By Martin Green
Some time ago, being aware of the approach of the 200 anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, I thought of various ways I could do to arouse interest in Paine and his most enduring and famous work and the republican ideals he espoused. Initially I approached a publisher over writing a new biography only to be told they were just publishing one. This was David Powell’s, Tom Paine: The Greatest Exile, and though this did not get much attention by the way of reviews, it scotched my own attempt at a new biography. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and my next effort went into composing a letter which I sent to eighteen Labour Party members of parliament. I reminded them that on their re-election to a future parliament (supposing they made it) their first act on entering the House of Commons would be to take an oath of allegiance to the crown, thus perpetuating for another parliamentary term the unjust constitution foisted on the people of this country by the parliament of 1688.
I wrote, ‘If you don’t make the challenge in your lifetime, you will die knowing not only that you have betrayed your duty to the people who elected you, but also to the people of the country, and further you will have been responsible for the perpetuation of injustice’.
In all I received some five replies. The first simply said, ‘I don’t agree with you about the Crown’. The second enclosed a draft Commonwealth of Britain Bill which contained a schedule detailing an oath to be taken pledging faith in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Great Britain and which had no chance under the present parliamentary set-up of ever being passed – imagine the Lords relinquishing their privileged power! The third said, ‘The people who elect me to parliament expect me to defend and further their interests…none of them have ever expressed any concern to me about my taking the oath…’ The fifth thanked me for my letter and continued: ‘When I first entered the Commons, I protested to the Speaker about the so-called oath’.
That concluded my attempt to rouse some republican spirit in the Labour Party if in power.
I next thought I would write a play about the life and times of Thomas Paine, but was slanted by the wide geographical scope of his life, his involvement in America during the War of Independence, in France with the French Revolution, with odd visits back to his native country concerning his bridge project and also by the cast-list that would include the first president of the United States of America, the deposed and decapitated king of France and various other historical figures.
I then decided on writing a first-person dramatisation of his life, which at the bright suggestion of the first actor to take the role, Alan Penn, we entitled, ‘A Wicked and Seditious Person’.
This had its first performance at the Plymouth Arts Centre in 1992 and subsequently at Conway Hall in London and later at the Arts Centre in Exeter. Each of the performances has been greeted with enthusiasm and genuine appreciation, and I am only sorry that to date we have not been able to organise a tour.
The dramatisation was not the only result of my enthusiasm for popularising Thomas Paine’s republican ideals. Two hundred years after the first publication of Rights of Man, I also gave a talk at Conway Hall which was subsequently published in the society’s journal, The Ethical Record, and I later expanded this into a book of some 25,000 words entitled, Towards a Republic. This has been graced with a preface by the second Labour MP to respond to my letter mentioned earlier, one Tony Benn. I have as yet to find a publisher for the book.