Richard Burke Jr.

Who was Richard Burke Jr.?

Richard Burke was a barrister and Member of Parliament in England. He was born in Battersea, the son of Edmund Burke and Jane Mary Nugent. 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.

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 attained a small measure towards Catholic Emancipation in the Irish Parliament's "Roman Catholic Relief Act". In 1794 his father resigned his seat in parliament over the failure to convict Warren Hastings in a parliamentary impeachment. Richard was elected Member of Parliament for Malton, North Yorkshire, 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 eye-witnesses 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’