Thomas Paine's bones were dug up by an admirer, shipped to England and lost

Paine signed his will on 18 January 1809. He asked to be buried in a Quaker burial ground, or failing that on his farm at New Rochelle, under a headstone naming him "author of 'Common Sense.'" His main heir was Margaret Brazier Bonneville, for herself and her sons. In March 1809 the New York Quakers refused him a plot. Paine predicted: "they will dig up my bones before they be half rotten." He died in June and was buried under a walnut tree on his farm. Six mourners attended. In 1819 the English radical William Cobbett dug up the bones to build a memorial in England. He landed at Liverpool with them on 21 November 1819. The memorial was never built. Cobbett died in 1835. A court receiver took over his estate, and the Lord Chancellor refused to count the bones as part of it. They passed to a man named Benjamin Tilly. After Tilly died in 1860, a Mrs Ginn said she had sold them to a rag-and-bone man. A clergyman, Robert Ainslie, bought what he said were the skull and right hand; a hired man later took them and they were lost. In 2026 the only verified relics are a lock of hair and a piece of brain held by the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. A monument has stood at the New Rochelle grave since 1839. A couple in Australia has claimed to own the skull since 1988; it has not been DNA tested.