At a time when reformers were beginning to mobilise a broad swath of opinion in Britain in favour of a reformed Parliament and a strictly constitutional monarchy, they were being forced, by their early embrace of the French revolution, to defend policies in France they did not advocate at home: the execution of the king and of regime opponents, the confiscation of the property of the Church and nobility. Against the institution of the Terror, the French Republic paid no heed to the entreaties in Paris of Thomas Muir or, from his place in the French National Convention, of Thomas Paine.