THE NEW MINISTRY--WARREN HASTINGS--BURKE'S PUBLIC POSITION
The six years which followed the destruction of the Coalition were, in
some respects, the most mortifying portion of Burke's troubled career.
Pitt was more firmly seated in power than Lord North had ever been,
and he used his power to carry out a policy against which it was
impossible for the Whigs, on their own principles, to offer an
effective resistance. For this is the peculiarity of the king's first
victory over the enemies who had done obstinate battle with him for
nearly a quarter of a century. He had driven them out of the field,
but with the aid of an ally who was as strongly hostile to the royal
system as they had ever been. The king had vindicated his right
against the Whigs to choose his own ministers; but the new minister
was himself a Whig by descent, and a reformer by his education and
personal disposition.
Ireland was the subject of the first great battle between the ministry
and their opponents. Here, if anywhere, we might have expected from
Burke at least his usual wisdom and patience. We saw in a previous
chapter (p. 33) what the political condition of Ireland was when Burke
went there with Hamilton in 1763. The American war had brought about a
great change. The king had shrewdly predicted that if America became
free Ireland would soon follow the same plan and be a separate state.
In fact, along with the American war we had to encounter an Irish war
also; but the latter was, as an Irish politician called it at the
time, a smothered war. Like the Americans, the Anglo-Irish entered
into non-importation compacts, and they interdicted commerce. The
Irish volunteers, first forty, then sixty, and at last a hundred
thousand strong, were virtually an army enrolled to overawe the
English ministry and Parliament. Following the spirit, if not the
actual path, of the Americans, they raised a cry for commercial and
legislative independence. They were too strong to be resisted, and in
1782 the Irish Parliament acquired the privilege of initiating and
conducting its own business, without the sanction or control either of
the Privy Council or of the English Parliament. Dazzled by the chance
of acquiring legislative independence, they had been content with the
comparatively small commercial boons obtained by Lord Nugent and Burke
in 1778, and with the removal of further restrictions by the alarmed
minister in the following year. After the concession of their
independence in 1782, they found that to procure the abolition of the
remaining restrictions on their commerce--the right of trade, for
instance, with America and Africa--the consent of the English
legislature was as necessary as it had ever been. Pitt, fresh from the
teaching of Adam Smith and of Shelburne, brought forward in 1785 his
famous commercial propositions. The theory of his scheme was that
Irish trade should be free, and that Ireland should be admitted to a
permanent participation in commercial advantages. In return for this
gain, after her hereditary revenue passed a certain point, she was to
devote the surplus to purposes, such as the maintenance of the navy,
in which the two nations had a common interest. Pitt was to be
believed when he declared that of all the objects of his political
life this was, in his opinion, the most important that he had ever
engaged in, and he never expected to meet another that should rouse
every emotion in so strong a degree as this.
A furious battle took place in the Irish Parliament. There, while
nobody could deny that the eleven propositions would benefit the
mercantile interests of the country, it was passionately urged that
the last of the propositions, that which concerned the apportionment
of Irish revenue to imperial purposes, meant the enslavement of their
unhappy island. Their fetters, they went on, were clenched, if the
English Government was to be allowed thus to take the initiative
in Irish legislation. The factious course pursued by the English
Opposition was much less excusable than the line of the Anglo-Irish
leaders. Fox, who was ostentatiously ignorant of political economy,
led the charge. He insisted that Pitt's measures would annihilate
English trade, would destroy the Navigation Laws, and with them would
bring our maritime strength to the ground. Having thus won the favour
of the English manufacturers, he turned round to the Irish Opposition,
and conciliated them by declaring with equal vehemence that the
propositions were an insult to Ireland, and a nefarious attempt to
tamper with her new-born liberties. Burke followed his leader. We may
almost say that for once he allowed his political integrity to be
bewildered. In 1778 and 1779 he had firmly resisted the pressure which
his mercantile constituents in Bristol had endeavoured to put upon
him; he had warmly supported the Irish claims, and had lost his seat
in consequence. The precise ground which he took up in 1785 was this.
He appears to have discerned in Pitt's proposals the germ of an
attempt to extract revenue from Ireland, identical in purpose,
principle, and probable effect with the ever-memorable attempt to
extract revenue from the American colonies. Whatever stress may be
laid upon this, we find it hard to vindicate Burke from the charge
of factiousness. Nothing can have been more unworthy of him than
the sneer at Pitt in the great speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts
(1785), for stopping to pick up chaff and straws from the Irish
revenue instead of checking profligate expenditure in India.
Pitt's alternative was irresistible. Situated as Ireland was, she must
either be the subservient instrument of English prosperity, or else
she must be allowed to enjoy the benefits of English trade, taking at
the same time a proportionate share of the common burdens. Adam Smith
had shown that there was nothing incompatible with justice in a
contribution by Ireland to the public debt of Great Britain. That
debt, he argued, had been contracted in support of the government
established by the Revolution; a government to which the Protestants
of Ireland owed not only the whole authority which they enjoyed in
their own country, but every security which they possessed for their
liberty, property, and religion. The neighbourhood of Ireland to the
shores of the mother country introduced an element into the problem,
which must have taught every unimpassioned observer that the American
solution would be inadequate for a dependency that lay at our very
door. Burke could not, in his calmer moments, have failed to recognise
all this. Yet he lent himself to the party cry that Pitt was taking
his first measures for the re-enslavement of Ireland. Had it not been
for what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session, and
which had still not subsided, he would have seen that Pitt was in
truth taking his first measures for the effective deliverance of
Ireland from an unjust and oppressive subordination. The same delirium
committed him to another equally deplorable perversity, when
he opposed, with as many excesses in temper as fallacies in
statesmanship, the wise treaty with France, in which Pitt partially
anticipated the commercial policy of an ampler treaty three-quarters
of a century afterwards.
A great episode in Burke's career now opened. It was in 1785 that
Warren Hastings returned from India, after a series of exploits as
momentous and far-reaching, for good or evil, as have ever been
achieved by any English ruler. For years Burke had been watching
India. With rising wonder, amazement, and indignation he had steadily
followed that long train of intrigue and crime which had ended in the
consolidation of a new empire. With the return of Hastings he felt
that the time had come for striking a severe blow, and making a signal
example. He gave notice (June 1785) that he would, at a future day,
make a motion respecting the conduct of a gentleman just returned from
India.
Among minor considerations, we have to remember that Indian affairs
entered materially into the great battle of parties. It was upon
an Indian bill that the late ministry had made shipwreck. It was
notoriously by the aid of potent Indian interests that the new
ministry had acquired a portion of its majority. To expose the
misdeeds of our agents in India was at once to strike the minister who
had dexterously secured their support, and to attack one of the great
strongholds of parliamentary corruption. The proceedings against
Hastings were, in the first instance, regarded as a sequel to the
struggle over Fox's East India Bill. That these considerations were
present in Burke's thought there is no doubt, but they were purely
secondary. It was India itself that stood above all else in his
imagination. It had filled his mind and absorbed his time while Pitt
was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, and Burke was looking forward
to match his plan of economic reform with a greater plan of Indian
reform. In the Ninth Report, the Eleventh Report, and in his speech
on the India Bill of 1783, he had shown both how thoroughly he had
mastered the facts, and how profoundly they had stirred his sense of
wrong. The masterpiece known as the speech on the Nabob of Arcot's
debts, delivered in Parliament on a motion for papers (1785), handles
matters of account, of interest turned into principal, and principal
superadded to principal; it deals with a hundred minute technicalities
of teeps and tuncaws, of gomastahs and soucaring; all with such a
suffusion of interest and colour, with such nobility of idea and
expression, as could only have come from the addition to genius of a
deep morality of nature, and an overwhelming force of conviction. A
space less than one of these pages contains such a picture of the
devastation of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali, as may fill the young orator
or the young writer with the same emotions of enthusiasm, emulation,
and despair that torment the artist who first gazes on the Madonna
at Dresden, or the figures of Night and Dawn and the Penseroso at
Florence. The despair is only too well founded. No conscious study
could pierce the secret of that just and pathetic transition from the
havoc of Hyder Ali to the healing duties of a virtuous government, to
the consolatory celebration of the mysteries of justice and humanity,
to the warning to the unlawful creditors to silence their inauspicious
tongues in presence of the holy work of restoration, to the generous
proclamation against them that in every country the first creditor is
the plough. The emotions which make the hidden force of such pictures
come not by observation. They grow from the sedulous meditation of
long years, directed by a powerful intellect and inspired by an
interest in human well-being, which of its own virtue bore the orator
into the sustaining air of the upper gods. Concentrated passion
and exhaustive knowledge have never entered into a more formidable
combination. Yet when Burke made his speech on the Nabob of Arcot's
debts, Pitt and Grenville consulted together whether it was worth
answering, and came to the conclusion that they need not take the
trouble.
Neither the scornful neglect of his opponents nor the dissensions of
some who sat on his own side, could check the ardour with which Burke
pressed on, as he said, to the relief of afflicted nations. The
fact is, that Burke was not at all a philanthropist as Clarkson and
Wilberforce were philanthropists. His sympathy was too strongly under
the control of true political reason. In 1780, for instance, the
slave-trade had attracted his attention, and he had even proceeded
to sketch out a code of regulations which provided for its immediate
mitigation and ultimate suppression. After mature consideration he
abandoned the attempt, from the conviction that the strength of the
West India interest would defeat the utmost efforts of his party. And
he was quite right in refusing to hope from any political action what
could only be effected after the moral preparation of the bulk of the
nation. And _direct_ moral or philanthropic apostleship was not his
function.
Macaulay, in a famous passage of dazzling lustre and fine historic
colour, describes Burke's holy rage against the misdeeds of Hastings
as due to his sensibility. But sensibility to what? Not merely to
those common impressions of human suffering which kindle the flame of
ordinary philanthropy, always attractive, often so beneficent, but
often so capricious and so laden with secret detriment. This was no
part of Burke's type. For is it enough to say that Burke had what is
the distinctive mark of the true statesman, a passion for good, wise,
and orderly government. He had that in the strongest degree. All that
wore the look of confusion he held in abhorrence, and he detected the
seeds of confusion with a penetration that made other men marvel.
He was far too wise a man to have any sympathy with the energetic
exercise of power for power's sake. He knew well that triumphs
of violence are for the most part little better than temporary
makeshifts, which leave all the work of government to be encountered
afterwards by men of essentially greater capacity than the hero of
force without scruple. But he regarded those whom he called the great
bad men of the old stamp, Cromwell, Richelieu, the Guises, the Condés,
with a certain tolerance, because "though the virtues of such men were
not to be taken as a balance to their crimes, yet they had long views,
and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and not
the destruction of their country." What he valued was the deep-seated
order of systems that worked by the accepted uses, opinions, beliefs,
prejudices of a community.
This love of right and stable order was not all. That was itself
the growth from a deeper root, partly of conviction and partly of
sympathy; the conviction of the rare and difficult conjunctures of
circumstance which are needed for the formation of even the rudest
forms of social union among mankind; and then the sympathy that the
best men must always find it hard to withhold from any hoary fabric of
belief, and any venerated system of government that has cherished
a certain order and shed even a ray of the faintest dawn among the
violences and the darkness of the race. It was reverence rather
than sensibility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than
philanthropy, which raised the storm in Burke's breast against the
rapacity of English adventurers in India and the imperial crimes of
Hastings. Exactly the same tide of emotion which afterwards filled to
the brim the cup of prophetic anger against the desecrators of the
Church and the monarchy of France, now poured itself out against those
who in India had "tossed about, subverted, and tore to pieces, as if
it were in the gambols of boyish unluckiness and malice, the most
established rights and the most ancient and most revered institutions
of ages and nations." From beginning to end of the fourteen years in
which Burke pursued his campaign against Hastings, we see in every
page that the India which ever glowed before his vision was not the
home of picturesque usages and melodramatic costume, but rather, in
his own words, the land of princes once of great dignity, authority,
and opulence; of an ancient and venerable priesthood, the guides of
the people while living, and their consolation in death; of a nobility
of antiquity and renown; of millions of ingenious mechanics, and
millions of diligent tillers of the earth; and finally, the land
where might be found almost all the religions professed by men--the
Brahminical, the Mussulman, the Eastern and the Western Christian.
When he published his speech on the Nabob of Arcot, Burke prefixed
to it an admirable quotation from one of the letters of the Emperor
Julian. And Julian too, as we all know, had a strong feeling for the
past. But what in that remarkable figure was only the sentimentalism
of reaction, in Burke was a reasoned and philosophic veneration for
all old and settled order, whether in the free Parliament of Great
Britain, in the ancient absolutism of Versailles, or in the secular
pomp of Oude and the inviolable sanctity of Benares, the holy city and
the garden of God.
It would be out of place here to attempt to follow the details of the
impeachment. Every reader has heard that great tale in our history,
and everybody knows that it was Burke's tenacity and power which
caused that tale to be told. The House of Commons would not, it is
true, have directed that Hastings should be impeached, unless Pitt had
given his sanction and approval, and how it was that Pitt did give
his sanction and approval so suddenly and on grounds ostensibly so
slender, remains one of the secrets of history. In no case would the
impeachment have been pressed upon Parliament by the Opposition,
and assented to by ministers, if Burke had not been there with his
prodigious industry, his commanding comprehensive vision, his burning
zeal, and his power of kindling in men so different from him and from
one another as Fox, Sheridan, Windham, Grey, a zeal only less intense
than his own.
It was in the spring of 1786 that the articles of charge of Hastings's
high crimes and misdemeanours, as Burke had drawn them, were presented
to the House of Commons. It was in February 1788 that Burke opened the
vast cause in the old historic hall at Westminster, in an oration
in which at points he was wound up to such a pitch of eloquence and
passion that every listener, including the great criminal, held his
breath in an agony of horror; that women were carried out fainting;
that the speaker himself became incapable of saying another word, and
the spectators of the scene began to wonder whether he would not, like
the mighty Chatham, actually die in the exertion of his overwhelming
powers. Among the illustrious crowd who thronged Westminster Hall in
the opening days of the impeachment was Fanny Burney. She was then in
her odious bondage at Court, and was animated by that admiration and
pity for Hastings which at Court was the fashion. Windham used to
come up from the box of the managers of the impeachment to talk over
with her the incidents of the day, and she gave him her impressions
of Burke's speech, which were probably those of the majority of his
hearers, for the majority were favourable to Hastings. "I told him,"
says Miss Burney, "that Mr. Burke's opening had struck me with the
highest admiration of his powers, from the eloquence, the imagination,
the fire, the diversity of expression, and the ready flow of language
with which he seemed gifted, in a most superior manner, for any and
every purpose to which rhetoric could lead." "And when he came to his
two narratives," I continued, "when he related the particulars
of those dreadful murders, he interested, he engaged, he at last
overpowered me; I felt my cause lost. I could hardly keep on my seat.
My eyes dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused as Mr.
Hastings; I wanted to sink on the floor, that they might be saved so
painful a sight. I had no hope he could clear himself; not another
wish in his favour remained. But when from this narration Mr. Burke
proceeded to his own comments and declamation--when the charges of
rapacity, cruelty, tyranny, were general, and made with all the
violence of personal detestation, and continued and aggravated without
any further fact or illustration; then there appeared more of study
than of truth, more of invective than of justice; and, in short, so
little of proof to so much of passion, that in a very short time I
began to lift up my head, my seat was no longer uneasy, my eyes were
indifferent which way they looked, or what object caught them, and
before I was myself aware of the declension of Mr. Burke's powers over
my feelings, I found myself a mere spectator in a public place, and
looking all around it, with my opera-glass in my hand!"
In 1795, six years after Burke's opening, the Lords were ready with
their verdict. It had long been anticipated. Hastings was acquitted.
This was the close of the fourteen years of labour, from the date of
the Select Committee of 1781. "If I were to call for a reward," Burke
said, "it would be for the services in which for fourteen years,
without intermission, I showed the most industry and had the least
success. I mean the affairs of India; they are those on which I value
myself the most; most for the importance; most for the labour; most
for the judgment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit."
The side that is defeated on a particular issue, is often victorious
on the wide and general outcome. Looking back across the ninety years
that divide us from that memorable scene in Westminster Hall, we may
see that Burke had more success than at first appeared. If he did not
convict the man, he overthrew a system, and stamped its principles
with lasting censure and shame. Burke had perhaps a silent conviction
that it would have been better for us and for India if Clive had
succeeded in his attempt to blow out his own brains in the Madras
counting-house, or if the battle of Plassy had been a decisive defeat
instead of a decisive victory. "All these circumstances," he once
said, in reference to the results of the investigation of the Select
Committee, "are not, I confess, very favourable to the idea of our
attempting to govern India at all. But there we are: there we are
placed by the Sovereign Disposer, and we must do the best we can in
our situation. The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." If
that situation is better understood now than it was a century ago, and
that duty more loftily conceived, the result is due, so far as such
results can ever be due to one man's action apart from the confluence
of the deep impersonal elements of time, to the seeds of justice and
humanity which were sown by Burke and his associates. Nobody now
believes that Clive was justified in tricking Omichund by forging
another man's name; that Impey was justified in hanging Nuncomar for
committing the very offence for which Clive was excused or applauded,
although forgery is no grave crime according to Hindoo usage, and it
is the gravest according to English usage; that Hastings did well
in selling English troops to assist in the extermination of a brave
people with whom he was at peace; that Benfield did well in conniving
with an Eastern prince in a project of extortion against his subjects.
The whole drift of opinion has changed, and it is since the trial of
Hastings that the change has taken place. The question in Burke's
time was whether oppression and corruption were to continue to be the
guiding maxims of English policy. The personal disinterestedness of
the ruler who had been the chief founder of this policy, and had most
openly set aside all pretence of righteous principle, was dust in the
balance. It was impossible to suppress the policy without striking a
deadly blow at its most eminent and powerful instrument. That Hastings
was acquitted, was immaterial. The lesson of his impeachment had been
taught with sufficiently impressive force--the great lesson that
Asiatics have rights, and that Europeans have obligations; that a
superior race is bound to observe the highest current morality of the
time in all its dealings with the subject race. Burke is entitled
to our lasting reverence as the first apostle and great upholder of
integrity, mercy, and honour in the relation between his countrymen
and their humble dependents.
He shared the common fate of those who dare to strike a blow for human
justice against the prejudices of national egotism. But he was no
longer able to bear obloquy and neglect, as he had borne it through
the war with the colonies. When he opened the impeachment of Hastings
at Westminster, Burke was very near to his sixtieth year. Hannah More
noted in 1786 that his vivacity had diminished, and that business and
politics had impaired his agreeableness. The simpletons in the House,
now that they had at last found in Pitt a political chief who could
beat the Whig leaders on their own ground of eloquence, knowledge,
and dexterity in debate, took heart as they had never done under Lord
North. They now made deliberate attempts to silence the veteran by
unmannerly and brutal interruptions, of which a mob of lower class
might have been ashamed. Then suddenly came a moment of such
excitement as has not often been seen in the annals of party. It
became known one day in the autumn of 1788 that the king had gone out
of his mind.
The news naturally caused the liveliest agitation among the Whigs.
When the severity of the attack forced the ministry to make
preparations for a Regency, the friends of the Prince of Wales assumed
that they would speedily return to power, and hastened to form their
plans accordingly. Fox was travelling in Italy with Mrs. Armstead, and
he had been two months away without hearing a word from England.
The Duke of Portland sent a messenger in search of him, and after a
journey of ten days the messenger found him at Bologna. Fox instantly
set off in all haste for London, which he reached in nine days. The
three months that followed were a time of unsurpassed activity and
bitterness, and Burke was at least as active and as bitter as the rest
of them. He was the writer of the Prince of Wales's letter to Pitt,
sometimes set down to Sheridan, and sometimes to Gilbert Elliot. It
makes us feel how naturally the style of ideal kingship, its dignity,
calm, and high self-consciousness all came to Burke. Although we read
of his thus drawing up manifestoes and protests, and deciding minor
questions for Fox, which Fox was too irresolute to decide for himself,
yet we have it on Burke's own authority that some time elapsed
after the return to England before he even saw Fox; that he was not
consulted as to the course to be pursued in the grave and difficult
questions connected with the Regency; and that he knew as little of
the inside of Carlton House, where the Prince of Wales lived, as of
Buckingham House, where the king lived. "I mean to continue here,"
he says to Charles Fox, "until you call upon me; and I find myself
perfectly easy, from the implicit confidence that I have in you and
the Duke, and the certainty that I am in that you two will do the best
for the general advantage of the cause. In that state of mind I feel
no desire whatsoever of interfering." Yet the letter itself, and
others which follow, testify to the vehemence of Burke's interest in
the matter, and to the persistency with which he would have had them
follow his judgment, if they would have listened. It is as clear that
they did not listen.
Apart from the fierce struggle against Pitt's Regency Bill, Burke's
friends were intently occupied with the reconstruction of the Portland
cabinet, which the king had so unexpectedly dismissed five years
before. This was a sphere in which Burke's gifts were neither required
nor sought. We are rather in distress, Sir Gilbert Elliot writes, for
a proper man for the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Lord J.
Cavendish is very unwilling to engage again in public affairs. Fox is
to be Secretary of State. Burke, it is thought, would not be approved
of, Sheridan has not the public confidence, and so it comes down
therefore to Grey, Pelham, myself, and perhaps Windham." Elliot
was one of Burke's most faithful and attached friends, and he was
intimately concerned in all that was going on in the inner circle of
the party. It is worth while, therefore, to reproduce his account from
a confidential letter to Lady Elliot, of the way in which Burke's
claim to recognition was at this time regarded and dealt with.
Although I can tell you nothing positive about my own situation,
I was made very happy indeed yesterday by co-operating in the
settlement of Burke's, in a manner which gives us great joy as
well as comfort. The Duke of Portland has felt distressed how to
arrange Burke and his family in a manner equal to Burke's merits,
and to the Duke's own wishes, and at the same time so as to be
exempt from the many difficulties which seem to be in the way. He
sent for Pelham and me, as Burke's friends and his own, to advise
with us about it; and we dined yesterday with him and the Duchess,
that we might have time to talk the thing over at leisure and
without interruption after dinner. We stayed accordingly, engaged
in that subject till almost twelve at night, and our conference
ended most happily and excessively to the satisfaction of us all.
The Duke of Portland has the veneration for Burke that Windham,
Pelham, myself and a few more have, and he thinks it impossible to
do too much for him. He considers the reward to be given to Burke
as a credit and honour to the nation, and he considers the neglect
of him and his embarrassed situation as having been long a
reproach to the country. The unjust prejudice and clamour which
has prevailed against him and his family only determine the Duke
the more to do him justice. The question was how? First, his
brother Richard, who was Secretary to the Treasury before, will
have the same office now; but the Duke intends to give him one of
the first offices which falls vacant, of about £1000 a year for
life in the customs, and he will then resign the Secretary to the
Treasury, which, however, in the meanwhile is worth £3000 a year.
Edmund Burke is to have the Pay-Office, £4000 a year; but as that
is precarious and he can leave no provision for his son, it would,
in fact, be doing little or nothing of any real or substantial
value unless some _permanent_ provision is added to it. In this
view the Duke is to grant him on the Irish establishment a pension
of £2000 a year _clear_ for his own life, and the other half to
Mrs. Burke for her life. This will make Burke completely happy, by
leaving his wife and son safe from want after his death, if they
should survive him. The Duke's affectionate anxiety to accomplish
this object, and his determination to set all clamour at defiance
on this point of justice, was truly affecting, and increases my
attachment for the Duke.... The Duke said the only objection to
this plan was that he thought it was due from this country, and
that he grudged the honour of it to Ireland; but as nothing in
England was ready, this plan was settled. You may think it strange
that to this moment Burke does not know a word of all this, and
his family are indeed, I believe, suffering a little under the
apprehension that he may be neglected in the general scramble. I
believe there never were three cabinet counsellors more in harmony
on any subject than we were, nor three people happier in their
day's work.[1]
[Footnote 1: _Life and Letters of Sir G. Elliot_, i. 261-263.]
This leaves the apparent puzzle where it was. Why should Burke not
be approved of for Chancellor of the Exchequer? What were the many
difficulties described as seeming to be in the way of arranging for
Burke in a manner equal to Burke's merits and the Duke of Portland's
wishes? His personal relations with the chiefs of his party were at
this time extremely cordial and intimate. He was constantly a guest at
the Duke of Portland's most private dinner-parties. Fox had gone down
to Beaconsfield to recruit himself from the fatigues of his rapid
journey from Bologna, and to spend some days in quiet with Windham and
the master of the house. Elliot and Windham, who were talked about
for a post for which one of them says that Burke would not have been
approved, vied with one another in adoring Burke. Finally, Elliot
and the Duke think themselves happy in a day's work, which ended in
consigning the man who not only was, but was admitted to be, the most
powerful genius of their party, to a third-rate post, and that most
equivocal distinction, a pension on the Irish establishment. The
common explanation that it illustrates Whig exclusiveness, cannot be
seriously received as adequate. It is probable, for one thing, that
the feelings of the Prince of Wales had more to do with it than the
feelings of men like the Duke of Portland or Fox. We can easily
imagine how little that most worthless of human creatures would
appreciate the great qualities of such a man as Burke. The painful
fact which we are unable to conceal from ourselves is, that the common
opinion of better men than the Prince of Wales leaned in the same
direction. His violence in the course of the Regency debates had
produced strong disapproval in the public, and downright consternation
in his own party. On one occasion he is described by a respectable
observer as having "been wilder than ever, and laid himself and his
party more open than ever speaker did. He is folly personified, but
shaking his cap and bells under the laurel of genius. He finished his
wild speech in a manner next to madness." Moore believes that Burke's
indiscretions in these trying and prolonged transactions sowed the
seeds of the alienation between him and Fox two years afterwards.
Burke's excited state of mind showed itself in small things as well as
great. Going with Windham to Carlton House, Burke attacked him in the
coach for a difference of opinion about the affairs of a friend, and
behaved with such unreasonable passion and such furious rudeness
of manner, that his magnanimous admirer had some difficulty in
obliterating the impression. The public were less tolerant. Windham
has told us that at this time Burke was a man decried, persecuted, and
proscribed, not being much valued even by his own party, and by half
the nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman.[1]
This is evidence beyond impeachment, for Windham loved and honoured
Burke with the affection and reverence of a son; and he puts the
popular sentiment on record with grief and amazement. There is other
testimony to the same effect. The late Lord Lansdowne, who must
have heard the subject abundantly discussed by those who were most
concerned in it, was once asked by a very eminent man of our own time,
why the Whigs kept Burke out of their cabinets. "Burke!" he cried; "he
was so violent, so overbearing, so arrogant, so intractable, that
to have got on with him in a cabinet would have been utterly and
absolutely impossible."
[Footnote 1: Windham's _Diary_, p. 213.]
On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the difficulties
in the way of Burke's promotion to high office were his notoriously
straitened circumstances; his ungoverned excesses of party zeal and
political passion; finally, what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the unjust
prejudice and clamour against him and his family, and what Burke
himself once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all his
life. The first two of these causes can scarcely have operated in
the arrangements that were made in the Rockingham and Coalition
ministries. But the third, we may be sure, was incessantly at work. It
would have needed social courage alike in 1782, 1783, and 1788 to
give cabinet rank to a man round whose name there floated so many
disparaging associations. Social courage is exactly the virtue in
which the constructors of a government will always think themselves
least able to indulge. Burke, we have to remember, did not stand
alone before the world. Elliot describes a dinner-party at Lord
Fitzwilliam's, at which four of these half-discredited Irishmen were
present. "Burke has now got such a train after him as would sink
anybody but himself:--his son, who is quite _nauseated_ by all
mankind; his brother, who is liked better than his son, but is rather
offensive with animal spirits and with brogue; and his cousin, Will
Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly from India, as much ruined
as when he went many years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any
prospects of power that Burke may ever have." It was this train, and
the ideas of adventurership that clung to them, the inextinguishable
stories about papistry and Saint Omer's, the tenacious calumny about
the letters of Junius, the notorious circumstances of embarrassment
and neediness--it was all these things which combined with Burke's own
defects of temper and discretion, to give the Whig grandees as decent
a reason as they could have desired for keeping all the great posts of
state in their own hands.
It seems difficult to deny that the questions of the Regency had
caused the germs of a sort of dissatisfaction and strain in the
relations between Fox and Burke. Their feelings to one another have
been well compared to the mutual discontent between partners in
unsuccessful play, where each suspects that it is the mistakes of the
other that lost the game. Whether Burke felt conscious of the failures
in discretion and temper, which were the real or pretended excuse for
neglect, we cannot tell. There is one passage that reveals a chagrin
of this kind. A few days after the meeting between the Duke of
Portland and Elliot, for the purpose of settling his place in the new
ministry, Burke went down to Beaconsfield. In writing (January 24,
1789) to invite Windham and Pelham to come to stay a night, with
promise of a leg of mutton cooked by a dairymaid who was not a bad
hand at a pinch, he goes on to say that his health has received some
small benefit from his journey to the country. "But this view to
health, though far from unnecessary to me, was not the chief cause
of my present retreat. I began to find that I was grown rather
too anxious; and had begun to discover to myself and to others a
solicitude relative to the present state of affairs, which, though
their strange condition might well warrant it in others, is certainly
less suitable to my time of life, in which all emotions are less
allowed; and to which, most certainly, all human concerns ought in
reason to become more indifferent than to those who have work to do,
and a good deal of day and of inexhausted strength to do it in."[1]
[Footnote 1: _Correspondence_, iii. 89.]
The king's unexpected restoration to health two or three weeks
later brought to nought all the hope and ambition of the Whigs, and
confirmed Pitt in power for the rest of Burke's lifetime. But an event
now came to pass in the world's history, which transformed Burke in an
instant from a man decried, persecuted, proscribed, into an object of
exultant adoration all over Europe.