Further Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

freedom.

      You ask me too, whether we have a committee of research. No, Sir, God forbid! It is the necessary instrument of tyranny and usurpation; and therefore I do not wonder that it has had an early establishment under your present Lords. We do not want it.

      Excuse my length. I have been somewhat occupied, since I was honoured with your letter; and I should not have been able to answer it at all, but for the holidays, which have given me means of enjoying the leisure of the country. I am called to duties which I am neither able nor willing to evade. I must soon return to my old conflict with the corruptions and oppressions which have prevailed in our eastern dominions.²⁴I must turn myself wholly from those of France.

      In England, we cannot work so hard as Frenchmen. Frequent relaxation is necessary to us. You are naturally more intense in your application. I did not know this part of your national character, until I went into France in 1773. At present, this your disposition to labour is rather encreased than lessened. In your Assembly you do not allow yourselves a recess even on Sundays. We have two days in the week, besides the festivals; and besides five or six months of the summer and autumn. This continued unremitted effort of the members of your Assembly, I take to be one among the causes of the mischief they have done. They who always labour, can have no true judgment. You never give yourselves time to cool. You can never survey, from its proper point of sight, the work you have finished, before you decree its final execution. You can never plan the future by the past. You never go into the country, soberly and dispassionately to observe the effect of your measures on their objects. You cannot feel distinctly how far the people are rendered better and improved, or more miserable and depraved, by what you have done. You cannot see with your own eyes the sufferings and afflictions you cause. You know them but at a distance, on the statements of those who always flatter the reigning power, and who, amidst their representations of the grievances, inflame your minds against those who are oppressed. These are amongst the effects of unremitted labour, when men exhaust their attention, burn out their candles, and are left in the dark. Malo meorum negligentiam, quam istorum obscuram diligentiam.²⁵

      Beaconsfield,

       January 19th, 1791

      I have the honor, &c.

      EDMUND BURKE

4

       AN APPEAL FROM THE NEW TO THE OLD WHIGS

August 1791

      The events of the spring and summer of 1791 were climacteric for Edmund Burke. His increasing alienation from his fellow Whigs finally issued in a rupture between him and the party’s leader, Charles James Fox, during the debates on the Quebec Bill on May 6 and 11. It gradually became apparent that Burke was not simply alienated but isolated within the House of Commons: “not one of the party spoke one conciliatory word,” he wrote to his patron, the Earl Fitzwilliam, of the May 11 debate. On May 21, Burke’s A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly was published; it was dismissed by Fox as “mere madness.” During the night of June 20–21, Louis XVI and the Queen fled Paris, only to be captured and suspended from their royal functions on June 25. Burke wrote that British sorrow for the King was “real, and unaffected, and general” (Corr. Copeland 6:291).

      The moment had arrived for Burke to explain his actions, not just as a political thinker, but as a member of the Whig party. In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) Burke had defined a political party as “a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” How could the man who had changed the British attitude toward parties—from viewing them as conspiracies to considering them respectable and even necessary bodies for free governments—now act in a way that virtually guaranteed a split in his own party? The operative word in Burke’s definition is “principle,” and An Appeal is meant to show how the “new” Whigs under the leadership of Charles James Fox had departed from the principles of the “old” Whigs at the time of the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), the first group of men who could rightly be called Whigs.

      Since much of An Appeal consists in Burke’s extracts from and comments on the trial of Henry Sacheverell (1674?–1724), a bit of background may prove useful. Sacheverell had virulently attacked Whigs, dissenters, and low-church Anglicans in pamphlets and sermons from the early 1700s. In 1709 the House of Commons declared that two of his printed sermons were “malicious, scandalous, and seditious libels, highly reflecting upon Her Majesty [Queen Anne] and her government, and the protestant succession.” The Whig ministers ordered his trial to be heard in Westminster, guaranteeing thereby that it would become a contest between Whig and Tory political principles. Sacheverell was declared guilty by the House of Lords in March 1710, but his sentence was so mild that he was felt to have won. The Whig ministry lost credit through the trial and was later replaced by the Tories.

      An Appeal, which Burke chose to write in the third person, may be divided into seven parts: Burke’s separation from his party because of the Reflections and his attempt to speak on the Quebec Bill; his alleged inconsistency, for he had defended democracy and attacked privilege at other times in his career; his interpretation of the Revolution of 1688 and the trial of Sacheverell; the beliefs of the “new” Whigs, as drawn from the pamphlets directed against Burke; a true political understanding of “the people” as against a majority “told by the head”; an analysis of the extremism of the revolutionary mind; and finally, Burke’s own attempt to understand the development of the British constitution by eliciting political theory from political facts and human nature. This work is central to Burke’s understanding that humanity realizes its true nature through “art,” including such artificial institutions as historical constitutions.