Edmund Burke: not for neocons

F. P. Lock
EDMUND BURKE
Volume Two, 1784–1797
648pp. Oxford University Press. £90 (US $160).
0 19 820 679 8

Despite everything that has recently happened in historical and in English literary scholarship, two men still bestride the world of late eighteenth-century England: Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson. At opposite ends of the parliamentary political spectrum, they now have one thing in common: in recent debates, their reassessment has depended on reinterpretations of their religious beliefs. In the 1950s, Burke was seen as a natural-law theorist indebted to Aquinas, implicitly arrayed against Communism; by the 1960s he was Conor Cruise O’Brien’s covert Catholic, a civil-liberties campaigner whose unacknowledged Irish allegiances produced a “slumbering Jacobite”; he progressed, in the 1980s, through a man shaped by High Churchmanship to be, today, someone whose crusades were prompted by his Anglican Latitudinarianism.

F. P. Lock has gone further than any of those who moved him into the Latitudinarian camp, even arguing that “Burke’s theism was much firmer than his Christianity”. Whatever the truth of that, Burke emerges from Lock’s two volumes as one whose broad sympathies were rooted in fundamental values: he looked on church polity, liturgy and “dogmas of religion” as being of less importance than virtue, Christianity’s common truths, and an overarching Providence. Providence is a theme running through Locke’s book: it made politics, for Burke, a “moral battlefield”. This indeed explains some of his Manichaean vision: “He tended to demonize his opponents, and was unable to conceive that they could act from conviction, or from honourable motives”.

The ways of Providence were not easy to discern in the reverses of politics. Burke begins this volume in failure: he had failed to avert the American Revolution, and failed to profit from the subsequent turmoil at Westminster. The Fox–North coalition, that alliance of opposites so shocking that it was invoked to characterize the deal between John Redwood and Kenneth Clarke in 1997, was decisively rejected by the electorate in 1784. Where Burke, since 1770, had depicted a sinister royal bid for power behind the scenes, a threat from which only the Whig nobility could save the nation, the electorate now backed the monarch against the Foxites. They were not fully to recover until 1830.

Burke then retrieved this situation by persuading the Commons to embark on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Britain’s first great moral crusade against Imperial maladministration; from 1784, Burke called down “the righteous judgement of God” against “oppression, peculation, rapine, and even murder”. Among the best things of Lock’s study is the way in which he rescues the Hastings trial from seeming a complex sideshow, of interest chiefly to students of British India, and replaces it as the central theme of Burke’s career from 1788 to 1795 (one wonders how many other Burke scholars have hitherto appreciated the achievement of P. J. Marshall, editor of the impeachment volume of The Writings and Speeches of Burke, 2000).

Yet Lock also shows how Burke’s imaginings in the 1770s about the shadowy role of the “king’s friends”, conspiring to institute a new royal absolutism, were carried over and projected onto the MPs who had made their money in India, and how Burke’s indignation at the defeat of Charles James Fox’s India Bill was projected onto Hastings, India’s administrator, once William Pitt the Younger had passed his own India Act. Burke was unduly influenced by Sir Philip Francis, Hastings’s rival, who hoped to become Governor General after Hastings’s fall. Burke’s personal obsession with Hastings even distracted attention from a systematic inquiry into the system of the East India Company’s governance of Bengal. Yet it was in the Hastings trial, in 1788, that Burke began to go beyond Latitudinarianism to speak of government as a “great gift . . . given by God to mankind”, to be exercised in accordance with natural law.

That it was the Indian debates which began Burke’s conversion from the Lockeian opposition Whig of the 1760s to the defender of Church and State of the 1790s is a novel insight, well developed. “Providence underpinned his justification of empire, and of the British presence in India”: Empire too was part of the Providential plan, if justly administered. Malpractice was not merely a betrayal of trust, but a defiance of God. Burke’s insight into the French Revolution as a gross act of impiety was already formed. Over India, he spoke of “an antient and venerable priesthood” and “a nobility of great antiquity and renown”; according to Lock, Burke there saw “religion and the law as significant checks on the power of the sovereign”. This was to be at the heart of his defence of France’s ancien régime.

Burke’s stock sank again when George III was diagnosed as mad in 1788, for the Whigs resorted to extreme hereditarian arguments to secure an unrestricted regency for their patron, the Prince of Wales, failed to secure one, and were left hopelessly compromised when the King recovered. Again, Lock shows how Burke’s reverence for the power of an ancient constitution whose rich resources could provide for all modern problems – which rose to Olympian heights in 1790 – was anticipated in the polemics of 1788. But Fox and his associates now made the running in the party, distancing themselves from the Hastings trial, and Burke was sidelined. He “could never become a Foxite”, and disdained Fox’s populist appeal. Burke was now “desperate for a cause”.

Famously, he found one. His terminal position was suddenly reversed in 1790 by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a work that changed the terms of the debate and cast Britain as the chief enemy of Revolutionary Jacobinism. Lock sides with those who see Burke’s stance in 1789 as informed by knowledge of the sixteenth-century wars of religion. As Burke announced of the French Revolutionaries on February 5, 1790, “their liberty was licentiousness, their religion atheism”. Already, he anticipated the Revolutionary “de-Christianization”, more conventionally dated by historians to 1793. By March 2, 1790, Burke spoke of civil society not only as having “annihilated all . . . natural rights” but as giving “faith to the doubtful”. By 1793, he was clear: “It is a religious war” that required “the extinction of Jacobinism”.

Lock dismisses as “without foundation” the old charge that Burke misunderstood the French Revolution; he offers detailed analyses of key episodes, the October Days and the attempted assassination of Marie Antoinette, to prove that Burke was fully informed, whatever his rhetoric. In general, Lock shows that “Burke’s ‘chivalry’ was not knight-errantry on behalf of a lost cause, but an impassioned defence of values grounded on a detailed, empirical knowledge of the realities of eighteenth-century society”.

Yet even this triumph ebbed as the war dragged on unsuccessfully, with no obvious exit strategy. In 1795, Hastings was acquitted. Burke became an ever louder denouncer of peace with the regicide Republic, an ever more determined preacher of the gospel that no deal could ever be struck with international Jacobinism; yet the ministry explored every avenue in order to survive the 1790s, and after his death made just such a peace. Burke, the crusader against tyranny, was a prophet with very mixed honour in his own country. Yet he emerged as the man above all who mobilized Christianity in all its forms as an anti-Revolutionary force. In the last decade of his life, he became “increasingly Johnsonian: a passionate defender of monarchy, hierarchy, and the Established Church”. Appropriately, Burke spent his last two days reading William Wilberforce’s newly published A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, which classically restated, in the new idiom of Evangelicalism, what Burke had made possible.

Lock’s picture of Burke is the more persuasive since he is not an unqualified admirer. By the 1790s, Burke misunderstood Ireland: he saw political and religious grievances only, and failed to grasp the economic ones. He blamed Ireland’s ills on a “jobbing Ascendancy”, which, he thought, used Protestantism only as a cover for self-interest, but failed to see the principled reasons that underpinned it. He failed to understand that granting Catholic Emancipation was now impossible without its entailing parliamentary reform, to which he remained opposed.

Indeed, he seldom saw more than one side of any question. Burke’s character, by middle age, had become “testy, inflexible, and self-righteous”. He was “less generous” than Johnson, Burke’s mind being “more warped by partisan prejudices”. He had an “ungovernable temper”. In his pursuit of Hastings, “Burke’s motives were mixed”; he was capable of being both “sincere” and “self-deluding”. Even with friends, “Burke could be an irritating know-all”; he alienated more than he conciliated. He was “by temperament unable to compromise”; he was “self-righteous, inflexible, and obsessive”, features counterbalanced only by a “tenacity in pursuit of . . . duty that no personal inconvenience, insult, or obloquy could deter”. The greatest orator of his age was, paradoxically, seldom able to persuade the House of Commons. Yet the stature of the man shines through these defects.

Burke was “always an outsider”, seeking security and status in English life but never finding them because he preferred principle and integrity to the usual path of power and preferment. It produced his uncritical loyalty to those who were loyal to him. His judgement was unreliable, and often led him astray. His two greatest crusades, against Warren Hastings and Jacobinism, were failures. One might add more, not explored by Lock: Burke’s failure to understand more profoundly the analogous Revolution in America, and his failure to extend to the nascent anti-slavery movement the passionate concern he felt for maladministration in India. Burke condemned slavery in rhetorical flourishes, but favoured only its regulation, concerned more for stability and property rights.

Yet Burke emerges triumphantly from this biography. His speeches here come alive: Lock brings the skills of a literary scholar to bear in showing for the first time how Burke’s rhetoric worked, although this sometimes takes priority over analysing the nature of the problem, as with Burke’s account of the Revolution of 1688. Lock also shows real insight into his subject: his “habitual self-depreciation and pessimism masked a stubborn tenacity and an unshakeable belief in himself and his cause. A professed defeatist, in his heart he could never accept defeat”.

Lock solves the long-standing dispute over whether Burke was a natural-law theorist or a utilitarian by arguing that, in the political world, he was both. The significance of this is not only academic. After a career from the 1950s as a cold warrior, Burke is now conventionally neglected as one who entirely dismissed in his age the culture of natural rights so dominant in ours. Lock rehabilitates Burke’s account of rights not as a “theoretical ideal” but as “a practical prescription for a ‘well-ordered’ society”. This makes Burke’s approach far more relevant: “In large parts of the world, including much of Africa, many Islamic countries, and China, democratic traditions of the Western kind are either weak or absent. Yet these societies possess alternative modes of governance and ways of thinking about the individual and the state that are well established and sanctioned by long traditions”. Burke’s minimal “real rights of man”, suggests Lock, “seem in principle achievable . . . . Values such as justice are indeed universal, but justice can equally well be administered in a hierarchical society as in a democratic one”. Students of Burke may find in his writings “an unexpectedly fertile source of ideas, encouragement, and inspiration”. Even Burke’s pursuit of Hastings has its application in the USA’s recent revival of impeachment, and in the broader rules of evidence now applied in international criminal courts under the aegis of the United Nations: here, too, Burke receives what Lock calls “posthumous vindication”.

Lock’s two volumes are the standard life of Burke for our age: scholarly, scrupulous, balanced, as minutely well-informed as Burke’s own crusades. They bear out Elizabeth Montagu’s verdict: “Nature does not make such a Man once in a Century”. Biographies such as this are almost as rare. F. P. Lock does nothing explicitly to link his analysis with those commentators who have identified America’s neoconservatives as the “new Jacobins”; but one can see why this book will not be bedside reading in George W. Bush’s White House.

_________________________________________________________

Jonathan Clark's books include an edition of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2001, and English Society 1660-1832, 2000. He is Professor of British History at the University of Kansas.