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.”

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Imagine Thomas Paine as a “raw and adventurous” youth, scurrying up a ship’s rigging in storm-tossed waters, overwhelmed by the booms of two dozen cannons fired in unison, the clouds of choking smoke, and the violent lurches of a shuddering ship. In Age of Reason, Paine recalled the greatest dangers came “not by cannon balls, but by splinters from the inside of the ship that fly in all directions.” 

Perhaps Paine’s worldview took shape in war. Paine biographers often cite his Quaker father and Anglican mother, his small-town upbringing in Thetford, his forced departure from schooling at age 12 to apprentice in staymaking, effectively ending his formal education. Debate persists if he made corset stays or rope stays for ships. Either way, for young Thomas, the purgatory of grueling, tedious handwork weighed on him.

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Ishmael went to sea “to hurtle after adventure and to inspect the self in a personal quest for truth and knowledge.” Young Paine apparently felt that same pull of the sea. 

He first tried fleeing to the sea in 1756 on the privateer Terrible, commanded by Captain William Death. Paine’s father pursued and begged his son not to go. Good thing, for the Terrible sank midway through its voyage with only a handful of survivors. 

Paine’s next escape attempt in 1757 succeeded. He found adventure on the privateer King of Prussia. For more than six months, he pursued prizes from seized French merchant ships, a life-changing event. 

In “Thomas Paine, Privateersman,” historian Alice Berry writes, “most privateersmen, like their piratical counterparts, sailed not for the glory of King and country, but for profit.” All hands shared the bounty. 

Understudied by biographers of Paine’s youthful years is the impact from his six months of shipboard life amid the Seven Years War. At age 19, he faced his first personal encounter with globalism. Paine worked with or fought against multinational ship crews. All profited directly from their oceanic capitalism. 

Privateers had their own sociability. Anthropologist David Graeber in Pirate Enlightenment, describes a “collectivistic ethos” aboard ships of plunder, including privateers. Graeber writes they were “experimenting with new ways of organizing social relations …happening not in the great cities of Europe — still under the control of various Ancien Régimes — but on the margins of the emerging world system, and particularly in the relatively free spaces.” 

As an inexperienced sailor, Paine’s job was to be “able-bodied,” ready to fight when needed. A knowledge sponge, he was eager to learn the ways of the sea. His desire to learn from experience led him later to observe about seamanship lessons, “a few able and social sailors will soon instruct… active landsmen in the common work of a ship.” 

In his later years Paine told his old friend Thomas “Clio” Rickman that he had “seldom passed five minutes… however circumstanced, in which he did not acquire some knowledge.” 

For Paine, as a curious young privateer exposed for the first time to a wide cross-section of humanity and worldviews, life at sea was a kind of higher education in the ways of the world. 

Paine’s early practical education was put to good use two decades later when he wrote Common Sense. He was able to knowledgeably present precise costs for building a navy. He accurately calculated the “charge of building a ship of each rate [type], and furnishing her with masts, yards, sails and rigging, together with a proportion of eight months boatswain’s and carpenter’s sea-stores.” 

In coming years, Paine’s naval experiences filtered into his fiscal analyses like a political crystal ball to see the future. Paine asserted that for the British, “the expense of the navy is greater than the nation can bear.” He backed up his statement with detailed calculations of the interest rates for the navy debts that Britain was incurring.

In addition to advising his colleagues on the construction and operating costs of navies, he addressed matters of naval invention and engineering by writing about deployment of gunboats for invasion and defense, also the rights of neutral vessels in times of war. His reasoning sprang from knowledge and experience. Paine’s youthful months at sea gave him understanding he carried with him for the rest of his life. 

NOTE: 

Essay excerpted from Thomas Paine and the Company He Kept, a doctoral dissertation in progress by Joy Masoff, PhD candidate

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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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INTRODUCTION 

We are fortunate to live in an era when the name “Tom Paine” is well known to virtually every high school and college student in America, and to a great many more students throughout the English speaking world, and the empire of France, parlayed into a worldwide reading public. Paine was a confidant and advisor to George Washington, Napoleon, and Thomas Jefferson. As the author of well respected books and pamphlets, letters and moral essays, Paine offers generation after generation his fiery eloquence, hammering away at vital issues of the American War for Independence, and then for the issues surrounding France’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary governments. Paine’s biographers, from Thomas Clio Rickman, 1819,1 and Calvin Blanchard, 1885, to the latest biographical work, that is John Keane’s award winning A Political Life” of 1995,3 have captured the basic facts of Paine’s writing life, that is, that he was not wholly a geopolitical writer, not entirely a social philosopher, and not just a highly accomplished author of pamphlets, but that Paine should have been credited with innovations and ingenious applications of wrought iron and cantilevered bridging techniques that are worthy of respect, and professional accreditation by constructors, engineers and architects, from his day to ours. 

TABULATING PAINE’S ARCHITECT-ENGINEER ACHIEVEMENTS 

When surveying Paine’s many non-engineering writings, from among the titles that made him famous, such as Common Sense, The Crisis, his other pamphlets, Rights of Man – Parts 1 & 2, Age of Reason – Parts 1 & 2, and other writings, it is evident that his massive political and philosophical accomplishments have tended to submerge and thus overshadow his work in the world of technology. 

It is unfortunate in the 21st Century that Paine’s technical writing skills have gone unrecognized. Intellectual stimulus was certainly in the air. From 1750. until 1772, L’Encylopedie edited by Denis Diderot with conspicuous help from Voltaire, brought a watershed of technology, 

watershed of technology, intellectual property, manufacturing, crafts and trades into public view. 

We can imagine with what delight Paine would view L’Encyclopedie, rich with engineering knowledge as well as the rational new wealth of philosophy from Voltaire. Here, in these pages, where the focus and emphasis will be on Paine’s scientific technical work –that is his architectural and engineering skill we will sort out and identify how Paine’s technical life was over-laid on the political. If a mental picture of this division of his mental capacity would be helpful, we can imagine the plans of an iron ship, each space compartmentalized and shut off from the others for Paine’s intellectual life, there are whole years where his intense bridging building and metallurgy innovations at the iron works seem to determine the direction of his life. 

Yet in other sealed off compartments, we see more years where the turbulence and mayhem from the American Revolution simply seized the rudder of his life. And then – just when he was back on track with his bridge building and engineering, Paine was again pulled asunder and thrown headlong into that most dangerous compartment of his life, the French Revolution. 

The Paine biographers cited above are generally well aware of his trip to France and England starting in 1787, Paine’s up and down popularity amidst the Revolutionary French, his imprisonment, with his freedom gained through Ben Franklin’s intervention, and at last a safe passage bound for America in 1794. What is not well spelled out and documented are the interim years of Paine’s European Voyage 1787 – 1794, and his later years in the French legislature. By early 1787, Paine had prepared himself exceptionally well for his European Voyage by making three scale model miniature bridges of his iron bridge, over the Schuylkill River, in Philadelphia, to both serve as demonstrations of what his actual bridges would look like. These models were also to file with English and French government agents whom we would today call Patent Officers, along with his applications to be granted copyrights and trade mark patents – where the models would be lawful requirements – to accompany the paperwork for official study and review. In England, the topic of bridges was hot – the stately Blackfriars Bridge had fallen into the Thames, along with two older and lesser bridges. Iron bridging technology was a welcome topic when Paine landed in England. 

The first model bridge Paine exhibited was made in wood, that is mahogany of the finest quality, workmanship and lustre. This is the model left with the French where it was displayed with great admiration and interest at the Louvre for technical assessment, and for public display. The mahogany model was the one chosen to show to the French Academy of Science, where many of the eminent scientific intellectuals of French society had offices. Quoting Calvin Blanchard, 

“This model received the unqualified approbation of the Academy, and it was afterwards adopted by the most scientific men of England.” 

Thanks to Paine, the history of iron bridges can thus be dated to begin in England in 1787. He reserved the other two bridge models for later use, the one in cast iron being next placed with the English authorities for patents and trademarks in London, also in 1787. This model was another mandatory submittal for the patent application process, thus leaving its creator with only one model left, which was made of wrought-iron, connected with blocks of wood shaped and painted to emulate cast-iron blocks. He carried this model about for some time as a talking piece when queried by learned constructors and engineers. The mahogany bridge model at the Louvre was proposed for an arch bridge, with a 400 foot span. In England, Paine contracted for and had built the bridge after his cast iron model, made from five cast-iron arch ribs, each of 110 feet in length, on a site outside London. In 1789, he designed, fabricated and load-tested another bridge trial rib. By 1790, a complete wrought iron and cast iron bridge of Paine’s design of some 36 tons was assembled and on display on Paddington Green, for a period exceeding a year, but with Paine by then stranded in Revolutionary France and committed to a post in the French government, the financing and business management arrangements of his engineering projects went askew, and the wrought iron and iron segments of Paine’s bridge were sold for the benefit of creditors. 

Nonetheless, Paine’s iron achievements at Paddington Green had become the prototype for other iron bridges, the best known of which is the well known Wear Bridge at Sunderland, England in 1796. Bridge architects and engineers are also beholden to Paine for cantilevered bridging techniques, which have been widespread since the 1800’s in England first, then all of Europe and the US. Today, there are several collections of wrought iron and iron bridges that have been named as historic structures after the Paine concepts, the most numerous in England, some in France and Spain, six have been itemized in the USA, and many in Russia by special selection by Czarina Catharina, the former German princess Katharina, called “The Great” for her technical choices and innovations and for her artistic patronages. Last, in the legacy and heritage of Paine’s bridge thinking, typifying cantilevered principles, there is the first iron bridge in America, constructed in 1839 – and still in service – the Dunlap Creek Bridge, Brownsville, Pennsylvania.7 

WE DIGRESS PAINE’S ROOTS IN AMERICA & HIS EDUCATION 

Paine’s bridge story does not simply go to England, then France, then return, a mere exodus back to America. Not unexpectedly, it would be back home in these new United States where Paine would reinvigorate and regain his engineering and planning momentum for iron bridges, but did culminate in his proposals to President Jefferson and the Continental Congress to install iron bridges, along with their accompanying canals and roads – a virtual road map for invigorating a new nation with a vigorous commercial transportation network. In his notes on his 1803 proposals to Congress, he mentions that he had requested without response the prompt return of his iron, and wrought iron models from England for illustrative demonstrations in America. It is generally believed that his mahogany bridge model still resides in the Louvre, in Paris. 

It remains for Paine scholars, probably focused at the Pennsylvania universities, to pursue the whole of Paine’s writing from The Library of Congress, Office of Patent & Trade Mark, Smithsonian Technical and Scientific Museum, Thomas Jefferson Presidential Papers and archives, Ben Franklin papers and archives, British Engineering Society, and the records of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania bridge contracts and construction work centres. Likewise, French scholars of technology may want to sift Paine’s bridge technology work out from his political activities, and using official records, account for marks of Paine’s technical skill sets on the French nation, and its bridges, canals and road networks. 

Other Paine-inspired projects were built in later years after his death in the United States. John Keane, Paine’s excellent biographer, credits Paine with bringing the engineering for cantilevered bridges to the new world. One such example was built at Bordentown, New Jersey in 1820, and served as a model for cantilevered techniques for a century. Paine has been praised for his foresight as “the father of all great structures that now serve human convenience everywhere.” 

A lot of ink has been splashed about with special regard to Paine’s parents, upbringing, family trade, schooling, and expertise in youth without focusing these diverse factors into a harmonic blend of what made up Paine’s intellectual character, his work ethos, and his broad and deep knowledge of the arts and sciences. Mr. Rickman holds that Paine’s attendance at a respectable Latin School was the only formal education he received in England. This may be so, but better Latin schools of the day also had roots and channels to the study of algebra and geometry beyond simple mathematics; and with Latin comes the language masters like Virgil, historians like Seneca, political genius such as Julius Caesar – whose wooden and rope bridge across the Rhine River sparkles among Caesar’s achievements from The Gallic Wars; and then, numerous translations of Vitruvius’s technical text book, De Architectura, were in circulation. Budding mathematicians and bridge builders and architects would have certainly taken Vitruvius to heart in their youth and studied his works throughout life. To think Paine a man of limited intellect, stamina or drive would be to grossly underestimate him. As Blanchard tells us, “During his suspension [of 1764] from [his job as an excise officer] that he repaired to London, where he became a teacher in an academy kept by Mr. Noble of Goodman’s Fields; and during his leisure hours, he applied himself to the study of astronomy and natural philosophy. He availed himself of the advantages which the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson afforded, and made the acquaintance of Dr. Bevis, an able astronomer of the Royal Society.” 

The University of Philadelphia recognized Paine’s technical knowledge with the award of a Master’s Degree in 1787, and he was also admitted to Membership in the Philosophical Society that year, 1787, shortly before he embarked with his bridge models to France and England. By this time, thanks to his editing and writing, he was very popular among the public and quoting Blanchard, “[Paine] enjoyed the esteem and friendship of the most literary, scientific and patriotic men of the age.” 

It is noteworthy that both British and French formal educational institutions made good and sufficient distinguished awards to him as to any learned professor, master, or doctor of arts & sciences in his era. That the British patent office granted him the British patents on his iron bridge by 1789 is a hallmark distinction before all of Britain’s industry and the law, recognising him the legitimate inventor and owner of the technologies described by Paine and modelled by him for the British patent office. 

It would seem that Paine was one of those technocrats whose education never stopped, and that he absorbed a great deal of geopolitical and diplomatic knowledge from his writing and editing of the revolutionary materials for the American war for independence, then embellished his mind and pragmatic skills the upper mathematics and construction sciences, to rank amongst the most skilled engineers of his era, be it London, Paris or Philadelphia. It is ironic that Paine’s skill and determination in engineering, architecture, science and technology, iron mongering, smelting the well hammered bolts and rivets, hot & sweaty, from the grimy anvil was precisely what brought Paine to England and France, not his pamphlets and politics. Here is truly an original genius worthy of the rank and title of professional engineer. 

PAINE’S LETTER TO GEORGE WASHINGTON OF MAY 1st, 1790 

This letter is from London, to Paine’s Commander, Benefactor & Friend, further FROM LONDON A TRANSMITTAL LETTER TO PAINE’S COMMANDER, BENEFACTOR & FRIEND, further, promises the Key to The Bastille to Washington; and important bridge news. An unusual and brief letter of only five paragraphs and a footnote tell us today so much about the relationship between Washington and Paine, what made them compatriots, kindred spirits, and Amici, in revolutionary French terms, that we pause here to read with Washington these words of Paine: 

“Sir: Our very good Friend, the Marquis de la Fayette has entrusted to my care the Key of the Bastille and a drawing handsomely framed, representing the demolition of that detestable prison as a present to your Excellency, of which his [Marquis de la Fayette] letter will particularly inform [you].” [This is the one and the same key had shut up from freedom, and sent to torture and death so many brave revolutionaries and persons of free thought in France for generations. This key, in and of itself is emblematic of the worst elements of kingship, aristocracy, faux aristocracy, and the engines of the police state which whip and flog, hang and guillotine, pull the teeth and nails of the plebiscite, and the fact that Paine has successfully argued for its disposition to be made not only in The New World, but in the American hands of General Washington this is no small miracle. The Louvre or other museums or national galleries in France, Britain would have been worthy repositories, then and now.] The letter continues: 

“I feel myself happy in being the person thro’ whom the Marquis has conveyed this early trophy of the Spoils of Despotism and the first ripe fruits of American principles transported into Europe to his great Master and Patron. He [the Marquis] mentioned to me the present he intended [to] you [that] my heart leaped with Joy – It is something so truly in character that no remarks can illustrate it and is more happily expressive of his remembrance of his American friends than any letter can convey. That the principles of America opened the Bastille is not to be doubted, and therefore the key comes to the right place [that is, to General George Washington.] We are advised that ” Mr. West wishes Mr. Trumbull [the noted British painter) to make a painting of the presentation of the Key to you.” 

Never bashful, having used the first four of the five paragraph epistle of this 1790 letter to describe the gift of the key to the Bastille to Gen. Washington, Paine proceeds in a personal tone, that is news promptly and bluntly delivered, as from one soldier or sailor to another. Paine’s news: 

“I have manufactured a Bridge (a Single arch) of one hundred & ten feet Span, and five feet high from the Cord of the Arch It is now aboard a vessel coming from Yorkshire to London where it is to be erected. It is this only which keeps me [in] Europe…” Fate and the French Revolution would of course change Paine’s plans, yet here in this letter of May the first, 1790, the reader is favoured with the news of the Key to the Bastille, and a tidy progress report on the iron bridge. There were only two persons in Europe or America who had these facts, and one of them was George Washington [Eric Foner p374-5]. 

HIGHLIGHTS OF PAINE’S LENGTHY STAY IN FRANCE: The French Decade, 1792 – 1802 

Paine’s departure from Europe had nothing to do with his scientific and technical pursuits, but on account of his politics, and the harshness of the era. To explain why Paine’s exodus was both hasty and necessary to safeguard his life, a brief sidelight to the French Revolution is needed. 

Parts of Paine’s career are similar to another great pamphleteer, the Englishman, John Milton. It is known by historians of the French Revolution that it was much more violent and bloodier than either The Glorious Revolution in England, leaving Oliver Cromwell’s forces in power; next, then to the new world, the American War of Independence, leaving George Washington’s and Lafayette’s forces in power. The regicide of the British sovereign, King Charles I, traumatized the English people so thoroughly that in the English Restoration, a new king and his royal line were promptly brought back to the throne. It is fortunate for Mr. John Milton, the greatest pamphleteer in English before Paine, that Milton made his anti-royalist statements on the inherent mismanagement and often villainy of the aristocracy, and their courts, in his famous pamphlet, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1648), which boldly supported whatever means were needed to divest a state of its hereditary monarchs, hangers-on, tainted judges and lax royal administrators. Had Milton’s pamphlet appeared a few weeks before the axe man cleaved a royal head from its king, Mr. Milton might have found himself swinging from a handy tree branch, or being disembowelled and roasted alive, at public execution, with other Roundheads who despised the king and brought about his death? Luckily, Milton’s scathing criticism of the English throne came weeks after the regicide, leaving Milton as a commentator, not a perpetrator, nor an instigator. Like Milton, Paine had clean hands where the path of the guillotine lay across France. 

However, our engineering and bridge building friend, Mr. Paine, found himself in a Miltonic milieu because in his pleas [and petitions] to spare the life of the king whom he insisted on identifying as Mr. Louis Capet. “And while conceding the odious waste, maladministration, misuse of office, etc., yet still in Paine’s view, the regent sovereign of France did not merit the death sentence. Here, due to his siding with humanitarian, less reactionary revolutionaries, Paine had made enemies in dangerous times and places. 

Robespierre in that very same year, thought eradicating France’s enemies the best solution, and held that the king of France and vast numbers of his retinue should perish, and so many aristocrats and faux aristocrats alike went then at Robespierre’s order, to the executioners, often tossed headlong into a public square in Paris, there to die by that most French execution device, the guillotine. 

Paine had earlier found himself jailed in Paris in 1793, but was then also was released, through the actions of powerful friends, led by Ben Franklin, and the American president. Now years later, 1799, even when firebrands such as Robespierre and Marat were dead, and different revolutionaries in power, Paine’s name was again put on the list of criminal undesirables. And he was again in great danger of the guillotine. Paine records in his own handwriting shows his wonderment of the events at the Luxembourg prison, Bruges, Belgium, for all of calendar 1799. It was at this prison which French authorities took 160 of 168 prisoners from their cells, and removed all but a few of these individuals to the guillotine in the space of only one night. Paine himself and seven others were spared, without explanation. 

In fact, when finally Paine boarded a ship from the port of Le Harve in 1802, he was just days ahead of a French warrant would have terminated his liberty, and perhaps his life. Also British ships were seen prowling the water around Calais, and said to have British warrants for Paine’s arrest, and transport and imprisonment to England for allegations of treason. 

What, indeed, had provoked the British authorities to pursue Paine across The English Channel? As early as December, 1797, in pamphlets and plans, he advocated a strategy and techniques for invading England. His proposal was sent in Memorandum form to Napoleon, with recommendations to build a French fleet of shallow-bottomed gunboats and flat bottom barges for transport of infantry and cavalry. He continued to advocate the invasion of England through 1798, using the auspices of M. Bonneville, his good friend, publishing in Paris in his friend’s “Bien Informe,” a press for pamphlets and newsletters. In 1798, he befriended the steamship innovator and naval architect Robert Fulton in Paris, while Paine himself was exploring the potentials for iron and steel and steam in ships – again mixing politics with technology. 

By 1798, Paine had also advocated to the French government with copies memos to Napoleon that French forces should go the assistance of Irish uprisings, and advocated overthrow of English rule across the whole of Ireland. In 1799, through “Bien Informe” he advocated open seas and international commerce regulation for all nations. By 1800, his paper Parte Maritime had proposed international regulation and standard rules for excise, safety and administration amongst the nations. He had also filled out his proposal to Napoleon to link the regions of France through its rivers, and estuaries, with new connecting canals and iron bridges. Couple these with Paine’s offense/defense/invasion planning skills, and we have Paine, the military engineer. For his regional linking proposal to Napoleon, he produced as many as four of the iron bridges he envisioned, using models five feet in length. Apparently, even this work was not appreciated, since he was voted out of his elected office in French government by his enemies, and slander undercutting his loyalties were tallied up against him. 

Had this architect-engineer not have exited France in such a speedy manner, the Tom Paine story might have ended in one of the mass graves dug outside of Paris for the decapitated bodies of enemies of the state. 

BRIDGES FOR AMERICA-PAINE’s 1803 PROPOSAL TO CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT JEFFERSON 

Returning to the American shores in 1803, it was some time before Paine devoted himself to technical matters again, but this time distinctive American in nature. 

His massive 1803 proposal plan for America’s bridges, waterways, canals and their collective commercial and military consequences is his great gift to the new nation, presented in proposal form to the Congress and President Jefferson. Recalling that his study of French waterways and bridging, that concept would be a prototype for the American proposal. Paine embarked on scrutinizing innovations and improvements for US bridges and canals, based on existing data and maps. It must be remembered that cartography was often a rough hewn science, and that much of America was poorly mapped, even after Lewis & Clark made their extensive exploration of the new American territories added by The Louisiana Purchase. He did extensive model building in 1803 to support his proposals. 

His techniques for the American proposal seem straightforward in his “The Construction of Iron Bridges, June 13, 1803,” which is quintessential Paine for documenting his American skills and achievements. While writing a nationwide schema for a great nation such as France may seem enough to exhaust many technical folk, Paine began a massive analysis of how best to safeguard, provide patrol boats/revenue cutters, bridges, canals and supporting civil constructions for the most newly acquired waters of America to follow The Louisiana Purchase. From 1803-1807, he did extensive model making and design work. In 1807, he wrote a series of articles articulating how to construct and manage a fleet of gunboats to defend American shores. The model gunboats made for this engineering mock-up were sent to the President in September, 1807. As with his bridge proposal, Mr. Paine used his modelling skills to carve models of armed river craft which the United States would patrol the gigantic new river basins along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, their streams and estuaries, from the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, to the northernmost rivers coming into America from Canada. He proposed the boats to be light, fast, able to hold troops, effective and economic. His model making skills for boats were well received at the US Patent & Trade Office; and delivered on President Jefferson’s desk were new boat models for the proposal. We are reminded here of Paine’s equally energetic plans for shallow draft gunboats for his proposals to Napoleon for an invasion of England. 

Naturally, where so many well charted rivers that needed bridging, iron bridge technology would bring many advantages, such as prefabrication, transportation by section, ease of assembly by semi-skilled workers, and ease of manufacture at large ironmongers. As with his study of France and concepts for streamlining that nation’s waterways and estuaries with bridges, stream widening, river deepening, and canal building, there was in Paine’s vision, a genuinely speedy and cost effective means for the new republic to safeguard its waterways. He proposed his model patrol ship to be a small, fast and trim military vessel to collect taxes, and assure safety of the waters, monitor smuggling, and control pirates and privateers — a real problem in the Barataria swamp and bayou regions outside New Orleans. 

Paine’s years in the British Excise office immediately jump to mind, that he was a skilful and knowledgeable taxation & duty officer for some years. Paine’s proposals to America, when fulfilled, would have assured that the many cities, towns, villages and settlements would get bountiful commercial river traffic and timely communication of information. 

It seems likely that Paine’s credentials to design and model a prototype small warship for patrols of US waters came from his youth, when having gained a sense of quality materials and good workmanship in the family stay business, he embarked literally into the world of privateering. Aboard the British licensed privateer, named “Terrible,” where the ship’s commander listed himself as “Captain Death,” we can imagine Paine as a young apprentice, perhaps working under the tutelage of the ship’s sail maker, or the carpenter, for the maintenance of the ship. After a brief stay, Paine shipped on board “The King of Prussia,” another privateer of British licensure, where he was most likely in the Able Bodied Seaman (ABS) category, fit for many jobs of seamanship. At the pleadings of his father, Paine left the nautical life on privateers after another brief stay on “King of Prussia.” We must remember that his nautical days were all done by 1759. Serving aboard vessels devoted to privateering seems to have provided Paine with basic ship design ideas for his own models, that is, for fast revenue cutters and nimble patrol corvettes, as he wrote about them some four decades later in his proposals to the Americans. 

The 1803 negotiations with the French for the turn-over of “Louisiana” whatever shape and size that would be, was still a mystery in 1802 – it was a complete surprise to American negotiators when French diplomats made the decision not to withhold or exempt any parishes or locations from one massive sweeping sale. Even today, the size of the lands absorbed into America by the Louisiana Purchase are huge, sweeping from the mouth of the Mississippi up to and across the border with Canada. 

Paine’s engineering skills helped him assimilate proposals for the massive transportation problems that the Louisiana Purchase brought with it. It was fortunate America had one such engineer on hand. Paine wrote a very persuasive letter to Jefferson, urging him to buy the entirety of the Louisiana Territory from France, with the consent of the occupants. Initially, Jefferson was considering buying only New Orleans, and the Florida’s, and in other important correspondence, Paine itemized to Jefferson the constitutional ramifications of assimilating so great a purchase; his correspondence to the president was also fiercely opposed to the Federalist proposal to seize New Orleans by force, which today seems fool-hearty and an invitation to war where there had been only peace. 

Having served in the French legislature as the representative of the great commercial, mercantile city of [le Port de] Calais in France, Paine had a keen eye for the pulse, ebb and flow of waterborne commerce. With an excellent knowledge of how the French government worked, its pitfalls and unusual characteristics. Moreover, he understood that Napoleon’s mandate that The French Law as specified by The Napoleonic Code would be permanent in the new US territories derived from France – which meant not converting the legal system over to the English Common Law, the familiar legal model of the Colonies. This meant that Louisiana would forever observe the Napoleonic Code. There is little doubt that Paine felt imminently well qualified to offer Jefferson and the young republic such advice due to his many years in France, working intimately with the French political administration and legislature councils of that nation which Blanchard calls then “the foremost nation in the world,” as he termed the new and imperial France. In his latter days, Paine was a good friend to France at the tables of American public opinion. 

By the time Paine grew ill and died in 1809, the many decades of theological and political warfare had battered down Paine’s good name. Many in England thought him a rogue, and then there was his hot-tempered, abrasive public letter to George Washington which won him no friends, and other opinion- based epistles – these had cast a shadow over his reputation as an editor, writer, technical man and statesman. His technical skills and achievements in engineering and architecture were lost to all but a few study New Englanders whose stock and trade was in the construction and bridge industry, and some scholars of his written work at large. 

Paine did himself no favours with his barbed epithets on religion, so that various religious revitalization movements brand him still as a heathen, atheist, or mean spirited agnostic – instead of one of the truest Age of Reason practitioners of Deism. When Thomas Edison publicly championed Paine’s reputation in the 1920s, and praised Paine’s whole canon of work, it is likely that engineers and architects at least in America, England and France, heaved a sigh of relief that Paine’s name was again a good one. Thomas Paine, American architect-engineer, innovator, inventor, political scientist, and man of letters had at long last gotten a laurel wreath he so long deserved. 

A BOLD NEW TECHNICAL IMAGE FOR PAINE 

Today a fresh image of Paine, Architect-Engineer, emerges from the technical side of the pantheon of American figures from the 18th Century. Paine deserves a more solemn 

solemn and prominent place for his technical accomplishments than he now holds for his political and ethical works by themselves. 

In Age of Reason neoclassic poses, we see grand and noble figures such as Washington, Voltaire and Franklin, carved by no less than the era’s master sculptor, Houdon. Indeed, we need to identify America’s 21st Century equal of Houdon, to be engaged for a brand new statuary of Paine. 

Today, with fresh emphasis on Paine the engineer, planner, model maker of bridges and ships, iron smith and draughtsman, we owe Mr. Paine a fresh new statuary to celebrate his broad, wide achievements in the crafts and sciences. And perhaps one new statue alone would not do a triumvirate might be needed. 

I suggest that three statues, that is, A Paine Triumvirate, should be created to show Century Paine in all his roles – writer, statesman, and architect-engineer. The first statue would be best set in the District of Columbia amidst the Federal Monuments, where Paine’s plain attire and a simple desk would show a pamphleteer and writer/editor at his work. 

A second sculpture then, in Philadelphia, close to Franklin’s home and the Liberty Bell, would be illustrative. Here, Paine’s wardrobe of a London gentleman’s clothing would best show him at our Constitutional Convention, then on to his elected office, representing Calais in the French legislature. Lastly, proposed as the engineer/architect Paine-a 3rd and final sculpture, which would be best placed in Cambridge/Boston, sited somewhere near the MIT Campus. This statue would remind the bustling crowds of the world of commerce about ordinary things like bridges and common sense. The almost divine smile of reason, I believe, would of necessity grace Paine’s face, where in artisan’s clothes, sitting on the work bench of an engineer or iron worker, Paine would hold a book on his knee with his left hand, and in the right hand and forearm, he would proudly cradle a model of his iron bridge. 

END NOTES 

[1] Thomas Clio Rickman, Life of Thomas Paine, especially, Preface and Chapter 1. However, in Part 2 of Rickman, this biographer confirms Paine’s bridge and model ship making skills; that his bridges were inspired by spider webs; and that his first model for the Paris trip was made from mahogany. 

[2] Complete Works of Thomas Paine, All Political and Theological Writings, preceded by A 

13 

Life of Paine, by Calvin Blanchard: Chicago, B.F. Ford, Clark & Co., 1885, pages 13-25, 26- 63. 

[3] John Keane, A Political Life: Biography of Thomas Paine, esp. Forward and Chapter 1. [4]David J. Brown, Bridges: Three Thousand Years of Defying Gravity, London: Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Publishing Group, 1999, pages 48-50. 

[5] Lithograph, printed by British Institute of Engineering, 1796 – Iron Bridge over the Wear River, Sunderland County at Durham, England. 

[6] Paine, Collected Writings: Literary Classics, NY 1955, Distributed by Putnam Penguin, Notes and Editorial by Eric Foner. Of special notes pages 423-428, iron bridges; pages 842 – 853, other bridge information. 

[7] Calvin Blanchard, Complete Works of Thomas Paine, pages 64-87. 

SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION 

Thomas Edison, The Philosophy of Thomas Paine. Web address 

https://www.positive.atheism.org/hist/paine dsn/htm 

L’Encyclopedie,’ Denis Diderot, Editor, Paris: The Complete Illustrations, 1762-1777, in facsimile edition by Harry N. Abrama, Inc., NY, 1978. Facsimile prepared by and edited by Arnoldo Mondadoir, Editore, Milano, Italia. 

Biographical note on the author: 

Tim Whalen holds the BA and MA degrees in English from the University of Tulsa and is ABD in the Ph.D programme; he has published books on technical and proposal writing ay Pilot Books, ARTECH, Horizon Books, IEEE Press and Management Concepts. He has contributed articles to several journals. 

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In the first part of The Age of Reason, written during the French Revolution and completed we are told only a matter of hours before his arrest, Paine devotes some pages to a general account of astronomy as an introduction to his ideas on Christian theology. It is worth looking at this account in the light of knowledge as it was then and as it is now, and also to consider the sources of Paine’s information. 

He begins with a comment on the ‘plurality of worlds’, an idea from the ancient philosophers gaining acceptance in scientific circles in the eighteenth century by virtue of the work of Halley and Herschell, indicating the vastness of space and the lack of uniqueness in the existence of the earth. 

He then describes the solar system – the sun and its six satellites or worlds, all in annual motion around the sun, some satellites having their own satellites or moons in attendance, each world keeping its own track (the ecliptic) around the sun. Each world spins around itself (rotates on its own axis) and this causes day and night. Most worlds, in their self-rotation, are tilted against their line of movement around the sun (the obliquity of the ecliptic) and Paine quotes the correct figure for earth of 231/2°. It is this tilt that is responsible for the changing seasons and for the variation in the length of day and night over the world and throughout the seasons. Earth makes 365 rotations in one year’s orbit of the sun. 

The six planets are then described with their distances from the sun. These figures are incorrect now but the figures Paine gives for the earth’s distance, 88 million miles, agrees with the eighteenth century figure derived from Kepler’s Laws of about 1620. In 1772 Bode formulated his empirical law of planetary distances giving the measurements more accurately than hitherto, but this information would not have permeated the circles in which Paine moved after his departure for America. 

As proof that it is possible for man to know these distances he cites the fact that for centuries the precise date and time of eclipses and also the passage of a planet like Venus across the face of the sun (a transit) have been calculated and forecast. 

Beyond the solar system, ‘far beyond all power of calculation’ (until Bessel calculated the distance of 61 Cygni in 1838) are the ‘fixed’ stars, and these fixed stars ‘continue always at the same distance from each other, and always in the same place, so does the sun in the centre of the system’. William Herschel! communicated to the Royal Society in 1783 that this was not in fact so, and that all stars were moving but at rates indiscernible as yet to man. Paine repeats a current idea that these ‘fixed’ stars and suns probably all have their own planets in attendance upon them. Thus the immensity of space. 

‘All our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions of those several planets or worlds of which our system is composed make in their circuit round the sun’. He regards this multiplicity as a benefit bestowed by the Creator – otherwise, all that matter in one globe with no revolutionary motion (there are echoes of Newton here) would have deprived our senses and our scientific knowledge, – it is from the sciences that all the mechanical are that contribute so much to our earthly felicity and comfort are derived’. Paine even suggests that the devotional gratitude of man is due to the Creator for this plurality. 

The same opportunities of knowledge are available to the inhabitants of neighbouring planets and to the inhabitants of planets of other suns in the universe. The idea of a society of worlds Paine finds cheerful – a happy contrivance of the almighty for the instruction of mankind. What then of the Christian faith and the ‘solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, with millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should devote all his care to this world and come to die in it? Has every world an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?’ And so to the rest of The Age of Reason. 

Where did Paine obtain his astronomical information and instruction? It is unlikely he had any books with him, he certainly did not have a bible. Paris, seething with the Revolution, had the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Badly as mayor until his execution in 1793. Condorcet (author of Progress of the Human Spirit) and Lavoisier (the father of modern chemistry) were deeply involved and died in the Revolution. Laplace (‘the French Newton’) and the astronomer Joseph Jerome Lefrangois de Lalande were also in and around Paris at this time. But all these scientists, like Paine, would have been too busy to teach or discuss astronomy. So Paine would have had to recall the lectures and practical demonstrations he attended in London before he went to America. They were given by Benjamin Martin, James Ferguson and Dr. John Bevis. It is worthwhile looking at the careers of these three men, mentioned only by surname early in The Age of Reason, because the facts, derived from the Dictionary of National Biography, afford some light on Paine’s life in London. 

Benjamin Martin (1704-1782). A ploughboy to begin with, he began to teach the ‘three Rs’ at Guildford while studying to become a mathematician, instrument- maker, and general compiler of information! He read Newton’s Opticks (1705) and became an ardent follower of his ideas. He used a £500 legacy to buy instruments and books in order to become an itinerant lecturer. He had over thirty major publications to his name as well as a number of inventions. He perfected the Orrery (not named after its inventor, as Paine states, but after the patron of the copier of the invention!), and used his own version in his lectures. He lived in London at Hadley’s Quadrant in Fleet Street, from 1740 onwards. He died following attempted suicide in 1782. 

James Ferguson (1710-1776). A shepherd-boy in Banffshire at the age of ten. He took up medicine at Edinburgh but gave up to sketch embroidery patterns and then to paint portraits and continue his interest in astronomy. He used the income from his painting to enable him to begin as a teacher and lecturer in London in 1748, where he had arrived five years before. His book, Astronomy explained on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1756), went to at least thirteen editions and was used by William Herschel! for his own study of astronomy. George III called on Ferguson for tuition in mechanics, and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1763. He became a busy lecturer in and around London, sometime also travelling to Newcastle, Derby, Bath and Bristol for speaking engagements. He occasionally had public disagreements with his wife – even in the middle of lectures! 

Dr. John Bevis (1693-1771). He studied medicine at Oxford and travelled widely in France and Italy before settling in London prior to 1730. Newton’s Opticks was his favourite reading matter, and in 1738 he gave up his practice and moved to Stoke Newington where he built his own observatory. Here, and at Greenwich, assisting Edmund Halley (who died in 1742) he did much astronomical work, and made a unique star-atlas, the Uranographia Brittanica, the plates of which, however, were sequestered in chancery when the printer, John Neale, became bankrupt, and earned a reputation (internationally) as an astronomer. When Nevil Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal following the death of the Rev. Nathaniel Bliss in 1764, Bevis, who had hoped for the appointment himself, returned to his medical practice, setting up at the Temple [London]. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765. But astronomy got him in the end, for, continuing his studies, he was quickly from his telescope one day he fell, sustaining injuries from which he died. It could only have been at this period in his life, at the Temple, as a FRS, that Paine knew him. `As soon as I was able I purchased a pair of globes, and attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson, and afterward acquainted with Dr. Bevis of the society called the Royal Society, then living in the Temple, and an excellent astronomer’. 

Moncure Conway in his Life of Paine mentions that [Thomas ‘Clio’] Rickman assigns the period of instruction in astronomy to the year 1767, but that he himself preferred the earlier time of 1757, when Paine would have been twenty years of age. Moreover, he suggests that Paine would have been too poor to afford globes in 1766-7. A study of the lives of his mentors shows clearly that he met Martin and Fergusson fairly certainly at the earlier time, but Dr. Bevis only at the later period, having bought his globes, terrestrial and celestial, ten years previously. On the first occasion he was a staymaker with Mr. Morris of Hanover Street; on his second he was teaching at Mr. Goodman’s and then in Kensington. 

There were some important events taking place in astronomy at this time but they seem to have escaped Paine’s notice. William Herschel discovered the seventh, telescopic , planet in 1781. He wanted to call it ‘George’s Star’, but it is now called Uranus. The scientists in Paris would have known all about this important discovery but one supposes that there would have been no occasion to discuss it with Paine; in any case he did not speak French fluently. There had been transits of Venus across the sun in 1761 and 1769 (the only occasions that century) and Paine mentions them in a footnote to prove how man can know sufficient to predict these and similar events. There must have been occasions of much general public comment – especially when scientists were trying to calculate accurately the distance of the sun from earth at these events. And then in 1789, Herschel made his great forty foot telescope, the envy of astronomers everywhere, indeed, the National Assembly was later to promote a prize for such an undertaking. However, time, scarcity of the necessary metals and shortage of money prevented any such project succeeding in stricken France. 

Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in these brief pages of The Age of Reason he shows he has gained a very clear understanding of the solar system from those early days in London.

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Introduction. 

Putting the world to rights: The presumptuous audacity of Thomas Paine. 

How dared Thomas Paine, a man whose formal education had ended at thirteen (Gilbert Wakefield, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, would call him ‘the greatest ignoramus in nature’), a man who had failed as a skilled craftsman, as a teacher, as a shopkeeper, as a street preacher, as a petty customs official in the Excise, dismissed more than once and a sometime debtor and bankrupt, how dared such a nobody, such a non-achiever even dare to think about the ends and means of government, about the basis of a just society, about the meaning we can give life? Some of the fundamental questions that Paine pondered and tried to answer were: 

Are humans essentially anti-social animals, whose lives are, in the philosopher Hobbes’ words, just ‘nasty, brutish and short’? 

Do we have to be ruled by some absolute, hereditary, hierarchical authority backed by force? 

Is humanity capable of instituting an alternative to war? 

Is Christianity the only true religion? 

Is any religion true? 

But Thomas Paine did not merely articulate such fundamental questions in his secret thoughts, he also talked about them and dared to write about them. Think of his audacity when he, an almost penniless, recently very sick, immigrant Englishman, not long off the boat, started telling the people of North America in print what they should all now do, first in relation to slavery (they should abolish it) and then in relation to Britain. He called on Americans to revolt against his own country, and even called it just ‘Common Sense’ for them to do so. 

Or think how Paine, a few years later, dared to take on Edmund Burke, Burke, the graduate of Trinity College Dublin, former barrister at the Middle Temple, former Private Secretary to the Secretary for Ireland, and then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister and himself an MP. Paine told Burke that his reactionary championing of the ancient regimes of Europe after the fall of the Bastille was wrong. His answer to Burke in Rights of Man was a trumpet call to ‘begin the world anew’: the British should abolish the hereditary principle of monarchy and aristocracy and substitute a just redistribution of wealth through graduated income tax. 

Paine did not engage only Burke but also with many other dominant spirits of his age, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, General Lafayette, Danton, Condorcet, Marat, even Napoleon. In his dedication of the first part of Rights of Man to George Washington, Paine hoped that its principles of freedom would soon become universal. In his Dedication of the second part of his Rights of Man to General Lafayette, he urged the latter to export the French Revolution to the whole world – above all to the despotism of Prussia. 

Finally, in his Age of Reason, Paine took on God Himself and denied the divinity of Christ whom he called simply ‘a virtuous and amiable man’: ‘I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church’. 

Mocked and caricatured in his own day as presumptuous little ‘Tommy Paine’, where on earth did Paine get this unexampled, defiant audacity from? But it was not unexampled. Paine did have exemplars for ‘speaking Truth to Power’. Ultimately, behind Thomas Paine, I suggest, there lies the Epistle of James: the most radical, angry exhortation to social justice in the whole New Testament. Let me remind you: 

…[Be] ye doers of the word, and not hearers only… My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ… with respect of persons. 

If there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come also a poor man in vile raiment and ye have no respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: 

Are ye not then partial in yourselves,… [Ye have despised the poor…[If] ye have respect to persons ye commit sin;… What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, poor…[If] ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin;… What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? And if a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not these things which are needful to the body; what do it profit? Even so faith if it hath not works, is dead … For, as the body without spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also… 

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you… Ye have heaped up treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth’. 

That had been written, perhaps by Jesus’s brother, 1,700 years before Paine’s birth but was available to him of course as a young child and a young man, in the Authorised version of the King James English Bible. The Epistle of James would resonate repeatedly among the early Quakers and in Paine’s own writings. 

Much nearer to Paine, both in place and time, as exemplars, were these early English Quakers – the Quakers of the recent persecution period 1650-1690. Moncure Conway, Paine’s first serious, sympathetic biographer wrote Iliad] there no Quakerism there would have been no Paine.¹ Was he right? 

Part One 

Who were the Quakers? 

Had there been no Civil War, or ‘Revolution’ as Paine himself called it, in England between1642 and 1651 there would have been no Quakerism, which began as a collective movement in 1652. The world had just been ‘turned upside down’ in Britain by that very recent war in which people had been asking – and killing each other over – fundamental questions about how to be a Christian and what kind of society Britain should be. The Parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ believed they were fighting against royal tyranny and ungodliness; the monarchist Cavaliers believed they were fighting against mob anarchy and against hypocrites out to usurp power under the fig leaf of religion. 

Each side, of course, believed very sincerely that God was on their side. And this English Civil War, called ‘The Great Rebellion’ by the royalist Cavaliers, and ‘The Good Old Cause’ by their Puritan Roundhead opponents, had actually been the English Revolution – culminating in the trial and execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1645 and of King Charles 1 – only very recently, in 1649. The men and women who would be convinced and converted to Quakerism just three years later at the beginning of the 1650s had sympathised with the Puritan, Roundhead side.

Some (though not George Fox), had even fought for Cromwell and Parliament against the king. They saw themselves in the tradition of the Protestant Martyrs burned at the stake under ‘Bloody Mary’ a century earlier – for instance Margaret Fell, ‘the Mother of Quakerism’, born Margaret Askew, was believed by some, mistakenly, to be actually descended from the famous Protestant martyr Anne Askew. During the Civil War they had often called themselves ‘independents’. Once the war had been won by Cromwell’s New Model Army and the Parliamentarians, many of these self- styled ‘Independent’ men and women remained restless ‘Seekers’, looking for spiritual leadership that might help them towards personal and social salvation. They would walk or ride many miles to hear a preacher who, they had heard, was a true man of God. Hence that great assembly of about a thousand or more Westmoreland Seekers at Firbank Fell, above Brigflatts, near Sedbergh, in Whitson, 1652, who heard George Fox tell them: ‘Let your lives speak’. He told them they had no need of a church or parish priest, but that they should all live their Christianity, emulating the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians as a Society of Friends. The ‘Valiant Sixty’ among those who heard Fox, then attempted to do just that, spreading their message of ‘the inner light’ in every man and woman out from the North Down to London, South, West and East – to Norfolk, the county of Thomas Paine. 

Although the Quakers’ creation of new congregations of ‘Friends’ in the 1650s came out of the spiritual turmoil of the Civil War, it was also a reaction against the brutal cruelty of that war. In fact George Fox had been moved to begin preaching a gospel of brotherly love already in 1646, right in the middle of the war. For is any war quite as terrible as the Civil War? – town against town, family against family, father against son, brother against brother, besieged women and children deliberately starved to death, prisoners deliberately mutilated and murdered after they have been promised pardon on surrender – and many other such atrocities – all in the name of ‘King and Country’ or else ‘For God and the People’. These very early Quakers were fired by a defiant, millenarian vision; they too wanted to turn the world upside down – but this time, unlike in the recent Civil War, by wholly non-violent means. Therefore immediately after the Civil War that had not brought about Jerusalem the Quakers preached and practised the alternative to war – non-violent resistance. Margaret Fell, the ‘Mother of Quakerism’ who would later marry Fox, wrote in 1660 to Charles II: 

We who are the people of God called Quakers, who are hated and despised, and everywhere spoken against, as People not fit to live… We are a people that follow after those things that make for Peace, love and Unity… we do bear our Testimony against all strife and wars… Our weapons are not Carnal, but Spiritual.

George Fox, 1661, delivered to Charles II a ‘Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, called Quakers against all plotters and fighters’. 

The Quaker Francis Howgilt, at his trial in Appleby said: 

It has been a Doctrine always held by us, and a received principle…that Christ’s Kingdom could not be set up with carnal Weapons, nor the Gospel propagated by Force of Arms, nor the Church of God builded by Violence; but the Prince of Peace is manifest among us and we cannot learn War any more, but can love our Enemies, and forgive them that do Evil to us…This is the Truth, and if I had twenty lives, I would engage them all, that the Body of Quakers will never have any Hand in War, or Things of that Nature, that tend to the Hurt of others. 

Following George Fox, the Quakers also opposed slavery and capital punishment. 

But if Quakers were so peaceable, why were they so persecuted in the 1650s, 1660s, 1670s and 1680s? Betrayed by local ‘informers’, arrested just for meeting to worship in silence in one another’s houses, or for refusing to attend their local church, they were heavily fined, imprisoned for months in filthy, stinking, dark holes – often below ground -, publicly stripped and whipped, stoned and even transported as slaves?. Under Charles II (1660- 1685), 13,562 Quakers were arrested and imprisoned; 198 were transported as slaves; at least 338 died in prison as a result of their injuries. It was in this same period that Bunyan the unlicensed Baptist preacher was in Bedford Jail and Richard Baxter, the Presbyterian minister who would not conform to the 39 Articles was tried in his frail and sick old age by the Chief Justice Judge Jeffreys. “What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain, that he would not conform… He hath poisoned the world with his linsey wolsey doctrine”. Judge Jeffreys wanted the old man publicly whipped. But Baxter and Bunyan were individuals who were persecuted; the Quakers were persecuted as a collective body, an alternative, threatening counter- culture, a ‘Society of Friends’ that was a standing criticism of the wider dominant – and unfriendly – social fabric of Great Britain. 

The Reasons for the persecution: 

Quakers were seen as a threat to the given social order into which they had been born because they had many subversive beliefs and practices in addition to their refusal to bear arms. The refused to take their hats off in respect to ‘their betters’ because they were `no respecters of persons (cf. the Epistle of James above). This was not trivial; it was a traditional gesture of popular social protests and enraged ‘the better sort’. When one accused Quaker refused to take his hat off before the magistrate, the judge seized it, burned it and sentenced him to five months’ imprisonment. 

Quakers refused to bow courteously or to use the polite terms of address; for instance they refused to say ‘You’ to their ‘betters’ but called everyone the familiar ‘Thou’, like ‘Du’ in German or ‘Tu’ in French. They refused to . give any of their fellow humans a special title. If they lived under a monarchy, they would not say ‘Your Majesty’ to the King, but just call him ‘King’; they would not say ‘My Lord’ to an aristocrat or ‘Your Honour’ to a Judge, or even refer to anyone as ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’, ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. Instead, everyone was simply called by their first name and surname and addressed as ‘Friend’ by Quakers – even Cromwell, when Lord Protector of England, was addressed as ‘Friend Oliver’ by Fox. 

Quakers refused to swear any oath in a court of law because Christ had said ‘Swear not at all’. Again, in that same radical Epistle of James, we find : ‘above all things brethren, swear not, either by heaven, neither by the earth, either by any other oath: let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay. The truth was that everyone should speak everywhere and at all time, not merely in the witness box. But how could the non-oath taking Quakers be believed to be loyal citizens owing allegiance, or held capable of keeping any binding contracts, if they refused all oaths? 

Quakers refused to have any parson or minister, believing instead in their own Inner Light, that which is of God in everyone; they refused even to attend Anglican church services, that is ‘the prescribed national worship’, let alone pay their local Anglican parson his ‘tithes’ or church rates, no matter how often and how grossly their own goods were thereupon ‘distrained’, looted; half of their confiscated property being taken by those who had informed against them. Quakers maintained that there should be no paid ‘hireling’ ministers in Britain at all, which did not endear them to the professional clergy. And who knew what sedition, or incitements their meetings in one another’s houses might not be brewing, asked the magistrates? 

Finally, and perhaps worst of all in the eyes of their contemporaries, there even were many women Quakers, who followed their own Inner Light and preached in the streets as public missionaries who, when they were not in prison, travelled indefatigably throughout Britain and even the world, broadcasting the Quaker message of ‘that of God’ existing in every human being, including women. 

Thus 17th century Quakers seemed to be threatening the creation of an alternative, much more egalitarian society, and one that even included the spiritual equality of men and women. Quakers would not conform to church or state. And they were making thousands of converts. Where might it not end if almost everyone turned Quakers? Social Revolution? Already by 1660, i.e. in their first eight years, there had been at least 20,000 converts. In 1653 George Fox wrote: ‘0 ye great men and rich men of earth! Weep and howl for your misery that is coming [quotation from the Epistle of James]…the day of the Lord is appearing… All the loftiness of men must be laid low’. 

Alarmed, the Presbyterian Major-General Skipton, then in charge of London, had said in Parliament already in 1656: ‘[The Quakers’] great growth and increase is too notorious, both in England and Ireland; their principle strike at both ministry and magistracy’. It is not surprising, after all, that peaceable though they were, the Quakers were ruthlessly persecuted in an attempt to extirpate every one of them. How did they respond? They articulated their resistance, and testified to the principle of liberty of conscience. 

Quaker History of the Persecution. 

From the moment that they were persecuted, the late 17th century Quakers chronicled that persecution and their own un-budge-able, non-violent resistance. They wrote and printed pamphlets and letters to one another, above all to Margaret Fell, herself often imprisoned, and appealingly eloquently to the Magistrates, to King or to Parliament. 

In 1660 Richard Hubberthom wrote ‘[If] any magistrate do that which is unrighteous, we must declare against it’. This the Quakers judged the magistrates, and their social ‘superiors’, not the other way round. In 1664, after the Conventicle Act, that sought to banish Quakers to the West Indies, George Whitehead, who has been called possibly the most influential advocate of religious liberty in Britain,² ‘sheaved the judges their duty from the law and Magna Carta’. Every single example of arrest and punishment of Quakers was documented by a local Friend who could write a clear hand, naming both the local Sufferers and the local Persecutors on facing pages of their records.³ 

Thus Quaker solidarity and continuity was achieved through the creation of their own written accounts of individual and collective persecution. And it was upon these many local records, in addition to trial transcripts, that the amazingly comprehensive collective narrative compiled by Joseph Besse was based – The Suffering of the People Call Quakers for the Testimony of a Good Conscience 1650-1689. Thomas Paine was born precisely half way between these dates, in 1737. 

Besse title page: If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (John). For the oppression of the poor, for the Sighing of the Needy, now I will arise, saith the Lord” (Psalms). 

Besse’s Preface to the Reader:

‘It was an excellent observation… that God is tried in the fire, and acceptable Men in the Furnace of Adversity… Persecution is a severe test upon the Hypocrite and Earthly-minded. ‘When thou passest flub the Waters, I will be with thee..ffsalahr. A Measure of this holy Faith, and a sense of this divine Support; bore up the spirit of the People called Quakers for near 40 years together, to stem the Torrent of Opposition… The Messengers of it were entertained with Scorn and Derision, with Beatings, Buffetings, Stonings, Whippings and Imprisonment, Banishments, and even Death itself’ 

Just to give one vivid example of the persecution of a woman Quaker in Sussex there is the case of Mary Akehurst as summarised by Besse in his volume on Southern England, ch. 34, pp.711-712: 

1659… Mary Akehurst, a religious Woman of Lewis [sic], going into a Steeple-house there, and asking a Question of the Independent Preacher, after his Sermon, was dragg’d out by the people, and afterwards beaten and puncht by her Husband, so that she could not lift her Arms to her Head without Paine. She also suffered much cruel Usage from her said Husband, who bound her Hand and Foot, and grievously abused her, for reproving one of the Priests who had falsely accused her. Her Husband also kept her chained for a Month together, Night and Day. 

Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the Church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although even after her husband had died, she was punished by the authorities time and again. David Hitchin’s Quakers in Lewes (1984), based on the full account held in the Public Record Office Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the Church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although even after her husband had died, she was punished by the authorities time and again. David Hitchin’s Quakers in Lewes (1984), based on the full account held in the Public Record Office takes up the story: In 1670 she was distrained of goods worth £29 by false information. She appealed to the next Sessions and the informer, fearing be found a perjurer, fled. Her goods were ordered to be returned. In 

1672 William Penn visited her in Lewes. In 1673 she was reported by an informer priest, William Snatt, for meeting in a private house, fined £8.10 shillings, and her goods were taken worth £16.18 shillings. In 1676 she was fined £10 for meeting in a house in West FirIe. In 1677 she was indicted for nine months’ absence from church. In 1686 (27 years after asking her first question in St. Michael’s church) when old, sick and unable to walk without being held up on either side, she was carried off at midnight by bailiffs to prison. In Besse’s words, op.cit. p.734: 

One of the Bayliffs, being drunk, when he got on Horseback, with many Oaths and Threatenings had set her upon his Horse, and would not suffer her to take Necessaries with her, so that her Friends thought she could not live till she came to the Prison. But the barbarous Bayliff swore, that if she could not hold it to Prison, which was twenty Mlles, he would tie her, and drag her thither at his Horse’s Tail. Being brought to Horsham Jail, she was kept dose Prisoner there about seven Months, and then was removed to London and committed to the King’s Bench. In Oxford… In Cumbria… 

It was men like George Fox, Francis Howgill, Edmund Burroughs, Richard Hubberthom, George Whitehead and Robert Barclay, and women like Margaret Fell, Ann Blaykling, Mary Fisher and Mary Akehurst who were Thomas Paine’s fearlessly radical 17th century forerunners, speaking out for justice and civil liberty, including liberty for (non-violent) non-conformity. 

Part Two 

Paine’s own Quaker Background. 

Paine’s magisterial biographer John Keane stresses that Paine was the child of a mixed marriage – half Anglican, half Quaker and suggests that this must have led to his having a balanced, even detached, view of both orthodox and heterodox Christianity and hence to his championing of toleration. I myself see no reason to think that young Paine felt himself to be equally Anglican and Quaker. He is generally agreed to have been much closer to his Quaker father to whom he was apprenticed at thirteen than he was to his Anglican mother. And he actually recounts in The Age of Reason how shocked and alienated he had been when he was 7 or 8 years old, on hearing his Anglican aunt’s orthodox Anglican religious teaching of Original Sin and redemption through God’s allowing the crucifixion of his own son. Instead, when young Tom Paine attended Quaker meetings in Meeting House Lane, he would have heard Quaker neighbours testifying not to sin or damnation but to their feelings of love and unity and to the working of God’s mercy in their own lives; he would also have absorbed the practical mercy that Thetford Quakers gave out towards the needy, suffering members of their meeting. 

For in Thetford, Quakers collective self-organization had already been established soon after the start of the first Friends’ meetings there.³ 

Through democratic ‘Quaker discipline’ that included ‘elders’ and ‘overseers’ and monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings as well as women’s meetings, taking care of the poor, the sick, the old, the widowed and the orphans had been the Quaker way from the first.⁴ Their path-breaking schemes of providing accommodation, weekly allowances, legacies and gifts of fuel and clothing (we again remember the Epistle of James) gave Paine a lifelong Quaker ‘feeling for the hard condition of others’ as he himself would write in his letter to the town of Lewes later. There would also have been (as there still is) decision-making by consensus – ‘the sense of the Meeting’. Therefore, despite arguments and some defections, and criticism, Quakers managed to practice democratic consultation and to avoid continuous acrimonious splitting into ever smaller groups. Instead, they tolerated different approaches to Truth if sincerely sought, trusting in each Friend’s own moral and reasoned judgement, as he or she followed their ‘Inner Light’. 

We should also note that Quakerism is, and has always been, an outward looking faith. They believed from the first that Quakerism is something to be lived out in the world and this bonded them in shared efforts at humanitarian intervention. For the Quakers have never been short of others’ Sufferings’ that need addressing, the sufferings of slaves, prisoners, the disenfranchised, the starving, refugees, the victims of war and persecution. 

Quakerism already had an influence on Paine’s schooling, between the ages of 7-13. His father said he must not learn Latin because of the books thro’ which that language is taught – think of the semi-divine status claimed for the founding of Rome in the Aeneid or the city or the deity accorded the later Roman emperors or Caesar’s triumph list history in his accounts of his conquest of Gaul. Simon Weil called history ‘believing the murderers at their own word’. 

Did, during this period, young Paine read a copy of Besse’s Sufferings of the Early Quakers in the small Thetford Meeting House library? Or did his father, or a richer Quaker neighbour actually own a copy?⁵ We shall never know, but at the very least there must have been an inextinguishable orally transmitted tradition. As Sylvia Stevens writes in her monograph A Believing People in a Changing World: Quakers in Society in North-east Norfolk, 1690-1800: 

When Friends such as Mary Kirby and Edmund Peckover who were directly descended from a Quaker of the first generation, gave their [oral] ministry, they were doing so as people who linked to the past but spoke a message for the present 18th century Norfolk Quakers acknowledged, shaped and revered their own religious pasts but lived in their own time. 

What would young Thomas Paine have read or been told about the treatment of the Quakers, including his own kin, in Thetford, in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk, before he was born? And how would they have reacted? 

The written history of persecution of Norfolk Quakers, especially Norwich and Thetford (Source: Besse)

1660 the deposition of Samuel Duncombe on the breaking up of a meeting in Norwich: ‘[We suffered their] smiting, punching, cruel mocking… thumping on the Back and Breast without Mercy, dragging some most inhumanly by the Hair of the Head, and spitting in our Faces, abusing both men and women…[They] have taken the Mire out of the Streets and have thrown it at the Friends, some of them holding the Maid of the House whilst others daubed her face with Gore and Dung, so as the skin of her face could hardly be seen.’ 

For that ‘scandalous expression’ Duncombe and the other Quakers were sent to prison. Whereupon Samuel Duncombe wrote again to the Mayor and Aldermen, beginning ‘Friends, Our Oppression is more than we ought always to bear in Silence. And now we are upon the brink of Ruin by the loss of our Goods,… made harbourless in our own houses… And what would you have us do? Do you think we are only wilful and resolve so to be? Do you think these things are pleasing to our own wills as creatures of flesh and blood as you are also, to suffer? You must also expect Judgement – therefore be not high-minded, but fear – for the Lord can quickly blast your Honour and disperse your Riches. We cannot sew Pillows under your armholes, but wish you well as we do ourselves.’

Duncombe later sent a second letter from Norwich prison, beginning not ‘Friends’, this time, but ‘Magistrates!’ And continuing: ‘For complaining of injustice our liberties are taken from us, we are forced to lodge in straw’. 

In February 1665 at the Quarter Sessions held at Norwich Castle, Henry Kettle and Robert Eden both of Thetford, and two others, were convicted of the third offence in meeting together (see Conventicle Act) and were sentenced to be carried thence to Yarmouth, and from that Port to be transported for seven years to Barbados’ (i.e. as slaves). When Kettle returned after seven years, he was again arrested and imprisoned. 

In 1676, William Gamham, Mary Townsend and Robert Spargin of Thetford were distrained of their good worth £2.5 shillings. One Captain Cropley molested them and attempted to disperse their religious meeting by Force of Arms. And when they asked for his commission so to do, he showed them his rapier. And one of them not going at his command, he beat him on the Head with his Stick and kickt him on the Back to the endangering of his Life. 

November 1676, Samuel Dunscombe [again] reported how his house was forcibly entered; ‘officers bringing with them one Tennison and impudent Informer and the common Hangman. They tarried several days and nights in that home and kept Samuel Duncombe’s wife, then big with child, a Prisoner, suffering her to speak to no body and admitting none of the neighbours to come near her. The Goods they took were valued at £42.19 shillings’. 

1678 ‘George Whitehead and Thomas Burr were taken at a meeting in Norwich. Charles Alden, a Vintner and one of the singing Men in the Cathedral, rushed in calling out ‘Here’s Sons of Whores; here’s 500 Sons and Daughters of Whores. The Church Doors stand open but they will be hanged before they will come in there’. sand whilst George Whitehead was speaking, [Alden] cryed out ‘Put down that Puppy Dog! Why do you suffer him to stand there prating?’ 

These Norfolk Quakers were then sent to prison in Norwich Castle and again in 1680 for refusing to take the oath. On his release George Whitehead went straight to Hampton Court to plead with the King on behalf of his fellow-prisoners left 27 steps below ground in Norwich Castle dungeons – ‘They are burying them alive’, he told the King, whom he just addressed as ‘King’, ‘They are poor harmless people, poor Woolcombers, Weavers and Tradesmen, like to be destroyed’. The prisoners were only released two years later. 

1682 Anne Payne was committed to prison for ‘absence from National Worship’ (Many other Paines, or Paynes, in Norfolk suffered the seizure of their goods, and imprisonment). 

1684 saw an ‘excessive Seizure from two Norfolk farmers, John Roe and William Roe, who were fined £240 and had all their cattle, corn and households goods taken by the Sherriff’s Officers in East Dereham. ‘The behaviour of the Officers and Assistants and who made this seizure was very rude. They broke open the Doors, Drawers and Chests and threatened the Servants of the House with Sword and Pistol. To make themselves merry they roasted a pigg and laid so much wood on the Hearth that they set the Chimney on Fire with which, and their Revelling, Cursing and Swearing, they affrighted the wife of the said William Roe to the endangering of her Life; she being then great with child, was delivered before her lime, and the child died a few days later’. 

The persecution continued in Norfolk up to 1690. Such things are not soon forgotten. Whether or not young Thomas Paine, born in 1737, read a copy of Besse, so many were the oral accounts of the persecution period that he must have heard many examples from his father, from his paternal grand- parents and from other Thetford Quakers. It was still living memory and there can be no doubt at all on which side he and his father were on. It would simply not have been possible for him as a sensitive, spirited, indignant child and youth to have been equally pro-Anglican, on the side of the punishing ruling class, and on the side of their victims, the heroes and heroines of Quaker dissent. 

Part Three 

Paine’s writing on Quakers and on Quakerly principles. 

1768-1775: Paine in Lewes. 

Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman, who would become Paine’s closest English friend and first devoted biographer (Paine would write part of the Rights of Man in his London home), first attached himself to Paine as his inspiring mentor when he was a youth in Lewes. ‘Clio’ Rickman was a ‘birthright’ Lewes Quaker on both sides of his family, the Rickmans being the dominant family in the meeting there. They first settled in Lewes around 1700 and were almost certainly related to, if not directly descended from, the Quakers Nicholas Rickman from Arundel who had been pitilessly persecuted in West Sussex decade after decade before 1690. Their common Quaker heritage and knowledge of Quaker persecution history would have been one of the bonds between the radical debating Paine of the Lewes Headstrong Club and his young admiring convert to radicalism, Rickman. ‘Clio’ Rickman himself would be disowned by the Lewes meeting for ‘marrying out’ but eventually died as a Quaker in London and would be buried in the Quaker burial ground in Bunhills Fields. He would publish Paine and give him sanctuary in London, and himself suffer as a publisher for his Paine connection. 

1775-1787 America. 

1775-80 Paine worked with Philadelphia Quakers in the first anti-slavery society in America, founded by the Quaker John Woolman. He wrote his first essay there asking the Americans to ‘discontinue and renounce’ slavery in African Slavery in America. 

1775. In his Thoughts on a Defensive War, he wrote “I am thus far a Quaker, in that I would readily agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket”, i.e. against the troops, including Hessian mercenaries, being employed by the British to put down the American struggle for colonial independence – ‘laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword (Common Sense). 

Therefore, in 1776 in his Appendix to Common Sense, Paine opposed those conservative ‘Tory’, non-resisting Philadelphia Quakers who, in 1776, advocated reconciliation with the British King, Paine accused this group of rich Quakers, who, he said, did not represent all Quakers, of being not really neutral and peacefully above the conflict as they claimed by de facto partisans on King George III’s side, when they argued against resistance. Their very participation in political argument forfeited their claim to be apolitical quietists. They were really on the side of Mammon. Had Paine known of the actual degree of American Quaker economic collaboration with the British then going on behind the scenes, he would have been even more incensed.⁶

It is noteworthy that in the same Appendix Paine proves that he has read some Quaker persecution history in his admiring allusion to ‘the honest soul of [the Quaker Robert] Barclay’ and his quotation from Barclay’s Address to Charles 11, criticising persecution under Charles II, a King who having himself been oppressed ‘hest reason to know how hateful the oppressor is to both God and man’. 

Xmas 1776 The American Crisis – first essay by Paine advocating total resistance even unto death: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls… Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered;…’ show your faith by your works’ (Epistle of James). 

November 1778, 7th Crisis essay, Paine coined the phrase ‘Religion of Humanity’, i.e. humanity is the true religion. My religion is to do good’. 

1788-9 and 1791: England. 

1789 Letter to Kitty Nicholson: 

There is a Quaker favourite of mine at New York, formerly Miss Watson of Philadelphia ; she is now married to Dr. Lawrence and is an acquaintance of Mrs. Oswald; so be kind as to make her a visit for me. You will like her conversation. She has a little of the Quaker primness – but of the pleasing kind about her.

1789 -1790 and 1792-1795: France 

1793 attacked by Marat re clemency for King denounced for being a Quaker and therefore against death penalty.

1794 – 6: Paine on Quakers and Quakerism in The Age of Reason. Conway Introduction. Paine’s ‘Reason’ is only an expansion of the Quakers “inner light’. Paine was a spiritual successor of George Fox. He too had ‘apostolic fervour’. 

Part 1, Ch. 1. The author’s profession of faith. 

‘I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy’. ‘My own mind is my own church’. 

Ch.111. The character of Jesus. 

‘He was a virtuous and amiable man. The morality he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some Greek philosophers many years before, by the Quakers since, and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any. 

Ch. X111 

My father being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceedingly good moral education, and a tolerable stock of useful learning. Though I went to the grammar school, I did not learn Latin, not only because I had no inclination to learn languages, but because of the objection the Quakers have against the books in which the language is taught. 

And note how his first attempts to think and write about politics and government were determined by the principle in which he had been raised – I.e. Quakerism. 

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true Deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers: but they have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at the conceit that if a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties nor a bird been permitted to sing. 

Part 2, Conclusion to The Age of Reason: 

The only sect that has not persecuted are the Quakers; and the only reason that can be given for it is, that they are rather Deists than Christians. They do not believe much about Jesus Christ, and they call all scriptures a dead letter. 

1797, Letter to Camille Jordan who was anxious to restore Catholic privileges, inc. church bells, in post-revolutionary France. 

The intellectual part of religion is a private affair between every man and his Maker, and which no third party has any right to interfere. The practical part consists in our doing good to each other. But since religion has been made into a trade, the practical part has been made to consist of ceremonies performed by men called priests; true religion has been banished; and such means have been found out to extract money even from the pockets of the poor, instead of contributing to their relief… 

No man ought to make a living by Religion. It is dishonest to do so. Religion is not an act that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another… that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another… 

The only people who, as a professional sect of Christians provide for the poor of their society, are people known by the name of Quakers. These men have no priests. They assemble quietly in their places of meeting, and do not disturb their neighbours with shows and noise of bells… Quakers are equally remarkable for the education of their children. I am a descendent of a family of that profession; my father was a Quaker, and I presume I may be admitted as evidence of what I assert. … Principles of humanity, of sociability, and sound instruction for advancement of society, are the first objects of studies among the Quakers… One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests. 

1803, Letter to Samuel Adams. 

…”the World has been overrun with fables and creeds of human invention, with sectaries of whole nations against all other nations, and sectaries of those sectaries in each of them against each other. Every sectary, except the Quakers, has been a persecutor. Those who fled from persecution were persecuted in their turn. 

1804, Prospect Papers. 

It is an established principle with the Quakers not to shed blood, Re revelation: the O.T. usage ‘the word of the Lord came to such a one – like the expression used by a Quakers, that ‘the spirit moveth him”. 

The Quakers are a people more moral in their conduct than the people of other sectaries, and generally allowed to be so, do not hold the Bible (i.e. the O.T.) to be the word of God. They call it ‘a history of the times’. 

Conclusion 

Paine himself was not a Quaker, because he was not a Christian and the Quakers were Christians, however unorthodox and radical. Nevertheless, his Quaker heritage from his father gave him a birthright example of principled, fundamental criticism of the corrupt, caste-ridden, unjust society into which he was born. 

The persecution history, in particular, of his Quaker forebears transmitted to Paine both by word of mouth and in print in his youth, must, I believe, have been truly inspirational ‘strengthening medicine’ as he in his turn dared to ‘speak truth to power’. There is no foundation for conviction like saeva indignatio. And Paine, like the early Quakers, would also face trial for ‘sedition’, would be exiled by a fearful aristocratic government and would be imprisoned and risk death for his convictions – the latter, ironically, at the hand of revolutionary extremists. 

Paine acknowledged the idea rightness of the Quaker Peace testimony and would only ever see justification in a purely defensive armed struggle. Paine helped start the American Quaker campaign in Philadelphia to abolish slavery and the slave trade. 

Paine remembered the Society of Friends’ organization of care for its weakest members as a template for the possibility of organized social welfare that he would expound in Rights of Man. His allusions to Quakerism and the practice of the Quakers in his writings whether in America„ in France or in England, were overwhelmingly respectful, even at time reverential – ‘I reverence their philanthropy’. 

So far I have implied the influence of Quakerism on Paine was as positive as it was profound. But was it wholly positive? Perhaps we should consider the comment made by the eighty year old portrait painted by James Northcote, himself a political liberal, as reported in Hazlitt’s first Conversation with Northcote, in 1829. 

Nobody can deny that [Paine] was a very fine writer and a very sensible man. 

But he flew in the face of a whole generation; and no wonder that they were too much for him, and that his name became a byword with such multitudes, for no other reason than that he did not care what offence he gave them by contradicting all their most inveterate prejudices. If you insult a room-full of people, you will be kicked out of it. So neither will the world at large be insulted with impunity. If you tell a whole country that they are fools and knaves, they will not return the compliment by crying you up as the peak of wisdom and honesty. Nor will those who come after be very apt to take up your quarrel. It was not so much Paine’s being a republican or an unbeliever, as the manner in which he brought his opinions forward (which showed self-conceit and a want of feeling) that subjected him to obloquy. People did not like the temper of the man. 

The first Quakers had certainly known how to get up the noses of their late 17th century persecutor. They knew they were in the right, that they were ‘the Children of God’ and those who were against them were mere ‘hirelings’ and ‘worldlings’. But they did not thereby endear themselves to their world. As Besse himself said: Nor could it be expected that a Testimony levelled both against the darling Vices of the Laity and the forced maintenance of the Clergy should meet with any other than an unkind reception.⁷ Was Paine too much like those earliest Quakers, forfeiting persuasiveness in the certainty of his own exclusive rightness – and so ‘[meeting] an unkind reception’? 

Twenty years earlier than Hazlitt’s Conversation about him with Northcote, on his deathbed in March,1809, Paine had expressed his last wish: 

“I know not if the Society of people called Quakers, admit a person to be buried in their burying ground, who does not belong to their Society, but if they do, or will admit me, I would prefer being buried there; my father belonged to that profession, and I was partly brought up in it.” 

According to Keane, a local New Jersey Friend, Willett Hicks: 

‘conveyed Paine’s request sympathetically to the local Friends, but it was refused. Hicks reported back that the society felt that Paine’s own friends and sympathizers “might wish to raise a monument to his memory, which being contrary to their rules, would render it inconvenient to them”….Paine sobbed uncontrollably’ …

Notes

1. Conway, Moncure, Life of Thomas Paine…. 1892, vol.1, p. 11. 
2. See Oxford DNB entry on Whitehead, See Public Record Offices for the earliest mss. Quaker archives, listing local ‘Sufferers’ and ‘Perpetrators on facing pages, month by month, year by year, 1652-1690. 
3. Those among the Valiant Sixty’ at Firbank Fell in 1651 who had gone to ‘ publish truth’ in Norwich and Norfolk in 1653-4 pi included Christopher Atkinson from Kendal, Ann Blaylding from Drawell, Richard Hubberthome from Yealand, James Lancaster from Walney, Dorothy Waugh from Preston Patrick and George Whitehead from Orton. 
4. Keane p. 24: they believed their mutual aid enabled them to return in Spirit to the grace of the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians. 
5. Quote intro. to facsimile of Besse re their distribution. 
6. See Conway, vol.1, pp. 78-77. 
7. Besse, Introduction.

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From the time that his first biographer, Francis Oldys, adopted Thomas Paine, the son of a Thetford stay-maker, as a subject,² all others have accepted the fact that he fathered no children. Recent examination of records, from a long time past, suggest that he might have done. 

Two hundred and forty one years ago an entry was made in the Parish Register of a church in Kent. Over the years, the pages yellowed and faded as further entries were made and the book was stored away when filled. That short mention of the baptism of a girl child might have evinced excitement in both conservative and radical circles if it had been sought and found during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but, until now, nobody thought to look! 

The little girl’s arrival and departure from this world went unnoticed in the way of most human beings, but her omission from biographies of a man who left an indelible mark on the world is remarkable. The extraordinary reason for this omission, over two hundred years, is difficult to explain. Oldys researched assiduously, and, from his work, all of his successors, good, bad and indifferent, have lazily borrowed. Some attempted to sweeten his words, as is done yet, in attempts to present a saintlike figure to admirers of their hero. Others have built upon that work which ran into several editions. Ironically, it is possible that the one biographer who had first-hand knowledge of his friend, Paine, was told of the child, but misheard. 

Oldys, who worked as a clerk to Lord Hawksbury in the Board of Trade and plantations, was paid £500 by his employer to write a disparaging biography of Paine.³ To his credit, he treated as gossip the stories of the ‘fate’ of Paine’s first wife, Mary Lambert, whom he met at Sandwich, Kent. Mary was employed as a waiting woman to the wife of a woollen-draper, Richard Solly, who had formerly been twice-elected mayor of Sandwich.⁴ Thomas, aged twenty-two, and Mary married in September 1759. The bride, who was baptised on 1st January, 1738, was probably aged twenty-one.⁵ In 1760, Thomas and Mary moved to Margate where he set up a stay-making business. From that point on, nothing is known of Mary Paine. 

By some [wrote Oldys] she is said to have perished on the road of ill usage, and a premature birth. The women of Sandwich are positive, that she died in the British Lying-in-Hospital, in Brownlow-street, Long-acre, but the register of this charity, which is kept with commendable accuracy, evinces that she had not been received into this laudable refuge of female wretchedness. And there are others, who have convinced themselves by diligent enquiry, that she is still alive, though the extreme obscurity of her retreat prevents ready discovery.⁶ 

Oldys, to no avail, thoroughly checked records of the Lying-in Hospital and the workhouse of St. George’s, Southwark, where newspapers of the 1790s had reported Mary to be living.⁷

Thomas [Clio] Rickman, a disowned Quaker from Lewes, Sussex,⁸ would-be poet, inventor, and friend of Paine, in whose house in London the latter wrote Part II of Rights of Man, merely wrote of Paine having married “…Mary Lambert, the daughter of an exciseman of that place [Sandwich]. In April 1760, he removed with his wife to Margate, where she died shortly after.” 

The muckraking literature that has, since before his death, dogged Paine’s name began with the hireling writer, Oldys, yet he, possibly, more truly represented the story of Paine’s hapless, first marriage than any other writer. Over the years, on his foundation, writers and commentators have built imaginative narratives on the marriage of Thomas and Mary. Some tell of Mary becoming pregnant and dying in childbirth. 

There is no entry in the parish registers at Canterbury bearing evidence of Mary’s death with possible mention of a child, but, in the seeking, a record of baptism leaps out of the pages of Register No. 5, 1760, of the Parish of St. Lawrence in Thanet, close to Margate, where Rickman wrote of Mary dying.

[Figure 1 (missing): Entry in the register of St.Lawrence Church, Thanet, recording the baptism of Sarah Paine. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U3/19/1/5.]

Another child, Elizabeth Gisby, was baptised on the same day.⁹ Just nine months later, a poignant, one line burial entry is to be found in the same parish register.

[Figure 2 (missing): Entry recording the burial of Sarah Paine in the register of St. Lawrence Church,¹⁰ Thanet. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U3/19/1/5.]

Nobody who has written on Paine mentioned these entries, here reproduced for the first time, yet they clearly suggest that the short-lived baby, Sarah Paine, was the child of Thomas Paine who, in later life, wrote his way to fame and infamy.¹¹ 

On the words of Oldys alone, biographers have written of Paine leaving Margate to live with his parents at Thetford during July 1761. He might have done, leaving an infant in care 

of the Sollys or others, but it seems unlikely that the Sollys would have taken the child as Mary Solly was probably ill; she was buried just two months after Sarah Pain, on 14th November, 1761.¹² It is more likely that Oldys was mistaken in the date of Paine’s return to Thetford. The child, Sarah, might or might not have been the daughter of Thomas Paine, but it seems a remote possibility that a child of like-named parents would have died in the area within a year of the birth of another.¹³. 

Sarah Pain was buried just ten days prior to the coronation of George III. Richard Solly was a Coronation Baron of the Cinque Ports of Dover, Hastings, Romney, Hythe and Sandwich which, in the thirteenth century in return for certain privileges, were obliged to furnish ships and men to defend the English Channel. His position required him to hold the canopy over the king and afterwards sit at the right hand of the monarch at the coronation banqueting table.¹⁴ The Sollys were possibly the only friends of Thomas and Mary Paine. In the time of the young parents’ grief, both the Sollys and the people of Sandwich were probably exited at the prospect of the baron’s important role in the royal celebrations and too distracted to recall with certainty, more than thirty years after the event when questioned by Oldys, the circumstances surrounding the birth and death of an unknown stay-maker’s child in a nearby town. In the 1760s, they did not know the radical Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man. Part I was published in 1791 and Part II in 1792. 

It might have been that Oldys cut short his research, which is unlikely close to the beginning of such a work, or kept to himself details of a story which, in a small way, might have led to public sympathy for Paine at the height of his radical popularity. It might have been that, when writing of his friend who had died ten years earlier, Rickman, in 1819, had forgotten details told to him by Paine. It might have been that when the two last conversed, in the 1790s, Paine reminisced quietly of moving to Margate, looked away, sniffed the air or even a tear, and turned to his friend who only heard the words, “….where she died shortly after.” It might have been that Paine had told Rickman of the birth of Sarah who “….died shortly after.” It was Thomas [Clio] Rickman who invented the “Patent Signal Trumpet, for increasing the Power of Sound.”¹⁵ It might have been that necessity was the mother of invention; it might have been that he was hard of hearing. 

It is possible that Oldys was correct in stating that Thomas Paine and his young wife were last seen leaving Kent for London. He quoted “the women of Sandwich” as having had knowledge of Mary being in London,¹⁶ but Margate, where Mary lived with Thomas, is ten miles from Sandwich so it would hardly have been local gossip. William Cobbett, in 1797, quoted and commented upon the London Review of Oldys’s Life of Thomas Paine and, in fiercely scurrilous prose, also wrote of Thomas and Mary leaving Margate for London. Francis Westley, in 1819, picked up, virtually word for word, the gossip reported by Oldys and related it as fact. Rickman and William Sherwin, both favourable to Paine and both published in 1819, merely state that Mary died at Margate in 1760.¹⁷ It is possible that Mary Pain was alive, in 1791, when Oldys first published his derisive biography of Paine! It is possible that she was the mother of little Sarah Pain! Diligent searching has revealed no clues to her ultimate fate. 

From the finding of Sarah Pain in the Thanet registers, questions arise, which have never been posed, regarding the early years of Thomas Paine. Until now all commentators have relied and built upon the account of the hireling, George Chalmers. His version of the little-known, early life of Paine, freed from embellishments of later writers, leads to speculation and theories which, when followed and found to produce hard evidence, lead to a revised story on the life and times of the man who coined the phrase ‘United States of America’.¹⁸ There he is recognised as a founding father. It is possible that he also named the little child, Sarah Pain, of whom he may, with caution, be recognised as father.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

I. Spelling of the name Paine/Pain is taken from quoted documents or in the context of Paine’s own usage. It does not present the problem that most derogatory writers on Thomas Paine have found it to be. In the eighteenth century, spelling was as much phonetic as concise and it was Paine’s prerogative to spell his name as he chose.

2. The Life of Thomas Paine: The Author of Rights of Men [sic] with a Defence of His Writings. London, 1791.

3. Rickman, op. cit., p.2; Sherwin, op. cit., p.iv.

4. Richard Solly served as mayor in 1738 and 1749 and was to serve a third term in 1778. Personal communication, Bob Solly, November, 1999.

5. Oldys. The Life of Thomas Pain, The Author of the Seditious Writings Entitled Rights of Man. 10th ed., London, 1793. n.t, p.11.

6. Oldys, 1793. pp.13-14.

7. Ibid., n.e, p. 14.

8. Rickman was disowned for marrying a non-Quaker in Cliffe Church, in 1783. David Hitchin, Quakers in Lewes: An Informal History, Lewes, 1984. p36. Paine’s father was disowned for the same reason when he married Frances Cocke at St. Genevieve’s Church, in the Suffolk parish of Euston, on 20th June, 1734. In the minutes of the Quaker Monthly Meeting at Hingham, which included the meetings of Mallishall, Wymondham and Thetford, on 4th May, 1733, it is noted that “Several [Quaker members]…. have gone to the priest to be Married and Several proffering

themselves Quakers have taken Liberty in Life and Conversation to the reproach of our Christian Profession. This Meeting desires that Friends of Each particular Meeting will suspect into these and all other disorderly practises and deal with such according to Gospell Order [Mel” SF 169, Norfolk Record Office. “Gospell Order” required disownment.

9. “Baptised 1760,” St. Lawrence, Thanet Parish Register. Courtesy of Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U3/I9/1/5

10. “Buried 1761,” Stinwrenoe, Thanet Parish Register. Courtesy of Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U3/19/1/5. I am deeply grateful to Carol Gill who first checked the records for me.

11. In America, laurels were heaped upon the head of the, then, anonymous author of Common Sense, the pamphlet that convinced patriots and converted loyalists to knowledge of Independence being in their best interests; in England the author of Rights of Man was found guilty of sedition, and, throughout the realm of Christendom, the writer of The Age of Reason went, unforgiven, to a literally lonely grave for attacking the Bible and denying the Trinity. Paine was buried in unconsecrated ground on his farm at New Rochelle, New York, from where, ten years later, he was exhumed by a former vilifier turned idoliser, William Cobbett, English Member of Parliament and journalist, with plans for a grand burial in England. Such burial never occurred.

12. DCb/BT1/207/165, Canterbury Cathedral Archives.

13. Pain/Paine/Payne is a common name in Kent and Sussex and Thomas and Mary were common names of the time.

14. The Cinque Ports., imp://www.hythe-kentdemon.co.uklcinque 1.htm>„ 11 3.1999, p.3.15. Advertisement, Rickman, op. cit., following p.277.

15. Advertisement, Rickman, op. cit., following p.277.

16. 1793, pp.I3-14. 

17.  Francis Westley, The Life of Thomas Paine, London, 1819, p.8; Rickman, op. cit., p.36; W.T. Sherwin, Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine, London, 1819, p.8.

18. The phrase first appeared in Paine’s American Crisis, No.11, 13th January, 1777.

This article first appeared in the Thetford Magazine, No.22. Summer, 2000, and is here reprinted with corrections provided by the author. © 2001. Hazel Burgess.

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Thomas “Clio” Rickman, who was dubbed an eccentric in one journal, at an early age was accorded the title, “Clio” by his literary friends in Lewes. Many of his youthful effusions were signed “Clio” and he subsequently used it as one of his names. 

Rickman was a classical scholar who had travelled widely. He was given the accolade of “Citizen of the World” for “having made truth the object of his discovery, and man that of his affection, sees the vices and errors of every country, and loves virtue in all.” Thomas Rickman was born into a Quaker family at Cliff, near Lewes, on 27th. July, 1761. He was the son of John Rickman (c.1715-1789) and Elizabeth nee Peter. He was educated at the public school at Coggenhall in Essex, where he studied the dead languages but stole away to read the more congenial Telemachus and Homer. 

His literary talent blossomed early and at the age of ten he sent his first essay to the Monthly Ledger. At thirteen he was apprenticed to his uncle, a surgeon in Maidenhead, where he remained for five years. During this time he read extensively, Bolingbroke, Hulme, Shaftsbury, Voltaire, Rousseau and Helveticus. He continued to write both prose and poetry for periodic publications. 

While in Maidenhead he met and married Miss Maria Emlyn of Windsor, the third daughter of an architect. Sadly she died after only eleven months of marriage in 1784. Grief stricken, Rickman returned to Lewes to join his father and brother in a mercantile business. He left the Quakers although he had only been a nominal member. Unable to settle, he went to London where he led a restless life. He then went to Holland and Catalonia in Spain. 

On his return to London in 1785, he set up in business as a printer and bookseller, first at 39, Leadenhall Street, then at 7, Upper Marylebone Street, “where all Periodical Publications are regularly served, and Newspapers franked to any part of England – Copper plates elegantly engraved – Printing and Bookbinding done in the best manner – an extensive Circulating Library.” He wrote and published, A Fallen Cottage, the list of subscribers testifying to the wide support for his work. 

In 1792, Rickman met Thomas Paine with whom he had frequently corresponded. They soon became firm friends and Paine benefited from Rickman’s knowledge of languages and classical education. Paine lived with Rickman and his second wife and whilst there he completed the second part of Rights of Man. On the small table on which it was written, Rickman later affixed a plaque with a commemorative inscription. This is now in the National Museum of Labour History. 

Rickman and Paine joined The Society for Constitutional Information which, after reaching a low ebb, had been revived. Rickman’s membership of the society was proposed by Paine and seconded by Home Tooke on June 22nd. 1792. He was formally elected on the 29th (Minute Book S.C.1 T.S.11/962, 103r, 115r, 91r, 93r). It met at the Crown and Anchor tavern and members included Lord Dare, Sir James Mackintosh, Home Tooke, Thomas Holcroft, William Sharp, the engraver, Joseph Gerald, John Richter, the publisher and Capt. Perry, publisher of The Argus. Rickman describes friends that he shared with Paine. They moved in radical circles with Joel Barlow, Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Priestly, among others (Rickman. Life of Paine. pp.100-1). 

The government, anxious to keep an eye on Paine, sent a spy, Charles Ross, to watch the activities in Rickman’s house. Paine, already awaiting trial, was alerted to the danger he was in and fled to France. Two Bills were found against Rickman, for publishing the second part of Rights of Man and The Letter to the Addressers. To avoid imprisonment, Rickman joined Paine in France and did not appear publicly in England for two years. His life in France is described in detail in his Life of Paine (pp.123-169). 

In 1794, Rickman returned and resumed his work in London. His wife had kept the business going in extremely difficult circumstances. 

When the Corresponding Society sent two delegates, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald to assist the reformers at their convention in Edinburgh, the authorities arrested them, and after a mockery of a trial, sentenced them to fourteen years transportation. Rickman did not forget Margarot and in 1814 wrote a tribute to him called “Elegiac Lines to the Memory of Maurice Margarot”: 

Thus, thus have fared the BEST in every clime, 

Witness the records of revolving time; 

And such, intrepid MARGAROT, they fate, 

The victim of a blind misguided state  

The friend of JUSTICE and of TRUTH you stood, 

Hurling defiance to Oppression’s clan, 

And nobly labouring for the RIGHTS OF MAN! 

Worse followed. The passing of the Two Acts at the end of 1795 prohibited seditious assemblies and made it a treasonable offence to incite to hatred or contempt of the king or the constitution or government by speech or in writing. 

Many reformers fled to America. Others, like Thelwall, left London. But Rickman found ways of using the limited legal scope available, avoiding imprisonment by slipping across to France when things became too hot. He continued to write and publish and in 1800 he hit back at the government in a poem, Mr. Pitt’s Democracy Manifest. In 1801, the authorities tightened security and checked Rickman’s overseas mail. 

In 1802, Rickman crossed the Channel and spent a week with Paine at Havre to help his friend prepare for his journey to America. On his return to London, he suffered a major tragedy and lost his desk containing three thousand original manuscripts. 

In 1803 he wrote and published An Ode to the Emancipation of the Blacks in San Domingo. 

In 1804 he published a few copies of a pamphlet for his friends. It was entitled, Thomas Paine to the People of England on the Invasion of England in 1804. The authorities managed to trap Rickman, sending a policeman in disguise to his shop and he was given a parcel of the pamphlets for delivery to Eastburn in Leeds. Rickman was arrested and his books and papers seized. Although the Attorney General dropped the prosecution after nine months, Rickman and his family suffered considerably. By then Mrs. Rickman had presented her husband with seven children, the boys having been blessed with the names Paine, Washington, Franklin, Rousseau, Pentarch and Volney. The seventh was probably a girl and her name is not recorded. 

Rickman did not let the situation pass without retaliation. He published a poem on “Corruption” which had an extensive sale as a broadsheet. 

When dire Corruption devastates the land 

And Whigs and Tories (each a factious band) 

When slaves of pow’r each cursed plan pursue, 

The Rights of Man and Nature to subdue; 

When gaunt oppression fearless holds her course, 

And Vile Hypocrisy is leagued with force, 

Each energy and feeling to destroy, 

That gives man comfort, every joy; 

Banish Corruption from our once blessed shore, 

And wield the scourge of tyranny no more. 

Be to the People faithful, firm, and true 

And such will ever be their conduct toward you.

Rickman was always ready to respond to current events. In 1806 when William Pitt died, he wrote: 

Reader! with eye indignant view this bier; 

The foe of all the human race lies here. 

With talents small, and those directed, too, 

Virtue and truth and wisdom to subdue,

He lived to every noble motive blind, 

And died, the execration of mankind. 

When Thomas Paine died in 1809, he left Rickman a legacy of half the proceeds from the sale of North Farm. 

In 1818 Rickman and a few other friends of Paine, induced Richard Carlile to issue a cheap edition of The Age of Reason. This had not been sold legally in Britain since 1797. The following year, Rickman published his Life of Thomas Paine, an impressionist account. This led to controversy with W.T. Sherman, whose own biography of Paine had appeared in July 1819. Sherwin relied largely on correspondence between Paine and his many friends and acquaintances. 

By 1820, Rickman was in reduced circumstances and ill. He was forced to sell his house in Carnaby Street. So difficult were his circumstances that Francis Place sent him a gift of £3 in March, 1832. Rickman died on 15th of February, 1834, aged 74, and was buried at the Friend’s Burial Ground at Bunhill Fields. 

Rickman was one of Thomas Paine’s closest friends. He wrote one of the first sympathetic biographies of him. His poetry, usually published under the name of Clio, was ephemeral. He responded to situations as they arose and often composed on journeys or walking or even skating. Well received at first and often set to music and sung in taverns and at radical meetings, they were soon forgotten. 

His courage as a publisher and bookseller in the period of the radical reform movement give him a place in history beside Danial Isaac Eaton, Thomas Spence and Richard (Citizen) Lee. 

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RECENTLY a member of the TPS resident in Sussex purchased an interesting manuscript from a Brighton bookseller. The MSS was in the hand of Mrs. Fitzherbert and is a copy of “OBSERVATIONS ON THE PREVAILING ABUSES in the British Army arising from the Corruption of Civil Government. With a proposal to the Officers towards obtaining an addition to their pay. By An Officer.” (Thomas Erskine, 1st. Baron Erskine,1750-1823).

The book has the heraldic bookplate of Thomas Clio Rickman and is bound ih 18th. century elaborately tooled red morocco, it measures 9 by 74 inches. Inserted is a letter dated 19th. November, 1842 from S.W. Burgess presenting the Mss to Mr. Justice Erskine (1788-1864), the fourth son of Lord Erskine, which states among other things that the MSS had been purchased “at the sale of “Clio” Rickmans (sic) Effects in 1840.” 

The text has been collated with the British Museum copy of the book (8287 de 88(2)) and shows a number of variants apart from a few scribal errors. An inscription on the fly-leaf in Rickman’s hand states that the MSS was “copied from the original by Maria in the year 1783”. 

Thomas “Clio” Rickman (1761-1834) was a prominent radical reformer, bookseller and propagandist. He was a close friend of Thomas Paine who subscribed to his book of poems and wrote the first friendly life of him. Rickman was associated with Whig circles, which included Erskine. Erskine made a name for himself as a defender of Paine and other reformers, but later sold out. As a favourite of the Prince of Wales was appointed attorney-general to him. Mrs. Fitzherbert entered London society in 1783, her full name being Mary Anne Fitzherbert (1756-1837), and became associated with the Whigs. She was always referred to as “Maria”. Two years later she married “Prinny”. 

The Revolution in France brought a reaction against reform and Rickman was threatened with prosecution for selling Paine’s works. He went into hiding aided by Mrs. Fitzherbert. 

The “Maria” referred to familiarly by Rickman on the Mss was manifestly Mrs. Fitzherbert, as a comparison of the handwriting of the manuscript against that of her extant letters demonstrates. Mrs. Fitzherbert had her work elegantly bound and presented it to Rickman. 

Erskine, who wrote the work copied out by “Maria” , had a colourful career. After much travel he bought a commission in the 2nd Battalion of the 1st. Royal Regiment of Foot and wrote his book as a farewell gesture on leaving the army in 1775 (he joined in 1767). Though published anonymously the work was early recognised as his and seems to have been suppressed as it is very rare. The inserted letter mentioned above states that no copy had ever been offered at auction.

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To Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man


Hail Genius! of Truth, and Life, and Light,

The purest wisdom marks thy manly page;

`Tis thine to purge from filth the mental site,

`Tis thine to renovate and bless the age

To valued naught but what is truly great,

To bow to sterling excellence alone;

To treat with contempt all the farce of state,

Not look with reverence but to Virtue’s throne.

These are the sentiments that fire thy breast

And Men through time, feeling the Rights of Man,

Shall bless themselves, in making others blessed,

And model governments in Heaven’s plan.

So shall man’s soul towards its maker rise,

And truth shall take the place of prejudice and lies.

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Preface to Rickman’s “Life”

The two following letters are explanatory of the reasons why the publication of the life of Mr. Paine has been so long delayed, and are so well calculated to excite the candor of the reader toward the work, that no apology is offered for making them a part of the preface.

“To the Editor of the Universal Magazine:

[November, 1811.]

“On Mr. Clio Rickman’s Supposed Undertaking of the ‘Life of Thomas Paine’

“Sir: The public has been, within the last year or two, led to expect a Life of the celebrated Thomas Paine, from the pen of Mr. Clio Rickman, well known, on various accounts, to be more thoroughly qualified for that task than any other person in this country.

“This information, however, I repeat as I received it, uncertain whether it came abroad in any authenticated shape; and can only add, that no doubt need be entertained of sufficient attention from the public in times like the present, to a well-written life of that extraordinary character, whose principles and precepts are at this moment in full operation over the largest and richest portion of the habitable globe, and which in regular process of time may, from the efficacious influence of the glorious principles of freedom, become the grand theater of civilization.

“I have often desired to make a communication of this kind to your magazine, but am particularly impelled thereto at this moment, from observing in some periodical publications devoted to political and religious bigotry, a sample of their usual sophistical accounts of the last moments of men who have been in life eminent for the independence and freedom of their opinions; but the whole that the bigot to whom I allude has been able to effect in the case of Mr. Paine, amounts to an acknowledgment that the philosopher died steadfast to those opinions of religion in which he had lived; and the disappointment is plain enough to be seen, that similar forgeries could not, with any prospect of success, be circulated concerning Paine’s tergiversation and death-bed conversion, which were so greedily swallowed for a length of time by the gulls of fanaticism respecting Voltaire, D’Alembert, and others, until the Monthly Review, in the real spirit of philosophy, dispelled the imposition.

“The late ‘Life of Thomas Paine’ by Cheetham of New York, gave rise to the above magazine article. Cheetham, humph! Now should it not rather be spelled Cheat’em, as applicable to every reader of that farrago of imposition and malignity, miscalled the ‘Life of Paine’?

“Probably it may be but a traveling name in order to set another book a-traveling, for the purpose of scandalizing and maligning the reputation of a defunct public man, instead of the far more difficult task of confuting his principles.

“Nothing can be more in course than this conjecture, authorized indeed by the following fact, with which I believe the public is, to this day, unacquainted; namely, that Mr. Chalmers publicly at a dinner acknowledged himself the author of that very silly and insipid catchpenny, formerly sent abroad under the misnomer of a ‘Life of Thomas Paine, by F. Oldys, of America.’

“The chief view of this application is to ascertain whether or not Mr. Rickman really intends to undertake the work in question.

“I am, Sir, etc., etc.

“Politicus.”

Universal Magazine, December, 1811.

“Mr. Clio Rickman’s Reply to Politicos

“Sir: If you had done me the favor of a call, I would readily have satisfied all your inquiries about the ‘Life of Mr. Paine.’

“It is true I had the memoirs of that truly wise and good man in a great state of forwardness about a year ago; but a series of the most severe and dreadful family distresses since that time have rendered me incapable of completing them.

“Though an entire stranger to me (for I have not the least idea from whom the letter I am replying to came), I feel obliged to you for the liberal opinion therein expressed of me and of my fitness for the work.

“I have taken great pains that the life of my friend should be given to the world as the subject merits; and a few weeks, whenever I can sit down to it, will complete it.

“Unhappily, Cheetham is the real name of a real apostate. He lived, when Mr. Paine was my inmate in 1792, at Manchester, and was a violent and furious idolater of his.

“That Mr. Paine died in the full conviction of the truth of the principles he held when living I shall fully prove, and should have answered the contemptible trash about his death, so industriously circulated, but that the whole account exhibited on the face of it fanatical fraud; and it was pushed forward in a mode and manner so ridiculous and glaringly absurd, as to carry with it its own antidote.

“Such Christians would be much better employed in mending their own lives, and showing in them an example of good manners and morals, than in calumniating the characters and in detailing silly stories of the deaths of those Deists who have infinitely outstripped them, in their journey through life, in every talent and virtue, and in diffusing information and happiness among their fellowmen.

“I again beg the favor of a call, as the circumstances attached to the query of yours, and the delays and hindrances, which are of a family and distressing nature, to the publication of Mr. Paine’s life, are better adapted for private than for public discussion.

“I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

“Clio Rickman.”

It may not be necessary for me to promise anything further than to say, that I affect not to rank with literary men, nor, as they rise, do I wish it; that authorship is neither my profession nor pursuit; and that, except in an undeviating attention to truth, and a better acquaintance with Mr. Paine and his life than any other man, I am perhaps the most unfit to arrange it for the public eye.

What I have hitherto written and published has arisen out of the moment, has been composed on the spur of the occasion, inspired by the scenery and circumstances around me, and produced abroad and at home, amid innumerable vicissitudes, the hurry of travel, business, pleasure, and during a life singularly active, eventful and checkered.

Latterly, too, that life has been begloomed by a train of ills which have trodden on each other’s heel, and which, added to the loss of my inspirer, my guide, my genius, and my muse; of her, the most highly qualified and best able to assist me, have rendered the work peculiarly irksome and oppressive.

In the year 1802, on my journey from France, I had the misfortune to lose my desk of papers — a loss I have never lamented more than on the present occasion. Among these were Mr. Paine’s letters to me, particularly those from France in the most interesting years to Europe, 1792, 1793. Not a scrap of these, together with some of his poetry, could I ever recover. By this misfortune the reader will lose much entertaining and valuable matter.

These memoirs [1819] have remained untouched from 1811 till now, and have not received any addition of biographical matter since. They were written by that part of my family who were at hand, as I dictated them; by those loved beings of whom death has deprived me, and from whom other severe ills have separated me. The manuscript, on these and many other accounts, awakens “busy meddling memory,” and tortures me with painful remembrances; and save that it is a duty I owe to the public and to the memory and character of a valued friend, I should not have set about its arrangement.

My heart is not in it. There are literary productions, which, like some children, though disagreeable to everybody else, are still favorites with the parent: this offspring of mine is not of this sort, it hath no such affection.

Thus surrounded, and every way broken in upon by the most painful and harassing circumstances, I claim the reader’s candor; and I now literally force myself to the publication of Mr. Paine’s Life, lest it should again be improperly done, or not be done at all, and the knowledge of so great and good a man be thereby lost to the world.

The engraving of Mr. Paine, prefixed to this work, is the only true likeness of him; it is from his portrait by Romney, and is perhaps the greatest likeness ever taken by any painter: to that eminent artist I introduced him in 1792, and it was by my earnest persuasion that he sat to him.

Mr. Paine in his person was about five feet ten inches high; and rather athletic; he was broad-shouldered, and latterly stooped a little.

His eye, of which the painter could not convey the exquisite meaning, was full, brilliant, and singularly piercing; it had in it the “muse of fire.” In his dress and person he was generally very cleanly, and wore his hair cued, with side curls, and powdered, so that he looked altogether like a gentleman of the old French school.

His manners were easy and gracious; his knowledge was universal and boundless; in private company and among friends his conversation had every fascination that anecdote, novelty and truth could give it. In mixed company and among strangers he said little, and was no public speaker.

Thus much is said of him in general, and in this place, that the reader may the better bear us company in his Life.

Life of Thomas Paine by Thomas Clio Rickman [1819]

The following memoirs of Mr. Paine, if they have no other merit, at least have that of being true.

Europe and America have for years been in possession of his works: these form the most important part of his life, and these are publicly sold and generally read; nor will the spirit of inquiry and sound reasoning, which the publication of them is so well calculated to promote, be long confined to any part of the world; for, to use his own words, “An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. It will succeed where diplomatic management would fail. It is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the Ocean, that can arrest its progress. It will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.”

“What manner of man” Mr. Paine was, his works will best exhibit, and from these his public, and much of his private character, will be best ascertained. But, as solicitude about the life of a great man and an extraordinary writer is common to all, it is here attempted to be gratified.

The Life of Mr. Paine by Francis Oldys was written seventeen years before Mr. Paine’s death; and was in fact, drawn up by a person employed by a certain lord, and who was to have five hundred pounds for the job, if he calumniated and belied him to his lordship’s and the Ministry’s satisfaction.

A continuation of this Life, printed at Philadelphia in 1796, is in the same strain as the above, and equally contemptible.

A most vile and scandalous memoir of Paine, with the name of William Cobbett as the author, though we hope he was not so, appeared in London about the year 1795 with this motto:

A life that’s one continued scene Of all that’s infamous and mean.

Mr. James Cheetham’s Life of Mr. Paine, published at New York after Mr. Paine’s death in 1809, is a farrago of still more silly, trifling, false and malicious matter. It is an outrageous attack upon Paine which bears upon the face of it, idle gossiping and gross misrepresentation.

The critique of this Life, in the British Review for June, 1811, consists of more corrupt trash about Mr. Paine than even Cheetham’s book and is in its style inflated and bombastic to a laughable excess. Whence this came, and for what purpose published, the candid will readily discern and cannot but lament the too frequent abuse, both by the tongue and by the pen, of characters entirely unknown to those who libel them, and by whom, if they were known, they would be approved and esteemed.

Indeed the whole of these works are so ridiculously overstrained in their abuse that they carry their own antidote with them.

The Life by Cheetham is so palpably written to distort, disfigure, mislead, and vilify, and does this so bunglingly, that it defeats its own purposes, and becomes entertaining from the excess of its labored and studied defamation.

It is indeed “guilt’s blunder,” and subverts all it was intended to accomplish. It is filled with long details of uninteresting American matter, bickering letters of obscure individuals, gossiping stories of vulgar fanatics, prejudiced political cant and weak observations on theology.

It may be supposed, from my long and affectionate intercourse with Mr. Paine, that these memoirs will have an opposite bias, and portray a too flattering and exalted character of him.

To this I reply, that I am not disposed to advocate the errors or irregularities of any man, however intimate with him, nor to suffer the partialities of friendship to prevent the due appreciation of character, or induce me to disregard the hallowed dictates of truth.

Paine was of those —

Who, wise by centuries before the crowd, Must by their novel systems, though correct, Of course offend the wicked, weak and proud — Must meet with hatred, calumny, neglect.

In his retirement to America, toward the close of his life, Mr. Paine was particularly unfortunate; for, as the author of the “Age of Reason,” he could not have gone to so unfavorable a quarter of the world.

A country abounding in fanatics, could not be a proper one for him whose mind was bold, inquiring, liberal and soaring, free from prejudice, and who from the principle was a Deist.

Of all wrath, fanatical wrath is the most intense, nor can it be a matter of surprise that Mr. Paine received from great numbers in America, an unwelcome reception, and was treated with neglect and illiberality.

It is true on his return to that country in 1802, he received great attention from many of those who remembered the mighty influence of his writings in the gloomy period of the Revolution; and from others who had since embraced his principles; but these attentions were by many not long continued.

Thousands, who had formerly looked up to Mr. Paine as the principal founder of the Republic, had imbibed a strong dislike to him on account of his religious principles; and thousands more, who were opposed to his political principles, seized hold of the mean and dastardly expedient of attacking those principles through the religious feelings and prejudices of the people. The vilest calumnies were constantly vented against him in the public papers, and the weak-minded were afraid to encounter the popular prejudice.

The letter he wrote to General Washington also estranged him from many of his old friends, and has been to his adversaries a fruitful theme of virulent accusation, and a foundation on which to erect a charge of ingratitude and intemperance. It must certainly be confessed that his naturally warm feelings, which could ill brook any slight, particularly where he was conscious he so little deserved it, appear to have led him to form a somewhat precipitate judgment of the conduct of the American President, with regard to his (Mr. Paine’s) imprisonment in France, and to attribute to design and wilful neglect what was probably only the result of inattention or perhaps of misinformation; and under the influence of this incorrect impression he seems to have indulged, rather too hastily, suspicions of Washington’s political conduct with respect to England.

But surely some little allowance should be made for the circumstances under which he wrote; just escaped from the horrors of a prison where he had been for several months confined under the sanguinary reign of Robespierre, when death strode incessantly through its cells, and the guillotine floated in the blood of its wretched inhabitants; and if, with the recollection of these scenes of terror fresh in his memory, and impressed with the idea that it was by Washington’s neglect that his life had been thus endangered, he may have been betrayed into a style of severity which was perhaps not quite warranted, we can only lament, without attaching blame to either, that anything jarring should have occurred between two men who were both stanch supporters of the cause of freedom, and thus have given the enemies of liberty occasion to triumph because its advocates were not more than mortal.

The dark and troublous years of the Revolution having passed away, and a government being firmly established, wealth possessed more influence than patriotism; and, a large portion of the people consisting of dissenters, fanaticism was more predominant than toleration, candor and charity.

These causes produced the shameful and ungrateful neglect of Mr. Paine in the evening of his days, of that Paine who by his long, faithful, and disinterested services in the Revolution, and afterwards by inculcating and enforcing correct principles, deserved, above all other men, the most kind and unremitting attention from, and to be held in the highest estimation by, the American people.

There were indeed a chosen and enlightened few, who, like himself “bold enough to be honest and honest enough to be bold,” feeling his value, continued to be his friends to his last hour.

Paine was not one of the great men who live amid great events, and forward and share their splendor; he created them; and, in this point of view, he was a very superior character to Washington.

Mr. Paine having ever in his mind the services he had rendered the United States, of whose independence he was the principal author and means, it cannot be a matter of wonder that he was deeply hurt and affected at not being recognized and treated by the Americans as he deserved, and as his labors for their benefit merited.

Shunned where he ought to have been caressed, coldly neglected where he ought to have been cherished, thrown into the background where he ought to have been prominent, and cruelly treated and calumniated by a host of ignorant and canting fanatics, it cannot be a subject of surprise, though it certainly must of regret, that he sometimes, toward the close of his life, fell into the too frequent indulgence of stimulants, neglected his appearance, and retired, mortified and disgusted, from an ill-judging, unkind, unjust world, into obscurity, and the association of characters in an inferior social position.

In this place it is absolutely necessary to observe that during his residence with me in London, in and about the year 1792, and in the course of his life previous to that time, he was not in the habit of drinking to excess; he was clean in his person, and in his manners polite and engaging; and ten years after this, when I was with him in France, he did not drink spirits, and wine he took moderately; he even objected to any spirits being laid in as a part of his sea stock, observing to me, that though sometimes, borne down by public and private affliction, he had been driven to excesses in Paris, the cause and effect would cease together, and that in America he should live as he liked, and as he ought to live.

That Mr. Paine had his failings is as true as that he was a man, and that some of them grew on him at a very advanced time of life, arising from the circumstances before detailed, there can be no doubt: but to magnify these, to give him vices he had not, and seek only occasions of misrepresenting and vilifying his character, without bringing forward the great and good traits in it, is cruel, unkind, and unjust.

“Let those who stand take heed lest they fall.” They too, when age debilitates the body and mind, and unexpected trials and grievances assail them, may fall into errors that they now vauntingly value themselves in not having. Singularly blest are they who are correct in their conduct; they should be happy and thankful that they are so; and instead of calumniating and being hard upon, should compassionate those who are not.

The throwers of the first stone would indeed be few if the condition were complied with on which it should be cast. That Mr. Paine in his declining years became careless of his personal appearance, and maybe, somewhat parsimonious, is in some measure true; but, to these errors of his old age, we ought to oppose his being the principal agent in creating the government of the American States; and that through his efforts millions have now the happiness of sitting at ease under their own vines and their own fig trees; his fair and upright conduct through life, his honest perseverance in principles which he might have had immense sums for relinquishing, or for being silent about, his never writing for money or making his works matter of pecuniary advantage to himself, but, on the contrary, as will be exemplified in these memoirs, his firmness in resisting all such emolument and in not listening to the voice of the briber.

Even amidst the violent party abuse of the day there were contemporary writers who knew how to appreciate Mr. Paine’s talents and principles, and to speak of him as he deserved.*

• Footnote: There were also public meetings held, and addresses to him from Nottingham, Norwich, etc., etc., from the Constitutional Society in London, to which belonged persons of great affluence and influence, and some of the best informed, best intentioned, and most exalted characters. From these and from many other bodies of men were published the highest testimonies of thanks and approbation of Mr. Paine and his political works. These addresses and the resolutions of the public meetings may be seen in the papers and hand bills of the day.

“We are now,” says one of these, “to treat of a real great man, a noble of nature, one whose mind is enlarged and wholly free from prejudice; one who has most usefully and honorably devoted his pen to support the glorious cause of general liberty and the rights of man. In his reply to Mr. Burke’s miserable rhapsody in favor of oppression, popery, and tyranny, he has urged the most lucid arguments, and brought forward truths the most convincing. Like a powerful magician he touches with his wand the hills of error and they smoke; the mountains of inhumanity and they melt away.”

“Had Thomas Paine,” says another most enlightened writer in 1795, in reply to Cheetham, Cobbett, Oldys, etc., “been nothing superior to a vagabond seaman, a bankrupt stay-maker, a discarded exciseman, a porter in the streets of Philadelphia, or whatever else the insanity of Grub Street chooses to call him, hundreds of thousands of copies of his writing had never announced his name in every village on the globe where the English language is spoken, and very extensively where it is not; nor would the rays of royal indignation have illuminated that character which they cannot scorch.”

Even Mr. Burke, writing on one of Mr. Paine’s works, “Common Sense,” says, “that celebrated pamphlet, which prepared the minds of the people for independence.”

It has been a fashion among the enemies of Mr. Paine, when unable to cope with his arguments, to attack his style, which they charge with inaccuracy and want of elegance; and some, even of those most friendly to his principles have joined in this captious criticism. It had not, perhaps, all the meretricious ornaments and studied graces that glitter in the pages of Burke, which would have been so many obscurities in the eyes of that part of the community for whose perusal his writings were principally intended, but it is singularly nervous and pointed; his arguments are always forcibly stated, nor does a languid line ever weary the attention of the reader. It is true, he never studied variety of phrase at the expense of perspicuity. His object was to enlighten, not to dazzle; and often, for the sake of more forcibly impressing an idea on the mind of the reader, he has made use of verbal repetitions which to a fastidious ear may perhaps sound unmusical. But although, in the opinion of some, his pages may be deficient in elegance, few will deny that they are copious in matter; and, if they sometimes fail to tickle the ear, they will never fail to fill the mind.

Distinctness and arrangement are the peculiar characteristics of his writings: this reflection brings to mind an observation once made to him by an American girl, “that his head was like an orange — it had a separate apartment for everything it contained.”

Notwithstanding this general character of his writings, the bold and original style of thinking which everywhere pervades them often displays itself in a luxuriance of imagery, and a poetic elevation of fancy, which stand unrivaled in the pages of our English classics.

Thomas Paine was born at Thetford in the County of Norfolk in England, on the twenty-ninth of January, 1736. His father, Joseph Paine, who was the son of a reputable farmer, followed the trade of a stay-maker, and was by religious profession a Quaker. His mother’s maiden name was Frances Cocke, a member of the Church of England, and daughter of an attorney at Thetford.

They were married at the parish church of Euston, near Thetford, the twentieth of June, 1734.

His father, by this marriage out of the Society of Quakers, was disowned by that community.

Mr. Paine received his education at the grammar school at Thetford, under the Rev. William Knowles, master; and one of his schoolmates at that time was the late Counsellor Mingay.

He gave very early indication of talents and strong abilities, and addicted himself when a mere boy, to reading poetical authors; but this disposition his parents endeavored to discourage.

When a child he composed some lines on a fly being caught in a spider’s web, and produced when eight years of age, the following epitaph on a crow which he buried in the garden:

Here lies the body of John Crow, Who once was high but now is low: Ye brother Crows take warning all, For as you rise, so must you fall.

At this school his studies were directed merely to the useful branches of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and he left it at thirteen years of age, applying, though he did not like it, to his father’s business for nearly five years.

In the year 1756, when about twenty years of age, he went to London, where he worked some time in Hanover Street, Long Acre, with Mr. Morris, a noted stay-maker.

He continued but a short time in London, and it is probable about this time made his seafaring adventure of which he thus speaks: “At an early age, raw and adventurous, and heated with the false heroism of a master [Rev. Mr. Knowles, master of the grammar school at Thetford] who had served in a man-of-war, I began my fortune, and entered on board the Terrible, Captain Death. From this adventure I was happily prevented by the affectionate and moral remonstrances of a good father, who from the habits of his life, being of the Quaker profession, looked on me as lost; but the impression, much as it affected me at the time, wore away, and I entered afterwards in the King of Prussia privateer, Captain Mendez, and went with her to sea.”

This way of life Mr. Paine soon left, and about the year 1758, worked at his trade for near twelve months at Dover. In April, 1759, he settled as a master stay-maker at Sandwich, and the twenty-seventh of September following married Mary Lambert, the daughter of an exciseman of that place In April, 1760, he removed with his wife to Margate, where she died shortly after, and he again mingled with the crowds of London.

In July, 1761, disgusted with the toil and little gain of his late occupation, he renounced it for ever, and determined to apply himself to the profession of an exciseman, toward which, as his wife’s father was of that calling, he had some time turned his thoughts.

At this period he sought shelter under his father’s roof at Thetford, that he might prosecute, in quiet and retirement, the object of his future course. Through the interest of Mr. Cocksedge, the recorder of Thetford, after fourteen months of study, he was established as a supernumerary in the excise, at the age of twenty-five.

In this situation at Grantham and Alford, etc., he did not continue more than two or three years, when he relinquished it in August, 1765, and commenced it again in July, 1766.

In this interval he was teacher at Mr. Noble’s academy in Leman Street, Goodman’s Fields, at a salary of twenty-five pounds a year. In a similar occupation he afterwards lived for a short time, at Kensington, with a Mr. Gardner.

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

During this residence in London, Mr. Paine attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson, and became acquainted with Dr. Bevis of the Temple, a great astronomer. In these studies and in the mathematics he soon became a proficient.

In March, 1768, he was settled as an exciseman at Lewes, in Sussex, and there, on the twenty-sixth of March, 1771, married Elizabeth Olive, shortly after the death of her father, whose trade of a tobacconist he entered into and carried on.

In this place he lived several years in habits of intimacy with a very respectable, sensible, and convivial set of acquaintance, who were entertained with his witty sallies, and informed by his more serious conversations.

In politics he was at this time a Whig, and notorious for that quality which has been defined perseverance in a good cause and obstinacy in a bad one. He was tenacious of his opinions, which were bold, acute, and independent, and which he maintained with ardor, elegance, and argument.

At this period, at Lewes, the White Hart Evening Club was the resort of a social and intelligent circle who, out of fun, seeing that disputes often ran very warm and high, frequently had what they called the “Headstrong Book.” This was no other than an old Greek Homer which was sent the morning after a debate vehemently maintained, to the most obstinate haranguer of the club: this book had the following title, as implying that Mr. Paine the best deserved and most frequently obtained it.

THE HEADSTRONG BOOK, OR ORIGINAL BOOK OF OBSTINACY, WRITTEN BY **** ****, OF LEWES, IN SUSSEX, AND REVISED AND CORRECTED BY THOMAS PAINE.

Eulogy on Paine. Immortal Paine, while mighty reasoners jar, We crown thee General of the Headstrong War; Thy logic vanish’d error, and thy mind No bounds, but those of right and truth, confined. Thy soul of fire must sure ascend the sky, Immortal Paine, thy fame can never die; For men like thee their names must ever save From the black edicts of the tyrant grave.

My friend Mr. Lee, of Lewes, in communicating this to me in September, 1810, said: “This was manufactured nearly forty years ago, as applicable to Mr. Paine, and I believe you will allow, however indifferent the manner, that I did not very erroneously anticipate his future celebrity.”

During his residence at Lewes, he wrote several excellent little pieces in prose and verse, and among the rest the celebrated song on the death of General Wolfe, beginning

“In a mouldering cave where the wretched retreat.””

It was about this time he wrote ” The Trial of Farmer Carter’s Dog Porter,” in the manner of a drama, a work of exquisite wit and humor.

In 1772 the excise officers throughout the kingdom formed a design of applying to Parliament for some addition to their salaries. Upon this occasion Mr. Paine, who, by this time, was distinguished among them as a man of talent, was fixed upon as a fit person, and solicited to draw up their case, and this he did in a very succinct and masterly manner. This case makes an octavo pamphlet, and four thousand copies were printed by Mr. William Lee, of Lewes. It is entitled “The Case of the Salary of the Officers of Excise, and Thoughts on the Corruption Arising from the Poverty of Excise Officers.” No application, however, notwithstanding this effort, was made to Parliament.

In April, 1774, the goods of his shop were sold to pay his debts. As a grocer, he trafficked in excisable articles, and being suspected of unfair practices, was dismissed the excise after being in it twelve years. Whether this reason was a just one or not never was ascertained; it was, however, the ostensible one. Mr. Paine might perhaps have been in the habit of smuggling, in common with his neighbors. It was the universal custom along the coast, and more or less the practise of all ranks of people, from lords and ladies, ministers and magistrates, down to the cottager and laborer.

As Mr. Paine’s being dismissed the excise has been a favorite theme with his abusers it may be necessary here to relate the following fact:

At the time he was an exciseman at Lewes, he was so approved for doing his duty that Mr. Jenner, principal clerk in the excise office, London, had several times occasion to write letters from the Board of Excise, thanking Mr. Paine for his assiduity in his profession, and for his information and calculations forwarded to the office.

In May following Mr. Paine and his wife separated by mutual agreement, articles of which were finally settled on the fourth of June. Which of them was in this instance wrong, or whether either of them was so, must be left undetermined, as on this subject no knowledge or judgment can be formed. They are now both removed, where, as we are told, none “are either married or given in marriage,” and where, consequently, there can be no disagreements on this score. This I can assert, that Mr. Paine always spoke tenderly and respectfully of his wife, and several times sent her pecuniary aid, without her knowing even whence it came.

Toward the end of the year 1774, he was strongly recommended to the great and good Dr. Franklin, “the favor of whose friendship,” he says, “I possessed in England and my introduction to this part of the world [America] was through his patronage.”*

• Footnote: Crisis, No. 3.

Mr. Paine now formed the resolution of quitting his native country, and soon crossed the Atlantic; and, as he himself relates, arrived in Philadelphia in the winter, a few months before the battle of Lexington, which was fought in April, 1775.

It appears that his first employment in the new world was with Mr. Aitken, a book-seller, as editor of the Pennsylvanian Magazine; and his introduction to that work, dated January 24, 1775, is thus concluded: “Thus encompassed with difficulties, this first number of the Pennsylvanian Magazine entreats a favorable reception, of which we shall only say, that like the early snow-drop it comes forth in a barren season, and contents itself with foretelling the reader that choicer flowers are preparing to appear.”

Soon after his return [sic] to America, as foreign supplies of gunpowder were stopped, he turned his attention to chemistry, and set his fertile talents to work in endeavoring to discover some cheap and expeditious method of furnishing Congress with saltpeter, and he proposed, in the Pennsylvanian Journal, November 2, 1775, the plan of a saltpeter association for voluntarily supplying the national magazines with gunpowder.

His popularity in America now increased daily, and from this era he became a great public character and an object of interest and attention in the world. In 1776, on the tenth of January, he published the celebrated and powerfully discriminating pamphlet, “Common Sense.” Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to this work is the effect it so rapidly had on the people, who had before no predisposition toward its principles.

Even Mr. Cheetham, whom no one will suspect of flattering Mr. Paine, thus forcibly describes the effects of “Common Sense” on the people of America:

“This pamphlet of forty octavo pages, holding out relief by proposing independence to an oppressed and despairing people, was published in January, 1776, speaking a language which the colonists had felt, but not thought of. Its popularity, terrible in its consequences to the parent country, was unexampled in the history of the press. At first involving the colonists, it was thought, in the crime of rebellion, and pointing to a road leading inevitably to ruin, it was read with indignation and alarm, but when the reader, (and everybody read it), recovering from the first shock, re-perused it, its arguments nourishing his feelings, and appealing to his pride, reanimated his hopes and satisfied his understanding, that ‘Common Sense,’ backed up by the resources and force of the colonies, poor and feeble as they were, could alone rescue them from the unqualified oppression with which they were threatened. The unknown author, in the moments of enthusiasm which succeeded, was an angel sent from heaven to save from all the horrors of slavery by his timely, powerful and unerring councils, a faithful but abused, a brave but misrepresented people.”

“Common Sense,” it appears, was universally read and approved; the first edition sold almost immediately, and the second with very large additions was before the public soon after.

Owing to this disinterested conduct of Mr. Paine, it appears that though the sale of “Common Sense” was so great, he was in debt to the printer -L-29 12s 1d. This liberality and conscientious discharge of his duty with respect to his serviceable writings, as he called them, he adopted through life. “When I bring out my poetical and anecdotical works,” he would often say to me, “which will be little better than amusing, I shall sell them; but I must have no gain in view, must make no traffic of my political and theological writings. They are with me a matter of principle and not a matter of money; I cannot desire to derive benefit from them or make them the subject to attain it.”

In the course of this year, 1776, Mr. Paine accompanied the army with General Washington, and was with him in his retreat from the Hudson River to the Delaware. At this period our author stood undismayed, amid a flying Congress, and the general terror of the land. The Americans, he loudly asserted, were in possession of resources sufficient to authorize hope, and he labored to inspire others with the same sentiments which animated himself. To effect this, on the nineteenth of December he published “The Crisis,” wherein, with a masterly hand, he stated every reason for hope, and examined all the motives for apprehension. This work he continued at various intervals, till the Revolution was established. The last number appeared on the nineteenth of April, 1783, the same day a cessation of hostilities was proclaimed.

In 1777, Congress unanimously, and unknown to Mr. Paine, appointed him Secretary in the Foreign Department, and from this time a close friendship continued between him and Dr. Franklin. From his office went all letters that were officially written by Congress, and the correspondence of Congress rested afterwards in his hands. This appointment gave Mr. Paine an opportunity of seeing into foreign courts, and their manner of doing business and conducting themselves. In this office, which obliged him to reside with Congress wherever it fled, or however it was situated, Mr. Paine deserved the highest praise for the clearness, firmness and magnanimity of his conduct. His uprightness and entire fitness for this office did not, however, prevent intrigue and interestedness, or defeat cabal; for a difference being fomented between Congress and him, respecting one of their commissioners then in Europe (Mr. Silas Deane), he resigned his secretaryship on the eighth of January, 1779, and declined, at the same time, the pecuniary offers made him by the ministers of France and Spain, M. Gerard and Don Juan Mirralles.

This resignation of, or dismissal from his situation as Secretary for Foreign Affairs, has been so variously mentioned and argued upon, that the reader is referred to the tedious detail of it in the journals of the day, if he has patience to wade through so much American temporary and party political gossip. Mr. Paine’s own account in his letter to Congress shortly is, “I prevented Deane’s fraudulent demand being paid, and so far the country is obliged to me, but I became the victim of my integrity.”

The party junto against him say he was guilty of a violation of his official duty, etc.

And here I shall leave it, as the bickerings of parties in America, in the year 1779, cannot be worth a European’s attention; and as to the Americans themselves they have various means, by their legislatural records, registers of the day, and pamphlets, then and since, to go into the subject if they think it of importance enough.

About this time Mr. Paine had the degree of Master of Arts conferred on him by the University of Philadelphia, and in 1780 was chosen a member of the American Philosophical Society, when it was revived by the Legislature of the Province of Pennsylvania.

In February, 1781, Colonel Laurens, amidst the financial distress of America, was sent on mission to France in order to obtain a loan, and Mr. Paine, at the solicitation of the Colonel, accompanied him.

Mr. Paine, in his letter to Congress, intimates that this mission originated with himself, and takes upon himself the credit of it.

They arrived in France the following month, obtained a loan of ten millions of livres and a present of six millions, and landed in America the succeeding August with two millions and a half in silver. His value, his firmness, his independence, as a political character, were now universally acknowledged; his great talents, and the high purposes to which he devoted them, made him generally sought after and looked up to, and General Washington was foremost to express the great sense he had of the excellence of his character and the importance of his services, and would himself have proposed to Congress a great remuneration of them, had not Mr. Paine positively objected to it as a bad precedent and an improper mode.

In August, 1782, he published his spirited letter to the Abbe Raynal; of this letter a very sensible writer observes, “that it displays an accuracy of judgment and strength of penetration that would do honor to the most enlightened philosopher. It exhibits proofs of knowledge so comprehensive, and discrimination so acute, as must in the opinion of the best judges place the author in the highest ranks of literature.”

On the twenty-ninth of October he brought out his excellent letter to the Earl of Shelburne, on his speech in the House of Lords, July 10, 1782.

To get an idea of the speech of this Earl it may not be necessary to quote more than the following sentence: “When Great Britain acknowledges American independence the sun of Britain’s glory is set forever.”

“When the war ended,” says Mr. Paine, “I went from Philadelphia to Borden Town on the East end of the Delaware, where I have a small place. Congress was at this time at Prince Town, fifteen miles distant, and General Washington had taken his headquarters at Rocky Hill, within the neighborhood of Congress, for the purpose of resigning his commission, the object for which he had accepted it being accomplished, and of retiring to private life. While he was on this business he wrote me the letter which I here subjoin:”

“Rocky Hill, September 10,1783.

“I have learned since I have been at this place that you are at Borden Town. Whether for the sake of retirement or economy I know not; be it for either, for both, or whatever it may, if you will come to this place and partake with me, I shall be exceedingly happy to see you at it. Your presence may remind Congress of your past services to this country, and if it is in my power to impress them, command my best services with freedom; as they will be rendered cheerfully by one who entertains a lively sense of the importance of your works, and who with much pleasure, subscribes himself,

“Your sincere friend, G. Washington.

In 1785, Congress granted Mr. Paine three thousand dollars for his services to the people of America, as may be seen by the following document:

“Friday, August 26, 1785.

“On the report of a committee consisting of Mr. Gerry, Mr. Petet and Mr. King, to whom was referred a letter of the thirteenth from Thomas Paine,

“Resolved, That the early, unsolicited, and continued labors of Mr. Thomas Paine, in explaining the principles of the late Revolution, by ingenious and timely publications upon the nature of liberty and civil government, have been well received by the citizens of these states, and merit the approbation of Congress; and that in consideration of these services, and the benefits produced thereby, Mr. Paine is entitled to a liberal gratification from the United States.”

“Monday, October 3, 1785.

“On a report of a committee consisting of Mr. Gerry, Mr. Howell and Mr. Long, to whom were referred sundry letters from Mr. Thomas Paine, and a report on his letter of the fourteenth of September,

“Resolved, That the Board of Treasury take order for paying to Mr. Thomas Paine, the sum of three thousand dollars, for the considerations of the twenty-third of August last.” — Journals of Congress.

The State of Pennsylvania, in which he first published “Common Sense” and the “Crisis,” in 1785, presented him, by an act of Legislature, five hundred pounds currency. New York gave him the estate at New Rochelle, in the county of Westchester, consisting of more than three hundred acres of land in high cultivation. On this estate was an elegant stone house, 125 by 28 feet, besides outhouses; the latter property was farmed much to his advantage, during his long stay in Europe, by some friends, as will hereafter be more fully noticed.

Mr. Monroe, when Ambassador in England, once speaking on this subject at my house, said that Mr. Paine would have received a very large remuneration from the State of Virginia, but that while the matter was before the Assembly, and he was extremely popular and in high favor, he published reasons against some proceedings of that State which he thought improper, and thereby lost, by a majority of one, the high reward he would otherwise have received;* — a memorable instance of the independence of his mind, and of his attachment to truth and right above all other considerations. A conduct exactly opposite to that of the pensioned Burke, whose venality cannot be better pointed out than in the following conversation with Mr. Paine, after dining together at the Duke of Portland’s at Bulstrode.

• Footnote: This work was entitled “Public Good, being an Examination of the Claim of Virginia to Vacant Western Territory.”

Burke was very inquisitive to know how the Americans were disposed toward the King of England, when Mr. Paine, to whom the subject was an ungracious one, and who felt teased, related the following anecdote:

At a small town, in which was a tavern bearing the sign of the King’s head, it was insisted on by the inhabitants that a memento so odious should not continue up, but there was no painter at hand to change it into General Washington, or any other favorite, so the sign was suffered to remain, with this inscription under it:

This is the sign of the Loggerhead!

Burke, who at this moment was a concealed pensioner, though a public oppositionist, replied, peevishly: “Loggerhead or any other head, he has many good things to give away, and I should be glad of some of them.”

This same Mr. Burke, in one of his speeches in the House of Commons, said, “kings were naturally fond of low company,” and “that many of the nobility act the part of flatterers, parasites, pimps and buffoons, etc.,” but his character will be best appreciated by reading Mr. Paine’s “Letter to the Addressers.”

In 1786 he published in Philadelphia “Dissertation on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money,” an octavo pamphlet of sixty-four pages. The bank alluded to is the Bank of North America, of which he thus speaks:

“In the year 1780, when the British Army, having laid waste the Southem States, closed its ravages by the capture of Charleston, when the financial sources of Congress were dried up, when the public treasury was empty, and the army of independence paralyzed by want, a voluntary subscription for its relief was raised in Philadelphia.” This voluntary fund, amounting to three hundred thousand pounds, afterwards converted into a bank by the subscribers, headed by Robert Morris, supplied the wants of the army; probably the aids which it furnished enabled Washington to carry into execution his well-concerted plan against Cornwallis. Congress, in the year 1781, incorporated the subscribers to the fund, under the title of the Bank of North America. In the following year it was further incorporated by an Act of the Pennsylvanian Assembly. Mr. Paine liberally subscribed five hundred dollars to this fund.

After the establishment of the independence of America, of the vigorous and successful exertions to attain which glorious object he had been the animating principle, soul and support; feeling his exertions no longer requisite in that country, he embarked for France, and arrived in Paris early in 1787, carrying with him his fame as a literary man, an acute philosopher, and most profound politician.

At this time he presented to the Academy of Science the model of a bridge which he invented, the principle of which has been since so highly celebrated and approved.

From Paris he arrived in England the third of September, just thirteen years after his departure for Philadelphia. Prompted by that filial affection which his conduct had ever manifested, he hastened to Thetford to visit his mother, on whom he settled an allowance of nine shillings a week. Of this comfortable solace she was afterwards deprived by the bankruptcy of the merchant in whom the trust was vested.

Mr. Paine resided at Rotherham in Yorkshire during part of the year 1788, where an iron bridge upon the principle alluded to was cast and erected, and obtained for him among the mathematicians of Europe a high reputation. In the erection of this, a considerable sum had been expended, for which he was hastily arrested by the assignees of an American merchant, and thrown into confinement. From this, however, and the debt, he cleared himself in about three weeks.*

• Footnote: More or less upon this plan of Mr. Paine’s, the different iron bridges in Europe have been constructed.

The publication of Mr. Burke’s “Reflections on the French Revolution,” produced in reply from Mr. Paine his great, universally known, and celebrated work, “Rights of Man.” The first part of this work was written partly at the Angel, of Islington, partly in Harding Street, Fetter Lane, and finished at Versailles. In February, 1791, this book made its appearance in London, and many hundred thousand copies were rapidly sold. In May following he went again to France and was at Paris at the time of the flight of the King, and also on his return. On this memorable occasion he made this observation: “You see the absurdity of your system of government; here will be a whole nation disturbed by the folly of one man.” Upon this subject also he made the following reply to the Marquis Lafayette, who came into his bedroom before he was up, saying, “The birds are flown.” “‘Tis well, I hope there will be no attempt to recall them.”

On the thirteenth of July he returned to London, but did not attend the celebration of the anniversary of the French Revolution the following day, as has been falsely asserted.

On the twentieth of August he drew up the address and declaration of the gentlemen who met at the Thatched House Tavern.

The language of this address is bold and free, but not more so than that of the late Lord Chatham, or of that once violent advocate of reform, the late Mr. Pitt, better known by the title of the “Enemy of the Human Race.”

On the subject of the address at the Thatched House Tavern, which Mr. Paine did write, it is impossible not to quote Cheetham’s “Life,” just to exhibit his blindness and ignorance, and to show how prejudice had warped this once idolizer of Mr. Paine: “Home Tooke, perhaps the most acute man of his age, was at this meeting; and as it was rumored, Paine observes, that the great grammarian was the author of the address, he takes the liberty of mentioning the fact, that he wrote it himself. I never heard of the rumor, which was doubtless a fiction formed and asserted by Paine merely to gratify his egotism. No one could mistake the uncouth and ungrammatical writings of one, for the correct and elegant productions of the other.” But what can be expected from him who calls “Common Sense” a wretched work; the “Rights of Man” a miserable production, and “Burke’s Reflections” a book of the proudest sagacity?

What can be expected from him who a few years before writing the above, in England deified Mr. Paine, and called his writings immortal?

Life of Thomas Paine Part Two Thomas Clio Rickman 1819

Mr. Paine’s life in London was a quiet round of philosophical leisure and enjoyment. It was occupied in writing, in a small epistolary correspondence, in walking about with me to visit different friends, occasionally lounging at coffee-houses and public places, or being visited by a select few. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the French and American ambassadors, Mr. Sharp the engraver, Romney the painter, Mrs. Mrs. Wollstonecraft, Joel Barlow, Mr. Hull, Mr. Christie, Dr. Priestley, Dr. Towers, Colonel Oswald, the walking Stewart, Captain Sampson Perry, Mr. Tuffin, Mr. William Choppin, Captain De Stark, Mr. Horne Tooke, etc., etc., were among the number of his friends and acquaintance, and of course, as he was my inmate, the most of my associates were frequently his.

At this time he read but little, took his nap after dinner, and played with my family at some game in the evening, as chess, dominos, and drafts, but never at cards; in recitations, singing, music, etc., or passed it in conversation; the part he took in the latter was always enlightened, full of information, entertainment and anecdote. Occasionally we visited enlightened friends, indulged in domestic jaunts, and recreations from home, frequently lounging at the White Bear, Piccadilly, with his old friend, the walking Stewart, and other clever travelers from France, and different parts of Europe and America.

When by ourselves we sat very late, and often broke in on the morning hours, indulging the reciprocal interchange of affectionate and confidential intercourse. “Warm from the heart and faithful to its fires,” was that intercourse, and gave to us the “feast of reason and the flow of soul.”

The second part of “Rights of Man,” which completed the celebrity of its author, and placed him at the head of political writers, was published in February, 1792. Never had any work so rapid and extensive a sale; and it has been calculated that near a million and a half of copies were printed and published in England.

From this time Mr. Paine generally resided in London, and principally with me, till the twelfth of September, 1792, when he sailed for France with Mr. Achilles Audibert, who came express from the French Convention to my house to request his personal assistance in their deliberations.

On his arrival at Calais a public dinner was provided, a royal salute was fired from the battery, the troops were drawn out, and there was a general rejoicing throughout the town. He has often been heard to remark that the proudest moment of his life was that in which, on this occasion, he set foot upon the Gallic shore.

In his own country he had been infamously treated, and at the time of his quitting Dover most rudely dealt with both by the officers who ransacked his trunks, and a set of hirelings who were employed to hiss, hoot and maltreat, and it is strongly suspected, to destroy him.

It depressed him to think that his endeavors to cleanse the Augaean stable of corruption in England should have been so little understood, or so ill appreciated as to subject him to such ignominious, such cowardly treatment. Yet seven hours after this, those very endeavors obtained him an honorable reception in France, and on his landing he was respectfully escorted, amidst the loud plaudits of the multitude, to the house of his friend, Mr. Audibert, the chief magistrate of the place, where he was visited by the commandant and all the municipal officers in form, who afterwards gave him a sumptuous entertainment in the town hall.

The same honor was also paid him on his departure for Paris.*

• Footnote: The reader is referred to Brissot’s paper, Le Patriot Franc,ois, and Le Journal de Gorsas, for minute particulars of Mr. Paine’s introduction to the president of the Convention, to the ministers and different committees; his being appointed a deputy, a member of the committee of constitution, etc., etc., etc.

About the time of his arrival at Paris the National Convention began to divide itself into factions; the King’s friends had been completely subdued by the suppression of the Feuillans, the affair of the tenth of August, and the massacre of the second and third of September; while the Jacobins, who had been hitherto considered as the patriotic party, became in their turns divided into different cabals, some of them wishing a federative government, others, the enrages, desiring the death of the King, and of all allied to the nobility; but none of those were republicans.

Those few deputies who had just ideas of a commonwealth, and whose leader was Paine, did not belong to the Jacobin Club.

I mention this, because Mr. Paine took infinite trouble to instil into their minds the difference between liberty and licentiousness, and the danger to the peace, good order, and welldoing of society, that must arise from letting the latter encroach upon the prerogatives of the former.

He labored incessantly to preserve the life of the King, and he succeeded in making some converts to his opinions on this subject; and his life would have been saved but for Barrere, who, having been appointed by Robespierre to an office he was ambitious of obtaining, and certainly very fit for, his influence brought with it forty votes; so early was corruption introduced into this assembly. For Calais, Mr. Paine was returned deputy to the Convention; he was elected as well for Versailles, but as the former town first did him the honor he became its representative. He was extremely desirous and expected to be appointed one of the deputies to Holland; a circumstance that probably would have taken place had not the Committee of Constitution delayed so long the production of the new form that the Jacobins anticipated them, and published proposals for a new constitution before the committee.

This delay was owing to the jealousy of Condorcet, who had written the preface, part of which some of the members thought should have been in the body of the work. Brissot and the whole party of the Girondites lost ground daily after this; and with them died away all that was national, just and humane: they were, however, highly to blame for their want of energy.

In the beginning of April, 1793, the Convention received the letter from Dumourier that put all France in a panic: in this letter he mentioned the confidence the army had in him, and his intention of marching to Paris to restore to France her constitutional King: this had the strongest effect, as it was accompanied by an address from the Prince of Coburg, in which he agreed to co-operate with Dumourier.

Mr. Paine, who never considered the vast difference between the circumstances of the two countries, France and America, suggested an idea that Dumourier might be brought about by appointing certain deputies to wait on him coolly and dispassionately, to hear his grievances, and armed with powers to redress them.

On this subject he addressed a letter to the Convention, in which he instanced the case of an American general who receded with the army under his command in consequence of his being dissatisfied with the proceedings of Congress. The Congress were panic-struck by this event, and gave up all for lost; and when the first impression of alarm subsided they sent a deputation from their own body to the general, who with his staff gave them the meeting; and thus matters were again reinstated. But there was too much impetuosity and faction in the French Convention to admit of such temperate proceedings.

Mr. Paine, however, had written the letter, and was going to Brissot’s in order to meet Barrere for the purpose of proposing an adjustment, when he met a friend who had that moment left the Convention, who informed him that a decree had been passed offering one hundred thousand crowns for Dumourier’s head, and another making it high treason to propose anything in his favor.

What the consequence of Mr. Paine’s project might have been I do not know, but the offer of the Convention made hundreds of desperate characters leave Paris as speedily as possible, in hopes of the proffered reward; it detached the affection of the soldiers from their general, and made them go over to the enemy.

Toward the close of 1792 his “Letter to the Addressers” was published, which was sought after with the same avidity as his other productions.

Of this letter, which, with many other things, he wrote at my house, I have the original manuscript, and the table on which they were written is still carefully preserved by me. It has a brass plate in the center with this inscription, placed there by my direction on his quitting England:

“This Plate is inscribed by Thomas Clio Rickman, in remembrance of his dear friend, Thomas Paine, who on this Table in the Year 1792, wrote several of his invaluable Works.”

The “Letter to the Addressers” possesses all Mr. Paine’s usual strength of reasoning, and abounds also in the finest strokes of genuine satire, wit and humor. About this time a prosecution took place against the publishers of “Rights of Man.”

As the Proclamation which gave rise to the “Letter to the Addressers” is a curious document, and evinces the temper of the powers that were of that day, it is for the entertainment of the reader here inserted:

“The London Gazette, published by authority, from Saturday, May nineteenth, to Tuesday, May twenty-second.

“By the King, a Proclamation.

“George R.

“Whereas, Divers wicked and seditious writings have been printed, published, and industriously dispersed, tending to excite tumult and disorder, by endeavoring to raise groundless jealousies and discontents in the minds of our faithful and loving subjects respecting the laws and happy constitution of government, civil and religious, established in this kingdom, and endeavoring to vilify, and bring into contempt, the wise and wholesome provisions made at the time of the glorious Revolution, and since strengthened and confirmed by subsequent laws for the preservation and security of the rights and liberties of our faithful and loving subjects: and whereas divers writings have also been printed, published, and industriously dispersed, recommending the said wicked and seditious publications to the attention of all our faithful and loving subjects:

“And whereas we have also reason to believe that correspondencies have been entered into with sundry persons in foreign parts with a view to forward the criminal and wicked purposes above mentioned: and whereas the wealth, happiness and prosperity of this kingdom do, under Divine Providence, chiefly depend upon a due submission to the laws, a just confidence in the integrity and wisdom of Parliament, and a continuance of that zealous attachment to that government and constitution of the kingdom which has ever prevailed in the minds of the people thereof: and whereas there is nothing which we so earnestly desire as to secure the public peace and prosperity, and to preserve to all our loving subjects the full enjoyment of their rights and liberties, both religious and civil:

“We, therefore, being resolved, as far as in us lies, to repress the wicked and seditious practices aforesaid, and to deter all persons from following so pernicious an example, have thought fit, by the advice of our Privy Council, to issue this our Royal Proclamation, solemnly warning all our loving subjects, as they tender their own happiness, and that of their posterity, to guard against all such attempts, which aim at the subversion of all regular government within this kingdom, and which are inconsistent with the peace and order of society: and earnestly exhorting them at all times, and to the utmost of their power, to avoid and discourage all proceedings, tending to produce tumults and riots: and we do strictly charge and command all our magistrates in and throughout our kingdom of Great Britain, that they do make diligent inquiry, in order to discover the authors and printers of such wicked and seditious writings as aforesaid, and all others who shall disperse the same: and we do further charge and command all our sheriffs, justices of the peace, chief magistrates in our cities, boroughs and corporations, and all other our officers and magistrates throughout our kingdom of Great Britain.

“That they do, in their several and respective stations, take the most immediate and effectual care to suppress and prevent all riots, tumults and other disorders, which may be attempted to be raised or made by any person or persons, which, on whatever pretext they may be grounded, are not only contrary to law, but dangerous to the most important interests of this kingdom: and we do further require and command all and every our magistrates aforesaid that they do from time to time transmit to one of our principal secretaries of state due and full information of such persons as shall be found offending as aforesaid, or in any degree aiding or abetting therein: it being our determination, for the preservation of the peace and happiness of our faithful and loving subjects, to carry the laws vigorously into execution against such offenders as aforesaid. Given at our Court at the Queen’s House, the twenty-first day of May, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two, in the thirty-second year of our reign. — God save the King.”

Soon after this, Mr. Paine’s excellent “Letters” to Lord Onslow, to Mr. Dundas, and the Sheriff of Sussex were published.

Mr. Paine’s trial for the second part of “Rights of Man” took place on the eighteenth of December, 1792, and he being found guilty, the booksellers and publishers who were taken up and imprisoned previously to this trial forbore to stand one themselves, and suffered judgment to go by default, for which they received the sentence of three years’ imprisonment each. Of these booksellers and publishers I was one, but by flying to France I eluded this merciful sentence.

On the subject of these prosecutions I wrote to Mr. Fox, whom I well knew, and my intimate friend for years, Lord Stanhope, as I was myself the subject of two of them, and was well acquainted with the party factions of the day, and the iniquitous intrigues of the opposing leaders, in and out of office; for the writings of Mr. Paine, which were as broad as the universe, and having nothing to do with impure elections and auger-hole politics, gave equal offense to all sides.

In the course of these letters, which are still extant, it was impossible not to dwell on the absurdity of trial by jury in matters of opinion, and the folly of any body of men deciding for others in science and speculative discussion, in politics and religion. Is it not applying the institution of juries to purposes for which they were not intended, to set up twelve men to judge and determine for a whole nation on matters that relate to systems and principles of government? A matter of fact may be cognizable by a jury, and certainly ascertained with respect to offenses against common law and in the ordinary intercourses of society, but on matters of political opinion, of taste, of metaphysical inquiry, and of religious belief, everyone must be left to decide as his inquiries, his experience, and his conviction impel him.

If the arm of power in every country and on every doctrine could have enforced its tyranny, almost all we now possess, and that is valuable, would have been destroyed; and if all the governments and factions that have made the world miserable could have had their way, everything desirable in art, science, philosophy, literature, politics and religion, would have been by turns obliterated, and the Bible, the Testament, the Alcoran, the writings of Locke, Erasmus, Helvetius, Mercier, Milton, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Swift, Bolanger, Hume, Penn, Tucker, Paine, Bacon, Bolingbroke, and of thousands of others on all sides would have been burned, nor would there be a printing press in the world.

It has happened happily for many years past, thanks to the art of printing and the means adopted to crush the circulation of knowledge, that the very modes employed to accomplish this end have not only proved abortive, but have given wings to truth, and diffused it into every corner of the universe. The publication of trials containing quotations from the works to be put down have disseminated their contents infinitely wider than they would else have reached, and have excited inquiries that would otherwise have lain dormant.

So ludicrously did this strike Mr. Paine that his frequent toast was, “The best way of advertising good books — by prosecution.”

As the attorney-general’s attacks upon prosecuted works of a clever and profound description, and the judges’ charges upon them contain nothing like argument or refutation, but follow up the criminating and absurd language of the indictment or ex-officio information, and breathe only declamation and ignorant abuse, they by their weakness expose the cause they espouse, and strengthen the truths they affect to destroy.

I shall close these observations by quoting two old and good humored lines:

Treason does never prosper — what’s the reason? When it prospers — it is never treason!

This trial of Mr. Paine, and these sentences, subverted of course the very end they were intended to effect.

Mr. Paine was acknowledged deputy for Calais the twenty-first of September, 1792. In France, during the early part of the Revolution, his time was almost wholly occupied as a deputy of the Convention and as a member of the Committee of Constitution. His company was now coveted and sought after universally among every description of people, and by many who for some reasons never chose to avow it. With the Earl of Lauderdale and Dr. Moore, whose company he was fond of, he dined every Friday till Lord Gower’s departure made it necessary for them to quit France, which was early in 1793.

About this period he removed from White’s Hotel to one near the Rue de Richelieu, where he was so plagued and interrupted by numerous visitors, and sometimes by adventurers, that in order to have some time to himself he appropriated two mornings in a week for his levee days. To this indeed he was extremely averse, from the fuss and formality attending it, but he was nevertheless obliged to adopt it.

Annoyed and disconcerted with a life so contrary to his wishes and habits, and so inimical to his views, he retired to the Faubourg St. Denis, where he occupied part of the hotel that Madame de Pompadour once resided in.

Here was a good garden well laid out, and here, too, our mutual friend, Mr. Choppin, occupied apartments: at this residence, which for a town one was very quiet, he lived a life of retirement and philosophical ease, while it was believed he was gone into the country for his health, which by this time indeed was much impaired by intense application to business, and by the anxious solicitude he felt for the welfare of public affairs.

Here, with a chosen few, he unbent himself; among whom were Brissot, the Marquis de Chatelet le Roi, of the galerie de honore, and an old friend of Dr. Franklin’s, Banc,al, and sometimes General Miranda. His English associates were Christie and family, Mrs. Wollstonecraft, Mr. and Mrs. Stone, etc. Among his American friends were Captain Imlay, Joel Barlow, etc., etc. To these parties the French inmates were generally invited.

Joel Barlow was for many years Mr. Paine’s intimate friend, and it was from Mr. Paine he derived much of the great knowledge and acuteness of talent he possessed.

Joel Barlow was a great philosopher, and a great poet; but there are spots in the sun, and I instance the following littleness in his conduct as a warning, and to prove how much of honest fame and character is lost by anything like tergiversation.

Joel Barlow has omitted the name of Mr. Paine in his very fine poem, “The Columbiad”; a name essential to the works, as the principal founder of the American Republic and of the happiness of its citizens.

Omitting the name of Mr. Paine in the history of America, and where the amelioration of the human race is so much concerned, is like omitting the name of Newton in writing the history of his philosophy, or that of God when creation is the subject; yet this, Joel Barlow has done, and done so, lest the name of Paine, combined with his theological opinions, should injure the sale of the poem. Mean and unhandsome conduct!

He usually rose about seven, breakfasted with his friends, Choppin, Johnson, and two or three other Englishmen, and a Monsieur La Borde, who had been an officer in the ci-devante garde du corps, an intolerable aristocrat, but whose skill in mechanics and geometry brought on a friendship between him and Paine: for the undaunted and distinguished ability and firmness with which he ever defended his own opinions when controverted, do not reflect higher honor upon him than that unbounded liberality toward the opinions of others which constituted such a prominent feature in his character, and which never suffered mere difference of sentiment, whether political or religious, to interrupt the harmonious intercourse of friendship, or impede the interchanges of knowledge and information.

After breakfast he usually strayed an hour or two in the garden, where he one morning pointed out the kind of spider whose web furnished him with the first idea of constructing his iron bridge; a fine model of which, in mahogany, is preserved at Paris.

The little happy circle who lived with him here will ever remember these days with delight: with these select friends he would talk of his boyish days, play at chess, whist, piques, or cribbage, and enliven the moments by many interesting anecdotes: with these he would play at marbles, scotch hops, battledores, etc., on the broad and fine gravel walk at the upper end of the garden, and then retire to his boudoir, where he was up to his knees in letters and papers of various descriptions. Here he remained till dinner time, and unless he visited Brissot’s family, or some particular friend in the evening, which was his frequent custom, he joined again the society of his favorites and fellow-boarders, with whom his conversation was often witty and cheerful, always acute and improving, but never frivolous.

Incorrupt, straightforward and sincere, he pursued his political course in France, as everywhere else, let the government or clamor or faction of the day be what it might, with firmness, with clearness, and without a “shadow of turning.”

In all Mr. Paine’s inquiries and conversations he evinced the strongest attachment to the investigation of truth, and was always for going to the fountain head for information. He often lamented we had no good history of America, and that the letters written by Columbus, the early navigators, and others, to the Spanish Court, were inaccessible, and that many valuable documents, collected by Philip II, and deposited with the national archives at Simania, had not yet been promulgated. He used to speak highly of the sentimental parts of Raynal’s “History.”

It is not intended to enter into an account of the French Revolution, its progress, the different colors it took and aspects it assumed. The history of this most important event may be found at large detailed by French writers as well as those of other nations, and the world is left to judge of it.

It is unfortunate for mankind that Mr. Paine by imprisonment and the loss of his invaluable papers, was prevented giving the best, most candid, and philosophical account of these times. These papers contained the history of the French Revolution, and were no doubt a most correct, discriminating, and enlightened detail of the events of that important era. For these papers the historian, Gibbon, sent to France, and made repeated application, upon a conviction that they would be impartial, profound, and philosophical documents.

It is well known that Mr. Paine always lamented the turn affairs took in France, and grieved at the period we are now adverting to, when corrupt influence was rapidly infecting every department of the state. He saw the jealousies and animosities that were breeding, and that a turbulent faction was forming among the people that would first enslave and ultimately overwhelm even the Convention itself.

On the day of the trial of Marat, Mr. Paine dined at White’s Hotel with Mr. Milnes, a gentleman of great hospitality and profusion, who usually gave a public dinner to twenty or thirty gentlemen once a week. At table, among many others besides Mr. Paine, was a Captain Grimstone, who was a lineal descendant from Sir Harbottle Grimstone, was a member of Cromwell’s Parliament and an officer in his army. This man was a high aristocrat, a great gambler, and it was believed could not quit France on account of his being much in debt. He took little pains to conceal his political principles, and when the glass had freely circulated, a short time after dinner he attempted, loudly and impertinently, to combat the political doctrines of the philosopher; this was, to be sure, the viper biting at the file.

Mr. Paine, in few words, with much acuteness and address, continued exposing the fallacy of his reasoning, and rebutting his invectives.

The Captain became more violent, and waxed so angry, that at length, rising from his chair, he walked round the table to where Mr. Paine was sitting, and here began a volley of abuse, calling him incendiary, traitor to his country, and struck him a violent blow that nearly knocked him off his seat. Captain Grimstone was a stout young man about thirty, and Mr. Paine at this time nearly sixty.

The company, who suspected not such an outrage against everything decent, mannerly, and just, and who had occasion frequently during dinner to call him to order, were now obliged to give him in charge of the National Guard. It must be remembered that an act of the Convention had made it death to strike a deputy, and every one in company with the person committing the assault refusing to give up the offender was considered as an accomplice.

But a short period before this circumstance happened, nine men had been decapitated, one of whom had struck Bourdeur de L’oise, at Orleans. The other eight were walking with him in the street at the time.

Paine was extremely agitated when he reflected on the danger of his unprovoked enemy, and immediately applied to Barrere, at that time president of the Committee of Public Safety, for a passport for the unhappy man, who must otherwise have suffered death; and though he found the greatest difficulty in effecting this, he however persevered and at length accomplished it, at the same time sending Grimstone money to defray his traveling expenses; for his passport was of so short a duration that he was obliged to go immediately from his prison to the messagerie nationale.

Of Mr. Paine’s arrest by Robespierre and his imprisonment, etc., we cannot be so well in formed as by himself in his own affecting and interesting letters.

While Mr. Paine was in prison he wrote much of his “Age of Reason,” and amused himself with carrying on an epistolary correspondence with Lady S*** under the assumed name of The Castle in the Air, and her ladyship answered under the signature of The Little Corner of the World. This correspondence is reported to be extremely beautiful and interesting.

At this period a deputation of Americans solicited the release of Thomas Paine from prison; and as this document, and the way in which it is introduced in Mr. Sampson Perry’s “History of the French Revolution,” bear much interest, and are highly honorable to Mr. Paine, the deputation, and Mr. Perry, I give it in his own words:

“As an historian does not write in conformity to the humors or caprice of the day, but looks to the mature opinions of a future period, so the humble tracer of these hasty sketches, though without pretensions himself to live in after times, is nevertheless at once desirous of proving his indifference to the unpopularity of the moment, and his confidence in the justice posterity will exercise toward one of the greatest friends of the human race. The author is the more authorized to pass this eulogium on a character already sufficiently renowned, having had the means and the occasion of exploring his mind and his qualities, as well with suspicion as with confidence.

“The name of Thomas Paine may excite hatred in some, and inspire terror in others. It ought to do neither, he is the friend of all, and it is only because reason and virtue are not sufficiently prevalent, that so many do not love him: he is not the enemy of those even who are eager to have his fate at their disposal. The time may not be far off when they will be glad their fate were at his; but the cowardly as well as the brave have contributed to fill England with dishonor for silently allowing the best friends of the human race to be persecuted with a virulence becoming the darkest ages only.

“The physical world is in rapid movement, the moral advances perhaps as quick; that part of it which is dark now will be light; when it shall have but half revolved, men and things will be seen more clearly, and he will be most esteemed by the good who shall have made the largest sacrifice to truth and public virtue. Thomas Paine was suspected of having checked the aspiring light of the public mind by opinions not suitable to the state France was in. He was for confiding more to the pen, and doubting the effect of the guillotine.

“Robespierre said, that method would do with such a country as America, but could avail nothing in one highly corrupted like France. To disagree in opinion with a mind so heated was to incur all the resentment it contained. Thomas Paine had preserved an intimacy with Brissot from an acquaintance of long date, and because he spoke the English language; when Brissot fell, Paine was in danger, and, as his preface to the second part of the ‘Rights of Man,’ shows, he had a miraculous escape.

“The Americans in Paris saw the perilous situation of their fellow-citizen, of the champion of the liberty of more than one-quarter of the world; they drew up an address and presented it at the bar of the Convention; it was worded as follows:

“‘Citizens! the French nation had invited the most illustrious of all foreign nations to the honor of representing her.

“‘Thomas Paine, the apostle of liberty in America, a profound and valuable philosopher, a virtuous and esteemed citizen, came to France and took a seat among you. Particular circumstances rendered necessary the decree to put under arrest all the English residing in France.

“‘Citizens! representatives! we come to demand of you Thomas Paine, in the name of the friends of liberty, in the name of the Americans your brothers and allies; was there anything more wanted to obtain our demand we would tell you. Do not give to the leagued despots the pleasure of seeing Paine in irons. We shall inform you that the seals put upon the papers of Thomas Paine have been taken off, that the Committee of General Safety examined them, and far from finding among them any dangerous propositions, they only found the love of liberty which characterized him all his lifetime, that eloquence of nature and philosophy which made him the friend of mankind, and those principles of public morality which merited the hatred of kings and the affection of his fellow-citizens.

“‘In short, citizens! if you permit us to restore Thomas Paine to the embraces of his fellow-citizens we offer to pledge ourselves as security for his conduct during the short time he shall remain in France.'”

After his liberation he found a friendly asylum at the American Minister’s house, Mr. Monroe, and for some years before Mr. Paine left Paris, he lodged at M. Bonneville’s, associating occasionally with the great men of the day, Condorcet, Volney, Mercier, Joel Barlow, etc., etc., and sometimes dining-with Bonaparte and his generals.* He now indulged his mechanical turn and amused himself in bridge and ship modeling, and in pursuing his favorite studies, the mathematics and natural philosophy. “These models,” says a correspondent of that time, “exhibit an extraordinary degree not only of skill but of taste in mechanics, and are wrought with extreme delicacy entirely by his own hands. The largest of these, the model of a bridge, is nearly four feet in length: the iron-works, the chains, and every other article belonging to it were forged and manufactured by himself. It is intended as a model of a bridge which is to be constructed across the Delaware, extending 480 feet with only one arch. The other is to be erected over a narrower river, whose name I forget, and is likewise a single arch, and of his own workmanship excepting the chains, which instead of iron are cut out of pasteboard, by the fair hands of his correspondent, The Little Corner of the World, whose indefatigable perseverance is extraordinary. He was offered -L-3,000 for these models and refused it. He also forged himself the model of a crane of a new description, which when put together exhibited the power of the lever to a most surprising degree.”

This anecdote is only related as a fact. Of the sincerity of the compliment, those may judge who know Bonaparte’s principles best.

• Footnote: When Bonaparte returned from Italy he called on Mr. Paine and invited him to dinner: in the course of his rapturous address to him he declared that a statue of gold ought to be erected to him in every city in the universe, assuring him that he always slept with his book “Rights of Man” under his pillow and conjured him to honor him with his correspondence and advice.

During this time he also published his “Dissertation on First Principles of Government,” his “Essay on Finance,” his first and second part of the “Age of Reason,” his “Letter to Washington,” his “Address to the Theophilanthropists,” “Letter to Erskine,” etc., etc. Poetry, too, employed his idle hours, and he produced some fine pieces, which the world will probably one day see.

Wearied with the direction things took in France, which he used to say, was “the promised land, but not the land of promise,” he had long sighed for his own dear America.

“It is,” he would say, “the country of my heart and the place of my political and literary birth. It was the American Revolution made me an author, and forced into action the mind that had been dormant and had no wish for public life, nor has it now.” Mr. Paine made many efforts to cross the Atlantic, but they were ineffectual.

In July, 1802, Mr. Jefferson, the then President of America, in a letter to Mr. Paine writes thus:

“You express a wish in your letter to return to America by a national ship.

“Mr. Dawson, who brings over the treaty, and who will present you this letter, is charged with orders to the captain of the Maryland, to receive and accommodate you back if you can be ready to return at such a short warning. You will in general find us returned to sentiments worthy of former times; in these it will be your glory to have steadily labored, and with as much effect as any man living. That you may live long to continue your useful labors, and reap the reward in the thankfulness of nations, is my sincere prayer. Accept the assurance of my high esteem and affectionate attachment.

“Thomas Jefferson.”

Washington, July, 1802.

By the Maryland, as Mr. Paine states, he did not go; and it was not till the first of September, 1802, after spending some time with him at Havre de Grace, that I took leave of him on his departure for America, in a ship named the London Pacquet, just ten years after his leaving my house in London.

The ardent desire which Mr. Paine ever had to retire to and dwell in his beloved America is strongly portrayed in the following letter to a female friend in that country, written some years before.

“You touch me on a very tender point when you say that my friends on your side of the water cannot be reconciled to the idea of my abandoning America even for my native England.

“They are right, I had rather see my horse ‘Button’ eating the grass of Borden Town or Morrisania, than see all the pomp and show of Europe.

“A thousand years hence, for I must indulge a few thoughts, perhaps in less, America may be what Europe now is. The innocence of her character that won the hearts of all nations in her favor may sound like a romance, and her inimitable virtue as if it had never been.

“The ruins of that liberty for which thousands bled may just furnish materials for a village tale, or extort a sigh from rustic sensibility, while the fashionable of that day, enveloped in dissipation, shall deride the principles and deny the fact.

“When we contemplate the fall of empires and the extinction of the nations of the ancient world we see but little more to excite our regret than the moldering ruins of pompous palaces, magnificent monuments, lofty pyramids, and walls and towers of the most costly workmanship; but when the empire of America shall fall, the subject for contemplative sorrow will be infinitely greater than crumbling brass or marble can inspire. It will not then be said, here stood a temple of vast antiquity, here rose a babel of invisible height, or there a palace of sumptuous extravagance; but here (ah! painful thought!) the noblest work of human wisdom, the grandest scene of human glory, and the fair cause of freedom, rose and fell! Read this, and then ask if I forget America.”

There is so uncommon a degree of interest, and that which conveys an idea of so much heart intercourse in this letter, that the reader may be led to desire some knowledge of the person to whom it was addressed. This lady’s name was I believe Nicholson, and afterwards the wife of Colonel Few; between her and Mr. Paine a very affectionate attachment and sincere regard subsisted, and it was no small mortification on his final return to New York to be totally neglected by her and her husband.

But against the repose of Mr. Paine’s dying moments there seems to have been a conspiracy, and this lady after years of disregard and inattention sought Mr. Paine on his death bed.

Mr. Few was with her, but Mr. Paine, refusing to shake hands with her, said firmly and very impressively, “You have neglected me, and I beg you will leave the room.”

Mrs. Few went into the garden, and wept bitterly.

Of Mr. Paine’s reception in America and some interesting account of his own life and its vicissitudes, his “Letters to the Citizens of America,” before noticed, speak better than I can.

These letters, under the care of Mr. Monroe, he sent me in 1804, and I published them, with the following one of his own accompanying them.

“My dear Friend,

“Mr. Monroe, who is appointed Minister Extraordinary to France, takes charge of this, to be delivered to Mr. Este, banker in Paris, to be forwarded to you.

“I arrived at Baltimore, thirtieth of October, and you can have no idea of the agitation which my arrival occasioned. From New Hampshire to Georgia (an extent of 1,500 miles) every newspaper was filled with applause or abuse.

“My property in this country has been taken care of by my friends, and is now worth six thousand pounds sterling; which put in the funds will bring me -L-400 sterling a year.

“Remember me in friendship and affection to your wife and family, and in the circle of our friends.

“I am but just arrived here, and the Minister sails in a few hours, so that I have just time to write you this. If he should not sail this tide I will write to my good friend Colonel Bosville, but in any case I request you to wait on him for me.

“Yours in friendship,

“Thomas Paine.”

What course he meant to pursue in America, his own words will best tell, and best characterize his sentiments and principles: they are these:

“As this letter is intended to announce my arrival to my friends, and my enemies if I have any, for I ought to have none in America, and as introductory to others that will occasionally follow, I shall close it by detailing the line of conduct I shall pursue.

“I have no occasion to ask, nor do I intend to accept, any place or office in the Government.

“There is none it could give me that would in any way be equal to the profits I could make as an author (for I have an established fame in the literary world) could I reconcile it to my principles to make money by my politics or religion; I must be in everything as I have ever been, a disinterested volunteer. My proper sphere of action is on the common floor of citizenship, and to honest men I give my hand and my heart freely.

“I have some manuscript works to publish, of which I shall give proper notice, and some mechanical affairs to bring forward, that will employ all my leisure time.

“I shall continue these letters as I see occasion, and as to the low party prints that choose to abuse me, they are welcome; I shall not descend to answer them. I have been too much used to such common stuff to take any notice of it.

“Thomas Paine.

“City of Washington.”

From this period to the time of his death, which was the ninth of June, 1809, Mr. Paine lived principally at New York, and on his estate at New Rochelle, publishing occasionally some excellent things in the Aurora newspaper, also “An Essay on the Invasion of England,” “On the Yellow Fever,” “On Gun-Boats, etc., etc.,” and in 1807, “An Examination of the Passages in the New Testament, Quoted from the Old, and Called Prophecies Concerning Jesus Christ, etc.”

This is a most acute, profound, clear, argumentative, and entertaining work, and may be considered and is now entitled “The Third Part of the Age of Reason.”

In the course of Mr. Paine’s life, he was often reminded of a reply he once made to this observation of Dr. Franklin’s, “Where liberty is, there is my country:” Mr. Paine’s retort was, “Where liberty is not, there is my country.” And, unfortunately, he had occasion for many years in Europe to realize the truth of his axiom.

Soon after Mr. Paine’s arrival in America, he invited over Mr. and Mrs. Bonneville and their children. At Bonneville’s house at Paris he had for years found a home, a friendly shelter, when the difficulty of getting supplies of money from America, and other and many ills assailed him. Bonneville and his family were poor, and sunk in the world, Mr. Paine therefore, though he was not their inmate without remuneration, offered them an asylum with him in America. Mrs. Bonneville and her three boys, to whom he was a friend during his life and at his death, soon joined him there.

The particulars of Mr. Paine being shot at while sitting by his fireside at New Rochelle are given in his own letters. The bullet from the fire-arm shattered the glass over the chimney-piece very near to him. I find a letter in reply to one of mine, in which he writes, “the account you heard of a man’s firing into my house is true — the grand jury found the bill against him, and he lies over for trial.”

In January, 1809, Mr. Paine became very feeble and infirm, so much so, as to be scarcely capable of doing anything for himself.

During this illness he was pestered on every hand with the intrusive and impertinent visits of the bigoted, the fanatic, and the designing. To entertain the reader, some specimens of the conduct of these intruders are here given.

He usually took a nap after dinner, and would not be disturbed let who would call to see him. One afternoon a very old lady dressed in a large, scarlet, hooded cloak knocked at the door and inquired for Thomas Paine. Mr. Jarvis, with whom Mr. Paine resided, told her he was asleep.

“I am very sorry,” she said, “for that, for I want to see him particularly.”

Thinking it a pity to make an old woman call twice, Mr. Jarvis took her into Mr. Paine’s bed room, and awoke him. He rose upon one elbow, and then, with an expression of eye that made the old woman stagger back a step or two, he asked,

“What do you want?”

“Is your name Paine?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, I come from Almighty God to tell you that if you do not repent of your sins, and believe in our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, you will be damned, and — “

“Poh, poh, it is not true,” replied Paine, “you were not sent with any such impertinent message. Jarvis make her go away: pshaw! He would not send such a foolish, ugly old woman about with His messages; go away, go back, shut the door.”

The old lady retired, raised both her hands, kept them so, and without saying another word walked away in mute astonishment.

The following is a curious example of a friendly, neighborly visit.

About two weeks before his death he was visited by the Rev. Mr. Milledollar, a Presbyterian minister of great eloquence, and the Rev. Mr. Cunningham. The latter gentleman said:

“Mr. Paine, we visit you as friends and neighbors. You have now a full view of death, you cannot live long, and whoever does not believe in Jesus Christ will assuredly be damned.”

“Let me,” said Paine, “have none of your popish stuff. Get away with you. Good morning, Sir, good morning.”

The Rev. Mr. Milledollar attempted to address him but he was interrupted in the same language. When they were gone, he said to Mrs. Hedden, his housekeeper, “do not let them come here again, they intrude upon me.”

They soon renewed their visit, but Mrs. Hedden told them they could not be admitted, and that she thought the attempt useless, for if God did not change his mind, she was sure no human power could. They retired.

Among others, the Rev. Mr. Hargrove, minister of a new sect called the New Jerusalemites, once accosted him with this impertinent stuff:

“My name is Hargrove, Sir; I am a minister of the New Jerusalem Church. We, Sir, explain the Scripture in its true meaning; the key has been lost these four thousand years, and we have found it.”

“Then,” said Paine in his own neat way, “it must have been very rusty.”

In his last moments he was very anxious to die, and also very solicitous about the mode of his burial; for as he was completely unchanged in his theological sentiments, he would on no account, even after death, countenance ceremonies he disapproved, containing doctrines and expressions of a belief which he conscientiously objected to, and had spent a great part of his life in combating.

He wished to be interred in the Quakers’ burying ground, and on this subject he requested to see Mr. Willet Hicks, a member of the Society, who called on him in consequence.

Mr. Paine, after the usual salutations, said, “As I am going to leave one place it is necessary to provide another; I am now in my seventy-third year, and do not expect to live long; I wish to be buried in your burying ground.”

He said his father was a Quaker, and that he thought better of the principles of that Society than any other, and approved their mode of burial. This request of Mr. Paine was refused, very much to the discredit of those who did so; and as the Quakers are not unused to grant such indulgences, in this case it seemed to arise from very little and unworthy motives and prejudices on the part of those who complied not with this earnest and unassuming solicitation.

The above named Quaker in a conversation of a serious nature with Mr. Paine, a short time before his death, was assured by him that his sentiments respecting the Christian religion were now precisely the same as when he wrote the “Age of Reason.”

About the fourth of May, symptoms of approaching dissolution became very evident to himself, and he soon fell off his milk-punch, and became too infirm to take anything; complaining of much bodily pain.

On the eighth of June, 1809, about nine in the morning, he placidly, and almost without a struggle, died, as he had lived, a Deist.

Why so much consequence should be attached to what is called a recantation in a man’s last moments of a belief or opinion held through life, a thing I never witnessed nor knew anyone who did, it is difficult to say, at least with any credit, to those who harp so much upon it. A belief or an opinion is none the less correct or true even if it be recanted, and I strenuously urge the reader to reflect seriously, how few there are who really have any fixed belief and conviction through life of a metaphysical or religious nature; how few who devote any time to such investigation, or who are not the creatures of form, education, and habit; and take upon trust tenets, instead of inquiring into their truth and rationality. Indeed it appears that those who are so loud about the recantation of philosophers, are neither religious, moral, or correct themselves, and exhibit not in their own lives, either religion in belief, or principle in conduct.

Paine was aged seventy-two years and five months. At nine of the clock in the forenoon of the ninth of June, the day after his decease, he was taken from his house at Greenwich, attended by seven persons, to New Rochelle; where he was afterwards interred on his own farm. A stone has been placed at the head of his grave according to the direction in his will, with the following inscription:

THOMAS PAINE, AUTHOR OF COMMON SENSE, Died June 8,1809, Aged 72 Years and 5 Months.

The reader must from the foregoing pages be persuaded how unkindly teased and obtrusively tormented were the closing hours of Mr. Paine’s life; hours that always should be soothed by tenderness, quietude, and every kind attention, and in which the mind generally loses all its strength and energy, and is as unlike its former self as its poor suffering companion the body.

Infirmity doth still neglect all office, Whereto our health is bound; we are not ourselves When nature, being oppress’d, commands the mind To suffer with the body. — Shakespeare.

To a rational man it should seem that a Deist, if he be so from principle, and he is as likely to be so as any other religionist, is no more to be expected to renounce his principles on his deathbed or to abandon his belief at that moment, than the Christian, the Jew, the Mahometan, or any other religionist.

It will be seen that Mr. Paine very early, when a mere child, was inspired as it were with the anti-Christian principles which he held religiously through life.

His philosophical and astronomical pursuits could not but confirm him in the most exalted, the most divine ideas of a supreme being, and in the purity and sublimity of Deism.

A belief in millions of millions of inhabited worlds, millions of millions of miles apart, necessarily leads the mind to the worship of a God infinitely above the one described by those religionists who speak and write of Him as they do, and as if He were only the maker of our earth, and as alone being interested in what concerns it. In contemplating the immense works of God, “the creation” is the only book of revelation in which the Deist can believe; and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of God in His glorious works, and endeavoring to imitate Him in everything moral, scientific and mechanical. It cannot be urged too strongly, so much wrongheadedness if not wrongheartedness is there on this subject, that the religion of the Deist no more precludes the blessed hope of salvation than that of the Christian or of any other religion.

We see through different mediums, and in our pursuits and experience are unlike. How others have felt after reading maturely the “Age of Reason” and the “Rights of Man,” and pursuing fairly, coolly, and assiduously the subjects therein treated, I leave to them; but for myself I must say, these works carried perfect conviction with them to my mind, and the opinions they contain are fully confirmed by much reading, by long, honest, unwearied investigation and observation.

The best and wisest of human beings both male and female that I have known through life have been Deists, nor did anything in the shape of their recantation either in life or death ever come to my knowledge, nor can I understand how a real, serious, and long-adopted belief can be recanted.

That Mr. Paine’s religious belief had been long established and was with him a deep-rooted principle, may be seen by his conduct when imprisoned and extremely ill in the Luxembourg prison in 1794.*

• Footnote: See “Age of Reason,” Part 1.

Mr. Bond, an English surgeon who was confined there at the same time, though by no means a friend to Mr. Paine’s political or theological doctrines, gave me the following testimony of Mr. Paine’s sentiments:

“Mr. Paine, while hourly expecting to die, read to me parts of his ‘Age of Reason’; and every night when I left him to be separately locked up, and expected not to see him alive in the morning, he always expressed his firm belief in the principles of that book, and begged I would tell the world such were his dying opinions. He often said that if he lived he should prosecute further that work, and print it.” Mr. Bond’s frequent observation when speaking of Mr. Paine was, that he was the most conscientious man he ever knew.

While upon this subject, it will probably occur to the reader, as well as to the writer, how little belief from inquiry and principle there is in the world; and how much oftener religious profession is adopted from education, form, prudence, fear, and a variety of other motives, than from unprejudiced inquiry, a love of truth, of free discussion, and from entire conviction. Reasoning thus, it may fairly be inferred that men like Mr. Paine, a pious Deist, of deep research, laborious inquiry, and critical examination, are the most likely from disinterested motives to adopt opinions, and of course the least likely to relinquish them.

Before I quit the subject I give the following authentic document, received in a letter from New York:

“Sir: I witnessed a scene last night which occasioned sensations only to be felt, not to be described; the scene alluded to was no less extraordinary than the beholding the well-known Thomas Paine struggling to retain a little longer in connection his soul and body. For near an hour I sat by the bedside of that well-known character, to whom I was introduced by one of his friends. Could the memory have retained the suggestions of my mind in the moments when I was reviewing the pallid looks of him who had attempted to overthrow kingdoms and monarchies, of him who had astonished the world with the fruits of a vast mind, whose works have caused a great part of mankind to think and feel as they never did before, such suggestions would not be uninteresting to you. I could not contemplate the approaching dissolution of such a man, see him gasping for breath, without feelings of a peculiar nature. Poor Paine’s body has given way before his mind, which is yet firm; mortification seems to have taken up its dwelling in his frame, and he will soon be no more. With respect to his principles he will die as he has lived; they are unaltered.

“Some Methodists went to him a few days ago to endeavor to make a convert of him, but he would not listen to their entreaties.”

Before I take leave of my reader I would press upon his mind the necessity of candor; and if he be a Christian I must tell him he will cease to be so the moment he appeals to coercion and resorts to prosecution and to persecution in matters of belief and opinion: such conduct his own “New Testament” is decidedly against. It is better not to believe in a God than to believe unworthily of Him, and the less we make Him after our image the less we blaspheme Him. Let inquiry supersede calumny and censure, and let it be ever remembered that those systems in government and religion which will not bear discussion and investigation are not worth solicitude. Ignorance is the only original sin; spread information and knowledge, and virtue and truth will follow.

Oppose argument to argument, reason to reason, opinion to opinion, book to book, truth must prevail; and that which is of divine origin will bring itself through.

Set not attorney-generals and human laws at work, nor pay any religion which boasts an heavenly origin so bad a compliment, or libel its founders, by endeavoring to support it by such infamous means.

How paltry, how detestable, is that criticism which only seeks to find out and dwell on errors and inaccuracies; passing over in silence, what is grand, sublime, and useful! How still more paltry, and detestable, is that disposition, which seeks only to find out and dwell on the defects and foibles of character!

While Mr. Paine’s enemies have labored, and are still laboring, to detect vices and errors in his life and manners, shall not his friends dwell on the immense good he has done in public life, on the happiness he has created for myriads, in private? Shall they not point to the abodes of delight and comfort, where live and flourish the blessings of domestic bliss; affection’s dear intercourses, friendship’s solaces, and love’s sacred enjoyments? And there are millions of such abodes originating in his labors. Why seek occasion, surly critics and detractors! to maltreat and misrepresent Mr. Paine? He was mild, unoffending, sincere, gentle, humble, and unassuming; his talents were soaring, acute, profound, extensive, and original; and he possessed that charity, which covers a multitude of sins.

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Epitaph On Thomas Paine

To future times this monumental stone

Need not be spared to make thy value known.

For future times will in each bosom raise

An Altar sacred to that worth and praise;

And sound with general voice, when envy dies,

Thee and thy works with plaudits, to the skies.

This Tomb is simply raised by friends sincere

To point the spot and tell that Paine lies here:

Their high respect and gratitude to prove

Who dared insulted excellence to love:

Who leave to future times and better days

Thy worth I appreciate and proclaim thy praise;

For future ages must with loud acclaim –

When man will live to Reason, Truth and Fame,

When Freedom, Virtue, Love shall reign below,

Hail him! to whom their happy stake they owe.

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