of Bengal. Even a technical acquittal might prove a substantive victory. Burke believed the evidence against Hastings to be overwhelming. If Pitt nevertheless persisted in screening Hastings from justice, as Burke expected he would, this proof of Pitt’s complicity in evil would be a worthwhile and comforting pis aller to an actual conviction. Such an outcome would vindicate Burke himself, the India Bill, and the reports of the Select Committee. Pitt and Hastings would be transmitted with infamy to posterity. Thus for Burke impeachment was not an anachronism, but a dormant power capable of revival. What a courageous and determined Commons had achieved in , courage and determination might repeat.
⁸⁸ Many contemporaries shared E.B.’s view. Modern historians are divided. W. R. Fryer, ‘King George III: His Political Character and Conduct, –. A New Whig Interpretation’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, (), –, agrees with E.B. Ian R. Christie, ‘Was there a “New Toryism” in the Earlier Part of George III’s Reign?’ (), repr. in his Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London, ), –, debunks the notion as a ‘myth’. ⁸⁹ On Apr. , E.B. stated that Rockingham had ‘advised him to abandon the impeachment’ (PH xxv. –).
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In form, the impeachment of Warren Hastings was the collective act of the Commons of Great Britain. Its actual conduct was entrusted to an elected Committee of Managers, responsible to the Commons. In substance, it was largely Burke’s initiative and responsibility. Without his energy and determination, there would have been no impeachment. A remarkable feat for an opposition politician seemingly superannuated, it was achieved only at considerable personal cost. What was widely perceived as the unremitting and irrational violence of his hostility to Hastings made him unpopular and distrusted, and weakened the influence he might otherwise have exerted on other subjects. Even the impeachment itself might have been more successful, had Burke been more willing to heed the ideas and advice of others. Differences of opinion between Burke and his closest collaborators, Fox and Francis, surfaced at the outset. As early as August , Fox had sought Francis as a political ally, and to cement their compact had offered to cooperate in impeaching Hastings.⁹⁰ Their motives, however, coincided neither with each other’s nor with Burke’s. Fox sought above all to vindicate his India Bills, and to neutralize the opprobrium they had incurred. Expecting (incorrectly) that Pitt would support Hastings, he hoped that Pitt’s reputation for probity and integrity might thereby be sullied. Francis, driven by personal hostility against Hastings, was eager to revenge himself for the frustration of his Indian ambitions. Nor had he abandoned hope that, if Fox were recalled to power, he might return to Bengal as Governor-General.⁹¹ These differences did not prevent all three acting in concert, for their aims overlapped. While all three, for example, would have welcomed legal conviction, the blackening of Hastings’s character in public esteem would prove an acceptable substitute. In other ways, however, their purposes, and therefore the strategies they favoured, were at variance. Their dissensions can be deduced from a series of letters from Burke to Francis, written between November and December . These letters, and especially the long and revealing ‘political dissertation’ of December, forcefully present Burke’s point of view.⁹² His premiss was that the actual conviction of Hastings was ‘impracticable’, because ‘we bring before a bribed tribunal a prejudged cause’. His aim was accordingly to ‘acquit and justify myself to those few persons and to those distant times, which may take a concern in these affairs and the Actors in them’. Maximizing support was not, therefore, a priority. If Fox, on the other hand, as a party leader, wanted ⁹⁰ Entry dated Aug. in an untitled commonplace book kept by Francis (BL (OIOC) MS Eur. D. , p. ). ⁹¹ In , at the age of , Francis still cherished this ambition (Bowyer, ‘Philip Francis and the Government of Bengal’, –). ⁹² E.B. to Francis, c. Sept., . Nov., Nov., Dec., Dec., Dec. (C v. , –).
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(as Burke supposed he did) to achieve ‘what is called, a respectable Minority’, he would be right not to move ‘without a considerable retinue’, and therefore to narrow the grounds of charge in order to secure as many votes as possible (C v. –). This did not satisfy Burke. So many potential allies had been connected, either directly or through their friends, with one or another episode in Hastings’s long administration, that the bill of accusation would be reduced to a few ‘striking’ acts, and a few such acts, in the course of ‘many years continuance in an arduous command’, would hardly warrant invoking ‘the reserved justice of the State’ in the form of an impeachment (). Initially, Francis seems to have shared the view that Burke imputes to Fox. In his letter of November, fixing a visit, Burke apologized for the ‘disgusting impropriety of Teizing you upon points, on which I have more than once troubled you already’ and promised not to make India ‘the Subject of a Business consultation’ (). By December, however, Burke had converted Francis (though not yet Fox) to his own plan. Regardless of the opinions and susceptibilities of potential supporters, Burke remained determined not to ‘abandon any one solid ground of Charge, which I have taken up in any report, speech or publick proceeding whatsoever, or which I find strongly marked in the Records, which I have by me’. Such a proceeding, detailing ‘a long series and a great variety of acts’, would infallibly convict Hastings, with posterity if not with the present age, of ‘a corrupt, habitual, evil intention’ (C v. –). Burke therefore wanted the charges to be as many and as multitudinous as possible. For the most part, he argued, the ‘facts’ were not disputed, and would therefore not need to be proved. The task of the prosecution would be to convince the judges of ‘the criminality of the facts’. The actual judges, he expected, would give Hastings the benefit of the doubt: ‘they will qualify his Acts by his presumed intentions’. The work of the prosecution would therefore be to ensure that posterity, at least, would infer Hastings’s ‘general evil intention’ from his actions (–). Seen in this light, the diffuse, argumentative form of the charges that Burke composed, and which he obstinately refused to modify, becomes more comprehensible. His aim was not to draw up criminal charges as generally understood, but to ‘make a case strong in proof and in importance, and to draw inferences from it justifiable in logick, policy and criminal justice’ (). The result was an unwieldy and incongruous amalgam of charges that demanded proof and narratives that required interpretation. From the outset, then, Burke encumbered himself with a burden of his own making. Having persuaded Francis, and eventually Fox, to adopt his strategy, Burke had next to convince the House of Commons. The new session of Parliament opened on January . Pitt kept the speech from the throne brief and bland. Its only positive recommendations were the maintenance of the strength of the navy, and the reduction of the national debt. Opposition was accordingly bereft of matter to oppose. Fox avowed himself constrained to
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discuss not what was, but what ought to have been in the speech. One such subject was India, on which he spoke at some length, but mentioning Hastings only incidentally, in relation to his main theme, the Carnatic.⁹³ Though Burke had not intended to speak in the debate, when Major Scott challenged him to say when he would make his promised move against Hastings, if indeed he really intended one, he could not allow the taunt to pass unanswered. For once, however, Scott’s provocation did not trigger a long tirade. Instead, Burke replied pithily with an anecdote from his reading of French history. When Henri IV (–) challenged the Duke of Parma (–), sent against him with a Spanish army, to give battle on a certain day, the duke replied that he would chose his own time and place.⁹⁴ Burke was thus seemingly in no hurry. Yet he took umbrage when, on February, Charles Jenkinson (–), whom Burke still believed wielded the same ‘secret influence’ as he had in the s, gave notice that on Friday the th, the next ‘open’ day, he would move for ‘certain papers concerning the exports and imports of a branch of the British trade of material import to the revenue of the kingdom’. An acknowledged expert on commerce and finance, Jenkinson was actually initiating an uncontroversial ministerial measure. Burke at once rose to object. In his most pompous manner (markedly at variance with the humorous anecdote with which he had responded to Major Scott), he declared his own intention to move on that day for ‘an enquiry the most serious and important that ever encountered a human judicature’. Since his motion ‘nearly and deeply concerned the honour of Parliament, the faith of the nation, and the radical, essential, and eternal interests of humanity’, he asked Jenkinson to postpone his, which could hardly be of equal significance. After some sparring between the two (Jenkinson being by no means disposed to defer his motion), Pitt intervened to suggest that both motions might be made on the Friday. If not, Burke should take the next ‘open’ day. He then asked Burke to be more explicit about the nature of his motion. Alluding to Major Scott’s challenge, Burke confirmed that he would indeed be making criminal charges. His first object, however, would be to prove the facts of his case, leaving their application to a later stage.⁹⁵ On February, Jenkinson’s motion was quickly approved, leaving ample time for a lengthy debate on Burke’s.⁹⁶ Burke opened with a speech which did ⁹³ CJ xli. –. Morning Chronicle, Jan. (PH xxv. –). ⁹⁴ Morning Chronicle, Jan. ; WS vi. . ⁹⁵ WS vi. –. London Chronicle, – Feb. , has a fuller account of the exchange between E.B. and Jenkinson. A parallel incident on June indicates how much E.B.’s mood had improved over the session. E.B. gave notice of his intention to resume consideration of Hastings on the following Wednesday. When Jenkinson objected that Wednesday was already taken for his Fishery and Navigation Bill, E.B. gracefully withdrew ‘in compliment to the prior claim of the Right Honourable Gentleman’ (Daily Universal Register, June). ⁹⁶ CJ xli. . Morning Chronicle, Feb. . Jenkinson’s business was the American Intercourse Bill, extending an earlier regulatory Act ( George III, c. ). Wholly uncontentious, this bill received the royal assent on Mar. (CJ xli. –) and became George III, c. .
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much more than introduce his first motion for papers (WS vi. –). Where his Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts had been vigorously anti-ministerial, he now adopted a much more conciliatory approach. He began by asking that two of Dundas’s resolutions of May should be read. Then, in a tone of sorrow rather than anger, he affected to regret that the role of an accuser should have fallen on him, rather than on Dundas or on some abler friend. His treatment of Dundas’s volte-face is gentler than in the Arcot speech. By reciting the various parliamentary moves that had been made against Hastings, Burke sought to establish that his motive was not a personal vendetta, but the vindication of the honour of the House of Commons. He then outlined the three possible modes of proceeding, making impeachment appear a middle course between a prosecution in the King’s Bench and a Bill of Pains and Penalties. Previous practice had been first to vote an impeachment, and then to appoint a committee to frame articles. Burke proposed instead to begin with the presentation of evidence, and only then to move resolutions that the evidence justified impeachment. This was a prudent course. Earlier impeachments had mostly been voted at moments of crisis, or when the intended victims were objects of general execration. In such a mood, the Commons had not worried overmuch about the admissibility or sufficiency of evidence. Burke knew that he enjoyed no such advantage. At this stage, independent opinion favoured Hastings, while Burke’s own reputation had yet to recover from the débâcle of . His strategy was therefore to move slowly and deliberately, until his ‘facts’ should have worked a change in his favour. Burke’s caution was justified by his success. In the ensuing debate, only Major Scott came unequivocally to Hastings’s defence, while Pitt and Dundas professed themselves willing to open an enquiry. The occasion demonstrated Burke’s rehabilitation. On July , when he had likewise made a string of motions for papers, he had provoked only impatience and contempt.⁹⁷ Now, Burke showed that he could again command respectful attention, and that his ideas about India were not to be lightly dismissed. Nine motions for papers were passed without a division. When Pitt and Dundas started some objections to a tenth, the Speaker was taken ill (the time was a.m.) and the debate was adjourned.⁹⁸ When the adjourned debate was resumed on February, Burke continued his strategy of moderation by amending his tenth motion to obviate the objections of Pitt and Dundas. Again, he played on the theme of the honour of the Commons. Comparing himself to Cicero prosecuting Verres for his notoriously corrupt and oppressive administration of Sicily, Burke declared that ‘the downfall of the greatest empire this world ever saw, has been, on all hands agreed upon to have originated in the mal-administration of its provinces.’⁹⁹ ⁹⁷ Debrett, xvi. – (PH xxiv. –). E.B.’s speeches are repr. in WS v. –. ⁹⁸ CJ xli. . Morning Chronicle, Feb. ; WS vi. –. ⁹⁹ PH xxv. –; WS vi. –.
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Burke was pleased with the outcome of the debate. As he told Sir Gilbert Elliot, he sensed that he had done much to neutralize the scepticism with which his moves against Hastings had at first been viewed ( Feb. : C v. –). By acquiescing in the motions for papers, the ministers had allowed him a forum in which to expound his case. This was the crucial first step. All did not, however, proceed smoothly. Burke suffered a temporary reverse on March, when he moved for papers relating to the peace concluded with the Marathas in . Dundas refused them, on the ground that their disclosure would damage British interests. The peace had been advantageous, he argued, and therefore no investigation of it was necessary. The methods used to disunite the members of the hostile confederacy should remain secret. Burke seized on an incautious expression used by Dundas (‘secrets of infidelity’) to retort that the peace was a disgraceful one, bought at the expense of betraying allies. In any case, the details of British perfidy were already well known in India. Only a parliamentary investigation of the improper means used to negotiate the peace, followed by a condemnation of them, could vindicate the national honour. Pitt, however, reinforced Dundas’s arguments, and most of the papers were denied, on the ground of preserving confidentiality.¹⁰⁰ Nor was Pitt prepared to allow Burke unlimited parliamentary time. On March, he pressed Burke to fix the day on which he would introduce specific charges against Hastings. Somewhat reluctantly, Burke named ‘this Day three Weeks’.¹⁰¹ On April, the Commons duly resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole House to consider the papers for which Burke had called. Burke proposed to continue the accumulation of evidence. Immediately, Sir Lloyd Kenyon (–), the Master of the Rolls, rose to make the first legal objection to Burke’s method of proceeding. Before calling for evidence, Burke ought to state the charge to which the evidence was meant to apply. Drawing on the familiar analogy of the Commons as ‘the grand inquest of the nation’, he argued that an impeachment should follow the procedure of a grand jury hearing a presentment. Burke had promised his charges that day; where were they? To hear evidence before framing charges was an inquisitorial procedure, repugnant to the English law. Kenyon was supported by two other government lawyers: the Solicitor-General, Archibald Macdonald (–); and the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Ilay Campbell (–). Major Scott, too, asserted that Burke had promised to deliver
¹⁰⁰ CJ xli. –. Debrett, xix. – (PH xxv. –). Pitt conceded the papers relating to the Rana of Gohad. Further requests for papers were denied, again on the ground of confidentiality, on and Mar. (PH xxv. –, –). ¹⁰¹ St James’s Chronicle, – Mar. . According to another report, on March E.B. said that ‘he hoped to be able to bring forward his charges by this day three weeks at farthest’ (Daily Universal Register, Mar.).
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his charges that day. Burke rose several times, to reply to the various objections raised by the lawyers and to deny Scott’s claim. In the end, however, he agreed to follow the legal method. He would submit immediately such charges as he had already prepared; the remainder would follow as soon as possible.¹⁰² This debate marks the first stage of what would become a repetitious and acrimonious wrangle between Burke and the lawyers, a struggle in which he was almost always worsted. The following day, April, Burke submitted his first nine charges. Seven more followed on the th, three on the th, two on the th; and a final charge was delivered on May, making twenty-two in all.¹⁰³ The rapidity with which he produced the first batch sufficiently proved that he had not been waiting for evidence to frame them. Yet some delay might have been advantageous to his cause, if only in arranging them in a more intelligible order. In previous impeachments, most charges had baldly stated specific crimes, and few had been longer than words.¹⁰⁴ Burke’s charges were unprecedentedly voluminous. The individual charges vary considerably in length, the shortest being only a few hundred words. But in toto they amount to , words, and fill of the ample folio pages of the Journals of the House of Commons. They were not Burke’s unaided work. In December , he sent the first charge to Philip Francis for revision. Francis later claimed to have drawn up ‘several’ others, and credited one to Sir Gilbert Elliot.¹⁰⁵ Burke also received material assistance from French Laurence (–), an Oxford graduate now studying civil law. Laurence compiled the twentysecond charge (Faizullah Khan), and perhaps others.¹⁰⁶ Subsequently appointed one of the counsel to the managers, he became one of Burke’s most faithful disciples. Burke may also have been aided by a protégé of longer standing, Walker King (–). A clergyman, and a member of the Burke circle from about , King had since about served Burke as a part-time confidential secretary. In –, he paid a long visit to Ireland, where his father was a dean. Burke wrote to him about July , urging his return to England, where ‘you certainly may be of use to us in an hundred ¹⁰² CJ xli. . Morning Chronicle, Apr. (PH xxv. –); WS vi. –. ¹⁰³ CJ xli. –, –, –, –, –, –. The articles are also reprinted in W iv. –, v. –, and in most editions of E.B.’s Works. The Rohilla War charge is reprinted in WS vi. –. ¹⁰⁴ Earlier c. articles of impeachment range from about , words (Dr Sacheverell, Jan. ; CJ xvi. –) to about , (Earl of Oxford, and July ; CJ xviii. –, –). On this scale, the articles (about , words) that E.B. drew up against North and his colleagues in were (unusually for him) models of brevity (WS iii. –). ¹⁰⁵ Joseph Parkes and Herman Merivale, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis (London, ), ii. –. ¹⁰⁶ The Faizullah Khan charge is attributed to Laurence by his brother Richard in Epistolary Correspondence of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke and Dr French Laurence (London, ), p. xxii. On May , apologizing for the lateness of this charge, E.B. claimed that it was ‘much better done than any other’, since he had been ‘favoured with assistance of a masterly kind’ (Debrett, xx. ). According to Francis, Laurence wrote other charges (Parkes and Merivale, Memoirs, ii. –).
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ways’ (C v. –). King probably helped with transcribing, for he was an expert decipherer of Burke’s hand (). Like Laurence, he became a close friend of Burke; the two later collaborated on the editing of Burke’s collected Works (–). For all the assistance he received, Burke was the primary author and bore overall responsibility for the form and arrangement of the articles. As criminal charges they are absurd, and indeed to criticize them as such is beside the point. Burke conceived them not as legal indictments but as polemical histories. His method, as he told Francis, was not only to state the fact, but to assign the criminality; to fix the species of that criminality; to mark its consequences; to anticipate the defence, and to select such circumstances as lead to presumptions of private corrupt views. By following this method, our Resolutions (or Articles of Impeachment, as they may turn out) will convey a tolerably clear historical state of the delinquencies; attending rather to the connection of things than the Order of time. ( Dec. : C v. )
Despite Burke’s intentions, the articles are hardly more satisfactory as histories than as criminal charges, being too polemical in tone. Burke was an exceptionally gifted and experienced rhetorician, and most of his compositions exhibit an intelligible structure clearly related to an evident persuasive aim. His Articles of Charge are his most conspicuous rhetorical failure. What went wrong? The root of the problem appears to have been a desire to make the articles perform two incompatible functions. Legal charges require precision of language. As a substitute, Burke sought to create an impression of legalese by heavy doses of ‘said’ and ‘aforesaid’, a stylistic mannerism that quickly becomes tiresome. More damagingly, Burke does not sufficiently distinguish between the charges and the evidence that supports them. The actual charges are buried under the mass of ancillary material designed to enforce them and make them intelligible. Much documentary material is inserted, to the detriment of narrative and even of thematic continuity and coherence. On April, Hastings petitioned to be heard in his own defence, and asked for a copy of the charges. His request generated a long and acrimonious debate, which exposed, more fully than before, the extent to which the impeachment was an opposition cause. Sir Grey Cooper (c.–; a survivor from Lord North’s wing of the Coalition) cited precedents to show that persons accused, if admitted to make a defence, had not been furnished with copies of the charges against them. This was just the kind of precedent which reflected the spirit of seventeenth-century impeachments, and which the less politicized jurisprudence of Burke’s time found repugnant. Pitt argued that Hastings should certainly be given a copy of the charges, which he called ‘confused and complicated’ and ‘full of extraneous matter’. Burke demurred, conceding that they were only ‘rough ingots’ needing to be shaped and
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polished, but blaming their shortcomings on the procedure he had been constrained to adopt. If allowed to follow his own method, and adduce evidence first, he could have produced shorter and more perspicuous charges. Fox then attacked Pitt, and Pitt retorted by accusing the opposition of unbecoming warmth. James Martin (–) suggested that, when the impeachment of Hastings was concluded, the House should impeach Lord North. Martin had been an inveterate enemy of the Coalition. In the debate on Fox’s India Bill on December , he had tauntingly expressed a desire to see a starling perched on the Speaker’s chair, taught to repeat ‘disgraceful coalition’ whenever a pernicious measure (such as Fox’s bill) came under consideration. On December, defending the Coalition, North wittily turned the ‘starling’ image against its author. So long as Martin, he observed, continued monotonously harping on his one theme, there would be no occasion for such a starling. This quip convulsed the House in ‘a violent fit of laughter’. Now, heatedly defending the Coalition, Burke compared Martin to a cuckoo, developing the figure at some length in a witty improvisation.¹⁰⁷ Hastings was occluded as the two sides indulged in mutual recriminations and the reslaying of the slain. After the motion to hear Hastings had been carried, Burke submitted his nineteenth charge and moved that the House should resolve itself into committee to hear witnesses.¹⁰⁸ This was where they had been on April, when Kenyon had objected to hearing witnesses before knowing the charges. Now, Kenyon argued that witnesses should not be examined before Hastings had been heard, since Hastings’s defence might induce the House to drop the proceedings. This led to another round of wrangling. Burke took fire when William Wilberforce (–) described him as ‘brooding’ over his charges for years. With his usual inventive extemporizing, Burke seized the image: the hon. gentleman had used a proper word—he had been brooding over the affairs of India, and the charges upon the table were the eggs that had been produced—his wish was to nourish those eggs and bring them to maturity with a truly parental and prolific warmth, and not suffer them to become addled by quitting the nest like an ostrich, and letting them grow cold in consequence of the delay now suggested by those who appeared to him to be artfully desirous of destroying his eggs, defeating the birth of his progeny, and demolishing his whole brood.
The metaphor reveals how closely Burke identified with his charges. Earlier in the debate, he had allowed that they needed revision. Now he denied that ¹⁰⁷ For Apr. : CJ xli. –; PH xxv. –. For Dec. : Morning Chronicle, Dec. (PH xxxiii. – has a longer version of Martin’s speech). For Lord North on Dec.: Morning Chronicle, Dec. (PH xxiv. ). ¹⁰⁸ CJ xli. –. This charge had not been ready when E.B. submitted articles and earlier in the day (xli. –); PH xxv. .
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they ‘contained a superfluous word’ and cited Sir Edward Coke’s opinion that ‘history was evidence’. As on April, however, the House followed Kenyon’s advice. Burke’s motion for a committee was defeated by to .¹⁰⁹ An early day was set for Hastings to appear before the House: May. Since this gave him only four days to prepare his defence, his supporters presumably expected him to enter a comparatively short, general reply, rather than to attempt a detailed refutation of the charges. Indeed, most of his friends had counselled against entering a defence at this stage.¹¹⁰ But Hastings was no more inclined than Burke to follow advice. Confident that his defence would silence his accusers, and drawing on the aid of several friends, he cobbled together a massive pièce justificative of some , words.¹¹¹ Expectations were high on May, or at least curiosity was piqued to see the alleged author of such heinous crimes. Three hundred and fifty members are said to have crowded into the House.¹¹² The event was anticlimactic. Instead of an animated oration, members were treated to about six hours of dry recitation, far from complete when cut short by a motion to adjourn.¹¹³ The remainder was read on May, to a rump of about sixty of the most committed members.¹¹⁴ Overweening self-confidence led Hastings to this miscalculation of what was needed. A forceful writer, his powers of expression honed by the East India Company’s practice of recording consultations in writing, he lacked experience of, or aptitude for, public speaking. Hastings himself regarded his defence as a success, and as usual he had friends who flattered him.¹¹⁵The thin attendance on the second day suggests otherwise. Most telling, the subsequent debates show that, far from silencing his critics and (as he had hoped) aborting the impeachment, he had lost supporters. On April, for example, Charles Jenkinson, known to be sympathetic to Hastings, had anticipated that a successful defence would induce the Commons to drop proceedings. More impartial members, such as William Wilberforce, had likewise expressed scepticism about the strength of the case against Hastings.¹¹⁶ Yet after his defence, both Jenkinson and Wilberforce voted for some of the charges. ¹⁰⁹ PH xxv. –. ¹¹⁰ On the other hand, two eminent legal authorities (Lord Chancellor Thurlow and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield) both advised offering an immediate defence, so the decision cannot be regarded as foolhardy. Hastings to George Nesbitt Thompson, May (BL Add. MS , fo. ; printed in Gleig, Memoirs, iii. ); and Hastings’s Diary (Add. MS , fo. ). ¹¹¹ CJ xli. –. According to Major Scott at the trial, Hastings was helped by Halhed, Shore, Scott himself, and others ( Apr. ; Minutes, –). ¹¹² Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, May (BL (OIOC) MS Eur. C /, fo. ). ¹¹³ Morning Herald, May . The reading of the defence was shared between Hastings himself, William Markham (the archbishop’s son), and the clerk of the House, John Hatsell (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹¹⁴ General Evening Post, – May . ¹¹⁵ Hastings to Thompson, May (BL Add. MS , fo. ). Wraxall also believed that the defence had made ‘a deep, & a favourable Impression on Men’s Minds. The Cursed Paddy will be foiled, I am certain’ (to Benfield, May (BL (OIOC) MS Eur. C /, fo. ). ¹¹⁶ PH xxv. ( Jenkinson), – (Wilberforce).
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Hastings’s defence, like the Articles of Charge to which it replied, was much too long, and overfreighted with documentation. Nor was its tone calculated to conciliate. In the debate on April, Edward Bearcroft (–), a ministerial lawyer well affected to Hastings, had adumbrated the kind of defence that he anticipated, and that he believed would be persuasive. He expected Hastings to plead extenuating circumstances in justification of some of his actions, and to advance the ‘set-off ’ argument, that his services had been greater than the demerits imputed to him.¹¹⁷ Far from taking this course, Hastings chose the untenable ground of self-glorification. Asserting that ‘my Political Conduct was invariably regulated by Truth, Justice, and Good Faith’, he demanded that his motives be taken on trust. Indignantly he rejected the ‘set-off ’ argument. No faults or errors, much less crimes, detracted from his abundant merits.¹¹⁸ The single-handed saviour of British India, he attributed the failures or miscarriages of his administration to uncooperative colleagues, incompetent subordinates, or unsupportive directors at home, never to himself. Elsewhere he avowed that he acted according to the despotic and arbitrary maxims of Asian governments, a declaration not likely to endear him to British opinion.¹¹⁹ The ineptitude of Hastings’s ill-advised defence gave the prosecution a much-needed boost. Many members were now convinced that Burke had mounted a case that needed a more cogent answer than self-panegyric and rodomontade. Confronted by the tendentiousness of Burke’s articles and the egotism of Hastings’s defence, and wearied by the length of both, a modern reader may yearn for a concise, plain, and even-handed statement of the case. ‘Most of the facts, upon which we proceed,’ Burke contended, ‘are confessed; some of them are boasted of. The labour will be on the criminality of the facts’ (to Francis, Dec. : C v. ). Even if such a separation proves elusive in practice, a skeletal account of the principal charges, set in the context of Hastings’s career in India, will at least suggest the variety and complexity of Burke’s articles and highlight the salient points at issue. Further, since at the trial evidence was offered on only four of the charges, a survey of the original twenty-two will evince the comprehensiveness of Burke’s initial indictment.¹²⁰ ¹¹⁷ PH xxv. . ¹¹⁸ CJ xli. , . ¹¹⁹ Ibid. , –. The appeal to ‘arbitrary power’ was actually written by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, and later disavowed by Hastings. ¹²⁰ The following account, intended solely to put the charges in context, is inevitably skeletal and negative. Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings (London, ), equally if oppositely biased, offers a sympathetic corrective. P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London, ), provides judicious assessments of the charges that actually came to trial.
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Joining the East India Company in , Hastings served in Bengal, rising through the ranks to be a member of the council. During these years, he witnessed the rapid expansion of British power and influence in India that followed the Battle of Plassey. Nothing from these years was formally charged against Hastings, but in his opening speech Burke sought to associate him with the disorder, oppression, and rapine that marked the period, and with some particularly discreditable episodes (WS vi. –). In , Hastings resigned, and returned to England. Perennially careless in money matters, he quickly found his fortune quite inadequate, and sought to return to India. In he was nominated second in council to the Governor of Madras, Josias Du Pré (c.–; later Burke’s neighbour at Beaconsfield). After serving for two years at Madras, he was promoted to be Governor of Fort William, the headquarters of the company’s Bengal presidency. Taking office in Calcutta on April , he immediately embarked on an ambitious programme of administrative reform. Some of his measures were mandated by the directors, who had determined that the company should ‘stand forth as diwan’, instead of maintaining the political fiction of the nawab’s authority. Others embodied his own ideas. Nearly all became matters of charge against him. One of Hastings’s instructions was to reform the court and government of the titular ruler of Bengal, Mubarak al-Daula (d. ). Accordingly, he dismissed Muhammad Reza Khan (c.–), the powerful naib (chief minister). This action became the first part of the seventeenth of Burke’s Articles of Charge. In his defence, Hastings pleaded the secret instructions of the directors.¹²¹ Instituting a reduced and more economical household for the nawab, Hastings appointed as his guardian Munni Begum (d. ), a widow of the previous nawab and an erstwhile professional dancer. For this scandalous (in Burke’s view) appointment, Hastings received, according to the eighth charge, a bribe of . lakhs of rupees. Hastings admitted the receipt of this sum, though he denied that it had influenced the appointment and claimed that it was a customary ‘entertainment’ allowance paid to visiting governors.¹²² Hastings also reorganized the method of revenue collection and instituted a new judicial system. Maximizing revenue was always the Bengal government’s most pressing concern. Hastings’s first idea was to farm the revenue by offering five-year leases open to competitive bidding. As Burke described the scheme, ‘the landed interest of a whole kingdom . . . [was] set up to public auction’ (Speech on Fox’s India Bill, Dec. : WS v. ). Burke exaggerated, but numerous established zemindars (landholders) were displaced by moneyed men. The renters were subject to the inspection of ‘collectors’, individual company officers stationed across the province. Burke argued, probably rightly, that this system offered too little protection against ¹²¹ CJ xli. –, –. ¹²² Ibid. –, –. Marshall, Impeachment, –.
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oppression on the part of rapacious renters. Even Hastings was not satisfied with it, and replaced the individual revenue collectors with a network of provincial revenue councils. In , he instituted a third system, with annual instead of five-year leases, managed by a central Committee of Revenue in Calcutta. These successive changes became the fifteenth charge. Admitting that he changed his mind more than once about how best to collect the land revenue, Hastings maintained that, under his latest plan, the revenues had considerably increased, while the plan itself had been approved by the directors. Employing a Burkean line of reasoning, he argued that ‘General principles in Theory often require Deviations in Practice.’¹²³ To administer justice, Hastings established a new hierarchy of civil and criminal courts, which administered Hindu or Muslim law as appropriate. This system was among his few public measures that were not charged against him as a crime.¹²⁴ In , Hastings again left Calcutta, this time to negotiate a treaty with the Wazir of Oudh, Shuja al-Daula (d. ), at Benares (then annexed to Oudh). Like Bengal, Oudh was nominally a subah or province of the Mogul Empire, but since its nawabs had in practice been autonomous, while retaining the honorific title of wazir (deputy) of the empire. Since , the wazir had been in name an ally (in reality, a dependant) of the company, employing some of its troops directly as well as paying an annual contribution for its military protection. By the Treaty of Benares, Hastings achieved two objectives: the strengthening of Oudh as a buffer state between Bengal and the Marathas (who controlled much of central India); and the receipt of a considerable sum of money above the regular subsidy. For a payment of lakhs of rupees (about £,), Hastings ceded to the wazir the districts of Kara and Allahabad, then temporarily in the company’s possession. These districts (as well as an annual tribute of lakhs of rupees from Bengal itself) had been guaranteed to Shah Alum II (–) by Robert Clive in , in return for the ‘grant’ to the company of the diwani of Bengal. Shah Alum thus became in effect a pensioner of the British. Yet in , seduced by a promise to restore him to substantive power, he unwisely put himself under the protection of the Marathas. Proving even more rapacious than the British, in the Marathas demanded Kara and Allahabad. British troops were sent to prevent their occupation, but Hastings did not wish to retain districts which, being so far from Bengal, would be ruinously expensive to defend. Hastings also discontinued the payment of the ‘tribute’ or pension which had been paid to Shah Alum. Dispossessing the emperor of Kara and ¹²³ CJ xli. –, –. M. E. Monckton Jones, Warren Hastings in Bengal, – (Oxford, ), –; Sophia Weizman, Warren Hastings and Philip Francis (Manchester, ), –. ¹²⁴ Jones, Warren Hastings in Bengal, –; Niranjan Dhar, The Administrative System of the East India Company in Bengal, – (Calcutta, –), ii. –, –; N. Majumdar, Justice and Police in Bengal, –: A Study of the Nizamat in Decline (Calcutta, ), –, –.
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Allahabad, and withholding his ‘tribute’, became Burke’s second article of charge. Hastings acknowledged the facts, but justified both actions as advantageous to the company, pleading further that his actions had been approved by the directors.¹²⁵ Much more contentious was another, secret agreement negotiated at Benares between Hastings and the wazir. This was to provide military assistance (the company maintained an army of about , men) against the Rohillas, his troublesome neighbours to the north-west. A tribe of Afghan warriors who, in the s, had conquered what became known as Rohilkhand, the Rohillas formed a small military aristocracy, ruling over a largely Hindu population of peasants and artisans. Like other powers, they frequently changed sides in the fluctuating alliances characteristic of eighteenth-century Indian politics. Most recently, they had sought the aid of the wazir against the Marathas, but had reneged on paying the price stipulated. Exasperated, the wazir determined to expel the Rohillas and to annex Rohilkhand. Since his own forces were unequal to this task, he sought to employ the British as mercenary auxiliaries to assist in ‘extirpating’ the Rohillas. The wazir was to pay all military expenses, plus an additional lakhs. Somewhat reluctantly, because he knew that the project would be repugnant to British opinion, Hastings assented. When the wazir postponed execution of the plan, he was relieved, perhaps hoping that it would never be activated. In , however, the wazir determined to attack the Rohillas, and called on Hastings for the promised assistance. In April, in large measure thanks to the company’s troops, the Rohillas were defeated and driven out of their territory. Reports of atrocities and cruelties on the part of the wazir’s forces were soon in circulation. When news of the Rohilla War reached England, it was generally condemned as an immoral and improper use of the company’s forces. It became Burke’s first article, which he called ‘the most atrocious’. The care and detail with which Hastings defended himself on this article shows that he too regarded it as the weightiest of the charges.¹²⁶ Under North’s India Act of , a new Supreme Council of Bengal was appointed. Hastings became the first Governor-General. The other members were Richard Barwell (–), a long-serving company servant already in Calcutta; and three outsiders sent from England: General Sir John Clavering (–), Colonel George Monson (–), and Philip Francis. The new arrivals landed at Calcutta on October . Within a few days, they began an open war against Hastings, and for the next two years they used their majority not only to frustrate his ideas and initiatives, but to investigate alleged corruption in his administration prior to their arrival. The ¹²⁵ CJ xli. –, –. C. Collin Davies, Warren Hastings and Oudh (Oxford, ), –. ¹²⁶ CJ xli. –, –. Practically the only defender of the Rohilla War, which even Feiling concedes was ‘inglorious’ (Warren Hastings, ), is Sir John Strachey, Hastings and the Rohilla War (Oxford, ).
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most spectacular case surfaced in March , when Maharaja Nandakumar (d. ; usually known as ‘Nundcomar’), a long-standing antagonist, charged Hastings with corruptly receiving presents in return for favours. Then, on May, Nandakumar was arrested on an old charge of forgery. After a controversial trial, he was found guilty, and hanged on August. Burke firmly believed that Hastings unscrupulously instigated the charge, and then influenced the sentence, in order to remove a powerful accuser. In his view, Nandakumar was the victim of a judicial murder. Impossible to prove, this allegation did not become an Article of Charge. Yet at the trial Burke would recklessly accuse Hastings of murdering Nandakumar. Despite being severely censured by the Commons for thus going beyond the charges they had authorized, Burke remained wholly unrepentant.¹²⁷ Early in , reduced by the hostile majority on the council to impotence and near despair, Hastings sent Lauchlin Macleane (c.–) to England as his agent, with conditional powers to offer his resignation. After intensive negotiation, Macleane secured what he claimed were satisfactory terms, and the directors accepted the proffered resignation. Clavering was appointed Governor-General. Meanwhile, in Bengal, on September , Monson died. Hastings, by virtue of his casting vote, regained control of the council. When news of Clavering’s promotion reached him, on June , he was therefore no longer in the least disposed to retreat. Boldly disavowing his supposed ‘resignation’, he refused to relinquish power to Clavering. (The dispute was referred to the judges of the Supreme Court, who ruled in Hastings’s favour.) This refusal became the ninth of Burke’s charges. In his defence, Hastings denied that he had authorized Macleane to tender his resignation. Clavering’s appointment was accordingly invalid, and his resistance to the usurpation proper.¹²⁸ In , hostilities broke out between the company and the Marathas. The casus belli was the support by the Bombay council of the cause of Raghunath Rao, who was trying to re-establish himself as Peshwa or chief minister. (In , Burke would entertain one of his envoys, Humund Rao, at Beaconsfield.) In Burke’s twentieth charge, Hastings was accused of having provoked this war. In his defence, Hastings denied responsibility for a conflict begun by the Bombay council without his privity. All the military actions ¹²⁷ On Apr. , E.B. accused Hastings of having ‘murdered this man [Nandakumar] by the hands of Sir Elijah Impey’ (W vii. ; Bond, ii. ). E.B. defended the expression in the Commons on Apr. (WS vii. –). E.B. interpreted Impey’s appointment in as president of the Sadr Diwani Adalat (the central civil court of appeal) as a reward for this judicial murder. If Hastings did not ‘murder’ Nandakumar, neither was he as innocent of all concern as he claimed (Lucy S. Sutherland, ‘New Evidence on the Nandakuma Trial’, English Historical Review, (), –). ¹²⁸ CJ xli. –, –. Lucy Sutherland, ‘The Resignation on behalf of Warren Hastings, : George Vansittart’s Evidence’, Bengal Past and Present, (), –; James N. M. Maclean, Reward is Secondary: The Life of a Political Adventurer, and an Inquiry into the Mystery of Junius (London, ), –, . Macleane was once a friend of the Burkes (supra, i. –, ), though his his agency for the Nawab of the Carnatic subsequently put them on opposite sides.
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he had approved had been directed against the expected combination between the Marathas and the French.¹²⁹ Soon Hastings was fighting on a second front. In , encouraged by the French, Haidar Ali, ruler of Mysore, invaded the Carnatic. The emergency measures which Hastings took to finance this double war provided material for several charges against him. The new Wazir of Oudh, Asaf al-Daula (d. ), who had succeeded his father in , was compelled to assume the cost of more troops than were stipulated in his treaty obligations. This became part of article sixteen. Hastings defended the necessity of the measure rather than its strict justice.¹³⁰ Additional demands were also imposed on Faizullah Khan (d. ), the one Rohilla chieftain who, by making terms with the wazir and the British after the Rohilla War, had retained his territory. These (and other infractions of the treaty with him) became article twenty-two. Hastings’s defence was long and evasive, stressing the policy rather than the strict justice of his treatment of Faizullah Khan.¹³¹ Payments in excess of treaty obligations were likewise demanded of Chait Singh (Raja of Benares since ) in each year from to . These formed part of article three. Hastings argued that, Chait Singh being a mere zemindar, not a sovereign prince, these impositions were perfectly legal, and justified by the threats the company faced from a powerful combination of enemies.¹³² By , Barwell was anxious to return to England to enjoy the large fortune (rumoured to exceed £,) that he had accumulated. In February, Hastings therefore concluded an agreement with Francis, whereby Francis agreed not to obstruct the conduct of the war. When Francis broke the terms of the agreement (as Hastings understood them), Hastings provoked a duel (fought on August), in which he wounded Francis. In December, a bitter and frustrated Francis departed for England, leaving Hastings in undisputed control of the Supreme Council.¹³³ In , Hastings lost patience over Chait Singh’s repeated tardiness in sending his additional contributions for the war, interpreting the delays as symptoms of disaffection. He therefore determined to visit Benares in person to make his displeasure felt. On his arrival there, despite submissive behaviour on Chait Singh’s part, Hastings decided to punish the raja for his contumacy by imposing a huge fine of lakhs of rupees. The order to arrest the raja, however, was clumsily executed, provoking an insurrection and permitting his escape. This treatment of Chait Singh, together with two later ‘revolutions’ in the administration of Benares, became part of the third article of charge. Burke believed that Hastings was motivated by personal ¹²⁹ CJ xli. –, –. Sailendra Nath Sen, Anglo-Maratha Relations during the Administration of Warren Hastings, – (Calcutta, ), –. ¹³⁰ CJ xli. –, –. ¹³¹ Ibid. –, –. Davies, Warren Hastings and Oudh, –. ¹³² CJ xli. –, –. Marshall, Impeachment, –. (Benares was transferred from Oudh to the company in , as part of a treaty between the Supreme Council and the new wazir. Hastings opposed the measure.) ¹³³ Feiling, Warren Hastings, –.
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animosity. In , hearing that Clavering had succeeded as GovernorGeneral, Chait Singh had sent to congratulate him. From that moment, according to Burke, Hastings meditated the raja’s ruin. Disclaiming any such personal vendetta, Hastings argued that, according to Mogul usages, he was justified in imposing such a fine.¹³⁴ Retreating from Benares, Hastings established himself at Chunar, where the wazir came to his aid with troops and supplies. (Benares was subsequently recovered, and Chait Singh replaced with a more compliant raja.) On September , Hastings and the wazir concluded the Treaty of Chunar. At the same time, the wazir made Hastings a ‘present’ of lakhs of rupees, receipt of which became part of the eighth charge. Hastings argued that he had accepted this sum on behalf of the company, and had never tried to conceal it, but only asked to be allowed to retain it (a request which the directors refused). Several of the provisions of the treaty itself, as well as Hastings’s subsequent infractions of it, became parts of Burke’s sixteenth charge. Rather than reply in detail to this lengthy and complicated article, Hastings entered only a general defence of his conduct in relation to Oudh, relying instead on the directors’ approval of his actions.¹³⁵ Another clause of the Treaty of Chunar, by which Hastings agreed to withdraw the company’s Resident from Farrukhabad (in effect, exposing the local nawab to oppression by the wazir), became the fifth charge. Hastings admitted that British interference in Farrukhabad had been a mistake, the weak and incompetent nawab, Muzaffar Jang (d. ), being impossible to help. What he had done had been well intentioned, but he was not responsible for the misgovernment of Farrukhabad whether by its nawab or by the wazir.¹³⁶ The fateful expedition to Benares had thus spawned momentous and unintended consequences. Even Hastings could not conceal from himself that an unfavourable construction could be placed on many of his actions. Uncomfortably aware of the criticism that he was likely to face, he published an elaborate apologia.¹³⁷ In , the Treaty of Salbai concluded the Maratha War. The means used to obtain this peace became part of Burke’s twentieth article. Though Hastings had denied responsibility for the war, he was eager to claim credit for the peace. Instead of countering Burke’s detailed objections, he noted that the peace had been almost universally approved, and seemed likely to last.¹³⁸ One omission from the treaty provided the material for a separate charge, the fourteenth. During the war, in , Hastings had formed an alliance with Chhatar Singh, Rana of Gohad. Yet in his instructions to David Anderson ¹³⁴ ¹³⁵ ¹³⁶ ¹³⁷ ¹³⁸
CJ xli. –, –. Marshall, Impeachment, –. CJ xli. , –, , –. Marshall, Impeachment, –. CJ xli. –, –. Davies, Warren Hastings and Oudh, –. A Narrative of the Insurrection which Happened in the Zemeedary of Benares (London, ). CJ xli. –, . Sen, Anglo-Maratha Relations, –.
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(–), who had negotiated the peace, Hastings directed that the rana be excluded. In consequence, he was abandoned to the hostility of the Marathas. To this charge, Hastings mounted a long and detailed defence, proving that the rana had been so repeatedly perfidious as to have deserved his fate.¹³⁹ The war had imposed extraordinary strains on the finances of Oudh, leaving the wazir even more deeply in debt to the company. Pressured by Hastings to liquidate his arrears, the wazir agreed (in Burke’s view, Hastings compelled him) to resume numerous jagirs (estates, the holders of which received the land revenue otherwise due to the government). The most controversial resumptions were the jagirs of the wazir’s mother and grandmother (Bahu Begum, c.–; and Sadr al-Nissa, d. ). Bahu Begum was also in possession of the treasure (estimated at as much as £ million) accumulated by Shuja al-Daula. The rightful ownership of this hoard was disputed between the Begums and the reigning wazir. (Hastings argued that the treasure was state property, and therefore subject to requisition by the wazir.) At Hastings’s behest, the wazir authorized the use of force to extract the treasure. During this process, the eunuchs in charge of the treasury were alleged to have been subject to various cruelties and indignities. The spoliation of the Begums became Burke’s fourth charge. A speech on the subject by Sheridan (on February ), extolled as the greatest ever delivered in the eighteenth-century House of Commons, gave ‘the Begums of Oudh’ a temporary celebrity. Defending both the justice and policy of the treatment of the Begums, Hastings claimed that the Begums had provided aid for Chait Singh during his rebellion.¹⁴⁰ A lesser victim of the resumption of jagirs was Balbadhra Singh (d. ), the Raja of Salon. In , he raised a revolt against the wazir. Complicity in the violent suppression of this revolt, and in the raja’s death, became Burke’s sixth charge. Hastings contemptuously dismissed Balbadhra Singh as ‘the Chief of a Herd of Banditti’ whose destruction was an act of public justice.¹⁴¹ Never one to accept criticism in a friendly spirit, the years of his struggle against a hostile majority on his council had left Hastings preternaturally sensitive to the least hint of opposition or reproof. He especially resented the failure of the Court of Directors to give him the wholehearted support he had expected. Accordingly, when they presumed to censure his treatment of Chait Singh, he was provoked to compose a stinging riposte of selfjustification. This letter, dated March , which Burke called a ‘Libel on ¹³⁹ CJ xli. –, –. ‘Rana’ is a title equivalent to ‘raja’. ¹⁴⁰ CJ xli. –, –. Marshall, Impeachment, –. In reality, the Begums and their eunuchs escaped lightly. Richard B. Barnett, ‘Embattled Begams: Women as Power Brokers in Early Modern India’, in Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety, ed. Gavin R. G. Hambly (New York, ), –, provides a sober corrective to Sheridan’s lurid exaggerations. ¹⁴¹ CJ xli. , .
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the Court of Directors’, exemplified the brazen defiance by the company’s ‘servants’ of the orders of their nominal masters. Its publication became the nineteenth charge. That the directors had censured him for ‘addressing them with such unguarded warmth’, Hastings conceded. But he denied that they had ever called his letter a ‘libel’; indeed, he had since received their ‘unanimous Thanks for my long, faithful, and able Services’.¹⁴² In theory at least, Hastings concurred with the official policy that prohibited wars of aggression or territorial expansion. In practice, however, his desire to increase British influence beyond the sphere of the company’s own territories and immediate allies, and his perennial search for new sources of revenue, sometimes drew him into, or dangerously near, such wars. In , while he was at Lucknow on a mission to improve relations between the wazir and the company, he received a visit from Shah Alam’s eldest son (the future Akbar Shah II; d. ). The prince came to seek British aid to restore his father to a measure of substantive authority. Hastings had himself deprived Shah Alam of Kara and Allahabad, and discontinued his tribute from Bengal. Yet the idea of ‘restoring’ the emperor appealed to the streak of adventurism in his character, and he recommended it to his council. As it would have started another war with the Marathas, they prudently declined the foolhardy proposal. Burke could not accept that Hastings’s motivation was simply quixotic. Instead, he was convinced that Hastings must have had ‘some other Motives for this long, dark, and laborious Proceeding with the Mogul’. Out of his imagination he spun a web of intrigue and double dealing, ‘The Mogul delivered up to the Marattas’, the eighteenth and the most fantastic of his charges. Hastings professed not to understand it.Implausible as an interpretation of Hastings’s actual motives and actions, the charge provides a striking illustration of the labyrinthine duplicity which Burke attributed to him.¹⁴³ The leading events and administrative reforms of Hastings’s administration thus furnished material for sixteen of the twenty-two articles of charge. Of the remaining six, four concerned corrupt and extravagant contracts and appointments made between and . In , Hastings had established a government monopoly of the sale and export of opium, farming the monopoly to individuals for fixed-term contracts. Two of these contracts (those awarded in and ) became Burke’s twelfth charge: that they had been awarded not to the lowest bidders, but to friends of Hastings; and on terms that allowed the holders to make exorbitant and unwarranted profits, to the detriment of the company’s revenue. Hastings defended the monopoly as the only way to make opium profitable to the government. Whatever profits had been made by the contractors, he argued, these contracts had been more advantageous to the government than their predecessors.¹⁴⁴ Several other ¹⁴² Ibid. –, . ¹⁴³ Ibid. –, . ¹⁴⁴ Ibid. –, –. Marshall, Impeachment, –.
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allegedly corrupt contracts and allowances were collected in the seventh charge. In , for example, Hastings had provided the new Commander-inChief, Sir Eyre Coote (–) with extra allowances of £, a year, allegedly to procure his neutrality at the council. In addition, two individual contracts became the subject of separate charges: the Surgeon-General’s contract of (article ten) and the Burdwan pulbandi (road repair) contract of (article eleven). In his defence, Hastings invoked the discretionary power with which he claimed to have been invested. Whenever he disregarded the rules prescribed, for example by not advertising a contract, or not accepting the lowest tender, he had acted in the best interest of the company. All of his contracts and allowances were advantageous to the company, and from none had he personally benefited.¹⁴⁵ The thirteenth article charged the corrupt appointment of Richard Joseph Sulivan (–) as Resident at Arcot in and at Hyderabad in . In one of his most concise answers, Hastings professed to see nothing objectionable in these appointments.¹⁴⁶ Finally, the twenty-first article charged Hastings with a breach of North’s India Act in concealing correspondence from his colleagues on the council, and from the directors. In another laconic answer, Hastings reserved his defence until the instances of concealment were specified.¹⁴⁷ Burke’s charges against Hastings, complex and various as they are, can be reduced to four chief heads. The first is perfidy and aggression in the conduct of ‘foreign’ policy, that is, his relations with Indian rulers beyond Bengal: his breaking faith with Shah Alum; his responsibility for the Rohilla War; his interference in Oudh. The second is violence, rapacity, and oppression against subjects and dependants: his cavalier treatment of the zemindars of Bengal, his deposition of Chait Singh. The third is corruption within the orbit of the company itself, through the award of contracts and appointments. The fourth is disobedience to superiors: his contemptuous attitude to orders from London, his refusal to resign, his suppression of correspondence. How much of all this, a modern reader may ask, was true? Even today, with the advantage of hindsight and several generations of historical research, no simple or easy answer can be offered. Much depends on the framework within which the charges are viewed. If judged by the high moral standards by which Burke thought British India ought to be governed, then many of Hastings’s actions are impossible to justify. But could British India have been ruled as Burke wanted? If Hastings is judged from a more pragmatic point of view, according to his success in preserving the company’s dominions, revenues, and influence, then he must be judged a success. In , an impartial and conscientious MP with no particular knowledge of India might well have been baffled to decide between Burke and Hastings. ¹⁴⁵ CJ xli. –, , –. Marshall, Impeachment, –. ¹⁴⁷ Ibid. , .
¹⁴⁶ CJ xli. –, –.
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Was Hastings, as Burke charged, ‘the scourge of India’?¹⁴⁸ Or was his conduct, as he declared himself, ‘invariably regulated by Truth, Justice, and Good Faith’?¹⁴⁹ On one point Burke and Hastings agreed: there was no middle ground. Hastings was a blackguard, or a hero. Less prejudiced contemporaries, however, such as Dundas, professed to regard Hastings as ‘a mixed character, in which much good, and much bad was to be found’.¹⁵⁰ If so, should his lapses be excused on account of his achievements? Were those lapses the inevitable errors and misjudgements incident to a long and arduous administration, or were they indeed ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’? These were some of the questions which MPs were now required to ponder. Two caricatures provide a graphic representation of these alternatives. The Political-Banditti Assailing the Saviour of India ( May : BMC ) by James Gillray (–), is dominated by a heroic, mounted Hastings holding a ‘Shield of Honor’ which easily repels the shot from Burke’s blunderbuss. Hastings carries ‘Territories acquired’, ‘Eastern Gems for the British Crown’, and bags of rupees ‘Saved to the Company’ and ‘added to the Revenue’. Though the main axis of the print leads from Burke (making his first appearance as a knight errant) to Hastings, Fox and North are also depicted, showing that the impeachment was regarded as a continuation of the attack on the company begun by Fox’s India Bill (Plate ). An opposite, idealizing view of the impeachment and Burke’s role is depicted in John Boyne’s Cicero against Verres ( Feb. : BMC ). Here the focus is entirely on Burke (though Fox and North are also present), dressed in a voluminous toga (Plate ). To make Burke look more dignified and classical, Boyne has omitted his wig and given him a statuesque pose. (The antique effect is somewhat spoiled by the retention of Burke’s spectacles: presumably no caricature would have been complete without them.) Beneath the image is a long quotation from Cicero, adapted to refer to Hastings instead of Verres. The trope of Burke as Cicero soon became a commonplace.¹⁵¹ After Hastings had made his defence, the way was clear for the much-delayed calling of witnesses. Nine were examined, before a Committee of the Whole House, over nine days between and May. Burke strenuously resisted attempts to restrict questioning to what would be permissible at a criminal trial. Thus on May three lawyers, including two of the Crown law officers, ¹⁴⁸ July (WS v. ). ¹⁴⁹ CJ xli. . ¹⁵⁰ July (PH xxiv. ). Dundas had earlier described himself as ‘neither a harsh censor’ nor ‘too enthusiastic an admirer’ of Hastings ( July: PH xxiv. ). ¹⁵¹ The parallel with Verres was controverted by friends of Hastings, e.g. by ‘Amicus Curiae’ in the Public Advertiser, – Feb. .
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objected to a question, put by Burke, on the ground that ‘it went to matter of opinion instead of matter of fact’. Burke retorted that they were engaged in a parliamentary enquiry, not a formal trial, and he won his point. On May, when Pitt objected that ‘the facts enquired into should be stated as they concerned Mr Hastings’, Burke argued, again successfully, that he needed to prove the facts first, ‘different things by different people’, and would establish their relevance later.¹⁵² The evidence adduced related chiefly to the Rohilla War, Benares, and the Begums of Oudh. All the witnesses had served in India, some of them for many years. Their testimony was meant, not only to establish particular facts, but to confirm Burke’s thesis that, wherever Hastings intervened, the country was devastated. Several of the witnesses so deposed, but their testimony was partly neutralized by the exposure, by members friendly to Hastings, of personal grudges harboured against him. In addition, Major Scott sought to discredit Burke’s case by calling Major Arthur Balfour (–) to deny the alleged devastation and to testify to the flourishing state of the provinces. Much the longest examination, conducted over four days between and May, was that of Nathaniel Middleton (–), Resident at Lucknow (–, –). As Hastings’s agent, Middleton had been charged with enforcing the wazir’s compliance with his agreement to seize the Begum’s treasure. More directly than Hastings, he was responsible for the illtreatment of the Begums, and (if Burke’s allegations were true) for the torture of their eunuchs. Middleton was therefore understandably defensive about giving evidence. What injected a note of comedy, even farce, into the proceedings was his transparent strategy of feigning amnesia. The most material circumstances seemed to have escaped his recollection. His evasiveness, which created the impression that he had much to hide, probably helped the prosecution case.¹⁵³ Middleton’s embarrassed performance, which he would repeat at the trial, was completely at variance with the stance of ostentatious self-righteousness adopted by Hastings. The examination of witnesses was thus a qualified success. Enough material damaging to Hastings emerged to suggest that there was a case to answer. On May, by which time most of the witnesses had been examined, Burke raised the question of how next to proceed. He proposed to frame a portmanteau resolution, embodying the substance of the Articles of Charge, on which the House might vote for or against impeachment. Pitt, however, argued instead that the committee should first vote on each particular charge, only then coming to a general resolution.¹⁵⁴ This suggestion carried an appearance of equity. When exception was taken to a complicated resolution, the usual ¹⁵² London Chronicle, – May . ¹⁵³ Lambert, lviii. –. Newspaper reports, while highly selective, often identify questioners, who are anonymous in the official record. ¹⁵⁴ General Evening Post, – May .
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practice of the House was to divide it into separate propositions.¹⁵⁵ On a judicial question, the objection to a compound resolution was especially weighty, as an accused who would have been acquitted on each separate article might be voted guilty on an accumulated charge.¹⁵⁶ On the other hand, Pitt’s plan would certainly protract the proceedings, for each of the twenty-two articles had the potential to generate a lengthy debate. At first sight, Pitt’s proposal seemed to favour Hastings, and both Fox and Burke opposed it. After some inconclusive discussion, the procedural decision was deferred for a week.¹⁵⁷ A day’s reflection, however, convinced Burke that he had more to gain from Pitt’s procedure. One consideration may have been the greater publicity that the individual charges would receive. On the th, accordingly, he announced that, while still convinced that his own mode was preferable, he would defer to Pitt’s preference, and propose a resolution on the first charge alone, the Rohilla War.¹⁵⁸ On June, Burke introduced his resolution with a speech that lasted about three hours. Since it was the first of a series, he opened the case as a whole, before focusing on the Rohilla War (WS vi. –). In an elaborate exordium, he defended the propriety of the prosecution, and extolled the importance of the subject and the occasion. The House of Commons, pledged (as he believed) since to punish Hastings, was bound to vindicate its faith and honour by finally initiating a prosecution. By chance, Lord Cornwallis was about to sail for Bengal as the next Governor-General. Seizing this synchronicity, Burke argued that the substantive issue was how British India should be governed: according to the arbitrary principles avowed by Hastings, or by the rules of justice and humanity? Burke also descanted on his own motives, denying any element of personal pique or resentment. Yet in another sense he made himself and the prosecution inseparable. Polarizing the issues and the personalities involved, he painted a stark contrast between black and white, virtue and vice. Between him and Hastings there could be no compromise or middle way. To exonerate Hastings was to inculpate Burke as a false and malignant accuser. To neutralize the apparent invidiousness of his task, Burke appealed to ancient Rome, where the character of a public accuser had been honourable and respected (). Next, he seized on the argument, advanced in Hastings’s defence, that all Asian government was founded on arbitrary power (–). Actions of his that in Europe might appear tyrannical and unjust, such as the fining and deposition of Chait Singh, were agreeable to the maxims of Indian ¹⁵⁵ This was not, however, a rule (P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, ), –). ¹⁵⁶ A notorious example was the motion of Feb. to expel Wilkes, which Lord North refused to divide. E.B. attacked it as improperly compounded of different charges (BL Egerton MS , fo. ). ¹⁵⁷ General Evening Post, – May . ¹⁵⁸ Morning Chronicle, May .
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politics.¹⁵⁹ Finally, Burke turned to the Rohilla War. As he had with Tanjore, Burke idealized Rohilkhand as a terrestrial ‘Paradise’. For a sum of money, Hastings had basely enabled the cruel and rapacious Shuja al-Daula to ‘extirpate’ its ruling classes, ‘the chief land-holders, the principal manufacturers, the nobles, the superior clergy, and the men of property among all ranks’ (–). Burke concluded his speech on the Rohilla charge by moving a massive and complex resolution of about , words, embodying most of the distinct allegations stated in the Article of Charge. Thomas Powys (–) immediately objected to so complicated a motion. Burke defended its propriety, but after much discussion agreed to withdraw it in favour of a short statement that the Article of Charge contained matter deserving impeachment.¹⁶⁰ This motion provoked a marathon debate. Adjourned at . a.m. on June, it was resumed that evening and lasted until . a.m. on the rd. More than in the subsequent debates on Hastings, opinions divided along party lines. Dundas, speaking for the ministry, condemned the war itself, but denied that Hastings deserved impeachment. In any case, he argued, Hastings’s subsequent reappointments were virtual pardons. Wilberforce, too, an influential independent, while unequivocally condemning the Rohilla War, conceded extenuating circumstances and avowed his willingness to take into account the great services that Hastings had since rendered. Most who spoke against Hastings were avowed oppositionists. There was, however, some encouraging indication of independent support. James Martin (who had previously argued that Lord North, not Hastings, ought to be impeached) confessed that ‘what he had heard that day, and the day preceding, had considerably altered his opinion respecting Mr Hastings, and he should vote for the Question.’ Few others were yet convinced. When the vote was finally taken, Burke’s resolution was defeated by to .¹⁶¹ The Hastings camp was jubilant, for the Rohilla War was widely regarded as the weightiest of the charges.¹⁶² The Benares charge was the next to be debated, on June. This time Fox led for the prosecution, and Pitt made the main speech from the ministerial benches. Where the Rohilla War had been a moral issue, the Benares charge was more technical, turning on the legal relation of Chait Singh to the East India Company. Fox argued that the raja was an independent prince. The extra demands on him were illegal, and in clear breach of a solemn treaty. As ¹⁵⁹ CJ xli. , – (E.B. was unaware that these passages were written by Halhed). E.B. had earlier developed this theme when opposing a bill to enlarge the powers of the Governor-General of Bengal ( Mar. : WS vi. –). ¹⁶⁰ London Chronicle, – June (PH xxvi. –). ¹⁶¹ Morning Chronicle, , June (PH xxvi. –). ¹⁶² CJ xli. – (about , words). John Wilkes reported the common opinion that the Rohilla War charge was ‘the clearest and most enormous’ (to his daughter, June , in Letters, from the Year to the Year , of John Wilkes (London, ), iii. ). At the trial, Major Scott claimed that, with ‘all the rest of the world’, Hastings was convinced that the Rohilla War charge ‘would be decisive of all the business’ ( Apr. : BL, Add. MS , fo. ).
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such, they exemplified the tyranny and rapacity with which Hastings treated the company’s allies. Hastings was therefore responsible for the Chait Singh ‘rebellion’, and for the misgovernment of Benares that followed. Pitt’s speech was carefully crafted to disagree with Fox as much as possible while allowing him nevertheless to vote against Hastings. Against Fox, he accepted Hastings’s argument that Chait Singh was a zemindar, not a sovereign prince.¹⁶³ The exceptional impositions were reasonable at a time of such emergency. Pitt further conceded that, in India, even a British administration must necessarily be conducted to some degree according to the practices prevalent in Asia. Having thus swallowed nearly the whole of the Hastings case, Pitt boggled at the size ( lakhs of rupees) of the fine that Hastings had intended to impose. While acquitting Hastings of any corrupt motive, and exonerating him from responsibility for the rebellion, he thought the fine itself ‘beyond all proportion exorbitant, unjust, and tyrannical’, and consequently ‘a very high crime and misdemeanor’. On this ground alone, and without committing himself to vote later for an impeachment, he would support the motion. Pitt’s intervention was decisive, and the Benares charge was approved by to .¹⁶⁴ To all appearance, Pitt had hitherto been hostile to the impeachment. His speech and vote were therefore quite unexpected, and occasioned much speculation about his motives.¹⁶⁵ Pitt, however, was not the only convert. Charles Jenkinson (who as recently as April had spoken favourably of Hastings) was the most prominent of several ‘king’s friends’ who approved the charge. Sir Gilbert Elliot attributed their conversion to ‘the power of truth’.¹⁶⁶ In Pitt’s case, this might sufficiently explain his vote, but not his speech, which led a friend of Hastings, reading it in a newspaper, to conclude that Pitt was ‘more of a Jesuit than even Burk’.¹⁶⁷ On the other hand, the ulterior motives commonly alleged (fear or jealousy of Hastings, or pressure from Dundas) are implausible.¹⁶⁸ More likely, the Benares charge provided an opportune occasion to demonstrate, by a vote against Hastings, that he was no screener of Indian delinquents. Whatever Pitt’s motives, his vote gave the prosecution a welcome boost. But little more could be done so late in the session. On June, when Burke raised the question of how to proceed, some of Hastings’s friends attempted to prevent the business being carried forward to the next session.¹⁶⁹ On June, against Pitt’s advice, John James Hamilton (–) moved for a Call of the House, with a view to keep members in town for a decisive vote (as he hoped) to kill the impeachment. Such a motion, unpopular at any time, ¹⁶³ At Pitt’s request, Hastings sent him a ‘definition of the nature of the office of a Zemindar’, and was chagrined when Pitt ‘used it, & voted for the Benares Article’ (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹⁶⁴ PH xxvi. –. ¹⁶⁵ Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, i. –. ¹⁶⁶ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, June , in Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, ed. Lady Minto (London, ), i. . ¹⁶⁷ G. N. Thompson to Hastings, June (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹⁶⁸ Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, i. –. ¹⁶⁹ Morning Herald, June (PH xxvi. –).
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was especially so towards the end of a session. It was easily defeated, by to . The voting figures show, contrary to Burke’s belief, how little influence Hastings was able to wield against the ministry.¹⁷⁰ Immediately afterwards, Burke concluded the examination of his final witness, held over since May, and further consideration of the impeachment was deferred to the following session.¹⁷¹ Burke could take some satisfaction in the progress he had made, though little enough in proportion to the energy he had expended. Against all expectation, the impeachment had not been defeated. Some impression had been made on independent opinion. Yet only one charge had been approved, and that only thanks to Pitt’s support on the narrowest possible ground. Hastings had lost more than Burke had gained. His defence had not, as he had so confidently expected, silenced all criticism. Even his friends now advised him to ‘recede a little from the security of a confident innocence’ and to construct a defence based on evidence rather than assertion.¹⁷² As early as regular reports of debates in the Commons are available, Burke is recorded as speaking on a great variety of topics. From , as he became increasingly preoccupied with India, his range narrowed. The session of is remarkable for his being reported as speaking only on Indian issues, indeed rarely except in relation to the impeachment.¹⁷³According to Fox, illness prevented Burke attending the dramatic debate of February, when after an allnight sitting the Duke of Richmond’s controversial scheme of dockyard fortifications was defeated by the Speaker’s casting vote.¹⁷⁴ On such a subject, Burke would surely have spoken. Yet if he had, the session of would still have marked a concentration on India that only the French Revolution would diffuse.
¹⁷⁰ Morning Chronicle, June (PH xxvi. –). E.B. deliberately abstained from speaking or voting. In a different context, William Fullarton estimated that ‘Hastings party or as they are called, the Bengal squad are very strong in Parliament. I believe near thirty & being always with the Minister can hardly fail to have some weight with him’ (to John Coxe Hippesley, Feb. ; BL Add. MS , fo. ). Against the minister, however, they were impotent. ¹⁷¹ Lambert, lviii. –. ¹⁷² Archbishop William Markham to Hastings, post May (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹⁷³ On topics unrelated to Hastings, E.B. spoke on Pitt’s bill to amend his India Act ( May: Debrett, xx. –), and on the East India Company’s petition ( June: Morning Herald, June). ¹⁷⁴ PH xxv. .
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Before Hastings came to the House of Commons to read his defence, Burke had seen him only once, ‘in the dusk of one Evening . . . and in the midst of a squadron’. Yet Burke was confident that he knew him intimately ‘in his actions and his writings’.¹ Might a chance encounter between the two, perhaps sheltering from the same shower of rain, as envisaged in Dr Johnson’s dictum, have taught them mutual respect? Hastings, like Burke, was ‘an extraordinary man’. Nor was he by any means the malevolent figure of Burke’s imagination. The two had actually much in common. Both respected the peoples and cultures of India, and sought to preserve them from oppression and exploitation. Both were keen farmers. Both were habitually careless about money, chronic overspenders, and philanthropic beyond their means. Even so, a meeting would more likely have ended in mutual recrimination than mutual understanding. Each was too unshakeably convinced of the purity of his own motives, of the rectitude of his conduct, and of the iniquity of his opponents. If both were incorrigibly self-righteous, in other respects they were psychological opposites, and in each case character had been reinforced by career. At the age of , Hastings was Governor-General of Bengal, where for twelve years he exercised power on a scale unknown to any minister in England. His tenure of office was tumultuous but upon the whole (in the verdict not of Burke but of history) successful. Despite the many reverses and (as he saw them) betrayals that he suffered, he remained an optimist at heart. Devious as Burke thought him, his letters display a frank and unclouded egotism that is never seen in Burke’s. In September , for example, when under the threat of impeachment, he drew this remarkable self-portrait in a letter to David Anderson, one of his closest friends from his time in India: If I might be allowed to point out the best Features of my own Character in office, I should place these in the Catalogue: Integrity & Zeal: affection for my Fellow Servants, & Regard for the Country which I governed; official Regularity; Accuracy & ¹ To Mary Palmer, Jan. (C v. –). The incident can be dated to the second half of , since E.B. saw Hastings in company with Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mary Palmer, who was not living with her uncle during Hastings’s previous residence in England (–).
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collatoral provision (you must find out the Meaning of these Words) in the Creation of new Offices or Systems of Policy, in Instructions for political Negotiations, & in the Construction of Treaties; Sincerity & Unreserve in my Dealings with the Chiefs in Connection with our Government[;] a Study to chuse Agents most fitted for their Trusts, Confidence liberally given them, & their Conduct guarded from the Hazard of every responsibility which belonged in Right to myself; & lastly Patience, long Suffering, Confidence & Decision.²
This is neither Burke’s Hastings, nor the Hastings of history. His best friends hardly counted ‘official Regularity’ among his virtues. Nor would his ‘Agents’ have endorsed his claim to have screened them from every ‘Hazard’. Whatever its accuracy or objectivity, however, the sincerity of his selfpanegyric is unquestionable. The straightforward satisfaction in his achievements goes far to explain his incredulity when others thought differently and denied him the rewards that he thought he so abundantly merited. Even a protégé conceded that Hastings was ‘not inclined to accommodate and is disappointed when every measure of his does not meet an unqualified assent and concurrence’.³ Burke wrote no comparable passage, for to display what he thought ‘the best Features of my own Character’ was not in his nature. His style was the modesty, even self-abnegation, that he thought appropriate to a novus homo. Thus in , when his party returned to office, he cloaked the chagrin he felt at having ‘no share whatever . . . in the Conduct of publick affairs’ with a show of humility. ‘In times of no small difficulty,’ he replied to a letter of congratulation, ‘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’ (C iv. ). Such passages are plainly rhetorical, and were not meant to be taken literally. Modern readers, unaccustomed to this deferential style, and uncomfortable with Burke’s patent insincerity, may miss his coded form of selfassertion. In practice, beneath the integument of his rhetoric, Burke was no more inclined than Hastings to acknowledge himself at fault, as two selfassessments written in the second half of illustrate. The first is part of a long apology for being a poor correspondent, sent to Thomas Lewis O’Beirne (–), an Irish clergyman and writer for the Portland party: with all your merits, and all your Just claims and with my full and perfect sense of them, that cursed Idleness and its cursed daughter procrastination have hindered me from doing what I really delight in, that is in giving you pleasure. This is one of the Paradoxes of Idleness which none but the Idle can comprehend—Whenever I relax
² Sept. (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ³ Stephen Sulivan to Laurence Sulivan, Dec. (Bodl. MS Eng. Hist. c. , fo. ).
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unfortunately my relaxation is complete. It is to the Credit of business that one is more in the train of doing one duty when Another is performed and that one has more space in the Chasms and Interstices of occupation that in the whole vast vacuity of a disengaged mind. I have always found it so. Even when the Uniformity of a Solid and Complete Idleness has fatigued and satiated you, you do not know how to break in upon it. ( Sept. : C v. –)
Burke cannot say, ‘I am sorry not to have written earlier’, and get down to business. Instead of an apology, he offers self-exculpation, ‘the Symptoms of a distemper’ (), excusing himself by making his supposed idleness an affliction, for which he deserves sympathy rather than blame. Yet from Burke, tales of idleness are rather suspect. He is not easily imagined in ‘the Uniformity of a Solid and Complete Idleness’. Yet he made nearly the same excuse in a letter to Mary Shackleton in December (). In both cases, typical of Burke is the generalization, his excusing himself by universalizing his failure to write a letter into a general principle of human psychology. In this way, qui s’accuse, s’excuse. Burke wrote a second revealing self-assessment about a month after the letter to O’Beirne. In , two classical scholars planned to dedicate a new edition of William Bellenden’s De Statu Libri Tres (; three essays on ancient history), to the three most prominent members of the Coalition ministry: Fox, North, and Burke himself. One of the scholars, Dr Henry Homer (–) of Cambridge, sent Burke a draft of the proposed dedication of the third book to Fox. (Burke was not told that he was to be similarly honoured.) The main topics of the dedication are Fox’s eloquence, firmness, consistency, integrity, and his willingness to incur unpopularity in pursuit of the right. Reading the dedication prompted Burke to reflect on his own career. While lauding the tribute to Fox, instead of welcoming Homer as a promising new recruit, Burke explained that he made ‘a very great scruple of encouraging any one to engage with our party’. As for himself, ‘there are certain of us who must be sacrifices’. Having embarked on a certain course, they must persist to the end. But they could not in conscience urge others to join ‘a party whose very principle casts its roots in despair’ (Nov. : C v. ). Burke expatiated on this sense of commitment to a lost cause at such length and with such relish as to transmute defeatism into a positive creed. Unlike Hastings, he had been denied the opportunity to exercise his talents in a constructive way. In the nightmare world of his imagination, failure became a guarantee of integrity, and frustration a badge of merit. Hence his determination to be a ‘sacrifice’. By this point in his career, Burke seems almost to enjoy the experience of defeat. To the sanguine Hastings, confident of triumphing over his contemptible enemies, every reverse came as an unpleasant shock. To the pessimistic Burke, expecting to be overwhelmed by the superior strength of the powers of darkness, success was nearly as disorienting. Both were equally if oppositely deficient in seeing themselves as others saw them.
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These contrasting temperaments influenced the way the impeachment developed, and perhaps even its outcome. On the part of Hastings, a more rhetorically effective defence might have aborted the process in . On Burke’s side, a franker recognition that he wanted to win as well as to be right might have induced him to develop a more realistic strategy, and to have prepared articles of impeachment better adapted to an actual legal process. For Burke’s habitual self-depreciation and pessimism masked a stubborn tenacity and an unshakeable belief in himself and his cause. A professed defeatist, in his heart he could never accept defeat. Eager to convict Hastings, he nevertheless refused to modify his articles in accord with the perceptions of others about how best to secure that conviction. Persistence in apparently self-defeating behaviour is one of the paradoxes of his character. Small occasions often serve as well as momentous issues to expose the rhetorical nature of Burke’s self-depreciations, such as his professions of idleness. Fits of indolence he may have suffered, but his constitution was that of a hard and compulsive worker, possessed of abundant energy and tenacious in pursuit of his aims. This trait is amply illustrated on the many occasions when he directed what in retrospect appears excessive time and effort to some local or trivial question. For Burke never reserved himself for the great debates. ‘Consider every Cause as an Exercise,’ he exhorted his son, and determine ‘be the matter what it will, though it were only de tribus Capellis, to put your shoulders to it, and to give it the whole recollected force of all your faculties.’⁴ Such was his own practice. A striking example surfaced in , trivial in the root sense of the word, since it concerned a muddy pond where three roads met (C v. ). Burke’s Beaconsfield estate had formerly been in the possession of the Waller family, whose most distinguished member was one of the favourite poets of his youth, Edmund Waller (–). Burke’s house had been built by a Waller. The family still owned estates in the district, and retained the lordship of the manor, though their principal local residence, Hall Barn, was usually let to a tenant.⁵ This ‘lordship’ was a relic of the feudal period, when most property was held as a fief. Such feudal tenures had largely disappeared, but even freehold property, such as Burke’s, was not entirely free of the manor to which it had once belonged. The lord of a manor, for example, possessed certain rights over common or ‘waste’ land, and these included the right to hold a manorial court to enforce them. Manorial courts had once been functioning organs of justice, through which (in theory at least) the lord ⁴ June (C v. ). The Latin phrase (from Martial, . ; literally, ‘three she-goats’) connotes any trifling concern. ⁵ Burke’s Landed Gentry (th edn. London, ), ii. ; Victoria History of the County of Buckingham (London, –), iii. –. The Wallers, who settled in Beaconsfield in the 14 c., held the manor from to .
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would administer and regulate the purely local concerns of the manor. A few of these courts were still serving practical purposes, although most had fallen into disuse.⁶ Burke became the principal victim of an attempt on the part of the lord of his manor, another Edmund Waller (c.–), to reverse this trend. Waller’s character and motives are far from clear. His father, yet another Edmund Waller (c.–), had been a second-rank member of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole. The younger Waller served briefly as his father’s colleague as MP for Chipping Wycombe, which his father controlled. Reportedly an alcoholic, he was deemed so untrustworthy that, by his father’s will, his inheritance was placed in the hands of trustees.⁷ Deep-drinking squires, however, were hardly exceptional. After succeeding to the property in , he divided his time between his estates at Farmington (in Gloucestershire) and Beaconsfield. He spent enough time at Beaconsfield to serve as an active JP, as well as to persecute his fellow landowners.⁸ Burke and Waller probably met soon after Burke bought his estate in , but their first recorded encounter was in . Waller claimed that what Burke believed to be a ‘private lane’ was in fact a ‘public road’, and that as lord of the manor he had the right to cut down trees growing outside the hedges that lined it. He therefore sued Burke at the local assizes. A ‘jury of gentlemen’, after a visit to the disputed lane, found in Burke’s favour. This defeat temporarily checked the further ‘law suits, squabbles, and vexations’ that Burke suspected Waller of plotting. Local sympathy was entirely on Burke’s side. After the case, as a mark of regard, he was invited to officiate as steward at the next Aylesbury races.⁹ In , Waller returned to the attack. At a session of the manorial court on April, Burke was presented for removing mud from Candlemas Pond, claimed as the property of the lord of the manor.¹⁰ Candlemas Pond was contiguous with Lower Candlemas Meadow, which was part of Burke’s property (Fig. ). As in , this action was intended to be vexatious. Again, precisely why Waller wanted to annoy Burke is unclear. On receiving a message from Waller’s steward, Burke drafted a short letter (two hundred words), businesslike but conciliatory. Believing the pond in question to belong to his meadow, he had drawn its water ever since acquiring the estate, as had ⁶ Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Manor and the Borough (London, ), i. –. ⁷ L. J. Ashford, The History of the Borough of High Wycombe from its Origins to (London, ), –. ⁸ Waller’s minute-book as JP, , – (Aylesbury, Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, DC///–); E.B. to Mrs Waller, Sept. (C iv. –). ⁹ E.B. to John Lee, July (C iii. –); W.B. to Charles O’Hara, Sept. , in Ross J. S. Hoffman, Edmund Burke, New York Agent (Philadelphia, ), –. ¹⁰ Beaconsfield Manor Court Book (quoted C v. n. ). The Court Book itself, now in the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies (DC///), has been severely damaged by damp, and for the years relating to this incident cannot be consulted.
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F. . Part of Burke’s estate, showing Candlemas Pond, the subject of his dispute with Edmund Waller
(according to his information) previous owners. Surprised that Waller should be concerned about such a ‘triffle’, Burke was prepared to acknowledge Waller’s right, should it be proven; but hoped that an amicable, neighbourly settlement would be possible (C v. ). This olive branch was rejected by Waller in a letter of August, unfortunately not extant. His friendly gesture spurned, Burke determined, as was his habit, to prove himself ‘perfectly in the
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right’ (i. ). He therefore drafted a reply much longer than his first letter (some two thousand words), dated August. With some writers, a hurriedly extemporized note may be the most revealing kind of letter. With Burke, an elaborately corrected epistle may be equally so, for he found the composition of such documents therapeutic. This letter to Waller, though on a smaller scale, is nearly as revealing as his epic reproof to William Markham of (ii. –). Burke’s first letter expressed a gentlemanly nonchalance and a willingness to please. Promising to investigate Waller’s claim, he offered to ‘settle the matter on the Evidence of the use amicably’ (C v. ). On August, he repeated this proposition in a markedly different tone: If you will get any Evidence who have not attempted any interest in this matter, to be examined upon oath before any two Gentlemen of the Law (one to be named by each of us), and if such evidence shall prove, that you or your ancestors have, at any time, turned this plash in any way whatsoever to yours or their Benefit, or that of yours or their Tenants, I shall cheerfully pay you to the last farthing of what the Mud is worth on any fair valuation, deducting the Expence. ()
Since Burke elsewhere claimed that the expense of removing the mud exceeded its value, this proposition was a challenge in disguise. Further, in keeping with his aim of demonstrating himself ‘perfectly in the right’, Burke recounted at much greater length the history of his involvement with the pond. In the earlier letter, it had been no more than ‘a convenience for washing my Sheep’ (). Now, he elevated its dredging into a disinterested public work: It has been very foul for many Years; and had overflown and quite spoild the Road during the last Winter, as some other of my Ditches had done in other parts towards the same Road. I had them all scoured on both sides of that way, (as I conceive) greatly to the Benefit of all that travel on it. This plash being very narrow, deep, and muddy, and in my opinion highly dangerous from those circumstances, was scoured at the same time and for the same purposes together with one opposite to it under my other hedge. (–)
Burke is at his most minutely autobiographical on such occasions, when his actions have been called into question. An earlier example was his quarrel with James Barry (–) in (iii. –). The tenacity with which Burke refused to concede Waller’s claim belies his profession that the matter in dispute was no more than ‘a few handfuls of Mud’ (C v. ). Between the two letters, he came to believe that the disputed mud from Candlemas Pond was no more than a first step, and that Waller had other designs. From Waller’s steward, he had learned of claims for arrears of quit-rent for a parcel of his estate amounting to about nine acres (). Nor had Waller abandoned his claim to the trees growing outside hedges, despite
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the decision against him in .¹¹ Burke was therefore justified in fearing that a campaign of vexation was meditated against him, and that he must firmly resist the first encroachment. Waller’s motives might be clearer if his letter of August had survived. It probably contained an implied slur on Burke as an interloper, for in his reply he retorts that ‘I neither interfere with the Business or amusements of the Gentlemen of the Country’, as though he had been accused of doing so (). If so, this would partly explain Burke’s prickliness. Yet his letter implies that Waller was not exclusively motivated by malice against him in particular. Waller had referred to ‘some late Law doctrines relative to the Rights of Lords of the Mannours which you do not approve, and which you imagine may in some way or other be counteracted by the Steps you take against me’ (–).¹² Burke did not imagine, however, that Waller expected to profit financially from his claims. They could only prove vexatious to the victim, and beneficial to the prosecutor only as an engine for the exercise of power. Claims, Burke hints, which ‘give uneasiness to the proprietors of the Land, and are of Little or no profit to the Lord of the Mannour’, are unlikely to be sustained in the courts (). Knowing as he did that Waller was litigious and combative, Burke was in effect defying him to take the matter to law. Waller rejected the mode of arbitration proposed in Burke’s letter (C v. ). Instead, he chose, after considerable delay, again to take legal action. The case was heard at the Aylesbury assizes on June .¹³ Waller did not long survive the verdict, dying on August. With him ended the attempts to revive the feudal jurisdiction of the Lord of the Manor of Beaconsfield. The episode may, however, have contributed to the passage in Burke’s Reflections in which he describes the lawyers elected by the Third Estate to the States General in . There Burke distinguishes between the few learned jurisconsults and the 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’ (R []). Admittedly, Burke’s animus against attorneys long predated his brushes with Waller. For lack of any documentation of the dispute from the Waller side, the part played by Robert Charsley (c.–), Waller’s attorney and the steward of the manor, cannot be determined. But given the reputation of attorneys for encouraging vexatious ¹¹ Court Book (quoted C v. n. ). ¹² Which ‘late Law doctrines’ Waller sought to combat remains uncertain. In A Practical Treatise on Copyhold Tenure, with the Methods of Holding Courts Leet [etc.] (London, ), Richard Barnard Fisher noted that ‘Of late years . . . the power and authority of these courts have been very much abridged’ (). Joseph Ritson, The Jurisdiction of the Court Leet (London, ), cites judgments of Lord Mansfield tending to their abridgement (p. xix). ¹³ The assize records for Buckinghamshire do not survive for this period, and I have not been able to discover the result of Waller’s suit.
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litigation from which they would profit, Charsley may have fomented as well as conducted Waller’s petty war. After reading and approving a draft of Burke’s letter to Waller of August, his brother Richard observed: ‘You Love the Country; you must take it with the Cattle who possess it, & the Toads & Attorneys which crawl on its surface’.¹⁴ If ‘the Cattle’ is a reference to Waller, to characterize Charsley as a ‘Toad’ certainly suggests that the Burkes held him in part responsible for Waller’s actions. The dispute with Waller has an unusual interest because so little evidence has been preserved of the Burkes’ relations with local society. Just before the trial at the assizes, Burke described in mock-heroic vein a visit from Robert Crook, another local landowner whom Waller had offended. Incensed at Waller’s tyrannical behaviour, Crook threatened to revive manorial rights which he thought might attach to property of his own. Burke’s usually peaceloving wife Jane, who was ‘very busy in stirring up the War’, he likened to ‘another Juno’ ( June : C v. –). The playfulness of this missive shows that the deadly earnest of the challenge to Waller represented his public persona, and that he was not blind to the absurdity of the dispute. At the same time, the combativeness reflects a prominent element of Burke’s personality. When he exhorted his son to apply ‘the whole recollected force of all your faculties’ even to a cause ‘de tribus Capellis’, he was preaching no more than he practised. Burke had not visited Ireland since . His interest in Irish affairs had diminished since about , and he took only a subordinate part in the campaign against Pitt’s Irish Propositions in . Yet early in October , on what Richard Jr. described as ‘quite a sudden thought, started by the fireside’, the Burkes, father and son, embarked on an impulsive trip, a ‘frolic’, landing in Dublin on October, and meaning to stay no more than ten days.¹⁵ They travelled with a servant, but Jane, as usual, stayed at home. The purpose of the trip, or so Burke explained to John Hely Hutchinson (–), Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and an influential Irish MP, was ‘to give me the only opportunity I should perhaps ever have, of shewing to my Son something of the Country whence he originated, and, to make him a little known there’ ( Nov. : C v. ). The motive is credible, though why this should have ¹⁴ R.B. Sr. to E.B., [ Aug. ] (WWM BkP /; printed in Corr. (), iii. –). ¹⁵ Mary Shackleton, Journal and Diary, Oct. (National Library of Ireland, MS , pp. –). Lord Mornington to W. W. Grenville, Oct. , in HMC (Dropmore), i. . Mornington crossed in the same packet boat as the Burkes. Saunders’s News-Letter, Oct., gives the date of their arrival as Oct. The suddenness of the impulse is confirmed by E.B. to Thomas Lewis O’Beirne, Sept. , which discusses Irish politics but makes no mention of a projected visit (C v. –).
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been Burke’s ‘only opportunity’ is unclear. To all appearance, Burke could have visited Ireland during the parliamentary recess of any year. The mystery that surrounds the sudden decision to visit Ireland extends to much of what the Burkes did while they were there. On October, five days after his arrival, Burke wrote both to his sister Juliana (–) and to Richard Shackleton, regretting that his stay was to be so short that he could not visit them. His excuse was that he had to be back for the new session of Parliament and Richard for the coming law term (C v. –). By what Richard later called ‘an accident’, these letters remained unsent for some days after they were written (to Juliana: ). The law terms were fixed: Michaelmas term would begin on November. Parliament would meet when the ministry decided. When Burke wrote, it indeed stood prorogued only until October. But so early a meeting, as he well knew, was most improbable. On that day it would almost certainly be further prorogued, as indeed happened. These letters suggest that, having made the journey on impulse, Burke was anxious to return as soon as he decently could. The new session in fact began unusually late, not until January .¹⁶ Ballitore was only about miles from Dublin, and just off a main road: in , an easy day’s journey. Loughrea, admittedly, where Juliana lived, was more remote, about miles (and therefore probably two or three days) from Dublin.¹⁷ Had the Burkes stayed only the ten days originally intended, the journey to Loughrea would indeed have been impracticable. But they prolonged their visit to twenty days, excluding the days of arrival and departure. The neglect of Juliana, whom Burke had not seen since , would be more comprehensible if the Burkes’ stay had been packed with social activity. Though Burke spoke of their time as ‘a continual hurry’ (C v. ), only three engagements are recorded during their first twelve days.¹⁸ In Dublin, they were entertained by the Lord-Lieutenant, the Duke of Rutland (–).¹⁹ They visited the Duke of Leinster (–) at Carton, and Thomas Conolly (–) at Castletown. These houses (both within miles of Dublin) were among the most palatial houses in Ireland, their owners two of its wealthiest men. Though architecturally Castletown was ‘reckoned the finest in the kingdom’, Carton seems to have taken the prize for the lavish and ¹⁶ CJ xli. . Early in October, however, Hastings was ‘assured’ that Parliament would meet in November; to David Anderson, Oct. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). Similar misinformation may have reached E.B. ¹⁷ Irish distances are given in English miles, converted from the distances in Wilson’s Post-Chaise Companion (Dublin, ). I have assumed that, with post-horses, the Burkes could have travelled miles in a day. ¹⁸ E.B. also met Lord Earlsfort and Sir Hercules Langrishe, but these engagements cannot be dated; Lord Earlsfort to E.B., Jan. (WWM BkP /), and E.B.’s Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (: WS ix. ). ¹⁹ Sir Joshua Reynolds to the Duke of Rutland, Dec. (HMC (Rutland), iii. ).
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ostentatious hospitality for which Ireland was famous. Another visitor described French horns playing at every meal, a quantity of plate that made one ‘imagine oneself in a palace’, and servants ‘without end’. Breakfast was served on ‘an immense table’, with ‘chocolate, honey, hot bread, cold bread, brown bread, white bread, green bread, and all coloured breads and cakes’. During the day, guests were free to amuse themselves as they liked before reassembling for a dinner of ‘courses upon courses’ which took up ‘full two hours’.²⁰ From the luxury of Castletown, the Burkes proceeded to Old Town (about miles from Dublin), the more modest seat of Thomas Burgh (–), a long-standing friend to whom Burke had addressed a pamphlet-letter in .²¹ The visits prompt a speculation about the purpose of the journey. Richard was now , with no immediate prospect of entering Parliament. Eager to promote his son’s career by bringing him into public notice, Burke may have sensed an opportunity when he heard a report that Pitt meant to reintroduce his Irish Propositions in the next session (to O’Beirne, Sept. : C v. ). In , the Duke of Leinster, Conolly, and Burgh had been among their most vigorous opponents.²² Perhaps Burke hoped that Richard might play a part in a renewed opposition. If so, he was disappointed. Pitt did not revive his propositions. Not until was Richard offered an opportunity to play a part in Anglo-Irish politics. At Old Town, Burke decided that they could, after all, find time for Ballitore, where they arrived, quite unexpectedly, on October. News that Burke was in Ireland had quickly reached Clonmel, where Mary Shackleton was staying. She immediately hastened home to Ballitore, only to be disappointed by the arrival of Burke’s mysteriously delayed letter of the th, then elated by his unheralded arrival. Her pride and joy in the great man’s visit was unbounded. Burke played the returning hero with grace and conviction. He asked to see the room where he had slept while a pupil, and was taken around the village, reminiscing and being introduced to the survivors of the s, or to their children. One veteran was William Gill (d. ), the steward. When Burke asked whether he was much changed, Gill replied that he could not see well. Burke accordingly ‘with all that kindness and affability for which he was so remarkable, took up a candle, and holding it to his own face, gave poor Gill a full view of it, and afforded a scene which those who were present cannot easily forget’. The next morning, the Burkes breakfasted with Abraham
²⁰ Lady Caroline Dawson to Lady Louisa Stuart, Oct. (Gleanings from an Old Portfolio, ed. Mrs Godfrey Clark (Edinburgh, –), i. , ). Miss Sandford, in , quoted in Brian Fitzgerald, Emily, Duchess of Leinster, – (London, ), . ²¹ A Letter from a Gentleman in the English House of Commons, in Vindication of his Conduct (London, : WS ix. –). ²² William Woodfall to William Eden, Aug. (Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, ed. Robert John Eden (London, –), i. , , ).
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Shackleton, Jr. (–), the present master of the school, before returning to Dublin.²³ On October, they dined with Lord Charlemont (–), another old friend (C v. ). In his capacity as president of the newly formed Royal Irish Academy, Charlemont later secured for Burke the distinction of election as an honorary member.²⁴ Before leaving Dublin for England, Richard wrote a short letter to his aunt, repeating, no more convincingly, his father’s excuses for not visiting her. Loughrea could surely have been squeezed into the itinerary, had Burke genuinely wanted to see her. On the pretext of having some unspent money, Richard enclosed a present of £, to be used for her daughter, his cousin Mary Cecilia French (–). This was probably his own initiative, as he asked Juliana not to mention it in letters to Beaconsfield (C v. ). The gift was a generous one, if too obviously an atonement for their failure to visit. In his letter of October, Burke had expressed the hope that ‘we shall be able to visit you next year at a more early, and to us, a more happy Season, when We may have the pleasure which with great mortification to us we must abandon for the present’ (–). To a sister, this is stilted language. This hope was never fulfilled. Burke would never revisit Ireland. Juliana died in , so Burke never saw her again, and Richard (who did not return to Ireland until ) never met her. In a rather frigid letter written on her death, which he described as a ‘a misfortune truly afflicting to me’, Burke lamented that ‘the will of Providence had seperated us for a great (much the greater) part of our lives—and now the same sovereign disposition has seperated us, on this side of the Grave, for ever’ ( Jan. : C vi. ). This is one of Burke’s least convincing references to Providence. But Mary French came to live with the Burkes after her mother died, married a friend of the Burkes, and remained part of the Beaconsfield circle. Confessedly an ‘unprofitable Brother’ (v. ), Burke made up to his niece for the neglect of his sister. The Burkes left Dublin about October. Their return passage was ‘dismal’. Instead of being tossed by the storms expected at that season, they were becalmed for three and a half days. Even so, Richard thought his father had ‘fatten’d upon his natal air’ and was pleased with the visit.²⁵ Burke’s interest in Ireland certainly revived, though he never returned to breathe that healthful ‘natal air’. During the s, indeed, he would become as deeply embroiled with Irish questions as at any time in his career. On his deathbed, ²³ Mary Shackleton’s Journal (National Library of Ireland, MS , pp. –). The anecdote about Gill appears in a note to ‘On a Visit Paid to Ballitore by Edmund Burke and his Son’, in her Poems (Dublin, ), . ²⁴ E.B.’s election was carried at the Council on Jan. , and at the Academy on Feb. (Royal Irish Academy, Council Minutes, i, p. ; Academy Minutes, i, p. ). E.B. was the first exception made to the rule that ‘no Englishman or Irishman shall be admitted as honorary’ (Lord Charlemont to Edmond Malone, June , in HMC (Charlemont), ii. ). ²⁵ R.B. Jr. to Richard Shackleton, Jan. (YB OF .).
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the report of an inflammatory ‘patriotic’ address by Henry Grattan (–) would deepen the gloom with which he took his leave of the world.²⁶ More immediately, however, on his return to England Burke’s attention was called not to Irish politics but to historiography. In , Burke had discovered some Irish manuscripts in the library of Sir John Sebright (–). An army officer and sometime MP, Sebright had inherited the manuscripts, which came from the collection of Edward Lhuyd (c.–), an eminent scholar of Celtic languages and antiquities. Knowing that his friend Thomas Leland (–), a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, had embarked on a history of Ireland, Burke persuaded Sebright to allow two volumes to be sent to Dublin for Leland’s use. Since Leland could not read Old Irish, he enlisted the help of Charles O’Conor (–), a learned antiquary. Even O’Conor, however, could make little of them, and therefore passed them to his friend Charles Vallancey (c.–). A military engineer by profession, in Vallancey had been posted to Ireland to supervise a survey of the country, primarily for defence purposes. Captivated by the archaeological remains of ancient Ireland, he became an enthusiastic, if amateur, student of Irish antiquities. He initiated a monograph series on the subject, Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis (–), mainly written by himself. Vallancey believed, chiefly on the evidence of etymology, that Ireland had been colonized by Etruscans. Sebright’s manuscripts, he persuaded himself, confirmed his hypothesis. Beginning in , he published extracts and translations in his Collectanea.²⁷ In June , Vallancey sent Burke a copy of the twelfth number of his Collectanea, in which (as he assured Burke in a covering letter) the ancient history of Ireland was ‘cleared of fable, and proved to be founded on fact’. Turning from his passion to his profession, he also told Burke that his recent survey of the Cork region had encompassed Burke’s own estate at Clogher. Expecting to visit England shortly, he would show Burke the map before it was submitted to the king.²⁸ Writing to thank Vallancey for the book, Burke professed himself ‘incapable of bringing any thing but docility and admiration to such enquiries’. Much of his letter is concerned with recommending publication in full, with Latin translations, of the manuscript sources for ancient Irish history, especially the Brehon laws, on the model of scholarly editions of Old English texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is the use that, he had hoped, would have been made of the Sebright manuscripts. ²⁶ French Laurence to Lord Fitzwilliam, July (C ix. ). ²⁷ Walter D. Love, ‘Edmund Burke, Charles Vallancey, and the Sebright Manuscripts’, Hermathena, (), –. ²⁸ Charles Vallancey to E.B., June (WWM BkP /). Vallancey’s map (on a scale of two inches to one Irish mile) is now in the BL (‘Military Survey of Ireland Extending from Corke Westward to Cape-Clear’, : Maps K. Top. ..).
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While Vallancey’s extracts whetted the appetite, only the publication of complete texts would allow early Irish history to be built on a firm foundation. In the context of a letter of thanks, these comments suggest that Burke was sceptical about Vallancey’s conclusions ( Aug. : C v. –). Vallancey’s theory was not the only current interpretation of Irish prehistory. Others held that Ireland had been settled from Scandinavia. Nor was the controversy entirely academic. Vallancey’s system traced the Irish to the Mediterranean, and hence to the great centre of civilization, as conceived in the eighteenth century. His opponents made them rude barbarians. In this second view, the English had first brought ‘civilization’ to Ireland.²⁹ Whatever his shortcomings as a scholar, Vallancey was at least no English chauvinist. In , as the fourteenth number of his Collectanea, he published A Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland, the most elaborate exposition of his views. Hearing that Burke was in Dublin, Vallancey sent him a copy, together with an invitation to visit him at Milltown, only about miles from Dublin. Unable or unwilling to thank Vallancey in person, Burke compensated for this neglect by sending a letter of thanks from London. As he had in , Burke declared himself incompetent to judge the validity of the argument. While voicing some reservations, he softened them to suggest that the theory was unproven rather than wrong ( Nov. : C v. –). Burke excelled at writing complimentary letters to authors. This one pleased Vallancey so much that he handed out copies to his friends, a pardonable vanity that embroiled Burke in a controversy about early Irish history. Burke was next approached by one of Vallancey’s adversaries, Thomas Campbell (–). A clergyman with wide scholarly interests, Campbell had initially been on friendly terms with the colonel.³⁰ By about , however, relations between the two had cooled, and Campbell determined to demolish Vallancey’s theory of Irish history.³¹ In October , Campbell happened to sail from Dublin on the same boat as the Burkes, and introduced himself. Communicative and hospitable as usual, Burke talked to Campbell at length and invited him to Beaconsfield.³² This visit probably took place about ²⁹ Walter D. Love, ‘Edmund Burke and an Irish Historiographical Controversy’, History and Theory, (), –. ³⁰ Campbell compliments Vallancey in his Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland, in a Series of Letters to John Watkinson, M.D. (London, ), –, . The Survey (written as though by an English visitor) was published anonymously. ³¹ Charles O’Conor to Thomas O’Gorman, and July (Letters of Charles O’Conor, ed. Robert E. Ward, John F. Wrynn, and Catherine Cogan Ward (Washington, DC, ), –). ³² ‘A Sketch of the Life’, prefaced to The Beauties of the Late Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, ), pp. cx–cxi; repr. (without acknowledgement) in James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (nd edn. London, ), i. –. The Beauties of Burke was edited by Charles Henry Wilson, and the original material in his ‘Sketch’ must be treated with caution. For example, Campbell’s report that E.B. spent ‘some days’ at Lord Kenmare’s seat at Killarney is most improbable. Campbell’s visit to Beaconsfield and E.B.’s loan of manuscripts are independently attested: Campbell, Strictures on the Ecclesiastical and Literary History of Ireland (Dublin, ), Dedication, –; E.B. to R.B. Jr., Feb. (C vii. ).
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August , and Campbell outlined his plans for a new ‘History of the Revolutions of Ireland’. For Burke, the great desideratum in Irish history was an account of the seventeenth century that would correct the anti-Catholic bias that derived from an exclusive reliance on Protestant sources, especially for the ‘rebellion’ of . The History of Ireland () by his friend Thomas Leland had done nothing to meet this need.³³ Eager to encourage Campbell to take up the challenge, Burke advised him ‘to be as brief as possible upon every thing antecedent to Henry II’ and lent him ‘four folio volumes’ of manuscripts.³⁴ In common with all the other Irish historians whom Burke tried to help, Campbell disappointed his hopes. Instead of taking Burke’s advice to concentrate on the period after , on his return to Ireland in he began a paper war against Vallancey in a series of letters in the Dublin Chronicle. In defence of Vallancey, one of the colonel’s admirers published Burke’s letter of November , intending to show that so eminent a figure as Burke thought highly of his work. A week later, Campbell retorted with a devastating riposte in which he reinterpreted Burke’s letter as an ironic, veiled criticism of Vallancey. In , Campbell reprinted his letters in a volume, which he dedicated to Burke. In the dedication, Campbell reports Burke’s advice in such a way as to make it appear to endorse his own scepticism about Vallancey’s theory of Irish history.³⁵ Vallancey was understandably hurt, and wrote a pained letter to Burke. Campbell, he hoped, had ‘perverted’ the sense of Burke’s letter. If not, Vallancey must ‘acknowledge myself a blockhead, and to have misconstrued a letter, I thought replete with applause’.³⁶ Burke’s reply was not entirely reassuring, for the only part of it thatVallancey ventured to print was a lament ‘that heats are kindled among wise and learned men, upon subjects, which, in themselves, seem the least of all others of a nature to rouze the passions’ (C vi. ). Little did Burke know ‘wise and learned men’, if he believed this.³⁷ Was Burke’s letter to Vallancey of November ironic? The letter is admittedly equivocal, since Vallancey and Campbell were both able to read into it what they wanted Burke to say. Yet the ambiguity may be no more than a by-product of Burke’s rhetoric of compliment. In most of his letters to ³³ E.B. in conversation with ‘Mr. T’, in Beauties of Burke, p. cxv (repr. in Prior, Memoir of Burke, i. –). As with E.B.’s reported shipboard conversation with Thomas Campbell, this material is not above suspicion. One evident absurdity is the remark attributed to E.B. that he visited Ireland in order to see his sister (p. cxii). In general, however, the report sounds plausible and deserves cautious acceptance. For example, Burke’s remark that Leland ‘had an eye to his bookseller’ is authenticated by a similar comment (‘he thought only of himself and the Bookseller’) in E.B. to R.B. Jr., Mar. (C vii. ). ³⁴ Campbell to John Pinkerton, Feb. (John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London, –), vii. ). The visit probably took place in August . ³⁵ Strictures on the Ecclesiastical and Literary History of Ireland, Dedication, –. ³⁶ Vallancey to E.B., Oct. (WWM BkP /). ³⁷ There may therefore be more than mere flattery in E.B.’s idealization of the academic life in his letter of June to William Richardson, Professor of Latin at Glasgow (C iii. ).
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authors, to avoid appearing fulsomely flattering, he seasons generous praise with a dash of mild criticism. ‘You are in some few Places,’ he once gently admonished Adam Smith, ‘what Mr Locke is in most of his writings, rather a little too diffuse’ ( Sept. : i. ). Following Campbell’s method, this could be read ironically as saying ‘you are as tedious and long-winded as Locke’. Burke meant nothing of the kind, and Campbell’s interpretation of the letter imputes a sly indirection that is entirely out of character. Vallancey saw only the compliments, and missed the reservations. Campbell seized on the reservations, and inflated them out of all proportion. While Burke was unpersuaded by Vallancey’s argument, his reservations did not amount to a coded dismissal. Admittedly, his remark that ‘I often thought I was reading Warburton’ (C v. ) sounds ironic to modern ears, since William Warburton (–) is now remembered as the type of the learned dunce. Burke, however, writing before the precipitous decline in Warburton’s reputation, could use the comparison without any such innuendo. In fact, it was particularly apt for his purpose, since it expressed admiration without endorsement. The prevalent opinion in of The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (–), Warburton’s magnum opus, was that, while its conclusions might be doubtful or even absurd, it was nevertheless a monument of profound erudition.³⁸ On a smaller scale, Burke felt something of the same respect for Vallancey. The praise of his ‘industry’ was unfeigned. Confirmation comes from a conversation recorded by an unidentified Irishman. Discussing Irish antiquities, Burke expressed the wish (as he had to Vallancey himself ) that the Brehon laws should be translated, preferably by a person of industry rather than genius. To the suggestion that Vallancey had ‘laboured hard in that mine’, Burke replied: ‘Yes, in that race he has carried off the prize of industry from all his competitors, and if he has done nothing more, he has wakened a spirit of curiosity in that line, but he has built too much on etymology, and that is a very sandy foundation.’³⁹ Vallancey would be better employed, he thought, editing source materials that others might use, instead of indulging in speculations for which his genius did not qualify him. Burke’s attitude to Vallancey and his theories illustrates the same judicious attitude to historical sources that governed his own unfinished ‘History of England’. There the brief account of ancient Ireland treads a middle path between scepticism and credulity. Rejecting the legend of colonization from Spain, Burke argues that on such questions ‘rational conjectures are more to be relied on than improbable relations’. Most likely, Ireland was peopled ³⁸ Despite some early depreciations, only after was there a ‘precipitous decline’ in his reputation (Robert M. Ryley, William Warburton (Boston, ), ). ³⁹ E.B., in conversation with an Irish gentleman (‘Mr T.’), Dec. [], in Beauties of Burke, p. cxiii (repr. in Prior, Memoir of Burke, i. –).
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chiefly from Britain, since the ‘language, the manners, and religion of the ancient inhabitants of both are nearly the same’. Yet he was prepared to accept that some kind of colony did come to Ireland from Spain, though as the ancient Spaniards were also Celts, this colony did not bring a new culture (WS i. ). Where Campbell contemptuously dismissed all early traditions as historically worthless, Burke believed that information of value might be extracted from them. For the session of Parliament, Burke had rented lodgings instead of taking an entire house. The experiment was not a success, for as early as August he made an excursion to London to look for ‘some habitation for the Winter’ (C v. ). House-hunting proved a long drawn-out process, and not until the beginning of January was Burke settled, this time in Gerrard Street, Soho.⁴⁰ Not since he abandoned Marylebone for Westminster in had Burke lived so far from the House of Commons. He leased the house for seven months in the first instance (). In July , after some difficult negotiations with the owner and her agent, he renewed the lease for three years, at an annual rent of £.⁴¹ Gerrard Street thus remained Burke’s London address until . Laid out between and , the street had initially boasted several aristocratic mansions. By Burke’s day these had disappeared. Instead, the street was enlivened by several coffee-houses and taverns, including the Turk’s Head, where the Literary Club met.⁴² Many houses were divided and let as furnished lodgings. In , for example, James Boswell rented rooms from a tailor.⁴³ A later lodger, the artist John Thomas Smith (–), provides an intriguing glimpse of Burke at work. Smith, whose upper-storey rooms overlooked Burke’s drawing-room, would often see Burke, late at night ‘after he had left the House of Commons, seated at a table covered with papers, attended by an amanuensis who sat opposite to him’.⁴⁴ The house that Burke leased, No. on Horwood’s map ⁴⁰ R.B. Jr. to Richard Shackleton, Jan. (YB OF .). Gerard Street was named after the Gerard family. The modern spelling (‘Gerrard’) dates from the c. (Survey of London, xxxiv, The Parish of St Anne, Soho (London, ), n.). Following the Survey of London, I have retained the older spelling for ‘Gerard House’. ⁴¹ E.B. offered £ p.a. for three years, or £ p.a. for two ( July : C v. ). Since he stayed for three, I assume the first offer was accepted. The house was owned by Lady James, widow of Sir William James (?–). After serving in India from about to , James became an active director of the East India Company. ⁴² Survey of London, xxxiv. –, –, –. ⁴³ Boswell’s Journal, Mar., Apr. (Boswell: The Ominous Years, –, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (London, ), , ). ⁴⁴ John Thomas Smith, A Book for a Rainy Day, or Recollections of the Years – (), ed. Wilfred Whitten (London, ), .
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(Fig. ), was part of Gerard House, a relic of the street’s grander days. Built as a single unit (about –), in the s it was divided into two. Its appearance in (probably little changed since Burke lived there) is recorded in a charming watercolour (Plate ). The Burkes lived in the larger, eastern portion, with three bays (on the left). This part of the house, at least, retained some of its former magnificence, as is evident from the grand, ramplike staircase, recorded in a much later watercolour (Plate ; the only interior view of any of the houses in which Burke lived). In , it remained one of the two most expensive houses in the street, with a rateable value of £. Burke’s Charles Street house had been rated at only £.⁴⁵ Gerard House was demolished after a fire in , and the site now forms part of a telephone exchange, fronting on Lisle Street. Gerrard Street is today in the heart of London’s Chinatown. Burke took possession of his new house early in the new year, for about January he invited Philip Francis to a business meeting there (C v. –). The campaign against Hastings was thus under way well before the new session of Parliament, which did not open until January. The principal theme of the speech from the throne was the commercial treaty that had recently been negotiated with France. Opposition was difficult, since the treaty could not be criticized until it was laid before the House. Even so, the occasion produced the usual altercation between Pitt and Fox, desperate to disagree with each other. Burke did not speak in the debate, but afterwards gave notice of his intention to renew the proceedings against Hastings.⁴⁶ On the th, he formally moved to resume them on February.⁴⁷ The first subject to be considered was the mistreatment of the Begums of Oudh (the fourth Article of Charge), which Sheridan had taken as his province. On and February, Sheridan therefore led the examination of Nathaniel Middleton and Sir Elijah Impey. Middleton’s evidence, vague and evasive, added plausibility to the case against Hastings. His lapses of memory became notorious, earning him the ironic sobriquet ‘Memory’ Middleton.⁴⁸
⁴⁵ City of Westminster Archives, Rate Books: St Anne Soho (Leicester Fields West), – (A, A); St James, Piccadilly, (D). The house E.B. lived in has been identified with the present No. (No. in Fig. ); Survey of London, xxxiv. . This house bears a commemorative plaque and has been described as the only one of E.B.’s London houses to survive (C v. n. ). In , E.B. received a letter from Rome, dated Feb. and addressed to him at ‘ Gerard Street’ (WWM BkP /). The evidence of the rate-books, however, though indirect, is decisive. The entries for the divided Gerard House (owned by Lady James) can be identified from the land-tax assessment of June (A). In , the ratepayers were Lady James and William Bateman, and their houses were assessed at £ and £ respectively. Lady James therefore paid for the larger house. An entry on one of the blotting-paper interleaves records arrears charged both to E.B. (£) and to Bateman (£ s.). E.B. therefore rented the larger house, though he was never the ratepayer (A). ⁴⁶ CJ xlii. –; Morning Chronicle, Jan. (PH xxvi. –). ⁴⁷ CJ xlii. ; London Chronicle, – Jan. . ⁴⁸ Lambert, lviii. –; Public Advertiser, Feb. ; Gazetteer, Feb. .
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F. . The Gerrard Street Area, from Richard Horwood’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (–). No. 34 is opposite Macclesfield Street.
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On February, Sheridan moved the adoption of the charge with an epic speech of five hours and forty minutes, universally praised as the finest speech ever delivered in the Commons. Two tributes will stand for many. Especially remarkable is that of Nathaniel Wraxall, one of Hastings’s firmest supporters. In his Memoirs, he remembered the speech as ‘the most splendid display of eloquence and talent which has been exhibited in the House of Commons during the present reign . . . Never was the triumph of genius over a popular assembly more signally displayed.’⁴⁹ From the other side, Sir Gilbert Elliot, writing to his wife the day after the speech, described it as ‘by many degrees the most excellent and astonishing performance I ever heard’, even surpassing ‘all I ever imagined possible in eloquence and ability’. Such was the ‘universal sense of all who heard it’. Sheridan ‘surpassed, I think, Pitt, Fox, and even Burke, in his finest and most brilliant orations’.⁵⁰ Many more such testimonies could be cited.⁵¹ The printed reports of Sheridan’s great speech preserve only faint traces of the magic that enthralled its auditors.⁵² Nevertheless, they permit some estimate of the probable grounds of Elliot’s judgement that Sheridan exceeded Burke at his best. Three reasons can be assigned for Sheridan’s extraordinary success: his subject matter; his style; and his delivery. Quick to appreciate the opportunities for rhetorical display offered by the Begums charge, Sheridan had ‘warmed with a sort of love passion to our Begums’, as Burke reported to Francis (c. Jan. : C v. ). To warm himself was the first step to warm others. Of all the charges, this has the richest narrative and the most opportunities for pathos. The interest of the story (greed in pursuit of treasure) is universal, unembarrassed by any local peculiarities. The plot (persecution of innocent women by diabolical men) is easy to follow, morally unambiguous, and replete with emotive appeal. The characters are the instantly recognizable stereotypes of melodrama and romance: black-hearted villains on the one side; suffering, innocent women on the other. Sheridan presented this material in a highly polished style. Many of his key points were structured with antithesis, parallelism, or tricolon (a series of three parallel clauses, the last often climactic), making them readily memorable. Even the ⁴⁹ Nathaniel William Wraxall, Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London, ), iv. –. ⁵⁰ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Feb. (Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, ed. Lady Minto (London, ), i. –). ⁵¹ Horace Walpole to Lady Ossory, Feb. (YWC xxxiii. ); Gentleman’s Magazine, (March ), –. Sir William Dolben was inspired to imitate Sheridan’s style: ‘the most perfect in point of arrangement of the Heads of Accusation, the most acute & penetrating in point of Investigation, the most severe & piercing in point of Satire, & the most brilliant & affecting in point of Oratory & Elocution that I believe was ever deliver’d in Parliament’; to John English Dolben, Feb. (NRO Dolben (Finedon) Papers, ). ⁵² The two fullest contemporary sources are The Genuine Speech of Mr Sheridan [etc.] (nd edn. London, []; printed for W. Richardson) and Speech of R. B. Sheridan, Esq. [etc.] (nd edn. London, ; printed for J. French). Both are much longer than the newspaper reports.
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brief newspaper reports are enlivened with striking passages that stuck in the reporter’s memory. The effectiveness and persuasive power of these schemes derives from the satisfying fulfilment of an expectation, as in the heroic couplet. Two examples of tricolon will illustrate the technique. The subject is Hastings’s mistreatment of the Begums: It was no resentment against the impotent efforts of two old women; no paroxysm of public spirit from the seditions that distinguished their councils, no violent passion for the laws of Mahomet, that fired him on this occasion to hurl all the terrors of Government against the Zenana . . . Still he recurs to Mahommedism for an excuse, as if there were something in the institutions of Mahomet, that made it meritorious in a Christian to be a savage; that rendered it criminal to treat the inhabitants of India with humanity or mercy; that even made it impious in a son not to plunder his mother.⁵³
Such highly structured passages create the sense of an authoritative speaker in perfect control of his material. Burke was rarely so schematic.⁵⁴ Even in his pamphlets, and pre-eminently the Reflections, he achieves the sense of a speaking voice. In the Commons, eschewing the polished, aphoristic correctness that ‘Junius’ had cultivated and that Sheridan favoured, Burke spoke in a more natural, even slightly ragged style. Wraxall, for example, thought Burke’s ‘rapid transitions from indignation or invective to raillery or levity’ betrayed a mind ‘borne away by an ardent imagination that often outran his reason’, while Sheridan’s passages of pathos, though ‘clothed with all the garb of nature or of passion’, were still manifestly ‘the fruit of consummate art and mature reflection’. Wraxall’s highest praise was that Sheridan ‘neither lost his temper, his memory, nor his judgment throughout the whole performance’.⁵⁵ Burke was often criticized for loss of temper and lack of judgement. Finally, Sheridan’s delivery was undoubtedly superior to Burke’s. Possessed of a mellifluous and beguiling voice, he had received some training from his father, a professional elocutionist. Most contemporary comments remark on the power of his voice. Burke was handicapped by an Irish brogue that he never attempted to eradicate.⁵⁶ Sheridan’s success, then, was the deserved result of a happy combination of sensational subject matter, a highly wrought style, and graceful delivery. On its quality as a performance, the verdict of those who heard it is decisive. Yet the disparity between that verdict and the judgement of posterity remains greater than the mere loss of Sheridan’s voice and gestures can explain.
⁵³ The Genuine Speech of Mr Sheridan, , (emphasis added). ⁵⁴ Even in the more carefully structured prose of E.B.’s later writings, his use of rhetorical schemes is less obtrusive than Sheridan’s. ⁵⁵ Wraxall, Memoirs, iv. . ⁵⁶ Wraxall contrasted Sheridan’s ‘singularly mellifluous’ voice with E.B.’s ‘unpleasant Irish accent’ (Memoirs, iii. ).
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Burke’s speeches have been read and enjoyed by many generations. The increasing remoteness of their subject matter has not dimmed their appeal. Burke possessed the more philosophical mind, and habitually enriched his speeches with what even a hostile modern critic has called ‘generalizations on human conduct of lasting value’.⁵⁷ This power of generalization has elevated Burke into the select pantheon of orators whose speeches have outlived them. On the evidence of the reports, Sheridan kept closely to his topic, rarely digressing or generalizing. Sheridan himself, conscious of how much its effect depended on his delivery, never published his great speech. This was surely an admission that, in print, he shrank from inviting comparisons with Burke. His biographer, Thomas Moore (–), commended this caution, as leaving to posterity ‘dreams of the eloquence that could produce such effects’ with no risk of perusal producing disenchantment.⁵⁸ Burke’s remain the only English speeches that, like those of Demosthenes and Cicero, are still read with profit and pleasure. Sheridan held his audience’s attention for about five and a half hours, concluding with a peroration which ‘worked the House up into such a paroxysm of passionate enthusiasm on the subject, and of admiration for him, that the moment he sat down there was a universal shout, nay even clapping, for half-a-second’.⁵⁹ Since clapping was unprecedented in the Commons, this spontaneous reaction suggests some confusion in the minds of the audience about whether they were in the theatre or the senate. The burst of applause that sealed Sheridan’s triumph was followed by a few moments of silence. Who would have the temerity to answer such a speech? Major Scott, indefatigable and irrepressible, was the most likely conjecture. Scott had been taking notes while Sheridan spoke, but did not venture to rise. Instead, into the breach rushed a new member, James Bland Burges (–), who had taken his seat as recently as January and who had yet to speak. Burges was at least an independent. Though he soon became a close friend, at this time he had yet to meet Hastings. He was impelled, so he claimed, by a disinterested desire to see justice done to a national hero. Less noble motives also played a part, for Burges was ambitious to shine in Parliament and rated his own abilities highly. By challenging Sheridan after such an oration, he hoped to make an immediate mark.⁶⁰ The decision was no sudden thought, for he began with a manifestly rehearsed, pompous, self-congratulatory exordium, and his speech shows that he had studied the question carefully. After exculpating and even praising Hastings at some length, sensing that his audience ⁵⁷ John Brooke, in The House of Commons, –, ed. Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke (London, ), ii. . ⁵⁸ Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, ), –. ⁵⁹ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Feb. (Life and Letters, i. ). ⁶⁰ London Chronicle, Jan.- Feb. .
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was unreceptive, he cut short his speech with a promise to take up the thread on a more propitious occasion.⁶¹ For the next three years, until he lost his seat at the election, he would prove one of the most pertinacious of Hastings’s supporters. After the fiasco of Burges’s speech, two of Hastings’s friends proposed to adjourn. Fox scouted the idea, and Major Scott, too, wanted to proceed, intending to launch into one of his lengthy panegyrics of his patron. After Pitt spoke decisively in favour of deferral, however, an adjournment was agreed without a division.⁶² When the debate was resumed on February, Scott delivered his expected eulogy of Hastings. Most of the facts he could not deny. He therefore stressed the dangerous threats to the British power which Hastings had faced, and his resourcefulness in overcoming them. For whatever severities had been used, however, Hastings was not responsible. Pitt, while as usual critical of the amount of extraneous matter in the charge, proved far more hostile to Hastings than he had been in the Benares debate. Identifying the resumption of the Begums’ jagirs and the seizure of their treasure as the two salient points, he condemned Hastings on both counts. When the committee divided, they found impeachable matter in the charge by to .⁶³ The combination of Sheridan’s oratory and Pitt’s authority proved irresistible. Burke (who had not spoken during the debate) felt justified. Whatever the final outcome, two of the weightiest charges had been approved by comfortable margins. The case against Hastings could no longer be dismissed as a figment of his imagination. As he acknowledged to the House on February, ‘they had relieved him of a terrible load which lay on his mind’.⁶⁴ A recurrent theme in the impeachment and trial of Hastings is an incongruous alternation between high-flown rhetoric and procedural technicalities, between appeals to the principles of eternal justice and legalistic quibbles about the rules of evidence. The debate on the Begums of Oudh exemplifies one side of the contrast. The Commons had shown itself responsive to a case argued in the highest moral terms, while the defence had proved shuffling and evasive. Burke hoped to capitalize on the mood induced by Sheridan’s triumph to secure an immediate vote for an impeachment. On February, he floated the suggestion that the House should notify the Lords that an impeachment had been determined, and that articles were in preparation. Pitt was frosty, reminding Burke that all the proceedings to date had been in a committee. Only when they were reported could the House itself come to any decision. Did Burke intend to abandon the remaining articles, and rest a
⁶¹ PH xxvi. –. ⁶² Morning Chronicle, Feb. (PH xxvi. –). ⁶³ PH xxvi. –. ⁶⁴ The World, Feb. . The expression does not occur in the longer report from the Morning Chronicle, repr. in WS vi. –.
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decision on those already decided? Burke certainly did not.⁶⁵ On the following day, prior to examining Sir Elijah Impey, the propriety of interrogating him while he was himself threatened with impeachment was questioned. Scenting a move to screen Impey, Burke vented his fury in some gratuitously offensive remarks aimed at Pitt. If Pitt, he supposed, were to be impeached, ‘either for corruption in office, for peculation, or even for the French Treaty, the Secretaries and his other colleagues might be called on for evidence, though they might themselves be afterwards impeached’. This was, as another reporter commented, ‘putting the hypothetical case rather strongly’. Pitt, however, did not rise to the provocation, coolly agreeing with Burke’s doctrine.⁶⁶ The impeachment also had to compete for parliamentary time with other, if in Burke’s view less momentous, subjects. On February, Burke was again annoyed when George Dempster (–) tried to secure priority for a petition he was sponsoring against the judicial provisions of Pitt’s India Act. Since Dempster was one of Hastings’s firmest supporters, Burke, ever quick to suspect sabotage, interpreted his move as a delaying tactic. But when even Thomas Pelham (–), who was to move the charge, admitted that he was not yet master of the evidence, Pitt intervened in favour of a postponement.⁶⁷ By the end of February, then, no progress had been made since the debate on the Begums. During March, however, the pace quickened. Three more charges were opened. Conscious that they could not compete with Sheridan, the movers eschewed rhetorical display and concentrated on businesslike exposition. On March, Pelham opened the Farrukhabad charge, ‘very flatly’.⁶⁸ In , the British had guaranteed a treaty between the Wazir of Oudh and his dependant, the Nawab of Farrukhabad. One of the provisions of the Treaty of Chunar was the effective withdrawal of this guarantee. Major Scott was driven to rest his defence chiefly on the ground of ‘state necessity’. Dundas minimized the importance of the charge, and doubted whether it should go to the Lords. But he would vote for it, as Scott’s ‘necessity’ had not been proved. For once, the voluble and resourceful Scott confessed himself unable to answer an argument. Burke spoke only briefly, and mainly to rebut Dundas’s trivialization of the charge. Hastings’s crimes, he argued, were ‘complicated’, each ‘of a most heinous nature, each serving to throw light upon and prove the other’. Burke’s belief in this ‘system’ of iniquity explains why he was so unwilling to drop any charge or circumstance. To select a few egregious offences would misrepresent the whole. The most telling speech against Hastings, however, came from Pitt. Lord Hood ⁶⁵ ⁶⁶ ⁶⁷ ⁶⁸
Morning Chronicle, Feb. (PH xxvi. –); WS vi. –. Public Advertiser, Feb. ; Morning Chronicle, Feb. Morning Chronicle, Feb. . Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Mar. (Life and Letters, i. ).
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(–) had entered a heartfelt plea on behalf of holders of responsible positions in difficult situations. Hood was a popular naval hero: he had topped the poll at the Westminster election, when Fox and Sir Cecil Wray had struggled for second place. A ministerial spokesman on naval affairs, he rarely spoke out of his profession. Further, his argument was not that Hastings had never erred, but that upon the whole he had served his country well. Such a speech carried weight. One such tribute from an independent mind was worth a dozen of Major Scott’s laboured panegyrics. Pitt chose to demolish it. While paying a glowing tribute to Hood himself, Pitt refuted his argument. Hastings was not in a position analogous to a military commander. In any case, Hastings had thought proper to disclaim the ‘set-off ’ argument. His general merits could not, at this stage, be weighed against specific crimes. The charge was easily approved by to .⁶⁹ On March, Sir James Erskine (–), who since his election in had established himself as one of the most promising new speakers on the opposition side, opened the composite Contracts charge, combined from four of the original articles.⁷⁰ His province, he admitted, was ‘dry and unentertaining’, but not less important than the more sensational charges. Even a plain exposition of the dozen different charges embraced under this article took four and a half hours. The debate produced an exchange between Pitt and Burke that illustrates how differently they viewed the prosecution. From the first, Pitt had objected to Burke’s diffuse charges. Now, he appealed to the promoters of the impeachment not to ‘clog it with useless, unnecessary, and impracticable matter’. After reviewing each of the various heads of charge that Erskine had outlined, he proposed an amendment, restricting the charge to the three he regarded as truly criminal: the Bullock contract, the augmentation of Sir Eyre Coote’s salary, and Stephen Sulivan’s opium contract. Speaking with a confident grasp of detail, he sought to create an impression of informed neutrality by sorting the wheat from the chaff in Burke’s charge. Burke, for his part, was unaccommodating. Comparing himself to the master of a ship reduced to throwing some of his cargo overboard, he professed himself unable to decide what to discard. Admitting that the charge was ‘multifarious’, he argued that only by such an accumulation of examples could he show that Hastings’s administration was a ‘system’ of prodigality and corruption. He therefore moved an amendment to Pitt’s amendment, to restore all the contracts Pitt had wanted to omit. By this time attendance had waned, and Burke’s amendment was carried by the closest margin in the whole session, to . Even fewer members stayed for the main question. As amended, this was carried at a.m. by to , the lowest ⁶⁹ Debrett, xxi. – (PH xxvi. –). ⁷⁰ The Contracts charge proper (No. ), together with the Surgeon-General’s (No. ), the Burdwan pulbandi (No. ), and the opium contracts (No. ).
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vote of the series.⁷¹ By allowing himself to be outvoted, Pitt ostentatiously showed that he had no intention of ‘screening’ Hastings, even against charges which he personally regarded as unfounded. On March, Windham opened the twenty-second article, relating to Faizullah Khan. Rhetorically unambitious, he was content, as Erskine had been, to summarize the charge. Faizullah Khan, like the Nawab of Farrukhabad, was an ally whom Hastings had wantonly betrayed. Scott was reduced to the vaguest of defences, taking refuge in general topics of praise. One of these was that ‘temples had been erected to the honour of Mr Hastings at Benares’.⁷² Burke played on the idea of such temples in a passage of witty extemporization: he well knew that there were temples dedicated in India to two very different sorts of divinities,—to Brama and Wisnow, the good and guardian deities, to whom the natives returned thanks for the benefits they received,—and to Rudor, the evil spirit, whose unwearied enmity and malign influence they earnestly deprecated. Whether Mr Hastings was most likely to have been worshipped in the latter or the former character, that committee might be at no great loss to guess; or, perhaps, the temple in question might be a temple of gratitude, in which the Indians offered up their hearty thanks to their guardian deities, for having delivered them from a monster, under whose persecuting spirit they had suffered so much.⁷³
This passage admirably illustrates one of Dr Johnson’s tributes: to the ‘great knowledge, great fluency of words, and great promptness of ideas’ that enabled Burke to ‘speak with great illustration on any subject’.⁷⁴ The charge was approved by to .⁷⁵ Concurrently with the debates on the charges themselves, the often unseemly wrangling about procedure and evidence continued. On March, Burke complained that some of the papers that he wanted were being withheld, and that Major Scott appeared to be receiving preferential treatment at India House.⁷⁶ (Scott may simply have been better informed about what to request.) On March, Burke wrote to John Michie (d. ), the chairman of the company, drawing attention to ‘many gaps’ in the correspondence from Bengal, and asking for the recovery of the missing letters (C v. –). The reply he received was most unhelpful. Michie asked Burke to ‘point out what Papers you conceive to have been withheld’ ( Mar. : ). On March, immediately preceding the debate on Faizullah Khan, a discussion
⁷¹ Morning Chronicle, Mar. (PH xxvi. –); London Chronicle, – Mar. . ⁷² PH xxvi. –. ⁷³ Ibid. . E.B.’s ‘Brama’, ‘Wisnow’, and ‘Rudor’ are Bramah, Vishnu, and Rudra (one of the names of Shiva) respectively. ⁷⁴ Sept. (Boswell’s Tour, in Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, –), v. –). ⁷⁵ PH xxvi. . ⁷⁶ Morning Chronicle, Mar. (PH xxvi. –).
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about procedure again exposed a rift between the ministers and the opposition. Dundas complained that too many papers were being demanded, and urged Burke to report the articles already approved, so that legal advice could be taken about putting them into a more proper shape. Burke protested that he had never moved for a trivial or unnecessary paper. As for the form of the articles, he professed himself eager that they should go to the Lords in ‘a shape regular, complete, formal, and perfect’. He would certainly not trust so crucial a matter ‘to so weak, uninformed, immature, and incompetent a head and understanding as his own’.⁷⁷ This was one of Burke’s most patently insincere self-abnegations. He would strenuously resist the attempt by Dundas and Pitt to have the articles recast in more strictly legal form. At the end of the day, when the Faizullah Khan charge had been approved, a further procedural step was taken: the committee’s resolutions were to be reported to the House on April.⁷⁸ This decision provoked an overt attempt by the Hastings camp to delay proceedings, moved by J. J. Hamilton on March. Burke made a ‘warm’ speech, amply fortified with precedents, denying undue haste. He need not have worried. Pitt, Dundas, and Grenville spoke against postponement, and Hamilton withdrew his motion.⁷⁹ On April, there were again two debates on the impeachment, one substantive, the other procedural. In the first, Sheridan opened the Presents charge. Conscious that he could not repeat his triumph of February, Sheridan followed the example of Pelham, Erskine, and Windham, and trusted more to exposition than to rhetoric. He also kept his speech comparatively brief (two hours). The ensuing debate was one-sided. Scott, of course, came loyally to Hastings’s defence. Admitting that Hastings had indeed received the various sums, he claimed that they had all been applied to the company’s service. But his interpretation of the clause of North’s India Act that prohibited the receipt of presents was too strained to be convincing, even to those who were eager to acquit Hastings. There were, besides, more suspicious circumstances than could credibly be explained as careless bookkeeping. Lord Mulgrave (–), a member of the Board of Control known to regard Hastings favourably, rose to rescue him from the ‘shabby species of defence’ that Scott had advanced. Much as he approved and applauded many parts of Hastings’s conduct, he could not condone the doctrine that justified taking ‘presents’ under false pretences. Even Grenville, who had defended Hastings on the Benares charge, condemned the taking of presents. Burke did not speak. With revived attendance, perhaps to hear Sheridan even on a more prosaic subject, the article was approved by to , the largest majority on any charge.⁸⁰ ⁷⁷ PH xxvi. –. ⁷⁸ Ibid. –; CJ xlii. . ⁷⁹ Morning Chronicle, Mar. ; Debrett, xxi. –. ⁸⁰ Morning Chronicle, Apr. (PH xxvi. –). PH is fuller for Grenville’s speech.
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When this vote had been taken, Pitt proposed to report the resolutions of the committee at once to the House. Scott and other supporters of Hastings wanted to defer the report till the following day. George Dempster asked Pitt whether he intended his motion to be followed by an immediate vote to impeach. Pitt thought not. After repeating his objections to the diffuse form of the Articles of Charge, he proposed to refer the resolutions to another committee, which would frame articles on which the House would then vote. Impelled as usual to disagree with Pitt, Fox advocated an immediate, simple resolution: ‘That Warren Hastings, esq. be impeached’. If passed, this should be communicated to the Lords, together with notice that articles were in preparation. Burke had advocated a similar course on February. Now, however, though he had not changed his mind, for the sake of unanimity he agreed to Pitt’s proposal. With pardonable pride, Burke lauded the impeachment as a cause that had inspired a ‘display of all the finer powers of the human understanding’. Never one to eschew hyperbole, he even detected a ‘softening almost into a common bond of union the hitherto obdurate hearts of violently contending politicians; sheathing the sword of embattled party, and lowering its hostile front’. The first claim is truer than the second. Burke knew as well as anyone that hearts had not been softened nor swords sheathed. Though their aims sometimes coincided, Fox and Pitt each sought to exploit the impeachment for his own advantage. The debate ended tamely, with a decision to resume the subject next day.⁸¹ How little unanimity really prevailed became apparent when the adjourned debate was resumed. Major Scott announced that he would defer his further defence of Hastings until the actual vote for impeachment. Sheridan, assuming that Scott intended to offer some kind of ‘set-off ’ argument, challenged him to say now whatever he had to say. Pitt in turn attacked Sheridan for presuming to dictate to another member the stage at which a measure should be opposed. Burke protested against the idea of a ‘set-off ’, a notion which Scott, too, indignantly repudiated. In his view, Hastings had committed no crimes against which his undoubted virtues and achievements needed to be balanced. Fox agreed with Sheridan that Scott should speak now, and protested against referring the charges to a committee. Dundas defended Pitt’s refusal to commit himself, and attacked Fox for not giving up his personal opinion for the sake of unanimity. The old animosities were as potent as ever. Even so, the six resolutions, finding impeachable matter in each charge examined during , were approved without a division.⁸² Recognizing their weakness, the friends of Hastings did not venture to divide the House.
⁸¹ CJ xlii. –. Morning Chronicle, Apr. (PH xxvi. –); WS vi. –. ⁸² Morning Chronicle, Apr. (PH xxvi. –); WS vi. –. CJ xlii. .
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After the resolutions had been approved, Burke moved for a committee to frame Articles of Impeachment. The twenty members he proposed were approved without opposition, except in the case of Philip Francis. In , Francis had claimed that all enmity between Hastings and himself was at an end.⁸³ Burke may have believed him, but few others did. Manifestly continuing the personal vendetta that had begun in Calcutta, Francis incurred widespread censure and distrust. Even his allies were conscious of this, for the opening of the Revenue charge was deferred until after the vote on the impeachment. The Presents charge, moved by Sheridan, was brought forward instead.⁸⁴ Pitt was particularly incensed by one of Francis’s machinations. Captain Thomas Mercer had been summoned before the committee on March, and examined about his unsuccessful bid for the opium contract. His appearance seemed no more than a pretext for receiving into evidence a letter from him to Francis, written on March, full of severe reflections on Hastings. Pitt regarded these as libellous, and in the procedural debate on March he accused Francis of manufacturing evidence.⁸⁵ Despite this hostility, when the House divided on April, the nomination of Francis was approved by to .⁸⁶ On this occasion, the friends of Francis were better organized than his enemies. In December, the vote would be reversed. Despite strenuous efforts on Burke’s part, Francis would be permanently excluded. A committee of twenty may seem unduly cumbrous, but was in keeping with parliamentary practice. Nineteen members sat on the committee that drew up the articles against Lord Macclesfield in .⁸⁷ Like most committees, Burke’s was a heterogeneous group. The most eminent were Burke, Fox, and Francis (the prime movers of the impeachment), and Sheridan, recruited for his rhetorical skills. Several others had served on the Select Committee of – with Burke: Sir Gilbert Elliot; Dudley Long; Frederick Montagu (–), an old Rockinghamite; and Thomas Pelham. General John Burgoyne (–) had earlier chaired the Select Committee on the East India Company and taken the lead in the proceedings against Clive in . By one of those twists so characteristic of the shifting politics of the time, he and Burke had then taken opposite sides.⁸⁸ Three other members of the committee were young friends of Fox: Charles Grey (–), later the architect of the Reform Bill of ; Lord Maitland; and St Andrew ⁸³ In the debate on Pitt’s motion for leave to introduce his India Bill, July (PH xxiv. ). ⁸⁴ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Mar. (Life and Letters, i. ). Sir Gilbert thought the ‘prejudice’ against Francis unjust. ⁸⁵ Lambert, lviii. – ( Mar.). Morning Chronicle, Mar. (PH xxvi. –). ⁸⁶ CJ xlii. . ⁸⁷ CJ xx. ( Feb. ). The size of impeachment committees varied: seventeen in the case of Henry Sacheverell (CJ xvi. –, Dec. ), only twelve for Lord Lovat (CJ xxv. , Dec. ). ⁸⁸ Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, ), –, –.
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St John (–). Sir James Erskine and William Windham were protégés of Burke. Since one of the aims of the impeachment was to vindicate the Coalition, some members were introduced to represent North’s wing: William Adam (–), who had actually fought a duel with Fox before becoming his friend; Sir Grey Cooper; the veteran Welbore Ellis (–); and George Augustus North (–), Lord North’s eldest son. The remaining two members were both lawyers. John Anstruther (–) had connections with North. In , in the Court of Proprietors, he had spoken against the recall of Hastings. When elected to Parliament in , however, he had supported the Coalition and Fox’s India Bill. His change of attitude to Hastings can be attributed to his joining the Coalition. Conversely, Michael Angelo Taylor (c.–), had been a Pittite before his involvement with the impeachment. As with most committees, the real work was done by an inner group. Even Sheridan, for example, while eager to display his rhetorical talents in the Commons, absented himself from the tedious business of revising the articles. This emerged amusingly on April, in a debate on the budget. When Sheridan questioned whether the East India Company would be able to pay the government the £, which Pitt expected, Dundas and Grenville accused him of abusing his position as a member of the impeachment committee (which met at East India House, the company’s headquarters in Leadenhall Street) to obtain confidential information. Burke came humorously yet insidiously to Sheridan’s defence. Far from exploiting his membership of the committee to ransack the company’s records for any improper purpose, Sheridan had only attended once, and then for half an hour. Since Sheridan was notoriously averse to application, and no one could imagine him poring over the minutiae of the charges, this drew a ‘hearty laugh’.⁸⁹ Burke’s pretended exculpation manifested his resentment that Sheridan, while prepared to work hard at a speech which would bring him personal kudos, was unwilling to share in the drudgery of revising the articles. The vote for impeachment taken, Francis could open the Revenue charge without jeopardizing the cause. This he did on April. Before entering on the charge itself, he offered a lengthy, defiant, and sophistical defence of his own conduct and motives. Perhaps he had better left the matter alone, for his arrogant self-righteousness was more likely to alienate than to convince. On the charge itself, Francis, like Erskine, had to deal with matter that he himself called ‘dull and intricate’. His speech provided a detailed if prejudiced history of Hastings’s administration of the Bengal revenues. The facts were hardly in dispute: Hastings’s own defence was ‘a justification, not a denial’. One ⁸⁹ Morning Chronicle, Apr. ; The World, Apr.
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crucial point, however, was controverted: what was the nature and status of a zemindar? Opinions were divided between two main theories. Some regarded the zemindars as ‘proprietors’ in something like the European sense. Francis espoused this view. Others took them to be government-appointed revenue collectors, whose positions had become hereditary in practice but not in right. Pitt argued that the exact nature of zemindari tenure was too perplexed to be the foundation of a criminal charge. Charles Boughton Rouse (–), who had served in India and who was now secretary to the Board of Control, offered a cautious and qualified expert opinion. This provoked Burke, armed with a folio volume of evidence given to the Select Committee in –, to rise in contradiction, reading the evidence that Rouse had given in , before his appointment to the board. On zemindari tenure, Burke was a firm believer in the theory advanced by Francis. Setting aside the question of the zemindars, however, Pitt further denied that Hastings’s successive changes of system, considering the unsettled state of the times, were criminal, unless there should appear evidence of ‘unfair and corrupt motives’. The only part of the article that he regarded as criminating was the receipt of ‘presents’ in connection with the revenue settlement of , and this was charged elsewhere. Yet as with the Contracts article, Pitt allowed himself to be outvoted, and the charge was approved by to .⁹⁰ On April, Burke submitted the first six of his Articles of Impeachment.⁹¹ That the impeachment would go to the Lords now appeared inevitable. Yet the Hastings camp mounted one last challenge. On May, the first six articles received their second reading. This provided a final opportunity to advance a general defence, weighing general merits against particular accusations. The debate was curiously unbalanced. Of thirteen speakers, eight opposed sending the impeachment to the Lords. The commonest argument was that, whatever his faults and errors, Hastings had preserved Britain’s empire in India. Pitt made the only substantive speech against Hastings, repudiating the ‘set-off ’ argument and arguing that, having passed so many articles, the Commons could not now retreat without sacrificing honour and consistency. On this occasion, his intervention was decisive. The silent majority followed his lead. The second reading of the articles was ⁹⁰ PH xxvi. –. Francis was an expert, if an opinionated one (Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris, ), esp. –). The opposing view (the zemindars as revenue collectors) was maintained by Harry Verelst, A View of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the English Government in Bengal (London, ), , ; John Scott, A Letter to the Right Honourable Charles James Fox on the Extraneous Matter Contained in Mr Burke’s Speeches (nd edn. London, ), –; and James Grant, An Inquiry into the Nature of Zemindary Tenures in the Landed Property of Bengal (nd edn. London, ). Rouse’s earlier evidence is printed in the Sixth Report, submitted on July (Lambert, cxxxix. ). He later wrote a monograph on the subject, A Dissertation Concerning the Landed Property of Bengal (London, ), a copy of which he sent to E.B. ( Apr. : WWM Bk P /). ⁹¹ Morning Chronicle, Apr. (Debrett, xxii. –). CJ xlii. –.
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approved by the comfortable margin of to , and the first article was endorsed with minor amendments.⁹² On May, after the next five articles had been approved, Burke formally moved that Hastings be impeached. Two friends of Hastings spoke against the motion, but did not divide the House. Scott ostentatiously voted for the impeachment, ‘as the means by which the honour of Mr Hastings will be fully cleared’. Frederick Montagu then moved that Burke immediately carry the resolution to the bar of the House of Lords. The Lords were hearing legal evidence when, at about ., Black Rod announced a message from the Commons. The Lord Chancellor walked to the bar, where Burke was introduced. Attended by a retinue of about sixty members, he approached the bar ‘with great solemnity’ and addressed Thurlow: My Lord Chancellor, I am authorised by the Commons of Great Britain to impeach Warren Hastings, Esq; late Governor General of Bengal at the Bar of this House, with having committed divers High Crimes and Misdemeanours in his character of Governor General of Bengal; and I am further authorised to inform your Lordships, that the Commons will most readily join in every measure that may be necessary to bring the said impeachment to a speedy decision.
While the words were formulaic, the solemn moment when he delivered the vote of the Commons to the Lord Chancellor was one of the triumphs of Burke’s career. The encounter between Thurlow and Burke was piquant, since Thurlow was known to be one of Hastings’s staunchest supporters. In retrospect, Burke’s reference to ‘a speedy decision’ would also prove ironic. After the deputation had withdrawn, Thurlow formally read the message to the assembly. The Lords then returned to more mundane business, the third reading of a drainage and enclosure bill.⁹³ All was not quite over, however. On May, Burke carried his first six articles to the Lords. On the same day, he submitted a further thirteen to the Commons. These derived from the original sixteenth Article of Charge (Misdemeanours in Oudh). They were approved without a division and almost without debate.⁹⁴ Subsequently, Major Scott would often complain of the scant attention paid to these last articles.⁹⁵ Thus, of the original twentytwo articles, one had been rejected (the Rohilla War), nine approved, and no fewer than twelve abandoned.⁹⁶ On May, Burke moved that Hastings be ⁹² Morning Chronicle, May (PH xxvi. –). ⁹³ CJ xlii. –. LJ xxxvii. . Debrett, xxii. –. London Chronicle, – May . On May, E.B. also submitted article to the Commons, where it was approved on the th (CJ xlii. –, ). On the st, he carried it to the Lords (LJ xxxvii. –). ⁹⁴ LJ xxxvii. –. Morning Chronicle, May (PH xxvi. –). ⁹⁵ Gazetteer, Feb. ; in the Commons, May , Feb. (PH xxviii. , ). ⁹⁶ The charges abandoned were nos. (Shah Alum), (Raja of Salon), (Refusal to Resign), (Surgeon-General’s Contract), (pulbandi Contract), (Richard Sulivan’s Appointments), (Rana of
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taken into custody. This was a less dramatic moment than it sounds, for Hastings was waiting to be arrested and taken to the Lords, where he was soon bailed.⁹⁷ On May, Burke carried the last thirteen articles to the Lords. The same day, Parliament was prorogued.⁹⁸ The initiative had now passed to the House of Lords. Burke was pleased. ‘Here our Caravan may take up its rest for a while,’ he told Thomas Burgh, ‘and our Camels may unload and drink’ ( July : C v. ). The image would prove apt, though Burke can have had no notion of how long, dry, and exhausting a trek through the desert lay ahead. In , India had absorbed Burke’s parliamentary energies to the exclusion of all else. In , while India remained his preoccupation, he found time to speak on a few other issues, of which the most noteworthy was the commercial treaty with France. This was certainly not a vintage year for Burke as an orator. Yet several of his speeches are of great psychological interest, exposing raw emotions and revealing a disturbed state of mind. Evidence of his ungovernable temper, the volcanic Burke who is often edited out of the marmoreal record of his rhetorical masterpieces, is to be found in his less guarded parliamentary moments. In these speeches, his feelings of anger and frustration found therapeutic ventilation. One of the provisions of the Treaty ofVersailles of had mandated the negotiation of commercial treaties between Britain and France and between Britain and Spain. Pitt thus inherited an excellent opportunity to put his economic ideas into practice. As a disciple of Adam Smith, he favoured the dismantling of trade barriers. In , he opened several negotiations, of which that with France was the most important.⁹⁹ France was Britain’s traditional enemy and principal economic rival. Hitherto, these considerations had prevented closer trading relations. The commercial treaty negotiated by the francophile Viscount Bolingbroke in conjointly with the Peace of Utrecht had been rejected by a House of Commons prejudiced against France and against free trade.¹⁰⁰ Pitt was therefore breaking new ground. To negotiate the treaty, he was fortunate in securing a new recruit, William Eden. Gohad), (Mohammad Reza Khan), (Shah Alum and the Marathas), (Libel on the Directors), (Maratha War), and (Suppression of Correspondence). ⁹⁷ The World, May (PH xxvi. –). ⁹⁸ LJ xxxvii. –; CJ xlii. . ⁹⁹ John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, –), i. –. ¹⁰⁰ D. C. Coleman, ‘Politics and Economics in the Age of Anne: The Case of the Anglo-French Trade Treaty of ’, Trade, Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial England, ed. D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (London, ), –.
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A junior minister under North, Eden had subsequently served in the Coalition, and in he had been a vocal opponent of Pitt’s Irish Propositions. Eden was Burke’s antitype: a man of ability who preferred not to waste his talents in fruitless opposition. As a renegade from the opposition, Eden desperately needed to succeed. Appointed in December , he spent some months of intensive preparatory study in London before leaving for France at the end of March . Since the French, for reasons of their own, were also anxious to secure a treaty, agreement was reached, rapidly by diplomatic standards, and signed at Versailles on September. The principal terms were reduced duties on French wines and brandies (but not silks) imported into Britain, and on most British manufactures imported into France. Given the acknowledged superiority of British industry, the treaty was expected to favour Britain. French approval was widely attributed to political rather than strictly commercial considerations.¹⁰¹ On the British side, the treaty needed to be approved by Parliament, to which it was duly submitted on January .¹⁰² The opposition was placed in a difficult position. Distaste for any measure originated by Pitt was exacerbated by repugnance towards Eden as a renegade. Yet to criticize the treaty was not easy. To all appearance, its provisions were to Britain’s advantage. Some mercantile interests protested, but commercial hostility was much less than had been provoked by Pitt’s Irish Propositions.¹⁰³ The main arguments available to the opposition were that it would prove injurious to the trade with Portugal, Britain’s oldest ally; and that closer commercial relations with France, her leading enemy and rival, might have dangerous political consequences in the longer term. Since approval of the treaty was a foregone conclusion, the six lengthy debates on the subject served chiefly as a forum for sparring between the ministry and the opposition.¹⁰⁴ Burke’s two speeches on the treaty provide a striking contrast of mood and tone. The first was delivered on February, technically on Pitt’s motion for a committee to consider the treaty on the th. In substance, of course, the debate canvassed the treaty itself. Burke made what one reporter called a ‘long and rather an extraordinary speech’. After opening with one of the standard topics of opposition, that the treaty should not be judged merely as a commercial arrangement, he drew a contrast between ‘men of narrow minds’ (such as Pitt), whose contracted views ‘converted large cities into small villages’, and those of ‘a more noble and more liberal way of thinking’ who
¹⁰¹ John Ehrman, The British Government and Commercial Negotiations with Europe, – (Cambridge, ), –; and The Younger Pitt, i. –. ¹⁰² CJ xlii. – (PH xxvi. –). ¹⁰³ Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, i. –. ¹⁰⁴ The debates took place on , , , , , and Feb. (PH xxvi. –, –). In addition, the debate on Jan. on the trade with Portugal, in which E.B. spoke, was part of the opposition campaign against the French treaty; Morning Chronicle, Jan. (PH xxvi. –).
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‘changed small villages into great cities’.¹⁰⁵ This was a familiar Burkean antithesis. He had employed nearly the same contrast in , in an attack on Sir William Bagot (–).¹⁰⁶ Lacking effective ammunition against the treaty itself, however, Burke turned to more congenial themes, an emotive defence of opposition and a personal attack on Pitt. Pouncing on Pitt’s remark that he had not much relished his short stint out of office, Burke retorted that the opposition side was indeed a very disagreeable part of the House to be seated in; it has all the evils of the low lands of Essex; the air on this side the House is peculiarly unhealthy, the malady rages here, the influensa rages here, the foulness of the air preys upon the nerves—we are here as croaking frogs in the bogs and low lands of despondency—while those on the other side of the House are like Alpine plants, thriving in a luxurious soil, elevated on the high mountains of power, enjoying the sweet breezes from Heaven, and breathing the purest and healthiest air—They are as Lazarus in comfort—we as Dives in misery. We can see each other, but there is a deep gulph between us.¹⁰⁷
No one else in Parliament possessed Burke’s gift for developing such metaphors, and no one else spoke quite in such tones. Nor was this all. He compared Pitt to a mountebank, climbing to power on a secret ladder, and his ministry to ‘scraps stolen from a great merchant’s warehouse, to furnish out a pedler’s box’. One of these ‘scraps’, who had ‘proved themselves to be slaves, by turning fugitives’, though not named, was of course Eden. Finally, still obsessed by the events of –, Burke once more sought to defend the much-maligned Coalition. Such an irrelevant emotive outburst was an embarrassment to the cause it was meant to serve. Wilberforce lamented that ‘a Gentleman of such abilities’ should descend to ‘stupidity and abuse’ from the ‘wit and argument’ of ‘his better days’. Pitt was more brutal, claiming never to have heard a speech ‘more replete with abuse, more personal, more gross, or more outrageous’, even from Burke.¹⁰⁸ Henry Addington (–), in a comment that anticipates many made at the time of the Regency Crisis, reported to his father that Burke was ‘violent to madness’.¹⁰⁹ Why was Burke so rancorous, and especially against Pitt? In two days’ time, Sheridan would open the Begums charge. Pitt’s attitude would probably
¹⁰⁵ Morning Chronicle, Feb. (PH xxvi. ). The reference is to Themistocles. Taunted by men of superior culture, he retorted that while he could not play the lyre or the harp, he could transform a small and inconsequential city into a great and glorious one (Plutarch, ‘Life of Themistocles’, . ). ¹⁰⁶ In the debate on the Birmingham Playhouse Bill, Apr. (WS iii. ). ¹⁰⁷ Public Advertiser, Feb. . The reporter for the Morning Chronicle noted only ‘a variety of similes’ at this point in E.B.’s speech. ¹⁰⁸ Morning Chronicle, Feb. (PH xxvi. –). ¹⁰⁹ Henry Addington to Anthony Addington, Feb. (Exeter, Devon Record Office, M/ C/F; misdated in George Pellew, The Life and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (London, ), i. ).
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prove decisive, and Pitt was expected to vote against Hastings.¹¹⁰ Burke therefore had every reason not to offend him. Yet he was even more eager to demonstrate his integrity and his independence, to show that he was not prepared to conciliate Pitt by moderating his opposition. Even so, he allowed gratuitous vituperation against Pitt to occlude his substantive arguments. If the debate of February showed Burke at his worst, he redeemed himself on the st. By then, after five debates, the subject was near exhaustion. New topics were needed, and invention was one of Burke’s strengths. On the th, Burke had concentrated on the political dangers of the treaty. Now, he shifted to an ingenious economic argument. Eschewing the details of which branch of trade might be better or worse off under the treaty, he generalized the question. Britain’s prosperity, he asserted, depended not on manufacturing but on ‘commerce’ (meaning trade, and especially international trade). The prosperity of Holland showed that ‘commerce’ could flourish without manufacturing. Germany, on the contrary, with manufactures but no ‘commerce’, remained economically backward. Possessed of an extensive and unified capital market, Britain could dominate world trade. Conceding that the treaty would favour British manufacturers, he claimed to discover a deep reach of policy in this apparent sacrifice on the part of the French. Their plan, he supposed, was to break down the barriers between the respective capitals of the two countries. Once admitted into a share of British capital resources, the French would exploit their geographical position to capture the trade of Europe, North America, and the Levant.¹¹¹ Burke excelled at such arguments from remote consequences. This one was subtle, wide-ranging, and carefully developed. The reporter who described it as Burke’s first speech on the subject was right in substance.¹¹² His outburst on February had been largely irrelevant, and was probably an impromptu performance. The speech of the st was manifestly premeditated. This is evident not only from the elaborately articulated argument about capital, but from the images with which Burke embellished his conclusion, comparing the fortifications under construction at Cherbourg to the pyramids of Egypt, and the treaty itself to a contract between a man and his kept mistress, in which present wealth and advantage were purchased at the expense of everlasting dishonour.¹¹³ Both similes smell of the lamp. They lack the power and energy of the ‘marsh and mountain’ passage in the speech of February, which catches Burke’s mind in the process of hammering out a comparison. Another telling indication that Burke was exceptionally in control of himself is that the speech of February is wholly devoid of personalities. In reply, both Grenville and Pitt, while disagreeing with his conclusions, complimented Burke both on his ¹¹⁰ Thomas Pelham to Lord Pelham, Feb. ‘’ [] (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹¹¹ Public Advertiser, Feb. (PH xxvi. –). ¹¹² Morning Chronicle, Feb. . ¹¹³ Public Advertiser, Feb. (PH xxvi. –).
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grasp of economics and on his eloquence.¹¹⁴ Such was Burke’s reward for a commendably statesmanlike performance. Burke could thus oppose without rancour when he chose, and reprobate measures rather than men. On February, he went ever further and actually delivered an encomium on Pitt, the ‘mountebank’ and ‘pedler’ of three weeks before. Pitt had introduced an ambitious plan to consolidate and simplify customs, excise, and stamp duties. Such a reform was long overdue. Nevertheless, since the most admirable proposals were not always considered on their merits, the bipartisanship with which this one was greeted was remarkable. Burke rose immediately after Pitt sat down. Acknowledging that he was one of those who ‘unfortunately felt it to be their duty frequently to oppose the measures of government’, on this occasion he would not rest content with a ‘sullen acquiescence’. Instead, he would ‘rise up manfully’, and give praise where it was due to an excellent plan brought forward ‘in so masterly, and intelligible a manner’. Fox was not prepared to be so magnanimous, and found a hole to pick.¹¹⁵ Two debates in late March provide an even more dramatic illustration of Burke’s oscillations of mood and temper. The first was on the th, when George Dempster moved for leave to introduce a bill to amend Pitt’s East India Judicature Acts of and . Burke began, as he often did, by ridiculing the previous speaker, in this case Archibald Macdonald, the SolicitorGeneral. In , Macdonald had attacked Fox’s India Bill, and during had been one of the lawyers who interposed legal objections to the course Burke wanted the impeachment to take.¹¹⁶ Now, Macdonald accused Burke of inconsistency. Burke’s objection to Pitt’s special court to try Indian offenders was that it deprived men of trial by a jury of their peers. Yet so did the impeachment of a commoner. Burke, of course, was impelled to defend his consistency, but contrived to do so without losing his temper. But when Pitt ventured to correct him on a point of fact about the method of selecting members for his court, he pushed Burke beyond his unpredictable flashpoint. Rising to explain, he soon launched into a second substantive speech on the motion. Since the House was not in a committee, this was disorderly. Called to order, Burke refused to desist. When the calls became louder, he moved to adjourn, claiming that this gave him the right to speak on his new motion. His adjournment speech, however, soon wandered back to the original topic. Again Burke was called to order, this time by the Speaker. More contumacious than ever, Burke refused to yield the floor. When Pitt intervened in support of the Speaker, Fox in turn rose to defend Burke. The Speaker again sought to silence Burke, still to no avail. Argument having ¹¹⁴ Morning Chronicle, Feb. (PH xxvi. –, ). ¹¹⁵ Morning Chronicle, Feb. (PH xxvi. –). ¹¹⁶ Nov. (PH xxiii. –); Apr. (xxv. –).
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failed, members tried to cough Burke into silence. Burke ‘persisted in his privilege of being heard—he was reasoning on principles eternal and immutable, no coughing could destroy them’. Dundas, rising to defend the use of the cough to oppose ‘so very obstinate and irregular perseverance in argument’, was himself coughed down by the opposition. Burke’s motion for an adjournment was then defeated by to , after which the main question (leave to introduce the amending bill) was negatived without a division.¹¹⁷ This was Burke’s most disruptive behaviour since July , when he had likewise used a new motion as an excuse for holding the floor.¹¹⁸ The earlier occasion is the easier to understand, for Burke was annoyed at the indifference of the House to what he considered a matter of consequence. In , however, his pertinacity was harmful to his own side. As the voting figures suggest, Pitt had ensured a sufficient attendance to throw out Dempster’s motion. He had no intention of allowing his legislation to be amended, except by himself. But Burke’s outburst closed the debate by deflecting attention away from the substantive question. This was Burke at his worst, guilty of exactly what he accused his opponents of doing, effectively denying others the opportunity of being heard. Burke was not wont to admit himself in the wrong. But two days later, on March, he made what might be construed as a virtual apology. Pitt moved for leave to bring in a special bill to authorize a retirement pension for Sir John Skynner (–), the respected Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Such a bill was necessary because of the limitation that Burke’s Act of had placed on pensions granted from the Civil List. Burke, who in another mood might have risen to defend the principle of Economical Reform, seconded the motion. Acknowledging the ‘violation’ of his own measure, he called it ‘so fully justified, that it had his hearty concurrence’, and paid Skynner a handsome compliment.¹¹⁹ Constitutionally incapable of apology, Burke could be gracious when he chose. These bursts of ill temper during February and March may have been partly the result of uncertainty about the impeachment. The vote of April, which allayed any remaining fears on this score, allowed him to relax and to assume the mantle of an elder statesman. On May, Grenville moved for a bill to renew and extend the system of Free Ports in the West Indies initiated by the first Rockingham ministry. Supporting the measure (which was quite uncontroversial), Burke reminisced about the debate on the subject in . Alderman William Beckford (–), the elder Pitt’s economic expert, had then prophesied that Free Ports would ruin the West India trade, while at the same time insisting that Jamaica (where his own estates lay) should have its ¹¹⁷ The World, Mar. ; Public Advertiser, Mar. (PH xxvi. –). ¹¹⁸ WS v. –. In , however, E.B. did not himself move the new motion that provided him with an excuse to hold the floor. ¹¹⁹ Morning Chronicle, Mar. (PH xxvi. –).
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share. The experience of the last twenty years had vindicated the Rockingham policy of (limited) free trade.¹²⁰ Freedom of trade was again the subject of debate on May, when a petition from the City of London was taken into consideration. The petition, presented on May, asked for a revival of the laws against forestalling and regrating (buying provisions in order to resell them at a profit), repealed in . Burke, for whom a free trade in provisions was an article of faith, spoke against the petition, but in his pleasantest manner, descanting on the reputation of the city for sumptuous civic feasts and gormandizing aldermen. In , as he reminded the House, he had himself initiated the bill that repealed many archaic restrictions on the trade in foodstuffs. To revive such regulations would be a mistake; the best means of ensuring a plentiful supply of provisions was to leave the trade open. Unwilling, however, to reject the petition out of hand, he proposed taking it into consideration on August (by which time Parliament would have been prorogued). One of the objects of Burke’s ridicule, Alderman Paul Le Mesurier (–), admitted that the plump aldermen of the popular imagination were ‘fair game’, and that Burke’s ‘good humour’ had disarmed the anger he had felt at a more violent and abusive attack on the petition.¹²¹ This performance showed Burke at his best, defending his opinions with argument, wit, and temper. These wild fluctuations of mood and temper were not unique to . They can be paralleled from most periods of his career. Their psychological interest is that they record emotional disturbances that are mostly kept under control in the formal, premeditated prose of his letters. Even in his letters, however, powerful subsurface currents can sometimes be detected, witness an example written soon after the end of the troubled session of . On May , the final day of the parliamentary session, Burke carried to the Lords the last of his Articles of Impeachment. For once, he had the solid satisfaction of a concrete achievement. ‘One great point we have secured,’ he told Thomas Burgh: ‘The House of Commons has cleared itself of the stain which its’ Eastern Government has fixed upon this Nation’ ( July : C v. –). The credit was in large part Burke’s. Others had co-operated and contributed, but without his persistence and determination there would have been no impeachment. In May , despite an occasional painful or embarrassing episode, his standing was higher than it had been for several years. ¹²⁰ Morning Chronicle, May . ¹²¹ CJ xlii. ; Morning Chronicle, May (PH xxvi. –). E.B.’s bill became law as George III, c. .
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Burke was accordingly dismayed to read, and not in a hostile newspaper or pamphlet, but in a panegyric written by an ostensible well-wisher, that he had lost the influence he had once possessed in Parliament. This unpalatable remark came from a most improbable source: the Preface to the new edition of William Bellenden’s De Statu Libri Tres, about which Henry Homer had consulted him in November (C v. –). This Preface was the work of Homer’s senior partner in the project, Samuel Parr (–). A schoolmaster by profession, Parr prided himself on being one of the leading classical scholars of his age. A clergyman (like most eighteenth-century schoolmasters), in he was presented to the living of Hatton, in Warwickshire, where he continued to take a few private pupils. Exceptionally combative and cantankerous, he revelled in controversy.¹²² In politics he was a Whig. Formerly a follower of Lord North, he now described himself as a Foxite, and he hated Pitt.¹²³ Burke received his copy of De Statu sometime in May , presumably from Parr, since Parr was the one he thanked ( June: C v. –). In the first part of the letter, Burke praised Parr’s erudition and affirmed the social value of classical education: conventional material typical of his letters of this kind. A more personal note is heard in his comments on Parr’s extraordinary Preface. Bellenden’s De Statu is divided into three books. In the new edition, the parts are separately dedicated to the three most prominent members of the ill-fated Coalition: Burke himself, North, and Fox. Each part is further embellished by an engraved portrait of the dedicatee. Burke’s was taken from a version of the portrait painted by George Romney (–) for the Duke of Richmond in , perhaps the least expressive representation.¹²⁴ The most extraordinary feature of the new edition, however, is a long Preface, written in self-consciously Ciceronian Latin, praising the three dedicatees and attacking Pitt and other leading ministers. The aims of this Preface were to flaunt Parr’s Latinity, to excoriate Pitt, and to laud Fox, probably in that order. Burke owed his inclusion to a conceit that Parr had borrowed from another book by Bellenden, De Tribus Luminibis Romanorum, an unfinished study of Roman history. Bellenden’s three luminaries were Cicero, Seneca, and the elder Pliny. Parr therefore needed a third to complement North and Fox. Of the three, Parr knew Burke the least well. This may be why the passage on Burke in the Preface is one of the least felicitous. Panegyric takes second place to the display of erudition and ingenuity in commenting on contemporary people and events through classical parallels. Thus Parr observes that, just as Cicero’s oratory had been criticized as ‘tumidum, ¹²² Warren Derry, Dr Parr: A Portrait of the Whig Dr Johnson (Oxford, ). ¹²³ Parr to Henry Homer, c. Nov. , in Memoirs, prefixed to Parr’s Works (London, ), i. . ¹²⁴ Since the original is lost, this judgement is based on the copy now at Churchill College, Cambridge. The engraving made for Parr’s Bellenden is reproduced in C v, facing p. xi.
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Asianumque, et redundantem’, equally ignorant critics now say much the same of Burke’s.¹²⁵ Though Parr meant this as an encomium, there are more gratifying ways of being compared to Cicero. Parr’s inept flattery was all too redolent of Boswell’s defence of Burke’s wit. Even more vexing to Burke was the suggestion that he had fallen from parliamentary esteem: ‘Cujus enim dicentis ex ore Senatus quondam pendebat, illius jam oratio, etsi nivibus hybernis simillima sit, sibi tamen audientiam vix ullam facit.’¹²⁶ Parr meant this as a compliment to Burke, and a reflection on the House of Commons that adulated Pitt. Nevertheless, the encomium is as awkward as the parallel with Cicero. As he had to Boswell, Burke voiced his dissatisfaction to Parr not openly, but through a transparent mask of contented humility: You are very generous in your condolence with me on the little estimation in which it is my fortune to be held. I am, however, myself not in the smallest degree affected with that circumstance. Whatever attention either is, or has at any time been paid to my opinions in the exercise of my public duty, is certainly more than I can lay any claim to . . . From a confidence in my own good intentions, I might wish my credit to be greater; as I might by that means become of more use to the part of affairs, which I touch. But in this respect, perhaps, I am mistaken. The effect might have been quite different. If I had enjoyed a reputation of greater splendour I might have been more intent on what might nourish that reputation, than on those ends, for which alone a reputation ought to be cultivated. (C v. –)
The last sentence reads like a veiled criticism of Fox and the direction in which he had taken the former Rockingham party. The pretence of humility is belied by Burke’s actual behaviour in Parliament. A domineering intellect, he was utterly convinced that his were ‘principles eternal and immutable’ which coughing might silence but which argument could not confute.¹²⁷ His opponents, therefore, who refused to listen to reason, could only be mercenary or unprincipled. More directly revealing is a passage in which Burke drops the pose of humility to chastise Parr. Even here, he involves the rebuke in a double negative: ‘for these three last years I cannot say that my attempts have not been as favourably received as they have been at any period of my life.’ This leads to another coded critique of Fox: It ought to be, if not to myself, to every body else, a matter of satisfaction that the time in which I was the most obscured, was that in which our friends have shone out with the greatest lustre, and had attained the highest pitch of their credit and prosperity. ¹²⁵ De Statu Libri Tres (nd edn. London, ), Praefatio, p. vii. The criticism of Cicero (as ‘bombastic, Asiatic (florid, as opposed to a chaste “Attic” style), and wordy’) is quoted from Quintilian, . . . ¹²⁶ Praefatio, p. vi. ‘Formerly, the Senate listened attentively when he spoke. Now, his eloquence, though as pure as winter snow, can hardly gain a hearing.’ ¹²⁷ Debate on the East India Judicature Bill, Mar. (The World, Mar.).
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If at such times I am a little run down, exertions of more consequence, and more wisely directed to their end, are prevalent. The season for weaker talents is, when there is little to be done. (C v. )
The period of ‘greatest lustre’ can only mean that of the second Rockingham administration and the Coalition, when Burke felt keenly his exclusion from the innermost circles of his party and the neglect of any permanent provision for his family. Unable to complain openly about this treatment, he could vent his frustrations under the cover of a transparently false humility. Edward Gibbon (–) could extract truth even from ‘the treacherous language of panegyrics and medals’.¹²⁸ Likewise, the careful reader of Burke’s letters can often penetrate the most patently insincere rhetorical professions to glimpse, if only momentarily, Burke’s inner feelings.
¹²⁸ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. ; ed. David Womersley (London, ), i. .
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Burke’s estate at Beaconsfield was conveniently situated off the main London to Oxford road, just miles from the capital. Short escapes were therefore practicable. Late in May , for example, soon after the second reading of the last of the Articles of Impeachment (on the th), he left for ‘a mouthful of good air’, though he had to return for the next stage of the articles’ progress on the th (C v. ). When Parliament was prorogued on May, Burke left London again about June, though he had to return for ‘an old engagement to dine’ on the th (). Other business kept him in town until June, when he left for a long summer retreat. Since he acquired his estate in , Burke’s life had followed a similar cycle: the parliamentary session spent chiefly in London, the long recesses at Beaconsfield. Latterly the pattern had been varied with summer pleasure trips to places of tourist interest. In , however, he broke with this recent habit. Apart from a brief visit to London in late July, to negotiate the renewal of his lease on the house in Gerrard Street, he stayed at Beaconsfield until early October. Not that the Burkes lived in seclusion: in July, for example, their visitors included Frances Crewe (–), the celebrated Whig hostess (wife of John Crewe, –, a Foxite MP); and Philip Francis, returning from a visit to Ireland (, ). At the end of a busy session, Burke often wrote a flurry of letters to catch up with his arrears of correspondence. These often provide some record of the months that Burke spent quietly at Beaconsfield. The summer of , however, is unusually barren of letters. None at all survives for August, the longest gap in the epistolary record since . Indeed, a few family letters excepted, only one letter from Burke is known between July and October. This single letter, however, deserves notice as an illustration of Burke’s response to a complete stranger. The episode began in the summer of , when John S. Barrow, a jeweller by trade with artistic aspirations, set out from London to walk to York (about miles). After trudging about miles, he was overtaken by Burke in his coach. Not wholly engrossed by the book he was reading (Buffon’s Histoire naturelle), Burke stopped to offer Barrow a ride. Barrow at first declined, as he intended to stop at the next village, only a mile further. Burke’s manner, however, was ‘so very persuasive’
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that Barrow stepped into the carriage, and drove with Burke all the way to Beaconsfield. Burke did not introduce himself, and Barrow took him for ‘a gentleman farmer’. After ‘some interesting conversation’, Barrow showed ‘the first or second attempt I had made at engraving’. Burke was sufficiently impressed to do more than he had perhaps at first intended: he invited Barrow to dine with the family, and after dinner gave him a tour of the art collection. When Barrow left, Burke made him a present of half a guinea.¹ From York, Barrow sent Burke ‘a very warm imagined’ letter of thanks. Burke replied (on October), but his letter did not reach York before Barrow left, and was returned to Beaconsfield. On his return to London, Barrow received an invitation to Beaconsfield, where he was ‘entertained . . . some days’. There Burke gave him the undelivered letter (C x. ). Barrow’s ‘warm imagined’ epistle has not survived, but can be partly reconstructed from Burke’s reply. Barrow evidently poured out his discontent at being confined to so humble a walk of life, and his ambitions to shine in a higher sphere as an artist. Impressed by the splendours of Burke’s house and its art collection, and unaware that the estate was heavily mortgaged and Burke deeply in dept, Barrow might easily have formed expectations from Burke’s behaviour of further and more extensive patronage. In particular, Barrow seems to have hoped that Burke might support him while he studied painting. These dreams Burke was obliged to dispel, insisting that he could do no more than recommend Barrow to the Royal Academy, and to Reynolds in person. Further, he advised Barrow ‘to put a little restraint on your imagination’, preaching sentiments which, publicly expressed, might be discounted as cant: You seem to feel too much disgust at humble but honest situations in life, and to form too slight an opinion of those whom the order of Providence has destined to those situations. This is a serious mistake, whether it regards the happiness or the virtue of men, which are neither of them much less in one condition than in another. ( Oct. : )
The appeal in a private letter to this commonplace suggests that, when Burke made the same argument in his Reflections, he at least believed what he preached.² Nothing came of Burke’s promised recommendation to Reynolds.³ Sometime in , presumably after Burke had left London for the summer, ¹ The main source for this incident is Barrow’s own account, prefaced to E.B.’s letter of Oct. , published in Annals of the Fine Arts (), and reprinted in C x. –. One puzzling question is why Barrow was walking along the road to Uxbridge. The direct road to York was through Barnet. ² In a well constituted society, a ‘protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people’ are ‘taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind’, not deluded by the ‘monstrous fiction’ which inspires ‘false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life’ (R []). ³ There is no record of Barrow’s admission to the Royal Academy Schools (Sidney C. Hutchinson, ‘The Royal Academy Schools, –’, Walpole Society, (–), –).
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Barrow again wrote to him, and, not receiving any answer, sent a second letter. The tenor of these letters has also to be inferred from Burke’s answer, dated September. Barrow evidently complained of receiving insufficient help from Burke, and hinted at alternative avenues of patronage that he might pursue. Most mysteriously, Barrow said something about ‘prophecies or prophets’. The tone of Burke’s reply is notably sharper than in the previous year’s letter. He reminds Barrow how explicitly he had denied being able to give him much help (this is confirmed by the earlier letter). Even so, he promises ‘such a triffling aid as I can afford’. As to the alternative patron, ‘a man of undoubted Merit, and one for whom I have much esteem’ (unfortunately unidentified), Barrow is welcome to apply to him. About ‘prophecies or prophets’, Burke advises silence: ‘to those, who are not used to make the allowances I am disposed to make for the singularities of men, it must tend to give them very disadvantageous impressions of you’ (C v. –). On that slightly sour note the episode ended. Carefully preserving his two letters from Burke, Barrow survived until at least . In that year he sent the first letter to a periodical, signing himself ‘Citizen of the World in a Sky Parlour—the fate of most geniuses’.⁴ The encounter illustrates two discrepant elements of Burke’s character. A genuinely kindly and forbearing man, he tried to help Barrow, and did not take umbrage at his letters of reproach. On the other hand, consciously or not, he raised in Barrow expectations that he could not satisfy. That Burke did not anticipate the likely effect of showing Barrow his art collection is hardly credible. He seems to have wanted to play Maecenas for a day, and is not readily acquitted of doing the young man an ill turn by unsettling him. A further question suggests itself. Did Burke often offer lifts to strangers, or was this an exceptional case, because he happened to be alone and bored with Buffon? At the least, the incident is a reminder of how unevenly Burke’s life is documented. The grand moments are amply represented, but few of the casual incidents like the serendipitous meeting with Barrow. The paucity of the epistolary record for the summer of may therefore be in part the result of chance. Yet on October Burke himself confessed to Sir Gilbert Elliot that ‘for near three Months, almost literally I have done nothing’. Confident that, as had happened in each of the preceding three years, Parliament would not meet before Christmas, he had succumbed to ‘the procrastination of idleness and recess’ (C v. ). Burke’s protestations of disengagement rarely carry conviction. But on this occasion, his statement to Elliot that only ‘about four or five days ago’ did he return to business is ⁴ Annals of the Fine Arts, / (), –. James Northcote (–) thought that E.B. ‘never appeared to me so great a man’ as in the letter of advice to Barrow; William Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote (), in Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, –), xi. –. The second letter was first published by James Prior in his Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (nd edn. London, ), ii. –. Prior does not name Barrow, and slants the story to reflect discredit on the unnamed artist.
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confirmed by the date ( October) of his first extant letter of ‘business’ since July (–). Burke did not spend the summer reading or thinking about India, for he observed to Elliot how ‘faint and dull all impressions of former facts appeard’ when he resumed the subject. How then did he spend his time? Farming can hardly have engaged his whole attention. Philip Francis, characterizing Burke’s mind as ‘a Magazine of information, full of stores of every sort’, was baffled by ‘how he found time to read every thing’. Such apparently empty summers as may supply part of the answer.⁵ One subject that probably engaged Burke’s attention during the summer of was the Dutch crisis, though there are no letters on the subject before October. For much of the eighteenth century, the ‘United Provinces’ of the Netherlands had in fact been riven by political tensions between an oligarchic, pro-Orange party supporting the Stadtholderate, and anti-Orange ‘Patriots’, intent on establishing a more representative regime. The Patriots sought support from France, rather than from Britain or Prussia, the Orange family’s dynastic allies. In the s, the Patriot party was in the ascendant, and in November the Dutch signed a defensive treaty with France. Alarmed at this development, Sir James Harris (–), the British envoy, began to use secret service money to strengthen the anti-French party. Though a career diplomat, Harris was a follower of Fox. Since he was also Sir Gilbert Elliot’s brother-in-law, Burke followed his activities with particular interest. Harris visited London in May for consultations with the ministers. He was accordingly well prepared for the crisis precipitated when on June the Patriots arrested the Stadtholder’s wife, Wilhelmina, Princess of Orange (–). In July, the Patriots sought French mediation; the princess appealed for support both to Britain and to her brother, the King of Prussia (Frederick William II, –). Internal political differences meant that both France and Prussia vacillated, prolonging the imbroglio. Not until October, when the French formally withdrew their earlier offer of support, was the threat of hostilities finally averted.⁶ For much of the summer, then, war seemed imminent. No one could predict the precise repercussions that a war with France would have on domestic politics. But two probabilities would have occurred to Burke. The first was a postponement of the Hastings trial. A deferral of any length might lead to its abandonment, as interest waned and feelings cooled. Even if the trial went ahead, a war would upstage it. Second, the commercial treaty of had identified Pitt and the ministry as pro-French. The opposition had warned of the dangers of closer links with France. In the event of a war, they would be well placed to profit from any mistakes or reverses. Military failures in the ⁵ Recollections of E.B., written in , apparently intended as a preface to a collection of documents (BL (OIOC) MS Eur. F. , fo. ). ⁶ John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, –), i. –; Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, – (Cambridge, ), –.
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early stages of a war (which were probable enough) would certainly lead to calls for a new ministry, or at least for a more broadly based one.⁷ In , one gloomy prognosis of Fox’s political prospects was that ‘nothing but the death of the King, or a war, can bring him forward’.⁸ Fox’s return to power would be good news for Burke, who could expect to return to the Pay Office, which would at least have solved his financial problems. These, or at least those of the Burke family as a whole, were worsening. In November, Richard Sr. was forced to flee to Brussels to escape his creditors, and not until the end of January did a settlement with them allow him to return.⁹ Burke’s feelings about the prospect of war are therefore likely to have been mixed. Uncertainty about the outcome of events in the Netherlands, and about how they might affect the trial of Hastings, may have contributed to his mental paralysis during the summer. The likelihood of war or peace was probably canvassed at length among the Burkes at Beaconsfield. Only in October, when Richard Jr., who had been ailing for some time, went to Brighton to try the therapeutic effects of seabathing, and Burke himself paid a short visit to London, do a few letters preserve fragments of the political news and speculations that were engaging their attention.¹⁰ Burke was at this stage no warmonger. Yet to prevent the United Provinces falling into the orbit of France was an established maxim of British policy. In this uncertainty, there was some comfort in Fox being equally perplexed. In conversation on October, when Burke attended the anniversary dinner commemorating Fox’s election for Westminster in , they agreed that they could neither oppose the expected war nor pledge themselves to support it (to Richard Jr., Oct. : C v. –). Even after the crisis subsided, Burke’s attitude remained ambivalent. To Sir Gilbert Elliot, he conceded that ‘the entire destruction of the French Interest in Holland is a good Event to this Country’. Sir James Harris’s part in the diplomatic triumph Burke could therefore applaud, but he was not disposed to give the ministers any credit. Nor, unluckily, could he easily find fault. Instead, he directed his indignation at the fickleness of popular opinion. Recalling the odium incurred by the Coalition for its censure of Shelburne’s peace, he contrasted the present irrational desire for a war, ‘with or without a pretence, with or without any policy’. Pitt could apparently do ⁷ Military failures led to the fall of the ministries of Sir Robert Walpole in , the Duke of Newcastle in , and Lord North in . ⁸ Sir Andrew Hamond to William Eden, Dec. , in Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, ed. Robert John Eden (London, –), i. . ⁹ Releases from creditors, dated Jan. (NRO, A. . –; WWM BkP /) enabled R.B. Sr. to return to England in time for the opening of the trial on Feb., where his presence is confirmed by Frances Burney (Diary & Letters, ed. Charlotte Barrett and Austen Dobson (London, –), iii. ). ¹⁰ Between and Oct.; C v. –. Brighton was becoming a fashionable resort, thanks in part to the visits of the Prince of Wales. The prince was in Brighton for most of R.B. Jr.’s stay there (Sussex Weekly Journal, , Oct. ), but is not mentioned in R.B. Jr.’s letters
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no wrong. The public was ‘perfectly ready either to applaud the Spirit of Measures leading to Hostility, or to applaud the prudence by which the Hostile measures are no longer pursued’ ( Oct. : C v. ). In such circumstances, what could be done? This is one of numerous passages in which Burke vents his impatience at being condemned to eternal opposition. As an MP, he had a part to play in national politics, and he was eager to take an active one. Yet he was excluded, seemingly in perpetuity, from power and influence, reduced even to gather his intelligence from the newspapers. Nor had he the standing in public opinion that might have given independent weight to his opposition. This deep-rooted frustration helps explain Burke’s extraordinary behaviour in , when the Regency Crisis offered the most enticing prospect since of returning to office. Once the prospect of war receded, the Hastings trial returned to the top of Burke’s agenda. On this subject, he was now far more sanguine than he had been in December , when he had acknowledged the actual conviction of Hastings as ‘impracticable’ (C v. ). At the end of , he still did not expect the case to reach the Lords. On December, he predicted to Adam Smith that the forthcoming session would ‘finally dispose of the affair’ (). Subsequently, a series of unexpected successes made him more optimistic. Reviewing the session of in a letter to Thomas Burgh ( July: –), he noted with some satisfaction that the overconfidence of Hastings’s supporters had been illusory. Their ‘boasting’ had served only as ‘a preliminary to every defeat’. Burke was therefore disposed to underrate the threat ‘to bind us down to certain unknown and unprecedented rules of pleading, and to an unparliamentary, and indeed impracticable strictness of Evidence’. However much they privately favoured Hastings, the Lords, Burke now hoped, would not dare to acquit him in the face of overwhelming evidence, publicly delivered. The last desperate move of the Hastings faction would therefore be, he feared, to prevent the trial being held in Westminster Hall. This did not happen. But neither was Burke’s dismissive attitude to ‘strictness of Evidence’ justified. The rules of evidence would prove the rock on which the impeachment grounded. As the meeting of Parliament approached, several of the other managers came to Beaconsfield for consultations (C v. , ). Dundas proved more elusive, ignoring both a request for ‘three Minutes conversation’ on October and a reminder note on the th (, –). On November, therefore, Burke wrote at length, asking for ministerial support for holding the trial in Westminster Hall, which could accommodate a large public audience. By convention, if the Commons attended as a Committee of the Whole House, impeachments were staged there; otherwise, they might be tried in the House of Lords. Burke was convinced that, in the publicity of Westminster Hall, even the ‘decided partiality’ which he attributed to the Lords could not save Hastings from ‘a condemnation followd by some ostensible measure of
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Justice’ ( Nov. : ). By November, he had received an assurance of support from Dundas, but still expected ‘something like a Battle’ in the Commons (). The new session opened on November. The main theme of the king’s speech was the successful resolution of the Dutch crisis. This diplomatic triumph was so patently advantageous that even Fox approved the address with only a few minor cavils and reservations. Burke came to town for the debate, but did not speak. No amendment was proposed, and the address was endorsed unanimously.¹¹ Soon, however, he found an opening to speak in a debate on a subsidiary issue, the Hessian subsidy. Britain maintained only a small standing army. When additional troops were needed, as they were when a Continental war was in prospect, most were usually hired from one of the German princes who maintained mercenary armies. In , as a precaution in case military intervention against France became necessary, Pitt negotiated a subsidy treaty with William IX, Landgrave of Hesse (–). This provided an annual retaining fee for keeping troops in readiness, to be taken into British service as required. The treaty required parliamentary sanction, and was accordingly debated on December. Approval was hardly more than a formality, since the substance of Pitt’s policy had been endorsed on November. Fox posed a few questions, which Pitt answered. After a token protest by Sir James Johnstone (–), an independent member schooled in the old ‘country’ tradition that opposed expensive entanglements in Continental politics, the debate was petering out when Burke rose in support of the treaty. His speech, the longest reported, illustrates why he could at different times be celebrated as the British Cicero and derided as an intolerable bore. Wittily dissecting the style of the speech from the throne, Burke rephrased its account of the King of Prussia’s intervention in the style of the extravagant prose romances he had enjoyed in his youth. The ridicule had a serious purpose: its subtext was to question whether the king’s motivation was really as pure as was pretended. Yet the speech was an unnecessary prolongation of debate, serving mainly as an outlet for Burke’s animus against Pitt. If some members were entertained, others, their minds on their dinner, were impatient for the vote.¹² Burke’s sportive speech on the Hessian subsidy is the more remarkable for being delivered soon after he had suffered a humiliating reverse on the subject of the impeachment. Earlier that day, the Commons had received from the Lords Hastings’s answer to the Articles of Impeachment. This was referred for consideration to an ad hoc committee. Procedurally, this would be a new committee, though the practice was to reappoint the committee that had drawn up the articles. The Speaker therefore began by nominating ¹¹ CJ xliii. –; Morning Chronicle, Nov. (PH xxvi. –). ¹² Morning Chronicle, Dec. (PH xxvi. –).
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Burke, who in turn proposed Francis. Opposition was not unexpected, for in April Francis’s membership of the earlier committee had been challenged, albeit unsuccessfully. Now, however, without any debate, a division was demanded and Francis was rejected by to . Such a margin reflected a disturbing change of opinion since the earlier vote. The pro-Hastings group, of course, voted against Francis, as they had in April. What shocked Burke, and what converted that small phalanx into a majority, was the defection (as he saw it) of many members who had hitherto supported the impeachment. The most eminent and ominous of these was Pitt himself.¹³ Nothing more strikingly illustrates Burke’s clouded perceptions about the impeachment than his complete misjudgement of attitudes to Francis, for he professed not to know, and certainly did not appreciate, either the nature or the strength of the objections to him. In an impassioned impromptu speech, he declared that the exclusion of Francis was a mortal blow to the impeachment. He would therefore seek Francis’s reinstatement at the earliest opportunity. The Speaker having ruled out of order any further debate on the subject, Burke could only nominate the remainder of the committee (WS vi. –). Three members of the earlier committee had withdrawn.¹⁴ In compensation, three new members were recruited.¹⁵ After the furore about Francis, there was no further controversy, and the remaining eighteen of Burke’s nominees were approved without debate or division.¹⁶ Burke did not accept defeat lightly. His immediate response was to enlist ministerial help. On December, he wrote to Dundas, hoping to pressure him into persuading Pitt to reverse his stand. Where Pitt led, others would follow. Crippling as he professed to regard it, the exclusion of Francis was not Burke’s only concern. The vote had been interpreted, he argued, as an indication ‘that Government is secretly adverse to the prosecution’. Witnesses would not come forward, he argued, if they believed that the accused is in fact ‘in possession of the power of the State’ (C v. –). In reply, Dundas tried to convince Burke that repugnance to Francis as a representative of the Commons was widespread, and by no means confined to those who were hostile to the prosecution. Francis’s aid was less indispensable than Burke imagined, and in any case he could assist informally ( Dec.: –). Far from
¹³ CJ xliii. ; Morning Chronicle, Dec. (PH xxvi. –); WS vi. –. E.B. to Dundas, Dec. (C v. ). ¹⁴ Welbore Ellis excused himself on the score of his advanced age; Sir Grey Cooper and Frederick Montagu pleaded illness (C v. ). In Montagu’s case at least, the excuse was genuine, for Montagu later resumed his place among the managers (E.B. moved his renomination on Jan. : CJ xliii. ; Debrett, xxiii. ). ¹⁵ Two were friends of Fox: Richard Fitzpatrick (–), and Roger Wilbraham (–). The third, John Courtenay, a frequent speaker in a bantering, satirical style (he had often ridiculed Burke), was a former follower of Lord North. His inclusion balanced the loss of Ellis and Cooper, both Northites. ¹⁶ CJ xliii. .
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being convinced or pacified, Burke was, as usual, provoked into a lengthier restatement of his original opinion ( Dec.: –). On December, the House formally entrusted the management of the impeachment to the committee named on the th, appointed solicitors (Albany Wallis, –; and Richard Troward, d. ), and resolved to be present as a Committee of the Whole House.¹⁷ After these uncontroversial decisions, Fox moved to add Francis to the committee of managers. Given the subject, the ensuing debate was remarkably, indeed self-consciously restrained. Fox and Windham spoke eloquently and temperately on Francis’s behalf. Francis spoke at length in his own defence, then left the House. Pitt spoke decisively against the inclusion of Francis. Professing himself a friend to the prosecution, he wished to preserve it from any taint of vindictive animosity. In any case, the question was not to be decided by argument, but by feeling. Many members felt that Francis was disqualified by his personal enmity to Hastings, and their feelings should be respected. Burke was furious. Speaking last, he made by far the most emotive speech of the day. What was this ‘delicacy’, he asked, launching into a brutal assault on Pitt’s argument: it was a term to which no definite idea had been found; at best it was but a superadded flower to virtue—it was but the ruffle of the shirt—but here the shirt was laid aside, and the ruffle only remained. Delicacy and feeling might be very proper terms of speech to express the sensations felt in consequence of the exertions of an opera singer, or a performer on the violin and German flute; but was it fitting that the solemnity and dignity of parliamentary deliberation should be insulted by such unmeaning nonsense?¹⁸
This passage exemplifies Burke’s spontaneous metaphorical exuberance. A more conciliatory speech, however, might have been more persuasive. Burke completely failed to gauge the feelings of his audience, unable to accept that they might honestly see the question in a different light. Pitt’s ‘feelings’, therefore, he interpreted as a mere screen for undermining the impeachment. Burke was not without rational arguments for adding Francis to the committee. None of the other members had been to India. Francis’s firsthand knowledge would therefore prove invaluable, above all on his speciality, the Revenue charge. Fox’s motion was lost by the large margin of to .¹⁹ Burke’s speech probably did more harm than good, but Francis owed his exclusion chiefly to the antipathies and mistrust inspired by his own character and conduct. Arrogant, self-righteous, and vindictive, he was manifestly pursuing a personal vendetta against Hastings. Rarely was Burke willing to concede gracefully. He therefore organized a letter, signed by all the managers, expressing their confidence in Francis and asking for his informal assistance ( Dec. : C v. –). Nothing ¹⁷ Ibid. .
¹⁸ PH xxvi. –.
¹⁹ Ibid. –; CJ xliii. .
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could have been more disrespectful of the decision taken on the th, or heedless of the arguments then voiced. In January, Burke’s indignation had still not cooled, and he congratulated Francis on his exclusion as ‘the Crown of your Life’ (). Indeed, as future occasions would show, while he was eager to claim that he spoke for the Commons, and to complain bitterly when he thought he received insufficient support, he was never prepared to pay the slightest regard to their views when they differed from his own. Burke took the defeat so personally because he had by now completely identified himself with the cause of the prosecution, and Francis with the same cause. Any attack on Francis was therefore an attack on him. Nor was Burke, however disposed to welcome martyrdom, ever inclined to suffer it in silence. Burke received some consolation for the exclusion of Francis. On December, Sir Gilbert Elliot opened his campaign to impeach Sir Elijah Impey with a lengthy speech that won universal approbation. One of the most approved passages was a panegyric on Burke as ‘the author, the founder, the animating spirit, the vital principle’ of the impeachment, who had devoted ‘the noblest talents, genius more than human, the profoundest wisdom, the most exhaustless labour’ to the cause.²⁰ Even from a friend and a colleague, Elliot’s tribute was gratifying. When Burke heard it, he was ‘affected so as to drop almost off his seat’ and ‘shrank down into half his size’. The heartfelt sincerity with which Elliot delivered it had the effect of ‘squeezing tears’ from the eyes of several members, and even from one of Hastings’s counsel, sitting in the gallery.²¹ If Burke’s excessive professions of modesty are never entirely credible, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his embarrassment at being so extravagantly eulogized in public. Nor had Elliot gone beyond the truth in listing some of what, in his struggle with ‘the dullness and the apathy’ of the age, Burke had sacrificed, ‘the charms of private life, the lures of fortune, the aims of ambition’; what he had provoked, ‘the dangerous and implacable enmities of wealth and greatness’; and what he had endured, ‘the scoffs of a corrupt and vulgar public’.²² Never had Burke received so eloquent an accolade. In , Westminster Hall was scarcely less venerable an edifice than it is today. Built about under William Rufus as the great hall of the Palace of Westminster, it was extensively remodelled under Richard II and had since ²⁰ Printed proof, headed ‘Speech, &c’ (NLS MS , pp. –). Elliot had the speech printed, intending to publish it, but abandoned the project. ²¹ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Dec. (NLS MS , fo. ). The letter is part printed (without the ‘squeezing tears’ passage) in Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, ed. Lady Minto (London, ), i. . ²² ‘Speech, &c’, p. .
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witnessed some of the most celebrated events of English history, including the trials of Sir Thomas More and Charles I, and the impeachments of Lord Strafford and Archbishop Laud. In Burke’s day, it remained a functioning public building. At the east end, the courts of Chancery and King’s Bench occupied two partitioned sections. During the legal terms, the hall was a scene of bustle and activity, a rendezvous for lawyers, clients, and men of business. Earlier in the century, the remainder of the Hall had been filled with shops, but these had been removed. The exterior of the building itself, however, was still encrusted with unsightly accretions, its exterior walls largely hidden from view by a huddle of courts, offices, and stables, and even (at the west end) coffee-houses and public houses. These undignified excrescences were coming to be regarded as eyesores unbefitting so historic a monument. Starting about , a process of clearance and restoration began, and by the s the hall could be seen in something like its present state of preservation. Today, though still used for state ceremonies, it has the air of an ancient monument. The exterior, certainly, is more readily appreciated, as are the scale and grandeur of the vast ( ⫻ . ft.) interior, with reputedly the largest unsupported roof in England. Except for special events, however, the inside remains an empty shell. A brass plaque marks the spot where Hastings sat during his trial.²³ When the hall was needed for a state event, the courts were boarded over, and temporary seating erected. Following plans used on earlier occasions, the Office of Works, under Sir William Chambers (–), between December and February constructed a court surrounded on four sides by wooden stands capable of holding about , people.²⁴ Its appearance is recorded in a contemporary print (Plate ), which depicts the hall as seen from the east end. A key (Plate ) identifies the areas assigned to the different participants and spectators. (The fourth side of the seating, not shown in the print, contained more seats for the Commons and for peeresses, and a box and gallery appropriated to the Great Chamberlain.) From the outset, the trial combined theatre, when attention would be riveted on the business of the day, with conversazione, as spectators sought to beguile the tedium of the duller parts of the proceedings by gossiping with their friends and acquaintance. Two watercolours by James Nixon (c.–) provide livelier sketches of the atmosphere than the formal grandeur depicted in Plate . One, taken on a crowded day, shows spectators in one of the galleries. A man has risen to greet an acquaintance sitting behind him; others are talking to each other (Plate ). Another, taken on a day when the Commons’ benches were not full, shows the Speaker in his chair (‘a’ in Plate ) surrounded by ²³ J. Mordaunt Crook and M. H. Port, The History of the King’s Works, vi: – (London, ), –; Hilary St George Saunders, Westminster Hall (London, ). ²⁴ NA Works /, //. The total cost of the construction was £ s. d. (Works /).
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members in various poses of inattention (Plate ). One MP uses a spy glass, perhaps to admire ladies in another part of the hall. Admission for spectators was by ticket, the distribution of which was the responsibility not of the Lord Chamberlain (whose department included the Office of Works, which constructed the court) but of the hereditary Great Chamberlain, a position exercised in right of his wife by Sir Peter Burrell (–). For sittings that were expected to be especially interesting (such as when Burke, Fox, or Sheridan was scheduled to speak), tickets were in great demand. The managers themselves, of course, had their own box, but they were importuned for tickets by their friends. Even Burke had to write begging letters to Sir Peter to obtain an occasional supernumerary ticket (C v. –, ). To prevent forgery, the engraved tickets (featuring Sir Peter’s coat of arms) were sealed and signed by hand (Fig. ). As a further precaution, the colour was varied from day to day, and small changes were made to the design.²⁵ These tickets became familiar enough to be parodied. James Sayers (–), who had earlier caricatured the Coalition (Carlo Khan’s Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall Street ( Dec. : BMC ) earned him a sinecure from Pitt) savaged the trial as a travesty of justice: the olive branch above Sir Peter Burrell’s crest is replaced by a scourge, and the prosecution attributed to ‘Envy Hatred & Malice’ (Plate a). This caricature was itself burlesqued by James Gillray, an artist more sympathetic to the opposition. His design shows an oppressed Indian threatened with a club, while Thurlow is twice depicted, above on a close-stool and below dominating the trial. The charge of ‘Envy Hatred & Malice’ is countered by that of ‘Bribery & Corruption’ (Plate b). Tickets did not guarantee a particular seat. On popular days, early arrival was therefore necessary, and spectators sometimes endured a long wait even before entry to the hall, and an undignified scramble when the doors were opened at a.m.²⁶ Having gained admission, spectators might have to wait three hours or more before the proceedings began. The actual session of the court usually lasted three or four hours. Most tickets did not allow exit and readmission.²⁷ How were the needs of nature accommodated? The managers had access to ‘a retiring room down a dark stair where is kept the Books Papers & Potty, & where I fancy we shall contrive to have a little refreshment provided for us’.²⁸ Guests of the Duke of Newcastle (–), who (as Auditor of the Imprests) occupied a house adjoining the hall, enjoyed the privilege of a special gallery (‘H’ in Plate ) with access from his house, to which they ²⁵ A report in the Gazetteer, Feb. , confirms that the variations were a precaution against forgery. ²⁶ Antony Storer to William Eden, Feb. ( Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, i. ). ²⁷ So I infer from E.B. to Sir Peter Burrell, [Feb. ], asking for a ‘pass and repass’ ticket and promising to ‘keep this favour a secret’ (C v. ). ²⁸ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Feb. (NLS MS , fo. ).
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FIG. . An admission ticket for day of the trial of Warren Hastings ( May )
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could retire at will to enjoy a ‘cold collation’ and use his privy.²⁹ Most spectators were less fortunate. Food and drink could be brought in. According to a handbill reprinted in a newspaper, refreshments such as sandwiches (veal and ham, ham and fowl, tongue and veal, and beef; all one shilling each), coffee, chocolate, orange and lemonade, cakes, biscuits, jellies, wine and water (unpriced) were sold in the hall itself.³⁰ About toilet facilities, however, contemporaries are silent, though some provision was surely made for such large numbers.³¹ The trial in Westminster Hall was thus much more of a public spectacle than were debates in the House of Commons. Another difference was that proceedings were recorded by an official stenographer, Joseph Gurney (–), the leading shorthand writer of the day. Summary accounts of the trial appeared in the newspapers, and these are often valuable for preserving the reporter’s impression of the scene or of a speech. For what was actually said, however, Gurney’s invaluable record provides a much fuller and more secure basis for study than is available for parliamentary debates, for which the newspapers are usually the principal source.³² The opening of the trial was most vividly recorded by Frances Burney (–), then Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte (–), from whom she obtained her ticket and a day off duty. Chaperoned by her brother Charles (–), Burney arrived between and a.m. Their seats were in the Great Chamberlain’s box, giving them the view seen in Plate . The court did not open until noon. Previously an ardent admirer of Burke, Burney’s connection with the royal court had led her to side with Hastings. She was therefore grieved to see Burke enter at the head of the managers, dressed in brown, with a ‘scroll in his hand’ and a ‘brow knit with corroding care and deep labouring thought’ in the character of ‘the cruel Prosecutor (such to me he appeared) of an injured and innocent man’. Then came the lords in procession. Finally, Hastings was summoned to appear. After a brief exchange between Thurlow and Hastings, the main business of the day
²⁹ Hannah More to her family, (describing her visit to the trial of the Duchess of Kingston), in William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More (nd edn. London, ), i. –. At the Hastings trial, the duke provided ‘a handsome cold collation’ only for the first year or two ( Journal of Mary Frampton, from the Year , until the Year , ed. Harriet Georgiana Mundy (London, ), –). ³⁰ The World, Feb. . The advertisement may, however, be a spoof. ³¹ Reference to ‘fitting up Rooms and Accommodations in the Metzonine & part of the North & two side Gallerys’ may include privies (Accounts of the Works, ; NA Works /). ³² The evidence submitted was printed each day, as Minutes of the Evidence Taken at the Trial of Warren Hastings [etc.]. Pagination is continuous (with a second sequence for the Appendix); division into volumes varies from one library to another. The principal speeches were printed (from a transcript of Gurney’s shorthand) as Speeches of the Managers and Counsel at the Trial of Warren Hastings, ed. E.A. Bond (London, –). The arguments about evidence remain in the longhand transcript prepared for Bond, of which there are sets at BL (Add. MSS –) and at the library of Lincoln’s Inn. I have used the BL set, except for a few days that are missing, for which I have used the Lincoln’s Inn copy.
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began, the reading of the charges ‘from an immense roll of parchment’, but ‘in so monotonous a chant that nothing more could I hear or understand than now and then the name of Warren Hastings’. The hall was not full (which suggests that many people knew how tedious the proceedings would be), and thinned out further after about p.m. Even Hastings’s attention wandered, and he began to look around the hall. Burney tried to evade his eye. Soon, she was even more embarrassed by being recognized and approached by several of the managers, as well as by Richard Burke, Sr. Over the next two or three hours, she conducted a series of lengthy conversations that fill several pages in her journal. There was a good deal of moving about the hall, and the chatter must quite have drowned out the clerk reading the charge. Burney probably left about p.m, when the queen did. The court did not adjourn until .. Even then, only the first seven articles and replies had been read.³³ The remainder were read the following day, when the court sat from noon to .. Attendance was much reduced, a prominent absentee being Burke himself.³⁴ The third day of the trial, February, began with the reading of the third, last, and shortest of the preliminary documents, the replication of the Commons to Hastings’s defence. Next, the Lord Chancellor asked who appeared for the Commons. Burke rose in response, and after pausing for about a minute, delivered the first instalment (lasting from about noon to .) of the long speech that, in substance if not formally, opened the trial.³⁵ This speech had been planned on a grand scale. On January, Walker King estimated that it would take ‘some three or four days’ to deliver, noting defensively that counsel in the celebrated Douglas Cause had spoken at comparable length.³⁶ The projected length of Burke’s opening speech was soon ridiculed in the newspapers. One announced that it would be ‘five days in length!—with many apologies for omissions’. Another, more imaginative, reported that it would be ‘precisely eleven days long, during which time a gentleman has betted that he will walk to Edinburgh and back again’.³⁷ In fact, after two days, on the advice of friends, Burke announced the truncation of his original plan. Even so, his opening took four sittings and lasted about eleven hours. The printed text runs to over , words. Though subsequently dwarfed by the
³³ Burney, Journal, Feb. (Diary & Letters, iii. –). Other details from LJ xxxviii. –; Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ); The World, Feb. ; London Chronicle, – Feb.; Gazetteer, Feb. ³⁴ LJ xxxviii. . The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. (London, ), pt. , . Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). The World, Feb. . ³⁵ LJ xxxviii. –. London Chronicle, – Feb. . Though E.B. subsequently revised the speech for publication, I have preferred to use the text printed in WS vi. – (based on the Gurney transcripts) as being closer to what E.B. actually said. ³⁶ C v. . Sir James Montgomery’s speech took three days, Alexander Wedderburn’s four (A. Francis Steuart, The Douglas Cause (Glasgow, ), ). ³⁷ The World, Jan. ; Public Advertiser, Jan.
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nine-day epic with which Burke closed the prosecution’s reply in , his opening speech was by far his most ambitious effort to date. Burke intended his opening speech as an introduction to the prosecution’s case as a whole. The first day’s stint (WS vi. –) was more particularly so, comprising two distinct preliminary discourses. The purpose of the first was to magnify the cause and the occasion. More was at stake, Burke insisted, than the fate of a single man. The questions at issue, he argued, concerned the welfare of the British empire, the credit and honour of the British nation, and the preservation of the British constitution, in which impeachment was a vital element. Tracing the germ of the prosecution to the interest that Parliament began to take in India about , he showed that the impeachment of Hastings had been the result of a long, deliberate, and impeccably conducted process. The crimes with which Hastings was charged were worthy of the most dignified legal tribunal known to the constitution. Hastings was a criminal eminently deserving exemplary punishment, ‘the captaingeneral in iniquity’ (). Such crimes, such a criminal, required substantive justice. While asserting that little of the evidence to be adduced would fail to satisfy the most stringent legal standards, Burke deprecated the application to such a case of any rules except those of ‘natural, immutable and substantial justice’ (). Possessed of ‘a boundless power and unlimited jurisdiction’, the Lords had before them ‘a boundless object’ (). In such a case, a technical acquittal would be a travesty of justice. Britain, however, was not Burke’s only, or even his primary concern. The scene of the crimes, and the abode of their primary victims, was India, ‘another world’ (WS vi. ). After a brief outline of the history and constitution of the East India Company, particularly its transition since from a trading concern to a political entity, Burke exposed the discrepancy between the ‘real inside’ and the deceptive ‘husk and shell’ of the company’s constitution (), between the company’s ostensible system of government by written record (which Burke commended), and the circumvention and subversion of this system by Hastings to serve his own corrupt ends. He then turned to another fertile source of mischief and corruption, the company’s double constitution. Its operations were in theory circumscribed by its parliamentary charter, yet it exercised its rule over Bengal on the basis of an independent ‘grant’ from its nominal sovereign, the Mogul Emperor. In the course of delineating the company’s role in India, Burke outlined his view of Indian history, beginning with an excursus that eloquently expressed an idealized picture of Hindu civilization: peaceful, self-contained, and admirably ordered to preserve its wise institutions (–). This civilization had been subjugated but not destroyed by successive waves of invading barbarians. Of these, the last and the worst were the British. Earlier conquerors had put down roots in India, and left some constructive memorial of their presence. Only the British remained birds of prey and passage, content simply to
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squeeze the maximum possible out of the country, before returning to Britain, their places taken by a new generation of exploiters. When Burke resumed his speech on the fourth day of the trial ( February), he began by justifying his lengthy and discursive opening. Such background material, he insisted, far from being mere scene-setting, provided an essential context for understanding the nature of the crimes charged (WS vi. –). Moving closer to the case against Hastings, he then outlined the history of Bengal from to (–). His leading theme was the corruption and rapacity of the British officials who engineered revolutions in Bengal to extract enormous ‘presents’ from the aspirants to the throne, such as Mir Kasim (d. ), ‘a man of daring, intriguing, furious, subtle, bloody character’ (), who in turn squeezed the money from the people. So notorious did these oppressions become that in Parliament imposed a reform on the company, appointing a new council to reform abuses. From this point, beginning with the appointment of Hastings as Governor-General, Burke moved from narrative to analysis (–). To the question, how should a British governor govern, he answered, ‘upon British principles, not by British forms’ (). Against these principles, Burke tested an incautious statement made in Hastings’s defence (actually written, as later emerged, by his friend Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, –), that his actions were justified according to the arbitrary modes of Asian governments. In his defence against the Benares charge, Hastings (or rather Halhed) argued that he possessed a ‘general—perhaps arbitrary’ right to impose on Chait Singh a pecuniary fine. For this ‘arbitrary’ right he was not responsible: it was ‘a Defect woven into the Texture of the Mogul System’. Later, he described the ‘whole History of Asia’ as proving ‘the invariable Exercise of Arbitrary Power’.³⁸ To refute this contention, Burke composed a lengthy historical and political disquisition against what he stigmatized as ‘Geographical morality’ ().³⁹ Right and wrong, he argued, in substance if not in form, are universal. In this essay on arbitrary power, Burke magnified Halhed’s hasty words into a theory of despotism which Hastings never held. In the context of the trial, the passage was therefore of doubtful relevance. As an eloquent formulation of his belief in a universal moral law, however, it transcends that context.
³⁸ Hastings’s Defence, May (CJ xli. –). On June , Hastings explained that what he and Halhed meant was ‘discretionary power’, such as ‘commanders-in-chief have over their armies’ (Bond, iii. ). Hastings seems to have claimed the exercise of this ‘discretionary’ power only in exceptional circumstances; E.B. interpreted him as avowing ‘arbitrary power’ as a general principle. The inference was not unreasonable. On Feb. , E.B. heard Major Scott (Hastings’s echo) avow that ‘the British government in India is despotic, was ever despotic, and must continue to be so—All the governments of the East have ever been despotic (Public Advertiser, Feb. ; PH xxvi. ). ³⁹ Evidence of the element of spontaneity in even so elaborate a speech is that, as E.B. told Burney, this felicitous phrase was ‘an idea that had occurred to him on the moment he had uttered it, wholly without study’ ( Journal, Feb.: Diary & Letters, iii. ).
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Burke first argued that the idea of ‘arbitrary power’ was contrary to the law of God. In an eloquent appeal to the divine original of ‘the great gift of Government, the greatest, the best that was ever given by God to mankind’, he asserted that all men are born in subjection to the pre-existing ordinances of God. Power, the gift of God, must be exercised in accordance with the divine will, and not treated as ‘the play thing and the sport of the feeble will of a man’ (WS vi. ). He did not, of course, deny that actual government in India had often been in practice despotic, just as European rulers had often broken the laws that were supposed to restrain their actions. Rather, in a wide-ranging excursus, he contended that Islamic political theory did not place arbitrary power in the hands of a despot, and that the best Islamic practice was in accord with this theory (–). To support his argument, he adduced an array of primary sources, from the Koran to a recent translation of the Institutes then attributed to the Emperor Timur (–). To show that Hindu political practice was likewise ruled by law rather than arbitrary power, he cited the Code of Gentoo Laws edited and translated by Halhed at Hastings’s request (–). This demolition of the claim to arbitrary power was the high point of the day’s speech.⁴⁰ Winding down, Burke briefly demolished two subsidiary defences, before adumbrating the line of argument he would next pursue. Identifying avarice as Hastings’s ruling passion, he promised to show how this vice had burgeoned into a whole ‘system of peculation and bribery’ (), poisoning not only the government of Bengal but British relations with other Indian states. This day proved the longest segment of his opening speech, lasting from . a.m. to p.m.⁴¹ Murmurs about the length of Burke’s speech were now heard even from his associates. Accordingly, on February, the fifth day of the trial, Burke began by announcing a curtailment of his plan. After restating the link between corruption and arbitrary power, he declared that he would confine the remainder of his speech to pecuniary corruption (WS vi. –). This truncation had one unfortunate result. Burke charged Hastings with the subversion of the company’s admirable system of government by record, and with pursuing, against his instructions, an aggressive foreign policy. Hastings regularly suppressed and destroyed correspondence; replaced official channels with private; circumvented the company’s agents by appointing his own; ignored directives from England; and pursued his own interests rather than those of the company. Much of this is true. Hastings was often impatient with conventional procedures and forms of business. Nor was Burke alone in his view. During the course of his administration, Hastings had repeatedly ⁴⁰ Even The World (usually hostile to E.B. at this period), lauded the speech as ‘the work of a Master . . . a , as it were, of the World’, and particularly praised the argument against arbitrary power as ‘glorious indeed!—he called together all the forces of Truth and Equity’ ( Feb. ). ⁴¹ Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ).
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clashed with the directors. In , one of them lamented that ‘Hastings continues in the same track of profusion & wildness which has created all our difficulties.’⁴² Had Burke completed his original plan, he might have given a more rounded or complex portrayal of this career of ‘profusion & wildness’. In the event, he overwhelmingly emphasized Hastings’s ruling passion as avarice and rapacity. For many employees of the East India Company, personal monetary gain was indeed their prime motive. Obvious examples would include Sir Thomas Rumbold and Richard Barwell.⁴³ Hastings was not among them. Ambition for glory, not avarice, was his ruling idea. ‘I have catched the desire of applause in public life,’ he confessed to the directors as early as .⁴⁴ While unscrupulous about financing the adventures he undertook, and impatient of conventional accounting methods, raising a vast personal fortune was never his primary aim. Indeed, some of his most questionable dealings came towards the end of his time in India, after friends warned him how little money he would have on his return to England.⁴⁵ Two suggestions may be advanced as to why Burke chose to focus on avarice as the key to Hastings’s career. Rhetorically, avarice is a more demeaning vice than ambition. Burke exploited this to degrade Hastings and to strip him of his heroic pretensions. Further, Burke genuinely believed that avarice was the leading feature of Hastings’s character. This led him to seize on the reports of the Rangpur atrocities with uncritical avidity, for they seemed perfectly to illustrate his thesis. As a suspect Irish adventurer, Burke needed to prove, to himself and to the world, that he was not in politics to make a fortune. Eager to manifest his own disinterestedness, Burke cast Hastings as his antitype. Money, Burke argued, is a peculiarly ignoble motive, with no trace of the virtue or nobility that might at least in part redeem a tyranny based on religious intolerance or conquest. Hastings, he charged, was never actuated by any principle more elevated than this base appetite for lucre. In support of this contention, Burke reviewed the history of Hastings’s administration of Bengal. The highlights are the revenue settlement of , with its ⁴² Francis Baring to Lord Lansdowne, Apr. (BL Lansdowne Papers, box , fo. ). ⁴³ Rumbold is known to have acquired in excess of £,. Barwell was rumoured, ‘probably with exaggeration’, to have cleared £, (P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, ), , ). This is not to imply that Hastings was indifferent to money. His documented remittances total £,, and his comparative ‘poverty’ on his return to England was the result of his profusion and extravagance (P. J. Marshall, ‘The Personal Fortune of Warren Hastings’, Economic History Review, (), –). ⁴⁴ Hastings to the directors, Nov. (G. R. Gleig, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Warren Hastings (London, ), i. ). ⁴⁵ Marshall, ‘Personal Fortune of Warren Hastings’, –. Marian Hastings was not so careless about money. Contemporaries believed that she accepted presents to influence her husband. In (when Hastings himself was pleading poverty), she possessed at least £,, most of which was probably accumulated in India, by means which are unlikely to have been creditable (P. J. Marshall, ‘The Private Fortune of Marian Hastings’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, (), –).
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dispossession of the old landed interest; the arrival of the new councillors in , and the episode of Nandakumar; and the establishment of the new Committee of Revenue in . The last provided a segue to the most sensational part of the entire four-day speech, Burke’s graphic description of the atrocities committed by revenue collectors at Rangpur during the administration of Devi Singh (d. ). This passage is said to have ‘convulsed and agitated the whole Assembly’. Some ladies, including the actress Sarah Siddons (–), are even reported to have fainted. To heighten the drama, Burke himself was taken ill with a violent pain in his side (though this seems to have been a physiological rather than emotional reaction, the result of his drinking cold water and eating oranges to preserve his voice). After resting for a few minutes, he tried to resume; but the Prince of Wales (–), seeing that he was in no state to continue, moved an adjournment. Burke had spoken for about three hours.⁴⁶ Burke’s account of the Rangpur episode (which probably took no more than half an hour) has an importance far greater than its length would suggest. The episode caused a sensation at the time, continues to generate intense interest, and raises troubling questions about Burke’s personal integrity. The gravamen of Burke’s charge was that Devi Singh bribed Hastings to award him the revenue farms of Dinajpur and Rangpur (districts in what is now the northernmost tip of Bangladesh). In , the methods and exactions of his agents provoked a revolt among the ryots of Rangpur. A company official, John Paterson (d. ), was sent to investigate. After gathering evidence of the cruelties and tortures alleged to have been employed by Devi Singh’s agents, Paterson submitted three reports which condemned the collectors and vindicated the ryots. A copy of this report reached Burke late in December , much too late for any charges to have been derived from it, even had he been able to convince the Commons that Hastings was morally, if indirectly, responsible for the atrocities. Nevertheless, Burke determined to use the episode, even, as he told Francis, to ‘dilate’ upon it, ‘for it has stuff in it, that will, if any thing, work upon the popular Sense’ (c. Jan. : C v. ). Burke described the tortures with extraordinary particularity, and the effect is certainly revolting (WS vi. –). Paterson’s reports, however, from which Burke drew the details of the tortures, did not close the episode. A committee of three was sent to Rangpur to reopen the investigation. Unknown to Burke at the time of his opening speech, this committee exonerated Devi Singh, and found no evidence for the worst of the tortures, though it did concede that some ‘severities’ had been used.⁴⁷ When this new report ⁴⁶ Morning Chronicle, Feb. . Gazetteer, Feb. WS vi. –. E.B. had previously exploited reports of atrocities in his Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts ( Feb. ), where the villain is Haidar Ali (WS v. –). ⁴⁷ A copy of Paterson’s reports, extensively annotated by E.B., is in BL (Add. MS ). The report of the second commission is in BL (OIOC), IOR, P//, pp. –.
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reached England (in April ), friends of Hastings exploited it to discredit Burke’s account, and by extension the impeachment.⁴⁸The second investigation may have been an official whitewash.⁴⁹ Exactly what ‘severities’ were used at Rangpur, and whether they were more than the ‘usual’ ones, is not easily determined. Nevertheless, even if all the allegations Paterson reported were true, Hastings neither committed nor authorized them, nor could he reasonably be held responsible for them.⁵⁰ About the time that news of the second commission reached London, Burke also received a letter from Paterson’s brother George (d. ), apparently hinting (the letter itself is not extant) that Burke had misused or distorted the reports, and that Paterson had withdrawn some of his allegations. Burke was furious, writing an indignant letter in his most pompous manner. Paterson, he assumed, had ‘sunk under persecution on the one hand, and under a total want of support either at home or abroad’ and been ‘obliged to relinquish his cause’. Tamely and cravenly, ‘for the sake of peace’, he allowed ‘his Acts to be discredited and his Character to be tarnished’. Burke, however, would not retract an iota. Indeed, he knew that Paterson’s evidence ‘could not be generally false’, the ‘general Rebellion of an Indian Province’ being ‘irresistible general Evidence of Extortion, Oppression, and Cruelty’ ( Apr. : C v. –). This letter exposes Burke at his worst: truculent, dogmatic, and impervious to criticism. It also illustrates the gulf between his belief in guilt by notoriety and the legal proofs demanded in a criminal trial. On many of the disputes about evidence that were to bedevil the trial, Burke’s impatience with legal technicalities is likely to evoke some sympathy. His attempts to use the Rangpur atrocities to discredit Hastings are, on the contrary, impossible to justify, and his inability to see the objections to them illustrates one of the most alienating aspects of his character, his unshakeable self-righteousness. Burke recovered sufficiently to resume his speech the next day, February, the sixth of the trial. After apologizing for his indisposition, he resumed his Rangpur narrative. Hastings was morally responsible for the atrocities, he argued, because he knew the bad character of the men he selected: not only Devi Singh, the immediate oppressor of Rangpur, but an even more powerful villain, Ganga Govind Singh, whom he appointed diwan to the Committee of ⁴⁸ John Scott, A Letter to the Right Honourable Charles James Fox, on the Extraneous Matter Contained in Mr Burke’s Speeches, in Westminster Hall (nd edn. London, ). ⁴⁹ This is the view of Narahari Kaviraj, A Peasant Uprising in Bengal, : The First Formidable Peasant Uprising against the Rule of the East India Company (New Delhi, ), –. ⁵⁰ Paterson later exonerated Hastings, in a ‘Statement of Facts’ enclosed in a letter to Charles Chapman of Sept. (BL (OIOC), IOR, H/, pp. –). While exculpating Hastings, however, Paterson maintained his charges against Devi Singh. Scott accused Burke of ‘deliberate, systematic, and intentional misrepresentation’, in exploiting the Rangpur atrocities while knowing they could not be linked to Hastings (Letter to Fox, on the Extraneous Matter, ). Scott did not allow for E.B.’s power of self-deception. Once having determined, to his own satisfaction, that Hastings had corruptly appointed Devi Singh, no amount of ‘evidence’ such as Scott adduced could have convinced him. E.B. believed what he said.
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Revenue. Burke expatiated on Hastings’s parting recommendation of Ganga Govind Singh to his successor, and on the oppressions he committed after Hastings’s departure. Burke thus placed Hastings in an unholy dynasty of grasping tyrants. Just as he had learned his principles of government from such miscreants as Mir Kasim, so he had bequeathed them to Ganga Govind Singh. Finally, Burke concluded with a lengthy peroration in his grandest manner. After recurring to his opening theme, the importance of the trial and the principles at stake, Burke concluded with a series of clauses beginning ‘I impeach him’. In a grandiloquent hyperbole, he accused Hastings on behalf of the Commons in Parliament, the people whom they represented, the people of India, ‘those eternal laws of justice which he has violated’, and finally ‘human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation and condition of life’ (WS vi. ). His purpose, as he had earlier told Francis, was to convict Hastings of a ‘general evil intention’ ( Dec. : C v. ). Thus the final appeal to universal values was more than a rhetorical flourish. Burke meant it literally. This last day of the speech was also the shortest: Burke spoke for under two hours.⁵¹ Burke fashioned his great opening speech to appeal to three distinct audiences: the Lords, the public, and posterity. While the Lords were nominally the primary audience, Burke was actually more concerned with the public and with posterity.⁵² Believing the Lords to be prejudiced in favour of Hastings, he thought that the most likely means of obtaining a conviction was to conduct the trial in public. Public opinion might compel the Lords to convict. Long stretches of the speech (such as those dealing with events in Bengal before Hastings became governor, and with the Rangpur atrocities) seem calculated rather to inflame opinion than to make a judicial case. As a public address, the speech was eminently successful. Testimony to its effectiveness comes from reports of the general demeanour of the audience, and most tellingly from hearers who believed firmly that Hastings was innocent. Frances Burney, for example, a staunch Hastings partisan, confessed that ‘the whirlwind of his eloquence nearly drew me into its vortex’. A ‘miscellaneous hearer’, she found the digressions ‘so fanciful, so entertaining, and so ingenious’ as to be welcome: When he narrated, he was easy, flowing, and natural; when he declaimed, energetic, warm, and brilliant. The sentiments he interspersed were as nobly conceived as they ⁵¹ WS vi. –. The World, Feb. ⁵² For posterity, E.B. revised the speech after delivery (precisely when is not known). This revised text, edited by Walker King, was published in in vol. vii of the quarto edition of E.B.’s Works. The most interesting substantive changes relate to the passage on arbitrary power, and attest the importance E.B. attached to that section (WS vi. – for the textual history; – for the revised passages, printed from E.B.’s papers). Christopher Reid, Edmund Burke and the Practice of Political Writing (Dublin, ), –, provides a sample of the more interesting stylistic changes.
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were highly coloured; his satire had a poignancy of wit that made it as entertaining as it was penetrating; his allusions and quotations, as far as they were English and within my reach, were apt and ingenious; and the wild and sudden flights of his fancy, bursting forth from his creative imagination in language fluent, forcible, and varied, had a charm for my ear and my attention wholly new and perfectly irresistible.⁵³
Another admirer of Hastings, Nathaniel Wraxall conceded that even those (such as himself) who ‘most disapproved the impeachment’ acknowledged ‘the magnificent structure of ideas, the vast series of facts, the prodigious grasp of his mind which could arrange, and his memory which could retain, such a multitude of transactions’.⁵⁴ Not everyone felt the spell. Burney’s brother James (–), for example, as befitted a bluff naval officer, was impatient and sceptical: ‘When will he come to the point? –These are mere words! –This is all sheer detraction! –All this is nothing to the purpose!’⁵⁵ The Burney siblings were both right. Judged as the production of a well informed imagination, or as a rhetorical discourse, or even as the eloquent expression of an argument, the opening speech deserves the highest encomiums. As a judicial address, the speech is more open to criticism. Burke spoke with a latitude more appropriate to the age of Cicero than to eighteenth-century England. His irresponsible inclusion of the Rangpur material demonstrated his refusal to accept the conventions of contemporary legal discourse, or to recognize that a trial at law was not a parliamentary debate, but a process governed by different rules and canons of evidence. The Rangpur atrocities, besides being extraneous to the charge, proved vulnerable to attack as unsubstantiated. Though they served their immediate purpose in raising public interest and indignation, their inclusion ultimately weakened the managers’ case. Unworried by concerns about its context in a criminal trial, modern readers of Burke’s speech are more likely to echo the approval of a ‘miscellaneous hearer’ such as Frances Burney than the reprobation of her brother. Some of Burke’s contemporaries knew more about the actuality of India than he did, and some had a keener insight into the ways in which it differed from Europe, but no one approached his ability to synthesize his knowledge and understanding into so compelling and eloquent a representation. Consequently, Burke’s opening speech remains one of the most frequently cited documents in the history of eighteenth-century conceptions of India. For Burke, the impeachment was always more a moral crusade than a legal process. His magnificent opening oration therefore expressed a vision of India ⁵³ Frances Burney, Journal, Feb. (Diary & Letters, iii. –). ⁵⁴ Nathaniel William Wraxall, Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London, ), v. . ⁵⁵ Burney, Journal, Feb. (Diary & Letters, iii. ).
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rather than a criminal indictment. After a few days, the moral issues increasingly took second place as the trial became increasingly concerned with the admissibility of evidence rather than its substance. Burke took more than his share in these wearisome and seemingly interminable squabbles about technicalities. Indeed, he often pursued them with a rancorous persistence which may appear disproportionate to the point in question. In part, this was his habitual practice of giving (as he advised his son) ‘the whole recollected force of all your faculties’ even to a dispute about three goats (C v. ). On a subject that he regarded as supremely important, he was therefore likely to exhibit what others would regard as excess and intemperance. In the battles and skirmishes in Westminster Hall, Burke often appears testy and obsessive. At such moments, the moral vision that motivated him is easily occluded. For him, the trial was about more than the guilt of an individual, deeply as he felt the turpitude of that guilt. In the first instance, it concerned the happiness and well-being of some million people. Indirectly, it involved the political and social order of a subcontinent comparable in size and civilization to Europe. Small wonder if Burke became impatient as the substantive questions were repeatedly obscured by the petty legalism he had always abhorred. Burke was acutely conscious of the difficulty of understanding another culture.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, his opening speech shows that he was confident both of his own understanding of India and of his ability to represent to his audience its history and culture. Today, such confidence is likely to provoke suspicion. In particular, any European attempt to represent an Asian society is liable to the charge of ‘orientalism’, defined as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’.⁵⁷ ‘Orientalists’ in this sense are typically charged with constructing their subject as inferior, exotic, alien, and threatening, and with disguising their constructions as objective descriptions in order to justify Western mastery and control. Was Burke an ‘orientalist’ in this pejorative sense? His representations of India were always rhetorical, calculated to support an avowed polemical purpose. While their immediate purpose was the correction of abuses in the government of British India, they never advocated British withdrawal, or Indian self-determination. To that extent, they were ultimately complicit with the colonial or imperial project of domination. That Burke ‘constructed’ his India, from fragments of second-hand information held together by his powerful imagination, may also be conceded. But the India of Burke’s creation, ⁵⁶ Introducing evidence from Demetrius Cantemir at the trial, E.B. acknowledged that ‘distress which arises not from our nature but from local institution’ was likely to provoke uncomprehending laughter ( Apr. : WS vi. ). ⁵⁷ Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, ), . Frederick G. Whelan, ‘Burke, India, and Orientalism’, in An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke, ed. Ian Crowe (Columbia, Mo., ), –, wrestles with the question whether E.B. may be regarded as an ‘orientalist’ in Said’s sense.
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little as it may correspond with the actual India of his day, is no less removed from the orientalist stereotype of Western constructions of the East. It is neither inferior, nor exotic, nor threateningly ‘other’. On the contrary, the main thrust of Burke’s representations of India was to convince his audience that India was part of their own moral universe, and that oppression and injustice committed in India was no less reprehensible, and equally deserving of punishment, as if committed at home. To acknowledge that Burke’s India was ‘constructed’ is not to imply that it was invented. Burke was always a lover of information on all subjects, and on none more than India. Indeed, the knowledge he acquired, especially of Bengal and its dependencies, was remarkably full and detailed. It derived primarily from the documentary and oral evidence presented to the Select Committee between and . He also learned much from men with personal knowledge of British India, such as Philip Francis. He even conversed with probably the only high-caste Hindu to visit Britain in the eighteenth century. For all this, Burke had no first-hand experience of India, which today would be regarded as a disqualification. In the eighteenth century, however, social theorists happily accepted travel literature as empirical evidence, and personal experience of a culture was not thought a prerequisite for research.⁵⁸ A visit to India might indeed have unsettled Burke’s secular universalism, belief in which was made easier by his not having been there. What he read and heard about India he could readily assimilate within European paradigms without having to confront the palpable otherness of the actual. Burke’s fashioning of the mass of Indian information that he acquired was guided by two fundamental assumptions. The first, characteristic of his age, was his belief in a common human nature, and in the universality of certain values. Writing to William Robertson, he spoke of ‘the Great Map of Mankind’, a common human nature that could be discerned beneath every variety of barbarism or refinement. India, while unmentioned in this passage, would provide a third example to add to ‘the very different Civility of Europe and of China’ ( June : C iii. ). This recognition of a common humanity did not preclude acknowledging that cultural differences, the result of history, geographical conditions such as climate, and other variables, were in practice so great that Indians appeared separated from the European world ‘by Manners, by Principles of Religion, and of inveterate Habits as strong as Nature itself, still more than by the Circumstances of local Distance’, even by ‘what may be considered as a Diversity even in the very Constitution of their Minds’ (WS vii. –). To this extent, like most of his contemporaries, ⁵⁸ Sir William Jones, however, warned Lord Spenser that ‘In Europe you see India through a glass darkly: here, we are in a strong light; and a thousand little nuances are perceptible to us, which are not visible through your best telescopes, and which could not be explained without writing volumes’ ( Aug. , in Letters, ed. Garland Cannon (Oxford, ), ii. ).
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Burke was a disciple of Montesquieu (–), whose De l’esprit des lois () was the age’s great compendium of cultural differences. Montesquieu was a mildly subversive philosopher who exploited the variation of local habits and customs to undermine received ideas and supposed universals, shrinking the realm of what was genuinely universal, and therefore in some sense ‘true’, and implicitly demoting revealed religion to the status of a local cult. Burke was more inclined to look beneath the diversity of human culture for similarities and common ground, concluding that religion (if not particular religions) was universal and natural: ‘man is by his constitution a religious animal’ (R []). This proclivity derived from a second assumption, which again divided him from Montesquieu: his belief in Providence and its beneficent ordering of the world. This faith in Providence underpinned his justification of empire, and of the British presence in India. Other circumstances also favoured Burke’s construction of India as another Europe. Indeed, perhaps at no other time would his task have been easier. India was sufficiently known to be no longer ‘exotic’.⁵⁹ The Indian economy was not manifestly inferior to that of Europe. Productivity was high (which compensated for stagnant technology), a sophisticated market and credit system was in operation, and its manufactures (especially its textiles) were competitive on world markets. The technological gap that, in the nineteenth century, made India seem backward and primitive, was only beginning to open. Militarily, too, the balance had not yet shifted decisively in favour of Europe.⁶⁰ What Burke perceived in India was neither a society arrested at an early stage of development, nor an empire in terminal decline.⁶¹ Rather, he recognized a civilization of great antiquity that was still flourishing, or had been until recent foreign invasions.⁶² Burke was no bigot to ‘progress’, and did not contemn Indian society for having changed less over time than had Europe (the general view). Hindu culture’s resilience under repeated foreign conquests was itself a presumption in its favour. Hinduism itself fitted readily into Burke’s concept of what a religion should be: it possessed a priesthood, sacred texts, and temples. Indian society was complex in a way that facilitated comparisons with Europe, with a social hierarchy; cities, towns, and villages; literacy (and even a ‘dead’ language analogous to classical ⁵⁹ P. J. Marshall, ‘Taming the Exotic: The British and India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester, ), –. ⁶⁰ P. J. Marshall, ‘Western Arms in Maritime Asia in the Early Phases of Expansion’, Modern Asian Studies, (), –. ⁶¹ Amal Chatterjee, Representations of India, –: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (Basingstoke, ), divides British commentators into two schools, the ‘primitive’ and the ‘degenerate’. E.B. (who is not treated) fits into neither category. ⁶² This was the view of Luke Scrafton, who attributed the decay and weakness of India to the invasion of Nadir Shah, and the wars between the British and the French in the Carnatic, not to any internal source (Reflections on the Government, &c of Hindustan (London, ), –, ).
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Greek); manufactures of acknowledged excellence; and a developed and thriving economy. Like Europe, India was a natural geographical entity divided into a plurality of independent states that shared a common cultural heritage. All these considerations combined to make Indian civilization appear a closer analogue to Europe than did any other part of the world. Burke was not unmindful of the many self-evident differences between Europe and India. But to stress the similarities was both congenial to his personal outlook (which, for all his respect for local differences, liked generalization) and helpful for his rhetorical purpose, which was to engage the sympathies of his audience for faraway peoples. Accordingly, he sought to familiarize India and to bring it within the reach of a universal moral code: ‘Fraud, injustice, oppression, peculation engendered in India, are crimes of the same blood, family, and cast, with those that are born and bred in England’ (Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts: WS v. ).This strategy, the opposite of that attributed to the ‘orientalist’, has been called the ‘construction of affinities’.⁶³ An instance of its operation, free of any rhetorical purpose, can be observed in the work of John Richardson (c.–). Like Burke, Richardson noted that, while the ‘Manners of Mankind’ displayed ‘a wonderful diversity of character’, beneath that diversity ‘the great original of the whole is Man’. Richardson considered the Mogul Empire as an example of feudalism, which he traced to the Tartars, and found eastern origins for cultural practices as various as romantic fiction, chivalry, royal jesters, and trial by ordeal. Distinctive Eastern institutions included despotism and domestic slavery.⁶⁴ Richardson exemplifies the capacity of Burke’s contemporaries to approach Asian civilizations without condescension, and to penetrate beyond the obvious differences between East and West in search of shared and analogous customs. Richardson learned Arabic and Persian, but had not, at the time he wrote his Dissertation, visited the East (only in did he travel to Calcutta). Like Burke’s, his was a text-based understanding. Yet even those with first-hand experience of India could engage in the construction of affinities. The case of the artist William Hodges (–) has a double interest. A protégé of Warren Hastings, he spent about five years (–) in India, and his depictions of the country exhibit a striking amalgam of familiar and exotic features. He registered the distinctiveness of Indian landscape and architecture, without making it either strange or alien. On his return to England, he published a ⁶³ Harry Liebersohn, ‘Discovering Indigenous Nobility’, American Historical Review, (), –. Liebersohn applies the idea to travellers who ‘make meaning out of their experiences by matching up features of a foreign culture with seemingly identical traits of their own, while permitting markers of distance to retreat into obscurity’ (). ⁶⁴ A Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations (nd edn. London, ), , –, –, –, , –. The Dissertation was originally prefaced to the first volume of Richardson’s Dictionary, Persian, Arabic, and English (London, –).
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series of aquatints, Select Views in India (–). Burke probably knew these prints, and if so, they would have been the most vivid pictorial representations of India that he encountered.⁶⁵Viewing them would have confirmed his notion of India as another Europe. While they include some unfamiliar architectural forms and are marked by an occasional touch of local colour (such as an elephant), Hodges’s views present an India that is often reminiscent of Europe. The buildings depicted (forts, mosques, bridges, temples, palaces) all have European analogues. In his impressionistic and picturesque style, an Indian fort looks much like a European castle, a mosque like a gothic cathedral. Indeed, in his travel book, Hodges explicitly makes such connections.⁶⁶ The views are sparsely peopled, concentrating on the landscape and the architecture. As in European topographical art, the monuments are presented as calm and dignified, even in ruin. Hodges scarcely notices characteristic Indian customs or religion, or Indian domestic, urban, or commercial life. One comment, on a gate leading to a mosque at Chunar, will exemplify his habit of mind. As an illustration of the diffusion of ‘gothic’ architecture from Persia east to India and west to Europe, Hodges observes that the ‘general forms of this building, as well as many others in India, are the same as those we see in Europe’. This gate is an especially good example, because even ‘all the minuter ornaments are perfectly the same—The lozenge square filled with roses, the ornaments in the spandrels of the arches’ and so on. Hodges concludes that ‘a person would almost be led to think that artists had arrived from the same school at the same time, to erect buildings at the extremity of India and of Europe’.⁶⁷ This search for similarities did not prevent Hodges from registering the strangeness of Madras and Calcutta, or from acknowledging that the Taj Mahal ‘far surpasses any thing that I ever beheld’.⁶⁸ Later British artists sought less to familiarize India than to represent the exotic elements that Hodges minimized. His immediate successors, Thomas (–) and William (–) Daniell, through a more precise rendering of details, accentuate the differences between Indian and European architecture. They, and their successors, also peopled their scenes more generously and depicted more scenes from daily life.⁶⁹ In doing so, they helped create the exotic India so memorably described by Thomas Babington ⁶⁵ Hodges also exhibited oil paintings of India at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy, which E.B. regularly attended. William Hodges, –: The Art of Exploration (New Haven, ), especially –, provides a fuller account of Hodges’s complex response to India. My concern is how an English audience might have perceived the Select Views. ⁶⁶ Travels in India, during the Years , , , & (London, ), , , –, –. ⁶⁷ Select Views in India, Drawn on the Spot, in the years , , , and (London, [– ]), letter press text accompanying plate (View of a Gate at Chunar). ⁶⁸ Travels in India, –, , –. Hodges gives more attention to ‘local colour’ in his Travels than he does in the Select Views. ⁶⁹ Mildred Archer, Early Views of India: The Picturesque Journeys of Thomas and William Daniell, – (London, ).
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Macaulay, and by him attributed to Burke. In a virtuoso passage, Macaulay asserted that out of the ‘darkness, and dullness, and confusion’ of ‘those huge bales of Indian information’, Burke imagined ‘a real country and a real people’: The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the cocoa tree, the ricefield, the tank, the huge trees, older than the Mogul empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the thatched roof of the peasant’s hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the imaun prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners, and gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden, with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the riverside, the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces, the elephants with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and the close litter of the noble lady . . . All India was present to the eye of his mind, from the halls where the suitors laid gold and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns to the wild moor where the gipsy camp was pitched, from the bazar, humming like a bee-hive with a crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyænas.⁷⁰
This is magnificent, but these are Macaulay’s images, not Burke’s, the grotesque construction of a confirmed Indophobe.⁷¹Though Macaulay spent some years in India (–), he scarcely ventured beyond the British enclaves. Despite its vividness, his description owes less to personal observation than to the illustrations of exotic Indian people and scenes which were popular at the time. Burke nowhere indulges in such picturesque fantasies. When he describes India, he does not particularize the local vegetation, but repeatedly invokes the archetype of the garden.⁷² Deploring the effects of the Rohilla War, he accused Hastings of ‘reducing the gardens of the universe to a desert’. Rohilkhand was once ‘the Eden of the East’, a ‘beautiful paradise’, a ‘delightful spot, the joint effect of nature and art, the united work of God and man’ ( July : WS v. , ). In his speech on the Rohilla War charge ( June ), Burke again characterized Rohilkhand as a ‘Garden of Eden’, while describing it in terms that suggest Italy, with ‘its populous and splendid towns, its beautiful villas, and its rich vineyards’ (vi. ). Thus he was able simultaneously to invoke images of a paradise unspoiled (until the incursions of Shuja al-Daula, abetted by Hastings) and of a real place.
⁷⁰ ‘Warren Hastings’ (; nominally a review of Gleig’s Memoirs of Warren Hastings), in Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the ‘Edinburgh Review’, ed. F. C. Montague (London, ), iii. . ⁷¹ Thomas R. Trautmann’s term, in Aryans and British India (Berkeley, ) for the Evangelicals and Utilitarians who reacted against the Indophiles of the late c. E.B. should be added to the number of Indophiles. ⁷² Yet E.B. could exploit the exotic when this suited his rhetorical purpose. Describing the scourging of the unfortunate inhabitants of Rangpur, E.B. charges that the agents of Devi Singh sought unusually painful instruments of torture in the ‘Bale’ (Bael) tree (or Bengal quince) and the ‘Bechetta plant’ (a kind of nettle), ‘a deadly caustic, which inflames the parts that are cut, and leaves the body a crust of leprous sores and often causes death itself ’ (WS vi. ).
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Indeed, so vivid was Burke’s description (of a place he had never seen) that, four years later, passing through the countryside around Brussels, Lord Mornington (–) wrote that it ‘put me in mind of Burke’s account of the Rohilla country. There is not one inch of ground uncultivated; the whole has the appearance of a garden.’⁷³ Unlike Macaulay’s jumble of exotic images, the archetype of the garden serves to universalize and familiarize, to put India and Europe on the same map. How much pictorial representations contributed to Burke’s vision of India is unproven. The work of Hodges, like that of Richardson, provides a suggestive analogue rather than a source. More certain is the influence of another species of visual evidence, the map. Today, maps have lost much of the aura of objectivity that they once enjoyed, and are readily perceived as agents of power and propaganda.⁷⁴ For Burke and his contemporaries, however, maps remained innocent repositories of knowledge, faithful mirrors of the reality they purported to represent, free of the bias acknowledged to compromise words and pictures. Scientists had dreamed of a language in which words unambiguously represented things; a map seemed to embody that ideal. By the s, excellent maps of India were available, thanks in large part to the pioneering work of Major James Rennell (–), employed by the East India Company. Rennell produced a large-scale Bengal Atlas, as well as smallscale maps of India as a whole.⁷⁵ Even Rennell’s general maps of India, despite some blank spaces that remained unfilled, suggest a country well known, travelled, and understood. The Bengal Atlas, with its wealth of detail based on actual surveys, reinforces this impression. Perusing the Atlas, with its precisely identified administrative districts (outlined in colour), its natural features (rivers, hills, mountains, and passes), its primary and secondary roads, the carefully graded hierarchy of cities, towns, bazaars, and villages, Burke would have been struck by the similarities to English county maps. In particular, the privileging of administrative boundaries over natural features suggests a world that has been tamed and ordered by civilization. A country that had been mapped in such detail, however little might be known about the actual life of the inhabitants, was a country that could be known. It was not wild, or exotic, or ‘other’, but clearly resembled Europe, where the same set of geographical features was to be found. ⁷³ To William Wyndham Grenville, July , in HMC (Fortescue), i. . As Marquis Wellesley, Mornington was later Governor-General of Bengal (–). ⁷⁴ Dennis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York, ); J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore, ). ⁷⁵ A Bengal Atlas, Containing Maps of the Theatre of War and Commerce on that Side of Hindoostan (London, ); Rennell sent E.B. a presentation copy of the edition (Sale Catalogue, ). His map of Hindoostan () was followed by A New Map of Hindoostan (). His first Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, or the Mogul’s Empire (London, ) was likewise replaced by a new Memoir in . Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, – (Chicago, ), esp. –, .
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Burke’s careful study of the map of India is evident from a remarkable passage in his Speech on Fox’s India Bill ( Dec. ). There he offers a verbal map of the subcontinent in general and the British possessions in particular. The statistics he adduces show how much more precisely the physical geography of India was known than the human. To enforce his comparisons, he can cite the precise areas of provinces; but when he comes to population, he can only guess (even the population of Britain, however, was not yet known with any exactness). The evidential basis may be uneven, but the purpose of the passage is clear: to ‘familiarize’ India by likening it to Europe, and the British dominions to the Holy Roman Empire.⁷⁶ Far from presenting India as a monolithic ‘other’ (the usual charge against ‘orientalism’), Burke stresses its diversity, but even that diversity provides a point of comparison with Europe. When he sketches the inhabitants of India, he places them in a social framework divided into classes analogous to those of Europe: 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. –)
This passage illustrates how completely Burke assimilated India within a universal paradigm of human life and society. The Hindu caste system (by others perceived as strange and even abhorrent) was merely the local form of the hierarchy characteristic of all human civilization. Admittedly, the passage in the Speech on Fox’s India Bill served an explicit rhetorical purpose. Burke avowedly wanted to ‘familiarize’ India. Yet comparison with another example of the same rhetorical device (chorographia, the description of a country) suggests that he may really have felt that India was, in some respects, more like Europe than was America. In his Speech on Conciliation ( March ), as part of a strategy of magnifying the importance of the colonies, he offered a sketch of their rapid progress between and , using some of the same elements (especially figures) as he would in the description of India (WS iii. –). An indicative contrast between the two passages is Burke’s presentation of the colonies as different from Europe. Unlike the staid mother country, America is growing uncontrollably both in ⁷⁶ In The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, ), Sara Suleri argues that this passage actually illustrates the ‘representational unavailability’ of Indian culture and history (–). For Suleri, E.B.’s India was ‘other’, sublime, and frightening. In my view, E.B. saw India as different, but neither alien nor unintelligible.
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population and trade: ‘Your children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood, than they spread from families to communities, and from villages to nations’ (). Economic activity has burgeoned. The rhetorical climax of this description is a graphic account of the American whaling industry: 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. . . . 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. ()
This passage is more exotic and ‘sublime’ than anything Burke wrote about India. Where America is immature (‘but in the gristle’, ), characterized by restless, unbounded energy, almost frightening in the rapidity of its movements and growth, and impatient of restraint, India is fully developed, well ordered, not a child but an equal, in some respects a superior. On one occasion, Burke was so intent on familiarizing India through a geography lesson that he actually took a map with him to the House of Commons. On February , he left on the table for members to peruse his copy of what he called ‘Mr Barnard’s Map of the Jaghire’.⁷⁷ Burke’s speech was in opposition to the diversion of public revenue to the payment of the Nawab of the Carnatic’s ‘debts’, which Burke regarded as fraudulent. One of his arguments was that the Carnatic could ill afford this drain on its resources, and he wanted to refute the facile argument that the Carnatic would soon and easily recover from the ravages of Haidar Ali in the late war. This map of the company’s jagir (the territory around Madras directly under its control) by Thomas Barnard (–) is much more detailed than Rennell’s maps of Bengal, its scale sufficiently large ( inches to miles) to show not only roads and villages but even numerous individual reservoirs (Plate ; the detail shown covers an area of about ⫻ miles). Unlike Europe (and most of the north of India), the Carnatic was not well watered, so that irrigation was crucial. Its prosperity therefore depended on the expenditure of land revenue to maintain the system of reservoirs, which Burke describes: in the happier times of India, a number almost incredible of reservoirs have been made in chosen places throughout the whole country; they are formed, for the greater part, of mounds of earth and stones, with sluices of solid masonry; the whole constructed with admirable skill and labour, and maintained at a mighty charge. In
⁷⁷ A Map of the East India Company’s Lands on the Coast of Choromandel, Based on an Actual Survey . . . by Thomas Barnard (London, ). The map was engraved by Alexander Dalrymple. Barnard’s original -sheet survey (to a scale of inches to the mile), which is not known to survive, would have been even more impressive (WS v. 522).
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the territory contained in that map alone, I have been at the trouble of reckoning the reservoirs, and they amount to upwards of eleven hundred, from the extent of two or three acres to five miles in circuit. (WS v. )
Poring over this map (long and laboriously, to count the number of reservoirs) gave Burke a more intimate knowledge of the area of Madras than he can have had of many parts of England. As this passage shows, Burke’s universalizing did not preclude his recognition of geographical differences. In this instance, he was drawing attention to a feature of the Carnatic that had no exact European analogue. Even so, Burke sought to familiarize it: the Carnatic is about the size of England (), its reservoirs a ‘national bank’, ‘the monuments of real kings’ (), corresponding to charitable foundations in Europe. Above all, the map shows that the Carnatic (and by extension India) can be known, and understood. India is not an exotic land inhabited by savages or barbarians, but a country much like Europe, the land intensively cultivated and laboriously yet intelligently modified by a long succession of farmers to maximize its yield despite unfavourable natural conditions. The maps of Barnard and Rennell, and the prints of Hodges, enabled Burke to imagine an India that was not radically different from Europe. What he knew of the social structure of India was also comprehensible in terms of European analogues. The main obstacle to the complete assimilation of India within European paradigms was the supposed prevalence of ‘oriental despotism’, the idea that, from a variety of natural causes, government in Asia always had been, and always would be, despotic.⁷⁸ ‘Despotism’ was usually taken to mean a system of government in which an all-powerful monarch ruled according to his arbitrary will, unchecked by the institutions (such as binding laws, parliaments, and respect for the inviolability of property) that circumscribed monarchical power in the West. This notion, in the form of a contrast between free Greeks and Persians who were ‘naturally’ slaves, is found as early as Herodotus. In the eighteenth century, the most influential exponent of the idea was Montesquieu, and his lead was followed by numerous other commentators.⁷⁹ Indeed, before the technological gap opened by the Industrial Revolution, the principal ground for a sense of European (and especially British) superiority, and the idea of Asia as ‘other’, was the contrast between European freedom and Asian despotism. ⁷⁸ R. Koebner, ‘Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, (), –; Franco Venturi, ‘Oriental Despotism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, (), –; Melvin Richter, ‘Despotism’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York, ), ii. –. ⁷⁹ Montesquieu, L’esprit des lois (especially books –); Alexander Dow, ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan’, in The History of Hindoostan, Translated from the Persian (London, –), iii., pp. vii–xxxvii; Guillaume Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. Justamond (nd edn. London, ), esp. ii. –.
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‘Despotism’ was so odious and pejorative term that it found no defenders. Burke was certainly no apologist for it. Since he regarded the protection of property as the primary purpose of society, and therefore of government, an essential component of any political system was a means to maintain and secure the rights of property owners. He therefore followed John Locke (–) in denying that despotism could be a legitimate form of government. Men joined in societies to protect their property; no one would join a society in which property was insecure. Locke required some form of representative institution to legitimate government. Without such as institution, there could be no freedom.⁸⁰ Burke did not go so far. For him, security of property and government according to known and fixed laws were the necessary safeguards against the arbitrary power of a despot. Burke’s rejection of the ‘oriental despotism’ thesis was a minority view, but it was not unique. The most ambitious refutation of Montesquieu was by the French traveller and linguist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (–), who had spent several years in Asia. In Législation orientale (), he sought to prove that Turkey, Persia, and India were all governed according to written laws and customs which had legal force; and that private property, in land as well as goods, existed in those countries. The monarch was not (as was often claimed) universal proprietor of the land.⁸¹ A few years earlier, Sir James Porter (–), who had spent some years in Turkey, had argued in the same vein (in relation to that country) that the Koran was in effect ‘a code of laws between prince and people’; that the army was not an instrument of despotism; and that the ulema (the body of legal scholars) was equivalent to a nobility as an institution intermediate between prince and people.⁸² In relation to the Mogul Empire, Burke likewise pointed to religion and the law as significant checks on the power of the sovereign, while the Hindus themselves possessed law codes and customs. This was not ‘arbitrary power’. Burke was not perturbed by the lack of representative institutions. In any case, in the eighteenth century these were not the markers of legitimate government that they have since (in the West at least) become. Even in Europe, only in a few countries did they operate effectively. In the Reflections, Burke would refute the contention of Richard Price (–) that George III was ‘almost the only lawful king in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people’.⁸³ The ancien régime in France, he ⁸⁰ Locke, Two Treatises, ii. § § –, , (despotic power inconsistent with civil society); – (consent through representation). ⁸¹ Législation orientale (Amsterdam, ); Frederick G. Whelan, ‘Oriental Despotism: AnquetilDuperron’s Response to Montesquieu’, History of Political Thought, (), –. ⁸² Observations on the Religion, Law, Government, and Manners of the Turks (; nd edn. London, ), pp. xxxv, –. Published anonymously. ⁸³ R []. Price made the claim in the anniversary sermon, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (), which provoked E.B.’s Reflections.
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would argue (in a passage where he conceded that the Turkish government was indeed a ‘barbarous anarchic despotism’), was not despotic, because its monarchy, absolute as it might appear, and while not ‘a free, and therefore by no means a good constitution’, in practice received corrective checks ‘from religion, from laws, from manners, from opinions’ (R []). The parlements, in particular, formed ‘permanent bodies politic, constituted to resist arbitrary innovation’ and ‘well calculated to afford both certainty and stability to the laws’ ([–]). For Burke, the minimum requirement for a legitimate constitution was government according to known and fixed laws. In his view, the Mogul Empire met that test.⁸⁴ In his opening speech, he supported this contention by a long passage from the Institutes of Timur ( Feb. : WS vi. –). Timur dispensed impartial justice, secured property, granted freedom of private religious practice, and worked tirelessly to create the social and economic stability that allowed individuals to make their industry fruitful and to preserve their gains. To modern readers, even from this passage of self-panegyric, Timur is likely to emerge as, at best, a benevolent despot. For Burke, however, his was the rule of law: ‘Therefore I established the foundation of my empire on the morality and the religion of Islaum; and by regulations and laws I gave it stability. And by laws and regulations I executed every business, and every transaction that came before me in the course of my government’ ().⁸⁵ Indeed, Timur’s practice respected precisely those ‘real rights of men’ that Burke would identify in the Reflections (R [–]). Only after the collapse of the imperial authority did true despotism emerge in some of the regional usurpations established by Shuja al-Daula in Oudh and Alivardi Khan in Bengal, whom Hastings took as the models for his rule. If India was indeed another Europe, a patchwork of political entities united by common traditions, and by no means inferior in its institutions, what could be the role of Britain, or of any other colonial power? The logic of Burke’s understanding of India, which precluded any improving or ‘missionary’ justification for an imperial presence, may appear to illegitimate the British regime. Burke did concede that ‘Our Indian government is in its best state a grievance’ (Speech on Fox’s India Bill: WS v. ). Yet he never
⁸⁴ Hastings, too, denied the popular notion that Indians were ‘supposed to be governed by no other principle of justice than the arbitrary wills, or uninstructed judgments, of their temporary rulers’ (letter to Lord Mansfield, Mar. , in Gleig, Memoirs of Warren Hastings, i. –). If this was his real opinion, he allowed himself to be misrepresented by Halhed in his defence before the Commons, and by his counsel on Feb. (Bond, ii. –). ⁸⁵ Institutes Political and Military, Written Originally in the Mogul Language, by the Great Timur (Oxford, ), edited and translated by William Davy and Joseph White. Unquestioned in E.B.’s time, the work is no longer accepted as genuine (Hilda Hookham, Tamburlaine the Conqueror (London, ), –).
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advocated withdrawal.⁸⁶ On the contrary, he thought the connection might be made mutually beneficial. Burke did not regard empire as in itself morally wrong. Conquests and empires were facts of history, and therefore part of the providential plan. In his ‘History of England’ he argues that Providence, which ‘strongly appears to have intended the continual intermixture of mankind’, had implanted in the human mind various means of effecting this purpose. Among these, ‘the spirit of conquest’ appears as a natural human trait, along with avarice and curiosity (WS i. ).⁸⁷ India had been repeatedly conquered without destroying or affecting the fundamental character of its ‘original’ Hindu civilization. For Burke, there could be a ‘good’ empire, and he clearly believed that the British Empire was (potentially at least) such. In the s, he struggled to retain the American colonies within the imperial fold, in the belief that both parties benefited from the relationship. Again, though in many respects a patriotic Irishman, Burke always opposed Irish legislative independence, and he believed that the British connection was economically beneficial to Ireland as well as to Britain. Admittedly, Ireland’s geographical position made its dependence on Britain appear more natural than could be the case with India. ‘But there we are,’ he declared in his Speech on Fox’s India Bill, ‘there we are placed by the Sovereign Disposer: and we must do the best we can in our situation. The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty’ (WS v. ). Years of familiarity with the worst excesses of the Hastings regime did not diminish his faith in ‘the dominion of the glorious Empire given by an incomprehensible dispensation of the Divine providence into our hands’ (to French Laurence, July : C ix. ). Despite a miserable record of misrule and abuse, in Ireland of long standing, in America and India of more recent date, Burke refused to despair of the institution itself.⁸⁸ Burke never articulated any detailed plan for the better government of British India.⁸⁹ In part, this was because his concerns were mainly negative, with the correction of past abuses. More generally, his failure to develop what today would be recognized as a programme for reform reflects his faith in the ⁸⁶ E.B. admitted that, if India cannot be governed well without governing Britain ill (alluding to the fear that despotism abroad would result in despotism at home), ‘a ground is laid for their eternal separation’, rather than for ‘sacrificing the people of that country to our constitution’. But he immediately revoked this rhetorical or theoretical concession by affirming that ‘every means, effectual to preserve India from oppression, is a guard to preserve the British constitution from its worst corruption’ (Speech on Fox’s India Bill: WS v. ). As usual, E.B. envisaged the imperial relationship as mutually beneficial. ⁸⁷ In his ‘History of England’, E.B. praises both Cnut and William the Conqueror (WS i. , –). ⁸⁸ Séamus Deane, ‘Factions and Fictions: Burke, Colonialism, and Revolution’, Búllan: An Irish Studies Review, / (): –. ⁸⁹ Noting E.B.’s failure to articulate any ‘precise programme . . . for the better government of British India’, Holden Furber observes that ‘It sometimes seems as if he would have been satisfied with the transference of British power into hands which to him were virtuous’ (Introduction to C v., p. xvi). Yet to suppose that, if men of integrity are appointed, they will pursue wise measures, is typical of E.B.
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pre-colonial social order. To ‘do the best we can in our situation’ meant for Burke a project of restoration and conservation. This appears from the contents of Fox’s regulating bill, which was practically a recitation of the abuses, oppressions, and corruption attributed to the Hastings regime.⁹⁰ Adam Smith had identified a trading company acting as a sovereign as an incurable evil.⁹¹ Fox’s bills would have divided the two roles. The company’s political concerns were to be controlled by a board of seven directors, men who could be trusted to govern wisely and disinterestedly. Purely commercial concerns were to be delegated to a subordinate board of assistant directors, men with knowledge of the trade (and shareholders in the company). Their brief would be to conduct the business side of the company on proper mercantile principles, which the company had lately neglected (WS v. –). In the Ninth Report, Burke had noted the alarming ‘drain’ of about a million pounds annually from Bengal to Europe since the company had (from ) financed its investment in goods for export from territorial revenues, not from imported specie (–). At the trial, he estimated that about £ million had been transferred ( Feb. : vi. ). Presumably, Burke hoped that, with trade again conducted on proper commercial principles, this drain would be greatly reduced, if not entirely eliminated. Britain would thus exercise a trusteeship, charged not with communicating its own superior culture, or with imposing order on anarchy, but with repairing and restoring what had been, prior to the European incursions, ‘the highly ordered socio-political structure of an ancient and refined civilization’.⁹² A British protectorate would ensure the conditions of peace and stability under which economic activity would revive and flourish, and the happiness of the inhabitants be secured. Since the ravages of recent misgovernment and oppression would take years to restore, Burke can hardly be faulted for not looking further forward as to how the imperial relationship might develop in the longer term. Burke’s dramatic exploitation in his opening speech of the Rangpur atrocities has been interpreted as an indictment of imperialism.⁹³ Against the background of his faith in the possibility of a moral empire, the episode more plausibly serves to illustrate what happens when the wrong men are in charge. If colonial rule necessarily entailed the use of violence and arbitrary power, ⁹⁰ The regulating bill provided for the restoration of displaced zemindars, and prohibited (inter alia): the delegation of powers to the Governor-General; the cession, exchange, or acquisition of territory, without orders from London; offensive alliances and the hiring out of the company’s troops; monopolies; and (more strictly than in previous regulations) the receipt of presents (A Bill for the Better Government of the Territorial Possessions and Dependencies in India (as amended, Nov. ), in Lambert xxxv. –). ⁹¹ Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, IV. vii (ed. R.H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, ), ii. –). ⁹² Jeff D. Bass, ‘The Perversion of Empire: Edmund Burke and the Nature of Imperial Responsibility’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, (), –. ⁹³ Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, ), ; Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge, ), –.
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Burke’s case against Hastings would be fatally weakened.⁹⁴ Hence, during the trial, he asked two revenue collectors whether they found the use of torture necessary.⁹⁵ He refused to consider that what happened at Rangpur might be only an exceptionally brutal episode in a mode of government that habitually relied on force to collect revenue. Attributing the atrocities to a corruptly appointed individual enabled Burke to maintain his faith in the possibility of a benevolent imperial rule. This insistence on blaming individuals is characteristic of Burke’s theory of history. It allowed him to attribute unpalatable and distressing events to individual human actors, without questioning that the general direction by Providence of the course of history was for the human good. Burke was no fatalist. Since the intentions of Providence cannot be known in advance, men of virtue may, indeed must, struggle to resist evil. Politics was therefore a moral battlefield. Seeing political conflicts in starkly moral terms, Burke inevitably demonized his opponents. Hastings had to be a monster of avarice and oppression; he could not be a mixed character. During the s, as the French Revolution appeared to succeed in establishing a new kind of government and society, Burke’s faith in Providence would be severely tested. After the heady rhetoric of Burke’s wide-ranging introductory speech, the Lords began the long, slow process of hearing arguments and evidence on the individual charges. On February, Fox introduced the first article, relating to Benares. Because the court adjourned from February to April, while the judges were on circuit, not until April did the managers close their case. On April, Adam opened the second article, relating to the Begums of Oudh. The submission of evidence took until May. Finally, over four days between and June, Sheridan summed up the Begums charge. The court was then adjourned until the next session, after sitting for thirty-five days to hear only two charges out of twenty. Although the prosecution subsequently dropped most of the articles without offering any evidence, the proceedings ⁹⁴ Jennifer Pitts argues that E.B.’s critique of British rule is so damning as to imply that British withdrawal was his preferred solution, though one which he did not articulate (A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, ), –). She takes Hastings’s crimes as ‘symptoms of much deeper, in fact systemic, corruption and abuse of power by the British in India’ (). They were indeed ‘systemic’ in the Hastings system, but E.B. imagined that an alternative system could avoid them. ⁹⁵ On May , E.B. asked this of Peter Moore (former collector of Dinajpur) and William Harwood (former chief of the Provincial Council of Dinajpur). His intent was to show that, since the provincial councils had been able to collect their revenues without the use of torture, their abolition by Hastings must have been for some corrupt purpose. Law charged E.B. with seeking indirectly to reintroduce the Rangpur cruelties (BL Add. MS , fos. –).
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were not concluded until , after sitting days. A full account of this epic trial would be a daunting task, and would require more space than a biography of Burke can afford, besides a more neutral setting than his life can provide. Nevertheless, since Burke was the most committed of the managers, and the most assiduous in attendance, and took much the largest share in presenting the prosecution’s case, a sketch of each day’s proceedings, emphasizing but not limited to his contributions, will serve to represent, however inadequately, what became the most Herculean and purgatorial labour of his life. On February, after Burke concluded his great oration, Fox proposed that the court should hear the charges ‘separate and severally, Distinctly and Simply one by one’. This suggestion, vigorously contested by the defence counsel, produced the first of the many legal wrangles that would contribute so much to lengthening the trial. Hastings was represented by a formidable triumvirate of lawyers. The most eminent was Edward Law (–), recommended to Hastings by Sir Thomas Rumbold (who had married Law’s youngest sister). Another connection with the East India Company was through his brothers Ewan (–) and Thomas (–), who served in Bengal (–) and Bihar (–) respectively. Though he already enjoyed a lucrative practice, this was Law’s first high-profile case relating to India. In , he was knighted and appointed Attorney-General; in he was created Lord Ellenborough and raised to the bench as Lord Chief Justice of England. His two associates, Robert Dallas (–) and Thomas Plumer (–), had both appeared as counsel for the East India Company against Fox’s Bill in December . Plumer had previously defended Sir Thomas Rumbold against the Bill of Pains and Penalties. Like Law, Dallas had a family connection with the company: his younger brother George (–) had served in Bengal from about to . Like Law, Dallas and Plumer both achieved legal eminence. In , Dallas was knighted and appointed Solicitor-General; in he was raised to the bench as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. Plumer was knighted in , appointed Attorney-General in , and promoted to Master of the Rolls in . Hastings thus commanded the services of three exceptionally able and ambitious lawyers, for whose talents the publicity attendant on the impeachment provided an ideal showcase. Of the three, Law possessed much the most abrasive personality and courtroom manner. His clashes with Burke would make many a technical dispute sharper and more acrimonious than if they had been conducted by more emollient characters. In this first dispute, the defence counsel contended that the prosecution should present its entire case first. Their main argument was that the charges were inextricably interrelated, and so could not properly be considered individually. Burke’s loose drafting of the articles, with regard to proving a ‘general evil intention’ rather than to specific criminations, gave this claim
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some plausibility. As Dallas noted, Burke’s opening speech presented the charges not as ‘so many Solitary and Single Acts’, but as ‘a Series of Systematic Misdemeanors’. After lengthy wrangling between the managers and the counsel (in which Burke, perhaps still exhausted, took no part), including a speech of ninety minutes by Fox, the Lords adjourned to consider the question. This procedure, repeated on many occasions, contributed significantly to the length of the trial. Whenever a procedural point was controverted, the Lords would retire to their chamber (which itself took between ten and twenty-five minutes) to discuss it. Often, rather than returning to Westminster Hall, they adjourned. Sometimes (though not on this occasion) they referred the question to the judges, who in turn would ask for time to consider, thereby occasioning a delay of as much as a week. In this first instance, the Lords decided to debate the issue on the st and to resume the trial on the nd.⁹⁶ The proceedings on February, the seventh day of the trial, began inauspiciously for the prosecution. Thurlow announced that the Lords had accepted the argument of the defence, that the managers should present their entire case first. This was severe blow, for it robbed the managers of the chance of a conviction on one or other of the early charges, especially perhaps the Begums, on which the Lords might be (as Burke hoped) reluctant to acquit in the face of public opinion. The managers withdrew briefly to consult. On their return, Fox entered a short protest.⁹⁷ Law regarded the decision as a ‘great point’ gained.⁹⁸ Such it undoubtedly was, postponing any verdict until feelings had cooled and public interest had waned. Yet it came at a certain price. By forcing the managers to present their entire case before the defence presented theirs, to which the managers would have the right to reply, a lengthy trial extending over several years was almost guaranteed. If the managers had lost the first article, the prosecution might have been abandoned, vehemently as Burke would have resisted such a move. Having entered his protest, Fox introduced the Benares charge in a speech which lasted about five hours. Expectations were high, and the court was more crowded than on any previous day. Unlike Sheridan, Fox did not pretend to compete with Burke for the palm of oratory. A powerful speaker, his particular excellence was strength of argument rather than elegance of expression. More forceful than Sheridan’s, and less digressive than Burke’s, Fox’s style was characterized by ‘nature and simplicity’, and he eschewed the ‘brilliant periods’ of his compeers.⁹⁹ Where Sheridan spoke for display, and ⁹⁶ LJ xxxviii. . BL Add. MS , fos. –. London Chronicle, – Feb. . On Feb. and June, the Lords took about minutes to process; on Apr., only (Morning Chronicle, Feb., June, May). ⁹⁷ LJ xxxviii. . London Chronicle, – Feb. . ⁹⁸ Edward Law to John Law, Mar. (NA PRO. ///, p. ). Bland Burges, too, thought this decision would be decisive (to his wife, Feb. ; Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fos. –). ⁹⁹ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, June (Life and Letters, i. ).
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Burke from passionate commitment, Fox was more lawyer-like. Having heard both, Frances Burney preferred Burke, and her comments identify this lawyerly quality in Fox’s speaking. Where Burke’s ‘excesses seemed at least to be unaffected’, Fox ‘looked all good humour and negligent ease the instant before he began a speech of uninterrupted passion and vehemence’. The moment he finished, he ‘wore the same careless and disengaged air’. In an acute comment on the operation of rhetoric, Burney judged that ‘a display of talents in which the inward man took so little share could have no powers of persuasion to those who saw them in that light.’¹⁰⁰ Blending a lucid narrative with a concurrent analytical commentary, Fox’s speech has great forward momentum. After explaining the status of Chait Singh and his relations with the East India Company, Fox explained the successive additional demands made on him in , , and , culminating in Hastings’s fateful journey to Benares in to impose the gigantic fine, and the rebellion he provoked. Rarely, and then briefly, did Fox leave the immediate argument to consider a broader theme, such as arbitrary power. Generalization, like metaphor, was Burke’s province. Fox’s most remarkable rhetorical flourish was an ironic passage comparing Hastings to Alexander the Great, intended to parody Thurlow’s parallel between the two in a recent speech in the House of Lords.¹⁰¹ Such ridicule of the presiding judge would hardly have been advisable in an ordinary criminal trial. Fox adapted his style to the court more than Burke did, but could not entirely erase habits formed in the House of Commons. On February, the eighth day of the trial, Grey resumed the narrative of the Benares article, detailing the suppression of Chait Singh’s rebellion and the subsequent misgovernment of Benares under the corrupt and oppressive ministers appointed by Hastings. Then Anstruther began the hard slog of actually proving the case by legally admissible evidence. The first material presented was uncontroversial, beginning with the charter of the East India Company and other official records. A foretaste of the battles ahead was not long delayed, however. When Anstruther proposed to read Hastings’s defence from the printed Journals of the House of Commons, the defence pedantically insisted on the production of his original manuscript. This demand, however, produced only a short delay.¹⁰² During the next sitting, the ninth, on February, a more substantive argument about evidence developed. Law objected to the reading of a letter of May from the Court of Directors, on the ground that disobedience to its orders was not charged in the article. More careful drafting could have ¹⁰⁰ Burney, Journal, Feb. (Diary & Letters, iii. ). ¹⁰¹ Bond, i. –. On Feb. , Thurlow told the Lords that he knew no more of Hastings ‘than I know of Alexander the Great, except from History’ ( John Scott to Hastings, Feb. , BL Add. MS , fo. ; London Chronicle, – Feb.). ¹⁰² Bond, i. –. Minutes, –.
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obviated this objection. Even so, Fox and Anstruther stoutly maintained its relevance to part of the charge. When the defence insisted on their objection, the Lords retired to consider it. They then adjourned without returning to Westminster Hall.¹⁰³ When the trial resumed, on February, the tenth day, Thurlow announced the decision. Exceptionally, it was in the managers’ favour. But the defence was unbowed. When Anstruther submitted the company’s standing order that ‘all our Affairs should be regularly transacted in Council, and every Member duly summoned to attend’, Law demanded that the managers prove that this order was actually in effect in Bengal during Hastings’s administration, justifying his apparently captious objection on the ground that ‘it becomes my duty to my client to see that what is admitted is legal evidence’. On the managers undertaking to bring proof to the next sitting, the evidence was conditionally admitted.¹⁰⁴ The following day, February, the eleventh, the managers were indeed able to substantiate their proof of the currency of the standing orders. After more documents were read, Anstruther began to call witnesses to conditions and events in Benares. This in turn produced new disputes about evidence. One provides another example of the loose drafting of the articles. Anstruther wanted to establish that Hastings’s appointment of William Markham (–; Archbishop Markham’s son) as Resident at Benares was oppressive to the natives. Among the lucrative perquisites granted to the resident had been a monopoly of saltpetre (a profitable export commodity). When Anstruther put a question about this to John Benn (–), who had been Markham’s assistant, the defence objected that the saltpetre monopoly formed no part of the charge, which specified the instances in which Hastings was alleged to have ‘tyrannically settled the Government’. A second objection raised a more general principle. Examined by the committee of managers, Benn had given answers more supportive of their case than his present testimony. When Anstruther proposed to question him about his earlier evidence, the defence objected that the managers were in effect discrediting their own witness. The point was contested at some length: for the defence, all three counsel spoke; for the managers, Fox, Adam, Anstruther, Taylor, and Burke all defended the propriety of the question.¹⁰⁵ Burke’s contribution (his first since February) was less technical and legalistic than those of the others. With one of his characteristic appeals to first principles, he argued that the Lords should ignore ‘all ideas of Prosecutor and Prisoner’ to permit ‘any questions . . . tending to bring out the truth’.¹⁰⁶ This claim became a leitmotiv in Burke’s arguments about evidence. He never accepted the applicability of ¹⁰³ ¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰⁶
BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fos. –.
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rules derived from contemporary legal practice. The Lords retired to consider the question, which they then referred to the judges for their opinion. The judges asked for time. Since they would soon be leaving London to go on circuit, the trial was adjourned until April. The judges in due course upheld the objection, as Thurlow announced at the opening of the twelfth sitting, on April. On behalf of the managers, Fox lodged a protest, but acquiesced in the decision. In practice, by rephrasing the questions, Fox and Burke managed to circumvent the ruling and extract some of the evidence they wanted.¹⁰⁷ On April, the thirteenth day, Anstruther summed up the evidence on the Benares charge. At the desire of some of the lords, however, two witnesses were recalled for supplementary questions. Benn’s evidence controverted two aggravating circumstances on which the prosecution had laid much stress: that Chait Singh, a brahmin, was at prayer at the time of his arrest; and that the death in confinement of Drigbijai Singh (d. ; administrator of Benares after the deposition of Chait Singh) was hastened by his harsh treatment. Benn deposed that Chait Singh was not a brahmin, and that the only hardship suffered by Drigbijai Singh while under house arrest was the temporary deprivation of his hookah, which he likened to an English gentleman being deprived of his snuff-box. Provoked by Benn’s attempt to palliate the indignities suffered by Chait Singh and Drigbijai Singh, Burke offered some further observations by way of a supplementary summary. Unable to cite any worse severities, Burke argued that while the deprivation of the hookah might seem nothing to a man at ease and in prosperity, to Drigbijai Singh it meant the loss of his last comfort in life. Burke then told an anecdote of a man imprisoned in the Bastille, who had amused himself by playing with a spider. When the gaoler saw this, he killed the spider, and the prisoner died in despair. As for Chait Singh not being a brahmin, he was certainly a person of sufficiently high status for his arrest to be a deep disgrace. To illustrate the point, and to vent some of his frustration at Thurlow’s bias towards the defence, Burke imagined a parallel. Suppose the Lord Chancellor was insulted ‘at his devotions’ by someone who took him for a bishop, the insult would be no less because offered to a high legal dignitary instead of a bishop. The point of the supposition is that Thurlow was notoriously irreligious, an improbable figure to be found ‘at his devotions’. The sarcasm is reported to have produced ‘a roar of laughter’, even from the Lord Chancellor himself.¹⁰⁸ This intervention, which attests Burke’s readiness in reply, is another example of his carrying into the court the habits of the House of Commons. Burke’s observations finally concluded the prosecution case on the first charge.
¹⁰⁷ LJ xxxviii. . BL Add. MS , fos. –; Minutes, –. ¹⁰⁸ Bond, i. – (Anstruther’s speech). BL, Add. MS , fos. –, and Minutes, – (Benn’s evidence). Bond, i. – (E.B.’s ‘Observations’). The World, Apr. (laughter).
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The second charge, concerning the mistreatment of the Begums of Oudh, was Sheridan’s province. Yet he decided not to introduce it, preferring to save his rhetorical powers for a speech in summary. Accordingly, on April, the fourteenth day, Adam opened the charge in a speech of nearly four hours.¹⁰⁹ Pelham followed on April with a speech in support that (at about three hours) allowed some time for the submission of evidence.¹¹⁰ Sheridan called Major Scott to authenticate what he called Hastings’s ‘second defence’ on the Begums charge, a privately printed pamphlet, a few copies of which Scott had distributed to MPs on the occasion of Sheridan’s speech of February . In this paper, Hastings conceded a misstatement in his defence before the Commons. The decision to seize the Begums’ treasures was not, as he had claimed, a response to their resistance to the resumption of their jagirs, but had been made at the same time. Scott was a willing, indeed a voluble witness, and his examination proved both revealing and entertaining. Questioned about the discrepancies between the two defences, Scott disclosed that the earlier document had been hastily assembled with the assistance of a team of Hastings’s friends. The Benares defence, for example (with its damaging appeal to ‘arbitrary power’) was the work of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. Parts of it, Scott claimed, Hastings had not even seen before they were read to the Commons. Scott’s evidence, while disarmingly candid in one way, showed that Hastings had been (at best) culpably cavalier in his defence before the Commons. Less charitably, it might be interpreted to create a presumption that, Hastings and his friends having failed to concoct a consistent story, there must have been something to hide.¹¹¹ The next sitting, the sixteenth, on April, was wholly occupied by a lengthy examination, chiefly by Burke, of Robert Holt, sometime assistant resident at Lucknow. Much of Holt’s evidence was hearsay and rumour. Burke sought to establish that the unrest in Oudh at the time of Chait Singh’s rebellion was not related to events in Benares, but provoked by the oppressive collectorship of Colonel Alexander Hannay (c.–) in Bahraich and Gorakhpur, for which Hastings was ultimately responsible. When the defence protested against questions about rumours, Burke defended the evidential value of ‘public notoriety uncontradicted’ as ‘a great presumptive proof perhaps one of the greatest that can be had of any transactions of a fraudulent nature’. When Law objected to Holt repeating from memory a passage from a letter from Hastings that was not entered in the books, Burke countered that the evidence should first be admitted, and then its ‘weight and validity’ judged. When another hearsay report was questioned, he defended ¹⁰⁹ Bond, i. –. The World, Apr. . ¹¹⁰ Bond, i. –. The World, Apr. . ¹¹¹ BL Add. MS , fos. –; Minutes, –. The ‘second defence’ (‘The Real State of the Facts contained in the Fourth Article’ [etc.]) is repr. in Minutes, –. P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London, ), –.
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the presentation of what ‘in civil life and civil affairs seems to be perfect and complete evidence’. Such evidence, whether or not legally admissible, ‘will go to the moral feelings and moral conviction of mankind’. These claims show how incorrigibly Burke remained a rhetorician, concerned with persuasion rather than legal proof.¹¹² Sheridan took the lead in the presentation of evidence and the examination of witnesses at the next sitting, the seventeenth, on April.¹¹³ Burke, however, assumed responsibility for one piece of ‘historical evidence’ that proved the respect and obedience paid to mothers in Islamic cultures. This was taken from the English translation of the History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (–; written in Latin, –) by Prince Demetrius Cantemir (–). Law objected to the ‘Reveries’ of Demetrius, unless Burke could show that the constitutions of India and the Ottoman Empire were the same. Yet when Burke argued that the custom was common to all Islamic societies, Law withdrew his objection, and Burke expatiated on the sanctity of the zenana. This theme led Burke to an excursus (of greater interest than the evidence itself ) on the difficulty of empathizing with an alien culture: It is our nature and we cannot help it; it is the most difficult thing in the world to bring ourselves to a proper degree of sympathy when we are describing those circumstances which are not ingrafted in our nature by custom. I believe that the first thing that creates laughter throughout mankind by general sympathy is distress which arises not from our nature but from local institution. And we know that these are stronger where they prevail than the customs of general nature . . . and, if they happen once to be grafted with the honor of mankind, which is a dearer possession than any other in life, when united, knit to them by habits, use, institution, and religion, that they are the strongest influences that govern their minds. (WS vi. )
This reconciliation of ‘nature’ and ‘custom’ is typical of Burke. Acknowledging a universal human nature, he nevertheless valued local customs. ‘Nature’ is indeed universal, but ‘custom’ (which Burke regarded as our ‘second nature’) is all-powerful.¹¹⁴The two exist in a symbiotic relationship: customs are naturally ‘ingrafted’ on our nature. Burke exemplifies the power of local custom from a passage in Cantemir about the special reverence paid, even by a sovereign prince, to a mother. Such customs, Burke admits, alien to European ideas, may at first appear merely ridiculous. Indeed, one caricaturist did ridicule his use of Cantemir. In A Reverie of Prince Demetrius Cantemir (Apr. : BMC ), James Sayers depicts Burke asleep under a bust of Muhammad. The open book is inscribed with quotations from Burke’s speech and from Cantemir. In ¹¹² BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹¹³ BL, Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹¹⁴ The idea (a commonplace found in Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch) is a favourite of E.B.’s. In the Philosophical Enquiry, he describes ‘use’ as a ‘second nature’ (WS i. ); in the Reflections, he calls the ‘habits . . . of civil life’ a ‘second nature’ (R []).
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Burke’s dream or ‘Reverie’, inspired by his reading of Cantemir, the sultana brings a bashful virgin to the sultan’s bed (Plate ). The caricature exploits a passage in Burke’s quotation not germane to his purpose, which describes the custom of a sultan’s mother controlling the virgins who were brought to his bed. Burke was prepared for such ridicule. Properly considered, however, such a custom furnishes ‘a proof of the vast power and dominion which women of that character assume in that Country’ (). Technically, Law was correct. Nothing in Demetrius could furnish legal evidence against Hastings. Burke was more concerned with impressing on his hearers the enormity, difficult for Europeans to conceive, of the indignities wantonly imposed by Hastings on the Begums to force them to surrender their treasure.¹¹⁵ Burke took little part in the next five sessions, which were dominated by Sheridan. On April, the eighteenth day, after the presentation of much documentary evidence, Natheniel Middleton, formerly Resident at Lucknow, was called. Examined at the Bar of the Commons, Middleton had proved a most amnesic witness, and he now appeared no less forgetful before the Lords. Evasive and prevaricating, his ‘recollection failed him upon every question of importance’, even whether a particular negotiation succeeded or not.¹¹⁶ Middleton’s examination was again the highlight of the following day, April, the nineteenth of the trial. His performance was so inept as almost to convert mockery into sympathy, one reporter averring that his ‘air of total uncertainty threw a ridicule over his manner and character, which we hear from all quarters he by no means merits’.¹¹⁷ The impression of duplicity was confirmed during his further examination on the twentieth day, April. At one point, Middleton admitted that he had offered to withdraw an official letter, and substitute another that would meet with Hastings’s approval. Later, he declined to answer a question on the ground that he might incriminate himself. The more he tried to evade and conceal, the more he reinforced the impression of guilt and mendacity.¹¹⁸ One of the occasions on which Middleton was examined was recorded in a watercolour by James Nixon which, in contrast to the panoramic engraving of Westminster Hall (Plate ), preserves a sense of the more intimate miseen-scène in which the principal actors performed (Plate ).¹¹⁹ The witness-box is the centre of attention, a reminder that the hearing of evidence occupied far more of the trial than the set speeches. ¹¹⁵ BL, Add. MS , fos. –. E.B.’s speeches are printed in WS vi. –, the extracts from Cantemir in Minutes, . E.B. correctly anticipated derision. The World printed several ribald squibs ridiculing the reading of Cantemir (, , Apr., May). ¹¹⁶ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. London Chronicle, – Apr. . ¹¹⁷ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. The World, Apr. . ¹¹⁸ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹¹⁹ In an engraving after this watercolour, The Examination of Sir Elijah Impey at the Tryal of Mr Hastings ([May ]: BMC ), the witness is identified as Impey. I have preferred to follow the annotation on the watercolour.
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No contrast could be more marked than that between Middleton and Major Scott, whom Sheridan called on April, the twenty-first day. Frank and communicative, indeed garrulous, Scott exuded confidence that all explanation would conduce to Hastings’s exculpation, even offering to produce his personal letters from Hastings. Scott openly avowed his conviction that a Governor-General had an overriding duty to ‘preserve to the East India Company and to Great Britain the Empire that is committed to his charge’, and if necessary to ‘disobey such orders of the Court of Directors as he shall think tend to endanger the safety of that Empire’.¹²⁰ This bold claim at least met the prosecution on the substantive issue, instead of taking refuge in legalistic evasions. On May, the twenty-second day, Sheridan again interrogated Middleton, who repeatedly parried awkward questions by referring them to the company’s records (on which the rules of evidence precluded the examination of witnesses).¹²¹ Burke took a more prominent part on May, the twenty-third day, when Sir Elijah Impey was called. Impey was a more impressive witness than either Middleton or Scott: dignified yet co-operative, and confident without Scott’s pertness. While the examination was conducted chiefly by Sheridan, Burke contributed. His most characteristic intervention followed from his defence of the managers’ right to elucidate ‘every thing that appears contradictory’ by prompting a witness’s memory through reference to previous testimony. As often happened, forgetting that he was not in the House of Commons, he digressed to ridicule Impey’s officiating as ‘the private Secretary and Amanuensis of Mr Hastings’ in taking affidavits about the rebellion of the Begums: we are the more astonished at finding this situation . . . because there are no less than of the Servants of the Company upon Record with Mr Hastings that out of them he could not choose one confidential Secretary. O miserable condition of the Company’s Servants! O abandoned and deserted condition of Mr Hastings, that not finding any of them in whom he could have confidence . . . he is obliged to have recourse to the Chief Justice as his Secretary.
Impey denied that he had done anything derogatory to his judicial character. In such an emergency, he avowed, he had felt obliged to offer every assistance in his power. By not over-reacting, Impey drew much of the sting of Burke’s sarcasm.¹²² The next sitting, the twenty-fourth, on May, was largely consumed by the production of written evidence intended to falsify Hastings’s account of ¹²⁰ BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotation on fo. ). Minutes –. ¹²¹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹²² BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotation on fo. ). Minutes, –.
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the Begums’ rebellion. This was managed by Sheridan, but Burke contributed to the debate about its admissibility. When Law objected to documents printed as part of the fourth Article of Charge, Sheridan rested their admissibility on a reference to them in Hastings’s own defence. Law rejected this as insufficient, and asked for further proof of transmission to Hastings. This is another objection which, however well founded in legal practice, created an impression of using a technicality to exclude evidence, the substantive authenticity of which Hastings had himself acknowledged. When the same issue resurfaced later in the day, Burke accused Hastings of deliberately suppressing evidence: ‘he and his Instruments . . . have destroyed to the best of their power the proofs of their guilt—We have saved from ruin these precious fragments which may tend to the relief of the People whose ruin was meditated by Mr Hastings.’ These papers had been authenticated before the House of Commons, and acknowledged by Middleton and by Hastings himself. Now, however, ‘his Counsel think fit to object to them. I don’t wonder they do, for they are murderous Papers to his cause.’ Since Hastings had ‘destroyed and kept back’ evidence, Burke argued, the deficiency should be made good ‘by the next best Evidence which can be produced’. Law maintained his objection, calling for the writers of the letters, being in England, to authenticate them, and for proof of their transmission to Hastings. The reference to the letters in Hastings’s defence, he claimed, was ‘more by way of observation upon them than by admitting them to exist’. Eventually he gave way, allowing the letters to be read, but restricting his admission to their being ‘a written paper annexed to the charge upon which Mr Hastings comments’, not as ‘Evidence of the existence of such Letters’.¹²³ By insisting on such legalistic pedantries, which subverted Hastings’s professions of candour, Law inadvertently strengthened the impression that relevant and damaging evidence was being withheld. The evidence on the Begums charge took a further seven days to complete. Sheridan continued to take the lead, with Burke making only a few brief interventions. On May (the twenty-fifth sitting), Middleton’s attempt to evade responsibility for the mutilation of his official letter-books descended into farce. Confronted with a book from which pages had been torn out and loose leaves inserted, the bound pages ending in mid-letter, with the remainder copied onto the loose leaves, he resisted the obvious conclusion and professed himself unable to account for the book’s condition.¹²⁴ On May, the twenty-sixth session, Burke presented some of the documentary evidence ¹²³ BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotations from E.B. on fos. –; from Law, fos. –); Minutes, –. The disputed documents, printed in the Articles of Charge, and acknowledged by Hastings in his defence (CJ xli. –, ), relate to Bahu Begum’s protection of Captain John Gordon and his men, an episode adduced to undermine the charge that she was in rebellion against the British. ¹²⁴ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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that proved the dependent status of the Wazir of Oudh, and therefore Hastings’s ultimate responsibility for events in that country.¹²⁵ On the twenty-seventh day, May, when Impey was called to authenticate some letters, he launched into a complaint about the manner in which his previous examination had been misrepresented in the House of Commons. Fox in turn reprobated Impey’s behaviour, and demanded that Thurlow call him to order. An old friend of Impey, Thurlow delivered the gentlest possible reprimand. Finally, Impey offered a species of apology.¹²⁶ On May, the twenty-eighth sitting, Impey was again examined, this time about discrepancies in his evidence; and there was another dispute about unauthenticated letters. Burke did no more than put a few questions.¹²⁷ The dispute was resumed on May, the twenty-ninth session. Law objected to the reading of Middleton’s copies of letters that passed between him and Major Martin Gilpin (–), commander of the British forces at Fyzabad, the Begums’ residence. The managers were reluctant to call Gilpin, because he would thereby become ‘their’ witness. Fox, indeed, charged that the defence’s object had been ‘to gain substantial injustice by the perversion of those very forms which are intended to produce substantial justice’. Burke said only a few words in support. The managers withdrew to consult. On their return, Fox announced that, under protest, they agreed to call Gilpin to authenticate the letters. Gilpin deposed that the originals remained in his possession, but that he had left them in the country, supposing that, the letters having once been ‘publicly authenticated’, the originals would not again be needed. Thurlow asked the defence whether they meant to insist on the letters being retrieved from the country. To mitigate the imputation of being obstructive, Plumer maintained the principle but waived the application in this instance.¹²⁸ The objection provided another instance of the legalistic quibbling that non-lawyers found baffling. On May, the thirtieth day, Gilpin and Middleton were again examined. Middleton was palpably evasive about whether Hastings originated the idea of seizing the Begums’ treasure.¹²⁹ On May, the thirty-first day, the evidence on the Begums’ article was finally concluded. Middleton was his usual amnemonic self: Sheridan: Whether you can account for some leaves being torn out of your letter Book D. exactly at the date where that order to Lieutenant Rutledge that we read should have appeared in the Book? Middleton: I cannot. ¹²⁵ ¹²⁶ ¹²⁷ ¹²⁸ ¹²⁹
BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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Sometimes even such stonewalling would not suffice, and Middleton was forced to decline answering some questions on the ground of self-incrimination.¹³⁰ Middleton is said to have amassed while in India ‘the largest private fortune on this side Sir Thomas Rumbold’s’, estimated (probably with much exaggeration) at £,.¹³¹ His repeated discomfiture during the trial was perhaps a small price to pay for these ill-gotten gains. Middleton’s performances had introduced a note of comedy and bathos into the proceedings. Sheridan’s closing speech returned the trial to the acme of rhetoric. He faced a daunting task. Expectations created by his extraordinary speech on the Begums in the Commons on February were pitched so high as to be virtually impossible to satisfy. Fox advised him to repeat the earlier speech, ‘as nothing better could be made of the subject’, but Sheridan preferred to rack his ingenuity and invention.¹³² In any case, he wanted if possible to outdo Burke’s opening speech, which would require a much longer oration. In challenging Burke, Sheridan was handicapped in two respects. In a general opening, Burke had been able to expatiate freely across a broad range of topics. Sheridan would be confined to the second charge. The subject was not only confined but familiar. Somehow he had to revitalize it. For the first day of Sheridan’s speech, June, the thirty-second of the trial, the demand for tickets and the eagerness to secure good seats was unprecedented. Some ladies were reported to have spent the night in one of the coffee-houses at the entrance to the hall. Others arrived in Palace Yard soon after six, though the doors did not open until nine. In the crush, many ladies lost caps and shoes, though no grievous injuries were reported.¹³³ Once inside and seated, they faced another three-hour wait, for business did not begin until about noon. Who could satisfy an audience that had suffered such privations in anticipation of hearing one of the greatest orations ever delivered? Sheridan spoke for four hours and twenty-seven minutes (Hastings timed him), and the wonder is that expectations were so nearly fulfilled. On June, he spoke for a further three hours and thirty-eight minutes, to as crowded an auditory. On June, the disappointment was that, after two hours and twenty-seven minutes, he was taken ill. Was this, perhaps unconsciously, an imitation of Burke’s similar illness on February, also on his third day of speaking? In the hope of his recovery, some documents were read, and Burke commented on them; but after a few minutes, Fox was obliged to request an ¹³⁰ BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotation on fo. ). Minutes, –. ¹³¹ John Macpherson to Laurence Sulivan, July , quoted in Marshall, East India Fortunes, –. Rumbold remitted to England over £,. E.B. probably believed the figure of £,, since it appears in a letter from ‘One of the Commons of Great Britain’ (French Laurence) in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Feb. . ¹³² Lord Byron, ‘Detached Thoughts’ (–), in Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London, –), ix. , on the authority of Lord Holland. ¹³³ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, June (Life and Letters, i. –). London Chronicle, – June.
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adjournment. Finally, on June, the thirty-fifth day of the trial, Sheridan concluded. After three hours and forty minutes, he sank into Burke’s arms in a histrionic gesture that made a fitting end to what had indeed been an astonishing performance. In only one respect can his and Burke’s speeches be objectively compared: length. Burke spoke for about eleven hours, Sheridan for fourteen hours and twelve minutes.¹³⁴ More meaningful comparisons between Burke and Sheridan are difficult, given the differences in subject matter and the inevitable element of personal taste in judging oratory. A discriminating comparison between their styles was made by Sir Gilbert Elliot, in a letter to his wife. Elliot confessed that, as ‘a worshipper of another deity’ (Burke), he was perhaps unfair to Sheridan. Even so, he called the speech ‘one of the very finest and most surprising exertions of genius I ever witnessed’, so he was not incapable of appreciating its quality. Elliot identified one feature of Sheridan’s speech as paradoxically at once a defining excellence and a defect: it was strewed very thick with more brilliant periods of eloquence and poetical imagination, and more lively sallies of wit, than could be produced probably by more than one other man in the world, with whom, however, they spring up and shoot out with all the luxuriance and grace of spontaneous nature. This certainly cannot be said of Sheridan’s flowers, which are produced by great pains, skill, and preparation, and are delivered in perfect order, ready tied up in regular though beautiful bouquets, and very unlike Burke’s wild and natural nosegays.
These passages, Elliot thought, were ‘so salient from the rest’ as to create a sense of premeditation, and to divert attention ‘from the purpose to the performance’. Sheridan appeared less as ‘a public man doing real business and addressing judges in a cause’ than as ‘performing to an audience as an actor’.¹³⁵ This sense of performing to an audience, more pronounced in Westminster Hall than in the House of Commons, may account for the superiority of the earlier speech, when Sheridan was ‘doing real business’. Theatrical metaphors and analogies are appropriate, for Westminster Hall had, for the trial, been turned into a theatre in the round, with the principal actors and their primary audience, the Lords, surrounded by as many as two thousand spectators.¹³⁶ Tickets were issued free, but they changed hands for ¹³⁴ Bond, i. – (some of the highlights are excerpted in Walter Sichel, Sheridan (London, ), ii. –). Timings from Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹³⁵ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, , June (Life and Letters, i. –). ¹³⁶ A clerk from the Board of Works reported to the House of Lords that there would be places for , spectators in the Lords’ galleries ( Feb. ; London Chronicle, – Feb.) In addition, there were seats for MPs, and several boxes and galleries at the disposal of other dignitaries. The maximum capacity of the Hall would thus be somewhat over ,, rather than the , given in some contemporary reports (Public Advertiser, Jan. ). Hastings estimated the average audience at ‘more than a thousand’ (to George Nesbitt Thompson, July , in S. Arthur Strong, ‘Warren Hastings’s Own Account of his Impeachment’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, (–), –).
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money, and as much as guineas are reported to have been offered for a ticket for one of the days of Sheridan’s great speech.¹³⁷ Even on ordinary days, when nothing more exciting was expected than the examination of witnesses or the reading of documentary evidence, during the first session the galleries were generally full. There was usually a good showing of peeresses and their daughters in the seats reserved for them, and the newspaper reports often comment on the dress of the most fashionable of the ladies.¹³⁸ Nor was the attention of the audience invariably riveted on the proceedings. People, including the managers themselves, moved freely from one part of the hall to another to talk to their friends and acquaintances. Frances Burney records several lengthy conversations with Windham and others; James Bland Burges likewise used the trial as a convenient venue for gossip.¹³⁹ Burney and Burges at least took a genuine interest in the proceedings. The diary of Lady Sophia Fitzgerald (–) records the impressions of a class of auditors for whom the trial was pure entertainment: Sophia was obliged to get up very early, which she did not much like: breakfasted, then went to call upon Lady Talbot and they both went to the Trial, where they staid till four o’clock. Mr Burke spoke, and they were delighted with him. It really was very fine. Sophia came home rather pitying poor Mr Hastings, as the Trial struck her to be a most awful thing . . . Sophia persuaded her mother to go to the Trial to-day, as she knew it would entertain her to hear Mr Burke. He was charming again, and Mother very well pleased at having gone. . . . We went again to the Trial to hear Mr Burke, who really made one’s blood run cold with the account of all the tortures and cruelties in the East Indies . . . We went in the Evening to see the play at Richmond House. Henry [an amateur actor] was charming.¹⁴⁰
This account catches the tone of the casual fashionable audience, for whom both Burke and Henry are equally ‘charming’. Such comments give substance to Hastings’s complaint that what ought to have been a solemn judicial proceeding had become a public entertainment, on a par with the theatre.¹⁴¹ Some thought that ‘theatre’ was too dignified a metaphor. In The Raree Show ( Feb. : BMC ) by William Dent (–), Westminster Hall
¹³⁷ This often-cited figure derives from Horace Walpole to Thomas Barret, June (YWC xlii. –), and is hearsay. Despite his reiteration (‘fifty—aye, fifty guineas’), Walpole may have been exaggerating or misinformed. Sir Gilbert Elliot (likewise on hearsay) gives the more credible figure of guineas (to Lady Elliot, May , in Life and Letters, i. ). ¹³⁸ The Duchess of Gordon, for example, was on Feb. ‘very elegantly dressed in cream-coloured satin; and her head dress adorned with a very beautiful plume of feathers’; on Apr. she sported ‘a turban with a plume of fennel’ (London Chronicle, – Feb., – Apr. ). ¹³⁹ Burney, Journal, , , Feb., Apr. (Diary & Letters, iii. –, –, –). James Bland Burges to his wife, ‘Wednesday’ [ May ], (Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fo. ). ¹⁴⁰ Journal of Lady Sophia Fitzgerald, quoted in Gerald Campbell, Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald (London, ), –. ¹⁴¹ Hastings to Thompson, July , in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, –.
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is travestied as an entertainment booth besieged by well-dressed spectators (Plate ). One poster shows Hastings as a ‘prodigious monster’; another shows him hanging from a gallows. To attract customers, Burke blows a trumpet, Sheridan beats a salt-box, and Fox (dressed as Punch) stamps and points to the posters. In this print, the trial is reduced to farce. Burke, of course, hoped that the public would be more than entertained: that (as neoclassical dramatic theory held, ought to happen in the theatre itself ) they would be instructed, and that an informed public opinion would deter the Lords from pronouncing an acquittal. This hope would be disappointed. In the end, the publicity of Westminster Hall probably worked to Hastings’s advantage by creating sympathy for him as the victim of so painful, protracted, and public a process. Although Burke impeached Hastings ‘in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled’ (WS vi. ), the implied unanimity was no more than a legal fiction. Small but persistent, the pro-Hastings faction in the Commons continued to harass the prosecution they had been unable to prevent. In Major Scott and James Bland Burges, Hastings possessed two friends who were indefatigable if obtuse, and so self-important as to be irrepressible. In , Burges took the lead in harrying the managers. They proved vulnerable on two counts: the rhetorical excesses of Burke’s opening speech, and the costs of the trial. On the second day of his speech, Burke had expatiated on what became known as ‘the story of the three seals’, a plot supposed to have been devised in to murder Ali Guahar (the future Shah Alum II), to which Colonel John Caillaud (–), commander of the company’s troops in Bengal, put his seal (–). When Caillaud heard of this, he came to London and sought an interview with Burges. Strangely enough, Burges arranged a meeting in a street near Westminster Hall. Advising Caillaud to do nothing for the present, he agreed to present a petition to the Commons when ‘a proper opportunity presented itself ’. Within a few minutes, back in the Hall, Burges was approached separately by two or three of the managers, who asked him whether he intended to present Caillaud’s petition that afternoon. When Burges affected surprise, his enquiries about the source of their intelligence were met with ‘a nod & a smile, as much as to say, We watch you pretty closely’.¹⁴² Burges obviously enjoyed the idea that he was important enough to be trailed, and his interpretation of the ‘nod & a smile’ is probably pure vanity. But the managers were gathering intelligence. ¹⁴² James Bland Burges to his wife, Feb. (Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fos. –).
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Charles Goring (–), a returned company administrator, informed Burke of an attack that Major Scott was planning, to move for papers that would refute Burke’s account of the Rangpur atrocities.¹⁴³ In the event, however, Caillaud presented no petition and Scott moved for no such papers. Burges and Scott contented themselves with supplying the newspapers with a constant stream of pro-Hastings letters and paragraphs. A readier handle with which to attack the impeachment was its burgeoning cost. Burges scented the chance to make trouble on this score even before the trial opened. His first thought was to attack the employment of five counsel to assist the managers, which he regarded as unprecedented and unauthorized, and in part a job to reward Burke’s dependants. Burges heard that both Richard Burke had been engaged, as well as Burke’s protégé French Laurence. Report exaggerated. In fact, Richard Jr. was not one of the counsel, while Laurence (who had helped prepare some of the articles) was an unexceptionable choice. The employment of Richard Sr., however, was palpable nepotism, especially as he had recently been forced to flee to Brussels to escape his creditors. Burges heard that Burke had offered to compound with the creditors at s. d. in the pound, to be paid from Richard’s fees as counsel (which included guineas per sitting for attendance). Burges hoped to have the payment of counsel disallowed, confident that ‘Parliament cannot be mad enough to vote away Public Money for so scandalous a job’.¹⁴⁴ Pitt, however, refused to countenance so manifestly ad hominem a charge. Indeed, since he too was burdened with a similarly incompetent brother, the second Earl of Chatham (–), whom he would shortly (July ) appoint First Lord of the Admiralty, he probably sympathized with Burke’s fraternal feelings. Where a ‘job’ for a brother was not in question, however, Pitt was prepared to indulge Burges’s hounding of the managers. Burges therefore bided his time until the total cost of the trial amounted to a substantial sum. On April, at Pitt’s instigation, his Treasury Secretary, Thomas Steele (–), wrote to the managers, noting that the expenses of the first eleven days of the trial had amounted to £,, and politely enough requesting ‘whether any measures can be adopted for diminishing the charges in future’.¹⁴⁵ Burke replied at some length. Defending the expenses incurred so far, he observed, with more moderation and less sense of injured selfrighteousness than could have been expected, that the charges covered much preliminary work as well as the trial itself. For the future, however, he did not, envisage any significant economies ( Apr. : C v. –). The Treasury let the matter rest. But on April, when a summary account of the expenses was submitted for the consideration of a committee of supply, ¹⁴³ Charles Goring to E.B., [post Feb. ] (WWM BkP /). ¹⁴⁴ James Bland Burges to his wife, Feb. (Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fo. ). ¹⁴⁵ Printed in History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, pt. , –.
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Burges complained to Burke that the account was too general to be informative, and threatened to move for a more detailed one. Burke took umbrage, warning Burges that he would consider such a motion as a personal attack.¹⁴⁶ Burges evidently hoped to goad Burke into some indefensible intemperance, which was rarely difficult. Accordingly, on May he moved for an itemized account. In support, Pitt reported that the Treasury had already expressed its concern, and observed, not unfairly, that Burke’s answer to the Treasury letter ‘did not give them any great hopes of being able to derive the necessary satisfaction from the managers’. He therefore welcomed the motion. True to form, Burke took fire, giving the lie direct to Pitt’s insinuation about his letter: ‘he positively asserted that it was not true’. Pitt retorted that Burke appeared to have transferred to the Commons the ‘extraordinary license of speech’ that he allowed himself elsewhere. Burke in turn was stung into a much lengthier defence of himself and the prosecution. Correctly identifying the complaint about the cost as a transparent screen for an attack on the impeachment itself, he accused Pitt of inconsistency in pretending to support it while secretly undermining it by cavilling at the cost. Burges’s motion passed without a division.¹⁴⁷ On May, Richard Troward presented his firm’s account of expenses incurred to May.¹⁴⁸ This, however, was not sufficiently minute for Burges. On the th, he therefore moved for an account ‘stating specifically to whom and on what account such sums have been issued’. None of the managers who spoke objected to the production of such an account, and they left before the house divided. During the debate, however, Taylor, Sheridan, and Fox, as well as Burke himself, all affirmed their belief that the motion was in effect a motion of censure on their conduct. Burke pointed to the ‘extraordinary circumstance’ of an avowed friend of Hastings calling for an account of the costs of the prosecution. Pitt, however, supported the motion, which was approved by to .¹⁴⁹ On May, Troward duly submitted the itemized account. This document particularizes some hundreds of trifling costs, besides the larger items such as fees to counsel, and preserves many details about the practical operations of the prosecution.¹⁵⁰ Nothing could have been more circumstantial, and on the th Fox and Sheridan called on Burges either to take the matter further, or to declare himself satisfied. Burges served notice that he would raise the question a week later.¹⁵¹ ¹⁴⁶ James Bland Burges to his wife, May (Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fos. –; printed in Selections from the Letters and Correspondence of Sir James Bland Burges, ed. James Hutton (London, ), ). ¹⁴⁷ Morning Chronicle, May (PH xxvii. –); WS vi. –. ¹⁴⁸ CJ xliii. . ¹⁴⁹ Ibid. . Morning Chronicle, May (PH xxvii. –). ¹⁵⁰ CJ xliii. . The original account is preserved among the Francis papers (BL (OIOC) MS Eur. E. ). Though Pitt resisted calls for their printing, the expenses to were unofficially published (probably by Major Scott) in a pamphlet: An Account of the Expences Incurred by the Solicitors Employed by the House of Commons [etc.] (London, ). ¹⁵¹ The World, May (PH xxvii. ).
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In the event, Burges proved unable to make much capital out of the accounts. On June, his best effort was to question the need for counsel, and whether their employment had been authorized, but he refrained from raising the issue of the persons employed. Lacking evidence of waste or extravagance, he feebly moved that the solicitors should for the future submit monthly accounts. Burges was unlucky in his timing. Just as, on February , he had vainly sought to engage the attention of the House immediately following Sheridan’s speech on the Begums, so now he made his motion after the second day of Sheridan’s speech before the Lords. This provided Burke with the grounds for one of his most withering speeches. With heavy sarcasm, he congratulated Burges on being able to lower his mind to ‘the items of a solicitor’s bill’ after witnessing ‘such a display of talents as were unparalleled in the annals of oratory’. Burke himself could not so ‘sink his thoughts’. Using a panegyric on Sheridan to convey his contempt for Burges and his haggling over shillings and pence, Burke for once offered no handle for a retort. He also made a remarkably apposite application of a famous anecdote about Publius Scipio Africanus. Accused of peculation, Scipio was summoned to defend himself on the anniversary of the battle of Zama, one of his great victories. Disdaining a conventional defence, Scipio reminded his auditors of his victory, and proposed to adjourn to the Capitol to give thanks to the gods for it. The people followed him, leaving his accusers to reflect on their own pusillanimity. Burges deserved no better answer. After this lashing, William Drake, Jr. (?–), a Burges supporter, felt constrained to echo Burke’s praise of Sheridan, and to apologize for ‘men of humbler faculties’ (such as himself) employing themselves on the dry details of an account. Pitt virtually withdrew his earlier criticism of the managers. Dundas went further. Acknowledging that the motion was an indirect censure, he moved the order of the day to negative it. His motion was carried without a division, and thus expired Burges’s attack on the expenses of the trial.¹⁵² Pitt’s role in the business typifies his equivocal attitude to the impeachment. Willing enough to support Burges in discomforting Burke, he nevertheless gave the prosecution enough protection to ensure its continuation. Shortly after disposing of Burges’s motion, the House turned to the question of compensation for the losses suffered by the loyalists in the American war. Their claims had been examined by commissioners appointed for the purpose, and Pitt now proposed to vote about £,, to settle them. The subject, recalling as it did old animosities, might have been expected to revive them. Instead, the debate was remarkably unpartisan. Soothed by the refusal of Pitt and Dundas to support Burges, even Burke was at his most emollient. If as usual he digressed a little, indulging in a comparison with the ¹⁵² PH xxvii. –. The source of E.B.’s anecdote is Livy, . .
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ungenerous treatment at the Restoration of those who had lost property during the interregnum, he commended Pitt’s proposal as ‘both liberal and prudent’, neither parsimonious nor overgenerous. Pitt in turn was uncommonly conciliatory. On a technical point about the calculation of compensation, he even agreed to a suggestion emanating from Fox.¹⁵³ Rarely did such complaisant reasonableness prevail in a Commons debate. This mood was exceptional, because since debates in the Commons had been increasingly conducted as a contest between Pitt and Fox. (Against this background, the degree to which attitudes to Hastings had cut across party divides was the more remarkable.) Marginalized by this struggle between these mighty opposites, Burke vented his spleen by needling Pitt on petty issues, and Pitt usually rose to the provocation. In these exchanges, Pitt enjoyed the advantage of greater self-control. When he returns Burke’s sarcasm, he sounds as though he is indulging himself in a pleasurable pastime. Burke, on the other hand, gives an impression of impotent fury, his animosity to Pitt so visceral that his usual wit and invention have deserted him. Examples of this antagonism can be found in most of the debates on the impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey. Burke’s hostility to Impey derived from the first task of his Select Committee, consideration of the petitions from Calcutta complaining of the Supreme Court (of which Impey was Chief Justice). The Bengal Judicature Act of attempted to redress many of these complaints, and Burke’s subsequent investigation of Indian misrule had led him to execrate Impey as second only to Hastings in his Indian demonology. In , Impey had been recalled, and since he had been in England awaiting an enquiry. Nothing was done until , his case delayed first by the political instability of – and subsequently by the return in of Hastings, Burke’s primary target. Nor could Burke spare the time or the energy to prosecute Impey himself. The task was therefore delegated to his young friend Sir Gilbert Elliot, who on February foreshadowed his intention to move charges against Impey. By the time he was ready to give formal notice, however (on April), Pitt and Dundas argued that the session was too advanced, and Elliot agreed to defer the business until the next session.¹⁵⁴ Accordingly, proceedings against Impey did not begin until December, when Elliot introduced his articles with an elaborate oration that won universal praise. Of the six charges, three were directly linked to the case against Hastings. The most sensational was Impey’s judicial ‘murder’ of Nandakumar in , which effectively silenced the charges of corruption which Nandakumar had advanced. The others were Impey’s acceptance of appointment as judge of the Sadr Diwani Adalat, with which Hastings had allegedly bought his support; and his
¹⁵³ Morning Chronicle, June (PH xxvii. –). ¹⁵⁴ Debrett, xxi. ( Feb.). Morning Chronicle, April (PH xxvi. –).
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taking the affidavits at Lucknow in , collected as evidence to justify Hastings’s actions against the Begums.¹⁵⁵ Further progress was delayed by the Christmas recess and other business. Following Hastings’s example, Impey petitioned to be heard, and his defence was fixed for February. Impey, however, adopted a sounder if less grandiloquent strategy. Instead of affecting to contemn the charges, and claiming not only justification but applause for his every action, as Hastings had done, Impey was content to challenge his accuser’s interpretation of the legal issues. These concerned such technical questions as what powers had been conferred on the Supreme Court by North’s Act, and which English laws were in force in Calcutta in . These arcana offered less opportunity for the emotive appeals to substantive justice and universal values that the charges against Hastings had encouraged. Burke was also eager to allow Sir Gilbert to distinguish himself, and kept in the background, though he could not resist a few snipes at Pitt, who from the first showed himself hostile to the case. Thus on February, after Impey had completed his defence on the Nandakumar charge, Burke opposed Pitt’s proposal to adjourn. Pitt retorted by accusing Burke of an improper ‘insinuation’ in regretting that Impey delivered no written version of his defence. When Burke incautiously admitted that ‘his mind was in a manner made up’ on the subject of Impey, Pitt seized on the phrase as unbecoming a judicial enquiry. Defending himself, Burke in turn accused Pitt of having ‘grossly misrepresented’ him. On February, Pitt and Burke clashed about whether Impey should be required to submit a document to which he had referred in his defence, or merely requested to provide a copy.¹⁵⁶ Later in the same debate, when Impey was summoned to continue his defence, he began by complaining of some libels published to his prejudice. Much to Burke’s annoyance, Grenville moved to take them into consideration the next day.¹⁵⁷ On February, he further moved for an address to the king for a prosecution by the Attorney-General. While the opposition had no interest in punishing libels against Impey, once a complaint had been made, they could not openly condone a breach of privilege. Fox therefore proposed that, rather than refer the case to the Attorney-General, the House should itself take action against the printers. Nor did Burke formally oppose prosecution, though he made plain his conviction that to single out these particular libels was an undue favour to Impey, since no gentleman could ‘sit down to his breakfast-table, without meeting abuse infinitely more violent and more offensive’ than Impey had suffered. Pitt retorted that by dwelling so long on the breakfast-time scandal, Burke was keeping members from their dinner.¹⁵⁸ This wearisome ¹⁵⁵ ‘Speech, &c’ (NLS MS ), –. The passage on E.B. does not appear in the report in PH xxvi. –. Elliot’s charges are in CJ xliii. –. ¹⁵⁶ PH xxvi. – (Impey’s defence), – (debate on Feb.), – ( Feb). ¹⁵⁷ PH xxvi. –. ¹⁵⁸ Morning Herald, Feb. (PH xxvi. –); WS vi. –.
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point-scoring continued on February, when witnesses were examined. Pitt took exception to one of Burke’s questions, asking him to explain its relevance. Burke in turn protested at having to explain the purport of every question. Arguing that such a practice would be a ‘a bad and dangerous precedent’, he refused to concede without a formal division. Professing an unwillingness to waste time (though his cavil was actually the cause of delay), Pitt ostentatiously withdrew his objection, allowing Burke to protract the business by ‘heaping irregularities upon irregularities’. Burke in turn rose to rebut the allegation.¹⁵⁹ Proceedings against Impey, like the trial of Hastings, were suspended while the judges were on circuit. Not until May did Elliot formally move his first charge, again with a lengthy speech. Finding himself exhausted before he could finish, he requested an adjournment. After some persiflage from Pitt about overlong speeches, this was granted, and he concluded his indictment on the th. In the ensuing debate, Pitt made the decisive speech in Impey’s favour. Seizing on Pitt’s argument that, in refusing a stay of execution, Impey had exercised permissible judicial discretion, Burke in reply charged that ‘if despotism itself were to speak, it would use the language, and adopt and enforce the arguments’ that Pitt had used. The charge of having murdered Nandakumar, by far the most onerous, was defeated by to .¹⁶⁰ The rejection of the weightiest charge effectively marked the end of the attempt to impeach Impey, though on May Elliot tried to bring forward another article. This time he gave no long introductory speech, since the debate was technically on a motion to go into a committee. Burke gave one of his least effective performances. In a vein reminiscent of his rambling speech of July , he recurred to the comparison between ‘young statesmen’ who had ‘all the body and strength’ of the wine, and ‘older politicians’, such as himself, who ‘were obliged to take up with the lees, which were somewhat stale and sour’. Pitt in turn began by accusing Burke of irrelevance. Then, coming to the point, he quoted an admission that Anstruther had made. Not suspecting that Pitt could mean to controvert anyone but himself, Burke missed his reference to ‘an honourable and learned gentleman’ (the usual way of referring to a member who was a lawyer) and interjected, ‘I never admitted that’. Indeed not, Pitt retorted: ‘the admission was too fair, too reasonable, and too candid’ to have been Burke’s; he meant another member. In reply, Burke complained that he had suffered more ‘severe things’ from Pitt than from any other minister. Pitt retorted with a sarcastic tu quoque: Burke ‘being himself remarkably guarded, and cautious of saying any thing to offend others, was peculiarly justified in taking offence at any thing rather harsh that was said of himself ’. Nor could Pitt resist a fling at the Coalition, hinting that Burke had forgotten some of the ‘severe things’ he had then said of some ministers.¹⁶¹ ¹⁵⁹ Public Advertiser, Feb. . ¹⁶⁰ PH xxvii. –; WS vi. –. ¹⁶¹ Morning Chronicle, May (PH xxvii. –).
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Neither Pitt nor Burke emerges with much credit from these exchanges. On Pitt’s part, silence, or an ostentatious refusal to be provoked, would often have been the wiser and more statesmanlike course. For his part, Burke was incontestably so personal and abusive in his debating style that he could not reasonably object to receiving what he so liberally bestowed. In terms of reciprocity, Pitt’s sarcasm could be justified. On the other hand, Windham was perhaps right in his complaint that, instead of treading ‘the grand path suited to his post as Prime Minister’, Pitt was ‘personal beyond all men; pointed, sarcastic, cutting’.¹⁶² Against other targets than Pitt, Burke could happily combine humour and vilification. An apposite illustration is the debate of March on Pitt’s East India Declaratory Bill, a measure intended to confirm the power of the Board of Control (dominated by Dundas) over the company’s Court of Directors.¹⁶³ Burke prepared an elaborate speech against the principles raised by the bill. In the heat of the debate, however, he discarded his notes and instead directed his fire against Dundas personally, and especially at Dundas’s pretence that he was only one member of the board, not more responsible than the others for its decisions. Burke was facetiously ironic about Dundas’s new-found bashfulness.¹⁶⁴ This was the Burke whose satire on the Board of Trade could amuse even its threatened members.¹⁶⁵ Something about Pitt, perhaps his icy aloofness, numbed Burke’s wit. ¹⁶² In conversation with Frances Burney in Westminster Hall (Burney, Journal, Apr. , in Diary & Letters, iii. ). ¹⁶³ C.H. Philips, The East India Company, – (Manchester, ; corrected edn. ), –. ¹⁶⁴ WWM BkP / (E.B.’s notes). Morning Chronicle, Mar. (PH xxvii. –); WS vi. –. ¹⁶⁵ Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, ), , with reference to E.B’s Speech on Economical Reform ( Feb. ).
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‘For near three Months, almost literally I have done nothing’, Burke confided to Sir Gilbert Elliot on October (C v. ). Almost a year later, to excuse his dilatoriness he confessed to having spent another summer of ‘general idleness’, in which he had ‘neglected all Duties of all sorts sizes and dimensions’ ( Sept. : ). Such self-flagellations are hardly to be taken seriously. Yet a perceptible difference in tone distinguishes these letters from those which Burke wrote to Charles O’Hara (?–) in the summers of the early s, expatiating about farming, and suffusing his descriptions of leisure and retirement at Beaconsfield with a glow of exuberant and active enjoyment.¹ In the letters to Elliot, contrasting business and inactivity, Burke characterizes repose more negatively as a kind of fallow period, a relief from pain rather than a positive pleasure.² Even if this shift represents a change in Burke’s self-image rather than in his actual experience, the mutation is prophetic of the darker, more pessimistic Burke of the s. He had by no means lost his interest in farming. In January , Boswell heard him deliver ‘a luminous dissertation’ on the subject.³ In July, when the Duke of Portland was planning an experiment with a special variety of turnip seed, he sent Burke a quarter share.⁴ But Burke’s summer letters no longer enthuse about the triumphs and disappointments of his experiments. Frustrating as Burke found politics, he could never escape its trammels. The time and effort required by his crusade to impeach Hastings left little leisure for other interests. Even at Beaconsfield, Burke became increasingly immured in his study. Indeed, Sir Gilbert Elliot would complain that a visit there provided so little ‘benefit in the way of air or exercise’ as ‘hardly to be call’d going to the country’.⁵ In , Burke’s confession of idleness was perhaps almost literally true. In , he may have been equally neglectful of ‘Duties’, but the summer was ¹ E.B. to Charles O’Hara, Sept. , July, Sept. , Aug. (C ii. –, –, –, –). ² In the Philosophical Enquiry (I. iii.), E.B. had maintained (against Locke) that ‘the removal or diminution of pain, in its effect has very little resemblance to positive pleasure’ (WS i. –). ³ Journal, Jan. (Boswell: The English Experiment, –, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, ), –). ⁴ Portland to E.B., July (WWM BkP, /). ⁵ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Mar. (NLS MS , fo. ).
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diversified by an election, a ramble, and a new acquaintance. The election, indeed, counted rather as a neglected duty and a disagreeable diversion. In , Lord Hood, the ministerial candidate who had topped the poll in Westminster at the election, was appointed a Lord of the Admiralty. An MP who accepted such an ‘office of profit’ automatically vacated his seat, but was eligible for re-election. Commonly, such re-election was a matter of course. This by-election, however, was unusual. Only rarely did a minister represent so ‘open’ a constituency as Westminster. Hood, admittedly, was popular, and in normal circumstances might have been re-elected unopposed. But the extreme bitterness of the contest at Westminster in , exacerbated by Pitt’s attempt to use an extended scrutiny to deny Fox his seat, made some of the Whigs eager to carry the war into the enemy’s camp and ‘make a push for both members’. The idea originated among the lower echelons of opposition supporters, for according to Burke neither he, nor Fox, nor the Duke of Portland really approved the scheme or even knew where it had started (C v. ). The Whig candidate was Lord John Townshend (–), a friend of Fox. He had represented Cambridge University from to , when he became one of ‘Fox’s Martryrs’ at the general election. When the Westminster poll opened on July , Burke was summoned to help canvass. Since he loathed electioneering at the best of times, he pleaded his need to recover his health and strength after the rigours of the parliamentary session.⁶ The Duke of Portland accepted his excuse. Lord John had taken an early lead, and only if Burke’s presence became ‘indispensibly necessary’, would the duke summon him ( July: ). One incident related to the election shows Burke in an amiable light. Dr Charles Burney (–), the musicologist whom Burke (when Paymaster) had appointed Organist to Chelsea Hospital at an increased salary, was embarrassed between his gratitude to Burke and his connections with the Court, where his daughter Frances was Keeper of the Robes to the queen. He therefore wrote to Burke, explaining why he felt obliged to vote for Lord Hood. Burke replied with sympathy. Deprecating the notion that ‘worthy men’ should be ‘made sacrifices to the minuter parts of politicks’, he told Burney to ‘put your Mind at Ease’ ( Aug. : C v. –). Burney was deeply touched by Burke’s response.⁷ Slight as it is, the exchange shows that, where Hastings was not concerned, Burke remained capable of magnanimity. Had Burke really cared about Townshend’s election, he might not have absolved Burney so easily. Though excused from canvassing, as a Westminster elector himself, Burke could hardly avoid coming to town to vote. This he did on August (C v. ). But he was not among the prominent Whigs who joined Townshend’s victory ⁶ Neither summons nor excuse is extant; both are inferred from Portland’s reply ( July : C v. –). ⁷ Charles Burney to E.B., Aug. (WWM BkP /). Burney’s earlier letter is lost.
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cavalcade on the th.⁸ On the th, however, he felt obliged to attend a victory celebration. Knowing the perils of such occasions, he prudently emptied all his pockets to prevent their being picked. While ‘almost justled to death’, he at least lost nothing (). Though Burke himself stood aloof, one of his disciples, French Laurence, had taken a vigorous part in the election. In the immediate afterglow of victory, Laurence hoped to turn the parish committee (for St Anne, Soho, which included Gerrard Street) into a regular club that would meet monthly during the parliamentary session. As a first step, he proposed a celebratory dinner on August, which he asked Burke to attend, if only to refute the reports in The World (a newspaper hostile to Burke at this period) that he had ‘washed his hands’ of the election.⁹ Knowing Burke’s aversion to such occasions, Laurence made the request as a personal favour ( Aug.: –). Burke professed himself indifferent to ‘the prattle of the world’, but agreed to attend ( Aug.: –). Victory in an ‘open’ constituency such as Westminster was valued by the ministry as well as by the opposition, as it was thought to confer the legitimacy of popular approval. Since popularity was the determining factor in few eighteenth-century elections, its rarity value led both sides to spend disproportionately in some of the large constituencies.¹⁰ In practice, of course, such lavish spending effectively undermined the value of what was being bought. This was why independent, propertied opinion was valued so much more highly: it could not be bought. Burke knew at first hand from his experience at Bristol that success in a large electorate was more likely to be the product of bribery, manipulation, and ignorance than a genuine reflection of popular opinion.¹¹ He was therefore indignant at the waste of money on Westminster. In his view, the £, squandered on electing Lord John could more profitably have purchased as many as ten seats from the patrons of pocket or rotten boroughs. In all, the last three Westminster contests had cost £,. Even this colossal expenditure bought no permanent advantage. Victory, he observed ruefully to Sir Gilbert Elliot, meant only ‘the power of fighting a new Battle’ ( Sept. : C v. ). Burke was proved correct. So expensive did the contest prove to both sides, that at the general election in the ministry and the Foxite opposition negotiated a compromise. Fox and Lord Hood were elected on what was virtually a joint ticket.¹² The £, ⁸ Morning Chronicle, Aug. . ⁹ The World, Aug. . A similar paragraph appeared in The Times, Aug. ¹⁰ In , of the £, spent by the government at the general election, £, was devoted to three ‘open’ constituencies (London, Westminster, and Surrey), of which Westminster alone consumed £,. This expenditure secured the return of one member. In , of a total of £,, £, was spent in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Fox at Westminster (Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, – (London, ), i. , ). ¹¹ Speech against shorter parliaments, May (WS iii. –); E.B. to Portland, Sept. (C iv. –). ¹² This agreement did not, in the event, avoid a contest. The nomination of John Horne Tooke forced a poll.
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spent to elect Lord John had thus purchased no more than a single member for a two-year term. The Westminster election, important as it seemed at the time, was soon forgotten. Even in Britain, public attention was increasingly directed towards what Burke, writing to Elliot, called the ‘extraordinary scenes . . . acting every where on the Continent’, most amazingly ‘the Total Eclipse of France in the very glow of her meridian Splendour’ ( Sept. : C v. ). The parlous state of the national finances had forced the French government to call an Assembly of Notables for February , in the hope of securing approval for increased taxation. This initiative failed, and subsequent attempts to effect reforms by means of royal edicts fared no better, meeting with firm resistance from the parlements. In August , the political and financial crisis intensified. On the th, the ancient States General, which had not met since , was summoned for May . On August came a virtual admission of national bankruptcy, when the government decreed the repayment of most public creditors in promissory paper instead of cash. On the th, Louis XVI (–) was forced to recall Jacques Necker (–), the reforming minister whom he had dismissed in . The French Revolution, or at least what has been called the ‘pre-Revolution’, had begun.¹³ Reading about these developments in the London newspapers, where they were extensively reported, Burke did not immediately perceive their long-term significance. At first they seemed to him no more than the latest ‘Pranks’ of the French court, ‘Strange postures’ exhibited ‘for the entertainment of Europe’ ( Sept. : ). Burke was not alone in this perception. Even Thomas Paine, then visiting France, saw no portents of revolution.¹⁴ Nor, when Burke and Paine met for the first time in August , could anyone have guessed that within three years their names would become indissolubly linked as mighty opposites in a political controversy that would reverberate for more than two centuries. Burke had long known Paine by repute as a revolutionary journalist, ‘the author of Common Sense, the Crisis &c’ (C v. ). Since , however, Paine had struck out in two new directions: as an inventor, and as an unofficial diplomat. As an inventor, his most plausible project was an iron bridge, which he proposed to erect in Philadelphia. Failing to attract local investors, in he took a model of his bridge to France. In Paris, he submitted the design to the Académie des Sciences. Several proposals for new bridges across the Seine were under consideration, and Paine sought to have his design adopted for one of them. Apart from his engineering aspirations, Paine was ambitious to play a political role on the international stage. His republicanism naturally led him to attribute wars to the personal and ¹³ Jean Egret, La Pré-révolution française, – (Paris, ). ¹⁴ As late as Feb. , Paine expected reform rather than revolution, and even the continuation of the monarchy (to Thomas Jefferson, Feb. , in Jefferson’s Papers, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, – ), xiv. ).
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dynastic ambitions of kings. Believing that peace was always in the true interest of all peoples, he was eager to promote international fraternity. In the summer of , the main threat of an international war came from the internal power struggle in the United Provinces, which threatened to erupt into hostilities involving Britain, Prussia, and France. Thomas Jefferson (–), the American ambassador in Paris, with whom Paine was on friendly terms, introduced him to some French politicians, including the abbé Morellet (–), secretary to the French chief minister, ÉtienneCharles Loménie de Brienne (–), Archbishop of Toulouse. After meeting Morellet, Paine wrote him a letter, designed to secure a semi-official reply which he could show to contacts in England. Morellet obliged. On his return to England in September, however, Paine found no opportunity to use this letter. In frustration, he wrote a pamphlet, Prospects on the Rubicon, which attracted disappointingly little notice. The international crisis was resolved without his mediation.¹⁵ News of a rival bridge scheme hurried Paine back to Paris in December . In June , however, he returned to London with his model, having reluctantly abandoned hope that his design would be used to span the Seine. He also brought a letter of introduction to Burke from Henry Laurens (–), the American whose release from the Tower Burke had tried to obtain in .¹⁶ Having introduced himself to Burke, Paine subsequently sent him a lengthy letter intended to improve their acquaintance, and transparently angling for an invitation to Beaconsfield. The main theme of the letter is international relations. From an analysis of the unsettled state of European diplomacy, Paine argued that Britain should avoid Continental entanglements. In particular, he thought the time propitious to bring Britain and France closer together. To demonstrate his credentials as a peacemaker, and the friendly disposition towards Britain that he believed prevailed among the French ruling élite, he enclosed the letter he had received from the abbé Morellet in .¹⁷ Always ready to entertain strangers of any distinction, Burke duly invited him to Beaconsfield, where he spent about a week in midAugust. On the th, Burke took Paine to dine with the Duke of Portland at Bulstrode.¹⁸ Burke was not greatly impressed, describing Paine as ‘not ¹⁵ John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London, ), –; Paine to the abbé Morellet, Aug. , in A. Owen Aldridge, ‘Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, and Anglo-French Relations in ’, Studies in Burke and his Time, (), –. Paine’s pamphlet, Prospects on the Rubicon: or, An Investigation into the Causes and Consequences of the Politics to Be Agitated at the Next Meeting of Parliament (), is repr. in Complete Writings, ed. P. S. Foner (New York, ), ii. –. ¹⁶ Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (New York, ), –. E.B. to James Bourdieu, Lord North, and Benjamin Franklin, Dec. (C iv. –). ¹⁷ Paine to E.B., Aug. (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society Library, B/P). Morellet to Paine, Aug. (WWM BkP /). ¹⁸ E.B. to French Laurence, Aug. (C v. ); Paine to Thomas Jefferson, Sept. ( Jefferson, Papers, xiii. ).
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without some attention to Politicks’ (a dismissive assessment after Paine’s long letter of August) but ‘much more deeply concernd about various mechanical projects’, principally his iron bridge (to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Sept. : C v. ). Paine overacted the part of the inventor, even claiming to have ‘closed my political career with the establishment of the Independance of America’.¹⁹ Only ‘not sorry’ to have seen Paine (), Burke ignored both Morellet’s letter and Paine’s own plan for an entente cordiale. For his part, Paine found neither Burke nor the duke as malleable as he had hoped. As he reported to Jefferson, the opposition was ‘as much warped in some respects as to Continental Politics as the Ministry’ (by which he meant, suspicious of France). Even so, Paine continued to cultivate Burke, so that by January he would claim to be ‘in some intimacy’ with him.²⁰ In , soon after Paine’s visit, the Burkes resumed the habit, broken in , of an annual holiday. This year their goal was Crewe Hall, in Cheshire, the seat of John Crewe and his wife Frances. The party, comprising Edmund, Jane, Richard Sr., and Edmund Nagle (–; Burke’s cousin), set out on September. Their first stop was Woodstock, where Thomas King (–; Richard Jr.’s former tutor) was Rector. While at Woodstock, they made an excursion to Blenheim, where they rowed on the lake and viewed part of the grounds before rain forced them to return to the rectory. From Woodstock, their route took them through Stratford-upon-Avon to Birmingham, where Matthew Boulton (–) showed them his Soho Manufactory, famous for its cut-steel goods and especially for the mass production of buttons. They arrived at Crewe Hall on the th. ‘We build no such houses in our time’, Burke remarked, more impressed by the Jacobean solidity of Crewe Hall than by the wonders of Boulton’s ‘enchanted Castle’. These details are preserved in a series of letters to Richard Jr., who was again sea-bathing at Brighton for his health (C v. –). The Burkes remained in the north for over a month, but their exact movements are unknown until about October, when they were staying with the Fitzwilliams at Wentworth Woodhouse. Paine, meanwhile, had also come north, to Rotherham, where a local ironmaster had cast a trial version of his iron bridge. Burke and Lord Fitzwilliam went to inspect it, and Paine was invited to Wentworth.²¹ The Burkes were back at Beaconsfield by about October. Burke immediately re-immersed himself in his Indian business. In London on the th, he called on Sir Gilbert Elliot, and brought him back to Beaconsfield. There they worked on the correction of the speeches on Impey, ¹⁹ Paine to E.B., Aug. (American Philosophical Society Library, B/P). ²⁰ Paine to Jefferson, Sept. , Jan. , in Jefferson, Papers, xiii. , xiv. . ²¹ David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York, ), –; Keane, Tom Paine, –. Paine told Jefferson that he ‘staid a few days’ at Wentworth ( Feb. : Papers, xiv. ). He seems only to have been invited to dine: ‘Mr Paine from America’ was one of guests on Oct. (list of persons dining at Wentworth on ‘open days’, ; NRO Fitzwilliam Papers, X. ).
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which Elliot still intended to publish. They returned to London for the annual dinner of the Whig Club on November, the last anniversary of before ‘Revolution’ acquired alarming new connotations.²² Burke then returned to Beaconsfield, as Parliament was prorogued until November, when a further prorogation was expected.²³ Before then, however, indeed within days of Burke’s return to the country, the political world was thrown into turmoil by news that the king was seriously, perhaps incurably, ill. For most of his long life, George III enjoyed robust good health. Admittedly, in , a serious illness had determined him to make legal provision for a regency in case he died before his eldest son came of age.²⁴ Since then, however, he had been remarkably fit and well. The sudden deterioration of his health in was thus surprising as well as alarming. After a short but severe illness in June, he spent five weeks in July and August convalescing at Cheltenham, where the water from the mineral spring was thought to be therapeutic. On his return to Windsor, he appeared to have recovered. But in October he relapsed, and on the nd his physician observed the first symptoms that suggested mental derangement as well as physical illness. For the next week or so, the king’s health fluctuated. Despite attempts to maintain a discreet silence, rumour and gossip abounded, and even began to appear in the newspapers. The king’s incapacity and probable insanity were soon common knowledge.²⁵ This alarming development was no mere subject of idle curiosity. In the circumstances of , it precipitated a constitutional crisis.²⁶ George III was a ‘constitutional’ monarch in that, in his political capacity, he was deemed to act on the advice of responsible ministers. Yet he was also a ‘personal’ monarch, able and unafraid, within certain constraints, to make political decisions and appointments according to his own personal opinions ²² Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Oct., Oct., Nov. (Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, ed. Lady Minto (London, ), i. –). According to Elliot, E.B. came to London to attend the dinner. He may have changed his mind, for the detailed report in the Whitehall Evening Post, – Nov., lists ‘persons of distinction’ who were present, not including E.B. ²³ CJ xliii. . Pitt to E.B., Nov. (C v. ), implies that, but for the king’s illness, Parliament would have been further prorogued (probably until January). ²⁴ Derek Jarrett, ‘The Regency Crisis of ’, English Historical Review, (), –. The Act then passed made no provision for the king’s incapacity. ²⁵ Charles Chenevix Trench, The Royal Malady (London, ); Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business (London, ). Macalpine and Hunter conclude that the king was suffering from an acute form of porphyria, caused by a metabolic imbalance (–). Porphyria was not diagnosed until the s. All contemporaries took the king’s symptoms to indicate some form of insanity. ²⁶ John W. Derry, The Regency Crisis and the Whigs, – (Cambridge, ); John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, –), i. –; L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party, – (Oxford, ), –.
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and preferences. Among the many undoubted prerogatives that he retained (though there was some disagreement about its limitation) was that of appointing ministers. This had been demonstrated, and at the same time controverted, by his dismissal of the Coalition in December . Though the appointment of Pitt and his colleagues had received popular legitimation by the election, they were still ‘the king’s ministers’ in a sense that their nineteenthcentury and later successors were not. If George III had died in , as at one time seemed likely, the Prince of Wales would have succeeded as George IV, and his right to appoint ministers of his own choice would have been unquestioned. The king’s incapacity posed a less tractable problem for which the constitution did not provide an easy solution. There were numerous precedents, but (as with most precedents) they were subject to widely differing interpretations. No one seriously doubted that, if the king’s illness lasted long enough, the prince would have to be offered the regency; or that, once appointed, he would dismiss Pitt in favour of Fox. If the existing Parliament proved hostile, Fox could recommend its dissolution. Backed by the patronage available to any ministry, he was likely to secure a majority at the ensuing election. In joining the opposition to his father’s government, the Prince of Wales was following the family tradition of Hanoverian heirs to the throne. In his case, the motive was as much personal as political. Shallow, selfish, pleasureloving, extravagant, irresponsible, out of place in the dull and decorous court of his parents, he found a natural home among Fox’s fast-living set. For Fox and his cronies, their friendship with the prince offered the possibility of power in the next reign. Meanwhile, however, the prince was not popular, and politically he was a serious liability. Many of the Whigs (Burke among them) regarded him with embarrassment and distaste. Not only had he amassed enormous debts, which he expected Parliament to discharge, he had contracted a clandestine ‘marriage’ (invalid by the Royal Marriages Act of ) with Maria Anne Fitzherbert (–). Mrs Fitzherbert, a widow, was also a Catholic. The ‘marriage’ was especially imprudent because, by the Act of Settlement of , to ‘marry a papist’ forfeited a claim to the Crown. The Whigs were popularly associated with this sham marriage. Even Burke, who had absolutely no connection with it, was in one caricature depicted as actually performing the ceremony, garbed (as often) as a Catholic priest.²⁷ On the prince’s authority, Fox had in the Commons denied the marriage, only to have his denial contradicted by Sheridan.²⁸ The episode left Fox completely alienated from Mrs Fitzherbert, and partly so from Sheridan and the prince. Sheridan’s influence with the prince, however, had correspondingly ²⁷ James Gillray, Wife & No Wife, or, A Trip to the Continent ( Mar. , reissued Mar. ; BMC ); reproduced in Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, ), . Robinson also reproduces other caricatures associating E.B. with the Fitzherbert ‘marriage’ (–). ²⁸ Mitchell, Charles James Fox, –.
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increased, greatly to Fox’s annoyance. Burke, of course, being much too old to be a companion to the prince, was not directly a competitor for his favour, and to some extent could stand aloof from these squabbles. Indeed, for a man of his age (58 in ), the cultivation of a dissipated and unpopular young man was neither agreeable nor creditable. Association with the prince would have been demeaning for a veteran of the old Rockingham party, the party of men of virtue and integrity, not of needy place-seekers and gamblers on the reversionary interest.²⁹ When the Regency Crisis erupted, Sheridan enjoyed a further accidental advantage. He was on the spot, while Fox was holidaying in Italy, his exact whereabouts unknown. When summoned to return, by travelling day and night, he undermined his own health. Weak and exhausted, he was in no state to impose his leadership on such an eager caballer as Sheridan. He failed even to convene a meeting to discuss the party’s overall strategy and the constitutional principles they would adopt.³⁰ Because Parliament could only be prorogued by the king or by his commission, on November the two houses met, in accord with the last prorogation, though unable to proceed to business. In the Commons, Pitt proposed an adjournment to December, which was approved without dissent.³¹ Burke immediately retired to Beaconsfield to await events. Even when news reached him of Fox’s arrival in London (on November), he remained in the country, unwilling to join the swarm of eager expectants who were buzzing about Fox, and preferring to communicate his views by letter. After professing his confidence in Fox’s leadership, Burke advised him to seize the initiative from the ministers. In particular, he urged the need to arrange for an independent examination of the doctors. The prince should take the lead, and not passively await developments. His doing so would ‘stiffle an hundred Cabals’ (C v. –). The cabals Burke had principally in mind were Sheridan’s. For in Fox’s absence, Sheridan had opened discussions with Lord Chancellor Thurlow about the possibility of a coalition ministry under the prince as Regent. Any such proposal was anathema to Burke, who was particularly eager to eject Thurlow from office. Thurlow’s dismissal would create an opening for Lord Loughborough (–; Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas). Since Loughborough shared Burke’s hostility to Hastings, his promotion to the Woolsack would be a great point gained for the remainder of the trial.³² ²⁹ E.B. thought the prince weak and irresponsible, and deplored the ‘State of dissipation’ in which he lived (to Lord Charlemont, May : C v. –). Hence he urged Sir Gilbert Elliot to cultivate the prince, as the best way of getting him ‘into a good train of conduct’ (Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, June , in Life and Letters, i. ). ³⁰ So E.B. complained to Windham in January (C v. ). Mitchell notes that, on his return, Fox was more intent on reconciling personalities than policies (Charles James Fox, ). ³¹ PH xxvii. –. ³² Loughborough’s hostility to Hastings can be traced to two sources: his support of the Fox–North Coalition (he defended Fox’s India Bill in the Lords on Dec. ); and his professional rivalry with Thurlow.
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From the beginning, then, Burke and Sheridan had discordant aims, and favoured correspondingly incompatible strategies. Burke, as usual, was eager to be active, and urged an early and dramatic assertion of the prince’s right. Initially, however, partly perhaps as a result of his physical exhaustion, Fox preferred to let Pitt retain the initiative. Pitt’s first move was to examine the king’s physicians before the Privy Council, at a meeting to which opposition as well as ministerial members were called. Burke attended this council, which was held on December. Pitt insisted that the questions be kept general and decorous: whether the king was capable of attending to business; whether he was likely to recover; and how long such a recovery might take. The doctors agreed on the king’s incapacity, and on the probability of his eventual recovery. They would not, however, hazard an estimate of how long this might take. Burke sought to elicit information about the king’s actual behaviour, but was not supported by the other opposition councillors.³³ The evidence of the physicians, cautiously optimistic about the king’s prospect of recovery, would enable Pitt to argue that the regency, since it was likely to be temporary, should be limited in its powers. On December, Pitt presented the report to the Commons. He parried the suggestion that the doctors should be further examined by the Commons, on the ground that, since the Commons could not administer an oath, such an examination would hardly strengthen the evidence already taken under oath at the Privy Council.³⁴ Soon, however, Pitt realized that a further examination of the doctors would prove a useful delaying tactic. Accordingly, on December, he professed himself ready to propose a committee to examine the king’s doctors. This was what Burke, too, wanted, trusting that, with more open questioning than had been allowed at the Privy Council, a less favourable prognosis for the king’s recovery could be elicited. Intensely suspicious of Pitt, however, he entered a protest, not against anything Pitt had said that day, but against the point he had made on the th, about the Commons’ inability to administer an oath. Burke affected to treat Pitt’s comment as a challenge to the ‘inquisitorial capacity’ of the House, which he tenaciously defended.³⁵ This speech was prophetic of many of Burke’s contributions to the debates during the Regency Crisis. It made a valid constitutional point. The Hastings impeachment, for example, had been grounded on evidence obtained from witnesses not on oath. Such a concern for remote consequences is characteristic of Burke’s habit of mind, and need not be dismissed as factitious. But only in Burke’s imagination was the threat that the Privy Council might usurp the ³³ CJ xliv. –. Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Dec. (Life and Letters, i. ). The minutes of the meeting of the Privy Council (NA PC. /, pp. –) do not record E.B.’s attempt to widen the enquiry. ³⁴ PH xxvii. –. ³⁵ Ibid. –.
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powers of the Commons at all real. His concern therefore appeared alarmist and gratuitously divisive. Rather than reply to Burke, Pitt snubbed him by pointedly excluding him from the committee named to examine the doctors. This was to consist of twenty-one members, selected (by Pitt) partly from a list supplied by the opposition and partly from his own supporters. Burke was on the opposition list. After reading out twenty names, Pitt created a dramatic moment by pretending to hesitate before naming the last member. The scene was especially relished by James Bland Burges, who loathed Burke: He then stopt for a minute; when, thro’ the Opposition benches, the name of Burke was re-echoed. Pitt still paused, and Burke’s name was repeated still more loudly. All this time he sat erect with much apparent consequence. When Pitt had kept us all in suspence for a couple of minutes, he very quietly proposed Lord Gower. Burke threw himself back in his seat, crossed his arms violently, and kicked his heels with evident marks of discomposure.³⁶
This was mortification indeed: to be rejected in favour of Lord Gower (–), scion of a great family, but ‘a shy young man, with little interest in politics’, who had never spoken in the House.³⁷ Pitt was indulging in the same petulant vindictiveness that he had shown against Fox during the Westminster scrutiny. Burges thought Burke rightly served by such a mark of disgrace, but Pitt’s action can also be construed as an unintended compliment. Burke was certainly inclined to regard such humiliations as triumphs, as on the occasion of the exclusion of Francis from the Committee of Managers in .³⁸ On December, after presenting the report from the committee that had examined the doctors, Pitt moved for another committee to examine precedents. In the debate on this motion, Fox recklessly asserted that no such committee was necessary, because, being of age, the prince had ‘as clear, as express a RIGHT to assume the reins of government, and exercise the power of sovereignty’ as in the case of the king’s ‘natural and perfect demise’. Pitt at once grasped the opportunity to present himself as the champion of the rights of Parliament against such high prerogative notions. Fox tried to restate his point in a more palatable form, but the damage had been done.³⁹ A tactical blunder, Fox’s claim, advanced without much consultation or perhaps even consideration, surprised and dismayed even many of his own supporters.⁴⁰ ³⁶ Ibid. –. James Bland Burges to his wife, [ Dec.] (Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fos. –). ³⁷ Namier and Brooke, The House of Commons, iii. . ³⁸ E.B. told Francis that ‘by the aid of Enemies, to whom a man often owes as much as to his friends’, the day of his exclusion from the Committee of Managers was ‘the Crown of your Life’ (c. Jan. : C v. ). E.B. would later regard his own public humiliation on – May in this light. ³⁹ CJ xliv. –. Morning Chronicle, Dec. (PH xxvii. –). ⁴⁰ After the debate, Sheridan is reported to have asked Fox ‘well I suppose he has some little right—has not he?’ (Duchess of Devonshire, Diary, Dec. , in Walter Sichel, Sheridan (London, ), ii. ).
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On the other hand, Lord Loughborough, the party’s chief legal luminary, had advanced nearly the same claim.⁴¹ Burke too, writing to Fox in late November, had boldly asserted, ‘This is an interregnum’ (C v. ). In order to reassert his authority over the party, Fox needed obliquely to repudiate Sheridan’s policy of negotiating a compromise through Thurlow. In addition, he dearly wanted to provoke a direct confrontation with Pitt, to avenge the humiliations of –. The notions of Loughborough and Burke, which Fox had probably not examined with much care, offered a ready and easy way of pursuing these objectives. Yet his doing so created a palpable inconsistency that Pitt could readily exploit. In –, Fox had championed the rights of the House of Commons against the prerogative of the Crown. Now, apparently motivated by the desire to scramble back into office, he seemed ready to exalt the royal prerogative. Further, he gave Pitt a pretext for delay. Since Fox’s claim of right was at best doubtful, the need to investigate it could hardly be denied. Most damaging of all, the claim proved in the end untenable, and had to be abandoned. Both Loughborough and Burke had been deluded by wishful thinking. Since Burke was convinced that the prince possessed an inherent, hereditary right, on December he naturally rose in Fox’s defence. Indeed, he was the only one who did. Silence, however, might have better served the cause, for his speech was an intemperate outburst against Pitt rather than a reasoned support of Fox’s claim. Accusing Pitt of having ‘burst into a flame’, he was much hotter himself. Seizing on Pitt’s phrase that the prince had ‘no right (speaking of strict right) to assume the Government more than any other individual subject of the country’, Burke omitted the qualification ‘strict right’, to argue that Pitt had denied his right altogether, and raised the spectre of Pitt, one of the prince’s ‘competitors’, being himself appointed regent. Burke so manifestly misrepresented Pitt’s words about the prince’s ‘right’ that refutation was easy. Pitt was now much more in control of himself than he had been on the th. Instead of reciprocating Burke’s abuse, Pitt calmly named him to the new committee.⁴² If ever votes were to be won by argument, December , when loyalties were fluid, was such a time. Yet Burke repeatedly damaged the credibility of his ideas by interlarding them with personal abuse.⁴³ His speech of December is an example. Abstaining from personalities, he might have found a more receptive audience for his claim that the constitution ‘was framed with so much circumspection and forethought, that it wisely provided for every possible exigency . . . the exercise ⁴¹ Loughborough to Jack Payne, [Nov. ], and a pencilled memo, reportedly read to the prince at a secret interview ( John, Lord Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England (London, –), vi. –). E.B. to Fox, Nov. (C v. ). ⁴² Morning Chronicle, Dec. (PH xxvii. –). ⁴³ Bruce E. Gronbeck, ‘Edmund Burke and the Regency Crisis of –’, in Rhetoric, a Tradition in Transition: In Honor of Donald C. Bryant, ed. Walter R. Fisher (East Lansing, Mich., ), –.
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of the sovereign executive power could never be vacant’.⁴⁴ This notion that the constitution provides in advance for all eventualities, unhistorical as it is, illustrates his instinctive appeal to history and aversion to innovation, that ‘powerful prepossession towards antiquity’ and emotive loyalty to the ‘ancient constitution’ that in the Reflections he would attribute to the common law tradition (R []). Though appointed to the committee to search for precedents, Burke spoke neither when the report was presented nor when it was debated. Both occasions were largely duels between Pitt and Fox.⁴⁵ Not until December did Burke return to the arena. Increasingly unhappy at the course the crisis was taking, he determined to assert himself and, most unusually, spoke first in the debate. (Technically, the proposition was an amendment moved by George Dempster, in effect to negative the restrictions proposed by Pitt.) Burke spoke for about two hours. A hostile witness described him as ‘wilder than ever’ and ‘Folly personified’, yet as ‘shaking his cap and bells under the laurel of genius’.⁴⁶ While nothing like a full text survives, glimpses of this characteristic Burkean amalgam can be discerned even from the summary reports. Untypically but presciently of his future alienation from the Whigs, Burke opened with an assertion of independence, claiming to know ‘as little of the inside of Carlton House, as he did of Buckingham House’ (the London residences respectively of the Prince of Wales, and of the king and queen), and therefore proposing to ‘deliver his sentiments as a plain citizen’. A coded complaint of his exclusion from the innermost councils of the Prince of Wales, this was uncomfortably near the truth. The body of his speech, however, was a frontal assault on Pitt and his proposals. For this purpose, he employed every argument he could muster, and was unmindful of their consistency. Thus in a characteristic passage he extolled ‘our excellent, our at present matchless constitution’ as ‘our inheritance . . . our powerful barrier, our strong rampart against the ambition of mankind’, by which he meant Pitt. Later in the speech, he brushed aside ‘the heterogeneous mass of cases and all the farrago of nonsense under the title of legal distinctions’ which had been adduced as precedents. He compared the ministers to ‘antiquarians, who valued a Homer without a head’ and who made of the constitution ‘a museum’. No precedent, he argued, applied to the present case, which should be decided by ‘the genuine spirit and the fair principles of the constitution’. Yet how, his auditors probably wondered, could this ‘spirit’ be known, except by precedents? Privately, indeed, Burke admitted that the precedents supported Pitt (C v. ). Nothing more assuredly proves his attachment to the idea of the ‘ancient constitution’ than his unwillingness to ⁴⁴ Morning Chronicle, Dec. (PH xxvii. ). ⁴⁵ The report was presented on Dec. and debated on the th (PH xxvii. –). ⁴⁶ Sir William Young to the Marquis of Buckingham, Dec. (Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George III, ed. Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (nd edn. London, –), ii. ).
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abandon his emotive appeal to it, even in making a case which would have been more consistent without it. Nor did Burke manage to conceal the personal ambitions and expectations that lurked behind the façade of debating constitutional principles, but which decorum required to be masked. Deploring the restriction on the granting of peerages, Burke appeared to be hinting at those that the regent might be expected to confer.⁴⁷ Rambling, inconsistent, and indiscreet as Burke’s speech was, even an auditor who disagreed with every idea it expressed could admire and enjoy his forceful application of a wealth of literary and historical allusions. Fertility of illustration, indeed, was always one of Burke’s strengths as a speaker. Pitt had proposed to regularize the proceedings of Parliament by a legal fiction, a commission issued under the great seal by the Lord Chancellor.⁴⁸ Seizing on this idea, Burke ridiculed this ‘composition of wax and copper’ as a ‘species of absurd metaphysics’, ‘a preposterous fiction’. He compared Pitt to the carpenter in Horace who, after considering whether to make a garden bench or a god, decides to create a Priapus (Satires, . . –). Burke refused to worship this Priapus, this mock-monarch. In a more serious vein, he used a quotation from Macbeth to express the horror which he imagined the king would feel at the exclusion of his son: ‘Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown . . . No son of mine succeeding’ (III. i. –). Burke also instanced the case of Charles VI of France (–). From , Charles had suffered from intermittent, recurrent insanity. The failure to establish a strong regency was generally regarded as having plunged France into thirty years of chaos.⁴⁹ Such passages, drawn from the cornucopia of Burke’s memory and imagination, suggest why his speeches were often admired and praised even by those who not only disagreed with him, but thought him ‘next to madness’.⁵⁰ In the peculiar circumstances of the Regency Crisis, victory in the Commons was not necessarily conclusive. Dempster’s amendment was defeated, and Pitt’s restricting clause approved.⁵¹ But with no sign of improvement in the king’s health, a regency still seemed inevitable. The proposed limitations did not deny the prince the right to dissolve Parliament, and a new Parliament could revoke whatever limitations had been imposed. This enticing prospect, however, only exacerbated existing tensions within the opposition, for the nearer they seemed to approach to power and place, the more they bickered about the distribution of the spoils. Even Burke received requests for patronage.⁵² Reconciling all the various claims would in ⁴⁷ PH xxvii. –. ⁴⁸ Dec. (PH xxvii. ). ⁴⁹ St James’s Chronicle, – Dec. (PH xxvii. –, ). ⁵⁰ Sir William Young to the Marquis of Buckingham, Dec. (Court and Cabinets of George III, ii. ). ⁵¹ By to (PH xxvii. ). ⁵² E.B. to Charles O’Hara, Jr., Dec. (C v. ); Thomas Lewis O’Beirne to E.B., Dec. (WWM BkP, /).
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no circumstances have been easy, and was rendered more difficult by tensions between the prince and the opposition, and by rivalries and animosities within the opposition itself. After the debate on December, Parliament adjourned for Christmas. Burke was increasingly frustrated by the opposition’s passivity. Since Fox was still convalescent, Burke invited him, together with Windham, to spend a few days at Beaconsfield during the break.⁵³ The recess was extended by the sudden illness and death of the Speaker, so that the Commons did not meet again until January. Sir Gilbert Elliot was the opposition candidate for the vacant chair, but only a half-hearted campaign was mounted on his behalf.⁵⁴ William Wyndham Grenville, Pitt’s friend, was easily elected. When the House resumed consideration of the Regency on January, Edward Loveden (?–), a backbencher who had lately deserted Pitt, proposed a further examination of the king’s physicians. Pitt spoke against it, Fox in its favour. The opposition hoped that their testimony would make the king’s early recovery appear less probable. This in turn would weaken the case for Pitt’s proposed restrictions. Their expectations rested chiefly on the opinion of Dr Richard Warren (–), the physician closest to the Whigs. Examined by the House of Lords, Warren had been pessimistic about the king’s chances of recovery. Burke therefore quoted Warren approvingly, while aspersing the authority of Dr Francis Willis (–), to whom the actual care of the king had been entrusted. Willis was the most optimistic of the king’s physicians, and his view carried weight, because he was by far the most experienced in the treatment of the insane. Burke therefore sought to discredit him as ‘a desperate quack’ and the mere ‘keeper of a mad-house’ (though an Oxford MD, he was not a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians), and therefore of less authority than an ‘eminent physician’ such as Warren. Further opinions ought to be sought, and ‘the keeper of a madhouse, with thirty patients’ (Willis) pitted against ‘the keeper of a mad-house with three hundred’. Burke meant Dr John Monro (–), an authority on insanity, physician to Bethlehem Hospital for the insane, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Sensing an opportunity to protract the proceedings without appearing to be responsible for the delay, Pitt conceded the demand for a further examination of the king’s physicians, but resisted Burke’s proposal for a wider enquiry. Burke, however, was named to the new comittee. Pitt thought it could do its job in ‘half a day or little more’.⁵⁵ In the event, the examination took nearly a week. Pitt imputed the delay to attempts (principally by Burke) to pursue irrelevant and unnecessary lines of enquiry. ⁵³ E.B. to Windham, Dec. (C v. –); Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Dec. (Life and Letters, i. ). Fox was at Beaconsfield from to Dec. ⁵⁴ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, , Jan. (Life and Letters, i. –). ⁵⁵ PH xxvii. –. CJ xliv. . In The Volcano of Opposition (Plate ), one of the MPs fleeing from the mad E.B. cries ‘Monro! Monro!’
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As a result, the printed report ran to forty folio pages, or about , words. Though Burke was one of the most pertinacious questioners, he failed to extract the replies he wanted. When the report was submitted on January, he therefore moved to recommit it. Not enough evidence, he argued, had been collected about the king’s behaviour, and the disagreements between the different doctors had been insufficiently probed. His motion was rejected without a division.⁵⁶ Burke’s obsession with the king’s madness brought his own sanity into question. Thomas Rowlandson (–) exploited the notoriety of Burke’s behaviour on the committee in Doctor Last’s Examination ( Feb ), in which an emaciated, deranged, Burke asks ‘How do you cure Insanity?’ (Plate ). The diminutive Willis replies ungrammatically ‘I does it all by my Eye’, at the same time fixing Burke, as though to demonstrate his method by practising it. Rowlandson caricatures both sides: Pitt’s prompt (‘Don’t hesitate to serve the Cause’) shows that he is no more impartial than Burke. More partisan was a newspaper squib, ‘Doctor Willis and Edmund Burke’. Asked by Burke to describe the symptoms of insanity, Willis responds with a sketch of Burke himself (‘tall, thin, and near sighted’). Merely by looking steadfastly at him, ‘as I now do on the Right Honourable Gentleman’, Willis clearly perceived his insanity. A catalogue of Burkean characteristics follows, disguised as symptoms of madness, including foaming at the mouth as he talked confusedly about India.⁵⁷ During these months Burke had to endure a torrent of such abuse, most of it less witty than this piece. While Burke was busy on the committee examining the doctors, his place in the expected new ministry was determined. Embarrassed about how to reward Burke, given the ‘unjust prejudice and clamour which has prevailed against him and his family’, on January the Duke of Portland invited Thomas Pelham and Sir Gilbert Elliot to dinner and a post-prandial conference, which lasted until nearly midnight. Though the duke and his friends felt a ‘veneration’ for Burke, Elliot had to concede that this was not widely shared. In particular, ‘veneration’ did not extend to admitting Burke to the Cabinet office to which his seniority in the party entitled him. As in and , he was again to be sidelined as Paymaster, with a salary of £, a year. This time, however, a permanent provision was also to be made: a pension of £, a year on the Irish establishment for life, with the reversion of half to his wife and half to his son for their lives. In addition, Richard Sr. was to return as Secretary to the Treasury, at £, a year, but to be retired at the earliest opportunity with a sinecure in the Customs of about £, a year.⁵⁸ This estimate of Burke was shared by a pamphleteer who hoped that, as ⁵⁶ CJ xliv. –; PH xxvii. –. ⁵⁷ The Times, Jan. . ⁵⁸ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Jan. (NLS MS , fos. –; printed in Life and Letters, i. –, as part of a letter of Jan).
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Regent, the Prince of Wales would retain Pitt as his minister. Fox and Sheridan, he argued, were dangerous, and should be kept out of power. Burke, on the contrary, was harmless, and even deserving, if perverse in the misapplication of his talents: Of Mr Burke, I reverence the character, and I sincerely hope you will reward the labours of his long political life with ease and dignity. I venerate him as a man of uncommon genius. I lament that such a man should be driven . . . to the narrow character of a party advocate. Even as an advocate for a party, he seems at present to be little valued; for he is heard in the house with impatience. Dismiss him, then, to ease; as you would turn out a good old horse to a fertile pasture for life.⁵⁹
Although Elliot did not call Burke a ‘good old horse’, a ‘fertile pasture’ was exactly what Portland proposed for him. Against all these expectations, however, Burke’s active political life would recover, and the s would prove the decade of his greatest influence. Burke himself was keenly aware that he was ‘little valued’ even by his own party. Indeed, he was so discouraged by his lack of influence that when Pitt introduced his limitations, on January, he did not speak in the debate.⁶⁰ Silence did not come easily to him, however, so that when the subject was resumed on the th, after a lengthy debate, he rose to speak. Yet for once, his sense that the House was unwillingly to hear him overpowered his determination to be heard, and he desisted.⁶¹ Disheartened and depressed, he withdrew to Beaconsfield for a few days, not of course to forget politics (which he could never do) but to record his thoughts on paper. They were addressed to William Windham, in a letter of over three thousand words (c. Jan. : C v. –). This letter is of great interest, both as a political statement and as a personal document. Burke’s speeches on the Regency are passionate and vituperative. This letter shows that the passion, while strongly felt, was also a matter of strategy. Only in part, he told Windham, had he retired to Beaconsfield for the more salubrious air of the country. In explaining his main motive, however, instead of open complaining of his associates, Burke preferred to veil his grievance behind an oblique and transparently insincere self-criticism: I began to find, that I was grown rather too anxious; and had begun to discover to myself and to others, a solicitude relative to the present state of affairs, which though their strange condition might well warrant in others, is certainly less suitable to my time of life, in which all emotions are less allowed, and to which, most certainly all human concerns ought in reason to become more indifferent, than to those who have work to do, and a good deal of day and inexhausted strength to do it in. ()
Burke had always been the most hyperactive member of the party. In the s, he had repeatedly sought, usually without success, to prod Rockingham into a ⁵⁹ Letters to a Prince, from a Man of Kent (London, ), . ⁶¹ The World, Jan. .
⁶⁰ PH xxvii. –.
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more aggressive course of action.⁶² In the present crisis, he had from the outset urged that the prince should seize the initiative. After this advice was rejected, he was ‘little consulted’ (). So convinced was Burke that any suggestion he made would now be disregarded merely as his, that he decided to transmit his ideas through Windham, who could advance them with some prospect of their being adopted. Burke’s recipe had not changed. He wanted the opposition to adopt a more aggressive strategy. Fox’s last speech (on January), while eloquent and weighty, was too moderate in tone, such as ‘might be spoken upon an important difference between the best friends’. Burke longed for the more abrasive style of argument ‘by which Lord North was run down’ (C v. ). He urged protests and manifestos, and even a secession, all measures he had championed in the s. Burke was indeed afraid that history was about to repeat itself: that Fox’s hunger for power would again, as in , induce him to sacrifice principle to expediency. Beside the forfeiture of consistency, if such a coalition took place, the political loaves and fishes would again have to be divided between two parties. Remembering how much he had been execrated for the Fox–North Coalition (of which he had never heartily approved), Burke was understandably (though mistakenly) apprehensive about another such junction. If Fox had adopted this moderate line in anticipation of a ‘foreseen coalition’ with Pitt, others (such as Burke himself ) ought to be taken into confidence, lest by excoriating Pitt’s conduct as ‘highly corrupt, factious and criminal’ they should expose themselves as ‘hot and intemperate Zealots’ not trusted with the secrets of their own party (). This was, of course, exactly Burke’s position, and the root of his resentment. Burke’s letter to Windham has a further interest as evidence of his attitude to majorities. During the American war, he had always convinced himself that North’s majorities in Parliament and (so far as it could be counted and judged) his support in the political nation as a whole were somehow illegitimate, either venal, self-interested, or ill informed. In this crisis, he was again prepared to fight against ‘a majority in the two houses’ and ‘for aught I know, the majority of the nation’ (C v. ). Burke was no respecter of popular opinion. On February, he would tell the Commons that those who had signed addresses of support for Pitt ‘touched upon points which they did not understand’.⁶³ So far he was consistent. Indeed, Burke was never prepared to bow to the opinion of a majority, merely on account of its numerical superiority.⁶⁴ Yet there is a hint of sophistry in Burke’s claim that ‘the constitutional propriety of the King’s submitting in every part of his executive Government to the advice of Parliament’, which he acknowledged, was nevertheless ⁶² Supra, i. , , –, –, , . ⁶³ PH xxvii. . ⁶⁴ The French Revolution only intensified E.B.’s hostility to the idea of ‘majority rule’ (‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, : WS viii. ).
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somehow limited and ‘like every other principle can bear a practical superstructure of only a certain Weight’. If Parliament ‘without any sort of reason, merely from faction and caprice’ should attempt to usurp ‘the whole power and authority of the Crown’, the monarchy would be no more than ‘an useless incumbrance on the Country’ if it could not resist such attempts (). This argument appears to invest the prospective regent with the prerogative to overrule the ‘faction and caprice’ of the Commons. In , Burke had argued the opposite, that the king should not keep Pitt in power against the will of the Commons. If a regent could with ‘reason’ dismiss Pitt, a fortiori George III had the right to dismiss the Coalition in . After his short seclusion at Beaconsfield, Burke returned to London for the resumption of the debates in Parliament. During the largely procedural discussion on January, he spoke several times.⁶⁵ More memorable, however, was his contribution on the th, though he had little enough to say on the nominal subject of the debate, the appointment of a committee to attend the Prince of Wales with the joint resolutions of the Lords and the Commons. This speech was animated by some strong emotive passages. On December, Thurlow had treated the Lords to a lachrymose profession of his loyalty to the king. As everyone knew of his earlier intrigues with Sheridan, this was universally regarded as an odious display of hypocrisy. These ‘iron tears which flowed down Pluto’s cheeck’, Burke observed, ‘rather resembled the dismal bubbling of the Styx, than the gentle murmuring streams of Aganippe’. They were ‘tears for his Majesty’s bread’, the real object of the loyalty of the lords of the household: ‘they would stick by the King’s loaf as long as a single cut of it remained. They would fasten on the hard crust, and would gnaw it, while two crumbs of it held together’. In another passage, Burke apostrophized ‘the true principles of a republic’, while reprobating the sham republic Pitt was attempting to create. Pitt’s republic bore the same relation to a true republic as the castrati of the opera did to the classical heroes whom they personated. To Pitt’s proposed commission to open Parliament, he applied Macbeth’s speech on seeing the ghost of Banquo: ‘Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; | Thou hast no speculation in those eyes’ (III. iv. –). Each of these conceits is developed with considerable force and ingenuity. As usual, Burke leavened the serious with the ludicrous and the trivial. In ridicule of the placemen anxious to keep their salaries, Burke imagined them hypocritically protesting (in a phrase popularized by one of Swift’s burlesque poems) that ‘they did not value the money three skips of a louse’. No detail of Pitt’s conduct was exempt from criticism, even his failure to send his letter to the prince of December in a formal black box. To Pitt’s contention that the House could not with propriety meet on January (the annual fast day in commemoration of the execution of Charles I) Burke replied that no day was fitter to determine ‘to annihilate the ⁶⁵ PH xxvii. –.
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constitution, and to change the form of our government’.⁶⁶ This heterogeneous material inspired Thomas Rowlandson to produce a caricature (Plate ) showing Burke submissively approaching the prince with the gift of King Charles’s head (representing that of George III), in an appropriate black box. Though hostile to Burke, the print is also an involuntary tribute to the force of his rhetorical imagery. Few speakers were sufficiently memorable to inspire such visual satire. On February, Pitt introduced his Regency Bill, which received its second reading on the th. Without Burke, the debate would have been a formality. His was the only speech, described by James Bland Burges as ‘an hour’s scurrility and madness’. Burke’s main charges were that the bill gave the prince responsibility without powers, and that patronage reserved to the queen would in fact be exercised by Pitt. Accusing the ministers of conduct ‘verging on treason, for which the justice of their country would he trust, one day overtake them, and bring them to trial’, Burke was called to order. In his most supercilious manner, Pitt affectedly welcomed Burke’s ‘peculiarly violent tone of warmth and of passion’ as making any reply unnecessary. No one came to Burke’s defence, but he was unabashed and continued in the same vein.⁶⁷ On the th, when the clauseby-clause consideration of the bill began, Burke was said to have ‘screeched half a dozen speeches and seemed stunned almost to madness at their clamorous inattention’. But on this occasion, Pitt too was ‘inflamed . . . to the highest degree’ and the whole debate presented ‘a scene of disorder’ in which ‘the great points of the question’ were completely submerged by rancorous personalities.⁶⁸ On February, during the debate on the clause giving the queen control of the king’s household, Burke made his most notoriously indecorous remark, using a phrase which would repeatedly be quoted against him: did they recollect that they were talking of a sick King, of a Monarch smitten by the hand of Omnipotence, and that the Almighty had hurled him from his throne, and plunged him into a condition which drew down upon him the pity of the meanest peasant in his kingdom—
Despite being called to order, he refused to recant.⁶⁹ ⁶⁶ PH xxvii. –. Robert Gore-Booth, Chancellor Thurlow (London, ), –. ⁶⁷ PH xxvii. –. Bland Burges to his wife, Feb. (Bodl. Bland Burges deposit, box , fo. ). The Regency Bill is printed in PH xxvii. –. ⁶⁸ PH xxvii. –. Henry Flood to Laurence Parsons, Feb. ( James Kelly, Henry Flood: Patriots and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Notre Dame, Ind., ), ). ⁶⁹ PH xxvii. –. E.B. had spoken on each of the previous clauses (, , –). The phrase (recalled from Paradise Lost), which became notorious, had been in E.B.’s mind for some time. On Dec. , he said, of a monarch such as James II, that the people ‘may hurl such a king from the throne’ (PH xxvii. ). William Mason thought ‘that hurling from the throne is surely what can never be got over’ (to Lord Harcourt, Mar. , in Harcourt Papers, ed. Edward William Harcourt (Oxford, [–]), vii. –). Two years later, Mason was still harping on the theme (to Lord Harcourt, Mar. , Aug. ; Harcourt Papers, vii. , ). When the mad John Frith threw a stone at the king’s coach as the king was going to open Parliament ( Jan. ), The Times likened the stone to ‘the speech
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Burke was equally offensive on February, in the debate on the mechanism by which the king’s recovery would be ascertained. Suspecting that Pitt would use a temporary recovery to induce the king to consent to a regency on such terms as Pitt prescribed, thereby permanently excluding the Whigs from office, Burke recurred to the example of Charles VI of France, whose repeated recoveries and relapses had led to decades of political turmoil and national weakness. This was a covert argument for not letting the king resume his authority too easily. The most revealing part of Burke’s speech, however, describes his personal researches into insanity. He claimed not only to have ‘turned over every book upon it’ but to have ‘visited the dreadful mansions, where those unfortunate beings were confined’. He expatiated on stories of relapses: some of these unfortunate individuals after a supposed recovery, had committed parricides, others had butchered their sons, others had done violence to themselves by hanging, shooting, drowning, throwing themselves out of window, and by a variety of other ways.⁷⁰
These visits to London madhouses had already been the subject of paragraphs in the newspapers, most insinuating that Burke himself was as mad as any of those confined.⁷¹ Indeed, Burke had occasionally been represented as ‘actually mad’ since about .⁷² Now, as early as December , George Selwyn (–, MP and wit) had exclaimed at the incongruity of ‘Burk walking at large’, while the king was confined ‘in a strait waistcoat’. Burke’s ill-judged excursions into the underworld of insanity, combined with the intemperate violence of his speeches in the Commons, gave the idea some plausibility. Newspaper squibs on the subject continued to appear for several months.⁷³ Burke’s speech of February was his last on the subject. Even as these debates were growing more ill-tempered, the king’s health was gradually improving. By February, there were encouraging signs of recovery. On the th, Pitt’s bill was given a third reading and sent to the Lords; before they that was hurled against his throne. Both were the acts of maniacs, and Bedlam ought to be the reward of each’ ( Jan.). In Isaac Cruikshank’s caricature Frith the Madman Hurling Treason at the King ( Jan. : BMC ), ‘Frith’ is recognizably E.B. (Plate ). ⁷⁰ PH xxvii. –. ⁷¹ The Times, , Jan. ; The World, , Jan.; Public Advertiser, , , Feb. . [Ralph Broome], Letters of Simkin the Second (London, ), – (Letter , Mar. ). Christopher Reid, ‘Burke, the Regency Crisis, and the “Antagonist World of Madness” ’, Eighteenth-Century Life, (), –, esp. –. ⁷² Horace Walpole, Last Journals, ed. A. Francis Steuart (London, ), ii. ( July ). James Boswell, Journal, May (Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, –, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London, ), ). Richard Atkinson to John Robinson, July , in HMC (Abergavenny), . ⁷³ George Selwyn to Lady Carlisle, [ Dec. ?] (HMC (Carlisle), ). The World, , , , , , , Feb., , Aug., , , Sept., Oct. .
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could pass it, the king had recovered sufficiently for it to be shelved. On the th, the Lords’ consideration of the Regency Bill was suspended; on the rd, the king wrote his first letter to Pitt since November. The crisis was over, save for an Irish epilogue. In Dublin, Henry Grattan, eager to maintain Irish legislative independence, had persuaded the Irish Parliament not to wait on events in London, but to ask the Prince of Wales to assume an unrestricted regency. When the Lord-Lieutenant refused to transmit the address, Parliament appointed commissioners to take it personally to London. They arrived on February, their mission rendered redundant by the king’s recovery.⁷⁴ The opposition, however, welcomed them, and Burke helped to write the prince’s formal replies.⁷⁵ Burke, indeed, remained sceptical of the supposed recovery, convinced instead that the king’s mind remained ‘subdued and broken; perfectly under the command of others’ and ‘certainly incapable of Business’ (to Thomas Burgh, Feb. : C v. ). As late as April, he was still repeating his belief in the king’s ‘total incapacity for Business’ (to Lord Charlemont: ). The king’s restoration to health generated extraordinary demonstrations of patriotic feeling, fuelling the transformation of his image from the ‘royal dupe’ of the s to the ‘perfect Englishman’ of the s.⁷⁶ In the celebrations that marked the event, the opposition was compelled to participate, with as good a grace as they could assume. The greatest gainer was Pitt, whose ascendancy was confirmed. Fox and the opposition were left in worse disrepute than after the election of . Within the Whig party itself, unity and mutual trust had been irretrievably shattered. However they might outwardly co-operate, Fox and Sheridan were now plainly rivals as rancorous against each other as against Pitt.⁷⁷ Burke suffered a precipitate fall in public esteem. The violence and extremism of his language isolated him from his friends as well as incurring the derision of his enemies, while his investigation of madhouses appeared grotesquely indecorous and exposed him to cruel misrepresentation. In a pamphlet purporting to describe the funeral of ‘Mrs Regency’, Burke appears in the procession, in ‘sackcloth and ashes, carrying a straight waistcoat in one hand, and the figure of Mad Tom in the other’, chanting a lament from Psalm : ‘I am feeble and sore broken; and I have roared, by reason of the disquietness of my mind’.⁷⁸ ‘Never throughout his
⁷⁴ R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution (Oxford, ), –. Nicholas Robinson, ‘Caricature and the Regency Crisis: An Irish Perspective’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, (), –. ⁷⁵ E.B. to Sheridan, post Feb. (C v. –). The letter is printed in Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, ed. A. Aspinall (London, –), i. –. ⁷⁶ Vincent Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens, Ga., ), –. ⁷⁷ Derry, Regency Crisis, –; Mitchell, Charles James Fox, –. ⁷⁸ The Death, Dissection, Will, and Funeral Procession of Mrs Regency [etc.] (London, ), .
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splendid parliamentary career’, Nathaniel Wraxall would recall of , ‘had he sunk so low in popular estimation.’⁷⁹ Burke’s standing among his associates was scarcely higher. Even on the subject of India, on which he was the party’s acknowledged expert, his intemperance and lack of judgement were felt to disqualify him for the position he would have found most gratifying, President of the Board of Control.⁸⁰ During the crisis, he received repeated rebuffs from the party leaders. Their disregard of his opinions emerges from the history of some of the documents that were prepared on behalf of the party. The first was a formal protest, intended to be entered in the Journals of the House of Lords after the debate on December. Burke was a veteran at such compositions, having written many for Rockingham in the s.⁸¹ On this occasion, the writing was first entrusted to French Laurence. His draft being ‘objectionable on some points’, Burke was asked to prepare another. Burke’s effort in turn was rejected.⁸² On December, when Pitt communicated to the Prince of Wales the restrictions he proposed to embody in his Regency Bill, Burke was commissioned to prepare a suitable reply. The prince, in confidence, showed the draft to Sheridan, who suggested certain amendments. At a party meeting called to discuss the letter, while the outline of Burke’s draft was preserved, its cantankerous tone was much mollified by adopting Sheridan’s alterations.⁸³ In March, when the king invited the prince and his younger brother, the Duke of York (–), to a concert to celebrate his royal recovery, the message hinted offensively that ‘it is given to those who have supported us through the late business, and therefore you may possibly not choose to be present’. The princes were annoyed, and proposed responding with ‘strong letters or papers of remonstrance and justification’. Burke, always eager to prove himself ‘perfectly in the right’ (C i. ), encouraged them to do likewise. Portland and Elliot advised conciliation, and their wisdom prevailed.⁸⁴ On May, the king wrote a letter to Prince William, his third son (–; later William IV), in which he complained of ‘the unkindness I met with during my illness from the ill advised conduct of my sons’.⁸⁵ Burke again urged self-justification. The princes decided to prepare a ⁷⁹ Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London, ), v. . ‘Albion’, Four Pleasant Epistles, Written for the Gratification of Four Unpleasant Characters (London, ); E.B. is ridiculed as ‘Second Childhood’ (–). ⁸⁰ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Jan. (NLS MS , fo. ). Fox to Portland, [ Jan.] (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ⁸¹ William C. Lowe, ‘The House of Lords, Party, and Public Opinion: Opposition Use of the Protest, –’, Albion, (), –. ⁸² Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Dec. (Life and Letters, i. –). ⁸³ Statement dictated by George IV to John Wilson Croker, Nov. (Croker Papers, ed. Louis J. Jennings (London, ), i. ). E.B.’s drafts and the final version are printed in Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, i. –. ⁸⁴ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Mar. (Life and Letters, i. –). The message was verbal, and its substance written down by the Duke of York. The emphasis may be either the duke’s or Elliot’s. ⁸⁵ Letters of King George III, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London, ), .
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memorial, but to entrust its composition not to the bellicose Burke but to the more conciliatory Elliot. Then, at a meeting called to discuss his draft, the party leaders decided not to submit any justification at all.⁸⁶ Burke, convinced that such a memorial was an opportunity of ‘turning the Tables effectually on their adversaries’, bitterly resented this decision (to Lord Charlemont, July : vi. ). A common thread connects all these episodes: aggressive hyperactivity on Burke’s side, caution and lethargy on the part of his associates. The pattern is reminiscent of the s, when Burke had similarly urged pièces justificatives on a reluctant Rockingham.⁸⁷ Burke had lost none of his determination to requite defeat by an appeal to posterity. While public attention was riveted on the Regency Crisis, few spared much thought for the trial of Warren Hastings. Burke, of course, was an exception. In a draft for a speech on the Regency, to emphasize the dangers of making the Crown in any degree elective, he imagined the nightmare of a Hastingslike figure usurping the monarchy: The great policy of the Law has ever been to keep elections out of it [the succession]. It would be its last its incurable corruption—an election to the Crown would be the worst—if we may think we are more virtuous than the Diet of Poland, but if it be venal twice an Age—why it should not be venal with us—if so a Nabob from India, one day the Object of your impeachment, may be the next an Object of succession to your Crown.⁸⁸
Such fantasies can only have fuelled suspicions that Burke had wholly lost touch with reality. Hastings himself was unsure how the expected accession to power of the opposition would affect his trial. Sir Gilbert Elliot imagined that both he and Impey were ‘quaking’.⁸⁹Yet James Bland Burges expected that the trial would ⁸⁶ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, , , , , and June (Life and Letters, i. , , –, –). According to the memoir dictated by George IV in , E.B. wrote this paper (Croker Papers, i. –). This account is so plausible and circumstantial that it has been generally accepted (e.g., by Mitchell, Charles James Fox, –). Elliot’s testimony, however, is contemporary and unequivocal. George IV probably confused the meeting at which Elliot’s paper was discussed with others at which drafts by E.B. were considered. The memorial is printed, together with a long letter intended to accompany it, both attributed to Elliot, in Lord John Russell, Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox (London, –), ii. –. ⁸⁷ In , E.B. composed an elaborate ‘Address to the King’ (WS iii. –), which was never presented. In (no longer restrained by Rockingham), nothing could prevent his moving a mammoth Representation to his Majesty in the Commons and subsequently publishing it as a pamphlet ( June : PH xxiv. –). ⁸⁸ WWM BkP /, fo. . The Polish monarchy was elective; its being ‘venal twice an age’ alludes to Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst (), lines –. ⁸⁹ Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Nov. (NLS MS , fo. ).
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be postponed to the following session, as a preliminary to its abandonment.⁹⁰ As he may have known, some of the managers were heartily weary of the business. In November , Sheridan reportedly avowed that he wished that ‘Hastings would run away and Burke after him’.⁹¹ Neither event was in the least likely. Yet even among Burke’s friends, the endless prospect was disheartening. Windham, receiving a letter from Burke that he suspected to be a summons to London to take up the burden, confessed that the sight of Burke’s handwriting filled him with misgiving and even ‘terrors’. He was, however, prepared, albeit reluctantly, to obey the summons ( Apr. : C v. ). Sheridan, whom Burke had asked to help open the next charge, was politely evasive ( Mar.: ). Meetings of the managers began as early as February, the day the Regency Bill received its second reading. Thirteen were held before the trial reopened on April, most being attended by no more than five or six of the twenty managers, barely enough to make a quorum (five). Burke, of course, was the most regular, missing only one meeting. The burden was shared by Long (twelve meetings), Anstruther (eleven), Grey (nine), and Maitland (nine). Nine managers attended between one and six meetings, and six (including Fox and Sheridan) absented themselves entirely.⁹² Interest and enthusiasm, even among the managers, had sunk dangerously low. Even Burke had every reason to be discouraged. His relations with Fox and Sheridan, and theirs with each other, had been severely strained during the Regency Crisis. The opposition as a whole was dispirited and demoralized, and stood much lower in the public esteem than it had a year earlier. The trial itself had lost its novelty. Since the most sensational of the charges had already been presented, public interest was likely to wane further as rhetoric gave way to the tedious and painstaking submission of evidence. The Presents charge itself, the next to be brought forward, as Sheridan had admitted when he introduced it to the Commons on April , was ‘colder and drier’ than Benares or the Begums.⁹³ The formal speeches, certainly, are of less interest than those delivered in . In compensation, however, the session of raised questions about the admissibility of evidence that were debated with a pertinacity that often made absorbing courtroom theatre, and that remain of considerable legal interest. First, however, Burke opened the charge with another gargantuan oration. Over four days, between April and May, he spoke for about fourteen hours, even longer than his eleven-hour general opening in .⁹⁴ The second ⁹⁰ James Bland Burges to his wife, Jan. (Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fo. ). ⁹¹ Duchess of Devonshire, Diary, Nov. , in Sichel, Sheridan, ii. . ⁹² Figures compiled from the Managers’ Minutes (BL Add. MS ). ⁹³ PH xxvi. . ⁹⁴ As printed (Bond, ii. –), E.B.’s speech runs to about , words, which at , words per hour would have taken over thirteen hours. Contemporary timings (which are discrepant) suggest a length between fourteen and sixteen hours.
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speech is less rewarding to read than the first. The subject matter itself is more restricted, offering little opportunity for historical excursus or appeals to general principles, and Burke treated it without much rhetorical embellishment. On the other hand, considered as an example of forensic rhetoric, the Presents speech is undoubtedly superior, since it adheres far more closely to the case to be argued. With little direct proof at his disposal, Burke skilfully constructed a chain of circumstantial evidence. Burke began his speech on April, the thirty-sixth day of the trial. His purpose was to convict Hastings, not merely of occasional, isolated acts, but of ‘a general, systematic, plan of corruption for advancing his fortune at the expense of his integrity’.⁹⁵ After a brief history of the various attempts made by the company to suppress the abuse of their servants accepting ‘presents’ from Indians, Burke turned to the bribe which he would expend most effort to prove, that from Munni Begum. In , in obedience to orders from London, Hastings had deprived Muhammad Reza Khan of his office of naib (which made him effective head of the government of Bengal), and begun an enquiry into his administration. In the reorganization of the nawab’s household which followed, Hastings appointed Munni Begum as the young nawab’s guardian. Burke charged that this appointment was extremely improper and unsuitable, given that (though a wife of the previous nawab) she was a former dancing-girl. Only corruption could account for her appointment to such an office, and Burke claimed that she had paid . lakhs of rupees for it. In , when the new members of council arrived in Bengal and began enquiring into abuses and corruption, Maharaja Nandakumar came forward to charge that Hastings had been bribed to appoint Munni Begum. Nandakumar was an old enemy of Hastings, though Hastings had recently employed him to gather evidence against Muhammad Reza Khan. Nandakumar wrote a letter to the Supreme Council, which Francis delivered on March . On the th, Nandakumar appeared at the board to substantiate his allegations. Hastings, however, protested at the irregularity of such a proceeding, and declared the council dissolved. The hostile majority (Clavering, Monson, and Francis) continued the session, and took evidence from Nundakumar, including a letter allegedly written by Munni Begum, confirming the offer and receipt of a bribe. Many hours would be consumed in attempting, against strenuous opposition, to have this examination accepted as legal evidence. Anticipating that the defence would seek to discredit Nandakumar’s testimony, Burke alluded to the controversial circumstances in which he had been tried and executed for forgery. Boldly, if irresponsibly, he accused Hastings of having ‘murdered this man, by the hands of Sir Elijah Impey’.⁹⁶ This was a rash and provocative claim, for it was nowhere charged in the Articles of Impeachment (in any case, commoners ⁹⁵ Bond, ii. .
⁹⁶ Ibid. .
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could not be impeached for capital offences). After long debate, the Commons had rejected the charge of judicial murder as imputed to Impey himself. A fortiori, they had exculpated Hastings.⁹⁷ In the remainder of his speech, Burke sought to confirm Hastings’s guilt by showing that he had repeatedly evaded and frustrated all attempts to investigate the circumstances of Munni Begum’s bribe. Understandably outraged at being branded a murderer, Hastings determined to protest, and immediately prepared a petition for Major Scott to submit to the House of the Commons the next day. On April, however, when the trial was scheduled to resume, Burke was ill, and requested a postponement. Scott therefore gave notice of the petition, but deferred offering it until Burke should be present.⁹⁸ Burke, of course, was unabashed. On April, the thirty-seventh day of the trial, he continued the accumulation of circumstantial evidence suggesting Hastings’s consciousness of guilt: his failure to offer an explicit denial, or a proper explanation; his contumelious treatment of the directors and their orders; his attempts to smother all enquiries. Part of the ‘bribe’, indeed, Hastings had actually admitted receiving; but he claimed that this sum (. lakhs) was a customary allowance made to visiting governors for their ‘entertainment’. Burke demolished this defence. After reviewing Hastings’s relations with the court of the nawab, he concluded that only corruption could account for his extraordinary partiality in favouring Munni Begum, and in refusing to appoint a more suitable guardian.⁹⁹ On April, Major Scott presented Hastings’s petition. This complained not only of the accusation that Hastings had ‘murdered’ Nandakumar, but also of the extraneous matter, not charged in the articles, that Burke had introduced into his opening speech in . The petition provoked a debate that Bland Burges called ‘the most violent and acrimonious I ever witnessed’. The first question was whether it should be received. Fox animadverted severely on the petition, though without arguing directly for its rejection. Pitt, in the first of a series of subtly equivocal speeches on the subject, concurred with Fox in ruling out of court the part of the petition that related to the previous year. Such a complaint ought to have been preferred at the time. Yet he saw no reason not to consider the charge relating to Burke’s recent speech, arguing that, while the House was certainly bound to give the managers every reasonable support, that did not mean placing an implicit and unlimited confidence in their every action. A petition against the conduct of the trial could therefore be heard without impropriety. Burke was defiantly unapologetic, announcing in advance that no censure passed on him by the House would have any ‘deep effect’. The disgrace would instead rest on the ⁹⁷ May (PH xxvii. –). ⁹⁸ E.B. to unknown, [ Apr. ], C v. –. The Diary, or Woodfall’s Register, Apr. (Debrett, xxvi. –). ⁹⁹ Bond, ii. –.
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House that censured him. He defended the charge of murder, and even more clearly than Fox had done, he asserted that any censure passed on the managers would be tantamount to their dismissal. When the petition was ordered to ‘lie on the table’ (a formal preliminary to taking it into consideration), Burke spoke again, denouncing Scott as a ‘known libeller’, for which he was called to order. Substantive discussion of the petition was then fixed for April, and a message sent to the Lords asking for the next sitting of the trial to be postponed.¹⁰⁰ On April, Pitt announced that he had discovered a procedural irregularity that would delay the debate for a day: Burke had not been given formal notice. Burke was prepared to waive this requirement, but Pitt insisted on its necessity. After declaring that he would absent himself from the debate on the petition, Burke offered a substantive defence of his conduct.¹⁰¹ In lieu of attending the debate, he wrote a letter to Frederick Montagu, one of his fellow managers and a respected parliamentarian who had so far taken little part in the proceedings ( May : C v. –). This letter (brief, for a Burkean apologia) breathes a characteristic self-righteous defiance, mixed with a dash of insincere self-abasement. Declining ‘to enter into a laboured, litigious, artificial defence’, he refused to ‘commit myself in an unbecoming contention with the agents of a criminal whom it is my duty to bring to justice’ (–). This line of defence is uncomfortably reminiscent of Hastings’s behaviour when accused by Nandakumar, further evidence of the temperamental affinities between the two antagonists.¹⁰² Far from retreating from the charge of murder, Burke claimed to have ‘documents’ and ‘witnesses’ to prove everything he had alleged. Meanwhile, the House should ‘give me an entire credit for the veracity of every fact I affirm or deny’. If he, ‘the weakest of their Members’, had lost their confidence, they should discharge him from his trust. Until then, the committee must be ‘the sole judge’ of the propriety of its procedure (–). These were most extraordinary and unwarrantable claims. In the ensuing debate (on May), three points of view were voiced. Scott wanted an opportunity to vindicate Hastings against the extraneous matter in Burke’s speech, as well as against the murder charge. Fox treated the petition as an invitation to pass a vote of no confidence in the managers, and urged its rejection. The Marquis of Graham (–), speaking for Pitt, took a middle position. He dismissed the allegations relating to , but was prepared to debate the charge concerning Nandakumar. First, however, the same punctilious formality that had delayed the debate for a day now required evidence of the words Burke had spoken, though he had in fact not only ¹⁰⁰ CJ xliv. . PH xxvii. –. James Bland Burges to his wife, Apr. (Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fo. ). ¹⁰¹ The Diary, May (PH xxvii. –). ¹⁰² ‘I know what belongs to the dignity and character of the first Member of this Administration. I will not sit at this Board in the character of a criminal; nor do I acknowledge the Members of this Board to be my Judges’ ( Mar. , printed in Eleventh Report of the Select Committee (); Lambert, cxli. ).
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admitted but defended them. The rule in the Commons was that a member’s words ‘must immediately be taken notice of ’. Otherwise, they could not subsequently become the subject of complaint. To examine the shorthand writer ( Joseph Gurney) about what Burke had said some time since in the House of Lords might seem to authorize the same procedure for debates in the Commons. Prior to doing so, therefore, a committee was appointed to examine precedents.¹⁰³ On May, the committee duly reported that there were no exact precedents, but drew attention to a number of analogous cases. After the petition had been read again, George Sumner (–), one of Hastings’s two sureties, proposed to examine Gurney ‘touching the Allegations contained in the said Petition’. Henry Addington, speaking for Pitt, moved an amendment to restrict the examination to the charge concerning Nandakumar. Eager to present a united front, the managers now joined with Hastings’s supporters in insisting that the petition be considered in toto or not all. Even so, Addington’s amendment was carried by to . Gurney duly authenticated Burke’s words. Lord Graham, again acting for Pitt, then moved that the Commons had given ‘no direction or authority’ to the managers to charge Hastings with the condemnation or execution of Nandakumar. This was surely the mildest possible reprimand. So innocuous did it appear, that Fox professed himself happy with it, as he did not conceive that it would prevent the managers recurring to the subject in the future. Any motion of censure, he argued, would be virtually a motion of no confidence in the managers. More clearly than before, Fox appeared to be courting censure as a means of emancipation from what had become a burdensome and unprofitable task. In response, Pitt entered a caveat against any such notion. Lord Graham then moved an amendment to his motion, adding that the words complained of ‘ought not to have been spoken’. Now Fox in turn proposed a further amendment, justifying the relevance of Burke’s words by quoting from the original Article of Charge and from Hastings’s defence. The temperature of the debate rose sharply, as Fox accused Graham and his seconder, Colonel Henry Phipps (–), of ‘duplicity’ and ‘scandalous and indecent’ conduct. In reply, Phipps virtually challenged Fox to a duel, and the atmosphere became so stormy that Pitt moved to clear the gallery of strangers. Having hitherto kept in the background, Pitt now intervened decisively, rejecting Fox’s implied claim that ‘the House could not restrict the managers without dismissing them’. The impeachment was ‘the impeachment of the Commons, and not of the managers only’. So long as they prosecuted the case which the Commons had approved, ‘the protection of the Commons was absolutely due to them’; but the House could not be expected to give ‘a blindfold implicit ¹⁰³ The Diary, May (PH xxvii. –). CJ xliv. –. John Hatsell, Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons (London, ), ii. .
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confidence’ such as Fox appeared to demand. In reply, Fox again hinted that he would resign if the vote of censure on Burke were passed. Even so, his own amendment was negatived without a division, and Lord Graham’s amended motion was then carried by to . Leaving the house, Fox was heard to say, ‘After this it is impossible I think to go on.’¹⁰⁴ Bland Burges regarded this motion as ‘a decisive and cutting resolution, containing the strongest Disavowal & Censure on Mr Burke & his Brother Managers’. He thought that Pitt had ‘entered nobly into the business’, and expected that Fox would make good his threat to resign.¹⁰⁵ Yet had Pitt really been as favourably disposed to Hastings as Burges imagined, he could easily have supported a stronger motion. Instead, he pointedly referred to Hastings as ‘a public delinquent’ whom he was zealous to prosecute.¹⁰⁶ That Burke’s eleven words ‘ought not to have been spoken’ was hardly ‘the strongest Disavowal & Censure’. Hastings himself believed that Pitt protected Burke on the ‘murder’ charge in order to prolong the impeachment.¹⁰⁷ Subsequent episodes suggest that this was more than paranoia on the part of Hastings.¹⁰⁸ Even if Pitt originally voted for the impeachment on the merits of the case (as his friends contended), by he had come to appreciate its utility as a tactical weapon to divert and divide the opposition. On May, the managers met preparatory to resuming the trial. The fullest account of what happened comes from a letter of explanation which Burke subsequently wrote to Fox ( May: C v. –). Fox was absent, but Burke learned from two or three colleagues who had spoken with him that Fox wanted to move for an adjournment, presumably as a preliminary to resigning.¹⁰⁹ Burke complained, reasonably enough, that Fox had told him nothing of the kind, and claimed that ‘the stream of the Committee ran strongly for our proceeding without delay’ (). This is open to doubt. Burke did not welcome criticism or dissent, and in Fox’s absence few members would have ventured to oppose what Burke so plainly wanted.¹¹⁰ Fox’s tardiness deprived him of his best opportunity to rid himself, without open dereliction, of the incubus of the impeachment. Burke would not have conceded, even to Fox, without a fight. But several of the managers were personal friends of Fox, and others would secretly have welcomed a plausible occasion to resign on ¹⁰⁴ CJ xliv. –. PH xxvii. –. John Freeman Mitford to Lady Kenyon, [ May ] (Preston, Lancashire Record Office, Kenyon Papers, Correspondence, box ). ¹⁰⁵ Bland Burges to his wife, [ May] (Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fo. ). ¹⁰⁶ May (PH xxvii. ). ¹⁰⁷ Draft for a pamphlet or newspaper article (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹⁰⁸ G. M. Ditchfield, ‘The House of Lords and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings’, Parliamentary History, (), –, esp. –. ¹⁰⁹ Burges told Hastings that the managers meant to resign (Hastings’s Diary, May ; BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹¹⁰ Unusually, the minutes of the managers’ meeting on May do not include a list of those who attended (BL Add. MS , fo. ).
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principle. A vote taken in the presence of Fox would most likely have left Burke in a minority, and an acrimonious debate might have precipitated a rupture between the two, two years earlier than their famous quarrel of . On such chances can history sometimes depend. In the absence of Fox, Burke’s ascendancy was complete, and on May he and his colleagues therefore trooped into Westminster Hall for the thirtyeighth day of the trial. Believing that unmerited censure was indirect praise, Burke was proud of the reprimand from the Commons. When he resumed his speech, his manner was defiant rather than chastened. Exulting in being ‘disavowed’ yet continued in his office, he read the resolution of the Commons that his words ‘ought not to have been spoken’. He then began what he called an ‘apology’ but which was patently a self-justification. The charge of murder, he maintained, was relevant to support the charge of peculation; and he used the word ‘murder’, in its ‘moral and popular’ rather than ‘legal and technical’ sense, only because he could think of no stronger word to express ‘the complicated atrocity of that act’. Nor had he adopted the word lightly or rashly, but after ‘nine years meditation’. The Commons, with their superior sagacity, had taken only a week to ‘discover the errors of my labours for nine years’.¹¹¹ Burke refused to acknowledge that the debates in the Commons had not concerned only the substance of the charge of murder, but the propriety of its introduction, without being specifically charged, as an aggravation of another charge. Impenetrably clothed in a self-righteousness that nothing could pierce, Burke treasured ‘the day I appeared at the bar of the House of Lords with the censure of the Commons in my hand’ as ‘the most brilliant day of my life, and that which I would most wish to live over again’.¹¹² Burke’s ‘apology’ took about half an hour. The remainder of the day’s speech (which lasted just under four hours in all) was devoted to a series of ‘presents’ which Hastings was alleged to have received between and .¹¹³ These were therefore covered by the clause in North’s India Act of , which had given legislative force to the company’s own earlier prohibitions. At the same time, the Act could be interpreted to permit a company servant to receive a ‘present’ on the company’s behalf. The difficulty of the prosecution case was that most of the evidence about these later ‘presents’ came from Hastings himself. He admitted the receipt, but claimed in each case to have applied the money to the company’s service. Burke’s strategy was to argue that Hastings had only acknowledged such presents as he could not hope to conceal, and to infer a general habit of corrupt present taking. The most persuasive evidence came from the culpably lax and cavalier way in ¹¹¹ Bond, ii. –. ¹¹² In conversation with John Wilkes and Sir Joshua Reynolds, c.; recorded in James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (nd edn. London, ), ii. –. ¹¹³ Bond, ii. –.
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which Hastings had accounted for the ‘presents’ he received. One of the murkiest transactions was a ‘loan’ or ‘present’ of lakhs of rupees which he received in from Maharaja Nabakrishna (d. ; ‘Nobkissen’). Hastings used the money to reimburse himself for certain expenses he claimed to have incurred on the company’s behalf.¹¹⁴ Such transactions, questionable in themselves, were rendered more so by the evasive and equivocal ways in which Hastings explained them. One passage quoted by Burke illustrates the tone in which Hastings answered the directors to whom he was nominally responsible: Why these sums were taken by me, why they were, except the second, quietly transferred to the Company’s use; why bonds were taken for the first and not for the rest, might, were this matter to be exposed to the view of the public, furnish a variety of conjectures to which it would be of little use to reply. Were the honourable court to question me upon these points, I would answer that the sums were taken for the Company’s benefit, at times in which the Company very much needed them; that I either chose to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design, which my memory could at this distance of time verify, and that I did not think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. I trust, honourable Sirs, to your breasts for a candid interpretation of my actions, and assume the freedom to add that I think myself on such a subject, on such an occasion, entitled to it.¹¹⁵
Much of Burke’s speech takes the form of commentary on such passages. Sporting with Hastings’s vagueness and inconsistencies, Burke claimed that such prevarication argued guilt. The most amusing example of Burke’s method is his dissection of a letter from Hastings to the directors, written on July . Hastings sought to achieve an effect of pained, injured innocence, for which he affected a style of studied elaboration. Directing his wit at the opacity of Hastings’s style, Burke selected for analysis a single sentence: ‘Neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in the report of them, and such inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability follow them.’ This, Burke claimed, was a perfect specimen of the rhetorical figure called in Persian a painche (literally a screw), which he defined as ‘a puzzled and a studied involution in a period, in order to prevent the discovery of truth, and to frustrate the detection of any frauds’.¹¹⁶ Then ¹¹⁴ P. J. Marshall, ‘Nobkissen versus Hastings’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, (), –. Much of the evidence about this ‘loan’ became available only after the trial. ¹¹⁵ Bond, ii. –. The complete letter (Hastings to the directors, May ) was read in evidence on Feb. (Minutes, ). ¹¹⁶ Bond, ii. . E. B.’s ‘painche’ is probably a corruption of Persian pech, which can mean ‘twisted, folded . . . coiled, crooked, complicated, intricate . . . a screw; a vortex . . . perplexity; deceit’; F. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian–English Dictionary (London, ), (private communication from Professor M. E. Subtelny). Persian, the official language of the Mogul Empire, remained the language of the East India Company’s administration.
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he paraphrased the letter, amusingly translating it from Hastingsese into plain English. Burke himself was a master of rhetorical convolution, which he often used in passages of mock-deference or feigned humility.¹¹⁷ He was therefore well equipped to expose its use by others. On May, the thirty-ninth day of the trial, Burke concluded his opening speech. This time his material was chiefly the confused and inconsistent accounts of the various money transactions which the prosecution charged as bribes. These need not be followed in detail. Since the records show, Burke argued, irregular receipts from three of the sixty-eight revenue districts, the presumption is that similar sums were extracted from the remaining sixtyfive, but were successfully concealed. In his peroration, Burke touched on one of his favourite themes: the fear that the money extracted from India in bribes would be used to corrupt British political life.¹¹⁸ Burke spoke for no more than two and a half hours. The remainder of the sitting was occupied by a brief procedural debate and the production of documentary evidence.¹¹⁹ The presentation of evidence, chiefly collateral and circumstantial, continued on May, the fortieth day of the trial. What Hastings called ‘a dull reading of indiff[eren]t Papers’ lasted from noon to five o’clock, enlivened only by an altercation between Burke and Law. As Burke was the most pugnacious of the managers, so Law was the most aggressive of the counsel. Disputes about evidence accordingly often degenerated into personal clashes between the two. On this occasion, Thurlow had ruled that no evidence was admissible that tended to prove only ‘general criminality or disposition to criminality’. This principle struck at the heart of Burke’s case. When Law first objected to some of the prosecution’s evidence on this ground, and then withdrew his objection, Burke ungraciously used this retreat to accuse him of being ‘too full of zeal for a Client in a desperate cause’.¹²⁰ On May, the forty-first day of the trial, began the lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful struggle to adduce as evidence the examination of Nandakumar before the majority of the Supreme Council. The consultation of March was read, down to the point where Hastings dissolved the meeting and left. Law voiced five strong objections to hearing Nandakumar’s evidence. It was neither given on oath, nor in the presence of the party accused. The council, without Hastings, was not competent to institute a legal enquiry. Even had it been so, its evidence could not be admitted in another jurisdiction and for a different purpose. Finally, Nandakumar was not a competent witness, having already committed the act of forgery of which he was later convicted (the crime not the conviction conferring infamy). These were ¹¹⁷ E.B. to Samuel Parr, June , full of double negatives and qualifications, exemplifies E.B.’s style at its most convoluted (C v. –). ¹¹⁸ Bond, ii. –. ¹¹⁹ London, Library of Lincoln’s Inn, Warren Hastings MSS, vol. , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹²⁰ BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotation from Thurlow, –; from E.B., –). Minutes, –.
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formidable objections, and in response Fox shifted the ground to arguing the relevance of Hastings’s reaction to being accused. Burke claimed that, on March , Hastings had virtually authenticated the examination of Nandakumar by referring the proceedings of the majority to the directors. Was there ever ‘so audacious an attempt’, he exclaimed, ‘made by a man to endeavor to set aside the proof of a certain number of facts and documents which he under his own hand has admitted?’ Law, taking ‘audacious’ to himself, asked Burke to use ‘more correct language’. This led to a discussion of courtroom decorum, in which Thurlow supported Law. Burke repudiated the notion that ‘delicacy’ was appropriate to the prosecution of ‘great crimes supported by great power’, and in the remainder of his speech repeatedly used the words ‘audacious’ and ‘audacity’ as a kind of refrain to emphasize his dissent from Thurlow’s opinion. The argument was continued by Fox, Grey, and Sheridan, until the Lords adjourned to consider the question, which they then referred to the judges.¹²¹ The trial resumed on May, the forty-second day, with Thurlow’s announcement that the examination of Nandakumar was inadmissible. Burke and Fox now tried to circumvent this ruling by arguing that, since the examination had been read at the council on March, Hastings had been ‘officially and regularly informed’ of the charge. The Lords withdrew to consider this argument, but rejected it almost at once and returned to Westminster Hall. When Thurlow reported the decision, Burke replied with a long, mockdeferential speech in which he professed not to understand exactly what the decision meant. Fox did the same. This would happen repeatedly, for the Lords’ decision was invariably to admit or reject the evidence, unsupported by any rationale or explanation. On this occasion, however, Thurlow did offer some help, saying that since Nandakumar’s examination contained ‘criminal imputation’ against Hastings, it could be admitted only if Hastings did or said something in relation to it, from which his guilt might be inferred. Hearing it read was not such an act. Fox argued that guilt might be inferred from Hastings’s demeanour. Burke made the same argument at greater length. If such evidence were rejected, he insisted, no governor could ever be convicted, for no better evidence could be expected. He then entered one of his many pleas that no ‘technical rule’ should prevail over ‘the rules of eternal and substantial justice’. Fox, too, claimed that impeachments ought not to be bound by rules of evidence to the detriment of ‘the rules of substantial justice’. Law naturally protested against this doctrine. Finally, the Lords withdrew to consider the managers’ contention that Hastings’s behaviour on ¹²¹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. E.B.’s repudiation of ‘delicacy’ recalls the debates of Dec. on the exclusion of Francis (PH xxvi. ), and Feb. on the Regency Bill (PH xxvii. ). Minutes, –. The rejected evidence is printed in appendices to the Eleventh Report of the Select Committee (Lambert, cxli). Nandakumar’s charges and examination are in appendix I, –.
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the reading of the charge formed a ‘presumption of guilt’, and that the charge ought therefore to be read.¹²² On May, the forty-third day of the trial, Thurlow declared that the consultation of March ‘cannot now be read’. Burke pounced on the word ‘now’ as leaving the door open to further argument. The managers therefore contended that Hastings’s refusal to allow the examination of his banian (Krishna Kanta Nandy, c.–; known as ‘Cantoo Baboo’) formed a presumption of guilt. Conceding the novelty of the ground, Thurlow asked whether they intended to propose any others. Fox refused to be drawn. Since no reasons were given for decisions, they needed at least to know to which argument a decision referred, which would not be the case if they submitted several at once. After much further skirmishing, during which Burke again argued that different rules should apply to cases from India, since no Hindu could come to England without losing caste, the Lords adjourned.¹²³ Burke anticipated that the Lords’ decision would be unfavourable. Accordingly, when the forty-fourth day of the trial ( May) began with the expected fourth rejection of the examination of Nandakumar, he was ready with a lengthy prepared speech which is one of the fullest statements of his views about the admissibility of evidence. The speech is in his parliamentary manner, with little concession to the judicial occasion. In ridicule of the wilful blindness of the court, he told a comic anecdote of the imposition of a rule that accusations of ‘criminal gallantry’ against a priest needed thirty-two eyewitnesses, and seventy-two against a bishop. No further accusations were preferred. More seriously, Burke mounted an elaborate argument for the admissibility of a letter purporting to be from Munni Begum to Nandakumar (in which she mentioned having paid Hastings lakhs of rupees for the office of guardian to the nawab), distinct from the examination of Nandakumar, by whom it was submitted. With his habitual generalization, Burke traced all the rules of evidence to one great imperial rule—namely—that in all Cases in order that there shall not be a failure of justice that is the best evidence and always admissible evidence which is the best that the nature of the Case will bear—and which does not suppose that there is better evidence produceable in the hands of the person who offers to produce it.
Because the Hastings case was new, being concerned with a distant country whose ‘manners customs religious opinions civil and family habits’ are totally different from those of England, the English law must vary its procedural rules to accommodate these differences. Rejecting the imputation that English law is ‘narrow pure limited and mechanical’, Burke argued that English courts were not bound by any body of technical rules. Rather, each ¹²² BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹²³ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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court operated under its own set of rules. Thus his argument that the ‘High Court of Parliament’ was not bound by the rules of the lower courts did not make Parliament exceptional or anomalous. Each court was master of its own procedures. The Lords were therefore free to judge ‘by no laws but the eternal rules of Justice administered by men not professional men’. They should be governed by ‘the natural reason of men—the principles of honor—the Spirit of Cavaliers’, not merely by ‘the low principles of jurisprudence only’.¹²⁴ This contrast between the liberal mind and the narrow legalism of the profession is a familiar Burkean theme. Applying his principle to the present case, Burke argued that, because Munni Begum could not testify in person, her letter to Nandakumar should be admitted in evidence. The rules of evidence should submit to ‘the nature of things’. In India, as even Sir Elijah Impey had acknowledged, evidence could not be taken from women of rank according to the usual English mode. After the letter itself was rejected, Burke proposed to examine Francis as to Hastings’s demeanour when it was produced at the council. Law, however, successfully prevented Francis being asked about anything that was recorded in writing. Burke was thus unable to make any use of the letter. Much of the remainder of the sitting was taken up by further wrangles and mutual recriminations between Burke and Law.¹²⁵ Burke did not always take so marked a lead as he did on May. On the th, for example, the forty-fifth day of the trial, he spoke only a few words. The most remarkable feature of the sitting was one of the rare occasions when the Lords withdrew to consider a defence objection (which Law had pressed even against Thurlow’s evident discouragement), but returned with a decision favourable to the managers.¹²⁶ The prosecution’s next piece of evidence was a series of five accounts by Munni Begum, which included sums paid to Europeans, among them . lakhs to Hastings. These had been procured at Murshidabad (the nawab’s capital) by Charles Goring, sent thither by the majority on the Supreme Council to gather evidence against Hastings. The council duly transmitted this document to the directors in London. Since Hastings, in common with his adversaries, had signed the consultation in which it was minuted, he had in a sense acknowledged them. At the next sitting, the forty-sixth, on June, this argument, presented by Adam, was challenged by Law, who argued that it had merely been passively transmitted by Hastings, and so was not evidence against him. The Lords retired, but soon returned with a ruling against admissibility. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to resubmit the accounts, Burke moved on to another piece of evidence, a letter from Munni Begum to the Council, complaining of Goring’s treatment of her, and ¹²⁴ BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotations from –, ). The allusion to ‘Cavaliers’ anticipates the chivalric values invoked in the Reflections (R [–]). Munni Begum’s letter is printed in the Eleventh Report, appendix I, . ¹²⁵ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹²⁶ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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acknowledging the payment to Hastings of . lakhs. Their case was conducted principally by Burke, and the occasion provides one of the most striking instances of his pertinacity, or obstinacy. Two of his arguments illustrate his ingenuity in deploying reasoning both from ‘the eternal nature of things’ and from the particular cultural practices of India. This narrative, he claimed, was the best evidence available, while ‘all professional rules which are contrary to the eternal nature of things and the Boundaries and barriers providence has settled’ are false. In support, he cited Pitt’s India Act as showing the sense of the legislature on the propriety of relaxing the rules of evidence to accommodate the special circumstances of British rule in India. Not that the Act (which Burke, of course, had vigorously opposed) had, in itself, any authority: ‘the voice of truth and nature’ did not need the support of ‘any miserable stuff which we miserable mortals here make and call Law’. Rather, the Act acknowledged those ‘eternal Laws of nature’ which ‘cannot be altered by man’. Applying these eternal laws to the present case, Burke argued that, as women of condition in India cannot take an oath administered by a man, their sealed deposition should be received as equivalent to sworn testimony. In the case of Omichund v. Barker, Lord Hardwicke accepted testimony from Hindus, given according to their own modes, not that of the English law. By analogy, this showed the law’s willingness to ‘conform itself to the mode of Swearing and the Religion of the people’. None of these arguments made any impression on Thurlow, who remained adamant that every witness must be ‘duly Sworn’ and ‘examined under the Authority of the Court in which the witness deposes’. Pressed by Burke to declare that ‘there is no way by which a Womans evidence could in the Year be made competent to establish any charge of robbing her’, Thurlow refused to generalize, stolidly maintaining only that this particular letter ‘cannot be received in evidence’.¹²⁷ Burke’s resources were by no means yet exhausted. He therefore called Major Scott. Since Scott had actually submitted Munni Begum’s letter of complaint against Goring to the Select Committee on May (with a view to discrediting Goring), Burke hoped to prove that, since Scott was Hastings’s agent, this would be tantamount to an authentication of the document by Hastings himself. Scott, however, did not have his powers of agency with him, so this line of enquiry had to be deferred. Burke examined several other witnesses, without being able to prove that Hastings had known of the letter. He therefore turned to a new piece of evidence, the charge against Hastings made by Raja Guru Das (son of Nandakumar), which Charles Goring had also transmitted to the Supreme Council. This, in turn, was open ¹²⁷ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. In Omichund’s case, however, the evidence was collected in India by a commission appointed by the Court of Chancery, where the case was heard (Philip C. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke (Cambridge, ), ii. –). Munni Begum’s accounts are printed in the Eleventh Report, appendix E (–); her letter of complaint, in appendix G, No. (–).
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to the same objection as Law had already raised against the admission of Goring’s other evidence. Nearing exasperation, Burke derided a suggestion of Thurlow’s about the order in which evidence should be presented as ‘a preposterous mode of proceeding’. Lord Kenyon took exception to the phrase. Reprimand usually stung Burke into even more offensive behaviour, but on this occasion he was given a few minutes to cool. Lord Stanhope, normally hostile to the managers, spoke in Burke’s defence, justifying his expression as imputing nothing to the court. Burke did not, of course, withdraw the phrase or apologize. But his lengthy speech of self-exculpation was notably more conciliatory in manner than most of his self-defences, and he even attributed Kenyon’s outburst to an admirable ‘quick sensibility of honor’. Still convinced that the proposed mode was ‘preposterous’, in the literal sense, ‘according to the vulgar phrase where the Cart was put before the horse’, he would nevertheless adopt it. But confessing that the managers did not have the next piece of evidence to hand, he asked for an adjournment.¹²⁸ When the trial resumed the next day, June, the forty-seventh sitting, Major Scott produced his instructions. These, he claimed, were ‘to great and important political points’, not to such a ‘foolish thing’ as Munni Begum’s complaint. Law objected to Scott being asked what he ‘conceived’, and more generally to the managers in effect cross-examining their own witnesses. In reply, Burke contended that, as most of their witnesses were ‘taken out of the Enemies Camp’, this was necessarily the case. Burke and Law then traded insults, and when Law objected to being called ‘pert’, Burke retorted that Law had yesterday called their evidence ‘loose slander’. This ‘loose slander’, however, had been delivered to a committee of the House of Commons by Hastings’s own agent, though it suited him now to asperse it. Once again, Burke protested against the unduly restrictive rules of evidence. Their ‘papers and documents and verbal testimony’ were enough to convince ‘the common reason of mankind’, whether or not the Lords in their ‘judicial capacity’ would receive it. Law next brought up the Commons’ disavowal of Burke: ‘I may say by the authority of the House of Commons some things which have been asserted by that honourable Manager are slander.’ Burke protested that the counsel would not treat the managers with such contempt ‘if they were not encouraged to do it’. Certainly Thurlow was slow to intervene, and unduly protective of Law, who on this occasion was the more offensive. The storm subsided, however, and the debate returned to the admissibility of Grey’s question to Scott, which the Lords withdrew to consider. After more than an hour’s deliberation, they returned to announce its rejection. The remainder of the session was devoted to further examination of Scott, to secure the admission of Munni Begum’s narrative as transmitted ¹²⁸ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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by him, acting as Hastings’s agent, to the Select Committee. Finally the Lords adjourned to deliberate.¹²⁹ The forty-eighth sitting, on June, was short and unexciting. Thurlow reported the inadmissibility of Munni Begum’s complaint. Burke protested as usual, professing not to understand the decision and restating the grounds on which the managers thought it competent evidence. This, he observed, was Hastings’s third evasion of responsibility for evidence supplied by himself or his agents. In , he had repudiated Macleane’s resignation on his behalf. At the trial, he had already disavowed parts of the defence which he had actually read in person to the House of Commons. Now Scott, notoriously his agent, claimed to have acted without his authority. Burke presented the evidence which had not been ready on June, and this was followed by a new attempt to secure the admission of Munni Begum’s accounts. The Lords retired to consider the case, but did not return. The sitting had lasted about an hour.¹³⁰ Even shorter, indeed the shortest of the entire trial, was the sitting of June, the forty-ninth. After Thurlow had delivered the court’s decision against the managers, Lord Porchester (–), an opposition peer, asked leave to put two questions to the judges, saying that he wanted this done in open court, so that both parties could hear and object. Thurlow, however, insisted that they must adjourn to put such questions, and they did not return. The sitting in Westminster Hall lasted only four or five minutes. Back in the House of Lords, Porchester’s initiative led to a lengthy dispute about whether questions should be put to the judges in open court, and whether the judges should give reasons for their answers. This lasted until nearly six o’clock, when the subject was referred to a committee of the whole house. After a debate on June, this committee resolved that the proper course (questions put in the House of Lords, and answers given without supporting arguments) had been followed. Only three lords signed a protest against the decision.¹³¹ When the trial resumed on June, the fiftieth day, the managers continued their struggle to introduce Munni Begum’s accounts. This time they sought to do so indirectly, by reading the letter of June from Goring to the council, transmitting the accounts, which had already been printed in the Appendix to the Minutes of Evidence as part of a consultation admitted for another purpose. On this occasion, Fox took the lead. Burke’s weightiest contribution was a warning to the Lords, delivered as part of an explanation of ¹²⁹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹³⁰ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fo. ; History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), pt. , . ¹³¹ BL Add. MS , fo. . Add. MS , fo. ; Add. MS. , fo. . Minutes, . LJ xxxviii. –. St James’s Chronicle, – June .
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why the managers felt obliged to be so pertinacious in resubmitting evidence that had already been rejected: May that Almighty God in whose name we administer justice and struggle for it guide your minds to do what is right—Depend upon it that if a great criminal should escape justice through means not open to the Common understanding of mankind by an unknown technical rule as all men are liable to the tribunal of the Public the Public will judge—and if the Public hear no reason why you have rejected evidence the Public will judge that you have rejected evidence without reason.
This passage is one of the plainest confirmations that the seemingly interminable arguments about evidence were really intended to convince the public that Hastings was evading justice by exploiting legal technicalities. Responding to different arguments, the Lords withdrew three times. Twice they returned, but on the third occasion, after upholding the objection, they adjourned.¹³² On July, the fifty-first day, Thurlow announced, as expected, the rejection of the disputed evidence. After submitting some uncontentious documents, Burke then sought to refute Hastings’s contention that his reappointment of Munni Begum, far from being the result of a corrupt bargain, was at the behest of the nawab. Burke argued that the nawab was a mere phantom, whom Hastings used as a shield when it suited him, to conceal his corrupt practices. In support of this contention, he cited the opinion of the Supreme Court (delivered on July ), denying diplomatic immunity to the nawab’s vakeel, on the ground that the nawab was a mere pageant, not a sovereign prince. Law objected to this evidence. After lengthy arguments from both sides, the Lords withdrew to consider. They referred the question to the judges, and the trial was adjourned.¹³³ Exceptionally, the judges supported the managers, for whom the session of July, the fifty-second, thus opened with a favourable decision. Once the disputed paper had been read, Burke continued with historical evidence. Law raised a number of objections to its relevance, but did not press any of them. At one point, Burke enlivened the evidence with one of the incongruously ludicrous passages which sometimes disfigure his parliamentary speeches, charging Munni Begum with keeping ‘the most considerable Gin Shop in all Asia’. Her motive (he had heard) was to prove that though ‘the Mahometan Ladies were said to have no Souls . . . they kept up a great deal of Spirit’. Law humourlessly intervened to ask the date of Munni Begum’s licence to sell spirits, which proved to be , over two years after Hastings had left India. The sitting ended with another legal argument, about the propriety of calling Charles Goring to deny that he used force to extract Munni Begum’s ‘confession’ that Hastings had bribed her. Law objected (as he had on February ¹³² BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotation from ). Minutes, –. Goring’s letter is printed in the Eleventh Report, appendix E (), and in Minutes (appendix), . ¹³³ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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) that this would be to discredit the prosecution’s own evidence, since they had produced the letter which Goring was to contradict. Burke retorted that the nature of the case obliged the managers to controvert evidence originating from Hastings. The Lords retired to consider the argument.¹³⁴ On July, the fifty-third day of the trial and the last of the session, Thurlow announced that the managers could not ask Goring the question proposed. After Burke entered his usual protest against the decision, Law in turn protested against these protests as ‘perfectly unexampled in the history of this Tribunal’ and ‘extremely injurious’ to Hastings. If objection were made to every decision in his favour, the public opinion of the justice of the decisions would be much weakened. Thurlow replied icily that the question was for the Lords, not for public opinion, which ‘has nothing to do with that strict rule of impartial justice which both sides have a right to expect from the House’. Law’s complaint confirms that the defence strategy of objecting to evidence on technical grounds, or at least on grounds which often appeared so to non-lawyers, while largely successful in the court, was damaging Hastings in public opinion. Conversely, the managers’ persistence in resubmitting evidence was good public relations, however unpersuasive to the judges. Recognizing the improbability of a conviction, the prosecution wanted an acquittal that would appear to be technical rather than substantive. Anstruther then began to open his part of the Presents article. But as he began by stressing its complexity, Thurlow intervened to ask how long he was likely to take. When Anstruther confirmed that more than two or three days would be needed, Thurlow virtually determined to adjourn the court for the year. This prompted Hastings to rise, and to petition for a speedy determination, in the present session if possible. He even offered to waive his defence, if (as was rumoured) the managers intended to conclude with the Presents charge. The Lords, Thurlow assured him, would take his request into account. But when they reassembled in the House of Lords, they gave only token consideration to Hastings’s appeal, and (though Parliament would not be prorogued for another month) deferred the continuation of the trial to the first Tuesday of the following session.¹³⁵The idea that the Lords as a body was under Hastings’s malign influence was a chimera of Burke’s imagination. While Burke’s letters are seldom overtly confessional, judicious interpretation can often penetrate the rhetorical surface to uncover expressive material. For Burke often used his letters as an outlet for psychological pressures, ¹³⁴ BL Add. MS , fos. –; Add. MS , fos. – (for Feb. ). Minutes, –. ¹³⁵ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, . LJ xxxviii. –.
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though usually an oblique one. Nor is valuable autobiographical material confined to letters to his intimates. An example is a letter of March to Joseph Emin (–), the ethnic Armenian (born in Hamadan) whom Burke had befriended about . Burke and Emin had been out of touch for many years, probably since . After an adventurous career devoted to the cause of Armenian independence, in Emin returned to Calcutta, whence he wrote several times to Burke without receiving any reply.¹³⁶ Then, in March , just when the Regency Crisis had left him isolated and despondent, Burke unexpectedly wrote to Emin, though without having anything particular to say (C v. –). The letter mixes news of people Emin had known with reflections on the course of history since their first meeting. Of greatest interest is a passage where Burke appears, while reviewing Emin’s career, to be thinking also of his own: ‘You have attempted great things on noble principles. You have failed, and you are better off for yourself than if you had succeeded; for you are an honest, and if you please, a happy private man.’ After being ‘tossed in many storms’, Emin is right to seek rest ‘in the comforts of a good conscience, and the domestic satisfactions of a good father of a family;—every thing else is but show without substance’ (). Burke likewise had ‘failed’ in the conventional sense. Though determined not to abandon his crusade against Hastings, he entertained no illusions about its outcome. The Regency Crisis had demonstrated the improbability of his ever returning to office. An inglorious retirement was in prospect. For however he might praise them, ‘domestic satisfactions’ did not satisfy Burke. Needing to be more than ‘a happy private man’, only in the frustrations of politics could he find fulfilment. Early in May, a letter from Bristol served to revive less happy memories of a more recent past. It came from Richard Bright (–), whom Burke had known since .¹³⁷ Bright was a Dissenter, and his letter, written on behalf of a committee of Bristol Dissenters, asked Burke to support the motion to relax the Test and Corporation Acts that Henry Beaufoy (–) would move in the Commons on May (C v. ). This letter arrived at an inopportune moment. Not only was his ‘every instant . . . thoroughly occupied’ (), but he had just suffered a humiliating rebuff from the Commons. Yet Burke neither ignored the letter, nor wrote the brief formal reply that might have been expected. Instead, he wrote at some length (over a thousand words). If able to attend the debate, he assured Bright, he would certainly vote for the motion. But ill health and the pressure of other business would probably prevent his going to the House. The day after the debate, he added a short postscript to report that he had not attended. The real burden of the ¹³⁶ Life and Letters of Joseph Emin, –, Written by Himself, ed. Amy Apcar (Calcutta, ), , –. Emin to R.B. Jr., Dec. (NA PRO. //, fos. –). ¹³⁷ Bright to E.B., July (WWM BkP /), implies previous acquaintance, most probably from E.B.’s election campaign at Bristol.
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letter, however, was a bill of complaint against the Dissenters for their withdrawal of support from the Whig opposition, at the election and since. The hyperbole of Burke’s rhetoric reveals the bitterness which he still felt at being unjustly exposed ‘to publick Odium, as one of a gang of Rebels and Regicides, which had conspired at one blow to subvert the Monarchy . . . and totally to destroy this Constitution’ (). Such treatment had not, he insisted, alienated him from the cause of the Dissenters. But since some duties are more imperative than others, he legitimately felt more strongly the claims of ‘twenty Millions of Dissenters from the Church of England, in Asia’ whose ‘real greivances’ are incomparably more severe than those of which the Dissenters at home complain (). Only by accident was Bright the recipient of this diatribe. Burke wanted to discharge some of his spleen against the Dissenters, and Bright’s letter gave him a convenient opportunity. On July, two days after the trial of Hastings had been adjourned for the year, Burke composed a more considered retrospect than the casual effusions that he had written to Emin and Bright. It took the form of a letter to his old friend Lord Charlemont, nominally a mere letter of compliment, to be delivered by a mutual friend who was returning to Ireland. Burke, however, took the opportunity not only to look back at ‘this strange Session’, but to make a more general assessment of his personal situation at what he evidently took to be a watershed in his career (C vi. –). When the Regency Crisis was over, he explained, he virtually withdrew from business: ‘My time of Life, the length of my Service, and the Temper of the publick, renderd it very unfit for me to exert myself in the common routine of opposition.’ To express his plight more pithily, Burke quoted a favourite tag from Ovid: ‘Turpe senex Miles’. Ovid’s point is that love and war are equally the preserve of the young: ‘turpe senex miles, turpe senilis amor’. Burke had applied the phrase before, as he applies it here, to the indignity of an old man who has failed of promotion continuing to labour in the ranks.¹³⁸ During the crisis, younger men such as Sheridan and Grey had taken the lead. Bitter at being neither consulted nor considered for responsible office, Burke pretended to have reached the time of life at which ‘if a man cannot arrive at a certain degree of authority, derived from a confidence from the Prince or the people’ he should ‘remit much of his activity’ (). In reality, nothing was further from his mind than retirement. Turning to the trial, he successively attacked the queen for her ‘protection’ of Hastings; Thurlow, Kenyon, and the judges, for their flagrant bias in Hastings’s favour; and the House of Commons, for betraying the managers. In spite of every discouragement, however, he remained determined to ‘persevere to the End’ (–). The Hastings business, indeed, served as his excuse for not retiring, despite sensing that his party regarded him as superannuated. ¹³⁸ Ovid, Amores, . . . E.B. had earlier quoted the phrase in letters to Richard Shackleton, July , and to the Duke of Portland, Sept. (C i. , iv. ).
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Out of favour with the king, with the public, and even with many of his own associates, Burke knew all too well how little ‘authority’ he possessed. The king, however, he had never courted, while the people he had always known to be fickle and easily duped. What really hurt was the disregard of his party, for his entire political career had been devoted to its service. ‘My strength was always’, he told Bright, ‘in those admirable Men (worthy of a better age than that they live in) with whom I had been connected. Stripped of them I am nothing’ ( May : C v. ). To an outsider such as Bright, of course, he maintained a show of solidarity. Even to Charlemont, his criticism of Fox was indirect, affecting to understand the ‘inactivity’ of those of his friends (principally Fox) who were ‘in the Vigour of Life, and in possession of a great degree of Lead and authority’ ( July: vi. ). In fact, Burke was most unhappy with Fox, most recently for his evident eagerness to drop the impeachment. The king, the people, the party, the age: all were at fault. Missing from Burke’s analysis is any criticism of himself. He betrays no glimmer of recognition that his own behaviour, whether in Parliament or in Westminster Hall, could in any way have contributed to the disregard and contempt into which he had fallen. Even in private, he could turn the same verbal violence on the closest and most loyal of his friends. Recording in his diary ‘Burke’s intemperate attack on me, for a difference, which he had forced me to declare, on the affairs of Baretti’, William Windham charitably resolved ‘to endeavour to obliterate from my mind, the impression, which passion so unreasonable and manners so rude would be apt to leave’. This quarrel (the precise nature of which is obscure) took place while they were driving from Lothian’s Hotel (in Albemarle Street) to Carlton House, less than a mile.¹³⁹ If Burke could turn on his friends in this way, small wonder that in hostile newspapers he was represented as deranged, or as a figure of fun. He is depicted as a mad dog; his tailor makes him a strait-waistcoat by mistake; his portrait is to be presented to the Lunatic Asylum at York.¹⁴⁰ A graphic illustration of the disrepute into which he had sunk is James Gillray’s caricature Cooling the Brain ( May : BMC ). The inmate of a madhouse, half naked and chained and sitting on straw, Burke is subjected to the ultimate indignity of having his head shaved by Major Scott (in military uniform). On the wall of his cell, a crudely drawn picture of the hanging of Nandakumar illustrates his insane imagination, as does the nightmare vision of Hastings buying himself a ready welcome at the royal court (Plate ). The summer of was indeed the nadir of Burke’s career. ¹³⁹ Diary, ed. Mrs Henry Baring (London, ), ( Mar. ). E.B. had known Giuseppi Baretti (–) since about , and had testified to his character at his trial for murder in (C ii. ). Since , Baretti had been a dependant of Richard Barwell, living for half the year at his country house in Sussex (Baretti to Francesco Carcano, June , in Lacy Collison-Morley, Giuseppe Baretti (London, ), ). This association is the most probable source of E.B.’s hostility. ¹⁴⁰ The World, , Aug., , Sept. .
The Making of the Reflections, ‒
The beginning of the French Revolution can be traced back to the calling of the Assembly of Notables in . This gamble on the part of the government marked a public admission of defeat. Faced with national insolvency, the government needed new taxes; but they could not be imposed without the consent of some kind of representative body. After the refusal of the Assembly of Notables to approve further taxation, the States General was summoned, for the first time since . Elections to this body generated intense public interest, and its meeting on May was another historic moment from which the Revolution might be dated. In the public mind, however, the event that epitomized the Revolution was the storming of the Bastille on July . In reality, the Bastille was a relic of a bygone age, housing a few inmates in conditions that were better than those in the average French prison. Its demolition, and the redevelopment of the site, had even been proposed. Nevertheless, as a highly visible monument of royal despotism, its destruction symbolized the death of the old order.¹ To many in Britain, and especially to advocates of reform, these developments were both amazing and welcome. Fox was unqualified in his admiration: ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!’² His enthusiasm for the dawning of the Revolution was at first widely shared. Even so firm a friend to social order and subordination as Hannah More (–), while disturbed by the violent triumph of ‘the lawless rabble’, hoped that ‘some good will arise from the sum of human misery having been so considerably lessened at one blow by the destruction of the Bastille.’³ Others assessed events in France from a more narrowly British point of view, rejoicing that the fall of the old despotism would make France a less formidable enemy for the foreseeable future.⁴ ¹ Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom, trans. Norbert Schürer (Durham, NC, ), esp. –. ² Fox to Richard Fitzpatrick, July , in Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed. Lord John Russell (London, –), ii. . ³ Hannah More to Horace Walpole, Sept. (YWC xxxi. ). ⁴ William Wyndham Grenville, for example, was ‘heartily tired’ of hearing of the debates in the National Assembly, the ‘main point’ being ‘quite secure, that they will not for many years be in a situation
REFLECTIONS , ‒
Burke’s was among the more sceptical and restrained responses. His first recorded comment was made in a letter to his old friend Lord Charlemont, written on August : As to us here our thoughts of every thing at home are suspended, by our astonishment at the wonderful Spectacle which is exhibited in a Neighbouring and rival Country—what Spectators, and what actors! England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud! The thing indeed, though I thought I saw something like it in progress for several years, has still something in it paradoxical and Mysterious. The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true, that this may be no more than a sudden explosion: If so no indication can be taken from it. But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them . . . What will be the Event it is hard I think still to say. To form a solid constitution requires Wisdom as well as spirit, and whether the French have wise heads among them, or if they possess such whether they have authority equal to their wisdom, is to be seen; In the mean time the progress of this whole affair is one of the most curious matters of Speculation that ever was exhibited. (C vi. )
Composed just three weeks after the taking of the Bastille, this prescient analysis anticipates several of the important ideas that Burke would develop at length in his Reflections. Like everyone else, he was taken by surprise.⁵ But he was soon able to discern a more complex reality than was apparent to the unequivocal admirers of the Revolution, such as Fox, who hailed it as a millenarian event, marking a new epoch in the history of humanity. Burke, on the contrary, appreciated almost at once that the Revolution was neither a unique event nor an unmixed blessing to mankind. Instinctively, he sought to understand the Revolution through history. Refusing to divorce the taking of the Bastille from other, more disturbing events, such as the brutal murder on July of two unpopular officials and the parading of their severed heads around the streets of Paris, he was reminded of earlier epochs in French history, particularly the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion.⁶ Where the optimists thought the Revolution was over, or nearly to molest the invaluable peace which we now enjoy’ (to the Marquis of Buckingham, Sept. , in Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George III, ed. Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (nd edn. London, –), ii. ). ⁵ Though, as early as , E.B.’s detailed knowledge of the French finances led him to anticipate ‘some extraordinary convulsion in that whole system; the effect of which on France, and even on all Europe, it is difficult to conjecture’ (WS ii. ). ⁶ A close parallel to E.B.’s reaction is that of Horace Walpole, likewise informed by a familiarity with French history. On August , Walpole doused the enthusiasm of Lady Upper Ossory for French ‘liberty’ by detailing ‘the savage barbarity that the French have always shown on all commotions’. He instanced the factious violence of the reign of Charles VI (–), the Massacre of St Bartholomew (), and the cruelties perpetrated by the Catholic League (–). The parading of the heads of the murdered officials reminded him of an incident in , when the body of the assassinated Marquis
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over, Burke realized that the events of July were no more than a beginning.⁷ Over the next few months, as events in France unfolded, Burke refined but did not significantly modify his view of the Revolution. The qualifications dropped out, the condemnation became complete. In September, Richard Jr. received a letter from Mme Parisot, in whose house at Auxerre he had lived in –. This letter, with its graphic account of the Grande peur that was sweeping the French countryside, eloquently testifies to the fear and incomprehension of the property-owning classes (C vi. –). Not all Burke’s informants were hostile to the Revolution. In August , William Windham and John Courtenay made an excursion to Paris. Confident ‘from the beginning’ that ‘the new Constitution’ would be ‘settled without a struggle’, Windham was confirmed in his opinion by this trip to Paris. On his return, he sent Burke some books, probably summaries of the cahiers de doléances drawn up before the meeting of the States General ( Sept.: –). Burke remained mistrustful. He was especially disturbed by the wholesale renunciation of feudal privileges on August. Concerned as always with the preservation of property rights, he condemned the episode as tending to anarchy. Plainly influenced by Mme Parisot, in his letter of thanks to Windham he articulated his distrust of the ‘paper’ constitution and his revulsion against the throwing off of ‘the Yoke of Laws and morals’, against ‘the subversion of all orders, distinctions, priveleges impositions, Tythes, and rents’ ( Sept.: ). The French, in his view, had purchased only a mirage of liberty, at the substantive cost of security of property, which for Burke was the necessary foundation of social order. Worse, however, was to come. On September, the National Assembly rejected the idea of a second chamber in the new constitution. On – October occurred what for Burke would become the defining events of the Revolution: the march on Versailles; the attack on the queen in her bedroom; the forced return of the royal family to virtual captivity in Paris. On November, the Assembly decreed the nationalization of the property of the Church.⁸ Writing to Lord Fitzwilliam on November, Burke characterized
d’Ancre was exhumed, cut up, and the heart grilled and eaten in an act of especially gruesome savagery (YWC xxxiv. ). James Bland Burges was also revolted by the violence of the Revolution: ‘cruelties & abominations, disgraceful indeed to humanity’ (to his wife, Aug. : Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, box , fo. ). ⁷ As early as Aug. , Andrew Stuart told Lord Thurlow (who disagreed) that the Revolution was ‘compleat’ (Thurlow to Lord Hawkesbury, [Aug. ]; BL Add. MS , fo. ). In Thoughts on the Probable Influence of the French Revolution on Great-Britain (London, ; published Feb.), Samuel Romilly declared the Revolution ‘accomplished’ (). ⁸ These events all feature in the Reflections: R [–] (no senate); [–] (October Days); [–, –] (confiscation of Church property).
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these events as ‘the total political extinction of a great civilized Nation’. The royal authority was gone; its ‘chief supports, the Nobility and the Clergy’ destroyed; the National Assembly no more than ‘an organ of the Will of the Burghers of Paris’. Burke was especially worried by ‘the pillage of the Church’, for he was sure that such a ‘convulsion in property’ would have grave social consequences. His only hope now was that, just as what had already happened was ‘out of the ordinary Course of Speculation’, the Revolution might still, against all odds, be reversed by some ‘overruling and mysterious disposition of Providence’: ‘One man may change all. But when and where and how is this man to appear.’ Burke knew that anarchy must end in despotism; and despotism might at least provide security of property. Still absent from this letter is any concern that events in France may have consequences for England. Burke was still keeping England and France in separate compartments of his mind (C vi. –). The comments so far quoted come from personal letters, and record Burke’s immediate reactions to events rather than a systematic analysis. His first formal statement was drawn up in late November, in response to a letter from France. Charles-Jean-François Depont (–), the ‘very young gentleman at Paris’ to whom Burke later addressed his Reflections, had visited England with his father in , and been hospitably entertained by the Burkes. Avowing that ‘son Coeur a battu pour la premiere fois au nom de Liberté en vous en entendant parler’, he now sought Burke’s reactions to recent events in France, obviously hoping for a favourable one (C vi. –). In reply, Burke drafted (but did not immediately send) a ‘letter’ of about , words (–). Such a response was characteristic. Burke had long been in the habit of writing such letters. As early as , he had recognized that ‘it is against my Nature to see people in an opinion I think wrong without endeavouring to undeceive ’em’ (i. ). In , for example, he wrote long letters to complete strangers about the Scottish anti-Catholic agitation. In writing such letters, Burke was always conscious that they might find their way into print. Burke also cast several of his pamphlets into epistolary form as a way of publishing his opinions while retaining the unstudied informality of a private communication.⁹ To Depont, then, Burke repeated at greater length and more systematically the ideas he had already expressed to his compatriots. While he conceded that events in France have been ‘so much beyond the scope of all speculation’ as to make an outsider hesitate to interpret them (C vi. ), his diffidence was no more than his habitual rhetorical deference. Defining his ideal of ‘Liberty’ as ‘social freedom’, as ‘but another name for Justice, ⁹ E.B. to Patrick Bowie, Mar. ; to John Erskine, June (C iv. –, –). E.B.’s epistolary pamphlets include his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (: WS iii. –) and A Letter from a Gentleman in the English House of Commons, in Vindication of his Conduct (: ix. –).
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ascertained by wise Laws, and secured by well constructed institutions’ (), Burke roundly denied that the French had achieved it, or even made a near approximation. Individuals did not enjoy such elementary ‘liberties’ as security of property or freedom of expression. The nominal legislative authority was not itself free either to deliberate or to act; the judiciary possessed neither independence nor authority. The French had ‘subverted Monarchy, but not recover’d freedom’ (). In a series of ‘if ’ and ‘when’ clauses extending through several paragraphs, Burke offered a comprehensive critique of recent events in France, contrasting the conditions necessary for the establishment of a free constitution with those that actually prevail (–). These pages, the germ of the Reflections, suggest that Burke was already convinced that the possibility of establishing a constitutional monarchy on the English model had been lost. Anarchy having advanced so far, Burke anticipated that France would have to pass ‘thro’ many varieties of untried being’ (varieties of ‘Chaos and darkness’) before achieving stability ().¹⁰ The present ‘constitution’, therefore, was unlikely to last. Looking to the future, Burke offered Depont advice, ‘the late ripe fruit of mere experience’ (C vi. ), that illustrates the continuity between his critique of the French Revolution and the principles of his Rockingham years. This advice was embodied in three related principles. The first is a distrust of theory. Burke urged Depont to pay more attention to ‘the Nature and disposition’ of men than to their supposed ‘Rights’ (). In human institutions, good and evil are inextricably mixed; in politics, in particular, an apparent defect is often ‘a necessary corrective to the Evils that the Theoretick Perfection would produce’ (). This had been the ground of Burke’s opposition to the Stamp Act and to the later attempt to enforce the right of taxation. The second principle is ‘Never wholly seperate in your Mind the merits of any Political Question from the Men who are concerned it in’ (). Inverting the conventional maxim, Burke had always believed in ‘men, not measures’, for reasons he explained in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (WS ii. –). Burke now repeated the argument, in order to prevent Depont becoming ‘a tool of the Ambition and ill designs of others’ (C vi. ). Burke’s third principle is moderation, ‘the Virtue only of superior Minds’: ‘dare to be fearful, when all about you are full of presumption and confidence’ (). Here, Burke remembered the rash, ill-conceived, oversanguine schemes of George Grenville, Charles Townshend, and Lord North. Burke’s reaction to the French Revolution was thus consistent with, indeed grew out of, his earlier ideas and principles. Depont’s misjudgement of Burke’s attitude to the Revolution is understandable. He imagined Burke as an English Necker (an analogy suggested by ¹⁰ E.B. reused the same quotation from Addison’s Cato (‘varieties of untried being’) at the end of the Reflections (R []).
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Burke’s scheme of ‘Economical Reformation’), whose reforms had been frustrated by royal obscurantism. Like other French observers, he saw the oppositionist, reforming side of Burke. Antoine-François Prost de Royer (–), for example, a well-informed jurist who followed English politics closely, wrote to Burke in in terms that anticipate Depont. ‘Anarcharis’ Cloots (–), likewise, was disappointed not to find Burke a friend to the Revolution.¹¹ These misunderstandings are such as would naturally occur to French readers of Burke’s publications of –, in which he typically appears in the guise of a reformer and a champion of ‘liberty’. To decode the aristocratic, oligarchic assumptions implicit in Burke’s writings and speeches of these years required an interior knowledge of British politics that was unusual in France. If intelligent Frenchmen could so misunderstand Burke, did Burke likewise misunderstand the French Revolution? The rapidity with which he formed his opinions may suggest as much. On the publication of the Reflections, he was repeatedly accused of writing in ignorance of France, and the imputation has often been echoed since.¹² The charge is without foundation. For Burke, as a politician, knowledge of France had an almost continuous practical application. Enmity and rivalry between England and France, commercial as well as political, a leitmotiv in English history from the time of Edward III, had since been almost continuously a prominent factor in contemporary politics. The Seven Years War, and French intervention on behalf of the American colonies and in India, were its most recent manifestations. The commercial treaty of had proved the most controversial issue during the parliamentary session of ; in , the French attempt to support the pro-French party in the United Provinces had nearly led to war. Since then, every step of the decline and fall of the ancien régime had been extensively reported in the British press, and Burke followed them minutely.¹³ Burke was celebrated for his general knowledge.¹⁴ Besides, he was habitually industrious about gathering information on subjects in which he took a special interest. His researches into insanity during the Regency Crisis are an ¹¹ Prost de Royer to E.B., Mar. (NRO A. XVII. ), and supra, i. –; Cloots to E.B., May (C vi. –). ¹² John Morley, Burke (London, ), ; J. Holland Rose, William Pitt and National Revival (London, ), ; Thomas W. Copeland, Edmund Burke: Six Essays (London, ), –; Alfred Cobban, ed. The Debate on the French Revolution (nd edn. London, ), ; Louis Cullen, ‘Burke, Ireland, and Revolution’, Eighteenth-Century Life, (), – (reference on ). ¹³ E.B. to Fitzwilliam, Nov. , for example, mentions the decree of Nov. nationalizing Church property, and shows detailed knowledge of debates in the National Assembly reported in the London press between Oct. and Nov. (C vi. –). ¹⁴ The strongest evidence is the praise of another polymath, Samuel Johnson: ‘Take up whatever topick you please, he is ready to meet you’ (recorded by Bennet Langton; inserted under in Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, –), iv. ).
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example.¹⁵ At several points in his career, he had acquired specialist knowledge of France and French institutions for particular purposes. Work on the Account of the European Settlements in America (), on which he had collaborated with his cousin Will Burke, had required a detailed knowledge of French colonial and commercial policies. Burke’s share in this work included the first use in England of Lafitau’s Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains (). Some time in the s, Burke had read Montesquieu, and was either greatly influenced by him, or discovered a remarkable affinity with his political philosophy. At a more mundane level, Will Burke had been temporarily employed on Guadeloupe, after its capture from the French in ; thereafter, until the Peace of Paris, the Burkes were intensely interested in AngloFrench commercial rivalries. For his first important political pamphlet, Observations on a Late State of the Nation (), Burke had assimilated a sufficiently detailed knowledge of the French financial system to convict his opponent (a former Under-Secretary of State) of numerous errors. In –, when proposing his own plan of ‘Economical Reformation’, he had drawn on the measures being pursued by Jacques Necker in France.¹⁶ Burke’s first-hand knowledge of France was admittedly not extensive. His only known visit, in , had been brief, and had taken him only from Calais to Paris and Auxerre. Despite his poor spoken French, he had made good use of this trip, enquiring into matters of political economy and forming his own impressions (however partial) of French society and especially of the Gallican Church.¹⁷ Since then, he had entertained at Beaconsfield some of the more prominent French visitors to England: the abbé Raynal (–) in , the notorious Mirabeau (–) in , Mme de Genlis (–) in . Among the less eminent, he entertained the two Deponts in (the father, Jean-Samuel, –, was an experienced royal official) and two of ¹⁵ Christopher Reid, ‘Burke, the Regency Crisis, and the “antagonist world of madness” ’, EighteenthCentury Life, (), –, esp. –. These researches, though derided by contemporaries as indecorous or even deranged, exemplify E.B.’s insatiable appetite for information. However he might manipulate it, he always sought evidence. Unlike Fox, E.B. was ‘incapable of lazily interpreting the revolution in the light of a few general principles and leaving the matter there’ ( John W. Derry, Charles James Fox (London, ), ). ¹⁶ Supra, i. – (Lafitau), (Observations), (Necker). In , Richard Wolfall, who claimed to be an expert in the French finances, was imprisoned for debt, and appealed for help to E.B. and others. Denying that he had received material assistance from Wolfall, E.B. claimed ‘I have taken a good deal of pains on the Subject of the Revenues of Foreign States; I have made ample collections; and I could shew you very precise Details relative to the Revenues of States, (even less known than those of France,)’ ( Dec. : C ii. ). Some of these ‘collections’ survive among E.B.’s papers (e.g. NRO A. XXV. , , ). ¹⁷ Supra, i. –. R [–]. En route from Calais to Paris, ‘we got out of the chaise at a farm house, where my Papa inquired about payments of labourers, & other farm business, which he is better able to give you an account of than I am’; R.B. Jr. to J.B., [Jan. ] (NRO A.XII. ). A puzzling reference in a later letter may refer to an otherwise unrecorded visit: ‘Is the French Fleet at L’Orient? I have been there’ (to Windham, c. Feb. : C viii. ). E.B. could have visited Lorient in , though why he should have gone so far out of his way is unclear. On the other hand, Philip Francis, who was likely to know, believed that E.B. was only ‘once in France’ (annotation in his copy of the Reflections, now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University).
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the Dillons, a prosperous family of Irish émigrés, in .¹⁸ These are no more than random examples that happen to have been preserved in the epistolary record, for Burke habitually cultivated foreign visitors. In , recommending to Burke’s notice Baron van Nagel (–), a Dutch diplomat, Lord Titchfield (–; the eldest son of the Duke of Portland) quoted a dictum that he had ‘so often heard from yourself—that no attention to foreigners was lost’. In , in keeping with this precept, Burke entertained at Beaconsfield Professor F. L. W. Meyer (–) of the University of Göttingen.¹⁹ In addition, Richard Jr., who could speak French fluently thanks to his year at Auxerre, spent about three months in France (mainly at Paris) from October to January . There he met a number of prominent Frenchmen, including the comte de Lally-Tollendal (–).²⁰ If Burke had never made a special study of France, as he had of British India, such a study was hardly necessary. His claim, in a letter of February , to ‘know France, by observation and enquiry, pretty tolerably for a stranger’ (C vi. ) was amply justified. This is not to imply that his knowledge was objective, or uncoloured by his own preconceptions. Obviously it was not. Burke saw France, as he saw England, from the point of view of the propertied élite, the circles in which Richard moved during his visit of –. In , however, France was less an object to be viewed dispassionately than a mirror for the hopes or fears of the observer. If Burke’s reactions in were prejudiced (and whose were not?), that prejudice was grounded in decades of observation and reflection. Burke’s letter to Depont is a carefully polished rhetorical composition, the writing of which took many days. That Burke devoted so much time and energy to the task suggests that, from the outset, he envisaged a wider audience than Depont. Acutely conscious of his own intellectual gifts, Burke was frustrated that his exclusion from office prevented his making any constructive use of them. The Regency Crisis had revealed that, even if Fox came to power, Burke could expect no more than some marginal place of profit rather than confidence, such as he had occupied in and . ‘It seems somewhat singular,’ he confided to Depont, ‘that I, whose opinions have so little weight in my own Country, where I have some share in a Publick Trust, should write as if it were possible they should affect one Man, with regard to Affairs in which I have no concern.’ Feelingly, he concluded: ‘But for the present, my time is my own, and to tire your patience is the only injury I can do You’ (C vi. ). In December, he took the time to make a detailed evaluation ¹⁸ C iii. , – (Raynal); v. – (Mirabeau). W. R. Fryer, ‘Mirabeau in England, –’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, (), – (esp. ). NRO A. IX. ; C v. – (Genlis); – (Deponts), – (Dillons). ¹⁹ Lord Titchfield to E.B., Dec. (NRO A. II. ). C vi. – (Meyer). ²⁰ R.B. Jr. visited Versailles and Fontainebleau as well as Paris. His flattering reception in court circles is likely to have reinforced his and E.B.’s aristocratic sympathies (C v. , , –; NRO A. IX. ).
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of a scheme for a French national bank, on which Francis had asked his opinion.²¹ Even such a barren exercise was preferable to idleness. Burke found indolence irksome. A true word spoken in jest was the motto proposed for Burke’s coat of arms in a newspaper squib: ‘LABOR IPSE VOLUPTAS, the very toil is a pleasure’.²² For all his talk about the pleasures of farming and the country life, he could in reality enjoy them only as a temporary relaxation from the fatigue of business. Perhaps this is true of most veteran politicians. Yet as drew to a close, even the approaching session of Parliament offered little hope of meaningful activity. No new or exciting issue was in prospect. Burke became more than usually testy, and suspicious of friend and foe alike. His letters at this period leave an impression of a mind preying on itself, frustrated by inactivity, desperate for a cause. Even the continuation of the impeachment seemed threatened, by ‘pretended friends’ as well as by open enemies (C vi. ). Early in January , he confessed to Sir Gilbert Elliot that he had been ‘perfectly idle, without pleasure, and without Care’ (). Little did he anticipate that, within days of his arrival in London, he would find an unexpected new outlet for his wasting energies, a welcome task that would become his greatest legacy to posterity. Parliament was summoned for January . Burke returned to town about then, though he missed the opening debate. Pitt kept the speech from the throne terse and bland. Its references to ‘the internal Situation of different Parts of Europe’ and to ‘the Interruption of the Tranquillity of other Countries’ were intended to do no more than justify a modest increase in the size of the armed forces to be maintained. This was avowedly a preventive measure rather than a response to any perceived threat. The opposition, still smarting from the débâcle of the Regency Crisis, did not attempt to move even a token amendment. Indeed, Fox and Sheridan, like Burke, absented themselves.²³ Burke, however, was in a pugnacious mood, and the energy and antagonism that might have found a vent in the Commons was released instead at what ought to have been a friendly and convivial occasion. On his first day in town, Burke dined with his friend Walker King, who had collected a ‘large and mixed Company’ of Anglicans and Dissenters. In and , motions for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts had been defeated. Undeterred, the proponents of this reform intended to mount another ²¹ E.B. to Francis, Dec. (C vi. –). This letter alone would refute the claim that E.B. was ill-informed about developments in France. ²² The Times, June . ²³ CJ xlv. –. PH xxviii. –. London Chronicle, – Jan. .
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challenge during the new session. Fox had promised to sponsor it. While his motion was unlikely to succeed, an election year was a propitious time to secure a larger than usual minority. Many members would be tempted to support it in order to ingratiate themselves with their Dissenting constituents.²⁴ At this dinner, Burke was incensed by what he heard from ‘a most worthy man, of Learning, sense, and ingenuity, one of the oldest and best friends I had in the world’ (probably Dr Richard Brocklesby, –). This friendly informant described, though as a sentiment he did not share, the extreme aversion of the Dissenters to Fox personally. Among them, ‘it was very general’ to speak of Fox ‘in a manner that one would not speak of some better sort of Highwayman’. The remainder of the Whigs they regarded as ‘weak men, and dupes, and the mere instruments’ of Fox. As evidence, he cited a sermon preached by Richard Price (–) on November , to commemorate the anniversary of the Revolution of , which contained a passage (softened when the sermon was printed) attacking Fox.²⁵ Although this sermon had already achieved considerable notoriety, and Burke had heard of it, he had not read it. Outraged at what he heard (‘warmd’ is his own word), Burke defended Fox in a dispute that lasted ‘some hours’.²⁶ The vehemence of Burke’s defence of Fox may appear surprising. He had long ceased to be close to Fox personally, and the Regency Crisis and Fox’s intention on May to end the impeachment had lately driven them further apart. Probably, then, the defence of Fox was no more than a convenient vehicle for an attack on the political perfidy and ingratitude of the Dissenters, and on Price in particular, for he and Burke were old antagonists.²⁷ During the American war (which both had opposed), Price had argued the case against coercion on grounds of natural rights and abstract principles. He had even ventured to ‘rail’ against the Declaratory Act, the palladium of the Rockingham party’s American policy (C iii. ). For Burke, Price was the archetypal wrong-headed theoretician, one of those who ‘split and anatomised the doctrine of free Government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity; and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling’ (Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, : WS iii. ). In , the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, Price had been invited to deliver the Revolution Society’s anniversary sermon, but had ²⁴ G. M. Ditchfield, ‘The Parliamentary Struggle over the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, –’, English Historical Review, (), –. ²⁵ A Discourse on the Love of our Country (London, ); repr. in Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge, ), –. The paragraph warning ‘not to disgrace the cause of patriotism by any licentiousness or immoral conduct’ () was aimed at Fox. ²⁶ E.B.’s account of this dinner comes from his letter of Jan. to William Weddell (C vii. ), and may be coloured by later events. ²⁷ Supra, i. . John Faulkner, ‘Burke’s Perception of Richard Price’, in The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crofton (Westport, Conn., ), –, esp. n. .
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declined on the ground of ill health.²⁸ In his place, Andrew Kippis (–), another eminent nonconformist minister, had preached a conventional panegyric on the Revolution of , accompanied by a modest hope that in time an even more complete toleration for Dissenters might be achieved.²⁹ If Price had enjoyed better health and preached in , and a more anodyne sermon been delivered in , Burke’s attack on the French Revolution might have taken a different form. For Price, far more than Depont, energized Burke’s opposition to the Revolution. Burke was so incensed against Price that, when he went home from the dinner, ‘late as it was, before I went to bed, I read Dr Price’s sermon’ (C vii. ). What he read not only rekindled his hostility to Price, but gave a new direction and intensity to his thoughts on France. The germ of the Reflections, Burke’s reply to Depont, was an avuncular reproof to the naïve enthusiasm of a young and therefore excusable French patriot. When Burke turned to Price, he found something altogether more provocative that demanded a different kind of response. Despite its title, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, and its text (the praise of Jerusalem in Psalm ), Price’s sermon is actually an argument against ‘patriotism’ as usually understood. Instead, Price defines true patriotism as loyalty to a shared ideal, not to a geographical division, and distinguishes it from an improper sense of national superiority. True Christian patriotism is the ‘universal benevolence’ that Jesus recommended as an antidote to the wrong kinds of patriotism, which were as prevalent then as now. While people naturally love best those who are closest to them, Christians will submerge such feelings in a broader, more inclusive, humanitarian benevolence. The interests of any particular country, truly understood, are best promoted through the pursuit of the ‘chief blessings of human nature’: truth, virtue, and liberty. In the pursuit of truth, men have a duty to enlighten their country. In the pursuit of virtue, they have a duty not only to be virtuous, but to discountenance vice. One way of promoting virtue is to encourage the setting up of more rational forms of public worship, since the existing Anglican liturgy is so defective that people are understandably reluctant to attend it. The pursuit of liberty is the most important of the three, because only in conditions of true freedom can truth and virtue flourish. True patriots must obey the laws and respect the magistrates of their country. Yet patriotism does not entail adulation and servility, as exemplified in the recent addresses to the king on his recovery from his illness. Neither, however, does it authorize ‘speaking evil of rulers’ (this passage seems aimed at such oppositionists as Fox and Burke). Patriotism demands the defence of one’s country against its internal as well as its external enemies. Examples of ²⁸ D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford, ), . ²⁹ A Sermon Preached at the Old Jewry on the Fourth of November, , before the Society for Commemorating the Glorious Revolution (London, ).
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internal enemies are ministers who seek to arrogate excessive power to themselves, and who use the threat of external enemies as a pretext for repression at home and aggression abroad (Pitt is the target here). Patriots also have a duty to pray for their country. Englishmen should thank God for the Revolution of . Protestant Dissenters, in particular, should give thanks for it, although they must continue their fight for greater toleration, and should not rest satisfied with the compromise settlement of . The Test and Corporation Acts should be repealed, and Parliament reformed. Patriotism is disgraced by personal immorality (this is the offensive passage alluding to Fox). Finally, Price returns to his assertion that true patriotism is perfectly compatible with the Christian principle of universal benevolence, ending with a stirring peroration celebrating recent events in France.³⁰ In the letter to Depont drafted in November, Burke’s analysis of the French Revolution itself was complete in all essentials. Only one element of the Reflections was missing: the threat to England. As late as December, he wrote to Philip Francis that ‘the follies of France, by which we are not yet affected, may employ ones curiosity more pleasantly, and as usefully, as the depravity of England’ (C vi. ). Price’s sermon showed Burke that England was indeed affected. Two strains can be detected in the Reflections: a rational, and often closely argued response to the threat to property and therefore to society posed by the Revolution in France; and a shriller, more emotive note denouncing the importation of French ideas into England. Each of these strains has its own genesis: the first from the letter to Depont, the second from Price’s sermon. No longer would Burke be the dispassionate foreign observer, dispensing sage advice from a neutral perspective, as in the letter to Depont. Now began a fight to prevent the spread to England of the detestable new French principles. Almost at once, Burke set to work on a pamphlet against Price. This would allow him to avoid the impropriety of seeming to interfere in the internal affairs of France, a consideration that had deterred him from publishing his long letter to Depont. Burke worked rapidly, his concern intensified by a second stimulus added about this time: a letter from Thomas Paine in Paris, giving a glowing account of the Revolution and assuming that Burke too would rejoice in its success. Even more ominously, Paine sketched what he hoped would be the progress of revolutionary fire throughout Europe ( Jan.: C vi. –). Though Burke’s pamphlet can hardly have been begun earlier than January, by February, it was being advertised as ‘in the Press, and speedily will be published’. The first claim was true: at least two sheets, or thirtytwo pages were set in type early in February.³¹ The promise of ‘speedy’ ³⁰ Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (Political Writings, –). ³¹ On Feb., Philip Francis sent E.B. his criticisms of some ‘printed sheets’ of the Reflections (C vi. –).
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publication proved optimistic. At this stage, Price and the Revolution Society were Burke’s primary targets. The original title was ‘REFLECTIONS on certain Procedings of the REVOLUTION SOCIETY of the th of November, , concerning the affairs of France’.³² This title suggests a much shorter work than Burke eventually wrote, perhaps corresponding to roughly the first third of the Reflections as published. By March, however, though the work had grown beyond a reply to Price to comprehend a defence of the Established Church of ‘considerable length’, it was still expected to appear within a few days. As late as April, when Sir Gilbert Elliot read it, it was still ‘just coming out’.³³ Publication receded, however, as Burke’s expansion of his ‘pamphlet’ continued. Thomas Paine, who returned from Paris in order to refute Burke’s forthcoming pamphlet as soon as it appeared, followed its progress with avid interest. He attributed the delay to Burke’s being ‘much at a loss how to go on’. Some of the sheets, he heard, Burke had revised ‘six, seven, and one nine times!’³⁴ Such intensive revision in proof, however, need not imply that Burke was ‘at a loss’. More probably, he regarded the proofs as drafts, printed to make the process of revision less laborious.³⁵ Eventually, vastly enlarged, what began as a pamphlet grew to a volume of pages.³⁶ While writing the Reflections, Burke opened a parallel campaign in the House of Commons. At first, he did not regard Parliament as an appropriate forum for the discussion of the Revolution in France. The speech from the throne had barely alluded to events in Europe. Lord Valletort (–), moving the address in reply, was more explicit. Surveying the distracted state of Europe, he touched on ‘the present unhappy situation of France’ in terms that Burke might have used, as ‘the most dreadful anarchy and confusion’ in which ‘the king himself was almost a prisoner in his own palace’.³⁷Yet when he read a report of Valletort’s speech, far from applauding it, Burke reprobated it as ‘imprudent’. ‘I should have said ten times as much,’ he observed on January, ‘had it been proper . . . We may be negotiating with them.’³⁸ Prudence, however, could only restrain Burke for so long: less than three weeks in this instance. ³² St James’s Chronicle, – Feb. ; Gazetteer, Feb.; The World, Feb. ³³ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Mar. (NLS MS , fo. ); Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Apr. (MS , fo. ). ³⁴ Paine to [Thomas Christie?], Apr. (Complete Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York, ), ii. –). W. E. Woodward, Tom Paine: America’s Godfather, – (New York, ), n., suggested Christie as the recipient. ³⁵ This practice is documented for the Letters on a Regicide Peace (E.B. to the abbé de La Bintinaye, Mar. : C viii. –). Indirect evidence suggests that E.B. adopted it as early as the Reflections. ³⁶ The only surviving manuscript of the Reflections is a partial outline in R.B. Jr.’s hand (NRO A. XXVII. ), printed in J. T. Boulton, ‘The Reflections: Burke’s Preliminary Draft and Methods of Composition’, Durham University Journal, (), –. ³⁷ PH xxviii. –. ³⁸ Boswell’s Journal, Jan. (Boswell: The Great Biographer, ed. Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady (New York, ), ).
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By February, Burke’s attitude to the French Revolution was notably more aggressive. Boswell recorded him as ‘very warm against French revolutionists’ and ‘really unpleasant’.³⁹This was perhaps the earliest occasion on which Burke’s tirades became socially offensive, in contrast to the studied moderation of January. The final provocation that goaded Burke into attacking the Revolution in public was Fox’s enthusiastic espousal of the cause in the Commons. This came on February, in a debate on the Army estimates. In a speech mainly concerned with arguing for reduced military expenditure, Fox referred briefly to France. Burke was not present, and Fox later claimed that he had been misrepresented. This may have been so, for his speech as reported contains little that, candidly considered, could have justified Burke’s next move.⁴⁰ By February, when the committee’s resolutions on the Army estimates were to be reported to the whole House, Burke’s burgeoning hostility to the Revolution and its English sympathizers was ready to explode. The early stages of the debate were largely a reprise of the arguments that had been advanced on the th. Fox, indeed, spoke more reservedly about France, though Burke cannot have relished his reference to the ‘anarchy and confusion incidental to such a revolution’, as though they were a price worth paying.⁴¹ Burke’s speech transformed a routine debate into a memorable, even historic occasion. Burke opened predictably enough, demolishing the arguments that Pitt and Grenville had advanced for an increased establishment. Their doctrine that ministers were entitled to an implicit ‘confidence’ he denounced as ‘unconstitutional’, such as might have been expected ‘from persons raw from schools and colleges’. To ridicule their ‘childish fears’, he recounted the fable of the hare and the frogs. Only when he turned to France, or rather to that ‘great gap, a vast blank, no longer of importance, and that was the space hitherto occupied by France’, did he break new ground. Admitting that reference to the internal affairs of France was ‘highly indiscreet’, he justified himself on the ground that the subject had already been raised. Alluding to what had been said on February in praise of events in France, he denied the analogy between the French Revolution and ‘what was termed our Revolution in ’. On the contrary, Burke asserted, ‘We had in fact no revolution, nor did we obtain a new constitution.’ This was a novel interpretation of , which Burke would develop at greater length in the Reflections. Then he launched into an inflammatory account of the ‘cruel, blind, and ferocious democracy’ that had seized power in France. With ‘the most savage and unfeeling barbarity’ they had ‘committed every sort of excess, marked their footsteps with blood, singled out every man of rank, and every man born a gentleman, for vengeance’. Their actions were those of ‘a lawless and sanguinary mob’; ‘their ³⁹ Boswell’s Journal, Feb. (Boswell: The Great Biographer, ). ⁴⁰ The Diary, or Woodfall’s Advertiser, Feb. (PH xxviii. –).
⁴¹ PH xxviii. –.
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liberty was licentiousness, and their religion atheism’. Such an anarchy posed no threat to its neighbours of a kind that an army was needed to repel. What was to be feared was the spread to Britain of their ‘dangerously levelling principles’.⁴² Burke now turned to Fox. Dreading ‘our being induced, by the advice of any man, however deservedly great his authority’ to imitate the French, he professed to hope, despite what Fox had said in the previous debate, that he would not lend himself to any ‘cabal’ which might seek to ‘introduce a dangerous innovation in any part of our constitution’. Pledging himself to oppose ‘the dearest friends on earth’ if they fell short in their ‘religious adherence to the constitution’, Burke trusted that Fox’s virtues would ‘prevent him from ever degrading the dignity of his own character’ by lending himself to the enemies of the constitution. Needing to avoid the imputation of deserting Fox, Burke infused a good deal of praise into his criticisms. Yet, perhaps inevitably with panegyric which is meant to serve such a purpose, some of the commendations carry a sting. For example, Burke hinted at Fox’s laziness, at his ignorance of the detail of what was happening in France, and at his being the cynosure of a mutual admiration society. Another hint that Burke was consciously rebelling against Fox’s domination came in the emotive peroration. Avowing that he had ‘spoken boldly’, he imagined being questioned about his temerity in contradicting Fox. If asked, ‘what made him so bold? he should give the same answer which Solon was said to have returned to some prince or politician, who questioned him in like manner: “That his age made him bold.” He had not, he believed, very long to trouble the House.’ The ‘prince or politician’ whom Solon, the wise old lawgiver of Athens, challenged in his old age was Peisistratus, who had just tricked the Athenians into allowing him a bodyguard, as the first step in establishing a tyranny.⁴³ Fox immediately rose to respond, reciprocating Burke’s flattery in a generous tribute: such was his sense of the judgement of his right honourable friend, such his knowledge of his principles, and such the value which he set upon them, and the estimation in which he held his friendship, that if he were to put all the political information which he had learnt from books, all which he had gained from science, and all which any knowledge of the world and its affairs had taught him, into one great scale, and the improvement which he had derived from his right honourable friend’s instruction and conversation, were placed in the other, he should be at a loss to decide to which to give the preference. He had learnt more from his right honourable friend, than from all the men with whom he had ever conversed. ⁴² Debrett, xxvii. –. PH reprints E.B.’s speech from the authorized pamphlet version. E.B.’s fable of the hare and the frogs differs in detail from the versions in the Aesopic tradition, suggesting that he was extemporizing. ⁴³ Debrett, xxvii. –. The source for the anecdote about Solon is Plutarch (‘Solon’, . ).
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Sincerity is hard to judge, and Fox’s flattery, like Burke’s, had a rhetorical purpose. Yet it rings more true. There is no admixture in Fox’s praise of the implied censure which is lightly veiled in Burke’s. On the other hand, there is a valedictory note in Fox’s tribute. While grateful for the instruction he has received from his old master, Fox is in effect emancipating himself. To say ‘that they could never differ in principles, however they might differ in their application’ was nothing, for all politics was the application of principles. Fox, too, claimed to be a friend of the constitution, but he took a more dynamic view of it. In particular, he controverted Burke’s interpretation of . In his view, there had been a Revolution, and further constitutional changes might be needed from time to time. For example, he believed (though he knew Burke did not) that some reform of Parliament was necessary. He avowed his approval of recent events in France. Even the excesses that had been committed were excusable in the circumstances. The speech as a whole, while respectful to Burke personally, was hardly such as to have allayed his fears. While Fox denied that he would ‘lend himself to any cabal’, the extent of their disagreement was confirmed.⁴⁴ Burke rose again, and professed himself satisfied. No enemy to reform, indeed ‘a known proposer of reforms of various descriptions’, he yet declared himself ‘anxious to protect and preserve . . . the grounds of the constitution itself ’. With this indefinite distinction the altercation might have rested, had not Sheridan (who was observed to ‘redden and change colour’ at some of Burke’s remarks, supposing himself their target) decided to intervene. Sheridan nodded to the convention of praise before disagreement, but his compliment to Burke was no more than a token gesture. Readier than Fox to declare forthrightly that he disagreed ‘in almost every word’ with what Burke had said about the French Revolution, he went further than Fox in condoning the excesses in France, for which he squarely blamed the former despotism. Quoting Burke’s ‘bloody, ferocious, and tyrannical Democracy’, Sheridan accused him of using the language of ‘some of the ministerial prints’ and of ‘so many friends of the Minister’. This was tantamount to saying that Burke was preparing to desert to Pitt. No charge could have been more hurtful.⁴⁵ Sheridan’s speech was gratuitously offensive. Burke welcomed it as the open declaration of hostility which he had long desired, for an avowed enemy was preferable to a treacherous friend. Immediately he rose to the challenge, proclaiming that he and Sheridan were now ‘separated in politics’. The remainder of his reply was devoted to correcting Sheridan’s misrepresentation of his arguments, which had aspersed him as an apologist for tyranny and absolutism. On the contrary, ‘the whole tenor of his life’ proved that he was ⁴⁴ Debrett, xviii. – (PH xxviii. –). ⁴⁵ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Feb. (Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, ed. Lady Minto (London, ), i. –). PH xxviii. –.
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‘a sincere and firm friend to freedom’. After this, the debate petered out. Pitt, adroitly enough, endorsed both Burke’s principles and his ‘warmth’. Professing to share Burke’s respect for the constitution (though he had done more than Fox for parliamentary reform), and to agree with his reading of the French Revolution, he contrived to widen the split within the opposition and, by taking Burke’s side, to brand Fox and Sheridan as unpatriotic.⁴⁶ A public squabble between two of the leading opposition politicians naturally generated considerable comment and speculation. The most impartial judgement was probably that of Thomas Pelham. Though closer to Fox, Pelham respected the sincerity of Burke’s feelings, and praised his speech as ‘one of his best’. Fox’s answer, he thought, showed ‘his usual Temper & discretion’. The real culprit was Sheridan, who ‘like a true Paddy thought proper to make ye most hostile, unjust, & invidious speech against Burke’. Pelham, however, was inclined to minimize the importance of the dispute: he thought it all ‘proceeded from the Potatoe planted in every Irishman’s brain’. In the same vein, another of Fox’s friends characterized the altercation as ‘a near race over the Curragh [an Irish race-track], for no two Irish heads ever displayed their absurdity’ so plainly.⁴⁷ Such comments betray the patrician hauteur with which Fox and his cronies were apt to regard interlopers such as Burke and Sheridan. Portland sought to effect a reconciliation, employing as a mediator Thomas Lewis O’Beirne, an old friend of Burke. Sheridan offered what appeared to Fox ‘all the necessary concessions’, but not enough to satisfy Burke. The attempt therefore failed.⁴⁸The quarrel became a cause célèbre, and was extensively reported in the newspapers. Amusingly, Pitt’s endorsement of Burke led to an immediate volte-face on the part of The Times, one of the ‘ministerial prints’ to which Sheridan had alluded. Its offensive paragraphs ridiculing or pillorying Burke were discontinued, and favourable ones began to appear. The Times even discovered that (in contrast to Sheridan) ‘warm as his attachment to the PARTY was’, Burke ‘never forgot what was due to his country’. If he ‘went to great lengths in political declamation, he did not lose sight of the true principles of the constitution’.⁴⁹ Suddenly, all was forgiven. Burke determined to take his case to a wider public. Although the Reflections was already in the press, he suspended work on it and hurried into print, as an immediate and accessible statement of his position, a version of ⁴⁶ Debrett, xviii. – (PH xxviii. –). ⁴⁷ Thomas Pelham to Lord Pelham, [ Feb. ] (BL Add. MS , fos. –). Richard Fitzpatrick to Mrs Benwell, Feb. (BL Add MS B, fo. ). ⁴⁸ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Feb. (Life and Letters, i. ). ⁴⁹ The Times, Feb. . The Times had lately satirized E.B. as ‘our British Jesuit’, the ‘Bogtrotter’ who introduced ‘Hurling’ (playing on the Irish game and E.B.’s ‘hurled from his throne’) into the House of Commons ( Jan. ), and ridiculed the impeachment as his ‘farce of “Muny Begum in the Suds” ’, to be ‘presented on the first opening of the theatre in Palace Yard’ ( Jan.). On Jan., E.B. was again ridiculed in ‘The Focus’.
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his speech of February. Copies were available as early as February.⁵⁰ A preface describes the pamphlet as ‘the heads and substance’ of the speech, intended as an ‘abstract’, not a verbatim record of what Burke had said. The published Substance of the Speech, while indeed the same in ‘substance’, differs in tone from the newspaper reports. Burke rendered the opening attack on Pitt and Grenville more dignified and statesmanlike by omitting both the jibe at ‘persons raw from schools and colleges’ and the fable of the hare and the frogs. He rephrased the panegyric on Fox to suggest that, being ‘of a temper mild and placable even to a fault’, Fox was the dupe of others less ‘artless, candid, open, and benevolent’ (W iii. ). The most revealing change, however, was in the peroration. Burke replaced the allusion to Solon with a quotation from Ovid: ‘Turpe senex miles’. ‘At his time of life,’ he explained, ‘if he could not do something by some sort of weight of opinion, natural or acquired, it was useless and indecorous to attempt anything by mere struggle’ (). This echoes the passage in his letter to Lord Charlemont of July where he complained of his exclusion from the inner circle of the party (C vi. ). Instead of presenting himself as Solon boldly confronting Peisistratus, he cast himself as an anonymous old soldier, worn out but too poor to retire. The effect is to make the speech less aggressive, as Burke casts himself as the victim. Reaching a wider audience by report and in print, Burke’s speech was remarkably well received, initiating the slow process whereby he began to reacquire some of the ‘weight of opinion’ that he had so conspicuously lost during the Regency Crisis. Queen Charlotte had every reason to think ill of Burke, who had repeatedly opposed the powers and patronage ceded to her by Pitt’s Regency Bill, hinting that she and Pitt were colluding to usurp the royal power.⁵¹ Yet on March the queen showed her appreciation of his Speech on the Army Estimates by an unusual reversal of roles, herself reading part of it aloud to her reader ( Jean-André Deluc, –). To Frances Burney, also present, she lent her copy for her to read the entire speech. Burney was captivated: ‘It is truly beautiful, alike in nobleness of sentiment and animation of language. How happy does it make me to see this old favourite once more on the side of right and reason!’⁵² Even more valuable, because extorted, is the ⁵⁰ Substance of the Speech of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, in the Debate on the Army Estimates, in the House of Commons, on Tuesday, the th Day of February, . Comprehending a Discussion of the Present State of Affairs in France (Todd, ). The speech was several times translated into French (Todd, f–j). ⁵¹ Jan., , , , , Feb. (PH xxvii. , , –, , –, –, ). E.B. was prejudiced against the queen because he believed that Hastings was under her ‘protection’ (to Lord Charlemont, July : C vi. ). Privately, E.B. was reported to have remarked: ‘Is it to be the House of Hanover, or the House of Strelitz [the queen’s family] that is to govern the country?’ (Lord Harcourt to Lady Harcourt, Jan. , in Harcourt Papers, ed. Edward William Harcourt (Oxford, [–]), iv. –). Deriding E.B.’s passage on Marie Antoinette in the Reflections, Philip Francis jibed, ‘how long have you felt yourself so desperately disposed to admire the Ladies of Germany?’ ( Feb. : C vi. ). ⁵² Burney’s Journal, Mar. (Diary & Letters, ed. Charlotte Barrett and Austin Dobson (London, –), iv. ).
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commendation of the dowager Lady Chatham (–; the elder Pitt’s widow). She observed acidly that Burke’s ‘Profession of Attachment to Constitutional Principles’ made her ‘wish to forget, If it cou’d be, the Past’.⁵³ One reviewer, having ‘spoken in favour of the revolution, at a time when expectation was sanguine, and when the first steps were promising’, used the publication of Burke’s speech as an opportunity to recant, acknowledging that ‘each day’s experience adds . . . to the force of Mr Burke’s opinions’.⁵⁴ Such comments anticipate the favourable reception of the Reflections in November. Conversely, Earl Stanhope (–), wrote a pamphlet reply which was a foretaste of the numerous replies that the Reflections would provoke. Convinced that the Revolution was over, Stanhope believed that it would in time ‘disseminate throughout Europe, liberality of sentiment, and a just regard for Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty’ and ‘make the World, for Centuries, prosperous, free, and happy’.⁵⁵ Stanhope proved no prophet. Burke soon found a second occasion to distance himself from Fox. On March, when Fox moved for a committee to consider the repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, Burke spoke vigorously against it. His stand surprised some and has the appearance of a volte-face, for as recently as May he had expressed support for an identical motion (C v. –), and the Whigs had always been associated with Dissent. First applied to political parties at the time of the Exclusion Crisis of –, the meaning of the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ changed considerably over the next century. One element, however, remained constant: the Dissenters overwhelmingly supported the Whigs, and the Tories were identified with the Established Church. Although the parliamentary Whigs were almost all at least nominal members of the Church of England, they were generally sympathetic to Dissent, and usually supported measures intended to mitigate the civil disabilities imposed on the Dissenters. Against this background, Burke’s pro-Catholic sympathies made him an untypical Whig. Nevertheless, during his early years in parliament he too had supported the Dissenters on some occasions.⁵⁶ The alliance between the Whigs and Dissent had been broken in , when the Dissenters had overwhelmingly supported Pitt against the Coalition. Burke bitterly resented this betrayal, which he never forgave or forgot.⁵⁷ Personal resentment was thus an element in the hostility towards the Dissenters that Burke manifested after . With Burke, such personal factors should never be underestimated, for emotional loyalties and hatreds often influenced his political views. ⁵³ Lady Chatham to Dr Edward Wilson, Feb. (Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, U/S/C/). ⁵⁴ Critical Review, (Apr. ), –. ⁵⁵ A Letter from Earl Stanhope to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Containing a Short Answer to his Late Speech on the French Revolution (nd edn. London, ), . ⁵⁶ Speeches on Toleration Bill, Apr. , Mar. (WS ii. –, –). ⁵⁷ E.B. to Richard Bright, – May , Feb. ; to William Weddell, Jan. (C v. , vi. , vii. –). E.B. was not alone. Theophilus Lindsey reported that ‘many old whigs of my acquaintance in
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Yet Burke was motivated by principle as well as by pique. He had, in fact, never been an unqualified supporter of Dissent. One of his earliest documented convictions, predating his entry into politics, was of the necessity of an Established Church.⁵⁸ Nor did he abandon or conceal this belief in conformity to the views of the majority of his party. In –, when several measures in favour of Dissent were canvassed, Burke on one occasion spoke and voted against his usual associates. While prepared to support and even extend the principle of ‘toleration’, as he understood it, he opposed any weakening of the position of the Established Church. In practice, by ‘toleration’ he meant allowing Dissenters freedom of worship and education. But he opposed relaxing the requirement that Anglican clergy subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles.⁵⁹ In , when Burke was canvassing on behalf of relief for the Catholics in Ireland, one of the arguments he used implied a readiness to support the repeal of the Test Act in England. When challenged on this, he admitted that, if the repeal were moved, he would support it, though he did not expect such a proposal to be introduced.⁶⁰ At first sight, this admission appears to convict Burke of inconsistency in . In , however, when a measure was introduced to relieve Dissenting teachers of a requirement to subscribe the doctrinal articles, Burke took the lead in insisting that a substitute declaration be subscribed instead.⁶¹ When the repeal of the Test Act was agitated in , he repeated this argument for an alternative ‘test’. A second consideration is that, by , the Dissenters were making larger claims and asserting them more stridently. Far from restricting themselves to the pursuit of freedom of belief and worship (what Burke called ‘toleration’), they now sought full civil equality with members of the Established Church.⁶² Even had the Dissenters not supported Pitt in , Burke had ample grounds, in his own previous convictions and from the change in the demands being advanced, for opposing Fox’s motion. Since , Pitt had steadily withdrawn from his earlier stance as a reformer, leaving Fox to re-emerge as the patron of Dissent. In , therefore, when (after their second defeat) the Dissenters began to lobby for a third attempt to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, Fox agreed to introduce the motion in the Commons. With an election expected in , even Burke was the house, through resentment I think at the Dissenters having conspired so much to bring in Mr Pitt and his party, are resolved to absent themselves or to vote against the Bill’ (to William Tayleur, Mar. ; Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Theophilus Lindsey Letters, Unitarian College Archive). ⁵⁸ ‘Religion’, in A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, ed. H. V. F. Somerset (Cambridge, ), –. ⁵⁹ Supra, i. –. ⁶⁰ E.B. to Edmund Sexton Pery, July (C iv. ). ⁶¹ Apr. (London Evening Post, – Apr.). The test was proposed by Lord North, but according to Theophilus Lindsey, Burke ‘gave a turn to the house, so that to him and his prejudices, (for he seemed to be sincere throughout) we owe the test’ (to William Tayleur, Apr. ; John Rylands University Library, Theophilus Lindsey Letters, Unitarian College Archive). ⁶² Richard Burgess Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience: A Study of the Theory and Practice of Religious Toleration in England during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, ), –.
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prepared to urge Fox to cultivate the Dissenters. In the summer of , Alexander Blair, an industrialist and a Dissenter, rented Hall Barn, the Waller house in Beaconsfield, and therefore became a neighbour of Burke. A friend of Joseph Priestley (–), the celebrated chemist and Unitarian minister, he wrote to Fox to obtain permission for Priestley to dedicate a scientific work to the Prince of Wales. Indolent as usual in the recess, Fox had done nothing. Burke wrote to remind him, and also raised the matter with Captain Jack Payne (–), one of the prince’s cronies. The Dissenters, Burke observed to Fox, were ‘powerful enough in many things, but most of all in elections’ ( Sept. : C vi. ). Burke was not himself prepared to court them. Secure at Malton, he personally could afford to ignore their electoral power. In , he had promised Richard Bright to vote for the repeal if he felt well enough to attend the debate; in the event, Burke stayed away. Since then, as he explained to Bright in a tactful refusal of support, Dissenters had taken the lead in forming a ‘considerable party’ which was ‘proceeding systematically, to the destruction of this Constitution in some of its essential parts’. In evidence, he cited ‘two extraordinary works’ recently brought to his attention, pamphlets to which he would refer in the forthcoming debate ( Feb. : –). The debate on March covered familiar ground. Burke spoke not so much in reply to Fox’s speech (which touched but lightly on ‘rights’) as against the arguments he had lately read in the pamphlets. Their claims of ‘right’ were anathema to Burke, and he denied them categorically. Abstract principles of any kind he disliked; but ‘of all abstract principles, abstract principles of natural right—which the dissenters rested on as their strong hold—were the most idle, because the most useless and the most dangerous to resort to’.⁶³ This was one of Burke’s most firmly held convictions. Throughout the dispute with the American colonies, from the repeal of the Stamp Act in to the conciliation proposals a decade later, he had deprecated all talk of ‘rights’.⁶⁴ Now, more forcefully than before, he argued that ‘natural rights’ are all surrendered on entry to civil society, where the rights men enjoy are a matter for that society to determine. In an eloquent paean to civil society, Burke offered a foretaste of the Reflections: It annihilated all those natural rights, and drew to its mass all the component parts of which those rights were made up. It took in all the virtue of the virtuous, all the wisdom of the wise. It gave life, security, and action to every faculty of the soul, and secured the possession of every comfort which those proud and boasting natural rights impotently held out, but could not ascertain. It gave alms to the indigent, defence to the weak, instruction to the ignorant, employment to the industrious, consolation to those who wanted it, nurture to the helpless, support to the aged, faith to the doubtful, hope to those in despair, and charity to all the human race; extending ⁶³ PH xxviii. –.
⁶⁴ Feb. (WS ii. , ); Speech on Conciliation ( Mar. : iii. ).
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itself from acts of tenderness to the infant when it first cried in the cradle, to acts of comfort and preparation to the dying man on the way to the tomb.⁶⁵
Such an anticipation of the Reflections is hardly surprising, since Burke was working on the book at this time. Having rejected the argument from ‘right’, he turned to what the Dissenters had lately said and done. He quoted several works (including Price’s anniversary sermon) to prove that their real aim was no longer ‘toleration’ or freedom of worship but the destruction of the Established Church. Ten years earlier, Burke acknowledged, he would have voted for the repeal. Even now, rather surprisingly, he declared at the end of his speech that he would not vote against it.⁶⁶ Some residual loyalty to a cherished Whig principle prevented him from acting on the logic of his own argument. No misplaced affection for a former associate restrained Fox. In his speech in reply, he pointedly controverted Burke’s arguments. Against his old friend, whose speech ‘filled him with grief and shame’, he affirmed his own reliance on ‘principles’ rather than on ‘pamphlets, private letters, anecdotes, conjectures, suspicions, and invectives’. Charging Burke with apostasy, Fox even quoted against him one of his speeches on the American war. Perhaps most offensive, because so gratuitous, was his explanation of Burke’s ‘dereliction’, which he affected to trace to a ‘too great and nice sensibility’. Events in France had affected his feelings and imagination so much that he had ‘lost the energy of his natural judgment, through the exquisite acuteness of his feelings’. The ‘transactions’ in France, Fox believed, were no more than the inevitable ‘miseries’ incident to any revolution in government ‘before the new constitution had acquired its full operation and establishment’.⁶⁷ These hurtful personalities appreciably widened the breach between two. Like many contemporaries, Fox thought the ‘revolution’ was over, or almost over. The voting figures suggest that Burke’s fears were more widely shared than Fox’s hopes. His motion was overwhelmingly defeated, by to . Support remained at about the same level as in () and (). Opposition, however, had increased substantially: from in and in .⁶⁸ The larger vote against repeal was probably a response to recent events in France, for little else had changed since the previous year’s debate. A year earlier, the old rallying-cry of ‘the Church in danger’ would have seemed alarmist. The spoliation of the Gallican Church made it plausible. Two days later, Burke again rose to defend the constitution against another innovation proposed by an old friend, Henry Flood (‒).⁶⁹ On March ⁶⁵ PH xxviii. . ⁶⁶ Ibid. –. E.B.’s declaration that he would not vote against the motion (not in PH) is reported in The Debate of the House of Commons, on Tuesday the d March, (London, ), ; and The Debate in the House of Commons on the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (London, ), . E.B. to R.B. Jr., Mar. , confirms that he did not vote (C vii. ). ⁶⁷ PH xxviii. –. ⁶⁸ CJ xlii. ( Mar. ), xliv. ( May ), xlv. ( Mar. ). ⁶⁹ E.B. knew Flood well in the s: six letters of show a close if not intimate friendship (C i. –; WWM, Bk P /; NRO, A. VIII. ; UBL (II), –). Thereafter they drifted apart: the only later
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, Flood proposed the addition of one hundred ‘county’ members, elected on a householder franchise. Citing the example of France, Flood explicitly offered his as a preventive reform, designed to satisfy what he thought were the legitimate aspirations of those who, largely excluded by the present system, deserved to be part of the political nation. Burke spoke briefly against the lesson Flood drew from events in France. In a series of rhetorical questions, Flood had asked: ‘who dared tell the middle ranks of life, that they ought not to enjoy that peculiar privilege, the exercise of the rights of electors?’ Burke dared. As in the debate on March, he rejected the argument from ‘right’. Rather, as he would argue at greater length in the Reflections, the franchise was a privilege, its extent to be determined by authority of law, prescription, and practice. He further denied Flood’s contention that a broader franchise would have prevented the American war, or ended it sooner. Democracy, Burke argued, citing examples from classical history, is by nature aggressive and tyrannical. The war with America ‘was originally the war of the people, and had been put a stop to, not by them, but by the virtue of a British House of Commons’. The House of Commons was corrupt; but what body of men was not? With his own experience at Bristol and the forthcoming general election in his mind, he argued that corruption within the Commons was as nothing to ‘the deluge of corruption practised by the people themselves, and now about to be let loose without doors’. For Burke, recent events in France only confirmed what he already knew, from history and his personal experience at Bristol, of the evils of elections and democracy. Others, who had previously supported similar reforms (such as Pitt and Wilberforce), without exactly recanting, argued that the time was not ripe to consider an extension of the franchise. Even Fox, though giving token support to Flood’s motion, was constrained to admit that public opinion was against reform. The motion was indirectly negatived without a division.⁷⁰ As these debates show, Burke was by no means isolated in his opposition to constitutional reform. On the contrary, his stance was shared by a large majority of MPs. After the dismal session, perhaps only two people would not have been relieved to be rid of the impeachment: Burke himself, and Francis. Even for Burke, the cause had become a species of purgatory. Though Hastings repeatedly complained of the hardships and sufferings imposed on him by letter (of Jan. , when E.B. wrote to thank Flood for defending him in the Irish House of Commons; C iv. –) is formal and distant. ⁷⁰ PH xxviii. –. CJ xlv. .
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the length of the trial, the managers, as Burke protested bitterly to Lord Charlemont, ‘betrayed by those who employ us, and traversd by the corruption of the Judges before whom we plead’, were the real sufferers ( July : C vi. ). Francis’s implacable hatred kept alive not only determination but hope: that Hastings would be convicted on at least one charge.⁷¹ No one else was so sanguine. During the recess, of course, the other managers would do little or nothing. Since Burke was now estranged from Fox and Sheridan, he decided to use Francis as an intermediary to prod them into resuming some share of ‘this our strange derelict Business’ ( Nov.: ). Meanwhile, early in December , on successive days the cause suffered two further setbacks. On the th, William Perryman (d. ), publisher of the Morning Herald, was convicted of libelling Sir Elijah Impey. The case originated in February , when Sir Gilbert Elliot was moving Impey’s impeachment. Impey had complained to the Commons of libels published against him. Despite vigorous protests from Burke and others, the House had ordered a prosecution. Convinced that Impey was the guilty party, Burke regarded this verdict in his favour as a monstrous travesty of justice.⁷² In the second case, tried on December, the roles were reversed. On February , the managers had demanded the prosecution of a pamphlet by John Logan (c.–) arraigning the impeachment of Hastings, and the House had agreed.⁷³ Since the pamphlet was anonymous, the publisher, John Stockdale (c.–), was indicted for publishing a libel on the Commons. Stockdale was defended by the eminent barrister Thomas Erskine (–), whose political connections were with opposition and who enjoyed a reputation as a libertarian.⁷⁴ Erskine advanced three main lines of defence. First, that since the charges had been published as a pamphlet, publication of a refutation of them was reasonable. Second, the pamphlet did not attack ‘the House of Commons’ as a body, but attributed the impeachment to a ‘faction’ that ‘by misrepresentation and violence’ had imposed it ‘on an unwilling House of Commons’. This imputation was highly offensive ⁷¹ Francis to E.B., Jan. (WWM, Bk P /; printed in Corr. (), iii. , misdated ). ⁷² Public Advertiser, Dec. ; General Evening Post, – Dec. ⁷³ Public Advertiser, Feb. (PH xxvii. –). E.B. had met Logan in , when Logan sent him a volume of his poems. E.B. praised the ‘Ode to the Cuckoo’ (now usually attributed to Michael Bruce, whose posthumous poems Logan edited) as ‘extremely elegant, and as far as I can judge, perfectly New in the thoughts, and the manner of handling the Subject’ ( July : C iv. –). E.B. later described Logan as ‘no contemptible Poet’, and acknowledged that he ‘liked a little Poem of his called the Cuckoo’ ( Jan : C viii. ). A careless quotation in the original Dictionary of National Biography has given currency to the idea that E.B. ‘pronounced’ this indifferent poem ‘the most beautiful lyric in our language’. The canard originated with John Small, who claimed that E.B. ‘complimented him as the author of the most beautiful lyric in our language’ (British and Foreign Evangelical Review, (), ). In the DNB, Small’s words are attributed directly to E.B. ⁷⁴ In , Erskine offered his services to Hastings and even accepted a retaining fee, before withdrawing, to Hastings’s annoyance (BL Add. MS , fo. ). Presumably he withdrew in deference to Fox. In the Stockdale case, his desire to appear in a libertarian cause seems to have trumped his friendship with Fox.
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to the managers, and indeed hardly creditable to the supposedly duped House. But the argument that Burke found most disturbing was the third. Passing beyond the strictly legal issue, Erskine raised the substantive question of how British India should be governed. After quoting Logan’s defence of Hastings’s use of ‘discretionary power’, Erskine asserted that ‘it is mad and preposterous to bring to the standard of justice and humanity, the exercise of a dominion founded upon violence and terror’. If Britons wanted to retain ‘our Oriental empire’, they must not ‘affect to be shocked’ at the only methods by which it could be governed. This third argument was strictly irrelevant to the legal case. Manifestly, Erskine included it because he thought it would appeal to the jury, as it did. Stockdale was acquitted.⁷⁵ Hastings himself had at least made the exercise of arbitrary power a regrettable necessity in a state emergency. Erskine bluntly asserted that arbitrary power was the inevitable concomitant of empire, apparently oblivious to the incongruity of defending freedom of speech in Britain while endorsing despotism in India. This was ‘Geographical morality’ indeed. In such proximity, these defeats, and especially the acquittal of Stockdale, were heavy inflictions, and they confirmed Burke’s worst fears about not only judicial, but popular bias in favour of Indian delinquents. Writing to Francis, he drew up a formidable catalogue of discouragements: the indifference and apathy of the ‘pretended friends’ of the impeachment; the venom of ‘hired Libels’ against the managers; the ill-will of the judiciary and the bias of the judges; the unpopularity of the cause in the country at large, and the antipathy to it in the Commons in particular ( Dec. : C vi. ). No wonder that, a few days earlier, he had confessed ‘that at last I totally despair; and think of nothing but an honourable retreat’ ( Dec.: ). In truth, however, for Burke no ‘retreat’ could ever be ‘honourable’. His temperament required him to fight to the last. Fox was decidedly less eager. Since he and Burke were now somewhat estranged, Francis served as intermediary. In late December , he was lucky enough to find Fox at Bath, where his undivided attention was easier to capture than in London. Better disposed to the cause than Francis had feared, Fox agreed to sum up the evidence on parts of the Presents charge. Even Burke had come to accept, reluctantly enough, that the managers would not be able to go through all the charges. Yet he remained convinced that the Contracts article was essential as a corollary to the Presents charge. Fox demurred. Francis, however, persuaded him to consent.⁷⁶
⁷⁵ The Whole Proceedings on the Trial of an Information Exhibited . . . against John Stockdale; for a Libel on the House of Commons (London, ); Erskine’s speech, – (quotations from , ). The trial is repr. in Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howells (London, –), xxii. –. ⁷⁶ Francis to E.B., Jan. ; Corr. (), iii. .
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The trial itself resumed on February, its fifty-fourth day. Aware that he was no great orator, Anstruther opened the remaining parts of the Presents charge with a lengthy (four and a half hours) but unexciting speech. Frances Burney observed that many in the audience ‘took gentle naps’. Only in his peroration did Anstruther essay a more impassioned style. Alluding to the defence of despotism advanced by Erskine at the trial of Stockdale, Anstruther reprobated the idea that a governor must ‘violate all the laws of God and nature’ or ‘run counter to all the principles of Asiatic government’. If the British could not rule ‘without inhumanity and injustice’, they should withdraw from India.⁷⁷ On the th, the fifty-fifth day, Anstruther began the presentation of evidence. The defence immediately recurred to the strategy that had proved so successful in , objections to admissibility. Law argued that some of the charges were too vague to require any defence, and therefore that no evidence should be admitted that tended to prove only a ‘general allegation’. Perhaps to Law’s surprise, Thurlow offered him no encouragement, insisting that, until a specific objection had been made to a specific piece of evidence, the court could not intervene.⁷⁸ On February, the fifty-sixth sitting, Law objected more forcibly to the presentation of evidence that did not relate to ‘certain definite and marked criminations’. This brought Burke to his feet for the first time in the session, provoking him to two brief rebuttals of Law’s contentions of irrelevance. The most memorable episode of the day, however, was a cutting rebuke of Law by Thurlow. This represented no softening on Thurlow’s part towards the prosecution, though he may have felt that a demonstration of judicial impartiality was in order. For Thurlow, characteristically, impartiality meant treating Law as harshly as he had previously treated the managers.⁷⁹ Law had yet to feel sufficiently confident of his ground to press a formal challenge to any of the managers’ evidence. Then, on February, the fiftyseventh day, he scented his first opportunity. The charge was that Hastings had taken a bribe of lakhs of rupees to appoint Raja Kyallaram and Maharaja Kalyan Singh as revenue farmers of the province of Bihar. When Anstruther tried to prove that Kyallaram was an improper person to have appointed, Law objected that his unfitness was not part of the charge. To Anstruther’s contention that the unfitness was an aggravation, Thurlow retorted that it should have been so charged. Burke then rose to make his first substantive intervention of the session. In a rambling and emotive speech, he conceded that some prosecutions are so odious that the court should be strict. Typically, he turned to literature for an example: Shylock. To tell the managers that ‘we are to have a pound of Mr Hastings’s flesh and not one drop of his blood’ was a perversion of justice. The unfitness of the person appointed implies ⁷⁷ Bond, ii. –. Burney, Diary & Letters, iv. –. Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ⁷⁸ BL Add. MS , fos. –. ⁷⁹ Ibid. – (Thurlow’s rebuke, –).
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corruption. As so often, Burke tried to sweep aside the legal niceties: ‘we are not here . . . to charge Mr Hastings with this crime or that crime with regard to the neatness and precision of it, but we are to shew you that they are not only crimes but high crimes.’ Burke’s real concern, however, was with the justice of the prosecution. More was at issue than a few questionable pecuniary transactions. Unless the bribes had been ‘followed with dreadful consequences’ in India, the managers would hardly have stood ‘all the obloquy, calumny, all the bought and hired abuse with which the Prostitutes of Indian delinquence have abused them’. Called to order by Law, Burke retorted that, for all that Hastings complained of the length of his trial, and protested that he had nothing to hide, as soon as the managers offered any evidence, his counsel sought to prevent it being heard.⁸⁰ Burke’s point was valid, though the defence strategy appears to have been determined by the counsel more than by Hastings himself. As his defence before the Commons showed, Hastings was confident that his conduct was not merely blameless, but meritorious. His counsel were content with the surer, if less glorious, method of securing the exclusion of evidence. Thurlow ignored Burke’s outburst, returning to the question of whether Kyallaram’s unfitness ought to have been specified in the charge, thus giving Hastings the opportunity to rebut it. The Lords then retired to consider the objection; on their return, the verdict was given against the managers. Burke objected at some length that the managers had not had sufficient opportunity to make their case, and repeated the familiar argument that ‘the Commons of Great Britain are not bound to any rules of pleadings’. His claim that the managers were ‘laymen totally ignorant of the Doctrine of Pleading’ was somewhat disingenuous, for they could and did avail themselves of expert legal advice. To say that Hastings was obliged ‘in equity’ to answer the accusation because, though omitted from the articles, it had been charged in the Commons, was a feeble excuse for the loose drafting of the articles themselves. Interrupted by Law, Burke responded with an even more meandering and diffuse self-exculpation, protesting that ‘if I had said anything that was irregular or improper your Lordships would instantly command me to be silent and I should as instantly submit to your determination.’ This claim, so absurdly at variance with Burke’s actual behaviour, his habitual pertinacity in seeking to circumvent the rulings of the court, reveals the disturbed state of his mind. Indeed, his next point shows a complete refusal to accept the protocols of legal procedure. He rested the managers’ exemption from the rules on ‘their knowledge that the party had the most perfect Knowledge of the aggravation with which he was going to be charged & that he knew the blackness of his act at the time he committed it’. This assertion ⁸⁰ Ibid. –.
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again illustrates how far Burke was from accepting the elementary rules of a criminal prosecution.⁸¹ Since the trial was suspended while the judges went on circuit, nearly two months elapsed before the next (the fifty-eighth) sitting, on April. This proved almost a reprise of the frustrations of February. Anstruther again proposed evidence of the ill consequences of Kyallaram’s appointment; Law again objected. The remainder of the day was occupied by an elaborate exchange of arguments between Anstruther, Fox, and Burke on the one side and Law, Plumer, and Dallas on the other. That all three of Hastings’s counsel spoke indicates the importance they attached to the question. These arguments show that Fox had by no means abandoned interest in the trial; both he and Anstruther evinced a greater familiarity with the legal technicalities, whereas Burke’s three interventions touch only lightly on the precise legal questions. The Lords withdrew, and referred the question to the judges, who asked for time to consider.⁸² The court resumed on April, the fifty-ninth day. The judges having ruled against the managers, Thurlow announced the rejection of the disputed evidence. On this occasion, Fox responded to the decision, and he did so in a manner markedly less choleric than was habitual with Burke on like occasions. The remainder of the day was taken up with further questioning, by Anstruther and Burke, designed to show the competence of the old provincial revenue councils, and the oppression likely to result from Hastings’s appointment of Kyallaram as both diwan and revenue-farmer. Frances Burney recorded the day as ‘mixed: Evidence and Mr Anstruther weighing it down, and Mr Burke speaking from time to time, and lighting it up’. As on the nd, the proceedings were brought to an end when Law objected to a question and the Lords retired to deliberate.⁸³ The next sitting, the sixtieth (on April), began with a difference. Thurlow announced the rejection of the managers’ question, but not on the ground (hearsay) that Law had pressed. Instead, it was rejected as inapplicable to the sixth article. Fox again responded more smoothly than was Burke’s wont. In the spirit of one playing an intellectual game with arcane rules, of which he had not been vouchsafed a copy, he announced that he would try to make the question applicable to the seventh article. Law, however, objected to his first question as relating to effects not charged in the article. This led to another lengthy wrangle. Law’s task was facilitated by the managers’ poor drafting. Once again, the prosecution was paying a penalty for Burke’s refusal to modify the form of the articles. For example, when Anstruther asked ‘whether oppressions did exist more or less after the appointment of the old than the new government’, Law objected to the question as relating to ‘a ⁸¹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. ⁸² Ibid. –. ⁸³ Ibid. –. Burney, Diary & Letters, iv. –.
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consequence not charged’. When Anstruther pointed to the words ‘tended to the vexation the oppression and the destruction of the Inhabitants of Bengal’, Law argued that they were mere ‘general words’, a formulaic ‘inference of law’, like the words ‘against the peace of our Lord the King’ found in every criminal indictment. Burke seized on the quibbling nature of the objection to launch into one of those emotive purple patches that had delighted Frances Burney on the th: I will venture to say that a man who is scourged and tortured—a man who has had his money unjustly taken from him knows something more in his feelings than an inference of law—when a Father and Son are tied one to another and whipped round, it is an inference of law they do not feel it—they know nothing of it; and all the bloody scourges, the enormous oppressions,—the squeezing money from the Inhabitants, the dreadful ruin of the first families in the world, are all inferences of Law.
This passage shows how unable or unwilling Burke was to recognize the canons of legal proof. Instead, he cited the trial of Henry Sacheverell to prove that ‘there is no rule of pleading drawn from the Courts below binding upon the Commons’. The rest of the sitting was devoted to legal argument on this point. Again, all three defence counsel spoke. Were the managers entitled to elicit evidence about oppression in general, or were they limited to questions about the oppression of named individuals, as specified in the articles of charge? The Lords retired to consult.⁸⁴ No one can have been surprised when, at the next sitting (the sixty-first), on May, Thurlow announced the inadmissibility of the managers’ question. Even Burke was now weary of protesting, and in a speech of extraordinary brevity (thirty words) responded that the managers submitted but did not acquiesce. The highlight of the day’s proceedings was an unusual flash of wit from Law. Alluding to the recent heroic exploit of Edward Riou (–), who successfully steered his shattered ship back to land, Burke affirmed the managers’ resolve ‘to carry on this Cause to the last and like Captain Riou to stick to our wreck till the last’. In a rare moment of humour, Law took up the allusion: ‘The argument of the honourable Manager is to be sure very much that of a shipwrecked Man ready to seize any Plank he can lay hold of—I have no objection to his doing it provided he can show that the plank is in the Ship but I don’t find any such charge as a clandestine receipt.’ Law argued that the concealment of the bribes was not charged, except in the concluding words, which (following a previous ruling) he treated as an inference of law. Burke responded that, unless the managers were allowed to produce all their evidence, Hastings ‘may be acquitted legally but goes from your Bar an infamous person’.⁸⁵ Burke’s appeal to disallow legal niceties in the interests of ⁸⁴ BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotation from E.B. on ). ⁸⁵ Ibid. –. E.B.’s allusion to Riou was highly topical. News of his survival had only just reached London (Public Advertiser, Apr.– May ).
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substantive justice is at odds with a cherished principle of English law, and indeed with the idea of ‘due process’. Should an accused not be entitled to take advantage of legal rules and technicalities? As Burke was well aware, the harshness of the English criminal law was often mitigated by requiring strict standards of proof and procedure. In this case, the problem was of his own making. Having sacrificed legal form to make the articles sensational reading, and resisted attempts to recast them, Burke had only himself to blame if they now proved a weak basis for a legal proceeding. Because he ‘knew’ that Hastings was guilty, Burke was impatient with rules that frustrated the proof of that guilt, and oblivious of how dangerous a principle he was advocating. The sixty-second day of the trial, May, was chiefly notable for the managers ostentatiously making a parade of not objecting to defence questions. In order to elicit the defence’s version of events, Anderson was crossquestioned by Law about the functions of the provincial councils. This was exactly the kind of parole evidence about written documents to which Law routinely objected when offered by the prosecution. When Anstruther objected, Law replied feebly that, without such short-cuts, ‘we should have to travel through the whole Records to find them’. Yet this was exactly what he expected the managers to do. Once the point about Law’s inconsistency had been made, Burke withdrew the objection. Later in the day’s proceedings, he twice digressed to commend the managers for never objecting to, or attempting to conceal, evidence. Attending the trial with her sailor brother, Frances Burney canvassed ‘all affairs, naval and national’ with him. ‘The trial is my only place for long dialogues’, she observed wistfully. Yet she paid some attention to the proceedings, noting ‘a very fine speech’ by Burke and commending Windham for speaking on a point of law ‘with a clearness and perspicuity very uncommon indeed amongst these orators’.⁸⁶ Most of the next sitting, on May (the sixty-third), was again consumed with disputes about evidence. Having established that the old revenue system did not require the use of torture to compel payment, the managers sought to prove that the new one could not be operated without it. Law objected to Burke asking William Harwood whether, as a revenue collector, he found the use of torture necessary. Later, he objected to the reading of a minute by Hastings himself, as irrelevant to the charge. Anstruther and Burke both argued that it was part of a chain of evidence, tending to prove that considerable enormities could be concealed from a European observer. The Lords retired to consider the question; on their return, the decision was given against the managers. Devi Singh’s enormities were not charged, and therefore could not be proved. Burke now made up for the brevity of his response on May by a protest, one of his longest, that took up most of the remainder of the session. Recurring to his opening speech, he recalled his description of ⁸⁶ BL Add. MS , fos. –, , . Burney, Diary & Letters, iv. –.
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‘a series of the most atrocious cruelties that ever have disgraced and ruined human nature and ever have desolated a Country’. These atrocities the defence called upon him to prove. A ‘great and noble Lord’ even remarked that ‘if these facts were not proved . . . the Manager who spoke them must be considered as a Calumniator’. Yet when the managers offered evidence to prove them, the defence, instead of controverting it, tried to prevent its being considered. After this long protest, the sitting ended tamely with the production of some uncontroversial documents.⁸⁷ Arguments about evidence again dominated the next sitting, the sixtyfourth (on May). This time, the dispute was about a letter from the Supreme Council to the directors. Plumer observed that the seventh article charged as false one particular statement in the letter, and objected to the managers entering into the falsehood of any other parts. This occasioned a lengthy debate, with substantial contributions from Fox and Anstruther as well as from Burke. Fox offered a close reading of the charge, arguing that its actual wording authorized the evidence that the managers sought to adduce. Anstruther cited a whole string of precedents, from authorities as well as from early impeachments, to show that circumstantial evidence had been admitted with considerable latitude. Burke, in contrast, took the high constitutional ground. Impeachment is the only means of controlling ‘wicked and corrupt Ministers’. This is the fundamental point on which Burke refused to recognize that, in eighteenth-century conditions, impeachment was an anachronistic political weapon. Viewing ministerial ‘wickedness’ as criminal, Burke regarded impeachment as a constitutional rather than a legal process. He therefore argued that the House of Lords was ‘a Court in which you judge principally from the principles which God has planted in the breasts of men which education has improved and a high situation brings to perfection’. Once more, Burke exposed the incongruity between Hastings’s high-flown protestations of innocence and merit, and the legalistic conduct of his defence in seeking to obstruct the presentation of evidence. In an impeachment, he argued, no objection of a formal or technical nature could be valid: ‘both the charge and the evidence must be regulated by the Law of Nature’. Admittedly, an accused should not be required to answer a charge or evidence ‘which he has no way of knowing’. Reason, truth, and ‘the eternal principles of justice’ say as much. But a letter, written by the accused with the express purpose of justifying his conduct, is surely admissible evidence according to ‘the eternal laws of truth and the nature of things’.⁸⁸ When Law interrupted to protest against the inclusion of ‘extraneous matter’, Burke darkly hinted at ‘what it is that gives them this boldness is a thing to be considered’. He meant that Hastings was protected by the influence of the queen. In Burke’s mind, the case of Hastings was still inextricably ⁸⁷ BL Add. MS , fos. –.
⁸⁸ Ibid. –.
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linked with the old conspiracy theory of ‘secret influence’ and the ‘double cabinet’. More was thus at stake than a criminal charge. At issue was a fundamental constitutional principle: The more deeply we wade into this business the more we see that we are not merely trying this Criminal but we are trying the Constitution—We are trying the Laws of the Land—we are trying whatever is most dear to Englishmen, for if we cannot without charging them prove any one account to be false which Ministers such as this man give as a reason for what they have done there is an end of that which the Commons have thought the security of our Constitution—that the Crown cannot stop an Impeachment[.] but if here are principles laid down which render a Minister like this at your Bar totally irresponsible . . . there is an end of that last anchor of our Constitution.
To apply the rules of evidence that govern procedures in the lower courts to an impeachment would guarantee, Burke feared, that no minister could ever be convicted of crimes such as bribery and corruption, which, by their nature, leave little or no direct evidence. From this high constitutional ground, Thurlow returned the debate to the substantive question: how far the managers were entitled to use the letter from the council. The Lords withdrew to consider, and once again turned to the judges, who asked for time.⁸⁹ This was one of several occasions when the request for a judicial opinion meant a delay of a week or more. Since the objections to evidence always came from the defence, Burke was justified in later blaming them for the slow progress of the trial. Seeking the exclusion of evidence, instead of arguing the merits of the case, Hastings’s counsel may have served the law better than their client. When the trial resumed on June (the sixty-fifth day), the ruling against the managers produced, exceptionally, no protest. Anstruther proceeded with the submission of documentary evidence and the examination of John Shore (–), an expert on the Bengal revenue and its collection. Many auditors probably agreed with Frances Burney that such business was ‘very unedifying’. Burney herself spent much of the sitting talking to Windham, discussing Burke’s Speech on the Army Estimates and John Courtenay’s pamphlet on the French Revolution.⁹⁰ On June, the sixty-sixth day of the trial, after the submission of the last of the managers’ evidence, Fox summed up the evidence on the Presents charge. Expectations were high, the court ‘crouded to overflowing’, and ‘public curiosity wound up to a higher pitch than on any former day’. Though the Court had left London for Windsor, the queen sent Burney to London to hear Fox. Burney found the day ‘extremely heavy’ and thought that Fox ‘disappointed all hearers’, his speech being ‘without any effect whatsoever, ⁸⁹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. LJ xxxviii. ⁹⁰ Ibid. –. Burney, Diary & Letters, iv. –.
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bringing home neither conviction, nor delight, nor information to my ears’. A newspaper reporter, on the other hand, described Fox’s speech as ‘one of the most powerful pieces of eloquence we ever heard’, its ‘impression on the soul’ made not by ‘the graces of language, or the glittering splendour of images and tropes’, but by the force of argument, clarity, and perspicuity. Burney and the reporter were perhaps equally if oppositely biased. Closer to the truth was probably the more moderate comment of Gouverneur Morris (–), the American diplomat, who despite having to wait three hours in the ‘foul air’ of Westminster Hall until the proceedings began, judged Fox’s summary of the evidence as performed ‘with great ability’. The sitting was one of the longest of the entire trial, lasting from . to ., and Hastings noted that the atmosphere (the hall being so crowded) was ‘excessively oppressive’.⁹¹ On June, the sixty-seventh day, Fox concluded his speech in just under three hours, and the trial was adjourned for the year.⁹² The conduct and progress of the trial itself were not Burke’s only concerns. During the session of , the proceedings twice came under scrutiny in the Commons. Neither episode proved so dispiriting a setback as the humiliating censure of Burke in for accusing Hastings of murdering Nandakumar. Indeed, both resulted in technical victories for the managers. Yet their overall effect underscored how little support the impeachment now commanded. As early as December , Burke heard rumours that friends of Hastings planned to introduce a motion into the Commons to terminate the trial. His instinctive response was to launch a pre-emptive strike, and to introduce his own motion reaffirming the House’s determination to continue the impeachment. But he made a show of consulting others about what should be done. A measure of his disillusion with his colleagues is his cynical expectation that the prevailing opinion would favour inertia (C vi. ). When the session opened, however, no direct action on behalf of Hastings was taken.⁹³ Burke therefore seized the initiative. Even he now recognized that many blamed the managers for the slow progress of the trial, and that the impeachment had become unpopular. He therefore sought a renewal of the managers’ mandate from the Commons, and a pledge to persist until judgment should be ⁹¹ History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), pt. , . Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, June . Burney, Diary & Letters, iv. . Morris, Diary and Letters, ed. Anne Cary Morris (London, ), i. –. Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). Fox’s speech is printed in Bond, ii. –. ⁹² Bond, ii. –. ⁹³ Major Scott, however, persuaded Captain David Williams (–) to petition the Commons to investigate his execution of Mustapha Khan (described in the thirteenth Article of Impeachment as a ‘cruel and atrocious Murder’; WS vi. ). Scott seems to have revived the story (through an article in the
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obtained. At the same time, he wanted to exculpate the managers from any imputation of blame for the length of the trial. For this purpose, early in March he composed a paper stating the managers’ case, and intended to form the basis for resolutions in the Commons. At first, he hoped for ministerial support. As an intermediary, he used John King (Walker King’s younger brother), who had studied at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn with William Wyndham Grenville, and with whom he remained on confidential terms. Burke therefore explained himself to King in ‘a tolerably long conversation’, and gave him his paper, to be shown only to Pitt and Grenville. The paper was highly critical of the conduct of Thurlow, with whom both Pitt and Grenville were at odds; Burke may have hoped that this would dispose them to side with him. Subsequently, he forwarded a copy of his proposed resolutions through the same channel.⁹⁴ Grenville’s response was disappointing. For some weeks, Burke heard nothing. Losing patience, and concluding that ‘nothing is intended to be done by way of mutual understanding’, Burke asked testily for the return of his papers. Grenville returned them through King, together with a long letter, nominally addressed to King but obviously intended for Burke’s eyes, explaining his (and by implication Pitt’s) position. Grenville offered only one crumb of comfort. The ministers would support ‘any proper vote’ that would authorize the managers to demand a judgment from the Lords on the basis of ‘the charges actually gone into’, and that would ‘express the determination of the House to persist till such judgement shall be obtained’. This was something: the partisans of Hastings would not be allowed to kill the trial. The House was not to imply that it abandoned the other charges; but neither would it be ‘proper’ to reassert them. Burke had wanted a reaffirmation of the whole syllabus of charges. Grenville pointedly declined to comment on Burke’s criticisms of Thurlow. Worse, he was prepared to support neither a motion endorsing the conduct of the managers, nor a motion of censure on Scott. The case against Hastings had been widely publicized; since he had not yet had any opportunity to defend himself in court, he could hardly be blamed for publications intended to ‘support his character’ in the interim.⁹⁵ On the last point, Burke could have retorted that the defence had insisted that the managers present their entire case before Hastings defended himself on any one article. Gazetteer on Feb. ) in order to bring the impeachment into further disrepute, by highlighting another irresponsible ‘murder’ charge. Williams’s petition was presented and rejected on Mar. In a remarkable instance of opposites agreeing, Francis then moved for an enquiry (which he hoped would result in Williams’s prosecution and conviction), but after debates on and Mar., in which Pitt opposed it, it was rejected (PH xxviii. –, –). Despite misgivings (French Laurence to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Mar. : NLS MS , fo. ), E.B. spoke in support of an enquiry in both debates. ⁹⁴ UBL (I), . ⁹⁵ King to Grenville, Apr. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). Grenville to King, Apr. (UBL (I), –). Erskine had advanced the last argument in his defence of Stockdale.
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This discouragement forced Burke to curtail the scope of his intended resolutions. On April, he gave notice of two motions: the first authorizing the managers to insist only on such parts of the charges as they thought best, the second pledging the House to proceed until a judgment was obtained. Even these seemed in danger when he heard Pitt (apparently in private conversation) question the need for the second motion. Dismayed, he again approached Grenville, through King. Without ministerial support, he feared, his motions might be defeated.⁹⁶ Pitt, however, was determined to keep the trial alive. On May, coming to the House straight from a gruelling three-hour sitting in Westminster Hall, Burke moved his resolutions with a speech defending the conduct of the managers. Pitt spoke in support. Major Scott spoke at length in defence of Hastings, but disclaimed any intention of opposing the motions. The first was accordingly put and carried without a division. At this point, many members left the House. Then came a coup de foudre: on the second motion, Sir John Scott (–, Solicitor-General; unrelated to Major Scott), insisted on a division. The motion passed, by to , apparently thanks to some quick whipping-in on the part of Pitt and Grenville. But Burke was furious, and accused Scott of deliberately waiting for members to leave before giving any hint that he intended to divide the House. An exchange that might have developed into an acrimonious debate was defused by Grenville, who acquitted Scott of any chicanery, but acknowledged that many members had indeed left, not expecting a division.⁹⁷ While nominally a victory for the managers, the result fell far short of the renewal of confidence for which Burke had at one time hoped. Major Scott was never one to leave well enough alone. Although the imputation of foul play on May might have counselled restraint, he immediately took the offensive. When reports of Burke’s speech of that day appeared in the newspapers, he wrote in refutation another of his interminable stream of letters to the press. Dated the th, the letter filled two columns of the Diary of the th. Burke was the principal target. Scott accused him of deliberate misrepresentation, and of deliberately protracting the trial in order to postpone the inevitable moment of Hastings’s acquittal. When the managers assembled on May prior to proceeding to Westminster Hall, two of them came armed with Scott’s letter and complained of it a libel ‘more audacious than the rest’. Burke pointedly declined to read it, but sent a note to the Speaker foreshadowing that the complaint might be taken up in the Commons.⁹⁸ Burke’s note is that of an angry man at the end of his tether. How could he have been so upset by a letter that he had not read? The answer is ⁹⁶ Public Advertiser, Apr. . E.B. to John King, May (UBL (I), –). ⁹⁷ CJ xlv. –. The Diary, May (PH xxviii. –). E.B. to John King, May (UBL (I), –). ⁹⁸ The Diary, May . E.B. to Grenville, May (UBL (I), ). There is no mention of the libel in the minutes of the managers’ meeting on May (BL Add. MS , fos. –).
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probably that Burke had been near boiling-point for some time, since at least Grenville’s letter of April. As on other similar occasions (such as his quarrel with William Markham in ), when the explosion came, it was out of all proportion to the immediate provocation. The managers (or at least Burke) felt that this particular challenge should not go unanswered. On May, General Burgoyne, probably selected as one of the less controversial of their number, gave notice of his intention to move that the letter be condemned as a libel on the Commons. On the st, he so moved.⁹⁹ Scott, of course, was present and eager to defend himself. Prolix and predictable panegyrics on his patron, Scott’s speeches generally make rather wearisome reading. This one is an exception, for the occasion forced him to look beyond Hastings and consider the more general question of freedom of speech and political comment in a free society. As to the publication of his letter, he was totally unrepentant, defending not only its substance but the propriety of printing it. That it was a breach of privilege, he did not deny. But so too, he argued, was the presence of strangers in the gallery, and the publication of any reports of debates; yet debates were printed every day, and strangers rarely excluded. A change of manners had taken place that rendered the regular enforcement of some privileges no longer in the public interest. People outside the House now had a right to know what was said there, and a right to comment on it. Burke himself had said as much in , when the last attempt to prohibit the reporting of debates had ended in a fiasco.¹⁰⁰ Scott did not quote Burke, probably because he had no reliable record of the debates. Instead, he brandished twelve printed speeches and pamphlets by Burke, each of which (he claimed) spoke, in terms at least as opprobrious as those he had used, of ministers and of measures that had been approved by Parliament. He quoted from the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts the passage in which Burke compares Pitt (to his disadvantage) to Nero (WS v. –). For good measure, Scott also quoted publications by Sheridan and Burgoyne himself. This was a most telling use of the tu quoque argument, and one of Scott’s most effective speeches. For Scott was right. The impeachment had never been the strictly judicial proceeding for which immunity from pendente lite comment might properly be claimed. Sheridan moved to censure Scott’s letter as a ‘scandalous and libelous writing’, but the debate petered out when Pitt moved an adjournment on the ground that time was needed to consider Scott’s letter.¹⁰¹ The question was resumed on May. Scott spoke again, though far more briefly. While inching closer to expressing an apology, he repeated his contention that he had done no more than Burke and others had done. In ⁹⁹ The Diary, May . CJ xlv. –. ¹⁰⁰ Supra, i. –. ¹⁰¹ The Diary, May (PH xxviii. –). PH reprints Scott’s letter to The Diary. E.B. was present but did not speak.
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Scott’s defence, Edmund Wigley (–), a Hastings partisan, argued that, as Scott had apologized, and so many nominal breaches of privilege went unpunished and even unnoticed, no further action should be taken. Burke, Fox, and Burgoyne all attacked Scott, but they failed to attract independent support. Pitt took the lead. As on May, he showed that the managers were on sufferance. Nominally, he reaffirmed his support for the impeachment. The House, he pledged, would always give the managers, as they had always given them, ‘proper’ support. To make Burke squirm, however, he alluded to the censure passed on Burke in the previous session for accusing Impey of murder. Without justifying Scott, Pitt declared himself in favour of a mild rather than a severe censure, given the ‘relaxation’ in recent years of the strictness with which such breaches of privilege had formerly been treated. Yet if the managers failed to rally independent support, so did Hastings. Apart from Wigley, only Joseph Jekyll (–) spoke for Scott: a feeble showing, in itself sufficient to disprove Burke’s phantom of a squad of MPs at Hastings’s command. Without a division, Scott’s letter was voted a libel, and Scott himself was censured. On a third motion, concerning the form that the reprimand should take, Pitt again showed his command of the House. In theory, and in descending order of severity, the options were to expel Scott; to take him into custody; or for the Speaker to censure him, either at the Bar of the House or (the more usual alternative for members) in his place. The managers knew that they could hope for no more than a censure at the Bar. Pitt, however, argued for the most lenient alternative; and his view prevailed.¹⁰² On May, Scott was duly reprimanded, in the usual terms. He remained unrepentant. After a nominal apology, he repeated his defence of having done no more than had ‘gentlemen of the first consideration’: ‘If I have been led into an error, it has been by taking these great authorities for my guide.’¹⁰³ Scott was no more capable than Burke of admitting that he had been in the wrong. For the managers, the censure of Scott was an unhappy reprise of the debate on Burke’s motions. They had won a superficial victory that fell far short of the vote of confidence they had wanted. Burke liked to believe that, in substance as well as name, he was speaking for the Commons of Great Britain. The emptiness of that belief had again been painfully exposed. Pitt would support the impeachment so far as was ‘proper’: that is, so far as suited his own purposes. The episode further illustrates how little Burke relished reciprocity of abuse, unreasonably expecting from others a respectful and restrained decorum that had never governed his own behaviour or rhetoric.
¹⁰² The Diary, May (PH xxviii. –).
¹⁰³ PH xxviii. –.
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Parliament was dissolved on June. The opposition was not caught unprepared, as it had been in . Indeed, it had the advantage of the rudimentary organization developed at the time of the Regency Crisis. This was now brought into action for the election, though it was largely confined to helping candidates to find seats.¹⁰⁴ Nor was the opposition identified with an unpopular measure, as the Coalition had been in . Indeed, in the absence of a single great question, such as the American war or the India Bill had provided, there was hardly a national campaign. Except in a few constituencies, the election (like most eighteenth-century elections) resolved into the personal ambitions of individuals to get into Parliament. In the end, the relative strengths of the ministry and the opposition remained about the same.¹⁰⁵ Burke himself was safe at Malton, where he spent a few days before being re-elected on June.¹⁰⁶ He could also rejoice in the return to Parliament of two old friends who had been among ‘Fox’s martyrs’, Lord Verney and William Baker. Burke and Verney had been personally estranged for several years, their relations embittered by Verney’s financial claims on Will Burke. Even so, Burke continued to give Verney his political support in Buckinghamshire, where Verney regained the county seat that he had lost in . His triumph, however, was short-lived: he died in . In Hertfordshire, William Baker was returned for the first time as one of the county members.¹⁰⁷ In county elections, the voting qualification was possession of a -shilling freehold. Since residence was not a requirement, property owners often had votes in several counties. An election might turn on being able to mobilize such out-voters. Since Baker was engaged in a close contest, Burke busied himself among the local gentry to find those who were also qualified to vote in Hertfordshire. The doings of one of these, Robert Crook, provoked in him both mirth and indignation. Crook, who lived at Beaconsfield, was a retired businessman with an income of around £, a year. Burke had known him since at least , when Edmund Waller’s high-handed behaviour as lord of the manor had brought them into alliance. Under the game laws of the time, only owners of land worth £ a year or more were entitled to kill game. ¹⁰⁴ Whig Organization at the General Election of : Selections from the Blair Adam Papers, ed. Donald E. Ginter (Berkeley, ). ¹⁰⁵ F. O’Gorman, calculating a net loss to the opposition of three members (from to ), concludes that ‘the election did not change the balance of forces in the House’ (The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, ), ). ¹⁰⁶ J.B. to Sir Gilbert Elliot, June (YB OF .). R. G. Thorne, The House of Commons, – (London, ), ii. . Several months earlier, the dissatisfaction of ‘some very refractory Boroughmen’ at Malton was reported to make E.B.’s return ‘very uncertain’ (The Times, Dec. ). No substantive opposition to the Fitzwilliam candidates appears, however, to have been started. ¹⁰⁷ Thorne, The House of Commons, –, ii. –, .
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In a family letter, Burke described Crook’s pretensions in mock-heroic terms: ‘He has made a very desperate threat, and declares, that Mr Waller has behaved so ill to him, that he intends to become a Gentleman. I hope he will think better of it, before he executes this rash resolution.’ Crook owned a farm ‘which he conceives to possess manorial Rights’. If so, he would be entitled not only to hunt himself, but to depute a gamekeeper to kill Waller’s hares. Crook proposed to take the opinion of one of the Richards on the subject. With any encouragement, ‘He will Depute a Gamekeeper—and then lo to you!—he executes all his threats by Deputy; and by deputy becomes a Leporicide and a Gentleman. Adieu—enjoy the first act of the Bourgeois Gentilhome—and the first Book of the heroic war of Crooke against Waller’ ( June : C v. ). The war with Waller, however, expired with Waller’s death later in August. In , learning that Crook owned land in Hertfordshire, Burke asked him to vote for his friend William Baker in the county election. By convention, all his expenses would be paid, though a man of his fortune could well have afforded to pay his own way. Burke even provided his cousin, Captain Edmund Nagle, as a travelling companion. After the election, he wrote to Baker: ‘I shall make you laugh at the voter I sent you, who is a man of three thousand a year, and yet brought off a Bottle of your Wine, as lawful Spoil, in his Pocket—but mum! For he has land and Beeves, and Votes in more Counties than one’ (C vi. –). To his son, well acquainted with Crook, Burke was even more outspoken: The Captain [Nagle] has well discharged his Commission he carried a Squire [Crook] and a Carpenter, one of the two [Crook] a most wonderful Blackguard—the other [the carpenter] a respectable and decent man. Crooke Topped his past and outdid his usual outdoings. He put Nagle to every expence he could think of. Never a venal Voter shined in the manner of our Neighbour—and at last he came home with a bottle of Bakers wine that, he had stolen, in his Pocket; besides what he had under his Belt. ()
The incident provides a revealing sidelight on Burke’s relations with his neighbours, and helps explain why he did not mix more in local society. It further illustrates why Burke regarded elections as ‘a great evil’. If a man of £, a year could not behave with decency and public spirit, what could be expected of the ordinary freeholders? No wonder elections became orgies of drunkenness. To salve his faith in the social hierarchy, Burke had to remind himself that Crook was a nouveau riche, and (as the allusion to Molière hints) only by courtesy a ‘gentleman’. However distasteful and grating the pretence, in public, Burke had to play the game of humouring men like Crook. In , James Boswell (who, undignified as his own behaviour might be, was acutely conscious of class distinctions) had been disgusted to find Burke ‘cajoling the blackguard mad publican,
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Sam House, because he has a considerable influence in Westminster’. House (d. ; ‘the fellow’, Boswell calls him) was ensconced in Burke’s breakfastparlour, with ‘a large glass of brandy or brandy and water with some pieces of bread for his regale’. Jane Burke, Lord Templetown (–), and other gentlemen ‘formed a circle round the animal’.¹⁰⁸ Little as he liked the false bonhomie of such occasions, Burke had again to caress the likes of House when on July he made a brief excursion to London to attend the dinner in honour of Fox’s victory at Westminster. On the th, he attended the county meeting at Aylesbury, which was in part a celebration of Lord Verney’s return as a county member.¹⁰⁹ Burke was then free to devote the remainder of July and August to the completion of his magnum opus. Between February and April, Burke enlarged his first plan (a short pamphlet directed primarily against Price and the Revolution Society) into a comprehensive analysis and indictment of the Revolution itself and its principles. As he wrote, he showed his drafts to several friends. One of them, Philip Francis, was frank enough to condemn what he read and advise against publication ( Feb. : C vi. –). Burke immediately fired off a long and intemperate reply that illustrates his inability to tolerate even friendly reproof ( Feb.: –). Nevertheless, Francis’s comments may have given him pause. Francis warned against the indignity of entering into a ‘war of Pamphlets’ with Price and his allies, in which even victory would be ‘vile and disgraceful’ (). The warning from Francis may have contributed to the transformation of the Reflections. If so, the reaction would be typical of Burke. Advised to desist, instead he intensified and redoubled his efforts. The decision to expand the plan of the Reflections cannot be precisely dated. Some time between March and April is probable. On the earlier date, William Elliot (–; a cousin of Sir Gilbert, and a member of the Burke circle since about ) perceived it as primarily a work about England, containing ‘reflections on the proceedings of the Revolution Society’, together with a defence of the Established Church against the Dissenters. By the latter date, when Sir Gilbert Elliot read what was still a ‘pamphlet’, the emphasis had shifted, for he described it as ‘on France & the relation of that subject to England’, and expected it to do ‘both us & the rest of the world a great deal of good’.¹¹⁰ During the parliamentary session, Burke was active both in the Commons and in Westminster Hall. Even so, he may have begun the expansion of the Reflections. To July and August, however, must belong the latter part of the book, in which several passages show that ¹⁰⁸ Boswell, Journal, Mar. (Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, –, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London, ), –). ¹⁰⁹ E.B. to Lord Charlemont, July (C vi. ). Lady Lee to William Lee, Jr., July (Aylesbury, Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, D/LE/F/). ¹¹⁰ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Mar. (NLS MS , fo. ); Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Apr. (MS , fo. ).
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Burke continued to follow events in France minutely. He alludes to the tax revolt in Lyons ( July) and the Fête de la Fédération ( July), dissects the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (promulgated on July), and quotes recent (between July and August) proceedings of the National Assembly. The latest datable reference is to the confederation at Nantes on August.¹¹¹ Since news from France took about a week to reach the London newspapers, these inclusions suggest that Burke continued to revise and add until the end of August. With the final (or nearly final) copy dispatched to the printer, Burke (in company with Jane and Richard Jr.) immediately set out for Cheltenham, where Richard Sr. was recuperating from an illness.¹¹² From Cheltenham, the Burkes travelled through the Malvern Hills to Ross-on-Wye, where they took a boat down the Wye to Chepstow. This excursion was a standard tourist route, popularized by the publication of William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye in .¹¹³ Richard Jr. described the journey: The banks of the Wye are romantick beyond description & far exceed any thing I have hitherto seen. A varying succession of beautiful hills, well wooded; rocks of all shapes sizes & characters[;] several of the finest views on the banks, the whole concluding with Chepstow castle; It forms altogether the most extraordinary & diversified scene that can be conceived. My father is perfectly delighted.¹¹⁴
Ruins were an important element in the ‘picturesque’. The most spectacular along the banks of the Wye were those of Tintern Abbey. Burke had just written eloquently of ‘the construction and repair of the majestic edifices of religion’ as one of the achievements of French monasticism (R []). As he wandered through the ruins of Tintern Abbey (already a tourist trap swarming with beggars), he may have wondered whether a similar fate was in store for some of the magnificent ecclesiastical monuments of France. From Chepstow, the Burkes proceeded to the Hotwells at Bristol, and thence to Bath. By September, they were back at Beaconsfield.¹¹⁵ During October, the Reflections was given its final corrections and printed. Burke did not attempt to incorporate all the latest happenings. Thus Necker is described as ‘now sitting on the ruins of the finances, and of the monarchy of France’ (R []), though he had resigned on September. Other events of
¹¹¹ R [] (Lyons), [] (Fête), [–] (Civil Constitution), [, , , ] (National Assembly), [] (Nantes). The proceedings at Nantes were reported in the General Evening Post, – Sept. . This last reference (which occurs in a footnote) was probably added in October, after E.B.’s return from his tour. ¹¹² They arrived at Cheltenham by Sept. (English Chronicle, – Sept. ). ¹¹³ Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics, and Tourism in Britain, ‒ (Aldershot, ), –. ¹¹⁴ R.B. Jr. to Lord Fitzwilliam, Sept. (NRO A. IV. ). ¹¹⁵ E.B. wrote two letters from Beaconsfield on Sept. (C vi. –).
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September, such as the brutal suppression of the mutiny at Nancy, are likewise unmentioned. On October, Burke described the Reflections as ‘on the point of appearing’ (C vi. ). Advance copies were sent to friends about the th, and publication was fixed for November. Thus ended the most remarkable twelve months of Burke’s life. In October , he was a pariah still smarting from the public and private humiliations of the Regency Crisis, an embarrassment to his friends, the butt of jokes and caricatures, and credibly portrayed by his enemies as actually mad. His reputation had plummeted even lower than the previous nadir of . On November , he emerged from this slough as the author of a book immediately hailed as a masterpiece, a work that has ever since ranked with the chef-d’œuvres of Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Locke as a classic of political thought.
Reflections on the Revolution in France,
Begun as a pamphlet reply to Price’s sermon, Burke’s Reflections soon outgrew its original purpose, in subject as well as scale, eventually embodying his most considered and profound thoughts about politics. Yet even in its finished form, the book remains in part a riposte to Price and firmly embedded in the events of –. That the Reflections should thus retain deep marks of its origin is characteristic of Burke, for he was averse to political theory and never wrote a systematic treatise on politics. Though a habitual generalizer, rather than arguing from first principles or axioms, he preferred to reason from some particular problem, situation, or circumstance. Thus, in the Reflections, general principles emerge from a commentary on recent events in England and France. Nearly a third of the book is a response to Price’s sermon. In order to avoid the appearance of a formal treatise, and to achieve a closer relationship with the reader, Burke cast the Reflections, as he had earlier pamphlets, in the form of a letter. The rhetoric of the epistolary form enabled Burke to achieve seemingly opposite effects. Oscillating between dry rationality and impassioned fervour, he writes now as a modest onlooker, now as a sage veteran of the world. Frank, unpremeditated, and sincere, his letter is also didactic, distanced, and authoritative. In England, the political pamphlet in the form of a letter became common in the s.¹ To its original audience, such a pamphlet would retain something of the illusion of being a real letter. The epistolary fiction helps avoid the appearance of didacticism. The reader naturally identifies with the implied recipient, enabling the creation of a more intimate relationship between author and reader. By , the convention was well enough established for Jonathan Swift to ridicule and parody it in his ‘Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’.² Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century, the letter remained ¹ An early example is A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (London, ), written for the first Earl of Shaftesbury. ² The fictive author notes that no title ‘holds so general a Vogue, as that of A Letter to a Friend: Nothing is more common than to meet with long Epistles address’d to Persons and Places, where, at first thinking, one would be apt to imagine it not altogether so necessary or Convenient; Such as, a Neighbour at next Door . . . and these upon Subjects, in appearance, the least proper for Conveyance by the Post; as, long
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a popular form for political pamphlets. Burke had himself considered casting his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents () in the form of a letter, and he actually used the genre for his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (). Longer works were also composed as a series of letters. The most familiar today are the epistolary novels, such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (–), but letters were also used for books of travel, and for many other subjects.³ Even today, the epistolary mode is sometimes employed, as Burke used it, to make political writing more personal and persuasive.⁴ When Burke decided to cast his Reflections in the form of a letter, he was thus writing in an established convention which experience made natural to him. Apart from the Letter to the Sheriffs, he had written several pamphletlength letters, addressed to a single recipient but intended for wider (but still limited) circulation in manuscript. These are not clearly distinguishable in style or method from the Letter to the Sheriffs, and (as Burke probably expected) some found their way into print.⁵ Only in its length and scope does the Reflections differ in kind from his earlier epistolary pamphlets. The letter provided him with a versatile generic framework. By a convention that can be traced back to antiquity, literary letters, like real ones, were permitted, even expected, to be loose and desultory in structure. This exactly suited Burke’s purpose in the Reflections. He could write selectively, omitting or passing lightly over what did not serve his purpose. He could vary his style, tone, and mood. Writing as a veteran politician to a ‘very young gentleman’, he could be intimate and authoritative by turns. He could switch from ‘I’ to ‘we’, now offering a personal view, now reporting the prevailing opinion. In addition, the epistolary form enabled Burke, who was used to addressing a known audience, to draw on the rhetorical armoury he had developed as a speaker in Parliament. These effects were not achieved without cost. To maintain the epistolary fiction, Burke sacrificed the structural divisions that would have made the book’s argument easier to follow. ‘A different plan’, he concedes in his preface, might have been ‘more favourable to a commodious division and distribution of his matter’ (R [iv]). The lack of divisions has posed an intractable problem to later readers and students: every edition has its own Schemes in Philosophy . . . Advice to Parliaments, and the like’; A Tale of a Tub [etc.], ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (nd edn. Oxford, ), . Though not published until , the ‘Mechanical Operation’ was written about . E.B. himself parodied the epistolary genre in A Vindication of Natural Society (). ³ Lord Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History (); Lord Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr Jonathan Swift (); Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (). ⁴ Recent examples include: Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York, ); Dinesh D’Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative (New York, ). ⁵ The Two Letters on the Trade of Ireland (: WS ix. –) were actually sent to their nominal recipients in Bristol, but printed in London under E.B.’s direction. The much longer Letter to Thomas Burgh (: –) and the Letter to Lord Kenmare (: –) were intended for private circulation, but printed in Dublin without E.B.’s authorization.
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pagination, yet no reference is possible except by page number.⁶ The seamlessness of the Reflections is in striking contrast to the elaborate divisions into parts and chapters that Burke considered appropriate for the Philosophical Enquiry. In framing his charges against Hastings, Burke chose to follow rather ‘the connection of things than the Order of Time’ (to Philip Francis, Dec. : C v. ). Likewise, in the Reflections, Burke carefully avoided following the sequence of events. A letter, he knew, even so extraordinary a letter as the Reflections, should not read like a treatise or a historical narrative. This deliberate informality, however, exposed Burke to an obvious line of criticism. Paine described the Reflections as ‘a pathless wilderness of rhapsodies, and a sort of descant upon governments’.⁷ Burke’s studied inattention to logical structure gave some colour to Paine’s remark, but the Reflections is by no means a ‘pathless wilderness’. While there is some meandering, intended to suggest the process of a mind at work, the Reflections develops a coherent central argument. Burke’s starting point is the young Frenchman’s request for information and advice on two points. What was Burke’s reaction, and what was that of British opinion in general, to recent events in France? Did he share the attitude of the British revolutionary societies, as expressed in their congratulatory addresses to the National Assembly? In the Reflections, Burke begins by attacking these societies, and dissociating himself from their views, before considering and condemning at greater length what they have praised in France. The Reflections thus falls into two unequal parts. Taking Price as typical of the nascent revolutionary movement in Britain, Burke begins with a critical dissection of his sermon. In particular, he denies the claim of the societies to be the true heirs of the Revolution of –, arguing instead that his own is the authentic interpretation of its meaning and significance. In a transitional passage, he then considers whether (as some had suggested) the French have developed their new principles from ideas of British origin, and whether Britain in turn should learn from the new French principles. This leads into the second and longer part of the book, in which he argues that Britain should in every instance reject the examples set by the French. Defending the government of the ancien régime as by no means tyrannical or intolerable, he argues that the National Assembly has done incomparably more harm than good. In turn, he subjects the new constitution and the associated reformation of the Church, the public finances, and the army, to severe criticism and condemnation. Finally, ⁶ All references to the Reflections are to the edition by J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, Calif., ), which reprints the text of the first edition. In the hope of establishing a standard form of reference, Clark inserts into his text the page numbers of the original. My references (placed in square brackets) are to this pagination. Clark’s comprehensively annotated edition is the best starting point for serious study of the Reflections. ⁷ Rights of Man (), in Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, ), .
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Burke concludes that cautious gradualism in politics, which the British have practised, is preferable to rationalistic destruction and rebuilding on the French model. Though written in a style of studied informality, the Reflections rests on a solid evidential basis. Burke’s correspondence, and the text of the Reflections itself, attest the care with which he kept himself informed about events in France. Admittedly, his sources are not easy to study, because he gives few references. The form of the Reflections, after all, is a letter, in which full documentation would have been incongruous. Yet following up such clues as he provides encourages confidence in his use of unreferenced sources.⁸ Corroborating evidence comes from the Correspondence. The long letter to Depont of November , and the letters to Francis in December (minutely dissecting the proposal for a French bank), show how intently Burke was following events in France (C vi. –). In January , he told another correspondent that he had ‘read, and with some attention, the authorised, or rather the equally authentic documents on this subject, from the first instructions to the representatives of the several orders down to this time’ (). In February, he assured another: ‘I conceive you have got very imperfect accounts of these transactions. I believe I am much more exactly informed of them’ (). Admittedly, just before the Reflections was published, Burke conceded that he might ‘in the infinite variety of matter contained in my general Subject’, be writing ‘sometimes in circumstances not favourable to accuracy’, and sometimes ‘from the Memory of what I had read’ and unable ‘to get the documents from whence I had been supplied when I wished to verifye my facts with precision’, he might have made ‘some Mistakes’ (to Windham, Oct. : ). Errors and inaccuracies there are in the Reflections, but few and slight in relation to its length and range, and they rarely affect the argument.⁹ A scrutiny of the two most commonly cited examples of inaccuracy and misrepresentation (the account of the October Days and the analysis of the proposed electoral system) will vindicate Burke’s claim that he was ‘exactly informed’ about events in France. The most quoted and discussed sequence in the Reflections is Burke’s narrative of the October Days, where he describes in the grand manner the attempt to assassinate Marie Antoinette (–) in the early morning of October : History will record, that on the morning of the th of October , the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite, ⁸ The same is true of Burke’s early ‘History of England’, where the marginal source references are likewise haphazard. ⁹ The report that the Archbishop of Paris was ‘forced to abandon his house’ (R [–]), a rumour which proved untrue, is an example of an unimportant error.
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and troubled melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was first startled by the voice of the centinel at her door, who cried out to her, to save herself by flight—that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give—that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge in at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment. (R [–])
Commentators on this passage have been reluctant to believe that anything like Burke describes could actually have happened. One critic claims that there is ‘no evidence of Marie Antoinette’s fleeing “almost naked” ’; another asserts that Burke’s ‘most brilliant and theatrical touches’, including ‘the phallic thrusts into the queen’s bed’, were invented; a third argues that Burke ‘exaggerates and dramatizes . . . already histrionic counter-revolutionary reports’.¹⁰ Burke’s passage is indeed rhetorical. The reader is invited either to agree with his depiction of the October Days as a scene of almost unparalleled horror, or to regard them (with Richard Price) as a proper subject for a ‘triumph’. Yet the historical veracity of Burke’s account is crucial to the success of the rhetoric. Readers must be persuaded that what he describes actually took place. The sentinel was not in fact killed (though his death was widely reported) but left for dead.¹¹This detail, though often cited by Burke’s opponents as symptomatic of his exaggeration and inaccuracy, hardly subverts the general reliability of his picture. In other respects, his narrative is amply supported by numerous eyewitness and contemporary accounts. The National Assembly ordered a judicial investigation of the October Days. Conducted over several months at the Châtelet, this inquiry received hundreds of depositions, all given on oath. These were printed too late for Burke to have used them, but his account is in accord with their evidence.¹² Other contemporary sources mention the queen’s undress, and at least one describes the violation of her abandoned bed.¹³ So far ¹⁰ Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (–) (New Haven, ), ; Peter Hughes, ‘Originality and Allusion in the Writings of Edmund Burke’, Centrum, / (), – (quotation from ); Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge, ), . ¹¹ He was François-Aimé de Miomandre de Sainte-Marie. His survival was reported in one of the earliest replies (published on Nov.), Short Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections’ (London, ), . R.B. Jr. later heard of Miomandre at Coblenz ( Aug. : C vi. ). ¹² The inquiry was initiated by a decree of the National Assembly on Oct. . Beginning on Dec., a total of depositions were taken. They were published as Procédure criminelle instruite au Châtelet de Paris sur la dénonciation des faits arrivés à Versailles la journée du octobre (Paris ). The achevé d’imprimer date is Sept., too late for E.B. to have used it. ¹³ Martha Swinburne, an English observer, uses the phrase ‘in her shift’: ‘Political Extracts from Mrs S[winburne]’s Letters from Paris in & ’ (BL Add. MS , fo. ). According to the Journal politique-national, the queen fled ‘en chemise’ (no. ; collected edition, ii. ). Jean-Joseph Mounier describes the Queen as fleeing ‘à demi-nue’; Exposé de la conduite de M. Mounier (Paris, ), ii. . A later account by Mounier describes the violation of the bed: ‘les Brigands irrités de n’avoir pu la
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as its historical content goes, Burke’s account differs little from what modern historians construct, largely on the basis of the same primary sources.¹⁴ In his account of the new electoral and administrative system, Burke identified his main source as the report of the Constitutional Committee of the National Assembly, presented on September by Jacques-Guillaume Thouret (–).¹⁵ This plan was vigorously debated and contested, and in some respects considerably modified before being approved. So far as they affect Burke’s account, the two most important changes were the abandonment of the square electoral districts, and the elimination of one stage in the sequence of indirect elections. The final scheme was promulgated in February , giving Burke ample time to have revised his text before publication. Yet Burke let his account of the original plan stand. Why did he do this? A few days before the publication of the Reflections, Burke received a copy of Calonne’s counter-Revolutionary De l’état de la France. Writing to thank Calonne for a complimentary copy, Burke said this about his own book: ‘In reality, my Object was not France, in the first instance, but this Country’ ( Oct.: C vi. ). In other words, his purpose was not to give an account of events in France for their own sake, but to warn English readers against imitating them. Burke’s credibility would be damaged if his account of the October Days could be proved in important respects fictitious or erroneous. Drawing evidence from the debates in the National Assembly, however, Burke was not limited to proposals approved or enacted. Any scheme or idea entertained in the Assembly was properly evidence of the intentions of the revolutionaries. The equal-area departments were not the wild dream of some visionary, but a measure emanating from the Assembly’s Constitutional Committee. Its leading architects, Thouret and the abbé Sieyès (–), were respected and influential members.¹⁶ So Burke’s use of the committee report rather than the final decrees does not undermine the evidential basis of the Reflections. For Burke’s purpose, a proposal canvassed in the National Assembly, whether or not put into practice, was evidence of the nature and tendencies of the Revolution. Two smaller examples will illustrate this point. In discussing the army, Burke mentions that ‘it has been a question, not ill received in the national assembly, whether they [the soldiers] ought not to have the direct sacrifier à leur fureur, percèrent les matelats à coups de piques, & commirent d’autres indignités’ (Procédure criminelle instruite au Châtelet, iii. ). ¹⁴ F. P. Lock, ‘Rhetoric and Representation in Burke’s Reflections’, in Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. John Whale (Manchester, ), –; Steven Blakemore and Fred Hembree, ‘Edmund Burke, Marie Antoinette, and the Procédure Criminelle’, The Historian, (), –. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, ), –. ¹⁵ Rapport du nouveau Comité de constitution . . . septembre (Paris, ); Philip B. J. Buchez and Prosper C. Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française (Paris, –), iii. –. ¹⁶ Murray Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyes (Leicester, ); Ernest Lebègue, La Vie et l’œuvre d’un constituant: Thouret, – (Paris, ).
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choice of their officers, or some proportion of them’ (R []). Such a scheme was actually introduced in . Even if it had remained no more than an idea, consideration of it was surely good evidence of what Burke called ‘the design of the architects’. A second example is ‘the project for coining into money the bells of the suppressed churches’ ([]). Though rejected (on the ground that the alloy was not suitable), the proposal serves to illustrate what Burke took to be the crude iconoclasm of the revolutionary mind.¹⁷ The debates of the National Assembly may indeed reveal more than their decrees. How carefully did Burke study the proposed electoral system, and how material are his errors? The division into departments was based on a scheme originally conceived by Sieyès. He may indeed have intended the divisions of eighteen leagues square literally, as the earliest map suggests. If so, he was quickly forced to modify the proposal. The principle of equal areas was retained, but their boundaries were to follow, so far as possible, natural features and existing administrative divisions. This is evident from a map published on October. Yet, in the debates that followed, both proponents and opponents of the scheme continued to talk about squares, seemingly as a kind of shorthand for the principle of equal-area divisions (as opposed to the main alternative, Mirabeau’s proposal for departments based on roughly equal populations). Some districts actually took the squares literally, and submitted geometric plans.¹⁸ Thomas Paine, living in Paris at the time and following events closely, wrote to Burke on January that the new departments were to be squares (C vi. –). If Paine made this mistake, Burke can be excused for the same error. In any case, the substantive point is that, even as modified, the new electoral system created artificial units. Burke’s objection to the dismembering of France applies as much to the final plan as to the original proposal. Even as modified, it was avowedly intended by some deputies to obliterate the regional loyalties and identities, the ‘little platoons’ that Burke cherished.¹⁹ Even after the Reflections was published, the symbolism of the squares remained powerful enough for a French reader to approve Burke’s ridicule: ‘Vous faites bien sentir Monsieur Le Ridicule Etroit de leur petite Géometrie dans la division puérile de la france en Carrés’.²⁰ ¹⁷ Louis Naurissart, on behalf of the finance committee, reported this as impracticable as early as Jan. (Histoire parlementaire, iv. –). Since the idea remained popular, he had to repeat the point on Aug. (Moniteur, Aug.: Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur (Paris, –), v. ). ¹⁸ According to Thouret, the new divisions were to be ‘égales entre elles autant qu’il sera possible’, while equally respecting ‘autant qu’il a été possible, les anciennes limites, et la facilité des communications’ (Histoire parlementaire, iii. ). According to Sieyès, the areas were to be as equal as possible, while utilizing whatever old boundaries (of whatever former administrative division) most closely coincided with the ideal lines (Observations sur le rapport du Comité de constitution, concernant la nouvelle organisation de la France (Paris, ); anonymous). A map was published on Oct. to illustrate the point; this is reproduced in Atlas de la Révolution française, iv (Paris, ). Marie-Vic Ozouf-Marignier, La Formation des départements: la représentation du territoire français à la fin du e siècle (Paris, ) gives a detailed account of these debates. ¹⁹ Thouret argued thus on Nov. (Histoire parlementaire, iii. –). ²⁰ Demoiselle de Vic to E.B., Jan. (NRO A. IX. ).
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What of the electoral process? The original proposal was that the same three-stage process should be used to elect both municipal and national representatives. Primary assemblies in the communes would elect to the district, where deputies would elect to the department, where deputies to the National Assembly would be elected. After discussion, the middle stage was eliminated for national elections, though retained for the purposes of local government.²¹ Shortly after publication, a friendly critic, François-LouisThibault de Menonville (–), who had sat in the National Assembly, identified some minor errors in Burke’s account of the electoral system. ‘To men of candour,’ he presciently observed, ‘such sligt Errors would be nothing’, but to the ‘Ennemies of Order, of Government, of Religion’ they afforded a handle to ‘disparage in the Eyes of an ignorant multitude, one of the finest composition of the age’ ( Nov. : C vi. ). In his response to Menonville’s remarks, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (), Burke mounted a double defence. First, the differences were not material. Second, ‘the true character’ of the plans would actually be ‘best collected from the committee appointed to prepare them’, and ‘the scheme of their building would be better comprehended in the design of the architects than in the execution of the masons’ (WS viii. ). Since Burke was constitutionally incapable of admitting that he was wrong, this defence may appear meanly evasive or merely sophistical. In terms of his rhetorical purpose, however, both arguments are tenable. The extent to which these minor errors undermine Burke’s analysis may be estimated from his opponents’ treatment of them. Paine, indeed, made rhetorical capital of Burke’s supposed errors, but did not controvert them in detail. He recognized that pointing out a few particular mistakes would not greatly weaken Burke’s case: he therefore concentrated on the positive virtues of the new constitution. After Paine, the most successful reply to Burke was Vindiciae Gallicae () by the aspiring lawyer James Mackintosh (–). Like Paine, Mackintosh eschewed detail. In his refutation of Burke’s analysis of the new electoral system, he says nothing at all of the modification of the squares. Adverting to the number of stages, he concedes that the main question ‘is perhaps not much affected by these details’.²² Mackintosh concentrates on the substantive issues: the tendency of the departmental divisions to dismember the country; and the objections to indirect elections. On each of these, he argues against Burke on general principles. Much less successful were the pamphlets that attacked Burke on the details. Thomas Christie (–), for example, in his Letters on the Revolution of ²¹ Menonville drew this to E.B.’s attention in a letter ( Nov. : C vi. ). ²² James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae (London, ), –. Likewise, E.B.’s French translator, informing E.B. of what he called a ‘légère inexactitude’, averred that even in France it would not be held a serious error in such a work ( July ; Journal of Modern History, (), ).
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France (), sought to convict Burke of as many errors as he could, no matter how minute. This welter of detail obscures the main point (which Christie fails to address), the merits and demerits of indirect election.²³ In contrast to the account of the October Days, the analysis of the electoral system is written in a dry, sober, rational style. The argument, carefully developed and illustrated with imagined numerical examples, reads like a dissertation on systems of popular representation. Burke begins by drawing a contrast between old establishments, which are ‘tried by their effects’, and ‘a new and merely theoretic system’ where ‘it is expected that every contrivance shall appear, on the face of it, to answer its end’ (R [–]). Because the British constitution is known to work, to answer every practical purpose, no one worries about the apparent anomalies. In the new French system, however, constructed de novo and unembarrassed by any need to conform to the previous constitution, there should be no incongruities or inconsistencies. Burke then outlines the new system, subjecting each part to two kinds of objection: is it in itself a reasonable proposal; and does it even answer the end proposed by its contrivers? No element of the system passes either test. France was to be divided into departments, cantons, and communes. At the base of the pyramid, each commune was to elect deputies to the canton, where deputies would be elected to a departmental assembly. There deputies to the National Assembly itself would be chosen. The divisions were to be squares of equal size. But in recognition of variations of population, and of wealth (as measured by taxation), more populous squares, and those that paid more taxes, were to elect more representatives. Suffrage was not universal, but subject to a qualification which in monetary terms varied from one place to another. Deputies to the National Assembly would serve a two-year term, and be ineligible for immediate re-election. Burke’s fundamental objection is that the system is arbitrary, resting on no basis of experience and outraging common sense. The geometric divisions, for example, produce only a delusive geographical equality, as the Assembly itself appeared to recognize by trying to incorporate considerations of population and wealth. Yet these modifications in turn are equally arbitrary: why should area, population, and contribution each be weighted at a third? This proportion owes everything to theory, nothing to experience. The property qualification is too low to serve any useful purpose, yet any qualification at all subverts the principle of universality. If wealth is to be taken into account, more votes should be given to the individual who pays more taxes, not to the places where the taxes happen to be paid. The Assembly’s proposal greatly over-represents places where wealth is spent (such as Paris) or where goods are imported (such as Bordeaux). Further, the system of indirect election effectively disfranchises all but the electors at the departmental level, who are the only ones who in ²³ Thomas Christie, Letters on the Revolution of France (London, ), –.
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reality choose a representative (R [–]). Worse, the general tendency of the new divisions is to ‘sever France into a variety of republics’, and to convert the National Assembly into a ‘general congress of the ambassadors from each independent republic’ ([–]). At the end of two years, these delegates, whether they have served conscientiously or have betrayed their constituents, all meet the same fate. The electoral system exemplifies how the new theorists of the ‘rights of man’ have ‘totally forgot his nature’ (R []). They treat men as numerically equivalent ciphers, as ‘ornamental gardeners’ treat nature, with no respect for natural differences ([]). Such theories belong to the ideal world of metaphysics, geometry, and arithmetic, not to politics, which deals with ‘the concerns, the actions, the passions, the interests of men’ ([]). In theory, ‘each head, on this system, would have its vote’; but even the National Assembly boggled at putting so absurd an idea into practice ([]). The Assembly has thus subverted its own principles without achieving any of the wiser aims (such as representing property) of other systems. Burke’s critique is neither captious nor carping. Instead, it identifies genuine weaknesses, recognized and debated in the National Assembly itself, where Mirabeau advanced precisely the arguments that Burke would use.²⁴ The geometric divisions proved repugnant to a majority of deputies, who were susceptible to the provincial loyalties that Burke cherished. They forced a modification of the squares, so that the departments as decreed were carved out of the old provinces, not constructed as the nearest possible approximation to squares. Burke suppressed these differences of opinion. His strategy was to foreground the extremists. Burke’s presentation of evidence in the Reflections is thus neither neutral nor objective. But for a polemical pamphlet, it rests on an extraordinarily solid base. Fox had more first-hand experience of France, and knew some of the prominent politicians, but there is no evidence that he was better informed than Burke.²⁵ He appears to have responded to the idea of the Revolution in a loose and emotive way, identifying it with the cause of ‘liberty’ (undefined), without taking the trouble to acquire detailed and accurate information about what was happening in France.²⁶ Burke’s interpretations may be controverted. Indeed, in a letter to an unidentified correspondent, Burke himself distinguished between facts and their interpretation: ‘A great many of the most decisive events, I conceive, are not disputed as facts, though, as usual, there is some dispute about their causes, and their tendency’ ( Jan. : C vi. ). About the ‘facts’, Burke is rarely mistaken. ²⁴ An example is Mirabeau’s speech on Nov. (Histoire parlementaire, iii. –). ²⁵ As L. G. Mitchell asserts (WS viii. , , n.; also in his edition of the Reflections (Oxford, ), p. vii). Yet Fox’s references to the Revolution in Parliament in are generalized, and show no detailed knowledge ( Feb. and Mar. : PH xxviii. –, –). ²⁶ John W. Derry, Charles James Fox (London, ), ; F. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, ), –.
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For Burke, the defining event in the Revolution was not the taking of the Bastille, which had captured the sympathy and imagination of so many British observers, but the October Days. On October, a procession of women, mainly from the districts of Les Halles and Saint-Antoine, marched from Paris toVersailles. Later in the day, a second column followed, more miscellaneous in character, and including a large contingent of national guards, led by the marquis de Lafayette (–), then a popular hero. The king received a delegation from the first group, and promised to send grain to Paris to help lower the high price of bread. With the second group, however, came two representatives of the Paris Commune, who demanded that the royal family return to the capital. After promising to consider this request, the king went to bed, as did the queen. The large crowd, however, had not dispersed, and at about six in the morning some invaded the courtyard of the palace. A few guards were killed. Some of the intruders gained entry to the palace itself, and made for the queen’s bedroom, reportedly intending to murder her. Escaping just in time along a service corridor, the queen reached the comparative safety of the king’s apartments. Accompanied by Lafayette, the royal family appeared at a balcony, and the king promised to return with the crowd to Paris. Early in the afternoon, a vast and therefore slow procession set out: the national guard, wagons of wheat, the royal family, the deputies of the National Assembly, the accompanying crowd. Most ominously, the heads of the guards who had been killed were carried on pikes. The departure from Versailles, which the king would never see again, was a historic moment, for the palace was as potent a symbol of the absolutist monarchy as the Bastille. There is no record of Burke’s immediate reaction. The October Days are mentioned neither in the long letter that he wrote to Depont in November, nor in his other letters of the time. That Burke was outraged as soon as he heard the news is a moral certainty. But the stimulus to make the episode the rhetorical climax of the Reflections came not from the event itself but from Price’s reaction to it, which Burke read only in January . In his peroration, Price applied to himself Simeon’s prayer in the Temple on seeing the infant Jesus and recognizing him as the Messiah: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.’ The crowning example of modern enlightenment that Price cited as enabling him to die happy was seeing the French king ‘led in triumph’. In the Preface to the fourth edition of his sermon, Price claimed that he was referring not to the October Days, but to the king’s visit to Paris in July .²⁷ This is scarcely credible. On November , when Price delivered his sermon, the forced ²⁷ A Discourse on the Love of our Country, in Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge, ), –, . The allusion is to Luke : –.
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departure of the royal family from Versailles was the event uppermost in everyone’s mind, and to which most readers would have applied the phrase ‘led in triumph’.²⁸ For Burke, the contrast between his own reaction of horror and Price’s blasphemous rejoicing came to symbolize the opposition between ‘natural’ and revolutionary sentiment. Burke therefore made the October Days an exemplary incident, a test of sensibility. Accordingly, the section of the Reflections devoted to the episode and its ramifications contains some of the most resonant passages in the entire work. Burke’s first response to Price’s ‘triumph’ was to deny its modernity. Far from being the fruit of enlightenment, the ‘triumph’ was no more than a repetition of the response of one of Price’s Dissenting predecessors, Hugh Peters (–), to the captive Charles I (–) in . During the king’s trial, Peters had actually preached on the same text as Price would choose in (R [–]). After descanting on this analogy for some time, Burke gives his version of the attempt to assassinate the queen ([–]). This purple passage expresses the sense of outrage which Burke expected his readers to share at this cowardly attack on a defenceless woman, an episode which even so staunch a supporter of the Revolution as Mary Wollstonecraft (–) condemned.²⁹ When the Reflections was published, Isaac Cruikshank (–) translated Burke’s account into a powerful visual satire, The Doctor Indulged with his Favorite Scene ( Dec. : BMC ). He added the voyeuristic figure of Dr Price, accompanied by a devil, kneeling on a crown, and uttering his blasphemous application of the Nunc Dimittis (Plate ). Having thus engaged his readers’ sympathies (reinforced by further reflections on the barbarous inhumanity of Price’s ‘triumph’), Burke turns to Marie Antoinette herself: I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the triumph, has borne that day (one is interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well) and that she bears all the succeeding days, that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race, and becoming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage; that like her she has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace, and that if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand. ²⁸ Even pamphleteers hostile to E.B. so applied the phrase: [Catherine Macaulay], Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, ), ; Sir Brooke Boothby, A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, ), –; [William Belsham], Historic Memoir of the French Revolution (London, ), , . ²⁹ Wollstonecraft called it ‘one of the blackest of the machinations that have since the revolution disgraced the dignity of man, and sullied the annals of humanity (An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (nd edn. London, ), –).
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It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which 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. Oh! What a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream that, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.—But the age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, œconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. (R [–])
The most discussed, admired, and ridiculed passage in the Reflections, these paragraphs serve, as they were intended, to polarize reactions to the book and indeed to the Revolution itself. Burke was well aware of the range of reactions he was likely to provoke. Philip Francis, shown an early draft of the Reflections in February , condemned the passage as ‘pure foppery’. Are you, he taunted, ‘such a determined Champion of Beauty as to draw your Sword in defense of any jade upon Earth provided she be handsome?’ (C vi. ). Criticism, as always, stung Burke to elaborate self-justification. In this instance, he retorted that Francis had misread the text, if he thought that the beauty, or even the virtue, of Marie Antoinette was at issue. Burke grounded his defence of the queen on her ‘high Rank, great Splendour of descent, great personal Elegance and outward accomplishments’. These, he argues, are ‘ingredients of moment’ in securing our interest and sympathy in ‘the Misfortunes of Men’ (). Modern readers are less likely than were Burke’s contemporaries to grant that social rank gives a special poignancy to suffering. Tragedy is now a thoroughly democratized genre, and even in an alternative, ‘bourgeois’ tragedy was well established. Burke, however, remained loyal to the still-dominant classical tradition in which he had been educated, and expected his readers to respond to the classical standard of decorum which restricted tragedy to characters of high rank.³⁰ Burke’s purpose in the passage on Marie Antoinette, as he explained to Francis, was ‘to excite an horrour against midnight assassins at back stairs, and their more wicked abettors in Pulpits’ (C vi. ). His rhetorical problem was to create sympathy for a woman whose reputation (as Francis had observed) was far ³⁰ Replying to Philip Francis’s critique of the passage, E.B. argued that ‘high Rank, great Splendour of descent, great personal Elegance and outward accomplishments’ were ‘ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in the Misfortunes of Men’. E.B’s answer to Hamlet’s question (‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?’) is ‘because she was Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, the Wife of Priam, and sufferd in the close of Life a thousand Calamities’ ( Feb. : C vi. ).
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from spotless.³¹To emphasize a sense of the weight of the queen’s ‘accumulated wrongs’, Burke constructs the first paragraph as a single paratactic sentence. The topic of her distinguished ancestry allows Burke to introduce the (logically irrelevant) virtues of her mother, Maria Theresa of Austria (–), the late empress, who had enjoyed a reputation as a pious and virtuous monarch. In a bold stroke at the end of the paragraph, Burke conflates three images: Maria Theresa; the noble suicide (such as Lucrece) who prefers death to life with dishonour; and the unfortunate Marie Antoinette herself. For this tragic fusion to work, the reader must accept that the reality of the queen’s situation might justify suicide as an alternative to a fate worse than death. In the second paragraph, Burke employs a different strategy. To deflect attention from inappropriate images of the queen, he moves from ‘I hear’ to ‘I saw’, and from the present to ‘sixteen or seventeen years ago’, Burke’s visit to France in . When Burke saw her, Marie Antoinette was a princess of , unsullied by the scandals that would soon cloud her reputation. Although much ridiculed and parodied, Burke’s style is appropriate to his purpose of evoking the appearance of a young princess surrounded at a respectful distance by a swarm of gallant admirers. Since the rhetorical intent of the passage is to form a contrast with the queen’s present humiliation, Burke emphasizes elevation rather than beauty. Conventional Petrarchan images evoke an idealized princesse lointaine. The conceit figures Marie Antoinette both asVenus, the morning star, just risen; and as a goddess, just stepping out of her chariot. The reader is invited to empathize with the once-adored princess, formerly defended by the ‘ten thousand swords’ of the admiring cavaliers, now a matron and mother threatened by the ‘bayonets and poniards’ of a gang of cruel assassins.³² Burke believed that his feelings, so different from those of Price and his followers, were ‘natural’. Shifting to the plural, he asserts: we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason . . . we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things. We are alarmed into reflexion; our minds (as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and pity; our weak unthinking pride is humbled, under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. (R [–]) ³¹ Chantal Thomas, La Reine scélérate: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (Paris, ); Lynn Hunt, ‘The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution’, in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Hunt (Baltimore, ), –; Leah Price, ‘Vies privées et scandaleuses: Marie-Antoinette and the Public Eye’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, (), –. ³² Acknowledging that E.B.’s ‘tirade on the Queen of France is condemned’, Horace Walpole avowed that ‘I admire it much. It paints her exactly as she appeared to me the first time I saw her when Dauphiness. She . . . shot through the room like an aërial being, all brightness and grace and without seeming to touch earth—’ (to Lady Upper Ossory, Dec. : YWC xxxiv. –).
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This is recognizably the theological psychology of the Philosophical Enquiry. There Burke argues that, ‘whenever the wisdom of our Creator intended that we should be affected with any thing’, its operation was not left to ‘the languid and precarious operation of our reason’, but entrusted to ‘powers and properties that prevent the understanding, and even the will, which seizing upon the senses and imagination, captivate the soul before the understanding is ready either to join with them or to oppose them’ (WS i. ). Modern readers, schooled to believe that much of what passes for ‘natural’ is in fact ‘constructed’, are likely to be sceptical of such arguments. In the eighteenth century, however, the prevalent view accepted that a wide range of practices and values were indeed part of a universal human nature. Throughout the Reflections, Burke maintains or implies a series of oppositions between what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘unnatural’. Among these ‘natural’ responses, Burke numbers ‘reverence to priests’ and ‘respect to nobility’ (R []). Even modern readers sympathetic to the idea that human psychology is in part ‘natural’ may boggle at this assertion, or at the idea that ‘chivalry’ is natural, or at the suggestion that the ‘age of chivalry’ was alive in . Burke’s ‘age of chivalry’, of course, is to be understood morally rather than as a historical period. For Burke, ‘antient chivalry’ gave rise to a ‘mixed system of opinion and sentiment’ which was still alive. This ‘system’ distinguished modern Europe, to its advantage, not only from contemporary Asian societies but from classical antiquity ([]). Burke took a pessimistic, but far from an entirely negative, view of human nature. While naturally selfish and corrupt, with some system of incentives and restraints people are capable of virtue and nobility. Religion and chivalry provided such systems. In building so much on these foundations, Burke was both part and promoter of an eighteenth-century chivalric revival. A complex and paradoxical fusion of Christian, courtly, and military values, ‘chivalry’ embodied an ethos that combined piety, courtesy, and knightly prowess. A socially exclusive ideal, it flourished in the aristocracies of Western Europe from about the time of the First Crusade () to the early fifteenth century. Chivalry declined as developments in the art of warfare made individual combat and heroism less important. The Seigneur de Bayard (c.–), famous as ‘le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’, is often cited as its last hero. By , the historical ‘age of chivalry’ was undoubtedly dead.³³ Its values and ideals, however, survived in literary form, not only in the prose romances beloved of Don Quixote but in the chivalric epics of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. From about , when English culture received an infusion of French neoclassicism, chivalry and chivalric literature, like most things medieval, came to seem at best quaint. After a century ³³ Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, ), . Keen opens his discussion of the ‘age of chivalry’ by quoting E.B.’s lament.
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of neglect and disesteem, however, as part of a larger re-evaluation of the past that resulted in a more sympathetic attitude to the Middle Ages, chivalry enjoyed a remarkable renaissance of interest. This revival was a complex phenomenon that took many forms.³⁴ Most germane to an understanding of the Reflections is the rehabilitation of chivalry as a historical force. In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (), Adam Ferguson (–), for example, credited chivalry with an important role in the development of modern ‘civilization’.³⁵ Even Edward Gibbon, though conscious of its abuses, could celebrate the chivalric ideal in the final volume of his History (). No careful reader of his pages would have been surprised at Gibbon’s reaction to Burke’s paean to Marie Antoinette: ‘I adore his chivalry.’³⁶ Admittedly, a spirit of mockery pervades Burke’s earliest extant treatment of the subject (in his letter to Shackleton of July ), a heavyhanded parody of the excessive sufferings imposed on knights by their ladies (C i. –). Having outgrown this youthful flippancy, however, Burke became a sympathetic student of the Middle Ages and of chivalry, showing in his ‘History of England’ (written about ) an imaginative historical understanding of the period.³⁷ During his editorship of the Annual Register, he reprinted many pieces of medieval and chivalric interest.³⁸ This chivalric revival was no mere passing fashion, as a few examples drawn from the s will illustrate. In , the seminal work of JeanBaptiste de La Curne de Saint-Palaye (–), his Mémoires de l’ancienne chevalerie (), was translated into English. Francis Grose (–) published an elaborately illustrated Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons (), a copy of which was in Burke’s library. Beginning in , Benjamin West (–) began a series of grand historical paintings for the audience chamber at Windsor Castle depicting scenes from the reign of Edward III. Particularly relevant to the Reflections is his Edward, the Black Prince, ³⁴ Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London, ); Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore, ); Emil Arca, ‘The Politics of the Analogical Imagination: Neo-medieval Theory in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Michigan Journal of Political Science, (), –; William C. Dowling, ‘Burke and the Age of Chivalry’, Yearbook of English Studies, (), –; R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest (Cambridge, ), –; Frans De Bruyn, ‘Edmund Burke the Political Quixote: Romance, Chivalry, and the Political Imagination’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, (), –. ³⁵ Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (), ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh, ), –. Ferguson’s Essay is listed in the catalogue of E.B.’s library (Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. d. , fo. ). ³⁶ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. ; ed. David Womersley (London, ), iii. –; Gibbon to Lord Sheffield, Feb. , in Letters, ed. J. E. Norton (London, ), iii. . ³⁷ Supra, i. –. ³⁸ ‘An Abstract of the Life and Heroic Actions of Balbe Berton, Chevalier de Grillon’ and (from Voltaire) ‘An Account of the Origin of Chivalry’ (Annual Register, , –, – bis); extracts from Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (, – bis); and ‘Some Account of the First Institution of Knights and their Esquires in England’ (, – bis).
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Receiving John, King of France, Prisoner, after the Battle of Poitiers ().³⁹ Treating the captured king with knightly courtesy, the Black Prince later waited on him at table. Even David Hume (–) had been captivated by the ‘really and truly admirable heroism’ of this epitome of chivalric behaviour. Adam Ferguson cited it to exemplify ‘the principal characteristic, on which, among modern nations, we bestow the epithets of civilized or of polished’, a quality in which the Greeks and the Romans had been deficient.⁴⁰ Burke, in turn, adduces the incident in the Reflections to illustrate the ‘inbred sentiments’ of the English, which he contrasts with the savage inhumanity of the revolutionaries (R [–]). Chivalry, then, was a particular historical manifestation of an ideal of universal value. These examples amply demonstrate that Burke’s invocation of the ‘age of chivalry’, though much ridiculed at the time and since, was neither absurd, nor nostalgic, nor anachronistic. Society, Burke knew, had changed since the Middle Ages, and upon the whole, he thought, for the better. He was no laudator temporis acti. But this improvement had been gradual, the result of the continuing operation of the influence of ‘old manners and opinions’. Instead of seeking to extirpate it, in the manner of the revolutionaries, the wiser course was to cherish the benign influence of ‘the spirit of a gentleman’ and ‘the spirit of religion’, under which learning and literature had flourished. Formerly, in a happy symbiosis, learning had repaid its debt to religion and nobility by ‘enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds’. Latterly (and as Burke thought suicidally), the French philosophes, whom he regarded as among the prime culprits in fomenting the Revolution, had broken this alliance. Without the fostering of religion and aristocracy, Burke feared, learning could not survive, but risked being ‘cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude’ (R [–]).⁴¹ Nor might learning be the only casualty of the delusive equality of the new barbarism of the ‘sophisters, œconomists, and calculators’. The conventional view was that the growth of commerce, fuelled by the division of labour, produced the surplus of wealth that enabled modern civilization to develop and flourish.⁴² Burke inverted this interpretation, suggesting that ‘commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our ³⁹ In all, E.B. owned fifteen volumes of Grose’s various Antiquities (Sale Catalogue, ). Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven, ), –, . ⁴⁰ Hume, History of England (–), ch. ; 1778 edn. (rpt. Indianapolis, ), ii. ; Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, . ⁴¹ This phrase (which alludes to Matthew : ), misquoted as ‘the swinish multitude’, achieved considerable notoriety, being often exploited in populist literature to imply that E.B. thought all multitudes ‘swinish’. John Bloomberg-Rissman identifies about thirty such titles (‘A Crowd of Bitter Retorts’, Factotum: Newsletter of the XVIIIth Century STC, no. (Apr. ), –). E.B. defiantly if ironically reused the phrase in his parody of the indictment of John Reeves ( Jan. : C viii. , –) ⁴² David Hume, ‘Of Commerce’ (), in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (rev. edn. Indianapolis, ), –; William Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe (), ed. Felix Gilbert (Chicago, ), –; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (), I. iii (ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, ), i. –).
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œconomical politicians’ may be no more than the product of ‘antient manners’ ([]). The destruction of religion and aristocracy may therefore be the presage of the decay of commerce, not (as some would suppose) its expansion. If commerce were to disappear, provided that ‘the spirit of nobility and religion’ remained, ‘sentiment’ could supply its loss. But if nobility and religion are destroyed, commerce cannot supply their place. The result will be ‘a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians’ ([]). This passage clearly evinces his religious and aristocratic conception of society. No society based wholly on economic relations and exchange can be ‘civilized’.⁴³ Society therefore needed ‘the spirit of a gentleman’ and ‘the spirit of religion’. By society’s dependence on ‘the spirit of a gentleman’, Burke meant that civilization required a hereditary class of landed proprietors who accepted that their wealth entailed social responsibilities. They were the patrons of the poor, as well as of learning. The idea of a moral aristocracy has a special place in Burke’s thought, partly as a result of his political apprenticeship with the Rockingham Whigs, who embodied his aristocratic ideal. Burke was of his time in regarding property, and pre-eminently landed property, as the best qualification for participation (whether as elector or as elected) in politics.⁴⁴ At their worst, landed gentlemen were ‘the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth’ (R []). At their best, their wealth and leisure gave them opportunities to acquire an informed and disinterested understanding of the true interests of their country. True nobility is therefore ‘a graceful ornament to the civil order’, the ‘Corinthian capital of polished society’. The French nobility had their faults, Burke concedes, but they were such faults as were curable. Instead of reforming their aristocracy, the French had destroyed it, to the impoverishment of society as a whole ([–]). An especially pernicious result of the doctrine of equal rights was the creation of delusive expectations of economic equalization. Convinced that, by ‘the nature of things’, the great majority of mankind could expect no more than a precarious livelihood, Burke deprecated raising ‘false ideas and vain expectations’ in ‘men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life’ (R []). Instead, they should be taught to ‘respect that property of which they cannot partake’ ([]). Men are in some respects equal: the ‘happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions’ makes ‘the true moral equality of mankind’ ([]). In the nature of things, this moral equality cannot be extended to the political, economic, or social spheres. The wise legislator will therefore consider men as belonging to ‘so many different species of animals’, ⁴³ J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’ (), repr. in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, ), –, esp. –. ⁴⁴ Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, – (Oxford, ), esp. –, –.
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and will respect differences of birth, education, profession, age, habit, and property ([]). Where property was unequal but stable, the poor were likely to accept the inequality as natural and inevitable. But by creating a vast lottery out of the property of the Church, the National Assembly had undermined respect for property of any kind ([–]). This respect was in the interests of everyone, not just of the rich, as Burke had argued in at the time of the Nullum Tempus agitation.⁴⁵ As much or more than ‘the spirit of a gentleman’, society and civilization needed ‘the spirit of religion’. Despite the undoubted growth in scepticism and infidelity, Britain in remained a religious society. Burke shared the common belief of his time that moral and social order required the sanction of religion. For Burke, religion was ‘natural’: ‘man is by his constitution a religious animal . . . atheism is against, not only our reason but our instincts’ (R []).⁴⁶ In this passage, written soon after the spoliation of the Gallican Church, Burke moves rapidly from ‘religion’ to a defence of ecclesiastical establishments. The political context and ulterior purpose may suggest that Burke valued ‘religion’ chiefly as a support for the social order, and Burke is sometimes depicted as no more than a politique defender of the Established Church, valuing it as a political institution rather than for its intrinsic religious function.⁴⁷ Some of his own remarks are liable to strike a modern reader as tepid. An example is a letter (to an unknown correspondent) in which he says of the Church of England that he has ‘seen no cause to abandon that communion’, and describes his attachment to Christianity ‘at large’ as ‘much from conviction; more from affection’ ( Jan. : C vi. ). Such statements lack the note of emotional intensity with which Burke typically invests what is nearest and dearest to him. Yet the reserved language is appropriate in a letter to a stranger, which Burke knew might become public property. Further, Burke grew up in the Church of Ireland, an anomalous institution not, as he is likely to have experienced it, calculated to inspire love and affection. Transplanted to England in , he could hardly feel the same deep emotional identification with the Church of England as if it had been his since birth. In such circumstances, intellectual conviction is what we should expect. Burke was a ‘rational’ Christian, though not in the sense used today in phrases such as ‘rational Dissent’, to describe theologians such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. Burke believed that genuine religious conviction was emotional, and he even applies to it the term ‘enthusiasm’. In the public sphere, however, the application of religious principles and the treatment of religious questions required a sober rationality, not ‘enthusiasm’ (a term that ⁴⁵ Supra, i. –. ⁴⁶ This idea is found in E.B.’s early essay ‘Religion’; A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, ed. H.V. F. Somerset (Cambridge, ), . ⁴⁷ Michael W. McConnell, ‘Establishment and Toleration in Edmund Burke’s “Constitution of Freedom” ’, in Supreme Court Review, (Chicago, ), –.
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for Burke is usually pejorative). Likewise, in the debate on the Feathers Tavern Petition on February , he applied the term ‘all rational Christianity’ to institutional Christianity (as opposed to the Christianity of ‘distempered imaginations’), and implied that ‘a rational Christian’ recognized that institutional Christianity could take many forms without being ‘essentially different’ (WS ii. –). As a ‘rational Christian’ in this sense, Burke believed that a Christian society needed an Established Church. But the form of such a Church would vary from one society to another, as it did between England and Scotland. His most eloquent defence of an Established Church is found in the Reflections, where religion and politics are so intertwined (properly, of course, as Burke believed) that he may appear to be defending the Church for its political utility. Yet the sincerity and consistency of Burke’s views on establishments are readily vindicated. Earlier texts illustrate the distinctively religious value that Burke attached to an Established Church. In an early essay on ‘Religion’, for example, a purely private piece that has therefore great evidential value on the question of sincerity, he argues that the preservation of revealed religion requires a priesthood ‘compellable to teach it’.⁴⁸ This, then, was an early belief that much predated his entry into politics. Nor was Burke in a minority in maintaining the need for an Established Church, witness the resounding defeat of Fox’s motion on March for a committee to consider the repeal the Test and Corporation Acts.⁴⁹ In the Reflections, Burke argues that, to command respect in an affluent society, the hierarchy of the Church must correspond to the social structure of the state. There must be archbishops and bishops to represent the Church in the world of dukes and earls. A ‘primitive’ clergy, apostolic in its poverty, could not hope to inculcate respect for religion from their social and economic superiors (R [–]). Later in the book, in a passage that illustrates his philosophy of religion as well as his political economy, Burke even defended an element of the Gallican Church that had been suppressed in the Church of England at the Reformation, and that found few defenders in his own time: the monastic orders ([–]). First, Burke concedes (for the sake of argument) that the monasteries ‘savour of superstition in their very principle’. Superstition, he admits, ‘in its possible excess’ is potentially ‘a very great evil’. Yet far from being ‘the greatest of all possible vices’, superstition is ‘the religion of feeble minds’, and some admixture of it must be tolerated in order not to deprive them of their consolation ([]). Then, again for the sake of argument, Burke makes another concession: ‘The monks are lazy. Be it so.’ Their idleness is socially no more harmful than that of secular owners of property. The surplus product of the soil that accrues to the ‘landed capitalist’ is returned to society by their expenses, whoever they are. Some of the ⁴⁸ ‘Religion’, in A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, –. E.B. further argues that there must be a ‘Society for this Purpose’, presumably with some constituted authority to impose uniformity of doctrine. ⁴⁹ By to (CJ xlv. ).
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wealth of the monasteries will be devoted to charitable, cultural, or educational projects: on magnificent buildings, on excellent libraries and the patronage of art, on scholarship and scientific research. Something they will spend on themselves. But the new proprietors of the Church lands are likely to be more selfish, and less public-spirited. Even on a narrow calculation of social utility, then, the advantage lies with the old possessors ([–]). As this passage shows, Burke’s defence of the ancien régime was not that of an unthinking reactionary. He believed that its institutions could be defended even by the kinds of argument used by their opponents.⁵⁰ Most of the leading ideas of the Reflections are thus adumbrated in Burke’s treatment of the October Days. Burke’s lament for the ‘age of chivalry’, far from invoking an irretrievable past, expressed in terms calculated to embody for his contemporaries (though not to most modern readers) a universal moral lesson. The choice with which Burke presents his readers remains important, though no one would now present it in terms of ‘chivalry’ and economics. Are there values which transcend the material, which cannot be assigned a numerical value, but which take precedence over utilitarian calculations? As long as there are those who believe so, Burke will have his disciples and the Reflections its readers. Not that Burke’s appeal to transcendent chivalric values meant the exclusion of economic or numerical arguments. Rather, he believed that each had its proper sphere. For if Burke’s was an ‘age of sophisters, œconomists, and calculators’, he was himself undoubtedly an economist and a calculator. To his opponents, at least, he was also a sophister. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (–), for one, thought so. In an essay of , while exonerating Burke from the common charge of supporting ‘different Principles at different æras of his political Life’, Coleridge instead accused him of ‘a certain inconsistency in his fundamental Principles’, a ‘want of congruity in the Principles appealed to in different parts of the same Work’: If his Opponents are Theorists, then every thing is to be founded on PRUDENCE, on mere calculations of EXPEDIENCY . . . Are his Opponents Calculators? Then Calculation itself is represented as a sort of crime. God has given us FEELINGS, and we are to obey them!⁵¹
Several passages in the Reflections, to look no further, could be adduced to support Coleridge’s contention.⁵² Yet in the same number of The Friend, Coleridge himself follows an argumentative paragraph extolling ‘Reason’ as the only foundation of morality with an emotive apostrophe to ‘REASON! best ⁵⁰ Derek Beales, ‘Edmund Burke and the Monasteries of France’, Historical Journal, (), –, sets this passage in its European context. ⁵¹ The Friend, ( Oct. ); ed. Barbara E. Rooke, in Collected Works, iv. (London, ), II. –. ⁵² The constitution of a kingdom is not ‘a problem of arithmetic’ (R [–]); ‘scales hung in a shop of horrors’, weighing the crimes of the old despotism and the new democracy ([]).
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and holiest gift of Heaven and bond of union with the Giver. The high Title by which the Majesty of Man claims precedence above all other living Creatures! Mysterious Faculty, the Mother of Conscience, of Language, of Tears, and of Smiles!’ Here Coleridge implicitly recognizes that the affective power of rhetoric may properly be employed to enforce a rational argument. Speaking and writing not as a philosopher but as a rhetorician, whose primary duty is to persuade, Burke can hardly be faulted for exploiting all the means at his disposal. Some questions, Burke might have retorted, are properly settled by calculation; others indeed belong rather to the province of feeling and intuition. Aristotle had said as much. We should ‘look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits’; to accept ‘probable reasoning from a mathematician’ was as foolish as to ‘demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs’.⁵³ Burke was familiar with this distinction, for he paraphrases it in his Speech on Conciliation: ‘Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all sophistry’ ( Mar. : WS iii. ). In accordance with this principle, Burke’s use of numbers is determined by the nature of the subject and the rhetorical requirement of his argument: sometimes quasi-mathematical, sometimes approximate, sometimes hardly more than illustrative. Aristotle’s advice is especially pertinent for the rhetorician, who is often faced with the need to choose between, or to balance, opposite or complementary appeals and arguments. When will a general principle be more persuasive than an example, where will the rational appeal persuade more than the emotional or ethical? In one situation, a plethora of ‘facts’ may suit the nature of the case; in another, an appeal to ignore so-called ‘facts’ and to trust instinct and intuition may prove more effective. A rhetorician of remarkable versatility as well as power, Burke moves effortlessly and seamlessly between these two poles. The Reflections affords numerous illustrations of such shifts. Setting aside the bravura passages, great contrasts of tone are evident even within those parts of the argument supported by numerical evidence. For example, after an emotive attack on ‘rapacious despotism’, culminating in a long quotation from Sir John Denham’s poem Coopers Hill (), Burke slides into a reasoned argument about the incidence of taxation under the ancien régime, an argument that makes considerable use of statistics and calculation (R [–]). This passage is far from unrhetorical. The appeal is indeed primarily rational, to facts and figures. The numbers prove their point as objectively as can be expected in any political argument. But there is also a supporting ethical appeal, deriving from Burke’s character as a rational ⁵³ Nichomachean Ethics, b–a (trans. W. D. Ross, rev. J. O. Urmson, in Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, ), ii. ).
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calculator. The reader is invited to imagine him at his desk with pencil and paper, taking notes from his sources and laboriously adding and subtracting with arithmetical exactness. Such passages are atypical, for political principles are rarely reducible to numbers. More commonly, when Burke uses figures, he makes them appear suggestive rather than decisive. An instructive example, again from the Reflections, is his treatment of the population of France (R [–]). Burke’s purpose is to prove that, under the ancien régime, the population of France was increasing, so that the government could not have been so oppressive as apologists for the Revolution had claimed. In this case, the numbers themselves are approximate, and Burke varies his style accordingly. The population ‘at the end of the last century’ was ‘generally calculated’ at million. Of a more authoritative calculation, based on figures submitted by the provincial intendants ‘about sixty years ago’, he says: ‘I have not the books, which are very voluminous, by me, nor do I know where to procure them (I am obliged to speak by memory, and therefore the less positively) but I think the population of France was by them, even at that period, estimated at twenty-two millions of souls’. A subsequent estimate, by Jacques Necker, for , is quoted exactly (,,), as is Richard Price’s of million for . Price’s figure was admirably suited to Burke’s purpose: it was high, and it came from his principal opponent. Indeed, it was too convenient. To have accepted it as it stood might have appeared opportunistic. Burke therefore scales it down to million as a conservative figure, from which he calculates that the density of population ( per square league) is greater than that of England.⁵⁴ Rhetorical effects pervade this passage. The estimates acquire greater precision as they approach the present. Burke’s deliberate vagueness about the figure calculated from the reports of the intendants, reinforced by his confession that he wrote about them from memory, exerts an unobtrusive ethical appeal (as rhetorical confessions usually do), and helps maintain the epistolary fiction. The treatment of Price’s figure, arbitrarily reduced to approximate to Necker’s, is likewise primarily rhetorical. It allows Burke to appear scrupulous and fair-minded, willing to take information even from his adversaries. Instead of simply presenting the figure that best proved his point, by subjecting it to judicious scrutiny, he reinforces the ethical as well as the rational appeal of his argument. Burke’s use of these numbers is palpably rhetorical. Yet each had a real external source, and the way Burke presents them gives us clues or warnings about the degree of precision with which each is to be regarded. While these passages are not as memorable as the lament for the ‘age of chivalry’, they are important for an understanding of the Reflections, ⁵⁴ Necker published his estimate in De l’administration des finances de la France (Paris, ), i. ; Price in A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, in Political Writings, . Price’s figure occurs in his rhetorical peroration, and may be a hyperbole rather than a serious calculation. Necker’s book is listed in the catalogue of E.B.’s library (Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. d. , fo. ).
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for they illustrate that Burke’s ‘chivalry’ was not knight-errantry on behalf of a lost cause, but an impassioned defence of values grounded on a detailed, empirical knowledge of the realities of eighteenth-century society. Burke’s rhetoric articulated deeply held convictions derived from extensive reading, experience, and insight. Appeals to ‘nature’, and contrasts between what is ‘natural’ and what ‘unnatural’, underpin much of the argument of the Reflections. In the part of the book that deals with Price and the October Days, Burke’s appeal is to the ‘natural’ response of the individual. Elsewhere, Burke invokes ‘nature’ as a moral and political norm that governs, or ought to govern, the development and workings of whole societies. To preserve is more natural than to destroy; to respect history and inheritance, more natural than to repudiate them. These contrasts embody the essential difference between the English Revolution of and the French Revolution, and are often memorably expressed in metaphor. An example is a paragraph in which Burke develops the idea of human society as a ‘contract’. The three principles enunciated by Price in his sermon were derived and developed from the theory of John Locke, who posited a ‘social contract’ as a means of subordinating the individual will to the greater good of society. In Locke’s theory, the original members of society enter into such a contract, and later generations virtually accept it when they accept the protection that society offers them. Such a contract is not indefeasible. If a ruler breaks it, the people are absolved from their allegiance, and are free to enter into a new contract. Price goes much further than Locke, making the role of the people both greater and more continuous.⁵⁵ Burke counters this theory by redefining the social contract. Society is indeed, in his view, held together by a contract, but not one that, like ‘a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco’, can be ‘dissolved by the fancy of the parties’. Being rather ‘a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection’, whose ends can be achieved only ‘in many generations’, the social contract is a compact ‘not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (R [–]). Those who are living have no moral competence to break the contract. The current possessors have a life interest in the constitution of their country; they are not freeholders ([]). Political knowledge is therefore to be sought not in abstract, metaphysical speculation, but in the lessons of history. Foolishly, the revolutionaries despise the ‘opinions, and prejudices . . . and instincts’ of mankind ([]), ⁵⁵ D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford, ), –.
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from which wise legislators have over time constructed social and political fabrics which answer every practical purpose. In politics, as in morality, the wise ‘are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason’ ([]). In his sermon, Price spoke tepidly and even critically of the Revolution of , reserving his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, which had ‘kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes and warms and illuminates Europe!’⁵⁶ His audience was left in no doubt about which revolution was preferable. To refute Price, Burke therefore sought not only to condemn the French, but to defend the English Revolution as a model of wise statesmanship. He was not, however, writing history, so much as employing a historical example as a means of persuasion: constructing what would today be called a ‘usable history’.⁵⁷ His account therefore differs in emphasis from the way he presented the Revolution in his ‘Address to the King’ of (WS iii. –). While the two in no way contradict each other, the ‘Address’ offers a more populist, and the Reflections a more minimalist or ‘conservative’, reading of the Revolution of . While deprecating revolutions in general, Burke acknowledged that revolution is sometimes, like war, a regrettable necessity (R []). If they are wise, the participants in such a revolution will seek to minimize what they have done. Faced with the need to fill the vacant throne, the English chose to pretend that they were doing no such thing. Burke attributes to Lord Somers (–), the framer of the Bill of Rights, a kind of Platonic ‘noble lie’ in using language that made the Revolution appear as little like a revolution as possible. Taking each of Price’s three principles in turn, Burke shows that, far from supporting, the framers of the Revolution settlement consciously sought to discountenance them. Without denying that, reworded in more decorous language, the principles may be metaphysically true, Burke argues that their application in practice would be pernicious. Price’s first principle was the right ‘to choose our own governors’. All monarchies, Burke admits, were originally elective. But experience soon showed that an elective monarchy resulted in contention and instability. In , accordingly, though William III (–) was in some sense ‘chosen’ king, his accession was more properly a necessity than a choice (R [–]). As to Price’s second principle, the right to ‘cashier’ elected governors for ‘misconduct’, Burke argues that ‘misconduct’ is too light and indefinite a term for the behaviour that might justify deposing a king. Again, at the Revolution only a ‘grave and overruling necessity’ forced the ousting of James II (–), a step taken ‘with infinite reluctance’ ([]). By confirming ancient privileges and controls on the executive, the Revolution ⁵⁶ Discourse on the Love of our Country, in Political Writings, –, –. ⁵⁷ By , there was an extensive literature contesting the meaning of the Revolution. E.B’s interpretation was close to those of William Blackstone and William Paley (H. T. Dickinson, ‘The EighteenthCentury Debate on the “Glorious Revolution” ’, History, (), –).
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made the need for another revolution extremely improbable. With Price’s third principle, the right after ‘cashiering’ a king ‘to form a government for ourselves’, Burke agreed in theory. In , ‘the nation’ was ‘in some sense, free to take what course it pleased for filling the throne; but only free to do so upon the same grounds on which they might have wholly abolished their monarchy, and every other part of their constitution’. Fortunately, the nation (or rather its representative, the Convention Parliament) was too wise to ‘think such bold changes within their commission’ ([]). In Burke’s interpretation of , necessity had compelled the Convention to accept a minimal departure from the strict hereditary succession. The framers of the settlement, however, tried so far as possible to present the Revolution as a reassertion of inherited principles and practice, not a constitutional innovation and still less a harbinger of further constitutional change. Because the Revolution settlement was the result of a compromise between widely different views about how to deal with the constitutional crisis precipitated by James II, neither Price’s interpretation nor Burke’s is invalid. The Revolution effected a much more substantive constitutional change than Burke allows, in practice if not in form. On the other hand, neither in nor would many have agreed with Price’s extreme statement of the principles established by the Revolution. What both have in common is that neither makes any allowance for differences of opinion in –, though the contemporary debates had long been in print and were well known. Price and Burke were both engaged in myth-making rather than history. Price sought to promote further constitutional change by arguing that the principles had already been accepted, and needed only to be put into practice. Burke wanted to capture the Revolution for his theory of an ‘ancient constitution’ periodically renewed and renovated, but not essentially altered. He therefore presents the men of as acting in the spirit of their ‘canonized forefathers’ (R []) and throwing a ‘politic, well-wrought veil’ ([]) over whatever small innovation they had been compelled to sanction. The lesson of – was therefore that, in a constitutional crisis, as little should be changed as possible, and that little should be disguised as a restoration. Nothing that has worked reasonably well in practice should be altered merely to achieve greater theoretic perfection. All this was exactly the reverse of how the French behaved in . While conceding that that the French constitution had suffered ‘waste and dilapidation’, Burke affirmed that there remained ‘the foundations of a noble and venerable castle’ (R []). The proper organ for constitutional repair was the States General, meeting in the ancient manner as three separate estates. When the States met, the French were ‘absolutely in possession’ of a ‘good’ constitution. All that was needed was ‘to secure the stability and independence of the states’, before proceeding to the redress of grievances.⁵⁸ Instead of ⁵⁸ Speech on the Army Estimates ( Feb. : W iii. ).
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seeking to restore their ancient constitution, however, the French foolishly chose to act as though they ‘had never been moulded into civil society, and had every thing to begin anew’ ([]). Most of the last third of the Reflections is devoted to a disapproving analysis of nearly everything the Assembly had done. Burke distinguishes between the ‘mere abstract competence of the supreme power’ in a state (in Britain, the theoretical omnicompetence of Parliament) and the more limited ‘moral competence’ which subjects ‘occasional will to permanent reason’ (R []). From Magna Charta, ‘our oldest reformation’, to the Revolution, the English spoke of their ‘most sacred rights and franchises’ as deriving not from some abstract principle but from ‘an inheritance’ ([]). Burke regarded the precise legal provisions of the Bill of Rights, based firmly on ancient practice and judicial precedents, as a stronger safeguard for individual liberties than any appeal to the abstract (and therefore indefinite and unenforceable) ‘rights of man’ ([–]). Those who inherit liberty treat it with the respect due to an object they wish to transmit to their children: ‘People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors’ ([–]). Burke imagines the State either as a ‘permanent body composed of transitory parts’, in which individual members die but the whole remains in a condition of ‘unchangeable constancy’, or as a kind of extended family ([–]). The National Assembly, on the other hand, disrespectful of their ancestors, treat their country as a ‘carte blanche’, upon which they may ‘scribble’ what they please ([]), or even like a ‘country of conquest’ ([]). In keeping with his belief that political measures were inseparable from the men who proposed or conducted them, Burke traced much of the evil of the French Revolution to the vicious composition of the National Assembly. After he had read the lists of the deputies elected to the States General, ‘nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing’ (R []). The British House of Commons drew largely on what, in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (), he would call the ‘true natural aristocracy’ of the country (W iii. ). Burke concedes that ‘there is no qualification for government, but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive’. Ability is needed in government. But ability being a ‘vigorous and active principle’, its operation must be restrained by property, which is ‘sluggish, inert, and timid’ (R [–]). Men of inherited wealth, with their superior educational opportunities and more extensive experience, should preponderate in the legislative body. At the worst, they will provide the necessary ‘ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth’ ([]). At the best, they will be distinguished but cautious patriots, having nothing to gain by rash, speculative schemes of social reconstruction. Far otherwise was the National Assembly. Since the Revolution, ‘the property of France does not govern it. Of course property is destroyed’ ([]). Its best men were inexperienced in practical politics; its worst harboured sinister personal ambitions. Burke especially objected to the preponderance of
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pettifogging lawyers among the representatives of the Third Estate, and to the country curates among the clerical deputies. There were even a ‘handful of country clowns’, some of them reportedly illiterate ([]). Burke believed that men engaged in ‘low’ occupations were not qualified to be legislators: ‘the state suffers oppression’ when hairdressers or tallow-chandlers assume political responsibility ([–]). Such men had no substantial stake in the existing order, and actually stood to gain from social and political turmoil. Uneducated and inexperienced, they were inevitably men of limited views. By some strange fatality, the natural leaders of French society had been largely excluded from the National Assembly. From such a convocation of inexperience and ignorance, little good could be expected and much evil was to be feared. Believing that the many would always be led by the few, whether by a ‘natural aristocracy’ as in Britain or by the unscrupulous demagogues who had taken the lead in France, Burke was always sceptical of the possibility of any genuinely popular participation in politics. Drawing on an aristocratic interpretation of classical Greek history, he describes a ‘perfect democracy’ as ‘the most shameless thing in the world’, because it permitted the unchecked exercise of arbitrary power (R []). Affecting to be a ‘perfect democracy’, with its elaborate charade of equality and elections, the new government of France seemed on the way to becoming ‘a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy’ ([]). The British constitution was widely celebrated for its system of checks and balances. The new French constitution manifestly lacked any counterweights to the democratic element. The National Assembly, mischievously composed as it was, would be omnipotent. The minimal powers allotted to the king reduced him to a mere cipher (R [–]). There was no second chamber to act, like the British House of Lords, as the representative of property ([–]). In the new judicial system, the elected judges would become subservient to those who elected them, and judicial impartiality would be impossible. The abolished parlements had often been criticized as venal, corrupt, and selfish guardians of aristocratic privileges. Following Montesquieu (himself a parlementaire), who placed great valued on such intermediate institutions, Burke defended them as independent custodians of the rights of private property and the privileges of the individual ([–]). In the army, the Assembly had destroyed ‘the principle of obedience’ and broken ‘the chain of military subordination’ by endowing common soldiers with the ‘rights of man’ ([–]).⁵⁹ Since the Assembly had also abolished ‘the very idea of a gentleman’, the new democratic officers, like the new judges, would enjoy only a precarious authority. Judges and officers alike would need to be at once sycophants and demagogues. In the end, ‘some popular general’ ⁵⁹ Fox, on the contrary, rejoiced that the Revolution proved that ‘a man, by becoming a soldier, did not cease to be a citizen’ (Debate on the Army Estimates, Feb. : PH xxviii. ).
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would become ‘the master of your whole republic’ ([–]). This prediction was verified when Napoleon seized power in .⁶⁰ The Reflections is a mixed, heterogeneous work, part history, part philosophy, part politics. Conceived as a riposte to Price, it expanded to become Burke’s most important statement on the nature of human societies and the art of government. Naturally, some questions of intense concern to Burke and his contemporaries have lost their urgency. Yet others remain insistent. Like any classic text, the Reflections is sufficiently rich and multifarious to speak to the changing interests and preoccupations of successive generations. Ours is ‘the Age of Rights’.⁶¹ Claims to rights have been advanced on an unprecedented scale, and solemnly recognized in such international documents as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of . Since then, appeals to ‘human rights’ have achieved increasing prominence in political argument and rhetoric. Indeed, the question of individual human rights is now so central a preoccupation of political discourse that one scholar has asserted that ‘the value of studying Burke today depends in large measure on his treatment of it’.⁶² Such an affirmation may initially provoke incredulity. Even to introduce Burke into the debate on so distinctively modern a topic as ‘human rights’ may appear an anachronism. Admittedly, the terms which Burke used (‘natural rights’, and after ‘the rights of men’ and ‘the rights of man’) are not synonymous with ‘human rights’. Yet the difference is philosophical and rhetorical rather than practical.⁶³ A more formidable barrier is Burke’s reputation as an enemy of such rights. Today, most readers first encounter Burke as the antagonist of Thomas Paine, the great champion and popularizer of the ‘rights of man’. A recent anthology, for example, presents Burke, together with Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx, as one of the three great antagonists of the concept of ‘human rights’.⁶⁴ How Burke earned his place in this triumvirate is no mystery. Abusing the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of , he excoriated it as ‘madness’, a ⁶⁰ E.B. here draws on the theory of a natural cycle of constitutions, adumbrated by Aristotle (Politics, b), Polybius (. –), and Machiavelli (Discourses, I. ii). ⁶¹ Louis Henkin, The Age of Rights (New York, ). An earlier version of this section appeared as ‘Burke and Human Rights’ in A Moral Enterprise: Politics, Reason and the Human Good. Essays in Honor of Francis Canavan, ed. Kenneth L. Grasso and Robert P. Hunt (Wilmington, Del.,), –, –. ⁶² A. Owen Aldridge, ‘The Case for Edmund Burke’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, (), – (quotation from ). ⁶³ This is not to minimize the importance of different theories of the origins of rights. For E.B., ‘natural rights’ derived from the law of nature, and therefore ultimately from God. The prevailing secularism of our time prefers to regard them as ‘inherent’ and therefore ‘human’. ⁶⁴ ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man, ed. Jeremy Waldron (London, ).
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compound of ‘childish futility’, ‘gross and stupid absurdity’, and ‘palpable falsity’ (Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, : W iii. ). These phrases, however, do not fairly represent Burke’s views on ‘human rights’. All his opprobrious epithets are fulminated against what he regarded as ‘the pretended rights of men’, not what he acknowledged as their ‘real rights’ (R []). Far from denying the existence of what are today called ‘human rights’, Burke regarded respect for these ‘real rights’ as a mark of the good and just society. Burke thus differs from the ‘liberal’ tradition not in rejecting rights but in what he recognizes as a right.⁶⁵ The French Déclaration of , so vilified by Burke, is the foundation document in the modern history of ‘human rights’.⁶⁶ Previously, such claims had typically been framed as lists of grievances. Notable examples include Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights of . Even the American Declaration of Independence, while advancing some universal propositions, retained much of the form of a bill of complaint. The French Déclaration marked a significant innovation. Dropping the complaint mode entirely, it asserts a series of universal ‘rights’ to which not only the French but all humanity are entitled.⁶⁷ Its modern successors, such as those promulgated by the United Nations, have followed this pattern. Critics of these documents have charged that they are too abstract and rationalistic, that in seeking to express ‘universal’ rights, they fail to respect differences between cultures, and the different ways in which societies may legitimately conceptualize and protect the ‘rights’ they accord to individuals. Outsiders should not seek to impose an alien code of doubtful universality.⁶⁸ This objection relates chiefly to ‘human rights’ as an international issue. A further charge is that ‘human rights’, at least as commonly conceived and asserted, are excessively individualistic, destructively privileging the atomized individual at the expense of the group and the community. Their pursuit authorizes, even encourages, the renewal within society itself of the Hobbesian ‘warre of every man against every man’ which society was instituted to supersede.⁶⁹ Combining both charges, Third World critics have argued that ‘human rights’ are an agent of Western imperialism, seeking to impose its values and objectives (especially individualism) ⁶⁵ In their anthology Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce (London, ), E. K. Bramstead and K. J. Melhuish exclude E.B. on the ground that he ‘repudiated the doctrine of natural rights’ (). ⁶⁶ The Déclaration was debated during August and presented to the king for approval on Oct. (French Revolution Documents, ed. J. M. Roberts (Oxford, –), i. –). ⁶⁷ Keith Michael Baker, ‘The Idea of a Declaration of Rights’, in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Régime and the Declaration of Rights of , ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, Calif., ), –. ⁶⁸ Adda B. Bozeman, The Future of Law in a Multicultural World (Princeton, ), –, –, ; Chris Brown, ‘Universal Human Rights: A Critique’, in Human Rights in Global Politics, ed. Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler (Cambridge, ), –. ⁶⁹ Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York, ); Charles Taylor, ‘Atomism’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, ), –. The quotation from Hobbes is from Leviathan, pt. I, ch. .
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in the guise of ideas that claim universality but which are in reality the product of Western capitalism.⁷⁰ These are weighty criticisms, which advocates of global ‘human rights’ have endeavoured to address.⁷¹ By what may at first appear a paradox, Burke’s treatment of ‘the rights of men’ proves unexpectedly relevant to the problem of ‘human rights’ in today’s world. For the French Déclaration, while advancing universalist claims, is founded on a concept of popular sovereignty and ‘democracy’ that is palpably a product of a distinctively Western tradition. Even a friendly critic has acknowledged that the United Nations Universal Declaration may appear ‘an attempt to universalize Canadian social democracy as it stood in the bright dawn of victory after ’.⁷² Burke’s theory of rights is less open to this objection. Wary of attributing indefeasible ‘rights’ to atomized individuals, Burke preferred to treat them as part of a system of social duties and obligations.⁷³ Further, without eschewing principles, he was always ready to modify generalized concepts (such as rights) according to local and particular circumstances. His long and intense concern with India forced him to confront the reality of cultural difference not as an armchair anthropologist but as a practical lawgiver. Inclined by temperament to respect such differences, Burke might have become a relativist. Instead, he sought the universal human needs and values that find expression in that cultural diversity. Burke’s most sustained treatment of ‘human rights’ occurs in the Reflections. Against the delusive principles enshrined in the French Déclaration, Burke champions what he calls ‘the real rights of men’, which the ‘pretended rights’ espoused by the National Assembly would actually subvert (R [–]). Attacking these ‘pretended rights’, Burke often gives the phrase ‘rights of men’ an ironic or negative edge. Thus he dubs Price ‘the archpontiff of the rights of men’, and stigmatizes ‘the rights of men’ as a ‘grand magazine of offensive weapons’ in which Henry VIII would have found a fit ‘instrument of despotism’ (R [, ]).⁷⁴ In , when the phrase ‘rights of men’ was associated with a levelling populism that most of Burke’s intended audience found distasteful, these ironic uses were rhetorically effective. For modern readers, ⁷⁰ Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab, ‘Human Rights: A Western Construct with Limited Applicability’, in Human Rights: Cultural and Ideological Perspectives, ed. Pollis and Schwab (New York, ), –. ⁷¹ Waldron, ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’, –; R. J. Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge, ); Charles Taylor, ‘Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights’, in The Politics of Human Rights, ed. Obrad Savi´c (London, ), –. ⁷² Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution (Toronto, ), . Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia, ), defends the Declaration against the charge of ethnocentrism. ⁷³ Joseph Pappin III, ‘Burke’s Philosophy of Rights’, in The Enduring Edmund Burke: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Ian Crowe (Wilmington, Del., ), –. ⁷⁴ Other examples include ‘these new doctors of the rights of men’ (R []) and ‘their rights, as men, to take fortresses, to murder guards, to seize on kings’ ([]). I count about thirty such passages.
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however, they are likely to create an appearance of unmitigated hostility towards such rights. This impression is misleading. What provoked Burke’s ire were false claims and abstract formulations. In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (), he deplored ‘the madness of their declaration of the pretended rights of man’ and deprecated ‘the mischievous tendency of all such declarations to the well-being of men and of citizens, and to the safety and prosperity of every just commonwealth’ (W iii. ). Burke did not deny the validity of the ‘rights of men’. Indeed, such rights are integral to his philosophy of politics. As a philosopher, he acknowledged their derivation from the natural law. As a statesman, however, he preferred to derive them from positive laws. The value of such enactments as Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights of was in declaring and recognizing such ‘natural rights’ in a form that made them effective and enforceable. The framers of the Petition of Right of , for example, rejected the ‘theoretic science’ which would have given them merely a ‘vague speculative right’ and ‘exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild litigious spirit’. Instead, guided by a ‘practical wisdom’, they chose a ‘positive, recorded, hereditary title’ (R []). Burke defended the value of inherited liberties through characteristic metaphors drawn from the law of property. Inheritance provides ‘a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement’. Inherited liberties ‘are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement; grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever’. This veneration of rights as an inheritance derived not from ‘the superstition of antiquarians’ but from ‘the spirit of philosophic analogy’ that treated the state as a kind of extended family ([–]). Rights so enshrined are likely to be respected. Abstract formulations of right, Burke believed, were delusive guides to the ‘real rights of men’ as they existed in actual societies. Characteristically, he expressed this idea through a metaphor drawn from the laws of physics: ‘these metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line’. In the ‘gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns’, the ‘primitive’ rights of men ‘undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction’ (R [–]). The ‘real rights of men’ exist in ‘a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned’ ([]). Instead of defining, Burke therefore chose to describe some of them: If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice; as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making
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their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. [In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership, has as good a right to it, as he that has five hundred pound has to his larger proportion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock; and] as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention.⁷⁵
Burke’s purpose in this passage was to advance a negative argument: participation in the political life of a society is not a ‘natural right’. This it does eloquently and unambiguously. The enumeration of the ‘real rights’ was only secondary. Nevertheless, as his fullest and most considered account of ‘the real rights of men’ as they are enjoyed and limited in actual societies, what are today called ‘human rights’, it deserves close analysis. By modern standards, Burke’s concept of the role of the State is minimalist (Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, : WS ix. –). So too is that implied by the French Déclaration. Yet the two could hardly be more different. The French document regards the State, and especially its agents, with suspicion, as a necessary evil. Many of its provisions are designed to protect the individual, treated as a discrete and ideally self-sufficient unit. Each individual is endowed with ‘rights’, articulated in terms of freedom from various kinds of ‘oppression’. Society exists only to protect those rights, among which ‘la résistance à l’oppression’ is prominent (Article ). In brief, government is the enemy. Burke’s ‘rights’, in contrast, are imagined less as protections against the oppression of others than as ‘advantages’ that accrue from co-operation with others. These advantages are less easily defined than legal ‘rights’, perhaps are not susceptible to legal definition at all. For the most part, they are reciprocal, requiring the co-operation of others. In Burke’s view, society exists not to protect individuals from each other but to facilitate their happy interaction. What then, for Burke, were these ‘real rights of men’, which comprise ‘all the advantages’ for which society was instituted? The fundamental right implied by membership of a society is the right to live under an equitable system of law, a right to justice. All members of society are entitled to protection by the law, against violence and oppression, whether on the part of the State itself or its officers, or on the part of other individuals. The law should, for ⁷⁵ R []. The passage in square brackets was an afterthought, added to the third edition. The first edition reads ‘But as to the share [etc.]’.
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example, prohibit arbitrary arrest or detention, and guarantee the secure inheritance, quiet enjoyment, and free transmission of property. Such basic legal rights figure prominently in all formulations of ‘human rights’ and are largely uncontroversial. A second, more contentious group of rights governs economic relations within society. Because the economic role of the State has changed so much more than its legal function, these rights are easily misinterpreted. Burke was no doctrinaire market liberal. Favouring freedom of enterprise as a general principle, he was nevertheless willing to abridge it when the public interest so demanded.⁷⁶ Hence the individual’s right to ‘do for himself ’ whatever he can do without ‘trespassing upon others’ implies a laisser-faire freedom from regulation, while the ‘right to the fruits of their industry’, offers protection against confiscation and arbitrary taxation. Yet other rights imply a more interventionist state. An example is the right of ‘making their industry fruitful’. In a modern context, this would be taken to imply that the State should provide work.⁷⁷ Likewise, a modern reader may interpret the right ‘to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring’ as mandating a system of provision or subsidy by the State of food and education for the young. Burke meant nothing of the kind. He consistently objected to any attempt to interfere with a free market in provisions.⁷⁸ In , which saw the most distressing food shortages in his lifetime, Burke vehemently opposed any attempt to supplement or subsidize wages from taxes, insisting that charity, not the State, must preserve the poor from starvation (Thoughts and Details on Scarcity: WS ix. –). What then did Burke understand by these particular ‘rights’? To illustrate the distinction between theory and practice, he cites ‘a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine’. Conceding the rights themselves as beyond dispute, Burke turns immediately to ‘the method of procuring and administering them’. In one of today’s welfare states, the acknowledgement would be taken as recognition of a social right to food and medical care. What Burke meant, however, was much more limited. To satisfy the right to food and medicine, he advises seeking ‘the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics’ (R [–]). These rights are best understood in conjunction with the right to ‘a fair portion’ of whatever society can do for an individual. They imply an active, benign paternalism on the part of the State, but nothing as specific as a make-work programme. This portion, significantly, is ‘fair’, not equal. Society should seek to create, to foster, and to maintain, so far as human endeavours can, conditions favourable to economic ⁷⁶ Francis Canavan, The Political Economy of Edmund Burke: The Role of Property in his Thought (New York, ), –. ⁷⁷ As seems to be implied by Article () of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ⁷⁸ Supra, i. –.
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enterprise, prosperity, and security. All will benefit from these conditions, though not all equally. Society’s efforts on behalf of the individual are thus general rather than particular. In the case of agriculture, the State should not intervene in the free market. Left to itself, the market will (with rare exceptions) best provide abundance of foodstuffs. This is the context within which men’s ‘right to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring’ should be understood. The state encourages provision, but does not directly provide. Even this role, however, goes beyond the limited concept of the economic provisions (Articles –) of the French Déclaration, which seem designed primarily to equalize and minimize the burden of taxation. More generally, the French Déclaration declares that the end of society is no more than ‘la conservation des droits naturels et imprescriptibles de l’homme’ (Article ). Burke, on the contrary, follows the Aristotelian tradition of attributing to the state a moral purpose.⁷⁹ The contrast with the French Déclaration is even more striking in the matter of religion. The French document says nothing about education, and treats religion only as a subheading of opinion, free expression of which is guaranteed (Article ). Attributing a more active role to the state than as a mere neutral guarantor of freedom of expression, Burke offers more, a right to ‘instruction in life, and to consolation in death’. Later in the Reflections, he endorses the institution of an Established Church as the best way of providing religious teaching and comfort (R [–]). Membership of such a Church should not be compulsory, but may properly confer civic privileges. Burke limits the personal ‘right’ to freedom of religion (such as envisaged in the French Déclaration) to its private practice. Society, acting through the legislature, had equally a ‘right’ to establish a particular religion, and for Burke such an establishment was no infringement of the ‘rights’ of those who chose not to belong to it. These are the two principles on which Burke decided all the questions relating to religion and society that arose during his career. On the one hand, and against many of his usual associates in the Whig party, he consistently championed the privileges of the Established Church. On the other, he supported with equal consistency the right to private dissent.⁸⁰ He broke with the Dissenters when he thought that their aim had ceased to be toleration, and encompassed the destruction of the Established Church. Again, the paternalist nature of Burke’s concept of the state is evident. For Burke, the legislative power had not only the right but the responsibility to provide, according to its best lights, a religion for the people, and to confer whatever civil or political rights they saw fit exclusively on the adherents of that religion. Individuals who dissent from the doctrine or practice of that Church are entitled ‘to instruction in life, and to consolation in death’ according to their own mode. ⁷⁹ Francis Canavan, Edmund Burke: Prescription and Providence (Durham, NC, ), esp. –. ⁸⁰ Supra, i. –.
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But, as he argued in notes for a speech on the Dissenters Bill in April , the precise limits of that toleration (like the extent of the franchise) is within the competence of the legislature to determine (WS iii. –). Burke did not, however, believe that a legislature was free to make any regulations it chose. To be morally valid, legislative power must be exercised ‘according to that eternal immutable law, in which will and reason are the same’ (R []). The most flagrant case known to Burke of a system of law that violated this requirement was the penal code that the Protestant minority had imposed on the Irish Catholics after . Having grown up in Ireland, Burke knew at first hand the misery and the degradation that these laws had caused. About , in response to a wave of anti-Catholic agitation that he regarded as hypocritical and factitious, he began work on a ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’ that was intended to expose both their injustice and their impolicy. These laws had been enacted by a legislature that represented only a small part of the population. Burke did not, however, argue that they were on this ground morally invalid. Instead, he advanced arguments drawn from natural law. Indeed, the ‘Tract’ provides some of the most convincing evidence for the natural-law interpretation of his thought.⁸¹As clearly as anywhere in his writings, the ‘Tract’ suggests just which ‘natural’ rights Burke thought were preserved when men entered society. Overwhelmingly, these are the rights to inherit, to acquire, and to transmit property (WS ix. –). The penal laws were not directed only against Catholic ownership of property. Other provisions abridged the right to bear arms; to freedom of education, religion, and marriage; to eligibility for public employment; and to the franchise. Burke’s treatment of these topics exhibits interesting variations. The more ‘private’ rights he treats with the same indignation as the laws against property. In discussing the ‘right of self defence’, admittedly, he concedes that although the ‘first’ of the laws of nature, ‘many wise communities have found it necessary to set several restrictions upon it, especially temporary ones, on some imminent danger to the publick from foreign invasion’. Yet Burke’s recitation of the draconian provisions of the penal laws shows that they went far beyond what the public interest could conceivably require. Indeed, some of the provisions were manifestly intended rather to humiliate than to serve any rational purpose (WS ix. –). Far different is Burke’s treatment of the exclusion of Catholics from public life. On the franchise, Burke is silent. Their exclusion from ‘all Offices in Church and State’ he accepts as ‘a provision just and necessary’ (WS ix. ). The sincerity of this statement has been questioned, as a concession designed to make the other arguments more palatable.⁸² Much later, in the s, ⁸¹ Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor, ), –. ⁸² Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago, ), –.
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Burke did indeed argue in favour of admitting Catholics to civil and military offices. But this need not mean that he thought so in the different climate of the s. He never regarded participation in public life as a ‘right’. All members of society are not entitled to equal ‘rights’. Not to have a vote, or to be eligible for public office, is no grievance against the laws of nature. But since people first entered into society the better to protect their property, society cannot, consistently with its primary purpose, arbitrarily deny the fundamental human right to inherit, acquire, and transmit property, ‘the first origin, the continued Bond, and the ultimate End’ of society (to Sir Lawrence Parsons, Mar. : C vii. ) The worst that Burke can say against the penal laws is that they are ‘a Law against property’, and therefore ‘a Law against industry’, a law that subverts the fundamental purpose of society itself (WS ix. ). Acts of and largely repealed the penal laws so far as they affected property, though Catholics were still excluded from public life.⁸³ After , in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Catholics’ agitation to have their remaining disabilities removed greatly increased. Burke was particularly disturbed by a development about , when (mainly) Dissenting reformers sought to draw the Catholics into an alliance. Much troubled by this possibility, Burke worked hard to prevent it by advocating timely concessions to the Catholics. Early in , he wrote a public letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (c.–), a moderately pro-Catholic Irish MP. This Letter confirms the evidence of the ‘Tract’ that, for Burke, the worst injustice of the penal laws was their trespass on the rights of property. Burke was convinced that the franchise should be extended to qualified Catholics, as a matter of equity and as highly expedient to prevent their Jacobinization. Even so, he avoided claiming the franchise as a ‘right’. Instead, he treated it a one of the ‘civil privileges’ that society is free to confer or withhold (WS ix. ). For Burke, the fundamental ‘human right’ was the right to protection of property. In the Reflections, he argues that not even Parliament has the right ‘to violate property, to over-rule prescription or to force a currency of their own fiction in the place of that which is real, and recognized by the law of nations’ (R [–]). In notes for a later speech, putting a hypothetical case, he wrote: ‘Slavery is contrary to Nature. True, but you would not instantly manumit all slaves. Property is to be secured.’⁸⁴ In according primacy to the protection of such rights, of course, Burke was doing no more than following Locke and the mainstream of eighteenth-century thought.⁸⁵Yet his emphasis is significantly different. Burke’s is a more paternalistic model of society and its organs. Among the ‘rights of men’, he argued in , is the right ‘to a wise ⁸³ W. E. H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London, ), ii. –, –. ⁸⁴ Draft for Speech on the Unitarian Petition, May (NRO A. XXVII.). ⁸⁵ Locke, Two Treatises, ii. § ; Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman.
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protecting parental Government’.⁸⁶ For Locke, participation in the political process was the individual’s best guarantee that he would in fact receive the benefits for which he had given up his ‘natural’ rights and accepted the social compact. Burke was less concerned with protecting the individual from the potential tyranny of the State, and more to protect the property of the few from the folly and the rapacity of the many. To prevent this, Burke posited a ‘right’ to ‘a sufficient restraint upon their passions’ by ‘a power out of themselves’. The nature and extent of this restraint could not be ‘settled upon any abstract rule’, and certainly should not be determined by those who were to be subject to it. The ‘rights’ which individuals were to enjoy was to be determined by the ‘constitution’, the perfection of which was ‘a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill’ (R [–]). Such a task called for the collective wisdom of ages, and should not be rashly undertaken by a mere temporary body of inexperienced men, such as the National Assembly. For Burke, the idea of a partnership across time circumscribes the moral, if not the legal, rights of a single generation to remake society according to its will and pleasure. Since the construction and preservation of a balanced constitution called for insight and reflection, Burke condemned what he called ‘this vile scheme of altering the principles of election to a right of voting by the head’ (Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe: WS ix. ). Many contemporary problems in ‘human rights’ concern the protection of ‘minority rights’ against the tyranny, or the potential tyranny, of a majority.⁸⁷ Burke’s warnings against the abuses of majority rule are therefore timely and relevant. Government, Burke insisted, is not ‘a problem of arithmetic’, to be decided by numbers (R []). While acknowledging that government was instituted for the benefit of the governed, he had no faith in the wisdom of the many. He therefore distrusted electoral democracy as a mode of government, and had little faith in popular elections, even with an electorate as narrow as that of eighteenth-century Britain. Speaking against a plan to shorten the duration of parliaments, he argued that popular elections were a ‘mighty Evil’, only necessary because the alternative was worse ( May : WS iii. ). He therefore opposed successive attempts to make elections more frequent, or to widen or reform the franchise. Most existing governments discharged their trusteeship responsibly. In the last resort, the people would rise to overthrow any government that became intolerably and incurably vicious. For such an extreme necessity, which would be a law unto itself, political wisdom could not provide. He therefore dreaded the destabilizing influence of French principles, which would unsettle established governments for an ⁸⁶ Draft for Speech on the Unitarian Petition, May (NRO A. XXVII. ). ⁸⁷ John Elster, ‘Majority Rule and Individual Rights’, in On Human Rights, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York, ), –, –. Elster refers to the debates in the Constituent Assembly, but not to E.B.
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advantage that would be at best theoretical and might prove wholly chimerical. In his view, the test of a legitimate government was its practical efficacy, not its theoretical basis. A constitution that could plead prescription, and under which an equitable system of law was equitably administered, served every purpose of society. All members of society, in Burke’s view, are entitled to certain rights. Some of these correspond to modern individual rights: for example, the right to equal treatment before the law, and to security for the inheritance, acquisition, and transmission of property. Another kind of ‘right’ is both less determinate and less individual, being exercised through participating in society itself. This is the right to ‘fair portion’ (but not an equal portion) of the advantages that society offers, such as the conditions of social stability that encourage economic enterprise. These are Burke’s ‘human rights’. Participation in politics is another matter, the preserve of a subset of citizens, membership of the group being settled by convention. For Burke, a just society is one in which individuals, protected by equality before the law, are free to pursue their own economic advantage. Since society is not a collective of equals, but rather a partnership between greatly unequal partners, ‘human rights’ are a necessarily unequal system of privileges and obligations, not a set of individualistic claims against each and all. This reciprocity is best codified in positive laws, privileges, and immunities, rather than being expressed as abstract, general truths. ‘Human rights’ as he conceives them are thus legal, unequal, and apolitical. While arguing against a petition on behalf of the Unitarians, Burke distinguished the point of view of a ‘professor in an university’ from that of a ‘statesman’. A professor seeks the ‘abstractions and universals’ of politics. A statesman, as Burke counted himself, must govern himself by ‘circumstances’, which are ‘infinite’ and ‘infinitely combined’ ( May : W vi. –).This is a leitmotiv in Burke’s thought, present as early as his advocacy of the repeal of the Stamp Act in . Parliament had an undoubted right to tax the colonies, a right ‘clear beyond contradiction as an absolute, clear and speculative opinion’. But the moment this right is ‘blended with the happiness and misery’ of the real world, its exercise becomes a matter of prudence ( Feb. : WS ii. ). After , his opposition to theory intensified, because in France theory was being applied to politics with no judgement or discretion. Burke condemned the French Déclaration as mischievous and delusive, inapplicable to real problems and impotent to protect actual rights in real societies. In pursuit of the abstract ‘rights’ described in the Déclaration, the French had plunged into an anarchy that violated on an unprecedented scale the basic rights to property, to liberty, and even to life. Before the Revolution, the French enjoyed the rule of law. Although their system was deficient in protecting personal liberties, the parlements guaranteed a high degree of security of property (R [–]). Wise reformers would have
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built on this inheritance, not destroyed it. By refusing to make any use of the old materials, the French had acquired paper liberties that could not be enforced and therefore could not be enjoyed. Repudiating the rule of law, they had fallen prey to the arbitrary will of the temporary majority of the National Assembly, itself subject to the caprices of the Parisian mob. Despite the right to property enshrined in an unequivocally worded article of the Déclaration, property rights had been totally subverted. Even the example of France, however, did not lead Burke to relinquish the concept of ‘natural rights’. Their pre-existence was no less important for him than for his opponents. Individuals surrendered their ‘rights’ to society, in trust. Society has no ‘right’ to be unjust towards any individual. This is no mere theoretical concession. Eager to avoid the chaos of anarchy, Burke was equally averse to the chains of despotism. The fear of arbitrary power was part of Burke’s Whig inheritance. Nor was arbitrary power the preserve of tyrants. It could equally be usurped by a tyrannical majority, or pretended majority. Burke was keenly aware of the convulsion in property caused by the English Civil Wars, and in the Reflections he accused Price of praising but being really inspired by (R []). The populist pretensions of the National Assembly were thus no unprecedented aberration. The French Déclaration explicitly defined the law (which is charged, among much else, with the final determination of the rights of property) as ‘l’expression de la volonté générale’, to which all citizens, either directly or indirectly, are entitled to contribute (Article ). This idea (which derives from Rousseau rather than Locke) was anathema to Burke. Not only did he deny the ‘right’ to participate, but to those who by convention were privileged to determine what was law in a particular society, he denied the ‘right’ to make their will and pleasure the standard of that law. Burke repeatedly denied that even Parliament has the ‘right’ to be unjust. In the course of his ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’, for example, he argued that ‘a Law against the majority of the people’ cannot be valid. Even if, he imagined, such a law were to be enacted not by representatives but by the entire people, it would still be ‘null and void’. The people themselves have no right to make a law ‘against the principle of a superior Law, which it is not in the power of any community, or of the whole race of man, to alter—I mean the will of Him who gave us our nature, and in giving impressed an invariable Law upon it’. No laws ‘can derive any authority from their institution, merely and independent of the quality of the subject matter’ (WS ix. –). The penal laws were morally invalid not because the majority had not consented to them, but because they denied to the majority a share in the ‘advantages’ for which society was constituted. The question of the moral competence of a theoretically sovereign legislative power arose in an even more acute form in relation to France after . Opponents of British intervention claimed that the internal government of
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France was a matter that solely concerned the French. Rejecting this notion that ‘men in possession of the ruling authority are supposed to have a right to act without coercion in their own territories’, Burke argued that ‘as to the right of men to act any where according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists’ (Letters on a Regicide Peace, : WS ix. ). In a world in which extreme assertions of national autonomy are increasingly perceived as inimical to peace and international order, and as a barrier to the universalizing of ‘human rights’, Burke’s theory of ‘weak sovereignty’ is attracting renewed interest.⁸⁸ Burke believed that some values were indeed universal. Acknowledging that the way in which ‘natural rights’ were embodied and given practical effect would vary from one society to another as well as over time, Burke had no difficulty in assimilating India within his paradigm. Opening his case against Hastings, he repudiated what he called ‘Geographical morality’, the idea (which he attributed to Hastings) that the nature and meaning of values such as justice might vary from place to place. ‘Arbitrary power’, exercised at the mere pleasure of an individual or a group, could never be legitimate anywhere ( Feb. : WS vi. –). Yet Burke nowhere suggested that representative institutions were needed, or would even be desirable, in India. Indians were as much attached to their ‘ancient constitution’ as the British were to theirs. Under their institutions, as Burke imagined them, whether Muslim or Hindu, the people enjoyed the benefit of living under known and equitable laws. Burke’s critique of British rule in India, and of the Hastings administration in particular, was that it had subverted a beneficent system of government and substituted nothing more than arbitrary power exercised for the personal advantage of the governing few. Most present-day readers of Burke live in one of the Western-style democracies, in which the franchise has been extended to virtually all adults. Habituated to regard the vote as a ‘right’, such readers may doubt the relevance of Burke’s ideas to their kind of society, or to the model of society they would like to propose to the world beyond the West. Limited as it may appear, however, Burke’s concept of ‘human rights’ has at least a descriptive validity that approaches the universal. His ‘rights’ represent not a theoretical ideal that only a few constitutions (and those modern) have ever approached, but a practical prescription for a ‘well-ordered’ society, such has often been approximated. Nor, in practice, even in the modern West, is the franchise actually treated as a ‘human right’. All societies regulate it in some way, usually making it a privilege of citizenship. This accords with Burke’s principle that political rights are to be ‘settled by convention’. In the s, Burke had good reason to fear the sudden and indiscriminate extension of the franchise. ⁸⁸ Empire and Community: Edmund Burke’s Writings and Speeches on International Relations, ed. David P. Fidler and Jennifer M. Welsh (Boulder, Colo., ), Introduction, esp. –, .
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His gradualism prevailed. No reform was undertaken until , and not until were nearly all adults (still with some few exceptions) entitled to vote. Burke’s attitude to the franchise, far from standing in the way of an acceptance of his concept of ‘human rights’, is actually what makes them so readily exportable. A nearly intractable problem in the international ‘human rights’ debate is how to interpret the concept to non-Western cultures. In large parts of the world, including much of Africa, many Islamic countries, and China, democratic traditions of the Western kind are either weak or absent. Yet these societies possess alternative modes of governance and ways of thinking about the individual and the state that are well established and sanctioned by long traditions. To accommodate this diversity, one modern authority has argued (without invoking Burke) that since ‘basic human rights express a minimum standard of well-ordered political institutions for all peoples’, they can be adequately protected in a ‘well-ordered hierarchical state with its consultation hierarchy’. In such a state, a ‘system of law’ can ensure ‘the right to life and security, to personal property and the elements of the rule of law, as well as the right to a certain freedom of conscience and freedom of association’.⁸⁹ The suggestion that an effective and respected system of law can serve as an adequate substitute for representation, and the phrasing of religious freedom as ‘a certain freedom of conscience’, are in the spirit of Burke. India before the advent of the British (at least as Burke idealized it), might qualify as a ‘well-ordered hierarchical state’, whereas the Ireland of the penal laws would not. If international formulations of ‘human rights’ are to have any chance of achieving universal acceptance, they need to be minimal rather than maximal. Burke’s ‘real rights’ seem in principle achievable. Burke offers a middle way, neither imposing alien norms on the strength of their presumed universality, nor admitting the excuse of local exceptionalism as a means of shielding tyranny and oppression from inspection and control. Values such as justice are indeed universal, but justice can equally well be administered in a hierarchical society as in a democratic one. Friends of ‘human rights’ should certainly not be deterred by Burke’s primary reputation as the antagonist of Paine and his Rights of Man from studying his writings, where they may find in his treatment of rights an unexpectedly fertile source of ideas, encouragement, and inspiration. ‘The style of an author’, Gibbon proclaimed, ‘should be the image of his mind.’⁹⁰ Burke, however, commanded a variety of styles, and no work ⁸⁹ John Rawls, ‘The Law of Peoples’, in On Human Rights, ed. Shute and Hurley, –, – (quotations from , ). ⁹⁰ Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, ), .
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illustrates better than the Reflections the versatility of his writing and the extraordinary range of his rhetoric.⁹¹ If Burke’s styles are so many images of his mind, what do they suggest about its character and workings? The impression is certainly far different from the image of philosophical detachment created by Gibbon’s. Burke’s styles, with their rapid transitions, preserve a sense of the volatility as well as the power and the fecundity of his mind. Many contemporaries, schooled in neoclassical aesthetics, disliked this mixture of styles. Thus one critic compared Burke’s ‘purple robes’ to ‘a patched garment’, complaining that ‘he often debases the sublimest thought by the coarsest allusion; and mingles the vulgarity of idiom with the most delicate graces of expression.’⁹² This versatility of style is probably to be traced to Burke’s being, primarily, a speaker rather than a writer. Speaking in Parliament, Burke utilized notes but never read from a prepared text. When he revised some of his more important speeches for publication, of course, he eliminated the hesitations and redundancies of oral delivery. Preferring to retain something of the informality of the spoken word, however, Burke did not strive for a highly polished style. Nor, in writing letters, did he cultivate ‘correctness’. As he admitted to Philip Francis, ‘My natural Style of writing is somewhat careless’ (C vi. ). In his more studied compositions, of course, Burke is often highly rhetorical. While much of the Reflections carefully preserves an air of informality, occasionally he embodies an intricate thought in a long, complex, and carefully articulated sentence that proclaims its premeditation. Often, these long sentences are juxtaposed against unusually short ones to heighten their effect. An example is a long sentence ( words) about convulsions of property, the convolution of which enacts the complexity of the calculation it describes. Having made this point, Burke immediately shifts to a different style, employing several short, staccato sentences: ‘The monks are lazy. Be it so’ (R []). Another complex sentence ( words) mimics the gradual progress and improvement of the science of taxation ([–]). The chef-d’œuvre of these long, mimetic sentences, the longest in the Reflections ( words), creates a miniature picture of the glories of the France of the ancien régime: Indeed, when I consider the face of the kingdom of France; the multitude and opulence of her cities; the useful magnificence of her spacious high roads and bridges; the opportunity of her artificial canals and navigations opening the conveniences of maritime communication through a solid continent of so immense an extent; when I turn ⁹¹ F. P. Lock, Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ (London, ), –. ⁹² Political Magazine, (Oct. ), . The World called E.B.’s style ‘the SUBLIME Billingsgate’ ( May ). ‘Anthony Pasquin’ [John Williams] likewise deplored E.B.’s ‘peculiar fondness to associate opposite objects somewhat abruptly, and mingle the mighty and the mean without any intermediate order’ (Legislative Biography, or, An Attempt to Ascertain the Merits and Principles of the Most Admired Orators of the British Senate (London, ), –).
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my eyes to the stupendous works of her ports and harbours, and to her whole naval apparatus, whether for war or trade; when I bring before my view the number of her fortifications, constructed with so bold and masterly a skill, and made and maintained at so prodigious a charge, presenting an armed front and impenetrable barrier to her enemies upon every side; when I recollect how very small a part of that extensive region is without cultivation, and to what complete perfection the culture of many of the best productions of the earth have been brought in France; when I reflect on the excellence of her manufactures and fabrics, second to none but ours, and in some particulars not second; when I contemplate the grand foundations of charity, public and private; when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish life; when I reckon the men she has bred for extending her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multitude of her profound lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her critics, her historians and antiquaries, her poets, and her orators sacred and profane, I behold in all this something which awes and commands the imagination, which checks the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscriminate censure, and which demands, that we should very seriously examine, what and how great are the latent vices that could authorise us at once to level so specious a fabric with the ground. (R [–])
The passage, an example of the rhetorical figure chorographia (description of a county) creates a verbal tableau in the tradition of literary pictorialism (or ekphrasis) that can be traced back to the celebrated description of the Shield of Achilles in Book of the Iliad.⁹³ Unity is created through the single, carefully articulated periodic sentence, the bird’s-eye point of view, figures of balance and antithesis, and the climactic image of the building. Diversity is achieved through the elaborate articulation, and the carefully varied verbs of perception. Though many of the terms in the description are general, the insistent verbs of vision invite the reader to supply concrete examples. The passage could easily be recast to achieve the sublime effect of magnificence, as described by Burke in the Enquiry: ‘a richness and profusion of images, in which the mind is so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to that exact coherence and agreement of the allusions, which we should require on every other occasion’ (WS i. ). In the chorographia in the Reflections, precisely the opposite effect is achieved: the order of pre-revolutionary France is represented through the majestic movement of an unfolding periodic sentence. Indeed, throughout the Reflections, clarity and perspicuity are Burke’s stylistic aims. When he rises to something like sublimity (as in the passage on Marie Antoinette), the effect is neoclassical elevation, not the obscure and terrifying sublime of his own Philosophical Enquiry.⁹⁴ ⁹³ Though now commonly applied to the description of a work of art within a literary text (as in W. B. Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’), ekphrasis was originally any elaborate, apparently digressive description in a rhetorical discourse. ⁹⁴ In ‘Rhetoric and Representation in Burke’s Reflections’ (in Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, ed. Whale, –), I have argued against the many recent attempts to use the Philosophical Enquiry to interpret the Reflections.
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Such sentences as the chorographia, however, like the passage on Marie Antoinette, are highly exceptional. A more frequent feature of Burke’s style, and the one that has attracted the most notice, from his own time to the present, is his use of metaphor. Apt and memorable metaphors had been characteristic of his speaking from the beginning of his parliamentary career.⁹⁵ Burke uses metaphors to make a statement or an argument more affecting, more pleasing, or more convincing, or to provide a vivid illustration of a general or abstract idea. The effect is usually one of familiarization, making a proposition more acceptable by associating it with a known quality. The sources of such metaphors are accordingly more restricted to a range drawn from common experience than is the case in literary texts, where the aim is often precisely the opposite, to make the familiar strange. Burke does sometimes quarry more recondite sources, such as chemistry or plant genetics. Thus he compares ‘the spirit of liberty in action’ to the escape of the ‘wild gas, the fixed air’ (carbon dioxide, which Joseph Black (–) had demonstrated was released when magnesia alba or limestone was heated). The final effect cannot be judged until the ‘first effervescence’ has subsided and ‘the liquor is cleared’ (R []).⁹⁶ More commonly, however, Burke employs familiar images such as the ship of state ([]). Most typical are ‘humanist’ images drawn from characteristically human arts and activities.⁹⁷ Burke relies particularly on metaphors of clothing and of building. Thus he contrasts the ‘coat of prejudice’ with ‘naked reason’ ([]), and commends the ‘decent drapery’ drawn from ‘the wardrobe of a moral imagination’ ([]). Clothing metaphors define the individual; building metaphors embody the state. The old French constitution is ‘a noble and venerable castle’, which should be restored in its original style ([]). Burke’s metaphors and emotive passages are the most memorable elements of his rhetoric. Paine, indeed, charged that the Reflections contained nothing but imagery and declamation.⁹⁸ On the contrary, much of the Reflections exerts a primarily rational appeal. Long sections develop orderly logical arguments from premiss to conclusion, relying on evidence and inference and with little use of rhetorical devices. This is especially the case in the last third of the book. After announcing the truncation of his original plan, Burke analyses in turn each of the ‘great and fundamental establishments’: the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the army, and the system of taxation (R [–]). This section employs the most formal signposting, occasionally even using explicit transitional devices of the ‘Having ⁹⁵ Supra, i. ; WS ii. . ⁹⁶ E.B.’s use of scientific metaphors was remarkable enough to be parodied in A Paraphrase in Rhyme of the Poetical Beauties and Spirit Exhibited in a Letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord (London, ), , –, . ⁹⁷ Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford, ). ⁹⁸ Rights of Man, ed. Philp, .
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concluded . . . I shall say’ pattern ([]). Here the Reflections conforms most closely to the conventions of the formal treatise on political theory. Even this part, however, repays rhetorical analysis. Burke was suspicious of political theory, and did not regard himself as a political theorist. Disclaimers to this effect are found in all periods of his career. In his Observations on a Late State of the Nation (), for example, he refers to ‘vexatious questions, which in truth rather belong to metaphysicks than politicks’, the agitation of which serves no useful purpose and can only result in ‘shaking the foundations of the best governments that have ever been constituted by human wisdom’ (WS ii. ). In the Reflections itself, ‘metaphysics’, in which Burke includes political theory, is always a pejorative term.⁹⁹ In part, this hostility to theory was rhetorical. Burke knew the kinds of argument likely to persuade his audience. Suspicion of theory was deeply ingrained in the mentality of the British parliamentary and property-owning classes.¹⁰⁰ Seeking to mobilize British opinion in support of the old order, threatened by events in France, he therefore drew largely on the arguments from law, history, and inheritance that he knew would appeal to his audience. Yet rhetoric and conviction can coincide. He articulated these arguments so persuasively because he believed in them himself. History was a better guide than metaphysics in the world of politics. An experienced debater and a master rhetorician, Burke was never content to deploy one argument where two or three were available. A case in point is his treatment of the confiscation by the National Assembly of the property of the Gallican Church. This seizure could with some plausibility be presented as a belated attempt to follow the example of England and other countries at the Reformation in retrenching the excessive wealth that hindered the Church in its spiritual mission. Many English observers looked with indifference or even schadenfreude on this spoliation, and Burke sought to convince them that the confiscation was both unjust and impolitic.¹⁰¹ While he develops the argument from expediency at greater length than the argument from justice, this need not imply that he thought it more important, only that he thought his audience likely to find it more persuasive. Replying to these arguments, James Mackintosh advanced chiefly legal arguments to prove that ⁹⁹ R [, , , , –, , , , , ]. Most of these references, however, are to inappropriate applications of metaphysics. Joseph L. Pappin III, The Metaphysics of Edmund Burke (New York, ), controverts the notion that E.B. was hostile to metaphysics itself. ¹⁰⁰ E.B. reported to Charles O’Hara that ‘those who don’t wish me well, say I am abstracted and subtile’, an objection he traced to being known as ‘the Author of a Book somewhat metaphysical’ ( Mar. : C i. ). ¹⁰¹ In response to a newspaper report of E.B.’s speech on the Army Estimates, Thomas Mercer contested E.B.’s claim that the Gallican Church had been ‘subverted’, approving the reduction of the excessive wealth of ‘pampered and luxurious prelates’ (letter to E.B., Feb. , printed in Monthly Magazine, (May ), –). E.B. replied at length ( Feb. : C vi. –). E.B. was aware that many British observers shared Mercer’s anticlericalism.
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Church property was not held on the same tenure as secular property, although in Vindiciae Gallicae as a whole his preference is for arguments from natural rights.¹⁰² As with Burke, this does not mean that he thought the legal arguments more compelling, but that he expected his readers to find them more convincing. Thus both Burke and Mackintosh selected their arguments to maximize their rhetorical appeal. The search for a single controlling idea in the Reflections is therefore likely to be delusive. In the contention between those who have interpreted Burke’s ideas as emanating from his belief in natural law, and those who have counted him as a utilitarian, both sides have a persuasive case.¹⁰³ Burke certainly believed in a universal natural law. Yet he also shared parts of the creed that would later be called utilitarian. Being a politician, and a rhetorician, not a theorist, when these and other ideas and principles came into conflict, he sought to reconcile them according to circumstances, appealing to history rather than to theory. ¹⁰² Vindiciae Gallicae, –. ¹⁰³ Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law; J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘Utility and Natural Law in Burke’s Thought: A Reconsideration’, Studies in Burke and his Time, (–), –.
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The long delay in the appearance of the Reflections, which had been prematurely advertised as early as February, exposed Burke to some ridicule.¹ Publication was finally fixed for November .² As the great day approached, Burke urged his secretary, William Thomas Swift, who was supervising the printing, to ‘move heaven and earth to get it out at the exact day’ (C vi. ). Understandably, he wanted the book published ahead of the meeting of the new Parliament (summoned for November). Price’s sermon, the book’s starting point, had been delivered as long ago as November . Burke was perhaps anxious to publish before the next anniversary meeting.³ But why he attached so much importance to the precise date remains a mystery. Whatever its cause, Burke’s anxiety was natural. After so lengthy a period of gestation, public expectation was high, and antagonists were poised to pounce. Paine, for example, was impatient to refute Burke and vindicate the Revolution.⁴ The immediate success of the Reflections was therefore a relief as well as a triumph. Sales figures provide the least ambiguous measure of the work’s impact and diffusion. At pages and shillings, it was an expensive book (a typical pamphlet of ninety-six pages usually sold for s. d.). Even so, by November, about , copies had been printed, a figure that reached , by the end of the year.⁵ These numbers represent only a fraction of the public reached by the Reflections. Some of the most memorable passages were immediately reprinted in the newspapers, introducing some of its leading ideas to the widest of all readerships. ¹ On Apr., The World reported that E.B.’s pamphlet had ‘gone the same way as Mr Fox’s popularity’. On June, it published an open letter to E.B. from ‘One of the Public’ enjoining him ‘either “to print and shame the rogues”—or give your reasons for not printing’. ² The publication date of Nov. was announced on Oct. (Gazetteer, Public Advertiser, The Times). ³ At the meeting of the Revolution Society on Nov. , John Horne Tooke moved a censure of the Reflections (Gazetteer, , Nov.). ⁴ Paine is reported to have boasted that he would answer E.B.’s book in ‘four days’ ( John Keene, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London, ), ). ⁵ Todd, pp. , . On Nov., the Gazetteer reported that , copies had been sold, ‘a greater number than was ever known to be disposed of in the same time’. By July , over , copies of the French translation had been sold (Pierre-Gaëton Dupont to E.B., July , in Journal of Modern History, (), ).
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Burke was almost assured of a welcome in the London Chronicle, published by James Dodsley (–), publisher of the Reflections and of most of Burke’s earlier works. The Chronicle appeared three times a week, on the days on which the post left London for provincial towns. Between and November it printed a series of extracts from the Reflections. The first was introduced as ‘a production of a very superior quality, and such as will not discredit either the talents or feeling of Mr Burke’, but the extracts were otherwise left to speak for themselves. On November, it printed an anecdote ridiculing Price, and on the th a letter attacking the Revolution Society. During the same period, the only substantive anti-Burke item to appear was the new material published in the fourth edition of Price’s sermon.⁶ The St James’s Chronicle, another tri-weekly, was both more outspoken in Burke’s praise and more open to adverse commentary. It was the first to recognize that the Reflections was more than a book about the French Revolution. ‘With much more justice than many more formal and systematical treatises,’ the St James’s declared, the Reflections might have been denominated ‘An Essay on Government’. Far more than an analysis of recent events in France, the Reflections explained ‘every rational principle, relative not only to the constitution of that kingdom, and the British Empire, but to all contracts between the people and their rulers’. On November, the St James’s printed some ‘Maxims on Government’ drawn from the Reflections. Yet the paper was open to other views, publishing a series of five letters signed ‘Lucius’ adumbrating the arguments that would soon become the staple of the pamphlet attacks. ‘Lucius’ disputed Burke’s interpretation of the Revolution of , defended the actions of the National Assembly, charged Burke with using rhetoric to conceal the weakness of his arguments, and decried his book as favouring aristocracy and despotism. ‘Lucius’ was a moderate opponent: he admitted that the French might have gone too far in abolishing nobility rather than subjecting it to stricter regulation. The one letter in Burke’s defence that the St James’s printed likewise concluded that some of his subsidiary points might need correction.⁷ Giving roughly equal space to Burke and to his opponents, it provided the most balanced coverage of the Reflections in any of the newspapers. The daily papers were generally open partisans of either the ministry or the opposition. The opposition dailies, faithful echoes of Fox and Sheridan, had welcomed the French Revolution. Predictably, they were hostile to the Reflections, treating Burke as an apostate. As early as November, the Gazetteer quoted, with palpable irony, Burke’s concluding praise of his own disinterestedness. A paragraph on the th charged that, on Burke’s new principles, he would have opposed both the Reformation and the Revolution of ⁶ London Chronicle, –, –, –, –, –, –, – Nov. . ⁷ St James’s Chronicle, Oct.- Nov., –, –, –, –, –, – Nov. .
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, and supported the war against the American colonies. On the th, the paper published a squib in the mock-form of a chemical analysis of the Reflections: a compound of despotism, priestcraft, and quixotism, brewed in a fevered imagination, infused with aristocratic principles, mixed with a little thought and large quantities of ill-humour and rhetoric, and spiced with garrulous self-importance.⁸ Such humour would be all too rare in the forthcoming debate. Certain to be excoriated in the opposition press, Burke could expect only a qualified welcome from the ministerial papers. In November , Pitt was still reserved in his public attitude to revolutionary France. Even if he had been more explicit in endorsing Burke, the Treasury papers had been ridiculing him for too long to learn a new lesson instantly. Thus the Public Advertiser, inveterately hostile to Burke (who had sued it for libel in ), balanced a sequence of extracts from the Reflections with a series of letters attacking it. The most abusive of these correspondents refurbished the old charge that Burke, ‘the sublime Arch Jesuit’, had devoted ‘the greatest exertion of his talents to the service of tyranny, and to palliate the enormity and absurdities of popery’.⁹ Another ministerial newspaper, The World, had likewise regularly ridiculed Burke. On the subject of France, however, The World was stridently anti-revolutionary. The paper therefore contented itself with some gentle mockery of the instant success of the Reflections, reporting that it had been ‘translated into French—before it was finished in English’ and that ‘the Second Edition came out before the first’.¹⁰ Other ministerial papers were friendlier. The Diary, for example, printed a series of extracts, while its only representation of the case against Burke was a moderate letter from ‘a Correspondent at Oxford’, approving Burke’s principles as they related to England, but defending the French Revolution.¹¹ This split reaction would be common. The Times was even more outspoken, having been more hostile to the Revolution. Welcoming the Reflections as in large part based on its own reports, The Times professed that, whatever political errors Burke had previously committed, ‘this work may be truly said to redeem them all’. Like the other ministerial papers, The Times was keen to deride the opposition as broken and divided. Accordingly, it eagerly spread the report that Sheridan was ‘laboriously occupied in an answer to Mr Burke’s Pamphlet’.¹² Much would be heard of this phantom reply.¹³ By the end of November, the ⁸ Gazetteer, , , Nov. . ⁹ Public Advertiser, – Nov. . The ‘Arch Jesuit’ letter (signed ‘Reflector’) appeared on Nov. ¹⁰ The World, , , Nov. . ¹¹ The Diary, , , , , , , , Nov. . ¹² The Times, , Nov. . The World had earlier claimed that the Reflections was ‘nearly copied’ from its own ‘Authentic French Intelligence . . . and the comments we have hazarded upon that Intelligence’ ( Feb. ). ¹³ On Nov. , R.B. Jr. told Fitzwilliam that he had been ‘just informed’ of Sheridan’s intention to answer the Reflections (NRO A. IV. ). The Times ridiculed the report ( Nov.), but it was taken seriously in Whig circles. Lady Elizabeth Foster recorded it on Nov. ( Journal, transcript in Dormer Archives).
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newspapers had brought some of Burke’s most powerful passages to a far broader audience than the readers of books. In addition, some of the main objections to Burke’s work had been started. Popular prints also disseminated the notoriety, if not the arguments, of the Reflections. Burke had long been a familiar figure in the political caricatures of the day, easily recognized by his prominent nose, spectacles, and imaginary ecclesiastical garb. The success of the Reflections inspired the caricaturists to enlarge their range of imagery to provide some of the most enduring images of Burke, now depicted not as a Jesuit but as a knight-errant. Three of the most memorable of these have been attributed to Frederick George Byron (–).¹⁴ In the first, Frontispiece to Reflections on the French Revolution ( Nov. : BMC ), a conventionally dressed Burke (his head touched by Cupid’s torch) kneels adoringly before Marie Antoinette, who treads on a cloud. Below is inscribed the passage from the Reflections lamenting the demise of the ‘age of chivalry’ (Plate ). In two later caricatures, the identification with Don Quixote is completed. In Don Dismallo ( Nov.: BMC ), a grotesquely emaciated Burke, clothed neck to foot in armour, but wearing a biretta marked with a skull and crossbones, and with an owl perched atop, deserts Jane Burke (making a rare appearance in a caricature) for Marie Antoinette (Plate ). Most powerful is the more allegorical The Knight of the Woeful Countenance Going to Extirpate the National Assembly ( Nov.: BMC ). Dressed in armour and grasping a phallic lance, Burke is mounted on an ass with a human head surmounted by a papal tiara. Carrying a shield quartered with scenes from the ancien régime (the Bastille, an autoda-fé, a chained prisoner in a cell, and a man being broken on a wheel), he charges out of Dodsley’s bookshop on a counter-revolutionary crusade (Plate ). All three prints ridicule Burke’s predilection for the old order, and their harping on the chivalric image attests to the power of the ‘age of chivalry’ lament, which soon became, as it has remained, the most famous passage in the book. More sympathetic to Burke is James Gillray’s Smelling out a Rat ( Dec.: BMC ). Price in his study (decorated with a picture of the execution of Charles I), plotting treason, is discovered by Burke, represented only by an enormous nose, spectacles, and hands holding a crown and a cross (Plate ). Though Burke is indeed caricatured, the print endorses the argument of the Reflections, at least as it relates to Britain. The caricatures provided some memorable images, but could hardly engage with the argument of the Reflections. Among the first substantial critiques of the book (antedated only by the earliest of the pamphlet replies) were the reviews. Each of the four leading monthly reviews treated the ¹⁴ The earliest caricature of E.B. as an emaciated knight-errant is ; the earliest anecdotal allusion that I have found is (supra, i. ). The authority for attributing these prints (and The Volcano of Opposition, Plate ) to Byron is Andrew Edmunds (Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, ), n. )
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Reflections at length, while several other notices appeared in the magazines.¹⁵ In keeping with the practice of the time, these reviews all consisted primarily of extracts, and therefore served, like the newspapers, to disseminate some of Burke’s most striking passages to a larger readership than would tackle a long book. Even a hostile review would therefore, in spite of itself, spread Burke’s ideas. Predictably, the two senior reviews treated Burke’s book according to their party allegiances. The Reflections was welcomed in the Critical Review, Tory or Pittite in its politics, though the reviewer could not resist a sly insinuation (alluding to the Regency Crisis) that ‘revolutions, or the calamities of kings, have not formerly been odious to Mr Burke’.¹⁶ Conversely, the Monthly Review, Whig and pro-Dissent, was hostile.¹⁷ More informative than either was the account published in the Analytical Review, though the Analytical was avowedly reformist. The youngest of the reviews, founded as recently as to promote ‘analysis’ rather than mere opinion, it was the brainchild of Thomas Christie, a reformer who subsequently wrote one of the lengthier replies to Burke. It was edited and published by Joseph Johnson (–), a prominent Unitarian who would later publish several of the pamphlet replies to the Reflections, including Christie’s.¹⁸ Christie had earlier corresponded with Burke, and he may have written the first instalment of the review of the Reflections, which appeared in the November number. More than half is devoted to a fair-minded synopsis of the Reflections, no easy task. Burke’s arguments are then controverted, but candidly and without personal rancour. General disagreement does not prevent the reviewer from conceding that Burke was probably right on some points (such as the evils of indirect election) and had made a plausible but ultimately unconvincing case on others. The review concluded with praise of the Reflections for its style, its imaginative power, and its range of illustration, while lamenting its fatal deficiency in ‘judgement’ (a frequent charge). Given the politics of the Analytical Review, Burke had escaped lightly. Too lightly, another of the review’s stable of writers may have thought, for the December issue carried a second part so unlike the first as to suggest a different reviewer. This sequel consists mainly of extracts, with a commentary chiefly devoted to the depreciation of Burke’s style. It condemns the Reflections as ‘the worst specimen we
¹⁵ European Magazine, (Feb. ), –; General Magazine, (Nov., Dec. ), –, –; Gentleman’s Magazine, (Nov. ), –; Literary Magazine, (Dec. ), –; Town and Country Magazine, (Nov., Dec. ), –, , –. ¹⁶ Critical Review, (Nov. ), –. ¹⁷ Monthly Review, NS (Nov., Dec. ), –, –. ¹⁸ Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson, a Liberal Publisher (Iowa City, ), –; Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing, and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Basingstoke, ), –.
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have ever seen of Mr Burke’s eloquence’, being ‘neither argumentative nor quite declamatory’, mingling reasoning with buffoonery and with too much ‘affectation of metaphysical subtlety’ for the ordinary reader.¹⁹ Sales figures, extensive newspaper coverage, popular caricatures, and lengthy reviews all testify to the immediate impact of the Reflections on the political world. Numerous comments in private letters confirm that interest in the book was widespread and intense, and for the most part favourable. William Elliot described it as ‘a subject of universal conversation’ and ‘much admired and relished by the Publick’.²⁰ His impression can be confirmed from less partial sources. Ewan Law, brother of Burke’s chief antagonist at the Hastings trial, observed that the Reflections ‘engross the publick conversation very much at present’.²¹ Lady Elizabeth Foster (–), who moved in Foxite circles (where the book was most coldly received), noted that ‘people seemed to be entirely taken up with Burke’s book’.²² The veteran politician Lord Camden (–) sent a copy to his daughter, ‘that you and your husband may not be uninformed of the Contents of a Book, which is now reading by all the world’.²³ Even the French envoy reported the favourable public response.²⁴ Because the Reflections became the subject of so much talk and debate, numerous private individuals recorded their opinions in letters. Most of their comments, unfortunately, are brief indications of general agreement or disagreement. For extensive or detailed analysis, recourse must be had to the reviews and pamphlet replies. Nevertheless, the evidence gleaned from personal letters is valuable in supplementing and correcting the impression created by the printed response. Most of those who published their views were antagonistic to Burke. The private letters show that many people agreed with him. Their evidence has its limitations. The surviving comments are a random sample, from which inferences must be made with caution. Yet, when carefully weighed, they suggest that in many quarters the Reflections was greeted with something like general approval, not the chorus of disapprobation and disregard that has been alleged.²⁵ The most cogent evidence comes from those who were not predisposed in Burke’s favour. In general, as Richard Shackleton shrewdly noted, ‘when a publick man writes . . . people generally divide in their declared opinions, not according to the merit of the work, but the prejudices which they have ¹⁹ Analytical Review, (Nov., Dec. ), –, –. ²⁰ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Nov. (NLS MS , fo. ). ²¹ Evan Law to John Law, Nov. (NA PRO. ///, p. ). ²² Journal, Nov. (transcript, Dormer Archives). ²³ Earl Camden to Lady Londonderry, Nov. (Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, U, C/). ²⁴ Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London, ), . ²⁵ L. G. Mitchell, Introduction (WS viii. –); and Reflections (Oxford, ), Introduction, p. viii.
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conceived respecting the man’.²⁶ The Reflections proved an exception to this rule. Several prominent supporters of Hastings wholeheartedly endorsed the book, despite their personal hostility to Burke himself. Archbishop Markham, for example, was reported to be ‘in raptures’ with it.²⁷ James Bland Burges, author of newspaper squibs ridiculing the impeachment, recorded his enthusiasm at length: it is a work of the very first rate merit; one which will do good to this Country and to the world; which deserves the thanks of all who now live, and of all who ever will be born; which equals in wisdom and justness of thought the works of any Philosophers antient or modern; and which exceeds in perfection any political performance I ever read, as connecting moral and religious truths, & drawing from that union Conclusions on which the happiness of mankind, present and to come, may be founded.²⁸
Several of Burke’s friends lauded the Reflections in similar terms.²⁹ But only from an enemy (or erstwhile enemy) is such praise exempt from the suspicion of flattery. Few can have been less disposed to praise than Lord Fife (–), hostile to Burke since the days of Economical Reformation, a Hastings partisan, and a firm royalist and Pittite at the time of the Regency Crisis. Yet he wrote of the Reflections that ‘every word should be printed in gold and I trust it will expose the vices and follies of dangerous Mad men’.³⁰ Lord Camelford was an even older antagonist, having (as Thomas Pitt) been a Grenvillite in the s. An active opponent of the Coalition and of Fox’s India Bill in particular, he had been ennobled in January by William Pitt, his cousin. In common with Burges and Fife, he supported Hastings. Yet he referred to the Reflections as ‘the gospel of St Edmund’. Not only was the argument ‘unanswerable’, but in many passages ‘divinely eloquent’, with a range of style that ‘like Shakespeare, touches the double octave from the sublime to the bathos’.³¹ Frances Burney, whose early admiration for Burke had been severely shaken by what she saw as his persecution of Hastings, and by his behaviour during the Regency Crisis, called the Reflections ‘the noblest, deepest, most animated, and exalted work that I think I have ever read’. She was confirmed in her opinion of Burke’s redemption by Elizabeth Montagu (–), ²⁶ Shackleton to R.B. Sr., Dec. (YB OF .). ²⁷ Edward Law to John Law, Nov. (NA PRO. ///, p. ). ²⁸ Burges to Lord Auckland, Nov. (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ²⁹ Sir Gilbert Elliot to E.B., Nov. (C vi. –); Robert Jephson to E.B., Dec. (WWM BkP /). ³⁰ Fife to William Rose, Nov. , in Lord Fife and his Factor, ed. Alistair and Henrietta Tayler (London, ), . On May, Fife invited E.B. to dinner, and toasted him. ‘Did you ever expect to see this?’, Fife asked his steward, ‘I never spoke to him, from the speech on the Regency, but now all is done away by the Pamphlet I sent you’ ( May, in Lord Fife, ). ³¹ Camelford to George Hardinge, Nov. , in John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London, –), vi. .
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another of ‘those the most vehemently irritated against its author but a short time since’.³² Montagu herself called the book ‘admirable, excellent, incomparable’, and was gratified that ‘people of all parties, of all ages, and of all humours’ were ‘united in approbation and praise’.³³ Finally, George III, for whom Burke had long personified the quintessence of factious opposition, declared publicly that ‘there is no Man who calls himself a Gentleman that must not think himself obliged to you, for you have supported the cause of the Gentlemen’.³⁴ This is a perceptive appreciation of the central argument of the Reflections. Many other panegyrics have survived from people previously ill-disposed to Burke, whose praise therefore carries conviction.³⁵ Further evidence of the remarkable impression made by the Reflections comes from comments made by those less closely connected to the world of the court and the government. James Beattie (–), for example, poet and professor at the University of Aberdeen, far from being an uncritical admirer of the ancien régime in France, ‘wished their Government reformed, and their religion’, both ‘according to the British model’. Yet, horrified by the actual course of events, he even thought of writing ‘something on the subject’ of Burke’s book, and ‘nearly according to his plan’. Unlike many authors when pre-empted, however, Beattie was sufficiently modest to acknowledge that Burke had treated the topic with ‘infinitely more justice than it was in my power to do’. His approval of ‘the spirit and principles of the work’ gains force from his minor cavils about occasional infelicities and awkwardness of arrangement.³⁶ Sir John Hynde Cotton (?–), a country gentleman and former long-serving MP (–), reading the Reflections for the second time, was so impressed with its exposition of the principles of government in ‘the best language’, that he wanted ‘all young men particularly those who are now coming over the threshhold of the House of Commons to make it their political Guide thro’ their Lives’.³⁷ In another country gentleman’s family, where reading the Reflections provided ‘our evenings amusement’, the auditors liked the book ‘wonderfully’. Previous antipathy to Burke is implied by
³² To Georgiana Waddington, Nov. (Diary & Letters, ed. Charlotte Barrett and Austin Dobson (London, –), iv. ). ³³ Montagu to an unnamed recipient (n.d.), in Mrs Montagu, ‘Queen of the Blues’: Her Letters and Friendships from to , ed. Reginald Blunt (London, []), ii. . ³⁴ Reported in J.B. to W.B., Mar. (C vi. ). The king made the remark when E.B. attended the levee on Feb. (Morning Post, Feb.; Gazetteer, Feb.). ³⁵ Hester Lynch Piozzi to Charlotte Lewis, Dec. (The Piozzi Letters, ed. Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom (Newark, Del., –), i. ). John Butler (Bishop of Hereford) to Lord Onslow, Nov. (Guildford, Surrey Record Office, ///). Samuel Horsley to E.B., Jan (WWM BkP /). ³⁶ Beattie to the Duchess of Gordon, Mar. (Margaret Forbes, Beattie and his Friends (London, ), –). ³⁷ Cotton to George Stevens, Nov. (Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS C. b./).
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the comment ‘I had no idea Mr Burke was so well meaning a man’.³⁸ From Edward Gibbon in distant Lausanne came one of the most comprehensive yet concise tributes to Burke’s ‘most admirable medicine against the French disease’: ‘I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can even forgive his superstition.’³⁹ Gibbon, in a sense, owed his expatriation to Burke, having lost his sinecure at the Board of Trade as a result of Economical Reformation. Horace Walpole (who had never liked Burke) was restrained in his praise of the book to Burke himself, but full of admiration in letters to others, calling the Reflections ‘sublime, profound and gay’; ‘one of the finest compositions in print’; and ‘the wisest book I ever read in my life’.⁴⁰ The Reflections even made a few early converts, long before events in France in turned British public opinion against the Revolution. Thomas Crompton (–), a Norfolk clergyman, recalled being ‘a great admirer of the French system’ before his reading of Burke ‘broke the charm’. Indeed, his conversion by ‘the wonder-working production of the mighty Burke’ ended his long-standing friendship with Lord Chedworth (–), who was immune to Burke’s magic.⁴¹ Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. Like many a classically educated man of his day, Boswell’s friend William Johnston Temple (–), another country clergyman, was doubly prejudiced against the Reflections. During the Regency Crisis, he thought Burke ‘fitter for Bedlam than for public business’. Since his reading of the Greek and Roman historians had inclined him ‘to the popular side’, he initially welcomed the French Revolution. Burke’s book first opened his eyes to its true nature: ‘what penetration, what argument, what eloquence, what sensibility’.⁴² Less candid were those who, while agreeing with Burke, were inclined to minimize the merits of his book. Thus Ewan Law thought that much of Burke’s argument was derived from his reading of ‘our friend Paley with great attention & profit’.⁴³ Anthony Storer (–), a man of fashion and former MP and diplomat, after acknowledging that the Reflections and Calonne’s De l’état de la France ‘have been and are the subjects of universal conversation’, wrote rather sourly that he did not believe ‘we wanted the assistance of Burke’s eloquence to persuade us not to change our constitution’. The Reflections he characterized as ‘diffuse and flowery, like his ³⁸ M. C. Cottrell to W. R. Cartwright, Nov. (NRO Cartwright (Ayhno) MS ). ³⁹ Gibbon to Lord Sheffield, Feb. (Letters, ed. J. E. Norton (London, ), iii. ). ⁴⁰ Walpole to Mary Berry, , Nov. ; to Edward Jerningham, Nov. (YWC, xi. , ; xlii. ). Walpole sent E.B. a short note of thanks for a presentation copy ( Nov. : ibid. ). ⁴¹ Crompton to Lord Chedworth, July (Letters from the Late Lord Chedworth to the Rev. Thomas Crompton (London, ), ). ⁴² Temple to James Boswell, Mar., – Aug. , Dec. , – Mar. (YB Boswell Papers, C , , , ). Temple praises the Reflections in similar terms in his Diaries, ed. Lewis Bettany (Oxford, ), – ( Dec. ). ⁴³ Ewan Law to John Law, Nov. (NA PRO. ///, p. ). Law probably had in mind William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London, ). Paley’s book is a tissue of commonplaces, from which E.B. is unlikely to have learned anything.
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speeches . . . but it is what is called a fine piece of eloquence and a splendid exercise of talents’.⁴⁴ Mean-spirited as this tribute is, it nevertheless confirms how widespread was agreement with the argument of the Reflections. Conversely, some at least of those who disagreed with Burke paid generous homage to the merits of the book. James Wodrow (–), for example, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, and an admirer of the French Revolution, agreed with the strictures of the reviews in the Analytical and the Monthly, and eagerly anticipated ‘other more full & masterly confutations’. Yet Wodrow found Burke’s attack on the Revolution ‘a much stronger one than I expected from the man whom I had conceived to be a little deranged’. (The comment shows how widely the charge of madness had spread.) For all its faults, the book ‘glows with warm eloquence’ and even ‘contains some argument that realy deserves the attention of the French Patriots & their friends here’.⁴⁵ This reluctant tribute, extorted from a determined antagonist, testifies to the power of Burke’s book, as well as to Wodrow’s own unusual open-mindedness. Tellingly, he lost his enthusiasm for the French Revolution sooner than did his correspondent, Samuel Kenrick (–; a Unitarian and a banker).⁴⁶ Most of Burke’s closer friends and associates agreed with him about the French Revolution, and many greeted the Reflections with enthusiasm.⁴⁷ Their evidence, of course, though flattering to Burke, adds little to what has already been amply documented from less partial evidence, the broadly favourable reception of the Reflections. More pertinent is the stream of appreciative letters which Burke received from strangers.⁴⁸ This general approbation is the more remarkable, given that Burke wrote the book under the influence of the October Days, when the Revolution looked set on an increasingly violent and anarchic course. The year , however, belied these expectations, and the new regime even seemed to be acquiring stability. When the Reflections was published, then, events had not begun to follow the path that Burke had predicted. On the contrary, well-wishers to the French Revolution could still believe in its beneficence. The Reflections achieved its impact with little help from external events. In the Reflections itself, Burke sometimes claims to speak only for himself: ‘I have no man’s proxy’ (R []). Elsewhere he more confidently speaks as ‘we’ for an implied majority. The ⁴⁴ Storer to Lord Auckland, Nov. , in Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, ed. Robert John Eden (London, –), ii. . ⁴⁵ Wodrow to Samuel Kenrick, Jan. (London, Dr Williams’s Library, MS ./). ⁴⁶ Wodrow to Kenrick, Oct. , and Kenrick to Wodrow, Oct. (Dr Williams’s Library, MS ./–). ⁴⁷ Richard Brocklesby to E.B, Nov. (WWM BkP /); John Burgoyne to E.B., Nov. (/); Michael Kearney to R.B. Sr., Nov. (/). ⁴⁸ E.B. received complimentary letters from (among many others) William Coats, a Glasgow merchant ([ Feb. ]: WWM BkP /); Samuel Cooper, clergyman, of Great Yarmouth ( Nov. : /); William Falconer, a Bath physician (Nov.: /); William Fernyhough, clergyman, of
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abundance of favourable comments in private correspondence confirms that Burke was justified in using this ‘we’. He indeed spoke for many. The claim that Burke’s book was generally well received must, however, be understood with one qualification. Nearly all the favourable opinions come from members of what could be broadly considered as the Establishment. Within the Establishment, only the Foxites are conspicuously absent from the chorus of praise and assent. Outside it, the Reflections was widely execrated, as was to be expected of a work so profoundly hostile to Dissent. For the opinions of the Dissenters, however, there is no need to delve into private correspondence. Their views were published at length in the extensive pamphlet debate which the Reflections generated. The number of pamphlets that Burke provoked is itself a tribute to the power of his book. Less than a year previously, Burke had been a figure of contempt. When a madman threw a stone at the king’s carriage, Isaac Cruikshank could exploit the incident to lampoon Burke. In Frith the Madman Hurling Treason at the King ( Jan. : BMC ), a ragged and demented Burke, holding a hat full of stones, is easily restrained by two guards. Burke is a lunatic, and his stones pose no real threat to the king (Plate ). Exactly a year later, Cruikshank published another caricature of Burke, The Aristocratic Crusade, or Chivalry Revived by Don Quixote de St Omer & his Friend Sancho ( Jan. : BMC ), equally hostile but tacitly acknowledging that he was no longer a harmless madman. Burke, champion of aristocracy, stands, dressed in armour, the Reflections his shield, on the back of a five-headed beast, which tramples ‘base born Plebeians’ (Plate ). Burke leads a counter-revolutionary procession of bishops (one of whom leads a group of commoners by the nose) and noblemen. These are arrayed against a procession representing the French Revolution and another representing its British admirers. Not that the transformation of Burke’s reputation was complete. William Windham, while praising the Reflections as ‘a work that may seem capable of overturning the National Assembly, and turning the stream of opinion throughout Europe’, acknowledged that Burke was ‘a man decried, persecuted and proscribed; not being much valued, even by his own party, and by half the nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman!’⁴⁹ By , the newspapers were publishing much more political commentary than earlier in the century, but their limited space meant that the pamphlet Stoke-on-Trent ( Feb. : /); James Hawkins, Bishop of Raphoe ( July : /); and James Landon, of Oriel College, Oxford, who had ‘been a Witness to some of the Circumstances it discusses’ ( Dec. : /). ⁴⁹ Diary, ed. Mrs Henry Baring (London, ), ( Nov. ).
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remained the staple of controversy. The Reflections provoked one of the most vigorous pamphlet debates of the period. About two weeks after its publication, when answers had already begun to appear, a ‘gentleman at the CocoaTree’ (a club famous as a gambling haunt) was reported to have waged a hundred guineas that ‘in the course of fifteen weeks, fifteen answers to Mr Burke would be printed and published’.⁵⁰ If the story was true, the gentleman won his bet. At least eighteen replies appeared within the time stipulated, and more followed. In February , the poet William Cowper (–) complained that every press ‘groan’d with answers’ to the Reflections, much retarding the printing of his translation of Homer.⁵¹ In all, about twentyeight replies were published in the six months or so after the appearance of the Reflections.⁵² Several of the weightier replies were written by members of the Dissenting Establishment. Since Burke had lately made public his opposition to the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the Reflections begins with an attack on one of the most venerable of the Dissenting sages, this was to be expected. Among the more substantial pamphlets were two written by prominent nonconformist clerics, Joseph Priestley and Joseph Towers (–). Priestley was primarily concerned with refuting Burke’s arguments about the relations between Church and State. Towers concentrated on the case for moderate political reform in Britain.⁵³ Yet the Dissenters sometimes disagreed with each other as much as they did with Burke. David Williams (–), for example, a former Unitarian and now an avowed deist, held theological and political opinions that were hardly closer to Price than they were to Burke.⁵⁴ Only occasionally, even in the s, does a genuine ‘voice of the people’ articulate the point of view of those routinely excluded from the political debate. One such man was moved to write a reply to Burke: John Butler (of Canterbury), whose Brief Reflections upon the Liberty of the Subject was printed at his own expense. If neither original nor eloquent, his book nevertheless remains a remarkable human document. Only lettered arrogance ⁵⁰ Gazetteer, Nov. . ⁵¹ Cowper to Clotworthy Rowley, Feb. (Letters and Prose Writings, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford, –), iii. ). ⁵² James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London, ), –. The exact figure depends on how an ‘answer’ is defined. Boulton’s list includes pamphlets in support of E.B., but omits an anonymous Answer to Burke’s ‘Reflections’ (Dublin, ). After the publication of Rights of Man, the debate widened. In ‘Towards a Bibliography of the Reflections and Rights of Man Controversy’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, (), –, Gayle Trusdel Pendleton lists about contributions to the larger debate. ⁵³ Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Birmingham, ). Joseph Towers, Thoughts on the Commencement of a New Parliament (London, ; the remarks on the Reflections are an afterthought, in an appendix). ⁵⁴ David Williams, Lessons to a Young Prince, by an Old Statesman, on the Present Disposition in Europe to a General Revolution (nd edn. London, ). Published anonymously. Lesson (on the Reflections) was added to the nd edn. Williams attacks Fox and Sheridan, as well as E.B.
, ‒ could sneer at such an erratum as ‘in general, for Alligarchy, read Oligarchy’. A victim of the oppressive oligarchy that controlled local government, Butler attacks the corrupt manipulation of the electorate by aspiring politicians of all stripes of opinion. While all the replies to Burke pay homage to ‘liberty’ as a political ideal, what their authors understood by this ideal was the redefinition of the political élite to include themselves and the interests they represented. Butler’s was a voice crying in the wilderness, an early adumbration of the genuinely popular writings of the s. Unsurprisingly, it had little impact.⁵⁵ Though the emphasis naturally varies from one to another, most of the pamphlets attack Burke on three fronts. They impugn his integrity, they dispute his facts, and they controvert his interpretation of them. To discredit Burke, they present him as an apostate, as a ministerial hireling, even as a madman.⁵⁶ A second strategy was to challenge Burke’s accuracy and veracity. Some charge him with ignorance, others with being misinformed, others again with wilful distortion. Since parts of the Reflections are written in a highly rhetorical and even hyperbolical style, Burke could plausibly be accused of exaggeration and histrionic misrepresentation. Other pamphleteers charged Burke with using the acknowledged power of his rhetoric to divert attention from the poverty of his facts and the weakness of his arguments.⁵⁷ A third line of assault, employed particularly by Burke’s more moderate opponents, was not to dispute the ‘facts’ but to controvert his interpretation of them.⁵⁸ The early replies were generally restrained in their use of ad hominem material, preferring (as part of their own rhetorical strategy) to treat Burke as a lost sheep who had wandered from his old, true path, or been misled by misinformation. Only two relied mainly on personal invective. One was predictable: Major Scott’s Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, the first of the replies, published as early as November. Scott, of course, had no interest in current events in France for themselves, but was willing to use any ⁵⁵ John Butler, Brief Reflections upon the Liberty of the British Subject; in Address to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke ([Canterbury?], []; ‘Printed for the author’). ⁵⁶ [John Scott], A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in Reply to his ‘Reflections’ (London, ), . Strictures on the Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, and Remarks on Certain Occurrences . . . Relative to that Event (London, ), . Benjamin Bousfield, Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Pamphlet (Dublin, ), –. The Wonderful Flights of Edmund the Rhapsodist, into the Sublime and Beautiful Regions of Fancy [etc.] (London, ). ⁵⁷ Thomas Christie, Letters on the Revolution of France, and on the New Constitution (London, ) is the most extensive attempt to ‘correct’ E.B.’s misrepresentation. [Catherine Macaulay], Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (London, ), . Robert Woolsey, Reflections upon Reflections, Including Some Observations on the Constitution and Laws of England [etc.] (London, ), –. ⁵⁸ Capel Lofft, Remarks on the Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Concerning the Revolution in France (London, ). Towers, Thoughts on the Commencement of a New Parliament, appendix, –.
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means to discredit Burke. Indeed, much of the pamphlet could have been written before the appearance of the Reflections, with the arguments of which it barely engages. Scott’s real subject was not the Reflections at all, but the iniquity of the Hastings impeachment.⁵⁹ The other mainly ad hominem attack was by David Williams, who denounced Burke as a self-interested turncoat whose venal pen was now Pitt’s as it had been Lord Rockingham’s. Burke was not alone in being the object of such abuse. So scathing was Williams about most politicians that a pervasive tone of personal rancour blunts the force of the argument. In Burke’s case, the source of his animus can be identified. According to his posthumously published autobiography, Williams had once been rudely treated by Burke.⁶⁰ If few of the pamphleteers abused Burke so personally as Scott and Williams, most charged him with inconsistency. Repeatedly, they drew attention to what they saw as the incongruity between the early Burke, the friend of liberty and America, and the new Burke of the Reflections, an apologist for tyranny and oppression.⁶¹The problem of consistency remains an open question in Burke studies.⁶² One opponent, however, eschewed this line of attack, though he meant no compliment to Burke by doing so. Instead of lamenting liberty’s lost leader, James Mackintosh argued that ‘an abhorrence for abstract politics, a predilection for aristocracy, and a dread of innovation, have ever been among the most sacred articles of his public creed.’⁶³ On one question Burke’s antagonists were agreed: the ancien régime had not been worth preserving, and the Revolution in France had been salutary and indeed necessary. Most, too, disputed Burke’s interpretation of the Revolution of as well as of the recent Revolution in France. Believing that reform, though not another revolution, was needed in Britain, they rejected Burke’s contention that in the English constitution had reached its final and perfect form, making further reform unnecessary. Yet they differed in how far they thought the lessons of the Revolution were applicable to the British situation. The most concerned to explain and justify the course of events in France was Thomas Christie, whose Letters provide the most detailed account of the new French constitution. For Christie, the ⁵⁹ A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, esp. , . ⁶⁰ Lessons to a Young Prince (nd edn.), –. Incidents in my Own Life which Have Been Thought of Some Importance, ed. Peter France (Falmer, ), –. The meeting with E.B. (incredible as narrated) is supposed to have taken place in . France dates the writing of the Incidents to about –. ⁶¹ Lord Macartney reported (from Antrim) that an ‘old Presbyterian neighbour’ who ‘almost worshipped Mr B for his speeches against the American War, for reforming the King’s household, and for punishing the enormities of Hastings’ was ‘shocked at what he called [E.B.’s] apostasy’ (to Sir George Staunton, Dec. , in Helen H. Robbins, Our First Ambassador to China: An Account of the Life of George, Earl of Macartney (London, ), ). The anecdote provides an unusual sidelight on how E.B. was regarded by those whose political opinions were rarely recorded. ⁶² Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, The Problem of Burke’s Political Philosophy (Oxford, ); C. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, ), –. ⁶³ Vindiciae Gallicae (London, ), p. i.
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extension of political rights to the previously unfranchised was self-evidently a desirable model for reform in Britain.⁶⁴ Sir Brooke Boothby (–), on the other hand, approved the Revolution without wanting to extend its principles to Britain. The Revolution had been necessary, he thought, to destroy the old despotism. Once the initial convulsions subsided, he imagined, the natural élite (the large landowners) would assume their rightful place as political leaders, as in Britain.⁶⁵ Others again were more reserved even in their praise of the Revolution, either deploring the excesses to which it had given rise or condemning particular elements of the new constitution. William Belsham (–), for example, tempered his general approval with some particular criticisms. All represented departures from the British practice: the ineligibility of deputies for re-election, the lack of a second legislative chamber, the complete separation between legislative and executive powers, and the reduction of the king to a figurehead.⁶⁶ Capel Lofft (–) condemned indirect elections, the lack of a senate, the confiscation of Church property, and even the abolition of titles of nobility.⁶⁷All these were objections that Burke had voiced in the Reflections. Their appearance in the replies of some of his antagonists shows that British attitudes to the French Revolution were more complex and nuanced than a casual inspection of the battle lines might at first suggest. In the Reflections, Burke privileges history and experience as better helps to practical statesmanship than political theory or rational speculation. His opponents were divided on this question. The least theoretical was Joseph Towers, who was more interested in practical reforms of particular abuses (such as the press-gang) than in their theoretical justification.⁶⁸ At the opposite end of the spectrum, David Williams borrowed the notion of a volonté générale from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (–) as the basis from which to argue for annual parliaments elected on manhood suffrage.⁶⁹ In the context of , this was utopian dreaming. In Vindiciae Gallicae, however, James Mackintosh made a more practical application of Rousseau. Whereas in Rights of Man Paine frightened the property-owning classes into siding with Burke, Mackintosh subtly reconciled democracy in theory and principle with security of property and privilege in practice. After affirming (against Locke) that the first business of government is not the protection of property but ‘the assertion and protection of the NATURAL RIGHTS OF MAN’, he controverted Burke to argue that, when men enter into society, they surrender only the rights necessary for the ends of society. Thus all men retain their political ⁶⁴ Letters on the Revolution of France, esp. –. ⁶⁵ A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, esp. –. ⁶⁶ Belsham, Historic Memoir on the French Revolution, –. ⁶⁷ Lofft, Remarks on the Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, –. ⁶⁸ Thoughts on a New Parliament, –, –. ⁶⁹ Lessons to a Young Prince (nd edn.), –, –. Williams agrees with E.B. (though from an opposite point of view) in censuring both the property qualification for the franchise and indirect elections (–).
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rights (including the right to participate, which Burke denied), because these do not interfere with the rights of others. Mackintosh was also one of the few who approved the decision in favour of a unicameral legislature. A single chamber, he argued, is better able to express the volonté générale, whereas senates tend to become closed oligarchies. Here, as elsewhere, Mackintosh showed himself hostile to corporate privileges, though not to the political advantages enjoyed by wealthy (and therefore powerful) individuals.⁷⁰ Burke, on the other hand, valued those institutions, such as the Church and the House of Lords, which mediated between the individual and the State. Vindiciae Gallicae is one of the best of the replies to Burke, in some respects superior to Rights of Man. More subtly argued and more stylishly written, Vindiciae Gallicae lost the battle to Paine because its audience was the property-owning élite, which soon took fright at the prospect of a revolution in Britain and turned to Burke. Rights of Man was better adapted to serve as the gospel of an incipient populism. Apart from Rights of Man, the only reply to Burke which is still widely read is the Vindication of the Rights of Men by Mary Wollstonecraft. In part, it owes its survival to its status as a companion piece to her later and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman (). Yet despite many palpable signs of hasty and careless composition (published on November , it was one of the earliest replies), her first Vindication is, after Paine’s, the most vigorous of the replies.⁷¹ Structurally weak, neither developing its own argument nor engaging much with Burke’s, with little to say either about or even about the French Revolution, and developing no deep political theory, it stands somewhat apart from the majority of the pamphlets. Its style, though unpolished, is richly and imaginatively metaphorical, employing striking images both to express her own ideas and to turn Burke’s own imagery (notably veils and drapery) against him. The Vindication is also animated by a deeply felt vision of human society that she eloquently opposes to Burke’s. Starting from a more optimistic estimate of human nature, and a faith in the possibility of eliminating mass poverty, she imagines an ideal community that is as far from the economic individualism of Paine and Mackintosh as it is from Burke’s aristocratic hierarchy. Hers is an agrarian utopia, a ‘garden more inviting than Eden’, where ‘the clergyman would superintend his own flock, the shepherd would then love the sheep he daily tended’.⁷² In , this pastoral idyll was no less nostalgic an ideal than Burke’s ‘age of chivalry’. One reply, however, eclipsed the rest, even Wollstonecraft’s: Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Paine’s remarkable career offers some curious parallels to Burke’s. Both were outsiders who had their way to make, though Paine, the ⁷⁰ Vindiciae Gallicae, –, –. ⁷¹ David Bromwich, ‘Wollstonecraft as a Critic of Burke’, Political Theory, (), –. ⁷² A Vindication of the Rights of Men (London, ), esp. , –, –.
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son of a staymaker in a small provincial town, had further to travel. Paine’s parents tried to give him a good education, better than they could really afford. His failure to profit from it cost him the readiest opportunity of improving his position in life, and he was subsequently apprenticed to his father’s trade. Failing as a staymaker, as a teacher, as an exciseman, and as a tobacco merchant (a business inherited with his second wife), Paine emigrated to America at the age of with nothing more than letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had contrived to impress. As with Burke, chance gave him an unexpected opportunity to exercise unsuspected talents. Arriving in Philadelphia consumed with a sense of grievance against England and the old order, Paine found his métier as a popular journalist, achieving immediate success and fame with his pamphlet Common Sense (). Luckier than Burke in his timing and his audience, Paine found himself articulating ideas for which people were ready. Failure in England and success in America naturally led Paine to associate the good life with the brave new world of the revolutionary republic. In Rights of Man (more especially in part II, published in ), he generalized an optimistic vision in which all the world would become America. His new ideal of society is egalitarian in civic status, free from the burden of the past and particularly from the incubus of religion. Encouraging economic individualism, the new republic, in which inherited advantages count for little, would create a vigorous natural aristocracy of self-made wealth. Yet in this society the weak would be protected by a presiding benevolent rationalism. A remarkable vision, and prescient where Wollstonecraft’s is retrospective, it was formulated at the only time when it could have been mistaken for a programme of political reform: when the American and French revolutions had given such grandiose schemes of regeneration a degree of plausibility. Paine articulated the aspirations and self-esteem of the underprivileged but enterprising, just as Burke expressed the inherited values of the established order.⁷³ Burke and Paine had not always been antagonists. As a member of an opposition that was more a loose confederation of independents than a united party, Burke had often been constrained to a degree of co-operation with men whose politics were more populist than his own. The case of John Wilkes in – is one instance. Another is the uneasy alliance between the Rockingham Whigs and other opposition groups during the American war. As late as , Burke sought to cultivate Joseph Priestley (C vi. , –). About the same time, he was on friendly terms with Thomas Christie, later the author of one of the replies to the Reflections (v. ). There is thus nothing exceptional in Burke’s early association with Paine, though Paine’s claim
⁷³ David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York, ); Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine, Apostle of Freedom (New York, ); John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life.
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to have been ‘in some intimacy’ with Burke was probably exaggerated.⁷⁴ Selfaggrandizing, pushy, and thick-skinned, Paine habitually forced his company on people politer than himself, while Burke (before at least) was accustomed for political reasons to endure people he disliked. Admittedly, both had been in one sense on the same side during the American war, since both had opposed the policy of coercion. But Paine had been an early advocate of independence, which Burke had most reluctantly accepted as an accomplished fact.⁷⁵ Paine certainly misunderstood Burke and his politics. In January , he sent Burke a long letter from Paris, expressing the most unbounded optimism about the Revolution, and evidently expected Burke to respond in kind (C vi. –). Surprised and hurt by Burke’s coolness, he determined, long before its publication, to answer the Reflections. His Rights of Man appeared on February , only to be hastily withdrawn by its timid publisher. By far the most inflammatory of the replies to Burke in its savaging of the oppressive pageant that (in Paine’s mind) was miscalled the British ‘constitution’, Rights of Man was considered so dangerous that not before March was a publisher found willing to risk accepting responsibility for it. The government considered, but decided against, prosecution.⁷⁶ Rights of Man soon outdistanced the other replies, establishing itself as a classic exposition of the politics of popular sovereignty.⁷⁷ Rights of Man deserved its success. Its ideas were not new, but they had rarely been expressed with such cogent clarity. Paine drew practical conclusions from notions that had usually been treated as abstract propositions. The crude vigour of Paine’s style repelled the fastidious. Horace Walpole described it as ‘so coarse, that you would think he means to degrade the language as much as the government’.⁷⁸ But the cultivated were not the intended audience of Rights of Man. A shrewd journalist, Paine perceived (as most of Burke’s opponents did not) that no mere ‘answer’ can command much interest. To refute Burke’s arguments would not be enough. He accordingly devoted more space to the exposition of his own revolutionary politics than to the refutation of Burke’s. Indeed, one of his most successful rhetorical ⁷⁴ Paine to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. , in Jefferson’s Papers, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, – ), xiv. . ⁷⁵ Common Sense (); E.B.’s speech on the Army Estimates, Dec. (WS iii. ). ⁷⁶ Keane, Tom Paine, –. ⁷⁷ E.B. and Paine are now indissolubly linked as champions of opposite political philosophies. Their discordance has been much studied: R. R. Fennessy, Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man: A Difference of Political Opinion (The Hague, ); Francis Canavan, ‘The Burke–Paine Controversy’, Political Science Reviewer, (), –; Gregory Claeys, ‘Republicanism versus Commercial Society: Paine, Burke, and the French Revolution Debate’, History of European Ideas, (), –; Ian Harris, ‘Paine and Burke: God, Nature, and Politics’, in Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling, ed. Michael Bentley (Cambridge, ), –. ⁷⁸ Walpole to Mary Berry, Apr. (YWC xi. ).
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strategies was to pretend that Burke had not advanced any ‘arguments’ that could be refuted, that the Reflections was all rhapsody and rhetoric.⁷⁹ What made Rights of Man peculiarly offensive to British opinion, and especially to the propertied classes, was not its treatment of events in France. Indeed, in French politics, Paine was a moderate. When he returned to France in and sat as a deputy in the Convention, he allied himself with the Girondins, voted against the execution of the king, and was imprisoned and barely escaped execution under the Terror. Where Paine went further than Burke’s other antagonists was in his call (not always explicitly articulated) for a new constitution and a new political order for Britain, one based not on property and precedent but on first principles. David Williams, who had advocated constitutional reform on much the same plan as Paine, presented his ideas as a restoration of the ‘ancient constitution’ as it was supposed to have existed in the days of King Alfred. Even James Mackintosh claimed that the new French constitution was based not merely on the speculative ideas of political philosophers, but on experience, albeit ‘experience’ of the evils of existing systems.⁸⁰ Paine dismissed precedents as irrelevant. Instead, he sought to rebuild the science of politics on a new and wholly rational (commonsensical) basis. Every institution must be justified in terms of its public utility. Mere existence confers no presumptive title, as it does in Burke’s system. Paine derived political rights from ‘natural’ rights (an equation that Burke had rejected), advancing a simple claim of equal political rights for ‘all’ (in practice, adult males).⁸¹ Parliament, possessing no legitimacy, could not (he implied) reform itself. A special constitutional convention would be required, as in France, mandated by the people with the power to form a new constitution. These were revolutionary ideas indeed. Yet without the stimulus of the Reflections, Rights of Man would probably never have been written. This irony was not lost on Burke’s opponents, who at celebratory dinners made a point of toasting him for ‘the important discussions he has provoked’.⁸² Replies, rejoinders, or ripostes to printed attacks rarely advance the cause or the reputation of their authors. Dignified silence has usually been considered the preferable strategy. In seeking to dissuade Burke from publishing the ⁷⁹ Rights of Man, in Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, ), . Paine defends his own ‘Miscellaneous Chapter’ by charging that E.B.’s book is ‘all Miscellany’ (). ⁸⁰ Lessons to a Young Prince, –; Vindiciae Gallicae, –. ⁸¹ Rights of Man, ed. Philp, esp. –, –. ⁸² E.B. was informed of this toast (given at a meeting of the Unitarian Society on Apr. ) in a mocking letter from Henry Wisemore ( Apr.: C vi. ). A similar toast was given at a celebratory dinner
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Reflections (which began as a reply to Price, though it quickly outgrew that origin), Philip Francis warned him of the danger of entering into ‘a war of Pamphlets’. Such a contest could lead only into ‘a vile and disgraceful, tho’ it were ever so victorious, an altercation’ ( Feb. : C vi. ). In principle, Burke agreed. Hitherto, he had ignored published criticism of his writings and speeches.⁸³ Not that dignified silence came naturally to him, for one of his basic psychological needs was to prove himself in the right. So much is evident not only from his speaking in Parliament, where he often rose several times in a single debate, but from the frequency with which he responded to private letters, even from obscure strangers. In , for example, he had replied at length to Patrick Bowie and to Dr John Erskine (–) when they questioned his support for relaxing the penal laws against Scottish Catholics (iv. –, –). More recently, a letter of February from Thomas Mercer (c.–), a retired East India merchant, expressing surprise and alarm at Burke’s apparent dereliction of the cause of liberty in his Speech on the Army Estimates, immediately drew from Burke an elaborately argued defence of his position ( Feb.: vi. –). Set against this readiness, indeed eagerness, to engage in epistolary controversy, Burke’s self-restraint with regard to antagonists in print is the more remarkable. When eight pamphlet replies to the Reflections had appeared, the Morning Post (hostile to Burke) speculated whether he would ‘take the trouble to answer them’, jestingly adding that his ‘gallantry’ would incline him to reply first to his two female critics.⁸⁴ In fact, Burke seems to have taken little interest in the replies. He told an anonymous defender that, while copies had been sent to him, he had not read them, being resolved ‘when I knew I was not likely to alter my own opinions, or to change those of my adversaries, not to be tempted into any further controversy’ ( Jan. : C vi. –). When Joseph Priestley, himself the author of one of the attacks, asked him whether he had read any of his antagonists, Burke replied ‘not one . . . except Paine—& that because his friends said it was an able one’. Burke disagreed, concluding from his reading of Rights of Man that Paine ‘seemed to him to be mad’.⁸⁵ on July (The Times, July). Less flippantly, Samuel Kenrick declared that ‘I look upon Burke, whatever his views may have been, as cooperating with all his able antagonists, in bringing forwards the great work of improvement—For had he not written—what must the world have lost,—which he has called forth’ (to James Wodrow, Apr. ; Dr Williams’s Library, MS ./). ⁸³ The Philosophical Enquiry () is only an apparent exception. In the Preface to the second edition (), E.B. reports reading ‘every thing which has appeared in publick against my opinions’ and taking advantage of ‘the candid liberty of my friends’. Yet he made no concession to any criticism, finding no sufficient reason for ‘making any material change in my theory’. Instead, the changes he made (the most extensive post-publication revisions to any of his works) were intended to ‘explain, illustrate and enforce it’ (WS i. ). ⁸⁴ Morning Post, Jan. . The two women antagonists were Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay. ⁸⁵ Reported in Samuel Kenrick to James Wodrow, July (Dr Williams’s Library, MS ./).
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Despite this dismissal, Burke subsequently paid Paine the compliment, not indeed of replying to him directly, but of selecting extracts from Rights of Man to exemplify the doctrines of the ‘New Whigs’ in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.⁸⁶ While Burke maintained his customary neglect of hostile pamphlets, he continued his habit of responding to private criticisms. To Philip Francis, who had earlier lambasted the first draft of the Reflections, he nevertheless sent a presentation copy. Francis, however, possessed an adamantine sense of his own rightness that was at least equal to Burke’s, and was the only friend to reply with criticism rather than praise. Himself a stickler for purity of style, Francis could not appreciate Burke’s unbuttoned eloquence: ‘Once for all, I wish you would let me teach you to write English . . . Why will you not allow Yourself to be persuaded, that polish is material to preservation?’ ( Nov. : C vi. ). Francis was wrong: polish is not ‘material to preservation’, as the example of Shakespeare sufficiently testifies. Francis was also unusual in the severity of his strictures. Most of Burke’s antagonists conceded the power of his writing, even as they disputed his conclusions. On the substance of the Reflections, Francis boldly contradicted Burke’s reading of French history, denying at some length that the French had ever enjoyed even the makings of a good constitution. The Revolution, however regrettable the accompanying violence, was therefore justified: ‘has not God himself commanded or permitted the Storm to purify the elements?’ (–). Burke replied with more forbearance than usual. Without entering into historical details, he argued that the most relevant comparison was not between the ancien régime and the new, but between the new and ‘such a government as I suppose that those wretches might have had and rejected’. Acknowledging that ‘I am not likely to alter my opinions’, which ‘I have not lightly formed, or that I can lightly quit’, Burke declined any further controversy on the subject, inviting Francis instead to a meeting with friends on a topic where they were in agreement, the impeachment ( Nov.: –). Cordial agreement to differ was impossible for Burke. Had he not been so closely allied with Francis on the Hastings question, he would probably have severed all relations, as he did with Fox. But recognizing that Francis was still as eager as ever about the impeachment (whereas for Fox it had become an irksome encumbrance), he was prepared to overlook even their total disagreement on the subject of the French Revolution. Yet if there was no explosive public break, as there was with Fox, their social and personal relations withered. Future communications were infrequent, terse, and confined to impeachment business.⁸⁷ Burke complained that Francis’s ‘paper’ (he avoids ⁸⁶ An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (London, ), –. ⁸⁷ C vi. –, ; vii. . The only exception is that in , perhaps as a gesture of reconciliation (for E.B was no Latinist), Francis asked E.B. to vet a Latin inscription. E.B. duly commented on the inscription ( Jan. : –), but the exchange did not lead to more cordial relations.
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the term ‘letter’) ‘has much more the character of a piece, in an adverse controversy, carried on before the tribunal at large, than of the animadversion of a friend on his friend’s performance’ (C vi. ). This is true. Indeed, had he not known Burke personally, Francis might have been tempted to write a reply to the Reflections. At least, he had his copy of the book bound with many blank pages, into which he entered numerous lengthy remarks and animadversions and copied quotations relevant to the rebuttal of Burke’s arguments. In addition, he made hundreds of shorter marginal notes, often correcting Burke’s grammar, punctuation, and usage. Some of these notes were made as late as , making the volume probably the fullest record of an individual’s response, an eloquent testimony to the book’s power to engage even a hostile reader’s attention over many years.⁸⁸ Temperamentally indisposed to admit error or inaccuracy, Burke did treat one complaint with an unusual degree of complaisance. In the Reflections, he asks why the property of the Church has been singled out for confiscation, in preference to that of the ‘ministers, financiers, and bankers’ who were ‘enriched whilst the nation was impoverished by their dealings and their counsels’. Among the ministers, he instances the late duc de Choiseul (–) as having received ‘infinite sums’ from ‘the bounty of his master, during the transactions of a reign which contributed largely, by every species of prodigality in war and peace, to the present debt of France’ (R []). This remark offended the duchesse de Choiseul, his widow (–), who was still living in Paris. Through a relation, the duchesse de Biron (–), who had moved to London and whom Burke knew well enough to have presented with a copy of the Reflections, Mme de Choiseul protested. Burke’s response was a model of courtliness. Professing that the complaint had made ‘a deep impression upon my Mind’, he averred that he would ‘sooner have burned twenty Books than have given her half an hours uneasiness’, and greatly regretted that ‘an unguarded expression has escaped me, in an unguarded moment’. Nevertheless, he would not change it. To do so, he speciously alleged, would only ‘afford a Subject for the malignant discussions of those Enemies, which great men almost always leave as the most lasting memorials of their fortune’ ( Mar. ; C vi. ). Burke later agreed to add a note to the French translation, but worded it carefully to avoid the imputation of withdrawing what he had said in the Reflections.⁸⁹ The elaborate courtesy of Burke’s letter to the duchesse de Biron, and his apparent willingness to satisfy the duchesse de Choiseul, mark his respect for aristocratic ladies in reduced circumstances. Even for them, however, he would not recant. ⁸⁸ Francis’s annotated copy is now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (*EC.B r) ⁸⁹ E.B. to duchesse de Biron, Mar. (C vi. –, and tailnote, –). Dupont, Burke’s translator, was charged with inserting the much-revised note in the next edition. As he confided to E.B., he regarded the whole episode as typifying ‘l’esprit de l’ancien régime’: ‘Que de paroles . . . que de tourmens, pour bien peu de chose!’ ( July : Journal of Modern History, (), ).
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Burke showed no such deference to other criticisms, even from Frenchmen opposed to the Revolution. His own translator, for example, Pierre-Gaëton Dupont (c.–), had the temerity to question, submissively enough, the critical tone of Burke’s treatment of Henri IV (R [–]; C vi. –). Burke’s response was a sharp lecture on French history ( Oct.: –). Written immediately on receiving Dupont’s letter, Burke’s reply shows his detailed and self-confident command of the subject. Not for a moment does he allow himself to suppose that Dupont might better know or understand the history of his own country. The same confidence in the evidential basis of the Reflections can be seen in Burke’s response to the abbé Jean-Siffrein Maury (–), one of the staunchest defenders in the National Assembly of the rights and interests of the Gallican Church. Burke had sent Maury a presentation copy of the Reflections. Some point of etiquette prevented Maury from addressing his letter of thanks directly to Burke. Instead, he wrote to Captain E. J. A. Woodford (presumably because he knew Woodford, who had spent some time in Paris), but obviously meaning it to be forwarded to Burke. Woodford himself, a protégé of William Windham, and later a good friend of Burke, had yet to make Burke’s acquaintance, for he in turn forwarded a copy of Maury’s letter through James Bland Burges, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. Maury’s letter is both complimentary and critical: Cette derniére production de votre illustre Compatriote est très digne de la célebrité dont il jouit, il parle avec le véritable accent de la liberté, et ses Principes sont excellents: Mais on l’a bien mal instruit des faits, et nous regretons tous, qu’avec un si bon espirt, il n’ait pas eu des renseignements plus approfondis et plus exacts sur l’histoire de nos folies depuis que Nous contrefaisons les Sages. S’il avait connû la Vérité toute entiére, la vertueuse indignation qui animoit sa plume, l’auroit rendu encore plus éloquent, et il auroit dispensé d’avance au nom de la Posterité, la louange et l’opprobre.⁹⁰
Maury’s critique, however, is quite different from that of Burke’s English adversaries who accused him of ignorance and inaccuracy. Maury’s charge is incompleteness (not knowing ‘la Vérité toute entiére’), not error. Burke, of course, could not accept the imputation of being ‘mal instruit des faits’, even from a Frenchman who had lived through the events concerned. As Maury had not written to him directly, however, he replied circuitously, in the form of a letter to Bland Burges, nominally written by his son Richard, but in substance representing his own views. In this reply to Maury, Richard Burke noted that he had not specified any error or omission in the Reflections. He therefore read the criticism as ‘an oratorical mode of expressing his sense of the condition of France’. If Burke, ‘knowing only what he knows, has given such a description of this Revolution, What would he have done, if he had ⁹⁰ Maury to Woodford (transcript, NRO A. IX. ).
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known all that we know’. Maury appears to have wanted a more detailed chronicle of the Revolution, leading to the assignment of ‘la louange et l’opprobre’. Burke’s aim, however, was quite different, ‘to detect & expose the general spirit & principle which actuates the whole proceeding and to refute those tenets of false politics & false philosophy which have been used to influence & corrupt the people’. Even so, far from conceding inaccuracy, Burke as usual claims (speaking through his son) that his work ‘whatever it is in ability, shews undoubtedly no common information on the subject’.⁹¹ Unwilling to reply to his antagonists, but having more to say about the French Revolution, Burke found a convenient pretext in a private letter from another, less prominent member of the National Assembly, FrançoisLouis-Thibault de Menonville. Though a stranger to Burke, Menonville wrote to him from Paris soon after reading one of the earliest copies of the Reflections to reach the city. Unlike Maury, Menonville was both generous in his praise and specific in what he called his ‘Remarks,—not animadversions’. For example, he observed that the new electoral system had been modified subsequent to the proposal described by Burke, and he defended those (including himself ) who continued to attend the Assembly, rather than emigrate or withdraw, against Burke’s harsh strictures. Relishing the Reflections as ‘a very refreshing mental food’, he asked for more: in particular, for some positive advice, which, with permission, he would publish ( Nov. : C vi. –). This request provided Burke with the opportunity he needed to return to the fray. Like the Reflections itself, Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly thus originated in a genuine epistolary situation. Unlike the Reflections, however, at about , words, it did not outgrow the common length of a pamphlet. The text is subscribed January, but Burke delayed its dispatch until the th, to take advantage of a safer conveyance than the post (C vi. ). On receipt of the Letter, Menonville himself translated it into French, being unwilling to let it appear ‘So much disfigured’ as the Reflections had been. In addition, he added a preface vindicating Burke against Joseph Priestley’s attack on the Reflections. The translation was finished by March, but was not published until near the end of April. Copies of the French edition reached London by May, and Burke’s English text (revised since the version sent to Menonville) was published on May.⁹² Burke begins the Letter by professing to prefer ‘approbation, attended with instruction’ to ‘general and unqualified praises’ (WS viii. –). Immediately, however, he distinguishes ‘errors’ from ‘cavils’, and finds only
⁹¹ R.B. Jr. to James Bland Burges, Dec. (UBL (III), –). ⁹² Menonville to E.B., Mar., Apr. (C vi. –). Todd .
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one material ‘error’, which he has corrected.⁹³ On the alterations to the electoral system as it passed through the Assembly, Burke argues that the ‘true character’ of the plans would be ‘better comprehended in the design of the architects than in the execution of the masons’. To have followed every turn by which ‘bungling practice corrects absurd theory’ would have been endless. The project of transferring political power to the uneducated mass of the population, in order to ‘oppress, degrade, impoverish, confiscate, and extinguish the original gentlemen, and landed property of an whole nation’ is so fundamentally and essentially wicked and destructive that no minor corrections or modifications could make any difference (–). More explicitly than he had in the Reflections, Burke concludes that the Revolution is irredeemable from within. The only hope of reversing it is from the use of external force. As precedents for foreign intervention in support of counterrevolution, he cites approvingly the invasion of the Netherlands by the King of Prussia in , and the Austrian occupation of Liège in (–). This is Burke’s first public call for external intervention in the affairs of France, a call he would repeat with increasing stridency. Into his reply to Menonville, Burke inserted what has become one of his most celebrated passages, a diatribe against the apotheosis of Rousseau as a revolutionary hero. Menonville had said nothing about Rousseau. Burke was provoked by the Assembly’s decree of December , which voted a public statue to Rousseau and a pension to his widow.⁹⁴ For Burke, this measure epitomized the perversity of the Revolution and its makers. In the Reflections, Burke identified a conspiracy to undermine the institutions of the ancien régime. In the Letter, Burke interpreted the public sanctification of Rousseau as a sign of a related conspiracy to pervert the educational system. He accordingly excoriated Rousseau less as an author than as a cult figure. For Rousseau’s writings, Burke had indeed, initially at least, felt some admiration, reviewing two of them in the Annual Register. In , he praised the Lettre à d’Alembert as ‘by far the most ingenious, spirited, and philosophical performance that ever appeared on theatrical entertainments’. At the same time, he doubted the general applicability of its ideas, and objected to Rousseau’s ‘tendency to paradox’. In , reviewing Émile, Burke developed his own paradox about Rousseau’s ‘paradoxical genius’. While most of the system of education described in Émile is either ‘impracticable’, ‘chimerical’, or even ‘highly blamable, and dangerous both to piety and morals’, the book yet contains ‘a thousand noble hints relative to his subject, grounded on
⁹³ The change (which E.B. does not specify) was probably the softening of the criticism of those who (such as Menonville himself ) continued to sit in the National Assembly rather than withdrawing. The original and revised versions are quoted in C vi. n. . ⁹⁴ Rousseau, Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh (Geneva and Oxford, –), xlvi. –.
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a profound knowledge of the human mind, and the order of its operations’.⁹⁵ In –, Rousseau’s writings could be admired as the ingenious fancies of a powerful imagination, expressed with forceful eloquence. By , Rousseau was so closely identified with the Revolution that such detachment was scarcely possible. Yet even in the Letter to a Member, Burke concedes that Rousseau occasionally shows ‘a considerable insight into human nature’ and that he is ‘sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain’ (WS viii. ). In other respects, the treatment of Rousseau in the Letter is unremittingly hostile. The excursus in the Letter is in large part an ad hominem attack on Rousseau’s life and character as ‘the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity’ (WS viii. ). Though Burke never met Rousseau, he received some first-hand information about his stay in England in – from David Hume. This convinced him that Rousseau ‘entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or to guide his understanding, but vanity’, a vice with which he was ‘possessed to a degree little short of madness’. This analysis was confirmed by the posthumous publication of Rousseau’s Confessions in , which Burke thought recorded a life of ‘mad faults’ and ‘obscure and vulgar vices’, not even ‘chequered, or spotted here and there, with virtues, or even distinguished by a single good action’ (). Burke emphasizes the contradiction between Rousseau’s professions of universal benevolence and his sending his children (‘the spawn of his disgustful amours’) to the foundling hospital: ‘a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred’ (–). Modern readers, accustomed to separating an author’s life and writings, may find Burke’s procedure distasteful. In the circumstances of , however, it was justified. With the publication of the Confessions, Rousseau’s life and writings became inextricably fused. The cult of Rousseau which developed, and which influenced so many of the participants in the French Revolution, was primarily a cult of personality. Rousseau was more influential as an icon and a role model than as a source of political ideas.⁹⁶ As Burke wryly observed, ‘there is a great dispute amongst their leaders, which of them is the best resemblance to Rousseau’ (). Burke’s attack on the man and the moralist was thus well aimed. For the most part, writers on Burke and Rousseau have presented them as opposites.⁹⁷ Their ideas are indeed antithetical. For all their intellectual differences, however, a strange affinity between the two is discernible. Contemporaries noted certain uncanny similarities between the two men. The two shared a temperamental extremism, an impatience of restraint, and ⁹⁵ Annual Register (), – bis; () – bis. ⁹⁶ Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, – (London, ); Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, ). ⁹⁷ Peter J. Stanlis, ‘Burke and the Sensibility of Rousseau’, Thought, (), –; Daniel E. Ritchie, ‘Desire and Sympathy, Passion and Providence: The Moral Imaginations of Burke and Rousseau’,
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both were prone to rhetorical excesses. Just as Burke thought Rousseau mad, so many thought that Burke was deranged. When John Wilkes read the Letter to a Member, while much of the pamphlet struck him as ‘the melancholy ravings of a maniac’, he agreed with ‘half ’ of what Burke said about Rousseau, adding that ‘It is much Burke’s own character, much splendid, brilliant eloquence, little solid wisdom.’⁹⁸ Burke and Rousseau shared at least one trait. Both were, by temperament, extremists. In his review of Émile, Burke identified this fault in Rousseau: There is, it must be acknowledged, one considerable defect in his judgment, which infects both his matter and his style. He never knows where to stop. He seldom can discover that precise point in which excellence consists, where to exceed is almost as bad as to fall short, and which every step you go beyond, you grow worse and worse. He is therefore frequently tiresome and disgusting by pushing his notions to excess; and by repeating the same thing in a thousand different ways. Poverty can hardly be more vicious than such an abundance.⁹⁹
Precisely such lack of judgement and tendency to excess has often been attributed to Burke.¹⁰⁰ The justice of the stricture will inevitably be a matter of opinion and taste. Those inclined to doubt it should consult the anthology of Burke’s abuse of Hastings collected by an anonymous pamphleteer.¹⁰¹ Burke often expressed his ideas in such intemperate language, and at such wearisome length, as to become ‘tiresome and disgusting’. Many who listened to Burke in Parliament or Westminster Hall would have smiled or groaned to hear Burke charge that Rousseau ‘never knows where to stop’. Some have gone further than temperamental affinity, and detected even ‘a similarity in some of the basic elements of their political thinking’.¹⁰² Nor is this entirely a modern notion. In January , an anonymous writer (who claimed personal acquaintance with Burke) published a pamphlet intended in Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Steven Blakemore (Athens, Ga., ), –. ⁹⁸ Wilkes to his daughter, May , in Letters, from the Year to the Year , from John Wilkes (London, ), iv. –. In a brief comparison between E.B. and Rousseau, Sir Brooke Boothby observed that both possessed ‘ungoverned imaginations’ (A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, –). ⁹⁹ Annual Register (), bis. ¹⁰⁰ ‘He possesses genius, but he wants judgment; and is better calculated for the closet than for a public assembly’ (Political Magazine, (Oct. ), ); ‘the most partial friends of Mr Burke are forced to acknowledge that his judgment does not keep pace with his other faculties’ ([William Combe], A Letter from a Country Gentleman, to a Member of Parliament, on the Present State of Public Affairs (nd edn. London, ), ). ¹⁰¹ The Debate in the House of Commons, on Friday, June , , on the Motion of Thanks to the Managers of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), –; repr. in History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), pt. , –. ¹⁰² Alfred Cobban (C vi. ). The most ambitious (if ultimately unconvincing) attempts to find similarities between the two are Annie Marion Osborn, Rousseau and Burke: A Study of the Idea of Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (London, ), and David Cameron, The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke: A Comparative Study (Toronto, ).
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to expose the absurdity of the National Assembly’s idolization of Rousseau, by exhibiting the common ground between his ideas and Burke’s.¹⁰³ For Rousseau, the author draws wholly on Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, et sur sa réformation projettée (), and his treatment even of this text is selective and partial. Had the author extended his comparison to include Rousseau’s more characteristic works, such as the Discours sur l’origine de l’inéqualité and the Contrat social, he could hardly have sustained his case. The Comparison is scarcely more than a jeu d’esprit, an essay in paradox. The author sent Burke a copy, and Burke replied with a letter of thanks in his usual manner (C vi. –). Disappointingly, he did not comment on the comparison between himself and Rousseau. Instead, he enlarged on his religious opinions, more candidly than might have been expected to a stranger. Indeed, this letter provides one of the most explicit statements of the grounds for his Christianity and for his attachment to the Church of England. In this respect, it is typical of many of Burke’s letters: occasional, in the sense of being written in response to a particular stimulus; yet generalized, so as to read more like a position paper. If Burke’s letters often lack intimacy, they preserve a valuable record of his opinions. When the new Parliament met on November , Burke found himself in an awkward predicament.¹⁰⁴ The publication of the Reflections had deepened the rift between him and those Whigs who shared Fox’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution, or who were reluctant to oppose him in public. Rumours were in circulation that Burke was about to desert the Whigs and join Pitt, and even that he had accepted a secret pension.¹⁰⁵ The continuation of the impeachment, the cause dearest to his heart, was threatened by legal arguments that an impeachment, like other unfinished business, was terminated by a dissolution of Parliament. On this question, Pitt’s attitude would probably be decisive. Yet the impeachment itself could only be conducted by the old committee of managers, about half of whom supported Fox rather than Burke on the French Revolution. Burke was thus caught in a conflict of loyalties. ¹⁰³ Comparison of the Opinions of Mr Burke and Mons. Rousseau, on Government Reform, and Strictures on the Answers to Mr Burke (London, ). ¹⁰⁴ For the – session, and until he retired from Parliament in , E.B. rented a house in Duke Street, St James’s (which runs south from Piccadilly to King Street). Because E.B. was not the ratepayer, his house cannot be identified (Westminster City Archives, rate books, St Margaret’s, Grand). His first letter dated from Duke Street is Nov. (C vi. ). ¹⁰⁵ Wollstonecraft accused E.B. of receiving a pension of £, a year on the Irish establishment under an assumed name (Vindication of the Rights of Men, –), a charge repeated in Strictures on the Letter of
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On June , the Lords (as at the end of the two previous sessions) had appointed the first Tuesday of the next session for the resumption of the impeachment. No one took this literally. (In –, the Regency Crisis had delayed all business; but in , when Parliament had met on January, the trial had not resumed until February.) Now, however, there was doubt not about how early the trial would recommence, but whether it would do so at all. For the dissolution of Parliament in raised a new question. With the exception of some of the Lords’ judicial business, all unfinished parliamentary business lapsed when Parliament was prorogued, and a fortiori when it was dissolved. Did an impeachment therefore lapse? Most lawyers (including Thurlow) took the view that it did.¹⁰⁶ Despite his reiterated protestations that he was eager to receive judgment, Hastings himself entertained great hopes of escaping on this technicality. Given that so far the purely legal decisions had favoured the defence rather than the prosecution, he had some reason for this optimism. As late as December, he assured James Boswell that ‘There is to be no more Impeachment.’¹⁰⁷ The question was genuinely difficult and doubtful, susceptible to being addressed from various points of view. The precedents were contradictory, and therefore arguable. A precedent of favoured continuation; one of , abatement.¹⁰⁸ Even what principles to apply, whether legal precedent or natural justice, the practice of the constitution, or what that practice ought to be, was far from clear. Though the question would not be one of ministerial confidence, much would depend on Pitt’s attitude. For in the increasingly partisan politics of the s, few issues could be debated on their merits alone. If Pitt chose to take a firm stand, he would carry with him a large bloc of members. His was likely to be the prevailing side. Burke was understandably anxious. The first few days of the new Parliament were consumed with swearing-in formalities. On November, however, he took the earliest opportunity, even before the debate on the address, to raise the question of the impeachment. A welcome early omen was that the Speaker, Henry Addington, unequivocally declared his belief that the impeachment was (in the technical term) ‘depending’. Less forthcoming, Pitt suggested that Burke move for a committee to consider the question. the Right Hon. Mr Burke, on the Revolution in France (London, ), and obliquely by Paine in Rights of Man (ed. Philp, , ). ¹⁰⁶ John Courtenay reported that ‘the general Opinion (among the lawyers of the first authority) is that it will not go on’ (to Lord Townshend, Nov. (YB Osborn Shelves, Townshend Papers, box ). Nevertheless, of the six pamphlets on the subject collected and bound by Francis Hargrave (now BL . k. ), three argue for abatement and three against. ¹⁰⁷ Boswell to Edmond Malone, Dec. , in Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, ed. Frank Brady et al. (London, ), –. ¹⁰⁸ The clearest precedent in favour of continuation was the case of Lord Stafford, impeached on Dec. . Parliament was dissolved on Jan. , and on Mar. the new Parliament resolved that the dissolution did not alter the status of an impeachment. This Parliament in turn was dissolved on July. The
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Following this advice, on December Burke successfully moved for a committee of the whole house.¹⁰⁹ This committee canvassed the question in three lengthy debates (each lasting into the small hours), on , , and December.¹¹⁰ The outcome, never in doubt after Pitt showed his hand, was a triumph for Burke. His opinion was vindicated against that of nearly all the lawyers in the House; and his speeches were widely praised. These debates are of interest from a wider point of view than that of the impeachment, for they are admirable examples of the parliamentary rhetoric of the time. They were less partisan than was usual, since Pitt and Fox supported the same side. Arguments of all kinds were brought to bear on the question, which was reasoned with only minimal reference to the particular case of Hastings. Though everyone knew that what was immediately at stake was the acquittal of Hastings, and most speakers were in fact privately influenced by their attitude to him, they generally kept to the high road of principle. Rarely can vested interests have been so happily concealed. The quality of these debates is the more remarkable when we remember that they took place against the background of the French Revolution, and of the controversy generated by Burke’s Reflections, published only a few weeks before. Yet, barring a few slight allusions from Fox, France was not allowed to intrude into the debate. Historians have often pondered why there was no ‘British Revolution’.¹¹¹ One reason (among many others) that may be advanced is the respect for legal precedent and constitutional practice that these debates evinced. This shared inheritance provided a framework of discourse within which differences, even those between Pitt and Fox, could be adjusted by argument rather than force. These debates support Burke’s assertion in the Reflections that ‘it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity’ (R []). This ‘entailed inheritance’ meant not a slavish following of precedents, but recourse to ‘the spirit of our constitution’ (R []). Indeed, this was common ground. The most persuasive speakers in favour of abatement appealed to new Parliament (which met on Oct.) proceeded with the trial of Stafford, who was found guilty on Dec. and subsequently executed. (This execution came to be regarded as a judicial murder, rendering the precedent odious.) In , however, the Lords resolved that a dissolution did terminate an impeachment, which explicitly nullified the precedent of . This last decision, however, could be impugned as an aberration of the slavish Parliament of James II, not freely chosen. The precedent was in turn open to the objection that it reflected the hysteria of the Popish Plot. ¹⁰⁹ PH xxviii. – ( Nov.), – ( Dec). ¹¹⁰ Ibid. – ( Dec. ), – ( Dec.), – ( Dec.). ¹¹¹ Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, ); Thomas Philip Schofield, ‘Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution’, Historical Journal, (), –; H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, ), –; Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia: Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, – (Manchester, ), esp. –.
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principle as well as precedent. Thus Thomas Erskine, an eminent barrister, after contending that the question was one of law not privilege (and therefore ought to be determined in the court itself, that is, by the Lords), and that the relevant precedents favoured abatement, did not rest his case there. Instead, he argued that the procedure of an impeachment should conform as closely as possible to the general principles of the law, such as the right to a speedy trial. Thus the Lords, as jury, ought in theory to be subject to challenge. While this could not be literally so in the British system, a lengthy trial before the Lords would meant that the body of jurors would change, and, as members of the lower house were awarded, or succeeded to peerages, accusers would become judges. This inequity, while unavoidable, should be minimized by restricting an impeachment to the life of a single Parliament.¹¹² Likewise, George Hardinge (–), another lawyer, after reviewing the precedents and arguing that they supported abatement, finally rested his case on equity and the spirit of the constitution.¹¹³ The Crown’s legal officers argued on much narrower grounds. Sir Archibald Macdonald (Attorney-General), declared the case ‘a dry question of the law and practice of the House of Lords’, which should be determined by ‘the orders of the court’. Sir John Scott (Solicitor-General), the most respected legal authority of the three, likewise relied wholly on precedents. Even if they were ‘absurd’, if they had become ‘a rule of law’, that rule should be followed, rather than ‘any abstract principle of theoretic benefit’. Sir Richard Pepper Arden (Master of the Rolls), a closer friend and associate of Pitt than the others, was therefore in a particularly difficult situation. Torn between his legal opinion and his loyalty to Pitt, he opted for a committee to examine precedents.¹¹⁴ Their contributions were, compared to those of Erskine and Hardinge, brief and perfunctory. Perhaps, in deference to Pitt, they deliberately did no more than state the law as they understood it. Pitt himself spoke decisively against abatement. The question was one of ‘the rights and privileges of parliament’. Even if the precedents were clear or unfavourable (and he argued that, in fact, they supported his position), they must give way to ‘the fundamental principles of the constitution’. The power of impeachment was ‘a privilege of the first consequence to the liberties of the country’, operating ‘as a salutary check upon those in administration, and against every undue influence of the Crown’.¹¹⁵ Strictly speaking, this speech had no reference to Hastings. Indeed, in an earlier debate, Pitt had insisted that the issue was constitutional, not personal. The only practical ¹¹² PH xxviii. – ( Dec. ), – ( Dec.). On the th, fatigue and the oppressive heat forced Erskine to postpone the latter part of his speech. ¹¹³ PH xxviii. – ( Dec. ). ¹¹⁴ Ibid. – (Macdonald, Dec. ), – (Scott, Dec.), – (Arden, Dec.). Those who opposed E.B’s motion (that the impeachment ‘is now depending’) adopted the delaying tactic of proposing a committee to examine precedents. ¹¹⁵ Ibid. – ( Dec. ).
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consequence of his speech, however, as he well knew, was to ensure that the trial of Hastings would continue, just as his supporting the Crown lawyers would have resulted in its abandonment. Hastings was paying a heavy penalty for his incautious letter of December , and for Major Scott’s decision to cultivate Thurlow rather than Pitt. Hastings came to regard Pitt as worse than Burke, a ‘personal & inveterate Enemy’ who ‘under the Mask of Candor and even of Kindness’ had ‘spread insidious Snares to effect his Purpose more surely for my Ruin’.¹¹⁶ Burke spoke at length in the first and third debates, on and December. These speeches make pleasurable reading, being in his best seriocomic style. Additionally, both speeches illustrate his readiness in reply. On the th, in response to being called constitutionally dead, he began his speech with some playful variations on the theme of his being thus reduced to an ‘ens rationis, a mere metaphysical abstraction’. Colonel Norman Macleod (–), who had served in India, had defended Hastings (and argued against the impeachment proceeding) by quoting what he had heard in his commendation from Tipu Sultan of Mysore (c.–). In what a reporter called ‘one of the most pleasant and fanciful retorts’ he had ever heard, Burke made merry with Tipu (‘this Marcus Aurelius of the East’) as a character reference. On the rd, Colonel John Graves Simcoe (–) incautiously used a clothing metaphor to insinuate that Burke had deserted his principles. Burke wittily rang changes on this metaphor both to defend himself and to ridicule Simcoe. In the same debate, he seized on a phrase used by Thomas Erskine (a modest admission that he did not feel ‘at home’ in the House of Commons) to mount a satirical attack on lawyers who used the Commons as a staging-post to legal promotion and the advancement of their careers. In the same vein, he mocked the absurdity of Arden, a judge in the notoriously slowmoving Court of Chancery, for complaining of the excessive length of the impeachment. Yet Burke’s speeches were also replete with substantive arguments. As usual, he decried moving ‘an abstract question’, being convinced that ‘much of the vice of the present age was owing to an abstract way of thinking’. Instead, he moved a resolution modelled on the precedent of . While arguing that the precedents supported his case (and offering a characteristic explanation of what made a ‘good precedent’), he did not rely entirely on them, but appealed also to general principles and analogies. Free of the rancour, ill-humour, and exaggeration that often disfigure Burke’s speeches on Hastings, these richly deserved the encomiums they received. Perhaps no
¹¹⁶ Hastings to an unnamed correspondent, Apr. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). On July, in the same vein, he told David Anderson that the ‘insidious professions’ of Pitt’s friends ‘have injured me much more than Burke’s open Malignity’ (Add. MS , fo. ). His letter to Pitt is printed in C. C. Davies, ‘Warren Hastings and the Younger Pitt’, English Historical Review, (), –.
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other member could have been so witty on so seemingly dry a question as the abatement of an impeachment.¹¹⁷ Even after the Commons had voted that the impeachment was still ‘depending’, the concurrence of the Lords was by no means a foregone conclusion. Lord Chancellor Thurlow was believed to support abatement.¹¹⁸ George Rose (–; Secretary to the Treasury), expected that the Lords would disagree with the Commons, and that conferences between the two houses would be needed to resolve the issue.¹¹⁹ Even after Pitt had spoken so unequivocally, Lord Grenville (William Wyndham Grenville, recently ennobled), his lieutenant in the Lords, remained doubtful and undecided: ‘the objections & inconveniences on both sides seem so strong that the choice of difficulties alone can decide, either what the Law is, or what it ought to be.’¹²⁰ What that choice would be depended much on Thurlow, no friend either to Pitt or to the impeachment. On January, however, Hastings heard that Pitt and Thurlow ‘had come to an understanding’.¹²¹ The details of the negotiation, and how Thurlow was pacified, are obscure. One other point needed to be settled. On December, attempting to defuse the plea that ‘the extreme length to which the trial was likely to extend’ was an argument for discontinuing it, Burke announced that the managers intended to present evidence on only one more charge, that relating to contracts, pensions, and allowances.¹²² On February, he introduced a motion approving this limitation with an impassioned three-hour speech in defence of the impeachment and its conduct. Despite a rearguard action by supporters of Hastings, government backing meant that Burke’s motion was assured of success.¹²³ Thus concluded the business begun on November. On February, Burke and the committee of managers, joined by Pitt himself, carried a message to the Lords asking for a date to be set for a resumption of the impeachment. The Lords appointed a committee to examine precedents.¹²⁴ This committee, in which Grenville took the lead, discharged its task conscientiously. Not until April did it submit its report, an exhaustive compilation of precedents.¹²⁵ Since a decent interval had to be allowed for members to read and digest this body of material, the report was not taken into consideration until May. On that day, in an unusually full house (with lords present at prayers), Lord Porchester, a known supporter of the ¹¹⁷ PH xxviii. – ( Dec.), – ( Dec.). History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, pt. , . Charles Yorke described the first speech as ‘extremely eloquent, the whole of it very interesting & entertaining (to Lord Hardwicke, Dec.: BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹¹⁸ Ewan Law to John Law, Nov. (NA PRO. ///, p. ). ¹¹⁹ Rose to Lord Auckland, Dec. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹²⁰ Grenville to Lord Camelford, Jan. (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹²¹ Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹²² PH xxviii. . ¹²³ Ibid. –. History of the Trial, pt. , –. ¹²⁴ LJ xxxix. . History of the Trial, pt. , . ¹²⁵ LJ xxxix. –.
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impeachment, moved to send a message to the Commons that the Lords would proceed. Led by Thurlow, the friends of Hastings argued that the precedents should be referred to a committee of privileges. The legal precedents were canvassed in lengthy speeches by Thurlow (attacking the resolution) and Loughborough (defending it). Though the question was not strictly ministerial, Grenville supported Porchester’s motion in a speech of nearly two hours. The debate lasted until . a.m., a most unusual event in the Lords. After the amendments proposed by the pro-Hastings party had been defeated to and to , Porchester’s motion was carried without a division.¹²⁶A list of the minorities confirms the extent to which the outcome was ministerial, and refutes one of Burke’s suspicions. Towards the end of the debate, Lord Lansdowne (formerly Shelburne) charged that ‘a certain description of Noble Lords had been convened on purpose to carry the question’. Shute Barrington (–; Bishop of Salisbury) took umbrage, supposing Lansdowne to allude to the bishops (usually among the ministry’s most reliable lobby-fodder). In reply, Lansdowne denied that he meant only the bishops. In fact, only three bishops voted in the minority, which suggests that Lansdowne was right.¹²⁷ Burke was therefore wide of the mark when he identified the bench of bishops as especially prejudiced in favour of Hastings.¹²⁸ These leisurely proceedings meant that, by the time the Lords were ready to proceed with the trial itself, the parliamentary session was approaching its close. Only five sittings were held, between May and June, by far the fewest of any year. The first four were taken up with the presentation of the managers’ last article, the Contracts; at the final session, Hastings made an impassioned but unsuccessful plea for an early judgment. Apart from its brevity, the session of was marked by the absence of Thurlow, on account of the recent death of his brother. Lord (formerly Sir Lloyd) Kenyon, acting as Speaker of the Lords, took his place. Kenyon proved less acerbic and less aggressively pro-Hastings. The Contracts charge was conducted chiefly by St Andrew St John and Sir James Erskine. Since they were regarded, even by their friends, as among the least impressive of the active managers, expectations were not high.¹²⁹ On May, the sixty-eighth sitting, St John opened the Contracts charge with a speech that (by the standards of the trial) was a model of brevity: under two ¹²⁶ Ibid. –. PH xxix. –. History of the Trial, pt. , ‒. ¹²⁷ Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). G. M. Ditchfield, ‘The House of Lords and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings’, Parliamentary History, (), – (appendix , –, prints the division lists). ¹²⁸ E.B. described ‘the most sacred part’ of the House of Lords as ‘precisely that in which we can confide the least’ (to Thomas Burgh, July : C v. ). Towards the end of the trial, E.B. linked ‘the Corps of Bishops’ with Thurlow and Stanhope as Hastings’s most shameless partisans (to Dundas, June : C vii. ). ¹²⁹ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, May (NLS MS , fo. ).
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hours. Aware that he was no orator, he confined himself to a dry exposition of the charge. After branding Hastings as the creator of a ‘system of corruption’, enriching his friends and dependants at the expense of the company and the country, he detailed the principal particulars.¹³⁰ Even Hastings conceded that his speech was ‘comparatively moderate’.¹³¹ After St John had finished, Hastings rose to address the Court, complaining of the inordinate length to which the trial had extended, and asking that it be concluded in the present session. This provoked a fiery outburst from Burke. Blaming the trial’s late resumption on the Lords’ protracted search for precedents, he launched into one of his lurid rodomontades: This man is charged with horrors—you cannot conceive a crime which deforms human nature with which this man is not charged . . . human nature is stirred with rage at those crimes . . . the sympathy that God has planted in us raises horror at those crimes . . . Murders . . . Women torn from their houses . . . the most cruel racks and tortures that were ever inflicted upon persons and all for the lust of money—
Asked by Law to specify where in the charges such crimes were alleged, Burke was unabashed. In the suppression of Chait Singh’s imaginary rebellion, Burke retorted, ‘every drop of blood unjustly shed by the Prisoner’ was a murder, accompanied with robberies, tortures, indeed ‘a complete scene of cruelty and corruption in every part of it’. Over the trial as a whole, he continued, the principal cause of delay had been the objections raised by the defence counsel. Taking the offensive, Burke further accused Hastings of fomenting a campaign of vilification against the managers. Fox spoke, more briefly and less vehemently, in Burke’s support. The excitement was over. The remainder of the sitting was occupied with the routine presentation of evidence. The documents submitted were received without objection. The examination of Benn, who had bought the opium contract from Stephen Sulivan (–), provoked a number of objections from both sides, but all were either conceded or dropped.¹³² Burke played only a secondary part at the next sitting, the sixty-ninth, on May. One newspaper report (markedly hostile to the managers) stigmatized it as ‘the dullest of all dull days’, and recorded that only eighteen lords attended.¹³³ Many of those who stayed the course from . to . probably agreed. Nevertheless, some of the arguments about evidence deserve attention. After some uncontroversial presentation of documentary evidence, ¹³⁰ Bond, ii. –. ¹³¹ Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹³² BL Add. MS , fos. – (quotation from E.B. on ). Minutes, –. Hastings’s speech is printed in Bond, ii., pp. xl–xlii. Hastings awarded the contract to Sulivan as an indirect favour to his father, Laurence Sulivan, Hastings’s ‘champion’ among the directors of the company (P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London, ), , –). ¹³³ History of the Trial, pt. , –.
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William Young (d. ; he had bought the opium contract from Benn) was called. Burke conducted part of his examination, asking him to explain why he had treated with Benn for the contract, even before it had been awarded. The presumption he sought to establish was corrupt collusion. Plumer’s objection to a question about Young’s motives drew from Burke another vehement protest against the tyranny of the rules of evidence. ‘We have daily in this box’, he complained, ‘the misfortune to hear objections made the principles of which no human being I believe can understand.’ This was directed at the refusal of the Lords to assign reasons for their decisions. As for the immediate point at issue, he argued that inquiry into ‘a fraudulent and secret transaction’ properly addressed questions of motive. Nor should he be required, as Plumer had demanded, to explain in advance the drift of every question. As usual, Burke wanted the pursuit of substantive justice to trump the niceties of established legal procedure. Plumer did not press his objection.¹³⁴ Two other disputes about evidence illustrate the manner of Law’s conduct of the defence, though Burke spoke on neither. Law asked Hudson, in attendance to authenticate evidence from the records of the East India Company, about an order of concerning the export of opium to China. Erskine objected that Law should produce the order as part of the defence. Law countered that Hudson had often been asked such a question about the company’s records. Stanhope, who usually supported the defence’s objections, was on this occasion constrained to agree with Erskine: such questions had been admitted only to prove a negative. Later, Law asked that a letter of from General Giles Stibbert (d. ) be read. Unluckily for him, this letter, though it had actually been printed in one of the reports of the Select Committee, did not appear in the official record at the India House. Kenyon was inclined to support Law, suggesting that the managers would hardly deny the authenticity of a letter appearing in one of their own reports. A piquant irony is that the defence had earlier insisted that letters printed in parliamentary reports were not evidence. Despite this palpable inconsistency, Law persisted in arguing for the letter. Kenyon, however, was obliged to uphold Erskine’s contention that, if the defence wanted to introduce the letter, they should produce it as part of their evidence. Twice worsted, Law was manifestly nettled.¹³⁵ These two instances, insignificant in themselves, show Law opportunistically seeking to evade the principles and practices that he demanded should be imposed on the managers. They exemplify the professional legalism that Burke found so abhorrent. The defence lawyers were ¹³⁴ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹³⁵ BL Add. MS , fos. –, –. On May , Dallas objected to a copy of a letter from Hastings to the directors, missing from the India House but printed in a report of the Secret Committee (BL Add. MS , fos. –).
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conspicuously less concerned to uphold genuine principles than eager to exploit the rules to suit the case of their client. For Burke, this was legal chicanery. The presentation of evidence continued on May, the seventieth day of the trial. Undaunted by his defeats on the th, Law again raised some rather captious objections. Burke took only a minimal part in the contentions.¹³⁶ On the th, the seventy-first day, the last of the evidence was submitted, and Erskine summarized the managers’ case in just over an hour. Following the example of St John in opening, he eschewed rhetorical flights, confining himself to a recapitulation of the details of the various corrupt contracts. His climax was arithmetical, calculating the total loss to the company as a result of Hastings’s profusion at £,. Thus, after more than three years, the case of the prosecution was closed, not on a rhetorical high note but with a summary of accounts.¹³⁷ The session itself might have ended on this anticlimactic note, had not Hastings (against the advice of his counsel) asked and been granted another day to speak for himself. For this, the seventy-second sitting, on June, public interest revived. Hastings was pleased that (after four thinly attended days) the court was ‘most full’. Frances Burney, fondly imagining that the crowd had come with a ‘just and fair curiosity to hear one day’s defence, after seventy-three of accusation’, was disabused. At first, she sat too high to hear. Later, when the crowd thinned and she was able to move to a more favourable seat, she found herself ‘just behind some of those unfeeling enemies who have not even the decorum due to themselves, of appearing to listen to what is offered against their own side’. Hastings spoke for about two hours. After complaining of unprecedented delay, he summarized his defence, justifying his actions as in substance beneficial to the company, and offering to rest his case without adducing evidence if judgment could be given that session (which he must have known was impossible). Fox decried it a ‘nonsensical rodomontade’, reminiscent of Pierre’s thrasonical speech to the Senate in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved (). Burke rose to reply, but the court adjourned. On Burney at least the speech made a great impression. Returning to court ‘so eagerly interested, that my memory was not more stored with the very words than my voice with the intonations of all that had passed’, she repeated the substance of Hastings’s speech first to the queen and then again to the king. Back in their own chamber, however, the Lords deferred the trial to the first Tuesday of the next session.¹³⁸ ¹³⁶ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹³⁷ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. Bond, ii. – (Erskine’s speech). ¹³⁸ Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). Burney, Diary & Letters, iv. – (like many contemporaries, she miscounted the days). Bond, ii. – (Hastings’s speech). Fox to Lord Holland, [ June ] (BL Add. MS , fo. ). LJ xxxix. .
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While the Lords were pondering whether to agree with the Commons that the impeachment of Hastings was indeed ‘depending’, there occurred the most memorable event of the parliamentary session, the public quarrel between Burke and Fox on May. This dramatic episode provoked much comment and speculation at the time, and has often been retold.¹³⁹ Since , when he became Rockingham’s private secretary, he had been identified as a ‘Whig’, whatever precisely that term might connote. Though Burke himself never disclaimed the affiliation, in the public mind his breach with Fox put his status as a ‘Whig’ in doubt. Had Burke abandoned the principles of twenty-five years? Many thought that he had. The events of May, however, were no more than a highly publicized dramatization of a split that was at least two years in the making. Indeed, a breach had only narrowly been averted in February , when Burke and Sheridan had quarrelled. In the early weeks of the new Parliament, Burke’s overriding concern was the continuance of the impeachment. He did not speak in the debate on the address, nor in the debates on the first controversy started by the opposition, the convention with Spain that resolved the Nootka Sound Crisis.¹⁴⁰ Yet, however unhappy with Fox, and however grateful to Pitt for supporting the impeachment, Burke was not yet ready to cross the floor. One question that allowed Burke to stake out an independent position, and to disagree with both Pitt and Fox, arose from an unusual election petition. In and , both ministry and opposition (to Burke’s disapproval) had expended enormous sums in contesting Westminster. In , a compromise was negotiated. Each side nominated a single candidate: Fox for the opposition, and Lord Hood for the ministry. The effect of this agreement was to deny the electors any real choice or participation. In protest, John Horne Tooke (–) stood as an independent, pledged to parliamentary reform. As an Anglican clergyman, Tooke was technically ineligible, and could not have taken his seat. His gesture was therefore symbolic. In the event, he finished a poor third to Fox and Hood. To gain further publicity for his cause, on December Tooke submitted a petition against the successful ¹³⁹ The account in Rivington’s Annual Register for (published in ) was written by a friend or follower of E.B., and represents his point of view (–). F. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, ), –; L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party (Oxford, ), –. ¹⁴⁰ Nootka Sound is an inlet on the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island, where a small British trading settlement was established in . In May , two British vessels were seized by Spanish warships, asserting Spain’s claim to the entire western coast of the Americas. The incident nearly led to a war, which after several months of negotiation was narrowly averted by the agreement (signed on Oct.) presented to Parliament on Dec. , and debated in the Commons on and Dec. (PH xxviii. –, –). In the previous session, E.B. spoke in support of Fox’s motion for papers on the subject ( May : PH xxviii. –).
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candidates. Purportedly directed against their undue return, his petition in substance denounced the unrepresentative nature of the electorate and demanded its reform. Legally, the petition had to be referred to a committee, though some members argued for its outright rejection.¹⁴¹ This committee (which met on February) rejected its allegations, but proposed no further action. When their report was presented (on the th), Burke immediately rose to disagree. Describing the petition as ‘a mere vehicle of atrocious abuse’, he advocated some form of punishment. Against the opinions of Thomas Powys (who had chaired the committee), and of Pitt and Fox, both of whom advocated treating the petition with silent contempt, Burke rose a further three times to restate his case. Eventually, finding no support from any other member, he desisted, content with having ‘discharged his duty, in endeavouring to call the attention of the House to a line of conduct which he thought the occasion demanded’.¹⁴² Following this assertion of personal independence, Burke began to moderate the tone and even the substance of his opposition. On and March, he spoke against Pitt’s Bank Dividends Bill, a measure that allowed the government to reclaim £, worth of interest on the national debt, paid to the Bank of England but uncollected by stockholders. The directors of the Bank of England had, unusually, petitioned against this bill. On March, Burke supported Fox’s motion for an adjournment to allow time to consider this petition. On the nd, he again spoke in favour of an adjournment. On neither occasion did he speak in the main debate on the bill itself. This suggests a conscious strategy of moderation, signalling unease with the measure rather than outright opposition. Samuel Whitbread (–), who opened the debate on the nd, represented the bill as a violent invasion of private property. Fox, too, spoke in similar terms. Burke was always liable to imagine dire if remote consequences as following from even the slightest encroachment on the sacred rights of property. His silence on this occasion is the more remarkable.¹⁴³ Burke’s partial disengagement from opposition emerges even more clearly from the debates on the Ochakov crisis. In , Catherine II of Russia (–) had begun her second war against the Ottoman Empire. This had at first proved successful, but by troubles in the north made Catherine anxious to conclude a peace. A sticking point in the negotiations was her unwillingness to surrender Ochakov, the fortress on the north coast of the Black Sea which gave its name to the episode. In one of his least happy excursions into European politics, Pitt sided with the Ottomans, his policy objective being to prevent too great an accession to power to Russia. In March , he issued a strident ultimatum to Russia, and persuaded the king to ask ¹⁴¹ CJ xlvi. –; PH xxviii. –. Christina and David Bewley, Gentleman Radical: A Life of John Horne Tooke (London, ), –. ¹⁴² PH xxviii. – ( Feb.), – ( Feb.). ¹⁴³ PH xxviii. – ( Mar. ), xxix. – ( Mar.).
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the Commons to prepare for an armed conflict.¹⁴⁴ The king’s message was delivered to Parliament on March, and was debated on the th. Ochakov proved a great opportunity for Fox to exploit. Pitt was unforthcoming about the details of what was happening, and seemed to be asking for unlimited confidence on an obscure issue. The idea of going to war on behalf of the Ottoman Empire was highly unpopular. Encouraged by rumours that the Cabinet was divided, and by the prospect of returning to power, Fox mounted an energetic and effective attack on Pitt’s folly and bellicosity. Not since the Regency Crisis had Pitt’s power seemed so threatened.¹⁴⁵ Burke’s contribution to this debate continued the process of distancing himself from Fox without joining Pitt. Speaking last, he touched only briefly on topics that had previously been aired. Instead, where Fox had emphasized the economic argument for cultivating an alliance with Russia, not going to war with her, Burke stressed the religious issue. ‘Worse than savages’, the Turks ‘despised and contemned all christian princes, as infidels, and only wished to subdue and exterminate them and their people’. To admit the Ottomans into the balance of Europe (as Pitt seemed to be doing) ‘would deserve all the bans and curses of posterity’. ‘All that was holy in religion, all that was moral and humane’ reprobated any support of ‘that cruel and wasteful empire’. Pitt’s policy was an ‘anti-crusade’, favouring ‘barbarians’ and oppressing Christians, ‘to the detriment of civilization and hindrance of human refinement’. This outburst provides a corrective to the respectful treatment of Ottoman government in his speech at the opening of the impeachment. At the trial, for tactical reasons, Burke portrayed the Turkish constitution as ‘a Government by law’ ( Feb. : WS vi. –). In the Ochakov debate, he recognized that (whatever might be its theory), the Turkish government was a practical despotism. Burke also made a more personal point. Despite excoriating Pitt’s pro-Ottoman policy, he paid tribute to Pitt’s ‘talents’, and disclaimed for the future the use of ‘any personal asperity’ towards him. The honourable part Pitt had taken on the abatement question, he explained, had ‘done away all acrimony from his mind’. This was as near as Burke could bring himself to an apology for the asperities of the past. Even more unusually, Burke ‘disclaimed all party considerations whatever’. Indeed, he forecast that ‘this would be the last time he should ever speak upon a political question in that House’.¹⁴⁶ Burke meant, not that he expected soon to retire (he knew that the impeachment was far from ended), but that he would no longer act with the regular opposition. Rather, he would confine himself to non-partisan issues, or to questions of great public moment (which might happen also to be ‘political’ in the sense he was disclaiming). ¹⁴⁴ John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, –), ii. –; Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, – (Cambridge, ), –. ¹⁴⁵ PH xxix. – ( Mar. ), – ( Mar.). ¹⁴⁶ Ibid. –.
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In keeping with his resolution, Burke did not contribute to either of the following debates on the Ochakov question. Admittedly, at the conclusion of the second debate (on April), he rose to speak, and only unwillingly gave way to impatient calls for the question to be put. But he had not intended to speak about Ochakov. Rather, he was provoked by Fox ending his speech with another gratuitous panegyric on the French Revolution.¹⁴⁷ While some kind of rupture between Burke and Fox was now unavoidable, had Burke been allowed to speak, their differences might have been aired with less rancour. Since the publication of the Reflections, Burke had sensed an attempt by the Foxites to marginalize and discredit him.¹⁴⁸ He can therefore hardly be faulted if, after being silenced on April, he turned to Pitt to negotiate an appropriate occasion to voice his views on the French Revolution, however distasteful and even treacherous other members of the party found this manoeuvre.¹⁴⁹ Burke’s desertion was especially galling to Fox, who mistakenly believed that he might be on the threshold of office. The king was rumoured to be unhappy with Pitt, and even prepared to replace him with Fox, or with some kind of coalition. Pitt (Fox supposed) wanted to prevent this, and strengthen his own position, by representing Fox’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution as disguised republicanism, and was using Burke to make the charge come from a credible quarter. Burke was therefore Pitt’s dupe. Burke, for his part, genuinely believed that Fox was a Jacobin. That the two should so misunderstand each other, and be unable to air and resolve their differences in private, shows how little mutual confidence now subsisted between them. Nevertheless, as late as April, the two walked cordially together to the House of Commons, expecting a debate on the Quebec Bill. In the event, after a short discussion (in which, however, the impending clash between Burke and Fox was ominously foreshadowed), the committee stage of the bill was postponed until May.¹⁵⁰ Characteristically, Fox took advantage of the recess to attend the Newmarket races. Burke retired to Beaconsfield to brood. The debate on May was one of the most dramatic in Burke’s parliamentary career. Rising as soon as the chairman put the opening question, he launched into a lengthy diatribe against the so-called ‘rights of man’ and against the example of the French constitution. Repeatedly called to order for ¹⁴⁷ PH xxix. – ( Apr. ), – ( Apr.). Fox had also been needlessly offensive to E.B. personally (who was not present) in a debate on the Quebec Bill on Apr, when he ridiculed the proposed hereditary council as an attempt to ‘revive in the West that spirit of chivalry which had fallen into disgrace in the neigbouring country’ (ibid. ). ¹⁴⁸ E.B. to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Nov. ; to William Weddell, Jan. (C vi. , vii. –). ¹⁴⁹ Rivington’s Annual Register (), ; Grenville to E.B., Apr. (C vi. ). Fitzwilliam thought E.B. had ‘not done right’ in confiding his intentions to Pitt, rather than to Fox and Portland (to Thomas Grenville, [ Apr.], BL Add. MS B, fo. ). ¹⁵⁰ Portland to Fitzwilliam, Apr. ; Grenville to Fitzwilliam, Apr. (WWM F /–). PH xxix. –.
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irrelevance by members of his own party, he was defended from the ministerial benches. After a long and disorderly wrangle about order, Fox rose, beginning by complaining of the irrelevance of Burke’s outburst, but soon deviating into the same subject himself, defending the French Revolution as vehemently as Burke had attacked it. Intemperate as Burke had been on the subject of the Revolution, he had avoided personal abuse. Fox was much less restrained, accusing Burke of deserting his old principles, and quoting his American speeches against him. Even after this provocation, Burke remained calm. He reiterated his detestation of French principles, repeated his conviction that they were relevant to the subject of the Quebec Bill, reaffirmed his loyalty to the British constitution, and defended himself against Fox’s imputations. Whatever the consequences, at whatever cost of provoking enemies or losing friends, he would continue to his last breath to exhort his countrymen to ‘Fly from the French constitution’. To Fox’s whispered, ‘there was no loss of friends’, Burke retorted, ‘Yes, there was a loss of friends’. Reduced to tears, Fox paused to collect himself before rising to reply. Despite the tears, he was unrepentant, accusing Burke of treating him in a ‘cruel and hard manner’. Burke in turn accused Fox of beginning a new attack under ‘the mask of kindness’. After such a display, the debate could not easily revert to the nominal business of the day, the detailed consideration of the Quebec Bill. While proposing an adjournment, Pitt pointedly praised Burke, denied that he had been out of order in referring to the French Revolution, and declared him ‘entitled to the gratitude of his country, for having that day, in so able and eloquent a manner, stated his sense of the degree of danger to the constitution that already existed’.¹⁵¹ The public quarrel between Burke and Fox was eagerly exploited by caricaturists.The Wrangling Friends, or Opposition in Disorder ( May : BMC ) depicts it from a ministerial point of view. Pitt observes nonchalantly that ‘If they’d cut each others Throats I should be Relieved from these troublesome fellows’, while Burke and Fox are both equally satirized (Plate ). A devil infuses ideas into Burke’s brain with a bellows, while Fox’s histrionic weeping is undercut by the presence of the boy with a bucket and scoop.The Volcano of Opposition ( May: BMC ) is overtly Foxite. Fox and Sheridan are lightly caricatured, without any suggestion that Fox’s tears are insincere. The volcano of Burke’s mouth spews forth a stream of exaggeratedly abusive language: ‘dregs of infamy, Terrible as Hell! Infernal Spawn, Damnation’ and so forth (Plate ). Members flee in horror, and one of them calls out for Monro, the mad doctor.¹⁵² Two caricatures by James Gillray, ¹⁵¹ PH xxix. –. E.B. was called to order by five fellow managers of the impeachment (Fox, Taylor, St John, Anstruther, and Grey), and by two other Whigs (William Baker and Lord Sheffield). He was defended only by James Martin (an independent), Colonel Phipps (a ministerialist), and Pitt himself. ¹⁵² BMC conjecturally credits The Wrangling Friends to Isaac Cruikshank. Robinson attributes it to a hand ‘similar to, but not that of ’ Cruikshank (Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature, ). Both agree that
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more favourable to Burke, allegorized the scene instead of depicting it directly. In The Impeachment, or the Father of the Gang, Turn’d King’s Evidence (May : BMC ), a commanding Burke hauls in by their hair his two former accomplices, Fox and Sheridan. (Exceptionally, this print shows a paunchy Burke, not the usual emaciated figure.) In Guy Vaux Discovered in his Attempt to Destroy the King and the House of Lords ( May: BMC ), Burke is again the commanding figure. Dressed as a watchman, he seizes a skulking Fox and raises the alarm, while Sheridan absconds.¹⁵³ In the debate on May, the Quebec Bill itself was almost entirely lost to sight, occluded first by the principles of the French Revolution, and then by the quarrel between Burke and Fox. Yet the Quebec Bill was more than a pretext. The original Quebec Act of had proved unsatisfactory as a longterm solution to the colony’s problems, but for a variety of reasons little was done to frame a new constitution until .¹⁵⁴ The new plan, largely the work of Grenville during his brief period at the Home Office, was open to numerous objections. Several of these raised the question of the proper constitutional balance between democratic and aristocratic elements. Nor was Fox’s opposition to it merely factious, for Pitt made concessions to some of his criticisms. Burke was surely justified in arguing that the example of France was relevant to the framing of any new constitution in . On May, when the committee stage of the Quebec Bill was resumed, the debate was at first more orderly, and actually focused on two particular provisions of the bill, the division of the colony into Upper and Lower Canada, each with its own legislative body, and the nature of the proposed legislative councils. Fox opposed the division, and argued for elected rather than appointed or hereditary councils. Burke disagreed with him on both counts, and the debate again degenerated into a personal altercation between the two. This time, however, Burke was the aggressor. Speaking on the nature of the councils, Fox had explicitly endorsed the need for an aristocratic element in the Canadian constitution, though he differed from Pitt as to the form such an element should take. Burke, too, addressed the point at issue, but sandwiched his comments between lengthy personal passages in which he accused Fox and his party of ‘a most insidious design to ruin him in reputation, and crown his age with infamy’. When Fox lamented what he termed Burke’s the print was probably engraved by John Nixon. BMC records without endorsing an attribution of The Volcano of Opposition to Thomas Rowlandson; Robinson tentatively assigns it to Frederick George Byron (Edmund Burke, ). ¹⁵³ Both reproduced in Robinson, Edmund Burke, . ¹⁵⁴ Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, – (London, –), ii. –; Peter Marshall, ‘North America’s Other Eighteenth-Century Constitution’, in Constitutions and National Identity, ed. Thomas J. Barron et al. (Edinburgh, ). E.B. had a long-standing interest in Canada, having opposed the first Quebec Act in (supra, i. –). In the debate on a petition from Quebec on May , E.B. reiterated his opposition to the system established in , and pilloried Pitt for the delay in forming a new one (PH xxvii. –).
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voluntary separation from his old friends, and assured him that if he should ‘repent that separation, he might be assured his friends would ever be ready to receive him’, Burke scornfully rebuffed the offer. Having been ‘publicly disgraced by his party’, he preferred to remain alone in the wilderness.¹⁵⁵ The immediate aftermath of these debates was to increase Burke’s isolation. No other Whig broke with Fox, all clinging to the desperate hope that a breach in the party could be avoided. The Morning Chronicle even announced Burke’s formal excommunication. ‘The great and firm body of the Whigs of England’, in solemn conclave on the dispute between Fox and Burke, declared Fox ‘to have maintained the pure doctrines by which they are bound together, and upon which they have invariably acted’. As a consequence, ‘Mr Burke retires from Parliament’.¹⁵⁶ Responding to this offensive paragraph, Burke borrowed the famous retort of Diogenes, on learning of his banishment from Sinope, his undistinguished native town: ‘And I condemn them to live in Sinope.’¹⁵⁷ For Burke, indeed, the banishment was liberating. Freed from the constraint of old party ties that had no relevance to the new political landscape created by the French Revolution, he could devote himself to the great cause of preserving European civilization. No longer branded with the stigma of opposition, he was better placed to influence ministers, and to urge them to more vigorous action against the pernicious doctrines embodied in revolutionary France. But Burke did not abandon the Whigs as nonchalantly as did Diogenes the citizens of Sinope. For the next three years, he worked tirelessly to convince his former associates that loyalty to the true Whig inheritance meant not following Fox but remaining faithful to the principles of the ‘Old Whigs’ of –. This would be the leading theme of his next pamphlet, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, published in August . A few days after the Lords adjourned his trial for the year, Hastings received a flattering present: an advance presentation copy of the two quarto volumes of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, inscribed by the author ‘in testimony of very high respect and sincere attachment’.¹⁵⁸ Though not officially published until May (the anniversary of Boswell’s first meeting with Johnson), the book was on sale, and presentation copies were dispatched, on the th. At guineas a set, Boswell’s Life was an expensive book. Nevertheless, it rapidly became the literary sensation of the day. Burke (to whom Boswell did not send a copy) was ¹⁵⁵ PH xxix. –. ¹⁵⁶ Morning Chronicle, May . ¹⁵⁷ An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, –. The source of the anecdote about Diogenes is Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, . . . ¹⁵⁸ Copy in YB, Boswell Papers (General MSS , /). Hastings’s copy is now in the New York Public Library (Frederick Albert Pottle, The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. (Oxford, ), ).
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soon as much fascinated as everyone else. At a levee (probably on June), he described it to the king (so Boswell heard) as ‘the Most entertaining Book he had ever read’.¹⁵⁹ This judgement is the more remarkable, as Burke was certainly not predisposed to like the book. Relations between him and Boswell had never recovered from the awkwardness created by the inept defence of Burke’s wit in the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides ().¹⁶⁰ If anything, they had worsened. The influence of Lord Lonsdale (–) and Archbishop Markham had turned Boswell into a firm partisan of Hastings. In turn, Hastings became the last in the long line of authority figures whom Boswell sought to cultivate (witness the presentation copy). On the French Revolution, Boswell shared Burke’s views, but not the obsessive intensity with which he held them. For his part, Burke paid little regard to Boswell’s opinions. What he disliked was Boswell’s habit of recording unguarded, private conversation.¹⁶¹ In principle, Burke had no objection to recording anecdotes of eminent people. Indeed, after repeating some about the elder Pitt, which Burke had gleaned from Anne Pitt (–), the great man’s sister, he regretted ‘extremely that he had not followed Boswell’s method of writing down these anecdotes after leaving this Lady’s company’.¹⁶² Yet Burke had never liked personal material about himself appearing in print.¹⁶³ In the Life of Johnson, Boswell published many flattering remarks about Burke, and Burke shines in one particularly full record of an evening’s conversation at the Club.¹⁶⁴ Yet these passages are balanced by some decidedly equivocal anecdotes. For example, thinking obviously of himself, Boswell comments that ‘a man who knows the teazing restraint of a narrow circle must relish highly’ the ‘freedom from remark and petty censure’ with which he might live in London. In confirmation, he cites Burke: Mr Burke, whose orderly and amiable domestick habits might make the eye of observation less irksome to him than to most men, said once very pleasantly, in my hearing,
¹⁵⁹ Boswell to E.B., July , asking him for a written account of his conversation with the king (C vi. –). ¹⁶⁰ If E.B. saw one of the newspaper paragraphs that attributed to Boswell the anonymous Vindication of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in Answer to All his Opponents (London, ; actually by Thomas Goold), he was probably chagrined at the prospect of another humiliating ‘defence’. ¹⁶¹ ‘The true cause I perceive, of B’s coldness, is that he thinks your habit of recording throws a restraint on convivial ease and negligence’ (Edmond Malone to Boswell, Sept. , in Correspondence of James Boswell, –). Malone had dined with E.B. the previous day. ¹⁶² Dugald Stewart, notes of E.B.’s conversation at Hatton, [Apr. ] (Edinburgh University Library, MS Dc. . , f. ). In his conversation with the king in June , E.B. undertook a ‘very friendly defence of my writing down the Conversations of Johnson’ (Boswell to E.B., July : C vi. ). ¹⁶³ E.B. to Shackleton, Apr. (C ii. –), concerning the biographical sketch which had been printed in the London Evening Post (– Apr.). ¹⁶⁴ Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, –), ii. ( Mar. ); iii. – ( Apr. ); iv. –, , – (, Mar. , May ).
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‘Though I have the honour to represent Bristol, I should not like to live there; I should be obliged to be so much upon my good behaviour’.
This is an oddly ambiguous passage. Seemingly a compliment, it actually invites speculation about what precisely Burke would have wished to conceal from his constituents.¹⁶⁵ Burke is also likely to have been annoyed by several of Boswell’s political asides. For example, Boswell twice alludes, quite gratuitously, to George III’s dismissal of the Fox–North Coalition.¹⁶⁶ Even more offensive to Burke was an instance of Boswell’s pompous self-aggrandizing. In , after assiduously cultivating Hastings, Boswell finally obtained from him three letters from Johnson: two from , the third from . They could not be inserted in their proper places, because by the time Boswell received them he had already revised the text as far as . Pretentiously identifying them as ‘a grand group’ (which they are not), Boswell therefore inserted all three under , heralded by a declamatory panegyric on Hastings, and preceded by the printing in full of a letter from Hastings to Boswell himself. The positioning of these letters (following the discussion of the last of the Lives of the Poets) is speciously justified: ‘While my friend is thus contemplated in the splendour derived from his last and perhaps most admirable work, I introduce him with peculiar propriety as the correspondent of WARREN HASTINGS.’¹⁶⁷ The vanity with which Boswell trumpets his association with Hastings is so common in the Life as hardly to call for comment. But the association manufactured between Johnson and Hastings is tendentious. All three of Johnson’s letters predate the controversies that, about , began to surround Hastings and his administration of Bengal. That Johnson had by then cooled towards Hastings can be inferred from a letter of November (when Fox’s India Bill was before Parliament). There Johnson acknowledged that ‘corruption and oppression are in India at an enormous height’, but excused the directors in London as unable to control their ‘officers’ in India.¹⁶⁸ This letter was not available to Boswell, and so does not prove suppressio veri. Nevertheless, even if unaware of Johnson’s misgivings (which seems improbable), Boswell was guilty of improperly enlisting Johnson in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Hastings. Burke probably found Boswell’s adulation of Hastings even more annoying than the references to himself. When Boswell, with his usual appetite for ¹⁶⁵ Ibid. iii. ( Apr. ). Elizabeth Lambert, ‘Boswell’s Burke: The Literary Consequences of Ambivalence’, Age of Johnson, (), –, esp. –. ¹⁶⁶ Life of Johnson, i. – (), iii. (). ¹⁶⁷ Ibid. iv. – (). ¹⁶⁸ Letters, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton, –), iv. . Speaking of the Rumbold case, Johnson argued that ‘the best plan for the government of India is a despotick governour’, a sentiment with which Hastings would have concurred. But Johnson added that, supposing the governor ‘to be a bad man, it is better to have one plunderer than many’ (Life of Johnson, iv. –; Apr. ). Johnson appears to have been convinced that India was being plundered.
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memorializing himself, asked Burke for a definitive statement of what the king had said about his book, ‘for my Archives at Auchinleck’, Burke sent him a frosty answer, so frigid as to deter even Boswell from approaching him again (, July : C vi. –, –). In any case, Boswell was now worshipping at another shrine. One of his last letters, dictated from his deathbed, congratulated Hastings on his acquittal (on April ) and promised as soon as he recovered to ‘fly to Mr Hastings and expand his soul in the purest satisfaction’ at his triumph over ‘rancorous persecution’.¹⁶⁹ Before he could pay this homage, Boswell died, on May. The depiction of Burke in the Life of Johnson is generally considered one of Boswell’s failures.¹⁷⁰ In part, this may be attributed to his fear of giving offence. Boswell often obscures references to Burke either by anonymity or by the semi-transparent veil of some such phrase as ‘an eminent friend’.¹⁷¹ This suggests self-conscious caution. Perhaps the same timidity restrained him from asking Burke for Johnsoniana. Nothing attributable to Burke appears in the Life. Yet Burke could surely have told him something more than Bennet Langton remembered of the contention between Johnson and Burke about the superiority of Homer or Virgil, and indeed of much else.¹⁷² Boswell’s neglect of so obvious a source remains puzzling.
¹⁶⁹ Boswell to Hastings, Apr. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹⁷⁰ Thomas W. Copeland, Edmund Burke: Six Essays (London, ), –. Frank Brady calls Boswell’s portrait of E.B. in the Life of Johnson ‘its most notorious failure’; Correspondence of James Boswell, . ¹⁷¹ About twenty veiled or anonymous references have been identified as allusions to E.B. While most are incontrovertible, some are doubtful, and I would reject about six. The most implausible is the ‘very eminent friend’ who, Johnson thought, ‘would not scruple to pick up a wench’ ( May : Life of Johnson, iv. ). ¹⁷² Life of Johnson, iii. (undated; mentioned in a footnote under Sept. ).
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By the end of the parliamentary session of –, Burke’s relations with the Whig party were awkward and anomalous. The principles adumbrated in the Reflections had been well received across a wide spectrum of political opinion. Many Whigs, even, had voiced their approval, at least in private. When Fox, however, declared against the book, no one on the opposition benches came to Burke’s defence. Even those Whig leaders who agreed with him were unwilling to repudiate Fox in public, and thus precipitate a schism in the party. Burke himself remained closely bound to the Whigs, by historical, personal, and emotional loyalties. His entire political career had been spent in their service, and he sat for a nomination borough of one of the Whig magnates. Yet, since the publication of the Reflections, he had been persistently calumniated as an apostate. Burke could suffer in silence, up to a point. But once that point had been passed, he was liable to overreact, out of all proportion to the immediate provocation. In this instance, the offensive paragraph in the Morning Chronicle of May, proclaiming Burke’s formal expulsion from the party, though only the latest shot in a campaign to discredit him, proved the trigger that released his hitherto suppressed anger. Denied a forum in the Commons, he determined to vindicate his consistency in a pamphlet that he knew would split the party. Burke was always prepared to stand alone. If the split had left him in a minority of one, he would have believed himself the sole true Whig. Far preferable, however, would be to isolate Fox. Burke knew that Fitzwilliam did not share Fox’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and that only personal affection and a misplaced party loyalty kept him from breaking with Fox. If he could gain Fitzwilliam to his side, others might be emboldened to defy Fox. An offer from Fitzwilliam of financial aid gave Burke a favourable opportunity to attack Fox.¹ Burke urgently needed the money. Nor did he attempt to conceal the fact. In respectfully declining Fitzwilliam’s offer, he acknowledged that he made a sacrifice to his ‘inward sense of honour’ (C vi. ). The ¹ Fitzwilliam’s letter is missing, but its purport can be inferred from E.B.’s reply ( June : C vi. –). Writing the day after receiving this letter, E.B. acknowledged that the ‘substance’ of what he wrote had ‘been for some time determined in my Mind’ ().
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same sense of propriety made him uneasy about sitting in Parliament for one of Fitzwilliam’s seats. The only honourable course was therefore to ‘draw myself within my own Circle’, to ‘depart quietly into such a retreat as Providence (he only knows what sort of retreat it is to be) shall allot for my declining hours’ (). Fitzwilliam knew as well as Burke that this meant poverty and perhaps even exile. Sandwiched between expressions of resignation, of apparent willingness to kiss the rod and submit to the party’s diktat of expulsion, Burke inserted an unrepentant justification of himself and the Reflections against its critics, principally Fox. The Reflections, he explained, was written for ‘the service of the party’ as well as of the public. It was meant to show that the Whigs were not disguised levellers and republicans. Many people, he believed, including the king, were ‘much reconciled to the party’ by taking the Reflections as the expression of Whig ideas. Initially, ‘most of the party’ agreed in approving the book ().² Within a short time, however, Burke imagined himself the victim of a conspiracy to convert the Whig party into an engine of revolutionary change: great, and almost systematick pains were taken to discredit that work [the Reflections] in the Party, and to get its principles disclaimed; and of course (for medium there is none) to get the Principles of Paine, Priestley, Price, Rouse, Mackintosh, Christie &ca &ca &ca magnified and extolled, and in a sort of obscure and undefined manner to be adopted as the Creed of the party. The supper at Brookes’s [a club frequented by Fox and his set] was a sort of Academy for these Doctrines. Individuals, little courted before, were seperately talked over, and, as it were, canvassed. ()
Characteristic of Burke is his belief that there was no ‘medium’ between himself and Paine, and his instinctive construction of a conspiracy theory.³ Yet if Fox had been aggressive and offensive, so had Burke. Nor could Burke accept honest differences of opinions. Those who supported Fox must be either knaves (if they agreed with him) or cowards (if they remained silent out of misplaced party loyalty).The subtext of the letter was to offer Fitzwilliam precisely that choice at which the party’s MPs had boggled: between Fox and Burke. On the surface, of course, Burke professed submission. Yet neither silence nor retreat was congenial to him, and even in this letter he alludes to the writing of a ‘defence’ (), the pamphlet subsequently published as An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, on which he was already engaged. To detach Fitzwilliam from Fox proved a lengthy and arduous task, though Burke was ultimately (in ) successful. Even the immediate response to his letter, however, was encouraging. Fitzwilliam soothed his wounded feelings ² E.B. claimed that Portland, Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord John Cavendish, Frederick Montagu, ‘and a long et cetera of the old Stamina of the Whiggs’ had given ‘a most full approbation to the principles’ of the Reflections (to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Nov. : C vi. ). ³ As early as Nov. , E.B. traced attempts to disparage the Reflections to ‘one conciliabulum that disseminates Objections and discontents’ (C vi. ).
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and sense of exclusion, so that when Burke next wrote, his tone was much warmer. Cordiality restored, he jested about Paine and his iron bridge (the occasion of his introducing Paine to Fitzwilliam in ), asked Fitzwilliam to send some ewes to breed with his ‘Colchian Ram’, and enclosed a copy of his Appeal, confident that it would receive a sympathetic reading ( Aug. : C vi. –).⁴ By November, Burke was again sharing with Fitzwilliam his most confidential political thoughts (–). Most tellingly, he accepted the financial assistance that he had earlier declined.⁵ There was no more talk of vacating his seat in Parliament ‘early in the next Session’ (). Burke probably began work on the Appeal soon after the appearance of the paragraph in the Morning Chronicle. The pamphlet was at first planned as a series of extracts from the trial of Henry Sacheverell, the Tory clergyman impeached by the Whigs in , to show that ‘the principles contained in his book correspond with the sentiments of the old Whigs’. To this he intended to preface a ‘defence of his conduct’. By June, publication was expected within two or three weeks.⁶ Most of the text was set in type by July, but as usual Burke added, rewrote, and corrected in proof.⁷ Another cause of delay was that the Burkes had left London for a holiday at Margate, a popular resort on the Kent coast, where sea bathing was expected to benefit Jane’s health (C vi. ). The Appeal was finally published on August.⁸The Burkes remained at Margate for about five weeks ( July to August).⁹ Among the other visitors that summer were Warren and Marian Hastings, who arrived on August and left on September. Hastings was there for the same reason as Burke: his wife’s health.¹⁰ An accidental rencontre between the two on the strand at Margate is an intriguing might-have-been. A surprising formal feature of the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs is that Burke cast it not, as might have been expected, in the form of a letter to a friendly ‘Old Whig’, but in the third person. Unusually, too, it was published anonymously. Burke was thus reverting to the impersonal mode of his Observations on a Late State of the Nation () and his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (). His more recent pamphlets had taken the ⁴ Again, Fitzwilliam’s letter is missing. The ‘Colchian Ram’ was probably one of those imported from Colchis (of ‘Golden Fleece’ fame) by Colonel William Fullarton, one of E.B.’s informants on India (C vi. n. ). Fitzwilliam sent the ewes in Sept. (–). E.B.’s request illustrates his continued interest in experimental farming. After E.B.’s death, J.B. (who sold the stock and let the farm) offered to present the ram to Fitzwilliam, who accepted it (Laurence to Fitzwilliam, July , and Fitzwilliam to Laurence, []: NRO FC). ⁵ On July , R.B. Jr. received £, from Fitzwilliam ‘for the use of E B’ (C vi. n. ). ⁶ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, June (NLS MS , fos. –). St James’s Chronicle, – June. ⁷ E.B. to William Thomas Swift, , , July (C vi. , –, ). ⁸ Morning Chronicle, Aug. The full title is An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Consequence of Some Late Discussion in Parliament, Relative to the Reflections on the French Revolution. ⁹ C vi. , , , . The expedition was only partly successful. On their return, E.B. told R.B. Jr. that J.B. was ‘better in her general health—not quite so much in her Limbs’ (). ¹⁰ Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fos. –).
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form of either speeches or letters. The principal reason for this choice was probably that the impersonality and anonymity serve to minimize the egotism of the work. Referring to ‘Mr Burke’ in the third person makes the authorial voice sound objective and impartial, as though judging between Burke and his opponents rather than presenting Burke’s case. Other features of the pamphlet’s style are in keeping with this aim. The writing is generally plain, forceful, but rarely emotive (the main exceptions being the opening and the conclusion, conventional places for the deployment of an emotional appeal). Rhetorical devices are employed sparingly, and there are few of Burke’s characteristic elaborate metaphors. Conversely, Burke relies more on inartificial proofs, printing long extracts from the speeches made at the trial of Sacheverell in , and from Paine’s Rights of Man.¹¹ His intention was to demonstrate as much as to argue. Burke wanted the pamphlet to be read as (paraphrasing its title) a judicial appeal from the unjust sentence of prejudiced judges, to the mature verdict of an independent tribunal. Contemporaries, long habituated to the exuberant richness of Burke’s rhetoric, observed the difference. One commented on ‘the dispassionate & undress language’; another noted its ‘cool temperate dispassionate argument’; a third thought ‘the reasoning much closer and more convincing (tho’ less flowery) than his Reflexions’.¹² Such were not the terms in which Burke was usually lauded. The appearance of objectivity, of course, was no more than a rhetorical strategy. In substance, the Appeal is no less polemical than Burke’s other political writings, though the topical material is (as usual) combined with more general reflections. The first part is the most personal and highly charged. Complaining that he was unfairly silenced during the debates on the Quebec Bill, Burke outlined what he intended to have said, and defended his right to a hearing. This leads to what, from a biographical point of view, is the most interesting section of the pamphlet, a vindication of his political consistency against the charge that his attitude to the French Revolution was a betrayal of his earlier principles, as evinced in his opposition to the American war, and his proposals for the reform of abuses.¹³ The second stage of the argument repelled the broader charge of deserting ‘Revolution Principles’. ¹¹ In the third edition, the rhetorical parallel between the French Revolution and Jack Cade’s rebellion of is expanded and documented with long Latin quotations from medieval chronicles. French Laurence collected this material (Laurence to E.B., ‘Saturday Morning’, in Epistolary Correspondence of French Laurence and Edmund Burke (London, ), ). ¹² Sir Abraham Hume to E.B., Sept. (WWM BkP /); Beilby Porteus (Bishop of London) to E.B., Aug. (BkP /); Charles Burney to Frances Burney, Aug. (YB Osborn MS , folder ). One reviewer noted that the Appeal lacked ‘that splendor of decoration for which this writer is usually conspicuous’ (English Review, (Oct. ), ). Another reported that E.B. had ‘so much abated of his usual brilliancy’ that ‘one of his warmest admirers’ called the Appeal ‘a dull book’, speculating that this was a conscious stylistic choice, in keeping with the pamphlet’s anonymity (Monthly Review, NS (Nov. ), ). ¹³ An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (London, ), –.
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To refute this accusation, Burke collected a series of passages from the trial of Sacheverell intended to demonstrate that his principles are identical with those of the ‘Old’ Whigs of . The choice of the Sacheverell trial as the source of sound Whig doctrine was a shrewd rhetorical move. The oldest Whigs of all, the Exclusionists of –, were perceived as anti-monarchical. Nor had the Whigs of the s entirely abandoned their populism and hostility to the royal prerogative. By , however, the Whigs had been the party of power for nearly a generation, and had every incentive to minimize the people’s supposed right to resist or to change their government.¹⁴ The terms of the Whig attack on Sacheverell therefore exactly suited Burke’s purpose. Conducted by impeccably Whig politicians, some of whom (the most eminent being Lord Somers, commonly regarded as the author of the Bill of Rights of ) had helped frame the Revolution settlement, the trial provided him with precisely the documentation he needed to define true Whiggism as he understood it.¹⁵ Having established what the ‘Old’ Whigs believed, Burke assembled a string of quotations from Paine’s Rights of Man to define the principles of the ‘New’ Whigs. These passages, unlike those from the trial of Sacheverell, which are precisely documented, are not identified, nor is Paine even named. Instead, Burke attributed them vaguely to ‘the societies’, as though they constituted a widely approved and promulgated creed. This refusal to discriminate between shades of opinion, and the identification of Foxite principles with Paine, was no mere rhetorical sleight of hand, but a genuine belief.¹⁶ In fact, most of the parliamentary Whigs, and even many of the pamphleteers who attacked the Reflections, would have repudiated Paine’s doctrines, or at least their application to Britain. For Burke, however, there was no middle way. The choice was between him and Paine. Failure to condemn Paine’s ideas was tantamount to approving them. Sympathizers with the French Revolution were open or covert ill-wishers to the British constitution. Against those who doubted or denied the danger from the spread of French principles, he argued that such misplaced security had hastened the fall of the French monarchy. To show that he did not oppose all political change, he praised the recent revolution in Poland as a constructive and bloodless reform, contrasting it with the French example. To instance a French theorist in his own favour, he cited Montesquieu, than whom no one had better known or understood the collective political experience of mankind, and who pronounced the British ¹⁴ John Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, – (Cambridge, ), esp. –. ¹⁵ Appeal, –. ¹⁶ Writing to Fitzwilliam on June , E.B. averred that ‘medium there is none’: to discredit the Reflections was inevitably ‘to get the Principles of Paine, Priestley, Price, Rouse, Mackintosh, Christie &ca &ca &ca magnified and extolled’ and ‘adopted as the Creed of the party’ (C vi. ). By his own account, of the writers listed, E.B. had read only Paine and Price. He relied on R.B. Jr.’s opinion that Mackintosh was ‘Paine at bottom’ and that all his opponents were ‘Paine with some difference in the way of stating’ (to French Laurence, Aug.: ).
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constitution the best of all. Burke then applied to constitutions the ‘test of time’ argument, more commonly used to ascertain the superiority of classic authors. Constitutions that, like great authors, have passed this test by surviving for ages, have acquired a presumptive excellence. Those who do not understand their excellence should admire and acquiesce, not seek to destroy or remodel. Burke did not close the door to reform, but he cautioned that it should be undertaken with ‘fear’ as well as ‘zeal’.¹⁷ In the last part of the Appeal, Burke advanced his most general arguments. He denied that ‘the people’ are or ought to be the final arbiter in politics, and that ‘the people’ (or a ‘majority’ of the people) have proprietary rights over the society in which they live, to alter its forms at their pleasure. People in society have duties as well as rights, and those duties are obligatory. The popular will cannot override moral imperatives that derive directly from God. Hence Burke’s extreme hostility to the atheism that he detected in French principles, for he relied on a belief in God as the ultimate source of political and moral authority. Reprobating the idea of ‘the omnipotence of a majority’, he denied the moral right of a mere ‘majority’ to impose its will on the whole. Out of society, there can be no majority; in society, the rights of a majority are not natural, but matters of social convention. Against the absurd adulation of ‘a majority of men, told by the head’, Burke set the idea of a ‘true natural aristocracy’, without which there can be no nation. This aristocracy is admittedly generated by ‘the state of civil society’. But civil society is itself a ‘state of nature’. Men were meant to live in civil society, for ‘art is man’s nature’. Burke then returned to history. Far from being a wonderful new beginning, the dawn of a new age of liberty, he argued, the French Revolution was only the latest in a series of destructive uprisings such as the Jacquerie in France or Jack Cade’s uprising in England. With these examples in mind, Burke denied that the French Revolution was genuinely an act of ‘the people’. Instead, he attributed it to the ‘evil arts of the conspirators’ and the ‘extreme weakness and want of steadiness in the lawful government’.¹⁸ This enforces his earlier warning that English Jacobinism must be fought while it remains in embryo. Finally, Burke called on the British to remain true to the spirit of their ancestors, and not to discard the inheritance of ages for a manifestly inferior system which had already brought chaos and destruction to France, and threatened to do as much to Britain. To achieve maximum impact, political pamphlets were usually published during the sitting of Parliament, when they would most rapidly circulate. Burke, however, was impatient, and determined to publish at once, though ¹⁷ Appeal, – (quotations from Paine, –; on Poland, –; on Montesquieu, ). ¹⁸ Appeal, – (‘natural aristocracy’, –; conspiracy, ). E.B. sometimes, for tactical reasons, supported ‘popular’ political agitation, such as the petitioning movement in . Expediency apart, he shared Samuel Johnson’s scepticism about the possibility of a genuinely ‘popular’ movement. In reality, ‘the people’ needed to be set in motion by agitators from above (supra, i. –).
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aware that ‘the time of year is unfavourable’ ( July : C vi. ). A compensating advantage of publication at such a time was that there was less competition for public attention. The first edition, which Burke thought overlarge at two thousand copies, was soon exhausted, and by August a second was in the press (). For this, Burke had time only to make a few cursory revisions. For the third edition, however, published on September, he made a significant structural change. On French Laurence’s advice, he brought forward the section on ‘the people’ to precede the warning about false security. He also added two paragraphs expanding on the idea that the British constitution (unlike the French) naturally tended to compromise.¹⁹ Though the size of the later editions is unknown, they are unlikely to have been of fewer than a thousand copies each, which suggests a total sale of at least , copies. This represented a satisfying success, if on a smaller scale than that of the Reflections. Burke did not believe that many Whigs actually shared Fox’s predilection for the French Revolution. Rather, he attributed their silence to an unwillingness to disagree with Fox in public. One of his aims in the Appeal was ‘to get the better of their inactivity, and to stimulate them to a publick declaration of, what every one of their acquaintance privately knows, to be as much their Sentiments as they are yours and mine’.²⁰ Burke was anxious to clear the Whig party of the suspicion of Jacobinism. A year or two later, the strategy might have worked. But in August , Fitzwilliam and other Whig leaders still refused to believe that Fox genuinely held anti-constitutional opinions, and remained unwilling to break with him. Nor had French atrocities yet turned public opinion decisively against the Revolution, as they would in September . As late as September , Charles Burney, a confirmed royalist, could still ‘rejoice at all the liberty the French have obtained that has not been at the expense of innocent & worthy people’.²¹ Burke, of course, denied that any such liberty had been obtained. An admirer of Burke but not unmindful of his ‘infirmities’, Burney moved in a range of social circles. His opinion of the Appeal, and his report of its reception, are therefore of particular value. Personally, he regarded it as ‘a most admirable book—the best & most useful on political subjects that I have ever seen’. Yet he thought that ‘all these differences between friends’ (as he still regarded the schism between Burke and Fox) ‘should have never been publickly discussed’. Some of ‘our friends’ regarded it as ‘a wicked ¹⁹ Thus Appeal (st edn.), –, corresponds to W iii. –; – to –; and – to –. Laurence to E.B., Aug. (WWM BkP /; C vi. n. ). More correctly, these ‘editions’ were ‘impressions’, being printed mainly from standing type (Todd ). E.B. added a further paragraph to the fourth edition. ²⁰ E.B. to R.B. Jr., Aug. (C vi. –). R.B. Jr. told Loughborough the same (Loughborough to Fitzwilliam, Aug. : WWM F /) ²¹ Burney to Frances Crewe, Sept. (YB Osborn MS , folder ).
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book—in which his friends, in a fit of patriotism, have been basely sacrificed’. Others ‘swear by it, as congenial to their principles’.²² Most of the leading Whigs, including Portland himself, were in the first category. Acknowledging that ‘there is so much excellent & admirable matter in it, so much that might have been of the most essential publick Service’, Portland thought the Appeal was rendered ‘worse than useless by passages which I am sure he can not have a friend who does not disapprove & deplore’.²³ Loughborough likewise dreaded the appearance of what he was convinced would prove a ‘Mischief ’, though he too believed that Burke’s principles were ‘fundamentally right’.²⁴ Sir Gilbert Elliot, while approving the latter part of the pamphlet, wished that ‘all that does not relate immediately to the constitutional Question’ had been omitted.²⁵ Even Fitzwilliam, who welcomed the Appeal for its exposition of ‘the doctrines I have sworn by, long and long since’, and avowed his determination to ‘continue to attempt their general propagation’, would do so only in ‘private conversation and private insinuation’ ( Sept. : C vi. ). In public, he expressed his ‘most decided approbation of all & every part of the Reflections’.²⁶ Nevertheless, much as he lamented ‘certain declarations’ (), Fitzwilliam remained in thrall to Fox, one of whose ‘declarations’ was his avowal in the Commons that as soon as Burke published the Reflections, ‘he condemned that book both in public and private, and every one of the doctrines it contained’.²⁷ Such absurd inconsistency and pusillanimity (for so Burke regarded the failure to support him) was all too prevalent in the party. Sir Francis Basset (–), for example, a backbench Whig, told Burke that ‘though for reasons which I will not now detail I did not then deliver my sentiments, I most perfectly differ from Mr Fox & from the great Body of opposition on the French Revolution’. Burke should not, therefore, conclude that the silence of the opposition meant unanimity against him.²⁸ Such silent support was gratifying and maddening in about equal proportions. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, where dissensions among the Whigs were likely to be perceived with a certain schadenfreude, and where Fox had long been persona non grata, the Appeal was warmly and unequivocally welcomed. Through his friend John Douglas (–), Bishop of Salisbury, Burke arranged for a copy to be presented to the king. A few days later, Douglas could report that the king had read it ‘with great Satisfaction’, and asked the bishop to tell Burke as much.²⁹Another presentation copy went ²² Burney to Frances Burney, Aug. (YB Osborn MS , folder ); to Frances Crewe, Sept. (folder ). ²³ Portland to French Laurence, Aug. (NUL PwF ). ²⁴ Loughborough to Fitzwilliam, Aug. (WWM F /). ²⁵ Elliot to Lord Malmesbury, Aug. (NLS MS , fos. –). ²⁶ Reported to French Laurence, and by him to E.B., Aug. (WWM BkP /); repeated by E.B. to R.B. Jr., Aug. (C vi. ). ²⁷ May (PH xxix. ). ²⁸ Basset to E.B., Sept. (WWM BkP /). ²⁹ E.B. to Douglas, Aug. (C vi. –); Douglas to E.B., , Aug. (WWM BkP /, ).
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to Charles Jenkinson, now Lord Hawkesbury, a prominent ‘king’s friend’ whom Burke in the s had supposed deep in the machinations of ‘secret influence’.³⁰ Perhaps surprised at the attention, Hawkesbury replied with some hesitation, doubting the propriety of acknowledging the gift of an anonymous publication. Yet there was nothing tentative about his endorsement of Burke’s efforts to ‘stem the Folly and Madness, which at present prevail almost universally, with respect to the Nature of civil Society, founded on the most perfect Ignorance of the Nature of Man, & of those Obligations on which all Government is founded, & by which alone it can be supported’.³¹ Here was a kindred spirit, speaking Burke’s own language. Burke, in turn, felt some awkwardness about their rapprochement, for instead of replying directly, he asked the Duke of Dorset to thank Hawkesbury on his behalf ( Aug. : C vi. ). These reserves soon melted. Hawkesbury invited Burke to dine at his country house (Addiscombe Place, just south of London) to meet the comte de Mercy-Argenteau (–), an influential Austrian diplomat (). Hawkesbury’s hospitality was soon extended to Richard Jr. Having imbibed Burke’s notions about ‘secret influence’, Richard relished the irony of ‘so important an æra in my history’ as being invited to dine ‘with Secret Influence in propria persona’.³² Other social events marked Burke’s welcome to court and ministerial circles. Dundas invited him to dine and spend the night at his villa at Wimbledon, in company with Pitt and others. Burke was surprised that ‘neither at dinner supper or breakfast did a single word pass which had the smallest reference either to foreign or domestick politicks’, that ‘so many politicians could have met, and could have kept so totally clear of that Subject’.³³ Burke seems to have missed the point that the invitation was to a social occasion, not a political consultation. By implication, his remark suggests the nature of his ‘social’ relations with such Whig grandees as Portland and Fitzwilliam. With them, his relations were primarily political, and (unlike Fox) he could not mix with them on terms of social equality. When Dundas extended a purely social invitation, Burke was accordingly at a loss. What could ‘so many politicians’ do, except talk about politics? Two days after his excursion to Wimbledon, Burke dined at Windsor with Bishop Douglas. After dinner, he strolled on the Terrace, where he was accorded a ‘gracious’ reception by the king. Unlike at Wimbledon, politics was not taboo. Burke and the king talked about the plight of Louis XVI.³⁴ ³⁰ ‘I have great reason to suspect’, E.B. confided to Rockingham, ‘that Jenkinson governs every thing’ ( Jan. : C iii. ). ³¹ Hawkesbury to E.B., Aug. (WWM BkP /). ³² R.B. Jr. to R.B. Sr., [ Dec. ] (NRO A. XI. .) The humour is uncharacteristic. ³³ E.B. to R.B. Jr., Aug., Sept. (C vi. , –). The dinner at Wimbledon took place on Aug. Other guests included Lord Hailes and Henry Mackenzie (The Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackenzie, –, ed. Harold William Thompson (London, ), ). ³⁴ E.B. to R.B. Jr., Aug. (C vi. ).
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Such occasions (which were reported in the newspapers) could only fuel accusations of apostasy.³⁵ Speaking of the success of his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (), Dr Johnson observed that ‘every body commended such parts . . . as were in their own way’. One praised his treatment of trade; another, his discussion of language; Burke, ‘that which describes the inhabitants of mountainous countries’.³⁶ Burke’s Appeal offers an amusing instance of the same idiosyncrasy. Dundas, a lawyer, selected for praise the legal arguments drawn from the trial of Sacheverell, convinced that such a ‘Practical Appeal’ was ‘always more forcible than even the most ingenious Theory unsupported by the Aid of such an appeal’. Conversely, Hawkesbury was most impressed by Burke’s exposition of ‘the Nature of civil Society . . . the Nature of Man, & of those Obligations on which all Government is founded’. Edmond Malone was ‘a very dragon of a defender; he will not suffer a word against any tittle of your book’. Yet his years as a textual critic of Shakespeare had left their mark, leading him to discover ‘two lacunae from errors of the press, & the omission of several commas, & breaks’.³⁷ In the press, the Appeal was welcomed or disparaged according to partisan prejudices. In a brief but laudatory notice, the Gentleman’s Magazine abstained from giving an abstract in order to encourage the reading of ‘so excellent a detection of the principles of modern Whiggism, written with so much temper, cool argument, and dispassionate reflection’.³⁸At the other end of the spectrum, the Analytical Review apologized for not being able to provide an ‘analysis’ of ‘this very desultory performance’, full of the ‘paradoxes with which this fanciful writer amuses his imagination’.³⁹ The Monthly Review, though hostile, at least paid Burke the compliment of offering a detailed refutation of his arguments against the omnipotence of majorities.⁴⁰ Perhaps because other Whigs were reluctant to advertise their internecine feud, the Appeal provoked only five pamphlet replies. The earliest to appear was the predictable riposte from the indefatigable Major Scott. The bulk of his pamphlet consists of extracts from Burke’s earlier works, tending to prove Burke’s inconsistency. Scott’s reply to the Reflections had been mainly about Hastings. In this new Letter, he somehow managed to keep material related ³⁵ Gazetteer, Aug. (quoted C vi. n. ); Morning Post, Aug. ³⁶ James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, –), iii. ( Sept. ). The reference to E.B. has been variously explained (– n. ). Most probably, Johnson was thinking of E.B.’s love of generalization. ³⁷ Dundas to E.B., Aug. ; Hawkesbury to E.B., Aug.; Laurence to E.B., Aug. (WWM BkP /, , ). ³⁸ Gentleman’s Magazine, (, supplement), . ³⁹ Analytical Review, (Sept. ), –. ⁴⁰ Monthly Review, (Nov. ), –. The reviewer was Thomas Pearne (a Unitarian), who had earlier reviewed the Reflections (Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review, Second Series, –: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford, ), –, ).
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to Hastings to a minimum.⁴¹ The most substantial reply was by Sir Brooke Boothby, who sought to steer a middle course (which Burke thought impossible) between the doctrines of the Reflections and those of the Rights of Man. For Boothby, as for Fox himself, true Whiggism still meant primarily suspicion of the Crown and of court influence. With aristocratic hauteur, he describes Rights of Man as written ‘with the logic of shoemakers and the metaphysics of barbers’.⁴² Boothby thus represents the herd of complacent Whigs that Burke was targeting in the Appeal: those who were oblivious to the dangers posed by the spread of French principles.⁴³ Like many of Burke’s political writings, the Appeal draws on disparate sources and straddles generic boundaries. To warn the public at large against the threat posed to British society by Jacobinism, and to rouse the Whigs in particular from their torpid acquiescence in Fox’s identification of the party with the principles of the French Revolution, Burke moves between personal apologia, historical enquiry, and political theory. For modern readers, its interest is decidedly uneven. Nevertheless, even the least engaging parts (such as the catena of quotations from the trial of Sacheverell) illustrate Burke’s historical approach to politics. As the prime mover of a later impeachment, he was gratified to find stores of wisdom in the speeches made at an earlier trial. His use of the Sacheverell trial helps explain why, even apart from justifying himself, Burke was chagrined that the Lords did not order the trial of Hastings to be printed, and determined to publish his own account.⁴⁴ In its turn, he hoped, it would provide future generations with a usable past. More obviously germane to today’s concerns are the arguments against what is now called ‘majoritarianism’, what Burke derides as the ‘principle that a majority of men told by the head are to be considered as the people, and that as such their will is to be law’.⁴⁵ The word itself, in the sense of ‘belief in rule or decisions by a majority’, was coined about .⁴⁶ ‘Majoritarian’ now usually denotes a system of democracy or representation in which a simple majority prevails, as opposed to more ‘consensual’ systems which aim to ⁴¹ A Letter from Major Scott to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, ). The text is headed Aug., and the pamphlet was published Aug. (Morning Chronicle). Of the pages of text, only 3 (–) refer to Hastings. ⁴² Observations on the ‘Appeal from the New Whigs’ and on Mr Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ (London, ). Part I is on the Appeal (–), part II, on Paine (–). The comment on the style of Rights of Man, however, is from part I (). ⁴³ The other replies are William Belsham, Examination of ‘An Appeal to the New Whigs’ (London, ); George Rous, A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, []); and Charles Pigott, Strictures on the New Political Tenets of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (London, ). All five authors had previously written against the Reflections. ⁴⁴ E.B. to Addington, Mar. (C viii. ). E.B. bequeathed the task of writing an account of the trial to French Laurence (ix. , ). ⁴⁵ An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, . E.B. repeats the idea on . ⁴⁶ The earliest citation in the online Oxford English Dictionary is from J. R. Pennock, Liberal Democracy (), .
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balance or reconcile different groups and interests, and often to preserve the rights and interests of minorities. Burke was a critic of majoritarianism avant la lettre. The primary importance of the Appeal, however, is undoubtedly its defence of Burke’s consistency. Memorably illustrated in James Gillray’s caricature, A Uniform Whig ( Nov. : BMC ), and often reformulated in new terms, the question of consistency remains a contested question in the interpretation of Burke’s life and writings. In its earliest form (as it appears in Wollstonecraft and Paine) the charge was linked to venality. Burke was supposed to have written the Reflections for some secret pension or other financial reward.⁴⁷ This is the version that James Gillray depicts (Plate ). On Burke’s left side, his clothes are in tatters, little remains of his shoe, and his pockets are empty. On his right side, richly dressed in an embroidered coat and properly shod, his pockets overflow with cash. Holding a copy of his Reflections in one hand, he leans on a pedestal supporting a bust of his new patron, George III. In the background, Fame is perched precariously on one of the arms of a windmill. Burke’s pose is unusual. In most caricatures, he is absorbed in the scene, oblivious of the viewer. Here, Gillray has given him a defiant arrogance, as he looks squarely at the viewer, unaware of, or unabashed by, his strange appearance. Gillray’s caricature parodies the convention of portraying a subject together with a representation of a patron or mentor.⁴⁸ The charge of venality can be dismissed. Burke had not been pensioned, and his reward, when it came, was certainly not payment for future services. The air of truculence, however, catches Burke’s attitude to the critics of his consistency. It is the stance of a man confident in his own rectitude. As do many of the caricatures, A Uniform Whig captures an aspect of his personality that is missing from the formal portraits. In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Burke sought to vindicate himself from the charge of apostasy and to warn against the dangers threatened by the spread of French principles. A third task remained: to extirpate Jacobinism at its source. Burke was convinced that the British constitution could not coexist with the French republic. He was therefore an early ⁴⁷ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (London, ), –; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, in Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, ), , . Similar insinuations appeared in the newspapers. ⁴⁸ A contemporary example from the Burke circle is Thomas Hickey, William Hickey with a Bust of Edmund Burke (c.; reproduced in Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture, – (London, ), plate ).
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advocate of the use of force to reverse the Revolution and restore the ancien régime. On his own, as he lamented to the comtesse de Montrond (c.–), a royalist émigrée who had urged his intervention, he could do little, being but ‘a very private man, totally destitute of authority and importance in the State’ and ‘perhaps not perfectly well with those who possess its powers’ ( Jan. : C vi. ). To John Hampden-Trevor (–), British minister at Turin, he wrote that none of the established governments of Europe could be safe while ‘this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Center of Europe’. Yet only a large military force, under the auspices of a coalition of European powers including Britain, could have any prospect of destroying it ( Jan. : ). Such a coalition seemed scarcely possible, so little did the European powers understand their true interests. In June , however, the flight of the French royal family and their recapture at Varennes provided what Burke thought ‘clear grounds of Justification’ for a foreign invasion to restore ‘order, laws and true freedom to France’ (to the marquis de Bouillé, July : C vi. –). On August, the Emperor (Leopold II, –) and the King of Prussia issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which invited other European powers to join a concerted intervention in France, nominally to assist Louis XVI restore ‘the basis of a Monarchical Government’.⁴⁹ Then, at a breakfast with MercyArgenteau, Burke was ‘mortified’ to discover that (despite the Declaration) the two monarchs would do nothing without British approval.⁵⁰ The British government, however, was determined to maintain its careful neutrality with regard to the internal affairs of France.⁵¹ Burke devoted much of his energies in the second half of to combating this policy of non-intervention, and to promoting a crusade against revolutionary France. Of the leading political figures in Britain, Burke was by far the most vocal champion of the ancien régime. Indeed, he was almost alone in preferring ‘the cause of the gentlemen’ above the national advantage that might accrue to Britain from a weakened France. The Reflections had extended his name and reputation across much of Europe. He therefore became a magnet for French émigés who sought either practical help, or the assistance of his pen or influence. The comtesse de Montrond was an early example. In July , Burke was approached by the most eminent of the émigré politicians, CharlesAlexandre de Calonne (–). He and Burke had exchanged letters and books in October , when the Reflections and Calonne’s De l’état de la France were published nearly at the same time (C vi.–). Burke admired ⁴⁹ The Times, Sept. . ⁵⁰ E.B. first met Mercy-Argenteau at Hawkesbury’s dinner on Aug., when there was no talk of politics. At breakfast on the th, however, E.B. and Mercy-Argenteau had ‘much political discourse’ (to R.B. Jr., Sept. : C vi. ). This meeting predated the formal promulgation of the Declaration of Pillnitz. ⁵¹ Grenville to Dundas, Sept. (HMC (Fortescue), ii. ).
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Calonne’s work, and incorporated some material from it in the third edition of the Reflections.⁵² Burke and Calonne were in agreement on the need to restore the ancien régime. By July , both the émigré princes (the comte de Provence (–), the future Louis XVIII; and the comte d’Artois (–), later Charles X) had taken up residence at Koblenz, and a royalist military camp had been established about miles away at Worms. Calonne, the princes’ chief adviser, visited London with a view to persuading Pitt to support the cause of the émigrés. Rebuffed by Pitt, he approached Burke (–).⁵³ As a result of their meeting, Richard Jr. undertook an unofficial diplomatic mission to Koblenz. Leaving London on August, Richard spent a few days at Brussels (another émigré centre) on his way to Koblenz, where he was introduced to the comte de Provence. As Burke’s son, Richard was treated with great civility and deference by the émigré communities. But he made a most unfavourable personal impression (as he habitually did), and was clearly tolerated only for the sake of securing his father’s services.⁵⁴ The one positive achievement of his journey was the dispatch of an emissary from the princes to the British government, a position that Richard obtained for the chevalier de La Bintinaye (–?). The chevalier, together with his brother the abbé de La Bintinaye, became while in England members of the Burke circle. Richard was back in London on September. Burke entertained greatly exaggerated notions of his son’s abilities. He was therefore disappointed that Richard’s trip did not lead to some offer of official employment.⁵⁵ If the ministers were not impressed with Richard’s performance, however, his mission served to deepen Burke’s own commitment to the émigré cause. Unfortunately for that cause, his espousal of it probably reduced the influence he might have exercised on British policy. For though Grenville and Pitt, over the next three years, moved closer to Burke’s view that an ideological war was required, they never approached accepting his views regarding the rights of the émigrés or the completeness with which the ancien régime should be restored. Initially, however, Richard’s adventure served to bring Burke into closer contact with the ministers. On several occasions, Burke received news from his son which he forwarded to Grenville or ⁵² E.B. to Calonne, Oct. (C vi. –). In the third edition of the Reflections (Todd, f; published Nov. ), E.B. incorporated material from De l’état de la France [, , and –], and added several notes ([, , , , and ]). ⁵³ Calonne to E.B. and E.B’s reply, c. July (C vi. –). Robert Lacour-Gayet, Calonne: financier, réformateur, contre-révolutionnaire (Paris, ), –. ⁵⁴ Calonne found R.B. Jr. ‘si affirmative, si important en paroles et si léger en connoissances que j’ai craint qu’il ne gâtât nos affaires’ (to Quintin Craufurd, Oct.: Lacour-Gayet, Calonne, ). CharlesÉdouard Dillon, sent on a mission to London, told Calonne that R.B. Jr. ‘pousse La suffisance, et la vanité Jusqu’a l’impertinence’ and that ‘son excessive presomption est télement Connue, qu’elle Sera incéssamment provérbiale’ ( Oct.: C vi. –). ⁵⁵ At dinner with Pitt and Grenville on Sept., E.B. proposed that R.B. Jr. should be sent on a mission to Berlin (C vi. ). In , E.B. asked Dundas for an appointment for his son (C vii. n. ).
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Dundas. On September, for example, he sent Grenville a long extract from one of Richard’s letters (C vi. –). Grenville seized the opportunity to invite Burke to an informal dinner with Pitt at Downing Street.⁵⁶ In a letter to Dundas, Burke mentioned having heard that both Portland and Fitzwilliam had approved the Appeal, Dundas asked to see their letters, obliquely hinting at his intention to show them to the king. (In fact, Burke had received a letter only from Fitzwilliam; Portland’s views he had received indirectly through a friend, probably French Laurence.) After some soul-searching, anxious to demonstrate that ‘the two excellent persons I speak of are not infected, nor ever were, in the slightest degree with the new doctrines’, Burke forwarded Fitzwilliam’s letter. Dundas in turn forwarded it to the king.⁵⁷ This betrayal of confidence (for such it surely was) is a measure of how far Burke’s loyalties had shifted since his break with the ‘New Whigs’, and how eager he was to build a bridge between the ministry and those Whigs who (while reluctant to say so in public) agreed with the ‘doctrines’ of the Appeal. This eagerness found another outlet in a composition that was something of a new departure for Burke. Hitherto, his opinions on the Revolution, and indeed on politics generally, had been disseminated either through pamphlets or through parliamentary speeches. Now, however, encouraged by his closer contacts with government, he wrote a lengthy memorial (about , words), ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, primarily for circulation among the ministers (WS viii. –). For this more restricted audience, Burke deliberately adopted a more moderate tone and a less rhetorical style than he had in his earlier writings on the subject. The genesis of the paper can be traced to a letter of September . Even as he voiced one of his frequent professions of disengagement (‘Wisdom and religion dictate that we should follow Events and not attempt to lead, much less to force them’), he acknowledged his determination to make ‘one Effort more; and that shall be my Last’ (C vi. ). In the event, far from being his last, the ‘Thoughts’ (written between October and January ) inaugurated a series of writings, culminating in the Letters on a Regicide Peace (–), all advocating a long and determined war against revolutionary France. In ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, Burke sought to answer the question, how should Britain treat revolutionary France? In the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, he had denied the alleged parallel between the French ⁵⁶ Grenville to E.B., Sept. (NRO A. IV. ). ⁵⁷ E.B. to Dundas, Sept. is untraced, known only from an extract (not mentioning Fitzwilliam or Portland) in a Sotheby catalogue of (C vi. ). Dundas to E.B., Sept. (). E.B. to Dundas, Sept. (–), enclosing Fitzwilliam to E.B., Sept. (–), and explaining that he had received no letter from Portland. Dundas to E.B., Oct. (–). The king’s letter to Dundas (sold at Sotheby’s in ) is untraced. Dundas, however, reported the king’s opinion to R.B. Jr., who relayed it to E. B. (NRO A. XI. ). In his anxiety to enlist Portland on his side, E.B. simplified the duke’s views on the Appeal. Acknowledging that it contained ‘much excellent & admirable matter’, Portland deplored its likely effect on public opinion (to French Laurence, Aug. : NUL PwF ).
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Revolution and the Revolution of . In the ‘Thoughts’, he adduced a wider range of historical analogies: the wars of religion at the time of the Reformation; the struggles between the aristocratic and democratic factions in the ancient Greek republics; and the conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines in Italy. These had all been contests between two irreconcilable parties, each seeking to impose its principles not only within a single state, but on other states. So far, then, the French Revolution could be assimilated to familiar historical paradigms. What was new and frightening about the Revolution is the ‘fundamental dogma’ which the revolutionaries wish to export and impose on other countries: That the majority, told, by the head, of the taxable people in every country, is the perpetual, natural, unceasing, indefeasible sovereign; that this majority is perfectly master of the form, as well as the administration of the state, and that the magistrates, under whatever names they are called, are only functionaries to obey the orders, (general as laws or particular as decrees) which that majority may make; that this is the only natural government; that all others are tyranny and usurpation.⁵⁸
To achieve this theoretical ideal of government, the revolutionaries had destroyed all ancient establishments and levelled all social distinctions. The nobility, the Established Church, and the landed interest, had all been extirpated. This system had its partisans in every country; in Britain they are found chiefly among the Dissenters. Britain was by no means, as some falsely supposed, immune to, or exempt from, this international faction. Leaving Britain, Burke moved to a masterly survey of the state of Jacobin influence in Continental Europe. Germany, Prussia, and Austria were all vulnerable. Formerly, France was the principal guarantor of German liberties. Now, the new, aggressive, French foreign policy, especially its determination to promote revolution abroad, had destabilized the entire system of international relations in Europe. The French had already seized Avignon, and were attempting the subversion of Geneva, Savoy, and Switzerland. They entertained good hopes of Italy, the Papal Sates, and even Spain. Burke even commended the Inquisition as ‘the sole but unhappy resource of publick tranquillity and order now remaining in Spain’. No longer warring with heresy, its ‘great object is to keep atheistick and republican doctrines from making their way in that kingdom’ (WS viii. ). In northern Europe, Jacobinism was likewise at work. Of particular interest in this section is Burke’s account of Poland, which contrasts with the praise which he lavished on the Polish revolution in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. In the Appeal, in a passage perhaps meant to recall Fox’s encomium on the French Revolution, Burke had lauded the new Polish constitution of as ‘the most pure and defecated [unmixed] public good ⁵⁸ Though Burke places this passage (WS viii. ) in quotation marks, no source has been identified. Probably it represents his own compendium of revolutionary doctrine.
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which ever has been conferred on mankind’. In a lengthy panegyric, he drew a series of implicit contrasts between the Polish and French examples, and particularly praising the part played by King Stanislaus (–).⁵⁹ This passage served two rhetorical purposes: to show that Burke himself was no enemy to reform, properly conceived and executed; and to expose the partial enthusiasm of the fanatical advocates of the French model. Stanislaus was so pleased with Burke’s encomium that he sent him a personal letter and a medal.⁶⁰ In the ‘Thoughts’, however, Burke condemned the new Polish constitution as serving only ‘to supply that restless people with new means, at least new modes, of cherishing their turbulent disposition’. He even found a good word for what was usually regarded as the worst feature of the old constitution, the liberum veto (WS viii. –, ). Yet the inconsistency is more apparent than real. Burke seems genuinely to have felt the admiration for Stanislaus that he expresses in the Appeal.⁶¹ He distrusted not the king, but the people. Probably he feared that, in the general state of Jacobinized Europe, the constitutionalism that Stanislaus sought to establish would prove unable to resist the pressure of democratization.⁶² After scrutinizing the dissemination of Jacobin principles, Burke turned to the false security that many have derived from an expectation that the French system could not last. To dispel this misconception, he described the frighteningly novel features of the new regime. It need not fear bankruptcy, for (in effect) it was already bankrupt. Power having been separated from property, it could safely ignore the stabilizing opinions of a landed interest. Control had been usurped by a new class of quasi-professional politicians, ‘needy agitators’, whose interests were bound up with maintaining the Revolution (WS viii. ). Internal resistance to the regime was therefore impossible. The present state of France, Burke argued, must not be judged by ‘what has been observed elsewhere’. A new phenomenon, it required new habits of thought: ‘Analogical reasoning from history or from recent experience in other places is wholly delusive’ (). No internal counter-revolution was likely. The longer the system lasted, the more firmly established it would become; and it would never cease to proselytize. Defence, accordingly, was not enough. French principles, while delusive, were flattering to the unthinking majority, and therefore infectious. Shortsightedly, they had also been adopted by many politicians and diplomats. Even kings had unwittingly done the work of the revolutionaries, by antagonizing their best supporters, the nobility, the clergy, and the magistrates (–). Louis XIV (–), by depressing ⁵⁹ An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, –. ⁶⁰ E.B. to Franciszik Bukaty (the Polish Ambassador), Oct. ; to Stanislaus, Feb. (C vi. –, vii. –). Neither the king’s letter nor the medal has been traced. ⁶¹ E.B. sent Stanislaus a ‘handsomely Bound’ set of his Works (to R.B. Jr., July : C vii. ). ⁶² In the same way, E.B. thought that the well-intentioned reforming spirit of the reign of Louis XVI had facilitated the Revolution (R [, ]).
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the nobility, had ultimately undermined the throne he imagined he was strengthening. More recently, the Emperor Joseph II (–) had acted with the same disregard towards established institutions (–). Just as he was reviewing the ‘Thoughts’ before submitting it, Burke found new confirmation of his fears in the manifesto promulgated by the new Legislative Assembly on January . On January, the Comité diplomatique proposed a decree threatening the German princes with war. On the th, an influential deputy, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (–) made a lengthy speech introducing a more bellicose version of the proposed decree, and his version was approved.⁶³ Brissot’s speech and the Assembly’s decree strengthened Burke’s contention that the state of France was of paramount concern to all European countries (WS viii. –). Action of some kind was required. Yet in deference to his audience, beyond a hint at discontinuing diplomatic relations with France, Burke declined a direct answer to the question ‘What is to be done?’ Instead, he left his ‘speculations’ to those who possessed ‘power, wisdom and information’ (–). If not stated explicitly, however, the policy that Burke advocated is clear: an immediate abandonment of neutrality, followed by concerted action with the other European powers to destroy the French regime before its infection could spread even further. Burke’s modest submission to better and more informed judgements would have provided a satisfying conclusion to ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’. Yet he added a remarkable coda that removes the argument to a new level and seems to negate the entire drift of the memorial: I have done with this subject, I believe for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for the last two years. If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate. (WS viii. )
This passage has attracted more interest than any other in the ‘Thoughts’, and has been variously interpreted. Some have read into it a rueful concession that the French Revolution might possibly enjoy providential approval, and should therefore no longer be resisted. Others have strenuously denied any such inference.⁶⁴ Rhetorical considerations exclude the first interpretation. Burke intended the passage as a climactic peroration. It must, therefore, enforce, not contradict the main thesis. Burke probably intended it as a theoretical concession, as though to say ‘I may be wrong’. Such concessions are never to be taken literally, but rather as assertions of impartiality and ⁶³ H.-A. Goetz-Bernstein, La Diplomatie de la Gironde: Jacques-Pierre Brissot (Paris, ), –. ⁶⁴ Francis Canavan, Edmund Burke: Prescription and Providence (Durham, NC, ), –.
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fair-mindedness. Burke could rely on his readers rejecting the supposition of the ‘if ’ clause. Nevertheless, the passage is more than a rhetorical ploy. Burke did believe that history was, in the long run, part of a providential plan. There was therefore a real possibility, not that the Revolution itself was ‘approved’ by Providence, but that, evil as it was, it served some ulterior purpose. In his ‘History of England’, he acknowledged that ‘political enquiry’ could hardly explain the collapse of the Roman Empire. Instead, he saw ‘the hand of God’ at work ‘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. ). The French Revolution might conceivably be the harbinger of such another of those ‘immense revolutions’. Burke often worried about this possibility. Yet he never wavered either in his faith in Providence, or in his belief in the individual’s duty to defend the institutions and values in which he believed. Since the ultimate design of Providence could not be known, defence of the established order could never be wrong. ‘We must not struggle with the order of Providence’, he admonished his son, ‘nor contrive our matters so ill, that, as Cicero says, whilst we are struggling to be in the Republick of Plato, we may find ourselves in no republick at all’ ( Aug. : C vi. ). Yet two months later he advised Richard that ‘most assuredly it will be wise in us to conform ourselves to that State of things which providence is pleased to direct or permit. To act otherwise is not to make sacrifices to our principles but our passions.’ When he wrote this (about the time he was working on the ‘Thoughts’), Burke was disheartened by the pusillanimity of the ministers and by the supineness of Portland and Fitzwilliam. ‘All men, and all Parties’, he thought, ‘from different motives, come pretty near to the same Conduct’ ( Oct.: ). At such moments, Burke was liable to despair. What could an unconnected individual do, when the great men did nothing? Perhaps in such a mood Burke wrote the last paragraph of the ‘Thoughts’, intending to rouse the ministers to a defence of what they too surely believed was worth defending. Burke sent the ‘Thoughts’ to Grenville for perusal ‘at a leisure hour’ (probably meaning before the meeting of Parliament on January). He also sent a copy to John King, to be shown to Pitt. From neither minister did he receive any reply. On February, when Burke asked for the return of the paper, Grenville returned it ‘without a word of Observation’.⁶⁵ Burke’s first attempt to influence the ministers through a ‘memorial’ was thus a complete failure. Only towards the end of , shocked by the September massacres and alarmed by further evidence of French bellicosity, did the ministers slowly come to accept what Burke had long argued, that a war with revolutionary France was inevitable. ⁶⁵ E.B. to Grenville, Feb. (UBL (I), ); E.B. to R.B. Jr., Feb. (C vii. ).
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In , when the Burkes made a short, unpremeditated trip to Ireland, one of its purposes was to make Richard Burke, Jr., ‘a little known’ there (C v. ). Nothing came of this scheme until August , when the Catholic Committee engaged his services (with a retainer of guineas) to assist their projected campaign for a further relaxation of the penal laws (vi. ). The Catholic Committee (formed in ) was the main organ of Irish Catholic political opinion. Since delegates were elected, it enjoyed some claim to a representative character. The retainer, while nominal, was significant. In , though desperately needing the money, Burke himself had declined to accept, as inconsistent with his public character, the guineas voted him by the committee as a reward for his services (iv. –). After his experience as agent for the New York Assembly, he was keenly aware of the need to avoid any imputation that his services were bought. He was a statesman, not a professional advocate. Richard, however, was explicitly employed as an agent. Yet, like his father, he was too self-confident to follow instructions, being convinced that he knew better than his employers what was in their best interests. This contradiction would have unfortunate consequences, though they did not immediately surface. In , the more active and ambitious members of the Catholic Committee determined to lobby more aggressively for the concessions they sought.⁶⁶ In September, the committee appointed Richard their London agent.⁶⁷ Their principal motive was to distance their activities from any taint of disloyalty or disaffection by associating with it, if only indirectly, the elder Burke, the figure least likely to be suspected of countenancing anything revolutionary. The decision proved, however, unfortunate. Whatever credibility Richard enjoyed as his father’s son was more than offset by his personal manner, and especially by his overweening self-importance. Richard was oblivious of the alienating effects of his personality, which had already manifested themselves during his mission to Koblenz. Returning thence brimming with self-confidence, and seizing what he took to be a new opportunity to display his talents, the moment he returned to London, he sought interviews with Pitt and with Dundas (who, as Home Secretary, was responsible for Ireland, and the official channel of communication between the Cabinet and the Lord-Lieutenant). Since Burke’s break with Fox, the ministers had been eager to widen the split in the Whig party, and took every occasion to conciliate or flatter Burke. Both ministers therefore agreed to see Richard. Encouraged by this polite attention (which he interpreted as an expression of ⁶⁶ Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, – (Dublin, ), esp. (for R.B. Jr.’s mission) –. ⁶⁷ Edward Byrne to R.B. Jr., Sept. (C vi. –).
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confidence) he sought to draw, particularly from Dundas, some statement of support for further concessions to the Catholics. Properly enough, Dundas refused to make any such commitment.⁶⁸ Richard never understood this necessary official reticence, expecting to be treated with a confidence to which he had no claim. In December, Richard decided to visit Ireland. Before leaving, on the th he enjoyed what he thought ‘a long and very satisfactory conversation’ with Robert Hobart (–), Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant, the Earl of Westmorland (–). This satisfaction, however, would prove short-lived. Soon afterwards, Richard submitted a memorial to Dundas, and the two met on December. Again, however, Dundas refused to be drawn into an official statement. Instead, he referred Richard to the Irish government, to whom Hobart would shortly communicate the views of the British ministers. Despite this hint, on the th Richard sought and was given further interviews with both Dundas and Pitt. He received letters of introduction, but no confidential communication.⁶⁹ These exchanges illustrate Richard’s obtuseness. Pitt and Dundas were in fact sympathetic to the Catholic claims, and were pressing concessions on a reluctant Westmorland. But they could not, with propriety, reveal this to Richard. In other circumstances, Richard’s importunity might have proved advantageous. In this instance, however, as events would show, his persistence served only to exasperate those with whom he had to deal. He left for Dublin on December, arriving on January. Almost at once, Richard began what he thought was a ‘negotiation’ with Hobart. In his own mind, he represented the Catholics of Ireland, which he somehow felt gave him the standing that might be accorded to the leader of a powerful opposition, negotiating as an equal from a position of strength.⁷⁰ In reality, of course, he was no more than the agent of the Catholic Committee, itself no more than a voluntary association. Nor was Richard a tactful negotiator. From the tone of his letters to Hobart, and to Dundas, complaining of Hobart, the wonder is that they were so patient.⁷¹ The Irish government’s first priority was to retain the confidence of the parliamentary majority, which was hostile to any further concessions to the Catholics. Yet it had somehow to persuade this majority to approve the concessions which the ⁶⁸ R.B. Jr. saw Dundas on Oct. (Dundas to R.B. Jr., Oct.: C vi. –), and Pitt on the th (Morning Chronicle, Oct.) R.B. Jr. minuted what transpired (NRO A. XII. ). R.B. Jr. also saw Grenville twice (Grenville to Dundas, Oct., in HMC (Fortescue), ii. ). ⁶⁹ R.B. Jr. to E.B., Dec. ; to Dundas, post Dec.; Dundas to R.B. Jr., Dec.; R.B. Jr. to Dundas, Dec. (C vi. , –). R.B. Jr.’s memorial to Dundas is printed in Corr. (), iv. –. ⁷⁰ R.B. Jr. to Hobart, Jan. ; Hobart to R.B. Jr., Jan.; R.B. Jr. to Hobart, Jan. (C vii. –, –). Hobart to R.B. Jr., Jan. (WWM BkP /); R.B. Jr. to Hobart, Jan. (C vii. ). ⁷¹ R.B. Jr. to Hobart, Jan. ; to Dundas, Jan. (C vii. –, –). Dundas to R.B. Jr., Jan. (–), is a remarkably restrained rebuke.
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British ministers all believed should be made, and which they were pressing on him.⁷²This was no easy task, even without Richard’s demanding, bullying, and threatening tactics. Having made no progress with Hobart, Richard drafted a petition to Parliament, in accordance with the Catholic Committee’s resolution of December. The paper he composed was an extraordinary document, more a manifesto than a supplication.⁷³ Worse than the tenor of the petition, however, was its timing. Compelled by the British Cabinet to introduce some token of Catholic relief, but unwilling to risk sponsoring it as a government measure, Hobart had persuaded Sir Hercules Langrishe to introduce it as a private member’s bill. Langrishe was a shrewd choice. A respected, independent ‘man of business’ who generally voted with the government, he had sat in the Irish Parliament for his own borough since , and he had a record of supporting Catholic relief.⁷⁴ Though Langrishe’s bill offered only minimal concessions, Hobart was still apprehensive of its defeat.⁷⁵ Richard’s agitation for a more comprehensive measure was likely to make its opponents more intransigent. As if to emphasize that Catholics would not be satisfied with Langrishe’s bill, Richard sought to have his petition submitted on the day the bill was introduced. Only an MP could present a petition. Yet such was the aggressive tone of Richard’s composition, and so little had he ingratiated himself even with members sympathetic to his cause, that he experienced great difficulty in finding one to assume the task. The result was a serio-comic incident. Richard finally persuaded Charles O’Hara (–; son of Burke’s old friend of the same name), to present it. Probably O’Hara was influenced by feelings of old family friendship, for he was opposed to further Catholic emancipation.⁷⁶ With evident embarrassment, O’Hara presented the petition gauchely and ineptly, disclaiming responsibility and even reserving the right to vote against its objects. Rather than speak in its support, he asked that Richard be allowed to explain it. While the petition was being ridiculed by Richard Sheridan (–), Burke Jr. (waiting behind the Speaker’s chair) tried to attract O’Hara’s attention. Hobart saw him, and raised the cry of ‘Stranger in the House’. The Speaker ordered him to be taken into custody, a fate which he narrowly escaped by a precipitate retreat. O’Hara then withdrew the petition. Richard minimized the incident as a ‘scrape’.⁷⁷ Despite the farcical failure of his petition, and in the face of a hint from Dundas that he had better return to England, he believed that only his continued presence in Ireland could prevent the Catholics uniting with the ⁷² Dundas to Westmorland, Dec. (NA HO. /, fos. –) ⁷³ Petition of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, Intended to have Been Presented to Parliament in February (Dublin, ), with an aggressive preface attacking the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’. ⁷⁴ Edith Mary Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament, –: Commons, Constituencies, and Statutes (Belfast, ), v. –. ⁷⁵ Bartlett, Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation, –. ⁷⁶ History of the Irish Parliament, –, v. . ⁷⁷ Dublin Journal, – January . R.B. Jr. to E.B., c. Jan. (C vii. –).
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‘the factious part of the dissenters’ to ‘lay the seeds of a revolution of the worst kind’.⁷⁸ To Westmorland, the incident confirmed his opinion that Richard was ‘the most unaccountable animal ever employed in any Mission’.⁷⁹ That Richard was a liability to his cause was by now evident, and he was given a golden handshake. In March, he was presented with , guineas for his services, and early in April he returned to England.⁸⁰ The committee was, however, too tactful in his discharge, and Richard imagined that he was simply being paid for services rendered. He therefore continued to act as an agent for the Catholics, and even made a second visit to Ireland (ostensibly on private business) from September to December . Soon after his arrival, however, his dismissal was made clear. Richard was outraged, still wholly unconscious of his faults and his failings.⁸¹ Some sympathy with him may be felt. The son of a famous father, and placed in a difficult situation for which he had neither natural aptitude nor previous experience, he was almost certain to disappoint expectations. Much of what was interpreted as egotism may rather have been zeal in his cause, well meant if ill directed. Nevertheless, the unanimous verdict of all those who worked with him was that he was supremely ungifted as a negotiator. No one saw more of him than John Keogh (–), a Dublin merchant and a leading member of the Catholic Committee. Keogh’s bill of complaint is formidable: ‘in the course of a few weeks’, Richard not only ‘contrived to quarrel with the leading men in Gov[ernmen]t’ while simultaneously giving ‘great Offence to the Gent[leme]n in opposition’. Worst of all, he ‘treated ourselves with so little consideration, he would not suffer our opinion to have weight, even in our own affairs, wherever it differed from his’.⁸² Insufferable self-righteousness was a trait that Richard inherited, or learned, from his father. In his case, however, it was not accompanied by the formidable powers and energy of mind that redeemed Burke père, even at his most intolerable. Richard possessed (as his father said of a bad imitation of Dr Johnson’s style) ‘all the nodosities of the oak without its strength’, and displayed ‘all the contortions of the Sybil, without the inspiration’.⁸³ Burke naturally followed his son’s mission to Ireland with the closest interest, sending him a stream of letters of encouragement and advice. ⁷⁸ R.B. Jr. to John King, Feb. (YB Osborn MS, c. . ). ⁷⁹ Westmorland to Dundas, Jan. (NA HO. /, fo. ). ⁸⁰ R.B. Jr. left Dublin soon after Apr., when he wrote to Shackleton (C vii. ), and was back in London a few days before Apr. (letter to the family, [ Apr. ]: NRO A. XI. ). ⁸¹ Thomas H. D. Mahoney, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., ), –. John Keogh to Thomas Hussey, Oct. (NA HO. /, fos. –). ⁸² Keogh to Hussey, Oct. (HO. /, fo. ). ⁸³ Boswell, Life of Johnson, iv. (). Boswell attributes the comment to ‘a very eminent literary character’. A note by Malone confirms that E.B. was meant. The subject was the ‘Life of Young’ contributed by Herbert Croft to Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.
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In addition, he wrote two public letters on behalf of the Catholic cause. The first was addressed to Sir Hercules Langrishe, whom he had known since about – (C viii. ), the mover of the Catholic Relief Bill in January . On December , aware that the Catholic question would be raised in the coming session of the Irish Parliament, Langrishe wrote to Burke, explaining his own views and asking for advice. While still sympathetic to the Catholic claims, Langrishe was nearing the limits of what he would countenance. To judge by the quotations from his letter in Burke’s response, and from the response itself, Langrishe was prepared to remove most Catholic disabilities, except their exclusion from the franchise, from Parliament, and from civil office.⁸⁴ His letter, coincidentally arriving just as Richard was preparing to leave for Dublin, gave Burke just the stimulus he needed to order and elaborate the ideas he had been discussing with Richard. Working with his usual energy, by January he had drafted a ‘letter’ of about , words. Transcribing took a day or two longer, and the fair copy was dated January. Though the letter was actually sent to Langrishe, and its printing left to his discretion, the epistolary form was scarcely more than a convenient fiction.⁸⁵ The argument is highly structured, and the extensive use of the topic of definition (the terms State, Protestant, and Revolution are each subjected to close scrutiny) makes the letter more formal than most of Burke’s pamphlets. It soon found its way into print (inaccurately, as Burke later complained).⁸⁶ The main point of contention was the franchise. Should Catholics be admitted to vote in county elections and, if so, on what terms? Opponents of the concession argued that, because the Catholics enjoyed such a superiority of numbers, allowing them to vote was tantamount, sooner or later, to undermining the Protestant Ascendancy. Even if a higher property qualification were imposed on Catholics (the Catholic Committee proposed £, instead of the existing £ freehold, which qualified Protestants), eventual Catholic domination would be rendered inevitable. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, the reformers (mostly Dissenters), eager to secure Catholic support for their schemes of parliamentary reform, proposed to admit Catholics on equal terms to a generally enlarged electorate on, or even broader than, the French model. Eager to prevent any such alliance between Dissenters and Catholics, Burke sought to bring the Catholics into the existing system. ⁸⁴ Langrishe’s letter, presently untraced, was sold at Sotheby’s in (C ix. ) and is presumably extant. ⁸⁵ Though E.B. thought that Langrishe might want to excise ‘such parts as he may choose as applying particularly to himself ’ (to R.B. Jr., Jan. : C vii. ). ⁸⁶ As A Letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke . . . to Sir Hercules Langrishe [etc.] (Dublin, ). Todd, a. The lengthy descriptive title is probably not E.B.’s. The newspaper advertisements are contradictory; the earliest announcement appears to be that in the Morning Post or Dublin Courant of Feb. . E.B. corrected the London edition, the text of which is reprinted in WS ix. –.
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Langrishe, on the other hand (as quoted by Burke) argued that Catholics ‘should enjoy every thing under the state, but should not be the state itself ’or even ‘a part of the state’ (WS ix. ; the emphasis may be Burke’s). Beginning with the question of what is meant by ‘the state’, Burke adduces a series of arguments to controvert this position. As usual, Burke combined consideration of local circumstances with appeals to general principles, giving the pamphlet far more than a topical, or Irish, significance. As always, he denied that participation in politics (in practice, the franchise) was a natural (what would today be called a ‘human’) or even a civil right. In the Letter to Langrishe itself, vehemently as Burke contended for the franchise as a concession, he explicitly excluded any argument from ‘a question of right’. Instead, he appealed to ‘discretion’, to what the legislature, in the present circumstances, may think best for the nation as a whole (WS ix. –). This appeal to circumstance is consistent with his stand in the Reflections, where he described the question of the franchise as ‘a thing to be settled by convention’ within each society (R []). With respect to Britain, he consistently opposed its extension. The Letter to Langrishe shows that this stand was principled and well grounded. In Britain, property was already represented; in Ireland, it was not. Burke’s arguments for extending the franchise in Ireland to property-owning Catholics illustrate the kind of timely reform that he believed was essential to maintain the fundamental principles of the constitution. An earlier example was his promotion of Economical Reformation in –.⁸⁷ By , Burke’s credentials as a reformer had been widely questioned. The Letter to Langrishe shows that the French Revolution had not destroyed his belief in the preservative value of seasonable, moderate reform. Arguing against Langrishe’s distinction between being ‘under the state’ and ‘part of the state’ occasioned Burke to reflect on three key terms, ‘the State’, ‘Protestant’, and ‘Revolution’. Only in a closed oligarchy such as Venice was ‘the state’ (in the sense of the upper reaches of government) the exclusive preserve of an élite. In Britain, and in Ireland (where the government was modelled on the British pattern), plebeians were an important constituent of ‘the state’. The exclusion of the majority of the population, as in Ireland, was therefore contrary to the genius of the constitution, and required particular justification. A religious test might once have been justified. But ‘Protestant’ in Ireland, since the repeal of the Test Act in , now meant no more than ‘not Catholic’, and comprehended atheists as well as ‘Protestants’ in the older acceptation of the word, when qualification as a Protestant required some form of doctrinal subscription. Even in France, before the impolitic revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Protestants, though ⁸⁷ Supra, i. –.
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subject to some exclusions, were nevertheless recognized as ‘part of the state’. Burke thus identified the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ with two prominent examples of states inimical to personal liberties: Venice, and the France of Louis XIV. As an ‘Old Whig’, Burke prided himself on fidelity to the Revolution of . Here, however, he denied that the principles of this ‘Revolution’ could justify the exclusion of Catholics. Not everything done about the time of, or in the name of, the Revolution should be regarded as a fundamental part of the Revolution settlement The Irish Parliament of did not act like its English counterpart of , but more like ‘a colonial garrison’ (WS ix. ). Further, many of the most oppressive penal laws dated from long after the Revolution proper. Ireland’s truly ‘revolutionary’ Parliament was that of , which achieved legislative independence. Thus Catholic emancipation could not be excluded from consideration simply as being contrary to ‘Revolution Principles’. Burke’s refutation of two further arguments deserves attention. One was that, because the bulk of the Catholics are ‘mutinous, disorderly, prone to sedition’, even the more respectable Catholics feared the extension of the franchise. Burke retorted that, supposing this to be true (which he doubted), the best remedy was to remove their grievances. Reiterating a distinction he made as early as the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (), he argued that ‘the most poor, illiterate, and uninformed creatures upon earth, are judges of a practical oppression’, because this is ‘a matter of feeling’. But the same people are the worst judges of ‘the real cause, or the appropriate remedy’ for the oppression.⁸⁸ This notion exemplifies Burke’s political paternalism. ‘The people’ are best served not by giving them what they say or imagine that they want, but what (in the estimation of superior, more informed understandings) is in their real best interests. Another argument for maintaining the exclusion of the Catholics was that they had joined with certain groups of Dissenters to promote ‘seditious propositions’, principally ‘altering the principles of election to a right of voting by the head’ (WS ix. ). Burke denied that any such alliance had yet been formed, but the possibility was one of his greatest fears. Indeed, one of his chief reasons for urging the admission of property-owning Catholics to the franchise was to prevent it. But putting himself in the position of an excluded Catholic, he posed this question: ‘universal popular representation, or none at all for us and ours’? Declining an explicit answer, he merely calls the choice ‘awkward’: ‘I don’t like this kind of dilemmas, especially when they are practical’ (). Nevertheless, Burke’s sympathies are plain. Intellectually, he condemns the alliance, while he acknowledges it as a natural reaction to a history of oppression. His solution, of course, was not to grant the universal ⁸⁸ WS ix. . In the Thoughts, E.B. observes 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’ (ii. ).
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franchise, but to remove the real root cause of the oppression. In his view, this was not that the people were unrepresented, but that the Catholics had no share in the existing ‘virtual representation’. The grievance could be removed, and Ireland brought into the British constitutional fold, by following ‘our oldest fundamental laws’, which couple ‘freehold with franchise’ (WS ix. ). This does not mean that the unpropertied are unrepresented: Virtual representation is that in which there is a communion of interests, and a sympathy in feelings and desires between those who act in the name of any description of people, and the people in whose name they act, though the trustees are not actually chosen by them. . . . Such a representation I think to be, in many cases, even better than the actual. It possesses most of its advantages, and is free from many of its inconveniencies: it corrects the irregularities in the literal representation, when the shifting current of human affairs, or the acting of public interests in different ways, carry it obliquely from its first line of direction. ()
Burke justified the anomalies in the unreformed British Parliament on exactly this ground.⁸⁹ In Ireland, of course, the representation of the Catholics would be even more ‘virtual’ than in Britain. Nevertheless, ‘the stigma would be removed’. Catholics would be able more easily to identify with the national community, and would be less tempted to embrace tempting but delusive French ideas. Again, the argument is paternalistic. Burke’s most potent fear was ‘the great danger of our time, that of setting up number against property’. Enfranchising Catholic property holders, ‘admitting settled permanent substance in lieu of numbers’, offered the best chance of averting this danger (). There are some passages in the Letter to Langrishe which, divorced from their context, might justify Westmorland’s description of it as ‘inflammatory’.⁹⁰ Taken as a whole, however, the Letter is a reasoned plea for timely, preventive reform. Burke began, but did not finish, a second pamphlet on the Catholic claims, in the form of a letter to his son, then in Dublin ( Feb. : C vii. ). Published posthumously in as ‘Letter to Richard Burke, Esq.’ (WS ix. –), it better deserves the epithet ‘inflammatory’ than does the Letter to Langrishe. For by mid-February, Burke’s temper had been soured by the evident failure of Richard’s mission, and by the hostility evinced in the Irish Parliament (as shown by the contemptuous treatment of Richard’s petition) ⁸⁹ Speech on Conciliation ( Mar. : WS iii. ); ‘Speech on the State of the Representation’ (‘ May ’: W vi. –); Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (: WS ix. ). Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, ), –. E.B. did not speak in the debate on May ; the drafts from which the ‘Speech’ was edited may have been intended for that occasion. ⁹⁰ Westmorland to Pitt, Feb. (National Archives, Dublin, Westmorland Papers, (Letterbooks), vol. , p. ). The publisher of the Letter to Langrishe, Patrick Byrne, also published part II of Paine’s Rights of Man. The two were advertised together in the Morning Post or Dublin Courant, Feb. .
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to even a modest measure of reform. The ‘Letter’ mounts a scathing assault on the term ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, a shibboleth empty of real religious meaning and no more than an excuse for corruption and oppression.⁹¹ After two hundred years, Burke argued, no hope can now be entertained that Ireland will not remain permanently a Catholic country (). The governing minority must accept this fact, and admit the Catholics to a more equal partnership. Yet Burke continued to support the privileged position of the Church of Ireland (–). Likewise, while deploring the confiscations from which they largely derived, he affirmed the sanctity of the present titles to property. For all his hatred of the Protestant Ascendancy, Burke never contemplated without horror any suggestion that land confiscated in the seventeenth century should be restored to its former owners. Nevertheless, he was uneasy about the narrowly legal basis of these titles, preferring to ground his acceptance of their validity on the prescriptive right that, however iniquitously acquired, they could now claim. Burke extols prescription as a ‘solid rock’: the soundest, the most general, and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or in publick jurisprudence; a title, in which not arbitrary institutions, but the eternal order of things gives judgment; a title which is not the creature, but the master of positive Law; a title which, though not fixed in its term, is rooted in its principle, in the law of nature itself, and is indeed the original ground of all known property; for all property in soil will always be traced back to that source, and will rest there. (WS ix.)
This is Burke’s most eloquent paean to prescription, one of his most cherished principles. Anxious above all to defend existing property rights, Burke appeals beyond the mere ‘municipal law’ to ‘the law of nature itself ’.⁹² In this passage, particularly, Burke is eager to escape the technicalities of the law. The appeal to prescription is in effect a call for national reconciliation. Let the Protestants abandon the pretence that the continued exclusion of the Catholics from the franchise is necessary to preserve their property. Let the Catholics accept that what they lost so long ago cannot now be recovered. While arguing that ‘prescription’ is part of the ‘law of nature’, Burke conceded that the precise ‘term’ which established prescription is not itself part of that law. It would therefore vary according to custom and circumstance. At the end of the ‘Letter to Richard Burke’, he appeals to the sixty-year rule ⁹¹ W. J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition, and Betrayal in Literary History (; rev. edn., Cork, ) dates ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ as a ‘potent collocation’ to early (). E.B. was thus attacking a newly minted phrase that would resonate for many years (–). ⁹² As Paul Lucas argues, the strictly jurisprudential basis of E.B.’s theory of prescription is weak (‘On Edmund Burke’s Doctrine of Prescription; or, An Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers’, Historical Journal, (), –). His concept is best treated as moral and philosophical rather than legal, as in Francis Canavan, Edmund Burke: Providence and Prescription, esp. –.
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defined in the Nullum Tempus Act of in bar of the dormant claims of the Crown (WS ix. ).⁹³ Any such figure is arbitrary, and in historical perspective, sixty years may seem a short period. Burke, however, regarded sixty years as reasonable. In a later letter to his son, he brands the disfranchisement of the Catholics ‘the yoke of late prostitute Acts of an innovating Parliament, made within the Memory of some yet living’ (post Nov. : C vii. ). The significance of ‘within the Memory of some yet living’ is to deny them prescriptive force. An old legal maxim defined custom as usage so long ‘that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary’.⁹⁴ Since few adult memories would extend further than sixty years, the sixty-year rule offered a reasonable approximation to this definition. Its implications for Ireland were that the property transferred in the seventeenth century should not now be restored.⁹⁵The paramount claim of social stability required acceptance of old injustices. Only by industry and ingenuity could the Catholics regain the property lost in earlier ages. Burke faults the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ not for wanting to preserve its property, but for seeking to exclude the Catholics in perpetuity from improving their condition. Thus behind even the more heated rhetoric of the ‘Letter to Richard Burke’, Burke accords the protection of property rights the highest priority. Richard Burke blamed the failure of his mission on the intransigence of the extremists in the Protestant Ascendancy, and on the pusillanimity of Westmorland and Hobart, whom he regarded as their compliant tools. Burke himself, of course, who could see no faults in his son, and who was in any case prejudiced against the Ascendancy, accepted this explanation.⁹⁶ Nor was it entirely unreasonable. In , after the outbreak of war with France and in response to more intense pressure from London, most of the concessions denied the previous year were granted.⁹⁷ This not only vindicated Burke’s prophecy that the franchise would be granted ‘sooner or later, and indeed but a little sooner or later’ ( Jan. : C vii. ), but seemed to confirm Richard’s belief that pressure from London could have achieved the same result a year earlier. This interpretation of events in turn reinforced Burke’s belief that the solution to the Irish problem was a sympathetic Lord Lieutenant, unequivocally backed by the British government, who would curb the power of the petty tyrants of the Ascendancy. In , when Fitzwilliam was appointed to the viceroyalty, this happy prospect seemed momentarily within reach, only to prove a mirage. ⁹³ The choice of sixty years was probably influenced by the Statute of Limitations of . ⁹⁴ William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (London, –), i. . ⁹⁵ Likewise, the boroughs added to the Irish Parliament under James I had now acquired prescriptive sanction. Admitting that ‘the actual constitution’ of Ireland was ‘in great part fabricated in ’, E.B. nevertheless opposed any alteration (to French Laurence, May : C ix. ). ⁹⁶ R.B. Jr. to Dundas, May ; to Fitzwilliam, Oct. (C vii. –, –). E.B. to R.B. Jr., – Nov (–). ⁹⁷ Bartlett, Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation, –.
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The publication of the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs had appreciably widened the split between Burke and his erstwhile associates. Even so, he was by no means prepared to join Pitt. Neutrality, however, was not easy for one who had taken so prominent and partisan a part. His silences would be noticed as much as his speeches. Burke’s solution was a partial personal secession. He ostentatiously stayed away from the opening debate. To explain the reason for his absence, he wrote an elaborate apologia of over , words, dating it Beaconsfield, January: the day of the opening of Parliament. The letter is a careful composition, manifestly the work of far longer than a day (C vii. –). Its dating was therefore no coincidence. The recipient was William Weddell (–), his fellow member for Malton, and an old Rockinghamite. Burke had sent him a copy of the Appeal, which Weddell had praised as ‘very valuable’, exhibiting ‘the same spirit of our Constitution’ as the Reflections, and ‘with the same Rectitude, & Purity of Mind, ever inherent in your disposition’. Weddell also reported, with some chagrin, the recent award to Fox of the Freedom of York. In , Weddell had stood for the county, but was forced to withdraw, tainted by his association with Fox. Though returned by Fitzwilliam for Malton, he was therefore in a sense one of ‘Fox’s martyrs’. That a mere seven years should have converted Fox from bugbear into hero was, for Weddell, a ‘Miraculous Conversion’ that made him relish what Burke had said of ‘The People’ in the Appeal.⁹⁸ Weddell thus represented what Burke regarded as the ‘stamina’ of the Old Whigs, making him an ideal recipient for a letter intended to be shown to ‘such of our friends, who, though they cannot, in prudence, support, will not, in Justice, condemn me’ (). The letter to Weddell served as a personal postscript or coda to the Appeal. It develops many of the same ideas, but without the distancing devices characteristic of the pamphlet. Its arguments are supported not from historical documents, but from Burke’s own experience as a veteran member of the Whig party. Taking as his starting point Weddell’s reference to Fox receiving the freedom of York, Burke speculates that those who praised Fox for embodying ‘the true principles of the Revolution’ were alluding to rather than – (C vii. ). As in the Appeal, Burke juxtaposes this ‘new republican, frenchified Whiggism’, with its supposed ‘right’ to make ‘new constitutions at their pleasure’, against true Whiggism, which espouses ‘a rational and sober Liberty upon the plan of our existing constitution’ (). In the letter, Burke goes beyond the Appeal in identifying the Whigs as ‘an aristocratick Party’. Its leading members are ‘connected with the solid, permanent long possessd property of the Country’, a guarantee that they are ⁹⁸ Weddell to E.B., Aug. (WWM BkP /).
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‘attached to the antient tried usages of the Kingdom’, equidistant from ‘servile court compliances’ on the one hand, and ‘popular levity, presumption, and precipitation’ on the other (–). ‘New men’ (such as Burke himself ) who joined the party ought, and until recently did, adopt that aristocratic ethos, placing their talents at the service of its principles and values. Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution was thus not (as had been charged) an apostasy from his earlier principles, but actually motivated by them. For the Revolution, a monstrous ‘Democracie royale’, has declared ‘inexpiable War’ on the nobility and the gentry (). Burke’s Reflections, however decried by the party, was actually written in the party’s interest, as well as that of the public. Finally, repeating a theme from the Reflections, Burke attributes much of the evil effects of the Revolution to the composition of the National Assembly, in which there are not fifty men of property worth £ a year ().⁹⁹ Indeed, Burke now asserts that the primary object of the Revolution was to destroy ‘not the despotism of a prince, but the condition of a Gentleman’ (). Conscious of being out of place in a party that espouses principles so antithetical to its former aristocratic nature, Burke has resolved to ‘retire to repose of body and mind’. Though obliged to continue in Parliament (by the impeachment), he is determined to take no part, ‘except on some deep constitutional Question’ (–). Burke was true to this resolve. Never had he spoken so infrequently as he did in the session of . Apart from a few minor interventions on questions related to the impeachment, he made only two speeches, each on a ‘deep constitutional Question’: parliamentary reform, and religious toleration. This withdrawal disappointed the ministers, who had hopes of his active support. Indeed, ‘a whole sentence out of his Book’ was said to have been inserted in the speech from the throne as a ‘bait’.¹⁰⁰As he confessed to his son, Burke was conscious of some coolness on the part of the ministers ( Feb. : C vii. ). Yet his standing aloof, initially at least, was surely justified. Too close a connection with the ministry would only have fuelled charges of apostasy. In the long run, however, the logical corollary of alienation from Fox was rapprochement with Pitt. Burke’s first speech was delivered on April, when Charles Grey gave notice that, in the next session, he would make a motion on the subject of ⁹⁹ In his speech on parliamentary reform on Apr. , E.B. claimed that ‘not six’ members possessed so much property (PH xxix. ). These figures (if they are more than rhetorical flourishes) may be based on information obtained by E.B. subsequent to the publication of the Reflections, where he criticizes the composition of the National Assembly but makes no estimate of how many members possessed property (R [–]). ¹⁰⁰ Walker King to R.B. Jr., Mar. (WWM BkP /). The sentence is ‘that Constitution which We have found, by long Experience, to unite the inestimable Blessings of Liberty and Order, and to which, under the Favour of Providence, all Our other Advantages are principally to be ascribed’ (CJ xlvii. ). This is probably a paraphrase of ‘that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty’ (R []).
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parliamentary reform. Grey was one of the founders of the recently formed Association of the Friends of the People, dedicated to the reform of Parliament, which two dozen MPs had joined.¹⁰¹ Properly, Grey’s notice did not initiate a debate (since there was no motion, and therefore no vote), but a conversation. Nevertheless, the increasing polarization of attitudes to reform (of which the Association was a symptom) meant that many members took the opportunity to express their views. Fox and Pitt staked out opposite claims, for and against reform. For Fox, revolutionary ferment made reform urgent; for Pitt, it counselled caution. Burke spoke next. In an emotive exordium, he declared himself ‘an old man’, who had ‘received from his best friends the best advice that they could have given to him . . . to retire’. In such circumstances, there were ‘few subjects indeed’ on which he would venture to speak. One of these was parliamentary reform. As a ‘friend to the country’, he would ‘use his utmost exertions in its service, whenever an attack was made upon the constitution’. In the body of his speech, he advanced two principal arguments against even considering the question. First, he denied that there was any significant popular demand for reform. Rather, the agitation was the artificial creation of doctrinaire politicians who were eager to import French ideas. Under the present system, popular opinion could make itself sufficiently heard, as it had on the Ochakov dispute. Second, temperate reform was impossible. Once the process was started, as in France, it would be captured and directed by the clubs and societies which were so eager to promote Paine’s ideas. As usual, Burke deprecated the application of theory to politics: ‘Theories ought to be founded on experience, and instead of adapting the constitution to a theory, the theory he wished to see grow out of the constitution.’¹⁰² Burke’s second speech of the session was delivered on May, against Fox’s motion for a repeal of the statutes which excluded non-Trinitarians from the benefits of the Toleration Act.¹⁰³ The third successive defeat, in , of a motion to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts had discouraged the movement for a more complete toleration. In the face of such determined and repeated parliamentary opposition, a fourth attempt appeared futile. One group of Dissenters, however, the Unitarians (who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity), remained sanguine that they might be afforded a more limited relief. In the s, when the Blasphemy Act (their chief complaint) had been ¹⁰¹ The signers of its founding ‘Declaration’ ( Apr. ) included MPs (Christopher Wyvill, Political Papers (York, –), iii. –; Eugene Charlton Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization, – (Cambridge, Mass., ), –). ¹⁰² PH xxix. –. ¹⁰³ The doctrine of the Trinity was no mere speculation, but entailed practical consequences for the authority of Church and State. Without it, the Church could not claim divine institution, and ‘the State was still more obviously secular’ (J. C. D. Clark, English Society, –: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, ), , –).
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passed, Socinianism (the then prevalent form of Unitarianism) had been perceived as a dangerous and extreme doctrine. In the intervening century, broadly Unitarian ideas had gained ground, and no longer seemed so shocking. By the s, while many still regarded it as deistic, Unitarianism had achieved an intellectual respectability, if not acceptance. Further, the Catholic Relief Act of showed that Parliament was prepared to extend the bounds of religious toleration. The Unitarians’ decision to petition Parliament was taken in April , and about , signatures were collected. On March , Fox presented the petition and gave notice that he intended to move the repeal of the entire body of penal legislation. By this time, however, external circumstances were much less favourable to the Unitarian cause. In July , during the ‘Church and King’ riots in Birmingham, a mob (with the connivance, at least, of the magistrates) had destroyed the house and chapel of Joseph Priestley, one of the most prominent and articulate of the Unitarian ministers, while events in France continued to hurt the cause of reform in Britain.¹⁰⁴ Burke at first (as he confided to Richard Jr.) hesitated whether to take part in the debate. Convinced that many of the Dissenters (and especially the Unitarians) were engaged in a covert plan to extirpate Christianity in Britain, as it had been destroyed in France, he relished an opportunity to expose ‘their manifest designs, and their conduct’. Yet he also distinguished between ‘the sober and well meaning conscientious dissenters’ and ‘the new French faction’. On March , in the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, he had compromised by speaking against, but leaving before the vote was taken. He could not repeat that course. He was therefore inclined to absent himself, despite his rooted hostility to the Unitarians ( Mar. : C vii. ). A year earlier, Burke had received a personal affront from the Unitarian Society. At the meeting of the society on April, one of the toasts given was: ‘Thanks to Mr Burke for the important discussions he has provoked.’ According to Henry Wisemore (a member who pertly sent Burke a copy of the proceedings), this met with ‘the most cordial approbation of the whole company’, grateful to Burke for having called forth Paine’s ‘Magnificent answer to you, which is a book that must tend to open the eyes of the People of England’. Soon, a cheap edition would be circulated throughout the country ‘in order to undermine, aristocracy, Church Power and national prejudices’ ( Apr. : vi. ). There is, however, no reason to suspect that this insult affected Burke’s attitude. Since the publication of the Reflections, he had suffered much obloquy from the Dissenters. In any ¹⁰⁴ CJ xlvii. –; The Diary, or Woodfall’s Register, Mar. . G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Antitrinitarianism and Toleration in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics: The Unitarian Petition of ’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, (), –; and ‘Public and Parliamentary Support for the Unitarian Petition of ’, Enlightenment and Dissent, (), –.
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case, as early as , he had declared that ‘he could hardly look upon Socinians as Christians’.¹⁰⁵ Since Fox’s motion was morally certain to be rejected, Burke could have absented himself with a clear conscience. Yet he was never reluctant to speak out, and the occasion promised an opportunity to tackle two enemies, Fox and the Unitarians, at once. In the event, Burke decided to speak, and extensive drafts preserved among his papers show that he prepared for the debate carefully.¹⁰⁶ He was therefore well primed when, on May, Fox opened the debate with a speech which, while in many respects moderate, was calculated to provoke Burke. He appealed to ‘the fundamental, unalienable rights of man’: ‘to refuse to any man any civil right, and an equal participation of civil advantage, on account of his religious opinions’ was ‘in itself persecution’. He denied that ‘it was the business of a statesman to consider the effect of any religious opinion’. The law should confine itself to actions, not opinions. By taking such general grounds, Fox turned what might have been perceived as a limited proposal to repeal some obsolete, unenforced statutes, into what could easily be interpreted as a covert attack on the idea of an established church.¹⁰⁷ Having determined to speak, Burke seized the opportunity for a confrontation, rising the instant Fox had concluded. The question turned not (as Fox had argued) on natural rights but on ‘prudence and policy’. The Unitarians, as ‘avowed enemies of the Church’, did not deserve toleration. Indeed, their connections and declared aims, their approval of Paine’s Rights of Man, showed that they were a political faction, not a religious sect. Digressing in the heat of the moment into his favourite subject, the evils of the French Revolution, Burke was called to order. On this occasion, however, there was no repeat of the events of the previous session. The Speaker took Burke’s side, and he was allowed to proceed with ‘a description of almost every event that has taken place in France since the revolution’.¹⁰⁸ Burke’s drafts preserve many passages that he did not use, or that were not reported. One is his rejection of ‘abstractions and universals’ in favour of ‘sound, well-understood principles’. A university professor may write with only ‘the general view of society’; a statesman has ‘a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas’. These circumstances are ‘infinite, are infinitely combined’; not to take them into consideration is to be ‘metaphysically mad’. Steering between abstract theory (as exemplified by Fox’s argument from ‘rights’) and myopic pragmatism, Burke founds politics on ¹⁰⁵ Theophilus Lindsey (a leading Unitarian) to William Tayleur, Mar. , in H. McLachlan, Letters of Theophilus Lindsey (Manchester, ), . The debate was on Mar. (Gazetteer, Mar.). ¹⁰⁶ Drafts related to this speech are at NRO A. XXVII. – and A. XXXVIII. . E.B. may not have used all this material in the debate. From these drafts, E.B.’s executors constructed a conflated text, first published in Works, v. (London, ), and reprinted in later editions (including W vi. –). ¹⁰⁷ PH xxix. –. Ditchfield, ‘Anti-trinitarianism’, –. ¹⁰⁸ Debrett, xxxiii. –. The report in PH xxix. – reprints in a running footnote the text of E.B.’s speech from his Works.
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prudence, ‘a moral and virtuous discretion’. Far from allowing a separation of Church and State, as implied by Fox’s definition of ‘persecution’, Burke argues that ‘in a Christian Commonwealth the Church and the State are one and the same thing’. Far from being indifferent to religion, a Christian magistrate ‘has a right and a duty to watch over it with an unceasing vigilance; to protect, to promote, to forward it by every rational, just, and prudent means’.¹⁰⁹ Again against Fox, Burke insists that the magistrate must also attend to opinions as well as to actions. Burke’s decision to restrict himself to ‘great constitutional questions’ meant that he did not contribute to the debate of April on the abolition of the slave trade. On this occasion, perhaps because public opinion was overwhelmingly against the trade (hundreds of petitions had been received against it), many of its supporters chose not to oppose abolition outright, but to endorse an amendment proposed by Henry Dundas, inserting the word ‘gradually’ into the resolution that the trade ought to be abolished. Burke would certainly have supported the amended motion, which, approved by to , marked the apogee of the anti-slavery movement in his lifetime.¹¹⁰ But what precisely was his attitude to the amendment? In earlier debates, he had spoken in favour of immediate abolition. His silence on this occasion, which could be interpreted as a weakening of his opposition, may have contributed to the equivocal nature of his legacy on the subject. After his death, advocates and opponents of abolition both claimed his approbation.¹¹¹ The contemporary evidence offers support for both sides. While Burke consistently championed abolition in principle, he also recognized that immediate abolition would adversely affect the economy of the British West Indies. In his view, this was too high a price to pay for the moral benefit of abolition. About , when (as he later said) abolition appeared a chimerical project, Burke drew up a ‘Sketch of a Negro Code’ (WS iii. –), an elaborate system of regulations intended to improve the treatment of slaves. In May , when abolition was first proposed with any prospect of success, he declared grandly in its favour: abstracted from all political, personal, and local considerations . . . the Slave Trade was directly contrary to the interests of humanity; that the state of slavery, however mitigated, was a state so improper, so degrading, and so ruinous to the feelings and capacities of human nature, that it ought not to be suffered to exist.
The statement, however, is easily interpreted to say more than Burke meant, for he was never one to exclude ‘political, personal, and local considerations’. Earlier in the speech, he conceded that if ‘opposition of interests’ rendered ¹⁰⁹ W vi. –, ; PH xxix. – (based on NRO A. XXVII. ). ¹¹⁰ Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (London, ), –. ¹¹¹ Robert W. Smith, ‘Edmund Burke’s Negro Code’, History Today, (), –; James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.– (Cambridge, ), –.
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abolition ‘impossible’, then the trade ought to be regulated.¹¹² From a record of his private conversation, he appears to have believed abolition impracticable. Fearing ‘the total ruin of the West India Islands, if the Trade were prohibited’, he advocated ‘a better regulation’ of the ships and other measures to improve the lot of the slaves.¹¹³ Modern readers may feel that Burke deferred too readily to the economic interests of the West India planters.¹¹⁴ In , when the slave trade again came before the Commons, Burke spoke against it more vehemently, calling it ‘the most shameful trade, that ever the hardened heart of man could bear’, and even declared against compensation for those engaged in it.¹¹⁵ In , referring to his own plan (prepared about ) for the regulation of the trade, he rejoiced that immediate abolition, which had then been ‘hardly a thing which could be hoped for’, was now in prospect. He therefore ‘burnt his papers and made an offering of them’ in Wilberforce’s honour.¹¹⁶ On the evidence of these speeches, Burke had become more favourably disposed to immediate abolition, and less concerned with the economic consequences. His silence in is the more surprising. Burke did not, however, burn his papers, for soon after the debate he sent a copy of his ‘Code’ to Dundas, the advocate of ‘gradual’ abolition. An accompanying letter expresses a more cautious attitude than he ever had in Parliament. Considered singly, he argued (as he had in ), the ‘utter abolition’ of the trade was ‘more advisable than any scheme of regulation and reform’. But he feared that, so long as slavery itself was allowed to continue in the West Indies, ‘some means for its supply will be found’. That being the case, ‘it is better to allow the evil, in order to correct it, than by endeavouring to forbid, what we cannot be able wholly to prevent, to leave it under an illegal, and therefore an unreformed, existence’. His own scheme would lead to the ‘extinction’ of the trade, but only after ‘a very slow progress’, by rendering the conditions of the slaves already in the West Indies so tolerable that in time their improved fertility would render ‘all foreign supply unnecessary’ ( Apr. : C vii. –). On questions which engaged his deepest feelings, Burke did not readily compromise. His readiness on this issue to accept a pis aller suggests that abolition, while enjoying his support, was not one of the causes dearest to his heart. If so, he may well have left an ambiguous legacy. Wilberforce remembered Burke’s fervent belief in the rightness of abolition, while Laurence and Windham recalled that he had advocated regulation.¹¹⁷ ¹¹² May ; Morning Chronicle, May (PH xxvii. –). ¹¹³ G. I. Huntingford to Henry Addington, Feb., reporting what French Laurence told him of E.B.’s views (Exeter, Devon Record Office, M/C/F). An extract printed in George Pellew, The Life and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (London, ), i. , contains one material error, the insertion of ‘at once’ before ‘prohibited’. ¹¹⁴ Michel Fuchs, ‘Edmund Burke et l’esclavage’, Réseau: revue interdisciplinaire de morale et politique, – (), –. ¹¹⁵ , May (PH xxviii. –, –). ¹¹⁶ Apr. (PH xxix. ). ¹¹⁷ Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, .
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By , the impeachment had lost most of its practical relevance. Pitt and Dundas had settled a system of governing India that would not be altered by the outcome of the trial. In some respects, as Major Scott never tired of reiterating, they continued or modified policies established by Hastings himself.¹¹⁸ In others, however, they had broken with his practices. The lessons of the Hastings era, they believed, had been learned, and the necessary reforms instituted. In particular, under Cornwallis, strict standards of personal financial integrity had been established.¹¹⁹ What remained at stake was the personal responsibility of Hastings for certain events in India, now seemingly as remote in time as they always had been in place. Burke, of course, continued to invest them with universal moral significance. Yet even he was at heart more concerned with events nearer home: with forwarding a coalition between Pitt and Portland in Britain, with preventing revolution in Ireland, with promoting counter-revolution in Europe. Not that Burke would have admitted to allowing these other preoccupations to dilute his commitment to what he persisted in regarding as the great cause of his life. Nor, in practice, was he required to make a choice. The managers had closed their case at the end of the session of . While the counsel made lengthy speeches in Hastings’s defence, Burke had little to do but listen. Thriving on activity and by nature and habit a speaker rather than an auditor, being thus constrained to listen was frustrating. This enforced silence, however, was confined to the days of the formal speeches. Burke often intervened during the presentation of evidence, and he took much the largest share in the cross-examination of witnesses. Even so, while it remained emotionally draining, the impeachment now made fewer demands on Burke’s time and energy than it had in the past. In February, Westminster Hall was liable to be cold and damp. Complaints to this effect had often been voiced in the previous sessions, and in , with no end to the trial in view, the Lords determined to tackle the problem. They appointed a committee, which inspected the hall in the company of ‘an eminent Stove-maker’ and recommended the placing of two large stoves in the lobby.¹²⁰ These were duly ordered, and the trial resumed on February. That day, and the two following sittings (on the th and the st; the seventy-third to seventy-fifth days), were occupied with a general opening speech by Law. He spoke for about ten hours in all. In part, his speech was a riposte to Burke’s opening address. Like Burke, he reviewed the course of ¹¹⁸ An example is a series of letters to the Public Advertiser, signed ‘Asiaticus’ ( Dec. to Jan. ), collected in Letters to the Right Honourable Henry Dundas, on his Inconsistency as the Minister of India (London, ). ¹¹⁹ Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill, NC, ), –. ¹²⁰ LJ xxxix. , (, Feb. ).
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Indian history, emphasizing (against Burke) its violence, its political instability, and the prevalence of arbitrary power. British rule, especially under Hastings, was on the contrary mild and benevolent. Law then outlined each of the main episodes in Hastings’s political career, as seen by Hastings himself. Occasionally, Law conceded, Hastings broke rules and disobeyed instructions (he instanced the allowances paid to Sir Eyre Coote), but never for personal gain, always for the greater good of the public service. Law also posed as a plain speaker. To the ‘luscious delicacies’ of the managers’ eloquence, the defence could only offer ‘the plain and simple food, I had almost said the dry husk, of fact and argument’. On the st, he closed with what Hastings, hardly an impartial judge, described as ‘great animation, & unexampled Effect’. Even Burke reportedly allowed that it was an ‘elegant peroration’. Habituated to the instant reciprocity of parliamentary debate, Burke immediately wanted to question Law, but (as Hastings rejoiced) was ruled out of order.¹²¹ On February (the seventy-sixth day), Plumer opened the defence on the first charge, Benares. His speech extended over the next four sittings, interrupted by the usual suspension while the judges were on circuit ( February, March, and April; the seventy-seventh to eightieth days). Its main theme was that Chait Singh was a zemindar, and guilty of rebellion. Hastings’s treatment of him was therefore justified. Plumer even defended the proposed fine of lakhs of rupees (the point which, in , had proved decisive with Pitt) as ‘a just and reasonable satisfaction’ for his guilt, indeed moderate compared to his deposition, the penalty he deserved (and suffered). Plumer also introduced one of Major Scott’s favourite arguments, that by not restoring Chait Singh, subsequent British governments had effectively endorsed Hastings’s actions. The second day of Plumer’s speech showed that the new stoves were a mixed blessing. Hastings noted that the hall was ‘crowded & Atmosphere oppressive from Braziers’. He himself felt faint, many suffered from headaches, and Plumer was ‘much fatigued’. All these effects he attributed to the fumes of the charcoal.¹²² Plumer’s speech was interrupted by the usual recess while the judges went on circuit. During this interval, Major Scott made another attempt in the Commons to discredit the prosecution. On March, he moved for an account of the expenses of the trial since . The motion passed without opposition.¹²³Though he said nothing in public, Burke was stung to a lengthy defence of the trial and its expense in a letter to Dundas. Always quick to scent a plot, he interpreted the lengthy speeches on the part of the defence counsel as part of an elaborate strategy to ‘consume all the time which they calculate the publick Patience will allow to the Prosecution’ on the Benares charge. ¹²¹ Bond, ii. –. History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), pt. , . Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹²² Bond, ii. –. Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹²³ The Diary: or, Woodfall’s Register, Mar. .
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By ‘disgusting the publick with this long spun defence against a single charge’, Hastings hoped to find some means ‘to make us drop the whole affair’. One such means was Major Scott’s motion ( Mar. : C vii. –). If so, it was a complete fiasco. On April, when the account was submitted, Scott moved to have it printed. Attacking the managers for their extravagance, Scott cited only one item, guineas for reading newspapers ‘in order to select censurable or libelous passages’. As everyone knew, many of these passages would have been Scott’s own work. The example therefore tended to bring his motion into ridicule. Pitt was particularly sarcastic: ‘what could pay a man sufficiently for drudging through all the publications under the signature of Asiasticus, J.S. and John Scott?’ The motion was an indirect slur on the managers, and he would vote against it. Despite this stinging rebuke, Scott insisted on dividing the House. Humiliatingly, he and his second teller failed to attract a third vote, and his motion was defeated to .¹²⁴ The episode shows that, while MPs might have cooled towards the impeachment, there was no support for ending it prematurely. After Plumer concluded his speech on April, eleven sittings were occupied by the presentation of evidence. Though Burke and Fox were now political enemies, and most of the other managers had sided with Fox, they maintained a semblance of co-operation. Their main task was objecting to evidence and cross-examining witnesses. Having argued for latitude in the admissibility of evidence in making their own case, they could not themselves adopt the defence tactic of pressing every possible objection. Instead, they adopted a strategy designed to appeal to public opinion. They frequently drew attention to what they saw as inconsistencies between the rules that had been applied to their evidence, and the greater latitude now allowed to the defence. But they never pressed their objections to the point of asking the Lords to retire, always acquiescing in the ruling of the Lord Chancellor. Burke made this strategy explicit on the first day of evidence, May, the eighty-second of the trial. When Plumer submitted evidence about Chait Singh’s unpunctuality in making payments due for one of his districts, Burke questioned its relevance. Plumer asserted its indirect relevance, a plea that had been rejected when advanced by the managers. This led Burke to make the first of many protests at the court’s double standard. Having made his point, however, he retreated to the moral high ground: ‘there is no matter of evidence whether direct or collateral that can tend to throw any light upon this subject which we are not willing to admit.’¹²⁵ At the next sitting, on May, the eighty-third day of the trial, Burke again took the lead in scrutinizing the defence’s evidence. His first interventions were to ask a series of questions about documents not produced, implying ¹²⁴ CJ xlvii. . The Diary, Apr. ¹²⁵ London, Library of Lincoln’s Inn, Hastings Trial MSS, vol. , pp. – (quotation from E.B. on –). Minutes, –.
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their suppression by the defence. His suggestion that the Lords should demand these papers (their existence being admitted) recalls a proposal that he made in the pre-trial proceedings: that Hastings be directed to surrender his correspondence with Middleton at Oudh, ‘publick and private’. Sir Lloyd Kenyon (then Master of the Rolls) had objected to this as ‘the conduct of the inquisition’. Pitt, too, had demurred at compelling Hastings to supply evidence against himself.¹²⁶ Burke’s return to the idea shows that he did not accept the right of non-self-incrimination, and that he viewed the role of the court as more inquisitorial than judicial. How far he would have applied this principle to other, more mundane criminal cases is uncertain. The court, of course, did not accede to Burke’s request, which he urged as a matter of principle rather than with any expectation that it might be granted.¹²⁷ On May, the eighty-fourth sitting of the court, Burke scored some notable victories. When Major John Osborne (d. ) was examined by Law concerning the Begums’ ‘rebellion’, Burke objected to his evidence as hearsay. Thurlow conceded that ‘the last part of the answer is not evidence’. To Burke’s further objection, Law was forced to advance a rather Burkean argument. Admitting that the evidence was hearsay, it was nevertheless ‘evidence admissible in the nature of the thing’. If such evidence were rejected, no official reports could ever be received. The appeal to ‘the nature of things’ rather than to the practice of the courts was unusual for Law. To a further objection to hearsay, Law could only concede lamely that ‘I do not mean to press that as evidence’. During Burke’s cross-examination of Osborne, Lord Stanhope objected to a question apparently intended to undermine the witness’s credit. Burke argued at length that cross-examination is often necessarily ‘circuitous’, and that any question which may tend to ‘weaken the competence the memory the credibility any circumstance whatever of the witness’ is permissible. Law countered that cross-examination ought to be applied to the matter of the charge, but Thurlow, for once, implicitly supported Burke. Small in scale as these skirmishes were, they served to boost morale, and they show Burke’s ability to hold his own in disputes on technical legal questions.¹²⁸ Burke concluded his cross-examination of Osborne on May, the eighty-fifth day of the trial. One argument about evidence deserves notice. When Stanhope objected to parole evidence about a written plan, Burke justified the question on the ground that the written records of the East India Company were ‘very imperfect’, and delivered to the managers ‘in a manner ¹²⁶ May (Debrett, xx. –). A year later, E.B. still thought Hastings ‘ought to be forced to produce his Letter Books’, and regretted ‘the days of Parliamentary power before our time’ when ‘the Committee would have adjourned to his house, and there inspected and taken possession, of what ought to be official records’ (to Dundas, Mar., Apr. : C v. –, –). E.B. refused to accept that attitudes to judicial process had changed since the seventeenth century. ¹²⁷ Lincoln’s Inn, Hastings Trial MSS, vol. , pp. –. Minutes, –. ¹²⁸ Lincoln’s Inn, Hastings Trial MSS, vol. , pp. –. Minutes, –.
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to us very unsatisfactory’. When they had a witness, they might therefore properly probe beyond what the records may contain. In substance, Burke was right. Hastings was notorious for circumventing or ignoring the company’s rules about record-keeping. To what extent this was impatience with bureaucratic niceties in the interest of getting things done (as his admirers insisted), and how far the deliberate obfuscation of chicanery (as Burke charged), remains an unsettled question. After Osborne had been dismissed, Plumer began the examination of William Markham.¹²⁹ Markham returned to the witness stand the next day, May, the eighty-sixth. On this occasion, his evidence was constantly interrupted by complaints from the managers that he was retailing hearsay. Burke took the lead in this sniping. A more substantive point was his demand that the nature of Markham’s appointment at Benares should be authenticated. This served both to parody Law’s earlier demands for documentary evidence on uncontentious points and to highlight the irregularity of his position as, in effect, private agent for Hastings rather than for the company. When the examination was over, Burke pleaded exhaustion and asked that cross-examination be deferred. Law objected, and Plumer threatened to call another witness. Burke therefore prepared to proceed, and asked his first question. But on a hint from Lord Derby (–), and on the defence admitting that they were not ready with any written evidence, Thurlow acceded to Burke’s request for an adjournment. Burke was not wont to excuse himself on the ground of fatigue. Why he did so on this occasion is unclear. The sitting had only lasted for two hours, and none of his interventions had been lengthy.¹³⁰ When the trial resumed on May, the eighty-seventh day, Anstruther conducted the cross-examination of Markham. The sitting lasted four and a half hours. Burke is not recorded as speaking, and there were no disputes.¹³¹ On the rd, the eighty-eighth day, the questioning was shared between Burke and Anstruther. Burke’s manner was markedly the more hostile. Markham was certainly not a forthcoming witness. He refused to answer questions about the opium and saltpetre monopolies that he had enjoyed at Benares, admitting that they were ‘not exactly according to the letter of the orders of the Company’, on the ground that to do so ‘might tend to criminate myself ’. This admission was certainly a point gained by the managers.¹³² Burke, especially, had reasons for wanting to discredit Markham, whose father (now Archbishop of York) was Burke’s early friend and later enemy.¹³³ The archbishop was one of the most constant attenders at the trial. The younger Markham was a protégé of Hastings, who had appointed him to the lucrative post of Resident at Benares. To Burke, he typified the tribe of ¹²⁹ Lincoln’s Inn, Hastings Trial MSS, vol. , pp. –. Minutes, –. ¹³⁰ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. History of the Trial, pt. , . Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS. , fo. ). ¹³¹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹³² BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹³³ Supra, i. –.
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bloodsuckers who enriched themselves at the expense of the ordinary people of India. Worse, the elder Markham exemplified the corrupt collusion by which Hastings was being tried before ‘a bribed tribunal’ (C v. ). Burke’s antagonism to Markham fils is therefore likely to have been strengthened by his previous hostility to Markham père. An incident of Burke’s own making illustrates his determination to expose Markham as mendacious in the service of corruption. In the week between sittings, Burke claimed to have discovered, ‘by mere accident’, among his papers at Beaconsfield, a letter of from Markham to his father, which the latter had forwarded to Burke as a member of the Select Committee on India. (This is barely credible.) Insinuating that the letter contradicted the testimony Markham had given at the trial, immediately before the next sitting ( May, the eighty-ninth) Burke returned it with the hint that he ‘might wish to render some Parts of your Evidence more exact’ (C vii. –). When the trial resumed later that day, Markham asked permission to read both his letter and Burke’s into the record. What Burke hoped to elicit remains obscure. There appear to be no significant discrepancies between the letter and what Markham had said in evidence, and Burke did not uncover any when he resumed his questioning. Indeed, on this day, Burke’s grilling of Markham was somewhat less hostile.¹³⁴ On June, the ninetieth day, four less important witnesses were examined. Burke was the only manager to take part, objecting to leading questions and undertaking the cross-examination of all four witnesses, seeking to discredit their testimony as based on rumour and hearsay. On this occasion, he remained reasonably even-tempered.¹³⁵ On the th (the ninety-first day), the defence concluded its evidence on the Benares charge. The cross-examination was again wholly conducted by Burke, in a more rancorous mood than on the previous day, and betraying manifest signs of frustration and anger. One of these led to an unpleasant incident outside the court. Burke cut short his grilling of Captain John Grey (–), who had served in Benares at the time of the Begums’ ‘rebellion’, with the remark, ‘It is pretty visible—I ask no further questions.’¹³⁶ Grey resented the remark as a personal insult (as though Burke had called him a liar) and tried to corner Burke outside Westminster Hall in order to compel an apology or an explanation. Burke stood on his dignity. When asked ‘for the explanation due to a gentleman’, Burke retorted ‘Gentleman! Sir, I do not know you; and I desire that you will not talk in that way to me, who am here invested with a public trust.’ Grey protested that Burke must know him, having just examined him as a witness. ‘I may remember you as a witness,’ Burke conceded, ‘but otherwise I have not ¹³⁴ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹³⁵ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ¹³⁶ BL Add. MS , fos. – (E.B.’s remark, fo. ). Minutes, –.
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the honour to know you.’¹³⁷ Grey’s approach to Burke was certainly improper, though understandable. Burke was in a quandary, torn between a desire to maintain a lofty refusal to answer and his usual eagerness to explain why he was ‘perfectly in the right’. He solved the dilemma by haughtily withdrawing, and then sending Grey a letter (composed in his most pompous and self-righteous manner) which provided the explanation which he had refused to give in person (C vii. –). Ever quick to scent a conspiracy, he twisted Grey’s not unreasonable attempt to exculpate himself into the latest in a string of incidents designed to impugn his own veracity ( n. ). The web of intrigue was woven in Burke’s own imagination, and illustrates his chronic inability to credit honourable motives in others. Trained in the rough play of the House of Commons, where the language of vituperation was not taken literally, Burke was surprised when those whom he traduced in Westminster Hall were offended and sought to vindicate themselves. The remaining three days of the session (, , and June, the ninetysecond to ninety-fourth) were occupied by Dallas’s summary speech. Besides reviewing the evidence itself, Dallas laboured to exonerate Hastings from the charge of personal malice towards Chait Singh.¹³⁸ Over the three days, Dallas spoke (as Hastings calculated) for eight hours and forty-two minutes.¹³⁹ Burke was not the only long-winded orator at the trial. The defence had thus taken an entire session to reply to only one charge; and of the twenty-two sittings, the counsel had required no fewer than nine for their speeches. Such an unhurried pace on their part implicates them in any charge that the trial took longer than necessary. Given that an acquittal was now widely perceived as overwhelmingly likely, devoting so many days to the Benares charge argues some ulterior purpose. Two at least can be inferred. Recognizing that the presentation of evidence would not on its own be enough, the counsel determined in their speeches not only to repel the charges, but to present Hastings and his achievements in a positive light.¹⁴⁰ Second, the counsel, all rising lawyers aspiring to eminence, were naturally eager to display their talents. Not since the celebrated Douglas Cause () had there been such an opportunity for the display of forensic rhetoric.¹⁴¹. Hastings himself, far from expressing impatience at their thus prolonging the trial, enjoyed and praised ¹³⁷ Dublin Evening Post, June . ¹³⁸ Bond, iii. –. On June, Dallas’s speech was preceded by the last of the written evidence (Minutes, –). ¹³⁹ Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹⁴⁰ James Bland Burges thought that ‘a proof of [his having] actually deserved praise and reward’ would be ‘more glorious and con[ducive] to his Interests’ than a ‘simple refutation of the charges’ (to his wife, Mar. : Bodl. Bland Burges Deposit, vol. , p. ). Hastings may still have entertained hopes of entering British public life. ¹⁴¹ At the trial before the Lords, the longest speech (by Alexander Wedderburn, later Lord Loughborough) extended over four days and lasted over twelve hours (A. Francis Steuart, The Douglas Cause (Glasgow, ), ).
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these speeches.¹⁴² Listening to lengthy panegyrics on himself was a retrospective salve for the abuse he had suffered from the managers’ tongues, and especially from Burke’s vituperation. At , Burke was by eighteenth-century standards an old man. He was by no means ready for retirement. When they were at Margate in , Richard Jr. observed how little to his father’s taste was ‘the lounge of a bathing place’, and was surprised to find him ‘amuse himself better than I expected’.¹⁴³ Describing himself, in his speech against parliamentary reform, as ‘become old and infirm in the service of his country’, Burke used an apt military simile. As ‘invalids . . . were always put upon garrison duty, and though not the first for foreign service, were those who ought first to move when the garrison was attacked’, so he would assume a more defensive, semi-retired, role.¹⁴⁴ His pushing Richard into a more active political life confirms this shift in his sense of himself. In , more direct intimations of mortality came in the loss of two friends of long standing and the near loss of his wife. Sir Joshua Reynolds was one of the oldest of Burke’s English friends, they having met about .¹⁴⁵ Their friendship has left little trace in the epistolary record. They met chiefly on social occasions while both were in London, and rarely needed to write to each other. Theirs was a more intimate friendship than Burke enjoyed with Samuel Johnson, partly because the two were never intellectual rivals, but perhaps mainly because they agreed about politics. Reynolds had been in a declining state of health since about , when he lost the sight of one eye. On December , he gave the last of his fifteen presidential addresses to the Royal Academy. The occasion was memorable in two ways. At one point, the beams supporting the floor were heard to crack, and a brief panic ensued. (Burke subsequently raised the question of the safety of Somerset House in the Commons.) More happily, when Reynolds pronounced his famous last words (‘Michael Angelo’), Burke rose to congratulate him, quoting Milton’s tribute to Raphael at the beginning of book VIII of Paradise Lost: The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear So charming left his voice, that he awhile Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear. ¹⁴² Law ‘in Continuation very able & animated . . . closed his speech w[ith] great animation, & unexampled Effect’; Plumer ‘heard with great attention, & universal Conviction’ (Hastings’s Diary, , , – Feb ; BL Add. MS , fos. , , ). ¹⁴³ R.B. Jr. to Fitzwilliam, July (NRO A. IX. ). ¹⁴⁴ Apr. (PH xxix. ). ¹⁴⁵ Sir James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare (London, ), .
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‘Nobody but Burke’, Samuel Rogers (–) would later reminisce, ‘could have done such a thing without its appearing formal and theatrical. But from him it seemed spontaneous and irresistible.’¹⁴⁶ Milton had always been one of Burke’s favourite poets. In August , Reynolds reciprocated the compliment, arranging the publication of an engraving of his portrait of Burke (Plate ), inscribed with a quotation from Milton’s praise of Abdiel, the sole angel who dared to oppose Satan’s call to rebellion: So spake the fervent Angel; but his zeal None seconded, as out of season judg’d Or singular and rash, . . . unmov’d, Unshaken unseduc’d unterrify’d His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal: Nor number, nor example with him wrought To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind Though single. From amidst them forth he pass’d Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustain’d Superior, nor of violence fear’d ought, And with retorted scorn his back he turn’d On those proud tow’rs to swift destruction doom’d. (v. –, –)
Burke, however, was offended by this apt and elegant accolade, asking Reynolds to withdraw the print and erase the inscription.¹⁴⁷ Two reasons for his vexation can be suggested. He did not like being reminded of his unpopularity, witness his response to Samuel Parr’s well-meant compliment ( June : C v. –). Second, in August Burke was trying to reclaim the Whigs, not turn his back on ‘those proud tow’rs’ which he fervently hoped were not ‘to swift destruction doom’d’. By January , Reynolds’s end was evidently near, with his ‘melancholy and obstinacy growing worse and worse’ (C vii. ). Burke was called twice to London in the expectation that death was imminent. On the second occasion, Reynolds had recovered enough of his habitual philosophical composure for Burke to be able to report that ‘Nothing can equal the Tranquility with which he views his End. He congratulates himself on it as an happy conclusion of an happy Life’ ( Jan.: ). On February, Reynolds died. Burke was ¹⁴⁶ E.B. in the Commons on Dec., asking for an enquiry, and an inspection of Somerset House, to which Pitt agreed (PH xxviii. –). Samuel Rogers, reported in Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, ), ii. –. ¹⁴⁷ Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. b. , fo. (probably from Frances Crewe, since most of the anecdotes in the collection appear in ‘Extracts from Mr Burke’s Table-Talk, at Crewe Hall. Written down by Mrs Crewe’, Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society, (–), pt. ). James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (nd edn. London, ), ii. –.
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appointed one of the executors of his will, along with Philip Metcalfe (–) and Edmond Malone. Being an executor involved Burke in what he modestly described as ‘some Business’ ( Feb. : C vii. ). While some of his duties would prove troublesome, the executorship was a duty of gratitude as well as friendship. For Reynolds had bequeathed Burke £,, besides cancelling a bond for another £,.¹⁴⁸ Burke’s first task was the composition of an obituary.¹⁴⁹ Next came the organization of a public funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. Burke was a pall-bearer, and so missed what for his brother, further back in the procession, was the most moving moment: as the coffin reached the choir, the organ began to play (). Then there was an engraved card to be sent to well-wishers, which needed an appropriate inscription and form of thanks (–). Later, Burke promoted a subscription for a monument in St Paul’s, himself contributing £ (C ix. –). This was a fitting commemoration, for Reynolds himself had advocated a scheme to decorate St Paul’s, and had been instrumental in the erection of a monument there to Dr Johnson. Malone hoped that Burke, too, would be memorialized there, but this was not to be.¹⁵⁰ More mundane duties included securing the payment of debts due to the estate. Catherine II had not paid for the painting that she had commissioned in , and which had been sent in . In , Burke had drafted a letter to the empress, urging her to give active support to the counter-revolutionary cause. At the desire of the king and the ministers, however, he did not send it (vi. –, –). Burke cannot have relished the irony that he should now become the empress’s correspondent in the undignified character of a debt-collector.¹⁵¹ Sir Joshua’s principal legatee was his favourite niece, Mary Palmer, herself a long-standing friend of the Burkes. Since her inheritance was valued at about £,, speculation about her marriage prospects was soon rife. Gossip even named Richard Burke, Jr.¹⁵² Mary’s choice, however, fell on a much older man ( in ), also a friend of the Burkes: Murrough O’Brien (–), Earl of Inchiquin (in the Irish peerage). The Burkes were delighted, and on July the couple were married at Beaconsfield.¹⁵³ ¹⁴⁸ The bond was for money borrowed to repay part of W.B.’s debt to Lord Verney (C vii. ). ¹⁴⁹ Published in the Morning Chronicle, Feb. . E.B.’s draft is printed in C vii. –. ¹⁵⁰ Note by Malone, in Reynolds, Works (nd edn. London, ), ii. . ¹⁵¹ Jan. (C vii. –). Letters were also sent to the heirs of Prince Potemkin, who likewise owed money for a painting (; ix. , ). ¹⁵² Sir Gilbert Elliot to Lady Elliot, Apr. , in Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, ed. Lady Minto (London, ), ii. . ¹⁵³ Buckinghamshire Parish Registers: Marriages, ed. W. P. W. Phillimore and Thomas Gurney, v. (London, ), .
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The marriage appears to have been happy, despite the disparity in age. But the new Lady Inchiquin proved importunate and demanding. Much of her fortune consisted of her uncle’s art collection, parts of which she wanted to sell. Burke was ‘distressed’ by her repeated request that he should write some kind of introduction to a sale catalogue.¹⁵⁴ Having been an executor, Burke was a natural choice for one of her trustees. This was a delicate business, for Lord Inchiquin was heavily in debt. Even the initial arrangements therefore required complicated securities.¹⁵⁵ The difficulties remained unsolved for years, and as late as October they brought Burke into sharp conflict with John King (another trustee), as well as with Lady Inchiquin.¹⁵⁶ Whether, in this last episode, Burke was exercising proper prudence or being needlessly cautious is hard to judge. If the latter, he can hardly be faulted for exercising his trusteeship conscientiously, and not as a matter of course. Excuses offered to evade an irksome or unwelcome task are not always to be taken literally. Even so, two comments that Burke makes about himself while trying to escape writing another account of Reynolds, and an introduction to a catalogue of his art collection, seem genuinely revealing. Having written one character (the obituary notice), he protested, he could not write another: this kind of things cannot be diversified without End—and if they were to be so diversified, I am not fit for it; who am used only to have some substantial matter of Praise or blame, to express, according to my powers, with force and clearness; but as to meer compliments or pretty turned Phrases, I never had any hand at them. (C vii. )
This is a perceptive account of the characteristic excellence of his own style. Though often criticized as flowery and ornate, at its best it is naturally forceful rather than fastidiously elegant. To disqualify himself from the introduction, Burke protests that he has never bought a painting on the basis of his own judgement, and that he knows ‘nothing of the Arts, but what I may possibly have endeavourd to know concerning the Philosophy of them’ (). This, in turn, rings true. It certainly describes the Burke of the Philosophical Enquiry, which pays little attention to the visual arts. Further, it helps to explain why, though the owner of a substantial art collection, Burke so rarely refers to it. Books and words were the true nutriment of his imagination. ¹⁵⁴ The date of E.B.’s letter is uncertain, but probably later than Dec. , the date tentatively assigned in (C vii. –), and closer to the date of the sale of Reynolds’s collection (– Mar. ). ¹⁵⁵ UBL (III), ; C vii. –. ¹⁵⁶ C ix. , –; E.B. to John King, Oct. (BL Department of Manuscripts, Microfilm ).
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In , when Malone was writing a biographical preface for a collected edition of Reynolds’s Works, Burke wrote down ‘some hints’ for Malone’s use. One of these helps illuminate the distinction between theories and principles adumbrated in his speech of May on the Unitarian Petition: He was a great generaliser, and was fond of reducing every thing to one System more perhaps than the variety of principles which operate as in the human mind and in every human Work will properly endure. But this disposition to abstractions generalizing and classifications is the great glory of the human mind, that indeed which most distinguishes man from other animals and is the Scource of every thing that can be called Science. (C ix. )
Burke, too, was a habitual generalizer. But, at least after the Philosophical Enquiry, he was wary of systems. In politics, particularly, he regarded them as the proper province of the professor rather than the statesman. Yet writing about Reynolds, more clearly even than in the Unitarian speech, Burke is careful not to denigrate theory or abstraction. Without some kind of organizing framework, even politics would be ‘only a confused jumble of particular facts and details’ (W vi. ). Even in politics, his objection is not to theory but to its inappropriate application. In the arts, the human mind can indulge its propensity to systematize at no greater cost than being wrong. The collected edition of Sir Joshua’s Works, edited by Malone, appeared in May . Malone undertook the work in order to memorialize Reynolds as an author as well as an artist, preserving a number of lesser writings together with his principal claim to literary fame, the fifteen Discourses on Art. The first edition was suitably monumental, in two handsome quarto volumes. A reprint in the cheaper octavo format was published in .¹⁵⁷ In , Burke had himself received a similar accolade, an edition of his Works in three volumes quarto, edited by French Laurence and Walker King. A slighting reference to it as ‘my Ineptiæ’ (to Thomas Hussey, ante Feb. : C viii. ) may suggest a lingering unease at his (mainly occasional) writings being ushered into the world in so pompous a format, more appropriate for a poet or a philosopher, or for posthumous homage, as in the case of Reynolds. The Works reprints all of Burke’s previously published writings, from the Vindication of Natural Society () to the Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (). The motive behind the collection was probably to demonstrate Burke’s political consistency, increasingly called into question since , by ¹⁵⁷ Frederick Whiley Hilles, The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Cambridge, ), –.
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asserting an implicit unity in the Works. Perhaps because many readers already owned separate editions of the most important individual pieces, the collected edition was slow to sell. Not until was it reprinted in octavo.¹⁵⁸ Burke’s friendship with Reynolds represented the personal side of the life that Burke had made for himself in England, where he came to know, and in some cases to know well, many of the most eminent men of the time. Richard Shackleton, who died on August , was a reminder of the life he had left behind in Ireland. Shackleton, Burke’s oldest friend (the two had met in ), had spent his entire life at Ballitore, succeeding his father as master of the school (which Burke had attended from to ), and in turn relinquishing it to his son. Since his retirement in (C iv. ), Shackleton had remained active in the business of the Society of Friends, whose annual meetings in London he regularly attended. Burke and he continued to meet on these occasions, though all efforts on Shackleton’s part to maintain a correspondence had failed. ‘Your family are very bad correspondents indeed,’ he complained in one of his last letters, ‘I give you up as lost for correspondents; but must ever hold you to my heart, as near & dear friends.’¹⁵⁹ For Shackleton, of course, letters, which linked him to the great world beyond Ballitore, were of more importance than they were to the Burkes. Burke heard of his old friend’s death from his daughter Mary (now Mary Leadbeater), who had visited Beaconsfield in . In reply, Burke wrote a moving letter of condolence. ‘Declining, or rather declined in life,’ he lamented, ‘the loss of friends, at no time very reparable, is impossible to be repaired at all at this advanced period’ ( Sept. : vii. ). For Burke, Shackleton represented a kind of life which he admired, but could not himself have lived. Earlier in , when Richard Jr. was in Ireland on his first mission, he had been planning to visit Ballitore when forced at short notice to return to London. When Shackleton next wrote, he regretted the missed visit, and made no secret of his distaste for the public career on which Richard Jr. was embarking. In words that applied as much to Edmund as to his son, Shackleton pitied ‘such of you as are perpetually conflicting with illprincipled, self-interested, acrimonious, insidious spirits’, descending ‘into the deep, dismal, under-ground pits of political intrigue, where the lamp neither of reason, nor religion can burn’. How much more pleasant and preferable to live ‘under the canopy of heaven, & breathe the pure air of
¹⁵⁸ Todd, a–b.
¹⁵⁹ Shackleton to R.B. Jr., Apr. (YB OF .).
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simplicity, sincerity, candour & truth’. From another, this might have seemed no more than conventional piety, but Shackleton had actually lived the kind of life he praised, ‘exercised in some honest vocation’ while ‘enjoying with tranquillity the endearments of domestick life’.¹⁶⁰ As a Friend, Shackleton was of course opposed to the establishment of any religion. Nor did he soften, or palliate, his opinion in order to placate Burke. Even in the course of praising Burke’s Reflections, he had felt obliged to protest against its doctrines on this topic.¹⁶¹ Because Burke knew Shackleton, he neither doubted his sincerity, nor suspected him of any covert desire or design to subvert the establishment of which he disapproved. Indeed, his friendship with Shackleton lies behind the passage in the speech on the Unitarian Petition where he distinguishes the Society of Friends from the Unitarians: ‘Quakerism is strict, methodical, in its nature highly aristocratical, and so regular that it has brought the whole community to the condition of one family.’ Yet Burke was not alarmed by such an apparent imperium in imperio, for ‘it does not actually interfere with the Government’ (W vi. ). From a modern perspective, the theological opinions and institutional practices of the Friends and the Unitarians are not far apart. That Burke should have placed them at opposite ends of the religious spectrum exemplifies the little importance that he attached to the speculative content of religious belief. What mattered, when he came to define the limits of toleration, was the political consequences. A conviction of the unlawfulness of church establishments might be held harmlessly by a Friend, which in a Unitarian, who drew from it practical conclusions, would be subversive and the proper object of vigilance and repression. When news arrived of Shackleton’s death, Burke was still suffering from the after effects of a near-tragedy in his own home. In late August, Jane suffered a ‘bad cold’, followed by ‘spasms and pains in her Limbs, with soreness and stiffness’, which made Burke suspect ‘something Gouty’ (C vii. , , ). One evening, probably August, Burke gave her ‘a two-ounce phial of laudanum’ instead of her prescribed medicine. When the mistake was discovered, on Jane’s visibly worsening, Burke was distraught. The local apothecary was summoned, as well as Dr James Lind (–) from Windsor. Fortunately, Jane was violently sick, thereby discharging most of the laudanum. More purgatives were prescribed. By the th, she was out of danger, though still with little appetite and complaining of ‘a soreness in her stomach and bowels’. By September, she was ¹⁶⁰ Shackleton to R.B. Jr., Apr. (YB OF .). ¹⁶¹ Shackleton to R.B. Sr., Dec. (YB OF .).
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well enough to add a short postscript to a letter to William Burke. In the letter itself, Burke minimized the incident, saying only that Jane had been ‘ill for a day, by mistake, of a medicine’. The danger appears to have been greater than this would suggest, but a day or two later, Burke could report her ‘complete recovery’.¹⁶² ¹⁶² E.B. to James Lind, Aug.; to W.B., Sept.; to R.B. Jr., c. Sept. (C vii. –, ). The ‘twoounce phial of laudanum’ derives from the more circumstantial account in William Hickey’s Memoirs, ed. Alfred Spencer (London, –), iv. –. Hickey (son of Joseph Hickey, E.B.’s lawyer), received the news in Calcutta. Since his Memoirs long postdate the event (after ), his version (in which no fewer than five physicians are summoned) may be exaggerated.
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On September , as soon as Jane was well enough to travel, the Burkes left Beaconsfield for Bath. Journeying slowly, they arrived on the th (C vii. , –). While at Bath, Burke himself suffered for a time from the recurrence of a ‘Bowel complaint’ ( Sept.: ). After drinking the waters for nearly two months, and bathing eighteen times, Jane’s ‘general health’, he reported to Richard Jr., was as good as ever. But with no perceptible improvement in the complaint in her limbs (for which Bath had been prescribed), their doctors did not encourage a longer stay (). They therefore left Bath on November.¹ Burke’s visit to Bath was embittered by his increasingly gloomy view of the political landscape, constantly exacerbated by discomforting news from the Continent. He was especially distressed by the reports of the September massacres, accounts of which reached him just as he was leaving for Bath. The massacres led to a great increase in the emigration of French clergymen, many of whom reached Britain in a state of destitution. On the military front, the French victory at Valmy on September led to the unexpected retreat of the allied army under the Duke of Brunswick (–). Not only did this end the prospect of re-establishing order and monarchy in France, it opened the prospect of French domination of Western Europe. On British opinion, the effect of these developments was mixed. Though the massacres caused a significant revulsion in British feeling against the French Revolution, the French military successes encouraged their sympathizers to applaud their war against despotism and to promote the spread of French ideas in Britain itself. Yet, faced with these appalling and menacing events, the British government persisted in its policy of strict neutrality, wary even of humanitarian aid to the refugee clergy. From Ireland, where Richard was on his second visit, Burke received a series of discouraging reports about the intransigence of the Castle and its unwillingness to conciliate the Catholic majority. Again, the British ministry refused to intervene. Worse even than this neutrality was the positive evil of their choice as ¹ C vii. . Earlier, E.B. left Bath for about a week ( Sept. to c. Oct.) to attend the installation of the Duke of Portland as Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
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Governor-General of Bengal of Sir John Shore, whom Burke regarded as a corrupt tool of Hastings. Short of reappointing Hastings, no name could have appeared to Burke a more decided repudiation of the impeachment.² Nor was Burke more in sympathy with his former associates than with the ministry. The Whig leaders still refused to break with Fox, ignoring the mounting evidence of his commitment to the principles of the French Revolution and to reform at home. Despite the obvious national emergency, which required a united front against the dangers from abroad, prospects of a coalition had been blighted by petty considerations of power and personal resentments. Out of favour with both sides, Burke described himself in a plangent letter to Fitzwilliam as ‘a struggling friend swimming on the last Plank of his wreck’, one who had ‘aimed not amiss’, but having undertaken things ‘above my measure of bodily and mental Strength, and above the external means with which fortune had furnished me’, was ‘crushed in the ruins of what I vainly endeavoured to support’ ( Oct. : C vii. ). Burke’s expressions of despair are never to be taken literally. Bleak as the outlook appeared, the next two years, indeed the remainder of his life, would be devoted to continued efforts to support the tottering fabric of civilization. Of all the troubling thoughts that pressed upon him at this time, Burke was most deeply moved by the plight of the exiled clergy. Victims of cruel and unprovoked persecution, for Burke they were the most palpable evidence of the evils of the French Revolution. As early as the Reflections, he had painted a glowing picture of the Gallican Church as a bastion of French civilization, and had denounced the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of July (one of the last measures mentioned in the book; R [–]). Successive anticlerical measures then made the situation of those clergy who did not accept the new regime increasingly difficult, and eventually intolerable.³ Many left France rather than submit. One of the earliest exiles, and the first French bishop to reach England, was Jean-François de La Marche (–), since Bishop of St-Pol-de-Léon in Brittany. An early and uncompromising opponent of the Revolution, he emigrated to England in April and quickly established contacts with prominent social and political figures. In July , having seen only a ‘little’ of him, Burke judged him ‘a most estimable and a most amiable man’ (C vi. ). Tireless and determined, La Marche became the recognized leader of the exiled clergy, and took charge of the earliest efforts to provide systematic relief.⁴ His personal efforts, however, were quite unable to cope with the exodus that followed the abolition of the monarchy, the imposition of the ‘second serment civique’ (by decrees of ² E.B. to Fitzwilliam, Oct. ; to Dundas, Oct. (two letters), to R.B. Jr., , –, Nov., to Fitzwilliam, Nov. (C vii. –, –, –, –, –). ³ John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (London, ), –. Dominic Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after (Bath, ), –. ⁴ Bellenger, French Exiled Clergy, –.
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and August ), and the September massacres. By September , about , clergy were estimated to have reached England, and some , by December.⁵ Most were penniless. Burke was one of the first to recognize that ‘a general Subscription’ for ‘that admirable and heroic Clergy’ would be needed (to Richard Jr., – Sept.: C vii. ), and became one of its most fervent supporters. He at once composed an emotive ‘Case of the Suffering Clergy of France’ for insertion in the newspapers and distribution as a broadside.⁶ This was published immediately prior to a public meeting in London on September, called to set up a formal organization. Burke (still at Bath) was named to the committee in absentia.⁷ John Wilmot (–), a wealthy MP with some experience of organizing charitable enterprises, was elected chairman. To gain credibility and respectability, Wilmot recruited a number of grandees (such as the Duke of Portland) as nominal members. Burke attended only one meeting (on October), otherwise transmitting his views through Walker King.⁸ In England, attempts to procure charitable support for the French clergy could expect to encounter a good deal of indifference and even hostility, compounded of traditional Francophobia, anticlericalism, and anti-Catholicism, and the belief that, as privileged members of a corrupt and oppressive system, they largely deserved their misfortunes. Wilmot was keen that the committee should be a strictly charitable enterprise, appealing on behalf of undoubtedly needy recipients. To maximize support and donations, he sought to make it as unpolitical as possible. Burke took a different view. As he told Dundas, he was keen precisely to make the charity ‘politick’, a way of interesting ‘the feelings of our Countrymen whether of pity or indignation, against the French System’, against which ‘every subscriber will be pledged’ (c. Sept. : C vii. ). ‘It is well known’, his ‘Case’ begins, ‘that a cruel and inhuman persecution is now, and hath for some time past been carried on by a faction of atheists, infidels, and other persons of evil principles and dispositions, calling themselves philosophers, against our brethren, the christians of France’.⁹ Burke was therefore annoyed when he learned that Wilmot meant the committee to confine itself to charitable work, and to remain neutral with regard to the Revolution itself. Incensed, he nearly withdrew from it in disgust (to Walker King, ante Sept.: –). Another cause of friction was that (as Burke thought) the committee was too parsimonious in its distribution of relief. Burke attributed this miserliness to fear of criticism from ⁵ Bellenger, French Exiled Clergy, . These figures exclude the Channel Islands, where another , clergy had taken refuge by Sept. and , by Dec. ⁶ E.B.’s ‘Case’ was published in The Times and the Morning Chronicle on Sept. . A copy of the handbill (not recorded in Todd) is preserved in a volume of Wilmot’s correspondence concerning the committee (YB Osborn Shelves, c. ). ⁷ Morning Chronicle, Sept. . ⁸ ‘Minutes of Committee of Subscribers for the Relief of the French Clergy’ (BL Add. MS ). ⁹ The Times, Sept. .
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hostile newspapers (to Fitzwilliam, Oct.: –). Another instance of pusillanimity was that the government, having offered the use of the former royal palace in Winchester to accommodate the clergy, and even to undertake some necessary repairs, refused to provide bedding. Outraged that such humanitarian assistance should be considered as ‘a breach of neutrality’, Burke ascribed the refusal to a craven fear of offending ‘the sovereign assassins of France’.¹⁰ By temperament a partisan, Burke could scarcely understand neutrality. As regards the French Revolution, he had from the outset believed that not to oppose it was in effect to support it. The urgent need for the British government to abandon its much vaunted neutrality with regard to the internal affairs of France became a familiar theme in his letters to ministers. After the attack on the Tuileries and the abolition of the monarchy, he warned Lord Grenville that continued ‘neutrality’ in such circumstances would be suspected of concealing ‘some lurking wish in favor of one of the Parties in the Contest’. At the least, Britain should withdraw its ambassador and refrain from recognizing the republic ( Aug. : C vii. –). The ambassador was withdrawn, but the stance of neutrality maintained. After the September massacres, and the Duke of Brunswick’s retreat, Burke began to argue more forcefully for much more than non-recognition. While at Bath, he composed a second memorandum (the text is subscribed November, just before he left) designed to influence ministerial policy, ‘Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs’.¹¹ Shorter and more outspoken than ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’ (), it begins with a brief survey of the successes of French aggression and the alarming state of Europe, bemoaning that ‘there is no vigour any where, except the distempered vigour and energy of France’, and that elsewhere only ‘tameness and languor’ are in evidence (WS viii. ). Burke then poses two questions: why did the Duke of Brunswick’s campaign fail; and how can this failure be redeemed? To the first, he offers two explanations: the absurd pretence of not interfering with ‘the interior arrangements of France’, of protecting the person of the king rather than the existence of the monarchy; and the neglect of the émigrés (–). Since these seem inadequate, Burke suspects that there is some ‘secret’ (), and he hints at a conspiracy between Prussia and France to partition the Netherlands (). Answering the second question, he argues that no anti-French alliance has any prospect of success, unless Britain takes a leading role. Britain should make every effort to forge such an alliance, but it should not be defensive ¹⁰ ‘Minutes of Committee’, , Sept., Oct. (BL Add. MS , fos. –, , ). E.B. to Lord Sheffield, Oct. (UBL (III), –). ¹¹ WS viii. –. Like ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, it was published only posthumously, in Three Memorials on French Affairs (). The MS at NRO (A. XXXVIII. ) has a postscript omitted from the printed texts.
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(as had been mooted) but offensive.¹² Its object should be the restoration of the old monarchical government of France, and the restitution of property. Though Burke gave copies of the ‘Heads’ to Pitt and other ministers, it had no effect.¹³ His ideas (especially on how much of the ancien régime should be restored) were not widely shared, either in Britain or (outside émigré circles) on the Continent, nor would he ever succeed in securing their adoption. For Burke, anything short of a crusade to reverse the destructive effects of the French Revolution was tantamount to its support. He could not understand those who, while revolted by the excesses of the Revolution, nevertheless regarded the old system as intolerably repressive and did not want it restored. Nor was everyone disposed to believe, as Burke did, that the fight against Jacobinism ought to obliterate and abolish all earlier animosities and political antipathies. Convinced that the fight against Jacobinism superseded all other political differences, Burke had been an early and vigorous advocate of an anti-Jacobin coalition between the ministry and the ‘old’ Whigs. Such a junction had been in prospect since about May . The split within the Whig party had been further exacerbated by the formation (in April), by Charles Grey and his friends, of the Association of the Friends of the People. This was pledged to more extensive reforms than many Whigs were prepared to countenance, as became apparent when Grey gave notice of a motion for parliamentary reform on April. Another alarming development was the popular success of part II of Paine’s Rights of Man, published in February. When the government drafted a proclamation against this and other ‘seditious’ writings, Pitt consulted Portland in advance, and adopted some of his suggestions about its wording before publishing it (on May). This partial rapprochement led to talks about a possible coalition. On May, Burke had a long conversation with Portland, submitting two possible schemes. On June, at a small gathering of party leaders at Burlington House, Burke declaimed for an hour against Fox and in favour of a coalition. Privately, the others agreed. But they remained unwilling to break with Fox. Though the discussions continued for some weeks, they came to nothing.¹⁴ The groundwork, however, had been laid for further negotiations in November. Soon after his return from Bath, Burke threw himself with characteristic energy into a renewed effort to forge a coalition, or at least an understanding, between Pitt and the Portland Whigs. His first step was to see Pitt (probably on ¹² E.B. does not name the ‘shop’ from which the ‘commodity’ of a defensive alliance originated. Mitchell speculates that Pitt was meant (WS viii. n. ). The reference is actually to the ‘Hopefull Scheme’ attributed by E.B. to the comte de Mercy-Argenteau and the baron de Breteuil (to R.B. Jr., Oct. : C vii. ). ¹³ E.B. showed the ‘Heads’ to Lord Camden while at Bath, and left copies with Pitt on Nov. and with Lord Hawkesbury on the th (C vii. , , ). He also sent a copy to Fitzwilliam (). ¹⁴ E.B. to Loughborough, May (C vii. –). Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury, ed. Third Earl of Malmesbury (London, ), ii. –. F. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, ), –. L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party, – (London, ), –.
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November), taking advantage of a meeting about the French refugees to broach other topics, and leaving with him a copy of his ‘Heads for Consideration’. The next day, Burke and Windham saw Loughborough, and agreed that Pitt should be told that, while no ‘Official coalition’ was in prospect, many opposition members were prepared to extend informal support to the ministry. On November, Burke and Windham saw Pitt and Grenville; on the th, they met Hawkesbury. Both meetings were cordial, but inconclusive. Burke then returned to Beaconsfield, and reported to Portland (then at nearby Bulstrode) on the th. Portland approved Burke’s initiative.¹⁵ Events took a less favourable turn when Burke was called back to town for a political dinner at Loughborough’s. This meeting, even in the absence of Fox, Sheridan, and Grey, exposed the divisions in the Whig ranks. Burke was not authorized to offer Pitt the anticipated assurances of support. Worse was to come. As late as November, Burke had ‘strong hopes’ of reclaiming Fox, recent atrocities in France having provided him with ‘an honourable retreat’ from his early enthusiasm for the Revolution ‘without any imputation of inconsistency’. Fox, however, returning to London for the new session of Parliament, was utterly unrepentant. No revolutionary outrage could revolt him, and he remained ‘disposed to lower and palliate whatever seemd shocking in their procedure’, obstinately convinced that ‘the danger to this Country chiefly consisted in the growth of Tory principles’. Portland, while eager to support ‘every thing which can be done against the extending French influence abroad or at home, not excepting a war’, was not prepared to shatter his party by breaking with Fox. Accordingly, when Loughborough was again offered the Great Seal, Portland advised against his acceptance. Burke attributed Portland’s unwillingness to suspend opposition to ‘his Doubt of getting any considerable number of his friends to fall in with him’. For Burke, this was a negation of the true principle of party, which in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents () he had defined 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. ). Now he reiterated to Fitzwilliam, ‘People who do not agree in principle are not of the same party’. A ‘small well orderd Phalanx’ was preferable to ‘an apparently great, but confused, and radically discordant Corps’. In short, ‘Party ought to be made for politicks: not politicks for Party purposes.’ Fitzwilliam, however, though hardly less alarmed than Burke at the spread of French principles, was no more willing than Portland to break with Fox. He therefore disapproved of Burke’s approaches to Pitt, whom he had by no means forgiven for the unconstitutional means by which he had seized power in .¹⁶ ¹⁵ E.B. to R.B. Jr., Nov. ; to Fitzwilliam, Nov. (C vii. –, –). ¹⁶ Loughborough to E.B., Nov. ; E.B. to Loughborough, Nov.; E.B. to Fitzwilliam, Nov. (C vii. –, –). Fitzwilliam to R.B. Jr., Aug. ().
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Still Burke did not despair. Two French decrees made the aggressive aims of the new republic clearer than ever. On November, the French declared the Scheldt open for navigation (to which it had been closed since , thereby throttling the trade of Antwerp in favour of Amsterdam); and on the th, they promised aid to any oppressed people that wished to throw off the yoke of tyranny. These were not internal matters, and the British government protested at both. Yet, on December, Fox made a flaming speech at the Whig Club, flaunting more openly than ever his enthusiasm for French principles. Portland, on the other hand, shown a draft of the king’s speech, explicitly hostile to France, promised to support it without amendment.¹⁷ Thus when Parliament met, the breach for which Burke had been working could no longer be postponed. In the previous session, he had spoken only rarely, on the impeachment or on constitutional questions. Now he determined to break that self-imposed semi-silence, and to return to a full participation in the parliamentary arena. After the fall of the monarchy and the September massacres, and the increasing probability of a war between Britain and France, unrestrained enthusiasm for the French Revolution came (at least to the propertied classes) to seem not merely misplaced but unpatriotic. Many early sympathizers recanted.¹⁸ At the opening of the new session of Parliament on December, the speech from the throne spoke of ‘a Spirit of Tumult and Disorder’ and ‘Acts of Riot and Insurrection’ at home, and ascribed to France ‘an Intention to excite Disturbances in other Countries’ and ‘to pursue Views of Conquest and Aggrandizement’. Fox boldly denied the reality of any ‘Insurrection’, advocated significant reforms (such as the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts) to remove discontents, and accused ministers of using scare tactics to justify repression at home and war abroad. Now assured of a more patient hearing than he had received in , Burke spoke at length, attacking Fox in particular and the French Revolution in general. Against Fox’s panegyric on ‘liberty’, Burke averred that he thought ‘even a despotism, where life and property were secure, preferable to that state of liberty, where both were continually liable to be invaded’. Since the French had already ‘declared war against all kings, and of consequence against this country’, he called for a firm and speedy resistance to French aggression. When the house divided on Fox’s amendment to the address, it was defeated by to . The minority included ten of the managers of the impeachment.¹⁹ ¹⁷ Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, – (Cambridge, ), –. Fox’s speech was printed in the Morning Chronicle, Dec. , and as a pamphlet. Loughborough to Pitt, Dec. (NA PRO. //, fo. ) conveys Portland’s approval of the king’s speech. ¹⁸ Eminent examples include Samuel Romilly (Life of Sir Samuel Romilly, Written by Himself (rd edn. London, ), i. ); Charlotte Smith (The Emigrants, ; and The Banished Man, ); and Arthur Young (‘French Events Applicable to British Agriculture’ ( Oct. ; Annals of Agriculture, (), –) . ¹⁹ CJ xlviii. –; PH xxx. –.
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Though small, this minority was formidable and tenacious. The next day, when the address was reported, Fox again spoke vehemently against the impending war. During the course of his speech, he quoted Burke’s earlier definition of ‘a free government’ against him, and ridiculed his ‘age of chivalry’. In response, Burke charged Fox with misrepresenting his opinions by quoting an isolated passage. As a corrective, he offered not a definition but a description of his idea of ‘liberty’: that he should be suffered to enjoy life as long as the Almighty permitted him—that his person should be free while he conformed to the laws of his country—that he should not be disturbed in the exercise of his religion—and that he should be left at the full enjoyment and disposal of his property, whether inherited, or acquired by his industry.
This ‘inventory of freedom’ is close to the list of the ‘real rights of man’ as defined in the Reflections, notably in excluding any participation in politics (R []). In Britain, these rights were secure; in France, they were not, despite the more extensive range of ‘metaphysical’ rights enjoyed in theory. Again, while professing that he ‘by no means wished to hurry the nation into a war’, he affirmed that ‘France had really declared war against them’. Fox’s amendment was again defeated, this time without a division.²⁰ Undeterred, on December Fox moved to send a minister to Paris to open negotiations with the new republic.²¹ Burke again spoke at length, concluding that ‘a war with France was necessary for the security of the liberties of England, the interests of Europe, and the happiness of mankind’. For the first time, Burke sat on the Treasury benches.²² A young American lawyer, Robert C. Johnson (–), who witnessed the debates of and December, left a candid outsider’s assessment of Burke’s speaking. Johnson was prejudiced in Burke’s favour, eager to be pleased, and shared his views on the French Revolution. On December, Johnson called on Burke at home, and was hospitably received. Burke was in excellent health and form. Believing him to be , (he was actually ), on the evidence of ‘a firm step and from his whole appearance’, Johnson thought he looked more like : ‘his eye lively, keen and penetrating, his voice strong, and his conversation highly elegant and animated’. A single half-hour of Burke’s talk ‘abundantly repaid’ him ‘for crossing the Ocean’: ‘I love him as a father and venerate him as of a superior order of beings.’ Yet when, later the same day, Johnson heard Burke speak in the House of Commons, he was disappointed. Admittedly, he was a critical auditor. Hearing in succession three of the greatest speakers of the day (Fox, Sheridan, and Burke; Pitt was not in the ²⁰ Dec. (PH xxx. –; quotation from E.B. on ). ²¹ Lord Gower, the last ambassador, had been recalled on Aug. . ²² PH xxx. –. The report in Bell’s Oracle emphasizes that E.B. spoke ‘from the Treasury Bench’ (Supplement to issue of Dec. ).
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House), he found fault with them all. Fox was ungraceful, ‘his pronunciation almost disgusting’. Sheridan was ‘much too theatrical to be convincing’ (a common criticism). Next, Burke delivered ‘an impassioned speech’ which was received with ‘repeated acclamations’ and ‘uncommon attention’. Yet something was wrong: his action was almost as violent and not more graceful than that of Fox. Shall I dare to say that as a speaker he did not please me, that if I had not known that it was Burke my attention would have been wearied, and that I heard nothing that I expected? No, I will not form an opinion. He frequently spoke low; I heard not the whole; and I have no right to judge.
The next day, Johnson repeated the experience. Burke was ‘grave and temperate, pathetic and affecting’, and heard ‘with the deepest attention and frequent bursts of applause’. But all to no avail: ‘I had rather read than hear his speeches if it had been possible. I would have been pleased. I wished it, but I could not.’ Johnson was not impossible to please: he praised Henry Dundas, Thomas Erskine, and William Adam.²³ His disappointment in the great speakers was perhaps no more than the result of over-sanguine expectations. While Britain was not yet, as Burke had asserted ‘engaged in actual war’, war was now probable, and the ministry introduced legislation to place foreigners in Britain under closer control. A further indication of Burke’s enhanced standing is that Pitt sent him a copy of the Aliens Bill, and invited his comments prior to its being debated in the Commons ( Dec. : C vii. ). Heartily approving the measure, Burke had little to say about the bill itself. Instead, he used the occasion of its second reading on December to stage a rather histrionic display. On the th, in a debate on a bill to restrict the export of naval stores and arms, he had reported that the French had sent orders to Birmingham for several thousand daggers.²⁴ The government was aware of these orders. Dundas had even obtained specimens of the daggers (). Burke secured one of these, and hid it in his coat when he went to the Commons. The debate soon wandered from the Aliens Bill to an airing of Whig differences. Burke declared that he and Fox now differed ‘systematically and fundamentally’. Arguing by implication against those Whigs (such as Portland and Fitzwilliam) who had agreed to support the ministry on selected issues (such as the Proclamation of May ), he insisted that, with war imminent, ‘those who wished to support government, must support it systematically’. Then, after briefly commending the Aliens Bill, he advanced his reasons for advocating a war with France. France, Britain’s natural enemy and rival, was in its new guise more aggressive and threatening than ever. The ²³ Vernon F. Snow, ‘Robert C. Johnson’s Appraisal of Burke’s Eloquence’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, (), –; and ‘The Grand Tour Diary of Robert C. Johnson, –’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, (), – (esp. –). ²⁴ The Diary, or Woodfall’s Advertiser, Dec. ; Debrett, xxxiv. .
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opening of the Scheldt was in direct violation of international treaties. The decree of November, offering fraternal assistance to all oppressed peoples, was ‘a direct denunciation of war against Great Britain’. The French had acknowledged sending unofficial emissaries to foment unrest and even rebellion in Britain. Worst of all, the French were establishing a ‘system of atheism’. The Aliens Bill was therefore necessary to exclude from Britain those ‘murderous atheists, who would pull down church and state; religion and God; morality and happiness’.²⁵ Towards the end of his speech, after referring to the French order for , daggers, Burke produced one of the specimens and threw it on the floor. ‘This’, he exclaimed, ‘is what you are to gain by an alliance with France.’ Then, retrieving the dagger, he held it as he delivered his emotive peroration: When they smile, I see blood trickling down their faces; I see their insidious purposes; I see that the object of all their cajoling is—blood! I now warn my countrymen to beware of these execrable philosophers, whose only object it is to destroy every thing that is good here, and to establish immorality and murder by precept and example—‘Hic niger est hunc tu Romane caveto’.²⁶
The effectiveness of Burke’s use of the dagger is difficult to estimate. Those who agreed with him probably responded to the dagger as powerful rhetorical gesture, while his opponents naturally derided it as theatrical and bathetic.²⁷ A response according to partisan prejudices is also suggested by two contrasting caricatures which commemorated the incident.²⁸ In The Dagger Scene, or the Plot Discovered ( Dec. : BMC ), James Gillray, an anti-revolutionary, depicts a dignified Burke. Pitt, Dundas, and Speaker Addington look shocked; Fox, Sheridan, and Taylor cower with conscious guilt that their plot has been discovered (Plate ). Isaac Cruikshank was more critical in his Reflections on the French Revolution ( Jan. : BMC ). Though he dominates the print, this Burke, with a dagger in each hand and exclaiming disjointed phrases (rather than the connected speech given him by Gillray), and left almost alone, seems more like a madman imprisoned in his own solipsistic world (Plate ). In the background, the Speaker holds up his hands in amazement, while Fox, running away, comments ‘he’s got the French disorder’. Even ²⁵ PH xxx. –. ²⁶ Ibid. . The quotation is from Horace, Satires . . : ‘Such a man is evil: beware of him, Roman’. ²⁷ The Morning Chronicle published comic paragraphs on E.B.’s dagger (, Jan. ). Bell’s Oracle ( Jan.) compared the effect of the dagger to that produced by the imaginary one in Macbeth. Henry Addington, the Speaker, recalled that the production of the dagger ‘excited a general disposition to titter’, but that ‘observing he had failed of making the intended impression’, E.B. ‘by a few brilliant sentences at once recalled the seriousness of the House’ (George Pellew, The Life and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (London, ), i. –). Addington, however, misremembered E.B. as having produced the dagger ‘after only a few preliminary remarks’, whereas in all the newspaper reports he makes the gesture at the end of his speech. This casts some doubt on his account. ²⁸ Gillian Russell, ‘Burke’s Dagger: Theatricality, Politics, and Print Culture in the s’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, (), –.
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so, as with many caricatures, the pose captures something of his characteristic intensity, a quality missing from the formal portraits. Although the dagger caught the public attention, it represents only one side of Burke’s rhetorical repertory. Burke often moved rapidly between the sublime and the ridiculous, and the ‘dagger’ speech offers a notable instance. Early in the speech, excoriating Fox for denigrating Britain’s friends and allies as ‘despots’, he ‘begged leave to tell a short story’: A very singular parrot was brought to prince Maurice, which had acquired the gift of language. The prince asked where it lived—it mentioned the place. What was its business—it replied, to call together the chickens, and I do it very well—chuck, chuck, chuck (imitating the cry employed to call chickens.) Now, he must own he considered the parrot that could call together the chickens, as a much greater statesman than the parrot that could only call out, fool, cuckold, and knave.
Such ludicrous anecdotes were characteristic of Burke’s speaking, and their breaches of decorum were much ridiculed by contemporaries. Later in the speech, he quoted Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and he concluded with a quotation from Horace.²⁹ Such a cornucopia of allusion illustrates the range of Burke’s reading and his readiness in debate. The war that, in Burke’s mind, had already begun was not long in becoming a reality. In January , Louis XVI was tried and executed. In response, the French minister was ordered to leave England. On February, the Convention declared war on Britain and the United Provinces, inviting their populations to rise against their despotic governments. The news reached London on the th. On the th, Parliament received the official notification from the king.³⁰ A grand debate, on an address in reply, was held on the th. Despite calls for unanimity, Fox and his small band of supporters mounted a vigorous opposition to the war. Not content with contesting the first piece of wartime legislation, the Traiterous Correspondence Bill, they took the offensive by staging three debates on motions of their own. Burke took full advantage of the opportunities offered by these debates to publicize his views on the necessity and justice of the war. Given that he spoke at length six times in just over four months, and in debates covering much the same ground, Burke was remarkably successful in avoiding repetition.³¹ Admittedly, he rarely confined himself closely to the particular aspect of the subject then nominally in debate. But he drew on a wide range of arguments and evidence to diversify his main theme, the iniquity of the Jacobin republic and the need to fight and destroy it. Since Burke was repeatedly replying to his opponents’ arguments, these speeches are less ²⁹ PH xxx. –, , . E.B. probably read about Prince Maurice’s parrot in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (book II, ch. ). ³⁰ The Times, Feb. . PH xxx. –. ³¹ , Feb., , Mar., Apr., June (PH xxx. –, –, –, –, –, –).
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carefully crafted expositions of his views than the three formal memorials that he wrote for the ministers between and . In compensation, they exhibit far greater rhetorical vigour and emotional power. Writing for the ministers, Burke was self-consciously restrained, and deliberately adopted a moderate tone. Speaking in the heated atmosphere of a Commons debate, Burke gave greater rein to his feelings and to the natural bent of his mind, which was certainly not towards moderation, and least of all on the subject of the French Revolution. These speeches show Burke in an ebullient mood, confident that the ministers have at last seen the error of their policy of neutrality and that public opinion supported the war. This optimism would soon be dented. Indeed, in one respect it was already misplaced. Those who were eager to resist French aggression did not necessarily want to restore the ancien régime. Few genuinely shared Burke’s commitment to a war against Jacobinism, rather than against French hegemony, a traditional object of national jealousy.³² At the first reverses, which came quickly, support for the ideological crusade that Burke wanted would melt away. Not even the war with France could halt the glacial progress of the trial of Warren Hastings, which continued in a world of its own. The sixth session of the trial opened on February , the ninety-fifth day, to about twenty peers and a ‘thin’ audience. Only in one respect did the trial reflect recent events. Loughborough now presided, in place of Thurlow, forced to resign as Lord Chancellor at the end of the previous session. The first member of the Portland party to join Pitt’s ministry, Loughborough had accepted the Great Seal (much to Burke’s satisfaction) on January. Hastings thought he showed a ‘marked inattention’ to the proceedings. Certainly, he was not biased in Hastings’s favour as Thurlow had been. (In , he would be one of the few peers to cast a guilty verdict.) Law spoke for about four hours, opening the defence on the second charge (the Begums of Oudh). The two main planks of his argument were that the treasure deposited with the Begums was not their property; and that their support for Chait Singh’s rebellion justified Hastings’s actions against them. Law concluded his speech at the next sitting, the ninety-sixth, on February. Speaking for a further three and a half hours, he stressed the solidity of the evidence in proof of the ³² Emma Vincent Macleod distinguishes between the larger number of ‘loyalist’ supporters of the war (who were primarily concerned with preserving the British constitution) and the minority of ‘crusaders’, who shared E.B.’s aim of reversing the Revolution in France and restoring the French monarchy (A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the War against Revolutionary France, – (Aldershot, ), –).
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Begums’ disaffection, and he minimized the harsh measures (of which Sheridan had made so much) used to extract the treasure from their grasp.³³ On February, the ninety-seventh day, Law began the submission of written evidence. This generated a series of acrimonious disputes, when the managers (as in ) demanded that the defence should be bound by the same rules as the counsel had insisted be observed when the managers presented their evidence. The French declaration of war had further embittered the rift between Burke and the Foxites. Burke, however, was no longer quite so isolated. Anstruther and Elliot, too, were now on the same side, supporting Pitt and the war.³⁴ Perhaps to demonstrate that political differences did not affect the impeachment, the managers orchestrated an unusual show of solidarity, no fewer than five of them (Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Elliot, and Anstruther) speaking on points of evidence. Since the Begums charge was Sheridan’s responsibility, he took the lead, especially in quoting the defence’s own previous arguments against them. Burke, too, played a prominent part in raising objections. Thus Burke interrupted Law, as Law had often interrupted him, to insist that the purpose and substance of the evidence be stated before it was read. Burke later called for Middleton to be examined in person, instead of his examination in Calcutta being read. When Law asked Burke’s consent to read about the Patna Cause from the Appendix to a report of the Select Committee, Burke was heavily sarcastic: ‘To be sure every part and step of this fails in almost every part of it but however we have no objection at all[,] let it go.’ (Law had previously objected to the admission of such evidence.) Further disputes centred on what evidence might be taken as read. As so often, while both sides professed to be eager to save time, both indulged in lengthy arguments that served only to consume it.³⁵ The ninety-eighth day, February, was devoted to oral evidence. The first witness examined was Captain John Gordon (–), who had served in Oudh in . His testimony was intended to prove that the Begums were indeed in rebellion, and that Hastings’s punitive actions against them were therefore justified. During his examination, the managers (principally Burke, supported by Adam) successfully objected to leading questions, to questions about opinion rather than fact, and to hearsay evidence. During cross-examination, Burke again scored some telling points against Law. But when Law objected to Burke’s request to defer the remainder of his cross-examination, Stanhope virtually accused Burke of meaning ³³ Bond, iii. – ( Feb.), – ( Feb.). Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ³⁴ Anstruther’s conversion can be dated between Mar. (when he criticized the war against Mysore) and May, when he supported the royal proclamation. Elliot initially agreed with E.B. and praised the Reflections highly, but in May refused to support E.B.’s attempt to force a break between Portland and Fox. In June , he remained ‘unable to go all lengths with him on the subject which most engrosses his mind—the French question’. But in December , he dissociated himself from Fox (Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, ed. Lady Minto (London, ), i. , ii. , –). ³⁵ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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‘to spin out the time in order to gain another day’. After a protracted dispute, Burke concluded his questioning. A second witness, Captain David Williams (–), who had also served in Oudh, was then sworn in, but his examination (by Plumer) had not proceeded far when the court adjourned.³⁶ Williams continued his evidence the next day, February, the ninetyninth sitting. Burke was again forward in objecting to leading questions and to hearsay evidence, which Plumer defended as proving the currency of reports about the Begums’ rebellion, on which Hastings might reasonably have grounded his actions. When Burke restated his objection, Loughborough suggested that he was impugning the force of the evidence rather than its admissibility. Sheridan then contended that the transmission of the reports to Hastings ought to be proved, leading to an altercation between him and Plumer. When Williams produced a paper purporting to be a request to raise troops for the Begums, both Burke and Sheridan raised objections to its authenticity. At the close of the sitting, Hastings made a personal appeal to the court to sit as often as possible before the judges went on circuit, and renewed his plea that the trial should be concluded that year. In response, Burke observed that the length of the trial now depended on ‘the mode of conducting’ adopted by the defence. The Commons would do anything in their power to expedite the proceedings.³⁷ In truth, both sides were at fault. The counsel had made many technical, as well as substantial, objections to the managers’ evidence. They could not reasonably expect to be allowed such short cuts as the report of a Commons committee, after being themselves so legalistic in requiring the utmost authentication. Besides, the counsel (Law especially) manifestly relished the gladiatorial aspect of the trial. As lawyers, they enjoyed scoring points off the politicians as much as the managers liked to defeat the lawyers at their own game. The real victim of these contests was Hastings, condemned to listen to interminable wranglings that often obscured rather than illuminated the substantive questions. On February, the th day of the trial, Captain Williams was again cross-examined by Burke and Sheridan. Burke first sought to undermine Williams’s testimony by adverting to a discrepancy between what he had said at the trial, and the affidavit he had sworn at Lucknow. When Stanhope objected to Williams being questioned about a written paper, Burke was furious: I have a right to cross examination to remind a Witness of what he has deposed in another place I maintain that right I stand for it on the grounds and principles of justice in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain. ³⁶ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ³⁷ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. Hastings believed that the Lords had intended this to be the last day before the recess, and attributed the next three sittings to his intervention (Add. MS , fo. ).
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Such an outburst was typical of Burke when his nerves were frayed and the propriety of his conduct called into question. On this occasion, Burke’s indignation was more than usually justified, for on February Stanhope had not objected when Law had tried to hand Captain Gordon a copy of his affidavit to refresh his memory. The application of this double standard by Thurlow when he presided, and by hostile lords such as Stanhope, gave some credibility to Burke’s belief that the Lords were biased in favour of Hastings. Stanhope did not press his objection. Burke then sought to discredit the affidavits, and to shift responsibility for the insurrections from the Begums to the British: to the oppressions of Colonel Hannay, to the dispossession and imprisonment of local zemindars, and especially to the execution in of Mustapha Khan, for which Williams had been responsible. This was an adroit use of cross-examination to (in effect) restate his own case.³⁸ The lengthy grilling of Captain Williams was concluded on March, the st day. Burke and Sheridan again divided the labour. Burke sought evidence that British oppressions had provoked the revolt, while Sheridan exposed the weakness of the evidence for implicating the Begums.³⁹ Loughborough opened the next sitting (on March, the nd day) with a reprimand to managers and counsel alike for their disorderly conduct, especially in interrupting each other. For the future, each side should be allowed to present its case without intervention from the other. While professing to submit, Burke countered that a brief question asking for an explanation might often save time. The first witness to be examined was Lieutenant Thomas Shuldham (c.–), an artillery officer in the company’s army. Questioned by Dallas about the disaffection of the Begums, he replied that it was ‘universally believed’. After an objection from Burke on the ground of hearsay, Shuldham replied at greater length when the question was repeated, drawing an analogy with ‘the same manner that it is universally believed in this Country there exists a party coalesced to destroy this happy constitution’. Resisting Sheridan’s attempt to interrupt him, Shuldham continued: ‘the people of England have no legal evidence to establish the fact but the notoriety of it has been deemed a sufficient proof to produce associations in the different Counties to resist the danger.’ This was a provocative analogy. In the Commons debate on December, this had been the great ‘fact’ which the Foxites had denied. Nothing could more strikingly have exposed the irony of Burke and Sheridan acting in tandem, or the irrelevance of the trial to contemporary ³⁸ BL Add. MS , fos. –; fos. – for Law and Gordon on Feb. Minutes, –. The execution of Mustapha Khan had earlier been debated in the Commons on , , and Mar. (Debrett, xxvii. –, –, –). ³⁹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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issues. Suddenly, if only momentarily, the trial irrupted from its time warp into the real world of .⁴⁰ After this dramatic outburst, the trial resumed its wonted routine. When the examination and cross-examination of Shuldham was concluded, the defence called two further witnesses to testify to the notoriety of the Begums’ fomenting the insurrection. Colonel Patrick Duff (–) and Major John Lumsdaine (d. ) had both served under Hannay in Oudh. Crossexamining Lumsdaine, Burke again sought to shift responsibility for the ‘rebellion’ to Hannay’s oppressive revenue administration. When Lumsdaine denied knowledge of any complaints against Hannay, Burke tried to stimulate his memory by asking about a letter from the wazir. Law objected. Sheridan then recalled the examination of the notoriously amnesic Middleton, when ‘we never got his recollection of any one fact till after he had denied all knowledge of it and we refreshed his memory by shewing him the Letters.’ Another unpleasant altercation between Law and Burke followed. After the long argument about the propriety of the question, Lumsdaine’s answer was anodyne: ‘I never heard of that Letter till this instant.’ Exasperated by Burke, Law made a rash concession: ‘In order to accelerate the business the honourable Managers may ask any one earthly thing they please from this moment to the end of the Trial.’⁴¹ This was said in a passing gust of passion. At the next sitting, the defence continued to resist what they thought improper questions. After the usual hiatus while the judges went on circuit, the trial resumed on April, the rd day. This sitting, too, proved argumentative, with many disputes about procedure and the propriety of individual questions. After the conclusion of Lumsdaine’s evidence, the defence called John Wombwell (d. ), a former company paymaster in Oudh. When Burke cross-examined him about the treasure extracted from the Begums, he professed to know nothing. He was likewise evasive when Burke asked him about pensions paid by the wazir to Englishmen. This question elicited two objections. Archbishop Markham branded it ‘illiberal’, as tending to ‘lead the witness to impeach himself ’. Dallas argued that, Wombwell having said that he knew no more than was in his accounts, the managers should produce the accounts. When Burke seized the opportunity to postpone further examination until the accounts were produced, Dallas objected again. Wombwell had come to testify ‘at great inconvenience to himself ’, and his duties with the Yorkshire militia required him to return as soon as possible. While justifiable from a legal point of view, the defence strategy in dealing with Wombwell’s evidence ⁴⁰ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, . On Dec. , the king’s speech spoke of a ‘Design to attempt the Destruction of Our Happy Constitution’ (CJ xlviii. ). In the ensuing debate, Fox and Sheridan denied, while E.B. and Windham affirmed, the existence of a conspiracy against the constitution (PH xxx. –). ⁴¹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –.
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created an unfortunate impression that there was much to hide. Having called Wombwell to testify about rumour and hearsay, they sought to prevent his giving evidence about transactions in his own office. After protesting that Wombwell had been ‘extremely ill’ since the events in question, and reference should therefore be made to the accounts, they effectively blocked the production of those accounts. An impartial observer would conclude that this was not the strategy of conscious innocence.⁴² On April, the th day of the trial, the disputes about evidence were conducted, for once, with less acrimony. The first arose from Burke’s attempt, in cross-examination, to discredit the testimony of James Peter Auriol, that he had never heard the fact of the Begums’ rebellion doubted. Burke asked about a motion made at the Supreme Council to institute an enquiry into the Begums’ rebellion: did this not imply some doubt? Plumer objected to the question as asking Auriol to speak from memory about a written paper. When Loughborough sustained the objection, Burke made a lengthy but temperate speech on the difference between examination in chief and cross-examination, defending the propriety, in cross-examination, of any attempt to supply defective memory or detect prevarication. The second argument was provoked by Plumer asking Robert Hudson, the East India Company’s examiner of correspondence in London, whether in any documents at the India House, ‘the Begums or their Ministers ever assert that they are entitled to hold their Jaghires for their lives’. Burke objected that this was asking Hudson to put a construction on a paper that ought to have been produced in evidence, a species of question to which the defence had previously objected (most recently, with respect to Burke’s own question to Auriol). Plumer retorted that he was merely trying to prove a negative, and Loughborough opined that similar questions had often been asked. This led Burke to discriminate between asking ‘whether a Witness knows of any paper’ and asking ‘his judgment whether such or such opinions were delivered in any paper’, distinguishing a matter of fact from ‘an opinion or a construction’.⁴³ The last of the written evidence on the Begums charge was submitted on April, the th day of the trial. As often, the objections were livelier than the evidence itself. Interest first quickened when Plumer, in order to show that jagirs were resumable, proposed to read a minute on the subject of Indian land tenure by Sir John Shore. In October , Burke had been outraged when Shore was to succeed Lord Cornwallis as Governor-General of Bengal.⁴⁴ Despite ministerial assurances of Shore’s abilities and integrity, Burke’s opinion of him had not softened. Burke therefore objected to receiving the minute, ⁴² BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ⁴³ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ⁴⁴ E.B. to Dundas, Oct. (two letters); to Francis Baring, Oct.; Dundas to E.B., Oct.; E.B. to Dundas, Oct. (C vii. –, –, –, –).
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on two grounds. Shore was one of those ‘concerned in fabricating’ Hastings’s defence; and he should have been called earlier, in person, and thus been available for cross-examination (Shore had left for Calcutta at the end of October). In response, Plumer stressed the official status of the minute, and praised Shore’s character. Burke retorted with a lengthier objection, now calling Shore ‘one of the Accomplices in sundry of his [Hastings’s] offences’, and adding that, while he might know about revenue matters, he was not therefore ‘conversant in the laws and customs of the Mogul Empire’. Loughborough observed that these objections went rather to the weight and credit of his evidence than to its admissibility. Although Burke had acquired a remarkable grasp of legal principles, he would never acquiesce in this technical distinction between admissibility and validity.⁴⁵ One other of the day’s disputes deserves notice, though Burke took no part in it. Law argued that some evidence (to which the managers had objected), implicating Saadat Ali Khan (d. ; the wazir’s half-brother) in the Begums’ ‘rebellion’, was admissible as tending to support the veracity of the affidavits. When Loughborough opined that it was ‘so totally vague as to be void of all application’, Law retorted that it was ‘not only competent but most material’. When Loughborough reaffirmed his opinion, Law interrupted to protest that ‘it is competent evidence and if I had not thought so I would not in this stage have produced it.’ These were bold words to a presiding judge. Though clearly nettled, Loughborough remained calm, icily requesting Law to ‘state your question’ for the Lords and judges to adjourn and consider. At this point, Plumer intervened to resolve the confrontation by abandoning the point.⁴⁶ The incident illustrates the differences in personality and style between Law, pugnacious and bullying, and the more emollient Plumer. It also helps to explain why the most bitterly contested arguments about evidence were fought between Law and Burke, each incurably convinced that he was right and incapable of conceding gracefully. On April, the th day of the trial, after a few more documents were authenticated, Plumer began his speech summarizing the evidence on the Begums charge. Continuing on April and May, he concluded on May, the th sitting. Altogether, he spoke for over twelve hours.⁴⁷ Fifteen days had thus been consumed by the defence on only one charge. Nor did Dallas show any greater sense of urgency, taking four days (, , , and May; the th to th sittings) to open the defence on the Presents charge. At the end of the speech, Hastings again addressed the court, explaining that his defence on the Contracts would be abbreviated by waiving speeches of introduction and summary, in order to allow the managers to complete their reply before ⁴⁵ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ⁴⁶ BL Add. MS , fos. –. ⁴⁷ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. Bond, iii. – ( Apr.), – ( Apr.), – ( May), – ( May).
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the end of the session. Not that he thought these speeches redundant. Rather, he thought that, even if he were not acquitted, the eloquence displayed by his counsel would transmit him to posterity with those ‘many other victims of false opinion’ who ‘have done service to the States which employed them, and been requited with unthankfulness and persecution’. In a brief rejoinder, Burke rejected the imputation of injustice and ingratitude, and hinted that Hastings’s motive in truncating his defence was to create an excuse to impugn the justice of a conviction.⁴⁸ At this point, the pace of the trial appreciably quickened. Most exceptionally, on May, the th sitting, the court sat from . to .. This allowed the whole of the defence’s evidence on the Presents charge to be submitted, punctuated only by brief mutual recriminations between Law and Burke as to who wasted more time, and by a more remarkable outburst from Archbishop Markham. While Burke was cross-examining James Peter Auriol, trying to extract an admission that he had heard rumours of the bribe supposed to have been offered to Hastings by Kyallaram, the archbishop angrily protested that Auriol was being treated not as a ‘Gentleman’ but as a ‘Pick pocket’. Had Robespierre or Marat been in the managers’ box, they could not have said anything ‘more inhuman and more against all sentiments of honour and morality than what we have been often used to since this Trial has commenced’. So apoplectic was the archbishop’s appearance that (Burke told his son) ‘such furious agitation, and bodily convulsion, not producing death, were wonderfull’. For once, Burke remained calm, ostentatiously declining to comment, except to say that the managers were examining not gentlemen but witnesses, and therefore were entitled to every freedom necessary to elicit the truth. After this altercation, Plumer began the submission of the ‘abridged’ evidence on the Contracts charge, without an introductory speech.⁴⁹ The th day, May, was another long sitting, from . to .. Again, the submission of evidence was enlivened by a dramatic intervention by one of the Lords. When Burke asked William Wright (the company’s auditor of Indian accounts) a question about Stephen Sulivan’s opium contract, Stanhope objected (though the defence had not done so) to receiving oral evidence about matters that were on record. This provoked a lengthy remonstrance from Burke. After protesting against individual Lords making objections, and observing that the defence had asked many similar questions, he launched a scarcely veiled ad hominem attack on Stanhope as one of ‘that ⁴⁸ Bond, iii. – ( May), – ( May), – ( May), – ( May). BL Add. MS , fos. – (Hastings’s speech; printed, not quite complete, in Bond, iii., pp. xxii–xxiii), – (E.B.’s riposte). ⁴⁹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. Add MS , fo. (Hastings’s timings). E.B. to R.B. Jr., June (C vii. –). On June, Samuel Whitbread read an account of Markham’s speech from The World of May, and moved for a prosecution. No action, however, was taken (PH xxx. –).
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half learned breed that having got the word record into their mouths imagine that there is some strange mystery in it out of the way and the road of common sense’. The managers, if not ‘professional lawyers’, were ‘not ignorant of the principles of the Law’, and had a right to ask for explanations even of ‘matters which may be found upon record’. Stanhope curtly moved to adjourn, and when the Lords returned Lougborough announced that the objection was upheld. In response, Fox observed that, if Lords intended to take upon themselves to object to questions not challenged by the defence, they should do so impartially. Burke entered a much longer protest, largely restating his previous arguments.⁵⁰ This was one of Stanhope’s most gratuitous interventions, and it served only to waste time.⁵¹ After two unusually long and disputatious days, the final sitting of the year, on May (the th), was short (lasting only from . to .) and tame. The defence examined Wright on some technical questions, such as the rate of exchange between current and sicca (newly minted) rupees, and the number of maunds (a unit of measure) in a ‘Bag’ of rice. Cross-examining Wright (who had never been to India), Burke asked how he knew such things. When Wright acknowledged that he spoke ‘only from what appears upon the Consultations’, Burke retorted that such questions were precisely analogous to the one objected to by Stanhope the previous day. After Plumer concluded the evidence on the Contracts charge, Law submitted the testimonials solicited on Hastings’s behalf in Bengal, and the farewell addresses from the British inhabitants of Calcutta and from the army. Finally, Hastings addressed the court, again affirming his own rectitude, and pleading for the trial to be concluded that year. But he was now sufficiently chastened to ask allowance for ‘errors resulting from the honest imperfection of my own judgment, from occasional deference to the counsels of others, and from the varying sense of expedience which at different periods governed my own’. Had he spoken thus in , he might have spared himself the whole ordeal.⁵² The rapidity with which the defence closed its case took the managers by surprise. The defence on the first two charges had been conducted at such an unhurried pace that they had not anticipated being required to begin their reply so early as June, the date set by the Lords for the next sitting. On May, Burke reported this unwonted haste to the Commons, and a select committee was formed to consider the matter. On the th, this committee reported that for various valid reasons the managers would need at least a ⁵⁰ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. Add. MS , fo. (Hastings’s timings). ⁵¹ Stanhope prided himself on his professional expertise. Indignant at clerical and legal opposition to his reforming ideals, on May he promised that ‘on another occasion I shall teach the noble and learned lord [Thurlow, Lord Chancellor] law, as I have this day taught the bench of bishops religion’ (PH xxviii. ). ⁵² BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. Add MS , fo. (Hastings’s timings). Hastings’s speech is printed in Bond, iii., pp. xxviii–xxxii.
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week to prepare to reply on the Benares charge, and four or five weeks for the others.⁵³ On June, Grey moved for a further postponement, until the following session. Predictably, this was opposed by the partisans of Hastings, who had circularized sixty or seventy members asking them to attend. (By June, many MPs had left town, so that even a modest influx of members might carry a question.) The Hastings camp thereby secured a rare victory, defeating Grey’s motion by to (with Pitt in the minority).⁵⁴ Burke (who is not reported as speaking) was outraged, and gave notice that he would move a motion on the subject the following day. On the morning of June, he wrote at length to Dundas, warning him of the consequences of allowing the Hastings faction to triumph. This letter presents one of the fullest accounts of Burke’s fantasy of the malign influence wielded by ‘the Indian interest’ (C vii. –). Burke need not have feared. In reality, as the next day’s proceedings in the Commons showed, their triumph was accidental and temporary. Though Hastings again summoned his supporters, active whipping on the part of the ministry ensured that a reworded motion to request the Lords to postpone the trial was approved by to . Several friends of Hastings reversed their stand, being unwilling to ignore a ministerial directive.⁵⁵ Once again, Pitt intervened, unobtrusively but decisively. ‘As to your trial’, one of Hastings’s correspondents in India observed in December , as long ago as the vote on the Benares charge, Pitt’s behaviour had convinced him that it would be ‘protracted as long & terminate in such manner as he shall be pleased to prescribe’.⁵⁶ Hastings continued to pay dearly for his temerity in criticizing Pitt’s India Act, and for Major Scott’s injudicious decision to cultivate Thurlow rather than Pitt. During his years in opposition, Burke’s life had followed an annual routine. He spent the parliamentary session in London, and the summer at Beaconsfield. These summer retreats he always professed to regard as therapeutic, opportunities to farm, read, and relax. After the publication of the Reflections, as he became more of a political maverick, with links to the ministry as well as to the opposition, and as his thoughts and energies turned increasingly from domestic to European questions, the House of Commons ⁵³ Debrett, xxxv. – ( May), – ( May; Fox made the main speech in vindication of the managers). The -member committee included E.B. and four other managers; Pitt and Dundas; two Hastings partisans (Dudley Ryder and Edmund Wigley); and a cross-section of members unconnected with the impeachment (CJ xlviii. ). ⁵⁴ Debrett, xxxv. – (PH xxx. –). Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ⁵⁵ Debrett, xxxv. – (PH xxx. –). Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). On June, the Lords deferred the trial to the second Tuesday of the next session (LJ xxxix. ). ⁵⁶ William Palmer to Hastings (from Patna), Dec. (BL Add. MS , fo. ).
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became a less important forum. As foreign affairs came to dominate even the domestic political agenda, and events on the Continent did not slacken during the parliamentary recess, Burke’s preoccupation with politics became nearly continuous, and further intensified following the outbreak of war with France in February . As he acknowledged to Charles Burney, despite being, morally if not officially, ‘as responsible, as a Minister, for the War’, he was never ‘consulted or communicated with’, and this made him feel ‘very awkward’ ( Sept. : C vii. ).⁵⁷ Burke was indeed caught in an anomalous position. Close enough to ministers to offer opinions and advice, he did not enjoy their real confidence. How could he? Not only was he not in office, but his ideas only partly coincided with ministerial policy. Some of his ideas were also shared by leading members of the Portland Whigs; but on other points (especially his attitude to Fox) he differed from them too. Frustrating as this isolation often proved, it provided Burke with two missions: to convince the Portland Whigs to abandon Fox, and to convert the ministers to his idea of the war. During the second half of , Burke worked hard at both. Though recognizing that he ‘was not indeed capable of doing much good’, he could not resist ‘the sollicitations of unhappy men, and the impression of unhappy circumstances’. He was therefore ‘continually running to Town’, finding himself unable ‘to keep long away from the center of affairs’ (to Fitzwilliam, Nov.: ). This was at least the kind of life that, for all his protestations to the contrary, he found fulfilling. Privately (for example in letters to William Windham), Burke was highly critical of ministerial policy.⁵⁸ Yet he remained convinced that ‘the very existence of human affairs, in their ancient and happy order, depends upon the existence of this ministry’, with the proviso of ‘their doing their duty in it’ (C vii. ). Doubtful as that chance might appear, it was better than nothing. The only alternative to Pitt was Fox, and a ministry headed by Fox meant an immediate surrender to Jacobinism. Burke’s hostility to Fox was now doubly grounded, on Fox’s increasingly open Jacobinism, and on the misplaced personal loyalty to him that kept the more responsible Whig leaders (especially Portland and Fitzwilliam) from the coalition with Pitt which Burke thought essential for national safety. In an attempt to break Fox’s hold over them, Burke drew up a lengthy (, words) indictment, ‘Observations on the Conduct of the Minority, in the Session of ’ (WS viii. –). Despite its title, the main target of the ‘Observations’ is Fox, whose parliamentary and public conduct Burke dissects in minute detail. The paper was written during and just after the parliamentary session, but for once Burke waited for his passion to cool before sending it to Portland on September, with the odd recommendation ⁵⁷ In his letter to the comte d’Artois of Nov., E.B. likewise protested that he was ‘not in His Majesty’s Service; or at all consulted in his Affairs’ (C vii. ). ⁵⁸ E.B. to Windham, Oct., c., Nov. (C vii. , , –).
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that he should not read it immediately, but ‘lock it up in the drawer of your Library Table’ (C vii. –). The central theme of the ‘Observations’ is that Fox has been actively and systematically promoting the cause of Jacobinism in Britain. The main charges are his inflammatory speeches in the House of Commons, and the mischievous tendency of the motions he either proposed or supported; his patronage of the societies for political reform, and his encouragement of popular agitation for political change; his factious opposition to the war, effectively co-operating with the French by fomenting discontent among the people; and his perversion of the Whig party to serve his own ends and opinions. Burke was especially alarmed by Fox’s increasing populism, his ‘appeal to the judgments of the meanest and most ignorant of the people on the merits of the War’. As usual, Burke concedes that such people can judge what they suffer in a war, ‘because it is a matter of feeling’. They are, however, incompetent to judge ‘the causes of a war’, which are ‘not matters of feeling, but of reason and foresight, and often of remote considerations, and of a very great combination of circumstances’. Not only are the poor ‘utterly incapable of comprehending’ such questions, ‘it is not every man in the highest classes who is altogether equal to it’ (). In fifty-five numbered paragraphs, Burke patiently accumulates the evidence, mainly from Fox’s behaviour during the – session of Parliament. The indictment is drawn up in the manner of a prosecuting counsel. Indeed, when a pirated edition of the ‘Observations’ was published in , it was subtitled ‘Containing Fifty-Four Articles of Impeachment against the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox’.⁵⁹ Instead of locking the ‘Observations’ away, Portland read it immediately. Within a few days, he replied to Burke’s covering letter, pointedly refraining from making any comment on the ‘Observations’. While reaffirming his detestation of ‘the horrors of Jacobinism’, and his support for a war ‘which I think is for every thing for which it is worth being born in the world’, he was not ready either to forgive Pitt or to repudiate Fox. Towards the end of the ‘Observations’, while admitting that he still disapproves of the means by which Pitt came to power in , Burke argues that circumstances now require that old animosities be superseded by the urgent need to fight Jacobinism. Fox is a Jacobin; anyone who is anti-Jacobin must accordingly be anti-Fox. Portland was not yet prepared to accept the logic of this argument, being ‘disinclined to impute to bad motives’ the conduct of a man whom he had admired and trusted for so long ( Oct. : C vii. –). As events would show, however, even Portland was not prepared to give unlimited credit to Fox’s good intentions. Within six months, he would join Pitt’s ministry. The ‘Observations’, like several of Burke’s writings of the s, was on target, but ahead of its time. ⁵⁹ Todd . There are actually ‘articles’, misnumbered in the early editions (WS viii. ).
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Burke thus made no immediate impression on Portland. Nor was he more successful with the ministers. Heartily as he approved of the war, he agreed neither with the ministers’ war aims nor with their strategy. Britain, as he told Sir Gilbert Elliot, was not at war with ‘the whole Nation of France’, but was engaged ‘in a Civil War’ on the side of the royalists and émigrés ( Sept. : C vii. ). He therefore persistently urged aid and intervention on behalf of the royalist insurrection in La Vendée, which he described as ‘the sole affair I have much at heart’.⁶⁰ In July , when Toulon came under British protection, Burke was at first pleased that Elliot was appointed one of three commissioners sent to administer the district ( Sept.: ). He was the more disappointed when Elliot ‘fell immediately into the hands of the intriguers’, that is, of those who did not share Burke’s views about using Toulon as a bridgehead for the return of the émigrés.⁶¹ Toulon thus became another missed opportunity. Almost the only bright spot in the summer was the capture ofValenciennes on July, which opened the road to an invasion of France. Burke received news of its imminent surrender from General Edward Dalton (–), an Irishman serving in the imperial army besieging the town ( July: –). Immediately he wrote a long letter of exhortation to Dalton, and an even longer one to the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, the imperial representative in Brussels, whom he expected soon to become involved in post-war reconstruction in France (–). These hopes were dashed when the allied army, instead of advancing on Paris, turned instead to besiege Dunkirk and Le Quesnoy. Dunkirk, used as a base by privateers, was a conventional British target in times of war. As Burke told Charles Burney, he was more disappointed by the choice of object than by its failure, convinced that ‘the whole Scheme of the war is mistaken . . . it ought to be, not for Dunkirk, or this or t’other Town—but to drive Jacobinism out of the World’ ( Sept.: ). Exasperated, Burke expounded his views on the proper aims and conduct of the war in another long memorandum (about , words) directed at the ministers. ‘Remarks on the Policy of the Allies’ (WS viii. –), his third such policy paper, was begun in October , when he learned that a statement of British war aims was about to be published.⁶² Although his earlier papers had been ignored, Burke remained sufficiently hopeful to ask Dundas and Grenville to suspend publication of the ministerial statement for a day or two until his ‘Remarks’ were ready for their perusal. In reply, the ministers regretted that the Declaration (dated October) had already been printed ⁶⁰ E.B. to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Sept. ; to Dundas, Oct.; to Windham, (‘the sole affair’) and c. Nov. (C vii. –, –, , ). Dundas was sympathetic (to E.B., Oct.: –). ⁶¹ E.B. to Windham, c. Nov. ; to Sylvester Douglas, Nov. (C vii. , –). ⁶² Many of the arguments of the ‘Remarks’ are anticipated in R.B. Jr. to William Elliot, dated Sept. (YB OF .). Though supposedly written for Elliot’s ‘own private consideration’, its length (, words) suggests that it was meant for wider circulation.
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and communicated, but assured Burke that he would find nothing in it ‘to which you will not subscribe’.⁶³ The Declaration went some way towards meeting Burke’s ideas. It described the war as initially ‘defensive’, but now waged ‘for the preservation of civil society itself ’. It justified interference in the internal affairs of France to end ‘a system of anarchy’ as ‘essential to the security and repose of other powers’. It called on the French to rally to ‘the standard of an hereditary monarchy’ in order to restore ‘the empire of law, of morality, and of religion’.⁶⁴ These sentiments fell far short of what Burke advocated, which was the restoration of the old ‘fundamental Constitution’ () as well as the monarchy. Further, he disapproved of the reference to seeking ‘a just indemnification’ as betraying that what was really being sought was national advantage rather than the common cause of humanity. Burke was in fact most unhappy with the Declaration, and revised his ‘Remarks’ accordingly, though now more (as he lamented to Loughborough) ‘to releive myself, rather than to suggest any thing to others’ ( Jan. : C vii. ). Burke presumably sent copies to the ministers, though there is no record of their response.⁶⁵ The premise of the ‘Remarks on the Policy of the Allies’ is that Europe cannot be safe while the Jacobin republic subsisted. Burke therefore demanded a crusade or holy war to restore the old order in France. To justify this interference under international law, he appealed to the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel (–), from whose Droits des gens () he collected a number of passages in an appendix.⁶⁶ Normal inter-state rivalries and policy differences should be sacrificed to ‘the extinction of jacobinism’ (WS viii. ). Likewise, religious differences between one sect and another should be sunk in the common cause against militant atheism: ‘It is a religious war’ (). No merely defensive approach will succeed. The Jacobins have energy: ‘Adventure therefore, and not caution, is our policy’ (). Burke argued that ‘the people of France’ or ‘the nation of France’ were not those currently residing within its geographical boundaries. The ‘true constituent parts of the nation’ were its corporations (now abolished) and its hereditary property owners, most of whom had now emigrated (). The émigrés thus ⁶³ E.B. to Dundas, Oct. , and Dundas to E.B., Oct. (C vii. , ); Grenville, to E.B., Oct. (NRO A. IV. ); and E.B. to Grenville, Oct. (UBL (I), –). ⁶⁴ PH xxx. –. ⁶⁵ WS viii. –. Like the earlier papers, it was posthumously published in Three Memorials on French Affairs (). ⁶⁶ The extracts from Vattel (omitted in WS) are reprinted in W iii. –. E.B. had previously appealed to Vattel to criminate Lord Rodney’s treatment of St Eustatius in (supra, i. –). Iain Hampsher-Monk argues that, in the ‘Remarks’, E.B. ‘distanced himself altogether from Vattel’s premises’, ‘impugning Vattel’ by aspersing his politics as ‘being rather of a Republican cast’, and grounding his own argument rather on ‘the publick law of Europe’ (‘Edmund Burke’s Changing Justification for Intervention’, Historical Journal, (), –, esp. –). The contents of the Appendix, however, show that E.B. believed that his position was consistent with Vattel. As for ‘impugning’ Vattel, I interpret this as a rhetorical ploy: if Vattel were a monarchist, his support might be suspect; republican testimony on the right to intervene against republics is unexceptionable.
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represented ‘the moral and political country’ (, ). Burke therefore advocated a vigorous and aggressive war to crush the Jacobin republic and restore the old order: the monarchy; the church; the legal system; the corporate bodies; and the dispossessed property owners. As a preliminary, for example, the exiled members of the Parlement of Paris should register the title of the comte de Provence as regent for ‘Louis XVII’ (–), the imprisoned titular king (). The allied occupation of Toulon should have been followed by the return of the bishop, and the remanning of the French ships with royalist officers (–). Convinced that the republic enjoyed little genuine popular support, Burke believed that, if attacked with sufficient force and vigour by a force with a large French component, it would quickly collapse. Burke was adamant that this should not be followed by a general amnesty or act of indemnity. The newly restored government should have a free hand in the punishment of ‘rebels’ (–). Against the historical precedents for a general indemnity (as given by Henri IV in France, and at the Restoration in Britain), Burke argued that they were irrelevant to ‘a state of things of which, in its totality, if history furnishes any examples at all, they are very remote and feeble’ (–). Burke’s scheme was remote from practical politics. Admittedly, the Declaration had at least, as he told the Marquis of Buckingham, ‘put the War on its right footing, if not in practice, at least in open and avowed profession’. But the profession hardly mattered when the ministers still pursued ‘the diminution of the power of France’ as their primary object, to which ‘the extirpation of Jacobinism’ was only secondary, and when any assistance to ‘the Royal Cause’ was given merely as a diversion ( Dec. : C vii. ).⁶⁷ Burke’s expectations were unrealistic. To imagine that any government would suspend for long the primacy of its national self-interest was naïve. Even less likely was such altruism on the part of an alliance of several governments with conflicting interests. Few thought as well as Burke did of the ancien régime, or shared his commitment to the cause of the émigrés and their rights. Even those who regarded the Jacobin republic as a danger to the peace of Europe, who rejected ‘the supposed Rights of Man, and the absolute equality of the human race’ (WS viii. ), and who wished France to return to a form of government more respectful of property rights, did not necessarily support the complete restoration of the ancien régime. Burke had long advocated British assistance for counter-revolution within France as the best way to fight Jacobinism. By the end of , the prospect of any such revanche was worse than ever. An attempt to send aid to ⁶⁷ Buckingham, formerly Earl Temple, was an old antagonist: he had notified E.B. of his dismissal in Dec. (C v. ). On opposite sides as late as the Regency Crisis (when Buckingham was LordLieutenant of Ireland), the French Revolution reconciled them. By , Buckingham could report that he and E.B. had been ‘flirting of late in a correspondence of great mutual flattery’ (to Lord Grenville, Sept. , in HMC (Dropmore), ii. ).
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the royalist insurgents in LaVendée failed. Nor did the occupation of Toulon lead to the expected royalist uprising. Instead, the arrival of a republican army forced the withdrawal of the British fleet. In one of his momentary fits of pique, Burke pretended to desire ‘not to be consulted at all’. Being ‘heartily sick of Politicks’, he longed ‘for the means of burying myself in a quiet Obscurity, until the Jacobins shall pull me, with others much my betters, out of it’ (to Loughborough, Jan. : C vii. ). As the new session of Parliament approached, this mood gave way to a determination to maintain ‘this struggle, perhaps the last struggle, in favour of Religion, morality and property’ (to Portland, Jan.: –). On the eve of the session, Portland extended a personal invitation to the preliminary meeting of his followers. Burke consulted Pitt before attending, and reported to Pitt the substance of what was resolved.⁶⁸ This was ‘to take a more decided line than they had hitherto done, in support of the administration’. For Fox, this was tantamount to the ‘dissolution’ of the Whig party.⁶⁹ For Burke, though short of the coalition for which he had been working, this represented a significant step towards that goal. Far from burying himself in ‘quiet Obscurity’, Burke therefore returned to the parliamentary arena. This would be Burke’s last parliamentary session. For him personally, it opened inauspiciously. On January, at the end of the debate on the address, when Fox made an inflammatory speech against the war, which included an attack on Burke, Burke rose to reply, but was drowned out by calls for the question. At least the size of the majority which defeated Fox’s amendment (–) showed how little support he enjoyed.⁷⁰ Burke’s first substantive speech (in a debate on the naval estimates on January) served only to expose Whig animosities. Burke attacked Sheridan; Grey retorted with an attack on Burke.⁷¹Then, on February, Richard Sr. died suddenly and unexpectedly in his chambers at Lincoln’s Inn. Often as Richard had been ill, his death came as a great shock. Burke retreated for a few weeks to Beaconsfield, where Richard was buried. Devastated by his brother’s death, Burke considered retiring from public life, even abandoning the impeachment.⁷² The elder Richard cuts a poor figure in the biographical record. Lazy and improvident, after failing in business and as a colonial official, late in life he turned to the study of law. By Edmund’s influence, he served as joint Secretary to the Treasury during the second Rockingham ministry, and again under the Coalition. As a tribute to Edmund, in he was elected Recorder ⁶⁸ Portland to E.B., Jan. ; Pitt to E.B., Jan.; E.B. to Portland, Jan.; E.B. to Pitt, Jan. (C vii. –). ⁶⁹ Fox to Lord Holland, Mar. , in Lord John Russell, Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox (London, –), iii. . ⁷⁰ Debrett, xxxvii. – (PH xxx. –). ⁷¹ Debrett, xxxvii. –. ⁷² C vii. . Edmond Malone to Lord Charlmont, Feb. (HMC (Charlemont), ii. ); French Laurence to Portland, June (NUL PwF ).
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of Bristol. Otherwise, his achievements were meagre, and (in common with William Burke) he was dogged by a series of financial scandals.⁷³ Burke, however, could see nothing but virtue and talent in his brother. In a sketch written late in , he even quoted the opinion of a friend (either Fox or Sir Joshua Reynolds) that ‘tho’ my reading was a good deal more extensive than his[,] his natural parts were superiour to mine’ (C vii. ). An earlier, more moving because unpremeditated, record of Burke’s affection for his brother is a letter of summons to an unknown physician, written when Richard was suddenly taken ill at Beaconsfield. Though mainly a detailed account of Richard’s symptoms, the letter is suffused with intense anxiety.⁷⁴ Burke did not often write thus. Burke did not long contemplate leaving public life. He was back in London by February, though he made no speech of any length until March, when he opposed Richard Fitzpatrick’s motion on behalf of the marquis de Lafayette, now a prisoner of the Austrians.⁷⁵ On April, in a debate on a bill to permit the enlistment of French émigrés, he delivered an eloquent plea for the restoration of the rule of property in France. Portland heard that no Jacobin ‘who pretends to taste’ denied it a ‘full Tribute of applause’.⁷⁶ Here was the old Burke, extorting praise even from opponents. His most characteristic speech of the session, however, was given on April, again on the enlistment bill. This would prove his last speech in what Portland called his ‘best manner’. He began, in classic Burkean style, with an extemporized attack on a previous speaker (Fox), wittily descanting on Fox’s praise of his own humanity. In the body of the speech, Burke moved from a closely argued justification of the principle of retaliation in wartime, illustrated with a wide range of historical examples, to an impassioned plea for extraordinary measures to extirpate the unexampled savagery of the revolutionary regime. The whole was enlivened and decorated with Burke’s usual range of literary allusions.⁷⁷ Earlier in the debate, Burke had received a remarkable accolade. Recalling the early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, Dundas declared that: It was reserved for the illuminated and comprehensive mind of Mr Burke alone, to foresee what must be its fatal and necessary consequences . . . If these strictures were termed the phantoms of an over-heated imagination, time, which weighs events in the balance of truth, and does justice to all men, has stamped his predictions, and verified them by events.⁷⁸ ⁷³ Dixon Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen: A Study of the Statesman’s Financial Integrity and Private Relationships (Boulder, Colo., ), –. ⁷⁴ UBL (II), –. The letter is undated, and I have been unable to date it. R.B. Sr. was often ill: in June , Nov. , Sept. , Dec. , and Nov. (C v. , vi. , , ; UBL (II), ). ⁷⁵ PH xxxi. –. E.B. returned to London by Feb., when he attended the trial. ⁷⁶ PH xxxi. –. Portland to Windham, Apr. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). Portland did not himself hear E.B.’s speech. ⁷⁷ Debrett, xxxviii. – (PH xxxi. –). ⁷⁸ Debrett, xxxviii. (PH xxxi. ).
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Having long been derided as a madman and a Quixote, by Burke was increasingly revered as a prophet.⁷⁹ Unfortunately, acknowledgement of the accuracy of Burke’s past prophecies was not accompanied by any disposition to pay any greater regard to his present arguments. The seventh, and last substantive, session of the impeachment proved also the second longest. Between February and June , the court sat on twenty-eight days (the th to the th of the trial), a tally exceeded only by the thirty-five days of . All that remained was for the managers to reply to the case for the defence, and for the Lords to pronounce judgment. In February, most expected the trial to be concluded before Parliament was prorogued for the summer. In the event, disputes about evidence, and an unprecedentedly long speech in reply by Burke, forced deferral of judgment to the session of . Primary responsibility for this rests with Burke, despite his protests at being ‘chained to an oar’. Even apart from his long final speech (which took nine days to deliver), he persisted in trying to introduce new matter, to which the defence predictably objected. The ensuing wrangles about admissibility of evidence proved the most time-consuming since . The nine-day speech, of course, was his alone. But Fox and Grey were both prominent in the disputes about evidence, despite their bitter opposition to Burke’s favourite cause, the war with France. Hastings himself and his counsel also share some responsibility. They lost two weeks waiting for Cornwallis to testify, while in the disputes about evidence they were as pertinacious as the managers. Since the adjournment in May , Lord Cornwallis had completed his term as Governor-General, returning as a national hero, the victor of the Third Mysore War, and with an unblemished reputation for decent and uncorrupt administration.⁸⁰ A less familiar figure, William Larkins (d. ), the company’s Accountant-General in Calcutta (who had also handled Hastings’s personal finances) had likewise retired to England, arriving in September . Hastings was anxious to have Cornwallis testify to the flourishing state of British India on his arrival there in . Larkins, on the other ⁷⁹ As early as , French Laurence called E.B. ‘Mahomet . . . the Prophet of the East’, while Sir Gilbert Elliot lamented his ‘distance from Delphos’ ( Aug., Sept. : C v. , ). By , the Morning Herald acknowledged that E.B.’s ‘pathetic prediction’ was now being fulfilled in the ‘sanguinary effects of the French Revolution’ ( May). The Evening Mail acknowledged that ‘scarcely one of the propositions laid down by this able writer but what time has confirmed’ (– Sept. ). ⁸⁰ Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill, NC, ), –, –, –; P. J. Marshall, ‘ “Cornwallis Triumphant”: War in India and the British Public in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in War, Strategy, and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard, ed. Lawrence Freedman, Paul Hayes, and Robert O’Neill (Oxford, ), –.
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hand, was a potential embarrassment. He ought to have been able to clarify the mystery surrounding Hastings’s receipt of various ‘presents’.⁸¹ The defence decision not to call him on his return betrays clearly enough that whatever benefit they might derive from his evidence was outweighed by what he might reveal under cross-examination. Calling Cornwallis was mere vanity on the part of Hastings, since the marquis could not testify directly to any of the charges. Hastings, however, was eager to receive his testimonial. So when the court assembled on February, Law asked the court’s permission to examine him. Strictly speaking, this was out of order, as the defence had closed its case in . Grey, however, on behalf of the managers, waived any objection, but warned that they could not begin their reply until after Cornwallis had testified. The court thereupon adjourned, after one of the shortest sessions of the entire trial.⁸² Unluckily for Hastings, Cornwallis was ill, and unable to testify immediately. After waiting about ten days, with no improvement in Cornwallis’s condition, Hastings decided to proceed without his evidence. The trial therefore resumed on February (the th day). The managers began the presentation of evidence in rebuttal of the defence case. Grey began on an amicable note, offering to allow Cornwallis to testify later. Law ungraciously and gratuitously soured the atmosphere by repudiating the favour. Then, to rebut the defence argument that Francis and Wheler had concurred in the Supreme Council’s measures against Chait Singh, Grey called Francis to testify that ‘in conversation at the Council’ he had voiced his opposition to the extra demands. Before he could say a word, a full-scale battle about evidence was joined, between Law and Plumer on the one side and Fox and Grey on the other. The defence advanced three objections: since Francis could have been examined as part of the evidence-in-chief, he should not be called in reply; nor should oral evidence be admitted to explain a consultation recorded in writing, and produced in evidence; nor, the managers having submitted the consultation, ought they now to be permitted (in effect) to subvert their own evidence by an oral explanation. To the first, the managers responded that greater latitude was allowed in impeachments, and cited precedents from the trials of Stafford and Macclesfield. (The counsel disputed these precedents, and, more generally, denied that different rules should operate in impeachments.) To the second objection, they argued that the council’s minutes were not matters of ‘record’ in the legal sense, and were therefore subject to explanation. To the third, they claimed that since the ⁸¹ Hastings had himself referred the directors to the testimony of Larkins as having been ‘privy to every process’ connected with the presents (to William Devaynes, July ; printed in Copy of a Letter from Warren Hastings . . . to which is Added a Letter from Mr Hastings to William Devaynes (London, ), –). Major Scott likewise appealed to Larkins’s testimony in a letter to the newspapers controverting Anstruther’s speech of Feb. (Public Advertiser, Feb.; The World, Feb.). ⁸² BL Add. MS , fos. –. E.B. was absent (Hastings’s Diary, Add. MS , fo. ) on account of R.B. Sr.’s death.
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minutes had been used by the defence for a purpose not foreseen by the managers, they had become in substance new evidence submitted by the defence, which they were at liberty to controvert by adducing supplementary evidence. Thus far both sides had been speaking the same language.⁸³ At this point, Burke intervened with an eloquent and emotive plea against allowing the law to be stultified by narrow legal professionalism. The ‘pretended rules of law’ cited by the counsel, he argued, are of no authority. They are not to be found ‘in any known declaration of a Court of Justice, not in any known Institute of Law, not in any known Code of law, not in any known digest of law elemental or otherwise no nor in any Adjudged Case or Report’. As for the legal textbooks, their ‘rules of evidence’ are ‘so few and so general and applied with such a number of reservations and exceptions’ that a parrot of moderate abilities could learn them in half an hour and repeat them in five minutes. In the absence of ‘settled and established rules’, the managers were guided by parliamentary precedents, ‘our inheritance’. ‘I cannot give up our Ancestors,’ Burke proclaimed, ‘and the Commons cannot give up our great Men of the Law in former days.’ The defence, he contended, had not been able to controvert the precedents adduced by Grey. Apart from venting his obvious frustration with the rules of evidence, this speech is remarkable for its emphasis on precedents rather than principles. Given the variety of Burke’s arguments on the subject, whether this represented his real preference or a tactical decision is unclear. Finally, Loughborough, observing that the Lords could not pronounce on the general principles that had been canvassed, returned the court to the particular objection to the individual question put to Francis. The Lords retired, then referred the question to the judges.⁸⁴ The judges pronounced against the managers. This was hardly surprising, as (despite Burke’s claim) the ‘parole evidence rule’ was an established principle of evidence.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, the managers repeatedly sought to evade it. The next sitting, on February (the th day of the trial), was therefore in large part a reprise of the previous day. Burke and Fox both protested against the decision, and repeated their earlier pleas that questions of law should be openly debated and reasons given for the decisions.⁸⁶ Loughborough rejected this request as unprecedented. After further unavailing protests by the managers, Francis again took the stand, and Grey asked him a question, to which Law objected as irrelevant to the reply. Law declined to enter into the detail of an issue that he claimed had already been decided, but both Burke and Fox ⁸³ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), pt. , . ⁸⁴ BL Add. MS , fos. –. A recent authority endorses E.B.’s estimate of the state of the law of evidence: John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford, ), . ⁸⁵ Thomas Peake, A Compendium of the Law of Evidence (nd edn. London, ), , . ⁸⁶ E.B. had protested on May and June against judicial decisions delivered without reasons, as had Fox on and Apr. (BL Add. MS , fo. ; , fos. –; , fos. –; , fos. –).
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spoke at length in defence of the propriety of the question. The contrasts between their two speeches provide an illuminating illustration of their different habits of mind, the more striking as both were making nearly the same case and both appealed to precedents as well as principles. Fox was the more technical, lawyerly, and argumentatively inventive. Taking Law’s supposed rule, he translated it into a principle, showed that Grey’s question was covered by that principle, then denied the force of the rule and moved his argument to a higher level of principle. Thus Fox sought to refute the counsel in their own terms, before rejecting their frame of reference as too narrow. Burke kept less closely to the particular point at issue, though he did cite precedents from the trials of Strafford and Stafford. Instead, he developed a series of appeals to higher principles, especially to the idea that substantive justice must take precedence over the practice of the courts, which is not binding in cases of impeachment. Relevance, he argued, was the only principle that should govern the admissibility of evidence: every evidence ‘that is relative to the question and tends to give light to decide upon the merits of it is perhaps prima fronte evidence that your Lordships ought to take’. In the interests of ‘substantial justice’ as opposed to ‘mere formal justice’, the court should ‘call for all the evidence which will enlighten their mind and to call for it at any period of the Cause’. This claim reflects Burke’s model of impeachment as more like an inquisition, concerned primarily with the discovery of truth, than a criminal trial as understood in the late eighteenth century. Burke’s conviction of Hastings’s guilt blinded him to the equity (in any trial) of certain rules of natural justice, such as the rule invoked here, that new matter should not be introduced in reply. After further discussion between Loughborough and the managers to frame the question to be put to the Lords, and another plea from an exasperated Hastings for a speedy end to the trial, the court was adjourned.⁸⁷ The trial resumed on March (the th day). Loughborough reported the rejection of the question proposed to Francis. Under protest, the managers abandoned their attempt to examine Francis, and turned instead to documentary evidence. They submitted five papers, to each of which Law objected, twice successfully. The most heated dispute concerned the directors’ minute of November , in response to a letter to them from Hastings of March, and published as a pamphlet.⁸⁸ This led first to a sharp exchange between Law and Burke, and then to a direct confrontation between Burke and Hastings himself. Law began by objecting to the Observations first as ‘a party pamphlet’ and then as ‘an actionable libel’. Burke retorted by accusing Hastings himself of ‘prostituted audacity’ in publishing ⁸⁷ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, . ⁸⁸ Observations on a Letter to the Court of Directors of the East-India Company, from Warren Hastings, Esq. ([London], ). Hastings’s letter is dated Mar. .
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‘insolent and audacious’ libels on the Court of Directors.⁸⁹ Called to order, Burke repeated his phrase ‘prostituted audacity’ and promised to substantiate it. Such intemperate language (never employed by Fox or Grey) was by now Burke’s habitual idiom at the trial, his verbal violence an index of his greater emotional commitment to the cause. On this occasion, Burke was stung by Law’s word ‘libel’, which he took as an indirect slur on the reports of his own Select Committee. These he proceeded to defend. This altercation in turn provoked an extraordinary verbal duel between Burke and Hastings. The decorums of judicial procedure were cast aside as each accused the other of libel. Finally, when the precise status of the directors’ pamphlet had been clarified, Hastings made another passionate appeal for a speedy conclusion, asking that the trial not be suspended while the judges were on circuit: ‘I am totally worn out—I can bear it no longer.’ Burke was pitiless. Adverting to the complaint of delay submitted by Hastings at the beginning of the session, Burke asked the court for an opportunity to examine and ‘falsify’ its allegations. Any such enquiry, of course, would have the effect of further protracting the trial. The court adjourned, referring to the judges the question of the admissibility of the directors’ Observations. They gave an immediate opinion against it. Hastings’s plea to continue the trial during their absence on circuit was ignored, and the trial was deferred until their return.⁹⁰ The first sitting after the recess ( April, the st day) was desultory. When Loughborough announced the inadmissibility of the directors’ Observations, Burke offered only a token protest. The managers moved on to other documentary evidence. This was presented by Sheridan and scrutinized by Plumer, a less combustible combination than Burke and Law. Plumer pressed only one objection, and that not beyond Loughborough’s ruling in the managers’ favour.⁹¹ At the next sitting, on April (the nd), Lord Cornwallis was finally able to testify. His examination was reported to have attracted the largest number of lords and spectators for three years. His evidence was fair-minded and impartial, and probably served the prosecution and the defence about equally. He agreed (in response to a question from Lord Hawke) that Hastings had rendered ‘very essential services to this Country’. Yet when cross-examined by Burke, he conceded the distressed state of the country when he commenced his government. When asked about Kyallaram, he replied that he had avoided retrospection, his duty being ‘to look forward and to endeavor to improve the country and to correct any faults that existed in the Government’. His testimony was received with only a few objections from Burke to leading questions and hearsay.⁹² ⁸⁹ Publication of his letter to the Court of Directors of Mar. (the subject of Observations on a Letter) formed part of the nineteenth of the original Articles of Charge, one of those dropped in the Commons. ⁹⁰ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. LJ xl. –. ⁹¹ BL Add. MS , fos. –.Minutes, –. ⁹² BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. History of the Trial, pt. , .
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Far different was the examination of Larkins, whom the managers now called. The lengthy debate on the propriety of examining him shows the importance attached to his evidence by both sides. In the absence of Law, the debate was more restrained than usual. Plumer contended that, at this stage of the trial, Larkins could only be examined to controvert evidence submitted by the defence. Burke’s questions in effect reopened the managers’ case. In a lengthy but temperate rejoinder, Burke began with the telling point that, having formerly appealed to Larkins’s testimony in his absence, they now ‘tremble at the sight of the person who was as they tell you in the depth of the secret of his transactions and they do not choose that a question should be asked concerning them’. Even if against the so-called rules, Larkins should be heard because ‘every rule made for the convenience and order of things must give way to the necessity of things’. Rejecting the distinction between prosecution and defence evidence, Burke contended that all evidence is ‘the evidence of the Court’. A rule that excluded relevant evidence was a ‘rule of blindness’. As usual, he reprobated ‘technical rules contrary to the nature of things and contrary to the fundamental principles of justice’. After a long recapitulation of the defence objection, Burke responded with an even longer restatement of the managers’ views, fortified this time by some precedents from seventeenth-century state trials. Fox and Taylor enlarged on these precedents. The Lords then withdrew to consider the objection. When the question was referred to the judges, they, as usual, unanimously supported the defence.⁹³ This decision was communicated at the opening of the next sitting, the rd, on April. Burke resumed his examination of Larkins. After a few questions, Plumer interposed to say that, while some of Burke’s questions were liable to the same objection as had already been upheld, the defence would acquiesce in Larkins testifying as though he were a witness for the prosecution called at the proper time. This concession was a public relations victory for the managers. Plumer admitted that, since the defence’s motives had been so widely impugned, further resistance to Larkins’s testimony ‘might perhaps seem to justify these insinuations’. Burke, however, was incapable of accepting this concession with a good grace. When Loughborough ruled that, after the formal decision to uphold the objection, the express consent of the defence must be entered in the minutes, Burke protested that the Commons claimed the examination of Larkins as a right, not as an indulgence. Although in this case the consent of the defence might be sufficient, he refused to ‘give up the inheritance of the Ancestors of the Commons of Great Britain’, supporting his position with precedents from the heroic period of . After a long debate about the propriety of entering reasons for a protest, Burke even more explicitly assumed the mantle of Pym, whose example he professed to follow. He did not, however, press the Lords to withdraw on the ⁹³ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. LJ xl. .
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point, and only a simple protest was entered. Later, when Dallas objected to a question and Burke asked for its ground, Law haughtily interjected, ‘I will not degrade myself by doing it.’ Burke immediately took fire, again identifying with Pym, appealing to ‘our ancestors—Mr Pym for instance who stood in the place that I do when Lord Strafford was tried here’. Law offered an ungraciously evasive explanation. In the personal altercations between Burke and Law, Burke was often at fault. Here, Law was plainly the aggressor. Burke would not have exploded, had Dallas been allowed to make a simple answer. Time-consuming as they were, these disputes did not occupy the entire sitting. Burke was able to expose the loose and cavalier manner in which Hastings treated accounts. At the end of the day, Hastings entered yet another plea for an early judgment.⁹⁴ The next sitting, on April (the th), followed much the same pattern. Burke’s examination of Larkins revealed more examples of Hastings’s negligence (to use the most favourable term) in accounting for the ‘presents’. Burke and Law indulged in their usual sparring and mutual recriminations. Hastings himself once more asked for a speedy judgment. (A measure of his increasing desperation is that he had begged the court to sit on the following day, to gain an extra sitting before the Easter recess.) Larkins was then crossexamined by Dallas, to prove that, however irregular his accounts, Hastings had not converted any of the money to his own use. In the House of Lords after the trial, Stanhope moved that the trial should continue the next day. This being defeated by to , resumption was deferred until April.⁹⁵ On that day (the th), Burke concluded his examination of Larkins, punctuated by the usual disputes about the propriety of questions.⁹⁶ On April (the th day), Burke sought to open a new head of evidence. This related to the ‘present’ from Maharaja Nabakrishna. In , Nabakrishna had filed a bill in the Court of Chancery seeking to recover what he now claimed was a loan. From the managers’ point of view, the most significant fact to emerge from the bill was that the ‘present’ or ‘loan’ had been made not in , as Hastings had claimed in his defence, but in , before Nabakrishna’s appointment as administrator of Burdwan. This new date made the transaction more suspicious.⁹⁷ The admissibility of such evidence, however, was doubtful. Burke probably anticipated its rejection, for he introduced it in a speech of more than an hour. This speech was deliberately provocative. He lambasted Larkins’s evidence as an attempt to screen ‘peculation, bribery, fraud, prevarication, falsehood, and forgery, by a plea of negligence, inattention, carelessness’. The word ‘forgery’ was startling, for ⁹⁴ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ⁹⁵ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. LJ xl. . Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ⁹⁶ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. ⁹⁷ P. J. Marshall, ‘Nobkissen versus Hastings’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, (), –.
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forgery was a capital offence, for which a commoner could not be impeached. When the defence remarked it, Burke explained that he meant the word in the general, rather than the strict legal sense. The incident parallels the earlier accusation that Hastings had ‘murdered’ Nandakumar. Law twice interrupted, asking Burke to specify the part of the charge to which the material about Nabakrishna related. Burke refused: ‘I will not do it.’ Thurlow, surely, would have supported Law’s objection. By allowing Burke to continue, Loughborough permitted the introduction of much material that the managers would not be permitted to prove. Parliamentary rather than legal in manner, arguing the claims of substantive justice against procedural nicety, and citing not only legal precedents but Horace and an anecdote from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the speech combines a scathing and minute dissection of the different accounts Hastings had given of the transaction, with one of Burke’s most eloquent pleas for ignoring the technical ‘rules’ of evidence.⁹⁸ Burke next sought to submit documents from the case in Chancery. The defence attached great importance to excluding this evidence. Not only did all three counsel speak, but for once (tacitly acknowledging the plausibility of the managers’ argument) they explained the reasoning behind the rules. They also sought to portray Hastings as a victim entitled to the protection of the law. The exclusion of Nabakrishna’s suit, they argued, was necessary to secure substantive justice. In reply, Fox and Taylor both spoke, before Burke made a second lengthy speech reviewing the legal and moral issues. Though eloquent and impassioned, it added little to what had already been said.⁹⁹ While Burke was fulminating, Fox used part of the time to write letters. One that happens to survive was addressed from ‘this cursed Place’ (the managers’ box) to his nephew, Lord Holland (–), then touring in Italy. Fox comments on letters received, retails news of British politics, and advises Holland about tourist attractions. If he goes to Cento (near Bologna), he must be sure to see the Guercinos, especially ‘Christ in the Garden which I think the first of his Pictures, and perhaps the most pleasing Picture in the world’. Nothing could more forcefully express Fox’s detachment from the arguments swirling around him, which he was yet able to follow closely enough to take part. Such detachment was utterly foreign to Burke, for whom writing a letter in such circumstances would have been impossible. The advice about Guercino also serves as a reminder that he had enjoyed a breadth of cultural experience that had been denied to Burke.¹⁰⁰ The th sitting, on May, began with Lord Kenyon (in Loughborough’s absence) announcing the inadmissibility of the evidence from Nabakrishna’s suit. Burke was undeterred. After an ‘apology’ for submitting the rejected evidence (in substance a protest against the decision), he proposed, in order ⁹⁸ BL Add. MS , fos. –. ⁹⁹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, . ¹⁰⁰ Fox to Lord Holland, Apr. (BL Add. MS , fos. –).
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to counter the argument that Hastings’s irregular methods of raising money were justified by the distressed state of the country, to prove that Hastings was himself responsible for the outbreak, the incompetent conduct, and the disgraceful conclusion of the Maratha War (–), and therefore for the distresses which he alleged in excuse. To Law’s objection that the Maratha War was not a matter of charge (the twentieth of the original Articles of Charge, it was never debated and dropped before the case reached the Lords), Burke countered that the defence’s evidence introduced new matter which was subject to reply. Fox argued more closely the applicability of the evidence. In contrast to the lengthy defence speeches of the previous day, Law spoke only briefly, evidently confident of his case. The Lords retired, and as usual referred the question to the judges.¹⁰¹ Given the virtual certainty that the lords would reject it, Burke’s proposal to canvass the Maratha War lends some credibility to the defence charge that the managers were deliberately protracting the trial. Indeed, on this occasion Burke explicitly denied that time was an object, arguing that ‘time was made for business and not business to be curtailed for the occasions of time and for connivance at delinquencies’. Justice, not time, was his object. By this stage, Burke was aware that a majority of the lords who attended would vote for acquittal. His strategy was accordingly directed less to convincing the judges, than to making a case for posterity. From this point of view, an attempt to introduce the Maratha War made sense, just as every rejection of evidence provided new support for his contention that the trial was being cramped by legalism. An acquittal could therefore be impugned as technical rather than substantive. On this occasion, Burke seized an unusual opportunity to insinuate the iniquity of the process. Part of the hall was reserved for foreign ambassadors, and on this day the Turkish ambassador and his suite attended. Burke professed to be glad that they could ‘not understand one word that passes here’, otherwise they might carry an unfavourable impression of the proceedings to ‘an Eastern part of the world which is supposed not to administer the correctest and purest justice’.¹⁰² Kenyon again presided at the next (the th) sitting, on May. Burke’s response to the rejection of evidence concrning the Maratha War showed him in his least defensible time-wasting mode. A speech that began as a mocksubmissive protest quickly became a complaint about the mistreatment of the managers, not only by the court but by ‘all that obloquy from the hired pens and voices which Indian delinquency is able to procure’, and wrongly claiming that the only objection to the Maratha War evidence was the time it would ¹⁰¹ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. The precedent of Apr. was much less general than E.B. claimed (T. B. Howell, Complete Collection of State Trials (London, –), iii. –). ¹⁰² BL Add. MS , fos. , . History of the Trial, pt. , .
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take. Successive interruptions from Law, Kenyon, and Stanhope made no impression on Burke, who continued to complain of a campaign of newspaper vilification. Kenyon proved unequal to the task of checking Burke. Indeed, the apologetic tone of his attempts to call Burke to order testifies to the ascendancy Burke had now acquired: ‘I ask your pardon—I am extremely sorry to interrupt any thing that comes from so respectable a quarter.’ Burke continued to insist that the newspaper libels were ‘nothing else but the echo of what we hear at the bar’, and that the court was thus indirectly responsible. Again assuming the mantle of Pym, Burke asked leave to enter a protest in the Lords’ Journals. This was of course refused, and even Burke had by now temporarily exhausted himself. The managers now presented some actual evidence, to which Law, eager to conclude the proceedings, made only token objections. But Burke had not done. He made three further attempts to protract the evidence. First, he proposed to call more witnesses, and then to resubmit Paterson’s report (rejected on May ) for a different purpose. After Law had objected to both, Burke launched into another description of Devi Singh’s cruelties, much as he had in . Law again objected, and Kenyon appealed to Burke’s ‘candour and extraordinarily informed mind’. The word candour only provoked Burke to a further complaint of the ‘insulting and outrageous language’ which the Lords had allowed the counsel to use. He then restated his arguments for the admission of Paterson’s report. But when Kenyon, having been astonishingly patient and forbearing, asked the managers whether they wanted the Lords to retire to decide the point, Fox intervened to say ‘No—No’. Kenyon turned to Law to respond to the managers’ evidence in reply. Confident that he had obtained a legal acquittal, Law waived the opportunity in a brief valedictory speech.¹⁰³ So ended the submission of evidence. But a further sixteen days were to be consumed in speeches of recapitulation. Grey’s speech in reply on the Benares charge occupied two days ( and May, the th and th days). On May (the st day), Sheridan made his third and shortest speech on the Begums charge, lasting under three hours. Fox’s indisposition (which Hastings believed was feigned) then caused a delay of a week. His speech on the Presents charge was delivered on and May (the nd and rd days). On and May (the th and th days), Taylor replied on the Contracts charge.¹⁰⁴ Last, and longest, came Burke’s general speech in reply, which would fill an unprecedented nine days between May and June (the th to th days). ¹⁰³ BL Add. MS , fos. –. Minutes, –. BL Add. MS , fos. – (for May ). ¹⁰⁴ Bond, iv. –. Hastings believed Fox’s sickness feigned, because on May he met Fox riding in the Park and ‘talking with a clear voice’ (BL Add. MS , fo. ).
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Over those nine days, Burke spoke for a total of hours and minutes.¹⁰⁵ On May, he began with a summary account of the history of the prosecution, followed by a brief refutation of the defence and particularly of the complaints about the length of the trial. The second half of the speech was devoted to a lengthy demolition of the argument that India was governed by arbitrary power. As in his opening speech, he drew on several Asian law codes, ending with a paean to natural and universal law. This part of the speech is of most general interest. On May and June, he reprised the Benares charge, depicting Hastings as a cruel, arbitrary tyrant, motivated by greed. On June, he outlined Hastings’s system of concealing correspondence and working through private agents rather than official channels, as a prelude to the charge of oppression in Oudh. On June, he recapitulated the story of Oudh from the Treaty of Chunar, including the resumption of the Begums’ jagirs and the forcible extraction of their treasure. On June, he concentrated on exposing the iniquity of Hastings’s fabrication of the evidence of the Begums’ ‘rebellion’. On June, he finished with Oudh, and moved to Bengal, dealing mainly with the charge of Munni Begum’s ‘presents’. On June, he completed his treatment of Munni Begum, before dealing (comparatively briefly) with the Contracts and Revenue charges. On June, he reverted to the Presents charge before attacking the argument that Hastings’s errors (if any) should be set against his ‘merits’. Finally, in a stirring peroration, he warned the Lords to learn from the fate of the Parlement of Paris, and to render justice or risk the direst consequences. Though nominally delivering a ‘Speech in Reply’, Burke in fact paid little attention to the defence case or to the controversies about evidence. Indeed, he set the tone early on May, when he affirmed that ‘We knew that he was guilty or we should not have brought him here’ (WS vii. ). What Burke provided was a lengthy restatement of the moral case against Hastings, with no regard to the question of legal evidence. In this respect, the speech illustrates his refusal to accept that he was presenting a legal case, or to be bound by the rules and conventions of contemporary jurisprudence. For example, despite the censures he had incurred, he had no compunction in repeating his charges that David Williams ‘murdered’ Mustapha Khan, and that Sir Elijah Impey was Hastings’s ‘executioner’ ( June: ). Other aspects of the speech contributed to make it less effective than his four-day opening speech. The thread of the argument is sometimes obscured by the insertion of lengthy documents. The tone is less statesmanlike. Burke’s mind was now darkened by his fears of revolution as well as by the impending acquittal of Hastings. In consequence, he too often descends into ad hominem material, scurrility, and gross imagery. ¹⁰⁵ Calculated from the timings in Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fos. –). Text of the speech in WS vii. –.
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The mere length of the speech is a deterrent to readers. Indeed, Burke often appears to have lost any sense of addressing a real audience, and to be dictating a case for the edification of posterity. In the absence of the informal discipline of parliamentary speaking, where even Burke could not hold the floor indefinitely in the face of a hostile house, his rhetoric became self-indulgent as well as intolerably long-winded. On two occasions, however, Burke did provoke interruption. On June, goaded beyond endurance, Hastings interjected to contradict him about a fact. Burke instantly took fire, deducing from Hastings’s ‘want of patience’ (this on the st day of the trial, and the sixth of Burke’s speech) his ‘insolence, audacity and cruelty’. For such an offence, Hastings ‘ought to be sent to Bridewell’ (WS vii. –). On June, even Loughborough, generally well disposed to the prosecution, was constrained to interrupt when Burke began to read from the seventeenth charge (one of those which the managers had dropped) and from Hastings’s reply. Despite the obvious inequity of introducing such material when there was no possibility of the defence being heard, Burke was most reluctant to concede (–). The episode is further evidence of Burke’s refusal to accept that the rules of due process should apply even to one whom he ‘knew’ to be guilty. These dramatic incidents momentarily enlivened what had sunk, by the eighth day, into a rather dull speech. The numbers of lords attending provides an approximate measure of this decline: from on the first day, to on the fourth.¹⁰⁶Yet those who persist through the printed text will encounter many fine and rewarding passages that illustrate characteristic Burkean themes and illuminate his ideas. A recurrent theme, given new urgency since by events in France, is the superiority of the rule of law to arbitrary power. Hastings becomes the type of the lowest species of tyrant, motivated by no higher purpose than the love of lucre. Even some of Burke’s digressions serve to evince his interests and habits of thought. For example, he takes occasion to contest Montesquieu’s report that, in the East, more girls are born than boys, even though the point (if true) would have strengthened his own argument ( June: WS vii. ). Burke was keenly interested in questions of demography, and he could not resist correcting even his acknowledged master. The speech is also embellished by Burke’s usual allusions and references to a wide range of literature, from Virgil to the Arabian Nights. Since judgment would be given by the Lords alone, Burke’s speech marked the end of the managers’ responsibilities. Only one formality remained: the usual vote of thanks to the managers from the Commons whom they had represented. Such a vote had ordinarily been a matter of course, but the conduct of Hastings’s trial, and especially Burke’s part in it, had been so ¹⁰⁶ Calculated from the ‘List of the Peers’ attending on days – of the trial (House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers, Hastings Trial, vol. , fos. –).
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controversial that some of Hastings’s friends determined to oppose the vote, or at least to exclude Burke. The debate took place on June. Aware that there would be opposition, Pitt introduced the motion with a speech in defence of the managers. George Sumner sought indirectly to negative the motion by moving the previous question. In his speech, he insisted chiefly on Burke’s extreme and abusive language at the trial. Other Hastings partisans (principally Ewan Law, Edward’s brother) also argued against Burke receiving any thanks. Burke, however, was defended by Windham, Francis, Fox, and Sheridan. In the end, the previous question was negatived by to , and the vote of thanks approved by to . The Speaker then gave the conventional speech of thanks. Burke responded with ‘a short defence of the conduct of the Impeachment’, which provoked a retort from Ewan Law.¹⁰⁷ There the business ended, as the House turned to the proposed vote of thanks to Lord Hood for the capture of Bastia. Burke’s brief speech in support of this motion was his last in the Commons. On June, he applied for the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, the procedure for resigning from the Commons (C vii. ). Pitt made the appointment on the th, and on July a writ was issued for a new member for Malton.¹⁰⁸ Thus, after twenty-eight and a half years, Burke’s parliamentary career closed. For most of those years, he had been a highly controversial figure, so that its ending with a wrangle rather than an accolade was hardly inappropriate.
Although Burke never wrote the general account of the trial that he hoped would vindicate him to posterity, he did produce a more limited defence of one of the most prevalent criticisms of its conduct, its extraordinary length. Hastings’s partisans began to complain about the inordinate length of his trial as early as , when the managers took thirty-five days to open only two of the twenty articles. Perhaps because the trial was intended from the outset more as a piece of political theatre than as a strictly judicial process, the managers appear never to have calculated its likely duration. From , criticism often focused on the managers’ repeated attempts to secure the acceptance of evidence ruled inadmissible. The charge of wasting time therefore became inextricably linked with questions of legal evidence. As the years passed and ¹⁰⁷ The friends of Hastings published an account of this debate in a pamphlet, The Debate in the House of Commons, on Friday, June, on the Motion of Thanks to the Managers of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ). This report (repr. in History of the Trial, pt. , –) is fuller than that in PH xxxi. –. ¹⁰⁸ Debrett, xxxviii. –. E.B.’s appointment (NRO A. VI. ); and Pitt to E.B., June (C vii. ). CJ xlix. .
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the trial dragged on, complaints became more frequent and acquired more obvious justification.¹⁰⁹ Burke always imputed the trial’s slow progress to the Lords and to the counsel for the defence. In , with the end finally in sight, he determined to exculpate the managers from any responsibility for delays, and at the same time to vindicate their record on the presentation of evidence. His intention was made public at the trial itself on February, during the course of his protest at the Lords’ decision that Francis could not be examined. Defending the managers against the charge of knowingly offering improper evidence, he announced that ‘if it pleases God to lengthen my short span of life’ he would make ‘a very abundant and sufficient answer’ to that and ‘all the other calumnies’ which would ‘go down to posterity’.¹¹⁰ On March, Burke accordingly moved for a committee to inspect the Lords’ Journals, and on the th for an enquiry by the managers into the slow progress of the trial. This enquiry produced a report, which he presented on April.¹¹¹ This report was reprinted as a pamphlet and (being clearly Burke’s composition) later included in editions of his Works.¹¹² The Report is of great interest, not only as Burke’s most sustained legal writing, but for its exposition of his ideas about the law of evidence and about the nature of impeachments. While many of its points had been made at the trial itself, the Report presents them in a more coherent and considered framework. The Report differs in emphasis from what Burke said in Westminster Hall. Sparing of natural law arguments, it relies more extensively on precedents, as befits the report of a committee whose brief was to inspect the Lords’ Journals. Burke never regarded the two as mutually exclusive. At times, he appeals in the highest strain to the eternal laws of justice; at others, he relies on legal precedents. Even on precedents, he speaks with a double voice: some are to be revered, as declarative of eternal principles; others are to be deprecated as narrow legalism. This mixture was likely alternately to delight and exasperate more doctrinaire readers, such as James Mill (–), the Utilitarian. Parts of the Report were exactly to his mind: he relished its ‘unprecedented exposure of abuses in the law, and of the advantage made of those abuses, by the professors of the law’. Yet he dismissed the Report as a whole as incomplete and superficial. Burke ‘neither stretched his eye to ¹⁰⁹ E.B. acknowledged these complaints as early as Apr. (day ). Pointing out that a single election petition had consumed nearly as many days as the trial to date, he declared ‘God forbid we should faint at thrice thirty days, if the proceedings should be drawn to such a length’ (Bond, ii. ). As early as , The World published several mock-calculations of the likely length of the trial ( Apr., Apr., May). ¹¹⁰ BL Add. MS , fo. . ¹¹¹ PH xxxi. ( Mar.), ( Mar.), ( Apr.). E.B. first submitted the report on Apr., but the discovery of some errors led to its recommitment on the th and its resubmission on the th. The report itself is printed in CJ xlix. –, and repr. in WS vii. –. ¹¹² Todd . E.B’s authorship is confirmed by portions of a draft in his hand (NRO A. XXIV. a, ).
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the whole of the subject, nor did he carry his vision to the bottom’. Mill attributed this failure partly to Burke’s timidity, and partly to his ‘artificial admiration of the bare fact of existence; especially ancient existence. Every thing was to be protected; not because it was good, but, because it existed.’¹¹³ In other words, Burke failed to anticipate Bentham’s comprehensive rationalist, utilitarian critique of the law of evidence. Mill’s comments are in fact a remarkable tribute to Burke’s powers of generalization, since he could treat so respectfully remarks made in the course of a trial and in a Select Committee report, from neither of which can be expected the consistency of a philosophical treatise. To appreciate Burke’s theory of evidence, allowance needs to be made for the different rhetorical purposes of what he said at the trial and what he wrote in the Report. At the trial, Burke was addressing the Lords, certainly, but beyond them, and more importantly, public opinion and posterity. In particular, the repeated resubmission of rejected evidence was intended to suggest a primal struggle between the managers, plain men uninstructed in the arcane technicalities of the law, and the incomprehensible, mysterious system of oracles pronounced behind closed doors. The Report, on the other hand, was prepared in the first instance for the Commons, to refute the charge that the managers were to blame for the length to which the trial had extended. This accounts for its reliance on precedents. Arguments from precedents carried more weight in the eighteenth century than they do today, and were nowhere more highly regarded than in the Commons. Burke therefore fortified his arguments with every precedent that he could muster. In addition, he cited many common law cases, seeking to prove that the law itself had actually been developing in the direction of taking a more liberal attitude towards evidence. His prize exhibits are the famous case of Omichund v. Barker (), in which the Court of Chancery had accepted evidence from a Hindu; and Donellan’s case (), in which a poisoner was convicted on circumstantial evidence.¹¹⁴ These examples show that, in some respects, particularly in civil and especially mercantile cases, the rules of evidence were being relaxed, a counter-trend to the stricter rules being enforced as a result of what a recent scholar has called the ‘lawyerization’ of the criminal trial.¹¹⁵ The result is an impressively documented case of the kind likely to persuade the Commons that the managers had acted in accordance with precedent and propriety, and that the Lords had been the sinister constitutional innovators. To recognize the different rhetorical purpose of the Report is not, however, to concede that Burke spoke one language at the trial, and another to the Commons. ¹¹³ James Mill, The History of British India (; th edn. (with notes by Horace Hayman Wilson) London, ), v. – (quotations on , , ). ¹¹⁴ Philip C. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke (Cambridge, ), ii. –. The Trial of John Donellan, Esq. for the Wilful Murder of Sir Theodosius Edward Allesley Boughton (London, ). ¹¹⁵ Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, –.
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Nor did Burke, as Mill and later critics have charged, extend protection to whatever existed. The precedents to which he appealed were validated not by the mere fact of being precedents, but as being declaratory of those rules of eternal and substantial justice which God had implanted in the human mind. At this philosophical level, Burke is at one with the common law tradition. For Burke, the common law formed part of the constitution, while the constitution itself he revered as a work of superlative wisdom, not the unaided invention of a few men but incorporating the inherited wisdom of the ages. He believed not that it was unchanging, but that it evolved in step with society. Its principles remained the same, though their application might change over time. Burke regarded impeachment as a necessary and valuable branch of this inheritance, in danger of being lost though disuse. He therefore saw no incongruity or absurdity in citing precedents from – (the earliest impeachments) to support the basic principles which should govern them: their freedom from technical rules was necessary for the very purpose for which they were instituted. They should be subject only to the eternal rules of substantive justice. Impeachment was threatened in two ways. The first was that the Commons, instead of prosecuting obnoxious or criminal ministers, tamely allowed them to retire. Here Burke was out of step with his contemporaries. At some time during the early eighteenth century, impeachment dwindled from a real threat to a rhetorical weapon. The failure in to impeach Sir Robert Walpole is the prime example. MPs and the public they represented no longer regarded political errors and misjudgements as crimes. Against this background, Burke’s success in persuading the Commons to impeach Hastings was remarkable, the result of an unusual combination of circumstances. The second enemy was the legal profession. The defence counsel argued that the trial should be conducted according to the rules of the lower courts, where, over the course of the century, stricter rules of evidence had been established. These arguments would have availed nothing, however, if the Lords had not referred all disputed questions to the judges and then invariably accepted the judges’ opinions. In Burke’s view, this represented an abdication of their right and duty, being themselves judges in the highest tribunal in the land, to judge for themselves, on points of law as well as on matters of substance. As a result, a constitutional procedure designed to call to account officials (including, potentially, judges) had been captured by a subgroup of those whom it was intended to control. Burke’s high idea of the judicial role of the Lords reflected his larger, aristocratic interpretation of the constitution. During a career in which he sometimes opposed the encroaching power of the Crown, and sometimes the growth of popular power, Burke never found occasion to question or seek to diminish the aristocratic element in the constitution. In this instance, his habitual support of aristocratic power was reinforced by his dislike of professionalism,
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especially legal professionalism. Earlier impeachments had been conducted within a legal system which offered few helps to the accused. Between about and , however, not only were counsel increasingly allowed to defend the accused in criminal trials, but they became more aggressive in challenging prosecution evidence and in establishing the presumption of innocence.¹¹⁶ Hastings benefited from this more defence-friendly legal culture. The crucial decision that the managers lost was the principle that trials in the Lords should be governed by the same rules as obtained in the lower courts. Once that principle was accepted, the seemingly technical subject of the admissibility of evidence would be among those where lords without legal training would most readily seek and accept expert legal advice from the judges. Burke never conceded the logic or the justice of this development. Burke’s attempt to revive the process of impeachment, governed by rules of procedure inherited from the seventeenth century and earlier, was a complete failure. Yet two recent developments have given the study of impeachment an unexpected new relevance. The first is its revival in the United States, which may be thought to vindicate Burke’s contention that seemingly obsolete constitutional processes should be preserved for unforeseen situations. Second, and more pertinent to the question of evidence, the international criminal courts recently established under the aegis of the United Nations offer a suggestive parallel to Burke’s idea of the purpose of impeachment. They are not restricted by the rules of evidence of national legal systems. Instead, each court is required to apply ‘rules of evidence which will best promote a fair determination of the matter before it and are consonant with the spirit of the Statute and the general principles of law’, and may admit ‘any relevant evidence which it deems to have probative value’, the criterion for relevance and probative value being reliability.¹¹⁷ In the same spirit, Burke argued for the rejection only of such evidence as had ‘no Sort of natural Aptitude directly or circumstantially to prove the Case’ (WS vii. ). The rationale for these principles is that, since these international criminal courts do not use juries, they do not need the stricter rules that serve to protect a jury from hearing improperly prejudicial evidence. Exactly the same consideration applied, as Burke observed, to trials before the House of Lords (). The establishment of such courts to try extraordinary crimes may therefore serve in some degree as a posthumous vindication of Burke’s contentions about the rules of evidence that should govern criminal tribunals at the highest level. ¹¹⁶ Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, –; J. M. Beattie, ‘Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Law and History Review, (), –, esp. –. ¹¹⁷ Archbold’s International Criminal Courts: Practice, Procedure, and Evidence (London, ), –.
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Burke never acknowledged how little his temperament was suited to retirement, or how inextricably his life was bound up with politics. For several years, he had hinted at a yearning to retreat, while citing the continuation of the impeachment as what kept him ‘chained to an oar’. Even after the prosecution case had finally closed, and the Commons had voted thanks to the managers, Burke could plausibly have waited until the Lords delivered their judgment before taking his leave of the Commons. This, indeed, is what Fitzwilliam expected ( June : C vii. ). The protestations of politicians on the subject of their own retirement are rarely taken literally, and Burke was therefore under no compulsion to make the vote of thanks his last appearance in the Commons. Two considerations are likely to have influenced his decision to retire. The occasion itself had been purgatorial and humiliating. Alienated from his former associates, and uneasy with his new ones, Burke was increasingly marginalized in an arena dominated by the personal rivalry of Pitt and Fox. In addition, he was keenly aware that his son Richard had made little progress in the political career for which Burke believed him eminently suited. His missions to Ireland and to Koblenz, indeed, had demonstrated to all but his fond father that Richard lacked the personal qualities that might have made him useful to a patron. Unsurprisingly, he had failed to find an entrée into Parliament. Burke, however, cherished fond hopes that, on his own retirement, Fitzwilliam would nominate Richard as his replacement at Malton.¹ On June, therefore, the day after the contested vote of thanks, Burke wrote to Fitzwilliam that, his ‘Engagement with the publick’ now fulfilled, he at last felt free to ‘escape from this Bustle’. He would therefore be applying for the Chiltern Hundreds, in effect resigning his seat (–). To the request for the Chiltern Hundreds, Pitt replied with polite insincerity, professing to regret ‘being accessary to depriving the House of Commons of One of its greatest Ornaments’ ( June: ). Privately, Pitt was probably relieved to be rid of an embarrassing ally, though if he imagined that he was done with Burke he was greatly mistaken. ¹ French Laurence to Portland, June (NUL PwF ).
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Fitzwilliam, too, spoke of the House losing its ‘brightest ornament’, but added ‘what is more essential, the source of its greatest wisdom’ (). At no time could Pitt have subscribed to that sentiment. Relations between Fitzwilliam and Richard Burke had never been easy. Indeed, in August , when Fitzwilliam declined to offer him a seat at Higham Ferrars, Richard remonstrated with a lengthy pièce justificative. Reading this ‘very extraordinary performance’ reinforced Portland’s conviction of the ‘disqualification’ which he had ‘always thought young Burke labor’d under of being brought into Par[liamen]t’.² Richard’s letter to Fitzwilliam was no aberration. He habitually wrote verbose and self-important epistles to correspondents with whom brevity and deference would have been more appropriate. No impartial reader of these letters could disagree with Portland.³ Malton was not a ‘rotten’ borough about the representation of which Fitzwilliam could be indifferent. Nor was Richard’s early death expected. Fitzwilliam ‘did not look for a long life’, but expected a ‘lingering’ illness (C vii. ). His nomination of Richard was therefore a substantial act of generosity and kindness to Burke, intended to make the old man happy. Fitzwilliam knew how much the hereditary principle meant to Burke, and how much he wanted to found a family. Richard’s election, and his eventual inheritance of the peerage which had been proposed for Burke himself, would offer some prospect of the family finally ‘casting a root’ (as Burke had hoped since his purchase of the estate in ) in Beaconsfield, and in county society. Had these dreams been fulfilled, Burke would have died a happier man. Though Malton was not a ‘rotten’, nor even quite a ‘pocket’ borough, Fitzwilliam’s wishes were at this period decisive, and Richard was duly elected on July. Replying to an address of thanks for his own services to the borough, Burke declared the day to be ‘The Happiest of his Life’.⁴ Richard was elated, and immediately availed himself of one of a member’s most cherished privileges, franking letters (C vii. ). Neither knew how transient their joy would prove. The journey to Malton and the excitement of the election proved too much for Richard, already suffering from advanced tuberculosis. He had never been robust, and some friends had recognized the symptoms of consumption.⁵ Burke himself had no notion of the gravity of his son’s illness. ² Fitzwilliam to R.B. Jr., Aug. ; R.B. Jr. to Fitzwilliam, Aug. (C vii. , –). Portland to Fitzwilliam, Sept. (WWM F /). ³ Examples are R.B. Jr. to Dundas, Jan., May (C vii. –, –). Even E.B., not remarkable for epistolary brevity, chided him: ‘You have written long Letters to Dundas. I wonder at it; for I know length only furnishes him with an excuse not to read them’ ( Feb.: ). ⁴ William Hastings to Fitzwilliam, July (C vii. n. ). E.B. later described it as ‘the most and the last happy day of my Life’ (to Fitzwilliam, Jan. : C viii. ). ⁵ Joseph Farington, Diary, ed. Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre (New Haven, –), i. . Farington’s source was Giuseppe Marchi, formerly an assistant to Sir Joshua Reynolds. French Laurence and Fitzwilliam both describe the disease as consumption (Fitzwilliam to Walker King, n.d. (YB Osborn Shelves, c. /); Laurence to Mrs Haviland, Aug. , in James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (nd edn. London, ), ii. ). William Elliot, however, reported the
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F. Cromwell House, Old Brompton, where Richard Burke, Jr., died
He was therefore devastated by Richard’s sudden worsening on July. Immediately, the family moved out of London (where they had been staying) to a secluded house in what was then rural Kensington. A sketch of the house, taken shortly before its demolition about , was published in one of the early biographies of Burke (Fig. ).⁶ A hurried note reveals the depth of Burke’s feelings: He sleeps in a very easy way from time to time—but his strength decays visibly and his Voice is in a manner gone. But God is all sufficient—and surely his goodness and post-mortem opinion of R.B. Jr.’s physicians that he died ‘in consequence of some disease of his Lungs, though they do not seem to think his disorder was what is usually called a consumption’ (to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Sept. : NLS MS , fo. ). ⁶ Survey of London, xxxviii: The Museums Area of South Kensington and Westminster (London, ), , . The illustration (Fig. .) in Peter Burke’s Public and Domestic Life of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, ), , may therefore derive from an actual sketch. Cromwell House stood at what is now Queen’s Gate, just south of Cromwell Road.
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his Mothers prayers may do much. As to me I feel dried up . . . Whether I am to have any objects depends on his recovery. ( July: )
The end was mercifully rapid, and the parents were spared the sight of their son (as the doctors expected) ‘dying by inches before their eyes’ (). The last scene was recorded in some detail, affecting without being mawkish, by French Laurence. Lying in bed, Richard was disturbed by his father’s silence, asking him to ‘Talk of Religion, talk of morality, talk, if you will, on indifferent subjects’. Overpowered, Burke could not speak. Richard then heard a noise which he at first took for rain, but which his father told him was ‘the the rustling of the wind through the trees’. Burke’s remark prompted a last intellectual effort, as Richard recalled and repeated Adam’s lines on the winds from Paradise Lost: His praise, ye winds, that from four quarters blow, Breathe soft or loud; and wave your tops, ye Pines, With every plant, in sign of worship wave! (v. –)
After repeating the lines (a favourite passage of both his father and his late uncle), he collapsed. Jane withdrew, but Edmund remained for the final moments.⁷ Richard died on Saturday, August. Burke would sometimes remember Saturday as ‘my sad Hebdomadary’ (to Walker King, Mar. : C viii. ). Burke’s earliest recorded response to the death was written in reply to a moving letter from Lord Fitzwilliam, tactfully calling on him to summon the same ‘manly fortitude’ that Richard would have shown on a like occasion ( Aug. : C vii. –). His most powerful feeling was not grief but remorse, remorse that he had ‘not husbanded the Treasure that was in my hands’, but ‘threw him away by every species of Neglect and mismanagement’ (). He explained more fully what he meant in a biographical sketch that he later wrote of his son (–). Preoccupied with public affairs, he had relied on Richard and Jane maintaining the family household and finances, keeping from his knowledge ‘every thing that was fretful, teizing and disgusting’. Without this protection, he could never have ‘preserved that cheerfulness and animation which it was visible I enjoyd’ and which ‘inspired my affairs and my desires’ (). Much as Burke exaggerated his son’s talents, there is no reason to doubt the truth of this claim. He does not, of course, express any remorse that Jane should have devoted herself to the needs of his domestic comfort: a wife was expected to do as much. But to have used his son as his business factotum seemed in retrospect inexcusable. Being the son of a famous father is not easy. Richard Burke’s faults are writ large in the record, especially in his intolerably prolix and presumptuous ⁷ French Laurence to Mrs Haviland, , Aug. (C vii. –; full text of letter of Aug. in Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character, ii. –).
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letters to his superiors, and in the hostile comments he provoked from most observers. Without his father’s testimony, we would not have known how much Richard sacrificed to smooth and soothe his father’s life. Yet Burke’s self-reproach was misplaced. Unsuited to public life, Richard surely found his true métier in his father’s shadow. As a son, Richard was irreplaceable. But after his death, Burke was fortunate to find several other younger men who were prepared to assume parts of the burden. Burke could do little to reward his assistants, and their willingness to serve him is a tribute to the affection and respect in which he was held by those who knew him best. In the first paroxysm of grief, Burke doubted whether he wanted to survive his son, or to join him in the grave (C vii. ). But his own better judgement, and Fitzwilliam’s call on him to live for those who loved him (), soon prevailed. He came to accept that ‘there may be something in the world, ordaind by God, that I should do or suffer’ (). Action and suffering in ample measure were indeed in store. The immediate future held more of suffering. Within less than a year, the tragedy of Richard’s early death had been compounded by Fitzwilliam’s ill-fated tenure of the viceroyalty of Ireland, and by the acquittal, not less bitter from being expected, of Warren Hastings. These combined to make – one of the most painful years of Burke’s life. Thereafter, as he recovered from these blows, he renewed with increased vigour the fight against Jacobinism, and produced some of his most eloquent and powerful writings.
Burke’s return to political life was made easier by the cause which first reanimated him: Ireland. If at first he professed to have no objects for which to live, he soon persuaded himself that he was permitted, perhaps obliged, to continue the work left undone by his son, ‘to spin out, with second hand and worn out materials, the broken Staple of his Life’ ( Sept. : C viii. ). Catholic emancipation had been the object of Richard’s mission in . Allowing himself to believe that he was taking up his son’s work, rather than resuming his own, helped to assuage Burke’s feelings of guilt and remorse at having fatally delayed Richard’s political independence. Ireland was also a cause where Burke could initially be hopeful about the value of his efforts and the success that might attend them. On the greatest issue of all, the war against Jacobin France, he knew that power was in Pitt’s hands, and that he had neither easy access to Pitt, nor much chance of influencing him. Ireland, he had reason to hope, would soon be in friendlier and more amenable hands. For in the interim between Richard’s election and death, the coalition between Pitt and the Portland Whigs, which Burke had been promoting for about two years, was finally effected. On July, the Duke
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of Portland took office as Home Secretary; William Windham, as Secretary at War; and Earl Fitzwilliam, as Lord President of the Council. The arrangement was made, moreover, on the understanding that Fitzwilliam would, if he wished, subsequently be appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, as soon as some equivalent office could be found for the present incumbent, the Earl of Westmorland. Since the Lord-Lieutenant reported to the Home Secretary, Ireland would be firmly under Whig, rather than Pittite, control. Such at least was how Portland, Fitzwilliam, and Burke understood the arrangement. Pitt interpreted it differently, but for some months Fitzwilliam was allowed to believe that he would be sent to Ireland to inaugurate a new system of government. Fitzwilliam recognized the difficulty of the task, and was diffident about his own abilities. At first, he had professed unwillingness to take any office, much less the arduous viceroyalty. But he was soon persuaded that, even in the sinecure Lord Presidency, his accession would strengthen the government, and by August he had even agreed to go to Ireland. Somewhat incautiously, he began at once to make plans and consult people, though no date had been fixed for his assumption of office.⁸ Burke, of course, was at least as eager as Fitzwilliam to begin the work of reformation. But before Fitzwilliam was even nominated, a question arose which required urgent action. John Hely Hutchinson, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, was thought to be dying. Who should succeed him? In England, the headship of an Oxford or Cambridge college was rarely controversial. Not so in Ireland, where Trinity College was one of the bastions of the Protestant establishment. Besides, the last two provosts had been political appointments. In , Francis Andrews (–) owed his promotion to the influence of the Lord-Lieutenant. Though a fellow of the college, he was a lawyer, not a clergyman, as the statutes required. When Andrews died in , Hutchinson, an ambitious place-seeker, obtained the position as part of an even more flagrantly political arrangement. Hutchinson was prominent in Irish politics, and continued to sit in the Irish Parliament (as Andrews had done). Burke had supported the candidacy of his old friend Thomas Leland, one of the senior fellows. Hutchinson was unpopular in the college, and was soon embroiled in controversy. Burke’s disapproval of his appointment is evident from an ironic letter he wrote in response to a pamphlet in vindication of his conduct, sent by Hutchinson.⁹ In treating the provostship as a piece of political patronage, Westmorland was thus doing no more than following recent precedents. In , he had ⁸ F. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, ), –; E. A. Smith, Whig Principles and Party Politics: Earl Fitzwilliam and the Whig Party, – (Manchester, ), –; John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, –), ii. –; David Wilkinson, ‘The Pitt–Portland Coalition of and the Origins of the “Tory” Party’, History, (), –. ⁹ R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College, Dublin, –: An Academic History (Cambridge, ), –. E.B. to William Markham, June ; to Hely Hutchinson, Jan. (C ii. –, iii. –).
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proposed to confer it on Arthur Wolfe (–), the Attorney-General, as a retirement sinecure. A deputation from the college travelled to London to present a petition against the appointment. On their way, they called on Burke, who was at first cool, but then gave them support and advice, though he seems to have done no more (C vii. –). In , when the question resurfaced with more urgency as Hutchinson’s health deteriorated, Burke played a more active part. Several reasons can be advanced for this. Rumours had been started that, as a reward for his apostasy, he was himself to be the next Provost. Further, in the candidate was to Burke’s mind even less suitable: William Bennet (–), an Englishman with no connection to Trinity, who came to Ireland as Westmorland’s chaplain, and who had since been successively promoted to the bishoprics of Cork and Cloyne. To compound the iniquity, Bennet intended to hold the provostship in commendam with his bishopric. Burke was especially irritated by this egregious example of episcopal rapacity. Keenly aware that the Church of Ireland occupied an invidious and anomalous position, he was dismayed at its being brought into discredit by a bishop, whose own self-interest ought to make him mindful of its reputation. More generally, Burke believed, perhaps more fervently since the French Revolution, that higher education ought to be in ecclesiastical hands (R [–]). In an age of revolutionary ferment, the state should carefully preserve and protect the institutions that promoted the religion of the governing classes. Colleges should not be treated as political pawns. Above all, the proposed appointment typified for Burke the jobbing spirit of the Protestant Ascendancy, which cared nothing for the welfare of the country, or the preservation of civilization against the Jacobin menace, provided its own monopoly of political patronage were maintained. In this case, Burke was successful. Portland was sympathetic, and Loughborough, to whom he turned for advice, declared that the appointment of a bishop was not within the dispensing power of the Crown. Richard Murray (c.–), the Vice-Provost, was appointed, as Burke had recommended.¹⁰ The provostship mattered, not only to the college, but as evidence of a more equitable distribution of Irish patronage. Burke traced the root of Irish misgovernment to the Lord-Lieutenant having become a pawn in the hands of the leaders of the obnoxious Protestant Ascendancy, principally Lord FitzGibbon (–; Lord Chancellor) and John Beresford (–; as First Commissioner of Revenue, he controlled extensive patronage). Their removal was therefore essential, as an earnest that a new system was to be pursued. They had opposed the concessions made in the Catholic Relief Act of , and Burke believed that they actively sought to render them nugatory
¹⁰ E.B. to Henry Grattan, Sept. (C viii. –); to Portland, Sept. (–). McDowell and Webb, Trinity College, –.
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or inoperative. Fitzwilliam, he hoped, by a benevolent and conciliatory conduct of the Irish administration, would persuade the Catholics to accept something close to the status quo. Two further concessions he recommended: allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament, and the establishment of a Catholic institute of higher education. The first was chiefly symbolic. Burke expected no more than three Catholic members to be elected to the Commons, and only one Catholic peer to take his seat in the Lords. Only in the much longer term, when time had allowed industrious Catholics to reacquire the landed property lost in earlier confiscations, could the Catholic presence in Parliament become more than token. Meanwhile, the admission of a token few would be a healing gesture. The Catholic college was a more practical initiative. Burke attributed the idea to Richard, and indeed such a college (Maynooth) was established in .¹¹ On a larger constitutional question that Burke thought might be in agitation, a possible union between Britain and Ireland, he expressed himself with reserve. The carefully chosen words of his letter to Fitzwilliam of September repay scrutiny: ‘I always looked upon an Union, even under Circumstances infinitely more favourable than any that now exist, as a bold experimental remedy, justified, perhaps called for, in some nearly desperate Crisis of the whole Empire.’ It would, he believed, be deeply unpopular in Ireland (C viii. –). Burke did not condemn a union more unequivocally, because he was afraid that the British Cabinet, and therefore Fitzwilliam, might already have decided at least to propose such a measure. He had therefore to speak guardedly against it, while making his opposition sufficiently plain.¹² By the middle of October, the differences between Pitt and Portland about Irish policy could no longer be ignored. Fitzwilliam found that he would not be allowed so free a hand as he had supposed. In particular, his plan to remove FitzGibbon and Beresford seemed to Pitt unnecessary and dangerous. Fitzwilliam and Portland were outraged at what they interpreted as duplicity on Pitt’s part, and threatened to resign. Windham sought to enlist Burke in preventing an irrevocable ministerial split.¹³ Burke was placed in a most awkward predicament. His primary personal loyalty was to Fitzwilliam, with whom he also agreed on the necessity of removals as an earnest that the old persecuting Protestant Ascendancy was no longer in the ascendant. Governing in a spirit of peace and reconciliation, Fitzwilliam would be able to preserve Ireland against further Jacobinization. Yet he believed that Pitt’s ¹¹ E.B. to Grattan, Sept. ; to Fitzwilliam, c. Sept.; to Windham, Oct. (C viii. , –, –). ¹² E.B. offers a similarly guarded disapprobation of a union in his Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (: WS ix. –). His dislike of the project can also be inferred from his letter to Samuel Span of Apr. (C iii. ). ¹³ E.B. to Windham and Windham to E.B., Oct. ; Windham to E.B., Oct. (C viii. –).
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continuing in power was essential to maintain the war against Jacobinism, for the only practical alternative was Fox and immediate peace and fraternity. In addition, Burke now had a personal obligation to Pitt for the pension which he needed to avert financial ruin.¹⁴ Perplexing as Burke found the situation, his mixed feelings and double commitments qualified him as a useful mediator. In response to Windham’s appeal, he wrote a long letter (over , words), intended to be circulated among the ministers (C viii. –). Professing to write ‘with no other View of the matter, than as it concerns the Interest, the stability, perhaps the existence of Mr Pitt’s power’ (), he argued that to strengthen the coalition, to make Portland and Fitzwilliam real allies rather than discontented subordinates, was in Pitt’s own best interest. His ‘paramount power’ was universally recognized. Concessions from him would therefore appear marks rather of strength than of weakness. Fitzwilliam, he admitted, might have ‘in some respects acted with a degree of indiscretion’ (). For Burke, of one of his friends, this was no small concession. In substance, however, Fitzwilliam’s intended plan of action for Ireland was the right and indeed only right one, not only for Ireland, but for Europe. The jobbing junto had brought ‘the old European System of Government’ into discredit; their dismissal was a necessary to restore its integrity (). This last point is one of many indications that, concerned as he was for Ireland itself, Burke never lost sight of the European context. As he had declared in the Reflections, ‘To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely’ (R []). To retain the loyalty of the Catholic majority, they must be given a sufficient stake in the constitution of the country to enable them to identify with it. If, however, Pitt was unable or unwilling to support the commitment that Portland and Fitzwilliam had made to reform in Ireland, then the only honourable course for them was to resign (C viii. –). Two other letters provide further evidence of Burke’s uncharacteristic uncertainty of mind at this juncture. Having occasion to thank Lord Loughborough for a patronage favour, about October he drafted a long letter in which he expatiated on his views on Ireland. Yet on second thoughts, he sent a much shorter one, retaining the paragraphs of thanks but drastically curtailing the political part.¹⁵ Of particular interest in the suppressed part of this letter is that Burke felt obliged to explain why, having ‘in Mind and inclination’ retired from public affairs, even before ‘Calamity had in a manner buried me alive’, he should nevertheless ‘choose to intrude my self into Such concerns’. The answer was that, although ‘incapable of all the pleasures of Life, and ever shall be, I am not insensible ¹⁴ E.B. received formal notification of the king’s ‘intention’ from Pitt on Aug. (C vii. –), but negotiations about the details took over a year. E.B. was therefore in a situation of awkward suspense and dependence. ¹⁵ C viii. – (draft); UBL (III), –.
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to its Duties, nor renderd dead to its friendships’ (C viii. ). That Burke should make such a protestation suggests the unease he felt at breaking the retirement that he had imposed on himself after Richard’s death, particularly in writing to Loughborough, who had not solicited his opinions. His truncation of the long letter is thus explicable. To Windham, however, who had actually asked for his views, he wrote again the next day. His perplexity remains in evidence: while advising moderation in the dispute with Pitt, he advocated ‘open, avowed, unappeasable War’ against ‘the Irish Jobb System’. Pursuing both lines of policy would not be easy. Unusually, too, he reversed his stand on whether Portland and Fitzwilliam should resign: now he argues that they should ‘not commit suicide, but be slain on their post in a battle against this Irish corruption’. As in the letter to Loughborough, an uncalled for apology reveals his disquiet. Burke first excuses his volte-face as a reversion to his first opinion, then asks: ‘If indeed my opinion was wholly changed on reflexion, why should I be ashamed of it, in one of the most difficult questions that ever was?’ (–). Burke did not often admit that he had changed his mind. The difficulty was less in the question than in his divided loyalties. The root of the problem was mutual distrust. Portland and Fitzwilliam remained suspicious of Pitt. They had neither forgotten nor forgiven the dismissal of the Coalition in . Burke, whose enmities were in general longlived, had in this instance more completely disburdened his mind of the legacy of that unhappy episode.¹⁶ In his view, the common cause of the fight against Jacobinism ought to obliterate the remembrance of earlier animosities. In a draft memorandum, he was accordingly critical of both sides for not recognizing ‘its being so extraordinary a time as it is’, and playing the old political game of ministry and opposition. Thirty years ago, ‘the greatest changes which could be rationally foreseen could have but little effect on the domestick happiness of mankind’. Now, ‘no mans fireside is safe from the Effects of a political Revolution’. Convinced as he was of the importance of the issues, Burke came to realize that ‘power’, and an unwillingness to share it, was the real sticking point.¹⁷ By the end of October, Burke was ‘in a state of mind as near compleat despair as a man can be’ (C viii. ). Even Fitzwilliam had failed to rise to the occasion, proposing to replace FitzGibbon as Chancellor with James Adair (c.–). Burke was outraged at the choice. His objections were partly personal. Adair was an old Foxite, who had deserted Fox as recently as , when he was returned by Fitzwilliam for Higham Ferrars, a vacancy that ¹⁶ Only on the eve of the coalition, and then reluctantly, did Fitzwilliam concede that the Whigs should ‘forget their animosity ag[ains]t the formation of the present Administration’ (to Portland, June : NUL PwF ). E.B. had taken this view as early as May (to Loughborough, May: C vii. ). ¹⁷ ‘Reflexions on the Breach in the Ministry’ (incomplete, dated Oct. : C viii. –).
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Burke had hoped Richard might have filled. In the Commons, Adair had proved a lukewarm supporter of the government, and Burke probably suspected him of remaining a Foxite at heart.¹⁸ Worse, in proposing an undistinguished Englishman who happened to enjoy his confidence, Fitzwilliam was imitating Westmorland’s promotion of Bennet. The crisis demanded that appointments should be made conspicuously on grounds of personal merit and fitness, to proclaim the end of the system of jobbery. At this juncture, Burke was enlisted by Loughborough as a mediator. Fitzwilliam was surprised at the choice. Writing to his wife, he hinted that Burke was hardly ‘the fittest person in the world for the purpose’, expecting his intervention to ‘end in a dispute on his own part with each, & leaving them at least as wide as he found them’.¹⁹ Such an assessment from a friendly source illustrates one reason for Burke’s failure to achieve anything like the success in practical politics that his talents ought to have commanded. Fitzwilliam was right: ordinarily, Burke would not have been a good choice. Far from conciliating, he was only too apt to irritate people. On this occasion, however, perhaps because his temporary disillusion with Fitzwilliam made him more impartial than usual, Burke evinced unsuspected diplomatic qualities. Far from widening the breach, he played a conciliatory role. Since he no longer leased a house in London, on his arrival (on Tuesday, November) he took rooms at Nerot’s Hotel in King Street, off St James’s Square.²⁰ Immediately, presumably at Loughborough’s suggestion, he wrote to Dundas to arrange a meeting, viewing him as a possible mediator on Pitt’s side. Wednesday was frustrating. Burke received a frosty reply from Dundas.²¹ He then called on Loughborough, who was not in, and in turn (having gone to dine with his brother-in-law) missed a call from Fitzwilliam. Discouraged, he felt that ‘The best thing I can do is to go out of Town.’²² Late in the evening, a note from Loughborough brought worse news, reporting a ‘conversation at Court’ with Dundas, and Pitt’s continuing ‘jealousies’, despite a meeting with Portland. Replying to Loughborough at a.m., Burke asked ‘why in the name of God don’t they meet together, and know what their mutual intentions are?’ (C viii. ). Impatient at the end of a single day, Burke’s inexperience in mediation is clear. ¹⁸ E.B. to French Laurence, Nov. (C viii. –). Adair was hardly a strong candidate for the Irish Chancellorship, but nothing in his subsequent conduct in Parliament justified E.B.’s suspicions (R. G. Thorne, The House of Commons, – (London, ), iii. –). ¹⁹ Fitzwilliam to Lady Fitzwilliam, c. Nov. (NRO Fitzwilliam Papers, X. /). ²⁰ Established in , Nerot’s was ‘one of the most fashionable hotels in the West End’ (Survey of London, xxix: The Parish of St James Westminster, Part , South of Piccadilly (London, ), ). E.B. would often stay there during the short visits to London of his last years. ²¹ Though E.B. was presumably unaware of the fact, Dundas would almost have welcomed a breach with the Portland party (to Pitt, Oct. , in Lord Ashbourne, Pitt, Some Chapters of his Life and Times (London, ), –). He resented Portland, on joining the ministry, taking part of his fief (Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh, ), –). ²² E.B. to Loughborough, Nov. (UBL (III), ).
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Thursday proved more hopeful. Burke had a long conversation with Fitzwilliam, the substance of which he transmitted to Loughborough at a meeting at which Henry Grattan (representing Irish opinion) was also present. As recorded by Loughborough, the main points were an acknowledgement of Pitt’s supremacy, with the last word on any ‘material measure as to things or persons’; no ‘vindictive removals’, and even necessary dismissals to be settled in concert with London; oblivion of ‘Misrepresentations and indiscretions’; and an arrangement for Ireland ‘in the best manner for the interest of both kingdoms’. Loughborough added his understanding that Fitzwilliam was ‘ready and desirous to state it more fully himself ’.²³ On Friday, Burke sent Fitzwilliam a fuller version. His account differs from Loughborough’s in that, while disclaiming ‘any thing which could be properly called new Systems’, it emphasizes Fitzwilliam’s resolution ‘of reforming the Abuses which prevailed in the Government of Ireland’ (C viii. ). Whichever report more accurately records what was said, the difference between them highlights an ultimately irreconcilable division between Fitzwilliam and Pitt. Fitzwilliam wanted to reform Ireland, and had decided opinions on how to proceed. Pitt wanted him above all to keep Ireland quiet. This difference, however, was not yet apparent. Informed of what Burke had said, Fitzwilliam’s response was to retreat. Burke now had to tell Loughborough that, while avowing the sentiments as his own, Fitzwilliam ‘had not given me any particular authority to communicate them as from him, or at his desire’. He was willing to attend a meeting with Loughborough, on the understanding that it was not of his seeking.²⁴ Burke stayed at his hotel for several hours waiting for a visit from Dundas, who did not come. On that frustrating note, the record of his mediation ends, though he may have stayed in London for a day or two longer and continued to act as a go-between. Burke emerges with credit from the episode, tirelessly striving to save an awkward and uneasy coalition. Agreement was finally reached at a meeting at Downing Street on November. As Fitzwilliam reported to Burke on the th, ‘I go to Ireland— though not exactly upon the terms I had originally thought of.’ FitzGibbon was to remain as Lord Chancellor. An indication of his unhappiness with the compromise is that he ‘left the decision’ to Grattan and the Ponsonbys; they urged his acceptance (C viii. ). Burke was relieved, even pleased, still believing that ‘much good may be done, and more Evil prevented’. Indeed, from Burke’s point of view, leaving FitzGibbon in office was better than replacing him with Adair. Advising Fitzwilliam to discharge ‘the sacred Trust of Patronage’ responsibly, ‘by publick principles’, Burke promised not to ²³ ‘Explanation settled between Mr Grattan and Mr Burke, coming from Lord Fitzwilliam and the Chancellor’, in HMC (Carlisle), (misdated Mar. ). ²⁴ E.B. to Loughborough, Nov. (UBL (III), –).
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burden him with recommendations of his own, or at least with only small ones ().²⁵ For the moment, then, a happier chapter in Irish history seemed to be opening. Fitzwilliam’s appointment as Lord-Lieutenant promised both to redress long-standing grievances and to keep Ireland safe from the menace of Jacobinism. Its failure was accordingly one of the bitterest disappointments of Burke’s final years, a period not barren of tragedy and disaster. So completely did Burke identify with Fitzwilliam’s aspirations and their defeat that the viceroyalty almost forms an episode in his own life. Indeed, the course of Fitzwilliam’s brief administration provides what is probably the best evidence of how Burke, given ministerial responsibility, might have acted. Fitzwilliam’s behaviour was certainly in many ways Burkean, and Burke was chiefly responsible for the pièce justificative prepared to defend his conduct. With hindsight, the failure of Fitzwilliam’s Irish mission appears predictable, even inevitable, and Fitzwilliam may seem the victim of an impossible situation. From the outset, there was a glaring incompatibility between his ideas and Pitt’s. Sooner or later, the two were certain to clash, and Pitt’s to prevail. Yet a more adroit politician than Fitzwilliam might have achieved an acceptable compromise: a wider spread of patronage, without excluding the old guard; and a more conciliatory attitude to the Catholics, with concessions stopping short of admitting them to Parliament. Such was probably what Pitt envisaged. Fitzwilliam was unable to pursue this course because, arriving in Ireland with deeply rooted prejudices, he naturally looked for advice to those who shared his views, so that his ideas were immediately and powerfully reinforced by his Irish advisers, men who had been in opposition to the previous administration. Like Burke, Fitzwilliam was inattentive to what he did not want to hear, and incapable of understanding an opposite point of view, or of appreciating honest differences of opinion. With such advisers, Fitzwilliam came, as Burke so often did, to identify the interests and beliefs of a party with the public good, and to polarize a complex political problem into a straightforward moral choice. Nor, lacking previous administrative experience, was he in the habit of making compromises. Compromise was needed, as even Burke appreciated. Soon after hearing of the terms on which Fitzwilliam was to go to Ireland, Burke described his ‘satisfaction’ to Frances Crewe: Things are not undoubtedly settled as I could wish them. Compromises are things not very much made for generous minds; but they are what wise tempers will ²⁵ E.B. wrote a memorandum of requests (C viii. –), which are indeed modest. True to his word, E.B. resisted Lady Inchiquin’s importunity to press Fitzwilliam for promotion for her brother, Joseph Palmer, Dean of Cashel. He recommended that she should write to the Duke of Portland ( Jan. : BL Department of Manuscripts, R.P. ).
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submit to. Perhaps in these things it is not only true, that half a loaf is better than no bread, but that other old proverb is as true, that in many things the half is better than the whole. I have seen many political struggles, and have had my share in some of them; and I never knew a complete victory obtained in which they who came off conquerors had not reason to be sorry for the decisive advantage they had got. I believe compromises are the very condition of our existence. (c. Nov. : C viii. –)
This is Burke, by temperament averse to compromise, struggling to convince himself. On December, he wrote in a different and more characteristic strain to Windham, giving him advice on the conduct of the new session of Parliament, the first for nearly thirty years in which he would take no part (–). The war had not gone well, and pressure for peace would be insistent. Burke was apprehensive that the ministry would be ‘driven to act upon the defensive’. If it was, all would be lost. Though ‘arms are not yet taken up . . . virtually, you are in a civil war.’ In such a situation, there was no room for negotiation or reconciliation: ‘If your hands are not on your swords, their knives will be at your throats. There is no medium,—there is no temperament,—there is no compromise with Jacobinism’ (). To animate the nation in defence of the constitution and against the menace of Jacobinism, Burke advocated the formation of a loyal association, on the model of those of and . Such a recurrence to the models of the past was typical of Burke. Yet the unprecedented threat posed by Jacobinism had taught him that, while ‘settled governments’ could not employ the ‘bold resources of new experimental systems’, they still ‘ought to approach, as nearly as our circumstances will permit, to the decisive character of the new enemy we have to contend with, abroad and at home’ (C viii. ). For the remainder of his life, Burke would reiterate this theme and this lesson: even in Parliament, the war against Jacobinism required firm, decisive, even unprecedented methods, not the familiar routine appropriate to a ministry and an opposition that might soon exchange places. Little heed would be paid to these warnings, as Burke became increasingly frantic at the failure of the guards to be sufficiently active in defending the constitution against its domestic and foreign enemies. Meanwhile, in Ireland, Fitzwilliam’s haste and impatience meant that his tragedy unfolded rapidly. Arriving in Dublin on January, he soon abandoned (in his own view, he was compelled by circumstances to abandon) two of the articles agreed at Downing Street on November. He made changes in personnel that certainly had the appearance of inaugurating a new system, and went far beyond cautious neutrality to active encouragement of the Catholic claims. Disapproval from the British Cabinet was not slow in coming, though its arrival was delayed by contrary winds. As early
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as February, Portland wrote in disavowal, and on the rd Fitzwilliam was recalled.²⁶ Burke was devastated. When Lord Milton (–; Fitzwilliam’s Chief Secretary) read to him the Duke of Portland’s letter of recall, his vexation could find vent only in physical action: he ‘actually rolled himself upon the ground’.²⁷ Burke’s sense of the flagrant injustice of Fitzwilliam’s dismissal was reinforced by an ominous accident of timing. Soon after the Cabinet recalled him, the House of Lords began the process of acquitting Hastings. If Fitzwilliam could be condemned by the Cabinet, while Hastings was exonerated by the Lords, where was justice to be found? Exaggerating and generalizing from these two travesties, Burke lamented to Henry Grattan that natural justice was ‘banishd by the formalities of Aristocracy, and the abominations of the Rights of man; and no other than Revolutionary Tribunals exist on Earth!’ ( Mar. : C viii. ). Burke could say nothing worse of the House of Lords than to equate its travesty of justice with those perpetrated by the tribunals of revolutionary France. As in November Burke had worked to secure Fitzwilliam’s appointment, so in February and March he strove to prevent a precipitate resignation. Fitzwilliam should stay, he argued, even if he had to compromise over a few jobs for his enemies. Indeed, as late as March, a day before Fitzwilliam’s successor was appointed, Burke was still hoping against hope that Fitzwilliam might somehow return to Ireland as its saviour. ‘Let Lord Fitzwilliam be prevailed on to go back to Ireland,’ he urged the Duke of Devonshire. ‘Seat him there with the honour that becomes an honest Servant of the Crown.’ His opponents should taste ‘what it is to feel punishment for their Crimes. Let us here no more of compromises and compensations’. Even Burke acknowledged, in a remarkable litotes, that ‘There is some difficulty in what I recommend’ (C viii. ). This is the authentic voice of a temperament that responds to failure by prescribing increased doses of the same medicine. Fitzwilliam’s recall, however, was now irrevocable, and he left Ireland, disgraced but popular, on March. As eager as Burke to prove himself ‘perfectly in the right’, he immediately embarked on a campaign of self-justification which Burke helped articulate.²⁸ Burke’s belief that jobbery was the main cause of Fitzwilliam’s recall appears to be mistaken, though it was certainly a subordinate factor. The real sticking point was the concessions to the Catholics, which, so the king and others thought, threatened the fabric of the constitution. Burke refused to ²⁶ Smith, Whig Principles and Party Politics, –. ²⁷ Lord Milton to Lord Fitzwilliam, ‘Thursday’ [ Apr. ] (NRO FC, ). ²⁸ Smith, Whig Principles and Party Politics, –.
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believe that people could sincerely hold this view. He therefore dismissed it as a cover for what he thought was really at stake, the preservation of what he derided as the ‘Jobbing ascendency’.²⁹ This is a revealing blind spot. Why could Burke, himself a firm believer in the sacrosanctity of the constitution, who would not countenance the smallest reform of the most corrupt and absurd anomaly of representation, not understand an apparently analogous objection to admitting Catholics to Parliament? Indeed, why was he prepared to advocate the repeal of an exclusion that had now enjoyed a century of prescription? The problem is the more acute because Burke did not believe that participation in political life was a natural right, but rather a matter to be ‘settled by convention’ (R []). The most likely answer is that, for Burke, Jacobinism was the primary enemy, and ‘the first, the last, and middle Object’ of Jacobinism was the extirpation of religion. Since the Jacobins ‘made no distinction of Sects’, neither did Burke. All religious denominations must accordingly make common cause (to William Smith, Jan. : C viii. ). At the same time, he recognized a difficulty: The weakness (if it be weakness) of man is such, that very few indeed are attachd to the great fundamental parts of Religion in which most Christian sects are agreed, who do not entertain a marked regard to those distinctive Tenets, Rules, or practices, which characterise their particular denomination. (to Fitzwilliam, Feb. : )
Knowing this ‘weakness’ might have cautioned Burke that the Irish Protestants, too, might entertain a ‘marked regard’ for their own tenets. It did not, because he believed that, in Ireland at least, ‘Protestant’ was no more than a negative term, empty of any real meaning, for someone who was not a Catholic. To Burke, therefore, Irish Protestantism was no more than a cloak to cover a determination to maintain an unjust system of oppression.³⁰ Just before the Irish Parliament was to meet to discuss the Catholic question, one of its members, William Smith (–) wrote to Burke for advice on the subject. Smith himself was prepared to admit Catholics on the ground that their exclusion was a kind of civil degradation, but was worried about the dangers that their admission might pose to the Church of Ireland ( Jan. : C viii. –). In his reply, Burke distinguished, as usual, between ‘abstract Questions’ and their application to the present problem. On the latter, he was clear: the Catholic religion should be ‘cherished’ and given ‘positive encouragement’ because ‘the serious and earnest belief and practice of it by its professors forms, as things stand, the most effectual Barrier, if not the sole Barrier, against Jacobinism’ (). Unless all ²⁹ E.B. to R.B. Jr., Nov. (C vii. , ). Later he derides ‘the Jobb-ascendency’, ‘that Junto of Jobbers’, ‘the Hucksters of Ascendency’ (, , post Nov.: , , ). ³⁰ ‘Letter to Richard Burke’ (: WS ix. –), esp. –.
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remaining disabilities were removed, ‘they will be made whole Jacobins’ (). For this opinion, Burke was repeatedly vilified and pilloried as a cryptoCatholic.³¹ There is no evidence to support this charge. Indeed, Burke carefully excludes the question of the competing claims of the different denominations: All the principal religions in Europe stand upon one common bottom. The support, that the whole, or the favourd parts, may have in the secret dispensations of Providence, it is impossible to tell: But humanly speaking, they are all prescriptive religions. They have all stood long enough, to make prescription, and its train of legitimate prejudices, their main Stay. ()
The point could be extended to the religions of Asia, which were likewise ‘prescriptive religions’. Burke seems to accord all religions equal standing, despite their mutual hostilities and incompatibilities. But can they all be ‘true’, and does the relativism implied in this argument call his own belief into doubt? Some of his statements can be interpreted as evidence that he viewed religion as no more than an instrument of social order and control.³² Yet the many incidental expressions of faith in private letters to family and friends suggest sincerely held religious convictions.³³ Fitzwilliam’s viceroyalty was almost as traumatic an experience for Burke as for Fitzwilliam himself. Only two gleams of light broke the otherwise unrelieved gloom. The provostship of Trinity College was restored to its statutory course. One of Fitzwilliam’s first appointments was Richard Murray as Provost, and this was approved in London. Perhaps in gratitude for the part Burke had played in resisting the intrusion of Bennet, the college commissioned a full-length portrait of Burke in academic robes, which still hangs in its Examination Hall.³⁴ Second, Burke had the satisfaction to see the foundation of the Catholic college which his son Richard had proposed. This project, initiated by Fitzwilliam, was implemented under his successor. St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, received its first students in . To commemorate Richard’s interest in the scheme, Burke donated to the new college some of Richard’s books.³⁵ ³¹ The prevalence of this charge is best attested by the number of caricatures in which E.B. is dressed as a priest (and often carrying a rosary, a scourge, or a crucifix), even on subjects to which religious affiliation was wholly irrelevant. An example is William Dent’s Revolutionists ( Oct. ), in which several prominent oppositionists assail the constitution. E.B. carries a large cross (Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, ), ). ³² Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago, ), –. ³³ E.B. to Windham, Oct. ; to Frances Crewe, c. Mar. ; to Laurence, July (C viii. –, ; ix. ). Nigel Aston, ‘A “Lay Divine”: Burke, Christianity, and the Preservation of the British State, –’, in Religious Change in Europe, –: Essays for John McManners, ed. Nigel Aston (Oxford, ), – (esp. –). ³⁴ John Kearney to E.B., Feb. (YB OF ). The portrait, by John Hoppner (–), was not delivered until . It is reproduced as the frontispiece to C viii. ³⁵ Patrick J. Corish, Maynooth College, – (Dublin, ), –. Thomas Troy to E.B., July (C viii. ).
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Deeply convinced that Jacobinism was at inexpiable war with all that he valued in European civilization, Burke was increasingly frustrated that those who had the most to lose by its triumph were either lukewarm in its defence or actively (if sometimes unwittingly) promoting its cause. The tragic outcome of Fitzwilliam’s viceroyalty reinforced this belief. In betraying Fitzwilliam, Pitt and Portland had virtually sold Ireland to the Jacobins. Yet Burke had perforce to remain loyal to Pitt, as at least preferable to Fox, an avowed sympathizer with French ideals. Worse was to come. In mid-April, Burke heard that the King of Prussia had signed a treaty of peace with the French Republic. The Emperor, he feared, would soon follow (C viii. ). If kings capitulated, who could resist? Burke was close to despair. For five years he had been fighting with ‘pen or voice (the only arms I possess) in favour of the order of things into which I was born, and in which I fondly hoped to die’ (WS ix. ), only to find the cause abandoned by those who had most to lose (far more than he had) and who ought to have been its most determined defenders. To ease his mind of some of its accumulated bile and spleen, he wrote two long letters (both dated May ), one to William Elliot (about , words), the other to Sir Hercules Langrishe (about , words). Both are carefully crafted compositions, intended for private circulation if not publication.³⁶ Both denounce the pusillanimity and folly of those entrusted with the defence of the old order. In the case of Ireland, Burke holds the Protestant Ascendancy responsible for creating conditions favourable to revolution. Their ‘religious principles’ made the Catholics potentially an ‘invincible dyke’ against the ‘inundation’ of Jacobinism. Instead of reconciling them to the present constitution by enfranchising them, the ‘malignity’ of the Protestant Ascendancy, by insisting on the perpetual exclusion of Catholics, was driving them into Jacobinism (C viii. –). The same rage that the governing classes were not only failing to fight Jacobinism, but were even indirectly doing its work, animates the longer, more pamphlet-like letter to Elliot. Indeed, the brilliant opening, which savages the Duke of Norfolk (formerly Lord Surrey) and Thomas Erskine for their attacks on Burke, anticipates the excoriation of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale in the Letter to a Noble Lord ().³⁷ Nor are Norfolk ³⁶ WS ix. –. The ‘Letter’ was posthumously published, together with the ‘Observations on the Conduct of the Minority’, in Two Letters on the Conduct of our Domestic Parties (; Todd, ). The letter to Langrishe (first published in in Works (–), v. –) is printed in C vii. – and in WS ix. –. ³⁷ Norfolk attacked (while also praising) the Reflections in the Lords on May (PH xxxi. –). Erskine quoted some of E.B.’s earlier works in his defence of Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke when they were tried for treason in November (T. B. Howell, Complete Collection of State Trials (London, –), xxiv. –; xxv. , , , ). E.B. was summoned to give evidence at Tooke’s trial, but not called (C viii. , ). Erskine presumably decided that quoting E.B. would be safer and more effective than questioning him.
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and Erskine his only victims. For Burke, by making peace with the French Republic, the King of Prussia has become a ‘Royal propagandist’ for the ‘rights of men’ (WS ix. ). With heavy irony, Burke confesses his inability to contend with ‘the magnanimous resolution of the great to accomplish the degradation and the ruin of their own character and situation’ (). Yet even when confronted with the stupidity and baseness of ‘the great’, Burke did not entirely abandon hope. In the second half of the letter, some reflections on historical causation permit a glimmer of optimism. These historical reflections are of great interest in themselves. Indeed, one critic has called this passage Burke’s ‘best account’ of the causes of the French Revolution, providing a ‘sociological account of the forces which may undermine a prosperous and seemingly stable society’, and in which ‘conspiracy’ plays only a secondary role.³⁸ But the ‘sociological’ does not exclude ‘conspiracy’. ‘Never’, Burke lamented, ‘was so beautiful and so august a spectacle presented to the moral eye, as Europe afforded before the revolution in France.’ Ominously, ‘this prosperity contained in itself the seeds of its own danger.’ On the part of the governing class, it produced ‘laxity and debility’; on the part of the excluded, ‘bold spirits and dark designs’ (WS ix. ). ‘Dark designs’ are common to both accounts. In the Reflections, Burke had emphasized the destructive alliance between the moneyed men and the literati.³⁹ In the letter to Elliot, he repeated the charge that ‘men of talent’, unhappy with their place in society, ‘systematically loosened’ the ties of religion, as a prelude to the destruction of other ‘prejudices’ and the undermining of the rights of property (). Burke’s predilection for conspiracy theories long predated the French Revolution.⁴⁰ Today, they are readily dismissed as fantasies of credulity. Yet Burke needed to believe in them in order to maintain the anti-revolutionary struggle. As he had observed at the end of ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, to resist ‘the decrees of Providence’ was ‘perverse and obstinate’. The ‘mere designs of men’, on the contrary, could be resisted (viii. ). If bad men ‘conspired’, good men might, indeed must, associate to combat them. This had been the lesson of his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (), where he had argued that ‘the scheme of the enemies of public tranquillity has disarranged, it has not destroyed us’ (ii. ). In , Burke likewise hoped that the Revolution had disarranged, not destroyed the old order. The Revolution was the work of ‘the infernal energies of talents set in action by vice and disorder’ (WS ix. ). Yet to mobilize opposition to those energies was not easy. Talents (except when mixed with uncommon virtue) ³⁸ Michael Freeman, Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism (Oxford, ), –. ³⁹ R [–]. The monarchy’s excessive openness to projects of ‘reform’ ([–]), and the ‘desultory and faint persecution’ of the philosophes ([]) may exemplify the ‘laxity and debility’ identified in the letter to Elliot. Otherwise, there seems no hint of the ‘seeds of its own danger’ theme. ⁴⁰ Edmund Burke on Revolution (New York, ), ed. Robert A. Smith, Introduction, pp. xvii–xviii.
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‘naturally gravitate to Jacobinism’ (). From those with the greatest stake in the established order, as Burke had lamented during the American war, ‘a great deal of activity and enterprize can scarcely ever be expected’ (to Fox, Oct. : C iii. ). What then was to be done? Burke drew hope from his philosophy of history. Rejecting the determinism of the ‘organic’ theory of the State, that ‘commonwealths . . . like the bodies of individuals, grow effete and languid and bloodless, and ossify by the necessities of their own conformation, and the fatal operation of longevity and time’, he called for ‘manly efforts’ and even for ‘the seasonable energy of a single man’ (WS ix. –). Since Burke had always distrusted ‘great men’, putting his faith rather in parties, the following passage comes as a surprise: How often has public calamity been arrested on the very brink of ruin by the seasonable energy of a single man? Have we no such man amongst us? I am as sure as I am of my being, that one vigorous mind without office, without situation, without public functions of any kind (at a time when the want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is) I say, one such man, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his own fortitude, vigour, enterprize and perseverance, would first draw to him some few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be in existence, would appear and troop about him. ()
Fitzwilliam is the only plausible candidate for the role.⁴¹ The clue is ‘without office’. Fitzwilliam was, for Burke, pre-eminently the man without office who should be in a position of power. Neither Fitzwilliam himself, nor most of his friends, would have recognized him in the portrait. Yet the description corresponds closely to Burke’s idealized, heroic image of Fitzwilliam at the time of his recall. If the identification is correct, Burke hoped that Fitzwilliam would have the boldness and strength of character to assume the leadership of a vigorous anti-Jacobin party, probably in the House of Lords. In the following paragraph, Burke declares that, ‘baffled and frustrated as I am, on the very verge of a timely grave, abandoned abroad and desolate at home’, he would join such a leader (WS ix. ). Later, he invites Elliot to put his talents to the service of such a man (–). Fitzwilliam was quite incapable of playing the part. Indeed, the only person able to challenge Pitt’s ascendancy was Fox. Both were men of ‘talent’, as Fitzwilliam undoubtedly was not. Was Burke losing touch with reality, or did he perhaps hope that Fitzwilliam might somehow rise to the occasion? The question is the more puzzling, as the letter to Elliot was not a private meditation but a call to action, meant to inspire those among whom it circulated. Whatever the precise import of the ‘single man’ passage, the final ⁴¹ Stephen H. Browne identifies the unnamed leader as E.B. himself (‘Generic Transformation and Political Action: A Textual Interpretation of Edmund Burke’s Letter to William Elliot, Esq.’, Communication Quarterly, (), –, esp. ). This is incredible: E.B. never aggrandized himself in the way Browne suggests. The identification with Fitzwilliam is far more plausible.
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message of the letter is plain. The struggle must continue. Referring to his late son, Burke attributed to him some of his own qualities: ‘unconquerable fortitude’ and ‘resources for every purpose of speculation and of action’ (). The letter to Elliot marks Burke’s return to the fight after the distressing public and private events of the previous year. In , Burke was accused of protracting his speech in reply in order to prevent the Lords coming to a verdict during that session of Parliament. The charge is probably untrue, for prolixity came naturally to Burke, especially on the subject of Hastings. In any case, the time taken by the Lords to reach a verdict in the session of –, over three months, shows that even had Burke confined his speech to a single sitting, instead of taking nine days, the trial could not have been concluded in . Parliament opened on December . The Lords did not take the impeachment into consideration until January, and then deferred the business to the th, when a committee was appointed to search for precedents. This committee was thorough (the precedents it unearthed range from to ) but in no haste. Not until February did it submit its findings. Its report was ordered to be printed, then (on the th) referred to a committee of the whole house.⁴² This committee, after some procedural wrangling, reviewed the evidence. Between and March, it sat on thirteen occasions. In these debates, Thurlow, who since his resignation as Lord Chancellor had abandoned any pretence of judicial impartiality, now openly took the lead in presenting the case for the defence. Major Scott fed him information. Loughborough, Thurlow’s arch-rival and successor as Lord Chancellor, spoke for the prosecution. Other lords played only minor roles.⁴³ On April, this committee submitted its report, in the form of twenty-four statements, each taking the form ‘that the Commons have not made good their charge’. This report was taken into consideration on the th, when all the resolutions were carried. On the th, the questions to be put to the Lords at the final sitting were reformulated into sixteen propositions, and the date for judgment was fixed for April.⁴⁴ On that day, the Lords proceeded to Westminster Hall for the th and final day of this epic trial. With acquittal now a certainty, the occasion was solemn but anticlimactic. Loughborough put each proposition to each of the twenty-nine Lords who regarded themselves as qualified to vote. In every case, the majority for ‘not guilty’ was large. Hastings was then called to the ⁴² LJ xl. , , –, ⁴³ Ibid. –. History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), pt. , –. ⁴⁴ LJ xl. –, , –.
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bar and, in a chilly formula, discharged. The session lasted about an hour and a quarter.⁴⁵ The verdict was commemorated by James Sayers in The Last Scene of the Managers Farce ( May : BMC ). The scene is a theatre, but the Lords giving judgment (Thurlow and Loughborough) resemble the carved angels in the roof of Westminster Hall. The charges go up in smoke, as the cauldron that contains them sinks through a trap door, as does Burke, defiant and still wielding the paint brush with which he has unsuccessfully sought to blacken Hastings (Plate ). Centre stage is a bust of Hastings on a pedestal, glowing with virtue. Legally, he was acquitted. Before the bar of public opinion, too, he had been substantively vindicated. Financially, however, he faced ruin unless he could recoup the crippling costs of a legal action that had lasted nearly ten years. Burke’s formal concern with the impeachment had ended when, on June , the managers having received the thanks of the house, he had retired from Parliament. ‘My Lords, I have done,’ he had declared towards the end of the ninth day of his great speech (WS vii. ). This did not, of course, mean that he took no further interest in the proceedings. Indeed, until the end of his life he professed to regard the impeachment as both his greatest achievement and his most splendid failure.⁴⁶ For some months, however, the death of his son and other preoccupations distracted him from Hastings. Then, rather belatedly, in January , when the Lords began their slow march towards judgment, he conceived the idea of printing a ‘syllabus’ or abridgement of the evidence. The evidence itself had been printed in extenso as received. Since it fills about , folio pages, the idea of a summary was not absurd. An abstract of the evidence on the Benares charge had already been prepared.⁴⁷ Convinced that the evidence would convict Hastings in any unprejudiced mind, Burke hoped that printing it in a more accessible form would ‘stagger the partial Judges and make them tremble for what they know will speedily follow’, a public outcry against the scandal of an acquittal.⁴⁸ Pitt was persuaded to agree, and promised to defend the expense ‘if any Observation should be made upon it’.⁴⁹ For reasons that are not clear, however, the project languished. It faced at least two plausible objections. The Commons having submitted their evidence, they could not now, in equity, be allowed to make in effect another presentation of their case. Second, the work of abridgement and printing must take months; the proposal would therefore appear in the light of a delaying tactic. In any event, the Lords proceeded to consider the evidence without Burke’s ‘syllabus’. ⁴⁵ LJ xl. . History of the Trial, pt. , –. Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ⁴⁶ ‘If I were to call for a reward (which I have never done) it should be for those [services] in which, for fourteen years, without intermission, I shewed the most industry, and had the least success; I mean in the affairs of India. They are those on which I value myself the most’ (Letter to a Noble Lord: WS ix. ). ⁴⁷ Bodl. MS Eng. Hist. c. , fos. –. ⁴⁸ E.B. to the Speaker (Henry Addington), Jan. (C viii. –). E.B. also canvassed Windham and Loughborough (–) ⁴⁹ Addington to E.B., Jan. (WWM BkP /).
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In March, as the early debates in the Lords proved favourable to Hastings, Burke revived the idea in a different guise. Now, the syllabus would be printed not to assist the Lords, but as a ‘justification’ for the formal demand for judgment that the Commons made at the end of an impeachment (to Addington: C viii. –). In reality, of course, it was intended as a public vindication of the strength of the Commons’ case and a demonstration of the partiality of the Lords in acquitting on such overwhelming evidence. This notion found no support, but Dundas agreed to move that ‘a recorded digest’ of the evidence should be prepared for insertion in the Journals of the House of Commons. Even this more modest proposal had to be abandoned.⁵⁰ On the payment of Hastings’s legal expenses Burke met at first with greater success. The case for reimbursement was that the charges on which Hastings had been tried all related to his conduct in his official capacity as Governor-General of Bengal. The East India Company might therefore with propriety, on his acquittal, indemnify him for costs incurred as a result of his service. Hastings had enemies in the company, and had often been at loggerheads with the directors. By , however, old animosities had subsided and his substantial services to the company were remembered. The company was therefore disposed both to pay Hastings’s costs and even to make some further financial provision for his needs. Under Pitt’s India Act, however, such payments required the approval of the Board of Control. When he heard of the move to reward Hastings, Burke at once protested to Dundas ( May: C viii. –). Dundas replied that he ‘must certainly undergo a great Change of opinion’ before he could agree, and informed Burke that Pitt was likewise opposed to any grant from public funds ( May: ). Within a year, Dundas would undergo just such a ‘great Change of opinion’. But for the moment Burke was satisfied. In any circumstances, Burke would have been outraged that Hastings should not only be acquitted, but actually rewarded with money squeezed, as he believed, from the sweat and tears of the people Hastings had oppressed. What aggravated the offence was that Burke himself had lately been awarded a pension. He could not stomach the idea, as he later told Dundas, that either the present age or posterity should believe that ‘the blood of India has been compromised by a Pension to the accuser and another to the party accused’ ( Mar. : C viii. ). That he should himself need a pension was degradation enough, let alone that he and Hastings should be fellows in ⁵⁰ Debrett, xli. ( Mar.). According to Hastings, on Apr. the motion was deferred sine die when a division against it was threatened (BL Add. MS , fo. ).
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dependence. In an age which valued financial independence as a guarantee of political integrity, to be a pensioner inevitably compromised that autonomy. For a ‘new man’ such as Burke, the surest route to independence was a ministerial career, leading to a lucrative office, and a comfortable sinecure for retirement. Instead, being for most of his parliamentary career in opposition left him not merely in poverty, but deeply in debt. In Rockingham, and in Portland, had been remiss in not securing some permanent provision for the most eminent member of their party without resources of his own. For many years, Burke subsisted on loans and gifts, a perpetual embarrassment to a proud man with a keen sense of his own moral rectitude. So visible was Burke’s lack of means that in , when he published the Reflections, antagonists reproached him with deserting his old principles for a secret pension.⁵¹ Though there was no truth in the charge, the accusation was sufficiently hurtful, and indicates the opprobrium associated with being a political pensioner. Part of the reason for Burke’s failure to obtain financial security was his own backwardness about pushing his claims. This bashfulness was exceptional in an age when politics and patronage were inseparable, so much so that some historians have seen patronage as the driving force of political action.⁵² Burke, on the contrary, prided himself on never asking for a reward. The first semi-official hint that he would receive one came at the end of a letter of October from Henry Dundas about French affairs. Both the king and his ministers, Dundas, reported, were anxious to see Burke’s ‘services to this Country and mankind rewarded and acknowledged’ (C vii. ). Burke’s reply, effusive in its expression of thanks, stressed that his gratitude for the king’s intended favour was the more heartfelt ‘as it comes from his own voluntary Grace without any sollicitation or expectation on my part’ (). When Burke defended his pension against the attacks of his political enemies, he emphasized that it came unasked.⁵³ If not initiated, however, his claims to a peerage and a pension were certainly forwarded by those of his friends who were on cordial terms with Pitt and other ministers, such as Sir Gilbert Elliot and William Windham. Richard Jr. certainly knew of these overtures.⁵⁴ Burke himself can hardly have been entirely unaware of them. Even with their prodding, the business only inched forward. As early as November , Portland heard that ‘something permanent was intended to be done’ for Burke.⁵⁵ For several months, however, nothing happened. ⁵¹ Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine had both made the charge. As the rumours grew, the secret name under which it had been granted (a Mr Woolstonehaugh) was even cited (Gazetteer, May ). ⁵² The prime exemplar is Sir Lewis Namier, whose contempt for E.B. is trenchantly expressed in ‘The Character of Burke’ (a review of C i., in The Spectator, Dec. , –). ⁵³ In the Letter to a Noble Lord, E.B. affirmed that ‘the first suggestion of it never came from me, mediately or immediately’ (WS ix. ). ⁵⁴ R.B. Jr. to Windham, June (C vii. ). Their efforts may have preceded Dundas’s hint to E.B. ⁵⁵ Portland to Fitzwilliam, Nov. (NRO FC).
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Only in an ideal world would Burke’s reward have represented a spontaneous ministerial decision to recognize outstanding public service. In reality, the decision to offer Burke a pension was at least in part motivated by Pitt’s desire to lure the Portland Whigs into some kind of alliance or coalition. As that prospect drew closer, so did Burke’s pension. In June , writing the day after a meeting about a possible coalition, Portland reported approvingly that Pitt’s proposal to give Burke a peerage and a pension large enough to leave him with £, a year after paying his debts was ‘no bad proof of His inclination to be well thought of by the Aristocracy & thorough defiance of E. Indian Influence’.⁵⁶ The importance that Portland attached to Pitt’s ‘defiance’ of Indian influence derived from the circumstances of the dismissal in of the Fox–North Coalition, memories of which remained an obstinate barrier to a junction between Pitt and the Portland party. Pitt’s refusal to approve the payment of Hastings’s legal costs was another calculated example of this ‘defiance’. Pitt was unprecedentedly lavish with peerages. Between and , he had conferred about thirty new British titles, increasing the size of the lay peerage from to .⁵⁷ This inflation, though defensible as a response to the rise in population and national wealth, was widely criticized as cheapening the peerage. George III, for example, however often he had to concede in particular cases, favoured maintaining the peerage as an exclusive body, and disliked promoting peers from outside the landed élite.⁵⁸ Richard Burke, who by inheriting the peerage would be assured of a place in public life, was indignant when difficulties were reported. (Indeed, the advantage to Richard was probably chiefly the reason that Burke wanted a peerage.) Who was more deserving than his father, he asked Windham, ‘unless it is determin’d that it should never be given to civil service’ ( June : C vii. ). Admittedly, the idea of the peerage as a reward for public services was still embryonic. Until at least, most new peerages were awarded to men of substantial landed property with some existing peerage connection. The exceptions, the ‘new men’, were mostly either lawyers who had achieved high legal office (who were usually in affluent circumstances by the time of their promotion), or military or naval heroes.⁵⁹ A peerage for a man of Burke’s background, career, and poverty would have been extraordinary. Edmond Malone argued ⁵⁶ Portland to Fitzwilliam, June (WWM F /). ⁵⁷ Calculated from J. C. Sainty, Peerage Creations, – (London, ), –; and The Royal Kalendar, or, Complete and Correct Annual Register for (–) and (–). Exact figures depend on the treatment of various marginal cases. ⁵⁸ Lord Holland, Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, –, ed. Lord Stavordale (London, ), –; Richard Pares, King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, ), –, . Rarely did E.B.’s prejudices so mislead him as in his remark (intended as a slur on George III) that ‘Kings are naturally lovers of low company’ (Speech on Economical Reformation ( Feb. : WS iii. ). ⁵⁹ John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, ); Michael McCahill and Ellis Archer Wasson, ‘The New Peerage: Recruitment to the House of Lords, –’, Historical Journal, (), –.
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that ‘there have been many peers made without property, for public services, real or imaginary. Of this sort are all our naval and military and diplomatic peers’. None of the three examples he cited, however, provides an analogous case to Burke’s.⁶⁰ The objection came from the king, whose social prejudices were deeply rooted. In this instance, they are likely to have been hardened by memories of Burke’s career, especially by his opposition to the American war and his conduct during the Regency Crisis. For George III, Burke’s public services began about . Had Pitt insisted, the king would have conceded. But Pitt, however anxious to placate the Portland Whigs, probably regarded this particular douceur as not constituting ‘a great Ministerial Point’, the only argument that would convince the king.⁶¹The peerage, then, was abandoned, and after Richard’s death it can have been no great object to Burke himself. The question of the peerage highlights the anomaly of Burke’s position in the ‘Old Whig’ party. In June , when a junction between Pitt and the Portland Whigs was under negotiation, Fitzwilliam described the ‘Old Whigs’ as ‘an Aristocratical party . . . compos’d of men, who from the circumstances of their independent fortunes, never can have pecuniary considerations in view’. Such men were ‘principally, & indeed almost solely, to be gratified by marks of Honor & distinction’. If the king genuinely wanted to readmit the Whigs to royal favour, therefore, he should show this ‘by a creation of peers from among our friends’.⁶² A month later, when the prospect of such peerages had been deferred, Fitzwilliam regarded the delay as ‘not a matter of much consequence’, except in the case of Burke. Not that Burke himself was especially disappointed: for him ‘a pecuniary provision’ was more necessary.⁶³ Burke was thus an exception in the ‘Aristocratical party’. Generous to Burke as Fitzwilliam always was, and as Rockingham had been, such comments show why they never quite regarded him as one of themselves, and why the king did not regard Burke’s promotion as proper. Even after Richard’s death, Windham continued to press for the peerage, arguing that ‘the virtue & disinterestedness that neglects fortune, should count for as much as the fortune itself.’⁶⁴ But the king could not be persuaded, and Burke, the great defender of aristocracy, was denied admission to its ranks. A more wounding disappointment than the peerage was the mode of granting the pension. Mindful of the stigma attached to political pensions, some of Burke’s friends had urged that his should be awarded in response to ⁶⁰ Malone to Lord Charlemont, Nov. (HMC (Charlemont), ). Malone’s examples are Rodney, Malmesbury, and Auckland (an admiral and two diplomats). Though all three titles were indeed rewards for merit, all three (unlike E.B.) were connected by descent or marriage to the existing peerage. ⁶¹ Portland to Fitzwilliam, July (WWM F /).Windham, however, was convinced that E.B.’s poverty was the real obstacle (to Pitt, Aug. : NA PRO. //, fo. ). ⁶² Fitzwilliam to Portland, June (NUL PwF ). ⁶³ Fitzwilliam to Portland, July (NUL PwF ). ⁶⁴ Windham to Pitt, Aug. (NA PRO. //, fo. ).
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an address from the House of Commons, ‘moved by some of his old connexions’.⁶⁵ This would make the pension a public, national reward, and remove any suspicion that Burke was being rewarded for his alleged apostasy. Immediately after Burke’s retirement from Parliament seemed the best time.⁶⁶ Nothing, however, was done before the end of the session. Only on August did Burke receive the first firm good news. Pitt announced an immediate grant of £, a year for his and Jane’s lives from the Civil List (the largest that, under Burke’s own Act of , could be granted without sanction of Parliament), together with the promise of a reward ‘more proportioned to his Majesty’s Sense of your Public Merit’ when parliamentary approval could be secured (C vii. –). Originally, this pension had been intended to run for Richard’s life as well. Burke’s pleasure was therefore tempered by a reminder of his loss, causing him to lament that ‘this is but watering old withered stumps, the fresh young shoot which should have drawn nourishment from the dew of this bounty is torn away.’ ⁶⁷ Even so, Burke’s pressing debts made the pension welcome, indeed necessary. Burke wrote two letters of thanks to Pitt. One was for Pitt himself, the other to be shown to the king ( Aug. : C vii. –). The latter, while maintaining that ‘I have never presumed to apply for any thing’, contains the remarkable admission that ‘In some instances of my publick conduct I might have erred.’ Never apt to confess himself in the wrong, Burke consoled himself with the thought that ‘Few have been so long, (and in times and matters so arduous and critical) engaged in affairs, who can be certain they have never made a mistake.’ If not one of those few, he was at least confident that ‘my intentions have always been pure, with regard to the Crown and to the Country’ (). This drew a shrewd comment from the king: misfortunes are the great softeners of the human mind, and has [sic] in the instance of this distressed man made him own what his warmth of temper would not have allowed under other circumstances, viz., that he may have erred. One quality I take him to be very susceptible of, that is gratitude, which I think covers many failings and make me therefore happy at being able to relieve him.⁶⁸
Given how much of Burke’s political career had been devoted to opposing and denouncing royal policies, and coming from one who had heartily disapproved of the impeachment of Hastings, these remarks show that the king could forgive if not forget. The promised parliamentary grant to supplement the Civil List pension never materialized. Pitt had intended to move for an annuity of £, for ⁶⁵ Laurence to Portland, June (NUL PwF ). ⁶⁶ Windham to Pitt, [June ] (Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, U/S/O/). ⁶⁷ Reported in French Laurence to Frances Crewe, Aug. (extract at WWM BkP /). ⁶⁸ George III to Pitt, Sept. , in J. Holland Rose, Pitt and Napoleon: Essays and Letters (London, ), .
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forty years, which would have allowed Burke to liquidate his debts (here estimated at ‘somewhat’ over £,), and leave him with a clear income (including his own resources) of £, a year. Despite ‘almost daily’ reminders from William Elliot, acting as a flapper, nothing was done until the subject of the debts of the Prince of Wales (about £,), for which parliamentary relief was sought, made asking for a provision for Burke ‘difficult’. Elliot attributed this dereliction to ‘that procrastinating spirit, which enters so much into all the proceedings of the Cabinet’. As a result, Burke was likely to end his days ‘in extreme indigence’, unless granted a pension from the West Indies revenues of the Crown, which were not subject to parliamentary control. Elliot was outraged at this shabby treatment of Burke, when the government was ‘scarcely able to prevent the most unbounded rewards’ being showered on ‘a corrupt, fraudulent, and rapacious delinquent’.⁶⁹ So long as the session of Parliament lasted, Burke could pacify his creditors with the prospect, indeed promise, of a grant. But when the session ended, on June , his situation became desperate, and he was threatened with the foreclosure of one of the mortgages on his estate. His moods fluctuated. At one moment, afraid that he no longer had the time to seek a ‘refuge’ in ‘America, Portugal, or elsewhere’, he was in dread of arrest and imprisonment for debt. ‘I cannot quite reconcile my mind to a prison’, he confessed to Walker King, ‘with great fortitude’ ( June: C viii. ). A few days later, to a visitor at least, he made a brave show of studying Italian in order to ‘end his days with tollerable Ease in Italy’.⁷⁰ Rescue, however, was at hand. Walker King forwarded Burke’s gloomy letter of June to Pitt, with one of his own outlining the state of Burke’s debts and proposing various expedients ( July: –). This appeal galvanized Pitt into action. On August, Burke wrote a letter of thanks, grateful for being enabled to satisfy his creditors and end his days in the style of life to which he had become accustomed. By coincidence, the day was the anniversary of Richard’s death. But if Burke could not take ‘true pleasure’ in the news, he could still feel gratitude to Pitt, ‘to whose wisdom and courage Europe must, under God, look for the existence of the moral and social order itself ’ (–). During the remaining two years of his life, Burke’s faith in Pitt as the defender of the European order would be sorely tried. But for the moment, he was all gratitude. The final arrangement for Burke’s relief was complicated. Besides the Civil List pension of £, a year, he was two receive two further annuities, charged on the Barbados and Leeward Islands custom duties. One was for £,, for three lives, including his own; the other, for £,, for three other lives. Burke would sell the reversion of the first grant after his death for ⁶⁹ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, June, July (NLS MS , fos. –; , fos. –). The ‘delinquent’ was Hastings. ⁷⁰ Frances Crewe to the Duke of Portland, July (NUL PwF ).
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an estimated £,, and the second grant for an estimated £,. In addition, both grants were to be antedated to January , providing a further £,. Burke would thus have an immediate £,, which would clear most of his debts, now estimated at £,.⁷¹ He would be left with two pensions, amounting to £, a year, plus the income from his estate; and a manageable debt load of £,.⁷² Burke had at least achieved financial security. In the absence of exactly comparable cases, whether the reward was niggardly or generous is hard to estimate. When his pension was attacked, Burke retorted that ‘between money and services of this kind . . . there is no common measurer’ (Letter to a Noble Lord: WS ix. ). Nevertheless, some examples suggest that Burke’s pension was not excessive. In a memorandum probably prepared about the summer of , Burke cited the pensions granted in at Shelburne’s behest to two of his protégés, Isaac Barré (–) and John Dunning (–). Barré received £, a year; Dunning, £, a year (including a sinecure).⁷³ Burke had certainly worked longer and harder for the public service than either. How did Burke accumulate debts of over £,? In the absence of account books, his finances are impossible to reconstruct in any detail. Nevertheless, even a necessarily impressionistic survey of the main sources of his income and expenditure will illustrate the perpetual precariousness of his position. On the income side, Burke’s most regular sources were his two estates, at Clogher (valued in at £ a year) and Beaconsfield (also valued, in , at £).⁷⁴ Burke farmed part of the land himself, producing enough to sell at market as well as to supply his own table. Since he was a keen experimental farmer, however, his farming is unlikely to have been profitable.⁷⁵ From to , he received £ a year as agent for the New York Assembly. In –, he received £ from Rockingham in secret service money, probably in lieu of a salary. Burke continued to receive ‘loans’ from Rockingham to an unknown amount, perhaps on the same scale, until . They were perhaps construed as advances to be repaid from the future profits of office; in the event, they were cancelled by Rockingham in his will.⁷⁶ ⁷¹ This figure, compiled by R.B. Jr., proved an underestimate (E.B. to Pitt, Sept. : C viii. ). ⁷² Walker King to Fitzwilliam, Aug. (C viii. ). ⁷³ H. V. F. Somerset, ‘Some Papers of Edmund Burke on his Pension’, English Historical Review, (), –. ⁷⁴ Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland (–), ed. Arthur Wollaston Hutton (London, ), ii. . The figure for Beaconsfield is from a chancery document (NA C. //, Verney v. Burke, E.B.’s reply, Nov. ), and is confirmed by Windham to Pitt, Aug. (NA PRO. //, fo. ). E.B. sold the Clogher estate in . ⁷⁵ So I infer from E.B.’s distinction between ‘general, practical’ improvements proper for the ordinary farmer and the ‘ingenious and speculative Agriculture’ suitable for the practice of ‘Gentlemen, and men who have time and fortune at command’ (to Charles O’Hara, Sept. : C ii. ). E.B. made the same point in conversation with Frances Crewe (‘Extracts from Mr Burke’s Table-Talk at Crewe Hall’, Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society, (–), pt. , –). ⁷⁶ WWM R/–. Fitzwilliam to E.B., July (C v. )
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For about three months in , and for about eight months in , Burke received £, a year as Paymaster-General. He also enjoyed an irregular income from his writings. For the Reflections, for example, he received £,.⁷⁷ An occasional windfall was a ‘loan’, later cancelled, or a legacy.⁷⁸ Taking all these sources into account, Burke’s average gross income may have been between £, and £, a year. This figure, however, was subject to large deductions. Clogher was held on a long lease, at an annual rent of £. Burke also directed some income from Clogher to help the less fortunate Nagles. The interest on the Beaconsfield mortgages (£,) probably exceeded the income from the estate.⁷⁹ Nevertheless, he still had to maintain the level of expense (carriages, servants) expected of a gentleman and an MP. Besides maintaining the estate at Beaconsfield, he leased (until ) a house in London. His son Richard was educated expensively, at Westminster, Oxford, and Auxerre. He employed secretaries and amanuenses. He gave generously, considering his means, to unfortunate individuals who came to his notice. These expenditures would always have greatly exceeded £, a year, and probably exceeded £,. The amount of his pension was calculated to pay his debts and allow him a clear income of £, a year. This figure was intended to enable him to maintain his habitual level of expenditure.⁸⁰ Pitt, who despite being a bachelor greatly overspent a large official income (also accumulating debts), probably regarded it as reasonable.⁸¹ If Burke lived at the rate of £, a year on an income of less than half that sum, the source of his indebtedness can be explained as a simple excess of expenditure over income. One further complication, however, needs to be taken into account, the Burkes’ ‘common purse’.⁸² In the s, this may have worked to Edmund’s advantage, for both William and Richard Sr. received salaries from official positions, while Will also inherited some money and (for a time at least) financial aid from Lord Verney. After about , both became drains on ⁷⁷ Receipt dated May , transcribed by Isaac Reed in ‘Memoranda from Mr Dodsley’s Papers’ (Edinburgh, New College Library). The same source records £ paid to Walker King on E.B.’s behalf for A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly and An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. ⁷⁸ In , Richard Brocklesby made E.B. an immediate present of the £, he had left him in his will; Sir Joshua Reynolds left E.B. £,, besides cancelling a bond for the same amount; Lord John Cavendish cancelled E.B.’s debts (amount unknown) and left him a legacy of £, (C v. –, vii. n. ; ix. n. ). ⁷⁹ If E.B. paid . per cent, the mortgages would have required £ a year. ⁸⁰ So I interpret E.B.’s statement to Pitt that £, a year would be sufficient for ‘our personal ease . . . without obliging us late in Life to change its whole Scheme, which, whether wise or justifiable or not, is now habitual to us’ ( Sept. : C viii. ). ⁸¹ Despite his huge official income of about £, (£, after ), Pitt was ‘seldom, if ever, out of debt’, and for reasons that are impossible to identify. Like E.B., he was insulated by friends and intermediaries from the sordid details of his finances. At his death in , his debts exceeded £, (Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, i. –, iii. ). ⁸² ‘They have long made one common purse’ (Elizabeth Vesey to Elizabeth Montagu, May , in Mrs Montagu, ‘Queen of the Blues’: Her Letters and Friendships from to , ed. Reginald Blunt (London, []), ii. .
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the ‘common purse’. William obtained two lucrative positions, first as agent to the Raja of Tanjore, later (thanks to Edmund) as Deputy Paymaster in India. But he was unable to live within these incomes, much less to save anything. He returned from India, indebted to the Crown, only to be arrested for old debts by Lady Fermanagh (–), Verney’s niece and heir. With no prospect of regaining solvency, he was forced to end his days in the Isle of Man.⁸³ Far from receiving help from Will, Burke borrowed heavily on his behalf.⁸⁴ Richard Sr. qualified and practised as a barrister, and obtained the position of Recorder of Bristol. During the Rockingham and Fox–North ministries, he was briefly joint Secretary to the Treasury, with a salary of £, a year. Yet he too was forced to flee the country to escape his creditors.⁸⁵ The one member of the household from whom Burke received financial assistance was his son. Before Burke propelled him into public life in , he built up a conventional practice as a lawyer. He travelled the circuits, for some years served as Fitzwilliam’s agent, and enjoyed an official position as receiver of land revenues. Few details of his work are known, but he earned enough for Burke to be ‘some thousands’ in his debt by .⁸⁶ His financial acumen was also responsible for keeping the creditors at bay, ‘by discreet delay or by method and foresight, and every species of Skilful management’ (C vii. ). Taking all these considerations into account, the complexity and chaos of the Burkes’ finances, that £, should have understated their debts is not surprising. By how much they exceeded this figure is unknown, but may have been £, or more. For one of the purposes of the pension was to enable Burke to discharge or greatly reduce the mortgages on his estate. This, however, was not done. When Jane Burke sold the property in , two mortgages amounting to £, remained outstanding and were repaid from the purchase money.⁸⁷ Much of what was intended for their discharge was probably applied to the repayment of other, more pressing debts. Even after , Burke remained in financial difficulties.⁸⁸ Several conclusions can be drawn from this brief survey, lacking as it has been in numerical precision. Burke was always careless and neglectful of financial matters, of ‘every thing that was fretful, teizing and disgusting’ in his words (C vii. ), a certain recipe for eventual disaster. The root cause of his indebtedness was living beyond ⁸³ E.B. to Thomas Venables, , Sept., Dec. ; to Mrs Venables, Oct. (C ix. –, –, , –). In the Isle of Man, W.B. was safe from his English creditors. ⁸⁴ W.B. to Portland, – Sept. (C iv. ). W.B. owed numerous debts. ⁸⁵ E.B. to R.B. Sr., Nov. (C v. –). R.B. Sr. came to terms with his creditors in time to attend the opening of the Hastings trial in Feb. . ⁸⁶ R.B. Jr. to Walker King, n.d. [July ] (YB Osborn MS c. /). ⁸⁷ Sir Joseph Napier, ‘Edmund Burke’, in Lectures, Essays, and Letters (Dublin, ), –. Napier’s source was James Du Pré, whose father bought the estate from J.B. That the larger mortgage remained undischarged is confirmed by D. Walker to J.B., Dec. (NRO A. VI. ). ⁸⁸ In Feb. , E.B. told French Laurence that his creditors ‘eat deep in what was destined to maintain me’ (C viii. ).
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his means, no uncommon habit among the politicians of his day. More to his credit, some of the expenditure that he could not really afford was devoted to charity and philanthropy of one kind or other. If he lived above his means, at least he also gave beyond them. The negotiations for Burke’s pension had taken over a year. After the final arrangements had been made, Burke wrote two letters of thanks to Pitt, one for him personally, the other to be shown to the king ( Oct. : C viii. –). These letters cover much the same ground as those he had written on the first news of his pension ( Aug. : vii. –). In one respect, however, there is a noticeable difference between the two personal letters (the ostensible letters, being more formal, are more nearly alike). Writing in the immediate aftermath of Richard’s death, Burke betrays real agitation: ‘My Mind is much troubled, So that I do not know, whether I express myself with any tolerable clearness’ (). The focus of the letter is on the immediate business aspects of the pension. By October , Burke had sufficiently recovered to use even the personal letter to Pitt as a vehicle of exhortation. A brief expression of gratitude soon gives way to his real concern, the prospect of what he would soon stigmatize as a ‘regicide peace’. Appealing to Pitt as ‘our last human hope’, Burke warns him never be led to think, that this War is, in its principle, or in any thing that belongs to it, the least resembling any other War; or, that what is called, a peace, with the Robbery of France, can by any plan of policy be renderd reconciliable with the inward Repose, or with the external strength, power, or influence of this Kingdom. (viii. )
Even ‘in the midst of other deep and piercing Griefs’, this dreadful prospect had cost him ‘many an anxious hour, at midday and at midnight’ (). To avert it, he would devote the last remaining energies of his mind. Burke exaggerated when he professed himself ‘a poor being, kept alive, in an undone and degraded State, by the mysterious Councils of him without whom Sparrows do not rise or fall’; ‘a desolate, afflicted, and useless person’; even ‘Dead’, or at least ‘in a situation not very remote from that of a man not existing in this Life’.⁸⁹ These were the expressions of moments of gloom. Burke never sank into passivity or despair. The indomitable spirit that had sustained him through a long political career which he once compared to the ‘torture of Sysiphus in Hell’ ( Sept. : iv. ) had lost little of its strength. Out of Parliament, during the remaining two years of his life Burke directed his energies into a series of forceful and eloquent pamphlets. Increasing isolation, in the physical sense, only intensified his determination to be heard, and to save the nation, if he could, from the folly and weakness of its leaders. ⁸⁹ E.B. to Fitzwilliam, c. Nov. ; to John Wilmot, Feb. ; to Thomas Grenville, Mar. (C viii. , , ).
An Old Oak, ‒
Writing to William Pitt to express his gratitude for the award of a pension, Burke professed himself ‘incapable of any active return’, reduced to ‘a feeble body and an exhausted mind’, capable only of ‘Repose’ ( Oct.: C viii. ). If Burke really entertained any thoughts of withdrawing from politics, they were soon shattered by the receipt of a letter from William Eden, now Lord Auckland (dated the same day as Burke’s to Pitt), enclosing a copy of a pamphlet that he had just written. Replying to Auckland, Burke again descanted on the theme of retirement, describing himself as ‘a dejected old man, buried in the anticipated grave of a feeble old age, forgetting and forgotten in an obscure and melancholy retreat’ ( Oct.: ). Auckland had employed a nautical metaphor to soften the fact that, in politics, they had usually been on opposite sides: ‘we have seldom sail’d precisely on the same Tack’ ( Oct.: ). Burke seized and extended the trope: we have generally sailed on somewhat different tacks . . . we should do so still, if I had continued longer to keep the sea . . . I cannot say now that we are on different tacks. There would be no propriety in the metaphor. I can sail no longer. My vessel cannot be said to be even in port. She is wholly condemned and broken up. To have an idea of that vessel you must call to mind what you have often seen on the Kentish road. Those planks of tough and hardy oak, that used for years to brave the buffets of the Bay of Biscay, are now turned with their warped grain and empty trunnion-holes into very wretched pales for the enclosure of a wretched farmyard. ( Oct.: )
The oak was a favourite image.¹ Soon, Burke would again apply it to himself in an even more dramatic way, describing himself as lying ‘like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me’ (WS ix. ). He had been voicing such sentiments of desolation since the death of his son. They are not to be taken literally. Rather, they express his intense sense of being left alone, excluded from the parliamentary struggle which had been his life-blood for nearly thirty years. ¹ E.B. to the Duke of Richmond, post Nov. (C ii. ); R []; E.B. to Sir John Scott, Jan. (C viii. –).
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Burke’s actions belied his words, with respect both to retirement and to energy. Even in the months after his son’s death, though he wrote little, he had maintained his passionate involvement in the politics of the day. Indeed, in a letter to an unknown correspondent, probably drafted earlier in , Burke shows more self-insight than in the letters to Pitt and Auckland, though he frames it in providential rather than psychological terms. If as ‘no sparrow falls to the Ground without a purpose so no being is preserved in its vital Energies but for some purpose’, Burke concluded that he was ‘orderd to linger in the Shades of this habitation’ in order to devote what remained of his strength to the causes he had espoused. ‘I cannot enjoy,’ he confessed. His element was work: ‘When I see my Labourers work to seventy eighty years old and assuage their afflictions with their Toil, as I have seen one of them the other day expire in a manner with the flail in his hand, I see no bad example and no unfit Law for us all’ (C viii. ). In the remaining two years of his life, Burke would indeed imitate this exemplary old man. Otium cum dignitate was not his métier.² For him, retirement could only be geographical, not moral or intellectual; and the writings of his last years show that his flail had lost none of its force. In October , Burke’s main worry was waning public support for the war against revolutionary France. For Burke, as he told Pitt, no cost could be too great to sustain ‘this just, this necessary, this politick, and (what can be rarely added, but which cannot be too often thought on) this moral War’ ( Oct.: C viii. ). Pitt’s view of the war had never coincided with Burke’s. Unlike Burke, and despite some public professions in his speeches, he felt no deep personal commitment to restoring the French monarchy. The unsuccessful campaign of therefore disposed him to negotiate with a republican government that showed reasonable prospects of being stable and responsible, as the Directory (inaugurated in November ) seemed to be.³ With Pitt’s approval, Auckland accordingly composed a pamphlet arguing as much, and timed its publication for October, the day before the opening of the new session of Parliament. Sending Burke a copy implies that Auckland entertain some hope of a favourable response. If so, he miscalculated. Little did Auckland know or understand Burke if he expected him to welcome what he would soon be stigmatizing as ‘the prospect of a regicide peace’. Even in acknowledging the pamphlet, Burke did not conceal his total and vehement dissent. Such a peace would entail ‘utter and irretrievable ruin to the Ministry, to the Crown, to the Succession, to the importance, to the independence, to the very existence of this country’ ( Oct.: ). This is the letter in ² Another temperamental affinity between E.B. and Hastings is their aversion to leisured idleness. Hastings found the life of a country gentleman ‘inconceivably dull’. Even his ‘amusements in husbandry’ palled. If given the opportunity to return to an active life, he would seize it without a thought for his ‘wheat, turnips or sheep’ (to David Anderson, , June ; BL Add. MS , fos. , ). ³ Jennifer Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution, – (Edinburgh, ), –.
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which Burke compared himself to one of those ‘planks of tough and hardy oak’ reduced to fencing a Kentish farmyard. In fact, Auckland’s pamphlet provided just the provocation needed to (continuing his metaphor) relaunch Burke’s vessel on the ocean of controversy. When Auckland wrote his pamphlet, the international situation was fluid. Pitt was prepared, if his peace terms were rejected by the French, to resume a vigorous prosecution of the war. Recognizing the risks of publishing at such a time, he gave it the modest title Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October . This is a moderate and intelligently argued pamphlet, by no means meriting the ridicule Burke heaped upon it. Auckland articulates a defensible middle position. On the one hand, he argues against those who manifested ‘an undue impatience for peace’; on the other, against ‘the doctrines of those [such as Burke] who think it essential to restore the French monarchy’, an object which he reprobates as ‘an obstinate perseverance in pretensions not to be maintained’. While condemning the constitution of , he welcomes it as at least a symptom of a desire to return to normality, assuming that, the revolutionary fervour having abated, French principles no longer pose a threat to other countries. Throughout, he privileges circumstances over principles. For example, he professes to regard as ‘just matter of regret, and a perilous responsibility, whenever the executive government of a country feels itself obliged to undertake the details of procuring food for the people’. In principle, then, he agreed with Burke. Yet he conceded that such interference was ‘perhaps, unavoidable . . . and seems now to be indispensable’, given the nature of the international market in grain’.⁴ Burke, too, had often argued that principles must be applied according to circumstances.⁵ On some principles, however, there could be no compromise. Revolutionary France represented the annihilation of liberty, property, and religion, as he understood them. With such a force, there could be no accommodation. To negotiate was to surrender. Accordingly, he determined to refute Auckland’s arguments. Had Auckland’s pamphlet been no more than an exposition of his own views, Burke might not have paid it the compliment of writing a lengthy riposte. What made Some Remarks hard to ignore was its semi-official status. Despite its anonymity, the pamphlet was widely known to be Auckland’s and to reflect ministerial opinion. As Auckland acknowledged to Burke, ‘three or four Friends with whom I am most connected in public and private Life’ had approved the pamphlet (C viii. ). Burke would certainly have understood ⁴ Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October (London, ), , –, . ⁵ In his Speech on the Unitarian Petition ( May ), E.B. distinguished a ‘statesman’ from ‘a professor in an university’ as one who modified his ‘general view of society’ by reference to ‘circumstances’, which are ‘infinite, are infinitely combined; are variable and transient’. Anyone not taking them into account is ‘not erroneous, but stark mad’ (W vi. ).
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this to include Pitt. The implication was confirmed by the speech from the throne, delivered on October, the day after the Remarks was published. This anticipated the establishment of a French government with which a peace ‘affording a reasonable Expectation of Security and Permanence’ might be concluded. Ominously, there was no mention of the monarchy.⁶ Probably soon after, Burke began work on his reply to Auckland, casting it in the form of a letter, his favourite polemical genre. The addressee would be Lord Fitzwilliam, whom Burke knew to share his opposition to any premature peace with the Jacobin republic. Before he could finish it, however, its original purpose was overtaken by an even more ominous development. On December, Pitt presented to the Commons a message, nominally from the king, but more expressive of his own than of the royal sentiments, in favour of peace.⁷ This declaration, plainer than the speech from the throne, made Burke’s task more urgent. He at once wrote to Fitzwilliam, begging him to attend the House of Lords to oppose the opening of negotiations for peace ( Dec. : C viii. –). Fitzwilliam obliged. Though he missed the debate on December, at which an address endorsing the proposed negotiation was approved, on the th he publicly if belatedly declared his dissent. His was, as Burke had expected, a lone voice.⁸This stand made Fitzwilliam an appropriate recipient for the pamphlet Burke was writing. On January , Burke confided to Fitzwilliam that he had ‘a thing on the Stocks’ relative to ‘the Regicide peace’ (C viii. –). In the pamphlet itself, Burke fixes the time of writing at about Christmas. While hardly more than a way of alluding to the true peace of the Christmas season (WS ix. ), this suggests that Burke then expected the pamphlet to appear early in January. Instead, he left it unfinished. The most probable explanation is that he came to feel that, after the king’s message of December and the approval by both houses of peace negotiations, Auckland’s pamphlet was no longer the prime target. Instead, Burke began another work on the same theme, at first called Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, and subsequently renamed Two Letters on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace. Sometime in the last few months of his life, however, he returned to his ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’, dictating part of a conclusion (–) and perhaps making other changes. At his death, the ‘Letter’ remained unfinished. In , with the addition of a long passage (–) originally written for the Third Letter on a Regicide Peace (but omitted in the posthumous publication of that pamphlet), and renamed ‘Letter IV. To the Earl Fitzwilliam’, it was finally published as part of the Regicide Peace series.⁹ This posthumous text is an incongruous amalgam, for ⁶ CJ li. –. ⁷ Ibid. –. The king’s real opinion is declared in a paper he sent to Pitt on Jan. , printed in J. Holland Rose, Pitt and Napoleon: Essays and Letters (London, ), –. ⁸ PH xxxii. – ( Dec. ), – ( Dec.). Fitzwilliam’s speech on the th was meant simply to record his protest, and drew no comment (Oracle and Public Advertiser, Dec.). ⁹ Works (London, –), v. –.
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parts of the section transferred from the Third Letter are strident and even apocalyptic in tone, out of keeping with the mood of the original ‘Letter’. Burke wrote the ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’ to scotch the notion that peace could safely be made with Jacobin or (in his newly applied term) ‘Regicide’ France. He continued to urge a war to extirpate Jacobinism and restore the monarchy and indeed the entire ancien régime. Pitt was much less committed even to the restoration of the monarchy as a war aim.¹⁰ Auckland, however, while ambassador at The Hague, had presented two explicitly anti-regicide memorials to the States General.¹¹ With evident relish, in the first part of the pamphlet Burke pretends to doubt whether the Remarks can really be Auckland’s, since its drift is so much at variance with this memorial (WS ix. –). In the same vein, he quotes the royal Declaration of October , which had explicitly called for the re-establishment of a monarchical government (–).¹² What had changed since? In Auckland’s view, the Directory, though exceptionable and unlikely to last, was at least ‘capable of maintaining the accustomed relations of peace and amity’; Britain was weary of the war; the high price of provisions was widely (if mistakenly) blamed on the war; and British resources were approaching exhaustion.¹³ This was the highly pragmatic case that Burke had to answer. Probably the first was the most powerful argument, for Burke devoted much of the ‘Letter’ to proving that the Directory was no improvement on the Committee of Safety, that (as he declared to Fitzwilliam) ‘the old Hangmen’ had merely ‘put on a new Stage Dress’ ( Dec. : C viii. ). In developing this argument, Burke exploited one of the foibles of the new French regime, its fondness for pageantry. The Directors and other notables wore elaborate, newly devised costumes, which indeed appeared theatrical and therefore lent themselves to ridicule. Burke sported with their absurdity (WS ix. –). But he was not content merely to ridicule the new plumes and pantaloons of the arriviste usurpers. He repeated one of his earliest criticisms of the French Revolution, which he had articulated in his first letter to Depont: that forms matter less than the men who administer them (Nov. : C vi. ). The form of the new constitution therefore signified little, if the same sanguinary tyrants were (with some few exceptions) still in control (WS ix. –, –). No constitution was acceptable while these impersonated ‘France’, whose true and natural representatives were the men of property, so many of whom were now living in exile. For Burke, ‘France’ meant the ¹⁰ In June , Pitt assured Portland that ‘the reestablishment of the Crown of France in such person of the Family of Bourbon as shall be naturally entitled to it was the first & determined Aim of the present Ministry’ (Portland to Fitzwilliam, June, WWM, F/). In the Commons, his statements of war aims did not always include the restoration of the monarchy, and when they did, were more guarded ( Apr. , Jan. : PH xxx. , ). ¹¹ On Jan. and (jointly with the imperial minister) Apr. (New Annual Register (), pt. , –, –). ¹² In the Declaration, the ‘people of France’ were invited to ‘join the standard of an hereditary monarchy’ (PH xxx. –). ¹³ Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War, –.
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rightful proprietors of its soil, not a mere numerical majority of the inhabitants of its territory. Indeed, he even denied that the new constitution enjoyed such a majority, since it had provoked more violent opposition than either of its predecessors. Burke never believed that the Revolution was genuinely popular, preferring to attribute it to the machinations of a gang of conspirators, duping and deluding the people for their own insidious purposes.¹⁴ To those who pleaded that the Directory promised stability, Burke retorted, so much the worse. His prime desideratum was the restoration of property, monarchy, and the Church. Because the new government, as much as its immediate predecessor, represented everything that was antithetical to political order, it must be rigorously excluded from the community of nations.¹⁵ Peace with the regicides would be a licence for them to proselytize Britain, where their levelling doctrines had already made too much progress. Burke’s argument is enforced with his habitual richness of imagery, historical examples, and literary quotations and allusions. These qualities make the ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’, as a composition, the most enjoyable of the Letters on a Regicide Peace. Within a single paragraph, refuting Auckland’s naïve optimism that the revolutionaries are ‘in a course of amelioration’, he first compares Auckland to Origen, the Church Father who believed that even the Devil himself would finally be saved; next, Auckland himself is ‘soft as a curd’, his veins (like Macbeth’s) full of ‘the milk of human kindness’; finally, the revolutionary bosom is ‘a rock of granite’ on which falsehood has built a stronghold which Truth ‘with her little pickaxe’ is powerless to demolish: ‘Nothing but gunpowder will do’ (WS ix. ). The range of allusions and images is as remarkable as their aptness, and they never ‘smell of the lamp’. Burke’s quotations and metaphors flowed naturally from a mind abundantly stocked from his reading, and on which he could call at will memorable images from medicine, physics, and astronomy, or from cookery, clothing, and the theatre.¹⁶ To enforce or illustrate a point, he draws on the Bible and the Classics; on Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Molière; and on anecdotes and exempla from European history. That he wrote from memory is confirmed by his occasional errors. The Roman emperor who ‘wished the Roman people had but one neck’ () was not Nero, but Caligula.¹⁷ Nor did ¹⁴ R [–]; Preface to Brissot’s Address to his Constituents (: WS viii. –). ¹⁵ WS ix. –, –. Jennifer M. Welsh, Edmund Burke and International Relations: The Commonwealth of Europe and the Crusade against the French Revolution (Basingstoke, ), esp. –. ¹⁶ Auckland is ‘this Physician of October’ with ‘all sorts of salves for all sorts of sores’ (WS ix. ). The ‘new system of France, after changing all other laws, reverses the law of gravitation’ (). The ‘slow-paced Saturnian movements of Spain’ contrast with the ‘rapid parabolick flights of France’ (). Of the new French constitution, ‘Contrary to what we might expect at Paris—the meat is good, the cookery abominable’ (). May no British ambassador ever appear ‘in any rags and coversluts of Infamy’ (). Murder is performed in the Convention ‘for the entertainment and instruction of their Excellencies the Foreign Ambassadors, who had a box in this constitutional Amphitheatre of a free People’ (). ¹⁷ Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, ‘Caligula’, . The vagueness of E.B.’s allusions to Bayle, Machiavelli, and Hudibras likewise suggests that he wrote from memory (WS ix. , , ).
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Burke confine himself to conventional literary sources, an indecorum for which he was sometimes pilloried. The ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’ contains one of the happiest of these excursions, his allusion to Rider’s British Merlin. Seeking an explanation for the significance of ‘the last week in October’, he consults ‘the sagacious astrologer’ and quotes his sage if trite advice (–).¹⁸ Burke’s omnivorous mind could make rhetorical capital out of the ephemeral as well as the classic. The ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’ was only one of several projects on which Burke was engaged in November and December . The others were two papers on the high price of provisions, which were posthumously conflated and published as Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (); and a remarkable apologia, in response to attacks on his pension, published in February as A Letter to a Noble Lord. Diverse as they are in subject and style, all address, directly or indirectly, a single preoccupation, and all express the same concern for the preservation of civilized society. Burke’s thoughts on the war against France, on state intervention in the economy, and on his own career, target a single enemy, the enemy of civilization: Jacobinism. Even in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, the example of revolutionary France is a constant ghostly presence, if explicitly invoked only at the end. Had Burke remained in Parliament, much of the energy that produced these works would have been expended in debates. Though deprived of this forum, he could not sit idly by and watch the civilization he knew and cherished threatened by enemies both without and within. This intense burst of activity belies Burke’s plea that he was ‘no longer capable of any exertion’ (C viii. ). Thoughts and Details on Scarcity was published in as a posthumous oracle. ‘The wisdom, which is canonized by death,’ its editors averred, ‘is consulted with a sort of sacred veneration.’ Burke’s on this subject was peculiarly valuable, because the opinions originally produced by ‘superior talents and more extensive knowledge’ could be heard from the grave ‘without influence from the little prejudices and passions, to which accident, folly, or malevolence may have given birth in the present moment’.¹⁹ In order to maximize the impact of Burke’s posthumous wisdom, they pieced together several fragments to create a unity that is easily taken as a more general statement of economic principles than Burke intended. Burke never meant to ¹⁸ On Mar. , E.B. cited ‘the directions in old almanacks’ to enforce his ridicule of the revolutionaries (PH xxx. ). Like most almanacs, Rider’s British Merlin provided advice about farming and health (mostly repeated from one year to the next), and brief predictions of the weather, which vary from year to year (Lord Kenyon’s set (, –), Preston, Lancashire Record Office, DDKE, acc. , quarto box ). ¹⁹ Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (London, ), preface, pp. iii–iv.
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compose an economic credo. In , the worst failure of the wheat crop for many years led to soaring bread prices and consequent hardship for many of the poor.²⁰ Burke began what would become Thoughts on Scarcity in response to a request from Henry Dundas for his ideas on the food crisis. Pitt, too, asked to see a copy of the paper. The subject was canvassed in the Commons on November.²¹ Before submitting his thoughts, Burke expanded his draft to refute some opinions that had been voiced in that debate ( Nov. : C viii. –). Though neither minister responded directly, the paper may have exerted some influence.²² If so, Burke’s would have been only one voice among many. Pitt himself, in principle at least, was averse to interfering in the free market in grain.²³ In Thoughts on Scarcity as published, Burke’s memorandum to Pitt is interwoven with three fragments of another work, advertised as ‘A Letter to Arthur Young’.²⁴ This ‘Letter’ was expanded in response to the parliamentary debate on a bill to regulate wages, introduced in the Commons on December by Samuel Whitbread, and supported by Fox.²⁵An eminent agriculturalist who had visited Burke’s farm and published a mainly approving account in his Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (), Young (–) was an early enthusiast for the French Revolution. In , he recanted, and subsequently wrote a Burkean palinode, The Example of France a Warning to Great Britain (). Burke probably chose Young as his addressee because, despite his general laissez-faire principles, Young had recently advocated parliamentary regulation of agricultural wages.²⁶ The ‘Letter to Young’, however, was never finished, perhaps abandoned when the defeat of Whitbread’s bill removed the immediate threat.²⁷ In any case, Burke was by then preoccupied with his Letters on a Regicide Peace. While Burke often spoke in Parliament on economic issues, his speeches there are imperfectly preserved in his notes and in newspaper reports. As his most considered statement on the subject, Thoughts on Scarcity is therefore ²⁰ Walter M. Stern, ‘The Bread Crisis in Britain, –’, Economica, NS (), –; John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, –), ii. –. ²¹ Debrett, xliii. – (misdated Nov.) is much fuller than PH xxxii. – (correctly dated). ²² E.B.’s memorial was ‘communicated to several members of the King’s Government’ and ‘believed at the time to have been not wholly unproductive of good’: the enquiry into the quantity of grain in hand was ‘silently dropped’, as was the scheme for public granaries, and ministers repressed the ‘restless spirit of legislation’ on the subject, including an attempt to revive the laws against forestallers (Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, preface, p. xi). Writing only five years after the event, Laurence and King would surely have remembered any positive testimony from the ministers. ²³ Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, ii. . ²⁴ The full title was ‘A Letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, to Arthur Young, Esq. on the Projects talked of in Parliament for an Encrease of Wages to Day Labourers, and other topics of Rustic Œconomy’ (advertised as ‘speedily will be published’, The Times, Dec. ). In , E.B. began a letter to Young about ploughing, which reads like a draft for publication (C ii. –). ²⁵ Debrett, xliii. –. Pitt was non-committal. The germ of E.B.’s ‘Letter to Young’ probably predated this debate, since as early as Dec. Walker King asked James Dodsley whether he would be interested in publishing ‘a small Pamphlet upon the present Scarcity of Provisions’ (YB OF .). ²⁶ Supra, i. –. John G. Gazley, The Life of Arthur Young, – (Philadelphia, ), –, –, –. ²⁷ Feb. (PH xxxii. –).
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central to any interpretation of his economic ideas. In two respects, however, it is ill adapted to bear this burden. It is not a finished work, but an editorial construct, designed to influence policy in . Second, it is not a work of economic theory, but the record of Burke’s response to an immediate, urgent question. Its intention was neither to describe nor to analyse, but to persuade. Nevertheless, this amalgam of two short, topical, rapidly written pieces has become a classic of laissez-faire thought, its doctrines compared with those of Adam Smith.²⁸ There could hardly be a more telling tribute to the powers of Burke’s mind. The thesis of Burke’s memorandum to Pitt is boldly announced at the outset: ‘Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous, and it is always worst in the time when men are most disposed to it:—that is, in the time of scarcity’ (WS ix. ). Burke’s main contention is that no government can provide food for the people. Numbers imply poverty; most people must inevitably be ‘poor’. As society advances, the ‘poor’ likewise advance, in absolute if not relative terms. The few ‘rich’ people are really ‘the trustees for those who labour’, turning the wheel of economic circulation by providing employment, ‘deducting some very trifling commission and discount’ in the form of their own consumption ().²⁹ Burke believed that the standard of living of the labourer had improved over the last fifty years.³⁰ Wages had not, he admitted, risen in tandem with the cost of living, nor ought they. Labour, a commodity, ‘rises or falls according to the demand’ (). Any attempt to raise wages beyond the market rate would either reduce demand or further increase the cost of living. Agriculture is a trade like any other. No regard should be paid to urban opinion on the subject. Shopkeepers ignorantly propose regulations on farming that they would indignantly reject if applied to their own trade. The popular cry against middlemen is likewise misdirected; they are not only necessary, but highly beneficial, in trade of every kind. The proposal to erect public granaries, Burke suspected, was an attempt to eliminate the middleman. He therefore condemned it. Only in a small state such as Geneva could public granaries be of any utility. In larger polities, public control of the food supply is inevitably pernicious. Burke cited the examples of ancient and modern Rome against any ‘attempt to feed the people out of the hands of the magistrates’ (). ²⁸ Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, – (Cambridge, ), –. ²⁹ Speaking on the outbreak of the war with France, E.B. argued that ‘the riches of the rich were held in trust for the poor’, and deplored the way the new French ‘system’ had ‘put the poor to judge upon the life and property of the rich’ ( Feb. : PH xxx. –). ³⁰ The accuracy of E.B.’s perception is an open question. For London bricklayers, L. D. Schwarz concludes that that real wages fell sharply between about and (‘The Standard of Living in the Long Run, London, –’, Economic History Review, NS (), –). Broader studies are less conclusive: M. W. Flinn, ‘Trends in Real Wages, –’, Economic History Review, NS (), –; and Peter H. Linder and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘English Workers’ Living Standards during the Industrial Revolution: A New Look’, Economic History Review, NS (), –.
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Years of scarcity and plenty alternate according to ‘pretty long cycles and irregularly’, and neither the government nor the rich can supply the poor with ‘those necessaries which it has pleased the Divine Providence for a while to with-hold from them’. Any attempt to do so, by artificially raising the price of labour or lowering the price of food, would be to break ‘the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God’ (–). Having outlined his general principles, Burke turned to a more detailed consideration of the harvests of and . The rise in food prices he explained as the natural result of bad weather, poor crops, and local scarcities. It was therefore likely to be a mere temporary fluctuation. The conclusion is clear. Government should not be tempted by the popular outcry to introduce measures which cannot succeed, but which will inevitably exercise a baneful influence on the country’s agriculture. ‘Let us be saved from too much wisdom of our own, and we shall do tolerably well’ (). Burke’s identification of the ‘laws of commerce’ with ‘the laws of God’ sounds uncomfortably like the language of triumphant capitalism, and inconsistent with his earlier excoriation of ‘sophisters, œconomists, and calculators’ (R []). Some have indeed seen a contradiction between Burke’s ‘chivalry’ (the model of society espoused in the Reflections) and his ‘capitalism’ (the unfettered market economy advocated in the Thoughts on Scarcity).³¹ Such an interpretation may appear plausible today, when conflicts between different social classes or interests (such as labour and capital) are assumed to be endemic. In Burke’s model of society, however, there was no necessary disharmony between chivalry and commerce. In France, admittedly, the nobility and the moneyed men had been kept apart, and this (in Burke’s view) was one cause of the Revolution ([–)]. But in British society, the two more readily intermingled. In the Reflections, Burke argues that commerce was not only the product of ‘antient manners’, but dependent on them for its continuation. Without nobility and religion, a country would degenerate into ‘poor and sordid barbarians’ ([–]). Thoughts on Scarcity should be read against this background. It presupposes a moral order founded on religion and aristocracy. Such a moral order was more likely to offer real protection to the poor than the delusive schemes of the revolutionaries. One further passage from Burke’s memorandum to Pitt deserves notice, both as an illustration of his economic ideas and as a gloss on the seemingly uncaring attitude to ‘the poor’ evinced elsewhere in the document. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the cheap availability of spirits, especially gin, came to be regarded as a national social problem, generating a large controversial literature and culminating in the Gin Act of , which imposed ³¹ Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York, ) ; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, ), .
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heavy duties. Thereafter, the consumption of gin fell dramatically; the problem seemed to have been solved, and ceased to attract much public attention. Gin, however, was tolerated rather than approved. To preserve wheat for use in bread, in times of unusually poor harvests distilling was therefore sometimes prohibited. This happened in , and provoked Burke’s ire. Against the stoppage, he advanced two lines of argument. The first was primarily economic: the distillery trade produced a large volume of exports, and contributed materially to the public revenue. Much of the trade used ‘damaged corn’ and ‘barley and malt of the lowest quality’, and therefore did not divert grain from bread. More surprising is Burke’s refutation of the moral argument against gin. Against the ‘thunder of eloquence’ that had been directed at the drink, he retorted that the ‘alembic . . . has furnished to the world a far greater benefit and blessing, than if the opus maximus had been really found by chemistry’. While conceding that ‘there may be a dangerous abuse in the excess of spirits’, he countered that they are medicinal, an aid to the digestion ‘of poor meagre diet’, and ‘a medicine for the mind’. On the last point, he alluded to the universal use of ‘some physical aid’ to the ‘moral consolations’ that relieve ‘the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition’, instancing ‘wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco’. Burke assumed that the poor were condemned to a ‘poor meagre diet’, and did not imagine that this could be ameliorated. Nevertheless, for a moment he escaped from the prejudices of his time and class in defending gin as a ‘medicine for the mind’ against the expected ‘ridicule’ of ‘wits inspired with champaign and claret’ (WS ix. –). His list of lenitives provides an illustration of what, in the Reflections, he calls ‘the true moral equality of mankind’ (R []).³² Burke’s executors expanded the memorandum to Pitt with three fragments of the projected ‘Letter to Young’.³³ These insertions amount to about per cent of the entire text. The first enlarges on a theme treated only briefly in the memorandum, the price of labour. Burke deplores the setting of wage rates by magistrates as, in effect, an arbitrary tax on the farmer. The argument follows from his conviction that, since the interests of the farmer and the labourer are the same, ‘it is absolutely impossible that their free contracts can ³² M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (; new edn. Harmondsworth, ), –; Jessica Warner, Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (New York, ). While comments are sparse after , the ruling élite continued to regard gin as a social problem. In , Hannah More wrote a ballad (‘The Gin Shop, or a Peep into a Prison’) on the subject for her Cheap Repository Tracts. Patrick Colquhoun believed that, when the distillery was again stopped in –, the London poor were ‘apparently more comfortable, paid their rents more regularly, and were better fed than at any period for some years before’ (A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (th edn. London, ), n.). Against the background of such comments, E.B.’s defence of gin is the more remarkable. ³³ These passages, as specified in the preface to the text, are: ‘There is an implied contract . . . sensible of it’s own infirmity’ (WS ix. –); ‘It is a perilous thing . . . we actually employ’ (–); and ‘It is one of the finest . . . of the people’ (–).
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be onerous to either party’ (WS ix. –).³⁴ His reasoning is revealing. Borrowing a classification from a Roman writer on agriculture, Burke divides the farmer’s ‘instruments’ into his instrumentum vocale (men), instrumentum semivocale (beasts), and instrumentum mutum (carts, implements, and such).³⁵ The farmer is himself ‘as a thinking and presiding principle to the labourer’. Because the labourer is the most valuable and useful of the instruments, labourers who are ‘well fed, and otherwise found with such necessaries of animal life, according to it’s habitudes, as may keep the body in full force, and the mind gay and cheerful’ are of even more importance than well-fed horses or equipment in good repair. The assumption behind this argument is that labourers are hereditary tillers of the soil, condemned to perpetual existence at subsistence level. Burke concludes that any ‘attempt to break this chain of subordination in any part is equally absurd’. In a theodicy that is remarkable in a letter on farming, Burke thanks ‘the benign and wise disposer of all things, who obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success’ (). The inequalities of human societies are both necessary and providential. In the second fragment of the ‘Letter to Young’, Burke advances another argument against forcing farmers to pay more for labour: the precariousness of the enterprise. Rare is the farmer, however long and hard he has worked, who dies ‘worth more than paid his debts, leaving his posterity to continue in nearly the same equal conflict between industry and want, in which the last predecessor, and a long line of predecessors before him, lived and died’. By allowing insufficiently for ‘accidents and losses’, Young overstated the profitability of farming (). Farmers, like the bulk of mankind, are thus inexorably doomed, in Burke’s view, to certain labour and uncertain reward. They should not be further burdened by well-intentioned but pernicious regulation. Burke’s editors placed the third fragment from the ‘Letter to Young’ at the end of Thoughts on Scarcity, where it forms an appropriate conclusion to the whole. Of greatest interest is a passage, explicitly presented as the fruit of long and hard thought, in which Burke attempts to define the proper limits of State activity. Any such definition, he admits, must be subject to ‘exceptions, many permanent, some occasional’. With that caveat, he argues that the State ³⁴ Adam Smith, more plausibly, recognized a fundamental clash of interests: ‘The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible’ (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (), I. viii. – (ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, ), i. –). E.B.’s optimism with regard to seemingly antagonistic economic relations is also reflected in his belief that debtor and creditor ‘were one person, and what was for the benefit of the one, was evidently for the advantage of the other’ ( May : PH xxix. ). Imprisoning a debtor disabled him from repaying his creditor. ³⁵ Varro, De re rustica, . . . E.B.’s interest in classical writers on agriculture is attested by Laurence and King, who claim that ‘All that the ancients have left us upon husbandry was familiar to him, and he once encouraged and set on foot a new edition of those valuable writers’ (preface to Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (London, ), p. iv).
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ought to confine itself to what regards the State, or the creatures of the State, namely, the exterior establishment of its religion; its magistracy; its revenue; its military force by sea and land; the corporations that owe their existence to its fiat; in a word, to every thing that is truly and properly public, to the public peace, to the public safety, to the public order, to the public prosperity. (WS ix. )
All governments have fallen into the error of trying to govern too much. Burke then cites an observation made by Richard Jr., that the ‘leading vice’ of the French monarchy was in ‘good intention ill-directed, and a restless desire of governing too much’ (). The example was ominous. For Burke, the ‘most momentous’, because most dangerous, species of ‘meddling on the part of authority’ was ‘meddling with the subsistence of the people’ (). In keeping with this minimalist conception of the State, he consistently opposed attempts to control the price of provisions, and he favoured abolition of the Poor Laws.³⁶ In his view, the ‘exterior establishment of religion’ was a proper concern of governments, but not social welfare. In Burke’s day, the Established Church was supported by a tithe, in effect a compulsory tax like the poor rate, levied on landed property. Burke regarded this as proper, for he condemned the revolutionaries for making the French clergy salaried (R []). Yet he disapproved supporting the poor from a similar tax on property. Burke’s attitude to the poor may appear unfeeling and inhumane. Nor can this impression be entirely discounted as anachronistic. Samuel Johnson declared that ‘a decent provision for the poor, is the true test of civilization.’³⁷ By contemporary standards, Britain passed this test. The poor and disadvantaged were generously treated, and Britain was regarded as ‘the exemplar of social welfare’.³⁸ Burke wrote what became Thoughts on Scarcity precisely because public opinion was liable to the fallacies he exposed (subsidizing the poor either by artificially raising wages, or by controlling prices). The triumph of his arguments in (not his alone, of course) has been taken as marking the demise of a paternalistic ‘moral economy’, and even as indirectly providing a rationale for the British government’s passivity during the Great Famine of –.³⁹ Why did Burke resist converting ‘charity’ into a compulsory charge on private property, even at the cost of allowing the poor to starve to death? The question can be answered at two levels. In practice, he believed, the existing system worked. Very few people (none to his ³⁶ Supra, i. , , –, –. ³⁷ Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, –), ii. (from William Maxwell’s Johnsoniana, inserted by Boswell under ). So too Adam Smith: ‘No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable’ (Wealth of Nations, I. viii. ; ed. Campbell and Skinner, i. ) ³⁸ Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, . ³⁹ E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’ (), repr. in Customs in Common (London, ), ; Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge, ), –.
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knowledge) had actually starved, thanks to ‘a care and superintendance of the poor, far greater than any I remember’ (WS ix. ). Well enough should be left alone. In principle, he was convinced that ‘to provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of Government’ (). Any attempt to do so would not only fail, but risk undermining the economic surplus from which, at present, the more prosperous in fact relieved the poor. For Burke, the protection of property took precedence over any other social good.⁴⁰ This privileging of property is the key to understanding such passages as the following: But what if the rate of hire to the labourer comes far short of his necessary subsistence, and the calamity of the time is so great as to threaten actual famine? . . . my opinion is this. Whenever it happens that a man can claim nothing according to the rules of commerce, and the principles of justice, he passes out of that department, and comes within the jurisdiction of mercy. In that province the magistrate has nothing at all to do: his interference is a violation of the property which it is his office to protect. Without all doubt, charity to the poor is a direct and obligatory duty upon all Christians, next in order after the payment of debts, full as strong, and by nature made infinitely more delightful to us . . . But the manner, mode, time, choice of objects, and proportion, are left to private discretion; and perhaps, for that very reason it is performed with the greater satisfaction, because the discharge of it has more the appearance of freedom; recommending us besides very specially to the divine favour, as the exercise of a virtue most suitable to a being sensible of it’s own infirmity. (WS ix. –)
Burke was keen to preserve ‘the laws of commerce’, because he thought them ‘the laws of God’, the means Providence had instituted for the generation and increase of wealth and prosperity. In the long run, any interference with them could only diminish the fund of surplus wealth from which ‘charity’ must derive. ‘Charity’ in this context has today an odious sound, often connoting condescension and superiority on the part of the giver. Indeed, the negative meaning of ‘condescension’, a positive term in Burke’s day, is an index of this shift in attitudes.⁴¹ Likewise, the theological gloss of the above quotation will strike many modern readers as insufferable canting. There is, however, no reason to doubt the sincerity of Burke’s religious convictions.⁴² Burke regarded ‘poverty’ as the inevitable condition of the mass of mankind, who must ‘respect that property of which they cannot partake’ (R []). Like many other eighteenth-century thinkers, he took social and ⁴⁰ Francis Canavan, The Political Economy of Edmund Burke: The Role of Property in his Thought (New York, ). ⁴¹ None of the quotations under ‘condescend’ and its cognates in Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (London, ) is pejorative. The earliest quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary that clearly carries negative connotations is . ⁴² Winch, Riches and Poverty, –.
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economic inequalities to be part of the providential design.⁴³ He therefore opposed all attempts to alleviate them as misguided, futile, and even impious. To break ‘the laws of commerce’ was indeed to break ‘the laws of God’. In the wake of the French Revolution, he feared that, in Britain, raising unreal expectations among the poor would lead to social unrest and perhaps even to another revolution. Such a cataclysm would destroy at a stroke the laboriously accumulated rise in economic standards of the past century, as he thought the Revolution had done in France.⁴⁴ The ‘poor’ in Britain, he argued, were better off in material terms than they had ever been, witness their consumption of better quality bread and more and better meat (WS ix. ). The gradual improvement in the general standard of living was a frequent observation, made by writers as diverse as Bernard Mandeville (–) and Adam Smith.⁴⁵ Burke was therefore justified in his diatribe against ‘the political canting language’ of such phrases as ‘The Labouring Poor’ and ‘The once happy labourer’. To the poor should be recommended ‘patience, labour, sobriety, frugality, and religion’; to flatter them that their poverty was remediable was ‘downright fraud’ ().⁴⁶ The real interests of the poor were best served not by delusive schemes of economic regulation, but by allowing the unfettered operation of the economy, for the surplus wealth of society, nominally accruing to the rich, inevitably ‘trickled down’ (in the modern phrase) to the poor. Shortly after dispatching to Pitt the memorandum that would become part of the Thoughts on Scarcity, and while still at work on his reply to Auckland’s Remarks, Burke became embroiled in a third polemic. Accepting a pension exposed him to attack from those Whigs who, having followed Fox, regarded Burke as an apostate. In the eighteenth century, any opposition politician who ⁴³ William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London, ) was an influential exposition of this commonplace. Numerous earlier examples are cited in Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (Philadelphia, ). Francis Canavan, Edmund Burke: Prescription and Providence (Durham, NC, ). ⁴⁴ R []. René Sédillot, Le Coût de la Révolution française (Paris, ) offers a Burkean counterargument to the more usual celebration of revolutionary ‘gains’. ⁴⁵ According to Mandeville (writing in ), ‘the very Poor | Liv’d better than the Rich before’ (The Grumbling Hive, in The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, ), i. ). Adam Smith records the ‘common complaint that luxury extends itself even to the lowest ranks of the people, and that the labouring poor will not now be contented with the same food, cloathing and lodging which satisfied them in former times’ (Wealth of Nations, I. viii. ; ed. Campbell and Skinner, i. ). ⁴⁶ Frances Crewe observed that E.B. disliked ‘a sort of Cant which was Kept up and made a fashion of concerning the Poor’ and that ‘those who had known Luxury and were reduced met with most of his Compassion’ (‘Extracts from Mr Burke’s Table-Talk, at Crewe Hall. Written down by Mrs Crewe’, in Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society, (–), pt. , ).
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accepted a place or pension was liable to be accused of venality. Burke, however, was especially vulnerable because of the leading part he had taken in Economical Reformation in –. In order to curb the burgeoning cost of Civil List pensions, by his Act of , no individual pension could exceed £,, nor could the total of pensions granted exceed £, a year.⁴⁷ That Burke, having attacked and limited Civil List pensions should now receive one was an irony too piquant for his enemies not to exploit. The incongruity, however, was more apparent than real. In his Speech on Economical Reformation, Burke had carefully distinguished between the pensions he reprobated and those he approved: between pensions awarded to influence future conduct, and pensions that rewarded public service. Avowing the propriety of public provision for the ‘weather-beaten vessels of the state’ to ‘come into harbour’, he actually anticipated his own case (WS iii. ). Satirists and political opponents, however, are rarely restrained by fairness from seizing whatever weapon will serve to ridicule or wound their victims. The first parliamentary attack on Burke’s pension was mounted on November , by the Duke of Bedford (–), the most prominent of the few peers who welcomed the French Revolution as a harbinger of reform in Britain. He had previously shocked Lord Fitzwilliam by attending the House of Lords in a ‘crop’, the hairstyle that proclaimed his revolutionary sympathies.⁴⁸ In the course of a debate on the Treasonable Practices Bill, after attributing the French Revolution in part to the extravagance of the old regime in rewarding its favourites with excessive grants and pensions, Bedford accused the present British government of the same profligacy. He instanced the pension awarded to ‘the very man who distinguished himself at one time as the advocate of rigid economy, but whose conduct, and whose writings had, in an eminent degree, contributed to create and continue the war, and to cause all its consequent enormous expenses’. Later in the debate, the Earl of Lauderdale echoed Bedford’s charge. This was an unkinder cut, for Lauderdale (then Lord Maitland) had been on friendly terms with Burke, and had even acted as one of the managers of the impeachment. These attacks did not pass unchallenged. Lord Grenville, for the ministry, avowed that ‘he was proud to boast of the part he had taken in recommending the pension of that gentleman, and was ready to take his share of responsibility for it . . . a public reward was never more merited for the most eminent services’.⁴⁹ News of the debate reached Burke on November, and he at once began a letter of thanks to Grenville. Rapidly, however, it turned into an attack on Bedford, and was ‘growing to a considerable length’ (as Burke’s letters often did), when he was interrupted by some neighbours. When they left, sensing ⁴⁷ George III, c. , clause . Larger pensions could be granted to members of the royal family, to retired diplomats, or on an address from Parliament. ⁴⁸ Fitzwilliam to Lady Fitzwilliam, Oct. (NRO FC). ⁴⁹ PH xxxii. –.
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that his letter was becoming a pamphlet, he set it aside and instead penned a brief note of gratitude, which he sent the same day. By the th, the original letter had ‘grown to so shameful a Bulk’ that it could no longer be called a letter. Nor was it yet finished. So Burke wrote another interim letter to Grenville, foreshadowing a mighty retaliation: ‘I think I have turned his Guns upon the Duke of Bedford.’ Burke had already determined to circulate this more public letter, either in manuscript to a few friends, or (if Bedford maintained his attacks) in print.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, on the th, the scene in the House of Lords was replayed in the Commons. Burke’s pension was attacked by John Christian Curwen (–), a Foxite, and defended by William Windham.⁵¹As soon as he heard of the debate, Burke began to draft a long letter of thanks to Windham (C viii. –). This, however, he soon abandoned, probably in favour of the letter to Grenville on which he was already engaged. On the following day, he therefore wrote and sent a briefer letter ( Nov.: –). Burke chose to expand his letter to Grenville into a pamphlet, rather than the one to Windham, because Bedford was by far the more prominent target. Curwen was but a ‘a slight man’ (C viii. ). Otherwise, Windham, a confidential friend of long standing, would have made the more appropriate recipient. Grenville was an old antagonist, whom similar views on the French Revolution had made a political ally, but not a personal friend.⁵² Grenville was thus hardly the ideal addressee. Indeed, Burke may have sensed that, as a minister, Grenville might be embarrassed to appear the recipient of so vitriolic a pamphlet as Burke was composing, for in his letter of November, he sounded Grenville on the question.⁵³ No response from Grenville is known. If he did not discourage the idea, Burke may have decided independently that an anonymous recipient would better serve his rhetorical purpose. The pamphlet was published as A Letter to a Noble Lord, with no reference in the title or the text either to Grenville, or to any defence of Burke in the House of Lords.⁵⁴ The ‘noble lord’ becomes a representative figure of true nobility, a foil to the renegade Duke of Bedford. ⁵⁰ E.B. to Grenville, , Nov. (UBL (I), –). ⁵¹ PH xxxii. , . After Windham spoke, Sheridan acknowledged that ‘no man deserved better’ a public pension than E.B., but objected to the manner of granting it as an evasion of E.B.’s own Act (). ⁵² The Grenvilles were Verney’s rivals in Buckinghamshire politics. Related to Pitt, they were also his political allies. In , William Wyndham Grenville (since ennobled as Lord Grenville) was appointed Paymaster-General on E.B’s dismissal, and was one of the ‘juvenile statesman’ of whose disrespect E.B. complained. ⁵³ UBL (I), . ⁵⁴ The full title is A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord, on the Attacks Made upon him and his Pension, in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, Early in the Present Sessions of Parliament (Todd, a). While many eighteenth-century pamphlets take the form of a ‘letter to a lord’, E.B. may have been echoing the title of Alexander Pope’s ‘A Letter to a Noble Lord’, written about but not published until after Pope’s death (Frans De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form (Oxford, ), –).
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The later stages of the pamphlet’s composition are less well documented. According to one newspaper report, it was ‘ready for the press’ within a few days of Bedford’s attack, but held back, and only released when, on February, Lauderdale gave notice of a motion concerning Burke’s pension.⁵⁵ That a considerable portion of the Letter was struck off in the initial heat of indignation against Bedford is plausible. But, as so often with Burke, the pamphlet soon outgrew its origin. Though subtitled ‘on the Attacks Made upon him and his Pension in the House of Lords’, the Letter uses those attacks as a pretext for a more general apologia pro vita sua. Indeed, the disproportion between the provocation and the retort suggests that Bedford was merely the accidental victim of Burke’s accumulated bitterness at his shabby treatment by the Whigs he had served. In addition, there are many rhetorical purple patches that indicate an unusual degree of attention to details of style, and suggest that Burke polished the work with exceptional care after the first burst of creative energy had cooled. The most autobiographical of his writings, A Letter to a Noble Lord is at the same time the most richly rhetorical. Though Burke speaks at length about himself, his manner is distant and selfconscious rather than confessional. Anxious to avoid the appearance of pique or personal resentment, he adopts a generally elevated style appropriate to a calm, philosophical response to a cowardly attack. The prose is more formally organized than his habitual style, making extensive use of structuring devices such as parallelism and antithesis. The Letter is meant to sound dignified and premeditated. Yet the style is not tiresomely uniform, but varied with some ludicrous and more conversational passages. Burke’s rhetorical problem in writing the Letter was an ancient one (the subject of an essay by Plutarch): how to praise oneself without incurring odium or ill feeling.⁵⁶ Employing many of the strategies used by Plutarch’s classical examples, Burke makes his self-praise appear not only inoffensive but creditable. He adopts a modest, deferential persona, valuing himself not on his abilities but on his labour (WS ix. , ). By emphasizing the immeasurable social and economic distance between himself and the wealthy Duke of Bedford, he casts himself as David against Goliath. Using the death of his son to evoke sympathy for a desolate old man deserving of pity, he makes Bedford’s attack seem distasteful and ungentlemanly. Lavish in his praise of others, even of a former opponent such as Lord North, he ends the pamphlet with a generous panegyric on a former friend, Lord Keppel (–). While Burke’s own rhetorical intelligence would have suggested all these strategies, the self-consciously classical style of the Letter makes its ⁵⁵ The Times, Feb. . ⁵⁶ Plutarch, ‘On Praising Oneself Inoffensively’ (Moralia, –). The author of A General Reply to the Several Answerers, &c. of a Letter Written to a Noble Lord (London, ) cites Plutarch’s essay in defence of E.B.’s self-praise (, note *).
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recall of Plutarch appropriate. Burke would surely have been pleased to be recognized as following the steps of such examples of calumniated virtue as Pericles, Phocion, and Demosthenes. Though in form an apologia, the Letter to a Noble Lord had a broader purpose than mere self-exculpation. Indeed, much of its autobiographical information is selected and slanted to enforce the political moral of the Letter, the dangers of Jacobinism. In his account of his public career and services, for example, Burke devotes most space to his brief period (–) as an active reformer. In part, this serves his autobiographical purpose: to justify his pension, by recalling how much public money has been saved as a result of his efforts; and by explaining the rationale behind his ideas of reform, to justify his consistency. But the larger purpose of this emphasis is to inculcate an opposition between true and false ‘reform’: ‘To innovate is not to reform’ (WS ix. ). Burke defends his own Economical Reformation proposals as preservative measures. The French revolutionaries, mistaking innovation for reform, destroyed without creating. Many pages are devoted to this topic. By contrast, what by any objective reckoning are more significant achievements (such his involvement with India, and his writings against the French Revolution) are treated only cursorily. The brief reference to India is typical in combining modesty with self-aggrandizement: If I were to call for a reward (which I have never done) it should be for those [services] in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I shewed the most industry, and had the least success; I mean in the affairs of India. They are those on which I value myself the most; most for the importance; most for the labour, most for the judgment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit. Others may value them most for the intention. In that, surely, they are not mistaken. ()
This passage exhibits several of the characteristic strategies of the Letter: the emphasis on labour rather than success; the indirectness of the self-praise (nominally recounting a failure); and the insistent use of anaphora to impose a disciplined pattern on the prose. The contrast between reform and innovation is only one of several antitheses that Burke uses to structure the argument of the Letter. The most memorable is the extended comparison that Burke draws between himself and his pension on the one hand, and the Duke of Bedford and his vast ‘landed pensions’ on the other (WS ix. –). One paragraph encapsulates the differences not merely between the two men, but between the values that each represents: The merit of the grantee whom he derives from [the first Earl of Bedford], was that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant [Henry VIII], who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury on every thing that was great and noble. Mine has been, in endeavouring to screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent,
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who in the bad times of confiscating Princes, confiscating chief Governors [Warren Hastings], or confiscating Demagogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice and envy. ()
Several successive paragraphs employ, in varying forms, this contrast between ‘his’ and ‘mine’. Here, the phrase ‘levelling tyrant’ explicitly links Henry VIII with the French revolutionaries, alike enemies of the aristocracy that Burke regarded as a nation’s best bulwark against the tyranny of the one or of the many.⁵⁷ Nor could Burke resist inserting a veiled reference to Hastings as a third example of an anti-aristocratic despot. Far-fetched as the parallel may appear, the linkage between what Burke elsewhere calls ‘Indianism’ and Jacobinism was much on his mind at this time.⁵⁸ The Letter to a Noble Lord shows that, much as he venerated aristocracy, Burke could be scathingly critical of aristocrats who betrayed their responsibilities. In times of revolution, as had often been observed, the wealthy and the prominent are the most exposed to danger.⁵⁹ The peculiar folly of the Duke of Bedford and other aristocratic admirers and would-be imitators of the French Revolution is their obtuse failure to learn from the example of France that they would be among the first victims of a British revolution. But to balance his excoriation of the duke, Burke concludes with an idealized portrait of Lord Keppel, Bedford’s antitype. Burke chose Keppel for several reasons. He was dead, so that his panegyric could not seem invidious; he was descended from the first Earl of Albemarle, a follower of William III (one of Burke’s heroes) rather than a tool of the detested Henry VIII; an admiral, he was a man of action, rather than a mere politician; and in he had been vindictively accused of cowardice, only to vindicate himself at his trial. Burke had helped with his defence.⁶⁰ Now, himself on trial before pubic opinion, Burke could invoke on his own behalf no more appropriate icon of the aristocrat as disinterested servant of the state. Quotation can only faintly suggest the rhetorical skill and verbal richness of the Letter to a Noble Lord. One of its most remarkable features is its careful deployment of the rational, emotional, and ethical appeals. The structure of the argument is rational, developing the topics of definition, difference and comparison, and cause and effect. This argumentative skeleton is ⁵⁷ The parallel between tyranny and democracy, and the attack on Henry VIII, are both anticipated in the Reflections (R [–, ]). ⁵⁸ Writing to Fitzwilliam on June , E.B. described ‘Indianism and Jacobinism’ as ‘the two great Evils of our time (C vii. ). In his ‘Second Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe’ ( May ), he added ‘the principles of Protest and ascendancy’ as a third great evil (WS ix. ). In E.B.’s mind, all three sprang from the same root. ⁵⁹ ‘When statutes glean the refuse of the sword, | How much more safe the vassal than the lord’ (Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, lines –; based on Juvenal, Satire X). ⁶⁰ Supra, i. –. E.B’s claim that Keppel would have taken his side was denied in Part of a Letter from Robert Adair, Esq., to the Right Honourable Charles James Fox, Occasioned by Mr Burke’s Mention of Lord Keppel in a Recent Publication (London, ).
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fleshed with Burke’s usual variety of images. Particularly striking are the animal metaphors, especially the memorable image of the Duke of Bedford as leviathan (WS ix. ). Another powerful image represents Burke’s prostration after the death of his son: ‘the storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth!’ (). This image may actually have been prompted by the sight of oaks at Beaconsfield uprooted by the great storm early on November .⁶¹ The concluding triplet serves to discipline the emotive appeal. A more elaborate structure organizes the image of Windsor Castle towering over the aptly named ‘Bedford level’ (an area of the fens drained by one of the duke’s ancestors): But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion—as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of it’s kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land—so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. ()
In this passage, metaphor and simile are not merely decorative. They give memorable form to an idea that Burke elsewhere expresses discursively: that the British constitution is a complex and venerable whole, the elements of which (monarchy, Church, law, and aristocracy) are interdependent. The preservation of Windsor Castle is the best means of preserving ‘the Bedford level’. Two of Burke’s images (the oak and the leviathan) were pictorialized in Isaac Cruikshank’s caricature The Modern Leviathan!! ( Mar. : BMC ). Sitting on the uprooted oak near the grave of his son, Burke regards more in sorrow than in anger the bloated Bedford, seemingly untouched by the spouts of ‘Envy’ and ‘Cromwellism’ (Plate ). Rarely did a caricaturist treat Burke with such sympathy, approaching the sentimental. A final sample will illustrate Burke’s characteristic method of using rhetoric at once to cover and to emphasize direct emotion. Exceptionally, Burke drops the conventional pose of modest deference to superior abilities, and openly complains about the opposition that had dogged him throughout his career: I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a Legislator; ‘Nitor in adversum’ is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and ⁶¹ ‘The memory of man does not recollect so violent a hurricane’ (Oracle and Public Advertiser, Nov. ). Many ancient trees were reported to have been uprooted.
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protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings, of the people. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step I was traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to shew my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my Country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with it’s laws, and the whole system of it’s interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise no rank, no toleration even, for me. I had no arts, but manly arts. (WS ix. )
This is a skilful example of self-praise disguised as a bill of complaint. The passage recalls, and may have been intended to recall, Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot ().⁶² Burke’s ‘manly’ qualities are represented only negatively, through the ‘unmanly’ arts that he did not possess, or through litotes (‘not wholly unacquainted’). Nevertheless, no reader could miss the still seething resentment of a man conscious of exceptional talents, denied the opportunity to serve his country by a succession of small-minded turnpike keepers. For once, if only briefly, Burke drops his affectation of modesty. Published on February , the Letter to a Noble Lord was an immediate success. Within a fortnight of publication, William Elliot reported that the Letter was ‘more universally admired than I recollect any of his compositions to have been’.⁶³ Within a few weeks, fourteen authorized ‘editions’ (probably of about a thousand copies each) were printed, besides piracies.⁶⁴ This triumph is easy to understand. The Letter to a Noble Lord has a concentrated force and a satiric bite unmatched in Burke’s œuvre. Even today, it remains among the most readable and enjoyable of his writings. That the Letter provoked some fifteen pamphlet replies, and much hostile comment in the press, may appear inconsistent with Elliot’s claim.⁶⁵ Even these pamphleteers, however, while seeking to refute and counter Burke’s arguments, were lavish in their praise of his eloquence. Admittedly, the sincerity of these encomiums is open to question. Praise of an opponent is a familiar rhetorical strategy. But the adoption of such a strategy implies that the qualities praised were too widely acknowledged to be denied. Indeed, most of the pamphleteers distinguished between the Letter as an argument and as a composition.⁶⁶ Elliot’s remark should be understood as relating to the latter. ⁶² De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke, –. ⁶³ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Mar. (NLS, MS , fo. ). ⁶⁴ Todd, . The actual print runs are not recorded. A thousand copies was a usual size for an ‘edition’ (strictly, an impression, since the type was kept standing). ⁶⁵ Four defences of E.B. were also published: James Beckett, Remarks on Conversations Occasioned by Mr Burke’s Letter (London, ); A General Reply to the Several Answerers, &c. of a Letter Written to a Noble Lord (London, ); ‘Sarpedon’, A Letter to Mr Miles: Occasioned by his Late Scurrilous Attack on Mr Burke (London, ); and Thomas Townshend, A Summary Defence of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, ). ⁶⁶ ‘The wizard has such potent charms about him, that I could almost wish to remain for ever spellbound by him. The vigour and eloquence of his periods enchant me—I admire, though I cannot approve, the energy of his invective’ (Thomas George Street, A Reply to a Letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke
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The charges and criticisms advanced in the pamphlets and in the press can be subsumed under three principal heads. Burke is a venal apostate who does not deserve a public pension; his attack on Bedford is both unfair and irrelevant; and in attacking Bedford, Burke is unwittingly undermining the principles he purports to uphold. The capital charge, as usual in attacks on Burke after , is his supposed inconsistency. The amount and type of ad hominem material varies from pamphlet to pamphlet. Some collect as much scurrilous abuse as they can, others adopt a loftier tone.⁶⁷ In their defence of Bedford, the pamphleteers were on new and firmer ground. They questioned the truth of some of Burke’s claims, especially his charge that the first earl was implicated in the judicial murder of the Duke of Buckingham (WS ix. ); they denied that Bedford could reasonably be held responsible for the misdeeds of his ancestors, whatever they were; and they observed that the Russells were by no means the only great family to have been enriched by the pillage of the Church or the lavish grants of the Crown.⁶⁸ The most damaging criticism of Burke’s pamphlet, however, was that by rendering Bedford’s title to his property morally dubious, he was undermining all prescriptive property rights. Some writers even linked Burke and Paine in an improbable, unconscious alliance.⁶⁹ None of Burke’s opponents attempted to deny the power of his eloquence, or the variety, exuberance, and richness of his metaphors and images. Instead, they conceded his mastery of style but sought in some way to convert it into a defect.⁷⁰ Several even sought to fight Burke with his own weapon. Edward Gibbon, who took a condescending interest in the pamphlet attacks on his History, ‘smiled’ when he read in a letter from one of his opponents to a collaborator that ‘the part where we encounter Gibbon must to a Noble Lord (rd edn. London, ), ). E.B., while ‘unquestionably a fine writer’, is motivated by ‘a very depraved or a very infatuated heart’ (Strictures on Mr Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord, on the Attacks Made upon him and his Pension (London, ), ). ⁶⁷ William Miles, A Letter to Henry Duncombe, Esq. (London, ) is the most abusive reply; Gilbert Wakefield, A Reply to the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq. to a Noble Lord (London, ), the most temperate and respectful. ⁶⁸ Street’s Reply to a Letter gives the most space to this topic. The most elaborate defence of the Russell family, Anecdotes of the House of Bedford, from the Norman Conquest to the Present Period (London, []), mentions E.B. (pp. vii, –) but hardly qualifies as a reply to the Letter to a Noble Lord. The recklessness of E.B’s charge of murder against the first earl recalls his accusation that Hastings ‘murdered’ Nandakumar ( Apr. : Bond, ii. ), which led to his censure by the Commons. ⁶⁹ The author of Three Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the State of Public Affairs (London, ) ‘always suspected, that Thomas Paine (with whom I understand you were once intimate) and you have more opinions in common than you have avowed’ (–). The same writer calls the Letter to a Noble Lord ‘your Confessions’, and likens E.B. to Rousseau (–). In the same vein, reviewing the Letter in the Watchman, Coleridge identified ‘propositions, from which his adversaries are entitled to draw strange corollaries. The egg is his: Paine and Barlow hatch it’ (The Watchman, , Mar. ; ed. Lewis Patton, in Collected Works, ii (London, ), ). ⁷⁰ Thus ‘Bolingbroke’, conceding that the Letter exhibits ‘the style and colouring of a great master’, charges that ‘tho’ dazzled with its brilliancy, we are perplexed with its variety, and the superabundance of loose and heavy ornaments with which he has thought proper to load it’ (A Letter Addressed to a Noble Lord, by Way of Reply to that of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Dublin, ), ).
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be brilliant and striking’.⁷¹ There is no evidence that Burke read the pamphlets written against him. Had he perused them, however, he might likewise have relished their frequent attempts at Burkean purple passages. Some of the pamphleteers developed elaborate Burkean metaphors, often in the course of decrying the excess or other defect of Burke’s own writing. A typical example occurs in the pamphlet published under the pseudonym ‘Bolingbroke’, whose author declares himself not ‘intimidated by that impetuous and overbearing eloquence, which has resounded throughout all Europe’. This consciously echoes the Preface to the second edition of Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society, Burke’s parody of the real Bolingbroke (WS i. ). Pseudo-Bolingbroke characterizes the Letter to a Noble Lord as ‘a tissue of contradictions, a tessellated ground-work, inlaid with mosaic, and exhibiting the most varied and repugnant assemblage of figures and colours’. The source of this image is the celebrated description of the Chatham ministry in the Speech on American Taxation (ii. ). Admitting that the Letter ‘still bears about it the style and colouring of a great master’, ‘Bolingbroke’ decries Burke’s ‘mob of metaphors’, and likens Burke in old age to one of those volcanoes, whose lofty summits are covered with the frosts of age, but whose entrails are consumed by hidden conflagrations,—those impotent irruptions of the mind, which, tho’ they astonish us with their glare, and astound us with their noise, neither serve to illumine the dark mazes of ministerial management, nor to purify the foul and pestilential regions of corruptions and venality.⁷²
This is not, in fact, a good imitation of Burke. The excessive use of balance and antithesis, as well as the use of alliteration, are more characteristic of Sheridan’s highly polished style. The ‘volcano’ of Burke’s rhetoric was rougher and more spontaneous. The most striking instance of this device, part tribute, part parody, and part ostentation, comes in the most scurrilous of the pamphlets, the Letter to Henry Duncombe by William Augustus Miles (c.–). The source of its visceral hostility to Burke is readily traced. A veteran journalist and pamphleteer, Miles was employed by Pitt as an agent in Paris in the early years of the French Revolution. Warned by Pitt to be less hostile to Burke, he ignored the hint, and the attack on Burke in Miles’s Letter to the Duke of Grafton () precipitated a break between Miles and Pitt. Unreasonably, Miles blamed Burke for his loss of Pitt’s favour.⁷³ His accumulated bile was discharged in his Letter to Henry Duncombe, in which he indulges so far in gratuitous malignancy as to rejoice at the death of Burke’s son: ‘what he bewails as a calamity, we ought to hail as a ⁷¹ Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, ), . ⁷² A Letter Addressed to a Noble Lord, , , . ⁷³ Howard V. Evans, ‘William Pitt, William Miles, and the French Revolution’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, (), –.
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blessing, and feel grateful to Providence that the legitimate breed of such a man is extinct for ever!’ For callous and revolting brutality, this passage would be hard to match. A desert of nearly unrelieved, rancorous scurrility, the Letter to Duncombe is relieved by a single oasis: No man ever more passionately admired the rich eloquence of his splendid oratory than I have done; no man laments more sincerely that his talents should not have been so beneficial as they were once captivating. As a poet giving full scope to wild fancy, and roving uncontrouled in his luxuriant garden of tropes, metaphors, and fictions, he ravishes all hearts . . . had he contented himself with gathering the rich foliage from its exuberant parterres, and distributing, as he was wont to do, their variegated sweets to a fascinated world; or if in love with science, he had strayed among the academic Groves of Greece, studying the wild lessons of philosophy, and by practising what he studied, have taught us virtue by example, the name of Burke would have descended to the latest posterity, with those of Shakespeare and of Aristotle, the idol of this country, and the proud boast of his own!⁷⁴
In this bravura passage, which has many analogues in the other pamphlets, a petty scribbler attempts to wield the bow of Ulysses. Despite its manifest insincerity, it pays an unconscious tribute. Miles cannot deny Burke’s gifts, only deplore their application. A compliment that, from a friend or admirer, would be discounted as ‘the mere twaddle of graciousness’, commands attention from an enemy. How many political writers have been compared, not by a friend but in the invective of an abusive opponent, to Shakespeare and Aristotle? Some of Burke’s opponents were content to parody his rhetoric rather attempting to imitate it. The most amusing examples are the scientific similes scattered through the anonymous Paraphrase in Rhyme of the Letter to a Noble Lord, each footnoted with a source reference: Could a blushing old Whig royal influence bear? The rose becomes pale, by the breath of fix’d air*. * ‘A red rose became perfectly white, by being held over the fermenting liquor, fixed air.’ Priestley’s Experiments on Air, vol. i. p. .⁷⁵
In the same vein, if less playfully, the reviewer in the Critical Review noted that Burke was ‘particularly fond of chemistry, and attended, probably, very lately Mr. Walker’s lectures’. Exceptionally, this reviewer was unremittingly disparaging to Burke’s style, and especially to his metaphorical language. In particular, he objects to what he takes to be an indecorous mixture of images drawn from incongruous sources: he ransacks the shambles,—the kitchens,—the laboratory,—the smitheries,— the menageries,—the tombs,—the day-schools,—the roads,—the stalls,—the ⁷⁴ Letter to Henry Duncombe, , –. ⁷⁵ A Paraphrase in Rhyme, (alluding to the ‘Fixed air’ image in R []).
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weigh-houses,—every thing, in short, above ground and under ground, dances before him in all the mazes of metaphorical confusion.⁷⁶
This passage captures the range of Burke’s imagery. Modern readers, unschooled in neoclassical notions of decorum, are unlikely to regard it negatively. Indeed, even in Burke’s day, this was a minority response. Most of Burke’s opponents were less captious than the Critical reviewer, conceding the brilliance of his style, if only by way of contrast to the weakness of his argument. Thus Gilbert Wakefield (–), acknowledging that ‘the entire composition rolls forward in a flood of fire, deep, flaming, and impetuous; involving every object within the vast embrace of it’s expansion in one general conflagration’, cautions that ‘eloquence is no convertible term for either truth or candour’. At the same time, Wakefield seasons his praise of ‘a sublimity, in my estimation, without a parallel in the repositories of mortal eloquence’ with complaints of ‘many unchastised improprieties of grammar and construction’ and ‘much slovenliness and frequent ambiguity; the result, perhaps, of haste and negligence’.⁷⁷This is perceptive. Burke was never a ‘correct’ writer in the manner of the ‘Letters of Junius’, whose probable author, Philip Francis, was so dismayed by the undress style of the Reflections that he exclaimed ‘I wish you would let me teach you to write English’ ( Nov. : C vi. ). What neither Francis nor Wakefield appreciated was that this lack of polish is not a defect, but the necessary condition of Burke’s kind of eloquence. In the Letter to a Noble Lord, more than in any other of Burke’s writings, the reader feels the force of a powerful and passionate intellect forging images and sentences in the red-hot smithy of a rhetoric instinctive because habitual. This quality derives from Burke’s practice in parliamentary speaking. Minute revision to achieve ‘correctness’ would impair, if not destroy, its force. Not that Burke spoke without preparation, or without notes, and even some passages elaborated in detail; but most of his actual words were extemporized. His auditors often observed that the metaphorical richness of his speeches sounded spontaneous, the overflowing of a well-stocked imagination, in contrast to those of his arch-rival Sheridan, whose images seemed more contrived and premeditated.⁷⁸ Tellingly, a few days after Burke’s death, Thomas Green (–), in a retrospective estimate of Burke’s eloquence, compared this ‘matchless diatribe’ not to any oration of Cicero, but to On the Crown (the ⁷⁶ Critical Review, (Mar. ), –. Adam Walker (c.–) offered a course of lectures in ‘Natural and Experimental Philosophy’, including chemistry. ⁷⁷ A Reply to the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq. to a Noble Lord, –. ⁷⁸ E.B’s imagery often inspired imitation. Thus James Boswell likened E.B. to ‘a man in an orchard where boughs loaded with fruit hung around him, and he pulled apples [figures of speech] as fast as he pleased and pelted the Ministry’ ( Journal, Apr. , in Boswell for the Defence, –, ed. William K. Wimsatt and Frederick A. Pottle (London, ), ). Sir Gilbert Elliot contrasted E.B.’s ‘wild and natural nosegays’ to Sheridan’s ‘regular though beautiful bouquets’ (to Lady Elliot, June , in Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, ed. Lady Minto (London, ), i. –).
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acknowledged masterpiece of Demosthenes, the classical exemplar of passionate eloquence), and judged it superior ‘in genius, erudition, taste, and pathos’.⁷⁹ The inclusion of ‘taste’ in this list of qualities is indicative. Green could appreciate that the seeming indecorums of the Letter (of which the reviewer in the Critical complained) are actually one of its greatest strengths. The Letter to a Noble Lord exhibits Burke at his most devastating. His touch was not always so sure. A few weeks before the Letter was published, he wrote a heavy-handed parody that provides posthumous justification for Dr Johnson’s denigration of his wit. In , John Reeves (–) had founded a loyalist Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (commonly known as the Crown and Anchor Association, after its meeting place). This naturally made him obnoxious to reformers. In , he published Thoughts on the English Government, which offers an ultra-monarchical (or ‘Tory’) interpretation of the constitution. Some incautiously worded passages, denigrating the status of Parliament, provided a handle for his enemies to attack it, and on November it was denounced in the Commons. For opportunistic reasons, Pitt chose not to defend Reeves, who was prosecuted for libel.⁸⁰ Outraged at the ministry’s failure to support Reeves, whose doctrines (with some reservations) he endorsed (to Windham, Nov. : C viii. –), Burke took an eager interest in the case. First, he suggested that Reeves should petition the Commons to be heard, and even drafted the opening of an address (–). Then, when the Commons ordered the prosecution of the pamphlet by the Attorney-General (Sir John Scott), Burke wrote a squib in the form of a brief letter to Scott, full of metaphors (including his own ‘swinish Multitude’), followed by a satirical ‘Information’ (a formal legal charge), written in a parody of legalese and showing how the most innocent expressions (including the ‘Dear’ of ‘Dear Sir’) could be twisted into seditious innuendoes ( Jan. : –). The care that Burke devoted to this feeble joke is attested by the much-corrected draft that survives.⁸¹ Such a trifle serves to illustrate the inequalities of Burke’s mind and art, now sublimely soaring, occasionally (in Johnson’s phrase) ‘in the kennel’.⁸² The Letter to a Noble Lord was a resounding victory. Widely read and admired, and relished for its satire even by those who disagreed with its politics, it converted the Duke of Bedford into an object of ridicule. It also ⁷⁹ Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature (Ipswich, ), ( July ). ⁸⁰ A.V. Beedell, ‘John Reeves’s Prosecution for Seditious Libel, –: A Study in Political Cynicism’, Historical Journal, (), –. Reeves was acquitted. ⁸¹ WWM, Bk P /. ⁸² Boswell, Life of Johnson, iv. ( May ).
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defused the intended attack on Burke’s pension. On March, when Lauderdale moved to appropriate the Barbados and Leeward Islands . per cent duties (on which two of Burke’s pensions were charged) to local purposes, he felt obliged to disclaim any personal rancour, and even affected ‘to look back with regret upon genius, talents, fancy, and all the decorations of a cultivated mind’, and to ‘drop a tear upon their degradation’. His motion was easily defeated.⁸³ On the subject of provisions and wage regulation, too, Burke enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing his ideas prevail.⁸⁴ There remained Burke’s third, most pressing, and by far the most difficult task, the prevention of an ignominious peace. On this question, he had few allies. The Foxites had opposed the war from the outset. Pitt’s initial enthusiasm for the war had cooled, as had that of most of his colleagues and supporters. Popular opinion was eager for peace.⁸⁵ Burke, however, had never been daunted by apparently insuperable obstacles. The clamour for peace might yet be stilled, if the real importance of the war could be demonstrated. Burke’s ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’ was nearly finished. As late as the end of February, he still planned to publish it.⁸⁶ Early in January, however, he had embarked on another pamphlet treating the same theme from a different point of view.⁸⁷ Soon it too was sufficiently advanced to be advertised, and even printed.⁸⁸ Then, in a momentary fit of ‘indignation’, he was sorely tempted to suppress what he had written ( Mar. : C viii. ). The reason had nothing to do with France or the prospective peace. Early in March, Burke was devastated and chagrined by news that ministerial approval had been given for the East India Company to award Hastings a substantial pension.⁸⁹ In this mood, Burke received copies of several anti-peace pamphlets ⁸³ The Times, Mar. ; PH xxxii. –. ⁸⁴ Whitbread’s bill to regulate wages was defeated without a division on Feb. (PH xxxii. –). Pitt spoke against it. ⁸⁵ Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, ii. –. The success of Auckland’s Some Remarks suggests that he accurately gauged the general weariness with the war. E.B. knew that his was a minority opinion. ⁸⁶ William Elliot to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Feb. (NLS MS , fo. ). The reference to Auckland’s pamphlet confirms that Elliot meant the ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’. ⁸⁷ On Jan. , E.B. told Fitzwilliam that he had ‘a thing on the Stocks relative to the general principles of your Speech about the Regicide peace’ (C viii. –), probably the ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’. By Jan., a ‘great deal’ (presumably of this pamphlet) was ‘actually printed’, but E.B. found that ‘I cannot dispatch it in one Pamphlet’ (–). This probably marks the inception of what would become Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace. ⁸⁸ The Times, , Feb. . On Feb., E.B. asked Walker King to make a correction in ‘the second part of the second Pamphlet’ (Letter II of the Thoughts on a Regicide Peace), even at the cost of cancelling a leaf (C viii. –). Since Letter II is much shorter than Letter I, this implies that most of the pamphlet had been printed. By Mar. the Thoughts had been printed (E.B. to French Laurence: ). About the same time, however, E.B. told John Bowles that ‘a considerable part of a series of Letters’ had been printed (c. Mar.: ). Some of E.B.’s references are ambiguous, and may refer either to the ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’, to the Thoughts, or even to both. ⁸⁹ The Board of Control approved the annuity (£, a year, backdated to ) on Mar., and it was announced at a General Court on the nd. The news may have taken two or three days to reach E.B., who reacted in a flurry of letters on the th (C viii. –).
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by John Bowles (–).⁹⁰ Casting about for a more rational excuse to withhold his own pamphlets than his pique at the Hastings pension, he persuaded himself that Bowles had ‘preoccupied me in the most material points’. His own work would do no more than ‘follow in your Track’. Most absurdly, Burke averred that ‘if what you have written will not prevent this Nation from bringing on itself the sure punishment of its faults’, nothing of his ‘will be of the least use’ (c. Mar.: –). Liable as he was to such sallies of passion, Burke rarely allowed them to interrupt his settled purposes. On this occasion, however, he was for a while so outraged at the pension awarded to Hastings and at what he considered his betrayal by the ministers, that in disgust he suspended publication of his pamphlet against the peace.⁹¹ His doing so is a remarkable tribute to the depth and durability of his feelings about Hastings, which a year had not cooled. Not until October would the pamphlet appear, further revised, as Two Letters on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace. Thanks to an imbroglio between Burke and his intended publisher, however, an early version (probably dating from March) is preserved in a piratical text. John Owen had published the Letter to a Noble Lord, jointly with Francis (–) and Charles (–) Rivington. Burke at first entrusted Owen with his Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace. Burke was a difficult and demanding author. His habit was to have his ‘rough Copy’ set in type, ‘to save transcribing’. The printed proofs he would then revise ‘according to my pleasure’ (C viii. –). Owen patiently ‘took upon me the trouble of dancing backwards and forwards alternately between Author and Printer, three or four times a day for almost three months, to attend to such a variety of alterations as can be conceived only by those who are acquainted with the whims, the caprice and the eternal versatility of genius’. Owen did this ‘chearfully’, partly because he shared Burke’s political views, and partly because (so he claimed) Burke had given him A Letter to Noble Lord and Thoughts on a Regicide Peace to publish for his own benefit. He was accordingly annoyed when, with the Thoughts still unpublished, he was asked to account for the profits of the Letter. When in October he saw the Thoughts advertised by the Rivingtons (under a new title), he therefore determined to recover what he could of his investment by publishing his own edition.⁹²This was on sale on October, one day ahead of the authorized version.⁹³ Owen’s piracy preserves an Urtext of the Letters on a Regicide Peace, approximately the form in which the pamphlet would have ⁹⁰ Bowles to E.B., Mar. (WWM BkP /). ⁹¹ Two letters that E.B. wrote on Mar. reveal his indecision about whether to publish. On Feb. , John Gifford sent E.B. a copy of his Letter to the Earl of Lauderdale (London, ), an anti-peace pamphlet (C viii. ). In reply, E.B. anticipated ‘altering some passages and omitting others’ in the light of what Gifford had written ( Mar.: –). On the same day, he told the abbé de La Bintinaye that he was ‘far from resolved, whether I shall publish it at all’ (). ⁹² Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace (London, ), preface, p. ii. ⁹³ Todd, a. There was nothing clandestine about Owen’s piracy: he advertised it in the newspapers.
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been published in March, before Burke suspended publication. The authorized text is longer (about , words, against Owen’s ,), with most of the new material added to the first letter. While they do not alter the essentials of the argument, the changes provide interesting glimpses of Burke at work, and of what Owen called ‘the caprice and the eternal versatility of genius’. Though it has been generally ignored or contemned as a mere piracy, Owen’s text deserves careful attention as a record of Burke’s views about March . The basic message of Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace is simple. Burke calls for ‘a long war’, to be prosecuted until the destruction of the Jacobin republic. There can and must be no compromise. Burke here assumes the mantle of the elder Cato, insisting that ‘delenda est Carthago’. In the first letter, Burke argues that such a war is necessary for the survival not only of Britain but of European civilization. Peace with France would inevitably lead to submission to its revolutionary values, which are antithetical to the entire European heritage. For the French Revolution represents ‘a revolution not in human affairs, but in man himself ’. The new French government, the Directory, is no improvement on its immediate predecessors. Abjuring law, religion, and morality, its principles are Regicide, Jacobinism, and Atheism. It encourages a ‘correspondent system of manners’ that vitiates human relations. Burke instances the prevalence of divorce as the most glaring example.⁹⁴ Such an inverted moral order cannot exist in the middle of Europe without contaminating the whole. Aware that his views were not widely shared, Burke developed three subsidiary lines of argument. The first contests the principle of international law that denies one country the right to interfere in the internal affairs of another sovereign state.⁹⁵ In rejecting its application to the present case, Burke vehemently denies that men have any right ‘to act any where according to their pleasure, without any moral tie . . . Men are never in a state of total independence of each other’. In support of this assertion, he applies to international law the civil law of vicinage or neighbourhood, which permits neighbours to act even before an offence or nuisance has been committed. Further, repeating an idea that he had advanced in the ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’, Burke denies that the present government is the legitimate representative of ‘France’. Mere locality does not constitute a body politic: ‘Nation is a moral essence, not a geographical arrangement.’ The monarchy, the nobility, the gentry, the clergy, the magistracy, its landed and moveable property: these constitute the true body politic of France. They still exist, though in exile; and theirs remains the rightful title to ‘France’.⁹⁶ ⁹⁴ Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, , , –, –. E.B. cites divorce statistics as a means of quantifying ‘the havock that has been made through all the relations of life’ (–). His hostility to divorce was long-standing (supra, i. –). ⁹⁵ As Iain Hampsher-Monk notes, E.B. thus shifted his ground from his previous reliance on Vattel (‘Edmund Burke’s Changing Justification for Intervention’, Historical Journal, (), –, esp. –). ⁹⁶ Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, –. In the ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’, E.B. protests at Auckland’s treating the ‘usurped power’, the ‘rebels against the lawful government’, as ‘France’ (WS ix. ).
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Burke’s second ancillary argument attempts to refute the suggestion that a war against ‘opinion’ is inevitably futile, because persecution only makes an opinion take deeper root. He concedes that ‘opinion is the very ground and pillar of Government, and the main spring of human action’. But this does not mean that opinion ought to control government; rather, ‘provident Government’ ought ‘to promote that which is sound; and to extirpate that which is mischievous, and which directly tends to render men bad citizens in the community, and mischievous neighbours out of it’. Thus Burke converts the objection that the war against France was ‘a war of opinion’, into a proof of its being ‘the most important of all wars’. To refute the alleged parallel between the war against France and the wars waged against the Reformation, he formulates a revealing distinction between theological and moral opinions. In a remark that helps an understanding of his own attitude to religion, he declares that ‘theological opinions as such, whether sound or erroneous, do not go directly to the well being of social, of civil, or of politick society’. Theological dogmas ‘concerning grace and justification—and the nature and essence of the sacrament and other pious opinions on the one side or on the other’ have little influence on human society. Jacobin opinions, on the other hand, such as ‘that it is a man’s duty to take from me my goods, and to kill me if I resist him . . . that he has a right, at his will, to pull down the Government by which I am protected in that life and property’, these are properly the object of ‘a war of opinions’.⁹⁷ Finally, Burke needed to combat the notion that ‘the general disposition of the people’ favoured ‘an immediate peace’, at whatever sacrifice of treaty obligations and on whatever terms. If so, he admits, ‘it is all over with us’. By not directly denying the unpopularity of the war, Burke tacitly conceded it as a fact. His strategy was to contest its significance. The war is unpopular, he argues, because its aims have never been properly explained. Instead of insisting that the safety and even existence of the British constitution depend on the destruction of Jacobin France, the ministers have treated the war as a matter of purely foreign policy, unconnected with domestic concerns.⁹⁸ Burke had never held a high opinion of the popular capacity for making independent political judgements. In his view, ‘the people’ needed to be informed, to be led, and to be inspired. But who were ‘the people’? The term was fraught with ambiguity.⁹⁹ For Burke, ‘the people’ in the political sense meant primarily men of property.
⁹⁷ Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, –. ⁹⁸ Ibid. –, –. ⁹⁹ The legacy of John Locke on this point was ambiguous. He may have meant to extend political rights to all adult males (Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Princeton, ), esp. –). Other early Whig theorists explicitly restricted such rights to freeholders. Only in the s did demands for an extended franchise enter the mainstream of debate (H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, ), esp. –). Most of those who belonged to E.B.’s ‘political nation’ probably agreed with his definition.
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Exceptionally, however, in the Thoughts on a Regicide Peace he not only defines his understanding of the term but offers a numerical estimate: It cannot be concealed. We are a divided people. But in divisions, where a part is to be taken, we are to make a muster of our strength. I have often endeavoured to class those who, in any political view, are to be called the people. Without doing something of this sort we must proceed absurdly. We should presume as absurdly, if we pretended to very great accuracy in our estimate: But I think, in the calculation I have made, the error cannot be very material. In England and Scotland, I compute that those of adult age, not declining in life, of tolerable leisure for such discussions, and of some means of information, more or less, and who are above menial dependence, (or what virtually is such) may amount to about four hundred thousand. In this number I include the women that take a concern in those transactions, who cannot exceed twenty thousand. There is such a thing as a natural representative of the people. This body is that representative; and on this body, more than on the legal constituent, the artificial representative depends. This is the British publick; and it is a publick very numerous. The rest, when feeble, are the objects of protection; when strong, the means of force. They who affect to consider that part of us in any other light, insult while they cajole us; they do not want us for counsellors in deliberation, but to list us as soldiers for battle. Of these four hundred thousand political citizens, I look upon one fifth, or about eighty thousand, to be pure Jacobins; utterly incapable of amendment; objects of eternal vigilance; and when they break out, of legal constraint.¹⁰⁰
This passage serves an obvious rhetorical purpose. Burke wants to discount anti-war sentiment among the population at large (who lacked the necessary qualifications of leisure, education, and independence), and to present the Jacobin menace as a minority, formidable and threatening indeed, but still a minority of those entitled to be regarded as ‘political citizens’. Even so, to be effective, his figures had to be credible. How did he calculate them? Burke uses numbers in different ways, with varying implied degrees of accuracy. One is the true ‘inartificial’ proof, the statistic quoted from an identifiable source, such as the statistics on divorce that Burke quotes later in the Thoughts, for which he cites his sources.¹⁰¹ At the other end of the spectrum, he uses loosely numerical rhetorical flourishes such as ‘I am convinced that the foreign speculators in France, under the old Government, were twenty to one of the same description in England.’ Here, ‘twenty to one’ means no more than ‘far more numerous’, and carries no statistical weight.¹⁰² Somewhere between the two extremes lie ambiguous figures, like the , and , in this passage, that may be taken either as estimates or guesses. ¹⁰⁰ Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, –; WS ix. –. ¹⁰¹ WS ix. . Such proofs are ‘inartificial’ (atechnos) in Aristotle’s sense, meaning not invented by the orator. ¹⁰² Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, ; WS ix. . In the same vein is this piquant example from Thoughts and Details on Scarcity: ‘Observation for the last forty years, and very particularly for the last thirty, has furnished me with ten instances of drunkenness from other causes, for one from this [excessive consumption of spirits]’ (WS ix. ).
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Burke’s wording implies a distinction between the two. He introduces the larger figure as a ‘calculation’, the result of having ‘often endeavoured to compute and class’ the population. Contemporary estimates of the population of Great Britain varied considerably. Indeed, observers were not even agreed as to whether the population was rising or falling. In this debate, Burke’s longtime antagonist Richard Price had been the most prominent proponent of the ‘decline’ thesis. Some pessimists put the figure as low as million. Since Burke took the optimistic side in this controversy, he probably accepted the figure of about million, calculated in by another optimist, George Chalmers (–).¹⁰³ Revising the Letters, Burke omitted the intriguing estimate of , women interested in politics, probably because it was hardly more than a guess, and might have damaged the credibility of the other two figures.¹⁰⁴ Knowing that Burke’s , were overwhelmingly men makes his figure easier to relate to an estimate of the total population. Drawing on the study of parish registers and other local sources, contemporary demographers generally estimated the proportion of adult males in the population at about one in four.¹⁰⁵ Using this proportion, Burke’s , would represent about a fifth of the million adult males in the total population of million. This is a minority, but a large minority, more than an élite. Burke took a keen interest in questions of social analysis. In the Reflections, he endorses Montesquieu’s observation that ‘in their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers’. These wise men were unlike the modern revolutionaries, who have ‘attempted to confound all sorts of citizens, as well as they could, into one homogeneous mass’ (R []). The most influential attempt to classify the population of Britain was Gregory King’s celebrated ‘Estimate’ of .¹⁰⁶ About , two political arithmeticians attempted to update King’s table. The earlier was compiled about by ‘a gentleman of honour in a public character abroad’.¹⁰⁷ A more comprehensive attempt to update King was ¹⁰³ D. V. Glass, Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Farnborough, ); the chief primary texts are reprinted in The Population Controversy, ed. Glass (Farnborough, ). George Chalmers, An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Britain, During the Present and Four Preceding Reigns [etc.] (London, ), . Chalmers repeated the figure in later editions of the Estimate (, ; , –). ¹⁰⁴ Nevertheless, its rarity gives it an unusual interest. I have found no other numerical estimate of the number of women who took an informed interest in politics. ¹⁰⁵ Gregory King estimated . million adult males in a population of . million. His figures, published in Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (London, ), were often cited. ¹⁰⁶ G. S. Holmes, ‘Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, th ser., (), –. ¹⁰⁷ Published in Malachy Posthlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade (London, –), ii. – (s.v. ‘People’). The article is reprinted unchanged in later editions (, , and ). The edition is listed in the Sale Catalogue of E.B.’s library (No. ).
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published by Joseph Massie (d. ) in . This offers revised estimates of annual incomes, as well as of the numbers of families in the various income brackets.¹⁰⁸ Since Burke, too, is likely to have taken King’s ‘Estimate’ as his basis, some inferences about his computation may be drawn from these two. As both assumed a population of about million, their figures must be scaled up to correspond to Burke’s probable base of million. A further complication is that both counted households or families rather than individuals. Towards the upper end of the scale, many of these will have contained more than one of Burke’s , individuals. Nevertheless, a broad conclusion may be drawn. Massie estimated , families with average incomes of £ or more. To illustrate how far down the social scale this figure reached, it included , of an estimated , ‘Freeholders’, , of an estimated , ‘Farmers’, and , of an estimated , ‘Tradesmen’. Scaling up for a larger population takes Massie’s , to ,; allowing one-fifth of these households to contribute two individuals each brings the total nearly up to Burke’s ,. The figures of the ‘gentleman of honour’ are broadly similar. Independent confirmation that Burke’s order of magnitude was right comes from a modern historian. Defining the ‘political nation’ a little more generously than Burke, he estimates its size as ‘at least ,–,’.¹⁰⁹ Burke does not offer his second figure, the , ‘pure Jacobins’, with the same assurance, introducing it with the weaker ‘I look upon’. In the absence of his working notes, the process by which he arrived at his , cannot be reconstructed. The most likely possibility is that he began with figures for membership of the societies for reform. At an anniversary dinner on April , a total membership of , was claimed for these societies. In the edition of his Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great-Britain, Chalmers, like Burke somewhat of an alarmist, made great play with this figure.¹¹⁰ By , the unpopularity of the war would have made a larger figure credible. Supposing that some such figure was the basis of Burke’s calculation, he would have needed to adjust it in two ways: downwards, to exclude members who did not qualify for inclusion in the ,; and upwards, to include ‘Jacobins’ who were not members of any society. These two procedures would have given him ample scope to reach the figure he wanted, one large enough to be alarming yet still a minority. Whatever method he used, his figure can hardly be regarded as more than a highly impressionistic estimate, ¹⁰⁸ Massie’s table was published as a broadside: A Computation of the Money that Hath Been Exorbitantly Raised upon the People of Great Britain by the Sugar-Planters [etc.] (London, ). It is reprinted and analysed in Peter Mathias, ‘The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, NS (), –. ¹⁰⁹ John A. Phillips, ‘Popular Politics in Unreformed England’, Journal of Modern History, (), – (quotation from ). ¹¹⁰ Morning Chronicle, Apr. . Chalmers, Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great-Britain, pp. xci–ci.
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if only because his idea of a ‘Jacobin’ was itself subjective. His introductory phrase ‘I look upon’ therefore means what it says. Even so, in the context of Burke’s interest in information gathering, the figure should be regarded as an estimate rather than a guess.¹¹¹ Burke always denied that participation in the political process was a human ‘right’. Instead, he regarded it as something to be settled within each society. But his idea of the ‘political nation’ was by no means narrow. Many farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, with incomes of about £ a year, would have been included within his ,. This is neither an oligarchy nor an aristocracy. Burke wanted to restrict participation to those who were at least minimally informed: to those of ‘tolerable leisure for such discussions, and of some means of information, more or less, and who are above menial dependence’. Among those outside this description, there could be no genuine independence of opinion. Between October and March , Burke had written four pamphlets, amounting to about , words. One of them, A Letter to a Noble Lord, is among the finest and most powerful of his writings. The others, if they lack the sustained brilliance of the Letter, all contain passages that show Burke’s characteristic combination of force of argument with eloquence of expression. These months of intense creativity were also a period of domestic distress. Indeed, Burke’s productivity may have been fuelled in part by a need to find distraction from the worries of the home to which, since his retirement from Parliament, he was increasingly confined. As repeated references in his letters testify, Burke had not recovered from the deaths in of his brother and, especially, his son.¹¹² Now, the remaining two members of his inmost circle were also suffering from ill health. Will Burke was the worse case. Since his return from India in , he had been living at Beaconsfield, broken in health and burdened by debt.¹¹³ In ¹¹¹ Confirmation of the accuracy of E.B.’s general perception comes from James Wodrow, a moderate sympathizer with the Revolution. Writing to his friend Samuel Kenrick, he estimated the ‘few enthusiasts’ willing to contemplate remodelling the constitution ‘on the French plan’ at ‘not a fifth perhaps not a tenth part of the nation’ ( or July ; London, Dr Williams’s Library, MS ./). ¹¹² E.B. to Fitzwilliam, Aug. ; to Mary Haviland, Sept.; to William Smith, Sept.; to Windham, Oct. (C viii. , , –, ). ¹¹³ E.B. made a valiant effort to make W.B. feel useful, by setting him to translate Brissot’s A ses commettans sur la situation de la Convention nationale (). Though requiring ‘considerable corrections’, W.B.’s translation was published, with a preface by E.B., in Jan. (C vii. –; WS viii. –). E.B. was keen to disseminate Brissot’s pamphlet, because it was an exposure of the Revolution by a revolutionary, and confirmed some of his favourite ideas: the Jacobin Club as the effective legislature, wielding ‘the absolute power of France’; the Jacobins as anarchists who have fomented a war between ‘those who have something, and those who have nothing’ (To his Constituents, on the Situation of the National Convention (London, ), , ).
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December , after being incapacitated by a series of strokes, he was arrested at Lady Fermanagh’s instance, apparently because she disbelieved his claim that he was penniless. Burke had to take charge of extricating him from this embarrassment. Will and he had been intimate since the s. For many years, Will had been a burden, but Burke’s commitment to him never wavered. As usual, he firmly believed that Will was an innocent and virtuous victim, cruelly persecuted (C viii. ). Lady Fermanagh eventually relented, but Will had other creditors. Burke had to arrange for ‘what remains of poor William’ to be transported to the Isle of Man, where he could not be arrested for debts contracted elsewhere (ix. , –). William was now physically helpless and unable to manage his own affairs. Burke assumed responsibility, even to providing Will with such extras as pocket money, wine, and tea (). The episode testifies to the enduring nature of his deepest emotional ties. A second source of domestic worry was Jane, who in February suffered ‘a very alarming illness . . . a sort of very irregular Rheumatism’ (viii. ). After an initial recovery, she relapsed, and for serveral days was ‘so terribly ill’ that Burke could not leave her (). A week later she remained ‘inconceivably weak’ (). In these circumstances, writing provided Burke with a necessary anodyne. Domestic distress Burke could overcome, perhaps because he could interpret it as in some mysterious way providential. What brought his polemical outpourings to a halt was not private unhappiness but a new source of vexation from the public world. Nothing more plainly attests to the hollowness of his protestations of disengagement from that world. A year had not diminished the passion and the prejudice which the spectre of Warren Hastings could provoke. Burke’s reaction to the acquittal of Hastings on April was more muted than might have been expected. He could console himself with the thought that the trial had been before a ‘bribed’ tribunal, and that before the public and posterity Hastings had in fact been convicted. When Pitt refused to reimburse Hastings for his legal costs, and Dundas blocked the award of a pension from the company, Burke could still take comfort in the thought that Hastings, though formally acquitted, had at least not been rewarded.¹¹⁴ Hastings, however, financially as imprudent and improvident as Burke, faced a mounting burden of debt, and was in desperate need of financial assistance. Burke’s belief that the case against Hastings had been amply proved, in substance if not in legal form, was not widely shared. Instead, Hastings was increasingly perceived as the victim of an unjust, if not malicious, persecution. In October , a group of his friends among the company’s proprietors secured a vote asking the directors to reopen the question of a pension with the ¹¹⁴ E.B. to Dundas, May ; Dundas to E.B., May (C viii. –).
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Board of Control. After some months of negotiation, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Dundas agreed to a settlement.¹¹⁵ When Burke first heard about this (in February ), he sought to persuade Dundas to reverse the decision, and asked for an interview with him and Pitt (C viii. –). Their response to this request is unknown. In any case, Burke failed to stop the pension, details of which were announced at the company’s General Court on March.¹¹⁶ Outraged, he immediately fired a volley of letters of protest: to such members of the government as he thought proper (Dundas, Windham, Portland, and Loughborough), and to the Speaker (Henry Addington). Determined that posterity should not think that his crusade to save ‘the blood of India’ had been ‘compromised by a Pension to the accuser and another to the party accused’, he threatened to petition the Commons, on the ground that the pension was in effect a libel on the prosecution (). Even his friends recognized that he was overreacting. Fitzwilliam and Laurence, while sympathetic, dissuaded him from petitioning the Commons. The pension was disgraceful, they agreed, but redress was impossible in a House of Commons controlled by Pitt. Sensing that Burke needed occupation, Laurence sought to rekindle his interest in writing a history of the impeachment for the instruction of posterity.¹¹⁷ Fitzwilliam was still living in the world of ‘secret influence’. He even suggested that Benfield might be behind Pitt’s volte-face on the subject. Plainly, his continuing hatred of Pitt disposed him to believe anything discreditable to the minister he detested ( Mar. : C viii. –). Loughborough had voted Hastings ‘guilty’ on thirteen of the sixteen propositions, only one fewer than Fitzwilliam.¹¹⁸ Yet he now showed himself both more charitable and less a prisoner of the past. Even if Hastings had been found guilty, he argued, he would not have condemned the company for awarding him a pension. His acquittal made a pension even more justifiable. Many people believed that, at the least, ‘His Services outweigh any demerits’. To oppose the company’s ‘Compassion to relieve from Indigence a very old Servant in very high Station’ would appear too like ‘personal Animosity’. Hastings was now ancient history, and Burke should direct his energies to the immediate crisis. ‘Who can think of Revolutions in Bengal Years ago, or be drawn from the awfull Contemplation of the Scene at present exhibited under our own ¹¹⁵ History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), pt. , –; Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings (London, ), –; Hastings’s Diary (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹¹⁶ St James’s Chronicle, – Mar. . ¹¹⁷ E.B. to Dundas, Fitzwilliam, and Windham, Mar. ; to Portland, c. Mar.; to Addington and Loughborough, Mar. (C viii. –). Fitzwilliam to E.B., Mar.; Laurence to E.B. Mar. (–, –) ¹¹⁸ To put these figures in perspective, of the lords who voted on Apr. , only recorded a guilty verdict on any of the propositions. Fitzwilliam and Carnarvon (formerly Porchester) each delivered , Loughborough, , and Radnor . Four other Lords voted Hastings guilty on counts or fewer (History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, pt. , ).
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Eyes’?¹¹⁹ This letter, moderate and statesmanlike, and appealing directly to Burke’s fear of Jacobinism, might have been expected to appease his anger. On the contrary, Burke found it ‘monstrous and provoking’ (), and began a lengthy riposte. Three drafts that survive among his own papers testify to the care he expended on this letter.¹²⁰ Burke claimed to have waited until ‘my indignation is a little evaporated’ before writing the letter. Only a little, however, for the opening paragraphs of the successive drafts chart the gradual cooling of Burke’s anger and the subsidence of his sarcasm. For once, Burke is caught in the act of donning his mask of deference. The first draft is brutal: I am infinitely Obliged to your Lordship for your goodness in throwing away any of your valuable time on a person of whom your Letter very fully discovers your Opinion. I assure you I shall not be in Haste to put your Patience and forbearance to the same Test in future. (C viii. )
Revision makes this a little less sarcastic: I have many obligations to your Lordship for your goodness and condescension in bestowing any part of your valuable time to convince me of my Errours. In return I shall take care how I put your Patience and forbearance to the same Tests in future. ()
Finally, Burke manages to sound sorry rather than angry: My poor wifes illness allows me so short an absence at a time from her Chamber, that I hope it will be an excuse for my not having made an instant acknowledgement of the obligations I owe your Lordship for your goodness and condescension in bestowing so much of your valuable time in an endeavour to convince an old friend of his old Errours. ()
These drafts provide an unusual insight into how Burke sublimated raw feelings into a rhetorical smokescreen. The activity of writing and rewriting not only provided occupation and distraction, but served to vent his frustration and allow his indignation to evaporate. Loughborough was not the only object of Burke’s resentment. About the same time, he began a similar letter to Henry Dundas. This too survives in multiple incomplete drafts, two short and one longer. Burke found these letters unusually difficult to write. Neither was ever finished.¹²¹ The two letters cover some of the same ground, but with revealing differences of emphasis. To Loughborough, Burke dilated on the legal issues; to Dundas, he focused on Hastings’s alleged poverty. Too much should not be made of unfinished ¹¹⁹ Loughborough to E.B., Mar. (YB OF ). This letter confirms the impression that Loughborough had never cared deeply about Hastings, but joined the cause for extraneous reasons, such as his rivalry with Thurlow. ¹²⁰ C viii. –, –, –. ¹²¹ So E.B. told French Laurence on Feb. (C ix. ). Since the abandonment of the letters was then a recent decision, E.B. had for several months intended to complete them.
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letters. Yet considerable intellectual and emotional effort went into these drafts (the longest extends to about , words, with no sign of reaching closure), and Burke preserved them. Determined to justify himself to posterity, if not to the nominal addressees of the letters, Burke intended them as historical records. Trenchant if partial statements of his case as they are, they are far more interesting as psychological documents. These letters display Burke at his least endearing: self-righteous, inflexible, and obsessive. Above all, they amply illustrate one of the most prominent and unvarying of his psychological traits, his need to prove himself ‘perfectly in the right’ (C i. ). Rejecting Loughborough’s friendly hint that opposition to the pension might be construed as personal malice, Burke undertook a lengthy historical review of his involvement with India. What is strange about this account is that it largely misses the point. Loughborough had not accused him of being partial. Rather, he had warned Burke how his conduct would be perceived. As usual, Burke paid no regard to this consideration. Confident that he was right, he offered no concession to what other people might be presumed to think or feel. An egotistical carapace prevented him from understanding or appreciating another’s point of view. This emerges most clearly in his refusal to accept the validity of Hastings’s ‘acquittal’. Convinced that he has ‘convicted’ Hastings in any impartial mind, he treats the ‘acquittal’ as one of those ‘judgments iniquitously legal’ of which he complains in the Letter to a Noble Lord (WS ix. ). Writing to Loughborough, he even drew a parallel between the ‘acquittal’ of Hastings and that of the accused in the Treason Trials. In each case, he argued, allowing notorious criminals to escape justice brings the courts and the law into disrepute. The constitution, in Burke’s imagination, was ‘beset by two different enemies’: ‘Indianism’, represented by Hastings; and ‘Jacobinism’, represented by the defendants iniquitously acquitted at the Treason Trials. Of the two, Indianism was the more dangerous as it ‘weakens discredits, and ruins’ the force with which government can fight Jacobinism (C viii. ). That Burke could so greatly overestimate the continuing relevance of the Hastings impeachment serves to explain his undiminished obsession, in the last year of his life, with transmitting his view of the case to posterity. He refused to concede that those ‘Revolutions in Bengal Years ago’ had already faded into insignificance. By coupling it with Jacobinism, he could convince himself that ‘Indianism’ remained a living threat. More disturbing than the fantasy of this alliance between Indianism and Jacobinism, the product of Burke’s penchant for conspiracy theories, is his loss of any sense of the importance of due process, or of the value of the law as an autonomous system designed to protect the innocent as well as convict the guilty. With his usual eagerness to prove himself ‘perfectly in the right’, Burke could not accept that Hastings’s career was susceptible of a more favourable interpretation. As he had asserted in his speech on the Rohilla War
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charge, ‘There was no medium, no alternative.’ Either Hastings was guilty of ‘gross, enormous, and flagitious crimes’, or Burke himself was a ‘base, calumniatory, wicked and malicious accuser’ (WS vi. ). Nor could Burke readily agree to differ. Disagreement, as usual, provoked him to a lengthier and more elaborate restatement of his case. Though he can have entertained no real hope of converting either Loughborough or Dundas, he was impelled to construct a formidable indictment, buttressed with elaborate arguments and detailed evidence. In the letter to Dundas, for example, he uses calculations of Hastings’s salary and probable expenses to disprove his risible claim of poverty (C viii. –). No wonder that even Burke’s friends and associates sometimes found him tiresome and even impossible as a colleague. Nevertheless, these letters also preserve a sense of some of Burke’s more admirable qualities: the depth and sincerity of his convictions; his public spirit that made acting on those convictions a duty; and a tenacity in pursuit of that duty that no personal inconvenience, insult, or obloquy could deter.
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King Alfred is one of the heroes of Burke’s ‘History of England’. Burke was most impressed by his extraordinary versatility: He not only excelled in the theory of the arts and sciences, but possessed a great mechanical genius for the executive part; he improved the manner of ship-building; introduced a more beautiful and commodious architecture, and even taught his countrymen the art of making bricks, most of the buildings having been of wood before his time; in a word, he comprehended in the greatness of his mind the whole of government and all its parts at once; and what is most difficult to human frailty, was at the same time sublime and minute. (WS i. )
Endowed with one the most comprehensive minds of his age, Burke himself was often complimented in terms that parallel his tribute to King Alfred.¹ Mary Shackleton, for example, visiting Beaconsfield in , was struck by the sight of ‘this famous Senator, this admired author, this inimitable man . . . mixing with his own hands pills for the sick Poor’.² In , members of the Literary Club sent a ‘round robin’ to Dr Johnson, asking him to revise his Latin epitaph for Goldsmith and to recast it in English. After a draft by Thomas Barnard (–) was rejected as too jocular, Burke drew up the text that was adopted. James Boswell, who was present, remarks this ‘hasty composition’ as ‘one of a thousand instances which evince the extraordinary promptitude of Mr Burke; who while he is equal to the greatest things, can adorn the least; can, with equal facility, embrace the vast and complicated speculations of politicks, or the ingenious topicks of literary investigation’.³
¹ The contemporaries who made these comments had not read Burke’s character of King Alfred, which was not published until . Its application to ‘the distinguishing features of his own mind’ was made by James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (nd edn. London, ), ii. –. ² Extract from a letter from Mary Shackleton of Sept. to an unnamed correspondent (YB Osborn Shelves, Ballitore Boxes). ³ Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, –), iii. – ().
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In , Edmond Malone paid a similar tribute to Burke, ‘whose mind is of such a grasp as to embrace at once the greatest and the minutest objects, and who, in the midst of his numerous and important avocations, has always found time for the calmer pursuits of philosophy and polite literature’.⁴ Dr Caleb Hillier Parry (–), who came to know Burke well while attending him at Bath in , admired his universal eloquence, ‘whether the illustrious husbandman descanted on the superior excellence of a crop of carrots, or debated in the Senate the happiness of an entire people’.⁵ Numerous examples could be cited to substantiate these panegyrics, from the range of topics on which he spoke in Parliament, from the extraordinary versatility of his style and the variety of his images and allusions, or from the fragmentary records of his conversation. Moving easily between the sublime and the minute, Burke did not always distinguish between them. He habitually treated every cause or subject as though the summa rerum depended on it. This led him, in the Commons, to debate seemingly inconsequential issues with disproportionate vehemence and asperity. Burke believed in giving his all to his every endeavour. In , he advised his son, then beginning his legal career, ‘be the matter what it will’, to ‘put your shoulders to it, and to give it the whole recollected force of all your faculties’ (C v. ). Such was his example, as well as his precept. Oscillations between the sublime and the minute are characteristic of every period of Burke’s career. At no time, however, are they more striking than during the last eighteen months of his life. Despite increasing ill health, he maintained and even intensified his paper crusade against Jacobin France, and especially against any attempt to enter into peace negotiations with the regicide republic. Simultaneously, he founded and supervised a small school for the sons of French émigrés, concerning himself, in the spirit of King Alfred, with its most minute particulars. That Burke, out of Parliament and increasingly isolated from the political world, should have sought some outlet for his still-abundant energies is unsurprising. He had always needed to be active, wanted to do good, and sought to make a difference. A career spent largely in opposition had afforded him limited opportunities for patronage or philanthropy, though he had often tried to help people in need. These efforts had, admittedly, usually brought him more vexation than satisfaction. His persistence, indeed, after repeated disappointments attests the genuineness of the impulse. Previously, Burke’s stimulus to philanthropy had been personal, a desire to help individuals. Why he should now have decided on an institution, and in particular a school, is perhaps surprising. Education had never been one of his obvious interests, if ⁴ A Letter to the Rev. Richard Farmer, D.D. (London, ), . ⁵ Biographical note by Parry, printed in Quarterly Review, (), . The manuscript quoted is now in the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.
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only because, in the eighteenth century, it rarely came before Parliament. Burke’s ideas on the subject were conventional.⁶ He was therefore shocked when the wild educational theories (as he regarded them) of Rousseau began to exert a practical influence in revolutionary France.⁷ Burke’s was to be a school for the sons of gentlemen, and would transmit aristocratic values to the next generation. If the school was in part an expression of antiRousseauism, a more practical consideration was that a suitable building was available in his neighbourhood. Burke wanted the school to be under his control. It needed, therefore, to be close. Tyler’s Green House, at Penn, about three miles north of Beaconsfield, had been the home of his friend General William Haviland (–). After Haviland’s death, the house was leased by the government for use as a barracks. It remained unoccupied, however, and in Burke successfully combated a proposal to board émigré priests there.⁸ In , the house remained vacant. Whatever the genesis of the project, by February Burke had drawn up a formal proposal and was canvassing it with influential friends. He was keen that the school should enjoy a regular government subsidy and not depend on voluntary contributions. Probably his experience with the committees for the relief of the clergy had convinced him of this. Government finance, however, meant that Pitt’s approval would be necessary. Burke could not decently approach Pitt directly.⁹ Needing a friendly intermediary, he chose the Marquis of Buckingham, whom he approached through a common friend, Frances Crewe. This indirect approach was politic, because Buckingham and Burke had been political enemies until the French Revolution brought them together. On March, Buckingham forwarded Burke’s proposal to Pitt, with his recommendation.¹⁰ Burke’s memorial focused on the plight of the children of those émigrés serving or killed in the British émigré corps: They are growing up in poverty and wretchedness; inevitably mixed with the children of the lowest of the people, in the miserable lanes and alleys of London, in ⁶ Warning Walker King that the Duke of Richmond entertained ‘singular opinions’ on the education of children, about which he ‘differs much from the sentiments and practice almost universally adopted’, E.B. tactfully observed that ‘the Chance is, that all singular opinions, in matters so obvious to popular experience, as Life and manners, should be wrong ones’ ( June : C ii. ). According to an anecdote recorded by James Prior, E.B. even approved of flogging as ‘our chief receipt in England for turning out eminent men’ (Memoir of Burke, ii. –). Prior’s anonymous source was probably James Gomme, the antiquary, who served as Treasurer of the school at Penn after E.B.’s death ( J. Gilbert Jenkins, A History of the Parish of Penn in the County of Buckingham (London, ), ). ⁷ Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (: WS ix. –). ⁸ E.B. to Portland, Sept. , to Windham, Sept., and to John King, ( Sept.; Portland to E.B., Oct., and E.B. to Portland, Oct. (C viii. –). The house was demolished c. (Victoria History of the County of Buckingham (London, –), iii. –). ⁹ Just as he was trying to secure government support for the school at Penn, E.B. was on the point of publishing his Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace. In addition, E.B. was vexed with the ministry for approving Hastings’s pension. ¹⁰ NA PRO. //, fos. –.
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which the poverty of their parents obliges them to reside. From wretchedness and bad company, the transition is easy to desperate vice and wretchedness. In this bad society they grow up without any sort of education. (C viii. )
Burke offers to board sixty of them in the house at Penn, for an initial cost of £, to furnish the house, and £ a year (plus the allowance of a guinea a month which the parents were already receiving for the boys) for running expenses (–). Burke was to be accountable to three trustees: Buckingham, the Duke of Portland, and Lord Grenville (all three of whom had estates in the neighbourhood). Pitt’s response is not recorded, but he moved with unusual speed. His approval was notified to Burke, through Buckingham, on March (). An order from the Barrack-Master General, dated March, gave Burke possession of the house at Penn.¹¹ When Burke first proposed the school, he conceived it as an autonomous French institution. The role of its English patrons would be, so he told Frances Crewe, ‘to protect it, to preserve it from wrong and fraud, and to feed it as well as we can’. Its patronage (appointing the staff and nominating the entrants, normally the prerogatives of the governing body of a charity school) and direction should be left to a committee of French émigré bishops and nobles. ‘I certainly’, he assured her, ‘shall not name a boy,—no, not one; nor attempt to direct an article of education. It shall be amongst themselves’ ( Feb. : C viii. –). Burke was deceiving himself, for he was incapable of submitting to such a self-denying ordinance. The ‘Proposal’ is silent on the subject of the curriculum, merely promising that the boys would be ‘instructed in a manner not wholly unbecoming persons intended to fill a decent situation in life’ (). Five classes of boys were eligible: four of these were for the sons of officers; the fifth was for sons of magistrates. Boys from military families would therefore predominate. Burke was consequently determined that the school would be ‘a military Academy’.¹² In particular, he wanted the boys taught elementary mathematics, and, especially, English. By , even Burke could not hope for a rapid counter-revolution. At best, the Jacobin republic would be overturned only by a ‘long war’ (WS ix. ). Burke seems therefore to have envisaged the boys who graduated from his school pursuing careers in some non-French army, most probably the British, rather as Irish Catholics had long served in the armies of the European powers. Apart from this goal, learning English would at least allow them to function in English society, instead of being confined to the miseries of a French émigré ghetto. ¹¹ Oliver De Lancey to Messrs Gomme, High Wycombe, Mar. (NRO A. VIII. ). ¹² E.B. to Thomas Hussey, July (C ix. ). E.B.’s model was probably the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Though French and Latin were taught in the lower classes, the curriculum was mostly practical: mathematics, drawing, fortification and artillery, geography, and chemistry (F. G. Guggisberg, ‘The Shop’: The Story of the Royal Military Academy (London, ), –).
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Burke’s ideas, unfortunately, were not shared by La Marche, Bishop of St Pol-de-Léon, the leader of the French émigré clergy. The bishop wanted instead to reproduce the typical French collège, with a classical curriculum taught by clerics.¹³ The bishop argued that Burke should confine himself to ‘la partie de la depense et de l’œconomie’, leaving instruction and internal regulations to him and to the master he had appointed.¹⁴ This master, the abbé Maraine (c.–), Burke described as ‘a perfect Clown’. Nor, in his view, did the bishop himself have ‘one right Idea’ on the subject of the school.¹⁵ Under such provoking circumstances, Burke could not long maintain the fiction of his non-involvement. Writing to the abbé on May, he now describes himself as having ‘undertaken to superintend the Education of these young Gentlemen’, for whom ‘a meer French Education, according to the Routine of a French College’ was not appropriate. In particular, he rejected the abbé’s request that English should be taught by Frenchmen. Even so, Burke tried to salvage something of the original idea of French autonomy: ‘In everything English, I pretend, and in that alone, to be the Judge’ (C ix. –). Later in May, in a letter to Walker King, Burke dropped the mask: ‘I will throw up [withdraw], if I am to be directed in this Education by any one whatever’ (). Perhaps, had the bishop chosen masters more to Burke’s liking, Burke might have interfered less. But believing that the bishop picked his masters ‘from a Click’, Burke determined to limit the damage. The first two (the abbé Maraine, and the abbé Le Chevalier) he was constrained to accept. They were, he conceded, ‘good and virtuous men’, but ‘utterly unfit for this employment’ (to French Laurence, June : C ix. ). Through his connections with senior Catholic clergy in Ireland and in London, Burke undertook a personal search for an English master who would be a native speaker of the language. To John Douglass (c.–; the Vicar Apostolic) Burke sent this job description: ‘a good knowledge of Latin, and a tolerable knowledge of Greek; and, if some elemental knowledge of Mathematicks is added it will be the better—but the main fundamental part is a mastery of our Native Tongue with a power of reading it, in prose and Verse, in a firm, just, and manly manner’ ( June: ). Plainly, Burke’s idea of ‘a military Academy’ was a liberal one. Much of the curriculum would be the conventional classical languages required in the education of an eighteenth-century gentleman. The stress on reading English is indicative. ¹³ The French collège, under the auspices either of a university arts faculty or of a religious teaching order, educated boys from about to years. Apart from religious instruction, the main subject (and often the medium) was Latin. Practical or ‘modern’ subjects were excluded (H. C. Barnard, Education and the French Revolution (Cambridge, ), –). ¹⁴ La Marche to E.B., May (NRO A. XIX. ). ¹⁵ E.B. to Walker King, Apr. (C viii. –). E.B.’s resentment of the bishop’s interference is ironic, given his theoretical belief in the clergy’s ‘natural preeminence in Education’ (to Henry Grattan, Sept. : –).
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Against Buckingham, who thought that a Frenchman might teach it, Burke insisted on an Englishman. As for the émigrés, ‘I never saw one, no not one, who could read it in Verse, or even in prose’ ( June: –). Ever conscious of his own lack of fluency in French, Burke wanted his boys to acquire a facility in spoken English that would enable them to mix readily in English society. Such a master proved difficult to attract and retain. The first choice, John Devereux (d. ), arrived in September, only to leave in December.¹⁶ The abbé Maraine had warned that a mixture of French and English masters would create difficulties.¹⁷ Perhaps his objection had more force than Burke was prepared to allow. Burke’s other appointment was a Frenchman: the baron Du Pac Bellegarde, the military master. He arrived on May and remained at the school until .¹⁸ How Burke secured his services is not known. A further source of friction between Burke and the bishop was the process of selecting the boys. Burke’s insistence that he would ‘not name a boy’ (C viii. ) meant that he intended the bishop and a French committee to receive and vet applications, which would then be forwarded to an English committee (in effect, this would have been himself and Buckingham) for the final selection. He was accordingly most unhappy when the bishop contrived to exclude him from the process altogether, by drawing up a list and sending it to Buckingham for his approval, all without giving proper notice of a closing date for applications. While pretending to act merely as a ‘commis’, the bishop had effectively made all the nominations. Burke then faced the unpleasant task of refusing applications made to him, which were now too late. This misunderstanding, if not duplicity, on the part of the bishop, led to a long and acrimonious correspondence.¹⁹ Anxious as usual to vindicate himself, Burke drew up a statement setting out the facts as he saw them, and disclaiming any part in the selection of the boys, whom he accepted ‘exactly as they stand on the List transmitted to him’ (ix. –). This memorandum is suffused with a sense of grievance. Much of this dissonance might have been avoided, had Burke from the outset been clearer and firmer about the allocation of responsibility, and resolved the contradiction between his professed intention to be no more than an ‘agent and steward’, who would not ‘attempt to direct an article of education’ (viii. ), and his real desire to control. Privately, indeed, about the time he wrote the minute about admissions, he admitted to the Marquis of Buckingham that ‘I was guilty of a great Errour in the beginning, by not putting an Englishman at the head ¹⁶ Westminster Diocesan Archives, Diary of Dr John Douglass, Sept. (vol. , p. ); C ix. n. . ¹⁷ Abbé Maraine to E.B., May (NRO A. XIX. ). ¹⁸ The baron later told William Windham that he owed his position ‘à L’Estime et à la confiance de Mr Burke’ ( May : BL Add. MS , fo. ). ¹⁹ A dozen letters on the subject passed between E.B., La Marche, Buckingham, and Walker King between May and June (C ix. –).
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of it’ ( June : ix. ). Fortunately, Burke had considerable experience of working with people who were not his choice, and his relations with the abbé Maraine improved. Indeed, the abbé, ‘a perfect Clown’ at the beginning of April, had by June been metamorphosed into a ‘conscientious, diligent, and intelligent Teacher’ (viii. ; ix. ). Superintending his ‘military Academy’ required Burke to give his attention to numerous particulars far more minute than such questions as the appointment of staff or the admission of boys. Before any boys could be accommodated, the house had to be furnished and equipped. Burke’s agent in London was Mrs Dorothy Silburn (d. ), an energetic supporter of the émigré cause. Some examples from the surviving correspondence illustrate the minutiae with which Burke had to deal. Early in April, Burke placed orders for cloth, blankets, mattresses, tureens, soup plates, spoons, and textbooks (C viii. –). Lists of early expenses include table and household linen, kitchen equipment and cutlery, earthenware, butter and cheese, and hats.²⁰ The first boys arrived in late April, but much remained to do. In May, Burke asked Walker King to procure some mathematical instruments (ix. –). In June, Du Pac Bellegarde requested some larger-size drawing paper, gum sandarac, and a scraper.²¹ By July, the school reached its full complement of sixty boys. Thereafter, references to it in Burke’s correspondence decline, suggesting that it was by then operating fairly smoothly. Even so, in August, there was a misunderstanding about the baker’s bill (). In November, observing that the boys ‘wear out their Cloaths fast’, Burke was ordering stockings of various sizes, as well as new winter uniforms (, ). For Burke, the management of domestic economy was a novelty. In his own household, his wife (latterly in conjunction with Richard Jr.) had screened him from all such worries (C vii. ). That he relished such occupations, which deflected his mind from the larger vexations of politics, is suggested by another charitable enterprise. In December , he leased a cottage at Penn, and proposed to offer it rent free to an émigré family with a boy at the school. Asking Walker King’s help in finding a suitable tenant, Burke described the cottage in minute detail: The Kitchen & two of the Bed chambers are very good rooms. The parlour indeed is small, not above feet by as I guess, but tolerable, & the Kitchen, where there is not very much to dress [cook] might serve for a room for ordinary habitation to a woman of an economical turn & who can submit to circumstances. There is also a stable for one Horse & a Wood & lumber House. The Garden indeed is very small, but there is a good Apple Tree in it & a pear tree against the Wall of the House; and the prospect from the Garden, where there may be a bench is very extensive & very pleasant. ²⁰ Bills dated Apr., and list of expenses to Apr. (NRO A. XXIV. , ). ²¹ Du Pac Bellegarde to E.B., June (NRO A. XIX. ).
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Catching himself in a most uncharacteristic mode, Burke jests: ‘One would think that I was Mr Christie advertizing the House for sale.’²² Burke was in a happy mood when he could thus joke about the intensity with which he habitually treated small matters as well as great. The school met one of Burke’s most urgent psychological necessities, his need to be active and doing. It allowed him to make a practical if minute contribution to the crusade against revolutionary France. While escaping from the frustrations of the political scene, Burke could still feel himself usefully employed. Yet the school proved more than a therapeutic hobby for Burke, admirably as it fulfilled that purpose. The best measure of its broader success is its longevity. So personal a project might have withered and died after its patron’s demise. This one survived. In , when the monarchy was restored, the French government assumed responsibility, and maintained it until . Though created as an outlet for Burke’s surplus energy, the school proved to meet a genuine and continuing demand.
In recommending Burke’s plan for a French school, Buckingham suggested to Pitt that the scheme might serve to ‘employ his mind’ and so divert his energies from the Letters on a Regicide Peace.²³ While Pitt is hardly likely to have approved the initiative merely to keep Burke occupied, such a consideration may have presented itself as a welcome bonus. For a few months, indeed, Burke was preoccupied with his school, and these are precisely the months during which work on the Letters was suspended. Ill health, his own and Jane’s, was another distraction. Towards the end of July, with the school requiring less of his attention, the Burkes travelled to Bath to drink the waters and for a change of scene. On August, he wrote despairingly to Windham about the futility of attempting to oppose the government’s obstinate determination to prefer an ignominious peace to a vigorous prosecution of the war (C ix. ). As late as September, when he knew of the proposal to send an ambassador to Paris, such opposition still appeared ‘an attempt to fight with the established Laws of Nature’ (). By about September he was back at Beaconsfield, ‘on the whole much the better for the Bath expedition’ (). There he received a letter from Fitzwilliam, declaring his intention to attend the opening of the new Parliament and to oppose any move towards peace, however unpopular his stand might prove and however little support it might attract.²⁴ This welcome news provided the stimulus Burke needed. At once, he drafted a protest for Fitzwilliam to enter in the Lords’ Journal, and offered ²² E.B. to Walker King, Dec. (UBL (II), ). James Christie (–) founded () the London auction house. ²³ Buckingham to Pitt, [ Mar. ] (NA PRO. //, fo. ). ²⁴ Fitzwilliam to E.B., Sept. (WWM Bk P /).
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to come to London to put ‘every rag of this poor Body and mind, to the last thread’ at Fitzwilliam’s service (, Sept.: –). At about the same time, he resumed work on the Letters on a Regicide Peace. Parliament met on September. Being a new Parliament, its first days were occupied by the swearing-in of members. The king’s speech was not delivered until October, when it announced the opening of ‘an immediate and direct Negotiation’, and the imminent sending to Paris of an envoy armed ‘with full Power’. Burke’s worst fears were confirmed. In the debate on the address, Fitzwilliam took his promised stand, maintaining that the object of the war was ‘the restoration of order’ and that no secure peace could be expected with the French republic. As Burke had expected, it was a lone gesture. His amendment was rejected without a division, and no other lord signed his protest.²⁵ Early publication of the Two Letters had by then been determined, for on a brief excursion to London to meet Fitzwilliam, Burke lost or mislaid two sheets of copy, which he was luckily able to recover from memory (C ix. ). On October, its publication was advertised in the newspapers. The wording of the first advertisements is revealing. The Rivingtons, joint publishers with John Owen of the Letter to a Noble Lord, are named as publishers, though the pamphlet was also to be ‘sold by’ Owen.²⁶ Owen was thus not yet completely estranged from Burke and the Rivingtons. Soon thereafter, however, they quarrelled, and Owen determined to publish his own edition, based on the copy that he had retained. Since the text was already set in type, his piracy did not take long to print, and was on sale on October, a day ahead of the authorized edition published by the Rivingtons.²⁷ Burke was able to secure an injunction against Owen, but not before about , copies of his edition had been sold.²⁸ Vexing as Owen’s action was, it gave Burke’s pamphlet even greater publicity and news value. Comparison of the two texts is instructive. From Burke’s point of view, the political situation had greatly worsened since he had abandoned work on the Regicide Peace in March. Pitt had persisted in pursuing his abject efforts to make peace at any price. Public opinion was even more clamorous in favour of peace. Even the Austrian military successes against France were interpreted by the peace party as likely to make the Directory more sincerely disposed to a peace. Burke remained convinced that any peace with the regicide republic ²⁵ CJ lii. ; Debrett, NS iii. –. The length and style of Fitzwilliam’s protest (LJ xli. –) suggests that he used E.B.’s draft. ²⁶ Oracle and Public Advertiser, , Oct. . The phrase ‘sold by’ probably meant that Owen had agreed to take a substantial number of copies. E.B. (who was unhappy with Owen) may have turned to the Rivingtons because, on Dodsley’s retirement, they took over the Annual Register. ²⁷ Publication of the Rivington edition was announced for Oct., then advanced a day in response to Owen (Oracle, , Oct.). Owen’s edition was advertised in the Oracle on Oct. ²⁸ Loughborough granted an injunction against Owen on Nov. (NA C. //).The sales figure is from George Steevens to Thomas Percy, Oct., in John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London, –), vii. –. By then , copies of the authorized edition had been sold.
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would mean the end of civilization. The Two Letters was thus intended as a last call to sanity before the impending doom. Yet in revising the text before publication Burke did not, as might have been expected, make its appeal more heavily emotive.²⁹ Instead, he sought to expand the historical context within which the present crisis should be viewed. One long addition was mandatory: an account of the negotiations since March.³⁰ These he presents as a series of ever-deeper humiliations. By way of creating a heroic antitype to the inglorious figure of Pitt, Burke added a long passage detailing William III’s dealings with France in the s, depicting William as a selfless and tireless figure, determined to save Europe from French domination, even against the supine indifference of the beneficiaries of his efforts. Such a leader, Burke argues, is urgently needed now.³¹ The most interesting of the other additions is a new introductory section (about , words) in which Burke sketched his theory of historical causation (WS ix. –). Typical of Burke is that he wrote this passage not for its own sake, but to support an immediate polemic point. It illustrates his remarkable ability to move from the particular to the general, without becoming lost in abstraction. Nevertheless, the historiographical excursus has a clear message. His theory of history is anti-deterministic.³² He accepted that, as a matter of historical observation, states do go through what may by analogy be called a ‘life cycle’, from formation, through growth and decline, to extinction. Yet he scotched the notion that these cycles are inevitable or predictable. States, he insisted, are ‘not physical but moral essences’ (). This belief did not prevent his drawing political images and metaphors from medicine and disease. The new section itself contains one of his most elaborate: Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body of the State the steadiness of the physician is overpowered by the very aspect of the disease. The doctor of the Constitution, pretending to under-rate what he is not able to contend with, shrinks from his own operation. He doubts and questions the salutary but critical terrors of the cautery and the knife. ()
The inconsistency is only apparent. Burke accepted and used such metaphors as the ‘body politic’ to furnish ‘similitudes to illustrate or to adorn’; he rejected them as ‘analogies from whence to reason’ (). The ²⁹ An exception is the expanded passage on ‘the sanguinary tyrant Carnot’ (WS ix. ). ³⁰ WS ix. –. Two small updates illustrate the minuteness with which E.B. followed events in France: a brief reference to a proposal to reform the divorce laws, and a new figure for the number of theatres in Paris (, ). ³¹ WS ix. –; expanded from Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, . ³² John C. Weston, ‘Edmund Burke’s View of History’, Review of Politics, (), –, esp. . E.B. accepted that the general course of history was subject to providential direction.
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example of the State as a patient is a graphic and memorable image, not an argument. Repudiating the life-cycle theory, Burke cites a variety of patterns, from which he argues that the rise and fall of states is unpredictable, the result either of fortuitous events or circumstances, or of providential design, perhaps working through what appears to be chance. Because of this gap between apparent cause and visible effect, history is unpredictable.³³ The inference is clear: however unpropitious outward circumstances may appear, we should not despair. Providence may yet save the old civilization of Europe. The regicide republic may collapse as rapidly and surprisingly as it has risen. To illustrate the vicissitudes of history, Burke recalls John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners of the Times (), a gloomy prognostic of national decay which achieved considerable popularity at the outbreak of the Seven Years War. People were ready to believe in national decline. Yet Britain rapidly ‘emerged from the gulph of that speculative despondency’ (WS ix. ). The year witnessed a remarkable series of victories in the war with France. Burke does not mention the elder Pitt, usually credited with inspiring the ‘year of victories’, but few readers would have missed the parallel implied between his aggressive self-confidence against the Bourbons, and his son’s pusillanimous refusal to maintain a principled stand against the far more threatening menace of Jacobin France. The national character has surely not declined since the s: but the people need leaders. In any case, Burke argues, Jacobin France is a new kind of State, a ‘monster’ () which feeds on what to other states would be ‘poison’ (). With this beast there can be no genuine accommodation: negotiation is surrender, peace but a prelude to vassalage. Burke made two other significant changes to the text of the Letters. The first expanded a strategic argument. In the early version, he had ascribed the war’s failure to its being conducted as a war of plunder rather than principle. Instead of targeting France itself, Pitt had preferred to attack the French and Dutch colonies. Now, Burke developed at greater length a favourite argument that he had been urging since the outbreak of the war: using the émigré forces, France should be attacked directly, by means of a descent on either the north or the west coast.³⁴ The second was the only extensive cut that Burke made. He excised the long passage defending the war as a ‘war on opinion’.³⁵ ³³ While E.B. conceded that, in time, enough might be known to ‘furnish grounds for a sure theory on the internal causes which necessarily affect the fortune of a State’, he was sure that present knowledge was insufficient (WS ix. ). ³⁴ WS ix. –; expanded from Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, –. This was a lastminute addition, accidentally omitted from the early printings and only incorporated in the ‘tenth edition’, published on Nov. (E.B. to Walker King, Oct: C ix. ; Todd k). The addition was printed separately for purchasers of the earlier editions. ³⁵ WS ix. –; Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, –.
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The reason for this deletion is not obvious. A plausible speculation is that, while he still regarded the war as one of opinion, and wars of opinion as potentially no less ‘just and necessary’ than any others, he felt that the stress on opinion weakened what he elsewhere emphasizes, that this was a war pro aris et focis. If so, the change provides an unusual insight into Burke’s rhetorical thinking, and is further evidence of how carefully he revised the Two Letters to maximize their persuasive force. Recognizing that the Two Letters lacked the ‘seasoning of personality’ that had contributed to the success of the Letter to a Noble Lord, Burke was somewhat diffident about the pamphlet’s reception.³⁶ He need not have worried. The Two Letters had been long awaited, and even those who knew that they would disagree were eager to read it. By November, just three weeks after publication, over , copies had been sold.³⁷ Extracts in the newspapers brought some of the most striking passages to an even wider audience. Only in one respect was the reception of the Two Letters disappointing. The pamphlet provoked only about half the number of replies that the Letter to a Noble Lord had generated.³⁸ Given the greater public interest of the Two Letters, this decline is puzzling. Perhaps the subject was exhausted, for several pro-peace pamphlets had recently been published.³⁹ Two pamphleteers who had attacked the Letter to a Noble Lord returned to the charge. One was John Thelwall (–), whose acquittal in on a charge of high treason had enraged Burke.⁴⁰ Thelwall wrote the most trenchant reply to the Two Letters, which he denounced as ‘an outrage upon human nature’. Brushing aside the question of war or peace, he identified the substantive issue as the British social system, with its massive and unjustified inequalities. Against Burke’s view that ‘every thing is natural that has the hoar of ancient prejudice upon it’, while ‘novelty is the test of crime’, he asserted that ‘nothing is natural, but what is fit and true, and can endure the test of reason’. Rejecting Burke’s , as the ‘natural’ representatives of the nation, he demanded universal political rights, and a redistribution of property that would give labourers more than a mere subsistence. As alarmist as Burke, he unmasked Burke’s real design as an attack on ³⁶ E.B. to Walker King, post Oct. (C ix. ). Henry Crabb Robinson indeed found the Regicide Peace ‘but dull’ compared to the Letter to a Noble Lord (to Thomas Robinson, Nov.: Dr Williams’s Library, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, –, no. ). ³⁷ Ten authorized editions, plus , copies of the piracy. According to George Stevens, the first five editions were of , copies each (Nichols, Illustrations, vii. ). The later editions were probably about the same size. ³⁸ Eight pamphlet replies were published (ten, including two anticipatory ripostes to what were expected to be E.B.’s arguments). ³⁹ Dennis O’Bryen, Utrum Horum? The Government; or the Country?; William Williams, Rights of the People; Thoughts on the Prospect of a Gregicide War, in a Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke; A Short View of the Inconveniencies of War; A Retrospect, Illustrating the Necessity of an Immediate Peace. All were reviewed in the Critical Review, (Oct. ), –, . ⁴⁰ E.B. to Addington, Jan. ; to Lord Loughborough, c. Mar. (C viii. –, ).
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traditional liberties (particularly trial by jury), and imagined ‘the relumined fires of Smithfield [where heretics were burned], and the axe upon Tower Hill [where trairors were beheaded]’. Yet the pamphlet has a lighter side. In one witty passage, Thelwall ridicules Burke’s habitual use of images and metaphors drawn from incongruous sources (though few today are likely to agree that this is a weakness).⁴¹ Burke’s other veteran opponent was Ralph Broome, who burlesqued the Two Letters in the style of his earlier series of ‘Simkin’ letters on the Hastings trial, and also wrote a conventional reply.⁴² Neither he nor the other authors found many novel arguments, their pamphlets echoing many of the themes of the previous debate. There is much ad hominem abuse. In the most scurrilous pamphlet, Burke is successively pilloried as an apostate, a madman, a Jesuit, and a pensioner; as illogical and inconsistent; and as a Quixote, a rhetorician, and a warmonger.⁴³ Yet Burke also received some unexpected accolades. One writer, while condemning the ‘intemperate language’ of the Letters, conceded that they exhibit ‘the same strength of thought, the same luxuriancy of style, the same richness and variety of imagery’ as earlier works which the author had admired.⁴⁴ Another imitated or parodied an elaborate Burkean metaphor, decrying the ‘luminous vapour, so visible in your writings’ as ‘nothing more than a rhetorical kind of phosphorus, it shines, it sometimes blazes even, but it never warms’.⁴⁵ A few fresh ideas were started. The most bizarre is the suggestion that the Two Letters was ‘a subtle and diabolical piece of art’, written to counteract the ministry’s ostensible moves towards peace in favour of their ‘secret intentions’ of prolonging the war, while throwing the blame on the French.⁴⁶ No one had suggested that the Letter to a Noble Lord was part of a plot to make the Duke of Bedford more popular. If advanced in earnest, the notion emanated from a mind as prone as Burke’s to imagine conspiracies. Also deserving of notice is the lengthy two-part review of the Two Letters by James Mackintosh, author of Vindiciae Gallicae (), one of the more moderate replies to the Reflections. Mackintosh was no democrat, but an ⁴¹ Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments, A Series of Letters to the People of England, part (London, ), repr. in The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, Pa., ), –. Thelwall had previously attacked E.B. in Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, to a Noble Lord (London, ; repr. in Claeys, –). ⁴² Letters from Simkin the Second to his Brother Simon, in Wales (London, ); Strictures on Mr Burke’s ‘Two Letters, Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament’ (London, ). ⁴³ The Retort Politic on Master Burke: or, A Few Words ‘en passant’, Occasioned by his ‘Two Letters on a Regicide Peace’ (London, ). ⁴⁴ Thoughts on a Peace with France, with Some Observations on Mr Burke’s ‘Two Letters on Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory’ (London, ), –. ⁴⁵ The Retort Politic on Master Burke, . ⁴⁶ S. F. Waddington, Remarks on Mr Burke’s ‘Two Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France’ (nd edn. London, ), .
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ambitious young man with a career to make—not unlike Burke in . Vindiciae Gallicae had introduced him both to Whig (Foxite) society and to the world of journalism. Among his first pieces for the Monthly Review were articles on the Letter to a Noble Lord and the Two Letters. The first is the most temperate and artful of the reviews of the Letter, tactfully contriving to appear fair both to Burke and to the Duke of Bedford.⁴⁷ Mackintosh displays the same studied moderation in his review of the Regicide Peace. Though he disagrees entirely with Burke’s arguments, he pays them the compliment of rational refutation. He eschews the abusive personalities of the pamphlets, and his admiration for Burke is manifest throughout. Instead of denouncing Burke as a warmonger, he concedes that, in some circumstances, ‘it is among the noblest offices of patriotic eloquence’ to animate the national spirit, citing Demosthenes and Cicero as examples.⁴⁸ Mackintosh’s critique is a model of civilized disagreement. Soon after the review appeared, Mackintosh sent Burke a flattering letter. Professing to ‘subscribe to your general Principles’ and ‘consider them as the only solid foundation both of political Science and of political prudence’, he claimed to differ ‘solely as to some applications of them’, and asked to meet Burke ( Dec. : C ix. ). Burke replied in his most courtly manner, inviting his former adversary to Beaconsfield ( Dec.: –). Mackintosh would recall Burke’s vitality and versatility: Passed the last Christmas with Burke at Beaconsfield; and described in glowing terms, the astonishing effusions of his mind in conversation. Perfectly free from all taint of affectation: would enter, with cordial glee, into the sports of children; rolling about with them on the carpet, and pouring out, in his gambols, the sublimest images mingled with the most wretched puns. Anticipated his approaching dissolution, with due solemnity, but perfect composure. Minutely and accurately informed, to a wonderful exactness, with respect to every fact relative to the French Revolution.
The image of Burke rolling on the carpet with the children recalls an occasion, over thirty years earlier, when the Shackletons found Burke in his rooms in Dublin Castle, ‘seated on the floor playing with his two little boys’.⁵⁰ It gives force to Burke’s own remark that ‘I love to be a boy; to have the careless gaiety of boyish days.’⁵¹ Strangely enough, even Pitt, reserved and chilly in ⁴⁷ Monthly Review, (Mar. ), –. ⁴⁸ Ibid. (Nov., Dec. ), –, –. Mackintosh contributed to the Monthly between Dec. and Feb. (Benjamin Christie Nangle, The ‘Monthly Review’, Second Series, –: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford, ), –). ⁴⁹ Thomas Green, Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature (Ipswich, ), , recording a conversation with Mackintosh on June . To French Laurence, Mackintosh acknowledged that, when he wrote Vindiciae Gallicae ‘he really was not acquainted with his facts’ (Laurence to Fitzwilliam, Feb. : NRO FC). ⁵⁰ The Leadbeater Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbeater (nd edn. London, ), i. –. The occasion can be dated to the winter of –, before Christopher died. ⁵¹ Boswell, Life of Johnson, iv. ( Mar. ). E.B. made the remark in response to Johnson’s ‘scale of liquors;—claret for boys,—port for men,—brandy for heroes’.
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public, could behave in private ‘like a boisterous schoolboy’.⁵²These glimpses of politicians in slippers serve as a salutary reminder of just how selective is the historical record of men such as Burke and Pitt. Only rarely are they seen at play. Mackintosh provides a revealing illustration of Burke’s characteristic uniting of the sublime and the trifling. Mackintosh’s account has a further value, for it contradicts the picture of Burke in decline recorded by Arthur Young in May . Young had previously visited Beaconsfield in , later publishing an account of Burke’s farm.⁵³ Now, Young made a second visit at the suggestion of Sir John Sinclair, President of the Board of Agriculture, who was eager to know whether Burke still intended to publish his thoughts on labour, as promised in the ‘Letter to Young’ advertised in December .⁵⁴ Young was shocked to find Burke ‘so broken, so low, and with such expressions of melancholy’ that he appeared ‘the greatest genius of the age in ruin’. Nor was the decay merely physical. Young believed that ‘the powers of his mind had suffered considerably’: His conversation was remarkably desultory, a broken mixture of agricultural observations, French madness, price of provisions, the death of his son, the absurdity of regulating labour, the mischief of our Poor-laws, and the difficulty of cottagers keeping cows . . . his discourse was so scattered and interrupted by varying ideas, that I could bring away but few of his remarks that were clearly defined.
At dinner, even with the stimulus of Frances Crewe, Burke ‘lounged rather than sat at table, his dress entirely neglected, and his manner quite dejected; yet he tried once or twice to rally, and once even to pun’.⁵⁵ To reconcile such discordant perceptions is difficult. Having come to elicit Burke’s opinions and intentions on a particular subject, Young was perhaps exasperated by his unwillingness to stick to the point, and impatient of the free play of mind which Mackintosh (eager to please and be pleased) so much admired.
When Mackintosh visited Beaconsfield, Burke had just begun what would prove the last of his writings, the Third Letter on a Regicide Peace. Though left unfinished at his death, it was edited by his executors and published on November .⁵⁶ A forceful polemic, the Third Letter confirms Mackintosh’s account of Burke’s intellectual vitality. By December , he had ‘begun to work’. Foreseeing that he would need statistical material ⁵² John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, –), i. –. ⁵³ The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (London, ); supra, i. –. ⁵⁴ The Times, , Dec. . ⁵⁵ The Autobiography of Arthur Young, with Selections from his Correspondence, ed. M. Betham-Edwards (London, ), –. ⁵⁶ Todd, .
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with which to ‘fortifye’ his arguments, he asked Windham to obtain them (C ix. ). As a Cabinet minister, Windham was understandably reluctant to use his official position to obtain information that he knew would be used to attack government policy (), and Burke only obtained this material later, and from other sources. He therefore began with some evidence in the public domain: the rapidity with which the ‘loyalty’ loan of December had been filled, which led him to some more general economic topics. Meanwhile, also on December, the Directory rejected Lord Malmesbury’s peace proposals, and ordered him to leave France. News of this reached London on December. Windham immediately relayed it to Burke, who received it on the th (, –). Malmesbury’s ignominious expulsion confirmed Burke’s earlier contention that the French were not in earnest in their professed desire for peace. Almost immediately, Burke sent a parcel of text to London to be set in type. He asked Walker King to forward it to the Rivingtons, who were to supply trial proofs ‘printed on a Paper with a very broad Margin and of a quality when it is dried to be wrote on. Stitched and interleaved’ ( Dec. : C ix. ). This suggests that Burke still expected to revise a good deal. Even so, perhaps only as a statement of intent, the new pamphlet was advertised as ‘in the Press, and speedily will be published’.⁵⁷ With this part of the pamphlet at the printer’s, Burke set to work on another section. On and December, papers relating to the negotiation were submitted to Parliament, and debated in both houses on the th.⁵⁸ Burke subjected these papers, and especially Pitt’s Declaration of December, to a scathing analysis. At first, he hoped to finish the pamphlet before leaving for Bath in search of better health.⁵⁹ This proved impossible, though he continued to work on the pamphlet while at Bath. By the time of his death, he had completed the account of Malmesbury’s mission, but had made little progress with the statistical part of the argument. This was assembled by his executors, partly from his notes and papers, and partly from their knowledge of his opinions. Though the pamphlet thus lacks Burke’s final imprimatur, there is no reason to doubt that, in substance, it represents what he would have published had he lived. The Third Letter is vintage Burke, full of his usual abundance of historical anecdotes, literary quotations and allusions, and memorable metaphors.⁶⁰ In Two Letters on a Regicide Peace, Burke had argued that any peace concluded with the French Republic would inevitably lead to the ⁵⁷ True Briton ( Jan. ); The Times ( Jan.). ⁵⁸ PH xxxii. –. In the Lords, Fitzwilliam moved a Burkean amendment, which was rejected without a division. ⁵⁹ Laurence to Fitzwilliam, Jan. (NRO FC). Laurence describes the Third Letter as ‘now in the press’. ⁶⁰ A memorable example is taken from the circulation of the blood: ‘When we see the life blood of the State circulate so freely through the capillary vessels of the system, we scarcely need enquire, if the heart performs its functions aright. But let us approach it; let us lay it bare, and watch the systole and diastole,
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Jacobinization or (in his view the terms were equivalent) the destruction of European order and civilization. Aware that some who supported the war were doubtful that Britain possessed the means to continue it, at the end of the second letter he foreshadowed a third, dealing with this and other topics. Pitt himself was one who professed ‘to subscribe to the reasoning’ without seeing ‘the means of execution’, which Burke had ‘unfairly reserved for future discussion’.⁶¹ With this topic Burke therefore began the composition of the promised Third Letter. Aware that an argument based on financial evidence could not be so ‘entertaining’ as the matter of the Two Letters, he was even worried whether a dull sequel might lessen the impact of the first instalment (to Walker King, Dec. : C ix. ). This fear was removed by the spectacularly humiliating failure of Lord Malmesbury’s mission to Paris, which gave him a topic more calculated to engage public interest. The Third Letter opens with a scorching attack on British diplomatic efforts to open negotiations with the French, and on Malmesbury’s mission in particular. For Malmesbury himself (with whom he had once been on friendly terms) Burke felt a particular loathing, believing that he ought to have refused the employment.⁶² Malmesbury therefore cuts a pitiful figure in the account of the negotiation.⁶³ Burke tells the story at length in order to establish the perfidy of the French, the pusillanimity of the English ministers, and the unpatriotic, if not treasonable behaviour of the opposition leaders, depicted as openly in the interests of the enemies of their country. He appeals to national pride to revolt at the humiliating spectacle of an English ambassador truckling to the murderous and overweening Jacobins. The entire section is reminiscent of Burke’s most aggressive, combative parliamentary manner. Yet the anger is carefully controlled. For whom, he asks rhetorically, are the ministers’ loud protestations of their pacific intentions intended? This question provides an excuse for a masterly survey of the map of European politics (reminiscent of a similar passage in ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’: WS viii. –), leading to the conclusion that their declarations can only have been intended to appease the leaders of the opposition. What made Burke despair more than anything was that the ministers, instead as it now receives, and now pours forth the vital stream through all the members’ (WS ix. ). While ‘systole’ and ‘diastole’ were not new words (being attested from and ), the Oxford English Dictionary cites no figurative uses earlier than . E.B. was thus revitalizing an old metaphor by giving it a more scientific turn. ⁶¹ Laurence to Fitzwilliam, Nov. (NRO FC). ⁶² On the failure of Malmesbury’s mission, E.B. commented that ‘this Mongrel has been whipped back to the Kennel yelping and with his Tail between his Legs’ (to Windham, Dec. : C ix. ). E.B. was convinced (on what evidence is unclear) that the diplomatic corps had become heavily infected with Jacobinism (‘Thoughts on French Affairs’ (): WS viii. –). ⁶³ Malmesbury was also the butt of one of E.B.’s most celebrated witticisms. When someone remarked on how long Malmesbury took to reach Paris, E.B. replied ‘Oh! Sir—people upon their knees get on very slowly’ (George Canning to Lord Malmesbury, Nov. ; Winchester, Hampshire Record Office, M, vol. ). The anecdote is well attested, though E.B’s exact words vary between versions.
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of boldly challenging their Francophile antagonists, seemed cravenly to be competing with them in kowtowing to the regicides. The latter part of the Third Letter lacks the passionate invective that gives the first half its rhetorical bite. In compensation, however, its themes are of greater permanent interest. It includes a lucid exposition of some of Burke’s central ideas about economics, for (as usual) he refers the particular problems of to general principles. Several pamphleteers had argued that peace with France was necessary, because Britain would not be able to continue the war without courting economic disaster.⁶⁴ Burke’s main strategy to counter this defeatism was to cite a range of statistics, mostly from government sources, to show that, far from being adversely affected by the war, the economy had actually continued its steady growth. These figures were assembled not by Burke himself, but by Laurence and King, from materials that Burke saw, but did not live to arrange. Though most modern readers probably skim or skip them (like the corresponding pages in the Observations on a Late State of the Nation), the tables of figures form the most extensive use of inartificial (atechnoi in Aristotle’s terminology) proofs in the whole of Burke’s writings. Burke reached his conclusion without them. As his executors explained, what this ‘authentick and official information’ proved, he had ‘with his usual sagacity . . . fully anticipated from his own observation’.⁶⁵Yet these statistics are more than decorative. Since Burke was often accused of excessive imagination and quixotism, they serve to ground his argument in hard, objective evidence, evincing his ability to combine economic principles of great generality with such minutiae as the increase in the duty on auctions and auctioneers (WS ix. ). Two of Burke’s more general arguments illustrate his conception of the economic framework of society. The first is a passage in defence of Pitt’s loan of , the terms of which had been criticized as overgenerous. The ‘moneyed men’ who were the main subscribers to these loans, an essential feature of every wartime budget, were an unpopular group. Since the worse the nation’s finances, the better the terms they secured, they appeared to benefit from national ill fortune. Burke had said as much about the loan contractors during the American war.⁶⁶ Now, however, without considering the precise terms of this particular loan, Burke affirmed the principle of a free market in money (WS ix. –). He defended the ‘moneyed men’ and even their ‘love of lucre’, just as (in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity) he had vindicated grasping landlords and farmers, and the hated middlemen. The ‘love of lucre’, he argued, is conducive to the general good (–). To the argument that the interest on the national debt is withdrawn from real economic activity to ⁶⁴ William Morgan, Facts Addressed to the Serious Attention of the People of Great Britain Respecting the Expence of the War, and the State of the National Debt (London, ); William Williams, Rights of the People: or, Reasons for a Regicide Peace (London, ). ⁶⁵ A Third Letter to a Member of the Present Parliament, on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (London, ), advertisement, p. iii. ⁶⁶ Supra, i. .
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reward the idle capitalist, he countered that much of the money paid in interest is in fact returned to circulation through the expenditure of the capitalist or, if hoarded, available for further loans to the State (–). Just as in the Reflections he had ridiculed the French ‘dons patriotiques’ (R [, , ]), he now reprobated the suggestion of any kind of ‘voluntary’ tax. Taxes are the circulating blood of the economy. They should be laid on all (or nearly all) as equitably as possible (–). These ideas show that Burke shared Adam Smith’s confidence that the selfish economic activities of individuals conduced to the general good. A second passage also recalls some of the ideas which Burke had expressed in his still unpublished Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. The context is his argument that, contrary to what has been claimed, people are not worse off because of the war. As for the poor, whose welfare is chiefly affected by the price of bread, they are the victims not of the war but of the inevitable fluctuations of the weather. No one capable of work should be pitied as ‘poor’. Accepting as ‘the common doom of man that he must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, that is, by the sweat of his body, or the sweat of his mind’, Burke argues that though ‘inflicted as a curse’, as we would expect ‘from the curses of the Father of all Blessings—it is tempered with many alleviations, many comforts’ (WS ix. ). Every attempt to evade this great rule of Providence must fail, bringing ‘heavier pains and penalties’ than the curse of work itself. Two of Burke’s cherished convictions emerge from this passage: his belief that the greater number of mankind were condemned to a subsistence existence; and his belief in the therapeutic value of work. While ill health did not permit Burke to finish the Third Letter, he did provide it with a rousing peroration (WS ix. –). This begins with one of his longest and most elaborate periodic sentences ( words, and another proof of his continuing intellectual vigour), in which he summarizes the real, flourishing state of the country, and ends with a rousing call for the ministers to display more energetic leadership. The fault is not with ‘the people’, who have done what they can. The ministers (which in practice meant Pitt) must discharge the responsibilities which Providence and the people have placed upon them. Pitt’s insane eagerness to negotiate a peace at any price was not his only dereliction of duty. Deeply troubled as Burke was by the threat from France, he perceived in the misgovernment of Ireland a parallel and almost as alarming a danger to national security. The situation in Ireland had steadily worsened since the disaster of Fitzwilliam’s recall, which ended (in Burke’s view) the last hope of preventing the Jacobinization of Ireland. Increasingly, he drew parallels between France and Ireland, even referring to what he usually called the ‘jobbing Ascendancy’ as ‘the Lilliputian Directory’.⁶⁷ Opposites as ⁶⁷ E.B. to French Laurence, Dec. (C ix. ). E.B. uses the phrase ‘the Irish Directory’ in a letter to Thomas Hussey, post Dec. (, ).
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the two regimes might appear, Burke was convinced that the practical effects of both were the same. The French Directory was openly subverting property and religion. By refusing to end discrimination against the Catholics, its Irish counterpart was driving them into an incongruous alliance with the avowed republicans. This was a recipe for a revolution that would shake the security of all property in Ireland. A fresh approach, such as Fitzwilliam had initiated, was urgently needed, but none could be expected while the present set of men was in power, and no change of men could be expected without a change of ministers in London. Yet such a change was to be dreaded rather than pursued. Unhappy as Burke was with Pitt’s determination to make peace with the Regicides, he knew that Fox would pursue even closer links with the French and even propose constitutional reform on the French model. In November , with the threat of a French invasion, Ireland resumed its place in the forefront of Burke’s mind. Thereafter, it remained one of his preoccupations until his death. He wrote many letters on the subject, including the last of his long letters, and (dictated from his couch at Bath) his last epistolary pamphlet. These late writings show that his ideas on the subject had not changed. He continued to support British imperial supremacy, believed that Irish prosperity was tied to the link with Britain, and attributed all Ireland’s ills to the selfish policies of the ‘jobbing Ascendancy’. Seemingly, he still believed that Fitzwilliam’s return as Lord-Lieutenant would solve all problems. Certainly he failed to appreciate the extent to which Catholic grievances were now economic as well as political. Merely sending a benevolent governor to perpetuate the old system of landed injustice would no longer satisfy. Burke’s fidelity to his old ideas cannot be attributed to paucity of information. As always, he was following events closely. But since his principal personal source of information about Ireland was Thomas Hussey (–; in January appointed Roman Catholic Bishop of Waterford and Lismore), whose opinions and prejudices he shared.⁶⁸ Reports at variance with his own interpretation he could plausibly ignore, especially if they supported the Irish government’s reading of the situation. Thus he was reluctant to believe that agrarian disturbances were motivated by genuine economic grievances, preferring to attribute them to outside agitators (to John Keogh, Nov. : C ix. –). Sympathetic as Burke was to Catholic claims, he was unwilling to go beyond admitting them to the franchise on the existing system. Thus he resolutely refused to countenance any measure of parliamentary reform. Even more fervently, when he perceived ‘a war declared between property and no property’ (to Fitzwilliam, Dec. : C ix.), he sided with property. ⁶⁸ In Apr. , Hussey published A Pastoral Letter to the Catholic Clergy of the United Diocesses of Waterford and Lismore (Waterford, ), widely regarded (in Protestant circles) as inflammatory. E.B. heartily approved (to Hussey, May : C ix. –).
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The sacrosanctity of property rights was always a fundamental article of his political creed. The present titles to property, however inequitable in their origin, could now claim prescriptive force. To uphold them was therefore in the general interest, to question them mischievous and subversive of all social stability. Burke’s most temperate and considered exposition of his views on Ireland at this time is found in a letter to an unknown correspondent, dictated during his stay at Bath in . From internal evidence, the correspondent was an Irish Protestant, sympathetic to Catholic emancipation, who had known Richard Burke, Jr., and who wished Burke to use his supposed influence to enlighten the English ministers about the real state of Ireland.⁶⁹ In any case, the length (nearly , words) and tone of the letter suggest that it was intended for circulation. Disclaiming any influence with those in power, and protesting that his health precluded his taking any further active part in politics, Burke was nevertheless eager to put his opinions once more on record, to show that ‘I am of the same opinion to my last breath, which I entertained when my faculties were at the best’ (C ix. ). Though it contains nothing new, the letter deserves attention as his final statement on the Irish question. As usual, Burke traced Ireland’s problems to ‘a certain very small Number of Gentlemen in full possession of a monopoly of that Kingdom’ (C ix. ). He meant the ‘jobbing Junto’, but in this letter he deliberately eschewed such opprobrious phrases. Britain was not to blame. On the contrary, Irish prosperity largely depended on the British connection, and Ireland would be the greater loser from its severance. While Ireland ought to retain its legal and commercial independence, in matters of ‘Imperial politics’, it ought to be ‘guided’ by Britain (). Catholics should be freed from their remaining civil disabilities (principally their exclusion from Parliament). AntiCatholicism was no more than a pretext for a ‘Protestant’ minority to perpetuate its own power. This ‘Protestantism’ was a mere ‘negative Religion’, being no more than a denial of Roman Catholicism. In this sense, Tom Paine is as good a ‘Protestant’ as any (). But the Catholics should be admitted to the franchise on the same terms as Protestants, that is, with a property qualification. The composition of the Irish House of Commons, Burke conceded, as established in , was ‘so vicious in its principle’ that its ‘degeneracy’ was desirable. By its ‘degeneracy’, however, he meant that it should cease to serve its original purpose (‘bringing that House into a state of dependance’), not that it should be reformed. Vicious as the system was, Burke believed that, if Catholics were admitted, it could become at least a ‘virtual’ representation of the people (). This is one of Burke’s clearest assertions of the sufficiency ⁶⁹ C ix. –; also in WS ix. –. Though the recipient has not been identified, a report dated July (published in the Morning Herald, July ), confirms that the composition was a real letter to an individual.
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of ‘virtual’ representation, an argument that he regularly used to oppose reform of the British Parliament. In keeping with his stance of being totally excluded from any political influence, Burke avoided the question of how to grant emancipation without parliamentary reform. Writing to other friends, he acknowledged its near impossibility. The present Irish government was too firmly committed to the current system to allow them to offer emancipation with any credibility. Yet the opposition was equally committed to parliamentary reform. The only ‘ray of hope’ was ‘some sort of Coalition’ between Pitt and Fox, ‘formed upon a sense of the public danger’ (to French Laurence, May : C ix. –). Such a hope was little better than despair. The letter to the unknown Irishman, the last of Burke’s epistolary pamphlets on Irish affairs, is in one respect misleading. Reasoned in manner, emotive only in speaking of his own exclusion and infirmities, it barely suggests his visceral hatred of the ‘jobbing Ascendancy’, to which he attributed Ireland’s ills. This hatred is amply expressed in his private letters, which also show how closely he continued to follow events in Ireland. Burke was convinced that the Irish government (‘that foolish and profligate Junto’) deliberately fomented disaffection among the Catholics in order, by playing on British fears, to secure itself in power (to Laurence, Nov. : C ix. ). The British ministry was more concerned for ‘that Knot of low Jobbers’ than for the whole people of Ireland. In this inverted order, ‘The Rats are not tolerated, because it is hard to keep rats out of Ships, but the Ship is kept up for the Benefit of the Rats’ (to Fitzwilliam, post Dec.: ). To Thomas Hussey, he developed the animal analogy in even more virulent terms: Great men will never do great mischief but for some great End. For this they must be in a state of inflammation and in a manner out of themselves—Among the nobler Animals whose blood is hot, the bite is never poisonous, except when the Creature is mad; but in the cold blooded reptile race, whose poison is exalted by the Chemistry of their icy complexion, their venom is the result of their health, and of the perfection of their Nature—Woe to the Country in which such snakes, whose primum Mobile is their Belly, obtain wings and from Serpents become dragons. ( post Dec.: )
This passage exemplifies Burke’s recurrent rhetorical strategy of demeaning his opponents by denying them greatness even in their crimes. Thus he contrasts the pettifogging attorneys of the National Assembly with examples of a ‘great’ revolutionary such as Cromwell (R [–]).⁷⁰ In another writer, such an extended metaphor as that of the cold-blooded reptiles might appear merely rhetorical, too elaborate to be the vehicle for genuine passion. For Burke, however, metaphors came naturally, and the experience of over thirty ⁷⁰ Likewise, in denigrating Hastings, Burke repeatedly foregrounded (and misrepresented) his obscure birth and mercenary motives. Typical is the charge that Hastings was ‘bred in obscure, vulgar and ignoble occupations and trained in sordid, base and mercenary habits’ ( June : WS vii. ).
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years in politics meant that even his private feelings tended to find rhetorical expression. The actions of the ‘Junto’ were to Burke so self-evidently destructive of the social order they were meant to uphold that he could only explain them as Jacobinism in disguise. The persecution (as he saw it) of sincere Catholics he therefore interpreted as part of a ‘plan’ to establish ‘a Jacobin indifference to all religion’ (to Windham, May : C ix. ).⁷¹ Such extravagant imaginings are apt to appear absurd, and Burke’s habitual appeal to ‘conspiracy theories’ to explain events may be thought the weak side of his understanding of history. Undoubtedly, raw emotions and irrational fears played a part in framing the various ‘conspiracies’ that he imagined. He tended to demonize his opponents, and was unable to conceive that they could act from conviction or from honourable motives. Irish anti-Catholicism, therefore, must have some ulterior, sinister explanation. In this case, Burke had long hated the tyrants of the Protestant Ascendancy. But a more rational element also played a part in his philosophy or theory of history. Though he believed in a general providential superintendence of history, he was no determinist. Particular events, in the ordinary course of things, were the result of human actions. Hence he repeatedly emphasized the importance of ‘men, not measures’. The concessions made to Catholics in , he believed, had been neutralized by the hostility of the Irish administration. What Burke found hard to accept, in the last years of his life, was the apparent success of the French Revolution. Why were all the efforts to contain it of no avail? Either it was part of the providential plan (a possibility that he considered, but was loath to accept), or it was really being aided by its nominal opponents. Burke found the latter the less disturbing alternative. If the spread of revolutionary principles was in part the result of the active efforts of the Irish Junto, and the passive pusillanimity of the British government, Providence might yet ensure that civilization would be saved.
Until , Burke had enjoyed remarkably robust health. Indeed, if the surviving letters are a reliable indication, he was the healthiest member of his immediate family. While there are many references to the illnesses of Jane, Richard Sr., and Richard Jr., Burke himself was rarely sick. The main exception is the breakdown of , when he seemed ‘very near death’, and which ⁷¹ Hence E.B.’s passionate pursuit of the case of Thomas Hyland, a Catholic soldier flogged for refusing to attend Protestant services, a flagrant and impolitic injustice which for E.B. came to symbolize the tyranny of the Protestant Ascendancy (Hussey to E.B., Jan. ; E.B. to Hussey, Feb. (C viii. –, ); Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge, ), –).
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he attributed to overwork (Letter to a Noble Lord: WS ix. ). For the next thirty years, the record is confined to often unspecified minor ailments.⁷² Then, rather abruptly, in the summer of , Burke’s health worsened. This deterioration makes the prodigious intellectual vigour and productivity of his last year, and the vitality recorded by Mackintosh, all the more remarkable. An early diagnosis was an unsettled or ‘flying’ gout.⁷³ Burke, however, who best knew his symptoms, was convinced that ‘my Stomach is irrecoverably ruind’ (to Thomas Hussey, July : C ix. ). Whatever he ate or drank ‘turns alike to a sort of thick mucus a little acid, but not very greatly so; but which disposes me to a small gnawing pain, or rather uneasiness’, and which produced ‘bursts of flatulance of a kind very extraordinary, the explosion of which costs me no difficulty, and probably it is this, which prevents the pain from becoming any way considerable’. (Flatulence, the symptom most often mentioned in the accounts of his illness, is unfortunately of no diagnostic value.) Already, Burke was convinced that medicine could do nothing for him, and anticipated his end, thankful that it promised to approach ‘in so very lenient and gentle a manner’ with no other malady than a slight intensification of what ‘more or less has attended me thro’ life’ (to Fitzwilliam, July: ). Burke did not, however, indicate the point at which chronic dyspepsia became something more alarming. At the urging of Fitzwilliam and others, he tried Bath, ‘the last retreat of hunted infirmity’. Jane, who also hoped to benefit from the waters, accompanied him. Soon after arriving at Bath, imagining that his end was near, Burke solemnly charged French Laurence with the legacy of producing a justification of the Hastings impeachment ( July : C ix. –). The Burkes spent about seven weeks at Bath (from late July to early September), and Edmund at least received some benefit, describing ‘the dawning of a recovery’ and imagining that ‘Providence had intended me some short reprieve . . . for some good and gracious Ends’ (to Fitzwilliam, Aug.: ). This improvement lasted for four to six weeks after his return from Bath, but about the beginning of October he ‘began gradually to decline’ (to John Keogh, Nov.: ). A palpable symptom of increasing weakness was his inability to write. From November , he dictated most of his letters and papers.⁷⁴ ⁷² These include ‘a tumour in the Tendon of my Wrist’ ( Jan. : C iv. ); unspecified complaints (Nov. and Dec. , May : v. , , , ); being ‘feeble and feverish’ (May : ); ‘one of my old Hoarsenesses’ (Nov. : vi. ); ‘a bowel complaint’ (Sept. : vii. , ); indigestion (Sept. : ); and gout ( Jan. : viii. ). The recurrence of ‘my old windy complaints’ and ‘a spasmodick affection in my right leg’ ( June : ix. ) appears to mark the beginning of E.B.’s final illness. ⁷³ Malone to Lord Charlemont, July (HMC (Charlemont), ii. ), apparently reporting a medical opinion. Where the standard type of gout pinched extremities of the body (especially the toes) and remained fixed, in ‘flying gout’ the pain ‘flitted apparently at random around the body’ (Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven, ), ). On hearing of E.B.’s symptoms, Fitzwilliam also diagnosed gout (to E.B., July: C ix. ). ⁷⁴ C ix. , , , , . As late as May , however, E.B. was able to write a short letter in his own hand (–).
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Laurence was convinced that Burke’s sickness was in part psychosomatic. At Beaconsfield, he was sometimes too much in solitude, sometimes ‘overpowered for two or three days by visitors more than his house will hold’. Jane thought that taking lodgings in London would help, as Burke could then ‘run up & down as he pleased for two or three days at a time’. To forward this scheme, Laurence suggested that Fitzwilliam might ask ‘to have the benefit of his counsels occasionally on publick affairs’, and especially about Ireland.⁷⁵ This was a shrewd suggestion, for Burke felt keenly his exclusion from Parliament and public life (to John Keogh, Nov. : C ix. –). Writing pamphlets, however successful, was no adequate compensation. Subsequently, Laurence was convinced that Burke’s was ‘the bodily complaint, whence is derived our word “melancholy” . . . an affection of the great organs of digestion, & especially of the liver, which secretes a bile more or less black’. The origin of this disease was commonly ‘excessive affliction’, in Burke’s case his grief at the death of his son. Laurence heard from Edward James (known as ‘Edmund’) Nagle (d. ), who often acted as Burke’s amanuensis and factotum in these last months, that ‘whenever his little attacks are again approaching, he had disturbed sleep, & constantly dreams of his Son’.⁷⁶ The trauma of Richard’s death may indeed have intensified an existing stomach complaint. Fitzwilliam, too, was inclined to think that Burke’s illness was in part psychological, recommending a return to Bath ‘to divert his thoughts from their constant occupation, & to unbend his mind’.⁷⁷ In December, Burke’s digestion and flatulence both worsened. Referring to ‘the Aeolian Cave of my Stomach’, he was again convinced that ‘in all probability I am not long for this world’.⁷⁸ He refused, however, to return to Bath, preferring to remain at Beaconsfield where he could at least work on his Third Letter.⁷⁹ In January, a further deterioration of his condition (sleeplessness and physical weakness) induced his friends to urge more insistently a recurrence to Bath. Windham pointedly asked whether he wished to recover, and made the preservation of his life a kind of public duty ( Jan.: C ix. –). Burke could not resist such importunity, and on January he and Jane again left Beaconsfield for Bath. Between his arrival at Bath and his departure on May, the progress of Burke’s illness is abundantly and often graphically recorded in a series of letters, mainly to William Windham.⁸⁰ Neither Burke nor his doctors entertained any hopes of recovery. ‘They have taken the town,’ Burke acknowledged to Laurence, ‘and are now attacking the citadel’ ( Feb. : C ix. ). ⁷⁵ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁸ ⁷⁹ ⁸⁰
Laurence to Fitzwilliam, [ Nov. ] (NRO FC). Laurence to Fitzwilliam, Apr. (NRO FC). Fitzwilliam to Laurence, [ Nov. ] (NRO FC). E.B. to Woodford, Dec. ; to Hussey, post Dec. (C ix. , ). Laurence to Fitzwilliam, Jan. (NRO FC). BL Add. MS , fos. –. The letters range from Jan. to July .
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Dr Parry identified the root of the problem as ‘a want of proper motion in the Alimentary canal . . . whether from mere muscular inactivity there, or from the existence of spasmodic or mechanical stricture’. For this there was no remedy, and the only palliatives were ‘aperients and gentle stimulants, aided by a diet easily digestible and nutritious’.⁸¹ To deaden the pain, Burke began taking opium. After some initial success, this proved to worsen his condition, and was discontinued (to Lord Frederick Cavendish, Mar. : C ix. ). Strong purgatives were required to overcome an obstinate costiveness. Though weak and emaciated, and producing stools and vomit of an unnaturally dark colour, Burke retained his appetite, and there are even hints that he overate.⁸² Towards the end of March, Burke’s symptoms temporarily improved. His stools showed a more favourable appearance than any since his arrival at Bath, and his appetite ‘good, if not too good, for yesterday he dined off the most indigestable of all things Lambs Fry’. His stomach, however, rejected the fry. Parry continued of the opinion that ‘the Cause of the Evil remained both concealed & unremoved’, arising from ‘some local Disease of the Intestines’. Burke’s life was in ‘continual, tho’ not immediate Danger’.⁸³ His final diagnosis, recorded after Burke’s death, was ‘a cancerous affection of the stomach’.⁸⁴ This may be accepted as the best guess of an informed observer, though Burke’s continuing appetite (which is abundantly attested), counts against it.⁸⁵ On April, Burke suffered a sudden turn for the worse, but purging and vomiting had beneficial effects. The vomit, though undigested, was not discoloured. This led Nagle to imagine that ‘by keeping the Bowels free, there may be still hopes of restoring the functions of the Stomach.’⁸⁶ Dr Parry knew better: ‘The machine appears to be rapidly wearing out under the repeated shocks which it has received.’ Between attacks, ‘it scarcely holds it’s ground’, and any new attack might produce ‘fatal effects’.⁸⁷ While Burke continued to suffer from constipation, indigestion, insomnia, and flatulence, the next attacks proved less debilitating than Parry had feared. Speaking to Jane, he was even guardedly optimistic that future attacks might be ‘lighter, & lighter every day’.⁸⁸ Writing to Windham, Parry repeated his earlier diagnosis (‘great retardation in the Intestinal canal’), but added that he now believed that the retardation was caused by ‘an organic obstruction in some part of ⁸¹ Parry to Windham, Feb. (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ⁸² Laurence to Fitzwilliam, Feb. (NRO FC); Parry to Windham, Feb.; Woodford to Windham, Mar. (BL Add. MS , fos. –, ). ⁸³ Woodford to Windham, Mar. (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ⁸⁴ Biographical note, printed in Quarterly Review, (), . ⁸⁵ Private communication from Dr Jacalyn Duffin. ⁸⁶ Nagle to Woodford, Apr. (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ⁸⁷ Parry to Windham, Apr. (BL Add. MS , fo. ). ⁸⁸ Walker King to Windham, May (BL Add. MS , fo. ); J.B. to Woodford, May (Harvard University, Houghton Library, Amy Lowell Autograph Collection).
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the canal, producing corresponding dilatation in one or more portions above’. (This could have been a tumour in the lower colon.) There was no remedy, but just before the Burkes left Bath, Parry gave Jane a detailed paper of recommendations for palliative care by ‘purgatives, absorbents, and an almost total confinement to animal food’.⁸⁹ Physical debility did not impair Burke’s mental faculties. ‘The Mind unaltered’, Woodford noted, wishing that ‘some one could carefully collect all he now says, & the Anecdotes which he repeats of his life, as he himself says, with an Intention of their being remembered’.⁹⁰ Though no recorder of Boswellian assiduity or capacity was available, Frances Crewe, whose presence in Bath raised Burke’s spirits, probably gathered much of her collection of his ‘Table-Talk’ at this time.⁹¹ The topics on which Burke conversed ranged, as usual, from the sublime to the minute: from aristocratic education to cookery, from the state of the clergy to the practice of architectural gilding (but not, oddly in the light of Woodford’s comment, anecdotes about himself ). One surprising subject was the penal colony recently established at Botany Bay. Burke criticized the failure to send out enough women, believing that ‘the worst rakes were half reformed by becoming Husbands & Fathers.’ Detailed comments about oranges, lemons, and cattle show the close attention that Burke had paid to the project.⁹² Preserved with these snatches of casual conversation is a more formal paper on ‘Religion’, which Burke dictated to Frances Crewe at the request of Dudley North, a sceptic who ‘had it much at heart to become a Christian’. This piece reveals much about Burke’s own religious faith and feelings, concerning which he rarely spoke or wrote. He characterizes ‘religion’ as a ‘mental resource from uneasiness of Mind’ and ‘the best & indeed the greatest cordial for the Cares of Life’. To believe in God is not difficult. Indeed, such a belief is practically innate and nearly universal. Belief in the Christian revelation is admittedly less easy. It requires not only habits of thinking, but, even more than mere understanding, ‘feeling,’ an ‘inclination to true piety’, and ‘humility’. Acknowledging the obstacles that stand in the way of belief, Burke requires that enquiry be candid, and conducted in a sympathetic frame of mind. Indeed, ‘wishing to be confirmed in faith may be considered itself as piety’.⁹³ ⁸⁹ Parry to Windham, May (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ⁹⁰ Woodford to Windham, Mar. (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ⁹¹ Nagle to Woodford, Feb. (Add. MS , fos. –). The collection was printed as ‘Extracts from Mr Burke’s Table-Talk, at Crewe Hall. Written down by Mrs Crewe’, Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society, (–), pt . Though the Burkes visited Crewe Hall in (and some of the items may derive from that visit), internal evidence suggests that the bulk of the material belongs to . There is a transcript of most of the Crewe collection among the Macartney Papers (Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. b. , fos. –). ⁹² ‘Extracts from Mr Burke’s Table Talk’, –. ⁹³ ‘Extracts’, – (headed ‘Religion’). In a MS at Sheffield (WWM BkP /–), the paper is headed ‘Christian Religion. Answer of Mr B. to a Message he received at Bath from a sceptic’, and North is not named. This MS is reproduced in facsimile in the Burke Newsletter, (), –.
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This document, admittedly, is not a ‘confession of faith’, but advice on how to acquire faith. Whether it implies faith is a matter of opinion.⁹⁴ Taken by itself, it may be thought somewhat equivocal. Never intended as a statement of belief, its interpretation depends on the presuppositions with which it is approached. Nevertheless, some points are clear. Burke’s theism was much firmer than his Christianity. Belief in God he took for granted. Christian belief requires habits of thought and a willingness to believe. Further, the document illustrates Burke’s psychological approach to religion, here (where its social utility is not in question) conceived as a mental resource, a function it can fulfil without necessarily being ‘true’. This need not imply that Burke thought Christianity no more than a balm for the afflicted. Rather, he is describing the psychology of faith in an age of unbelief, or at least in an age where scepticism was rife and religious belief optional. If Burke had himself taken the ‘leap of faith’, as seems probable, the document provides further evidence about the character of his Christianity. Broadly, he was what may be called a latitudinarian, and indeed he has been identified as such.⁹⁵ This designation means that Burke thought dogma, church government, and liturgical practice secondary to the belief in fundamentals and the exercise of virtue. Himself undogmatic, he was tolerant of other opinions, even other religions. Finally, he was anti-Calvinist in rejecting predestination and election, believing rather that human actions would earn rewards or retribution. Indeed, Burke’s unwillingness to believe in an eternity of punishment is one of the few documented articles of his creed.⁹⁶ Though Burke never wrote an exposition of his faith, some notion of its nature can be gained from the reading that he recommended to the sceptic. For one who was ‘in the habits of Metaphysics’, Burke recommended Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (); for others, Addison’s Spectator papers on religion. These epitomize what is meant by ‘latitudinarianism’. Especially pertinent is The Spectator, no. ( Aug. ), which includes Addison’s poem ‘The spacious firmament on high’, a classic expression of the religious universalism that Burke espoused. His description of Addison’s religion may stand as a definition of his own: ‘a Christian, in the most enlarged sense of the word’. Burke was a Christian by historical contingency, because he was born in Ireland. Had he never given much thought to religion, we might conclude that he was indeed a Christian by default, or at least by education. But the ample evidence of the attention Burke gave to the philosophy and politics of religion suggests that he should be believed when he describes himself as a Christian ⁹⁴ Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., and Jeffrey Hart, ‘Burke and Christianity’, Studies in Burke and his Time, (–), –. ⁹⁵ Frederick Dreyer, ‘Burke’s Religion’, Studies in Burke and his Time, (), –; J. C. D. Clark, English Society, – (nd edn. Cambridge, ), . ⁹⁶ Boswell, Journal, Mar. (Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, ), ); May (Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, ), ).
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‘much from conviction; more from affection’.⁹⁷ Yet Burke knew that, while belief in God was nearly universal, Christianity was not. Burke believed that ‘man is by his constitution a religious animal’ (R []). He respected nonChristian faiths. Did he also regard them as in some sense ‘true’? The most intriguing case is Hinduism.⁹⁸ The excursus on the Hindus in his speech at the opening of the Hastings trial is extraordinarily favourable, even allowing for its rhetorical purpose ( Feb. : WS vi. –). Burke was not alone in his respect for Hinduism.⁹⁹ Yet professed Christians were reluctant to accord it the same status as Christianity. Sir William Jones (–), for example, respected Hinduism as much as any European of the time. He regarded the Hindu notion of immortality as ‘incomparably more rational, more pious, and more likely to deter men from vice, than the horrid opinions inculcated by Christians on punishments without end’. Even so, he boggled when Hindu chronology conflicted with that implied by the Old Testament, and proved unwilling to abandon the biblical account of history.¹⁰⁰ An admirer of Richard Price, Jones subscribed to a distinctively Protestant and ‘rational’ (in the modern sense) version of Christianity. He was therefore reluctant to disclaim the authority of the Bible. Burke was more flexible, describing the Bible (in the context of arguing against its suitability as a standard of faith) as ‘one of the most miscellaneous books in the world’ ( Feb. : WS ii. ). This was before he had much studied Indian religion. In , Nathaniel Brassey Halhed published his translation of A Code of Gentoo Laws, a book that Burke admired, and cited at the Hastings trial.¹⁰¹ In the Preface, Halhed cautiously insinuated an attitude to Hinduism that Burke may have shared. Unlike Jones, he did not reject Hindu chro-nology out of hand. Noting that Christians and Hindus both place the ‘same confidential Reliance’ in their respective scriptures, he attributes this to ⁹⁷ E.B. to an unknown correspondent (the author of A Comparison of the Opinions of Mr Burke and Monsr Rousseau, ), Jan. (C vi. ). ⁹⁸ E.B. accepted Judaism and Islam as deserving of toleration and respect (to William Burgh, Feb. ; to John Erskine, June : C iii. , iv. ). Nevertheless, he spoke more harshly of both than he ever did of Hinduism. At the time of the Ochakov crisis, he deplored, on religious grounds, any alliance with the Turks ( Mar. : PH xxix. –). No condemnation could be stronger than E.B.’s using Islam as a metaphor for Irish Protestantism (to Richard Burke, Jr., Mar. : C vii. ). At the trial of Hastings, he described ‘the era of the Prophet Mahomet’ as one ‘of great misfortune to that Country [India] and to the world in general’ ( Feb. : WS vi. ). The anti-Semitic references in the Reflections likewise indicate a distaste for some aspects of contemporary Judaism (Frans De Bruyn, ‘AntiSemitism, Millenarianism, and Radical Dissent in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, (), –). E.B. aligns both Islam and Judaism with the intolerant ‘Protestantism’ that he abhorred. Of Hinduism, he never speaks unfavourably. ⁹⁹ P. J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, ); Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, ), –. ¹⁰⁰ Jones, ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’ (), repr. in British Discovery of Hinduism, –; to Lord Spencer, Aug., – Sept. , in Letters, ed. Garland Cannon (Oxford, ), ii. , –. ¹⁰¹ E.B. said of the Code that ‘there are very few books, if we were to take them by a small body of extracts, that would exceed that book’ ( Feb. : WS vi. ). In his Speech in Reply, he read a lengthy paraphrase from it ( May : vii. –).
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‘mistaken Prejudices’ on the part of the Hindus. But no careful reader would mistake the implications of Halhed’s admission that both groups have an ‘equal Right . . . to suppose the Veracity of their own Scriptures incontrovertible’.¹⁰² In Voltaire or Gibbon, such a comment would be presumed ironic, as equally subverting both. Halhed, however, if not orthodox, was no sceptic. Indeed, in he was a convert to the ‘prophet’ Richard Brothers (–). Later, he searched for divine truths in Hindu scriptures as well as in the Bible, and believed himself the recipient of direct revelations.¹⁰³ If Burke remained personally within the Christian fold, he too may have believed that both religions emanated from the same Providence. The paper on religion was one of Burke’s last sustained mental efforts. The stream of detailed medical bulletins likewise ends with the Burkes’ departure for Beaconsfield on May. The most informative account of Burke in June comes from Dr Parry’s son, Charles Henry Parry (–). Parry provides an engaging picture of Burke at his best, despite ‘an evident decline in his physical powers’: The greatest Orator & Statesman of the times, threw into his private circle all the charm which drew attention to his superior powers in public Life. He appeared to be all mind, & yet transcendent as was his Capacity, & extensive as was his knowledge, no inferiority was felt, when Burke conversed. His range of subject was almost universal. With every Art & Science, he seemed to be familiar, certainly so familiar as to draw from all sources, illustrations & examples.
One occasion may even reveal the origin of a celebrated Burkean metaphor: In the beautiful Evenings of June, he has sometimes walked, leaning on my arm, to his Farm . . . & made frequent pauses to admire the beauties of the Scene. After the turbulent Season of political life, he quietly enjoyed the tranquillity of the Country. He had particular pleasure in watching his Cows quietly chewing the Cud. That animal, said he, gives me a more complete idea of Repose, than any other object in nature.¹⁰⁴
This anecdote suggests that Burke’s contrast between ‘half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern’ making a noise while ‘thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent’ (R [–]) may have been inspired by an actual scene at his farm.¹⁰⁵ As late as the beginning of July, Burke was capable of rallying. On the nd, Laurence saw him ‘looking rather better’ than he had two weeks previously. On the th, Burke could still ‘eat a very hearty breakfast of mutton-chops’ ¹⁰² A Code of Gentoo Laws, or Ordinations of the Pundits (London, ), p. xiii. ¹⁰³ Rosane Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry, and the Millennium: The Checkered Life of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, – (Delhi, ), –, –. ¹⁰⁴ ‘Memoirs’ (written c.; Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. d. , pp. –). ¹⁰⁵ Parry seems to have been unaware that E.B. was dying. As the young man left, E.B. invited him to revisit Beaconsfield every year. Parry, who did not want to follow his father into medicine, briefly
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before going back to bed.¹⁰⁶ Later that day, however, there was a ‘sudden change’ for the worse. After taking a purge, ‘as he went from a Night Chair to his Bed’, he collapsed and was briefly unconscious. By the evening, he felt ‘tranquil & even recovered’, but on the th he fainted while vomiting and could barely move without assistance. Sensing that the end was near, Burke spoke to Edmund Nagle alone, telling him ‘some things I am to communicate to Mrs B. after his death’.¹⁰⁷ During this ‘private conversation’, Burke asked to be buried in a ‘spot unmarked, seperate from his Son Wife & Brother on Account of the French Revolutionists’. Burke was feverish at the time, and Nagle said that he would not regard this as Burke’s final intention unless he repeated it the next day (which he appears not to have done). Woodford thought the strange request showed ‘something like wandering & as if his Head was going’, and that Burke was ‘otherwise rather incoherent’.¹⁰⁸ These are the first intimations of any kind of intellectual failing. Burke’s appetite had not diminished, and he consumed a turbot ‘with much Satisfaction’. He was anxious to hear Grattan’s ‘Address to the Citizens of Dublin’, on which he commented, but otherwise ‘does not willingly I think take notice of any thing, but when put upon it, will talk as usual’. The next day his mind seemed to one observer, ‘perfectly indifferent to every thing’, to another ‘great to the last. Full of energy & vigour, collected and composed’.¹⁰⁹ The discrepancy between these comments probably reflects different moments of observation. Burke certainly discussed Henry Grattan’s ‘Address’ with some animation (Laurence to Fitzwilliam, July: C ix. ). Sublime and minute to the end, he spent much of his last two days reading Wilberforce’s recently published Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (), while not forgetting ‘minute occurences connected with ordinary Life’, sending ‘messages to his Gardner & Bayliffe about the Clover & the flowers which he feared had been neglected since he went upstairs’.¹¹⁰ Finally, late on the night of July, as he was moved from the couch to his bed, he fainted, and then vomited, after which he ‘gave scarce any sign of life, no Groans, no Convulsion’. Jane asked for ‘the Service of the Sick’ to be read. His breath grew weaker and weaker, so that his final passing, soon after midnight, was imperceptible.¹¹¹ A death mask was taken, which entertained ‘dreams of eminence, & public utility’ as a result of E.B.’s patronage. These, alas, were soon disappointed, and Parry submitted to the fate of being a doctor (Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. d. , p. ). ¹⁰⁶ Laurence to Fitzwilliam, July (NRO FC). ¹⁰⁷ Edmund Nagle to Fitzwilliam, , July (NRO FC). ¹⁰⁸ Woodford to Windham, July (BL Add. MS , fos. –). ¹⁰⁹ Woodford to Windham, , July (BL Add. MS , fos. –, ); Nagle to Sir Gilbert Elliot, July (YB OF .). ¹¹⁰ Fitzwilliam to Thomas Hussey, July (WWM, BkP b/). Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce (nd edn. London, ), ii. (on the authority of Frances Crewe). Thomas Hume to French Laurence, [ July ] (YB OF .). ¹¹¹ Woodford to Windham, ‘’ [] July (BL Add. MS , fos. –).
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preserves the characteristic turn of the mouth, familiar from so many caricatures (Plate ).¹¹²
In his will, Burke asked that that his funeral should be like that of his brother, and if possible no more expensive.¹¹³ To French Laurence, however, he explained that ‘he did not mean to preclude his friends from those last offices, which might be attended with gratification to them, though with no advantage to him.’¹¹⁴ In accordance with these wishes, Burke was buried in Beaconsfield church, after a simple ceremony. The funeral was fixed for Saturday, July, in the evening, to enable the Speaker of the House of Commons to attend. The hearse left Gregories at p.m., preceded by the members of a local friendly society dressed in mourning cloaks and hatbands, followed by two mourning coaches carrying relatives and intimates (but not Jane, since, by the custom of the time, women did not attend), Burke’s own coach, empty, and other empty coaches sent by neighbouring families as a mark of respect. This procession went first to Mary Haviland’s house in Beaconsfield, nearer to the church, where Burke’s friends assembled. The distinguished pall-bearers were William Windham, Sir Gilbert Elliot, Lord Inchiquin, Henry Addington (the Speaker), Lord Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Portland, the Duke of Devonshire (–), and Lord Chancellor Loughborough. (A slight awkwardness was that Portland and Fitzwilliam were still not on speaking terms.) At p.m., the cortège, now including the curate of the parish and two other local clergymen, and about thirty of Burke’s friends, proceeded to the church, where his body was interred.¹¹⁵ Then the grandees departed, and Beaconsfield ceased to be a name on the political map of Europe. Jane let the home farm, but continued to reside at the great house. Forced to consider selling the estate in , she was saved by the rise in agricultural prices stimulated by the Napoleonic wars. In , she sold the reversion to James Du Pré (–; owner of the neighbouring Wilton Park estate) for £,. She died in . In , the house ¹¹² The death mask is said to have been taken at the ‘especial desire of Queen Charlotte’ (Laurence Hutton, Portraits in Plaster from the Collection of Laurence Hutton (New York, ), ). I am grateful to Professor M. H. Kaufman for showing me the exemplar now in the possession of the William Ramsay Henderson Trust, inherited from the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. ¹¹³ E.B.’s will (signed on Aug. , just after R.B. Jr.’s death, with a codicil signed on Jan. ), is printed in C ix. –. ¹¹⁴ Laurence to Fitzwilliam, July (NRO FC). ¹¹⁵ French Laurence, ‘Account of Mr Burke’s Funeral (YB OF ); Elizabeth R. Lambert, Edmund Burke of Beaconsfield (Newark, Del., ), –.
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burned down, while being altered for use as a school.¹¹⁶ Beaconsfield remained something of a backwater until the coming of the railway, since when the estate has been largely built over, though Walk Wood remains as a spot of classic ground for the imaginative Burkean. While the more sentimental may regret not being able to visit the house, or the site where Humund Rao dressed his dinner, there is a more philosophical and durable satisfaction in searching for Burke’s monument not in stone but in the living legacy: in the books that are in every library, in the ideas that retain their power to engage and inspire, and in the words that are among the most eloquent in the language. Though Burke in his will named Jane as sole executrix as well as legatee, the actual business fell largely on his unofficial literary executors, Walker King and French Laurence. Almost at once, they began the process of posthumous publication of Burke’s Nachlass. First to appear was Three Memorials on French Affairs (September ). This was followed by Two Letters on the Conduct of our Domestic Parties (October), in which an authorized edition of Observations on the Conduct of the Minority (pirated by Owen in February) was accompanied by the hitherto unpublished ‘Letter to William Elliot’. These were all texts which Burke had left complete or nearly so. Rather more controversial was the decision to publish, in November, the Third Letter on a Regicide Peace, a substantial section of which is an editorial continuation of Burke’s manuscript. In , when another failed harvest replicated the conditions of , King and Laurence likewise fabricated Thoughts and Details on Scarcity from Burke’s unfinished ‘Letter to Arthur Young’ and his memorandum to Pitt. Then the process slowed, and not until was the Burke canon substantially extended. In that year a new volume of his Works gave the public his ‘History of England’, the ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’, and many shorter pieces. In , the Ninth and Eleventh Reports of the Select Committee, and the Articles of Charge against Hastings, were reprinted as a further volume of the Works. Two final volumes (–) made available texts of Burke’s formal speeches at the trial.¹¹⁷ The canon thus formed was reprinted many times throughout the nineteenth century. In publishing Burke’s remains, King and Lawrence were motivated by a desire to transmit Burke’s ideas to an immediate public, and to posterity. In their day, editors were expected to ‘edit’ posthumous publications with more freedom and discretion than is thought appropriate today. Unfortunately, much of the manuscript material on which they based such crucial texts as Thoughts and Details on Scarcity has not survived, so that their work stands as a permanent shield between Burke and his readers. In compensation, a large mass of unpublished papers, much of it unused by King and Laurence, is extant. Most of it was preserved among the papers of Lord Fitzwilliam, at his two great houses (Wentworth Woodhouse near ¹¹⁶ Prior, Memoir of Burke, ii. –.
¹¹⁷ Todd, , , , , .
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Rotherham, and Milton near Peterborough), and did not become widely available for scholarly study until , so that only in did an edition of Burke’s Writings and Speeches, based on modern ideas of textual integrity, begin to appear.¹¹⁸ Even this edition is selective, and many of Burke’s manuscripts, especially drafts and notes for speeches, remain unpublished, a rich resource for the patient and painstaking scholar.¹¹⁹ Burke’s letters form an integral part of his political writings, as King and Laurence recognized when they published some of the more obviously public ones in the posthumous Works.¹²⁰ More extensive publication was inhibited by contemporary standards of propriety.¹²¹ In , Burke’s entire correspondence with French Laurence was published, and in the fifth Lord Fitzwilliam and Sir Richard Bourke edited a four-volume general selection.¹²² As with the Writings and Speeches, a scholarly edition of Burke’s letters had to wait for the Fitzwilliam papers to become available.¹²³ Nor is the harvest quite complete. Of the numerous letters sold at auction since about , most may be presumed still to exist and to be awaiting rediscovery and publication.¹²⁴ Admittedly, neither the unpublished drafts nor the ‘lost’ letters are likely to change the general perception of Burke and his legacy. However much a biographer or historian may regret the loss of particular letters, or of adequate reports of what Burke on some occasions said in the Commons, the general contours of Burke’s ideas, and indeed most of the finer points, are adequately represented by what he himself published. Apart from publishing Burke’s posthumous works, King and Laurence also undertook to write a biography. Initially, the task was assumed by Laurence, who seems, however, to have done little. After Laurence’s death (in ), King (evidently inheriting no materials) conceived the desperate plan of ‘dividing & subdividing it into Compartments’ and then seeking ‘Artists who will each work on the different parts’.¹²⁵ Nothing came of this initiative. Laurence and King enjoyed one incomparable resource as biographers: the use of Burke’s papers. These, however, are scanty for the early period of his ¹¹⁸ Writings and Speeches, ed. Paul Langford et al. (Oxford, – ). W. B. Todd was responsible for the textual editing of the writings. I regret his decision to use as copy texts the latest editions revised by E.B., and to exclude substantive variants between editions. Readers interested in E.B.’s process of revision still need to consult the early editions. ¹¹⁹ The two main collections are at Sheffied Archives (WWM BkP) and at the NRO (Fitzwilliam (Burke) Papers). ¹²⁰ Todd, p. . ¹²¹ Fitzwilliam to Laurence, [] (NRO FC); Laurence to Loughborough, Sept. , in Epistolary Correspondence of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke and Dr French Laurence (London, ), –. ¹²² Epistolary Correspondence; Correspondence of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (London, ). ¹²³ Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland and others (Cambridge, –); sixty additional letters are printed in my ‘Unpublished Burke Letters’, English Historical Review, (), –; (), –; (), –. ¹²⁴ The list of untraced letters in C ix. – includes about fifty from E.B. ¹²⁵ King to William Elliot, Sept. (NLS MS , fo. ).
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life. Indeed, King and Laurence knew remarkably little about this, not even Burke’s correct date of birth.¹²⁶ They even possessed and transmitted some misinformation. In one of their posthumous prefaces, they claimed (on Burke’s authority) that ‘by the death of a brother . . . he had succeeded to upwards of £,’.¹²⁷ From his brother Garrett (c.–), Burke inherited the small estate at Clogher, which he sold in for £,. Had Burke received, in , so large an inheritance as £,, he would hardly have faced such formidable difficulties in funding the purchase of his estate in . Despite this paucity of information, in Laurence failed to secure a series of letters (since lost) from Burke to his early friend William Dennis.¹²⁸ Perhaps they still await rediscovery in some trunk or attic in Ireland. As early as , John Arbuthnot (–) quipped that the practice of publishing hasty, catchpenny, and usually scandalous biographies made Edmund Curll (d. ) ‘one of the new terrors of Death’.¹²⁹ Burke did not escape this fate. Charles M‘Cormick (c.–) obtained from William Thomas Swift (Burke’s sometime secretary) and perhaps others a small cache of Burke’s papers. These he used to give a documentary cast to an attack on Burke, from a Foxite point of view, lightly disguised as a biography.¹³⁰ M‘Cormick savaged Burke as a venal turncoat. His book is perhaps more properly regarded as the last of the pamphlet attacks on Burke (though an overgrown one) than as a biography. For the biographical tradition concerning Burke has been overwhelmingly laudatory, inaugurated in with a Life by Robert Bisset (c.–).¹³¹ The author of a Sketch of Democracy (), a survey of classical history written to demonstrate the folly of populist politics, Bisset was at least thoroughly in accord with Burke’s views on the French Revolution. His Burke is a wise and far-sighted statesman who towers above the petty squabbles of lesser men, leaving to posterity a storehouse of political wisdom. Bisset’s hagiography was transmitted to later generations by James Prior (c.–), a naval surgeon by profession who saw active service against Napoleon. As such, he had played his part in ‘the great struggle, now happily past’ against the French Revolution and its aftermath, just as Burke had ¹²⁶ Supra, i. . ¹²⁷ Preface to Two Letters (London, ), p. xxiii. The editors likewise mention ‘an ample estate which his grandfather had actually enjoyed’, though nothing has been discovered about this grandfather. ¹²⁸ French Laurence to J.B., , July (WWM BkP /–). The letters were shown to Laurence by Dr William Hales (–), who had known E.B. slightly. James Prior had access to some of these letters, and others were printed in the National Magazine, (C i. –). Hales himself published an extract from E.B. to Dennis, Nov. , in Irish Pursuits of Literature in A.D. and (Dublin, ), pp. xviii–xix (this escaped the notice of Copeland: C i. –). ¹²⁹ Arbuthnot to Swift, Jan. (Swift’s Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, –), iv. ). ¹³⁰ Memoirs of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: or, An Impartial Review of his Private Life, his Public Conduct (London, ). ¹³¹ The Life of Edmund Burke, Comprehending an Impartial Account of his Literary and Politics Efforts (London, ; nd edn. ).
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‘laboured so strenuously to defend . . . those venerable institutions of our country’ which had ‘proved the salvation of Europe’.¹³² Drawing extensively on Bisset, Prior undertook more research (or at least inquiry) into Burke’s early life. His Memoir of Burke thus remains valuable for the primary information that it preserves. First published in , and greatly expanded in , in it was again revised as a companion volume to the edition of Burke’s Works in Bohn’s British Classics, the standard Victorian edition of Burke.¹³³ No biography of Burke has enjoyed wider dissemination or longer currency than Prior’s. Its popularity is easy to understand. In his pages, nineteenth-century readers met the Burke they wanted to know: a wise statesman who represented the disinterested integrity and cautious but not obscurantist conservatism that had preserved Britain from revolution. Where M‘Cormick wrote an avowedly ‘Whig’ (or rather Foxite) account, Bisset and Prior were unashamedly ‘Tory’ biographers. A vigorous controversialist whose public career was clouded by partisan rancour, Burke is difficult to view dispassionately. Even today, the French Revolution has by no means faded into an event of merely historical interest. Until it does, only the blandest account of Burke can escape appearing, to those who do not share its point of view, partisan. Some, indeed, have postulated two Burkes, an idea memorably expressed by Thomas Moore in his life of Sheridan: His mind indeed, lies parted asunder in his works, like some vast continent severed by a convulsion of nature,—each portion peopled by its own giant race of opinions, differing altogether in features and language, and committed in eternal hostility with each other.¹³⁴
Moore’s image exaggerates and simplifies. Burke was professedly not a philosopher, nor engaged in a rigorous and relentless search for abstract truth. Over a long career, he responded to changing circumstances and conditions with remarkable consistency. To imagine all his utterances existing simultaneously, as they are perceived in retrospect, blurs a properly historical understanding of their totality. A more accurate and illuminating metaphor would be a geological deposit. For the materials from which the entity of ‘Burke’s thought’ is constructed are the residue of a lifetime’s intellectual activity, not all of which has left traces in the record. For analysis and study, his ideas may helpfully be isolated and displayed in cases like fossils. But true understanding requires that they be imaginatively resituated in the context of Burke’s career, where they form part of a meaningful sequence of debate and controversy. Far from being an isolated thinker whose ¹³² Memoir of Burke, i, pp. iii–iv. Prior dedicated the book to John Wilson Croker (–), Tory politician, his chief at the Admiralty. ¹³³ The Memoir was expanded into two volumes for a second edition (London, ), and revised again for a fifth (London, ), retitled Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. ¹³⁴ Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, ), .
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ideas evolved according to an internal logic, Burke was a politician responding to the needs of the immediate situation. The record of his ideas shows periods of relative stability, punctuated with moments of rapid upheaval, such as – and –. To take the analogy further would be fanciful, but the geological metaphor highlights the importance of contextualizing Burke’s ideas in their proper chronological strata, each layer the product of a particular historical moment. The totality of Burke’s thought is difficult to grasp. Selective quotation is tempting. Moore credited him with a ‘versatility’ comparable to Shakespeare’s, his writings possessing such a universality of application to all opinions and purposes, that it would be difficult for any statesman of any party to find himself placed in any situation, for which he could not select some golden sentence from Burke, either to strengthen his position by reasoning or illustrate and adorn it by fancy.¹³⁵
Political speakers indeed continue to draw on Burke in this way. Conversely, William Hazlitt (–), a radical in politics but still a passionate admirer of Burke, asserted that ‘the only specimen of Burke is, all that he wrote’.¹³⁶ Yet even this is hardly enough, for all that Burke wrote requires interpretation. Ignoring context invites distortion. For this reason, a biography is the least polemical form that the study of Burke can take. With patient attention to detail, with careful sifting of the evidence, the historical Burke can be as nearly as possible identified. The purpose of this biography has been to offer a detailed account of Burke’s life and political career. Though necessarily selective, the principle of selection has sought to represent the breadth of Burke’s interests, rather than the support of a particular interpretation. Nevertheless, no biographer can be neutral, and readers may expect a more explicit verdict on Burke’s character and career than emerges from the implied tribute of a thousand pages. Burke was always an outsider. Like other outsiders, he sought security, independence, and an assured place in the world. There were recognized routes to reach those goals, even for the son of a Dublin attorney. That Burke never quite achieved them reflects in part their genuine difficulty, and in part his own angular personality. For many, perhaps most, of Burke’s contemporaries, politics was primarily about power and patronage. Burke was unusual, in being a ‘new man’ and yet refusing to make personal advancement his primary goal. He preferred to be right, even at the expense of isolating himself within, and then breaking with, his own party. Nor, having broken with the Whigs, did he enlist under Pitt. His willingness to sacrifice personal advantage to principle, and to risk alienating all sides in the process, was an ¹³⁵ Ibid. ¹³⁶ ‘Character of Mr Burke’, in The Eloquence of the British Senate (); Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, ), vii. .
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undoubted strength. Yet it was also a weakness, for his sense of rectitude prevented his seeing an opponent’s point of view or accepting that different opinions might equally result from honestly held principles or values. Though self-righteousness and inflexibility made Burke a difficult friend or ally, he could inspire loyalty and love among his intimates. To those who fell under his spell, he was an oracle. At a low point in his career, after his defeat at the Bristol election of , his friend Richard Champion paid him this remarkable tribute: The first and greatest of my pleasures, next to that of my family, have been the result of his friendship. He has improved my mind, he has added to my Satisfactions. He found me in a narrow and contracted Circle, and taught me to forget the little prejudices affixed to the Situation, in which my Lot was cast. Weak as I am, whatever Strength I have, I owe to him.¹³⁷
Burke reciprocated this loyalty by his uncritical faith in his nearest and dearest. To his close relatives, in particular, to his son, his brother, and his cousin Will, he was absurdly partial. But his lack of judgement was a more general fault. It prevented his allowing sufficient weight to the opinions and especially the feelings of others. Possessed of boundless energy, Burke was relentlessly driven to be active. He needed causes for which to fight, and he was never temperate in his antagonisms. This trait, too, made him a difficult colleague. Burke’s insensitivity and refusal to compromise (in the parlance of his day, he was ‘impracticable’) proved insuperable barriers to his reaching the high office that his other talents deserved. He is probably the most talented British politician never to reach the Cabinet rank that he in some respects so richly merited. Nor was his career marked by any legislative achievements of the first rank. Admittedly, he achieved a number of successes, from the repeal of some outmoded Corn Laws to Economical Reformation and the reform of the Pay Office. But these are hardly why he is remembered. Of his two greatest causes, the impeachment of Hastings and the crusade against the French Revolution, neither resulted in a simple victory. The trial of Hastings, indeed, was upon the whole a failure, and not only in the sense that Hastings was acquitted. Though it succeeded in raising public awareness of India and the problems of governing it, Burke did not persuade contemporaries, and has not convinced posterity, to adopt his view of Hastings. In the Reflections, his prescient analysis of the Revolution (undoubtedly superior to Fox’s) articulated British fear of constitutional change, and has exercised a vast influence on posterity. Yet his later anti-revolutionary writings failed to give the war with France, for which some held him responsible, the ideological direction that he wanted. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of Burke’s career is the ¹³⁷ Champion to Portland, Sept. (NUL PwF ).
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gap between his acknowledged eloquence (admitted even by his firmest opponents) and his habitual inability to persuade. Another paradox is that the writings and speeches which failed to persuade their hearers have now retained their interest for many generations. Only a few historians now read the speeches of Fox, Pitt, or Sheridan. Burke’s have outlived their contexts. Two qualities have contributed to this longevity. One is Burke’s power of generalization. Philip Francis recorded that ‘what he professed to value chiefly in his own writings was, that they had a general taste or tincture of Philosophy’.¹³⁸ This ‘general tincture’ allows Burke to occupy a middle ground between doing no more than answering a particular question, and a degree of abstraction that fails to engage with the actual. Burke is not systematic, but this is a strength rather than a weakness. Working from a real problem, he appeals to principle, and his exposition of principles is often of lasting value. Not all of Burke’s lessons are likely to find a receptive audience at any one time. The history of his reputation amply illustrates this. For much of the nineteenth century, he was regarded as a great ‘liberal’ thinker, and his writings on the French Revolution were minimized or palliated. In the twentieth, he came to be regarded as ‘the father of conservatism’.¹³⁹ Whatever the mode of the moment, Burke’s writings can remind us of truths that are out of fashion or neglected. In an age of egalitarianism, for example, his insistence on the inevitability of inequalities, and the futility of any attempt to eradicate them, may prove salutary. Burke’s supreme gift, however, was not his wisdom but his eloquence. This was the product of ‘an Imagination uncommonly vigorous, lively, playful, & Luxuriant, which threw over all his Speeches, & most of his Writings all the graces, & beauties of the sublimest Eloquence’.¹⁴⁰ Burke’s powers of expression surely account for the admiration felt by those, such as Godwin and Hazlitt, who stood at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Working in a mature language with a thousand-year-old tradition already exploited by some of the world’s most gifted writers and thinkers, Burke extended its range and its capability. Before Milton, few supposed that English could be the vehicle for an epic poem that might rival the Aeneid. Burke showed that English could likewise challenge the hitherto unsurpassed eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero. For this achievement, he surely deserves Macaulay’s seemingly hyperbolical accolade, ‘the greatest man since Milton’.¹⁴¹ ¹³⁸ BL (OIOC) MS Eur. F. , fo. . ¹³⁹ Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, Burke to Santayna (Chicago, ), esp. –, . The ‘father’ image seems to postdate Kirk. ¹⁴⁰ Beilby Porteus, Transcript of ‘Occasional Memorandums’, vol. , entry dated July (Lambeth Palace Library, MS , fos. –). ¹⁴¹ Diary, Feb. , recording his rereading of ‘most of Burke’s works’ (George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London, ), ii. ).
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Index Account of the European Settlements in America , , Adair, James – Adam, William , , , , , Addington, Henry , , , , , Addison, Joseph n., ‘Address to the King’ n., Akbar Shah II Albemarle, Arnold Joost van Keppel, Earl of Alexander the Great Alfred, King of England Aliens Bill – Alivardi Khan , America , , n., –, American loyalists – American dispute and war –, , , , , , Declaration of Independence E. B.’s speeches on , , New York, E. B. agent for –, , Stamp Act , , , ‘ancient constitution’ –, –, , , Anderson, David –, , Andrews, Francis Anne, Queen of Great Britain Annual Register , – Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anstruther, John , n., manager of the impeachment of Hastings , speech at the trial other interventions –, , , –, , Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs , –, , majorities in , – ‘natural aristocracy’ in –, reception –, rights, claims of , Arabian Nights ‘arbitrary power’ , avowed by Erskine – as a defence of Hastings , –, –, –, tyranny of the majority Arbuthnot, John ‘Arcot, Nabob of ’, see Muhammad Ali Khan ‘Arcot squad’ n., Arden, Richard Pepper , – Argyle, John Campbell, Duke of Ariosto, Ludovico
aristocracy ‘natural aristocracy’ –, Whigs an aristocratic party , –, see also Reflections, chivalry in Aristotle , n., , n., , n. E.B. compared to Arthur, Archibald n. Artois, Charles-Phillipe de Bourbon, comte d’, later Charles X Asaf al-Daula, Wazir of Oudh –, , Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Atkinson, Richard n. Auckland, Lord, see Eden, William Aurangzeb Auriol, James Peter , Australia – Bacon, Francis Bagot, Sir William Bahu Begum, see Begums of Oudh Baker, William , –, Balbadhra Singh Balfour, Arthur Ballitore , –, Bank Dividends Bill Baretti, Giuseppe Barlow, Joel n. Barnard, Thomas (member of Literary Club) Barnard, Thomas (cartographer) – Barré, Isaac Barrington, Shute Barrow, John S. – Barry, James Barwell, Richard , , , n. Basset, Sir Francis Bateman, William n. Bayard, Pierre du Terrail, seigneur de Bayle, Pierre n. Beaconsfield (E. B.’s estate) –, , , , , , – dispute with Waller – farm and farming , , , , finances – Humund Rao at – neighbours , , , , robbery visitors , , , , , –, Bearcroft, Edward Beattie, James Beauchamp, Francis Seymour Conway, styled Viscount ,
Beaufoy, Henry Beccaria, Cesare Bonesana, marchese di n. Beckett, James n. Beckford, William Bede, the Venerable Bedford, Francis Russell, Duke of , –, , – ‘Begums of Oudh’ , , – see also Hastings, Warren, charges against and Sheridan Richard Brinsley, and the Begums of Oudh Bellenden, William , Belsham, William n., , n. Bembridge, Charles –, Benfield, Paul , , Bengal Judicature Act , , ‘Bengal squad’ , n., –, , , Benn, John –, Bennet, William , , Bentham, Jeremy , , Beresford, John – Bible , – Samuel Psalms , Matthew n. Luke – Biron, Amélie de Boufflers, duchesse de Bisset, Robert – Black, Joseph Blackstone, Sir William n., n., n., –, n., n. Blair, Alexander Blaquiere, Sir John –, n. Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount , ‘Bolingbroke’ (pamphleteer) n., Boothby, Sir Brooke n., , n., Boswell, James n., , , , , –, on E.B. n., relations with E.B. –, , – E.B. in Journal of a Tour – E.B. in the Life of Johnson – E.B. quotes Life at trial of Hastings and Hastings , – Botany Bay –, Boulton, Matthew Bousfield, Benjamin n. Bowie, Patrick Bowles, John Boyne, John , Bright, Richard –, Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre Bristol , , , electioneering at , , E.B. as MP would not like to live there Brocklesby, Richard , n., n. Broome, Ralph , Brothers, Richard
Brown, John Bruce, Michael n. Brunswick, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of , Buckingham, Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, George Nugent Grenville, Marquis of, see Temple, Earl Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de , Burges, James Bland n., , , , , n. defends Hastings in Parliament – attacks impeachment and its cost – revulsion against French Revolution n. praises Reflections and the French Revolution n., , Burgh, Thomas , Burgoyne, John , –, n. Burke, Edmund, calumny and abuse –, , n., n., n., – apostasy and inconsistency , –, , , , , , – crypto-Catholic Don Quixote , , Irishness , Jesuit , n., , madness , , , , –, , , , , , , , secret pension , Burke, Edmund, caricatures , , , n. break with Fox n., – ‘dagger’ scene ( Dec. ) Hastings trial , , –, –, inconsistency Letter to a Noble Lord madman , , Reflections , Regency Crisis , Burke, Edmund, death and funeral – Burke, Edmund, finances , – debts – pension , –, , – Burke, Edmund, health , , , – Burke, Edmund, portraits , , Burke, Edmund, speeches in Parliament: Feb. (Stamp Act) n., Nov. (East India enquiry) Feb. (Wilkes) n. Feb. (Feathers Tavern Petition) , Apr. (East India Company) Mar. (toleration) June (East India Bill) Apr. see Speech on American Taxation Mar. see Speech on Conciliation Nov. (America)
May (Hulks Bill) Apr. (Birmingham Playhouse) Feb (Indian allies) n. May (Irish trade) n. May (Irish trade) n. Apr. (clerical subscription) May (parliamentary reform) Apr. (India) Apr. (king’s message) Apr. (India) May (recall of Hastings) Dec. (report of address) n. Dec. (recall of Hastings) Apr. (Hastings) Dec. see Speech on Fox’s India Bill June see A Representation to his Majesty June (parliamentary reform) July (Pitt’s India Bill) –, n., July (Hastings) , , , , Jan. (address) Feb. (Westminster scrutiny) Feb (Westminster scrutiny) n. Feb. (Irish propositions) Feb. (Irish propositions) Feb. (East India Judicature) n. Feb. see Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts Mar. (Offices Reform Bill) Mar. (Lancashire petition) n. Mar. (transportation) – Apr. (parliamentaray reform) May (Irish propositions) June (Hastings) Jan. (Hastings) Feb. (Hastings) Mar. (Maratha papers) Mar. (Hastings) Apr. (Hastings) Apr. (Hastings) – May (Pitt’s India Bill) n. May (Hastings) – May (Hastings) May (Hastings) – May (Hastings) June (Rohilla War) –, , – June (E.B.’s notice of motion) n. June (East India Company petition) n. June (Call of the House) – Jan (Portugal trade) n. Feb. (French treaty) – Jan. (Hastings) Jan. (Hastings) Feb. (Hastings) , – Feb. (Hastings) –, Feb. (Hastings) Feb. (French treaty) Feb. (Hastings)
Feb. (customs and excise) Mar. (Hastings) Mar. (Scottish weavers’ petition) n. Mar. (Hastings) Mar. (East Indian Judicature) –, Mar. (Skynner’s pension) Mar. (Hastings) – Mar. (Hastings) Apr. (Hastings) – Apr. (Hastings) – Apr. (Hastings) Apr. (Budget) Apr. (Hastings) May (Hastings) – May (Hastings) May (London petition) May (Hastings) – Dec. (nomination of Francis) – Dec. (Hessian subsidy) Feb. (Impey) Feb. (Impey) Feb. (Impey) Feb. (Impey) Mar. (East India Declaratory Bill) May (impeachment costs) May (Impey) May (slave trade) – May (Quebec petition) n. May (impeachment costs) June (impeachment costs) Dec. (Regency) – Dec. (Regency) – Dec. (Regency) – Jan. (Regency) Jan. (Regency) Jan. (Regency) Jan. (Regency) Jan. (Regency) Feb. (Regency) Feb. (Regency) Feb. (Regency) Feb. (Regency) – Feb. (Regency) Apr. (Hastings) n., – Apr. (Hastings) May (slave trade) May (slave trade) May (uprooting trees) Feb. see Speech on the Army Estimates Mar. (Test and Corporation Acts) –, Mar. (parliamentary reform) Mar. (Mustapha Khan) n. Mar. (Mustapha Khan) n. Apr. (Hastings) May (Nootka Sound) n. May (Hastings)
Burke, Edmund, speeches in Parliament: (cont.) May (Scott’s libel) Nov. (abatement) Dec. (abatement) Dec. (abatement) , Dec. (Somerset House) , n. Dec. (abatement) – Feb. (Horne Tooke’s petition) Mar. (Bank Dividends) Mar. (Bank Dividends) Mar. (Ochakov) , n. May (Quebec Bill) n., – May (Quebec Bill) – May (insolvent debtors) n. May (limitation of impeachment) Apr. (parliamentary reform) – May (Unitarians) –, , , n. Dec. (address) , – Dec. (report of address) – Dec. (negotiation with France) n., – Dec. (Aliens Bill) – Feb.– June (war with France) – Feb. (war with France) n. Mar. (war with France) n. May (Hastings) June (Hastings) June (Hastings) Jan. (address) Jan. (naval estimates) Mar. (Hastings) Mar. (Hastings) Mar. (Lafayette) Apr. (enlistment of émigrés) Apr. (enlistment of émigrés) Apr. (Hastings) n. Apr. (Hastings) June (thanks to managers) Burke, Edmund, speeches at the trial of Hastings: Opening Speech (, , , Feb. ) –, , –, , Presents Speech (, Apr., , May ) –, – Speech in Reply ( May– June ) , –, , n. Burke, Edmund, other interventions at the trial: – –, n. – – – – –, Burke, Edmund, wit and humour , , –, , , n.
Burke, Edmund, writings and published speeches, see under titles Burke, Garrett Burke, Jane , , , , , in caricature health , –, , – travels , , , after E.B.’s death , – Burke, Juliana , , n. Burke, Richard, Sr. (E.B.’s brother) , , , , , counsel at the trial of Hastings death – finances , , , – on fraud and felony health , , Recorder of Bristol , travels , Burke, Richard, Jr. (E.B.’s son) , , , , , death, false report of E.B.’s biographical sketch and E.B.’s pension and peerage – finances , Fitzwilliam, relations with health , last illness and death –, , , , , –, , and Ireland –, –, , , , , , , , mission to Koblenz , MP for Malton – defends Reflections to abbé Maury – visits to France , Burke, William , –, agent for Tanjore – finances –, , –, – translation of Brissot n. Burney, Charles , n., – Burney, Charles, Jr. Burney, Frances at the trial of Hastings –, –, , , , , –, compares E.B. and Fox as speakers on Speech on the Army Estimates on the Reflections Burney, James , Burrell, Sir Peter Bute, John Stuart, Earl of Butler, John (Bishop of Hereford) n. Butler, John (of Canterbury) – Butler, Joseph Butler, Samuel n. Byron, Frederick George , n. Cade, Jack n., Caillaud, John –
Caligula Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de , , – Camden, Charles Pratt, Earl , n. Camelford, Lord, see Pitt, Thomas Campbell, Duncan Campbell, Ilay Campbell, Thomas – Cantemir, Demetrius n., – ‘Cantoo Baboo’, see Krishna Kanta Nandy Carnarvon, Lord, see Porchester, Lord Carnatic, Nawab of the, see Muhammad Ali Khan Carnot, Lazare-Nicholas-Marguerite n. ‘Case of the Suffering Clergy of France’ Catherine II, Empress of Russia , Cato, Marcus Porcius, the elder ‘Causidicus’ n. Cavendish, Lord John n., n. Cervantes, Miguel , Chait Singh, Raja of Benares , , , , Hastings and –, , –, , status as zemindar –, Chalmers, George – Chambers, Sir William Champion, Richard –, Charlemont, James Caulfeild, Earl of , , Charles I, King of England –, , Charles VI, King of France , , n. Charlotte, Queen of Great Britain , , , , ‘protection’ of Hastings reads Speech on the Army Estimates Charsley, Robert , , Chatham, Hester Pitt, Countess of Chatham, John Pitt, nd Earl of Chatham, William, st Earl of, see Pitt, William Chedworth, John Howe, Lord Chhatar Singh, Rana of Gohad n., – Choiseul, Étienne-François de ChoiseulStainville, duc de Choiseul, Louise-Honorine Crozat du Châtel, duchesse de Christie, James Christie, Thomas –, , n., , , , n. Cicero, Marcus Tullius , , , n., , E.B. compared to , , –, , E.B. compares himself to Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clavering, General Sir John –, , Clive, Robert , , Clogher , –, Cloots, ‘Anarcharsis’ clubs: E.B.’s Dublin Literary Club , ,
Cnut, King of England n. Coalition, the Fox-North –, , , , , n., dismissal of , , , . Dissenters hostile to , E.B. on , and India , , –, , Coats, William n. Coke, Sir Edward Coleridge, Samuel Taylor –, Colquhoun, Patrick n. Conolly, Thomas – Cooper, Sir Grey , , n. Cooper, Samuel n. Coote, Sir Eyre , Cornwallis, Charles, Earl , n., , , testifies at the trial of Hastings –, Cotton, Sir John Hynde Courtenay, John , n., , , n. Cowper, William Crewe, Frances Anne , , , , Crewe, John , Crompton, Thomas Cromwell, Oliver Crook, Robert , Cruikshank, Isaac , , n., , Curll, Edmund Curwen, John Christian Dallas, George Dallas, Robert speeches at the trial of Hastings , other interventions , –, n., –, – Dalton, Edward Danby, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Daniell, Thomas Daniell, William Deluc, Jean-André Demosthenes , , , , , Dempster, George , , , Denham, Sir John Dennis, William , Dent, William –, n. Depont, Charles-Jean-François n., –, , , Depont, Jean-Samuel Derby, Edward Smith Stanley, Earl of Devereux, John Devi Singh –, , Devonshire, William Cavendish, Duke of n., , Dillon family Diogenes Dissent and Dissenters , , , – E.B. and –, – and election ,
Dissent and Dissenters (cont.) and the French Revolution and the Reflections – Society of Friends – repeal of Test and Corporation Acts –, –, , , , , Unitarians and Unitarian Society n., –, Dodsley, James Dolben, Sir William n. Dorset, John Frederick Sackville, Duke of , Douglas Cause , Douglas, John – Douglass, John Dow, Alexander n. Drake, William, Jr. Drigbijai Singh Duff, Patrick Dundas, Henry , , , , and Arcot debts –, in caricature E.B. attacks , – E.B. shows Fitzwilliam’s letter to calls E.B. to order invites E.B. to Wimbledon praises Appeal from the New Whigs and E.B.’s pension on E.B. as prophet and Hastings –, –, , , , –, –, , , n., , –, as minister for India , , and Ireland – in negotiations to heal ministerial split – scarcity, asks E.B.’s opinion on and Secret Committee on East India Company , and the slave trade – Dunning, John Du Pac Bellegarde, Baron – Dupont, Pierre-Gaëton n., Du Pré, James Du Pré, Josias Earlsfort, Lord n. East India Company –, , , , Bengal Judicature Act , , courts and criminal justice , n., E.B. and – Fox’s India Bills , n., , , , , , , , ‘Indianism’ and Indian delinquents , , , , , North’s India Act () , , , , , , North’s Regulating Act () payment of Hastings’s legal costs and pension , , –
Pitt’s Act , , , , , , , Pitt’s Judicature Acts , – revenue collection –, , – Secret Committee , Supreme Court –, see also Select Committee ‘Economical Reformation’ , , , , , E.B. defends in Letter to a Noble Lord and E.B.’s pension economics: farming , – free trade , free ports – labour and wages , –, limits of State activity – ‘moneyed men’ – poverty , –, state subsidy of provisions –, taxes war, economic effects of Eden, William, later Lord Auckland –, –, n., –, n. Edward III, King of England Edward, the Black Prince – elections, evils of , , elections, general: , n., , , , , , –, , – Elliot, Sir Gilbert n., n., , , , at Beaconsfield , – E.B., panegyric on , n., n. E.B. visits at Minto , – French Revolution, opinions on n. and Hastings , , , Impey, impeachment of , –, in Regency Crisis –, – on Sheridan as a speaker , Elliot, John Elliot, William , , , , , Ellis, Welbore , n. Emin, Joseph Enquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans, An Erskine, Sir James , , , , – Erskine, Dr John Erskine, Thomas –, n., –, , – ‘Essay towards a History of the Laws of England’ Estienne, Henri Faizullah Khan , , Falconer, William n. Ferguson, Adam – Fermanagh, Mary Verney, Lady ,
Fernyhough, William – n. Fife, James Duff, Earl Fitzgerald, Lady Sophia FitzGibbon, John, Lord –, , , Fitzherbert, Maria Anne Fitzherbert, William n. Fitzpatrick, Richard n., Fitzwilliam, William Wentworth, Earl , n., , , –, approves Appeal from the New Whigs E.B.’s relations with –, E.B. visits , , on R.B. Jr.’s death – Fox, reluctance to break with –, –, , and Hastings in ‘Letter to Elliot’ ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’ (Regicide Peace, Letter IV) –, , as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland , , , –, and Malton – opposes peace with France approves Reflections on the Whig party Flood, Henry – Foster, Lady Elizabeth Fox, Charles James , , , , , , , n., , in caricatures , , , –, dedicatee of Parr’s Bellenden , and the Dissenters , –, , – and French Revolution –, , , , n., , , , , – and Hastings –, , manager of the impeachment of Hastings , , speeches at the trial –, –, , –, other interventions –, , , , , , , , , –, – and parliamentary reform –, , Pitt, rivalry with –, , , , , , –, and Quebec Bill and the Regency Crisis –, –, on rights and Rockingham party , , as speaker , –, –, , war with France, opposes , and Westminster –, , , –, – idea of Whig party fêted in Yorkshire Fox, Charles James, relations with E.B.: E.B.’s early dissatisfaction with , , during Regency Crisis , ,
Fox favours abandoning the impeachment – quarrel in Feb.–Mar. –, on the Reflections , break in May – E.B. denounces at party meeting In ‘Observations on the Conduct of the Minority’ – Fox, Charles James, speeches in Parliament: abatement of impeachment address American loyalists Bank Dividends Bill Dutch crisis E.B., thanks to France, against war with , , Francis, exclusion of French Revolution –, n., Hastings , –, , , n. Impey, libel on India , –, – Ochakov parliamentary reform , , Quebec Bill , – Regency Crisis –, repeal of Test and Corporation Acts –, scarcity Scott’s libel Horne Tooke’s petition ‘Fox’s Martyrs’ , , , , France: Assembly of Notables commercial treaty , , –, , E.B.’s knowledge of n., –, – parlements , , States General , , Wars of Religion France, war (and peace) with: Declaration of Oct. – Dunkirk, attempt on E.B. advocates war , – E.B. justifies in Parliament – E.B. critical of its conduct , –, E.B. opposes peace –, –, , –, – Toulon, capture of , – Valenciennes, capture of war of opinion , – Francis II, Emperor Francis, Philip on E.B. , exclusion as manager – and Hastings –, , , –, , –, , in India , , influence on E.B. , and Mustapha Khan n.
Francis, Philip (cont.) on the Reflections n., n., , , –, visits E.B. at Beaconsfield Franklin, Benjamin Frederick William II, King of Prussia , , , , – French, Mary Cecilia French Revolution: army –, Bastille , – British reactions –, cahiers de doléances causes Church property, nationalization of –, n., , –, , Civil Constitution of the Clergy , coin church bells, proposal to Committee of Safety Déclaration des droits de l’homme –, , , – decrees of Nov. Directory , –, , , , ‘dons patriotiques’ electoral system –, , émigrés –, –, – exiled clergy – flight of the royal family Grande peur historical precedents La Vendée, insurrection in , manifesto of Jan. monarchy abolished Nantes, confederation at National Assembly , n., , , –, , n., , national bank , October Days , –, – Pillnitz, Declaration of ‘pre-Revolution’ , revolutionary tribunals second chamber, rejection of , , , September massacres , –, States General see also Jacobinism Friends of the People, Association of the , Frith, John n. Fullarton, William n. Gambia – Ganga Govind Singh – Garrick, David Gellius, Aulus Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité, comtesse de ‘Geographical morality’ , , George III, King of Great Britain –, , , , ,
and Boswell’s Life of Johnson – E.B.’s conversation with, at Windsor and E.B.’s pension , opinion of the Reflections of the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs on party on peerages – and Regency Crisis – and royal prerogative , George, Prince of Wales, later George IV n., , –, , and Regency Crisis –, – Gibbon, Edward , n., , –, on the Reflections , Gifford, John n. Gill, William Gillray, James , , , , , , Gilpin, Martin Gilpin, William gin –, n. Glasgow , – Godwin, William v, Gohad, Rana of, see Chhatar Singh Goldsmith, Oliver n., Gordon, Jane, Duchess of n. Gordon, John , Goring, Charles , –, – Gower, George Granville Leveson Gower, styled Earl , n. Graham, James Graham, styled Marquis of – Grattan, Henry , , , Green, Thomas – Grenville, George , , Grenville, William Wyndham, later Lord Grenville , , , on abatement of impeachment – on Arcot debts E.B. attacks in the Commons , and E.B.’s pension – and France n., –, , , on Hastings , – Penn school, trustee of speeches in Parliament , , , , Grey, Charles attacks E.B. in the Commons n., and impeachment of Hastings , , speeches at the trial , other interventions , , –, and parliamentary reform –, Grey, John – Grose, Francis Guercino Gurney, Joseph n., , Guru Das Haidar Ali , , , n., Hailes, Sir Daid Dalrymple, styled Lord n.
Hale, Sir Matthew Hales, William Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey n., n., , , n., , – Hamilton, John James , Hamilton, William n. Hannay, Alexander , – Hardinge, George Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, st Earl of , Hardy, Thomas n. Hargrave, Francis n. Harris, Sir James, later Earl of Malmesbury –, n., – Harwood, William n., Hastings, Marian , Hastings, Warren: affinities with E.B. –, n. and Arcot creditors – attempted recall , – and Boswell , – career in India , – in caricatures , –, , character of himself – contrasts with E.B. – in Letter to a Noble Lord Margate, visits pension , –, –, n. Pitt, opinion of pre-impeachment proceedings against , , , –, –, ‘protected’ by Queen Charlotte n. Scotland, tour of n. supporters who praised the Reflections temples erected to Hastings, Warren, charges against: Begums of Oudh , , –, , , –, –, Benares –, –, , , –, Contracts and allowances –, –, n., , , –, –, Faizullah Khan , , Farrukhabad , ‘Libel on the Court of Directors’ –, n., Maratha War , , –, ‘Misdemeanours in Oudh’ ‘The Mogul delivered up to the Marattas’ , n. Mohammad Reza Khan , n. ‘murder’ of Nandakumar , , –, , , , n. Presents , , , , –, –, –, –, Raja of Salon , n. Rana of Gohad –, – n. resignation , n., Revenue –, , –, –
Rohilla War , n., , , , –, , , – Shah Alum –, n. Sulivan’s appointments , n. suppression of correspondence , n. Hastings, Warren, impeachment and trial of: abatement question – abusive language, E.B.’s , n. account of trial, proposal to print acquittal , – Articles of Charge –, , , Articles of Impeachment , –, bishops, attitude of committee of managers –, –, , –, –, –, , , debates in the Commons –, – defence before the Commons –, , Dutch crisis and – expenses –, – evidence, arguments about , –, –, –, –, –, –, –, – Hastings’s interventions , , , , , –, , his legal expenses length criticized – and Regency Crisis session of –, – session of – session of – session of – session of – session of – session of – session of – ‘syllabus’ of evidence, proposal to print – trial as theatre –, trial, where to be held – Hatsell, John n. Haviland, William Hawke, Edward, Lord Hawkesbury, Lord, see Jenkinson, Charles Hawkins, James n. Hazlitt, William , ‘Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs’ – Henri IV, King of France , Henry VIII, King of England , – Herbert, Newcomen Herodotus Hesse, Landgrave of, see William IX Hessian subsidy Hickey, Joseph n. Hickey, William n. history, E.B.’s theory of –, , , –, conspiracy theories , , , , ,
‘History of England’ –, , n., , , , Hobart, Robert –, Hodges, William –, , Holland, Henry Richard Fox, Lord Holt, Robert Homer , , , , Homer, Henry , Hood, Samuel, Lord –, –, , Horace , , Hornby, William n. Horsley, Samuel n. House, Samuel Hudson, Robert , Hulks Act ‘human rights’, see rights Hume, Sir Abraham n. Hume, David , Humund Rao –, , , Hurd, Richard n. Hussey, Thomas Hutchinson, John Hely , Hyland, Thomas n. impeachment (as a process) –, , – abatement question – Impey, Sir Elijah , , , n. E.B. accuses of ‘murdering’ Nandakumar n., , , impeachment , –, – libel on , witness at the trial of Hastings , Inchiquin, Mary, Countess of, see Palmer, Mary Inchiquin, Murrough O’Brien, Earl of –, India: ‘ancient constitution’ Benares –, , – Benares, Treaty of Carnatic , , – Chunar, Treaty of , courts and criminal justice , n., development of E.B.’s concern for , – E.B.’s vision of – Farrukhabad Hindu civilization , maps – Marathas , , , –, –, Rangpur atrocities –, , n., –, Salbai, Treaty of Tanjore –, –, zemindars , see also East India Company and Select Committee Ireland: Absentee Tax Catholic Committee –
Catholic relief , –, , –, –, – connection with Britain – E.B. visits – Fitzwilliam viceroyalty Great Famine history of – Jacobinization – ‘jobbing Junto’ (and like phrases) , , – legislative independence , parliamentary reform in –, – penal laws –, , Pitt’s Irish propositions () –, , , ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ , , , –, , , , –, n. union with Great Britain Irvine, William n. Jacobinism: Directory represents extirpation of, E.B. advocates , , –, –, , , , , – Fox and Jacobins in Britain ‘Indianism’ and –, influence of, in Europe – in Ireland , – number of Jacobins, E.B. calculates , – ruling classes indirectly promote – James II, King of England n., – James, Lady n. James, Sir William n. Jefferson, Thomas Jekyll, Joseph Jenkinson, Charles, later Lord Hawkesbury , , , –, n., Johnson, Joseph Johnson, Samuel n., , , , , , n., in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour – and E.B. – tributes to E.B. , , n. on E.B.’s wit –, and Hastings – on provision for the poor Johnson, Robert C. – Johnstone, Sir James Jones, Sir William n., Jonson, Ben Joseph II, Emperor ‘Junius’ , Kalyan Singh, Maharaja Kearney, Michael n. Kenmare, Lord n. Kenrick, Samuel , n.
Kenyon, Sir Lloyd, later Lord Kenyon: and Commons proceedings against Hastings , –, at the trial , , , , – Keogh, John Keppel, Augustus , King, Gregory – King, John , –, , King, Thomas King, Walker –, , , , as E.B.’s secretary and assistant –, n., , as his literary executor and editor n., , , – ‘king’s friends’ (and their ‘secret influence’) –, , Kippis, Andrew Knole Koran , Krishna Kanta Nandy Kyallaram, Raja –, , La Bintinaye, Agathon-Marie-René, chevalier de La Bintinaye, François-Marie, abbé de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste de Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de , Lafitau, Joseph-François Lally-Tolendal, Trophime-Gérard, comte de La Marche, Jean-François de, Bishop of St-Pol , – Landon, James n. Langrishe, Sir Hercules n., , –, Langton, Bennet , Lansdowne, Marquis of, see Shelburne, Earl of Larkins, William –, Laud, William , Lauderdale, James Maitland, th Earl of Lauderdale, James Maitland, th Earl of, see Maitland, Lord Laurence, French n., –, , , , n. on Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs n., correspondence with E.B. published as E.B.’s editor and literary executor , , , – on E.B.’s last illness , – and Hastings , , , Laurens, Henry Law, Edward – speeches at the trial of Hastings –, n., – other interventions n., –, –, –, –, , , –, –, –, –, , –, , , –, –
Law, Ewan , , , Law, Thomas law: attorneys in National Assembly , capital punishment , , , common law tradition , convicts crime and punishment –, custom Donellan’s case evidence, see Hastings, Warren, impeachment and trial fraud and felony insolvent debtors – international criminal courts manorial courts – natural law n., , , , , Nullum Tempus , Omichund v. Barker , penitentiaries prescription – sovereignty transportation – Leadbeater, Mary, see Shackleton, Mary Leachman, William Le Chevalier, abbé Charles-Gabriel Lee, John Leinster, William Robert Fitzgerald, Duke of – Leland, Thomas , , Le Mesurier, Paul Leopold II, Emperor Letter from a Gentleman in the English House of Commons (Letter to Thomas Burgh) n., n. Letters on a Regicide Peace , , , , ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’ (later Letter IV) –, , Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace –, n., n. Two Letters , – Third Letter , –, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly , –, n. Letter to a Noble Lord , , n., , , , –, , , , , –, ‘Letter to Arthur Young’ , –, ‘Letter to Fitzwilliam’ –, Letter to Lord Kenmare n. ‘Letter to Richard Burke’ – Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe –, –, , n. Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol n., , ‘Letter to William Elliot’ –, Lhuyd, Edward Lind, James Lindsey, Theophilus – n.
Locke, John , , , –, , n., n. Lofft, Capel n. Logan, John Loménie de Brienne, Etienne-Charles de London: Charles Street Cromwell House Duke Street n. Gerrard Street –, , Nerot’s Hotel St Paul’s Cathedral Westminster Abbey Westminster Hall , –, –, , Long, Dudley, later Long North , , , Lonsdale, James Lowther, Earl of Loughborough, Alexander Wedderburn, Lord , , –, n. speech in the Douglas Cause n., n. and Hastings , –, – presides at the trial of Hastings , –, , , –, , , and coalition with Pitt , – and the Regency Crisis , Louis XIV, King of France – Louis XVI, King of France , , , ‘Louis XVII’, titular King of France Lovat, Simon Fraser, Lord , n. Loveden, Edward Lumsdaine, John Macartney, George, Lord , Macaulay, Catherine n., n., n. Macaulay, Thomas Babington , –, Macclesfield, Thomas Parker, Earl of , , M‘Cormick, Charles – McCrea, Jane n. Macdonald, Archibald , , Macdonald, Sir Alexander, later Lord Machiavelli, Niccolò n., n. Mackenzie, Sir George Mackenzie, Henry n. Mackintosh, James , –, , n., –, Macleane, Lauchlin , Macleod, Norman Magna Charta , , , Mainwaring, William Maitland, James, styled Lord, later th Earl of Lauderdale , , , attacks E.B.’s pension , , majorities and ‘majoritanianism’ , , , –, Malmesbury, Earl of, see Harris, Sir James Malone, Edmond , , –, –, Malton , , , , , , – Mandeville, Bernard
Mansfield, William Murray, Earl of n., n. Maraine, abbé Jean-Marin , Maria Theresa, Empress Marie Antoinette, Queen of France n., –, –, , Markham, William, Archbishop of York , and Hastings , –, , on Reflections Markham, William, Resident at Benares n., , – Marsham, Charles Martial n. Martin, James , , Marx, Karl Mason, William Massie, Joseph Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange Maury, abbé Jean-Siffrein – Maynooth, St Patrick’s College , ‘measures, not men’ (and E.B.’s reversal) –, , , , Menonville, François-Louis-Thibault de , – Mercer, Thomas , Mercy-Argentau, Florimond-Claude, comte de , , n., Metcalfe, Philip Meyer, Friedrich Ludwig Wilhelm Michie, John Middleton, Nathaniel , , –, –, , , Miles, William Augustus n., – Mill, James – Millar, John , n. Milton, George Damer, styled Viscount Milton, John –, , Miomandre de Sainte-Marie, François-Aimé de n. Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel-Victor, comte de , , n. Mir Kasim , Molière , Monro, John Monson, George –, Montagu, Elizabeth v, – Montagu, Frederick , , n., , n. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de , , , –, , and ‘oriental despotism’ – on sex ratio of births in the East Montgomery, Sir James n. Montrond, Angélique-Marie Darlus du Taillis, comtesse de Moore, Peter n. Moore, Thomas n., , – More, Hannah n., , n. More, Sir Thomas
Morellet, abbé André – Mornington, Richard Wellesley, Earl of n., Morris, Gouverneur Mubarak al-Daula, Nawab of Bengal , Muhammad Ali Khan, Nawab of the Carnatic (‘Nabob of Arcot’) n., , , n. his debts – Muhammad Reza Khan , Mulgrave, Constantine John Phipps, Lord Munni Begum , –, – Murray, Richard , Mustapha Khan – n., , Muzaffar Jang, Nawab of Farrukhabad , , Nabakrishna, Maharaja , – Nagel, Anne Willem, Baron van Nagle, Edmund (–) , Nagle, Edward James (known as ‘Edmund’; d. ) , Nandakumar, Maharaja , E.B. accuses Hastings of ‘murdering’ , , –, , , n. Impey impeached for his ‘murder’ , Napoleon Necker, Jacques , , , Nero , Newcastle, Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, nd Duke of – Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, st Duke of , n. Nicolson, Sir George Nixon, James –, Nixon, John n. ‘Nobkissen’, see Nabakrishna Nootka Sound Norfolk, Duke of, see Surrey, Earl of North, Dudley Long, see Long, Dudley North, Frederick, styled Lord –, , , , n., , , in caricatures threatened with impeachment , n., , and India – speeches in Parliament , , n. North, George Augustus Northcote, James n. ‘Nundcomar’, see Nandakumar O’Beirne, Thomas Lewis , Observations on a Late State of the Nation n., , , , ‘Observations on the Conduct of the Minority’ –, Ochakov crisis –, O’Conor, Charles Offices Reform Bill , O’Hara, Charles O’Hara, Charles, Jr.
oriental despotism –, ‘orientalism’ – Ormonde, James Butler, Duke of Osborne, John – Otway, Thomas Oudh, Begums of, see ‘Begums of Oudh’ Oudh, Wazir of, see Shuja al-Daula and Asof alDaula Ovid , Owen, John –, Oxford, Robert Harley, Earl of , n. Paine, Thomas , , , , , , meets and visits E.B. –, –, eager to reply to Reflections , Rights of Man , , –, n, , , n. E.B.’s response to –, – E.B. linked to Paley, William n., n., , n. Palmer, Joseph n. Palmer, Mary, later Countess of Inchiquin , n., –, n. Palmer, William Parisot, Madame Parliament: reporting debates virtual representation , – parliamentary reform –, – Flood’s proposal – Fox advocates Grey’s motion –, in Ireland –, – Pitt’s proposal –, , , Price advocates shorter parliaments Parma, Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parr, Samuel –, Parry, Caleb Hillier , Parry, Charles Henry ‘Pasquin, Anthony’ n. Paterson, George Paterson, John –, Paymaster-General, E. B. as –, , , , Payne, John Willett Peisistratus , Pelham, Thomas , , , , Penn, school for French émigrés – E.B. leases cottage at – ‘people, the’: and American war E.B.’s attitude to , , , , , E.B. calculates ‘the political nation’ – popular opinion , , –, , Pericles Perryman, William Peters, Hugh
Phillip, Arthur Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A , , , , – Phipps, Henry , n. Phocion Pigot, George, Lord –, Pigott, Charles n. Piozzi, Hester Lynch n. Pitt, Anne Pitt, Thomas, later Lord Camelford , Pitt, William, the elder, later st Earl of Chatham , –, n., Pitt, William, the younger –, , –, , Bank Dividends Bill in caricatures , commercial treaty with France – and the Dissenters economic ideas finances Fox, rivalry with –, , , , , –, –, , and France , , , –, , , – and Ireland –, , , , Irish propositions –, , loan of and Ochakov crisis – and parliamentary reform , , , , , Parr and – and peerages – Portland, coalition with , –, –, –, – attacked by Price private life , – and Quebec Bill in the Regency Crisis – as speaker throne speeches , , , on Tooke’s petition and Westminster scrutiny –, Pitt, William, the younger, and India on abatement of impeachments –, and Arcot debts –, – and Francis , – in pre-trial debates on Hastings , –, –, –, –, –, –, –, , and the trial of Hastings –, –, –, , , , , – disapproves pension for Hastings , and Impey India Acts , , , , , , , –, , Pitt, William, the younger, relations with E.B.: clashes in Parliament , , –, , , –, –, , , , , E.B. posits Fox-Pitt coalition
E.B. sends memorials on French affairs , – gradual rapprochement with E.B. , , –, , , , , mediates between E.B. and Jenkinson and pension and peerage for E.B. , –, , on E.B.’s retirement – and school at Penn , warns W. A. Miles not to attack E.B. Plato Pliny the Elder Plutarch n., – Plumer, Thomas speeches at the trial of Hastings –, n., other interventions , –, , , , , –, , –, Poland , , – Polybius n. Ponsonby, George and William Pope, Alexander n., n., population: of France of Great Britain – sex ratio of births in the East Porchester, Henry Herbert, Lord, later Earl of Carnarvon , –, n. Porter, Sir James Porteus, Beilby n., n. Portland, William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Duke of , , , n., , , on Appeal from the New Whigs –, opinion of R.B. Jr. and Fox – and Ireland –, , , Penn school, trustee of Pitt, relations and coalition with , –, –, , –, in Regency Crisis –, Sheridan and E.B., promotes reconciliation between and Westminster election Powell, John , Powys, Thomas , ‘Preface to Brissot’s Address to his Constituents’ n. Price, Richard , , , , , , n., in caricatures , A Discourse on the Love of our Country , –, , , –, –, , , on population of France Priestley, Joseph , E.B.’s relations with , reply to the Reflections , , , n.
Prior, James n., – property and property rights: E.B’s respect for , , , – Church property –, – as human right in Ireland –, – and representation – subverted by French Revolution –, –, , – Prost de Royer, Antoine-François Provence, Louis-Stanislaus-Xavier de Bourbon, comte de, later Louis XVIII , Providence: E.B.’s personal sense of , , and economics , – and Empire , and the French Revolution , – and history , , and religion , and scarcity , Prussia, King of, see Frederick William II Pym, John –, Quebec Bill –, Radnor, Jacob Pleydell-Bouverie, Earl of n. Raghunath Rao , Raynal, abbé Guillaume n., Reeves, John Reflections on the Revolution in France , , –, ‘ancient constitution’ in anti-Semitic allusions in n. calculation in –, Calonne, material from in rd edition in caricatures chivalry in n., –, , , , , chorographia in – commerce in –, composition and publication –, , –, –, analysis of electoral system in – E.B.’s response to criticisms – epistolary form – Established Church in , , evidential basis – Fox and Foxites seek to discredit , , Gallican Church in Henry VIII in n. law and lawyers in Marie Antoinette in n., –, –, , moneyed men and literati in ‘nature’ in –, monks in – National Assembly in n.,
October Days in –, – origin in letter to Depont –, –, pamphlet replies – parlements in population of France – reception –, –, , n. reviews – Revolution of in – religion in –, rhetoric – rights in , , –, , –, , , refutation of Price , , , silent cattle image ‘swinish multitude’ society as a contract –, ‘true moral equality of mankind’ n., –, Whigs, written to serve , Reformer, The Regency Crisis , –, –, –, , E.B.’s supposed madness , –, , E.B.’s research into insanity , – Queen Charlotte and Reid, Thomas n. religion , –, –, atheism , Catholic relief , denominationalism E.B. and Johnson on episcopacy Established Church , , , , , Hinduism , –, , – Islam , , n. Judaism n. man a ‘religious animal’ in Reflections –, Scottish Catholics , Test and Corporation Acts –, –, , , , theology and society see also Dissent and Dissenters ‘Religion’ (E.B.’s early essay) n. ‘Religion’ (paper dictated to Frances Crewe) – ‘Remarks on the Policy of the Allies’ – Rennell, James , – Report from the Committee Appointed to Inspect the Lords Journals – Representation to his Majesty, A ( June ) , , n. Revolution of –: E.B. on , , , –, , , E.B.’s interpretation disputed Fox and , Price on –, –
Revolution Society , , , Reynolds, Sir Joshua , , n., , E.B. and , –, n. Richard II, King of England Richardson, John , Richardson, Samuel Richardson, William n., n. Richmond, Charles Lennox, Duke of n., , , , n. Rider, Cardanus Ridge, Ann , n. Ridge, Catherine – Ridge, James n., Ridge, John Ridge, John, Jr. n. Ridge, Michael Ridge, Sarah , n. Right, Petition of rights , , –, , , franchise not a ‘right’ , , , in society –, – Rights, Bill of , , , Riou, Edward Rivington, Charles and Francis , , Robertson, William , , , n. Robinson, Henry Crabb n. Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquis of , , , , –, and E.B.’s finances , , Rockingham party , , , , , , Rodney, George Brydges, Lord n., n. Rogers, Samuel Romilly, Sir Samuel n., n., n. Romney, George Rose, George Rous, George , n. Rouse, Charles William Boughton Rousseau, Jean-Jacques , , –, n., Rowlandson, Thomas , , n. Royal Academy , Royal Irish Academy Royal Marriages Act Royal Military Academy, Woolwich n. Rumbold, Sir Thomas , , , , , n. Rutland, Charles Manners, Duke of Ryder, Dudley n. Saadat Ali Khan Sacheverell, Henry –, n., n., –, – Sadr al-Nissa, see ‘Begums of Oudh’ St John, St Andrew –, –, Salon, Raja of, see Balbadra Singh ‘Sarpedon’ n. Sayers, James , , Scipio Africanus, Publius
Scott, Major John n., , –, – n., avows Asian government is despotic in caricature censured for newspaper libel – attacks E.B. n. challenges E.B. in the Commons , – report on E.B. in the Commons defends Hastings in the Commons , , –, –, , defends Hastings in a pamphlet helps write Hastings’s defence n. attacks impeachment costs petitions against E.B.’s charge of ‘murder’ – replies to the Reflections – replies to Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs – and Thurlow –, , witness at the trial of Hastings , , – Scott, Sir John , , Scrafton, Luke Sebright, Sir John ‘secret influence’ , , , , Select Committee on East India Company (E.B.’s) –, , –, , , evidence submitted to , , , its reports impugned (by Hastings), (by Thurlow), (by Law) ‘Observations’ on the First Report n. Ninth Report , , Eleventh Report , and Supreme Court –, , Selwyn, George Semple, James George – Seneca Septennial Act Settlement, Act of Seven Years War –, Shackleton, Abraham Jr. – Shackleton, Mary, later Leadbeater , , , , , Shackleton, Richard , , , –, – Shah Alum II –, , , Shakespeare, William , allusions to , , , , n. E.B. compared to , , Macbeth , , n. Shaw, Peter Shebbeare, John Sheffield, John Baker Holroyd, Lord n. Shelburne, William Petty, Earl of, later Marquis of Lansdowne , , , , , , , Sheridan, Richard (Irish MP) Sheridan, Richard Brinsley , , , , , , in caricatures , –,
clashes with E.B. in the Commons –, , defends E.B. in the Commons , n. estranged from E.B. Hastings, wishes E.B. and would abscond manager of the impeachment – interventions at the trial , –, Presents charge, opens , press attacks on n., , and Regency Crisis –, , , , reported reply to the Reflections as speaker , , speeches in Parliament , , –, n. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, and the Begums of Oudh: Speech in the Commons () , –, conducts Begums charge at trial – Speech at the trial () , – Speech in reply () Shore, Sir John n., , , – Shuja al-Daula, Wazir of Oude –, , , , Shuldham, Thomas – Siddons, Sarah Sieyès, abbé Emmanuel-Joseph – Silburn, Dorothy Simcoe, John Graves Sinclair, Sir John , Siraj al-Daula –, ‘Sketch of a Negro Code’ – Skynner, Sir John slavery and slave trade , – Smith, Adam n., , , , n., , E.B. compliments E.B. meets at Edinburgh , on labour relations n. on treatment of the poor n. Smith, Charlotte n. Smith, John Thomas Smith, William Solon , Somers, John, Lord , Somerville, Thomas Speech on American Taxation ( Apr. ) , , Speech on Conciliation ( Mar. ) , , –, n., , n. Speech on Economical Reformation ( Feb. ) , n., , , Speech on Fox’s India Bill ( Dec. ) , n., , n., , , , , – Speech on the Army Estimates ( Feb. ) –, –, , , Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts ( Feb. ) n., n., n., –, , n., , Spenser, Edmund
Stafford, William Howard, Viscount – n., , Stanhope, Charles, Earl , n., interventions at the Hastings trial , , –, –, Stanislaus Poniatowski, King of Poland Steele, Thomas Stephanus, see Estienne, Henri Stevenson, Alexander Stewart, John Stibbert, Giles Stockdale, John –, n. Stonehenge , , Storer, Anthony Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, st Earl of , , , , Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, rd Earl of Street, Thomas George – n. Stuart, Andrew n. Suetonius n. Sulivan, Richard Joseph Sulivan, Stephen , , Sumner, George , Surrey, Charles Howard, styled Earl of, later Duke of Norfolk , Swift, Jonathan , , Swift, William Thomas , Tanjore, Raja of, see Tuljaji Tasso, Torquato Taylor, Michael Angelo , , n., at the Hastings trial , , Temple, George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, Earl; later Marquis of Buckingham , , , , Temple, William Johnstone Templetown, John Henry Upton, Lord Thelwall, John – Themistocles n. theory, E.B.’s distrust of , , , , , , , Thoughts and Details on Scarcity , –, n., –, ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’ n., –, , Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents , , , , , , impeachment in theory of party in , Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace , –, n. Thouret, Jacques-Guillaume , n. Three Memorials on French Affairs Thurlow, Edward, Lord on abatement of impeachments – and Arcot debts – in caricature
Thurlow, Edward, Lord (cont.) and Hastings , n., , , , n., , – at the trial of Hastings , , , , , , –, , –, –, , –, , n., and Regency Crisis , , Timur , Tipu Sultan Titchfield, William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, styled Marquis of Tooke, John Horne n., –, n. Towers, Joseph , n., Townshend, Charles Townshend, Lord John – Townshend, Thomas, later Viscount Sydney n. Townshend, Thomas (pamphleteer) n. ‘Tract on the Popery Laws’ –, , travel and tours Bath , , , – Cheshire , n. France , Italy (proposed) , Margate , Scotland – Wye Valley Treasonable Practices Bill Treason Trials n., Trevor, John Hampden- Trinity College, Dublin –, Troward, Richard , Tuljaji, Raja of Tanjore , Two Letters on the Conduct of our Domestic Parties n., Two Letters on the Trade of Ireland n., Tyler’s Green House, Penn Unitarians and Unitarian Society n., –, United Provinces of the Netherlands –, , Universal Declaration of Human Rights , , n. utilitarianism Vallancey, Charles – Valletort, Richard Edgcumbe, styled Viscount Varro, Marcus Terentius Vattel, Emer de , n. Verney, Ralph, Earl , , , , Verres, Gaius , Vindication of Natural Society, A n., , Virgil , , Voltaire n., Waddington, Samuel Ferrand n. Wakefield, Gilbert n.,
Wales, Prince of, see George, Prince of Wales Walker, Adam , n. Waller, Edmund (poet) Waller, Edmund (c. –) Waller, Edmund (c. –) –, Wallis, Albany Walpole, Horace n., , n., n., n., , Walpole, Sir Robert , his ministry , , Warburton, William Warren, Richard Washington, George Weddell, William Wedderburn, Alexander, see Loughborough, Lord West, Benjamin – Westminster elections –, , – Westminster petition (Horne Tooke’s) – Westminster scrutiny –, , , , , Westmorland, John Fane, Earl of , , , , –, Wheler, Edward Whig Club , Whig party , , , , , –, ‘Old Whigs’ , –, , Portland Whigs , , – Whig split , , Whitbread, Samuel , n., Wigley, Edmund , n. Wilberforce, William , , , and Hastings , , Wilbraham, Roger n. Wilhelmina, Princess of Orange Wilkes, John , , n., , William I, King of England n. William III, King of England , , William IX, Landgrave of Hesse William, Prince Williams, David (radical) , Williams, David (witness) – n., –, Willis, Francis – Wilmot, John Wilson, Alexander n. Wilson, Charles Henry n. Windham, William , n., , , , , , defends E.B.’s pension and French Revolution , n. on the Reflections and impeachment of Hastings , , , , , , at the Hastings trial , , and the Regency Crisis – and rift in ministry – trip to Scotland with E.B. – visits E.B. at Beaconsfield
Windsor Castle , Wisemore, Henry n., Wodrow, James , n. Wolfe, Arthur Wollstonecraft, Mary , –, n., n., , n. Wombwell, John – Woodford, Emperor John Alexander , , , Woolsey, Robert n. Works (–) –,
Wraxall, Nathaniel William , n., , – praises E.B. as a speaker , , Wray, Sir Cecil , Wright, William – Wyvill, Christopher York, Frederick, Duke of Yorke, Philip, later rd Earl of Hardwicke n. Young, Arthur n., , Young, John n. Young, William
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PLATE 1. Burke (left), North, and Fox attacking Warren Hastings, by James Gillray (11 May 1786)
PLATE 2. Burke as Cicero (7 Feb. 1787), by John Boyne
PLATE 3. Gerard House, drawn in 1826 by J. Breun. Burke rented the three-bay house on the left
PLATE 4. Interior view of Gerard House by John Crowther (1884), showing the original staircase
PLATE 5. The trial of Warren Hastings, by R. G. Pollard after E. Dayes (1789). Burke (with his back to the viewer, and his right arm extended) is speaking
PLATE 6. Key to the print of the trial: A (throne); B, C (royal boxes); D (foreign ministers); G, L (holders of peers’ tickets); H (Duke of Newcastle’s gallery); I, J, K (galleries for officials); M (peeresses); N, O, X, Y, Z (lords); V (archbishops); W (bishops); S (judges); T (Lord Chancellor); a (Speaker); b (Commons); c (managers); d (Burke); e (shorthand writer); g (witness box); h (Hastings); i, j (counsel)
PLATE 7 (left). Spectators in one of the galleries in Westminster Hall (James Nixon, 1788)
PLATE 8 (below). The Speaker (in long wig) and other MPs (James Nixon, 1788); the Speaker’s chair is ‘a’ in Plate 6
(a)
(b)
PLATE 9. Two burlesques of admission tickets to the trial: (a) a pro-Hastings version by James Sayers; (b) an anti-Hastings version by James Gillray. In both, Burke is seated behind Fox, who is declaiming
PLATE 10. Detail from Thomas Barnard’s map of the East India Company’s jagir surrounding Madras (1778). British Library (*52615/1)
PLATE 11. Burke dreaming about Demetrius Cantemir’s account of the Ottoman Empire, by James Sayers (26 Apr. 1788)
PLATE 12. Nathaniel Middleton examined by Sheridan (James Nixon, 1788); Burke is on the far right
PLATE 13. The Hastings trial as popular entertainment, by William Dent (25 Feb. 1788)
PLATE 14. Burke questioning Dr Francis Willis, by Thomas Rowlandson (7 Feb. 1789)
PLATE 15. Burke offers Charles I’s head to the Prince of Wales in a black box, by Thomas Rowlandson (30 Jan. 1789)
PLATE 16. Major Scott shaves Burke, confined as a lunatic, by James Gillray (8 May 1789)
PLATE 17. A devil shows Richard Price the would-be assassins attacking Marie Antoinette’s bed, from which she has just escaped (right), by Isaac Cruikshank (12 Dec. 1790)
PLATE 18. Burke (touched by Cupid) adoring his vision of Marie Antoinette walking on air, by Frederick George Byron (2 Nov. 1790)
PLATE 19. Burke as Don Quixote, embracing Marie Antoinette, by Frederick George Byron (18 Nov. 1790)
PLATE 20. Burke as Don Quixote (personifying the Reflections), leaving Dodsley’s bookshop on his crusade to extirpate the National Assembly, by Frederick George Byron (15 Nov. 1790)
PLATE 21. Burke discovers Richard Price at work in his study, by James Gillray (3 Dec. 1790)
PLATE 22. Burke caricatured as Frith the madman (who threw a stone at the king’s coach), by Isaac Cruikshank (31 Jan 1790)
PLATE 23. Burke as Don Quixote leading an aristocratic crusade, by Isaac Cruikshank (31 Jan. 1791)
PLATE 24. The quarrel between Burke and Fox on 6 May 1791, by John Nixon after another artist (10 May 1791)
PLATE 25. A more violent depiction of Burke on 6 May 1791, by Frederick George Byron (16 May 1791)
PLATE 26. A satiric representation of Burke’s inconsistency, by James Gillray (16 Nov. 1791)
PLATE 27. A tribute to Burke from Sir Joshua Reynolds, with the inscription from Milton that Burke insisted be removed (1791)
PLATE 28. The ‘dagger’ scene in the House of Commons, 28 Dec. 1792, by James Gillray (30 Dec. 1792)
PLATE 29. A less sympathetic depiction of Burke and his daggers, by Isaac Cruikshank (1 Jan. 1793)
PLATE 30. A celebration of the acquittal of Warren Hastings, by James Sayers (8 May 1795)
PLATE 31 (above). Burke, sitting on an uprooted oak, contemplates the Duke of Bedford as Leviathan, by Isaac Cruikshank (8 Mar. 1796)
PLATE 32 (right). Burke’s death mask