Shortly after returning from France in the spring of 1793, the young William Wordsworth wrote a pamphlet against Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, for having betrayed the cause of liberty. Formerly a Foxite liberal sympathetic to the Jacobin cause, Watson had publicly renounced his support for the Revolution when he heard of the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793. Suitably enough, therefore, when Wordsworth came to draft his reply, he responded to the bishop in a selfconsciously ‘republican spirit’, treating English politics as if it were a merely an extension of the French conflict:

During the constitutional period Lafayette and Mirabeau had appeared to be fervent supporters of the cause of freedom, but as the Revolution had progressed, their complicity with the old order had been unmasked. And it was this and other examples of political betrayal which inspired the belligerent Girondin Jacques-Pierre Brissot to call for the mass desertion of traitors during the war crisis of 1792.