However, it needs to be added that the British authorities cracked down on religious 'radicals'. The thesis presented is a useful addition to understanding the society of Britian at the time, but the state were far more repressive to some religious groups than others. Unitarians were particularly targetted as until the 1960's, the denial of the trinity in a nominally Anglican country was illegal. George Washington Maribeau Milnes of Wakefield, Dr Rev Priestley and other Unitarians together with other British radicals welcomed the French revolution: they interpreted it as a move toward modernity, the throwing off of the old absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and breaking the power of the Catholic Church, moving toward a more enlightened constitutional model of government. The humanist and Unitarian William Hazlitt spoke for many in his famous account of the revolution when he wrote:

‘A new world was opening to the astonished sight. Scenes, lovely as hope can paint, dawned upon the imagination; visions of unsullied bliss lulled the senses, and hid the darkness or surrounding objects, rising in bright succession and endless gradations, like the steps of that ladder which was once set up on the earth and whose top reached to heaven. Nothing was too mighty for this new-begotten hope; and the path that led to human happiness seems as plain as the pictures in “Pilgrim’s Progress” leading to Paradise.’

Unitarians may have been naïve in their idealised support of the French revolution, but they did so and maintained their support for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity against a backdrop of fierce hostility [church burnings, book burnings, deportations of ministers, effigy burning, anti-Unitarian riots] both against their religious belief (rejection of the Holy Trinity was punishable by death until 1813) and of their politics. Religion and politics in Britain 1790-1815 was, and is highly emotive, and demonstrates how the state the British state used repression to quell any critique of War with France and for making peace.