Edmund Burke
Ayling, Stanley
B the man of faith was also a L P man of action—bold, it would appear from what Ayling reports, to the point of recklessness. At school and college in Ireland, Burke already displayed his undoubted...
...Both sought to defend established property and established religion, which the French Revolutionists were destroying, unleashing more and more violence in the process...
...When the Duke of Portland was putting together a Whig administration in the 1780s, the best job he was willing to offer Burke was that of paymaster, although he did at least propose as well to grant him a life pension of £2,000...
...These last words encapsulate the whole philosophy by which Burke's life in politics was inspired, and which he tried in all his speeches and publications to impress upon others—namely that imperfection is part of the unchanging human condition, but that specific abuses and injustice can, with great effort, sometimes be corrected...
...One consequence of this is that Burke has had to wait a very long time for anything like an adequate biography...
...and there,in company with numerous Irish kinsfolk, he kept up the appearance—despite all the debts and the delapidation of the fabric—of a gentleman of substance...
...It seems that Burke's parliamentary colleagues mistrusted his brilliance as much as they admired it...
...If justice requires reform," he wrote, "the work itself requires more minds than one age can furnish...
...Literature did not make young Burke's fortune or even make up for the loss of the allowance that his father cut off...
...By tracing the evolution of Burke's political opinions, his biographer shows that this is a false notion based on a failure to understand either what Burke was saying or the situation in which he found himself...
...It was his consolation and support in his climb up the greasy pole of an English political career, from the back streets of journalism to the forefront of parliamentary eminence...
...he condemned the French revolutionists of 1789 because they were rationalists, trying to overthrow their church and king, and remodel society on the impious assumption that heaven could be built on earth...
...His need for money was all the greater since Burke was very much a family man, having besides a wife, a brother, Richard Burke, and a distant kinsman, William Burke, whom he called his cousin, on his hands...
...When the French Revolution first began, Burke believed, as most people did, that the French were simply out to copy the English Revolution of 1688 and replace their absolutist monarchy with a constitutional one...
...He demonstrated his independence to marvelous effect after he had left the seat at Wendover for Bristol and informed his constituents there, in an immortal letter, that he did not, as they imagined, represent Bristol, and its petty local interests, but England and the interests of the entire Kingdom...
...The rewards he received never matched his services...
...political beliefs that always went together with the faith of a nonsectarian Christian...
...It was during Burke's six years as M.P...
...Coming from a family half Anglican, half Catholic, and being educated by Quakers, he made his own distillation of the essentials of Christianity from these competing conceptions of its truths, and to those essentials he clung with steadfast faith...
...At school and college in Ireland, Burke already displayed his undoubted talent for writing, and against all advice to earn a safe living in the law in London, he chose both to abandon that profession in favor of literature at the age of twenty-six, and to acquire a wife at the age of twenty-eight...
...Stanley Ayling is not that definitive biographer, but his book is more than acceptable as a provisional biography, soundly based on the researches of Copeland and distinguished by the three great virtues of literary style: brevity, clarity, and euphony...
...But wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names...
...No way is open," he warned the House of Commons, "but to comply with the American spirit as necessary...
...a liberal who, for no very creditable reason, became an arch-conservative...
...The question is not whether you have the right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not in your interest to make them happy...
...The French enterprise of transforming the whole of society in a matter of weeks was the utmost folly...
...He could support the American revolutionists in 1776 because he could see that they were godly men "appealing to heaven" (as Locke had once described the taking up of arms in the defense of historic rights...
...Significantly, his first published book was an attack on the anti-Christian ideas of Lord Bolingbroke called A Vindication of Natural Society...
...Burke has the reputation in the textbooks of being a turncoat, a vigorous champion of the American Revolution in 1776 who became a bitter critic of Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...
...Ayling remarks that Burke was not considered to be "Cabinet material," despite his being "the brains and maybe the conscience of the party...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 43 as member of Parliament for Wendover at the age of thirty-six...
...He wrote in the form of a satire, and like many satires it was not well understood by readers and enjoyed only a mixed success...
...His most celebrated address to the public was his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which he wrote soon after the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and published in 1790...
...He said that the Americans, if only because they were mostly of English origin, had a "fierce love of liberty' and "an Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery...
...His leader, Rockingham, congratulated him, but the majority in the House were unmoved by his argument —his constituents in Bristol even less so, since they suffered financially from the American troubles...
...Martin's Press/715 pp...
...for Bristol that the American Revolution took place, and Burke achieved his greatest fame in Parliament as a champion of the Americans' claim to freedom...
...To the Whig party, Burke was a one-man think tank...
...You might change the names...
...Months before Robespierre sent his victims in droves to the guillotine, Burke discerned that that would be an inevitable outcome of the kind of revolution on which the French had embarked...
...to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the transitory modes in which they appear...
...However, the appearance in 1978 of the Correspondence of Edmund Burke, in a magisterial edition by the American scholar Thomas W. Copeland, brought to light much that had previously been veiled, and Burke now awaits his definitive biographer...
...In the end he found a leader in Lord Rockingham, who ran the Whig party, and a rich friend in Lord Verney, who arranged for Burke to be elected EDMUND BURKE: HIS LIFE AND OPINIONS Stanley Ayling/St...
...When Burke sought the acquaintance of various grandees in the hope of securing some of the patronage that was on offer in the then expanding British Empire, he wanted that patronage more for his dependents than for himself...
...not just a speechwriter, but a political theorist and parliamentary strategist...
...Burke uttered these words in a speech that lasted two-and-a-half hours...
...Burke was a Christian without being a sectarian...
...In eighteenth-century England, it would hardly have been possible for an Irishman with a Roman Catholic mother and no money to acquire a seat in Parliament and a prominent place in the Whig party without keeping a good many things dark...
...But whereas most liberals and progressives in England went on thinking this for the next few years, Burke realized in a matter of weeks that something quite different was happening in France...
...0 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989...
...The French Revolution had been taken over by the ideology of human perfectability, which Burke associated with the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau...
...Far from his career in politics being a movement from liberalism to conservatism, he developed—if he developed at all—from a conservative reformer into a reforming conservative...
...He warned the English that they would never overcome the Americans' love of liberty by force, and since sound politics was the art of the possible, they should yield graciously to American demands by negotiation...
...Sir William Young described him as "folly personified, shaking his cap and bells under the laurels of genius...
...The English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776, Burke argued, were both largely conservative revolutions, dismissing despotic innovations in order to restore traditional liberties and institutions...
...26.00 Maurice Cranston rr he life of Edmund Burke has al- 1 ways been something of a mystery—partly because he chose to make it one...
...In Parliament Burke always spoke and acted as if he were himself as grand as any Whig grandee...
...Burke had already decided that a man could not command any respect in Parliament unless he was himself a landowner, and so, with the help of mortgages and loans and perhaps some financial tricks of one kind and another, he acquired a large country house in Buckinghamshire...
...His own ambitions were less to be employed by the state than to legislate for it in the House of Commons...
...or, if you please, to submit to it as to a necessary evil...
...the French Revolution in 1789...
...Burke saw that fanatical left-wing politicians, backed up by a hysterical mob filled with envy for ancient privilege, were out to transform France into an army or anthill of equals, in which men would be "forced to be free" by means of Terror...
...That required a different kind of patronage—the backing of a party leader and the friendship of someone who controlled an available seat—most elections being simply fixed...
...rr his speech was perhaps the most I celebrated of all Burke's speeches in Parliament...
...So Burke turned to journalistic hack work, then to editing the Annual Register and accepting a commission,which he never completed, to write a history of England...
...It is worth noting that Burke did not speak of the Americans having a "right" to independence...
...You would not cure great public evils by resolving that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel, no interpreters of law, no general officers, no public councils...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
