AS PAINE GREW ABSORBED with world affairs, his circle in England also expanded. Initially limited to old friends from his Lewes and Thetford days, it now included some of Britain’s most influential men. In addition to providing information about affairs of state, Paine’s new British friends proved indispensable supporters of his bridge building.
The most important such person was Edmund Burke. By the time he and Paine met in 1788, the fifty-nine-year-old Burke had been a Member of Parliament for more than twenty years. After half a decade as MP for the port city of Bristol, Burke had become MP for Malton, a small market town in North Yorkshire. It was a seat he held at the behest of the Marquess of Rockingham, his close friend and political patron, who had died in 1782. Rockingham’s party, the so-called Rockingham Whigs, emerged as an organized opposition to the ministry of Lord North during the American War.
Reflecting much of his party’s oppositional temperament, Burke had become a prominent voice of reform. He had opposed the American War on the grounds that it would irreparably damage Britain, whatever the outcome. He favored the extension of rights to persecuted minorities—particularly, Britain’s disaffected Catholics. In the aftermath of the Gordon Riots, a violent anti-Catholic uprising that swept across London in June of 1780, he urged the government to respond with restraint. He opposed slavery and led a long and exhausting campaign to root out corruption in the British East India Company. In his defense of these causes, Burke came to be known as one of the great orators of his age. If he was not always able to influence an intransigent governing majority, he made his voice heard within and beyond Westminster.
BORN IN DUBLIN, the son of a prosperous Protestant attorney and a Catholic mother, Burke was raised a Protestant and educated by Quakers. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he moved to London to pursue a career as writer and poet. Although his father pressured him to study law, the young Burke persisted and made his way among London’s legions of scribblers. Since so much written for London’s literary periodicals was anonymous, it is difficult to know the full scope of Burke’s early work. But it almost certainly included magazine essays, sentimental verse, doggerel, and perhaps political pamphlets.
By his mid-twenties, Burke had begun accumulating a distinguished body of philosophical and historical work. His literary talents attracted the interest of prominent politicians, including the Marquess of Rockingham. In 1765, the year the King asked Rockingham to lead the government, Rockingham hired Burke as a personal secretary, a position that included a seat in Parliament. Rockingham remained in power for barely over a year, but Burke retained his seat after having led the administration’s quest to repeal the controversial Stamp Act.
Politics may have been the initial basis for Burke’s friendship with Paine. But the two men also shared an interest in the built environment. Early in his Parliamentary career, Burke had helped advance a bill to finance London’s first substantial public office building, Somerset House. For the seat of so great an empire, the city had remarkably few distinguished public edifices. Many of its government offices were housed in ramshackle buildings around Whitehall and Westminster; similarly, its great learned societies—including the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Society of Antiquaries—all convened in buildings of little distinction. It was time, Burke and his allies thought, for the capital to have a public building worthy of its imperial greatness.
The initial planning of Somerset House, named for the Duke of Somerset, whose sixteenth-century palace originally occupied the site of the new building, incited the kind of controversy public buildings always seem to stir up. Burke and others assailed the first design as crude and utilitarian, while others argued for economy of scale and style. When the architect responsible for this early design died, Burke’s friend William Chambers, George III’s chief architect, was chosen to propose an alternative. His building was really a grouping of connected neoclassical structures situated around a grand courtyard. In the front was the busy Strand, the thoroughfare linking the commercial City of London with the governmental City of Westminster. The rear of the building looked out upon a vast, stately terrace, perched high above the banks of the Thames and affording one of London’s most stunning vistas.1
IN THE SPRING of 1788, Paine approached Burke with a letter of introduction from Henry Laurens, a South Carolinian, an old and devoted friend of Burke, and father of John Laurens, Paine’s former diplomatic associate. During the American War, the older Laurens had been captured at sea, charged with treason, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Burke was a vocal opponent of Laurens’s treatment and helped negotiate his release. Once Paine met Burke at the latter’s Soho residence, he became a regular in Burke’s circle, which included the Duke of Portland, a former prime minister. The Duke invited Paine to Bulstrode, his Buckinghamshire estate. Paine would also be an occasional visitor to Burke’s nearby country home at Beaconsfield.2
Early in the friendship, Paine had sought to separate himself from his radical past, telling Burke that he “had closed [his] political career with the establishment of the independence of America, and had no other business in France than to execute the orders of the government of Pennsylvania with the academy of sciences respecting the model of the Bridge.” And although he had published Prospects on the Rubicon, this foray into global affairs was momentary: “The quiet field of science has more amusement to my mind than politics and I had rather erect the largest [iron] arch in the world than be the greatest emperor in it.”3
BY THE SPRING of 1788, Paine had still heard nothing from authorities in Pennsylvania and had all but abandoned hopes of American financing for his bridge. Burke and the Duke of Portland gave him access to a new network of wealthy patrons, whom he now hoped would finance the prototype. Paine had also begun entertaining fantasies about bridging the Thames and using the profits from the sale of the bridge to finance a Schuylkill bridge.
The first step remained the construction of the new prototype. In addition to its architectural value, such a model would help Paine survive in Britain. He still had some money from the Continental Congress and was able to borrow against his American property, but funds were running low and his diplomatic work was strictly pro bono. The immediate solution, Paine believed, would be income from the display of his bridge model. London was awash in exhibitions of artistic and scientific curiosities. For a few shillings, Londoners could experience electricity shows, balloon ascents, and automata, humanlike machines that appeared to play chess, dance, draw, or play music. They could also view astonishing works of art and craft. In 1790, a gallery on Greek Street in Soho displayed Josiah Wedgwood’s remarkable Portland Vase, a replica of the celebrated Roman original owned by the Duke of Portland.
Paine hoped to capitalize on this public appetite for science and art. While devising the scheme, he met an English-born Philadelphia merchant named Peter Whiteside, who promised to finance the new prototype on the condition that Paine acquire English, Scottish, and Irish patents. Paine had never intended to turn his bridge into proprietary technology, but Whiteside expected a return on his investment. Whiteside also recognized that Paine’s iron arches could do more than support bridges and he insisted that these other applications get their due. As Paine’s patent made clear, his was a very broadly applicable technology: “A Method . . . by Means of Which Construction, Arches, Vaulted Roofs, and Ceilings may be Erected to the Extent of Several Hundred Feet Beyond what can be Performed in the Present Practice of Architecture.”
British patent law carried no authority in the United States and Paine disclaimed any interest in a separate American patent. “With respect to the patents in England,” he explained to Jefferson, “it is my intention to dispose of them.” For Paine, the patents were means to an end: in securing Whiteside’s investment, they would allow him to build the bridge prototype upon which he had now staked his architectural future.4
However dismissive he may have been of his patents, they showed remarkable architectural prescience. The age of cavernous interior spaces of the sort that required iron ceiling trusses would have to await the arrival of large-scale factories, exhibition halls, and the most triumphal expression of industrial-age architecture, the railroad station. As Boulton and Watt were transforming the British industrial landscape, some of these sorts of buildings might have been imaginable. But for an American, whose country remained an industrial backwater, they were truly visionary.
MOST LIKELY through Burke’s introduction, in August or September of 1788, Paine met members of the Walker family, proprietors of one of Britain’s largest and most profitable ironworks. Founded in the 1740s by the late Samuel Walker, the firm was now run by Walker’s four sons, Samuel, Joseph, Joshua, and Thomas. During the recently concluded American War, the firm’s works in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, had profited mightily from the production of hundreds of tons of cannon. With little fanfare, the Walkers determined that Paine’s bridge design was feasible and potentially profitable. They agreed to fabricate a new prototype and provide additional financing.
Paine never showed any qualms about the fact that the Walkers made their money supplying the British army in its war against his homeland. Nor did he ever acknowledge that his adventure into the age of iron would now be made possible by the very forces of war and state finance he so despised. In some sense, this silence reflected precisely the kind of hypocrisy Paine’s critics would endlessly attribute to him. He was building bridges and writing political pamphlets not because he believed in what he was doing, but for base personal profit. Perhaps a more persuasive explanation, given Paine’s ideals, is that he was willing to suspend scruples because he believed doing so would make possible the construction of an American bridge. And it was on the other side of the Atlantic that he expected his ideals to be fulfilled. Unless its people chose the path of revolution, Britain would always be a taxing, war-making nation. America, with its commercial population freed from the depredations of the British government, would be different.
BY OCTOBER 1788, Paine had traveled to Rotherham to begin work on a giant 250-foot bridge model. Shortly after his arrival, Francis Ferrand Foljambe, a local gentleman and Yorkshire MP, offered him his first British architectural commission. The River Don ran in front of Foljambe’s home, and could be crossed only by an “ill constructed” bridge. Foljambe’s proposal that Paine build a bridge over the river was ideally timed. As the winter grew colder and darker, Paine had begun to rethink the size of his planned prototype. A smaller model could be built indoors and perhaps finished more quickly. It turned out that a smaller model was what Foljambe needed near his house. South Yorkshire would now have an iron bridge worthy of its growing iron industry. At ninety feet in length, the Foljambe bridge would be only slightly smaller than the famed Iron Bridge.
The fate of the Foljambe bridge is unknown, but it clearly fed a growing sense among the region’s industrial and political elite that the American Paine was an architect worthy of their patronage. The project immediately attracted the attention of local dignitaries. The Rotherham works were just a few miles from Wentworth Woodhouse, the Marquess of Rockingham’s vast 365-room manor, now occupied by Rockingham’s nephew, heir, and political successor, the Fourth Earl Fitzwilliam. Shortly after Paine began working on Foljambe’s bridge, Burke brought Fitzwilliam to see the marvel. The Earl was sufficiently impressed to invite Paine to spend time with him at Wentworth Woodhouse, an invitation Paine happily accepted.5
The year 1788 was a superb one for the Walker brothers. The firm issued £14,000 in dividends, some of which the Walkers agreed to use to finance yet another prototype. The new bridge would be displayed in London where, Paine hoped, it would attract paying visitors. Throughout 1789, Paine traveled back and forth between London, Paris, and Rotherham, alternately supervising the construction of the newest bridge, following what appeared to be the beginnings of revolution in France, and keeping up with British affairs in London. By the end of May, the following year, the Walkers had finished casting the parts of Paine’s bridge and all 36½ tons of them were taken by ship to London.6
Paine would spend the next several months observing the construction process from a distance. He had hired an American, a Mr. Bull, to oversee the three carpenters and two laborers who would assemble the structure. The arrangement allowed Paine to keep a foot in the worlds of both architecture and politics. And it turned out that in the spring of 1790, the latter were particularly consuming.
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE had been under way for the better part of a year. The Estates General, a representative body that had not met since 1614, had been convened by the King, and the Third Estate, its quasi-representative branch, had decreed itself a new unitary National Assembly. The Bastille, a prison in central Paris, had been seized by partisans of the Third Estate. And the new self-declared National Assembly had abolished feudal privilege and seized church-owned property. The people of France, it seemed, had begun a wholesale reformation of government.
Although Paine watched these events with great anticipation, what most absorbed him were British affairs. Once again, it appeared, the government was preparing for war. After Spanish naval vessels captured two British merchant ships at Nootka Sound, on the remote west coast of present-day Vancouver Island, the government seemed bent on punishing its Spanish rival.
During the spring and summer of 1790, the crisis consumed Paine’s political energies. He never acknowledged that his new patrons stood to profit from renewed war. Instead, he spoke of the crisis as another indication that Britain was in need of deep political reform. The government of Prime Minister William Pitt, he believed, had trumped up another excuse to raise taxes.7
By late summer, Spain had largely capitulated and the danger of war dimmed. Paine turned his attention back to his bridge. This was, it turned out, a necessary shift. In early August, Bull had fallen during a rainstorm, and he was now unable to work. Paine would have to oversee the final assembly of the new bridge. For the fifty-three-year-old Paine, the work proved exhausting but also exhilarating. “I am always discovering some new faculty in myself either good or bad,” he wrote to Thomas Walker, “and I find I can look after workmen much better than I thought I could.”
The construction site was carefully concealed behind a fence, but Paine reported many interested onlookers. He was as hopeful as he had ever been. A 110-foot iron-arch bridge, built entirely to his specifications, would now demonstrate once and for all the suitability of his design for the Schuylkill River.8