We live in curious times amid astonishing contrasts, reason on the one hand, the most absurd fantasies on the other…… a civil war in every soul. 

– Voltaire

Paine’s dismissal from his excise appointment at Afford left him with a shattered career, and without immediate prospects. His regular income had slipped from his grasp, but despite his swift change of fortune and the suddenness of his dismissal, he was probably quite well placed to look after himself for a few weeks while he took stock of his position and sought a means to make a living. He could always return to his trade of stay-making if nothing else was available, but he had put that trade behind him when he entered the excise, and he seems never to have considered it serious again.

Oldys, the chief informant about Paine’s movements during his first English period, painted a very sorry picture of Paine after leaving Afford, but he probably did this to heighten the effect of Paine’s dismissal in the minds of readers of his life, and also to cover the inadequacy of his own knowledge of Paine’s next few months, and as usual when he was trying to convey a false impression, he carefully phrased his account to facilitate the drawing of adverse conclusions from unsubstantiated suggestions: 

Our adventurer who appears to have had from nature, no desire of accumulating, or rather no care of the future, was now reduced to extreme wretchedness. He was absolutely without food, without raiment and without shelter. Bad, however, must that have been, who finds no friends in London. He met with persons who, from disinterested kindness, gave him clothes, money and lodging. 

So strong has been the influence of Oldys over most later biographers of Paine, who appear not to have realised that the excise records were his chief source of information about Paine’s first thirty-seven years, that the picture he painted has usually been accepted without question. But it was no wretched ragged beggar who rode his own horse from Alford to London, for simple analysis of the known facts of Paine’s excise career to date indicates a very different situation. 

Grantham, a busy town, would not have been the cheapest place in England for an excise supernumerary to maintain himself in the conservative style of living expected of a minor official and under the watchful eye of his Collector, but Paine livered there without known difficulty from December 1762 until leaving for Alford in August 1764. A supernumerary’s salary was only £25 a year, but on promotion to a ride officer in Alford, his salary would have doubled to £50, a considerable advance notwithstanding the attendant expense of acquiring and keeping a horse. His Alford duties entailed riding country roads that were frequently under water in winter, but which an exciseman nevertheless was required to negotiate, and he must have equipped himself with a serviceable wardrobe of stout clothing to enable him to continue riding in all weathers. And since Solomon Hansard (the landlord of the Windmill where Paine lodged) valued his excise connection sufficiently to retain it until he died, it is probable that Paine was able to lodge at the Windmill on very reasonable terms. 

Paine applied for restoration to the excise within a year of leaving Alford, and it was by no means certain that his application would meet with success, for there were many instances of such applications being rejected by the excise board. When he did apply, his re-appraisal would have laid particular emphasis on whether he was free from debts, in accordance with standard excise practice; and this hurdle he was to surmount with consummate ease. It was in all probability as a thrifty young man with a supply of money saved during a year of quiet living that Paine returned to London, and there he would have been able to add to his reserves by selling the horse he no longer required. Nor would he have had any great worries about whether he would be able to find employment, for he himself was to detail the comparative ease with which a discharged excise officer could find a job when he came to write his Case of the Excise Officers a few years later. 

The easy transition of a qualified Officer to the ‘Cornpting-House’ or at least to a School-Master, at any time, as it naturally supports and backs his Indifference about the Excise, so it takes off all Punishment from the Order whenever it happens. 

Paine might have sought a teaching appointment in a country town such as Thetford or Afford, each of which maintained a notable school, but London seems always to have retained its magnetism for him. He had already lived there long enough to know the metropolis reasonably well and to appreciate that it offered the greatest scope for new employment; and it may have seemed the most attractive centre for his future studies. It was in London that John Wesley had his own church and this was sited not far from that other building to which Paine proposed soon to address himself — the Excise Office in Broad Street. 

It is one of the stranger aspects of the story of Thomas Paine that the outstanding failure in his life — his personal religious struggle to promote a free community of men happily together in the light of the dispensations of a Supreme Being — has been largely lost to sight in the conventional accounts of his political struggles, which were but the means by which he strove to advance his mission. Not even the pioneer work of Moncure Conway, who first recognised religious motivation as the driving force in Paine’s life, has done much to dispel the general prejudice that Paine was primarily a secular revolutionary; yet Paine, the political innovator, was merely the working guise of Paine the idealistic preacher. John Wesley originated the Methodist practice of associating humanitarianism with assemblies of religious harmony; his follower, Thomas Paine, went much further and saw that religious harmony and social fulfilment were two equally important sides of a single golden coin representing the wealth of a happy contented people. 

It was during the years after Alford and prior to his emigration that we can now see most clearly the original Paine, and can glimpse the pattern of his probable development had Fate dealt more kindly with him. Although already scarred, Paine then looked at life with compassion blended with quizzical humour, and would probably have made his mark as an influential and popular commentator on human affairs, pointing the way towards amelioration of the common lot. But that was not the path which would have led Paine to the great historic part he was to play in world affairs. In his later life, like John Bunyan and George Fox before him, he was to feel that Providence had taken a special interest in him and had intervened to influence his progress; indeed it may have been because he felt himself unable fully to comprehend the mysterious working of the Divinity in his own life that he did not publish an autobiography. And if there was one critical incident in which the Divinity covertly intervened to direct Paine’s path towards his destiny, it was surely in his diversion from the standard excise life and into intellectual originality. After leaving Afford and returning to London, Paine would have returned naturally to the circles in which he had moved before going to Dover, and it would have been his old Methodist friends whose ‘disinterested kindness’, to borrow Oldys’s words, helped Paine into his next profession of school teaching which was to become the springboard from which he made his great leap forward towards the spectacular achievements that lay ahead of him. 

It was in July 1766, barely ten months after his dismissal from Alford, that Paine addressed himself to the Excise Commissioners. It is one of the unexplained inconsistencies in his story, which in most respects is poorly illustrated by personal documents, that Paine’s application to them has long been known in full. It was first published as early as 1817 by Richard Celine, an admirer of his political career who was persecuted and imprisoned for publishing Paine’s writings although he did not accept his religious opinions. Celine did not indicate how he learned the contents of Paine’s restoration application, but it is likely that the source was Paine himself. The application read: 

London, July 3, 1766. 

Honourable Sirs,

In humble obedience to your honours’ letter of discharge bearing date August 29, 1765, I delivered up my commission and since that time have given you no trouble. I confess the justice of your honours’ displeasure and humbly beg to add my thanks for the candour and lenity with which you at that unfortunate time indulged me. And though the nature of the report and my own confession cut off of expectations of enjoying your honours’ favour then, yet I humbly hope it has not finally excluded me therefrom, upon which hope I presume to entreat your honours’ to restore me. The time I enjoyed my former commission was short and unfortunate — an officer only a single year. No complaint of the least dishonesty or intemperance ever appeared against me; and, if I am so happy as to succeed in this, my humble petition, I will endeavour that my future conduct shall as much engage your honours’ approbation as my former has merited your displeasure. 

I am, your honours’ most dutiful humble servant, 

Thomas Paine. 

The board’s minutes for the following day, July 4th record: 

Thomas Paine, late Officer of Alford Outride Grantham Collection having petitioned to Board praying to be restored, begging Pardon for the Offence for which he was Discharged and promising diligence in future; Ordered that he be restored on a proper vacancy. 

Paine’s history was given newspaper publicity in September 1871 when The Scotsman printed a letter from Mr. B. F. Dun, who had been for many years an officer in the excise. This letter first disclosed the Board’s misleading minute of Paine’s dismissal from Alford which Dun had seen on a visit to Somerset House [where the records were stored], and this fresh item about Paine attracted journalistic comment from G. J. Holyoake, who apparently received a further letter from Dun which the latter passed on to Moncure Conway. Dun seems merely to have disclosed the dismissal minute, expressed routine departmental opinions, and given a short conventional biographical sketch of Paine which included his previously-known restoration application in full as a natural sequel to the dismissal minute. But Dun’s connection with the excise induced Conway to overate him as an informant, with the result that instead of subjecting Dun’s account to critical scrutiny, Conway welcomed it at face value as supplying additional authentic information beyond that already publicised by Oldys. 

There are several points arising from Paine’s restoration petition which call for consideration when reconstructing his position at this time. The first is the address at the top of his letter, the single word London. No experienced person in any age addresses to a government office an appeal which he hopes will elicit a favourable reply, without making arrangements to be informed of the response. There is but one logical conclusion to be drawn from Paine’s use of this single word address, he addressed his letter from the London Excise Office itself during personal attendance there, and arranged to call again as necessary to be informed of any progress. 

It would have been quite inconsistent with the detailed vetting Paine had to undergo on first applying for an excise appointment, if there had been no formal re-appraisal before re-appointment after an alleged offence incurring dismissal, with its consequent heavy blot on his official character. Perusal of the exercise archives reveals a number of instances of applicants for restoration failing to pass this second vetting, and where reasons for rejection are recorded, inquiries into personal solvency figure prominently. Yet Paine’s formal application dated July 3 was approved by the Board on the following day; the circumstances indicated by this apparently swift processing of his application are not difficult to envisage when the ways of the excise are taken into account. 

Instead of conducting his restoration application by letters submitted through the post, Paine initiated his attempt by a personal call at the central office, where he would have been interviewed by the official responsible for such matters, who at the time was a Mr. Earle. Paine’s record would have been examined, and any necessary enquiries conducted by Earle, who would have invited a formal application from Paine on their satisfactory conclusion, which Paine therein made out on the spot In accordance with standard excise routine his letter would have been headed by the name of the office of origin; thus the single word London was all that was necessary. 

The tone of Paine’s petition has surprised some commentators, who have thought it servile; but his repeated expressions of humility has occasioned no raised eyebrows amongst excisemen, in the experience of the present writer. For Paine’s letter is a perfect example of the style Commissioners are believed to consider fitting in addresses to their august selves. It is highly probable that the petition was phrased on the advice, and possibly dictation, of Earl. Paine’s own character shows only where he claims he was never accused of dishonesty or intemperance, and thereby excludes any admission of having stamped a survey [having stamped an interest as having been taxed but not having actually been so]. 

Earl would have re-examined the circumstances of Paine’s dismissal scarcely two months after processing Swallow’s [William Swallow, Paine’s supervisor) appointment as supervisor at Caister following restoration, and in 1766 he was probably better informed than Paine himself about the outcome of the affair at Alford. As a responsible headquarters official with experience in personnel and disciplinary matters, had been aware of Swallow’s admitted misconduct at Afford [Swallow was later himself dismissed having admitted faking the charges against Paine]. It is to be observed that the board’s minute restoring Paine speaks of his begging pardon for his offence, although he had not done so; it is likely that Earle under-wrote his petition by a reports based on a personal interview which gave this impression, and that he did so to obviate any possible reluctance on the part of the commissioners to refuse the application. That Paine’s petition struck the right note with the board is demonstrated by the remarkable swiftness of its acceptance, and the fact that it took place only a day after Paine submitted it is a further strong indication that he penned it in the excise office and did not submit it through the post. John Tucker, another discharged officer, whose application for restoration was considered at the same time as Paine’s, does not appear to have been as well advised about the appropriate style of petitions as Paine had been, and he did not conform to the requisite ritual grovelling; the minute recording Tucker’s failure immediately follows that detailing Paine’s success. 

Restoration did not confer swift re-appointment to an excise station, and Paine would surely have had his name added to a waiting list there was nothing he could do now except to wait patiently for a summons to return to the service, but in order to ensure that the summons when it was eventually issued should reach him, it was necessary for him to register his private address with the board and keep the central office informed of any subsequent change in personal circumstances during the waiting period. Paine therefore would have reported his post-restoration addresses and movements for inclusion in his personal file; there Oldys found them in due course when he was given access to that file, and he abstracted for publication such details as suited his purpose. 

Oldys cognisance of Paine’s excise records explains very simply his remarkable proficiency as the first biographer of Paine, and his ability to disclose details which other biographers have not been able to verify should have pointed to the air source of his information. However, as Paine had no reason to declare his movements between his first dismissal and his restoration, Oldys was not informed of this period from excise sources, and it was probably to cover his ignorance about those months that he depicted Paine as having been penniless and homeless at that time. 

There is an interesting error of fact in the Oldys account of Paine’s restoration. Whereas the board’s minute books establish absolutely that Paine was restored on July 4, Oldys dates that event as July 11, although the manner of writing the figure 4 in the minute book precludes any confusion with 11. The working system in the personnel section is detailed in the excise archives. It was the task of the clerks to translate the board’s decisions into appropriate instructions and letters, and this could only be done after the minutes of the day had been written up and passed to them. The restoration minute bears the appropriate tick, the initials of the supervising official appear on the page, and these marks and the subsequent note ‘he has had notice’ are indications of subsequent action which would not have been completed for a few days, and would have appeared in Paine’s file where Oldys would have found it recorded. In that file the completion of action was probably dated July 11, and Oldys mistook this date for the restoration date itself. 

The further details Paine registered with the board after his restoration had been approved, enabled Oldys to reveal significant facts about the ensuing period, which was a very important one in Paine’s life; for it was now that he was able to extend his education and prepare himself for his great intellectual advances. Oldys informs us that he began to teach at the great academy kept by Mr. Noble in Goodman’s Fields, earning a salary of twenty pounds a year, with an allowance of another five pounds for finding his own lodgings in nearby WhItechapel at the house of a hairdresser named Oliver. 

Daniel Noble, Paine’s new mentor, was one of a group of Baptist ministers who included Arminian views in their philosophy, and he would this have been amicably disposed towards Wesleyan Arminians, from whom may have come the recommendation that led to him employing Paine as an assistant However, it may have been that Paine had taught in other places during the ten months when his movements remain unknown to us, and that he worked his way up to Noble’s establishment through experience of teaching in lesser schools. 

The dissenting academies owed their origin to the Act of Conformity of 1662 which had forbidden dissenting ministers to teach in established colleges and had driven them to found their own centres of learning. Their original attitudes of mind had guided their academies to a much higher standard of instruction than was to be found in the long established grammar schools such as the one Paine had himself attended at Thetford. The main impetus was not conditional on proficiency in the latin language, but was placed upon developments in the scientific world; in consequence, some of the clearest-sighted and most influential men of the country were glad to send their sons to these academies, which accepted adherents of all faiths, and were rated by many progressive minds as superior to universities. 

In this fresh environment, and at the comparatively late age of twenty-nine, Paine at last had access to the new learning of his day, and was able to join whole-heartedly in the study and evaluation of advances in scientific knowledge. Astronomy figured high in his interests, and he himself recorded that as soon as he was able he had purchased a pair of globes and attended philosophical lectures, where he would have made the acquaintance of some of the most notable astronomers of his day, and perhaps established contact with other pupils of note. His close associated of later days, Thomas Rickman, was himself to record: 

I remember when once speaking of the improvement he gained in the above capacities and some other lowly situations he had once been in, he made the observation: °Here I derived considerable Information; indeed I have seldom passed five minutes of my life, however circumstanced, in which I did not acquire some knowledge’. 

Education is most swiftly accomplished in the early years of life. As spring is the season when nature reproduces last year’s foliage in quick green growth, so is youth the time when the knowledge’ our forefathers slowly gathered is most easily re-created by progressive study under the guidance of teachers. But even brilliant young students may not develop Into skilful practitioners until student days are left behind and they approach their work from practical angles. There are differences which can produce varying attitudes to problems from relatively unquestioning students and objectively viewing operatives, and these are perhaps never more impeding than when a practical man becomes a scholar. Difficulties that may not occur to an academic student may then arise out of his remembered experience to hinder smooth acceptance of progressive tuition. Because his practical mind already reaches out from intermediate stages, he is less likely to be able to accept scholastic opinions as secure platforms by which to advance towards his goal. 

Paine not only had a mind thirsty for knowledge, but he possessed also a varied background against which to set his new ideas. In the ten years that had elapsed since he left his parental home, his restive spirit had led him into many situations. He had worked in town and country, at sea and on land; he had been apprentice and master-tradesman, religious convert and preacher, he had been stay-maker, privateersman, class-leader, exciseman and now schoolmaster, and he may have followed other professions as well since Rickman referred to ‘some other lowly situations he had been in’ without specifying them. 

A man who comes late to the fount of contemporary knowledge has to struggle harder than his youthful contemporaries if he is to benefit fully from his opportunity; but if such a man succeeds, he acquires erudition more widely and more soundly based than theirs, for in the process he will have worked out within his own mind and from his own initiative many more problems than they; and in overcoming these additional difficulties he develops an indigenous momentum of thought which carries him forward more swiftly than his fellows. This enables him to appreciate the wider implications of new concepts, to relate them to the every-day world he already knows and understands, and to realise how they will be viewed by the ordinary people who inhabit it. 

As his comment to Rickman makes clear, Paine used his return to the scholastic sphere to expand his existing knowledge; he would also have been able to fill in some of the gaps in his original schooling that had resulted from the restricting tenets of his Quaker father, and to re-examine questions that had troubled him, such as the concept of redemption which had perplexed his childish mind. He would not have been concerned to construct a basic philosophy as a young student might have been, but rather to test and advance the views he had already worked out during his chequered career to date. In a dissenting academy headed by a minister, Paine would have had opportunities not only to acquaint himself with the progress of science, but also to study the early history of Christianity. The new ideas he encountered did not disturb his basic belief in God, but they seem to have stimulated re-appraisal of the attitudes of the Anglican Church. Paine’s analytical mind began to identify pagan traditions that had been grafted onto the original teaching of Jesus by church-makers; this had probably happened when pagan communities had been absorbed into the expanding early Christian church as their members had accepted the essence of the message of Jesus, but had retained their festivities and superstitions deriving from their interpretation of the annual waning and waxing of the sun, and of other important natural phenomena.

Paine reversed this process, and began to reject these additions, streamlining his personal religion into a simpler faith revolving around the ideas he found good in the philosophy of Christ This simplified Christianity did not conflict with the emergent scientific view of the universe, which Paine eagerly studied with the help of his newly acquired globes under the guidance of the astronomers whose lectures he was now able to attend. As a schoolmaster he now had facilities for after-school studies, whereas during his earlier period in London (as a journeyman staymaker) he had worked daily for from six in the morning till eight at night But as, and probably because, his own beliefs became strengthened through simplification, he found it difficult to countenance and excuse the indecision in lesser minds thrown into confusion by conflict between paganised Christianity and scientific concepts, and deplored the attitudes who became more confused they more they studied. A few years earlier, when Paine began to express in print his views as they had so far evolved, he developed the forceful style which was to become the hall mark of his major writings. From a careful sympathetic arrangement of his premises, he proceeded swiftly to his conclusions, and punched home his message in striking phrases that seized the imagination of his readers: 

Among the various Kinds of Idolatry we have upon record, that of worshipping the heavenly bodies, seems of all others the most plausible and rational. Consider the Sun as an immense fountain of light and heat, ripening by his influence into lie and action all the several tithes of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms, and you may, I think, easily conceive how obvious and natural it was for the uninstructed heathen to mistake such a body for the God of this lower world. I remember at school being much pleased with Herodotus’s worshippers of the Moon, waiting to hail and welcome their rising Goddess with all the festivities of music, dancing &c., they were really Idolaters of taste. In all the grand machinery of the creation, I hardly know so fine an object as the rising full moon, especially in summer. After an oppressively hot day, which has thrown a languor upon both mind and body, can anything equal the coming of a grateful evening mild”, ushered in by such a glorious harbinger? What exquisite painting! What scenery! A very bulgy of nature, One of her richest repasts; Every sense seems regaled, every faculty harmonised and disposed to favour thought and reflection. And yet how lost, how utterly lost is all this to millions and millions? Why? Because we all look through different glasses; one has the lens of his (mind’s) eye so thick and horny that he sees no objects distinctly. Some view everything through the medium of gain; others through the misty glass of sensual pleasure. Some are blinded by ambition, others drunk and besotted by Intemperance. But of all, one is most vexed by these who are TOO SHARP-SIGHTED TO SEE, or, in other words, who have too much learning to have any taste at all, who are so bewildered in the labyrinth of science falsely so-called, that they are lost to everything worthy of their notice. Admirable work this!, to be learnedly stupid. A man in such a case is like a warrior pressed to death with the weight of his own armour. 

The works of Herodotus, the Greek historian and traveller whose descriptions made a strong impression on Paine’s mind, were available in translation when Paine was ‘at school’ in the academies of Noble and Gardner; the importance attached to them is evidenced by the prefatory comment of the translator Isaac Littlebury that Herodotus first advanced history from fable and poetic fiction to ‘true dignity and lustre’. Paine probably used such translations and other kindred works to trace the residual forms of ancient practices in contemporary dogma. Philosophers of old had always been strongly influenced by the paramount importance of the sun in human affairs, and had progressed to a study of other celestial bodies, as the standing stones of Stonehenge and the massive sextant carved in the rock near Samakand bear witness, and, as the horoscopes widely printed in our own day confirm, such influences are slow to lose their grip. But Paine was an original thinker, and instead of becoming over awed by the immensities of the skies, his flexible mind found confirmation of divine purpose in the minutiae of Creation as well as its most significant manifestations: 

One of the loudest Infidel batteries that have been ptay’d off against revealed religion, is that it abound in mysteries. It is absurd (they say) to require our faith in matters confessedly above the reach of our understanding”. The objection, at first sight, appears formidable enough, but it will be found, upon examination, to carry with it very little or no force at all. Whether a thing exists, and how it exists, are certainly two very different enquiries. Even among the objects of sense, which we may be supposed to be the best acquainted with, are every moment forced to acknowledge numberless truths, which, with the uttermost stretch of our faculties, we can no way fully conceive, nay, which we have hardly any competent idea of at all. The various modifications of matter, the exquisite mechanism, and organisation of animal and vegetable bodies, &c, are (as to their first rationale) utter secrets to us, and so they will ever remain. A single blade of grass is as effectual a puzzle-wit for all the philosophers on earth, as is Its Solar System, and twenty other Systems added to it. 

The originality of mind Paine first displayed in his religious writing was later to find expression in his secular works also. Historians, like students of Nature, were drawn naturally to the influence of the Suns; and it was not by accident that Louis XIV of France became known as the Sun IGng, and that English history, even in the twentieth century, has been presented mainly in terms of the sovereign and his entourage. But modern commentators are coming to place less weight upon central authority and greater emphasis upon the effects by plebeian personalities. As long ago as the eighteenth century Thomas Paine had the vision to see the divine patterns in the minute as well as in the enormous, and he was one of the earliest to appreciate the potential goodness of the human spirit even in its modest manifestations in the minds of ordinary people. He realised that effective power could spring from such tiny units if peaceful persuasion could induce coalescence of a multitude of them in a common concerted purpose, and an understanding of how such persuasion could be exercised was to come to his mind over the following years. As Trevelyan has indicated, the beginnings of democracy as we know it are all traceable to the writings of Thomas Paine, and the power of this new force in domestic politics was to grow as his work was to become known to the general public through the mass distribution of cheap editions of his books, which Paine was always keen to promote. 

RETURN TO THE EXCISE 

Although the progression on Paine’s thinking may have been continuous, his career was destined to embrace a number of disjointed episodes, and in May 1767 he faced again the prospect of a change in his way of life when the opportunity arose for him to return to the Excise. In the Cornish town of Grampound, George Chappell the resident exciseman had been ill for some months, and when his supervisor reported that he was unlikely to be able to resume his duties, the Excise Board decided that he should be retired under the pension arrangements of the day. As no other exciseman had applied for the vacancy, the Commissioners turned for a successor to the waiting list, at the head of which now appeared the name of Thomas Paine, who was duly appointed. The Grampound post was a town division, otherwise known as a footwalk, which rated above an outride, so the posting was in the nature of a promotion for Paine as well as restoration to active service. 

The term footwalk indicated an excise station where the work was sufficiently concentrated to be covered by foot instead of on horseback; but any impression of comparatively easy travelling which this seems to imply is misleading, for footwalks could be far from comfortable postings. The Commissioners had considered the ambulatory powers of their officers, and set the limits of footwalks as up to twelve miles overall for regular traders and up to sixteen for those visited occasionally, so town officers commonly walked up to twelve miles a day, with an extra four thrown in now and again for variety. It is not surprising that after being ill for several months Chappell was thought to be incapable of copying with the excise work in Grampound. 

Lack of competition for the vacancy may have reflected the character of the town and its reputation amongst visitors. John Wesley preached there, and recorded an unfriendly reaction from the mayor, who asked him to move on. Such surly resentment of newcomers may have been a feature of local attitudes at the time, which an incoming exciseman might have had to face also. The operation of political bribery at parliamentary elections furnishes another illustration of the local atmosphere; one freeman of Grampound received more than one hundred pounds in cash during the six years preceding the election of 1754 to secure his vote. Local worthies accustomed to be treated with such exaggerated consideration could have been prickly customers of the exciseman, and throughout Cornwall these revenue officers had become accustomed to performing their duties with scant regard for the procedures decreed by the Board for the protection of the revenue. And Grampound, like Alford, was a one man excise station where the exciseman was thrown largely on to his own resources. Paine, as a restored officer, would have been particularly vulnerable to official repercussions if he was again represented as being at fault by his superiors or by influential local traders. 

Paine may have had some idea of the peculiar excise conditions in Cornwall, which were so unusual that rumours about them must have circulated in the service; he may have consulted Earle and had been informed about them, or he could have made contact with London excisemen to keep himself familiar with service conditions in order to facilitate his eventual return to duty. Alternatively he may have been sufficiently wrapped up in his current activities to wish to continue them. Whatever his reasons, Paine decided against Grampound and requested to be allowed to await a further vacancy. His rejection of the proposed appointment was probably a wise one, as events were to demonstrate.

In the summer of the following year the Board ordered a general inspection of the Cornwall Collection which was organised in four districts under its collector, and was probably administered by between forty and fifty local officers. As a result of the consequent report, the collector and one supervisor were dismissed, the three remaining supervisors were reduced to officers and removed to other collections, two officers were dismissed, twenty-seven reprimanded and six admonished. The supervisor Truro, whose district included Grampound was dismissed; he was reported as having been remiss in Grampound in particular, where he rarely bothered to re-gauge important brewing vessels to ensure that beer duty was accurately charged, and the interchangeable letters in his stamp for marking hides, which should have been periodically changed as a safeguard against malpractice, had not been varied in thirteen years and had become rusted in their positions. The supervisor at Launceston was demoted to one of the town divisions at Lewes in Sussex, where he would have been able to recount the slaughter of the Cornish excisemen to his Lewes colleagues, amongst whom was numbered at that time Paine himself, who was probably thankful to have escaped being involved in the debacle. 

As Paine sought restoration in the summer of 1766, only ten months after being dismissed, he must have seriously considered returning; but from movements he subsequently reported to the Board, Oldys was able to recount: 

Paine’s desire of preaching now returned on him: but applying to his old master for a certificate of his qualifications to the bishop of London. Mr. Noble told him that since he was only an English scholar, he could not recommend him as a proper candidate for ordination in the church. Our adventurer, however, determined to persevere in his purpose, without regular orders. And he preached in Moorfields, and in various populous places in England, as he was urged by his necessities, or directed by his spirit. 

A contemporary account of aspiring Methodist preachers at Moorfields is to be found in the memoirs of the publisher, James Lackington, who was at the time estranged from the Methodist movement to which he owed his start in business, and to which he later returned. Some latitude is therefore called for when considering his unfavourable comments, and his disparagement of itinerant Methodist preachers whom he depicted as frequently lodging at the houses of sympathetic widows, and readily abandoning their itinerancy if offered a permanent home by one of them. An essay by Paine entitled Forgetfulness, which he probably wrote many years later and which was preserved by being copied by a friend, also sheds some light on Paine’s movements at this time. In it he speaks of himself being ‘about the summer of 1766’ in a fenland village and lodging with a widow who was also sheltering a young lady in a depressed frame of mind following an unhappy love affair. Paine mentioned these circumstances because he was able to dissuade the young lady from an attempt at suicide, but in the present context they serve as an indication that Paine could already have been engaged in itinerant preaching about the time he applied for restoration in the Excise. 

If Paine was already a circuit preacher in the summer of 1766, it means that he had been approved by the Methodist organisation. His practical experience and his repeated changes in his way of life would have indicated his adaptability, and hence his suitability for a nomadic life, and his experience of riding the difficult sunken roads of Eastern England as an exciseman would have made him a natural choice for East Anglican circuits. Paine possibly returned to Alford as an itinerant preacher about a year after he left it; he may have learned what had happened to Swallow after his own departure, and he may also have played a part in preparing the ground for the establishment of a Methodist group in the town, which was to come about within few more years. 

At this critical stage in his life, it seems that Paine stood at a crossroads, with the separate paths of two different professions — the Excise and the Methodist ministry — diverging before him. But it would seem that he had not yet decided which path he would follow although he would soon have to make up his mind to which he proposed to devote the rest of his life. It is suggested here that the reason for his delaying his decision was his desire to pursue his evangelistic career as an ordained minister, a course which John Wesley encouraged his lay ministers to follow, and until he has ascertained his prospects for ordination Paine preferred to keep both his options open. 

An attempt can now be made to reconstruct Paine’s position at this period, using as a basis the Oldys account, which would have drawn upon dated information given by Paine to the Excise Office:

Mr. Noble relinquished Paine, without much regret, to Mr. Gardner, and then taught a reputable school at Kensington; yet, owing to whatever cause, he here acted as usher only the first three months of 1767. 

The adverse slant of Oldy’s writings cannot conceal Noble’s regret at Paine’s departure in early 1767, and it is also dear that Paine’s assistance was sought by a school of considerable standing, although nothing is further known about Mr. Gardner, its proprietor. Since Paine returned to Noble, a minister, when seeking a recommendation to the bishop of London in the spring of 1767 at the time of leaving Gardner, it is clear that Paine decided to test his prospects in the church about the time when he would have been preparing for another summer as an itinerant Methodist minister. In May 1767, when the excise station at Grampound was offered to him, Paine may have wished to hold himself readily available for ordination-studies, and it would have been for this reason that he decided against departing for distant Cornwall. And since the only known reason why Noble did not recommend him for ordination is his lack of classical education, Paine may well have concluded that the ministry was not closed to him, and that his chance of acceptance would be greatly enhanced if he added proficiency in the classics to his growing erudition. 

The Oldys account leaves little room to doubt that Paine was again a circuit preacher in the summer of 1767. Great interest would attach to any reliable accounts of Paine’s preaching style, as they would indicate his approach to his listeners; even Oldys gives a hint in his remark that Paine preached ‘as directed by his spirit’, for Paine’s spirit was characterised by originality, and his sermons may have been arresting. But the scant references to his work in the field which have survived give no indication of his effectiveness beyond intimating that he was at last adequate in his addresses. However it is probable that Paine found a return to an itinerant life precluded continuation of the rapid advances in self-education that he had enjoyed during his periods as a schoolmaster in London. If acquisition of the classics, especially a knowledge of the latin language, had become one of his objectives, he may have found the prospect of another settled period in the Excise increasingly attractive because of the attendant improved facilities for systematic study. 

Paine’s rejection of Grampound probably resulted in his name being returned to the bottom of the list of restored officers awaiting re-appointment, and it took nine months for his name to work its way back to the top. Then, at Abergavenny in Wales, Robert Henry Whitney, after having been seven times reprimanded and thrice admonished in the preceding three years, again incurred censure and was dismissed. The detailed account of the Board’s minute book of the multiple faults of this hardened offender once again highlights the harshness of Paine’s dismissal after an unestablished first offence at Afford. Daniel Jones of Wells Outride in Somerset obtained Abergavenny, and Paine was posted to Somerset, but following receipt of a letter from a certain Edward Dalton, the Board decided on different arrangements. Dalton, the officer at Lewes 4th Outride was now appointed to Abergavanny, Jones was ordered to remain at Wells, and Thomas Paine was appointed to the Lewes vacancy on February 29, 1768. 

Thus a new chapter commenced in Paine’s life that was to have consequences which at the time neither he nor anyone else may have envisaged.

The post Paine At The Crossroads, 1763-1768  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

A biography can follow a personal life-history as honestly or as deviously as suits its author’s purpose, for biographers may be motivated just as strongly against as in favour of their subject. The justification for a biography is that its subject has achieved enough distinction to excite curiosity about the factors in his life, which induced a situation marking parts in the development of many personal lives, and these can become known only in variable degree, even to close associates. It is not very surprising when a man from a distinguished background makes an impact upon the history of this time (although his background does not diminish his title to credit for his achievements), but it is much more intriguing when a man from an apparently common-place background makes a strong impact. Sons born to monarchs, and sons born to prominent dignitaries may reasonably be expected to make a contribution to contemporary society, but members of the lower orders do not inherit springboards from which to launch themselves. Those of undistinguished birth who do achieve enduring fame, whether or not they drive – or were driven by,- the special circumstances with which posterity subsequently associate them, may therefore fall to be judged by serried ranks of undistinguished peers unwilling to award them adequate credit through reluctance to concede that better results than their own have been attained from similar circumstances. As has long been recognised ‘a prophet is’ never without honour save in. his own country and amongst his own people’. So it has been, in considerable measure for Thomas Paine, the man from the people who remained always a man of the people, notwithstanding that he achieved far greater distinction than did most of his fellows. 

To the resentment of those of similar social standing to himself, who felt – and still feel in their subconscious minds, that his exceptional success underlined their own mediocrity, there must be added the open hostility shown by members of the upper classes who could not bring themselves to recognise that greater intellectual powers could emanate from a man of lower social ranking. To these, any rod was a suitable one with which to belabour the upstart stay-maker turned excise officer, later driven by intellectual hostility into rebellion against the Crown that failed to reciprocate his loyalty. And since Paine was modest about his private life. A circumstance which greatly contrasted with his justified pride in his immensely popular writing — his personal life was an avenue to which his enemies and detractors have turned en masse when seeking to off-set the great unassailable support his writings elicited from the numerous thinkers then emerging from the populace. Within Paine’s little-known private life, there was no important aspect less familiar to the public than the marriages which had been central to his early life in England, and so it was the matrimonial field which was selected as the location for the most virulent attacks upon his personal character. 

Paine’s experience of marriage, that of his parents as well as his own, did greatly influence him, just as it greatly influences the great majority of other Englishmen; and it is therefore appropriate to take another look at all three of these, within the broad context of feminine influence upon him during his formative years; for greater insight into this aspect of his life has slowly accrued to us, and has conferred an ability to make a more fair assessment thereon than Paine has generally received from earlier writers. 

Paine’s parents, Joseph Pain and his wife Frances, came from two very different backgrounds; Joseph was a farmer’s son and a practising Quaker, Frances was daughter to an attorney and a member of the Established Church. Their points of contact are not easily imagined, but were obviously sufficient to allow them to move towards wedlock. They seem to have resolved their religious differences through toleration of each other’s opinions. Frances’s view was allowed to prevail when they decided the mode and location of their marriage, and Joseph’s yielding to her wishes was a reasonable masculine deferment to her natural concerns that their wedding should be recognised by her family and friends; but Joseph’s choice of a bride from outside the Quaker community brought him into disfavour with his own religious confreres, who are thought to have expelled him from formal membership of their Society. However, this would not have debarred Joseph and his family from attendance at Quaker meetings. 

Joseph and Frances were married on June 20, 1734 in the parish church at Euston, just outside Thetford. Joseph was twenty-six on his wending day, and his bride was eleven years older. According to Oldys [George Chalmers], the biographer who found out most about Paine’s family, Frances possessed a sour temper and was an eccentric character, and later commentators have sometimes drawn the conclusion that Joseph contracted an unhappy marriage, but this opinion is probably ill-founded, as is explained below, and there is no positive reason to suppose that the marriage was other than normally stable and happy. Thomas was born after two years of wedlock to a mother aged thirty-nine, and was followed eleven months later by a sister, who did not survive infancy. Understandably, in view of Frances’s age, there were no more children born to the union, which continued without known loss of harmony until Joseph died in 1788 at the age of seventy- eight; Frances survived him by nearly three years, living to the grand old age of more than ninety. 

Joseph Pain probably received a great deal of help from his wife in the course of his business, for Oldys speaks of ‘fitting stays for the ladies of Thetford’. At that time, corsets were worn continually until they were worn out, and they were never cleaned. The fitting of these foundation garments would have called for considerable tact, and a working wife would have been necessary for a small stay maker; certainly, a woman such as Oldys represented Frances to have driven customers away, and the family business would scarcely have survived. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, and Joseph% constant source of guidance, had expressed Quaker opinion on such matters: ‘There are many things proper for a woman to look after, both in their families and concerning women, which are not so proper for the men; which modesty in women cannot so well speak of before men as they can amongst their own sex’. Undoubtedly, the matrons of Thetford would have addressed themselves more readily to Frances than to Joseph when they needed a new corset. 

Thetford was an old town and the government maintained a constant presence in it, for an excise officer was stationed there. Excise offices were usually located at inns and when Paine was born it was at The Swan, though the following year it was moved to another inn, The Cock. Thomas would have been familiar with the excise presence from his earliest days and Oldys suggested that in his early youth he enquired about the duties of the excise men.

Later in life, when Paine returned to Thetford and applied for an excise appointment, his application would have entailed placing on record a considerable amount of information regarding his personal circumstances, and this would have been fully disclosed to Oldys when the Excise Head Office was instructed to cooperate with him in his privileged researches into Paine’s life and excise experience. Thus it was Paine himself who supplied much of the information drawn on by Oldys for his book, though it was adversely slanted by him, but every biographer of Paine since has turned to his biography for information; but it is not necessary to accept it blindly and without consulting contemporary information from sources Oldys found convenient to ignore. For example, he disclosed that Paine had not been baptised, but he did not make known to the public that this was sufficiently common in excise applicants (in those days) for the Excise Commissioners to have provided for alternative evidence of an applicant’s age to be acceptable for ensuring that it fell within the strictly prescribed limits. Family evidence, such as an entry in a family bible, was the favoured alternative, but all alternative evidence of age was required to be vetted by an investigating supervisor (a senior excise official), who had to reconcile it with visual indications, and have it confirmed by formal declarations before magistrates. When Paine applied to join the excise service his mother would have been visited by a mature official who studied her face and inquired why she was so much older-looking than he had expected, and why there had ‘been variations in the baptismal practices of her children, and he would have demanded legal statements in support of her replies. Such probing into her personal life might have seemed highly impertinent to Frances, and if she gave sharp replies, the investigator would have recorded them as evidence of Paine’s family background, and in due course they would have been made known to Oldys. Such is the likely basis for the adverse comments he made about Frances. 

Paine separated himself from the direct influence of the unusual marriage of his diverse parents when he left Thetford whilst still a young man, having found himself dissatisfied by the hum-drum life of an assistant to his father in the stay making business, and went to sea, but returned to the stay making craft for a while in London, at which stage in life he probably joined the new Christian sect we now know as Wesleyan Methodism, which was then growing within the Established Church. Methodism took root and spread most swiftly within the concentrations of workers who had entered the new industries spawned by the Industrial Revolution; many of them keenly missed the social support they had known in cottage industries now superseded, and they found an answer to their need in Methodism. Much of the credit for the movement’s success is due to the genius of its leader John Wesley, whose novel technique for integrating local groups into an internally- communicating national organisation was soon copied by other movements seeking to integrate workers. 

Well-known features of modern trade-unionism such as the membership card and regular local subscriptions are of Methodist origin. Wesley’s local societies were the fore-runners of local union branches, each guided by a class leader who collected a penny a week from every member. Each society also elected its own officers and took a lively interest in the welfare of every individual member. Membership was formally acknowledged by a ‘ticket which conferred membership nationally as well as locally and thus served as a ‘passport’. It is probable that Paine availed himself of such a Methodist ‘passport’ when he moved from London to Dover in 1758, and there entered into employment with another stay maker, Mr. Grace, a prominent Methodist in the town. Indeed, he may even have heard of the vacancy in Dover through the Methodist grape-vine. 

The Methodist Recorder for August 16, 1906, described Mr. Grace as the Dover class-leader, and that he took Paine to class with him. On one occasion a preacher failed to turn up and Paine was invited to take his place. It is interesting that Grace did not himself take the missing preacher’s place but delegated the job to Paine. Clearly he had decided that Paine was worthy to stand before his fellow Methodists, but it is unlikely that this was solely on his own judgement, for there was another member of his household whose advice would have been highly influential, Miss Grace, his niece, a lady of outwardly meek behaviour, but who was driven by an implacable will. She had already demonstrated her concern to further Methodism by converting her uncle, and she was probably the strongest influence on Paine. She has been frequently misrepresented by Paine biographers as the daughter of Mr. Grace, a precedent maliciously set by Oldys which others have ineptly followed. Oldys also foolishly imputed a romantic attachment between her and Paine, although at the time of his sojourn in Dover she was probably being courted by the first of her two husbands. But she was undoubtedly a strong influence on Paine at the time, and she is long overdue for depiction in his story.

Miss Grace was born about May 1735 and was brought up in Wakefield, where she scandalised her parents by attending a Methodist service in a public house. They thought her insane and threatened to have her confined in an asylum if she attended again, but on reflection decided to send her to live with her uncle in Dover, where Methodism had not quite arrived, but it soon did and Miss Grace attended its first service there held in a cooper’s shop about 1755. Now it was her uncle’s turn to remonstrate with her and he too banned her from attending but she ignored the ban. He then reported the matter to her family in Wakefield which brought her mother to Dover. But this too failed to prevent the girl attending the meetings, and eventually she converted her uncle! 

Paine moved to Sandwich, but the town was in the doldrums and a poor prospect for a stay maker. Oldys states that Paine was ‘not the first who had there used the mysteries of stay-making’, and Mr. Grace would have known the fate of Paine’s predecessors in trade and probably had warned him of the risk he was taking, but also probably hoped that Paine would bring hope to the town with his missionary zeal for Methodism. Oldy records that ‘There is a tradition that in his lodging he collected a congregation to whom he preached as an independent, or as a Methodist…’. 

One of Paine’s most urgent needs was for a local source of raw materials, which would have brought him into contact with Richard Solly, the town’s woollens draper, his visit would also have afforded him an opportunity to make known his evangelical mission and issue invitations to his meetings. Solly’s wife Maria seems to have become interested in the remarkable new-comer, and just as Miss Grace had taken her uncle to a Methodist meeting in Dover, so did Maria Solly bring her maid an orphan named Mary Lambert, who, according to Oldys, was ‘a pretty girl of modest behaviour’. To her the lonely preacher may have seemed a romantic figure. Five months later Paine and Mary married at St. Peter’s Church, Sandwich, one of the witnesses being Maria Solly. 

The marriage did not last long. Paine may have drawn encouragement from his parent’s union, as they had achieved success although initially appearing to have little in common, but his parents were much more mature on their wedding day than 

Mary, aged twenty-one, and Thomas twenty-two, whose parents had both come from the same locality and had got to know each other over a far longer period than Thomas had known Mary, a mere five months. The pair simply had not had enough time together, nor enough leisure in each other’s company to discuss to adequately discuss their ambitions and domestic prospects. For Mary, the sudden transition from a life in service where many decisions would have been taken for her, to a hectic doubly- demanding existence divided between being a working wife to a newly-established stay-maker, and a supportive wife to an enthusiastic evangelical preacher, must have been traumatic. Many years later, in the June 1775 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Paine published his essay, ‘Reflections on Unhappy Marriages’, and his comments therein seem drawn from the disappointment of his youthful first marriage: 

Those that are undone this way are the young, the rash and amorous, whose hearts are ever glowing with desire, whose eyes are ever roaming after beauty, those dote on the first amiable image that chance throws in their way when the flame is once kindled, would risk eternity itself to appease it. But, still like their first parents, they no sooner taste the tempting fruit, but their eyes are opened: the folly of their intemperance becomes visible; shame -succeeds first, then repentance; but sorrow for themselves soon returns to anger with the innocent cause of their unhappiness. Hence flow bitter reproaches, and keen invectives, which end in mutual hatred and contempt. Love abhors clamour, and soon flies away, and happiness finds no entrance when love is gone. Thus for a few hours of dalliance, I will not call it affection, the repose of all their future days are sacrificed, and those who but just before seem’d to live only for each other, now would almost cease to live, that the separation might be eternal. 

Little is known of Paine’s first marriage except that it was short; and the circumstances of its termination have never been reliably ascertained. The couple are said to have furnished a house with the assistance of Mr. Rutter, an upholsterer, who could have been another supplier of materials to Paine in his business; a house in Sandwich has long been regarded as their abode, but this is not an established fact, and a few months after their wedding, the couple moved to Margate, a busier town where Methodism was also making its appearance. And there Paine’s first marriage seems to have come to an end. 

Oldys sought to portray Paine as a cruel husband, disappointed because Mary, who had been merely a lady’s maid, had bought no fortune, but conceding that Maria Sony remained a benefactress. Oldys also recalls a local tradition that Mary died in childbirth, but this is unsubstantiated, although many writers sympathetic to Paine have seized upon it as the reason for the termination of the union. Finally, Oldys suggested that Mary may have left Paine to live out the rest of her life in obscurity, and this is not only plausible, but is the most probable outcome of his ill-advised, short lived first marriage. Little information has ever come to light, although Oldys availed himself of every assistant he could find, including an antiquary living in Sandwich, and various excise officers in Margate and London. He tried very hard to trace Mary, because Paine’s first marriage and its break-up, offered him the most likely prospect of embarrassing Paine though his private life, but he did succeed in capitalising on this opportunity. However, he did succeed in discovering a lot about Mary’s background (probably through trawling the excise network in south-east England), and elicited the fact that her father had once been an excise officer in the vicinity of Sittingboume, consequently, with the assistance of the surviving excise archives, we can discern some features of Mary’s life and experiences before her marriage to Thomas, from which an outline of her world may be attempted. 

Mary Lambert seems to have been of considerable interest in her own right; she was the only known child of James Lambert and his mentally unstable wife, having been born two years after he was dismissed from the excise station of Milton near Sittingboume. James became first a shop-keeper and then a bailiff for the rest of his life. He died in poor circumstances when Mary was only fifteen years old, and her mother died in an asylum about the same time, thus her situation must have been very difficult. Nevertheless, she made a life for herself, although this entailed crossing the county and entering into service in the Solly household, where six years later she appears to have achieved the status of an accepted companion for Mrs. Solly, going with her to church, and enjoying her mistress’s support both at her marriage and afterwards. Why she came to Sandwich is not dear, but there is a link between Sandwich and Sittingboume through trade, for many of the brick houses in Sandwich had been built of Sittingboume bricks; the distance between the two towns was about thirty miles, and heavy consignments of bricks would have floundered in mud on poor roads if they had been conveyed in horse drawn carts, but both tons had access to functioning wharves along the coast and transport by sea would have been convenient and economic for this trade. The greater part of Lambert’s professional life whilst Mary lived with him was as a bailiff, which would have brought him into contact with disputing parties within this established trade, and he would have been called to Sandwich on occasion and to have met some of the established traders there, possibly including the Sollys. We do not know when Mary’s mother entered a mental home, but as Mary approached school-leaving age, her father may have looked out for vacancies in service for young girls in his area of work, and he may have been the agent arranging Mary’s employment by Mrs. Solly, who is a rather shadowy figure of whom we know little. But Maria SoIly was obviously a warm-hearted woman, possibly lacking a daughter of her own, and she seems to have treated Mary more as an adopted daughter than just a maid. 

When Mary tried to settle down with her very busy husband, and friction began to arise in the marriage, it is quite likely that from a background of a quasi-favoured daughter she stood her ground against Thomas, and noisy quarrels became known to their neighbours, which reflected against Paine as both a stay maker and preacher. Mary, indeed, may seriously have fought to make a success of her marriage, but whether she knew it or not the dice were loaded against her, for her husband probably already had in mind a fixed idea of the wife he thought he needed, and believed he had found in Mary, whose modest behaviour would have initially seemed to reflect that of Miss Grace, the talented niece of his previous employer. But if so, such an expectation would have been unfair, as well as ill-judged. Miss Grace had settled into her uncle’s household before Methodism became a growing part of both their lives, and her later style of living was in the established house of a successful man much more mature in outlook than the young preacher Mary married. Had Paine been similar to John Bunyan, and content to develop his religion with the assistance of his wife, Mary’s marriage might have enjoyed better prospects, but Paine was more akin to George Fox, are zealous to pit himself against a world still hostile in many places to Methodism. Mary may have soon lost heart, and Thomas may well have lost patience; the circumstances of unhappy marriages which Paine later described accord very well with what is known of his swift courtship and hasty marriage to Mary, and with the rapidly deteriorating domestic relationships they soon seem to have found themselves in. 

In such stressful circumstances, the not-distant town of Margate where Methodism was also taking hold, may have offered better domestic prospects from stay making, and hence a firmer basis from which Paine could acquire expanding status a..; a preacher, but clearly any such idea did not work out. There is no indication whether Mary developed similar irrationality to that which had brought her mother into mental care, but having once before made a new start in life, Mary could have felt it was time to do so again, and slipped away to another location where Oldys failed to find her. And Paine probably sought her himself after she had gone missing and similarly failed to find her. However, speculative gossip retailed by Oldys that Mary, now pregnant, had gone to a lying in hospital may have been well-founded although it was not confirmed by his subsequent enquiries. But two entries survive in the records for the nearby Parish of St. Lawrence in Thanet which strongly suggest the presence there of Mary after the presumed break-up date of her marriage; the first is of the baptism on December 7, 1760 of: ‘Pain — Sarah, daughter of Thomas and Mary; the second sadly records that Pain’s daughter did not survive infancy, for in a burial entry reading baldly: Sarah, daughter of Thomas and Mary Pain. Clearly someone had been concerned that Sarah’s brief existence should be formally recorded; Mary herself is the obvious suggestion, and since Sarah lived for nine months someone must have taken care of her, presumably within the Parish of St. Lawrence, where Mary gave her birth, and may have seen out her own life also. Nothing is known of any other friends of Mary along the coast, but her father may have had contacts she could avail herself of, through deliveries coastwise of consignments of Sittingboume bricks. And of course Maria Sally may have had friends to whose care Mary and her unborn child could have been recommended; but although Mrs. Sally is reputed to have maintained contact with Mary after her marriage, Mary’s return to the Sally household never seems to have taken place. 

How much Paine ever learned about his daughter and his estranged wife we will probably never know. Sarah would appear to have conceived about six months after the marriage, and Paine was back in Thetford to commence studying for the Excise about the time his daughter died in the Autumn of 1761, according to information supplied by Oldys. Only one piece of evidence as to what actually happened has ever existed, and amongst the scores of Paine biographers it has been held only by Oldys. It is the written declaration of his martial status Paine made in his own hand when he applied to enter the Excise. Oldys seems to have held this document in reserve, presumably to challenge Paine if he could tempt him into public dispute, but it must have been insufficient in itself to clinch a case against Paine in the contemporary climate. Unless Paine’s excise dossier ever comes to light, and this, in the opinion of the present writer, remains a possibility, then the circumstances of the break-up of his first marriage, and its probable effect on his second, will remain forever subjects of speculation. The likelihood is that Mary simply left him, possibly while he was visiting his parents and seeking their advice, and it may have been that when Paine returned to Margate he found her gone, and never ascertained what had actually happened to her. This possibility, which Oldys also postulated, is supported by what we know of his second marriage ten years later in 1771.

Editorial Note

The paper presented above was extracted from notes left by the late George Hindmarch that are now held by the society, having been presented to it by his wife. It was intended to be followed by a study of Paine’s second marriage, as there is a note to that effect at the conclusion of the paper, but there is no manuscript of such a study in the papers we have. 

However, Mr. Hindmarch, who worked as an Excise officer for forty years and took a great interest in its history, wrote about Paine’s work in drawing up a petition for better pay and conditions for excise officers which he set out in his Case of the Officers of Excise (1772-3). Mr. Hindmarch’s study was published in an edition of only one hundred copies in 1998, of which he allowed only a strictly limited number to go, and then only to scholars he felt would acknowledge his work. His book, a paperback of 95 pages was entitled, Thomas Paine: The Case of the King of England and his Officers of Excise, and is a very important though little known study. Anyone seriously interested in Paine’s life and work should read it. The remaining copies of the book have been presented to the society to sell for its funds and copies are available at £3. 50 which includes postage.

The post Thomas Paine: Observations On Methodism And His Marriage To Mary Lambert  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

THE French Revolution has not been the subject of much impartial consideration in the United Kingdom, indeed some of the strongest influences on public understanding of this cataclysm in human affairs seems to have been purely fictional works, such as A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, or the even more fanciful exploits of The Scarlet Pimpernel Readers may perhaps be re-assured to learn that the greatest source of information for the present note is, A History of Mathematics by Carl B. Boyer, formerly Professor of Mathematics at Brooklyn College, published by Wiley and Sons, in which work Chapter 22 is devoted to ‘Mathematicians of the French Revolution’ and Thomas Paine is afforded very slight notice en passant However, since this work sets the world’s major mathematicians in the contemporary context of their lives (as well as describing their contributions to their discipline), it affords valuable insight into the progress of human thought, notwithstanding that the actual mathematics are largely incomprehensible to a general reader (like myself) who retains only the sketchiest recollection of the differential and integral calculus of his schooldays. 

It is important to remember that in Paine’s day learning was not selective in the way that it has largely become today and an inquiring mind then ranged over many aspects which are now generally treated as specialised subjects. Paine himself clearly demonstrates this generalised way of thinking, as we see him debating a sermon in his childish mind, purchasing globes to facilitate his studies of astronomy, sermonising the good folk of Dover and Sandwich as a Methodist preacher, advocating increased salaries for his fellow excise officers and writing some of the most important and influential political tracts of all time. And we know also that he rarely passed a few minutes without endeavouring to utilise them to improve the vast store of knowledge that he committed to his exceptional memory. To such a man the philosophies which he observed developing in Paris during his years of residence there would have proved of absorbing interest in their widest scope, not merely in the localised revolutionary practices which dominate most accounts of his French experience. It is well, therefore, that we should glance at the progressive Frenchmen of his day, whose thinking he would have followed eagerly in all its aspects as he mixed freely with them as an equal, playing an active part in the contemporary scene just as they did. 

During the 14th. century, Paris had ranked with Oxford as one of the scientific centres of the world, but subsequently seems to have played a much quieter role, and only recently have the French mathematicians of revolutionary times come to be seen as laying the foundations for the wide-spread scientific explosion of later centuries. Boyer has singled out six of Paine’s contemporaries in Paris as worthy of notice from his specialised viewpoint, but he discussed them in far wider context. 

The six French mathematicians, diplomatically listed in order of their births, are: 

1. Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) who is the only member of the sextet with origins other than wholly French. He was born and educated at Turin, where he became professor of mathematics in the military academy there, before securing the patronage first of Frederick the Great of Prussia and later Louis XVI of France. His wealthy parents enjoyed both French and Italian backgrounds, and he was the only one of their eleven children to survive infancy. He distinguished himself as an astronomer as well as a mathematician and published notable works in both fields. 
2. Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794), the only member of the sextet who has been generally associated with Paine. The two men admired each other’s work and sometimes co-operated closely. Condorcet however fell victim to the contemporary vicissitudes, becoming forced into hiding, from which he emerged when he felt his protectors were thereby bringing themselves into danger; he was then arrested on sight and imprisoned, only to be found dead in his prison on the following morning, presumably from suicide; but his final resting place was to be the Pantheon. An aristocrat and philosopher, Condorcet had been an associate of Voltaire, with whom he shared a hatred of injustice; he believed implicitly in the innate goodness of human nature, a characteristic which would have facilitated his rapport with Paine, and he was an enthusiastic advocate of social reforms, such as the introduction of universal education which he saw as an antidote to vice; he unsuccessfully presented a plan for reform to the Legislative Assembly, of which he became Presiden• His earlier writings included books on probability and the integral calculus, but he later devoted himself to social affairs, including a defence of variolation – the predecessor of vaccination as we know it. Like Paine he originally entertained high hopes of the Revolution, but became disillusioned by its excesses. True to his principles, during his period of hiding he wrote his celebrated Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, which culminated in a prediction of the bright future he imagined would follow from the Revolution (an English translation by June Barraclough was published in 1955 in New York by Noonday Press). 
3. Gaspard Monge (1746.1818), son of a poor tradesman, was perhaps lucky that his exceptional ability attracted the attention of a lieutenant-colonel who secured for him opportunities to study at a military academy where he rose to become a teacher himself. Teaching appears to have been his natural vocation and his wide interests in physics and chemistry as well as mathematics had made him one of the best-known French scientists by the outbreak of the revolution; it was his unusual experience that part of his most famous book, Gecnnetrie Descripling was banned from publication in the interest of national defence. He was also active in the political scene, and as Minister of the Navy it fell to him to sign the official record of the trial and execution of Louis XVI. His concern for adequate national defence led to his advocacy for a training school for engineers, which was to be established as the famous Ecole Polytechnique, of which Monge was a distinguished administrator as well as instructor. His great aptitude as a teacher resulted in a stream of exceptional pupils who more than made up for the reluctance of Monge to publish very much himself, although he made discoveries which still bear his name. And it speaks well of his reputation and judgment that Napoleon took him on both Italian and Egyptian campaigns and entrusted him with the delicate decisions of which works of art were to be carried back to France as prizes of war! He was to become the outstanding scientist in his various fields that the revolutionary era produced. 
4. Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), kept a low profile in the political scene, which does not seem to have interested him although he mixed freely with colleagues who were prominent. He became the most distinguished astronomer in the post Isaac Newton period, and this caught the attention of Napoleon (an admirer of men of science) who appointed him Minister of the Interior; but in this high-ranking appointment Laplace proved so undistin- guished that Napoleon, displaying his own interest in the calculus, quipped that Laplace ‘…carried the spirit of the infinitely small into the management of affairs’. It is of far greater importance in our present context that Laplace’s astronomical theories would have become known to Thomas Paine, also a life-long student of the heavens, but one whose interpretation of heavenly movements was very different, with the possible major result for world philosophy which is suggested below. 
5. Adrien Marie Legrendre (1752-1834), seems to have had an exceptional influence on posterity, particularly in America, and in the field of mathematical physics. His Elements of Geometry was apparently the antithesis of practical maths, yet it was published in more than twenty editions during his lifetime and it was still being re-issued in America as late as 1885. The scope of his writings was very wide, but since he was primarily a ‘mathematician’s mathematician’, his work is very difficult for a non-mathematical mind to comprehend, notwithstanding its great importance and his famed exceptional clarity in exposition. 
6. Lazare Carnot (1753-1823), the youngest member of the sextet, had the most spectacular career of them all during the revolutionary years and enjoyed immense popular acclaim. He shared the military background which recurs in the personal histories of these men, and in the difficult years when the Revolution came under external threat, it was Carnot who organised the armies and laid the basis of their successes. Although intensely republican in his views, he avoided involvement with factions and actually defended royalists against false accusations (including charges that they mixed powdered glass into flour intended for republican soldiers). He antagonised Robespierre, but when a call for his arrest was made the assembled deputies rose in his defence, noisily acclaiming him as the ‘Organiser of Victory’ and it was Robespierre who fell not Carnot. But in spite of his brilliant career, he was to fall himself through maintaining his independence throughout later major political changes, and as he departed into exile his chair as professor of geometry was voted to Bonaparte, whose ascent to power had owed much to Carnot’s genius for organisation. In exile Carnot wrote a famous work, Reflections on the Metaphysics of the Injinitessimal Calculus which was philosophical rather than scientific in tone; Boyer’s comment on this work displays the permanent influence of Thomas Paine, for he remarked that even in times that try men’s souls, mathematics finds many devotees. Carnot’s grandson, Sadi Carnot, was to become the 4th President of France in 1887. 

The varied origins of the sextet, who largely came together in projects under revolutionary aegis, possibly indicates the broad levelling effect of the revolution, before when a military career was heavily influenced by status; indeed it was a saying at the military academies, ‘The competent are not noble and the noble are not competent’. All six achieved prominence in their fields by 1789, when the Revolution erupted, and it was to offer opportunities which they could not have expected to enjoy before that date. It is ironic that only Condorcet had held views that encouraged reformist activities, and that he alone was to lose his life in the turmoil, the others all surviving him by decades. But there was much more to the Revolution than politics, and Condorcet was to play a notable part in projects which were extensively debated in committee, were finalised and implemented and still stand today in testimony of practical achievements to which the sextet heavily contributed. These developments constitute a memorial to the Revolution and to the many men who genuinely strove for progress within it. But it is not a memorial in stone, it is expressed in every-day use which has continued to expand extensively, even in our own recent years. 

Early in the Revolution, Tallyrand proposed a revised system of weights and measures, and a committee was set up through the Academie des Sciences to consider this reform; Condorcet and Lagrange were both founding members of this committee and during ensuing changes Laplace, Legendre and Monge also joined in its deliberations, which were so important, and called for so much expertise and judgment, that it is to be wondered how the eventual decisions and their implementation were arrived at in a comparatively short period. 

First, the committee had to decide on a question which even modest scientific minds have always dreamed about – what was to be the numerical base on which the new units were to stand? It was not without considerable debate that the decimal system was decided upon, rather than the duo-decimal of twelve which even today is sometimes advocated as the more desirable, since twelve is divisible by three and ten is not. Discussion then centred on the new measurement of length, for which one suggestion was the length of a pendulum which would beat in complete single seconds, a proposal which is deceptively simple-sounding, but which presented certain practical problems (the pendulum was to evolve to a scientifically accurate measurement of time in England, not in France). The day was carried by the accuracy shown by astronomers (notably Legrende), in their measurement of the earth’s latitudes, which are constant around its surface, unlike the variable degrees of longitude; the metre was then decreed to be the ten-millionth part of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, a precise distance which the present author confesses his inability to verify to any degree of accuracy whatsoever! The committee, however, had completed their metric system in all essentials by 1791. 

It is not conceivable that such dramatic changes in measurement could have been thrashed out in committee without exiting keen interest from every man in France who had a professional interest, whether practical or theoretical, in the technical operation of making measurements, not only in length but in the higher degree of measurement of volumes, which reaches its most complicated form (in normal commercial practice) in the process of gauging, the mysteries of which were legendary, at least in poetic legend, for Oliver Goldsmith in his idyll of country life, The Deserted Village, extolled the wondrous skills of the schoolmaster in seemingly hushed tones ‘and e’en the whisper ran that he could gauge’; and there was one man in Paris who had begun his professional government service as a gauger of brewers’ casks in Grantham, the former exciseman Thomas Paine. And Paine, the close associate of Condorcet, would certainly have been a most eager gatherer of every nuance of the arguments which were debated by the committee and retailed to him by Condorcet. But, alas, the many biographers of Paine have given us little information about his widespread activities and interests in his Paris days. Fortunately, from the point of view of a general reader (like myself) trying to follow Paine’s thinking and its development, he left several autobiographical leads to posterity in The Age of Reason, his most important writing during this period. This uncharacteristic action may have been accidental, but I personally think it was deliberate on the part of a man who had seen ‘many of my most intimate friends destroyed’, and had come to accept the likelihood that he would soon follow them along the same fateful path. 

The technique of putting thoughts to paper varies widely between authors, as does also the technique of setting musical compositions into manuscript, which latter has been more extensively studied. For example, Beethoven’s development of themes is illustrated, • at least to some degree, by the jottings in his notebooks, but Mozart seems to have composed mainly in his head, and inscribed finished works directly to paper. The manuscripts of Mozart, including the paper itself and its revealing water marks, have proved valuable sources of information, but there never seems to have been any comparable study of the manuscripts of his contemporary Thomas Paine, and this, I think, is a pity because it has long been my opinion that Paine’s technique resembled Mozart’s, in that many sections of Paine’s writings were similarly composed and rounded out in his head, then committed to his remarkable memory much as other authors nowadays commit finished work to computers from which they can be retrieved at will. In my younger days I sometimes had the pleasure of listening to a professional elocutionist reciting long passages from standard works (particularly from the novels of Charles Dickens), to an attentive audience marvelling at his memory; Paine seems to have had similar extraordinary powers of verbatim recollection. I imagine that he first developed this technique in his days as a Methodist preacher so that his words could seem fresh and original to his hearers. In later life, Paine’s contemporaries spoke of his lengthy accurate quotations from his already-published works, and also of the swift fluency of his writing (e.g. of articles for the Pennsylvania Magazine), once he had settled his mind to his task, when his pen appears to have been able to reproduce as essay previously committed to memory as a modern computer furnishes a print-out. 

It is now appropriate to consider Paine’s actual writing of The Age of Reason. He himself informs us in his prefatory profession of faith that he had been envisaging a revolution in religion since soon after he had helped produce a revolution in government in America by publishing his pamphlet, Common Sense and he further informs us that it had been his intention for several years past to publish his thoughts on religion. Following the views expressed in the previous paragraph, I conjecture that quite a lot of these thoughts on religion had already been arranged in his memory-files and possibly partially committed to paper. Paine also tells us the events in Paris had convinced him that he should prepare for publication, but he does not specify at what point the decision to publish was actually taken; however, in his preface to the second part he reveals that after action was taken in the Convention against its two foreign members (Cloots and himself) he ‘sat down and brought the work to a close as speedily as possible’. Clearly, at that stage Part 1 was well advanced and required only a few days intensive writing for completion. However, Paine also made a very curious statement which I think important; his printer had been furnished with only thirty-one pages out of the total of seventy-six which were to compose the final draft of Part 1. I have worked at this division of Part I into two sections, and now that I have read chapter twenty-two of Boyer’s, History of Mathematics. I have come to the striking conclusion that pages one to thirty one may effectively have comprised the whole of Part 1 of The Age of Reason as Paine originally envisioned it. I now proceed to explain this conclusion, but in doing so I beg to invoke Paine’s sentiment, as expressed in his dedication to his fellow-citizens of the United States, that I maintain my right to my own opinion just as I insist on every other man’s right to his. 

The Age of Reason as we now have it, consists of two parts, of which the seventy-six pages Paine had passed to his printer when he entered the Luxembourg prison in December 1793, is now known as Part 1, and it is with this, the earlier part, that I am mainly concerned in this present essay. But this Part 1 itself comprised two sections, which were specifically described by Paine himself as consisting of thirty-one pages for the first section and forty-five pages for the second (and it is as first section and second section that I refer to them in the remainder of this paper). Without seeing the original manuscript, it is not possible to be certain of the position where the division between them occurs, but since it is probable that Paine was reasonably consistent in his writing of complete manuscripts intended for publication, it is also reasonable to assume that the separate pages would have had similar word-content, and the division is therefore likely to have occurred after about thirty-one seventy sixths of the finished work, and this is approximately two-fifths through any subsequent reliable printing. By this criterion, it appears that the division was probably after the passage headed ‘Of the New Testament’ and before that headed, `Defining the True Revelation’. In my view this position proves on examination to separate Part 1 of The Age of Reason into two sections of very different character. 

The first section (apart from a few sentences, which could have been last-minute alterations) is devoted to a review of religious writing with the accent heavily on the Old Testament which is termed the Bible. It is a beautifully-written criticism, which I have personally read and admired many times, but it could have been written or committed to Paine’s memory at any time during the preceding two or three decades. It may have originated in Paine’s studies when he aspired to ordination in the Established Church, his subsequent disillusionment, and his renunciation of that ambition. It is, in substance, very much an amplification of the message which George Fox (founder of the Quakers and mentor of the elder Paine and his son the young Thomas) had declared as corning to him • from the Almighty: 

I was sent to turn people from the darkness to the light, and I was to bring people off from all the world’s religions, which are vain, that they might know the pure religion, and I was to bring them off from all the world’s fellowships, and prayings, and singings, I was to bring people off from Jewish ceremonies, and from heathenish fables, and from men’s inventions and windy doctrines, and from all their images and crosses, and sprinklings of infants, with all their holy days (so called) and all their vain traditions, which they had instituted since the apostles’ days…. 

The first section, with possibly a little rounding, could well have been printed as a self-contained pamphlet. But Paine gives us two reasons why he did not take this course. First, he intended The Age of Reason ‘…to be the last offering I should make my fellow-citizens of all nations…’ and so was concerned to delay it as long as possible, no doubt because he wished to publish his thoughts in their most mature form. But he also knew that the religion of ordinary people had wider implications than the observance of mere dogma; thus he wrote ‘that many good men have believed this strange fable, and have lived very good lives under the belief (for credulity is not a crime), is what I have no doubt of.’ Like most people of mature thought he did not wish to throw the baby out with the soiled bath-water, or, as he much more elegantly wrote, ‘…lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of theology that is true.’ It is a fair reply to destructive criticism of harmless religious practice to ask, “What do you propose to put in its place?” I believe Paine found his response to that question in revolutionary Paris. 

In the first section he refers to biblical comment, ‘What! Is Saul also amongst the prophets?’. On re-reading the second section in light of Boyer’s chapter twenty-two, I found myself asking, “What! Is Paine also amongst the mathematicians?” For, there, he is at pains to associate himself with the growing knowledge of the sextet of mathematicians who have been identified in the early pages of this paper, to whose company, conversation and debates his association with Condorcet would have given him access. It is not to be assumed that l’aine claimed equality with their expertise, although he cited Newton and Descartes in his arguments, he made no claim to familiarity with analytic geometry, or the calculus. Instead he detailed his own education in Thetford, revealing that although he was not himself a Latin scholar, he familiarised himself with the contents of all Latin books in the school. By implication, he explains how through association with the leading mathematicians of his day he became familiar with the development of astronomical theories which he could follow from his early studies in London after purchasing a pair of globes and attending lectures at the Royal Society. At last it became apparent why Paine, normally so reticent in personal details, chose to make these details known in the unlikely context of combating the spread of atheism in revolutionary Paris! He was preparing his ground, in case he afterwards had need to justify the astronomical knowledge on which he bases his assertion of the true revelation the Almighty has made to all men in terms that transcend all languages and all domestic situations. 

He proclaims this new theology: 

The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, he has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if He had said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, “I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort, AND LEARN FROM MY MUNIFICENCE TO ALL, BE KIND TO OTHERS.” 

Paine introduces his new revelation in the very first words of the second section. It is his cry of EUREKA; it is a clarion call, such as he might have proclaimed in his days as an evangelistic preacher! He proclaims it now in jubilation and with urgency. 

But some, perhaps, will say: Are we to have no Word of God, no revelation? I answer, YES; there is a word of God; there is a revelation. THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human intervention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man. Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His munificence? We see it in the abundance with which He fills the earth. Do we wish to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the Scripture called the creation.

Having once impressed upon his readers the message that the Almighty speaks to all men through science, Paine hastened to emphasise its unlimited capacity for adaption throughout the ever-expanding field of human knowledge and awareness. 

The scientific principles…. relating to the motion of the heavenly bodies, are contained chiefly in that part of science which is called trigonometry, or the properties of a triangle, which, when applied to the study of the heavenly bodies, is called astronomy; when applied to direct the course of a ship on the ocean it is called navigation; when applied to the construction of figures drawn by rule and compass it is called geometry; when applied to the construction of plans or edifices, it is called architecture; when applied to the measurement of any portion of the surface of the earth it is called land surveying. In fine. it is the soul of science; it is an eternal truth; it contains the mathematical demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses is unknown. 

The second section contains scant reference to biblical text, just as the first section contains scant reference to science; but both sections were addressed to Paine’s whole wide audience, and in later years, when he wrote Part 2 of The Age of Reason, he disclosed that the spate of dissent which Part 1 aroused was based on what its dissenters termed scripture evidence and bible authority. He recorded no dissent from the scientific world to his presentation of scientific progress as the new Revelation. This must have been a source of great satisfaction to him, since (as I pointed out in 1979) his prime purpose in publishing Part 1, comprising the first and second sections set in contrast, had been to challenge the emerging scientific world to recognise his own need of a creative God, whom their specialised language he termed The Almighty Lecture); rather as Freemasons refer to their conception of the Almighty as The Architect Divine. 

There remains to be considered the question of what had finally decided Paine that the time had come to publish his thoughts on religion, as he had been minded to do for a number of years. The obvious answer, the attack in the Convention on foreigners, is not sufficient, for it is apparent that Paine had by then already dispatched his first section (possibly in updated version) to his printer, and the attack on Cloots and himself had only the lesser effect of provoking him into hurried completion of the second section. I now put forward my own answer to this question, which I base on present knowledge of the activities of the French mathematicians who were for years much in the public eye since they were playing an important practical role which had been allocated to them in consequence of their reputation as scientists. And of these activities by far the most important, in the context of this paper, are those of Laplace, the outstanding astronomer, whose theories were widely and openly discussed (with Napoleon in person, for example) and which would have riveted the continuing interest of Paine. 

Laplace was a prolific writer who issued many publications over a period extending at least from 1774 to 1776; he is credited with having brought to its culmination Newton’s theory of gravitation, and in his astronomical research he made extensive use of higher mathematics. In other words, he did not merely propose a theory, he set out to demonstrate mathematically that the natural laws of the universe supported its plausibility. He is strongly associated with a theory that the solar system originated in a mass of rotating gas, which as it cooled from its edges inwards formed the planets and left the rotating sun as the remaining rotating core of the original huge mass of rotating gases. Such a theory, with its on-going complicated mathematical calculations could only have developed over a long period of time; and to Paine, whose conception of God was of a first cause, a theory that antedated the solar system he knew and had studied would have proved endlessly fascinating. But from Paine’s standpoint, Laplace’s philosophy, within which he developed his theories, presented an irresistible challenge. 

Napoleon has been shown above to have taken an interest in Laplace, as he did in any prominent thinker, Thomas Paine included. And as Napoleon was far more than just a military genius, his discussions with thinkers was wide-ranging, as befitted a leader who was to become an outstanding head of state. Boyer recounts that when discussing with Laplace the long-developing theory that the solar system had originated in a rotating mass of gas, Napoleon observed that Laplace included no mention of God. Laplace is said to have replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis”. According to the same sources this attitude of Laplace was not universally held amongst scientists, nor even amongst the members of our celebrated sextet, for Lagrange, on hearing of this interchange between Napoleon and Laplace, is said to have commented in his turn, “Ah, but it is a beautiful hypothesis”. Paine, with his absorbing interest in the theory, and all related aspects, must have become aware (possibly through direct conversations with Laplace) of this deep division between eminent scientific minds, and after observing it he could not possibly have remained a passive onlooker but would have been compulsively driven to contest the spread of atheism by throwing his powers of persuasion against it. 

In this urgent task that he set himself; Paine again conferred to posterity a valuable clue as to the pressure of circumstances leading to his decision to publish The age of Reason he set this out in The Author’s Profession of Faith, which reads to me as his final preface to what we now know as Part I of The Age of reason, but which he originally presented as a complete work contrasting false revelations with newly-appreciated truth. A lesser mind might have sought to present his message as yet another revelation to a single human being, as George Fox had done; Paine, much more humble before his God, saw his role as interpreting the workings of a first cause to all men, not all of whom had yet realised the import of the unravelling of the mysteries of “the starry heavens”, even though they themselves were participating in the unravelling. Paine tells us in the clearest possible terms, “As several of my colleagues, and others of my fellow-citizens of France, have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine…” He does not identify these informants and he does not tell us how they communicated to him their personal creeds. He certainly does not say that they published them or publicly proclaimed them, rather is the tenor of his comment that he received them in a series of private examinations of beliefs during his many discussions with his contemporaries of pressing topics of the hour. Paine acknowledges these differing personal creeds, but he does not reveal or criticise them; he builds upon them. 

Paine was not a remote academician writing for readers of succeeding centuries; he was a living creature of immense vitality acutely observing the essential features of contemporary times, avidly joining in dis..ussion and influencing progress through his eloquent pen; and he seized time by the forelocks when he realised that delay could cost his fellows their right of overt individual approach to God. His first section might well have been composed long before as an overall view in a historical perspective, calling for no urgent presentation and committed to his memory for eventual publication as a last offering to his fellows; it was when his many contacts with influential personages of his day brought realisation that there was em”-ging an on-going battle for the possession of men’s minds and souls that he found himself driven to publish his personal Pilgrims Progress recounting the advancement of knowledge and opening a new approach to God for his fellows.

And amongst his fellows he found widely varying willingness to accompany him upon this new path and a broad division between two distinct lines of thought; there is little doubt in my own mind that these two groups can be typified by the two mathematicians whose comments are recorded above; one, the atheistic brilliant young non-political administratively-incompetent astronomer, Laplace; the other, the slightly older, deistically-inclined Lagrande who shared with Paine the benefit of having lived and worked in three different countries and had enjoyed high contacts in each of them. 

Thomas Paine lived through a series of stirring events of unprecedented importance, none of which were foreseen by even the best-informed of his contemporaries during his youth, but which he came to see as a natural development in the affairs of western peoples; and he himself was no idle spectator of its progress. His participation was continuous, beginning with England, where his efforts have been largely unexplored (except by myself, notably in my papers, ‘The First Excise Period’ and ‘The Methodist Influence’, published in the TPS Bulletin in 1978 and 1979. I hope to add to these in the not-too-distant future). Paine soon saw that the American Revolution was only a beginning which would eventually embrace a revolution in religious thought, as he made clear in his first section of The Age of Reason.

Soon after I had published the pamphlet “Common Sense”, in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it has taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, has so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. 

The revolt of the American colonies, enormously important though it was, was not internal but was directed against a very distant external power (naturally it had some opponents, such as Oldys, who vented his fury through his hostile biography of Paine after retreating across the Atlantic). However, when revolutionary fervour spread to France, the French Revolution took the very different internal form aimed against the domestic government and its supporting factions, amongst which the church stood high. But in this second major revolution Paine took no originating part (other than the example of his American participation), not even in the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion and compulsive articles of faith, although he had long anticipated that such a result would follow internal revolution in government; for the natural impetus of the French Revolution brought about this result without his aid as a natural consequence of its new thinking. Paine merely observed the fulfilment of his expectations, until circumstances forced his active concern with the right of freedom of worship of each individual Frenchman and Frenchwoman, to whom he offered a new revelation which every one of them could accept. And it is to be observed that when Paine later wrote of the opposition provoked by The Age of Reason, he mentioned no dissenters in France. 

It is also to be observed that although Paine’s knowledge of the patterns in the Creation was not extensive, his understanding was wide. Thus although he did not know that the three satellites of Jupiter, lo, Europa and Ganymede, rotate around the planet in 1,77, 3.55 and 7,16 days, almost exactly in ratio 1-2-4, he had already covered this extraordinary circumstance by his observation that the extent of mathematical demonstration in the heavenly bodies is unknown, and while he would not have known of the numerical sequence devised by Leonardo Fibonacci about 1200, and its modern application to questions in botany, he had made an astonishing prescient forecast of the exquisite mechanism…of…vegetable bodies in The Lewes Writings.

Thomas Paine was not by nature a revolutionary; he was a reformer. His early attitude towards both government and religion was benign, and when his early history is finally presented to the public it will at last become apparent that he was originally a conformist. But Paine’s conformity was not blind. He recognised injustices, and when he saw abuses practised by authority, whether civil or ecclesiastic, he exposed them, at first by public speaking, but later by the telling arguments flowing from his fluent pen. That he has become associated with the advocacy or revolution stems from the hostility of established figures to his philosophy (which they resented from a man of his modest birth) and to their great fear of his skilled powers of persuasion by a technique he disclosed in The Lewes Writings, and specifically re-stated in Part 2 of The Age of Reason. Thus, when cognisance of The Age of Reason spread widely from France, high church dignitaries feared sever weakening of their own authority and lies were disseminated to discredit Paine, the visionary who uniquely advocated universal revelation with associated global deism, misrepresenting him as an atheist in a disgraceful attack on his intellectual integrity in order to preserve their own privileges and power. 

But it would be unfair to single out the church alone for lies spread to counter Paine’s influence in revolutionary times; secular England also resorted to invention. The Charter that King John forced upon the rebel barons at Runymede, which they rejected in favour of civil war and the installation of a French usurper, was misrepresented in a myth that the self-seeking barons had protected the people of England, notwithstanding that the Runnymede Charter was never English law, that it disappeared for centuries (until its terms were first published by Blackstone in Paine’s hey-day), and that the real Magna Carla, with its complimentary Charter of the Fares-4 was issued by John’s son in 1216 as his contribution to the evolution of the Charters of Liberty (these facts have also been brought to notice in The Bulletin, and no historian has ever been able to refute them). 

The greatness of The Age of Reason, in my personal opinion, stems from the original publication now called Part I, which was written on a high intellectual level, outclassing the Bible, the New Testament and the Koran, from none of which Paine needed to quote in his exposure of the false bases of many accepted religious tenets. Part 2 certainly has interest, mainly from the further topical and autobiographical disclosures of Paine, but his detailed refutation of biblical text therein has little persisting value, except for those who hanker after religious dispute rather than crvr a basic philosophy of good living. Paine produced a detailed study of the Bible, but he did not examine the Koran, which he had also dismissed earlier in its entirety, and this perhaps was a pity, for had he done so he might have observed that the futility of argument between believers and disbelievers about dogma had been put into rational context by Mahomet centuries before, when he declared: 

O ye UNBELIEVERS! I worship not that which ye worship, And ye do not worship that which I worship; I shall never worship that which ye worship Neither will ye worship that which I worship. To you be your religion; to me be mine.

I began this paper by referring to the common practice of seeing the events of the French revolution in terms of popular fiction, in which heroes save intended victims from the guillotine, a form of swift sure execution introduced for reasons of humanity in substitution for prolonged public sufferings such as those long exhibited at Tyburn. But it can be rationally argued that there is a basis of truth in such tales. And indeed there is, for not all who came under threat perished. The reasons some did not are varied, although no authentic record exists that I know of showing an intended victim surviving through voluntary substitution by a friend who took his place on the scaffold. During the highly publicised Reign of Terror, which all rational minds deplore (although rarely comparing it with the far greater scale of executions by other regimes in our own century), some who thought themselves in danger made their escape from France. Thomas Paine did not, although he enjoyed considerable opportunity for doing so. Even when he saw the prospect of execution looming inexorably before Cloots (who was guillotined) and himself, he devoted himself not to his own preservation but to more intensive pursuit of the cause for which he had remained, the preservation of spiritual freedom. 

Verily truth is stranger than fiction. In fiction heroes offered themselves in substitution for those whom they had warm ties of affection. The emotional affection of Thomas Paine for other people is little known, for he valued his privacy. But Paine foes not seem to have entertained any doubts that his proper course was to continue his life’s work, even though he knew that thereby he was almost certainly condemning himself to the guillotine, because by offering the sacrifice of himself he was simultaneously offering to his fellows through the completion of his great work, a prospect for survival of the better elements of religious belief. 

Note: 

The author offers this paper as a belated supplement to his paper, `Thomas Paine, The Methodist Influence’ (TES Bulletin, 1979. 6.3. 59-78). He freely concedes that some of its points are matters of opinion, but feels it has a logic which merits attention and would welcome independent critical analysis by competent scholars, as he would of his paper, ‘Thomas Paine and the Myth of Magna Carta’ (TES Bulletin. 1982. 7.2. 29-52).

The post Thomas Paine: His Decision To Publish The Age Of Reason appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

“Magna Carta is the first corporate act of the nation roused to its sense of unity.” “The na- tion in general, the people of the towns and villages, the commons of later days….had now thrown themselves on the side of the barons.” “The people….for the first time since the Conquest ranged themselves on the side of the barons against the king. 

– William Stubbs, author of Constitutional History of England (3 vols), 1873-8, as quoted by Edward Jenks in his paper, “The Myth of Magna Carta” (1904). 

STUDENTS OF THE life of Thomas Paine have long been familiar with the wide-spread distortion of fact used to misrepresent his personal character and message, and posterity owes a continuing debt to Moncure Conway for his dispersal of the smokescreen contrived by ‘intimidated historians’ to hide Paine’s true nature from later generations. But Conway’s exposure of the misrepresentation of history has much wider application than the life of Paine, for in order that the intended defamation should be effective and effective it was for a long time it had to be broadly based. 

Recent reading by the present writer now suggests that the propaganda directed against Paine, linked as it was with efforts to counteract early favourable reactions to the French Revolution, included in its scope misrepresentations of earlier periods when the continuous struggle for human rights similarly found expression in public unrest. Of these the most important is the famous confrontation of King John by the barons at Runnymede in 1215, but the confrontation of Richard II by the peasants headed by Wat Tylor at Smithfield also figures prominently. A linking of Paine’s name with the, conventional presentation of the events at Runnymede, which took place more than five hundred years before Paine was born, may appear startlingly unorthodox, but the connection is clear enough to justify the outlining in the present paper of the path to Runnymedd, and the drawing of parallels between two victims of major historical slander, King John and Thomas Paine.

However, since an understandable immediate reaction in the reader’s mind could well be that this thesis is untenable in view of the time-gap of five centuries between the two periods under consideration, it is appropriate to draw attention to a little known fact which clearly indicates how strongly the popular presentation of Runnymede has been conditioned by influential 18th century opinion. The authority for this revelation is the eminent legal commentator, Sir William Blackstone, who, when publishing The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest in 1759, a year when Paine was 22 years of age, disclosed that the terms of the Runnymede charter had never previously been set before the public. Indeed, as we are now able to see, its terms remained unknown, even to the most erudite of historians, for more than four hundred years after the great gathering at Runnymede had dispersed. Blackstone’s opening words to his readers were: 

There is no transaction in the ancient part of our English history more interesting and important than the rise and progress, the gradual mutation, and fi- nal establishment of the charters of liberties, emphatically styled THE GREAT CHARTER AND CHARTER OF THE FOREST; and yet there is none that has been transmitted down to us with less accuracy and historical precision. There is not hitherto extant any full and correct copy of the charter granted by King John.

The character of King John has suffered from misrepresentation even longer than that of Thomas Paine, and as with Paine – a major reason for this injustice has been the revenge taken by the established church, for John continued the process of diminishing excessive ecclesiastical privilege which his father had pursued during his clash of wills with Archbishop Thomas Becket. The early church wielded such enormous secular influence that a priest could commit the most heinous crimes without facing trial in lay courts; such a criminal churchman was answerable only to the church itself, and it was this legal absurdity which was the root of the struggle between Henry II and Becket. This ecclesiastical privilege can now be set into historical perspective by a twentieth century parallel; Paul Scharfe, legal head of Hitler’s SS, declared that, no State Court… had the right to judge an SS man; this was the sole prerogative of SS judges and SS superior officers!¹ 

Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury and chief ecclesiastical opponent of the king during the civic unrest in John’s reign, was appointed by Pope Innocent III over the head of the King. Langton knew little of England, having spent most of his adult life acquiring fame as a scholar in France and Italy, and his appointment was resisted by John until the long dispute between king and pope was resolved through the efforts of a special papal emissary, Pandulf, who thereafter figured prominently amongst John’s entourage. Innocent, who thus acquired a permanent highly-placed representative at the English court, learned in the ensuing years that he had made a serious mistake in appointing Langton, and he endeavoured to minimise the consequences of his error during the last part of his papacy by holding Langton indefinitely in Rome. But the death of Innocent on July 16, 1216, shortly before the death of John on October 18, 1216, permitted Langton to resume his position as overlord of the church in England, and to exert tremendous pressure on church functionaries; these later included the authors of manuscripts long accepted as authentic annals of the 13th century, but now largely discounted. In John’s day, churchmen enjoyed a near-monopoly of literacy, and even merchants trying to set up commercial records needed their assistance, a circumstance which caused the word clerk to denote both bookkeepers and churchmen. By a quirk of history there was no annalist active during John’s reign, and the ecclesiastical annals were compiled after his death by cloistered scribes lacking personal knowledge of the major events of the reign, who set down accounts fed to them by visitors to their monasteries. A well-known example of their virulence is the comment of Matthew Paris, a monk of St. Alban’s:

“Foul as it is, hell is defiled by the fouler presence of John.”

It has not been until well into the 20th century that the prejudices against John implanted by Matthew Paris and his ilk have been outgrown, but even today it does not seem to be generally appreciated that their excessively-biassed accounts cannot rationally be regarded as distorted only when speaking of the king. The re-appraisal of John, now in progress, needs to be accompanied by a complementary re-appraisal of his chief opponent in England, Archbishop Langton. 

Henry II, first of the Angevin kings. of England, hailed from the French pro- vince of Anjou, and already ruled over other major areas of France when he completed his Angevin empire on absconding the throne of England after the death of King Stephen in 1154. John was Henry’s youngest and favourite son, born unexpectedly to a queen in her mid-forties after Henry, believing his family to be complete, had already allocated his empire amongst his older sons. Thus John, in infancy, was dubbed Jean-Sans-Terre, which historians have translated and preserved as John Lackland, although it was a foolish sobriquet with which to burden a future king who by the age of nine had become one of the greatest land-owners in his father’s dominions. Henry II is recognised as one of the great kings of England, specially notable for his introduction of a nation- wide system of common law which progressively supplanted feudal law as it was carried into the shires by travelling judges appointed by the king for this purpose. By 1181, by his Assize of Arms, Henry made another notable advance in the social progress of Englishmen by conferring upon the small but steadily- growing class of freemen en enhanced status. Henry required every freeman to furnish himself with arms and hold himself in readiness tó support the royal standard if called upon to do so, thus creating a new national militia (with greater substance than the ancient Saxon fyrd) which the king could call into being in any area of England where he needed temporary armed support. 

This new militia was summoned directly by the king through his own royal officials, the sheriffs of the shires, and it was thus quite distinct from the feudal levies which the lords of the manors could raise. Henry’s subsequent summonses gave his freemen military experience, and he ensured the permanence of their martial spirit by requiring them to bequeath their arms to their sons. Feudalism was never notable for inculcating national spirit, for its kings were sometimes little more than the strongest amongst many nobles, who could not easily dissuade groups of their erstwhile followers from forming opposing armed camps. English barons, who already chafed under the greater feudal power acquired by William I on parcelling out England after the Conquest, and the diminution of their local power as feudal law declined under Henry, were now further disquieted by the emergence of an independent permanently armed yeomanry in areas they had regarded as their personal preserves, John, who spent much time with his father, probably received special tutelage in Henry’s policies and their application, and he too called upon this militia in times of need. Thus in 1213, only two years before Runnymede, he called out the freemen of the southern counties when he was girding England against a possible French invasion. But there was to be a gap of ten years after the death of Henry before his favourite son took his place, and those years witnessed the very different regal policies of Richard I. 

The brothers Richard and John were as different as they have been depicted, yet neither king has been accurately described in popular history: While John has been held to typify all that was evil, Richard has been lauded as the embodiment of chivalry, but the mask of chivalry hid an ugly face. At Acre, during the crusades, Richard callously butchered more than two thousand hostages in sight of the Saracen tents, and in England he hanged Englishmen in front of Nottingham Castle to induce its garrison to surrender. During his ten-year reign he spent only a few months in England, but inflicted continuous harsh taxation upon the English to fund his military adventures abroad. To raise money, he sold every property, office and privilege for which he could find an affluent buyer. Scotland bought independence from him for ten thousand marks, and whole counties of England were sold for exploitation by their purchasers. It is to his reign that tradition understandably attributes the exploits of the legendary Robin Hood against the oppressive sheriff. But the heaviest levy the English people ever endured was inflicted on them after Richard, through foolhardiness, had allowed himself to be captured; then every Englishman of substance suffered a levy of one quarter of the value of his goods and rents, as a contribution towards the king’s ransom. 

Consequently, John inherited the crown of England along with the vast resentment provoked by Richard’s excessive taxation, and baronial resentment included opposition both to military service abroad in the service of the king, and also to payment of soutage (or shield money) which had become the traditional alternative payable in lieu of service in arms. It was John’s demand for scutage in 1214, a demand quite legitimately made in accordance with the customs of the times, which was to be the spark causing the long-smanouldering resentment of the barons to flare up in a revolt by a minority of their number. 

John was a capable and successful military commander, who also displayed great naval foresight by laying the foundation of the future of the future Royal Navy. He shared the fierce Angevin temperament, which could find expression in outbursts of violent rage as well as in energetic and determined pursuit of an aim, but first and foremost John was a negotiator who did not resort to force unless he had exhausted the possibilities for resolving difficulties by peaceful means. This characteristic earned him another nick-name from his barons, John Softsword; centuries later another famous national leader was to epitomise this attitude: jaw-jaw is better than war-war. 

John soon had good reason to feel pleased with his policy of diplomacy, for at the end of the first year of his reign he seemed stronger on the continent than Richard had appeared after ten years of conflict. John now turned his attention to England, and at once embarked upon a new pattern of kingship. His novel technique called for greater contact and confidence between monarch and common people than had ever previously existed; John achieved this by long journeys across the length and breadth of his kingdom in all seasons of the year. His subjects soon became aware of the greater royal interest in their lives, and they quickly reciprocated; when John elected to sit on the bench of local courts along his way, his initiative drew numerous appeals from his more humble subjects as soon as it became known that small disputes as well as great ones could now be submitted to royal jurisdiction. 

John’s extensive and arduous journeys could not have been accomplished had he remained burdened with the extensive train of royal officials who had accompanied previous kings. John, therefore, hived off many officials to permanent quarters in London where they employed the Great Seal to authenticate degrees issued under his directions; he introduced a small Privy Seal for business personally conducted in the shires. Because he fully appreciated the need to retain adequate supervision of the newly separated bureaucracy, he required the permanent officials to keep detailed records on permanent rolls which he scrutinised on his return to London. It is from modern study of these rolls a much more demanding task than facile reading of distorted annals that reassessment of John’s kingship is being made. And these new studies have revealed that John employed a system of authenticating important instructions by confidential countersigns known only to himself and his trusted dignitaries; for obvious reasons these were not written down, and we have learned of them only because occasions arose when they could not, be operated as arranged, but were operated inversely by being overtly declared and cancelled; thus John might order that a messenger need no longer produce a pre-designated royal ring before an instruction was put into operation. The importance of this royal and secret system cannot be over-emphasised in consideration of the later events of John’s reign, notably Runnymede, for it means that John had ample time during the earlier stages of the dispute to arrange with key sheriffs that any instructions issued under duress (or other circumstances rendering them illegal) would not be put into practice unless confidential counter-signs, unknown to the rebels, were also employed by the king. John used this system from the early days of his reign, and that he did so is another example of his exceptional administrative skill in the particularly difficult art of kingship in feudal times, when the loyalties of lesser nobles were notoriously fickle. 

Feudalism operated through interlocking alliances at all levels of society, cemented by paths of fealty. These had first been devised in an endeavour to combat invaders, such as the early Vikings, but in later times the more important feudal alliances arose from military truces, and reflected the balance of power at the cessation of hostilities. Such feudal arrangements persisted as long as that balance lasted, but when a lesser party saw a promising opportunity he frequently revoked his oath, and the greater party would then attempt to re-impose a new agreement under a fresh oath. But continually changing local relationships could make this process lengthy, and sometimes centuries passed before a major relationship could be effectively restored.² 

Henry IIs vast possessions in France came to him through parentage and marriage, and the conventional term Angevin empire is misleading; he was no emperor, but ruled each of his separate French provinces individually as a duke or count, and he owed fealty for every one of them, directly or indirectly, to the King of France, whose over-riding ambition was to regain control of them all and re-unite France under direct royal authority. Henry’s great problem, which his sons inherited, was to maintain control of each separate province although necessarily absent from it for long periods during which unrest was skilfully fomented by the French king. During the long contest of royal ambitions, meetings took place from time to time between the rival kings to re-negotiate their feudal relationship; but the tide of history flowed with the kings of France. Although nobles and knights would rally behind their liege lord to repel an invader from their home territory, they increasingly declined to support him in regions other than their own, and this growing resistance was a European phenomenon, influencing · French nobles as well as English barons. No-where was its effect to be more strikingly illustrated than in Normandy, notwithstanding its strong historical ties with England. 

In the year 911, Charles the Simple, King of France, had ceded control of the province to the Viking chieftain Rollon under the treaty of St. Clair sur Epte which established Rollon as Duke of Normandy, but as a vassal of the King of France. Strong resident Norman dukes had no difficulty in retaining their dominant position, but after the Conquest the personal authority of the duke and chief nobles became much more variable as the affairs of England and other autonomous regions absorbed more of their attention. By Angevin times, the duke was no longer Norman, and his forces were increasingly mercenaries who further estranged the Norman people, and correspondingly strengthened the old attachment to the French crown. It was John’s lot to be Duke or Normandy when increasing rever- sion to the French cause tipped the balance, and restored to Phillip Augustus in 1204 the province wrested from the French king three centuries before. 

No one saw more clearly than John the trend underlying his loss of Normandy; no one appreciated more keenly than he the need to re ?n the loyalty of his nobles if his position elsewhere was to be retained. Preservation of his nobles’ oaths of fealty became his over-riding concern; he watched vigilantly for signs of disaffection and strove to remedy any justified grievances; any rebel who resumed fealty was generously welcomed back into the fold. In the international field too, co-operation became his strategy, as he showed when he endeavoured to stem the tide of French success by engineering a pincer movement against the French king which merits an important place in the history of English military development. John himself headed a successful campaign from Poitou, but his allies failed in the complimentary offensive through Flanders. Once again John conferred as a great French noble with the King of France, and returned to England with the promise of five years peace between them. He was to devote the rest of his life to an endeavour to unite the English people behind their king in an increasingly just society with greater human rights for all. 

It was to be the tragedy of John’s reign that his vision of the new England was to be anathema to a minority of his lesser nobles, who could envisage nothing finer than a land of small domains where the common people lived as serfs of the lords of the manors. Dissident nobles, honk after greater privileges protected by royal guarantees against reform, and further bolstered by feudal powers to coerce upstart serfs in their own local courts. One of the great thorns in their flesh was the presence of the independent armed freeman, whom they yearned to reduce to subservience to themselves if they could. But a freeman now enjoyed a water-tight legal defence against the re-imposition of serfdom; once he had taken his oath to the king as a member of the royal militia, no noble could set aside in a local court the freeman’s royally sanctioned independence.³ And it was to become a major objective of the rebel barons to force the king to abandon his direct link with the freemen, and to make him order them to transfer their allegiance back to the local lords. 

As individuals, rebellious barons could do very little against the strong Angevin king, and before they could muster effective opposition as a group they needed an astute and determined leader. Such a leader was supplied unwittingly by Innocent III in the person of Stephen Langton. For years Langton had been excluded from Canterbury by John’s opposition, and in the course of time his resentment against the king had hardened into hatred; once Langton donned the archbishop’s robes after the reconciliation between John and Innocent, he lost no time in organising the baronial resentment against the king. Innocent realised in time that the baronial revolt against John had taken on substance only after Langton had acceded to Canterbury.⁴ He was later to suspend Langton from office, and was dissuaded from dismissing him only by the influence of senior papal advisors. But it took considerable time before a pope could be convinced of the necessity to reverse an attitude previously supported with. tenacity, and during the period of time necessary for Innocent to change his mind, events occurred which have been amongst the most misrepresented in English history. 

It is likely that John saw from the outset of his new relationship with Innocent that admission of Lanton to Canterbury involved a serious threat, for he followed up the reconciliation with a swift master-stroke, which makes strange reading to modern eyes; as King of England, John voluntarily surrendered his realm to the pope, receiving it back in fief as a papal vassal. To understand the brilliance of John’s manoeuvre, it is necessary to appreciate that the feudal oath he exchanged with Innocent’s proxy, sub-deacon Pandulf, cemented a feudal alliance which bound Innocent to support John equally as it bound John to support Innocent. In John’s day there was nothing unusual in a ruler being a vassal; Henry II, Richard and John were all vassals of the French king, Henry had been a vassal of the pope as had been Willian the Conqueror, and a few years earlier the supposedly indomitable Richard the Lionheart had surrendered England to the Emperor of Germany in fealty, as part of the price he paid for release from captivity.⁵ All the barons of England already accepted the pope as their spiritual overlord, and none saw cause to object to the new relationship entered into by John. Pope and king both faithfully complied with the terms of their reciprocal oath, and to assist in the smooth operation of this co-operation, Pandulf, the Pope’s proxy, seems to have been given a special commission which enabled him to shuttle between London and Rome as a confidant promoting continuous understanding and co-operation. 

The great world-wide importance accorded human rights in our own day has tended to represent the struggle for personal liberty as a characteristic of the 20th century, but in England individual liberty has been the subject of a continuous struggle stretching back into our history. Anglo-Saxon kings had sworn a tri-partite coronation oath promising their people just government, and the Norman kings had continued this practice. At the beginning of his reign, Henry I issued the first charter of liberties which has survived in English constitutional history; it is not an extensive document, but is notable for regal promises to quash all ‘evil customs’ and revive the legal standards of Edward the Confessor, who had come to be regarded by nobles smarting under the Norman yoke as the embodiment of a just ruler. Although this early charter had survived in English archives, few English nobles would have been familiar with its terms during the next hundred years during which illiteracy was normal even in the higher ranks of laic society; and when Langton theatrically flourished a copy before an assembly of the discontented barons, the emotional appeal of a sentimental return to the halcyon past, with all evils customs abolished, had a great effect upon his dupes.It was to be a little while before they realised this document, which few except the archbishop could read, promised them little beyond an obligation to serve their king in arms in return for freedom from taxation borne by non-military subjects. But it provided an excellent starting point for their deluded campaign against John,for in the selfish view of both ecclesiastic and laic lords, John had introduced ‘evil customs’ which certainly had not been practised in the days of Edward. For example, when assessing (in accordance with the reconciliation agreement) the financial compensation due to the church for revenues from vacant sees, who could say from personal experience the true extent of losses suffered. Even worse, the ‘wicked’ king had decreed that his Great Council of the (word lost) should be enlarged by the admittance of lesser men from each shiro to proffer advice to the Crown; to some historians, this order of John’s dates from the beginning of English parliamentarianism, but to the reactionary barons it introduced an ‘evil custom’ of unparallelled magnitude which threatened the very basis of their entrenched privileges. 

When John retumed from Poitou in 1214, and demanded scutage from those nobles who had declined to follow him in arms a perfectly legitimate demand by accepted practice the dissidents, schooled by Langton in the king’s absence, refused to pay, and some of their representative insolently appeared before the king in full armour. John could easily have responded to their show of armed resistance by crushing them by force, as his father had crushed previous revolts; but John was not seeking their humiliation, but their allegiance. He played for time, hoping for reconciliation through two sided discussion, and there ensued a lengthy period of negotiation conducted by intermediaries, amongst whom Langton was prominent; and the barons became increasingly truculent under the archbishop’s influence. John, reading the signs. with his customary acumen, further strengthened his claim on papal support by taking the cross as a crusader. Just as British servicemen were guaranteed their jobs when called to the colours during the second world war, so a crusader was guaranteed retention of his domestic situation by the Church; respect for this papal guarantee throughout Europe had been a major factor in saving Richard I from the loss of his continental domains during his absence abroad. Communication with Rome was conducted by the rebels also, but they were not interested in following the pope’s advice that they should resolve their differences by arbitration under papal chairmanship, an offer which John made to them. 

The minority of the baronage which had rebelled against the king assembled in arms carly in 1215 and sent demands which he dismissed as calling for his surrender of his crown. Under a leader grandiloquently styled Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church – an indirect admission that they were ranged behind Langton since Innocent certainly did not support their insurrection, they marched against Northampton Castle, and impotently squatted before its walls for weeks before moving to another castle held by a sympathiser who opened its gates. In search for easy revenues, the rebels now headed for London and its warehouses, and now they met with a stroke of great good luck the wealthy London merchants saw no profit in waging civil war in defence of the king, but discerned the prospect of tax-reduction if they joined the rebels in a joint attempt to limit the king’s power to demand revenue. Secret emissaries from the merchants informed the barons when the gates of London would be open, and the rebels marched unopposed into the capital, Thereafter the Mayor of London figured amongst the rebel leaders, and reduction of royal power to tax London and other towns was added to the list of rebel demands. 

John was never again to enter London, and in his chancery there, took into his hand his Great Seal of the Kingdom. His Great Seal disappeared; how, when and why, remained unanswered questions. John bided his tino quietly in the shires, still the undisputed ruler of the majority of the baronage, and the great bulk of his people; and there he had ample time to arrange with trusted sheriffs and other loyal subjects whatever safeguards and secret counter-signs he deemed necessary. He sent an invitation to the rebels to meet him at the ancient consulting field of Runnymede, and after some delaying they came – supported by a host of thousands. John met them with only a handful of advisers, and then by force of personality and brilliant kingship won a great victory for his people. He even turned their vast military strength into a factor telling against them, for the enormous disparity in numbers ensured that in any future impartial appraisal of the outcome John might be held to have been constrained by the illegal use of force to make the concessions he granted in the course of feudal bargaining. 

A digression is now necessary to comment on two important factors in the situat- ion which have received scant attention in conventional accounts. The first is the special role played by Pandulf, the shadowy papal diplomat so influentially placed between king and pontiff, whose name occupies an important place in the documents of Runnymede. It was Pandulf who was to suspend Langton, and later defeat him in an argument before the pope in Rome. In 1214 Pandulf had been appointed bishop-elect of Norwich, but reluctant to put himself in a position subservient to Langton caused him to delay taking up his appointment for many years. No biographer has yet risen to the challenge of adequately presenting the career of this remarkable man, whose origins remain obscure, but who was to rise to become the effective (and highly efficient) ruler of England during the minority of John’s son, Henry III. Pandulf died in Rome but so strong was his connection with England that his body was carried across Europe to interment in his own cathedral of Norwich.⁶ We need to know a great deal more about Pandulf, the pope’s proxy, and of his communications with Innocent, both by letter and in person, before an adequate account of the Runnymede saga can be written. 

The second factor is the curious history of the documents of Runnymede, which were never invested with legal authority, but are of great importance as witnesses to the magnificent battle waged by John to advance the social security of his common people. These documents survived partly through luck, and partly through the activities of Sir Robert Cotton, one-time M.P. for Thetford, the birthplace of Thomas Paine. Cotton achieved such a great nation-wide reputation as a collector. of historic documents, that any which turned up were sent to him almost as a matter of course. And in due time his collection was passed to the British Museum at its foundation in 1753. 

On January 1, 1629, Cotton received from a certain Humphrey Wyems, of the Inner Temple, the first copy of John’s charter to turn up; where it had lain for the past four hundred years is not known. In 1630 he received from the Warden of Dover Castle a second copy, which bore what seems to have been a small seal, perhaps John’s Privy Seal, but after surviving the centuries without damage it was rendered ille- gible by a fire in Cotton’s which melted the seal into an unrecognisable Both these copies had amendments added below the main text, but two further exemplifications which were later found in cathedral archives at Lincoln and Salisbury had the amendments fully incorporated into the text which was more carefully written, presumably by scribes no longer writing under pressure. But the Salisbury copy soon disappeared again, and Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, who had been granted special facilities to pursue his own historical studies, was suspected of purloining it. But Burnet had come into possession of another, and more important document, now known as the Articles of the Barons; it is permanently exhibited in the British Library, but there is no known corroboration of the general belief that the impression of John’s Great Seal which is exhibited beside it was originally attached at its base.⁷

One further important document has surfaced; it remained in oblivion for so long that when it was found in the Public Records Office in London in 1893 it was called The Unknown Charter of Liberties. The title was apt, for it had been published in France thirty years earlier, yet remained unknown to English historians who had always neglected John’s continental position in their pursuit of him as the evil English king. 

Thus there are four main documents that figure prominently in the Runnymede story the originating Charter of Liberties of Henry I, which has always been available to scholars, and the three main documents dating from John’s reign, the Unknown Charter, the Articles of the Barons, and John’s Charter, which were all lost for centuries and have been rediscovered in reverse chronological order. The present paper enjoys the great advantage of treating them in their correct order. 

The reality of their situation had begun to dawn upon the rebels as they squatted impotently before the walls of Northampton Castle, passing the weeks in gloomy assessment of their weak military position, and discussing possible sources of support. Whilst help from Scotland and Wales was welcome, by far the most effective ally in the field would be Phillip Augustus, the king of France, who was known to have prepared an invasion of England only a short time before. But Phillip now needed an inducement before he would revive his plan of invasion, and so to the French king went the Unknown Charter as an indication of the concession the rebels hoped to wring from John, and the benefits such concession would confer on Phillip. Of particular interest to him would have been limitation of the rate of scutage levied to fund John’s war chest, and restrictions of baronial support to armed campaigns in Normandy and Brittany. Such constraints on John would greatly have increased Phillip’s chances of regaining regal control of the regions of France still held by John. But Phillip was precluded from supplying armed assistance to the rebels (no matter how fervently he wished them success), by the papal guarantee to crusaders which required him to respect John’s position at the time of donning the Crusaders’ Cross.

The style of the Unknown Charter is of considerable interest. It is prefaced by a copy of the Charter of Liberties of Henry I, and then begins, ‘Concedit Rex Johannes…..,’ which may be translated, ‘King John concedes…. Thus the Unknown Charter, as in the Charter of Liberties of Henry I which served as a model, the king speaks in the first person singular, but the royal plural had become standard legal practice during the reign of Richard;⁸ the Unknown Charter, therefore, was not drafted by a hand versed in the legal terminology used in John’s chancery. 

As negotiations between king and rebels continued, and particularly after the unexpected surrender of London gave the rebel confidence a temporary boost (which induced them to issue an unsuccessful nation-wide appeal to uncommitted nobles and towns to join them in revolt), the Unknown Charter was displaced as the expression of rebel aims by a more exhaustive document which increased its scope as the arguments developed. It was drawn up. by a more clever mind, and written by a more practiced scribe. From its separate heading (usually translated as ‘these are the Articles that the barons seek and the King concedes’) this document has acquired its conventional title, The Articles of the Barons. It is a very informative document which, to date, has been too little studied. 

There are several distinctive features of the Articles which mark its difference from the prevailing form of charters. It is a lengthy strip of parchment, 21 inches long and 10 inches wide, and whereas charters were written in a continuous text without paragraphs, the Articles comprises forty-nine separated items; they are unnumbered, but nowadays are usually treated as numbered in sequence, for ease of reference. The handwriting appears uniform, but the ink varies in intensity from one section to another, strongly suggesting that the document was built up by the addition of groups of items over a period of time. The calligraphy is good, and the Latin scholarly, but again the style is not that of John’s chancery, for the king is made to figure in the third person. The probability is that the document was prepared by a scholar who had not kept in touch with the development of English regal expression. Stephen Langton, who had been out of England when the royal plural was introduced during Richard’s reign, is a strong candidate for authorship, but the text may have been inscribed by one of his scribes at his dictation. 

The most important feature of the Articles is a considerable gap near the bottom, beneath which appears only one item, the last; this is the ‘security clause,’ set at the base to ensure that it covered all the items which might be inscribed above it. The addition of further ideas ceased before the available space had been used up, and this gives an important indication of the point in the argument between king and rebels at which the phase represented by the Articles reached its conclusion. The security clause obviously was inscribed at an earlier date, for had it been the last item to be written there would have been no gap above it.It is a long and complicated clause, produced by much thought and careful choice of words, and designed to ensure that it remained applicable in a variety of subsequent circumstances. Its importance is very great indeed as an indication of the rebel position before the confrontation at Runnymede was arranged, yet it has rarely been reproduced in a form comprehensible to the general reader. It would certainly be an instructive exercise if it could be ascertained what percentage of the readers of the present paper were previously familiar with its terms, and for this reason it is here reproduced in full in translation: 

This is the form of the security for observing peace and the liberties between the king and the realm. The barons shall choose twenty-five barons of the realm, whom they will, who should with all their power observe, keep and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties which the king mth granted, and confirmed by this charter; so that if the king or his justiciaries, or the king’s bailiffs, or any of his servants, offend against any one in any particular, or transgress and of the articles of peace and security, and the offence be shown to four barons out of the twenty-five aforesaid barons, these four barons shall go to our lord king or his justiciary, if the king be without the realm, declaring to him the misdeed, and they shall pray of him that the misdeed shall be corrected without delay; and if the king or his justiciary does not correct it, if the king be without the realm, within a reasonable time to be fixed in the charter, the aforesaid four shall bring that case to the remainder of the twenty-five barons, and these twenty-five, with the commonality of the whole realm, shall distrain and distress the king in allways that they can, to wit, by the capture of his castles, lands, possessions, and in other ways that they can, until right be done according to their will, the person of the king, the queen, and his children being saved, and when it be corrected they shall obey the lord king as before; and whoever of the land wills, shall swear that he will obey the commands of the aforesaid twenty-five barons to carry out the aforesaid, and will distress the king as much as he can with his, and the king shall publicly and freely give leave to swear to anyone who wishes to swear, and shall forbid none from swearing; but all those of his own land who of their own accord and by themselves will not swear to the twenty-five barons about distraining and distressing the king with them, the king shall cause them to swear to his command as is aforesaid. Also if any of the aforesaid twenty- five barons dies, or quits the land, or be restrained in any other way from. ‘following out the aforesaid, those who remain of the twenty-five shall elect another into his place at their discretion, who shall be sworn in the same way as the others were. In all matters which are committed to these twenty-five barons to be carried out, if by chance these twenty-five are present and disagree on any topic, or any of them when summoned will not come, or are unable to be present, that shall be had to be decided and fixed which the greater part of them has provided or ordained, just as if the whole twenty-five had agreed; and the aforecased twenty-five shall swear that they will faithfully observe all the aforesaid, and to the best of their power cause them to be observed. Besides, the king shall keep them secure by the charters of the archbishop and bishops, and Master Pandulf, that he will get nothing from our lord pope, by which any of these engagements shall be revoked or diminished, and, if he shall seek to obtain any such thing, it shall be deemed void and vain, and have no effect.⁹

By this verbose but carefully-worded security clause, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, sought to shackle King John, attempting to coerce the monarch by the threat of the military power of the rebel barons he headed; and this rebel power was to be reinforced (he planned), by oaths of fealty to the twenty-five – voluntarily given or enforced from the common people, including the freemen who were thereby to lose their freedom from baronial domination acquired by royal guarantee when enlisting in the royal militia. This absurd committee of twenty-five rebels, chosen from the ranks of the declared enemies of the king, answerable only to themselves, and self-invested with almost unlimited powers to humiliate the crown, was to decide on its own authority what constituted an offence and how severe was to be the retribution exacted. And when its members were not actively punishing the king for an alleged unproven offence, they were to pretend to be his loyal subjects for as long as this suited them. The whole security clause bespeaks the delusions of a scholar dreaming of temporal power, but totally unversed in the practical problems of formulating and enforcing legislation in times when any considerable nobleman could call upon his personal army to back him in rebellion arising from personal pique. 

Dimly, through his crazy vision, Langton glimpsed the power of the pope, the feudal overlord of England. Displaying ineptitude as a practical churchman, he sought to isolate John from the protection of Innocent by requiring his bishops to join him in guaranteeing that any intervention by the supreme pontiff should be “void and vain, and have no effect.” But Pandulf was not yet the bishop of Norwich, he had not accepted the yoke of Canterbury, he remained the pope’s man, true to his master, and incorruptible by the archbishop’s blandishments. No moral course was open to Pandulf other than to report fully to Innocent on the proposed three-part pact, to be incorporated into a royal charter, whereby the church was to act as guarantor of arrangements illegally extracted from the crown by the rebels under threat of duress. And John, the possessor of the keenest administrative brain in England, was perfectly well aware of the impracticability of the security clause, and of the tremendous bargaining power it conferred upon him in his negotiations with the rebels. When the pope later set the charter aside as he was bound to annul such an affront to his overlordship – the revocation would be made by papal, not regal, authority; but the barons would remain bound in principle to any arrangement they had made of their own free will, since revocation of the agreement would not have come from them. 

Once the silly security clause was known to have been incorporated into the still growing text of the Articles, John was master of the situation and could bargain from a very flexible position for the ends he sought, namely the resumption by the rebels of their oaths of allegiance after agreement had been registered, and a guarantee of the continuing social advancement of the common people, upon whom(as John had long discerned) the security of the crown was increasingly coming to rest. It is with this situation in mind, and with the benefit of hindsight, that the Articles may now be examined as the basis for the great concourse which gathered at Runnymede at John’s invitation. 

The Articles begin with a section devoted to the long-debated feudal rights over heirs and widows; they progress into legal procedures and the increasing part played by the king’s court in determining disputes; guarantees to merchants and freemen are followed by financial clauses including control of taxation; and after a section relaxing John’s disciplinary hold over his adversaries, appears at last the clause that deserves to be permanently sculpted in the green field of Runnymede as the nation’s grateful, but belated, tribute to an outstanding leader and defender of his people. For it is an unprecedented and revolutionary clause, introducing a new era for the commonality of England and severely curbing the autocratic nobility which had for so long held the great bulk of the people in thrall. 

This last clause to be inscribed into the Articles marks the conclusion of the pre-Runnymede phase of the bargaining; it expressed the critical concession wrested from the rebels by the king, upon receiving which John decided that the moment had come for an invitation to a formal meeting at Runnymede at which the Articles should be transcribed into a royal charter, a charter which, though itself bound to be swiftly set aside, would initiate a new basis from which the social status of his people would advance. It is a clause which establishes King John as the predecessor of Thomas Paine, as the crusader for the Rights of Man in feudal times as Paine crusaded in the same cause under the Hanoverians. It is a clause identified, to date, only by the number 48 adduced to its position on a. parchment sheet; but it merits a title commensurate with its importance. It is now suggested that it become known as the Equity Clause. Translated from the form in which it was expressed by John’s chancery, it reads: 

All these customs and liberties that we have granted shall be observed in our kingdom in so far as concerns our own relations with our subjects. Let all men in our kingdom, whether clergy or laymen, observe them similarly in their relations with their own men.¹⁰

No longer was liberty to be a concession to the privileged; whatever the nobles obtained for themselves they should henceforth bestow upon their own men. Never before had so few simple words presaged such a profound advancement in the social standing of the common people of England. Notwithstanding the qualifications and vicissitudes that were yet to come, King John had lit a lamp that was to light his people out of mediaeval serfdom long before similar freedom was acquired by the commonalty of other European countries. Men like Wat Tyler would still need to throw down the gauntlet to resisting authority, and shed their blood for their cause, but the determination of authority to withstand their just demands had already been undermined by John in an undertaking that was to endure. 

There was no call for John to seal the Articles, which were but the basis for a charter that was yet to be drawn up, as the security clause made clear; if the Great Seal was ever attached at the base, this was probably done in the London chancery where the seal was normally kept, and which was now under rebel control. The next act in the drama was to take place at Runnymede, where the charter was to be agreed. 

The Runnymede Charter, which Blackstone with his immense authority termed merely the charter granted by King John, bears at its conclusion the date June 15, 1215, but by the practice of the times this made clear that only on this date was the great conference in session.¹¹ It was to continue over many days, and during that time the forty-nine items of the Articles were reviewed and re-drawn as necessary by the chancery draftsmen, who expanded them into a continuous text which modern commentators have broken down into no less than sixty-three separated items. There were notable alterations, but the king’s domination of the situation is clear; there is no suggestion of the concessions being extracted to the advantage of the baronial class, the charter is designed as a grant of liberties to all free men of the kingdom and their heirs, from John and his heirs, in perpetuity. There are concessions to the disappointed rebels and their allies, the London merchants; London alone is cited as entitled to reasonable levies of taxation, the other towns which declined to follow London’s lead receiving no mention; and the general council of the realm which is to approve taxation levies is to be drawn from the major dignitaries of the realm, the lesser men from the shires no longer being summoned. But the Equity Clause is maintained, being merely re-expressed in formal legal terms. Justice for the great is to be mirrored in justice for the commonalty. John would brook no relaxation of his great principle of equal justice under the crown throughout the realm. 

The security clause, no longer last but numbered 61 out of 63, was modified, for royal cognisance could not be given to the delusion that Pandulf might be called upon to obstruct communication between king and pope, since Pandulf himself has accepted (as the pope’s proxy) John’s oath of fealty to Innocent and Innocent’s successors that: “Their harm, if I know it, I will strive to remove, and do it if I can; otherwise, as soon as I can, I will communicate, or tell to such a person, as I certainly believe will tell it to them.” Instead the security clause now incorporated a general undertaking that John would not seek, directly or indirectly, to have the charter revoked. John had no need of such action, its revocation by Innocent was inevitable, and had probably already been initiated by Pandulf. But Pandulf’s name still appeared, in the following clause, this time as guarantor that John would take no punitive action against the rebels for their actions between Easter and the restoration of peace; there would have been nothing for Pandulf to do had peace been restored, for John was ever generous to rebels who recanted and resumed feudal allegiance to him as their king.¹²

But there was to be no peace, only a temporary lull in the conflict, even though John sealed the Runnymede Charter, probably with the Privy Seal he carried with him into the shires, for the tapes that remain attached to the original charter are not long enough to accept his Great Seal, and the mass of the fire-melted wax suggests that it was only large enough to accept the impression of a much smaller seal. 

Any belief that, at Runnymede, John was coerced by the great rebel army into making peace on their terms, fades as the facts of the situation emerge from the false legend. Modern scholars, even those still bemused by the prejudice that John was an evil king, now concede that before the end of the conference they had begun to slink away. Disgusted by their lack of success against the seemingly-defenceless king, they sulkily refused to re-take their oaths of fealty to him. An alarmed Langton now saw his dream of power dissolving as the prospect of renewed unity faded, for he could not hope to exercise power from the king’s shadow, through the committee of twenty-five (now nominated as twenty four rebels and the Mayor of London), if that committee did not conform to his basic concept of being the king’s men except when adjudicating against him. 

In a desperate attempt to revive his dream of power, Langton called upon the rebels to resume fealty to the king; it was to be one of his last acts as John’s archbishop, and it was ineffective. Instead of gathering again into a composite group under the king, easily influenced by the archbishop from his as one of the greatest dignitaries of the realm, the rebels stood aside and watched as Langton was himself deprived of his position, and with it his capacity to fish in troubled waters. Innocent moved strongly against the rebels, and when Langton failed to comply with the papal directive he was suspended by Pandulf, notwithstanding that the archbishop was on the point of setting out for Rome. He was never to return during John’s reign. 

A number of copies of the Runnymede Charter were distributed, but if they had any effect it was to confirm that John remained in control; no action followed in the shires, probably because the authorising counter-signs had not been sent out with the charter. On June 27, John went so far as to decree the seizure of the lands of any who declined to swear allegiance to the twenty-five; he could have issued a hundred such decrees without any action being taken in the absence of the counter-signs. But John, in his capacity as king, made great concessions to the rebels, even seriously weakening his own military position in the process, in an endeavour to draw them back to his side. It was in vain, the twenty-five members of the committee were now absorbed in formulating demands against the king, each for himself, and none for the realm. The outcome was inevitable. In the face of continuing rebel obstinacy and selfishness, John re-grouped his military forces, and the civil war he had striven to avoid came to pass. The rebels remained based on London; the king held all the major fortresses, including Dover Castle, where, as he now lacked the facilities of the London chancery, he seems to have deposited the sealed Runnymede Charter. 

John’s military successes against the rebels soon demonstrated that he could have crushed their revolt with ease, had he not been minded to seek their return to his standard through negotiation. But soon an ugly new development complicated the situation; Phillip Augustus had devised a means of circumventing the papal guarantee to John as a crusader! An absurd claim was made that John was not the rightful king of England, and a pretender was put forward – Phillip’s son, Prince Louis. The pretender’s claim deceived no-one, but it was not put forward as a serious claim, only as a pretext, and it served to excuse Prince Louis’ landing in England at the head of a French army, to be welcomed by the rebels into London, where, according to French sources, he was crowned king, and where he took over the trappings of kingship which remained in John’s capital. 

The military situation was to be complicated by the sudden death of John, a death which (typically) was to be misrepresented by his detractors as due to gluttony. But this darkest hour was to prove the fore-runner of the dawn. The general nobility was deeply shocked by the consequences to the nation which had stoned from the revolt of a minority of their number; they closed ranks around the person of John’s heir, the nine-year old Prince Henry, who was taken into the care of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, and the greatest noble in the land, and hurriedly crowned him as Henry III at Winchester; a simple gold ring was employed for this ceremony in place of the Crown of State. Erstwhile rebels now joined forces with the earl, and helped him win a decisive victory over Louis at Lincoln. At the ensuing Treaty of Lambeth Louis abandoned his false claim to the English throne, and undertook to return the belongings of the king to which he had helped himself. The Great Seal of King John was not amongst the items returned, it may already have been destroyed, or perhaps Louis tucked it away as a souvenir of his short-lived spurious occupancy of the throne of England. 

In accordance with the tradition of the preceding centuries, the accession of Henry III was marked by the issuing of a promise of good government, but the boy king can have played little part in its formulation. Under his father, the great King John, good government had become a vastly expanded term, too wide-ranging (as the great nobles now seem to have decided) to be expressed in a single charter. And so the two charters were issued, the smaller, the Charter of the Forest, hived off forest matters, the larger charter, which by virtue of its greater size was called the Great Charter, or in the official legal latin, MAGNA CARTA, listed the remainder. That Magna Carta, which first was granted during the reign of Henry III, has been misrepresented by historians, is a major distortion of historical fact. 

Of course, as Magna Carta is properly located in the succession of charters of liberties, it bears resemblances to the Runnymede Charter and also to the Charter of Henry I, but it also displays major differences, including the exclusion of the absurdities which mark out the Runnymede Charter as originating in ecclesiastic dementia, for the security clause disappeared for ever, as did the limitation of the support the king could call upon from the nobles, both military and financial. But the Equity Clause survived, and was incorporated unchanged into both charters; however, the tragic lifting of the strong hand of John had unfortunate consequences for the common people of England, for the Equity Clause was now qualified by a new clause which conflicted with its spirit, and which reserved to ‘archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, templers, hospitallers, earls, barons, and all others persons as well ecclesiastical as secular, all the franchises and free customs they previously had.’ 

Thus Magna Carta, when it eventually appeared at the outset of the reign of Henry III, far from initiating a great advance in the freedom of Englishmen, actually gravely retarded the great forward surge of human rights initiated by King John and incorporated by him into the Runnymede Charter in 1215. But the principles of human rights could no more be permanently expressed in one or two royal charters in the 13th century than they can be in the 20th. The revising of Magna Carta was to be a continuing process as English constitutional law developed. It was the revision of Magna Carta in 1225, when Henry reached his majority, that was to be placed on the statute book and become the bedrock on which the liberty of Englishmen was to rest. And still the Equity Clause of King John endured, and the passage of centuries merely brought an ever-increasing appreciation of its importance; thus Sir Edward Coke, the great legal commentator of the 17th. century was loud in his praise of John’s great gift to the common people of England, lauding the Equity Clause, he wrote: 

This is the chief felicity of a kingdom, when good laws are reciprocally of prince and people (as is here undertaken) duly observed.¹³

But the day has yet to dawn when this enlightened view sheds credit upon the author of the clause, King John, one of the greatest kings ever to occupy the throne of England, and perhaps one of the most concerned to advance the cause of his people against the oppressions of his day. 

The Treaty of Lambeth, by establishing peace in England, satisfied the final condition Innocent had set as requisite before Langton could be freed from restraint in Rome. The archbishop returned to England, and resumed his position at Canterbury, but he was never to attain the secular eminence achieved by his predecessor, Hubert Walter, or wield the temporal power Walter had enjoyed, and after which Langton lusted. Power, during the minority of Henry III, lay first with the Earl of Pembroke, and after Pembroke’s decease with Pandulf. To assuage his bitter continuing hate for John, the king who had exposed and humiliated him. Langton resorted to a cowardly vendetta mean enough to satisfy his twisted mind. As Thomas Paine, after his death, was to be assailed by a scurrilous biographer, so the ecclesiastic annalists were primed to prepare scurrilous accounts of the deceased King John, and to accompany the denigration of John with the lauding of Langton. 

The myth of the evil King John was deliberately created, but it was not yet the myth of Magna Carta, for Coke and Blackstone recognised, studied and wrote of the true Magna Carta, the charter granted by Henry III, in their commentaries. But the myth of King John was to provide a ready-made basis for the myth of Magna Carta when it was deemed expedient for this to be propagated during the 18th century by the defenders of privilege who stood in direct line with those ‘archbishops, bishops….. etc., who had degraded the Equity Clause of King John by introducing into Magna Carta the conflicting clause which preserved their privileges to the detriment of the free-men of England. 

The arch-defender of privilege in the 18th. century was Edmund Burke, and there are strong similarities between the careers of Langton and Burke. Both exercised their facility to misrepresent historical fact in a period when a great opportunity had arisen for the advancement of the commonalty, and each threw his weight behind the faction concerned to retain effective power in the hands of the privileged. 

Both Langton and Burke succeeded in their defamatory campaigns, which were not only believed at the time they were launched but were given credence in later centuries. For far too long have the names of the great reformers, King John and Thomas Paine, been besmirched by malicious slander. It is perhaps fitting that as the light of truth strengthens they should share an opportunity to have their later places in history re-appraised, just as they have shared the ignominy or character-assassination. 

The first published re-appraisal of the fanciful popular presentation of John’s charter seems to have appeared in November 1904 when Edward Jenks published in The Independent Review his challenging paper, “The Myth of Magna Carta.” Jenks’ paper was noticed by W.S. McKechnie in his book, Magna Carta (1905), and it has remained in the bibliography of John’s charter, but it has never been accorded its proper importance, possibly because Jenks did not follow it with a detailed analysis of the myth he exposed and debunked. Thus even G.M.Trevelyan, who in his History of England made comments which underlined the part played by 18th. century politicians in the creation of the myth, nevertheless accepted the myth, although his history appeared more than twenty years after Jenks’ paper. 

Jenks was a lawyer, rather than a historian, and it was as a man of law that he had long accepted and taught the prevailing view that Runnymede witnessed the culmination of a popular revolt against the king, spearheaded by the barons, which laid the basis of civil liberty for all degrees of Englishmen. But when Jenks ha reason to look carefully at John’s charter, he was appalled to discover that it had done nothing of the sort, it being mainly the outcome of selfish action h barons to promote their own interests; and he found the Runnymede charter had proved a stumbling block in the path of progress.’ 

Jenks laid the blame for the unquestioning general acceptance of the myth at the door of Dr. William Stubbs, doyen of English constitutional historians, whose monumental work became the standard work of reference when it was published in 1873- 8, and Jenks began his paper with the quotations from Stubbs which head the present paper also. Jenks speculated briefly on the reason why Stubbs had been led into error, and thought that Sir Edward Coke, whose celebrated Second Institute had appeared in 1642, was the culprit. But here Jenks fell into another long-persisting error, that of confusing John’s charter with the Great Charter of Henry III: 

As J.C. Holt has declared in his scholarly study, ‘In the 17th.century, Coke never used the charter of 1215. His commentary was based on the re-issue of 1225. He only seems to have known of the 1215 charter from the chronicle of Matthew Paris.’¹⁴

The crucial part played in the unveiling of the relevant historical documents by Blackstone’s publication of 1759 strongly suggests that the origin of the myth should be sought after that date. But the decades following 1759 did not blend into a placid period facilitating re-thinking by influential opinion of the lessons of Runnymede. On the contrary, those decades witnessed the domination of the domestic scene by a series of overseas events of shattering impact. In 1759 the British people leapt for joy, but not in their reception of Blackstone’s revelations, of which the great mass of Britons have always remained in total ignorance; public jubilation in 1759 was centred on the thrilling ascent of the Heights of Abraham by the forces of General Wolfe to overwhelm the French army and capture Quebec. In 1762 France conceded all her territory in Canada to Britain, but the political climate on the western shore of the Atlantic, which might then have been expected to grow calmer, instead grew tense as the British government sought to ease the burden on the British people, the most heavily taxed in Europe, by imposing tax levies on the American colonies. Friction between the colonists and the Home government escalated through acts of reprisal, such as the Boston Tea Party, into bloodshed. In 1776, shortly after the publi- cation of Paine’s sensational pamphlet, Common Sense, the dispute was brought to open conflict by the American Declaration of Independence. During those seventeen years it would have taken greater political courage than was possessed by the public figures of the day to warn the British nation in clear terms of the close parallel between the path to revolt, along which an increasing number of resenting Americans were being driven, and the progression to Runnymede of the rebel barons protesting against John’s last imposition of scutage. At least one Member of Parliament did see this parallel, but he carefully stopped short of spelling out the obvious dangers and possible consequences of contemporary goverment policy. In 1775, in a speech to parliament on American affairs, Ednund Burke remarked: 

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.Liberty inhere in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point which, by way of eminence, becomes the criterion of its happiness. It has happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. 

That Burke was a notable contemporary of Paine, at one time a personal friend and later an uncompromising enemy, is common knowledge. But although Burke has attracted great interest as a political commentator, Burke the man has been studied less than might be expected, and his most authoritative modern biographer, Professor C.B. Cone has pointed out that his voluminous papers did not become available to the public until the surprisingly late date of 1949. Burke’s address to parliament on American affairs has naturally endeared him to American opinion, and his advocacy of the American cause in the face of the accepted imperial right of the home country to control the colonies at first seems to mark him out as a statesman more courageous and far-sighted than most of his fellows. But at the time he made his speech, his advocacy was rendered less effective in parliament by a circumstance then well known but now rarely mentioned; in December 1770 the New York Assembly had unanimously elected Burke its agent in London, thus effectively making him an ambassador to Britain charged to represent American interest, and he retained this post until it was liquidated by the outbreak of the war. For his part-time services as agent Burke received a salary of £500 a year, ten times the amount received by Paine for his full-time service as an Excise Officer, a criterion which sets the modern equivalent of Burke’s stipend at about £70,000;¹⁵ and in addition Burke received expenses, which in 1774 had amounted to 140. On second thoughts, therefore, it becomes surprising that Burke did not give better value to his American sponsors by advocating their cause with greater vigour. This surprise becomes greater when it is appreciated that Burke was already the author of an outline of English history up to the reign of King John, that he was a skilled latinist who quoted at length from authors of antiquity, and that he was a student and historian of English statutes which in early times were written in the latin language. No other Member of Parliament was better qualified than Burke to understand the implications of Blackstone’s publication and to warn parliament of the likelihood of history repeating itself. 

The American War of Independence was formally concluded in 1783 by the Treaty. of Paris which recognised the United States of America internationally, but hardly had the British people settled down to the new situation when another and even greater conflagration brought the groundswell of popular rebellion swirling close to the southern shore of England. In 1789 the greatest economic crisis of the century in France, attended by widespread shortage of food and consequent rioting, erupted in the French Revolution, which swept away the French aristocracy. And now Edmund Burke, who in his twin capacity of paid agent of the New York Assembly and Member of Parliament had displayed professional sympathy with the American resentment of autocratic government, recoiled in horror from the French activists who looked to the American precedent. 

Initially there was much sympathy in England for the French rebels, and for a while Burke remained silent; but as the exuberant Frenchmen set themselves up as the originators of a new European order, which could easily cross the Channel, Burke projected himself to a new prominence as the spokesman for anti-revolution reaction by publishing his Reflections on the French Revolution, to which Paine replied with his immensely-popular first part of Rights of Man, which set ablaze. the emergent reformatory enthusiasm of working-class opinion. It is in the ensuing period of bitter ideological dispute, waged between the supporters of privilege broadly following the standard raised by Burke, and the more numerous but less articulate aspirants towards a more equitable society who hailed Paine as their spokesman, that we can now discern the origin of the myth of a nation-wide popular rebellion, headed by the barons extracting justice from a tyrannical King John. 

The Burke-Paine controversy has come to be accepted as a classic illumination of the crisis of public conscience in England during the initial stages of the French Revolution, but this controversy is usually considered only in the context of the first round, which comprised the publication of Burke’s pamphlet and Paine’s reply, and the reception accorded them. The present paper will extend consideration of this controversy to its less discussed second round; but it may first be commented that even the first round, extensively debated though it has been, has not been accorded a generally-agreed assessment. Continuation of disagreement is probably inevitable, since the attitudes of the two chief disputants and their political heirs appear irreconcilable. At the time they clashed, Liberty was a word on every man’s lips, but with varying connotations; to some, the French Revolution represented the greatest advance in history towards civic justice for the common man, but others saw it as a victory for tyranny. Burke still has supporters, but Michael Foot has recently written: 

‘Government is for the living, not for the dead, had been Paine’s reply to Burke in 1791; forty years later, England marched on, in company with France and America, along the road which Paine, not Burke, had mapped out for her.¹⁶ 

One man who seems to have accepted that on the limited showing of the first round Paine had proved to be the more successful disputant, was. Burke himself, who made no attempt to continue the controversy by open debate, and in parliament, as well as in popular opinion, Burke was worsted, for as he has himself recorded, the Morning Chronicle of May 12, 1791, carried the following notice of the impending cessation of Burke’s parliamentary career: 

The great and firm body of the Whigs of England, true to their principles, have decided on the dispute between Mr.Fox and Mr. Burke; and the former is declared to have maintained the pure doctrines by which they are bound together, and upon which they have invariably acted. The consequence is that Mr.Burke retires from Parliament.¹⁷ 

This newspaper report, as Burke wryly pointed out, was premature; Burke was not yet extinguished as the chief apologist for entrenched privilege, within parliament or without, but he had been compelled to review his strategy and revise his campaign in its defence. 

The consequent change in tactics by the Burke faction was swiftly scented by the sensitive political nose of Thomas Paine, and he was quick to combat this new challenge, meeting it on its own ground, as was his practice. He did so in a long footnote appended to the second part of his Rights of Man, and began it with a reference to the contemporary circumstances which necessitated it: 

Several of the Court newspapers have of late made frequent mention of Wat Tyler. That his memory should be traduced by Court sycophants and all those who live on the spoil of a public is not to be wondered at. He was, however, the means of checking the rage and injustice of taxation in his time, and the Nation owed much to his valour.¹⁸ 

Paine’s words, published in 1792, evince a campaign intended to denigrate popular leaders emerging like Wat Tyler, and by implication like the French revolutionaries, from the broad mass of the people; and they show that this campaign was being carried on, not by a pamphlet such as Burke’s Reflections to which Paine had made his immensely successful reply, but by a series of co-ordinated derogatory references calculated to influence informed opinion without providing a platform from which Paine could launch a second devastating counter-attack. Paine did reply, and in the permanent form of this footnote to one of his best known works, which continued by setting out the view then generally held of the incident which rocketed Tyler to the leadership of the Kentish below in 1381 (this was an indecent approach by a collector of poll tax to Tyler’s daughter under pretext of verifying whether she had reached the qualifying age of fifteen years, which provoked a violent reaction from her enraged father, resulting in the death of the revenue officer). But it was his conclusion to the footnote in which Paine fitted together the pieces of the contemporary jig-saw: 

All (Tyler’s proposals) were on a more just and public ground than those which had been made to John by the Barons, and notwithstanding the syncophancy of historians and men like Mr. Burke who seek to gloss over a base action by the Court by traducing Tyler, his fame will outlive their falsehood. If the Barons merited a monument to be erected in Runnymede, Tyler merits one in Smithfield.¹⁸

To identify and collate the ‘frequent mention of Wat Tyler’ in court newspapers, to which Paine referred, would involve arduous research, and might produce little substance in view of the oblique nature of the campaign; Paine seems to have been of this general view since he did not identify any particular comment. Newspaper research may eventually fill in a few details, but the general tenor of Paine’s opening to his footnote is already well substantiated by authoritative comment, as will appear below, and it is more conducive to the present thesis to concentrate on Burke’s second pamphlet in defence of privilege which has long been available in his published writings. Although referred to much less frequently than his Reflections, this second essay was in fact a continuation of his first pamphlet, as becomes apparent when the shortened title by which it is usually identified is expanded to its original length: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Consequence of some late Discussions in Parliament, relative to the Reflections on the French Revolution. 

Burke’s Appeal is a lengthy document, nearly half the length of his Reflections, and written in a curious style which appears to have had the object of restricting its circulation to the well-schooled; ‘Mr. Burke, is frequently spoken of in the third person, but the first person is also frequently employed, thus conveying the general impression that it was written by one of Burke’s supporters; and it is laced with quotations in Latin and Greek, which are not translated, and hence obscure his line of argument, and make critical appraisement extremely difficult for general readers. The author is not identified, but Professor Cone opinions that Burke’s authorship would have been clear to the readers to whom the Appeal was directed.¹⁹ It is not surprising, in these circumstances, that Burke’s Appeal has not hitherto been greatly studied by general readers as a commentary on the practical politics of his faction. 

Little of the first part of the Appeal bears upon the present theme; mid-way Burke complains that the new Whiggism has been imported from France, and significantly remarks on the growing use of the term the people; and it is only in its last third that Burke develops his new manoeuvre. Here he inserts quotations from Paine without acknowledging them, and pointedly comments that Paine’s opinions call for no refutation other than that of criminal justice an indirect admission, perhaps, that he was privy to the anti-Paine measures to be undertaken by the establishment. And at last Burke comes to the nub of the matter, the meaning to be applied to the term so prominently employed in the contemporary dispute, the PEOPLE. 

A people, claimed Burke, is a corporation, such as cannot exist in a state of rude nature, which comes into existence only when the majority of men as ‘told by the head’ accepts the discipline imposed by ‘the wiser, the more expert, and the more opulent. The essential integrant that binds men together into a state,is a true natural aristocracy, and for the benefit of the select readership to which the Appeal seems to have been addressed, he catalogued, as the qualities of this natural aristocracy, the advantages which normally fell to the landed gentry leavening this class with the addition of rich successful merchants. Thus Burket exactly paralleled the composition of the committee of twenty-five (including its solitary merchant, the Mayor of London) which arrogantly set itself up to halt the tide of social progress which was flowing against them under Hohn’s programme of reforms, and succeeded in enshrining their privileged rights in the Great Charter of his son, Henry. III. 

Conspicuously absent from Burke’s catalogue are the qualities of character, such as integrity and trustworthiness, which any rational philosopher in any age might be expected to insist upon as indispensable qualifications for those selected as being the natural leaders of a state; it is again informative to turn for a moment from Burke the pamphleteer to Burke the man. Edmund Burke had not been born into the landed gentry, and had soon been made aware that he was thereby heavily handicapped in his pursuit of a political career. He acquired this ruch longed for status by the purchase in 1768 of a country estate for £20,000, a sum far outside the financial resources of the Burke family. The purchase money was borrowed, with a critical element of £6,000 (assessed by the Court of Chancery) coming from Burke’s political patron, Lord Verney. Burke thereafter lived in permanent debt, and when Verney eventually brought an action in Chancery in a final endeavour to get his money back, Burke swore a denial of debt to Verney, taking refuge in the circumstance that the loan had been negotiated by an intermediary, a close relative who had passed on Verney’s money, not by himself. Thus did Burke display in practice the personal qualities of a prominent member of his natural aristocracy.’²⁰

By ridding themselves of their ‘natural aristocracy,’ Burke argued, the French had destroyed their identity as a people, and when the ‘common sort of men’ became separated from ‘their proper chieftains’ they were lawfully to be fought with and brought under, whenever opportunity offered. The French Revolution was not the first revolt of common men in France; Burke recalled the insurrection of the Jacquerie in 1358, but without mentioning that the French peasants had then been goaded by taxation as had the Americans in recent times; the revolt had properly been suppressed, but Burke did not support the pitiless severity with which this had been done, and which the contemporary revolutionaries might have thought a viable precedent in French affairs. 

From the Jacquerie of 1358, Burke passed to the rebellion of the English peasants in 1381, commenting ‘for these humours never have affected one of the nations without some influence on the other, and thereby warning his readers that they in their turn could expect repercussions from the French Revolution. Burke’s. treatment of the English Peasants’ Revolt is instructive; Wat Tyler is not named, but John Ball, the preacher whose addresses had made the villains conscious of their social deprivation, is extensively cited as the infamous prototype of the contemporary preachers, and Burke’s constant answers at Ball for preaching the rights of man, and attracting a vast audience of 200,000 at Blackheath, make clear that he is using Ball to lambast Paine. In approving tones he summarises what he presents as Ball’s lack of success: 

But these poor people, who were not to be envied for their knowledge, but pitied for their delusion, were not reasoned (that was impossible) but beaten out of their lights. With their teacher they were delivered over to the lawyers; who wrote in their blood the statutes of the land, as harshly, and in the same sort of ink, as they and their teachers had written the rights of man. 

The severe repressing of the Jacquerie in France may have seemed harsh to Burke, but he evinced no qualms that the English rising was followed by severity after the peasants had peacefully dispersed, that the undertakings given them by the king were revoked, and that John Ball was hung, drawn and quartered, the four parts of his body being exhibited publicly in four different towns. Burke is often credited with a knowledge of history. It may therefore be of interest to compare his reading of the two peasant revolts, in France and England, with the observations of Stephen Dowell, one of the greatest writers on the history of taxation and its influence in the affairs of nations and of men: 

When the spoils of France…had proved to the English nobility the incentives to extravagance riches papidly acquired always prove to be, they opened for themselves a new source of revenue in the sale of freedom to their manorial serfs….But when after the Black Death…the free labourers demanded increased wages in consequence of the scarcity of labour, they endeavoured substantially to back out of the position in which they found themselves placed… In these circumstances nothing was wanting for an outburst of discontent… but some sharp motive for immediate action…. It was supplied by the government. They knew that nothing, perhaps, had tended directly to render the nobles in France un-popular and induce the Jacqueries, than the taxes on salt,… And yet now they chose…a new poll tax,… touching every one in the kingdom… The revolt was soon over. Within three weeks of its commencement Wat the Tyler, the leader of the Kentish men, had fallen under the mace of Walvorth, and the king had granted those charters of freedom that formed the real object of many of the insurgents. The charters, granted illegally, as infraction of the rights of private property, were indeed subsequently revoked; but the peasant insurrection had its effect. During the next century and a half villages died out so rapidly that it became an antiquated thing, the landowners taking in many cases small money payments in lieu of service.²¹

It may seem surprising that after preparing his case so carefully in his. Appeal, Burke did not proceed to consideration of the baronial confrontation at Runnymede as the beneficent antithesis of the malevolence of the peasants.’ confrontation of the king at Smithfield, especially as Paine’s comments in his footnote indicate that both confrontations were the subject of contemporary comment. Possibly it was unnecessary for Burke to spell out the connection as it had already been brought to notice during the press campaign, but it is also possible that he was shy of commenting further on Runnymede, having already found himself at fault in his understanding of that event. Professor Cone tells us that Burke had been invited, early in his career, to write a concise history of Ing- land to be completed by 1758, and Cone seems surprised that after working on it for some time, Burke abandoned it uncompleted about 1760, leaving the manuscript amongst his papers.²² But when this historical essay is read, the probable. reason becomes apparent, for in it Burke incredibly asserted that at Runnymede King John signed both the Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest.²³ Burke probably brought this delusion with him from Dublin, where it figured in the account of English history taught at the university, but Burke had no excuse for persisting in this error since he had come to London primarily to study law in Middle Temple. Both these famous statutes had been recorded on the Statute Roll for centuries, and both begin with the words, ‘Henricus Dei gratia rex Anglie’ which make it clear to anyone with even the flimsiest knowledge of Latin that they had not been issued by John. It is therefore probable that Burke had been brought face to face with his own ignorance by Blackstone’s publication on the subject in 1759; by that time Burke was editor of the Annual Register, and it was one of his functions to review new books.²⁴ It is fair comment that a sound knowledge of history is another surprising omission from the imposing catalogue of advantages that created the ‘natural aristocracy’ of Burke’s imagination. 

But if Burke was reticent on the point, a much greater historian, G.M.Trevelyan, was quite explicit about Burke’s thinking on the Runnymede charter, and his comments underwrite Paine’s linking of it with the press campaign mentioned in his footnote: 

In the eighteenth century,….the greatest charter of all was worshipped by Blackstone, Burke and all England. It had become the symbol for the spirit of our whole constitution. When, therefore, with the dawn of a more strenuous era, the democracy took the field against the established order, each side put the Great Charter in the ark which it carried into battle. Pittites boasted of the free and glorious constitution which had issued from the tents of Runnymede,…. radicals appealed to the letter and the spirit of ‘Magna Carta’ against gagging acts, packed juries, and restrictions of the franchise.²⁵ 

In Tory cartoons, any time between 1790 and 1830, ‘Magna Carta,’ the Bible, and the King’s Crown on top of these two sacred volumes, are pictured as the basis of our national liberties which the Foxite Whigs… were accused of desiring to destroy.²⁶ 

It is a pity that a historian of Trevelyan’s stature should have joined the host of lesser writers who followed Stubbs as instinctively as processional caterpillars follow their leader. Treelyan also write: 

Moreover the barons of Runnymede were not strong enough to rebel…without the aid of the other classes whom John had suppressed and alienated The English people for the first time sided with the barons against the Crown.²⁷ 

It was Edward Jenks who approached this question from an independent viewpoint. Surely, Jenks sagely argued, had the people in general supported the baronial revolt against King John, somewhere in the ancient chronicles would contain a reference to this support. But he searched them all, and he found not one single word of confirmation that the barons and the people had joined in common cause. And he went on to comment that if the barons had really enjoyed such general support, they would have felt no need to solicit aid from France. Jenks, with commendable perspicacity, pithily presented the question posed by the popular myth, and spelt out its inescapable implications: 

..If (Stubbs view) be true, the grant of Magna Carta was an epoch in the national life, if it be untrue, the whole nation is being trained to take a distorted view of its own past. 

Stubbs had not been unaware of the absence of historical evidence to support the interpretation of Runnymede which he advanced, for Jenks in his painstaking search for the truth found in Stubbs’ writings an observation which holds the clue to the establishment of the myth and of Stubbs own acceptance of it: 

That the historians have recorded less of the action of the third estate, is accounted for by the fact that at this period….the baronage acts as advocate for it. Here at last we see the basis of the myth. Just as his followers lacked the intellectual courage to differ from the opinion Stubbs delivered from his scholarly eminence, so Stubbs did not rise to the challenge of examining critically and impartially the opinion projected by prominent politicians in the preceding century. Stubbs,in accepting the baronage as the advocate of the people was merely re-stating Burke’s pretence that the baronage (with the Mayor of London) constituted a natural aristocracy which united the people, and necessarily spoke for them when it spoke for itself. 

Had Jenks’ courageous challenge been followed up by independent minds, it would not have been left to this paper to trace the origin of the myth that has been wrapped round John’s charter. Had Moncure Conway read Jenks’ paper before he embarked on his biography of Paine, it is possible that he might progressively have dispelled that myth as he progressively dispelled the smoke-screen contrived to hide the true character of Thomas Paine. For the myth of Magna Carta’ and the myth of the infamous Tom Paine, are interlocking parts of the same wide-ranging distortion of English history, and they are joined by a third part, the myth of Burke’s natural aristocracy arising from a hotbed of hereditary privilege to form a stratum set above the common people, to speak for them and lead them in the path pre-ordained for them. 

The myth of Runnymede has persisted for centuries, but it never prevailed. Its purpose was to mislead, to prejudice the nation against the emergent English democracy which Paine fathered and the working-class fostered after he had been driven abroad. Just as John Ball’s apparent failure was an incident in the path of his policies towards success, so was Burke’s successful launching of the Runnymede myth incidental to its eventual failure. Burke, made the mistake of over estimating the importance of the small number of privileged, who enjoyed the sweets during their life-times but are often remembered for their inadequacies. How different are now seen to be the stories of King John and Thomas Paine who tasted the bitterness of disappointment at the hands of the uncomprehending, but who are now rising stars in the estimation of posterity. 

King John, in pursuit of the policies initiated by his father, was probably the first great leader to comprehend the destiny of the yeoman of England as the decisive element in the nation, and he set himself to advance their cause in the national interest. Thomas Paine made another great step forward by bringing to the working-class an awareness of its ability to play an active part in politics and participate in the charting of progress. An active upper-class belief that the baronage was the only acceptable advocate of the common people did not in the least trouble the stout hearts who had been excluded by the propagator of the myth from the circle in which it was initially circulated. 

The Burke-Paine controversy was not decided by disputing politicians; it was resolved in the melting pot of history, and quite quickly. Forty years were sufficient to bring the nation to the critical point when reforms were enacted, and England then ‘marched on….along the road which Paine, not Burke, had mapped out for her.’ The myth of John’s charter was put upon a shelf; it has been periodically taken down and aired by flowery words; the down-to-earth Englishmen who take the essential political decisions as to who is to rule the country in the following years take scant notice. Like their forefathers, the yeoman of King John, the artisans of Thomas Paine, they make their decisions on the basis of their native common sense. They will lose control of the destiny of the nation only if they allow themselves to be led astray by the propagators of new political myths. 

1. Hohne, Heinz. The Order of the Death’s Head. Secker & Warburg. p.149. 
2. It will be appreciated that whilst the formulation of the present thesis has entailed wide reading, its presentation within the confines of a single paper necessitates brevity; the Angevin background and the critical features of John’s reign have therefore inevitably been recounted in the way most conducive to this concise presentation. Of the many published accounts of John’s reign I have found Alan Lloyd’s, King John, the most informative and readable. Of specialised studies, Sydney Painter’s, The Reign of King John, and in particular his chapter on the royal administration, seems to me outstanding, with John’s use of counter-signs and introduction of the Privy Seal described on pages 106-9. W.A. Morris refers to John’s summons to the royal militia to guard the south coast in 1213 at page 346 of his Constitutional History, and J.C. Holt writes of similar action by John in 1205 in his Magna Carta, pages 49 and 198. 
3. Holt, J.C. Magna Carta. CUP. 1965. p.198. 
4. Ibid. p.133 and footnote.
5. Manning, Cardinal. The Pope and Magna Carta. Contemporary Review, December 1875. 
6. Dictionary of National Biography. 
7. Information about the long-lost documents of Runnymede is most easily found in the booklet, Magna Carta, by G.R.C. Davis, available from the British Museum, but McKechnie (see below) is also important.I have added my own interpretation of Davis’s careful comment about the sealing of the Articles. 
8. The first use of the royal plural I have noticed occurs in a charter to Winchester granted by Richard in the first year of his reign; this gives rise to speculation that change from the singular to the plural was prompted by the necessity for Richard to have an authorised deputy, since he had no intention of sparing much time from his foreign adventuring for the affairs of England. His deputy thus spoke for himself personally and for Richard vicariously, and although the plural is more effective in regal pronouncements and has been retained, its possible initial importance may have been to strengthen the authority of the deputy by reminding his audience that he spoke for the king. 
9. There is a great need for a modern exposition of all the documents relating to the charters of liberties, and for the charters themselves to be set out in a form permitting them to be compared and contrasted by the general reader. Such an exposition would need to be in translation, it is simply not good enough for the original latin text to be reproduced untranslated in our modern age when few can understand it. It is fortunate that Dr. Stubbs, Select Charters of English Constitutional History, was followed by a published translation of his text, which is available in archives such as the British Library, and from this translation I have taken my reproduction of the security clause in the Articles. 
10. My translation is taken from the British Museum booklet, Magna Carta, as I feel it best conveys to a modern reader the implications of John’s great Equity Clause after it had been expressed in the legal language of the time at Runnymede. 
11. See W.S. McKechnie, Magna Carta (1905), pp.48-9, for an exposition of the dangers of interpreting medieval dating by modern practice. I draw the inference that June 15 would have been the day on which the Articles were formally agreed as being the acceptable basis on which a charter might be drawn up. 
12. Blackstone’s 18th century complaint that the development of the charters of liberties had been inadequately presented to the reading public can be repeated with even greater justification today. And yet the public interest in human rights has probably never been so strong or so wide-spread. McKechnie’s work seems to me to be the only serious attempt to trace the development of Magna Carta in a form suitable for the general reader, which has appeared in the 20th century. McKechnie remained under the influence of the prejudices against John, but his comments were broadly based and afford the reader an opportunity to weigh them and come to his own conclusions; his style probably reflects the influence of the legal tradition in which he seems to have been raised. 

J.C. Holt’s more recent study lacks McKechnie’s clarity, and I have found it disappointing, although it includes fresh material. I would not have expected a modern historian to make the unsupported assertion that John must often have settled business by a brief word over the gaming table (pp. 277-8); such a comment is reminiscent of the unjustified slandering of Paine, and if it has any value this lies, in my opinion, in further underlining the similarities in the historical treatment of John and Paine. The importance of Holt’s work is to demonstrate that although modern historians seem unable to free themselves from prejudiced teachings of their fore-runners, they are nevertheless being forced to re-assess John and admit to his authorship of at least some of the most forward looking sections of the Runnymede documents. Of particular importance in this context is Holt’s assertion (at page 6) that John must be credited with the famous words of cap 39: No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or expl.d, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Holt’s assertion thus lends weight to my own presentation of John as the defender of the free man against the barons. 

I take advantage of the present opportunity to suggest that the shedding of the prejudices of centuries may be too much to ask of any single academic, and that the elicitation of the true facts of the development of the charters of liberties should be entrusted to a committee comprising senior members of the legal profession as well as historians. The enormity of the deception practiced upon the nation seems to me to justify this approach, preferably under royal warrant For King John is entitled to enjoy. 

13. Quoted by McKechnie, op.cit. p.544. 
14. Holt. op.cit. p.17. 
15. Cone, C.B. Burke and the Nature of Politics. Vol.1. University of Kentucky Press, 1957. pp.252-7. 
16. Foot, Michael. Debts of Honour. Davis-Poynter, 1980. In his chapter on Paine. 
17. Quoted by Burke at the beginning of his Appeal. There have been several editions of the writings of Burke, I have used the eight volume set published by F. & J. Rivington in 1852, in which this newspaper comment appears in volume 4 at pp.395-6. 
18. Foner, Philip S. The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine. Citadel Press, Secaucus, 1948. pp.416-7. A welcome re-issue of Paine’s major writings, of which I have been very glad to obtain a copy through the good offices of the Secretary of the Thomas Paine Society. 
19. Cone. op.cit. Vol.2. (1964). p.360. 
20. Vol.1. pp.123-136. 
21. Dowell, Stephen. A History of Taxation and Taxes in England. Longmans, 1888. Vol.1. pp.99-103. 22. Cone. op.cit. Vol.1. pp.30-33. 
22. Burke. op.cit. Vol.6, pp.356-7. 
23. Cone. op. cit. Vol.1. pp.33-34. 
24. Trevelyan, G.M. History of England. Longmans, 1979. p.205. 
25. Ibid. 
26. … p.662. p.202. 

The post Thomas Paine And The Myth Of Magna Carta  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

ONE OF THE few indications Thomas Paine gave of the way his thinking developed, is his remark to his friend Rickman that he seldom passed five minutes of his life without acquiring some knowledge. This observation shows Paine’s general attitude to learning, and explains how he overcame the limitations of his restricted schooling that terminated at the age of thirteen. And it follows from this declared attitude, that Paine must often have been preparing himself for his next step forward. 

All men of ability, even those of genius, continue to develop throughout their active lives. The immortal Beethoven enjoyed in youth the benefits of tuition from the greatest musicians in Europe, yet he still posited through recognisable stages of development, and in his later years declined to compose in his earlier style; but lovers of Beethoven’s music do not, reject the earlier works. Paine similarly progressed, and modifications to his earlier thinking do not deprive those views of interest, rather do they make them of special interest as showing the path by which he came to his maturity. 

Students of Paine have always regretted that he left little information about himself, and that he was singularly, reticent about his personal life even in conversation, with his closest friends; the consequence of this remarkable modesty is that we still lack an adequate biography of this most exceptional man; nor is it likely that one can yet be supplied from the pen of one single writer. It is probable that a fair assessment of Paine, and of his achievements, will necessitate the combined efforts of several contributors, each an expert in one of the fields in which Paine achieved prominence. However, we are now in a position to consider in greater detail than has previously been possible, some of the influences which bore upon him in his formative years. One of the strongest of these early. influences was Wesleyan Arminian Methodism, a movement which came into being and flourished in Paine’s lifetime, and which not only effected his profoundly in his spiritual life but also aided him considerably in his practical affairs. It was probably Methodism that facilitated Paine’s entry into a new community when he moved from town to town, and it was his sympathy with Methodists which prompted Paine into journalism, thus helping him to mould himself into an accomplished commentator, ready and able to blaze into prominence as a propagandist in the New World. 

The fact that Paine became an experienced journalist during his years in Lewes has not previously been brought to general notice, and this is surprising, since his newspaper work there has remained on record, and he left clues in his American writings which point to the existence of his earliest offerings to the public. These early essays, which I term the Lewes Writings, number more than forty varied articles in the form of letters to the Sussex Weekly Advertisers or Lewes Journal. They include novel and provocative views; they display not only Paine’s mastery of the written word but also some forms of writing, such as satire, which he does not employ elsewhere, and they are revealing in considerable degree of the man behind the pen, of his methods, and of his objectives. 

As might be expected of a commentator who was keenly aware of the influence of religion upon his contemporaries, Paine included in the Lewes Writings a number of observations on religious attitudes, and, after he announced his intention of making every seventh article a serious address, it was to religious topics that he turned for his most thoughtful dissertations. It is now suggested that it was Paine’s religious evolution that laid the basis for his later advanced thinking in the secular field. A critical factor in this evolution was probably the influence of the Dutch theologian, Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), whose interpretation of the message of Jesus was exhilaratingly unorthodox when it was enunciated by his followers in the remonstrance of 1610. Although rejected in Holland, it was accepted and developed in England, notably by John Wesley. The essential feature of Arminianism was that all men, not just a select few (as envisaged by Calvin) could share in spiritual grace. This philosophy outraged many highly-placed people, of whom the Duchess of Buckingham could have been acting as spokeswoman when she commented that the doctrines of the Methodists were ‘strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their Superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and to do away with all distinctions.’ (Quoted by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, p. 46.) Arminianism, in fact, envisaged a form of spiritual democracy, which Wesley embodied into his teaching. It takes little imagination to see that a thinker of Paine’s originality and humanity would pass easily from this spiritual equality to the social democracy which the historian Trevelys considered to originate in Paine’s writing.(Trevelyan, G. M. English Social History, p. 468.) 

The Lewes Writings show that Paine was conscious of breaking new ground and provoking discussion among his readers. It was perhaps awareness of his inexperience as a social commentator that prompted him to write, when explaining his motives:

“We don’t perhaps know enough of our own hearts to know always what our design is, but the object I seem to have in my eye is TRUTH, Truth moral and natural. And we are indeed apt to be very partial to our own judgments, and therefore, possibly (aim as I) I may sometimes shoot very wide of the mark; however, when I do, let any man candidly show me my error, and I will show him in return that I can retract an opinion as well as advance it. But no controversy, let matters go as they will.” (Sussex Weekly Advertiser or Lewes Journal, December 14, 1772 — here in after Lewes Journal.)

Some of Paine’s early paragraphs make particularly interesting reading, since they now appear almost prescient. Paine might already have sensed the odium that was later to be heaped upon his name when he observed:

“If you have a mind to know the outlines of any man’s real character, take a view of the original, get acquainted with the man himself. There is no other way. Common fame is but a common liar.” (Ibid. March 1, 1773.)

Although Paine did not leave us enough information to enable us to follow his advice and get acquainted with him when seeking to delineate his own character, there was one period in his life when he was not allowed to exercise his customary reticence: when he applied to join the Excise, he was required to declare many facts about himself, and his personal records in the service would have been periodically updated. These records would eventually have been made available to George Chalmers when he was commissioned to write his defamatory life of Paine under the pen name Francis Oldys.

The authenticity of biographical details of Paine’s early life included in that work is rooted in access to particulars placed on record in the excise archives by Paine himself.

Some comment on Chalmers is necessary, since the hostile nature of his life of Paine has led to it being dismissed too lightly. As I have previously demonstrated in a paper on Paine’s first excise period, Chalmers is in some respects an important witness for the defence rather than for the prosecution, because he took great care that his reputation as a researcher should not become damaged through quoting from a document subsequently shown to be unreliable.

Chalmers was a clerk in government service, but the term “clerk” has many shades of meaning, and Chalmers was chief confidential clerk to the first President of what came to be known as the Board of Trade. This was an influential appointment which afforded access to the records and facilities of other government departments. However, having obtained confidential documents, Chalmers often retained them with his own manuscripts instead of returning them, with the result that they were sold after his death with his own voluminous papers, and some have since turned up in the libraries of American universities. (Cockcroft, Grace Amelia. The Public Life of George Chalmers, New York, 1939.) It may have been Chalmers’ cavalier attitude towards confidential government papers which led to the passing of the first Public Record Act after his death.

The importance of Chalmers, so far as Paine is concerned, is that clearly expressed statements of fact in Oldys’ biography need to be carefully considered and not set aside without very good reason. But this is not to say that we should be deceived by Chalmers’ clever introduction of surmises and reconstructions that are calculated to mislead; reading his words with a care equal to that he employed in writing them often reveals the deceptions.

The purpose of this paper is early traced from his first period in London. At that time he supported himself by practising his original trade, stay-making, in the workshop of the old London staymaker John Morris. Morris is known to have indicted on a long from 6 to 8 o’clock per and to have opposed the attempt by workers in the trade to secure a shortening by one hour in the evening. (Barry, Alyce. “Thomas Paine, Privateersman.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1977.) The arduous day worked by Paine and his fellows is but one indication of the harsh conditions then endured by the working population of London. Many people lived in conditions of squalor, insecurity, disease, physical danger from collapsing buildings, and with little prospect of advancement as we nowadays understand the term.

It was consistent with the general harshness of that day, and with the policy of encouraging acceptance of the consequences deemed to punish even minor criminal activity, that the gallows was made the scene of executions as public entertainments. Paine has left us a record of his own reaction to these grisly events:

“Can anything give in so striking a light the callous insensibilities of an unfeeling heart, as the number of happy faces to be seen on these melancholy occasions? Streets through which the poor outcasts of society are to pass lined with crowds of people, and most of them as merry as if they were going to the exhibition of some uncommon show; and (to make the scene quite complete) you see bakers coming along with their aprons full of buns for the spectators to regale themselves with. O sensibility, whither art thou fled? Dost thou reside with the Cherokees, or hast thou taken shelter in some of the deserts of Africa?” (Lewes Journal, May 17, 1773.)

Few philanthropists or religious leaders set themselves to bring positive mitigation of the conditions of the working people by direct approach to them, but historians of the period have singled out one notable exception to this general observation.

The Methodists did concern themselves to reach out and proffer spiritual comfort to the underprivileged; they also brought those who responded into organized groups, in which the spiritual and moral welfare of each was accepted to be the concern of all his fellows. The originator of the Methodists was John Wesley, an indefatigable worker in his cause who was remarkable not only for the many thousands of outdoor meetings he addressed all over the country, but also for his great talent for organization, which led to the setting up of a nation-wide network of communicating local societies.

It is important to bear in mind that Wesley opposed separation of the Methodists from the Established Church; he and his followers remained members throughout his life. There was thus no bar to a Church of England member playing an active part in Methodist affairs, even though he was bound to be a declared Anglican.

It is probable that the young Paine joined the Methodists during his first period in London, and that he was impelled to do so by a desire to participate in their endeavours to bring spiritual readings to working people, a worthy cause to which his religious tenets and social conscience alike would have compelled him.

The Bishop of London at that time was Thomas Sherlock, whom Paine has introduced for mention in the Lewes Writings as a very worthy and ingenious gentleman. The National Biographical Dictionary records that Sherlock cultivated kindly relations with those who dissented from orthodoxy, and his example may have facilitated Paine’s membership of Wesley’s movement. (Ibid. March 15, 1773.)

It is easy to scoff at another man’s personal religious beliefs, and Methodists have been the butt of much criticism by those who do not agree with them. Some commentators have found difficulty in comprehending how the movement could have exerted such a strong appeal to the industrialised workers, and evoked from them an enthusiastic response; yet that it did so is an undeniable historical fact.

The explanation may well be that Methodism, like other great popular movements, must be viewed against the social conditions in which it arose, and not judged by those of later days, after many changes had taken place, including some which had been inspired by the movement itself.

Dr. E. P. Thompson, in *The Making of the English Working Class*, has drawn attention to the transmission of some aspects of Methodist organization to working-class societies, and he mentions, too, the Methodist “ticket” which was to be widely copied by radical associations. He points out that this ticket of church membership could serve as a ticket of entry into a new community when a worker migrated from one town to another. (Thompson, E. P., op. cit., pp. 47 and 417.)

Paine possibly made use of a Methodist ticket when he left London in 1758, and entered into new employment in Dover with another stay-maker, Mr. Grace, for Grace was a prominent Methodist in the town, and Paine may have learned of the vacancy on his staff through church contacts.

It was during Paine’s association with Grace that he made his first authenticated appearance as a Methodist preacher. Grace was a class leader, and Paine went with him to class meetings, one of which a preacher failed to keep his engagement, and Paine was invited to conduct the service in his stead.

The invitation would probably have been issued by Grace as the class leader, who would have had opportunities to form well-based opinions on Paine’s outlook and moral qualities; he would also have known whether Paine had sufficient experience of the Methodist cause to be fitted to play this leading part in Grace’s own society.

This incident at Dover was brought to light in the Methodist Recorder of August 16, 1906, and it was subsequently recounted in the standard edition of John Wesley’s Journal, in a footnote by its editor, Nehemiah Curnock, on page 31 of volume 8. Curnock was a previous editor of the Recorder, and he would not have repeated the report unless he was sure it was an authentic record.

Paine preached in a meeting-house in Limekiln Street, which by 1906 had been vacated for larger premises. Wesley preached in the same meeting-house on September 19th, 1759, when Paine was still in the vicinity of Dover, and it would be very surprising indeed if Paine was not a member of the congregation on that occasion.

According to Oldys, Paine remained with Grace almost a year before moving to the nearby town of Sandwich to set up business for himself, with the assistance of £10 advanced by Grace. Another Methodist practice must now be mentioned: that of assisting fellow members of a group financially.

The contemporary publisher James Lackington, in his memoirs, acknowledged that he owed his own start in business to a Methodist advance, and Paine’s £10 was probably another instance of this benevolent Methodist practice. But it is likely that Paine was supported in his move to Sandwich not merely so that he could start his own business but also to found another Methodist group; for Oldys speaks of a tradition that Paine preached in his lodgings there, and this strongly argues that Paine was the leading light in a new class gathering around him.

The Methodist Recorder suggests that Grace may have been the first class leader in Dover, and if so he would have been gratified to see his protégé following in his footsteps.

With a new business to attend to, and a new Methodist class to build and guide, Paine would have been a very busy young man in Sandwich, with little time for any further demanding interests. Yet it seems that it was only five months after his arrival there that he married Mary Lambert, after what must have been a short courtship; it is quite possible that Mary came to know and admire Paine through membership of his congregation.

Oldys has suggested that Grace’s daughter, who would have heard Paine preach in Dover, was also romantically attracted to Paine, and congregational romances involving young preachers are by no means rare. Paine’s first marriage, as we know, was short-lived, and the circumstances of its ending have never been positively ascertained.

Years after, in an essay on unhappy marriages, Paine referred to the risks of marrying in haste; if personal experience underlay his comments, it is more likely to have been associated with his first courtship than his second, for his marriage to Elizabeth Ollive did not take place until he had known her for three years, and had been her partner in business for half that time. (Foner, Philip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine. Vol. 2, p. 1118; here in after Writings.)

After the termination of his first marriage, Paine changed his way of life and became an Excise Officer. His first excise period has been researched and written up in a separate paper, copies of which have been lodged with the Thomas Paine Society and the American Philosophical Society to ensure that the new information therein, and the reasons for my conclusion that Paine was unjustly dismissed from Alford, may remain permanently on record.

No indications have been found that Paine continued to preach during that period, but the point has scarcely been covered, since the Lincolnshire Methodist History Society possesses no records for Alford in the 18th century, and it is there that Paine is most likely to have continued the practice.

On his subsequent return to London, Paine probably resumed contact with his original Methodist group, and through it may have secured his post at the academy of Mr. Noble in Leman Street, for Noble was an ordained minister who also held Arminian views, and hence would have been well disposed towards Wesleyans. (Payne, E. A. Letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 31 May 1947, p. 267.)

Paine was restored to the Excise within a year, but the position he was offered, at Grampound in Cornwall, was similar to the one he had held at Alford, and fraught with similar risks; that Paine was wise in asking to await another vacancy was demonstrated by subsequent events.

In declining the Grampound post, Paine risked being denied a further excise appointment, but this may not have seemed very important to him, for he was by then strongly drawn towards a career as a Methodist preacher. That he took this project seriously is shown by Oldys’ revelation that he sought from Noble a recommendation for ordination, but that Noble was unable to comply because Paine lacked classical education.

Oldys’ reason for this disclosure can only have been to bolster the reputation of his biography, for when it appeared there would have been many who knew of Paine’s preaching activities and who would have noticed the omission had Oldys ignored them.

Paine’s failure to secure ordination did not lead to his giving up preaching, for, like other Methodist lay preachers described by Lackington, he preached in Moorfields and other places.

Moorfields was at that time an open site favoured by Londoners as a gathering place in their limited hours of leisure. Notable sermons were preached there in the Methodist cause, both by John Wesley himself and by his original friend—later his doctrinal opponent—George Whitefield, who did not accept Arminianism, but preached instead a Calvinistic form of Methodism.

Lay preachers who were accepted and approved by the central Methodist organisation were sent out into the country in the summer months to preach on arranged circuits. This entailed considerable physical exertion and called for some aptitude for wayfaring on horseback.

Paine’s experience of riding the remote Lincolnshire countryside as an exciseman would have made him an obvious choice for itinerant preaching in that locality, and we know from Paine’s own essay *Forgetfulness* that he was indeed back in Lincolnshire in the summer of 1766 when he lodged at the house of a widow living in the fens. (Foner, P. S., Writings, Vol. 2, p. 1120.)

Lackington wrote of the practice of lay preachers lodging with members of the congregations they addressed, and he singled out widows for special mention. He moved away from Methodism in middle life (but returned to the fold towards his end) and his comments are somewhat malicious, but they contribute to our knowledge of the activities Paine was engaged in about this time.

Wesley’s original policy had been to accept only ordained ministers as his preachers, but the number available to him was too small to meet the demand, and lay preachers were increasingly used to address the many communities that assembled to hear the Methodist message—sometimes in sympathy, and sometimes in bitter hostility.

Lay preachers were encouraged to seek ordination, and this may have led to Paine’s own candidature. The employment of lay preachers is another example of democratic practices within the Methodist movement, and it was one of Wesley’s constant cares to restrict democratic tendencies to the spiritual plane and to discourage their incidence in the secular field under the banner of Methodism.

This was a practical policy forced upon him, for in the political climate of his day such a development could not have failed to provoke a strong reaction against his movement; its existence would have been threatened, and the source from which democracy drew its inspiration in both religious and secular fields could have dried up.

The reality of this threat was demonstrated in 1811, when Lord Sidmouth, as Home Secretary, introduced a Bill to restrict lay preaching, which was seen as subversive to the state, since “cobblers, tailors, pig-drovers, and chimney-sweepers” were claiming the right to preach.

Baptists, Congregationalists, and Unitarians joined with the Methodists to combat the Bill; five hundred petitions against it were laid before the House of Lords, and Lord Erskine (who had defended Paine) drew attention to the abstinence of Wesley and his followers from political affairs. The Bill was then withdrawn. (Semmel, Bernard. The Methodist Revolution. Heinemann, London, 1974.)

Although Wesley’s policy of keeping the democratic aspects of mainstream Methodism within the spiritual field may thus appear to have been justified by events, some of his preachers were not prepared to follow his lead on this point, and considered social philosophy to fall within their ambit.

Notable among these was Alexander Kilham, who became known as the champion of liberty and equality within the movement; this reputation earned him the accusation of being a “Tom Painite” and led to his being tried by the central Methodist authority on the ground that his activities would jeopardise the movement’s survival. (Ibid. pp. 118–19 and 121–24.)

When the persecution of Paine’s supporters is considered, the persistence of anti-Paine propaganda remembered, these fears become understandable, if not justifiable.

Some consideration of the secular effects of Methodist thinking has been thought necessary to show that membership of the movement was not inconsistent with the development of Thomas Paine into one of the foremost thinkers of his age, but this paper is not the place for a detailed examination.

Readers who might like to look more deeply into the revolutionary aspects of Methodism may find interesting a perusal of Bernard Semmel’s book *The Methodist Revolution*, in which he postulates the thought-provoking thesis that it may have been because the English working class had already achieved spiritual democracy through Methodism that the people were not impelled to pursue social democracy through revolution, as were the American and French peoples during the 18th century.

When Paine was given the opportunity to return to the Excise in March 1768, his decision to accept the posting to Lewes may have been a difficult one, as it entailed cessation of itinerant preaching; but it did not entail termination of other activities within the movement, and Paine may have seen a settled period at Lewes as offering opportunities for further study.

He had probably kept in touch with the service through the London officers; indeed, it is difficult to see how he could have formed his association with Thomas Sykes (the first signatory to his subsequent salary petition) at any other period. (T.P.S. Bulletin, No. 1, Vol. 6, 1977, p. 14.)

Sykes’s office was in the City of London, and Paine may have approached him for information about the Grampound post when it was offered him; once Paine had become personally known to the London excisemen, they would have observed his preaching activities at Moorfields and might thus have discerned his potential as a leader.

Dr. Johnson observed and commented upon the singular ability of Methodist preachers to express themselves “in a plain and familiar manner, which is the only way to do good to the common people.” (Semmel, B., op. cit., p. 20.) The excisemen at Paine’s meetings might have come to a similar conclusion.

Although Paine’s period at Lewes was perhaps the most important one in his early life, it has not yet been adequately portrayed. It is accordingly now proposed to summarise it and make known further information which has recently come to light.

As Paine went to Lewes as an Excise Officer, his first concern on arrival would have been to report at the excise office in the town, and he would thus have become immediately familiar with the White Hart Inn, where the Lewes excisemen had been quartered for decades.

The master of the inn, Thomas Scrace, was the officially appointed excise office-keeper, as the preceding masters had also been, and he was responsible for a number of minor excise functions which would have kept him on familiar terms with each of the nine Excise Officers based at his premises.

Scrace was a prominent member of the urban community, who took an active interest in public affairs as well as being in constant contact with the various “clubs” regularly held at his inn; he was probably the first person whose acquaintance Paine made in Lewes, and Paine could have had no more versatile an informant on the community he was joining.

Paine’s second concern would have been to ascertain where he could meet local people holding similar religious views to himself, and at that time they were associated with the congregation at the Westgate Chapel.

This was multi-denominational. It had been founded by a Lewes minister who had suffered displacement under the Act of Uniformity, and when conditions later eased sufficiently for him to obtain a fresh licence to hold meetings, the deeds of the new meeting house were designed to avoid repeating what was seen as the injustice perpetrated by that Act.

No particular mode of worship was prescribed, and ministers were free to dissent from the opinions of their predecessors. Paine may well have been pointing out the benefits of this broad approach to Christian worship, and deploring its absence elsewhere, when he wrote:

“How capable the best things are of being perverted to the worst purposes has been too clearly evinced by the many unhappy feuds and dissensions that have torn and distracted the Christian world. Such a variety of sects and parties have started up that it requires a very tolerable share of understanding to distinguish their very names: Arians, Socinians, Arminians, Lutherans, Calvinists, etc..

“Now whatever may have been the causes of such a diversity of tenets, the consequences we are but too well acquainted with. Our zeal has eaten up our charity. In quest of the shadow we have lost the substance, and the most essential duties of Christianity have been either mistaken or forgotten, while we have been disputing about circumstantials.

“If we could learn to be cool and dispassionate, we should then learn to be candid and open to conviction, and our differences would terminate happily, viz. in the detection of our own errors or those of our antagonists. But here we fail. Being warm and strenuous in the defence of our own sentiments, we don’t love to give our opposers a hearing.

“Hence it happens that many of our misunderstandings are literally nothing more than our not understanding each other.” (Lewes Journal, 1773.) (Ibid. September 6, 1769.)

Paine needed a permanent lodging, and when seeking one he would probably have consulted Scrace, for it is long-standing unofficial practice in local excise offices to maintain a list of available lodgings for the benefit of new-comers; there would have been a particular need for such a list at Lewes, for in the autumn of most years thirty-odd extra officers were drafted there to collect the duty on the hop harvest. The list would have been in the hands of Scrace, who was always present to greet new arrivals, and when he had ascertained Paine’s particular interests, Scrace probably recommended Paine to lodge with Samuel Ollive, son of a previous Westgate minister, whose residence adjoined the chapel. Ollive seems to have taken quickly to Paine, and would have been his sponsor with the Westgate congregation, which had always been notable for its strong tradition of public service. Ollive was serving his second term of high local office, and it is very likely that Paine’s association with him paved the way for his early election to the “Jury” of twelve prominent citizens who managed urban affairs; but Paine’s personal bearing and his reputation as a former preacher would doubtless have been the deciding factors.

At the time of Paine’s arrival, Ollive’s daughter Elizabeth was an assistant teacher at the school of a Mrs. Bridges, but this lady found it necessary to retire through ill-health shortly afterwards. Elizabeth seized the opportunity to open a school of her own, a bold step for a young girl, which she is unlikely to have been able to finance from her own resources; perhaps she needed the backing of her father, but if so his assistance was not long forthcoming for Ollive died in poor circumstances a few months later. Following a meeting of his creditors at the White Hart, his whole possessions, professional, domestic and personal, were sold under the hammer. The sale was advertised in two editions of the Lewes Journal, and on the second occasion another advertisement accompanied it:

THOMAS PAIN, and ELIZ. OLLIVE, Daughter of the late Mr. Sam. OLLIVE, near the West-Gate, Lewes, continue selling in the same Shop, all sorts of TOBACCO, SNUFF, CHEESE, BUTTER, and Home-made BACON, with every Article of GROCERY, (TEA excepted) Wholesale and Retail, at the lowest Prices. An entire new STOCK will be laid in as soon as the present Stock, now advertised for public Sale, can be disposed of. (Ibid. December 13, 1773.)

Suggestions that Paine re-opened Ollive’s business subsequently are now seen to be incorrect, since the advertisement makes clear that there was no break in trading; the business would presumably have passed into Paine’s sole ownership under the laws of the time when he married Elizabeth, but we already know that when they subsequently separated there was a division of the property. The public advertising of his partner- ship with Elizabeth is positive proof that his involvement was known to his excise superiors, who were based only a few yards from the Westgate premises, and it is prob- able that it was to avoid any possible objections from them that tea was excluded from the range of groceries for sale, for tea was the staple commodity of the contraband trade. The reason why Paine stopped lodging at Bull House on Ollive’s death is also now clear, since every stick of furniture and every shred of household linen was auctioned to pay Ollive’s debts, no living facilities would have remained there for him incorrect, since the advertisement makes clear that there was no break in trading; the business would presumably have passed into Paine’s sole ownership under the laws of the time when he married Elizabeth, but we already know that when they subsequently separated there was a division of the property. The public advertising of his partner- ship with Elizabeth is positive proof that his involvement was known to his excise superiors, who were based only a few yards from the Westgate premises, and it is probable that it was to avoid any possible objections from them that tea was excluded from the range of groceries for sale, for tea was the staple commodity of the contraband trade. The reason why Paine stopped lodging at Bull House on Ollive’s death is also now clear, since every stick of furniture and every shred of household linen was auctioned to pay Ollive’s debts, no living facilities would have remained there for him.

Nothing is positively known of the scholastic attainments of Elizabeth, but the general impression has been that she was a well-educated girl. The Lewes Writings, which were penned after Paine’s second marriage, contain a number of references not only to Milton and other English poets, but also to Latin poets, although Paine has generally been thought unversed in that language; Elizabeth may have had a knowledge of Latin, and she may have passed it to her husband, who had been at a disadvantage without a classical education when applying for ordination. It is quite compatible with Paine’s character, as we can now see it, with the religious vein that runs through the Lewes Writings, and with the general tenor of his observations on other ethical questions, that Paine could still have aimed at ordination during his Lewes period. As Elizabeth was the granddaughter of a former Westgate minister, it is conceivable that they both bore in mind the possibility of Paine becoming the minister of the liberal-minded Westgate congregation.

Paine’s appointment to Lewes was to Lewes 4 Outride, which means that he was one of the six riding officers who covered the countryside around Lewes on horseback. Each of them would have been responsible for a specified area, but the one Paine covered has not been identified; such circumstantial evidence as is available suggests that he may have been concerned with the vicinity of Uckfield. Excise work within the town limits was primarily laid to two town officers, but the central situation of the common office in the White Hart meant that Paine would have had some business in the town. The incidence of sickness and similar disruptions of normal arrangements might also lead to Paine making visits within the town, but mainly he would have worked in the country. After he lost his original lodgings on Ollive’s death, it is possible that he found a new residence in the country more convenient for his working practice than living in the town.

The countryside around Lewes was probably the most attractive area to which Paine was directed by the Excise Commissioners; Lewes stands at the edge of the ancient forest lands that once extended from the South Downs to the North Downs, and it was timber from those forests which fuelled the Sussex iron industry that was active when Paine was resident there. He recorded the impressions the countryside made upon him, and the thoughts it stimulated:

One of these Halcyon days, some time since, tempted me to extend my walk beyond its usual limits. I was drawn insensibly on, till I had gained a considerable eminence, where I was presented with a very striking prosp- ect. It was bounded on one side by a distant view of the downs, on the other by the Forest; the intervening tract of land was agreeably diversified with several pleasing objects, and the whole terminated by a beautiful sky. As the sun shone, and the air was remarkably still, I stood some time gratifying my eye with the landscape. “Ah! (thought I) if the human mind were always as serene and calm as the scene I have now before me, how pleasantly might we glide down the stream of life: But as it is in the greater, so it is in the little world, called man: our sunshine is still succeeded by storms: some rustling passion is still breaking in upon our repose, and depriving us even of those ration- al enjoyments we might otherwise innocently partake of.” (Ibid. September 7, 1772.)

Again Paine’s words appear prescient to modern readers. They appeared in December 1773; within months the Sussex countryside was swept from his daily life by his second excise dismissal, which came like a bolt from the beautiful sky he had admired.

Particular interest naturally attaches to the first of the articles in the form of letters that Paine addressed to the printer of the Sussex Weekly Advertiser, which in this paper is generally referred to by its alternative title of the Lewes Journal. It will now come as no surprise that Paine’s prime motivation was his sympathy with the endeavours of the Methodists, and that his object in writing it was to open the way towards a more rational appraisal of these endeavours than had recently been accorded them in the vicinity. Methodism exerted its greatest appeal in industrial districts, and it was still a contentious movement in conservative areas such as rural Sussex. The Lewes Journal in September 1772 carried a report of a Methodist preacher being harried from parish to parish by persecutors assailing him with missiles and rotten eggs. Paine showed in his first letter to the Journal that he was already the Man of Reason, opposed to mindless hostility, but seeking to counter it, not by confrontation, but by stimulating mild and thought-provoking suggestion:

Mr. Printer,

I BELIEVE, with no other instruments than plain truth and a little common sense I could dissect that paragraph in your paper which mentions the defeat of the Methodist troop in (or near) Uckfield. However, I shall only observe, that confronted and confused as they were with the all- powerful rhetoric of rotten eggs, broombats, their enemies must, at least, allow that it was only a common idea of generalship to quit the field, and make a prudent retreat. In the whole circle of Logic not a syllogism can be found that hath half the force of a missile weapon, directed at the outside of the head. People talk of convincing one another by force of argument; but ’tis all a joke, I assure you, compared to the dint of a broombat. In short, the oratory of the mob is in itself perfectly irresistible… But, by the bye, if we should ever live to see a thorough reformation take place, both in principles and practice, I am inclined to think it will never be brought about by mere dint of rioting and rotten eggs. I am told, a sensible magistrate upon the spot thought this but an awkward kind of reasoning, and therefore rationally enough desired the Logicians to desist from this species of argument. But you will say, “Are not these people in the wrong? And do not many of the Clergy oppose them?” They do, and I heartily reverence them for so doing, because I believe they do it from principle; they do it, because they suppose these people Schismatics. But we don’t know of the Clergy to go in print at the head of a mob to oppose them. No! Men of principle can’t do this. But let me whisper a word in your ear: If their discourses are really so stupid and unconnected as they are said to be, it would not be much amiss to let them convict and confute themselves; a much more rational triumph this, than one obtained by any other means whatever. (Ibid. November 2, 1772.)

Paine did not sign this letter with his name; in accordance with the custom of the time he cloaked his identity under a pen-name — one which leapt to my eye when I observed it on perusing a file of the Lewes Journal. Paine signed himself — A FORESTER.

My view that A FORESTER and Paine were the same person is based on the internal evidence in the Lewes Writings — of style and subject matter; on the logic of the pen- name, which Paine is known to have revived (without a slight variation) in America where he had no known connection with a forest; and on comparison of time factors including Paine’s known visit to London in the winter of 1772/3 to pursue his Case of the Officers of Excise. Paine’s actual departure for London appears to have been precipitate, for although he had arranged to supply a weekly feature to William Lee, printer of the Lewes Journal, he left Lewes without making arrangements for two-way correspondence, as is shown by his inserting a note in the town column of the paper for November 30th, 1772, which he knew Paine would read in the London coffee houses where the Journal was regularly circulated: “A line from Forester, acquainting the Printer where he may be wrote to, will be esteemed a favour. “

Lee was also the printer of the 4,000 copies of Paine’s Case of the Officers of Excise, which Paine was distributing about that time to his fellow officers, the Members of Parliament, and to prominent public figures, and it may be that Lee was seeking instructions for distributing some of the considerable bulk of pamphlets, which Paine may have wished to be done promptly in support of his personal efforts.

It is not practicable to include in this paper more than a selection from the Lewes Writings; those that now follow have been chosen as illustrations of my reasons for attributing their authorship to Paine, and also as examples of his thinking during his Lewes period: on religion, on society, and on his fellow men. With the welcome revival of interest in Paine, which seems to have been particularly strong in America following the bi-centennial celebrations, the time appears ripe for a new edition of his works, and if this is forthcoming, it is hoped that the Lewes Writings will become generally available in their entirety. 

The following quotation foreshadows in some degree the first part of The Age of Reason. It is attractive writing, and is concluded by an incisive assessment of the fallibility of learning unsupported by understanding — which could only have been expressed by a mind as brilliant as that of Thomas Paine:

Among the various kinds of idolatry we have upon record, that of worshipping the heavenly bodies, seems of all others the most plausible and rational. Consider the Sun as an immense mountain of light and heat, ripening by his influence into life and action all the several tribes of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms, and you may, I think, easily conceive how obvious and natural it was for an uninstructed heathen to mistake such a body for the God of this lower world. I remember at school being much pleased with Herodotus’s worshippers of the Moon, waiting to hail and welcome their rising Goddess with all the festivities of music, and dancing. They were really idolaters of taste. In all the grand machinery of the creation, I hardly know so fine an object as a rising full Moon, especially in summer. After an oppressively hot day, which has thrown a languor upon both mind and body, can anything equal “The coming on of grateful evening mild,” ushered in by such a glorious harbinger? What exquisite painting! What scenery! A very luxury in nature. One of her richest repasts! Every sense seems regaled; every faculty harmonised and disposed to favour thought and reflection. And yet how lost, how utterly lost is all this to millions and millions! Why? — Because we all look through different glasses; one has the lens of his (mind’s) eye so thick and horny that he sees no objects distinctly. Some view everything through the dirty medium of gain; others through the misty glass of sensual pleasure. Some are blinded by ambition, others drunk and besotted by intemperance. But of all, none is more vexed by those who are TOO SHARP-SIGHTED TO SEE, or, in other words, who have too much learning to have any taste at all; who are so bewildered in the labyrinth of “falsely so called,” that they are lost to everything worthy of their notice. Admirable work this, to be learnedly stupid. A man in such a case is like a warrior pressed to death with the weight of his own armour. (Ibid. May 3, 1774.)

The next extract, which is also in religious vein, depicts Paine in the unfamiliar role of an apologist for revealed religion. It displays his remarkable ability to postulate an apparently strong proposition, and then to demonstrate its weakness in a few lines of concise, forceful and lucid reasoning, punching the message home by a strikingly effective homely illustration that exerts an immediate impact upon readers of all persuasions. But I think it is important to note that even when defending orthodox religion, Paine based his case not on quotations from the Bible, but upon the force of rational reasoning: 

One of the solidest infidel batteries that have been played off against revealed religion is that it abounds in mysteries. “It is absurd” (say they) “to require your faith in matters confessedly above the reach of our understanding.” The objection at first sight appears formidable enough, but will vanish upon examination. It carries with it little or no force at all. Whether a thing exists and how it exists, are certainly two very distinct enquiries. Even among the objects of sense, which we may be supposed to be best acquainted with, we are every moment forced to acknowledge numberless truths, which, with the utmost stretch of our faculties, we can no ways fully conceive, nay, which we have hardly any competent idea of at all. The various modifications of matter, the exquisite mechanism and organisation of animal and vegetable bodies, &c., are (as to their first rationale) utter secrets to us, and so they will ever remain. A single blade of grass is as effectual a puzzle — with all the philosophers upon earth — as is the solar system, and twenty other systems added to it. (Ibid. November 14, 1772.)

The suggestion that Paine evinced no interest in social affairs of his day, before his emigration to America, is shown by the Lewes Writings to be quite unfounded. Paine’s consuming interest in his fellow-mortals is clearly expressed — almost off-handedly, as if such an obvious truism did not warrant taking up newspaper space to record — in a short parenthesis: 

“…and (as I love to see human nature in all its shapes)…” (Ibid. February 20, 1773.) (These words might well be preserved as the standing reason why excisemen continue in their harassing and unremunerative profession, ground as they are between insensitive authority and the perplexed and resenting public.) 

In another extract, Paine makes observations on humanity in much greater detail, and demonstrates that notwithstanding the apparent wide differences between the great and the lowly, there is much less real difference between them than many suppose:

I have sometimes thought that a work in which all the various movements of pride should be fully discussed, would consist at least of twenty volumes in folio; and I believe then, after the publication of the twentieth volume, the writer would find fresh matter starting up in his way. High life and low life are both equally full of it. Has a nobleman his attitudes, his peculiar manner, gait, &c.? So has a carter; I have seen it clearly in the carriage and conduct of his whip, and in his tone and manner of address to his horses… People may be poor, but they won’t let lords and ladies have all the pride to themselves. The villager has a world of his own (of which his cottage is the centre), and there he strives to cut a figure, as your great folks do in a higher sphere. The barber (forgetting himself) rises into a politician, trims the balance of Europe, and talks of Kings and Princes with all the freedom of a prime minister. (Ibid. October 20, 1772.)

Paine’s range of sympathetic interests extended beyond human affairs into the animal kingdom, and beyond that again into the domain of insects:

…Life is life, though it be in miniature, and it’s nothing but ignorance and prejudice that makes you think a creature beneath your notice, only because it’s less than yourself. To crush with your foot an inoffensive reptile, or otherwise needlessly maltreat any of the creatures that are put in your power, is the triumph of a little mind, and a species of cruelty which it will more than puzzle all your philosophy to justify. (Ibid. October 1772.)

But in reflecting upon creatures other than man, Paine was quite capable of pointing to the moral that man was by no means the vastly superior being he was popularly represented to be. The following reflection on the community life within an ant hill is an example of this, and it carries a sting that could have found some uneasy victims:

There’s not a state in Europe, I move, half the harmony that subsists in this little republic. Every individual Ant there is a patriot, I warrant him, and has the good of the community warmly at heart. Every individual Ant supports the character assigned him with equal dignity and propriety. And if such little beasts are susceptible of many passions, I dare affirm, they are well governed, all under due regulation and restraint, and all subservient to the public cause. Can you conceive of an Ant statesman selling his country and betraying the interests of the hillock to the enemy? I can’t. Can you form an idea of an Ant, whether peer, commoner, or what not, idly basking in the sun, and living at the expense of the public, without bringing in a single grain to the stock? There is no such to be found… And if I were to give you a list of human follies and extravagances, and then ask you if you thought each any place in this hillock, I think you must necessarily answer me in the negative. (Ibid. October 25, 1773.)

One aspect of Paine’s character which is well known, but for which he has been given too little credit, is his lack of personal greed, and his willingness — indeed his anxiety — to forgo pecuniary gain from the major works he envisaged as altruistic contributions to human philosophy. There have been many writers whose efforts have led to amelioration of want, or even to improvement in human conditions, and there have been many men and women of wealth who have generously contributed to charity. But if there have been philanthropists — other than Thomas Paine — who have donated the rewards from their literary successes to the community they sought to serve while they themselves remained in modest circumstances, there has been no listing of them that has been generally brought to notice. Paine declared the dangers of over-valuing worldly wealth while he was in Lewes, and at a time when he was actively proclaiming the hardships inflicted upon excisemen by the constraint of fixed salaries in inflationary times. His declamation on this point is one of the indications that inclines me to the view that he may well have seen himself as a possible minister inculcating the desirability of a broad rather than a narrow approach to human values. And Paine’s subsequent dispersal of the rewards from his own literary successes shows that his views were genuinely held, and not mere rhetoric.

My good friends: however difficult it may be to persuade many of you to think so, yet certain it is, that the universal veneration men have for the mineral call’d Gold is highly absurd and preposterous. To be sure it’s a useful thing in its place. It is found to be a good viaticum enough upon a journey, and to answer many other purposes in social life. But because it answers some purposes, is it therefore to answer all? Suppose it to be a convenient medium in the business of commerce, to reduce wares to a balance, is this any reason it should be made the common measure and standard of everything else? If they are, then, when we see a child in raptures over a piece of gilt gingerbread, we see a PICTURE OF THE TIMES. (Ibid. September 28, 1772.)

But Paine, like other human beings, must inevitably have been influenced at times by the happenings — and any bitter experiences — which had befallen him in person. It was possibly the injustice of his first dismissal from the Excise which lay behind his plea for proper consideration being given to matters which involved the public interest: 

“When any thing is upon the carpet, in justice to the public, as well as yourself, do suspend your judgment a little; assert the distinguishing privilege of a rational being, which is, to think, before you determine; otherwise you are liable to injure society, you commit an outrage against common sense, and in so doing, glaringly insult your understanding.” (Ibid. June 14, 1773, and September 27, 1773.)

Although Paine could not have known so, these words were opposite not only to his first excise dismissal, but also to his second. Whilst the full circumstances of this second dismissal are best reserved for separate discussion elsewhere, it is consistent with the general purpose of this paper to delineate them broadly, so that the substance of new information may be recorded. 

A new reading of Paine’s excise career now suggests that in early 1774 Paine was recommended for promotion by the Excise Commissioner George Lewis Scott, who has long been recognised as a patron of Paine. It may be wondered why Scott should have delayed more than a year after Paine’s visit to London to take this step, but again the Lewes Writings provide a clue, as there are indications that Paine suffered an illness — possibly serious enough to be counted a breakdown — after his return to Lewes. (Customs and Excise Library, reference.) This illness caused a break in the continuity of the Writings, and it also explains the cessation of Paine’s participation in urban affairs in 1773, although he did not leave the town until the following year. 

A recommendation for promotion from Commissioner level could not fail to carry strong weight, and it would have commanded immediate attention. Paine is seen, from his known correspondence, to have been favourably disposed towards promotion, and it is conceivable — to judge by his actions — that he had been assured promotion was certain. But promotion carried an inevitable consequence; it necessitated removal from Lewes and cessation of his activities in the town. Paine accepted this. The *Lewes Journal* of April 11th, 1774, carried an announcement of the sale by auction of business and household effects near the West Gate, the sale to be conducted on April 14th and 15th. The substance of this announcement was published by Oldys; but he refrained from detailing its suffix: 

F.B. The Dwelling House with a good Warehouse, Stable and pleasant Garden, to be LET and entered on immediately.** (A minor point that may be mentioned here is that the announcement spelt *Paine* with the final *e*, showing that the alternative spelling was in use before Paine emigrated.) 

No indication has so far been found of how much notice was required for the insertion of an announcement in the *Lewes Journal*; it is highly probable that several days at least would have been required, as is the practice today, and it follows that the decision to quit the Westgate premises must have been taken several days before Monday, April 11th. Since the Commissioners dismissed Paine from Lewes 4 Outride on Friday, April 8th, and their decision must have been physically carried to Lewes, it is apparent that the decision to sell up the business was taken before Paine was dismissed. 

What seems to be clear is that Paine was in line for promotion in March, and that he arranged to sell up his business some days before April 11th. It happened that an opportunity to contrive Paine’s second dismissal arose about this time, when his Supervisor was granted leave; a substitute official named Edward Clifford, whose movements were controlled from London, was sent temporarily to Lewes, and on April 6th he lodged a complaint that Paine was absent without leave, and imputed debt as Paine’s reason. Under the standing rules of the service, such a complaint should have been passed for investigation to the highest local official, the Excise Collector for Sussex, who was also based in Lewes town. The Collector would have been the official who had arranged Paine’s prolonged visit to London the preceding year, and he would have known Paine very well; he would have known Paine’s promotion position, he would have been personally familiar with Paine’s shop, and he would have known, in all probability, why Paine was selling up. He would in fact have been ideally placed to investigate Clifford’s complaint and to report fully upon it to the Commissioners, as was his duty. That no such investigation was made is shown by the terms of the Board’s minute dismissing Paine on April 8th: 

Thomas Pain, Officer of Lewes 4th Outride Sussex Collection, having quitted his Business without obtaining the Boards leave for so doing, and being gone off on account of the Debts which he hath contracted, as by Letter of the 6th instant from Edward Clifford Supervisor and the said Paine having been once before Discharged; ORDER’D that he be again Discharged, that the Supernumerary or a proper officer supply the vacancy… (Foner, P. S., Writings, Vol. 2, p. 1131.) 

Not only was Clifford’s complaint uninvestigated by the Collector, but it must have been rushed post-haste to London; otherwise it could not have been decided by the Board — or by the advising official — two days later. The wording of the minute gives no indication that Clifford was only temporarily at Lewes and had only slight knowledge of Paine; further, the minute reads as if Clifford was an established Supervisor when he was in fact an Examiner — an apprentice Supervisor employed on head office duties when not officiating for Supervisors absent on leave or for other causes. The speed with which the unsupported complaint by a temporary official at Lewes was rushed to the Board and irregularly dealt with, is strong circumstantial evidence of the desire to contrive Paine’s ruin at Lewes. 

In the space of a few days, Paine, who had looked set for an advancement in the Excise, was deprived of his livelihood and robbed of his reputation in Lewes. No evidence has ever been produced that the sale of his possessions was other than voluntary, and there is no evidence that the business was not satisfactorily wound up. Oldys has told us that Paine continued to enjoy the confidence of the Commissioner, G. L. Scott, who supported his appeal for restoration, but the grounds of Paine’s appeal have never been ascertained. We know from other sources that Paine entered into legal articles of separation from his wife, whom he set legally free without dissolving the marriage; and we know Scott enlisted the aid of Benjamin Franklin to give Paine a good start in a new life in America when Paine decided to emigrate. Scott, in fact, did his very best to mitigate the disastrous results that followed his well-meaning attempt to promote Paine’s interest in the Excise. 

Until recently it was believed that the first thirty-seven years of Paine’s life formed a self-contained episode that bore little relationship to the spectacular career that was to follow; the truth is far different, for it was on the experience of those years that Paine was to build, and he left clues that enable the continuity to be traced. 

Paine’s personal life during his first year in America seems to be no better known than much of his early life in England, but information continues to be gathered about the structure of society in Philadelphia, in which he moved. The most detailed account to date of Paine’s early journalistic activities in America is to be found in D. F. Hawke’s biography Paine, which appears to lay surprising emphasis on scurrilous comments by Paine’s detractors, which are not impartially assessed; but Hawke, like Oldys, supplies information on some points which are not found elsewhere, and which allows an independent opinion to be advanced. 

Hawke’s account of Paine’s connection with the Pennsylvania Magazine seems to me to be of particular importance, for his description of Paine’s editorial practices reveals — to a researcher who has looked through the files of the Lewes Journal — that these were modelled upon the practice in Lewes. More important, Hawke quotes the motto of the magazine, Juvat in sylvis habitare, the significance of which I think he misses. Literally it means ‘It is of use to live in the woods,’ which is surely a strange sentiment with which to launch a new magazine in an environment which has no specific sylvan associations; however, when this motto is expressed in the Paine idiom, it becomes, ‘It is useful to be A FORESTER,’ and this exactly summarises Paine’s situation on taking over the practical control of the magazine. 

Paine’s letter to Benjamin Franklin dated March 4th., 1775, (Aldridge, A. O. Man of Reason, p. 41.) gives a reasonably clear explanation of Paine’s position; in it he says ‘Robert Aitken, has lately attempted a magazine, but having little or no turn that way himself, has applied to me for assistance.’ This suggests that Paine could have found himself in charge of a first number unprepared editorially for printing, and that he pulled it into shape for production; in other words that he may have played no part in the first number as a contributor, but may have edited in part. The position regarding the first number is not clear, but it may be made clearer by a detailed examination of surviving copies of the magazine. The intriguing point is the allocation of the motto to its instigator, for whereas it has no apparent relevance to the printer of the magazine or its readers, it seems to have a very clear relevance to Paine. 

Increased interest now attaches to the known fact that Paine originally intended Common Sense to be published as a series of letters in the newspapers (Ibid. p. 29.) for this is now seen to be merely an intention to continue his Lewes practice of submitting regular articles for continuing publication in successive editions. Hawke tells us that Paine began journalistic activities in the first days of his American experience, and It now appears to me that Paine’s intention on emigrating to America was to continue his career as a journalist which had been well established in England. This would have been a bold intention for an inexperienced immigrant, but Paine cannot have expected to support himself by writing from the first. Ordinary prudence would have suggested an alternative approach would be necessary initially, and tutoring would have seemed a good choice for this temporary expedient. Benjamin Franklin’s letter recommending Paine to his son-in-law, Richard Bache, may be read as seeking to secure for Paine some such provisional employment: 

…If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country….(Lewes Journal, December 28, 1772.)

When newspaper correspondence followed the publication of Common Sense, and Paine became involved in the debate, he found himself in a similar situation that which prompted his first letter in the Lewes Journal, which had also defended the preaching of a new doctrine. While it was natural, in these parallel circumstances, for Paine to revive his first pen-name, it must also have been a deliberate decision, for by that time he had been long enough in his new environment to know how unusual the pseudonym The Forester would appear there. The minor variation in the pen-name is easily accounted for for whilst on penning his first article in the Lewes press Paine had been t one of the many local residents who could regard themselves as foresters, the success of his articles was such that he had quickly become known as The Forester, and indeed he occasionally so referred to himself in the Lewes Writings. (Ibid. November 1, 1773.) But there is another point relating to Paine’s revival of his first pen-name which is of greater interest and importance; at one time in Lewes Paine found himself being regarded as the author of many more letters to the Journal than he had himself written; this situation provoked from him a special letter to the Journal which was penned in humorous vein, but which concluded with an undertaking that Paine might have felt himself bound to respect even in his new life in America:

It is a common remark that people are seldom very fond of being called upon to father other folks’ children. And indeed I see no reason why they should. If a man provides for, and take care of his own, it appears to be all the claim the community has upon him in that respect. And yet, we find, this won’t always serve his point neither. But to come to the point. I am (it seems) the reputed, author of many Letters that have appeared in your Paper, besides what I have acknowledged for my own. Nay, at one time, not a single literary bantling could put its head into the world, but it was immediately laid to my charge. To be sure when a Hen roost is robb’d, it is so natural to suspect an old offender, that I had but little room to be angry. If the imputation was designed me as a compliment, I acknowledge the obligation; but I must confess, I am not a very passionate admirer of such compliments, because they may involve a man in difficulties, which all the friends he has can’t extricate him out of. I have no ambition to be called upon to eat another man’s words, nor to defend any opinions but my own. The maxim in these affairs seems to be, Res tuas tibi habeto, et ego habeto meas. I have made this an invariable rule. You may call mine indeed a kind of Bush-fighting, because I always take my stand in the Wood; but it deserves that name in no other sense whatever, because I have never discharged a single bolt (however wildly it might be aim’s) without first setting my mark to it. However, to guard against all misunderstandings for the future, in A MATTER OF SUCH MIGHT IMPORTANCE, I take upon me to affirm, and I can affirm it with truth, that as I never have, so I never will send any thing to the Paper, but under one and the same Signature, namely, that of

– A FORESTER. (Foner, P. S., Writings, Vol. 2, p. 463.)

There is an obvious implication in Paine’s (presumed) respect for this Lewes Journal undertaking that his American writings might have been known – or were expected to become known – to some of his friends in Lewes; there is some evidence that he kept in touch with Lewes whenever he could. We know for certain that Paine read the Lewes Journal when he eventually returned to London, for he clearly stated as much in his letter to the Sheriff of Sussex dated June 30th., 1792; (Lewes Journal, July 9, 1792.) (this letter was produced at the meeting in the Town Hall at Lewes, but was ‘cast unopened upon the table, and torn to pieces with distinguished marks of contempt,….’ but not without some sounds of protest from the assembly) (Ibid. January 25, 1773.) In my view, Paine deliberately linked his old and his new journalistic careers by his revival of the Forester identity, but he did so in a manner which did not make the link immediately apparent to his contemporaries, although the connection is clear to any impartial researcher in our own day.

Another point of interest is that Oldys described the American Forester letters as written by A Forester, although – since he was a student of American newspapers – he might have been expected to use the later form of Paine’s pen-name. Since Oldys had access to Paine’s excise records, which probably detailed Paine’s literary activities in Lewes, it is likely that Oldys was aware of the Lewes Writings, but preferred not to publicise them. Yet by using the first form of the pseudonym, he put himself in a position to defend his own reputation as a researcher if he ever needed to. 

Discovery of the Lewes Writings seems to me a major advance in our knowledge of Paine, but their impact is bound to vary from reader to reader, for, as is to be expected of the early work even of so gifted a writer as Paine they differ in subject matter, in style, in interest, and in importance. My own impressions, as set out in this paper, can only be presented as starting points for further consideration. Within this context, I may perhaps be permitted to record that on first perusing them I reflected that possibly the most important single item therein is a short passage in which Paine describes his approach when seeking to convert a man to a fresh opinion:

….but one thing I seem to be clear in, viz. that the best way to convince a man, or (if you make a metaphor of it) to conquer him, is to meet him in his own way, and fight him with his own weapons. David might well say of the arms they furnished him with, “I cannot go with these, for I have not proved them.” People do not love to have instruments put into their hands which they have not been used to, they always seem awkward to us, and ’tis but natural to throw them away with disdain. (Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, pp. 111–13.)

These words, like much of Paine’s writing, seem to express the opinion of a simple man, but the thinking behind them is profound. I think they embody the secret of Paine’s vast popular appeal, and show his blending of many sources of experience into his advanced technique of persuasion. Who could have learned better than the exciseman who never needed to refer a contentious matter to the Lewes Justices that the way to overcome a trader’s reluctance to pay revenue was to reason with him from his own point of view? Who but a man who loved ‘to see human nature in all its shapes’ and who was familiar with manual practice in many trades, would have appreciated the general reluctance to accept unfamiliar tools (and novel ideas) thrust into unwilling hands (and minds) by misguided well-wishers, and the astonishing results that could be achieved by adapting familiar ones to new circumstances? Who could know better than an itinerant lay preacher the force of biblical precepts aptly quoted to match a human situation and resolve a human dilemma? And who knew better than Paine, the architect of social democracy, the number of potential Davids in any worthy community capable of emerging as giant-killers when effectively called to battle? 

With hindsight, it is now possible to see Paine’s technique employed even in his first letter to the Lewes Journal, but the finest example of Paine’s mounting an argument for change from the standpoint of his audience must surely be Common Sense. And Common Sense is a masterly display of the Methodist approach being adapted to a secular situations Methodism had been popularised in America, not by John Wesley, but by George Whitefield, whose vigorous Calvinistic preaching ignited the religious fervor of the American settlers, during the period known as the Great Awakening. Eric Foner has related that the evangelical religious fundamentalism flowing from that time was still a potent source of the social climate Paine found on his arrival in the New World. (Foner, P. S., Writings, Vol. 1, p. 12.) In Common Sense, after stating the broad outlines of his subject, Paine launched into strong biblical declamation. He thus met the ordinary Americans in their own way, and he fought their conservative reluctance to break with monarchical government with their own familiar weapons of biblical quotations: 

Paine may well have moved away from the religious attitude he adopted in Common Sense in his own thinking, but it was not his object to present his own current religious views in his anonymous pamphlet; yet it is to be carefully noted that when punching home the message that the Almighty had entered a divine protest against mon- archial government in the scriptures, he presented this not as a single conclusion, but as one of two possible conclusion, the alternative being ‘or the scripture is false.’ (T.P.S. Bulletin, No. 1, Vol. 6, 1977, pp. 5–19.) Paine was not at that time the only advocate of American independence, but he was the only one with sufficient understanding of ordinary people coupled with the essential gift of lucid rational exposition, who was able to lead them towards indep- endence from their own positions, which were their inevitable starting points when he brought them into the political debate. Thomas Paine, who seemed to some American leaders to be a man of inferior intellectual talents, was in fact already the master of psychological warfare, an advanced technique scarcely dreamed of in those days. Paine not only understood its basis, but was its skilled and experienced practitioner; his enemies could never forgive his clearer vision of social democracy, and his greater wisdom in applying it to the purpose he was immediately concerned with.

Paine’s technique in seeking conversion, as he set it out in the Lewes Writings at the outset of his career, explains the great difference in approach in the first and second parts of The Age of Reason. The first part was specifically aimed at the growing band of French atheists who had already rejected dogma and placed their faith in reason; Paine started from their chosen ground and wrestled with them on the basis of of the incontrovertible evidence in the heavens above as explored and interpreted by their own new priests, the scientists of the day. When the practitioners of orthodoxy became sufficiently alarmed to enter the debate from a different point of view, and on the quite different premises of biblical authority, Paine accepted their challenge; he wrote the second part on the basis of the ground chosen by his challengers, and he fought them with their own chosen weapon – the reliability of scriptural writings. 

Discovery of the Lewes Writings will inevitably revive, and in more acute form, the question why Paine disclaimed writing in England. Since no evidence has emerged that Paine benefited financially from them, the Lewes Writings do not diminish the previous suggestion that Paine was merely denying writing for pecuniary profit. I do not find this suggestion convincing, and I suggest that a more positive approach to the problem is to consider the position which would have arisen if Paine had acknowledged his English writings. He would then have identified the author of Common Sense as an exciseman from Lewes who had produced the Lewes Writings and the Case of the Officers of Excise, both of which were known to the Establishment. 

The inference seems to be that he was concerned to avoid being so identified, and it appears that he may have been successful in this endeavour until the publication of Oldys life many years later. Since Paine himself would have had nothing to lose in America by such identification, my conclusion is that Paine sought to avoid a resulting consequence which would not have fallen upon himself, but upon his wife and parents left behind in England. In other words, Paine was already a political refugee at the time of his emigration, and – like similar tragic figures in our own times – he was concerned to shield his relatives back home from persecution in revenge for his contribution to the American Revolution. Paine’s wife would have been particularly vulnerable to officially-inspired abuse, and it could have been to minimise this possibility that be set her free before emigrating; and we know from the persistence of the anti- Paine lobby in Thetford that his parents could have been made very uncomfortable indeed in their old age. 

Paine’s position on his-return to England was quite different. He was then a famous: and influential American citizen, whom the Establishment would not attack until it managed to diminish his stature, a manoeuvre which was attempted by commissioning Chalmers to write the Oldys biography. And it is quite clear that Paine still continued to shield his associates, and set himself to draw the recriminations of the Establishment onto himself alone. It almost seems that – he courted martyrdom, perhaps because he could see no other effective way of impressing his case upon history. That he changed his tactics was due to the introduction of a new factor into the situation which offered him a chance to play a continuing part in the events which were changing the Western World, Achille Audibert arrived in London to acquaint Paine that he had been elected as representative for Pas de Calais,. and Paine accompanied Audibert back to France to continue his career on the world stage as a member of the French Convention.

To readers who find difficulty in crediting that an exciseman and his family could become subject to persecution in England, I offer a single cold legal fact. Two centuries of continuing human progress were necessary before the Age of Human Rights arrived; the Parliamentary Commissioner Act of 1967 then empowered an English Ombudsman to enquire into action taken on behalf of the Crown. But the Act incorporates a third schedule which excludes from its benefit a vast range of public servants, including excisemen, no matter how gross the maladministration practised against them is claimed to be. This schedule is conveniently forgotten when the clamour arises for Human Rights to be respected in other countries. Yet were this Principle of exclusion from protection of individuals directly under the contract of the State, to be restated in kindred terms in the legislation of monolithic societies, complaints of abuses against individuals in those societies would be ruled out of court by the precedent of the legal provisions of the United Kingdom! This is a sobering thought which others are free to debate and to contest; but, in the words of A FORESTER, “no controversy, let matters go as they will.” 

There is no need to look further than Paine’s visit to London in the winter of 1772/3 to find evidence that Paine could have upset the Establishment, In a previous paper, (Lewes Journal, December 7, 1772.) I have shown reason to suppose that he was then in London – with the acquiescence of the Excise Commissioners. From his base in the Excise Coffee House he pursued his salary claim for the excisemen with Members of Parliament and Prominent Men in other walks of life, as well as with the Treasury through the Commissioners, Paine would have been a temporary London celebrity, and his Lewes Writings would have become a topic of conversation, for the Lewes Journal was regularly available in some of the coffee houses of the capital. The article in the Lewes Journal of December 14th., 1772, records an incident when a colleague Paine had not seen for some time, possibly. Thomas Sykes, burst into his room to launch into a conversation about ‘these Newspaper crackers of yours,’ and it is thus apparent that Paine’s activities as a journalist were quite well known. My final extract from the Lewes’ Writings is from an article that the Establishment would not have failed to remark and remember, and in their own time and in their own fashion to revenge. In this satirical essay Paine took his line from Swift and recounted a dream in which he was endowed by a magician with a supernatural ‘visive faculty’:

Upon throwing up the sash I found myself on the first floor in one of the busiest parts of the city, east of St. Paul’s, but told my director I observed nothing more than usual, viz.’ a great number of people passing the street. “Look (added he) a little more narrowly.” I did, and discovered on many of their shoulders, a little fairy, or sylph-like figure, with just such a flap in its hand as the Dean says he saw in Laputa. “This (says he) is virtually the good genius or guardian Angel, talked of by the ancients, but to make the Scene more intelligible to you, call it conscience.” Very busy in general did these little agents seem to be, sometimes whispering in, and sometimes’ flapping the ears of the persons they had in charge, but, as observed with very different effect. One passenger you might have seen turning his head and seeming to listen, another perhaps hurrying insensibly on as if he heard nothing of the matter. Many an ear did I see plied very hard just as the party was entering a house, from which I inferred that the business in hand was of no very laudable kind. “But how happened it, Sir, (said I) that on some shoulders I see no such appearances as these? That gentleman in the gilt chariot has no attendant of this Sort.” “The reason (answered he) is, because tho’ conscience will bear so great many repulses, yet, if the man after all her repeated remonstrance, still turn a deaf ear, she will at last retire, and resign her office.” After some time spent at the window, I began, in my mind to quarrel with my situation, as it confined my view in general to persons and characters utterly unknown to me. Westminster now (thought’ I) or St James’s would be a glorious field to range in. I communicated my thoughts to the Gentleman that had endowed me with this visive faculty he nodded assent, and I took coach for Westminster. The principal remark I made in my way thither was, that the nearer I got to the.west end of the town, the fewer flappers were to be seen. In some streets not one to be met with. The coachman set me down near the abbey, time enough for getting into a certain law court, just as the gentlemen of the long robe had mustered their forces. Now, my good friends, (thought I) look to yourselves, for I may perhaps go near to see more of your proceedings than you are aware of. “Sure (said I) one flapper to a head will hardly suffice here, unless he bestir himself stoutly indeed.” But see what it is to raise our expectations too high; a circumstance I did not dream of before, dashed all my hopes to the ground, for behold! The whole region of the shoulder, where this little (and to them) invisible monitor was to have taken his stand, was, in every limb of the law present, entirely occupied with an enormous bush of false hair. (Quoted by Eric Foner, op. cit.)

There is a special aura that surrounds Paine, and which has clung to him over the centuries. Privileged and favoured commentators simply do not seem able to believe that an intellect as distinguished as Paine’s could have emerged from the common populace of his day. It is felt incumbent to pass judgment upon him, and not merely by the usual standard of what he achieved, but additionally by the spurious criterion of what he did not achieve. And though Paine was a human being, excuses for any human foibles and failings are not lightly to be allowed him, no matter how severe and exceptional the trials and tribulations be endured. 

Madam Roland, the celebrated hostess of revolutionary Paris, received Paine in her famous salon, and judged him in her memoirs. Her assessment of him is sometimes quoted:

The boldness of his thought, the originality of his style, the incisive truths, audaciously flung before the very persons they offend, have doubtless produced a great sensation; but I find him more fit…to scatter these kindling sparks than to…prepare the formation of a government. Paine is better at lighting the way for revolution than drafting a constitution. (Paine, Thomas. “Appreciation of the Character of Jesus Christ,” in The Age of Reason, Foner, Writings, Vol. 1, p. 40.)

In this paper which has suggested that Paine’s philosophy was based in his religious thinking and experience, I venture to mention that Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher accepted by untold millions as having been divinely inspired, also scattered kindling sparks, also produced a great sensation through the boldness and originality of his thinking…., and also left the formation of the government of his church, co his disciples. 

Paine admired the teachings of Jesus, and he went to great lengths to free them from smothering additions, which had been drawn from the mythology of ancient cults and grafted onto them by the churchmakers who usurped Jesus’s role of teacher, audaciously flinging the incisive truths of ancient history before the very persons they offended, Paine lit the way towards a revolution in understanding the morality of Jesus Christ, which, though reflected by the systems preached by good men in all ages, ‘has not been exceeded by any.’ (Paine, Thomas. “Appreciation of the Character of Jesus Christ in The Age of Reason. P.S. Foner. Writings. Vol.1; p.40.)

Is it not ‘an awkward kind of reasoning’ that sets for Thomas Paine, the fallible man from the people, wider criteria than, the devout have deemed appropriate for God Incarnate in Man?

The post Thomas Paine: The Methodist Influence appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

The meteoric political career of Thomas Paine was so dazzling that it has largely eclipsed the events of his formative years during which he obtained the expertise and developed the tenacity that enabled him to respond to the opportunity afforded by the rapid changes in the American colonies in the years following his arrival there. Paine’s biographers have usually given a brief account of his early years and his excise career as an introduction, but one treated as a closed date separated from the main events of his life by his migration to America. There has been little attempt to fit this early period into the overall pattern of his life, and his first thirty-seven years have often been spoken of as a period of failure. In the opinion of the present writer, this is a mistaken view. 

Admittedly there are great difficulties in evaluating his early struggles for Paine was very reticent about personal matters, and other sources of information are not easily tapped or understood. Yet they are informative, and it may be because of the neglect of material relating to these early years that Paine’s character and the influences that bore upon it have not yet been fully comprehended. Oldys, although a hostile biographer, was under no illusion as to the importance of Paine’s excise career, and took full advantage of his exceptional opportunity for tracing details still available to him in the official records. Moncure Conway, almost certainly the greatest of Paine’s biographers, played the major part in rescuing Paine from the obscurity in which his enemies sought to bury him, but Conway paged himself under some difficulties regarding the excise period by retiring to America to write his life of Palle, for unlike Oldys he was thus without contact with practical excisemen who could have informed him about working conditions in the excise, which have changed very little over the centuries; they could also have explained to him that the excise has its own jargon and words may be used in an excise context to convey something quite different from their meaning in common usage. Conway did not underestimate the importance of the early years, and went to great pains to check Oldys and repudiate some of his slurs, but in his desire to redress the Injustice done to Paine he was at times in danger of doing Paine even greater damage, and this danger has not been lessened in the long run by the attempts of Palm’s later biographers to explain Paine’s excise dismissals without studying the excise background and language in sufficient detail to express the facts accurately. 

It is disappointing to note that some of the best recent accounts of Paine’s life are quite sloppy in their presentation of his excise career. It is necessary for an understanding of Paine’s development to stress that he was an Excise Officer, never a Customs Officer, and in The Case of the Officers of Excise he differentiated between Excise Officers and other revenue officials. Not only were the Customs and Excise separate revenue services, but there was rivalry between, and friction was so acute on some occasions that special rules were drawn up in 1755 to minimise it when representatives of the separate services became involved in a particular investigation at the same time. It was not until 1909, a hundred years after Paine’s death, that the Customs and the Excise were brought together in the newly constituted department of Customs and Excise, and this event is of interest to students of Paine because it occasioned the disgorging from the archives of the Inland Revenue in Somerset House of hundreds of volumes of excise records which till then had been regarded as confidential and not available for inspection. These books are almost wholly headquarters records which are only partially representative of the work of the excisemen, for the vast bulk of the department’s work was performed by local officers usually working as individuals in near isolation from their fellows. Paine was such an individual country officer in his two periods of service in Alford and Lewes, and his personal records would have been kept in the offices of senior area officials known as Collectors. 

Few local records have survived, or at any rate have yet been brought to light, but such as are available to us, although Incomplete, are of great importance in any consideration of Paine as an Exciseman; yet they have been entirely neglected. Not only have his departmental efforts been incompletely comprehended, but the rather curious fact that he chose to be an exciseman, and clung to his appointment, does not seem to have excited the curiosity of his biographers to when it might well have afforded a challenge. For the Excise was a service which attracted a phenomenal amount of hatred from the public, and this hatred is again an important element in Paine’s story which has not been fully taken into account. 

The subject of the Excise is undoubtedly a difficult one, for whereas there have been a number of accounts of the Customs department – for which more comprehensive records survive – the Excise has been almost entirely neglected by serious historians as a subject in itself, and it will now be every difficult task to fill this glittering gap in the history of central government. In addition to the paucity of early Excise records there is a rather major difficulty in that the individual officers and the staff at headquarters have been, until the last decade, quite separate castes within the department knowing very little about each other’s work. Yet the Excise has exited such extraordinary reactions from the public at large that it might have been expected that social histadens would have queued up to study it. The redoubtable Dr. Johnson laid down the tone in characteristic and provocative fashion when he defined excise in his famous dictionary as a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom the Excise is paid. On the appearance of his dictionary, the outraged Excise Commissioners took legal advice, and the Attorney General optioned that there was libel, but he suggested that an opportunity for changing the words mould be allowed, but Dr. Johnson did not deign to take action and apparently the Commissioners did not dare!

Some general observations appear necessary if the excise background to Paine’s

activities is to be appreciated.

The range of duties discharged by excise officers is very wide and complex and it extends far beyond the narrow field generally regarded as appropriate to a minor civil servant; but in its simplest form – the collection of tax on consumable articles such as alcoholic beverages – it has been in continuous operation in England since 1643. Before that date excise had often been employed on the continent where its operation had led to its acquiring such an evil reputation in England that any known consideration of its introduction led to a public outcry. Both Elizabeth I and Charles I are known to have thought about it, but each shrank from the probable consequences of public resentment. Even after the outbreak of the civil war when the parliamentary forces stood in need of increased financial resources, a statement was issued in 1641 which not only denied that imposition of the excise was imminent, but declared that those spreading the rumour should be sought out and brought to the House for punishment. 

Yet in 1643 the excise was introduced, allegedly only for the duration of the civil war, at first in the simple form of a levy on popular alcoholic beverages to raise revenue for the support of the parliamentary forces; it was collected by eight Commissioners and their subordinate officers, who were empowered to call upon the assistance of organised forces if necessary. London was a stronghold of the parliamentary cause, but its citizens nevertheless saluted the imposition of the hated excise – which taxed the poor man’s glass equally with the rich man’s – by rioting and burning the Excise House which had been established at Smithfield. The royalists also imposed excise on the areas they held and also found it expedient to pretend that it was a temporary measure. But although the range on which excise was imposed was in due course reduced, the excise has never been revoked, although resentment against it continued and sometimes flared up in riots. 

So great and so persistent was the general hatred of the excise that in 1733 when Walpole introduced a plan to extend it, he was forced by fierce opposition to withdraw his Excise Bill. Yet Walpole had good grounds for his proposal, for the customs service had been found to be both inefficient and corrupt (150 Customs Officers having been dismissed in the preceding few years for fraudulent practices) and it made sense to transfer much of the control of imported dutiable good to the Excise. Contraband goods were being widely and frequently landed in quantity, and distributed throughout the country by organised gangs of armed smugglers who rode with impunity to within a few miles of London in such strength that revenue officers did not dare challenge them without military support. Once these goods had passed out of the coastal areas the excise officers would have been much better placed to challenge and collect duty at a later point of sale. 

The cancellation of Walpole’s excise proposals led to widespread public rejoicing. Walpole is reported to have said that his Bill could only have been operated by an armed force and that he would rather resign than enforce taxation at the cost of bloodshed. London celebrated his defeat with illuminations, bonfires, and the ringing of bells. Provincial cities followed suit as the news was brought to them by special messengers. In Bristol the church bells began to peal at 2am and continued all day as bonfires were lit and effigies of Walpole and an exciseman were burnt. Chester never had so many bonfires – one was kept burning for five days – and at Oxford jubilant crowds urged on by the gownsmen of the university rampaged in celebration for three days. More than fifty years were to elapse before it was dared to introduce new excise duties on commodities of general consumption, and during that half-century of hatred Thomas Paine grew up, entered the Excise, was twice dismissed, and emigrated to America to speed the secession of the American colonies. 

The distinguishing feature of the Excise has always been the close direct association of the officers with the traders they control for revenue purposes all over the country. Excisemen have never been faceless men, and they are known personally and as personalities in their working localities; and as they were denied employment in their home areas they always appeared as intruders in the eyes of the local people. Their work consisted mainly in visiting traders’ working premises, keeping permanent accounts of the traders’ business operations, and ensuring that all relevant excise dues were collected at the appropriate times, When notices had to be delivered to the public at large, this was done, even in Paine’s day, by affixing them to the doors of churches, and adding a notification of the official residence of the excise officer for the area. The faceless men of the service were the Commissioners at the Excise Office in London who disdained to deal directly with the public, with whom until 1838 they would not communicate otherwise than through their local officers. The Commissioners have ruined extremely chary of placing their signatures to documents which woul. indicate their personal cognisance of contentious matters, and still prefer to shelter behind lesser officials and irregularities such as any misrepresentation of legal provisions are brought to their notice – even though the representations may be upheld and the incorrect practices rectified as a result of such submission. 

In 1771 the total strength of the Excise department was 4,321, of which the headquarters of 9 Commissioners and their staff comprised merely 230. Country excise officers totalled 2,736 under 256 Supervisors reporting to 53 Collectors, who were the Commissioners’ representatives in the provinces, each Collector being responsible for an area approximating to a county. Communications were very poor by the standards of today and the Collectors were vested with great authority so that swift action could be taken when emergencies arose but the conferring of local authority also presented risks, as a Collector could act to conceal irregularity as well as to suppress it, and Collectors proved on occasion to be fallible mortals. There were also hundreds of town officers in London and the ports. 

Supervisors themselves needed to be supervised, for they not infrequently abused their authority, and officers were poorly placed to resist improper proposals or rebut malicious charges made against them if they declined to co-operate with a dishonest Supervisor. These matters will call for greater consideration when considering Paine’s two dismissals, which are outside the scope of the present article, but in passing it can be observed that in 1725 the Commissioners commented that few Supervisors showed proper diligence and ordered the Collectors to report on them. Supervisors were forbidden to borrow money from officers as some neglected to pay their debts, and they were forbidden also to make arrangements for participating in officers’ rewards when they had not shared in the officers’ work that had earned them. 

It has always been known that Paine was active in promoting a scheme for obtaining an increase in the salaries of the excise officers. Oldys comments that Paine had ‘risen by superior energy to be a chief among the excisemen,’ and also remarks, a ‘rebellion of the excisemen who seldom have the populace on their site was not much feared by their superiors.’ It has usually been taken for granted that Paine’s initiative on salary drew upon him the displeasure of the Commissioners, but this is not established, and examination of the official records has produced evidence to the contrary, during the period when the claim he had submitted in accordance with the procedures of the times was under consideration. 

The Commissioners had long been concerned about dishonesty and irregular cond- uct in the excise service, and not only Supervisors but also officers and Collectors had been guilty of misdemeanours which had incurred the Board’s administrative displeasure. There had been a number of cases of officers collecting excise dues from traders, and simply making off with them; these blatant thefts had not been hushed up, but on the contrary the Collectors had been instructed to warn traders against paying excise dues to officers and to tell them that in any case of an absconding officer the tax was still due to the Crown and must be paid to the Collector. In 1761, it was ordered that traders were themselves to collect their excise licences which were not to be delivered to them by officers, who presumably may have thought that such a service deserved pecuniary reward. But probably the most significant warning was that issued in 1743 when the Commissioners circulated all the Collectors and ordered that every officer and Supervise should write into his records a stern admonition against entering and searching private premises without first obtaining a warrant authorising entry from the Justices of the Peace. The order makes clear that many warnings to the same effect had been previously issued, but they had been ignored, and quantities of goods had been illegally seized by officers on unjustifiable suspicion that they had been improperly obtained. There is no reasonable doubt as to the root of these malpractices. The officers had long been unable to support their families and themselves properly by the honest execution of their onerous and dangerous duties, and had frequently descended to augmenting their official salaries by irregular proceedings, to the severe embarrassment of the Commissioners and the detriment of the reputation of the excise service. 

No student of Thomas Paine can imagine that he would have viewed with equanimity these abuses which went on around him, and which the Commissioners themselves repeatedly brought to the notice of every working officer. Paine a reformer by nature and a preacher by inclination, could have seen no course open to him other than to work for the eradication of these irregularities and the creation of an honest excise service which would operate efficiently and humanely to the eventual good of the community, to whose ultimate benefit the excise revenue should properly be used. Nor would the excise service of his own time have been his sole concern, for much greater issues would already have been revolving in his mind. 

In 1772 Paine reached the age of 35 years. He had spent his life till then in a variety of ways, and (he told Rickman) he seldom passed five minutes of life without acquiring some knowledge; he had acquired a wealth of acceptance in town and country, on land and sea, as staymaker, sailor, preacher, schoolmaster and exciseman. He would then have been meditating the schemes of social welfare which he was to publish in his Rights of Man, and which we know from his correspondence he discussed in his London days with John King in the city. Paine was no mere dreamer, he actively pursued the realisation of his ideals, and as well as formulating plans for old-age pensions and the like he would have been considering how they might be put into operation in the England of his day when nationwide services were nearly non-existent and local services in their infancy. The Excise, and the Excise alone, operated a network which covered every square inch of the kingdom, and no matter where any state pensioner might reside, his address would already be allocated to an Excise Officer who would accept responsibility for any business of state related to the occupants of that address. Already some of the work of supervision of pensions, such as those paid to Chelsea Pensioners living away from the hospital, had been delegated to the Excise – indeed dishonest excisemen at Stirling in Scotland had been sentenced to transportation for fraudulent practices in connection with these pensions. Had a national old age pension been introduced in Paine’s day the Excise Officers would have been called upon to help operate its provisions, just as they were in fact called upon when the national scheme was actually introduced in the 20th century. The excise service was the only existing means of ascertaining and catering for the needs of the distressed sections of the populace as well as being one of the chief means of raising the necessary revenue. And throughout the whole kingdom there was probably no man more keenly aware of the potential value to the community of an honest efficient excise service than Thomas Paine. 

In Paine’s day no ordinary man could have envisaged that a single Excise Officer could set about putting right the deficiencies in the Excise, but Paine was no ordinary man, and he applied himself to provoke the winds of change. In 1776 when he published Common Sense, the world realised his potential for reformation. In 1772 the excise authorities had already made the same discovery, but it was never made public knowledge. At the same time Paine somehow bridged the yawning gulf between town and country, between the mighty Commissioners who sat aloof in London and the thousands of excisemen who performed the routine work of the department in obscurity and near isolation. How he accomplished it we do not know, but he spent the winter of 1772/3 in London working on his scheme for securing an increase in the salaries of the excisemen. Yet he could not have gone to London without the knowledge and approval of his superiors, for unauthorised absence from his station speedily resulted in the dismissal of an exciseman, and we know that Paine was not dismissed for the second time until 1774.

The Excise Office, the seat of the Commissioners, was situated in Broad Street In London, and so was the Excise Coffee House, from which on December 21, 1772 Paine addressed his famous letter to Dr. Goldsmith, which still survives amongst Goldsmith’s correspondence in the British Library. The juxtaposition of the. two similarly named premises is not to be wondered at, yet again the fact that Paine wrote from a coffee house near to the excise headquarters has not apparently called forth comment. Coffee houses were a feature of London life, and they performed more functions than merely to entertain and refresh those who frequented them. There Is nothing unusual in business being discussed in places of refreshment over working lunches or cups of coffee in any age, but the coffee houses of old London were sometimes used as regular offices for business; for example in 1714 when the London Custom House was seriously damaged by fire; the Customs Commissioners set up temporary premises at Ganaway’s coffee house, from which they conducted the business of the Customs department. 

The present writer no seriously suggests that during the summer of 1772/1773 Thomas Paine was working on his Case of the Officers of Excise from the Excise Office itself, or its environment, with the active co-operation of the Excise Commissioners who facilitated his efforts. However, as Paine was working in an unofficial capacity – much as present-day representatives of civil service staff organisations work in government offices by arrangement he would not have been allowed to address himself to his colleagues and prominent citizens of the realm from the Excise Office, and so would have adopted the practical expedient of corresponding from the nearby coffee house, whose name would have indicated to all his correspondents that the country exciseman was conducting his salary claim manoeuvres from a command post adjacent to the central authority. 

We know from the Goldsmith letter that upwards of 500 pounds was raised by Paine at three shillings per head, and this indicates that the vast majority of his colleagues actively supported him, although individually they were very vulnerable to the displeasure of their superiors. It is most unlikely that such extensive support could have been forthcoming nationally in the England of that day when national trade union activity had never previously been practised, unless there had been some indication that Paine, the chief instigator of the scheme, was working with the cognisance and tacit acquiescence of the Commissioners; it is probable that many excisemen would have declined to append their names to a national petition If there had not been some indication of at least a blind eye from the departmental disciplinarians, for not all excisemen had, or have, the moral courage of a Thomas Paine. 

Even in the 20th century organizations of any national body of individuals kept together by central correspondence know the onerous nature of the work involved in securing multiple support for a petition, however worthy its object. Picture, then, the problem facing Paine when without the facilities of the modern postal services he addressed himself to every parish in the country. No register of local excise offices of Paints day has survived, none is known positively to have existed. Examination of the surviving excise records shows that the Channel of communication to them from the Excise Office was through the 53 country Collectors. It is suggested that only the use of the same channel with the tacit approval of the Commissioners could have permitted Paine’s association of excisemen to be formed on a subscription basis. 

There is further circumstantial support for this suggestion. Although Paine does not say so in his letter to Goldsmith, his association covered all the excisemen in England and Wales, but not those in Scotland, although the Scots would have been just as sympathetic to his objectives and are unlikely to have been more timid in supporting him than their southern colleagues. The practical exclusion of the Scottish excisemen is apparent from the examination of the official records of this matter which have survived and have now become known. It is not difficult to understand why the Scots were not included in Paine’s petition. On the union of England and Scotland in 1707, five Scottish Commissions were appointed to form a Scottish Excise Board to control excise in Scotland separately from the English excise, but on the same lines, the British revenue being paid over to the English Board for onward transmission to the Treasury. There would therefore have been no direct avenue from the London Excise Office to the individual Scottish officers open to the English Commissioners, or to Thomas Paine if he was using the official channel. The co-operation of the Scottish Commissioners would have been necessary. 

Examination of the official records lends further support to the theory that Paine’s efforts did not initially meet with disapproval. It was not of course a new development for an increase in salary to be sought, what was new was that a national body of lowly civil servants, individually obscure and without influence, should be organised in a common application. For those government servants who had access to the corridors of power and knew the acceptable forms of application there was an accepted procedure for seeking increases. Some years before Paine petitioned on behalf of the whole body of excisemen, a single individual in the excise headquarters made his own approach, and in the year of Paine’s petition the six judges of the Scottish Court of Judiciary combined in a common application for themselves and their retainers who went on circuit with them. 

The eminence of the Scottish judges and their undoubted knowledge of procedures acceptable to their paymasters, ensure their application of pride of place as a criterion for assessing the technique practiced by Paine. The judges addressed themselves to the Head of the Court of Judiciary in Scotland, the Duke of Queensbury and Dover, and set out the difficulties which changing circumstances had inflicted upon them. We cannot doubt that they would have presented an eloquent and convincing case, and indeed the duke in his subsequent letter dated October 6th., 1773, addressed to the Lords of the Treasury, confirmed this. Unfortunately, as he did not attach a copy of their submission to him we are not able to compare their presentation of their difficulties with that Paine prepared of those of the excisemen. The duke proved a worthy advocate, and although the judges had foreborne to specify the amount of increase in their salaries which might meet their case he recommended that their existing salaries be raised from £200 to E300, with a further £50 on their expenses for earn of their circuits, together with commensurate increases for the clerks, macers and trumpeters, who accompanied them on circuit. 

Within the Excise Office, the clerk to the Comptroller had previously made his own approach to the widespread problem of an inadequate salary, and like the excisemen he addressed himself to the Commissioners, his commencing salary in 1741 had been £120 which had been augmented by £60 in 1752; his further petition for relief was undated but the Commissioners forwarded it to the Treasury on October 23rd, 1764 with a recommendation for a further £20 a year. The Treasury warrant authorising this increase bore the signature of Lord North. 

The pattern of approach is clear, and it seems that Paine, the countryman from Lewes, was able to learn it, possibly under the guidance of George Lewis Scott, the Commissioner with whom he was able to achieve a considerable degree of rapport – in itself a remarkable feat far an obscure underling, which has also escaped informed comment. Yet the task Paine had set himself was vastly greater than that faced by the Scottish judges in combination; he spoke not for a hand but for more than three thousand, not for eminent members of a highly-regarded profession but for detested and lowly officials. The Commissioners may well have sympathized with his objective but they lacked his courage. We cannot accurately date his presentation to them of his Case of the Excise Officers – which Oldys tells us first attracted the attention of George Lewis Scott – but it is most improbable that the Commissioners did not see it before Goldsmith; it may be that Scott was one of Paine’s superiors who advised him to proceed with the printing and presentation of 4,000 copies. It may also also have been that the Commissioners hoped that Members of Parliament would have the courage to recommend the hated excisemen to the paymasters in the Treasury, but if so they were disappointed and the matter returned to the Commissioners’ table. 

Paine told Goldsmith of a petition having been circulated throughout the kingdom and signed by all the officers; possibly this was passed to the Commissioners of Excise, for it could hardly have been addressed to any other authority. It has not been discovered. What has come to light is a short address to the Commissioners over the names of eight excise officers who presumably made up the executive committee of Thomas Paine’s association. It is a remarkable document which has both grace and charm in its presentation. It is not possible to do justice to it by merely reproducing its wording, which is as follows:

To the Honourable the Commissioners of Excise,

The humble and Dutiful Petition of the Officers of that Revenue Sheweth, 

That We the undermentioned Persons being deputed by the whole Body of the Officers of Excise throughout England and Wales to represent and set forth in an humble and dutiful Petition the Distress and Poverty we at present labour under, and to Pray Such Relief as the Wisdom and Goodness of That Power in whom the Right of Relieving Us (as Officers of Excise) is vested Humbly beg leave to lay before this Honourable Board —THAT the amazing una increasing Difference in the Price of all the Necessities of Life between the present Time and that wherein the Salaries of Officers were at first established has so reduced the Circumstances or your Petitioners and so involved them in Want and Misery that they are become unable to support themselves and Families with that Credit, Decency and Independence which is essentially necessary in a Revenue Officer. 

That our Salaries after Tax, Charity and Sitting Expenses are deducted amount to little more than FORTY SIX POUNDS per annum. That the greatest part of us are obliged to keep Horses purchased and kept at an Expense which we are unable to support. That the other Part are confined to live in Cities and Market Towns, or in London, where the Rent of Houses, Taxes thereon, and every Article necessary for the support of Life, are procured at the dearest Rates That the little we have for our Support is rendered less comfortable by our being removed from all our natural Friends & Relations, and thereby prevented in all those Parental or Friendly Assistances from them, which if enjoyed would in some measure lessen the Burden of our Wants. 

Suffer us therefore Honourable Sirs in behalf of our Distressed Brethren and selves to Petition You to take into Your Consideration the Wants and Misfortunes of your Petitioners and to give such Recommendation of their Case to the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury, or any such other Assistance as Your Honors in Your Wisdom and Lenity shall judge proper for the Happiness of the Petitioners. 

And Your Petitioners as in Duty bound will ever pray. 

There followed the names of eight brave men to whom belongs in all probability the honour of having launched the first national collective pay claim for working men in the Western World: Thomas Sykes, William May„ Henry Holland, Thomas Gray, John Crosse, Richard Ayling, Thomas Pattinson, and lastly the chief instigator or the petition and godfather of country-wide Trade Unionism as well as of the United States of America, Thomas Paine. 

It Is not known how many or the Excise Commissioners were actively in favor of Paine’s initiative; George Lewis Scott, by virtue of his special relationship with George III may well have exercised exceptional influence on the Board, but we know that he could not carry his point without support from other Commissioners. There is however no doubt whatever that all the nine Commissioners united in passing on Paints petition to the Treasury, for on February 5th., 1773, the following submission was forwarded over the signature of every one of them, each signing in order of seniority on the Excise Board:

To the right honorable the Lords Commrs of his Majesty’s Treasury

May it please your Lordships.

We beg leave to acquaint Your Lordships that a petition has been presented to us by several Officers of Excise on behalf of themselves and the whole Body of Officers of Excise throughout England and Wales praying us to take into Consideration their Distresses arising from the Smallness of their Salaries and praying relief. 

The Object of this Petition being of great and extensive Importance We have not thought proper to some to any determination thereupon until we have laid the same before Your Lordship a copy of the Petition is therefore annexed to our Memorial which we humbly submit to Your Lordships Consideration.

Excise Office 

London 

5th, February 1773. 

We are Your Lordships most obedient and most humble servants.

The fourth signature of the nine Commissioners is Geo. L. Scott.

By an accident of history, the Treasury did not at that time copy its correspondence into registers (as did the Excise Commissioners), but simply put the documents away. To this chance we owe the fact that the two documents detailed above survived and were passed in due course to the Public Records Office, where they were unearthed by the present writer. It is an interesting experience to look through the boxes of documents handled by the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury two centuries ago. The various petitions have been penned in a variety of hands, and while there is an even tenor of humility in all the missives – those signed by the Excise Commissioners equally with that of the Excise Officers – there is great variety in the present condition and in the style of execution. It does not take long before the missives from the Excise Office can be picked out at sight, for they are beautifully written by penmen who clearly took great pride in their handiwork, and they used excellent materials which have scarcely faded in two hundred years.

Amongst the documents dispatched from the Excise Office to the Treasury none has been seen that surpasses in elegant penmanship the copy of the petition of the eight excisemen. It incorporates elaborate flourishes, multiplicity of capitalized gradations in the size of words and letters which give emphasis and promote some initial letters to semi-capitals. The two associated documents have lain in close contact for so long that the ink of one has faintly penetrated the surface of the other. The two epistles are strikingly similar in style, and both survive in excellent condition except for wear at the edges where they have been folded, and it is noticeable that the folds of the petition are much more worn, as if it has been unfolded for perusal many more times than the Commissioners’ memorial. There are points which provoke speculation. For example the copy of the petition is very large, approximately 15″ by 20”, which makes it a rather cumbersome enclosure In correspondence, and it could easily have been copied in smaller format (it is indeed copied on a smaller scale in the copy retained in the records of the Excise Office). The memorial of the Commissioners is comparatively unimposing in size at about 10” by 15″; one might have thought that the Commissioners would have pref- erred to have their signatures on a more impressive document, and it appears that the copyist may have prepared a replica of the petition, rather than a mere copy of its wording. 

However there is another possible explanation. It would have been very time consuming for a single petition to have circulated to 3,000 individual officers for perusal and signature, and it would have been far more practical for a number of separate copies of the proposed petition to have been circulated, say one for each of the 53 country Collections, with supporting sheets on which the officer; could have placed their signatures. In return these separate copies could have been gathered into the composite petition for submission to the Excise Board; it could have been one of these circulated copies which the Commissioners detached and forwarded to the Treasury. This would account for the greater wear which the copy petition appears to have had, compared with the Commissioners’ memorial; had the two documents been prepared and forwarded at the same time, it is likely that wear on their folds would have been similar. 

Multiple copies for circulation to Collections would also be consistent with the separate letter concerning the Nottingham officers, which Oldys – with his exceptional facilities for inspecting the official records – discovered. It appears that the Nottingham officers reacted as a group, probably as a Collection group, and this could follow from an approach having been made to them as a group with a copy of the petition. It could have been that the Collector Nottingham was a particularly severe disciplinarian, and that his volunteers did not care to petition with their colleagues without Lurtner assurances from Paine about non-victimisation. Had such been the case, Oldys would not have been anxious for the full facts to be made public knowledge. 

While the Excise Commissioners had been happy to recommend an increase in the salary of their comptroller’s clerk they did not dare to recommend one for the Excise Officers. Perhaps in passing on the petition they went as far as was to be expected of servile bureaucrats. By the criterion of the Scottish judges award, the excisemen merited an increase of at least £25 on their meagre £50 per annum, but for 3,000 excisemen this would entail an increase in the salary all of £75,000 – a far larger sum those days than now. The memorial from the Commissioners reacted to the Treasury on February 5th, the day it was dated; perhaps they were called to a discussion for they were regular attenders at the Treasury, but the decision was reached in four days and endorsed on the reverse or the memorial in a significant word: ‘Nil.” 

The Treasury’s decision was perhaps a political one, for or the justice of the claim can have been no doubt, as the Excise Commissioners’ words of transmission indicate. Ironically, the excisemen, led by Thomas Paine, one of the greatest democrats of all time, were possibly baulked on this occasion by the reputation of the very people who were to enthuse over his philosophy in later decades. The crowds who poured from the slums of Lennon to defeat Walpole’s Excise Bill in 1733 were active participants in the political scene throughout the 18th century, and their appearances were dreaded. The eleven days discrepancy in the calendar broke them out in 1751, and they rioted in support of John Wilkes more than once. Was it to be expected that they would have remained passive in their hovels if the hated excisemen had been aware of a considerable increase in salary at public expense? These men, whose drink was taxed by the excise, and whose tempers and camaraderie brought them into the streets in unkempt battalions when their sentiments were outraged, haunt the London scenes painted by the contemporary artist Hogarth. A few years later in 1780, when they took to the streets again to terrorise the capital during the Gordon riots, the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury nag well have congratulated themselves that in 1773 they had not risked the Treasury being burned down as the Excise Office was burned in 1643, and as Newgate Prison then flamed before their eyes. 

The Excise Commissioners would doubtless have been given an explanation of the rejection of the excisemen’s petition, and it may have fallen to George Lewis Scott to retail it to Thomas Paine. If the reason herein suggested – the unwillingness to provoke the people again with the excise issue and invite retaliatory riots – was indeed the reason given him, then doubtless it would also have been made clear that Parliament would take the same view, and this would account for the cessation of Paine’s parliamentary initiatives Paine would have returned to normal duties at Lewes a wiser and vastly more experienced men, and his valiant spirit even in his disappointment would already have been seeming another path towards the reforms he intended to achieve. 

Enough is now known about Paine’s endeavours in 1772/3 to establish that his efforts on behalf of the excise service were gallant indeed, and supported in some degree throughout the department; that his striking achievement in rallying his comrades into a national association has been so little esteemed is surprising. Twenty years were to pass before the stage was set by his Rights of Man for a second round in the battle to secure better representation of working men at the tables where salaries and working conditions were determined. Nor did the second stage meet with swift success, yet success in considerable degree was to come. Is the second stage considered a struggle that failed? If not, can the first stage be considered a failure when at his initial effort Pain’s petition was passed through the established bureaucratic channels to the fountainhead itself, the Lords of the Treasury? This writer suggests that the word failure is inappropriate. Paine’s brilliance in 1773 was recognised by Commissioner G.L. Scott, who remained a Paine supporter, and it would have been a major cause of his recommending Paine to Benjamin Franklin. Franklin in turn would have heard the full story of Paine’s efforts, and would have recognised his striking ability to rally dispersed unorganised men into a cohesive national body by the power of the written word. Franklin by then was well aware of the coming need of a man of Paine’s genius in the American colonies. Without The Case of the Officers of Excise there would have been no Common Sense and the Crisis. 

The field is now open to others to discuss and evaluate the facts and opinions set forth in this article, and following the bi-centennial year of American Indep- endence it is not an inappropriate time for such a discussion. Meanwhile a document lies in the archives of the Public Record Office which is basic to the genesis of trade unionism and perhaps also to that of the United States of America. That it is worthy of exhibition is a view the present writer has already expressed; it may be that further support for this view will be forthcoming. 

Members of the Thomas Paine Society will appreciate that n new’discoveries, such as the documents described in this article, can only be appraised over a consider- able period of time. There can be a number of aspects of their impact which may need to be carefully considered. Pain’s efforts of 1772/3 may not be easily placed in the evolution of national trade unions for example; so far as preliminary enquiries by the present writer have shown, the early activities previously known were of local associations of working people, who would have been in personal contact. Paine’s association of excisemen was a vastly more difficult enterprise to originate in view of their national distribution and the very small numbers in a particular provincial town. 

It will also be appreciated that examination of the old excise records continues, and while no complete account of the true facts of the excise career of Thomas Paine is now likely to emerge in positive form, circumstantial evidence is still being discovered which can be used for the intelligent reconstruction of a much fuller account of his activities and their effort upon our national social history, than has previously been made public. 

The writer of this article hopes to be able to make further contributions to our knowledge, and perhaps to compile a much more ambitious study of Thomas Paine as an exciseman, as it remains his opinion that the excise influence was not only of major importance in forming his exceptional character but that it remained with him and played a considerable part in his activities long after he had been forced out of the excise service. 

NOTE:

The documents transcribed in the body of this article are made known by Mind permission of the Keeper of Public Records, to whom is delegated authority to administer the copyright in them which is the property of the Crown.

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