The history of the French Revolution is more than usually subject to the vagaries of intellectual fashion and remains a vehemently contested field for research. Indeed, this has been the case since the first days of the Revolution. Although less subject to historical fashions, the precise nature of the British response to France has also been hotly disputed territory ever since news of events in France first crossed the Channel. It is not difficult to see why this should be so. The French Revolution, following hard on the heels of the American, raised questions for contemporaries, as for later generations, about the legitimacy of Britain's ‘ancien régime’ and the degree and sources of its stability. It also led many to believe that substantial parliamentary reform was both necessary and inevitable, and this gave rise to a number of organisations dedicated to making the inevitable actual. The period from 1791 to 1803 is seen by many historians as the first major opportunity (and for some also the last) for a radical, popular, democratic reform of the British social and political order. One indication of its significance is Alfred Cobban's description of the pamphlet debate which followed the publication of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790 as, ‘perhaps the last real discussion of fundamentals of politics in this country… Issues as great have been raised in our day, but it cannot be pretended that they have evoked a political discussion on the intellectual level of that inspired by the French Revolution’.