Free-Born John: Champion of English Liberty
For John Lilburne, every Englishman should stand shielded from the arbitrary decisions of those in power
Iain Murray is Vice President for Strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. He was born just north of Sunderland and attended the same Northern grammar school as John Lilburne
Every May, trade unionists, socialist politicians like John McDonnell MP, and associated organizations gather in the sleepy village of Burford in Oxfordshire to celebrate Levellers’ Day. There are banners, speakers, the Internationale, a “community group workshop on biodiversity,” and other festivities aimed at preserving the memory of a 17th century political movement known as the Levellers, whom the celebrants praise for “their wish to abolish property rights and develop an equalisation of wealth.”
In other words, they honour the Levellers as ancestors of the English left. They are right to honour them, as they deserve a place in our national memory, but they are wrong to claim them exclusively for the left. An exemplar is probably the man most associated with the term Leveller during his lifetime, John Lilburne, or Free-Born John.
Born in Sunderland and the product of a Northern grammar school, Lilburne was at first a champion of religious liberty, publishing and importing unlicensed Puritan tracts. This brought him to the attention of the Attorney-General, who in 1637 prosecuted him in the Star Chamber for unlawful printing and publishing of “Libellous and Seditious books.” The Star Chamber required all those before it to an “ex officio oath” to swear to answer all question put to them, before knowing the charges. Lilburne refused to take the oath.
He based his objection on Clause 39 of Magna Carta, the “nullus liber homo” clause that states that no free man can be stripped of his liberties unless by the law of the land. He argued that a secret oath that leads to self-incrimination was illegal, and that freedom from such abusive processes was the birthright of all Englishmen, basing his arguments on earlier work by Sir Edward Coke. This led to his moniker, Free-Born John. The Star Chamber ordered him whipped and pilloried.
By his stance, Lilburne started a movement that demanded what we would now call due process or natural justice. The legal process referred to in Magna Carta required protection against self-incrimination, notice of any charges, confrontation of accusers, trial by jury (David Lammy, take note), and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, alongside the freedom of Englishmen to publish, speak, and follow their own religious conscience. Consider the importance of these elements in the American constitution’s Bill of Rights, and you will see how important Lilburne’s stance was. The Star Chamber was abolished in 1640.
Although Lilburne revered Magna Carta to the extent that he would carry around a copy and read it out to any unfortunate guard sent to detain him, he did not rely on the Great Charter alone. Increasingly as the years went on, he appealed to both historic law and custom and to what we would now call natural law or natural rights. Having been scarred by Charles I, Lilburne took up arms against him and drafted England’s first written constitutional proposal, the Agreement of the People, which went through several versions during the Civil War. But having vanquished the arbitrary government of Charles, he found himself subject to the arbitrary government of Cromwell, who imprisoned him. In England’s Birthright Justified, he condemned arbitrary power whether “regall or parliamentary.”
Lilburne’s experience taught him an important lesson, that victory over an abusive power does not entitle its opponents to exercise the same power themselves. In today’s world where both conservatives and leftists want to use the power of the state to punish their enemies and reward their friends, Lilburne’s lesson should be heard more.
Yet you will notice something missing from this. At no point did Lilburne call for the abolition of property rights or redistribution of wealth. Yes, the Levellers opposed inherited privilege and called for equal political status in their Agreement and the Putney Debates, but Lilburne and other prominent Levellers explicitly defended their movement against the accusation that it stood for expropriation. Indeed, they claimed that they were unjustly styled Levellers.
To be fair, Lilburne did not have a modern sense of property rights, but he explicitly defended every person’s right securely to enjoy what was his own, including his rights, and denied that government possessed authority to equalise estates. He and his comrades opposed monopolies, privileged corporations, arbitrary taxation, and politically-conferred advantage (or cronyism, as we might call it today.)
The reason why Levellers’ Day celebrates a proto-Marxist version of Leveller thought is a conflation between the movement of Lilburne, Overton, and Rainsborough, and the movement known as the Diggers, or “True Levellers,” led by Gerald Winstanley, who really did believe in the expropriation of property and the redistribution of wealth, and who were crushed by Cromwell just as much as Free-Born John and his colleagues.
Yet we owe the trade unionists, and particularly the Workers Educational Association of Oxford, a great debt. When no-one else was preserving the memory of Lilburne and his colleagues, they did. But Lilburne belongs neither to socialism nor to any political party. He belongs to the history of liberty. His simple demand was that every Englishman, however mean his condition, should stand equally shielded by the protection of the law, free from the arbitrary decisions of those in power. In the history of English freedom, few names should be celebrated more than that of Free-Born John.