The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

  "CAW" a bird yells down from a tree.

  I stop on Cobbett Hill Road and look around: I am utterly alone here. This is not a place of pilgrimage. There are no monuments to Paine or to Cobbett, no tombs grand or otherwise. This is indeed where Paine's bones would be coming to rest for a spell—but first they would travel a wildly zigzagging path.

  Back down on the A323, I see a bus with green phosphorescing destination on its front. I run for it, waving my arms, and it slows down and swings its doors open. In the hour between here and London are miles of farmland, of old wooden gates and tail-swishing horses; and then more miles of stubby pebble-dashed and stuccoed bungalows; and then an endless procession of city tenements: the landscape evolves before your eyes, from broad and rural to narrow and urban, from the rolling hills of Cobbett's boyhood to the sulfurous cities of his jail-cell nightmares. But it was out here in the countryside, far from the madness of London, that Cobbett was going to build a monument to his former enemy. And as his nation's greatest gardener, Cobbett even had a fitting procession planned for him: twenty wagonloads of flowers, "brought to strew the road before the hearse."

  It did not quite work out that way.

  Patrons shook their heads in the Fleet Street coffeehouses, holding the latest newspaper in their hands: Digging up the fellow claiming you'll raise a monument to him? Who ever heard of such a thing!

  Actually, some of the old men had. About thirty years before, the parishioners over at St. Giles on Cripplegate had the bright idea of erecting a monument to their most famous permanent resident—John Milton. True, the old poet's Areopagitica kept turning up in coffeehouse and courtroom defenses of that wretched infidel Tom Paine, but still . . . surely the man who'd also penned Paradise Lost warranted some sort of honor. Tradition held that Milton had been buried in 1674 under the clerk's desk in the chancel. But before parishioners went to the trouble of putting up a monument on the spot, a few thought that . . . well, maybe they should make sure he really was there.

  Workmen began digging on August 3, 1790, and soon enough they struck a corroded lead coffin lid on the north side of the chancel. Could this be it? It was hard to tell, so the industrious sextons brushed off and then washed the coffin lid in a futile effort to find an inscription. A wooden coffin was now visible underneath the lead one—Milton's father, probably—but by now the day was getting late and the workmen were ordered to cover the whole thing back up. There was a pair of likely-looking coffins in more or less the right place, and that was good enough. He could be reburied now, and the gravediggers were left that night to get back to work.

  So they got good and drunk.

  Why don't we look inside and see Milton? came the inevitable suggestion. A mallet and hammer were produced, and the lid smashed open.

  "Upon first view of the body," reported a witness, "it appeared perfect, and completely in the shroud, which was of many folds; the ribs standing up regularly. When they disturbed the shroud, the ribs fell."

  Well, now the poet's physique was ruined anyway: might as well finish the job. Sensing some fine opportunities, two fellows ran home and fetched scissors to clip off locks of the bard's hair, though their trip was wasted: upon returning they discovered the hair came out in clumps with no effort. Another laborer decided that maybe Milton's five remaining teeth would come out as easily. To his surprise, they did not, so he cleverly applied a rock to Milton's skull. Then the teeth came out. In fact, the whole jaw came out in the hand of another fellow, though he thought better of it and tossed it back into the coffin. He yanked a leg bone out, too, but once again had second thoughts and threw that back in as well. But the teeth, rather more practical as souvenirs, were happily distributed among the merry workmen.

  But morning would soon come; people would want to get into the church . . . then what? Now, sobering a little, the gravediggers decided it was time to get to business. They carefully barred the doors of the church, and pious locals arriving were thereupon informed that they could enter and see the body, but only if they would "pay the price of a pot of beer for entrance." And so the faithful parishioners of Cripplegate dutifully lined up, paid the cover charge, and filed past the coffin of their poet.

  They left with an awe born of Milton's mortality. Also, they left with his ribs, his fingers, his hair, and numerous shilling-sized pieces of skin. When those were gone, they also surreptitiously snapped off little chunks of the corroded coffin. It was a splendid business, and the workmen might have kept it going until the poet was disassembled altogether like an exploded drawing of so many machine parts, except . . . there was that smell. It seemed the water they used to wash off the coffin lid had gotten inside. There was, an observer noted, "a sludge at the bottom of it, emitting a nauseous smell." Well, that settled it: it was time to do the proper thing and rebury Milton—with his head whacked in, his teeth gone, his ribs snapped off, his hands missing, and bald—doomed to this day to circulate in tiny fragments across the land.

  They never did get around to building his monument.

  Mind you, this is what Englishmen did to writers they liked. But Milton was hardly the only one to suffer such indignities. A great many coffins in London cemeteries were empty or weighted with nothing more than rocks. Grave-robbing was a long-standing trade, illicit if tacitly acknowledged, though the public deeply and rather understandably resented the practice. In Cobbett's day at least ten "resurrection men" made their living supplying London medical students, and they were assisted by numerous bribed gravediggers, sextons, and churchwardens. It could be a dicey business: when one pair of resurrection men got into a dispute with a school over a five-guinea payment, they responded by dumping two extremely ripe bodies on the school's sidewalk on Great Marlborough Street. Mer a pair of young ladies tripped up on them, an angry mob was barely prevented by police from tearing the school apart.

  What was strange about Cobbett was not so much that he'd dug up a dead body as that he'd openly admitted to having done it. The Times, never the greatest of friends with Cobbett, couldn't quite believe his story at all. They accused him of planning to use local body snatchers: 'There is a suspicion that the whole of this is a falsehood-a trick arranged by certain people in London, who have put in requisition the aid of resurrection-men, for the production of a body which will be decayed enough by the time Cobbett has occasion for it." But the reports filtering back from Liverpool docks were awfully convincing. Aside from the box of bones, Cobbett's luggage also included a tarnished brass coffin plate, rather worse for having been dug up with pickax and spade blows. But on it a few words were still visible:

  PHNE

  180

  aged 74 years

  The Times, still trying to needle Cobbett, now decided that instead of planning a hoax, he'd simply made a galling mistake: "instead of bringing home the bones of Paine," it speculated, "he has brought home the remains of a negro!" But it was becoming obvious that the wild story about Paine's bones was true: he'd actually gone and done it. The news was spreading wildly across the countryside, leaving listeners variously elated, angry, or just bewildered. At Coventry, Cobbett was surrounded by a cheering crowd, and stood atop his carriage to give an impromptu speech; while in Bolton, a town crier with the temerity to announce the news of Cobbett's arrival was promptly tossed in jail.

  Publishers rushed to cash in. Three competing biographies miraculously appeared in London bookstalls within a matter of weeks, each recounting Paine's innumerable misdeeds. All had been out of print for decades until now, but they promised to deliver anew the dirt on "a man," as one summarized, "who was a compound of all that is most base, disgusting, and wicked, without the relief of any one quality that was great or good." Tom Paine smelled bad; he drank and beat his wife; he knocked up innocent girls; he was an infidel and—worse still—a cheapskate. Another publisher cleverly reprinted Cobbett's own annotated Life of Thomas Paine, allowing the Cobbett of 1796 to damn the Cobbett of 1819. But Paine's partisans leaped into the ring too. From his shop on Upper
Marylebone Street, Paine's old friend Clio Rickman hurriedly assembled a competing Life of Thomas Paine, asserting that the man had been a saint, an absolute saint. Not that Rickman was averse to making money himself-for his printing and engraving shop, he hastened to tell readers, also sold books, music, and Rickman's own "PATENT SIGNAL TRUMPET, For Increasing The Power Of Sound."

  Local doggerel scribblers were even faster out of the gate. Under a picture of Cobbett bearing a coffin on his back came one broadside: 'This is WILL COBBETI', with Thomas Paine's bones / a bag full of brick-bats, and one full of stones," it chanted, ". . . Tis Cobbett the changeling, worthless and base /Just arrive'd from New York, with his impudent face." A printer on Threadneedle Street merrily issued Sketches of the Life of Billy Cobb and Death of Tommy Pain, with a cover depicting both Satan and Paine's vengefully reanimated skeleton grabbing Cobbett at the graveside and choking him: 'Up THOMAS jumped, (and Satan too) / And caught him by the pipe / In which the wind keeps passing through . . ."

  Even Lord Byron descended briefly from his empyrean realm of poetry to take a swipe at him:

  In digging up your bones, Tom Paine,

  Will Cobbett has done well

  You visit him on earth again,

  He'll visit you in hell.

  Cobbett had not even issued his first call for donations yet, and money was already pouring in . . . to booksellers. But hanging over them all year had been the real question—he belling of the cat. It had been a quarter of a century since anyone had openly sold the treasonous books of Cobbett's martyr. Who would now dare to reprint the works of Thomas Paine?

  The Bone Grubbers

  JUDGE BAILEY EMERGED from the chambers, stern in his robe and wig, and sat high in his chair overlooking the defendant. The latest case in his docket had become an utter headache. Just blocks away, copies of Cobbett's Political Register were being hawked with news of the return of Thomas Paine. How could one have imagined such nonsense? And delivered on the day of sentencing? The awful timing of Paine's return was now threatening to turn what should have been a straightforward blasphemy prosecution into a cause celebre. It was bad enough that the defendant was a notorious local seller of Cobbett's Register. But the slight and defiant-looking young man standing in the docket, one Richard Carlile of 55 Fleet Street, had done something more, something that made him a match waiting to be thrown into a tinderbox.

  "The crime of blasphemy is one of the most serious offenses known to our law," Bailey began his pronouncement. "The sentence of the court upon you, Richard Carlile, is that, for publication of Paine's Age of Reason, you pay a fine to the king of El000 and be imprisoned for two years in the county gaol of Dorset, in the town of Dorchester; and that for the second offence, the publication of Palmer's Principles of Nature, you pay a further fine to the King of E500, and be further imprisoned for one year in the said gaol in Dorchester." The judge rambled on with his sentence-more fines, more crushing sureties required upon release-and the young man bowed his head.

  It wasn't supposed to be like this. Carlile came from a God-fearing family, and his mother and older sister couldn't fathom what had brought their misguided Richard to this place. One of his earliest boyhood memories, after all, was of gathering kindling with other village children to burn Thomas Paine in effigy—"Scouring the hedges for miles around," Carlie mused, "from daylight till dark, to gather a faggot wherewith to burn the effigy of 'old Tom Paine,' my now venerated political father!"

  Then again, Richard needed a father. He'd lost his own in 1794, when he was but four years old. "Having no father to guide me," he recalled, "I must say that, until twenty years of age, I was a weed left to pursue its own course." He learned his letters from a local schoolmistress with the delightful name of Cherry Chalk, but by age twelve he'd dropped out of school altogether. His youth was squandered in miserable apprenticeships to a druggist and then a tinsmith; they ran him ragged on minimal food and five hours of sleep a night. But any resentment that he had was vague and unfocused. He knew a few bookbinder's apprentices who, passing around forbidden books, avowed themselves followers of Paine, but Carlile never paid them much heed.

  In 1811 he moved to London to get married and seek a living as a journeyman tinsmith. It was hard to make ends meet—and even harder once Britain suffered a recession. Paine's warning seemed to be coming true: by 1816, with the nation stumbling under a bad harvest and a massive accumulated debt from endless foreign wars, the economy was becoming dire. It was a year, Carlile mused, "that opened my eyes." Scores of banks failed, and wages plummeted nationwide. Worse still was the feeling of powerlessness, as voter qualifications were rigged so that a tiny and well-to-do wealthy portion of the population determined parliamentary elections. Barely employed journeymen and apprentices near Carlile's home on Holborn Hill grumbled among themselves, passing around Cobbett's Political Register and contraband copies of Paine's Rights of Man. The grinding of poverty sharpened the edge of their complaints, Carlile recalled—"In the manufactories nothing was talked of but revolution." Trapped since childhood in a rigid class system and under a church and state that he vaguely resented without really knowing why, Paine's work at last brought Carlile's inchoate anger into focus. Why did the government have to be like this? Why not reform it? When a new and vehement radical paper called Black Dwarf fell into his hands, it found the tinsmith ready to drop everything for the cause.

  "On March 9,1817, I borrowed a pound note from my employer and went and purchased 100 Dwarfs," Carlile later recalled from his jail cell. The date of his visit to the paper's publisher still stood clear in his mind. "The Dwarf was then at an almost unprofitable [circulation] number, and it was a question about giving it up. However, I traversed the metropolis in every direction to find new shops to sell them . . . I persevered, and many a day traversed thirty miles for a profit of eighteen-pence." Carlile stopped showing up at work much, which was easy for his boss to overlook; the economy was so dreadful that there was little to do there anyway. Within weeks he gave up any pretense of still being a tinsmith: each morning he rose and reported directly to an abandoned auctioneer's storefront at 183 Fleet Street. He was now Richard Carlile, Publisher and Bookseller.

  It didn't take long for him to make his mark. Alongside newspapers urging the reform of a parliamentary election which barely any citizens could either qualify to run for or vote in, Carlile also lashed out at the clergy. Upon hearing that publisher William Hone's parody of the Liturgy had been banned by the government, Carlile hoisted placards in his shop window announcing to astonished Londoners that now he would publish it. Even Hone was surprised, since he hadn't given Carlile permission. But Carlile didn't care: to him, his duty was to the book, not to the government or even the author.

  "I believe that I am right when I say that this was the first time that ever an individual bade defiance to the veto of the Attorney-General upon any publication whatsoever," Carlile proudly claimed. The astounded head of the local Society for the Suppression of Vice, William Wilberforce, demanded that the blasphemous bookseller be prosecuted. Scarcely five months from the fateful day he borrowed a pound from his old employer, Carlile was sent on his first stretch in prison.

  He kept publishing.

  To the amazement of the authorities, now Mrs. Carlile ran the shop at 183 Fleet Street. And she just kept on selling Hone's parodies as impudently as ever. It was so blatantly defiant that nobody quite knew what to do. When Jane Carlile's husband was finally let out of jail after a four-month term, the married couple simply carried on with their insolence. More indictments: more books and newspapers. They even moved into larger quarters at 55 Fleet Street. Richard Carlile just kept contemptuously laughing off the government penalties: he didn't care.

  But soon he came to care a great deal about the heavy hand of the government. In August 1819, while Cobbett was still sitting in a Long Island cottage and pondering when best to dig up his old enemy, Carlile was sharing a stage in Manchester with other reformist speakers gathered together for
a massive rally. Upwards of fifty thousand Manchester workers turned out on St. Peter's Fields to hear them. It was a joyous day: noisemakers and impromptu instruments sang out as the workers marched in, carrying aloft handsome blue and green banners reading SUFFRAGE UNIVERSAL and LIBERTY AND FRATERNITY. Another demanded EQUAL REPRESENTATION OR DEATH.

  The government chose the latter. Carlile watched in horror as the cavalry made a charge upon the crowd, slashing and stabbing with their sabers in a melee that left eleven dead and hundreds injured. A woman in front of Carlile, clutching a newborn infant, was "sabred over the head, and her tender offspring drenched in its mother's blood." Carlile barely escaped with his life from what was quickly dubbed "Peterloo"; hiding incognito in a carriage omnibus filled with right-thinking stouthearted Englishmen, he found himself having to pass around a flask and join in a toast heartily damning himself, praying as he drank his shot that nobody would recognize him. His blistering account of Peterloo, published upon returning to London, accused the government of nothing less than cold-blooded and calculated murder to terrorize the populace. "Every stone was gathered from the ground on the Friday and Saturday previous to the meeting," he bitterly reported, "by the scavengers sent there by the express command of the magistrates, that the populace might be rendered more defenseless."

  Public outrage over Peterloo was still palpable when Cobbett arrived back with his infamous box of bones. Like an unexploded bomb, Paine's ideas were now newly unearthed and ready to detonate, and they had to be kept out of the hands of the citizenry. Carlile had been the most outrageous instigator of all—even having the gall to read all of Paine's Rights of Man aloud as evidence, in a clever attempt to be able to publish it again—yet again!—under the guise of a courtroom transcript. And this from a man who by his own admission had already sold nearly five thousand copies of this pernicious book. Judge Bailey decided to make an example of Carlile: it was time to throw the book at the bookseller.