A Plan for the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament and the Oeconomical Reformation of the Civil and Other Establishments.

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Of Burkes’ speech on Economical Reform

Edmund Burke, M.P. for Bristol, brilliant orator and opponent of the war with the American Colonies, here seeks to sway his constituents on fighting corruption by limiting the spending powers of the King, and English aristocracy. He speaks on the spending of the English nobility “Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there “Boreas and Eurus and Caurus and Argestes loud,” howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants—the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henries—who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers.”

Burke is scornful and humorous, describing the corruption of the court and Lord Talbot’s efforts at reform with “the turnspit in the king’s kitchen was a member of Parliament.” His hyperbole gives way to a moving call to shed frivolities of wealth and work with each other towards common good “Let us cast away from us, with a generous scorn, all the love-tokens and symbols that we have been vain and light enough to accept;—all the bracelets and snuff-boxes and miniature pictures, and hair devices, and all the other adulterous trinkets that are the pledges of our alienation, and monuments of our shame. Let us return to our legitimate home and all jars and quarrels will be lost in embraces…. Let us identify, let us incorporate ourselves with the people. Let us cut all the cables and snap the chains which tie us to an unfaithful shore, and enter the friendly harbour that shoots far out into the main its moles and jettees to receive us.”

In the face of the financial strains from the war in America, the point made by Burke carried over into real legislation. With The Civil List and Secret Service Money Act, the power over the expenditure in the King’s household was transferred to the Treasury, and branches of which were regulated. No pension over £300 was to be granted if the total pension list amounted to over £90,000. Thereafter, no pension was to be above £1,300 unless it was granted to members of the royal family or granted by Parliament. Secret service money employed domestically was similarly limited. A section of the act also abolished the existing Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations which, with the loss of the American War of Independence, had been dismissed earlier by King George III on 2 May 1782.