Burke, EDMUND, a celebrated orator and philosophic politician, was born in 1729 at Dublin, where his father had an extensive practice as an attorney. In 1741 Burke was sent to school at Ballitore, in the county of Kildare, and in 1743 entered Trinity College, Dublin. His undergraduate course was not marked by the ordinary distinctions, and he mainly devoted himself to a very extensive and desultory course of reading. Cicero was his favourite author. In 1748 he graduated B.A. Being destined for the English bar, he proceeded to London in 1750 to keep his terms at the Middle Temple. He never took kindly, however, to legal studies, and ultimately abandoned the idea of becoming a barrister.
The period from 1750 to 1760 in the life of Burke was a time of obscurity, spent chiefly in literary work, which in time brought him a considerable reputation. His first important publication was the celebrated Vindication of Natural Society, written in imitation of the style and ridicule of the reasoning of Lord Bolingbroke, in which, with well-concealed irony, he confutes Bolingbroke's views of society by a reductio ad absurdum. It was published anonymously in 1756, when its author was twenty-seven; with many of its readers it passed as a serious work. Soon after, in the same year, appeared his well-known essay, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful—a treatise which attracted considerable attention both in this country and in Germany, and which, though crude, contains much able and independent thinking (see ÆSTHETICS). The same year Burke made a happy marriage with the daughter of a Bath physician, Dr Nugent.
In 1759 the first volume of the Annual Register appeared, a work which Burke originated, and to which he contributed largely till 1788. These writings of Burke not only introduced him to society, but opened up a wider field of activity. In 1761 Mr W. G. Hamilton ('Single-speech Hamilton'), then Secretary for Ireland, having appointed him his private secretary, he returned to Dublin, where he spent about two years, and received a pension on the Irish establishment of £300. In return for this favour Hamilton claimed that Burke should thenceforward devote his whole time to his special service, with the result that they had a violent quarrel, and Burke threw up his pension.
On his return to London he became a member of the Literary Club, the history of which is associated with almost every considerable name in the literature of the period. But literary society did not draw his attention from the chances of a political career. In 1765 he became private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, at that time premier, and in the same year was returned to parliament as member for Wendover. He obtained the seat through the influence of Lord Verney. His eloquence at once gained him a high position in the Whig party, and in the House of Commons. The Rockingham administration, however, lived only about a year, and with it terminated his second political employment. Though he held no office till the downfall of the North ministry in 1782, the public activity of Burke never ceased till his death. His eloquence, political knowledge, and force of character gave him a foremost place among the statesmen of the time.
The times were, indeed, unfavourable for a new man, who had only his natural genius to rely on for advancement, and whose strong convictions unfitted him to be an instrument of mere court or party interests. At that time there were two great forces in English politics, the court and the territorial aristocracy. With the accession of George III., the court had reasserted itself, and by an unsparing use of the public money in influencing elections, had gathered round it a powerful party. George III. found a willing servant in Lord North, whose long administration from 1770 till 1782 was marked by the unsuccessful coercion of the American colonies, by corruption, extravagance, and a prevailing reaction. Against this policy Burke and his Whig friends could only raise a strong protest. The best of Burke's writings and speeches belong to this period, and may be described as a defence and exposition of sound constitutional statesmanship against prevailing abuse and misgovernment. His first great pamphlet was Observations on the Present State of the Nation, a reply to George Grenville, written in 1769. In 1770 he published another great political pamphlet On the Causes of the Present Discontents, which treats of the many questions arising out of Wilkes' controversy, and the attitude of the court. Three great writings on the American struggle are perhaps the finest of his many efforts. These are the speech on American Taxation (1774), the speech on Conciliation with America (1775), and the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777). In all three Burke is the advocate, with reference to the colonies, of wise and liberal measures, which would have averted all the mischief that ensued. In 1774 Burke had to retire from his seat for Wendover, but the important constituency of Bristol elected him as its representative. His Bristol seat he lost through loyalty to his political convictions. He claimed the right not to be a mere delegate, but the reasoning and independent representative of his constituents. When proposals were made for relaxing the restrictions on the trade of Ireland with Great Britain, and for alleviating the laws against Catholics, he supported them in opposition to the wish of his Bristol constituents. With regard to Ireland generally, he showed a knowledge of her affairs, and a sympathy with her people, worthy of the best statesmanship. He had a kindly and reverent feeling for Catholicism; his mother and wife had been brought up in that faith, and he always advocated a broad and liberal policy towards its members.
The enlightened views of Burke were not pleasing to the majority of his Bristol constituents. He lost the seat in 1780, and from that time till 1794 he represented Malton. When the disasters and difficulties arising out of the American war had at last brought Lord North's government to a close, Burke's patron, Lord Rockingham, was called to office in 1782. Under him Burke held the post of Paymaster of the Forces, and he resumed it under the coalition government headed by the Duke of Portland in 1783. His tenure of office on each occasion was for only a few months; and the emoluments were reduced to £4000 a year in accordance with the principles laid down by himself in his Plan for Economical Reform.
After the fall of the Whig ministry in 1783 Burke was never again in office, and he was so far misled by party feeling that he opposed Pitt's measure for Free Trade with Ireland and the Commercial Treaty with France. In 1788 he opened the trial of Warren Hastings by the celebrated speech which will always rank among the masterpieces of English eloquence. Till his death the energies of Burke were now practically absorbed by the French Revolution. Loving 'liberty only in the guise of order,' he had from the beginning regarded the proceedings of the Revolution with suspicion. In 1773, during a visit to Paris, he had learned to dread the new opinions current amongst the leaders of French thought, and the excesses which soon marked the progress of the revolutionary movement made him tremble for social order. In 1790 he appeared as the champion of the old state of things in Europe by the publication of his famous Reflections on the French Revolution. This book had an influence far beyond that of any other writing of Burke. In less than a year it reached its eleventh edition. It was read all over Europe, and tended powerfully to encourage its rulers in a strenuous resistance to the Revolution. In the subsequent career of Burke, his attitude to the Revolution had a decisive influence, alienating him from Fox and many of his other Whig associates, but giving him a position of credit and honour in the political world, and especially with the reactionary portion of it, which he never enjoyed before. As time went on, Burke became more and more vehement in his denunciations of the French innovations, till he became incapable of expressing a calm and rational judgment about them. Most of his subsequent writings, the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Thoughts on French Affairs, and Letters on a Regicide Peace, are marred by the passion with which he urges the government not only to fight the Revolution but to suppress free opinions at home. Burke died 9th July 1797. He was buried in the little church at Beaconsfield, where in 1768 he had purchased the estate of Gregories. During his whole political life Burke's private affairs were sadly embarrassed. He had to borrow money to buy his estate, and he was always deeply in debt. He had considerable pensions granted him in 1794. A proposal to raise him to the peerage under the title of Lord Beaconsfield on his retirement from the House of Commons in that year, was arrested by the death of his only son.
Burke ranks as one of the foremost orators and political thinkers of England. He had vast knowledge of affairs, a glowing imagination which kindled everything he touched, a wide and passion- ate sympathy with the most remote and unfamiliar conditions of life as shown in his great speeches on India, and an inexhaustible wealth of powerful and cultured expression. His manner and delivery as a speaker, however, was unattractive and even awkward and ungainly. Speeches which captivated the reader only served to empty the benches of the House of Commons. Generally, and especially in his earlier days, he was on the side of an orderly freedom and a well-considered progress; yet it should be remembered that party feeling led him to oppose some of the wisest and most liberal measures of the younger Pitt, and that the fiery vehemence of his utterances on the French Revolution did much to let loose the passions which made Europe a scene of war for three and twenty years. His views were lucid, comprehensive, and philosophic. Society he regarded as a stable and orderly system moved by large historic influences; but in his passionate reverence for ancient order, he greatly exaggerated the value of things as they were. The irritable and intractable temperament which grew upon him during his later years, together with his circumstances as a new man handicapped by social prejudice, prevented him from attaining a worthy position in the ministries of the time. Yet in the application to politics of vast knowledge, high moral principle, great intellectual power, and rich and noble gifts of expression, he still stands unrivalled among English statesmen and orators.
A collected edition of his works in quarto, begun in 1792, was finished in 1827; another edition of Works and Correspondence, in 8 vols. 8vo, in 1852; an edition of Select Works by E. J. Payne in Clarendon Press, 3 vols. 1874-78. His writings on Irish affairs were edited by Mr Matthew Arnold in 1881. The best biography of Burke is that of Sir J. Prior (1824; 5th ed. 1854). See also J. Morley's Edmund Burke, a Historical Study (1867); his admirable sketch in the Men of Letters series (1879); and Dilke's Papers of a Critic (1875).