Letters on a Regicide Peace

An unauthorized version, printed by John Owen, a printer who had worked on the letters earlier in the year, appeared the day before Burke's edition was published.

[1] The last of the letters written, but the third in the series, was occasioned by the inability of Pitt's ministry to make peace with France; on 19 December 1796, Britain's envoy was expelled by the French.

All the little quiet rivulets, that watered an humble, a contracted, but not an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse, and boundless, barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France.

It is no longer an object of terrour, the aggrandizement of a new power, which teaches as a professor that philanthropy in their chair; whilst it propagates by arms, and establishes by conquest, the comprehensive system of universal fraternity.

That reigning party no longer touches on its favourite subject, the display of those horrours, that must attend the existence of a power, with such dispositions and principles, seated in the heart of Europe.

[8] The letters also stigmatise Pitt's actions towards a peace with France as appeasing the French nation, which was the wrong way to act in Burke's view.

[10] By chance, at the time the letters were being published, the French navy very nearly landed an army of 15,000 men at Bantry Bay in Ireland over Christmas 1796, known as "L'Expedition d'Irlande".

The government's paper the True Briton attacked Burke's language and claimed that his ideas about restoring the French monarchs would be impossible.

[13] John Thelwall, a democrat and radical, was upset by his belief that Burke assumed that only a portion of the population, the informed individuals, should be understood as the public.