Why, sirrah, and why, madam, hast thou not read thy Tom Paine?
‘Kings succeed each other not as rationals but as animals …
an hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author.’
And you needn’t visit Paris in this, the year of our Lord,
Seventeen Hundred and Ninety Two,
To witness republican enthusiasm,
You could travel on the turnpike to Sheffield instead,
And witness the 5,000 cutler ‘republican levelers’,
The ‘Sheffield sans-culottes’ with their Angel of Peace
Proffering Tom Paine’s Rights of Man to Britannia,
While across the land, parodies of the national anthem are sung:
God Save Great Thomas Paine,
While
AT THE FEDERATION THEATRE IN EQUALITY SQUARE,
On Thursday
Will be Performed
A new and entertaining Farce, called LA GUILLOTINE!
Or GEORGE’S HEAD IN THE BASKET!
Dramatis Personae: Numpy the Third …
Tight Rope Dancing from The Lamp-post,
By Messrs. CANTERBURY, YORK, DURHAM &.
And
Pamphlets such as King Killing;
The Happy Reign of King George the Last;
100, 000 people meeting at Copenhagen Fields, Islington;
The King’s carriage attacked:
‘No War! No King! No Pitt!’
The following sung to the tune of ‘God Save the King’
At Drury Lane Theatre:
‘And when George’s Poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The Guillotine’
Or you could visit Uley in 1795,
To read a threatening letter:
O remember ye poor in distress by ye high prs of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishis round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a famly by a quarter flour for a shillin and here is a man in this parish do say the poore was never beter of as they be now a fatel blow forhim and his hous and all his property we have redy 5000 sworn to be true to the last & we have 510000 of ball redy and can have pouder at a word & every think fitin for ye purpose no King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.
Or hear the words of Sir George Paul on our locality:
’‘the cry of want of bread … forms a body of insurgents, amongst them
are mixed a number of seditious persons’,
And the Earl of Berkeley
‘A vein of bad materials runs through the lower order in the clothing part of the county which still continues to study Tom Paine with a few political clubs
of the very dregs and of T. Paine’s cash’.
Why, sirrah, and why, madam, hast thou not read thy Tom Paine?
‘Kings succeed each other not as rationals but as animals …
an hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author.’