Richard Price's 1789 sermon 'A Discourse on the Love of Our Country' provoked Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and touched off the Revolution Controversy

On 4 November 1789 — the 101st anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 — Richard Price preached "A Discourse on the Love of Our Country" to the Revolution Society in London. The sermon drew an approving parallel between England's 1688 settlement and the French Revolution then underway, framing both as expressions of a people's right to choose its own governors. It "ignited the pamphlet war known as the Revolution Controversy," and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) "attacked Price directly." Price's defenders — Thomas Paine, in Rights of Man, and Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men — wrote their replies into the same controversy.

Burke's Reflections is conventionally read as the founding text of modern conservatism, and the exchange it triggered is often taken as an origin point of the modern left/right political axis. On this account the sermon that set it off was delivered not by a career polemicist but by the actuary of the Northampton mortality table — the same Richard Price whose reversionary-payment mathematics priced British life assurance. That double identity is the cross-domain bridge treated in observation-richard-price-anchors-actuarial-and-political-philosophy-lineages. The episode is roughly contemporaneous with the late-Georgian legal ferment recorded in claim-englands-bloody-code-made-petty-property-theft-a-capital-crime, another corner of the same 18th-century English public order Burke set out to defend.

The causal link — that the Discourse specifically provoked the Reflections — is the note's spine and rests only on Tier-4 Wikipedia; it is flagged [unverified-historical] and routed to question-verify-price-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections-primary pending a reading of the two primary texts.