The Radical Duke

I am quite enjoying the Atlantic series on the American Revolution… this entry (from Danielle Allen) changes our thinking on the evolution of Thomas Paine…

For me, The Juryman’s Touchstone palpably summoned this episode from the past into the present. A few of the pamphlet’s pages bore small corrections from what I knew to be the pen of the Duke. And on the flyleaf of the pamphlet was a handwritten dedication: “To the Duke of Richmond as A Tribute due to him for His Strenuous Efforts & unwearied perseverance in the Defence of Constitutional Liberty this Pamphlet is presented by the Author.”

The existence of the pamphlet in the Duke’s library had been unknown. There are only two other extant copies, one at Yale and the other in the New York Public Library. It did not occur to me at first to wonder if the firm, plain handwriting of the anonymous dedication might belong to Thomas Paine. His first book was widely accepted to have been Common Sense, as he himself maintained, and that book was published five years after The Juryman’s Touchstone. But the pamphlet addressed two matters of great concern to Paine—the Wilkes case and the rights of jurors. And then there was the geographic alert from the London taxi driver. Paine had indeed been living in Lewes, a day’s ride from Goodwood across the wildflower-strewn South Downs. And he was living there when the pamphlet was published.

I eventually went back to the inscription and checked it against examples of Paine’s handwriting. To my eye, it looked like a match—especially the capital T ’s and the capital P. A weightier verdict than mine was provided by the editors of Thomas Paine: Collected Writings. They confirmed the handwriting match and tested the pamphlet’s text by means of computer-assisted author-identification software, applying statistical techniques to word choice and grammar as a way to compare texts of known authorship and texts whose writers are unknown. The comparison produced a match: About half of The Juryman’s Touchstone was written by Paine, the editors concluded, and about half by an American friend of his who had been living on and off in London as a representative of the Pennsylvania colony—Benjamin Franklin. One paragraph, specifically about the House of Lords, appears to be the work of Richmond himself.

So this, not Common Sense, was Thomas Paine’s first book. The inscription not only established for the first time a personal connection between Paine and the Duke of Richmond but also, given the nature of the book’s content, put Paine definitively in the Duke’s intimate circle of radical associates. Here was a crucial piece of validation for our hypothesis about the source of the Sussex Declaration. Richmond had been the first patron of a writer who would do more than any other to stir revolutionary sentiment in the colonies.

It can be easy to think of the American Revolution as a fire lit at the margins of empire, where distance made it hard for central authorities to wield control. The American colonists, we’ve come to understand, learned how to govern themselves partly because the British government was an ocean away. Then, when Crown and Parliament sought to assert more control, the homegrown spirit of self-government rose up to resist.

But this leaves out an earlier chapter, one centered not in Boston but in London, where the memory of Charles I—beheaded by order of a court established by the House of Commons in 1649—and the Glorious Revolution decades later had immense staying power for aristocrats and commoners alike. 

Evidently part of a longer argument that will be published next year…