The last decade or so has seen a marked revival of interest in the way in which conservative opinion in Britain responded to the challenge of the French Revolution. If fraternal inquiries into British radicalism proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, a good deal of scholarly attention in the 1980s was lavished on explaining the loyalist response to revolution. This shift in focus was foreshadowed in 1977 when Harry Dickinson argued, in the concluding section of Liberty and Property, that it is ‘evident that the radicals had neither massive popular support nor an effectual political organization capable of seizing power; whereas their conservative opponents possessed considerable power and were ready to use it’. Dickinson went on to suggest that conservatives, rather than radicals, won the battle of ideas which raged in the 1790s. Ian Christie went still further in his Ford Lectures for 1984, ending his discussion of ‘The intellectual repulse of revolution’, with the confident assertion that, ‘in the 1790s, British publicists summoned up the lessons of history, of pragmatic experience, and of utility, in defence of the existing system of government. In so doing they appealed to and rallied the instinctive support of the great majority of the British political nation’. Shortly before Christie delivered his Ford Lectures, Robert Dozier's For King, Constitution, and Country appeared, claiming to offer the first systematic treatment of the relationship between the British government and the loyalist movements of the 1790s.