In September 1789 Hannah More wrote to her old friend Horace Walpole:

In this, More's opinion mirrored not only Yearsley's, (‘And, daring now to ACT, as well as FEEL, / Crushes the convent and the dread Bastille!’, as she wrote in the Epilogue to Earl Goodwin), but a significant number of observers in England. They, like More, were optimistic that the French would now move towards a system of government like Britain's own; the destruction of the Bastille symbolized, it was felt, the end of arbitrary and repressive powers wielded by a superstitious state against its subjects. But as the Revolution descended into violence, and as the position of the French royal family became increasingly precarious, many who had hoped for reform across the channel began to change their minds. In the spring of 1792 the Revolutionary government declared war against Austria and Prussia, and in September over one thousand prisoners, many of them priests, were massacred. By the end of the year the monarchy had been abolished and Louis XVI was to stand trial; in late 1792 Walpole wrote to More to tell her, as Anne Stott notes, ‘that the whole [French] nation should be exterminated’.