Burke, Edmund

Burke, Edmund (1729–97), political writer. Born in Dublin, he was educated at Trinity College and studied law in London. His early work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1787) influenced a number of Irish artists (see painting), and he was later to use his influence in England to promote the careers of several among them, notably James Barry.

Burke was private secretary to the chief secretary for Ireland, William Gerard Hamilton, during 1761–4, and from 1765 private secretary to Lord Rockingham. Elected to the British parliament in 1765, he emerged as a leading orator and theorist of the new reformist Whig Party. He attacked George III's personal government, called for conciliatory treatment of the American colonists, introduced an economical reform bill (1780) to reduce official corruption, and led the attack on Warren Hastings's abuse of power in India. Following the French Revolution, however, Burke became a defender of the existing order against what he saw as a destructive quest for abstract liberty, publishing Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and breaking with his Whig colleague Charles James Fox.

Burke's mother was a Catholic of the Co. Cork Nagle family, and he was shaken when Nagle relatives were caught up in the show trials of prominent Catholics provoked by the Whiteboy movement. He was partly educated in a Catholic school in Co. Cork, his wife was an Irish Catholic, and his lawyer father may have been a convert. Yet opinion is divided between those who see this background as shaping his whole political outlook and those who see the mature Burke primarily as a metropolitan reformer. His open advocacy of free trade for Ireland cost him his Bristol constituency in 1780. On the other hand he was cool towards legislative independence, which he saw as strengthening an intolerant Protestant elite. In the 1790s, notably in his Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792), he advocated Catholic relief as the only means to prevent revolution in Ireland. His son Richard Burke (1758–94) was a somewhat ineffectual agent for the Catholic Committee 1791–2, until replaced by Tone.