Edmund Burke(1729–1797)

Edmund Burke was born at 12 Arran Quay on the north bank of the Liffey in Dublin on the twelfth of January 1729, second surviving son of Richard Burke, a Dublin attorney, and Mary Nagle of Ballyduff in County Cork. His father was Anglican and his mother Catholic; he was raised in the Church of Ireland but kept lifelong family connections to the Catholic Nagles of north Cork, a duality that shaped the religious sympathy of his later political work. He was schooled at the Quaker boarding-school at Ballitore in County Kildare under Abraham Shackleton (with whose son Richard he kept a thirty-year correspondence), and at fifteen entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his BA in 1748 in the classical course.

He moved to London in 1750 to read for the bar at the Middle Temple, abandoned the legal training within two years, and made his living from 1752 to 1765 as a working man of letters. He published in 1756 the youthful prose-treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the work that put the categories of the sublime and the beautiful into the central vocabulary of late eighteenth-century English aesthetics and influenced Kant's Critique of Judgement of 1790. He launched in 1758 the Annual Register, the founding English-language journal of contemporary political history, which he edited or co-edited for the next thirty years.

In July 1765 he entered the patronage of the Marquis of Rockingham as private secretary, and in December 1765 was returned as Whig member of Parliament for Wendover in Buckinghamshire, sitting for it for the next nine years. He took his seat in January 1766 and the parliamentary career that followed ran for the next twenty-eight years to his retirement in 1794. He sat from 1774 to 1780 for Bristol, then the second city of England, and from 1781 to 1794 for the Rockingham pocket borough of Malton in Yorkshire. He never held cabinet office for more than the briefest interval (Paymaster of the Forces in the second Rockingham ministry of 1782 and again briefly in 1783), and his power was that of an opposition orator and a writer.

The four great causes of his parliamentary career are on every history of the period. He was the leading parliamentary advocate of conciliation with the American colonies through the 1770s: the Speech on American Taxation of 1774 and the Speech on Conciliation with America of the twenty-second of March 1775 (the work that ends Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together) are the foundational documents of the principle of imperial concession. He led from 1786 to 1795 the parliamentary impeachment of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal, on charges of corruption and oppression in the government of India, an eight-year prosecution that established the constitutional principle of metropolitan parliamentary accountability for the conduct of imperial administration. He was through the late 1770s and 1780s the leading advocate of Catholic relief in Ireland and of the easing of the Penal Laws.

His Reflections on the Revolution in France, written through the summer of 1790 in response to the French National Assembly's confiscation of Church lands and abolition of the nobility, was published in November 1790 and ran through eleven editions in the first year. It set out the doctrine of organic constitutional inheritance, of prejudice and prescription as the foundations of stable government, of the small platoon of family and locality as the schoolhouse of political affection, and of revolution as the rupture from which counter-revolution and dictatorship follow. The Reflections has been continuously in print since 1790 in every major European language, was the central English-language response to the French Revolution of the next century, and is on every modern list of the foundational texts of political conservatism. Burke died at his Buckinghamshire estate of Gregories near Beaconsfield on the ninth of July 1797 in his sixty-ninth year. The Burke name in modern English-language political thought carries the weight of the Dublin-born Whig orator who wrote, in the Reflections, the foundational defence of constitutional government against revolutionary abstraction.