They still show you—if you are persistent enough to at length find those who know or care anything at all about it—the birthplace of Tom Paine, in White Hart Street, but it must be confessed, gladly or with regret—one is not quite sure which emotion is pre-eminent—that Paine, that stormy petrel of late eighteenth-century politics, has quite faded out of popular recollection in this his native town. Who, anywhere, knows nowadays much more about Tom Paine than that he was the author of a work, “The Rights of Man” which no one ever reads nowadays and therefore is generally thought to be much worse than it really is? For the rest, there remains a vague impression that he was a “wicked” person, and, above all, not “respectable,” which last consideration, of course, sufficiently deters the mass of people from seeking to learn anything about him. Yet in his day he was a most remarkable person, and exercised an enormous influence.

Tom Paine—no one ever seems to have called him “Thomas”—was born in 1737, the son of a Quaker staymaker. They were quite humble people, the Paines, and their household so dull and cramped that Tom, early a rebel against authority, ran away from home in his nineteenth year and went for a sailor. He fought on board the man-o’-war Terrible in 1756, but authority, stalking rampant, so to speak, on the quarter-deck, was, of course, not at all to his mind, and he left the Navy. Turning then to his handicraft of staymaking, he is found, a fleeting figure of unrest, in London, Dover, and Sandwich. He married in 1759, and his wife died in the following year.

Staymaking seems then to have lost all attractions for him, for in 1761 he succeeded in obtaining the modest appointment of supernumerary officer in the Excise, and was stationed in this his native town. How very modest that post really was may be sufficiently explained when it is said that the pay was £50 a year, and find your own horse! If that was an advance upon his earlier employment—why, then, staymaking must have been a poor thing. Paine does not seem to have taken his duties very seriously. Could any one, at the price? So, after he had been transferred to stations at Grantham and Alford, he was at length, in 1765, dismissed for neglect. The neglect was rather serious, consisting as it did in filling up returns of examinations he had not made.

Two years of wandering followed. Staymaking at Diss and ushering in London filled in the time until 1767, when by some strange chance he secured another appointment in the Excise. This billet would have taken him to Grampound, in Cornwall, but that was too far West, and so he held off until the following year, when a similar post offered at Lewes. There he lodged with a tobacconist, who died the following year, and two years later Paine married his late landlord’s daughter. She and her mother opened a small grocery business, and Paine contributed his small share towards keeping up the establishment. But it was not in the scheme of life laid down by the Fates for Paine that he should be allowed to jog comfortably on through an obscure provincial existence of this humdrum nature. He became a noted figure in local political debates, and in 1772 the excisemen, who had long chafed under a combination of arduous work and small pay, found in Paine a champion who could display their grievances to advantage. He wrote and issued a pamphlet, setting forth their circumstances and demands, and eventually found himself dismissed from the service. He petitioned the Board of Excise for reinstatement, but they had no use for firebrands, and his appeals were disregarded.

Meanwhile, domestic differences had been at work, and that lack of conjugal agreement it has been left for modern times to gracefully term “incompatability of temperament” had caused a more or less amicable separation.

This general upheaval and ruination of Paine’s little world sent him drifting to London, where he met Dr. Franklin, who found him eager to try his luck in what were then the North American Colonies, and so gave him introductions to Philadelphia folks who might be of use. At Philadelphia he landed, accordingly, in 1774, and presently found his way into an editorial chair, at a salary of £50 a year, which we may perhaps look upon as an advance, because he certainly had not to support a horse, as well as himself, out of it, as in old Excise days.

He had reached America at a critical juncture of affairs. The Home Government had exasperated the colonists to the last degree by seeking to tax them in support of an Exchequer depleted by the world-wide warfares not long before brought to a conclusion. It mattered nothing that those wars had been fought for the very existence of England and her colonies alike: the New Englanders were not patriotic when their pockets were touched, and would not pay, and the Home authorities tactlessly insisted that they should. The result was armed rebellion, an inglorious war, and the independence of the United States. In all the many and involved political intrigues of the rebellion and the setting up of the new nation Paine had a part, and even did some service for the revolted colonists in the field. But it was as a negotiator, wire-puller, and general go-between he shone. From his trivial editorial throne he raised himself into the status of a personage by pamphleteering, and conducted himself as an equal with Washington and the other leaders. Nay, more; it was he who, seeing how eager France was to aid the colonies against England with men, munitions of war, and in diplomatic ways, suggested and did actually in most skilful manner, negotiate a loan from the French Government to the States. For these services he was granted a salary of $800, equivalent to £160. Clearly negotiators were cheap in America in those days! But although he wrought such yeoman service to the cause, his fellow-revolutionaries did not love their Paine. He stood for negation in everything. Kingdoms, principalities, and powers, aristocracies and religion were as naught to him; while, for the most part, the successful colonists had no quarrel with anything but the British Government. They were pious and God-fearing: he was an atheist. Washington and his lieutenants were essentially of the aristocratic class, and with the prejudices of their order: Paine was—as modern slang would put it—“no class,” and it is clear that although his associates were glad of his lucid and pungent pen, they were not desirous of close association with him.

Paine returned to England, in 1787, and made acquaintance with Fox and others of those who, had they not been blinded by political animosities, must needs have looked upon him as what he really was, a traitor to the land of his birth. By this it will be seen that the “Pro-Boers” of modern times are no novel phenomena: they have always existed as “pro” something or other likely to be injurious to their own country. It is rather a pity, when you consider it, that Paine was not properly hanged when he set foot again on these shores; but he was not molested until the second part of his atheistical book, “The Rights of Man,” was published, in 1793. Then he had to flee the country, a fugitive from the wrath of a nation that could endure a traitor, but found it impossible to forgive one who denied his God.

Where should such an one seek refuge but in Paris? There he became “Citizen Paine,” and consorted with Marat, Robespierre, and others; publishing his “Age of Reason” in midst of that hurly-burly of revolutionary jealousies. The victory of one party and the downfall of another brought him in that land of liberty an unexpected introduction to a Parisian dungeon, where he lay for ten months, and narrowly escaped the guillotine. It was only through the strong attitude taken up by his American friends, and by the false claim of his being an American citizen, that he became again a free man. The year 1798 found him still in France, and hoping much from that rising star, Bonaparte, in whose mind it is not at all improbable he planted the first thought of invading England. Bonaparte then stood for freedom, and Paine looked forward to “proclaiming liberty at Thetford” under his protection; but, alas for that beautiful dream! Bonaparte, the Republican general, became Napoleon the Emperor and autocrat, and it grew evident at last, even to Paine, that it was not by his aid this land of slaves and helots was to be set free.

And what did Thetford think of it all? It is rather grievous to acknowledge Thetford was so sunk in slavery that it did not recognise the fact, and desired to be let alone. It sat in chains and misery, all unconscious! Thrice unhappy Thetford!! Folk in the taverns and in the streets even expressed a contempt and dislike of “Tum Paine,” and loudly proclaimed their earnest desire to duck him in the river that runs so handy, through the town. But Tom never came back, and so the community lost its projected sport. He returned to America in 1802, and did not linger to watch the fortunes of that flotilla Napoleon was at last fitting out for the conquest of England. Seven years later, in 1809, he died in New York, and was buried at New Rochelle, but the unrest of his life followed him beyond the grave; for Cobbett, himself a reforming Radical, but on slightly more suave lines than Paine, in 1819, as a hero-worshipper, exhumed his bones and brought them to Liverpool. Cobbett, twenty-three years earlier, had denounced him as “base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous.” There his stock of adjectives ran out, and he brought the indictment to a conclusion. How the satirical shade of Paine must have chuckled at this right-about-face!

When the available property of Cobbett’s son was seized for debt, in 1836, these poor relics formed a part of his belongings. Thence they passed into the hands of a Mr. Tilly, but since 1844 have not been heard of.

So much for Paine. The street of his birth, the street that leads out of the town on the way to Norwich, is still old-fashioned. There stands yet the old “White Hart,” and a handsome house of two pointed gables, once said to have been the “Fleece.” Lower down, opposite the “Bell,” a house now occupied by an ironmonger was once the “George”; and midway is a pre-eminently ancient building whose age is tacitly recognised as transcendent, in the name of “the old house,” given it locally. Its timbered frontage probably belongs to the fourteenth century. Traces of an old watchman’s box remain, and dark traditions survive of a chain being stretched across the street at night, from this to the opposite house. Something more, perhaps, than tradition, for the staples from which the chain hung are still pointed out. No records remain to tell the why or wherefore of that chain, but we have only to recall the misty past again to find in the solitary position of Thetford, surrounded by heaths—and those heaths frequented, to put it mildly, by undesirables—much virtue in chains, and comfort unspeakable to the listening midnight ears of nightcapped burgesses in the watchman’s resonant “Twelve o’clock, and a starlight night! All’s well.”