This essay examines Edmund Burke's attitude towards Protestant Dissenters, notably the more radical or rational Dissenters who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards Church and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke's attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. It would, however, take another ten years before his opposition to Dissenters became open and virulent.

In the 1770s a group of Latitudinarian clergymen, led by Rev. Theophilus Lindsey, petitioned Parliament for relaxation of the requirement that clergy should subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The debate in the House of Commons on the Feathers Tavern Petition, as it was known, revealed that the government was against such a change but would not oppose a relaxation of the existing requirement that Dissenting ministers, tutors or schoolmasters subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the Thirty-Nine Articles. The Dissenters proceeded to petition for such change. There were, however, divisions within the petitioning camp, with some Dissenters being prepared to accept an alternative subscription requirement and others believing that the state had no right to demand any religious test at all. Burke favoured change, believing that a profession of faith should replace the existing requirement to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. At this time, Dissenters regarded him as an advocate of toleration. Even Theophilus Lindsey, who was critical of Burke's opposition to the Feathers Tavern Petition, wrote of Burke speaking in favour of ‘the most unbounded toleration to Dissenters’. In the early 1770s, one might have thought that was indeed Burke's stance. In a speech on the Protestant Dissenters Relief Bill on 7 March 1773, which he made soon after he had visited France, he spoke in favour of toleration even for Deists. One may see this in part as a reaction to the atheism which he had found prevalent among the philosophes. After stating his strong preference for revealed religion and even more so for the Church of England, which he wanted to see so powerful that it could ‘crush the giant powers of rebellious darkness’, he conceded that ‘episcopacy may fail and religion exist’.