Burke

On the first of November 1790 the London publisher James Dodsley issued a octavo volume of three hundred and fifty-six pages, written by Edmund Burke, Member of Parliament for Malton, on the subject of the political experiments then in progress at Paris. The book had been written over the spring and summer of 1790 in answer to a letter from a young French acquaintance, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke whether the events of the previous year should be celebrated. Burke had at first been thought, by the Whig friends of his old age, likely to be sympathetic to the Revolution; he had spent thirty years on the Whig side of the House on the side of America in the 1770s and on the side of the Indians against Warren Hastings in the 1780s. The book changed the impression. By the end of 1790 it had sold nineteen thousand copies in seven editions; by the end of 1791, thirty thousand; by 1796, sixty thousand. Reflections on the Revolution in France is, by every careful judgment, the founding text of modern political conservatism in the English-speaking world. Burke was sixty-one years old. He had eight years to live. He spent five of them broken from the Whig caucus and taking the political-philosophical argument the book had begun out across Europe.

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William Burke was born at Orrery in County Cork in 1792, emigrated to Ulster as a young man, served as an officer's servant in the Donegal militia, and came to Edinburgh in 1818 to find labouring work on the Union Canal. He met William Hare in West Port, Edinburgh, in 1827. Through November 1827 to October 1828 the two men killed sixteen people in lodging-houses in West Port, mostly the lonely poor of the city, and sold the bodies for between seven and ten pounds apiece to the anatomist Dr Robert Knox of 10 Surgeons' Square for use in his teaching dissections. The murders were discovered when a body was found behind a curtain in Burke's lodgings on the morning of the second of November 1828, and Hare turned king's evidence in exchange for immunity. Burke was tried at the High Court of Justiciary on the twenty-fourth of December 1828 on a single count of murder, was convicted on a unanimous jury, and was hanged at Liberton Wynd in Edinburgh before a crowd of twenty-five thousand on the twenty-eighth of January 1829. His body was publicly dissected by Professor Alexander Monro III at the University, his skeleton hung in the medical museum of the medical school. The skeleton is still there.

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