• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The trajectories of these three – Overton, Walwyn and Lilburne – were crossing in the summer of 1645 in response to the Presbyterian campaign to take charge of the parliamentary cause. What cemented this incipient alliance was the political martyrdom of John Lilburne. Although Prynne had ignored Lilburne in the spring, he was prompted into action by a meeting at the Windmill Tavern in the summer. On one account this was convened to discuss the implications of Parliament’s defeat at Leicester, immediately prior to Naseby. At the time of the loss of Leicester, however, the New Model had not been able to engage the royal army, another spring was slipping away and now the royalists had scored a significant military blow. According to Overton’s Martin’s Eccho this was one of the signs of God’s wrath against the persecuting spirit in the parliamentary cause. The meeting recommended adjourning Parliament for a month, to allow members to reacquaint themselves with the temper of those they represented. The Westminster Assembly was to take a similar break. To Prynne this seemed to be an Independent attack on the assembly and the Presbyterian interest in Parliament. This provocation, and the pamphlet attacks on him, provoked A Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious New Wandring-Blasing Stars.6

A new bout of pamphlet jousting between Prynne and his opponents coincided with a print campaign in defence of Lilburne. He had been denounced by Bastwick (another man whom Lilburne had supported in the resistance to Laudianism) on the basis of a conversation overheard on 19 July. Bastwick claimed that in the course of that conversation Lilburne had said that Lenthall had sent £60,000 to the enemy at Oxford. Lilburne was brought before the Committee of Examinations the following week, where, rather than dispute the charge, he questioned the authority of the tribunal and asserted his rights as a free-born Englishman. And, of course, he launched into print, with England’s Birth-Right Justified (10 October 1645). In this he was supported directly by Walwyn, whose pamphlet England’s Lamentable Slaverie appeared the following day, and engaged in a public dialogue with Lilburne.7

One of Lilburne’s gifts was for seeing in his own troubles principles of general significance, and it was this that facilitated the translation of religious freedom into the civic sphere: his serial oppressions at the hands of various civil bodies became the basis for arguments about the illegitimacy of their authority. Walwyn’s view of free grace was the basis of a radical view of the constitution. Secular power ought to be so arranged as to guarantee freedom of conscience, since there could be no free moral agent without civil liberty. These were very clearly practical questions, in the light of Lilburne’s experience. It was an anti-Calvinist position, and one based not on the ancient constitution but on ancient rights. In Lilburne’s hands these ancient rights became the basis for political settlement, a uniform set of rights due to all Englishmen by birth.8

Measured against the flood of pamphlets in these months, this was a fairly insignificant set of exchanges. It is not clear that the arguments for religious toleration made by Walwyn were of more importance to contemporaries than those made by Burton and Williams the previous year, but an earlier generation of historians saw here the germ of a modern, and admirable, politics for in this convergence among London radicals lie the origins of the Levellers. ‘To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the Levellers’, wrote H. N. Brailsford in 1958. For Brailsford it was the Levellers who came to champion popular sovereignty expressed in a democratically accountable House of Commons. In The Araignement, for example, Walwyn had appealed to human reason as a source of authority, combining it with the maxim that salus populi suprema lex (the good or safety of the people is the supreme law).9 As we have seen, Overton had Presbyterian persecution arraigned before a Grand Jury, the voice of the local community.