ABSTRACT
Thomas Paine lived dangerously in dangerous times. He played an active role in both the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1779, was imprisoned in France for ten months where he narrowly missed the guillotine through the incompetence of his jailors, and was widely (and wrongly) believed to be an atheist because of his attacks on organised religion at a time when publishing atheistic tracts attracted severe penalties under the law of blasphemous libel. He was in fact a deist, but was severely critical of the hypocrisies and absurdities of organised Christianity. His opposition to the idea of monarchy landed him in trouble in England, the country of his birth: he could never return there after leaving in middle age. Paine’s life was, then, never easy. He lived a precarious existence trying a range of careers that included corset-maker, customs officer, and bridge designer; but it was as a writer, thinker and self-styled ‘citizen of the world’ that he excelled. At the height of his fame he was well-known in England, France and the United States – and had fervent admirers and detractors in all three countries. Yet, largely because of his attacks on religion in his later book The Age of Reason, when he returned from France to the United States he was not welcome. Far from it. He ended his life in poverty and obscurity in New York. Only six people attended his funeral. Ten years after his death, William Cobbett exhumed his bones and brought them back to Britain142 where he intended to set up an appropriate monument for Paine. He was unable to raise the money to do this, and Paine’s bones remained in a trunk in his attic. After Cobbett’s death they disappeared.
