It was in this context that Burke framed one of his most famous and enduring essays. In 1768–9 he had written – perhaps with William Dowdeswell, the Rockinghamites’ leader in the Commons – Observations on a Late Publication Entitled ‘The Present State of the Nation’. Two years later he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The first is a long and carefully argued pamphlet, now somewhat unjustly ignored; the second is a classic of political thought, which has been rightly read and re-read by succeeding generations. Together, they mark Burke’s transition to political maturity.
The Observations is Burke’s first real political pamphlet. In purpose, it is a counter-attack. In late 1768 William Knox, a follower of Grenville, had published The Present State of the Nation, which set out a vigorous defence of Grenville’s trade policy, and an attack on Rockingham and his followers for betraying that policy and the interests of the nation. In response, Burke does not simply resort to the political stock-in-trade of deflection, denial and insult. Rather, he makes a lengthy argument on the merits, backed up with a host of detail, statistical tables and evidence. The subtext was clear. The Rockinghamites were right on the facts and right on the principle, and they stood ready to serve when the ministry collapsed, as it surely would. But more than that: as a party they had the capacity to articulate policy based on fundamental political principle, which could as a result outlast the vagaries of the moment, and become the basis for loyal and yet energetic opposition.
Much of the Observations is dry stuff indeed, though towards the end it moves from evidence and rebuttal to a vigorous defence of the Rockingham ministry along the lines of the Short Account. Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific detail with Olympian generalization. Thus a discussion of imports from Jamaica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that ‘politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part’. Or take Burke’s magisterial repudiation of Grenville’s proposal for the American colonists to be enfranchised and their representatives sent 3,000 miles to London. This he denounces as constitutional folly, in terms that have resonance today: ‘Has he well considered what an immense operation any change in our constitution is? How many discussions, parties and passions it will necessarily excite; and when you open it to inquiry in one part, where the inquiry will stop?’ In a favourite metaphor, Burke likens the British constitution to an old building, which ‘stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then it may come down upon our heads altogether, in much uniformity of ruin; and great will be the ruin thereof.’ In its scepticism about human reason, and its respect for tradition, for what is given, the thought is deeply conservative. In language, it is biblical.
In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, published anonymously in April 1770, Burke turns from economic to social disorder. The return of Wilkes in 1768 had spread panic in official circles, generated huge public excitement and cast the authorities generally in the worst possible light. But Burke does not analyse popular grievances simply in their own terms. Rather, he develops an elaborate conspiracy theory, in which their ultimate cause is to be found in the extension and consolidation of royal power.
This was potentially dangerous territory, even for someone protected by parliamentary privilege, and Burke prudently follows the convention of the time that the King can do no wrong. Instead he attributes to the ‘King’s Friends’, an alleged Court faction of shadowy advisers, the importation from France to Britain of a Double Cabinet: a parallel administration designed to control the workings of government from the inside. This has as its counterpart an attack on other sources of power; notably, he accuses the Court faction of seeking to destroy potential opposition within Parliament through patronage, and by constant changes of administration. Given all these offices and pensions, it was little wonder that the Crown could not live within the ample financial means voted to it by Parliament.
Rhetorically, Burke’s argument was highly ingenious. It allowed him to retell recent political history as an unconstitutional attempt by George III to escape the constraints imposed by the Glorious Revolution in 1688–9 and accepted by monarchs thereafter. It offered a delicious hint of foreign intrigue, reminiscent of the influence of Louis XIV over Charles II and James II. And its analysis had a plausible and deeply satisfying twist in the tail. Far from being unwelcome to the King’s friends, Burke argues, the advent of Wilkes offered them an extraordinary opportunity, for it actively assisted their project of undermining Parliament, and securing more power for themselves in the ensuing crackdown.
The Thoughts thus contained an elaborate conspiracy theory. One might think this a thin rationale for political immortality, especially since the theory of the Double Cabinet has since been largely exploded by historical research. How, then, has it achieved its status as a classic of political thought?
As in the Observations, the reason lies in the final third of the book. Formally, Burke dismisses radical solutions like shorter parliaments and a ‘place bill’, which would remedy excesses of patronage by excluding holders of lucrative offices or pensions from the Commons. He also disavows specific remedies of his own. In fact, however, he has nothing less than a complete re-engineering of party politics in mind. He insists that power can never be properly exercised by an individual, however distinguished, for any great length of time. Practically, then, the only solution is a principled assertion of the power of the House of Commons, through political parties: ‘Government may in a great measure be restored, if any considerable body of men have honesty and resolution enough never to accept Administration, unless this garrison of King’s men, which is stationed, as in a citadel, to control and enslave it, be entirely broken and disbanded, and every work they have thrown up be levelled with the ground.’ In other words, parliamentarians should band together on principle to destroy what Burke insisted was the King’s network of patronage.
If that fails, then the only backstop can be at the ballot box:
I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the Representatives, but [by] the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that these Representatives are going to over-leap the fences of the law, and to introduce an arbitrary power … nothing else can hold the constitution to its true principles.
In a mixed constitution, then, all sources of power are constrained: MPs hold the government to account, but they must themselves be held accountable by the people if the constitution is to work its magic.
But, Burke argues in a brilliant move, this balance in turn rests on a crucial distinction. For faction is not party. Factions are groupings of the moment, which exist to take power and to exercise it. Those forming Burke’s ‘considerable body of men’ are not a faction. No, they are a political party; that is, they are ‘united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some political principle in which they are all agreed’. The test comes when such a group is evicted from office. Founded on self-interest, factions will tend to disperse. Parties, however, will sustain themselves and their membership – on principle and shared values, on mutual commitments and on personal loyalties and friendship – until the opportunity to exercise power returns.
There is a risk of circularity here: to the conspiracy theorist, lack of success can itself be a form of self-justification, and an excuse for inertia. Nevertheless, it was a matter of deep political principle that the Rockinghamites should be able to sustain themselves as a party in opposition, and they had learned how to do this, with some difficulty, since 1766. So it was not surprising that they saw themselves as almost the sole repository of political virtue, and came to refer to the Thoughts as ‘our political creed’.
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