A Philadelphia scholar reads about Prince William’s three number plates and opens Common Sense, which said everything necessary about hereditary succession in 1776
Friday, 23 October 2026. Philadelphia. Independence Mall, a cold bench, a reprint of Common Sense, and a group of schoolchildren being told about the Liberty Bell by a very tired guide, 11.00am.
A Pamphlet Printed Ten Blocks From Here
In January 1776, a recent English immigrant named Thomas Paine published a pamphlet in Philadelphia called Common Sense. It was printed not far from where I am sitting. It sold in enormous numbers, was read aloud in taverns and is generally credited with persuading many colonists that independence from Britain was not madness but sense. Its most devastating section is an attack on hereditary monarchy, and I reread it this morning after reading the London Prat report on Prince William’s three personalised number plates.
The plates are NOTYET on an Aston Martin for waiting to be King, NOTHARRY on a Range Rover for avoiding his brother and DISTASTEFUL on a Bentley for disapproving of nearly everything. The report says the throne is a job that cannot become vacant through retirement, redundancy, poor performance or an unfavorable annual appraisal, and that William has been on the management training program since birth.
Paine On Hereditary Succession
Paine got there two hundred and fifty years earlier. He wrote that, all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever. He also observed, with typical bite, that nature disapproves of hereditary right, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.
I would like to be fair to the Prince, who by all accounts is a dedicated and decent man, and who has not chosen any of this. But Paine’s argument was never really about individuals. It was about the system. NOTYET is not a personal flaw. It is the system’s job description. Paine would have read the number plate and nodded. He would have said: you see, even the King’s son knows it is absurd. He has had it printed on his car.
An American Reads A British Joke
As an American, I occupy a slightly awkward position when reading British royal satire. We fought a war to get rid of the King. We wrote a Constitution that bans titles of nobility. And yet Americans are, in my experience, more obsessed with the British royal family than the British are. My mother in Delaware has watched every royal wedding live, at four in the morning, with a commemorative plate on her lap. She considers this compatible with being a passionate patriot. When I mention Thomas Paine, she says, oh, he was very rude.
He was very rude. That was the point. Common Sense worked because it took something everybody treated with reverence and talked about it in plain, cheeky, tavern English. The London Prat piece does the same. A prince with a Bentley called DISTASTEFUL is the twenty-first century version of Paine’s ass for a lion. Both are jokes. Both are arguments.
Paine also understood that faith and power make an uneasy pairing, a theme he returned to in The Age of Reason and one I wrote about recently in a diary entry on religion versus reality. Monarchy, in his view, borrowed its authority from heaven to avoid answering to anyone on earth. A number plate, at least, is registered with the licensing office.
The Founders Had Their Own Plates
In fairness to the British, Americans have their own version of personalized number plates for politicians. Ours is called the presidential library. Every former president gets a large building with his name on it, filled with documents, gift-shop mugs and a replica of the Oval Office where tourists can pretend to sign bills. It is a NOTYET plate in reverse: a monument to the moment when the waiting ended. Paine would have disapproved of these too. He disapproved of almost everything. He died in 1809 in poverty in New York, with very few people at his funeral. History is not always kind to the people who are right early.
The Schoolchildren At The Liberty Bell
While I read, the tired guide was explaining to a group of fourth-graders from Lancaster County that the Liberty Bell cracked, was repaired and cracked again, and is now kept in a glass pavilion where nobody can ring it. A small girl asked why they did not just buy a new bell. The guide said it was a symbol. The girl said, so it is broken but important. The guide said yes. The girl said, like a king.
I wrote that down. I will be using it in class. Thomas Paine took fifty pages to say it. A fourth-grader from Lancaster County did it in four words.
For The Diary
For readers who find their way here, my diary home page is where I keep my running notes on eighteenth-century literature and American politics, a combination that becomes more natural with every news cycle. This week, the past arrived in the form of a Bentley. Next week, I suspect, it will be a tricorn hat on a cable news panel. The founders would be appalled. Then they would write a pamphlet about it. Then they would sell it in a tavern for a shilling, and we would all still be quoting it in 2276.