What is agreed is that the street numbering has changed since 1792. Barb Jacobson, former secretary of the Thomas Paine Society UK, wrote an excellent article about this topic in 2010, isolating the site to an apartment block at 148 New Cavendish Street. Jacobson wrote that earlier writers who claimed the house was located at 154 New Cavendish Street were in error, unfortunately so because 154 is one of the few 18th century houses remaining.

A FAMILY MEMORY

While doing a bit of family genealogy, I entered the fray. About 125 years after Thomas Paine lived at No. 7, my grandparents and uncles moved to No. 4 Upper Marylebone Street. My father was born in that house in 1919. As a child, I remember my father pointing out the Rickman house. When I saw Barb Jacobson’s article and resolved to visit New Cavendish Street for the first time in 50 years, eyeball logic, combined with my limited knowledge of 1937’s renaming and renumbering, suggested that 154 was correct—148 was an error.

Searching the electoral rolls from 1935 and 1939 offered proof of renaming and renumbering. Almost every house had occupants who spanned the changes. The confusion stemmed from The Horwood Plan, a series of 1790s maps. The relevant map shows three unlabelled units at the eastern end of the block, placing No. 7 at 148 New Cavendish Street. But it is clear from the renaming and renumbering in the 1930s that the three houses Horwood left un-numbered were actually 1, 2 and 3 Upper Marylebone Street. An early 19th century walking guide was in accord with my numbering.

Next, I investigated the archive of Howard de Walden Estate, a property estate that dates from 1715. Their archive contained documents that including plans drawn up circa 1800, as the basis of lease books. That numbering accords with my hypothesis.

The mystery truly started to unravel when I found an article in the October 26, 1926 Worthing Herald republishing a historical extract from the paper’s June/July 1791 edition. Not No. 7, but No. 4. Something twigged in my memory. I’d seen reference to Rickman at No. 4 before.

In Jacobson’s 2010 article, her perceived misidentification was a letter from Rickman to Joshua Reynolds: From Thomas Rickman, No. 4 Upper Marylebone Street, July 19 – 1791. Both of the No 4 Upper Marylebone Street references were in July 1791. All subsequent written references to the exact address (October 1792 being the earliest) say No. 7. I took a deeper look at the history of the Horwood Plan. The first page of the Horwood Plan, including Upper Marylebone Street, was mapped between October 1790 and June 1792. Horwood had not made a mistake, but a diligent record of the state of affairs at that time. The three un-numbered units on the north-east corner of that street were presumably still under construction. A visit to the Westminster Archive to examine the rates books for the Parish of St. Marylebone confirmed my theory, reflecting the yearly changes as the property moved from not listed, to being labelled No. 4 and finally as No. 7.

So there you have it. Evidence that the house was briefly No. 4 but soon became No. 7 Upper Marylebone Street, before finally becoming 154 New Cavendish Street in the 1930s. Today, it is a coffee shop. Paine probably would have liked that.

In July 2025, I wrote an open letter to the TPHA and English Heritage advocating an English Heritage Blue Plaque at 154 New Cavendish Street. English Heritage, the group that manages historic monuments in England, are very receptive and are investigating the evidence. With any luck, there will soon be a new monument to the life and works of Thomas Paine in London.

Also see my July 30, 2025 blog piece, Thomas Paine Lived & Wrote At 154 New Cavendish Street: Evidenced.

Ian Harris is a London-based writer and amateur historian.

The post Rediscovering the Birthplace of Rights of Man appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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.

The post The Curious History of Thomas Paine’s Biographies appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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. 

The post Tom Paine, Architect – Engineer & His Iron Bridge  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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.

The post Thomas Paine’s Astronomy  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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.

The post `No Respecter Of Persons’: Thomas Paine And The Quakers: The Influence Of 17th Century Quaker Persecution History On Paine’s Radicalism  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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.

The post A Small Addition To The Writings On Thomas Paine (1), Quakers appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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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BIRTH-DAY OF THOMAS PAINE.

A number of vulgar persons, admirers of the writings of Thomas Paine, met on Wednesday, in the Brewer-street Assembly-rooms, to celebrate that individual’s birth-day.

The bait was a dinner; tickets 4s., “clearing the table;” thus the bill implying, in ordinary colloquy, that all beer, or brandy and water (wine of course is out of the question), is to be matter of separate arrangement; and we were contented to take, at once, the hazard of a head-ach to see what manner of trash the self-constituted philosophers would exhibit.

The apartment of meeting, which in its time has served the purposes of a dancing-school, a race-ground for velocipedes, and, if we recollect right, a public spouting-room, the apartment was decorated with a Bust of Thomas Paine, bought at Carlisle’s sale for the sum of £7 10s.; and the tickets and placards were stuck about, with the inscriptions—”Truth”—”Reason”—”Free Discussion”—and “The Rights of Man.”

At five o’clock, nearly 300 persons being assembled, Citizen Clio Rickman was called to the chair; dinner was soon after put upon the tables. It was a hasty, ill-dressed, ill-served, coarse, clumsy repast, most impudently charged at four shillings, and scarcely fit to eat at any charge.

The struggle being over, and the cries of “Porter for the Chair!”—”Boiled beef for Mr. Gale Jones!”—”Sneaker of brandy for Mr. Simpkin!”—”Drop of gravy for Mr. Goosetree,” &c. being a little abated, the cloths (there were cloths on the tables) were removed, and the business of the evening was proposed to be entered upon. Here, however, a difficulty in Paine occurred. The talking people were for the most part absent. Carlisle could not attend on account of his being in prison—Cobbett got a surfeit the other day at Hereford and Reading, and does not mean, we hear, to go to public dinners any more. Gale Jones sat on the Chairman’s right hand, and really looked like respectable among the folks who surrounded him; but the majority of the company consisted of persons as incapable of communicating the doctrines of Paine, as they would be of digesting the ill-cooked provender by which their intended inculcation had on the present occasion been preceded.

Citizen RICKMAN, apologising for illness, addressed the meeting very shortly. He spoke of the immense benefits which Paine had conferred upon mankind, declared that his very name comprehended all that was sublime and beautiful, confessed that his (Rickman’s) praises could no more throw splendour upon such an illustrious character than farthing rushlights could illuminate a chandelier, and concluded by asserting, in equally poetic and emphatic commendation, that—

“Reason and truth had long lay hid in night,
Until Tom Paine appeared—and then all was right.”

Mr. Bowie and a Mr. Robinson squabbled about points of faith; but

Mr. GALE JONES said something at which the people laughed.

Toasts in the mean time were given galore; but the chairman seemed troubled by bad management, saying that he could get nothing to drink them in.

A Mr. CRANGER then proposed appointing a select committee to wait upon Mr. Cobbett, and inquire when he meant to bury Paine’s bones;—it was right that the admirers of so general a writer should have notice of the event, that they might attend at his funeral.

Mr. GALE JONES objected to a deputation being sent to Cobbett, and thought that Paine’s bones were a secondary consideration—that his works were in the best and in the hands of every man.

It was whispered, indeed, that Cobbett has sold the bones to some anatomist at a high price, owing to the present scarcity of subjects.

The motion was eventually negatived without producing much amusement. Songs were then called for, and more toasts given; some gentlemen wished for pipes, but the woman at the bar had none to furnish them—a veto which excited considerable irritation. The juniors were beginning to be vociferous, and the conversation, when we left the room, about nine o’clock; but we understood that, after that hour, a great many pots of porter were tapped off, and that the assembly eventually separated without mischief.

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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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