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also speaks of "the monumental misjudgment which produced the
Revolution's quarrel with the Catholic church," and he argues that there
was "something horribly new and unimaginable in the prospect of a gov–
ernment systematically executing its opponents by the cartload for months
on end...."
Burke's response to the French Revolution, then, is consistent with his
progressive conservatism. In his view, the Revolution was a setback for
progress because it destroyed the manners necessary for the functioning of
civil society. As he said in 1795: "I wished to warn the people against the
greatest of all evils: a blind and furious spirit of innovation, under the name
of reform." He was for reform, but the French revolutionaries were radicals,
not reformers.
In the 1790s Burke was not only worried about the situation in France;
he was also concerned about the political situation in his native land. Ireland
was a nightmare version of his recipe for a healthy civil society because
there prescription and prejudice propped up tyranny. Whereas the estab–
lished church of England "harmonizes with our civil constitution, with the
frame and fashion of our Society, and with the general Temper of the peo–
ple," the established Protestant church of Ireland was an instrument of
oppression because it supported a ruling class that Burke called "an armed
and Systematick Tyranny." Burke despised this ruling class; he detested its
"insane prejudices, and furious temper. ..." Thus the prejudices of the
Protestant Ascendancy were not good prejudices: "I think I can hardly
over-rate the malignity of the principles of [the] Protestant Ascendancy, as
they affect Ireland...."
Although Burke strongly condemned the Protestant Ascendancy, say–
ing that it was "repugnant to humanity and good sense that the unity of any
Establishment, civil or religious, can ever depend upon the misery of those
who live under it," he did not agree with Johnson that this tyrannical estab–
lishment could only be destroyed by the end of British rule. It would be
"unnatural," Burke said, for Ireland to become independent. If Ireland were
separated from England, she "would certainly lose all her Tranquillity, [and]
all her prosperity. . .." Burke never lost faith in the English connection.
"My poor opinion," he said the year he died, "is, that the closest connex–
ion between Great Britain and Ireland, is essential to the well being...of the
two Kingdoms." If Burke had taken Johnson's position on Ireland his polit–
ical career would have ended, since his patron and other members of his
party had vast estates in Ireland, but Burke seems to have genuinely believed
that London would eventually rein in the Protestant Ascendancy.
In the 1790s Burke hoped he could improve the political situation in
Ireland by persuading Protestants and Catholics that they were fellow
Christians who should unite against their common enemy-the atheisti-
