For such democrats, it was not power itself that corrupted, but the wielders who corrupted power.

Trapped as he was by the limitations of liberal social theory from seeing non-governmental threats to freedom, equality and democracy, confined as he was to seeing society only in terms of competitive individualism, it still bears repeating that there have been precious few in the liberal camp who so passionately assaulted privilege as Paine did. Few liberals were so fervently committed to democracy and egalitarianism. Lest we forget the democrat Paine, we need remember only how he was hated by the conservatives of his day. John Adams could not bear him. In 1805 Adams wrote of Paine, who was for him the symbol of mischievous radicalism:

I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it the Age of Paine.24

PAINE’S LEGACY

 

When William Cobbett set sail from New York for England on 30 October 1819, he carried with him in his baggage the bones of Thomas Paine. The precise moment in English history and the strange, elaborate tribute devised by one English radical leader and writer to another combined to make the event memorable. Just a few weeks before, Manchester had witnessed on its streets the Peterloo massacre, and the nation was still gripped by the political debate which followed. Cobbett had chosen to cross the Atlantic months earlier to escape the clutches of the same persecuting, panic-stricken government. The memory of Thomas Paine figured prominently in his thoughts. No such intrusion could normally displace his own claims and pretensions; he had a reputation for being preposterously vain. But on this occasion, most notably, he wished the world to know what was his own considered verdict on his great forebear and exemplar. (Sadly, the body never had the memorial over it that Cobbett intended. It was washed over-board at sea.)

No small part of Cobbett’s energies during the whole of his stay in America was devoted to tasks associated with Paine. He cited Paine’s views in several of his own writings and took the trouble to engage in controversy about his alleged blasphemies and irreligion. He made the acquaintance of Madame de Bonneville and others who had known Paine in his last days before his death a decade earlier. He proposed to himself and others the idea of writing Paine’s life and publishing a full edition of his works. In an article written in February 1819 he declared: ‘I hope to see an Act of Parliament to cause his bones to be conveyed to England and deposited in the stead of those of Pitt, whose system he opposed, the ruin attending whose schemes he foretold, and for which foretelling he was persecuted.’ Six months later he returned to the subject:

Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America. There, however, he shall not lie, unnoticed, much longer. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of the English; and if no other people will show they value that fame, the people of England will.

A few weeks later he went and fetched the bones himself. ‘Let this be considered’, he said,

the act of the reformers of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In their name we opened the grave and in their name will the tomb be raised. We do not look upon ourselves as adopting all Paine’s opinions upon all subjects. He was a great man, an Englishman, a friend of freedom and the first and greatest enemy of the Borough and Paper system. This is enough for us.25

Back in England, the mood was not so respectful and euphoric, even among all the various groups of reformers. The very week before Cobbett’s return, Richard Carlile had been found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for publishing The Age of Reason. Some ridicule was lavished by the caricaturists and political satirists of the day on Cobbett’s bag of bones, about which, as he said, ‘the hypocrites were in alarm lest they might injure the cause of religion’. He was variously denounced as a ‘grave robber’, a ‘bone grabber’ and a ‘resurrection man’. But Cobbett was only fortified in his most estimable display of magnanimity. At a Crown Anchor reformers’ dinner in December, he defended his action more belligerently than ever.