Burke was hardly more favourable to Imperial power in his comments about British North America. Canada, a minor appendage to the more consequential Thirteen Colonies, was mostly beneath his notice, but his few remarks about it were strikingly unsympathetic to the cause of Empire. Burke had condemned Britain’s deportation of the Acadians as both evil and self-defeating. “We did, in my opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretenses that in the eye of an honest man are not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern, or to reconcile, gave us no sort of right to extirpate.” 10 In 1780 he attacked Acadia’s successor colony, Nova Scotia – then serving as a vital bulwark in Britain’s war against the Americans – as an “ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favoured brat,” and an endless, useless drain on the British taxpayer.11 In 1774, just a decade after the conquest of New France, he made a proposal to empower the conquered French Canadians that would have been startling in Lord Durham’s day – and long after. “Give them English liberty, give them an English constitution,” he told Parliament about the Canadians, “and then, whether they speak French or English, whether they go to mass or attend our own communion, you will render them valuable and useful subjects of Great Britain.”12
Why did Burke consistently dismiss the whole basis of British Imperial rule in Canada? Burke was an anti-imperialist at the heart of the Empire, and his anti-imperialism grew from the same roots as his counter-revolutionary fervour. He believed British political usages were best for Britain because they had evolved in Britain for British needs, and he believed all governments should, in effect, be grown rather than invented according to a theory. Against the theoretical Enlightenment philosophy of the rights of man, adopted enthusiastically by slave-holding Virginians and despotic French revolutionaries, Burke preferred the actual rights that Englishmen had evolved ad hoc over centuries. In his opposition to building governments on a theory lay the root of the Reflections’s attack on the French Revolution and the root of its defence of the British constitution.
But if the constitution that had evolved in Britain was appropriate for Britain, it followed that it might not be appropriate for societies that had evolved differently. In an age that had made General Wolfe a heroic martyr, Burke was sceptical of governments rooted in conquest. He argued that ties between a nation and its colonies could only be rooted in common interests and a shared heritage, never in coercion. His willingness to let colonies go if those ties could not be sustained was, of course, heresy and treason to the handfuls of Protestant Englishmen struggling to maintain and to justify their authority over the Catholics of Ireland, the Hindus of India – and the French population of Canada.
Despite his horror of change based on nothing but abstract theories of man or government, the author of the counter-revolutionary bible had not even been a reliable supporter of the status quo at home. The worshipper of Marie Antoinette might be expected also to have idolized George III. Yet to read Burke on George III is to move from the counter-revolutionary propagandist of the Reflections to a vigorous opponent of royal power. In domestic politics, the British tradition that Burke extolled and defended was the Whig tradition of parliamentary supremacy. Whigs looked proudly back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when England’s Stuart dynasty was deposed and the Dutch Prince William of Orange was made King of England as a constitutional monarch, obliged to seek and follow the advice of Parliament.
The Glorious Revolution fell short of completely or permanently shearing British kings of their independent power. The active, young King George III of the 1760s had often chosen prime ministers for their assent to his policies and then struggled to bring Parliament into line. In Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, a long essay he wrote on this subject in 1770, Burke had argued that the king and his cabinet were not truly responsible to Parliament, that they consistently interfered in and circumvented the workings of Parliament. Thoughts on the Causes attacked the covert influence the king still maintained and the way royal influence corrupted parliamentarians, who too often served the king’s will rather than the interests of the nation. That kind of Parliament, said Burke, became “the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man.”13
The political power of the monarch and his friends was no dead issue in the 1770s. In the midst of the American Revolutionary War, Burke and his parliamentary allies who supported American independence fought a long war against royal influence and royal power. King George had made the refusal of American independence a question of personal dignity, even when it was clear that granting independence was essential to ending the war. In 1779 George declared, “Before I will ever hear of any man’s readiness to come into office, I will expect to see it signed under his hand that he is resolved to keep the empire entire.” That royal will still shaped national policy.14
In 1782, the peace faction in the Commons, strengthened by every defeat in the colonial war, struck back. After the British disaster at Yorktown, the party of which Burke was a key strategist demanded, with the backing of a parliamentary majority, that “the king must not give a veto” to American independence. This blunt demand, rooted in the principle that any interference with parliamentary control over national policy was simply unconstitutional, brought George III to the brink of abdication. When the king swallowed his pride and kept his throne by accepting Parliament’s decision on the independence of the United States, a crucial step in securing parliamentary sovereignty had been taken. Burke briefly became a cabinet minister in a government committed, with the king’s very unwilling consent, to accepting the independence of the former colonies. Since then, no British monarch has successfully withstood the will of the House of Commons on a significant matter of public policy.
It was his advocacy of reducing the monarch from a power in politics to a symbol who reigned but did not rule that made Edmund Burke a congenial figure for Canadian politicians of Edward Whelan’s sort. For all his angry radicalism in other areas, Whelan was an orthodox child of Burke in his campaign to promote parliamentary government. Responsible government had brought Whelan into politics in 1846, at the age of twenty-one. He had wrapped himself in the rights of Englishmen and the “defence of the constitution,” in language that paraphrased Burke’s struggle against George III. Like other reformers from Newfoundland to Upper Canada, he pushed Burke’s argument that the elected legislature must control the executive branch. He likened governors and their advisers to arbitrary monarchs, and portrayed fellow reformers as loyal subjects and defenders of the constitution, even in the midst of their agitation for change. Looming inevitably behind them was the parliamentary Burke. The Burke they quoted, however, was not the defender of Marie Antoinette but the crusader against arbitrary royal authority, who nevertheless avoided any tinge of disloyalty by his deference to monarchy as a symbol.
After the achievement of responsible government in 1847, the doctrine that governors must defer to elected representatives was adopted throughout British North America. Paraphrases of Burke rolled out instinctively whenever a governor like Arthur Gordon needed to be educated about colonial political realities – or indeed, whenever colonial politicians bridled against the wishes of the Colonial Office. Charles Tupper used such arguments as confidently as Edward Whelan, and it hardly proved that either of them was a political philosopher. The argument that power must belong to elected parliamentarians was the fundamental assumption of mid-nineteenth-century Canadian politicians. Burke, an impeccably British ancestor, provided much of the rhetorical splendour which the confederation-makers mustered on this issue. In British North America, he was a force for change, not continuity.
The British Parliament whose power Burke himself had fought to expand was a very curious one. The House of Commons Burke defended against royal autocracy was itself wildly unrepresentative of the people of Britain. Britain in Burke’s time – and at the time of Canadian confederation as well – was governed by a Parliament for whic
h few Britons could vote. Many MPs held parliamentary seats controlled by a single aristocratic patron. Burke himself held such a seat for most of his parliamentary career, and he unapologetically defended the unreformed House of Commons. In Thoughts on the Causes, his attack on the political powers of the king, he associated “the natural strength of the kingdom,” which Parliament represented, not with the people, but with “the great peers, the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, the substantial yeomanry.”15
That narrow definition of who should elect the House of Commons was barely beginning to change in Britain in the 1860s. When the confederation plan was being debated in Canada, the hot controversy of British politics was a bill intended to increase – slightly – the number of men eligible to vote. Opposition was deep and strong, and the issue made and broke British governments in the 1860s.
Was Britain’s unreformed Parliament the model the makers of confederation extolled when they quoted Burke? A surprising number of our historians and political scientists have assumed it was. But the makers of confederation managed to combine reverence for parliamentary rule with a commitment to a broadly based electoral franchise totally unlike Britain’s. Edmund Burke had defended the dominance of a handful of property owners in the British Parliament on the grounds that, in truth, they dominated British society. The tightly limited circle of British voters, he had argued, actually modelled and represented real power in British society, just as it should.
In the North American colonies, however, property and the vote had always been very broadly held. There were rich and poor in British North America, but the distinction between them was much smaller than in Britain. Unlike their British counterparts, most families in nineteenth-century Canada could and did acquire property sufficient to give the household head the vote. The same principles that decreed a narrow electoral franchise in Britain supported a broad franchise in British North America.
The issue of voting power in Canada had once been hotly debated in Britain, and Edmund Burke himself had joined the debate. In 1791, when the British government drafted constitutions for the newly created colonies of Lower and Upper Canada, it wanted to prevent them from drifting, like the lost Thirteen Colonies, into hostility and independence. How was that to be done? The Constitutional Act of 1791 was intended to create societies like that of Britain, where long-established patterns of deference would buttress a lasting commitment to Britain, its monarchy, and its Empire. The Canadas would remain loyally British, argued the authors of the Constitutional Act, if they became societies led by a wealthy, secure, respected, and politically privileged local aristocracy, supported by an established church.
As late as the 1840s, John Beverley Robinson, then chief justice of Upper Canada, “bone and sinew of the Family Compact,” a beneficiary and a defender of the Constitutional Act of 1791, could still advocate “the control of numerous landlords over a grateful peasantry” as the way British North American society ought to be run. He defended the rule of “the most worthy, intelligent, loyal and opulent inhabitants … of high character, of large property, and of superior information” as the proper government for Upper Canada, as for Britain itself. Robinson always said, and believed himself justified in saying, that he was merely defending the constitution the Crown had bestowed on British North America in 1791.16
But in this interpretation of the English constitution, the conservative Robinson could not claim the support of the conservative Burke. In 1791, Edmund Burke had argued against the objectives that Robinson came to hold sacred. In the British House of Commons debate on the bill that created Upper Canada, he asserted his view that societies were organic, the product of history and tradition. Government, he always held, should be a reflection of society as it actually existed, not a tool for re-inventing society. “Let the Canadians have a constitution formed on the principles of Canadians and the English upon principles of Englishmen … but let there be no wild theories,” he declared. It was useless and wrong, in other words, to try to conjure into being a Canadian aristocracy, simply to bind the colony to the mother country. Even at the risk of losing Imperial control over Canada, Burke endorsed a French-Canadian government for French Canada, just as he had endorsed an American government for the American colonists and proposed an Indian government for India.17
The 1791 act, with its provisions for encouraging a Canadian landed gentry, was Upper and Lower Canada’s constitution from 1791 to 1841. But, as Burke predicted, no Canadian aristocracy took root. The appointed councils that dominated Canadian government between 1791 and the 1840s came to represent, not an independent landholding gentry, but a handful of petty office-holders, dependent on the Crown’s patronage. Canadian reformers, presenting themselves as loyal defenders of the rights of Englishmen, argued with all the more force that the constitution of 1791 had to be adapted to local circumstances. The logic of the British constitution, they had been saying since the 1820s, required that, since property was widely held in the Canadian colonies, political power had to be widely held. Political power in British North America, they argued, was the birthright of the elected assemblies, not the appointive councils of the would-be gentry. They dismissed the other view, the ostensibly conservative one advocated by Robinson, as fundamentally unconstitutional.
The reform interpretation triumphed so completely in British North America in the 1840s that, by the 1860s, it was a non-controversial orthodoxy. Old-fashioned “compact tories,” hanging on to Robinson’s views, had been pushed aside by conservative politicians like Macdonald and Tupper, ready and very much able to secure electoral support for their brand of conservatism. Reformers and conservatives, whatever their other differences, had all become parliamentarians. On the role of parliament, they were all Burkeans, which (despite Burke’s counter-revolutionary aura) meant they had all accepted what had been reform arguments and had become orthodoxy after the winning of responsible government in 1847.
What elected representatives had lacked before responsible government was not representativeness; they had always been close to their voters and elected on a remarkably broad franchise for the times. What they had lacked was power. The makers of confederation, as heirs and beneficiaries of the long struggle to secure the authority of elected assemblies over the executive arm of government, quite naturally held an exalted view of representative bodies. Here again, Burke was a crucial exemplar. Once more, he has made the makers of confederation liable to a charge of being conservative reactionaries when they were actually being notably progressive.
The classic statement of the right and duty of parliamentarians to make up their own minds and to vote, not simply as pipelines for their constituents but in accordance with their own convictions, was Edmund Burke’s. In 1774, Burke was invited to stand for Parliament in the city of Bristol. To sit for Bristol, then England’s second-largest city and its most important west-coast port, would be a promotion from holding a seat through the patronage of a landholding aristocrat. Holding that seat would make Burke a significant figure in Parliament. Yet Burke was frank in telling the voters of Bristol how he expected to act as their member of Parliament. He would not let them tell him how to vote.
Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention.… But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.… Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.18
Late-twentieth-century opinion often condemned this view of the parliamentarian’s role. Burke’s declaration was frequently cited as simple élitism, a permission for politicians to dismiss with disdain the ignorant masses who merely elect them. But Burke argued that parliamentary representation was in fact worthless unless parliamentary study and debate could lead representatives to reach informed conclusions, even to change their minds. As for
his supposed contempt for voters, it is worth observing what happened to his parliamentary career as Bristol’s representative.
Burke did follow his own counsel as Bristol’s member of Parliament, and he managed to offend many of the voters there. By 1778 he was clearly in danger of losing his seat. It was a risk he was prepared to run. “He should not blame [his constituents] if they did reject him,” he wrote. “The event would afford a very useful example, on the one hand of a senator inflexibly adhering to his opinion against interest and against popularity; and, on the other, of constituents exercising their undoubted right of rejection; not on corrupt [grounds], but from their persuasion that he whom they had chosen had acted against the judgement and interest of those he represented.” Soon after, with his defeat certain, Burke withdrew his candidacy on the eve of the election and ceased to be member for Bristol after a single term.19
After his defeat in Bristol, Burke was able to stay in the House of Commons only by acquiring once again a seat controlled by an aristocratic patron. He retained the title of member of Parliament, but lost the clout that came from being elected by a key constituency. In modern terms, it was as if a potential party leader had thrown away a House seat for a Senate appointment. Burke took the demotion in stride, for he was more a philosopher in politics than a typically ambitious politician, and relied more on his voice in the House than on raw political power. But few conventional politicians would so willingly have thrown away the Bristol seat. Burke’s experience, in fact, proved that elected parliamentarians who were cavalier about their constituents’ wishes put their careers in jeopardy. Whatever their theoretical freedom, few conventional politicians were as reckless as Burke was about disagreeing with the voters.
Having fought for a generation to secure the rule of the elected assemblies against appointive governors and councils, Canadian politicians of the mid-1800s held an exalted view of the status of a parliamentary representative. They frequently spoke in Burkean tones of Parliament’s independence, and of a legislator’s obligation to consider the national good, not simply the local interest. They consistently argued that the elected assembly was the body where legislators should make up their mind and cast their votes according to their convictions.
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