The Fate Of Paine’s First Wife: A Note 

By W. A. Speck 

There has been much speculation on what became of Thomas Paine’s first wife, Mary Lambert, after they moved from Sandwich to Margate in April 1760. George Chalmers, in his hostile life of Paine published in 1791, was the first to speculate on it. ‘By some she is said to have perished on the road of ill-usage’, he asserted, and a premature birth’.¹ The inference is that Tom’s’s wife-beating led Mary to miscarry and this caused her death. Then, without any acknowledgement of the contradiction, Chalmers also retails a rumour ‘that she is still alive, though the extreme obscurity of her retreat prevents ready discovery’.² Clearly both tales cannot be true. 

Hazel Burgess cast doubt on the first with her discovery in the records of St. Lawrence’s church Thanet, in Ramsgate, not far from Margate, of entries recording the baptism on 7 December, 1760, of Sarah, daughter of Thomas and Mary Pain, and of her burial on 12 September, 1761.³ This turns out to have been a red herring, however, for a later entry in the same parish register records the birth of another daughter, Pleasant, to Thomas and Mary Pain on 1 January, 1769. They were clearly not the same couple as Tom and Mary but their namesakes.⁴ It still leaves the fate of Toms’s wife a mystery. 

While Chalmers suggested that she may have survived, he admitted that ‘the women of Sandwich are positive that she died in the British Lying in Hospital, in Brownlow Street, Long Acre; but the registry of that charity, which is kept with commendable accuracy, evinces that she had not been received into this laudable refuge of female wretchedness’.⁵ ‘When Paine’s first wife died in childbirth, old women of Thetford, according to another account ‘blamed him saying that he had demanded that his wife get out of bed too soon to cook for him.’⁶. Although they differed about the circumstances, the women of Sandwich and Thetford were probably right in believing that Mary had died. 

End Notes 

1. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers]. The Life of Thomas Paine (10th edition. 1793), p.13. The ‘ill usage’ Chalmers refers to he had mentioned previously, alleging that following their marriage ‘two months had hardly elapsed when our author’s ill usage of his wife became apparent’ p.12. 
2. Ibid., p.14. 
3. Dr Burgess first announced her discovery In ‘To Thomas a Daughter, the Thetford Magazine (Summer, 2000), pp.14-17; she published a corrected version in this journal: Hazel Burgess, ‘A Small Addition to the Writings of Thomas Paine’. Thomas Paine Society Bulletin and Journal of Radical History 5:3 (2001). Pp. 7-10. Cf. George Hindmarch. ‘Thomas Paine: Observations on Methodism and his Marriage to Mary Lambert’. The Journal of Radical History of the Thomas Paine Society 8:3 (2008). p.22, and Burgess’s letter in the following issue, 8:4, p.37, 
4. Canterbury Cathedral Archives U3119/115. Registers of St. Lawrence Thanet sub baptisms 1769. Pleasant’s death is recorded under burials for 13 October, 1775. Pain was a surname shared by others in the parish. A ‘Thomas Pain batchelor’ married Ann Pierce on 28 December, 1784. 
5. Chalmers, pp.13-14.
6. Fawn Brodie. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1975), 122-3. Cited by John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (1996). pp.50-1. Brodie cites only James Cheetham, The Life of Thomas Paine (1809), who did not mention the old women of Thetford, so her source is unknown.