Parliament, Country, and Friendship

To return to eighteenth century British politics, especially to the Mother of All Parliaments, and most especially to Edmund Burke, to inform contemporary Anglo-American statecraft is a well-trodden path. Harvey Mansfield found in this period the origins of the idea of loyal opposition. Woodrow Wilson used it to develop his theory of the advantages of linking the legislative and executive in order to articulate and implement a popular mandate. James Grant’s delightful Friends Until the End also has much to tell us about the character of statesmen and the power (and limits) of rhetoric.

The book’s two protagonists, Edmund Burke and Charles Fox, were Whig allies as critics of British policy toward the American colonies and as prosecutors of Warren Hastings, governor-general of the East India Company. But in May 1791, a time when many in Westminster could still believe that the French were on the path to constitutional monarchy, Burke broke publicly with Fox over his support for the revolutionaries. Grant characterizes Burke’s stance as “There could be no sacrifice of principle, even for the sake of friendship.” As a reformist party committed to limited monarchy, limited democracy, and judicious power projection abroad, founded on landed wealth but friendly to commerce, the eighteenth century Whigs seem to have had both liberal and conservative virtues. Although Fox’s Whiggism is a fountainhead of English liberalism and Burke’s Rockingham Whigs helped sire intellectual conservatism, Grant argues there is no need to choose between them: “As for me, I love them for what they said and the way they said it; for what they believed and for what they did.”

Grant, a financial journalist and biographer of British constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot as well as of John Adams, Bernard Baruch, and Walter Reed, has meticulously researched parliamentary history. His choice of subject matter benefits from such a wealth of records as to be the envy of most historians, and he succeeds in linking a plethora of episodes with a novelistic eye for anecdote. Burke’s brother gambling the family finances by speculating on East India Company stock in hopes of continued victories for Clive; Fox sporting a Continental Army uniform on the floor of the House of Commons; Burke remonstrating with the mob during the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780: this period gave great personae a large canvas on which to paint their virtues and their vices. Other larger-than-life figures who move in and out of the pages of Friends Until the End include King George III, Lord North, Pitt the Younger, Hastings, Burke’s patron Lord Rockingham, and Lord Walpole.

Viewed from America’s 250th year, the grave Parliament of that era contrasts favorably with our moribund Congress. Burke and Fox’s House of Commons debated everything from the Empire's overall budget to specific troop dispositions to pensions in honor of individual public servants. This was a legislature that had to govern. Even Burke and Fox’s erudition and copious allusions to Demosthenes, Cicero, and Virgil — in which both excelled, even if Burke was the one known for speaking around the clock — did not seem inapt in such a chamber. In a note on “Parliamentary Eloquence in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville comments, “The English orators of the last century constantly quoted Latin and even Greek at the rostrum. Their sons of America quote only Shakespeare, the democratic author par excellence.”  Our Congress was always going to be plainer and franker in its idiom. But if we shed ornamentation entirely, we risk losing something essential to self-government.

Political philosophy is not the focus of this book. Fox, despite his much greater political success (three brief stints as Foreign Minister) and his pretensions to be a classical scholar, does not appear to have been much of a reflective statesman. Without having investigated French institutions or prospects, Fox exulted over the storming of the Bastille: “How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world, & how much the best.” By contrast, each of Burke’s major writings and speeches — from his youthful Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful to the classic Reflections on the Revolution in France and the late Letters on a Regicide Peace — appear in Friends Until the End at some point. Burke put copious research into each, especially studying the situations in Ireland, America, and India before opining on them. On the Reflections, Grant rightly emphasizes Burke’s financial indictment. By defaulting on debts, confiscating Church property, and trying to inflate their currency with fiat money, the French National Assembly revealed the Revolution’s mala fides. “Burke… identified coercion as the essential element of the French monetary system.” By contrast, “It was an Englishman’s right to demand the gold in exchange for the paper representation of gold.” The great French historian Jacques Bainville went further: the Revolution had to be exported through force of arms so that continual looting could back the Republic’s assignats.

But Friends Until the End treats these texts as outgrowths of Burke’s life and politics, not as worthy of exposition in their own right. Regicide Peace receives a passing mention in the Epilogue as evidence of Burke’s isolation and sense of failure in his final years. But this text, warning Pitt not to make peace with a France that has outlawed herself from the community of nations, is essential for understanding Burke. Burke writes in the First Letter,

Instead of the religion and the law by which [the French] were in a great politick communion with the Christian world, they have constructed their Republick on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on which the communities of Europe are built. It’s [sic] foundation is laid in Regicide; in Jacobinism; and in Atheism.

No quarter can be asked or given with such an enemy; its interests cannot be weighed like a rational actor’s. This is not the Burke Leo Strauss charged with being merely a defender of tradition and opening the door to historicism; this Burke appears as more of a crusader than a relativist, insisting that some evils cannot be accommodated. Leaving this out risks playing into the hands of the frustrated radicals today who wish to dismiss Burke for lacking an account of the ends worth moving toward in politics, ironically, the very image of Burke crafted by the moderate progressives of the previous generation.

John Adams counseled his son John Quincy to read history so as to see “Wisdom and Virtue…represented, with all the Charms which Language and Imagination can exhibit, and Vice and Folly painted in all their Deformity and Horror.” This is the classical view of the purpose of history: to shape the loves through presenting examples worthy of imitation and of avoidance, all based on a shared human nature. Grant has written a lively, thorough, often beautiful book about two great men, and he is refreshingly free of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” toward them. But does he think history can form our judgment of what is good? Two key themes in Friends Until the End raise this question: Burke’s unrivaled decency as faithful husband (Grant says of Jane Burke, “Burke knew she was too good for him”), devoted father, sober (though impecunious) friend, and humane pleader for the downtrodden (his entreaty on behalf of the pillaged Jews of the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius is particularly moving) was never rewarded with high office. Fox, on the other hand, who “seemed as incapable of anxiety as he was of thrift, sleep, marriage, or diligence,” who played Falstaff to the Prince of Wales’ Hal, was perennially among the most powerful men in England. Does this imply that Machiavelli is right that virtue is not political efficacy? Or does it imply that Burke’s great strengths did not translate into the prudence needed for gaining and wielding executive power?

Burke devoted seven years to the trial of Warren Hastings, and Grant devotes almost a quarter of the book to it. Although Grant clearly admires both Burke’s zeal on behalf of the abused peoples of Bengal — he writes, “Fox approached India, the East India Company, and Warren Hastings as political questions. Burke treated them as moral certainties.” Grant also suggests that key charges against Hastings were overstated. Hastings himself emerges as a supremely talented man who may have learned so much about India that he embraced local despotism. Grant speaks admiringly of his mastery of Bengali, Urdu, and Persian and his contribution to an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita. But was Hastings guilty of gross abuse of office, as Burke charged? The House of Lords acquitted Hastings for lack of evidence, but Grant could offer more of a judgment.

Fox and Burke were Friends Until the End, not of their lives, but of their friendship. A practical disagreement with Fox over the British posture toward France led Burke to believe they no longer shared a vision of the good. Up to that point, despite their diverging philosophies, Parliament itself was the shared love that bound Fox and Burke. Grant’s work prompts Americans today to reflect on what those binding loves are amid our own, much wider, ideological divergences.

Luke Foster is Assistant Professor of Government at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC. He is co-founder of Academia Tocqueville, an intensive, Paris-based seminar in the history of French political thought.