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Edmund Burke

1729–1797

 

Outside Trinity College in central Dublin stand two statues, one of the poet Goldsmith, the other of Edmund Burke.  For the nineteenth century, they represented the two aspects of Anglo-Irish culture which the college was most proud of.  Though Goldsmith is still much admired, it is Burke as a political writer and statesman who has come to be seen as the most influential.  He remains the great philosopher and expounder of the anti-revolutionary philosophy that Ireland has produced.

      Like that of his country, Burke's was a divided, perhaps even confused, identity.  His father came from a Catholic family, but being an attorney he had conformed to the Church of Ireland for professional reasons.  His mother was a Catholic from rural Cork.  Burke himself seems to have been born not at his father's house in Dublin but at his uncle's house in rural Cork.  As a small child he was sent to live among his Cork relatives, where he would have absorbed the Catholic culture.  From there he entered Trinity College, which he seems to have found intellectually stimulating, and where he distinguished himself.  He was to be a lawyer and was sent by his father to study at the Middle Temple in London.  In London he married a Catholic, Mary Nugent (who remained a Catholic all her life).  Burke's view of Christianity was an inclusive one, covering both the Catholicism of his mother and the nominal Anglicanism of his father.  In later life he was secretive about his background and his relations, as the nature of his upbringing might not have appealed to many in London political circles.

      Burke did not care for the law; his father did not care that his son wished to be a writer.  Breaking with his father, Burke entered on the lower rungs of a political career.  In 1756 he made his name with a satire on Bolingbroke called A Vindication of Natural Society, but the irony was easily misunderstood.  Far more successful was his essay on 'The Sublime on the Beautiful'.  His literary career continued, and among his books was one dealing with the political settlement with America, a continent always of interest to him.  He began the Annual Register, a record of political, social, and criminal events which still continues, and from the beginning proved a success and an essential source for later historians.

      When WILLIAM HAMILTON [76] was made Irish secretary, Burke accompanied him to Dublin.  His views on the social situation of his native country were reinforced by this stay.  As John Morley, himself immersed in Irish affairs, later wrote: 'He always took the interest of an ardent patriot in his unfortunate country; and made more than one weighty sacrifice on behalf of the principles which he deemed to be bound up with her welfare.'

      Though he was entitled to a small pension for his services, Burke quarrelled with Hamilton and gave it up.  England was now passing into a period of political change under George III, who wished to break with the settlement of 1688 and rule with more authority rather than the permission of a set of great families.  In July 1767, Lord Rockingham became prime minister in a reversal of fortune for the king, and appointed Burke his secretary.  This remained a lifelong friendship.  But Rockingham fell from power, largely because he was not supported by William Pitt.  This ended any possibility of a wise policy toward the American colonies.  Burke had now been elected a member of Parliament.  From the day of his election until 1790 he was to be one of the essential guides of a revival of the Whig party, from which, in due course, would spring the great Liberal party of the nineteenth century.  In opposition, Burke showed by his writings and speeches that he had a wide-ranging and firm grasp of the details and prospects of political life that was unrivalled.

      Oddly enough for a man who had been a penniless scribbler a few years before, Burke was now able to buy an estate costing £22,000, which brought him £500 a year in rents.  His finances were another mysterious aspect of his life.  He spent more than he made - far more - for he was a friendly man who kept up with his friends and others of interest in London.

      Burke was more than a politician; he was an eminent man of letters.  Until very recently, his description of Marie Antoinette was among those pieces of famous prose which every schoolchild in Ireland studied.

      The main themes of his political life, aside from his sympathy for Ireland, were the fate of the American colonies, the beginnings of the British imperial adventure in India, and the French Revolution.  These events inspired Burke's most eloquent pieces.  His desire for a policy of reconciliation in Ireland led to the loss of his seat.  But he was soon re-elected for another borough and held several offices in government.  However, these were small matters compared with the saga of the impeachment of Warren Hastings for his highhanded and cruel actions against the natives of India, which Burke pursued from 1787.

      In 1790 he published Reflections on the Revolution in France, which appeared in eleven editions at the time, and drew fierce responses from the romantic admirers of the bloody events in Paris; one of these being Tom Paine's Rights of Man.  Though it gained Burke a universal reputation, it also led to a break with the leader of his party, Charles James Fox, a more radical man than Burke, in May 1791.

      When the long trial of Warren Hastings concluded with his acquittal in April 1795, Burke gave up his seat in Parliament.  Though his writings and speeches on the whole defended the value of tradition and good order, he was not a great admirer of the landed oligarchs of the Whig party.  He was a representative of 'the new man', the sort of person who rose through the ranks of British society and would become a great feature of the nineteenth century.

      Burke died at his house in Beaconsfield on 9th July 1797.  He remains an outstanding figure, a proponent of a view of society which has many admirers.  Like many other Irishmen later, he had made a career for himself in British public life.  'There have been,' his admirer John Morley concluded, 'many subtler, more original, and more systematic thinkers about the condition of the social union.  But no one that ever lived used the general ideas of the thinker more successfully to judge the particular problems of statesmen.  No one has ever come so close to the details of practical politics, and at the same time remembered that these can only be understood and only dealt with by the aid of the broad conceptions of political philosophy.  And what is more than all for the perpetuity of fame, he was one of the great masters of the high and difficult art of elaborate composition.'

      It has been the lament of many Irish people since that these amazing talents could not have served his native country more directly than they did.  But Burke was caught by the political circumstances of his day, and like all leaders of men had to make what he could of them.