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Edmund Burke's Irish History: A Hypothesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John C. Weston Jr.
John C. Weston Jr.*
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University of MassachusettsAmherst
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Extract

In 1763 when Edmund Burke had not yet given up his plan to make his way in the world by literary efforts, he wrote a letter to William Gerard (“Single Speech”) Hamilton who had just procured for him a pension on the Irish Establishment. His purpose was to make it clear that in accepting the pension he would not be giving up all his time, some of which he wanted to devote to writing:

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1962 , pp. 397 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

1 The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, I (Chicago, 1958), 164–165. The volumes of this edition so far published are henceforth cited as Corr.

2 Corr., i, 164n.

3 All of them, except the successful “Historical Articles” in the Annual Register begun in 1758, were unsatisfactory. The first was a collaboration in a sharp piece of hack writing, the anonymous Account of the European Setttlements in America (published in 1757, but probably begun as early as 1751); the second was a short but brilliant fragment, An Essay towards an History of the Laws of England, written before 1757 (Works of Edmund Burke, Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1871, vii, 475–488—henceforth cited as Works); and the third was unfinished, the Abridgment of the English History begun in 1756 or 1757 (Works, vii, 159–474). None of these had enhanced Burke's reputation, and few knew of his authorship of the fourth historical project, the popular “Articles” in the Register.

4 Corr., i, xviii.

5 Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven, 1937-), ix, 405, 407, 418.

6 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eighth Report, Appendix 1 (London, 1881), pp. 450–451.

7 In 1764 Burke drew up for the Catholic Association at Curry's request “an address and petition to the king” about the injustices of their property disqualifications; printed by Curry in Historical and Critical Review (Dublin, 1786), ii, 287–293 (A. P. Levack, “Edmund Burke, his Friends, and the Dawn of the Irish Catholic Emancipation,” Catholic Historical Review, xxxvii, 1952, 393). Curry later told Burke that this document was laid before the king as the first measure leading to the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 (Edmund Burke, Correspondence between 1744 and 1797, ed. Earl Fitzwilliam and R. Bourke, London, 1844, ii, 237–238—hereafter cited as Corr., 1844).

8 Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rpt, App. 1, p. 476.

9 James Ussher, A Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and British, 1631, in Whole Works (Dublin, 1847), iv, 238–239.

10 Abbey Jacques MaGeoghegan (1702–64), a French priest of Irish background, used O'Conor to translate Irish documents (Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rept., App. 1, pp. 465–466) and praised him and his historical work in Histoire de l'Irland Ancienne et Moderne, 3 v. (1758–63), a history much in the school of O'Conor and Curry; John O'Brien (d. 1767), Roman Catholic bishop of Colyne and Ross (ibid., p. 486a); and Thomas O'Gorman (1732–1809), an Irish expatriot in France, was evidently working on a history of Ireland in 1765 when O'Conor introduced him to Burke (Fitzwilliam MSS., O'Conor to Burke, 25 April 1765; the documents cited as “Fitzwilliam MSS.” are on deposit in the Sheffield Public Library and are used with the permission of Earl Fitzwilliam and the Trustees of the Wentworth Woodhouse Settled Estates): “Mr. O'Gorman who will deliver you this [the letter], is brother in law to the late French Minister: the Chevalier D'Eon. He has been in his leisure hours making collections at home and abroad for the Civil and Ecclesiastical History of his native country.” This passage possibly augments the findings of Dr. Richard Hayes, who states that O'Gorman was only compiling commissioned genealogies of other Irish expatriots in France (“A Forgotten Irish Antiquary,” Irish Historical Studies, xxx, 1941, 587–596). No history of Ireland by O'Gorman survives.

11 The List of Subscribers prefixed to the volume (Dublin: “Printed by James Hoey, for the Editor, Mr. Mich. Reilly,”) includes an “Edm. Burke, Esq.; M.D.,” which is evidently not our Burke, but the List also includes, interestingly, Burke's most intimate later Irish correspondent, Charles O'Hara.

12 Fitzwilliam MSS., O'Conor to Burke, 25 April 1765.

13 Dissertations on the History of Ireland (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1766), p. xv.

14 MaGeoghegan, Ferdinando Warner, George Lyttleton, and Thomas Leland so sought him out (Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rpt., App. 1, pp. 441–492, passim).

15 Ibid., pp. 479a, 480a. Evidently Burke visited O'Conor at his residence just once: The “worthy O'Connor [sic], author of the Dissertations on Irish History, always talks of you with the greatest Respect, and the high Honour you did him in visiting him” (George Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller, to Burke, 20 Jan. 1767, Fitzwilliam MSS.).

16 Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rept., App. 1, p. 486a.

17 Fitzwilliam MSS., 25 April 1765. George Faulkner wrote to Burke that, “Dr. Leland, your other friends and I, never meet together that we do not toast your Health in Bumpers” (20 Jan. 1767, ibid.).

18 Ibid., Reilly to Burke, 19 July 1766.

19 Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rpt., App. 1, p. 489b.

20 Ibid., p. 480a.

21 Fitzwilliam MSS., Curry to Burke, 15 Dec. 1764, 24 Feb. 1765; Corr., I, 202. Prof. William B. Todd writes in a letter that a London edition of 1765 by Richard Balfe is a piracy of the 1761 edition, reissued in 1767, and that “the ‘fourth edition,‘ Dublin, 1770, is revised and presumably incorporates” the material Burke suggested. What Curry thought were Burke's reasons for not fulfilling his intention to help with a London edition can be seen in Curry's letter to O'Conor, 12 Sept. 1765: “I have not had an answer from our friend Mr. Burke. I suppose he is afraid to correspond with us, in his present situation, as he has been publically mal-treated in the English newspapers for favouring us, & our affairs” (Royal Irish Academy, MS B.1.1). In 1772 both O'Conor and Curry were very angry with Burke for refusing to supervise—evidently because of political caution—an enlarged version of Curry's work (MSS in the O'Conor Don collection in Clonalis, Ireland). I am indebted to Prof. Walter Love for the last two references.

22 An Historical and Critical Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland, 2nd ed. (1786) cites (ii, 281n) Letter to a Peer of Ireland (Works, iv, 219–239).

23 Ferdinando Warner, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in Ireland, 2nd ed. (London, 1768), p. ix. Warner undertook this work instead of completing his general history, because he felt, like the revisionists, that its subject was the most important period. Although he is generally critical of the extreme revisionist interpretations, he is as critical of the Protestant, and in view of his desire to have repealed “those severe and vindictive Statutes” against Roman Catholic Irishmen (p. xii), we can call him a moderate revisionist.

24 Annual Register for 1761, rv, 277.

25 Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rpt., App. 1, p. 469a.

26 Warner gives an account of his efforts in writing this volume in the Preface to his History of the Rebellion; Burke's review appeared in the Annual Register for 1763 (vi, 257–264). O'Conor found much to be displeased with, but allowed Warner to have had “the merit of casting our antiquities into a good historical mould” (Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rpt., App. 1, p. 476).

27 Dissertations, p. xv.

28 O'Conor wanted to be in touch with people writing about Irish history in order to influence them with revisionist ideas. He wrote to Curry, June 1761: “I hear of other able undertakers [besides Warner, who had just written for help]. Dr. Smollet [sic], Mr. Nugent (the translator of Montesquieu), etc.” And again two years later: “Mr. R[eilly, O'Conor‘s Dublin publisher] tells me (from Cunningham's [his London bookseller's] information) that Dr. Smollet is coming over to Dublin to collect materials and encouragement for a history of Ireland (Warner having failed of any encouragement among us)” (Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rpt., App. 1, pp. 469a, 471). O'Conor also attempted to persuade Francis Sullivan, Royal Professor of Common Law in Trinity College, to prepare a collection of ancient Irish laws and annals, explained by a literal translation into Latin (with O'Conor‘s help); but, in spite evidently of some work on the project, it failed through lack of patronage (ibid., pp. 476b, 479; also O'Conor, Dissertations, p. xiv). Sullivan published a book on feudal law (1772). Because of Sullivan's connection with the revisionists and because of the obvious influence of Montesquieu on his work, Burke, the revisionist and disciple of Montesquieu, might well have met him in 1761–62 and 1763–64. This helps to corroborate Copeland's conjecture about their acquaintance (Our Eminent Friend, Edmund Burke, New Haven, 1949, p. 129n), but no letters between them survive.

29 Corr., i, 68.

30 Annual Register for 1763, vi, 257–264.

31 Corr., i, 147–148.

32 Corr. (1844), I, 223; John O'Donovan, A Grammar of the Irish Language (Dublin, 1845), pp. 70–71. These volumes came from the collection of Edward Lhuyd, the Celtic scholar, and are still preserved at Trinity College Library. See the careful article by Walter D. Love, “Edmund Burke, Charles Vallancey, and the Sebright Manuscripts,” Hermanthena, xcv (1961), 21–35. Vallencey's letter to Burke of 25 June 1783 announces his plans to visit him in London and his just having sent a complimentary copy of Vol. 12, Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicus; he includes in the letter a long, detailed discussion (2 full pages) of the early settlement of Ireland (Fitzwilliam MSS.). About this time another Irish antiquary, a physician from Limeric, sent Burke a long account of 2 ancient rings found near Tipperary evidently formerly worn by a “Celtic Knight” and of an old fresco on the wall of an ancient Irish abbey (ibid., O'Halloran to Burke, 15 Sept. 1783).

33 James Prior, Memoir of Edmund Burke, 2nd ed. (London, 1826), i, 508–509, and Works, ii, 146–148; vii, 410–415.

34 Corr. (1844), iii, 442.

35 Robert Bisset, Life of Edmund Burke, 2nd ed. (London, 1800), ii, 426.

36 Corr. (1844), iii, 441–442.

37 John B. Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1848), vii, 773. The present location of these volumes is not known, according to R. J. Hayes, Director of the National Library of Ireland.

38 Corr., ii, 285. For further evidence of his knowledge of 17th-century Irish history, see Works, iv, 225, 246–247, 254–255, 271–277; vi, 407–411; and Hansard, Parliamentary History, xxv, 650.

39 Among all Burke's writings (other than the Abridgment of the English History) one would most expect to find something on the history of Ireland in his fragmentary Tract on the Popery Laws (Works, vi, 301–360), but there is almost nothing. An earlier version of the 2nd section of the Tract, now among the Fitzwilliam MSS. (R 103), contains no historical material either.

40 The smaller bundles are variously endorsed in Burke's hand, “On Irish History from Lord Straffordes [sic] Letters not printed,” “Spanish authors who mention Ireland to have been peopled from Spain with other matters,” “Relative to Hist. & State of Ireland.” There are five types of notes: (1) transcriptions of early 17th-century letters from Strafford's collection relative to the English policy toward Ireland, with Burke's annotation and references to printed sources; (2) “extract from life of Usher [sic], Archbishop of Armagh, relative to the toleration proposed in 1626”; (3) long extracts from “[Sir George] Cary's Collection at Oxford,” mainly from Spanish authors relative to the very early period, but one passage from William Caxton on an event relevant to Ireland under Henry VI; (4) a list of titles pertaining to 16th- and 17th-century Irish history in “Eight Volumes of Manuscript,” with a note giving an estimate by a printer of the number of sheets required to print the listed items; and (5) a transcription of an old manuscript about the Tyrone Rebellion (Fitzwilliam MSS., Bk. 27d).

41 Works, vi, 355. Also Prior, 2nd ed., i, 510, for Burke's similar opinion in 1787.

42 Corr. (1844), iii, 442.

43 Corr., ii, 285. Although O'Conor and Curry urged him to this task too, it was evidently Burke's urgings principally which induced Leland's undertaking; he wrote to Burke on 19 May 1770 asking for help in transcribing manuscripts on Ireland located in England: “Now pray … do not deny me…. You seduced me into my present state of sinful slavery. Don't be so much a Devil as to desert me” (Fitzwilliam MSS.). See Walter Love, “Charles O'Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland's ‘Philosophical’ History of Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies, forthcoming.

44 Corr. (1844), I, 223, 226–227.

45 Leland's work was The History of Ireland from the Invasion of Henry II, with a Preliminary Discourse on the Antient State of the Kingdom, 3 vols. For Burke's hopes but disappointment, see D. C. Bryant, Edmund Burke and his Literary Friends (St. Louis, 1939), p. 230. The review is in the Annual Register, xvi, 255–266, where a passage from the History is printed which includes Leland's acknowledgement of Burke's assistance. For Burke's probable authorship of the review, see Copeland, Our Eminent Friend, pp. 125, 140–141n. Burke was disappointed because Leland's history was not revisionist, as he had tried to influence Leland to make it, but gave the stock Protestant interpretations. A convenient test for whether or not an 18th-century Irish historian is a revisionist is his treatment of the massacre of the Irish on the Island of Magee in November 1641. Curry, wanting to show that the Irish atrocities against the English were provoked, attempts to prove that 3,000 innocent Irish were massacred by Scotch Presbyterians, that this was the first massacre in Ulster, and that it took place in early November (Historical and Critical Review, 1786, i, 197–213). Burke supported this view and showed Curry how to prove it more convincingly (Fitzwilliam MSS., Curry to Burke, 15 Dec. 1764). Warner, clearly with Curry in mind, alters the number to 300, denies that it was the first massacre, and claims that it occurred after the Irish were in arms (History of the Rebellion, p. 115). Leland, referring to the massacre, writes that “popish writers have represented it with shocking aggravation” and then denies the number, the date, and the priority of the event by citing manuscript depositions taken from Protestant eye-witnesses and located in the Trinity College Library, Dublin (History of Ireland, iii, 128–129), manuscripts which the revisionists, Burke among them, despised as completely unreliable; see, e.g., Corr. (1844), iii, 442, where Burke calls the Trinity documents a “rascally collection.”

46 Bryant, Literary Friends, p. 231; J. Nichols, Illustrations, vii, 765, 773; Corr. (1844), iii, 441. Campbell's book: Strictures on the Ecclesiastical and Literary History of Ireland (1789); as a result of the publication of this book, Burke was drawn into a messy but amusing controversy over Irish antiquities. Burke had written a letter praising with studied and courteous qualifications Vallancey's Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland; the letter had gotten into print in a paper defending the Vindication against attacks by Vallencey's enemies, among whom was Campbell. Campbell in his Strictures, which was dedicated to Burke, reprinted the entire controversy together with a reinterpretation of Burke's letter derogatory to Vallancey. The latter, who wanted to answer Campbell, wrote to Burke, 8 Oct. 1789 (Fitzwilliam MSS.), asking for a clarification—how could Burke love both him and his enemy? See Walter Love's article on this controversy in History and Theory, forthcoming.

47 Hume decided, in July 1759, to complete his History of England by narrating the period from the beginning to the Tudors (Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, Oxford, 1932, i, 314). The main tradition is that Burke abandoned his Abridgment because of the competition offered by Hume's History (e.g., Andrew Strahan wrote in 1809 that he heard George Nicol, James Dodsley's executor, say this [Times Literary Supplement, 27 May 1955, p. 285]; see also Prior, Memoir, I, 74, and R. Straus, Robert Dodsley, London, 1910, p. 256). Therefore, if Hume's competition was the cause, Burke abandoned the work in 1759. He would have had no cause to abandon until that date a short general history of England, undertaken after the publication of Hume's volumes on the Stuarts (1756) and while Hume was writing the volume on the Tudors (begun in 1757) with evidently no idea of writing a complete history.

48 Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole thought in 1761 that he was still engaged in it (Walpole's Correspondence, ed. Lewis, ix, 407; xiv, 122).

49 Corr., i, 164.

50 Corr., i, 202. The MS fragment on the Whiteboys now at Sheffield was written about this time too. Leland probably refers to the latter on 28 Feb. 1765: after discussing the local Irish disturbances, he asks Burke to let him “have a more explicit account of that work in which you are now engaged” (Fitzwilliam MSS). Some have erroneously dated the writing of this Tract as 1761: Prior, Memoir, 2nd ed., i, xviii; Thomas Mahoney, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 15, Carl Cone, Edmund Burke and the Nature of Politics (Lexington, 1958), p. 43. Walker King, its first editor, was closer to the truth, now proved by Curry's letter, when he said it was written “soon after the year 1765” (Works, vi, 300).

51 It was, however, widely read in MS during Burke's life (Mahoney, Burke and Ireland, p. 356).