"Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a little way East of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to an old doorway … of an eighteenth-century house … Number 12, Arran Quay."
For advocates of ordered freedom, Number 12, Arran Quay is an important address. Why? This is where Edmund Burke was born in 1729 and lived until he was 20, when, after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he moved to London to study law, enter politics, and shape the course of history. Burke’s career as a Whig member of the British parliament, however, has tended to overshadow his birthplace in the popular imagination. It did not go unnoticed by Russell Kirk, who opens his classic study,
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, with the literary signpost quoted above.
Kirk understood that Burke’s Irish heritage had an influence on his worldview. So, too, have other scholars, including Sean Patrick Donlan, a lecturer in law at the University of Limerick and the editor of a new, compelling collection of essays entitled
Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities. In his introduction, Donlan states that the volume’s purpose is “to invite discussion of Burke’s relationship to Ireland,” which is an appropriate conversation on Saint Patrick’s Day. Exploring Burke’s Irish background, in combination with some of the other more famous episodes in his career, will enhance our understanding of one of the most significant historical figures of the North Atlantic world. We will also see that Burke has much to teach his trans-Atlantic political heirs today, including reform-minded conservatives in the United States, their patriotic counterparts in the United Kingdom, and democratic citizens everywhere dedicated to winning the War on Islamic Terror.
The Great MelodyWhile Burke is most famous for his sustained opposition to Jacobin tyranny in Paris, which is encapsulated in his landmark treatise of 1790,
Reflections on the Revolution in France, we can learn much from his preceding years as a Whig reformer, which began in the late 1750s and, for American readers, are best expressed in his famous speech in 1775, “On Conciliation with America.” Both stages of his public life, as we shall see, are more consistent than is commonly understood. At the outset of the first phase, according to Kirk, “Much in the Whig program could attract the imagination of a young man like Burke: freedom under law, the balancing of orders in the commonwealth, a considerable degree of religious toleration, the intellectual legacy of 1688.”
Where did this reformist impulse originate? Some scholars trace it, in part, to Ireland, where Burke witnessed first-hand the tenuous situation of Catholics, whose prospects were circumscribed by the self-aggrandizing habits of Anglo-Irish landlords and the residual effects of the Penal Laws (watered-down since their passage in the late 17th century, they still prevented many Catholics from joining certain professions, acquiring property, voting, or holding elective office). All of this would have cut close to the bone for Burke. He was a Protestant and a member of the Established Church, like his father, Richard (who, incidentally, may have converted in order to become a lawyer), but his mother, Mary Nagle, was a Catholic from the Blackwater Valley in Cork, where he spent time as a youth and would have encountered a Gaelic culture straining to maintain its customs, its religion and its land. In 1761 he observed these conditions again when he returned to Ireland as private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton, a member of Parliament who had been appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the second-ranking official at Dublin Castle, the seat of the British administration in the country. Spending part of each year in his native land, he grew more agitated by the corrupt Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the enduring restrictions on Catholics. During this time, he penned one of his early political pamphlets, entitled
Tract Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland, which was an attack against the Penal Laws.
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