The Dangerous Book of Heroes Page 18

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  In August 1915, three Germans demanded entrance to the clinic. Once inside, they produced a pistol and had the nurses line up against the wall. Edith was summoned, and she came down to them in her nurse’s uniform, carrying a small traveling case and gloves. They took her to the Saint-Gilles prison, where she was charged with aiding the enemy. She remained there for two months. In her absence, one of the nurses, Sister Wilkins, sought out the American ambassador. He tried desperately to contact the German governor of Brussels, but to no avail. The nurses sent her roses, and she kept them in her cell.

  Sister Wilkins was allowed to visit Edith in prison and found her worn out and thin but still determined to keep her dignity.

  “I have done what was my duty,” Cavell said. “They must do with me what they will.” Her faith was a comfort to her, and she wrote to the nurses: “Remember that it is not enough to be good nurses; you should also be good Christian women.”

  At her trial, Edith Cavell would not lie. She admitted in court that she had cared for two hundred British, French, and Belgian soldiers, helping many of them to escape. The sentence was death. On October 12, 1915, a chaplain was allowed to visit her in her cell. Before she was taken out to be executed, she said to him: “Standing as I do in the view of God and Eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone.” Deeply moved by her courage, he said later: “I came to comfort her and she has given me comfort.”

  At 7 A.M., Cavell was made to stand against a wall and a firing squad assembled. Some of the men fired deliberately wide, and it is said that one refused to shoot. He was also killed and buried in a shallow grave beside her.

  A few days later, her personal effects were returned to the clinic, with a final letter to the nurses. In it, she wrote:

  I hope you will not forget the little talks we had each evening. I told you that voluntary sacrifices will make you happy; that the idea of duty before God and yourselves will give you support in the sad moments of life and in the face of death. I know I have sometimes been harsh, but never have I been voluntarily unjust. I loved all of you more than you will ever know.

  When the war ended, Cavell’s body was returned to England. An impressive ceremony was held at Westminster Abbey. From there the coffin was taken home to Norfolk and she was laid to rest outside Norwich Cathedral. Every second year since, in Swardeston, a flower festival is held around October 12 in her memory. Her courage, her sense of duty, her example, are as valuable today as they have ever been.

  Recommended

  Edith Cavell by A. A. Hoehling

  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

  Thomas Paine and Rights of Man

  If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

  —George Orwell

  The United Kingdom is the originator of modern democracy. Not for nothing is Westminster called “the Mother of Parliaments.” English common law, dating back to Alfred the Great (871–99), is the basis of many countries’ legal systems as well as Britain’s. In the United States, created almost a millennium after Alfred united England, its law refers back through British law to this common origin.

  Like much progress, the spread of British democracy around the world has always been a case of “two steps forward one step back.” The governing of Ireland should have been better, while the independence of the Australian colonies in 1901 is an example of good intentions misused. The earlier British act of 1828 decreed “free people of color in the colonies” had legal equality with their fellow citizens, yet two of the first acts of the independent Australian government classified Aborigines as “subhuman” and removed their right to vote. These acts have since been overturned, yet they demonstrate the constant threat to our freedoms and “rights,” even from ourselves.

  The greatest backward step for Britain was the imposition of the European feudal system upon the English freeman system. Most of the freedoms developed from Alfred’s reign were lost in 1066 when William defeated King Harold at the battle of Hastings. Feudalism created peasantry, serfdom or slavery, a class-divided society, and the divine right of kings—dictatorship. It took four hundred years to overturn all these, through the Magna Carta and the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, to the civil war and Cromwell’s commonwealth of 1649.

  Our freedoms, liberties, and civil rights come at a price—human life. It’s the greatest argument of all for never losing them.

  Radical thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, David Home, John Locke, and Thomas Paine devised the principles of our modern democratic society in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Britain. They attacked authoritarian government, oppression, censorship, and religious dogma. As a result, equality before the law, votes for everyone, freedom of speech, and secret ballots are British concepts, while the first Declaration of Rights was passed into law in Westminster in 1689. Even the concept and term “rights of man” was created in Britain. The later U.S. and French constitutions are based upon Locke’s revolutionary Two Treatises of Government of 1690.

  Yet in practical terms, no one in the world has a “right” to anything, not even life itself. When a person is drowning, the sea does not recognize any right to survival. All our “rights” are man-made, and while armies and navies are necessary to protect them, the first step is their creation. The man who brought all these diverse rights and concepts together—who sent shock waves through governments, churches, through society itself—was Thomas Paine, son of a humble corset maker from Thetford in Norfolk.

  Born on January 29, 1737, Thomas Paine was brought up a Quaker and attended the local Thetford school. When he was twelve years old he was apprenticed to his father. He lasted four years before running away from corsetry to the sea. He served as a seaman in the British privateers Terrible—commanded by a Captain Death and Lieutenant Devil—and the King of Prussia, preying on enemy shipping during the Seven Years’ War.

  After his first wife and baby died in childbirth, Paine became a customs officer in Kent and then Sussex, the county of Quaker William Penn. With the separation from his second wife, Elizabeth, in 1774 came the first indication of Thomas Paine’s ideals of personal freedom. Despite the patriarchal laws of the time and although poor himself, he signed his ownership to Elizabeth’s inherited property back to her, permitted her to carry out business and trade with the rights of a single woman, and split the proceeds from the sale of their house and goods.

  Dismissed from the customs office the same year because of his labor agitation and pamphleteering, he wrote the fiery Case of the Officers of Excise, and in London he met the British colonial free-thinker Benjamin Franklin. With Franklin’s letter of introduction, Paine sailed to the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania.

  In Philadelphia he was appointed editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine—just in time to campaign for the American colonies’ independence from Britain. Paine had discovered his life’s purpose: the campaign for individual freedom.

  The background to the American War of Independence is unique. On the one hand was Great Britain, then the most democratic and liberal nation in the world; on the other were thirteen of Britain’s American colonies, each with its own independent assembly and its people also British. In each land, sometimes in the same family, there was support for the other. It was almost a civil war.

  Paine’s magazine contributions included several essays condemning slavery, but it was his pamphlet Common Sense, written and published in 1776, that made his name. It was the most widely read pamphlet of the war, both in Britain and America, and in addition was translated and read widely in monarchist Europe. In Common Sense Paine made his arguments for independence, crystallizing the vague views of radicals in Britain as well as the British colonists. He sketched a system for a united self-government, although as he asserted in another essay, his “principle is universal. My attachment is to all the world, and not to any particular part.”

  When Pain
e was appointed secretary to an American committee for foreign affairs, he uncovered the French supply of free arms and munitions to the colonials. He was a man of great personal integrity, and despite the adverse effect it would have on the cause for independence, Paine exposed this foreign interference. Politically embarrassed, France denied the arms supply and demanded Paine’s dismissal. When the American colonial congress refused to support Paine, he resigned.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  Bizarrely, the French then offered Paine seven hundred pounds to write articles supporting France and an alliance with the colonists against Britain. He refused. In 1782 he published Letter to the Abbe Raynal, a refutation of the French version of the War of Independence. He destroyed the argument—still promoted—that the war arose mainly from dispute over taxation. Paine recognized that the colonists’ desire for independence was self-driven, a part of the progressive enlightenment within the English-speaking world, like an adolescent breaking free of its mother. Taxation was merely the spark that ignited the flame.

  This Anglo-American revolution was only the beginning for Thomas Paine. Although given a farm at New Rochelle by the state of New York for services to liberty, he returned home in 1787 to campaign for political and social change in Britain and Ireland. In July 1789, the Paris mob stormed the Bastille. The first French revolution had begun, and Paine was again in the right place at the right time. Although a symbol of the revolution, the sacking and destruction of the Bastille was not by the bourgeois revolutionaries and was not to release political prisoners; there were just seven common criminals inside. It was merely a mob looting the citadel for weapons and money.

  In Britain there was sympathy and support for this revolution at first. The excesses and tyrannies of King Louis XVI were well known, and British radicals such as Edmund Burke looked on with approval. At last the French were resisting their own feudal system. When ideals degenerated into civil war, and civil war into war on neighboring countries, most British radicals withdrew their support. Paine, however, took this opportunity to reaffirm his support for the original ideals. He used the publicity to write and publish in 1791 his watershed Rights of Man. That same year the first biography of Thomas Paine, encouraged by the government to be critical of him, was also published.

  So radical were Paine’s proposals, the first publisher withdrew for fear of prosecution, yet Rights of Man became so popular that a second publisher was forced into further printings. After only two months, fifty thousand copies were in circulation, an immense number in those days of smaller populations.

  Paine completed a second part to Rights of Man in 1792, and soon sixpenny joint editions and translations abroad circulated widely. In his introduction to Part 2 he declared: “If universal peace, civilisation and commerce are ever to be the happy lot of man, it cannot be accomplished but by a revolution in the system of governments.”

  In Rights of Man, Paine advocated in Great Britain and Ireland a major redistribution of wealth, a progressive taxation system to finance poverty relief, child benefits, pensions at sixty, maternity grants, free education for all, accommodation for the homeless, and compensation for discharged soldiers and sailors. Internationally, he proposed treaties limiting armaments and the formation of a league of nations to prevent wars. It was 1792, the same year that a bill for the abolition of the slave trade was first passed by the House of Commons. They were heady days of ideas and social change.

  Argued singly, each of Paine’s proposals could be accepted as a reasonable step for the improvement of society. Brought together in one document, they were dynamite. Rights of Man was read aloud in coffeehouses and inns throughout the land. Paine’s arguments commanded people to listen and to think; his proposals were debated and argued from government chambers to cottage kitchens.

  However, after two overseas revolutions in thirteen years, the British government was nervous. While the United States was small, weak, and nine thousand miles away, France was large, powerful, and only twenty-two miles away. Under attack, Parliament introduced a law prohibiting seditious libel and publication. The publisher of Rights of Man was quickly charged. Despite Paine’s pleas to him to make it a test case, the publisher pleaded guilty and paid the fine. A further Royal Proclamation instructed magistrates to seek out authors and printers of seditious writings; some were charged but all were acquitted.

  That June, Paine himself was charged with seditious libel, yet he refused to be cowed. He published letters criticizing the repressive law, including Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation. (While his arguments were incisive, Paine’s titles sometimes were not.) That letter was effectively Part 3 of Rights of Man, in which he argued that true representative government must rely upon votes for all. A government’s power must rest upon the sovereignty of its people, not upon itself.

  Paine’s prosecution was delayed until December, yet the pressure on him remained intense. Modernist societies applauded and debated his arguments, while for traditionalists it was too much, too soon. He was arrested for a business partner’s debt, a charge instigated by the government. The debt was paid by Dr. Johnson, creator of the famous dictionary. Paine had influential friends as well as enemies, but in September he fled to France, where he had been given honorary citizenship.

  In France, he was actually appointed deputy to the French National Convention, but already the revolution was unraveling. The revolutionaries declared war on Prussia, and in November they offered military aid to all “oppressed peoples” of other countries—an excuse to invade. In an open letter to his British prosecutor, Paine unwisely supported revolution in Britain. He was outlawed.

  In the new year the French king was executed. By February 1793, France had invaded or declared war on most western European countries, including Britain. In September began the bloody Reign of Terror and the revolution was destroyed.

  The uprising had gotten rid of the antique French monarchy and feudalism only to replace it with a republican dictatorship. That was soon followed by a military dictatorship and twenty-two years of world war. In the long term little was gained at a huge cost in lives and liberty. English radical philosopher William Blake estimated that resisting and defeating the French dictatorships set back democratic reform in Britain by more than fifty years. It was this parallel struggle for survival that made life so difficult for British radicals; the abolition of slavery was delayed, Blake charged with sedition, scientist Joseph Priestley’s house set on fire, and radical William Cobbett imprisoned. Survival takes priority over freedom.

  Against this background of chaos and bloodshed, Thomas Paine began his second great work, The Age of Reason. In December 1793, Paine himself was arrested for his opposition to the French king’s execution. He was imprisoned in Paris, sentenced to death, and had his honorary citizenship revoked. The translated manuscript of Part 1 was already with French publishers, and the original English text was immediately smuggled to Britain.

  Paine’s health deteriorated during ten months in Luxembourg Prison, and he was nursed from death by two imprisoned British doctors. Paine completed Part 2 between bouts of fever and semiconsciousness. Part 1 was published in London and Paris at the beginning of 1794, Part 2 in 1795.

  In The Age of Reason Thomas Paine argued strongly against the religion of his time. Still a Quaker, he prefaced his work with the statement: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.” He rejected organized religion with the argument “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish [Islam], appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit.”

  He also disavowed religious revelation, stating: “A thing which everyone is required to believe requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal.” Like scientist Sir Isaac Newton earlier, Paine found his proof and evidence of God in nature. He was the first to argue that religious books such as the B
ible, Koran, and Torah were the writings of men, not the holy words of God.

  Once again these were groundbreaking—even dangerous—views to publish in a predominantly Christian Europe, especially in a time of world war. Understandably, they created great hostility toward Paine, and he has been much misrepresented ever since. However, in their separate fields, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason are watersheds in society as important as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. All three are part of the framework of today’s Western secular societies.

  With a new French regime in place, the American ambassador took up the issue of Paine’s imprisonment, claiming that he was American as well as British. His death sentence was overturned, and Paine was released in November 1794, although his health collapsed again with further fevers. Because of the threat of British imprisonment, he remained in Paris for eight more years. He wrote the important essay for reforming land ownership, Agrarian Justice, advocating ownership based not upon a destructive socialist redistribution but upon commercial viability and individual freedom. He also wrote essays about how Bonaparte might invade Britain and America. Paine was still blinded to the realities of dictatorship by the original ideals of that first French revolution.

  With gifts from other British radicals, Paine cleared his debts, and during the 1802 Treaty of Amiens, he took ship to America. There he found himself rejected by many former colonial friends because of his writings. Once again he was temporarily arrested for a dubious debt. By that time, the revolution in the United States had also unraveled, the principles of freedom and liberty not applying to slaves and Native Americans. Presidents Washington and Jefferson both were slave owners, and the new republic was on the path to federalism and becoming the greatest slave society of them all.