Irish Historical Mysteries: Edmund Burke and Charles Lucas
There exists a remarkable imbalance in eighteenth-century Irish historiography or historical writing, whereby the events of the latter part of the century have received disproportionate attention from historians, to the detriment of the study of the less dramatic but nonetheless important events of the early and middle parts of the century. One notable victim of this historiographical imbalance is Charles Lucas, a tenacious and pugnacious political agitator born in 1713 in County Clare of Cromwellian planter stock. Lucas enlivened Dublin, and it must be added, national politics in the 1740s with his campaign for municipal reform in the city and his revival of Molyneux's claims in support of Irish legislative independence. Lucas was very much a successor of both Molyneux and Swift, and a forerunner not only of the constitutional Nationalism of Grattan and Flood, but a pivotal figure in the transition to the Republican separatism later to be espoused by the United Irishmen. Dubbed the 'Wilkes of Ireland' despite being in business well before the English radical, Lucas made a considerable impact on Irish politics in his lifetime, his memory subsequently going into eclipse mainly for the historiographical reasons mentioned above. (1)
One glaring example of the historical neglect of Lucas, and by no means the only one, is provided by Conor Cruise O'Brien's biography of Edmund Burke. Demonstrating that his father Richard Burke was almost certainly a convert to Protestantism, Dr O'Brien has shown the crucial importance of Burke's Irish Catholic connections in the formation of his character and political ideas. Furthermore, O'Brien concludes that Burke, though brought up a Protestant, was deeply wounded by the oppressive and humiliating effects of the Penal Laws on his family and connections, and that this trauma was responsible both for his secretiveness about his Irish background and his life-long hatred of abuse of power in all its forms. According to O'Brien, there was a fundamental consistency and harmony to Burke's political thought and actions concerning his four great causes, Ireland, America, India and France, which borrowing a phrase of Yeats, he dubs the 'Great Melody'. Given the biography's emphasis on Ireland and stress on Burke as a political animal, it might be expected that considerable attention would have been devoted to the earliest recorded political involvement of its subject, which concerned Lucas. In fact, Lucas is not mentioned at all in O'Brien's biography of Burke. (2)
In 1748-9, few in Dublin could have been unaware of Lucas's existence, as he campaigned vigorously to win one of the capital's two vacant parliamentary seats in one of the eighteenth century's most bitterly-fought and interesting by-elections. Lucas deluged the protestant voters with pamphlet addresses and letters, in which he extended the range of his campaign from municipal reform to Irish legislative independence. These tracts were republished in a collected edition by Lucas in 1751, and in the writer's view this is one of the most important but neglected Irish political works of the eighteenth century. (3) In his tenth address of 13 January 1749, after summarising of Molyneux's Case of Ireland, Lucas made a radical statement which was eventually to land him in serious trouble with the authorities: 'It must now be confessed that there was no general rebellion in Ireland since the first British invasion, that was not raised or fomented by the oppression, instigation, evil influence or connivance of the English'. In his eleventh address of 31 January Lucas went even further in his critique of English misgovernment in Ireland, claiming that though the native Irish in medieval times had shown their willingness to submit to English law, they had been treated as badly 'as the Spaniards used the Mexicans, or as inhumanly as the English now treat their slaves in America'. (4) The not unsurprising result of Lucas's daring propaganda was that in October 1749 the Irish house of commons charged him with seditious writings and justifying Irish rebellions, so that he had to flee abroad to escape imprisonment and would remain in exile for eleven and a half years.
Lucas specifically included the 1641 Rebellion in his charge concerning the root causes of Irish rebellions, flying in the face of the establishment consensus that the 1641 outbreak had been a totally unprovoked attempt by Catholics to extirpate Protestants. Though Lucas was not without a measure of anti-Catholic prejudice, his stance on Irish rebellions in 1749 distinguishes him from the extreme and bigoted wing of Irish Protestantism, to which he has often wrongly been alleged to belong. This is a crucial point in endeavouring to understand the probable nature of his relationship with the young Burke, to which issue we now turn.
Burke was completing his studies in Trinity College as the Dublin by-election of 1748-9 was being fought. Unfortunately, Burke later destroyed much of his early correspondence, undoubtedly because of the secretiveness about his Irish background already mentioned, and this makes it difficult to be certain about details of his life during these years. However, Bisset, Prior and other early biographers claimed that Burke had in fact opposed Lucas during the Dublin by-election, but without offering any documentary proof of this. (5)
There was no serious challenge to the virtual consensus that the young Burke was anti-Lucas, until in 1923 Arthur Warren Samuels, completing a work commenced by his deceased son Arthur P I Samuels, claimed that Burke could not have opposed Lucas. (6) Samuels listed a substantial body of pamphlets written in support of Lucas which he claimed were in fact Burke's work, but it has to be said that he produced no really plausible evidence that they were written by one author, still less that it was Burke.
Yet Samuels did identify a group of five distinctive articles in Lucas's newspaper, the Censor, as having been written by Burke, some of which were signed with the initial 'B'. (7) Burke had also employed the signature 'B' in his own journal, the Reformer, in 1748. The 'B' Censor articles exhibit a lofty and indeed Burkean tone, only supporting Lucas in a relatively cautious and moderate way. In what appears significantly to be a reference to anti-Catholic legislation, 'B' counselled that if 'penal laws' had been made for 'turbulent and seditious times', the wise judge would suffer them 'to be forgot in happier days and under a prudent administration'. The 'B' articles also contain examples of 'character drawing' of illustrious figures, and some other themes popular with Burke.
The Samuels findings seemed to have received tacit acceptance, or at least to have cast serious doubt on the tradition that the young Burke had opposed Lucas, until challenged in 1953 by the American scholar Gaetano L Vincitorio. Vincitorio purported to have demolished Samuels's claims, on the grounds that a 'sensitive aesthete' and sympathiser with Catholics such as Burke could not have supported a demagogue and virulent bigot such as Lucas. More tellingly, Vincitorio was able to quote from Burke's correspondence to show his undeniable later hostility to Lucas, so that for example after his return from exile Burke dismissed Lucas as a 'mountebank' in 1761 and wrote disparagingly about his 'pompous funeral' in 1771. (8)
Yet the fact that Burke opposed Lucas in later life does not prove conclusively that he had never supported him, and indeed Burke would not be the first young radical who became more conservative as he grew older. As well as drawing what was merely an unhelpful caricature of Lucas, Vincitorio ignored the similarity between the Censor and Reformer articles. Furthermore, one of the most prominent leaders of the Catholic party, Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, felt able to write a pamphlet in Lucas's support in 1749. Burke therefore could well have written in Lucas's interest as a radical university student with Catholic sympathies, and indeed his later condemnation of Lucas in 1761 contains the admission that he was now 'somewhat out of humour with patriotism', as well as noting rather cryptically that he was obliged 'from decency and other considerations' to hold his tongue on the matter. If we are right about his early support for Lucas, this provides yet another reason for the mature Burke to be embarrassed and secretive concerning his Irish past.
Now the possibility that at any stage Burke could have supported a radical Protestant nationalist such as Lucas poses some difficulties for those who believe in the 'consistency theory' concerning the great conservative's political thought and actions throughout his career, and Dr O'Brien is undoubtedly the leading contemporary exponent of this theory. Well before the publication of his biography of Burke, the writer drew Dr O'Brien's attention to the Lucas problem, and he replied that while appreciating the force of the arguments, he was not convinced that Burke could have written in favour of Lucas. Given the need to discover as much as possible about Burke's 'missing years', and the fact that a considerable amount has now been written on the question of the relationship between Burke and Lucas, it seems extraordinary that Dr O'Brien does not refer to it in any way in his biography.
There could also be a problem with regard to Dr O'Brien's historical method, which tends toward the literary, neglecting tedious chronology to pursue grand themes, and with a reliance on what he calls fantasia or 'imaginative insight'. Now every good historian knows that imagination can be a useful aid, provided that it is kept subordinate to critical analysis of all relevant evidence, most of which is not to be found conveniently in the published writings and speeches of great men. In sum, it is suggested that the Burke-Lucas relationship raised the possibility of a troublesome discord sounding in the Great Melody, which Dr O'Brien simply chose to suppress lest it should interfere with what is admittedly a superb flight of fantasia. Other historians too have tended to deal with the perceived inconvenience of Lucas either by airbrushing him out of the picture, or by presenting him as a mere bigot of little historical importance. It is time that historians revised their attitudes to Lucas, who was a significant figure requiring more considered attention than that hitherto granted him.
References
(1) For a general account of Lucas's career, see Sean Murphy, 'Charles Lucas, Catholicism and Nationalism', Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 8, 1993, pages 83-102.
(2) Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Great Melody: a Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, London 1992.
(3) Charles Lucas, The Political Constitutions of Great Britain and Ireland Asserted and Vindicated, London 1751.
(4) Lucas, Political Constitutions, pages 112-43.
(5) For more specific references relating to the Burke-Lucas question, see Sean Murphy, 'Burke and Lucas: an Authorship Problem Re-examined', Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1, 1986, pages 143-56.
(6) A P I and A W Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence and Writings of Edmund Burke, Cambridge 1923.
(7) Lucas, Political Constitutions, pages 487-91, 501-5, 517-21, 563-72.
(8) G L Vincitorio, 'Edmund Burke and Charles Lucas', Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 68, 1953, pages 1,047-55.