ABSTRACT
Certainly, John Thelwall's domestic historical interests predate his conversion to radicalism. Thelwall allowed himself fullest reign as a 'philosophical antiquary' in the pages of The Peripatetic in 1793, a work that may be read as an index to the English landscape as a repository of historical memory. Like many of his circle in the London Corresponding Society, Thelwall was broadly sympathetic to the venerable libertarian belief that the historical roots of the reform movement lay in 'usurped' Anglo-Saxon precedents of universal suffrage, elected chief magistrates and annual parliaments. Thelwall's Rights of Nature is certainly not a work of history in the same sense as Baxter's book, but it is deeply ingrained with historical thought and begins in familiar Jacobin style by contesting Edmund Burke over the place of precedent in rational argument. Thelwall sought an accommodation between a wholesale Paineite rejection of history on the one hand and popular radical constitutionalism on the other.
