EDMUND BURKE.
[Sidenote: 1730-82--Rockingham and his Ministry]
The friction between Grenville and the King was rapidly becoming
unbearable to George, if not to his minister. George was resolved to
be rid of his intolerable tyrant at the cost of almost any concession.
He was now fully as eager to welcome Pitt back to office as he had once
been hot to drive him out of it. Again Cumberland was called in; again
Cumberland approached Pitt; again Pitt's willingness to resume the
seals was overborne by the stubbornness of Temple. The King was in
despair. He would not endure Grenville and Grenville's bullying
sermons any longer, and yet it was hard indeed to find any one who
could take Grenville's place with any chance of carrying on Grenville's
work. Cumberland had a suggestion to make, a desperate remedy for a
desperate case. If Pitt and the old Whigs were denied to the King, why
should not the King try the new Whigs and Rockingham?
The old Whig party, as it had lived and ruled so long, had practically
ceased to exist. So much the King had accomplished. Saint George of
Hanover had struck at the dragon only to find that, like the monster in
the classical fable, it took new form and fresh vitality beneath his
strokes. There was a Whig party that was not essentially the party of
Pitt, a party which was recruiting its ranks with earnest, thoughtful,
high-minded, honorable men to whom the principles or want of principles
which permitted the old Whig dominion were as intolerable as they
appear to a statesman of to-day. At the head of this new development
of Whig activity was the man to whom Cumberland now turned in the hour
of the King's trial, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham.
{94}
Lord Rockingham was one of those ornaments of the English senate for
the benefit of whose biographers the adjective amiable seems especially
to have been invented. Although the master of a large fortune, while
he was still a boy of twenty he was deservedly noted for the gravity
and stillness of his youth, and during a political career of
one-and-thirty years, if he showed neither commanding eloquence nor
commanding statesmanship, he did honor to the Whig party by his sincere
patriotism and irreproachable uprightness of character. If heaven had
denied Rockingham the resplendent gifts that immortalize a Chatham, it
had given him in full measure of the virtues of patriotism, honesty,
integrity, and zeal. The purity of his life, the probity of his
actions, and the excellence of all his public purposes, commended him
to the affectionate regard of all who held that morality was more
essential to a statesman than eloquence, and that it was better to fail
with such a man than to succeed with those to whom, for the most part,
the successes of that day were given. Two years before, in 1763, his
dislike for the policy of Lord Bute had driven him to resign his small
office as Lord of the Bedchamber, and he carried his scrupulousness so
far as to resign at the same time his Lord-Lieutenantcy of Yorkshire.
To the delight of the Duke of Cumberland, and to the delight of the
King, Rockingham consented to form a Ministry. With the best will in
the world Rockingham could not make his Ministry very commanding. It
was but a makeshift, and not a very brilliant makeshift, but at least
it served to get rid of Grenville and of Grenville's harangues. So
long as Grenville was unable to terrorize the royal closet with
reproaches and reproofs addressed to the King, and with menaces aimed
at Bute, George was quite willing to see Newcastle intrusted with the
Privy Seal, and Conway made Secretary of State for one department, and
the Duke of Grafton for the other. But the Ministry which the King
accepted because he could get nothing better, and because he would have
welcomed something much worse so long as it delivered him from {95}
Grenville--the Ministry that provoked the derisive pity of most of its
critics was destined to attain an honorable immortality. The
heterogeneous group of men who called themselves or were called, who
believed themselves or were believed to be Whigs, had obtained one
recruit whose name was yet to make the cause he served illustrious.
Lord Rockingham had many claims to the regard of his contemporaries;
undoubtedly his greatest claim to the regard of posterity lies in the
intelligence which enabled him to discern the rising genius of a young
writer, and the wisdom which found a place by his side and a seat in
the House of Commons for Edmund Burke.
[Sidenote: 1765--The coming of Edmund Burke]
The history of a nation is often largely the history of certain famous
men. Great epochs, producing great leaders, make those leaders
essentially the expression of certain phases of the thought of their
age. The life of Walpole is the life of the England of his time
because he was so intimately bound up with the great movement which
ended by setting Parliamentary government free from the possible
dominion of the sovereign. The life of Chatham, the life of Pitt, the
life of Fox, each in its turn is a summary of the history of England
during the time in which they helped to guide its destinies. But to
some men, men possessing in an exceptional degree the love for humanity
and the longing for progress, this power of representing in their lives
the sum and purpose of their age is markedly characteristic. Just as
Mirabeau, until he died, practically represented the French Revolution,
so certain English statesmen have from time to time been representative
of the best life, the best thought, the best purposes, desires, and
ambitions of the country for whose sake they played their parts. Of no
man can this theory be said to be more happily true than of Edmund
Burke.
It would scarcely be exaggeration to say that the history of England
during the middle third of the eighteenth century is largely the
history of the career of Edmund Burke. From the moment when Burke
entered upon political life to the close of his great career, his name
was associated with every event of importance, his voice raised {96} on
one side or the other of every question that concerned the welfare of
the English people and the English Constitution. As much as this,
however, might be said of more than one actor in the political history
of the period covered by Burke's public life. But the influence which
Burke exercised upon his time, the force he brought to bear upon his
political generation, were a greater influence and a stronger force
than that directed by any other statesman of the age. Whether for good
or for evil, according to the standards by which his critics may judge
him, Burke swayed the minds of masses of his countrymen to a degree
that was unequalled among his contemporaries. With the two great
events of the century--the revolt of the American colonies and the
French Revolution--his name was the most intimately associated, his
influence the most potent. With what in their degree must be called
the minor events of the reign--with the trial of Wilkes, with the trial
of Warren Hastings--he was no less intimately associated, and in each
case his association has been the most important feature of the event.
Where he was right as where he was wrong, and whether he was right or
whether he was wrong, he was always the most interesting, always the
most commanding figure in the epoch-making political controversies of
his day. Grenville wrote of him finely, many years after his death,
that he was in the political world what Shakespeare was in the moral
world.
[Sidenote: 1729-59--Burke's early life]
Burke entered political life, or entered active political life, when he
was returned to Parliament in the December of 1765. Up to that time
his life had been largely uneventful; much of it must be called as far
as we are concerned eventless, for of a great gap of his life, a gap of
no less than nine years, we know, if not absolutely nothing, certainly
next to nothing. It is not even quite certain where or when he was
born. The most approved account is that he was born in Dublin on
January 12, 1729, reckoning according to the new style. The place of
his birth is still pointed out to the curious in Dublin: one of the
many modest houses that line the left bank of the Liffey. His family
was supposed to stem from Limerick, from {97} namesakes who spelled
their name differently as Bourke. His mother's family were Catholic;
Burke's mother always remained stanch to her native faith, and, though
Burke and his brothers were brought up as the Protestant sons of a
Protestant father, the influence of his mother must have counted for
much in creating that tender and generous sympathy towards a proscribed
creed which is one of the noblest characteristics of Burke's career.
Burke's earliest and in a sense his best education was received between
his twelfth and fourteenth years, in the school of a Yorkshire Quaker
named Abraham Shackleton, who kept a school at Ballitore. Burke used
often to declare in later years that he owed everything he had gained
in life to the teaching and the example of those two years with Abraham
Shackleton. The affectionate regard which Burke felt for his
schoolmaster, an affectionate regard which endured until Shackleton's
death, thirty years later, in 1771, he felt also for his schoolmaster's
son, Richard Shackleton. Most of what we know of Burke's life in
Trinity College from 1743 to 1748 we gather from his letters to Richard
Shackleton, letters of absorbing interest to any student of the growth
of a great mind. Less vivacious, less brilliant than the boyish
letters of Goethe, they resemble them in the eager thirst they display
for knowledge of all kinds, in their passionate enthusiasm for all the
rich varieties of human knowledge, in their restless experiments in all
directions. In those younger days Burke thought himself, as every
generous and ambitious youth must needs think himself, a poet, and many
verses were forwarded to the faithful friend, to lighten the effect of
serious theological discussions and elaborate comparisons of classical
authors.
Dissensions with his father and a determination to study for the bar
sent Burke to England in the early part of 1750, and there for nine
long years he practically disappears from our knowledge. All we know
is that he studied law, but that, like many another law student, he
gave more time and thought to literature than to his legal studies;
that this action deepened the hostility of his father, who {98} reduced
Burke's allowance to a pittance, and that his daily need as well as his
desire drove Burke to seek his livelihood in letters.
[Sidenote: 1759--The work of Edmund Burke]
He seems to have had a hard fight for it. The glimpses we get of him
during that period of youthful struggle show him as an ardent student
of books, but a no less ardent student of life, not merely in the
streets and clubs and theatres of the great city, but in the seclusion
of quiet country villages and the highways and byways of rural England.
Romance has not failed to endeavor to illuminate with her prismatic
lantern the darkness of those nine mysterious years. A vivid fancy has
been pleased to picture Burke as one of the many lovers of the
marvellous Margaret Woffington, as a competitor for the chair of Moral
Philosophy at Glasgow, as a convert to the Catholic faith, and, perhaps
most remarkable of all these lively legends, as a traveller in America.
These are fictions. The certain facts are that somewhere about 1756 he
married a Miss Nugent, daughter of an Irish physician who had settled
in England. Miss Nugent was a Catholic, and thus, for the second time,
the Catholic religion was endeared to Burke by one of the closest of
human relationships. At about the same time as his marriage, Burke
made his first appearance as an author by the "Vindication of Natural
Society," a satire upon Bolingbroke which many accepted as a genuine
work of Bolingbroke's, and by the "Essay on the Sublime and the
Beautiful," which is perhaps most valuable because we owe to it in some
degree the later masterpiece of aesthetic criticism, the "Laocoon" of
Lessing. From this time until his connection with public life began
his career was linked with Fleet Street and its brotherhood of authors,
and his pen was steadily employed. With that love for variety of
subject which is characteristic of most of the authors of the
eighteenth century, he handled a number of widely differing themes. He
wrote "Hints for an Essay on the Drama," a work which has scarcely held
its place in the library of the dramatist by the side of the "Paradoxe
sur le Comédien" of Diderot, or the "Hamburgische {99} Dramaturgie" of
Lessing. He wrote an account of the European settlements in America,
still interesting as showing the early and intimate connection of his
thoughts with the greatest of English colonies. He wrote an
"Abridgment of English History," which carries unfortunately no farther
than the reign of John a narrative that is not unworthy of its author.
He founded the "Annual Register," and was in its pages for many years
to come the historian of contemporary Europe. Of all the many debts
that Englishmen owe to Burke, the conception and inception of the
"Annual Register" must not be reckoned as among the least important.
It was at this point in his career that Burke's connection with public
life began, not to end thenceforward until the end of his own life.
Single-speech Hamilton, so called because out of a multitude of
speeches he made one magnificent speech, was attracted to Burke by the
fame of the "Vindication of Natural Society," sought his acquaintance,
and when Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, Burke
accompanied him. For two years Burke remained with Hamilton in
Ireland, studying the Irish question of that day, with the closeness of
the acutest mind then at work and with the racial sympathy of the
native. Then he quarrelled, and rightly quarrelled, with Hamilton,
because Hamilton, to whom the aid of Burke was infinitely precious,
sought to bind Burke forever to his service by a pension of three
hundred a year. Burke demanded some leisure for the literature that
had made his name. Hamilton justified Leland's description of him as a
selfish, canker-hearted, envious reptile by refusing. Burke, who
always spoke his mind roundly, described Hamilton as an infamous
scoundrel, flung back his pension and returned to freedom,
independence, and poverty. But he was soon to enter the service of
another statesman under less galling terms, under less unreasonable
conditions.
Burke's name was brought before Lord Rockingham, probably by Burke's
friend and namesake, though in all likelihood not kinsman, William
Burke. Lord Rockingham {100} appointed Burke his private secretary,
and by the simple integrity of his character bound Burke, to use his
own words, "by an inviolable attachment to him from that time forward."
But the alliance thus begun was threatened in its birth. A mysterious
hostility attributed by Burke to "Hell-Kite" Hamilton brought certain
charges to the notice of the Duke of Newcastle. The Duke of Newcastle
hurried to Lord Rockingham to warn him that his newly appointed
secretary was a disguised Jesuit, a disguised Jacobite. Lord
Rockingham immediately communicated these accusations to Burke, who
repelled them with a firmness and dignity which had the effect only of
confirming Lord Rockingham's admiration of Burke and of drawing closer
the friendship of the two men. Burke was promptly brought into
Parliament as member for Wendover, and during the single year which
Lord Rockingham's Administration lasted its leader had every reason to
rejoice at the happy chance which had given to him such a follower and
such an ally.
Burke delivered his maiden speech in the House of Commons on January
27, 1766, a few days after the opening of the session, on the subject
of the dissatisfaction in the American colonies. His speech won the
praise of the Great Commoner; his succeeding speeches earned him
enthusiastic commendation from friends and admirers outside and inside
the House of Commons. The successful man of letters had proved himself
rapidly to be a successful orator and a politician who would have to be
reckoned with.
[Sidenote: 1766--The influence of Burke's career]
It has been contended, and not unreasonably, that as an orator Burke is
not merely in the first rank, but that he is himself the first, that he
stands alone, without a rival, without a peer, and that none of the
orators of antiquity can be said even to contest his unquestionable
supremacy. But it is in no sense necessary to Burke's fame that the
fame of others should be in any way impugned or depreciated. It is
sufficient praise to say that Burke is one of the greatest orators the
world has ever held. To argue that he is superior to Demosthenes on
the {101} one hand, or to Cicero on the other, is to maintain an
argument very much on a par with that which it amused Burke himself to
maintain when he contended for the superiority of the "Aeneid" over the
"Iliad." It is quite enough to be able to say well-nigh without fear
of contradiction that Burke is probably the greatest orator who ever
spoke in the English language.
Burke's political career began brilliantly in the championship of
freedom, in the defence of the oppressed, in the defiance of injustice.
He was made welcome to the great political arena in which he was to
fight so long and so hard. His ability was recognized at once; he may
be said to have leaped into a fame that the passage of time has not
merely confirmed but increased. No author more profoundly influenced
the thought of his time; no author of that time is likely to exercise a
more enduring influence upon succeeding generations. Of all the men of
that busy and brilliant age, Burke has advanced the most steadily in
the general knowledge and favor. While other men, his rivals in
eloquence, his peers in the opinions of his contemporaries, come year
by year to be less used as influences and appealed to as authorities,
the wisdom of Burke is more frequently drawn upon and more widely
appreciated than ever. The world sees now, even more clearly than the
world saw then, that whether Burke was right or wrong in his
conclusions as to any question, it had to be admitted that the point of
view from which he started to get at that conclusion was the correct
one.
{102}