I

William Burke's ‘notebooks and scraps of juvenilia’, as his remaining papers have been described, were first examined by Dixon Wecter in the 1930s.Footnote ⁶ Wecter described one of these notebooks as filling a gap in our knowledge of what had hitherto amounted to the ‘missing years’ of Edmund Burke's biography.Footnote ⁷ It is this notebook that was subsequently edited by Somerset and which provided new evidence for Edmund's activities in the early to mid-1750s, since it clearly contained a number of pieces by Edmund Burke, most in William's hand but some in Edmund's own. It was in some sense a collaborative venture, preserved by William, giving us access to Edmund's earliest prose writings. But it amounts to only a fraction of the William Burke manuscripts held at the Sheffield Archives. The other notebooks contain a range of political sketches and draft pamphlets, mainly composed during the early part of the Seven Years’ War. Nearly all these writings are of some historical interest, many of them addressing topical issues of the day. But a number are of particular interest since the evidence suggests that they were written by Edmund Burke.

A manuscript note headed ‘Contents of the Books’, inserted as a loose sheet into the first William Burke notebook, groups the manuscripts into six main notebooks. There is also a seventh notebook, not mentioned in the Contents, containing a number of pages of verse, for the most part written in heroic couplets.Footnote ⁸ Taken together, these notebooks comprise diverse material, including draft pamphlets, open letters, memoranda, a travel journal, and a political diary. The first of these notebooks is described in the Contents as containing ‘Some of the Characters worth Examining’.Footnote ⁹ This is a conspicuously perfunctory characterization, since what is being referred to is the collection of writings later edited by Somerset, which includes at least one substantial essay by Edmund Burke and a number of important drafts on philosophical and theological themes usually attributed to him.

The Somerset notebook is followed by a second William Burke notebook, bound in vellum and consisting of an array of writings, hastily identified in the manuscript table of contents by the title of one of the items in the book, the ‘Address to the good people of England’.Footnote ¹⁰ The third notebook comprises ‘A dialogue on conversation’, described in a note added to the table of contents as being ‘by W Burke as I believe & of no great merit’. The fourth notebook is another itemized volume belonging to William with a note on the cover scrawled by Edmund Burke in the ‘fatal August’ of 1794, the month in which Edmund's son died: ‘amongst the Infinite number of political & moral Sketches written early by W Burke[.] I keep these from the flames as being most brought into form.’ It is further stated that they were ‘written from 1756 to 1759’.Footnote ¹¹ The fifth notebook is introduced with a descriptive note that reads, ‘Notes chiefly agricultural & Oeconomical, probably written by Mr. Wm Burke on his journey to Paris 177[?]’,Footnote ¹² while the sixth is described in the Contents as ‘A Commonplace Book of WB begun in 1770 & not persevered in’.Footnote ¹³ A note following this caption at the foot of the page may refer to the contents of the seventh notebook: ‘N. B. There are some translations by R[ichard]d B[urke] junior and some trifling poems & other bundles’.Footnote ¹⁴ It is the second and fourth of the William Burke notebooks that are of special interest, partly because they include a number of drafts and sketches concerned with British high politics in the mid- to late 1750s, but also because they contain Edmund Burke's earliest political writings.

Any such attribution has to be made on the balance of probabilities. The main problem with ascribing any of this material to Edmund Burke is that all the writings contained in the second and fourth notebooks are in William Burke's hand. This is not decisive, however, since it has long been accepted that many of these papers in William's hand were in fact authored by Edmund Burke. In some cases, in the Somerset notebook, the pieces in William's hand have been initialled (either ‘EB’ or ‘WB’), making the authorship easier to establish. But this is not the case with many of the pieces. In such cases, stylometric indicators can be used, but they are bound to be problematic, not least since we know from later manuscripts that Edmund was in the habit of revising both William's and his brother Richard's drafts.Footnote ¹⁵ Consequently, the mode and substance of argument offers the best guide to authorship. In the case of the essays attributed in this article to Edmund Burke, these criteria prove sufficiently decisive to establish authorship beyond reasonable doubt. Given that these pieces represent contained units of argument, it also seems right to attribute responsibility to Edmund alone.

Apart from some scraps of poetry by Burke's son in the seventh notebook, all of the material to be found among these papers was composed by either Edmund or William. Therefore, in deciding issues of authorship, there is really only one thing to be decided: is the piece by William or Edmund? In adjudicating between them, the nature and calibre of argument is a potent discriminator, since Edmund Burke's generalizing, philosophical interest in politics can be readily contrasted with William's more narrowly empirical concerns. William's correspondence and parliamentary interventions, together with his only avowed publication, An examination of the commercial principles of the late negotiation between Great Britain and France, exhibit an effective but conventional intelligence, mostly concerned to marshal evidence, capable of deploying standard exempla to buttress a case, but consistently unoriginal, and ultimately uninterested in the science of underlying political causes, which Edmund learned from Montesquieu to prize.Footnote ¹⁶ William sought in the main to convince by marshalling facts, with the occasional resort to familiar homilies as a substitute for independent argument, but he never indulged in the kind of sustained philosophical analysis that became the distinguishing feature of Edmund's approach to politics. For these reasons, scholarship has generally come to accept that Edmund Burke's writings can be contrasted with William's in terms of their powers of reflection, abstraction, and synthesis.Footnote ¹⁷ The ‘abstracted and subtile’ style of reasoning of which Burke was accused after entering parliament in early 1766 is wholly absent from his friend's writings.Footnote ¹⁸ This capacity for philosophical abstraction and synthesis on Burke's part was a product of his exposure to an array of enlightenment contributions to philosophical history and the science of politics, most obviously the works of Montesquieu and Hume. It is the legacy of enlightenment political philosophy of the kind to Burke's thought that separates his work from the writings of William, and this legacy can be found in the essays attributed to Edmund here. But there is additional, internal, evidence connecting Burke to some essays in the second and fourth of the William Burke notebooks. The essay presented below on the theme of ‘National character and parliament’, appearing in the second William Burke notebook in William's hand, is explicitly claimed in a manuscript note written by Edmund Burke as his own: ‘N. B. this to the End of the part ab[ou]t short parl[iamen]ts are of Edm[und] Burke about 1755. The rest W. Burke.’ This essay has not been published before, although it has been noticed by previous scholars. Apart from the interest of its subject matter, this piece has a further significance: it establishes that, in addition to the Burke essays that appear in the Somerset notebook, material by Edmund definitely is to be found elsewhere among William Burke's papers.

The essay on ‘National character and parliament’ was attributed to Edmund Burke on the basis of his own marginal note by the editors of his Correspondence in a footnote to a passage from a letter he wrote in May 1766 on the duration of Irish parliaments, but no attention was paid to the surrounding material in the archive.Footnote ¹⁹ F. P. Lock, possibly following the lead of this footnote in the Correspondence, provides some discussion of the essay, but again he did not examine the remaining material in these notebooks more generally.Footnote ²⁰ On its own, the essay on ‘National character’ is of some importance, showing Burke beginning to think reflectively about politics around the time he had just published his Philosophical enquiry. But, taken together with the other three essays on ‘Ireland’ ‘Parties’, and the ‘Militia’, it is of major significance, demonstrating the development of a theoretical interest in political affairs, particularly in the juridical and constitutional organization of British and Irish politics.

‘Hints of Ireland’ also plays an important role in demonstrating Edmund Burke's involvement in the composition of essays and fragments to be found in these notebooks besides those already collected by H. V. Somerset. Appearing as the first item in the fourth notebook, it is concerned with the terms on which the Irish ‘princes’ of the twelfth century surrendered authority over their affairs to Henry II. This had been an important theme in Irish political debate since the publication of William Molyneux's 1698 polemic, The case of Ireland's being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated. The essay is unsigned, and appears in William's hand, although he cannot be the author of it, since, unlike Edmund, he, as an Englishman, can have had scarcely any investment in the topic as such, and certainly could claim no technical mastery of the constitutional history of Ireland. The existence of this essay thus offers a clear precedent, if one were needed, for an unsigned essay in the William Burke notebooks, excluding the Somerset notebook, written by Edmund Burke but appearing in William's hand.

Edmund Burke examined the contents of these notebooks in 1794, the year after William had returned from India, presumably with a view to returning the papers to his friend. Since he noted his responsibility for ‘National character and parliament’, why did he not claim authorship of the three essays ascribed to him here? When Burke came to inspect these papers in 1794, it was nearly forty years since the composition of much of the material in William's notebooks, and during the intervening period Edmund Burke had been involved in producing copious publicity, reflection, and comment on public affairs. It is reasonable to assume that his earliest writings were not that important to him, and easily missed on a cursory inspection of bundles of papers during the ‘fatal August’ of 1794. After all, he did not himself identify the material in the Somerset notebook as his own. Moreover, he was usually disposed to distance himself from his writings of the 1750s: all of those that were published appeared anonymously at the time. In addition to the philosophical mode of argument which Burke deployed in these essays, the most compelling reason for associating them with him has to be the overlap between their subject matter and his known concerns or, still more persuasively, the identity between the positions espoused in these essays of the 1750s and arguments which Burke developed in his published writings in this or a later period. If Burke did not write ‘Hints of Ireland’, then it has to be the work of William, which would be (literally) incredible. This argument is equally applicable to ‘On parties’: the position which the essay on parties staked out would later appear as a notorious intellectual innovation of Burke's, and so either William Burke originated Edmund's theory of party in 1757 without ever subsequently contributing anything of significance to political thought, or Edmund Burke is the author of his own conception of party, experimenting with ideas in the 1750s that were to be applied to practical politics in the later 1760s.

Considering the substantive arguments of these pieces brings us to the final essay by Edmund Burke to be found in the William Burke papers, written in March 1757 and concerned with the militia. The essay is a comprehensive critical assault on current plans to establish a militia, and a defence of the standing army as offering not only sound military protection against enemy forces but also security to the constitution. What distinguishes its argument is its ability to extrapolate from the matter at hand to the underlying constitutional significance of the measures proposed. On the basis of an examination of the military defences of the realm, a sophisticated indictment of tory and radical whig shibboleths is provided, together with an analysis of the organizing principles underpinning a modern mixed constitution. We know that these wider concerns were central to Burke's intellectual preoccupations in the mid- to late 1750s and, given their treatment in the ‘Militia’ essay, constitute overwhelming grounds for ascribing it to Burke. Not only does it proceed by means of a philosophical-historical analysis of the foundations of British political order of a kind that Burke was eager to develop at this time, but its topics were being actively explored by Edmund during exactly this period, both in his fragmentary Essay towards an history of the laws of England, probably written in 1757, and in his Essay towards an abridgement of English history, contracted in February of the same year.Footnote ²¹

Burke's philosophical politics distinguished him as a commentator on affairs throughout his career in public life after 1765. It can now be asserted that he developed this approach to political issues in the 1750s, the period in which he worked out many of his signature ideas, some of which were originally sketched in his early essays. The theoretical approach that he adopted is itself a distinguishing feature of these essays, so much so that Burke draws attention to this procedure in ‘National character and parliament’. There he points to the ‘wise & excellent order’ that underlies the British political process with a view to discovering the secret springs that govern the state's fortune. Since the springs that maintain a polity in a condition of health may also in the longer term contribute to its demise, we are told that it is important to seize any opportunity for reform to restore the mechanisms of government to effective operational order. The precondition for such reform is presented as a science of politics, capable of uncovering fundamental causes operating beneath the froth of daily affairs.

Burke goes on to claim that to effect change under a regulated system of government it is necessary to regard constitutional principles rather than leading personalities. Sallust, we are told, made the mistake of believing that the fate of Rome hung on ‘the Virtues & Capacity of particular men’, whereas the success of constitutional politics, in Britain and Rome alike, depended on the political framework (or ‘Scheme’) underlying the conduct of affairs.Footnote ²² In unmixed systems of government, events varied with the fortunes of individual men, as illustrated by Thebes under the leadership of Epaminondas, or Athens under such generals as Cimon and Themistocles. Britain, like Rome, was different: the cause of its greatness was not individual caprice but the constitutional order that formed the ‘spirit’ or ‘character’ of its people. In The spirit of the laws, Montesquieu had made the science of underlying principles of this kind a prerequisite for any serious study of politics; in the same vein, since the 1740s, Hume had been analysing the British system of politics in the light of general theory.Footnote ²³ Burke's innovation was to introduce this procedure into the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate. What the four essays reproduced below make clear, beginning with his essay on ‘National character and parliament’, is that the foundation of this approach was laid in the 1750s. In the next three sections of this article, the four Burke essays are analysed as contributions to a science of practical affairs.

II

It is clear from the writings of Edmund Burke preserved among the William Burke papers that the author of A vindication of natural society (1756) and A Philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1757) had begun experimenting with topical political essays around the middle of the 1750s. In 1757, he accepted a commission to write an Abridgement of English history, intended as a single-volume account extending from Roman Britain to Queen Anne, which, from the evidence of the text Burke managed to complete, was to combine narrative history with philosophical reflection on the origin and descent of the English constitution. Although the surviving narrative comes to a halt with Magna Carta, Burke seems to have worked on his abridgement down to the early 1760s. It is therefore clear that in these years he was subjecting the historical assumptions embedded in previous accounts of the ‘ancient’ constitution to sceptical scrutiny. It is also apparent that he applied the methods of philosophical history to the analysis of the Irish past. ‘Hints of Ireland’ is an exploration of the implications of Molyneux's Case of Ireland, which was re-introduced into debate over the status of the kingdom of Ireland during the pamphlet war surrounding the Lucas controversy in the period immediately preceding Burke's departure from Dublin for the Middle Temple in 1750.Footnote ²⁴ Burke accepts the fundamental import of Molyneux's original argument, namely that Ireland in the twelfth century was not an acquisition to the English parliament ‘by right of conquest’.Footnote ²⁵ The Irish chiefs of the time, Burke tells us, did not subject themselves to the ‘people’ of England, but rather pledged allegiance to the English king, surrendering on feudal terms to a personal monarch as first lord. Such terms of submission, Burke pointed out, had to be categorically distinguished from the unconditional subjection of one people to another.Footnote ²⁶

The same analysis appears in Burke's Abridgement of English history: Dermot, king of Leinster, submitted to Henry II ‘as his feudatory’; the other Irish chieftains, along with Roderick, king of Connaught, did ‘homage’ to the English monarch.Footnote ²⁷ In ‘Hints of Ireland’, Burke makes a further revealing claim, to the effect that the contractual rules binding the Irish people to the English king were of a piece with the prevailing gothic law of nations applicable throughout Europe at the time. This same point, again, can be glimpsed in the Abridgement: ‘All the kingdoms on the Continent of Europe were governed nearly in the same form.’Footnote ²⁸ Connecting English politics and manners to wider European society implied a challenge to the assumptions underpinning ideas of the ancient English constitution. This served Burke's wider purpose, evident in ‘National character and parliament’, of debunking popular whig precepts about the antiquity of English liberty. This purpose was also conspicuous in Burke's An essay towards an history of the laws of England, which seems to have been composed as an appendix or introduction, or possibly in parallel, to the Abridgement. Here, he challenged the idea of the seamless historical progress of the common law, emphasizing instead the ‘remarkable revolutions’ to which it had been subjected, together with the European influences that had determined its advance.Footnote ²⁹ The ancient constitutionalist paradigm, Burke implied, had been erected into a whig piety that construed political liberty to be ‘as old as the nation’.Footnote ³⁰ It was against what he regarded as superannuated pieties of this kind that Burke began to direct his critical attention around 1757, and some of the fruits of this effort can be found in the political essays which he evidently undertook at the same time.

The essay on ‘National character and parliament’ is a case in point. Having established that British politics should be understood in terms of a conflict and balance of forces rather than in terms of leading personalities, Burke then considers those elements of public life which might ultimately subvert the existing order. He lists a number of factors commonly taken to pose such a threat – the state of the church, the national debt, and so on – before analysing long parliaments as a putative source of corruption. The purpose of the remaining portion of the essay is then dedicated to challenging this assumption, arguing that in fact long parliaments offer security against constitutional degeneration. The defence of short parliaments became a tory and indeed an opposition whig principle, as illustrated by Archibald Hutcheson's House of Commons speech against the repeal of triennial parliaments delivered in 1716: frequent parliaments, Hutcheson argued, were an integral provision of the ‘ancient Constitution’.Footnote ³¹ In this vein, nearly two decades later, it was declared in opposition to the Septennial Act that the ‘frequent rotation of Legislative Power’ was a principle of Saxon provenance, continued unaltered after the Norman conquest.Footnote ³² This was the line that had been developed by Bolingbroke around the British general election of 1734. As he put it in his Dissertation upon parties, the assembly of the Saxons operated ‘in nature and effect’ in much the same way as frequent parliaments which survived the Norman invasion.Footnote ³³ Such parliaments acted as a restraint upon power on the basis of their representative status. Burke's purpose in ‘National character’ is to show that constitutional restraint has an entirely different foundation.

Burke begins by conceding the apparent plausibility of the country party case, which Bolingbroke had been attempting to justify: long parliaments do seem to facilitate the workings of corruption, in the process imperilling the security of ‘publick Liberty’.Footnote ³⁴ With time, the executive is more able to understand the various interests of the members of the House of Commons, the better to adapt its allurements to their aspirations. On this assumption, the independence of parliaments is compromised by their duration, handing the initiative to the court. However, in the remaining part of ‘National character and parliament’, Burke sets about undermining this assumption, advancing a court whig case against the Bolingbrokean argument. Burke presumably accepted the Humean claim that the complete independence of parliament would upset the balance of the constitution by handing absolute authority to an already powerful House of Commons: some monarchical control over the activities of parliament was ‘necessary to the preservation of our mixed government’, Hume contended.Footnote ³⁵ The question then became one of how far this species of ‘corruption’ – or, simply, patronage – could be extended without reducing the House of Commons to abject dependence.Footnote ³⁶

Burke's argument in ‘National character and parliament’ was that longer parliaments fostered the means of counteracting this tendency towards dependence insofar as they developed a reliably corporate spirit. A deliberative political organ of the kind was liable to evolve its own self-consciousness over time, strengthening its sense of its standing and committing it to the defence of its privileges: ‘it becomes more of the nature of a Senate’, as Burke put it.Footnote ³⁷ The senatorial character of the House of Commons disposed it to view the king and his ministers with suspicion, thereby protecting its members from being co-opted as tools of the crown. Moreover, parliament was the source of alternative administrations, and so over a longer term it housed a succession of ministries. While an alternation of administrations over the duration of individual parliaments had not been a conspicuous feature of British parliamentary history between 1715 and 1754, it was a notable aspect of public life between the accession of Newcastle to the Treasury and the early stages of the Seven Years War. According to ‘National character and parliament’, such revolutions in the personnel of government ensured the creation of an opposition interest within the legislature, headed by politicians experienced in the arts of government, and thus prone to resort to political conspiracy, albeit in support of the public interest. Conspiratorial ‘intreagues’, ordinarily hatched for the purpose of constitutional subversion, could in the context of the British mixed system of government be made to serve the public good insofar as they brought the executive to book.Footnote ³⁸ Longer parliaments, in other words, promoted the development and facilitated the conduct of opposition parties which, by scrutinizing and criticizing public power, helped to bolster the tenacity of the more independent members of parliament even as they secured the support of court-oriented politicians through the promise of future ministerial office.

III

Implicit in Burke's argument is a defence of parties as integral to the balance of the constitution. It is perfectly clear, as the historiography has long emphasized, that such parties were not conceived of in the eighteenth century as operating without reference to the elements of personal monarchy that composed a vital component of the British system of government. Newcastle, Hardwicke, and Mansfield, as Namier commented, had no idea of ‘a party-government unconnected with the King’.Footnote ³⁹ Nonetheless, parties inevitably conspired to thwart the freedom of the crown by seeking its support on their own terms.Footnote ⁴⁰ For this reason, as Hume came to see matters in the period just after Burke's ‘National character and parliament’ was written, it may not be practicable, or indeed desirable, to abolish parliamentary parties in a ‘free government’.Footnote ⁴¹ Hume of course perfectly knew that parties could not bid for power by circumventing court politics; they could only limit the government's room for manoeuvre. As already shown, for Burke this was best done by appealing to what he thought of as the senatorial instincts of members of parliament. However, while appeals to parliamentarians in their senatorial capacity might block the court in the interest of the public, the parties championing such appeals were commonly viewed as motivated by partisan ambition and, as such, a factious element within the fabric of the constitution. In the first substantial pamphlet that he published after his admission to parliament, the Observations on a late state of the nation of 1769, Burke in effect acknowledged the threat posed by faction when, having recognized with Hume that ‘Party divisions’ were ‘things inseparable from free government’, he noted in the same breath that they could operate either ‘for good or evil’.Footnote ⁴² The question, then, was how they could be made to work for the common good.

The destructive effects of factionalism in a commonwealth was a prominent theme in Augustine's account of the dissensions of the Roman republic in The city of God, basing its case on a close examination of Sallust's Histories whilst exploiting a horror of party strife that had been publicized from Thucydides to Aristotle.Footnote ⁴³ However, since the Sallustian narrative of Roman history had been subject to careful criticism by Machiavelli in the Discourses, argument in favour of the constitutional propriety of political ‘dissensions’ had a powerful precedent in post-Classical literature. This Machiavellian strain of argument was carried into eighteenth-century British political discourse by radical whig polemicists like Toland and Moyle, reviving the association between liberty and party struggle.Footnote ⁴⁴ For Burke, the kind of struggle envisaged by the likes of Toland could never amount to anything other than factionalism, and so he set about establishing the dignity of party on less provocative foundations. As he put it in the Observations, it was incumbent upon parliamentary leaders to ‘act in party’ – to ‘take a decided part’ – whilst ensuring that the part they took ‘should be a sober one’.Footnote ⁴⁵

The fragmentary essay ‘On parties’ shows that Edmund Burke's interest in party as a means of moderating faction can be traced back to around 1757. The boldness of Burke's argument is partly due to particular doctrines that he is challenging. His argument does not merely seek to distinguish ‘party’ from ‘faction’, a distinction that, as seen, was evident in the neo-Machiavellianism of ‘True Whig’ radicals writing in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. Rather, the Burkean idea of party as it was worked out in 1757 is notable for its qualifications of both Bolingbroke and Hume. Burke begins his examination of the ‘State of the Parties’ with a plea for an analysis of underlying causes in public affairs to replace the standard procedure of ascribing responsibility for political difficulties to the actions of individual leaders. This theme was to reappear thirteen years later in Burke's Thoughts on the present discontents where the corruptions of the political system are identified as posing a greater danger to the state than the actions of ‘any individual person’.Footnote ⁴⁶ We have already noted how this conception is indebted to the science of politics developed by Hume and Montesquieu, and seen it operate in ‘National character and parliament’. In ‘On parties’, in the face of public lamentation over the recent ‘ill successes’ of British forces at the outset of the Seven Years War, Burke's audience is similarly urged to look beyond the plight of particular personalities and to focus on the ‘real causes’ to be found in the underlying arrangements.Footnote ⁴⁷ In preparation for his anatomy of those arrangements, Burke offers a conventional history of party strife between the Restoration and the Revolution, explaining how the religious and political antagonisms of tory and whig under Charles II were reconfigured by the advent of James II and then William III. In supporting opposition to the designs of a Stuart monarch whilst opposing the principle of resistance, toryism was caught between deference to royalty and opposition to a king. At the same time the whigs, in allying themselves with William of Orange, became sudden ‘friends of Royalty’ in the process of resisting a Stuart monarch.Footnote ⁴⁸

These paradoxical developments, while they gave rise to the rage of party in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, also contained the seeds of the demise of the original antagonisms. On the one hand, a confusion of political ideas together with the diminishing fortunes of Jacobitism completed the ‘Ruin’ of the Tories. On the other, the combination of the principle of resistance with the practice of submission reduced the idea of whiggism to ‘no better than a jest’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This narrative provides the backdrop to the middle of the 1750s where heated political battles between parliamentary factions are played out in the context of the disappearance of the grounds for disputes. ‘Three factions divided the ruling men of the nation’, as Burke characterized the divisions between Newcastle, Fox, and Pitt.Footnote ⁵⁰ On 20 November 1756, Burke's friend, Arthur Murphy, looked forward in the Foxite periodical, The Test, to a coalition ‘of our eminent statesmen’ as a means of softening the ‘resentments’ and ‘animosities’ that attended ‘faction’.Footnote ⁵¹ Burke was obviously happy to applaud the prospect of a triumph over faction, but he must have wondered how the resulting harmony would affect the constitution. Extreme divisiveness would threaten any commonwealth with disintegration but, equally, the absence of all opposition is a recipe for absolute authority. Burke's development of the idea of party is intended as a check upon the unaccountable exercise of sovereign power.

Whereas factions prosper under pure, ‘unmixed’ forms of government – as with the Blues and the Greens under the Byzantine Empire, the cabals of Caesar and Pompey under the Roman democracy, or the Yorkists and Lancastrians under the English monarchy – ‘party’ is a feature of constitutional government based on a legitimate opposition of forces. A party in this sense is a partisan affiliation dedicated to advancing the cause of one of the constituent elements in a mixed system of government with a view to preserving the whole. For this reason, ‘Party is always useful, faction always pernicious’ – a point, Burke emphasizes, ‘which has hardly been enough considered’.Footnote ⁵² In fact, it is a point that was not given any further articulation until the publication of Burke's own Observations on a late state of the nation and Thoughts on the present discontents of 1769 and 1770 respectively. Moreover, it is on this basis that the originality of Burke's idea of party has been established in the scholarly literature since.Footnote ⁵³ The so-called ‘eschatological’ defence of party as a means of putting an end to party divisions had been popularized by Bolingbroke, and continued to be advocated in the 1740s and beyond.Footnote ⁵⁴ However for Burke, as just seen, party is not a temporary expedient but ‘always useful’ in a free state.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the first four Letters of the Dissertation upon parties, Bolingbroke saw divisions within a polity as a residue of ignorance and superstition to be overcome by reason.Footnote ⁵⁶ This conception formed the basis for the supersession of factional strife by the extinction of party under a patriot monarchy as advocated by The idea of a patriot king some years later: ‘To espouse no party, but to govern like the common father of his people, is so essential to the character of a Patriot King’, as he put it.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet, this is the very programme that is dubbed ‘very problematical’ by Burke in ‘On parties’. It ‘might be imagined’, he wrote, that ‘we should be considerable gainers by this Extinction of Party’.Footnote ⁵⁸ But this would be a grossly erroneous assumption: parties are in fact essential for mobilizing political virtue since ‘a mere abstract notion of [the] publick’ is not sufficient to motivate concerted action whereas acting in partnership in the service of ‘some general Scheme & some fixed object’ sustains political collaboration.Footnote ⁵⁹ Burke identifies ‘principles of Government’ as exemplifying the kind of ‘fixed object’ he has in mind.Footnote ⁶⁰ Parties are partisan associations devoted to advancing the interest of one of the components of a mixed system of government in order to redress the threat of constitutional imbalance.

As Burke saw things in 1757, with the British constitution having apparently lurched towards a ‘perfect Democracy’, there was little hope of forming genuine parties out of the existing competing factions.Footnote ⁶¹ By 1770, however, with a court cabal seeming to Burke to threaten both the democratic and aristocratic elements of the constitution, the idea that a party of principle spearheaded by the Rockingham whigs might liberate parliament from the intrigues of faction had come to look like practicable politics.Footnote ⁶² There is a clear continuity of thought here beneath the change of circumstances. In both ‘On parties’ and the Thoughts on the present discontents, a party of principle is seen as an agent of constitutional balance in a parliamentary monarchy. This perception represents a departure from the arguments canvassed by David Hume who, perhaps more than any other thinker in eighteenth-century Britain, devoted considerable thought to the plight of political parties.Footnote ⁶³ ‘Parties from principle’, he wrote, ‘especially abstract speculative principles, are known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phœnomenon, that has yet appeared in human affairs.’Footnote ⁶⁴ It was to a contest of speculative principles of this kind that Hume attributed the descent into civil commotion that characterized the political struggles of seventeenth-century England. For Burke, on the other hand, the divergent principles that animated politics since the demise of Jacobitism had been purged of all aggravating fury. For this reason, as he put it in the Thoughts on the present discontents, parties formed around ‘leading general principles of Government’ could be depended upon to act as constitutional solvents rather than as instruments of division.Footnote ⁶⁵

Burke's assessment was in no sense an inversion of Hume's priorities as these had been formulated in the context of the 1740s. It was, instead, an alternative diagnosis of British constitutional stability applied to the period between the rise of Pitt to popularity in the early stages of the Seven Years War and the decline in the fortunes of Old Corps whiggism during the decade following the accession of George III. In this period, the key to constitutional harmony did not seem to Burke to lie in a campaign to moderate the climate of opinion, as Hume was still urging as late as 1758, so much as in a collision of competing principles whose friction would yield ‘an Appearance at least of something like moderate Counsels’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The articulation of the characteristically Burkean commitment to parties of principle as vehicles of moderation in the Thoughts on the present discontents not only constitutes an overwhelming argument in favour of Burke's authorship of ‘On parties’, it also illustrates the extent to which some of the pivotal arguments that he deployed during his career in parliament from 1766 had their basis in ideas he developed in the late 1750s.

IV

Richard Pares suggested that Burke constructed a ‘general theory’ of politics on the basis of lessons drawn from the career of the marquess of Rockingham.Footnote ⁶⁷ There is some truth in this observation – unsurprisingly, since what else, other than practical experience, could possibly lay the foundations for an empirical theory of politics? Nonetheless, the remark is crucially mistaken if it is taken to be an account of the derivation of Burkean principles from his parliamentary experience. Rather, Burke turned his attention to the development of general political principles during the mid- to late 1750s, formulating positions about British politics in a number of draft essays that have fortuitously survived in the papers of his closest friend from those years, William Burke, who was, as we know, in the habit of transcribing Edmund's writings at this time. The redeployment of Burkean ideas originally conceived in the mid-1750s in the context of parliamentary debates from the mid-1760s onwards can be charted with certainty: for example, it is possible to observe the survival of political precepts formulated in Burke's signed draft on ‘National character and parliament’ into the Thoughts on the present discontents. One instance of this is the description of the House of Commons in its representative capacity as a ‘Procurator’ in both ‘National character and parliament’ and the Thoughts on the present discontents, as well as an account in each of the Septennial Act as having conferred upon parliament the character of a ‘Senate’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this vein, we have already traced Burke's conception of party, famously promulgated in 1770, to the essay ‘On parties’ of 1757. Finally, it is likewise possible to observe the impact of principles outlined by Burke in the final essay to be dealt with here – the ‘Considerations on a militia’ of March 1757 – on his later political thought.

Towards the end of the central section of his Thoughts on the present discontents, Burke considers the issue of a Place Bill in British politics, a topic with a continual history of parliamentary controversy since the middle of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁶⁹ In a pamphlet like Burke's Thoughts whose basic concern is with the corrupting effects of royal influence upon parliament, criticism of parliamentary office-holders is surely to be expected, yet, despite this, there is a clear wariness about any attempt to disconnect ‘such mighty and important bodies as the military and naval establishments’ from parliament. ‘It were better, perhaps’, Burke commented, ‘that they should have a corrupt interest in the forms of the constitution, than that they should have no interest at all.’Footnote ⁷⁰ The idea of cleansing parliament of military officers in a general sweep of placemen provoked a similar alarm in Burke in his ‘Considerations of the militia’: ‘This shews how little they understood the Genius of our Constitution or how little they regarded it, who would have thrust out of the house of Commons all Officers of the Army, & all other Persons who hold Places under the Crown’.Footnote ⁷¹ The reasons for this are given in detail in the essay, in which Burke presents an elaborate account of how the standing army ought, as he put it, to be seen as a ‘legal Army’.Footnote ⁷² The legality of the army to Burke is a function of its constitutional regulation, in turn maintained by a balance of interests. Depriving the military of its interest in the current constitutional balance risked subverting the established order of the state. On the other hand, as things then stood, the officers of the army had more reason on the basis of their ‘particular Interest’ to be well disposed to the constitution than any other body of men in the kingdom.Footnote ⁷³

Burke's defence of the standing army as a properly constitutional force adapted to the provisions of the Revolution settlement was intended as a rebuke to a long-standing tradition of radical whig and country party demands for the re-establishment of the militia.Footnote ⁷⁴ These demands were based on a contention dating back to the New Model Army and surviving into the reign of William III that standing armies were liable to subvert national liberty while the militia armed the people against encroachment by the state.Footnote ⁷⁵ This issue, having persisted as a controversial topic in English and Scottish public life since the middle of the seventeenth century, came once more to occupy the centre of debate in the run up to the Seven Years War.Footnote ⁷⁶ On 8 December 1755, George Townshend moved in the House of Commons for a consideration of the current state of the militia laws, leading to the introduction of a bill for their reform, which duly passed in the lower house on 10 May. However, the measures contained in the bill met with resistance in the Lords, sparking a significant debate on its third reading on 24 May, with Hardwicke and Granville leading the opposition. Although the bill was successfully resisted at this stage, the issue returned with a vengeance after the British loss of Minorca to the French the following June. This cleared the way for a new bill, introduced into the House of Commons on 26 January 1757, reaching its third reading on 25 March.Footnote ⁷⁷ It was presumably in response to these developments that Burke set about composing his ‘Considerations on a militia’, reiterating elements of the opposition to the bill articulated in the House of Lords.

Burke's objections to the proposed militia share certain features of the court whig opposition to Townshend's bill, especially as voiced in the Lords by Hardwicke in 24 May 1756. Hardwicke's worries stemmed from the prospect of a constitutional collision between parliament and the crown over the terms for summoning and deploying the militia. Implicitly criticizing the duke of Bedford, he lamented the militarization of society, which he assumed was likely to follow from the circulation of large numbers of men through the ranks of a citizen army. It would be far better, he contended, to organize national defence through a specialized fighting force while the bulk of the population were ‘formed, and habituated, to trade, manufactures, and arts’.Footnote ⁷⁸ But above all he was anxious that the ‘scale of power’ was progressively leaning towards the ‘democratical side’ in the British system of government, and a bill, such as that being proposed, which appeared to increase the powers of the House of Commons, threatened to reawaken the controversies of the seventeenth century. While Burke's concern was more about avoiding the isolation of the army from all branches of the constitution save the one that had ‘the disposal of offices’, he shared with Hardwicke a sense that the basic issue was one of constitutional propriety.Footnote ⁷⁹ Burke's fundamental argument was that the maintenance of this propriety through the system of checks and balances perfected at the Revolution, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and entrenched by the Act of Settlement, offered the best means of securing liberty, whereas popular resistance via a militia looked both antiquated and ineffective.

Advocates of the militia frequently promoted it as a means of reinforcing the standing army, yet Burke sensed that this was merely a ruse for replacing the one with the other. In countries, such as Sweden, where both types of military establishment were apparently harmoniously combined, the militia was in reality subordinate to the regular forces. This subordination was a product of the demise of the feudal organization of military defence on which militias were originally based. The passing of the ‘feudal Armies’, especially in England, had been accompanied by the emergence of forms of political regulation that owed more to constitutional restraint than to violent resistance, thereby obviating the need to take up arms ‘on every real or pretended Infringement’ of popular privilege.Footnote ⁸⁰ In reality, Burke went on, attempts to bolster liberty through the protection offered by an armed populace is better seen as a remnant of those ‘times of Rudeness’ before the dominance of commercial society than as an attribute of a properly civil society.Footnote ⁸¹

The historical perspective underlying this judgement is one which Burke had evidently been developing at this time, as is apparent from his attack on the ancient constitutionalism employed to support the idea of the antiquity of English liberty in his Essay towards an history of the laws of England. Here, again, modern liberty is sharply distinguished from the ‘crude institutions’ that underwrote the ages of ‘rudeness’.Footnote ⁸² In this spirit, in his Abridgement of English history, Burke criticized the ‘military and licentious manners’ that predominated under the feudal institutions grafted on to Saxon culture after the Norman conquest.Footnote ⁸³ Since the Abridgement was commissioned a month before the ‘Considerations on a militia’ was written, the combined evidence of these works indicates Burke's interest in developing a historical vision of English politics at this time, adapting the lessons of Montesquieu to domestic concerns. Within the inherited framework of an historical science of politics, Burke was nonetheless determined to develop his own principles and conclusions. Having been commissioned to write a short history of England in February 1757, it is unimaginable that Burke did not study the first two installments of Hume's History which appeared in 1754 and 1756 respectively. In fact, it seems likely that it was this work that inspired Burke to base his analysis of English politics on an account of the past that transcended the partisanship of earlier histories.Footnote ⁸⁴

Hume's History must also have confirmed Burke in his commitment to the idea of the modernity of English liberty, a perception that underlies the argument of ‘Considerations on a militia’. That idea likewise found classic expression in Hume's essay ‘Of luxury’ that appeared in the Political discourses of 1752, where the progress of freedom is traced to the decline of feudal subjection tied to the predominance of agricultural production: ‘In rude unpolished nations, where the arts are neglected, all labour is bestowed on the cultivation of the ground; and the whole society is divided into two classes, proprietors of land, and their vassals or tenants’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Because the modern House of Commons, on which British liberty depends, owes its power to the sum of its property, modern freedom has to be explained in terms of a shift in the balance of property determined by the steady ‘encrease of commerce’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Even so, elsewhere in the Political discourses, Hume implied that the security of popular institutions was best underwritten by an armed body of citizens, citing Sweden as an example of this arrangement.Footnote ⁸⁷

It seems likely that Burke felt obliged to orientate his thinking by way of offering refinements to aspects of Hume's arguments. Accordingly, the case he mounts in ‘Considerations on a militia’ adopts its own distinct emphasis on the perils that have accompanied the passage from the antiquated rudeness of feudal society to modern civil existence based around concentrations of urban merchants, artisans, and labourers animated by a ‘mutinous and turbulent spirit’. In fact, a territorial state such as Britain, comprising diverse commercial centres linked together by networks of trade, ought rightly to be seen as ‘one great manufacturing City’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Since an arrangement of this kind facilitates the spread of sedition, distributing arms among the populace seemed to Burke a recipe for popular insurrection. Given that revisions to the militia bill in 1757 included arrangements for ‘altering the Custody of Arms from the Church Wardens to the Serjeants’, Burke was not alone in this worry.Footnote ⁸⁹ With an upsurge in food riots and civil unrest across England in 1756–7, there were immediate reasons to be wary about opportunities for escalating disturbances.Footnote ⁹⁰ As Burke would later emphasize in his writings on revolutionary France, the politicization of discontent only needed the support of armed militants to threaten the political order with dissolution.

V

The essays examined in this article were written during a period for which only two pieces of Burke correspondence survive. The discovery of new materials that he composed in 1757 therefore enhances our understanding of his intellectual biography. However, the importance of the essays presented here is still greater insofar as they point to Burke's involvement in the development of ideas about party, parliament, and the union after the completion of the Account of the European settlements in America and the Philosophical enquiry, around the time when he was undertaking to write his Abridgement of English history and to edit the Annual register. This body of work shows that some of the positions that later characterized his style of political analysis were thrashed out in the period before he entered public life. This poses a challenge to the old Namierite idea that the key to Edmund Burke is to be found in his opportunism, and that his rhetoric merely rationalizes an attitude of unabashed expediency. These writings also show Burke developing an approach to public affairs rooted in an enlightenment science of politics. In developing this approach, it is clear that Burke did not straightforwardly look to Montesquieu or Hume for inspiration, in the sense of seeking to act as a conduit for their ideas. Instead, he applied the kind of historical approach exhibited in their work to circumstances he himself encountered, arriving at his own estimation of the dangers and opportunities presented by modern politics. Over time, circumstances changed, and Burke was obliged to tailor his insights to fit the unfolding situation. For instance, the opportunity which the idea of party seemed to offer as a form of protection against faction in 1770 gave way to an overwhelming preoccupation with the destructive factionalism of revolutionary cabals in the 1790s.Footnote ⁹¹ At that point, a long-standing concern about popular militancy stretching back to 1757 re-emerged as an issue whose treatment in the Reflections on the revolution in France and beyond would make Burke a pivotal figure in the history of European thought and politics.

FOUR ESSAYS BY EDMUND BURKE

Note on editorial procedure: Original spelling has been retained throughout. Where punctuation has been modified for ease of reading, this is indicated by square brackets, as are all other editorial interventions and conjectures. Two of the essays below were originally untitled. For convenience, these have been given working titles in square brackets. The first letters of new sentences appear in lower case in the original. These have now been capitalized throughout.

1 [NATIONAL CHARACTER AND PARLIAMENT]

It is always the effect of freedom to give those who enjoy it an high & Impatient Spirit: as such a Spirit sooner or later certainly produces freedom where it is not checked by Powers that no Spirit can overcome.

Under Absolute Governments the Ability[,] the Experience, & even that unlimited Authority may extend the Power of a Nation very considerably[,] let the Spirit & temper of the People be almost what they will: People in Slavery have no Character of their own & therefore may be formed to almost any Character, & they may retain it for some time, but the Power of a free People will always depend on their own proper Turn, Temper & Genius; if this lastFootnote ⁹² be little[,] which is indeed rarely the Case, in that Circumstance no art, no Abilities of Particular Men can make such a state emerge or if it should emerge it dies away with the temporary Cause of its emerging, if otherwise, the Genius of the people supplies every other Defect. I take this to be very much the Case with respect to the People of Great Britain.Footnote ⁹³ They have ever had an haughty Spirit, and idea of their own Superiority, & a steadiness even to obstinacy in the Pursuit of their own Designs. On this wild stock some of our Noblest Virtues have been engrafted & to thatFootnote ⁹⁴ our success & the Glory of our Country has principally been owing. We have had no such series of Wars as to give us a great Experience in them & yet we have been generally successful & neither the Courage nor the Discipline of our troops has fallen into Contempt among nations the most famous for their Military Skill. However we may have been exceeded in the Number & Capacity of the Generals of other Nations we have been unrivalled in our Soldiery. This made the distinguishing Character of the People of Rome, & a principal Cause of the greatness of that Commonwealth. Sallust indeed depreciates the general Character of his Countrymen & attributes all their Glory to the Virtues & Capacity of particular men. But whoever considers the uniformity of the Designs of that Commonwealth, reflects upon a Scheme carried on with the same Spirit through so many ages & in such a Variety of Conjunctures & fortunes, & remarks that peculiar Colour that falls upon all their Actions, which distinguishes & marks them for Roman[,] must necessarily be led to think that some Causes operating more generally & steadily than the Genius of particular Men must have been the Causes of it. This could only be the Genius & Character of the Roman People: which rather influenced that of their General[s] than was influenced by theirs. If it had been otherwise the National Character must have admitted many more changes than it was ever known to do. Thebes became considerable during the Life of Epaminondas but when he died, nothing but its great & sudden fall & its serving as a perpetual Illustration of what a great Genius can do with any people has made it memorable.

Athens[,] which made so splendid a Figure under Cimon & Themistocles[,] was altogether as contemptible when the Armies were headed by [name missing] whereas the same Character appeared in all the fortunes of the Romans, whilst they continued a People. Whatever other points of Difference may be found between the People of Rome & Britain they agree in that haughtiness & superiority & that fixedness of a sudden Resolution which foreigners distinguish at the first Glance. We should undoubtedly be great losers if this disposition suffered any considerable Change & perhaps if it admitted any temperament, but as it is in our Minds that the passions which work most powerfully for our preservation may in some Cases exert the same Power for our Destruction, & as the same wise & excellent order that preserves our Bodies from sickness or even cures it, works, when it takes a wrong turn as effectually to destroy it, so may this spirit that gave birth to & supports our Liberty be one dayFootnote ⁹⁵ its overthrow.

What evils irremediable? An unsuccessful War the best time of curing Grievances, because People are more disposed to cure what they smart under, & being in a bad Situation, makes them bear desperate remedies. House of C. Ministers. Reformation of the Constitution. Settling a civil Police. The Debt. The Morals of the People. The Church. Elections in the K. B. Preventing all associations.

A long Continuance of the same Parliament gives those who have Designs on the publick Liberty a better means of corrupting it: as in a considerable Space of time they may come to know the tempers & Circumstances of every person who composes that Body, so well that they may adapt their allurements to them in such a manner as scarce ever to fail.

On the other hand it may be considered that when a Parliament sits a long time it becomes more ofFootnote ⁹⁶ the nature of a Senate: it begins to have an Interest of its own as a Body: & all men are more tenacious & jealous of such an Interest, than when they act as procurators for others, however honest & well meaning they may be. This senat[or]ial Interest is very contrary to that of an ambitious Prince or Minister & it often coincides with that of the People, at least the People cannot suffer a great deal whilst there is a Contest between the different Parts of the Constitution. Their danger is when they join in a scheme against the Common good, or when one has totally subdued the other as in Henry the 8ths time who had the Parliament subjected, & in the long Parliament when the royal authority was destroyed.

Again when a Parliament sits a long time it may live to see Successions of Ministers[.] The ou[s]ted Minister has suppose formed an Interest in the house. He may & probably will make use of that Interest to oppose & counterwork his successors: & by this means turn those intreagues which were designed for the detriment of his Country to its Service & Preservation.

In such Revolutions it can scarce happen but that many Senators shall themselves have filled Employments. This will make those who on any occasion are displaced more critical on those who have supplanted them & by being all versed in the Evil arts & Practised or that may be practised, they may the better detect & bring to justice the Persons in Power for any abuse of their trust. They will search every sore to the bottom & keep a watchful & severe Eye on everything relating to the Publick Affairs.

It may be said, a Prince if he find a Parliament less compliant than his designs require may dissolve it, & so bring a Parliament whether long or short to the same issue – I answer[:]

1^st It is true he may but this objection lies equally against every parliament under the limits of our Constitution.

2ndly If he should the People have all the advantage of Experience either to amend or confirm their old Choice & the Court all the Disadvantages of untried Men to deal with[.]

3. Princes have so often found the sad Consequence of dissolving one Parliament in hopes of finding the next more passive that they will hardly ever attempt that Course again & if they do they will find the very same mischiefs to attend it.

2 HINTS OF IRELAND

It is in the Histories of that time that the Irish Princes did Homage and sware fealty to H[enry]2.

From the nature of Homage & fealty we may derive some light on the kind of Power by them transferred.

1. On doing Homage the Vassal became man to his Lord for the lands he held; so that by this he excluded all other power & for the same Lands, could do no Homage to any other person without a saving to the first Lord.

2. This Homage was a thing personal which could not be transferred nor used nor paid by money – therefore – by doing Homage to H[enry]2 as their Chief Lord, they excluded all other jurisdiction. Nor did they by this act, nor could they by the nature of it, bind themselves to any other than H[enry] & his heirs.

3. Tho they thus owned him as their Lord, yet they did not give him absolute power over them. For the Homage they did & the fealty they swore to him, was for their Land so that if he attempted to take away or arbitrarily dispose of that, the Homage ceased of course & they were dispensed from their oath & the obligation of the land & ten[an]t was held so mutual that when the ten[ant] property was at the Lords will, as in the case of villain tenures, then Homage was never used, as a thing useless & trifling.

4. But suppose the Irish chiefs never so willing to do this Homage & to submit themselves to the people of England: I can[']t conceive how they could have done it because the parl[ia]m[en]t of England is not a Body corporate capable of taking any thing & supposing it were, yet no corporation consisting of Many persons, is capable of receiving or doing Homage. So that in fact they only placed themselves in the Condition of the Kings other subjects in England, & France, absolutely independent of any other power whatever.

5.Footnote ⁹⁷ What I have laid down will help to clear-up all those Arguments used to assert the Subjection of I[reland] to E[ngland] founded on the right of Conquest. For whether they submitted willingly or to irresistible force when they performed the aforesaid Acts, a compact was created between them, & the conqueror, by the nature & necessary implication of the Acts themselves; as I have shewed already; besides having once yielded themselves Vassals to one, as the highest power; they had it not in their choice to chuse any other Lord; without Breach of faith, & Treason ag[ain]st the first; so that neither expressly nor tacitly could they have been supposed to give the People of England, any power over their Lives, Liberties, or Estates.

6.Footnote ⁹⁸ It may be objected that these Arguments are drawn from the Laws of Engl[and] & therefore will be no rule in the Irish controversies between Nations, not subject to the same Laws. To this it may be answered:

1^st that neither these tenures nor the Rules by which they are governed, were peculiar to England but in force in every place where the Gothic Rules [?] got any footing.

2. that tho the practice had not been known out of Eng[land]; yet when the K[ing] demanded a Submission in the same form, as used in his other dominions, it must be supposed that it was the same in substance too & as it was attended with the like services that it partook like privileges.

3 [ON PARTIES]

CONSIDERATIONS ON A MILITIA