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progress within the framework of England's established institutions. In
The
Portable Enlightenment
Isaac Kramnick calls Burke "the gravedigger of the
Enlightenment," but he should have said that Burke was the gravedigger of
the French Enlightenment, for Burke disliked the French Enlightenment's
virulent anticlericalism and disembodied rationalism.
It is not easy, though, to categorize Burke's politics because the polit–
icallabels we use today do not exactly fit late eighteenth-century English
politics, where the political parties were shifting alliances of aristocrats
rather than political parties in the modern sense. Burke is also hard to cat–
egorize because he was a prolific writer on many questions in the course
of a poli tical career that spanned roughly thirty-five years-twenty-eight of
them as a Member of Parliament.
Burke's career was marked by controversy right from the start. When
he was about to be appointed Secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham,
who was the head of the Rockingham Whigs-a party that held office for
only two brief periods during Burke's long Parliamentary career-the
Duke of Newcastle warned Rockingham that Burke was an Irish Papist
educated in France by the Jesui ts and sent into England as a spy. Burke per–
suaded Rockingham that the allegations were unfounded; although
Burke's mother was a Catholic, he was raised as an Anglican and was edu–
cated at the Protestant Trinity College in Dublin. Rockingham hired
Burke, yet to some degree the calumny stuck; throughout Burke's career
he was dogged by the suspicion that he was soft on "Popery"-i.e., Roman
Catholicism-because of his Irish background and his Catholic family
connections. Horace Walpole and others called
him
an Irish adventurer.
Despite the disadvantage of his background, the "Irish adventurer"
made his mark on English society when he was fairly young. When Burke
entered parliament in 1765 at the age of thirty-six, he was already a well–
known intellectual: the editor of a distinguished journal (the
Annual
Register),
the author of a highly regarded book on aesthetics
(A Philosophical
Enquiry concerning the Origin
if
our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
),
and a
member of the famous club presided over by Samuel Johnson. He quickly
rose to political eminence, becoming one of the leading speakers in
Parliament-known for his eloquent speeches-and one of the chief
spokesmen for the Rockingham Whigs. His success did not surprise his
close friend Johnson, who often said that Burke was the most intelligent
man he knew and a great conversationalist. Burke, he said in 1776,
"is
an
extraordinary man. His stream of mind is perpetual.... We who know
Burke, know, that he will be one of the first men in this country."
Burke's political career flourished in the 1770s. During that decade, he
gave a number of brilliant speeches in which he outlined what English
policy should be toward the American colonies. He came reluctantly to the
