Burke, Ireland, and America

EDMUND Burke was elected to Parliament in December 1765, in time to take part in the great debate over the Stamp Act. Burke favored repeal, and it seems to have been he who swung his party—the faction of the Whigs led by Lord Rockingham—in that direction. His speech urging the repeal of the Stamp Act, on February 3, 1766, ends with the words: “We have nothing . . . for it, but to let [the colonists] carry across the ocean into the woods and deserts of America the images of the British Constitution; the Penates of an Englishman, to be his Comfort in his Exile, and to be the pledges of his fidelity and to give him an interest in his Dependency on this country.”

Horace Walpole, who belonged to a different faction of the Whigs and always had mixed feelings about Burke, noted in his memoirs for January 1766, referring to an earlier speech by Burke on the same subject: “There appeared in this debate a new speaker, whose fame for eloquence soon rose high above the ordinary pitch. His name was Edmund Burke, an Irishman, of a Roman Catholic family, and actually married to one of that persuasion.”

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Conor Cruise O'Brien

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EDMUND Burke was elected to Parliament in December 1765, in time to take part in the great debate over the Stamp Act. Burke favored repeal, and it seems to have been he who swung his party—the faction of the Whigs led by Lord Rockingham—in that direction. His speech urging the repeal of the Stamp Act, on February 3, 1766, ends with the words: “We have nothing . . . for it, but to let [the colonists] carry across the ocean into the woods and deserts of America the images of the British Constitution; the Penates of an Englishman, to be his Comfort in his Exile, and to be the pledges of his fidelity and to give him an interest in his Dependency on this country.”

Horace Walpole, who belonged to a different faction of the Whigs and always had mixed feelings about Burke, noted in his memoirs for January 1766, referring to an earlier speech by Burke on the same subject: “There appeared in this debate a new speaker, whose fame for eloquence soon rose high above the ordinary pitch. His name was Edmund Burke, an Irishman, of a Roman Catholic family, and actually married to one of that persuasion.”