Given Burke’s background and evidently slender means, the purchase was a source of wonderment to his friends, and of gossip and slander to his enemies. But he loved the countryside, and now set himself to become a successful farmer on scientific principles. The house also brought with it a magnificent collection of paintings and sculpture. Boswell noted seven landscapes by Poussin on a visit, and a sale catalogue of the estate in 1812 included sixty-four paintings – including four by Titian, five by Reynolds and one by Leonardo da Vinci – fifty marbles and twelve drawings. Some of these works were added by Burke, including most likely the Reynoldses and a large Poussin sent by his protégé James Barry from Rome.
The new property was close to London, a crucial merit for the working politician of the day. But best of all it would give him the respect then accorded to men of property. As one admirer remarked, ‘An Irishman, one Mr Burke, is sprung up in the House of Commons, who has astonished every body with the power of his eloquence, his comprehensive knowledge in all our exterior and internal politics and commercial interests. He wants nothing but that sort of dignity annexed to rank, and property in England, to make him the most considerable man in the Lower House.’ That was precisely the point. Gregories would make Burke a gentleman.
But his new status came at a high cost. Mortgages at that time could be called in at six months’ notice, the estate was far from paying its own way, and the Burkes did not live frugally. Moreover, through the common purse, they were acutely exposed to changes in the value of East India Company shares. Nemesis inevitably followed. There had been stock market tremors, notably in 1766 when Chatham announced a parliamentary inquiry which was seen as a transparent attempt by government to annex a portion of the company’s profits. But three years later events in India caused a sudden panic, and the price of East India Company shares fell 13 per cent. The effect on the over-extended Will Burke was catastrophic: from being handsomely ahead, he and Verney now faced a joint debt of £47,000, and were themselves the hapless creditors of other East India speculators whose holdings had crashed. Richard faced similar ruin. Despite – sometimes because of – numerous other money-making schemes over the years, the two adventurers would die in debt. For his part, Edmund Burke would spend the rest of his life with money troubles. Members of Parliament could not be arrested for failure to pay their debts; but failure to get re-elected carried with it the imminent possibility of debtors’ prison.
The Chatham administration started badly and ended worse, having dragged on despite parliamentary defeat and the chronic illness of its principal; its parting gesture was to pass the Townshend duties on American imports of items such as paint, paper and tea, which only stoked the fires of rebellion among the colonists still further. The government was taken over by the Duke of Grafton, only to be reconstructed yet again under pressure from the Rockinghamites … in collaboration with none other than Chatham himself. With these endless changes, the country seemed close to being ungovernable, all the more so as a tide of radical petitions flooded in complaining bitterly of parliamentary corruption, incompetence and the growing subordination of ministers to the King.
Burke was indefatigable throughout. In addition to his secretarial duties, he was writing, canvassing for petitions and speaking in Parliament wherever possible. It has been estimated that over the period 1768–74 he was the third most active speaker in the House, rising more than 400 times on a wide range of topics, especially on trade policy and his growing concern at the abuse of the King’s prerogative powers. Around him, the Rockinghamites and their leader were reluctantly having to acknowledge, and even embrace, the fact that theirs might be a protracted parliamentary exile.
Radicalism was in the air. But in the 1760s it also had a specific cause célèbre: the case of John Wilkes. In giving him a vicious squint and a prognathous jaw, nature had not been kind to Wilkes (see following page/s). But he had overcome these impediments to procure himself a notorious reputation as a hell-raiser and philanderer; he boasted that it ‘took him only half an hour to talk away his face’ with a woman. He also had a positive genius for constitutionally valuable mischief-making, a vaulting ambition frustrated by lack of patronage, and a great hatred for the Earl of Bute. In 1763, now an MP, Wilkes obtained an advance copy of the King’s Speech, and he denounced it and its presumed author Bute in his radical (and violently anti-Scottish) weekly, the North Briton. He had previously accused the Archbishop of Canterbury of buggery, and called the Bishop of Gloucester’s wife a professional prostitute. He had even suggested that Bute’s influence extended to taking George III’s mother as his mistress. This, however, was the final straw.
The King’s response was to instigate a criminal charge of seditious libel, and have the government issue general warrants in which Wilkes and his collaborators were not named. Forty-nine people were arrested, including Wilkes himself. He was sent to the Tower of London, his home ransacked for incriminating materials, and papers removed. He then counter-sued for trespass and to secure his own immunity as an MP to libel claims under parliamentary privilege. Both actions were successful. Over a series of cases, Wilkes was able to establish both the illegality of general warrants and the now basic principle that the English courts were under no obligation to defer in law to so-called ‘reasons of state’, advanced by government in the cause of political expediency.
6. Portrait of John Wilkes
Wilkes, however, was only just getting into his stride. In the same year, his political enemies published an erotic burlesque of Pope’s Essay on Man attributed to him called An Essay on Woman. Among other things, the poem neatly summarized what seems to have been Wilkes’s own personal credo: ‘Life can little more supply / Than just a few good fucks, and then we die.’ It was condemned as blasphemous and obscene by the House of Lords, and Wilkes, who had been wounded in a duel, escaped to Paris to recover and avoid imprisonment. He was convicted in absentia of obscene and seditious libels early in 1764, and declared an outlaw. Four years later, however, and under some pressure from his French creditors, Wilkes made a dramatic return to England and was elected to Parliament for Middlesex, amid wild scenes of mob hysteria and rejoicing. He surrendered himself, waived parliamentary privilege and was sent to jail, whereupon some of his supporters were killed by troops at a riot in St George’s Fields, on the site of the present Waterloo Station, not far from Parliament. As if this was not enough, a succession of expulsions from and re-elections to Parliament now followed, which only succeeded in embarrassing the authorities still further and cementing the words ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ into the popular mind.
Even then Wilkes was not finished. As an MP, he burnished his radical credentials by denouncing British policy in America, and in 1771 fought a successful campaign to prevent the suppression of reports on parliamentary debates. The loss of trust in our ancient institutions, and specifically in Parliament, is often regarded as a modern phenomenon. But Wilkes reminds us that this is not so. In less than a decade, he had almost single-handedly thrown Parliament into grave disrepute, shining a searching light on its corruption, authoritarianism, dependence on the Crown and willingness to suppress the common-law freedoms of the citizen. He had galvanized the press, organized political societies and mobilized the mob.
To Burke, Wilkes was at best a mixed blessing. Personally, he found him ‘a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no principles’. There was little in common between them temperamentally, or much politically, since Burke was no radical. In many ways Wilkes was an embarrassment and, worse, a highly effective one. The Rockingham Whigs shared his criticisms of overreaching Crown prerogative and British policy towards America, and during their brief year in power Parliament had banned both general warrants and the arbitrary seizure