Burke, Edmund

Burke, Edmund (1729–97), educated at Trinity College, Dublin, entered the Middle Temple in 1750. He was more interested in literature than in law: Dr Johnson (of whose Club he was a founding member) was among his many eminent literary friends. In 1758 with Dodsley he founded the Annual Register to which he contributed until 1788. He was elected MP for Wendover in 1765 and first spoke in the House in 1766 on the American question. During the following years he vehemently attacked the Tory government. He published his Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation in 1769, and his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents in 1770. In 1774 he became MP for Bristol, and made his speeches On American Taxation (1774) and On Conciliation with America (1775). His Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol was written 1777. His championship of free trade with Ireland and Catholic emancipation lost him his seat in Bristol in 1780; he became MP for Malton in 1781. His attacks on the conduct of the American war contributed to North's resignation in 1783. Burke opened the case for the impeachment of Warren Hastings in 1788 and supported Wilberforce in advocating abolition of the slave trade. The French Revolution prompted his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and other important works, including Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–7). He retired in 1794 and received a pension from the ministry, for which he was criticized; he defended himself in his A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796).

Burke's political life was devoted to five ‘great, just and honourable causes’: the emancipation of the House of Commons from the control of George III and the ‘King's friends’; the emancipation of the American colonies; the emancipation of Ireland; the emancipation of India from the misgovernment of the East India Company; and opposition to the atheistical Jacobinism displayed in the French Revolution. As a writer and orator he won admiration from all sides. Macaulay declared him the ‘greatest man since Milton’. (See also Sublime and Beautiful, A Philosophical Enquiry into the; Vindication of a Natural Society, A.)