When I joined the ranks of His Majesty’s Customs & Excise in 1946, I was quickly made aware of the department’s historic literary tradition, led by Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Smith, Robert Bums and Thomas Paine. But even after nearly 200 years there seemed to be a question mark over the last of these famous men. Paine had twice been dismissed from the service, and was subsequently charged with sedition, prompting his escape to France. Bums, by contrast, appeared to be revered without reserve, though I eventually discovered that during his Excise years he too had found himself in hot water, when some of his writing and activities had called his political loyalty into question. But the two men had much more in common than their time in the service of the Crown. 

There is a substantial academic literature about both Bums and Paine (in the latter case, some of it hostile). Biographies include splendid modem works by Robert Crawford (Bums) and John Keane (Paine), along with a forensic analysis of Burns’ radical tendencies by Liam Mcllvanney. But although both lives have been well chronicled (albeit separately), I hope there may be merit in a short selective account of the most salient features of the common radical ground shared by the two great writers, and its inspiration, a comparison that has attracted scant attention. I will not attempt condensed biographies outside that narrow focus: that would neither be possible, nor necessary. 

Parallels can first be found in their origins and upbringing. Both had working class roots in rural surroundings, environments and experience that inevitably conditioned their views. It is unsurprising that both found resonance in the religious and political dissent of the 18th century. 

Paine’s childhood home was close to Thetford gallows and within the purview of the ruling Grafton family. He could not have failed to be aware of the rough justice handed down to the rural poor and the contrasting privilege and power enjoyed by the landed gentry. In Scotland, Bums knew from his own painful experience the penalties of toil and labour, made futile by poverty. Drudgery and hunger racked his body, but they could not vanquish his spirit, his humour, or his innate genius. The result was, to quote Barke, that “his sympathies were for the poor, the oppressed… He hated all manner of cruelty, oppression and the arrogance of privilege and mere wealth.” 

Likewise, both men, as children, were exposed to religious ideology. In Paine’s case direct evidence is limited, but we know at least that his parents belonged to different branches of the Christian faith – his mother to the established church, his father to the dissenting Quaker sect – and that he had regular contact with the teaching of both traditions. Although never an atheist, it appears from his later writings that he was not persuaded by either theology. He said in The Age of Reason: “from the time I was capable of conceiving an idea, and acting upon it by reflection, I either doubted the truth of the Christian system or thought it to be a strange affair.” But more important than the influence of parental indoctrination is the evidence of Paine’s voluntary association with Methodism. There is a record that he heard John Wesley preach on one of his several visits to Thetford. Later, as a 21 year-old, he is said to have preached as a Methodist in both Dover and Sandwich. Eight years later, while in London waiting for an Excise vacancy, he is said to have again turned to occasional preaching. There is even a suggestion in the Oldys biography (repeated by Conway) that Paine sought from the Baptist minister Daniel Noble an introduction to the Bishop of London with a view to ordination. It is certainly reasonable to think that Methodism appealed to Paine. Its preachers were enthusiastic and able to reach out to the common people. They emphasised that Christ died for all, and their message, although concerned with spiritual salvation, was in tune with the 18th century radical aspiration towards equality. Notwithstanding Paine’s later assault upon organised religion and his repudiation of the Bible, Keane’s view “that his moral capacities ultimately had religious roots” is very persuasive. 

Bums was baptized and brought up in the Christian faith. His father William, a strict Calvinist, was committed to his sons’ religious education, though the tone of it was somewhat tempered by the preaching of his parish minister. William Dalrymple was of the Presbyterian persuasion: a moderate, liberal man, antagonistic to divisive sectarianism, zealotry and hypocrisy, concerned to reach out to the poor, and an advocate of amity and love. Although Bums later strayed from his father’s model of piety and virtue 

(particularly in his sexual inclinations: according to Berke he had passionate relationships with many women, productive of fifteen children, six out of wedlock) this early teaching was later reflected in many of his poems. And despite his departure from the constraints of Presbyterian theology, he never relinquished his belief in God. Crawford notices a manual written by Bums’s father addressing some of the fundamental questions of religious belief. One of these not only conditioned his children but, as I will mention later, was also very much in line with Paine’s thinking: 

Q. How shall I evidence to myself that there is a God? 

A. By the works of Creation; for nothing can make itself and this fabrick of nature demonstrates its creator to be possessed of all possible perfection, and for that cause we owe all that we have to him.

Similar parallels apply to the relatively brief formal education of the two writers. At the age of seven, Paine was fortunate to gain a place at Thetford Grammar School, but left when only twelve to serve for the next seven years as an apprentice in his father’s business as a maker of stays. But as a young man, over time, he cultivated the friendship of a number of distinguished men: the Scottish astronomer and instrument maker, James Ferguson, destined to become a Fellow of the Royal Society; the well-known lexicographer and optical instrument maker, Benjamin Martin; the celebrated astronomer and Fellow of the Royal Society, Dr. John Bevis; the writer, Oliver Goldsmith, and crucially the influential Benjamin Franklin, whose support helped Paine to establish himself in America. During his time in London he extended his reading, and met like-minded people who were challenging orthodox theology and the concept of top-down government. He was introduced, as Keane puts it, “to a new culture of political radicalism that rejected throne and altar”, and experienced a long- term conversion to republican democracy.” 

Burns’s first formal education was even shorter, spent between the ages of six and nine in a local school at Alloway Mill, before having to leave to help on his father’s isolated farm at Mount Oliphant. He was, however, fortunate through those years in having a young, inspirational teacher, John Murdoch, who before his departure to Dumfries imparted a thorough grounding in the technicalities of language, with an expectation far wider than was customary for children of such tender years. This, combined with Bums’s voracious and wide-ranging reading, established a literary disposition that would prosper against the grain of physical labour and frugal living on the land. Much credit for that is also due to Bums’s father. Despite the necessity of setting his sons to farming, William Burnes contrived to continue their education at home, conversing with them as adults, and procuring books for them designed both to nurture their faith and spur their imaginations. It was fortunate, too, that in 1772 Murdoch returned to teach at another school in Ayr and was concerned enough to find time to sustain intermittent contact with the Bums brothers in pursuit of their development. Unlike Paine, Bums could not yet add personal acquaintance with leading intellectuals, but he did so at second- hand, gleaning counsel from literature, not least Arthur Masson’s Collection of English Prose and Verse and John Newbury’s anthology of letter-writers of distinguished merit. 

In 1777 the family moved to Lochlea. There, although still committed to hard labour in the fields, Bums was not without friends. As he reached manhood he found particular inspiration among the Masons of Tarbolton, warming to their principles of friendship, benevolence and religious toleration. But the final shaping of Burns’s muse was forged in the depths of adversity. His problems during 1782 to 1784 have been well documented: a business venture that literally disappeared in flames; a breakdown of mind and body; the failing family farm, with the prospect of utter destitution; his father’s legal struggle in the face of a writ of sequestration. Bums’s response, as Crawford puts it, was to write his way out of it. Surrounded by deep recession and gloom across rural Scotland, he fixed upon ideals that would underpin his later poetry: dignity in poverty and admiration for men of independent minds, prepared to reject the lure of wealth and position. In 1783 he began his ‘Commonplace Book’, and gradually his identity as a ploughman gave way to that of a poet and the emergence of his distinctive style and language. By the following year he had come to think that he might be capable of exposing his work to a wider public. And among many strands of his eager imagination were political ideas drawn from his harsh, personal experience that were pointedly radical in their day. 

The legal action against Bums’s father was decided in his favour in January 1784. By then, however, he was exhausted and ill, dying a few weeks later. Throughout the travails of their lives at Lochlea, Bums and his brother had respected their father dearly. But his death and release from debt, allowed a move to Mossgiel, a new beginning, a freer lifestyle and the burgeoning of Robert’s romantic poetry. 

Quite when Paine moved from personal conviction to written advocacy remains unclear. More than once he insisted that he wrote nothing in England, though appearances suggest otherwise. What is certain is that in January 1775, having overcome a serious illness picked up on the voyage to America, he was taken on as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Articles and poems in this new periodical and in William Bradford’s earlier Pennsylvania Journal appeared anonymously or under pseudonyms, but it is generally accepted that Paine was the author of a number of them, including a broadside against slavery, an exposure of cruelty to animals, and a plea for women’s rights. The battle of Lexington in April 1775 stirred him to give vent to increasingly radical views about British tyranny, and to consider the necessity of using force to secure human liberty. In July 1775 he penned a song Liberty Tree, the final verses of which were unequivocal in their call for revolution: 

But hear, 0 ye swains (`tis a tale most profane).

How all the tyrannical pow’rs,

King, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain’

To cut down this guardian of ours;

From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms,

Through the land let the sound of it flee:

Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer,

In defense of our Liberty Tree.

In the Journal of October 1775, Paine (as Humanus) followed this with an article headed A Serious Thought in which he reflected on the barbarities wrought by Britain, particularly the importation of negroes for sale. He declared that he would “hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain”. 

His direct, terse and incisive prose appealed to the common citizen, and found its most positive expression with the publication, in January 1776, of his seminal pamphlet Common Sense. I need not recapitulate the arguments of this famous text, save to notice that its opening pages drew on ingrained tenets of English radicalism, with an insistence on natural rights to liberty and a vision of a new world order. Its impact was, of course, dramatic and a major factor in setting the course in favour of the war of independence. 

Chronologically, Burn’s literary debut came ten years later, with the publication in July 1786 of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (the so-called Kilmarnock edition). Bums was then only 27, some ten years younger than Paine had been at the time of his first Pennsylvania articles. The collection was a chosen, wide-ranging miscellany of 36 poems, verses, songs, odes and dirges, previously written alongside his farming at Mossgiel. One reviewer thought the love poems “execrable”, and most critics regretted that they were written in some measure in “an unknown tongue” which limited their audience to a small circle. But there was general recognition of Bums as “a native genius”. He was seen as the ‘ploughman poet; a phenomenon bursting from the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life”. Yet in all this, only two reviewers briefly mentioned occasional “libertine” tendencies, dismissed as regrettable but excusable in the light of his origins. 

In fact, the edition contained three overtly political poems, written shortly before publication: The Twa Dogs, A Dream, and The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer. Like all the other pieces, they pre-dated Burns’s Excise service, and, according to his Preface, had not been “composed with a view to the press°. Nevertheless, one can perhaps detect a note of caution in Bums’s approach. He commonly made a virtue of his low social standing and used the paradox of a simple bard appealing to a refined audience. 

The Twa Dogs is a gem. Briefly, the dogs are represented as friendly observers of the lives of their keepers: one a local dignitary, the other a ploughman. The poem, masterly crafted, contrasts the pleasure-seeking, self-interest and dissipation of the gentry (leaving aside “some exceptions”) with the destitution and toil faced by the poor, who nevertheless, in their respite from labour, find joy in the simple, frugal, common recreations of rural life: 

A countra fellow at the pleugh,

His acre’s till’d, he’s right enough;

A countra girl at her wheel,

Her dizzen’s done, she’s unco weel;

But gentlemen, an’ ladies warst,

Wi’ ev’n down want o’work are curst

They loiter, lounging, lank an’ lazy;

Though deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy:

Their days insipid, dull an’ tasteless;

Their nights unquiet, lang an restless.

A Dream began with a vindicatory preamble:

Thoughts, words and deeds, the Statute blames with reason; But

surely Dreams were ne’re indicted Treason.

Bums went on to pretend that he had fallen asleep after reading Thomas Warton’s Laureate’s Ode for His Majesty’s Birthday, 4 June 1786, and in his dreaming fancy had imagined his own, alternative address. It was a daring device, for whereas Warton’s ode had lavishly flattered George III, Bums’ satire made it clear that he would do no such thing, but instead addressed the king with mock reverence, feigning loyalty while favouring defection, reminding him of the embarrassment of the loss of the American colonies and the failures of his ministers. He hoped that the King might wring corruption’s neck, and reduce the burden of taxation: levied till ‘old Britain’ was fleeced until she had ‘scarce a tester’ (an old Scots silver coin of small value). A cloak of pretended adulation and a representation of being but a humble poet might not normally have been enough to escape dire retribution, but Bums destiny appears somehow to have been charmed. 

The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer was addressed to the Right Honourable and Honourable Scotch representatives in the House of Commons. Bums again began with mock deference: To you a simple Bardie’s prayers are humbly sent. But thereafter his 25 stanzas and postscript of a further seven were unmistakably critical: an ironic blast against the 45 Scottish members, apparently supine in the face of legislation to increase the duties on whisky:

In gath’rin votes you were na slack;

Now stand as tightly by your tack:

Ne’er claw your lug, an’ fidge your back,

An’ hum and haw;

But raise your arm, an’ tell your crack

Before them a’.

He followed this with a swipe at those whose ranks he would shortly join: 

“damn’d excisemen in a bustle”! 

But his main thrust was aimed at the liaison of Scottish and English members, which he clearly saw as an unholy alliance: 

Yon mixtie-maxtie, queer hotch-potch, The Coalition.

An opinion that, albeit in a different context, has a certain resonance today. 

In 1787, though written in 1784, a further political offering appeared in a second expanded edition of Bums’s poems, published in Edinburgh. This was a ballad conveying his thoughts on the American Revolution. Aware that it might be thought “rather heretical”, he had decided not to publish it in the Kilmarnock edition, but later, with the advice of Lord Glencaim and Henry Erskine, caused it to be included in the new edition. Whereas Paine, in 1776, had fomented the war of independence, and throughout had continued to support it in eight issues of The Crisis (the last in April 1783), Bums now reflected, after its conclusion, on the tide of events. Though the facts were no doubt gleaned from other sources, it remains a brilliant and witty summary of the hapless record of Britain’s generals and politicians, remarkable for having been constructed alongside the drudgery of Bums’s ordinary occupation. 

For some years Bums added almost nothing to his political output. To make ends meet, he joined the Excise service as a common gauger, receiving his commission in 1788 and starting work in September 1789. Like myself, a condition of appointment required a pledge of allegiance to the monarch. While his poetic output was undiminished, he was now on the whole careful either to avoid contentious political issues or to try to ensure that controversial material did not appear over his name. 

Not so Paine, who was in Paris during the winter of 1789-90, seeing for himself and documenting the beginnings of the popular revolution. In January 1790 he wrote enthusiastically to his friend Edmund Burke, intimating that the French Revolution was “certainly a forerunner to other revolutions in Europe”. The reaction from Burke, a supporter of the American Revolution, was unexpected. We now know that he had already been mightily disturbed by Dr Richard Price’s address A Discourse of the Love of Our Country, given at the London Revolution Society on 4 November 1789. Rather than welcoming the new revolutionary movement, Burke denounced it in his vitriolic Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on 1 November1790. This drew from Paine his famous response, Rights of Man, published in two parts, brought together in February 1792, drawing inspiration from France and making the case for the government of the people. Despite huge sales (in Britain alone, 200,000 by 1793), public opinion was divided. Those who ached for reform saw the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens as a most desirable model for Britain; many had found in the American Revolution a prospect for change, and in the French uprising a hope that a new politics might flourish in Europe. Whereas Burke, along with the government and entrenched conservative opinion, viewed the events across the Channel with alarm, dreading the possibility of civil resistance and copycat disturbances; the more so as violence and vengeance escalated in Paris. In May 1792 George III issued a Royal Proclamation against sedition, subversion and riot. In September, Paine, indicted to stand trial on a charge of promulgating seditious libel, and under constant harassment, escaped to France. He was, of course, later tried in his absence, found guilty, and vilified by the ruling establishment. 

Burns was undoubtedly aware of the furore created by Paine’s pamphlet, and sympathetic to the reformist view; but also acutely conscious that as a government officer, needing the salary that went with the job, he must not parade his sentiments. He was careful to require that his poems should bear his name only with his agreement. However, on 30 October 1792 this show of neutrality was severely tested. In the newly opened Theatre Royal at Dumfries, with friends, he was in the pit for a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, also attended by some of Scotland’s elite. When at the end of the play God Save the King was called for, there were shouts from the pit for ca ira, the song of the French revolutionaries. Scuffles accompanied the singing of the national anthem, through all of which Exciseman Burns remained in his seat. 

There could be no real doubt as to where Bums’s heart lay. Four weeks later he wrote to Louise Fontenelle, a touring London actress he admired, offering her an ‘occasional address’ to use on her benefit night on 26 November. The Rights of Woman, published anonymously in The Edinburgh Gazetter on 30 November, all too obviously echoed that of Paine’s notorious, inspirational text. Harmlessly, Burns extolled female rights as those of protection, decorum and admiration; far more interesting, however, are the lines with which he topped and tailed his thoughts:

While Europe’s eye is ftx’d on mighty things,

The fate of empires and the fall of kings;

While quacks of State must each produce his plan,

And even children lisp the Rights of Man;

Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,

The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

When awful Beauty joins with all her charms,

Who is so rash as rise in rebel arms?

But truce with kings, and truce with constitutions,

With bloody armaments and revolutions,

Let Majesty your first attention summon:

Ah! Ca ira! The Majesty of Woman!

As the year drew to its close, and Burns became more confident of what he believed to be the impending triumph of the British reform movement, he was quite unable to restrain his feelings, giving vent to a ballad, Here’s a Health to Them That’s Awa. This unreservedly raised a series of toasts to reformers over the border. Its message was undisguised:

May Liberty meet wi’ success’

May Prudence protect her frae evil!

May tyrants and Tyranny tine i’ the mist

And wander their way to the Devil!

Here’s freedom to them that wad read,

Here’s freedom to them that would write!

There’s nane ever fear’d that the truth should be heard

But they whom the truth would indite!

And wha wad betray old Albion’s right,

May they never eat of her bread!

Sadly, Burns’s optimism was misplaced. Doubts about his loyalty had been brought to the notice of the Excise Commissioners, who promptly launched an inquiry. Learning of the Board’s misgivings, and fearful of the consequences, Burns wrote on 31 December 1792 to one of the Excise commissioners, Robert Graham of Fintry, to assure him that any such allegation was unfounded, in that he was devoutly attached to the British Constitution “on Revolution principles [i.e the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’], next after his God”. Remarkably, Graham promptly responded on 5 January to reassure Bums that his job was safe. And, by return, Bums then replied to the specific allegations, admitting that he had at first been an `senthusiastic votary” of the French Revolution, but had altered his sentiments when France came to show her old avidity for conquest. Some writers have judged that the tone of Bums’ letters was contrite, even abject; that effectively he renunciated his reformist stance. This is certainly the feeling they convey on first reading; but Mcllvanney makes a convincing case that on closer analysis there was no apostasy and no apology. 

Yet the detail of all this is perhaps beside the point: it seems obvious that what kept Bums in his job was his high artistic reputation and good standing, based on the fame his poetry, then as now largely focused on its sentimental, urbane and apolitical content. He was fortunate to have a number of friends and supporters in high places, not least Graham; a relationship that may fairly be judged from a ballad of 1790, which opens with the lines: 

Fintry, my stay in worldly strife, 

Friend o’ my Muse, friend o’ my life, 

The brush with authority has attracted microscopic attention, and certainly made Bums anxious for his future. But it must also be seen in the context of explicit violent agitation in France, where, exactly at this time, Paine was in Paris, passionately — but unsuccessfully – seeking to convince his fellow deputies of the National Convention that Louis XVI should be spared the guillotine. 

The Excise inquiry reminded Bums of the dangerous ground of radical poetry. Indeed, with the execution of Louis on the 21 January 1793 and the French declaration of war on Britain on 1 February, the reform movement as a whole was forced to wake up to the perils of open defiance. For the time being the State’s policy was one of such severe repression as to drive radical opposition into hiding. But at the time of the dramatic Scottish sedition trials of August 1793, Bums could no longer contain his feelings. He ventured three poems, based on the legendary heroics of Robert Bruce, all of which carried parallels, for those who could see them, to the then contemporary challenges to Scottish liberty; as Mcllvanney puts it “the tendency to view one struggle for liberty through the optic of another.” The most famous of the three, sent to trusted friends and published anonymously in The Morning Chronicle on 8 May 1794, is Scots Wha Hae, with its stark call to resist “chains and slavery° Unambiguously, through the words of Bruce, it brings the challenge into Burns’ own time – “Now’s the day, and now’s the hour”- and ends with the appeal from the lips of Bruce: 

Lay the proud usurpers lowl 

Tyrants fall in every foe! 

Liberty’s in every blow! 

Let us do, or die! 

Bums followed this up with an Ode for George Washington’s Birthday, comparing the liberty achieved in America with the political suppression imposed from London. Although he could not then openly publicise his views, this clarion call now reveals the strength of his true feelings: 

But come, ye sons of Liberty, 

Columbia’s offspring, brave as free, 

In danger’s hour still flaming in the van, 

Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man! 

Here Bums is no longer the humble bard; there can be no mistaking the contemporary relevance of his historical allusions. 

By this time, Paine had written the first part of his passionate but controversial essay The Age of Reason: being an investigation of true and fabulous theology. The astonishing story of how he took up the subject while fearing for his life is too well known to need repetition; indeed the prefaces to the first and second parts of the eventual book, separated by his incarceration in the Luxembourg prison, largely describe the perilous circumstances that attended its completion and survival. The French Revolution had turned sour. The libertarian principles that had marked its beginning had given way to bloody retribution. Paine, whose name was on the death list, had for many years intended to express his opinions on religion, and felt that he now had no time to lose. Part one appeared during February 1794, and part two, expanding his first thoughts, came out in October 1795. Together they presented the reader with a double paradox: firstly, the essays unequivocally repudiated belief in the Bible as the authentic ‘Word of God’, but by no means repudiated God; secondly, though despising the purveyors and apparatus of organised religion, there was also a recognition that the eradication of Christianity in favour of a revolutionary dogma of equality and liberty could lead the French state towards atheism. As Paine explained at the beginning of his first essay: 

The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true. 

As usual, Paine wrote with clarity and raw honesty, appealing to reason. He saw the Old Testament as “a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales”, and the so-called ‘New’ Testament as being of doubtful provenance, lacking authenticity, heaping hearsay upon hearsay, and replete with irrational, fabulous inventions and contradictions. While not doubting the existence of Jesus Christ, he regarded him as merely “a virtuous and an amiable man”. On a questionable base of “wild and visionary doctrine”, the church had “set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears…a religion of pomp and revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.” Nor was this type of construction limited to Christianity. Every national church or religion “had established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals”, each with books which they call ‘revelation’, or the word of God. 

Paine’s own belief was simpler. He believed “in one God, and no more” and hoped for happiness beyond this life. He expressed belief in the equality of man, and argued that religious duties consisted of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. He saw God as the compassionate creator, evidenced by creation, whose choicest gift was the gift of reason. In the first part of the essay there is a particularly interesting passage: 

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. 

Paine’s polemic excited huge interest, reinforcing those of a radical persuasion, but surely making more enemies than friends. Crucially, in Britain, those in gilded positions in the liaison of established church and state chose to see it only as an assault on cherished beliefs and values, a threat to good order and their own positions. Some, who cannot have read the essays, dubbed Paine an atheist. This he emphatically was not, but he undoubtedly provided his opponents with ammunition to confirm in their eyes his reputation as a disreputable trouble-maker. 

Those who had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of a new age clung tenaciously to its original thinking in pursuit of liberty. In 1795, Bums, though still employed in the Excise (acting- up as supervisor at Dumfries), and having felt duty-bound to enlist in the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, nevertheless contrived to write his most celebrated political song. Popularly known as A Man’s a Man for a’ that, it first appeared anonymously in the Glasgow Magazine of August 1795. James Barke, in his edition of Bums’ poems and songs, has aptly described it as “the Marseillaise of humanity”. Disparaging the ‘tinsel show” of rank and title, Bums extols the merits of the honest man of independent mind. As others have noticed, the short verses echo the sentiments of Paine’s Rights of Man, while Marilyn Butler has pointed out that the closing lines closely follow the letter and spirit of the revolutionary song ca Ira!: 

Then let us pray that come it may 

(As come it will for a’ that) 

That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth 

Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that! 

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, It’s comin yet for a’ that, 

That man to man the world o’er 

Shall brothers be for a’ that 

Paine struggled on until 1809, adding a number of less well-known studies to his archive, and at the last declining an attempt to have him accept Christ as the Son of God. Bums, like Paine, never surrendered his belief in a benevolent God. He died in 1796, still impoverished but a radical exciseman to the last. There is nothing to suggest that the two men ever met, but there may yet be one unremarked final parallel. Another version of The Liberty Tree, although never quite proved to be the work of Bums, bears the hallmarks of his style. Here then, to close, are the last two verses of eleven:

Wi’ plenty o’ sic trees, I trow

The wand would live in peace, man.

The sword would help to mak’ a plough,

The din o’ war wad cease, man,

Like brethren in a common cause,

We’d on each other smile, man:

And equal rights and equal laws

Wad gladden every isle, man.

Wae worth the loon wha wadna eat

Sic halesome, dainty cheer, man!

I’d gie the shoon frae aff my feet

To taste the fruit o’t here, man!

Syne let us pray, Auld England may

Sure plant this far-famed tree, man:

And blythe we’ll sing, and herald the day

That gives us liberty, man.

Sources:

• James Barke (ed.): Poems and Songs of Robert Bums (Collins, 1960)
• James A Mackay: A Biography of Robert Burns (Mainstream, 1992)
• Robert Crawford: The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography (Pimlico, 2009)
• Liam Mcllvanney: Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Tuckwell Press, 2002)
• And, of course, the works of Paine and Burns referred to in the text.

The post Burns And Paine  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Dr Richard Price was a man of many parts: preacher, moral philosopher, commentator on actuarial and public finance, and ardent campaigner for civil liberties. This essay focuses, for the most part, on his latter activities. 

One of the most influential radical thinkers of his day, though now little known beyond dedicated historians and scarcely quoted, he was a dissenting (non conformist) minister, the son of a dissenting minister, yet thoroughly traditional in his core beliefs in the omnipotence of God, the power of prayer and the rewards of heaven. Brought up and educated in the dissenting tradition, he cut no imposing figure, yet eventually attracted both a worshipful following as well as a coterie of powerful detractors. 

He was dissenting, of course, as a Protestant refusing to accept the practice of the established Church of England, and therefore restricted under the harsh laws introduced after the collapse of the Puritan Revolution. The Toleration Act of 1689 provided some easement, but this had excluded Roman Catholics and Unitarians (a word that first appeared in Britain in 1673). Nevertheless, after 1774, Price followed Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey in avowing a revealed Unitarian theology based on reason and the enlightened conscience. Typically, beliefs were not precisely prescribed, but the emerging Unitarians rejected the doctrine of the Trinity (looking at God as One as distinct from Father, Son and Holy Spirit), the idea of original sin and the threat of eternal punishment (yet fell short of a rational rejection of theism). They held Jesus Christ in the highest regard, but as a mortal man, not an incarnate deity. 

Newington Green 

Unsurprisingly, some of those of this dissenting persuasion extended their nonconformity into areas of political criticism, with a zeal for social reform. Price was a remarkable example. Born in 1723, and ordained at the age of 21, he spent the first twelve years of his ministry as chaplain to the Streatfield family of London’s Stoke Newington, as well as assisting at the Old Jewry Presbyterian Chapel, before moving, with his new Anglican wife Sarah, to the village of Newington Green as minister of its nonconformist church in 1758. The house where they lived, 54 Newington Green, part of a surviving historic terrace, was next door to the banker Thomas Rogers and therefore, from 1763, to a baby, Samuel Rogers, destined to become one of England’s leading poets. The area was already established as a centre of non-conformity, home to many well-heeled dissenting families. During the next 30 years no.54 was to extend a welcome to a wide assortment of celebrities, including his close friends Benjamin Franklin, James Burgh (who kept a dissenting academy on Newington Green) and Priestley, along with occasional visitors such as David Hume and Adam Smith, John Howard, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Home Tooke, Lord Lyttleton, and Earl Stanhope. Allardyce (see sources) describes it as “an important meeting place for the progressive and radical thinkers of the day”. 

By all accounts Price was not at first a great preacher. Cone (see sources) tells us that “his weak, unpleasant voice accentuated his other shortcomings as a speaker”, but that he later gained success “out of the thoughtful content of his sermons, the quiet earnestness of his demeanour, and his sincerity and humility”. These were virtues that were also effective in his writings. At least until his final address he was no firebrand; persuasive rather than dogmatic; indeed it was the mildness of his approach and his scholarly, measured discourse which earned respect from his friends and did much to confound those who opposed his views. His first important work was published in 1758 with a forbidding title which I will shorten to A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals. He had perfected this over many years, emphatic that morality should not be divorced from religion. Nature was evidence of God’s power and he believed that inconsistencies in such evidence were merely attributable to our inability to comprehend God’s design. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of a text running to nearly 500 pages, but it is relevant to bring out his insistence that intelligence is one of the requisites of practical morality, “necessary to the perception of moral good and evil”. And that liberty is essential to intelligent morality: “A thinking, designing, reasoning being, without liberty, without any inward, spontaneous, active, self-directing principle” cannot be conceived (pp 305-6). Thus, he argued, liberty and reason constitute the capacity of virtue. 

A call to civil liberty 

This passionate advocacy of personal freedom lay at the heart of Price’s thinking and found its most positive expression in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, published in February 1776 (compare Burgh’s Political Disquisitions (1774)). Here he sets out his concept of liberty as the principle of self-direction or self-government, in contrast to the external conquest of will and private judgement: the difference between freedom and slavery. “To be free,” wrote Price, “is to be guided by one’s own will, and to be guided by the will of another is the characteristic of servitude.” Liberty could be physical, moral or religious, but in relation to civil liberty, it was necessary for governance to be seen as “the creature of the people”, originating with them and conducted under their direction, with a single-minded view to their happiness. Thus taxes must be freely given for public services and laws established by common consent; magistrates being merely trustees or deputies for carrying regulations into execution. Price recognised that not everyone could express their views on public measures individually or personally, but they could delegate authority through the appointment of substitutes or representatives. In doing so, he stressed the importance of a rule that people given the trust of government should hold office only for short terms, chosen by the majority of the state and subject to their instructions. 

Inevitably, he noticed, the interests of states would clash, but it would be no solution to make one of them supreme over the rest. His solution has a familiar ring: “Let every state, with respect to all its internal concerns, be continued independent of all the rest, and let a general confederacy be formed by the appointment of a senate consisting of representatives from all the different states.” 

The antithesis of civil liberty, Price contended, was the doctrine that there are certain men who possess in themselves, independently of the will of the people, a God-given right of governing them. Such a view represented mankind as a body of vassals: “to be obliged, from our birth, to look up to a creature no better than ourselves as the master of our fortunes, and to receive his will as our law — what can be more humiliating? …There is nothing that requires to be watched more than power. There is nothing that ought to be opposed with a more determined resolution than its encroachment… should any events ever arise that should render the same opposition necessary that took place in the times of King Charles the first, and James the second, I am afraid that all that is valuable to us would be lost. The terror of the standing army, the danger of the public funds, and the all- corrupting influence of the treasury, would deaden ail zeal and produce general acquiescence and servility.” 

The case for American independence 

It is irresistible not to see the first part of the pamphlet as a prelude — a setting of the scene — for the slightly better-known Part Two, devoted to Price’s observations on the justice and policy of the war with America. He was overtly sympathetic to the cause of the American colonies, in which he had taken a close interest for some years, not least as a consequence of his friendship with Franklin. Stanley Weintraub (see sources) notices that in January 1774, Price, Edmund Burke and Joseph Priestley were among those in the gallery of the Whitehall Palace Cockpit when the 68- year-old Franklin was called to the Privy Council to answer a claim that he had “publicly exposed” private letters from the royal governor of Massachusetts that somewhat exposed the realities of British foreign policy. These, said to have been sent by Franklin in confidence to an old friend in Boston, had subsequently been leaked to the Boston Gazette. Though subjected to a long and vitriolic assault, Franklin made no concession, but was eventually stripped of his representative office and obliged to return to America. The humiliation merely served to raise Franklin’s reputation in his home country and to reinforce a divide that was on its way to becoming irreconcilable. 

Both Price and Franklin had been members of the ‘Honest Whigs Club’ from at least 1769, along with James Boswell, dissenting clergymen Joseph Priestley and Andrew Kippis, James Burgh, botanist Peter Collinson, and Sir John Pringle (from 1772-78 president of the Royal Society – to which Price had himself been elected in 1765). The club met in a coffee-house on alternate Thursdays, and whilst we cannot now be privy to their discussions it seems clear that for some of them radical political reform was high on the agenda. They must have fed off each other, for obvious similarities are evident in the writings of Franklin, Burgh, Priestley and Price. 

Up to mid-1775, despite military activities, the grain of popular sentiment in America and the perceived colonial objective had generally been one of reconciliation. There was trust in George III and a belief that the British parliament would see sense and be persuaded to restore American rights within an amicable union. Indeed there was a view, especially in the so-called Continental Congress, that independence would not only be disloyal but might lead to mob rule and the loss of relatively safe trading routes. Such faith in the monarchy was, however, soon to be dispelled by a series of repressive royal measures and pronouncements which clearly demonstrated that the king was leading rather than being overruled by parliament, and was deaf to colonial supplications for conciliation and reform. Price had by this time been increasingly drawn into the political arena, both in his campaigning against the continuing intrusion upon the rights of Protestant dissenters and his empathy with the colonial rebellion. His contacts in London and letters from America kept him in touch with the tide of events across the Atlantic and elicited his unequivocal support for the rebels and their cause. There had been little appetite for war among the general populace in Britain, and several prominent people had warned of the futility of attempting to subdue the aspirations of these distant and disparate colonies by military force. But the king and his establishment were fixed on a collision course of crushing the rebellion, maintaining control, order, obedience and the sovereignty of parliament: effectively domination. Towards the end of 1775, Price determined to enunciate his thinking. When his Observations were published on 9 February 1776, six years had elapsed since the Boston ‘massacre’, all but nine months since the attack at Lexington and, crucially, more than a month after the sensational appearance of Paine’s Common Sense (some three months if one takes account of the time needed for Price’s pamphlet to reach America). It is now apparent to us that, although Price’s text reinforced the bid for independence and was welcomed, the American Congress was already moving to a separation from Britain: the die was already cast and the rift beyond reconciliation. 

Yet Price’s work contains some imperishable principles which have since been tested by history and deserve our closer attention. Typically, he began with a barbed olive branch, ready to make great allowances for the different judgments of others, rhetorically conceding that his words would not have any effect on those who still thought that British claims could be reconciled to the principles of true liberty and legitimate government. He recognised that the idea of America as a subordinate British colony was deeply ingrained, but argued that this was open to a change of heart when the idea of colonists being British subjects, bound by British laws, was seen to be unreasonable when tried against the principles of civil liberty. 

He pointed out that, although novel, the fact that the colonised state was on its way to becoming superior to its parent state was something that should be considered on the ground of reason and justice, rather than the old rules of narrow and partial policy. Alas, however, he saw that matters had already gone too far and that conflict (“the sword”) was now to determine the rights of Britain and America. But he thought it was not too late to retreat; to rely on the king’s disposition to “stay the sword”. 

First, one should consider the justice of the war. This rested upon an act of parliament giving Britain the power and the right to “make laws and statutes to bind the colonies and the people of America, in all cases whatever”. A dreadful power indeed, commented Price: “I defy anyone to express slavery in stronger language.” It amounted to saying that we had a right to do with them what we please. 

Price rejected the argument that there needed to be a supreme right to interfere in the internal legislations of the colonies, “in order to preserve the unity of the British Empire”. He pointed out that similar pleas had, in all ages, been used to justify tyranny, citing the example of the Pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church. Such an approach could produce “nothing but discord and mischief’. 

Nor could it be claimed that Britain was the superior state as the parent state. Parents do indeed have authority over their children, but only until they become independent and capable of judging for themselves. Thereafter only respect and influence is due to the parent. By this measure our authority in relation to the colonies should have been relaxed as they “grew up”, whereas we had taken our authority “to the greatest extent, and exercised it with the greatest rigour… No wonder then, that they had turned upon us.” The land was not ours simply because we had first settled there; if anyone could lay such a claim it was first with the natives, and then only with the settlers who cleared and cultivated the wilderness. Had they not, he asked, then established a system of governance similar to our own, with our agreement, for more than a century? Was it any wonder that they should revolt when they found their charters violated, and an attempt made to force innovations upon them by famine and the sword?” 

But aside from charters, Price continued, was it common sense to imagine that when people settle in a distant country those they have left behind should for ever be able to control their property and have the power to subject them to any modes of government they please? To be taxed and ruled by a parliament that does not represent them? And ought we to be angry because the colonies looked for a better constitution and more liberty than that enjoyed in Britain? Rather should it not be wished that there may be at least one free country left on earth to which we might flee when venality, luxury and vice had completed the ruin of liberty here? Imposing taxes without representation, Price suggested, was simply another form of despotism. 

Price then turned to the future, with, we can now judge, top marks for foresight. If, he speculated, it was argued that Britain had a supremacy entitling its government to exercise jurisdiction over taxation and internal legislation, should we then be equally entitled in perpetuity? In 1775 the colonists numbered a little short of half the British population, but the probability was that in another 50 or 60 years they would double our numbers, forming a mighty empire, consisting of a variety of states with the same or greater accomplishments and arts “that give dignity and happiness to human life”. Would they then have to continue to acknowledge Britain’s claim to supremacy, even should our legislature degenerate into a body of sycophants, little more than a public court for registering royal edicts? 

These were powerful arguments in favour of self-determination for the American colonies, reinforced by a scarcely concealed scepticism about our own governance and its future. Price went on to discuss specific aspects of the war with America: whether it was justified by the principles of the British constitution, its policy implications, its effect on the honour of the nation and the probability of its success. In its belief that discontent could be quelled by a resort to force of arms, he argued, the government had massively over-reacted, provoking a shift away from a natural disposition to accept British authority and co-operate in trade to a general exasperation and spirit of revolt. 

Divergent reactions 

In Britain, Price’s Observations prompted considerable interest: predictably divided between liberals who generally shared his views and conservative opponents who quickly published a number of angry rebuttals; not least one from John Wesley, who saw Price’s work as “a dangerous Tract…which, if practised, would overturn all government, and bring in universal anarchy.” But apart from concern raised by his close analysis of the likely financial consequences of war, Price’s text had little effect; none at all on Britain’s belligerent foreign policy. There were some fears for Price’s safety, but in fact no punitive action was taken against him. Ambrose Serie, the secretary to the British Admiral Lord Richard Howe, saw it as evidence of the mildest & most relaxed Government in the World”. In any other state than Great Britain, he argued, the book would have been burned and the author hanged. 

In America, unsurprisingly, Price’s text was well received and added to the author’s already glowing reputation. But whereas Paine’s Common Sense made a forceful and unambiguous case for independence and transformed colonial opinion, I think that the response to Price was no more than thoughtful. I think that anyone who reads Price’s full text, as against my considerable simplification (indeed over simplification) cannot fail to be struck by the contrast between Paine’s plain speaking and concise, straightforward and inspirational prose and Price’s lengthy perambulations. This distinction, I believe, similarly accounts for Price’s relatively low-key historical reputation. This is unfortunate, because the essence of Price’s text is not dissimilar from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, adopted only five months after the publication of Observations. Price’s thinking went to the heart of the values on civil liberty that we now share with the United States. Sagely, Cone titled his biography of Price Torchbearer of Freedom. 

The Declaration itself, written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, further fermented the spirit of rebellion, particularly against the obdurate George III. After its famous opening statement of principle it enumerated the history of the king as one of “repeated Injuries and Usurpations”, all directed to the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the states of the Union, and concluded with a declaration that the united colonies were free and independent states absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown. Readings of the text were organised in various parts of the colonies, prompting demonstrations hostile to the British and its monarch, the most famous of which took place in the evening of 9 July 1776 in New York. When the reading was over, a crowd marched to the Bowling Green, the location of William Wilton’s splendid representation of a mounted George Ill. In a great symbolic gesture, the rebels pulled horse and monarch down from its plinth, an event which now inevitably draws comparison with the fate of Sadam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. In the case of the unfortunate image of George, the insult was intensified when the statue was later melted down and made into musket balls: apart, that it, from its head, which was mounted on a pole and exhibited for a time outside Fort Washington. 

Meanwhile, Price’s pamphlets continued to make waves at home. In the face of heavy criticism he went on to produce Additional Observations in 1777, and to republish a combination of both texts in 1778, attracting still more abuse. In America, by contrast, his popularity continued to grow. On 6 October in the same year, as a mark of the esteem in which he was held in America, Congress wrote to express its desire to consider him a citizen of the United States and to solicit his help in regulating their finances. He could be remunerated both for the move there and his services. But Price, no longer eager or feeling himself sufficiently fit for any such challenge, while gratified, graciously declined. Cone records that in his reply he looked to the United States as “the hope, and likely soon to become the refuge of mankind”. In 1781 Yale University honoured Price as a Doctor of Law, and in the following year the American Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him a fellowship. 

Nor was this the only political offer. Lord Shelburne, an old friend, keenly aware of Price’s financial expertise and concern for the national debt, had sought to tempt him away from his theological pursuits. When appointed Prime Minister in July 1782, on the death of Rockingham, he promptly asked Price to assist him. Once again, content in the radical milieu of Newington Green and preaching to a full chapel, Price declined, feigning that he did not have much to contribute. As it turned out, the opportunity would have been short-lived. Shelburne resigned in February 1873, after defeats in the Commons. 

Strategies for a blessed peace 

The end of the American war brought Price back into the political scene. He was able to correspond more freely with his friends in the new world, and soon started work on a pamphlet which reached the United States in 1784: Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the means of making it a benefit to the world. Though his advice was unsolicited, it was warmly welcomed by Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and other friends, thankfully received by members of Congress (and by George Washington personally), and widely read and admired. He enjoyed a status as a champion of America and in January 1785 was elected into membership of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. 

In these Observations, Price suggested that the American Revolution, next to the introduction of Christianity, might prove to be the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement: a casting off of the shackles of superstition and tyranny. At the end of the pamphlet he conceded that he may have carried his ideas too high and deceived himself with visionary expectations. But there are those who find parallels in Price’s Observations and the American Constitution of 1788, and a close reading of his remarkable text will certainly reveal some surprising and timeless principles. 

Of particular interest are his thoughts on the “supreme importance” of religious and civil liberty, based on truth and reason. He looked for constitutional developments that would make government even friendlier to liberty, as a means of promoting human happiness and dignity; specifically liberty of discussion in all speculative matters and liberty of conscience in all religious matters, subject to restraint only if used to injure anyone in their person, property or good name. In the exercise of liberty of discussion Price included “the liberty of examining all public measures and the conduct of all public men; and of writing and publishing on all speculative and doctrinal points”. 

Here Price faced a difficulty, for he was aware of a common opinion (then as now) that some matters were so sacred, and others of so bad a tendency, that no public discussion of them ought to be allowed, and that those in authority should penalise any such discussion. Those, for example, who opposed the Muslim view of the divine mission of Mohamed, the Popish view of worship of the Virgin Mary, or the traditional Protestant view of doctrines of the Trinity or the supreme divinity of Christ. But, argued Price, civil power had nothing to do with such matters, and was not equipped to judge their truth. Would not, he asked, perfect neutrality be the greatest blessing? Different sects were continually exclaiming against one another’s opinion as dangerous and licentious. Even Christianity, at first, was so accused in that it ran counter to pagan idolatry; and the Christian religion was therefore reckoned “a destructive and pernicious enthusiasm”. Were this kind of judgment the rule there would be no doctrine, however true or important, the avowal of which would not in some country or other be subjected to civil penalties. 

Price next turned to liberty of conscience: freedom of religious belief and practice. Here he was on his home territory, and expounded — at length — on the virtues of true religion and their perversion when civil authority was involved. This, essentially, was a statement of the Unitarian position: a blast against slavish adherence to “obsolete creeds and absurdities”, imposing boundaries on human investigations and confining the exercise of reason. In some European countries, wrote Price, these dogmas and rituals had been recognised and acknowledged, but had become so entrenched by the state apparatus that it was scarcely possible to get rid of them. In his own country the growth of enlightenment had had no effect on the religious establishment: “not a ray of the increasing light had penetrated it”. Price believed that there were lessons here for America, where constitutional examples — while not perfect — encouraged him to think it might be possible that pernicious civil forms of gloomy and cruel superstitious religion might be avoided. 

Price’s thoughts on education were similarly challenging. He believed that its purpose should be to teach how to think, rather that what to think. He particularly regretted that people of different faiths, convinced that they alone had discovered the truth, should be confident advocates of education; whereas the “very different and inconsistent accounts that they gave” demonstrated that they were utter strangers to the truth. It would be better to teach nothing, he suggested, than to teach what they held out as truth. 

The greater their confidence, the greater the reason to distrust them: “We generally see the warmest zeal where the object of it is the greatest nonsense.” Thus, in Price’s view, education ought to be an initiation into candour, rather than into any systems of faith. Hitherto, education had been dominated by adherence to established and narrow [formulaic] plans, whereas Price contended that the mind should be rendered free and unfettered, quick in discerning evidence, and prepared to follow it from whatever quarter and in whatever manner it might offer itself. 

There were other snares and dangers facing the emerging nation. Price ranged briefly over the need for a just settlement of federal union and the avoidance of internal conflict. He warned of the danger of disputes being settled at “the points of bayonets and the mouths of cannon”, instead of relying on the collective wisdom of confederation. He stressed — as he had begun – the perils associated with excessive public debt, and the importance of preventing too great an inequality in the distribution of property. He saw equality in society as essential to liberty and, in this regard, urged that America would do well to avoid the British enthusiasm for hereditary honours and titles of nobility. Let there be honours to encourage merit, he proposed, but let them die with those who had earned them rather than bequeath to posterity a proud and tyrannical aristocracy. America would be better off without lords, bishops and kings, and certainly without the rule of primogeniture. 

Price similarly inveighed against excessive love of one’s own country, widely applauded as one of the noblest principles of human nature, but in fact one of its most destructive forces. He commended instead the benefits of communication across nations, whence people could see themselves as citizens of the world rather than of a particular state. 

But Price saved his most fervent — and controversial — proposition to a final section headed ‘Of the negro trade and slavery’. He was not the first writer to point out that slavery was completely at odds with principles of equality. Benjamin Rush had castigated slavery as a national crime, and early in 1775 Thomas Paine had made a spirited attack against the trade in The Pennsylvania Journal. Price himself cited Thomas Day’s tract Fragment of an original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes, written in 1776, but not published until 1784. Keane (see sources) refers to there having been around half a million slaves working in the 13 colonies during the Revolution. The system of forced labour was well established and widely seen as legitimate. Price would have none of this. The trade was one that ‘cannot be censured in language too severe”; a traffic “shocking to humanity, cruel, wicked and diabolical”. Until measures were introduced to abolish this odious servitude, the United States would not deserve the liberty for which they had fought. Three years later a certain William Wilberforce would be drawn into the abolitionist cause. 

A female protege 

In the year marked by the publication of his observations on the American Revolution, an accident of fate introduced a completely different interest into Price’s day job at Newington Green. A young woman, destined famously to assert the rights of women, took a lease on a large house within sight of the church. Mary Wollstonecraft, aged 25, had chanced upon an unexpected inspiration. It is not for this article to set out the complex circumstances that brought Mary, her dearest friend Fanny Blood and her sister Eliza to this part of London; suffice it to say that, led by Mary but lacking adequate resources, each of them was seeking to break out from miserable situations and equally breaking with convention. They remained for a relatively brief period that was in many respects an unhappy one, marked by an unending struggle to make ends meet, the death of Fanny, and the ultimate impracticability of making a success of the school. But it was also a precious time that brought Mary into contact with Price and his circle. Although an Anglican, Mary was also drawn to attend the dissenting church, and was invigorated to experience the support and stimulation of good people whose religion was based on reason rather than a belief in supernatural events. Here, among an assembly of intellectual radicals steeped in a tradition that went back to Defoe, she was exposed for the first time to radical ideas, to the quest for change, seen as a realistic possibility. Here she was introduced to Joseph Priestley and taken to Islington to meet Samuel Johnson (though she preferred the thinking of Price) and, through Price, met her future publisher Joseph Johnson. And she also met women who could hold their own. The dissident aspiration for social reform took Mary in a particular direction in keeping with her personal experience, as a female, of blatant discrimination. We may conjecture that it influenced her in writing her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which earned her a much needed advance from Joseph Johnson. Her school survived only until the autumn of 1786, when she moved to Ireland, but her experience at Newington left an indelible impression. Tomalin (see sources) refers to a letter from Mary in which she mentioned the particular friendliness of Dr. Price. Though his wife was dying (Sarah passed away on 20 September 1786 after a long illness), he still had time to think of Mary’s welfare. Tomalin comments that Mary learnt a great deal from Price; although she was never tempted to exchange her “easy-going” Anglicanism for his dissenting faith, he “set her on certain paths and prepared her to think critically about society”. 

Inspired by revolution 

The loss of Sarah, advancing age and declining health bore down on Price. He relocated to Hackney and, though continuing to preach, was mindful of retirement. Events, however, were moving in the opposite direction. It is hard to say quite when discontent in France could fairly be called a revolution, but by 1789 the social upheaval there was recognised as a powerful movement that could easily spread abroad; in Britain bringing hope to radicals aching for reform and fear to those attached to the old social order. Price, despite his tribulations, was drawn into the fray. As a leading member of the London Revolution Society, the agitation in Paris excited him and other radical protagonists to think that what had been achieved in America might be transplanted into Europe and give power to the people. The Society had been formed in 1788 to commemorate the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, but inevitably interest was now centred more on the revolution in France. On 4 November 1789 (the anniversary of the birthday of William of Orange), at the annual meeting of the Society held in the Dissenters’ meeting house in Old Jewry, Price delivered a daring sermon, quickly published as A Discourse of the Love of Our Country (with various appendages). This, of course, was an opportunity to return to some of his most precious themes and stand conventional thinking on its head. 

‘Country’ he said, was not to be thought of as the soil or spot of earth on which we happened to be born, but rather the community of which we were members. Nor should we see our country or its laws and governance as superior to other countries; nor confine wisdom and virtue to the circle of our own acquaintance and party. Indeed, we should see ourselves as citizens of the world guided by the blessings of truth [enlightenment], virtue and liberty, embracing under God universal benevolence, and loving our neighbours as ourselves. An enlightened and virtuous community must also be a free country; one that did not suffer invasions of its rights, or bend to tyrants. Obedience to just laws was essential to prevent a state of anarchy, but there were extremes of compliance that ought to be avoided: adulation was always odious and, when offered to men in power, served to corrupt them. Price deplored servility, and castigated the crawling homage that had greeted George ill’s recovery from illness. He would have chosen to wish that the king would henceforth more properly consider himself the servant than the sovereign of his people. 

He asked his congregation not to forget the principles of the 1688 revolution, which the Society had held out as “an instruction to the public”, notably: 

• the right to liberty of conscience in religious matters,
• the right to resist power when abused, and
• the right to choose our own governors; to cashier them for
• misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves.

Price rejoiced that the ‘Glorious Revolution’, which had got rid of James II, had broken the fetters of despotism and saved Britain from the “infamy and misery” of popery and slavery. Yet, he was eager to point out that those events had fallen short of delivering perfect liberty. He lamented in particular continued civil restrictions on dissenters and the gross and palpable inequality of parliamentary representation. (in a footnote added to the version published in 1790 he defined this as “A representation chosen principally by the Treasury and a few thousand dregs of people who are generally paid for their votes.”) The state of the country was such as to render it “an object of care and anxiety”: a monstrous weight of debt was crippling it, and vice and venality were such that the spirit to which it owed its distinctive qualities was in decline. Every day seemed to indicate that the country was becoming more ready to accept encroachments on its liberties. 

But again Price saved his most audacious salvo to the end of his address. He declared that he saw “the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general amendment in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.” The times were auspicious. People were “starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors.” The spirit (“light”) that had set America free had reflected on France, and there kindled into a blaze that was laying despotism in ashes, warming and illuminating Europe! He concluded with a warning: “Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! Take warning all ye supporters of slavish governments and slavish hierarchies!…You cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.” 

On the same evening, members of the Society met again for their annual dinner at the London Tavern. Price, no doubt weary but still animated, moved an address to the National Assembly of France sending congratulations on the revolution and the prospect it gave “to the first two kingdoms in the world of a common participation in the blessings of civil and religious liberty”. As well as adding ardent wishes for the settlement of the revolution, the Society unambiguously and unanimously joined in expressing the particular satisfaction with which they reflected on “the tendency of the glorious example given in France to encourage other nations to assert the inalienable rights of mankind, and thereby to introduce a general reformation in the governments of Europe, and to make the world free and happy.” 

A mixed response 

The radical sermon and the congratulatory message inevitably reignited hostility to Price and provoked a pamphlet war. Price was not without supporters, yet perhaps the most telling reservation came not from an enemy but a valued friend. When John Adams, who was to become the second President of the United States, was appointed the new American minister to the Court of St. James in 1785, he and his family had travelled to Hackney to hear Price preach. But when, five years on, Adams read Price’s Old Jewry sermon, his response, while generous, was cautious. He warmed to its principles and sentiments, and recognised the historic importance of the French Revolution, but felt constrained to add that he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling.” He knew that France was not America, and warned that in revolutions “the most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses frequently obtained more influence than men of sense and judgment; and the weakest man may carry foolish measures in opposition to wise ones proposed by the ablest.” He saw France as being in great danger. McCullough (see sources) remarks that ahead of anyone in the government, and more clearly than any, Adams foresaw the French Revolution leading to chaos, horror, and ultimate tyranny. 

Mary Wollstonecraft’s defence of his Discourse (A Vindication of the Rights of Men), published anonymously, was decidedly double- edged, arguing that while his final political opinions were “Utopian reveries” they deserved respect as the product of a benevolent mind tottering on the verge of the grave. The world, she argued, was not yet sufficiently civilised to adopt such a sublime system of morality. 

Edmund Burke had been far less kind. As well as being alarmed by Price’s discourse he was also aware of Thomas Paine’s sympathy for the Revolution, and spent the best part of 1790 preparing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on 1 November. He wrote of his astonishment on discovering a Society that had devoted itself to consideration of the merits of the constitution of a foreign nation, leading on to sending, as though in a sort of public capacity, a sanction to the proceedings of the National Assembly in France; on its own authority and without the express agreement of the Society’s own government. He saw Price’s sermon as having been designed to connect the affairs of France with those of England, “by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the National Assembly”. This had given him “a considerable degree of uneasiness”. He had found “some good moral and religious sentiments, and not ill expressed, [but these were] mixed up in a sort of porridge of various political opinions and reflections”, of which the French Revolution was the “grand ingredient in the cauldron.” 

Burke saw the congratulatory message sent to the National Assembly as a corollary of the principles of the sermon, moved by its preacher. Few harangues from the pulpit, he wrote, had ever breathed less of the spirit of moderation. Much as in our own time the Archbishop of Canterbury has been criticised for expressing his political dissent in the pages of the New Statesman, Burke observed that “no sound ought to be heard in church but the healing voice of Christian charity.” “The cause of civil liberty and civil government,” he argued, “gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties.”

Burke’s Reflections are well known and need no further elucidation here. The same can be said of Paine’s famous rejoinder. The first part of his Rights of Man was published on 13 March 1791_ Little more than a month later, on 19 April, Price died, having been for some months, as Cone puts it, “a silent spectator to events in France and England”. He was buried at Bunhill Fields, after a service led by Joseph Priestley. Allardyce tells us that the funeral route was so crowded by well-wishers that the coffin arrived five hours late for the service. 

We, of course, have the benefit of hindsight in knowing that Britain would not take the revolutionary road. But it is important to understand that Price and Paine were writing before the onset of the horrific phase of the French Revolution that came to be known as the Reign of Terror. They believed that the uprising heralded a new dawn. Price knew that there were dangers. In a footnote to the Discourse he accepted that countries lacking our “excellent constitution of government” could not achieve liberty without “setting everything afloat, and making their escape from slavery through the dangers of anarchy.” But it is reasonable to surmise that the “good Dr Price” — known for freeing birds caught in the nets of local bird-catchers and a hero to poor people in Newington Green — would have shifted his ground in the light of those terrible events. The bloodletting in France (which almost claimed Paine’s life) need not be seen as invalidating Price’s cherished principles. It is perhaps rather that we British have been slower to act and less inclined to dramatic change and violence. Reform towards Price’s Utopia has gradually been conceded, both in Britain and the European Union, but has taken longer. Some may feel that even now we have still some way to go in achieving the goal of “perfect liberty”.

Sources 

Carl B. Cone: Torchbearer of Freedom, the influence of Richard Prim on eighteenth century thought (University of Kentucky Press, 1952). 

Richard Price: Observations on the nature of civil liberty, the principles of government and the justice and policy of the war with America (1776, available as a Google book). 

Richard Price: Observations on the importance of the American Revolution, and the means of making it a benefit to the world (the edition of March 1785, available as a Google book). 

Richard Price: A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (T.Cadell, 1790; available as a Google book). 

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event (J. Dodsley, 2’d edition, 1790, available as a Google book). 

Alex Aliardyce: The village that changed the world (Newington Green Action Group, 2”d ed. 2010). 

Stanley Weintraub: Iron Tears, rebellion in America 1775-1783 (Simon & Schuster, 2005). 

Gregory T. Edgar. Campaign of 1776 — the road to Trenton (Heritage Books, 1995). Contains a brilliant account of the close-run congressional debate on the Declaration of Independence. 

United States Declaration of Independence (the first Dunlap broadside version, 4 July 1776). 

David McCullough: John Adams Simon & Schuster, 2002). 

Claire Tornalin: Mary Wollstonecraft (Penguin, revised edition 1992). 

John Keane: Tom Paine, a political life (Bloomsbury, 1995), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

The post Richard Price, Dd., Fsa: Champion Of Civil Liberty  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Anyone who looks at William Hone’s life in the round will discover some failings, notably a lack of a consistent sense of direction. His radical period was short lived, and he had neither the literary genius of Thomas Paine nor Henry Hunt’s rapacity to rouse an audience. He is best remembered for charming miscellanies rather than radical squibs, was regularly unsuccessful in business, and finally succumbed to the comforting embrace of religion. Writing of his late ‘conversion’ his biographer. Frederick Hack-wood, says: 

“Hone was now long turned fifty years of age. and his life so far — as men count such things – had been a failure. Bankrupt in estate and broken in health, with the heavy responsibilities of a family still resting upon his shoulders, what outlook had he on life? What hope did he possess for the future? Would his old friends come to his assistance again? Or, did he not feel that by his incorrigible commercial incompetence he had wearied their patience, that he had completely exhausted their indulgence? Who shall say what his feelings were when he was now casting about for a new anchorage? Was he seeking new friends, or was he realising that there was some other support, some more abiding source of comfort, which hitherto he had always missed? Who shall judge him?” 

Not then-a candidate for a lifetime achievement award; yet strangely this erratic man played one of the key roles in securing our freedom of expression. 

Childhood 

I could say of I lone’s early life — as some sources do- simply that he had a strict religious upbringing. That is true, but fails to explain why Hone turned his hack on a discipline of nurture that amounted to indoctrination. 

In an extended note, written in 1835, he tells us that his father, having served as an apprentice to a law stationer. became intimate with “theatrical people” and was about to go upon the stage, when he was suddenly struck down by a severe illness. As a result of this experience he became “decidedly religious”. Hone could remember, as an infant. standing between his father’s knees. listening to Old Testament stories. The Bible was his father’s only book. He constantly read from it and used it to teach his first-born son to read. 

The family moved to London in 1783, Hone’s father having secured employment as a solicitor’s clerk. His son’s education now passed to an elderly woman, Dame Bettridge, who taught local children in her own home, also making great use of the Bible. Hone loved her and was “happier there than anywhere”. It was infinitely sad, therefore. when he learned that she was dying. lie tells the story of her passing with great sensitivity and reveals an element of it that is of consummate interest: for as he had stood crying by his teacher’s bed he was told that “a gentleman was coming”. That gentleman was none other than John Wesley, a preacher roundly hated by Hone’s father and frequently spoken of among his associates as ‘the Old Devil’. On the contrary. however, the great man attended affectionately and reverently upon the dying old woman. As he withdrew he also laid his hands upon the young Hone’s head, saying “My child, God bless you, and make you a good man’. 

Hone never again thought ill of Mr Wesley, a view confirmed in later life by a study of his writings. But as a child his knowledge was constrained by what his father gave him to read. He delighted in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, taking it literally and reading it many times over. This was followed by the same author’s The Holy War, which he found less interesting 

James Janeway’s A Token for Children (“an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children”) and. later, Foxe’s ‘Book o fMartyrs. What really fascinated him more, however, was nature. With another, slightly older, boy he gained deep affection for quiet, solitude and the London countryside. This love remained with him throughout his life, detaching him from “alluring society and busiest occupations”. 

In 1787, his education was continued in a boy’s day school, again with a strong religious flavour but he soon succumbed to the virulent disease of the age, smallpox, coming near to death. In the following years, after a very slow recovery, Hone’s father took over his son’s education, teaching him to write and requiring him to learn lessons from the Bible “thoroughly by heart”. It was during this period, in July 1789, that (as Hone tells us with exquisite detail) a boy he knew stopped him in Hand Court. Holborn from driving his hoop to say. “There’s a revolution in France”. At much the same time, the nine-year-old Hone first met his future wife. Sarah Johnson. the only daughter of friends of his father and mother. 

It was inevitable that the young Hone could not be confined forever. He saved up from his penny- a-week pocket money to acquire hooks from local shops situated within the range he “was allowed for walking”. He was befriended by a nearby copper-plate printer who awakened his love for old books and a love of engravings. He also met people whose literary vision extended beyond that of his father. At the age of eleven he found a copy of Bishop Huet’s Essay on the Weakness of the Human Understanding, which, he recalls, first led him to “reflect”. He was also making good progress at school; that is until he was bullied by “the son of a parish officer”. His father took him away and this, he remarked. “ended his scholastic attainments”. Further instruction was given by his father, but limited to two hours a day, which given the nature of the instruction was perhaps just as well. Confined at home, Hone became listless and found that the tasks set him from the Bible made the book itself distasteful. The crunch came when, one morning at breakfast, his father required him to learn by heart a ‘heavy’ passage from the Bible in time for his return to dinner, warning him that if he failed to learn it perfectly he would strictly chastise him. Hone found that he was unable to learn a single word and was duly thrashed. From that time on the boy “regarded the Bible as a book of hopeless or heavy tasks”. 

Seeds of doubt 

At the age of twelve, Hone made his first serious attempt at writing. Unsurprisingly, given his background, it was anything but radical: an intensely patriotic panegyric in six verses, the first two of which suffice to demonstrate the thrust of its content:

“Come Britons unite, and in one Common Cause

Stand up in defence of King, Liberty, Laws:

And rejoice that we’ve got such a good Constitution,

And down with the barbarous French Revolution!

“There’s Egalite Marat, and famous Tom Paine

Had best stay where they are, and not come here to reign.

Be staunch for your King, and your good Constitution,

And down with the barbarous French Revolution!

The piece was accepted by the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, and Bone received “presents” from those who had promoted the publication which just exceeded its expenses. He had known of Paine’s Age of Reason from a friend, who saw it as “a mischievous work”. This view was reinforced by his father, who gave him a copy of Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible, written as a response to Paine’s radical work. Hone thought that Watson proved the untruth of much that Paine had written, yet significantly he also found that the Bishop’s work created doubt in one who had never before doubted. 

In the following years, as he grew into adolescence, Hone had several unfulfilling employments, mostly under his father’s watchful eye or. if not, governed by his own conditioned conscience. But within these constraints he had better access to books and even to the theatre (despite an acute awareness of “the vices inseparable from theatrical acquaintances”). An unexpected development, however, was his falling in with another young man with very different ideas: a “seducingly eloquent” friend who was convinced “that religion was a dream, from which those who dared to think for themselves would awake in astonishment at their own delusion”, and who looked forward to a ‘new philosophy’. By now Hone was beginning to think for himself. Ile saw God as the “great Creator”, who, being satisfied with what he had made, left those he had created to do the best they could for themselves. As to Christianity, he imagined that with the cultivation of the intellect, it would – like earlier obsolete religions – disappear, and that ‘Reason’ would become omnipotent. Nevertheless, upon a thorough perusal of the New Testament he concluded that ‘the character of Christ stood out as an example of inimitable virtue”. 

With such conflicting thinking, and merely sixteen years old, Hone became a member of the London Corresponding Society, an organisation much at odds with the government of the day. His association with the Society and other debating groups greatly distressed his father but he was “determined not to be swayed”. Disregarding paternal admonitions and remonstrances, l Hone was making a bid for independence. 

Steering clear of dangerous waters

Hone’s father had good reason to be concerned that his son had joined the London Corresponding Society. It had been formed in January 1792 to bring working men together, primarily to press for constitutional reform and an extension of suffrage in parliamentary elections. Some reformers advocated Paine’s idea of electing delegates to a national convention based on the French model. As such, the authorities saw the Society, and similar provincial groups, as subversive. In October 1793. Two of its members were sentenced to transportation, and in the following year three leading protagonists, including John Home Tooke, were charged with high treason, said to have encouraged people to disobey the king and parliament. In the event the prosecution was unable to convince the jury, which returned ‘not guilty’ verdicts, but the government then moved swiftly to suspend habeas corpus, so that perceived agitators could in future be detained without bail or trial. The Seditious Meetings Act of 1795 further curtailed the activities of the movement for reform, and there were further arrests in 1796. 

Sensibly, Hone’s father found a place for his son in a solicitor’s office in Chatham, out of harm’s way. By the time of his return to London in 1798, the London Corresponding Society was virtually dead. But religion had also ceased to have any charm for him. He still attended a chapel, but privately regarded the sermons of Rowland Hill with detached scepticism. Rockwood describes him as “cherishing the doctrines of a deistic rationalism”. 

By now his preoccupations were elsewhere. In 1799 he took lodgings in Southwark and in the following year married his childhood sweetheart, and opened a book and print shop, with a circulating library, in Lambeth Walk. Ile delighted in the world of books- especially antiquarian books – but, lacking adequate finance, signally failed to translate that interest into a viable business in any of a succession of businesses. In one of these he partnered Kidd Wake, a master printer who had recently spent five years in Gloucester Penitentiary for the offence of shouting `No George! No war!’ in the direction of George Ill’s carriage. In another partnership he teamed up with John Bone, the former secretary of the London Corresponding Society, who had been imprisoned without trial for three years on a warrant for treason. These business associates no doubt go some way towards explaining Bone’s emergence as a radical pamphleteer, but another important consequence of his involvement in this and later enterprises was that it also brought him into contact with a number of distinguished customers, some of whom remained friends in times of trouble. He was also busy with his pen, his early work involving books on gardening and farriery, editing Charles Millington’s The Housekeeper’s Domestic Library, and indexing Bemer’s Translation of Froissart. 

But he was dogged with illness, and little of what he attempted achieved any measure of success. Ilackwood remarks that this was typical; he repeatedly embarked on commercial enterprises without sufficient capital: “He was constantly in a maelstrom of debt, struggling against heavy rents and grievous taxation…To the hour of his death life was one unsuccessful struggle”. He was declared bankrupt in 1810 and again in 1811, by which time he and his wife had seven children, barely supported by occasional contributions to literary journals. Even his philanthropic endeavours failed: an abortive project with Bone to establish a national savings bank and annuity plan, and the creation of a society for the gradual abolition of the poor rate. Both were too far ahead of their time, though it is interesting to notice, in the light of current proposals for welfare reform, that the prospectus for the latter society claimed that the Poor Law had failed in its purpose, and that rather the poor needed to be taught not to depend on ‘charity’ but to rely on their own exertions. 

From 1806 to 1816 Hone appears to have written nothing truly radical, focusing rather on a miscellany of disparate subjects that attracted his interest, reported in the manner of an observant. critical journalist. Neither the banning of the slave trade throughout the Empire, nor the victories of Wellington, nor the Anglo-American war, nor the ill-fated French invasion of Russia provoked him to comment. But he was alert to social abuses and cases of injustice. In 1813 he proposed and joined a self-appointed committee of inquiry into the conditions in and treatment of patients in mental asylums. Visiting one asylum after another, they found that maltreatment and brutality was common. The resulting report reinforced the findings of official reports, not least by focusing on and illustrating the dreadful condition in which one patient, William Norris, was confined. Hackwood is in no doubt that “to Hone’s unwearied efforts may be attributed, to a great extent. the steady advance of humane treatment of the mentally afflicted.” 

Late in 1814, lione and his family moved into a house with a bookshop at 55 Fleet Street, and in 1816 he opened a shop at 67 Old Bailey. Bookselling brought him into contact with many of the radicals of his time. ‘They included Francis Burdett (1770-1844), John Cartwright (1740-1824), Francis Place (1771-1884), and Robert Waithman (1764-1833). 

Hone’s humanitarian concern next led him to take an intense interest in the trial and execution of a servant girl, Elizabeth Fanning, on a charge of triple murder. The case against her could not show motive, was based on purely circumstantial evidence, and so prejudiced as to persuade Hone to gather signatures for a petition for mercy. When this failed to save her from the scaffold, he published, in 1835, The Case of Elizabeth &ming and a pamphlet The Maid and the Magpie, his first collaboration with the illustrator George Cruikshank (1792-1878), whom he had known since 1911. 

Truly radical 

Circumstances soon conspired to thrust Hone firmly into the radical camp. It is difficult to say whether he was provoked or provocative, or perhaps merely saw an opportunity to make some money. In 1815 the government had raised the stamp duty on newspapers to 4 pence a copy, so that The Times cost an exorbitant 7 pence. ‘This was clearly intended to restrict the circulation of unfavourable news to the working classes, but the unwanted result was also to stimulate cheap, unstamped, radical and often disreputable publications. Even the eminent William Cobbett was moved to produce a slimmed-down version of his Political Register priced at two-pence. In his first two and a half years as a publisher Hone claimed to have issued upwards of one hundred and thirty pieces, mainly of his own production. 

Favourite targets for disaffection were the Holy Alliance, the restored French monarch Louis XVIII and our own overweight and licentious Prince Regent, mercilessly caricatured by Cruikshank. In August 1816 Hone added a famous contribution when he published his View of the Regent’s bomb, now uncovered for the gratification of the public in St. James’s Park, majestically mounted, on a monstrous nondescript, supposed to represent legitimate sovereignty. A cannon presented by the Spanish government had been unveiled in the park, and Hone and George Cruikshank took the opportunity to lampoon the Regent, with suggestive analogies between ‘bomb’ and the Prince’s ample posterior (bum) Such scandalous material could hardly be challenged without giving it unwanted publicity, but Hone was now a marked man. The government’s view was made clear in the Regent’s speech at the opening of Parliament in January 1817, when he declared that its programme would “omit no precaution for preserving the public peace, and for counteracting the designs of the disaffected”. This did not go down at all well. On his journey back from Parliament a crowd hissed, jeered and, it was alleged, sought to assault him. In the same month, Hone, greatly assisted by another zealous reformer, Francis Place, had already launched a Weekly Commentary, and from February 1817 this was quickly absorbed into The Reformists’ Register, also selling for two-pence. It urged parliamentary reform and ridiculed the allegation that the Prince had been attacked. But the incident strengthened the government’s case. With the excesses of the French Revolution still relatively fresh in mind and fearful of a popular uprising, it brought forward so-called ‘gag acts’. which included legislation to suspend habeas corpus and allow indefinite detention without bail or trial. Lord Sicimouth, the Home Secretary, followed this up by ordering Lords Lieutenant to “apprehend all printers, writers and demagogues responsible for seditious and blasphemous material”. It was enough to persuade Cobbett to beat a retreat to the United States, causing the temporary suspension of his Register. Hone’s similar polemic filled the gap. It maintained the thrust of Cobbett’s incisive reports and, in April, left no doubt as to Hone’s political sympathies when he paid fulsome tribute to the great man, as having “sown amongst us the seeds of Reform, which have taken deep root, which all the harpies of corruption and violence can never eradicate, and which in good time will bring forth good fruit.” Cobbett’s Register reappeared in England in July with material sent from America, and with the withdrawal of Francis Place’s involvement Horn’s publication survived only to 25 October 1817. 

In trials 

The government employed a network of spies and informers intended to root out dissent, but in practice the authorities found it difficult to secure convictions on charges of sedition. They took no action against Hone’s Register, perhaps because he had provided them with an easier target. In January and February of 1817 he printed and published three parodies written in the style of parts of the Catechism, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, a device that laid bim open to charges of blasphemy contrary to religious sentiment and far more likely to be condemned by traditional jurors. The story is relatively well known, for it largely accounts for Hone’s celebrity. Informations were laid against him in April by Sir William Ganow, the attorney-general, and without warning he was arrested in the street on 3 May and kept in custody for two months. When he heard of the charges, Hone’s father came to him and said “William, what have you done?” And out of respect for his father’s concern, Hone suppressed any further sale of the parodies, much though he needed the money. While held, he received various invitations to support treasonable activities. all of which he saw as attempts to entrap him, and which he firmly repulsed. Indeed, remarkably, he was able to use his Register to relate the alleged perfidious dealings of government agents.

The eventual proceedings were brought in December. not on a single composite charge but on three, heard separately on successive days: firstly against a parody of the catechism, secondly of the litany, and lastly of the Athanasian (‘reed. There is not space here to detail the alleged impieties, but as an example one passage should suffice to capture the nature of the alleged profanity. 

“Our Lord who art in the Treasury, whatsoever he thy name, thy power he prolonged, thy will be done throughout the empire, as it is in each session. Give us our usual sops, and forgive us our occasional absences on divisions; as we promise not to forgive them that divide against thee. Turn us not out of our places; but keep us in the House of Commons, the land of Pensions and Plenty; and deliver us from the People. Amen.”

Sir Samuel Shepherd, who had succeeded Garrow, led for the prosecution, whereas Hone, unable to afford legal representation, conducted his own defence. Crucially, he had succeeded in advance. with the help of a city solicitor, to disallow the appointment of special (i.e. chosen) jurors. At the trials he did not cut an impressive figure but despite his shabby appearance, his mind was acutely incisive. Taking his inspiration from the trial of John Lilburne in 1651, he was well prepared and conducted himself most ably, arguing that his parodies were essentially political and that the familiar religious associations merely served as a vehicle to carry his message. implying no disrespect for the original texts or their original content. Hawkwood rightly describes the three trials as amongst the most remarkable in our constitutional history producing more distinct effect upon the temper of the country than any public proceedings of that time. Hone spoke directly to the jury as an avowed Christian, disputing each charge successively for six. seven and finally eight hours. The second and third trials attracted a multitude of spectators and were presided over by no less a legal luminary than the severe Lord Ellenborough, the Chief Justice, determined to secure a conviction. At the opening of the last trial lion addressed the jury in lines which were not famous. deserve to be: 

“Gentlemen, it is you who trying me today. His lordship is no judge of me. You are my judges, and you only arc my judges. His lordship sits there to receive your verdict…I trust his lordship today will give his opinion coolly and dispassionately, without using either expression or gesture which can be construed as conveying an entreaty to the jury to think as he does. I hope the jury will not be beseeched into a verdict of guilty.” 

On each of the three historic days, on all three charges, Hone was found ‘not guilty’. It was a triumph for justice, as well as of sheer endurance, but one that left him exhausted. Nevertheless he emerged a hem, greeted by thousands of well-wishers and enshrined for all time as one of the great saviours of press freedom. 

A fresh start 

At the end of the trials Hone was showered with compliments from friends and admirers. One of them, John Childs (1784-1853). an ardent radical who ran a large printing firm in Bungay; was to remain a friend for life. He congratulated Hone on “the glorious victory you achieved over ministerial hypocrisy and judicial tyranny”. And from then on, every Christmas, Childs and his eight sons raised a toast to Hone’s triumph and hacked this up with the present of a turkey. Yet for all the glory, Hone was now quite without financial means. Well-wishers – aristocrats and commoners – rapidly promoted a subscription on his behalf which raised £3,000. But a third of this money was spent on advertising and another third stolen, so that only £1,000 ever reached the intended beneficiary. Nevertheless this was enough for him to open a large shop at 45 Ludgate Hill, from which he planned to make a fresh and more ambitious start. The trials had taken a toil on his health as well as his pocket. He was afflicted with severe physical problems and what he described as “habitual melancholy” which together limited his business plans and his involvement in public life. In February 1819 he confided to Childs that if he were able to provide for the future of his wife and children he would be happy to pass to “where the weary are at rest and the wicked cease from troubling” and confessed that his mind was not as it ought to be. Over the following years he continued to be plagued with ill health, fits and neuroses, probably aggravated by fatigue, and came to experience hallucinations, delusions that had also afflicted his father. 

Despite all this, he continued to write, resuming in 1818 with a detailed account of his trials. In the same year he launched the first issue of his Facetiae and put his relationship with George Cruikshank which had begun in 1815 – on a business footing. Then, in the following year, an event occurred that reignited his radical tendencies. On 16 August at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, an estimated 60,000 people had gathered at a rally calling for the reform of parliamentary representation. One of the rostered speakers was the radical orator Henry Hunt. Ordered by local magistrates to arrest him, local cavalry charged the crowd with sabres drawn, killing eleven people and wounding 400. The government’s response was to introduce even more repressive legislation, but for the people the massacre. dubbed ‘Peterloo’ (after ‘Waterloo’ ), defined and inflamed the movement for reform and stiffened their resolve. Hone’s personal response was to send for George Cruikshank. Together, this memorable partnership, produced the much admired and hugely successful The Political House that Jack Built (December, 1819) — the title a parody that had occurred to Hone after observing one of his daughters reading the old nursery rhyme. His verses and Cruikshenk’s etchings audaciously attacked the political establishment and, again, the Prince Regent. The pamphlet, priced at one shilling, caught the public mood and sold in thousands. This time, the government, fearful of another popular humiliation, took no action to suppress it. 

Ridicule proved to him a powerful, and popular, weapon against the ruling elite. Among many of Hone’s publications which followed, the most popular and best remembered, hugely enhanced by Cruikshank’s illustrations, included The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder (1819), representing the steps on Queen Caroline’s unhappy relationship with the monarch; The Man in the Moon t1820), a parody on a speech to Parliament by the Regent; Non mi ricordo (I don’t remember) (1820), a satirical blast against the trial of Queen Caroline that George IV took to the House of Lords, and the imperfect memory of one of the witnesses; Hare’s Political Showman – ar Horne (1821). caricaturing leading politicians of the day: and finally A Slap at Slop and the Bridge Street Gang (1822), a satire against Dr John Stoddard, a former leader writer for The Times, and the Constitutional Association, an organisation founded specifically to oppose seditious and immoral publications. 

A change of direction 

Quite what led Hone to turn his back on further radical pamphlets is unclear. Perhaps his poor health led him to seek quieter waters; perhaps the imperative was to find new means to stay financially afloat. But the transition to other interests was emphatic. In 1820 he published his Apocryphal New Testament, an academic recapitulation of material he had gleaned while preparing his defence in 1817. It brought together texts omitted by the compilers from the authorised version. Even this, while avoiding politics in one sense, proved highly controversial in another and was attacked from all quarters. Three years later he brought out Ancient Mysteries Described, a further product of his antiquarian research, and on 1 January 1825 launched his well- known Every-Day Book a miscellany of odd information that had come his way. 

Debtors’ prison 

Though successful, this project involved considerable expense and did nothing to relieve his parlous finances. These had been deteriorating for some years, and do not appear to have been helped by the employment of a clerk whose conduct was later described by one of Hone’s daughters as “a course of treachery”. In April 1826 Hone was arrested for debt and carried off to a lock-up house, so hurriedly that he had to leave behind, and lost, a perfect set of his publications. His considerable family was thrust out of their home at 45 Ludgate I fill and took temporary refuge with his father. Hone was confined in a tobacconist’s shop within the area outside the walls of King’s Bench Prison known as the ‘Rules’. Remarkably from there he was able to continue to produce copy for his Every-Day Rook or Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements, which was printed and published elsewhere. In all it ran in the two years of its publication to 104 weekly numbers. 

By contrast, the work that was closest to his heart, a projected History of Parodies on which he laboured from about 1819, never materialised. In preparing the ground for it he had purchased. at considerable expense, a large number of books and prints dating back to 1611. But when “pressing embarrassments” assailed him the whole collection had to be deposited as security for cash advances from a few friends. Sadly, the loans could never be repaid and Hone’s treasured library was sold ‘under the hammer’. 

Hone’s resilience, however, was unbounded. In January 1827, while still within the prison ‘rules’ (he remained confined for nearly two and a half years), he launched a new periodical, The Table Book, similar to the Every-Day Book. The writer Christopher North (John Wilson) of Blackwood’s Magazine described it as having “spirit-stirring descriptions of old customs, delightful woodcuts of old buildings, as well as many a fine secret learned among the woods and fields”. Among those literary correspondents invited to provide material was Hone’s friend Charles Lamb. He had previously supplied personal articles for the Every-Day Book, but now became a constant contributor, writing regular extracts from the collection of plays that David Garrick had left to the British Museum. The enterprise lasted less than a year, impeded by Hone’s continued illness, the loss of his son William and a severe injury suffered by a second son, Alfred. Despite its literary success, sales of The Table Book did little to assist I lone’s recovery from debt, which was quantified by an account rendered by the publishers. Messrs Hunt and Clarke. This revealed that, despite the enormous effort that Ilone had made. £400 was still needed to satisfy his creditors and secure his release. 

New ventures 

In the event, Hone gained his liberation only by again submitting to bankruptcy at the end of September 1828 (a fate to be shared by his publishers in the following April). With his family. he promptly removed to 54 Newington Green. This famous property remains as part of the oldest terrace in London, having been the home of Dr. Richard Price (1723-91). minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church and one of the foremost champions of British political dissent and civil liberty. At this address Price had welcomed such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin (a close friend). Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, William Pitt, David Hume, Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft. My research has failed to discover the circumstances that led to the impoverished Hone being able to take up residence in such a prestigious home. It cannot be that, penniless and bankrupt, he could have secured the tenancy of such a house without help; moreover, the synergy between his views and those of its former resident strongly suggests that such help must have had some basis in the values he shared with the illustrious cleric. 

Bone immediately began work on an illustrated calendar for 1829, advertising his third daughter. Matilda, as publisher. And in the same year he spent three weeks in Liverpool on a mysterious mission which he described as “an affair of the utmost importance to my family” which would alter their and his own destination in life. Hackwood speculates that this “momentous expedition” was made as a desperate effort to raise money to put an end to his financial difficulties. Be that as it may — and the purpose remains undiscovered it was unsuccessful. Hone appears to have been rebuffed and he returned to London disappointed.

The failure of Hunt and Clarke had resulted in the stock and plates of Hone’s works being sold to another publisher, Thomas Tegg of Cheapside, who, according to one of Ilone’s daughters, was to reap a ‘rich harvest’ from the sale of reprints. As usual, Hone was less fortunate. After 15 months he found himself unable to sustain his family’s occupation of 54 Newington Green. The prosperous Tegg took action to raise a further subscription among Hong’s friends to enable the unfortunate writer to take over The Grasshopper, a coffee-house and hotel in Gracechurch Street. This was followed by a national public subscription to finance its fitting out. Tegg, with an eye to new business. also paid Hone £400 to provide the text and illustrations for a year’s issues of a 64- page monthly magazine The Year Book ft) Daily Recreation and Information. to build on the success of his previous miscellanies. The first issue appeared in 1831 and continued into the following year. though not without difficulties. The idea had been that the coffee-house would he run by Hone’s daughters, leaving him free to pursue his literary pursuits: but in practice they could not keep up, and Hone was obliged to labour there from morning to night with scarcely any time for writing, until its eventual failure in 1833. 

Nevertheless, taken together, the three non-radical publications- (of which a well-chosen selection is reproduced in John Wardoper’s The World of William Hone), arguably represent his most memorable contribution to English literature. 

‘Conversion’ 

Shortly after the move to Gracechurch Street Hone began regularly to attend services at All Hallows in Lombard Street. It had been a long time since he had attended a place of worship, and he felt moved by “most of” the supplications in the church liturgy, but was less than satisfied by the discourse from the pulpit. It happened that on New Year’s D-ay 1832, having sent his children into All Hallows, he went on. without any firm purpose, to Basteheap. There it struck him that as there had been a change of ministry at the King’s Weigh House chapel, the new man might be worth hearing. Ile had been there about 38 years earlier, and now went in just before the text was given. The new minister was the Rev Dr Thomas Binney (1798-1874), a Congregationalist who was to become popularly known as the ‘Archbishop of Nonconformity’. Its sermon had a dramatic impact on Hone. To quote his own words: “To my wonder, everything appeared changed the world and its pleasures, literature and its choicest works, had lost their charms — in short, I found that I myself was changed. and the mystery of salvation, through the blood of Christ, God made manifest in the flesh, is to me, through the eye of faith, and by the power of grace, a precious truth, by which my rebellious will has been subjugated, and my heart reconciled to God.” 

Hone continued to attend the Weigh I louse, apart from an unexplained three months in temporary lodgings at Kingsland Green (close to the intersection of Boleyn Road and Bails Pond Road). In this period he attended Whitefields Tabernacle (presumably the offshoot in Moorfields) where the minister was the dissenting Congregationalist Rev John Campbell (1795-1867). 

A move to Camberwell 

Despite his ‘conversion’, misfortune, rather than blessing, continued to he Hone’s lot. On 27 January 1833, while attending a service at the Weigh ]louse, he suffered a paralytic stroke that deprived him of the use of his right side, was carried into the vestry “as one dead”, and for many weeks anticipated his end. With his wife and younger children, he was removed from Gracechurch Street in a helpless state to lodgings at Woodland Cottages, Grove Lane, Camberwell. Creditors of the coffee-house business took possession of his home and all his pose lions, and the rest of his family was dispersed, leaving him (as he wrote to his brother): “without a friend 1 could look to, other than Almighty God, who had been my merciful support throughout my affliction”. Then in April came the news that his mother had passed on, with her son still so afflicted as to be unable to attend the funeral.

Hone’s new-found faith (it may be thought remarkably) held firm. 

Renunciation of his past 

Hone’s priority was to make his peace with his reclaimed religious regime; more specifically to seek admission to fellowship at the Weigh House. His first approach, in October 1834, was met generously, but with some circumspection, by Dr. Binney, who was mindful of “outsiders’ opinion” of the “notorious Mr Hone”. He also felt that it would help if members of the Hone family joined him in his application. Binney invited him to prepare a formal statement of his “change of views and feelings”. The remarkable document that Hone carefully prepared in response is reproduced in full in Hackwood’s biography. It summarised much of the information contained in this article, but presented it as being from one who had seen the error of his ways. hone had come to believe that rational Christianity did nothing to give succour in times of distress, whereas submission to the “Divine grace” created an avenue for intercession and spoke to him “Peace, be still”. But for some readers credulity will be tested when, towards the end of his lengthy statement, he attributes his paralytic stroke to the Almighty having suddenly suspended his mental and bodily functions while engaged in His worship. The statement went on: “Every infliction from His hand has driven me closer to Him, and been sanctified by His holy spirit to enlarge my views of His abundant mercies, and ne’er-failing Providence”. 

Indeed, some readers may find the whole statement whereby Hone “humbly !presumed] to claim fellowship with the Church of God”, unduly penitential. As he had said himself in Aspersions Answered (1824), in everything he had until then put on paper there had been; 

“Not one immoral, one indecent thought, 

One line which, dying, I would wish to blot!” 

We have seen that he was essentially a humane person and certainly no firebrand. Samuel Carter Hall (1800-89) described him as “a small and insignificant-looking man; mild, kindly, and conciliatory in manner, the very opposite of a traditional demagogue”. Nor were his radical squibs misplaced. He lived in a despotic age, headed in. Britain by a monarch of notoriously dissolute habits. Distress and discontent were widespread, the populace hungry and repressed, parliamentary voting reaffirmed and concepts of equality and human rights barely considered. Justice was cruel and open to abuse, with harsh penalties for minor offences. Throughout his ‘radical phase’ he upheld Christian values, detested injustice, and, though some alleged it, could never have been considered an atheist. Frances Rolleston (1781-1864), his neighbour in Camberwell, was in error (or at least exaggerated) when in 1853 she brought out a retrospective of his life under the title Some account of the conversion from atheism to Christianity of the late William Hone. It is true that at the age of 16 Hone declared that he was “a believer in all unbelief”, but this was surely no more than a teenage rebellion. lain MoCalman points out that even at his most radical Hone was among those “Puritan rebels” who made the Bible an emblem of truth. He “deployed this legacy brilliantly in his celebrated court defences of 1817 land with] Cruikshank featured the Bible conspicuously beside Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights as part of ‘the Wealth that lay in the House that Jack Built”‘. Thus while Hone became more conventional in religious expression, and undoubtedly presents us with a paradox, there was no question of a conversion in the sense of a heretic turned believer. 

The Congregationalists had no such reservations. Hare’s expression of a change of heart was enough to satisfy a Weigh House church meeting. Hone, his wife and several of their children were admitted to membership on 30 December 1834.

By this time Hone and his family had somehow been able to move to Rose Cottage, Peckham Rye Common, where they were to spend the next three years. It was an agreeable move. Even while recovering from his stroke, he was able to attend Mr ‘Thomas Powell’s Baptist meeting in Rye Lane: “a small Church. of poor and despised people”. On one occasion, Hone even managed (with difficulty) to deliver a short and simple address at a tent meeting on the Rye. 

The surroundings in this “quiet and remote place- were peaceful and congenial and his health gradually improved. The family delighted in frequent Sunday-school treats on the Common. Frances Rolleston recalled one such outing in the summer of 1834: 

“I found him there, happier than ever, boiling the tea-kettle over his cottage hearth for the rejoicing party of a Sunday School Anniversary on Peckham Rye, running backwards and forwards with it. followed by his own little girls, with all the glee of a child.” 

Back to work 

Hone was eventually able to return to gainful employment: first undertaking the revision of evidence previously taken in a Thames navigation inquiry, and then in December 1835 also being appointed as ‘sub-editor’ of the journal Patriot at a weekly salary of £2. This was a publication for evangelical non-conformists, for which he was well suited. The paper was pro-active in taking on ‘issues’, protesting against church rates and other inequalities and abuses of the times. On one occasion. Hone even left his desk to seek the support of Sir Francis Burdett in the campaign to abolish church rates. This was almost like the old days, but  Hackwood slyly suggests that the baronet “probably regarded him as an extinct volcano”. Be that as it may, Burden resisted Hone’s pleas. 

What Hone had not anticipated, however, were the hours. He had been led to expect that his attendance at the Patriot offices would be “trifling”, whereas in practice the business of the paper often detained him until midnight. While he was also involved with the Thames inquiry evidence. he found that he had scarcely any leisure time, often rising at 4 am and returning home early the next morning. In the course of the Thames work he had taken on the compilation of an index of the evidence, a task that caused – in his own words – “distressing symptoms of having over- laboured”. On one Saturday he did not get home until 3 am on the following day, when not even a walk on the Common could restore him. Having progressed only a few hundred yards his mind became confused and his sight obscured. His doctor resorted to the application of leeches. 

He gave up on the index. but his small salary was important to him and he persisted in his other work. So much so that a few months after joining the Patriot he took up residence at the office of the paper at 5 Bolt Court. But even this strategy was insufficient The journal became bi-weekly in 1836, and the strain on Hone began to tell. He found it difficult to sleep because “the reporters were here in the house all night, and all night the doors were slamming between the goings to and from of them, and the compositors in be news-office.- Though he struggled on for a year he periodically suffered paralytic attacks, and in June 1837 became so ill as to be unable to come down from his upstairs room. He overcame even this episode, but his powers continued gradually to diminish. As he wrote to Miss Rolleston: “The mind, as mind, is clear and firm. I am only to others seeming idiotic or idiot-like. 

To make matters worse he was quite unable to make ends meet on £2 a week, and resorted to selling off his cherished library. Finally in June 1840 he found himself unable to continue his editorial work. lie moved yet again, to Tottenham. where death came to his aid in 1842. Shortly before he drew his last breath on 6 November, George Cruikshank and Charles Dickens came to see him. as did Rev Binney and Rev John Davies, minister of Tottenham Baptist Church. All four attended his funeral. He was 62 years old.

Sources 

Frederick Wm. Hackwood: William Hone, his life and times (Fisher Unwin, 1912), which has quotations from [Tone’s own notes. 

The Hone Archive: https://honearchive.org 

Bill Ure: Cobbett and Hone, tribulations and trials (Cobbett’s New Register, v.10, no.4, 2003) 

J.B. Priestley: The Prince of Pleasure, and his Regency 1811-20 (Heinemann, 1969) 

Samuel Carter Hall: Retrospect of a Long Life (Appleton & Co. 1883) ii, p.29. 

Who was William Hone? (Adelphi University) at hup://libraries.adelphi.edu/bar/hone/intro.htm€ 

lain McCalman: Radical Underworld — prophets, revolutionaries and pornographers in London 1795-1840 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993 — paperback edition) 

Frances Rolleston: Some account of the conversion from atheism to Christianity of the late 

William Hone (Keswick, 1853) John Wardroper The World of William Hone (Shelfmark Books, 1997),

The post William Hone: The Confused Radical  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Bill Ure, who revealed through his newsletter (No.101, Autumn, 2005) that William Cobbett, the famous polemicist, resided in the winter of 1815-16 at Peckham Lodge, near Rye Lane, as a guest of banker Timothy Brown. As far as I can tell, this episode had previously been noticed only by lain McCalman in 1988,¹ and was not mentioned in the monumental biography of Cobbett by George Spater in 1984.² 

Peckham Lodge, Rye Lane

Peckham Lodge does not appear on any of the early maps of Peckham, but Heaton’s Folly, which lay within its grounds, is marked by a dot on an 1810 map of Camberwell parish on the right hand side of a pathway leading from Peckham to Nunhead, approximately where the grounds of St Mary’s College were later situated, now occupied by Morrison’s car park. The original Lodge was leased from the de Crespignys who had inherited this and other properties from Isaac Heaton, its builder, in 1808. It was left in turn to Brown. 

Bill Ure, who is a relative of Cobbett, has told part of the story, but there is more: 

William Cobbett, a close friend

Cobbett, of course, is famous, particularly for his weekly Political Register, which so got under the skin of the establishment of the Establishment. One of his biographers, Daniel Green, has described him as “one who was hostile to the government and who had dedicated himself to the exposure of corruption and the destruction of the system”.³ Certainly he was perceived as dangerous, particularly in the context of a bitter war against France. Those in authority dearly wished to silence him and saw their opportunity when Cobbett used the Register to comment on what came to be known as the Ely Mutiny. A number of soldiers stationed at Ely unwisely refused to obey orders in response to some fairly minor grievances. Cavalry from the German Legion was called in, a summary court martial held and the reputed ringleaders sentenced to 500 lashes each. It should be understood that the lash, and the fear it was thought to induce, was then seen as the primary means ol maintaining discipline in the miserable ranks of the armed forces. But to Cobbett it was abhorrent, and he railed against both it and the Hanoverian involvement at Ely. It led him to express the hope that those who criticised Napoleon’s harsh discipline might in future be more cautious when they saw our own “gallant defenders not only required physical restraint, in certain cases, but even a little blood drawn from their backs, and that, too, with the aid of German troops”. 

Nowadays, any such level of comment in the media would hardly raise an eyebrow. But in 1809 it was enough for a charge to be filed against Cobbett for sedition, followed by a trial in 1810 when every possible infringement against the interests of the nation were successfully held against him. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment and a fine of £1,000. In addition, he was required to- find two sureties to assure his keeping the peace for seven years after his release, He was committed to Newgate Prison, though this was not quite the calamity it may appear since, as Green puts it, “in those days influence and money could procure almost anything except freedom”. Not only was Cobbett able to live in some style, visited by Timothy Brown and other admirers from all over Britain,⁴ but continued to keep the Register going, every article carrying, beneath his signature, the address, ‘State Prison Newgate’ to rub in his sense of injustice. 

When he was released on 9 July 1812, Cobbett was entertained to dinner by Sir Francis Burdett, joined, it is said, by 600 guests, and hailed as a public hero. As Bill Ure has noticed, Timothy Brown became and remained one of Cobbett’s closest friends. He was one of the sureties for his ‘good behaviour’ and stood to forfeit £5,000 should the released prisoner overstep the mark, a very real risk given Cobbett’s predilection for plain-speaking. One possible reason for Cobbett’s stay at Peckham may simply have been Brown’s generosity. Newgate left Cobbett firmly in the camp of the radicals with a thirst for reform but, as Green shows, his imprisonment had also drained his resources, sales of the Register had declined and he had been for some time reliant on gifts and loans from well-wishers. By 1815 his financial position was precarious. He needed a rich, like-minded friend and a London base, and it appears likely that Timothy Brown came to his rescue. 

‘Equality Brown’, his partnership with Samuel Whitbread II

Brown’s hospitality was entirely in keeping with his reputation. Blanche tells us that he was known as ‘Equality Brown’ and described himself as the “well-known local democrat”.⁵ It is interesting that by 1875 he should be so described, when in his day he might have been thought dangerously radical rather than democratic. Apart from his banking interests, from 1799 to 1810 he was a partner with Samuel Whitbread in the famous brewing company. This was Samuel Whitbread, the son of the founder,⁶ and the partnership agreement between Brown and others contained a most unusual clause which freed Whitbread from attending personally to any business. This allowed him to follow his political aspirations. He had been elected MP for Bedford in 1791, a position he held for the rest of his life, in which he gained recognition as a champion of religious and civil rights and was notably prominent in seeking to improve provision for poor people, the abolition of slavery and attempts to introduce a national education system.⁷ Controversially, he also urged negotiations with France, admiring Napoleon Bonaparte and hoping that his reforms might be introduced in Britain. It would be tempting to suppose that beyond his financial interests, Brown found a synergy with Whitbread’s reformist views. In reality the reverse appears to have been the case as reforms might be introduced in Britain. It would be tempting to suppose that beyond his financial interests, Brown found a synergy with Whitbread’s reformist views. In reality the reverse appears to have been the case. Roger Fulford, Whitbread’s biographer, says that Brown was “noisy, opinionated and reforms might be introduced in Britain. It would be tempting to suppose that beyond his financial interests, Brown found a synergy with Whitbread’s reformist views. In reality the reverse appears to have been the case. Roger Fulford, Whitbread’s biographer, says that Brown was “noisy, opinionated and quarrelsome: he was rich and radical, and revealed to the world a combination which is happily rare – a banker with dangerous views”.⁸ In particular, Brown was “a fervent supporter of Burdett (Sir Francis Burdett), a stance not without embarrassment to Whitbread. In 1810 a dispute arose between the two partners, settled only by Brown being paid off. Whitbread wrote that he had “never been a very pleasant partner to me” and that the difference without him was incalculable”.⁹

Brown’s Association with Home Tooke. 

A happier relationship was that between Brown and another campaigner for radical change, John Home Tooke. Originally a priest, Home Tooke remained a champion of the Church of England throughout his life and had many esteemed, respectable friends. We owe to him the first steps to secure for the public the right of making available an account of parliamentary debates. As such he may be seen as an unlikely revolutionary. Yet he was imprisoned in 1777 for having solicited subscriptions for the relief of relatives of Americans “murdered by the King’s troops at Lexington and Concord”, and in 1769 was prominent in setting up a society to support a Bill of Rights, which he saw as a vehicle to campaign for a radical programme of parliamentary reform. But it was his involvement in The Society for Constitutional Information that most profoundly brought him into conflict with the government. The society, without doubt, enthusiastically supported much of the thinking that had promoted the French Revolution. On 14 July 1790, on the occasion of a first anniversary dinner, a resolution was passed rejoicing in the establishment and confirmation of liberty in France. But even here Home Tooke may be seen as a moderating influence, for he introduced a separate resolution to the effect that to achieve this English people had only “to maintain and improve the Constitution which their forefathers had transmitted to them.¹⁰ Nevertheless, he was one of three radical freethinkers arrested and tried for high treason in 1794. Pitt’s government, dreading an uprising similar to that in France, brought a huge weight of evidence against the defendants, determined to eradicate the radical movement. It was alleged that Home Tooke and his co-defendants had organised meetings seeking to encourage people to disobey the king and parliament. Prominent in the persecution’s massive case was Home Tooke’s support for Thomas Paine’s hugely successful Rights of Man. This had already been the pretext for a successful prosecution for seditious libel, obtained in Paine’s absence, the defendant having hurriedly and wisely fled to France. But in treason trials the public mood was against the establishment. To general rejoicing, after a trial that lasted for six anxious days, all three defendants were acquitted in eight minutes. 

However, Home Tooke had indeed been sympathetic to Paine’s ideas. During his time in London, Pain¹¹ was a frequent guest at Wimbledon Common, where Home Tooke’s famous Sunday dinners attracted many like-minded friends and associates.¹² They included some of the most distinguished men (and I do mean men) of letters, scientists and intellectuals of the day, some of them of a decidedly radical and reformist disposition, including Lord Erskine, Sir Francis Burdett, Gilbert Wakefield and Sir James MacKintosh.¹³ One of the most regular visitors was Timothy Brown, who “frequently rode over on a Sunday from his house at East Peckham, near Camberwell, on purpose to dine at Wimbledon… Tooke must have entertained a high opinion of the character and integrity of Mr. Brown as the latter was his banker for many years”.¹⁴ 

Home died on 18 March 1812 and the following few years it fell to Timothy Brown to continue the tradition of meetings, housing and encouraging radical discussion at his Peckham home. I noticed how Cobbett came to join him there and have suggested a possible explanation for his stay at Peckham. lain McCalman offers an alternative or perhaps additional scenario. He points out that Brown was fascinated with religion and philosophy as well as political radicalism. And that in addition to stimulating debate he had an important role in financing the publication of freethinking publications. One of these was particularly controversial. Early in 1813 Brown learned that a near-destitute Scottish journalist, George Houston, was seeking to secure the publication of a new English edition of Baron d’Holbach’s Ecce Homo!, to be published as A Critical Inquiry into the History of Jesus of Nazareth, being a rational analysis of the Gospels. The title is perhaps misleading. The baron was perhaps the first modem theorist of atheism and one of the most radical philosophers of the Enlightenment. Ecco Homo first appeared, in French and anonymously, in 1770.¹⁵ In a modern edition, Andrew Hunwick explains that d’Holbach regarded all religion as an illusion, based on fear and ignorance. In place of religious morality, which he rejected as socially harmful, he appealed for the establishment of a natural system of ethics, based on the needs of individuals as social beings, arguing that nature urges humanity to seek out its own happiness. The author’s close friend Denig Diderot observed that the text, which sought to demythologise the scriptures, was “raining bombs within the House of the Lord”, Jesus being presented as a normal human being, born normally. Hunwick sums up the contents as “a vehement attack on the Bible, Christian dogma and morality, and all aspects of Christian institutions”. 

When he heard of Houston’s initiative, Brown was, writes McCalman, “rapturous”. He tells us that “Brown threw the full weight of his wealth and influence behind its publication” and “encouraged and entertained Houston ceaselessly – even at ‘his parties for pleasure”, He subsidised the printing and publishing of the work, read and commented on the proofs and worked hard to promote its circulation. Then, in September 1813, a sceptical article in the Political Register, written by another freethinking publisher, George Cannon, inspired Brown to approach William Cobbett to give similar publicity to Ecco Homo. Despite some reservations, Cobbett, who was in favour of free expression, agreed, and he, Brown and other members of the Peckham circle, under various pseudonyms, co-operated in writing letters to the Register and the short-lived Theological Inquirer exploring and defending the arguments in Ecce Homo. It was hazardous territory. The radical publisher Daniel Isaac Eaton had been charged as publisher of d’Holbach’s book in November 1813, the prosecution only being dropped when Eaton revealed Houston as the translator.¹⁶ In November Houston was prosecuted and found guilty of blasphemous libel and sentenced to two years imprisonment and a fine of 200 pounds.¹⁷ Although Cobbett went on to include further articles by Cannon in the Register,¹⁸ both he and Brown knew the game was up. To make matters worse, Houston having served sixteen months in Newgate, provided the authorities with information about Cobbett’s and Brown’s involvement in the publication of Ecce Homo.¹⁹ 

Last years

Brown remained supportive of Cobbett, but by 1820 his friend’s debts were dearly out of control. Spater tells us that Brown, himself “a friendly creditor, urged Cobbett to seek refuge in bankruptcy, and undertook the necessary procedures at his own expense. Typically, from a small house at 15 Lambeth Road where he was permitted to live, Cobbett used the period of his bankruptcy to brilliant effect, campaigning on behalf of the reviled Caroline of Brunswick to claim her place as queen to George IV. He was released from bankruptcy in November 1820, the burden of his debts lifted and his energy unimpaired. Timothy Brown was less fortunate, he died of a stroke on 4 September 1820.

Two Hundred years ago, dissent, including religious dissent, was a dangerous business. Darwin had yet to make his epic voyage on HMS Beagle, and his Origin of Species, with its cool scientific approach, had yet to make its revolutionary mark. Even today there will be many readers who find radical views, or some of them, unacceptable. But I ask them to reflect that these advocates of change began the struggle for human rights, the freedom of speech, for the Enlightenment, for the inclusive franchise, for universal education and for our parliamentary democracy (such as it is). Much that was once considered radical is now orthodox. In my view, nothing more important came out of Peckham.

Endnotes

1. lain McCalman. Radical Underworld. Cambridge University Press, 1988. 
2. George Spater. William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend. Oxford University Press, 1984. 
3. Daniel Green. Great Cobbell, The Noblest Agitator. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1983. 
4. More than 1,000 according to Cobbett. 
5. William Harnett Blanche. Ye Parish of Camberwell (1875). 
6. I recall that as an Excise Officer I made several visits to the Chiswell Street premises and was eventually sent to check the last brew and finalise the firm’s involvement with the Revenue. The Shire horses and the brewery oozed prosperity. The fermenting room boasted an enormous unsupported roof, second only to that of Westminster Hall. 
7. A contemporary, Sir Samuel Romilly, described him as the “promoter of every liberal scheme for improving the condition of mankind, the zealous advocate of the oppressed, and undaunted opposer of every species of corruption and ill-administration”. He is said to have spoken in the House more often than any other member. 
8. Roger Fulford. Samuel Whitbread, 1764-1815, A Study in Opposition. London, Macmillan, 1967. 
9. ibid. 
10. Alexander Stephens. Memoirs of John Home Tooke. London, J. Johnson & Co., 1813. 
11. A former Excise Officer. 
12. William Hamilton Reid. Memoirs of the Public Life of John Home Took. London, 1812. 
13. See Alexander Stephens. Memoirs of John Home Tooke (1813). 
14. ibid. 
15. It is now available in a critical edition and revision of George Houston’s translation, edited by Andrew Hun wick (Berlin-New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1995). 
16. Daniel McCue Jr. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It has also been said that his age was a factor. He died in 1814, impoverished and exhausted. 
17. The radical publisher, Daniel Isaac Eaton, had also been previously charged – not far the first time. 
18. As Rev. Erasmus Perkins. 
19. Spater says the files of the Privy Council indicate that Houston sought employment as a government informer.

The post Radical Peckham: The Story Of Timothy Brown appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Those of a radical persuasion are unlikely to have missed the reference in Richard Dawkins’ new book The God Delusion. Dawkins points to the epithets hurled at ‘poor Tom Paine: Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, archbeast, brute, liar and of course infidel’ in an age when deists were commonly seen as ‘indistinguishable from atheists’.

Although Paine’s views on religion are not yet universally accepted, and perhaps never will be, it is open to question whether my use of the term ‘radical’ remains appropriate. Leaving aside those ‘don’t know’ or who are not interested’, it may be that in Britain today thinking that was once thought of as radical has for the most part become orthodox. Despite pockets of religious fundamentalism we live in a largely secular society. 

Nonetheless, I wonder whether members of the Thomas Paine Society, in focussing upon the historical context of Paine’s life and work and associated memorabilia, are in danger of neglecting the enduring relevance of his core ideas. I am thinking in particular of his mature opinions as set out in The Age of Reason, addressed to his fellow citizens of the United States of America: a nation, paradoxically, that is now home to some of the most entrenched opponents of his views. 

In his approach to religion, I believe that Dawkins can be seen, in every aspect save one, as the lineal descendent of Paine. The exception is that Paine, despite his rejection of religious creeds and denunciation of national institutions of churches as “human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit”, remained firm in his belief in one God and a hope for happiness beyond this life. With that reservation, however, he was comprehensive in his critique of the foundations of every established religion, singling out the Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan traditions. All of them, he argued, pretended some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals, and relied upon books claimed as the revealed word of God. But, Paine protested, revelation, when applied to religion, could only be something communicated immediately from God to man. Anything else is hearsay, or hearsay upon hearsay, that we are not obliged to believe. 

In the present climate of sensitivity surrounding criticism of Islam, it is particularly apt that Paine, as well as laying about the contrivance of the Christian tradition, was forthright in expressing his view of the origin of the Muslim faith: 

When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former [the commandments of Moses]. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it’.

Yet to my mind, Paine did not go far enough. Impeccably fair, he asserted that everyone has a right to their own opinion, however different that opinion might be to one’s own, and that the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. Well my reason tells me that even what is perceived as immediate, firs- hand revelation is not to be trusted. And that if there is no God, then there is no immaculate, divine revelation. Which brings me back to Richard Dawkins.

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