Paine, THOMAS, deistical and radical writer, was born at Thetford in Norfolk on 29th January 1737, the son of an ex-Quaker staymaker. He himself had by turns been staymaker and marine, school-master, exciseman, and tobacconist, had married twice, losing his first wife, and soon divorcing the second, when in 1774, with introductions from Franklin, he sailed for Philadelphia. On 1st January 1776 appeared his pamphlet Common Sense, which argued simply but strongly for complete independence, and which in Washington's words, 'worked a powerful change in the minds of many men.' His Crisis, a twelvemonth later, gave the battle-cry, 'These are the times that try men's souls,' for the Americans' first victory at Trenton, where Paine himself was serving as a private; and congress rewarded him with the post of Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs. He lost that post in 1779 for divulging state secrets, but was appointed clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature, and in 1785 received from congress $3000 and the confiscated farm of New Rochelle. In 1787 he returned, by Paris, to England, where in 1791-92 he published The Rights of Man, the most famous of all the replies to Burke's Reflections upon the French Revolution. The work, of which a million and a half copies were sold in England alone, involved many in heavy penalties; Thomas Muir, for instance, for circulating it got fourteen years' transportation. Paine, however, had slipped off to Paris, having been elected by the department of Pas-de-Calais its deputy to the National Convention. Here he voted with the Girondists, and at Louis XVI.'s trial he 'alone,' says Madame de Staël, 'proposed what would have done France honour—the offer to the king of an asylum in America.' He thereby offended the Robespierre faction, and in 1794 was thrown into prison; just before his arrest having written part i. of The Age of Reason, against Atheism and against Christianity, and in favour of Deism. Part ii. appeared in 1795, and a portion of part iii. in 1807. The book alienated Washington and most of his old friends; and it was not till after an imprisonment of eleven months that he was released and restored to his seat in the Convention. He became, however, disgusted with French politics, and occupied himself chiefly with the study of finance, till in 1802 he returned to America in a ship placed at his service by President Jefferson. He died at New York 8th June 1809. The stories about his intemperance were greatly exaggerated. In 1819 his bones were removed by Cobbett (q.v.) from New Rochelle to England; their whereabouts since 1847 is unknown. 'Paine's ignorance,' says Leslie Stephen, 'was vast and his language brutal; but he had the gift of a true demagogue—the power of wielding a fine vigorous English.'
The completest edition of his works is that by Mendum (3 vols. Boston, 1850); of his numerous biographies may be mentioned those by 'Francis Oldys' (i.e. George Chalmers, 1791), Cheetham (1809), Rickman (1814), Sherwin (1819), Vale (1841), Blanehard (1860), and that by Moncure D. Conway (2 vols. 1892). See also Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1880); and Alger's Englishmen in the French Revolution (1889).