Burke, Edmund

BURKE, EDMUND. (1729/30–1797). Edmund Burke was born in Dublin, the son of a Catholic mother and a Protestant lawyer. He received a thorough intellectual training at a Quaker school in Baltimore (Ireland) from 1741 to 1744, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read law and graduated in 1748. In 1750 went on to the Middle Temple in London, intending to qualify for the Irish bar, but he became disenchanted with the law and began instead to write. A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) was his first widely noticed work, and his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful also commanded admiration. With his friend William Burke, he contributed to An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757). From 1758 he was the editor of the new Annual Register, for which he was paid a handsome £100 per volume. In 1759, having a wife and young son to support, he became private secretary to the new chief secretary in Ireland and, in 1765, to the new prime minister, Lord Rockingham (Charles Watson-Wentworth). At the end of the year he was elected to Parliament and took his seat on 14 January 1766.

Burke entered parliament as an adherent of the Rockingham Whigs, and shared their belief that a secret court influence was subverting Parliament. In colonial matters he repeatedly made a distinction between Britain's undoubted right to tax and the expediency of letting the colonies look after themselves and create wealth for the empire. His speeches in support of the repeal of the Stamp Act and of the Declaratory Act were intelligent and much admired. He also coordinated the lobbying of merchants and manufacturers who stood to lose from a retaliatory American embargo on imports. This experience both confirmed his belief in extra-parliamentary politics and gave him experience in its organization. In 1767, having evaded an offer of office from William Pitt, the earl of Chatham, whom he thought intellectually bankrupt, he opposed the Townshend duties and the subsequent deployment of troops in Boston.

Up to 1773 these arguments carried some weight. However, the Boston Tea Party convinced almost all British politicians that it was time to stop giving way in the face of violent American blackmail. In these circumstances, even Burke found it difficult to oppose a carefully graded incremental process of coercion. The Coercive Acts of 1774, however, were sufficiently draconian to allow Burke and Rockingham to appear as champions of a saner, more generous course of conciliation. His two key speeches, "Taxation" (1774) and "Conciliation" (1775), argued powerfully for the repeal of the Acts and the abandonment in practice of parliament's constitutional right to tax. In Burke's view, both sides should focus less on rights and more upon mutual responsibilities and cooperation. These views did not go down well in Parliament, although their published versions (1775) earned him admirers among the wider public. The promulgation of the Declaration of Independence made it even more difficult to oppose the war in the American colonies, but Burke's preferred solution, secession from parliament, was only patchily observed by his colleagues, and the justification Burke offered to his electors, published as A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, was rather lame. When he returned to parliament, Burke lashed out at the employment of German mercenaries and Native irregulars by Englishmen against Englishmen. When the war began to go badly, and men blamed it on corruption and inefficiency, he sought reform in the shape of a public accounts committee. However, the government's position under the prime ministry of Lord North was almost unassailable until the battle of Yorktown, and it did not collapse until 1782.

Burke was paymaster to the forces in Rockingham's second ministry and, later, that of the duke of Portland. His continuing zeal for hunting out injustice and corruption in imperial affairs was evident in his contributions to Henry Fox's India Bill in 1783 and to the prosecution of Warren Hastings (1785–1794) for corruption. However, he was still no revolutionary and was steadily becoming more conservative. In 1790 he published his famous denunciation, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was aimed at English radicals advocating sweeping reforms at home. This, along with other factors, caused a final rift with Fox and the publication of his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs in 1791. By 1794 Burke was equating the prosecution of Hastings with the war on Jacobinism, and when Hastings was acquitted, Burke resigned his parliamentary seat. He died on 9 July 1797.

SEE ALSO Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts; Stamp Act.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lock, F. P. Edmund Burke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

                              revised by John Oliphant