A Revolutionary Lays Down His Bones in Ash?

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was a revolutionary, a republican and radical philosopher. His iconoclastic writings; Common Sense, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason were of considerable influence on the development of both the American and French Revolutions and Paine was an active, personal participant in each. It is a measure of his stature that the title of the last named work was subsequently borrowed by historians seeking a description for the entire age.

Unable to settle in Britain for fear of sedition charges, he made his home in America and eventually died there, near New York, on the eighth of June, 1809, at the age of 72. Because of the attempted systematic demolition of the scriptural basis for Christianity contained in his book, The Age of Reason, his expressed wish for burial in a nearby Quakers' cemetery was refused and he was therefore laid to rest, in unconsecrated ground, on his farm. The (platonic) companion of his latter years, Madame de Bonneville, has left a moving description of the sparsely attended funeral:

The 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 piece of land .... This was the funeral of this great politician and philosopher.

His passions now stilled, his great struggles ended, Paine lay at peace beneath freshly planted weeping willows and cypresses - for a few short years ....

Paine's one previous association with Surrey was a letter he had written in 1792 to Lord Onslow, the Lord Lieutenant of the County, taking issue with Onslow's campaign in favour of a recent Royal proclamation against 'seditious writings'. The proclamation had threatened the publication of volume two of Paine's Rights of Man and Paine was indeed put on trial for proceeding with it. This was surely bad enough but Paine's second, posthumous, encounter with a Surrey man was to prove far more troublesome ....

There now enters the story another famous figure, a man whose close and intimate links with South West Surrey are uncontested: William Cobbett, radical reformer, political journalist and prolific author (of the classic Rural Rides among other titles). He had been settled in America since 1817, having fled his native land for fear of arrest and summary trial after the suspension of Habeas corpus by the repressive government of the day. Whilst resident in New York, Cobbett made the point of learning all he could about Paine, having been much impressed with his writings on the subject of that controversial, comparative novelty - paper money. Characteristically, Cobbett straightaway became involved in a long running controversy over Paine's alleged death-bed conversion to Christianity and he also proposed writing a life of Paine and publishing his collected works. In the end nothing came of these two projects but, in an article written in February 1819, he declared :

I hope yet to see an Act of Parliament to cause his [Paine's] bones to be conveyed to England and deposited in the stead of those of Pitt [William Pitt, Prime Minister, died 1806] whose system he opposed, the ruin attending whose schemes he foretold and for which foretelling he was persecuted.

Six months later, in another article, Cobbett's thinking had progressed a stage:

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.

Never one to wait for Acts of Parliament, the fullness of time or permission, one September dawn in 1819, Paine saw fit, with the assistance of his son James and an English shoemaker called William Benbow, to exhume Paine's coffin and spirit it back to New York. Then, on the thirtieth of October, 1819, aboard the ship 'Hercules' and with Cobbett as his chaperon, Thomas Paine made his long delayed journey home to England.

It was one of Cobbett's greatest errors of judgement. Aside from ignoring Paine's own last wishes, the mere act of the resurrection deeply offended public opinion. The refusal of one ship's captain to carry him and his strange baggage across the Atlantic should have served as some warning but once in motion, Cobbett was never easily brooked in his impulsive actions. The price was the gibe of 'bone-grubber' which was to accompany him, in print and in public, for the rest of his days.

Cobbett might have derived some encouragement from the warm reception of a crowd which had gathered to greet him when the 'Hercules' docked in Liverpool on the twenty-first of November, 1819. Less enthusiasm however was manifested for his dead companion and there was even some jeering when Cobbett displayed the cadaver at the customs house, declaring :

There, gentlemen, are the mortal remains of the immortal Thomas Paine.

The Times report of the event stated that :

Cobbett was extremely attentive to the box and looked rather serious during the exhibition.

Well he might, as sober reflection replaced his earlier enthusiasm but, duly crated up, the remains either accompanied or eventually followed Cobbett on to London. Once there, in a reception given for 400 reformers, Cobbett stated that 'if he lived another year' he intended to erect a colossal bronze statue of Paine and would inaugurate a great public dinner to be held annually on Paine's birthday.

In fact, Cobbett lived a further sixteen years but his loss of interest in Paine's earthly remains was more than matched by public indifference. All of his proposed commemorations, including a grotesque plan to sell gold rings containing wisps of Paine's hair, foundered on a lack of general interest and the whole matter became a subject for jest and cruel political gibes. The poet Byron's offering serves as just one example of the torrent of material produced by Cobbett's tormentors :

In digging up your bones, Tom Paine,
Will Cobbett has done well,
You visit him on Earth again,
He'll visit you in Hell.

Cartoonists also found the matter irresistible - see the above examples.

To pour salt onto poor Cobbett's wounds it was even suggested (by newly arrived Americans) that he had inadvertently excavated the wrong cadaver and was, in fact, now paying honours to the bones of an unknown Negro rather than those of Thomas Paine. One 'poet' celebrated this novel theory thus :

The radicals seem quite elated,
and soon will be intoxicated,
for Cobbett seems to turn their brain
with his American SHAM PAINE!

Cobbett, disconcerted by the tirade of abuse and the lack of support shown to him, sadly noted:

No one dared to move a pen or tongue in my defence. Former friends, or pretended friends, shrugged their shoulders.

The ending of Cobbett's collaboration with a number of long term friends and political associates dates to this disillusioning time.

In due course, the controversy died down and the subject (and Paine's bones) rested for fifteen years or so; until after Cobbett's death in 1835 at Normandy Farm, Ash, Surrey. Cobbett's effects were duly put up for auction by his son in January 1836 but the auctioneer, a Mr Piggott of Guildford, refused to offer for sale a certain box ....

found to contain human bones, wrapped up in separate parts.

Like the proverbial bad penny, Paine's bones had returned to trouble the Cobbett family again.

Cobbett's son appealed to the Lord Chancellor against the auctioneer's decision but he in turn supplied official sanction to Mr Piggott's good taste by ruling that Paine's bones should not, and indeed could not, be regarded as a marketable asset.

Thereafter the history of the bones becomes excessively obscure and surrounded by legend. Like some secular version of a medieval holy relic (a thing anathema to Paine in life) they crop up in a multitude of places with an ever decreasing guarantee of authenticity. One story has it that they somehow passed into the ownership of a 'labourer' and then a London furniture dealer who presumably evicted them from the empty coffin bearing a silver plate inscribed: 'Thomas Paine, died eighth of June 1809, aged 72' which was owned by a Guildford gentleman in 1849.

By 1854 a Unitarian clergyman claimed to possess Paine's skull and right hand although the story of their detachment is not known and is probably best not speculated upon. It was reported that examination of same by a Professor of the Royal College of Surgeons revealed the hand at least to be that of a young woman. Since that date both specimens have been lost to view.

A more fitting and dignified version of events is the persistent legend, said to emanate from the Cobbett family themselves, that Paine's skeleton was discreetly buried by a Cobbett descendent at some time past in the churchyard at Ash. The wish may be father to the thought but this story does have the recommendation of its long life and a certain plausibility in Ash's proximity to Cobbett's one-time residence. However, aside from an unexpected discovery, such as that of a confirming document or hidden memorial plaque or the like, the matter is no longer open to conclusive proof.

It would doubtless be pleasing for Surrey to be able to claim such an illustrious figure as Thomas Paine residing within its boundaries but I nevertheless cannot but feel that neither guest or host would be entirely happy with this suggested final home. Paine never deigned to disguise his hostility to the Christian religion and his general view of it is eloquently summarised in his Age of Reason:

Of all the systems of religion that were ever invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince and too inconsistent for practise, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purposes of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.

For its part, the Church of Paine's time held similarly unflattering views of Paine and the other rationalist philosophers of his ilk. Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, went so far as to say, in his An Apology for the Bible in answer to the writings of Thomas Paine that it would have been 'fortunate' had Paine's life been 'terminated' before he commenced to write.

To be fair, Paine had always denied the oft repeated (by George Washington among others) charge of atheism and consistently described himself as a 'deist'; that is to say, a believer in a benevolent supreme being, albeit not the Christian God. In the first chapter of his Age of Reason he makes the following confession of faith:

I believe in one God and no more and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of men and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, having mercy and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy.

Even so, it hard to credit that either Church or Paine would have sought each others company in death, any more than in life. Accordingly, if the Cobbett family legend is true, it is just possible that there are some very restless bones beneath the soil of Ash.

Sources consulted

Thomas Paine
A J Ayer Secker & Warburg 1988.

Thomas Paine - his Life, Work and Times
A Williamson George Allen & Unwin 1973.

William Cobbett - the Poor Man's Friend
G Spater Cambridge University Press 2 vols 1982.

An Apology for the Bible in Answer to the Writings of Thomas Paine
Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff 1796.

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