The Trouble with Tom (6 page)

As a thoughtful final touch, Cobbett added that he very much looked forward to his subject being "abandoned in death, and interred like a dog." Strange words for a man who, reporting to British readers back home while on another American sojourn twenty years later, now complained that "PAINE lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America." And—he now added rather cryptically-"there, however, he shall not lie, unnoticed much longer." Cobbett, having gotten his old wish for Paine to be interred like a dog, now wanted to raise a monument to the man.

What?

One might question Cobbett's sanity: certainly his detractors did, and they had no lack of apparent madness to point at. One favorite sport of newspapers was to arrange vehemently pro and scabrously con quotes about issues of the day, where quoted verbatim for the pro side was Mr. William Cobbett. And quoted verbatim for the con side was . . . Mr. William Cobbett.

Generally, when a man is rabidly for one cause, and then is just as rabidly for another cause, it is not because he loves the causes: it is because he loves the rabies. But there was something more than that at work with Cobbett. His two years of jail time in London had profoundly changed him. A man who once loudly applauded the death penalty—'When you hear a man loud against the severity of the laws, set him down as a rogue," he'd written—now discovered that life looked different from the other side of the bars. Paine had died only months before, in 1809, a frail old man hounded to the last: now that he, too, was thrown against the wall, Cobbett viewed his hated old enemy differently. He passed his hours in prison reading Paine's 1796 pamphlets
The Decline and Fall of the British System of Finance
and
Agrarian Justice
, and realized with horror that all these years he'd been assailing a blood brother.

"This man, born in a humble life, knew more than all the
Higher orders
put together," Cobbett concluded. Though barely known alongside
Common Sense
, Paine's essays were indeed extraordinary. Decline and Fall decried the British government's use of unbacked paper currency to finance foreign adventurism through ever-spiraling debts; these, in turn, required more wars to shore up domestic support and foreign resources. The national debt, Paine contended, would eventually become a national bankruptcy—and strength of its financial markets could prove the country's greatest weakness. "It will not be from the inability of procuring loans that the system will break up," he admonished. "On the contrary, it is the facility with which loans can be procured that hastens the event." Paine was deeply unimpressed by the financial acumen of members of Parliament—”they only understand fox-hunting," he snapped-and he was not fooled by the smoke and mirrors the Prime Minister employed to pay down this debt: "As to Mr. Pitt's project of paying off the national debt by applying a million a year for that purpose, while he continues adding more than twenty millions a year to it, it is like setting a man with a wooden leg to run after a hare. The longer he runs the further he is off."

Instead of endless conquest and debt, Paine's sister pamphlet
Agrarian Justice
proposed that Britain turn inward and tend to its own assets. He thought it hopeless to turn back the clock on Enclosure Acts, nor was he particularly opposed to the wealth they brought—"I care not how affluent some may be," he shrugged, "provided that none be miserable in consequence of it." But the newly landless poor, Paine warned, now faced becoming a "hereditary race." The wealthy were becoming a hereditary race, too, thanks to land inheritance, and Paine proposed a novel way to make them pay for this new social order: estate taxes. After all, he reasoned, "personal property is the
effect of Society"
—so the least they could do was support the
cause
. The collected monies would provide minimum stake for everyone when they were getting a start in life, and when they were approaching its close. "Create a National Fund," he proposed, "out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of Fifteen Pounds sterling, as a compensation in part for the loss of his or natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property; and also the sum of Ten Pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living of the age of fifty years."

What Paine proposed looks astonishingly like modern state pensions and student grants, which we take for granted now without much thinking about the seismic shifts in the social order that necessitated them. Only someone like Cobbett—sent as a soldier in a corrupt regiment to defend barren land, and returning home to find his farming community destroyed—could fully understand
why
Paine was assailing military debt and the menace of rural poverty. And this was why, chastened and humbled before the grave of his old enemy, the one-time Peter Porcupine had preceded his return to Liverpool with a remarkable letter to his astonished newspaper readers back home. "Our expedition set out from New York in the middle of the night," he reported, "got to the place (22 miles off) at the peep of day, took up the coffin entire; brought it off to New York; and just as we found it, it goes to England." He'd return with Paine's bones, he promised, in a couple of months. "At any rate, I will be there, or at the bottom of the sea."

But he couldn't contain himself, and Cobbett booked passage on another boat scarcely following the one bearing his letter. Quaker passengers refused to board when they heard of its cargo, muttering about God striking the vessel down; this was not an entirely fanciful expectation, as on a previous voyage lightning had struck two passengers sitting at either side of Cobbett. But he was elated at the prospect of returning with his prize—"These bones will effect the reformation of England in church and state" he giddily claimed before leaving New York—and with him arriving at the Liverpool docks just days after his first article appeared, the crowds meeting him at the docks were still abuzz over what he'd done. And that wasn't the only surprise he had in store for them: now, he announced, he was going to raise money for a grand English tomb to Paine.

"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:

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
."