 After the publication of statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which he surprisingly broke ranks with his liberal Whig colleagues to support the French aristocracy, a pamphlet war discussing the Revolution began in earnest. Because Burke had supported the American colonists in their rebellion against England, his views sent a shockwave through the country. While Burke supported aristocracy, monarchy, and the Established Church, liberals such as Charles James Fox supported the Revolution, and a programme of individual liberties, civic virtue and religious toleration, while radicals such as Priestley, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft, argued for a further programme of republicanism, agrarian socialism, and abolition of the "landed interest". Alfred Cobban calls the debate that erupted "perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in [Britain]". However, by December 1795, after the Reign of Terror and war with France, there were few who still supported the French cause or believed that reform would extend to Britain, and those suspected of remaining radicals became the subject of official and popular suspicion.
