Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics. Jesse Norman

circles that Members of Parliament could and should be bound by instructions from electors as to how to vote. For how else could electors know that their wishes were being heeded? What was to prevent an MP, having been elected, from doing exactly as he pleased? The same cry is frequently heard today.

      Speaking first, Cruger pledged himself to be guided by his constituents’ instructions. Burke, however, simply destroyed the idea at source, in words that have resounded down the ages.

      Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence and the most unreserved communication with his constituents … It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures … to theirs; and above all, ever and in all cases to prefer their own interest to his own.

      Yet deference could go only so far; indeed, too much would be self-defeating. Burke continued:

      But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

      In the interests of their constituents, then, Members of Parliament must have, and must be allowed to have, independent minds: ‘Authoritative instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey … these are things utterly unknown to the laws of the land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution.’ MPs, then, should not be held hostage simply to advocates of particular issues or interests.

      Moreover, such an approach to politics mistook the character of Parliament itself:

      Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests … Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament.

      These were stern, even foolhardy, words from a newly elected MP to an electorate tempted by radicalism, and they carried with them a hint of trouble to come. But the present moment carried troubles of its own. Lord North had been vindicated at the election with a comfortable majority, reflecting the popularity of his harder attitude towards America. Rockingham’s followers, in contrast, are estimated to have fallen in number from fifty-five to forty-three MPs. Amid allegations of divided loyalty and even betrayal they were increasingly stigmatized as ‘friends of America’, as relations with the colonies further deteriorated. Rockingham himself was becoming withdrawn, while his group was further undermined by the death in February 1775 of William Dowdeswell, its leader in the Commons and in-house expert on financial matters. The wider opposition was split, with Chatham as erratic and uncooperative as ever in the Lords.

      Burke chafed at the enforced inactivity. Lacking the position to lead his party or his nation, his reaction was again to quarry out from within himself the intellectual leadership that the situation demanded, and offer it to those in authority. The result was his ‘Speech on Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies’, delivered on 22 March 1775. Its message was plain and bold:

      The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord … [or] to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions … It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace.