Pitt "sought the opinion of the Universities of France and Spain on the charge generally alleged against Catholics that their allegiance to their sovereign was subordinate to their allegiance to the Pope; that they held that heretics might lawfully be put to death, and that no faith was to be kept with them.

The Universities had unanimously disavowed doctrines which they declared at once inhuman and unchristian, and on the strength of the disavowal the British Parliament repealed the Penal Acts of William for England and Scotland, restored to the Catholics the free use of their chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy." Toleration was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and complete emancipation might have followed but for the interference of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.
To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere.
In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have been brought by the rebellion.

Protestant ascendency as understood in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than anything else in the world.

He even denied that there was such a thing as the Protestant religion.

The difference between Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a negative no religion could be made.