In 1819 an English journalist dug up Thomas Paine’s grave on a New York farm and shipped the bones to England for a heroic reburial that never happened; the remains were eventually lost. Ten years earlier, only six people had attended the funeral of the most widely read political writer of the 18th century. This episode asks how the man whose pamphlet launched a revolution ended up ostracized by the nation he helped create.

We follow Paine from a corset-maker’s apprenticeship in Thetford through privateering, two firings as an excise officer, and near-debtor’s prison, to Benjamin Franklin’s letter, the 1776 pamphlet that went viral in taverns and farms, and the morale-boosting essays Washington had read to freezing troops. Then come the Silas Deane affair, his million-copy defense of the French Revolution and the British sedition warrant, nearly a year in a Paris prison awaiting the guillotine, his deist critique of organized religion, a proposal for a guaranteed income, and his blistering open letter attacking George Washington.

• How Paine’s plain-spoken style bypassed Latin-quoting elites and alarmed John Adams
• Why his whistleblowing on war profiteering embarrassed both Congress and France
• His vote against executing the French king and the arrest that followed
• Property redistribution, a lump sum at adulthood, and pensions for the elderly in the 1790s
• Why New York denied him the vote and who the six mourners at his funeral were