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

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СКАЧАТЬ MP, Wilkes obtained an advance copy of the King’s Speech, and he denounced it and its presumed author Bute in his radical (and violently anti-Scottish) weekly, the North Briton. He had previously accused the Archbishop of Canterbury of buggery, and called the Bishop of Gloucester’s wife a professional prostitute. He had even suggested that Bute’s influence extended to taking George III’s mother as his mistress. This, however, was the final straw.

      The King’s response was to instigate a criminal charge of seditious libel, and have the government issue general warrants in which Wilkes and his collaborators were not named. Forty-nine people were arrested, including Wilkes himself. He was sent to the Tower of London, his home ransacked for incriminating materials, and papers removed. He then counter-sued for trespass and to secure his own immunity as an MP to libel claims under parliamentary privilege. Both actions were successful. Over a series of cases, Wilkes was able to establish both the illegality of general warrants and the now basic principle that the English courts were under no obligation to defer in law to so-called ‘reasons of state’, advanced by government in the cause of political expediency.

6. Portrait of John Wilkes

      Wilkes, however, was only just getting into his stride. In the same year, his political enemies published an erotic burlesque of Pope’s Essay on Man attributed to him called An Essay on Woman. Among other things, the poem neatly summarized what seems to have been Wilkes’s own personal credo: ‘Life can little more supply / Than just a few good fucks, and then we die.’ It was condemned as blasphemous and obscene by the House of Lords, and Wilkes, who had been wounded in a duel, escaped to Paris to recover and avoid imprisonment. He was convicted in absentia of obscene and seditious libels early in 1764, and declared an outlaw. Four years later, however, and under some pressure from his French creditors, Wilkes made a dramatic return to England and was elected to Parliament for Middlesex, amid wild scenes of mob hysteria and rejoicing. He surrendered himself, waived parliamentary privilege and was sent to jail, whereupon some of his supporters were killed by troops at a riot in St George’s Fields, on the site of the present Waterloo Station, not far from Parliament. As if this was not enough, a succession of expulsions from and re-elections to Parliament now followed, which only succeeded in embarrassing the authorities still further and cementing the words ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ into the popular mind.

      Even then Wilkes was not finished. As an MP, he burnished his radical credentials by denouncing British policy in America, and in 1771 fought a successful campaign to prevent the suppression of reports on parliamentary debates. The loss of trust in our ancient institutions, and specifically in Parliament, is often regarded as a modern phenomenon. But Wilkes reminds us that this is not so. In less than a decade, he had almost single-handedly thrown Parliament into grave disrepute, shining a searching light on its corruption, authoritarianism, dependence on the Crown and willingness to suppress the common-law freedoms of the citizen. He had galvanized the press, organized political societies and mobilized the mob.

      To Burke, Wilkes was at best a mixed blessing. Personally, he found him ‘a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no principles’. There was little in common between them temperamentally, or much politically, since Burke was no radical. In many ways Wilkes was an embarrassment and, worse, a highly effective one. The Rockingham Whigs shared his criticisms of overreaching Crown prerogative and British policy towards America, and during their brief year in power Parliament had banned both general warrants and the arbitrary seizure of personal papers. But they were deeply uncomfortable about any alliance with such a notorious blasphemer and libertine. Burke himself deplored the use of general warrants, and pressed in the public interest for three years for a parliamentary inquiry into the killings in the St George’s Fields. But nothing could have been more hostile to his developing conception of principled political opposition, or to his deep belief in the value of the social order, than Wilkes’s willingness to whip up crowd hysteria and pander to the mob. That way led to revolution.

      It was in this context that Burke framed one of his most famous and enduring essays. In 1768–9 he had written – perhaps with William Dowdeswell, the Rockinghamites’ leader in the Commons – Observations on a Late Publication Entitled ‘The Present State of the Nation’. Two years later he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The first is a long and carefully argued pamphlet, now somewhat unjustly ignored; the second is a classic of political thought, which has been rightly read and re-read by succeeding generations. Together, they mark Burke’s transition to political maturity.

      The Observations is Burke’s first real political pamphlet. In purpose, it is a counter-attack. In late 1768 William Knox, a follower of Grenville, had published The Present State of the Nation, which set out a vigorous defence of Grenville’s trade policy, and an attack on Rockingham and his followers for betraying that policy and the interests of the nation. In response, Burke does not simply resort to the political stock-in-trade of deflection, denial and insult. Rather, he makes a lengthy argument on the merits, backed up with a host of detail, statistical tables and evidence. The subtext was clear. The Rockinghamites were right on the facts and right on the principle, and they stood ready to serve when the ministry collapsed, as it surely would. But more than that: as a party they had the capacity to articulate policy based on fundamental political principle, which could as a result outlast the vagaries of the moment, and become the basis for loyal and yet energetic opposition.

      Much of the Observations is dry stuff indeed, though towards the end it moves from evidence and rebuttal to a vigorous defence of the Rockingham ministry along the lines of the Short Account. Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific detail with Olympian generalization. Thus a discussion of imports from Jamaica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that ‘politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part’. Or take Burke’s magisterial repudiation of Grenville’s proposal for the American colonists to be enfranchised and their representatives sent 3,000 miles to London. This he denounces as constitutional folly, in terms that have resonance today: ‘Has he well considered what an immense operation any change in our constitution is? How many discussions, parties and passions it will necessarily excite; and when you open it to inquiry in one part, where the inquiry will stop?’ In a favourite metaphor, Burke likens the British constitution to an old building, which ‘stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then it may come down upon our heads altogether, in much uniformity of ruin; and great will be the ruin thereof.’ In its scepticism about human reason, and its respect for tradition, for what is given, the thought is deeply conservative. In language, it is biblical.

      In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, published anonymously in April 1770, Burke turns from economic to social disorder. The return of Wilkes in 1768 had spread panic in official circles, generated huge public excitement and cast the authorities generally in the worst possible light. But Burke does not analyse popular grievances simply in their own terms. Rather, he develops an elaborate conspiracy theory, in which their ultimate cause is to be found in the extension and consolidation of royal power.

      This was potentially dangerous territory, even for someone protected by parliamentary privilege, and Burke prudently follows the convention of the time that the King can do no wrong. Instead he attributes to the ‘King’s Friends’, an alleged Court faction of shadowy advisers, the importation from France to Britain of a Double Cabinet: a parallel administration designed to control the workings of government from the inside. This has as its counterpart an attack on other sources of power; notably, he accuses the Court faction of seeking to destroy potential opposition within Parliament through patronage, and by constant changes of administration. Given all these offices and pensions, it was little wonder that the Crown could not live within the ample financial means voted СКАЧАТЬ