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

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      THE BRITAIN TOWARDS WHOSE SUMMIT Burke now set his course was a country in a state of extraordinary excitement. Politically, it had enjoyed a remarkable degree of stability for over forty years, stability established and personified in the formidable figure of Sir Robert Walpole, now generally regarded as its first Prime Minister, and sustained by his immediate successors. Walpole was a Whig: that is, one of those who supported the constitutional monarchy established after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, in which the Catholic James II had fled into exile, and Parliament had confirmed William of Orange from the Netherlands as King William III. On the other side of the political divide were the Tories, the landowners who supported James II and his successors, and who generally defended the prerogative rights of the Crown.

      Personal pre-eminence in Westminster was nothing new, but in Sir Robert Walpole it found perhaps its greatest ever exponent. He was a man of enormous political subtlety and energy, a master of detail dedicated to three simple ends: the extension of British trading influence and economic strength; his own complete control of the different organs of government; and the continued political defeat of the Tories.

      These three goals Walpole amply achieved. War was in general avoided, the national debt reduced, taxes kept low and colonial trade managed to the benefit of the mother country. After the death of Queen Anne in 1714 Toryism went into a long decline; discredited by the Jacobite rebellion of the following year, it started to collapse, yielding to what came to be known as the Whig supremacy, a process only enhanced by a second failed rebellion in 1745. It was far from inactive, bubbling away in town and country, in the constituencies and in Parliament. But only in 1760 did it start to reappear in government.

      In 1720 the South Sea Company, which held the monopoly of trade with South America, collapsed amid a frenzy of financial speculation. In the aftermath it became clear that there had been rampant bribery and insider trading in its shares. Many establishment figures were touched by the scandal, which extended to members of the Cabinet; Walpole himself had invested latterly with reckless enthusiasm, but had managed to escape censure and financial ruin. Having served a few years earlier as First Lord of the Treasury, ultimately in charge of the nation’s finances, he was appointed to that post again in April 1721 and set about consolidating his personal power. Supported by the immense wealth of the Duke of Newcastle, he was able to place himself at the centre of a vast network of influence stretching from King George I – and his mistresses – to the Church of England, the City of London and many of the great families. This influence was maintained after the accession of George II in 1727.

      Walpole made it his settled principle that every appointment to Church or state, however insignificant, should be conditional on loyalty to Walpole himself. Where patronage did not suffice, bribes and electoral sweeteners were deployed instead, on a prodigious scale. A famous caricature of the period, Idol-worship, or the Way to Preferment (see following page/s), shows him astride a great gateway and baring a pair of enormous buttocks, which men line up to kiss before going through. There was no need even to show Walpole’s face, so clear was the inference.

2. Idol-Worship or the way to preferment

      Walpole did not cease to exercise political influence after he left office in 1742; his machine lived on through Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham. But the increasing need for vigorous leadership in the Commons brought an energetic Whig politician, William Pitt, to the fore. Unlike those of Walpole and his successors, Pitt’s family connections were only distantly aristocratic. The family fortune had been made with the East India Company by his grandfather, Thomas Pitt, a governor of Madras whose discovery and sale of an enormous diamond caused him to be known as ‘Diamond’ Pitt. William was close to his grandfather, and imbibed from him the lessons that Britain’s greatness relied on aggression in controlling overseas trade and colonial expansion, and that nothing was impossible to an individual of outstanding personality and energy.

      Over time, and despite frequent bouts of illness, Pitt made himself into such an individual: an orator of extraordinary power able to instil in his audience, and in the country at large, the conviction that his was the voice of destiny. Reckless, insecure, bombastic, capable of manic bouts of work lapsing into frequent periods of lassitude, Pitt was determined to exercise power not through any faction or network, but in his own name and through sheer force of personality.

      Pitt joined the government in 1746, over the deep objections of George II, and in due course became an ostentatiously upright Paymaster General. His moment came in 1756, when the calamitous early stages of the Seven СКАЧАТЬ