From 1768 to 1774, when Thomas Paine sailed to America, he lived in the town of Lewes, England. In his honor, a conference was organized in Sussex, January 9- 10, 2026, by Thomas Paine: Legacy; the University of Sussex; and the Iona University Institute for Thomas Paine Studies. About 40 scholars and Paine admirers met to share research findings and explore Paine’s life, work, and global influence,with a special focus on the 250th anniversary of Paine’s seminal work, Common Sense. They were also treated to tours of the charming medieval town of Lewes, and enjoyed experiencing part of the conference inside Bull House, Paine’s residence while in Lewes, now open regularly as a historic site and an aspiring “center for democracy.”

This article seeks to capture the major themes and only partially summarizes the wealth of information and wide range of perspectives exchanged during two full days of formal sessions and informal discussions. A number of presentations drew attention to the mutual influences between Paine and radical thinkers supporting working-class and suffrage reform movements in England, Scotland and Ireland in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Presentations also addressed the widespread influence of Paine’s ideas not only in England and America, but in France, Spanish America, and beyond. Starting with the German translation of Common Sense for the German community in Philadelphia, other Paine writings were thereafter translated into many languages. Participants often alluded to Common Sense as a living document, one that encourages people to think for themselves, evokes emotional responses, and deservesto be heard orally, as it often was when it was first published.

Presenters recognized Paine’s writing as a call to action against tyranny and dogma not only in 1776, but throughout the 19th century and one still relevant for our time.Paine was praised as a political philosopher who was practical in his approach to institutions and the work of good government, which he regarded as essential to protecting freedom and achieving equality.

Gregory Claeys, Professor Emeritus of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and general editor of Paine’s new Collected Writings, delivered a keynote presentation entitled “Thomas Paine and Three Revolutions That Weren’t.” The presentation highlighted Paine’s roles in reform efforts in America, Britain, and France. Paine’s ideal was a universal democratic republic with limits on concentration of power and executive authority. He envisioned a forerunner to the modern welfare state, governed by a popularly elected legislature. As Claeys concluded, Paine’s ideal was unfulfilled in all three cases. In America, he was particularly disappointed by the Federalist constitution adopted in 1787.

PAINE AND THE JUNIUS LETTERS

A second keynote presentation was made by the respected political scientist and historian Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard. Like Claeys, Allen affirmed that Thomas Paine was forming his ideas and beginning to write eloquently long before he arrived in America. She described her discovery of a close relationship between Paine and Charles Lennox, the reformminded Duke of Richmond who lived near Lewes. Her research on Lennox will be published later in 2026 under the title Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat-and the American Revolution-Transformed Britain. Among other things, she looked closely at the Junius letters: seditious attacks on the British monarchy that called for universal male suffrage, published during the period from 1768-1772. The actual authors were kept secret, constituting a mystery for centuries. Allen has concluded that the Junius letters were underwritten by the Duke and that Paine was a key author of many of the letters, recruited by the Duke to advance his agenda. Allen reached her conclusions on the roles of the Duke and Paine in the Junius letters independently of the editorial team assembling Paine’s new Collected Writings, which also recognizes Paine’s hand in the Junius letters based on computer-assisted text analysis.

Paul Myles, member of the TPHA Board,reported on his continuing research into Paine’s early writing while in Lewes. Various presentations also examined Paine as a man with many gifts and a social being with varied friendships and influential networks throughout his career. His writings tell uslittle about his views on gender relationships. As one presenter described, he married a local Lewes woman and schoolteacher, Elizabeth Ollive, in 1771. Although their marriage dissolved in 1774, both the content of the separation agreement and the evident mutual respect between the two may provide an indication of Paine’s relatively enlightened perspective on women.

The enthusiasm and engagement of younger scholars in Lewes suggests that scholarship about Thomas Paine and exploration of the context and impact of his work will continue to yield new insights well into the future.

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Back in 2020, I was asked by the South Coast Rail Partnership (SCRP) if I could create a poster exhibition about Thomas Paine in the four waiting rooms in Lewes Railway Station. I was keen to tell the story of two men, Thomas Paine and General Gage, Britain’s Commander-in-Chief in North America at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Both had strong links to Lewes, Paine residing here from 1768 to 1774 and the family seat of the Gage family at Firle just five miles east of Lewes. Covid struck and froze the work but I recently suggested that we could mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by resurrecting the project.

The posters were hung in late December 2025, this time badged as a TPHA project with my having recently joined its Board. As I hung the posters, public engagement was immediate! People kept asking questions while I hung them! It was very heartening as I had no idea that it would work at all. The challenge was to give enough information without too much detail. Judging from the initial responses I think we got the right balance.

Here are the posters:

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A Political Biography Of Thomas Paine. W. A. SPECK. xv & 258pp. Hardbound. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2013. ISBN 13: 9781848930957. £60.00 

For anyone interested in the life and influence of Thomas Paine the appearance of a new biography of him is to be warmly welcomed. Naturally it invites comparison with previous biographical studies, in particular the most recent. It bears out well in relationship to them. What stands out in this new work is its detailed coverage of Paine’s career and his comprehensive treatment of the controversies and issues Paine addressed. 

The author draws attention to the problems encountered by biographers due to the gaps in surviving information about Paine’s early life. To some extent he fills some of these gaps, particularly when it comes to Paine’s years in Lewes, in doing this he has drawn on the research undertaken by a retired excise officer of George Hindmarch, though not uncritically, though approvingly citing his contention that there was no such thing as the Headstrong Club, and that Paine had adopted republicanism – “even revolutionary” views as a consequence of his involvement. Professor Speck’s examination of the years Paine spent in Lewes bring out clearly that further research might well pay dividends. A more plausible explanation for Paine’s conversion to republicanism could have been a degree of resentment at the rejection of his Case of the Officers of Excise, over which he had laboured long and hard, and eventually lost his post with the Excise. His resentment, could well have made him more receptive to republicanism when after moving to the American colonies and there became aware of the discontent amongst the colonists to British government policies in respect of the colonies. His final conversion may well have been events at Lexington and Concord, which prompted Paine to write of rejecting ‘the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England for ever’. I would have liked to see Professor Speck go into the subject in detail. Whatever, Common Sense became not just a rallying point for the colonists but an exposition of republicanism that had an influence internationally. Yet for all his unqualified republicanism he was to oppose the execution of the deposed French king – at his personal cost, and would, but for an accident, or was it?, followed the king to the guillotine. 

Professor Speck refers to Paine’s ability to express himself in a manner readily understood by his targeted readership, artisans, small tradesmen, apprentices and others, an ability that was to alarm the political and religious establishments in England following the publication of Rights of Man which had achieved record sales. Previous Paine biographers have accepted the claim that the first biography of him, written by George Chalmers, who concealed his authorship under the name “Francis Oldys”, which appeared in 1791, had been commissioned and paid by the government, for whom he worked, however, Professor Speck questions the validity of this, and notes that given Chalmers political views [he had fled from the colonies following the outbreak of the revolution] he may have taken it on himself to denounce Paine. The fact that he had access to official papers, as chief clerk to the committee of the Privy Council, he would have had this. 

An example, not cited by Speck, of the alarm generated first by Rights of Man and then by The Age of Reason, can be found in a missive addressed to his clergy by the bishop of London, Beilby Porteus. Writing specifically of Paine’s works he refers to “the meanness of their style, and the homeliness, the plainness, and the gross familiarity of their manner, are all too well adapted to the taste and apprehension of those readers whom they are meant to captivate. This”, he goes on, “is a new (his emphasis) species of infidel writing, recently introduced among us. Hitherto we have had to contend with the Tolands, the Tindals, the Bolingbrokes, and the Humes of the age; men, whose writings could fall only into the hands of a few in the higher ranks of life, and were not likely to make much impression on well- informed and well cultivated minds. But the pieces to which I allude [Rights of Man and The Age of Reason] are addressed to the multitude (again his emphasis), and are most dexterously brought down to the level of their understanding”. He continues in a similar vein calling Paine’s works, “most artful snares” (Beilby Porteus. Tracts on Various Subjects. London, Cadell & Davies, 1807. pp.276-278). 

Ironically, having roundly condemned Paine’s style of writing he called upon his clergy to emulate it in both their writing and sermonising. Perhaps aware they could not, or would not, in 1792 he begged Hannah More to write something in simple words to open the eyes of uneducated people dazed by the words “liberty” and “equality”. Initially she had refused but then agreed, writing her tract, Village Politics, supposedly about a discussion between a country carpenter Will Chip, who was happy with his inferior social status and defended the political and social status quo, and a supporter of Paine’s ideas, who, naturally, ended up agreeing with Chip. This tract is briefly discussed by Professor Speck. 

A Political Biography of Thomas Paine must surely become one of the most important of Paine biographies and deserves a wide readership. It is a detailed overview of Paine’s life and career presented in varying degrees of detail, and written in what is a very readable, almost Paineite style. As well as its nine chapters on Paine and the disputes he became involved in through his writings, many of which retain their relevance and could apply to events and situations today given some minor changes, it also has thirty-four pages of notes, an extensive bibliography and a useful index. One error I noted, the reference to Paine’s Jewish critic David Levi, as being an American, whereas he was English, being by profession a hat-maker turned printer. 

A Political Biography of Thomas Paine is a comprehensive and thoughtful work that deserves to be not only in academic libraries but also those of anyone seriously interested in Thomas Paine. However, its high price is regrettably likely to put it beyond the reach of many students, though the Historical Association has just published an essay on Paine by Professor Speck. Priced at £2.99 it is at the time of writing restricted to Kindle, but hopefully the association will publish it in pamphlet form. 

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George Chalmers, Thomas Paine’s first and most hostile biographer, maintained that he ‘commenced public writer in 1771. The electors of New Shoreham had lately shone with such uncommon lustre, as to attract parliamentary notice, and to incur parliamentary disfranchisement. A new election was now to be held, not so much in a new manner, as on new principles. The poets of Lewes were called upon by Rumbold, the candidate of fair pretensions, to furnish an appropriate song. Our author obtained the laurel, with three guineas for his pains.’ Chalmers went on to remark ‘it may then be doubted whether it be strictly true, what he asserted in his news — paper altercations, in 1779, that till the epoch of his Common Sense, he had never published a syllable’. Since no copy of Paine’s election song appears to have survived, however, it seems reasonable to assume that it never was published but was simply sung.¹ 

Chalmers version of the New Shoreham bye — election is also unreliable in other respects. It did not take place in 1771 but on 26 November 1770. Moreover, so far from being consequent upon an alteration of the qualifications for voting in the constituency, it provoked one. The bribery employed in it was so blatant that it could not be disregarded even in an age which turned a blind eye to corruption at the polls. Consequently a parliamentary inquiry was held, which resulted in the number of electors in the borough being increased from about 100 to about 800. Many of those who enjoyed the franchise there had formed a so — called Christian Society, ‘ostensibly for charitable purposes, but really to arrange the sale of the borough’s parliamentary representation’.² The general election held in 1768 had resulted in the return of two members unopposed. The subsequent death of one of them in October 1770, however, necessitated a bye – election to fill the vacant seat. The Christian Society determined on selling their votes to the highest bidder. Initially five candidates stood. One offered to spend £3000 and to order the construction of a ship of 600 tons, an attractive inducement in Shoreham where shipbuilding was a major industry. Thomas Rumbold then made an offer of £34 or £35 for each member of the Society, which they found more appealing and accepted. This overt deal so appalled the returning officer that he announced he would be no party to it. At the polls he refused 76 votes given to Rumbold by members of the Society and returned one of his rivals, John Purling, even though only 37 had voted for him. This led Rumbold to petition parliament objecting to the return of Purling. Though the Commons upheld Rumbold’s claim to have been rightfully returned, the House insisted on an investigation into the proceedings at the election. This uncovered such corrupt practices that ‘it was proposed to disfranchise the borough; this, however, was thought too dangerous a precedent’.³ Instead an Act was passed in 1771 disfranchising 69 named members of the Christian Society and increasing the electorate eightfold. 

Tom Paine was thus involved in one of the most blatantly corrupt elections held under George III. No principle appears to have been at stake in it, even though Rumbold ‘opposed the ministry’.⁴ All three candidates who contested the bye – election were members of the East India Company. Rumbold, the candidate who commissioned electoral propaganda from Paine, and paid him for it, had returned from India in 1769 with a fortune calculated at between £200,000 and £300,000.⁵ He was intent on buying a seat in parliament and found one up for sale in the borough of New Shoreham. Why he also felt the need for an electoral song is hard to explain. That Tom Paine, the future advocate of parliamentary reform, obtained the commission is even harder to square with his reputation for political radicalism on the eve of his departure for America. On the contrary, as Moncure Conway observed of this episode, ‘he appears to have been conventionally patriotic’.⁶ 

Shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia, however, Paine published an essay on ‘the Life and Death of Lord Clive’ which was highly critical of the type of ‘nabob’ whose election campaign he had supported in Shoreham.⁷ Clive’s conduct in India had been investigated by parliament in 1773 and, although he had been exonerated, many felt that his career with the East India Company had been characterised by corruption and extortion. Paine clearly shared this view, for his ‘reflections’ on Clive were far from complimentary. On the contrary, he described India as the ‘loud proclaimer of European cruelties’ and the ‘bloody monument of unnecessary deaths’. He pictured Clive returning home ‘loaded with plunder’, then going back to a country where ‘fear and terror march like pioneers before his camp, murder and rapine accompany it, famine and wretchedness follow in the rear’. Clive, ‘resolved on accumulating an unbounded fortune’, is there ‘the sole lord of their lives and fortunes [and] disposes of either as he pleases’. Although he was acquitted by parliament, ‘some time before his death he became very melancholy — subject to strange imaginations — and was found dead at last’. Paine imagines Clive in the final stages of his life unable to enjoy his wealth, which reminds him of the ways in which it was acquired. Thus port wine appears like blood to him. And in the end he was suspected of taking his own life. 

Clive died on 22 November, just a week before Paine arrived in Philadelphia so he cannot have known of the nabob’s death before he left England. But he would have been aware of the parliamentary enquiry into Clive’s conduct in India, which was held in May 1773. Paine himself was probably in London while it was being held, for he spent much of the time between the fall of 1772 and the spring of 1773 in the capital pursuing the claim of his fellow excisemen to an increase in their salaries. Though his own printed Case of the Officers of Excise was supported by George Lewis Scott, one of the commissioners of the excise, it failed to find favour with the Treasury or the prime minister, Lord North, who rejected the claim in February.⁸ Paine became very disillusioned with politics as a result of this rebuff, and the scales seem to have fallen from his eyes when he heard of the proceedings against Clive. He could even have been thinking of his own reaction when he observed in his ‘Reflections’ on them “Tis the peculiar temper of the English to applaud before they think. Generous of their praise, they frequently bestow it unworthily; but when once the truth arrives, the torrent stops, and rushes back again with the same violence’. At all events, the Clive affair marked a turning point in the political stance of Paine from being the recipient of favours from Rumbold to becoming a major critic of British imperialism.

Endnotes 

1. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain (1791), pp. 26 — 7. It has been suggested that a poem, ‘Farmer Shorter’s Dog Porter’; which Paine published in the Pennsylvania Magazine in July 1775, was the song in question. Although it involves a farmer who had voted in the Shoreham election, which shows that Paine was familiar with that event, being subsequent to the polling it cannot have been used for electoral purposes. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain (1791), pp. 26 — 7. 
2. The House of Commons 17 — 1790 edited by L. B. Namier and J. Brooke (3 vols, History of Parliament, 1964), i. 397. 
3. T. H. B. Oldfield, An entire and complete history Political and personal of the boroughs of Great Britain (3 vols, 1792), iii, 56. 
4. In 1786 Rumbold topped a list of wealthy nabobs with a fortune estimated at £300,000. Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in eighteenth — century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), p. 13. 
5. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (2 vols, 1998), i, 24. 
6. The complete works of Thomas Paine edited by Philip Foner (2 vols, 1969), ii, 22 — 27. 
7. George Hindmarch, Thomas Paine: The Case of the King of England and his Officers of Excise (1998). 
8. Foner, ii, 25. Paine documents the essay with quotations from the proceedings of the committee set up to investigate Clive’s activities, which he presumably obtained before he left England.

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Introduction. 

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

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

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

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

Is humanity capable of instituting an alternative to war? 

Is Christianity the only true religion? 

Is any religion true? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part One 

Who were the Quakers? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reasons for the persecution: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quaker History of the Persecution. 

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

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

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

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

Besse’s Preface to the Reader:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part Two 

Paine’s own Quaker Background. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part Three 

Paine’s writing on Quakers and on Quakerly principles. 

1768-1775: Paine in Lewes. 

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

1775-1787 America. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

1788-9 and 1791: England. 

1789 Letter to Kitty Nicholson: 

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

1789 -1790 and 1792-1795: France 

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

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

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

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

Ch.111. The character of Jesus. 

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

Ch. X111 

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

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

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

Part 2, Conclusion to The Age of Reason: 

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

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

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

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

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

1803, Letter to Samuel Adams. 

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

1804, Prospect Papers. 

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

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

Conclusion 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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.

This important document has recently been purchased by the Sussex Record Office Articles of Agreement Tripartite Indented had made and agreed upon the Fourth day of June in the Year of our Lord One thousand and Seven Hundred and Seventy four Between Thomas Pain of Lewes in the County of Sussex Fate- inserted above] Excise Officer of the first part Elizabeth Pain Wife of the said Thomas Pain ( late Elizabeth Olive Spinster) of the Second part and the Reverend James Castley of Lewes aforesaid Clerk of the Third part. 

Whereas certain unhappy Quarrels and dissensions have arisen (and which do now in part subsist) between the said Thomas Pain and Elizabeth his Wife for putting an End to which They the said Thomas Pain and Elizabeth his Wife bath mutually agreed to live separate and apart and Previous to such Separation he the said Thomas Pain hath consented thereto and also proposed and agreed that the said Elizabeth shall have and take a few fixtures now remaining in their late dwelling House at Lewes and valued by Mr Verret/ at about Twenty five Shillings 

And whereas Samuel Olive late of Lewes aforesaid Grocer deceased Father of the said Elizabeth in and by his last Will and Testament Did give and Devise All that his Messuage or Tenement and Appurtenances wherein he lived Situate in the parish of Saint Michaels in the Town of Lewes aforesaid unto his Wife Hester Olive for and during the Term of her Natural Life and after her Decease he gave and Devised the same unto John Ridge of Kingston in the said County Gentleman and John Attersoll of Lewes aforesaid Carpenter and the Survivor of them and the Heirs and Assigns of the Survivor In Trust to sell the same and out of the Monies arising thereby In Trust to divide the same between his Four Children John Samuel Thomas and Elizabeth ( now the Wife of the said Thomas Pain as aforesaid) in equal shares and in case any or either of them should happen to Die before the Monies Should become Payable then to pay the same in such manner as therein is mentioned As in and by the the said Will and Probate thereof relation being thereunto had more fully will appear 

Now the said Thomas Pain bath also consented and agreed that the said Elizabeth shall have and take her share of the said Monies of the said House when the same shall become due and Payable and will also give any Discharge that shall be then required to and for the Use of the said Elizabeth And the said Elizabeth hath agreed to give up to the said Thomas Pain the sum of I Forty Five Pounds- inserted ] now in hor Possession on or before the [ Sixth- inserted day of [ June – inserted ] 

And the said James Castley for and on behalf of the said Elizabeth Pain bath agreed to indemnify the said Thomas Pain of and from Payment of all Maintenance Monies to be by her the said Elizabeth Pain demanded or Recovered against him the said Thomas Pain as also of and from all contracts Debts and Engagements whatsoever to be by her the said Elizabeth Pain in any wise contracted and which he the said Thomas Pain shall actually Pay together with Charges touching the same in such manner as hereinafter is mentioned 

Now those Presents Witness that the said Thomas Pain in Pursuance of his aforesaid Proposal and Agreement doth hereby for himself his Executors and Administrators and every of them Covenant Promise and agree to and with the said James Castley his Executors and Administrators and cloth also agree with the said Elizabeth his Wife in manner and form following, that is to say, That it shall and may be lawful to and for the said Elizabeth his Wife and that he the said Thomas Pain shall and will Permit and Suffer her the said Elizabeth from time to time and at all times from henceforth during her Natural Life to live Separate and apart from him and to reside and be in such Place and Places and in such Family and Families and with such relations Friends and other Persons and to follow and carry on such Trade and Business as she the said Elizabeth from time to time at her Will and Pleasure (Notwithstanding her [present- inserted above] Coverture and as if she were a Feme Sole and unmarried) shall think fit and that he the said Thomas Pain shall not nor Will at any time or times hereafter sue her the said Elizabeth in the Ecclesiastical Court or any other Court for her living Separate and apart from him or Compel her to Cohabit with him or to sue Molest disturb or trouble her for such living Separate and apart from him or any other Person or Persons whatsoever for receiving harbouring or entertaining her nor shall or will without the Consent of the said Elizabeth Visit her or knowingly come into any House or Place where she shall or may dwell reside or be nor shall or will at any time hereafter claim or demand the said few fixtures or the said Monies which she shall be entitled to at the time of the Sale of the said House in Lewes aforesaid or any of the Monies Rings Plate Clothes Linen Woolen Household Goods or stock in Trade which the said Elizabeth shall or may at any time hereafter buy or Purchase or which shall be devised or given to her or shall otherwise acquire and that she shall and may enjoy and Absolutely dispose of the same as if she were a Feme sole and Unmarried 

And also that he the said Thomas Pain shall not nor will at any time hereafter Slander or defame his said Wife or detract from her Good Character or do any Injury whatsoever to her or her reputation And also that it shall and may be lawful for the said Elizabeth to have receive and take to her own Separate Use and Benefit her said Share of the Monies for which the said Messuage or Tenement in Lewes shall be Sold when the same shall become due and Payable 

And the said James Castley for himself his Heirs Executors and Administrators and for every of them doth covenant Promise and agree to and with the said Thomas Pain his Executors and Administrators by these Presents That he the said James Castley his Heirs Executors and Administrators shall and will from time to time at all times hereafter well and Sufficiently save defend keep harmless and Indemnified as well the said Thomas Pain his Heirs Executors and Administrators as also his and their Lands Tenements Goods and Chattels of from and against Payment of all manner of Debts whatsoever and of what nature or kindsoever which she the said Elizabeth Pain from henceforth from time to time and at all times hereafter during the said Separation shall Contract or make with any Person or Persons whomsoever and also of and from Payment of all Alimony Maintenance and Support whatsoever which [ she- inserted above] the said Elizabeth Pain at any time hereafter may have claim challenge or Demand from the said Thomas Pain or his Estates Real or Personal during the Continuance of such Separation and likewise of and from all Costs Charges Expenses and Damages whatsoever which he the said Thomas Pain his Heirs Executors and Administrators shall or may at any time hereafter pay Sustain or be put unto by the said Elizabeth Pain Contracting any such Debt or Debts or Demand of any such Alimony Maintenance or Support as aforesaid or for or by reason or in respect of any other Cause matter or thing whatsoever which may be born paid or Sustained by him the said Thomas Pain touching or concerning her the said Elizabeth so living separate and apart from him the said Thomas Pain during the time aforesaid. In Witness whereof the Parties first above named have to these Presents Set their Hands and Seals the Day and Year first above written 

Signed Sealed and Delivered ( being first duly stamped) by the said Thomas Pain and James Castley in the Presence of John Ollive 

William Wright 

Signed Seated and Delivered ( being first duly stamped) by the said Elizabeth Pain in the presence of John 0llive.

The post Text Of The Separation Document Between Thomas Pain [Paine] And His Wife Elizabeth, June 4, 1774  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

We live in curious times amid astonishing contrasts, reason on the one hand, the most absurd fantasies on the other…… a civil war in every soul. 

– Voltaire

Paine’s dismissal from his excise appointment at Afford left him with a shattered career, and without immediate prospects. His regular income had slipped from his grasp, but despite his swift change of fortune and the suddenness of his dismissal, he was probably quite well placed to look after himself for a few weeks while he took stock of his position and sought a means to make a living. He could always return to his trade of stay-making if nothing else was available, but he had put that trade behind him when he entered the excise, and he seems never to have considered it serious again.

Oldys, the chief informant about Paine’s movements during his first English period, painted a very sorry picture of Paine after leaving Afford, but he probably did this to heighten the effect of Paine’s dismissal in the minds of readers of his life, and also to cover the inadequacy of his own knowledge of Paine’s next few months, and as usual when he was trying to convey a false impression, he carefully phrased his account to facilitate the drawing of adverse conclusions from unsubstantiated suggestions: 

Our adventurer who appears to have had from nature, no desire of accumulating, or rather no care of the future, was now reduced to extreme wretchedness. He was absolutely without food, without raiment and without shelter. Bad, however, must that have been, who finds no friends in London. He met with persons who, from disinterested kindness, gave him clothes, money and lodging. 

So strong has been the influence of Oldys over most later biographers of Paine, who appear not to have realised that the excise records were his chief source of information about Paine’s first thirty-seven years, that the picture he painted has usually been accepted without question. But it was no wretched ragged beggar who rode his own horse from Alford to London, for simple analysis of the known facts of Paine’s excise career to date indicates a very different situation. 

Grantham, a busy town, would not have been the cheapest place in England for an excise supernumerary to maintain himself in the conservative style of living expected of a minor official and under the watchful eye of his Collector, but Paine livered there without known difficulty from December 1762 until leaving for Alford in August 1764. A supernumerary’s salary was only £25 a year, but on promotion to a ride officer in Alford, his salary would have doubled to £50, a considerable advance notwithstanding the attendant expense of acquiring and keeping a horse. His Alford duties entailed riding country roads that were frequently under water in winter, but which an exciseman nevertheless was required to negotiate, and he must have equipped himself with a serviceable wardrobe of stout clothing to enable him to continue riding in all weathers. And since Solomon Hansard (the landlord of the Windmill where Paine lodged) valued his excise connection sufficiently to retain it until he died, it is probable that Paine was able to lodge at the Windmill on very reasonable terms. 

Paine applied for restoration to the excise within a year of leaving Alford, and it was by no means certain that his application would meet with success, for there were many instances of such applications being rejected by the excise board. When he did apply, his re-appraisal would have laid particular emphasis on whether he was free from debts, in accordance with standard excise practice; and this hurdle he was to surmount with consummate ease. It was in all probability as a thrifty young man with a supply of money saved during a year of quiet living that Paine returned to London, and there he would have been able to add to his reserves by selling the horse he no longer required. Nor would he have had any great worries about whether he would be able to find employment, for he himself was to detail the comparative ease with which a discharged excise officer could find a job when he came to write his Case of the Excise Officers a few years later. 

The easy transition of a qualified Officer to the ‘Cornpting-House’ or at least to a School-Master, at any time, as it naturally supports and backs his Indifference about the Excise, so it takes off all Punishment from the Order whenever it happens. 

Paine might have sought a teaching appointment in a country town such as Thetford or Afford, each of which maintained a notable school, but London seems always to have retained its magnetism for him. He had already lived there long enough to know the metropolis reasonably well and to appreciate that it offered the greatest scope for new employment; and it may have seemed the most attractive centre for his future studies. It was in London that John Wesley had his own church and this was sited not far from that other building to which Paine proposed soon to address himself — the Excise Office in Broad Street. 

It is one of the stranger aspects of the story of Thomas Paine that the outstanding failure in his life — his personal religious struggle to promote a free community of men happily together in the light of the dispensations of a Supreme Being — has been largely lost to sight in the conventional accounts of his political struggles, which were but the means by which he strove to advance his mission. Not even the pioneer work of Moncure Conway, who first recognised religious motivation as the driving force in Paine’s life, has done much to dispel the general prejudice that Paine was primarily a secular revolutionary; yet Paine, the political innovator, was merely the working guise of Paine the idealistic preacher. John Wesley originated the Methodist practice of associating humanitarianism with assemblies of religious harmony; his follower, Thomas Paine, went much further and saw that religious harmony and social fulfilment were two equally important sides of a single golden coin representing the wealth of a happy contented people. 

It was during the years after Alford and prior to his emigration that we can now see most clearly the original Paine, and can glimpse the pattern of his probable development had Fate dealt more kindly with him. Although already scarred, Paine then looked at life with compassion blended with quizzical humour, and would probably have made his mark as an influential and popular commentator on human affairs, pointing the way towards amelioration of the common lot. But that was not the path which would have led Paine to the great historic part he was to play in world affairs. In his later life, like John Bunyan and George Fox before him, he was to feel that Providence had taken a special interest in him and had intervened to influence his progress; indeed it may have been because he felt himself unable fully to comprehend the mysterious working of the Divinity in his own life that he did not publish an autobiography. And if there was one critical incident in which the Divinity covertly intervened to direct Paine’s path towards his destiny, it was surely in his diversion from the standard excise life and into intellectual originality. After leaving Afford and returning to London, Paine would have returned naturally to the circles in which he had moved before going to Dover, and it would have been his old Methodist friends whose ‘disinterested kindness’, to borrow Oldys’s words, helped Paine into his next profession of school teaching which was to become the springboard from which he made his great leap forward towards the spectacular achievements that lay ahead of him. 

It was in July 1766, barely ten months after his dismissal from Alford, that Paine addressed himself to the Excise Commissioners. It is one of the unexplained inconsistencies in his story, which in most respects is poorly illustrated by personal documents, that Paine’s application to them has long been known in full. It was first published as early as 1817 by Richard Celine, an admirer of his political career who was persecuted and imprisoned for publishing Paine’s writings although he did not accept his religious opinions. Celine did not indicate how he learned the contents of Paine’s restoration application, but it is likely that the source was Paine himself. The application read: 

London, July 3, 1766. 

Honourable Sirs,

In humble obedience to your honours’ letter of discharge bearing date August 29, 1765, I delivered up my commission and since that time have given you no trouble. I confess the justice of your honours’ displeasure and humbly beg to add my thanks for the candour and lenity with which you at that unfortunate time indulged me. And though the nature of the report and my own confession cut off of expectations of enjoying your honours’ favour then, yet I humbly hope it has not finally excluded me therefrom, upon which hope I presume to entreat your honours’ to restore me. The time I enjoyed my former commission was short and unfortunate — an officer only a single year. No complaint of the least dishonesty or intemperance ever appeared against me; and, if I am so happy as to succeed in this, my humble petition, I will endeavour that my future conduct shall as much engage your honours’ approbation as my former has merited your displeasure. 

I am, your honours’ most dutiful humble servant, 

Thomas Paine. 

The board’s minutes for the following day, July 4th record: 

Thomas Paine, late Officer of Alford Outride Grantham Collection having petitioned to Board praying to be restored, begging Pardon for the Offence for which he was Discharged and promising diligence in future; Ordered that he be restored on a proper vacancy. 

Paine’s history was given newspaper publicity in September 1871 when The Scotsman printed a letter from Mr. B. F. Dun, who had been for many years an officer in the excise. This letter first disclosed the Board’s misleading minute of Paine’s dismissal from Alford which Dun had seen on a visit to Somerset House [where the records were stored], and this fresh item about Paine attracted journalistic comment from G. J. Holyoake, who apparently received a further letter from Dun which the latter passed on to Moncure Conway. Dun seems merely to have disclosed the dismissal minute, expressed routine departmental opinions, and given a short conventional biographical sketch of Paine which included his previously-known restoration application in full as a natural sequel to the dismissal minute. But Dun’s connection with the excise induced Conway to overate him as an informant, with the result that instead of subjecting Dun’s account to critical scrutiny, Conway welcomed it at face value as supplying additional authentic information beyond that already publicised by Oldys. 

There are several points arising from Paine’s restoration petition which call for consideration when reconstructing his position at this time. The first is the address at the top of his letter, the single word London. No experienced person in any age addresses to a government office an appeal which he hopes will elicit a favourable reply, without making arrangements to be informed of the response. There is but one logical conclusion to be drawn from Paine’s use of this single word address, he addressed his letter from the London Excise Office itself during personal attendance there, and arranged to call again as necessary to be informed of any progress. 

It would have been quite inconsistent with the detailed vetting Paine had to undergo on first applying for an excise appointment, if there had been no formal re-appraisal before re-appointment after an alleged offence incurring dismissal, with its consequent heavy blot on his official character. Perusal of the exercise archives reveals a number of instances of applicants for restoration failing to pass this second vetting, and where reasons for rejection are recorded, inquiries into personal solvency figure prominently. Yet Paine’s formal application dated July 3 was approved by the Board on the following day; the circumstances indicated by this apparently swift processing of his application are not difficult to envisage when the ways of the excise are taken into account. 

Instead of conducting his restoration application by letters submitted through the post, Paine initiated his attempt by a personal call at the central office, where he would have been interviewed by the official responsible for such matters, who at the time was a Mr. Earle. Paine’s record would have been examined, and any necessary enquiries conducted by Earle, who would have invited a formal application from Paine on their satisfactory conclusion, which Paine therein made out on the spot In accordance with standard excise routine his letter would have been headed by the name of the office of origin; thus the single word London was all that was necessary. 

The tone of Paine’s petition has surprised some commentators, who have thought it servile; but his repeated expressions of humility has occasioned no raised eyebrows amongst excisemen, in the experience of the present writer. For Paine’s letter is a perfect example of the style Commissioners are believed to consider fitting in addresses to their august selves. It is highly probable that the petition was phrased on the advice, and possibly dictation, of Earl. Paine’s own character shows only where he claims he was never accused of dishonesty or intemperance, and thereby excludes any admission of having stamped a survey [having stamped an interest as having been taxed but not having actually been so]. 

Earl would have re-examined the circumstances of Paine’s dismissal scarcely two months after processing Swallow’s [William Swallow, Paine’s supervisor) appointment as supervisor at Caister following restoration, and in 1766 he was probably better informed than Paine himself about the outcome of the affair at Alford. As a responsible headquarters official with experience in personnel and disciplinary matters, had been aware of Swallow’s admitted misconduct at Afford [Swallow was later himself dismissed having admitted faking the charges against Paine]. It is to be observed that the board’s minute restoring Paine speaks of his begging pardon for his offence, although he had not done so; it is likely that Earle under-wrote his petition by a reports based on a personal interview which gave this impression, and that he did so to obviate any possible reluctance on the part of the commissioners to refuse the application. That Paine’s petition struck the right note with the board is demonstrated by the remarkable swiftness of its acceptance, and the fact that it took place only a day after Paine submitted it is a further strong indication that he penned it in the excise office and did not submit it through the post. John Tucker, another discharged officer, whose application for restoration was considered at the same time as Paine’s, does not appear to have been as well advised about the appropriate style of petitions as Paine had been, and he did not conform to the requisite ritual grovelling; the minute recording Tucker’s failure immediately follows that detailing Paine’s success. 

Restoration did not confer swift re-appointment to an excise station, and Paine would surely have had his name added to a waiting list there was nothing he could do now except to wait patiently for a summons to return to the service, but in order to ensure that the summons when it was eventually issued should reach him, it was necessary for him to register his private address with the board and keep the central office informed of any subsequent change in personal circumstances during the waiting period. Paine therefore would have reported his post-restoration addresses and movements for inclusion in his personal file; there Oldys found them in due course when he was given access to that file, and he abstracted for publication such details as suited his purpose. 

Oldys cognisance of Paine’s excise records explains very simply his remarkable proficiency as the first biographer of Paine, and his ability to disclose details which other biographers have not been able to verify should have pointed to the air source of his information. However, as Paine had no reason to declare his movements between his first dismissal and his restoration, Oldys was not informed of this period from excise sources, and it was probably to cover his ignorance about those months that he depicted Paine as having been penniless and homeless at that time. 

There is an interesting error of fact in the Oldys account of Paine’s restoration. Whereas the board’s minute books establish absolutely that Paine was restored on July 4, Oldys dates that event as July 11, although the manner of writing the figure 4 in the minute book precludes any confusion with 11. The working system in the personnel section is detailed in the excise archives. It was the task of the clerks to translate the board’s decisions into appropriate instructions and letters, and this could only be done after the minutes of the day had been written up and passed to them. The restoration minute bears the appropriate tick, the initials of the supervising official appear on the page, and these marks and the subsequent note ‘he has had notice’ are indications of subsequent action which would not have been completed for a few days, and would have appeared in Paine’s file where Oldys would have found it recorded. In that file the completion of action was probably dated July 11, and Oldys mistook this date for the restoration date itself. 

The further details Paine registered with the board after his restoration had been approved, enabled Oldys to reveal significant facts about the ensuing period, which was a very important one in Paine’s life; for it was now that he was able to extend his education and prepare himself for his great intellectual advances. Oldys informs us that he began to teach at the great academy kept by Mr. Noble in Goodman’s Fields, earning a salary of twenty pounds a year, with an allowance of another five pounds for finding his own lodgings in nearby WhItechapel at the house of a hairdresser named Oliver. 

Daniel Noble, Paine’s new mentor, was one of a group of Baptist ministers who included Arminian views in their philosophy, and he would this have been amicably disposed towards Wesleyan Arminians, from whom may have come the recommendation that led to him employing Paine as an assistant However, it may have been that Paine had taught in other places during the ten months when his movements remain unknown to us, and that he worked his way up to Noble’s establishment through experience of teaching in lesser schools. 

The dissenting academies owed their origin to the Act of Conformity of 1662 which had forbidden dissenting ministers to teach in established colleges and had driven them to found their own centres of learning. Their original attitudes of mind had guided their academies to a much higher standard of instruction than was to be found in the long established grammar schools such as the one Paine had himself attended at Thetford. The main impetus was not conditional on proficiency in the latin language, but was placed upon developments in the scientific world; in consequence, some of the clearest-sighted and most influential men of the country were glad to send their sons to these academies, which accepted adherents of all faiths, and were rated by many progressive minds as superior to universities. 

In this fresh environment, and at the comparatively late age of twenty-nine, Paine at last had access to the new learning of his day, and was able to join whole-heartedly in the study and evaluation of advances in scientific knowledge. Astronomy figured high in his interests, and he himself recorded that as soon as he was able he had purchased a pair of globes and attended philosophical lectures, where he would have made the acquaintance of some of the most notable astronomers of his day, and perhaps established contact with other pupils of note. His close associated of later days, Thomas Rickman, was himself to record: 

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

Education is most swiftly accomplished in the early years of life. As spring is the season when nature reproduces last year’s foliage in quick green growth, so is youth the time when the knowledge’ our forefathers slowly gathered is most easily re-created by progressive study under the guidance of teachers. But even brilliant young students may not develop Into skilful practitioners until student days are left behind and they approach their work from practical angles. There are differences which can produce varying attitudes to problems from relatively unquestioning students and objectively viewing operatives, and these are perhaps never more impeding than when a practical man becomes a scholar. Difficulties that may not occur to an academic student may then arise out of his remembered experience to hinder smooth acceptance of progressive tuition. Because his practical mind already reaches out from intermediate stages, he is less likely to be able to accept scholastic opinions as secure platforms by which to advance towards his goal. 

Paine not only had a mind thirsty for knowledge, but he possessed also a varied background against which to set his new ideas. In the ten years that had elapsed since he left his parental home, his restive spirit had led him into many situations. He had worked in town and country, at sea and on land; he had been apprentice and master-tradesman, religious convert and preacher, he had been stay-maker, privateersman, class-leader, exciseman and now schoolmaster, and he may have followed other professions as well since Rickman referred to ‘some other lowly situations he had been in’ without specifying them. 

A man who comes late to the fount of contemporary knowledge has to struggle harder than his youthful contemporaries if he is to benefit fully from his opportunity; but if such a man succeeds, he acquires erudition more widely and more soundly based than theirs, for in the process he will have worked out within his own mind and from his own initiative many more problems than they; and in overcoming these additional difficulties he develops an indigenous momentum of thought which carries him forward more swiftly than his fellows. This enables him to appreciate the wider implications of new concepts, to relate them to the every-day world he already knows and understands, and to realise how they will be viewed by the ordinary people who inhabit it. 

As his comment to Rickman makes clear, Paine used his return to the scholastic sphere to expand his existing knowledge; he would also have been able to fill in some of the gaps in his original schooling that had resulted from the restricting tenets of his Quaker father, and to re-examine questions that had troubled him, such as the concept of redemption which had perplexed his childish mind. He would not have been concerned to construct a basic philosophy as a young student might have been, but rather to test and advance the views he had already worked out during his chequered career to date. In a dissenting academy headed by a minister, Paine would have had opportunities not only to acquaint himself with the progress of science, but also to study the early history of Christianity. The new ideas he encountered did not disturb his basic belief in God, but they seem to have stimulated re-appraisal of the attitudes of the Anglican Church. Paine’s analytical mind began to identify pagan traditions that had been grafted onto the original teaching of Jesus by church-makers; this had probably happened when pagan communities had been absorbed into the expanding early Christian church as their members had accepted the essence of the message of Jesus, but had retained their festivities and superstitions deriving from their interpretation of the annual waning and waxing of the sun, and of other important natural phenomena.

Paine reversed this process, and began to reject these additions, streamlining his personal religion into a simpler faith revolving around the ideas he found good in the philosophy of Christ This simplified Christianity did not conflict with the emergent scientific view of the universe, which Paine eagerly studied with the help of his newly acquired globes under the guidance of the astronomers whose lectures he was now able to attend. As a schoolmaster he now had facilities for after-school studies, whereas during his earlier period in London (as a journeyman staymaker) he had worked daily for from six in the morning till eight at night But as, and probably because, his own beliefs became strengthened through simplification, he found it difficult to countenance and excuse the indecision in lesser minds thrown into confusion by conflict between paganised Christianity and scientific concepts, and deplored the attitudes who became more confused they more they studied. A few years earlier, when Paine began to express in print his views as they had so far evolved, he developed the forceful style which was to become the hall mark of his major writings. From a careful sympathetic arrangement of his premises, he proceeded swiftly to his conclusions, and punched home his message in striking phrases that seized the imagination of his readers: 

Among the various Kinds of Idolatry we have upon record, that of worshipping the heavenly bodies, seems of all others the most plausible and rational. Consider the Sun as an immense fountain of light and heat, ripening by his influence into lie and action all the several tithes of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms, and you may, I think, easily conceive how obvious and natural it was for the uninstructed heathen to mistake such a body for the God of this lower world. I remember at school being much pleased with Herodotus’s worshippers of the Moon, waiting to hail and welcome their rising Goddess with all the festivities of music, dancing &c., they were really Idolaters of taste. In all the grand machinery of the creation, I hardly know so fine an object as the rising full moon, especially in summer. After an oppressively hot day, which has thrown a languor upon both mind and body, can anything equal the coming of a grateful evening mild”, ushered in by such a glorious harbinger? What exquisite painting! What scenery! A very bulgy of nature, One of her richest repasts; Every sense seems regaled, every faculty harmonised and disposed to favour thought and reflection. And yet how lost, how utterly lost is all this to millions and millions? Why? Because we all look through different glasses; one has the lens of his (mind’s) eye so thick and horny that he sees no objects distinctly. Some view everything through the medium of gain; others through the misty glass of sensual pleasure. Some are blinded by ambition, others drunk and besotted by Intemperance. But of all, one is most vexed by these who are TOO SHARP-SIGHTED TO SEE, or, in other words, who have too much learning to have any taste at all, who are so bewildered in the labyrinth of science falsely so-called, that they are lost to everything worthy of their notice. Admirable work this!, to be learnedly stupid. A man in such a case is like a warrior pressed to death with the weight of his own armour. 

The works of Herodotus, the Greek historian and traveller whose descriptions made a strong impression on Paine’s mind, were available in translation when Paine was ‘at school’ in the academies of Noble and Gardner; the importance attached to them is evidenced by the prefatory comment of the translator Isaac Littlebury that Herodotus first advanced history from fable and poetic fiction to ‘true dignity and lustre’. Paine probably used such translations and other kindred works to trace the residual forms of ancient practices in contemporary dogma. Philosophers of old had always been strongly influenced by the paramount importance of the sun in human affairs, and had progressed to a study of other celestial bodies, as the standing stones of Stonehenge and the massive sextant carved in the rock near Samakand bear witness, and, as the horoscopes widely printed in our own day confirm, such influences are slow to lose their grip. But Paine was an original thinker, and instead of becoming over awed by the immensities of the skies, his flexible mind found confirmation of divine purpose in the minutiae of Creation as well as its most significant manifestations: 

One of the loudest Infidel batteries that have been ptay’d off against revealed religion, is that it abound in mysteries. It is absurd (they say) to require our faith in matters confessedly above the reach of our understanding”. The objection, at first sight, appears formidable enough, but it will be found, upon examination, to carry with it very little or no force at all. Whether a thing exists, and how it exists, are certainly two very different enquiries. Even among the objects of sense, which we may be supposed to be the best acquainted with, are every moment forced to acknowledge numberless truths, which, with the uttermost stretch of our faculties, we can no way fully conceive, nay, which we have hardly any competent idea of at all. The various modifications of matter, the exquisite mechanism, and organisation of animal and vegetable bodies, &c, are (as to their first rationale) utter secrets to us, and so they will ever remain. A single blade of grass is as effectual a puzzle-wit for all the philosophers on earth, as is Its Solar System, and twenty other Systems added to it. 

The originality of mind Paine first displayed in his religious writing was later to find expression in his secular works also. Historians, like students of Nature, were drawn naturally to the influence of the Suns; and it was not by accident that Louis XIV of France became known as the Sun IGng, and that English history, even in the twentieth century, has been presented mainly in terms of the sovereign and his entourage. But modern commentators are coming to place less weight upon central authority and greater emphasis upon the effects by plebeian personalities. As long ago as the eighteenth century Thomas Paine had the vision to see the divine patterns in the minute as well as in the enormous, and he was one of the earliest to appreciate the potential goodness of the human spirit even in its modest manifestations in the minds of ordinary people. He realised that effective power could spring from such tiny units if peaceful persuasion could induce coalescence of a multitude of them in a common concerted purpose, and an understanding of how such persuasion could be exercised was to come to his mind over the following years. As Trevelyan has indicated, the beginnings of democracy as we know it are all traceable to the writings of Thomas Paine, and the power of this new force in domestic politics was to grow as his work was to become known to the general public through the mass distribution of cheap editions of his books, which Paine was always keen to promote. 

RETURN TO THE EXCISE 

Although the progression on Paine’s thinking may have been continuous, his career was destined to embrace a number of disjointed episodes, and in May 1767 he faced again the prospect of a change in his way of life when the opportunity arose for him to return to the Excise. In the Cornish town of Grampound, George Chappell the resident exciseman had been ill for some months, and when his supervisor reported that he was unlikely to be able to resume his duties, the Excise Board decided that he should be retired under the pension arrangements of the day. As no other exciseman had applied for the vacancy, the Commissioners turned for a successor to the waiting list, at the head of which now appeared the name of Thomas Paine, who was duly appointed. The Grampound post was a town division, otherwise known as a footwalk, which rated above an outride, so the posting was in the nature of a promotion for Paine as well as restoration to active service. 

The term footwalk indicated an excise station where the work was sufficiently concentrated to be covered by foot instead of on horseback; but any impression of comparatively easy travelling which this seems to imply is misleading, for footwalks could be far from comfortable postings. The Commissioners had considered the ambulatory powers of their officers, and set the limits of footwalks as up to twelve miles overall for regular traders and up to sixteen for those visited occasionally, so town officers commonly walked up to twelve miles a day, with an extra four thrown in now and again for variety. It is not surprising that after being ill for several months Chappell was thought to be incapable of copying with the excise work in Grampound. 

Lack of competition for the vacancy may have reflected the character of the town and its reputation amongst visitors. John Wesley preached there, and recorded an unfriendly reaction from the mayor, who asked him to move on. Such surly resentment of newcomers may have been a feature of local attitudes at the time, which an incoming exciseman might have had to face also. The operation of political bribery at parliamentary elections furnishes another illustration of the local atmosphere; one freeman of Grampound received more than one hundred pounds in cash during the six years preceding the election of 1754 to secure his vote. Local worthies accustomed to be treated with such exaggerated consideration could have been prickly customers of the exciseman, and throughout Cornwall these revenue officers had become accustomed to performing their duties with scant regard for the procedures decreed by the Board for the protection of the revenue. And Grampound, like Alford, was a one man excise station where the exciseman was thrown largely on to his own resources. Paine, as a restored officer, would have been particularly vulnerable to official repercussions if he was again represented as being at fault by his superiors or by influential local traders. 

Paine may have had some idea of the peculiar excise conditions in Cornwall, which were so unusual that rumours about them must have circulated in the service; he may have consulted Earle and had been informed about them, or he could have made contact with London excisemen to keep himself familiar with service conditions in order to facilitate his eventual return to duty. Alternatively he may have been sufficiently wrapped up in his current activities to wish to continue them. Whatever his reasons, Paine decided against Grampound and requested to be allowed to await a further vacancy. His rejection of the proposed appointment was probably a wise one, as events were to demonstrate.

In the summer of the following year the Board ordered a general inspection of the Cornwall Collection which was organised in four districts under its collector, and was probably administered by between forty and fifty local officers. As a result of the consequent report, the collector and one supervisor were dismissed, the three remaining supervisors were reduced to officers and removed to other collections, two officers were dismissed, twenty-seven reprimanded and six admonished. The supervisor Truro, whose district included Grampound was dismissed; he was reported as having been remiss in Grampound in particular, where he rarely bothered to re-gauge important brewing vessels to ensure that beer duty was accurately charged, and the interchangeable letters in his stamp for marking hides, which should have been periodically changed as a safeguard against malpractice, had not been varied in thirteen years and had become rusted in their positions. The supervisor at Launceston was demoted to one of the town divisions at Lewes in Sussex, where he would have been able to recount the slaughter of the Cornish excisemen to his Lewes colleagues, amongst whom was numbered at that time Paine himself, who was probably thankful to have escaped being involved in the debacle. 

As Paine sought restoration in the summer of 1766, only ten months after being dismissed, he must have seriously considered returning; but from movements he subsequently reported to the Board, Oldys was able to recount: 

Paine’s desire of preaching now returned on him: but applying to his old master for a certificate of his qualifications to the bishop of London. Mr. Noble told him that since he was only an English scholar, he could not recommend him as a proper candidate for ordination in the church. Our adventurer, however, determined to persevere in his purpose, without regular orders. And he preached in Moorfields, and in various populous places in England, as he was urged by his necessities, or directed by his spirit. 

A contemporary account of aspiring Methodist preachers at Moorfields is to be found in the memoirs of the publisher, James Lackington, who was at the time estranged from the Methodist movement to which he owed his start in business, and to which he later returned. Some latitude is therefore called for when considering his unfavourable comments, and his disparagement of itinerant Methodist preachers whom he depicted as frequently lodging at the houses of sympathetic widows, and readily abandoning their itinerancy if offered a permanent home by one of them. An essay by Paine entitled Forgetfulness, which he probably wrote many years later and which was preserved by being copied by a friend, also sheds some light on Paine’s movements at this time. In it he speaks of himself being ‘about the summer of 1766’ in a fenland village and lodging with a widow who was also sheltering a young lady in a depressed frame of mind following an unhappy love affair. Paine mentioned these circumstances because he was able to dissuade the young lady from an attempt at suicide, but in the present context they serve as an indication that Paine could already have been engaged in itinerant preaching about the time he applied for restoration in the Excise. 

If Paine was already a circuit preacher in the summer of 1766, it means that he had been approved by the Methodist organisation. His practical experience and his repeated changes in his way of life would have indicated his adaptability, and hence his suitability for a nomadic life, and his experience of riding the difficult sunken roads of Eastern England as an exciseman would have made him a natural choice for East Anglican circuits. Paine possibly returned to Alford as an itinerant preacher about a year after he left it; he may have learned what had happened to Swallow after his own departure, and he may also have played a part in preparing the ground for the establishment of a Methodist group in the town, which was to come about within few more years. 

At this critical stage in his life, it seems that Paine stood at a crossroads, with the separate paths of two different professions — the Excise and the Methodist ministry — diverging before him. But it would seem that he had not yet decided which path he would follow although he would soon have to make up his mind to which he proposed to devote the rest of his life. It is suggested here that the reason for his delaying his decision was his desire to pursue his evangelistic career as an ordained minister, a course which John Wesley encouraged his lay ministers to follow, and until he has ascertained his prospects for ordination Paine preferred to keep both his options open. 

An attempt can now be made to reconstruct Paine’s position at this period, using as a basis the Oldys account, which would have drawn upon dated information given by Paine to the Excise Office:

Mr. Noble relinquished Paine, without much regret, to Mr. Gardner, and then taught a reputable school at Kensington; yet, owing to whatever cause, he here acted as usher only the first three months of 1767. 

The adverse slant of Oldy’s writings cannot conceal Noble’s regret at Paine’s departure in early 1767, and it is also dear that Paine’s assistance was sought by a school of considerable standing, although nothing is further known about Mr. Gardner, its proprietor. Since Paine returned to Noble, a minister, when seeking a recommendation to the bishop of London in the spring of 1767 at the time of leaving Gardner, it is clear that Paine decided to test his prospects in the church about the time when he would have been preparing for another summer as an itinerant Methodist minister. In May 1767, when the excise station at Grampound was offered to him, Paine may have wished to hold himself readily available for ordination-studies, and it would have been for this reason that he decided against departing for distant Cornwall. And since the only known reason why Noble did not recommend him for ordination is his lack of classical education, Paine may well have concluded that the ministry was not closed to him, and that his chance of acceptance would be greatly enhanced if he added proficiency in the classics to his growing erudition. 

The Oldys account leaves little room to doubt that Paine was again a circuit preacher in the summer of 1767. Great interest would attach to any reliable accounts of Paine’s preaching style, as they would indicate his approach to his listeners; even Oldys gives a hint in his remark that Paine preached ‘as directed by his spirit’, for Paine’s spirit was characterised by originality, and his sermons may have been arresting. But the scant references to his work in the field which have survived give no indication of his effectiveness beyond intimating that he was at last adequate in his addresses. However it is probable that Paine found a return to an itinerant life precluded continuation of the rapid advances in self-education that he had enjoyed during his periods as a schoolmaster in London. If acquisition of the classics, especially a knowledge of the latin language, had become one of his objectives, he may have found the prospect of another settled period in the Excise increasingly attractive because of the attendant improved facilities for systematic study. 

Paine’s rejection of Grampound probably resulted in his name being returned to the bottom of the list of restored officers awaiting re-appointment, and it took nine months for his name to work its way back to the top. Then, at Abergavenny in Wales, Robert Henry Whitney, after having been seven times reprimanded and thrice admonished in the preceding three years, again incurred censure and was dismissed. The detailed account of the Board’s minute book of the multiple faults of this hardened offender once again highlights the harshness of Paine’s dismissal after an unestablished first offence at Afford. Daniel Jones of Wells Outride in Somerset obtained Abergavenny, and Paine was posted to Somerset, but following receipt of a letter from a certain Edward Dalton, the Board decided on different arrangements. Dalton, the officer at Lewes 4th Outride was now appointed to Abergavanny, Jones was ordered to remain at Wells, and Thomas Paine was appointed to the Lewes vacancy on February 29, 1768. 

Thus a new chapter commenced in Paine’s life that was to have consequences which at the time neither he nor anyone else may have envisaged.

The post Paine At The Crossroads, 1763-1768  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Most biographers of Thomas Paine say something about his early religious associations. There is general agreement that his father was a Quaker and his mother an Anglican, that he was baptised and confirmed into the Church of England and that as a boy in Thetford he preferred the quiet meetings of the Friends to the services at the parish church. It is also well known that, although he continued all his life to admire the Quakers for their good works, he could never completely accommodate himself to their life-style. 

Though I reverence their philanthropy I cannot help smiling at the conceit that, if the taste of a Quaker had been consulted at the creation, what a silent and discoloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have bloomed its gayeties nor a bird been permitted to sing. 

But if neither the Church nor the Quakers attracted him, where could he find a place to belong religiously?¹

John Keane, in a biography that has been acclaimed as ‘definitive’, has suggested that as a young man Paine had a significant ‘brush with Methodism’: 

In Thetford Paine reportedly heard John Wesley preach. Wesley’s journal also records that when Paine was living in Dover, Benjamin Grace, Paine’s employer, took him along to the Methodist chapel on Limekiln Street, where Paine, aged twenty-one, confessed himself a believer and later preached sermons to the congregations (‘the hearers’) who gathered in that chapel. 

This gives the impression that Wesley, who frequently visited Dover, had himself supplied this important information. Only those readers who turn to Keane’s copious endnotes will realise that the Dover story did not come from Wesley but from the editor of the 1916 edition of his Journal, who recorded it in a footnote. The authority he cited was an article that had appeared ten years previously in the Methodist Recorder, in which an anonymous contributor — following a day trip to Dover — assembled a few miscellaneous facts about the local history of Methodism. After describing the chapel that Wesley had opened in Limekiln Street the writer added this interesting snippet:

The building in question, now a public house, has one queer association. Tom Paine, author of The Age of Reason, read a sermon there one day. He was apprenticed to Mr.Grace and went with him to class and chapel. He professed to believe, and was so far trusted that when a minister failed one day Tom Paine took the service. 

Since the information was provided by a leading Methodist whose family had lived in Dover for generations there is likely to be some truth in it. In fact, as Keane points out, the story is attested by this inscription in a copy of Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions taken to America in the nineteenth century: 

Out of this volume Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason, used to read sermons to the Congregations at the Methodist Chapel in Dover when they were disappointed of a Preacher. At that time he belonged to the Methodist Society in that place. 

Be that as it may, Paine did not stay long in Dover. After only a year he moved to Sandwich where he remained until 1761 and, according to a local tradition, sometimes preached ‘as an independent or a Methodist’ to small gathering in his own Iodgings.² 

Paine’s involvement with Methodism, it is suggested, did not end on his departure from Sandwich, as Keane speculates that during the year and a half he spent as an Excise officer in Grantham (1763-4) he relieved his boredom either by ‘socialising with patrons of the George inn’ or by ‘mixing with local Methodists’ — activities that, in view of the Wesleyans aversion to alehouses, might be considered barely compatible. The mixing with Methodists is said to have continued after Paine, following brief sojourns in Alford and Diss, eventually moved to London in 1766. Here for a time he eked out a living by teaching in an academy run by Daniel Noble, which, according to Keane, ‘stood in a forest of private-enterprise schools then shooting up in London. 

Some of these charitable schools were run by Methodists and Methodist sympathisers for labourers’ children, who were taught godliness, craft skills, and their social duties and rights. Noble’s academy was one of these.

It is, however, rather misleading to include this academy in the general run of ‘charitable schools’. Noble was no ordinary private school proprietor and was almost certainly not a ‘Methodist sympathiser’. Such a description is not borne out by the brief biographical details Keane himself supplies. 

[Noble] had been well educated at the Kendal Academy under Caleb Rotheram (a friend of Joseph Priestly) and at Glasgow University. He had a large private library and was well known for his Dissenting sympathies and active support for civil liberties. 

Apart from the confusion of Rotheram with his son of the same name (who was Priestley’s contemporary) his description of Noble, taken from a letter written to the Times Literary Supplement by the Baptist historian Ernest Payne, is accurate and to the point.³ 

Keane considers it likely that Paine assisted Noble in the work of preaching to his Seventh Day Baptist congregation at Mill Yard. He also gives some credence to a tradition that during his brief residence in London he preached in the city’s open fields. Here again, it is suggested, there was a significant link with Methodism. 

The Methodists, for whom he had preached in Dover and Sandwich, welcomed lay preachers in the struggle for ministers especially among London’s poorer folk, whose souls they thought could be saved from wickedness and whose lives could be defended in the name of humanity and civilization. 

But would they have welcomed Paine as a preacher if they had known that he was an associate of Noble? As Ernest Payne pointed out, Noble ‘belonged to a group of Baptists who added Arian sympathies to their Arminian and Sabbath-Keeping views’. . Moreover, as another Baptist historian W. T. Whitley expressed it, ‘he did not escape the drift towards Socinianism• which was prevalent nor did he seem to have been attracted by the revival under the early Methodists.⁴ 

Paine in Lewes 

As it transpired, Paine’s association with Noble was not to last long. Early in 1768, having been appointed to the post of Excise officer there, he left London and moved to the Sussex town of Lewes, where he took lodgings in the house of a tobacconist named Samuel alive. Keane states that he acquired this accommodation ‘through Methodist connections’, but, since there were no Wesleyans in or around Lewes at this time, this is highly unlikely. It was not until the nineteenth century that Lewes became what he calls ‘a town of Nonconformist churches’. Apart from the Quakers there were in Paine’s day, only two non-Anglican congregations there and both belonged to ‘Rational’, as opposed to ‘Evangelical’, Dissent. These were the General Baptists in Eastport Lane, and the mixed Presbyterian-Independent congregation at the Westgate Meeting, to which Ollive — who lived next door at Bull House — himself belonged. By this date the General Baptists and the Presbyterians, who were eventually to unite to form a single Unitarian congregation, were drawing closer together. Therefore it may be that, metaphorically speaking, Paine came to Bull House by way of Eastport Lane. The little congregation meeting there formed part of a General Baptist association extending throughout Kent and Sussex with which Noble, who was later to be invited to become their ‘Messenger’ or district minister, was closely associated. When needing help to find lodgings in Lewes it would have been only natural for Paine to turn to him.⁵ 

Where did Paine worship during his six years in Lewes? Lodging where he did, it is likely that, if he went anywhere, it would be to the Westgate Meeting. ‘Bull Meeting’, as it was also sometimes known, and Bull House had originally been one building and the wall of partition between them remained thin. Indeed, if Paine stayed in bed on a Sunday morning he might have heard the singing of psalms next door. On occasion he might have been inclined, if only out of courtesy, to accompany the 011ives to their family chapel. It is said that it was here that he went with Samuel’s daughter Elizabeth in March 1771 to exchange vows before going to be legally married to her at St. Michael’s church over the road. It is likely, however, that he was never formally a member of the Westgate congregation. The shilling a year that he agreed to pay to the trustees was not a membership subscription. It was, as he expressed in a letter to them in 1772, ‘an acknowledgement for their sufferings the droppings of rain’ which fell into the meeting- house yard from a structure that he had erected above it.⁶ 

Had he attended services at Westgate Paine would probably have approved of the preaching of Ebenezer Johnston, the liberal- minded Scotsman who had ministered there since 1742. Like Noble he had been educated at a Dissenting academy and well grounded in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Although none of his sermons survive it is certain that, like all the Rational Dissenters, his emphasis would not have been upon the saving work of Christ but upon ‘practical religion’. At a time when many Protestant Dissenting congregations were experiencing divisions and schisms, Johnston succeeded — possibly by being ‘all things to all men’ — in keeping his people together. Although probably not himself a Socinian, he would have tolerated heretical views if he encountered them. And so if Paine, in the course of conversation, had expressed doubts about the Atonement or the Trinity or even gone so far as to question the whole idea of revealed religion, Johnston would not have been shocked.⁷ 

It is not certain where Paine stood theologically during his time in Lewes, but it is clear that he was mentally on the move. For many people their early 30s are formative years and for Paine, who was regularly exercising his critical faculties and speaking skills in debates at the local Headstrong Club, they may have been specially so. If, as Keane suggests, he was the ‘P….’ who wrote a satirical poem entitled ‘An Arithmetical Paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer’ printed in the Lewes Journal in July 1771, he may by then have reached a Deist position. Perhaps his anger against injustice had already led him to reject revelation and question the truth of what Noble had said in a 1767 sermon about ‘the wisdom of Christ’: 

It is certainly proof of the wisdom of Christ that he did not at all interfere in civil matters or make such declarations in behalf of the common rights of universal mankind as could only have tended to draw down the whole fury of the secular power upon all his followers. 

By the time he left Lewes in 1774 it is likely that Paine, never one to worry about drawing down fury, would have openly disagreed with this statement and with Noble’s conclusion that philosophy must always be ‘assisted by Revelation’.⁸ 

Conclusion 

Which then had the greater influence on Paine as a young man — Wesleyan Methodism or Rational Dissent? John Keane is evidently convinced that it was Methodism. In a sub-section of his book entitled ‘The Methodist Revolution’ he considers the effects of Paine’s involvement with the Wesleyan movement. He contends that historians have misunderstood Methodism, wrongly seeing it as ‘a reactionary protest against Enlightenment reason and a movement that seduced its followers into conformism’. On the contrary, he says, Methodism ‘fed the modem democratic revolution in mid-eighteenth century England by offering a vision of a more equal and free community of souls living together on earth’ Although he admits that ‘the extent of Paine’s involvement with Methodism is uncertain’ he believes that it was primarily from this that the young man derived his egalitarianism, his passion for justice and his conviction that individuals were morally responsible for their own conduct. Several sentences begin with statements such as ‘Methodism demonstrated’, ‘Methodism showed’ or ‘Methodism convinced him’. Moreover it was Methodism that allegedly provided Paine with ‘the exhilarating view, traceable to the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminus, that Christ’s sacrifice and atonement meant that all men and women might be saved’. 

‘You are steeped in sin, and there is nothing in you which merits God’s goodness’, the young Paine may have told his nervous and spellbound congregations in Dover and Sandwich, rephrasing words from other Methodist preachers that he had heard in action. ‘Yet remember the new light of God’s grace shines equally upon the poor and the rich. God is ready to welcome you — all of you — as His children so long as you strive to attain His grace and live the holy life which allows you to enter into His Kingdom’. 

But do these sound like the worst of a man who had been (at the age of seven or eight) ‘revolted, by a sermon on the Atonement and had ever since ‘either doubted the truth of the Christian system or thought it to be a strange affair’? Although the Wesleyan doctrine of the Atonement was more liberal and humane than that of the Calvinistic Methodists it is doubtful if it could ever have been acceptable to Paine, whom the whole idea of God sacrificing his own son was repugnant.⁹ 

Because of his distaste for the orthodox ‘Christian system’ it is likely that Paine responded positively to the heterodox preaching of Rational Dissenters such as Daniel Noble. Although, as Keane points out, Noble ‘preached Arminian views’, his Arminianism was very different from Wesley’s. While Wesley’s position was close to that of Arminius himself (as introduced into England by the Caroline divines), Noble’s was that of a later generation of Dutch Remonstrants, whose views had been introduced into England by Limborch and Locke. Having been steeped in Locke’s philosophy at Kendal academy, Noble was more concerned with enlightening men’s minds than with saving their souls. His Arminianism, to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Nuttall, was not ‘of the heart but ‘of the head’.¹⁰ 

Some idea of what Noble’s preaching was like can be obtained from a sermon he delivered during Paine’s time in London, entitled ‘Religion, perfect Freedom’. It is full of references to such things as `the providence and moral government of God’, the ‘Sovereign Being who is able to make all things work together for good’ and the ‘laws of benevolence which are the true spirit of the Gospel’. ‘Is it not evident’, he asked, ‘that the pure and undefiled religion of Jesus bears a very friendly aspect to the cause of civil liberty?’ This is a very different tone than that of the average Methodist sermon with its heavy emphasis on sin and personal salvation. Is there not a foretaste here of what Paine was to write in The Age of Reason? Could not Noble’s preaching have helped to convince him that ‘the oral duty of man consists in imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God’ and that ‘everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and of everything of cruelty to animals, is -a violation of moral duty’? Apart from the reference to cruelty to animals, which shows Paine to have been far ‘ahead of his time’, the phraseology could have been lifted from almost any Rational Dissenting sermon.¹¹

Was it not from the Rational Dissenters rather than the Methodists that Paine derived the belief that his religion was simply ‘to do good’? Is it not likely that, as Ernest ‘Payne suggested, his association with Daniel Noble was ‘of some importance for the young man’s intellectual and spiritual development’? Judging by ‘A Sketch of the Character of the late reverend and learned Daniel Noble’ published in The Protestant Dissenters’ Magazine some years after his death he sounds like a man after Paine’s own heart. 

He had very enlarged ideas of the rights of others and was, upon principle, a thorough friend to the civil and religious liberties of all mankind. In conversation he was open and liberal, and at the same time serious and instructive. 

By all accounts Ebenezer Johnston of Lewes was a man of similar temper. Could the author of The Age of Reason have found better mentors than these two very rational Dissenters?¹²

References

1. T. Paine. The Age of Reason. Paris, 1794. 82-3. 
2. J. Keane. Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995). 46, 544 n.29; N. Cumock. Ed.. The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol.8 (1916), 3, in The Methodist Recorder, 16 August, 1906, 9. 
3. Keane, op.cit, 55, 60-1. E. A. Payne, ‘Tom Paine Preacher’, The Times Literary Supplement, 31 May, 1947, 267. 
4. Keane, op.cit., 62; Payne. back, W. T. Whitley, Seventh Day Baptists in England, Baptist Quarterly, n.s., Vol. 12 (1947), 265. 
5. Keane, op.cit., 62-3; W. T. Whitley, ‘Daniel Noble’, Baptist Quarterly, n.s., Val (1922), 137. 
6. J. M. Connell, The Story of an Old Meeting House, 2nd edn (1935), 64- 6; Keane, op.cit., 76-7. 
7. Connell, op.cit, 55-60. 
8. Keane, op.cit., 70; D. Noble, Religion, perfect Freedom: A sermon preached at Barbican. March 1, 1767, 25-7. 
9. Keane, op.cit., 45-9; Paine, The Age of Reason, 80-81. 
10. Keane, op.cit, 61; C. G. Bolam et. AL, The English Presbyterians (1968), 22-3; G. F. Nutthall, The Influence of Arminianism in England’, in, G. 0. McCulloch, ed., Man’s Faith and Freedom (1962), 46-7. 
11. Noble, op.cit, 19-20, 26-8; Paine, The Age of Reason, 116. 
12. The Protestant Dissenters’ Magazine, Vol.5 (1798), 441-2. 

Dr. Jeremy Goring is a member of the Thomas Paine Society and is a former Dean of Humanities at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of, Bum Holy Fire: Religion in Lewes Since the Reformation, which was published by the Lutterworth Press in 2003. 

Reprinted from the Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society.

The post Young Thomas Paine, Wesleyan Methodist Or Rational Dissenter?  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.

Elizabeth, the wife of the famous (if not, infamous) revolutionary, Thomas Paine,^a died in Cranbrook on 17 July, 1808, and lies buried in the churchyard of St. Dunstan’s. This fact is well known and is recorded by Tarbutt¹ and also by Pile.² The local newspaper for Cranbrook (the Maidstone Journal), contained the following announcement on 19 July, 1808.³ 

“Sunday morning, at her brother’s house at Cranbrook, in the 68th^b year of her age, Mrs. Pain, wife of the notorious Mr. Thomas Paine, author of the Rights of Man, to whom she was married, at Lewes, in Sussex, in the year 1771.^c She had lived only three years with this Assertor of Rights, when a separation took place, occasioned by his brutal behaviour to her, since which she has lived with her friends. She was the daughter of Mr. Ollive, a respectable tradesman in Lewes; she lived much respected, and died sincerely lamented – a firm Believer in Christ and the Truths of the Christian Religion – may his last days be like hers!’ 

It will be seen that the obituary is used as much to vilify Thomas Paine, as it is to lament Elizabeth’s passing. No doubt composed by her brother (in fact half-brother), Thomas Ollive, with whom she had lived in Cranbrook, the obituary reads like a cathartic rant, inveighing not only against Paine as an `assertor of rights’, but also by implication against his lack of Christian beliefs. A charitable interpretation of the final words of the obituary is that they refer to the example Elizabeth gave in her Christian readiness to embrace the life to come, rather than to any particular painful terminal illness that she had suffered. Clearly, it would have been possible for the obituary not to have made any reference to Paine himself. The implication must be that Elizabeth’s relationship to Paine was so well known that it would have seemed odd if it had not been mentioned. However, if it were to be mentioned, the treatment of Paine was to be one of censure. The fact was that, except in radical circles, Paine remained an anathema. Moreover, in this case the customary vituperation is heavily overlaid with personal animosity. 

In essence, Paine’s notoriety derived from the impact of two works – Rights of Man⁴ (as referred to in the obituary) and The Age of Reason.⁵ The former, written as a rebuttal of Burke’s, Reflections…, appeared in two parts in 1791/2. It attacked the monarchy (`It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but, to be a king, requires only the animal figure of man – a sort of breathing automaton.’); the aristocracy (`The idea of hereditary legislators is…as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man.’); Burke’s love of tradition (`…as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.’); and his disdain for the common people (`He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.’). The book was an enormous success and in E.P. Thompson’s words was the ‘foundation-text of the English working-class movement.’ Paine became a household name, but also found himself the object of a major offensive from the Pitt government, which eventually led to his being convicted in absentia of seditious libel in December 1792. In The Age of Reason published in 1794/5 Paine posited a deist philosophy (I believe in one God and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life’) and attacked all organised religion in uncompromising language (All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit.’). The book sold well and was to become the “bible” for nineteenth century freethinkers, but many (inaccurately) branded Paine as an atheist and he was generally reviled amongst those who attended church and chapel. 

What of Paine’s alleged “brutal behaviour” to Elizabeth? What do we know of their relationship? The couple had first met in 1768 when he had come to Lewes to take up the position as an excise officer. He found lodgings in the Bull House at the top of the High Street, from which Samuel Ollive and his second wife, Esther, ran a retail snuff and tobacco business.⁶ There were four children – three by his first wife, Elizabeth (John, Samuel and Elizabeth) and one by Esther (Thomas).⁷ Paine seems to have been taken under his wing by Samuel Ollive and quickly became involved in local political and social circles, where he established himself as a formidable debater, as well as contributing articles for local publications. Samuel Ollive, however, died in July 1769 and, within a few months, Paine had accepted an invitation from Esther Ollive to help to run the Bull House business with her step-daughter, Elizabeth, “reportedly an intelligent and pretty woman,” some twelve years younger than Paine. Paine’s job as excise officer was not well paid – and he no doubt welcomed ‘moonlighting’ in the Ollive’s shop. The relationship between Elizabeth and Paine burgeoned and, having made their vows in Westgate Chapel,^d they were duly married in March 1771 at St. Michael’s Church, Lewes (since the law did not permit marriages in dissenting chapels). Elizabeth’s eighteen year old brother, Thomas, was one of the witnesses.⁸ 

Without indulging in too much fanciful speculation, it is not difficult to see good reasons why Paine and Elizabeth were mutually attracted. For Elizabeth, Paine, who was somewhat older than her, may well have provided a father-substitute figure. She was no doubt impressed by the fact that her father had thought so highly of Paine that he had introduced him into influential civic and social circles in Lewes, where he had made a very favourable impact. Paine was tall and of an athletic build, with intense blue eyes, “full of fire, the eyes of an apostle.” Moreover, he possessed “innate charm and disposition” and an “easy conversational style”.⁹ Conway (who wrote the first authoritative biography of Paine) put it more succinctly: “He was her hero”.¹⁰ As regards Paine, we have already noted that Elizabeth was characterised by being both pretty and intelligent, with sufficient education, initiative and independence to have started a boarding school for young ladies in Lewes in January 1769.¹¹ Moreover, the Ollive family provided a welcome refuge for Paine, who had been drifting somewhat aimlessly up to this point in his life, giving him an entree to local circles in Lewes and a level of social respectability. 

However, as Keane¹² reports, within a year of their marriage, an “icy quarrel” broke out between Elizabeth and Paine. “Paine was absent for several months in London campaigning on behalf of the Excise officers… Rumours spread that the newlyweds had never slept together… Others said that a local doctor, John Chambers, had quizzed Paine ‘on the non-performance of the connubial rights’ and that Paine’s impotence had led him to fling himself into the Headstrong Club,^e town affairs, his work and the campaign to build a union for excise men. Still others whispered that Paine was too set in his ways, neglectful of his wife and business, and too bent on drinking and arguing ‘politick affairs’. Unaware of the death in childbirth of his first wife, no one considered whether Paine, driven by guilt and shame, had subsequently developed a coldness toward women and a liking for men’s company.” Regarding the charge of impotence, Fruchtman¹³ cites a comment from Clio Rickman, a long-time friend and biographer of Paine, who had asserted that “no physical defect on the part of Mr. Paine can be adduced as a reason for such conduct”.¹⁴ Interestingly, Conway¹⁵ cites Paine’s increasing deviant religious views as being the real basis for the developing schism with Elizabeth. 

Things went from bad to worse. In April 1774 Paine was dismissed from his position as an excisemen for spending too much time away from his post and incurring debts. In the same month, all his personal effects were auctioned – an indication of his public bankruptcy. Elizabeth and Paine separated soon afterwards. The relevant articles of separation record simply that: “Dissensions had arisen between the said Thos. Pain and Elizabeth, his wife, and that they had agreed to live separate.” Paine was always tight-lipped about the underlying reason for their alienation: “it is nobody’s business but my own, I had cause for it, but I will name it to no one.” In the case of Elizabeth the separation may have been more understandable – a husband who probably offered her little affection, who spent long periods away from the marital home, who was an inadequate bread-winner, yet who would indulge in high-flown rhetoric about “justice for the poor and more liberty for all”. Thomas and Elizabeth finally parted in June and were never to see or communicate (as such) with each other again.¹⁶ According to Rickman, “Mr. Paine always spoke tenderly and respectfully of his wife” and periodically sent her money anonymously.¹⁷ 

Keane¹⁸ reports that Elizabeth was disgraced by the separation and was thus compelled to leave Lewes with few possessions and never returned there. He also states that she came to Cranbrook to live with her brother, Thomas Ollive, a clock-maker. There is in fact no definite information as to when Elizabeth came to live in Cranbrook. We can contrast Keane’s account – of her need to leave Lewes in something of a hurry – with Newton Taylor’s speculation that Elizabeth may have come to Cranbrook in 1789 with her step-mother, Esther Ollive, to look after Thomas Ollive’s three young daughters following the death of their mother.¹⁹ We do know that Thomas had become a master clock- maker in 1777 and in February of that year is listed in the Churchwardens’ Rate Books as occupying a property next to the George Inn on the church side of that property. He remained there until 1791, at which time he moved to a property on the north side of Stone Street (formerly the Freeman Hardy & Willis shop, now Berry Antiques). It is thought that he remained here until his death in 1829.²⁰ 

Whatever year Elizabeth came to Cranbrook, it is clear that as a separated woman she would have derived her standing and status in Cranbrook society from Thomas Ollive. The only direct reference that I can find regarding Elizabeth’s life in Cranbrook can be found in Vale’s, The Life of Thomas Paine, published in 1841.²¹ It is worth quoting in full: “She was afterwards a professor of a sectarian religion in Cranbrook, Kent, and boarded in the house of the watchmaker, a member of the same church; his house was consequently visited by religious people, many of them with strong prejudices and some very ignorant. These, after the publication of The Age of Reason, would sometimes speak disrespectfully of Mr. Paine in her presence, when she wilfully left the room without a word. If, too, she was questioned on the subject of their separation, she did the same. We have these facts from those who resided with her. Our most intimate friend at one point was a Mr. Bourne, a watchmaker in Rye, about eighteen miles from Cranbrook, England. This gentleman was apprenticed in the house where Mrs. Paine lived; he sat at the same table with her for years. We have these facts confirmed by other residents of Cranbrook. Thus nothing could be learned from her, except that though she differed from Mr. Paine on religious subjects, she could not bear to hear him spoken ill of.”

Vale’s reference to “a sectarian religion” ties up with what we have been able to establish about Thomas Ollive. We know that in 1793 he was one of the signatories to an application for a certificate under the Toleration Act of 1689 to form a dissenting congregation at Isaac Beeman’s premises in Cranbrook (which were later to form the site for Providence Chapel.²² It is therefore not un-reasonable to suppose that Thomas and Elizabeth were members of the congregation there. There is a certain irony about this, as Huntington, who preached periodically in Cranbrook, and who in Wright’s words²³ was ‘a high Tory and a perfervid admirer of Pitt’, viewed Paine as the devil incarnate. For example, in December 1797 in a sermon entitled ‘Watchword and Warning’ he urged his congregation in London “to obey the voice of God” rather than give heed to “the claims of Popery, the teachings of Tom Paine, and the tyranny of the mob.” It is not unreasonable to suppose that Beeman’s message to his congregation was a similar one. If it were so, then Elizabeth would surely have been discomforted by hearing it. 

Whilst it appears that the fact that Elizabeth was the wife of Thomas Paine was not hidden from Cranbrook residents, there seem to be grounds for thinking that she was a potential victim of persecution. For example, the Sussex Weekly Advertiser (published in Lewes) noted in its 8 July, 1793 edition:²⁴ “It is not true that Tom Paine’s wife subsists on the bounty of her neighbouring parishes, as stated in a Morning Paper on Saturday. She is a native of this town, and now follows the business of a mantua-maker,^f near London, by which she gets a good livelihood, independent of what she receives from her relations, who we believe are very kind to her.” It seems clear that the Ollives still had good friends in Lewes (and it is known that Thomas her brother maintained links with it). The certain coyness about Elizabeth’s whereabouts and her alleged proximity to London does not detract from the fact that she probably resided in Cranbrook at this time. 

Following the publication of Rights of Man, Paine became a major target for the ‘counter-revolution’ of the Pitt government. One of its ploys was to circulate a copy of a letter supposedly written by Paine’s mother, Francis, to Elizabeth on 27 July, 1774, following her separation from Paine.²⁵ The letter lambasts Paine for being both a worthless son and husband. Some doubts exist as to the authenticity of this document, but it really is pretty mild stuff with which to sully an opponent. If the letter is authentic the obvious provider would be the original recipient of the letter, Elizabeth herself. However, it seems apparent that she still felt a lingering affection for Paine, so she is unlikely to have colluded in besmirching his reputation. The whole matter remains a mystery. 

In 1800 Elizabeth’s step-mother, Esther, died in Cranbrook. In that year – no doubt associated with the latter;s demise – Elizabeth was party to a property agreement which states that: “the said Elizabeth Pain had ever since lived separate from the said Thos. Pain, and never had any issue, and the said Thomas Pain had many years quitted this Kingdom and resided (if living) in parts beyond the seas, but had not since been heard of by the said Elizabeth Pain, nor was it known for certain whether he was living or dead”.²⁶ According to Williamson,²⁷ the seals attached to the signatures of the parties to the agreement show the head of Thomas Paine as a young man – a further indication of Elizabeth’s endearment. However, the statement itself shows a complete distancing of Elizabeth from Paine himself. Surely, she was not so isolated in rural Cranbrook that she had not been aware of the fame and infamy that had greeted both parts of Paine’s hugely successful Rights o/ Man in 1791/2 and The Age of Reason in 1794/5. In fact we know from Vale’s account²⁸ that this was certainly not the case regarding the latter. More likely she regarded the statement as merely legalese that she was only too pleased to sign in order to tidy up some legal loose ends. 

Elizabeth died in July 1808 and, as we have noted, her death was announced in the Maidstone Journal Also, according to Williamson, in another newspaper (which I have so far been unable to trace). The latter notice apparently reflected her wishes by stating that to abuse her husband would be “needless, ungenerous and unjustifiable”.²⁹ Thus, according to this account, Elizabeth would seem to have retained a deep affection for Paine. If Williamson’s account is correct, then it shows that Elizabeth’s view of her husband contrasted sharply with that of her brother, Thomas, who was almost certainly the author of the vituperative Maidstone Journal obituary quoted earlier. Indeed, there seem to be grounds for believing that their differences over Paine gave rise to a degree of antipathy between them. Illustratively, the place where Elizabeth was buried in Cranbrook churchyard is not where her gravestone currently stands – adjacent to that of her brother Thomas Ollive, and presumably that of another member of the Ollive family (which is completely impossible to decipher). We know this from a hand-written reference in the museum archives, which states: “the tombstone of the grave of Miss Ollive – wife of Tom Paine, has been moved to a position close to other memorials of the Ollive family`.³⁰ Moreover, Elizabeth’s headstone carries a very simple, if not, stark inscription: “MRS ELIZH PAIN of this Town Died 17th July 1808 Aged 58”. While it was not to be expected that reference should have been made to her husband, it is perhaps unusual for some form of endearment not to have been added, nor anything about the hereinafter. Contrast this inscription, for example, with that of her brother which almost smugly speaks of, inter alia, “a life of exemplary piety and usefulness wholly relying on the full and free salvation of JESUS CHRIST”.³¹

In conclusion, it seems likely that when Thomas Paine became a household name in the 1790s, Elizabeth not only publicly acknowledged that she was his estranged wife, but even implicitly defended his personal reputation. On the other hand, her brother Thomas – as a prominent local tradesman, and probable Pitt supporter, with declared Christian beliefs – must have preferred that Paine did not intrude into his life in Cranbrook and that ‘Miss Ollive’ lived a secluded rural existence. Following the publication of The Age of Reason in 1794/5, Thomas like others must have come to regard Paine as a complete infidel – and already as someone whom he regarded as having ruined his sister’s life and embarrassed his own. When Elizabeth died in 1808, the obituary that he drafted gave vent to his accumulated venom regarding Paine.

References and Notes

a. From at least 1774, Thomas Paine added a final ‘e’ to his name and this spelling is used throughout when referring to him, except where direct quotations spell the name otherwise.

b. This is incorrect. Elizabeth was born in December 1749. She was therefore in her 59th year at the time of her death.

c. Her marriage to Paine in fact took place in 1771.

d. John 011ive, Samuel’s father, had been minister of this chapel (which was Calvinistic in learning) between 1711-40.

e. An all-male dining and debating club which met at the White Hart in Lewes High Street.

f. i.e. a dress-maker.

1. Tarbutt, W. Second Lecture The Annals of Cranbrook Church, (1873). p.45.

2. Pile, C.C.R. Cranbrook: A Wealden Town. (1990). pp.75-76.

3. Maidstone Journal, 19 July, 1808. For a more temperate obituary please refer to that in Sussex Advertiser, 25 July, 1808.

4. Paine, T. Rights of Man with introduction by E. Foner. 1984. pp.174, 83, 45 and 51.

5. Paine, T. The Age of Reason, Part 1. in, The Thomas Paine Reader, edited by M. Foot & I. Krammick. (1987). p.400.

6. Keane, J. Tom Paine – A Political Life. (1995). p.62.

7. Newton Taylor, P.S. ‘Many Years an Inhabitant of this Town’. Cranbrook Journal, No.6. (1993). p.10.

8. Keane. op. cit. pp.65-71& 75-76.

9. Fruchtman, J. Thomas Paine – Apostle of Freedom (1994). op.26 & 38.

10. Conway, M.D. The Life of Thomas Paine. (1892). Volt p.26.

11. Sussex Weekly Advertiser. 30 January, 1769.

12. Keane. op.cit. p.77.

13. Fruchtman. op. cit. p.36.

14. Rickman, T.C. The Life of Thomas Paine. (1819). p.15.

15. Conway. op. cit. pp.31-32.

16. Keane. op.cit. p.78.

17. Rickman. op. cit. p.45.

18. Keane. op.cit. p.78.

19. Newton Taylor. op. oil. p.11.

20. Newton Taylor. Ibid. p.11.

21. Vale, G. The Life of Thomas Paine. (1841). p.25.

22. CKS QISB 264. (1793).

23. Wright, T. The Life of William Huntington S.S. (1909). p.108.

24. Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 8 July, 1793.

25. Paine, F. to ‘Dear Daughter’, Thetford, 27 July, 1774.47.6.12.105 British Museum (reference in Keane. op.cit. p.595).

26. Williamson, A. Thomas Paine: His Life, Work and “limes. (1973). p.57.

27. ibid. p.57.

28. Ref.21 above.

29. Williamson. op.cit. p.53.

30. Cranbrook Museum Archives, Ref.1397, ‘Grandfather Clock 1752-1829’, p.4.

31. I am most grateful to Mr. P.S. Newton Taylor for supplying this and other information relating to the Ollive family.

This article was first published in the Cranbrook Journal by the Cranbrook and District Local History Society in 1997.

The post Elizabeth Paine: The Wife Of A Revolutionary appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

I decided to visit the United States in October as it was the month Paine had set out to go there in 1774, the first of his five journeys across the Atlantic. It so happened that my visit would coincide with the Annual General Meeting of the Thomas Paine-Huguenot Historical Society of New Rochelle. My journey contrasted greatly to Paine’s in that it lasted a mere six and a half hours in comfort unlike his of nine weeks in great discomfort and illness. My object in going was to meet TPS members in the United States, visit places of Paine interest and do some research. My hosts at New Rochelle were Mr & Mrs Stapleton, and they were awaiting me at the station. Florence is Historian of the American organisation, and is a charming individual, a tireless and enthusiastic worker in the Paine cause. Within an hour of my arrival the terrible earthquake hit California and the media was full of it – was there a connection!!!? 

Next day Mrs. Stapleton took me to visit the Paine Museum, which is shared with the Huguenots, refugees that had fled from religious persecution in France. The museum is in Paine’s cottage, which had been moved from its original site. The museum has a lecture hall which has a portrait of Paine and houses a bust of him and several relics. There is also a splendid library where we spent an all too brief two hours. Near the museum and not far from where Paine had been buried is a monument to him, erected in 1839. 

The following day I paid a return visit and heard an interesting talk from the President of the New Rochelle society about Paine and women’ s rights. On the Friday I ventured alone into New York to visit the United Nations, though the weather left much to be desired. At the United Nations I sat in on a debate about disarmament. I also joined a tour of the building which prompted me to conclude that despite all its weaknesses the United Nations has achieved a lot over the past forty years. The remainder of the day was spent in the City Museum of New York for a Thomas Paine browse. 

On the Sunday I visited a Baptist church for what turned out to be a three hour spiritual jamboree. I thought Thomas Paine would have been pleased to see ladies all dressed in white taking a prominent role in the service, with a black lady preacher, and when they asked visitors to stand up and announce themselves, there was a round of applause when I told them I was on a “Paine pilgrimage”. 

In the afternoon I attended the AGM of the Thomas Paine— Huguenot Historical Society, at which I was invited to address the members. I congratulated them on the splendid way they guard and promote the Thomas Paine image, and the devoted manner in which they shoulder their responsibilities. I concluded my address with my “Human Rights Missionary Man” song. President Cooper, in his address to the society, reported on a visit to Paris he had made for the rededication of the Paine statue there. A proposal I made for support for an exchange visit in 1991 was well received. After the meeting a few of us went on to the splendid Thomas Paine Hotel at which we had “Tom Paine pie”. 

WASHINGTON 

Our member David Henley drove me to Washington, stopping at Fort Lee, Morristown, where stands a magnificent statue of Paine in a lovely setting that any Paine enthusiast should make every effort to see. This statue should really be in Washington itself. We then went on to Bordentown to visit Paine’s house there, which has been occupied for over sixty years by the charming Valentini sisters, both TPS members, who were most happy to see us. Another keen member of the TPS who lives in Bordentown, George Earle, came round to meet us and took David and I to see Col. Kirkbride’s grave and monument. Mr. Earle took us out to dinner and it was 11.30pm before we eventually reached Washington and there I met David’s charming wife, Nancy. David Henley is a great admirer of Paine and has collected many interesting items related to him. He has made a detailed study of Paine portraits, and has an unrecorded example in his collection, perhaps the one Col. Trumbell presented to Jefferson in 1789. David supports the hypothesis that Paine wrote the letters of Junius, and had a child by his first wife, which he considers was adopted. 

In Washington I took in the usual round of tourist sites. In the Smithsonian Institute I saw a model of Paine’s bridge. In the Capitol there was no trace of any gratitude for Paine’s role in the formation of the United States apart from a minor ceiling painting. A visit to the National Library allowed me to inspect original Paine documents and hear tapes of quotations from Paine used in the last war to encourage men to enlist in the services. These included Basil Rathbone reading the famous passage starting: “These are the times that try mens souls….” It was a pleasure to have dinner with Frank Smith, author of Thomas Paine Liberator, and Herbert Manius, who offered to help with the 1991 exchange proposal. 

PHILADELPHIA 

I went to Philadelphia by Greyhound coach, a journey of three hours. This was where Paine began his great work. I stayed at a youth hostel set in glorious parkland a few miles out of the city, where I met a party of Estonians and had a long discussion with one and distributed Paine literature to the rest. My first venue in Philadelphia was Independence Hall, a picture of Paine hangs there. Next I visited the Philosophical Society to inspect the Gimbel Paine Collection housed there. Looking at the original letters and other material made me realise just how close Paine was to many leading figures in three countries. 

Benjamin Franklin is well commemorated in Philadelphia, and a modern “shrine” to him is found at the site of his family residence. Here is shown a sugary film about his life and recorded conversations take place between models dressed in period costume which rise from beneath the floor. The centre has ingenious computerised devices to stimulate visitors, and it was good to find that Paine’s role in American history was not ignored, but there is no portrait of him and no postcards showing him available at the shop. A visit to several other historical places in the city revealed that Paine is not portrayed in any, nor is it known where he lived, however, most of those I spoke to seemed to know something about him, though many were still ambivalent in their attitude to him. 

So it was then back to New York, where I had the unpleasant experience of having my pocket picked at Grand Central Station, and discovered the New York police to be particularly unhelpful, to put it mildly. I wrote about this to the Mayor of the city, and also to the “Philadelphia Public Enquirer” about that city’s general lack of public recognition of Paine’s heroic stand for American independence (the letter was, I understand, published). In Washington, I noted a statue of Edmund Burke. 

I must express my heartfelt thanks to Mr & Mrs Stapleton, Mr & Mrs Henley, Ann Kalloudis, George Earle and the members of the New Rochelle society for their great help. An added bonus was to bring back a splendid bust of Paine by Gabriel Pierro, rescued from New Rochelle Town Hall by Mrs Stapleton, which will be “installed” at the “Bull”, Lewes, next year by our new Vice—Presidents, Mr & Mrs David Henley as a gift from the United States. 

In all my “pilgrimage” was a truly memorable and Paine-expanding experience, which should hopefully make me more effective in talking about and working for the great man’s ever continuing cause.

The post A Paine Pilgrimage 17-31 October, 1989 appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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

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

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

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

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

THE ROOTS OF THE IDEAS EXPRESSED BY PAINE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eulogy on Paine 

Immortal Paine, while mighty reasoners jar 

We crown thee General of the Headstrong War; 

Thy logic vanquished error, and thy mind 

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

Thy soul of fire must sure ascend the sky, 

Immortal Paine, thy fame can never die: 

For men like thee their names must ever save 

From the black edicts of the tyrant grave. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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