At His Funeral, Six People Came. He Had Helped Start Two Revolutions.

The Full Story

Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk in 1737. His father made corsets. Paine failed as a corset maker, a sailor, a tobacconist, a tax collector and a teacher. England had nothing for him. At thirty-seven he met Benjamin Franklin in London. Franklin handed him one letter of introduction and told him to go to America. He arrived in Philadelphia in November 1774 with almost nothing.

Two years later the American colonies were on the edge of revolt but most ordinary people still could not imagine breaking from the Crown. Paine sat down and wrote a pamphlet in plain English, aimed at farmers and craftsmen, not politicians or kings. Common Sense was published on 10 January 1776. Its sales figures are genuinely contested, but estimates commonly run to 100,000 copies or more in 1776 alone, in a country of two and a half million people. General Washington had it read aloud to his troops. Six months later came the Declaration of Independence. Paine gave away every penny of his royalties to fund the Continental Army.

He went back to Europe and did it again. The Rights of Man, published in 1791, was a direct challenge to hereditary power. The British government charged him with treason. He was already in Paris, where the French revolutionary government had elected him to their National Convention. Then Robespierre had him arrested. He spent ten months in a cell waiting to be executed. He survived because the jailer, marking the doors of the condemned, chalked the wrong side of his. He died back in New York in 1809. Six people came to his funeral.