Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen: A Study of the Statesman’s Financial Integrity and Private Relationships

116 Pages·1939·6.159 MB·English

by  Dixon Wecter

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES
Series B. Studies in the Humanities
Vol. i. No. i
EDMUND BURKE AND HIS KINSMEN
A study^of the statesman’s financial, integrity
and private relationships
BY
Dixon Wecter
Boulder, Colorado, February, 1939
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EDMUND BURKE
AND HIS KINSMEN
A Study of the Statesman’s Financial
Integrity and Private Relationships
By DIXON WECTER
v
Boulder, Colorado, February, 1939
The purpose of this brief study is to clarify some of the less familiar aspects of Edmund Burke’s
biography, chiefly with the help of new material drawn from the private papers of the statesman
now preserved in part at Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire and in part at Milton, near Peter¬
borough. To the kindness of the present owners, Earl Fitzwilliam and Thomas Wentworth
Fitzwilliam, Esq., the writer is greatly indebted. Sir Harry Verney, Bart., has also generously
given him permission to investigate and quote from the unpublished papers of Lord Verney at
Claydon House, Bucks. To R. B. Adam, Esq., who has kindly allowed him to make quotations
from manuscripts now at the University of Rochester in the Adam Collection, and to the Curator
of that library, Robert F. Metzdorf, Esq., for the furnishing of helpful information, the writer
is also in debt. Several quotations from the privately printed Boswell Papers are made with
the consent of Lieut. Col. Ralph H. Isham at the kind recommendation of Professor Frederick
A. Pottle. References in Chapter I, in the annotation of Burke’s youthful essay on the Char¬
acter of a Fine Gentleman, to Professor Virgil B. Heltzel’s unpublished University of Chicago
dissertation, Chesterfield and the Tradition of the Ideal Gentleman, are made with the author’s
obliging permission. My colleagues Professor S. Harrison Thomson and Dr. James G. Allen
have given me the benefit of their good advice. To Professor Chauncey B. Tinker I ow'e my
acquaintance with the Burkes, although my debt goes far beyond the limits of this short essay.
To Professor D. Nichol Smith and to Dr. L. F. Powell of Oxford, for various helpful sugges¬
tions; to Sir Philip Magnus, Bart., for generous comparison of gleanings made among the Public
Records; and to H. V. F. Somerset, Esq., Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, for the benefit
of many conversations about the Burkes, I am truly indebted. My work at the Public Record
Office was greatly aided by the unflagging patience and knowledge of Noel Blakiston, Esq.
In respect to the numerous documents from that Office cited in Chapter III, touching the West
Indies, I have made reference to a variety of volumes by number alone, for the sake of economy
in space—trusting that any reader who cares for a fuller description of these archives will turn
to the check lists found in Lowell Joseph Ragatz’s Guide to the Official Correspondence of the
Governors of the British West India Colonies with the Secretary of State, 1763-1833 (2nd ed., Lon¬
don, 1929) and in the same author’s Guide for the Study of British Caribbean History, 1763-1834
(U. S. Government Printing Office, 1932), pp. 28 ff. On the other hand, the Chancery docu¬
ments employed in Chapter II in connection with the litigation over Burke’s estate at Beacons-
field and documents from the India Office in Chapter IV are cited with somewhat more explicit
labels.
rt
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES
Series B, Studies in the Humanities. Vol. i, No. i
February, 1939
EDMUND BURKE AND HIS KINSMEN
By Dixon Wecter*
I. The Early Record. 3
II. Edmund Burke’s Finances. 23
III. Richard Burke and the West Indies. 49
IV. William Burke and India. 76
V. The Integrity of Edmund Burke. 95
Index.108
I. The Early Record
The life and character of Edmund Burke offer several rather strange paradoxes.
Upon the one hand there is the forthright and ingenuous Whig statesman who
once declared “that he had no secrets with regard to the public,”1 yet contrived
to be the subject of perhaps as many mysterious legends as any Briton of his
day—that he had a brother who was a Benedictine monk at Parma, and that the
future orator himself had been converted to Catholicism either upon a clandestine
visit to St. Omer or else after marriage to a Papist wife; that he was the lover
of Peg Woffington the actress, who had expired in his arms; and that as a youth
he had made a secret visit to America about which he never spoke.
But perhaps there is no aspect of Burke’s life so puzzling as the air of mystery
which surrounds his financial affairs. During his public career there were many
newspaper squibs and innuendoes of chicanery,2 as well as dark insinuations
by reputable contemporaries whose evidence will be cited below, and Burke’s
first biography—that by Charles M’Cormick in 1797—is filled with rumors of
fraud and double-dealing. Yet later biographers like Bisset, Prior, Macknight,
Napier, Morley, Newman, and Murray have stoutly rejected these aspersions,
often with an indignation which does little to clear the issue. The whole difficulty
* Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Colorado.
1 Correspondence of Burke with Dr. French Laurence (London, 1827), p. 291.
2 Cited in some detail by C. W. Dilke in his shrewd but prejudiced examen of Burke’s finances in Papers of a
Critic (London, 1875), II, 309-384.
3
4 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES [Series B
arises from a manifest contradiction. There is the noble, wise, openly generous
nature which was the very essence of Burke as Dr. Johnson, Malone, Reynolds,
Rockingham, Fitzwilliam, and Charles James Fox knew him, and as he seems
to reveal himself in all utterances public and private; and on the other his mastery
of the art of ‘living on nothing a year,’ and the suspicious vagueness which hangs
over the purchase of his handsome estate at Beaconsfield, his dealings with the
East India Company, Lord Verney’s suit against him, and the Clogher estate,3
which Dilke helped to raise many years ago but left painfully unsolved.4 An
inquiry by the present writer into documents in the Public Record Office and at
India House, the private papers of Burke at Wentworth Woodhouse and at
Milton, and the Verney archives at Claydon House, may, he ventures to hope,
cast some new light upon this paradox. Its understanding may be made easier
by a simple framework of biography, and also by some analysis of those less
familiar contemporaries—like Richard and William Burke, Lauchlan Macleane,
and Lord Verney—who played important parts in the statesman’s financial
and private affairs.
Edmund Burke was born on January 12, 1729, N. S.,5 in Dublin, the son of
an Irish solicitor in moderate circumstances. Stories that the Burkes had come
down in the world—from possession of an estate in Limerick which was lost by
forfeit “in the troubled period between 1641 and 1653,”6 or from the annual
income of £3000 which Burke’s grandfather is said to have lost by “confisca¬
tion”7—cannot apparently be verified. The worldly station of the Burkes in
Edmund’s generation, as reflected in his schoolboy letters and as traced by Sam¬
uels in a careful biography of his youth,8 is one of modest middle-class respect¬
ability. Burke’s mother, “a genteel, well-bred women, of the Roman faith,”9
* Upon the minor problem of the Clogher estate, with its discrepancies, I can offer no new explanation; however,
a fairly satisfactory account with no discredit to Burke himself is given by Dr. J. Napier, Burke (Dublin, 1865), pp.
50-56.
* His study cited above was made without the help of an inquiry into the Verney MSS. or into the private papers
of Burke which were then, as now, in the possession of Dilke’s own relatives the Fitzwilliam family.
5 See a note by the present writer, Notes and Queries, clxxii, 441.
* Sir J. Prior, Memoir of Burke (5th ed., London, 1854), p. 1.
9 Robert Bisset, Life of Burke (2nd ed., London, 1800), I, 39.
8 A. P. I. Samuels, Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings of Burke (Cambridge University Press, 1923), based
upon family papers, Trinity College records, and documents which were destroyed in the burning of the Dublin
Public Record Office in 1922.
9 Thus described in Richard Shackleton’s sketch of his old friend which was published, to Burke’s intense chagrin,
in the London Evening Post, April 14-17, 1770. Shackleton adds: “This connection has given rise to an opinion, that
he was addicted to the errors of that Church, but without any foundation in reason for such a conclusion.” For the
legend of Burke’s Benedictine brother, whose source apparently is the painter Benjamin West and his biographer Galt,
cf. Dilke, op. cit., p. 350. Among others, Boswell long believed Burke to be a Jesuit (Boswell Papers, ed. Scott and
Pottle, VI, 92), It is perhaps fortunate that these excitable contemporaries never saw a letter which Burke wrote to
John Hippisley at Rome, October 3, 1793, now among the private papers at Wentworth, in which the statesman
advocates “much more distinctly & avowed political connections with the Court of Rome,” and warmly praises “the
present Sovereign Pontiff who unites the Royal & the Sacerdotal Characters with advantage and lustre to both. He is
indeed a Prelate whose Dignity as a Prince takes nothing from his Humility as a Priest.” See also H. V. F. Somerset,
“Edmund Burke, England, and the Papacy,” Dublin Review, January 1938, pp. 138-148.
Vol. 1, No. 1] EDMUND BURKE AND HIS KINSMEN 5
sprang from the Nagle family; they lived near Castletown Roche and produced
a band of poor relations who, as we shall see, often applied for and received help
from the statesman in his heyday. Edmund was one of a family of fifteen chil¬
dren, of whom only three besides himself reached maturity—Garret, who died
unmarried in 1765, “a man of wit and drollery”;10 Juliana, whose daughter Miss
French was to become one of the pensioners in the Burke household at Beacons-
field, “the most perfect she-Paddy that ever was caught,” as Elliot described
her;11 and Richard, whose “mirth and agreeable vein” was later to win him the
modest immortality of a portrait in Goldsmith’s poem Retaliation, but who it
will be seen was often a millstone about the neck of his famous elder brother.
Burke’s father appears to have been a gloomy, saturnine man given to family
quarrels,12 and his mother was a prey to that hypochondria or nervous depression
which seems to have been pandemic in the eighteenth century.13 But among
the younger Burkes and their friends, if one may judge by the letters and jeux
d’esprit which they wrote, there was a good deal of jollity and banter; one recalls
that up to the very last years of Edmund Burke’s life cheerfulness was always
breaking in so frequently, even amid the cares of state and family, that Boswell
named him as an example of “continued happiness.”14
As a boy Burke spent several years prior to 1741 with his mother’s family in
County Cork, near Spenser’s Kilcolman Castle, for reasons of health.16 Return¬
ing north with the rudiments of Latin grammar learned in a village school, young
Burke entered the Ballitore Boarding School on May 26, 1741 under the ferule
of a Quaker schoolmaster named Shackleton, whose son Richard soon became
Burke’s inseparable friend. From Burke’s entry into Trinity College, Dublin
in April, 1744, until the time when he stands upon the threshold of public life
fifteen years later, his letters to Shackleton are the most illuminating record we
have of this obscure interval.16 The severe regimen afforded by Trinity College
10 Prior, pp. 2-3.
11 Sir Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto, Life and Letters (London, 1874), II, 136.
12 Cf. a letter of Burke’s school-friend Dennis, and one from Burke himself to his father in Prior, pp. 41-42, dated
from London on March 11, 1755; in an earlier letter to Shackleton from Dublin, August 19, 1746, Burke discreetly hints
at his father’s splenetic temper (Samuels, p. 102). Burke’s letter to Vesey, September 10, 1760, shows how the old
feud flared up at that late date and was soothed by Vesey’s tactful offices (letter printed in New Monthly Magazine,
vol. XIV, part 2 [1825], p. 382).
12 For hypochondria in the Burke family cf. Macknight, Life and Times of Burke (London, 1858) I, pp. 11 and 29.
To the mid-eighteenth century, hypochondria was the equivalent of that ‘melancholy’ which had brooded over Robert
Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, or the ‘spleen’ and ‘vapours’ which the Augustans had regarded as the malady of the
gently bred.
14 Boswell to Temple, August 12, 1775, in Letters, ed. Tinker (Oxford, 1924), p. 238.
16 Samuels, pp. 8-10.
18 Printed chiefly in Correspondence of Burke, ed. Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir R. Bourke (4 vols., London, 1844), a
selection from the Wentworth archives hereafter referred to as Fitzwilliam Correspondence, to distinguish it from other
collections of Burke letters, and in Leadbeater Papers (London, 1862), vol. II, passim.
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES [Series B
6
in the eighteenth century, upon which both Swift and Lord Chesterfield com¬
mented,17 should not be forgotten. Of Trinity College Oliver Goldsmith wrote:
“At that university they are a great deal stricter in their examination entrance,
than either at Oxford or Cambridge.”18 A note of painful remembrance may
be detected in poor Goldsmith’s words; he was a ne’er-do-well undergraduate
here in Burke’s own time. Between the two there seems to have been little or
no commerce: when fame and Dr. Johnson finally brought them together, they
had to invent their memoirs of bright college years.19 About another schoolfellow
of theirs at Trinity College circa 1746, an Irishman named Lauchlan Macleane,
not much is known at this time—although he was later to figure in a none too
creditable way in the financial speculations of Richard and William Burke in
London.20
Burke’s intellectual interests during this period seem to have been like those
of Dryden’s Zimri, “everything by starts and nothing long.” His letters are
filled with brief enthusiasms for natural philosophy, logic and metaphysics,
astronomy, lectures on physiology, what he terms the furor historicus, and finally
the furor poeticus, “which (as skilful physicians assure me) is as difficultly cured
as a disease very nearly akin to it, namely, the itch.”21 He tried his hand at
poetry and essays, and his voice in declamations before a newly founded Club
which later became the famous College Historical Society—where, as recorded
by the Minute Book, one of his fellow-members called him “damnd absolute,”
an attitude of mind which he never lost.22 In February 1748 Burke took his
B. A., but remained in Dublin almost two years longer, engaging apparently in
the Lucas controversy and writing political pamphlets which were issued anon-
17 See Swift to Peterborough, April 28,1726, in Correspondence, ed. Ball, III, 309, and the testimony of Chesterfield,
a Cantabrigian, in Miscellaneous Works (London, 1779), IV, 237.
18 “Life of Dr. Parnell,” Works, Bohn ed., IV, 190.
19 In 1777 Johnson said of Goldsmith that “when he had got high in fame, one of his friends began to recollect
something of his being distinguished at College. Goldsmith in the same manner recollected more of that friend’s
early years, as he grew a greater man” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Hill-Powell ed., Ill, 168). Burke is obviously meant.
In 1747, it may be noted, both Burke and Goldsmith were involved in riots between town and gown which punctuated
the life of Trinity College in those times (Samuels, pp. 117 and 142), though both seem to have been essentially peace¬
ful men.
20 Forster, Life and Times of Goldsmith (London and New York, 1888), I, 25, shows him as an undergraduate at
this time at Trinity College. He is mentioned facetiously in a juvenile notebook kept jointly by Edmund and William
Burke, ca. 1750-57, now at Wentworth, in a Dialogue in limbo as “the new Irishman I think they call him, one Mac-
lane, a fellow that made his way to this world by the Gallows, & lived by his Galantrys in the other.” In 1761 he
accompanied Monckton in an expedition against Martinique, speculated in West Indian land with some temporary
success (Dilke, pp. 348-49), was in Dublin in 1764 before making another trip to America (Miscellaneous Works of
Hugh Boyd, London, 1800, I, 116), and was in Paris in 1765 to receive a letter from Edmund and William Burke in¬
troducing their proteg£ James Barry (Barry’s Works, London, 1809, I, 26). A letter from Leland to Edmund Burke,
March 22, 1770, inquires “Alas! what is become of my dear friend Maclean?” (Fits-uiilliam Corr., I, 224). The part
which he played in the financial affairs of the Burkes will become apparent later.
21 Samuels, p. 128.
22 Idem, p. 239.
Vol. 1, No. 1] EDMUND BURKE AND HIS KINSMEN 7
ymously.23 At some time in the spring of 1750 he left Ireland to keep his terms
in the Middle Temple, where his bond is dated May 2, 1750.24
Morley in the best known of Burke’s biographies remarks that the nine years
which follow “are enveloped in nearly complete obscurity.”25 But upon the
evidence of unpublished juvenilia now among the Burke papers at Wentworth,
in conjunction with the infrequent letters to Shackleton, the present writer has
attempted to trace the movements and principal events in Burke’s life during
these cloudy years.26 A brief summary may suffice. Upon arrival in London
young Burke appears to have lodged with John Burke, a barrister of Serjeants’
Inn, who was also his bondsman and the father of William Burke. Although
Edmund and William called each other “cousin,” and though in 1777 the statesman
described William as one “whom I have tenderly loved, highly valued, and con¬
tinually lived with in an union not to be expressed, quite since our boyish years . ..
my dearest, oldest, best friend,”27 yet upon oath on November 26, 1783 Edmund
Burke declared
that he does not know nor can form any distinct opinion of what degree of relation (if any)
William Burke in the Bill named may stand to this Defendant, but that he does believe that
their fathers did sometimes call each other cousins, but has no other occasion to believe that
they are of kindred.28
It is known that William Burke was born in 1730, that he was admitted as a
scholar to Westminster in 1743, and went on to Christ Church, Oxford in 1747,
where he published some elegiac verses on the death of the Prince of Wales in
1751 and proceeded B. C. L. in 1755.29 He is not mentioned in the Trinity
College correspondence of Edmund Burke, and it seems therefore likely that
the two never met until Edmund’s arrival in London—when the clannishness of
Irish blood and the supposed kinship of their fathers brought them together,
and quickly cemented their friendship. A notebook which they kept jointly,
unpublished but preserved at Wentworth, begins in November 1750, when
Edmund is found writing a verse epistle from Croydon in Surrey to William who
is in London. He versifies about their common pursuit of the law, and the vanity
23 Idem, pp. 191 ff.
21 Prior, p. 32. However, Prior’s assumption that Burke reached London before February 20, 1750 because of a
letter so dated to Shackleton, is erroneous. The letter was dated according to the Old Style, as shown by its allusion
to the Bill introduced “yesterday” in the House of Lords by the Earl of Chesterfield (cf. Parliamentary History,
XIV, 979 ff., for February 19,1751). This letter was therefore written more than nine months after the date of Burke’s
bond in the Middle Temple, the only known terminus a quo for fixing the time of his arrival in London.
25 Burke, English Men of Letters ed., p. 8.
26 “The Missing Years in Edmund Burke’s Biography,” PMLA, December 1938. The documents upon which the
following summary is based are there cited in detail.
27 Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, ed. Parkes (London, 1867), II, 103-104.
28 Burke’s answer to Lord Verney’s Bill in Chancery, transcribed by Dilke, II, 368-70.
29 Joseph Welch, Alumni Westmonasterii (London, 1852), p. 341.
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES [Series B
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of the ambition which drives them on—in contrast to the blissful mediocrity of
their acquaintance “Mr. C.} a very honest Young Divine very much in Love &
more in Debt, very orthodox & very poor”—
The hopeful parson new arriv’d in town,
who just has got a wife, & just a Gown,
Tho’ young, yet rev’rend; warm yet nice in Love,
Enjoys chast raptures with his Turtle Dove,
What pretty Chat! what soft endearing Arts!
What blending souls! what Sympathy of Hearts!
Mindless the while of Duns impatient calls,
The Grocers hooks, the Vict’lers fouler scrawls,
And Chandlers endless scores that Whiten all the Walls
This Swain, if Nature to the Test we bring
Tastes more true joy and nearer to the spring
Than we, who vainly wise consume our years,
Ills to prevent, that only mock our Cares,
Altho’ our fortunes our desires should Shape,
Gain all we wish, and all we fear escape;
In this alone, my friend, true Quiet lies
Wholly to be a fool, or wholly wise.
The space betwixt is but a mangled Scene,
Where the Extreams are Golden not the mean.30
William Burke’s reply is of little intrinsic interest, save in the attitude of admira¬
tion and dependence which he avows toward Edmund—
Your word Dear friend has been my guiding Line
Your Conduct was, & is the Rule of mine.
From the following entries in this notebook, in verse and in prose, we find that
early in his English sojourn Edmund Burke’s delicate health—probably a dis¬
position to tuberculosis, which caused several deaths in the Burke family—had
sent him to Dr. Christopher Nugent, a well known Irish physician practicing
at Bath.31 Dr. Nugent soon became a staunch friend of both the young Burkes,
who are found writing verse epistles to him and inviting him to visit them. From
the notebook we also get glimpses of holiday trips into Wiltshire and the West
10 This notebook, labeled on the cover “Found among Mr. Wm. Burke’s Papers By W. Cuppage,” I have described
in some detail in the PMLA article cited above. The excerpts which X now give—to illustrate the character and
youthful philosophizing of the future statesman—are not, in general, represented in that article and to the best of my
knowledge have never been published before.
» In “A Letter from Dr. Johnson,” London Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 1938 I have discussed briefly the
relationship between Burke and Dr. Nugent. I should like however to correct one error which that article contains;
the Dictionary of National Biography, s. v. Christopher Nugent, gives the date of his death as October 12, 1775, and
this statement misled me at the time. Upon investigating the obituary notices in The Gentleman’s Magazine for No¬
vember, 1775 I find that the correct date is November 12. After his removal to London Dr. Nugent became a good
friend of Samuel Johnson and a charter member of the Literary Club in 1764; the fact that he became Burke’s father-
in-law and lived for many years with the Burkes in Queen Anne Street gives to him a more than casual interest.