(having suffered above measure, but intentionally done injury to none) and pressed under with the importunity of friends, especially with the heart-breaking sighs of my dear, but even half-distracted wife; as when my late children lay in a most disconsolate condition (which ended their lives) your House did me the favour to grant me my liberty to visit them, which I think was the saving of her life: So now greater importunities lying upon me from divers, and her that is dearer to me than many lives, I as earnestly entreat you to move your House, in the most effectual manner you can, that my trial (so suddenly intended) may for some reasonable time be suspended, that so I may have time to hear and consider what many of them say they have to offer by way of reason and argument to persuade me to what at present my conscience is not convinced of

Upon the knowledge of the acceptance of which, during all that time of suspension of trial, I do hereby faithfully promise not in the least to disturb those that shall grant me this favour." This letter however was of no avail,

1

So that Lilburne

and only added to his wife's sorrow. got his friends to prevail on her to go into the city and there to keep her till his trial was over..

I have repeatedly had occasion to notice the sensitiveness of the Government on the subject of the expression of any opinions except such as were favourable to themselves. In regard to the liberty of the press they had all along been as arbitrary and tyrannical as Henry the Eighth or Archbishop Laud; but, in the atrocious act which has been cited, and which adjudged what by the English law was merely liable to the punishment of libel to be high treason, they not only went beyond any former English tyrant, but

1 State Trials, vol. iv. pp. 1432, 1433.

beyond themselves. What the Star Chamber, directed by the savage intolerance of Laud, had punished with the pillory, and mutilation, they punished with death; at least they sought to punish with death, for they found that an English jury would not carry out their law, and this very fact proves that the people were disposed so far to take Lilburne's advice as "not to side with or fight for the chimeras, fooleries, and pride of the present men in power." And chimeras they were, the imaginations that those men or any of them entertained that the government they had established was a republic, and that it would last. I do not say that an actual republic-a democracy—such as Lilburne and his friends denominated the Levellers aimed at -would have secured the end of good government-but it would at least have had the merit of being what it called itself. It might have been a tyranny no less, or it might have fallen to pieces at once; but it would not have been an oligarchical tyranny under the name of a republic. Moreover there is one thing that seems a little strange. Even the panegyrists of Vane and Marten do not claim more for them than that, after the battle of Worcester, towards the close of the third year of their Commonwealth, they began to have doubts respecting Cromwell's designs. Now long before that time, more than two years before, Lilburne had declared, in several of his publications that the "false Saint Oliver," as he calls him, was aiming at the supreme power. His very words read against him at this trial in October 1649 actually came to pass to the very letter, three or four years after they were written and published. "The present contest of the present dissembling interest of Independents for the people's liberties in general" he says "is merely no more but self in the highest, and to set up the false saint, and most desperate apostate, mur-.

1649.] LILBURNE'S PREDICTIONS RESPECTING CROMWELL. 157

derer,' and traitor, Oliver Cromwell, by a pretended election of his mercenary soldiers, under the false name of the godly interest, to be King of England, (that being now too apparently all the intended liberties of the people that ever he sought for in his life); that so he might rule and govern them by his will and pleasure, and so destroy and evassalize their lives and properties to his lusts: which is the highest treason that ever was committed or acted in this nation in any sense or kind; either, 1. in the eye of the law: or, 2. in the eye of the ancient (but yet too much arbitrary) proceedings of Parliament: or, 3. in the eye of their own late declared principles of reason (by pretence of which, and by no rules of law in the least, they took away the late king's head)."

» 2

Now Lilburne published this in the summer of 1649, and the very men, who now in October 1649 sought to destroy him for promulgating such opinions, such men as Bradshaw, Vane, Marten, Scot, when at last the proceedings of the memorable 20th of April 1653 opened their

1 In his "Legal Fundamental Liberties of England," p. 1, Lilburne says, "I positively accuse Mr. Oliver Cromwell for a wilful murderer for murdering Mr. Richard Arnold near Ware." To which the Attorney-General's answer was, "Which man, my lord, was condemned for a mutineer by a council of war, where the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland was but one member; and the Parliament gave him and the rest of the Council thanks for shooting that mutinous soldier to death; and yet Mr. Lilburne calls him murderer therefore; and this is laid to my LordLieutenant's charge for his part." answer to the Attorney-General Lilburne talked of the Petition of Right,

In

and cited the case of the Earl of Strafford, which in fact is not a parallel case.-State Trials, vol. iv. pp. 1367, 1368. This charge of murder against Cromwell is one of the weakest points of Lilburne's case.

2 From "An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell, and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, esquires, members of the late forcibly-dissolved House of Commons; presented to public view, by Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne, close prisoner in the Tower of London, for his real, true and zealous affections to the liberties of his native country," page 5, cited in State Trials, vol. iv. pp. 1359, 1360.

eyes, must have been forced to admit that Lilburne's opinion of Cromwell was right and that theirs was wrong. Marten, when he saw his beloved oligarchy, which he called a republic, destroyed, precisely as Lilburne had predicted four years before, might feel when too late that, when making jokes on John Lilburne for the amusement of Cromwell, he somewhat resembled the fowl comfortably at roost on the boa constrictor, though destined for part of that animal's supper. The cause of Lilburne's seeing the truth so much sooner may have been this. Lilburne, who was unquestionably an acute, observing, clear-sighted man, had occasion to see Cromwell under circumstances more calculated to bring out his whole character than those under which the parliamentary men who were not soldiers saw him. To the latter he could wear a mask, or even a mask within a mask. Now it would happen at times that all his masks would drop off or be thrown aside in the tumult of those stormy debates that sometimes occurred in the councils of the officers of the army.

Lilburne has himself described one of those stormy scenes in a passage which has an instructive significance, and which like that already quoted is one of those produced against him at his trial by the Attorney-General. "But alas, poor fools!" he says, "we were merely cheated and cozened, it being the principal unhappiness to some of us, as to the flesh, to have our eyes wide open, to see things long before most honest men came to have their eyes open. And this is that which turns to our smart and reproach, and that which we commissioners feared at the first, viz. That no tie, promises, nor engagements were strong enough to the grand jugglers and leaders of the army, was now made clearly manifest;

for when it came to the Council, there came the general, Cromwell, and the whole gang of creature-colonels, and other officers, and spent many days in taking it all to pieces, and there Ireton showed himself an absolute king, if not an emperor; against whose will no man must dispute. And then Shuttlecock, Roe their scout, Okey, and Major Barton (where Sir Hardress Waller sat president) began in their open council to quarrel with us, by giving some of us base and unworthy language; which procured them from me a sharp retortment of their own baseness and unworthiness unto their teeth, and a challenge from myself into the field. Besides, seeing they were like to fight with us in the room in their own garrison, which when Sir Hardress Waller in my ear reproved me for it, I justified it, and gave it him again, for suffering us to be so affronted. And within a little time after, I took my leave of them for a pack of dissembling, juggling knaves, amongst whom in consultation ever thereafter I should scorn to come (as I told some of them); for there was neither faith, truth, nor common honesty among them. And so away I went to those that chose and entrusted me, and gave publicly and effectually (at a set meeting appointed on purpose) to divers of them, an exact account how they had dealt with us, and cozened and deceived us; and so absolutely discharged myself from meddling or making any more with so perfidious a generation of men, as the Great Ones of the army were; but especially the cunningest of Machiavelians, commissary Henry Ireton.'

" 1

If Lilburne's view of the character of Ireton be accepted as the true one, Ireton's ulterior designs must be considered as not less fatal to constitutional liberty than those of

1 From Lilburne's "Legal Fundamental Liberties of England asserted

and vindicated," page 35, cited in State Trials, vol. iv. pp. 1368, 1369.