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Richard Burke Jr.
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Richard Burke (9 February 1758 – 2 August 1794; not be confused with his uncle, also named Richard Burke) was a British barrister and Member of Parliament.
Key Information
He was born in Battersea, the son of Edmund Burke and Jane Mary Nugent.[1] He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1780. His father had high hopes for "the Whelp", never to be realized.
He was Recorder of Bristol from 1783 until his early death.
In 1791 Richard carried out a mission to the Koblenz headquarters of the French émigré army on behalf of his father, who was indulging in private diplomacy. Thereafter he returned to Ireland to become an agent of the Catholic Committee, which achieved a small measure of Catholic Emancipation in the Irish Parliament's Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793.
In 1794 his father resigned his seat in parliament for Malton, North Yorkshire over the failure to convict Warren Hastings in a parliamentary impeachment. Richard was elected in succession to his father, but fell ill soon afterwards, and died in South Kensington at the early age of thirty-six on 2 August 1794, and was buried in Beaconsfield.
The elder Burke suffered grief on a scale described by eyewitnesses as "truly terrific". In the words of his biographer, Edmund's bursts of affliction were of fearful force, so overwhelming indeed as to fright and almost to paralyze those who were around them. The Dictionary of National Biography article describes the grief of the parents as "almost uncontrollable", and his father considered himself ‘marked by the hand of God’ [2]
Richard had been a member of The Club since 1782. His contacts with Samuel Johnson were fairly slight, and on one occasion involved a rebuke to the younger man for futile attempts at "smart drollery".
No evidence has been found to support the claim that he was married, though a potential marriage to Mary Palmer, niece of Joshua Reynolds was speculated in 1792.[3]
In August 1791, Richard was sent by his father to Koblenz with the mission of helping unite royalists on the continent against the revolutionary regime in Paris. He found it beyond his skill to reconcile the warring factions among French royalists, and was snubbed by government ministers on his return.[4]
He was again an instrument of his father's policy in Ireland: to secure the loyalty of the comparatively small class of propertied Catholics by securing the vote for them on the same very limited and idiosyncratic terms on which it was available to Protestants.[5] This was achieved with the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, though by then (in early 1792) the younger Burke had been replaced as secretary of the Catholic Committee in Dublin by the United Irishman, Theobald Wolfe Tone, in a move that signalled a radicalisation of Catholic opinion.[6]
On his father’s retirement in 1794, Burke accepted an offer from Lord William Fitzwilliam, appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, of his English parliamentary seat at Malton. However, after receiving what his father called "a glimmering of public hope", a week after his election Richard Burke died of tuberculosis on 2 August 1794. Edmund Burke "reproached himself for having made such unsparing use of his son’s services".[4]
References
[edit]- ^ Paul Langford, ‘Burke, Edmund (1729/30–1797)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 23 November 2007
- ^ Burke, Edmund. Correspondence, 8.90
- ^ F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume II: 1784-1797, Clarendon Press, 2006, 424. Retrieved 1 May 2022.
- ^ a b "BURKE, Richard (1758-94). | History of Parliament Online". www.historyofparliamentonline.org. Retrieved 20 February 2022.
- ^ Durey, Michael (1994). "The Dublin Society of United Irishmen and the Politics of the Carey-Drennan Dispute, 1792-1794". The Historical Journal. 37 (1): (89–111), 96–100. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00014710. ISSN 0018-246X. JSTOR 2640053. S2CID 143976314.
- ^ "Webb, Alfred. "Tone, Theobald Wolfe", A Compendium of Irish Biography, MH Gill & Sons, Dublin, 1878". Archived from the original on 30 June 2019. Retrieved 10 September 2010.
