# Biographia Britannica/Volume 5/Lilburne

​Lilburne [John], the coryphæus of the Levellers, was descended of an ancient family, and born in 1618 at Thickney Puncharden in the county of Durham. He gave early proofs of an excellent memory, a ready apprehension, and a strong imagination; and being a younger son, and also of a very forward temper, was carried by his father without any grammar learning to London, and put apprentice at twelve years of age to Mr Thomas Hewson an eminent wholesale clothier near London-Stone. In this service he had not been a long while, before, young as he was, he complained to the City-Chamberlain of his master’s ill usage; and having carried this point to his satisfaction, he afterwards spared not to indulge his genius freely. He was naturally of a high-mettled daring spirit, and having been trained up among the Puritans, he spent several days a week in reading such of their books as were proper to inflame his zeal against the established Hierarchy. The event was answerable to his endeavours, he ​became of such eminence among those people, as to be consulted upon the boldest of their undertakings while an apprentice, and presently after, was esteemed by them as a person inspired. Among others, the teacher of that congregation which he attended, frequently approving thereof, contracted an intimacy with him, and in 1636, brought him into the acquaintance of Dr Bastwick, then a Star-chamber prisoner in the Gate-house, whom he afterwards constantly visited. At one of these visits, the Doctor reading his Merry Litany, young Lilburne was so much captivated with the anti-episcopal spirit of the piece, that with the author’s consent, he carried the manuscript to Holland, and printing it there, after a stay of several months, employed in libelling and defaming the Bishops and the Prerogative, he returned home, and continued the same practices in disguise; but being in a little time betrayed by his associate, he was seized and carried before the Council-Board, and the High-Commission-Court, after some examinations being referred to the Star-chamber, was, after several examinations there, also found guilty February 13, 1637. of printing and publishing libels and seditious books, particularly one entitled, News from Ipswich. In all these examinations, stiffly refusing to comply with the ordinary rules of trial, as contrary to the liberties of a free-born Englishman, he got the nick-name of Free-born John; and being condemned to a severe punishment which was rigorously executed, he went through it with such a degree of hardiness and unfeeling obstinacy, as obtained him the title of a Saint among the Enthusiasts. After this he was ordered to be imprisoned in the Fleet, ’till he should make his submission, where, tho’ he was loaded with double irons on his arms and legs, and put into one of the basest wards, yet he found means to print and publish another libel of his own writing, under the title of The Christian Man’s Trial, in 4to, the same year. ​He continued a prisoner ’till the meeting of the long Parliament, November 3d 1640; when, upon his petition to the House of Commons, he was ordered on the 7th of that month, to have the liberties of the Fleet, and a better apartment there. In consequence of which, we find him a chief ringleader in the armed mob that appeared at Westminster May 3d 1641, crying out justice, against the Earl of Strafford; and drawing his sword upon Colonel Lunsford, was apprehended and arraigned the next day of high-treason at the bar of the House of Lords, but dismissed; and the same day, May the 4th, the following votes passed the House of Commons. That the sentence of the Star-chamber against him [Lilburne] is illegal, barbarous, bloody, and tyrannical. That reparations ought to be given him for his imprisonment, sufferings, and losses, and that the committee shall prepare this case of Mr Lilburne’s to be transmitted to the Lords, with those other of Bastwick, Leighton, Burton, and Prynne. As soon as the Parliament voted an army, Mr Lilburne entered a volunteer therein, was a Captain of foot on that side, at the battle of Edge-hill, October 23d 1642; and remarkably distinguished himself in the engagement on the 12th of November following, at Brentford: where being taken prisoner by the King’s forces, he was carried to Oxford, and brought upon his trial for high-treason, but the sentence was prevented by means of a special declaration of the Parliament in his favour, December 17th 1642; after which returning to his party, he ​was received in the army with extraordinary marks of joy, and his gallant behaviour rewarded with a purse of 300 pounds by the Earl of Essex. But that General beginning to press the Scots Covenant upon his followers, the Captain left him, and going to the army newly raised, under the Earl of Manchester in 1643, obtained from him a commission on the 7th of October that year, for a Major of foot in the regiment commanded by Colonel Edward King, Governor of Boston in Lincolnshire. The Major was diligent in putting that garrison into a good state of defence, and very narrowly escaped with his life at raising the siege at Newark, by Prince Rupert. He had quarrelled with his Colonel some time before, and proceeding to lay several accusations against him before the General. His Lordship removed the Major from Boston, and made him Lieu​tenant-Colonel to his own regiment of Dragoons, on the 16th of May 1644. This post he sustained with signal bravery at the battle of Marston-moor, in the beginning of July, which being observed by Cromwell and Fairfax, he was offered a good post also in the army, upon the new modelling thereof, in April 1645: but the boilings of his conscience swelling now as high against the covenanted Presbytery as they had formerly done against the Prerogative and Episcopacy, he resolved to quit the service, and accordingly, on the last day of that month, he delivered up his troop, with the regiment, to Colonel John Okely near Abingdon. He had no sooner laid down his military weapons, than he took that state weapon his pen up, against the new-rising dominion: and attacked his old associate Mr Prynne, in a printed epistle to him on that subject, dated June the 7th, 1645; and being brought before a committee of the House of ​Commons on the 13th, on account of some passage in that piece, he printed another epistle addressed to Mr Lenthal, charging the speaker with an embezzlement of 60,000 pounds of the publick money. Whereupon an accusation against him being presented to that house, by Colonel King and Dr Bastwick, on the 12th of July, he was put into the custody of the serjeant at arms on the 19th. While he was under the care of that officer, he published a third epistle to a friend, dated July the 25th, upon which he was committed to Newgate on the 9th of August, and orders were given for his trial at the Old-Bailey on a charge of seditious practices; but in the interim, printing a state of his case, addressed to the world and his jury, no bill was found against him, and he was discharged from the prison by an order of the House of Commons, October ​the 14th, without being brought to a trial. On the 10th of November the petition for his arrears (which he had presented soon after quitting the army) was read by that house, but being referred to the Committee of Accounts, where he refused to give in the particulars upon oath, no order was made for payment. While these things passed in the lower House, our author was engaged in another business before the House of Lords, upon a petition he had presented there for reparations and damages, on account of his sufferings in the Star-chamber, and on the 13th of February his cause was re-heard and a few days afterwards the former decree of 1640, annulling the proceedings of the Star-chamber was confirmed, and on the 5th of March he obtained a decree for two thousand pounds, and a bill to that effect having passed the House on the 27th of April, was sent down to the Commons for their consent: but in the beginning of that month he was charged by the Committee of Accounts with a debt of 2000 l. to the State, and was ​moreover arrested for the like sum on the 14th at the suit of Colonel King, in an action of trespass, from the Court of Common-pleas, for calling him a traytor. Our author being exceedingly provoked with this prosecution, which hindered him from bringing the affair of the Lord’s decree to a good issue, having put in extraordinary bail for his appearance, he first offered a petition to the House of Commons, to bring the Colonel to his trial upon the abovementioned impeachment: and receiving no satisfaction there, he penned an epistle by way of appeal to Judge Reeves, and printed it with the title of The just Man’s Justification. This piece was dated the 6th of ​June, and having therein aspersed the proceedings in law as unjust and tyrannical, and also cast some reflections upon the Earl of Manchester, he was called on the 10th before the House of Lords, where that Nobleman being Speaker, and examining him upon interrogatories touching the writing of the just mentioned book, he not only refused to answer, but protested against their jurisdiction over him in the present case, whereupon he was committed to Newgate, Whence, upon the 16th, he sent an appeal to the House of Commons, which being received there, he persevered in shewing the utmost contempt of the upper House; for which, having been first committed close prisoner in Newgate on the 23d, he was sent thence to the Tower as a more secure custody; on the 10th of July, a remonstrance signed by many thousand persons having been presented to the House of Commons in his favour. In the Tower he was denied the use of pen, ​ink, and paper, and no body suffered to visit him; however, he found means to write another petition, renewing his appeal to the House of Commons, which being delivered by his wife, September the 23d, a committee was appointed to hear and report his complaint against the Lords. Sir Henry Martin was chairman of this committee, before whom our author made his first plea in the inner Court of Wards, on the last day of October, and was heard again by them in the Exchequer-chamber, November the 6th following, but no report being made to the House, he sent a copy of his second plea before the Committee to Sir Henry Martin, and afterwards printed it under the title of The Anatomy of the Lords Tyranny. Not content with the justice done to himself in this performance, he published, not long afterwards, another book entitled, The oppressed Man’s Oppression declared, &c. in which he complained of the injury done to him by the House of Commons, in their deferring to take his case into consideration, and threatening to raise the people in his defence, he proceeds to charge that House, not only with having of late years done nothing for the general good, bur also, with having made many ordinances notoriously unjust and oppressive. Whereupon the whole impression was ​seized, and our author, by a warrant directed to the serjeant at arms, February the 8th, was fetched before the Committee for suppressing scandalous pamphlets; where, having obtained an express order from the chairman [Corbet] to set open the doors, contrary to their usual practice of keeping close Committees on such occasions, he acknowledged the writing, printing, and publishing of the book, in pursuance of the question put to him, and the affair was never prosecuted any farther. But as he had herein departed from his constantly avowed principle of not answering to interogatories against himself, and his friends appeared to be uneasy upon it, therefore, to prevent any ill consequences that might ensue from that quarter, he wrote a piece shortly after for their satisfaction, and published it on the 30th of April 1647, with the following extraordinary title, The Resolved Man’s Resolution to maintain with the last drop of his heart’s blood, his civil Liberties and Freedoms, granted unto him by the good, just and honest Laws of England his native Country; and never to sit still, so long as he has a Tongue to speak, or a Hand to write, ’till he hath either necessitated his Adversaries, the House of Lords, and their arbitrary Assistants in the House of Commons, either to do him Justice and Right, by ​delivering him from his cruel and illegal imprisonment, and holding out unto him legal and ample Reparation for all his unjust sufferings, or else send him to Tyburn, of which he is not afraid; and doubteth not, if they do it, but at and by his death to do them, Samson-like, more Mischief at his Death, than he did them all his Life. All which is expressed and declared in the following Epistle, written by Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne, prerogative prisoner in the Tower of London, to a true friend of his, a citizen thereof, April 1647. In this piece, having intreated his friend to ply the Parliament well with petitions and remonstrances, he intimates a design, if that method did not succeed, to apply himself to the army. Accordingly, as that faction soon after gave a manifest proof that they had play’d the supreme power into their own hands, we find our prerogative prisoner consulting with the agitators, how to turn this new revolution to his service; and being informed by these friends, that all their endeavours in his favour were defeated by the commanding officers, and chiefly by Cromwell, he sent this last a threatning letrer, August the 13th, wherein he charges the Lieutenant-General with a design of usurping the sovereignty; which was seconded by another on the 29th, addressed to Fairfax the General, ​undertaking to make good that charge. And the same day he also transmitted a third letter to the Council of Agitators, with a petition to exert themselves for his deliverance from the Tower. The same day likewise, a petition in his behalf being presented to the House of Commons, in the name of many citizens, it was referred to the Committee, and to report it with all convenient speed. Accordingly, the House voting on the 13th of September to receive the Committee’s report the day following, Crom​well made him a friendly visit in the Tower, but still the House, instead of discharging him as he expected, referred the case back to the Committee: whereupon, our author being informed of their intention to examine him in the Tower, wrote a letter September 18th, to the Lieutenant thereof, declaring his resolution not to see them if they came with that design, and absolutely protesting against the authority of the House, and on October the 2d he sent the Speaker a proposition to argue his cause against the jurisdiction of the House of Lords with any forty lawyers in the kingdom ​On the 20th of that month he was fetched again before the Committee, when Serjeant Maynard being in the chair, he had a fair and full hearing upon that point; but the Committee declining to hear him upon some other things relating to the House of Commons, he sent a paper upon those matters inclosed in a letter to Mr Maynard on the 28th, wherein he promised, for the satisfaction of his enemies, to leave the kingdom if he had his demands paid by an order of the House, threatening otherwise to raise his friends among the people in his defence. On the 9th of November an order passed the House that he should have liberty every day to go without his keeper to attend the Committee appointed about his business, and to return every night to the Tower. And he enjoyed the benefit of it some time, but an information of seditious practices being made against him in January to the House of Lords, he was taken into custody again, and brought before the House of Commons on the 19th of that month. When in his defence, he delivered a charge of high-treason against Cromwell and Ireton; upon which he was remitted to the Tower, and ordered to be tried by the law of the land, for seditious and scandalous practices against the state. Conceiving himself to be especially in​titled by this order to his habeas corpus, he made a regular application for it to the King’s-Bench both that term and the next, and being put off by the Judges, he printed first, an epistle dated April 8th 1648, to Mr Lenthal, intitled, The Prisoner’s Plea for a Habeas Corpus, which was followed by another dated the 19th of that month to Mr Justice Rolle, in 1648, intitled, The Prisoner’s mournful Cry against the Judges of the King’s Bench, and was suffered to plead his cause himself at that bar, on the 8th of May. However, no rule being made there in his favour, he petitioned the House of Commons, whereby he obtained, August 1st, both his discharge from imprisonment, and an order to make him satisfaction for his sufferings. The next day after he had got his li​berty, he wrote a friendly letter to Cromwell, then warmly attacked by the Presbyterians, September the 11th, he joined with several others in a large petition to the House of Commons against a personal treaty with the King; presently after which, he went down into the North to take possession of some effects that had been assigned to him, in pursuance of the last mentioned vote of the Commons, Returning to London in a short time, with a design to procure the settling of a new model of government before the King’s execution, which was then resolved on by the leading men in the army, he had several meetings with Ireton and others upon that affair, but the ​general council of officers quashing all the projects of his party, he published, December 15th 1648, such articles of an Agreement with the People as had then been proposed (tho’ without effect), by them, and presenting at the head of several of his friends, a complaint of the army, and a kind of protest against their proceedings, to Cromwell, on the 28th, returned in a few days to Newcastle, where he continued attending the business of his reparations ’till the death of his Majesty, soon after which he went back to London, where finding Duke Hamilton, Lord Capel, and some other royalists, lately ​brought to their trial before the High-Court of Justice, He appeared warmly in their favour against the jurisdiction of that Court; at the same time he was informed of some violence threatened against his person, in a council of war at Whitehall, about the 22d of February, whereupon he engaged in drawing up his piece called England’s new Chains discovered, and on the 26th of that month accompanied by Walwyn, Prince, and Overton, he presented an Address to the Supreme Authority of England in the House of Commons, containing a frame of new modelling the state, in opposition to that which had been offered there by the army in January preceding, and being ordered to withdraw without receiving an answer, our author published the whole under the last mentioned title, upon which he was committed with his associates to the Tower, March the 29th, 1649. He had not been there long before he joined with them in writing another pamphlet, intitled, The Agreement of the People, which was published on the first of May, with a licence by Gilbert Mabbot. This being followed with seve​ral others notoriously vilifying the conservators of the liberties of England, and Cromwell in particular as their supreme head and master; a new act of treason was passed May 14th, and Mr Lilburne’s estate seized: many consultations were had from time to time, by the judges and principal lawyers, in pursuance of orders from the Council of State, to consider of the properest and most effectual method to be taken with him. At length, a special commission of Oyer and Terminer was issued to 40 persons, before whom, being brought to his trial on the 24th of October at Guild-hall in London, upon ​an indictment of high-treason, after a hearing of three days, in which the facts alledged against him, notoriously and flagrantly treasonable against that government, were clearly ​proved, he was fully acquitted by the jury; the people present, with extraordinary acclamations of joy, testifying their approbation thereof; and he was discharged from the Tower by an order of the Council of State on the 8th of November. Shortly after this, having recovered his estate from Sir Arthur Haslerig, he undertook the management of a dispute in law, in which his uncle George Lilburne happened then to be engaged with that Baronet. While this cause was depending, he published a pamphlet in the beginning of August, intitled, A just Reproof to Haberdasher’s-Hall, &c. therein charging Sir Arthur, with several base practices in the proceedings ​thereon. And in the further prosecution of this affair, he delivered to several members at the door of the House of Commons the same year, a petition, setting forth, that the said Baronet had overawed a Committee appointed for trying this cause, to give a false judgment contrary to the plain evidence before them. On the 15th of January, the Parliament gave a judgment for fining him in the sum of 7000 pound to the state, and banishing him the kingdom, upon which he retired from London and crossed the water to Amsterdam, where he presently saw in the news-papers the act which passed on the 30th for the execution of that judgment. During his exile he fell into conversation with several of the royal party, before whom he spoke very freely, both against the then reigning powers in England, and in favour of the King. He wrote also ​a paper which he called an Apology for himself, and printing it sent it in a letter to Cromwell, wherein he charged the Lord General with being the principal instrument in in procuring the just mentioned act. Upon the dissolution of the long Parliament, he set all his engines at work, to obtain a pass for England, which proving ineffectual, he returned home without one in the beginning of June 1653, and was apprehended at London by the Lord-Mayor’s warrant on the 15th, upon which he printed a plea on the 28th, asserting the nullity of the act for his banishment, for want of a legal power in the Parliament that passed it, and being committed to Newgate in July, he sent thence a petition on the 12th to the newly erected Parliament, praying a discharge from them; but that being neglected, he was brought on the 20th of August to his trial before the sessions at the Old-Bailey; where, however, upon making the same plea as before, and moreover that he was not legally shewn, by reason of a kind of misnomer in the indictment, to be the person mentioned in the act, he was a second time acquitted by the jury. Notwithstanding this he was shortly after conducted ​to Portsmouth, in order for transportation, but giving security to behave himself quietly for the future, was suffered to return: after which he settled at Eltham in Kent, and joining the Quakers, preached among that sect there, and sometimes at Woolwich and the places adjacent, ’till his death, which happened at Eltham, August 29th 1657, in the thirty-ninth year of his age. Two days after, his corps was conveyed to a house called the Mouth near Aldersgate in London, at that time the usual meeting place of the Quakers. Here it was warmly debated whether his coffin should be covered with a hearse cloth, which being carried in the negative, it was conveyed without one to the then new burial-place in Moor-Fields, near the place now called Old Bedlam, and interred there, four thousand persons attending the burial. The character given by Mr Wood of our author, appears from his history to be very just, That ‘he was from his youth much addicted to contention, novelties, opposition of government, and to violent and bitter expressions; that growing up, he became for a time the idol of the factious people, being naturally a great trouble-world in all the variety of governments. That he grew to be a hodge-podge of religion, the chief ring-leader of the Levellers, a great proposal maker and modeller of state, and publisher of several seditious pamphlets.’ But the remark upon him, attributed by this writer to Judge Jenkins, as spoken in a reproachful way, we are informed by Mr Rushworth, was said in Mr Lilburne’s favour by his friend Sir Henry Martin: That if there were none living but him, John would be against Lilburne, and Lilburne against John. Lord Clarendon, who judged our author not unworthy of a place in a history of the civil wars, having observed that he was a person of much more considerable importance than Wildman, and that Cromwell found it absolutely necessary to his own dignity effectually to crush him, concludes his account of him in the following terms. ‘This instance of a person not otherwise considerable is thought pertinent to be inserted, as an evidence of the temper of the nation, and how far the spirits at that time [1653] were from paying a submission to that power, when no body had the courage to lift up their hands against it.’ We have taken notice in the course of this memoir, that our author likewise complains heavily of this cowardliness in general, and particularly of his party on that very account. Indeed one main design in enlarging upon this article, was to produce a large variety of instances, which may serve as a commentary to the History of the Rebellion, the plan of which would not admit of being so particular. Another principal end herein, has been to give a series of proofs not commonly known, of the infinite guile and subtlety of Cromwell, which, joined to an enthusiastic confidence that he should always accomplish his designs in every instance, carried that arch-dissembler at length through a sea of difficulties, into the full possession of a despotic supremacy.
Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "citation", but no corresponding <references group="citation"/> tag was found Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "footnote", but no corresponding <references group="footnote"/> tag was found Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "sidenote", but no corresponding <references group="sidenote"/> tag was found

## Textual notes
### Sidenotes

Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "citation", but no corresponding <references group="citation"/> tag was found Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "footnote", but no corresponding <references group="footnote"/> tag was found Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "sidenote", but no corresponding <references group="sidenote"/> tag was found

### Footnotes

Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "citation", but no corresponding <references group="citation"/> tag was found Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "footnote", but no corresponding <references group="footnote"/> tag was found Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "sidenote", but no corresponding <references group="sidenote"/> tag was found

### Citations

Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "citation", but no corresponding <references group="citation"/> tag was found Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "footnote", but no corresponding <references group="footnote"/> tag was found Cite error: <ref> tags exist for a group named "sidenote", but no corresponding <references group="sidenote"/> tag was found