Lilburne united with many of these progressives when he joined the army as Parliament rose up against the king in the English Revolution. The monarchical forces captured Lilburne outside Oxford and planned to try him for treason. Elisabeth Lilburne, who was pregnant at the time, rode from London to Oxford to get Lilburne freed in an exchange of prisoners. He became a war hero. He resigned from the army when Cromwell instituted a religious oath to the government, which many Quakers and other Protestant denominations refused to take since they believed that swearing to God in secular matters violated the separation of church and state and their religious consciences.
Unable to countenance public discrimination of any kind, Lilburne fulminated against the maintenance of social differences in the Parliamentary army that fought against the king in the revolution. Lilburne's refusal to compromise landed him in prison again in 1647. When he was released in 1648, he and his friends started a newspaper, which they called The Moderate. He, Elisabeth Lilburne, Thomas Prince, William Walvyn, and Richard Overton organized a political party, which their enemies labeled "the Levellers," that set about winning civil liberties. Many of its doctrines appeared in their political manifesto, An Agreement of the People. "We the free People of England," read the Agreement, "to whom God hath given hearts, means and opportunity to effect the same . . . Agree to ascertain our Government, to abolish all arbitrary Power, and to set bounds and limits both to our Supreme, and all Subordinate Authority, and remove all known Grievances."8 In reaction to their radical propositions to reform the system of governance outlined in the Agreement, the three men were arrested in the spring of 1649 and, despite the work of Leveller organizer Mary Overton, who succeeded in rousing thousands to sign a petition for their release, the men were imprisoned in the Tower of London, and Lilburne was again accused of treason.
When Lilburne, the Levellers, and other radical democrats called for the abolition of the Monarchy and the House of Lords, Cromwell and his government supported them. But when they demanded universal male suffrage, the Cromwellian government arrested them. Lilburne was far too consistent in his commitments to democracy to keep the support of more opportunistic politicians, or even those willing to work out compromises. Although he thought that he could persuade Cromwell and the Parliament to bring King Charles I to trial, they instead chose to execute the king on their own authority in January 1649 and imprisoned Lilburne for opposing them. The Levellers, with Elisabeth Lilburne again in the lead, organized another petition campaign that engaged over 10,000 angry supporters, especially in London. Despite this support, Cromwell refused to release Lilburne. Again charged with treason, he was imprisoned, tried, exiled, and then exonerated. Between 1649 and 1651, he wrote fewer pamphlets and devoted himself to supporting his family as a soap maker. He returned to attacks on the government for its imperialism in Ireland, England's first colony, and once again was charged with treason. A trial for libel resulted in his banishment to Holland in 1651 on pain of death if he returned. Unable to follow, the beleaguered and abused Elisabeth Lilburne, seven of whose children had died, tried to support their remaining family as a single mother. They were scarcely able to survive.9
After a little over two years, in 1653, when Cromwell overthrew Parliament and seized power in a military dictatorship called the Protectorate, John Lilburne audaciously returned to England. Once again brought to trial for his life in July 1653, his apprentice supporters thronged the Guild Hall in London, where he was being tried. In one of the most important trials of the century, Lilburne used his righteous anger to proclaim his rights as a citizen. The jury again proclaimed him not guilty and refused to impose the death penalty. He nevertheless spent the rest of his life in prison. Cromwell moved him around from London to a dungeon in a castle on the Isle of Jersey, and finally to the Dover Tower, from which he was periodically released for home visits. He converted to Quakerism in 1657, shortly before he died at the age of forty-three, leaving Elisabeth Lilburne, herself an activist, to raise their children on her own.
Oddly matched, the efforts of Guru Nanak, Maria Pacheco, Juan de Padilla, and John and Elisabeth Lilburne actually form a pastiche of how democratic demands for equality and human rights proceeded. When a rich man's steward invited Guru Nanak to a feast with representatives of four Hindu castes, Nanak responded "I belong not to any of the four castes; why am I invited?" The wealthy steward asked why Nanak had snubbed them. Nanak asked both the steward and the poor carpenter at whose house the feast was taking place to bring him a sample of their regular food. As the Sikh legend goes, Nanak then squeezed the carpenter's bread, and milk came out. But when he squeezed the steward's bread, the blood of oppression and bribery came out.10 Although Nanak made no reference to rights, his preoccupation with justice marked him as someone determined to establish equality. Likewise, de Pacheco, who was from a wealthy family one of whose sons was a viceroy and one of whom was a Catholic bishop, nevertheless could appreciate the need for certain urban groups to gain equality with the emperor and the high aristocracy in determining how resources should be allocated. And the Lilburnes, despite the poverty and repression they endured because of their beliefs, were nevertheless able to stand up against religious and judicial tyranny and demand democratic rights for all.
Democracy against All Odds
S
ome view democracy simply as representing the act of continuous conversation and deliberation until a consensus is reached. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many skilled workers, women of all classes, soldiers, and priests gathered in small societies in order to discuss the political, intellectual, and commercial issues of their day with the goal of creating what we might call democratic governments. Although the concept of "democracy" gained a following among such people, they might well have regarded it as synonymous with mob rule until the committees that participants constructed came into being in the late eighteenth century. If no country or group had a monopoly in taming what could be the wild demands of individuals, democratic practices of talking things through in groups and challenging others to defend their political and intellectual positions regained a standing in the eighteenth century it had not held in centuries, anywhere on earth.
In small-town Boston, whose population never increased much above 15,000 between 1750 and 1770, craftsmen and printers like Paul Revere, who at nineteen had inherited his father's shop and trade as a silversmith while continuing to work as a printer, joined with others who were only willing to consider paying increased government taxes if they had a greater say in how the revenues were spent. While magnates and elite merchants in many medieval cities had long withheld revenues from kings in protest until their demands were met, the eighteenth century went even further as merchants and artisans organized their clubs and enhanced their networks to help shape more productive democratic links between one another.
Revere, who is widely known for his ride in 1775 from Lexington to Concord to alert citizens that British troops were on their way to seize gun powder that the colonial insurgents had stockpiled, is representative of the working people who fought for their rights as citizens and helped define the linkages that would make democracy in the United States possible.1 Revere grew up in the North End of Boston, along the harbor, among printers, metalworkers, carpenters, rope-makers, shipbuilders, coopers, washerwomen, tailors, and other craftsmen and women. He learned to read and write in a local school and used these skills in his print business. Like later use of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, print itself had made possible reducing the political authorities' control over information that was circulating. Print could, of course, be suppressed as the Leveller pamphlets had been, and writers and publishers could be held to account and punished for their views. But even having access to print technology exploded the constraints on democratic and reactionary thought that had previously been circumscribed.