By George Hindmarch
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.