In the two decades between 16 there were only four years in which Lilburne did not spend some time behind bars. Lilburne’s early career allowed him to develop his capacity to use the court and the prison as a political platform. Lilburne was then, and remained all his life, part of the dissenting gathered churches that met in the back alleys and taverns of the City of London and in the unruly suburbs outside the walls in Tower Hamlets and Southwark. There he was put in the stocks, the welts on his back ‘swelled almost as big as a penny loafe with the bruses of the knotted Cords’, still throwing radical pamphlets from his coat pocket. His eventual punishment was to be tied to the back of a cart and whipped in the London streets from the Fleet to Whitehall. It is from his defiance of this court’s right to try him that he became ‘Freeborn John’. He was then hauled before the Star Chamber, a prerogative court in which the main evidence was the defendant’s confession (a procedure creeping back into English law in secret trials).
When he was captured in 1637 he was jailed. Lilburne secretly imported seditious tracts from Holland. Lilburne first became famous in the 1630s as a supporter of John Bastwick, William Prynne and Henry Burton, the ‘Puritan martyrs’ who railed against the state church of Charles I and his Archbishop, William Laud. And Lilburne’s life bears witness to that fact. Yet freedom of speech entered the world in the first modern revolution not as a secular ideology but as the inseparable counterpart of freedom for religious dissent from the state church.
We hear much these days to the effect that freedom of speech means secularism. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Leveller leader John Lilburne, who did more than most to make religious and political liberty part of the English social landscape.
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