Burge came from a Somerset family active in the local textile industry in the eighteenth century. His paternal grandfather William Burge (d.1778) and his father, whose dates of birth and death remain uncertain, were stocking makers and maltsters at Bruton and Castle Cary, whence John Burge, against whom bankruptcy proceedings were instigated in 1808 (and finalized in 1815) moved to Bath. Burge retained until 1847 certain Thomas family properties in Evercreech devised by his mother.
Burge divided against the second reading of the Grey ministry’s reform bill, 22 Mar., and for Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. 1831. He had recently attended highly publicized meetings on manumission with the colonial secretary Lord Goderich;
An editorial in the Suffolk Chronicle of 20 Apr. 1831 criticized Burge’s stance on slavery, but failed to jeopardise his election for Eye that month.
He had postponed his motion on the foreign slave trade at the leader of the House Lord Althorp’s request, 13 July 1831, and concentrated on opposing the government’s sugar refinery bill which permitted foreign sugar to be refined in Britain, without safeguarding the colonial trade from ‘unfair’ competition from Brazilian and Cuban producers. Howick objected to producing certain details in the returns Burge ordered of orders sent out for the emancipation of slaves belonging to the crown, 17 Aug.; and, revising his motion, 18 Aug., he accused ministers of deliberately releasing and circulating dispatches from Goderich to the governor of Jamaica Lord Belmore, which showed the latter in a bad light. When, later that day, Hume questioned the payment of the £11,000 balance of the £16,000 authorized as compensation for Lecesne and Escoffery, Burge stubbornly defended his part in the affair and insisted on the legality of their deportation. He did so again when the grant was carried (by 117-12), 22 Aug. On 7 Sept. he opposed the duty on Cape wines as a breach of faith and complained that Britain’s colonial policy was being subordinated to her foreign interest. He condemned the proposed renewal of the Sugar Refinery Act as an act of ‘gross injustice’ to the colonies and a direct encouragement to perpetuation of the foreign slave trade; but his attempt to refer it to a select committee, which ministers had feared might be carried, was narrowly defeated (by 77-73), 12 Sept. He vainly urged ministers to drop the plan, 22, 28 Sept., and attacked their ‘cold and heartless policy’, but lost his inquiry motion that day (by 125-113). Calling for the abandonment of the sugar refinery bill, 30 Sept., he complained that the suggested inquiry into the commercial state of the West Indian colonies was ‘nothing more or less than an expedient resorted to for the purpose of creating delay’ and to ‘soothe the irritable feelings of the colonies with the pretence of taking their distress [whose causes were well known] into consideration’. He found little support for adjournment when the select committee was proposed, 6 Oct., and, giving way, was named to it that day (and again on 15 Dec.), and testified before them on the planters’ increasing distress, 16 Feb. He had resumed his attack on the sugar refinery bill, 7, 13 Oct. 1831, but thanked ministers on the 12th for the ‘humanity’ of their emergency measure sanctioning the free import of American flour to Barbados and St. Vincent following the devastation caused by the recent hurricanes. He applauded the convention with France on the slave trade, though he thought it might have been made more effectual, 6 Feb., and rebutted Hume’s criticism of spending on the colonial military establishment, 17 Feb. 1832. He consulted the colonial office on the 20th about the Jamaican slave insurrection and called for additional information on the matter in the Commons later that day. He wanted to see a Lords select committee investigate slavery, but Lords Holland and Seaford, whom he consulted, had reservations. He persuaded ministers (with a promise to ‘abstain from anything like vexatious opposition’) to postpone consideration of the sugar duties until the evidence submitted to the Commons select committee became available, and welcomed the proposed £100,000 grant for hurricane relief, 29 Feb.
I would endeavour to obtain from the House the adoption of certain resolutions which would express a strong and decided opinion of the value of our colonies, of their present distress, of the duty of pursuing that policy towards them which might alleviate that distress and retain their connection with this country ... I believe resolutions of this nature would be supported by a numerous party who have hitherto voted with the present government. The spirit which pervaded the meeting held in London in April has made its way in the country. It would exercise an extensive and beneficent influence if it were seen to prevail in the House. Resolutions ... sanctioned by the House or powerfully supported, would be of no inconsiderable aid to a [parliamentary] candidate assailed by anti-slavery applications for pledges.
Peel evidently advised against any such general initiative being taken.
I am not here as the representative of West Indians ... I am as exclusively the representative of the constituents who sent me here as ... any other Member ... In no way whatever did the West Indians assist me in obtaining my seat ... I should have been in the House whether I had or had not been in any degree connected with the West Indies.
Burge dissented from the majority view of the West India committee, and when they were directed to report their minutes of evidence he complained that, if published in its incomplete form, it would reinforce the ‘erroneous opinions’ prevalent on the subject, 6 Aug. 1832.
He had defended spending on the law commissioners, 18 July, wished to see the Maynooth grant discontinued, 26 Sept., and expressed reservations about John Campbell’s arbitration bill, 29 Sept., and the general register bill, 4 Oct. 1831. He opposed Brougham’s bankruptcy court bill on the ground that it would not remedy the court’s acknowledged defects, 12, 14, 15, 17 Oct. 1831. He voted against the Vestry Act amendment bill, 23 Jan. 1832. He supported the creation of a form of representation for New South Wales, 28 June, and was one of the senior lawyers who protested to Brougham at the hasty passage of four bills to amend the real estate laws.
At the general election of 1832 Burge contested the newly enfranchised borough of Oldham, where William Cobbett and John Fielden stood in harness and the Anti-Slavery Society sent down their solicitor George Stephenson to oppose him. His speeches and addresses condemned the government’s alliance with France against Holland and professed support, in the abstract at least, for a lower duty on corn, an equitable adjustment of taxation, and a commutation of tithes, though he stressed that he was at bottom ‘a friend to the security of property’. Stressing the importance of the West Indian export market to Oldham and the industrial towns, he played on the threat posed to it by a precipitate abolition of slavery, but said that
he hated slavery himself, and if he saw a way of abolishing it with safety to the slaves, he would rejoice to support its abolition - but they were not prepared for freedom. He could not recommend those measures which wild enthusiasm wished to be adopted.
As expected he polled a distant fourth.
Although no longer a Member, as agent for Jamaica, Burge played a prominent role in the colony’s turbulent history and dealings with Parliament and successive ministries in the 1830s. ‘Checked’ by the duke of Wellington in ‘his violence’ against emancipation in 1833, he continued to advance every possible argument for the extreme West Indian position on abolition, and orchestrated verbal attacks on the stipendiary magistrates and missionaries charged with administration of the transitional phase of negro apprenticeship. His machinations against the governor, Lord Sligo, in 1834 earned him a rebuke from the colonial office, but a vote of thanks from the Jamaican assembly. Testifying before the select committee on apprenticeship in 1836, he argued that the assembly’s lack of enthusiasm for it was dictated by its irritation at British interference on such issues as immigration and policing.
It has been my study to unite with the qualifications of an English lawyer an intimate acquaintance with the jurisprudence of foreign countries ... I venture to entertain the belief that I could usefully and efficiently discharge its functions, and that I could also render my acquaintance with foreign jurisprudence beneficial to the judicial committee of the privy council as an appellate court.
Testifying before the 1842 select committee on the West Indian colonies, he suggested remedying Jamaica’s labour shortage through ‘coolie’ immigration. Peel refused to make him master in chancery that year and his official approaches in 1844 and 1845 for a reduction of the duties on colonial coffee and sugar failed. After applying for a judgeship in November 1845, he was eventually offered and accepted a commissionership of bankrupts for the Leeds district. He did not relinquish the Jamaican agency.
Burge rented a house for £100 a year at Oulton Green, near Leeds, where disaster and humiliation struck early in 1847, when he lost the agency ‘quite unexpectedly’ and was arrested and imprisoned in York Castle in March on a suit for the balance of a £800 debt incurred in London on the security of his legal library, whose sale failed to realize this sum. In all, 44 actions were begun or pending against him. He resigned his commissionership, and his remaining books, furniture and wines were sold under several executions for £2,000. Several Leeds creditors opposed his claim for a final protection order at his first county court examination, 16 Sept. 1848. His liabilities were then scheduled at nearly £56,000; but, disagreeing, Burge discounted £20,000 owed to relatives and friends and claimed that his ‘hostile debts’ amounted to no more than £14,000, when he came to Leeds, where he had borrowed a further £6-7,000 to pay off his London creditors, leaving him with interest bearing debts of £17,200 at the time of his arrest. He claimed to have made no concealment of his affairs and said that when he borrowed the money in Leeds he considered that he had means enough to repay everything. Justice Wharton, who suspected Burge of deliberately delaying his first petition to prejudice his creditors, refused to name a day for the issue of his final protection order and sent him back to gaol. Assignees were appointed to control and collect his estate in October 1848, but Wharton remained unsatisfied when he next came before the court three month later. Only after two doctors had testified to Burge’s poor physical and mental condition and said that it was ‘exceedingly improbable’ that he would survive another six months in prison (24 Feb. 1849), was his protection and discharge on 26 Apr. authorized. He died intestate in London in November 1849. On 3 Feb. 1851 a limited administration, sworn under £50, was granted to John Lettsom Elliot of Pimlico Lodge, Middlesex, the surviving trustee of William Mitchell of Lime Street, London, in respect of an insurance policy for £4,000 on Burge’s life, which he had mortgaged for £4,137 at five per cent interest in 1830 to Mitchell and his partners in a West Indian mercantile house. A further grant was made on 2 Feb. 1916. Of Burge’s three surviving sons the eldest, Alexander Barrett Burge, joined the Indian army and the second, Milward Rodon Burge, entered the church.