The debates over constitutional reform that shaped so much of the political discourse of the English 1790s were fundamentally inseparable from arguments over the character and significance of the national past. Between a broad loyalist consensus that constitutional legitimacy was bound by precedent, and a Paineite alternative that located legitimacy only in timeless rational abstractions, John Thelwall set out a stall of his own in 1796. ‘History is to be consulted not for precedents that must be followed, but for examples that should be weighed’, he wrote, ‘not for dogmas to restrain, but for circumstances to illustrate our speculations: and, as far as they extend, for landmarks to direct our course’. This interpretative sense of the English past, not as a justification for present and future action, but as a storehouse of exemplary memory with which to warn, inspire and instruct popular agency, was deeply ingrained in Thelwall's political reasoning; and responsible too, perhaps, for his optimism following Peterloo some thirteen years later that, ‘No man acquainted with English history could suppose that the English spirit was to be put down by the sword or by massacre’.

Despite teaching himself classics and history as a youth, composing an early and unfinished ‘epic poem on the subject of Caesar's invasion’, and starting work when still a boy on his own ‘History of England’, the mature Thelwall's historical thought has been given scant attention beyond the role it played in his tactical evasions of government attempts to silence his political lectures through use of the Seditious Meetings Act in 1796. This was certainly the limited view projected by E. P. Thompson's ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’ in 1994, a narrative of disappointment in which the reclusive Thelwall's preoccupation ‘with researches into Nordic, Saxon and Celtic antiquities’ in 1801, are presumed to have been spurred only by the requirements of his ‘mediocre’ and unfinished Saxon epic, The Hope of Albion.