John Lilburne

English political writer and activist

• Born: c. 1615
• Birthplace: Greenwich, England
• Died: August 29, 1657
• Place of death: Eltham, Kent, England

A leader of the Levellers, England’s first organized popular political movement, Lilburne contributed to and publicized Leveller ideas and demands, such as religious freedom, the sovereignty of the people, a government answerable to the electorate, and wide access to the vote.

Early Life

John Lilburne (LIHL-burn) was the third child and second son of Richard Lilburne and Margaret Hixon. Both the Lilburnes and the Hixons were respectable gentry families with minor connections to the royal court. The Lilburnes even boasted a coat of arms, and John, although a champion of the rights of the people, always stressed his upper-class lineage. Margaret Lilburne died when her son John was very young, and he probably did much of his growing up at the Lilburne family manor near Durham. He was also sent to school, but his formal education lasted less than ten years. As the Lilburne family estate would go to John’s older brother Robert, some other provision had to be made for the younger sons. So, when John was about 15, his father apprenticed him to a London cloth wholesaler named Thomas Hewson.

The city of London must have seemed dazzling to a young boy from the country, but what Lilburne himself later remembered most about his apprenticeship was all the reading that he was able to do in the empty hours spent minding his master’s warehouse. Lilburne’s family seem to have been Puritans, and the young man’s reading reflected Puritan tastes: He read the Bible, of course, but also John Foxe’s Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1554; Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes, 1563, popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), theological works, and books on history and law. All of this reading made a deep impression, instilling in him a concern for social justice and possibly a certain identification with martyrs. When his apprenticeship ended in 1636, however, there was not yet anything to distinguish Lilburne from any other fervent young Puritan in London, preoccupied with Bible reading and attending Puritan sermons.

Life’s Work

Lilburne’s public career began in 1637, when he came under the influence of the Puritan pamphleteer John Bastwick and started smuggling banned Puritan works into England. As a result, Lilburne was arrested; he was tried and convicted in 1638 and ordered to be whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned. Lilburne’s first published work, written in March of 1638, was an account of his trial. He portrayed himself as a godly martyr defying cruel religious authorities. While in prison, Lilburne managed to both write and publish several such tracts, in which he denounced the bishops of the Church of England in increasingly angry terms.

Lilburne was released from prison by the Long Parliament late in 1640. He set up a brewery, married Elizabeth Dewell, and staunchly supported Parliament in its opposition to King Charles I . At the outbreak of the First English Civil War in 1642, he enlisted in the Parliamentary army, fighting with distinction and eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He refused, however, to sign the Solemn League and Covenant, in which the Parliamentary side officially embraced Presbyterianism, and so left the army in April of 1645. Returning to London, Lilburne, increasingly dissatisfied with the Parliamentary regime, began writing and publishing again. His new works again got him into trouble with the authorities; more often than not, his tracts were written in prison.

Lilburne’s works criticizing the Parliamentarians, like his England’s Birth-Right (1645), demonstrate both how far he had moved from religious issues to political concerns and how much more radical he was becoming in his ideas in general. Lilburne’s increasing radicalism was due in part to his association with Richard Overton and William Walwyn, who were also publishing tracts and pamphlets on similar themes and concepts.

The writings of Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, and a handful of others developed the ideas that would form the basis for the Leveller movement. Among other things, they called for sovereignty to reside solely in the House of Commons, the democratically elected representatives of the people, and for the government to remain answerable to the people. They demanded religious freedom, the reform of the legal and tax systems, a much wider distribution of the vote, and safeguards for the people’s rights. By March of 1647, these demands had taken the form of a specific program for social and political reform set forth in the Levellers’ Large Petition, which was formally presented to Parliament September 11, 1648. In the process of authoring the Large Petition, the Levellers had become a formal political movement, a movement that was spread throughout the army through agents known as Agitators.

From prison, Lilburne advised both the Agitators and those working on behalf of the petition. He also continued to be one of the Levellers’ chief propagandists, with a knack for passionate rhetoric and an ability to dramatize political points. Lilburne probably had a hand in the Agreement of the People, drawn up in October of 1647 in a collaboration of Agitators and civilian Levellers. The agreement was nothing less than a proposed new constitution for England, with a government based on the sovereignty of the people, exercised through their elected Parliament.

At the end of 1648, Lilburne and some other Leveller leaders attempted, but failed, to persuade the army leaders to support the Agreement of the People. By February of 1649, Lilburne was denouncing the army-dominated government; in England’s New Chains Discovered (1649), he accused that government of betraying the people of England. In May, Lilburne, Walwyn, and Overton published a revised version of the Agreement of the People, retitled Agreement of the Free People (1649) and representing a summation of Leveller political thought.

The Agreement of the Free People was the Levellers’ swan song. By the end of the summer of 1649, the Leveller movement had been crushed. Lilburne was released from prison in November of 1649 but was unable to keep out of trouble. In January of 1652, he was banished from England; when he returned in 1653, he was imprisoned once again. In 1655, he was moved to Dover Castle and had begun to covert to Quakerism. The next year, although still a prisoner, he was allowed to visit his wife and children, eventually spending extended periods of time with them. He died on August 29, 1657, aged forty-two.

Significance

The Leveller movement failed, but the political ideas articulated by Lilburne and the Levellers did not die: They are the foundations upon which modern democratic government rests. Lilburne’s greatest significance, then, lies in his role in developing and promoting such concepts as popular sovereignty, the rightful derivation of power from the will and consent of the people, and the answerability of all governments to the people for their actions. He insisted on the supreme importance of securing the people’s rights, sought an expansion of suffrage, and demanded religious freedom, as well as reform of the legal system. From his religious convictions, Lilburne drew the notion of a complete and total equality of all men and applied it to the political realm.

Lilburne’s significance to the Leveller movement itself, moreover, extended beyond what he contributed in ideas. Lilburne was the heart and public face of the Levellers. A great deal of Leveller organizing activity, such as protests and petitions, centered on his trials and imprisonments. Lilburne’s great gift as a political publicist was his ability to both personalize and generalize the injustices inflicted upon him so that they were understood as being inflicted on every free Englishman.

Bibliography

Arnoult, Sharon L. “The Sovereignties of Body and Soul: Women’s Political and Religious Actions in the English Civil War.” In Women and Sovereignty, edited by Louise Olga Fradenburg. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Contrasts the religious and political ideas of Leveller women with those of nonradical women.

Aylmer, G. E., ed. The Levellers in the English Revolution. London: Thames and Husdon, 1975. Primarily a collection of the writings of John Lilburne, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton; the editor’s introduction remains one of the best, brief explications of Leveller thought in the context of the times.

Frank, Joseph. The Levellers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955. Provides biographical information on key Leveller leaders, including John Lilburne, and traces the development of the Leveller movement with special focus on Leveller texts.

Gregg, Pauline. Free-born John: A Biography of John Lilburne. London: George G. Harrap, 1961. Only full-length biography of John Lilburne.

Sharp, Andrew, ed. The English Levellers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A useful collection of Leveller tracts.

Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Comprehensive history of the dramatic events that formed the context for John Lilburne and the Leveller movement.