Thomas Paine And America, 1776-1809. Edited by Kenneth W. Burchell. 6 volumes. 2496pp. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2009. ISBN-13-9781851969647. £495.00. $875.00 

When Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 he faced an uncertain future. He was seriously ill from an ailment picked up on the voyage to America, although thanks both to the captain of the ship on which he had travelled, having a cabin to himself, and the letters of introduction he carried from Benjamin Franklin to relatives, he received medical assistance on arrival that led to his. recovery. Because of the actions of the British government in imposing unpopular taxes and what was perceived to be restrictions on trade, there was considerable unrest amongst the populace which was accompanied with a feeling that change was called for. As for Paine himself, his first and most pressing need was to find employment, for although he was given the job of tutoring the sons of some prominent individuals, one of the recommendations in the letters being that he could undertake this as he had been a schoolmaster in London, he was not destined for this, as a chance meeting in a bookshop with one of the two proprietors of the newly established Pennsylvania Magazine, led to an invitation to him to contribute to it and before long he was appointed as its editor, a job in which he proved an outstanding success. 

Paine had some experience of writing as he had been asked when working as an exciseman in Lewes, to draw up a document for presentation to the British parliament setting out the arguments supportive of giving the low paid excisemen an increase in their salaries, only to have the members of parliament refuse to accept it. His Case of the Officers of Excise has been described as the first national trade union manifesto. But it was to have unfortunate consequences for Paine, as the Commissioners of Excise, who had asked him to draw up the appeal, dismissed him following its failure, then his marriage broke down and the shop he ran in Lewes failed. The future for him must have looked exceedingly bleak. However, he had got to know Benjamin Franklin in London, a friendship stemming from their common interest In science, and Franklin suggested to him that he should make a new start by emigrating to Pennsylvania. Paine, who rarely ever appears to have taken note of advice, this time did so. Perhaps the astute Franklin had sensed that he had potential, but it is unlikely that he had any inkling of the impact Paine was destined to make on the political life of the thirteen British colonies in America. 

Although the magazine Paine edited was officially apolitical, this did not prevent him including material that had a political slant, although most of his interest in political and social controversy was given voice to in letters he wrote to newspapers. Paine was no stranger to controversy having served an apprenticeship, so to speak, in the cut and thrust debates at the Headstrong Club that met in Lewes, of which he was a leading member. It is also believed that he was a supporter, if not an active helper, of the radical politician John Wilkes. Thus he would have taken a close interest in the discussions in the coffee houses and taverns of Philadelphia as well as in private gatherings that centred around the disputes with the government in London during which the idea of independence probably cropped up from time to time, for the radical John Cartwright had suggested the idea in one of his works that circulated in the colonies. Then late in 1775 Paine resigned as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, not a step to be taken lightly for one new to the colony who did not possess private means. This would suggest that something was afoot. 

In January 1776, there appeared on sale in Philadelphia a pamphlet entitled Common Sense, that created a tremendous stir accompanied by much speculation as to the identity of its anonymous author. Written in what might be described as a journalistic style, it marshalled the arguments not just for the colonies becoming independent of Britain but also that their form of government should be republican, a suggestion that went far beyond Major Cartwright’s ideas. Such was the pamphlet’s persuasive impact that there can be little doubt that it prepared the ground for the Declaration of Independence issued by the American Continental Congress on July 4, of the same year. Thus Paine may be said to have been the inspiration for that document, although some Americans have gone further and argued that while he may not have been one of the signatories he was, in effect, its actual author (cf. Joseph Lewis. Thomas Paine, Author of the Declaration of Independence. New York, Freethought Press Association, 1947). Although most historians reject this hypothesis, a far more probable case can be made for some of his ideas having had an input into the Declaration, particularly a clause that had it been included would have banned slavery in America, however, this was eliminated from the final draft because of opposition from plantation owners, bankers and others of that ilk. 

Evidence of how Common Sense swayed opinion in favour of independence is provided by the anonymous author of Civil Prudence, Recommended to the Thirteen United Colonies of North America, which had been written, so the author states, not long after the repeal of the Stamp Act. He had heard of the pamphlet and it’s advocacy of the case for independence, which disturbed him and had led him to conclude it to have been the “the invention of some Tory, to sow discord among the Colonies, and to set our friends in Great-Britain against us”, but once having obtained and read a copy, he underwent a complete change of mind, finding it had given him “a new set of thoughts, and opened a wider door to the flourishing of trade and common wealth, as well as of the due preservation of liberty” than he had ever imagined to be the case. As a consequence he decided to dedicate his own work “To the most excellent Patriot, COMMON SENSE, Defender of natural Right and Liberties of Mankind”. 

In contrast to the opinion expressed by the writer of the foregoing, are the arguments set out in another response. The writer, who describes himself as °An American”, entitled his pamphlet The True Interest of America Impartially Stated in Certain Strictures on a pamphlet entitled Common Sense. As far as he was concerned Common Sense was “one of the most artful, insidious and pernicious pamphlets” he had ever met with, in which the author “gives vent to his own private resentment and ambition”. His “scheme”, the writer believed, would be found to be “shocking to the ears of Americans. The man who penned these hostile sentiments is now known to have been Charles Inglis, a prominent New York cleric and outspoken critic of both independence and republicanism, who left America after the British forces withdrew from New York, though he was later to return to the continent following his appointment as the first Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia in Canada, 

The two pamphlets cited from above are included among the hundred other pieces of varying length reprinted in Thomas Paine and America, making this an important source of contemporary works written in response to those of Thomas Paine, none of which are included. Although the overwhelming majority are American published and written, there are five by British writers, all critical of Paine, included, for, as the editor Kenneth Burchell explains, they had been specifically addressed to an American readership and their known influence was almost exclusively limited to America. Most of the works reprinted are reproduced as facsimiles, each of which has been digitally cleaned to make for easier reading, while the remainder which did not allow for such treatment have been reset. Collectively the six volumes of Thomas Paine and America have in excess of two thousand pages. The organisation is thematic and chronological, with each item being prefaced by a short introductory note presenting relevant information that includes, whenever possible, the identity of those writers who wrote anonymously or used pseudonyms. Some limited bibliographical data is also provided. According to the editor, the criteria employed when it came to selecting works for inclusion was governed by an intention to concentrate on lesser known responses as the better known essays are more easily accessible. As a consequence, many of the works to be found in Thomas Paine and America are reprinted there for the first time since the original dates of their publication, although some have been cited in books on Paine.

The first volume concentrates exclusively on Common Sense, and includes a total of seven works all dated to 1776. The second volume has a threefold division, the first part of which is devoted to the dispute Paine had with Silas Deane, although only two works are reprinted, one a brief letter favourable to Paine and the other the anonymously written Echo from the Temple of Wisdom, thought to be by Deane himself. The second part to the reaction to Rights of Man and reprints sixteen pieces including a sequence of letters published in the press and two poems. One of the more substantial works included is Henry Mackenzie’s, An Answer to Paine’s Rights of Man. The author, a Scottish lawyer who lived in Edinburgh, describes his book as being “addressed to the people of Great Britain”, although no British imprint is currently recorded. The edition reprinted here is that published by William Cobbett in Philadelphia in 1796 when he was living and working there. It includes a hostile dedication to Joseph Priestley written by him as Peter] Porcupine. Priestley, like Paine, had strongly supported the French Revolution and was known for his support of Paine’s political ideology. He had been forced to leave England in 1774 and had settled in Northumberland Town in Pennsylvania. The final part of the volume reprints three replies to The Age of Reason, a theme continued throughout the next three volumes, which is illustrative of the interest in, and controversy aroused by Paine’s book, which prompted Priestley join the many who replied to it, although his An Answer to Mr. Paine’s Age of Reason, that was first written and published in America in 1794, but is not amongst those reprinted. The final volume has a two-fold division, the first part containing six pieces relating to Paine’s public criticism of George Washington for, in his view, not having responded to an appeal he had sent to him requesting that the president, whom he had considered to be a personal friend, use his influence with the French to gain his release following his arrest in Paris in 1793. One of the pieces reprinted here is an anonymously written attack on Paine by William Cobbett. The second part reprints some forty- two pieces published in American newspapers and journals reacting to the news in 1802 that Paine intended to return to the United States having been away for fifteen years. 

Concluding each of the six volumes is a section containing fully detailed and annotated end-notes, while in addition to these, the final volume also has a general index relating to the various reprints but not to editorial matter. An index covering this would have been of value. 

Thomas Paine and America is competently edited by the American Paine scholar Kenneth Burchell, who in the introduction found in the first volume explains the rationale behind the work, stating it to have been the aim to “place a large single collection in the hands of scholars and others concerned with the debates that surrounded Paine and the American Early Republic”, for Paine’s works “were at the centre of the most important debate on democratic principles in history, from which emerged for the first time the full range of recognizably modem political ideologies, ranging from conservatism to Whiggism and liberalism to radicalism”. 

The introduction also has some critical notes appertaining to the first two biographies of Paine, the first of which had been written by George Chalmers, a government employee who concealed the fact by using the pseudonym ‘Francis Oldys, A. M. of the University of Pennsylvania’, his book being entitled, The Life of Thomas Pain (sic), the Author of Rights of Man, With a Defence of his Writings, which was first published in London in 1791 by John Stockdate, and was anything but a “defence”, instead the use of the word sought to lull supporters of Paine to buy the heavily subsidised book in the hope that after reading it they would drop their support for Paine and his radical, republican ideas If that was truly the government’s hope then it cannot be considered a success. Yet, as it contains material on Paine’s early life not available elsewhere, it possesses some value. It is interesting to note that Stockdale also published John Quincy Adams’s An Answer to Pain’s (sic) Rights of Man, which is reprinted in Thomas Paine and America, from the Stockdale edition. John Quincy Adams’ father, also named John, had himself written a response to Paine’s Common Sense, although without mentioning it by name: Thoughts on Government: Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies. He had been alarmed by amongst the populace for Paine’s proposals, which he considered to be “foolish”, as he records in his diary from which Burchell quotes. Adams considered the ideas in Common Sense to have flowed from what he terms “simple ignorance”, and had been written from a “desire to please the democratic party in Philadelphia”. Nowhere in his pamphlet, which some have seen almost like a monarchical manifesto despite its references to republicanism, does he refer by name to Paine’s pamphlet. Adams’ work can be read in volume one. 

The second biography discussed is that written by James Cheetham, and was published in Philadelphia in 1809, a few months after Paine’s death. Cheetham may be said to have popularised the stories about Paine having been personally dirty, smelly and a drunkard, tales destined to become the stock-in-trade of later critics of Paine that included some scholars, notably Sir Leslie Stephens, although he retracted his comments and apologised after he had been challenged by John M. Robertson. The Cheetham biography has been dubbed as having been the first muckraking work in American literary history. Regarding the ChatmersiOidys biography, in the course of his discussion the editor makes two questionable assertions, the first being that the pseudonym used by Chalmers was ‘Sir Francis Oldys’, but of the many copies I have examined that have been published in both the United States and in Britain, none have prefaced the pseudonym with the title ‘Sir’. The second point is that Chalmers had sought to infer that ‘Oldys’ was a clergyman. Reading copies of the book have certainly not left me with that impression. 

Those studying the reaction by Americans to Thomas Paine’s ideas, and, perhaps, to him as an individual, will find the judicious selection of works reprinted herein of immense value. Of course, there are works that one feels should have been included, but where does this process end, another six volumes? It has to be accepted that the selection process for a work of this character must in the last analysis always be subjective and so can never satisfy everyone. For some the cost of the work may seem high, but try finding copies of the originals, assuming it is possible to locate them, but if you manage to do so be prepared for a fright. It is the editor’s hope that Thomas Paine and America will make a substantial contribution to Paine’s bicentenary. I feel it to do so, and congratulate both him and his publisher for having produced so valuable a work. 

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Gender, Religion And Radicalism In The Long Eighteenth Century by Judith Jennings. Illustrated. 204pp. ISBN 0 7546 5500. £55.00 

This excellent book, sub-titled “The ‘Ingenious Quaker’ and Her Connections”, came my way by chance. I enjoyed reading it. 

It is well presented, and beautifully printed. The scholarship is rigorous. The book itself is easy to handle, and the text well written. It is meticulously indexed. 

Although a Quaker I knew nothing of Mary Morris Knowles, sometimes called Molly Knowles, nor of her patient determination to live her faith so fearlessly and – more or less – without pretension. Her constancy shines through the text; so does her single mindedness in holding to her beliefs and mounting her attack when forced so to do without bitterness even when wrongly accused, and always with considerable fortitude. A certain tenacity emerges, but one devoid, apparently, of jealousy or pettiness. 

Born in 1733 as Mary Morris, Knowles was an accomplished eighteenth century artist and writer who struggled successfully to express her gender within the turbulent ups & downs of George the Third’s feign. That vibrant century with its agricultural and industrial revolutions, the emergence of Wesley and English Methodism, the new sciences, the challenge of slavery, the French and American revolutions, Thomas Paine and other enlightened thinkers, but then the loss of the American colonies – could not have been an easy stage on which a woman might make her case, let alone win it. But Knowles was no ordinary woman. She deliberately cultivated new forms of “polite Quakerism” which stood her in good stead throughout life – not least with non-Quakers. She also knew how to use humour so as to subvert traditional Quakerism. 

Knowles was a “middling” woman by way of social standing. But she emerges under the skilful eye of author Jennings (Kentucky Foundation for Women, USA), as a powerful, determined woman who thought for herself and acted accordingly – regardless of class, wealth, or standing.

Because of their commitment to non-violence, their assumption of equality as between men and women, their rejection of titles and honours including clericalism, Quakers who sought social advancement were mostly excluded from-the recognised norms for making progress — the Crown and its royal court, the Church of England, or the military. Their idiosyncratic faith obliged them to find their own way notwithstanding these closed doors. 

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many Quakers turned to industry, commerce, or manufacturing for their living. Increasingly, education and science also became an open and creative field of endeavour for many of them. Mainly because of their honesty and plain speaking they performed brilliantly – as the great banking families of Lloyds and Barclays, the manufacturers Carr (biscuits), Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry (chocolates), Clarke of Street (footwear) and many others, demonstrated: Often the entrepreneurs became embarrassingly wealthy as a consequence of their probity and inventiveness. Power came their way, frequently to their inner embarrassment. 

Knowles, doubly handicapped as a woman and a Quaker, found her way through force of personality, diligence, and clarity of thought. In not a few instances she helped to create or shape prevailing social conditions. 

She chose her own husband when most women did not. Dr. Thomas Knowles was an expert in treating fever, although he would die of it in due course. Their marriage was happy and fulfilling. Knowles was also able to count amongst her personal friends many of the leading Quaker bankers, some of the principle manufacturers and educationalists, many writers and poets. Unusually she was destined to be recognised by the King and became a visitor at court, yet without bending before it. 

Her style was to communicate by way of poetry — the heroic couplet more often than not. She travelled widely, enjoyed good health, engaged in music, and a new form of needlework. In the process she developed her radical politics without rancour or bitterness. Moreover, inner serenity and a blend of gender confidence arising from clear religious convictions formed a solid basis for life. By probing these characteristics in the “most minute of particulars” as Ashmole might have observed, Jennings reveals new insights which rarely appear in the lexicon of standard British history. 

Knowles’ life was punctuated by a handful of events or occasions which became her “concerns” — itself a special word in Quaker philosophy. 

From her twenties she helped to pioneer the new art form of “needle painting”. Later Dr. Johnson was to call her art “the subtle pictures which imitate tapestry”. It changed her life for on seeing examples of her work the Queen, in 1771, invited her to embroider a full size portrait of her husband, King George the Third. It was an outstanding success such that it went into the Royal collection where it remains today. The King, mightily pleased, gave her £800 (sterling) for her endeavours — a considerable sum of money in the eighteenth century. Knowles was also made welcome in court as, a century earlier, had been Wm Penn who founded Pennsylvania but whose father had been an Admiral of the Fleet. 

Both “portraits” and “access to the court” must have been problematic for the Quaker needle painter — but once settled in her mind that her independence had not been compromised, Knowles would not.be diverted. She knew that, “Those who tread in Courts tread in slippery places.” Her commitment to political liberty and all that flows from that concept emerges as the constant of her personal morality. Jennings unravels this process with sound analysis. 

In 1776 Knowles met James Boswell and then the formidable Dr. Samuel Johnson over dinner. Others were present including John Wilkes and his supporter Arthur Lee as well as other radical Whigs. Their host was the liberal Quaker Edward Dilly. Typically, Knowles was the only woman present. 

The American colonies were a major subject for debate — but so therefore were religion and liberty — especially women’s liberty on which subject Johnson was decidedly negative, complex and, at times, contradictory. He placed individual liberty lower than social cohesion and so had little sympathy for the American revolutionaries. 

Knowles’ position was the opposite – she abhorred slavery. Being a Quaker she held it self evident that “that there is that of God in every person”. The Quakers were largely responsible for forming the Anti-Slavery Society which continues the work today. 

Her argument with Johnson and Boswell embraced the case of a young Jamaican woman — Jane Harry — who had decided to quit the Church of England and was later to attend Quaker meetings. Eventually Harry was disowned by her adopted family and was looked after by the Knowles. Knowles directly disputed Johnson’s position. She defended the right of the Jamaican to choose her own religion. She also rebuked Johnson for his negative attitude towards Quakers whom he disparagingly classified as “deists”. The dispute thus laid between them was to rumble on for decades. 

From the outset of their many encounters Knowles steadfastly claimed that Boswell took no notes during much of the argument as to her own contribution, nor when they met again to dispute much the same range of subjects. She maintained that Boswell only wrote later in respect of her contribution from memory. She asserted that he had paraphrased her contribution, getting it wrong in the process. When Boswell and Johnson visited her in 1790 so as to read to her Boswell’s narrative of her earlier meetings with Johnson, Knowles declared that “It was not genuine”. It contained too many “fabrications and suppressions”. Subsequently, she published her own account. Boswell refused to recognise its authenticity. 

It is within the interstices of the arguments which continue over the years that Jennings is able to unveil and pin-point aspects of gender, morality, liberty, freedom for colonists, the social limits of toleration (Harry), the meaning of death, of Quakerism and the like, which other historians have tended to ignore — except with passing reference. Knowles’ analysed issues painstakingly. She drew radical confusions consistent with her spiritual beliefs. Henceforth, Knowles would speak and write carefully, but without restraint and largely in contradiction to what the Doctor claimed, or judged. She gave no quarter whatsoever. 

In June 1788, for example, to take but one typical example, Knowles crafted the verse,

‘Tho various tints the human face adorn,

To glorious Liberty Mankind are born:

0, May the hands which rais’d this fav’rite weed (tobacco)

Be Ioos’d in mercy and the slave be freed!’

Here is what Jennings calls “a female expression of the radical commitment to “glorious liberty”. Knowles viewed liberty as the birthright of all. For her, liberty encompassed politics as well as religion, “liberty had become a rational, non-sectarian, universal, human right”, she wrote. We still need to understand that insight two centuries later. She advocated the freeing of all slaves. She practised and extolled the virtues of her Quakerism; she promoted the virtues of liberty and tolerance, especially for women. 

Knowles discussed Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man Part 1 with her close Quaker friend, Anne Seward. She also quoted from Paine’s Age of Reason that the Quaker taste presided at the Creation “what a drab world we should have had.” (1794) Two years earlier Seward & Knowles had discussed Paine’s Rights of Man Part 11 when the former criticised “Paine’s pernicious and impossible system for equal rights.” This radical difference between the two women gave rise to “sharp tension” for Knowles supported the French Revolution and whole- heartedly approved of Mary Wollstonecraft’s, Vindication of the Rights of Women. 

Motherhood and a happy, secure marriage were critical to Knowles’ understanding of life. She secured and held on to lifelong friendships, not least within the Society of Friends, but also well outside that community. Her verse, her wit, and her fearless but consistent honesty, transcended even her feminism. 

The French Revolution as well as lesser issues were dissected, debated and fought over when necessary. She never backed off. Issues included deism, water baptism, wealth, beauty and public fame, all of which featured in her verses, as well as in her discussions with friends and those experts or commentators whom she met. 

At the end Knowles, now a rich woman, carefully arranged for The transfer of 50 — 60 thousand pounds prior to her death to her son, George, by way of a “Deed of Gift”. Prudent to the end, yet despite having practised “polite Quakerliness” all her life, she was finally assailed by doubt as death approached. She died on the morning of 3rd February 1807, aged 73 years. 

The real virtue of this riveting analysis of a highly intelligent woman who could and did match any man or alleged “expert” who came her way is in the light it shines on the way the great issues of the day were meticulously discussed in homes and saloons, in court and coffee houses by otherwise ordinary men and women. Many of the issues she tackled through her verse, the exchange of letters, or by debate remain to be resolved 200 years later. But as a guiding light Knowles, an extraordinary woman, can be trusted and followed.

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John Wilkes, A Friend Of Liberty. Peter D.G.Thomas. Oxford, Clarendon, 1996. 

Radical and Rascal

Although he would have denied the charge and hated the idea, Wilkes was in some ways a precursor to Thomas Paine. His career, foreshortened in history textbooks to the slogan ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ is a fascinating one. Wilkes was a Londoner and made the City of London his political power-base for the several years that he flashed across the public stage, discomfiting established politicians of government and opposition alike. He had a unique power to disturb and irritate everyone from king George M down; and during his best years he succeeded in shifting the power from the oligarchic Whig lords to ensure that the shop-keepers and others of the lower middle-class who constituted the part of the political nation that was most keen on liberty and a say in the governing of the country that they were fiercely patriotic about. 

It is sometimes overlooked that the genesis of much of the later emphasis upon the Rights of Man lay in the political experience of the English revolution of 1688. The subsequent legislation restricting the power of the monarchy and the constitution that evolved was much admired in France and elsewhere. In 1769 a ‘Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights’ was formed with the intention of maintaining and defending ‘the liberty of the subject’, notably through support of Wilkes and his cause. At the time he was in prison and the society was principally concerned to uphold his right to take his seat in Parliament as Member for Middlesex, where he had won the election. It was the refusal of the government (and the House of Commons) to accept that verdict which provoked widespread discontent and popular, probably radical, opposition to the Whig oligarchy who dominated politics during the 18th century. 

This book, ending with the statement that Wilkes ‘was a genuine Radical as well as an undoubted rascal’ uses its 200 odd pages to prove both. A profligate and generous womaniser, Wilkes was also a charming and highly educated man, with a taste for literature as well as bawdy. He spent years in prison to defend the independence of elected members of Parliament and was rewarded with the devotion of radicals and reformers. If he disapproved of the war to subdue the American colonists it was not from any sympathy with the idea of an independent republic, but he clearly saw that the British government would fail to prevent American independence and he was given financial help by the colonists. 

Wilkes was always in debt. It was his inability to curb his spendthrift ways and his insouciant attitude to the political estab- lishment that enabled the government often to shrug off his trenchant and accurate criticisms of its illegal and unconstitutional actions. By damning the man as a rogue and a wicked reprobate, his opponents muted his appeal to all but the Londoners. Nevertheless, his real talent for administration, aptitude for hard and steady work made him a formidable force on the mid-18th century political scene. Above all, his rare political skill in organising opposition to arbitrary authority led to the abandonment of general warrants of arrest and enabled the reporting of Parliamentary debates to be carried on without interference by the government. And with him he could be a charmed social companion even his doughty opponent, Samuel Johnson, who characterized him a ‘retailer of obscenity and sedition’ was won over to the point of uniting in their dispraise of their common whipping boys, the Scots.

Wilkes died in 1797 but retired from active politics two decades earlier, and although he had spent some of the happiest years of his life in France he seems to have been little interested in the Revolution that Thomas Paine was so involved in. This is the first researched biog- raphy for eighty years as Wilkes has been claimed as ‘the founder of British radicalism’ he is a fitting prelude to Paine’s greater career.

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The 1987 Thomas Paine Lecture, University of East Anglia

As it happens, it was through Thomas Paine that I became interested in early American Freemasonry. While working on my biography of Paine, I was intrigued from the outset by the fact that all of sudden, within just a few weeks or months, as if by magic,  he jumped from his obscure humdrum existence in England where he worked as an Excise officer and a corset-maker onto the American literary-political stage, there to became, at the age of almost forty, one of the leading lights of the Revolutionary movement. 

How was it that a man who was little short of a failure in his native country became acquainted so rapidly with the met prominent figures in the Colonies, even becoming a friend of theirs in many cases? How can one account for the quickness of his ascent and the suddenness of his glory? 

One way of accounting for this, one hypothesis (which has several times been made), is to consider that Paine had become a Freemason and that, as such, he enjoyed, first in America, and then In England and in France, the kindly assistance of certain lodges or of certain individual Masons. 

Some time before he left England in 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin in London. Franklin, the founding father of Freemasonry in Pennsylvania, and future Venerable of the famous Lodge of the line Sisters in Parte where he was to preside over Voltaire’s initiation on April 7, 1778. In his Revolution and Freemasonry, the French historian Bernard Pay goes so far as to say that it was Franklin himself who then converted Paine to the Masonic creed. But he does not give any factual evidence in support of his assertion. The only thing we know for sure is that on September 30, 1774, on the very eve of his departure from London, Paine was given by Franklin a letter of recommendation for his son-in- law, Richard Bache, himself a Mason and a wealthy businessman in Philadelphia. It was Bache who guided Paine’s first steps in that city where he was to live until 1787 – and where he met, among many other colonial Masons, John Witherspoon, Frederick Rullenberg, Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse, William and Thomas Bradford – and, some time later, Henry Laurens, the Lee brothers, General Roberdeau, Robert Norris, Nathaniel Greene (also a Quaker !), Joel Barlow, Thomas Jefferson (whose membership is not proven), and of course George Washington. And who were to become his friends in revolutionary France? Denton, Condorcet, Lafayette, Sieyes, Brissot, Rochefoucauld, Duchatelet, all Masons. And where did he stay after his release from prison in Paris ? First with Nicolas de Bonneville and then with James Monroe, both of them known as notorious Freemasons. 

Paine’s interest in Freemasonry was such that toward the end of his life, in 1805, he wrote a lengthy piece entitled An Essay on the Origins of Freemasonry in which he traces back the birth of Masonry to the ancient rituals of druidism. 

But this does not prove, any more than any other detail or fact that we know of, that Paine was a Mason. There is indeed no formal trace of his initiation or membership in England, none in America, and none in France. Questioned about Paine’s membership – questioned because non-Masonic scholars cannot have direct  access to English Masonic archives -, the United Grand Lodge of England had only this to answer : “In the absence of any record of his initiation it must, therefore, be assumed that he was not a member of the order’. Whether or not he was initiated, it is most unlikely that Paine ever became a member of a British lodge, if only because English Freemasonry was at that time closely connected with aristocracy and even with the king or his entourage : thus the Duke of Cumberland, Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge until 1790, was succeeded by the future George IV! 

In France, although Philippe-Egalite and the future Charles X were also Freemasons, the situation was somewhat different. French lodges (and Paris had no less than 81 lodges) seam to have been socially and politically sore open. During the Revolution the French capital even had an ‘American Lodge” ( known as “la loge des Amerlcains”) which numbered no less than 143 members – but in whose records Paine’s name never appears. Nor does it appear on any of the lists recently established by Alain Le Bihan regarding the respective memberships of ‘le Grand Orient’ and “la Grande Loge de France”. 

And yet Bernard Fay maintains that Paine was a Mason. And so do Dr. Robinet in his “Danton emigre” and Franck Alengry in his biography of Concorcet, And Brissot himself alluding in his “Memoirs” to his ‘friend Bonneville and Thomas Payne … who pride themselves on possessing every single secret of the Order*. But Brissot’s remark is no proof: studying the secrets of Freemasonry, or even “possessing” them or some of them, does not necessarily imply that one is a member (I am not a member). In such the same way, Ignace Guillotin, the humanitarian inventor of the guillotine, recorded in his diary that be ‘attended Lodge in company with Mr. Jefferson and Mr.. Paine from the American states’. But this again is no proof, for there were, and there still are today, two types of Masonic meetings: some open to non-members and others tiled (i.e. with the tiler or warden, standing outside the outer door to keep off “cowans” (uninitiated people and eavesdroppers and other unauthorized persons). 

More convincing perhaps is the testimony provided by R. Le Porestier in his famous book on the Bavarian Illuminati, a subversive secret society founded in 1778 at Ingoldstadt by an enlightened and ambitious eccentric called Adam Veishaupt. Le Forestier writes that in 1794 (at a time when Thomas Paine was a member of the Convention in Paris), Count Lebrbacb, imperial ambassador in Munich, sent to Vienna a list of illustrious Illuminati containing, among others, the names of the “Duke of Orleans, Becker, La Fayette, Barnave, Brissot, La Rochefoucauld, Mirabeau, Payne, Fauchet, for Prance”. This is indeed an official document, but It is not the record of a specific Masonic Lodge and besides one could actually belong to the Illuminati without necessarily being a Mason. So, again, we are left with no satisfactory evidence. 

My investigations in the United States have not been more successful. The name “Thomas Paine’ does figure on several Masonic rosters of the Revolutionary period (in Boston, Albany or Providence), but there is no evidence whatsoever that the man thus listed was the historic figure whose memory we are celebrating today. Similarly local records do mention the creation in 1792 of a Paine’s Lodge E’27” at Amenia, N.Y., but at the time it was not uncommon for lodges to take the name of such or such famous man who had never been initiated. In 180, when Paine died, the Grand Lodges of both Louisiana and Georgia honoured his memory with solemn orations, while the Grand Lodge of South Carolina organized a mourning procession in the streets. but who was actually honoured in these celebrations: the hypothetical Freemason? Or the apostle of Reason? Or the champion of the rights of man? We cannot validly decide. 

If we are to understand Paine’s intellectual itinerary, it is quite enough to know that, though he probably never belonged to any specific fraternity, but nevertheless actively sympathized with the Masonic movement and the philosophy it carried. Masonic thought had such in common with his own deistic outlook and his own cult of reason, and it was part of the great intellectual swirl of the age of Enlightenment wherefrom he derived most of his creeds as a rationalist. Therefore it was into ideas rather than into rituals that Franklin initiated his protege, inasmuch as he initiated him into anything. Paine’s psychology is here more convincing than material evidence. A rugged individualist, Paine neither liked collective ceremonies nor secret practices ; he dreamt, instead, of an open form of democracy, of a see-through republic with a public life as transparent as a palace of glass. Both his nature and the lessons of experience made him loathe the idea of regimentation. He never was a declared member of any party or erect or church and It is highly probable that he never joined the Masonic order. “My own mind is my own church”: no words could describe, better than this key sentence of a man who could at best become a “fellow traveler”, as we say today, but whose real vocation was to espouse causes, not structures. 

Why then bother, some might rightfully ask, about Paine’s relationship with an organization in which with all probability he never belonged? Well, just as penicillin was invented by a scientist who was in fact looking for something else, so studying Paine in that context – i.e. against the background of Masonic organization and militancy – Inevitably led me to widen the scope of my research – and of my inconclusive findings – to the role of Freemasonry in the American revolution at large. And the paradox is that, although I did not find much about Paine in terms of positive data, I discovered about the larger issue quite a number of interesting things that had hitherto been overly and unjustly neglected. Let me then lift for you at least one tiny corner of the veil. 

While non-Masonic historians have, with very few exceptions, tended to overlook the underground role of lodges in the American revolution, the great majority of Masonic scholars have on the contrary been prone to overrate their real impact. One has, therefore, to be even more careful when dealing with so-called secret societies than when studying public data or duly archived history. Consider, for instance, the Declaration of Independence and its 56 signers : how many of them have been identified as Masons? The answer varies considerably from one enumerator to another. William Grimshaw gives a list of 51 Masonic signers, as against 8 only In Henry Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia. William Boyden suggests 29; Ronald Heaton 9; Philip Roth 20; and the George Washington Masonic National Memorial Library says 30. 

The main problem here lies in fact with the unreliability of primary sources. The early lodges and Provincial Grand Lodges were careless about the keeping of records and minutes. In Colonial days, many lodges functioned for a short time only, leaving no trace whatsoever of their transient existence. And during the War of Independence there were many so-called ‘Army Lodges”, which conferred degrees, but kept no records or destroyed them for lack of a safe and steady place to store them in. Over the years a fair amount of Masonic records were destroyed as a result of warfare, or were lost by fire, or discarded by heedless holders through ignorance of their value, or done away with to prevent disclosure. On the whole, what characterizes the surviving vestiges of Masonic life in XVIlIth and early XIXth century America is that they are, more often than not, “gappy”, or fragmentary, or confused, or all three. 

Finding relevant Masonic documents is, then, hardly an easy task. Interpreting the any prove to be a risky venture, as is evidenced by the following anecdote. In his fairly reliable listing of “10,000 Famous Freemasons”, William Denslow surprisingly identifies James Madison as a Mason, on the basis of a letter sent to him on February 11, 1795, by John Francis Mercer,  governor of Maryland. The passage quoted by Denslow reads : “I have had no opportunity of congratulating you on becoming a Free Mason – a very ancient and honourable fraternity”. If this was no proof, I thought to myself, what could  be? Some time later, however, I was able to read Mercer’s letter in its entirety, and found to my astonishment that his hint at Masonry was a mere Joke, a play on words, a metaphor ; that in fact Mercer was congratulating Madison on his recent marriage ; that the ‘fair prophetess who has converted you to the true faith” was no other than his wife, Dolley Payne Todd ; and that the initiation into Masonry to which Mercer referred was nothing but an Initiation into the bonds and mysteries of married life. Although an obvious source of error, this Masonic metaphor is nevertheless interesting and significant In that it shows how important Freemasonry was in the mental world of XVIIIth century Americans. 

Freemasonry settled down in British America as early as 1710, four years before Benjamin Franklin printed Anderson’s “Constitutions” known as ‘the Bible of the Masonic Order’ originally published in London in 1723 -, it was only during the decade preceding the Revolution, and during the Revolution itself, that American Freemasonry thrived and grew in a spectacular way. Was there a relation of cause and effect between the two phenomena? That is precisely the question to which I would like to address myself tonight, without of course going into too much detail. 

Here are some figures and a selection of events, some well-known, some less known, but the bulk of which is fairly impressive:

Prior to the Revolution, there were more than 100 stationary lodges in the Colonies and upward of 50 travelling military lodges. During the Revolution about 25 additional military lodges were created (10 in the Continental army and 15 in the British ranks). The city of Boston had 6 lodges prior to the Revolution, and 10 lodges had been warranted in Philadelphia when the first Continental Congress met in 1774. The Masonic population of Philadelphia and the vicinity at the time is estimated to have been upward of 1,000, 14. about 3% of the total population, as against 2.5% in Boston. It has also been calculated that there were some 3,000 Freemasons in the thirteen United States. In 1790 for a total population of 4 million, i.e. almost 1%. 

Freemasons were present and active in the very first stages of the rebellion. It was James Otis, a member of St John’s Lodge In Boston, who in 1761 first took the now familiar view that taxation without representation is tyranny. In 1772 the burning of the HMS Gaspee was organized and led by Abraham Whipple of St John’s Lodge in Providence. The leaders of the Committees of Correspondence, created that very same year, were most often Freemasons, as is shown by the records. And there is such reason to believe that the Boston Tea Party was headed and carried out by Bostonian Freemasons, although only nine of them actually took part in the attack on the tea vessels. The fact that the chief ringleader, Samuel Adams, was probably not a Mason did not deter Paul Revere, future Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, from declaring the very next day : “The Tea Party was as dignified a Masonic event as the laying of a cornerstone, as indeed in very truth it was”. 

I have already mentioned the high proportion of Masonic signers of the Declaration of Independence. According to the best available sources, between one third and two thirds of the 39 signers of the Constitution were also Masons. In that connection, an original way of looking at the Constitutional Convention would be to view it as a meeting to a large extent organized according to Masonic rule, i.e. behind locked doors, with the proceedings held in camera, and George Washington himself elected to the chair – let alone certain similarities between the historic Federal document and Anderson’s Constitution. Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is that many, if not most, of the leading figures of the Revolution belonged to the Masonic Order – or to the ‘Craft’, as it was then called. Such, in addition to those already cited, was the case of: George Washington, John Hancock, Peyton and Edmund Randolph, Henry Laurens, John Dickinson, Robert R. Livingston, John Paul Jones, Robert Treat Paine, Roger Sherman, William Hooper, John Marshall and, in all likelihood, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Richard Henry Lee, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, David Rittenhouse, etc. 

Of the 75 General Officers of the Continental Army, at least 33, and possibly 40 more, were Masons. According to Lafayette, Vashington was always reluctant to appoint a general that was not a member of the Fraternity ; and when be heard that Benedict Arnold had betrayed the American cause, he turned to Henry Knox and Lafayette, both of them Masons, and said in words that have become famous : ‘Thom can we trust now r Montgomery, Greene, Sullivan, Veyne, Clinton, Persons De Kalb, etc. were all “brethren of the Mystic Tie’, as also were Ethan Allen, the Ticonderoga hero, and George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Northwest. Quite unsurprisingly, the main protagonists at Yorktown were all Masons : Washington, de Graeae, Rochambeau, d’Estaing, Lincoln, Knox, Hamilton (?), Lafayette, – and Cornwallis himself ! 

Not all Masons, or Masonic leaders. were Patriots. There were some Loyalist lodges, and Masonry as a whole was not left untouched by what was then known as ‘Toryism’. It seems nevertheless that in most cases political dissensions within the lodges, or between lodges, did not prevent Masons of all persuasions from remaining on speaking. or even brotherly, terms – presumably because, and in the name of their common principles. 

I could go on and on with facts, but it is now time to try and account for this profusion of data and its historical significance. That Freemasonry was real is beyond doubt, but the question is : How real and how specific was its actual impact on the American Revolution? 

The reality of revolution is so complex that it would be an error to study Freemasonry as an isolated agent of change. Masonic lodges were part of a larger intellectual, institutional, and international phenomenon. They contributed no, or very few, original ideas to the Age of Enlightenment whose ready-made philosophy catered to all their needs. It would be of little use then, to analyze the Masonic discourse at the time because, as we shall see, the medium was in that instance the message, and it was through rites and social behaviour that Masonic ideology was in fact produced. From an institutional point of view, lodges were one particular form amid a proliferation of clubs, salons, literary circles, reading associations, learned societies, scientific or philosophical academies – what we in French call “socillites de pauses” : Franklin’s “Junto”, or the Philosophical Society, or the first Anti-Slavery Association in Philadelphia are well-known instances of this. In terms of social change, some of these active cells were more significant than others, and R.R. Palmer, author of The Age of the Democratic Revolution, was, I think, mistaken when he suggested that “reading clubs were more important than Freemasonry as nurseries of pro-Revolutionary feeling’. At the time, instilling new attitudes was probably more subversive than propagating theories and doctrines. Palmer makes a good point, though, when he explains that the network of Masonry created across the Atlantic “an international and interclass sense of fellowship among men fired by ideas of liberty, progress, and reform”. The Masonic ties between France and America were particularly strong, and the fact that Washington and most American leaders were Masons should not be neglected. On his arrival In Paris in 1777, one of the first things Franklin did to popularize the Revolution was to Join the Lodge of the Wine Sisters; and, with perhaps the exception of Jefferson and Silas Deane, all of the American negotiators in Paris were Masons, as were most of their French counterparts. In those years common membership of the Craft worked, among these Republicans and Royalists of two different countries, as a kind of political esperanto a higher language also understood and spoken in England by such illustrious Masons as Burke or Chatham or Wilkes. 

But the Masonic “International” was, at the very most, an intellectual network, a shared language, a common mold ; by no means the instrument of some wilful conspiracy. Historically, the “plot theory” was formulated alter the event, at the very end of the 1790’s, and was nothing but an unsupported piece of counter-revolutionary polemic. The doctrine of an underground machination against ‘the Throne and the Altar” was originally put forward by Barruel in France and John Robison in Britain. Robison’s ideas were peddled in America by leading figures of the New England Congregationalist establishment like Jedidiah Morse, minister at Charlestown, David Tappan, professor of divinity at Harvard, and Timothy Dwight, president of Tale, not only were Masons accused of subverting social order and religion, but it was also proclaimed that they were manipulated by infiltrated agents, and that their own conspiracy was in fact secretly engineered by the international Order of the Bavarian Illuminati. Thomas Paine, who was then living in Paris, was one of Morse’s favourite targets. His widely-circulated pamphlets being viewed as “part of the general plan to accomplish universal demoralization”. Theodore Dwight, brother to Timothy, aimed even higher : “if I were to make proselytes to illumination in the United States, he wrote on Independence Day 1798, I should in the first place apply to Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, and their political associates”. Uttered at the end of the century, these political attacks sounded like rearguard actions, but at the same time, with the myth of Masonic conspiracy serving as a pretext, they actually foreshadowed, and paved the way for, the anti-Masonic witch-hunt of the early 1830s. 

When one considers Freemasonry during the Revolutionary period, the difficult thing in to weigh the active, conscious, militant part it played, against its more seminal  role in favour of independence, human rights, or the republic : a rule and an influence that extended tar beyond the bounds of the Craft Itself and which, in spite of its diffuseness, or perhaps thanks to It, was an important factor of ideological and political transformation. Whether the political commitment of a Patriot should be ascribed to his being a Mason or to some other cause can hardly ever be proved. But what it did to an American to ‘attend lodge” and model his behaviour on its rituals is something whose impact can more easily be grasped and measured. 

In all lodges, whatever their affiliation, an extensive though orderly and ritualized liberty of expression and discussion was the rule – much on the model of British Parliament -, together with a common practice of tolerance and open-mindedness. Therefore what American Masonry actually contributed to the Revolutionary movement was first and foremost an Image of its own functioning, with its local cells operating as discreet schools of liberalism, as republics in miniature, as living laboratories of democratic and egalitarian values, as the palpable prefiguration of a new era. Belonging to a lodge was in itself a form of dissent, since the lodge worked, both in vitro  and in vivo as a social utopia experimented against a background of universal tyranny. 

While attending lodge, Colonial Masons normally divested themselves of their social differences so as to appear, if only for a limited time, on an equal footing with their brethren. An artificial form of equality was thus pitted against the social hierarchies of the outside world, with its oppressive pattern of age-old subordinators. To be a Mason was to usher in “a world turned upside down” and, as Francois Furet has pointed out, a Masonic lodge was, a societie pensee, “characterized, for each of its members, by nothing but its relation to Ideas, thereby heralding the functioning of democracy”. If Masonry was important in the American Revolution it was not as the instrument of a mythical plot, but because, Furet goes on to say it embodied more than anything else, “the chemistry of the new power, with the social becoming political, and opinion turned into action”. By and large, Masons tended to belong to social groups that were not miles apart, so that their abstract equality within lodges was not too difficult to achieve ; but what mattered politically and ideologically was the ritual itself as the living sign of a better world for all. And since 1% of all Americans belonged to the Craft, it may be inferred that the Revolutionary impact of Masonry was by no means insignificant. Although they debated new and sometimes subversive ideas, Masonic lodges were not regarded as dangerous institutions and no authority ever thought of banning them, at least during the Revolutionary period. What went then unnoticed was that Masons were, so to say, political mutants, with their lodges working in the dark as unseen vehicles of social change. Thomas Paine was not wrong in emphasizing the role of pre-revolutionary ideas and the force of the mind – ‘by which revolutions are generated’ ; but be missed the central point, which is to know how these ideas worked their way into society and gradually settled there as new dynamic forms of social practice. 

American Freemasonry was in many ways similar to its European equivalents, but it had features of its own that should not be overlooked. 

Especially when contrasted with French Masonry, the American Craft of the time was original in that it never defined itself, and never was, anti-religious. Henry May has shown that Enlightenment figures in America were much less committed to rationalism and freethinking, much less cut off from religious traditions than their European counterparts. A parallel distinction should be made with regard to Masonry: religious tolerance, not to say ecumenical attitudes, was a striking feature of American lodges, although Deism, with its view of God as the great architect of the universe, fitted more neatly into the spiritual pattern of Masonry. One had to be a believer to become a Mason, and the Bible was used in all Masonic rituals. In America no Mason, however committed to republican ideas, ever dreamt of establishing a Civil Constitution of the Clergy, not to mention the enthronement of a Supreme Being as a substitute for the Christian god! The anti-religious excesses of the French Revolution had, to say the least, a cooling effect and many sympathized with Mason in America – and, to begin with, on George Washington himself. 

During the whole Revolutionary period, American lodges also worked as centers of welcome and social integration for immigrants newly-arrived from Europe, for foreign soldiers serving in the Continental Army, and later on for French expatriates who were hounded out of their country by the Terror. Aliens were readily admitted into American lodges, and several foreign lodges came into being during the war. The first French lodge known as ‘la loge de A’mitie’, was created. In Boston as early as 1779. It soon got into trouble, however, as a result of financial misappropriations and, some time after, because its Right Worshipful Master was deservedly accused of bigamy : the ways of social integration are unfathomable! For native Americans, Masonic lodges seem in many cases to have served as places of transit from social life to patriotic or political action. This may well have been the case for George Washington, Initiated as a mere land-surveyor at the early age of 20, and for Franklin as well, who was made a Mason when he was 25. 

I don’t have time to tell you about the anti-Masonic hysteria of the late 1820’s, but, to put the whole matter in a nut shell, I will simply say that, as long as the American Masonic Order was part and parcel of Colonial Society, as as long as it surfed, as it were, over the Revolutionary wave, or even guided it. It was not seriously challenged ; problems emerged several decades later when it shrank back into a separate brotherhood, seemingly cut off from the larger fraternity of the new nation. 

Nor do I have time to tell you about the birth In 1775, and subsequent development, of a Black Masonic Fraternity called ‘Prince Hall Freemasonry” after the name of its founder. Even today, with its 5,000 lodges and 300,000 members, this American Negro Craft is still looked upon as “spurious, Irregular, and clandestine” by all its caucasian counterparts in the United States. Prince Hall Freemasonry had no direct impact on the American Revolution, but it was ironically during the Revolution, and in its context, that racial discrimination became a bone of contention between men whose raison d’être, as either white or black Masons, was a brotherhood. 

I discovered all these things, and many more, thanks to Thomas Paine and the riddle of his relationship with the Masonic Order. Paine was not a Mason, but like all the American, British or French Masons with whom be used to mix, he was a builder; the builder of a democratic system or Ideal based on freedom, equality, social solidarity, and brotherhood. He is usually bailed in the United States as one of the Founding Fathers. Perhaps it would be more appropriate, especially today, especially here, to celebrate him as a “Founding Brother”.

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THE SOCIALISM WHICH first emerged in 19th century England was not an isolated phenomenon, but like all political movements had its roots in the past. Directly, it extended back to Chartism, and through this to Thomas Paine and his influential works, Rights of Man  and The Age of Reason.  Both books were censored under English law and anyone printing or selling them suffered imprisonment or transportation. 

Nevertheless, Paine’s works were still sold underground on a huge scale from the 1790s, when they were written, and through to the time of the Chartists. Ri ts of. Man was known as “the Chartists’ Bible.” And although Chartism and its direct aims died out, its ideals survived in the new field of socialism, influenced both by Marx and by Paine. 

Paine however was by no means the first or only 18th century radical either in politics or religion. Some would say the movement actively began with John fakes; others that Rousseau and his Social Contract  as being the original inspiration. Others point to the great influence, not only in France where it helped to aspire the French Revolution, of the group called the philosophes, and of Voltaire. Voltaire and Rousseau both came to England; and Jean-Paul Marat, when a young physician, lived here and proclaimed himself a follower of Wilkes. 

Actually in England some had started acting a century before. Those were the Levellers and Diggers of Cromwell’s time, and in particular John Lilburno, who in 1637 was tried and flogged for the distribution of what today we would call radical literature. “I am a free man, yea, a free-born citizen of England,” declared Lilhurne when brought before the Committee of Examination, and the literature of the Levellers poured out between the years 1645 and 1653. One of the writers, Richard Overton attacked not only the lack of a free press but suggested a Parliament freely elected by all men. Universal suffrage, no less! 

Early in the 18th century certain craftsmen and tradesmen were already banding themselves together to protect their interests. Tailors and weavers were particularly active in this way, and strikes were by no means unknown in the 18th century. As yet there were no Combination Laws to prevent this incipient form of trade union. 

That was lacking, and lacking almost entirely, was the average person’s right to any active intervention in Parliament. Very few had the vote, and none below a cert- ain income; while growing manufacturing towns, like Manchester, were still allowed no representation in Parliament at all. 

Freedom of the press and of speech wore the other major 18th century issues, and this was the basis of the notorious John Wilkes eruption and the”Wilkes and Liber- ty!” cry which soon echoed among crowds throughout England. Wilkes was Member of Parliament for Aylesbury He had an independent free spirit and disliked corruption in high places and at Court, and with his friend, the poet Charles Churchill, he started a journal called The North Briton,  which was a continual source of irritation to. the king and government. Wilkes was soon charged with “ceditious libel,” a censorship charge on which Thomas Paine read also later arraigned for writing Rights of Man. 

Wilkes did not wait for his trial: he took off for Paris as Paine did in similar circumstances some years later. After four years, however, Wilkes got tired of exile and announced his intention to return and stand for Parliament. Although he was arrested and tried for seditious libel, as expected, and incarcerated in the King’s Bench prison, he carried on from there by proxy a lively election campaign and was returned for Middlesex with an overwhelming majority. The government promptly declared his election was null and void. Two further elections were held, with the same result. After which the House of Commons announced that Wilkes’ rival candidate, who had polled only a few votes, was the new Member. 

All hell broke loose! “Wilkes and Liberty” crowds grew, and in spite of a military charge which killed some of them continued. Wilkes’ plight even stirred freedom- lovers across the Atlantic – the later architects of the American Revolution – who sent him letters of congratulation, hampers of food, and even live turtles. When released in 1770 he went on a triumphant tour, one of the towns he visited being Lewes in Sussex, where an Exciseman named Paine was living and working. Paine was already involved in Lewes parish affairs, sitting on the local Vestry which helped widows and orphans, and also attending meetings of the early form of Town Council. 

While in Lewes, Paine was persuaded by his fellow excisemen to write a pamphlet on their behalf, The Case of the Officers of Excise.  It was a clear plea for better wages, and it also set out certain principles about poverty and crime rarely made at that time. Ile who never was a hungered,” wrote Paine, “may argue finely on the subjection of his appetite….The rich, in ease, and affluence, may think I have drawn an unnatural portrait; but could they descend to the cold regions of want, the circle of polar poverty, they would find their opinions changing with the climate….” 

Paine when he wrote his pamphlet was thirty-five years ago. He took the pamphlet to London and distributed it among Members of Parliament, and here met Benjamin Franklin, who had common scientific interests and gave him a letter of recommendation to his son-in-law in America. Paine’s long history as a supporter of the American Revolution, soon to break out, and of human and political rights, had begun. 

He was away thirteen years, in the meantime the radical movement in England grew. Wilkes in the end won his way back into Parliament and became not only an Alderman of the City of London but in 1774, the year Paine sailed for America, Lord Mayor. 

It was Wilkes who in 1776 put forward the first Motion in Parliament for a wider and more (steal representation. In 1780 a great protest meeting was held in Westminster Hall attended by Charles Fox, Wilkes, General John Burgoyne (the ‘Gentlemanly Johnny’ of Shaw’s play, The Devil’s Disciple, who after his army service in America became a very liberal M.P.) and other reformists demanding annual parliaments(they we then elected only every seven years) and universal suffrage. The same year a follower of Wilkes and later Paine, the radical parson, John Horne Tooke, helped to found the Constitutional Society. This was to revive and become an active element in the radical politics of the 1790s, when Paine came back to England and wrote Rights of ‘an in answer to Burke’s attack on the French Revolution. Similar societies proliferated and one of them, the London Corresponding Society, ran the first largely working-class society, led by a shoemaker, Thomas Hardy. 

This radical activity was very much linked with the dissenting movements in religion, and also the scientific discoveries which came in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. A Unitarian chapel was opened.in London in 1774,  with Franklin among the attenders. Another Unitarian present was Dr.Joeeph Priestley, the great economist and discoverer of oxygen, who was an active writer on liberty as well as chemistry and theology. In Loren, Paine had married into a Unitarian family. Radicalism spread to the dissenters because like the Catholics they had no political rights in the state; and the fight for their rights and civil liberties irrespective of religion, was a part of the 18th century Enlightenment and rebellion. 

In France it had been led by Voltaire, and the philosophes whom Wilkes knew in Paris included D’Alembert and Cideret, the editors of the great Encyclopedia of human knowledge which was one of the wonders of 18th century learning. Years later, the bookseller and writer Richard Carlile published Diderot as well as Paine, and served long terms of imprisonment for doing so. 

Rationalism was part of the Enlightenment, and when Paine wrote The Age of Reason he was only putting into his own original form the criticism of the bible and organised religion which had been going on increasingly throughout the century. “All natural institutions of Churches,” wrote Paine, “….appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolise power and profit.” He thus almost literally anticipated Marx’s later famous phrase about religion being the opium of the people. 

Another rather radical society to which Priestley belonged was the Lunar Society of the Midlands, a kind of middle—class club formed partly of manufacturers such as the potters Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton, and the scientists and writers such as James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the evolutionist Charles Darwin. At this time there was still hope that the Industrial Revolution might be used to benefit the workers as well as the management. 

William Godwin, author of Political Justice  (1798), actually believed that social justice would eradicate all crime. Dr. Richard. Price was another of this school, believing in the ‘perfectibility’ of man. It was his discourse hailing the French Revolution which sparked off Burke’s bitter rejoinder, “Reflections on the Revolution in France” or “Reflections on Behalf of the English Government,” as they might be called: for Burke received a pension for this work. Price was also an economist of long standing, whose Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty  had been a bestseller in 1776. He was well-known in America, where he received an Honorary Degree alongside George Washington. 

Dr. John Jebb, who died in 1786, was another Unitarian founder of English radicalism. “Equal representation, sessional Parliaments and the universal right of suffrage, are alone worthy of an Englishman’s regard,” he wrote. He was a real revolutionist, believing that reform would not come through Parliament but through “the active energy of the people.” Another was Major John Cartwright, who ruined his naval career by refusing to fight the Americans. 

The political principles at the base of the radical societies came largely from Rousseau. “It is contrary to the law of nature,” Rousseau had written, “that the privileged few should gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multi- tude are in want of the bare necessities of life.” This was in 1755, in a work called A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.  A few years later his Social Contract  opened with a cry that went around the world: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” 

Godwin’s Political Justice  attacked government, imprisonments and transportations, private property and organised religion, but escaped suppression because it cost three guineas, which the government believed was far too dear for the book to reach the lower classes. Rights of Man sold cheaply, and reprinted by the revolutionary societies, was more dangerous. So was Paine’s practical analysis of the economical possibilities  of equality, education, the unionisation of workers and a welfare state. The government launched a campaign of vilification against Paine and in his absence (he had gone to France to take a seat in the National Convention) tried him for seditious libel, and won.

In 1794 they instigated trials for treason against Horne Tooke, Holcroft, Hardy, Cartwright and eight others. In this case they failed for lack of evidence. But next year the government under Pitt repealed Habeas Corpus and soon afterwards the new Combination Laws prevented any congregations of workers, or indeed ordinary people, whatsoever. England became virtually a police state. 

The amazing thing is that despite this, the movement continued to flourish underground. So did the subversive literature. Pig’s Meat  was the title of one of the workers’ journals — one of many to describe lampoons on Burke’s notorious reference to the “swinish multitude” in his Reflections.  Over a century later Bernard Shaw wrote in his Preface to Man and Superman:  “Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke, and the swine are now courted electors.” 

Another democratic journal was Politics for the People, and yet another Tribune: a name resurrected by Aneurin Bevan and Jennie Lee when they founded the journal for which many left-wing politicians write today.  Even the radical poet, Robert Burns,’ The Tree of Liberty, took its title from a piece of the same name written by Paine. 

Burns was not the only poet to echo popular radical ideas. Much of William Blake’s elaborate poetic symbolism was invented as a cover for his radical ideas when these became subject to prosecution. And in the next generation Byron and Shelley, who was the son-in-law of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women – carried on the radical tradition. “That great and good man”was Bhelley’s description of Paine, at a time when Paine was still reviled in his native country. 

What we owe to Paine, and those who kept his works in circulation in spite of per- secution, is incalculable. He first set working men on the way to genuine participation in government, and the poor on the path to the welfare state. He suggested family allowances, old age pensions, and set out economic schedules for these things. He attacked slavery almost on setting foot in America, almost a century before Lincoln, and attacked war as an outmoded form of settling international disputes. “The conquerors and the conquered are generally ruined alike.” 

All disputes, he said, should be settled by arbitration treaties. It was this idea or Paine’s that consciously inspired President Woodrow Wilson when he founded the League of Nations. The United Nations today is inherited from Paine’s suggestion. 

Basically, like all the greatest writers on liberty, Paine was a humanitarian. “My country is the world and my religion is to do good,” he wrote, and it is one of the inscriptions on the base of his statue in his native Thetford. Freedom, in Paine’s view, could not be dissociated from political morality, and he sounded a warning note which still carries a message: 

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression…”

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THIS PAPER CONSTITUTES a portion of a larger endeavour to trace the roots of the political thought of Thomas Paine. The purpose of this larger project is to illuminate the many traditions upon which Paine drew in order to more confidently ground and appreciate those traditions of thought which claim Paine as a central figure of influence. The traditional way of looking at Paine as an Enlightenment political propagandist or as a Newtonian Deist is not sufficiently explicit enough to distinguish him from others in that category.¹  Nor do these general descriptions of Paine enable one to explain why Paine appeals to such a wide variety of radical, liberal and even some conservative causes. Similarly, attempts to derive the core of Paine’s political thought from Locke, Rousseau and Hobbes have broken down under modern interpretations of the social contract theorists coupled with a more than superficial examination of what Paine says.² 

Three rather important shifts in scholarship in the last fifteen years have made it possible to reassess the writings of Thomas Paine from a new and more profitable perspective. First has been the re-evaluation of the influence of Locke on the English and American traditions of liberal dissent. This opened up in many areas the possibilities for seeking non-Lockean derivations for elements of dissenting thought. Secondly, the studies of Pocock and others have paved the way for identifying through the civic humanist paradigm a more comprehensive approach to identifying strains of political expression. Thirdly, the movement in more recent scholarship linking the issues and language in English opposition discourse from the Civil Par to dissent in the Revolutionary Era of American politics provides a chance to look at Thomas Paine as perhaps an important link in this tradition.³ 

Most recent scholars have placed Paine somewhere in the radical tradition of dissent concentrating specifically on those aspects which derive from the English tradition.⁴ Some writers have suggested the debt that American dissent during the Revolutionary Era owed to the conflicts of the seventeenth century. They push the roots of American radical dissent back to the Levellers, especially to Lilburns, Winstanley and Overton. Others trace American dissent back to the writings of the British Commonwealthmen, especially Burgh, Macaulay, Clarendon and Sydney. The language of debate took on a neo-Harringtonian tone illustrated nicely in the writings of Trenchard and Gordon in the early eighteenth century. 

The writings of Trenchard and Gordon, especially Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig,  deserve a special place in importance. Clinton Rossiter proclaimed Cattle Lettern more popular and quotable than Locke’s Civil Government  in the American colonies.⁵ Bernard Bailyn suggests that the writings of Trenchard and Gordon in addition to Locke provided a vehicle for the transportation of English opposition thought of the early eighteenth century into American revolutionary thought.⁶  Jacobson traces the “radical Whiggish” posture of Trenchard and Gordon partially to Algernon Sidney, who had previously spelled out arguments for the rights of resist- ance to tyrannical power. Trenchard and Gordon embellished upon Sidney’s theme adding opposition to hereditary rule as well as papal influence to their own writ- ings. The writings of Tronchard and Gordon addressed themes which captured the American interest: separation of church and state, rejection of divine right of kings, resistance to tyranny. They were read by Adams, Jefferson, Dickinson and Franklin just to name a few among the influential. American revolutionary writers.It is obv- ious from assessing the differences from among the aforementioned Americans that each of them chose what they wanted from Trenchard and Gordon and were not more parrots of Cato. 

A few scholars on the basis of some astute educational hunches have begun to link Thomas Paine with various of these traditions of English dissent. Henry Yorke charged that Paine’s political writings said nothing which “is not found in the writings of Sidney, Harrington, Milton and Buchanan.”⁷ Paine’s idRas on human rights have been traced more to the English Levellers than to Locke.⁸ Hill and Foner have mentioned similarities between Paine and the Levellers. 

Pocock⁹ and Jacobson¹⁰ mention that Cato’s Letters may have influenced Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense.  A closer examination of this assertion is an important one to me for two reasons: a person can use the analogy between Paine and Trenchard and Gordon to find out if there really is a substantial basis for linking Paine with the English tradition of radical dissent in general. Secondly, through the personage of Paine there can be a vehicle for the transmission of radical dissenting ideology and language into American radicalism. Where Paine diverges from Trenchard and Gordon there may be an opportunity to link him with other figures in English dissent as well as Scottish figures. Parts of my research excluded from this paper have explored the more detailed areas in which Paine espoused and diverged from the traditions of dis- sent expressed by the Levellers and later by Algernon Sidney. 

This paper concentrates on Paine’s connections and the possible debt to the writ- ings of Trenchard and Corion,especially as they appear in Cato’s Letters.To  compare with Cato’s Letters  I have selected Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense,  which was his first major tract which drew upon a wide assortment of political, social and economic ideas. 

Paine and English Traditions of Radical Dissent 

The first section of this paper lays the groundwork for Paine’s possible contact with elements of English radical ideology. 

Paine was born and raised until the age of nineteen in Thetford in Norfolk,England Williamson relates that Norfolk, and especially nearby Norwich, had long been a “center for liberalism and dissent, some of it dating back to the Levellers of Crom- well’s time…. The child of Norfolk with an independent mind and spirit could hardly fail to register some of the influence of his country’s radicalism.”¹¹  Foner attests to the possible contact that Paine had with underground radical ideas in London and Lewes when he was there in the late 1753.¹²  He mentions that Paine read the paper of Lewes which often expressed anti-monarchical sentiment. Paine worked with the Excise service in Lewes in 1768 and was active as a Whig in Lewes politics. Williamson relates further that from 1754 to 1774 Paine followed the activities of John Wilkes, even reading his paper, The North Briton. 

Perhaps the Wilkes’ cause is an important link between American radicalism and British radicalism which can be traced through the personage of Thomas Paine. Paine’s personal experience as an excise officer and his familiarity with the Wilkes movement may have combined to inspire him to write the Case of the Officers of Excise  in England (1772-73). In this piece, Paine pleads to Parliament for higher wages for those working in the Excise service. He lost his case and on the basis of what he knew about the Wilkes’ case could very well have formed the lasting impression that it was futile to work within the existing British political institutions for change. In addition, Paine’s observations of the influence of the ministry and the king in the Wilkes’ case could have acquainted him with the realities of the king’s power over his ministers.¹³  It seems that Paine had already made up his mind when he came to America that England under the existing king and ministry would not redress the grievances of the colonies. This may help explain why Paine directed his attacks to the king of England in Common Sense  instead of copying Cato’s preoccupation with a corrupt ministry. The Journal of Radical History. At this time Paine does not propagate the dominion theory of colonial status that had been suggested in 1773 by Sam Adams. 

Garry Wills and Pauline Maier in independent studies suggest a connection between Americans who defended John Wilkes and also took up radical ideas.¹⁴  Maier suggests that the Boston “Sons of Liberty” identified with the Wilkes cause. She mentions that John Dickinson’s Farmer’s Letter in 1768 was a “virtual platform” for American and British Wilkesites.¹⁵ The Wilkes’ affair drew attention to the need to restore the balance of the British constitution, reform the laws regarding taxation, bankruptcy and indebtedness, and redistribute representation to include people with moveable property. Brewer mentions the possible connection between Wilkes’ economic reforms and the encouragement of anti-aristocratic feelings. “The followers of Wilkes saw politi- cal reform as part and parcel of a reordering of social and economic relationships in English society, to facilitate commercial relations and to provide for a policy of independent men of small property ruled by an accountable (and incredible weak) state.”¹⁶ 

Maier contends that part of the American acceptance of Paine’s Common Sense lay in the possibility that they had held the king responsible for the Wilkes’ affair and were already conditioned to accept government “malfeasance -and corruption” as part of their problem with Britain.¹⁷ Maier reports that at about this time a few Americans were beginning to shift their hopes for appeal from the king’s corrupt ministers to the king. If their problems were then not supported and redressed by the king, they were psychologically prepared to accent the thesis that the entire British government was corrupt, endangering the British Constitution and liberties. 

Foner suggests that “Common Sense did express ideas which had long circulated in the colonies — the separateness of America from Europe, the corruption of the old world and innocence of the new, the absurdity of hereditary privilege and the possib- ility of a future American Empire.¹⁸ 

Many American pamphlets in the 1760s and early 1770s used the language of the British Commonwealthmen.¹⁹  Especially in Virginia Cordon Wood traces a preoccupation with “corruption, virtue and luxury.”²⁰ Many of the colonial pamphlets appearing between 1764 and 1776 were asserting demands for equality within the British empire as well as locating the chief causes for corruption in the “personal avarice of the English executives and agents.”²¹ 

Two years before Common Sense American articles began to use harsh language against the king such as calling him “son of a whore.” Maier also reports that about this time articles began to appear advocating a republic in America.²²  Bailyn notes that the language in some pamphlets in America in the 17603 and 1770s began to assign America a special role as a refuge for liberty and a special place to carry out Cod’s will for freedom.²³ 

Beginning in the 1760s early American revolutionary sympathizers such as Franklin, Price, Priestly and Burgh met at the London Tavern to share ideas Paine met Burgh, Price and Priestley at Franklin’s Club of Honest Whigs in London.’²⁴ 

Paine had arrived. in the American colonies from England toward the end of November, 1774. He bore a letter of introduction written by Benjamin Franklin. Robbins reports that Paine was a sort of “political son” of Franklin, who no doubt had informed Paine of the ideas shared by the Honest Whigs. Paine was writing for the Pennsylvania Magazine in Philadelphia by the spring of 1775 and could also have been reading selections from Bradford’s bookstore which carried items such as The Spectator, The Tatler and Steele’s Guardian.²⁵ Foner reports that when Paine wrote for the Pennsylvania Magazine he wrote on to ‘es such as manners and virtue consistent with the writings of the Commonwealthmen.²⁶

In October 1775 Benjamin Franklin reputedly gave Paine a collection of materials to serve as a basis for Paine writing a history of the American and British transactions. Paine relates that he then formed the outlines of Common Sense and wrote the first part.²⁷ 

The pamphlet Common Sense was published on January 10, 1776, and was signed “written by an Englishman” on the title page. An appendix to it which addressed the king’s speech to Parliament appeared on February 14. Since few people knew who the im- mediate author of the pamphlet was, others such as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were at first given credit for it. 

Paine cites very few sources in Canon Sense. He refers directly to Burgh’s Disquisitions,  Dragonetti’s essay on “Virtue and Rewards” and Milton’s Paradise Lost.²⁸ Paine’s exposure to other thinkers of his day might shed some light on possible paths for the formation as well as the transportation of his ideas from England to America. There is no direct evidence from Paine that he ever read Trenchard and Cordon. It is possible that he could have come in contact with their writings either in England or America. 

Three colonial papers reprinted sections from their writings in the 17’b. Paine was well acquainted with both Franklin and Rush at the time he composed Common Sense, so quite possibly could have come in contact with the content of Cato’s Letters first hand. 

Since Paine cites James Burgh and Jacobson observes that Burgh himself lied borrowed arguments and facts from many sources and frequently used the pithier phrases of Trenchard and Cordon in his world;²⁹ it might be fruitful to examine some possible connections between Paine and Burgh. 

Since Paine cites Burgh, I thought that a comparison of the two would yield some common concerns.”³⁰ Paine recommends Burgh for his proposals for a broad based and equal suffrage. Paine agreed with Burgh’s position on suffrage reform. They both designate the role of government as a moral instrument assigning practically the overall goals to government: preserve order, public morality and encourage prosperity. They assume the influence that national character exerts over national government. Paine takes Burgh’s enthusiasm for voluntary associations to guide reform seriously enough to propose that most problems in social living be dealt with through voluntary associations. He suggested that a national association be formed to frame a constitution for the colonies. Both stress the need for social stability and opposed associations such as parties and factions that tend to divide the public. They both advocated an expansion of sea power and Paine’s emphasis on the navy rather than the army for defense could have come from Burgh, though Burgh does share this with Teeneeerd are: Cordon. Paine and Burgh are champions of protections of civil rights, especially rights of oppression. The Cato Letters share their interest in protection of civil liberties. 

Where Burgh and Paine differ is typical of the split between. British and American radicals. First, Burgh, for all his language about virtue and corruption, appears to be a constitutionalist when it comes to proposing actual plans for reform. He was convinced that the ancient constitution could be restored if parliament reformed itself internally and broadened the franchise. Secondly, Burgh favoured internal reform within the British empire of its policy toward the colonies; hence, he opposed colonial independence. Burgh is consistent with the Cato Letters on this policy. Thirdly, Burgh blamed the military rather than the monarchy for the corruption in the British government. He felt that ministerial reform could restore the balance of power within the British constitution. Burgh, like Trenchard and Cordon, supported limited power being  held by an aristocracy and a monarchy. His emphasis was more similar to Wilkes, who he supported, in wanting to extend the involvement of the non-aristocratic sectors of the population in government. Where Paine does not actually differ from Burgh he appears to be more liberal, especially in suffrage reform. Though Burgh is very important to the American cause, his importance to Paine cannot be established without a more thorough comparison of their repetitive works. This endeavour is outside the scope of the present study and will be completed, at a later date. 

Many general themes that appear in the writings of Trenchazd and Gordon appear in the writings of Paine. The anti-clerical theme which John Adams found so appealing in The Independent Whig, will not appear in a fully developed pattern in Paine until his Age of Reason (1794 and 1796). What Adams liked in Trenchard and Gordon, he found abhorrent in Paine. This may indicate that Paine either radicalized some of the doctrines shared with Trenchard and Gordon or else Paine drew from another tradition of religious dissent. Paine shares the concern of Trenchard and Cordon for a needier agrarian reform, or an “Agrarian Law,” but he did not develop this theme in depth until Rights of Man (Part 2, 1792) and Agrarian Justice (1797). There are still enough themes that appear in both Cato’s Letters and. Common Sense to encourage comparison. Although the very title of Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense was allegedly suggested to him by Benjamin Ruch, the inspiration for the title could well have sprung from Cato’s Letters both in the way Trenchard and Gordon used the term and the nume- rous times the phrase appears. In general, in Pocock’s words, “they all share an objection to the world of absolute authority – absolute monarchy and the world of superstition and priestcraft.”³¹ 

Nature of Man and Origin of Government 

Cato and Common Sense both profess an optimistic view of humanity. They assume the innate moral and natural equality of all men. Cato accounts for differences among people by referring to Fortune.³²  Common Sense by people’s exposure to different circumstances. Both use the language of civic humanism with references to virtue, corruption and fortune. Cato and Common Sense trust the innate judgment of the masses objecting to political distinctions which elevate some people arbitrarily over others.³³  They make a connection between the nature of people and the nature of the Governments. Cato warns of the tendency to corrupt public officials and government to corrupt the otherwise honest masses of people. Common Sense warns that the institution of monarchy alone is enough to corrupt and impoverish a nation. Since Cato feels that the people are susceptible to being misled or corrupted by corrupt leaders, they need a decent prince to manage them rightly.³⁴  Cato becomes the skeptic when he admits that people (abstractly) may be basically good, yet should not treat each other. 

Where Cato leaves it to unvirtuous magistrates to lead the good people astray,Coe- mon Sense is afraid that the inherent moral weakness (human frailty) of people will tempt them to subvert their own liberty and security. This can occur when people lose touch with their innate sense of benevolence and fair play. All other things being equal, however, Common Sense trusts the people. 

Many impulses drive people into political society. Cato and Common Sense acknowledge the human need for companionship and dependence upon others for physical survival.³⁵ Cato pictures people joining into society and government simultaneously. He sounds Hobbesian (and in fact cites Hobbes) in originating the formation of government out of fear of individuals for each other. He puts people through the process of the social contract by asking each to surrender a part of his individual property to a magistrate who is empowered to apply the “united Force of the Community” to provide security and freedom for all members of the community.³⁶  Cato still sees people as “subject” to governmental authority. 

Common Sense separates between the forming of society “which is always a blessing” and the formation of government which is a “necessary evil.”³⁷ In the formation of society Common Sense takes and his foundation a charitable and benevolent moral sense. Paine uses the moral sense in a manner that seems akin to Francis Hutcheson’s use of it. Garry Wills points out some portions of Common Sense  that place the origin of the social contract in feelings.³⁸  Wille’s approach makes much more sense to me in appreciating Paine’s vantage point in talking about the formation of society. It is the natural social urge that identifies the good of ethers with one’s own survival that originally impels men into society. Paine could not conceive of a “contract” anal the surrender of power implied in the Lockean social contract. Paine never alienated the ruler and the ruled in the style of Cato and other social contract theorists. Paine’s portrayal of the role of society follows the pattern of Hume and Hutheesen.³⁹ It is the failure to retain moral sense in Society that leads Cession Sense to suggest that people formed a government to substitute for deficiencies in moral virtue. Simply, the government assumed the burden for moral guidance when people became distracted with other things. 

Paine makes the distinction between the origin of society and the formation of government. He draws on other traditions by using three different theories for the origin of government. When speaking of the origin of monarchy, Paine combines the force theory for the institution of kingship with the divine theory for hereditary succession. By associating the origins of hereditary power with original sin Paine is activating anti-popery feelings associated with the Catholic church and coupling these to resentment against monarchy, especially the Stuart monarchs. For Common Sense “monarchy is the property of government.”⁴¹  Next, when Common Sense walks the reader through the state of nature into the formation of government he alludes to social contract language in only one phrase about the individual surrendering a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest.”⁴²  In finding a way to apply the prevailing notions of his time for the formation of the state, Paine widens the appeal of his arguments to a larger audience. Though they arrive at the formation of society and the state differently, both Cato and Common Sense agree th- at the institution of government should not put people in a worse position than they were without it.⁴³

Structure of Government 

Cato and Common Sense prefer the republican form of government founded on popular sovereignty.⁴⁴ The form that this republic takes differs widely between the two.Cato wants to restore the balanced constitution which he feels has been subverted by a corrupt ministry which has caused the monarch’s power to become imbalanced. To strengthen the democratic part of the constitution Cato puts trust in the parliamentary power of the purse and frequent elections. Cato still accepts a constitutional (limited) monarchy. 

Common Sense pictures a confederation type of republic originating out of voluntary associations formed by the public. This republic is headed by a rotating president who functions as a presiding officer. In many ways Paine anticipates the American Articles of Confederation which will evolve as a result of the second Continental Congress which was meeting when Paine published Common Sense. 

In a republic characterised by representative mechanisms Cato and Common Sense agree that the instructed delegate model of representative is the preferred method to assure a harmony of interests between the people and their delegates. Cato puts more emphasis on correcting the mechanical deficiencies in the workings of the balanced constitution to accommodate a broader based public opinion. Common Sense goes beyond the mechanics (though he does not ignore their importance) to the source of credibility for a government: the enjoyment of public confidence which comes from genuine public support. 

Both Cato and Common Sense suggest that limits of law be put on government. They feel that people need to be stabilised by a constitution and a charter (fashioned after Magna Charta) to protect civil liberties. Common Sense marvels at the sentiment that is holding the American colonies together “without law, without government”⁴⁵ but was afraid that a more defined tie was needed to sustain the colonies through the future. 

Common Sense consciously rejects the model of the British Constitution preferred by both Burgh and Cato. Common Sense feels that the locus of authority in the British Constitution is too confusing for people to find out who is really responsible for policy making. He accuses the British Constitution of inviting monarchical tyranny especially through the use of places and pensions. In Cato we heard objections to the over-extension of monarchical power through places and pensions, but not tied to a dismissal of the utility of the British Constitution which he contended was a valid instrument which had the capacity to correct its own imbalances. Common Sense is convinced that the Commons lacks meaningful checks over the monarchy and rejects the whole concept of a balanced constitution. Cato still invokes the classical notion of an outside consultant to remedy the defects of a constitution. Common Sense rejects this notion in preference for a simple (direct) enough structure that can be run and repaired by the populace. 

Monarchy and hereditary succession 

Cato feels comfortable with limited monarchy objecting strongly to absolutism and tyranny. Common Sense categorically rejects monarchy. The tone of his objections has the familiar ring of the radical dissenters during the Civil War. Common Sense also invokes the.Norman Yoke myth referring to William the Conqueror as a “French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives.”⁴⁶  His use of the Norman Yoke is similar in its usage to that of the Levellers and as found in the writings of Milton. The term “banditti” is fowl in Milton, Cato and Paine. The use of the terms “brutes” and “robbers” to describe corrupt ministers and kings permeates the anti-monarchical arguments from the Civil War to the Revolutionary War. Cato, however, does not appear to subscribe to the Norman Yoke myth even in the Whig sense of invoking the common law. He does refer to the Ancient Constitution in favorable terms by picturing the kings as too weak to corrupt or force their policies on others.⁴⁷ 

If one takes Common Sense’s”arguments against monarchy and compares them to Cato’s arguments against tyranny then similar arguments are made, but one must recall that their similar arguments are supporting two quite different institutions. Once a monarch is branded as a tyrant than arguments pre-dating Cicero -and including Algernon Sidney sanction the death penalty for the tyrant. Paine finds the death penalty and similar violence abhorrent and proposes a different evaluation of tyranny. In Common Sense, he considers tyranny a breach of the impetus for forming a valid government, a violation of the public trust, and a justification for revolution. Hence, Common Sense could elaborate on the need for American independence and futility of reconci- liation due in part to the alienation of feelings between the inhabitants of the American colonies and the king of England. 

Instead of holding the king accountable for the character and behaviour of his ministers and policy, Cato portrays his king as an innocent victim of his corrupt ministers which absolves the king of responsibility. Cato’s corrupt ministers do al- most all of the things that Common Sense attributes to a corrupt king: they destroy the liberties of the people, pursue projects that make people poor and themselves rich, engage the country in war to keep the people distracted, and finally, subvert the interest of the entire nation.⁴⁸ At the heart of the misuse of power that irrit- ates both Common Sense and Cato is the dangerous tendency to promote “luxury, idleness, expense and deprivation of manners.”⁴⁹ Maybe Cato could actually believe that the ministers were at the root of English corruption under George I in 1720, but Michael Foot in absolutely correct when he points out that Paine would not buy that excuse for a minute in 1776.⁵⁰ 

Cato traces the outline of tyranny back to Roman times through Asia and other non- western parts of the world. Common Sense for the most part spares the reader the civic humanist trip through classical antiquity in preference to a son ptural argument that takes one through the kings of Israel. Common Sense concludes that “the Almighty has here entered his protest against monarchical government.”⁵¹ 

Once we get through Cato’s and Common Sense’s different treatments of monarchy, we find more agreement between them in their general objections to hereditary rule.Both find it an insult to natural equality, a poor way to assure competent rulers and an impetus to civil war. Both cite the examples of Holland favorably and Turkey unfavorably. Both use the term Tahomet like in an uncomplimentary way to designate arbitrary monarchical power. 

Superficially, they appear to be very much in accord, but there are some differences. Cato blames the selfish interest of governors and lack of legal restraints for the plight of Turkey.⁵²  He combines moral and constitutional arguments in his essay on hereditary rule. Common Sense denounces the ability of the constitution in either England or Turkey to restrain the monarchs. The only difference he sees between the way the monarchy acts in England versus Turkey rests on the different acculturation of the respective peoples. Both refer to the Wars of the Roses but for different reasons: Cato to illustrate the virtues of a civilian army; Common Sense to illustrate that no matter what kind of army is fighting, the tendency of monarchy is to perpetuate bloodshed. 

Status of the American Colonies 

Cato, like Burgh, devotes a special address to the relationship between England and the American colonies.⁵³ They both share a preference for colonial dependence and constitutional redress of problems between the two. Common Sense breaks radically with their position. 

Paine’s arguments for independence follow very closely the weaknesses in colonial policy identified by Trenchard and Gordon. Cato advises the mother country to consider the interest and advancement of the status of the colonies so that they will be treated so well and dependence will be not much to their advantage that they will not seek independence. Cato warns that colonies will not be content to draw milk from their mother when they can get better food, nor will they remain subservient because of ancestral ties.⁵⁴  Common Sense takes both of these points, applies them to the relationship between England and America and uses them as arguments for independence. 

Both Cato and Common Sense focus attention on the economic relationship between the colonies and England. They link individual prosperity and freedom to national prosperity and a republican form of government. They describe the ill effects of absolute monarchy and tyranny on trade, commerce and individual initiative. They agree that property and commerce are secure only in free governments. Cato uses examples from outside Great Britain. Common Sense focuses on England. 

Next, Cato and Common Sense built a case for the connection between commercial growth, development of naval power and the restoration of virtue to a people. They both contend that virtuous and patriotic traits are encouraged by a seafaring society.⁵⁵ They also point out that where people can work for themselves and build a stake in society, they will fight to defend that society voluntarily. Both Cato and Common Sense illustrate the capacities of small, free states to defeat more formidable tyrannical states for these aforementioned reasons. 

Paine devotes almost a fourth of Common Sense to the subject of the development of commercial and naval power in the American colonies.⁵⁶  In presenting a detailed outline for the colonial shipbuilding enterprise, Common Sense actually is building a practical case for the ability of America to support herself economically. Paine considers the link between commerce and defense vital. 

Economically, Common Sense and Cato share some of the same concerns. Both agree that trade and commerce are basically beneficial enterprises as long as they are kept free from arbitrary political control. Both link standing armies and the tendency to corruption from luxury to arbitrary monarchies. Both see navies and the development of trade as supportive agents for individual liberty. Common Sense assumes the arguments of Cato in being suspicious of standing armies and assigns the qual- ities of virtue and reasonableness to a citizen soldiery.⁵⁷ Paine seems to be aware of violating the radical dissenting position against standing militias When he develops a rationale to defend the existence of a standing navy in the colonies. Paine provides himself an escape hatch on the navy issue by suggesting that ships can be used for commerce or sold off to make money. 

Cato and Common Sense part company when one looks at the overall purpose for their economic arguments. Cato wants to build economic prosperity from political dependence. Common Sense attacks mercantilism as a ruinous policy and makes a case for building economic prosperity from the base of political independence. A factor to be confronted in building economic prosperity is the question of a national debt. Cato, of course, objects to a public debt and Common Sense shares his concern that the assumption of heavy debt can invite corruption.⁵⁸  Common Sense is willing to accept a temporary national debt as a means to build a navy, establish independence and encourage a national bond. He objects to perpetuating the debt onto another generation and offers suggestions for paying it off in a short time. 

In conclusion, this author still cannot fit Paine into the Commonwealth tradition even when it is apparent that superficially he shares many of the concerns of the Commonwealthmen in broad areas such as preference for a republic, devotion to civil liberty, extension of suffrage and limited government. Paine’s hostility to the monarchy and the notion of the balanced constitution, place him outside even the radical commonwealthmen. On the other hand, Paine in Common Sense seems to carry on some of the language of the civic humanists. He and Tronchard and Cordon link together political inequality on some level with corruption and lack of virtue. Both are conscious of defending programmes which will discourage vice, encourage manliness and cultivate manners. Both link the destruction of manners with non—free states. The whole economic argument that Common Sense appears to make for American independence centers on avoiding the corruption through dependence that Britain has fostered in the colonies. Cato faces the dangers that a monopolistic monied interest poses to the English notion of the balanced constitution; Common Sense accepts the failure of the balanced constitution without linking a corrupt monied interest to its immediate destruction. Paine is aware that overindulgence of a nation in commercial ventures may lead to luxury and vice with the resulting inattention diminishing the spirit of patriotism and civil liberties. Therefore, rather than using this as an argument against commercial development, Paine uses it and the example of London to hasten Americans towards independence from Britain before her interests and growth turn her energies elsewhere. Paine places his bets that the overriding civilizing force of commerce nurtured by the confederated republic will contain the forces of corruption, luxury and vice. 

In some ways Paine continues the neo—Harringtonian critique of corruption into the American scene and he shares the concerns of the Commonwealthmen with removing the sources for corruption, but the methods he proposes for doing this differ notably from the commonwealthmen and the English country party of his day. This is even brought clearer when Paine is contrasted to Jefferson and Adams.⁵⁹ Paine may prove to be a pure descendent of Harrington and the Levellers set in the climate of the late 18th century. His rejection of the British model cf government in favour of the un-tried confederation—type republic, his treatment of commercial growth and his leanings toward Scottish moral philosophy set him apart from other radicals of his day; The most consistent theme in Common Sense is Paine’s conviction that all the economic and political conflicts between America and Great Britain have alienated their affections past the point of restoring them. Clark originally linked Paine’s attacks on monarchy to his notice of a betrayal of the innate popular benevolence.⁶⁰ then labels this as the sensibility—sociability argument from the Scottish Enlightenment.”⁶¹ 

There is no tidy way to end this paper without pointing to two other facets of Paine’s ideas in Common Sense that need further explanation. The first is his possible dependence on the Scottish school for the economic and social underpinnings of his arguments. The second is the connection of Paine with the radical religious dissenters, Price and Priestley, and millennial thought. In several places in Common Sense Paine links American independence and republicanism with the rill of the Almighty. It may be, after all these studies are completed, that instead of appearing to be a confused and unsystematic simpleton or parrot, that Paine is an extraordinary synthesizer of some very important traditions of thought that were “in the air” at the time and of some that were thought to be dead. If these many factors can finally be sorted out through the personage of Thomas Paine, the many facets of American radicalism that claim Paine as their inspiration may be more fully appreciated.

REFERENCES 

1. See Harry Hayden Clerk “Introduction,” In Thomas Paine: Selections. Rev.edn. (New York. Hill and Wang 1972); Clark, “Toward a Reinterpretation of Thomas Paine,” American Literature. V (1933). 133 -145. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine. (New York: .1.8. Lippiscott Co., 1959); Bally. “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas In Eighteenth Century America” in “The Causes of the American Revolution”. ed. John WahDm (Health, 1973) Tilt Journal of Radical History. 
2. Nelson F. Adkins, “Introduction,” In Common Sense and Other Political Writings (Indiana: The Liberal Arts Press 1953). This is the edition of Paine’s Common Sense cited in this paper; Charles Herriam, “Thomas Paine’s Political Theories.” Political Science quarterly, XIV,  No.3 (September, 1899), 389-403; Cecilia ii. Kenyon.”Where Paine Went Wrong,” American Political Science Review XLV (December, 1951, 1086-99. Aldridge, A.O. “The Influence of Locke and Rousseau in Paine’s Common Sense” Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, Loyola University, Chicago, April 9-11, 1976. 
3. H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property; Political Ideology in 18th Century Britain (New York: Holmes end Meier. 1977), PP.240-258; Bernard Ballyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Stoughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968). For the civil humanist paradigm see especially the studies of Z.S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945); J. G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). For language links see Caroline Robbins, “European Republicanism in the Century and a Half 1776′ in The Development of a Revolutionary  Mentality (Washington: Library of Congress, 1972); Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions: 1641.1688. 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958) Chapter 3. Cecilia Kenyon, “Republicanism and Radicalism in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly (1962), 153-182; Mordecai Roshweld„ “The Concept of Human Rights,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 19 (1949), 354-379. 
4. Lynd, Intellectual Origins; Hill, World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), especially the conclusion; Bailyn, “Common Sense,” in Fundamental Testaments of the American Revolution (Washington: Library of Congress, 1973); Dickinson, Liberty and Property, PP.59-269; Eric Foner, Tom Paine and and Revolutionary America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1976); David L Jacobson (ed.), The English Libertarian Heritage (Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965). “Introduction.” David Lovejoy, “Two American Revolutions, 1689 and 1776,” in Pocock (ed.) Three Revolutions. 
5. Seedtime of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), P.141. 
6. Ideological Origins, p.36. 
7. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Cancsonwealthoan (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961). P.3 22. during the early reign of George III. 
8. Roshwald. pp. 354..379. 
9. Moment, p.515. 
10. Jacobson. p. lvii. 
11. Audrey Williamson, Thomas Paine: His Life.Work and Times (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), p.26. 
12. Foner, pp.10-14. 
13. Maier, p.395. 
14. Garry Wills, Inventing America (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p.45. 
15. Maier, p.378. 
16. John Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” In Three British  Revolutions,  p.361. 
17. Maier, pp.390-95. 
18. Foner, pp. 79-80. 
19. Maier, “The Beginnings of American Republicanism 1765-1776, In The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality (Washington: Library of Congress, 1972), pp. 99-113; Pocock, Moment, chapter 15. 
20. Gordon S. Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” in John Wahlke, The Causes of the American Revolution, pp. 240-241. 
21. Richard Bushman, “Corruption and Power in Provincial America,” in The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality PP. 63-03. 
22. Maier, “Beginnings of American Republicanism, p.105. 
23. Ballyn. Origins,  p. 141. 
24. Robbins. Conuonmealthman, P. 320. 
25. Williamson, p. 65. 
26. Foner, p. 72. 
27. Williamson, p. 76. 
28. James Burgh, Political DIsquistitions: or. am Inquiry into Public Errors. Defeats and Abuses. 3 vols. London, 1774-75; Glacinto (Hyacinthe), Marquis de Dragonetti (1739-1818), A Treatise on Virtues and Rewards London, 1769. See Adkins’ note on this in Common Sense are Other Political Writings, p.176; John Hilton, Paradise Lost, iv. 98-99. 
29. Jacobson, p. ivii. 
30. Works consulted on Burgh Include: Carla Hay James Burgh. Spokesman for Reform in Hanoverian England  (Washington: University Press of America, 1979); Oscar and Mary Remain, “James Burgh and American Revolutionary Theory,” ProceedIngs of the Massachusetts historical Society LXXIII (January-December, 1961), 38 -57 Martha K. Zebrowski. “One Cato is Not Enough: The Rhetorical Association and the Extra-constitutional Regeneration of the Commonwealth,” no further citation available. 
31. Pocock Moment, p. 474. 
32. Jacobson, pp. 101-106. 
33. Adkins, p. 10 and 42. 
34. Jacobson, p. 64. 
35. Jacobson, p.82; AdkIns,11.5. 
36. Jacobson, p.128 and 116-18, also p.141. 
37. Adkins, p.4. 38. Wills, PP.303 & 315. 
38. Wills pp.303, 315. 
39. Felix Gilbert, “The English Background of American Isolationism in the 18th Century,” Willies and fiery Quarterly,  3 series 1 (April. 1944), 138-160; Wills, pp.215-17 and pp.236 -38. 
40. Adkins, 9.5. 
41. Ibid. p.14. 
42. Ibid. p.5. 
43. Jacobson, p.265: Adkins, p.4. 
44. Adkins, p.32; Jacobson, p.63. 
45. Adkins, 9.48. 
46. Ibid. p.15. 
47. Jacobson, p.122. 
48. Ibid. p.51. 
49. Ibid. p.54. 
50. Michael Foot, “Shatterproof Paine,” The Guardian, January 24, 1982, p.20. 
51. Adkins, p.13. 
52. Jacobson, pp.100-101. 
53. Ibid. pp-42-2119. 
54. Ibid. p.245: Adkins, p.22. 
55. Jacobson, pp. 152-161; Adkins, pp.37-39. 
56. Adkins, pp. 34.44. 
57. Ibid. p.50. 
58. Ibid. p.35; Pocock, moment, 9.469. 
59. Willoughby Jarrell, “Some Anarchistic Implications of the Political Writings of Thomas Paine.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1974. chapter 5: and Jarrell, “From Liberalism to Anarchism,. paper presented at the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Tale University, 1975. 
60. Clark, Thomas Paine: Selections, pp.xxxvil and xxxix. 
61. Wills, p.303. 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

Willoughby Jarrell is Associate Professor of Political Science at Kennesaw College, at Marietta, Georgia, USA. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in government from Indiana University, and a doctorate of philosophy in political science from Em- ory University. He has presented several papers on Paine at conferences, and is now working on a book on Paine. 

Audrey Williamson is an historian and author of several important books, including a biography of Thomas Paine and a study of Wilkes. She is a Vice—President of the Thomas Paine Society and has lectured on Paine to several organisations. 

Robert Morrell is secretary of the Thomas Paine Society. A graduate of the University of Liverpool, he was before establishing his own business as a geologist. He has had a long standing interest in radical and freethought history, and has published several papers in these fields as well as the history of science.

The post Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, an English Tradition of Radical and the Dissent: The Cato Letters   appeared first on .

This paper was given as Pearce’s Presidential Address to the Society on July 17, 1979. 

THERE IS NOT only a problem, but many, about Paine’s early life before he went to America, when 37 years old, a mature man. Yet Moncure Conway, the recognised standard biographer of Paine, in a work of nearly 500 pages devoted only 31 to Paine’s formative years in England. This can largely be due to the following circumstances that he details in his Life of Paine:

“In 1802 an English friend of Paine, Redman Yorke, visited him in Paris. In a letter written at the time, Yorke states that Paine had for some time been preparing memoirs of his own life, and his correspondence, and showed him two volumes of the same. In a letter of January 25, 1805, to Jefferson, Paine speaks of his wish to publish his works, which will make, with his manuscripts, five octavo volumes of four hundred pages each. Besides which he means to publish a miscellaneous volume of correspondence, essays and some pieces of poetry.’ He had also, he says, prepared historical prefaces, stating the circumstances under which each work was written. All of which confirms Yorke’s statement and shows that Paine had prepared at least two volumes of autobiographical matter and correspondence. Paine never carried out the design mentioned to Jefferson, and the manuscripts passed by bequest to Madam Bonneville. This lady, after Paine’s death, published a fragment of Paine’s third part of The Age of Reason, but it was afterwards found that she had erased passages that might offend the orthodox (My emphasis – H.H.P). Madam Bonneville returned to her husband in Paris, and the French Biographical Dictionary states that in 1829 she, as the depositary of Paine’s papers, began ‘editing’ his life. This, which could only have been the autobiography (my emphasis – H.H.P.) was never published. She had become a Roman Catholic (same – H.H.P.). On returning to America in 1833, where her son, General Bonneville (also a Catholic), was in military service, she had personal as well as religious reasons for suppressing the memoirs. She might naturally have feared the revival of an old scandal concerning her relations with Paine. The same motives may have prevented her son from publishing Paine’s memoirs and manuscripts (same H.H.P.). Madam Bonneville died at the house of the General in St. Louis. I have a note from his widow, Mrs. Bonneville, in which she says: ‘The papers you speak of regarding Thomas Paine are all destroyed, at least all which the General had in his possession. On his leaving St. Louis for indefinite time all his effects – a handsome library and valuable papers included – were stored away, and during his absence the storehouse burned down, and all that the General stored away were burned.’ 

“There can be little doubt that among those papers burned St.Louis were the two volumes of Paine’s autobiography and correspondence seen by Redman Yorke in 1802. Even a slight acquaintance with Paine’s career would enable one to recognise this as a catastrophy…” (Conway, x-xi). 

A similar catastrophe occurred to Lord Byron and Sir Richard Burton and our own Bernard O’Dowd. Is it any wonder that a modern writer says that, “considerable mystery surrounds (Paine) and his career. One can begin with the paradox of Common Sense….written by a man with only the briefest experience in this country (America). Until now historians have failed to explain either the unique impact or the roots of the ideas expressed by Paine.” (Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. Oxford University Press, 1976. p.xii.) 

THE ROOTS OF THE IDEAS EXPRESSED BY PAINE:

The same author says, “The problem of Common Sense, however, is only one facet of the larger problem….Biographers have always faced an unenviable task, and not only because of the complexity of Paine’s personality and the fact that most of his correspondence and papers…were accidently burned over a century ago. To depict Paine in his entirety requires a knowledge of the History of America, England and France in the Age of Revolution and familiarity with Eighteenth century science, theology, political philosophy and radical movements. Paine’s connections must be traced among the powerful in Europe and America, and also in the tavern-center world of political artisans in London and Philadelphia. The questions central to an understanding of Paine’s career, in fact, do not lend themselves to exploration with the confines of conventional biography” (p.xii). 

“We can only speculate about Paine’s contact with the coterie of nonconformist artisans, clergymen, and intellectuals who made up Franklin’s ‘Club of Honest Whigs’ in London… Among the members who seem to have influenced Paine were three writers: James Burgh, a London schoolmaster, Richard Price, a dissenting minister and teacher, and Joseph Priestly, a dissenting clergyman and scientific and political experimenter.” (Ibid. p.7.) 

We are told that Lewes was “a center of political disaffection,” and that Wilkes at one stage visited The Wilkes movement, played an important role in engaging the political energies and broadening the political education of the artisans, shopkeepers and humbler professional men among whom Paine moved. (Ibid. p.11.)  

So it is with this man, so well known of, but so inadequately known or the makings of him are, that I wish to give some account of in so far I have been able to gather from the biographies of Paine that I have, and think that half the trouble is due to the historic religious hatred, lies, sla- nder and libel by Christian apologists that has helped to prevent the preservation of documentary and oral records that escaped destruction in the fire mentioned. Christians did all they could by all means they had to wipe every vestige of anything favourable to the memory of Paine. To advise anyone even to read Paine was a treasonable offence, and even to mention his name was enough to be thought treasonable (Thomas Muir had among the charges laid against him one that asserted that he had advised a person to read Paine). 

Paine burst out upon the world with his Common Sense in support of the American colonists after he went to the colonies in 1774. But what was his English background that gave him the astounding ability to write that pamphlet and have it published by January 1776? He was just forty years old. 

Despite the importance and influence of Paine on America and England there is no in-depth study of his first thirty-nine years. Even Moncure Conway has only 31 pages devoted to this period. It is about time the situation was rectified. I have half-a-dozen Lives of Paine, the authors of which also skip over his early years in a similar manner, with only passing reference to the most significant events without examining the vital implications they could, or did, have in forming Paine’s ideas. At 39 years of age it must be obvious that he would have formed very definite and mature opinions to have been able to write Common Sense so soon after landing in America. 

So I can only take what has already been published as I have no means in Australia of making original research. But in this paper I hope to set the pattern for someone to follow-up. In doing so I can only take what seem to me to be the most significant events in Paine’s early life. A lot of other things I must pass over. 

Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk, 29th January, 1737, of Quaker/Anglican parentage, and went to the Thetford Grammar School, which he left at years of age. Now, here is the first significant thing, the implications of which have been completely missed. This school was not an ordinary one depending on parish support, as its name “Grammar” school should indicate. It was founded in 1566 on a legacy left by a Sir Richard Fulmerston, and did not depend on public funds, and taught such things as history and the sciences, which would, almost for certain be along the lines of what would then called Natural Philosophy, which is now divided up into the various branches of study such as astronomy, physics, chemistry, etc., including mathematics. (Woodward, W.E. Tom Paine: America’s Godfather, 1737-1809. Secker & Warburg, 1946. p.34.)

Knowing, as we do, the interest that Paine took in these things, here have at the very outset of his life, a form of education that has not followed up. I need only just mention at this point his interest in designing iron bridges. With the teaching of “history,” whatever its nature have been, the implications of it we might validly suggest, could have set Paine’s thinking along social and political lines, or led onto these, or stood him in stead, when he took up political thinking, as a background. 

After leaving school he ran away to sea. Even the “implication” of this suggests an independent, self-reliant and bold character that he displayed throughout his life. It was short-lived, but he went to sea a second time, and later told Clio Rickman that during his time at sea he learned a lot, and that there was hardly a period in his life that he was not learning something. (Rickman, Thomas Clio. The Life of Thomas Paine. Rickman, London, 1819. p.37.) Paine said, “I scarcely ever quote; the reason is I always think.” (Collins, Henry. Introduction to Rights of Man. Penguin Books, 1976. p.12. 7. Robertson, J.M. Biographical Introduction to Rights of Man. Vol.1. A. and H. Bradlaugh Bonner, 1895. p.vii.) The implication again being the education he received at the old “Grammar” School, in “the sciences,” which would be based in the principles reasoning, ie. thinking, and its expression and understanding in clear intelligent “language,” which, again, his whole literary work shows how well he learned its principles. 

After his second return from the sea, when he was 20 years old, in London, employed as a staymaker, his father’s trade, for two years, “in which time he zealously studied astronomy and attended the lectures of Martin Ferguson.” This is quoted by Paine himself and repeated in a number of biographical notices, and where Paine says that he bought himself a pair of globes and some instruments. Woodward, quoting Paine, draws attention to him becoming acquainted with Dr. Bevis “of the Society called the Royal Society, then living in the Temple, and an excellent astronomer…” (Woodward. p.30. Rickman. p.37.)  

Adam Ferguson was a professor of Natural Philosophy. He wrote a book Civil Society, and another on Refinement, defending the morality of stage plays that were under attack at the time. He had a reputation in the classics, mathematics and metaphysics, and was a friend of David Hume and had visited Voltaire. His lectures were attended by a number of non academic hearers. 

Benjamin Martin was a mathematician, instrument maker, astronomer, and travelled giving lectures on Natural Philosophy; he was the author of several books including, “Philological Library of Literary Arts and the Sciences”. 

Dr. John Bevis, is said to have had Newton’s Optics, as his “inseparable companion,” and was a proficient astronomer, being a friend of Halley, and himself had discovered a new comet in 1744. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1765, and to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He was the author of numerous publications. Both Hawthorn and Edwards say that Ferguson introduced Paine to Bevis. (Hawthorn, Hildegarde. His Country was the World, A Life of Thomas Paine. Longman’s, Green and Co., 1949. p.6.) (Woodward. p.30.) (For information on Martin, Ferguson and Bevis see the Dictionary of National Biography, where much information about them appears.)  

This clearly shows that Paine, at 20 years old, was for a period of up to two years on intimate terms with at least Ferguson and Bevis, and, we may assume, not only attended their lectures, but read their literature. I obtained my biographical data from the National Biographical Dictionary. When 24 years old, in 1761, Paine decided to become an exciseman. His wife’s fa- ther had been one (she had died some time earlier) and the project found favour. Conway says that Paine “after passing some months of study in London, returned to Thetford in July 1761. Here, while acting as a Supernumerary officer of excise, he continued his studies, and enjoyed the friendship of Mr. Cocksedge the Recorder of Thetford.”(Conway, Moncure D. The Life of Thomas Paine. Watts & Co., London, 1909. p.7. 13. Rickman. p.36.) Rickman says that Paine 1761 “went back to Thetford for 14 months to study for an examination. “This would seem to suggest that he “went back” for one of two reasons, or both, to stay with his father, and/or utilise the facilities of the Thetford Grammar School. 

Here, again, we must notice the educated class of person Paine so easily got acquainted with. I might also mention here Benjamin Franklin, though I will leave it as just an aside until I come to deal with him later. But mixing in such company so freely indicates that Paine was fulfilling his claim to have always been “learning” something. It indicates to me that he combined a natural learning capacity combined with a strong desire to take every opportunity that was offered or was available. 

He passed his examination for the Excise and took up various stations for a few years until in 1768 he was stationed at Lewes in Sussex. (Conway, p.9.)  

Paine was born into a poor family and stated, “My parents were not to give me a shilling, beyond what they gave me in education, and to do this distressed themselves.” (Ibid. p.5.) He also said, “the natural bent of my mind was to science.” In his almost continuous condition of poverty, it highlights a determination to educate himself beyond what his father could do for him, and it emphasises his ability to impress those above his own position in life. 

The condition of the people of England at these times was a deplorable one, and that of the excisemen no better, if not worse, if that was possible. So it would seem that because of the better education and ability of Paine, he took on the work to state their case for a rise in salary by a petition to both Houses of Parliament, and so came about his first publication, The Case of the Officers of Excise, which was written in 1772 and published in 1773, an edition of which I possess was published by W.T. Sherwin in 1817. (Rickman. pp.40-41.) 

Here we see Paine at 35 years of age already in possession of the fundamental powers of strong logical reasoning, clear observation and understanding of the case he was presenting; a command of language and expression, and a co-ordinated presentation of the points he wished to bring to the attent- ion of his readers. 

If there is any problem about his writing Common Sense after he went to America, it is right here that it should start in his Case of the Officers of Excise. Right through the pamphlet of 16 pages there is unmistakably the basis for all his writing that followed. He marshalls the points of case in the same way as in his later works. 

Paine takes the various seasonal conditions under which the excisemen worked, their living expenses in detail, their duties, temptations to bribery, lack of incentive, details of the particulars of their work when away from home, maintenance of their horses, the time away from home, the total cost of their expenses as against their salary, and arrives at one shilling and nine pence farthing a day for a man on 50 pounds per year. The case for an increase in salary he builds up would do credit today to a union advocate before the arbitration court, and not only on the physical side, but on the moral and human side. 

He punctuates his case by such remarks as forecast those that he presents in Part 2 of his Rights of Man, such as (he is referring to the temptations to bribery): “The bread of deceit is the bread of bitterness; but alas! How few in these times of want and hardship are capable of thinking so? Objects appear under new colours, and in shapes not naturally their own; sucks in the deception, and necessity reconciles it to conscience.” “He who was never an hunger’d man may argue finely on the subjection of his appetite; and he who never was distressed, may harangue as beautifully the power of principle. But poverty, like grief, has an incurable deafness, which never hears; the oration loses all its edge; and To be, or not to be,’ becomes the only question.” 

In this last extract there is an internal link in his thinking with a similar expression in his Crisis No.1. – “POVERTY, LIKE GRIEF, HAS AN INCURABLE DEAFNESS.” Right at the opening of Crisis No.1., we have the words: “TYRANNY, LIKE HELL, IS NOT EASILY CONQUERED.” 

“The Woodward says, “Paine spent the whole Winter of 1772 in trying to get Parliament to take some action,” but the Case was a complete failure. Commissioners of Excise said there were so many applicants for places in the service that any officer who was not satisfied with his pay was welcome to quit, and they would be able to fill his place immediately.” (Woodward. p.51.)  

I have already mentioned that Paine had made the acquaintance of Franklin, to whom he was introduced by Oliver Goldsmith. Franklin represented the American Colonies in London from 1764 to 1775. Samuel Edwards says, “Through Oliver Goldsmith (Paine) had become acquainted with…Benjamin Franklin. But when, in the period mentioned, is not stated. It seems that Paine kept green in his thought contact with Goldsmith, as he seems to have done with Franklin, who enough of his ability to give him a letter of introduction to friends in Philadelphia and advise him to migrate there.”(Edwards, Samuel. Rebel! A Biography of Thomas Paine. New English Library, 1974. P.33. Conway, p.15.) 

While at Lewes, in the meantime, though, and where Paine settled for years, 1768-1774, (Rickman, 1768, p.37 to 1774, p.41.) He became a notable, even being elected to the Town Council. (Collins, note p.13.) Collins says that he “became something of a celebrity Lewes, not only through his work on the Council, but mainly as a and well-liked member of the Headstrong Club, a discussion-cum-social society which met at the White Hart tavern, a few yards from his lodgings” was also appointed one of the two constables for Lewes. (Ibid. p.13.) 

I have written of Paine’s biographers failing to follow-up the implications before of what is known, however vague, about the early days and activities he went to America. I feel that tremendously important implications were not followed up sufficiently by such as Conway, Gilbert Vale, and Clio Rickman. Conway says that after Paine left Lewes he went to London, but it is not known how he lived physically, but he quotes from a letter by Paine indicate how he lived mentally. It is written later than the Rights of Man, which is mentioned in it. (Conway, p.15.) It is written to John King, “a renegade,” and refers to when he and Paine met. In it Paine writes: “I was pleased to discuss with you under our friend Oliver’s lime tree those political notions, which I have since given to the world in my Rights of Man (here we have a valuable piece of evidence that while at Lewes Paine was discussing “political notions” that he later gave the world in his Rights of Man) You used to complain of abuses, as well as me, and write your opinions of them in terms what then means this sudden attachment to Kings?” 

Conway says that this Oliver was “probably” the famous Alderman of London who was imprisoned in the Tower during the great struggle of that city with the government when John Wilkes was Lord Mayor. Now, if this was so, Paine discussed with King “those political notions” later incorporated the Rights of Man, Raine must have already developed these before going to America, and under their “friend” Oliver’s lime tree, who in turn was intimately mixed up with the Wilkes business to have been confined to Tower of London? And yet Conway leaves it here without further investigation. 

Conway tells us that Paine in early life “cared little for POLITICS, which seemed to him a species of jockyship.” There is a very vague, even meaningless statement, “How early in life?” And does politics include systems of government? But Conway does go on to say that, “the contemptuous word (jockyship) proves that Paine was deeply interested in the issues which people had joined with the king and his servile ministers. (Ibid. p.15.) Did Paine by “jockyship” simply mean the “art of playing politics”? I think so. 

Collins in a footnote says, “The discovery that Paine served on the Lewes Town Council was made as recently as 1965 by Leslie Davey of Lewes, member of the Thomas Paine Society. (Collins. p.13.) 

The White Hart “Headstrong Club,” says Rickman kept a book of activities called the Headstrong Book, which was no other than an old Greek Homer which was sent the morning after a debate to the most obstinate haranguer of the Club. (Rickman, pp. 38-39.) In it was a statement that it had been “revised and corrected by Thomas Paine,” and it contained the following: 

Eulogy on Paine 

Immortal Paine, while mighty reasoners jar 

We crown thee General of the Headstrong War; 

Thy logic vanquished error, and thy mind 

No bounds, but those of right and truth, confined: 

Thy soul of fire must sure ascend the sky, 

Immortal Paine, thy fame can never die: 

For men like thee their names must ever save 

From the black edicts of the tyrant grave. 

Rickman says that Paine as an excise man at Lewes was a Whig in politics, and “….notorious for that quality which has been defined as perseverance in a good cause and obstinacy in a bad one. He was tenacious of his opinions, which were bold, acute and independent, and which he maintained with ardour, elegance and argument.” (Carlile, Richard. The Republican. Vol. V. 1822. See article pp.291-296, where there follows a full reprint of Wilkes’ famous article from No.45 of his North Briton.)

One series of events that Paine became interested in, but a silent spectator of, was the fight by John Wilkes against the British Parliament for the right to report and criticise the proceedings of Parliament. Years later Paine said that he had been deeply moved by the ideas which Wilkes had expressed in his writings (Conway, p.16.) Wilkes’ platform was, 1. Reform of Parliament. 2. Enfranchisement of the lower classes. 3. Suppression of rotten boroughs. 4. Protection of individual liberty. 

To completely understand Paine one must understand the political, social and living conditions of the people from whom he came and among whom he grew up. His whole life and writings show this. 

Wilkes was elected to Parliament when Paine was 17 years old, in 1757. Wilkes was a Whig and fell out with the Government over his criticism of the King’s Speech, which traditionally was recognised as having been written for him by the Prime Minister, who had been a friend of Wilkes. To have a platform for his criticism, Wilkes established a paper called the North Briton, in number 45 of which he severely criticised the Speech under the impression that it would be taken as a criticism of the policy of the Government. But not so. Wilkes was charged with high treason, but escaped France, and was outlawed, and his seat in Parliament declared vacant. The developments became too complicated to detail here. The public took up the cause of Wilkes, who later was elected Lord Mayor of London amid a series of public demonstrations, riots, petitions, etc. Three times Wilkes stood for Parliament and was three times elected, and three times the seat declared vacant, until elected again for a new seat no action was taken to unseat him, and which has been acclaimed a victory for the right and freedom of the press to report and criticise proceedings of Parliament. Wilkes became the hero of the people. Richard Carlile said, “No other name, hor the conduct of no other person, save the late Queen, ever agitated the country so much as the name and conduct of Mr. Wilkes did after the publication of the North Briton…..such was the clamour for ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ that the phrase was common within the walls of the palace…” The events must have had an important influence on the formation of Paine’s ideas and attitude to the Government of his day. 

Conway says that Paine’s “studies of the Wilkes conflicts (were) a lasting lesson in the conservation of despotic forces. “Franklin witnessed it. Paine grew familiar with it. And to both the systematic inhumanity and injustice were brought home personally. “Franklin recognised Paine’s ability.” 

Eric Foner, in his Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, says (p.6), “Like so many other figures of the eighteenth century, Paine’s thoughts about the political and social world were influenced by Newtonian science. (Foner, p.8.) The Newtonian universe was one of harmony and order, guided by natural laws. And “Newton was not orthodox, being some kind of Unitarian,” as disclosed after his death. He wrote in a letter on the “Corruptions of Scripture” relating to the doctrine of the Trinity. (Robertson, John M. History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern to the Period of the French Revolution. Watts, London, 1936. pp.668-9.)

With the picture I have presented it is easy to see why Benjamin Franklin became interested in Paine. Franklin founded the Philadelphia Library in 1721, and established the American Philosophical Society in 1744. He obtained degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh in 1762, and was elected to the Royal Society. His style of writing and expression was expressed by a fellow scientist, Sir Humphrey Davy, thus, “The style and manner of his publication on electricity, are almost as worthy of admiration as the doctrine it contains. He has endeavoured to remove all mystery and obscurity from the subject. He has written equally for the uninitiated and for the philosopher, and he has rendered his details amusing and perspicacious, elegant as well as simple. Science appears in his language, best adapted to display her native loveliness. He has in no instance exhibited that false dignity, by which philosophy, is kept aloof from common applications.” (Amacher, Richard E. Benjamin Franklin. College & University Press, New Haven. PP.144.) 

I must compare that with what Rickman says about the style of Paine’s writing. Paine is speaking: “In my publications I follow the rule I began, that is to consult with nobody, nor let anybody see what I write till it appears publically” (Rickman notes that Paine was so tenacious on this subject that he would not alter a line or word, at the suggestion even of a friend. “I remember,” notes Rickman, “when he read me his Letter Dundas in 1792, I objected to the pun MADJESTY as beneath him; ‘Never mind,’ he, said, ‘they say MAD TOM of me, so I shall let it stand MADJESTY.” Rickman continues, “were I to do otherwise (let others influence me) the case would be that between the timidity of some who are so afraid of doing wrong that they never do right, as if the world was a world of babies in leading strings, I should get forward with nothing. My path is a right line, as straight and clear to me as a ray of light. The boldness (if they will have it so) with which I speak on any subject is a compliment to the person’s address; it is like saying to him, I treat you as a man and not as a child. With respect to any worldly object, as it is impossible to discover any in me, therefore what I do, and my manner of doing it, ought to be ascribed to a good motive. In a great affair, where the good of man is at stake, I have to work for nothing; and so fully am I under the influence of this principle, that I should lose the spirit of pride, and the pleasure of it, were I conscious that I looked for reward.” (Rickman, pp.64 & 66.) This illustrates how sure Paine was about what he wanted to say. 

Paine’s personality is given by Rickman, who knew him both at Lewes before he went to America, and when he returned to England, and in whose house in London Paine lived and wrote some of his famous works. He was, Rickman tells us, about five feet ten inches tall, rather athletic, shouldered, stooped a little. His eye had “exquisite meaning,” was brilliant, singularly piercing, and had in it the “muse of fire.” hair “cued” (a twist of hair at the back of the head), with side and powdered, like “a gentleman of the old French school.” Easy and gracious manners. “His knowledge was universal and boundless.” Among friends his conversation had “every fascination that anecdote, novelty and truth could give it.” In mixed company and among strangers he said little, and was no public speaker. (Ibid. p.xv.) 

Paine’s character I would say was clearly studious, highly intelligent, logical, scientific, self confident, a consecutive thinker who thought out an idea from premise to conclusion. He knew what he wanted to say and said it fearlessly. He had strong human sympathies, great powers of observation and penetration to get to the heart of a problem. In these and other characters he was very similar to Benjamin Franklin, which I think was the key to Franklin’s interest in him, particularly after he had read his Case of the Officers of Excise, in which Paine’s ability to gather together, sum up and state the excisemen’s case. In fact Franklin’s style of writing was similar to that of Paine. Franklin was long sighted as to the future of the American colonies, and I feel sure that there was some deep-seated purpose in him advising Paine to go there. Everything in Philadelphia seemed all set-up for Paine when he arrived there, ready for him to fall into, with a job as editor of the Pennsylvanian Magazine which Conway says was a “seedbag” for Paine to “scatter the seeds of great reforms….” In about fourteen months he had actually published Sense, with the assistance of Franklin. Paine had arrived in America November 1774, and the following October he said that Dr. Franklin proposed giving him such materials as “were in his hands towards completing a hist- ory of the present transactions…I had the formed the outlines of Common Sense, and finished nearly the first part…” (Conway, p.27). 

Paine, I am sure, was never “just” an exciseman, a teacher, staymaker, or storekeeper. His mental activity, interest in science, government and human relations, implied that there was far more bigger and grander things for him to do. But, his meeting with Franklin, seems to me, to have been the turning point that led on to those things. 

The post Thomas Paine’s Early Life In England  appeared first on .

(Arising out of the last TPS Bulletin, Summer 1977)

AS ONE OF Paine’s biographers who did point out not only the dangers of the Excise service through public dislike and evasion of the duties (in particular the tea duties), and also the importance of Paine’s continued association with George Lewis Scott in showing his dismissal was not considered as on serious grounds, I welcome George Hindmarches article and most valuable further discoveries. They support my own theory, based also upon research into the Lewes parish records and the New Shoreham by-election of 1770, that Paine’s political and sociological attitudes were already well-formed before he went to America. The revelation of the widespread and semi-official nature of his attempts at Excise reform reinforces this. The evidence is partly circumstantial, but I am sure Mr. Hindmarch is right in his general thesis. 

I would disagree with him to some extent on the nature of the English so-called “mob” riots of the 18th century. Hogarth is not a reliable reflector, for his was, like Draohnsonla, a highly conservative and pro-establishment political point of view, as his savage anti-Wilkes cartoons demonstrate. Paine would have got a far fairer view of the North Briton controversy from the local Lewes journal, and must have been personally associated with Wilkes’ lawyer, Sergeant Glynn, in the New Shoreham election. It is even possible he met Wilkes when Wilkes was received with enthusiasm in Lewes on his tour the same year. More research, I believe, is still possible here into Paine’s English life generally. 

As for the Gordon Riots of 1780, the exhaustive researches of Professor George Rude (Paris and London in the 18th Century: Studies in Popular Protest) have demonstrated clearly that these were not only anti-Catholic but also political. No lives were taken by the rioters, and some of the houses between those of politically disliked non-Catholics such as Lord Mansfield. The burning of Newgate was at least partly to release political prisoners. Dickens’ description in Barn & Budge of the “sober workmen” drawn into the riots was therefore a true one; and Wilkes, as a magistrate, in helping to put them down lost the support of a number of City aldermen who were politically involved. 

One reason for anti-Catholic feeling was the proposed Catholic Relief Bill, In granting civil rights, would make Catholics eligible for tiro army, thus helping to prolong the now unpopular American War. There was also the usual resentment against poor Irish emigrants undercutting wages.

James Betka in his review of Eric Loner’s book, Tom Paine and Revolution in America, is equally wrong in suggesting Hogarth’s notorious Gin Lame illustrates the life of London’s ‘Everyman.’ The dregs of the poor, especially as depicted by the cartoonist, are never representative of the main body even of a working class, and the weavers, tailors and other artisans who formed committees. Throughout the 18th century were, like Paine’s Excise petitions, part of incipient trade unionism, and their protest not always as riotous as the government liked to present. 

There is still such that might be learned about influences on Paine while in London as well as Lewes, but Professor Betka’s theory that Paine was largely repeating (or indeed had read) the many sources among political writers he mentions seems to me untenable, and certainly unproved. He denied reading even Locke, and his own style in general is very different from the North Briton, whose scurrilous tone he probably did know well. Basically, although be makes mistakes on the English radical movement (naming Major Cartwright as the most “revolutionary’ of its exponents and not seeming aware of the far more radical Dr. John Jebb), and overstates the case of Paine’s artisan connections as opposed to his middle class ones, I believe Professor Loner is right that Paine did forge a literary style direct enough to reach the people, both American and English, in a way his political theorist or satirist predecessors had never done, some cartoonists accepted. The proof is not only the widespread sale and influence of Common Sense, but the way Rights of Man, far more than the works of any other 18th century writer, penetrated the London revolutionary societies, including the working-class London Corresponding Society, and the later Chartist movement. 

The point is Paine was a born writer, with the clarity of expression and picturesque grasp of imagery missing from most writers of political and economic theory, and I suspect Professor Betka’s own prose and economic analyses would have been largely unintelligible to him. 

Of course it is true that any writer, in particular a political writer, assimilates and reflects the ideas current in his time; and the influence of those In the 18th century, as I have often pointed out, reached right back to the Levellers and English deists, as well as the French philosophers, Paine’s originality in presenting and developing these ideas, with practical suggestions as to their implementation, and imaginative us of language still remain. 

It is a pity if Professor Betka’s review of some of Loner’s theories prevents Paineites from reading Loner’s book, for it does, for the English reader, present many little-known facts about Paine’s Philadelphia associates and environment that could not but have had sane influence on his attitude and American writings. The references to Paine, as Professor Betka points out, hardly justify his prominent position in the book’s title, but Erik Loner has presented an interesting, well-researched social background picture which cannot be ignored in Paine’s development, any more than his English backgrounds can be ignored. 

Professor Betka himself makes an often-repeated but quite unprovable assumption when he says only Paine’s “English enemies” called him “Tom.” Late in the 19th century, a British socialist workman objected to the diminutive as deliberately downgrading Paine’s status as man and writer, and thus seems to have started this myth; but there is evidence at least some friends in his own time used “Tom* affectionately, and indeed it is inconceivable that anyone christened Thomas, at any period in this country, could avoid this. 

As my own book on the Pre-Raphaelites, reviewed in the same issue of the Bulletin, points out, although Paine’s works seem to have by-passed later middle class socialist writers such as Ruskin and Carlyle, and William Morris shoved no particular awareness of him, some knowledge of Paine’s works probably reached Morris in the end, through old Chartists who attended his lectures at working class meetings, and through Walter Crane, his Kelmscott Press assistant. Crane had been an apprentice of the Chartist engraver, W.J. Linton, who in 1842 wrote a brief life of Paine. 

I cannot agree with J.A. Hadwick that Morris was essentially a “middle-class” socialist: his Marxist dedication was total and he associated with working-class socialists on their own level, in a way that divided him from the Fabians and other intellectuals in the rising Labour movement. Dr. E.P. Thompson and Morris’ latest Marxist biographer, Jack Lindsay, as well as associates of Morris at the time, make this quite clear.

I hope, too, Miss Hadrick in her generous review of my book does not really intend to suggest that I maintain the Pre-Raphaelite mid-Victorian revolt was the first in the world of art. Both my book on Paine and this new one, Artists and Writers in Revolt, mention Blake’s radical rebellion. He was, of course, a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelites, who did much to revive his reputation, as they also revived that of Keats. 

Finally, Gordon Hone is wrong to perpetuate the legend that Paine “fled” from England in September, 1792, and was thereafter offered the Calais deputyship in the new French Convention. In fact, as Rickman’s biography and French evidence make clear, Paine was offered four deputyships, of which he chose Calais, and the French government representative Audibert came over to England to accompany him. There is no indication at all that these offers were made to help Paine avoid the December trial, In fact the French districts also voted deputyships to Dr. Joseph Priestley and other known foreign sympathisers with the Revolution. It does appear the English police agents got wind of Paine’s intended departure and naturally tried to stop him; they turned up at Rickman’s house after he had gone.

As I remarked in my biography, Paine, confronted with the French offers, made a sensible choice in accepting in all the circumstances. There is no evidence at all that he would otherwise have attempted to avoid the trial; and indeed later he expressed doubts about the wisdom of his decision, for it did ultimately affect his reputation in England. 

With regard to Paine’s imprisonment in the Luxembourg, this was not as a direct result of his voting (with many others) against the execution of Louis XVI but because after the outbreak of war with England all British subjects were incarcerated as enemy aliens (Mary Wollstonecraft’s American lover registered her at the American Embassy as his wife so that she could avoid this). Paine then and later based his appeal on the strong protest that he was no longer a British but an American subject: a fact denied by the then royalist American representative in Paris, Paine’s enemy Gouverneur Morris. When James Monroe succeeded Morris, Paine’s release was soon obtained; but later in America he was once infamously denied the right to vote because he was not, it was claimed, an American citizen! 

It is necessary to make this clear because the English claim that Paine was a “traitor” had no substance in Paine’s own mind. He always, after emigration in 1774, looked on himself as an American citizen. Once the War of Independence was ended no other English emigrant who had fought in the War, to my knowledge, was accused of being a “traitor” to his country of origin. But Paine was a dangerous political writer and the ‘traitor” myth is maintained in certain Establishment historical circles to this day, although the official accusation even at his trial was merely of “seditious libel” (i.e. a censorship matter).

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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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Part 1

DESPITE VARIOUS CONFLICTING interpretations, there is general agreement that a significant extension of the political nation was one of the fundamental aspects of British social development during the 1790’s. According to J.I. Western, whereas prior to the 1790’s governmental stability depended upon a broad apathy and indifference toward the national political process among the lower orders faced with the threat of major social upheaval agents of Pitt’s government were responsible for the creation of a broad conservative consciousness among the bulk of the propertied classes. (J. Western. ‘The Volunteer Movement as an anti-revolutionary Force’. E.H.R. (1956).1) 0603-5, 6133 cf. A. Mitchell, ‘The Association Movement of 1792-3’. Hist. J1. (1961) .p.57.) During this decade the poor began to be looked upon from totally different aspects. ‘The shock of the French Revolution had brought with it a new way of looking at the mass of the nation’. Previously the poor had merely rioted; they had rebelled only upon the instigation of members of the ruling class. ‘After the French Revolution the tone was very different. The poorer classes no longer seemed a ‘passive’ power, they were dreaded as a Leviathan that was fast learning his strength. Or we may say that before they were regarded as people morally content, they were now regarded as people naturally-discontented.’ (J. L. & B. Hammond. The Town Labourer 1760-1832. (liongmans,1920). p.93-4.) Such a relatively novel fear of social revolution, absent since the Mid-seventeenth century believed to draw the propertied together as a class. (H.J. Perkin. The Origins of Modern English Society. (R.K.P.,1969). p.195) Those historians who have chosen as their subject the emergence of the working class movement have adopted a similar view of the period. E.P. Thompson has argued that the 1790’s witnessed for the first time the ‘emergence of a national and international consciousness among significant numbers of working men.’ According to Gwyn Williams, 1792 saw the entry of a new breed of men’ into the political arena. (G.A. Williams. Artisans and Sans-Culottes. (Arnold, 1968). p.66.)

Anxiety concerning this downward extension of the political nation was responsible for the prosecution of radical pamphlets in the 1790’s. In 1793 Daniel Holt of Newark was prosecuted for publishing a pamphlet previously issued with impunity by the Westminster Committee. The only reason for this was his re-addressing it to ‘tradesmen, mechanics and labourers.’ (State Trials, xxii. p.1201,1237.) Paine’s Rights of Man was prosecuted for libel not so much because of its contents but because, rather than confining his audience to ‘the judicious reader’, he had addressed ‘the lowest orders of the people – people who…cannot from their education or situation in ‘life, be supposed to understand the subject on which he writes.’ (Ibid., p.381, 780.) The prosecution in 1794 of Eaton’s Politics for the People stemmed precisely from the intended audience indicated by title, tone and price. The case for Eaton’s defence on the other hand rested upon the right’of access to political information on the part of the whole of the people. (Ibid., xxiii. p.1019, 1023, 1027, 1034.)

It is clear that both conservatives and radicals ascribed to pamphleteers and booksellers a central role in this struggle over the extension of the political nation. (Cf. Thompson. p.118.) The massive number of tracts published by Reeves’s Loyal Association and under the Cheap Repository imprint were both the conservative reaction to Paine, and a recognition of the irreversibility of that extension of the political nation which he, more than.any other individual had accomplished. Philip Brown observed that, ‘Bookselling and publishing began to touch a new public. A new specialist in the trade, the “Political Bookseller”, began to’advertise himself. (P.A. Brown. The French Revolution in English History. (Cass, 1918). p.71.) Thompson commented upon the central place within Sheffield that Jacobinism occupied by Joseph Gale’s journal bookshop and pamphlet press. (Thompson. p.166r.) The main targets for persecution on the part of the local Loyal Associations were apparently booksellers. (Mitchell. p.69.) The principal agency then in this downwards extension of the political nation was the radical bookseller. 

Hostile contemporary observers from Burke onwards emphasised the connection between political radicalism and infidelity. It seems to have been Burke who, in his vastly influential Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), initially established this connection, regarding the events in France as ‘this philosophic revolution.’ (E. Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France. (Penguin, 1968). p.237.) ‘Licentious philosophy’ and ‘insolent irreligion’ had been the ruin of the French monarchy. (Ibid. p.244, 125.) The Revolution itself he ascribed to the conspiratorial machinations of a cabal of so-called philosophers, ‘whom the vulgar, in their blunt, homely style commonly call Atheists and Infidels. (Ibid. p.185-6.) The Revolution’s excesses he ascribed to savagery engendered by widespread diffusion of ‘the spirit of atheistical fanaticism. (Ibid. p.262.) The subsequent course of the French Revolution, especially in its Jacobin phase, apparently justified Burke’s analysis and prediction of a full-scale attempt to extirpate Christianity. (Ibid. p.256.) The widely read and profusely documented works of Barruel and Robison (1798) reinforced the view of the Revolution as the first manifestation of an international conspiracy aiming at the overthrow of all governments and the extinction of Christianity. (A Barruel. Memoirs pour servir a l’histoire du Jacobinisme; J,Robison. Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions’and Governments of Europe. The latter went through five editions in two years.R.A.Soloway. Prelates and People. (R.K.P.,1969). p.36n.)

To ascribe the French Revolution as an atheistical conspiracy, its political excesses to divine anger at that country’s moral and religious apostasy, became the contemporary conventional wisdom among Conservative Englishmen. (See Soloway, Chapter 1. M.J.Quinlan, Victorian Prelude. (ff.Y.1 1941), chapter III. V. Kiernan .’Evangelicalism and the French Revolution’, Past and Present,1952.) An anonymous contributor to The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1797 succinctly expressed the prevalent attitude; ‘Whatever proximate circumstances hastened the Revolution in a neighbouring state, infidelity was its prime cause; and the vengeance of an offended God has been awfully manifested. (The Gentleman’s Magazine. LXVII .(i).1797. p.188.) In his Apology for the Bible (1796), Bishop Watson spoke of that evil heart of unbelief, which brought ruin on a neighbouring nation. (R. Watson & Autology for the Bible. (London,1797). P.384.) For Wilberforce, the Revolution was an awful warning of the consequences of infidelity. (Wilberforce. A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System, etc. (London, 1797) 13 101398.) Ipadman, another critic of Paine, identified the French Revelation with Deism, its horror being the expression of irreligion and impiety. (I. Padman. A Layman’s Protest assinst… Thomas Paine. (1797). p.190-1.) The famous liberal Baptist divine, Robert Hall, saw the barbarities of the Revolution as justly chargeable on the prevalence of atheism. Let those who doubt of this recollect that the men who, by their activity and talents, prepared the minds of the people for that. great change Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau and others, were avowed enemies of revelation; that in all their writings the diffusion of scepticism and revolutionary opinions went hand in hand, that the reign of atheism was avowedly and expressedly the reign of terror.

As the heathens fabled that Minerva issued full-armed from the head of Jupiter, so no sooner were the speculations of atheistical philosophy matured, than they gave birth to a ferocity which converted the most polished people in Europe into a horde of assassins. (R. Hall. ‘Modern Infidelity Considered with Respect to its Influence on Society’ (1799). In Works. (7th. Edition, 1841). i.p.46-7.)

Not only did the extension of the political nation arouse considerable anxiety among the propertied classes, but also the observation that associated with ‘political radicalism’, the theological radicalism of infidelity was also penetrating the masses. Indeed their attitude towards contemporary French events predisposed them to make such a connection. By the close of the decade it was no longer felt possible to echo Burke’s complacent assertion of 1790 ‘that there is no rust of superstition’ that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety.’ (Burke.p.187.) A new proselytising zeal among lower-class infidels was the source of such anxiety, particularly in the light of what we have seen to be the standard conservative interpretation of the origin of the French Revolution. Gibbon, the most notorious of the late eighteenth century aristocratic sceptics, was prepared to forgive Burke’s superstition in the light of its trenchant criticism of democratic principles. Terrified by the course of the French Revolution and its destruction of his personal ease he, seemingly with seriousness, argued in favour of the Inquisition.’ Referring to the possibility of any extension of his own infidelity to the masses, he wrote: 

I have sometimes thought of writing a dialogue of the dead, in which Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire should mutually acknowledge the danger of exposing an old superstition to the contempt of the blind and fanatic multitude.” (E. Gibbon. Autobiography. (0.U.P0,1907). 13.249,262,216.)

Robert Hall drew attention to:

The efforts of infidels to diffuse the principles of infidelity among the common people… HUME, BOLINGBROKE, and GIBBON, addressed themselves solely to the more polished classes of the community, and would have thought their refined speculations debased by an attempt to enlist disciples from among the populace. Infidelity has lately grown condescending; having at length reached its full maturity, it boldly ventures to challenge the suffrage of the people, solicits the acquaintance of peasants and mechanics, and seeks to draw whole nations to its standards. (Hall .i.p 59,63.)

The parallel phenomena of the anti-Christian aspects of later phases of the French Revolution and Paine’s dual authorship of Rights of Man and The Age of Reason served to demonstrate conclusively the association of popular radicalism and popular infidelity. 

The Englishmen of the upper and middle classes had already learned from French history to associate political radicalism with infidelity and now the development in England seemed only to prove an inalienable connection between the two. Such phrases as ‘infidel democracy’, ‘sedition and blasphemy’, etc., came almost unconsciously to be part of the intellectual equipment of these two classes. (H.A. Faulkner. Chartism and the Churches. (Columbia U.P., New York, 1916). P.16. of Quinlan .p.78. Brown. p.182.)

For Hannah More, ‘Republicanism and infidelity…are sworn friends both here and in France.’ (‘Will Chip’ (Hannah More). A Country Carpenter’s Confession of Faith. (1794). P.21.) ‘Churchman’, attacking Paine, wrote: ‘Republicanism and Deism, have the most intimate alliance in principle, and have seldom long been separated in practice… scepticism and political licentiousness, infidelity and contempt for the civil magistrate advanced with equal progression. (‘Churchman’. Christianity the Only True Theology or Answer to Paine’s Age of Reason.)

Paine’s writings were the principal literary agencies responsible for both the deliberate extension of a radical political consciousness and a comparable extension of infidelity to new sections of the population. Whereas hitherto the ‘rank weed’ of infidelity had been confined to ‘the great and opulent’, Bishop Watson accused Paine of ‘endeavouring to extend the malignity of its poison through all classes of the community. (Watson. p.382.) Robison, objecting to his popular tone, made a similar accusation. (Robison. p.479-80.) Hannah More, writing in early 1797 to Zachary Macaulay, considered ‘speculative infidelity, brought down to the pockets and capacities of the poor’, as a ‘new area in our history,’ which required ‘strong counteraction. (W.Roberts. Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs.Hannah More. (Seeley, 1g34). ii.P.458.) As Reeves’s Loyal Association ‘was formed principally to counteract the influence of Rights of Man’, so in comparable fashion were the Cheap Repository Tracts issued to counter The Age of Reason. A comment in a letter from Hannah More to Wilberforce in 1796 upon Watson’s Apology clearly reveals the intent behind her tracts: ‘I could tell him with great truth that I much admired it; but I told him also, that a shilling Poison, like Paine’s, should not have a four shilling antidote. (Ibid. p.446. Cf. Quinlan. p.123.) P.Q. of Salisbury advocated cheap editions of Watson to counteract Paine’s work. (Gentleman’s Magazine. LXVI (i).1796. p.270.)

From the above evidence, it is clearly apparent that Paine is, in both religion and politics, one of the crucial figures of the 1790’s. His significance lies in his destruction of the symbolic universe of Christianity and Constitution, Church and King, in The Age of Reason and Rights of Man. Discussing the impact of infidelity in the 1790’s R.N. Stromberg writes:

Voltaire and Paine began to reach the English working classes…. about 1796…. This popular deism was not very important. Paine was effective through….Rights of Man, not The Age of Reason; if this extreme deist was to become the very ‘centre and life’ of the ‘radical’ political movement of the 1790’s, it was not because he attacked religion, but because he spoke out against political corruption and inequality. This English Radicalism paid relatively little attention to religion. (R.N. Stromberg. Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England. (0.U.P., 1954) .p164. This opinion is virtually repeated in the most recent article on The Age Of Reason, P.K. Prochaska„ ‘Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason Revisited. J1. Hist. Ideas. 1972, passim.)

It should be apparent from the preceding pages, that such a separation of republicanism and infidelity is untenable, that in the minds of both radicals and conservatives, and especially among the latter, the two were inextricably fused. Perhaps it was in the interest of conservatives to emphasise, for purposes of propaganda, such an association. Retrospectively Southey considered that ‘the union between infidelity and sedition during the late war…. ruined the democratic party.’ (R. Southey. Letters from England (first published 1807; reprinted The Cresset Press,1951). p.400) From its inception, infidelity and republicanism were inextricably connected within British popular radicalism. (E.J. Hobbsbawn. Primitive Rebels. (Manchester U.P.*, 1959). p.128. E. Royle. 2 11 2211Al2.1121719211.22 adol.22.111 kaLIEL (Longman,1971. p.3.)

As a consequence of his pre-eminence in establishing such a connection, at least at an ideological level and within his own life, an examination of the writings of Thomas Paine, on both religious and political subjects, is essential. Although this part is concerned principally with Paine’s writings on religion, it would be wrong to consider them either in isolation from the political writings of which the bulk of his work consists’, or as a mere afterthought to these concerns. From his youth Paine was concerned with religion and in his declining years in New York State he was active primarily as a Deist. Politics were by no means his initial concern. A youthful interest in science preceded any political concerns:

The natural bent of my mind was to science… I had no disposition for politics. It presented to my mind no other idea than is contained in the word Jockeyship. When, therefore, I turned my thoughts upon matters of government, I had to form a system for myself that accorded with the moral and philosophic principles in which I had become educated. (T. Paine. The Age of Reason. (ffatts, 1938). P.39-40.)

The understanding of Paine’s intellectual background is dependent upon the interpretation of that final phrase. It was originally maintained by M.D. Conway, Paine’s first serious biographer, that these principles were primarily those goa Quakerism acquired by assimilation during his childhood in Thetford. (M.D. Conway. The Life of Thomas Paine. (Putnam, 1892). I.p. 4-51231; ii.p.182-220.) Such an interpretation has been rendered obsolete, largely as a consequence of the detailed researches of who has argued that Paine’s ideas on all subjects can be adequately explained only ‘when the organic development of the complete body of his thought is considered in relation to the pattern of ideas germane to the enlightenment, and, in particular„ to scientific deism, which as powerfully reinforced by Newtonian doctrines of natural law and order.” (H.H. Clark. ‘Toward a Reinterpretation of Thomas Paine’. American Lit., 1933. p.133-4. On the question of Paine’s relationship to Quakerism, see also, R.P.Faik. ‘Thomas Paine: Deist or Quaker?’ Pennsylvania, MaA. of Hist. and Biog, 1938. R.R. Fennessy. Burke, Paine and the, Rights of Man. A Difference of Political ougal (Martinus l Nijhoff, The Hague, 1963). p.12-14.)

The crucial influences upon Paine’s intellectual evolution were, argues Clark, the scientific lectures of those popularisers of Newtonianism, Benjamin Martin and James Ferguson, which ‘may have aided in moulding his scientific deism.’ (Clark.p.135.) Far from his political preceding his religious opinions,’ ‘his political theories grew out of his religion, his scientific deism, and its moral and political implications’, particularly his ‘Newtonian’ conception of the social harmony which would flow automatically upon the removal of traditional political impediments.’ (43. Ibid. p.136-9.)

As a believer in the applicability of scientific modes of thought and methods of investigation to all areas of existence, for Paine the essential task was to bring to bear the clarity of thought and simplicity of expression characteristic of science upon those regions where mystification had previously been dominant. It was upon the maintenance of such mystification that despotic power rested. Apropos the ‘science’ of government he wrote in 1795:

Notwithstanding the mystery with which the science of government has been enveloped; for the purpose of enslaving, plundering, and imposing upon mankind, it is all things the least mysterious and most easy to be understood. The meanest capacity cannot be at a loss, if it begins its enquiries at the right point. Every art and science has some point, or alphabet, at which the study of that art or science begins and by the assistance of which the progress is facilitated. The same method ought to be observed with respect to the science of government. (T. Paine. ‘An Essay on the First Principles of Government’ (1795). Edited by M.D. Conway. Collected Writings. (republished. Franklin, N.Y., 1969). iii. p.257.)

Paine’s writings are expressive of his belief in the decisiveness of an appeal to the innate rationality of his readers. In Common Sense he wrote: 

In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense: and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves: that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of a man and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day. (Paine.’Common Sense’ (1776). Edited by W.M. Van der Weyde. Collected Works. (Thomas Paine National Historical Association, N.Y., 1925). ii.p.122-3.)

Paine was the enemy of all forms of ‘superstition’, be they political or religious. His possession in full measure of the characteristic contemporary faith in the power of reason and his experience during the American Revolution convinced him of the immense potential impact of the political pamphlet addressed directly to the masses. (If the American Revolution demonstrated to Paine the power of reason it also demonstrated its limitations. Advocating a people’s war against the German monarchies in 1792 he wrote reason with despots is throwing reason away. The best of arguments is a vigorous preparation.’ (Conway, C.W., iii. p.79).) In 1792, when sales of cheap editions of Rights of Man were claimed to exceed 30,000 monthly, Paine wrote apropos his impending promotion in absentia for seditious libel:

It will hereafter be placed in the history of extraordinary things, that a pamphlet produced by an individual unconnected with any sect or party,…that should completely frighten a whole Government, and that in the midst of its most triumphant security. Such a circumstance cannot fail to prove that either the pamphlet has irresistible powers, or the Government very extraordinary defects, or both. (Paine. ‘Address to the Addressers’ (1792). Cal., iii. p.58,55)

In the same pamphlet he remarked that, ‘Truth, whenever it can fully appear, is a thing naturally familiar to the mind, that an acquaintance commences at first sight’, and that ‘it is impossible to calculate the silent progress of opinion, and also impossible to govern a nation after it has changed its habits of thinking, by the craft or policy that it was governed by before.’ (Ibid. p.46,94) A decade later he considered that had conditions in England approximated to those existing in the Colonies in 1776, Rights of Man would have produced results similar to those effected by Common Sense. (Paine. ‘Letters to the Citizens of the United States’. C.W., iii. p.382.)

Paine’s faith in the power of reason, stemming both from personal experience and his scientific deism, in association with a democratic conception of politics as the concern of every man rather than the mysterious prerogative of a privileged minority, had certain definite stylistic consequences. (Cf. Fennessy. p.245. J.T. Boulton.The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke. (R.K.P., 1963). p.139.) The central characteristic of this style was what might be termed ‘the technique of demystification.’ The simplicity and clarity of scientific discourse, which had been presented as an ideal prose model by Bishop Sprat as early as the 1660’s, was opposed to the elaborate periods characteristic of the traditional literary manner.’ (T. Sprat. The History of the Royal Society of London. (1667). p.112-3.) As Clark observes, ‘the distinctive features of Paine’s theories of literary composition….were in no small measure conditioned by scientific deism.’ (Clark. p.144.) Just as the natural sciences were the enemies of superstition, in analogous fashion a prose modelled on scientific discourse was the appropriate instrument for the destruction of other forms of superstition. In Rights of Man his principal target was the political superstition of hereditary government. (Paine. Rights of Man. (Watts 1937). P.149.) ‘A superstitious reverence for ancient things maintains the ignorance upon which tyranny rests.’ (Ibid. p.172.) He condemned Burke’s “contemptible opinion of mankind” as a herd of beings that must be governed by fraud, effigy and show. (Ibid. p.147.) Men must be awakened from the dreams of superstition to a rational conception of their real interests. In contrast to Burke’s melodramatic mystification and complex prose, clarity, vigour and economy of expression were essential in effecting the destruction of the great enemies, prejudice and ignorance.’ (Ibid. p.147.)

It is precisely the recognition of the difficult necessity of breaking through the centuries old prejudices forming so firm a bulwark of traditional authority that accounts for the force and brutality of Paine’s style’. (Cf. ‘Common Sense’. C.W. (Weyde). Ii. p.93,102,106; Rights of Man. p.128; The Age of Reason. p.222.) Only by demonstrating clearly to men their real interests, can prejudice be destroyed. (Rights of Man. p.128,121.) As Thompson observes, many expressions in Rights of Man have ‘some of the dare-devil air of blasphemy. He was the first to dare to express himself will; such irreverence; and he destroyed with one book century-old taboos.’ (Thompson. p.100. Cf. Williams on Rights of Man ‘Most shattering is the tone; probably most effective of all was the contempt and jovial ferocity His insolence was the best cure for deference.’ (op.cit.a.14,15)) His intention was to destroy the unthinking deference upon which traditional sources of authority depended; his technique was to present the familiar in an unfamiliar fashion, to make men observe the old in an entirely novel manner. Burke provides a description of this process of demystification as acute as it is hostile:

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal…are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas…are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. 

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman. (Burke. p.171. Of course he is not referring specifically to Paine.)

Paine himself offers what is by implication a valuable metaphor for this promise of shock demystification when, discussing that ‘silly contemptible thing’, monarchy, he writes: 

I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity, but when, by an accident, the curtain happens to be open and the company sees what it is, they burst into laughter. (Rights of Man. p.155. The differing uses made of the metaphor of the theatre are illuminatingly discussed in Boulton, op. cit., p.143-5. See also Tolstoy’s description of the theatre as a source of corruption and mystification in War and Peace, Bk. VIII, Chap. IX, X.)

The principal target for this treatment in his political writings is monarchy, ‘the master-fraud, which shelters all others’. (Rights of Man. p.180.)

Demystification is as essential, if more difficult a task, in the realm of religion as of politics, the two congruent sources of the ignorance upon which tyranny was founded: 

It has been the scheme of the Christian Church and all the other invented systems of religion to hold man in ignorance of his Creator, as it is of government to hold him in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support. (Age of Reason. p.116. Since examples of this literary technique can easily be located within any of Paine’s writings, it is unnecessary to burden the text with quotation. Here, for example, is his famous contemptuous dismissal of the claims to traditional authority of the English monarchy in Common Senses. A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. The plain truth is, that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into. (C.W., Ed.Conway. i.p.80-1) In Riots of Man (p.145-6). Kings succeed each other not as rationals, but as animals… It requires some talent to be a common mechanic; but to be a king requires only the animal figure of a man – a sort of breathing automaton.)

Precisely because he is encountering an area far more beshrouded in an unthinking superstitious reverence, this technique is most pronounced in The Age of Reason. It was in areas so heavily invested with a mysterious significance that it was necessary to ‘speak a language full and intelligible’, to ‘deal not in hints and intimations.’ (Age of Reason. p.222; cf. p.51.) His method is to present the Bible stories in the bald manner of everyday speech in order to demonstrate their patent absurdity when deprived of their traditional mode of presentation. Translated into such language; the narrative of the Fall and Atonement serves merely to ‘excite laughter or detestation by its profaneness’ and the Book of Genesis, once Moses’ claim to authorship is disposed of, becomes ‘an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities, or downright lies. The story of Noah and his ark drops to a level with the Arabian Tales.’ (Ibid. p. 9,77. See also p. 86,90,106,109, etc.) After translating the narrative of Christ’s conception into ‘intelligible language’, he comments, ‘When told in this manner there is not a priest but must be ashamed to own it.’ (Ibid. p.128-9.) His later retelling of the conception narrative reinforces its absurdity by exiting incredulous laughter: 

Were any girl that is now with child to say…that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so ‘would she be believed? Certainly she would not. Why then are we told to believe the same thing of another whom we never saw, told by nobody knows whom, nor when nor where? Can any man of serious reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story naturally impossible, repugnant to every idea of decency, and related by persons already detected of falsehood?’ (Ibid. p.133,132.)

The vehement antagonism aroused by Such passages among his critics is perhaps an index of their effectiveness.’ 

It is common ground among students of Paine that his religious views were of long standing. (Clark. p.133-6. Conway, C.W. iv. p.4.) Conway’s apparently sound conclusion that the first part of The Age of Reason was written prior to Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in 1781 seems to have remained unchallenged. (Conway, ed.,00.iv.p.3-4. This argument is founded upon Paine’s references to only five planets, Saturn,Jupiter,Mars,Venus and Mercury, neglecting the recently discovered Uranus (Age of Reason, p.33). Conway argues that, considering his well-known and intense interest in astronomy, it is inconceivable that Paine would have remained ignorant of Herschel’s discovery for so long. Rather it would appear that Part I of The Age of Reason had remained in MSS for at least thirteen years before Paine, under threat of imminent execution, had it published without revision in France in 1793.) Thus before offering any consideration of the origins and pasture of Paine’s infidelity, it is necessary to provide some kind of solution to the apparently bibliographical problems: why did Paine delay the publication of The Age of Reason until 1793 and why was it published then? There seems little reason to question Conway’s view that the publication of at least Partl was the result of the threat of imminent execution, but this does not account for the continuing assault on Christianity which occupied the bulk of his remaining years. (C.W. iv. p.12.)

Paine’s fierce criticism of Christianity was to a considerable extent a reversal of earlier views. While he had always defended an unlimited liberty of conscience from a position essentially detached from formal Christianity, rather like Franklin or David Williams he had always defended religion. (71. ‘Common Sense’, C.W. (Weyde). Ii. p.162-3. Rights of Man, p.52. See chapter I, section III, on David Williams.) He avoided religious disputation, considering that ‘Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.’ (Rights of Man. p.240; cf. p.251.) Nevertheless, with his Protestant background, he had always associated ‘spiritual freedom’ with ‘political liberty.’ (‘Thoughts on Defensive War’ (1775), C.W. (Weyde). Ii.p. 83) Monarchy he considered comparable to popery. (Rights of Man, p.158.) Before the 1790’s he did not see in religion a significant bar to political liberty. His observation in 1792 ‘that ‘religion is very improperly made a political machine’, while an intimation of a changing opinion, still did not lead him beyond the demand of liberty of conscience into an attack on Christianity itself. (Ibid. p.252.)

As regard the origin of The Age of Reason, as distinct from any earlier manuscript in Paine’s possession, Clark has argued that it was a growing recognition of the utilisation of religion for politically conservative purposes that was responsible for Paine’s increasingly emphatic opposition toward Christianity. (Clark. p.136.) Conway and Foner, following more directly Paine’s own explanation, have argued that it was events in France which stimulated his overt criticism of Christianity. (Conway, Life of Paine. Foner, Biographical Essay, C.W. of Paine, (19477375;5337:)) In his own later account of its origins Paine offers two main explanations:

In the first place, I saw my life in continual danger. In the second place, the people of France (sic) were running headlong into Atheism, and I had the work translated and published in their own language to stop them in that career (sic), and fix them to the first article… of every Man’s Creed who has any creed at all, I believe in God.’ (Paine. Letter to Sadams. 1802. C.W., iv. p.205. of Age of Reason. p.60.)

But Aldridge has offered the naively justifiable objection, that in a work intended to counteract atheism, the greater part consists of a criticism of Christianity. (A.O.Aldridge. Man of Reason. The Life of Thomas Paine., (Cresset Press, 1960). p.230.)) Such an objection is valid insofar as it draws attention to the connection discerned by Paine between such apparent extremes; ‘As to the Christian faith, it appears to me a species of. atheism; a sort of religious denial of God….(which) produces only atheists and fanatics.’ (The Age of Reason. p.28,165.) 

Paine seems to have been anxious during the period of dechristianisation in France ‘lest in the general wreck of superstition…and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true. (Ibad., p.1.) He had clearly become steadily more pessimistic about the prospects of political action alone during the 1790’s, largely as a consequence of the unexpected strength of English reaction and the consuming ferocity of the French Revolution’s factional struggles, the source of major personal suffering on Paine’s part. Rights of Man contains numerous examples of Paine’s optimism concerning the prospects of a rapid and relatively peaceful revolutionising within the decade of the whole of Europe. (p.6; what we can foresee, all Europe may form but one great republic.’ (Rights of Man,p.185). For other examples of such optimism, see ibid. p.82,114,127,254.) Conceiving of an imminent revolution in England comparable to those in France and America, he writes ‘The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the progeny generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world. (Ibid.p.149.) Only a year later, writing to Jefferson in April, 1793, he observed that, as a result of what he considered the Jacobins’ immorality and imprudence in executing Louis XVI, these opportunities had vanished. (Paine. ‘Had this revolution been conducted consistently with its principles, there was once a good prospect of extending liberty through the greatest part of Europe; but now I relinquish that hope.’ In a letter to Denton dated 6. May, 1793, he wrote in a similar vein ‘I now despair of seeing the great object of European liberty accomplished, and my despair arises not from the combined foreign powers, not from the intrigues of aristocracy and priestcraft, but from the tumultuous misconduct with which affairs of the present revolution are conducted.’ (Cf. also ‘Forgetfulness’, (R.B.) ‘Ah, Francel thou hast ruined the character of a Revolution virtuously began and destroyed those who produced it.’ (Ibid., p.319).) Evidently Paine saw in the excesses of the French Revolution the legacy of the inhumanity fostered by Christianity. Describing the origins of The Age of Reason, he wrote in the Preface to Part ll:

The just and humane principles of the revolution…had been departed from. The idea…that priests could forgive sins had blunted the feelings of humanity, and callously prepared men for the commission of all manner of crimes. The intolerant spirit of Church persecutions had transfered itself into politics; the tribunals, styled Revolutionary, supplied the place of an Inquisition;, and the Guillotine of the State outdid the fire and faggot of the Church. (The Age of Reason. p.60.)

In 1797 he wrote:

When we reflect on the long and dense night in which France and all Europe have remained plunged by their governments and their priests, we must feel less surprise. than grief at the bewilderment guised by the first burst of light that dispels the darkness. (‘Agrarian Justice’.)

It was to help to destroy a religion whose consequence was a ‘practical atheism’ which had fatally marred the early achievements and anticipations of the Revolution that Paine wrote The Age of Reason. 

His fundamental concern with the immorality fostered by Christianity is plainly evident throughout his theological writings.° (Cf. Conway. Life of Paine. Ii. p.198-9,202.) He argued that insistence upon exclusive divine revelations to particular individuals or groups had resulted in murderous intolerance between adherents of competing faiths and the neglect of.God’s universal revelation within the natural world and within the minds of men themselves. (The Age of Reason. p.160-1.) Far from improving human dispositions, ‘the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness’ which form a considerable portion of the Old Testament are ‘a history of wickedness, that has served to compt and brutalise mankind.’ (Ibid.,p.13. The Age of Reason contains so many references to the immorality of the Bible, by which Paine means the Old Testament, that it would be superfluous to give examples. The following passage, from a letter dated May 12, 1797, summarises succinctly the grounds for his objection to the Bible: ‘It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.’ (C.W., iv. p.198). The complete letter is very important for an understanding of Paine’s theological views.) Paine’s central objections to Christianity from a relatively early age were primarily moral and religious. (For a famous autobiographical passage see The Age of Reason, p.41.) It was because of its inadequacy as a religion, because of its barbarous conception of a Deity and of the appropriate standards of human conduct that Paine regarded Christianity as inferior to Deism. (Ibid., 41-2.)

How inadequate any conception of Paine is which considers him as basically irreligious has, since first criticised by Conway, been repeatedly emphasised by his biographers. (Conway called The Age of Reason, ‘the work of an honest and devout mind’ (Life, ii. p.182). Weyde considered it ‘the work of a profoundly religious man’ and ‘essentially a religious work’ (Life of Paine, vol.1. of C.W., p.394,402). Aldridge writes ‘he at all times defended religious belief as socially beneficial and individually satisfying’ (Man of Reason, p.229). Leslie Stephen eventually modified his original opinion of Paine and wrote: ‘Paine’s appeal was not simply to

licentious hatred of religion, but to genuine moral instincts. His ‘blasphemy’ was not against the Supreme God, but against Jehovah’ History of British Thought in the Eighteenth Cent. (Harbinger,1962). i. p.392)) Paine’s fundamentally religious impulse permeates all of his writings on the subject. He indignantly rejected the appellation of infidel given to him by Erskine: 

Mr. Erskine is very little acquainted with theological subjects, if he does not know there is such a thing as a sincere and religious belief that the Bible is not the word of God. This is my belief; It is not infidelity, as Mr. Erskine profanely and abusively calls it; it is the direct reverse of infidelity. It is a pure religious belief, founded on the idea of the perfection of the Creator. (Paine. ‘Letter to Erskine’, 1797. C.W., iv. p.230.)

In the same letter he wrote:

Morality and religion, which is the most solid support thereof, are necessary to the maintenance of society, as well as to the happiness of mankind. (Ibid. p.233.)

Paine always regarded Deism as a religious position and towards the close of his life considered himself, according to the signature appended to one of his letters to The Prospect, ‘A MEMBER OF THE DEISTICAL CHURCH’. (‘Prospect Papers”, 1804. C.W iv. p.334) Deism in its simplicity and genuine catholicity was the highest form of religion:

There is a happiness in Deism that is not to be found in any other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason., or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to believe them. But in Deism our reason and our belief become happily united. (Ibid., p.316. For evidence that Paine’s religious impulse was not purely intellectual, see ibid., p.324-5 and The Age of Reason. p.42.)

A further demonstration of Paine’s religiosity can be found in his belief in personal immortality ridiculed as ‘superstitious’ by Carlile. (The Age of Reason. P.109,143,155,233-4. Carlile. The Republican, April 2, 1824, ix. P.437)

Although superficially paradoxical, it can be claimed that both his devastatingly effective critique of Christianity and the equally eloquent advocacy of natural religion originate in Paine’s fundamental interest in science: We have already observed a youthful interest in science which preceded any corresponding interest in politics. (See above.) As he observed, ‘The natural bent of my mind was to science.’ (Age of Reason. p.39.) It is interesting to observe that a developing acquaintance with natural philosophy, particularly astronomy, reinforcing the moral revulsion already in existence, proved the culminating agency in his rejection of Christianity:

After I had made myself master, of the use of the globes and of the orrery, and conceived an idea of the infinity of space and the eternal divisibility of matter, and obtained at least a general knowledge of what is called natural philosophy, I began to compare — or as I have said, to confront — the eternal evidence those things afford with the Christian system of faith. (Ibid., p.42.)

He proceeded to argue that an awareness of the plurality of worlds ‘renders the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous. (Ibid., p.43.) His conception of the mechanistic sublimity of the universe supplied the basis for the kind of ridicule of Christiality which caused either delight or apoplectic horror:

From whence then could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest and come. to die in our world, because they say one man and one woman had eaten an apple? And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve„ an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than travel from world to world, in an endless succession of deaths, with scarcely a momentary interval of life. (Ibid., p.49.)

The introductory observation makes it clear that there is another aspect of Paine’s interest in science. For him natural philosophy leads on ineluctably to natural theology: 

That which is called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. (Ibid. p.28.)

Such an attitude to natural philosophy would vanquish both the fanaticism resulting from a search for God within any particular revelation and the atheism consequent upon the teaching, (of) natural philosophy as an accomplishment only instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator himself. (‘The Existence of God’, 1797. C.W., iv. p.236 —40.)

Writing in 1804, he even uses that mainstay of natural theology, recently re-emphasised by Paley, the ‘watchmaker’ argument from design, to prove the existence of God.

The paradox of Paine’s attitude to science lies precisely in this combination of the platitudes of eighteenth-century natural theology and, considering the specific English context, the relatively novel critical use of science. The prominence in eighteenth century England of a natural theology based upon widespread popularisation of Newton is well known. (C.G. Gillispie. Genesis and Geology. (Harper Torchbooks, N.Y., 1959) chapter 1. P. Heimann. ‘Newtonian Natural Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution’. Hist. of Science, 1973.) A teleological conception of the universe was the common heritage of both rational Christian and freethinker. As Leaky observed in 1878’s, ‘One of the most remarkable differences between eighteenth-century Deism and modern freethinking is the almost complete absence in the former of arguments derived from the discoveries of science. (V.E.H. Lecky. A History of England in the Eighteenth Century. (Longman 477). iii. p.5-7.) Christianity customarily found itself under attack on the basis of its irrationality, immorality, and, increasingly, its inadequate historical veracity, rather than its incompatibility with the dominant Newtonian scientific world view.

How can the appearance in The Age of Reason of arguments derived from Newtonian natural philosophy alongside more traditional criticisms be accounted for? As a consequence of almost a century of itinerant scientific lecturing, Paine was able to assume the existence of a general scientific awareness among significant sections of his intended audience. (See chapter 1.) Paine’s natural theology consisted entirely of the popularised Newtonianism purveyed at these lectures. However, while these lectures were aimed, with ambiguous results, at reinforcing belief in God’s existence, they correspondingly proved dissolvent of the traditional conceptions of revelation and providence, of incarnation and resurrection, the theological and emotional foundations of Christianity. This perhaps may not have been significant during much of the eighteenth century when the debate on Christianity seemed confined to the respectable classes within a basically stable society and when even its principal defenders emphasised its rationality. But from the 1790’s onwards when, particularly as a consequence of the impact of Evangelicalism upon these classes, the most irrational components of Christianity, the emphasis on innate human depravity and the threat of hell, began to be utilised as ideological agencies of social control against an emerging popular radicalism, for the first time one encounters, in Paine’s Age of Reason, the use of scientific arguments against Christianity alongside the older ones mentioned above. It was at this moment that the radical implications of popular science first began to be evident, and it may be argued that Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) was as much a response to a fearfully anticipated spread of infidel doctrines as Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1796) or Wilberforce’s Practical View (1797). 

But why should the advocacy of natural philosophy figure so prominently in The Age of Reason and Paine’s other theological writings? The importance of scientific instruction is clearly evident in Paine’s programme for his Theophilanthropic Church in Paris in 1797, which aimed to”combine theological knowledge with scientific’instruction’, principally for artisans. (Paine. C.W. ply. p.245.) There are, however, a considerable number of reasons why science should figure so prominently in the writings of Paine and later infidels. The appeal of science to Paine as a means of radically devaluing the learning and status of traditional intellectuals was absent among the earlier undemocratic opponents of Christianity. Science and traditional theology were the popular paradigms of useful and useless knowledge. Paine took the Baconian point of view that the progressive accumulation of the scientific knowledge resulting from the study of the works of ‘the great mechanic of the creation, the first philosopher and original teacher of all science’ was responsible for social progress.° (The Age of Reason. p.169.) Christianity, on the contrary, was responsible through its sustained persecution of science, for ignorance and stagnation.” (Ibid., p.36-7.) Paine asserted the value of scientific knowledge against the forms of the learning characteristic of traditional intellectuals, theology and the study of the classical, the ‘dead’ languages, distinguished equally by their practical inutility and their social exclusivity. (Ibid. 733-5.) The priests had substituted ‘the study of the dead languages instead of the sciences’ as a means of maintaining the ignorance upon which their authority was based. (Ibid. P.39.) This was because of the democratic principles inherent within scientific knowledge. (Ibid., p.35. The following quote should have appeared after the word ‘knowledge’ ‘the human mind has a natural disposition to scientific knowledge’ (Ibid.,p.150.)) Scientific knowledge was available and accessible to all literate and numerate individuals, offering a method of challenging and radically devaluing society’s traditional intellectuals and their ideology, for here in the person of Paine, was a self-taught artisan contemptuously vanquishing the clergy of England.

The sum total of a person’s learning, with very few exceptions, is a b, ab, and hic, haec, hoc; and their knowledge of science is three times one is three.

The culmination of this democratic attack on traditional intellectualism which aroused so much antagonism was his suggestion of replacing churches with lecture halls and the clergy with scientific lecturers, a position which was to remain fundamental to infidel theory and practice and whose implications have remained unappreciated and unexplored. (Ibid., p.169-70.)

It has been argued that the traditional conception of Paine as the individual solely responsible for extending infidelity to the masses, largely a consequence of the semi hysterical contemporary reaction to The Age of Reason, is to a considerable extent erroneous. That work’s novelty lay almost entirely in the context in which it was both written and received. This changed context, that of social revolution in France and crisis of authority in England, was responsible for The Age of Reason’s novelty and the reaction it elicited. This accounts for the firm association of congruent radical political and religious attitudes, on the part of both radical and conservative, absent in the previous controversies over religion which had taken place within a relatively stable society. Paine’s brusqueness of style, the source of much antagonism, was demonstrably an integral component of his total literary and ideological project. Similarly, the critical reliance upon an almost entirely internal textual analysis of the contradictions and absurdities of the Bible in addition to arguments derived from an elementary scientific knowledge simultaneously appealed to the self-taught audience at which Paine was aiming and gave them the means and confidence to challenge the traditional intellectual’s panoply of classical and historical learning so radically; devalued in his writings. What remains to be considered is the extent of the circulation and impact of The Age of Reason and other similar works in the 1790’s, insofar as this can be discovered.

Part 2: THE 1790’s: THE IMPACT OF INFIDELITY

By Michael J. Williams

IN A RECENT ARTICLE DEALING, principally with response of Christian apologists, Franklyn Prochaska has challenged what he considers to be a standard overestimation of the contemporary impact of Paine’s Age of Reason, by later authors. Of such writers, some of whom he briefly disbusses, he comments: ‘Judging Paine’s views clear-headed, they have supposed that they had extensive popularity.’ On the contrary, writes Prochaska, ‘It is doubtful whether Paine’s religious views ever gained such currency’ as has been claimed for them. (F.K. Prechaska. ‘Thome Paine’s The Age of Reason Revisited’. J1. Hist. Ideas. 1972. p.569.) As evidence for an assertion totally unencumbered by the kind of evidence any social historian would consider requisite, he observes that only one among over thirty pamphlets issued in reply defended Paine. (Ibid. pp.569-70.) Disregarding the fact that such a literary response is comparable quantitatively only to that elicited by Burke’s Reflections, which would apparently indicate some considerable impact, it completely, escapes Prochaska, operating within a purely intellectual history, that to have written and published such a defense would have been to court almost certain imprisonment. 

Suoh blind misapprehension concerning the political context in which The Age of Reason appeared only serves to highlight the inadequacy of a purely internal intellectual history, which bases its estimation of a writer’s influence solely upon the study of a number of relatively easily accessible published texts commenting directly upon the particular work in question. This is especially so when one is considering the work of a writer aiming at reaching not the traditional intellectual strata whose literary output comprises the principal subject matter of the conventional intellectual historian; but that of such a writer as Paine whose avowed intent was to reach a popular audience. To assess the impact of any work which, like The Age of Reason falls into this latter category, a different kind of intellectual history is essential. Prochaska apparently realises the inadequacy of his own approach in his concluding observation that it would be rash to take its popularity (or unpopularity, MJW) for granted, particularly as our knowledge of radicalism and popular religion is so imprecise and the role of ideas so obscure”. (Ibid. p.576.) Such a qualification totally undermines his previous unsupported assertions concerning the popular impact of Paine’s work. Precisely because of the fragmented quality of predominantly literary sources, it is extremely difficult to assess the impact of ideas beneath those higher social strata – who have bequeathed the customary source material of the intellectual historian. 

To discover the extent of the circulation and impact of The Age of Reason and other works of a similar character on, anatomical scale, would require immense labour and ingenuity for relatively limited and unsatisfactory results. So far as the circulation and impact of infidel writings in London during the 1790’s is concerned, we are fortunate in possessing two very detailed, reliable and accessible sources, W.H. Reid’s The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies of this Metropolis and Francis Place’s Autobiography, both of which have – recently become available in published form. (W.H. Peid. The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies of this Metropolis. (1800 Reprinted Cass 1972)  Ed. M. Thale. The Autobiography of Frances Place (CUP., 1972)) Although Reid’s work has long been familiar to, and extensively utilised by historians of the period, there must necessarily have persisted some degree of skepticism about the reliability of such an avowedly polemical work. (See P.A. Brown. The Freneh Revolution in English History. 1918,. P.158. H. Collins, “The London Corresponding Society, in J. Saville, Democracy and the Labour Movement (Lawrence & Wishart, 1954) P.128-9; E.P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class. (Penguin, 1968). P.163,182. G.A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-Culottes C. (Arnold 1968). P.109-10. E. Royle. Radical Politics 1790-1900. Religion and Unbelief. (Longman,1971). p.22, 102.) Until the researches of the present author there was no means of verifying the author’s claim upon which the pamphlet’s aka source principally depends, to have ‘been involved in the dangerous delusion he now explodes,’ and an active infidel. (Reid. p.iii, iv) In his pamphlet he describes the London Magistrates’ suppression in 1798 of an infidel tavern debating society and the arrest of its members. (Ibid. p.13.) A brief account of this incident in the current Gentleman’s Magazine, mentions the presence among the arrested of W. Hamilton Reid, translator. (The Gentleman’s Magazine. LVIII (i). 1798. p.166.) Exact agreement between these narratives and the independent confirmation of Besides claims adds considerably to the value of his pamphlet as a source.

It is curious that in Reid’s pamPhlet.there is no reference to Place nor any confirmation of the latter’s account of his share in the publication of The Age of Reason. (Nor has it been possible to discover any reference to Reid’s pamphlet in the Place MSS, which is surprising considering the lengthy and precise account of Williams’ prosecution in the Autobiography. One can only assume that Place knew of neither Reid or his pamphlet.) There is neither any significant degree of overlap nor contradiction between the two works, which deal with differing and complementary aspects of the same phenomena: Of course, some doubt has been cast on the reliability of Place’s recollections of the Jacobins of his youth. As a consequence of his own later development, Place has been accused of overemphasising the sobriety and correspondingly underestimating the glamor and conviviality of as portrayed by contemporaries. (Thompson. pp.153,169-70.) This may be so far as Place’s political and social development is concerned, but as Thompson elsewhere observes, so far as free thought was concerned he lost his Jacobinism as he grew older and more superficially respectable. (Idib. p.846.) Should this be correct, as his steadfast support and consistent encouragement of Carlile during the 1820s indicates, then there is ‘reason to attach considerable reliability to recollections of his youthful atheism and co-partnership in the publication of an edition of The Age of Reason. Thus While our principal sources of information concerning London infidelity during the 1790s may be embarrassingly limited in number, their reliability and comprehensiveness provide ample compensation.

I.

Although published initially in France in 1793, Part I of Rights of Man first appeared in London early in 1794. (M.D. Conway. Ed. The Writings of Thomas Paine. R. Gimbel, “The First Appearance of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason”. Thomas Paine Society Bulletin. Jan. 1971, pp.5-6; Morning Chronicle, 6 February 1798, Place Collection, (B.M. Add. MSS.,38.i.f.251.)) No information available concerning numbers published but, according to the statement of Thomas Williams, confirmed by Lord Erskine, it was purchasable from ‘a great number of booksellers’ and had an extensive and free circulation initially. (Morning Chronicle, 6 Feb., 1798) It was in mid 1794 that Place read a copy of The Age of Reason borrowed from his landlord. (Place. Autobiography. p.126) Three further editions of Part I are catalogued in the British Museum as appearing in 1795 and Daniel Isaac Eaton published a cheap edition in 1796. After Part II was first published in London by H.D. Symonds at the relatively high price of 2/6 in October 1795. Paine wrote to Eaton asking him to publish a cheap edition, which appeared in January 1796. This edition was solely for 1/6 until its suppression at the time of Williams’ prosecution. (Conway. Ed. iv. PP. 13-14.)

The Age of Reason had presumably by this time aroused the considerable enthusiasm among large sections of the London Corresponding Society (L.C.S.) which was to lead to a plan in late 1796 to publish an even cheaper edition 461/- each which could be circulated among the Society’s expanding divisions. (Place. P159. Reid. P.54)

Thomas Williams, a bookbinder, in collaboration with Place; then a divisional delegate, proceeded to publish an edition of 2,000.of which all were sold. Only with his publication of a second edition of 7,000 independently of Place, which resulted in considerable sales, did The Age of Reason finally incur prosecution at the hands of the Proclamation Society. (Place. Pp.159-60.) ‘According to Paine, before his imprisonment Williams managed to sell at least 7,000 copies….’ The truth is thatTilliams never discontinued the sale of The Age.of Reason as long as a copy remained, but he ceased to sell them openly in the shop, and only supplied the trade or let persons whom he knew have them.’ As Erskine, hired by the Proclamation Society to prosecute Williams, commented: 

That circulation was at first considerable, but became at last so extensive, and from the quarter whence it came, and the manner . in which it was propagated, became so dangerous to the public, that the prosecutors thought it a duty incumbent upon them to bring this prosecution. (Morning Chronicle 9 .6 Feb, 4 1798.)

Thus it was not so much the actual publication of Paine’s work, but its increasing circulation by Jacobins among the London poor, which inspired its ultimate prosecution. Williams eventually received what the judge considered a mild sentence: a year’s hard labour in Cold Bath Fields. Despite Williams’ imprisonment, The Age of Reason continued to circulate surreptitiously. As Place wrote at the time:

At the time as there had all along been there were many different editions of The Age of Reason on sale, as there was for a long time afterwards, until the demand declined, but the book has never been out of print, and never has there been a time when any difficulty to obtain copies existed. (Place. p.169)

Mayhew has a tale from ‘the early nineteenth century about the manner in which The Age of Reason was sold by an old London bookseller:

 ‘If anybody bought a book and would pay a good price for it, three times as much as it was marked, he’d give the Age of Reason…. The old fellow used to laugh and say his stall was quite a godly stall, and he wasn’t often without a copy or two of the Anti-Jacobin Review, which was all for Church and State and all that, though he had ‘Tom Paine’ in a drawer.’ (H. Mayhew. London Labour and the London Poor (1851))

Although it was the only one prosecuted, The Age of Reason was not the only infidel work in circulation during the 1790s. (Of. Thompson. p.107.) Principal among these others was Volney’ Ruins of Empires,” of which at least three editions were published in 1795-6. (B.M. Catalogue of Printed Books.) Unimpeded by prosecution, according to Carlile, writing in 1820, it found a great circulation in England, at least to the extent of 30,000 copies. (24. The Republican p18, Feb 4 1820. ii: P.148.) Among other works d’Hoibachl’s atheistic System of Nature, translated by a person confined in Negate as ‘a patriot,’ was published by the LOS in weekly numbers. Reid considered these two works, which’ were looked’ upon retrospectively by him as ”The Hervey of the Deists….and the Newton of the Atheists,’ to be no less influential than Paine’s more notorious work:

Nothing like a miraculous conversion of the London Corresponding Society is to be imputed to Mr. Paine’s Anti-theological Work. On the contrary, their minds were prepared for this more popular performance, by these more learned and elaborate productions. (Reid. p.6. It was probably this work, published in 6d. numbers by one Kearsley, which transformed the young William Hone into an atheist: ‘It caught my imagination and it brought upon me to believe in what its object was to prove, that in nature there was nothing but Nature (I forbear to mention the title): F.W. Hackwood. WilliamHone: His Life and Times. (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912). p54))

Until well beyond the close of the period under study these two works were to remain, with The Age of Reason, the most influential within infidel circles. Hence any any estimations of lower-class infidelity which is, like Prochaska’s, based purely upon the latter must inevitably remain inadequate. (Prochaska. pp.569-70.)

Other less influential works circulating among LCS members during the 1790s – included Northoote’s Life of David, in a small edition and the projected republication of Annet’s writings discontinued after three installments as a consequence of Williams’ prosecution. At the LCS club rooms the works of Voltaire and Godwin were available and the lectures delivered at the Temple of Reason in Whitecross Street in 1796 were based on those of David Williams. Other projected publications included The Beauties of Deism; A Moral Dictionary; Julian against Christianity and lastly, that Paragon of French Atheism, LE BON SENSE.” (Reid. p.6-8. Place. p.136.) Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary remained in circulation throughout this period, and Helvetius and Rousseau were available for those few, who like Place and other LCS veterans, could read French. (Reid. P.89, A.M.D. Hughes.The Nascent Mind of Shelley (OUP. 1947). P.83. A Pocket Edition of The Philosophical Dictionary was published in London in 1796 (B.M.Catalogue).)

Despite fairly reliable evidence for the circulation of The Age of Reason in Cork, alarmist reports that the miners of Cornwall and the colliers of Newcastle were selling their bibles.to purchase To Paine’s Age of Reason, and a contemptuous reference to the circulation of (Voltaire’s) worst works on dirty paper and in worn type by travelling auctioneers and at country fairs,’ there is little easily accessing information concerning the circulation of infidel works beyond the metropolis. (Nigel H. Sinnott. ‘Dr. Hincks and The Age of Reason in Cork.’ TPS Bulletin, Oct. 1971. R.A. Soloway. Prelates and People. (R.K.P. 1969.) p.39. R. Southey. Letters from England. (1807 Reprinted. Cresset Press. 1951),. P.400) Only an assiduous search beyond the opacity of any individual researcher among County records, local newspapers and magistrates’ reports, would yield even approximately adequate information. (See Williams, p.116.) On the basis of information referring only to London it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that infidelity had a considerable popular impact during the 1790s. It is likely that sales of The Age of Reason reached a figure of between ten and fifteen thousand, with a potential circulation many times this number. 

So far our attention has been confined to questions relating to the publishing history and circulation figures of infidel works during this decade. The alarm felt about this phenomenon among ruling class circles has already been observed. But to what extent was the alarm concerning the popular dissemination of infidelity and the association between it and political radicalism justified? Was it unfounded hysteria or political manipulation of middle class responses as has been suggested, or was there some foundation to these claims, at least as far as London, the inevitable source for assertions concerning national phenomenon was concerned? (Cf. Southey’s comment quoted in Part 1. TPS Bulletin. No.2. Vol.5. 1965)

II.

There is reliable evidence of this association between infidelity and political radicalism within the LCS, not merely its final years of division and decay, but from its very inception and at the height of its development. It has been argued that during the eighteenth century the principal locus of popular freethought, normally in association with a putative or actual political radicalism, was the tavern debating society. Both Thelwell and Gale Jones, who was to remain a prominent London infidel for close on half a century, entered Jacobin politics from the world of the debating society. Brown noted the extent to which in the early 1790s Jacobinism was identified with debating clubs. Indeed, it could with justice be claimed that the debating society, far more than the Methodist class-meeting, provided a body made organisational model for the LCS. In April 1792 the old Coachmakers’ Hall Society for Free Discussion was ejected from its quarters and a similar society in Ipswich was dispersed by magistrates.’ (Brown. pp.59,83,85; Thompson. p.167 (The next reference should go before this)) Jephson argued that the Two Acts of 1795 were particularly directed against debating societies. (H. Jephson. The Platform: its rise and progress. (1892. Reprinted Cass, 1968). i. p.255.) In 1793, Eaton was prosecuted for publishing in his Politics for the People (the very title was a manifesto) a speech originally delivered by Thelwell at the Capel Court Debating Society emphasising the importance of ‘free discussion of political opinions, in public assemblies.’ (Politics for the People. VIII. Nov. 16, 1793. p.106.) Place’s well known description of the organisation of the LOS divisions gives similar emphasis to debate. (Place. p.131.) Apparently even after the formal suppression of the LCS in the late 1790s many activists returned, like Galleones, to the world of the debating society, then both ‘numerous and popular.’ (J. Britton. Autobiography. (1850). i. p.95. Brown. P.154) The ‘Spenson- ians’ met in this way in the early years of the next century and Gale Jones found himself propelled to the centre of the political arena as a consequence of a speech delivered at his British Forum in 1810. (B.M. Add MSS. 27.808 (3). p.201-2; T. Preston. Life and Opinions. (1817). Pp.20-1. Jephson. i. pp.336-8.) To a considerable extent the LCS emerged from a long tradition of free tavern debate which continued to flourish throughout the years of repression and quiescence. (Cf. T. Bewick. Memoir. (Bodley-Head, 1924). P.149; Thompson. pp.197-8.)

Such a connection in ethos between the LCS and earlier phenomenon makes the presence of infidels extremely likely, even before the growing impact of the circulation of infidel works in the mid-1790s. An atheist even before he joined the ICS., Place’s initial encounter with Jacobinism was via the freethinking landlord and LCS member from whom he borrowed Paine’s Age of Reason. (Place. p.126.) The LCS’s leading publisher, Baton, became an infidel while he was still a schoolboy. (State Trials. xxxi. p.938.) Judging from some later comments, Spence also was an infidel of sorts, or at least considerably opposed to traditional Christianity. (T. Spence. The Reign of Felicity. (1796). p.3.) In his account of a visit to Jacobins lower down the Thames Valley in 1796, Gale Jones wrote: ‘I do not profess to be a Christian.’ (J. Gale Jones. Sketch of a Political Tour Through Rochester, etc. (1796) .p.33.) On the other hand, of course, such prominent figures as Hardy and Bone were committed Christians. Nevertheless, Place was emphatic about the dominant attitude to religion prevailing within the LCS. ‘Nearly all the leading members were either Deists or Atheists – I was an atheist.’ ( B.M. Add. MSS. 27,608 (1). f. 115.) In his Autobiography, he expanded considerably on the subject of religious attitudes within the LCS. 

If ever toleration, in its widest sense (sic), prevailed anywhere, it was in the London Corresponding Society. No man was questioned about his religious opinions, and men of many religions and of no religion were members of its divisions and of its Committees. Religious topics never were discussed, and scarcely ever mentioned. It was a standing rule in all the divisions and in committees, that no discussion or dispute on any subject connected with religion should be permitted and none were permitted. In private religion was a frequent topic of conversation. It was well-known that some of the leading members were Free Thinkers, yet no exception was ever made to any one of them on account of his speculative opinions, nor were ever brought into discussion. Thomas Hardy was a serious religious man, John Bone a good honest man, sometime assistant secretary, was a saint, and a busy man privately in his endeavours to make converts, many others were very religious men of various denominations.

Nonetheless, ‘The Society was stigmatized, as an association of Atheists and Deists whose object was to rout out all religion and all morals.’ (44. Place. p.197-8.)

This passage is sufficiently important to warrant lengthy. quotation. While remaining an admirable prescriptive statement of what Hobsbawm has characterised as the predominantly secular gone of the British labour and radical movement is as unreliable as the other descriptions of the LCS discussed by Thompson. Place was apparently also concerned with criticising the conservative propag- anda which which identified political radicalism with an intolerant atheism. Consequently, as on other occasions, he probably over-emphasises the rationality or the LOS members – so far as religion was concerned. Not only are such sweetly reasonable attitudes psychologically improbable within such a milieu, but on the basis of extensive research, admittedly principally in a slightly later period, it is impossible not to question its accuracy. Such reasonable and tolerant attitudes concerning emotionally and ideologically heavily-charged issues are unlikely. 

Not only is Place’s account historically and psychologically inherently dubious, it is also contradicted by Reid’s portrait of the LCS, and also by a contemporary secret service report. James Powell, who had infiltrated the General Committee, reported that on 24 September 1795, “a letter was read from a numerous meeting of Methodists, belonging to the Society, requesting the expulsion of Atheists and Deists, from the Society.”‘ Powell considered that the rejection of the resolution would result in defections to be numbered in hundreds. This contemporary report contradicts Place’s description and confirms that of Reid, who ascribes the rapid predominance of infidelity within the Society to the appearance in 1795 of The Age of Reason. Such a predominance was not, however, gained, without considerable conflict, particularly in the General Committee, and a schism resulting in the formation of a new Civil and Religious Society, led by the booksellers Bone and Lee. Acknowledgement of ‘belief of the Holy Scripture, and that Christ is the Son of God became a necessary condition of membership. Apparently the refusal of Bone and Lee to sell The Age of Reason led to their prescription by the main body of the Society. (E.J. Hobsbawm. The Age of Revolution. (Mentor, N.Y., 1962). p.262; Thompson. pp.153,169-70.) On the basis of an apparently reasonably reliable account, Reid’s ascription of infidelity to the LCS in the post-1795 period seems justified, the origins of these developments in the appearance of Paine’s work provides sufficient evidence of its impact on the LOS, the predominant Jacobin organisation of the decade. 

After the secession of the Christian minority in 1795 the Society became overtly infidel. 

Impregnated with the principal objections of all the infidel writers, and big with the fancied importance of, being instrumental in a general reform, almost every division room could now boast its advocate for a new philosophy. In fact, such a torrent of abuse and declamation appeared to burst from all quarters at once, that as the idea of a Deist and a good Democrat seemed to have been universally compounded, very few had the courage to oppose the general current. 

As a consequence divisional delegates began to be recommended for election as ‘A good Democrat and a Deist’, or more strongly, ‘That he is no Christian.’ (Ibid. pp.8-9. According to Thompson, Bone became LCS. Secretary in January, 1797. This could either have followed reconciliation with the LCS or have preceded the conflict described by Reid, whose chronology is unclear. (Thompson. p.182). Bone’s original secession does not seem to have been the result of conflict over religion. Hence some of these details in Reid’s pamphlet are rather unreliable.)

William Hone’s description of his youthful acquaintance with an infidel in 1795 provides us with a valuable illustration of the persuasive impact of infidel doctrines within the LOS at this time. Hone’s nineteen-year-old ex-school-fellow:

 ‘Calmly insinuated that I was in ‘leading strings,’ and should be good for nothing while I read silly authors, and took things on trust. I knew not what to answer, and in a few conversations I thought him unanswerable.’ He was my elder by three years, well educated and seducingly eloquent. He had settled to his own satisfaction that religion was a dream, from which those who dared to think for themselves would awake in astonishment at their delusion; that the human mind had been kept in darkness and men in slavery, but that the reign of Superstition was over… (etc.).’ (Hackwood. p.51.)

The flattering insinuations of the argument such as Hone has presented are so transparent as to require further comment.

Reid’s assertion that ‘from this period on, when leaders began to force their anti-religions opinions upon their co-officiates, it is undeniable that their intestine divisions hastened their dissolution more than any external obstacles’ undoubtedly requires some consideration. (Reid. p.9.) What relationship does the infidel attainment of hegemony within the LCS have with the Society’s decline in the late 1790’s. According to Thompson’s estimate, the adoption of The Age of Reason by the LCS and the consequent Christian secession Councils approximately, with its highest peak of membership, the last haIf of 1795. (Thompson. p.167. On the basis of a detailed consideration of the available evidence, Thompson estimates a membership of approximately 1,000 in late 1795 (pp.167-9). Cf. Williams. p.96.) Place’s gradual withdrawal from active participation in the Society’s affairs in 1796-7 was certainly unlikely to be an expression of dissatisfaction concerning its infidelity.” (Place. pp.151-4. Rather he resigned as it result of disagreement over tactical and organisational questions)) Thompson and Williams date the LCS collapse to around this period, ascribing it to government pressure and division among the leaders concerning the appropriate organisational structure and other questions of internal policy.’ (Thompson. pp.151,161-3.179,182; Williams. P.99-102.) There is little evidence that infidelity was the principal cause of the LCS’s decline; rather the evidence points to an open assertion of the infidel character of the organisation at the moment of its maximum political impact.

Nevertheless, there is more to be said about the role of infidelity during the LCS’s later years. Thompson identifies underground activism as a principal consequence of the suppression of the open agitation for constitutional reform.” (Thompson. pp.183-91.) However, alongside the United Englishmen movement, ‘the most striking feature of 1796-7 is the growth of deism and free-thought.’ (Williams. p.109. Reid’s suggestion that there was some degree of contact between the infidels and the United Men (p.13) gains some limited support from the discovery of a long infidel diatribe among the Privy Council Papers dealing with the United Englishmen (P.C1-3117)) It is perhaps no accident that after his departure from the LOS, Place should have combined a rejection of conspiratorial politics with an initially active participation in infidel propagandism. It might be argued that there were twin alternative responses to the failure of a mass movement for political reform and the succession of a period of apathy, withdrawal and repression. The significance and identification of the conspiratorial reaction to such a situation is clear. The same cannot be said of the relationship between the failure of the mass movement and the emergence into prominence of infidel forms of activism. Reid’s imprecise yet suggestive association between infidelity and the LCS’s decline remains unresolved.

The principal among the infidel societies identified by Reid met initially in The Green Dragon, Cripplegate, on Sunday and Wednesday evenings in Spring 1795. This society continued its customarily crowded meetings, harried from tavern to tavern by hostile local magistrates, until 1798. Several other debating societies met throughout the East End of London during this period. Formal political debate was prohibited at these meetings so as to avoid suppression. However, the society to which Reid belonged was closed on February 1798 because of the political implications of the audienee’s use of the appellation ‘Citizen’ during the debates and the attendance of Binns. (Reid. pp.9-13. Gentleman’s Magazine. LXVIII (1) p.166.)

A parallel, more formal phenomenon, obviously influenced by the writings of both Paine and Williams, was the London’ Temple of Reason. Organised by the ‘Friends of Morality’ and commencing at Nichols’ Sales Room, Whitecross Street in 1796. (T. Wallis. Guide to London. (1814) p. 320. Reid. pp.22-6) Lectures based on the writings of Voltaire and Williams were regularly delivered by two lawyers until it was forced to close as a result of declining attendances. Nevertheless, its impact was sufficient to warrant inclusion in the 1814 edition of Wallis’ Guide to London. 

These were not the only forms of infidel activity during this period. As well as meeting in clubs, on Sundays some regularly issued forth to verbally harass itinerant preachers in the fields around London:

For instance, during the summer of 1797, a very formidable party were organized and assembled every Sunday morning, at 7 o’clock, near the City road here, in consequence of the debates, forced upon the preachers or the hearers, several groupes (sic) of people would remain upon the ground till noon, giving an opportunity to the unwary passengers to become acquainted with the dogmas of Voltaire, Paine, and other writers. In fact, the fields were resorted to… upon the same principle as the sportsman goes in search of games, ”We shall be sure to find some Christians in the fields” was the standing reason for the excursions. 

Such waa their impact that in 1798 “the magistrates were compelled to put a partial stop to field preaching.” It is interesting to note Reid’s location of the infidels within the world of “radical and antinomian dissent, among such ancillary “Field Disputants” as “Mystics, Muggletonians, and a variety of characters ‘ of different denominations.” (Reid. pp.17-9.) Infidels were also active within working-class benefit society, circulating The Age of Reason and claiming their own ‘conversions’. (Ibid. p.20.)

Ample evidence has been presented to demonstrate the connection, at least within London, of infidelity with radical politics was more than mere collective upper-class paranoia. The action taken against them is:sufficient presumptive evidence of their impact. It is more difficult to assess the impact of such ideas among the population as a whole, especially when it must be emphasised that Jacobinism itself must have reached only a minority among the London poor, the bulk of whom were unquestionably more accessible to the reveries and prophecies of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcote than the arguments of Paine and Voltaire. (CF. Thompson. p.127-30) There is evidence within Reid’s work of various manifestations of infidelity that could be assumed, from the crudities of tap-room blasphemies and anti-clericalism to the secular millenarianism of the founders of the Temple of Reason. (Here is an example of the former: ‘I am an Atheist, ‘exclaimed one of these persons, and jumping upon a club-room table; here he said, holding up an infant, ‘here is a young Atheist.’ Another, to show how little he regarded the Bible, observed, at ‘another meeting, ‘That just  before he came from home, he kicked something before him, and picked it up, what should it be but an old Bible that till then, he did not know he held, any shrill thing in his house’s (p.15).) According to Reid, the infidels met with considerable success; the novelty of their opinions strongly attracting the public mind. Their lecture rooms in working-class areas were usually crowded and the zeal and energy of the speakers…had also great weight in making converts; for among the lower orders of people an extemporaneous harangue against the ministers of religion had an effect not easily imagined. This was particularly noticeable at Spittelfields. 

In 1799, giving evidence at the Old Bailey, a clergyman mentioned his own precaution of wearing an unpowdered wig because Clergymen could not pass along the streets without being insulted.’ (Reid. pp.14,50. (Gf. accounts – of the Robin Rood Society in Chapter 1).) Certainly the audiences at these infidel debating societies and lecture halls consisted principally of ‘the lower orders.’ Apprentices were particularly frequent visitors. (Ibid. pp.16.20.) The presence of an educated man like Reid in the society meeting at the Angel, entirely composed of mechanics, mostly shoemakers and taylors, excited considerable surprise on the part of the presiding magistrate. (65. Gentleman’s Magazine. loc. cit.)

The previously raised question of the relationship between the emergence of infidelity as a prominent expression of radioism and the failure of the pre-existing reform movement was left unresolved. (This paragraph is, because the concentration of my research on the later period, 1817-35, necessarily rather abstract and speculative, drawing rather too general and schematic contribution from a limited body of impressionistic research.) While discussing earlier periods of the eighteenth century it was argued that infidelity was the principal manifestation of radicalism during a time of general mass political quiescence and that, on investigation, the political associations of infidelity were quite evident. During the period, like the 1790s, which witnessed a rapid increase and significant expansion of the political nation, the political implications of infidelity became more pronounced, with the involvement of its adherents in the Jacobin reform movement. It might be suggested that a re-emphasis on infidelity and a return to the forms of activism associated with it, principally the informal tavern debating society, was consequent upon the suppression of 1790s Jacobinism. Thus one might expect infidelity to assume a certain predominance among the overt forms of radical activism.

There are, however, more significant, if less prominent implications in such a development. Central to the infidel position.was an immense faith in the liberating potential of knowledge. For Paine, it was the ‘progress of knowledge’ more than anything else which would be the basis for the development of a democratic society. (Right of Man. (Watts, 1937). P.81 and passim.) It was as the principal obstruction to such progress that Paine and the other infidel were hostile to Christianity belief of the power of knowledge and the importance to be attached to the extension of political information, were fundamental among the 1790s Jacobins. During the critical year of 1796, a Rochester Jambin wrote to the LCS Committee describing their projected circulation of cheap books and publication of a magazine:

We are more anxious to accelerate the Diffusion Of Knowledge, because we agree with you, that the Patriotism of many, ebbs and flows in proportion as the Pride of Previsions, the Obstacles to Reform, & other temporary circumstances vary, and we are sure, that till they are taught to distinguish between Passion & Principle they can never afford.any real Assistance to the Cause of Reform. This lesson they can only be taught by the circulation of Political Truth. (B .M. Add. MSS. 27,815, f52; 29 April 1796.)

Rather later in the same year Thelwall wrote to the LCS:

There is nothing for which I am more anxious that to see the spirit of enquiry revived in our society and prosecuted with all its former ardour. Depend upon it, nothing but information can give us liberty. (69. B.M. Add MSS. 27,815 f.142; 15 Dec., 1796.)

Place’s description of the LCS’s divisions indicated the significance attached to reading and discussion, despite the over-respectability of his account. 

Hence the decline of the Jacobin movement could be interpreted among its surviving adherents as the consequence, not only of repression and apathy, but also of a popular ignorance maintained principally by Christianity in its various forms. Certainly this was the message of the works of the Enlightenment and of their own experiences as auto-didacts. Paine’s juxtaposition of alexia and schoolmaster in The Age of Reason is an indication of this view of reform as a contest between the forces of Obscurantism and Enlightenment. Thus infidelity could become rather more than merely a reversion to a traditional form of informal, minority radical activism or a relatively safe substitute for active political agitation or conspiracy. By means of the kind of hypothetical perspective outlined above it offered a valid alternative in so far as it aimed at destroying what could be perceived as the principal source of a persistent popular ignorance and the main ideological weapon in the hands of an aristocratic ruling class. A more adequate comprehension of the political significance of infidelity in the 1790s and beyond must, however, rest upon an examination of the conservative views of the role of religion and the threat of infidelity in a society experiencing unprecedented social, economic and political stress.

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Audrey Williamson. Wilkes: ‘A Friend to Liberty’. 254 pages. Illustrated. George Allen & Unwin. 4.95.

Following her excellent biographical study of Thomas Paine, Audrey Williamson has now given us one on another radical reformer, John Wilkes. Unlike Paine, Wilkes has been the central subject of many a learned book and article, and has not had the dead weight of the political ‘establishment’ move heaven and earth, so to speak, to smear his reputation, rather, whatever his early radicalism, they have sought to make him one of the historical figures of the ‘establishment’, as in later life he actually was. 

There are many facets to the life of Wilkes; the radical reformer and writer, enemy of the Tory establishment; the amorous ‘man-about–town’ and member of the notorious Hell-Fire Club; the civic official and man who ordered troops to fire on and into a crowd of. workers. Whatever his good deeds this last act has sullied his reputation for ever, for with it, and despite any excuse that might be made, it demonstrated that he had changed sides. 

All the many aspects of Wilke’s life are dealt with fully by Miss Williamson, who blends a warmness towards her subject with the objectivity so essential to a good biographer, thus we do not get a whitewash job from which Wilkes emerges spotless, a man beyond reproach. However, I do feel that there is a slight tendency to play down the change of sides so evident a characteristic of Wilke’s later years. Perhaps in modern terms Wilkes was the revolutionary turned moderate, however, it is the early and middle years of Wilke’s life that are the most interesting, and in this very readable work they come to life. 

Readers of Audrey Williamson’s book on Paine will know that as a biographer she does not simply accept at face value what others wrote of her subject, thus giving us a ‘rehash’, which is all too often the case with many a biography; Miss Williamson checks on the facts behind the story, and her re-examination of the original material produces both new information and corrects errors. In this work will be found some important new data bearing directly upon a possible connection between Paine and Wilkes, and suggesting that further investigation might produce in its turn a whole new chapter on the obscure early days of Paine. 

Wilkes: ‘A Friend to Liberty’, is a book which I have no hesitation about recommending. It is well written, well researched, excellently illustrated, and with a good index. Its price is regrettably high, but then this is an inflationary era. Whatever my personal reservations about Wilkes there is no doubt that he holds an important place in the history of social reform, and this book should introduce him to a new generation of students, or simply those curious about how our political institutions evolved.

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Of all the radical writers who knew Thomas Paine, the one whose work is among the least known or read today, but whose career was the most Varied and Striking, was Thomas Holcroft: Newmarket stableboy, schoolmaster, actor, playwright, novelist. Paris Correspondent for the Morning Herald, acknowledged mentor of William Godwin, victim of the 1794 treason trials and diarist whose entries for the year 1798 provide a fascinating picture of London celebrities, the frequentors of Debrettes, and rumours about Napoleon then freely proliferating about London.

All the admirers of Paine must know that Holcroft, with William Godwin and Thomas Brandl Hollis, helped to see Rights of Man through the press while Paine was in France and greeted the arrival of the book from the printers with the histrionic and indeed, in its way, prophetic ‘Hey for the New Jerusalem! The Millenium! And peace and eternal beatitude be until the soul of Thomas Paine’. It is less well known that Holcroft, even before Lanthenas whose translation of Part 2 of Rights of Man Bonneville published in Paris in 1792, may have provided the link between Paine and Nicolas de Bonneville that ended in Paine’s lodging with the French editor of Bien Informe for five years, from 1795 until his return to America in 1802.

Holcroft was born in December, 1745, the year Culloden, and was thus almost nine years Paine’s junior Baptised at St. Martine-in-the-Field’s, he was the son of a London shoemaker of somewhat feckless application to his trade, which ended in his becoming a peddler roaming the English countryside, and not helping his fortunes by an enthusiasm for the racecourse which he transmitted to his devoted son…’ The whole scene was like enchantment’, Holcroft wrote in his Memoirs fifty years later of a visit to Nottingham races in 1756 when as a boy of ten he watched a match between two horses, Car less and Atlas, then considered the greater: since Plying Childers (still famous today in books on racing, And a legend of forty years before when the boy Holcroft tasted the delights of the Nottingham course) (Holcroft, Thomas. Life and Memoirs. Edited by E.Colby. 1925.). In 1757 at the age of under twelve, he entered a stable near Newmarket, to whioh:bown his father had been drawn as by a magnet, and in fact the ‘whole of his Memoirs are devoted to his life there (he wrote them virtually on his deathbed, and his life story was continued by William Hazlitt”).

They are of great interest historically to anyone: interested in racing and training methods, especially as in view. of Holcroft’s eventual fame in totally different directions, they are little known in racing circles today, (‘Heavens!, they were really tough in those days. I cannot help wondering what some of our modern horses — or trainers — would think about the sort of methods used’ was a typical comment – from John Oaksey — when I sent a few extracts to one or two racing writers).

It should be explained the toughness: applied to the prolonged-hours (beginning at 2.30am – in summer) of training horses and the style of training details, not to cruelty as such indeed Holoroft, who adored horses all his life, paints a picture of stables and trainers singularly free from bribery and inconsideration, and (a revealing touch from a boy who had known only the life of the eighteenth century poor) he is more enthusiastic about the meals and treatment of the ‘lads’ than are some writers of social conscience in the pages of Sporting Life today. When he fell from a difficult mare he was nursed back to health in the home of his employer with genuine kindness and although he lost his job he soon found an even more celebrated trainer, under whose guidance he became a first-class and valued rider. Once again his enthusiasm points the changed conditions of his life:

‘Now I was warmly clothed, nay, gorgeously, for I was proud of my new livery, and never suspected that there was disgrace in it; I fed voluptuously, not a prince oh earth perhaps with half the appetite, and never-failing relish; and instead of being obliged to drag through the dirt after sluggish, obstinate, and despised among our animals, I was mounted on the noblest that the earth contains, had him under my care, and was borne by him over hill and dale, far outstripping the wings of the wind.’

In the interim he mentions being briefly at the stables housing the thirteen, racing horses owned by the Duke of Grafton, who was the ‘squire’ of Paine’s home town, the ‘rotten borough’ of Thetford, but he gives us no recollections of the young ‘Sporting Duke’, afterwards so-maligned by Junius, and owner of the 1810 Derby winner, Whalebone (possibly named, I have suggested in my biography of Paine, in commemoration of the notorious Thetford staymaker’s son), Holcroft, nevertheless, had brains and vision beyond the scope of his fellow stableboys. While at Newmarket he began to read voraciously, starting with Gulliver’s Travels, and intent on improving his education he went to study in his spare time with a schoolteacher named Langham, who was also the local maker of leather breeches. Langham was so impressed by his quickness that he gave him free lessons, and Holoroft soon outstripped his master. Having a good treble voice and a feeling for music, he also sang in the.choir at one of Newmarket’s two churches (this love of music he retained all his life, and as late as 1784 he took the tenor part in the Handel celebration at Westminster Abbey).

In many ways, Holcroft was never to experience again times as happy and, within their limits, affluent as those at Newmarket. He left in 1760 to follow his ‘rolling stone’ father to London, and perhaps with a sense already of wider and more literate horizons. He had begun by being only horsestruck; he was soon stagestruck too, and although for ten years he scraped a living as a shoemaker and schoolmaster, by, 1770, at the age of twenty-four, he had turned strolling player and was acting in Dublin with the great veteran actor, Charles Macklin, whose fame had been partially eclipsed by David Garrick but who lived to an enormous age, still churning out performances the length and breadth of England and Ireland, including a celebrated ‘Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. It is estimated that he was still acting at well over ninety.

Holcroft never made much headway as an actor; as with so many with intellectual interests and accomplishments, he was best at characters requiring the assumption of old age or characteristics outside the sweep of emotion which is always a major factor in carrying the really great actor to the top of his profession. But he had taught himself several foreign languages and made an expert study, too, of vocal and instrumental music and it was through this that he at last succeeded, in 1776, in getting an engagement at Drury Lane under Sheridan’s management, at 20 shillings a week. As many of the plays performed had incidental music, he was able to sing in the choruses as well as to play very small parts. Only when Sheridan saw him play a character called Mungo, was he impressed enough to raise his salary to 25 shillings.

Although Holcroft was obviously already interested in writing for the theatre before, Sheridan engaged him as a an actor he had a farce (oddly, to Paineites, called The Crisis) to Mrs. Sheridan to read and his own years of poverty must have got his mind in politically questioning directions, there is little doubt the association with Richard Brinsley Sheridan helped to consolidate both Holcroft’s radical interests and ambitions as a dramatist. ‘Sheridan had been drawn to politics long before he started to write ‘plays’, writes his most recent biographer, and there exists fragments of various political essays which were written at Anna St. Ives, in Holcroft’s own words, was intended ‘to develop (Holcroft’s own spelling) certain general principles by exhibiting imaginary characters’ and to depict ‘the vices and distresses which are generated by the existing institutions of society’. Ibsen or Shaw could not have put it more clearly. Hugh Trevor, a novel in two parts published in 1794 and 1797, continued this doctrinaire philosophy of novel-writing. Crabbe Robinson once wrote that Holcroft’s novels had been a mental introduction to the reception of Godwin’s Political Justice (which, in 1793, could well have been true of Anna St. Ives).

Holoroft was very active in the Constitutional Society, sitting on its committee and at one time edifying its members, but also probably much holding up its business, with a dissertation on the human mind, which continued until the meeting broke. (Brown, P.A. ie French Revolution Histo. a 1918 (republished by Cass, 1965)) He shared with, and indeed perhaps helped to form in Godwin a strong sense of human perfectibility; and with Shaw – at least the Shaw of Back to Methuselah – he believed mind was all-important, and could conquer anything. His mind cast an unconscious shadow on the future in another theatre direction, for in his play The Deserted Daughter, he anticipates Pirandello’s moral theme, in Six Characters in Search of an Author, about a father who encounters his own daughter in a brothel (J.B. Priestley also used it in his play, Johnson Over Jordan). He also had his censorship problems; there was a trying bother over the line in Love’s Frailties, ‘he was bred to the most useless, and often the most worthless, of all professions, that of a gentleman’. Paine would undoubtedly have relished this.

When, in 1794, the Government decided to try and put a stop to the growing revolutionary societies and arrested most of Holcroft’s associates on a treason charge, Holcroft, knowing his turn would come, turned the tables of public sympathy by courageously giving himself up. Thomas Erskine, the great lawyer who had defended Paine in 1792, immediately offered his services free of charge, and Holcroft in fact was never brought to trial. He was released when it became clear to the Government (which had been grossly misled by its spies) that none of the accused could be proved guilty of the charge on any evidence. Holcroft resented his release without official ‘pardon’, as it cast a shadow on his name that he had no means of repudiating, unlike those who had actually been brought into court; and in fact his political enemies so powerfully attacked his works from then on that eventually he took to a pseudonym, thus achieving his only play success thereafter.

Yet although his fortunes were fading he remained bravely in London among his friends, frequenting Debrett’s (which was virtually a social club as well as booksellers) and recording in his Diary meetings and comments of considerable interest. His visitors in 1798 included Mrs.Reveley (once courted by Godwin and later a friend to his daughter Mary and Shelley in Italy) at a musical evening devoted to Mozart and Haydn; James Barry the painter (whose attractive young self-portrait is in the Tate Gallery close to where I write this); and a child pianist prodigy, John Field, who later became famous in Russia as an antecedent of Chopin in the composing and playing of Nocturnes. Benjamin Disraeli’s father (still calling himself D’Israeli), the painter Richard Wilson, Horne Tooke, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Joseph Banks, James Boswell (‘a pompous egotist, servile, selfish, and cunning’) flit across his canvas, and he pins down Tooke (who turned his coat twice to desert two former allies, John Wilkes and Thomas Paine) like a butterfly with a reference to a discussion of the’misapplication of his powers, the sacrifice of wisdom and virtue to the pitiful triumph of the moment’ (Miss Banks also takes tea with Tooke’s two natural daughters, living with him at Wimbledon and known euphemistically as ‘the Misses Hart’). William Sharpy the engraves of Romney’s portrait of Paine, who had been introduced into the Constitutional Society by Horne Tooke, is shown to be an eccentric believer in the ‘Grand Millenium’s ‘The earthquake is still to happen, and the peaceable, even if uninspired, are all to be saved’, as Holcroft puts it. ‘Last summer he retired to a lonely place…..and there he himself had been absolutely favoured with a revelation, communicating to him personally, beyond all doubt, the revolutions that are immediately to happen’. One can imagine what would have been the reaction to all this the author of The Age of Reason!

At Debrett’s he meets Erskine and records the great lawyer’s opinion that ‘it was wrong to give up agitating the question of reform without doors, i.e. out of the House of Commons. He had before remarked that the people had lost all spirit, which I denied, and, on this occasion, reminded him that the leaders of the people had abandoned them in a cowardly manner, and then had called the people cowards’. He adds that Sir Francis Burdett is inquiring into the number of persons imprisoned on suspicion, and their treatment, meaning to state the particulars to Parliament. (Burdett, a distinguished radical Member of Parliament, four years later, in 1802, joined Rickman in seeing off Paine to America at Le Havre.) Erskine, as a lawyer, has great talents, quick conceptions, acute feelings, and uncommon power over juries, he is far from ranking in the first class’s which in view of Erskine’s offer of his services without fee four years before, seems perhaps a little ungrateful.

It is revealing of the rumours besieging London in 1798 that on 26th July he heard ‘Buonaparte and his whole fleet were taken’ (a rumour which proved wishful thinking) and on 14th. December records ‘the assassination of Buonaparte the subject at Debrett although the next day this, too, ‘was much questioned at Debrett’s’. Among references to other friends or acquaintances of Paine, he reports on 15th, November ‘Johnson the bookseller sent to the King’s bench Prison for selling Wakefield’s pamphlet°, and also ‘Read at Debrett’s, in the papers, the manly behaviour of Tone, tried at Dublin, and cast for high treason’. (Dr. Gilbert Wakefield, a classical scholar, had published a pamphlet replying to one by the bishop of Llandaff on the French Revolution. He was sentenced to imprisonment in the common goal of Dorchester for two years,, and died fourteen weeks after his liberation. Llandaff, who also crossed swords with Paine, had tried in vain to prevent Wakefield’s being prosecuted, ‘thinking the liberty of the press to be the palladium of the Constitution’ (Rae. Wilkes, Sheridan, Fox)) It was the year of the great Irish rebellion of 1798, in which Paine’s friend Lord Edward Fitzgerald also lost his life, and the Irish question, then as now persistently obtrudes.

By 1799 his funds were so depleted that he had to sell his fine collection of pictures and his library (he was a connoisseur of taste in both, and his Diary includes the acquisition of surprising items, such as ‘the bible in Welsh, Polish, Danish and Swedish likewise Novelle di Salernitano (scarce) and other books’). The loss of the library cost him bitter pangs. He left for Hamburg and voluntary exile in Europe until 1802. In Paris, as Professor Aidridge’s researches have recorded, he again met Paine, but in October 1802 he returned to London. (Aldridge, A.O. Man of Reason. The Life of Thomas Paine. Cresset, 1959. It would be interesting to know if he lodged again with Bonneville, with whom Paine was then living) Success eluded him and in 1807 he was forced to sell a new collection of books and pictures. He died in poverty on 23rd, March 1809, the same year as Paine.

His life had been overshadowed by personal tragedies. The first two of his three wives died young, and in 1789, the year which should have been a beacon for all lovers of liberty and equality, his sixteen-year-old eldest son, in some slight family altercation, had run away with £40 and tried to sail on a vessel to America. His anxious father, ready to forgive all, had found the ship through police efforts, but as he was descending to the cabin to fetch his son, the boy threatened to shoot himself if taken. Believing, as most parents would, this was merely adolescent histrionics, Holcroft had continued to descend, only to hear his son fire the pistol. When he reached him the boy was dead. This tragedy shattered his life, and for a year he scarcely went out of doors.

Francis Place, years later on the death of James Stuart Mill, wrote: ‘He was all the time as much of a bright reasoning man as ever he was, reconciled to his fate, brave and calm to an extent which I never before witnessed, except in another old friend, Thomas Holcroft, the day before and the day of his death’. Holcroft, like Sheridan, had known poverty, and like Sheridan at the end he returned to it. Neither man forgot that it is the poor that must help the poor. As Holcroft’s little Song of Gaffer-Gray has it:

‘The poor man alone,

When he hears the poor moan,

Of his morsel a morsel will give,

Well-a-day.’

It was a philosophy Paine, too, understood.

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