232 Chapter X
his chief ideas. Burke’s philosophy was ultimately to be of such importance that,
like that of Rousseau’s Social Contract, it demands attention in a section by itself.
The Conservatism of Edmund Burke
The best way to show that Burke’s philosophy of conservatism was not a critique of
the French Revolution, and was not directed against the more doctrinaire or purely
rationalistic aspects of the Enlightenment, is to show how fully its principles were
formed before the French Revolution, and that it was directed against practical
proposals made in England, by Englishmen, for England.
He was Anglo- Irish, born in Dublin in 1729, the son of an Anglican attorney
and a Catholic mother. He became an eloquent writer, a man of feeling, and an
expatriate, in many ways surprisingly like Jean- Jacques Rousseau. He accepted the
English aristocracy in a way that Rousseau never accepted the French; he was in
turn accepted as an able follower and a friend by the Whig dukes and the Marquis
of Rockingham, but they did not exactly regard him as one of themselves, and
when they came briefly into office in 1782 they made him Paymaster of the Forces
but would not give him cabinet rank. Together with his brother and cousin, at the
beginning of his parliamentary career, he bought a country house in Buckingham-
shire for £20,000, a price which he was wholly unable to afford, so that he was
under constant strain for many years to keep up his style of living. When Rocking-
ham died in 1782 he cancelled a debt of £30,000 owed him by Burke. Burke’s ca-
reer was a series of disappointments, for the Rockingham Whigs were out of office
from 1766 to 1782, and in 1782 their term of office was cut short by Rockingham’s
death, so that Burke lost his lucrative position as paymaster almost immediately on
receiving it, and did not even obtain a pension until 1795.^18
Burke warmly identified himself with anything and anyone in which he be-
lieved. When rumors, which were in fact true, began to circulate about the dubious
financial practices of the brother and cousin with whom he lived, he refused to
believe them. He considered such talk as a persecution of himself. Of his own
honesty there is no doubt, but he did benefit from his relatives’ income, some of
which helped to pay for the grand house and landed property that they occupied
jointly. Somewhat similarly, he could believe no evil of the British constitution,
and accept no criticism, if at all basic, of the House of Commons. Nor would he
admit that he personally benefited from the political habits of the day, or see the
proponents of parliamentary change as anything but wrongheaded men. It is in
fact in his adulation of Parliament that we may see the unifying force behind the
various political positions that he took. His carefully qualified attitude on Ameri-
can questions, his opposition to George III, his framing of the doctrines of party
responsibility for the Rockingham Whigs, his sponsoring of economic reform, his
opposition to electoral reform, and, in later years, his fear of the corruption of Par-
18 For Burke’s personality, see the illuminating essays by T. W. Copeland, Our Eminent Friend,
Edmund Burke (New Haven, 1949); for the finances of the Burke brothers and their cousin see D.
Wecter, Edmund Burke and His Kinsmen (Boulder, 1939) in University of Colorado Studies, I.