William Cobbett arrived at the New Rochelle farm at midnight on September 22, 1819, with two laborers and a lantern. The grave had been there for ten years. The coffin was where it should have been. They opened it, lifted the bones into a smaller pine box, and were on the road to New York City by dawn.
By December, Cobbett was on the Hercules sailing for Liverpool with the bones in a sea-trunk in his cabin. He had been planning a national monument to Paine in England for several years; he had been planning the disinterment for several months. He paid no one at New Rochelle for the bones. He took no permission. The Quakers who had refused Paine a burial plot in 1809 did not need to be consulted in 1819, because the body had been buried in the corner of Paine’s own farm. By the time the Hercules docked, the news of the disinterment was in every American newspaper that had a Paine partisan or a Paine detractor on staff, and most of them did.
The plan was simple and Cobbettian: parade the remains through England, raise a public subscription, build a monument in some prominent London cemetery (Bunhill Fields was the favorite), and use the spectacle to revive English radical politics under Paine’s banner. Cobbett, by 1819, was the most read political journalist in England. His Political Register was selling sixty thousand copies a week. He had been a Tory; he had become a Painite; he was, at sixty, the popular voice of English Whig-radical politics in the years just before the Reform Act.
The plan failed at every joint.
The Liverpool customs office detained the trunk for three weeks before allowing the bones to enter England. The English newspapers that should have been reverent were instead embarrassed. Cobbett’s enemies, the Tory press, treated the affair as a freak show. The Times compared the parade of the bones to a traveling exhibition of preserved animals. The radical papers, who would have been Cobbett’s natural audience, were divided: some thought a monument to Paine would help; others thought the disinterment itself was a violation that no monument could redeem. The subscription was never raised. The bones did not get a monument.
What happened to them is genuinely unknown.
Cobbett kept them at his farm in Normandy, Surrey for the rest of his life. After he died in 1835, his estate went into receivership and the trunk passed to his son, William Cobbett the Younger. The son was a less successful man than the father. The estate’s papers and chattels were auctioned in 1844 to settle Cobbett the Younger’s debts. The trunk does not appear in the auction inventory. By 1850, the bones had been reduced from a trunk’s worth to scattered relics in private hands across England. By 1900, those relics had themselves disappeared.
There are unverified accounts of pieces. A skull turned up in Brighton in 1853, claimed to be Paine’s; the claim was never proved. A jawbone is alleged to have been in the possession of a Manchester radical at the turn of the twentieth century. A right ulna was reportedly given as a relic to a French freethinker who founded a Paine-themed reading society in the early twentieth century. None of these provenances has held up to historical scrutiny. The most honest summary, after two hundred years of investigation, is that we do not know where any of Paine’s bones are.
The story is the legend’s perfect coda because the failure was multidirectional. Cobbett, who meant the disinterment as a tribute, accomplished only the displacement. The bones, which he meant to monument, became scattered relics. The radical English public, which he meant to mobilize, was scandalized. The American public, which he ignored, mostly cheered: a New York paper noted that “the bones of Tom Paine being now in England, the loyal patriots of America are spared the embarrassment of his proximity.” The whole episode was the kind of grand gesture that goes wrong because it tries to make a single dramatic act do the work of two centuries of slow recovery.
The grave at New Rochelle is empty. There is a stone marker, set in 1881 by the Paine Memorial Society of Boston, in the corner of the farm where the original burial took place. There is also a marker on Grove Street in New York City, where Paine died at number 59 in 1809. Neither marks where Paine actually is. He is, in the most literal sense, lost.
The biographical irony is exact. Paine spent his life arguing that the dead have no claim on the political arrangements of the living, that government is the work of the present generation, that institutions exist to serve the people they presently govern. He spent his life arguing against the kind of monumental remembrance that puts dead heroes above living judgment. The man who argued most strenuously against the cult of the dead was, after his death, denied even the indignity of burial. He was, by the strictest measure of his own principles, well served.
The site that preserves his words is the only monument that obeys his logic. The bones do not matter; the writing does. We have the writing.