Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke

FEUDAL PRINCIPLES AND MODERN TIMES.

In the first place, it is formed, in many respects, upon FEUDAL PRINCIPLES. In the feudal times, it was not uncommon, even among subjects, for the lowest offices to be held by considerable persons; persons as unfit by their incapacity, as improper from their rank, to occupy such employments. They were held by patent, sometimes for life, and sometimes by inheritance. If my memory does not deceive me, a person of no slight consideration held the office of patent hereditary cook to an earl of Warwick. The earl of Warwick's soups, I fear, were not the better for the dignity of his kitchen. I think it was an earl of Gloucester, who officiated as steward of the household to the archbishops of Canterbury. Instances of the same kind may in some degree be found in the Northumberland house-book, and other family records. There was some reason in ancient necessities, for these ancient customs. Protection was wanted; and the domestic tie, thought not the highest, was the closest. The king's household has not only several strong traces of this FEUDALITY, but it is formed also upon the principles of a BODY CORPORATE; it has its own magistrates, courts, and by-laws. This might be necessary in the ancient times, in order to have a government within itself, capable of regulating the vast and often unruly multitude which composed and attended it. This was the origin of the ancient court called the GREEN CLOTH—composed of the marshal, treasurer, and other great officers of the household, with certain clerks. The rich subjects of the kingdom who had formerly the same establishments (only on a reduced scale) have since altered their economy; and turned the course of their expense from the maintenance of vast establishments within their walls, to the employment of a great variety of independent trades abroad. Their influence is lessened; but a mode of accommodation, and a style of splendour, suited to the manners of the times, has been increased. Royalty itself has insensibly followed; and the royal household has been carried away by the resistless tide of manners: but with this very material difference;—private men have got rid of the establishments along with the reasons of them; whereas the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching anything of the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment. It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross tuns of ancient pomp in a vial of modern luxury.