Thelwall's best-known public oration was staged on 26 October 1795 at the giant open-air meeting at Copenhagen Fields to protest against war, the high price of bread and the absence of effective political representation. Three days later came the attack on George III's coach at the opening of parliament by crowds clamouring for peace and a reduction in the price of bread, threatening ‘a king without a head’, if their demands were not met. These events marked only the crescendo of an argument that commenced earlier in the year as food prices inexorably rose and as riot and popular agitation spilled onto the streets. For Thelwall the deep cause of the crisis lay in the absence of political representation, and the solution was to be sought in ‘a loud, a fervid, and resolute remonstrance with our rulers’. ‘Remonstrance’ of course is a gesture towards the long shadow cast by the political contests of the seventeenth century, suggesting to the historically-minded the precedence of the Great Remonstrance presented to Charles I at the Long Parliament, which had complained amongst other things about the burden of maintaining long and costly wars. But Thelwall's pronouncements in this year, delivered as lectures, then published in The Tribune, have been freighted with extra significance, suggesting indeed a watershed in political thought: the moment at which the powerful modern sociology of political economy was first set out in defence of the labouring poor. This essay explores the nature of Thelwall's contribution to what might be termed the political economy of English Jacobinism.

Interest in Thelwall as an English Jacobin theorist has grown in recent years; he has also come to occupy a crucial position in the historiography of British radicalism, so much so that a careful review of precisely what he said, together with its context, is required in order both to move away from some inaccurate portrayals of his politics and to recapture the true sources of his originality.