Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics. Jesse Norman

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3. A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s

      Even among the members of the Club, Johnson was a towering figure, in height and presence and accomplishment. The self-made son of a Lichfield bookseller, he had survived low birth weight, scrofula, smallpox and tuberculosis – maladies which scarred his features, left him partially deaf and blind and gave him a disturbing array of tics and convulsive gestures – to become one of the greatest men of letters of that or any age. There are, it has been noted, few literary genres to which Johnson did not make a foundational contribution, including journalism, fiction, poetry, criticism, satire, biography, the essay, travel writing and, of course, lexicography. But it was the publication of his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 that turned him into a nationally celebrated figure.

      Johnson had met Burke some years later, and clearly enjoyed the latter’s flood of conversation, saying ‘he does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full’. The relationship matured over time, so much so that Johnson was apt to repeat that ‘If a man were to go by chance at the same time with Burke, under a shed, to shun a shower, he would say: “This is an extraordinary man.” If Burke should go into a stable to see his horse dressed, the ostler would say, “we have had an extraordinary man here.”’ It was a handsome tribute, especially since Johnson was no flatterer.

      Nevertheless, the relationship between Johnson and Burke was never an entirely easy one. It was not helped by political differences – Johnson was a devout Tory, Burke a Whig – or by the sometimes scheming James Boswell, who oscillated between the quest for political favours from Burke and the gossip’s tendency to retail Johnson’s occasionally cutting private remarks. No, the two men had different styles: Johnson possessed of a lapidary wit and a natural genius for quotation, Burke more prolix, carefully building up comic or tragic detail in his speeches to devastating effect. And as so often with two big beasts at the table, there was perhaps an undercurrent of competition. As an out-of-sorts Johnson once said, ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.’

      But Burke’s connections were increasingly social and political, as well as literary. They included several opposition Whig politicians, including William Fitzherbert and Lord John Cavendish, the charismatic Charles Townshend and the Buckinghamshire landowner Lord Verney, to whom Will Burke had become very close. In 1763 an ill-starred ministry led by the Earl of Bute had finally fallen, over the supposedly concessionary terms of the Peace of Paris which ended the Seven Years War, and George III was forced to treat with two men he detested, George Grenville and the Duke of Bedford. Two years later the political merry-go-round took another turn, and they too left office. For his part, Pitt remained disenchanted and aloof. The King then asked the Marquis of Rockingham, as leader of a large parliamentary faction, to form an administration, with Newcastle alongside him and the Duke of Cumberland acting as the King’s éminence grise.

      Burke must have been at a low ebb at this time, for his second son Christopher died between the ages of five and six, probably in 1764. We know virtually nothing about the circumstances of his death, but its effect can only have been to focus Burke’s love and attention on his surviving boy, Richard. Still more so if, as seems possible from Burke’s letters, Jane then had a miscarriage, and perhaps even another. The couple may have been coming to the very sad conclusion that there would be no more children.

      But the effect of Rockingham’s elevation was to hand Burke the first of two huge strokes of luck. Rockingham had only just engaged him as his private secretary, despite the protestations of the aged Duke of Newcastle, who denounced Burke in soon-to-be familiar terms as a closet Catholic and a Jacobite. But Rockingham ignored the Duke, and Burke was thus catapulted from near-obscurity into the very cockpit of power. The new administration took office on 15 July 1765, and Burke started work the following day.

      The second bit of luck was better still, for Will generously waived his own political ambitions temporarily and persuaded Lord Verney to allow Edmund to stand for Parliament for Wendover, a ‘pocket borough’ in Verney’s personal gift. For Burke, the way was now clear to a political career.

      The new government’s first priority concerned the American colonies. For decades, these had been allowed to prosper in an atmosphere – it would be too much to call it a policy – of more or less benign neglect. The exception was trade. Colonial affairs, in America as elsewhere, were managed along strictly mercantile lines: the colonies existed to generate raw materials and import finished goods, the mother country to manufacture those finished goods and derive the extra value thereby added, the goods themselves always to be carried in British ships. The counterpart of this trade was that American merchants were perennially short of hard currency, and so perennially indebted to financiers in the City of London. From a British perspective, it was an immensely convenient and lucrative arrangement, sustained by each side’s general ignorance of the other.

      But events now conspired to change this. Over the course of the century, the modest American colonial population of some 200,000 had doubled, then doubled again, and again. By 1765 it stood at not quite 2,000,000. It had been swelled by immigration, much of which was not English, but Scottish, Irish, French and German, to say nothing of those at the margins of society seeking to escape the law or gain a new life. Thomas Paine would later be one of these, emigrating to America in 1774. Many of the new immigrants felt no great love for the Westminster Parliament.

      The Seven Years War had ended in triumph for Britain, and the further extension of its early colonial empire around the world. In the long term, this would bring vast profits. But the war’s immediate effect was a drastic depletion of the Treasury. The national debt nearly doubled, from £70 million to £130 million. Taxes, totalling some 15 per cent on a country gentleman’s estate, were regarded as unfeasibly high. Something had to be done. Grenville’s response was to limit expense by restraining westward expansion and seeking to end the long-running border war with the American Indians; to enforce the Navigation Acts, limiting foreign trade competition and forcing the colonies to pay higher prices, especially for sugar; and to raise revenue directly from the Americans, via a new Stamp Act on legal transactions, passed in 1764.

      Within the increasingly fractious colonies, the result was uproar, resistance and the first signs of rebellion. The urgent question for the new government in 1765 was, therefore, what to do about the Stamp Act. To enforce it would be ruinously expensive, while compromise would likely please no one. Rockingham therefore opted for outright repeal, a view in which he may have been influenced by Burke, whose memorandum urging repeal has survived. To save face and give itself a measure of political cover, the ministry added a Declaratory Act, which insisted on Britain’s right in principle to tax the colonies, even if that right was not exercised. The move worked, and both Acts were voted through. But it proved to be a short-term expedient; the colonists had been informed that the Declaratory Act would not be exercised, and their reaction later to further taxes was to prove extreme.

      Meanwhile, Burke needed to get elected and take his seat in Parliament. Wendover at that time had just 250 electors – the modern constituency has around 70,000 – most of whom were Lord Verney’s tenants and therefore disposed to vote as instructed. The sitting member was induced to retire, but there was still the formality of election. In keeping with the time, this was accompanied by an extended bout of mass inebriation. It was not to Burke’s taste, but he got the job done. As he wrote to his Irish friend and mentor Charles O’Hara on Christmas Eve of 1765, ‘Yesterday I was elected for Wendover, got very drunk, and this day have an heavy cold.’

      Facing the chamber of the House of Commons itself was another matter, however. The chamber itself has been rebuilt twice since Burke’s time, once after the great fire of 1834 and then after bomb damage sustained in the Second World War. On the latter СКАЧАТЬ