Richard Price at the Old Jewry

Revolutions are made on battlefields and in palace courtyards, but their philosophy is made elsewhere. It is made in plain chapels in foreign cities by quiet men who have spent forty years arguing what nobody yet believes, and who one autumn evening discover that the world has begun, without notice, to agree with them.

THE OLD JEWRY

On the evening of Wednesday the fourth of November 1789, on a damp grey London evening with the river smell coming up Cheapside on a north-east wind, the elders of the Revolution Society of London gathered in the meeting-house of the Old Jewry off Cheapside (a City of London street named for the medieval Jewish quarter that had stood there before the 1290 expulsion, the chapel itself a Christian Dissenting meeting-house built on the street in 1701) to keep the anniversary-eve of the Glorious Revolution. The meeting-house was a plain English Dissenting chapel, square brick walls under a slate roof, a horseshoe gallery in oak, plain glass in the windows, no font and no altar, a high pulpit at the centre of the south wall reached by steps. The Society had been founded the year before by Lord Stanhope and a dozen other Whigs to commemorate, once a year, the bloodless deposition of James II by William of Orange in November 1688. The form of commemoration was a sermon in the afternoon at the Old Jewry, a procession across the City after, and a dinner in the evening at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate. This year the sermon was preached by the chairman, a sixty-six-year-old Welsh Dissenting minister of small frame, mild voice and habitual black coat, who had been preparing it since the news from the Bastille had reached London in late July, three and a half months before.

THE MAN AT THE PULPIT

He was Richard Price, born at Tynton in the parish of Llangeinor on the southern slopes of Mynydd y Gaer above the Garw valley in Glamorgan on the twenty-third of February 1723, the son of a Dissenting minister of the Calvinist confession. He had been educated at Pentwyn in Carmarthenshire and at Talgarth in Brecon, walked at nineteen to London to enter Coward's Academy in Tenter Alley, ministered to a Dissenting congregation at Newington Green from 1758, and at the Gravel Pit chapel in Hackney from 1770. He was, by 1789, the most consequential moral philosopher and mathematician of the English Dissenting tradition. In 1763 he had edited and communicated to the Royal Society the posthumous paper of his friend Thomas Bayes, the Tunbridge Wells Presbyterian, An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, the paper that founded modern inverse probability and that still underlies, in 2025, the statistical methods of every quantitative discipline. In 1771 he had published the Observations on Reversionary Payments, the actuarial work that put English life insurance on a sound mathematical footing. In 1776, on the eve of the American Declaration, he had published the Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, a pamphlet that sold sixty thousand copies in three months and was read aloud to the Continental Congress; the Congress had offered him American citizenship in 1778 and asked him to advise on the finances of the new Republic; he had declined, courteously, citing his Welsh ancestry, his Dissenting ministry, and his elderly wife who could not face the Atlantic crossing.

THE SERMON

His subject that afternoon was the love of one's country: not as patriotic flag-waving, but as the obligation of every free people to extend, in their politics, the principles their country claimed for itself. He worked his way through the doctrine in the manner of a careful sermon, scripture and exegesis, the lesson being Psalm 122 (pray for the peace of Jerusalem) read against the political condition of three nations: Britain, America, and now France. He came at the end to the personal application. He had, he said, lived long enough to see two of the three reach the principles of 1688: the American colonies in 1776, the French Estates-General in 1789. He had seen the Bastille fall in July; he had seen the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen passed by the National Assembly on the twenty-sixth of August; he had seen the King of France brought from Versailles to Paris by the women of the markets on the sixth of October. He read, as the climax, the passage that would two months later be reprinted in pamphlet form and shipped across the Channel:

Behold, the light you have struck out has, after setting our hemisphere in a blaze, warmed and illuminated France. I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error. I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever, and nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it. I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice, their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects.

He closed with the Nunc Dimittis of the aged Simeon, applied to his own ministry and his own century: Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. The congregation stood in silence. The chapel emptied through the Cheapside door into the dusk. The minister was helped down from the pulpit by his nephew George Cadogan Morgan and carried the half mile to the London Tavern for the dinner.

THE DINNER AND THE PRINTING

At the London Tavern dinner Lord Stanhope read a congratulatory address to the French National Assembly, drafted by Price and seconded by the meeting. The address was sent to Paris by the night packet from Dover the following morning. It was the first formal communication from any English political body to the French Revolution. The Marquis de la Rochefoucauld read it to the Assembly later in November; Mirabeau answered for the French. Price's sermon was printed for sale at one shilling by Thomas Cadell of the Strand in the first week of December. It went through four London editions in three months and was reprinted in Edinburgh, Dublin, Boston, Philadelphia, and, in French translation, in Paris.

BURKE AT BEACONSFIELD

At Gregories, his small estate at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, the sixty-year-old Edmund Burke, MP for Malton, Whig of the Rockingham faction, ally of Price on the American question for the past fifteen years, read the Discourse on a January morning by his library fire. He read it twice. By the second reading he had taken his pen and was writing in the margin. He had heard, in the Welsh minister's gentle voice on the page, what he heard as the cracking of a continent: the application of abstract first-principles to the historical complexities of a thousand-year polity, the celebration by an English Dissenter of the humiliation of a French throne. He sat down that night to write what he intended to be a letter of correction to Price. By spring the letter had become a pamphlet. By summer the pamphlet had become a book. The Reflections on the Revolution in France, four hundred and ninety-six octavo pages, was published by James Dodsley of Pall Mall on the first of November 1790, almost exactly one year after the sermon. The book named Price by name in its opening pages and addressed him directly through the first hundred. It sold thirteen thousand copies in five weeks, went through eleven English editions in nine months, was translated into French, German, Italian and Dutch, and is, in 2025, still in continuous print as the foundational text of modern political conservatism.

THE PAMPHLET WAR

Mary Wollstonecraft, who had attended the Newington Green chapel as a young schoolmistress in 1784 and had counted Price as her first intellectual mentor, sat down on the second of November 1790 and wrote, in fourteen days of nightly composition, A Vindication of the Rights of Men in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, published anonymously by Joseph Johnson of St Paul's Churchyard on the twenty-ninth of November. It was the first reply, and the public guess at the author's identity was that some Whig man-of-letters, perhaps Mackintosh, had written it. Thomas Paine, in lodgings in Versailles, took the next eight weeks to write Rights of Man, published by Johnson on the thirteenth of March 1791; James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae, more measured than Paine, appeared in April; Joseph Priestley's Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke in May. By the autumn of 1791 there were more than fifty published replies to the Reflections, of which Paine's would sell a quarter of a million copies in three years and provoke a treason prosecution against the author. The whole apparatus of the modern political-philosophical conversation between liberal universalism and historical-conservative particularism took its shape from the Burke-Price-Paine triangle that opened on the afternoon of the fourth of November 1789 at the Old Jewry.

THE DEPARTURE OF THE SERVANT

Price preached only once more. He gave a memorial sermon at Hackney on the twenty-ninth of January 1791 for the Reverend Andrew Kippis. He fell ill of an inflammatory fever in March, weakened steadily through April, and died at his house in Hackney on the morning of the nineteenth of April 1791, sixty-eight years old. He was carried to Bunhill Fields on the twenty-sixth of April and buried among the Dissenters, between the graves of John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe, in the burying-ground of the people who had built their faith on the right to read the scripture in their own language and elect their own ministers. The Nunc Dimittis was read over his coffin. He had outlived the Bastille by twenty-one months, the Declaration of the Rights of Man by twenty, the King of France by twenty-one (Louis XVI was guillotined in January 1793). He had not lived to see the Terror, the Directory, Napoleon, or the long century of European wars that followed. He had lived long enough to know that his sermon had been read; that Burke had answered it; that Paine had answered Burke; that the conversation he had opened in a Welsh-Dissenting voice from a London pulpit on an autumn afternoon was going to be the conversation of his country, of his cousins across the Atlantic, and of the new French republic, for the rest of human time.