Edmund Burke

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 28th of December 1792, Edmund Burke rose to speak in the House of Commons during the debate on the Aliens Bill. He pulled a concealed dagger from his coat and threw it to the floor. France, he said, had placed an order for 3,000 daggers. Then came the line: "This is what you are to gain by an alliance with France". Burke picked the weapon up and kept speaking.

  The man behind that stunt was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher and politician, born in 1729, who died on the 9th of July 1797. In the twentieth century, he came to be seen as the philosophical founder of conservatism, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. The ultra-royalist Joseph de Maistre shares that title with him. Yet in the nineteenth century, conservatives and liberals alike had praised him.

  How could one thinker satisfy both camps? What did he write that shaped opinion in Britain and in France after 1789? And what drove a man who preached restraint and principle to throw a weapon onto the floor of Parliament?

  2711135

• 2. From Dublin To Print

  ›

  Mary Nagle, Burke's mother, was a Roman Catholic from a County Cork family and a cousin of the Catholic educator Nano Nagle. His father Richard, a successful Dublin solicitor, belonged to the Church of Ireland. Nobody has settled whether this Richard is the Richard Burke who converted away from Catholicism.

  The name Burke descends from William de Burgh, an Anglo-Norman knight who reached Ireland in 1185, after Henry II's invasion of 1171. The family belonged to the Old English houses that merged into Gaelic society. De Burgh, latinised as de Burgo, became de Búrca or Búrc in Irish. Over the centuries that Irish form turned into Burke.

  Burke's sister Juliana was raised a Roman Catholic and stayed one. Burke followed his father into the Anglican church and practised that faith all his life. His political enemies kept charging that he had been schooled at the Jesuit College of St Omer, near Calais, and secretly favoured Catholicism. Under Ireland's Penal Laws, Catholic membership would have barred him from public office. Burke told Frances Crewe the claim was false. His father could not have practised law in Dublin unless he belonged to the Established Church. And although Burke twice visited Paris, he said, he never happened to pass through Saint-Omer. After winning a seat in the Commons, he took the required oath of allegiance and abjuration, the oath of supremacy and the declaration against transubstantiation.

  Killavullen, in the Blackwater Valley of County Cork, was home to his mother's family. The young Burke sometimes went there to escape the unhealthy air of Dublin. For schooling he went to a Quaker school at Ballitore in County Kildare, some 67 km from Dublin. Like his cousin Nano Nagle, he may also have attended a hedge school near Killavullen. A classmate at Ballitore, Mary Leadbeater, the school owner's daughter, remained his correspondent for the rest of his life.

  Trinity College Dublin took Burke in 1744. It was a Protestant college that refused to let Catholics take degrees until 1793. In 1747 he set up a debating society, Edmund Burke's Club, which merged with Trinity's Historical Club in 1770 to form the College Historical Society. That body is the oldest undergraduate society in the world, and it still holds the minutes of Burke's meetings. Burke graduated in 1748.

  His father wanted him to study law, so in 1750 Burke went to London and entered the Middle Temple. He soon gave up the law to travel in Continental Europe. After that, he tried to earn a living by writing.

  Lord Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History came out in 1752, and his collected works followed in 1754. These provoked Burke into his first published work, A Vindication of Natural Society, which appeared in the spring of 1756. Burke copied Bolingbroke's style and ideas to push his case for deistic rationalism to an absurd conclusion. His point was that Bolingbroke's arguments against revealed religion could be turned against every social and civil institution.

  Lord Chesterfield and Bishop Warburton, among others, first took the book for Bolingbroke's own work. Every review was positive, and critics singled out the quality of the writing. Some missed the irony altogether, so in the preface to the second edition in 1757 Burke stated that it was a satire. Richard Hurd thought the imitation so close that it defeated itself. An ironist, he argued, should exaggerate enough for the ridicule to show. This book, he complained, was written "with so apparent, or rather so real an earnestness, that half his purpose is sacrificed to the other". A minority of scholars even argue that Burke meant every word and disowned the book later for political reasons.

  In 1757 Burke also published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. This treatise on aesthetics drew the attention of Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. It was his only purely philosophical work, and he had completed it in 1753. Thirty years later, Sir Joshua Reynolds and French Laurence asked him to expand it. Burke replied that he was no longer fit for abstract speculation.

  On the 25th of February 1757, Burke signed a contract with Robert Dodsley. It called for a history of England from the time of Julius Caesar to the end of Queen Anne's reign. The length was set at eighty quarto sheets, or 640 pages, nearly 400,000 words, due by Christmas 1758. Burke carried the work only as far as the year 1216 and stopped. The fragment, An Essay Towards an Abridgement of the English History, appeared only in an 1812 collection of his works. G. M. Young dismissed it as demonstrably a translation from the French. One story says Burke quit because David Hume published his own history. Lord Acton remarked that "it is ever to be regretted that the reverse did not occur".

  The year after that contract, Burke and Dodsley founded the Annual Register, in which various authors assessed the previous year's international political events. How much Burke wrote for it is unclear. His biographer Robert Murray quotes the Register as evidence of Burke's opinions, yet Philip Magnus does not cite it directly. Burke stayed chief editor until at least 1789, and no evidence shows any other writer contributing before 1766.

  On the 12th of March 1757, Burke married Jane Mary Nugent, who lived from 1734 to 1812. She was the daughter of Dr Christopher Nugent, a Catholic physician who had treated Burke at Bath. Their son Richard was born on the 9th of February 1758, while a second son, Christopher, born that December, died in infancy. Burke also helped raise a ward, Edmund Nagle, who became Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle. The boy was the son of a maternal cousin and was orphaned in 1763.

  William Gerard Hamilton, nicknamed "Single-speech Hamilton", entered Burke's life at about this time. When Hamilton became Chief Secretary for Ireland, Burke went with him to Dublin as private secretary for three years. In 1765 Burke took the same role for Charles, Marquess of Rockingham, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, who became a close friend and associate.

  14141825

• 3. Party And Principle

  ›

  In December 1765, Burke entered the House of Commons as Member for Wendover in Buckinghamshire. Wendover was a pocket borough whose seat Lord Fermanagh could bestow. He was later the 2nd Earl Verney and a close political ally of Rockingham. After Burke's maiden speech, William Pitt the Elder said he had "spoken in such a manner as to stop the mouths of all Europe". Pitt added that the Commons should congratulate itself on acquiring such a Member.

  A 1769 Grenvillite pamphlet, The Present State of the Nation, drew a reply from Burke titled Observations on a Late State of the Nation. Surveying the finances of France, he predicted "some extraordinary convulsion in that whole system". That same year he bought Gregories, a 600 acre estate near Beaconsfield, mostly with borrowed money. The estate came with saleable assets such as art by Titian. It still proved a heavy burden for decades, and Burke never fully repaid the price. His speeches and writings had made him famous enough that some suspected him of writing the Letters of Junius.

  Samuel Johnson sat at the centre of the circle of London intellectuals and artists that Burke joined around this time. The circle included David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds. Edward Gibbon called Burke "the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew". Johnson admired Burke's brilliance but judged him a dishonest politician.

  Burke's most important work on royal power appeared on the 23rd of April 1770, as Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. He traced the discontents to the "secret influence" of a neo-Tory group he called the "king's friends". In the Court's technical language, their system was known as "Double Cabinet". Against it, Britain needed a party marked by "an unshaken adherence to principle, and attachment to connexion, against every allurement of interest". Party divisions, he wrote, "whether operating for good or evil, are things inseparable from free government". Burke argued strongly against unrestrained royal power, and for opposition parties able to stop abuses by the monarch or by factions inside the government.

  A bill Burke drafted in 1771 would have let juries decide what counted as libel. Burke spoke for it, but some opposed it, Charles James Fox among them, and it never became law. In 1791, when Fox introduced his own bill while in opposition, he repeated Burke's text almost word for word without acknowledgement. Burke also played a prominent part in securing the right to publish parliamentary debates.

  On the 16th of November 1770, Burke defended a free market in corn during a debate on banning grain exports. He denied that any price was inherently encouraging or discouraging. There was, he told the House, "nothing but a natural price, which grain brings at an universal market". In 1772 he was instrumental in passing the Repeal of Certain Laws Act 1772, which removed old laws against dealers and forestallers in corn.

  The Annual Register for 1772, published in July 1773, carried Burke's condemnation of the partition of Poland. He called it "the first very great breach in the modern political system of Europe" and said it upset the balance of power.

  In March 1782, Rockingham returned to power after the fall of Lord North. Burke became Paymaster of the Forces and a Privy Counsellor, without a seat in Cabinet. Rockingham died unexpectedly in July 1782, and Shelburne replaced him as Prime Minister. That ended the administration after only a few months, yet Burke still introduced two Acts.

  The Paymaster General Act 1782 ended the post as a lucrative sinecure. Paymasters had previously drawn money from the Treasury at their own discretion. Under the new law, they had to deposit requested funds in the Bank of England and withdraw them for specific purposes. The Treasury received monthly statements of the balance. Shelburne's administration repealed this Act, but its replacement repeated almost the whole text of Burke's.

  Burke's Speech on Economical Reform of the 11th of February 1780 had outlined bigger ambitions than the Civil List and Secret Service Money Act 1782 delivered. The Act still abolished 134 offices in the royal household and civil administration. The third Secretary of State and the Board of Trade were abolished, and pensions were limited and regulated. The Act was expected to save £72,368 a year.

  In February 1783, Burke resumed the post of Paymaster when Shelburne's government fell and a coalition headed by North, including Fox, replaced it. That coalition collapsed in 1783, and William Pitt the Younger began a long Tory administration that lasted until 1801. Having backed Fox and North, Burke remained in opposition for the rest of his political life.

  4414223940

• 4. A Representative's Judgment

  ›

  On the 3rd of November 1774, Burke won election as Member for Bristol, at the time "England's second city", in a genuine contest. At the close of the poll he gave his Speech to the Electors of Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll. It rejected the idea that voters could bind their member with instructions and put forward a "representative mandate" in its place. "Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment", he told them. He betrays his voters, he added, "instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion". Parliament, in his words, "is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests".

  The political scientist Hanna Pitkin observes that Burke tied a district's interest to the proper behaviour of its member. In her reading, he pictured a few broad, fixed interests, mostly economic or tied to a locality, with each group or place holding just one.

  In May 1778, Burke backed a motion to loosen restrictions on Irish trade. His constituents in the great trading city of Bristol urged him to oppose free trade with Ireland. If the stand cost him their votes, he said, it would remain on record as an example. It would show "that one man at least had dared to resist the desires of his constituents when his judgment assured him they were wrong". He then published Two Letters to Gentlemen of Bristol on the Bills relative to the Trade of Ireland. In it he argued for free intercourse within the kingdom and against restriction and monopoly. His summary was that "the gain of others is not necessarily our loss".

  Sir George Savile's attempts to repeal some of the penal laws against Catholics also had Burke's support. In 1776 he called capital punishment "the Butchery which we call justice". In 1780 he condemned the pillory for two men convicted of attempting to practise sodomy. Backing such unpopular causes, notably free trade with Ireland and Catholic emancipation, cost him his Bristol seat at the 1780 general election. For the rest of his Parliamentary career he sat for Malton, another pocket borough under Rockingham's patronage.

  Three reasons lay behind Burke's doubts about democracy. He allowed that it might suit some cases in theory, but he insisted that in his day it would be inept and oppressive. First, he thought governing took intelligence and breadth of knowledge that common people rarely had. Second, he feared that if they had the vote, demagogues could easily stir their dangerous and angry passions. The result, he believed, would be violence, confiscation of property and damage to cherished traditions and established religion. Third, he warned that democracy would create a tyranny over unpopular minorities, who needed the protection of the upper classes.

  Burke's conscience also ran against the interests of his Bristol electors on slavery, since many of them profited richly from the slave trade. He proposed a bill to ban slaveholders from sitting in the House of Commons, calling them a danger incompatible with traditional notions of English liberty. Slavery, he said, was a "weed that grows on every soil".

  Gregory Collins argues that Burke's view of Africans as "barbaric" and in need of Christian "civilising" was not unusual among abolitionists then. Burke thought Christianity had "tamed" European civilisation, and he regarded Southern European peoples as equally savage and barbarous. Collins adds that Burke blamed the "uncivilised" behaviour of enslaved Africans partly on slavery itself. In Burke's belief, enslavement stripped anyone of virtue and left them mentally deficient, whatever their race. Burke's gradual plan for emancipation, the Sketch of a Negro Code, was quite detailed for its time. Collins concludes that this gradualism, however odd it may look to modern readers, was sincere.

  5372717677

• 5. The American Question

  ›

  On the 19th of April 1774, Burke spoke on American taxation during a motion to repeal the tea duty. The speech was published in January 1775. He urged the House to leave America to tax herself and to bind her only through laws of trade. "I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them", he said. If sovereignty and freedom could not be reconciled, he asked, which would the Americans choose? His answer was that "They will cast your sovereignty in your face". He added, "No body of men will be argued into slavery".

  On the 22nd of March 1775, Burke delivered a speech to the Commons on reconciliation with America. It appeared in print in May 1775. He argued that peace beat civil war and reminded the House of America's growing population, industry and wealth. Because most Americans were of British descent, he warned, they would not back down in the face of force. He described the bond between the two peoples as "ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron". His proposal was simple: "The proposition is peace".

  Four carefully ordered reasons stood against using force. First, force could only be temporary, while the colonists' objections to British governance would not be. Second, victory was uncertain, and "An armament", Burke said, "is not a victory". Third, a scorched-earth war could leave the prize damaged or useless. The colonists could retreat into the mountains, and the land they abandoned would most likely be ruined. Fourth, Britain had never tried to rein in an unruly colony by force, let alone one thousands of miles away.

  Several of Burke's worries proved prophetic, because the American colonists did not surrender and Britain failed to win a war fought on American soil. Even so, none of the four was Burke's main argument. The main one was the character of the Americans themselves. He called "a love of freedom" the predominating feature of that character. A "fierce spirit of liberty", he said, was probably stronger in the English colonies than in any other people on earth. He ended with a prayer that Britain might avoid actions that "may bring on the destruction of this Empire".

  Burke also put six resolutions before the House. They would let the colonists elect their own representatives, settling the quarrel over taxation without representation. Britain would acknowledge its wrongdoing and apologise for the grievances caused. A General Assembly would be set up in America with powers to regulate taxes. Taxes imposed by law would stop and be gathered only when needed. Needed aid would go to the colonies. Whether these steps could have quelled the colonial revolutionary spirit can never be known. Burke spoke less than a month before the fighting at Concord and Lexington, and the resolutions were never enacted.

  Admirers of the speech especially loved its passage on Lord Bathurst, who lived from 1684 to 1775. Burke imagined an angel appearing to Bathurst in 1704 and foretelling the future greatness of England and of America. Samuel Johnson grew so irritated by the constant praise that he wrote a parody. In it, the devil appears to a young Whig and predicts that Whiggism will soon poison even the paradise of America.

  Lord North's administration, which ran from 1770 to 1782, tried to defeat the colonial rebellion by military force. British and American forces clashed in 1775, and the United States Declaration of Independence came in 1776. Burke was appalled when celebrations broke out in Britain over the defeat of the Americans in New York and Pennsylvania. He thought this authoritarianism was changing the English national character. "We seem no longer that eager, inquisitive, jealous, fiery people, which we have been formerly", he wrote.

  In Burke's view, the government was fighting "the American English". It was using "the hireling sword of German boors and vassals" to destroy their "English privileges". Yet he did not cheer for independence. He could not wish success to those "whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire", he wrote. During the Gordon Riots in 1780, Burke became a target of hostility. The military placed his home under armed guard.

  5960611551

• 6. India On Trial

  ›

  In 1781, Burke was appointed Chairman of the Commons Select Committee on East Indian Affairs. From then until the end of the Hastings trial, India was his chief concern. Parliament had wrestled with the Indian question for two decades by then. The committee was charged with investigating alleged injustices in Bengal, the war with Hyder Ali and other Indian difficulties. A second, secret committee examined the same matters, and Burke wrote the reports of both. The reports assured the Indian princes that Britain would not wage war on them, and they demanded that the East India Company recall Warren Hastings. Burke told the Commons that the Indian problem had begun "in commerce" but "ended in empire".

  On the 28th of February 1785, Burke delivered The Nabob of Arcot's Debts. The speech condemned the damage the East India Company had done to India. In the province of the Carnatic, the people had built reservoirs to make dry soil fertile. Their society centred on the husbandry of water. Burke called these works "the monuments of real kings, who were the fathers of their people". The Company's domination, he claimed, had eroded much of that tradition without supplying new customs to replace it, and the Indian people suffered needlessly. He set about establishing expectations for empire, with a moral foundation that in his opinion could warrant holding territory overseas.

  On the 4th of April 1786, Burke presented the House of Commons with the Article of Charge of High Crimes and Misdemeanors against Hastings. Hastings was formerly Governor-General of Bengal. The impeachment itself did not begin in Westminster Hall until the 14th of February 1788. It became the "first major public discursive event of its kind in England" and brought the morality of imperialism to the front of public attention. Burke was already known for his eloquence, and his part in the trial added to its popularity and significance.

  His indictment of Hastings was fuelled by emotional indignation. He branded Hastings a "captain-general of iniquity" who never dined without "creating a famine". Burke said Hastings had a heart "gangrened to the core". He compared him to both a "spider of Hell" and a "ravenous vulture devouring the carcasses of the dead". The House of Commons eventually impeached Hastings, but the House of Lords then acquitted him of all charges. On the 20th of June 1794, the Commons gave Burke a vote of thanks for his services in the trial. He resigned his seat at once, and his son Richard took it.

  7884858083

• 7. Reflections On Revolution

  ›

  On the 9th of August 1789, Burke wrote a letter that captures his mixed first reaction to France. He described England "gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud". Of the revolutionary spirit he said "it is impossible not to admire", even as "the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner".

  The events of the 5th and the 6th of October 1789 changed his mind. A crowd of Parisian women marched on Versailles to compel King Louis XVI to return to Paris. In a letter to his son Richard on the 10th of October, Burke described the state of France. The "Elements which compose Human Society", he wrote, seemed "all to be dissolved", with "a world of Monsters" taking their place. On the 4th of November, Charles-Jean-François Depont wrote asking him to endorse the Revolution. Burke answered that any critical words from him should count as mere doubt, then added: "You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover'd freedom".

  Burke's first public condemnation came on the 9th of February 1790. Pitt and Fox had provoked it by praising the Revolution during a debate on the army estimates. In a short space of time, he said, the French had pulled down their monarchy, church, nobility, law, revenue, army, navy, commerce, arts and manufactures. They had shown themselves "the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world".

  Richard Price's sermon of the 4th of November 1789, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, reached Burke in January 1790. Price had delivered it to the Revolution Society, founded to commemorate the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He preached universal "Rights of Men" and said Englishmen should see themselves "more as citizens of the world than as members of any particular community". Price claimed the Glorious Revolution gave the English "the right to choose our own governors". It also gave the right "to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a government for ourselves". Burke started a draft of what became Reflections on the Revolution in France right after reading it. The exchange has been called "the classic moment at which two fundamentally different conceptions of national identity were presented to the English public".

  A press notice on the 13th of February 1790 said Burke would soon publish a pamphlet on the Revolution and its British supporters. He spent the rest of the year revising and expanding it. On the 1st of November 1790, the Reflections finally appeared and became an immediate best-seller. At five shillings, it cost more than most political pamphlets. Even so, it went through ten printings and sold approximately 17,500 copies by the end of 1790. A French translation came out on the 29th of November. The next day, the translator Pierre-Gaëton Dupont wrote that 2,500 copies had already sold, and the French edition reached ten printings by June 1791.

  Inside the book, Burke gave a classic Whig defence of the Glorious Revolution and rejected Price's reading of it. He opposed abstract, metaphysical human rights and championed national tradition. "We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers", he wrote. English liberties were claimed as the rights of Englishmen, a patrimony from forefathers, and not as "the rights of men". He defended prejudice as "the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages", better than the small stock of individual reason. He criticised social contract theory but called society a contract all the same. It was, he said, "a partnership not only between those who are living". Its partners also included "those who are dead, and those who are to be born".

  The book's most famous passage described the events of the 5th and the 6th of October 1789 and the part Marie-Antoinette played in them. His account differs little from those of modern historians working from primary sources, but his flowery language drew both praise and criticism. Philip Francis told him the passage on Marie-Antoinette was "pure foppery", while Edward Gibbon declared, "I adore his chivalry". An Englishman who had talked with the Duchesse de Biron told Burke that Marie-Antoinette burst into tears reading it. She took considerable time to finish the passage. Price had rejoiced that the king was "led in triumph" during those days. To Burke, that image symbolised the Jacobin spirit and a cowardly attack on a defenceless woman. Louis XVI translated the Reflections into French "from end to end".

  Fellow Whig MPs Richard Sheridan and Charles James Fox disagreed with Burke and split with him. Fox thought the book "in very bad taste" and "favouring Tory principles". Other Whigs agreed in private but did not want a public breach. On the 29th of November 1790, Burke wrote that Portland and Fitzwilliam had sent "a most full approbation" of the book's principles. So had the Duke of Devonshire, Lord John Cavendish, Frederick Montagu and "a long et cetera of the old Stamina of the Whiggs". Portland said in 1791 that he told critics he had recommended the book to his sons as containing the true Whig creed.

  On the 3rd of February 1791, Burke attended a levee to meet the King. Paul Langford sees the occasion as Burke crossing a Rubicon. Jane Burke later recounted how the King spotted Burke in the crowd and went straight to him. He spoke loudly enough for the whole Court to hear, though the usual tone at Court was a whisper. "You have been of use to us all", he told Burke. He said that no man calling himself a gentleman could fail to feel obliged to Burke, who had supported the cause of the Gentlemen.

  Mary Wollstonecraft was among the first into print, publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Men a few weeks after Burke. Thomas Paine followed in 1791 with the Rights of Man. James Mackintosh, who wrote Vindiciae Gallicae, was first to call the Reflections "the manifesto of a Counter Revolution". After meeting Burke in December 1796, Mackintosh came around to his views. He remarked that Burke was informed "to a wonderful exactness" on every fact about the French Revolution. Of Burke he wrote: "He is without parallel in any age, excepting perhaps Lord Bacon and Cicero".

  In November 1790, François-Louis-Thibault de Menonville, a member of France's National Assembly, wrote to praise the Reflections. He asked for more "very refreshing mental food". Burke supplied it in April 1791 with A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. There he called for external forces to reverse the Revolution and attacked the late Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the subject of a personality cult. Burke granted that Rousseau sometimes showed "a considerable insight into human nature", but he was mostly critical. He never met Rousseau, who visited Britain in 1766-1767, though he was a friend of David Hume, with whom Rousseau had stayed. Burke said vanity was Rousseau's only principle, possessed "to a degree little short of madness". He pointed to the Confessions as proof of a life of "obscure and vulgar vices". Rousseau preached universal benevolence yet sent his own children to a foundling hospital. Burke called him "a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred".

  8786891597

• 8. The Break With Fox

  ›

  Charles James Fox praised the Revolution in a Parliamentary debate on Britain's relations with Russia. Burke could not reply, because cries of "question" from his own side overpowered him. A debate on the Quebec Bill, a constitution for Canada, brought the clash into the open. Fox again praised the Revolution and criticised some of Burke's arguments, such as hereditary power.

  On the 6th of May 1791, Burke used another Quebec Bill debate to answer Fox. He condemned the new French Constitution and "the horrible consequences flowing from the French idea of the Rights of Man". Those ideas, he said, were the opposite of both the British and the American constitutions. When Burke was interrupted, Fox urged that he be allowed to continue. Lord Sheffield nevertheless moved a vote of censure on Burke for noticing French affairs, and Fox seconded it. Pitt praised Burke. Fox rebuked and complimented him in the same speech, and questioned his sincerity by quoting his own speeches from fourteen and fifteen years before.

  Burke replied that it was indiscreet to parade enemies. Still, he would risk everything and exclaim with his last words, "Fly from the French Constitution". Fox whispered that there was "no loss of friendship". "I regret to say there is", Burke answered. "I have indeed made a great sacrifice; I have done my duty though I have lost my friend". Fox was overcome with tears and for some time could not speak. When he did, he appealed to their inalienable friendship but also uttered "unusually bitter sarcasms", which deepened the rupture.

  On the 5th of June 1791, Burke wrote to Fitzwilliam declining money from him, a sign of how far he had parted from the party. He was dismayed that some Whigs, instead of embracing the principles of the Reflections, had adopted "French principles" and accused him of abandoning Whig ideas. He feared that giving way to Fox's followers would turn the party into a vehicle for Jacobinism. Burke wanted to represent the whole party "as tolerating, and by a toleration, countenancing those proceedings". His aim was to provoke it into declaring what its members privately believed.

  On the 3rd of August 1791, Burke published An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. It renewed his attack on radical revolutionary programmes and on the Whigs who backed them. He leaned on The Tryal of Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1710), of which he owned two copies, calling it a practical compendium of Whig political theory. In his view, the Commons at that trial had justified 1688 on the same foundations laid out in his Reflections. Burke then quoted from Paine's Rights of Man to show what the New Whigs believed, and his belief that Foxite principles matched Paine's was genuine. Finally, he denied that a majority of "the people" could alter society at their pleasure. People had duties as well as rights, he said, and those duties were not voluntary. They could not overthrow morality derived from God.

  Portland and Fitzwilliam privately agreed with the Appeal but wished for more moderate language. Fitzwilliam saw in it "the doctrines I have sworn by, long and long since". The King let Burke know through a friend that he had read the book "with great Satisfaction". Burke himself complained, "Not one word from one of our party. They are secretly galled". Charles Burney thought it "a most admirable book", but he believed the quarrel between Burke and Fox should not be aired in public. Eventually most of the Whigs sided with Burke and backed William Pitt the Younger's Tory government. In 1793, after France declared war on Britain, that government declared war on France's Revolutionary Government.

  In December 1791, Burke sent ministers his Thoughts on French Affairs. It made three points. No counter-revolution in France would come from purely domestic causes. The longer the Revolutionary Government lasted, the stronger it would grow. And its interest and aim was to disturb every other government in Europe. As a Whig, Burke did not want an absolute monarchy restored once Jacobinism had been rooted out. He wrote to an émigré that year about Versailles. What stood there before the upheaval was a "system of Court Intrigue miscalled a Government", he said. In his view, it could not simply be put back as it stood.

  Burke backed the war, seeing Britain as fighting beside royalists and émigrés in a civil war and not against the whole nation of France. He gave particular support to the royalist uprising in La Vendée. In a letter to William Windham on the 4th of November 1793, he called it "the sole affair I have much heart in". On the 7th of October he had urged Henry Dundas to send reinforcements. He saw La Vendée as the only theatre of the war that might lead to a march on Paris. Dundas ignored the advice. Burke believed the British government was not taking the uprising seriously enough.

  A letter dated the 23rd of October came from Prince Charles of France, the comte d'Artois. It asked Burke to intercede with the government on behalf of the royalists. Burke had to reply on the 6th of November: "I am not in His Majesty's Service; or at all consulted in his Affairs". Burke began his Remarks on the Policy of the Allies with Respect to France in October. In it he wrote that in this war "one Frenchman is worth twenty foreigners". La Vendée, he said, was the proof.

  In August 1794, Burke lost his son Richard, to whom he was tenderly attached. Burke saw promise in Richard that others did not, and that appears not to have existed. That view may instead have reflected Richard's successful work in the early battle for Catholic emancipation. King George III, whose favour Burke had gained through his stand on the French Revolution, wished to make him Earl of Beaconsfield. The death of Richard stood in the way.

  98100999396