Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. Letters I. and II. With introduction and notes by H. G. Keene

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Introduction

AND NOTES BY H. G. KEENE, C.I.E., M.A., AUTHOR OF "A MANUAL OF FRENCH LITERATURE," "A HISTORY OF INDIA," ETC LONDON: GEORGE BELL _ SONS, YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN. AND NEW YORK. 1898. CHISWICK PRESS : — C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE. I. OUTLINE OF THE AUTHOR'S CAREER. BURKE'S biography has been related in detail by Sir J. Prior (5th edition, 1854) ; and more recently by McKnight, Bisset, and MeCormick, and to their works those who desire to study his career should refer. We need here only attempt a brief recapitulation of such parts of his public life as may be useful to the consideration of the "Letters" with which we are concerned. These are mainly to be found in the able and sympathetic httle book by the Right Hon. John Morley,1 and in the pamphlet by Mr. Burke himself in answer to the attack made upon him, just before these " Letters " appeared, by Francis, Duke of Bedford — grandson of the friend and colleague of Grenville — of whom an unfavourable but far from just portrait was drawn in the famous " Letters of Junius." 2 Edmund Burke, then, was born in 1729 at Dublin, his father being a solicitor sprung from a respectable Limerick family, and his mother a lady of the name of Nagle, a native of Cork.

Mrs. Burke was a Roman Cathohc ; and although her son and his two brothers were brought up in the creed of the father, who was a Protestant, our author never lost a kindly sympathy with the ancient faith. Pre pared by an estimable Quaker tutor named Shackleton, he 1 " Burke " (English Men of Letters), by John Morley. London, 1879. . "A Letter to a noble Lord," etc., 1796. VI INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. entered the University of Dublin in 1743, and graduated there five years later. In 1750 he was sent to study law in London, and thus laid the foundation of that knowledge of general jurisprudence and that reverence for old prescrip tion which marked his course as a statesman and author. So active a mind, however, was not to be chained down to the practice of a lawyer ; Burke does not appear to have been called to the bar, and certainly never appeared in court as an advocate.

Politics and political literature soon attracted his attention; and, in 1756, he leaped into immediate distinction by the publication of " A Vindication of Natural Society," in which the paradoxes of Rousseau were ridiculed by a pretended recommendation in the style and manner of Lord Bolingbroke. The irony of this work was so successful as to deceive superficial readers ; so late as 1765 the author found it necessary to produce a second edition, with an explanation of its true nature and intention. In the year 1756 also appeared the "Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful." But the times were not such that a man of ardent tem perament could be content with irony and æsthetic. The " unofficial war," as Sir George Trevelyan calls it, which had been going on between the French and English, both in America and Asia, for some years, was, in 1756, sanc tioned and extended by declarations from the British and French governments.

Never, however, was the spirit of the British people at a lower ebb : all classes of men, immersed in a growing pursuit of commercial gain, ab stained from military hfe, and seemed to look on soldiers as contemptible mercenaries ; so that the declaration of war excited in England no feeling nobler than a dread of invasion. The House of Lords threw out a Bill, that had passed the Commons, for the reform of the militia ; and foreign troops had to be called in to protect the British coasts. The scandalous retreat of Admiral Byng from Minorca left the Mediterranean at the command of the French navy ; Montcalm took Oswego and threatened New York ; in India the British lost Calcutta with every circumstance of disgrace. As often happens in the case of a nation at heart proud and persevering, this apparent depression was followed by a rebound, and the terrible accumulation of disaster was met by one of the grandest uprisings known in history.

It proved a turning-point in the life of the race ; and the brave, if not very intelligent king, George II. , departed from the scene in a general dawn of glory, whose morning stars were such men as Clive and Wolfe, and the great minister, William Pitt the elder. In the end of 1760 George III. succeeded to the thrones of Great Britain and Ireland — a young prince of the best intentions, who " gloried in the name of Briton." Under such omens did Burke commence his pubhc life, in the humble capacity of a private secretary. The politician to whom he was attached was Wilham Gerard Hamilton (1729-84), Chief Secretary for Ireland in the viceroyship of Lord Halifax, and afterwards for many years Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer. In this company Burke revisited his native country in 1761. At that moment Ireland was divided sharply into two nations : the descendants of the English colonists and the native race.

The former were in chronic animosity against Britain, yet entirely dissociated from the Irish. The latter, despised socially and kept down by cruel laws, were " not regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed " — so said a competent authority.1 The relations between these helots and their unkind countrymen impressed Burke at the time, and he saw clearly that they were laying the foundation of future 1 Archbishop Stone (of Dublin), cited by Mr. Morley. Stone (1707-64) was a liberal Anglican, favourable to the civil claims of the Catholics. trouble ; although the struggle for supremacy in law and commerce which was carried on between the British government and the aristocracy of race tended to the emancipation of the Catholic natives. In 1765 Burke parted from Hamilton and came to England once more.

He was already known as a political scholar by the editor ship of the " Annual Register," which he had held ever since 1759. The Marquess of Rockingham (1730-82) had just become prime minister, and he now selected Burke as his private secretary ; before the end of the year a seat in the House of Commons was provided for him; and his public career began. Burke was now in his thirty-sixth year ; his mind stored with legal and historical study ; well acquainted with the affairs of the British empire ; a sincere and warm supporter of liberty, so far as it could be based on precedent and the interests of existing society. It was not long before his gifts and acquirements found congenial employment. The country had again begun to decline. Pitt had been dismissed from office, and George Grenville, who succeeded as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had introduced customs duties for goods imported into the colonies, together with a Stamp Act whereby further revenues were to be levied from North America.

Pitt raised a strong opposition ; the colonists resisted the new laws ; and the ministry was changed by royal order. In the beginning of 1766 Burke made his first appearance as a parliamentary orator, delivering two able speeches on the side of the colonists. But before the end of the year the Rockingham ministry was, in its turn, dismissed, and Burke (as he afterwards said) " cheerfully took his fate with his party." Ere long he showed that he could do party-service outside the House which might be at least as useful as anything that he could render within. Grenville attempting to console his disappointment by publishing a pamphlet intended to show what a danger the country incurred by the loss of his assis tance, Burke replied in the " Observations on the Present State of the Nation " (1769).

A few months later followed the still more celebrated " Thoughts on the Present Dis contents." The time had indeed come for patriotic warning and reproof. George III., with excellent personal con duct and motives, was gradually squandering the capital of popularity and prosperity with which he had entered on his reign. The temporary head of the administration was the Duke of Grafton, able but idle, and of ostentatious immorality. The king and the House of Commons had combined for the exclusion from public life of the member for Middlesex, John Wilkes, and the troops had used force and shot down some of Wilkes's supporters. In America the mutterings of a coming storm were still audible, in spite of the repeal of the Stamp Act. On all these questions Burke actively espoused the liberal side, urging — alike in his pamphlets and his parliamentary speeches — all the best and most scientific arguments in favour of hberty.

But it was liberty only as he understood the word ; that is, within the limits of the constitution ; and it is important to bear this in mind if we would understand the fundamental consistency which supported the varied superstructure of his public life. During this period Burke took an important step, pur chasing a small estate in Buckinghamshire called "Beacons field," where he continued to have his headquarters for the remainder of his days. It cannot be hoped that this attempt to enter the ranks of the landed aristocracy con duced to the happiness, or even to the permanent credit, of the great publicist ; but, like the case of Sir Walter Scott in after years, it deserves notice, as showing how great was the power of old English institutions on superior minds. Burke had been for some time a husband and a father; the pathetic allusions in his later writings leave X no doubt that he was at this time ambitious of founding a family.

For the present all things appeared full of promise. On January 22nd, 1770, Grafton resigned the premiership, and was succeeded by Lord North, the leadership of oppo sition being taken by the great Pitt, now Earl of Chatham. This was probably the happiest, as it was the most pros perous and influential, period of Burke's life ; one preg nant, too, with the germs of a future to which he might well look forward with confident hope. Happily for him self he resisted a tempting offer of a post of dignity and consequence in India, by which the ministry sought to remove him from his party and from the House, in 1772. The incident is now memorable only as marking the com mencement of Burke's connection with India, and because the members of the Commission which he declined to join were never heard of after they set sail, their vessel being lost at sea.

In 1773 Burke added to the already great stores of his knowledge and imagination by that visit to France which " sixteen or seventeen years " later inspired the immortal passage on Marie Antoinette, the ill-fated queen of that country. The men whom Burke then met at Paris did not inspire him with much respect or confidence, though he could not know that their principles would soon be taken up by politicians with whom he was long to show much sympathy. In 1774 the attitude of the American leaders became so hostile that Lord North resolved on a dissolu tion, hoping for a more tractable House of Commons. Burke received a spontaneous call from the electors of Bristol — then the second commercial town in Britain — and was duly elected in November, 1774. It was an ill-starred gathering, that Parliament ; subservient to the Champion Boroughmonger who then wore the British Crown, and ready to back up his most ruinous adventures.

The king refused to receive the petition of the Colonists ; the House of Commons rejected with contumely the evidence ten dered by their emissary, Benjamin Franklin. The witty but lethargic North allowed himself to be made the organ of a combination of pride and prejudice whose absurdity he clearly perceived. Such were the political conditions in which, hooted by the wine-flown young aristocrats on the Tory benches, and ill-understood by the members of his own party, Burke attempted to plead for prudence and justice in dealing with America. Great authorities, too, of a calmer sort were against him ; the right of the British Government to treat the Colonists as subjects was main tained by great writers, who argued that the correlative of taxation was not being represented, but being protected.

Only four hundred thousand of the population of the British islands were represented — and these in a mostly indirect way — but all were taxed, and all were protected. To such arguments — even when urged by his revered friend, Samuel Johnson — Burke was ready with the answer that the question was not one of right, but of expediency ; the supposed right was of no commensurate value if it could only be obtained at the cost of conquest and hostility ; nothing should persuade him that "when a whole people are con cerned, acts of lenity are not means of conciliation . . . . he did not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people." Burke's speech on " American taxation " was delivered to a House that was not worthy, on 19th April, 1774 ; in the following year he recorded a still more important one on " Conciliation with America," and he closed his efforts in this direction by a " Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol" — for which city he still sat — in 1777.

These treatises are the best models of his political style ; because, having no favouring tide of general sympathy to aid him, Burke had to leave declamation and employ, to an extent not usual with him, the persuasive arts of reasoning. The cause has prevailed — though by other means. Aided by the' French, Burke's American clients proved their patriotism, and made good their claim to be treated as a nation. Pity it is that when their French allies attempted to act upon the principles laid down and enforced in the struggle, it could not be done without excesses which brought discredit on freedom, and turned the generous advocate into an irreconcilable adversary. In 1780 Burke undertook another task of conservative reform. Petitions to the British Parhament had been pouring in from a distressed and weary people, who felt having to pay the bill for their unhappy orgies.

The corruption of the State, the influence of the Crown in both Houses, and the inordinate expenditure on sinecures and pensions, these made the triple substance of John Bull's burden. The Commons were persuaded by Dunning to vote that the royal power had increased, was still increasing, and ought to be diminished ; but the resolution came to no practical result. Burke — always opposed to what was called " Parliamentary Reform " — was all the more eager for such a reform of administration as should protect the country, not only against undue expense, but against corrupt influences. In the early part of the session he brought forward a bill for restricting the power of the ministry to purchase support among the members of the House. His efforts were necessarily defeated, because they were made in the very Chamber where the degrading trade went on, and where the members of the majority either were, or hoped to become, the gainers.

In June disgraceful riots arose in London out of a measure in* which Burke and his friends had been more successful. Two years earlier he had supported Dunning and Sir G. Savile in carrying an enactment for the relief of the Enghsh Catholics. The action of Burke in this matter, joined to his exertions on behalf of his native island, cost him his seat at Bristol, where he refused to act as a mere delegate, assuring his constituents that what he owed them was his service, not his conscience. In June, 1780, the proposition to extend relief to the Catholics of Scotland led to the tumult usually known by the name of its chief pro moter, Lord George Gordon. Burke was a witness of the violence of the rabble on this occasion, and his mind never threw off the impression produced by those days of drunken fury and fierce reprisal.

It was to these days, however darkened by the lack of immediate success, that Burke in after years looked back with the greatest satisfaction. In 1782 North fell from a power which he had long ceased to exercise ; and the Marquess of Rockingham, Burke's former patron, returned to the head of the government. The services which Burke had rendered to his country, no less than to his party, were recognized by the gift of a lucrative office, the perquisites of which, however, he himself abolished. On May 5th Burke scored the one practical success of his public life by a bill for civil service reform, which — though before it became law it had fallen somewhat short of his full proposals — did a great deal to weaken the illegitimate influence of the Crown, and begin an era of comparative purity. The Irish Parliament now achieved its short-lived independence, and peace with the " United States " of North America was brought about by the wisdom of Lord Shel burne, who succeeded to the premiership on Rockingham's death, 1782.

Burke, who now sate for a small and sub servient borough in Yorkshire, continued in office (with a brief interruption) until the end of 1783, when the Whigs lost power for half a century. This, which is usually taken as the climax of Burke's fame and influence, is also notice able as the commencement of his decline. After Rocking ham's death he had displayed some failure of temper — his INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. enemies said a want of candour. He got into not unde served trouble by reinstating two subordinates against whom charges were still pending, and who had been dis charged by his predecessor. He gave way to violent passion when his conduct was questioned in Parliament. Finally, he allowed his sympathy with India to lead him into preparing and supporting the injudicious and unsuccessful bill which went by the name of Fox, and which wrecked the fortunes of the party.

In 1785 the zeal and knowledge which Burke was thought to have shown in this affair were still farther displayed in the long and able speech on the Nawab of Arcot's debts, in which occurs the famous description of the invasion of the Carnatic by Haidar Ah, the usurper of Mysore ; and, in the following year, and in an early part of the parliamentary session, Burke presented to the Commons articles of impeachment against the retired Governor-General, Warren Hastings. The splendour of the rhetoric employed by Burke and some of his asso ciates, united to the extraordinary mastery of many of the details, has dazzled — and somewhat blinded — mankindfrom that day to our own time. There had been, doubtless, great oppressions, corruptions, and abuses of power in Bengal ; but since the passing of the Regulating Act (1773), the improved machinery and the sense of responsi bility had combined, with the able and earnest character of Hastings himself, to produce a vital improvement.

This, unhappily, escaped the attention of Burke, whose keen vision was concentrated upon the profligate inca pacity of the Madras officials, until finally misled by the sinister inspirations of the retired Governor's baffled enemy, Philip Francis. That able but unscrupulous man had maintained a virulent opposition to Hastings in Bengal, actuated by the ambition of driving him from his post and acquiring the succession for himself. But in August, 780, the tables had been turned. Hastings had provoked a quarrel, and Francis challenging him to a duel received so severe a wound that he himself had to retire. He entered Parliament, and became the inveterate censor of all that Hastings did ; nor did his taste and judgment suffice to keep him from endeavouring to be made one of the members who were to manage the impeachment.

That final indecency was indeed avoided; but Francis con tinued for many years to act as Burke's evil genius, filling his mind with unjust suspicions and garbled facts. On February 13th, 1788, the great trial began in Westminster Hall.1 Burke's opening speech struck the keynote of the whole trial. For four days the excited orator went on in " rich variety of phrase," ringing the changes on the prisoner's imaginary offences, until he moved many of his hearers to the borders of hysteria, and almost convinced Hastings of his own guilt. Yet, before the close of the marvellous harangue, the audience had regained com posure ; as one of the most intelligent of them said, she " became a mere spectator in a public show." 2 It was not till 1794 that Burke made his last speech in the case. His closing address lasted nine days, and was denounced by one of the opposing counsel as " gross, violent, abusive, and indecent."

This characterization was not expressed in a forensic reply, but in a set speech, dehvered by Mr. Law — afterwards Lord Ellenborough — in his place in the House of Commons. Hastings, as we all know, was acquitted on all the charges. By that time, indeed, the shadows were gathering round 1 See Macaulay's "Warren Hastings" (ed. Deighton), pp. 97 114. In assigning the date of 1781 for the beginning of Burke's hostility to Hastings, Macaulay was perhaps thinking of the inter position of the Governor-General in the affairs of Madras by Burke's friend Macartney in that year. See also Trotter's " Warren Has tings " (Rulers of India), p. 191. 2 Miss Fanny Burney, afterwards Mme. d'Arblay. b INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. the orator ; and his masculine vehemence was degenerating into the scolding of a disappointed and enraged politician.

In 1788, the king's mind was so deranged that he was pronounced incapable of carrying on the royal functions, and a regency was proposed under which Mr. Fox was expected to be the head of the government. Attached as Fox had long been to Burke, it was found impossible to make room for the latter in the cabinet, and an arrangement was proposed by which he should be provided for other wise. It seems hard to avoid concluding, with Mr. Morley, that these things in some degree unhinged Burke's temper and prepared him for the approaching rupture which was to separate him from his political friends and render him a solitary for the remainder of his days. The king, how ever, presently recovering, nothing for the present came of these combinations. But a last opportunity was arising in which the now aging politician, if ousted from his first sphere, was to earn a new stock of distinction in his second and more appropriate field of labour.

Defeated as a practical states man, in his sixtieth year he was to win eternal glory as a publicist. In 1789, the first symptoms of popular hostility to the government of France appeared in Paris and at Versailles, the royal residence. Many causes combined to make the despotic monarchy of the Bourbons unpopular. The national finances were in a state of insolvency, the nobility and clergy refused to contribute to their relief, and the various ministers to whom in turn the well-meaning king, Louis XVI., had recourse were unable to produce any permanent resources or practical reforms. The middle classes, intelligent, but destitute of political training, were full of more or less reasonable discontent ; the vast bulk of the population, overworked, ill-paid, and burdened with many vexatious taxes and feudal exactions, were ready to welcome any change, whatever it might be, by which their present situation might be ended.

In this conjuncture it was resolved to call a meeting of national representatives which — under the title of " States- General " — was a part of the old French constitution that had lain dormant for about a century and three-quarters. The deputies were to be elected, 300 by the nobles, 300 by the clergy, and 600 by the rest of the people ; and they were invited to appear at Versailles bringing written in structions from their respective constituencies. The three orders, thus represented, opened their session on the 5th May, 1789 ; and at first all seemed to promise so well that the friends of freedom, both in France and else where, formed the sincerest hopes of moderate and salutary reform. But all classes of Frenchmen had grown up without traditions or habits of practical politics ; and the harmless king had to bear the consequences of a system of arbitrary government for which he was not personally responsible.

In such a state of things misunderstandings necessarily arose. Both sides attempted to base a constitution on abstract maxims. The principle of the Royalists was that of Louis XIV., "The King is the State;" that of the Reformers was taken from the doctrine of Rousseau, that the People was Sovereign. The king, though per sonally intrepid, could not control the conflict, could not even depend upon his troops. After a vain attempt to coerce the Assembly by personal influence, he conceded the point on which the future turned, namely, that the States should vote by heads and not by orders; whereby the popular deputies — with the aid of sympathisers among the more liberally-disposed of the nobles and clergy — became an overwhelming majority. The Bastille was taken by the mob of Paris, July 14th, 1789.

It had once been the State-prison for political offenders ; on its capture it was found to contain seven prisoners, mostly debtors INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. confined on civil process. The king submitted * the princes and leading nobles left the country ; and the Revolution had begun. It was in the main a good and necessary work; but Burke saw at once, and quite correctly, that it was a work not of reform, but of destruction. His error — if we may say so without presumption — was that he did not observe that it was not a constitution that was being destroyed, but a crowned anarchy and an obsolete sham. Proceeding on this natural though fatal misconception, he attacked the Revolution in a manner which gratified the fears of the many who shrank from innovation as much as it grieved the few who overlooked the immediate evils of the movement in the belief that ultimate benefit would not fail to be secured.

Shocked by the sufferings of the aristocratic emigrants and by the humihation of a royal family but lately so exalted, Burke neglected the liberation of twenty five milhons of human beings from a situation of hopeless oppression and misrule. In the words of the English democrat Thomas Paine, he forgot the dying bird to weep over the plumage. Those who fancied that a conflagration in so near a region would spread to England hailed Burke as their deliverer, seeing in him the champion of their selfish alarms. Thus the "Reflections on the French Revolution" (1790) succeeded by what was worst in it rather than by what was best. This explanation may be useful to those who at the present day are hable to fall into a similar mistake, and think Burke a priest of reaction when he was, at worst, no more than a fanatic of order.

It was Burke's sanest con tention that, in all the great struggles of his life, he had been animated by one and the same feeling. In working for the claims of the Irish he was not sympathizing with the "Whiteboys," but with the violated undertakings which called those rebels into existence ; in taking the part of the Americans he was actuated by a belief that the king and Lord North were false to the fundamental prin ciples of the British constitution ; his inexorable pursuit of Warren Hastings was caused by the generous idea that the India of his day was a venerable social and political fabric with which Hastings had systematically tampered from the basest motives. But the British pubhc of those days was indisposed to study either the nature of Burke's convictions or the phenomena of French politics ; while the French them selves were almost equally ignorant.