Volume 1. Biographical Note
by Francis Canavan
Since E. J. Payne does not furnish the details of Edmund Burke’s biography, it will be useful to the modern reader to include a brief sketch of Burke’s life here. (See also the chronological table in volume 2 of this edition.)He was born in Dublin on January 12, 1729, of a Roman Catholic mother and a father who, according to the most likely account, had conformed to the Established Anglican Church of Ireland (whose head, as in England, was the King of Great Britain and Ireland) in order to be able to practice law, a profession forbidden to Catholics under the Penal Laws. Of the children of that marriage who lived to maturity, the boys, Garrett, Richard, and Edmund, were raised as Protestants; the one girl, Juliana, as a Catholic.Since Edmund was a somewhat sickly child, he was sent to live from 1735 to 1740 with his mother’s Catholic relatives, the Nagles, in the country air of County Cork. He maintained cordial relations with them throughout his life. If Burke had a personal religious problem as a result of this mixed religious family background, he solved it by maintaining that all Christians shared a common faith which subsisted in different forms in the several nations of the commonwealth of Christendom. The points on which they differed were the less important ones which could be left for the theological schools to argue about. When the French Revolution came, Burke found it easy to insist that all Christian kingdoms and churches must forget their quarrels and unite against what he called “an armed doctrine” hostile to all religion and civilization. (On a visit to France many years earlier, in 1773, he had been shocked by the rationalism and even atheism that he encountered in Paris.)From 1741 to 1744, he attended a school in County Kildare that was conducted by a Quaker, Abraham Shackleton. Again, Burke maintained friendly relations with the Shackleton family for many years. In 1744, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, the intellectual stronghold of Irish Protestantism; he graduated with an A.B. degree in 1748 and received an M.A. degree in 1751.By that time, he had gone to London to study law in the Inns of Court. But although in later life he displayed a considerable knowledge and understanding of law, he found the method of study distasteful and, much to his father’s annoyance, abandoned the law for a literary career.He began this with two books that attracted much attention:
A Vindication of Natural Society, a satire on the Deism of the Enlightenment, in 1756; and a treatise on aesthetics,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in 1757. In the latter year, he married Jane Nugent, the daughter of a Catholic doctor; Jane herself may or may not have been brought up as a Catholic and, if she was, may or may not have continued to practice that religion after her marriage to Burke. In any case, the two children of the marriage, Christopher and Richard (who alone survived to maturity), were brought up in their father’s religion.In 1758, Edmund became the editor of a yearly review of events and literature, the
Annual Register, which continues publication to the present day. He also became private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton and went with him to Dublin in 1761 when Hamilton became Chief Secretary (a powerful post) to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. It was there that Burke began, but never finished, his
Tracts Relative to the Laws against Popery in Ireland. He returned to London with Hamilton in 1764 and, after a bitter break with him, became private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham in 1765. The Marquis, one of the wealthiest men in both England and Ireland, was the leader of a Whig faction that resisted the efforts of the new young king, George III, to reassert the personal power of the monarch.In 1765, a reluctant King George appointed Rockingham First Lord of the Treasury (Prime Minister). In the same year, Burke was elected to the House of Commons from the nomination borough of Wendover through the influence of Lord Verney, with whom the Burke family had become friendly. Burke immediately made a reputation in the Commons as an orator. The Rockingham administration fell from power in 1766, after it repealed the Stamp Act that had so outraged the American colonies. Burke remained one of Rockingham’s followers, however, and so spent most of the rest of his parliamentary life in opposition. In 1768, Burke bought an estate in Buckinghamshire, which made him a country gentleman but kept him in debt to the end of his days.In the Commons, he quickly became the intellectual spokesman for the Rockingham Whigs. In that capacity, he wrote the party’s creed,
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. During the American crisis, he argued for the Rockingham Whigs’ position and against the British government’s policies in his great speeches on American taxation and on conciliation with the colonies, and in other documents, such as his
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.Burke lost his seat in Parliament when Lord Verney, strapped for money, had to sell it (a practice fully acceptable in that time). But, now well known, Burke was elected to the Commons from the city of Bristol, where he delivered his famous speech on the role of a parliamentary representative (see
Miscellaneous Writings, published with this set). Burke’s disagreements with his constituents on a number of issues (his
Two Letters to Gentlemen in Bristol describe one of them) led him to withdraw from the Bristol election in 1780. The Marquis kept him in Parliament, however, by having him elected from the Yorkshire borough of Malton, a seat that Burke held until his retirement in 1794.A second Rockingham ministry came into office in 1782 to make peace with the rebellious Americans. Burke, who was never invited to sit in a Cabinet, became Paymaster of the Forces. The post was supposed to be lucrative to its holder, but Burke chose to reform it. He also carried on the Rockingham policy of combatting royal influence in Parliament with a bill designed to reduce the king’s power of patronage. Unfortunately, the Marquis died in the same year, and Burke was again out of a job.He became Paymaster again in 1783, however, when a coalition government led by Charles James Fox, who succeeded the Marquis as leader of the Rockingham Whigs, and the Tory Lord North, who had been King George’s prime minister during the American war, had a brief period in power. During this time, Burke delivered his
[Speech on Fox’s East India Bill](burkeindia.speech) (see
Miscellaneous Writings).Burke was again out of office when the coalition fell in 1783 and was replaced by a Tory ministry under the younger William Pitt. The following year, Pitt’s Tories won a smashing victory in a general election and remained in power for the rest of Burke’s life.Two of the great causes that engaged Burke began in the 1780s: the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, which began in 1788 and ended with Hastings’s acquittal in 1795; and the French Revolution, which began in 1789. Burke’s principal and most famous writing on the latter subject is his
Reflections on the Revolution in France. The most important of his other writings on that great cataclysm,
A Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Thoughts on French Affairs, and
Letter to William Elliot, have been published by Liberty Fund in
Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by Daniel E. Ritchie. Burke’s last and increasingly severe attacks on the Revolution are the
Letters on a Regicide Peace.Burke was also active in Irish affairs during this period, mostly through private correspondence, and he had a significant influence in the continued relaxation of the Penal Laws against Catholics in Ireland. His
[Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe](burkelangrishe.letter) is one piece of his writing on Irish affairs that was published in his lifetime.Burke became a man without a party after his break in 1791 with Charles James Fox over the attitude to be taken toward the French Revolution. Burke’s last years were sad and bitter ones. Rejected by his own party, he was not received by the governing Tories except as an occasionally useful ally. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, dismissed
Reflections on the Revolution in France as “rhapsodies in which there is much to admire, and nothing to agree with.” Burke retired from Parliament in 1794, having completed the prosecution of Warren Hastings, and was utterly disgusted, though not surprised, when the House of Lords acquitted Hastings in the following year. In 1794, Burke also suffered the loss through death of both his brother Richard and his son Richard, Jr. His son was the apple of his father’s eye and had been, Burke said, his main reason for continuing to live after the end of his parliamentary career.But Burke did keep on living and writing. Abandoned politically at home, he became through his writings, as a friend of his said, “a sort of
power” in Europe as well as in England. The aristocratic order he so strenuously defended eventually died, and he can be praised or blamed only for having delayed its passing. But Burke lives on in his writings. Today it would be too much to say, as Payne did in 1874, that “the writings of Burke are the daily bread of statesmen, speakers, and political writers.”
Yet they are still reprinted, read, and quoted, because each new generation finds something of lasting value in them.
Edmund Burke: A Bibliography of Secondary Studies to 1982 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1983), no. 916.
Second Supplement (1912), 3:85.
Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in
Miscellaneous Writings, the companion volume to
Select Works of Edmund Burke (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), p. 202.
Greek Political Theory: Plato and His Predecessors (New York: Barnes and Noble, 4th ed., 1951), p. 75.
The Parliamentary History of England (London: Hansard, 1806-1820), 29:365-66.
First Letter on a Regicide Peace, in
Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 3 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), p. 127.
Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1920), pp. 15, 26, 172.
Vol. 1, Biographical Note by Francis Canavan
[P. 7 below.](burke1front.anchor1)
Vol. 1, Introduction by E. J. Payne
All Notes below written by Payne.
The coalition should be judged, not by the better standard of political morality which dates its prevalence from the younger Pitt, but by that of the early part of the century, to which it properly belongs. The fruits of a long and honourable opposition were far more prodigally cast away, by the selfishness of a few, on the occasion of the fall of Walpole, and that by the hands of such men as Pulteney and Carteret.
See the remark on Lord Chatham,
[post, p. 63.](burke1.introduction.anchor1) Burke, in a letter to a private friend, calls Lord Shelburne, who was Chatham’s lieutenant and the link between the elder and the younger Pitt, “weak, wicked, stupid, false, and hypocritical,” in one breath, and exults at having at length “demolished” and “destroyed” him. Time has placed things in another light. Chatham and Shelburne founded the modern school of independent statesmen.
Volito vivu’ per ora virom.
Burke’s father was a Protestant and his mother a Catholic. The girls of the family were brought up in the faith of the mother, the boys in that of the father. Mrs. Burke was born in a family similarly circumstanced.
“1793 and 1853,” Works, vol. i.
Hazlitt says with great truth, that those who looked upon him as a man of disordered intellect, did so “because he reasoned in a style to which they had not been used, and which confounded their dim perceptions.”
From the
Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, written to vindicate himself from this charge.
Contained in vol. ii. of these Select Works.
Oldham, Second Satire on the Jesuits:
Think Tories loyal, or Scotch Covenanters;
Robbed tigers gentle; courteous, fasting bears.
A friendly critic has called this (which is borrowed from Hallam) a “hard saying.” What can be more of the essence of Whiggism than the fundamental doctrine of the pamphlet that the title of Kinds merely
descends, and is not in any way strengthened by its descent?
Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 509, ed. Croker.
Speech on the Jews’ Naturalization Bill, 1750. Eloquence of the British Senate, i. 521. Lord Egmont published in 1742 a capital pamphlet called “Faction Detected.” On his character and abilities see Walpole’s Memoirs of George III, vol. i.
Hazlitt borrows his argument from Bishop Taylor’s Discourse on Friendship.
Eloquence of the British Senate, vol. ii. The student is also recommended to the Section on the “Use and Abuse of General Principles in Politics,” in Dugald Stewart’s Philosophy of the Human Mind, Part i. ch. iv.
A. H. Müller, Verm. Schr. Th. i.
It can be read in the German translation, “Conservatismus und Reform, eine Abhandlung über E. Burke’s Politik,” Utrecht, 1852.
Variously termed
,
, or
.
Notes for Speech on the Amendment on the Address, Nov. 30, 1774.
See the chapters in Mr. Morley’s “Edmund Burke, A Historical Study.”
See
[note to p. 116, l. 34,](burke1.1.endnotep116l34) inf.
Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.
Edinburgh Review, vol. xlviii. p. 519.
“Il ne faut pas tout corriger.” So Erasmus: “Scio quidvis esse ferendum potius quam ut publicus orbis status turbetur in pejus.”
See his letter to Murphy, upon his Translation of Tacitus.
See, for instance, the Letter to W. Elliott, Esq., 1795. “There may be sometimes too much even of a good thing. A toast is good, and a bumper is not bad; but the best toast may be so often repeated as to disgust the palate; and ceaseless rounds of bumpers may nauseate and overload the stomach. The ears of the most steady-voting politicians may at last be stunned with ‘Three times three.’ “;
“Is erit eloquens,” says Cicero, “qui poterit parva summisse, modica temperate, magna graviter dicere. … Qui ad id, quodcunque decebit, poterit accommodare orationem. Quod quum statuerit, tum, ut quidque erit dicendum, ita dicet, nec satura jejune nec grandia minute nec item contra, sed erit rebus ipsis par et aequalis oratio” (Orat. c. 29, 36).
There is a product of his pen which is raised by the nature of the subject from that description, but which is altogether a lawyer’s work, full of patient research and mature judgment, the Report of the Committee to examine the Lords’ Journals in relation to proceedings on the same occasion. Charles Butler, the eminent conveyancer, considered this an ample refutation of the notion that he was not equal to the sbtleties of abstract jurisprudence. “It is one of the most valuable productions of his pen. It abounds in learning and profound observation, and embraces the whole of the subject” (Reminiscences, vol. 1 p. 139).
See South’s sermon, “The Scribe Instructed.”
Bishop Hurd well says: “The more generally the best models are understood, the greater danger of running into that worst of literary faults—affectation.”
Green, Diary of a Lover of Literature.
“I ask pardon for my blots (i.e. erasures and corrections). It is not proper, I am sensible, to send you a paper in that fashion; but I am utterly incapable of writing without them.” Correspondence, vol. iii. p. 196.
The student must beware of abusing this useful figure, as in the following passage: “No individual can be happy unless the circumstances of those around him be so adjusted as to conspire with his interest. For, in human society, no happiness or misery stands unconnected and independent. Our fortunes are interwoven by threads innumerable. We touch one another on all sides. One man’s misfortune or success, his wisdom of his folly, often by its consequences reaches through multitudes.” Blair, Sermon VIII. Here the same proposition is repeated five times, without any material addition or illustration, the impression left being that of great poverty of thought. See
[note to p. 116, l. 34,](burke1.1.endnotep116l34) infra.
Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians, 1792.
This remark belongs, of course, only to prose.
Hazlitt, Conversations of Northcote.
It may be useful to subjoin the opinions of two authorities well qualified to pronounce upon this point. In the first extract, Crassus is criticising the systems of “debating societies.”
“In quo fallit eos, quod audierunt, dicendo homines, ut dicant, efficere solere. Vere enim illud dicitur, PERVERSE DICERE HOMINES PERVERSE DICENDO FACILLIME CONSEQUI. Quamobrem in istis ipsis exercitationibus, etsi utile est, etiam subito saepe dicere, tamen illud utilius, sumpto spatio ad cogitandum, paratius atque accuratius dicere. Caput autem est, quod (ut vere dicam) minime facimus; (est enim magni laboris, quem plerique fugimus:) quam plurimum scribere, STILUS OPTIMUS ET PRAESTANTISSIMUS DICENDI EFFECTOR AC MAGISTER.” Cic. De Orat. Lib. i. cap. 33.
“I should lay it down as a rule, admitting of no exception, that a man will speak well in proportion as he has written much; and that with equal talents he will be the finest extempore speaker, when no time for preparing is allowed, who has prepared himself the most sedulously when he had an opportunity of delivering a premeditated speech. All the exceptions which I have ever heard cited to this principle are apparent ones only.” Brougham, Address to the Glasgow Students, 1825.
Speech on a Bill for shortening the Duration of Parliaments.
“There is now an elegance of style universally diffused.” Again, on the Divines: “All the latter preachers have a good style; every body composes pretty well.” Boswell, April 7, 1778.
“Sublime” and “Beautiful.”
HISTORY. The Histories if Bisset, Belsham, Adolphus, Massey, Phillimore, Bancroft, and Stanhope; Wraxall’s Historical and Posthumous Memoirs; Walpole’s Memoirs; Jesse’s Memoirs of George III; Rockingham Memoirs; Bedford Correspondence; Grenville Papers; The Annual Register; Almon’s Biographical Anecdotes; Letters of Junius; Chesterfield’s Letters; Macaulay’s Essays; May’s Constitutional History.
BIOGRAPHY. Boswell’s Life of Johnson; Butler’s Reminiscences; The Lives of Burke by M’Cormick, Bisset, Prior, and the recent work of Mr. Macknight, which, however, does not supplant the work of Sir James Prior as the standard biography; the brief Life of Mr. Burke by Mr. Sergeant Burke; Mr. Morely’s Edmund Burke, a Historical Study; the admirable Lecture on the Life of Burke to the Dublin Young Men’s Christian Association, 1862, by Sir Joseph Napier; Professor Robertson’s Lectures on Burke.GENERALLY. Professor Goodrich’s Select British Eloquence; Hazlitt’s Political Essays and Eloquence of the British Senate; Roger’s Biographical and Critical Introduction to Holdsworth and Ball’s Edition of Burke’s Works, 1834; Allibone’s Critical Dictionary, art. Burke; De Quincy on Style and Conversation; Mackintosh’s Memoirs and Works; Winkelmann’s (German) edition of the two Speeches in this volume; Müller’s Lectures, and Miscellaneous Writings (German).
Addresses were sent in the early part of the year from the counties of Essex, Kent, Surrey and Salop, the towns of Bristol, Liverpool, Leicester, Coventry, &c., and from almost every part of Scotland. The county of Middlesex led the way in petitions on May 24: and was followed by the livery of London, the electors of Westminster, and the freeholders of Surrey, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wilts, Gloucester, Hereford, Northumberland, and the most important cities and boroughs.
“More difficult … than to produce something altogether new.” Letter to Rockingham, July 30.
Burke’s brother Richard, and distant kinsman William Burke.
Burke to Rockingham, Nov. 6, 1769.
Burke’s Correspondence, i. 229.
“No heroine in Billingsgate can go beyond the patriotic scolding of our republican virago. You see I have been afraid to answer her.” Burke to Shackleton, Aug. 15, 1770.
Milton (Par. Lost, iv. 121) names Satan “Artificer of Fraud.”
Select British Eloquence, by Chauncey A. Goodrich, D.D., Professor in Yale College.
See also Peel’s Speeches on the East Retford Franchise, May 5, 1829, and on New Zealand, June 17, 1845.
