In Thetford Thomas Paine was born

A day that heralded the dawn

Of revolutions that shook the world

When freedom’s banner was unfurled

First in America then France

When liberty learned to dance.

For while he plied his trade

Making stays for wife and maid;

He lost a wife and then began

To take the post of excuse man.

He moved to Lewes, found a wife,

Took up another roll in life.

He wrote a paper, cost him dear,

His job, his wife, a badger’s jeer.

Next to America he sailed

Turning his back on what had failed.

Benjamin Franklin was the hand

That sent him to the promised land.

There came the call – ‘Independence’.

Which he distilled in Common Sense –

‘These are the times to try men’s souls’

Identified America’s goals.

A bridge of iron was his next plan

To aid transport for everyman.

To Europe he returned and where

Revolution was in the air.

In France the Bastille was destroyed

All common people overjoyed.

Edmund Burke’s Reflections came

Saying the people were to blame

Tom Paine then wrote Rights of Man

And from the printing press it ran.

In one lifetime, of honour shorn,

Two Republics had been born,

Tom Paine was midwife to them both

Had witnessed freedom take its oath

In America where he had died

Only two or three there sighed.

William Cobbett stole his bones

An act no memory condones;

We do not know now where they lay

His words will greet each living day.

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The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine. Paul Collins. 275pp. Paperback. Bloomsbury, 2006. ISBN 0 7475 7768 4. £12.99. 

This is a book that truly lives up to its title, a labyrinthine journey the author takes to trace the bones of Thomas Paine. After his burial in America, they were dug up by William Cobbett who brought them back to England with him, and initially lodged them in a hotel in Liverpool. Thereafter, they changed hands a number of times until they disappeared altogether. 

The author starts his search in New York, initially tracking down the house that Thomas Paine died in and visiting various other sites associated with his last days, before his burial at his farm in New Rochelle. 

He then journeys to England, visiting any places or sites where the bones may have been taken. He also writes about all those associated with Thomas Paine and all who wrote about him and published his works, particularly his biographer Moncure Conway, after whom Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, London, is named.

One of the difficulties of the book is the immediate detail the author describes in following up his trail. The children playing in the streets he visited, the coffee he drank in cafés, nothing is spared in the minutest detail. 

However, what it does demonstrate is how the influence of Thomas Paine lives on, and interest in his work that has never ceased, and nor will ever.

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Some time ago, being aware of the approach of the 200 anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, I thought of various ways I could do to arouse interest in Paine and his most enduring and famous work and the republican ideals he espoused. Initially I approached a publisher over writing a new biography only to be told they were just publishing one. This was David Powell’s, Tom Paine: The Greatest Exile, and though this did not get much attention by the way of reviews, it scotched my own attempt at a new biography. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and my next effort went into composing a letter which I sent to eighteen Labour Party members of parliament. I reminded them that on their re-election to a future parliament (supposing they made it) their first act on entering the House of Commons would be to take an oath of allegiance to the crown, thus perpetuating for another parliamentary term the unjust constitution foisted on the people of this country by the parliament of 1688. 

I wrote, ‘If you don’t make the challenge in your lifetime, you will die knowing not only that you have betrayed your duty to the people who elected you, but also to the people of the country, and further you will have been responsible for the perpetuation of injustice’. 

In all I received some five replies. The first simply said, ‘I don’t agree with you about the Crown’. The second enclosed a draft Commonwealth of Britain Bill which contained a schedule detailing an oath to be taken pledging faith in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Great Britain and which had no chance under the present parliamentary set-up of ever being passed – imagine the Lords relinquishing their privileged power! The third said, ‘The people who elect me to parliament expect me to defend and further their interests…none of them have ever expressed any concern to me about my taking the oath…’ The fifth thanked me for my letter and continued: ‘When I first entered the Commons, I protested to the Speaker about the so-called oath’. 

That concluded my attempt to rouse some republican spirit in the Labour Party if in power. 

I next thought I would write a play about the life and times of Thomas Paine, but was slanted by the wide geographical scope of his life, his involvement in America during the War of Independence, in France with the French Revolution, with odd visits back to his native country concerning his bridge project and also by the cast-list that would include the first president of the United States of America, the deposed and decapitated king of France and various other historical figures. 

I then decided on writing a first-person dramatisation of his life, which at the bright suggestion of the first actor to take the role, Alan Penn, we entitled, ‘A Wicked and Seditious Person’. 

This had its first performance at the Plymouth Arts Centre in 1992 and subsequently at Conway Hall in London and later at the Arts Centre in Exeter. Each of the performances has been greeted with enthusiasm and genuine appreciation, and I am only sorry that to date we have not been able to organise a tour. 

The dramatisation was not the only result of my enthusiasm for popularising Thomas Paine’s republican ideals. Two hundred years after the first publication of Rights of Man, I also gave a talk at Conway Hall which was subsequently published in the society’s journal, The Ethical Record, and I later expanded this into a book of some 25,000 words entitled, Towards a Republic. This has been graced with a preface by the second Labour MP to respond to my letter mentioned earlier, one Tony Benn. I have as yet to find a publisher for the book.

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