An edited and revised version of the Eric Paine Memorial Lecture, March 5, 2011

The fourth sort or classe amongest us, is of those which the olde Romans called capite censij proletary or operce, day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, all artificers, as Taylers, Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers, Bricklayers, Masons, &c. These have no voice nor authoritie in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but onelie to be ruled, not to rule other, and yet they be not altogether neglected. For in cities and corporate townes for default of yeomen, they are faine to make their enquests of such manner of people. And in villages they be commonly made Churchwardens, alecunners, and manie times Constables, which office toucheth more the common wealth, and at the first was not imployed upon such lowe and base persons. Wherefore generally to speake of the common wealth, or policie of Englande, it is governed, administred, and manied by three sortes of persons, the Prince, Monarch, and head governer, which is called the king, or if the crowne fall to a woman, the Queene absolute, as I have heeretofore saide: In whose name and by whose authoritie all things be administred. The gentlemen, which be divided into two partes, the Baronie or estate of Lordes which conteynethl5i barons and all that bee above the degree of a baron, (as have declared before): and those which be no Lords, as Knightes, Esquires, and simple gentlemen. The thirde and last sort of persons is named the yeomanrie: each of these hath his part and administration in judgementes, corrections of defaultes, in election of offices, in appointing tributes and subsidies, and in making !awes, as shall appear heereafter. 

– Sir Thomas Smith, De Republic Anglorum (1583)’ (An electronic version is reproduced here: https://www.constitution.or_g/eng/repang.htm)

‘if we wilt suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English Constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new Republican materials’ 

‘First. — The remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king. 

Secondly. — The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers. 

Thirdly. — The new Republican materials, in the persons of the Commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776). (The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. P. S. Foner, (2 vats., New York, 1969) i, 7.) 

These two quotations are from two authors seemingly poles apart in time, politics and personality: one, Sir Thomas Smith, the Elizabethan diplomat, renaissance scholar and loyal servant of the crown, the other Thomas Paine, former stay-maker, revolutionary pamphleteer and literary thorn in the side of the English monarchy. But, in the course of this article, I hope to demonstrate that Sir Thomas Smith and Thomas Paine shared more than a first name in common. (Others have noted the potential parallels between Paine’s ideas and the ‘Commonwealth’ literature of the sixteenth century, see A. McLaren, ‘Commonwealth and Common Sense: John Hales, Tom Paine and the Early American Republic’, unpublished paper delivered at the University of Liverpool Early Modem Virtual Research Group Seminar, April 2008. for info see htto://www.liv.ac.uk/history/research/cultures of counseliseminars.htm)

Thomas Paine’s thought and writing has often been presented as distinct from the mainstream of late eighteenth-century English radicalism: his frank republicanism, the relative absence of historical or classical allusions in his prose, and his clear Francophilia are all seen as marking him out from the more Whiggish political philosophy of either the artisan-led London Corresponding Society or the more middle-class Revolution Society. (See for example M. Philp, ‘The Fractured Ideology of Reform’ in Philp ed.,) It is certainly hard to image Paine endorsing the idea of an Anglo-Saxon ‘ancient constitution’ enshrining British liberties or extolling the importance of the revolution of 1688 as numerous declarations from the LCS did. (For pertinent quotations see my A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, rebels and revolutionaries — the men and women who fought for our freedom (London, 2010), p. 238.) According to this account, this difference became only more marked as war with revolutionary France tainted Painite radicalism with treasonable overtones. (See on the Anglo-Saxon symbolism of post-Waterloo radicalism, P. A. Pickering, “Class without words: Symbolic communication in the Chartist movement’, Past and Present 112, (1986), 154-5; for a more mixed picture J. A. Epstein ‘Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 122 (1989), 75-118.) Paine here appears as a stylistic and intellectual aberration whose subsequent influence was felt only amongst the ‘ultra-radical’ fringes in the later 19th century.’ (Even here, lain Macalman sees the enduring influence of domestic intellectual and religious traditions, Radical Underworld, Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London 1795-1840 (Cambridge, 1988), pt II.)

However, here I will suggest that Paine’s ideas were actually closer to more established strains in English political thought than is usually recognised. 

***

The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge, 1991), pp.50- 77. J. R. Dinwiddy noted that the most thoroughgoing criticisms of the British Constitution came from those, such as Paine, who were ‘exogenous to the English political scene’, Radicalism and reform in Britain, 1780-1850 (London, 1992), P. 173. 

***

To return to that quotation from Sir Thomas Smith, Smith’s work is a valuable example of what the distinguished historian of Elizabethan England, Patrick Collinson, memorably labelled ‘monarchical republicanism’. A seeming oxymoron — how can you have a republic that is also ‘monarchical’? But for an Elizabethan gentleman like Sir Thomas Smith, there was no contradiction. England was a ‘commonwealth’, to use the vernacular term most often substituted for the Latin republics, which contained elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. In his analysis of the English state, if not in his assessment of the efficacy of the arrangement, Smith was in agreement with Paine. For Smith and for many other 1681 and 17thC thinkers, a ‘commonwealth’ was defined primarily not by the form of government which was, significantly, potentially subject to alteration but by its end, the service of the ‘common weal’, the public good. The point was reiterated by Paine in Rights of Man pt. 2 chap. 3: 

“What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed, Res -Publics , the public affairs, or the public good”. (Foner, 1, 369.) 

So Smith and Paine were agreed that a ‘commonwealth’ or republic was defined not by a form of government but by that government’s end, the public good. However, it is worth stating here that it is not the intent of this paper to make an ultra- revisionist argument (and thereby send the membership of the Thomas Paine Society into a collective apoplectic fit) that Paine was really a closet monarchist. As Paine went on to state in Rights of Man monarchy categorically could not be the form of government of a true commonwealth because the end of monarchical rule was to serve the interests of a hereditary ruler not the public good. But I do want to suggest here that ‘monarchical republicanism’ may, in a variety of ways, have influenced Paine’s intellectual development and vision of both society and government. 

Before looking at its potential relevance to Paine, we need to unpick what Collinson means by ‘monarchical republicanism’. For Collinson there are essentially two types of monarchical republicanism — one representing a theory about the state and what it was for, the other, a fitting description of how, at a local level, the Elizabethan state actually operated. 

As historians are now recognising, the theory of ‘monarchical republicanism’ had a long shelf-life. It is still mostly associated with the Elizabethan period and the schemes of William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, for a temporary English republic leading to an elective monarchy, should the Queen fall victim to illness, old age or a Catholic assassination attempt. In these schemes, hatched as early as the 1560s, the political vacuum caused by the Queen’s death would be filled by the Privy Council and a recalled Parliament, acting as a de facto government. A long–term republican vision was completely absent from these schemes — the goal was for the Privy Council to act effectively as a sixteenth- century interview panel, judging appropriately blue-blooded (and Protestant) candidates for the vacant throne. However, as Collinson notes, these schemes still involved radical constitutional alterations, essentially setting preservation of the Protestant religion above observing the line of succession (a point to be revisited with revolutionary consequences in the 1688-9) and transforming England from a hereditary to an elective monarchy. It also had more sustained implications in the sixteenth century in terms of its emphasis upon the need for rulers, especially female rulers, to listen to (predominately male) counsel and govern for the public good. ((P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth 1’ Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, LXIX (1987), pp. 394-424 reprinted in J. Guy ed., The Tudor Monarchy (1997) and Collinson, The Elizabethans (2003). For earlier schemes see the work of Steven Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis 1558-1569 (Cambridge, 1998) and Alice Hunt, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Mary Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 557-572 available here https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/151567/1/AHunt MonarchicalRepublic. pdf)) The incipient radicalism of ‘monarchical republicanism’ was brought out in the seventeenth century. Variations on this form of thinking can be found in the Levellers’ proto-constitutions, the Agreements of the People, and in the late seventeenth-century writings of the ‘Harringtonian’ Henry Neville in his Plato Redivivus (1681) – a work which called for a limited monarchy supporting a religiously tolerant state. (See G. Mahlberg, ‘Henry Neville and the Toleration of Catholics during the Exclusion Crisis’, Historical Research 83:222 (2010), pp. 617-34; idem, Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)) In both the Levellers’ and Neville’s view, there could be a place for a hereditary monarch as a head of state but this monarchical element would be grafted onto a largely ‘republican’ structure: under both the Levellers’ and Neville’s schemes the king’s prerogative powers would be severely circumscribed while the rights of citizens (especially freedom of conscience) would be constitutional protected against encroachment from either the legislature or the executive. (It is worth stating here that the Levellers’ commitment to monarchy was expedient at best. At other points, Levellers writers expressed deep hostility to the monarchy, an early example of this being Richard Overton and William Waiwyn’s A Remonstrance of Many Thousands of Citizens (1646),p. 5: ‘The continual oppressors of the nation have been kings’. For an electronic version see here: https://www.constitution.org/levieno lev 04.htm) 

The same ideas, as Rachel Hammersley has shown, were also part of the intellectual make-up of the radical Whig ‘commonwealthsmen’ of the early 18thC, as Robert, viscount Molesworth stated: 

‘A true Whig is not afraid of the name of a Commonwealthsman…queen Elizabeth, and many other of our best princes, were not scrupulous of calling our government a Commonwealth, even in their solemn speeches to parliament. And indeed if it be not one, I cannot tell by what name properly to call it: for where in the very frame of the constitution, the good of the whole is taken care of by the whole (as it is in our case) the having a king or queen at the head of it, alters not the case.’ (Quoted in R. Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester, 2010).p. 15.)

Of course, Thomas Paine did differ from these authors — his advocacy of republicanism was clear and consistent from the publication of Common Sense (1776) onwards. But, even so, he could seemingly engage with this monarchical republican tradition 

in his most famous English political work, Rights of Man pt 1. ‘civil government is republican government. All that part of the government of England which begins with the office of constable. and proceeds through the departments of magistrate, quarter- session, and general assize, including the trial by jury, is republican government. Nothing of monarchy appears in any part of it, except the name which William the Conqueror imposed upon the English, that of obliging them to call him “their Sovereign Lord and King”.’ (Foner, 1, p. 326.) 

To what extent he had been directly influenced in this section of Rights of Man by previous English political works in this vein is not clear. Paine’s mature political thought has usually been presented as the shared inheritance of American and French republicanism. though work on his reading by Caroline Robbins and A. Owen Aldridge suggests an author equally well-read in literary classics. British history and seventeenth and eighteenth century English political thought. (A. O. Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (London, 1984), C Robbins, ‘The Lifelong Education of Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Some Reflections upon his Acquaintance among Books’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 127 (1983), pp. 135-142.) Aldridge sees some echoes of Leveller writing in Paine’s American works, though no evidence of direct influence or quotation. The water is muddied further by the work of J. G. A Pocock and, much more recently Rachel Hammersley, which reminds us that both French and American republicanism was itself in debt to the writings of English Commonwealthsmen like Thomas Gordon and Robert Molesworth (quoted earlier). (For Hammersley see earlier refs for Pocock see The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975))

The obvious difficulty with seeing Paine as a ‘monarchical republican’ is his unequivocal attachment to republicanism and his hostility to monarchy. The Commonwealthsmen of the early eighteenth century had been at pains to point out (whether for reasons of self-preservation or out of genuine intellectual commitment) that while they saw intellectual value in republican works such as Algernon Sidney’s Discourses, they did not share that author’s views on monarchy or the legitimacy of the regicide of 1649. After 1776 at least, Paine appears to have held no such reservations. Not only did he attack George Ill as a ‘bad king’ (to use the terminology of 1066 and all that), in Common Sense styling him as the ‘Pharaoh of England’ and ‘the Royal Brute of Britain’, he laid waste to the institution itself. (Foner, I, 25, 29.) For Paine, as Gregory Claeys has noted, hereditary government was tyranny because the principle imposed rulers on future generations without their consent. (G. Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London, 1989), p. 72) Paine’s clearly stated antipathy to ‘mixed government’ (as in the British case, King, Lords and Commons) — ‘A mixed Government is an imperfect everything, cementing and soldering the discordant parts together by corruption’, Rights of Man pt 1, Conclusion — was also at clearly odds with the ideas of the ‘Commonwealthsmen.’ (Foner, I, 339.) 

Yet, even given these differences and the difficulties in tracing Paine’s intellectual influences, there are still reasons for thinking that Paine’s intellectual development owed something to this English tradition of ‘monarchical republicanism’. As stated earlier, Collinson identified two types of monarchical republicanism: crudely put monarchical republicanism in theory and monarchical republicanism in practice. As evidence of the latter, Collinson singled out the parish of Swallowfield, in the sixteenth century in Wiltshire but now part of Berkshire, whose chief inhabitants produced their own articles: 

`To the end we may the better & more quietly lyve together in good love & amytie to the praise of God and for the better servynge of her Majesty’ (Quoted in M. J. Braddick, State formation in early modem England c 1500- .1700 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 73.)

The articles themselves were partly drawn up to help resolve the anomalous position of Swallowfield —a parish for administrative purposes in Wiltshire but geographically in Berkshire. This was not a local constitution creating a petty democracy within a monarchy — the articles were clear about the need to maintain social distinctions within the parish, any ‘malapert’ poor who upbraided their betters were to be firmly reprimanded. But it was a document that looked to local co-operation and civic participation to ensure the smooth running of the community without recourse to the heavy-handed instruments of the law. At Swallowfield, then, the name of the Queen, through the operation of her courts, was, as far as possible to be left out of things, just as Paine said it routinely was in the operation of English government in the eighteenth century. (For Swallowfield see Braddick, State Formation, pp. 73-6.)

Swallowfield was an exceptional case, but recent histories of the ‘politics of the parish’ in early modern England have attempted to broaden out this picture of local autonomy and self-government to the nation in general. Mark Goldie produced an important but controversial paper in which he described parish office-holding as the ‘unacknowledged republic’ within the English state. For Goldie, it was office-holding in early modem England (exemplified by Smith’s sub-yeoman class of ale-conners and parish constables) rather than elections (more often than not really the ‘selection’ of MPs by local magnates) which constituted the genuinely participatory element of civic society at this time. (M. Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office Holding in Early Modem England’, in Harris ed., The Politics of the Excluded c. 1500-1850 , (Basingstoke, 2001) pp. 153-194.) 

Paine, while at Lewes, had first-hand experience of serving in this ‘unacknowledged’ English republic. Since the first hostile biography of Paine appeared in 1791, commentators have noted that Paine sought to reinvent himself as an individual who had only become a writer in America, therefore drawing a veil over his life in England prior to emigration in 1774. However, as A. Owen Aldridge pointed out, many of the ideas in Common Sense and in later works such as Rights of Man pt 2, had previously been aired in his early anonymous contributions to the Pennsylvania Magazine. Prior to this, he had already in England, in the Case of the Officers of the Excise (1772), produced a work that was much more than a merely sectional document, addressing broad themes of poverty and • corruption. More important than these early writings was his work in Lewes as a vestryman and juryman. The transfer to Lewes was significant because of the more open nature of the borough in comparison to his birthplace, Thetford, a town safely in the pocket of its aristocratic patrons, the Graftons. So his experience in Lewes between 1768 and 1774, as detailed in recent work by Colin Brent, George Hindmarch and Paul Myles, much less being one of ‘almost unrelenting failure’, was of exactly the sort of open, active civil society that he would later idealise in Common Sense and associate much more broadly with America. (E. Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (2nd edn., Oxford, 2005), p. 3.) Here, as Colin Brent has aptly put it, in ‘England’s republican government’, was that free human society which he contrasted with that ‘at best necessary evil’, government. (C. Brent, D. Gage and P. Myles, Thomas Paine in Lewes 1768- 1774: A Prelude to American Independence (Lewes, 2009), quoted at p. 14; C. Brent, ‘Thirty something: Thomas Paine at Bull House in Lewes, 1768- 1774 — six formative years,’ Sussex Archaeological Collections, 147 (2009), 153-168.;G. Hindmarsh, The Case of the King of England and his Officers of the Excise (Privately published, 1998))

For Paine it was not a centralist monarchical state which held together society, ‘So far is it from being true, as has been pretended, that the abolition of any formal government is the dissolution of society, that it acts by a contrary impulse, and brings the latter the closer together. All that part of its organisation which it had committed to its government, devolves again upon itself, and acts through its medium.’ (Foner, I, 358) 

Rather it was an excess of ‘government’ which led to ‘riots and tumults’, ‘If we look … we shall find, that they did not proceed from the want of a government, but that government was itself the generating cause; instead of consolidating society, it divided it; it deprived it of its natural cohesion, and engendered discontents and disorders, which otherwise would not have existed.’ (Foner, 1, 359)

There remain problems with viewing Paine’s experiences in England, especially Lewes, as well as his English intellectual inheritance as demonstrating the influence of ‘monarchical republicanism’. As noted by Ethan Shagan, much of theory of monarchical republicanism actually cut against the vision of England as a nation of thousands of self-governing, autonomous, parish or borough mini-republics. For many theorists, the drive was for the state to obliterate administrative anomalies like Swallowfield which threatened the reach and uniformity of central administration. (E. Shagan, ‘The two republics: conflicting views of participatory local government in early Tudor England’ in J. F. McDiarmaid ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modem England: Essays in Response to Patrick CoMason (Aldershot, 2007), ch. 1.) Similarly, for Paine, England’s ‘rotten boroughs’ contaminated even that part of the state which was supposedly representative of the people, the House of Commons, by denying representation to large sections of the country (notably manufacturing towns such as Manchester) and leaving the rest open to the corrupt influence of aristocratic patrons. 

Yet, fundamentally, Paine’s view of civic society continued to tally with his own lived experience. Constitutions existed in microcosm in voluntary associations such as the Lewes Headstrong Club of which Paine was a member. These self- generating, bottom-up forms of political association demonstrated that high taxation existed not because society required it but because these revenues were necessary to prop a parasitic court and the vast war machine that it directed. In his regard for England’s ‘associational culture’, Paine was, again, in line with much contemporary, polite opinion. (Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800, the origins of an associational world (Oxford, 2002)) As Paine saw it, it was this ability to create clubs and societies to serve a number of social needs that demonstrated that the English were perfectly capable of governing by themselves for themselves. (See for example Foner, 1, 359: “In those associations which men promiscuously form for the purpose of trade, or of any concern, in which government is totally out of the question, and in which they act merely on the principles of society, we see how naturally the various parties unite”)

The posthumous celebration of Paine would prove his own point. In the nineteenth century, radical clubs and societies across Britain would toast the ‘Immortal Paine’ in displays of radical sociability and conviviality which reinforced the political potential of this national trait of ‘club-ability.’ (For some interesting reflections on radical sociability see Christina Parolin’s, Radical Spaces: Venues of popular politics in London, 1790-c. 1845, (AN Li E-press, 2010) available as an electronic book here https://epress.anu.edu.au/apos/bookworm/view/Radical+Spaces % 3A+Venues +of+popular+polltics+in+London,+1790%E2%80%93c.+184512021/ch01.xtrtini) In conclusion, we remember Paine now, as radicals did in the nineteenth century, because he was distinctive — there have been few, if any, English political figures whose republicanism has been so strident and yet who have managed to communicate such a radical ideology (in an English context) to such a wide audience. But that distinctive philosophy and style was not solely the product of his American experiences. England shaped Paine the republican not only because of what he might have read (even between the lines of more orthodox texts), but also because of what he did and how he lived.

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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.

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A biography can follow a personal life-history as honestly or as deviously as suits its author’s purpose, for biographers may be motivated just as strongly against as in favour of their subject. The justification for a biography is that its subject has achieved enough distinction to excite curiosity about the factors in his life, which induced a situation marking parts in the development of many personal lives, and these can become known only in variable degree, even to close associates. It is not very surprising when a man from a distinguished background makes an impact upon the history of this time (although his background does not diminish his title to credit for his achievements), but it is much more intriguing when a man from an apparently common-place background makes a strong impact. Sons born to monarchs, and sons born to prominent dignitaries may reasonably be expected to make a contribution to contemporary society, but members of the lower orders do not inherit springboards from which to launch themselves. Those of undistinguished birth who do achieve enduring fame, whether or not they drive – or were driven by,- the special circumstances with which posterity subsequently associate them, may therefore fall to be judged by serried ranks of undistinguished peers unwilling to award them adequate credit through reluctance to concede that better results than their own have been attained from similar circumstances. As has long been recognised ‘a prophet is’ never without honour save in. his own country and amongst his own people’. So it has been, in considerable measure for Thomas Paine, the man from the people who remained always a man of the people, notwithstanding that he achieved far greater distinction than did most of his fellows. 

To the resentment of those of similar social standing to himself, who felt – and still feel in their subconscious minds, that his exceptional success underlined their own mediocrity, there must be added the open hostility shown by members of the upper classes who could not bring themselves to recognise that greater intellectual powers could emanate from a man of lower social ranking. To these, any rod was a suitable one with which to belabour the upstart stay-maker turned excise officer, later driven by intellectual hostility into rebellion against the Crown that failed to reciprocate his loyalty. And since Paine was modest about his private life. A circumstance which greatly contrasted with his justified pride in his immensely popular writing — his personal life was an avenue to which his enemies and detractors have turned en masse when seeking to off-set the great unassailable support his writings elicited from the numerous thinkers then emerging from the populace. Within Paine’s little-known private life, there was no important aspect less familiar to the public than the marriages which had been central to his early life in England, and so it was the matrimonial field which was selected as the location for the most virulent attacks upon his personal character. 

Paine’s experience of marriage, that of his parents as well as his own, did greatly influence him, just as it greatly influences the great majority of other Englishmen; and it is therefore appropriate to take another look at all three of these, within the broad context of feminine influence upon him during his formative years; for greater insight into this aspect of his life has slowly accrued to us, and has conferred an ability to make a more fair assessment thereon than Paine has generally received from earlier writers. 

Paine’s parents, Joseph Pain and his wife Frances, came from two very different backgrounds; Joseph was a farmer’s son and a practising Quaker, Frances was daughter to an attorney and a member of the Established Church. Their points of contact are not easily imagined, but were obviously sufficient to allow them to move towards wedlock. They seem to have resolved their religious differences through toleration of each other’s opinions. Frances’s view was allowed to prevail when they decided the mode and location of their marriage, and Joseph’s yielding to her wishes was a reasonable masculine deferment to her natural concerns that their wedding should be recognised by her family and friends; but Joseph’s choice of a bride from outside the Quaker community brought him into disfavour with his own religious confreres, who are thought to have expelled him from formal membership of their Society. However, this would not have debarred Joseph and his family from attendance at Quaker meetings. 

Joseph and Frances were married on June 20, 1734 in the parish church at Euston, just outside Thetford. Joseph was twenty-six on his wending day, and his bride was eleven years older. According to Oldys [George Chalmers], the biographer who found out most about Paine’s family, Frances possessed a sour temper and was an eccentric character, and later commentators have sometimes drawn the conclusion that Joseph contracted an unhappy marriage, but this opinion is probably ill-founded, as is explained below, and there is no positive reason to suppose that the marriage was other than normally stable and happy. Thomas was born after two years of wedlock to a mother aged thirty-nine, and was followed eleven months later by a sister, who did not survive infancy. Understandably, in view of Frances’s age, there were no more children born to the union, which continued without known loss of harmony until Joseph died in 1788 at the age of seventy- eight; Frances survived him by nearly three years, living to the grand old age of more than ninety. 

Joseph Pain probably received a great deal of help from his wife in the course of his business, for Oldys speaks of ‘fitting stays for the ladies of Thetford’. At that time, corsets were worn continually until they were worn out, and they were never cleaned. The fitting of these foundation garments would have called for considerable tact, and a working wife would have been necessary for a small stay maker; certainly, a woman such as Oldys represented Frances to have driven customers away, and the family business would scarcely have survived. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, and Joseph% constant source of guidance, had expressed Quaker opinion on such matters: ‘There are many things proper for a woman to look after, both in their families and concerning women, which are not so proper for the men; which modesty in women cannot so well speak of before men as they can amongst their own sex’. Undoubtedly, the matrons of Thetford would have addressed themselves more readily to Frances than to Joseph when they needed a new corset. 

Thetford was an old town and the government maintained a constant presence in it, for an excise officer was stationed there. Excise offices were usually located at inns and when Paine was born it was at The Swan, though the following year it was moved to another inn, The Cock. Thomas would have been familiar with the excise presence from his earliest days and Oldys suggested that in his early youth he enquired about the duties of the excise men.

Later in life, when Paine returned to Thetford and applied for an excise appointment, his application would have entailed placing on record a considerable amount of information regarding his personal circumstances, and this would have been fully disclosed to Oldys when the Excise Head Office was instructed to cooperate with him in his privileged researches into Paine’s life and excise experience. Thus it was Paine himself who supplied much of the information drawn on by Oldys for his book, though it was adversely slanted by him, but every biographer of Paine since has turned to his biography for information; but it is not necessary to accept it blindly and without consulting contemporary information from sources Oldys found convenient to ignore. For example, he disclosed that Paine had not been baptised, but he did not make known to the public that this was sufficiently common in excise applicants (in those days) for the Excise Commissioners to have provided for alternative evidence of an applicant’s age to be acceptable for ensuring that it fell within the strictly prescribed limits. Family evidence, such as an entry in a family bible, was the favoured alternative, but all alternative evidence of age was required to be vetted by an investigating supervisor (a senior excise official), who had to reconcile it with visual indications, and have it confirmed by formal declarations before magistrates. When Paine applied to join the excise service his mother would have been visited by a mature official who studied her face and inquired why she was so much older-looking than he had expected, and why there had ‘been variations in the baptismal practices of her children, and he would have demanded legal statements in support of her replies. Such probing into her personal life might have seemed highly impertinent to Frances, and if she gave sharp replies, the investigator would have recorded them as evidence of Paine’s family background, and in due course they would have been made known to Oldys. Such is the likely basis for the adverse comments he made about Frances. 

Paine separated himself from the direct influence of the unusual marriage of his diverse parents when he left Thetford whilst still a young man, having found himself dissatisfied by the hum-drum life of an assistant to his father in the stay making business, and went to sea, but returned to the stay making craft for a while in London, at which stage in life he probably joined the new Christian sect we now know as Wesleyan Methodism, which was then growing within the Established Church. Methodism took root and spread most swiftly within the concentrations of workers who had entered the new industries spawned by the Industrial Revolution; many of them keenly missed the social support they had known in cottage industries now superseded, and they found an answer to their need in Methodism. Much of the credit for the movement’s success is due to the genius of its leader John Wesley, whose novel technique for integrating local groups into an internally- communicating national organisation was soon copied by other movements seeking to integrate workers. 

Well-known features of modern trade-unionism such as the membership card and regular local subscriptions are of Methodist origin. Wesley’s local societies were the fore-runners of local union branches, each guided by a class leader who collected a penny a week from every member. Each society also elected its own officers and took a lively interest in the welfare of every individual member. Membership was formally acknowledged by a ‘ticket which conferred membership nationally as well as locally and thus served as a ‘passport’. It is probable that Paine availed himself of such a Methodist ‘passport’ when he moved from London to Dover in 1758, and there entered into employment with another stay maker, Mr. Grace, a prominent Methodist in the town. Indeed, he may even have heard of the vacancy in Dover through the Methodist grape-vine. 

The Methodist Recorder for August 16, 1906, described Mr. Grace as the Dover class-leader, and that he took Paine to class with him. On one occasion a preacher failed to turn up and Paine was invited to take his place. It is interesting that Grace did not himself take the missing preacher’s place but delegated the job to Paine. Clearly he had decided that Paine was worthy to stand before his fellow Methodists, but it is unlikely that this was solely on his own judgement, for there was another member of his household whose advice would have been highly influential, Miss Grace, his niece, a lady of outwardly meek behaviour, but who was driven by an implacable will. She had already demonstrated her concern to further Methodism by converting her uncle, and she was probably the strongest influence on Paine. She has been frequently misrepresented by Paine biographers as the daughter of Mr. Grace, a precedent maliciously set by Oldys which others have ineptly followed. Oldys also foolishly imputed a romantic attachment between her and Paine, although at the time of his sojourn in Dover she was probably being courted by the first of her two husbands. But she was undoubtedly a strong influence on Paine at the time, and she is long overdue for depiction in his story.

Miss Grace was born about May 1735 and was brought up in Wakefield, where she scandalised her parents by attending a Methodist service in a public house. They thought her insane and threatened to have her confined in an asylum if she attended again, but on reflection decided to send her to live with her uncle in Dover, where Methodism had not quite arrived, but it soon did and Miss Grace attended its first service there held in a cooper’s shop about 1755. Now it was her uncle’s turn to remonstrate with her and he too banned her from attending but she ignored the ban. He then reported the matter to her family in Wakefield which brought her mother to Dover. But this too failed to prevent the girl attending the meetings, and eventually she converted her uncle! 

Paine moved to Sandwich, but the town was in the doldrums and a poor prospect for a stay maker. Oldys states that Paine was ‘not the first who had there used the mysteries of stay-making’, and Mr. Grace would have known the fate of Paine’s predecessors in trade and probably had warned him of the risk he was taking, but also probably hoped that Paine would bring hope to the town with his missionary zeal for Methodism. Oldy records that ‘There is a tradition that in his lodging he collected a congregation to whom he preached as an independent, or as a Methodist…’. 

One of Paine’s most urgent needs was for a local source of raw materials, which would have brought him into contact with Richard Solly, the town’s woollens draper, his visit would also have afforded him an opportunity to make known his evangelical mission and issue invitations to his meetings. Solly’s wife Maria seems to have become interested in the remarkable new-comer, and just as Miss Grace had taken her uncle to a Methodist meeting in Dover, so did Maria Solly bring her maid an orphan named Mary Lambert, who, according to Oldys, was ‘a pretty girl of modest behaviour’. To her the lonely preacher may have seemed a romantic figure. Five months later Paine and Mary married at St. Peter’s Church, Sandwich, one of the witnesses being Maria Solly. 

The marriage did not last long. Paine may have drawn encouragement from his parent’s union, as they had achieved success although initially appearing to have little in common, but his parents were much more mature on their wedding day than 

Mary, aged twenty-one, and Thomas twenty-two, whose parents had both come from the same locality and had got to know each other over a far longer period than Thomas had known Mary, a mere five months. The pair simply had not had enough time together, nor enough leisure in each other’s company to discuss to adequately discuss their ambitions and domestic prospects. For Mary, the sudden transition from a life in service where many decisions would have been taken for her, to a hectic doubly- demanding existence divided between being a working wife to a newly-established stay-maker, and a supportive wife to an enthusiastic evangelical preacher, must have been traumatic. Many years later, in the June 1775 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Paine published his essay, ‘Reflections on Unhappy Marriages’, and his comments therein seem drawn from the disappointment of his youthful first marriage: 

Those that are undone this way are the young, the rash and amorous, whose hearts are ever glowing with desire, whose eyes are ever roaming after beauty, those dote on the first amiable image that chance throws in their way when the flame is once kindled, would risk eternity itself to appease it. But, still like their first parents, they no sooner taste the tempting fruit, but their eyes are opened: the folly of their intemperance becomes visible; shame -succeeds first, then repentance; but sorrow for themselves soon returns to anger with the innocent cause of their unhappiness. Hence flow bitter reproaches, and keen invectives, which end in mutual hatred and contempt. Love abhors clamour, and soon flies away, and happiness finds no entrance when love is gone. Thus for a few hours of dalliance, I will not call it affection, the repose of all their future days are sacrificed, and those who but just before seem’d to live only for each other, now would almost cease to live, that the separation might be eternal. 

Little is known of Paine’s first marriage except that it was short; and the circumstances of its termination have never been reliably ascertained. The couple are said to have furnished a house with the assistance of Mr. Rutter, an upholsterer, who could have been another supplier of materials to Paine in his business; a house in Sandwich has long been regarded as their abode, but this is not an established fact, and a few months after their wedding, the couple moved to Margate, a busier town where Methodism was also making its appearance. And there Paine’s first marriage seems to have come to an end. 

Oldys sought to portray Paine as a cruel husband, disappointed because Mary, who had been merely a lady’s maid, had bought no fortune, but conceding that Maria Sony remained a benefactress. Oldys also recalls a local tradition that Mary died in childbirth, but this is unsubstantiated, although many writers sympathetic to Paine have seized upon it as the reason for the termination of the union. Finally, Oldys suggested that Mary may have left Paine to live out the rest of her life in obscurity, and this is not only plausible, but is the most probable outcome of his ill-advised, short lived first marriage. Little information has ever come to light, although Oldys availed himself of every assistant he could find, including an antiquary living in Sandwich, and various excise officers in Margate and London. He tried very hard to trace Mary, because Paine’s first marriage and its break-up, offered him the most likely prospect of embarrassing Paine though his private life, but he did succeed in capitalising on this opportunity. However, he did succeed in discovering a lot about Mary’s background (probably through trawling the excise network in south-east England), and elicited the fact that her father had once been an excise officer in the vicinity of Sittingboume, consequently, with the assistance of the surviving excise archives, we can discern some features of Mary’s life and experiences before her marriage to Thomas, from which an outline of her world may be attempted. 

Mary Lambert seems to have been of considerable interest in her own right; she was the only known child of James Lambert and his mentally unstable wife, having been born two years after he was dismissed from the excise station of Milton near Sittingboume. James became first a shop-keeper and then a bailiff for the rest of his life. He died in poor circumstances when Mary was only fifteen years old, and her mother died in an asylum about the same time, thus her situation must have been very difficult. Nevertheless, she made a life for herself, although this entailed crossing the county and entering into service in the Solly household, where six years later she appears to have achieved the status of an accepted companion for Mrs. Solly, going with her to church, and enjoying her mistress’s support both at her marriage and afterwards. Why she came to Sandwich is not dear, but there is a link between Sandwich and Sittingboume through trade, for many of the brick houses in Sandwich had been built of Sittingboume bricks; the distance between the two towns was about thirty miles, and heavy consignments of bricks would have floundered in mud on poor roads if they had been conveyed in horse drawn carts, but both tons had access to functioning wharves along the coast and transport by sea would have been convenient and economic for this trade. The greater part of Lambert’s professional life whilst Mary lived with him was as a bailiff, which would have brought him into contact with disputing parties within this established trade, and he would have been called to Sandwich on occasion and to have met some of the established traders there, possibly including the Sollys. We do not know when Mary’s mother entered a mental home, but as Mary approached school-leaving age, her father may have looked out for vacancies in service for young girls in his area of work, and he may have been the agent arranging Mary’s employment by Mrs. Solly, who is a rather shadowy figure of whom we know little. But Maria SoIly was obviously a warm-hearted woman, possibly lacking a daughter of her own, and she seems to have treated Mary more as an adopted daughter than just a maid. 

When Mary tried to settle down with her very busy husband, and friction began to arise in the marriage, it is quite likely that from a background of a quasi-favoured daughter she stood her ground against Thomas, and noisy quarrels became known to their neighbours, which reflected against Paine as both a stay maker and preacher. Mary, indeed, may seriously have fought to make a success of her marriage, but whether she knew it or not the dice were loaded against her, for her husband probably already had in mind a fixed idea of the wife he thought he needed, and believed he had found in Mary, whose modest behaviour would have initially seemed to reflect that of Miss Grace, the talented niece of his previous employer. But if so, such an expectation would have been unfair, as well as ill-judged. Miss Grace had settled into her uncle’s household before Methodism became a growing part of both their lives, and her later style of living was in the established house of a successful man much more mature in outlook than the young preacher Mary married. Had Paine been similar to John Bunyan, and content to develop his religion with the assistance of his wife, Mary’s marriage might have enjoyed better prospects, but Paine was more akin to George Fox, are zealous to pit himself against a world still hostile in many places to Methodism. Mary may have soon lost heart, and Thomas may well have lost patience; the circumstances of unhappy marriages which Paine later described accord very well with what is known of his swift courtship and hasty marriage to Mary, and with the rapidly deteriorating domestic relationships they soon seem to have found themselves in. 

In such stressful circumstances, the not-distant town of Margate where Methodism was also taking hold, may have offered better domestic prospects from stay making, and hence a firmer basis from which Paine could acquire expanding status a..; a preacher, but clearly any such idea did not work out. There is no indication whether Mary developed similar irrationality to that which had brought her mother into mental care, but having once before made a new start in life, Mary could have felt it was time to do so again, and slipped away to another location where Oldys failed to find her. And Paine probably sought her himself after she had gone missing and similarly failed to find her. However, speculative gossip retailed by Oldys that Mary, now pregnant, had gone to a lying in hospital may have been well-founded although it was not confirmed by his subsequent enquiries. But two entries survive in the records for the nearby Parish of St. Lawrence in Thanet which strongly suggest the presence there of Mary after the presumed break-up date of her marriage; the first is of the baptism on December 7, 1760 of: ‘Pain — Sarah, daughter of Thomas and Mary; the second sadly records that Pain’s daughter did not survive infancy, for in a burial entry reading baldly: Sarah, daughter of Thomas and Mary Pain. Clearly someone had been concerned that Sarah’s brief existence should be formally recorded; Mary herself is the obvious suggestion, and since Sarah lived for nine months someone must have taken care of her, presumably within the Parish of St. Lawrence, where Mary gave her birth, and may have seen out her own life also. Nothing is known of any other friends of Mary along the coast, but her father may have had contacts she could avail herself of, through deliveries coastwise of consignments of Sittingboume bricks. And of course Maria Sally may have had friends to whose care Mary and her unborn child could have been recommended; but although Mrs. Sally is reputed to have maintained contact with Mary after her marriage, Mary’s return to the Sally household never seems to have taken place. 

How much Paine ever learned about his daughter and his estranged wife we will probably never know. Sarah would appear to have conceived about six months after the marriage, and Paine was back in Thetford to commence studying for the Excise about the time his daughter died in the Autumn of 1761, according to information supplied by Oldys. Only one piece of evidence as to what actually happened has ever existed, and amongst the scores of Paine biographers it has been held only by Oldys. It is the written declaration of his martial status Paine made in his own hand when he applied to enter the Excise. Oldys seems to have held this document in reserve, presumably to challenge Paine if he could tempt him into public dispute, but it must have been insufficient in itself to clinch a case against Paine in the contemporary climate. Unless Paine’s excise dossier ever comes to light, and this, in the opinion of the present writer, remains a possibility, then the circumstances of the break-up of his first marriage, and its probable effect on his second, will remain forever subjects of speculation. The likelihood is that Mary simply left him, possibly while he was visiting his parents and seeking their advice, and it may have been that when Paine returned to Margate he found her gone, and never ascertained what had actually happened to her. This possibility, which Oldys also postulated, is supported by what we know of his second marriage ten years later in 1771.

Editorial Note

The paper presented above was extracted from notes left by the late George Hindmarch that are now held by the society, having been presented to it by his wife. It was intended to be followed by a study of Paine’s second marriage, as there is a note to that effect at the conclusion of the paper, but there is no manuscript of such a study in the papers we have. 

However, Mr. Hindmarch, who worked as an Excise officer for forty years and took a great interest in its history, wrote about Paine’s work in drawing up a petition for better pay and conditions for excise officers which he set out in his Case of the Officers of Excise (1772-3). Mr. Hindmarch’s study was published in an edition of only one hundred copies in 1998, of which he allowed only a strictly limited number to go, and then only to scholars he felt would acknowledge his work. His book, a paperback of 95 pages was entitled, Thomas Paine: The Case of the King of England and his Officers of Excise, and is a very important though little known study. Anyone seriously interested in Paine’s life and work should read it. The remaining copies of the book have been presented to the society to sell for its funds and copies are available at £3. 50 which includes postage.

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Beyond The Call Of Duty, Memoirs Of An Excise Man.  Horace Sheppard, M.B.E. Illustrated. 424pp, Brighton, The Old  Museum Press, 1998. ISBN 1 84042 012 X. £15.99  

ALTHOUGH this is not a work about, Thomas Paine, or specifically associated with him, not that he goes unnoticed by the author, it is written by an individual who has a connection with him by virtue of having been an excise officer, al though unlike Paine he remained in the excise for the better part of his career. The author was born in Chatham in 1906 and accepted into the Customs and Excise as an `Unattached Officer’ in 1927 at the age of twenty-one, retiring in 1969 after having served forty-two years. This book is essentially a record of his life and experiences in the excise, though well larded with reminiscences of his family and social  activities, which seem to have included collecting antiques and  antiquarian books, whether these included books on Paine is, however,  not stated.

Thomas Paine accompanied by Robert Burns turns up in chapter  twenty, the four and a half pages making up this part of the book being  devoted exclusively to them. It rapidly becomes clear from what the  author writes that he holds both men in very high esteem. It has to be  said there is nothing new in this chapter, but Mr.Sheppard does repeat the all too common error about Paine having been charged with  treason, whereas in actual fact it was one of seditious libel. Burns, of  course, was an admirer of Paine, although he tended to be rather  circumspect in regard to the radical ideas he shared in with him; his  personal copies of Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, which he would  have had to conceal, are still extant.  

There are many fascinating and amusing incidents recorded in the pages of this book and though tempted to mention some I will resist  doing so, leaving the reader to find these for themselves (it is a great  pity there is no index). If pressed to identify any feature giving the book a degree of importance which removes it from simply being a recreational read, I would point to material in it which social historians will find of great value, although this is expressed in an entertaining  manner rather than in terms of what one would expect in a scholarly treatise. Whether it was the intention of the author to give his work this  measure of importance is doubtful, but whatever be the case he has  done so in the most pleasurable manner.  

This is a book to be taken to bed, but be warned, once you start  reading it you may find it difficult to put down and become so absorbed  in it that you will suddenly discover it is time to get up!

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Thomas Paine: The Case Of The King Of England And His Officers Of Excise. George Hindmarch. 95pp. Paperback. Purley,  published by the author, 1998. ISBN 0 9531981. Unpriced.

This short essay is unquestionably a major contribution to Paine studies, though likely to be considered rather on the controversial side in that it casts Paine in a role few, if any, of his admirers would have thought even remotely possible, for it is the belief of the author that Paine was ‘an undercover agent’ for George III (p.56) and wrote his  Case of the Officers of Excise in support of him as well as on behalf of his  excise colleagues (p.51). This was his first political publication, the  promotion of which ‘was the apprenticeship Paine served as a political  propagandist’ (p.3’7), however, those who he believes were behind  Paine, or as he puts it, ‘the high dignitaries who stood in the obscurity  of Paine’s shadow’, had no intention of revealing to ‘the majority of the  readers to whom it was selectively addressed’ the pamphlet’s ‘main purpose’ (p.11). And this ‘purpose’? According to Mr. Hindmarch it was  to promote the king’s case for an increase in the Civil List, which had  been set at £8000,000 annually when he came to the throne in 1750, but  because of inflation it had become insufficient to cover his expenses,  which included paying the salaries of excise officers.  

Mr. Hindmarch draws upon many sources for evidence to support his  thesis, including the archives of the Customs and Excise Department,  which most Paine scholars have curiously tended to neglect, numerous  economic and historic studies and, of course, Paine’s own works, in  particular his excise essay. Taken as a whole this impressive volume of  material provides him with a solid foundation from which to work. He is  the first researcher to recognise the difficulties Paine would have had to  overcome had he been alone in attempting to mobilise support amongst  the nation’s 3000 riding officers as well as collecting the three shilling  voluntary donation each had been asked to give. The author rightly  refers to ‘undistinguished writers’ (on Thomas Paine) who fail ‘to  research into his background’ thus perpetuating ‘a number of serious  misrepresentations’ (p.9), a point also made by the late Audrey  Williamson (cf. Thomas Paine, His Life, Work and Times. Allen &  Unwin, 1973. chapter 3). 

Working alone Paine would have been unable  to overcome these problems, however, he had the active backing of a  recently appointed Excise Commissioner, George Lewis Scott, who was  supported by his fellow commissioners (the author rejects the claim of  previous biographers about the Excise Board being hostile to Paine’s  activities (p.36)), and it was Scott who co-ordinated the circulation of  officers and arranged the collection of their ‘donations’, for unlike  Paine he would have had access to the essential address list and the  authority to apply pressure on subordinates (p.38). It is not without  significance that Scott was an intimate of the king, having been his tutor  in his youth. Mr.Hindmarch contends it was Scott’s role ‘to persuade  Parliament that changes in the king’s static civil list arrangements were  necessary in the national interest’, using a ‘forceful cogent argument  from the principal fundraising Department – the Excise. The much hated excisemen were to lead the campaign…’ (p.30).  

On the debit side is the fact that Paine never acknowledged publicly  or privately any involvement in a scheme to help the king, which would  have made him, in effect, ‘an undercover agent of the king’, or that  such a scheme was part of his brief when writing his Case of the Officers  of Excise. It is difficult to understand why he remained silent if he had  been caught up in the operation of a hidden agenda. After he was  outlawed he had nothing to lose by keeping silent. The same is true of  the government, once Paine was known as being the author of Common Sense, to have revealed him as having acted as an agent for George III may well have  created suspicions amongst his revolutionary colleagues about his trustworthiness and  reliability, thus politically harming the colonial cause. Then there is George Chalmers,  author of the first attempt at the character  assassination of Paine, which he wrote  under the fictitious name Francis Oldys. He  could have used the information in his  book, published in 1791, which would  undoubtedly make Paine suspect by his  French as being a potential agent for the  English government, in other words, it  would have paid the English authorities a  dividend to have revealed the secret if there had been one. But Chalmers, who Mr.Hind march believes to have known all the details, remained silent. This is explained away by the author as being due to him not wishing to embarrass the  king and government, the latter having not only paid him £500 to write the book but also accorded him maximum assistance to gather information.  

There is what may be a reference by Paine to his involvement in a scheme such as postulated by the author. It occurs in his letter to Oliver Goldsmith, which accompanied a copy of The Case of the Officers of Excise he sent unsolicited to the playwright. Although he reproduces the letter in its entirety Mr. Hindmarch appears to have overlooked this comment, perhaps because of its ambiguity. However, it might (my  emphasis) constitute evidence. Paine writes of George Chalmers (”Francis  Oldys”) Portrait by H. Edridge acting in the humble station of an officer of excise, adding, ‘though  somewhat differently circumstanced to what many of them are…’ A strange  comment indeed, but it could just provide an important missing piece  of the jigsaw. For the present it would be premature to draw any firm conclusions  one way or another in respect of Mr.Hindmarch’s thesis, even though  there is much to be said in its favour, as I have sought to show.  Considerable further research and discussion is certainly required so what I would suggest is that anyone with a serious interest in Thomas  Paine obtain a copy, assuming any are available, for I understand it was  issued in a limited edition primarily for private circulation, to enable  them to study the author’s thesis in detail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Thomas Paine and His Radical Contemporaries  appeared first on .

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

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

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

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

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

THE ROOTS OF THE IDEAS EXPRESSED BY PAINE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eulogy on Paine 

Immortal Paine, while mighty reasoners jar 

We crown thee General of the Headstrong War; 

Thy logic vanquished error, and thy mind 

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

Thy soul of fire must sure ascend the sky, 

Immortal Paine, thy fame can never die: 

For men like thee their names must ever save 

From the black edicts of the tyrant grave. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The meteoric political career of Thomas Paine was so dazzling that it has largely eclipsed the events of his formative years during which he obtained the expertise and developed the tenacity that enabled him to respond to the opportunity afforded by the rapid changes in the American colonies in the years following his arrival there. Paine’s biographers have usually given a brief account of his early years and his excise career as an introduction, but one treated as a closed date separated from the main events of his life by his migration to America. There has been little attempt to fit this early period into the overall pattern of his life, and his first thirty-seven years have often been spoken of as a period of failure. In the opinion of the present writer, this is a mistaken view. 

Admittedly there are great difficulties in evaluating his early struggles for Paine was very reticent about personal matters, and other sources of information are not easily tapped or understood. Yet they are informative, and it may be because of the neglect of material relating to these early years that Paine’s character and the influences that bore upon it have not yet been fully comprehended. Oldys, although a hostile biographer, was under no illusion as to the importance of Paine’s excise career, and took full advantage of his exceptional opportunity for tracing details still available to him in the official records. Moncure Conway, almost certainly the greatest of Paine’s biographers, played the major part in rescuing Paine from the obscurity in which his enemies sought to bury him, but Conway paged himself under some difficulties regarding the excise period by retiring to America to write his life of Palle, for unlike Oldys he was thus without contact with practical excisemen who could have informed him about working conditions in the excise, which have changed very little over the centuries; they could also have explained to him that the excise has its own jargon and words may be used in an excise context to convey something quite different from their meaning in common usage. Conway did not underestimate the importance of the early years, and went to great pains to check Oldys and repudiate some of his slurs, but in his desire to redress the Injustice done to Paine he was at times in danger of doing Paine even greater damage, and this danger has not been lessened in the long run by the attempts of Palm’s later biographers to explain Paine’s excise dismissals without studying the excise background and language in sufficient detail to express the facts accurately. 

It is disappointing to note that some of the best recent accounts of Paine’s life are quite sloppy in their presentation of his excise career. It is necessary for an understanding of Paine’s development to stress that he was an Excise Officer, never a Customs Officer, and in The Case of the Officers of Excise he differentiated between Excise Officers and other revenue officials. Not only were the Customs and Excise separate revenue services, but there was rivalry between, and friction was so acute on some occasions that special rules were drawn up in 1755 to minimise it when representatives of the separate services became involved in a particular investigation at the same time. It was not until 1909, a hundred years after Paine’s death, that the Customs and the Excise were brought together in the newly constituted department of Customs and Excise, and this event is of interest to students of Paine because it occasioned the disgorging from the archives of the Inland Revenue in Somerset House of hundreds of volumes of excise records which till then had been regarded as confidential and not available for inspection. These books are almost wholly headquarters records which are only partially representative of the work of the excisemen, for the vast bulk of the department’s work was performed by local officers usually working as individuals in near isolation from their fellows. Paine was such an individual country officer in his two periods of service in Alford and Lewes, and his personal records would have been kept in the offices of senior area officials known as Collectors. 

Few local records have survived, or at any rate have yet been brought to light, but such as are available to us, although Incomplete, are of great importance in any consideration of Paine as an Exciseman; yet they have been entirely neglected. Not only have his departmental efforts been incompletely comprehended, but the rather curious fact that he chose to be an exciseman, and clung to his appointment, does not seem to have excited the curiosity of his biographers to when it might well have afforded a challenge. For the Excise was a service which attracted a phenomenal amount of hatred from the public, and this hatred is again an important element in Paine’s story which has not been fully taken into account. 

The subject of the Excise is undoubtedly a difficult one, for whereas there have been a number of accounts of the Customs department – for which more comprehensive records survive – the Excise has been almost entirely neglected by serious historians as a subject in itself, and it will now be every difficult task to fill this glittering gap in the history of central government. In addition to the paucity of early Excise records there is a rather major difficulty in that the individual officers and the staff at headquarters have been, until the last decade, quite separate castes within the department knowing very little about each other’s work. Yet the Excise has exited such extraordinary reactions from the public at large that it might have been expected that social histadens would have queued up to study it. The redoubtable Dr. Johnson laid down the tone in characteristic and provocative fashion when he defined excise in his famous dictionary as a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom the Excise is paid. On the appearance of his dictionary, the outraged Excise Commissioners took legal advice, and the Attorney General optioned that there was libel, but he suggested that an opportunity for changing the words mould be allowed, but Dr. Johnson did not deign to take action and apparently the Commissioners did not dare!

Some general observations appear necessary if the excise background to Paine’s

activities is to be appreciated.

The range of duties discharged by excise officers is very wide and complex and it extends far beyond the narrow field generally regarded as appropriate to a minor civil servant; but in its simplest form – the collection of tax on consumable articles such as alcoholic beverages – it has been in continuous operation in England since 1643. Before that date excise had often been employed on the continent where its operation had led to its acquiring such an evil reputation in England that any known consideration of its introduction led to a public outcry. Both Elizabeth I and Charles I are known to have thought about it, but each shrank from the probable consequences of public resentment. Even after the outbreak of the civil war when the parliamentary forces stood in need of increased financial resources, a statement was issued in 1641 which not only denied that imposition of the excise was imminent, but declared that those spreading the rumour should be sought out and brought to the House for punishment. 

Yet in 1643 the excise was introduced, allegedly only for the duration of the civil war, at first in the simple form of a levy on popular alcoholic beverages to raise revenue for the support of the parliamentary forces; it was collected by eight Commissioners and their subordinate officers, who were empowered to call upon the assistance of organised forces if necessary. London was a stronghold of the parliamentary cause, but its citizens nevertheless saluted the imposition of the hated excise – which taxed the poor man’s glass equally with the rich man’s – by rioting and burning the Excise House which had been established at Smithfield. The royalists also imposed excise on the areas they held and also found it expedient to pretend that it was a temporary measure. But although the range on which excise was imposed was in due course reduced, the excise has never been revoked, although resentment against it continued and sometimes flared up in riots. 

So great and so persistent was the general hatred of the excise that in 1733 when Walpole introduced a plan to extend it, he was forced by fierce opposition to withdraw his Excise Bill. Yet Walpole had good grounds for his proposal, for the customs service had been found to be both inefficient and corrupt (150 Customs Officers having been dismissed in the preceding few years for fraudulent practices) and it made sense to transfer much of the control of imported dutiable good to the Excise. Contraband goods were being widely and frequently landed in quantity, and distributed throughout the country by organised gangs of armed smugglers who rode with impunity to within a few miles of London in such strength that revenue officers did not dare challenge them without military support. Once these goods had passed out of the coastal areas the excise officers would have been much better placed to challenge and collect duty at a later point of sale. 

The cancellation of Walpole’s excise proposals led to widespread public rejoicing. Walpole is reported to have said that his Bill could only have been operated by an armed force and that he would rather resign than enforce taxation at the cost of bloodshed. London celebrated his defeat with illuminations, bonfires, and the ringing of bells. Provincial cities followed suit as the news was brought to them by special messengers. In Bristol the church bells began to peal at 2am and continued all day as bonfires were lit and effigies of Walpole and an exciseman were burnt. Chester never had so many bonfires – one was kept burning for five days – and at Oxford jubilant crowds urged on by the gownsmen of the university rampaged in celebration for three days. More than fifty years were to elapse before it was dared to introduce new excise duties on commodities of general consumption, and during that half-century of hatred Thomas Paine grew up, entered the Excise, was twice dismissed, and emigrated to America to speed the secession of the American colonies. 

The distinguishing feature of the Excise has always been the close direct association of the officers with the traders they control for revenue purposes all over the country. Excisemen have never been faceless men, and they are known personally and as personalities in their working localities; and as they were denied employment in their home areas they always appeared as intruders in the eyes of the local people. Their work consisted mainly in visiting traders’ working premises, keeping permanent accounts of the traders’ business operations, and ensuring that all relevant excise dues were collected at the appropriate times, When notices had to be delivered to the public at large, this was done, even in Paine’s day, by affixing them to the doors of churches, and adding a notification of the official residence of the excise officer for the area. The faceless men of the service were the Commissioners at the Excise Office in London who disdained to deal directly with the public, with whom until 1838 they would not communicate otherwise than through their local officers. The Commissioners have ruined extremely chary of placing their signatures to documents which woul. indicate their personal cognisance of contentious matters, and still prefer to shelter behind lesser officials and irregularities such as any misrepresentation of legal provisions are brought to their notice – even though the representations may be upheld and the incorrect practices rectified as a result of such submission. 

In 1771 the total strength of the Excise department was 4,321, of which the headquarters of 9 Commissioners and their staff comprised merely 230. Country excise officers totalled 2,736 under 256 Supervisors reporting to 53 Collectors, who were the Commissioners’ representatives in the provinces, each Collector being responsible for an area approximating to a county. Communications were very poor by the standards of today and the Collectors were vested with great authority so that swift action could be taken when emergencies arose but the conferring of local authority also presented risks, as a Collector could act to conceal irregularity as well as to suppress it, and Collectors proved on occasion to be fallible mortals. There were also hundreds of town officers in London and the ports. 

Supervisors themselves needed to be supervised, for they not infrequently abused their authority, and officers were poorly placed to resist improper proposals or rebut malicious charges made against them if they declined to co-operate with a dishonest Supervisor. These matters will call for greater consideration when considering Paine’s two dismissals, which are outside the scope of the present article, but in passing it can be observed that in 1725 the Commissioners commented that few Supervisors showed proper diligence and ordered the Collectors to report on them. Supervisors were forbidden to borrow money from officers as some neglected to pay their debts, and they were forbidden also to make arrangements for participating in officers’ rewards when they had not shared in the officers’ work that had earned them. 

It has always been known that Paine was active in promoting a scheme for obtaining an increase in the salaries of the excise officers. Oldys comments that Paine had ‘risen by superior energy to be a chief among the excisemen,’ and also remarks, a ‘rebellion of the excisemen who seldom have the populace on their site was not much feared by their superiors.’ It has usually been taken for granted that Paine’s initiative on salary drew upon him the displeasure of the Commissioners, but this is not established, and examination of the official records has produced evidence to the contrary, during the period when the claim he had submitted in accordance with the procedures of the times was under consideration. 

The Commissioners had long been concerned about dishonesty and irregular cond- uct in the excise service, and not only Supervisors but also officers and Collectors had been guilty of misdemeanours which had incurred the Board’s administrative displeasure. There had been a number of cases of officers collecting excise dues from traders, and simply making off with them; these blatant thefts had not been hushed up, but on the contrary the Collectors had been instructed to warn traders against paying excise dues to officers and to tell them that in any case of an absconding officer the tax was still due to the Crown and must be paid to the Collector. In 1761, it was ordered that traders were themselves to collect their excise licences which were not to be delivered to them by officers, who presumably may have thought that such a service deserved pecuniary reward. But probably the most significant warning was that issued in 1743 when the Commissioners circulated all the Collectors and ordered that every officer and Supervise should write into his records a stern admonition against entering and searching private premises without first obtaining a warrant authorising entry from the Justices of the Peace. The order makes clear that many warnings to the same effect had been previously issued, but they had been ignored, and quantities of goods had been illegally seized by officers on unjustifiable suspicion that they had been improperly obtained. There is no reasonable doubt as to the root of these malpractices. The officers had long been unable to support their families and themselves properly by the honest execution of their onerous and dangerous duties, and had frequently descended to augmenting their official salaries by irregular proceedings, to the severe embarrassment of the Commissioners and the detriment of the reputation of the excise service. 

No student of Thomas Paine can imagine that he would have viewed with equanimity these abuses which went on around him, and which the Commissioners themselves repeatedly brought to the notice of every working officer. Paine a reformer by nature and a preacher by inclination, could have seen no course open to him other than to work for the eradication of these irregularities and the creation of an honest excise service which would operate efficiently and humanely to the eventual good of the community, to whose ultimate benefit the excise revenue should properly be used. Nor would the excise service of his own time have been his sole concern, for much greater issues would already have been revolving in his mind. 

In 1772 Paine reached the age of 35 years. He had spent his life till then in a variety of ways, and (he told Rickman) he seldom passed five minutes of life without acquiring some knowledge; he had acquired a wealth of acceptance in town and country, on land and sea, as staymaker, sailor, preacher, schoolmaster and exciseman. He would then have been meditating the schemes of social welfare which he was to publish in his Rights of Man, and which we know from his correspondence he discussed in his London days with John King in the city. Paine was no mere dreamer, he actively pursued the realisation of his ideals, and as well as formulating plans for old-age pensions and the like he would have been considering how they might be put into operation in the England of his day when nationwide services were nearly non-existent and local services in their infancy. The Excise, and the Excise alone, operated a network which covered every square inch of the kingdom, and no matter where any state pensioner might reside, his address would already be allocated to an Excise Officer who would accept responsibility for any business of state related to the occupants of that address. Already some of the work of supervision of pensions, such as those paid to Chelsea Pensioners living away from the hospital, had been delegated to the Excise – indeed dishonest excisemen at Stirling in Scotland had been sentenced to transportation for fraudulent practices in connection with these pensions. Had a national old age pension been introduced in Paine’s day the Excise Officers would have been called upon to help operate its provisions, just as they were in fact called upon when the national scheme was actually introduced in the 20th century. The excise service was the only existing means of ascertaining and catering for the needs of the distressed sections of the populace as well as being one of the chief means of raising the necessary revenue. And throughout the whole kingdom there was probably no man more keenly aware of the potential value to the community of an honest efficient excise service than Thomas Paine. 

In Paine’s day no ordinary man could have envisaged that a single Excise Officer could set about putting right the deficiencies in the Excise, but Paine was no ordinary man, and he applied himself to provoke the winds of change. In 1776 when he published Common Sense, the world realised his potential for reformation. In 1772 the excise authorities had already made the same discovery, but it was never made public knowledge. At the same time Paine somehow bridged the yawning gulf between town and country, between the mighty Commissioners who sat aloof in London and the thousands of excisemen who performed the routine work of the department in obscurity and near isolation. How he accomplished it we do not know, but he spent the winter of 1772/3 in London working on his scheme for securing an increase in the salaries of the excisemen. Yet he could not have gone to London without the knowledge and approval of his superiors, for unauthorised absence from his station speedily resulted in the dismissal of an exciseman, and we know that Paine was not dismissed for the second time until 1774.

The Excise Office, the seat of the Commissioners, was situated in Broad Street In London, and so was the Excise Coffee House, from which on December 21, 1772 Paine addressed his famous letter to Dr. Goldsmith, which still survives amongst Goldsmith’s correspondence in the British Library. The juxtaposition of the. two similarly named premises is not to be wondered at, yet again the fact that Paine wrote from a coffee house near to the excise headquarters has not apparently called forth comment. Coffee houses were a feature of London life, and they performed more functions than merely to entertain and refresh those who frequented them. There Is nothing unusual in business being discussed in places of refreshment over working lunches or cups of coffee in any age, but the coffee houses of old London were sometimes used as regular offices for business; for example in 1714 when the London Custom House was seriously damaged by fire; the Customs Commissioners set up temporary premises at Ganaway’s coffee house, from which they conducted the business of the Customs department. 

The present writer no seriously suggests that during the summer of 1772/1773 Thomas Paine was working on his Case of the Officers of Excise from the Excise Office itself, or its environment, with the active co-operation of the Excise Commissioners who facilitated his efforts. However, as Paine was working in an unofficial capacity – much as present-day representatives of civil service staff organisations work in government offices by arrangement he would not have been allowed to address himself to his colleagues and prominent citizens of the realm from the Excise Office, and so would have adopted the practical expedient of corresponding from the nearby coffee house, whose name would have indicated to all his correspondents that the country exciseman was conducting his salary claim manoeuvres from a command post adjacent to the central authority. 

We know from the Goldsmith letter that upwards of 500 pounds was raised by Paine at three shillings per head, and this indicates that the vast majority of his colleagues actively supported him, although individually they were very vulnerable to the displeasure of their superiors. It is most unlikely that such extensive support could have been forthcoming nationally in the England of that day when national trade union activity had never previously been practised, unless there had been some indication that Paine, the chief instigator of the scheme, was working with the cognisance and tacit acquiescence of the Commissioners; it is probable that many excisemen would have declined to append their names to a national petition If there had not been some indication of at least a blind eye from the departmental disciplinarians, for not all excisemen had, or have, the moral courage of a Thomas Paine. 

Even in the 20th century organizations of any national body of individuals kept together by central correspondence know the onerous nature of the work involved in securing multiple support for a petition, however worthy its object. Picture, then, the problem facing Paine when without the facilities of the modern postal services he addressed himself to every parish in the country. No register of local excise offices of Paints day has survived, none is known positively to have existed. Examination of the surviving excise records shows that the Channel of communication to them from the Excise Office was through the 53 country Collectors. It is suggested that only the use of the same channel with the tacit approval of the Commissioners could have permitted Paine’s association of excisemen to be formed on a subscription basis. 

There is further circumstantial support for this suggestion. Although Paine does not say so in his letter to Goldsmith, his association covered all the excisemen in England and Wales, but not those in Scotland, although the Scots would have been just as sympathetic to his objectives and are unlikely to have been more timid in supporting him than their southern colleagues. The practical exclusion of the Scottish excisemen is apparent from the examination of the official records of this matter which have survived and have now become known. It is not difficult to understand why the Scots were not included in Paine’s petition. On the union of England and Scotland in 1707, five Scottish Commissions were appointed to form a Scottish Excise Board to control excise in Scotland separately from the English excise, but on the same lines, the British revenue being paid over to the English Board for onward transmission to the Treasury. There would therefore have been no direct avenue from the London Excise Office to the individual Scottish officers open to the English Commissioners, or to Thomas Paine if he was using the official channel. The co-operation of the Scottish Commissioners would have been necessary. 

Examination of the official records lends further support to the theory that Paine’s efforts did not initially meet with disapproval. It was not of course a new development for an increase in salary to be sought, what was new was that a national body of lowly civil servants, individually obscure and without influence, should be organised in a common application. For those government servants who had access to the corridors of power and knew the acceptable forms of application there was an accepted procedure for seeking increases. Some years before Paine petitioned on behalf of the whole body of excisemen, a single individual in the excise headquarters made his own approach, and in the year of Paine’s petition the six judges of the Scottish Court of Judiciary combined in a common application for themselves and their retainers who went on circuit with them. 

The eminence of the Scottish judges and their undoubted knowledge of procedures acceptable to their paymasters, ensure their application of pride of place as a criterion for assessing the technique practiced by Paine. The judges addressed themselves to the Head of the Court of Judiciary in Scotland, the Duke of Queensbury and Dover, and set out the difficulties which changing circumstances had inflicted upon them. We cannot doubt that they would have presented an eloquent and convincing case, and indeed the duke in his subsequent letter dated October 6th., 1773, addressed to the Lords of the Treasury, confirmed this. Unfortunately, as he did not attach a copy of their submission to him we are not able to compare their presentation of their difficulties with that Paine prepared of those of the excisemen. The duke proved a worthy advocate, and although the judges had foreborne to specify the amount of increase in their salaries which might meet their case he recommended that their existing salaries be raised from £200 to E300, with a further £50 on their expenses for earn of their circuits, together with commensurate increases for the clerks, macers and trumpeters, who accompanied them on circuit. 

Within the Excise Office, the clerk to the Comptroller had previously made his own approach to the widespread problem of an inadequate salary, and like the excisemen he addressed himself to the Commissioners, his commencing salary in 1741 had been £120 which had been augmented by £60 in 1752; his further petition for relief was undated but the Commissioners forwarded it to the Treasury on October 23rd, 1764 with a recommendation for a further £20 a year. The Treasury warrant authorising this increase bore the signature of Lord North. 

The pattern of approach is clear, and it seems that Paine, the countryman from Lewes, was able to learn it, possibly under the guidance of George Lewis Scott, the Commissioner with whom he was able to achieve a considerable degree of rapport – in itself a remarkable feat far an obscure underling, which has also escaped informed comment. Yet the task Paine had set himself was vastly greater than that faced by the Scottish judges in combination; he spoke not for a hand but for more than three thousand, not for eminent members of a highly-regarded profession but for detested and lowly officials. The Commissioners may well have sympathized with his objective but they lacked his courage. We cannot accurately date his presentation to them of his Case of the Excise Officers – which Oldys tells us first attracted the attention of George Lewis Scott – but it is most improbable that the Commissioners did not see it before Goldsmith; it may be that Scott was one of Paine’s superiors who advised him to proceed with the printing and presentation of 4,000 copies. It may also also have been that the Commissioners hoped that Members of Parliament would have the courage to recommend the hated excisemen to the paymasters in the Treasury, but if so they were disappointed and the matter returned to the Commissioners’ table. 

Paine told Goldsmith of a petition having been circulated throughout the kingdom and signed by all the officers; possibly this was passed to the Commissioners of Excise, for it could hardly have been addressed to any other authority. It has not been discovered. What has come to light is a short address to the Commissioners over the names of eight excise officers who presumably made up the executive committee of Thomas Paine’s association. It is a remarkable document which has both grace and charm in its presentation. It is not possible to do justice to it by merely reproducing its wording, which is as follows:

To the Honourable the Commissioners of Excise,

The humble and Dutiful Petition of the Officers of that Revenue Sheweth, 

That We the undermentioned Persons being deputed by the whole Body of the Officers of Excise throughout England and Wales to represent and set forth in an humble and dutiful Petition the Distress and Poverty we at present labour under, and to Pray Such Relief as the Wisdom and Goodness of That Power in whom the Right of Relieving Us (as Officers of Excise) is vested Humbly beg leave to lay before this Honourable Board —THAT the amazing una increasing Difference in the Price of all the Necessities of Life between the present Time and that wherein the Salaries of Officers were at first established has so reduced the Circumstances or your Petitioners and so involved them in Want and Misery that they are become unable to support themselves and Families with that Credit, Decency and Independence which is essentially necessary in a Revenue Officer. 

That our Salaries after Tax, Charity and Sitting Expenses are deducted amount to little more than FORTY SIX POUNDS per annum. That the greatest part of us are obliged to keep Horses purchased and kept at an Expense which we are unable to support. That the other Part are confined to live in Cities and Market Towns, or in London, where the Rent of Houses, Taxes thereon, and every Article necessary for the support of Life, are procured at the dearest Rates That the little we have for our Support is rendered less comfortable by our being removed from all our natural Friends & Relations, and thereby prevented in all those Parental or Friendly Assistances from them, which if enjoyed would in some measure lessen the Burden of our Wants. 

Suffer us therefore Honourable Sirs in behalf of our Distressed Brethren and selves to Petition You to take into Your Consideration the Wants and Misfortunes of your Petitioners and to give such Recommendation of their Case to the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury, or any such other Assistance as Your Honors in Your Wisdom and Lenity shall judge proper for the Happiness of the Petitioners. 

And Your Petitioners as in Duty bound will ever pray. 

There followed the names of eight brave men to whom belongs in all probability the honour of having launched the first national collective pay claim for working men in the Western World: Thomas Sykes, William May„ Henry Holland, Thomas Gray, John Crosse, Richard Ayling, Thomas Pattinson, and lastly the chief instigator or the petition and godfather of country-wide Trade Unionism as well as of the United States of America, Thomas Paine. 

It Is not known how many or the Excise Commissioners were actively in favor of Paine’s initiative; George Lewis Scott, by virtue of his special relationship with George III may well have exercised exceptional influence on the Board, but we know that he could not carry his point without support from other Commissioners. There is however no doubt whatever that all the nine Commissioners united in passing on Paints petition to the Treasury, for on February 5th., 1773, the following submission was forwarded over the signature of every one of them, each signing in order of seniority on the Excise Board:

To the right honorable the Lords Commrs of his Majesty’s Treasury

May it please your Lordships.

We beg leave to acquaint Your Lordships that a petition has been presented to us by several Officers of Excise on behalf of themselves and the whole Body of Officers of Excise throughout England and Wales praying us to take into Consideration their Distresses arising from the Smallness of their Salaries and praying relief. 

The Object of this Petition being of great and extensive Importance We have not thought proper to some to any determination thereupon until we have laid the same before Your Lordship a copy of the Petition is therefore annexed to our Memorial which we humbly submit to Your Lordships Consideration.

Excise Office 

London 

5th, February 1773. 

We are Your Lordships most obedient and most humble servants.

The fourth signature of the nine Commissioners is Geo. L. Scott.

By an accident of history, the Treasury did not at that time copy its correspondence into registers (as did the Excise Commissioners), but simply put the documents away. To this chance we owe the fact that the two documents detailed above survived and were passed in due course to the Public Records Office, where they were unearthed by the present writer. It is an interesting experience to look through the boxes of documents handled by the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury two centuries ago. The various petitions have been penned in a variety of hands, and while there is an even tenor of humility in all the missives – those signed by the Excise Commissioners equally with that of the Excise Officers – there is great variety in the present condition and in the style of execution. It does not take long before the missives from the Excise Office can be picked out at sight, for they are beautifully written by penmen who clearly took great pride in their handiwork, and they used excellent materials which have scarcely faded in two hundred years.

Amongst the documents dispatched from the Excise Office to the Treasury none has been seen that surpasses in elegant penmanship the copy of the petition of the eight excisemen. It incorporates elaborate flourishes, multiplicity of capitalized gradations in the size of words and letters which give emphasis and promote some initial letters to semi-capitals. The two associated documents have lain in close contact for so long that the ink of one has faintly penetrated the surface of the other. The two epistles are strikingly similar in style, and both survive in excellent condition except for wear at the edges where they have been folded, and it is noticeable that the folds of the petition are much more worn, as if it has been unfolded for perusal many more times than the Commissioners’ memorial. There are points which provoke speculation. For example the copy of the petition is very large, approximately 15″ by 20”, which makes it a rather cumbersome enclosure In correspondence, and it could easily have been copied in smaller format (it is indeed copied on a smaller scale in the copy retained in the records of the Excise Office). The memorial of the Commissioners is comparatively unimposing in size at about 10” by 15″; one might have thought that the Commissioners would have pref- erred to have their signatures on a more impressive document, and it appears that the copyist may have prepared a replica of the petition, rather than a mere copy of its wording. 

However there is another possible explanation. It would have been very time consuming for a single petition to have circulated to 3,000 individual officers for perusal and signature, and it would have been far more practical for a number of separate copies of the proposed petition to have been circulated, say one for each of the 53 country Collections, with supporting sheets on which the officer; could have placed their signatures. In return these separate copies could have been gathered into the composite petition for submission to the Excise Board; it could have been one of these circulated copies which the Commissioners detached and forwarded to the Treasury. This would account for the greater wear which the copy petition appears to have had, compared with the Commissioners’ memorial; had the two documents been prepared and forwarded at the same time, it is likely that wear on their folds would have been similar. 

Multiple copies for circulation to Collections would also be consistent with the separate letter concerning the Nottingham officers, which Oldys – with his exceptional facilities for inspecting the official records – discovered. It appears that the Nottingham officers reacted as a group, probably as a Collection group, and this could follow from an approach having been made to them as a group with a copy of the petition. It could have been that the Collector Nottingham was a particularly severe disciplinarian, and that his volunteers did not care to petition with their colleagues without Lurtner assurances from Paine about non-victimisation. Had such been the case, Oldys would not have been anxious for the full facts to be made public knowledge. 

While the Excise Commissioners had been happy to recommend an increase in the salary of their comptroller’s clerk they did not dare to recommend one for the Excise Officers. Perhaps in passing on the petition they went as far as was to be expected of servile bureaucrats. By the criterion of the Scottish judges award, the excisemen merited an increase of at least £25 on their meagre £50 per annum, but for 3,000 excisemen this would entail an increase in the salary all of £75,000 – a far larger sum those days than now. The memorial from the Commissioners reacted to the Treasury on February 5th, the day it was dated; perhaps they were called to a discussion for they were regular attenders at the Treasury, but the decision was reached in four days and endorsed on the reverse or the memorial in a significant word: ‘Nil.” 

The Treasury’s decision was perhaps a political one, for or the justice of the claim can have been no doubt, as the Excise Commissioners’ words of transmission indicate. Ironically, the excisemen, led by Thomas Paine, one of the greatest democrats of all time, were possibly baulked on this occasion by the reputation of the very people who were to enthuse over his philosophy in later decades. The crowds who poured from the slums of Lennon to defeat Walpole’s Excise Bill in 1733 were active participants in the political scene throughout the 18th century, and their appearances were dreaded. The eleven days discrepancy in the calendar broke them out in 1751, and they rioted in support of John Wilkes more than once. Was it to be expected that they would have remained passive in their hovels if the hated excisemen had been aware of a considerable increase in salary at public expense? These men, whose drink was taxed by the excise, and whose tempers and camaraderie brought them into the streets in unkempt battalions when their sentiments were outraged, haunt the London scenes painted by the contemporary artist Hogarth. A few years later in 1780, when they took to the streets again to terrorise the capital during the Gordon riots, the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury nag well have congratulated themselves that in 1773 they had not risked the Treasury being burned down as the Excise Office was burned in 1643, and as Newgate Prison then flamed before their eyes. 

The Excise Commissioners would doubtless have been given an explanation of the rejection of the excisemen’s petition, and it may have fallen to George Lewis Scott to retail it to Thomas Paine. If the reason herein suggested – the unwillingness to provoke the people again with the excise issue and invite retaliatory riots – was indeed the reason given him, then doubtless it would also have been made clear that Parliament would take the same view, and this would account for the cessation of Paine’s parliamentary initiatives Paine would have returned to normal duties at Lewes a wiser and vastly more experienced men, and his valiant spirit even in his disappointment would already have been seeming another path towards the reforms he intended to achieve. 

Enough is now known about Paine’s endeavours in 1772/3 to establish that his efforts on behalf of the excise service were gallant indeed, and supported in some degree throughout the department; that his striking achievement in rallying his comrades into a national association has been so little esteemed is surprising. Twenty years were to pass before the stage was set by his Rights of Man for a second round in the battle to secure better representation of working men at the tables where salaries and working conditions were determined. Nor did the second stage meet with swift success, yet success in considerable degree was to come. Is the second stage considered a struggle that failed? If not, can the first stage be considered a failure when at his initial effort Pain’s petition was passed through the established bureaucratic channels to the fountainhead itself, the Lords of the Treasury? This writer suggests that the word failure is inappropriate. Paine’s brilliance in 1773 was recognised by Commissioner G.L. Scott, who remained a Paine supporter, and it would have been a major cause of his recommending Paine to Benjamin Franklin. Franklin in turn would have heard the full story of Paine’s efforts, and would have recognised his striking ability to rally dispersed unorganised men into a cohesive national body by the power of the written word. Franklin by then was well aware of the coming need of a man of Paine’s genius in the American colonies. Without The Case of the Officers of Excise there would have been no Common Sense and the Crisis. 

The field is now open to others to discuss and evaluate the facts and opinions set forth in this article, and following the bi-centennial year of American Indep- endence it is not an inappropriate time for such a discussion. Meanwhile a document lies in the archives of the Public Record Office which is basic to the genesis of trade unionism and perhaps also to that of the United States of America. That it is worthy of exhibition is a view the present writer has already expressed; it may be that further support for this view will be forthcoming. 

Members of the Thomas Paine Society will appreciate that n new’discoveries, such as the documents described in this article, can only be appraised over a consider- able period of time. There can be a number of aspects of their impact which may need to be carefully considered. Pain’s efforts of 1772/3 may not be easily placed in the evolution of national trade unions for example; so far as preliminary enquiries by the present writer have shown, the early activities previously known were of local associations of working people, who would have been in personal contact. Paine’s association of excisemen was a vastly more difficult enterprise to originate in view of their national distribution and the very small numbers in a particular provincial town. 

It will also be appreciated that examination of the old excise records continues, and while no complete account of the true facts of the excise career of Thomas Paine is now likely to emerge in positive form, circumstantial evidence is still being discovered which can be used for the intelligent reconstruction of a much fuller account of his activities and their effort upon our national social history, than has previously been made public. 

The writer of this article hopes to be able to make further contributions to our knowledge, and perhaps to compile a much more ambitious study of Thomas Paine as an exciseman, as it remains his opinion that the excise influence was not only of major importance in forming his exceptional character but that it remained with him and played a considerable part in his activities long after he had been forced out of the excise service. 

NOTE:

The documents transcribed in the body of this article are made known by Mind permission of the Keeper of Public Records, to whom is delegated authority to administer the copyright in them which is the property of the Crown.

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We do not usually think of Thomas Paine as an economist and, indeed, his writings under this head are neither systematic nor particularly original. Nevertheless, his economic ideas reflect his attitude to wider political issues and show both a grasp of economic realities and a penetration in powers of analysis which have been consistently under-rated by his biographers.

The Case of the Officers of the Excise, which Paine wrote in 1772, is his first known political work of which we have any record. He backed up the claim of his fellow excisemen to improved pay and working conditions by drawing attention to “the high price of provisions” which he attributed to “the increase of money in the kingdom”. Rising prices, he argued, were harmful because they were unjust. To some they brought affluence; others might find their market situation strong enough to enable them to offset the effects of inflation by pushing up the price of their own products. But large numbers of people would find themselves in the same category as Paine’s fellow customs officers and would lack either the economic or the political strength to counter the effects of inflation.

Paine returned to the question eight years later when, in The Crisis Extraordinaza,he dealt with the problems of war finance at the time of the American revolution. The Federal Government had come to depend increasingly on paper money to cover its expenses. Paine underlined the inflationary consequences and stressed the importance of meeting public expenditure out of taxes and loans rather than by the printing press. Assessing the needs of the central government at £2 millions a year, he proposed raising half the sum by taxes and half by loans at 6 per cent. Paine would have preferred to raise the entire sum by taxes but he recognised that in view of the primitive state of government machinery this was unpractical. In the circumstances he recommended that half the money should be raised by loans and half by taxes. These should consist mainly of import duties – since there were only a few points of entry they would be comparatively easy to collect – and by excise duties on liquor. He argued the case for the latter in characteristic Paine style, with a touch of salty irony: “How often”, he remarked, “have I heard an emphatical wish, almost accompanied by a tear, ‘Oh, that ‘etir-poor fellows in the field had some of this!’ Why then need we suffer under a fruitless sympathy, when there is a way to enjoy both the wish and the entertainment at once?”

Paine’s views on war finance in particular, and on monetary policy in general, were developed more explicitly in his Letter to the Abbe Raynal, which appeared in 1782. Inflation and taxation, it argued, were two alternative ways of paying for a war and, of the two, taxation was much to be preferred. However, it needed an administrative machine that might not be available to a revolutionary Government, so that inflation might be used as a temporary expedient. Otherwise taxation, by directly reducing demand, made people aware of the real costs which were being incurred, and so occasioned frugality and thought”, while inflation gave rise to “dissipation and carelessness”. Moreover, taxation gave governments some control over the allocation of the burden and this, in democratic conditions, increased the likelihood that it would be fairly distributed. As soon as possible after the war the currency should again be based on gold and silver. This would restore the public’s confidence and provide an automatic discipline on government.

Paine’s most recent biographer, Professor A.O. Aldridge, says baldly that: “Paine’s economics are now outmoded. Virtually a mercantilist, he considered gold and silver as the only form of capital”.”But to put the matter in these terms suggests some lack of historical imagination. Paine’s life was passed in a period of secular inflation which began in the 1740s„ when he was a child, and continued down to the end of the French wars. British wheat prices rose from less than 30/- a quarter in the early 1740s, to over 50/- in the early 1770s, when Paine left for America. By the 1790s they were over 70/- and still on a rising trend. By contrast, the wages of a craftsman in the Home Counties rose only from 2/- a day in 1740 to a day in 1800. Add to this the fact that Paine spent the most active periods of his political life supporting revolutionary governments which were desperately coping with the problems of war finance, and his ideas can be seen in reasonable perspective.

Professor Aldridge, writing in a period of full, Keynesian reaction to the depression of the 1930s, may have failed to grasp the significance of what Paine was saying. But to the radical of the late ei;Iteenth century, as to William Cobbett who in this, as in some other respects, became his disciple, the salient feature of inflation was that it re-distributed income in favour of the rich and to the detriment of the wage-earner and artisan. Taxation, by contrast, made possible a more equitable distribution of the burden and in this aspect of Paine’s Letter to the Abbd Raynal we can find the germ of the ideas which were to reach fruition ten years later in Part 11 of the Rights of Man.

After the end of the Revolutionary War, Paine found himself spelling out, in somewhat greater detail, his ideas on sound finance which then and later gave him an undeserved reputation for economic “conservatism”. The War had been followed by a slump and it seemed to many, including, for a time, a majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly, that trade would improve if the supply of paper money were to be increased. The agitation was directed against the Bank of Pennsylvania, which Paine had helped to establish during the War, and the reformers were demanding the repeal of the Bank’s charter and a substantial increase in the note issue. In 1786 Paine replied with a pamphlet, Dissertations on Government the Bank and Paper Money. The Bank’s opponents, mainly up-country farmers and their friends, complained that the Bank had a vested interest in keeping money scarce and therefore dear. On the contrary, wrote Paine, the role of a bank is to mobilise savings which would be otherwise unspent, and return them, through loans, into circulation. In doing so it earns its own profits while at the same time serving the interests of the farmers and merchants by increasing the amount of trade.

Paine was not against the use of paper money as such. But he insisted that whatever was printed must have a hundred per cent backing from the country’s reserves of gold and silver. This would not, as was feared, restrict trade by unduly limiting the supply of money. Paine showed that the volume of trade depended not only on the quantity of money but also on the efficiency with which financial institutions were able to attract deposits from the public’s savings and return them through loans back into circulation. Paine did not use the term “velocity of circulation” which was to feature so prominently in the later development of monetary theory, but he certainly employed the concept.

Like many of his contemporaries, Paine was obsessed by the growth of the National Debt. In 1786 he wrote Prospects on the Rubicon mainly to oppose the war which was clearly threatening between England and France. The pamphlet’s nAin argument was that England’s past wars had increased her National Dept and that this had resulted in “an unparalleled burden of taxes”. In consequence; “A few men have enriched themselves by jobs and contracts and the groaning multitude bore the burden.” Paine thought that the system was not only vicious but also unstable and that the further rise in the national debt which would result from a belligerent foreign policy would inevitably end in national ruin.

The War which Paine had foreseen broke out in 1793. Three years later, soon after his release from the Luxembourg prison, he published The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, in which he carried these arguments further and re-stated them in more rigorous and systematic form. He argued that the system of financing wars by borrowing, which had been in operation since the late seventeenth century, was insidious. It meant that in the long run the national debt must grow faster than any possible increase in the gold reserve. Paine was here developing a theme he had already broached in Part 11 of his Rights of Man. Every expansion of the national debt would increase the load of interest payments which could only be met by further depreciating the currency. Paine was convinced that he had stumbled on a new economic law of epochal import- ance. In accordance with a principle analogous to the law of gavitat- ion, the developments he was describing must, he was convinced, accelerate in geometric ratio. “I have not made the ratio”, he insisted, “any more than Newton made the ratio of gravitation. I have only discovered it…”

As a piece of economic analysis, The Decline and Fall has serious limitations. The British economy turned out to be more firmly based and its tax system much more resilient than Paine – or, for that matter, any of his contemporaries – expected. Though Paine recognised the importance of the manufacturing industry in Britain and the United States, such industry was still in its early infancy. The industrial revolution had barely begun and no-one seems to have rightly assessed the strength which it was to give an economy or buoyancy it could impart to tax receipts. Paradoxically, however, despite its inadequacies as a long range economic forecast, The Decline and Fall was one of Paine’s more immediately influential publications. In 1797, the year following its appearance, the Bank of England was forced to suspend cash payments and Paine’s predictions seemed vindicated. From then on the automatic discipline of a paper currency linked to the gold reserve was removed and inflation- ary pressures were accentuated. As in America, the main sufferers included the self-employed artisans and wage-earners to whom Paine was linked by social origins and political outlook. In short, while Paine was wrong in thinking that a rising national debt would mean an inevitable economic collapse he was right to see in it an instrument for enriching the wealthy at the expense of the poor. When in 1803, his pamphlet came into the hands of William Cobbett it converted him at once from an acid critic of Paine to one of his warmest – and most influential disciples.

Paine wrote The Decline and Fall in Paris, soon after his release from the Luxembourg. During the winter of 1795-6, while still convaleso- ilk, he wrote what was to be his last important work, Agrarian Justice opposed to which appeared in 1797. To a greater extent than in any of his other writings, Paine dealt on the stark contrasts between wealth and poverty. He flatly asserted that the effects of civilisation had been to impoverish the mass of mankind. “Civilization…or that which is so called”, he maintained, “has operated two ways, to make one part of society more affluent and the other part more wretched than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.”

Paine saw the cause of poverty in the appropriation, by large land- owners, of the proceeds of other men’s labour. Land, the main source of wealth, was the natural gift of the Creator and its fruits should not be privately appropriated. On the other hand existing land had gained considerably from cultivation, the benefits of which belonged, by right, to the improver – that is, as a general rule, to the landowner., large or small. The solution, therefore, was not, as some had already begun to argue, the public ownership of land, but an inheritance tax of 10 per cent – more where land was not in the direct line of descent – to be used to finance cash grants of £15 to all on reaching the age of 21, and an annual pension of £10 to everyone over the age of 50. The same pension would also be available to the disabled. The interest of this pamphlet lay not only in its detailed proposals, which completed the social security programme outlined in Part 11 of the Rights of ° but also in the underlying philosophy which rejected a return to an agrarian society and fully accepted, indeed welcomed, the part played by manufacturing industry in promoting the general welfare.

Paine’s ideas on economics and finance were of a piece with his approach to politics. Applied science and the development of industry could bring undreamed of benefits to humanity, but only so long as their fruits accrued to the labouring men and small property owners who were, in his view, the creators of wealth. The economy would grow best in conditions of “sound” finance. Wars, paper currency not linked to gold, inflation and a rising national debt made up a complex which redistributed wealth in the interests of the rich. 

On this ground and within these limits it is difficult to say that Paine was wrong.

(The edition of Thomas Paine’s Key Writings edited by Harry Hayden Clark (Hill and Wang, New York, 1965) announces on the front cover that The (sic) Rights of Man is published, along with other writings, “complete”, perversely omits the entire social security programme of Part 2.)

1. Man of Reason. The Life of Thomas Paine, 1960, p.121.

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