‘Hardly had he finished the last page of the “Reflections” at the Red Lion in Islington’, recalled Thomas Clio Rickman, who knew Paine in London at the time, ‘before he asked for pen and ink and set about composing his reply in the inn itself’. Although Rights of Man was ‘in answer to Mr Burke’, it was not just a reply to him but also a defence of ‘a system then established and operating in America’ which Paine ‘wished to see peaceably adopted in Europe’. This wider aim was implicit in the dedication of Rights of Man to George Washington, ‘that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old’.

The subtitle of Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution was And on the Proceedings of Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. The London Revolution Society was the one he had especially in mind. At its proceedings on 4 November 1789, Richard Price, a leading dissenter and radical – and friend of Paine – had delivered a sermon in the Old Jewry which ‘reinterpreted the principles of 1688–9 and praised the French Revolution’. His reinterpretation of the Revolution Settlement of 1689 was that it had upheld the right of the people to choose and cashier their rulers and to change the constitution. Burke denied that there were any such rights, or that anything of the sort had transpired at the time.