Extract from the General Conclusion to ‘Thomas Paine and the Polity of the Blood’

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An instructive contrast distinguishes the return of Paine’s bones from the USA to England in November 1819 and the return of the body of Terence McManus from the USA to Ireland in November 1861. McManus had suffered transportation to Tasmania for his part in the Young Irelanders’ Uprising in Tipperary of 1848. Escaping to San Francisco, he died at the age of forty-one and was initially buried there in 1861. Arrangements were made, however, by the Irish Republican Brotherhood to exhume the body and return it to Ireland. This was done with a service held by the grave side in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, where, despite the rain, slush and mud, a large crowd of 20-30,000 gathered to honour the body. McManus’ burial signalled a turning point for the Brotherhood in Ireland, with James Stephens, organiser of the funeral arrangements, suddenly finding himself leader of a flourishing republican movement in his home country.

Something similar might have followed the return of Paine’s skeleton to England in 1819, but for the fact that there was no equivalent of Stephens to exploit the republican opportunity and, given the strength of loyalty to the Crown, not much of a constituency to arouse. And, whereas in Ireland republicanism and Christianity went hand in hand through Catholic opposition to an imposed Protestant state religion, in England Paineite republicanism had to face the repressive authority of the Anglican Church. Moreover, radical reformers, as led by Henry Hunt and later by Feargus O’Connor, were predominantly monarchists and Christians, so little inclined to resurrect Paine. In fact, given their central goal of extending the parliamentary franchise to include all adult males, they were more inclined to distance themselves from his doctrines in order not to damage this cause. In such a hostile environment, the keepers of Paine’s bones, namely William Cobbett and later Benjamin Tilly, chose to hide them away. Instead of the spectacular funeral and impressive monument that Cobbett had promised, they were simply stowed away in the chest used to convey them to England and kept well out of public sight.

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Guide to Establish a True Republic

Paine’s legacy was not just a skeleton but also a celebrated book: a teach-yourself treatise on how to define and establish a true republic. Rights of Man was a best seller when first published in 1791-2 but thereafter suffered many years of government suppression, a period of persecution only terminated by William Sherwin’s boldness in republishing it in 1817. Paine’s political beliefs belonged to a British radical tradition reaching back to the revolutions of the seventeenth century. Yet they were distinguished by their unrelenting antipathy to rule by hereditary right. Previously, kingship had been condemned but only for being autocratic, its critics having no deep-seated grudge against the principle of hereditary succession. All that was required was a parliamentary limitation upon the monarch’s authority.