The Role Of The East India Company In Thomas Paine’s Radicalisation 

By W. A. Speck

George Chalmers, Thomas Paine’s first and most hostile biographer, maintained that he ‘commenced public writer in 1771. The electors of New Shoreham had lately shone with such uncommon lustre, as to attract parliamentary notice, and to incur parliamentary disfranchisement. A new election was now to be held, not so much in a new manner, as on new principles. The poets of Lewes were called upon by Rumbold, the candidate of fair pretensions, to furnish an appropriate song. Our author obtained the laurel, with three guineas for his pains.’ Chalmers went on to remark ‘it may then be doubted whether it be strictly true, what he asserted in his news — paper altercations, in 1779, that till the epoch of his Common Sense, he had never published a syllable’. Since no copy of Paine’s election song appears to have survived, however, it seems reasonable to assume that it never was published but was simply sung.¹ 

Chalmers version of the New Shoreham bye — election is also unreliable in other respects. It did not take place in 1771 but on 26 November 1770. Moreover, so far from being consequent upon an alteration of the qualifications for voting in the constituency, it provoked one. The bribery employed in it was so blatant that it could not be disregarded even in an age which turned a blind eye to corruption at the polls. Consequently a parliamentary inquiry was held, which resulted in the number of electors in the borough being increased from about 100 to about 800. Many of those who enjoyed the franchise there had formed a so — called Christian Society, ‘ostensibly for charitable purposes, but really to arrange the sale of the borough’s parliamentary representation’.² The general election held in 1768 had resulted in the return of two members unopposed. The subsequent death of one of them in October 1770, however, necessitated a bye – election to fill the vacant seat. The Christian Society determined on selling their votes to the highest bidder. Initially five candidates stood. One offered to spend £3000 and to order the construction of a ship of 600 tons, an attractive inducement in Shoreham where shipbuilding was a major industry. Thomas Rumbold then made an offer of £34 or £35 for each member of the Society, which they found more appealing and accepted. This overt deal so appalled the returning officer that he announced he would be no party to it. At the polls he refused 76 votes given to Rumbold by members of the Society and returned one of his rivals, John Purling, even though only 37 had voted for him. This led Rumbold to petition parliament objecting to the return of Purling. Though the Commons upheld Rumbold’s claim to have been rightfully returned, the House insisted on an investigation into the proceedings at the election. This uncovered such corrupt practices that ‘it was proposed to disfranchise the borough; this, however, was thought too dangerous a precedent’.³ Instead an Act was passed in 1771 disfranchising 69 named members of the Christian Society and increasing the electorate eightfold. 

Tom Paine was thus involved in one of the most blatantly corrupt elections held under George III. No principle appears to have been at stake in it, even though Rumbold ‘opposed the ministry’.⁴ All three candidates who contested the bye – election were members of the East India Company. Rumbold, the candidate who commissioned electoral propaganda from Paine, and paid him for it, had returned from India in 1769 with a fortune calculated at between £200,000 and £300,000.⁵ He was intent on buying a seat in parliament and found one up for sale in the borough of New Shoreham. Why he also felt the need for an electoral song is hard to explain. That Tom Paine, the future advocate of parliamentary reform, obtained the commission is even harder to square with his reputation for political radicalism on the eve of his departure for America. On the contrary, as Moncure Conway observed of this episode, ‘he appears to have been conventionally patriotic’.⁶ 

Shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia, however, Paine published an essay on ‘the Life and Death of Lord Clive’ which was highly critical of the type of ‘nabob’ whose election campaign he had supported in Shoreham.⁷ Clive’s conduct in India had been investigated by parliament in 1773 and, although he had been exonerated, many felt that his career with the East India Company had been characterised by corruption and extortion. Paine clearly shared this view, for his ‘reflections’ on Clive were far from complimentary. On the contrary, he described India as the ‘loud proclaimer of European cruelties’ and the ‘bloody monument of unnecessary deaths’. He pictured Clive returning home ‘loaded with plunder’, then going back to a country where ‘fear and terror march like pioneers before his camp, murder and rapine accompany it, famine and wretchedness follow in the rear’. Clive, ‘resolved on accumulating an unbounded fortune’, is there ‘the sole lord of their lives and fortunes [and] disposes of either as he pleases’. Although he was acquitted by parliament, ‘some time before his death he became very melancholy — subject to strange imaginations — and was found dead at last’. Paine imagines Clive in the final stages of his life unable to enjoy his wealth, which reminds him of the ways in which it was acquired. Thus port wine appears like blood to him. And in the end he was suspected of taking his own life. 

Clive died on 22 November, just a week before Paine arrived in Philadelphia so he cannot have known of the nabob’s death before he left England. But he would have been aware of the parliamentary enquiry into Clive’s conduct in India, which was held in May 1773. Paine himself was probably in London while it was being held, for he spent much of the time between the fall of 1772 and the spring of 1773 in the capital pursuing the claim of his fellow excisemen to an increase in their salaries. Though his own printed Case of the Officers of Excise was supported by George Lewis Scott, one of the commissioners of the excise, it failed to find favour with the Treasury or the prime minister, Lord North, who rejected the claim in February.⁸ Paine became very disillusioned with politics as a result of this rebuff, and the scales seem to have fallen from his eyes when he heard of the proceedings against Clive. He could even have been thinking of his own reaction when he observed in his ‘Reflections’ on them “Tis the peculiar temper of the English to applaud before they think. Generous of their praise, they frequently bestow it unworthily; but when once the truth arrives, the torrent stops, and rushes back again with the same violence’. At all events, the Clive affair marked a turning point in the political stance of Paine from being the recipient of favours from Rumbold to becoming a major critic of British imperialism.

Endnotes 

1. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain (1791), pp. 26 — 7. It has been suggested that a poem, ‘Farmer Shorter’s Dog Porter’; which Paine published in the Pennsylvania Magazine in July 1775, was the song in question. Although it involves a farmer who had voted in the Shoreham election, which shows that Paine was familiar with that event, being subsequent to the polling it cannot have been used for electoral purposes. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain (1791), pp. 26 — 7. 
2. The House of Commons 17 — 1790 edited by L. B. Namier and J. Brooke (3 vols, History of Parliament, 1964), i. 397. 
3. T. H. B. Oldfield, An entire and complete history Political and personal of the boroughs of Great Britain (3 vols, 1792), iii, 56. 
4. In 1786 Rumbold topped a list of wealthy nabobs with a fortune estimated at £300,000. Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in eighteenth — century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), p. 13. 
5. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (2 vols, 1998), i, 24. 
6. The complete works of Thomas Paine edited by Philip Foner (2 vols, 1969), ii, 22 — 27. 
7. George Hindmarch, Thomas Paine: The Case of the King of England and his Officers of Excise (1998). 
8. Foner, ii, 25. Paine documents the essay with quotations from the proceedings of the committee set up to investigate Clive’s activities, which he presumably obtained before he left England.