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[sidenote 1]. 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[sidenote 2], was apprehended and arraigned the next day of high-treason at the bar of the House of Lords, but dismissed[footnote 1]; 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[sidenote 3]. 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[sidenote 4], October 23d 1642; and remarkably distinguished himself in the engagement on the 12th of November following, at Brentford[sidenote 5]: 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[sidenote 6] of the Parliament in his favour, December 17th 1642[footnote 2]; after which returning to his party, hewas
footnotes
- ↑ [H] Arraigned of high-treason but dismissed.] Our author tells us, that after the battle at Brentford in 1642, when he was a prisoner in Oxford castle, there came to him the Lords Dunsinore, Maltravers, Newark, and Andover, who told him, among other things, that he should be arraigned for a traytor, for being the chief or general of the apprentices, that came down to Westminster and Whitehall, and forced the House of Peers, and drove away the King from his Parliament, and so begun the wars. Unto which he replied, ‘Alas, my Lords, you will be far mistaken there; and, continues he, I cannot but wonder, that your Lordships should so undervalue your own honours and reputations, as so much as once now to mention this. Why, sirrah? said one of them. Why, my Lord? because your Lordships may remember, that the 3d of May 1641, the King caused warrants to issue out to apprehend me as a traytor for this very thing, and others depending on it, and as a traytor I was apprehended by his messengers, one of which that night kept me prisoner as a traytor, and the next morning being the 4th of May 1641, as a traytor I was brought by him to Whitehall, where (as I remember) old Sir Henry Vane and Mr Nicholas were appointed by the King himself to carry my impeachment to the House of Peers, at whose bar I that day appeared, and was there that day arraigned for my life, and one Littleton, the Lord Keeper’s kinsman, swore most bitterly against me; but upon further examination of witnesses, and hearing with patience my own defence for myself, I was by your whole house, who looked upon themselves as the highest judicatory in England, honourably and nobly acquitted, as a person innocent and free of the King’s accusation: of which, my Lords, let me plainly tell you, if I were guilty, you were a company of unrighteous and unjust judges for freeing me from that accusation. But, my Lords, being judicially tried therefore, and acquitted by yourselves, who (if my memory fail me not, I saw all at that trial) and by your house (then extraordinary full as ever I saw it) who judge yourselves the highest judicature in England, I am acquitted thereby, my Lords, from any more question about that business, although it should be granted I was never so guilty of it[citation 1].’ We see here that our author on this occasion pleaded before the House of Lords; he takes notice of it himself, and says in excuse, that he did not then understand the jurisdiction of that house, when afterwards, in a similar case, he withstood that jurisdiction even to imprisonment in 1646. This submission was frequently thrown in his dish by his adversaries, to whom his constant answer was this, When I was a child I spake as a child and acted as a child, but as soon as I became a man I put away childish things. He also gave upon a particular occasion the following account how he came by that knowledge. That about a month or six weeks before the Lords committed him to prison in 1646, a member of the House of Commons, and one that he believed wished him well, gave him a hint to take care of himself, for that to his knowledge there was a design among some of the Lords (the grounds and reasons of which he then told him) to clap him up by the heels. That upon this warning, he took every opportunity of discoursing with such as he thought knew any thing of the Lords jurisdiction, and found a general concurrence that the 29th chapter of magna charta was against it: Upon that he enter’d his protest. That upon further enquiry he found Sir Edward Coke’s judgment expressly against them; which book he takes notice was published after his first trial before the Lords. And that after he was put into the Tower, being informed by one of his fellow-prisoners of Sir Simon Beresford’s case in Edward 3d’s time, he presently got the record of it by Mr Collet’s hands, deputy-keeper of the office in the Tower[citation 2].
- ↑ [I] Saved by a declaration of the Parliament.] Upon the first day of his trial, the judge [Heath] at his request, not only freed him from close imprisonment, but allowed him pen, ink, and paper, and also a week’s time to advise with counsel. The use he made of these favours was to write two letters (in conjunction with Vivers and Catesby his fellow prisoners) one to the Speaker of the House of Commons, and another to young Sir Henry Vane, setting forth the proceedings against him. These being sent to his wife[citation 3] then at London, with proper instructions, she managed the affair with so much diligence, as to bring down a letter from the Speaker containing the substance of the abovementioned declaration, and delivered it to Judge Heath two days before they were to appear again at the bar, and upon this the farther prosecution of them was staid, our author’s wife having heard the judge at his reading the Speaker’s letter, say to the company then present, that ‘as to himself, he valued not the threat, but, said he, we must be tender of the lives of the Lords and Gentlemen that served the King, and are in the custody of those at Westminster[citation 4].’ Thus the trial was suspended, and not long after, Lilburne made his escape out of the jail by corrupting the marshal, says, Lord Clarendon, who tells us, he was liberally supplied during his imprisonment with money, by his friends
that resolute and wild fierceness which is the genuine effect of inflamed enthusiasm, and which made Lilburne the idol of his party. During his imprisonment he had many scuffles with the wardens, wherein two of his fingers were so maimed, that he lost the use of them ever afterwards, as he alledges in his petition quoted in note (12). Besides the pamphlet abovementioned, he wrote several others during this imprisonment, as 1. Come out of her, my People. 2. The afflicted Man’s Complaint. 3. A Cry for Justice. 4. An Epistle to the Apprentices of London. 5. Several Epistles to the Wardens of the Fleet. 6. Nine Arguments against Episcopacy. Afterwards, when Presbytery prevailed, he printed these arguments against that polity, in a piece intitled, An Answer of nine Arguments, written by T B Lond. 1645; and they were also in the same view inserted in his Oppressed Man’s Oppression declared, p. 21. the following year, as a full answer to Mr Edwards’s Gangræna, written in defence of the Covenant.
sidenotes
- ↑ (o) Rushworth, Vol. II. part i. p. 21. edit. 1692.
- ↑ (p) Legal and Fundamental Liberties, p. 22. and his speech, at the opening of his trial in 1649; where he says, it was supposed that Col. Lunsford and his associates intended to cut the throats of the chiefest men then living in the House of Commons. p. 3. His own edition, in 4to. under the fictitious name of Theodorus Verax.
- ↑ (q) Rushworth, in the volume last cited, p. 250. The sentence was also declared null by the Lords, and ordered to be taken out of the records. Ibid. p. 469.
- ↑ (r) England’s Birthright, &c. p. 22. edit. 1646, 4to.
- ↑ (s) Our author declares, that about 700 of them withstood the King’s whole army for 5 hours, fighting it out to the very sword’s point, and the butt-end of the musket. His trial, as above, p. 3. and Lord Clarendon observes, that the two regiments there were reckoned the Parliament’s best foot, having behaved eminently well at Edge-hill, and that the King’s forces entered the town after a very warm service. Hist. of the rebellion, Vol. II. part i. p. 74. 8vo. edition.
- ↑ (t) Threatning the Lex Talionis, i. e. to punish the prisoners of the King’s party in their hands, in the same manner as Lilburne and the rest should suffer at Oxford. Rushworth, Vol. II. part iii. p. 93.
citations
- ↑ (19) Legal and Fundamental Liberties, p. 71.
- ↑ † Oppressed Man’s Oppressions declared, p. 15. where a copy of the record here mentioned is inserted.
- ↑ (20) He had married her some time before in this year 1642, as appears from his Preparative to a Hue and Cry after Sir Arthur Haslerig, toward the end, printed in 1649; where he says, She had been a comfort to him in all his troubles and sufferings for seven years.
- ↑ (21) See his trial in 1649, published under the fictitious name of Theodorus Verax in 4to. p. 38, 39.
