LITMIR.BIZ

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ran through four editions, and made Burke, now forty years of age, into a national figure. More than 3,000 copies were printed, and it was widely debated in the press. As a political call to action it was a failure: too intricate and theoretical to be really effective, it was neutered when publication coincided with a rare lull in Wilkes-related scandal. As a basic credo for the Rockingham Whigs, it was a vital statement of shared belief. As political analysis, it remains of enduring importance today.

      But by mid-1770 Burke’s own mind was elsewhere. Jane had fallen ill and was confined to her bed for two months, perhaps as a result of a miscarriage. Worse, just as the Thoughts was published there had also appeared a detailed, accurate and highly personal article about him in the London Evening Post. In general Burke accepted public scrutiny; he could do no less. But this was different: ‘Hitherto, much as I have been abused, my table and my bed were left sacred, but since it has so unfortunately happened, that my wife, a quiet woman, confined to her family cares and affections, has been dragged into a newspaper, I own I feel a little hurt.’ What made it worse was that the original source was a well-meaning account by his oldest friend, Richard Shackleton, which had fallen into the wrong hands. In it Shackleton had claimed that Burke was ‘made easy by patronage’, unintentionally inflicting a wound; and what was worse, he had revealed that both Burke’s mother and wife were Roman Catholics. Coming at a time when Irish grievances were rapidly on the rise, this could only excite and succour Burke’s political opponents.

      In other ways, this period was more hopeful. In December 1770 Burke was chosen by the Assembly of the colony of New York to act as their agent in London, a role which paid well – £500 a year, or roughly that of a middle-ranking official – and kept him closely in touch with colonial affairs and issues relating to trade with America. He expanded the farm at Gregories, and invested money he did not have in new techniques and experiments under the influence of the agriculturalist Arthur Young. He also made a very happy visit to France in 1773, travelling to Auxerre with his son Richard, then fifteen, placing the boy with a local family named Parisot in order to teach him some French, and also establishing a lasting link which would feed Burke much useful information in due course about the first years of the revolution. Returning via Paris, Burke visited Versailles, where he saw the young Dauphine, Marie Antoinette, an experience which would later be immortalized in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

      However, it was with revolution in America that the government, and Burke, were to be increasingly concerned. The Rockinghamites had learned to survive in opposition during the Chatham and Grafton ministries. But their morale was sustained by the regular change in administration, and by hopes of a return. In January 1770, however, George III had after ten years at last discovered in the Tory Lord North a Prime Minister in whom he could repose his trust. It was a fateful choice.

      North was likeable, flexible, deferential, a patriot and a moralist in his private life, all high recommendations to the King. What he was not was a great leader. In 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company, which had built up a vast surplus of tea in Britain, to export tea to America for the first time. At North’s insistence this tea bore a symbolic tax of three pence per pound, a last remnant of the highly unpopular and now discarded Townshend duties, left in part specifically to remind the American colonies of Britain’s right to tax them. Even including this tax, however, East India Company tea was cheaper than other imported tea, and cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea. The effect of the new Act, then, was immediate and comprehensive: at a single stroke it united all sections of American opinion, nationalist and loyalist, commercial and illicit, against the new imports. On 16 December, after a lengthy stand-off in Boston harbour with the colonial authorities, and a raucous meeting of some 7,000 local citizens, rebels disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three ships at night – all of which were American, not owned by the East India Company – and dumped 342 cases of tea from them into the harbour.

      The ‘Boston tea party’ scandalized Parliament and British public opinion alike. With feelings running high both in the country and on the backbenches, Lord North and his ministers prepared draconian measures to crack down on the colony of Massachusetts and the port of Boston, and reassert their control. Both in principle and in his well-remunerated role as the British agent of the New York Assembly, Burke’s sympathies lay with the colonists. As the storm clouds of revolution gathered, in April 1774 he made the first of two great speeches designed to bring Parliament back to its senses, to vindicate – yet again – the policy of the Rockingham government, and to set out a proper long-term basis for relations between Britain and America.

      Burke devoted enormous time and trouble to his ‘Speech on American Taxation’, anticipating its later publication. In it he traces the odious tea tax back through a tortuous history of varied and sometimes contradictory policy: imposition of the Stamp Act by Grenville; its repeal under Rockingham; renewed taxation via the Townshend duties, passed during the chaos induced by Chatham’s temporary absence from politics; and their partial withdrawal in turn under North, leaving only the odious tea tax behind. Describing his opponents in the most generous terms, he is nonetheless perfectly clear in attributing to them the blame for Britain’s ugly predicament, in terms at once impassioned, ironic and magisterial. Though he does not say as much, the whole episode amounts for him to a case history in which failed policy derives from a failed approach to government itself.

      Experience and not abstract ideas, Burke insists, is what counts:

      Lord North asserts, that retrospect is not wise; and the proper, the only proper subject of inquiry, is ‘not how we got into this difficulty, but how we are to get out of it.’ In other words, we are, according to him, to consult our invention, and reject our experience. The mode of deliberation he recommends is diametrically opposite to every rule of reason and every principle of good sense established amongst mankind.

      The Stamp Act marks a profound and disastrous shift in policy, Burke argues, in attempting for the first time to derive revenue from America itself, over and above the revenue naturally deriving from its growth and Britain’s control of trade through the Navigation Acts. America could never be governed effectively without a recognition that Americans were freeborn Englishmen abroad, to whom the tea tax was a grave insult: ‘No man ever doubted that the commodity of tea could bear an imposition of three pence. But no commodity will bear three pence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are irritated, and when two millions of men are resolved not to pay.’

      The only solution was to build ‘a rampart against the speculations of innovators’, embrace ‘a spirit of practicability, of moderation and mutual convenience’, and repeal the tea tax. But this in turn required Britain to return to an earlier and fundamentally different conception of empire: as non-coercive, commercial and based on shared interests and identity, not on attempts at control and retribution. Only thus, and through a far more selective exercise of national power, could Britain reconcile imperial sovereignty with imperial dominion. But without such a shift, Burke predicts, there will be disaster in the American colonies. ‘Will they be content in such a state of slavery? If not, look to the consequences. Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not … such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun.’ It was an early demonstration of his gift of prophecy.

      The ‘Taxation’ speech signally failed to secure the repeal of the tea tax. Published in January 1775, it and its sister speech on ‘Conciliation’ with America are gems of historical analysis and statesmanship. But they also marked a small but important watershed in political communication. Speeches by parliamentarians had been published before, but these were some of the earliest occasions on which they had been self-consciously used to build a basis of knowledge and shared education within politics, a reputation outside Parliament and indeed – such was the interest that they attracted in America – a degree of international renown.

      This was all to the good. But in April 1774 Burke was having difficulty in securing a platform even in his own country. A general election was imminent, but his patron Lord Verney had been all but destroyed financially by his speculations in the East India Company. Verney’s pocket borough at Wendover was a valuable asset, which would undoubtedly be put out to bid. The result was that Burke had nowhere to stand for Parliament.

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