You can't really talk about Thomas Paine or John Walking Stewart without coming across a Coaching Inn established in 1685 which was first called The Fleece and was later called The White Bear. The Inn was in a part of London England nowadays called Piccadilly.
In the 1790's Piccadilly was frightfully fashionable, relatively peaceful, in modern parlance it was a hub for the social, literary and political elite. It had posh grocery stores, and a gathering of highfalutin bookshops were people went to talk about stuff, and worth noting that in the 1790's the drinking of coffee was all the rage, with over 3000 coffee shops across England. And I have to say that I was very disappointed when I found out that around 1791-92 John Walking Stewart was a lodger at the White Bear.
It just shows how the wish factor that aligns your thinking can often hit hurdles and how easy it is to yell "Fake News" when your feelings are hurt. I should have guessed that something like that would happen to my attempts at balance. It should have been obvious! Walking Stewart had been a general for Hyder Ali, and after pissing off Hyder Ali he'd reacquainted himself with East India Company by becoming a member of the Nabob of Arcot's inner circle. Stewart had money aplenty for his walk from Madras to London. The so called threadbare Armenian private soldier's jacket he'd wear, he'd probably paid for. And indeed you have to ask whether John Walking Stewart had ever actually slept in a hedgerow or befriended a very young streetwalker like Ann who when De Quincey was on the run from his family had filled his dream time with confusion and pity. Later in his life a vision of her regularly visited him in the rush of his opium highs, poor chap....
Anyway, you might want to know what on earth a founding father was doing lodging with Walking Stewart at the White Bear in the fashionable Piccadilly of 1791-92. Go ahead, quarrel all you want, Paine may not have signed the bit of paper but he was a revolutionary intellectual and former disgraced English custom and excise officer whose words and writings shaped a nations 'Founding Ideals.' If the prissy fingered passionless Yankees with their attention to detail and ridiculously big army can't handle a Thomas Paine being a founding father, then f-em in the ear.
In the 1790's The French Revolution was the talk of the town. From rural England it all looked very European, it was just one big war after another big war, but "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" did appeal to a good few intellectual types in Piccadilly amongst whom lopping the head off a tyrannical yoke wasn't that big a problem if it was done "For the People and By the People." Perhaps not Walking Stewart's opinion, the only people he really trusted were the Laplanders
Thomas Paine had just written and published a book he'd called "Rights of Man" and lo, Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister of the British Islands and her colonies, Great Britain as it was called through the 1700's until 1800, had decided to start banning books and arresting authors who didn't really see a problem with radical changes like those French Revolutionaries were engaged in, and on this subject, Pitt the Younger, despite being a man who'd remained obedient to his doctor's advice to drink a bottle of port every day since he was 14, couldn't help but notice that Thomas Paine, a particularly incendiary rabblerouser who'd had great success in the Americas had written another book and was dolling around in Piccadilly as an unmarried male and probably drinking coffee.
But it was because he was lodging at the White Bear in a very fashionable part of town, and not hiding in a hedgerow, Thomas Paine was warned by his friend the Poet, Painter and Madman William Blake just in time for a Founding Father to run away to France where he was already an elected representative and was receiving income as a deputy for the Pas-de-Calais region to the National Convention of France.
Paine missed his trial date for seditious libel, which had been set for December 18th 1792. The Magistrate declared him guilty, he was convicted of being an Outlaw, no better than a Highwayman, new warrants were issued for his arrest and on January 15th 1793, Thomas Paine, fulfilling his obligations as citizen of the world who represented the Pas-de-Calais region of France, was called to speak to the French National Convention on the subject of Executing Louis XVI (the sixteenth), husband of Marie Antoinette and King of France.
Thomas was of the opinion that the Republic shouldn't execute Louis, instead they should exile him. Thomas' reasons were like this: First of all, Louis wasn't all bad, if it hadn't been for Louis supporting the Americans in their war of independence from the British there would be no Constitution of the United States. Second of all he argued against the Death Penalty by suggesting it was a barbaric method of punishment favored by Monarchy and the French Republic shouldn't stoop to the level of monarchs. And thirdly, there was no point in turning Louis and his dumb-ass family into martyrs for the Royalists Cause. Thomas Paine voted against executing Louis, and for his trouble he was arrested and jailed during Robespierre and the journalist Marat's rule by fear. This was the period of French history referred to as the Reign of Terror. Thomas, a very brave man in defense of his beliefs, was lucky not to have been executed himself.
Interestingly, for those who in our difficult time may have a fever for karma, Marat, the journalist and ideas man, was stabbed to death in a bath by a supporter of the Moderate Girondin faction, a striking woman called Charlotte Corday, sometime in the year of 1793. And then a badly wounded Robespierre, who was the progeny of a lawyer marrying a brewer's daughter, was dutifully and formally executed for counter revolutionary activities in the July of 1794.
Vive La Belle France was by 1799 yearning for a Napoleon to tell his Grenadiers to fix bayonets.
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