In April 1797, as Napoleon Bonaparte continued his meteoric rise, Thomas Paine made his way to 4 Rue du Théatre Français. With his knock on the door, life changed for Nicolas and Marguerite Bonneville and their very young children. Paine had grown close to the couple during the early days of the French Revolution. Now, stateless and homeless in the wake of the Committee of Public Safety’s Terror, an 11-month incarceration that almost killed him, and his long recuperation at the home of American Minister to France, James Monroe, Paine had been invited to take refuge at the Bonneville home. Madame Bonneville expected the great man to stay for a fortnight. Instead, he stayed for six years.

Surrounded by the Bonneville’s circle of writers and intellectuals—headstrong, passionate, and yet still optimistic even in the wake of so much death—Paine new companions rekindled his revolutionary spirit. The Bonnevilles were great admirers of Paine. They even named their fourthborn son, Thomas Paine Bonneville, in the great man’s honor the year after Paine arrived at their home, and asked him to serve as godfather. As Paine’s fortnight turned into months and then years, his presence as a doting, albeit eccentric, “grandfather” became the norm, while the family’s hospitality towards him—between 1797 and 1802—became the foundation of an abiding friendship.

In 1802, Nicolas Bonneville was arrested by Napoleon and his printing presses were seized just as Paine was finally preparing to return to the United States. Paine saw a way to pay the struggling Bonnevilles back for their generosity, so Madame Bonneville and three of her four boys—12-year old Louis, 5-year-old Benjamin and 4-year-old Thomas, sailed to America shortly after Paine’s return, planning to stay until Nicolas could get back onto a solid financial footing. Instead, for the next seven years in New York, this “odd couple” became a part of Paine’s sometimes eccentric orbit. Little Nicolas was too frail to travel and remained in France, while Louis, the oldest, was unhappy in New York, so arrangements were made for him to return to France and to the care of a family friend until he could be reunited with his father.

By 1808, prone to a growing litany of frailties, Paine was not the easiest person to be around. The small town of New Rochelle, 22 miles from New York, was no panacea for a happy life. There was an ill-executed attempt on Paine’s life by a disgruntled workman, and the town had infuriatingly refused to let him vote in an election, alleging that he was not an American citizen. As a result, the Paine-Bonneville “family” began spending more time in what is now Greenwich Village. Paine began facing physical struggles. A bad fall and episodes of transient ischemia made it difficult for him to hold a pen. But he was still busy trying to make the world a better place.

As Paine shuttled between a series of rooming houses, Madame Bonneville became his occasional secretary: “I …went regularly to see him twice a week; but, he said to me one day: “I am here alone, for all these people are nothing to me, day after day, week after week, month after month, and you don’t come to see me.” An aging, ailing man, who thrived on arguments in the service of great ideas, now roiled against the infirmities of old age and his confinement in lonely, shabby rooms. At the same time, the futures of the Bonneville boys weighed heavily upon Madame Bonneville. It was the central bond between Paine and her.

On June 8, 1809, Thomas Paine—physically diminished but with his mind still clear—died peacefully. With the reading of Paine’s will, the responsibilities for his burial and the execution of his estate lay on Madame Bonneville’s shoulders.

Whatever scholars may make of Paine’s feelings about Madame Bonneville, and hers about him, there can be no disputing her position as the principal beneficiary in Paine’s will. His bequest included “shares, movables, and money… for her own sole and separate use, and at her disposal, notwithstanding her coverture.” Small amounts were dispensed to old friends, including Nicolas, but the most significant chunk, including 100 acres in New Rochelle, went to Madame Bonneville: “…in trust for her children …their education and maintenance, until they come to the age of twenty-one years, in order that she may bring them well up, give them good and useful learning, and instruct them in their duty to God.”

Madame Bonneville wrote, “Paine, doubtless, considered me and my children as strangers in America. His affection for us was…great and sincere.” His generous bequest to the boys in his will proves that.

In March of 1810, Marguerite Bonneville, with Paine’s dear friend Walter Morton by her side, took a stage coach to Albany, and, associated with Paine’s estate, posted a bond of $14,000—an amount that would today be the equivalent in purchasing power of about $359,973. Paine had indeed provided for his “boys”. Thomas Paine—physically diminished but with his mind still clear—died peacefully. With the reading of Paine’s will, the responsibilities for his burial and the execution of his estate lay on Madame Bonneville’s shoulders.

What of Paine’s “Dear Boys”?

Benjamin Bonneville

Paine loved the youngest Bonneville boys. After his death, Madame Bonneville, with a boost from Lafayette, petitioned Thomas Jefferson for a place for Benjamin at West Point. He rose to Brigadier General in the U.S. Army as well as gaining fame as an explorer of the American northwest. The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Pontiac Bonneville are named for him.

Thomas Paine Bonneville

Thomas Paine Bonneville did not fare as well. On January 1, 1812, now dropping the “Paine,” the adolescent Thomas became a midshipman in the U.S. Navy. He was awarded a sword of valor for his service during a fierce battle, but Thomas was a discipline problem. Heroism and discipline did not go hand in hand. Thomas resigned from the Navy in 1816. In November 1820, he enlisted as an Army private for a five-year tour, took a 2-month leave for illness, left on March 26, 1821, and vanished from history’s gaze.

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By Joy Masoff

ABSTRACT: The intellectual and political sides of Paine have had their time in the spotlight. More scholarly attention needs to focus on Paine, the person, his connections, and his networks. Few publications have examined Paine’s intimate inner circles, and almost nothing has been written about Paine as a devoted confidante, much less as a family man. Underexamined in the entire Paine corpus is the story of Paine’s role as a surrogate father and grandfather during the long denouement of the Revolution in France and the years he spent living with Nicolas and Marguerite Brazier Bonneville and their four young boys. Paine’s deep relationship with the Bonnevilles lasted for more than 15 years. This essay studies Paine’s time with the Bonnevilles in Paris during the six years he lived with them, from 1797 to 1802, as Napoleon Bonaparte began his ascent to power and U.S.-France relationships floundered.

The impressive Théâtre-Français, affectionately called La Maison de Molière in honor of the French literary icon, is the world’s oldest established national theatre. In the late 1790s, the homes surrounding it were relatively new, and the residents relatively prosperous. The Left Bank was beginning to acquire its reputation as a bohemian and artistic mecca. The street directly north of the theater square was called the Rue de Theatre Français, and it was here that Nicolas Bonneville’s Imprimerie de l’Cercle Social occupied part of the ground floor at No. 4: here that Thomas Paine’s knock on the door, one April day, changed the trajectory of his life. 

This new period in Paine’s life was transformative. In addition to fretting about the state of the world, he assumed a new role: godfather, surrogate grandfather, and family man. His absorption into family life adds a nuanced dimensionality to our knowledge of Paine. The Bonneville family was unique among Paine’s circles because their roles in his life were unique. Family became a part of Paine’s persona through their shared experiences of the revolution as ongoing unrest unfolded across Europe: through years of disruption and uprooting, and even the simple struggles of daily household existence. Several historians have dubbed Paine a “loner,” and missed this important connection. Paine’s inner circles were broader than mere political or pontifical associations, and far more than simply springboards for epistolary exchanges or impassioned editorializing. Friends and family changed Paine’s future.

WHO WERE THE BONNEVILLES? 

Paine first met Nicolas Bonneville in the early, heady days of the French Revolution, after he faced sedition charges in England and arrived to take his seat as the delegate from Calais at the 1792 National Convention. Paine had already formed several firm friendships with friends of the Bonnevilles who were members of the Girondins—especially the Condorcets, the Brissots, and the Rolands.¹ With these contacts came entry into several new networks, including L’Cercle Social, the benignly-named, initially-secretive organization that played an aggressive role in the Revolution as it unfolded. Paine’s induction into the Cercle, helmed by Nicolas Bonneville and the Catholic cleric, Claude Fauchet, firmly inserted him into the heart of French revolutionary activism. 

Bonneville (1760-1828) was a writer, utopianist, activist, publisher, and editor of four newspapers, each aimed at a different demographic. He was part of a rarified coterie of political, philosophical, and theosophical thinkers of the time, and some historians regard him as a founder of the “modern revolutionary tradition.”² His wife, Marguerite Brazier (1767-1846) was a proto-feminist and Cercle Social activist. The Bonnevilles were in the thick of Girondin politics until the rise of the Committee of Public Safety, which unleashed the Terror and led to the executions of many Girondist leaders. Paine was incarcerated, allegedly for being British, and almost died, abandoned by the U.S. Minister to France at the time, Gouverneur Morris.³ After Paine’s release from his imprisonment and long recovery, he came to live with the Bonnevilles, not sure how long he would remain. His years with the family humanized Paine, revealing a different dimension of a complicated man. The constant exchange of ideas between Bonneville and Paine— two utopianists separated by age and temperament— offers glimpses of the intergenerational inspirations that flowed in both directions and steadied Paine through this period of his life. These connections enabled the political Paine, the spiritual Paine, the scientific Paine, and the social Paine to flower in new ways. Imbued with a sense of safety that came from the warmth of his new living arrangements, Paine could focus on the many ideas crowding his thoughts.

Meeting Paine as a family man, in conjunction with his search for relevancy in the wake of the failure of France’s 1793 Constitutional Convention and his difficult imprisonment, discloses a scantily examined chapter in his life. Paine’s stay with the Bonnevilles lasted for six years, from 1797 to 1802, when Paine was finally able to return to the United States after Jefferson was elected president. Paine wrote several forceful pamphlets, and he certainly remained engaged in furthering of his cause for universal republicanism. Paine wrote tirelessly, constantly, and frequently defensively, particularly as Age of Reason continued to create blowback. Significantly, Paine was deeply invested in the triangulated political machinations of the United States, Britain, and France, as well as Bonaparte’s continued thrust into, and annexation of, regions across much of Europe. Paine’s output was largely reactive, rather than accretive. He was not building on radical new ideas, as he had with Agrarian Justice, but instead attempting to dismantle existing ones that conflicted with his own. 

AS THE CENTURY ENDED 

Despite the Enlightenment mantra that we are all created equal, societies are not, and their responses are unpredictable. Causality, complexity, and contingency all played roles in the events leading up to the Western Hemisphere’s revolutions and in the crumbling of their possibilities in France in the years that followed the Terror. The last five years of the eighteenth century saw tremendous turmoil in both the Atlantic world and the halls of governance in America. The Genêt Affair and the Jay Treaty had worsened Franco-American relations, and several events in the United States impacted Paine’s world: John Adams’s ascension to the U.S. Presidency; 1797’s XYZ Affair; and a declaration of what became known as the Quasi-War with France.⁴ It was during this period in America that Federalist hegemony in opposition to Democratic-Republican agrarianism exploded—both in the halls of Congress and across the Atlantic world— as slave revolts in the Caribbean, Napoleon’s incursions deeper across Europe, and diplomatic failures pushed the Western Hemisphere deeper into unrest. 

A NEW HOME, A NEW NETWORK

The Bonneville-Paine connection was forged at the beginning of the Revolution, during the many socio-political gatherings of the post-Bastille, pre-Terror years. In addition to sharing common notions of freedom and an unflaggingly optimistic belief in a better future, Nicolas Bonneville’s fluency in English allowed Paine to speak “in a more familiar and friendly manner than to any other persons of the society.”⁵ On the April day that Marguerite Brazier Bonneville welcomed Paine into her home, she expected him to stay for a fortnight. Instead, he stayed on and off for six years. Many years later, in collaboration with Paine acolyte William Cobbett, Madame Bonneville recalled the statesman’s arrival and the many years spent under her roof.⁶ Her memoirs offer a fascinating picture of Paine’s time between James Monroe’s departure from Paris in 1797 and Paine’s final farewell to France in 1802. 

It fell upon Madame Bonneville—with a newborn in her arms when Paine arrived—to look after her new houseguest. Two other boys scampered around the house: Louis, aged seven, and little Nicolas, just three-and-a-half. 8 Paine loved the children, especially the new baby, named Benjamin in honor of Ben Franklin. He nicknamed the infant “Bebia,” an endearment that stuck through late childhood. A little over a year after Paine’s arrival, a fourth boy, Thomas Paine Bonneville, added to the bustle of an already hectic household and became Paine’s godson. But who was Madame Bonneville? 

Love and marriage did not necessarily go together in pre-revolutionary France, or, for that matter, in much of Western Europe. Marriage often dragged the heavy baggage of laws of inheritance, dowries, dotage, and paternity behind it. For families with any wealth, it involved elaborate financial documents with multiple pages of fiscal foreplay—more business arrangements than bonds of love: a mariage de convenance. Worse still, it could involve conjugal cruelty and forced unions. Within the Catholic Church, there was no escaping an unhappy, or worse, a brutal marriage. In Suzanne Desan’s The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, the author quotes the Comte d’Antraigue’s 1789 description of Old Regime marriage, not as a sacrament, but as “a sacrifice, a sacrilege.”⁹ 

During the revolutionary period, vigorous debates were held on how best to reform the conjugal system. Within the context of these discussions that we can best understand the union Marguerite Brazier entered into with Nicolas Bonneville and the life they began to create together. As a result, with the Enlightenment came newfound matrimonial freedom and a new framework that, to this day, informs the marital laws of many Western nations. 

When Lyonnaise-born Marguerite Brazier— the now-orphaned daughter of an activist maître pâtissier—met Nicolas Bonneville, he had not yet found his true calling. He was alternately hyperfocused or unfocused, with a kind of intellectual attention deficit disorder that kept him veering from one passion to another. Was he a philosophe? A poet? A political theologian? A journalist, politician, linguist, historian? No matter the label, he assuredly believed that he had earned the right to call himself a full-fledged member of the Republic of Letters—as well as a citizen of Paris, which had anointed itself as the cultural capital of the world. 

Meeting Marguerite sparked something new in Nicolas. If he were to be a husband, then the notion of matrimony demanded some of his scattershot attention. In 1792, he finally gathered all his thoughts on marriage—both personal and civic—and published Le Nouveau Code Conjugal.¹⁰ His ability to speak definitively on the subject owed much to his union with Marguerite. As a dyed-in-the-wool idealist, he would not have written this were his marriage a sham. The slender volume is at times frustratingly arcane, particularly in its theoretical discussions of a return to the monarchy. Should any new king only be permitted to marry a Frenchwoman?

In Le Nouveau Code Conjugal, traditional church vows were replaced with a more free-spirited pledge. “I declare, as a free man and good citizen, that I take _________as my friend and my wife.” The woman would reply “ as a free woman and good citizen, I take_________as my friend and my husband.” Friends and lovers: By combining ideals of citizenship with love and friendship, the Bonnevilles saw the culmination of a utopian ideal.

At the time, both believed that a civil union was an act of patriotism and Nicolas argued that religious marriages could only take place if the couple were first bound in a civil marriage—an oddly prescient idea that is the norm in America, where the statement “by the powers vested in me by the State of ________takes place at the end of most wedding ceremonies no matter how religious. But as radical as this ideology was, the union of Marguerite and Nicolas, proved as enduring as any marriage bound by ecclesiastical promises. As Paine settled into his rooms, he read reports of a new monarchist revival brewing, as Royalists emerged from their hiding places, eager to take advantage of the nation’s continued economic struggles to foment a new rebellion and a return to monarchical rule. This troubled Paine, so he sharpened his quill and began writing for Bonneville’s newspaper, Le Bien Informé.

Living with the Bonnevilles offered a healing atmosphere for Paine: the warm and boisterous embrace of family was something he had never experienced before. Bonneville quickly became the son Paine had never had, and Marguerite Brazier, his surrogate daughter-in-law. Every morning, Paine would sleep late, devour the local newspapers, and then seek out his genial host, journals in hand, to “chat upon the topiks [sic] of the day.”¹¹ He wrote editorials for Le Bien Informé, and often found himself in the company of two of Bonneville’s great friends, Louis-Sebastien Mercier and Jean-Charles Nodier both book lovers and brilliant creative writers. 

Mercier was a prolific playwright and one of the earliest writers of science fiction. He, like Paine, had served at the Convention, aligned with the Girondins, and also ended up in prison during the Terror, while Nodier, almost 40 years younger than Paine, represented a new generation of thought.¹² He was a writer of contes fantastiques—tales of vampires and of the romantic monsters that were a hallmark of Gothic literature.¹³ Nonetheless, both Mercier and Nodier were political creatures. They spent a great deal of time with the Bonnevilles, exposing Paine to writers who were part of a burgeoning “romantic” movement in the arts that was sweeping across Europe. 

Romanticism brought a way of seeing a new and rapidly changing world. Feeling was more important than thought, and introspection more important than exposition.¹⁴ The Romantics argued that human behavior was governed by passion, not reason, and we are left to wonder what Paine thought about this.

Bonneville’s newspaper, Le Bien Informé, was a work of serious journalism and was widely read in Paris. It covered politics, society, and literary events along with stock market and weather reports. In addition, Bonneville’s post-Terror printing establishment, Imprimerie de Cercle Social, offered a second journal: Vieux Tribune et sa Bouche de Fer, which was Bonneville’s philosophical playpen for his own idealistic visions, many of which read like mystical fever dreams. Bonneville also translated and published several of Paine’s political tracts, including Compacte Maritime—one of Paine’s last polemical pamphlets. 14 Paine’s association with Bonneville’s imprimerie and specifically Le Bien Informé gave him a platform, a voice, a degree of relevance, and, perhaps misguidedly, a sense of power—a bully pulpit from which he could preach about his ongoing obsession with the end of the British monarchy. Four significant areas occupied Paine as he ricocheted from politics to ombudsmanship to religion to science, and back again, often in the same day.

THE ATLANTICIST PAINE

I have been introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He’s being vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part, I forgive him. He has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than in his writings where his humor is clumsy enough.¹⁵

—Theodore Wolfe Tone

Theobold Wolfe Tone was an Irish revolutionary and a Paine admirer. Together with James Napper Tandy, in 1791, the two Irishmen founded the Society of United Irishmen, with the organization’s goal of “the abolition of bigotry in religion and policies, and the equal distribution of the Rights of Man through all Sects and Denominations of Irishmen.”¹⁶ Paine was an ardent advocate of Irish independence and worked actively for their cause throughout the entirety of his years in France, beginning in the early days of France’s revolution. He wrote several articles in Le Bien Informé lauding the United Irishmen and their leaders, and frequently socialized with both Tone and Tandy, who had come to Paris to rouse French support for their cause.¹⁷ 

Le Bien Informé frequently reported on Paine’s interactions with both men, as well as his associations with Scots agitator Thomas Muir.¹⁸ Paine believed that a corrupt British government was the greatest threat to peace at the time. It became an obsession for Paine, to the point where Great Britain, not Bonaparte’s increasing power grabs, were foremost on his mind. Irish independence was simply part and parcel of Paine’s grander view, and, to his thinking, the logical next steps after France’s victories in Belgium and the creation of a French alliance with the Dutch in 1795.¹⁹ This allowed Paine to foment a fever-dream of his own: an invasion of Great Britain.²⁰ 

Both Paine and Bonneville had a shared flaw: what historian Thomas Walker called their relentlessly “exhilarating optimism.”²¹ Paine’s democratizing international liberalism dominated his activities at this point, yet it is a study in contradictions. He had a deep disdain for war-prone authoritarianism, yet conversely, a belief that military interventions were an acceptable price to pay for progress.²² But in Paine’s envisioned military, the incursions were won by small liberating armies—rather than large-scale invasions—and directed toward nations and states eagerly expressing a desire to transition from a monarchy to a republic. 

Paine began authoring a series of articles for Le Bien Informé, urging an invasion of England.²³ Returning to mathematical analysis as a weapon, he calculated everything from the military force needed to successfully effect an invasion to the cost of building a thousand gunboats. One month later, Paine penned a letter to the Directoire’s Council of Five Hundred, followed by a piece that appeared in Le Bien Informé the next day. In it, Paine championed an intervention entirely funded by contributions from fellow French Republicans. Paine proudly put his money where his mouth was, writing, “My economy permits me to make a small patriotic donation. I send a hundred livres, and with it all the wishes of my heart for the success of the descent, and a voluntary offer of any service I can render to promote it.”²⁴

Throughout this push for invasion, Paine maintained polite relations with Bonaparte, who visited the Rue de Théâtre Français and even dined with the Bonnevilles. Who better to bring down Great Britain’s monarchy than the French general who was wreaking such havoc on Europe? Their initial meetings were cordial, and Paine, a sponge for praise, told his friend Joel Barlow that Bonaparte confessed to sleeping with a copy of Rights of Man by his bed. Many years later, Madame Bonneville remarked that Paine “was not satisfied without admirers of his success,” and at that point, Bonaparte indeed was. That admiration did not last. By 1802, according to a friend of Paine’s, whenever Paine and Bonaparte found themselves together at political gatherings, they would not speak. They simply glared at one another.²⁵ 

Paine had been obsessively devising a British invasion plan, and shared it in a long and detailed letter to James Monroe written in 1797. He praised the efficiency of small, swift gunboats—“a vessel that can elude ships of war, for its object is not to fight but to elude and disembark”—to be deployed across the North Sea under the proper wind conditions to sneak down the British coast to launch an attack.²⁶ Reading the minute details of Paine’s plan, the imaginary envisioning of an almost Viking-like offensive, and the swift crumbling of British monarchist resistance, seems nearly as dreamlike as Bonneville’s romanticist ramblings in Vieux Tribune et sa Bouche de Fer. An abortive attempt to liberate Ireland in August 1798, ended in disappointment one month later after a very short-lived Irish Republic.²⁷ Curiously enough, although specifically warning against authoritarianism in government and condemning the restoration of special privileges based on wealth or caste, Paine at first felt little alarm at the rise to power of Napoleon. For Paine, the greatest of all enemies to the French people, internal or external, was the corrupt and autocratic British government. With his eye on Great Britain, he may have overlooked the potential threat posed by Napoleon to France, so focused was he on the problem of delivering a military defeat to his sworn foe. 

THE SOCIAL PAINE 

The house at No. 4 became Paine’s sanctuary, offering him a metaphorical “throne:”a place to hold court with some of the most influential scientists, politicians, warriors, and philosophers of the age. One role that Paine loved playing was ombudsman: the man with “connections.” He was always busily introducing a needy individual to the right person who could offer help. There was an “innocent Englishwoman trapped in France with a five-year-old child, longing to get home, who Paine assisted.”²⁸ Paine connected Bonneville with a banker he knew to help prepare an loan application for Madame Bonneville to become the proprietress of a lottery office.²⁹ In a remarkable two-column bilingual letter written by Paine and Bonneville, on shared pieces of paper, the men submitted a two-language petition to free Charles Este—the son-in-law of Paine’s close friend Robert Smith—who had been imprisoned.³⁰

Paine even wrote to General Brune—a close friend of Bonneville’s and a key leader with part of Napoleon’s multi-placed strike forces—to say “I congratulate you, my dear and brave general, on your happy and glorious success in Holland,“ and then, still obsessed with the trampling of the British fleet, suggested that the Batavians would need to raise a new navy.³¹ “I have a friend, an American, who has been bred up to sea from his infancy, and is very desirous of serving under Admiral Dewinter. He is in the prime of life, brave, and a complete seaman.”³² Paine also maintained his lifeline to Fulwar Skipwith throughout his years with the Bonnevilles, facilitating help for the inventor Robert Fulton and many others. 

Madame Bonneville, busy with proofreading and child-rearing, was assigned the role of “concierge” and charged with either allowing the visitors who flocked to her door to see Paine, or offering up “polite prevarications” as she put it, when she told them he was not in.³³ 

Paine’s visitors included Tadeusz Kosciuszko, hero of the American Revolution, and Henry Redhead Yorke, a young British friend of Paine’s, who survived Madame Bonneville’s intense scrutiny the first time he came to visit. Yorke was an illegitimate Creole born to a British slave-owning plantation overseer in Barbuda and a free black Antiguan mother. At age six, his father brought him to England to be educated, bestowed a private income upon him, and saw to it that the lad went on to Cambridge, where he studied law. His Caribbean roots and mixed parentage placed Yorke in a position of liminality, and throughout his life, he never quite knew where his feet might best be planted.³⁵

Sociable evenings capped off Paine’s days. He frequently visited with the Barlows and their houseguest, Robert Fulton, or dined with the Smiths. Other nights, Paine would walk over to an Irish coffeehouse on Condé Street. There, a drink in hand, he would hobnob with expatriate Irish, English, and Americans to take the pulse of politics in the U.S. and England.³⁶ Constant exposure to people of many nationalities and all ages kept the cosmopolitan Paine energized and engaged even though he had no official role. 

THE SPIRITUAL PAINE 

The blowback from Christian church adherents to Age of Reason, Part the Second, was vitriolic. Nonetheless, Paine stayed the course, tirelessly defending his beliefs to whoever took him to task about them. Having gained his higher education in the company of learned people in his post-privateering London days, he found himself craving the company of likeminded deists, so Paine joined a relatively new society that began welcoming members in January of 1797. It was a lovely 20-minute walk from the Bonneville’s, past the glorious Saint Chapelle, and across the Seine to gatherings of the Society of the Theophilanthropists. Their dogma was simple: “les Theophilantropes croient a l’existence de Dieu, et a l’immortalite de l’ame,” which translates to “The Theophilanthropists believe in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.”³⁷ Rather than being an apostate, as he was constantly accused, the opposite was true. Paine’s faith was pure and deeply felt, as evidenced in a part of the speech he gave to the group.

The Universe is the bible of a true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God. It is there that the proofs of his existence are to be sought and to be found. As to written or printed books, by whatever name they are called, they are the works of man’s hands, and carry no evidence in themselves that God is the author of any of them. It must be in something that man could not make that we must seek evidence for our belief, and that something is the universe, the true Bible, — the inimitable work of God. 38

—Thomas Paine

The dismantling of the Christian Church by the Committee of Public Safety had left holes in the hearts of many French citizens. Throughout 1797, Paine wrote a series of letters defending his thoughts while challenging his critics to examine their own claims of personal godliness. In a pamphlet entitled Worship and Church Bells, Paine wrote to Camille Jordan, a royalist member of the Council of Five Hundred, and reminded him, “It is a want of feeling to talk of priests and bells while so many infants are perishing in the hospitals, and aged and infirm poor in the streets, from the want of necessaries.”³⁹ 

Paine’s hackles were continually raised by the clinging rigidity of some of his colleagues to existing religious traditions. It is sometimes hard to tell which he was more determined to achieve: the spread of democracy or the global embrace of a new religion of humility and humanity. 

In Prosecution of the Age of Reason, a pamphlet that Paine published in Paris in September of 1797, he confronted Thomas Erskine, a lawyer who had once defended Paine in absentia at his trial for publishing Rights of Man, and who now, five years later, had taken a Burkean path, and chose to prosecute Thomas Williams, Paine’s British publisher of Age of Reason, Part the Second.⁴⁰ Williams was found guilty and sentenced to a three-year prison term. “Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity,” wrote Paine.⁴¹

Bonneville and Paine shared another powerful spiritual bond. Both were intrigued by Freemasonry, but only as an abstraction. Despite allegations of initiation, no records of a single lodge in England, France, or the United States bear either Paine or Bonneville’s name, but both had seriously investigated the practice.⁴² In 1788, before Paine and Bonneville became close, Bonneville had written Les Jesuites Écossoise chassés de la Maçonnerie.⁴³ In it, Bonneville dealt with a conspiracy theory that alleged that the Jesuits infiltrated Masonic lodges and had done the same thing to the medieval Templars. 

The famed historian of the Revolution, Albert Mathiez, described the original gatherings of the Cercle Social as an offshoot of Masonic ideology, writing, “Bonneville, the smoky and bold spirit, [was] the Grand Chief.”⁴⁴ Paine continued to march to his own spiritual drum and began amassing notes for his own study of Freemasonry.⁴⁵

At the same time, Bonneville grew increasingly obsessed by the Bavarian Illuminati, who championed universal brotherhood and the pursuit of global peace through benevolent spirituality. Compassionate globalism was Bonneville’s guiding vision, which he expressed with a romantic’s passion-tinged pen. Paine shared his sentiments but wrote more clinically and scientifically. In L’Esprit des Religions, Bonneville had also championed the creation of a “united universal association” to settle global imbroglios, which he called “the supreme court of nations.”⁴⁶ Paine had adopted that idea and included it in Agrarian Justice—both men envisioning what would one day become the United Nations. The two men, living under the same roof, working together at Le Bien Informé, socializing at a favorite café on the Rue de Marais, discussing literature and philosophy with other forward thinkers, and sharing in the antics of the Bonneville’s little boys, filled a deep ache in Paine’s soul.⁴⁷

THE SCIENTIFIC PAINE 

Politics, religion, and Paine’s occasional ombudsmanship were not enough. As he balanced a full plate of intellectual and social challenges, there was one cherished place of escape for him. When he left America for France in 1787, he created and carried models of his iron bridge. Now, almost 10 years later, living with the Bonnevilles, he had the time to focus on more than party politics and insurrections. Paine resumed his obsession with his arched iron bridge and transformed Bonneville’s study into what he began to call his “work-shop.”⁴⁹ Adding to the din of crying babies, the thrum of the presses on the first floor, and the shrieks of rambunctious children running through the hallways, came the hammering of mallet against metal late into the night. Paine had returned once more to the world of physics and the parameters of engineering: the certainty that came with the laws of nature. 

One of the reasons Paine slept late most mornings was that he stayed up late into the night. Madame Bonneville recalled, “He employed part of his time, while at our house, in bringing this model to high perfection…This was most pleasant amusement for him.”⁵⁰ The blows of a sledgehammer were now added to the soundtrack of the Bonneville home, but the good-natured Bonnevilles accepted the eccentricities of their guest. 

Paine especially welcomed the company of fellow scientists. A frequent visitor to Paine’s workshop was Robert Fulton, one of the masterminds of the steamboat. As a 12-year-old growing up in Pennsylvania, Fulton had met Paine’s Revolutionary wartime friend William Henry, the munitions-maker who had built a giant testing lab to explore steam power. Putting engineering aside in favor of art, Fulton began his career as a portraitist but found himself increasingly distracted by the lure of invention.

He began by improving the functioning of devices to cut marble, dig ditches, and twist rope, but like Paine, he was fascinated by river crossings and experimented with devising a method to make prefabricated iron bridges.⁵¹ He grew interested in the construction of canals, particularly a design with no locks, which initially led to his journey to France. There, he forged a friendship with Paine and his great friends, the Barlows. 

Joel Barlow also shared Paine and Fulton’s fascination with the mechanical arts and took the younger man in as a full-time, long-term guest, whom he affectionately called “Toot.” Together, one of their favorite topics was the notion of submarines, so Fulton submitted a radical plan to the Directoire. He eventually offered a self-funded submarine that he named Nautilus for the purpose of attacking British warships using what he called “torpedoes.”⁵² His reward for any successes would be a bounty for each ship destroyed, based on the number of guns on board. Over the next few years, it is likely that Paine, Barlow, and Fulton talked about Fulton’s submarine, which was eventually built and proved operational. It was during these gatherings that Fulton became a political disciple of Paine’s, adopting a kindred ideology, believing that with France’s help, Britain’s monarchical government would eventually be overthrown. 

During his years with the Bonnevilles, Paine worked diligently on plans for an improved crane and a machine to more efficiently plane wood, which he then used in building newer iterations of his bridge model. In 1801, writing from Paris to his friend, now president, Thomas Jefferson, Paine evoked the third law of Galilei-Newtonian mechanics, describing a self-propelled automotive carriage with wheels that were propelled by small bursts of exploding gunpowder.⁵³ His rapture at the ability to affect motion controllable by man rather than nature, i.e. wind and running water, was intoxicating. Paine saw the limitations of a steam engine as “impracticable, because…the weight of the apparatus necessary to produce Steam is greater than the power of the Steam to remove that weight, and consequently that the Steam engine cannot move itself.”⁵⁴

Paine thought outside the box with an iteration of a combustion engine. “When a stream of water strikes on a water wheel it puts it in motion and continues it. Suppose the water removed and that discharges of gunpowder were made on the periphery of the wheel where the water strikes would they not produce the same effect?”⁵⁵ How glorious, Paine thought, that an agent of death could be a pathway to a better future. He likened it to a poison that suddenly had the potential to cure instead of kill. 

With the end of the one-term presidency of John Adams in 1800 and the ascension of Thomas Jefferson, Paine’s old friend Robert R. Livingston was named the seventh U.S. Minister to France. He arrived in Paris in December of 1801 and called on Paine several times. Madame Bonneville remembered that “One morning we had him at breakfast, [Charles] Dupuis, the author of the Origin of Worship, being of the party; and Mr. Livingston, when he got up to go away, said to Mr. Paine, smiling, “Make your Will; leave the mechanics, the iron bridge, the wheels, etc. to America, and your religion to France.”⁵⁶ 

THE LAWS OF THE SEA

Paine and Bonneville both shared visions of a global peace and a universal brotherhood. Both men had written about it: Paine in Agrarian Justice and Bonneville, five years earlier, in L’Esprit de Religions. Paine was still impacted by his long-ago privateering experiences, still obsessed by oceanic inter-dependencies, and still angered by the Jay Treaty, so he gathered several articles and letters he had penned and put them together into a new pamphlet, Compact Maritime, which Bonneville translated into French and printed in 1800.⁵⁷ An English version emerged the following year.⁵⁸ The first part, “Dissertation on the Law of Nations,” was a condemnation of treaties, which “besides being partial things, are in many instances contradictory to each other.”⁵⁹ Paine applauded the Armed Neutrality pact, earlier proposed by Russia and signed by most of the maritime commercial nations of Europe stating, “neutral ships make neutral property,” but Tsar Paul’s death precluded its enactment. Why, Paine wondered, if this step could be taken, were there no international laws when it came to the seas? 

Bonneville was a philologist. He loved words, loved analyzing them, loved dissecting them down to their ancient roots. Paine had absorbed this habit and proceeded to autopsy the word “contraband” in the first part of Compact Maritime. If the Western world’s economy was driven by commerce, nations could not simply define contraband as they saw fit. The word in itself was meaningless. This was Paine’s first common sense stepping-stone to calling for the creation of international maritime protocols. Part II, “On the Jacobinism of the English at Sea,” was directed toward neutral nations. It was a call to action—a demand that nations assert their “rights of commerce and the liberty of the seas.”⁶⁰ Paine pointed to the fact that Britain’s power came from its commerce and not from land resources, “hence, upon external circumstances not in her power to command.”⁶¹ That made the nation vulnerable in his estimation. Part III spelled out Paine’s 10- part proposal for an international trade agreement, based on oceanic safe spaces. If all the neutral nations of Europe, together with the United States of America, entered into an association to suspend all commerce with any belligerent power that molested any ship belonging to the association, England would either lose her commerce or be forced to consent to the freedom of the seas. Commerce, Paine pointed out, was England’s Achilles Heel. Paine’s time with the Romantics led him to pen a very flowery, Bonneville-like conclusion. “…we see France like the burning bush, not only unconsumed, but erecting her head and smiling above the flames. She throws coalitions to atoms with the strength of thunder—Combat and victory are to her synonymous.”⁶² 

BONAPARTE’S REVENGE 

Combat and victory were also words synonymous with Napoleon Bonaparte’s incursions across Europe and into Africa. His meteoric rise from a Corsican expat to military wunderkind came to some degree through a series of fortuitous patronages. He had identified with the Robespierrists during the revolution, but somehow survived the taint of that association to catch the eye of Paul Barras, President of the Directoire, in 1795. During France’s protracted wars, Bonaparte’s ongoing military successes made him a hero. 

During Paine’s time living with the Bonnevilles in France, Bonaparte made several visits to No. 4 Rue de Theatre Français and made a favorable impression on both Paine and Bonneville as Paine tried to convince the General that a full-throttled invasion of Britain was achievable. There were three meetings arranged with the Irish Republicans and Bonaparte, in which Bonneville served as a translator, but little came of the efforts.⁶³ Bonaparte instead turned his attentions to Egypt, and Ireland was forgotten. 

The seventeenth of Fructidor (September 3, 1797) was a landmark day in France. A coup d’état backed by military force, purged royalist and counter-revolutionary elements from the government, and gave emergency powers to the members of the Directoire. In response, Paine began penning a pamphlet, To the People of France and the French Armies, analyzing the progress of the Republic, and acknowledging that the crisis was a result of the “darksome manoeuvres of a faction.”⁶⁴ He cited historical precedent for martial law to avoid bloodshed and to restore tranquility, perhaps as much to calm his readers as himself. In 1799, after a string of military victories, Bonaparte declared himself the First Consul of France, which led to a fast-growing disenchantment on the part of both Paine and Bonneville. Napoleonic France was a betrayal of the democratic values that so many had sacrificed their lives to obtain. 

Bonneville had been growing increasingly critical of the government through his editorializing in Le Bien Informé, and one day he went too far. He skewered the frequently silent Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyés, one of the members of the Directory, after Sieyés went to Prussia on a state visit, writing, “If there were organized in Berlin a club of mutes, [he] should be named president, the dean of silent men.”⁶⁵ The order came down to cease publishing, but Paine—always anxious to insert himself in the defense of the oppressed, wrote to the Directory and assured them that Bonneville was “honest” and “uncorrupted…a very industrious man—a good father, and a good friend.”⁶⁶ Paine’s appeal worked, but only temporarily. Bonaparte was also monitoring Bonneville (and by extension Paine) as a potential enemy of the government.” 

Soon after the Coup of 18 Brumaire—the day Bonaparte declared himself First Consul of the French First Republic—Bonneville likened Napoleon to Oliver Cromwell—a brutal autocrat who had orchestrated a genocide in Ireland over religious freedoms in 1649. In response, his presses were confiscated, and Bonneville was soon taken away and imprisoned. He would be silenced for several years.⁶⁷

Paine had the good sense to leave town, head for Dieppe on the coast, and then on to Bruges to stay with Joseph Van Huele, a former inmate at the Luxembourg, who had cared for Paine during his almost fatal illness.68 Paine described Van Huele as his “particular friend” in recognition of the terrifying bond they shared after Joseph’s brother, Jean-Othon Van Huele, was hurled from a top-floor window, as Paine and the Belgian watched in horror.⁶⁹ 

THE ROAD HOME 

Paine had made his disaffection with Washington well known after his liberation from the Luxembourg, and it had cost him dearly. His opinion of John Adams was even worse (and certainly there was nothing but overt contempt in Adams’ opinion of Paine). Not holding back, Paine dubbed Washington and Adams, “Terrorists of the New World.”69 So when news finally reached France of Jefferson’s ascent to the U.S. presidency, he rejoiced, knowing he would be able to return to the place he called his true home.⁷⁰ In March of 1801, Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as president. A year earlier, the Treaty of Mortefontaine was signed, ending the Quasi-War, which gave Paine the opportunity to arrange for a safe journey across the Atlantic. Jefferson tried to send an official U.S. ship to carry Paine home, but Federalist opposition in the press created too much of a stir. 

Finally, a ship was found courtesy of a Connecticut sea captain that Paine was friends with and a departure date set: September 2, 1802. A few days before Paine was due to leave, he dined with the Smiths one last time, and after a festive evening, he remarked that he had nothing to detain him in France; “for that he was neither in love, debt, nor difficulty.”⁷¹ During his lengthy imprisonment, Lady Charlotte Smith had exchanged poetry with Paine, he writing from “The Castle in the Air,” and she replying from her “Little Corner of the World.” She fixed her gaze on him and remarked that it was ungallant to say such a thing in the company of women. In reply, Paine jotted off one final ditty to his cherished friend, called “What is Love?” In its first stanza, he wrote:

It is that delightsome transport we can feel 

Which painters cannot paint,

nor words reveal, 

Nor any art we know of can conceal. 

Canst thou describe the sunbeams

to the blind, 

Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?⁷²

But what of Madame Bonneville? Paine had often talked of the family coming to America, but the choice to leave France was not so easy for Madame Bonneville. She was left with four young boys and no means of support other than the charity of her husband’s father in provincial Evreux. Should she stay in France, or take advantage of Paine’s offer to care for her sons until her husband might be freed? Many years earlier, she had chosen dislocation, leaving her native Lyon and her siblings when she was barely 18 to travel to Paris in search of adventure. But Lyon was a few hundred kilometers away, not across an ocean. A decision had to be made. Choosing to protect her husband’s future reputation, she evasively recalled in her later memoir, “Some affairs of great consequence made it impracticable for Mr. Bonneville to quit France…it was resolved, soon after the departure of Mr. Paine for America, that I should go thither with my children, relying fully on the good offices of Mr. Paine, whose conduct in America justified that reliance.”⁷³ 

On September 2, 1802, with his stalwart friend Thomas “Clio” Rickman by his side to wave farewell as he sailed away, the men arrived at Havre-de-Grâce. Two British friends, Francis Burdett and William Bosville, bestowed a £500 gift upon Paine to help him settle in when he finally arrived in America.⁷⁴ It was not until October 30 that he finally sailed into Baltimore harbor after a treacherous crossing. He had been away from his adopted country for 15 years. He was 63 years old and worn by age, maltreatment, and disappointment—heartsick over the continuing sparring of warring political parties in America—tired of what he saw as the Federalists’factionalism, and the failures of some of the Atlantic revolutions. Still, as it has been said, “hope is optimism with a broken heart.” So Paine, always the eternal optimist, dug deep, believing that he still had the power to effect change. 

THE PATH AHEAD 

At the same time that Paine arrived in America, there were enormous changes afoot across the great swath of New France—the vast tracts of land that lay to the west of the Mississippi River.⁷⁵ In October 1802, Spain’s King Charles IV signed a decree transferring the territory to France, while Spanish agents in New Orleans, acting on orders from the Spanish court, revoked U.S. access to the port’s warehouses. New Orleans was well on its way to becoming one of the busiest slave markets in America by then. Paine had thoughts on the topic and wrote to Jefferson two months after he arrived back in America from France.

Spain has ceded Louisiana to france and france has excluded Americans from N. Orleans and the Navigation of the Mississippi – the people of the western territory have complained of it to their government, and the governt. is of consequence involved and interested in the affair. The question then is, What is the best step to be taken first.⁷⁶

—Thomas Paine 

Perhaps he could convince Jefferson to offer to purchase all the Louisiana Territory for the United States: not just the Port of New Orleans. He believed he understood the mindset of the French government in a unique way. Perhaps there was even an official role for him. Paine was not finished: There was still work to be done.

THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF A TWO-PART ESSAY

ENDNOTES

1. The group that Brissot, Roland, and Condorcet belonged to, were known as the Girondins, because many of them were from Bordeaux in an area known as the Gironde. They were politically moderate with a specifically nationalistic viewpoint. Their opposition were often called the Montagnards, who had earned that somewhat sarcastic name—the Mountain—because they sat in the higher rows of the chamber where the Assembly met. The Montagnard’s interests were more focused on Paris and more radical. 
2. See Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, The Girondins, and the French Revolution, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 
3. Morris disliked Paine, and was happy to have him locked away. The recall of Morris in 1704, and his replacement with James Monroe saved Paine.
4. The Directory needed money to continue funding Bonaparte’s European incursions, and many French politicos were angry that John Jay allied with Britain in 1794, especially since The U.S. still owed France repayments for loans from the War of Independence. In 1796, France issues an order allowing for the seizure of American merchant ships. 
5. The Cobbet Papers in Moncure Daniel Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. 2, Appendix A. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 429-460 
6. William Cobbett was an Englishman who went from hating Paine, to becoming an ardent admirer. After Paine’s death, Cobbett and Madame Bonneville began collaborating on a homage to Paine and there are many manuscript notes prepared by Madame Bonneville in which she shares her memories. These were eventually included in “The Cobbett Papers” that were added to Conway’s Life of Thomas Paine. 
7. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol 2, 443. 
8. A fire at the Paris city archives destroyed all records of births, deaths and marriages. None of the boys were baptized in the Catholic Church so no records exist there. Benjamin Louis Eulalie (Bebia) was born April 14, 1797, and little Nicolas was born on December 5, 1793. These are the only two officially verified birthdates because we know Benjamin’s birthdate from his application to attend West Point when he was a teenager and Nicolas—who had been too frail to travel to America—from his death certificate when he was 15. Louis and Thomas’s ages (but not dates of birth) were cited on the ship’s manifest when Madame Bonneville sought refuge in America in 1802.
9. Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15. Desan writes, “if the state was now to be rooted in a contract freely chosen by the people, then marriage too, should rest on the free choice and contract of individuals.” 
10. Nicolas Bonneville, Le Nouveau Code Conjugal: Etabli sur les bases de la Constitution, et d’après les principes et les considérations de la loi, (Paris: L’impremier du Cercle Social, 1792).
11. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol 2, 443. 
12. Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740-1814) was a venerated playwright and his science-fiction novel, L’An 2440 was groundbreaking. Jean-Charles Nodier (1780-1844) was a book-lover from a young age. A librarian, he was also an ardent Romanticist and eventually gained fame for his Gothic novels. 
13. Maurice Cranstoun, The Romantic Movement, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,1994), 11. 
14. Paine had fleshed out these ideas in a series of letters to Thomas Jefferson prior to the pamphlet’s publication 
15. Theobold Wolfe Tone, The Autobiography of Theobold Wolf Tone, Vol II, (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893), 189.Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) was a cofounder of the United Irishmen, and an officer in the French army under General Hoche, who led an assault on the Irish Coast in 1796 which failed due to bad weather. A second attempt in October 1798 also ended badly, with Tone captured and imprisoned. He killed himself rather than being hanged.
16. Nancy Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798.(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), 24. 
17. James Napper Tandy (1739-1803) was also a co-founder of the United Irishmen and a friend of Thomas Paine’s, living in Paris at the time Paine was articulating an invasion plan of attack against Britain. 
18. See Ann Thomson, “Thomas Paine and the United Irishmen,” Persee: Études irlandaises, no.16-1, (1991), 109-119. 
19. A revolt in the Netherlands between 1794-1795 led to the birth of the Batavian Republic as a “satellite” republic under French auspices. For enemies of Great Britain, that belief was that the alliance, which had created a long stretch of coastline, as far south as the Pyrenees, would offer control of shipping, banking, and other resources through the combined fleets of two maritime powers against British trade and sea power. 
20. Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Thomas Paine’s Plan for a Descent on England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1957), 74–84. Through France’s alliance with the Netherlands, the French now had a large stretch of coastline on the North Sea from which to launch a possible invasion. The formation of the Batavian Republic in 1795 took place when the Dutch Stadtholder was overthrown and a French “sister state” was established. 
21. Thomas Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet: Tom Paine’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly, 44 no.1 (2000), 166. 
22. Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet,” 51 
23. Le Bien Informé, Paris, Frimaire, and 25 Frimaire, An VI (December 14, 1797. Biblitoteque National de France
24. Le Bien Informé, January 28, 1798. 
25. Henry Redhead Yorke: Letters from France, in 1802, (Volume 2, London: H.D. Symonds, 1804), 339. 
26. Thomas Paine to James Monroe, “Observations on the Construction and Operation of Navies with a Plan for an Invasion of England and the Final Overthrow of the English Government,” 1797. Library of Congress. 
27. About 1,000 French soldiers, under the leadership of General Humbert staged a successful landing in County Mayo on August 22. There were three attempted invasions that summer, but none were successful. 
28. Thomas Paine to Citizen Peyel, 9 Ventoise, An 3. BNF 
29. On October 26, 1797, Nicolas Bonneville wrote to banker Jean-Frédéric Perregaux, a friend of Paine’s, to borrow money to purchase, with government authorization, a lottery office that would be operated by “the mother of his children.“ Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. 
30. Thomas Paine/Nicolas Bonneville to Senator Garat, 7 Nivoise, An 9, (December 27, 1800), Iona College/ Thomas Paine Archives.
31. Thomas Paine to General Brune, November 1799. TPHA 
32. Thomas Paine to General Brune, November 1799. TPHA 
33. Paine to Brune, November 1799. 
34. The Cobbett Papers in Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. II, 443. 
35. For more on Yorke, see Amanda Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical: Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World (1772-1813), (London: Routledge, 2019.) He met Paine in late 1792 as a presenter for the Society for Constitutional Information to the National Convention, where he mixed with the British expatriate community, and witnessed the revolution first hand. 
36. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 438. 
37. Thomas Paine, Religious Year of the Theophilanthropists: or Adorers of God and Friends of Man, 2nd edition, John Walker, trans. (London: Darton and Harvey, 1797; For more, see Henri Gregoire’s “Histoire des Sectes,” tom. I., livre 2
38. Thomas Paine, A Discourse Delivered by Thomas Paine, at the Society of the Theophilanthropists, at Paris, 1798. 
39. Thomas Paine to Camille Jordan, “Worship and Church Bells,” 1797. TPHA. 
40. Thomas Paine, A Letter to Mr. Erskine, September 1797. TPHA 
41. Thomas Paine, A Letter to Mr. Erskine, September 1797. TPHA
42. Many historians assert that Bonneville was a Mason, but he was not. Bonneville offered a debt of gratitude to the “very dear and very respectable” Loge de la Réunion des Etrangers, but never joined. 
43. Nicolas Bonneville, Les Jesuites Écossoise chassés de la Maçonnerie, et Leur Poignard Brisé par les Maçons, (Paris: Orient de Londres, 1788.) Bonneville fascinated by the Bavarian Illuminati, and wrote L’Esprit de Religion in response to that movement. 
44. Isabelle Bourdin, Les Sociétés Populaire a Paris Pedant La Révolution (Paris, 1910), 159, quoting Albert Mathiez, Le Club des Cordeliers pendant the la crise de Varennes et la massacre du Champs de Mars.(Geneva:Slatkine, 1975). 
45. After his death, Madame Bonneville edited out some of Paine’s more pointed anti-Catholic sentiments and had printed, On the Origin of Freemasonry, (New York: Elliot and Crissy, 1810.)
46. Nicolas Bonneville, L’Esprit de Religions, (Paris: Imprimerie de le Cercle Social,1793), 159-160 
47. Paine grew up as an only child after his sister died in infancy. His first wife, Mary Lambert, died in childbirth, and he separated from his second wife, Elizabeth Ollive, having never consumated the marriage. 
48. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
49. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
50. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
51. Alan Rems, “Man of War,” Naval History, Volume 25, No. 4, July 2011. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history magazine/2011/july/man-war 
52. Rems, “Man of War.” 
53. Cobbett wrote, “A machine for planing boards was his next invention, which machine he had executed partly by one blacksmith and partly by another. The machine being put together by him, he placed it on the floor, and with it planed boards to any number that he required, to make some models of wheels. Mr. Bonneville has two of these wheels now. There is a specification of the wheels, given by Mr. Paine himself. This specification, together with a drawing of the model, made by Mr. Fulton, were deposited at Washington, in February 1811; and the other documents necessary to obtain a patent as an invention of Thomas Paine, for the benefit of Madam Bonneville.” 
54. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, “On the Means of Generating Motion for Mechanical Uses,” 1801, LOC
55. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, “On the Means of Generating Motion for Mechanical Uses,” 1801, LOC
56. The Cobbett Papers in Conway, 456. Dupuis’s work was a study of comparative religions based on the thesis that argued that all religions have a common origin, which can be traced back to the worship of the sun, moon, and stars. 
57. Thomas Paine, Pacte Maritime adresséaux nations neutres par un neuter, (Paris: Imprimerie–Librairie du Cercle Social, 1800). 
58. Thomas Paine, Compact Maritime, (City of Washington: Samuel Harrison Smith, 1801). 
59. Paine, Pacte Maritime, 4 
60. Paine, Pacte Maritime,11 
61. Paine, Compact Maritime, 24. The Fourth part of Paine’s work was a sarcastic analysis of the decisions of the judge of the English Admiralty
62. Paine, Compact Maritime, 24. The Fourth part of Paine’s work was a sarcastic analysis of the decisions of the judge of the English Admiralty
63. A petition from Bonneville to Napoleon reveals that he served as an interpreter during three meetings of General Bonaparte in 1797 with the United Irish chief. Arch. nat. F7 4286 dos.16. 
64. Thomas Paine, To the People of France and the French Armies, TPHA. (In Foner, Complete Writings, 2.605). 
65. Le Bien Informé September 17, 1798 66F7/8083/1196, Archives Nationale, Paris 
66. Le Bien Informé September 17, 1798 66F7/8083/1196, Archives Nationale, Paris 
67. Bonneville was imprisoned for having hidden Augustin Barruel in his home, under the guise of hiring him as a copyeditor. But Barruel had described Bonneville as an “impudent continuator of the nefarious job undertaken by Voltaire and his acolytes,” in Augustin Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Fauche, 1803), 2:275–301.
68. “De filosoof Thomas Paine en zijn Brugse vriend Joseph Van Huele,” Bruge die Scone 4 (1993). 
69. Thomas Paine, “To the Citizens of the United States” (Letter III), 29 November 1802, in Complete Writings, 2:918, 920; “To the Citizens of the United States” (Letter VI), 12 March 1803. 
70. Beginning in October 1800, Paine wrote a series of letters, that culminated with his essay, Compact Maritime. In March, 1801, Jefferson offered Paine transportation on a U.S. ship, but Paine learned that his old friend, Robert Livingston, would be Jefferson’s minister to France, so decided to wait for Livingston’s arrival, hoping that he might be offered an official government role. 
71. The Cobbet Papers, 446 
72. Thomas Paine to Mrs. Robert Smith, “What is Love,”1800. TPHA 
73. The Cobbet Papers, 446-447
74. Mark Philp, Thomas Paine: Very Interesting People, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 80. Burdett (1770-1844) was an English reformist politician who championed universal male suffrage. Bosville (1745-1813) was an extremely wealthy eccentric. He fought against the Americans during the War of Independence but left the battle impressed with the republican ethos. He was an ardent Whig and a very close friend of Paine’s friend John Horne Tooke. He and Burdett frequently socialized together. 
75. These territories were originally the dominion of France, but in 1762, after the signing of the Treaty of Fontainbleau the Francophile citizens of the region learned that they were now subjects of Spain. The entire Mississippi River Valley passed from Louis XV to his Spanish cousin Charles III as part of a secret pact at the end of the Seven-Years War, but this political sleight-of-hand changed little for the residents. French was still the Lingua Franca of the region. 
76. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, December 25, 1802, Library of Congress.

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The complete essay from the TPNHA Collection:

Although pious legends picture Thomas Paine as terrified of death, his only fear was lest he should live too long, and suffer like his parents from helpless age. When at length death was plainly approaching his only dread was excited by the zealous aggressions of proselytizers, whose eagerness for some miraculous manifestations from heaven or hell, at the death bed of the famous deist was likely, he foresaw, to fabricate a fabulous fulfillment. He therefore sent for the widow of friend Elihu Palmer, who had been left in poverty, to watch beside him till his death. His next anxiety was lest fanatics, in their disappointment that he was neither converted nor carried off by Satan, should subject his body to indignities, and, his parents having been Quakers, he requested burial in the Friends’ graveyard in New York. This was refused solely because of his deism, nothing whatever being alleged against his character. He was buried at New Rochelle on the farm presented to him by the State of New York at the close of the Revolution because of his services in that struggle.

And even then Paine entered on his posthumous career. There was no Quaker formula against deism, and the refusal of a grave to Paine, resented by some members of that Society, began a controversy which as I believe resulted twenty years later in a split, and the establishment of the rationalistic Society now known as “Hicksite Quakers”.

A plain headstone was placed at Paine’s grave, but bits of it were chipped away by visitors. A Fragment is sometimes shown at Paine’s celebrations in New York, and the destruction of the headstone ascribed to orthodox vandalism. But Gilbert Vale, who in 1837 edited The Beacon, said in that paper that it was done by “admiring visitors”. In his paper of July 15, 1837, Vale says: “After Cobbett violated the grave, and removed the bones from the remains of Paine, the headstone as broken, and pieces successively removed by different visitors; one large fragment was preserved by a lady in an opposite cottage, in which Mr. Paine had sometimes boarded; but this fragment gradually suffered diminution, as successive visitors begged a piece of what they could no longer steal. To preserve the last remnant the lady has had it plastered up in a wall.” The cottage alluded to is the Bayeaux house, and the lady Mrs. Badeau, who lived there with her mother, the widow Bayeaux, when Paine was a boarder. Her son, Mr. Albert Badeau, whom I visited in New Rochelle in 1891, preserved various relics of Paine. He saw Cobbett’s workmen digging up Paine’s bones about dawn.

In September 1819 Cobbett wrote from America a public letter to Lord Folkstone in which he advised him to read Paine’s “Decline and Fall of the British System of Finance”: “and then blush at the use of the words ‘Lower Orders’; blush to think that this man, born in humble life, knew more than all the ‘higher orders’ put together. Yet while such a fellow as pensioned Johnson, ‘that slave of state’, stands in colossal marble in St. Paul’s, Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America. There, however, he shall not lie, unnoticed, much longer. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of England; and if no other people will show that they value that fame, the people of England will. Yes, my Lord, among the pleasures that I promise myself, is that of seeing the name of Paine honoured in every part of England, where base corruption caused him, while alive, to be burnt in effigy. Never will England be what it ought to be until the marble of Pitt’s monument is converted into a monument to the memory of Paine.”

In the same month the remains were dug up. “Our expedition”, wrote Cobbett, “set out from New York in the middle of the night; got to the place (twenty-two miles off) at peak of day; took up the coffin entire; and just as we found it, goes to England. Let it be considered the act of the Reformers of England, Scotland and Ireland. In their name we opened the grave, and in their name will the tomb be raised.” (Cobbett’s Register xxxv. P.382.) According to The Beacon (Dec. 27,1845) a little finger of Paine was left in America, and was “in the possession of a friend <?Quaker> on Long Island.”

In Manordes’s “Biographical Treasury” it is said, “Many however assert that Cobbett did not take that trouble, but brought over from America the remains of a criminal who had been executed.” There is not however the slightest room for doubt on this point. Not only did Mr. Albert Badeau of New Rochelle witness the removal of the coffin, but the grave itself long bore the like witness. Dr. Clair J. Grece of Redhill has sent me an extract from a diary kept by his uncle Danial Constable while in America, who visited the grave on July 26,1822, and says “The grave is surrounded by a stone wall 16 feet by 12 and l8 inches thick, about 4 feet high. The grave is sunk in about the depth of a coffin. Some of the neighbors aided the three men who came with a wagon a little before day. They say had the proper authorities had known in time they would prevented the outrage.”

An aged Quaker informed me that a number of “Friends” who were on the “Elizabeth” when Cobbett came aboard with the big box, at New York, left the ship on learning its contents; but those who looked for a striking judgment on the vessel were disappointed. Cobbett with his strange freight landed at Liverpool on November 21,1819.

Before relating the adventures of Paine’s bones it may be of interest to record that the project of a monument to Paine at New Rochelle originated in 1837 with Gilbert Vale, who compiled a biography of Paine, and Mrs. Badeau, who, with her mother Mrs. Bayeaux, – both orthodox, – preserved an affectionate memory of the author and his sojourn as a boarder in their home at New Rochelle. The graceful monument was designed by John Frazee, an eminent architect, gratuitously, and was constructed at James’s marble works in New Rochelle. The portrait was cut from a medal of the time, owned by a Mr. Gill and is – or was- a good likeness. The monument is not exactly over the grave but near its head. The farmer into whose hands the surrounding land had passed would not permit the committee to reach the twelve square feet which had been reserved inviolably for Paine’s grave, by Madame Bonneville, so they had to purchase, at a cost of $50, twenty square feet of ground at the corner of the road and the lane leading to Paine’s house. The largest subscription for the monument was that of Hiram Parker, $30, the others having mostly one dollar each. The total cost, including the land, was $1,634. The monument was erected in November 1839, in the presence of about fifty persons, but without any formalities or speeches.

The reaction caused by the French Revolution was beginning to subside when Cobbett brought to England the bones of its famous outlaw, who, the Attorney General had declared in 1792, should never enter the country again except in vinculis. The “Painites” were reviving interest in their hero, and Richard Carlile had just been sent to prison for publishing the “Age of Reason”. And by the way, soon after his arrival Cobbett visited Carlile in gaol: the prisoner said “Ah, had I been in America, they would not have thrown me in prison.” “No”, replied Cobbett, “they would have tarred and feathered you.”

Cobbett’s enterprise was met with mingled wrath and ridicule. Probably most people now have no association with the incident except the four lines of Byron (following an equally cynical epitaph on Pitt) in a letter to Moore, from Ravcuna, Jan. 2,1820

“In digging up your bones, Tom Paine, Will Cobbett has done well: You visit him on earth again, He’ll visit you in hell.”

“Pray”, adds Byron, “let not these versiculi go forth with my name except among the initiated, because my friend H. has foamed into a reformer, and I greatly fear will subside into Newgate.” Even while the poet was writing, his friend H. – John Cam Hobhouse – was already in Newgate. It was for a pamphlet on Lord Erskine, so severely contrasting his earlier with his reactionary position, that it must almost have seemed to summon Paine as a Banquo at the feast of his once noble defender, but afterwards ennobled prosecutor. In fact Byron, in his Southern retreat, interested only in his alter ego Don Juan, was little aware of the political situation in England, and took the laughter over Paine’s bones to be more genuine than it was. The merriment was not that of the Tories, but rather an effort of the old Whigs to hooh-pooh an incident fallen at the most serious crisis since the French Revolution.

In August had occurred the terrible suppression of the mass meeting at Manchester (“Peterloo”). The trials of the Carliles and other heretical publishers and writers were filling the radicals with consternation. The storm was rising concerning Queen Caroline around whom the liberals were gathering with intense wrath against the Prince Regent whose full reign was at hand. Eight days after the arrival of Paine’s bones at Liverpool three different Bills were introduced into Parliament, all heavily loaded guns aimed against the recovery by the people of rights lost during the French revolution – the Seditious Meetings Bill, the Training Prevention Bill, and the Blasphemous Libels Bill. The promoters of these measures were not slow in availing themselves of the Paine-Cobbett incident. On December2 Mr. Wilmot made a strong point of it in the House of Commons:

“Does anybody advocate the principle of these meetings? If such a man exists it can only be in the person of the individual just returned from America, who has dug up the unhallowed bones of the blasphemer, and has brought them to this country for the purpose of creating a frenzied feeling in favour of his projects, and like old John Ziska, who desired that his skin be made into a drum to rouse his countrymen, wished to stir up impiety and disaffection by the exhibition of this mummery to the initated people of this country.”

After that, the Whig ridicule began, as if by mot d’ordre, and on December 17 a leading opponent of the government Bills, Earl Grosvenor, utilized the ridicule to prove them unnecessary:

“To prove still further the feelings by which people are actuated, I beg leave to mention the way in which a posthumous production, the bones of Thomas Paine, has been treated in this country. The person by whom that vile experiment has been tried found that he had a little mistaken the feeling and character of the people of England. Was there ever any subject treated with more laughter, contempt, and derision than the introduction of these miserable bones, – whether the bones of Thomas Paine or not I will not undertake to decide.”

Mr. Edward Smith of Walthamstow, Cobbett’s able biographer, does not share my suspicion that this ridicule was artificial. He says that Paine’s religious heresies had obliterated his political ideas.” In England he was known by his theology; and was branded as an Atheist by the hirelings who could not, or dare not try to refute him.” He reproaches Cobbett for not knowing that such things do not strike or interest the English mind. But two years later the performance was imitated by the importation in a ship of what was left of the bones of Major Andre for burial in Westminster Abbey, and Cobbett wrote: “All the differences between me and the Duke of York is, that I bring home the bones of an Englishman famed throughout the world for his talents and writings; and that the Duke brings home the bones of one who was hanged as a spy.” As for the ridicule, it was, apart from newspaper paragraphs, chiefly represented by some anonymous rhymes written with skill, but with an affectation of rudeness, and printed in the cheapest form. The date of the first effusion in December1 819, about three weeks after the bones were heard of in London, and it was entitled, “The Political House that Jack Built”. In a picture Cobbett is seen in a boat marked “Rights of Man”, seated on a coffin, and rowed by two Negroes.

“B is a boat that used to ply Across the Brooklyn Ferry; To Market Slip that’s called the Fly, A pretty kind of wherry.

“And ’tis constructed on a plan That’s best to cut the waves: The name of it is rights of man, And rowed by Negro slaves.

“This boat Bill Cobb hired for a week, And entered on a trip, A passage over sea to seek In Merchant Brig or Ship

“A coffin with him too he took When Paine’s Bones lay in state, And tried each bark from Sandy Hook, In vain – quite to Hell’s Gate.

“And thither was his utmost scope, Nor farther has he been; The massive door refused to ope Just yet – to let him in.”

Another piece is headed “sketches of the Life of Billy Cobb and the death of Tommy Pain”. The woodcut here shows Cobbett under an apple tree, his hat on the ground full of apples, with Paine’s skeleton on one side seizing him by the throat, and on the other the Devil touching him on the shoulder. The muses tell that when Paine was dying the Devil appeared and said his skull was now to be buried “for ever and ever.”

“One boon and only one I crave”, Said Thomas with a sigh, “Let it be till there pass my grave A caitiff worse than I.”

The Devil thinks it quite safe to agree to this, but when Cobbett touches the grave Paine springs up, and attacks him on old scores, for Cobbett had reproduced “Oldys”‘ libels in America, and was connected to Painism only in after years. The Devil is at first rather pleased with the fight, being afraid that he may be “superceded” on his throne by one of them, but finally he reconciles them in view of the mischief they can do in England. Another woodcut shows Cobbett, coffin on shoulder; and next we see the ship.

“E for Elizabeth doth stand And that’s a vessel’s name, That lately sailed from Yankey-Iand And to the Mersey came.”

Another hand identified in Notes and Queries, Feb. 29, 1868 as Thomas Rodd, Sr., (“John English” is the pseudonym) wrote an “Ode on the Bones of the Immortal Thomas Paine, newly transported from America to England by the no less immortal William Cobbett, Esq. Hic labor hic opus. Great Paine for little trumpery.” (4 to pp 8). This privately printed poem (now very rare) tries at points to be satirical, without much success; it is severe on Paine’s theological negations, but discloses a certain admiration for the arch-heretic. I quote a specimen:

“No Judge or Jury does he fear, Nor e’en the Attorney General’s frown Nor dread lthuriel with his spear Can knock this doughty Champion down.

‘Tis cowardice to strike the slain, ‘Tis cowardice to strike Tom Paine High high in dust the hero lies, And from his narrow box his face defies.

Who shall the great Arch-Flamen be Of this new god? Upon whose shrine Let brass and farthing candles shine; His pen once gain’d the victory,

And still victorious reigns, in spite Of all the Bishop could indite: None but the mighty hand of Law Against this daring Chief the quill could prosperous draw.”

Whether under more auspicious circumstances Cobbett could have received any enthusiasm for Paine can now be only a matter of conjecture. In 1820 George the Third, born in the same year with Paine, gave a fatal blow to all interest in his bones by dying on Paine’s birthday, January 29. Thenceforth popular feeling was entirely occupied with the sufferings of Queen Caroline and the affairs of George IV. Cobbett at once began his efforts to get into Parliament, and Paine’s bones were stored away and forgotten for many a long year. It appears, however, that he occasionally exhibited the bones. The Rev. Gerald Davies, of Charterhouse, wrote to the “Surrey Times”, Feb. 2, 1889, that he was told by the late James Wyatt, of Bedford, geologist, that in boyhood, being at Normandy Farm, Cobbett’s last residence, he said, “Is it true you keep the bones of Tom Paine, the infidel?” Cobbett replied, “What do you know about Tom Paine?” But he took the boy up stairs and showed him the bones. William Cobbett dies June 18, 1835, at Normandy Farm, near Guilford. His son J.P. Cobbett found himself unable to pay off his father’s debts and his own, and the effects were sold by Thomas Piggott at auction in the autumn of the same year, on the premises. This information was communicated to the “Surrey Times”, Jan. 19, 1889,b y D.M. Stevens, who adds:

“My informants, who were present at the sale, told me that a box was pointed out as containing the remains of Paine, and they believed that the box and its contents were described in the catalogue, and that some allusion being made to the fact, the auctioneer refused to bring the lot under the hammer. What eventually became of the box and its contents is an unsolved problem, and, notwithstanding my own efforts to solve it, had better to remain so. The whole subject is a painful one, and I have no doubt that Cobbett, of whom we Surrey men have abundant reason to be proud, often regretted that he had not left the noted Freethinker’s bones to remain in their original American resting-place.”

Gilbert Vale, who was in correspondence with English freethinkers, stated in “The Beacon”, Dec.27, 1845, “The bones fell into the hands of an elderly female, a nurse in Cobbett’s family, and by her given or sold to Lta King’s gardener.'” Lord King, who died two years before Cobbett, was a nobleman who held many opinions in common with Paine. His residence, Ockham, was not far from that of Cobbett.

I have a letter (autograph) written by Gilbert Vale, Aug. 20, 1860, in which he says: “Cobbett did take the bones of Paine to London: they are in the hands of the friends of Paine, who will one day put a monument up to him. I saw some of the parties in charge of them in 1848, and I have a pamphlet on the subject which I suppose I brought from England in that year.”

The pamphlet was: “A Brief History of the Remains of the late Thomas Paine, from the time of their disinterment in 1819 by the late William Cobbett M.P., down to the year 1846. London: J. Watson, 1847” pg.8.

I was acquainted with James Watson, and gave the address at his burial, in 1874. He was an able and exact man, and as he no doubt wrote the pamphlet himself, the following statements in it were undoubtedly those Watson received from Benjamin Tilly, – a tailor, and a factotum of Cobbett in London. According to the pamphlet Cobbett brought the coffin-plate, inscribed “Thomas Paine, died June 8, 1809, aged74 years.” (Both Watson and Tilly would certainly know that laine was- born January 29, 1737, and this pres6rvation of an error as to his age, probably due to Madame Bonneville who ordered the coffin, is a certificate of the genuineness of this plate, which must still be in existence.) Cobbett placed Paine’s remains for a short time “in the keeping of a well known friend of his in Hampshire” (Lord King?), but they were brought to London, and remained in Cobbett’s house, Bolt Court, until January 1833, when Tilly sent them to Normandy Farm. There they remained until Cobbett’s death (June 18, 1835). James Paul Cobbett (his son and executor) inscribed his own name in several places on the skull, and on the larger bones. This gentleman was charged with insolvency by one Jesse Oldfield, who had been his father’s shopman, and the litigation resulted in the appointment of a receiver for the Normandy Farm estate, George West, a neighboring farmer. In January 1836, when Cobbett’s effects were sold at his Farm, the auctioneer refused to offer Paine’s remains, and they were retained by the receiver to await the orders of the Lord Chancellor, who, on the subject being mentioned to him in Court, refused to recognize them as part of the estate, or to make any order. Georgel West’s receivership ended in 1839. After keeping Paine’s remains nine years, he ascertained that Tilly wished to carry out Cobbett’s intentions concerning them, and he therefore, saysW atson, conveyed them in March, 1844, to Mr. Tilly (13 Bedford Square, East, London) “by whom they will in all probability be kept, until a public funeral of them can be arranged.”

In “Notes & Queries”, January 25, 1868, a writer signing “A Native of Guilford” states that in the summer of 1849 he saw Paine’s bones in a box in the house of John Chennell, corn merchant in Guilford, who told him that they had been purchased at the Cobbett sale at Ash by someone ignorant of the contents of the chest. A writer in the “Surrey Times”, January 19, 1889, states that the same merchant, Chennell, possessed a porcelain jar, with parchment cover inscribed “The GreatP aine’s Bones”, but that “only a few bones were inside the jar”. To this the Surrey editor adds: A correspondent from the United States was assured that in 1849 they were lying in the cellar of Mr. Chennell’s house, and inquiries are being anxiously made in the States for any authentic information as to them..” This American correspondent had probably got his information from the “Native of Guilford” in “Notes & Queries”, which can hardly be correct. It does not harmonize with the porcelin jar story, and the latter is inexact; the sale was not at Ash, but on the Normandy Farm premises. Chennell may have kept the remains for some years for the receiver George West, but if any were there in 1849 it could only have been a few of the bones which, as will presently appear got separated from the rest. In that year they were seen in possession of Benjamin Tilly.

About 1860 Tillv died in the house of a Mr. Ginn, wood-merchant, Bethnal Green, and left with him a number of Cobbett’s MMS. and Paine relics, but apparently without careful information. According to a statement made to me by Mr. George Reynolds of 23 Stepney Green, his attention was called to these relics in 1879 by a daughter of Mr. Ginn, who was a member of the Baptist Church of which he (Reynolds) was then minister. He purchased the box of papers and relics which proved to be the MSS. Of Cobbett, and some of the brain and hair of Paine, of which Mr. Reynolds is still in possession. From these papers he ascertained that Tilly had owned Paine’s skeleton, and he at once inquired about it. Mrs. Ginn said that in cleaning the room after Tilly’s death she found a lot of bones in a large bag and sold them to a rag-and-bone collector. Mr. Reynolds says she did not appear to know they were human bones. Mr. Ginn, however, knew they were human, and said it was “a skeleton with the exception of the skull and leg or arm.”

On hearing this story of Mrs. Ginn it struck me that there was an accent of sophistication about it. The rag-and-bone collector must have known they were-human bones, if she did not. She may have expected to gain some credit with the Baptist pastor for having turned the remains of “Tom Paine” into more rubbish and dust. I have since discovered that her story is not true, and also, what Mr. Reynolds did not know, that the skull and right hand of Paine had indeed, before Tilly’s death, been removed and gone on a career of their own.

It is probable that Tilly never. knew that any of the bones had been removed from the box. Mr. Joseph Cowen (of the “Newcastle Chronicle”) tells me that about 1853-54 he was consulted by James Watson concerning the propriety of a public burial of Paine’s bones at Kensal Green. Watson said they were in the possession of a tailor who kept them in a box on which he sat while at work.. Mr. Cowen went with Watson to the shop of the tailor who however was not at home. On his next visit to London he again went to the place, but the tailor had removed without leaving any address. Mr. Cowen says it was in the neighborhood of Red Lion Square, and he does not remember he name; but it was no doubt Tilly, who might have been temporarily working in that neighborhood. Mr. Cowen never heard of the matter again, but he remembers asking James Paul Cobbett about the bones, and finding that he knew not what had become of them, and evidently did not wish to talk on the subject.

In December 1874 I inserted in the “National Reformer” an inquiry concerning Paine’s remains. I received the same week a note from Mr. James Dickens of Denham Vila, Guilford, who said that he had made inquiries there, but could only learn that at the Cobbett sale “there was no bidder” for the box and its contents. My inquiry, however, was taken up, and Mr. J. Darbyshire of Manchester, in a letter of September 18, 1875, to “The Secular Chronicle” (London) suggested that “Messrs. Bradlaugh, Watts, G.L. Holyoake, Foote, Mrs. Law and Mrs. Besant, and others should be requested to look after the remains of Thomas Paine and conduct a public funeral, and that a monument be erected over his grave.” Mr. Darbyshire was “sure that sufficient cash would be obtained for so good an object.” Therein he was no doubt right, but Paine’s remains were not discovered.

Meanwhile, however, a lecture I gave in London in 1876 on Thomas Paine attracted the attention of Edward Truelove, the veteran publisher rationalist literature, who wrote me (Dec. 2,1876) that in 1853 or 1854 the Rev. Robert Ainslie came into his shop in the Strand, and observing Paine’s Works “volunteered the very startling information that he, the Rev. Robert Ainslie – of all men! – had in his possession the skull and right hand of Thomas Paine, but did not say how he came by them, evading my question.”

Mr. Ainslie was not aware that Mr. Truelove knew his name, but the bookseller recognized him as the Secretary of the London City Mission, under whose auspices many years before a course of lectures had been given in Eagle Street Chapel against “Infidel Socialism”. Mr. Ainslie gave one of the lectures, and Mr. Truelove was naturally startled that any remains of Paine should have fallen into such orthodox hands. However, he did not mention to Mr. Ainslie that he recognized him. But on a later occasion, when the minister again entered his shop (removed to Holborn) he asked him what had become of Paine’s bones, and his question was not answered.

Mr. Ainslie probably became the owner of Paine’s skull and right hand before George West brought the box to Benjamin Tilly. His daughter Margaretta (first wife of the late Sir Russell Reynolds) having received an inquiry of mine addressed to her father (1877) who died before it arrived, answered:

“Mr. Thomas Paine’s bones were in our possession. I remember them as a child, but I believe they were lost in the various movings which my father had some years ago. I can find no trace of them, but if I do by more inquiries.”

I heard nothing more from Mrs. Russell Reynolds, and she died in 1880. The late Sir Russell Reynolds had, as he lately wrote me, “an obscure recollection of having seen the bones of a hand a great many years ago.” As Margaretta Ainslie was married in 1852, her childhood recollections probably extended into the years preceding 1844, when Watson says the bones were brought to London. This marriage took place at Fromer House, Bromley, Kent, where Mr. Ainslie resided at the time, and it is not Improbable that his near neighbor, Charles Darwin, inspected the skull of his predecessor in heresy. But it is a more picturesque reflection that eventualities should have brought Paine’s skull back to the vicinity of his favourite haunt, -the so-called “Tom Paine Tree”, an ancient oak in the grounds of the old Bishop’s Palace.

As this tree has not, I believe, been mentioned in any book, it may interest the reader to know that there is such a tree, and that it is said by long tradition to be the favourite resort of Paine while writing the “Age of Reason”. I recently visited the tree, in company of Mr. Coles Childs, present owner of Bromley Palace. The trunk, about 25 feet in girth at the ground, is entirely hollow, but the foliage is ample, and there is hardly a dead branch. As a matter of history Paine did pass some time in Bromley, and a very intelligent watchmaker there, Mr. How, told me that he remembers his aged father pointing out the rather handsome residence, “Church Cottage”, as that in which Paine resided. There is no evidence that Paine wrote any part of the “Age of Reason” at Bromley, but it is not improbable. In my historical introduction to the “Age of Reason”, just published, I have shown that parts were written long before its publication; the subject was always near his heart, and he was fond of discussing it with his neighbors. In the early months of 1792 Paine was residing with his publisher, Clio Rickman, at 7 Upper Marylebone Street (still a bookbinding with the old bookshelves remaining), where the swarming of radicals left too little leisure for writing. “Mr. Paine goes out of town tomorrow to compose what I call Burke’s funeral sermon”, says John Hall in his diary, April 20,1792. This was at Bromley, where, on May l4, he heard of the summons of the publisher of “Rights of Man”, and hastened to London, and claimed the right to stand in the publisher’s place. He then doubtless resumed work at Bromley, and one may indulge the picturesque legend that there in “Church Cottage”, which was ecclesiastical property, and beneath the giant oak on the bishop’s grounds, this heresiarch worked on the book that was to shake temples. From the “Tom Paine Tree” one may almost see Down homestead, where Darwin still more shook the temples, though the most venerable of them became his monument.

The Rev. Robert Ainslie had a brother who was an eminent veterinary surgeon, and in his professional or some other capacity was, I am told, connected with the estate of Lord King at Ockham, not far from Cobbett’s place. It was through him that the Rev. Robert Ainslie heard of Paine’s bones. His son. Mr. Oliver Ainslie, tells me that the remains were then in the rooms of the auctioneer Richards( 43 Rathbone Place) “for sale”, and that the skull and right hand were there purchased by his father. It is thus clear that all of the facts were not known to Tilly and Watson. In Watson’s pamphlet it is stated that the bones were brought up to London by George West and given to Tilly, at 13 Bedford Square East. But Benjamin Tilly’s name does not appear at that place in the directories of the time; indeed it does not appear at all until 1852. It seems possible that the tailor had no such fixed residence as would carry as his name into the directory, and that he confided the box of bones to the auctioneer Richards until he had a house of his own. If so Richards, or some subordinate, may have abstracted th e skull and hand and sold them to Mr. Ainslie, Tilly remaining ignorant of the trespass. It is possible, however, that the skull and hand had been sold by West the receiver to Chennell of Guilford before the remains were brought to Tilly, who did not examine them. Mr. Edward Smith tells me that he “interviewed” the son of Chennell in 1877, and heard that Paine’s bones had been sold, and brought 7s 6d. Mr. Truelove says that when he told Watson that Ainslie had the skull he smiled in credulously, yet amid all the tangle of conjectures the certainties are that Tilly had the skeleton without the skull and right hand, a portion of the brain and several pieces of hair, and that Ainslie possessed the cranium and right hand.

Mr. Oliver Ainslie remarked that the smallness and delicacy of Paine’s hand were such that the late Professor John Marshall, of the Royal College of Surgeons, at first thought it the hand of a female. “The head was also small for a man, and of the Celtic type I should say, and somewhat conical in shape, and with more cerebellum than frontal development.” ‘Some little time after his father’s death the skull and hand were brought from 7l Mornington Road, where the Rev. Robert Ainslie had resided, to Mr. Oliver Ainslie’s house 48 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, whence they were taken away by a Mr. Penny, to whom had been confided some arrangements of the room containing them for a new tenant. Mr. Oliver Ainslie became interested in the remains only when too late to save them, and has not been able to find Mr. Penny, nor does he know his full name. He fears that Penny may have disposed of the skull to one of the wastepaper dealers nearby. But this appears to me improbable. Every physician must possess a skull, which is worth more than a wastepaper dealer would pay. This skull of Paine also had the name of J.P. Cobbett written, or perhaps scratched, on it. If an obvious remark may be forgiven, Mr. Penny would hardly be so pound foolish as to dispose of a skull so inscribed as mere rubbish, and it is probable that Paine’s skull is now in some doctor’s office or craniological collection.

The Rev. Robert Ainslie, whom I met at Brighton in 1863, was a man of ability, and my conjecture would be that his purchase of Paine’s skull may have been due to an interest in phrenology, were it not that he bought the hand also. Mr. George Jacob H lyoake tells me that he spoke to Mr. Ainslie about these bones, but that the minister did not wish his name publicly connected with them at the time. There were sufficient reasons for this, but they have long since passed away.

Mr. Ainslie had been, it will be remembered, an official member of the City Mission, which consists of men belonging to different denominations, but has a reputation of being very strict about their orthodoxy. Mr. Ainslie’s orthodoxy was assailed by some of his fellow-labourers in the City Mission, and though he warmly resented this at the time it would appear that his assailants saw the tendencies of some of his views more clearly than himself, for some years after the controversy he became (1860) minister of a liberal chapel at Brighton, where he remained until 1870. Mr. Ainslie had come into possession of Paine’s skull some years before his orthodoxy was called in question, and the hue and cry might have been disagreeably renewed had it reached the public that while Secretary of the City Mission he had the bones of the terrible “Tom Paine” in his house.

It appears certain that when he purchased the skull and hand, Mr. Ainslie was quite unconscious of any heretical symptoms. If it were admissible for Painites to believe in the potency of saintly relics they might point to the fact that Paine’s skull fell into the hands of an orthodox member of the City Mission, and Paine’s brain into those of an orthodox Baptist Minister (Rev. George Reynolds), and that both of these ministers subsequently became unorthodox. And indeed it seems not improbable that these relics may have contributed something to the result, by exciting in the two divines some curiosity to know what thoughts had played through the lamp whose fragments had come into their possession. And it is difficult for one who reads the “Age of Reason” to remain precisely the simple believer he was before.

That Paine’s skull is still somewhere in London is highly probable, and were any found with the name “Cobbett” on it its genuineness could be easily proved by another word or two on it which for the present I reserve. As to the other remains of Paine’s skeleton they were not destroyed, as Mrs. Ginn’s story might imply, for they were seen in by the Rev. Alexander Gordon, now a Unitarian tutor at Manchester, in 1873, and heard of in 1876. Although that gentleman gives no further particulars, the correspondence which has passed between us leaves no doubt on my mind that he was led by his respect for Paine (despite divergences from that author’s religion) to secure for the remains quiet burial, – perhaps near his parents at Thetford. I find especial satisfaction in this belief since reading in the “New York World” (January 26,1896) the following statement:

“Out in the country, somewhere back of New Rochelle, in a lonesome spot, there is a mound with a monument raised over it, and an inscription to the effect that the remains of Thomas Paine lie beneath that stone. If this is not true a great many worthy people are wasting their indignation, for the majority of those who pass the monument and know to whom it is erected, throw stones at it. Thus do Christians show their contempt for those whose opinions do not agree with theirs.”

This stone-throwing ceased, I believe, some years ago; the pious anti-Painites may have found that they were really adding to the author’s cairn by attributing such importance to his writings long after those of his opponents were forgotten.

Of the remains of Thomas Paine exhumed by Cobbett there are now traceable a portion of his brain and two locks of his hair. One of the latter was presented to me by Mr. Edward Smith, biographer of Cobbett. Paine’s hair never became grey. The hair before me (on the old paper wrapping of which is written in Tilly’s hand “Mr. Paine’s Hair”) is soft and dark, with a reddish tinge. The portion of Paine’s brain owned by Mr. George Reynolds is about the size of one’s fist, and quite hard. It is under glass and beside it is a note in Tilly’s writing:

“On Tuesday January 7th 1833 I went to 11 Bolt Court, Fleet Street, and there with Mr. Entrell and Mr. Dean, I saw, at the house of Mr. Cobbett, the remains of Mr. Thomas Paine, when I procured some of his hair, and from his skull I took a portion of his brain, which had become hard, and which is almost perfectly black. – B. Tilly”

There are other personal relics of Paine. During the American revolution Paine wrote the fifth number of his “Crisis” at the house of the Hon. William Henry at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and his spectacles and shoe-buckles were left there. These were presented by a grand-daughter of Mr. Henry to the National Museum at Washington, where I examined them. The spectacles (silver) have small glasses of extraordinary power. Paine’s arm-chair and his brass and irons are in the possession of Albert Badeau at New Rochelle. It is said that a walking cane of his exists but I cannot discover it. Mr. G.J. Holyoake has a copy of Paine’s portrait (Sharp’s engraving of Romney’s picture) with the author’s presentation to Rickman on it. Claire J. Grece, of Redhill, possesses Paine’s snuff-box presented to his uncle, Daniel Constable, in 1807, by Paine. Edward Truelove possesses the writing-table used by Paine while in Rickman’s house in 1792. Alfred Hammond, of Lewes, possesses imprints of his (portrait) seal while an exciseman in that town, Louis Breeze, Stratford-by-Bow, has a piece of wood from the birthhouse of Paine, at Thetford, now destroyed. Of course there are many autograph letters of Paine, but no manuscript of anything he ever wrote for publication has been preserved.

A considerable number of these relics were among the five hundred articles shown at the Paine Exhibition in South Place Chapel, openedD ecember 2 , 1895.There were also first editions of his works, and many polemical caricatures, books, and pamphlets called forth by these works; there were portraits of famous men – American, English, French – whose swords were unsheathed to maintain or assail the republic of Paine’s vision, with its rainbow flag; but most impressive of all was the darkened bit of brain whence radiated the inner light of that miraculous Thetford Quaker.

If we pass from personal relics to relics of personality, those of Paine are innumerable; and among these the most important are the legends and fictions told concerning him by enemies, unconscious that their romances were really tributes to his unique influence. Nothing concerning Paine seems to have been too marvelous for acceptance, in the past, and even in our own time one occasionally meets with inventions suggesting a certain praeternaturalism in his character. Thus on September 21, 1895,a London journal, “Answers”, gravely published as a genuine autograph letter of Paine’s, in the possession of one of its Dublin readers, the following, said to be addressed to a linendraper at Chelmsford:

“Chapter Coffee House

London, May 8th, 1793

“Sir, – in perusing the Chelmsford paper I see you are a vendor of Fleecy Hosiery, and as you are a man after my own heart, a Leveller and a Talker of Treason, please to send six pair of the above Fleecy Hosierie to me at Chapter, and I will send you the money. Yours, Tom Paine.”

I wrote to the editor asking to be put into communication with the owner of this letter signed “Tom(!) Paine”, and written more than seven months after Paine had left England forever, but he could not do so -of course.

I must venture to repeat here, though it is mentioned in my edition of the “Age of Reason”, a legend told me by Mr. Van der Weyde, the eminent London photographer, who remembers when a boy a sermon in which the preacher said that Tom Paine was so wicked that he could not be buried. The earth would not hold him. His bones were placed in a box and carried about from one place to another, until at last they came into the hands of a button-maker, and now his bones are traveling about the world in the form of buttons! This variant of the Wandering Jew legend recalls to me a verse which William Allingham added with pen to his admirable poem “The Touchstone” in a volume in my possession. The original poem, it will be remembered, closes with burning the formidable man’s touchstone, and strewing the ashes on the breeze, little guessing that each grain of these `conveyed the perfect charm.’ The manuscript addition is:

“North, South, in the rings and amulets, Throughout the crowded world ’tis borne, Which, as a fashion long outworn, Its ancient mind forgets.”

The post The Adventures of Thomas Paine’s Bones appeared first on .

Mariam Touba

Slipped into the newspaper in 1827 was an “Anecdote of Thomas Paine.” As such stories go, it was far from the worst, but it was meant to be denigrating. A visitor stops in to see the elderly Paine while he is denouncing the Bible among his cohorts and interrupts with questions of his own, and Paine, supposedly bested in argument, leaves the room without so much as a word. This little vignette was repeated often and was typical and mild fare for the time, especially as the newspaper was co-edited by a Presbyterian minister. The paper was not otherwise ordinary, as Freedom’s Journal was the first newspaper in the United States to be issued by and for African-Americans and, significantly, was begun in New York City in the year that slavery was to be finally abolished in the Empire State. This, however, was how the editors chose to depict Thomas Paine, an early and consistent opponent of black slavery in all forms.

The pattern can be seen even more starkly elsewhere in much of the antislavery press in the decades before the Civil War. A Massachusetts paper representing the distinctly abolitionist Liberty Party had this to say of Thomas Paine in 1845:

He was an open blasphemer and a contemner of God and all things sacred. He was a shameless debauchee, and a most loathsome, degraded sot. He trampled upon the decencies of civilized society, and was a slave to the vilest and most sensual of the animal appetites and passions. He was also void of moral honesty: for, on his dying bed, he called, in the bitterness of his soul, upon Jesus Christ, whom, during his life, he had affected to despise and had uniformly ridiculed and blasphemed.

And so, Thomas Paine’s strong antislavery stand was hardly appreciated and often unknown to those “in the trenches,” the 19^th century abolitionists who were actually fighting the peculiar institution in antebellum America.

Reasons for this ignorance can easily be found: For one, scholars contend that revolutionary era abolitionism had little hold over this new generation of mostly New England reformers. Except for his 1804 “To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana,” Paine’s antislavery publications were contained in unsigned newspaper articles and were entirely unknown before being brought to light by his dedicated biographer Moncure Conway-an abolitionist in his own right-only late in the 19^th century, when the fight against North American slavery was over. Paine’s religious writings made him unpalatable to the churched, many of whom provided the energy for the abolitionist and reform movements of the first half of the 19^th century. Thus, the very Northern, Christian-based publications that printed arguments against slavery ran them virtually side-by-side with denigrating stories about the “infidel” Thomas Paine.

The exceptions to this pattern were rare and noteworthy, and one is stunned by Wendell Phillips lecturing the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1858 where he goes so far as to say that Thomas Paine and the Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards – “their names found side by side in the anti-slavery societies of the revolutionary periods”-would “embrace” as they mount this antislavery rampart together (although he does not make the distinction, Phillips is undoubtedly referring to Jonathan Edwards, Junior, more of Paine’s contemporary). Nonetheless, Phillips is very much the exception both in being aware of Paine’s antislavery commitment and daring to make this bold link with Edwards. Wendell Phillips would move farther away from conventional Christianity in the post-Civil War period, and this pattern can be found in other abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and, of course, Moncure Conway. As Harvey Kaye documents, the appreciation of these longtime radicals for Paine augments with their post-Christian evolution, but it is largely a post-War phenomenon. Phillips stands out as the only prominent leader who links Paine to the cause at hand.

There was, however, something additional that added fuel to this abolitionist ignorance about Thomas Paine. Turning up in the abolitionist press in 1849 was “Mr. Rushton’s Letter to Thomas Paine.” “Mr. Rushton” was Edward Rushton, a British poet and early abolitionist with an interesting life story: Like John Newton, he found himself working on an 18^th-century slave ship, but, unlike Newton, young Rushton seems to have been forced there as part of his apprenticeship in a Liverpool shipping company. Appalled by what he witnessed, Rushton threatened mutiny; later, he went himself and ministered to the sick among the shackled slave cargo. The contagion on this particular ship was one that affected the eyes, and Rushton, at age 19, was blinded as a result of his compassion. He spent the rest of his years advocating for the blind and the enslaved. Unlike his contemporary, William Wilberforce, who approached antislavery from the Tory side, Rushton was a radical, a Paineite himself, and his enthusiasm for the American revolutionary cause led him to address letters to his heroes George Washington and Thomas Paine pleading with them to use their influence against slavery. In recounting Rushton’s admirable life and writings, it is common to lump the two letters together, but they differed in tone and circumstance. The letter to Washington was intemperate and written just at the close of Washington’s second term as President. Washington was smarting from criticism (not least by Thomas Paine) and returned Rushton’s missive unopened. Feeling rebuffed, Rushton then printed his communication as an angry pamphlet in 1797. The letter to Paine was written after Paine had returned from Europe to live in New York and probably dates from 1804 or 1805. It is admiring in tone and, as it appears with some later editorial commentary, suggests that Rushton was aware of Paine’s comment on Rushton’s native Liverpool, wondering why God Almighty did not blast it with a thunderbolt given its prominent role in the slave trade (Paine, it be might recalled, wrote something similar to Thomas Jefferson). In an addendum Rushton admits that “since his [Paine’s] receipt of this, he has frequently sent me his verbal respects, but will not commit himself to paper on the subject.” Nonetheless, Rushton’s original letter, later published in the main antislavery literature of mid-century America, has this unfortunate misstatement: “As the clear and energetic champion for broad and general liberty, you have not a superior in the annals of mankind; yet through the whole of your writings I do not recollect a single passage that is particularly pointed against the slavery of the negroes.”   

How did, what was meant to be a private letter from Rushton to Paine in about 1805, find its way into the antislavery newspapers of 1849? We can trace that with some probable accuracy as it appeared just after Paine’s death in the Belfast Monthly Magazine of December 1809. Nearly 40 years later, in 1848, the Massachusetts abolitionist, Anne Warren Weston was helping to compile a gift annual called the Liberty Bell. Gift annuals, as their name implies, were attractive books issued each year and stocked with poems, illustrations, and light literature, and marketed as Christmas or New Year’s presents. With the Liberty Bell, however, the American Anti-Slavery Society was adopting this popular medium for the cause, and Weston, always desperate for more material, implored her contact in Dublin, activist Richard Davis Webb, for more antislavery writings. Webb complied in part by sending the published letter of Rushton’s, most likely taken from the Irish magazine of 1809. From the Liberty Bell, the Rushton letter rather naturally found its way into both William Lloyd Garrison’s the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, both additional organs of the American Anti-Slavery Society, papers with a relatively small circulation but deeply influential with activists.

The well-meaning Rushton unwittingly did Paine a lasting disservice then, but his basic question is a reasonable one: Why did Paine oppose slavery and yet devote so little of his writings to the injustice of slavery?

In addressing this, we should first be aware that we may not have access to all of Paine’s writings: Most of his unpublished papers burned, and he was not in the habit of signing everything he had printed. Approaching a subject such as antislavery, with adherents on both sides of the ramparts of Federalist and Republican in the United States, Tory and Whig in England, Girondist and Jacobin in France, may have caused Paine to step lightly or work anonymously. One notes that Henry Redhead Yorke, upon visiting Paine in Paris in 1802, observed that Paine was isolated and held in contempt, and he attributed it to Paine’s support of the black Haitians against the French general Charles LeClerc. These Paris writings have not surfaced and beg the question, Are there fugitive writings by Paine that were translated into the French newspapers?

One of Paine’s biographers, David Freeman Hawke, sees a partial answer to Paine’s seeming reticence on slavery in his letter from Paris to Benjamin Rush in 1790, “I despair of seeing an Abolition of the infernal traffic in Negroes-we must push that matter further on your Side the water [sic]-I wish that a few well instructed Negroes could be sent among their Brethern [sic] in Bondage, for until they are enabled to take their own part nothing will be done.” On the one hand, Hawke is dismissive of Paine’s suggestion that the cause needed the input of the African victims themselves. But to contemporary ears, Paine’s prescription, far from passing the buck, sounds acutely modern, and one that black activists such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth would embrace.

Hawke goes on about Paine, “He was not a joiner; rather, he was something of a prima donna, disinclined to share credit when honors were being handed out. No reform movement that required group action ever attracted his interest.” Paine did refrain from joining clubs in the flurry of the French Revolution and seems not to have been a conventional committee man, but Hawke overreaches when suggesting that Paine was not likely to work as a simple foot soldier in a cause. Paine not only wrote on behalf of groups he supported, but did so anonymously: In England, he penned John Horne Tooke’s speech for the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty, he wrote the manifesto for the Société Républicaine in the immediate aftermath of the Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes; during the American Revolution he offered to go on a dangerous mission incognito to England to write in support of the American cause; some have suggested, and there is a bit of evidence for this, that Paine may have contributed in perfect anonymity to the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

Hawke does quote Paine’s most succinct statement on the subject: The question was put to Paine by the English physician John Walker, “How it was to be accounted for, that he had not taken up the pen to advocate the cause of blacks,” and where Paine’s response was recalled by Walker as, “an unfitter person for such a work could hardly be found. The cause would have suffered in my hands. I could not have treated it with any chance of success; for I could never think of their condition but with feelings of indignation.”

Paine’s explanation requires a certain amount of self-awareness about himself and his role as a writer. Those who tend to view Paine as a sort of “natural talent,” who wrote easily and without hesitation on what he believed, may be cynical about this reason, but Paine does more than once write about the need to be “always the master of one’s temper in writing,” and how a writer’s argument is lost when his judgment is “disordered by an intemperate irritation of the passions.” Even Hawke, one of the more skeptical of Paine’s modern biographers, concludes, this “excuse from one known for his impassioned writing sounds flimsy, but given his literary credo-warm passions must always be combined with a cool temper-it may have been the truth.” And, indeed, we may have to leave it at that.

Just about the time Rushton was chiding him for his inaction, Paine expressed once more his feelings about slavery. This is found tucked away in a greeting right here in the Thomas Paine National Historical Association/Iona Collection, in an unpublished letter, written from New Rochelle to his good friend John Fellows on April 18, 1805. Paine offers news about the farm, gives instructions about the Bonneville boys, and provides specifications for wallpapering the cottage. And then he tells Fellows, “And also call on Counsellor Emmet with my congratulations on his eminent success in the Affrican [sic] Affair.” What is the African Affair?

Counselor Emmet is Thomas Addis Emmet, the Irish émigré lawyer whose sojourn was not so different from other prominent participants in the failed Irish uprisings of the 1790s. It would involve years of imprisonment, followed by exile to the Continent (where Emmet spent time in Paris and got to know Paine’s good friend Nicolas de Bonneville) before Emmet could emigrate to the United States in late 1804. He was persuaded to remain in New York and practice law, and since there was a vacancy in the local bar-given that a prominent lawyer, Alexander Hamilton, had met an untimely death that summer-New York’s Republican leaders were willing to expedite the process for Emmet’s entry into the profession. Some Federalists resisted, and the matter became just became more fodder for partisan controversy. The Republicans prevailed, and Emmet was allowed to argue before the New York bar in 1805. And his 19^th century biographer describes

Very soon after Mr. Emmet appeared at our bar, he was employed in a case peculiarly well calculated for the display of his extraordinary powers. Several slaves had escaped from a neighbouring state and found a refuge here. Their masters seized them, and the rights of these masters became a matter of controversy. Mr. Emmet, I have been informed, was retained by the society of friends…and of course espoused the cause of the slaves. His effort is said to have been overwhelming. The novelty of his manner, the enthusiasm which he exhibited, his broad Irish accent, his pathos and violence of gesture, created a variety of sensations in the audience.

Records of this case have not been found, but the tradition is repeated even into this decade when writing of Emmet. The diligent records of a current researcher into slavery cases in the Early Republic reveal, however, that this most likely was not a fugitive slave case, but rather the major prosecution of a slave trader. Emmet assisted, on behalf of the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves, in seeing to it that one Philip M. Topham was brought to justice in federal court on April 1, 1805. The Manumission Society was one place where prominent Federalists and Republicans worked together in this highly partisan age, and Emmet may have found it a natural entry to the polarized legal community. The case did not receive newspaper publicity, but Paine could have heard of it from his friend Walter Morton, serving as the Manumission Society’s secretary. Emmet and Morton were two of Paine’s most trusted friends; indeed he would choose them as co-executors of his will. Looking further from this event, one learns that Emmet goes on to become counsel for the Manumission Society. In addition to clarifying a long-obscured aspect of Thomas Addis Emmet’s biography, the episode illustrates how deeply Thomas Paine’s closest friends were engaged in the antislavery struggle, demonstrates Paine’s own interest in the matter, and suggests that there is indeed more to be discovered in the collection here at Iona.

Notes

Freedom’s Journal (New York), March 30, 1827. The paper was edited by the Presbyterian minister Samuel Cornish and by John Russwurm.

From the Worcester County Gazette (Worcester, Mass.), as reprinted in the Liberator (Boston), December 5, 1845. Some of the vehemence is a reflection of the rivalry between the Liberty Party and the American Anti-Slavery Society (or Garrisonians). This quotation was, in fact, a direct response to William Lloyd Garrison’s paper The Liberator, but the statements about Paine were believed to be true, and neither mentions Paine’s firm opposition to slavery. Similarly, some of the attacks on Paine in moderate Christian antislavery publications were ultimately directed toward doctrinaire Christian abolitionism that had begun to be seen as “infidel” See, for example, “Thomas Paine,” New York Evangelist, January 31, 1850, p. 19.

James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996) p. 43.

“‘Speech of Wendell Phillips,’ New York Anti-Slavery Society: Phonographically reported for the Liberator by Mr. Yerrinton” Liberator, May 28, 1858. Phillips was arguing against letting sectarian considerations weaken the abolitionist movement, demonstrating that he had already moved toward making the antislavery cause paramount over theology.

Even the most historically minded abolitionist would have known little of Paine’s antislavery opinions: Phillips’s awareness that Paine joined an antislavery society may have been because his name appears in the published history of the Pennsylvania Society, Edward Needles, An Historical Memoir of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1848), p. 29. This is when Paine was elected to join the Society as it was reconstituted after the war in 1787. Not surprisingly, he comes with an asterisk and this note:

Perhaps it might be proper to remark, that the latter individual, who subsequently acquired an unenviable notoriety as an infidel writer, was only known at this time as a patriot and lover of equal rights to all men, his peculiar principles in regard to theology not having been publicly known, as they were subsequently developed during his residence in France, where, in the time of the Revolution, he made the public avowal of his sentiments by the publication of his most obnoxious work, “The Age of Reason.”

Benjamin Rush’s recollection that he was drawn to Paine by his early antislavery essay had been published in James Cheetham’s otherwise hostile biography of 1809, but the specific discovery that Paine wrote the essay, “African Slavery in America” in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser (postscript) March 8, 1775, was an outgrowth of Conway’s research in the late 1880s or early 1890s; Conway clearly just followed the lead in Rush’s reference to [William]”Bradford’s paper” by paging through the newspaper in an archive until he hit upon an essay that obviously fit that description (See “Thomas Paine and Charles Bradlaugh,” The Open Court, March 5, 1891). Some recent scholars, such as Alfred Owen Aldridge and Eric Foner, thought Conway’s evidence was unpersuasive, given that Rush’s memory proved to be faulty, Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (Newark: University of Delaware, 1984) pp. 289-290; Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Library of America, 1995) p. 835; this is more strongly stated in James V. Lynch, “The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Thomas Paine and Slavery,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 123, no. 3 (July 1999) pp. 177-199. Similarly, Paine’s authorship of “A Serious Thought,” signed Humanus, in the Pennsylvania Journal of October 18, 1775 was also only brought to light by Conway who credited a Joseph N. Moreau with this unpublished attribution (Moncure Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine [New York: G. P. Putnam, 1892] vol. 1, p. 59). Conway also claimed to be the first to include “The Forester’s Letters” of 1776 (No. 3 contains Paine’s footnote: “Forget not the hapless African.”) among Paine’s published works. Thus it may be that Paine’s letter of 1804, “To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana,” that does appear in earlier versions of Paine’s collected writings, was his only published antislavery work that was available to mid-19^th century abolitionists.

Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005) p. 150. Reasons for this departure from Christianity may have had its roots in James Brewer Stewart’s assertion about the abolitionists at the height of their struggle, “These spiritually restless young men and women had now invented a religion of their own, a sanctified community which filled the enormous void created when they had rejected orthodox revivalism and which would sustain them during the struggles that lay ahead,” Stewart, Holy Warriors, pp. 57-58; see also this “antislavery theological innovation” described in detail in Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 44-51. For many, there was no turning back to orthodox Christianity.

Rushton’s name may sound familiar to dedicated Paineites because his son, Edward, Jr., figures in the long saga of William Cobbett and Paine’s remains, Paul Collins, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 273-274.

Rushton’s Expostulatory Letter to Washington, of Mount Vernon, in Virginia, on his Continuing to be a Proprietor of Slaves (Liverpool, 1797) may have had its greatest impact in New York City, where it was reprinted in the Republican newspaper the Time Piece on May 26, 1797, and where it touched off a debate, much of it in poetic form. See David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006) pp. 167-169.

Paine shared similar commentary about Liverpool when writing to Thomas Jefferson at about the same time: “Had I the command of the elements I would blast Liverpool with fire and brimstone. It is the Sodom and Gomorrah of brutality.” Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 25, 1805 in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. by Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1945) vol. 2, p. 1462 (Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 350).

Richard Davis Webb to Anne Warren Weston, October 20, 1848, Antislavery Collection, Boston Public Library, HYPERLINK “https://www.archive.org/details/lettertomydearfr00webb43” \t “_blank” https://www.archive.org/details/lettertomydearfr00webb43; Ralph Thompson, “The Liberty Bell and Other Anti-Slavery Gift Books,” New England Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1 (March 1934) pp. 154-168.

Liberator, February 23, 1849; National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 14, 1849; the latter may have come directly from Richard Davis Webb since he was a regular correspondent for the paper.

Henry Redhead Yorke, Letters from France, in 1802 (Printed for H.D. Symonds by Bye and Law, 1804) vol. 2, p. 338.

Thomas Paine to Benjamin Rush, Paris, March 16, 1790, reprinted in The Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions [vol. 1, no. 1], 1943, p. 20-22.

David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) p. 150.

Mariam Touba, “Thomas Paine’s Offhand Remark,” Bulletin of Thomas Paine Friends, vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2011) HYPERLINK “https://www.thomas-paine-friends.org/touba-mariam_thomas-paines-offhand-remark-2011.html” https://www.thomas-paine-friends.org/touba-mariam_thomas-paines-offhand-remark-2011.html. For Paine and clubs, see Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 46

John Epps, The Life of John Walker, M.D. (London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., 1831) pp. 140-41.

“Thomas Paine to the Citizens of the United States, Letter IV” [December 3, 1802] in Foner, Complete Writings, vol. 2, p. 926 (Conway, Writings, III, 402); Letter to Abbé Raynal in Foner, Complete Writings, p. 214 (Conway, Writings, II, 70). These writings are identified and discussed in Harry Hayden Clark, “Thomas Paine’s Theories of Rhetoric,”  Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, vol. XXVIII (1933) pp. [307]-339. Clark puts great emphasis on Paine’s recognition of the need for self-discipline in writing, a legacy, he believes of 18^th century deists who believed in living in harmony with the laws of nature, pp. 330-334.

Hawke, p. 37, also citing Clark.

Thomas Addis Emmet, Memoir of Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet with their Ancestors and Immediate Family (New York: Emmet Press, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 395, 406.

Charles Glidden Haines, Memoir of Thomas Addis Emmet (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1829) pp. 87-88.

Emmet’s law firm, Emmet, Marvin & Martin, LLP included this fact in their bicentennial publication in (naturally) 2005:

HYPERLINK “https://www.emmetmarvin.com/pdf/emmetMarvin.pdf” \t “_blank” https://www.emmetmarvin.com/pdf/emmetMarvin.pdf ; Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, edited by Roger K. Newman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 187.

New York Manumission Society Records, 1785-1849, vol. 7, p. 278, New-York Historical Society. The minutes suggest that the case was heard on April 1 in the Second Circuit court with Justice William Paterson hearing the case. Emmet and his fellow counsel were commended by the society for their “very zealous able ingenious management of this complicated and severely contested suit.” I am very much indebted to Sarah Levine-Gronningsater for finding this case and adding further insight into the role the Manumission Society may have played in Emmet’s legal career. Emmet‘s admission to the U.S. Supreme Court bar preceded his clearing his final hurdle to be admitted to the New York Bar, Emmet, Memoir, vol. 1 p. 406. William Paterson’s presence can merely be inferred from John E. O’Connor, William Paterson, Lawyer and Statesman, 1745-1806 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1979) p. 276; William Paterson to Euphemia Paterson, New York, April 1, 1805, Folder 14, William Paterson Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries. Topham’s case appears to have dragged on in the courts, and President Jefferson would pardon Topham in 1808. The pardon was due to his inability to pay the $16,000 fine, and was apparently approved by the Manumission Society, Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, Second Term, 1805-1809 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974) p. 547, n. 19.

All that could be gleaned from the newspapers is: “The Circuit Court of the United States, was opened yesterday morning at the City Hall. An elegant address was delivered to the grand jury by the hon judge Patterson [sic],” Morning Chronicle [New York], April 2, 1805.”

“Report of Dr. Macneven in relation to Mr. Emmet’s Monument, “in Emmet Monument (New York: Printed for the subscribers, 1833) p. 1.

Mariam Touba

October 2012

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Part One of a Three-Part Historiography

Even before Paine’s death, his life was being dissected by those around him on both sides of the Atlantic. The earliest “biographies” of Paine were highly critical, politically-motivated smear campaigns funded by political enemies in high places. Each writer set out to debunk Paine’s major works, especially Common Sense; The Crisis; and the Rights of Man. 

The earliest published works were political hatchet jobs by Paine’s enemies. Francis Oldys, a 1793 biographer, really was George Chalmers, masquerading as a University of Pennsylvania divinity professor. Chalmers painted Paine as a drunken, lazy wife-beater. 

William Cobbett, another British expatriate in America, joined Chalmers in verbally tarring and feathering Paine. Cobbett’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1797) built upon the foundation of Chalmers’ work and quoted heavily from it. 

Like Chalmers, Cobbett offered a running editorial commentary about Paine’s embrace of enlightenment thinking and then picked up with Paine’s life through his release from prison during the French Revolution. Cobbett wrote: 

Whenever or wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow nor compassion… men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous, by a single monosyllable, Paine. 

This statement demands a word about the long and erratic relationship between Cobbett and Paine, the downs and ups of their often parallel lives.

Both were sons of the British working class. Both were successful pamphleteers, although Paine was more commercially successful. Both suffered some degree of egotism and arrogance. 

Cobbett, the angry polemicist, later made a drastic emotional U-turn and disinterred Paine’s corpse from its New Rochelle resting place for an envisioned monument to honour Paine in England, where it was not permitted. 

The Cheetham Biography 

Shortly after Paine died in 1809, his enemies and friends began sharpening their quills. Some spewed vitriol, while others offered praise. 

James Cheetham, the New York publisher of a newspaper called The Citizen, was a colleague of Paine turned bitter foe. Cheetham’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1809) opened with a description of his first meeting with Paine in New York in 1802, shortly after Paine returned to the United States from France. A more unsavory description of the encounter cannot be imagined, which is interesting because Cheetham published Paine’s writing in The Citizen for five years until a falling out (evidently over pay) led to Paine’s refusal to write for him anymore. 

Claiming impartiality, Cheetham wrote that his goal was “neither to please or displease any political party. I have written the life of Mr. Paine, not his panegyrick [sic].” Rather than telling the life of Thomas Paine, Cheetham brought an indictment. 

Cheetham said he’d interviewed many who knew Paine personally, describing them as people of the highest echelons of society. He ridiculed/ Common Sense as “Defective in arrangement, inelegant in diction…” While ostensibly analyzing all of Paine’s writings, Cheetham relentlessly criticized them. 

So vituperative is Cheetham’s tone that one wonders if there’s any value in reading it, but it captures the ethos of the Painehaters, giving a better understanding of the constant bile Paine faced throughout his life in the public eye. 

Harford, Rickman, Sherwin, and Carlile 

Ten years after Paine’s death, a quartet of biographies appeared within months of each other: John S. Harford’s Some Account of the Life, Death, and Principles of Thomas Paine (1819); Thomas Clio Rickman’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1819); W. T. Sherwin’s Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine (1819); and Richard Carlile’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1820). 

Harford picked up where Cheetham left off, offering a scathing portrait of a despicable human being. The other three mounted a defense against the virulent misrepresentations of Paine’s life. Rickman, Sherwin and Carlile actually knew Paine and believed that fear of progressive ideas, not facts, were behind the grotesque portrayals being offered. 

John Harford came from a wealthy British banking family. While he shared Paine’s abolitionist sentiments and began his biography promising to be less vindictive than Cheetham, he unleashed an equally critical diatribe. While conceding that Paine did have “considerable natural talent, ” Harford presented Paine as cruel, unclean, constantly drunk, and miserly. He painted Paine as being possessed of an “inordinate spirit of egotism and selfishness which rendered him incapable of friendship to a single human being.” He described those who befriended Paine as “chiefly low and disreputable persons.” 

Clio Rickman, a lifelong friend of Paine, set out to rescue his friend “from the undeserved reproach… cast upon it by the panders of political infamy.” Rickman knew Paine better than anyone and had much in common with him. He grew up in Lewes, the coastal Sussex town where Paine lived, worked and became politically active between 1768 and 1774. The two men shared Quaker beliefs and a love of books. Rickman eventually moved to London, became a publisher of political pamphlets, and a lifelong friend. 

William Thomas Sherwin, a London publisher, wrote the first unbiased assessment of Paine’s life. For Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine, Sherwin interviewed Paine’s personal and political friends to offer a biography devoid of mudslinging and name-calling. 

Sherwin pointed at Chalmers, who was paid £500 to smear Paine’s reputation. He pilloried Cheetham as a “treacherous apostate” and “illiterate blockhead.” 

One year later Richard Carlile, released The Life of Thomas Paine. Carlile also rebutted Cheetham’s work by presenting an entirely laudatory portrait, built upon the same structure of analyzing each work in counterpoint to Paine’s life at the time of its writing. 

Carlile’s Paine is a man above reproach, a man so honest that he would not let a friend correct one of his grammatical errors, saying, “he only wished to be known as what he really was, without being decked with the plumes of another.” 

Vale and Linton 

These early works cannot be read as traditional biographies, but they prove useful as a way to understand Anglo-American radicalism in the eighteenth-century. Cobbett, Harford, Rickman, and Carlile all lived with one foot in America and the other in Britain. Much like Paine they were “ideological immigrants.” 

A Compendium of the Life of Thomas Paine (1837) by Gilbert Vale was the first biographical study intended to look at Paine through an American lens, untinged by Whig versus Tory politics. Vale was London-born, but he openly tried to remove Paine’s story from friends and foes on European shores. 

Vale wrote from avowed neutrality, determined to neither debase nor laud. He declared, “We are not… about to write a eulogy; to enhance his virtues, or to suppress his faults, or vices. Paine was a part of human nature, and partook of its imperfections.” 

William James Linton’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1841) clearly shows where his sympathies lay. Linton called Paine a “sturdy champion of political and religious liberty.” In subsequent editions, Linton wove in brief profiles with homage quotes from some of Paine’s notable cohorts — such as Benjamin Franklin and Mary Wollstonecraft — to further humanize him. 

By the mid-1800s, Paine had become a man instead of a monster. The dawn of the 20th century would bring a new scrutiny to his life.

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By Edmund Smith

A curious teenager sifting through my fathers small library, I opened up a cardboard-boxed book by Joseph Lewis, Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine, signed by the author. Contained within were numerous short and longer quotes of Paine’s writings, filled with such clarity, power and sense! I felt drawn back to that book numerous times.

I came to Paine not as an academic, but as a “common man.” My life’s bent was as a naturalist, eventually a science teacher. History was a hobby for light dabbling. Always pulled toward Paine, I once asked a high school social studies department chair what he thought of Paine. He grimaced and said he despised Paine for having sought the execution of King Louis XVI, who had supported the colonies against England. I believed him and assumed I had misread Paine. Soon after, I read the truth about him in France. I was shaken that a respected history teacher could err so badly.

In time, I learned that much of Paine’s “history” is false — he was a drunk, a filthy little atheist. “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.” The true history of Paine’s treatment was worse — spat on when he returned to America, denied service, denounced in newspapers and physically accosted in the streets. Even the Quakers refused him burial privileges. 

Why then did young Lincoln have a copy of Age of Reason and quote from it, causing his concerned friends to hide this fact from public view? Why was Jose Gervasio Artigas so inspired by Paine that he led the revolution that founded Uruguay? How could Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Edison come to write defenses of Paine with passion, eloquence and glowing praise?

I joined the TPNHA hoping to learn more of Paine, to discover if he wasn’t, in fact, optimis hominus. Here I learned of Paine’s anti-slave letter to Jefferson. I wondered, would there have been a Civil War if the founders listened? Would we have a prouder American history? No race massacres? No razing of Black Wall Streets? No Green Book? No impugned Black welfare mothers? No necessity for Black Lives Matter? 

Here in the TPNHA, I learned that wherever Paine went, he profoundly moved the needle of progressive history. His pamphlets and books helped form modern America, England and France, earning immediate translations into other languages. That’s known. Few know about his several weeks’ sojourn in Mystic, Connecticut, with Madame Bonneville’s family. Few know he dove into the creation of the Connecticut state constitution. For me, there is no greater catalytic enzyme to accelerate progressive movements everywhere he journeyed. 

I ponder what were Paine’s other achievements that we know nothing about, partly from many of his papers being lost in a fire, mostly from public rejection of him since Age of Reason was published in America. 

When he wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” what if the world had listened to his views regarding religion? Would Europe’s Christians have engaged so deeply in the Jewish Holocaust? 

Would there have been the Irish “Troubles?” Would Christians, Muslims and Jews still be squabbling over shared holy acres, scattered throughout the Mideast? Would there be war in Gaza and Israel today? 

Why did the world miss its chance for the equitable, sustainable and happier world that Paine envisioned? Why did our ancestors not pay heed? 

Carl Sagan, a Paine admirer, wrote: 

What an astonishing thing a book is. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Thus I hear Thomas Paine speaking to me. He still lives. He still wants the world to listen. 

To achieve the civilization we can still have, if only we listen and take action, have we fairly named ourselves homo sapiens, wise humans? Would a better fit be homo insipiens, senseless, or homo acedians, peevish?

I joined the TPNHA because Paine still lives among us, on bookshelves, yes, but moreso here in The Beacon. There are still statues to be cast, a national monument to be built, national school curriculums to be written, and biographical movies to be made with enough drama without the slightest exaggeration. 

“We — even we here — hold the power and bear the responsibility,” said Lincoln, channeling Paine when trying to save our nation. Do not both speak directly to us at this moment, as our modern American democratic government again teeters?

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Beacon #1 September 1, 2021

By Gary Berton

An article in the journal The Log of the Mystic Seaport in December, 1948 recounts an oral history of the Haley family there. It seems that Captain Nathan Haley, according to the oral history, was a friend of Thomas Paine, having been the captain of the ship that brought him back to America in 1802. Haley had embraced the political and religious philosophy of Paine, and had remained friends. 

In 1803, we know that Paine traveled first from Washington, DC to Bordentown, NJ. From there he went to New York City and was celebrated in receptions and dinners. From New York, Paine did not go directly to his farm in New Rochelle, but instead traveled to Connecticut, ostensibly to arrange schooling in a Deist academy for the two Bonneville boys he was attending to. There were other suitable academies and it has been unexplained why he chose Connecticut. He did stay there for several months. 

Now we may have a tie to Connecticut, Capt. Haley. The Log reports:

“The Haleys lived on Pistol Point and it was there that Capt. Nathan took him, to the home of his father, Jeremiah. But the house that Tom Paine occupied was a “little” house, it was said, nearby Jeremiah Haley’s. We can only speculate whose house it was but it seems likely it may have been an earlier house of Jeremiah’s, before he built a larger pretentious place.” 

The account also includes the name of the ship that brought Paine over, the Neptune, and Haley was not the captain of that ship at the time, and it was assumed Haley had arranged the passage. The friendship between Haley and Paine may have predated the voyage in France, as Haley had ties to France at the time, bringing back to America a French wife. The two men had similar world views, and Haley requested that “no religious ceremony be performed at his funeral.”

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First let me say what a great pleasure it is to read the Journal of Radical History (hereinafter JRH). There is always a great deal to ponder and often a good deal of useful information and/or history. Thanks to the Thomas Paine Society for publishing it. 

A recent article by Leo Bressler entitled ‘Peter Porcupine and the Bones of Thomas Paine’ gives pause to consider the nature of history; particularly the nature of good history.

1. Bressler says Paine “died in poverty”. He most certainly did not. His friends visited and sat with him until the end and when he died he left a considerable estate valued at around $7500.00 in liquid assets apart and aside from his 300 acre farm in New Rochelle. According to the Economic History Centre, and depending on how you compute it, that would equate in today’s dollars something like this:

$111,518.92 using the Consumer Price Index.

$109.889.04 using the GDP deflector.

$1,084.791.78 using the unskilled wage.

$2,664. using the GDP per capita.

$110,106.191.02 using the relative share GDP.

Paine was no pauper. The testimony of those who knew him is that he was abstemious in personal habit but with the need to be generous to a fault.

2. Bressler describes Madame Bonneville as “a French Catholic whom Paine had befriended along with her children, when she was widowed”. That statement is just as inaccurate as the previous. To the contrary, Paine resided with Madame Bonneville and her husband Nicholas and their family in Paris, from approximately 1797 to 1802. Nicholas was a prominent publisher, freemason and at the centre of the Cede Social… and a very close friend and associate of Paine’s. He was placed under surveillance and virtual house arrest, his safety compromised and his press suspended under Napoleon’s regime. Paine welcomed his wife and sons to shelter in America. He supported them and his Last Will and Testament provided for the boys’ education upon his death. Conway has it about right when he describes how Nicholas rejoined his wife in America after he was “relieved of his surveillance, hastened to New York, where he and his family were reunited, and enjoying the happiness provided by Paine’s self- sacrificing economy” (Moncure Conway. The Life of Thomas Paine. Putnam & Sons, 1908). 

3. Bressler’s statement that “Cobbett had come first to the United States in 1792” is technically correct, but he leaves the wrong impression since Cobbett came to America for the first time seven years earlier in 1785 when he served in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with a military regiment. He lived in America about four years on that occasion. 

4. The editor of this journal has already properly observed that, contrary to Bressler’s assertion, Cobbett was never flogged. 

5. Bressler says that Cobbett “had become almost as much a crusader for human rights as Paine had been”. There is no wish on my part nor would it be possible to detract from the influential and amazing career of Cobbett, but to compare him to Paine is a stretch. Even in his later more radical phase (he was a hidebound and antagonistic Tory apologist in his early years) Cobbett never achieved anything near the democratic perspective or influence of Thomas Paine. Cobbett ever looked to the somewhat chimerical “English Constitution” or the mythical Saxon one for precedent. Paine’s radically democratic conception repudiated the Constitutionalism of Cobbett and others, has never yet been achieved, and still electrifies the mind today: 

“There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of man, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time”, or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; …Every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations that preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies…It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated…That which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to do”. (Thomas Paine. Rights of Man, Part 1).

6. Bressler says that Cobbett “requested permission to disinter Paine’s bones. After encountering some difficulty, he was granted permission in 1819”. No such thing ever happened. First of all, no civil or statutory authority had the power to give that permission. With the provisio that, like Paine, I shall be happy to be proven wrong (and thereby learn and profit by experience). I should like to know where Bressler came up with this bit of fantasy; perhaps the grave robber’s own self-serving account? Factually, Cobbett desecrated Paine’s grave in the early hours before sunrise and fled to New York City with a Westchester deputy in pursuit. 

7. Bressler states that “it too a great deal of courage for Corbett to bring the remains of Paine to England”. Courage? More like a shameless self-serving gall. Cobbett may be said to have violated every landmark of honour and propriety through his actions and additionally to have violated the last wish of the man he claimed to admire. Paine’s Last Will and Testament stated unequivocally that he wished to be interred on his farm in New Rochelle and he never gave the slightest inkling of any desire that his remains remain anywhere else but in America. 

8. Bressler cites Cobbett’s complaint that “Former friends shrugged their shoulders and looked hard in my face, as if in wonder”. No doubt. They were doubtless shocked to find themselves in the company of a grave robber. As such, he was lucky any friends kept by him whatsoever. Many believed him mad; it seems reasonable to observe that he showed signs of derangement. 

9. Bressler refers to “Cobbett’s noble project”. The phrase is shocking and bereft of common sense. 

10. Bressler says that “three years after Cobbett’s death the United States belatedly erected a monument to Paine in New Rochelle”. Nothing of the sort. The modest marble column was erected through the efforts of publisher Gilbert Vale and a relatively small group of radical reformers and freethinkers with connections in the Working Men and Loco Foco/Equal. 

Cobbett’s grim folly not only fell predictably on its face, it resulted in the scattering and loss of Paine’s remains. Beilby Porteus (1731-1809) 

The author concludes by saying “in some sense the monument was also a tribute to William Cobbett”. If the essay’s conclusions follow from its premises, we may well question the author’s judgement.

Coeur d’Alene,

Idaho, USA.

© Kenneth W. Burchell, 2005. All rights reserved. Non profit users may reprint with author’s copyright cited as above.

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In the past months, ideas have come together for me to explain Thomas Paine’s final year differently than most sources. My different perspective about his burial came from my own experience as principal caregiver to my mother and husband as they passed on in 1999 and when I read of the sale of Thomas Paine’s Bordentown property in 1808 at Mt. Holly, New Jersey Hall of Records. In that record, I read that Thomas Addis Emmet took over a power of attorney and sold the property for Thomas Paine. The circumstances of that act by Emmet took two pages of documents in the Mt. Holly records. Emmet had gone out of his way on behalf of Thomas Paine. Obviously, this was a person who had a close relation to him. But who was he? My continued research revealed that he was part of a circle of friends who cared for Paine. These caregivers acted sensitively and prudently as Thomas Paine passed on from this life to the next. But it was during my trip to Thomas Paine sites in England from March 6-13, 2005, that provoked my need to write about my different view of Paine’s last year on earth. 

On the trip I heard English folk call Thomas Paine a traitor, which is technically correct since he was tried and convicted for treason in England. However, this comment was usually prefaced to the “fact” that he died penniless and without friends in America. This was Thomas Paine’s punishment for being a whistle-blower and traitor! Here is when I commented that neither is true. Both constitute soap opera history and ought to be corrected. Poor wealth is easy to dispute by simply reading Paine’s will in which he leaves property and stock to various heirs. This will, by the way, take three weeks for Paine and two caregivers to write. I suggested to folks it would be helpful to read Thomas Paine’s will and perhaps, also to buy a complete collection of his writings (that include his will) and donate them to their local library. Surprisingly, neither the library at Thetford or Lewes had a complete collection of his writings to show me.

To dispute “poor in friends” will take more words. Specifically, I believe, “poor in friends” relates to the fact that few people, i. e., five, attended his burial. That fact bothered me for a long time. Now I have an explanation to that which no one else has ever put forward. But, to understand why so few attended Paine’s burial one must learn more about his caregiver friends and the relationship between him and the deBonneville family. 

The French connections between the deBonneville family and Paine began in Paris at the time of the French Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte to power. The deBonnevilles, Marguerite, Nicholas and their three sons Louis, Benjamin and Thomas adopted Paine as a member of the family for the five years, 1797 — 1802, he stayed with them. In his lifetime this close relationship was equal to that he had with Mary and Joseph Kirkbride in Bordentown. As an itinerant revolutionary, Thomas Paine had really no family or household of his own. These adopted family ties were very important to his well-being. 

Marguerite Bonneville, she dropped the de part when she arrived in America, and her three sons came to these parts in 1803 at Paine’s invitation. Parting from this Parisian family he loved was difficult for all of them including and so he offered to care for them should they accept his invitation to come to America. To compensate for his inadequate funds, he promised the Bonnevilles a share in his inheritance. He kept that promise. Marguerite, in turn, remained a faithful friend, indeed a primary caregiver to Paine through his final days on earth and stood with her two sons and gravediggers at his burial in New Rochelle in 1809. The story of their familial friendship began in Paris in 1792. 

In 1792 Thomas Paine fled from England to France literally slipping by soldiers of the English Crown that had tried, convicted and readied to execute him for his treasonous writing, namely Rights of Man, against the English government. This was the time of the French Revolution and Paine’s writings were widely read and applauded. He received a hero’s welcome when he arrived in France. The French bestowed him with an “honorary citizenship”. However, as the two factions of the revolution vied for power, the violence became so great that persons of both sides, depending who was in power and when, were executed. Paine became ensnared in this struggle, was arrested, thrown into prison, and condemned to death.

Paine’s written efforts to gain his release by American intervention were dealt with in a roundabout way by Gouverneur Morris, America’s consul to France at the time. Morris knew Paine and chose to intervene in a diplomatic and rather circuitous way by wrestling with the issue of Paine’s citizenship. He was not a Paine fan and really was quite jealous of his reputation with his pen and disliked his personal lifestyle. Luckily, James Monroe replaced Morris, as America’s consul almost in the nick of time, for Paine was quite ill from his imprisonment by then. In fact, the rumour was that Paine had died. By the hand of luck or a sympathetic guard, his prison door, which was marked with a designation for the guillotine, somehow was positioned in such a way that the mark was unseen. Paine was never marched to his execution. Monroe knew he was a patriot and worked quickly to achieve his release. The Monroe’s took him to their home and nursed him back to health. 

One would think that by that time Paine was more than ready to return to America. However, he faced a dilemma. He was a wanted man. If word reached the English that a certain ship carried him, the English would stop the ship and take him back to England to face execution. He had to be careful. As he stayed in Paris, Paine soon became acquainted with Nicholas deBonneville, a young publisher of a liberal newspaper, Bien Informe. His publishing company, Cercie Social, named after a club he helped to found a few years earlier, was very liberal and idealistic. DeBonneville was a freemason and believed by reshaping the world to its ideals, peace and freedom would result. This coupling of deBonneville and Thomas Paine seemed very natural and moved from a friendship of family dinners to one of accommodation at their home. An offer to house Paine for a few weeks turned into a stay of five years. He became an “adopted” family member. Marguerite carefully screened which persons were invited to her salons for Thomas Paine. The children doted on him and the servants adored him. Nicholas and Marguerite polished his writings into acceptable French for Nicholas’ publications. 

The atmosphere outside the deBonneville household was not so amicable. It was tense. Social forces that quelled the violence of the French Revolution now fertilised an environment where Napoleon gradually climbed to his dictatorship. One evening General Bonaparte rapped on the door of the deBonneville’d 4 rue du Theatre Francaise, to ask for Thomas Paine. They chatted

together and went off to dine at a restaurant. Their conversation was amicable, even flattering to Paine, but soon, in watching Bonaparte’s subsequent moves Paine suspected that he should be wary of him. In 1798, the government shut down Nicholas’ newspaper. Through the efforts of Paine and other supporters this suppression was rescinded, however, the family became subject to surveillance and when this happened, Paine became so uncomfortable he left for Belgium. As Bonaparte’s rise to power deepened, Nicholas responded with a satirical editorial. He was arrested and imprisoned. 

Marguerite informed Paine that should he return to Paris he would also be subject to surveillance and so he remained away until 1800 when Nicholas’ release seemed imminent. As soon as his return became known, the government let him know that he was a suspect. If he wrote against the government he, and perhaps also the deBonnevilles would suffer imprisonment. This threat alone might explain Paine’s relatively quiet pen during this time. He 

now focussed on securing passage to America. President Thomas Jefferson offered him a place on the Maryland, which he refused. His funds were low but fortuitously friends of the Rights of Man from England paid him a call and offered him such a handsome appreciation that he was able to settle his debts in Paris and book passage home. 

Leaving the deBonnevIles was especially painful and he offered the family his patronage should they wish to move to America. Given the political situation in France, it was no surprise that Marguerite agreed to the offer. On November 1, 1802 Paine landed in America. Warmly received by President Jefferson, Paine also received attacks in the press from the Federalists who used every trick, exaggeration and mud slinging to smear Jefferson by way of Paine. This was now a different United States of America where thirteen individual colonies worked to mesh their rights with that of the new national government. No easy task. No models to imitate. At times they were just “winging it”. Undoubtedly a painful but important experience to effect, these two major political parties, embodying this struggle, strove to find a way to be the United States of America and balance their individual and states rights. 

In September 1803, Paine learned that Mm. Bonneville and her three sons had arrived in New York. While his tiny place in Bordentown could hardly handle four people, this is where the Bonnevilles stayed until larger quarters in New Rochelle were ready. Marguerite must have shivered from culture shock. Accustomed to a household of servants, large quarters, ample funds and a cosmopolitan atmosphere, she was now in a pastoral village, as it were, in the middle of nowhere. Help from the Kirkbrides might have come except for the fact that Thomas Paine’s good friend Joseph died in October of that same year. Such a death probably eclipsed possible assistance from Nary Kirkbride. When the expanded quarters in New Rochelle were ready, Mm. Bonneville found these objectionable, too. Paine was mystified at her objections and reactions. He quipped in a July 31 letter to John Fellows, she could…. “not even make an apple dumpling for her own children” (French women don’t make apple dumplings, English women do). But, in truth, Paine had little understanding of running a household, as he usually had none to run. He often was the guest in a household run by somebody else. When Marguerite’s oldest son Louis declared he did not wish to live in America and wanted to return to his father in Paris, Mm Bonneville agreed reluctantly and Paine booked his passage home. Benjamin stayed with his mother in New York city and Thomas Paine stayed with his namesake in New Rochelle. The family came together on weekends. Marguerite became a French teacher. 

Thomas Paine could not work the New Rochelle farm successfully and soon he was back in the city, then back to New Rochelle as his funds dwindled, then back to the city, etc., as he tried to work this new life and commitment to the Bonnevilles. When his friend William Carver seemed to offer him room gratis, Paine accepted only to find he was mistaken. Soon Carver wanted rent and this caused a rift between them that escalated into a lawsuit. When Carver became so incensed at Paine’s refusal to pay $150 back rent, he conjured a tale of a romance between Mm Bonnevile that explained the child Thomas Paine de Bonneville as Thomas Paine’s child. He spread this “story” to James Cheetham, supposedly Paine’s friend, who published a scurrilous Thomas Paine biography that included this “story” in the spring of 1808. Paine responded with a lawsuit citing libel. Imagine this, Thomas Paine, now actively dealing with illness and death, must now mount a lawsuit to defend his honour and the Bonneville’s! 

As Paine’s health deteriorated, Marguerite remained nearby. Gradually it became clear that while, at first, when she came, Paine was her protector, however, now these roles were reversed. She had behaved like a dutiful daughter in Paris, but now she had become his protector, his principal caregiver. She was not alone in her caregiving to Thomas Paine. There were other friends who gathered together and offered assistance as caregivers. It is reasonable that they all knew each other and they knew Marguerite. Two were Thomas Addis Emmet and Walter Morton. Emmet, a well-known and respected attorney from Ireland, viewed his friend not only through the eyes of an attorney but a physician as well. His first education was a medical degree from Edinburgh before he turned to the law. With these two skills, his caring involvement with Paine was invaluable. His younger brother Robert achieved icon status in Irish patriotic history days when he led an Irish revolt against the English and paid the ultimate price, his life. Thomas left Ireland so that he too would not lose his life. Emmet’s love of liberty and freedom drew him to Paine who wrote so passionately about it. 

With the eyes of a physician and an attorney, Thomas evaluated Paine’s surroundings at one point, and he prevailed upon Paine to move to better rooms for better, cleaner care. Then as good caregivers might well do, he and Walter Morton one day took matters into their own hands, scooped Paine up in a chaise, piled his belongings on top and took him to a better place. Likely, Paine complained all the way. Sensitive to Paine’s sense of pride, Emmet offered himself with power of attorney to sell Paine’s Bordentown properties to provide him with fresh money of his own to cover the cost of these new accommodations. Documents at Mount Holly show that on July 6, 1808, as Thomas Addis Emmet with power of attorney John Sturdyvant, Thomas Paine’s Bordentown cottage and seven acres were sold to John Oliver for eight hundred dollars. His Bordentown property that had provided him with so much joy and comfort in the past, now gave him funds to maintain him for his last days on earth. 

Emmet and Walter Morton helped Paine get his affairs in order by spending three weeks with him to craft a new will. They were friends who performed with grace, kindness and skill that anyone would want. Walter Morton, a former custom’s officer, now ran the Phoenix Assurance Company. He arranged in February, 1809, for a rent increase to cover the new intensive care that Paine required. He became an executor of Paine’s estate. Another friend, John Fellows, then manager of New York City waterworks, dated back to the bathe of Bunker Hill, where he fought and achieved the rank of colonel. Fellows had published the first American edition of The Age of Reason. As a deist and Freemason, his thoughts on life fit easily on the same page as Paine’s, who often turned to him with ideas about further publications and gave him articles to pass on for publication But for matters personally close, he also called on Fellows by way of letters to him. In his 1805 letter Paine said, in effect, help the boys, the Bonneville boys, with some of your good advice. And, by the way, please retrieve my favourite penknife and blanket from where I left them last and send them up to me. Fellows helped with business also when in 1804 he arranged the state of some sixty New Rochelle acres to balance Paine’s cash flow problems. 

John Wesley Jarvis, a young artist whom Paine met through James Cheetham, became part of his caregiving circle. Looking for a new place to stay, Paine arrived at “Bachelor’s Hall” where Jarvis resided and decided to accept the offer to move in. Jarvis was a bon vivant, a marvellous storyteller, an inveterate partygoer, and often was the life of any party. While he knew of Paine’s view on religion, John Wesley Jarvis took no offence that his old friend’s views were different from his Wesleyan Methodism. From January through April 1807, these storytellers enjoyed each other’s company. Jarvis’ famous quote about Paine to Charles King in a letter of spring 1807 was classic: “I have had Tom Paine living with me for these past five months. He [sic] is one of the most pleasant companions I have met with for an old man”. Jarvis seemed neither intimidated by Paine’s cantankerous outbursts nor overly concerned but accepted Paine as the superb storyteller he was and joined him at it! Some portraits of Paine are attributed to Jarvis but have not been found, instead, the death mask and a silhouette of Paine survive. Two prominent New Yorkers, Dr. Alexander Anderson, a wood engraver, and John Pintford accompanied Jarvis to take Paine’s death mask. The plaster cast of the head and a plaster bust of the mask were donated to the New York Historical Society. 

During the last months of his life Paine did not want to be left alone, and so it was arranged. Dr. Manley, a physician, who worried as much about Paine’s soul as his body, came daily. In addition to his caregivers, there was a host of women who actually administered care, feeding, changing of linens etc. Also there were many visits from many religious people who wanted to save Thomas Paine’s soul. To say that Paine was without friends and visitors during his last days is utterly wrong. Marguerite was almost always there. Finally he prevailed upon her to allow him to stay with her in her place and she agreed. As he came nearer death, he became more afraid and did not want to be alone. Anyone who has cared for a dying one knows that such a request is not unusual. After he moved to her place at 49, Grove Street on May 4, he felt immediately better and received more friends. He was only one month short of his death. Many, many friends came. Soon after his death on June 8, 1809, Jarvis came and created his death mask. 

As Marguerite’s role shifted from being protected to that of Paine’s protector, she, of course, was part of the circle of Paine’s caregivers. She probably exerted the major role among his caregiving friends. After his death, her grief for his passing may have engendered in her an acute protectiveness regarding his reputation. Such a reaction to grief is not unusual. Aware that the lawsuit against Cheetham still was not resolved, I believe Marguerite wanted the burial to be dignified, private and quiet. Cheetham’s scandalous biography of Paine still had its share of lively believers and lip smackers. Zealots could use his burial as an event for a bizarre demonstration. It is not unreasonable to think that his caregiving friends agreed to keep his burial private and even keep the time and place a secret. We all know that a request for a private burial is not an unusual one. I believe the absence of his close friends at his burial was because these good friends desired to protect and honour Thomas Paine with a private, dignified burial. 

Continuing her role as protector after Paine’s death, Marguerite pursued the lawsuit against Cheetham and the court found in Paine’s favour in 810. In court, at least three friends, Robert Fulton, John Wesley Jarvis and Thomas Addis Emmet rose as her character witnesses along with many parents of children who had learned French from Marguerite. The reputations of Thomas Paine and the Bonnevilles were cleared. History now records that. Afterwards, still in her rote as his protector and likely, dealing with her grief for him, Marguerite destroyed some of Paine’s unpublished papers he left to her, mostly dealing with religious matters.

Thomas Paine did not die in poverty or without friends. I sincerely hope that my readers on both sides of the pond will correct this “historical” mistake, whenever they hear it, let us set the record straight for Thomas Paine and history. 

1. Paine was charged with seditious libel not treason — ed. 

Sources 

The major source is John Keane’s excellent biography of Paine.

The Jarvis information is from Harold Dickson’s biography published by the New York Historical Society in 1949. The Bordentown property sale information is at the Hall of Records and Deeds, Mount Holly, New Jersey, Book S, pp.675-677.

Emmet material is from Patrick M. Geoghegan, Robert Emmet, Montreal. Queen’s University Press, 2002.

The post Thomas Paine’s Last Year: A New Perspective appeared first on .

During The American Revolution the name of Thomas Paine was almost as well known to Americans as that of George Washington. His pamphlet Common Sense was directly responsible for bringing on the Declaration of Independence. The first number of The Crisis, which begins the famous sentence “These are the times that try men’s souls”, stirred the colonists from New England to Georgia. Written in December, 1776, when the cause of the colonies was at its darkest hour and American troops were deserting, The Crisis gave renewed hope and courage to Washington’s ragged army. Succeeding numbers of The Crisis made Paine the official propagandist of the American cause and truly one of the Founding Fathers of the nation. 

The fame which these writings brought to Thomas Paine during the Revolution is known to every school boy. Not so well known are the pathos and tragedy of the closing years of his life. A national hero at the end of the war, Paine saw his reputation swept away by the currents of reactionary politics and evangelistic religious enthusiasm. Once hailed as the “father of American Independence”, his friendship cherished by the great figures of the Revolution — Washington, Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Lafayette, and many others — he spent his last days in obscure poverty, shunned by former friends and reviled by his enemies as an atheist! He was denied the right to vote because he was not a citizen. The government refused him the paltry pension he had been promised. And, finally, when he realised that death was approaching and he asked to be buried in the Quaker cemetery at New Rochelle, New York, even this request was denied.¹ 

Paine died in Greenwich Village on June 8, 1809. A cortege composed of six persons accompanied the body to the grave in a field on Paine’s farm near New Rochelle. And yet the small group of mourners was in many ways a fitting one. In the processions were Madam Bonneville,² a French Catholic whom Paine had befriended, along with her children, when she was widowed. Madam Bonneville’s two young sons, a Quaker minister Willett

Hicks, and two Negroes, who walked the twenty-five miles from New York to the burial place. To Paine, who had devoted his life to the cause of human equality and freedom, who had said, “The world is my country, and to do good is my religion”, these attendants would have been eminently satisfactory. And he would no doubt have been gratified by Madam Bonneville’s words, pronounced as the earth fell on the coffin, “Oh, Mr. Paine, my son stands here as testimony of the gratitude America, and I for France”.³ 

Paine’s isolated grave was neglected and all but forgotten until 1819. Then, by a strange irony, the man who had once been Paine’s bitterest enemy, an Englishman by the name of William Cobbett, came to cry shame upon the United States for its shabby treatment of its great Revolutionary hero. 

Cobbett had first come to the United States in 1792. He was then twenty-eight, a tall, heavy set man with a florid complexion and a tendency toward corpulency, characteristics which later prompted Carlyle to call him “the pattern John Bull – of his century”.⁴ He brought with him a letter of introduction to Thomas Jefferson from William Short, the American Ambassador at The Hague; but this gained him only. an indefinite promise of future help from Jefferson. After working as a teacher and gardener at Wilmington, Delaware, for several years, Cobbett came to Philadelphia and soon became embroiled in political strife. Writing under the name of “Peter Porcupine”, he became perhaps the most widely read pamphleteer of his time and was one of the founders of our party press. 

Although he hoped to become an American citizen and to establish himself here, he remained an extremely loyal Englishman. Thus, when Britain was violently denounced in Philadelphia newspapers and effigies of Pitt, the British prime minister, were burned in the public square, he rushed to the defence of England. Allying himself with pro-British Federalists, he published scores of pamphlets and two newspapers, The Political Censor and Porcupine’s Gazette, in which he defended the monarchy and lashed out at those who supported democratic ideas. His dear, direct, idiomatic style and his genius for nicknames and vituperation soon made him one of the foremost political journalists in the young republic. 

Showing no respect for person or office, Peter Porcupine hurled his poisoned quills at random. Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and a host of other notable public figures were the victims of his gifted and abusive pen.⁵

At various times he called Franklin a quack, a hypocrite, an infidel and a whoremaster. Frequently he referred to him as “Old Lightning Rod”. In a venomous attack upon Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Franklin and editor of the Republican Aurora, Porcupine called Franklin “a lecherous old hypocrite of a grandfather, whose very statue seems to gloat on the wenches as they walk the State House yard”.⁶ He called Dr. Rush, among other things, “Dr. Death” and “Dr. Quack”, accusing him of having killed more people with his purging and blood-letting during the yellow fever epidemic than Samson slew Philistines. 

But Porcupine directed his most vicious attacks against Thomas Paine and even wrote an abusive, slanderous biography of him.⁷ As no single epithet served to describe “the infamous Tom Paine”. he called him a hypocritical monster, a sacrilegious monster, a seditionist, a rascal, a blasphemer, a wretch who beat his wife. ‘Like Judas”, wrote Porcupine, “he will be remembered by posterity. men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous. by the single monosyllable, Paine”. 

Cobbett finally overreached himself and was sued for libel by Dr. Rush. After being ordered to pay $5,000 damages — a very heavy penalty in those days — he decided that the United States had become too hot for him. With a final blast at Americans, democracy, and the government in a bitter farewell address, he sailed for England on May 30, 1800. Philip Freneau celebrated Cobbett’s departure with a bit of doggerel that seems to have just a touch of regret in it:

Alack, alack, he might have stayed

And followed here the scribbling trade,

And lived without royal aid.

But democratic laws he hated,

Our government he so be-rated,

That his own projects he defeated.

He took his leave from Sandy Hook,

And parted with a surly look

That all observed and few mistook.

Back in England,. Cobbett led a quiet life for-a time, continuing his newspaper work. But he soon became disillusioned with the Tory class he had so staunchly defended in America. He saw the upper classes getting rich while the great mass of workers lived in poverty. He noted widespread political corruption. He saw British seamen brutally flogged in public. He saw hungry men not and saw the riots cruelly put down. With characteristic vigour and fearlessness, Cobbett turned his pen against the evil and injustice about him. And when the Tory government refused to do anything to right these wrongs, he became a Radical and appealed to the labouring classes. 

For his efforts Cobbett was fined, flogged, (There is no evidence that Cobbett was flogged — Editor) and thrown into prison. But nothing silenced him. He was determined to better the condition of the workingman, whom he saw helpless before a growing industrial and financial power. Through pamphlets and through his cheap newspaper, the Political Register, he rallied the labouring classes to their own defence. His “two-penny trash”, as his enemies called his newspaper, was read avidly in every workingmen’s club and meeting place; and from it the workingmen got courage and a sense of strength. 

As the popularity of Cobbett’s writings grew, so did the wrath of his aristocratic and wealthy enemies. Feeling that he might incite a revolt among the workers, they assailed him from all sides until his very life was in danger. Thus, early in 1817, Cobbett was once more in flight — this time to America. 

The Cobbett who returned to the United States in 1817 was not the Peter Porcupine who had denounced this nation and all democratic ideas. He now came in sackcloth and ashes, singing the praise of this country, its government, and its people. Here, said Cobbett, one saw no “hang-dog face of a tax-gatherer”, no “long-sworded and bewhiskered Captains”. The people were “the most moral and happy in the world”; nowhere else were people “so well-behaved, so orderly, so steady …. So obedient to law”.⁸ 

Cobbett had changed his mind not only about the United States, but “also about Thomas Paine. Indeed, he had become almost as much a crusader for human rights as Paine had been. During his stay in England he had read Paine’s Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, a treatise which had correctly predicted the suspension of cash payments by the Bank of England. This completely changed his opinion of the man he had once pictured as a devil.⁹ Convinced that he had done Paine a great injustice in the slanderous biography he had written, Cobbett resolved to make amends. 

Proclaiming that the United States had too long neglected the remains of Thomas Paine, he requested permission to disinter Paine’s bones. After encountering some difficulty, he was granted permission in 1819. An account of the disinterment was published in Cobbett’s Political Register. 

‘I have just done here a thing, which I have always. since coming to this country vowed that I would do: that is, taken up the remains of our famous countryman, Paine, in order to convey them to England. The Quakers. even the Quakers. refused him a grave! I found him lying in the corner of a rugged barren field! Our expedition set out from New York, in the middle of the night; got to the place (twenty-two miles off) at peep of day; took up the coffin entirely; brought it off New York; and just as we found it, it went to England. Let it be considered the act of the Reformers of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In their names we opened the grave and in their names will the torn be raised.”¹⁰ 

After the bones had been put on a ship sailing for England, Cobbett wrote to an American friend: 

“I have just performed a duty which has been too long delayed: you have neglected too long the remains of Thomas Paine. I have done myself the honour to disinter his bones…. They are now on their way to England. When I myself return, I shall cause them to speak the common sense of the great man; I shall gather together the people of Liverpool and Manchester in one assembly with those of London, and these bones will effect the reformation of England in Church and State.”¹¹

The news of Cobbett’s venture caused a great stir in the United States, but the excitement here was nothing compared to that in England when the bones arrived there on November 21, 1819. The town crier of Bolton was imprisoned for nine weeks for proclaiming the arrival of Thomas Paine’s remains. Even the halls of Parliament echoed with loud denunciations of. Cobbett and Paine. English newspapers launched bitter attacks against Cobbett. One paper carried a cartoon picturing Cobbett seated on Paine’s coffin, in a boat named, ‘Rights of Man’, rowed by Negro staves. A pamphlet containing a cartoon of Cobbett carrying Paine’s coffin on his back and copies of Peter Porcupine’s The Blood Buoy and of his Weekly Register¹² in his pocket was so popular that it went into at least eight editions. Written in derisive doggerel, it imputed the basest of motives to Cobbett’s bringing the bones of Thomas Paine to England:

This is

WILL COBBETT

With Thomas Paine’s bones

A bag full of brick-bats, and

one full of stone,

With which he intends to discharge

the long Dept.

He owes to his friends, and Sir Francis Burdet: 

Tis Cobbett. the changeling,

the worthless and base.

Just arrived from New York.

with his impudent face.

Who comes to dispel our

political fogs,

And to add one more beast to

our Hampshire Hogs.

Totnix with the RADICALS-

Friends of Reform.

Devising new Plots, for

Exiting a Storm….¹³

It actually took a great deal of courage for Cobbett to bring the remains of Paine to England. As a near contemporary of Cobbett’s stated, Paine’s reputation “among the governing and conventionally respectable classes … was an abhorred thing”.¹⁴ At about this time, Richard Carlile, a Rationalist publisher, spent nearly ten years in prison for publishing Paine’s works. “To have brought home the bones of Pine amidst such a state of things was to put the public to the severest test. The Times and Courier newspapers attacked Cobbett with every species of vindictive scurrility…. ‘Former friends’, writes Cobbett, ‘shrugged their shoulders and looked hard in my face, as if in wonder’.¹⁵

But courage was one thing Cobbett had never lacked, and he had long been accustomed to public abuse. Thus, soon after his arrival in England he announced plans for honouring the memory of Thomas Paine; “If it please God to give us life, we will have a funeral worthy of the remains that are to be buried. I do not say when this will take place; but it shall be, if I live, in a season when twenty wagon-loads of flowers can be brought to strew the road before the hearse.”¹⁶ He proposed to build a splendid mausoleum to house the bones of Paine. Funds for this project, he said, would be raised by public subscription. However, his idea was so poorly received that Cobbett never made any effort to collect the money. 

He next announced plans for a great dinner to be held on Paine’s birthday. But once again no one would take him seriously and the idea was abandoned. Finally, he had locks of Paine’s hair soldered up in rings. which he hoped to sell — presumably to raise money for some memorial to Paine. But Cobbett found no buyers; he succeeded only in producing a great deal of amusement.¹⁷ 

Cobbett’s noble project to honour the memory of Thomas Paine finally collapsed under a barrage of insult and ridicule.¹⁸ Hack writers and distinguished poets had an equal share in jeering at “Cobbey’s Dream”, as one versifier called it. Even Lord Byron contributed a quatrain to the general fun:

In digging up your bones, Tom Paine,

Will Cobbett has done well; .

You visit him on earth again,

He’ll visit you in hell.

Or, Byron suggested, these alternative lines might be used:

You come to him on earth again,

He’ll go with you to Hell.¹⁹

Thus the mortal remains of Thomas Paine found no resting place in England. For a number of years they were shunted about Cobbett’s house in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, London, where Cobbett had taken up residence. In January 1833, the bones were packed into a box and sent to Normandy Farm, Surrey, where Cobbett had taken up residence. A Mr. Benjamin Tilly, who served as Cobbett’s secretary and companion in his last years, removed part of the brain from the skull as he was preparing the bones for shipping. Years later the following note from the souvenir-hunting Tilly was found among the Cobbett family papers: “On Tuesday, January 27, 1833, I went to 11 Bolt Court, Fleet Street, and there in the company of Mr. Antsell and Mr. Dean, I saw at the house of Mr.Cobbett the remains of Mr. Thomas Paine, when I procured some of his hair. and from his skull I took a portion of his brain. which has become hard, and is almost black. — B. Tilly.²⁰

Upon Gobbets death, on June 18, 1835, Cobbett’s oldest son and sole executor took possession of the farm and also the remains of Paine, which had been packed into an old trunk.²¹ When Cobbett’s effects were sold at auction in January 1836, the bones were not listed in the catalogue of the sale. Mr. Oldfield, Cobbett’s publisher, requested that they should be sold, but his appeal was denied by the Lord Chancellor, who refused to regard the bones as part of Cobbett’s estate. For a time the bones were in the possession of a day labourer by the name of George West. In 1844, West turned them over to Tilly, who had expressed his determination that Cobbett’s intentions regarding the bones be carried out.²² From here the records are vague. In 1854, Robert Ainslee, a Unitarian clergyman, maintained that he owned the skull and right hand of Paine, but he refused to answer further inquiries.²³ Some time later, according to one source, a man by the name of Ginn told a visitor that he had the bones in a bag, but that he couldn’t find them at the moment because his wife wasn’t home. When Mrs. Ginn returned, she said that she had let the bones be carried away with some rubbish • when she cleared out the room where BenjaminTilly had died.²⁴ What eventually happened to the mortal remains of Thomas Paine — whether they were buried or whether they were simply knocked about until they crumbled to dust — no one knows.²⁵ 

The bones of Paine thus ended their long, restless journey in oblivion. And yet, William Cobbett’s strange enterprise was perhaps not entirely a failure. As late as 1847 a society was formed in London for the purpose of collecting funds for raising a monument to the memory of Paine.²⁶ Three years after Cobbett’s death the United States belatedly erected a monument to Paine at New Rochelle. In a sense his monument was also a tribute to William Cobbett, who first took Americans to task for failing to honour the memory of Thomas Paine. 

Legend has it that when Cobbett took the bones of Paine to England, Paine’s little finger was left in the United States.²⁷ This, as one biographer has written, is probably only a nicely contrived fable of Paine’s “one small movement, now stronger than the loins of bigotry that refused him a vote or a grave in the land he so greatly served.

References and Notes

1. William Cobbati described the Quakers refusal of Paine’s request with characteristic rashness, but also with essential truth: “Mr.Paine was the only man of distinguished talent produced•amongst- the Society of Quakers. His wish was to be buried in the Quaker burying ground in New York. This wish was expressed, I believe, to Mr. Willett Hicks, of that city. And what was the reason on which the Quakers founded their objection? Why this, that there were many who accused them of deism already; if they buried him in their ground, the accusation would have a circumstance to rest on. The reason was very mean, to say the best of it; and all the Quakers I have talked with on the subject, in America, will acknowledge that I reproached them with their cowardice; and their want of all feeling of honour, and with their casting from them the only great man their sect has ever produced”. Quoted in, J. Watson, A Brief History of the Remains of the Late Thomas Paine from the Time of Their Disinterment in /8/9 by the late William Cobbett, M.P. down to the Year 1846. London, 1847. p.2. 

2. Mother of Capt. B.L.E.Bonneville, whose journal recounting his travels in the northwestern territory and his activities in the fur trade was published by Washington Irving under the title, The Rocky Mountains in 1837. 

3. Quoted in William Cobbett’s Sketch of the Life of Thomas Paine, which was written , in collaboration with Madam Bonneville The Sketch is appended to Moncure D. Conway’s, The Life of Thomas Paine (New York, 1909. pp.433-559. 

4. Clark, M.E. Peter Porcupine in America: The Career of William Cobbett, 1792-1800. New York, 1939. p.5. 

5. Cobbett’s Observations on the Emigration of Dr. Priestley, was tremendously popular, going through four editions. Even more widely read was his pamphlet The Bloody Buoy, a piece of anti-revolutionary propaganda. This was read as late as 1825 and was even translated into German and published in Reading as Die Blut Fahne. 

6. Porcupine’s Gazette, July 13, 1797. See also the issue for Sept. 23,1797. 

7. ‘Life of Thomas Paine’ in Political Censor, September 1796. 

8. Cobbett, W. A Year’s Residence in the United States. Boston, Nd. pp.25, 154, 169, 181 and passim. 

9. In Paper Against Gold, and Glory Against Prosperity, published in 1815, Cobbett wrote as follows: “In principle of finance, Mr. Paine was greatly skilled; and to his very great care and rare talents as a writer he added an uncommon degree of experience in the concerns of paper money, the rise and fall of which he witnessed in the United States and in France…. Events have proved the truth of his principles on the subject, and to point out that fact is no more than an act of justice, due to his talents, an act more particularly due at my hands, I have been one of his most violent assailants. Any man may fall into error, but a fool or a knave will seldom acknowledge it. Quoted in Watson, 4. See also William Reitzel, ed. The Autobiography of William Cobbett. London, 1933. pp.129-130.

10. Vol.XXXV, London, 1920. p.382. 11. From a letter to J.W.Francis published in Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Cobbett in England and America. New York, 1913. 

11. P.116. 

12. Cobbett’s paper underwent many changes of title, Political Register is the most familiar title. 

13. The Real or Constitutional House That Jack Built. London, 1819. 

14. ‘Thomas Paine’s Bones and their Owners’, South Place Magazine. XIV. December, 1908. p.40. One piece of satirical versifying, in twelve stanzas, Ode on the Bones of the ray-mortal Thomas Paine, newly transported from America to England by no less lm-mortal William Cobbett, Esq. London, 1819, attacked Paine’s Deism and those who supported it. Now let a thousand cat-squalls sound To tell the neighbouring kingdoms round: Let England, Ireland, Scotland Ring, • Whilst Paean hosts of Deists sing, “The bones of our Apostle PAINE “Revisit England’s happy shores again!” 

15. ‘Thomas Paine’s Bones and their Owners’. P.40. 

16. Quoted in Watson, p.7. 

17. Melville. II. P.118. 

18. Cobbett did not give up his project easily or immediately. In September 1821, he wrote: “as to the bones of Paine, they shall have their honourable burial and monument. There must be suitable preparation for this. The healing hand of time is working for his memory. The memory is in the care of the wise, the just, and the generous of mankind. His bones are ‘in my care, and in due time they shall be deposited in a place and in a manner that are suitable to the mind that once animated the body, and set those bones in motion. If I shall die before this is accomplished, those who will be alive that will perform the sacred duty in my stead. Quoted in ‘Thomas Paine’s Bones and their Owners’, p.24. 

19. Melville. II. P.116. 

20. ‘Thomas Paine’s Bones and their Owners’, p.39. This article is based on statements made by a Mr.George Reynolds, who was at one time a Baptists minister at Stepney. Reynolds stated that he obtained a collection of manuscripts formerly belonging to Cobbett through a family named Ginn. These manuscripts, according to Reynolds, formerly belonged to Benjamin Tilly, who had given them to the Ginns for kindnesses they had paid him during the last days of his life. Reynolds maintained that he bought the manuscripts from the Ginns for twenty-five pounds, including the fragment of hair and Tilly’s note. 

21. According to one source, Cobbett’s son inscribed Cobbett’s name “in several places on the skull and on most of the larger bones of the limbs, in order, we suppose, to the more easy verification of them in case of dispute…” Watson, pp.5-6. 

22. Ibid. p.7.

23. See Conway, p.427 (note). 

24. See reference 19. 

25. For further unverified reports of the later history of Thomas Paine’s bones see, ‘Thomas Paine’s Bones and their Owners’. 

26. Watson, p.2. 

27. In an article published in the New York Sun, May 25, 1902, Moncure Conway wrote that, according to an item in the New York Beacon, for December 7, 1845, “a little finger of Paine was in the possession of a `Friend’, a Quaker of Long Island”. In the same article Conway related how he had bought the fragment of Paine’s brain from a London bookseller for five pounds and brought it to the United States for burial. 

28 Conway, p.428.

This paper was originally published in the Pennsylvannia Magazine of History and Biography. 82. 1958, and more recently in Cobbett’s New Register, the journal of the William Cobbett Society, from which we have reprinted it.

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Of Moses the great lawgiver of Israel we read that, “no one knoweth of his sepulchre”. The same may be said of Thomas Paine, who was a mighty potent force in advancing a better system of government, human rights and much else in America, Britain and France. It took time for his message to be heard but the history of the spread of democracy cannot be written without it.Yet why do the people of Britain generally know more about Pepys of the 17th century than Paine of the 18th. century? 

It was William Cobbett who dug up Paine’s bones in the dead of night in 1819 and brought them back to England with the intention of building a mausoleum in his honour. Appropriately the ship carrying his remains was the ‘Hercules’. Earlier Cobbett had written misguidedly in the USA, “How Tom gets a living or what brothel he inhabits I know not. He has done all the mischief known to man in the world and whether his carcass is the last to be suffered to rot in the earth or to be dried in the air is of little consequence”. Yet after Paine died he changed his opinion, writing in his Register, “We will honour this noble of nature, his memory, his remains, in all sorts of ways. The tomb of this noble of nature will be an object of pilgrimage with all people”. But what actually happened? 

Upon opening the coffin at the Liverpool Customs House, Cobbett said, “These, gentlemen, are the mortal remains of Thomas Paine’. True to form the plate on the coffin bore the wrong date of death, seventy-four instead of seventy two years. The coffin went to Cobbett’s London home and two years after his death to his farm near Farnham, Surrey. Soon after their arrival a Bolton town crier was imprisoned for announcing this. The Times and The Courier attacked Cobbett for bringing Paine’s remains back with great vindictiveness. Former friends shrugged their shoulders and Members of Parliament ridiculed him, so he rather furtively kept them until his death, making it rather late as an MP. 

A few years before death Cobbett became permanently estranged from his family and a Mr. Tilley became his secretary and constant companion. After Cobbett’s death his son engraved Paine’s name on his skull and other bones, but when his effects were sent for auction the auctioneer refused to put Paine’s remains up for auction. The Lord Chancellor’s was appealed to but declined to consider them as part of Cobbett’s estate and refused to make any order concerning them. The box was taken by a Mr. West, one of Cobbett’s trustees, but when he subsequently failed as a farmer he sent them to Mr. Tilley, who in 1847 was living in Stepney. 

In 1818, a Stepney Baptist minister named Reynolds said he had purchased for £25 some manuscripts and other items of Cobbett’s via a family named Guin, among these being Paine’s brain, or part of it, that had been removed from the skull by Tilley. He also said that following Tilley’s death a bag containing Paine’s bones had been thrown out. 

Moncure Conway in an article he contributed to the New York Sun in 1892, said that he had purchased a small portion of Paine’s brain for £5, which he buried below the Paine monument at New Rochelle in 1839. There are also reports of Paine’s jaw having been buried in Wales and his bones having been buried at Ash near Farnham.

Now who should we blame for this dastardly treatment of the remains of one of mankind’s greatest benefactors? First in line of censure must be the New Rochelle Quakers for refusing Paine burial in their graveyard. This would have been most appropriate in view of the strong Quaker beliefs of his father, which he had instilled into his son. 

The Lord Chancellor of Britain must also be held culpable for not ordering a proper burial, but most of the blame rests with that great agitator and enigma, William Cobbett, and perhaps later with his son. If financial problems were the main difficulty in Cobbett’s failure to provide his planned mausoleum, then he could have appealed for financial assistance from his Liberal minded friends, or did he fail to do this because he feared it would effect his chance of election to the House of Commons? 

In the circumstances it would have been better, perhaps, for Cobbett to have left Paine’s remains at New Rochelle, where he had been buried with only five people present, two being Negroes who stood as witnesses to his efforts to end slavery, the others being Mrs. Bonneville, long time platonic friend of Paine’s from France, her son, and a Quaker, Willett Hicks. Had his remains been left they would have lain for ever in the land granted him by New York State in gratitude for his services to American independence. 

However, Cobbett unwittingly did the right thing for the wrong reason, for the first real Citizen of the World belongs to no one country. Paine’s memory is part of the cultural history of all peoples and we should be proud of that fact. 

Editor’s note: This unpublished article by the late Eric Paine appears to have been prepared initially as a lecture given to the William Cobbett Society on April 25, 1992

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Thomas Muir was one of the seven Scottish martyrs sentenced to Botany Bay in 1793 for sedition. The charges included circulating Rights of Man. He met Thomas Paine in Paris and the seven martyrs are commemorated by an obelisk erected in 1851 at Nunhead cemetery,  Rye Hill Estate, London.  

After being arrested in January 1793 for his so-called seditious  activities; Muir was released on bail and then he went to France to warn  the French that the execution of the monarch would be counter  productive to the reform movement. He came back via Ireland and was  arrested again at Stranraer. Being a barrister he defended himself at his  trial.  

This intrepid character escaped captivity en route to Botany Bay in  the Friendly Isles and after many adventures, including being badly  wounded when the Spanish ship he was on was attacked by a British  warship, he got back to France, where he was feted on his arrival in Bordeaux and Paris. 

He eventually died at Chantilly, a suburb of Paris,  having succumbed to the wounds he had received coupled with the  effect of his other ordeals.  

The Thomas Paine Society hope to be associated with the friends of Nunhead Cemetery in commemorating the 200th anniversary of the  sentencing of the Scottish martyrs.  

A recent copy of a Norfolk paper reveals a fitting coincidence in that a Thomas Muir is now manager of the Thomas Paine Hotel in Thetford,  which stands on the traditional site of Paine’s birthplace.

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