Burke must have been at a low ebb at this time, for his second son Christopher died between the ages of five and six, probably in 1764. We know virtually nothing about the circumstances of his death, but its effect can only have been to focus Burke’s love and attention on his surviving boy, Richard. Still more so if, as seems possible from Burke’s letters, Jane then had a miscarriage, and perhaps even another. The couple may have been coming to the very sad conclusion that there would be no more children.
But the effect of Rockingham’s elevation was to hand Burke the first of two huge strokes of luck. Rockingham had only just engaged him as his private secretary, despite the protestations of the aged Duke of Newcastle, who denounced Burke in soon-to-be familiar terms as a closet Catholic and a Jacobite. But Rockingham ignored the Duke, and Burke was thus catapulted from near-obscurity into the very cockpit of power. The new administration took office on 15 July 1765, and Burke started work the following day.
The second bit of luck was better still, for Will generously waived his own political ambitions temporarily and persuaded Lord Verney to allow Edmund to stand for Parliament for Wendover, a ‘pocket borough’ in Verney’s personal gift. For Burke, the way was now clear to a political career.
The new government’s first priority concerned the American colonies. For decades, these had been allowed to prosper in an atmosphere – it would be too much to call it a policy – of more or less benign neglect. The exception was trade. Colonial affairs, in America as elsewhere, were managed along strictly mercantile lines: the colonies existed to generate raw materials and import finished goods, the mother country to manufacture those finished goods and derive the extra value thereby added, the goods themselves always to be carried in British ships. The counterpart of this trade was that American merchants were perennially short of hard currency, and so perennially indebted to financiers in the City of London. From a British perspective, it was an immensely convenient and lucrative arrangement, sustained by each side’s general ignorance of the other.
But events now conspired to change this. Over the course of the century, the modest American colonial population of some 200,000 had doubled, then doubled again, and again. By 1765 it stood at not quite 2,000,000. It had been swelled by immigration, much of which was not English, but Scottish, Irish, French and German, to say nothing of those at the margins of society seeking to escape the law or gain a new life. Thomas Paine would later be one of these, emigrating to America in 1774. Many of the new immigrants felt no great love for the Westminster Parliament.
The Seven Years War had ended in triumph for Britain, and the further extension of its early colonial empire around the world. In the long term, this would bring vast profits. But the war’s immediate effect was a drastic depletion of the Treasury. The national debt nearly doubled, from £70 million to £130 million. Taxes, totalling some 15 per cent on a country gentleman’s estate, were regarded as unfeasibly high. Something had to be done. Grenville’s response was to limit expense by restraining westward expansion and seeking to end the long-running border war with the American Indians; to enforce the Navigation Acts, limiting foreign trade competition and forcing the colonies to pay higher prices, especially for sugar; and to raise revenue directly from the Americans, via a new Stamp Act on legal transactions, passed in 1764.
Within the increasingly fractious colonies, the result was uproar, resistance and the first signs of rebellion. The urgent question for the new government in 1765 was, therefore, what to do about the Stamp Act. To enforce it would be ruinously expensive, while compromise would likely please no one. Rockingham therefore opted for outright repeal, a view in which he may have been influenced by Burke, whose memorandum urging repeal has survived. To save face and give itself a measure of political cover, the ministry added a Declaratory Act, which insisted on Britain’s right in principle to tax the colonies, even if that right was not exercised. The move worked, and both Acts were voted through. But it proved to be a short-term expedient; the colonists had been informed that the Declaratory Act would not be exercised, and their reaction later to further taxes was to prove extreme.
Meanwhile, Burke needed to get elected and take his seat in Parliament. Wendover at that time had just 250 electors – the modern constituency has around 70,000 – most of whom were Lord Verney’s tenants and therefore disposed to vote as instructed. The sitting member was induced to retire, but there was still the formality of election. In keeping with the time, this was accompanied by an extended bout of mass inebriation. It was not to Burke’s taste, but he got the job done. As he wrote to his Irish friend and mentor Charles O’Hara on Christmas Eve of 1765, ‘Yesterday I was elected for Wendover, got very drunk, and this day have an heavy cold.’
Facing the chamber of the House of Commons itself was another matter, however. The chamber itself has been rebuilt twice since Burke’s time, once after the great fire of 1834 and then after bomb damage sustained in the Second World War. On the latter occasion, at the specific insistence of Sir Winston Churchill, care was again taken to make it too small for the membership. In Churchill’s words, ‘The essence of good House of Commons speaking is the conversational style, the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges … [This] requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency … a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House.’ The chamber thus measures a rather modest 68 feet by 46 feet, and contains only 427 places for 650 MPs. Yet the eighteenth-century chamber was smaller still, at about 58 feet by 33 feet or 300 to 350 places for 558 MPs, an even smaller percentage. It functioned effectively simply because many county members only rarely attended.
The sense of enclosure was increased after 1707, when Sir Christopher Wren remodelled the chamber, bringing the ceiling down and installing galleries supported by columns along both sides. Then as now, such a confined space is infinitely removed from the empty caverns of the great modern democracies. In it politics becomes, literally, hot and personal. Today the chamber of the House of Commons is the only air-conditioned public space in the Palace of Westminster, and a blessed refuge from a steamy summer day. In Burke’s time it must have been stifling.
Then as now, the members faced each other. The seating reflected the institution’s earliest origins in St Stephen’s Chapel; for in an English chapel the congregants look across the aisle, not towards the altar as in a church. The Speaker and clerks sat, wigged and gowned, at the east end beneath three high windows. Senior ministers wore full court dress, with swords; the sartorial contrast with backbenchers was such that it caused something of a stir when large numbers of them lost office in 1782 and the Rockinghamites appeared in the Commons from court, bedecked in blue, with swords, lace and hair powder. But, ministers apart, there was no dress code as such: members wore hats, boots, sometimes spurs, and often carried sticks. They talked among themselves, ate fruit or nuts, and not infrequently slept in the chamber; but they were forbidden to smoke or read. Without the microphones and tiny speakers dotted around the modern chamber, members needed formidable powers of vocal projection if they were to make themselves heard.
Since Walpole’s time the modern custom had arisen that government ministers would sit on the front bench on the Speaker’s right, and by the 1770s senior opposition figures sat on the bench directly facing them. But – there being as yet no political parties in the modern sense – other members sat individually or in groups as they chose. Burke normally sat, with other Rockinghamites, on the third row behind the opposition front bench, close to a pillar and not far from the Speaker’s chair. That was close enough to be fully engaged in the cut and thrust of debate, but distant enough to underline the group’s independence in opposition.
There followed the awful initiation of a maiden speech. Some of life’s terrors are inevitable, others self-inflicted, and among the latter there are few to compare with the task of making a maiden speech in the House of Commons. To dull the pain, both for the speaker and their audience, the convention has arisen in recent times that maiden speeches should be short, pleasant and uncontroversial. They often take place late at night, in minor debates, when few MPs are present and the chamber is becalmed. The new member sings the praises of their predecessor, however evil or incompetent, and takes those present on a light and ideally brief tour of the constituency, before identifying some