Chapter 6

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.

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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.

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