The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts its past, 1806–1829

Abstract

On 27 January 1806, in a house of commons newly integrating the momentous events of Trafalgar, Nelson's death, and Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz, the obsequies of William Pitt commenced. Lord Lascelles proposed that the late prime minister be honoured as had been his father twenty-eight years before, with a public funeral. The motion eventually passed but the inter-party wrangle that it caused was unseemly. William Windham, who had served as Pitt's Secretary at War between 1794 and 1801, wondered why such unusual honours were proposed for Pitt, given both the precarious situation of the current war (so unlike the Great Commoner's contribution to British glory) and the fact that Edmund Burke's death in 1797 had elicited no such designs. ‘In every point of comparison that could be made,’ said Windham, ‘Mr Burke stood upon the same level with Mr Pitt, and I do not see the reason for the difference.’ In retrospect, it may appear odd that any leading politician thought Burke was entitled to a state funeral. He had been neither war leader nor prime minister, the usual recipients of public funerals. Few others in the political nation in 1797, whig or Pittite, shared Windham's judgement on this matter. That Windham thought the Pittitesshouldhave shared his judgement was the source of his bitterness in his speech to the House. If Burke's acknowledged enemies, the Foxite whigs, had opposed public honours for Burke, Windham would not have been surprised,But that was not the case; it was not from them that the objection came, but from gentlemen on the other side of the house [Pittites], who took Mr Burke as the leader of their opinions, who cried him up to the skies, who founded themselves upon what he had done, but who were afraid, that if they consented to such honours, it would appear as if they approved of all the sentiments of that great man some of which were, perhaps, of too high a tone for them to relish.