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and liquidity at low interest rates to Britain’s fast-growing entrepreneurial, industrial and commercial classes. It was a crucible of new ideas, and political controversy fuelled by newspaper and pamphlet wars. And like the country as a whole, it was celebrated on the continent as the home of the liberty of the individual, the land of the theatre and the pub, a place where monarchical authority had been made subject to law and freethinkers could dissent without the endless fear of reprisal. Voltaire had famously asked, ‘Why can’t the laws that guarantee British liberties be adopted elsewhere?’ Why indeed? The contrast with the absolute monarchy and social and religious hierarchies of France was manifest.

1. Gin Lane

      Above all, as it grew richer London was ever more a centre for the arts and culture. The British Museum was founded in 1753 as the world’s first ‘universal museum’: a national institution, owned by neither Church nor monarch, open to all at no charge, and dedicated not merely to Britain but to human culture and the world as such. Paintings too were starting to find their way out of the great houses and into the public realm. In 1746 the Foundling Hospital began to show works by contemporary artists, though it would be twenty-three more years before the new Royal Academy could emulate the Paris Salons with its first Summer Exhibition.

      Handel’s late oratorios date from this period, and his Music for the Royal Fireworks, written to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, had its first performance in 1749 in Green Park with 12,000 in attendance. The celebrated actor David Garrick took over the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1747, and made it one of the greatest theatres in Europe. Poems and plays coursed through the city, many of them moralizing parodies and satires, which were enormously popular. The novel, then in its infancy, had recently been galvanized as a literary genre by Pamela and Clarissa, two works of Samuel Richardson, who had come to London from Derbyshire in 1736; and still more by Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, a tale which combined acid social commentary with a self-aware assertion of the value of fiction itself.

      Nothing, then, was impossible in London. It was filled at that time with a spaciousness, a sheer energy in human ambition that is hard to imagine even today. The effect on the young Burke, far from home for the first time, must have been overwhelming and electric.

      Burke enrolled in the Middle Temple in May 1750. At that time the four Inns of Court were colleges-cum-professional associations, where would-be barristers received instruction in the law. They were a necessary entry-point to a career at both the Irish and the English Bar, and most Irish students opted for the Middle Temple, composing roughly a quarter of its total numbers. The demands were not onerous, and no examination was required to be called to the Bar. Instead, the students needed to eat dinners for eight terms and one vacation, and complete nine exercises, from which they could pay to buy their way out. Most did.

      It was a narrow, dry and practical education, requiring scrupulous attention to precedents, and Burke seems to have hated it. A few years afterwards he wrote, ‘He that lives in a college, after his mind is sufficiently stocked with learning, is like a man, who having built, rigged, and victualled, a ship, should lock her up in a dry dock.’ In a later unfinished essay on the laws of England, he said, ‘the study of our jurisprudence presented to liberal and well-educated minds, even in the best authors, hardly anything but barbarous terms, ill explained; a coarse but not a plain expression; an indigested method; and a species of reasoning, the very refuse of the schools’. Nothing could be further removed from his own belief in extensive learning – or from the bustle and energy of the city outside.

      But there were three serious drawbacks to his hostility. For the young man with ambition the law was itself a well-trodden path to fame, fortune and social advancement. Moreover, without a legal qualification Burke had no professional direction, or practical means to provide for himself. And finally, a decision to give it up would put him on an emotional and financial collision course with his father. Whatever the tensions between them, Richard Burke had been more than good to his son. He had paid Edmund’s way through four years of Trinity College, though this was not strictly necessary for the Bar, and then a further five years in London. He was, in the most literal sense, heavily invested in his son. And what to do instead?

      Little wonder, then, that Burke seems from his letters and poems to have had bouts of recurrent ill-health in 1750–2. He recuperated, avoided the big question and saved money by going on extended journeys with a new friend, William Burke. ‘Cousin Will’ had the same surname as Edmund, but may in fact have been little or no relation at all. He was perhaps a little younger, and had been educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, before heading to the Middle Temple and the Bar. Twenty-five years later Burke described Will as someone whom he ‘tenderly loved, highly valued, and continually lived with, in an union not to be expressed, quite since our boyish years’. Will was to prove a lifelong friend to Burke, but in many ways a disastrous one: a boon companion and a route to preferment, but also an adventurer, a financial burden and a source of embarrassment and scandal.

      All this lay in the future, however. For now, Edmund’s travels took him to Bath, then a highly fashionable resort whose spa waters were a magnet for the infirm and well connected, and to Dr Christopher Nugent. Nugent had been an early acquaintance, an Irish Catholic with a medical degree whom Burke may originally have consulted on medical grounds. Like Abraham Shackleton, he was both wise and sympathetic: there is a magnificent painting by James Barry of Nugent as an older man, in which he somehow comes across as at once modest, intensely reflective and yet non-judgemental. Like Shackleton, he exercised a profound and lasting influence on the young Burke, who explicitly credited him as the cause of his recovery in a poem: ‘’Tis now two autumns since he chanced to find / a youth of body broke, infirm of mind / he gave him all that man can ask or give / restored his life and taught him how to live.’

      ‘Taught him how to live’ – best of all, Nugent had a daughter in her late teens, Jane, who quickly caught the young man’s fancy. Burke was an Irish transplant with literary ambitions, then in the process of alienating his only source of financial support. By no stretch of the imagination could he be described as a catch, not least since Jane was herself a Catholic. He was no Adonis, either, to judge by later pictures; and had no known patrons or social advantages. What he did have was warmth, energy and talent, albeit a talent then confined to his personality, private letters and occasional writings. The beautiful thing is that this was all she needed. It was a love match, and would remain so over forty years of marriage.

      Jane herself is hard to glimpse in her own right, then or later. Abraham Shackleton described her rather prosaically as ‘a genteel, well-bred woman of the Romish faith [whom Burke married] neither for her religion nor her money, but from the natural impulse of youthful affection and inclination, which guided his choice to an agreeable object, with whom he promised himself happiness in a married state’. Burke himself begins with effortless condescension, in a passage from a eulogy written while they were still courting: ‘her stature is not tall. She is not made to be the admiration of everybody, but the happiness of one.’ But he soon yields to unfettered admiration: ‘She has all the delicacy that does not exclude firmness. She has all the softness that does not imply weakness … her voice is a low soft music … To describe her body, describes her mind: one is the transcript of the other …’ And he ends, rather piteously, ‘Who can know her, and himself, and entertain much hope? Who can see and know such a creature, and not love her to distraction?’ Even by the ironic standards of the time, this is the language of true love.

      In 1755 Burke took the momentous decision not to pursue a career at the Bar, deepening the breach with his father, who had supported him quite handsomely to that end. Richard Burke’s sense of moral and financial injury was evidently fanned by his son’s continuing lack of direction in life. Edmund wrote to his father, ‘it grieves me deeply to think that … your suffering should be at all increased by anything which looks ill-judged in my conduct … In real truth in all my designs I shall have nothing more at heart than to show myself to you and my mother a dutiful, affectionate and obliged son.’ Instead he threw himself into writing and thinking,

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