The Paine Family

The parents: Joseph and Frances

Joseph Pain (the e was added by his son later) was a Quaker stays-maker in Thetford, Norfolk -- a respected craftsman in the small economy of an East Anglian rotten borough. The Quaker meeting at Thetford was Paine’s first school. His father’s religion shaped his prose style for life: plainness, suspicion of priestcraft, the right of the conscience to speak.

Frances Cocke was the daughter of a Thetford attorney, eleven years older than her husband, and an Anglican. The Cocke side of the family disowned her for marrying down and out. The marriage was officially mixed; under English ecclesiastical law of the 1730s the children were christened into the established church regardless of the father’s dissenting profession. Paine was therefore Anglican on paper, Quaker in the meeting, and never quite at home in either. Frances outlived her son by almost a year, dying in 1790 at ninety-two.

The sister: Elizabeth

Joseph and Frances had a second child, a daughter named Elizabeth, born in 1738 and dead before her first birthday. She is one sentence in the Thetford parish register and one note in Conway. Paine grew up effectively an only child.

The first marriage: Mary Lambert

Paine married Mary Lambert, a maid in service in the household of an exciseman’s widow at Sandwich, Kent, on September 27, 1759. He was twenty-two, she was younger. The marriage lasted about a year. Mary died in childbirth in 1760; the child died with her. Paine never spoke of either loss in print. Conway found a single private reference; the standard biographies treat both deaths as the unexamined wound under everything that follows.

The second marriage: Elizabeth Ollive

Paine married Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of his Lewes landlord, on March 26, 1771. She was twenty-one, he was thirty-four, and the marriage was apparently unconsummated. They formally separated in June 1774, dividing what little property they had and signing an agreement that prevented further claims on either side. Paine never explained the separation in writing. Elizabeth lived another thirty-four years; she died in 1808, the year before her former husband, having never remarried. Their settlement was honored on both sides.

No children, no descendants

Paine left no surviving children. The Bonneville sons -- Benjamin, Louis, and Thomas -- whom he provided for in his will were Madame Bonneville’s children by her husband Nicolas, not Paine’s; the rumor of paternity was a Federalist slander Paine sued (or threatened to sue) at least twice. Benjamin Bonneville did become a U.S. Army captain and the namesake of the Bonneville Salt Flats and Lake Bonneville, but the genealogical line is the Bonnevilles’ alone.

The result is that the Pain / Paine line ends with him. There are no living descendants. The Thetford parish records, the Lewes Society of Friends, and the Bonneville papers preserve everything that can be known.

A note on sources

This tree reflects what is reliably attested in the standard biographies -- Moncure Conway’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1892), David Hawke’s Paine (1974), Alfred Owen Aldridge’s Man of Reason (1959), and John Keane’s Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995/2003) -- plus the Thetford parish register, the Lewes Friends’ minutes, and the Bonneville family papers at the University of Iowa. Corrections from better-sourced genealogical research are welcome; please contact the editor.