It is unlikely that Hannah More would have felt much regret if she had known of her dismissal by Robert Southey for being ‘sunk too deep in the mire of aristocracy’ for inclusion in the Annual Anthology. As Southey's monument to Bristol radicalism was folding under the pressure of increasingly reactionary national politics (in addition to the demands of personal circumstances), Hannah More's influence was reaching its zenith. As we saw earlier, More and her fellow conservatives had utilized their networks to efficiently counter the threat of overt radicalism from the likes of Tom Paine; by the end of the 1790s even covert radicalism – as practised by members of the Cottle circle in 1796 – was seriously compromised. By the turn of the century, in response to the rise of Napoleon and the transformation of the Revolutionary wars into wars of expansion, radicals like Coleridge and Southey had recanted their former support for the Revolution, and the conservatism and loyalism urged by publications like the Cheap Repository and Village Politics were increasingly dominant ideas. With the radicals retreating to the margins politically and geographically, Hannah More, at the centre of a network of powerful and well-connected people, was in a position to effect a powerful reinforcement of the existing social and political order.