Nineteenth-century biographers MacKnight and Prior went even further, the latter noting, for example, that it took “two thousand years to produce one Cicero and one Burke.”40

One nineteenth-century biographer, however, did keep alive the myth of heroic Tory Burke, and in doing so was an early example of a tendency in Burkeana that would flower in the twentieth century—the latter-day partisan use of Burke. George Croly was an Anglican minister actively opposed to the Chartist movement. It was a time, he felt, much like the last decade of the eighteenth century. His purpose in writing on and editing Burke in 1840, he informed his readers, was to compile “an anti-revolutionary manual of the wisdom of the wisest of men.” Burke had been the genius behind “the forces that preserved society as it was,” and his words could do that again against the new menace. Croly may well have been the first to refer to Burke’s “renown as a prophet,” as well as to use him as a weapon in counterrevolutionary politics. Until our own day few have written of Burke as the Reverend Croly did.

The politician was elevated into the philosopher, and in that loftier atmosphere from which he looked down on the cloudy and turbulent contests of the time, he soared upward calmly in the light of truth and became more splendid at every wave of his wing.41

Croly was an exception, however. The nineteenth century in general had little of Burke as prophet of reaction. He was percieved, on the contrary, as an exemplar of the school that dominated Victorian thought, utilitarian liberalism. This was in no small part due to the efforts of Burke’s great nineteenth-century biographer, John Morley. Morley was a liberal and a positivist, schooled like John Stuart Mill in the writings of Auguste Comte. His two biographies of Burke rooted him in the liberal cause, emphasizing his years of opposition to the Crown and especially his role in the American Revolution, “that part of his history about the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.” On the French Revolution there was indeed dispute. Morley avoided the problem by leaving the verdict to history, “to our grandchildren.”42 What attracted Morley to Burke was his conviction that Burke’s political philosophy was at bottom Benthamite utilitarianism. It seemed this way to Morley because Burke had rejected natural rights and other abstract and absolute principles. His every utterance praised expediency and prudence at the expense of rigid adherence to ultimate values. Henry Buckle, Leslie Stephen, and William Lecky agreed; Burke was a utilitarian liberal.

These Victorian liberals who wrote of Burke as in their camp were no less outspoken in their praise for him. It was in fact partly because of his alleged utilitarian affinities that they were so effusive. They considered utility, expediency, and prudential calculation to be the heart of politics, and so it was that they saw in Burke a kindred spirit. While they had little taste for the gorgeous excesses of his prose, he was for them the theorist par excellence of political wisdom. Lecky wrote of Burke’s writings that “the time may come when they will no longer be read. The time will never come in which men would not grow wiser by reading them.”43 Buckle described Burke as “one of the greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest thinker who ever devoted himself to English politics.”44

What happened to Burke at the hands of the Victorian liberals is of crucial importance. It represents the first and most important step in his capture by the middle class and his enlistment to save their cause and their interests. His aristocratic biases as displayed in his writings on France and India were pushed to the side, and his writings on America are pushed front and center. More important than this, however, was the realization that his empiricism—and his skepticism, when severed from his “unfortunate” predilection for aristocracy—could serve the new status quo in which the middle class dominates. The age of chivalry was indeed dead and buried. The powers that be were now the triumphant middle class, which had already turned its back on the French Revolution and the politics of upheaval. The romance of Jacobinism was appropriate only for the assertive and struggling bourgeoisie seeking to find its place in the sun. It might not even be necessary then to overlook Burke’s writings on the Revolution. For it would come to pass that middle-class liberals could find wisdom in this very tirade against their earlier struggle. It was after all, a plea for order, for stability, for submissive obedience to the powers that be.

One sees this deep conservative strain in the nineteenth-century liberal embrace of Burke at work in Woodrow Wilson. It is not surprising that Wilson, the professor of government enamored of English parliamentary politics, would gravitate so naturally to the pull of this House of Commons man.