ALTHOUGH PAINE WAS CONSUMED BY his ideological clash with Burke, financial necessity demanded that he attend to his bridge. He had returned most of his profits from Rights of Man to the printers as a means of keeping the price low. Peter Whiteside and the Walker brothers expected returns on their investment, and his personal reserves much diminished, Paine needed the income from the bridge exhibit.
By April 1791, Paine again welcomed visitors to Lisson Green. In an inept attempt to attract more of them, he and Whiteside took out newspaper ads announcing that in six weeks the bridge would leave London for Paris. A rush of new visitors never materialized and the ad provided fodder for the conservative London press, which lambasted Paine for using British money to finance a bridge that would ultimately be erected in its enemy’s capital city. “The King of France,” noted the General Evening Post,
has purchased Mr. Paine’s Iron Bridge, for which he paid him a considerable sum. The Patriot has got his reward; this, together with the shillings he has received in this country for seeing the bridge, will enable him to make great improvements on his plantation in the Jersey’s [sic], the present of the Congress for his political labours in America.—Patriotism is a lucrative trade.1
The bridge remained in place over the course of the summer. But the enterprise was now in a free fall. Paine’s own financial fortunes continued to decline and his lease on Lisson Green was about to expire. By the end of August, he was asking the Walkers to “take some steps in this [bridge] business as the time has expired for which the ground was hired and I cannot possibly charge myself any longer with the care of the concern.”
Through the early fall, the bridge remained but by the end of the year it had been dismantled and shipped back to Rotherham. Those who would see Paine’s bridge had, by now, seen it. And while much of the response was colored by Paine’s political activities, the model itself was no triumph. The bridge rested between two small wooden abutments and over the course of the seasons these yielded, causing the structure to sag. Paine was somewhat dejected, but not despondent. To Hall, he wrote that although the Lisson Green model had problems, they were not irreversible. The first Rotherham prototype, which was probably the bridge erected on Foljambe’s estate, had been “erected between two steel furnaces, which supported it firmly; it contained not quite three tons of iron . . . was loaded with six tons of iron, which remained upon it a twelve month,” and there was no sign of failure. The design, Paine remained convinced, was sound. Whether he would be able to continue its refinement was another matter.2
UNTIL JUNE 1791, PAINE and most other observers had assumed that as long as Louis XVI and his family remained in Paris, a new National Assembly would enact reform with the King’s consent. There would be no need to abolish the monarchy. But if the monarch fled or otherwise disavowed the revolution, the path toward government without a king would be unavoidable. Radicals would point to royal duplicity as justification for the creation of a French republic.
In the end, this is precisely what happened. On June 21, the King and his family fled Paris, disguised as common travelers. They nearly managed to escape to the Dutch dominions of Leopold II, the Austrian emperor and brother of the French queen, Marie Antoinette. However, they were apprehended a little over thirty miles from the border, at the town of Varennes. For French republicans, the King’s flight was proof that the Revolution could no longer protect a deceitful Bourbon monarchy.
Paine, who was in Paris at the time of the King’s flight, interpreted events similarly and immediately joined the republican cause. He helped found the new Société des Republicains, whose members included the journalist and politician Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville; Achille François du Châtelet, a young aristocrat who served as Paine’s translator; and the forty-eight-year-old statistician the Marquis de Condorcet. Paine was also involved in founding the club’s short-lived journal, Le Républicain, a role well justified, he explained, by his citizenship in the United States, “a land that recognizes no majesty but that of the people, no government except that of its own representatives, and no sovereignty except that of the laws.”3
When Paine returned to England later that summer, he discovered that his fealty to French republicanism had further alarmed the Pitt government. Rather than tolerate an emboldened Paine, the government undertook a carefully orchestrated smear campaign, propagating rumors about financial malfeasance, commissioning a malicious biography by a Scottish lawyer writing under the pseudonym of Francis Oldys, sponsoring new anti-Paine royalist associations, and covertly encouraging a flood of anti-Paine pamphlets.
During the fall of 1791, as government pressure against him grew, Paine sought refuge at the London home of an old friend from Lewes, a bookseller named Thomas “Clio” Rickman. Encouraged by his many like-minded friends, Paine responded with Part II of Rights of Man. “As revolutions have begun,” it proclaimed, “other revolutions will follow.” The message could not have been plainer: the tide of revolution had turned, and whatever Edmund Burke may have wished to believe, Britain would soon follow France on the path to republican government:
Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all Europe, as is produced by the two Revolutions of America and France. By the former, freedom has a national champion in the Western world; and by the latter, in Europe. When another nation shall join France, despotism and bad government will scarcely dare to appear. To use a trite expression, the iron is becoming hot all over Europe. The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think. The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.
Revolution was now as much a fact of the Old World as the New. “What pace the political summer may keep with the natural,” Paine concluded, “no human foresight can determine. It is, however, not difficult to perceive that the spring is begun.”4
And all of this was the result of a simple truth: governments of war and taxes, of meaningless pomp and splendor, were giving way to governments by the people. In addition to openly prophesying revolution in Britain, Rights of Man put forward a radical plan to revamp the British system of taxation. Government by the people, liberated from endless dynastic and imperial war, would bring massive tax cuts, especially for poor and working Britons. The remaining revenue could be applied to a new system of social security for the poor, particularly the legions of British military veterans. In a letter he wrote not long after the appearance of Part II, Paine summarized his plan:
The work shows . . . that the taxes [of Britain] now existing may be reduced at least six million, that taxes may be entirely taken off from the poor, who are computed at one third of the nation; and that taxes on the other two thirds may be considerably reduced; that the aged poor may be comfortably provided for, and the children of poor families properly educated; that fifteen thousand soldiers, and the same number of sailors, may be allowed three shillings per week during life out of the surplus taxes; and also that a proportionate allowance be made to the officers, and the pay of the remaining soldiers and sailors be raised.5
Paine knew well that this call for revolution in state finance would only further incite his growing list of enemies. He also knew that the government would use his latest publication as yet another justification to attack his character. It would point out that a man who once served its revenue system now identified that system as a source of social injustice. Paine would counter these claims with a propaganda campaign of his own. He wrote old associates in Lewes, reminding them of “the exceeding candor, and even tenderness, with which” he carried out his gauging. “The name of Thomas Paine is not to be found in the records of the Lewes’ justices, in any one act of contention with, or severity of any kind whatever toward, the persons whom he surveyed, either in the town, or in the country.”6
Paine’s efforts did little to quiet the alarm produced by his latest pamphlet. Part II of Rights of Man sold as well as Part I. In addition to the tens of thousands of legally printed copies, thousands of copies of cheap pirated editions appeared throughout England, Wales, Scotland, and the United States. In Ireland, more than anyplace else in the British Isles, the pamphlet struck a chord. Long oppressed Catholics, dissenting Protestants, and republicans savored Paine’s no-holds attack on Britain’s constitution. For the government, Paine’s popularity in Ireland constituted a frightening threat to national security. Despite its deep and conservative Catholicism, no population in Britain was more susceptible to French radicalism than the legions of alienated Irish Catholic peasants. For many of them, the Revolution’s hostility to monarchical government eclipsed its deep anticlericalism. The danger of radicalism in Ireland grew all the more acute with the emergence in 1791 of the United Irishmen, a reform party composed of disaffected Irish Presbyterians and middle-class Catholics. One of the group’s founders and its most prominent spokesman, a Protestant lawyer from Dublin named Theobald Wolfe Tone, would come to know Paine as a man who “drinks like a fish,” but who nonetheless “has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe.” 7
Initially Tone and the United Irishmen favored incremental reform more in the vein of the reformist Burke and his Whig allies than the radical Paine. Nonetheless, Britain’s government saw signs of Painite republicanism in the group’s calls for greater representation and Catholic voting rights. The possibility that such radical sentiment would spread throughout the country’s embittered sectarian factions, encouraging revolution, was something the Pitt administration could not tolerate. The loss of American colonies to republicanism had already driven Lord North and his ministry from office. Pitt could not allow Irish radicalism to do the same to his government. And if this meant a heavy-handed response to Paine’s latest revolutionary publication, so be it.
IN MAY 1792, the government issued a summons to Paine’s publisher, J. S. Jordan, to appear before the King’s Bench on charges of seditious libel. Jordan pled guilty and surrendered materials relating to Paine. Several days later, the government issued Paine a similar summons. Paine considered the legal action a conspiracy engineered by Burke to discredit the writer who had defeated him in the era’s great ideological contest.8
Even though a conviction would mean imprisonment, Paine saw in his persecution signs of victory. He had succeeded in shaking conservative England and had every expectation of furthering his cause through a public trial. But the authorities were a step ahead of him. They delayed any trial until December, hoping that anti-Paine demonstrations, with their loud loyalist proclamations and executions of Paine in effigy, would force Paine to confess his crimes or leave the country.
The strategy worked.
On the evening of September 13, 1792, under cover of darkness, Paine fled for Dover, intending to sail the next day for Calais. The journey proved harrowing. Paine was detained by Customs officers, who forced him to surrender personal papers, including the page proofs for a third part of Rights of Man. The following morning Paine was released and, passing through a gauntlet of shouting, spitting local loyalists, he boarded a boat for France. He would spend the next decade there and never again return to England. The Lisson Green bridge, as far as he knew, was now a disassembled heap, rusting away at the Walker Brothers’ foundry.
In December of 1792, the Pitt government began court proceedings against Paine. Given Paine’s absence, the trial was obviously for show, but was undertaken with urgency, as antigovernment unrest erupted throughout the country, much of it stoked by rising food prices, Painite republicanism, and the prospects of war against revolutionary France. Although Paine’s defense lawyer was Thomas Erskine, attorney general to the Prince of Wales, and among the nation’s best lawyers, the carefully selected jury found Paine guilty. Far from quashing Painite sympathies, however, the verdict only seemed to excite Paine’s supporters, thousands of whom rallied in the streets of London as Erskine’s carriage made its way from Guildhall at the trial’s conclusion.
DESPITE ALL THE DOMESTIC tumult, industrial Britain continued its forward march. The nation’s second major iron span was opened across the River Wear in 1796 at the northeastern town of Sunderland. Although the 236-foot bridge never achieved the iconic status of the Iron Bridge, it was a much more ambitious and majestic structure. For a region whose coal had been heating London and fueling the new steam-engine boom, the bridge was a triumph, a testament to northern England’s capacity for industrial development.
Capturing this spirit, although with a sharper note of aspiration than its authors probably intended, the foundation stone of the bridge’s abutment, which had been laid on September 24, 1793, paid tribute to the bridge’s creator, a Member of Parliament for the County Durham and a Tory ally of Prime Minister Pitt:
At that time when the mad fury of French citizens, dictating acts of extreme depravity, disturbed the peace of Europe with iron war, Rowland Burdon, Esq. aiming at worthier purposes, hath resolved to join the steep and craggy shores of the river Wear with an iron bridge.9
To a degree, the inscription was accurate. The Sunderland Bridge was the work of a northern gentleman, one whose family estate at Castle Eden stood as a monument to conservatism and, in this case, its mercantile roots. Rowland Burdon’s father had been a founder of the Exchange Bank in Newcastle and Burdon himself had extended the bank’s business to the southeast, facilitating the growth of the Sunderland port and financing the construction of the new bridge.
The opening of the bridge in August 1796, reported one London paper, drew a who’s who of establishment Britain, featuring “a grand Masonic procession, attended by the Commissioners of the River Wear, Magistrates, clergy, Officers of the Navy and Army, and the Loyal Sunderland Volunteers.” These dignitaries had come together to commemorate a great improvement in local life. The small colliers and coal barges feeding the North Sea coal trade could now travel uninhibited up and down the river while those traveling overland between Sunderland and Newcastle freely moved across the bridge. It was a fitting tribute to a British industrial revolution untouched by a French political one. 10
Beneath all the righteous commemoration lay deep social tensions. Improving navigation had been, for Burdon and his constituents, a matter of vital economic importance. The region’s keelmen—the small barge operators who hauled coal downriver to oceangoing ships, anchored in deeper waters—had periodically blockaded the Wear and Tyne Rivers during the course of the eighteenth century in what were among Britain’s earliest labor strikes. A bridge that carried traffic above the river without further inhibiting boat traffic below could do much to mitigate the effectiveness of the keelmen’s strikes.11
From the vantage of its builders, then, the gently curving single-arch Sunderland Bridge was a monument to capitalism and counterrevolution. Thomas Paine, one might well conclude, was the last person Burdon and his associates would have had in mind as they erected their iron bridge. And yet, observers and chroniclers of the bridge regarded it as an architectural wonder inspired by the vision of Thomas Paine.
BURDON DEVELOPED an interest in architecture in the mid-1770s during a grand tour of Italy. He and a group of fellow students traveled around the country studying its architectural monuments, particularly those built by the sixteenth-century architect Andrea Palladio. Among the lifelong friends Burdon made was John Soane, a young English architecture student who as professor at the Royal Academy would shape nineteenth-century Britain’s first generation of architects.
As he was planning the bridge across the Wear, Burdon had consulted his old friend Soane, who was then working as architect and surveyor for the Bank of England in London. Burdon was most interested in Soane’s views on iron construction and sent him a drawing to evaluate. The drawing was entitled A Slight Sketch of Thos. Paine’s Patent Cast Iron Bridge Proposed to Be Erected over the River Wear near Sunderland. The only surviving image of Paine’s bridge was most likely made by the Walker brothers to advance a bid to build Burdon’s bridge. Soane made two copies of the drawing in November 1791. These remain in his papers along with a careful report on Paine’s Lisson Green bridge.
Soane’s assessment of Paine’s bridge was guarded. “On reviewing the progress and improvement made in various arts and sciences,” he noted, “I believe it will be found that most of them have been made by ingenious men not brought up to or engaged in that particular science, branch of business or manufactory.” So it was that “perhaps we have seen a woman’s stay maker outstrip [Britain’s foremost bridge architects] in constructing bridges of Iron . . . without any farther pretensions to a knowledge of Architecture than what a moderate share of common sense may afford.”
But a bridge across the Wear required much more than common sense. Even supposing an iron arch would function as Paine assumed it would, “there are many other things to be known . . . such as lying foundations, building piers, constructing centres [or temporary supporting scaffolds] for turning the arches upon & c.” Above all, though, the integrity of the iron-arch bridge would be an aesthetic matter. “Properly proportioning one part to another so as to give the whole structure the greatest strength and elegance” was, in the end, something only the most “judicious and practical architects” could ensure. Paine was very clearly not one of these.12
Encouraged by Thomas Wilson, a local Sunderland architect, Burdon nonetheless settled on an iron bridge very similar to Paine’s. To construct the bridge, he turned to the Walkers, now Britain’s foremost iron-bridge fabricators. They had urged him to build with iron from the start and, to promote the idea, may even have re-erected Paine’s Lisson Green bridge at Castle Eden, the Burdon family estate in County Durham. What the Walkers made for Burdon was different in its specifics from what they had made for Paine. Instead of a series of parallel iron arches composed of smaller, curved bars, with a road deck resting directly on the arches, the Sunderland Bridge consisted of a series of arches, as well as a detached deck supported by circular iron spandrels. But the fundamental form of the bridge, a shallow iron arch composed of smaller load-bearing iron members, was still Paine’s.
Such, in any case, was the common perspective; however minimal Paine’s actual role in the creation of the bridge, it stood in the minds of contemporaries as a tribute to the architectural genius from America. “The greatest object of curiosity in Sunderland is its iron bridge thrown across the river Wear, forming an arch so lofty as to allow large ships to pass under it,” wrote the traveler and geographer Reverend Richard Warner. “Tom Paine . . . was the original inventor of these extraordinary structures,” surely among “the grandest specimens perhaps, of the powers of modern art.” In fact, according to his lecture notes, prepared in 1811, after he had become professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, John Soane had concluded that the iron bridge “was introduced to England by Tom Payne.” Some claimed that the Sunderland Bridge was fabricated from the remains of Paine’s Lisson Green bridge. The 1847 edition of Edward Cresy’s Encyclopedia of Civil Engineering noted, for instance, that “Sunderland Iron Bridge, over the Wear, was formed in part out of another contrived by the celebrated Thomas Payne, which was put up at the Yorkshire Stingo, Lisson Grove, and afterward carried back to Rotheram.”13
IN 1859, as a refurbished Sunderland Bridge was about to be opened, planning for commemorative events was disrupted by scandal. The board overseeing the project made plans for a tribute to its original architect but it was divided over who most deserved the honor. Burdon’s son, the Reverend John Burdon, offended by the possibility that his father would be denied his due “while Paine . . . is promoted to the place of honour,” attacked the proceedings. In a lengthy published letter, he claimed that his father was a victim of the crude and narrow thinking of modern professionals: “I cannot help fancying a good deal of the doubt which has been cast upon this matter has originated in . . . a certain vague notion, abroad now-a-days, that a mere country gentleman is not to be expected to possess any great qualities of mind or character; and that, therefore, there is great antecedent improbability that one of that class should have hit upon . . . anything so remarkable as the invention of the Bridge.”
Burdon’s pleas had little impact. “At the Iron and Steel Institute, at Liverpool,” reported the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette in 1879, “Mr. J. A. Picton, F.S.A., in the course of his paper on ‘Iron and Steel as Constructive Materials,’ on Thursday last, is reported to have said: ‘The boldest [use of these materials] . . . was the cast iron bridge over the Wear [at] Sunderland, which was designed by the celebrated Thomas Paine and was opened in 1796.”14
PAINE LEARNED OF the Sunderland Bridge sometime in the mid-1790s. Assuming it was a copy of his Lisson Green model, he asked a Paris friend and former Member of Parliament, Robert Smith, to help him obtain compensation. Smith wrote an old colleague, the Whig Ralph Milbanke, Rowland Burdon’s fellow MP from County Durham. Although he had been an early supporter of the bridge, Milbanke had little to do with its design and construction and was able to offer Smith little more than acknowledgment of the bridge builders’ debt to Paine:
With respect to the iron bridge over the river Wear at Sunderland, . . . I have good grounds for saying that the first idea was suggested by Mr. Paine’s bridge. . . . With respect . . . to any gratuity to Mr. Paine, though ever so desirous of rewarding the labors of an ingenious man, I do not feel how . . . I have it in my power . . . but if you can point out any mode according to which it would be in my power to be instrumental in procuring him any compensation for the advantages the public may have derived from his ingenious model, from which certainly the outline of the bridge at Sunderland was taken, be assured it will afford me very great satisfaction.15
Under different circumstances, Paine might have taken some encouragement from Milbanke’s words. He did, after all, have a patent for his bridge. Surely the younger Paine would have done so, or at the very least a Paine not wanted for seditious libel.