'Bosom friend'
Sir: From various highly challengeable assertions and, I think, some plain errors in David Nokes's de haut en bas review of my life of Burke (Spectator, 14 January), may I perhaps be allowed to single out just one matter? My reference to William Burke as Edmund's 'bosom friend' Nokes finds to be somewhat 'quaint', `no explanation' being offered for the term. None was needed. Together with the dictionary, I take 'bosom friend' to mean 'dear or close friend'. If David Nokes wished to support the suggestion that Burke was homosexual, he might have said so. He did not; not quite, but nevertheless leaned towards the theories of 'recent biographers' strongly suggesting so.
First, there have been no 'recent' biog- raphies of Burke. Your reviewer should have been less vague and more careful with his attribution. Secondly, and more impor- tant: if, after some years of genuine re- search of his own (since he finds mine so deficient) he can find a hint of Burke's homosexuality among the very great quantity of recorded evidence, whether from Burke's own writings or those of his friends, enemies, relatives, and not least his wife (about whom Nokes finds my language, alas, 'formulaic') I shall be more than surprised.
When Burke once intervened in an attempt to save the life of a soldier sentenced to death for sodomy, he acted on humanitarian grounds, being reinforced by doubts concerning the reliability of the prosecution's evidence, and he specifically condemned in the strongest terms the offence of sodomy itself. A second in- tervention, this time after a mob had pelted to death in the pillory two men accused of sodomy, brought him vilifica- tion in at least one newspaper, which so outraged him that he demanded and obtained a public apology, and thereupon withdrew his suit of libel. My book states these facts, and I therefore cannot under- stand why David Nokes chooses to write, `Mr Ayling prefers not to speculate' on Burke's motives.
Stanley Ayling
The Beeches, Winterslow, Salisbury
Previous page
