Having pointed to some of the
flaws inherent in the British monarchy as cause for concern to the citizens of the
Thirteen Colonies, Paine transitioned in the second section of Common Sense to decrying monarchy itself
as a form of government. This series of denunciations depicts Paine at perhaps
his most radical as he gleefully dismissed the underpinnings of hereditary rule
as unwise, unnatural, and unjust. This radicalism, rhetorically forceful though
it was surely intended to be, remained couched in plain-spoken terms that were
no doubt distinctly digestible by the average American colonist in the 1770s. Whereas
Thomas Jefferson would later call for separation from Great Britain in the
Declaration of Independence because the actions of Parliament and the Crown had
violated the unspoken social contract between those entities and the citizens
of the colonies, a claim fundamentally rooted in a philosophical abstraction,
Paine endorsed independence because he believed that monarchy was quite simply
a bad idea.
At its heart, Paine argued,
hereditary rule was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption; namely that wisdom,
nobility, or administrative acumen were inherited traits, and that fate did not
sometimes reward a worthy and altruistic parent with an avaricious and unworthy
child. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in
kings,” he wrote to that effect in the tenth paragraph of the second section,
“is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it
into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” He provided no examples of
what he was specifically referring to by this turn of phrase, perhaps counting
them so numerous as to be common knowledge. A cursory glance at the annals of
British kingship would seem to bear this out. Henry II (1154-1189), if not a
good king then certainly an effective one, was followed by his sons Richard I
(1189-199), the soldier-king who nearly drained England dry to pay for his
wars, and John, (1199-1216) whose weak rule witness the beginning of the end of
his father’s empire in France. An example slightly more contemporary to Pain
and his readers is that of James I (1603-1625), who united the thrones of
England and Scotland, and his son Charles I (1625-1649), whose disregard for
Parliament led to the English Civil War (1642-1651) as well as his own
execution. Doubtless unversed in the history of medieval England, most American
colonists in the 1770s likely had some (albeit vague) knowledge of the monarchs
of the House of Stuart (who ruled Britain from 1603 to 1714). Their alternating
strength and ineptitude had serious consequences for the fortunes of Britain’s
North American colonies, and the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution
(1688-89) in particular loomed large in the American popular imagination.
Paine was doubtless attempting to
play to the common understanding of the British monarchy that was held by the
average, formally uneducated American with arguments such as these. To his
benefit, the monarchs of the House of Stuart and the House of Hanover
(1714-1901) had generally proven themselves to be somewhat less than virtuous
and self-sacrificing. Yet Paine was not content merely to solicit agreement
that the last century or so of English monarchy leading up to the 1770s had
witnessed a downslope in quality. Rather, he was keen to point out to his
readership that the very concept of monarchy was, and always had been, morally
bankrupt. This he set out to do by using plain, at times even course or crude,
language as a means of demystifying kingship and its various trappings. William
I (1066-1087), commonly known as William the Conqueror, Paine accordingly
described in the thirteenth paragraph as, “A French bastard landing with an
armed banditti, and establishing himself as king of England against the consent
of the natives.” It was, he continued, “a paltry rascally origin. It certainly
hath no divinity in it.” This was essentially the crux of Paine’s argument
against the supposed noble origins of kingship. Far from being divinely
ordained by God, as many of them claimed, they were nothing more than the
descendants of, “the principle ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage
manners or pre-eminence in subtility (sic) obtained him the title of chief
among plunderers” (paragraph twelve). There was nothing noble in celebrating
the brutal rise of a particular tribe, Paine asserted, and much to be gained in
casting off their legacy.
Not content with levelling a
stinging indictment at the origins of monarchy, Paine went on in subsequent
paragraphs of the second section of Common
Sense to describe some of the ills that kingship continued to perpetuate as
of the 1770s. The first, in the sixteenth paragraph, concerns the way kingship
acts on the minds of kings themselves. Often the undisputed lord and master of
the territory over which they rule, it would seem prudent that a monarch be
well-educated, worldly, and cognizant of the concerns of his/her realm and its
many inhabitants. The underlying logic of kingship, however, creates a barrier
between a monarch and the rest of the world by declaring them to be of an
ill-defined but immutably different quality than the great mass of humanity.
“Men who look upon themselves born to reign,” Paine argued, “and others to
obey, soon grown insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are
easily poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially
from the world at large.” How could such a person be expected to govern justly,
knowledgeably, or effectively when they are ignorant of the reality in which the
majority of their subjects exist? How could they act compassionately or rule
fairly when they have been taught from birth that they are intrinsically
superior to the vast majority of their fellow man? In Paine’s estimation they
could be expected to do neither, and were more often, “the most ignorant and
unfit of any throughout the dominions.”
“Another evil which attends
hereditary succession,” as Paine put it in paragraph seventeen, is the manner
in which formal authority is given over to appointed regents in instances of
infant succession or eventual infirmity. Because, generally speaking, monarchy
transfers from one individual to another instantly upon the death of the holder
it is not uncommon for minors, or even newborn infants, to be crowned a king or
queen. Such was the case, to take an example seemingly at random, with Mary,
Queen of Scots (1542-1567), who ascended the throne upon the death of her
father James V (1512-1542) in 1542 at the venerable age of six days. In such
instances a regent, often a surviving parent, family member, or leader of a
council of nobles, is appointed (or appoints themselves) to oversee the
administration of the realm and exercise formal power in the name of their
infant charge. A similar situation could and did occur in instances when an
elderly monarch becomes mentally or physically incapable of ruling or is
otherwise absent from the realm. Paine’s objection to this revolved around the
accordant responsibility attached to the office of regent and the ample
opportunities for personal enrichment that abound under the cover of acting on
behalf of a ruler incapable of acting for themselves. Were it not bad enough
that hereditary succession often places near-absolute power in the hands of
those not fitted for it, a regency could potentially open up the exercise of
this power to, “every miscreant, who can tamper successfully with the follies
of either age or infancy.” To return to a prior example, young Queen Mary soon found
herself a pawn in the attempts of Scotland’s Catholic and Protestant political
factions to secure their place via alliance with either France or England. Her
regents, neither elected nor even “divinely appointed,” ruled with their own
interests in mind. This Paine found particularly objectionable, and plainly
declared as much.
The third, and what Paine claimed
to be, “the most plausible plea” against hereditary monarchy, he unfolded in
paragraph eighteen of the second section of Common
Sense. Monarchy, he wrote, was often claimed to be a force for political
stability, and in particular to act as a guard against the outbreak of potentially
destructive civil wars. If true, this would certainly seem to be a point in its
favor. Its various flaws notwithstanding, if monarchy were able to preserve the
lives and property of its subjects indefinitely it would seem to warrant no
small degree of consideration as a useful form of government. As it happened,
however, “the whole history of England disowns the fact.” By Paine’s
estimation, the thirty kings and two minors that reigned between 1066 and 1776
witnessed at least eight civil wars and more than twice that number of
rebellions (including the American Revolution). A cursory evaluation of the
history of England within the indicated period reveals a multitude of civil
conflicts that were likely the basis of Paine’s declaration. These include, but
are not limited to, the dynastic struggle known as the Anarchy (1135-1154), the
Great Revolt (1173-74) between Henry II and his sons, the First and Second
Barons’ War (1215-1217 and 1264-1267) between rebellious alliances of nobles
and Kings John and Henry III, respectively, another dynastic conflict famously
referred to as the War of the Roses (1455-1487), the popular revolt know as the
Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-37) which resulted from Henry VIII’s desire to reform
the English church, the English Civil War (1642-1651), and the Glorious
Revolution (1688-89). Lacking sufficient evidence to conclude that the English
monarchy was the direct cause of all of these disturbances, which Paine appeared
to intimate, it would nonetheless seem fair to conclude that the mere fact of
the Crown was manifestly incapable of preventing them.
In this, and the previous two arguments, Paine’s central thesis was relatively simple. Namely
that hereditary monarchy, apart from having its basis in the perpetuation of a
contest of strength and cunning that has little to do with the qualities of
good government, continued to produce a numbers of ills in its present (i.e.
1770s) form that were easily observable and measurable by the average person.
He endeavoured to prove this point, as he did throughout Common Sense, by deploying simple logic and relying on the existing
assumptions of his audience. Monarchs were distant, Paine wrote, and had little
knowledge of the way their subjects lived. Nobles were untrustworthy, he
argued, and would leap at the opportunity to seize power upon the succession of
an infant to the throne or the infirmity of a reigning monarch. Civil war was
common in England, he asserted, and even provided a tally of just how many
times the Crown had failed to preserve the peace of the realm and contributed
to the destruction of lives and property nominally under its protection. Absent
access to a detailed sociological survey of the political biases and historical
memory of the average American colonist in the 1770s (would that such a thing
existed), I have little trouble believing that they would have responded well
to arguments whose core conceits were simple assertions such as these.
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