Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower 1795

Along with Hardy, Horne Took and other leading British radicals, Thelwall was arrested in May 1794, taken to the Tower, and later charged with High Treason. If convicted, they stood to be hanged, drawn and quartered (as many had been after the Jacobite rebellion fifty years before) but the twelve sonnets, two odes and various poems of this volume have about them surprising poise and calm.