FRIENDS UNTIL THE END: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution, by James Grant
Edmund Burke, an 18th-century British traditionalist who respected the monarchy but nevertheless believed in progress and representative government, is still famous today, over two centuries after his death; Charles James Fox, an enemy of despotism whose sympathies came to lie with revolutionaries, is remembered mainly by historians. In their own time, however, as James Grant shows in his double biography, “Friends Until the End,” they were a brilliant team in the House of Commons, an odd couple from what we might today call different ends of the political spectrum.
Spellbinding speakers in an age of great oratory, Burke and Fox made an indelible mark on a country that was responding to a series of challenges — the loss of its American colonies, the exploitation of India for profit and the radicalism of the French Revolution. There was also the iniquity of slavery, which Burke and Fox eloquently denounced. Though they had very different ascents through the ranks of British society, Grant, the author of a biography of John Adams and of numerous books on finance, shows how they came together to form the conscience of their nation.
Born in Dublin in 1729, Burke did not follow his father into the law. Instead, after a move to London in 1750, he turned to journalism and aesthetic theory, which won him the attention of literary giants like the essayist Samuel Johnson, who became his close friend. At the age of 36 in 1765, Burke leveraged his intellectual talents to win a seat in Parliament. His opponents sneered at him as an Irish upstart, and although he was a Protestant they persisted in calling him a secret Catholic. Caricaturists depicted him as a Jesuit.
Two decades younger than Burke, Fox came from significant wealth; his father, a member of the peerage, helped procure Fox a seat in Parliament in 1768 when he was just 19. A playboy and risk taker, he gambled extravagantly and drank to excess. Caricaturists had fun with him too — he was fat and slovenly, with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Still, he had an engaging personality and formed friendships wherever he went.
Inseparable allies in Parliament, Burke and Fox were nearly always members of the opposition. “In any body of men in England,” Burke said ruefully, “I should have been in the minority; I have always been in the minority.” As spokesmen for a splinter group of the Whig Party, they came to power just once, in 1782, and Burke’s criticism of slavery helped cost him his seat in Bristol, a center of the slave trade, forcing him to seek re-election elsewhere.
Burke’s “Speech on Conciliation With America” — once widely read in American schools, as Grant notes — is a compelling argument against imposing taxes that had never been imposed before. He didn’t want the colonies to gain independence, but he foresaw that British policy might drive them to that. He also made India a personal crusade, mastering vast amounts of information about the age-old civilization that was being pillaged by the East India Company. In 1783 he and Fox produced an East India Bill to address the abuses, and it passed in the House of Commons but was defeated in the Lords. For such efforts, a peer called Burke “the advocate of distrest humanity.”
In 1789, the French Revolution arrived and broke up the team. Despite a lifetime of privilege, Fox became radicalized and hailed the revolution as “the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had ever been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country.” Burke, however, denounced it in his masterpiece, “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” He insisted that change must be cautious and gradual, reforming abuses but not demolishing established structures. Never given to understatement, he called the French Revolution “an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy.” When it gave way to the Terror with its guillotines and then to the dictatorship of Napoleon, his analysis was seen as brilliantly prophetic.
Grant describes these issues in depth, but focuses above all on the complexities of parliamentary maneuvering. Though the narrative sometimes bogs down in details, he has an eye for quotations that bring the players to life. And as an expert on finance, he is illuminating on the dilemma of paying for wars before the existence of a modern bond market.
In our own day, with authoritarianism making a resurgence throughout the world, zeal like Fox’s may seem inspiring. Yet Burke’s prudence and wisdom are inspiring too, and his political philosophy has deservedly endured. In “Friends Until the End,” there is no choosing sides, and Grant’s enthusiasm for both his subjects is winning. “I love them for what they said and the way they said it,” he writes, “for what they believed and for what they did.”
FRIENDS UNTIL THE END: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution | By James Grant | Norton | 477 pp. | $45
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