Reintroducing himself to public life during a boisterous election meeting for Westminster in 1819, John Thelwall offered his audience a quick word of explanation for his twenty-year absence from the reform struggle. Weary of government-inspired attempts to ‘hunt him down like a wild beast’, and doubtful about his own effectiveness in the cause of reform, he had withdrawn into the arms of his family. Yet, now, here he stood once again, unchanged, uncorrupted and re-energized. How would he have them remember him? Simply, he said. And when he died, a memorial stone might record his contribution for posterity: ‘Here lies John Thelwall, whose moral and political character was never impeached’.

As ill-luck would have it however, Thelwall died quietly on a lecture tour at Bath in 1834. His funeral was not noticed in either the national or local press, and for seven months no memorial marked his last resting place. His widow and a few friends in London tried unsuccessfully to raise a subscription for a ‘handsome mural monument’, but finally settled for a ‘temporary’ marker of local stone. Its inscription is a good deal less simple than the one Thelwall had in mind in 1819, but no less evasive in its commemoration of a man who had been, in E. P. Thompson's judgement, Britain's most important, ‘courageous and judicious’ radical theorist of the French Revolutionary years, a man who had once addressed crowds of 500–600, twice weekly in his London lecture rooms, and who had stood trial on a charge of High Treason for it: