Reborn John?: The Eighteenth-century Afterlife of John Lilburne

Corrigendum

This man proved a great trouble-world in all the variety of Governments afterward, being chief of a faction called Levellers: he was a great proposal-maker and modeller of State, which by his means was always restless in the Usurpation. He died a Quaker; and such as his life was, such was his death.

James Heath, Chronicle of the Late Intestine War (1661), 1676

In so describing the Leveller activist and pamphleteer John Lilburne (1615?-57) in his 1661 history of the civil wars, James Heath, best known as the hostile biographer of Oliver Cromwell, was outlining a figure he assumed would already be well known to his readership. Indeed, he referred to him as 'that famously known person John Lilburne'.¹ Today, Lilburne remains the most celebrated of all seventeenth-century English radicals, commemorated in popular biography, television drama (Channel 4's The Devil's Whore) and even rock opera.²

Many scholars argue that the relatively high profile of the Levellers today, in both popular and academic works, is a recent phenomenon. Historians such as Royce MacGillivray, Alistair MacLachlan, and, most notably Blair Worden, have claimed that the Levellers received virtually no attention from historians until the late nineteenth century and only really gained prominence in the twentieth century, through the work of liberal, socialist and Marxist authors.³ The one exception to this historical neglect, as Worden notes, was John Lilburne, who continued to be deemed worthy of the attention of biographers and historians through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even so, he was treated as a fairly minor player and did not figure prominently in many histories of the civil wars. Moreover, Lilburne's relatively visibility in contrast to his associates Richard Overton, John Wildman and William Walwyn had very little to do with his connections to something identified as the Leveller movement. Instead, Lilburne was given eighteenth-century labels like 'enthusiast' or 'patriot'. The Levellers, when mentioned at all, were crudely caricatured as 'social levellers' (those advocating the redistribution of property and/or the obliteration of marks of status) and scant attention was paid to the ideas manifested in documents such as the many versions of the Levellers' written manifesto, the Agreement of the People. Rather than being remembered as a political radical, it has been argued, Lilburne was memorialized for his many courtroom battles which struck a chord with eighteenth-century legal controversies, especially over freedom of the press.⁴ On this reading, it was Lilburne the litigant who was remembered, not Lilburne the Leveller.

Fig. 1.

Frontispiece to Theodorus Verax [Clement Walker], The Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne (1649).

This is a persuasive presentation of the historical influence of the radicalism of the civil war and one which reflects a broader scholarly unease with the conception of a 'radical tradition'. The notion of a tradition of radical thought was powerfully evoked in the classic works of British marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson and retains some importance in the popular historical imagination.⁵ Academics have become increasingly critical, however, both of the use of the term 'radical' to describe pre-modern politics and of the idea of a continuum of radical ideas and movements. Scholars have pointed out that the term 'radical' - not in common political use until the early nineteenth century anyway - had a very different meaning in the seventeenth century, indicating not ideas that would dramatically transform the status quo but instead a return to fundamentals or to the root. Using the term 'radical' in its modern sense then, risks distorting the political outlook of historic individuals who did not necessarily view themselves as advocating anything new or novel. The notion of a radical tradition is now seen as equally problematic, as it implies both a similarity in radical thought over the ages and a degree of influence from one radical group to the next which often cannot be supported with empirical evidence.⁶ At best, the idea of a radical tradition is seen as a poor way of thinking...