Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784-1797
by F.P. Lock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
IAN CROWE is Associate Professor of History at Brewton-Parker College in Georgia and Executive Director of the Edmund Burke Society of America.
The two volumes of F.P. Lock’s biography
of Edmund Burke span more
than one thousand pages and, by the author’s
own calculation, over twenty years
of research. In structure, method, and argument,
they constitute a work of extraordinary
consistency and erudition, and one
that, in its use of contemporary evidence
for Burke’s life and thought, is definitive in
the true sense of the word. Back in 1998,
reviewers may reasonably have trimmed
their opinions of Lock’s first volume for
fear of being cut adrift by the second, but
they will encounter few surprises here.
Indeed, this most recent volume readily
reinforces the former, as Lock frequently
leads us back, implicitly and explicitly, to
themes first raised there. Now is a good
time, then, to offer some thoughts on how
this enormous project has shifted scholarship
on Burke, and where it points to ways
in which we might further deepen our un
derstanding of Burke and his legacy.
Volume Two resumes the story of
Burke’s life at one of its lowest points,
the trouncing of the supporters of Charles
James Fox (“Fox’s Martyrs”) at the election
of March 1784 by the king’s appointee,
William Pitt, the Younger. Burke had
thrown in his lot with Fox after the death of
Lord Rockingham in the summer of 1782,
and, after Pitt’s triumph, he was never to
hold government office again. “The people
did not like our work,” he conceded, and
with the people, the press, the new parliament,
and the king now apparently ranged
against him, he resigned himself to a future
of opposition. In fact, by 1786, Lock writes,
“Burke seem[ed] almost to enjoy the experience
of defeat,” and, instead of tackling
the greasy pole once more, Burke directed
much of his considerable energy in his
remaining years in parliament chiefly to
two causes: the impeachment of Warren
Hastings and the national and international
implications of the French Revolution.
After the conclusion of the impeachment
and his retirement from the House, right
up to his final illness and death in July 1797,
Burke continued to throw himself into the
struggle against Revolutionary France,
which became increasingly associated in
his mind with the threat of rebellion in his
native Ireland. In all that time, the man who
had established his reputation by defending
party as a tool of political association in
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
(1770), and by his staunch loyalty to
Rockingham’s political connection, drifted,
or was nudged, into increasing isolation, his
little platoon diminishing as his rhetoric
intensified.
In attempting to make sense of the
twists in Burke’s career and of its paradoxes,
Lock does not follow the thematic search
for coherence adopted by scholars such as
Conor Cruise O’Brien in his famous study
The Great Melody. Instead, he places his
faith in what may seem to the reader a more
conventional form of biography, aiming,
“as nearly as possible,” to track down the
“historical Burke” through painstaking
reconstruction from the broadest possible
range of primary materials. The result is a
well-textured portrait of the subject that is
embedded in an exhaustive but readily accessible
narrative and displays a highly impressive
grasp of the available sources. Unsurprisingly,
Lock’s approach means that much
the greater part of this volume is devoted to
Burke’s campaigns over India and France;
yet his careful incorporation of evidence
sifted from surviving drafts of speeches and
pamphlets, records of parliamentary debates,
and minutes of the impeachment trial, adds
freshness and vital tone to the picture. Even
readers already persuaded of Burke’s considerable
and accurate knowledge of India and
France, or already convinced that Burke
was driven to challenge Hastings and the
French revolutionaries more by principles
than by personal or political self-interest,
will find much here to reinforce and enlarge
their views.
At the same time, Lock does not sacrifi
ce the more peripheral of Burke’s activities
to these dominant themes, arguing
persuasively that “Burke never reserved his
energies for great occasions or affairs” and
using illustrations from Burke’s bouts of
artistic patronage, or his interest in estate
management, or the domestic life and
economy at Beaconsfield, to reveal how
often the less guarded episode can provide
fresh insight into the weighty decisions of
a public figure. In a similar way, Lock’s
analysis of Burke’s positions on issues
such as crime and punishment and slavery
is significant primarily in the way it is
incorporated into the full body of Burke’s
extraordinarily active and diverse political
life, giving renewed weight to Hazlitt’s
famous comment that “the only specimen
of Burke is, all that he wrote.“
This is not to say that Lock uses his
biographical method to avoid critical
interpretation. In one splendid section of
this book, he lays out a powerful refutation
of contemporary postcolonial readings
of Burke, and, while he is gentler
with other schools of Burke scholarship,
such as the Utilitarian and natural-law
ones, his purpose is not so much irenic
as transcendent. Indeed, his meticulous
mining of correspondence and contemporary
accounts of Burke appears intended
to dislodge all such paradigms with the
accumulated evidence of character traits
and constitutional dispositions that are
assumed to yield their own interpretative
consistency. The dominant traits
and dispositions that Lock identifies in
this volume, and that invest the narrative
details with an underlying pattern, will be
familiar to readers of the earlier volume:
Burke was (to select from some of the
more frequently mentioned) a “professed
defeatist [who] could never accept defeat”;
he displayed a consistent “need to prove
himself ‘perfectly in the right'” that left him
“[c]onstitutionally incapable of apology”
and “[t]emperamentally indisposed to
admit error or inaccuracy”; he was “always
liable to imagine dire if remote consequences”
from the slightest encroachment
upon the rights of property. Very
largely, these observations, supported with
evidence across the years, are plausibly
deployed to help explain such puzzles as
the flawed construction and self-defeating
pursuit of the charges against Hastings,
Burke’s seemingly bizarre and contradictory
behavior during the Regency
Crisis, the early intensity with which he
advocated a war of extermination against
Revolutionary France, and even his
awkward, affecting refusal to admit Fox to
his bedside during his final days.
While Lock’s method here should never
be confused with the speculative psychohistory
that has occasionally intruded into
Burke studies over the years, there are a few
cases where Lock himself might appear to
overwork the evidence for the sake of consistency.
One such is his attribution to paranoia
of Burke’s periodic rhetorical invectives
against “hidden” cabals that were supposedly
subverting parliamentary procedure—
from the “king’s friends” in the 1760s to the
“Bengal squad” or “India interest” in the
1780s. Despite, or perhaps because of, the
chimeras Lock shows us prowling through
Burke’s imagination, there is something
stubbornly unconvincing in the view that
the conspiracies Burke constructed from
time to time were so outlandish as to merit
Lock’s emphatic psychological explanation,
especially given the highly personal nature
of political associations at the time. Similarly
unpersuasive is the weight Lock places
on Burke’s “unshakeable self-righteousness”—
a particularly significant charge
given Burke’s oft-stated commitment to
prudence and his reputation for moderate
skepticism. The evidence Lock presents
leaves us in no doubt that Burke exhibited
bouts of self-righteousness; but we see at
least as often in this volume an awareness
on Burke’s part of the complexities of the
human condition that could only subsist
with a keen sense of the ambiguities, limitations,
and paradoxes of his own motivations
and powerful rhetorical gifts. Consider, for
example, Lock’s own excellent, nuanced
description of Burke’s religion and intellectual
submission to a divine providence
in human affairs, or his moving account of
how Burke faced the personal and political
whirlwinds that battered him in the last
three years of his life. At such points in the
narrative, the reader will hardly doubt that
Burke’s character and spirit were tempered
beyond the norm by the trials of Job, and
Lock’s insistent repetition of certain character
traits may appear as static as the ideological
templates he rightly critiques.
In its emphasis upon its subject’s character
traits and dispositions, then, Lock’s
biography represents a richly polemical
step beyond polemics, and the same could
be said of another feature of his biographical
method—the space, or lack thereof,
that he devotes to certain areas of Burke’s
life. Perhaps most contentiously, given the
current direction of Burke scholarship,
Lock shows refreshing caution over treating
Burke’s “Irishness” as a key to explaining
his later writings. Instead of inflating his
subject’s Irish background with speculative
jargon about repressed colonial resentments,
Lock keeps it strictly in step, politically,
with the evidence of Burke’s developing
concerns with Catholic relief, and, more
personally, with Burke’s private relations
with kin such as his sister Juliana and his
paternal ambitions for his son Richard.
Readers may, however, still feel the need to
supplement Lock’s uncharacteristically brief
and awkwardly-situated treatment of the
“Tract on the Popery Laws,” and his interpretation
of the thin material on Burke’s
enduring relationship with his maternal
relatives, the Nagles, with the perspectives
of other scholars such as L.M. Cullen and
Elizabeth Lambert.
No such supplementing would seem
necessary for Lock’s fascinating blow-byblow
account of the protracted trial of
Warren Hastings, nor for his comprehensive
and tightly focused coverage of the texts
relating to Burke’s response to the French
Revolution. In line with his intent to
provide an historical rather than an intellectual
biography, his treatment of both subjects
is driven primarily by a reconstruction of
the immediate circumstances that affected
their form and timing, reinforced, in the
case of France, with a vivid and instructive
survey of the public responses to Burke’s
successive publications. There is less space
available, however, for reflections on how
Burke’s earlier literary interests and associations
defined his assumptions about some of
the key concepts that were being contested
in this pamphlet war. For example, Lock
rightly draws attention to the significance
of Richard Price’s use of the term “patriotism”
in the Revolution Day sermon that
famously enraged Burke, but there is still
room for acquiring a firmer grasp of how
Burke understood that term, and how the
ideas of “public-spiritedness” that he had
imbibed in his younger days were shared, as
well as betrayed, by his antagonist.
In the closing pages of the book, Lock
turns to the unenviable task of summarizing
a thousand-page study in as many
words. Cautiously and diplomatically, he
limits his judgments to the resolution of
two apparent paradoxes that emerge out of
his own biographical method: the first is
that of Burke’s “acknowledged eloquence .
. . and his habitual inability to persuade”;
the second is how, if his thought can only
be understood properly when embedded in
its immediate historical context, we might
explain the enduring influence of Burke’s
writings upon readers in modern democratic
and capitalist societies. Lock finds
that each paradox may be resolved through
those fixed character traits and dispositions—
self-righteousness, inflexibility,
insensitivity, refusal to compromise—that
conveyed a timeless sense of moral rectitude
and justice but “proved insuperable
barriers to his reaching the high office
that his other talents deserved.” Consequently,
while admiring Burke’s “power
of generalization,” Lock argues that, ultimately,
“Burke’s supreme gift . . . was
not his wisdom but his eloquence.” Even
given the high praise that Lock bestows
on Burke here—an English successor to
Demosthenes and Cicero who ranks with
Milton in his ability to extend the range
and capability of the English language—I
suspect that some of Burke’s admirers will
still balk at the implications of that contrast.
And that is as it should be. Far better than
solving the riddle of Burke’s genius, Lock’s
extraordinary achievement will fuel and
refresh the search for a solution for years
to come.