He had, however, attracted the notice of the chiefs of his party. He declared his views with much vigour on the necessity of giving improving tenants in Ireland some security for their outlay. The subject had been familiar to him from boyhood, and he brought to it a knowledge of details, obtained in the double capacity of a squire's son and of a practical farmer, willing to improve his land, but determined to make it pay.
In 1851 he supported his party by a great array of facts and figures concerning the Irish milling trade. This question also lay within his personal experience, both from the farmer's point of view and from the capitalist's. He knew the actual working of the system; and he succeeded in keeping the ear of the House through 16½ columns of Hansard—the longest speech but one in his twenty-one years of Parliamentary life. An enthusiastic letter of thanks from a meeting of Irish millers rewarded the effort.
Next year the Conservatives came into power. People remarked at the time, that Lord Derby, in forming his Ministry, chose a larger proportion than usual of men untried in office. Lord Naas was one of them. To his surprise and delight, he received the offer of the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland—the highest Parliamentary appointment which an Irish commoner holds in his native country. He was but thirty years of age, and he went at the outset by the name of the Boy-Secretary, a title which Sir Robert Peel and the late Earl Derby had borne before him. He wrote to his brother with diffidence as to his fitness, but very resolute as to trying to do his best: 'I am a new hand, but at any rate I am not afraid of the work.'
Having accepted office, Lord Naas went over to Ireland to seek re-election. But he found things changed in County Kildare since 1847. In that year the popularity which he had won during the famine just enabled him to turn the scale at the hustings. The ebullition of public feeling had naturally passed off by 1852, and Lord Naas found it prudent to content himself with the less difficult constituency of Coleraine. He sat for Coleraine in the north of Ireland from 1852 to 1857, when he came in for Cockermouth, in Cumberland, backed by the interest of his wife's family, the Wyndhams. This borough he continued to represent until he left for India in 1868.
During the short time which the Conservatives continued in power, after Lord Naas' appointment to the Irish Secretaryship, he brought forward, besides a Tenant-Right and a Tenants' Compensation Act, several very important Bills affecting Ireland. He spoke only on Irish questions; and after the resignation of his party, he steadily pursued the same system until the Conservatives again came into power, in 1858. During these six years he was practically the Parliamentary leader of the Conservative party in Ireland, and of the Irish Conservatives in the House. His father sat as a representative peer in the Lords, voting with the Tories, but scarcely speaking, and taking little interest in politics.
The Crimean war brought deep anxiety to the Bourkes, as to most other families throughout the British Islands. The second son, Colonel the Honourable John Bourke, gave up his staff-appointment and joined his regiment, the 88th Connaught Rangers, on its being ordered to the seat of war. The Earl and Countess of Mayo were then residing in Paris, and it fell to Lord Naas to keep his parents informed of each crisis. His letters, full of that mingling of affectionate pride, heart-eating anxiety, and sternly subdued longing for the end, which form the true discipline of war to a nation, recall the family aspects of the struggle with a most affecting veracity. The 88th did its duty, and the names of 'Alma,' 'Inkermann,' and 'Sevastopol' figure in the proud roll on its colours. But the weary waiting for the lists of killed and wounded is the chief record which its achievements have left in these letters.
Lord Naas tried to comfort his mother in her painful suspense about her son by a mixture of religious consolation and the doctrine of chances. 'Keep up, and hope in God he may be safe. Two thousand men are about one in seven killed or wounded of those engaged; so even human chances are in our favour. But it is in the God of battles we must trust.' Then a few days later, 'My dearest Mother,—The list of killed and wounded has just arrived. Thank God, our dear Johnny is safe. It is the greatest mercy our family has ever received, and I trust we may be thankful for it to the end of our lives. What an awful list!'
How the ever present anxiety of those winters penetrated the smallest details of life! 'I went to Ballinasloe last Monday,' he writes, 'and bought thirty-one heifers. The cost was enormous, £15. 15s., and they never can pay unless prices keep up. But they were as cheap as any in the fair. I went over to Lord Cloncurry's for the night. John Burke, of Johnny's regiment, was there. He told me a great deal about him. He said he did his work well. He says he saw him telling off his company, after the battle of Inkermann, as coolly as if he had been on parade.'
Meanwhile Lord Naas was doing good work for his party during their six years in opposition. He had won the liking and confidence of the Irish Conservatives in the House; and Lord Derby, when he came into power in 1858, again offered Lord Naas the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland. A long list of measures in that and the following year bears witness to his activity.
One who was officially connected with him in two of his principal Bills thus writes: 'What struck me in my communications with him on these matters was this. After the Bills had been settled by those conversant with the legal part of the subject, he would detect errors which had escaped us all. He swooped down upon a flaw like a scholar on a false quantity, and would sometimes break up a whole set of clauses with his own hand, and re-write them himself, saying, "There, now; you may put it into legal language, but that is the sense of the thing I want." Again, when a draftsman would produce something very symmetrical and beautiful in theory, he would say: "That's all very fine, but the House of Commons won't look at it." At this time he began to feel almost a despair of accomplishing any real work for Ireland, owing to the factions within herself and in Parliament. I do not think he had more respect for the ultra-Orange party than he had for the Fenians. He believed they were alike hurtful to the country, and that the opposition to be expected from one, or it might chance from both, made it hopeless to attempt anything sound or moderate.