Free The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins

spite against his old enemy, mad old King George had died that very morning .
    It was not exactly a propitious occasion to be publicly railing at the monarchy, and attendance at the dinner was muted indeed. Instead of the saint's relics that would incite a revolution, Cobbett was quickly finding himself stuck with a dead body in his house. Caricatures mocked him, showing Paine's ghost hovering over Cobbett in his bedroom, demanding, "Give me back my pilfer'd bones," and the Times now made sure to always preface any mention of their favorite villain as "the bone-grubber Cobbett." Writing to his son, Cobbett complained that "no one dared to move a pen or tongue in my defence . . . Former friends, or pretended friends, shrugged up their shoulders, and looked hard in my face, as if in wonder that I was not dismayed."
    Cobbett could take some small comfort as he gazed up the street from here that at least he was not in jail alongside Paine's publisher. But Carlile's sufferings, he warned the government, would only backfire on them. "Is this the best way of checking the progress of Mr. Carlile's, or, rather, Mr. PAINE's principles?" he asked pointedly in the Register. 'Was it ever known that man was cured of an error by punishment of any sort? . . . Punish a man for any matter of opinion and you gather round him a crowd of converts." This should have sounded like wishful thinking: after all, the government had even checkmated Mrs. Carlile. It might have been expected that the tenacious Jane Carlile would, just as she had done before, take up where her husband had left off. But with the loss of their bookshop's lease and stock, any prospects for another comeback were grim indeed.
    Oh, and one other thing: she was pregnant.
    Jane Carlile kept up a brave face with her husband in jail, but theirs was not a relationship that augured great things. The two had been growing apart, in fact. Her manic behavior around the house left him in fear of his life at times, and they'd already quietly agreed to divorce. But Jane believed in a free press as passionately as her husband did, so they decided that they would wait awhile to divorce—many years, if need be—the better to deny any satisfaction to their persecutors.
    But then there was the baby. Surely she couldn't start a shop again now?
    Yet that, as her neighbor Cobbett and the rest of London watched in amazement, is just what she did. Supporters rallied in every major English city, sending money in dribbles and in torrents, from a few well-to-do sympathizers with a liberal bent and from many angry unemployed working men alike. Within months, the Temple of Reason at 55 Fleet Street was back—MART FOR BLASPHEMY AND SEDITION read one sign in its windows—and rather than a temple it was now beginning to distinctly resemble a hornet's nest.
    Mrs. Carlile was promptly hauled before a judge for selling The Age of Reason to an undercover informant. She lashed out at the court, listing egregious violations upon the freedoms of the press and electoral reformers, right down to the murders at Peterloo and the imprisonment of her husband: "If all these things do not constitute tyranny," she snapped, "then the word is but a word of sound, and Dionysus, Draco, Torquin, Nero, and Caligula, have been falsely libeled."
    Did she not have a newborn now? she was asked. Indeed she did.
    You were warned , her judge ruled. Send the baby to jail too.
    It was a sentence which, though meant to keep mother and child from being separated, proved sensational in the hands of Carlile's partisans. A whole family sent to jail! Father, mother, and the innocent babe at her breast! The rebellion became giddy in defiance as another Carlile was arrested for selling Paine at the Fleet Street shop: this time it was Richard's younger sister Mary-Anne. Volunteers flooded in to work at the Temple of Reason as never before, and with each arrest another stepped up to the counter. The fight had spread now from Paine and