Burke, Edmund (1729–1797)

British Whig politician and political theorist, born in Dublin, Ireland. During a parliamentary career spanning more than 30 years, he was famous for opposing the government's attempts to coerce the American colonists, for example in Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), and for supporting the emancipation of Ireland. However, he was a vehement opponent of the French Revolution, which he denounced in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and attacked the suggestion of peace with France in Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–97).

Burke was also the author of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), on aesthetics. He was a leading figure in the impeachment of the British colonial administrator Warren Hastings. Burke's basic political credo – that liberty is only possible within the strict framework of law and order – ensured that he was subsequently revered by British Conservatives as one of their main inspirational figures.

Burke's father was a Protestant (in which faith Edmund himself was brought up), but his mother was a Roman Catholic, and this, together with the fact that he was educated at a Quaker school, perhaps gave him the foundations of the tolerance he later applied to religious questions. In 1748 he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and two years later came to London. In 1758, when the events of the Seven Years' War were just beginning to turn in Britain's favour, Burke put forward the idea of the Annual Register, a review of the chief political events and movements of the year. The first volume of this work appeared in 1759, and Burke's active connection with the publication continued until 1788. He gradually came to be well known in society. In 1765 he entered Parliament as the member for Wendover, was appointed private secretary to the prime minister, Lord Rockingham, and soon gained a reputation as one of the most eloquent and powerful speakers in the House. In 1766 the Rockingham ministry was overthrown, and Burke spent a short time in Ireland. On his return he was offered a post in the administration which the Earl of Chatham was forming, but declined to leave his old leader, and became during the session one of the leading members of the Opposition. In 1769 he published Observations on a late Publication on the Present State of the Nation, and in the following year his famous Thoughts on the Present Discontents, in which he attacked the existing system of government, with its basis in court patronage. In 1774, the same year he was elected the member for Bristol, his famous association began with the future Whig prime minister Charles James Fox. The next few years were occupied with plans for economic reform and with pleadings for Catholic relief. The latter cause aroused anger in London; nevertheless in 1781 he was re-elected to the Commons as MP for Malton. Burke became paymaster of the forces in Rockingham's second government in 1782 and in the Fox–North coalition in 1783, and after the collapse of the latter spent the rest of his career in opposition. He attacked Warren Hastings's misgovernment in India and promoted his impeachment, which was finally accepted by prime minister William Pitt the Younger in 1784. Yet despite his best efforts, Hastings was finally acquitted of wrongdoing in 1795. Burke's attack on the revolution in France won him praise from several quarters, including many of the crowned heads of Europe, but was effectively countered by the radical Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man (1791–92). Burke defended his inconsistency in supporting the American but not the French Revolution in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) and Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). He retired from political life in 1795 and, shattered by the death of his only surviving son the following year, died in 1797.