The social ferment of those years had been stilled by a federal constitution and a federalist ideology which seemed to throw the balance of pohtical and social power into the hands of the powerful and well-to-do. Common Sense was a thing of the distant past. Paine was no longer the celebrated author of the pamphlet so influential in its day. He was now the notorious author of the godless Age of Reason with its assault on Christianity. Jefferson was man enough to renew his old ties with Paine, but to most Americans Paine was evil personified. The federalist press wrote of him as a ‘lilly-livered sinical [sic] rogue’, a ‘loathsome reptile’, a ‘demi-human archbeast’, an ‘object of disgust, of abhorrence, of absolute loathing to every decent man except the President of the United States’. A Boston newspaper summed up the feelings of polite and privileged America; Paine was a ‘lying, drunken, brutal infidel’.7

The ageing Paine, with no family and few close friends, became cantankerous and argumentative, turning more and more to the solace of drink and to bitter reflections on having been forgotten or ignored. He had come full circle. From an unknown self-educated parvenu arriving in America in 1774 he had climbed the heights of world fame. Now he was once again ignored or mocked. It was a difficult fate for a man like Paine whose arrogance and conceit knew no bounds. His was a colossal ego. Had he not claimed that the success of Common Sense ‘was beyond anything since the invention of printing’? Had he not told a friend that his ‘Rights of Man could take the place of all the books in the world’, and that ‘if it were in his power to demolish all the libraries in existence he would do it, so as to destroy all the errors of which they are the depository – and with the Rights of Man begin a new chain of ideas and principles’? Paine seemed to Morris ‘to become every hour more drunk with self-conceit’.8

The aristocratic Morris had always held Paine in contempt as an outsider, an arriviste. He described him, as already noted, as an adventurer, lacking wealth, family and connections, ‘ignorant even of grammar’. In an ‘age of gentlemen’ Paine stood out not only because of his less than perfect speech; to a French observer he was coarse and uncouth in his manners, loathsome in his appearance, and a disgusting egoist, rejoicing mostly in talking of himself and reading the effusions of his own mind’.9

Parvenus often seem uncouth to the established; in turn, it is not unusual for angry newcomers to cultivate vulgarity. Paine was convinced that his was a superior talent and he lashed out at the aristocratic belief that rewards were due only to those born to privilege, to the nobility, whom he called men of ‘no-ability’. Paine’s writings are filled with defiance of and disrespect towards kings, ambassadors, nobility, presidents and pious priests. How better to subvert these untalented superiors in a world of polished privilege than by repudiating the pattern of civility they dictated?

Paine’s last years were spent in New York City, in what is now Greenwich Village, or on his farm in New Rochelle outside the city. He died on 8 June 1809. Few people saw the coffin from the city to the farm in New Rochelle. At the burial site there were even fewer present, merely a handful of New Rochelle neighbours and friends. There were no dignitaries, no eulogies, no official notices of his death. The staymaker from Thetford who had shaped the world as few have ever done, who had known and been known by many great men of America, France and England, was laid to rest in a quiet pasture with no ceremony, no fanfare, no appreciation. The irony of such a funeral for such a man was too much for Madame de Bonneville, who had acted for several years as Paine’s housekeeper, and who was one of the few present. She later wrote:

This interment was a scene to affect and to wound any sensible heart. Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help feeling most acutely. Before the earth was thrown down upon the coffin, I, placing myself at the east end of the grave, said to my son Benjamin, ‘stand you there, at the other end, as a witness for grateful America’. Looking round me, and beholding the small group of spectators, I exclaimed, as the earth was tumbled into the grave, ‘Oh! Mr Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!’ This was the funeral ceremony of this great politician and philosopher!10

PAINE’S IDEOLOGY

 

No democrat so enthusiastically rejected the aristocratic world as did Thomas Paine. Burke wrote of him that he sought ‘to destroy in six or seven days’ the feudal and chivalric past that ‘all the boasted wisdom of our ancestors has laboured to bring to perfection for six or seven centuries’.11 Paine’s every reflex was egalitarian, bent on undermining what he considered the ‘quixotic age of chivalric nonsense’. Kings were the first nonsense to go.