A Letter from Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord: On the Attacks Made upon him and his Pension, in the House of Lords by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale

by Edmund Burke

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Genres: Nonfiction

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1796

About the author

After A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , aesthetic treatise of 1757, Edmund Burke, also noted Irish British politician and writer, supported the cause of the American colonists in Parliament but took a more conservative position in his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790.

Edmund Burke, an Anglo statesman, author, orator, and theorist, served for many years in the House of Commons as a member of the Whig party. People remember mainly the dispute with George III, great king, and his leadership and strength. The latter made Burke to lead figures, dubbed the "old" faction of the Whig against new Charles James Fox. Burke published a work and attempted to define triggering of emotions and passions in a person. Burke worked and founded the Annual Register, a review. People often regard him as the Anglo founder.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and contempt. By me they have been so always. I knew that as long as I remained in public, I should live down the calumnies of malice, and the judgments of ignorance. If I happened to be now and then in the wrong, (as who is not?) like all other men, I must bear the consequence of my faults and my mistakes."

After mentioning different acts of parliament: "I greatly doubt whether his Grace has ever read the one or the other."

"For a little time the helm appeared abandoned—"

"The liberty they pursued was a liberty inseparable from order, from virtue, from morals, and from religion; and was neither hypocritically nor fanatically followed. They did not wish, that liberty, in itself one of the first of blessings, should in its perversion become the greatest curse which could fall upon mankind."

"At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand—I do not say I saved my country; I am sure I did my country important service."

"I found a great distemper in the commonwealth; and, according to the nature of the evil and of the object, I treated it. The malady was deep; it was complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms. Throughout it was full of contraindicants. On one hand government, daily growing more invidious from an apparent increase of the means of strength, was every day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor was this dissolution confined to government commonly so called. It extended to parliament; which was losing not a little in its dignity and estimation, by an opinion of its not acting on worthy motives. On the other hand, the desires of the people (partly natural and partly infused into them by art) appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a manner, with regard to the economical object, (for I set aside for a moment the dreadful tampering with the body of the constitution itself,) that, if their petitions had literally been complied with, the state would have been convulsed; and a gate would have been opened, through which all property might be sacked and ravaged. Nothing could have saved the public from the mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity; which would soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into discredit."

"But there were then persons in the world, who nourished complaint; and would have been thoroughly disappointed if the people were ever satisfied. I was not of that humour. I wished that they should be satisfied. It was my aim to give to the people the substance of what I knew they desired, and what I thought was right, whether they desired it or not, before it had been modified for them into senseless petitions."

"It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, to innovate is not to reform. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all unchanged. The consequences are before us,—not in remote history; not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation."

"The revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy, which generates equivocally "all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey, (both mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal."

"as Hamlet says, the face of heaven glows with horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every reflecting mind, and every feeling heart, perfectly thought-sick, without a thorough abhorrence of everything they say, and everything they do...."

"I had (what I hope that noble duke will remember in all its operations) a state to preserve, as well as a state to reform. I had a people to gratify, but not to inflame, or to mislead. I do not claim half the credit for what I did, as for what I prevented from being done."

"Government is made for the very purpose of opposing that reason to will and caprice, in the reformers or in the reformed, in the governors or in the governed, in kings, in senates, or in people."

"Every honest father of a family in the kingdom will rejoice at the breaking up for the holidays, and will pray that there may be a very long vacation in all such schools."

"who even in his amusements is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil."

"My merit has been in resisting the power and pride of France, under any form of its rule; but in opposing it with the greatest zeal and earnestness, when that rule appeared in the worst form it could assume."

"But let him take care how he endangers the safety of that constitution which secures his own utility or his own insignificance; or how he discourages those, who take up, even puny arms, to defend an order of things, which, like the sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless."

"They seemed tame, and even caressing. They had nothing but douce humanité in their mouth. They could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on the greatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice made their flesh creep. The very idea that war existed in the world disturbed their repose. Military glory was no more, with them, than a splendid infamy. Hardly would they hear of self-defence, which they reduced within such bounds, as to leave it no defence at all."

"those, who have nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoyment of undisturbed possessions. But security was their ruin. They had dashed to pieces in the storm, and our shores are covered with the wrecks. If they had been aware that such a thing might happen, such a thing never could have happened."

"Naturally men so formed and finished are the first gifts of Providence to the world. But when they have once thrown off the fear of God, which was in all ages too often the case, and the fear of man, which is now the case, and when in that state they come to understand one another, and to act in corps, a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to scourge mankind."

"It is some time since they have divided their own country into squares. That figure has lost the charms of its novelty. They want new lands for new trials."

"He would have told him, that when men in that rank lose decorum they lose everything."

"He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in the interests of Europe, and he could not have heard with patience, that the country of Grotius, the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law, should be taught a new code by the ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue, and turbulency, of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian republic."

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read A Letter to a Noble Lord because it is featured in volume 24 of The Harvard Classics alongside other writings by Edmund Burke, “On Taste”, On the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), and Reflections on the French Revolution (1790). Burke is one of the fathers of modern Conservatism and was a staunch supporter of the English monarchy and aristocracy – certainly not concepts I am a proponent of. It is always good to challenge our biases. As I’ve been slowly reading through the series out of order, it has introduced me to many texts I would never have read otherwise.

This 70+ page letter was written in 1796, near the end of Burke’s life in 1797, as a response to efforts to strip him of a pension the British government had awarded him for his decades of service. Editor of the Harvard Classics Charles W. Eliot states in his introduction that as a political work, A Letter to a Noble Lord “gives us Burke’s own view of his record as an administrator; as literature, the piece is probably unsurpassed in the language of lofty and scornful inventive.” It also provides insight into the political world of Burke’s day. In the light of the horrors of the French Revolution — a revolution in the name of Liberal Democracy that led to terror and inevitably into a dictatorship — the author’s favoring of sticking to conservative values is understandable. Burke references William Shakespeare and Hamlet in A Letter to a Noble Lord, but I think that the Bard’s historical tragedy Julius Caesar had themes more directly applicable to what Burke spent so much of his career fighting against.


[Statue of Burke in Washington, DC, USA, designed by James Havard Thomas]

*Quotes

"The liberty they pursued was a liberty inseparable from order, from virtue, from morals, and from religion; and was neither hypocritically nor fanatically followed. They did not wish, that liberty, in itself one of the first of blessings, should in its perversion become the greatest curse which could fall upon mankind."
*
"At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand—I do not say I saved my country; I am sure I did my country important service."
*
"I found a great distemper in the commonwealth; and, according to the nature of the evil and of the object, I treated it. The malady was deep; it was complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms. Throughout it was full of contraindicants. On one hand government, daily growing more invidious from an apparent increase of the means of strength, was every day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor was this dissolution confined to government commonly so called. It extended to parliament; which was losing not a little in its dignity and estimation, by an opinion of its not acting on worthy motives. On the other hand, the desires of the people (partly natural and partly infused into them by art) appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a manner, with regard to the economical object, (for I set aside for a moment the dreadful tampering with the body of the constitution itself,) that, if their petitions had literally been complied with, the state would have been convulsed; and a gate would have been opened, through which all property might be sacked and ravaged. Nothing could have saved the public from the mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity; which would soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into discredit."
*
"It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, to innovate is not to reform. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all unchanged. The consequences are before us,—not in remote history; not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation."
*
"...as Hamlet says, the face of heaven glows with horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every reflecting mind, and every feeling heart, perfectly thought-sick, without a thorough abhorrence of everything they say, and everything they do..."
*
"Government is made for the very purpose of opposing that reason to will and caprice, in the reformers or in the reformed, in the governors or in the governed, in kings, in senates, or in people."
*
“[Lord Augustus Keppel] was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in the interests of Europe, and he could not have heard with patience, that the country of Grotius, the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law, should be taught a new code by the ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue, and turbulency, of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian republic."
*

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[Image: Cover of the Delphi Classics’ The Harvard Classics]

Citation:
Burke, E. (2018). A letter to a noble lord. In C. W. Eliot (Ed.), The Harvard classics [eBook]. Delphi Classics. https://www.delphiclassics.com/shop/t... (Original work published 1796)

Title: A Letter to a Noble Lord, full title: A letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a noble lord: on the attacks made upon him and his pension, in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Bedford, and the Earl of Lauderdale, early in the present sessions of Parliament
Author(s): Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Year: 1796
Series: The Harvard Classics (1909): Volume 24 - Delphi Complete Harvard Classics and Shelf of Fiction
Genre: Nonfiction - Politics
Date(s) read: 3/27/25
Book 66 in 2025
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[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A movement is made to strip Burke of his pension, and he responds by defending his own ideas on government economy (a topic he’d written and spoken about before) and showing how his and other pensions were not incompatible with these ideas. He attacks the French Revolution and notes how its ideas were threatening the very people after his pension, presumably because he was hostile to precisely these ideas. He also goes right for the throat, insulting the noble parties by name and showing how much more worthy of his pension he was than they were of their noble titles, lands, and income.

While focusing on his ideas regarding government and its reform, he notes, “Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand.” (location 44765-44767) Sage advice for our day and age of “hope and change.”

In his own way of describing penny-wise and pound-foolish, Burke observes, “Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment, and a firm, sagacious mind.” (location 44886-44889)

When describing the actions of the French Jacobins, and warning his fellow Englishmen of their terrors, he notes, “It is remarkable that they never see any way to their projected good but by the road of some evil.” (location 45171-45172) So it is for all revolutionaries, sacrificing humans for “humanity,” or as Isabel Paterson said in The God Of The Machine, “The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.” (p 242)

Worth reading, Burke’s attacks on the two noblemen named, even while defending the concept of aristocracy, is interesting.

I read this as part of Collected Works of Edmund Burke, which I cannot review in under Goodreads' 20,000 character limit; the location references are to the work I read.