By R.W. Morrell

Extracts from Cobbett’s works and The Satirist. Compiled with comments by Robert W. Morrell.

BEFORE HIS “CONVERSION” to a pro-Paineite position, William Cobbett made several bitter attacks on Paine and his ideas. Following his “change of heart” Cobbett found his anti-Paine material being used against him. Leading the attack was the anti-reform, pro-government journal The Satirist. 

The following extracts are taken from issues of The Satirist dated July-December, 1810, and illustrate the bitterness with which Paine was attacked. When The Satirist published this anti- Paine material it was done in order to attack Cobbett, who was then in prison.

When the wight who here lies beneath the cold earth 

First quitted the land that had given him birth, 

He commenced the apostle of bloodshed and strife 

And practised the trade to the end of his life; 

Sedition and nonsense and lies to dispense, 

He took up the title of “old common sense,” 

Taught poor honest men how rich rogues to keep under 

Exited to pillage, and shared in the plunder; 

But when there was no longer plunder to share, 

His “common sense” led him to seek it elsewhere. 

To his countrymen now he returned back again 

The wronger of rights and the righter of men; 

He told them they still were a nation of slaves 

That their king was a fool and his ministers knaves; 

And the only sure way for the people to thrive 

Wue to leave neither one nor the other alive. 

But Thomas who never knew when he should stop 

Went a little too far and was catch’d on the hop;

In short ’twas determined that poor Tom should lose 

His ears at , a post, or his life in a noose; 

“Old common sense” boggles, then skulks out of sight 

Then packs up his rags and decamps in the night, 

His arrival in Paris occasions a fete 

And he finds in a den of assassins a seat; 

Here he murders and thieves, and makes laws for a season,

Is cramn’d in a dungeon and preaches up “Reason;”

Blasphemes the Almighty—lives in filth like a hog,

Is abandoned in death and interred like a dog.

Tom Paine for the devil is surely a match

In hanging old England he cheated Jack Catch,

In France (the first time such a thing had been seen)

He cheated the watchful and sharp guillotine;

And at last to the sorrow of all the beholders

He marched out of life with his head on his shoulders.

The above was written by Cobbett at a time when he thought Paine had died and was entitled Epitaph on Tom Paine. Earlier, the anonymous Satirist writer had referred to a poem by Rickman about Paine, or as he called Paine, “the scoundrel Paine.” Rickman is termed “this poor driveling straw-decked maniac… The “straw decked” part refers to Rickman’s straw hat. Paine, the writer continues, was “one of the most mischievous traitors that ever disgraced our country.” 

Cobbett’s description of Paine as “the hoary blasphemer at the bottom of his dungeon… manacled, besmeared with filth, crawling with vermin, loaded with years and infamy ” pleases The Satirist and is frequently brought up when Cobbett is aimed at.”Tom,” the insulting shortened version of Thomas is used, “frequents a brothel” and “men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous, by the single monosyllable PAINE” Cobbett had attacked the ideas in Paine’s The Decline and Fall of the British System of Finance and stated the theories to be unfulfilled — and would remain so. The Satirist following Cobbett’s “conversion” took a delight in pointing out that Cobbett had changed his mind and stated that the said theories had been “completely FULFILLED”. The Satirist writer refers to Cobbett’s earlier view that Paine’s ideas in The Decline and Fall…. were “as stupid and despicable as their author,” and contrasts them with his later claim that Paine “was among the most celebrated statesmen and writers of the last and present century, second to’none but Hume, BEFORE Burke ” “No good man ever respected Paine,” stated Cobbett, he was “a fool…blackhearted traitor…base…stupid… treacherous and blasphemous wretch”, some of Paine’s work was “a task that the dregs of his old brain were quite unequal to.” 

Such, then, were the considered opinions for many years of Cobbett. How he must have squirmed when The Satirist reprinted them, however, Cobbett did have the courage to admit he was wrong; that can take some doing and is itself a courageous act.