Читать книгу Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics - Jesse Norman, Jesse Norman - Страница 8

THE BRITAIN TOWARDS WHOSE SUMMIT Burke now set his course was a country in a state of extraordinary excitement. Politically, it had enjoyed a remarkable degree of stability for over forty years, stability established and personified in the formidable figure of Sir Robert Walpole, now generally regarded as its first Prime Minister, and sustained by his immediate successors. Walpole was a Whig: that is, one of those who supported the constitutional monarchy established after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, in which the Catholic James II had fled into exile, and Parliament had confirmed William of Orange from the Netherlands as King William III. On the other side of the political divide were the Tories, the landowners who supported James II and his successors, and who generally defended the prerogative rights of the Crown.

Personal pre-eminence in Westminster was nothing new, but in Sir Robert Walpole it found perhaps its greatest ever exponent. He was a man of enormous political subtlety and energy, a master of detail dedicated to three simple ends: the extension of British trading influence and economic strength; his own complete control of the different organs of government; and the continued political defeat of the Tories.

These three goals Walpole amply achieved. War was in general avoided, the national debt reduced, taxes kept low and colonial trade managed to the benefit of the mother country. After the death of Queen Anne in 1714 Toryism went into a long decline; discredited by the Jacobite rebellion of the following year, it started to collapse, yielding to what came to be known as the Whig supremacy, a process only enhanced by a second failed rebellion in 1745. It was far from inactive, bubbling away in town and country, in the constituencies and in Parliament. But only in 1760 did it start to reappear in government.

In 1720 the South Sea Company, which held the monopoly of trade with South America, collapsed amid a frenzy of financial speculation. In the aftermath it became clear that there had been rampant bribery and insider trading in its shares. Many establishment figures were touched by the scandal, which extended to members of the Cabinet; Walpole himself had invested latterly with reckless enthusiasm, but had managed to escape censure and financial ruin. Having served a few years earlier as First Lord of the Treasury, ultimately in charge of the nation’s finances, he was appointed to that post again in April 1721 and set about consolidating his personal power. Supported by the immense wealth of the Duke of Newcastle, he was able to place himself at the centre of a vast network of influence stretching from King George I – and his mistresses – to the Church of England, the City of London and many of the great families. This influence was maintained after the accession of George II in 1727.

Walpole made it his settled principle that every appointment to Church or state, however insignificant, should be conditional on loyalty to Walpole himself. Where patronage did not suffice, bribes and electoral sweeteners were deployed instead, on a prodigious scale. A famous caricature of the period, Idol-worship, or the Way to Preferment (see following page/s), shows him astride a great gateway and baring a pair of enormous buttocks, which men line up to kiss before going through. There was no need even to show Walpole’s face, so clear was the inference.

2. Idol-Worship or the way to preferment

Walpole did not cease to exercise political influence after he left office in 1742; his machine lived on through Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham. But the increasing need for vigorous leadership in the Commons brought an energetic Whig politician, William Pitt, to the fore. Unlike those of Walpole and his successors, Pitt’s family connections were only distantly aristocratic. The family fortune had been made with the East India Company by his grandfather, Thomas Pitt, a governor of Madras whose discovery and sale of an enormous diamond caused him to be known as ‘Diamond’ Pitt. William was close to his grandfather, and imbibed from him the lessons that Britain’s greatness relied on aggression in controlling overseas trade and colonial expansion, and that nothing was impossible to an individual of outstanding personality and energy.

Over time, and despite frequent bouts of illness, Pitt made himself into such an individual: an orator of extraordinary power able to instil in his audience, and in the country at large, the conviction that his was the voice of destiny. Reckless, insecure, bombastic, capable of manic bouts of work lapsing into frequent periods of lassitude, Pitt was determined to exercise power not through any faction or network, but in his own name and through sheer force of personality.

Pitt joined the government in 1746, over the deep objections of George II, and in due course became an ostentatiously upright Paymaster General. His moment came in 1756, when the calamitous early stages of the Seven Years War, and in particular the loss of Minorca to the French, thrust him to centre stage. His famous, and utterly characteristic, remark to the Duke of Devonshire dates from this time: ‘My Lord, I am sure that I can save this country, and that no-one else can.’ Astonishingly, Pitt made good this claim. He took personal control of the war, targeting overseas trade, and French trade in particular, across four theatres: the West Indies, North America, Africa and India. Each saw vigorous action. An alliance with Prussia on the European mainland freed up British troops to support the navy in Pitt’s ‘blue water’ strategy. French plans to invade Britain were cut off by a blockade of their fleets in Brest and Toulon.

The year 1759 proved to be one colossal triumph after another, for Britain and for the Great Commoner, as Pitt was now known. Guadeloupe was captured, and Dakar. French Canada fell to General James Wolfe after a brilliant night attack on Quebec. Sweetest of all, the French navy was at last forced to put to sea. The Toulon fleet was destroyed by Admiral Boscawen, that of Brest by Admiral Hawke off Quiberon. The country rejoiced. ‘Our bells are quite worn threadbare from ringing for victories,’ wrote Horace Walpole, son of Sir Robert and man of letters, late in the year. Pitt, it seemed, could do no wrong.

But military triumph was succeeded by political instability. In 1760 King George II died, and – his son Frederick having died unexpectedly in 1751 – his grandson ascended the throne as George III. The new King was young, restless, highly judgemental and widely suspected of being under the malign influence of the Earl of Bute. He shared with Pitt a desire to govern without the need for party or faction. But the two men had fallen out some time earlier, and it was only a matter of time before Pitt departed, as he did in 1761. Nine further years of political turmoil and turnover in government were to follow.

Among the King’s early changes, Lord Halifax was moved from the Board of Trade and sent to Dublin as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. William Hamilton accompanied him, now promoted to Chief Secretary; and with him went Burke, leaving the family to follow later. It was Burke’s first trip home since leaving Ireland in 1750, and he cannot have relished seeing his father again. To soften the blow, he sent him a copy of the Enquiry via an intermediary, and received back a message of thanks and forgiveness, and even a remittance. But the wound was never to heal fully, for Richard Burke died before seeing his son again. It was a sad ending to their relationship, but perhaps a relief as well.

Burke’s stay in Dublin was unremarkable, except for an outbreak of rural terrorism by a group known as the Whiteboys, after their white smocks. These protests arose from poverty and protest at high rents and arbitrary evictions. Initially non-violent, Whiteboy tactics were hardened by the scale and savagery of the response by Protestant landlords and the Dublin authorities, which sent in a force of militiamen. This killed some protesters and captured others. It was followed by what was widely seen as the judicial murder of the main suspects by hanging. This was Burke’s first exposure to organized protest and its violent suppression, and his sympathies were heavily on the side of the Catholic underclass. All the more so since the victims included Father Nicholas Sheehy, an opponent of the penal laws and relative of Burke’s by marriage, who was tried three times in relation to the Whiteboys and finally hanged, drawn and quartered in 1766.

In 1763 Hamilton was promoted again, this time to the valuable sinecure of Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland. For his part Burke accepted a grant, or ‘pension’, of £300. His feelings were equivocal, however, combining gratitude to Hamilton with a chafing desire to maintain a degree of independence. Pensions were common, but almost always regarded as the result of political corruption and patronage, still more so since the jobbery of Walpole (one of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary definitions of a pensioner is ‘a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey his master’). What made things worse was that Burke’s pension was on the Irish Exchequer, not the English, at a time when such pensions were a particular focus of grievance among Irish politicians, including some of his own friends. Burke knew well how little his countrymen could afford him; and claims of undue Irish influence, indeed of popery and Jesuitry, were to dog him later in public life.

In retrospect, it was inevitable that Burke and Hamilton would split. Their personalities were quite different: Burke passionate, committed and warm, Hamilton cool, indolent and sarcastic. Burke was blossoming, Hamilton controlling. Matters were not helped when Hamilton fell out with his new Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Northumberland, and was dismissed in May 1764. On returning to Ireland he appears to have sought to retain Burke under an exclusive lifetime contract of service. Burke, who had greatly disapproved of Hamilton’s conduct in Ireland, rejected the offer as ‘a sort of domestic situation’ and resigned his pension. Nothing could be more rebarbative than such a role to his free-ranging mind, need for self-expression and nascent political ambitions. By February 1765, amid some rancour, they had parted.

Always prickly about his personal integrity, after the breach with Hamilton Burke felt it necessary to circulate a note among his friends clearing himself of any fault, but setting terms for them as well: ‘I never can … submit to any sort of compromise on my Character; and I shall never therefore look upon those, who after hearing the whole story, do not think me perfectly in the right, and do not consider Hamilton as an infamous scoundrel, to be in the smallest degree my friends.’ At a time when personal reputation counted for much, laying out the facts may have seemed only prudent. It had a theoretical basis too, in Burke’s developing view that party and political leadership were properly anchored in good character. But it was also unfair to Hamilton, neurotic and alienating. As he grew older, Burke’s own essential goodness would shine through on many occasions. But under pressure of events his belief in it would harden into unconquerable self-righteousness, and occasionally self-deception. He gained devotees, but lost many would-be friends and political allies as a result.

All this was in the future, however. For the most part, Burke’s friendships at this time were flourishing. Ability and luck had brought him to the very heart of one of the greatest gatherings of talent ever witnessed. This included the Scottish philosopher, historian and notorious infidel David Hume, who on a visit to London gave Burke a copy of the Theory of Moral Sentiments by his friend Adam Smith. Burke responded with a letter of thanks to Smith and published a very favourable review in the Annual Register, leading to an acquaintance. Then there was the painter Joshua Reynolds, later to found the Royal Academy, who was an intimate of Burke’s for more than three decades. He in turn presented Burke with a portrait of their close mutual friend, the actor David Garrick, then leading a revolution to replace bombast and declamation in the theatre with more realistic styles of acting.

But the centre of literary debate would in time become Dr Johnson’s Club, or simply ‘the Club’. In general, it has been well said that the eighteenth century was the age of the club. There were clubs to meet almost every conceivable social need, personal interest or human contingency. If Joseph Addison is to be believed, they included clubs for the surly, the ugly and the flatulent; and even a Lunatick Club set up by a group of Essex farmers, which met at the full moon. And there was a roster of clubs catering to aristocratic debauch. One such was the infamous Hellfire Club, another ‘the Most Ancient and Most Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland, Anstruther’, an all-male sex club much patronized by the lawyers, businessmen and clergy of Fife, and in particular by the Earls of Kellie. The clue is in the title, ‘Merryland’ being a popular codeword for the female body.

Despite its perennial association with Dr Johnson, the Club seems in fact to have been the inspiration of Reynolds. Founded in early 1764, it was devoted to conversation, and met originally every two weeks at the Turk’s Head tavern in Soho, in the centre of London. Its nine founding members spanned the arts and included, as well as Burke and Reynolds (known as ‘Romulus’, after the founder of Rome), Burke’s congenial father-in-law Dr Nugent, the Irish playwright and fellow Trinity alumnus Oliver Goldsmith, the music critic Charles Burney, the classical scholar Bennet Langton and of course Samuel Johnson himself. A print by George Thompson (after James William Edmund Doyle; see following page/s) of a literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house in 1781 doubtless conveys something of the atmosphere: Johnson is holding forth to Burke, watched by Reynolds and Garrick. Burney and the Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli look on. Boswell, Goldsmith and the poet Thomas Warton have been relegated to the background.

3. A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s

Even among the members of the Club, Johnson was a towering figure, in height and presence and accomplishment. The self-made son of a Lichfield bookseller, he had survived low birth weight, scrofula, smallpox and tuberculosis – maladies which scarred his features, left him partially deaf and blind and gave him a disturbing array of tics and convulsive gestures – to become one of the greatest men of letters of that or any age. There are, it has been noted, few literary genres to which Johnson did not make a foundational contribution, including journalism, fiction, poetry, criticism, satire, biography, the essay, travel writing and, of course, lexicography. But it was the publication of his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 that turned him into a nationally celebrated figure.

Johnson had met Burke some years later, and clearly enjoyed the latter’s flood of conversation, saying ‘he does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full’. The relationship matured over time, so much so that Johnson was apt to repeat that ‘If a man were to go by chance at the same time with Burke, under a shed, to shun a shower, he would say: “This is an extraordinary man.” If Burke should go into a stable to see his horse dressed, the ostler would say, “we have had an extraordinary man here.”’ It was a handsome tribute, especially since Johnson was no flatterer.

Nevertheless, the relationship between Johnson and Burke was never an entirely easy one. It was not helped by political differences – Johnson was a devout Tory, Burke a Whig – or by the sometimes scheming James Boswell, who oscillated between the quest for political favours from Burke and the gossip’s tendency to retail Johnson’s occasionally cutting private remarks. No, the two men had different styles: Johnson possessed of a lapidary wit and a natural genius for quotation, Burke more prolix, carefully building up comic or tragic detail in his speeches to devastating effect. And as so often with two big beasts at the table, there was perhaps an undercurrent of competition. As an out-of-sorts Johnson once said, ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.’

But Burke’s connections were increasingly social and political, as well as literary. They included several opposition Whig politicians, including William Fitzherbert and Lord John Cavendish, the charismatic Charles Townshend and the Buckinghamshire landowner Lord Verney, to whom Will Burke had become very close. In 1763 an ill-starred ministry led by the Earl of Bute had finally fallen, over the supposedly concessionary terms of the Peace of Paris which ended the Seven Years War, and George III was forced to treat with two men he detested, George Grenville and the Duke of Bedford. Two years later the political merry-go-round took another turn, and they too left office. For his part, Pitt remained disenchanted and aloof. The King then asked the Marquis of Rockingham, as leader of a large parliamentary faction, to form an administration, with Newcastle alongside him and the Duke of Cumberland acting as the King’s éminence grise.

Burke must have been at a low ebb at this time, for his second son Christopher died between the ages of five and six, probably in 1764. We know virtually nothing about the circumstances of his death, but its effect can only have been to focus Burke’s love and attention on his surviving boy, Richard. Still more so if, as seems possible from Burke’s letters, Jane then had a miscarriage, and perhaps even another. The couple may have been coming to the very sad conclusion that there would be no more children.

But the effect of Rockingham’s elevation was to hand Burke the first of two huge strokes of luck. Rockingham had only just engaged him as his private secretary, despite the protestations of the aged Duke of Newcastle, who denounced Burke in soon-to-be familiar terms as a closet Catholic and a Jacobite. But Rockingham ignored the Duke, and Burke was thus catapulted from near-obscurity into the very cockpit of power. The new administration took office on 15 July 1765, and Burke started work the following day.

The second bit of luck was better still, for Will generously waived his own political ambitions temporarily and persuaded Lord Verney to allow Edmund to stand for Parliament for Wendover, a ‘pocket borough’ in Verney’s personal gift. For Burke, the way was now clear to a political career.

The new government’s first priority concerned the American colonies. For decades, these had been allowed to prosper in an atmosphere – it would be too much to call it a policy – of more or less benign neglect. The exception was trade. Colonial affairs, in America as elsewhere, were managed along strictly mercantile lines: the colonies existed to generate raw materials and import finished goods, the mother country to manufacture those finished goods and derive the extra value thereby added, the goods themselves always to be carried in British ships. The counterpart of this trade was that American merchants were perennially short of hard currency, and so perennially indebted to financiers in the City of London. From a British perspective, it was an immensely convenient and lucrative arrangement, sustained by each side’s general ignorance of the other.

But events now conspired to change this. Over the course of the century, the modest American colonial population of some 200,000 had doubled, then doubled again, and again. By 1765 it stood at not quite 2,000,000. It had been swelled by immigration, much of which was not English, but Scottish, Irish, French and German, to say nothing of those at the margins of society seeking to escape the law or gain a new life. Thomas Paine would later be one of these, emigrating to America in 1774. Many of the new immigrants felt no great love for the Westminster Parliament.

The Seven Years War had ended in triumph for Britain, and the further extension of its early colonial empire around the world. In the long term, this would bring vast profits. But the war’s immediate effect was a drastic depletion of the Treasury. The national debt nearly doubled, from £70 million to £130 million. Taxes, totalling some 15 per cent on a country gentleman’s estate, were regarded as unfeasibly high. Something had to be done. Grenville’s response was to limit expense by restraining westward expansion and seeking to end the long-running border war with the American Indians; to enforce the Navigation Acts, limiting foreign trade competition and forcing the colonies to pay higher prices, especially for sugar; and to raise revenue directly from the Americans, via a new Stamp Act on legal transactions, passed in 1764.

Within the increasingly fractious colonies, the result was uproar, resistance and the first signs of rebellion. The urgent question for the new government in 1765 was, therefore, what to do about the Stamp Act. To enforce it would be ruinously expensive, while compromise would likely please no one. Rockingham therefore opted for outright repeal, a view in which he may have been influenced by Burke, whose memorandum urging repeal has survived. To save face and give itself a measure of political cover, the ministry added a Declaratory Act, which insisted on Britain’s right in principle to tax the colonies, even if that right was not exercised. The move worked, and both Acts were voted through. But it proved to be a short-term expedient; the colonists had been informed that the Declaratory Act would not be exercised, and their reaction later to further taxes was to prove extreme.

Meanwhile, Burke needed to get elected and take his seat in Parliament. Wendover at that time had just 250 electors – the modern constituency has around 70,000 – most of whom were Lord Verney’s tenants and therefore disposed to vote as instructed. The sitting member was induced to retire, but there was still the formality of election. In keeping with the time, this was accompanied by an extended bout of mass inebriation. It was not to Burke’s taste, but he got the job done. As he wrote to his Irish friend and mentor Charles O’Hara on Christmas Eve of 1765, ‘Yesterday I was elected for Wendover, got very drunk, and this day have an heavy cold.’

Facing the chamber of the House of Commons itself was another matter, however. The chamber itself has been rebuilt twice since Burke’s time, once after the great fire of 1834 and then after bomb damage sustained in the Second World War. On the latter occasion, at the specific insistence of Sir Winston Churchill, care was again taken to make it too small for the membership. In Churchill’s words, ‘The essence of good House of Commons speaking is the conversational style, the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges … [This] requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency … a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House.’ The chamber thus measures a rather modest 68 feet by 46 feet, and contains only 427 places for 650 MPs. Yet the eighteenth-century chamber was smaller still, at about 58 feet by 33 feet or 300 to 350 places for 558 MPs, an even smaller percentage. It functioned effectively simply because many county members only rarely attended.

The sense of enclosure was increased after 1707, when Sir Christopher Wren remodelled the chamber, bringing the ceiling down and installing galleries supported by columns along both sides. Then as now, such a confined space is infinitely removed from the empty caverns of the great modern democracies. In it politics becomes, literally, hot and personal. Today the chamber of the House of Commons is the only air-conditioned public space in the Palace of Westminster, and a blessed refuge from a steamy summer day. In Burke’s time it must have been stifling.

Then as now, the members faced each other. The seating reflected the institution’s earliest origins in St Stephen’s Chapel; for in an English chapel the congregants look across the aisle, not towards the altar as in a church. The Speaker and clerks sat, wigged and gowned, at the east end beneath three high windows. Senior ministers wore full court dress, with swords; the sartorial contrast with backbenchers was such that it caused something of a stir when large numbers of them lost office in 1782 and the Rockinghamites appeared in the Commons from court, bedecked in blue, with swords, lace and hair powder. But, ministers apart, there was no dress code as such: members wore hats, boots, sometimes spurs, and often carried sticks. They talked among themselves, ate fruit or nuts, and not infrequently slept in the chamber; but they were forbidden to smoke or read. Without the microphones and tiny speakers dotted around the modern chamber, members needed formidable powers of vocal projection if they were to make themselves heard.

Since Walpole’s time the modern custom had arisen that government ministers would sit on the front bench on the Speaker’s right, and by the 1770s senior opposition figures sat on the bench directly facing them. But – there being as yet no political parties in the modern sense – other members sat individually or in groups as they chose. Burke normally sat, with other Rockinghamites, on the third row behind the opposition front bench, close to a pillar and not far from the Speaker’s chair. That was close enough to be fully engaged in the cut and thrust of debate, but distant enough to underline the group’s independence in opposition.

There followed the awful initiation of a maiden speech. Some of life’s terrors are inevitable, others self-inflicted, and among the latter there are few to compare with the task of making a maiden speech in the House of Commons. To dull the pain, both for the speaker and their audience, the convention has arisen in recent times that maiden speeches should be short, pleasant and uncontroversial. They often take place late at night, in minor debates, when few MPs are present and the chamber is becalmed. The new member sings the praises of their predecessor, however evil or incompetent, and takes those present on a light and ideally brief tour of the constituency, before identifying some worthy cause as their one true political ambition. Rare and brave is the MP who deviates from this primrose path.

Things were very different in Burke’s day. A maiden speech was a political statement, of course; but it was also a social one, in which the ambitious novice sought to cut a certain figure, regardless of his – and it was always ‘his’, until the twentieth century – personal origins. Most importantly, it was a first presentation of political force. In the days before round-the-clock media coverage, political debate focused on the chamber of the House of Commons. Moreover, a really controversial Bill hugely increased attendance, from 200–300 members to over 400, most of the extra being county members, of more independent mind. There being relatively little ‘whipping’ or party discipline to speak of, none of the present party lines to take and no national political organizations to take them, effective oratory could make a huge difference. Careerists heeded the MP Hans Stanley’s advice: ‘Get into Parliament, make tiresome speeches; you will have great offers; do not accept them at first, then do: then make great provision for yourself and family, and then call yourself an independent country gentleman.’ But, given the stakes, many MPs simply could not bring themselves to make a maiden speech at all. The great historian Edward Gibbon was one such, in a political career of nine years; the poet Andrew Marvell was another, a century earlier. More than half the 558 members never spoke at all on public matters.

Burke took the plunge on 17 January 1766. This was no primrose path. The occasion was the stormy debate on repeal of the Stamp Act, the chamber packed and rancorous – Karl Anton Hickel’s painting of Pitt addressing the Commons after news of the French declaration of war in 1793 conveys something of the atmosphere (see following page/s). But not only did Burke speak once; he spoke again, and once more, and then frequently on subsequent days. There were no official, full or accurate records of debates at that time; the great crisis of whether or not the Commons would permit public reporting of debates only occurred in 1771. But even so it is clear that Burke was extremely effective. No less an authority than the Great Commoner himself weighed in: after a speech in February it was remarked that Burke ‘received such compliments on his performance from Mr Pitt as to any other man would have been fulsome, but applied to him were literally true and just’.

4. The House of Commons 1793–94

Under other circumstances this might have been the beginning of a long friendship between the older and the younger man. In fact the opposite was the case. Shortly afterwards Burke went on a mission to see Pitt at his house in Kent. He sought to persuade the older man of the merits of a free port in Dominica, but also to ask on Rockingham’s behalf whether and how Pitt might be prepared to return to government. The mission underlined the fragility of Rockingham’s government, and his increasing reliance on his secretary. But in hindsight it was exceedingly ill judged, for even the most cursory understanding of Pitt’s character would have made clear that this supreme egoist was not about to discuss such issues with a mere parliamentary whippersnapper. Pitt dismissed Burke in the most cutting terms, and sent him away with a flea in his ear. The result was to create bad feeling between them, magnified by Burke’s increasing view that Pitt was in fact a bombast who lacked any real intellectual substance. When the Younger Pitt took office some fifteen years later, Burke’s view of him may already have been coloured by a degree of familial antipathy.

The Rockingham administration fell in July 1766, after little more than a year. It was undermined by the inexperience and incompetence of its ministers, by Rockingham’s unwillingness to treat with the followers of Bute, whom he regarded as mere placemen for the King, and most of all by the opposition of Pitt. Pitt had denounced the Stamp Act as unconstitutional, as asserting a right to tax colonists who were not represented in the Commons, a position which earned him wild popularity in America. Now he turned around and distanced himself from Rockingham and his followers, through a general denunciation of political parties and factions as such. The King, who similarly despised parties, took the hint and invited Pitt himself to form a government. This Pitt did from the House of Lords as the newly ennobled Lord Chatham, a transformation from Great Commoner to Noble Lord which earned him enormous public ridicule and opprobrium.

Burke’s reaction, as so often, was to turn to his pen. The result was A Short Account of a Late Short Administration. At just 750 words, it was less a political pamphlet than a squib, a brief piece of instant history designed to present a favourable image of the departed ministry’s year in office and its achievements. The Rockingham administration had brought calm to the Empire, the argument went, and placed British trade upon a settled basis. It had preserved the constitution, and enhanced the liberties of the subject through a prohibition on general warrants and against the seizure of personal papers. In particular, Burke was at pains to contrast the Rockinghamites’ uprightness with the forces ranged against them: ‘With the Earl of Bute they had no personal connection … They neither courted nor persecuted him. They practised no corruption … They sold no offices. They obtained no reversions or pensions … for themselves, their families, or their dependents [sic]. In the prosecution of their measures, they were traversed by an opposition of a new and singular character; an opposition of placemen and pensioners.’ These were not purely personal remarks; they gave a glimpse of a new conception of the very idea of a political party.

Burke had hopes of being given a position within the new administration, but these were ended by Chatham himself. The experience strengthened his conviction that his future belonged with Rockingham, whether in opposition or in government. Chatham was visibly ageing; it could surely only be a matter of time before Burke and his patron were back in office. But while his personal influence had grown with Rockingham, a huge social gulf still separated the two men. Rockingham was one of the very wealthiest men in England. Rich in his own right, he had married an heiress and inherited Wentworth House, now Wentworth Woodhouse, a home of such stateliness that it has 365 rooms (more or less; no one has ever succeeded in counting them definitively) and, at 606 feet, an east front with the longest façade of any house in Europe. He had large properties in Northamptonshire and County Wicklow, as well as vast family estates in Yorkshire. Burke, by contrast, was struggling to maintain a modest household in London.

At first glance, it is easy to see Rockingham himself just as a dilettante given over to racing and gambling, the twin passions of the day, and he was often so described. But in fact he was rather more than this. A retiring man, he was no public speaker and was plagued by illness, including a debilitating venereal disease picked up on a visit to Italy, which may have rendered him sterile; there was no third Marquis. But he had great personal charm, a certain personal nobility – to be seen in his portrait, after Reynolds (see following page/s) – and a remarkable capacity to inspire loyalty in his followers, who included great Whig aristocrats such as the Dukes of Richmond and of Portland in the Lords, and fifty or so MPs in the Commons. He began to set a pattern among his political set, combining moral principle with a consistent adherence to a set of core policies, and political patronage and financial support. Burke was a mere salaried secretary. But over time he assumed a crucial role within the Rockingham Whigs, moving them away from factional politics and shaping them organizationally and intellectually into the prototype of the modern political party.

In the meantime, Burke continued to yearn for financial security and social status. He had always been close to Will Burke, regarding him as a member of his household. These ties had been deepened still further by Will’s magnanimity in securing Edmund a seat in Parliament from his friend Lord Verney. Now they extended into financial speculation. Will had started to invest ‘on margin’, using money borrowed from Verney, in shares in the East India Company. Immense sums were involved – as much as £49,000 at one point. There is no evidence that Edmund was aware of the details of Will’s scheme, or had any direct involvement. But they and his brother Richard had long had a ‘common purse’, whereby they shared mutually in each other’s gains and losses. So Edmund was seriously exposed to Will’s financial dealings.

5. Portrait of Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham

For a while, all went well. In May 1767, the East India Company raised its dividend, for the second time in eight months, to the giddy heights of 12.5 per cent. In the previous year Will had estimated his own gains at more than £12,000. So Edmund may have felt few qualms in purchasing Gregories, a handsome Palladian country house with an estate of some 600 acres of mixed land near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. Its cost was £20,000, almost entirely funded by loans and mortgages, including a loan of £6,000 from the ever-willing Lord Verney, again arranged by Will.

Given Burke’s background and evidently slender means, the purchase was a source of wonderment to his friends, and of gossip and slander to his enemies. But he loved the countryside, and now set himself to become a successful farmer on scientific principles. The house also brought with it a magnificent collection of paintings and sculpture. Boswell noted seven landscapes by Poussin on a visit, and a sale catalogue of the estate in 1812 included sixty-four paintings – including four by Titian, five by Reynolds and one by Leonardo da Vinci – fifty marbles and twelve drawings. Some of these works were added by Burke, including most likely the Reynoldses and a large Poussin sent by his protégé James Barry from Rome.

The new property was close to London, a crucial merit for the working politician of the day. But best of all it would give him the respect then accorded to men of property. As one admirer remarked, ‘An Irishman, one Mr Burke, is sprung up in the House of Commons, who has astonished every body with the power of his eloquence, his comprehensive knowledge in all our exterior and internal politics and commercial interests. He wants nothing but that sort of dignity annexed to rank, and property in England, to make him the most considerable man in the Lower House.’ That was precisely the point. Gregories would make Burke a gentleman.

But his new status came at a high cost. Mortgages at that time could be called in at six months’ notice, the estate was far from paying its own way, and the Burkes did not live frugally. Moreover, through the common purse, they were acutely exposed to changes in the value of East India Company shares. Nemesis inevitably followed. There had been stock market tremors, notably in 1766 when Chatham announced a parliamentary inquiry which was seen as a transparent attempt by government to annex a portion of the company’s profits. But three years later events in India caused a sudden panic, and the price of East India Company shares fell 13 per cent. The effect on the over-extended Will Burke was catastrophic: from being handsomely ahead, he and Verney now faced a joint debt of £47,000, and were themselves the hapless creditors of other East India speculators whose holdings had crashed. Richard faced similar ruin. Despite – sometimes because of – numerous other money-making schemes over the years, the two adventurers would die in debt. For his part, Edmund Burke would spend the rest of his life with money troubles. Members of Parliament could not be arrested for failure to pay their debts; but failure to get re-elected carried with it the imminent possibility of debtors’ prison.

The Chatham administration started badly and ended worse, having dragged on despite parliamentary defeat and the chronic illness of its principal; its parting gesture was to pass the Townshend duties on American imports of items such as paint, paper and tea, which only stoked the fires of rebellion among the colonists still further. The government was taken over by the Duke of Grafton, only to be reconstructed yet again under pressure from the Rockinghamites … in collaboration with none other than Chatham himself. With these endless changes, the country seemed close to being ungovernable, all the more so as a tide of radical petitions flooded in complaining bitterly of parliamentary corruption, incompetence and the growing subordination of ministers to the King.

Burke was indefatigable throughout. In addition to his secretarial duties, he was writing, canvassing for petitions and speaking in Parliament wherever possible. It has been estimated that over the period 1768–74 he was the third most active speaker in the House, rising more than 400 times on a wide range of topics, especially on trade policy and his growing concern at the abuse of the King’s prerogative powers. Around him, the Rockinghamites and their leader were reluctantly having to acknowledge, and even embrace, the fact that theirs might be a protracted parliamentary exile.

Radicalism was in the air. But in the 1760s it also had a specific cause célèbre: the case of John Wilkes. In giving him a vicious squint and a prognathous jaw, nature had not been kind to Wilkes (see following page/s). But he had overcome these impediments to procure himself a notorious reputation as a hell-raiser and philanderer; he boasted that it ‘took him only half an hour to talk away his face’ with a woman. He also had a positive genius for constitutionally valuable mischief-making, a vaulting ambition frustrated by lack of patronage, and a great hatred for the Earl of Bute. In 1763, now an MP, Wilkes obtained an advance copy of the King’s Speech, and he denounced it and its presumed author Bute in his radical (and violently anti-Scottish) weekly, the North Briton. He had previously accused the Archbishop of Canterbury of buggery, and called the Bishop of Gloucester’s wife a professional prostitute. He had even suggested that Bute’s influence extended to taking George III’s mother as his mistress. This, however, was the final straw.

The King’s response was to instigate a criminal charge of seditious libel, and have the government issue general warrants in which Wilkes and his collaborators were not named. Forty-nine people were arrested, including Wilkes himself. He was sent to the Tower of London, his home ransacked for incriminating materials, and papers removed. He then counter-sued for trespass and to secure his own immunity as an MP to libel claims under parliamentary privilege. Both actions were successful. Over a series of cases, Wilkes was able to establish both the illegality of general warrants and the now basic principle that the English courts were under no obligation to defer in law to so-called ‘reasons of state’, advanced by government in the cause of political expediency.

6. Portrait of John Wilkes

Wilkes, however, was only just getting into his stride. In the same year, his political enemies published an erotic burlesque of Pope’s Essay on Man attributed to him called An Essay on Woman. Among other things, the poem neatly summarized what seems to have been Wilkes’s own personal credo: ‘Life can little more supply / Than just a few good fucks, and then we die.’ It was condemned as blasphemous and obscene by the House of Lords, and Wilkes, who had been wounded in a duel, escaped to Paris to recover and avoid imprisonment. He was convicted in absentia of obscene and seditious libels early in 1764, and declared an outlaw. Four years later, however, and under some pressure from his French creditors, Wilkes made a dramatic return to England and was elected to Parliament for Middlesex, amid wild scenes of mob hysteria and rejoicing. He surrendered himself, waived parliamentary privilege and was sent to jail, whereupon some of his supporters were killed by troops at a riot in St George’s Fields, on the site of the present Waterloo Station, not far from Parliament. As if this was not enough, a succession of expulsions from and re-elections to Parliament now followed, which only succeeded in embarrassing the authorities still further and cementing the words ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ into the popular mind.

Even then Wilkes was not finished. As an MP, he burnished his radical credentials by denouncing British policy in America, and in 1771 fought a successful campaign to prevent the suppression of reports on parliamentary debates. The loss of trust in our ancient institutions, and specifically in Parliament, is often regarded as a modern phenomenon. But Wilkes reminds us that this is not so. In less than a decade, he had almost single-handedly thrown Parliament into grave disrepute, shining a searching light on its corruption, authoritarianism, dependence on the Crown and willingness to suppress the common-law freedoms of the citizen. He had galvanized the press, organized political societies and mobilized the mob.

To Burke, Wilkes was at best a mixed blessing. Personally, he found him ‘a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no principles’. There was little in common between them temperamentally, or much politically, since Burke was no radical. In many ways Wilkes was an embarrassment and, worse, a highly effective one. The Rockingham Whigs shared his criticisms of overreaching Crown prerogative and British policy towards America, and during their brief year in power Parliament had banned both general warrants and the arbitrary seizure of personal papers. But they were deeply uncomfortable about any alliance with such a notorious blasphemer and libertine. Burke himself deplored the use of general warrants, and pressed in the public interest for three years for a parliamentary inquiry into the killings in the St George’s Fields. But nothing could have been more hostile to his developing conception of principled political opposition, or to his deep belief in the value of the social order, than Wilkes’s willingness to whip up crowd hysteria and pander to the mob. That way led to revolution.

It was in this context that Burke framed one of his most famous and enduring essays. In 1768–9 he had written – perhaps with William Dowdeswell, the Rockinghamites’ leader in the Commons – Observations on a Late Publication Entitled ‘The Present State of the Nation’. Two years later he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The first is a long and carefully argued pamphlet, now somewhat unjustly ignored; the second is a classic of political thought, which has been rightly read and re-read by succeeding generations. Together, they mark Burke’s transition to political maturity.

The Observations is Burke’s first real political pamphlet. In purpose, it is a counter-attack. In late 1768 William Knox, a follower of Grenville, had published The Present State of the Nation, which set out a vigorous defence of Grenville’s trade policy, and an attack on Rockingham and his followers for betraying that policy and the interests of the nation. In response, Burke does not simply resort to the political stock-in-trade of deflection, denial and insult. Rather, he makes a lengthy argument on the merits, backed up with a host of detail, statistical tables and evidence. The subtext was clear. The Rockinghamites were right on the facts and right on the principle, and they stood ready to serve when the ministry collapsed, as it surely would. But more than that: as a party they had the capacity to articulate policy based on fundamental political principle, which could as a result outlast the vagaries of the moment, and become the basis for loyal and yet energetic opposition.

Much of the Observations is dry stuff indeed, though towards the end it moves from evidence and rebuttal to a vigorous defence of the Rockingham ministry along the lines of the Short Account. Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific detail with Olympian generalization. Thus a discussion of imports from Jamaica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that ‘politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part’. Or take Burke’s magisterial repudiation of Grenville’s proposal for the American colonists to be enfranchised and their representatives sent 3,000 miles to London. This he denounces as constitutional folly, in terms that have resonance today: ‘Has he well considered what an immense operation any change in our constitution is? How many discussions, parties and passions it will necessarily excite; and when you open it to inquiry in one part, where the inquiry will stop?’ In a favourite metaphor, Burke likens the British constitution to an old building, which ‘stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then it may come down upon our heads altogether, in much uniformity of ruin; and great will be the ruin thereof.’ In its scepticism about human reason, and its respect for tradition, for what is given, the thought is deeply conservative. In language, it is biblical.

In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, published anonymously in April 1770, Burke turns from economic to social disorder. The return of Wilkes in 1768 had spread panic in official circles, generated huge public excitement and cast the authorities generally in the worst possible light. But Burke does not analyse popular grievances simply in their own terms. Rather, he develops an elaborate conspiracy theory, in which their ultimate cause is to be found in the extension and consolidation of royal power.

This was potentially dangerous territory, even for someone protected by parliamentary privilege, and Burke prudently follows the convention of the time that the King can do no wrong. Instead he attributes to the ‘King’s Friends’, an alleged Court faction of shadowy advisers, the importation from France to Britain of a Double Cabinet: a parallel administration designed to control the workings of government from the inside. This has as its counterpart an attack on other sources of power; notably, he accuses the Court faction of seeking to destroy potential opposition within Parliament through patronage, and by constant changes of administration. Given all these offices and pensions, it was little wonder that the Crown could not live within the ample financial means voted to it by Parliament.

Rhetorically, Burke’s argument was highly ingenious. It allowed him to retell recent political history as an unconstitutional attempt by George III to escape the constraints imposed by the Glorious Revolution in 1688–9 and accepted by monarchs thereafter. It offered a delicious hint of foreign intrigue, reminiscent of the influence of Louis XIV over Charles II and James II. And its analysis had a plausible and deeply satisfying twist in the tail. Far from being unwelcome to the King’s friends, Burke argues, the advent of Wilkes offered them an extraordinary opportunity, for it actively assisted their project of undermining Parliament, and securing more power for themselves in the ensuing crackdown.

The Thoughts thus contained an elaborate conspiracy theory. One might think this a thin rationale for political immortality, especially since the theory of the Double Cabinet has since been largely exploded by historical research. How, then, has it achieved its status as a classic of political thought?

As in the Observations, the reason lies in the final third of the book. Formally, Burke dismisses radical solutions like shorter parliaments and a ‘place bill’, which would remedy excesses of patronage by excluding holders of lucrative offices or pensions from the Commons. He also disavows specific remedies of his own. In fact, however, he has nothing less than a complete re-engineering of party politics in mind. He insists that power can never be properly exercised by an individual, however distinguished, for any great length of time. Practically, then, the only solution is a principled assertion of the power of the House of Commons, through political parties: ‘Government may in a great measure be restored, if any considerable body of men have honesty and resolution enough never to accept Administration, unless this garrison of King’s men, which is stationed, as in a citadel, to control and enslave it, be entirely broken and disbanded, and every work they have thrown up be levelled with the ground.’ In other words, parliamentarians should band together on principle to destroy what Burke insisted was the King’s network of patronage.

If that fails, then the only backstop can be at the ballot box:

I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the Representatives, but [by] the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that these Representatives are going to over-leap the fences of the law, and to introduce an arbitrary power … nothing else can hold the constitution to its true principles.

In a mixed constitution, then, all sources of power are constrained: MPs hold the government to account, but they must themselves be held accountable by the people if the constitution is to work its magic.

But, Burke argues in a brilliant move, this balance in turn rests on a crucial distinction. For faction is not party. Factions are groupings of the moment, which exist to take power and to exercise it. Those forming Burke’s ‘considerable body of men’ are not a faction. No, they are a political party; that is, they are ‘united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some political principle in which they are all agreed’. The test comes when such a group is evicted from office. Founded on self-interest, factions will tend to disperse. Parties, however, will sustain themselves and their membership – on principle and shared values, on mutual commitments and on personal loyalties and friendship – until the opportunity to exercise power returns.

There is a risk of circularity here: to the conspiracy theorist, lack of success can itself be a form of self-justification, and an excuse for inertia. Nevertheless, it was a matter of deep political principle that the Rockinghamites should be able to sustain themselves as a party in opposition, and they had learned how to do this, with some difficulty, since 1766. So it was not surprising that they saw themselves as almost the sole repository of political virtue, and came to refer to the Thoughts as ‘our political creed’.

The Thoughts was a significant succès d’estime. It quickly ran through four editions, and made Burke, now forty years of age, into a national figure. More than 3,000 copies were printed, and it was widely debated in the press. As a political call to action it was a failure: too intricate and theoretical to be really effective, it was neutered when publication coincided with a rare lull in Wilkes-related scandal. As a basic credo for the Rockingham Whigs, it was a vital statement of shared belief. As political analysis, it remains of enduring importance today.

But by mid-1770 Burke’s own mind was elsewhere. Jane had fallen ill and was confined to her bed for two months, perhaps as a result of a miscarriage. Worse, just as the Thoughts was published there had also appeared a detailed, accurate and highly personal article about him in the London Evening Post. In general Burke accepted public scrutiny; he could do no less. But this was different: ‘Hitherto, much as I have been abused, my table and my bed were left sacred, but since it has so unfortunately happened, that my wife, a quiet woman, confined to her family cares and affections, has been dragged into a newspaper, I own I feel a little hurt.’ What made it worse was that the original source was a well-meaning account by his oldest friend, Richard Shackleton, which had fallen into the wrong hands. In it Shackleton had claimed that Burke was ‘made easy by patronage’, unintentionally inflicting a wound; and what was worse, he had revealed that both Burke’s mother and wife were Roman Catholics. Coming at a time when Irish grievances were rapidly on the rise, this could only excite and succour Burke’s political opponents.

In other ways, this period was more hopeful. In December 1770 Burke was chosen by the Assembly of the colony of New York to act as their agent in London, a role which paid well – £500 a year, or roughly that of a middle-ranking official – and kept him closely in touch with colonial affairs and issues relating to trade with America. He expanded the farm at Gregories, and invested money he did not have in new techniques and experiments under the influence of the agriculturalist Arthur Young. He also made a very happy visit to France in 1773, travelling to Auxerre with his son Richard, then fifteen, placing the boy with a local family named Parisot in order to teach him some French, and also establishing a lasting link which would feed Burke much useful information in due course about the first years of the revolution. Returning via Paris, Burke visited Versailles, where he saw the young Dauphine, Marie Antoinette, an experience which would later be immortalized in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

However, it was with revolution in America that the government, and Burke, were to be increasingly concerned. The Rockinghamites had learned to survive in opposition during the Chatham and Grafton ministries. But their morale was sustained by the regular change in administration, and by hopes of a return. In January 1770, however, George III had after ten years at last discovered in the Tory Lord North a Prime Minister in whom he could repose his trust. It was a fateful choice.

North was likeable, flexible, deferential, a patriot and a moralist in his private life, all high recommendations to the King. What he was not was a great leader. In 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company, which had built up a vast surplus of tea in Britain, to export tea to America for the first time. At North’s insistence this tea bore a symbolic tax of three pence per pound, a last remnant of the highly unpopular and now discarded Townshend duties, left in part specifically to remind the American colonies of Britain’s right to tax them. Even including this tax, however, East India Company tea was cheaper than other imported tea, and cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea. The effect of the new Act, then, was immediate and comprehensive: at a single stroke it united all sections of American opinion, nationalist and loyalist, commercial and illicit, against the new imports. On 16 December, after a lengthy stand-off in Boston harbour with the colonial authorities, and a raucous meeting of some 7,000 local citizens, rebels disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three ships at night – all of which were American, not owned by the East India Company – and dumped 342 cases of tea from them into the harbour.

The ‘Boston tea party’ scandalized Parliament and British public opinion alike. With feelings running high both in the country and on the backbenches, Lord North and his ministers prepared draconian measures to crack down on the colony of Massachusetts and the port of Boston, and reassert their control. Both in principle and in his well-remunerated role as the British agent of the New York Assembly, Burke’s sympathies lay with the colonists. As the storm clouds of revolution gathered, in April 1774 he made the first of two great speeches designed to bring Parliament back to its senses, to vindicate – yet again – the policy of the Rockingham government, and to set out a proper long-term basis for relations between Britain and America.

Burke devoted enormous time and trouble to his ‘Speech on American Taxation’, anticipating its later publication. In it he traces the odious tea tax back through a tortuous history of varied and sometimes contradictory policy: imposition of the Stamp Act by Grenville; its repeal under Rockingham; renewed taxation via the Townshend duties, passed during the chaos induced by Chatham’s temporary absence from politics; and their partial withdrawal in turn under North, leaving only the odious tea tax behind. Describing his opponents in the most generous terms, he is nonetheless perfectly clear in attributing to them the blame for Britain’s ugly predicament, in terms at once impassioned, ironic and magisterial. Though he does not say as much, the whole episode amounts for him to a case history in which failed policy derives from a failed approach to government itself.

Experience and not abstract ideas, Burke insists, is what counts:

Lord North asserts, that retrospect is not wise; and the proper, the only proper subject of inquiry, is ‘not how we got into this difficulty, but how we are to get out of it.’ In other words, we are, according to him, to consult our invention, and reject our experience. The mode of deliberation he recommends is diametrically opposite to every rule of reason and every principle of good sense established amongst mankind.

The Stamp Act marks a profound and disastrous shift in policy, Burke argues, in attempting for the first time to derive revenue from America itself, over and above the revenue naturally deriving from its growth and Britain’s control of trade through the Navigation Acts. America could never be governed effectively without a recognition that Americans were freeborn Englishmen abroad, to whom the tea tax was a grave insult: ‘No man ever doubted that the commodity of tea could bear an imposition of three pence. But no commodity will bear three pence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are irritated, and when two millions of men are resolved not to pay.’

The only solution was to build ‘a rampart against the speculations of innovators’, embrace ‘a spirit of practicability, of moderation and mutual convenience’, and repeal the tea tax. But this in turn required Britain to return to an earlier and fundamentally different conception of empire: as non-coercive, commercial and based on shared interests and identity, not on attempts at control and retribution. Only thus, and through a far more selective exercise of national power, could Britain reconcile imperial sovereignty with imperial dominion. But without such a shift, Burke predicts, there will be disaster in the American colonies. ‘Will they be content in such a state of slavery? If not, look to the consequences. Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not … such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun.’ It was an early demonstration of his gift of prophecy.

The ‘Taxation’ speech signally failed to secure the repeal of the tea tax. Published in January 1775, it and its sister speech on ‘Conciliation’ with America are gems of historical analysis and statesmanship. But they also marked a small but important watershed in political communication. Speeches by parliamentarians had been published before, but these were some of the earliest occasions on which they had been self-consciously used to build a basis of knowledge and shared education within politics, a reputation outside Parliament and indeed – such was the interest that they attracted in America – a degree of international renown.

This was all to the good. But in April 1774 Burke was having difficulty in securing a platform even in his own country. A general election was imminent, but his patron Lord Verney had been all but destroyed financially by his speculations in the East India Company. Verney’s pocket borough at Wendover was a valuable asset, which would undoubtedly be put out to bid. The result was that Burke had nowhere to stand for Parliament. Disaster stared him in the face.