Every bureaucracy was in a state of trepidation. The political atmosphere was heavily charged with electricity and no one could foretell where and when the next thunderbolt would descend. Naturally enough the great vested interests in Church and State looked askance at, and were disquieted by, these periodical celebrations of such an event as the destruction of the Bastile and all that it symbolised, with their odes to Liberty, Fraternity and Equality, and their impassioned appeals to Demos, and the rising hopes of a people grown restive and impatient under what they were taught to believe was political thraldom. It required but a small spark to bring about a conflagration, and designing and unscrupulous men saw in the approaching anniversary of the memorable 14th of July an opportunity of which they were determined to take advantage. Priestley had himself, unwittingly, laid the train which brought about the catastrophe. “Dr Priestley,” says Corry, writing in 1804, “from the commencement of his residence at Birmingham, had undoubtedly turned his attention too much from the luminous field of philosophic disquisition to the sterile regions of polemic divinity and the still more thorny paths of polemic politics. His tracts on these subjects amounted to upwards of thirty, and from his celebrity they had a very general circulation. As a philosopher he clearly saw defects in the most perfect of human institutions, and expressed himself with a boldness and freedom which alarmed the neighbouring clergy of the Established Church, and excited their resentment. The labouring classes in Birmingham certainly looked upon him as a disaffected and dangerous man. Incapable of deep reflection themselves, they abhorred his Unitarian principles as subversive of Christianity, and the idea that the Church was in danger was propagated among them by men of deeper discernment, who wished to render Dr Priestley odious and unpopular. A very considerable number, however, of the more enlightened inhabitants, who were convinced of the Doctor’s integrity as a man, sincerity as a preacher, and superlative merit as a philosopher, were his strenuous advocates and admirers. The collision of parties became every day more violent, and the events which were daily transacting in France kept alive the jealousy arising from uncongenial opinions.”