David Powell - Tom Paine: The Greatest Exile

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
POLITICAL THOUGHT AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Volume 47

TOM PAINE

TOM PAINE

The Greatest Exile

DAVID POWELL

First published in 1985 by Croom Helm Ltd

This edition first published in 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1985 David Powell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-21961-1 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-429-35434-2 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-27133-6 (Volume 47) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-29500-3 (Volume 47) (ebk)

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Thomas Paine by August Milire, after George Romney. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

TOM PAINE

The Greatest Exile

David Powell

1985 David Powell
Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row,
Beckenham, Kent BR3 1AT
Croom Helm Australia Pty Ltd, First Floor, 139 King Street,
Sydney, NSW 2001, Australia

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Powell, David

Tom Paine: the greatest exile.
1. Paine, Thomas 2. PoliticiansEngland
Biography
I. Title
350.510924 JC178.V2
ISBN 0-7099-2074-1

Filmset by Mayhew Typesetting, Bristol, UK
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and Kings Lynn

CONTENTS

For Rachel

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth and two centuries since he was central to the American and European Revolutions Thomas Paine remains as much a contemporary as a controversial figure. Theodore Roosevelt, a former US President, once anathematised him as that filthy little atheist (having never read The Age of Reason on which the charge was based); Michael Foot, a former leader of the British Labour Party, recently described him as the greatest exile ever to leave these shores; while, in response to a BBC documentary of 1982, the Daily Telegraph of London felt compelled to carry a leader, for which the introduction set the tone:

After MR KENNETH GRIFFITHS marathon television eulogy of TOM PAINE it would be difficult for this newspaper to remain silent without disloyalty to its own traditions. For what was this man that we are invited to admire above all the national heroes who are actually known to us? He fought against his country in the American War of Independence and invited France to invade us during the French Revolution. Among decent Englishmen in his time his name was a synonym for treachery, blasphemy, and (whether justly or not) debauchery.

What the Telegraph failed to mention was that Paine was charged with treachery by what was possibly the most repressive British government of the past two centuries; that, as with Roosevelt, their leader writers had not read The Age of Reason, a diests profession of a belief in God; and that, if the allegations relating to debauchery were based on Paines drinking habits, then they had better look to the social practices of the eighteenth century when hard drinking was the rule the premature death of their mentor, Pitt the Younger, possibly having been accelerated by his fondness for port!

Arguably, the innuendoes were unworthy of the traditions that the paper itself claims to represent, though it may be that such superficial charges disguised a deeper fear. Paine, they write, was the kind of philosopher whose natural forum was the pub. Then, as now, the radical populist was deeply suspect, for he threatened the established order and the only response of the Pitt government to the publication of the second part of Rights of Man (which sold 200,000 copies within the year in a country with a population of little more than ten million people) was to charge Paine with being a malicious, seditious, and ill-disposed person.

And what was the basis of this bar-room philosophy of Paines? The Telegraph supplied an answer: He made human liberty his supreme value; he talked glibly and abstractedly about the rights of man, evading all the dilemmas which are created by setting them in a social context. Surely, even the Daily Telegraph could not deny the benevolence of such principles while, once again, they ignored the fact that Paine did, indeed, recognise the implications of his proposals his carefully costed social programme anticipating Beveridge by almost two hundred years.

Not that the tenor of the Telegraph leader was unique; rather it was representative of the treatment that Paine has received since the late eighteenth century. In 1794, a handbill subsidised out of Pitts Secret Fund was declaiming:

as for them that do not like the PRESENT CONSTITUTION, let them have their deserts, that is the HALTER AND A GIBBET, and be burnt afterwards, not as PAINE hath been, but in body and person. To which every loyal heart will say Amen;

while in 1802, the New England Palladium was writing, on news of Paines return to America: What! Invite to the United States that lying, drunken, brutal infidel who enjoyed in the opportunity of basking and wallowing in the confusion, devastation, bloodshed, rapine, and murder, in which his soul delights?

In the years between, the United States has lived down its fears. Today Paine remains the towering figure of whom President Monroe wrote: The services which he rendered them (the American people) in their struggle for liberty have made an impression of gratitude that will never be erased, whilst they continue to merit the character of a just and generous people. In Great Britain the bogy remains, if he is remembered at all. For all the occasional outbursts against A Radical Rascal (the headline over the Telegraph leader), neglect more than abuse has ensured that Paine has remained little more than a disturbing footnote to English history.

The contrast is extraordinary, and reflects as much on America as on Great Britain. While the one was extrovert and open, willing to debate new ideas and concepts, the other was closed and reactionary and, for half a century after Paine wrote, the answer to dissent was transportation or the hulks. While the one was exploring new constitutional forms, the other took precedent as its touchstone, to echo with Burke: The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror and suffrage was not to become universal until Paine had been dead for 120 years. In short, while the one was young and spirited, the other was old, paranoic and fearful of any change which threatened the established order, temporal or spiritual.

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