The Reception of Edmund Burke in Europe

This essay discusses the relationship between Edmund Burke and the rational Dissenters who were an important reformist element within the British Enlightenment. The first section examines Burke’s attitude towards Dissent, especially rational Dissent; the second looks at Joseph Priestley’s perception of Burke; and the final section looks at the attitude of a provincial rational Dissenter, Samuel Kenrick, through his correspondence with his Scottish friend Rev. James Wodrow. Rational Dissenters formed a loose but powerful grouping within Protestant Dissent. They were usually highly educated, liberal in theology and many were forcefully heterodox, becoming Unitarian in theology. In politics they were reformist, covering a spectrum from moderate to radical. They were considerable self-publicists and played a major role in the media. Forming ‘a sort of cultural imperium in imperio’ (Lincoln 1938, 53), and an incipient middle class, they were subject to discriminatory laws that gave an edge to their self-understanding. During the American Revolution they would be natural allies of Burke, but subsequently they would become his natural enemies. For Burke, as L. G. Mitchell has noted, ‘religious dissent of all kinds acquired a demonic character’ (Writings and Speeches, 8:8).1

Edmund Burke (1730–1797) was born in Dublin where the majority of its inhabitants (as in the rest of Ireland) were Roman Catholics. While Burke was brought up a member of the Church of Ireland, he always looked with favour on measures for extending toleration to the Catholic community. Some believe that his father, an attorney, had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism in order to practise the law. F. P. Lock, however, in his recent two-volume biography has concluded that Burke’s father, Richard, was brought up a Protestant (1998, 26).2 Burke’s mother Mary Nagle, however, was certainly a Roman Catholic and his sister Juliana was raised and remained Catholic.3 These circumstances made Burke sensitive to the importance of religion, although it did not guarantee that he himself would be religious. His father, according to Burke’s school friend, Richard Shackleton (Lock 1998, 6), put worldly advancement before religion. For Burke worldly advancement was a vital concern, but never at the expense of religion, which he came to believe was essential to civilization. Shackleton was a Quaker and thus Burke’s first experience of Dissent, and it is notable that in later life he exempted Quakers from his attacks on Dissent (Lock 1998, 27). It has been suggested by those who believe that Burke’s father had converted to Protestantism for the sake of a career that this ‘permanently afflicted his son with a sense of familial guilt’ (Langford 2004). Whether true or not, however, we do not have to resort to his father’s putative apostasy to explain a sense of guilt or ambivalence toward religion, for Anglicanism in Ireland was the minority religion of a colonial power. In England, where Burke chose to pursue his career, it was the majority religion intimately bound up with the nation’s history and sense of identity. Reflecting on his youth in rural Surrey, William Cobbett wrote: ‘Our religion was that of the Church of England, to which I have ever remained attached; the more so, perhaps, as it bears the name of my country’ (1795, 21). For his part, Burke the politician would defend the Church of England to the last as essential to national unity and civilisation. If we add to this Burke’s tendency to personalize issues in which he engaged, then matters concerning church and state were exceptionally tender for him.

Burke’s first sustained writing on church and state was his Tracts relating to the Popery Laws. Written in the early 1760s, the tracts were unfinished and only fragments remain. What they show, however, is Burke’s willingness at that time to use natural law and natural rights arguments to demonstrate the injustice of the penal laws concerning the Catholics, and particularly those relating to property and inheritance. After he became MP for Wendover in 1766 Burke became preoccupied with Westminster politics and usually set arguments of this sort aside – though they were always at the forefront of his views on Irish issues. In dealing with matters of church and state in Britain, Burke consistently stressed the importance of custom and circumstance, and if change were necessary it should be within existing tradition.

We witness this attitude relatively early in Burke’s political career, when a movement arose to end the requirement of the clergy of the Church of England to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles that embodied the doctrine of the church, and replace subscription with a declaration of assent to the sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures (Belsham 1812, 46).4 Those in favour of change were known as the Feathers Tavern Petitioners and they gathered some 200 names on the petition. These were from the latitudinarian wing of the Anglican church, and included some who were heterodox and finding it increasingly difficult to remain within the church.

During the parliamentary debates on the Feathers Tavern Petition in 1772 and 1774, Burke opposed any alteration in the requirement of clergy to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles.5 In 1772 he argued that the Bible was not an adequate basis for an established church, which he defined as ‘a certain system of religious doctrines and practices, fix’d and ascertained by some law’, maintained by a tax authorized ‘by the same sovereign authority’ (Cobbett 1813, 17:280 n.). While the Bible furnished ‘everything necessary to salvation’ it was inadequate as a basis for the church establishment. Indeed it was ‘one of the most miscellaneous books in the world’ (Cobbett 1813, 17:286). He summed up this view in his peroration:

In short, I would have a system of religious laws, that would remain fixed and permanent, like our civil constitution, and that would preserve the body from ecclesiastical tyranny and despotism, as much at least as our code of common and statute law does the people in general; for I am convinced that the liberty of conscience contended for by the petitioners would be the forerunner of religious slavery. (Cobbett 1813, 17:288)

Burke’s speech did not go down well with Theophilus Lindsey, one of the key organizers of the Feathers Tavern Petition. He wrote of Burke’s contribution to the debate:

Burke declaimed most violently against us in a long speech, but entirely like a Jesuit, and full of Popish ideas – the multifarious, strange compound of the book called the Scriptures – the uncertainty what were the Scriptures – the necessity of a priesthood – of men in society, religious as other, giving up their right of private Judgment &c. &c. (Ditchfield 2007, 124–26)6

It was thought that Burke was expressing the opinions of his patron Lord Rockingham (Ditchfield 2007, 124–26),7 but he maintained his stance when the issue was next (and finally) debated in 1774 arguing for ‘a strict estabilishment (sic), narrowly watched’ (Ditchfield 2007, 184–87).8 By that time Lindsey had left the church and joined the ranks of Dissent. Dissatisfied as he was with Burke’s attitude towards the established church, Lindsey could at least take comfort from Burke’s argument in favour of ‘the most unbounded toleration to Dissenters’ (Ditchfield 2007, 184–87). In 1772 Burke had remarked that the arguments of the petitioners and their supporters were more relevant to the issue of toleration for Dissenters, whose ministers tutors and schoolmasters were required to subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Indeed, the debate gave heart to leading Dissenters and they decided to petition for their own relief from subscription.

During this period, and well into the 1780s, Burke remained friendly with Dissenters and he favoured greater toleration for them, reminding MPs that toleration was not about tolerating opinions like one’s own but ‘those religious notions’ which are ‘totally different’ (Ditchfield 2007, 184–87).9 Yet if we look at his interventions on their behalf, and the causes they appeared to have in common, we can see elements in his thought that could quite easily lead him to turn against Dissenters. His speech on the Feathers Tavern Petition contained the stinging observation: ‘Dissent not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition’ (Cobbett 1813, 17:281).10

Burke’s concerns about Dissent did not come to the fore until much later, however, and on one notable occasion, he seemed to embrace the most liberal view of religious toleration. In his speech on 17 March 1773 supporting relief for Dissenting ministers, tutors and schoolmasters from subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, Burke at the same time betrayed his fear of atheism. Advocating broad religious freedom, and toleration for all who conscientiously dissented from the Church, he added:

if dissent is at all punished in any country … it is upon a presumption, not that a man is supposed to differ conscientiously from the establishment, but that he resists truth for the sake of faction.

At this time the ‘wicked dissenters’ he had in mind were the atheists and infidels. They were ‘outlaws of the constitution; not of this country but of the human race’. He felt himself ‘sinking everyday under the attacks of these people’, and his remedy was to draw together all those who were ‘united in the belief of the great principles of the Godhead, that made and sustain the world’ (Cobbett 1813, 17:779).

This speech was delivered soon after Burke had been to France, and in it we find some of the crucial ingredients of the Reflections. He had formed a generally favourable impression of French government and society. He appears to have been satisfied with the workings of the French legal system11 and was impressed by the Parisian clergy and those he met in the provinces (1790, 97). On 15 February 1773 he visited Versailles and saw Marie Antoinette – a view of her that led to a famous passage in the Reflections. If there was any danger to French society, it could be attributed to the atheism of the philosophes who frequented the Parisian salons, notably that of Baron d’Holbach (Courtney 1975, 35). In Reflections he claimed that a ‘literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion’. ‘A spirit of cabal, intrigue and proselytism pervaded all their thoughts, words and actions’ (1790, 97–98). He had by then come to regard rational Dissenters in the same light. In his 1773 speech there are indeed clues as to his subsequent condemnation of rational Dissent, and much that explains why rational Dissenters would feel betrayed. Yet they could hardly envisage that he would come to regard them among those who resisted ‘truth for the sake of faction’ and whose religion was not serious. They believed that Burke had resiled from his earlier declaration of toleration which embraced natural religionists and Deists, as well as those like themselves who were dependent on revealed religion but were theologically heterodox.

The American Revolution

In the 1770s rational Dissenters felt that Burke was very much on their side, not just regarding toleration but also on the great political issue of the day, namely the American Revolution. In 1770 Burke had been appointed Colonial Agent for New York. In that capacity, and as an MP, he did all he could to prevent the rift between the imperial government and the colonies developing into all out war. Most Dissenters, according to James Bradley, favoured the American cause, and especially rational Dissenters (1990). One of their leading luminaries, Rev. Richard Price, in his best-selling tract Observations on the Nature of Civil liberty (1776), provided a philosophical justification for American Independence: ‘every community has the right to govern itself and every man has the right to participate, in some form or other, in the government of his own country’ (Thomas 1999, 146). This was distinctly at odds with the stance of Burke and the Rockingham party, for they had asserted, in the Declaratory Act of 1766, the supremacy of the Westminster Parliament over the American Colonies. In Price’s view this constituted a species of slavery (Page 2011, 53–73). Of that act he wrote: ‘I defy anyone to express slavery in stronger language’ (Thomas 1991, 37). Burke in turn wrote in his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777) that: ‘there are people, who have split and anatomised the doctrine of free Government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity; and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling.’12 Price was right to infer that this was, in part, aimed at him. Not long after Price published Observations on Civil Liberty in early 1776, Burke wrote to an important supporter:

Let Dr Price rail at the declaratory act of 1766. His friends have so abused it, that it is but too natural. Let him rail at this declaration, as those rail at freewill who have sinned in consequence of it. (Corr. 3:254)13

Yet this remained a dispute between friends. Indeed, it appears that Dissenters failed to notice or understand that Burke’s position was fundamentally different from most of those who favoured the American cause upon matters of principle (Bisset 1798, 289).14 This is less surprising when one considers that Burke himself was anxious to downplay the right of the Westminster Parliament ‘to make laws and statutes to bind the colonies’, as the Declaratory Act asserted (Thomas 1991, 37).15 In his ‘Speech on Conciliation’ (1775) he argued that America should be governed according to her ‘nature and circumstances’ and ‘not according to our own imaginations, not according to abstract ideas of right, by no means according to mere general theories of government’ (Hill 1975, 162). ‘Man’, he declared in conclusion, ‘acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations’ (Hill 1975, 186). Yet if Burke did not favour the natural rights approach of Richard Price, and if he did his best to side-step the issue of sovereignty, he nevertheless seemed to be on the side of the Dissenters when he described the nature and circumstances of the Americans. As Frank O’Gorman has argued, ‘Burke displayed considerable insight into the spirit of the American people and the conditions which had formed it including traditions of protestantism, free thought, free education, and self government’ (1973, 77). In retrospect, Richard Price’s nephew and biographer, William Morgan, argued that for Burke and the Rockinghamites the principles of his uncle ‘were much too liberal for their creed’ (Thomas 2003, 29). He observed that Burke had taken occasion ‘in his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, to censure Dr. Price’s principles on the origins of government’ (Thomas 2003, 29). Yet he noted that Price acknowledged their differences without ‘the slightest resentment’. Indeed, even if the rational Dissenters could not view Burke ‘as one of us’, it was natural for them to see him as being on their side. His rhetoric was appealing. How could they disagree with the sentiment that ‘liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened’, even if that statement came after Burke’s attack on Price’s abstract principles (Hill 1975, 199–200).16 Price himself believed that ‘there are … few in the world whose zeal for it [liberty] is more united to extensive knowledge and an exalted understanding’ (Peach 1979, 48–50n. c).17 And Capel Lofft, in reviewing several proposals for resolving the conflict with the American colonies, concluded that Burke’s was best (1776, 49).

Toleration and parliamentary reform

At the end of the 1770s, a further motion was put for abolishing the subscription requirement of Dissenting ministers. This was in many ways a follow-up to the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 that upset many Dissenters (though ably supported by Burke). Dissenters were angered to see Lord North’s government encouraging ‘popery’ with the 1774 Quebec Act and the 1778 Catholic Relief Act, while their own petitions for greater toleration had been rejected in the early 1770s (Haydon 1993, 183–85). Burke was in favour of relief for the Dissenters but not on their terms, and there were straws in the wind that indicated Burke was not entirely on their side. When the Dissenters’ 1779 bill was attacked in the House of Commons, Lindsey reported that Burke spoke ‘gloriously’ in its favour (Ditchfield 2007, 288).18 The Dissenters hoped that the bill would free them from subscription entirely, but the episcopate was generally against relief. Many bishops even opposed a less radical proposal that relief from subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles should be replaced by a requirement that Dissenting ministers make a Declaration that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain the whole revealed will of God, and that they will receive them as their rule of faith and practice. That was however what Lord North proposed and in a debate in the Commons, in which Lindsey felt Burke’s intervention was crucial, it was that, with a minor modification, which carried the day (Ditchfield 2007, 292).19

It was at least possible to see Burke’s role as a mediating one, for during the course of the relief campaign he had dined with the Dissenters’ Relief Committee.20 He does not seem to have incurred the censure of rational Dissenters like Lindsey even though in the course of the debates on subscription he had described Socinians and Arians as beyond the Christian pale, even mentioning Lindsey by name (Ditchfield 2007, 289–90).21 Events in the 1780s, however, would widen and then break the link between Burke and leading Dissenters – especially those closely associated with the movement for parliamentary reform. In 1780 Richard Price, John Jebb, Brand Hollis and Capel Lofft were founding members of the Society for Constitutional Information, and Joseph Towers would play a major role. For Burke such radical reformers were ‘very despotic persons’, and careful argument against their proposals often ended up in impassioned rhetoric (Corr. 4:235–38).22 Speaking against the consequences of triennial Parliaments, Burke suggested that ‘society would be dissolved, industry interrupted … morals vitiated and gangrened to the vitals’ (Cannon 1969, 84). When in May 1782 Pitt the Younger proposed an enquiry into the state of the representation, Burke could hardly contain himself. According to Sheridan, Burke attacked Pitt ‘in a scream of Passion’, declaring that ‘Parliament was and always had been precisely what it ought to be and that all who thought of reforming it wanted to overturn the constitution’ (Price 1966, 1:144–47).23 Rhetoric aside, Burke believed that more frequent elections would serve only to strengthen the patronage powers of the Crown. Instead, he favoured economical reform as a means of diminishing the influence of the Crown, which the Rockinghamites believed had been responsible for the collapse of their first administration. To that extent he was on the side of the reformers – but it was reform he would not go beyond, and which they thought inadequate. After the death of Lord Rockingham in mid-1782, his followers were led by Charles James Fox into opposition after Lord Shelburne was made prime minister. Rev. Joseph Towers lamented the loss of Burke to government: a ‘gentleman who possesses such a splendour of genius … and extent of knowledge, and such uncommon powers of eloquence’, and no less entitled to ‘esteem for the qualities of his heart’. Towers regretted, however, that ‘this amiable man, this elegant and classic orator’, was not ‘more a friend’ to electoral reform, being ‘too much under the influence of aristocratic prejudices’ (1782, 27–28).

Everything changed, however, with the Fox–North coalition. This coalition of declared foes came as a shock to the Dissenters. John Jebb, who had been an ally of Fox, denounced the coalition as ‘a hateful union’ concerned ‘with power, not the good of the country’. Jebb, in a long speech to the electors of Westminster in March 1783, delivered ‘with all the vehemence which the action called for, to the great offence of Mr Fox’s friends’, urged Fox not to enter coalition with North (Page 2003, 248, 251). After the fall of the Fox–North coalition rational Dissenters placed their hopes for reform in Pitt, and supported him in the election of 1784, with Jebb declaring: ‘the conduct of the coalitionists is so fundamentally wrong, that … I most cordially wish entire rout to the party of Fox, Burke and North’ (Page 2003, 252).

As far as Burke was concerned after 1784 the Dissenters were in the wrong camp and some of their leading luminaries, notably Priestley and Price, were closely associated with Shelburne, whom Burke personally detested.24 After returning to government as part of the Fox–North coalition in 1783, Burke told his friend Richard Shackleton:

We have demolished the Earl of Shelburne; but in his fall he has pulled down a large piece of the Building. He had indeed undermined it before. This wicked man, and no less weak and stupid, than false and hypocritical, has contrived to break to pieces the body of men, whose integrity, wisdom, and union, were alone capable of giving consistency to publick measures, and recovering the Kingdom from the miserable State into which it had fallen. (Corr. 5:71–72)25

The coalition was short-lived and in 1784 Burke found himself out of power. Without Rockingham’s patronage Burke lost status and influence among the Whigs. He complained that the opposition led by Fox had lost its focus: ‘As to any plan of Conduct in our Leaders there are not the faintest Traces of it’ (Corr. 5:177).26 He had also lost authority in the Commons where he was treated with disrespect (Bisset 1798, 395–97).27 With a decline in his status, and the American war over, restraints on Burke and leading Dissenters saying what they really thought of each other were loosened.

Burke brooded on the Dissenters’ desertion of the Whig party, and absented himself from a vote on repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1787.28 When the Dissenters of Bristol asked him to support repeal in 1789, Burke professed that if he attended the house for the debate he would vote for the motion, but he was unwell and had other priorities (Corr. 5:469).29 He observed that there were ‘no Men on Earth to whom I have been more attached, and with a more sincere Esteem and Affection, than to some amongst the Dissenters’, but:

In the year 1784, a great Change took place; and all of them who seem’d to act in Corps, have held me out to publick Odium, as one of a gang of Rebels and Regicides, which had conspired at one blow to subvert the Monarchy, to annihilate, without cause, all the Corporate privileges in the Kingdom, and totally to destroy the constitution.

Dissenting attacks had sapped Burke’s energy and hindered him from serving ‘the cause of humanity, with facility and Authority, which I am now struggling to perform lamely, imperfectly and inefficiently’ (Corr. 5:470–72)30

In 1789 the Dissenters’ repeal motion came close to success, losing by only twenty votes (100 to 122), and they believed one final push would succeed. This was not likely, however, because the near success of 1789 came at the end of a session dominated by the Regency Crisis and attendance had been low. The Dissenters nevertheless organized on a national scale in the hope that more pressure on their MPs would do the trick. The newspapers were full of the resolutions of their regional meetings in which they claimed toleration as a natural right. Such claims of abstract rights, as Burke would view them, were reinforced by commemorations for the Glorious Revolution and the Toleration Act of 1689. In many of these celebrations it was claimed that the people, not Parliament, was sovereign – the Glorious Revolution was depicted as unfinished business on the road to popular sovereignty (Wilson 1989, 349–86). These notions were encapsulated in Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of our Country – the published version of his commemoratory sermon for the London Revolution Society on 4 November 1789. He reiterated the society’s view that the revolution established:

First; the right to liberty of conscience in religious matters.

Secondly; the right to resist power when abused

Thirdly; The right to chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves. (Price 1790, 34)

Price portrayed the revolution in France as a development of the revolutionary tradition of Britain and America, and attached the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen to the published sermon. And to cap it all, in his peroration, Price rejoiced in the way the French had treated their king:

I have lived to see THIRTY MILLIONS of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects. –After sharing in the benefits of one Revolution, I have been spared to be a witness to two other Revolutions, both glorious. (Price 1790, 49)

Price, of course, was by no means alone in expressing the euphoria of the moment, but his Discourse was also an expression of his moral philosophy, and a view of patriotism, with which Burke profoundly disagreed (Duthille 2012, esp. 32–33).

In February 1790 Burke responded, declaring his abhorrence of the French Revolution to a shocked House of Commons in the debate on the Army Estimates. In the following month, during the debate on the Test and Corporation Acts, Burke accused the Dissenters of ‘asserting doctrines which threatened the most imminent danger to the future safety and even the very being of the church’. He speculated that:

the dissenting preachers were themselves recommending the same sort of robbery and plunder of the wealth of the church as had happened in France, where some men were weak enough to imagine a happy revolution had taken place: but where he knew the most miserable system of government at this moment prevailed that ever disgraced the annals of Europe.

Under the guise of claiming their natural rights the Dissenters threatened the stability of society. Such rights ‘were the most useless and dangerous to resort to. They superseded society, and broke asunder all the bonds which had formed the happiness of mankind for ages. He would venture to say, that if they were to go back abstractedly to original rights, there would be an end of all society.’ This led to an eloquent passage in which he praised the virtues that accrued to society from abdication of natural rights:

abstract principles of natural right had been long since given up for the advantage of having, what was much better, society, which substituted wisdom and justice, in the room of original right.

After enumerating the beneficent effects of society he added that ‘the advantages attributable to the society’ were ‘also deducible from the church, which was the necessary creature and assistant of society in all its great and beneficial purposes’ (Cobbett 1813, 29:432–43).

Burke’s defence of the existing constitution in church and state was overlain with personal hostility towards leading Dissenters. This was encapsulated in his Reflections, which he had started drafting before the debate. In February 1790 Burke had sent his friend Philip Francis the first draft of what he proposed to call, ‘Reflections on certain proceedings of the Revolution Society, of the 4th November 1789, concerning the affairs of France’. Francis counselled against entering into a controversy, for he suggested that Price would be the victor.31 Burke was angered by his description of the encomium to Marie Antoinette as ‘pure foppery’ (Corr. 6:85–87).32 He immediately penned a long reply in which he declared they were his ‘real feelings’:

But I intend no controversy with Dr. Price or Lord Shelburne or any other of their set. I mean to set in a full View the danger from their wicked principles and their black hearts; I intend to state the true principles of our constitution in Church and state – upon Grounds opposite to theirs … I mean to do my best to expose them to the hatred, ridicule, and contempt of the whole world; as I shall always expose such, calumniators, hypocrites sowers of sedition, and approvers of murder and all its Triumphs. (Corr. 6:88–92)33

Burke depicted Price in the Reflections as heir to the seventeenth-century regicide, Hugh Peters – as someone who gloried in the misfortunes of the French royal family, as a cold-blooded, calculating personality. Such a portrayal of Price came as a shock to Dissenters, and did not square with the man whose ‘talents and character were revered by all parties’ (Hall 1791, 73). Mary Wollstonecraft, who knew Price personally and had attended his congregation at Newington Green, was profoundly influenced by rational Dissent (Taylor 2002, esp.108–12). Her Vindication of the Rights of Men (November 1790) was the first response to Burke:

In reprobating Dr. Price’s opinions you might have spared the man; and if you had but half as much reverence for the grey hairs of virtue as for the accidental distinctions of rank, you would not have treated with such indecent familiarity and supercilious contempt, a member of the community whose talents and modest virtues place him high in the scale of moral excellence. (Wollstonecraft 1790, 33)34

Price refused to get embroiled in controversy with Burke, but he did reply to the most hurtful charge that he had rejoiced in the mob’s treatment of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on the night of 6 October. According to F. P. Lock, this was the defining moment for Burke, and he believes, as Burke did, that Price was referring to those events when he spoke of ‘the king led in triumph’ (2006, 295–96).35 Here we must distinguish between what Price meant and what his audience thought he meant. Since the theme of the sermon was about the accountability of kings to their people, and opposition to arbitrary government, one might argue that the defining moment for those who thought like Price was the fall of the Bastille. Yet given the greater proximity of the October days to 4 November, when Price delivered his discourse, even those who admired him may not have immediately realized Price was referring to the events of July. Those who were hostile to him would not need to think twice that Burke was correct in thinking he was referring to the October days. Burke footnoted evidence in Reflections to substantiate his claim. In a typically balanced note on the issue, D. O. Thomas argued that Burke, at least, carelessly failed to realize that the sources he footnoted pre-dated the October days (Thomas 1982, 202–04). He also failed to note the source was one person not two (as it appears in Reflections). That source was Price’s nephew, George Cadogan Morgan, who was in Paris at the time of the fall of the Bastille. He wrote to Price about the events and his letter, or parts of it, were subsequently published in The Gazeteer on 13 August and 14 September. Unfortunately those issues have not survived, neither has the manuscript of the letter. However, Morgan kept a memoir, which has recently come to light. He does not repeat the phraseology of his letter but indicates his pleasure at witnessing the king’s entrance into Paris ‘without his guards’ (Constantine and Frame 2012, 53). Price shared the euphoric feelings of Morgan and his travelling companions in France – a passage from Edward Rigby’s journal matches closely Price’s sentiment in the peroration of his Discourse – and this lends credibility to his referring to the events immediately following the fall of the Bastille (Constantine and Frame 2012, 18–19). Although Price drew attention, in the preface to the fourth edition of his Discourse, to the inconsistencies in Burke’s use of evidence, by then the damage was done (1790, v–vi). Wollstonecraft complained that he had ‘grossly’ misrepresented Price’s meaning. Besides, she thought Burke had given ‘in some instances, a most exaggerated description of that infernal night (6 October)’ even though she herself had described it as ‘the mobbing triumphal catastrophe’ (Wollstonecraft 1790, 25–26).36 Nonetheless it remained easy to slip into Burkeian ways of thinking; a subsequent defence of Price, by the historian William Belsham, carelessly applied Price’s very words to the October event. Perhaps it did not matter to him. While not condoning the ‘dreadful and sanguinary’ event, he suggested that it had saved France from civil war (Belsham 1791, 52–53).37

Burke may have done Price a disservice, but he was not concerned with the finer points of evidence against rational Dissenters – he was now clearly launched on his crusade ‘to expose such, calumniators, hypocrites, sowers of sedition, and approvers of murder and all its Triumphs’ (Corr. 6:88–92).38 Gillray’s caricature, Smelling out a Rat, could be applied not just to Price but to all his fellow rational Dissenters (1790). In 1792 they petitioned the Commons for toleration for Unitarians and that gave Burke another opportunity to portray them as seditious (Ditchfield 2012, 189–90).39 Of course, he was by no means the first to express the idea that the Dissenters were dangerous – the idea had a long pedigree. Yet Dissenters like Samuel Heywood felt more bitter towards Burke than towards traditional enemies of Dissent who asserted High Church doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. His High Church Politics, occasioned by the failure of the campaign for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in March 1790, concluded by turning its attention to Burke’s Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), a work in which Burke had renewed his attack on Price. Heywood argued that Price’s account of the right of resistance was historically grounded and philosophically correct. He was, however, unfortunate enough to live ‘in times when it was become fashionable to trace back the path from liberty to passive obedience, and when, after the enjoyment of free government for more than a century, we are obliged to re-learn its principles’ (Heywood 1792, 184). In his speech opposing the Unitarian petition, Burke denounced ‘the Constitutional, the Revolution, and the Unitarian societies’, as ‘insect reptiles’ aiming to inaugurate a revolution, French style, by seizing the Tower of London on Bastille day (1852, 105–6; Barlow 1962, 287). In response, William Smith MP claimed that the Unitarians were ‘inoffensive men’ and ‘ridiculed Mr. Burke’s idea of plots’ (Parliamentary Register 1792, 32). But Burke had given authority to the most serious alarmist fears at a time when the tide of public opinion was already flowing strongly against them.40

Rational Dissenters did their best to justify their principles and conduct. From the very beginning of their campaigns for wider toleration they had emphasized their adherence to the principles of the Glorious Revolution and loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty.41 Joseph Towers provided a detailed vindication of the Revolution Society and its principles, as articulated by Price, and justified the right of the Society and the Society for Constitutional Information to correspond with enlightened individuals and societies in France (1790, 77–78).42 Price had printed some of the correspondence in his Discourse on the Love of our Country. Rev. Christopher Wyvill pondered the question as to why the ‘fierce animosity’ and ‘insatiable malevolence’ experienced by Price far exceeded the ‘utmost rancour of opposition, which the [parliamentary reform] Associations experienced during the period of their greatest activity’. Since Burke had ‘never accepted’ Price’s principles, his answer pointed to Burke’s personality and circumstances; ‘personal enmity, disappointed ambition, the loss of popularity and the despair to recover it’ led ‘a mind naturally irritable’ to attack Price (Wyvill 1792, 71–72).43 William Roscoe, the Liverpudlian rational Dissenter, in a popular poetic broadside entitled The Life, Death and Wonderful Achievements of Edmund Burke (1791), took up the theme of a personality given to ‘squabbles and fighting’, portraying him as a knight in armour tilting at his foes (a common theme in caricatures of Burke), yet finally felled by Wollstonecraft and Paine (Chandler 1953, 83, 386–90). Roscoe would later argue that Burke was ‘the avowed and ostensible instigator of a most sanguinary and cruel war’ with France (1796, 6).44 Although this was somewhat wide of the mark, it remains true that until his death in 1797, Burke was the leading proponent of a counter-revolutionary crusade against France (Macleod 1998, 82). The Dissenters’ one-time friend and supporter had become their foremost critic and opponent of all they stood for.

Priestley and Burke

One of those who suffered most from the upsurge of hostility towards rational Dissenters was Joseph Priestley, whose house, laboratory and library were demolished in the Birmingham Riots of July 1791. How did Priestley chart Dissenting relations with Burke? Here we are fortunate that towards the end of his life he left recollections on that very point.45 Priestley says that he had first met Burke when he was a minister at Leeds through a common friend, John Lee, subsequently Solicitor General in the Second Rockingham Administration. At the time they had no difference of opinion, except that Burke believed the power of the Crown was best checked ‘by increasing the influence of the great Whig families in the country’, whereas Priestley thought the same end would be ‘most effectually secured by a more equal representation of the Commons in Parliament’. According to Priestley, this difference of emphasis did not affect their views on the American Revolution: ‘We had but one opinion, and one wish, on that subject; and this was the same with all who were classed by us among the friends of the liberty of England’ (Rutt 1817–31, 25: App.24, 395). This seems fairly typical of the way pro-American and pro-reform Dissenters minimized their differences. On one occasion, when Burke helped Priestley through the crowd wanting to get into the Privy Council hearing of the grievances of Massachusetts, Priestley said: ‘Mr. Burke, you are an excellent leader’; and he replied, ‘I wish other persons thought so too’ (Rutt 1817–31, 25: App.24, 393).

According to Priestley, his last conversation with Burke was at Birmingham in 1782.46 Burke had just visited Rockingham’s nephew and heir, Earl Fitzwilliam, to help sort out Rockingham’s papers. The visit to Yorkshire had not been a great success, as it appears that Burke broke the cardinal rule of hospitality by quarrelling with some of Fitzwilliam’s guests on the topic of parliamentary reform (Lock 1998, 519). On his return journey to Beaconsfield he took a detour to spend an afternoon with Priestley. Theophilus Lindsey wrote that Burke, ‘having called upon Dr. Priestley and seen his Library, Laboratory, and philosophical pursuits, reported him to all his friends as the most happy of men and most to be envied’ (Ditchfield 2007, 386–88).47 This was not long before the Fox–North coalition and Priestley never saw anything of Burke again, ‘except by accident’ (Rutt 1817–31, 25: App.24, 396).

Priestley thought it was his reply to the Reflections that earned him Burke’s hostility, most notably his call for the separation of church and state.48 It is true that the Letters to Edmund Burke (1791) were particularly feisty, but the seeds of their falling-out had long been sown. In his History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) Priestley predicted calamitous convulsions in the political world unless a timely reformation occurred and the unnatural alliance of church and state were broken. His beliefs were antithetical to Burke, for he believed that religion was a private matter for individuals (Priestley 1791, 27), and was confident that the separation of the spiritual and secular would be the fulfilment of prophecy. Such millennial views may have seemed harmless when published in the mid-century by Priestley’s great inspiration, David Hartley, but in the tumultuous decades closing the century they seemed thoroughly alarming. Indeed, Priestley’s memory was not quite accurate, for he was one of those Burke singled out for attack in his speech against the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (Cobbett 1813, 29:438). Priestley concluded his account of his relations with Burke by relating that, according to someone present at the time, when news of the Birmingham Riots reached Burke ‘he could not contain his joy on the occasion’ (Rutt 1817–31, 25:398).49 This may have been overstating things, but Burke seems to have shared George III’s view that Priestley was ‘the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled’.50

Whether or not Burke approved of the riots,51 he did not approve of their consequences, for he felt that they had made rational Dissenters more dangerous. Early in 1792 Burke wrote:

This affair of Birmingham which frightened them at first, now fortifies them. They come forth as persecuted men. They all, as fast as they can meet, take up Priestly, and avowedly set him up as their head. They are preparing to renew the 14. of July. At Manchester they have advertised their Thanks to Mr Thomas Paine for his second work, more infamous if possible than their first. They keep up their French correspondences as before. In short, the unitarian Society, from whence all these things originate are as Zealous as their Brethren at Constantinople – If care is not taken, I should think it very probable, that you may live to see Christianity as effectually extirpated out of this Country as it is out of France. (Corr. 7:119)52

A few months after this letter, Fanny Burney dined with Burke. Writing to friends, she expressed a wish that they ‘could meet this wonderful Man when he is easy, happy and with people he cordially likes! – but Politics, even on his own side, must always be excluded: his irritability is so terrible on that Theme that it gives immediately to his Face the Expression of a Man who is going to defend himself from Murderers’. Burke was convinced that ‘English Liberty and Property’ were threatened by a ‘contagion of Havock and novelty’ (Sabor and Troide 2001, 347).53 Dissenting enthusiasts for radical reform attracted the full force of his terrible irritability.

In the 1790s Loyalist fears of revolution in Britain placed leading Dissenters like Priestley in the dock under the accusation of subversion.54 Perhaps the death of Price in 1791, and the exile of Priestley in 1794, helped to ease the tension, for they were consistently caricatured as dissident, atheistical, regicidal republicans. Nonetheless many ministers and leading laity remained true to their principles and suffered for supporting the Friends of Peace. David Wykes has uncovered widespread evidence that rational Dissenting ministers and their congregations were intimidated by Loyalists (1991, 22–3). Indeed, John Wilkinson, Priestley’s brother-in-law, thought that the best security was ‘a gun well-manned’ (Chaloner 1958, 145–46). Vicesimus Knox published a work entitled The Spirit of Despotism (1795) in which he defended Price as ‘among the first ornaments of his age’, but was advised to publish it anonymously (Rutt 1817–31, 22:181–2n.). Being an Anglican clergyman and critic of rational Dissenting theology was no guarantee of personal safety. Unsurprisingly some rational Dissenters at the time preferred to keep a low profile, like the congregation in Exeter of Rev. Timothy Kenrick, which was upset by his refusal to refrain from criticizing the persecuting spirit of the times (Gordon, rev. Skedd 2004).

The correspondence of James Wodrow and Samuel Kenrick

Timothy Kenrick was the nephew of Samuel Kenrick, who provides us with the best information we have for the reception of Burke’s thought among provincial lay Dissenters. Like many rational Dissenters he was highly educated, not at one of the Dissenting academies in England and Wales (Kenrick’s family came from Ruabon, Denbighshire), but at the University of Glasgow. There he met his future lifelong friend James Wodrow, who became a minister of the Kirk at Stevenston in Ayr. Kenrick’s initial intention was to become a Dissenting minister, but feeling he was not suited to the church he eventually settled in Bewdley, Worcestershire, joining his brother in a banking and grocery business. The two friends maintained a lively correspondence in which they debated the issues of the day.55 They rarely agreed. Wodrow’s views were fairly typical of a Scottish Moderate clergyman, although he was better informed than most about the situation of Protestant Dissenters in England and Wales, and sympathized with their efforts for greater toleration. But in politics he was cautious, and sympathetic to authority. Indeed, he defended the government’s policy over the American colonies against the more radical views of his friend. In the correspondence it is Wodrow’s view of Burke which is more fully expounded, and who was prepared to give Burke detailed consideration. As far as Samuel was concerned Burke had ‘never liked us or our cause’ (W-K Corr., f.153, 24 February 1790). He rejoiced, however, in the controversy stirred up by Burke’s Reflections. Like Priestley, he was an eternal optimist, confident that whatever happened, all would be for the good. He believed in the triumph of truth through vigorous debate and therefore saw virtue in those who openly opposed reform at home and revolution abroad. Characteristically, Wodrow agreed but added a note of scepticism: ‘But as you say of Burke’s book I hope it will co-operate in doing good in opening the eyes of men yet it will only be the eyes of the virtuous & already enlightened’ (W-K Corr., f.161, 29 April 1791). In the very letter describing the devastation of the Birmingham riots, Samuel Kenrick added: ‘Tis all right – good, great good, will arise out of it’ (W-K Corr., f.166, 21 July 1791). This was very much Priestley’s own view: ‘violence is temporary, truth eternal.’ Wodrow cautioned his friend against such excessive optimism, remarking on the violence in France: ‘Every thing adverse & hostile you consider as intended by providence to support and benefit the cause it was meant to hurt & suppress’ (W-K Corr., f.174, 30 May 1792).56 In discussing the Birmingham Riots, Kenrick almost makes concessions to the role of circumstance, but they are soon swamped by his continued enthusiasm for the times and confidence in providential progress. Burke was partly responsible for gloomy future prospects, as his defence of prejudice had encouraged the cherishing of atavistic prejudices. Yet, buoyed up by Priestley’s optimism and equanimity in the face of persecution, Kenrick enthused:

If bigotry & barbarity are hurrying up to their άκμή, (acme) it probably announces their approaching downfall. How feeble, how cautious are their partisans! No person of character or literary fame except Burke hath put his name to what has been written in their defence. And how has he shrunk under the weight of sound arguments & bold truths wch. he has called forth & wch. wd. not probably have so soon been brought forward! Was not the Revolution in America a miracle in favour of the cause of truth & happiness prevailing even in this wicked world[?] how is this confirmed by a much greater Revolution in France ― & this followed by Poland, perhaps still more improbable! From wch. we have much more reason to expect similar changes, in every country in Europe. (W-K Corr., f.173, 10 April 1792)

Kenrick never gave up his belief in the value of controversy and its role in bringing about progress. In that sense he was indebted to Burke: ‘I look upon Burke whatever his views may have been as co-operating with all his able antagonists in bringing forward the work of great improvement – for had he not written – what must the world have lost – which he has called forth’ (W-K Corr., f.160, 20–21 April 1791). A similar view was expressed in a toast to Burke at a meeting of the newly formed Unitarian Society on 14 April 1791. This was communicated to him the following day and reportedly ‘threw him into a paroxysm of rage’ (W-K Corr., f.163, 10 June 1791). Described by F. P. Lock as an insult, Kenrick’s private observation indicates that this idea was more than a means of goading Burke, but was a deep-seated belief among some rational Dissenters (2006, 411). As Anna Barbauld put it in addressing those like Burke who had opposed the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts: ‘We appeal to the certain, sure operation of increasing light and knowledge which is no more in your power to stop than to repel the tide with your naked hand’ (1790, 30–31). Such optimism was not completely misplaced, for as Mark Philp has observed, Burke ‘prompted precisely the kind of intellectual fervour in favour of reform which he so despised’ (Philp 1990, 109–10). Indeed he may have made ‘the radical position more capable of being articulated’ (Smith 1984, 37).

Not all rational Dissenters were quite such unbridled believers in progress. Addressing the Dissenters after the failure of the campaign for repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts, John Aikin argued that the reaction to the campaign provided ‘too strong evidence against that progress towards general reformation which some of you are so fond of conceiving’ (1790, 10, 31–32). Whatever the divisions within rational Dissent, however, there appears to be little evidence that Burke persuaded any of them to abandon their optimistic view of human nature, and their belief that, in a candid free society, progress would occur – progress which, in the strained context of the 1790s, they understood primarily in intellectual and spiritual terms. They believed Burke’s conduct in the last decade of his life was reprehensible and was a betrayal of his principles. Even the mild James Wodrow thought Burke ‘a little deranged’, and, although impressed by some of the arguments in Reflections, believed that he had laid ‘too much stress on prejudice & custom, so much in my opinion as to destroy all the difference between … right and wrong’ (W-K Corr., f.159, 28 March 1791).

Conclusion

The rational Dissenters generally regarded Burke as someone who had abandoned his principles. Their view was hardly subtle nor was it exclusive to them. Burke had appeared to be in favour of the American Revolution, of greater toleration for Dissenters, and even a modicum of constitutional change via economical reform. On all these things Burke had appeared to be on the side of moderate reform. Then, with the outbreak of the revolution in France, he suddenly became a reactionary, deeply hostile to them, and their cause. From the viewpoint of Reception Studies this is not an unfamiliar story – the rational Dissenters had, to a degree, heard what they wanted to hear, read what they wanted to read. They had failed to see the underlying elements of in Burke’s hostility to natural rights philosophy and to reform based on such principles. It may be true, as scholars like F. P. Lock have argued, that Burke applied his principles consistently, attacking the rational Dissenters, in the context of the French Revolution, as dangerous and factious. Nevertheless, this fails to take into account the degree of personal invective which informed Burke’s attack, and the shock this administered to the rational Dissenting community. Burke played a key role in fixing the reputation of rational Dissenters as dissident, atheistical, regicidal republicans. In his address at Price’s funeral, Rev. Andrew Kippis dismissed Burke’s hostile rhetoric as amounting to no more than the ‘coruscations of the northern lights’ (1791, 17). But Kippis could not foresee the increasing vehemence of Burke’s writings in the 1790s as his warnings were largely ignored (Philp 1990, 100). William Morgan, looking back over this period, suggested that there was a demonic aspect to his hostility to rational Dissent (Thomas 2003, 82).

Hostility to Dissent was not exclusive to Burke, and the Loyalist movement was not dependent on him, yet, as Gillray’s caricature suggests, there was something wild and manic in Burke’s attitude towards leading rational Dissenters. The idea that Burke had lost his bearings after the death of his patron Lord Rockingham was not unique to the rational Dissenters – it can be seen in Robert Bissett’s account of his life, published a year after Burke’s death. And it was well expressed by William Belsham:

During the lifetime of the Marquis of Rockingham, [Burke] appeared, not without some remarkable deviations, to adhere with laudable zeal to the genuine principles of Whiggism; but from the lamented decease of that distinguished Nobleman, he became on a sudden, very capricious and eccentric in his conduct; and his judgement, being naturally weak and his passions proportionally violent and habitually indulged, the force of his genius in other respects has unfortunately only plunged him, in the latter years of his life, deeper into the abyss of absurdity and extravagance.57

Perhaps viewing Burke in this light diminished the sense of fear Dissenters experienced in reading his words, and turned him into an eccentric figure, certainly not harmless, but perhaps rather pitiable.58

Notes

1See also Duff (2011, 63).

2This remains a contentious view. O’Brien (1992, 3–13) has argued that Richard Burke did convert to Anglicanism in 1722 but was already practising as an attorney.

3She was, according to the register of the Church of Ireland, baptized a Protestant, although she could have also been baptized into the Catholic Church. We owe this suggestion to Richard Bourke.

4The petition also included a petition for the relief the subscription requirement in the universities; it included fifty lay signatures. See Ditchfield (1988, 45–80) and Ditchfield (2004).

5Here he found himself, as he wrote to Lady Huntingdon, ‘in opposition to the opinions of nearly all my own party’. Life of Countess of Huntingdon, vol. II, 287, cit. Lecky (1918–20, 4:295).

6To William Turner of Wakefield, 7 February 1772. The previous year Burke was referred to in the press as ‘the Jesuit of St. Omer’s [the Jesuit College]’ (Lock 1998, 324).

7Officially the Rockinghamites, led on this issue by Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, were in favour of the petition, but Rockingham’s support was tepid (O’Gorman 1975, 290–91).

8To William Turner of Wakefield, 5 May 1774.

9Ditchfield (2007, 184–87), Cobbett (1813, 17:436), debate on 3 April 1773 on Dissenters’ bill for abolishing subscription.

10See also Cone (1957, 221–23).

11Madame du Deffand commented: ‘Il va tous les jours au Palais écouter nos avocats, je ne sais s’il dit ce qu’il pense, mais il pretend en être content.’ Courtney (1975, 34), citing Marie-Anne, marquise du Deffand, Correspondance Complète¸ ed. le marquis de Sainte Aulaire (1866), II: 331–2.

12Cit. in Faulkner (2005, 109).

13To Richard Champion [19 March 1776]; see also Faulkner (2005, 110).

14Bisset felt it necessary to remind his readers that only superficial examiners of their writings could believe that Burke and Price derived their support for the Americans from the same political principles.

15Price cited the act in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty.

16A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777).

17From Richard Price, The General Introduction and Supplement to Two Tracts on Civil Liberty, the War with America and the Finances of the Kingdom.

18To William Tayleur, 17 March 1779.

19To William Tayleur, 21 April 1779; see also Ditchfield (1988). The word ‘whole’ was omitted from the final declaration.

20Diary of Thomas Gibbons, 17 March 1780.

21To William Tayleur, 27 March 1779. Dr John Disney, who joined Lindsey as a minister at Essex Street Unitarian Chapel, London, in 1783, in recollecting the 1770s, bracketed Burke with Fox as an advocate of toleration. Correspondence of Rev. John Disney: To Rev. C. Wyvill, 9 July 1803.

22To the Duke of Richmond [post 8 May 1780].

23To Richard Fitzpatrick, 20 May 1782.

24According to John Cannon (1969, 23–24), Burke could not be persuaded to refrain from ‘bombarding him with lurid personal invective’ in the period after the death of Rockingham during the formation of Shelburne’s short-lived ministry.

253 March 1783.

26To William Windham, 14 October 1784.

27Bisset noted his ‘uncommon genius and eloquence … were treated by many in the house with a disrespect they had never experienced before.’ Burke for his part was easily goaded by ‘hooting’, ‘coughing’ and the stamping of the feet, and ‘frequently fell into the most outrageous fits of passion’. Bisset’s views were noted by a reviewer in the Dissenter-dominated Monthly Review: ‘ART. III. Dr. Bisset’s Life of Mr. Burke’, Monthly Review, 27 (September 1798) 23.

28According to Bisset (1798, 436) he attended the debate but absented himself from the vote. A deputation from the Dissenters’ Repeal Committee had waited on Burke early in February 1787 but had not received an encouraging response (Davis 1978, 5 n.17).

29Richard Bright to Burke, 5 May 1789. Apparently Bright had written to Burke asking for his support in 1787. See also Henriques (1961, 108–15).

30To Richard Bright, 8, 9 May 1789. The cause Burke was referring to was the impeachment of Warren Hastings (Lock 2006, 261).

31Morgan noted in his Memoirs of Price: ‘Some of his friends had urged him to reply to Mr. Burke’s late publication; but at this period his spirits were not equal to the task, even if he had thought it necessary to engage in it’ (Thomas 2003, 86–87).

32Philip Francis to Edmund Burke, 19 February 1790.

33To Philip Francis, 20 February 1790.

34See Jones 2002, 47–48.

35Lock believes that Price’s account was ‘scarcely credible’; cf. Thomas (1982).

36Joseph Priestley later claimed that he had heard from a gentleman who was in Paris at the time that Burke’s account of 6 October was erroneous. Letters to… Burke (1791), in Rutt (1817–31, 22:162 n.).

37Willam Belsham was the brother of Thomas Belsham, the leading Unitarian of the next generation.

38To Philip Francis, 20 February 1790.

39To Timothy Kenrick, 29 May 1792. Lindsey wrote of ‘Mr. Burke’s ravings against unitarians’.

40See Ditchfield (1991, 59–61).

41Heywood (1787, 3) described the Dissenters as among ‘the best friends of the constitution’. The Dissenters continued to emphasize their patriotism and loyalty in the deteriorating circumstances of the 1790s. See Abraham Rees, To the Editor of the Times, 14 March 1793, p. 3 Issue 2558; Col. B, dated Hackney 9 March 1793.

42See Writings and Speeches, 9:57n.

43Wyvill described Burke’s eloquence as ‘Asiatic’ (1792, 81).

44Roscoe’s pamphlet was a response to Burke’s, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796). Lindsey, described Roscoe’s Letters as ‘deservedly prized’, although he attributed them to Roscoe’s friend, William Rathbone; Ditchfield (2012, 413–15), To John Rowe, 23 December 1796.

45In 1802 Priestley wrote a letter to the Monthly Magazine (published in February 1803) about Franklin and Burke. That was followed by a letter penned on 1 February 1804, five days before he died, about his own relationship with Burke. These documents were reprinted as an appendix in Rutt (1817–31, 25: App.24, 391–98).

46Samuel Kenrick reported Priestley calling on Burke after the publication of Reflections (W-K Corr., f.165, 10 July 1791).

47To William Turner of Wakefield, 1 September 1783.

48Priestley pointed to a weakness in Burke’s defence of the Church of England, for its establishment in Catholic Ireland could not be justified on the basis of his own principles (Priestley 1791, 28–29).

49Rutt 1817–31, XXV, 395–98.

50George III to Dundas, 16 July 1791, cit. Ehrman (1983), p.133. Burke wrote of the ‘insidious Hypocrisy’ and evil intentions of ‘Faction’: ‘They have changed some of their Notes since the Riots at Birmingham. Now that the anniversary of murder has produced arson and given it a direction they did not wish, they are Martyrs of order, Good government and sobriety – but “peace to all such” a thing, by the way, they do not over eagerly desire.’ Corr. 6:311–12, To Dr. French Laurence, 2 August 1791.

51In the debate on the Unitarian Petition, Burke claimed to sincerely regret the riots, but such sympathy was extremely limited for he argued that the riots were a result of the politics of Priestley and his supporters. Parliamentary Register (1792, 30)

52To Richard Burke Jr, 23 March 1792.

53F. Burney to Susanna Phillips and William and Frederica Locke, 18 June 1792.

54See ‘An Address of the Deputies and Delegates of the Dissenters of England to the Sufferers in the Riot at Birmingham …’ which declared their attachment ‘to the constitution of this kingdom, as settled on the principles of the glorious Revolution, on which alone depends the title of the present august family to the British throne …’ (Rutt 1817–31, 19:568–70).

55Differences in their outlook are explored in Fitzpatrick (1988) and Fitzpatrick (1996).

56Andrew Kippis (1794, 12), in trying to make sense of violent times, argued that the Deity ‘will not permit the cause of truth and integrity to be oppressed, though, for valuable purposes, he may leave it in a suffering state’.

57Belsham (1795, 2:51–52) cf. Darrin M. McMahon’s recent comment that in the closing days of his career Burke acceded to violent anti-Enlightenment views which earlier he would have repudiated; see McMahon (2003), Kindle location 5677–5694.

58Close to the time of his death he was described by Theophilus Lindsey as ‘that wild man, now poor Burke’. Ditchfield (2012, 427–29), To Russell Scott, 17 May 1797.