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Governor-General of Bengal-an effort that ended in failure when
Hastings was acquitted in · 1795. Burke was considered to be somewhat
unbalanced-a man who exaggerated the evils of British rule in India. A
cartoon that appeared in 1785 shows most MPs leaving Parliament while
Burke is speaking-the point being that Burke's speeches about British
policy in India had become rambling and boring.
In the 1790s Burke's standing in the party collapsed completely
because he strongly disagreed with Fox about the French Revolution. Fox
thought the Revolution was "one of the most glorious events in the his–
tory of mankind," whereas Burke thought the Revolution had unleashed
forces that posed a threat to all established regimes in Europe. In 1792, less
than a year after he had broken publicly with Fox, an embittered and angry
Burke wrote Earl Fitzwilliam, the nephew and heir of Rockingham:
"Thank God that I have been completely separated from all the Partizans
of that sort of Liberty"-i.e. the radical idea of liberty that Fox and his sup–
porters condoned. Burke resigned his seat in 1794.
When Burke attacked the Revolution before it was widely con–
demned by the English establishment, the old charge against him that he
was a crypto-Jesuit was dredged up. He was accused of being against the
Revolution because he was a friend of Catholicism. A cartoon that
appeared in 1790 portrays Burke as a Jesui t Don Quixote: "The Knight of
the Woeful Countenance Going to Extirpate The [French] National
Assembly." On Burke's horse is a copy of his
Riiflections on the Revolution in
France
(1790). Many members of Burke's own party, including Fox, also
insinuated that his anti-French stance was partly motivated by the desire to
get a pension from the Pi tt government, which was growing increasingly
concerned about the Revolution.
The main charge levelled against Burke was inconsistency. Fox and
others pointed out that Burke had praised the Glorious Revolution pf
1688 and had argued that the American colonists deserved independence,
so they could not understand why he didn't support the French
Revolution, which in their minds was the heir to these two revolutions.
They agreed with Thomas Jefferson, who said: "The Revolution in France
does not astonish me so much as the revolution of Mr. Burke."
The charge of inconsistency was unfair for two reasons. First, Burke
had always argued that prudence was important in political affairs, and he
thought it was prudent to support American independence. Secondly,
Burke had always said that religion was "one of the bonds of society," and
anticlerical violence marked the French Revolution from the start: a
famous cry of the Revolution in its early stages was "hang the bishops
from the lampposts!" and in 1790 the French National Assembly nation–
alized church property. According to Burke, the revolutionaries were
