An Academic Salutes the Royal Wedding
By Julius Hogben
My first serious secondhand book was the 1791 edition of Rights of Man published out of his own pocket by Thomas Paine. It cost me three pounds. As a student, I had to pay by instalments, to the bookseller’s annoyance. A friend with a similar copy introduced me to the Thomas Paine Society. At the AGM two years ago I was thrilled to hear about a hitherto unknown letter by Paine in 1791, about my book:
“The first and second parts of the Rights of Man are printing complete, they will come at nine pence each. As we have now got the stone to roll, it must be kept going by cheap publications. This will embarrass the Court Gentry more than anything else, because it is a ground they are not used to”.
This year’s Esoteric Paine lecture, ‘Thomas Paine and Monarchical Republicanism’ was meandering, obscurantist, uninspiring and boring. It would certainly put anyone off the TPS. It was of no more interest to TPS members than the hundreds of PhD theses which litter dusty university archives with titles like “Highway Tolls in 13th Century Devon”, or, “Incidences of Murrain in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1842”. The lecture was a footnote, marginal to the life and achievements of Thomas Paine. Worse, it was a travesty of Paine’s ceaselessly subversive and exciting writing.
Monarchical republicanism never actually existed. It’s a purely theoretical construct by a historian which fits some facts but not others. Its contradictions abound – and that’s before Ted Valiance even tries to squeeze Paine into this artificial mold. He writes: “The obvious difficulty with seeing Paine as a ‘monarchical republican’ is his unequivocal attachment to republicanism and his hostility to monarchy”. He himself makes so many qualifications to Paine’s membership of this hypothetical category, that I was constantly baffled as to why this essay had been written at all. Ted Valiance wrote his excellent Thomas Paine – Made in England essay for the BBC history magazine not as a lecture for the TPS.
Of a seventeenth century someone called Smith, Valiance writes:
“In his analysis of the English state, if not in his assessment of the efficacy of the arrangement, Smith was in agreement with Paine”.
Well, there’s the rub. They’re so utterly at odds, that any comparison is futile.
Yes, club and societies showed Paine that people were capable of governing themselves. By slipshod wording, Valiance seems to give the impression that in saying this, Thomas Paine was somehow RESPECTABLE: “Paine was, again, in line with much contemporary polite opinion”. Polite opinion! Can this be the man who was prosecuted for sedition and convicted of High Treason in his absence, with crowds paid to burn him in effigy and stone his boat as he left the country? Who wrote accurately enough that “…the Government of England is as great, if not the greatest perfection of fraud and corruption that ever took place since governments began”. Merely publishing Right of Man put Carlile in gaol, a milestone in our long struggle for freedom of expression, which hasn’t ended yet.
In his inauguration speech President Obama harked back to one of Paine’s most stirring passages: by his heartening timely pamphlet he almost single-handedly saved the Americans in their War of Independence. He was in the battle with them. Clear analysis went with denunciation of tyranny and corruption – and with prescription. Paine’s aims and his writing style were on the march hand in hand.
To appreciate how stunning and unusual this combination was, we have only to dip into the virtually unreadable output of Mary Woolstonecraft. Paine demystified ruling class ideology by casting a fresh and fundamental eye on history, religion, political structure, international affairs. He didn’t write “History is lies about crimes”, but he could have. When he described William the Conqueror as “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself as king of England against the consent of the natives”, it’s understood that England has been governed for centuries by hereditary aristocratic thugs. Paine constantly mixed the specific and the general: “There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, nor any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity ‘to the end of time.”‘
When Paine wrote “Man (were it not for governments) is naturally the friend of man, and human nature is not of itself vicious”, it’s plain that no-one is born with Original Sin; no-one needs Christ to save his soul (whatever that was!) from Sin. Friendship crossed national frontiers. “If men will permit themselves to think as rational beings ought to think”, he wrote, “nothing can appear more ridiculous and absurd than to be at the expense of building navies, filling them with men, and then hauling them out into the ocean to see which one can sink each other the fastest”. Again, “Wars are the means by which non-representative governments maintain their power and wealth”. He pioneered the emancipation of the slaves, he advocated an international organisation to outlaw war, care for the poor and aged, to be paid by progressive income tax. My sympathies are deeper still when Paine writes, with the personal feeling that I often share, “I become irritated at the attempt to govern men by force and fraud”.
Any member of the TPS can out quote me. I’m writing this simply because after this lecture, it needs to be re-established why we admire Thomas Paine. And yet Vallance’s article in the BBC history magazine does this.
No wonder Paine was a bestseller! So far removed from the deservedly obscure forerunners dug up by Ted Valiance for this lecture. Paine never patronised and never divided his readers into those educated, and those for whom the reading of his pamphlets was an education. Ted Vallance’s praise of “the distinctive philosophy and style” of Thomas Paine’s writings only goes to emphasize his lack of either, in this lecture. From last year’s Eric Paine lecture on Cobbett ‘Two Cocks on a Dunghill”, which omitted his Paine-bashing period, we’ve descended to this. Whatever Paine read, he saw beyond it. TPS members must see beyond academic sterility.
Paine’s purposes were close in meaning to a passage such as this written by the seventeenth century Leveller and later Quaker, William Welwyn. We’ll never know whether Paine read it, because his autobiographical papers were Destroyed by fire: “He that bade us try all things, and hold fast that which was good, did suppose that all men have faculties and abilities to try all things, or else the counsel had been in vain. And therefore however the Minister may reason of his continual exercise in preaching and discoursing, by his skill in Arts and Languages, by the conceit of the esteem he hath with a great part of admiring people, presume it easy to possess us, that they are more divine that other men (as they style themselves) yet the people would but take boldness to themselves and not distrust their own imaginings, they would soon find that use and experience is the only difference, and that all necessary knowledge is easy to be had, and by themselves acquirable.
A brief note: I submitted a brief note to Ted Valiance’s website criticising his lecture, asking for explanation. He didn’t answer. He suppressed it. That’s the sort of censorship we expect from the Guardian biogosphere, not from a TPS lecturer.