negotiated at the start of each reign.
The tensions locked within the new
tripartite system, the Crown, Lords and
Commons persist to this day, but it was
particularly difficult for the naïve young
George III, whose settlement
was low with no adjustment for inflation.
The King immediately started to run
up debts.
50
After his arrival in Lewes, Paine was
selected to join a committee of eight
officers of excise to jointly petition the
commissioners of Excise for better pay
and conditions.
The civil list was used to defray the
expenses of the civil service, which
included personal and household
expenses. Pensions were also paid
from the civil list, a pension effectively
gagging Dr Samuel Johnson who said
“But, Sir, I think that the pleasure of
cursing the House of Hanover, and
drinking King James’s health, are amply
overbalanced by three hundred pounds
a year”.
It now started to appear that there was
some identifiable process to Thomas
Paine’s development from a humble
outrider to world commentator. Smith
indicates that this committee was
assembled from above, Hindmarch goes
fur ther and claims that George Lewis
Scott, one of the commissioners on
the board of Excise, previously tutor to
the young King George III, acted with
the King’s knowledge in this matter.
Smith notes that Scott was a great
mathematician and introduced new
ideas to the revenue, tantalisingly he
does not cite Paine’s pamphlet.
Some startling facts emerge, by the
time Paine came to Lewes, the excise
wages paid from the civil list had been
frozen for nearly a hundred years. King
George III had short-changed himself
in his initial settlement with Parliament.
Both the King and the officers of
excise were short of cash in a period
of high inflation. The King had to go to
Parliament to liquidate his debts and the
revenue officers were corrupt in order
to survive. The King of England and
his officers of excise were trapped in a
spiralling problem.
Thomas Paine penned ‘The Case of the
Officers of Excise’ and wrote with one
voice for two thousand seven hundred
officers. Every officer of excise signed
a petition for the first mass campaign
of this kind. Paine wrote to Goldsmith
from the Excise Coffee House in Broad
Street, “A petition for this purpose has
been translated through every part
of the kingdom, and signed by all the
officers therein. A subscription of three
shillings per officer is raised, amounting
to upwards of £500, for supporting
the expenses” on December the 21st,
1772. Paine was obviously given leave
from Lewes to gather intelligence in the
London excise office.
The implications of the foregoing are
weighty, ‘The Case of the Officers of
Excise’ represents the first civil service
unionisation, and foreshadowed the
green and white paper lobbying system
of the British parliament. It proposed an
impeccable civil service; four thousand
copies were distributed, one to every
officer of excise, every member of both
houses of parliament and important
businessmen of the day and was
forwarded to the treasury by the nine
members of the excise board. What we
can see in this pamphlet is his urgent,
cogent, witty and elegant prose, which
he used with such devastating effect in
‘Common Sense’.
But Paine is not revolutionary as
an advocate for better pay and
conditions. His whole argument was
for improvements to the status quo.
He does not argue here for deposition
of the Crown. Rather he argued in
the King’s favour. Improve pay and
conditions and the whole country will
thrive. He was in support of his fellow
officers of excise and the country in its
entirety. Paine cut his literary teeth in
Lewes, but he did it in the service of his
King.