1The Reception of Burke in Ireland
Edmund Burke said ‘that eventually newspapers would govern the country’.1 The point is as moot in the late eighteenth-century context as it is in the early twenty-first, but there is no doubt that they played a major role in governing his reputation – forging ‘the opposer of the omnipotency of the British Parliament over its dependencies in America’ and ‘the avowed scourge of tyrannic governors in the more remote regions of the East’, just as they reduced him to the state of ‘mental derangement’ that allegedly engendered the writing of his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).2 Looking at how Burke was received in Ireland in the pages of this consumer item is clearly a very different way of approaching his Irish identity from the tacks taken by the likes of Connor Cruise O’Brien, Louis Cullen, Katherine O’Donnell and Luke Gibbons.3 This essay is not about asserting any kind of Irish influence, inflection or agenda in his writings, but rather trying to assess the ways in which Burke’s variegated career was absorbed in Ireland. As his career and interests were nearly as wide-ranging as the possible Irish audiences that are worth considering, it is important, in the first instance, to be realistic about what might be achievable.
As hinted at above, the newspaper has been selected as the primary mode of getting to grips with the way in which Burke was received by Irish public opinion. There are problems here. It is, for the most part, reflective of the Irish urban experience – it would be dangerous to assume anything of views in rural, Gaelic-speaking Ireland using this evidence. Much of the readership may also have been Protestant, and certainly government-funded titles may not have reflected anything other than the views of the printer and those who paid him. Even the most popular title of the period, the Northern Star, would have had a readership, using the most generous of calculations, of 40,000 (O’Brien 1998, 17). Nevertheless a focus upon the way in which a certain representation of Burke was received by a popular press that was negotiating its way through complicated Whiggish agendas – whether government supporting or opposing – can be potentially revealing. The British parliamentary opposition had never been particularly sure-footed in its engagement with Irish politics, and Burke’s pamphleteering for the Whigs did not always help their cause. But at least some of the issues that dominated his early political career were clearly Irish patriotic winners: Wilkes and Liberty; commercial reform; the American war. Even Burke’s support for Catholic Relief seemed to chime with a shift in the Irish zeitgeist in the late 1770s, as many newspapers called for restrictions on Catholics to be removed and Volunteer regiments allowed Catholics to join up. As with so many features of the Irish political landscape in this period, however, it was the crystallization of Protestant Ascendancy after the failure of parliamentary reform that would create a shift in the way that Burke’s work was received. Just as a sharper divide between clubs, newspapers and politicians emerged, so did a split in the way that Burke could be interpreted.
In an important re-reading of Burke, Luke Gibbons argues that Burke’s politics of the sublime ‘affords the possibility of a more grounded, ethnographic Enlightenment, sensitive to cultural differences, inherited loyalties, and the contingencies of time and place’. He continues: ‘Though easily construed as a counter-Enlightenment, it offers the possibility of an alternative vision of social change which questions the logic that modernity only extends to the victors, leaving the powerless casualties of history in its wake’ (Gibbons 2003, xiii). Whether this makes any sense in the urban public sphere of Dublin is an interesting question (and in some ways it does).4 But while Gibbons’s work necessarily privileges the Ireland of Burke’s ancestors, it is of course important to recognize that Burke was the archetypal urbane, civil society creature – clubman, writer for newspapers, imbiber in taverns, closely connected to dozens of figures identified by Roy Porter as of critical importance in his later eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In Ireland support for the press was a necessity for any patriot writer; significantly Burke even termed the United Irish newspapers as ‘rational, manly and proper’.5 But if we are looking to find Burke’s intellectual universe within them, or indeed other organs, then, as we shall see, there are complications. Indeed it is clear that in this context British newspapers may have been more attuned to Burke. Like Henry Bate’s Morning Herald, for example, Burke was an inheritor of the civic humanist tradition and would have inveighed against those straying outside of accepted norms – dissenters, political radicals, republicans, enlightenment philosophes, the enthusiastic (in religion or fashion). As we will see, the cross-over between British and Irish newspapers was exceptionally important in this period – but in some areas there would always be a particular Irish inflection. With this in mind, this essay will trace the way the Irish reception of Burke altered and bifurcated as his career was buffeted by the revolutionary events that dominated the second half of the eighteenth century. Ultimately the French Revolution resulted in a seismic shift in political life that would find a Burke who might have claimed that true reasoned control over one’s passions was the preserve of the propertied elite become ridiculed for his own hysterical predilections.
The Enquiry and John Wilkes
In the Irish context above all it makes little sense to see the response to Burke simply in terms of his political life during the revolutionary period. From the publication of his Enquiry onwards he was a figure of note and comment. To the Belfast News-Letter in 1765 he was ‘Author of a celebrated performance on the Sublime and Beautiful’.6 Indeed much of his later output was seen in Ireland through the lens of this earlier activity – hence he was in 1794 the ‘sublime Mr Burke’ – and his interest in aesthetics did not always redound to his advantage.7 Mary Wollstonecraft claimed that his definitions of beauty in the Enquiry idealized weak and helpless women (Lock 1998, 111). Such a fascination with these unworthy beings also degraded men, and, according to Wollstonecraft, denoted unmanliness and effeminacy (Fulford 1999, 56). If we begin earlier than this, then the Burke held up for ridicule by Wollstonecraft was a very different animal to the image of the young man who entered Trinity College Dublin aged 14. College, club and associational life were arenas in which we can find a patriotic, manly Burke. Indeed Burke began his career in the rough and tumble of Dublin street politics. Two of the most notorious riots involving Trinity College students took place while Burke was an undergraduate and Burke played a minor role in the Gentleman versus Players, or ‘Kelly’ riots of January 1747. However if we are considering the reception of Burke in the press then this early version of Burke does not appear to have made much of an impact, beyond an awareness of his Irish education. Indeed in a reflective piece published in 1786 even the Enquiry is airbrushed out of his career: ‘Mr Ed. Burke, made his first appearance in public life at the time of the repeal of the Stamp Act in the year 1766.’8 This particular potted history was most concerned with Burke’s support for Irish free trade, and it made much of his determination to support an extension of Irish commerce against the views of his Bristol constituents. Such a position was heralded much earlier in his career. In a meeting of Burke’s own Dublin club in 1747 the topics for discussion included free trade, support for the linen and woollen industries, and the evils of absenteeism (Lock 1998, 48). This latter point was one of the few hostile barbs aimed at Burke in the 1786 Irish appraisal – his failure to reside in Ireland and add lustre to the Irish Commons.9 His role – as loyal Rockinghamite party man – in undermining the proposed Irish absentee tax of 1773 might also have been mentioned.10
The Freeman’s Journal, patriotic but bullishly Protestant in its earliest incarnation, linked Burke’s aesthetics to his support for Catholic relief, and took a side-swipe at his recently awarded pension. If the viceroy had not laid the basis for ‘refining our language in a certain pension to a certain author’, then ‘the Roman Catholics, the Body of the Nation, would have lost a zealous Advocate and Private Agent with G[overnment] and our young S[enators], tho’ desirous of distinguishing themselves in Oratory, would have lost the Opportunity of improving from those delicate touches of the Sublime and the Beautiful, with which some particular speeches were bespangled in the last S[ession]’.11 The article was as mocking of Burke’s subject matter as it was contemptuous of his pro-Catholic stance. Here, however, Burke’s person was merged into the personality of the unpopular chief secretary, the calculating William Gerard Hamilton; it was he who had delivered Burke’s carefully crafted speeches in the Irish Commons. Luke Gibbons sees the execution of Nicholas Sheehy, on Whiteboyism charges, as a major incident in the formation of Burke’s views on the sublime, and most particularly the body in pain (Gibbons 2003a, xii). Later agitators for Catholic relief also expressed views on his Enquiry, ‘including, in the 1790s, both Thomas Russell and Wolfe Tone, Russell being particularly positive’ (Gibbons 2003a, 13).
Much of the Irish reception of Burke in the late 1760s and early 1770s would have been filtered through the controversies involving John Wilkes. A good deal of this material, as might be expected, was cut and pasted from British newspapers, though of course the precise newspapers chosen for source material can be indicative of particular sympathies. Burke’s oratorical skills would clearly have been noted. Reflecting on his emergence after his connection was forged with Rockingham, the Belfast News-Letter claimed that ‘his mind abounds with a luxuriance of imagery, clothed in language of the most delicate and elegant nature’, though this was backed up with ‘the most solid and weighty arguments’.12 His activities on behalf of the petitioning movement – in defence of Wilkes and opposition to the Grafton ministry – particularly in Buckinghamshire, featured an hour-long speech ‘in a pure, eloquent, and rhetorical manner, truly Ciceronian, which he is well known to be master of’.13
In the late 1760s and early 1770s the Freeman’s Journal (the Hibernian Journal and Dublin Evening Post were formed later in the 1770s) remained the most serious organ of Irish opposition politics. The controversial Townshend administration had polarized Ireland, and Wilkite politics became enmeshed in this. In his defence of John Wilkes, Burke opposed the use of General Warrants and wanted a parliamentary enquiry into the massacre at St George’s Fields. His speeches were invariably filtered through to the Irish newspaper reading public through the Freeman’s Journal. Though it is difficult to prove absolutely the source of the Commons debates, or other material relating to Burke, it is clear that the London Evening Post and the Middlesex Journal were sources utilized. The former was the source for Burke’s tale ‘of some Mice who held a Consultation what to do with a Cat that tormented them; they voted that the Cat should be tied up, to prevent her Depredations for the future, but unfortunately forgot how to tie him up’.14
Burke’s speeches on Wilkes focused both on the application of arbitrary powers by the state, and its general incompetence. The Freeman’s Journal reported Burke’s repartee with North in the opening of the budget, most likely in this case taken from the Middlesex Journal. North said that the opposition had ‘contrived to lead the House into such Dilemmas, that they could not be moderate, without being accused of Timidity; or vigorous without being charged with oppression’. Burke’s reply was that
most People, who had been brought into Dilemmas, were content to take only one Part of the evil Alternative; but this Ministry manage Matters so, as to fall into both the Evil Extremes. They had, with great Dexterity, contrived to be at once remiss and rigorous; but in such a Manner, that their Moderation should always evidently appear to the World the Effect of Fear, and their Rigour the Effect of Injustice.15
Of course Burke was not always singled out. Again on the budget the Freeman’s Journal noted that ‘Mr Burke, Col. Barré, and Mr Thomas Townshend, spoke … with their usual Eloquence’;16 and Burke’s Irish counterpart, the Chathamite Col. Issac Barré, MP for Chipping Wycombe, was probably toasted more frequently than Burke in Irish patriotic clubs in the 1770s. Obviously some parliamentary reporting tended to be fairly functional in nature and reproduced across many government and opposition titles. But the Wilkite material involving Burke, as reported in the Freeman’s Journal, often went a good deal further than this; in part because its source was frequently the Middlesex Journal. Burke was named in a list of 159 gentleman, ‘the standing Toast in all public Companies, and are Friends to the happy Constitution, and the Liberties of the People’.17 Discussion of the riots that attended the arrest of Richard Oliver in late March 1771 saw Burke described as one of the gentlemen ‘who distinguished themselves most in Favour of the Lord Mayor, and in support of the People’.18 An important point to note here is that when parliamentary debates were taken from the British press featuring Burke during this period, they usually concluded with political inflections and asides.19 The only Irish newspaper that showed any consistent opposition to Wilkes and his followers was the government-supporting Dublin Mercury, and here Burke was again featured in Wilkes’s coterie; for example in a list of ‘bankrupts in patriotism’, which included ‘Ed. Burke, pamphleteer’.20
Burke’s more obviously party work, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), dealing with Wilkes, but also, in terms of the Rockinghamites’ fortunes, the notion of a double cabinet, was said to have been popular in Ireland. As Charles O’Hara put it: ‘no work of yours was ever so greedily read, nor so much applauded. Few understand it, but ‘tis the fashion to like it.’21 And here it is important to emphasize that Burke’s commitment to traditions of Whiggish liberty was a key element of his public profile – one that was received in Ireland. Indeed, Rockinghamite pamphlets like Thoughts can be regarded as, if not team efforts, then certainly bearing the mark of a party editorial policy (Brewer 1971, 483–84). Outside of the attractions of his party links Burke was, in many ways, a bad match for the brand of Whiggery that infused Irish patriotism in this period. Cromwell was regularly toasted at Irish dinner tables and the Protestant celebratory calendar would carry through into Orangism. Burke noted of this: ‘One would not think that decorum, to say nothing of policy, would permit them to call up, by magic charms, the grounds, reasons, and principles of those terrible confiscatory and exterminatory periods.’22 But in his early career he would have found himself toasting those very same Whig heroes – the memory of John Hampden for example during the petitioning movement in 1769.23 In 1788 Irish newspapers reported on a Whig Club meeting on the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution. Burke was in attendance and his fellow Irishman Richard Brinsley Sheridan was entrusted with ‘paying an eloquent tribute to the memory of our immortal deliverer WILLIAM the Third’. The same meeting saw the Revolution Society communicate to the Whig Club that it intended to press for a bill to make the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution a day of national thanksgiving.24 Nathan Wallace argues that Burke’s Whiggery ‘is a career-spanning practice of cultural and political border-crossing between his native Irishness and his adoptive Englishness’ (Wallace 2006, 134); a view that crucially allows for both the Burke that saw the Glorious Revolution, at least in Britain, as the ‘essential constitutional moment’ (Donlan 2006, 72), and the same individual who in the Irish context despised the same tenets enshrined within Protestant Ascendancy. This perhaps goes to the heart of the nature of Whiggery in late eighteenth-century Ireland, and its bifurcation over Catholic relief – an issue that saw Burke straddle both a tolerant, corrective, Whiggism, and its loyalist, anti-Enlightenment counterpart.25
Free trade, America and Warren Hastings
In the context of Irish public opinion the American War was probably more important in defining Burke as a supporter of Irish free trade than anything associated more directly with the American colonists’ cause. In this arena Burke had made his proto-nationalistic chauvinism evident at a very early stage. His articles for the Reformer, a newspaper established with his clubmates, focused on the way in which Ireland neglected home grown talent, preferring English imports (Lock 1998, 59). Burke also spent the 1760s and 1770s campaigning for Irish commercial relief, a principled stance that would go a long way towards ensuring that he lost his Bristol seat; a consequence noted by the Irish press:
Never, perhaps, did our admired countryman, Mr Burke, appear to greater advantage, than on the Hustings at Bristol, delivering his valedictory speech to ungrateful, jobbing electors, Never, scarcely, can constituents appear in a more contemptible light, than those Bristoleans, when parting with a representative, whose attachment to liberty and extensive patriotism they could not comprehend, and would not support!26
Despite this sacrifice, Burke’s patriotic image would eventually be tarnished by his attitudes towards Irish Free Trade. In part this was because his actions as an Irish patriot were constrained by his allegiance to patron and party. But Burke was genuinely uneasy about Ireland’s anti-importation associations, though when Camden planned to term them as ‘threatening’ in Parliament, he was ‘wholly against the argumentative part of the motion’, regarding it as ‘most highly indiscreet and dangerous’.27 More significant for his reputation was his response to North’s concession of a generous Free Trade package. The Dublin Evening Post reminded its readers: ‘The men of this land should recollect how Fox, Burke, and others of that gang, “drooped their heads in silence”, when our rights were acknowledged in a British House of Commons.’28 It sardonically asked: ‘Did Burke, tho’ our countryman, exert himself in our cause?’29 The Irish patriot leader Henry Flood defended Burke, but the Irish patriot press found it difficult to forgive the British Whigs, and the event, and perhaps more importantly its press coverage, was significant enough to propel William Drennan, future United Irishman, to write his A Letter to Edmund Burke Esq; by Birth an Irishman, by Adoption an Englishman (1780). Worse still, in 1784 Burke backed Fox’s rather conniving approach to Pitt’s trade proposals, making it seem that his support for Irish commercial expansion was wavering. In that year when it was rumoured that Burke might travel to Ireland as chief secretary to the viceroy the Hibernian Journal referred sardonically to ‘our beloved countryman, Edmund Burke, who wept at Britain’s humiliation, when she gave Ireland a free trade’.30
In general terms the Rockingham and then the Foxite Whigs played the Volunteers, the paramilitary body that had a major role in campaigning for free trade, very badly, perpetually unsure whether to regard them as a threat to British liberty, or fellow Whigs to be congratulated. The Duke of Portland’s attempt to subvert the Volunteers through the fencible scheme, followed by the assertive policies of the Fox–North coalition meant that by 1784 the British Whigs were in particularly bad odour. The Hibernian Journal referred to ‘the very extraordinary Contempt with which they treated the Address from the whole Volunteer Army of Ireland’.31 In comparison with Shelburne, who was savaged in the Irish press for his comments on the Volunteers, Burke was a little more circumspect, but his speech on the Volunteers on 12 March 1779, reported in the Irish press, unintentionally juxtaposed Ireland’s beloved Volunteers with Burke’s reputation for histrionics. Burke, ‘in great agitation of spirits which seemed nearly to approach to rage, endeavoured by the most animated exertions, to bring the members to a sense of their duty, repeatedly calling upon them to get up and speak like men’. Burke was reprimanded by the speaker and forced to offer a proper motion, which was ‘that an enquiry be made into the fact of there being 11,000 men now under arms in Ireland unknown to government’.32 His obsessing throughout the speech with the 11,000 men independent to government would not have met with patriot Irish approval. It is notable that William Burke, his close friend, reflected on the fact that the Volunteers ‘had no legal sanction for their conduct’, and described the vote of thanks given to the associations by the Irish Commons as ‘an abdication of all government’. His views, especially his fear of ‘a new dismemberment of the empire’, probably mirrored those of Burke.33 The responsible behaviour of the Volunteers was regularly compared in the Irish press to the Gordon rioters, and as a particular target of the mob, Burke was perhaps able to recover a measure of esteem in Ireland.34 His manly and principled conduct played well in the Irish press, as it did even in British organs usually hostile to Burke such as the Morning Post.35
Although Burke’s position on the American war was certainly popular in the Irish patriotic press and in clubs – he was toasted by gatherings in Dublin (the Free Citizens) and Belfast in 1776, along with other Whigs opposed to the American war36 – the broader implications of his role as New York agent and supporter of the grievances of the American colonists became more evident in the 1790s when they were contrasted with his opposition to the French Revolution. Some of the later commentary was misleading: ‘The blockade of New-York, the surrender of armies, and consequent disasters which threatened the heaviest sorrows to the bosom of Royalty, were to him situations the most agreeable, and points of view the most charming.’37 This of course takes no account of the important imperialist strain – influenced by his Whig allegiances38 – that can be discerned in Burke’s writing, and shaped his views on the American war, the rise of the Volunteers and Irish legislative independence. And as we have seen above, it was a facet of Burke that was recognized – and criticized – in the Irish press.
The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings was also carried in detail by many Irish newspapers, and as with most aspects of his career, the response was largely dependent upon a particular newspaper’s relationship with the Irish government and by extension the British government (which Burke was opposing). The same could be said for his involvement in East India Company affairs more generally. A number of patriotic Irish newspapers including the Hibernian Journal and the Volunteers’ Journal were hostile to the Fox–North coalition, simply because it was now the face of the British ministry. As the Hibernian Journal put it: ‘we have in this kingdom nothing to do with the ministerial changes in England, for, however they differ in other respects, they perfectly agree in their systematic hatred and oppression of Ireland.’39 By extension this meant opposition to Fox’s India bill. There was, nevertheless, a broader public appetite for Burke’s oratory on this topic, as an Irish version of his speech on Fox’s bill was published by Luke White of Dame Street and advertised in the Dublin Evening Post and Freeman’s Journal.40
Significantly, perhaps, Burke’s treatment of Hastings was one of the episodes of his career that was difficult to forgive in the most positive of obituaries (carried by the Belfast News-Letter): ‘it has generally been thought strange that he should seem to attack Mr Hastings with so strong an indication of personal rancour and vindictive persecution.’ This was put down to Burke’s ‘diffusive humanity’ when considering the ‘oppressed millions’, but also ‘the effect of party combinations’, which was lamented.41 The Volunteer Evening Post, usually aligned to the British ministry’s interests, highlighted very particular aspects of Burke’s performance, which, as I have written elsewhere, located it firmly within Whiggish Irish political conventions (Powell 2010, 113–35). In one very revealing commentary it noted: ‘Mr Burke, we are inclined to believe is a well-meaning man; but the impetuosity and warmth of his imagination, betrays him into visionary conceits of men and things, which have no existence in truth and reason.’42 Burke’s approach to oratory in this reading was anathema to manly, civic patriotism, and from the late 1780s it is possible that newspapers were picking up on his reception in the Commons – he endured jeering from some MPs, particularly following his performance in debates on the Regency Crisis. The Volunteer Evening Post continued, prefiguring later comments by Matthew Arnold: ‘No man is better qualified to write or talk in the style and manner of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, for he has a fund of fancy, and a pavilion for poetic fiction, which is unbounded, but for sober debate and solid discrimination, no man was ever less endowed.’43
This was not the first time in his career that his manner of writing and speaking had, in the eyes of some commentators, undermined his message. A Limerick Chronicle reader sent the printer clippings from Sir Robert Dallas’s Considerations on the American Enquiry (1779) that did not redound to Burke’s advantage: ‘Intent upon the display of his own abilities, he cannot watch the passions, or accommodate himself to his audience.’ Dallas continued: ‘We admire for a while the splendour of the dress; but the eye becomes tired with the gaudy glare of the glittering tinsel, and wishes for the beautiful simplicity of nature.’44 A few years later the sometime lord lieutenant George Townshend, whilst in Ireland, remarked of Burke’s performance during Warren Hastings’ impeachment: ‘Mr Burke very brilliant sometimes, but prolix.’45 The Volunteer Evening Post pointed out during the Hastings trial: ‘As an enemy to Mr Hastings, he would describe him as the most abandoned being upon earth; but had he accidentally been his friend, Mr Hastings would have been exalted to the stars, and dignified with the virtues of an Archangel.’46
His style of rhetoric, particularly in the Commons, was of its time. Clare Connolly has written of later concerns over Irish eloquence – Burke spoke with an Irish brogue – and its connection with political enthusiasm (Connolly 2008, 125). However in Burke’s case one can also suggest that it was designed to fulfil audience expectations. A section of the Hastings trial printed by the Belfast News-Letter – no doubt taken from elsewhere, ended with the following comment: ‘A vast number of ladies attended; but they appeared dissatisfied, or rather disappointed with the figurative part of Mr Burke’s speech – As soon, however, as he dropped his observations on the Revenue, they were charmed and astonished by his eloquence.’47 Outside of the government supporting press that had an axe to grind with the Whig opposition, it can be suggested that the impeachment of Warren Hastings acted as a high point in Burke’s reputation in the Irish public sphere. A piece carried in the Belfast News-Letter on ‘Illustrious British Characters’, presumably taken from the British press, and also including the Duke of Portland, lavished praise upon Burke’s qualities: ‘Transcendent abilities, and erudition, will ever claim respect and attention; and though they have added but little to his fortune, have extended the limits of his fame.’ Of course the reference to ‘fortune’ would be turned on its head when Burke accepted a pension. The same can be said for another line in this encomium, in which Burke was said to have selflessly devoted himself to ‘establish the happiness of millions, and affect the general rights of mankind’. Again in this piece the early intellectual legacy was evident, and offered further proof that it could be a label for friends and enemies: ‘Whatever is beautiful may be found in the mild purity of his private life; whatever is sublime, in his public disinterestedness, and contempt of wealth.’48
Burke and the French Revolution: (i) The Revolution Debate
Recent scholarly efforts to reposition Burke in the 1790s tend to focus, naturally, on ways of reading Burke’s writings, many focusing on Burke as a radical Irish Catholic sympathizer. Among other material espousing this line, Luke Gibbons notes that Burke claimed that ‘Catholic Defenderism is the only restraint upon Protestant Ascendancy’, and has used Iain McCalman’s observations on Burke’s possible sympathy for United Irish revolutionary goals.49 But in his recent survey Michael Brown reaffirms that Burke was hostile to the politics of the United Irishmen (Brown 2006, 218). And there is not much evidence to show that this radical side of Burke was ever comprehended in the Irish public sphere; even if we accept that the United Irish conception of natural rights – due to their concern for native, Catholic, culture – had a ‘Burkean inflection’ (Gibbons 2003b, 70).
The Reflections was certainly popular in Ireland, going through eight reprints in Dublin between 1791 and 1793, and there were pamphlets in support and opposition.50 As might be expected, government and opposition newspapers took pro- and anti-Burke lines, with some of the former printing extracts. Reflecting on the peerage given to Fitzgibbon, The Press, the Dublin United Irish newspaper, wondered: ‘But how can wash of heraldry efface, The name of Burke, and dignity disgrace.’51 As the Dublin Morning Post, also radical, put it: ‘It is not a question between two men of the names of Paine and Burke – it is the Rights of Men, against the Reign of Prejudice.’52 The Dublin Morning Post said of Burke’s Reflections that ‘there is a degree of malignancy, a contagious exhalation poured thro’ every page’.53 He was a ‘man who has volunteered himself in the cause of despotism, and in support of ecclesiastical tyranny’.54
Somewhat more telling were the ways in which some of the longstanding patriot organs dealt with Reflections. The Belfast News-Letter printed a long and determinedly moderate review, originally appearing in the Monthly Review, in December and January 1790.55 However the tone was critical throughout: ‘He pleads for ancient usage, and precedent, and prescription, and non-resistance, with all the vehemence, and with much of the very sophistry, of the most determined Tory.’ There is a general acceptance of natural rights (echoed in the Dublin Evening Post), and if not a defence of Paine, then certainly a pointed reminder that this was common currency since John Locke’s writings. The reviewer went on to say that ‘the principles of civil government will never quietly settle, unless they rest on the choice, or acquiescence of the people.’56 A few days later the same newspaper printed a piece that was critical of Burke’s attitude towards revolution – more particularly his sympathy for the aristocracy and the church and his hostility towards the French lower orders, National Assembly and leading Enlightenment intellectuals.57 The Dublin Evening Post agreed, complaining that Burke would likely ‘call you a sophister, a philosopher, a rebel, and an atheist’ if you were not governed by his monarchical, aristocratic and ecclesiastical prejudices.58
The following year the Belfast News-Letter published extracts from Paine’s Rights of Man as ‘Paine’s Answer to Burke’.59 It also carried a positive puff for James Mackintosh, Burke’s critic and author of Vindiciae Gallicae, and extracts from the pamphlet itself.60 The work of less renowned authors also appeared, such as George Rous’s A Letter to Burke in Reply to His Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791). Not all snippets were given with their authors, which can perhaps lead to an overestimation of the genuinely Irish responses. William Roscoe’s ‘O’er the vine-cover’d hills’, which saw Burke (as a bat) shrink from the light of reason in its second verse, was printed anonymously in the Belfast News-Letter.61 Yet some Irish commentators took the time to address very particular elements of Burke’s writings – such as a misrepresentation of a sentence written by Paine in Burke’s Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791).62
It is perhaps significant that the substantial extract appearing on 8 November related to Rous’s sympathies towards dissenting communities, though there was also a reference to his rescue by Irish law students during the Gordon Riots.63 There was much support in the Irish press for the views of Joseph Priestley and Richard Price against those of Burke,64 and Burke’s antipathy to dissent was one of the more problematic areas of his post-1789 output in an Irish context. One writer referred to Burke’s ‘sneer at the body of Protestant Dissenters, whose unalterable attachment to liberty has more than once saved the state’.65 It certainly made him an unlikely United Irish sympathizer; especially when considering the commercial tone of the United Irish support in Ulster. The reprinting of a letter from Joseph Priestley to the London Morning Chronicle in the Belfast News-Letter, focusing on a speech Burke had made in Parliament in which he had attacked Priestley’s politics, would likely have appealed to Belfast’s dissenters. Priestley’s response was moderate, rational, and, to an extent pained. Priestley remarked that Burke’s sneering at his lack of rewards for his activities ‘is a mean insult, in one basking in the sun-shine of power, on one who is under its frowns’. He continued, ‘far from expecting any reward, I shall think myself very happy if I escape without further punishment.’66
Burke’s apparent reverence for the aristocracy was also difficult to incorporate within Irish patriotism. Burke was, like Sheridan, a fish out of water in the higher echelons of the Foxites, and he was never wholly at ease with the round of country house visits beloved of the more aristocratic members of his party, and rarely accepted such invites. In contrast, his more urbane tastes did work in the Irish press (Langford 2004), but the defence of aristocracy in Reflections made any personal proclivities irrelevant, and given the violent anti-aristocratic sentiment that was palpable in Irish newspapers from the early 1780s there was bound to be a reaction. The Monthly Review piece sampled in the Belfast News-Letter critiqued both the aristocracy and Burke’s style, describing ‘the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Aristocratic fealty … so overwrought, and extravagantly bespangled, that we fear the generality of beholders will look on them also as gilt baubles and painted gewgaws’.67 And one of the themes that the Dublin Morning Post focused on in a series of anti-Burke letters in the 1790s was the superiority of men of relatively humble origins – lawyers, medics – over aristocrats.68 That said, the popularity of aristocratic Whig leaders like Charles James Fox in Ireland throughout the 1790s is noteworthy. Burke’s planned publication on Rockingham was eagerly awaited,69 and Fox and Burke were brought together in an extract from Burke’s speech on the army estimates – their famous break – reprinted five years later in the Belfast News-Letter. Burke’s views on Fox – ‘drawn by a masterly hand’ – focused here on Fox’s moderation, ‘which is the best corrective of power’.70
The timing here is significant. In many quarters Burke had been proven right, and the moderate Whiggism of Fox in Britain, and the patriot Henry Grattan in Ireland, though old-fashioned, seemed distinctly peaceable, as the Revolution moved through Terror to war. However, even in moderate publications there were sallies against Burke in defending the progress of the Revolution. After mischievously quoting from Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1776) – vide, ‘Liberty is in danger of being made unpopular to Englishmen’ – an Armagh correspondent noted that: ‘The popular excesses which attended the French Revolution shocked the feelings of many, without allowance being made for the former servitude unexpiated.’71 And continued: ‘Man is prone to extremes and even virtue runs into excess.’72 Earlier, a writer in the Dublin Morning Post had claimed: ‘I think the conduct of the armed multitude, virtually released from their allegiance, exhibits manifest proof of moderation and clemency.’73 Amongst certain sections of the Irish press there would of course be a shift to reflect the threat posed by France. Always a supporter of government, Saunders’s Newsletter printed a substantial extract from Burke’s Thoughts on a Regicide Peace in 1796.74 In the same year the Belfast News-Letter published substantial extracts from his A Letter to a Noble Lord, in an uncritical fashion.75 In 1797 the Belfast News-Letter carried a digest of Burke’s posthumous Three Memorials on French Affairs.76
Burke and the French Revolution: (ii) Masculinity
Although this chronological shift is somewhat predictable, it is, I think, also worth considering some of the more consistent strains that featured in the Irish press response to Burke in this period. The historian Philip Carter suggests that as with Chesterfield before him Burke had undermined the predominant concept of masculinity (Carter 2000, 90). Following the publication of his Reflections, Edmund Burke was ridiculed by Mary Wollstonecraft for his claim to be the guardian of ‘manly sentiment’ (Carter 2000, 113). She linked his style to effeminacy, which, more recently, has been described as ‘evocative of feminine emotions’ (Fulford 1999, 56, 59). Even Burke’s ally, Sir Philip Francis, described the passages relating to Marie Antoinette in his Reflections as ‘pure foppery’ (Carter 2000, 123n). A very positive obituary carried in the Belfast News-Letter noted that: ‘As a writer he is often sublime and beautiful, though the exuberance of his genius, and the warmth of his feelings, frequently betrayed him into a violation of taste.’77 If in the 1790s Burke was demonstrating concern over the decline in politeness exhibited by French radical leaders (Carter 2000, 112), then the robust men of action now in the vanguard of Irish patriotism would have looked equally askance at Burke (and before him Chesterfield) and their championing of an ancien régime model of masculinity. Indeed, it is striking how much of the Irish response to Burke and his anti-revolutionary output in the 1790s touched upon issues around manliness. This, I would suggest, was for two reasons. Firstly the tone of the Reflections, which was frequently connected by the press to Burke’s earlier aesthetic interests, and sat uncomfortably with enlightened discourse based on reason, and, secondly, the nature of Irish patriot culture, still heavily influenced by a combination of Whiggism and civic humanism that valorized the citizen soldier, and scorned the standing army.
On the first of these the Dublin Morning Post printed an extract (unacknowledged) from a pamphlet by the Dissenter Joseph Towers that juxtaposed the rational tone of Paine with the rather more florid style of Burke. Burke had a ‘luxuriant imagination’, ‘a great profusion of rhetoric’ and his take on the French Revolution ‘has often much more the appearance of an historical romance’. Burke is accused of indulging in the ‘false pathetic’.78 The Dublin Morning Post, in reference to Paine’s Rights of Man, claimed that Burke and his followers had not ‘dared to attack it in front, or ventured farther than to enfilade by a few distant oblique shots’. In its view the contest was between a proclamation and a political system, with Paine representing the latter.79 The current mode of government, it contended, ‘builds its hopes of permanence upon proclamations, encampments, and arbitrary dicta’. Again the discourse of manliness was important here. The refusal to allow the liberty of free discussion of the current system was all important. And, of course, ‘[t]he first dawn of manly reason must DISPEL such darkness’.80
Also on that theme the same newspaper considered Burke’s current actions in the light of theories on human behaviour – more particularly the inconstancies caused by acting according to passions – postulated by the Scottish philosopher Dr Hugh Blair. As the Dublin Morning Post’s restyling of Blair’s prose put it: ‘the disorderly [and fanciful mind] resemble[s] those tumultuous elements on earth, which by sudden and violent irruptions disturb the course of nature’; a statement that tied together – and surely not chosen by accident – Burke’s intemperate prose with his earlier work on the sublime.81 The Press, in a poem on Burke’s venality influenced by Juvenal – aptly enough as Burke was an admirer (Fuchs 1996, 34) – makes similar points on his rhetoric
Not to be blam’d, but in a tender tone;
Not to be prais’d, but with a heartfelt groan:
He liv’d a lesson, for all future time,
Pathetically great, and painfully sublime.82
Other Irish patriots were also called upon to enter the fray in defence of Paineite ideas. The Dublin Morning Post referred to the employment of ‘the whole force of ministerial persecution – in order to cry down his opinions like rap halfpence’. First in line was ‘Mr Burke’s battery’, ‘but soon silenced’.83 Here Burke is an unworthy Swift, and in many ways Burke was ranked by Irish patriot newspapers alongside that pantheon of Irish wits. The Belfast News-Letter, while expressing its doubts, reprinted a piece from another Irish paper which claimed that Burke’s name would ‘go down to posterity with those of Swift and Goldsmith’.84 On another occasion the same paper called upon the talents of ‘a GIBBON, a SHERIDAN’, to oppose Burke.85 The Juvenal pastiche in The Press, reflected:
O why is genius curs’d with length of days?
The head still flourishing, the heart decays!
Protracted life makes virtue less secure;
The death of wits is seldom premature.86
The specific case in point here was Samuel Johnson – disgraced by pension and support for the American war: ‘Quench’d too by years, gigantic Johnson’s zeal, Th’unwieldy elephant was taught to kneel.’87 The point is, I think, that Burke’s end of career publications and pension – criticized in the Irish press as soon as it was rumoured88 – were not only a betrayal of his patriotic Whiggism, but also his position as one of the great men of letters. Similar views were expressed in the Belfast News-Letter, which saw his Reflections as a betrayal of his ‘profound abilities as a literary character’.89
In the British context Burke’s anguish at the fate of Marie Antoinette was deemed to be foppish, and even friends and allies termed him ‘Don Dismallo’, the knight of woeful countenance (Fulford 1999, 5). This most notorious section of the Reflections was given plenty of attention in Ireland. A piece printed in the Belfast News-Letter referred to him speaking ‘with a bombastic rapture of the charms of his [Louis XVI’s] Queen’.90 The same newspaper’s Monthly Review extracts reinforced this image, referring, ironically, to ‘his sublime and beautiful apotheosis of the great lady’.91 More bluntly a correspondent accused Burke of attempting to ‘deceive us into general disgust to so grand an enterprise, because a young Queen was abused by a mob of female fishmongers,’92 an interesting near-defence of the female crowd, given that Burke’s chivalric prose was directed against their threat to masculine hegemony (Corbett 1994, 880–82). Another commentary claimed that according to Joseph Priestley the scene involving the queen had no basis in truth.93
This material was also a barb aimed at Burke’s championing of the chivalric code and knight errantry, a dimension that had particular ramifications in Ireland due to the massing of troops in Dublin and elsewhere. The Dublin Morning Post locked onto his comment that ‘the Age of CHIVALRY is gone’ in precisely this context:
The streets of Dublin would now bring to his exuberant imagination an idea that the AGE of CHIVALRY was reviven, after a sleep of some centuries; but he would not agree that it was altogether so cheap a defence. Every second coat he shou’d meet in the street he would discover, even without the help of his spectacles, to be a red one, and he would see such a profusion of plumage, nodding over the heads of the illustrious warriors, with a profusion of banners at every step, that he must suppose himself amongst a nation of Knight Errants.94
This may have been unfair, as Burke was himself uneasy about ‘the colonial garrison in Ireland’. And along with Fox and Sheridan he was very critical of the policies of the Protestant Ascendancy in the 1790s, views most notably enshrined in his Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792).95 However, as we have seen, he had grave doubts about volunteering, and was even more concerned by political crowds. Both exhibited a heightened form of masculinity, which Burke himself had connected with energy and terror in his Enquiry.96
Burke and the French Revolution: (iii) Burke and Whiggism
For sections of the Irish press Burke’s position on the American War was trumped by Paine’s. The latter’s Common Sense (1776) was printed in the Dublin Morning Post in the 1790s, and it is important to note that the debate between Burke and Paine on the French Revolution was not just about the 1790s, but had a lengthy back-story that Irish readers comprehended. As late as August 1790 the gentleman of the bar of the north east of Ireland, at their assizes, were toasting the pantheon of Whig heroes including ‘The memory of Algernon Sydney’, ‘The memory of Lord Russell’, and in the Irish context ‘The Free Citizens of Dublin’, ‘The Northern Whigs’ and ‘Our countryman, Edmund Burke’.97 Of course the publication of his Reflections in November changed this picture, and there was sniping at his abandonment of his ‘revolution principles’ and ‘all his Whig friends’; he was also criticized for reprobating the ‘good old Whig principle’ of the right of election.98 Burke claimed that his Whiggish constitutional position was entirely consistent with his past, and his references to the prosecution’s arguments in the impeachment of Henry Sacheverell in 1710 in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) should have worked in his favour in Ireland where Sacheverell was, at least for the patriot press, an uncomplicated bogeyman.99 This was, of course, insufficient, as many Irish publications had moved to a position far more radical than any British parliamentarian – though the ‘Whig’ tag was still prevalent. In printing Paine’s response to Burke, the Morning Post cited the wishes of the Whigs of the Capital, a radical club led by the later United Irishmen James Napper Tandy.100 The Irish experience of the Glorious Revolution was more vivid than the English; and it could be added here, more discomforting for Burke. Hence the Dublin Morning Post cautioned that Burke’s Reflections was ‘reviving the notions of high prerogative, of the last century, which the Revolution had so completely checked, but probably did not destroy’.101
One of the most lengthy Irish responses to Burke – the series by ‘Decius’ in the Dublin Morning Post titled ‘Loose Thoughts on Mr Burke’s Letter, Addressed to the Men of Ireland’, stuck firmly to the Whig principles line. Indeed the series, excepting the title, was not particularly Irish, and would have sat easily within a more general Commonwealthman tradition. There was approval of Charles I’s defeat, and William of Orange was styled ‘our Great Deliverer’.102 One letter was a lengthy discourse on the Williamite revolution; the express purpose of which was to emphasize that ‘William the Third ascended the Throne in consequence of an express capitulation with the People’.103 Even the much more radical Press found it difficult to pull away from the Whiggish discourse that saw Burke’s actions as a betrayal of the pantheon of Whiggish patriots: ‘Glory resolve to act the Patriot part / Join Sydney’s pulse to Russell’s zealous heart.’ According to this newspaper, thanks to Burke’s betrayal, the true heirs to Russell and Sydney were Thomas Fysshe-Palmer and Thomas Muir – the Scottish radicals sentenced to transportation in 1793.104 A piece in the same paper had criticized Charles II and described the Scottish Covenanters as ‘the United Irishmen of the present day’.105
There was also much support for the conduct of Richard Price and the Revolution Society, and the anti-Catholic ethos of the latter, and its impact upon Burke, has been commented on by Conor Cruise O’Brien and Katherine O’Donnell; though, as we have seen, he had acted out the role of friend of the Glorious Revolution (and the Revolution Society) in the past (O’Brien 1992, 396; O’Donnell 2007, 417). Decius commented on ‘the absolute necessity of frequent meetings, or anniversary assemblies of the people’.106 A piece in the Belfast News-Letter also condemned Burke’s attack on Price and the Revolution Society as well as the Society for Constitutional Information, and another issue published the Society for Constitutional Information’s rejoinder to Burke.107 Other pieces insisted that striking at Price was equivalent to abusing John Locke, ‘the friend of our Molyneux and of mankind’,108 and there is no sense that Burke’s reading of Irish history was more palatable than that of Molyneux, notwithstanding the implications for Ireland’s Catholics (Fuchs 1996, 238). At a banquet with a strong United Irish presence in celebration of the anniversary of the French Revolution in July 1792, the company, according to the Northern Star, toasted Locke, Molyneux and Price.109
In Decius’s second letter there was hostility towards the French Catholic church and the ‘Romish whore of Babylon’.110 The approach of the Irish press to the depiction of the Catholic church in Burke’s Reflections also points to a reception characterized by a radical Whiggism, and if Burke’s treatment of the Catholic church was indeed layered, then the Irish press missed the subtleties (Blakemore and Hembree 2001, 505–20). In January 1791 the Belfast News-Letter noted that: ‘[w]hatever may be Mr Burke’s opinion as to the general consequences of the French Revolution, every rational and unprejudiced man will allow that it has been productive of at least one good effect – the deliverance of the great body of the people from ecclesiastical oppression.’111 It was a country ‘lately over-run with ridiculous monastic institutions, where a pampered, illiterate, and bigoted clergy engrossed a mighty territory’.112 But though there was a defence of the French religious orders in the Reflections (Beales 2005, 415–36), in the Irish context it should be noted that Burke saw Catholic relief as a limited and necessary constitutional reform, and did not in any way accept papal authority. He was certainly aware of the way in which a Gaelic Catholic Ireland welcome to his son on his visit to Munster could play in the ‘mischievous’ newspapers (O’Donnell 2007, 409). More problematic for Burke in an all-Ireland sense was his failure to stand against tithes, a cause of popular protest in Ireland throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. Response to Burke on this issue united criticism of both Anglican and Catholic churches: the ‘abolition of TYTHE will naturally excite the fears of all who enjoy them in these countries’; it was termed a ‘mode of providing for the Ministers of his holy religion, fraught with seeds of hatred and disunion between them and their flocks’.113
Following Burke’s death on 9 July 1797 a range of Irish newspapers carried very positive notices, obituaries and other forms of commentary. A poem published in the Belfast News-Letter, by Glaucus – address, High Street, Belfast – was one of the few pieces to go beyond the hysterical rhetoric line, and link Burke’s oratorical gifts to an Irish past: ‘No more, in wonder ‘rapt, the list’ning throng / Catch the fine accents of his tuneful tongue.’114 The Ennis Chronicle’s initial notice was tantalizing: ‘Was that eloquence, were his talents, and acquirements usefully employed?’ But the follow-up was glowing without any carping points.115 The Press – the only surviving radical organ in Ireland on Burke’s death – certainly acknowledged early greatness: ‘the fair fame of the Once celebrated EDMUND BURKE’. It is clear that Irish opinion never doubted his intellectual heft. In response to his honorary doctorate of law conferred upon him at Trinity College Dublin in December 1790, the Belfast News-Letter, described Burke as ‘the powerful advocate of the Constitution, the friend of public order, virtue and the happiness of mankind’.116 Flowing through much of the Irish commentary on Burke in the 1790s there was a recognition of his philosophical abilities, and the applicability of many of his maxims. During the turmoil in Dublin in the mid-1790s the Belfast News-Letter noted Burke’s statement in the Reflections that ‘Government, is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants’, and that in the Irish case government was most definitely not providing.117
In the Irish context he was frequently remembered as both author of the sublime and the beautiful and ‘the hero of American freedom’.118 He was also termed the ‘Champion of the East’, a reference to his role in the Hastings trial.119 And these intellectual and political contributions were seen as high water marks in his career, betrayed by his response to the French Revolution. As the Dublin Morning Post put it: ‘Alas! Poor Burke! How fallen is the sublime! How hurled from reason’s throne by a false zeal!’120 So, the most positive views on Burke in the patriot press were ‘before his fall’. In this interpretation, the French Revolution was the point of transformation – ‘his disgraceful apostacy’ – and also the cause of ‘the cankering remorse that rapidly brought him to the grave’.121 On Burke’s part, there were moments of remorse. He regretted the swinish multitude comment, and claimed that he had not meant the British ‘piggen-riggen’. A sense that Burke had somehow lost his reason during this period was reflected in a reference in the Belfast News-Letter to the ‘Swinish Multitude of poor Burke’.122 After the Revolution the dominant image of Burke was of one who has suffered ‘his passions and vehemence of temper to pervert his abilities to improper ends’.123 This was the Dublin Morning Post, but the Belfast News-Letter struck a similar note: ‘The eccentricities and fantastic wanderings of Mr Burke, give just cause of mortification to human pride, and may teach the most elevated genius humility; as they prove that the greatest powers of mind must cease to command applause, in the instant that the still voice of reason is silenced by the intemperance of passion.’124 In this sense Burke’s unreason was a product of his betrayal of Enlightenment principles. In the Irish context the Enlightenment was heading in two directions, but Burke’s claim to an important element of its Irish future through his criticism of the Protestant ascendancy was largely ignored by the radical press.
Postcolonial criticism has an inbuilt antagonism towards the Enlightenment, and it has been carried on to its logical endpoint in relation to Burke’s career by Luke Gibbons. But aside from the theoretical wrangling, if we look at the Burke of the 1790s through the lens of the Irish patriot press then it is clear that he is condemned as the enemy of the Enlightenment. The Dublin Morning Post lined up Voltaire and Hugh Blair against him; the Belfast News-Letter Montesquieu.125 A choice section from Voltaire printed in the Dublin Morning Post, with Burke in mind, condemned the Anglican church’s attachment to its tithes.126 Burke’s writings were described, after Voltaire, as ‘a work of eloquent false reasonings’.127 The Belfast News-Letter published a response to Burke which noted that from him one would ‘hardly have expected that violent and somewhat illiberal attack on the philosophers and men of letters in France which your book contains’. ‘Do you really’, it said, ‘in your cooler judgment, believe, that this world has gained nothing by their labours?’128 This was the point perhaps – that Burke had betrayed his enlightened past; he was, after all, an admirer of Montesquieu, and most likely influenced by Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson (Fuchs 1996, 200). After his death he was still described in the Belfast News-Letter as one capable of leading the enlightened through the force of his oratory,129 and there is a sense in some newspapers that his arguments were ultimately based on reason and evidence, a point recently re-emphasized by F. P. Lock (2006, 157). Elsewhere, however, it was claimed that his style prevented scientific enquiry: ‘For philosophical research, his faculties are less fit.’130 Of course in many ways Burke would have been content to be defined against some of these philosophers – as he put it, ‘We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us’ (1865–67, 345) – but their importance to a new generation of Irish radicals makes any reading of Burke or even the Reflections in a national, Irish, sense complicated.
Much effort has been made in recent historiography to uncover a radical, Irish, Gaelic even, Burke. And there are ways of incorporating this reading into a press study of his reception – if Gaelic, Jacobite tinged then it stands to reason that Burke’s impassioned treatment of Marie Antoinette would have rubbed up the Irish press the wrong way (O’Donnell 2007, 405). The difficulty is that ‘old’-Whiggism can be traced both backwards to Burke’s former self, and forwards to the radical groups, and their publications, that forged the rebellion of 1798. In other words there is no easy way of reconciling older, ancestral pulls on Burke.131 Dublin’s public sphere had other uses for him. When the reception of Burke is considered in the pages of Irish patriotic newspapers at the end of the eighteenth century, it is evident that although there was much keening for his older more oppositional rhetoric, this was almost always couched in the language of manly Whiggism. Burke had betrayed both wits like Swift and Johnson (though the latter remarked ‘Burke never once made a good joke)132 and great Commonwealthmen such as Russell and Sydney. The Irish press – even very radical organs – were happy to combine praise for Burke as an enlightened figure defending local liberties, with the contradictory Whiggish position. If a thread can be found linking the various takes on Burke, then it is the discourse on manliness. Though his work on the sublime and the beautiful could be disengaged and lauded for its intellectual worth, it was just too easy for hack writers – and more serious philosophes – to link the emotional themes to the passionate rhetoric in the Reflections.
Of course this reception of Burke is of a limited kind. Irish newspapers cannot be seen as being particularly reflective of public opinion outside of their predominantly urban constituencies. In many ways they were more reflective of a general pan-British Whiggism – a matter that is not surprising when we note the ways in which editorial staff criss-crossed the Irish Sea. William Bingley of the Wilkite North Briton contributed to Ireland’s Volunteers’ Journal, as did John Williams, better known as Anthony Pasquin, a one-time writer on Henry Bate’s Morning Herald. This perhaps gives a clue as to reasons behind the consistency in political thought on view in Irish newspapers, even through the revolutionary 1790s. Bingley and Williams wrote for two of the more obviously Whiggish journals on view in late eighteenth-century England, and yet went on to contribute copy to a radical Irish newspaper printed by a Catholic. If we are thinking about (equally constant) views on Burke, then it is clear that the dominance of a Whiggism infused by the politics of Junius and Wilkes in the 1770s and 1780s meant that there was little room – in the press at least – for alternative enlightenments. However it is important not simply to see a Whiggish, hegemonic, enlightenment as the antithesis of an Irish national Burke.133 Rather Burke, willing or unwilling, was a part of it.134 David Hume might have accused him of being a party man on the Catholic question, and 1641 in particular (Bisset 1798, 195–97), but for much of his career he was another party man – a Rockingham Whig – and his reception in Ireland was defined to a great extent by his loyalty to, and betrayal of, this position.
Notes
1Quoted in Werkmeister (1967, 27).
2Belfast News-Letter, 7 June 1791.
3Cullen (1993), Cullen (1997), O’Donnell (2006; 2007). For assessments of Burke in the Irish context see Fuchs (1996), Donlan (2006), ‘Introduction’, Brown (2006) and McBride (2012).
4Katherine O’Donnell (2009) connects Burke’s club life to his Irish experience of poetic courts.
5Quoted in Gibbons (2003a, 163).
6Belfast News-Letter, 30 July 1765.
7Dublin Morning Post, 23 August 1794.
8Belfast News-Letter, 13–17 October 1786.
9Belfast News-Letter, 13–17 October 1786.
10See Griffin (2006).
11Quoted in Gibbons (2003a, 87–88)
12Belfast News-Letter, 13–17 October 1786.
13Belfast News-Letter, 22 September 1769.
14London Evening Post, 2–4 May 1771; Freeman’s Journal, 9–11 May 1771.
15Middlesex Journal, 13–16 April 1771; Freeman’s Journal, 20–23 April 1771.
16Freeman’s Journal, 18–20 April 1771.
17Freeman’s Journal, 26–28 February 1771.
18Middlesex Journal, 26–28 March, 1771; Freeman’s Journal, 2–4 April 1771.
19See for example Freeman’s Journal, 30 March 1771–2 April 1771, which corrects Alderman Townshend’s supposed absence from the debate through illness in a vigorous fashion, complimenting his performance.
20Dublin Mercury, 22 November 1770.
21Corr. 2, 139, Burke to O’Hara [21 May 1770].
22Quoted in Gibbons (2003a, 14).
23Belfast News-Letter, 22 September 1769.
24Belfast News-Letter, 11 November 1788.
25This also explains why Burke was such an ill fit for Irish conservatives – in contrast to, say, Sir Richard Musgrave – after the rebellion.
26Finn’s Leinster Journal, 23–27 September 1780.
27Corr. 4, 70–1, Burke to Rockingham [9 May 1779].
28Dublin Evening Post, 17 January 1784.
29Dublin Evening Post, 12 February 1784.
30Hibernian Journal, 5 May 1784.
31Hibernian Journal, 11–13 February 1784.
32Limerick Chronicle, 25 March 1779.
33Nottingham Lib., Pwf 2,169, William Burke to Portland [20 October 1779].
34Limerick Chronicle, 25 February 1779; Freeman’s Journal, 27–29 June 1782
35Morning Post, 7 June 1780.
36Hibernian Journal, 19–22 July 1776; Londonderry Journal, 10 September 1776.
37Morning Post, 21 December 1790.
38O’Brien sees this imperial Whiggish stance as one adopted by Burke (1992, 152). On this see also Brown (1996, 209–10); Wallace (1996, 137–38); Lock (2006, 155–56, 161).
39Hibernian Journal, 5 May 1784.
40Dublin Evening Post, 26 February 1784; Freeman’s Journal, 28 February 1784.
41Belfast News-Letter, 21 July 1797.
42Volunteer Evening Post, 24 May 1787.
43O’Donnell (2000, 99); Volunteer Evening Post, 24 May 1787.
44Limerick Chronicle, 13 September 1779.
45Beresford Correspondence, ii, 307, Townshend to Beresford [3 June 1786].
46Volunteer Evening Post, 24 May 1787.
47Belfast News-Letter, 12 May 1789.
48Belfast News-Letter, 15 May 1789.
49Gibbons (2003a, 243); McCalman (1996, 140); Corr. 8, 378, Burke to Thomas Hussey [18 January 1796]. For a broader view on Irish public opinion and the French Revolution, see Ultán Gillen, ‘Monarchy, Republic and Empire: Irish Public Opinion and France, c. 1787–1804’ (Oxford, DPhil, 2006).
50See O’Sullivan (2006, 172).
51The Press, 7 October 1797.
52Dublin Morning Post, 24 August 1793.
53Dublin Morning Post, 13 January 1794.
54Dublin Morning Post, 13 January 1794.
55Belfast News-Letter, 17 December 1790; Belfast News Letter, 18–21 January 1790.
56Belfast News-Letter, 17 December 1790; see Frankis (2012, 27).
57Belfast News-Letter, 21 December 1790.
58Quoted in Frankis (2012, 27).
59Belfast News-Letter, 8 April 1791; Belfast News-Letter, 19 April 1791.
60Belfast News-Letter, 19 August 1791; Belfast News-Letter, 6 January 1792.
61Belfast News-Letter, 20 September 1791.
62Belfast News-Letter, 18 November 1791.
63Belfast News-Letter, 8–11 November 1791; Rous (1791, 47–51).
64See for example ‘Priestley versus Burke’, Belfast News-Letter, 21 January 1791.
65Belfast News-Letter, 10 December 1790.
66Belfast News-Letter, 15 March 1793.
67Belfast News-Letter, 18 January 1791; Monthly Review, 1790: 439.
68Dublin Morning Post, 13 January 1794.
69Belfast News-Letter, 11 September 1789.
70Belfast News-Letter, 15 May 1795.
71Belfast News-Letter, 4 October 1793.
72Belfast News-Letter, 1–4 October 1793.
73Dublin Morning Post, 2 December 1790.
74Saunders’ News-Letter, 5 November 1796.
75Belfast News-Letter, 29 February 1796.
76Belfast News-Letter, 18 September 1797.
77Belfast News-Letter, 21 July 1797.
78Dublin Morning Post, 24 August 1793. The extract is taken from Joseph Towers, Thoughts on the Commencement of a New Parliament (1790).
79Dublin Morning Post, 9 June 1792.
80Dublin Morning Post, 9 June 1792.
81Dublin Morning Post, 21 December 1790; Blair (1786, 26), Sermon no.1, ‘On the Importance of Order in Conduct’.
82The Press, 7 October 1797.
83Dublin Morning Post, 26 June 1792.
84Belfast News-Letter, 31 January 1792.
85Belfast News-Letter, 10 December 1790.
86The Press, 7 October 1797.
87The Press, 7 October 1797.
88Belfast News-Letter, 8 November 1791.
89Belfast News-Letter, 16 November 1790.
90Belfast News-Letter, 21 December 1790.
91Belfast News-Letter, 18–21 January 1791; Monthly Review, 1790: 439.
92Belfast News-Letter, 10 December 1790.
93Belfast News-Letter, 21 January 1791.
94Dublin Morning Post, 23 August 1794.
95See Gibbons (2003a, 9).
96It is possible to read the French revolutionary crowds appearing in Burke as a sexual body, linked to the promiscuousness of earlier forms of Protestant dissent; see Paulson (1983, 61). Also see Corbett (1994, 880).
97Belfast News-Letter, 17 August 1790.
98Belfast News-Letter, 30 November, 10 December, 17 December 1790.
99Dublin Morning Post, 13 November 1790; Monk.
100Dublin Morning Post, 9 April 1791.
101Dublin Morning Post, 13 November 1790.
102Dublin Morning Post, 4 December 1790.
103Dublin Morning Post, 14 December 1790.
104The Press, 7 October 1797.
105The Press, 14 October 1797.
106Dublin Morning Post, 2 December 1790.
107Belfast News-Letter, 16 November 1790; Belfast News-Letter, 10 June 1791.
108Belfast News-Letter, 10 December 1790.
109Northern Star, 11–14 July 1791.
110Dublin Morning Post, 4 December 1790.
111Belfast News-Letter, 4 January 1791.
112Belfast News-Letter, 10 December 1790.
113Belfast News-Letter, 10 December 1790.
114Belfast News-Letter, 28 July 1797.
115Ennis Chronicle, 17 July 1797; Ennis Chronicle, 20 July 1797.
116Belfast News-Letter, 14 December 1790.
117Belfast News-Letter, 24 August 1795.
118Dublin Morning Post, 17 January 1793.
119Dublin Morning Post, 14 December 1790.
120Dublin Morning Post, 17 January 1793.
121The Press, 21 October 1797.
122Belfast News-Letter, 25 June 1793.
123Dublin Morning Poste, 14 December 1790.
124Belfast News-Letter, 7 June 1791.
125Dublin Morning Post, 21 December 1790; Belfast News-Letter, 10 December 1790.
126Dublin Morning Post, 21 December 1790; Voltaire’s reference to tithes was not, however, sympathetic to Catholic communities – quite the opposite, he saw it as one among the ‘great number of the Romish Ceremonies’ that the Anglican church had retained (Voltaire 1759, 25). The Dublin Morning Post version was slightly different in phrasing – but the meaning was the same.
127Dublin Morning Post, 13 January 1794.
128Belfast News-Letter, 21 December 1790.
129Belfast News-Letter, 28 July 1797.
130Belfast News-Letter, 19 August 1796, taken from The Monthly Review, July 1796.
131Ian Crowe argues that the imaginativeness of Burke’s thought enabled him to ‘merge his Irish Whiggery so powerfully with the mainstream of eighteenth-century political discourse’ (2005, 3)
132Belfast News-Letter, 13 December 1785, extract from James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785).
133Clare Connolly offers an interesting take on the ‘divided’ Burke (2008, 114–31)
134From a different perspective, Wallace suggests that there is a close relationship between Burke’s reverence for the constitution of 1688 and his experience of the Irish Jacobite tradition (2006, 140).