The comuneros fought from July 1520 through April 1521. Although Maria Pacheco led the troops from Toledo in defending that city until the following fall, royal troops defeated her husband Juan de Padilla and Juan Bravo of Segovia on April 23, 1521, in the town of Villalar. The king's forces beheaded Juan de Padilla and Juan Bravo, and hung their heads on spikes to warn the population about the price of rebellion. Pacheco, though she escaped death, lived out the rest of her short life in exile in Portugal and died at the age of thirty-six without the amnesty that Charles V had bestowed on almost all the other surviving rebels.
The comunero uprising raised perennial questions about democracy. King Charles, eager to pursue his role as an emperor in earnest by imposing a single law and a single set of religious practices over extensive parts of Europe and Latin America, attempted to centralize his power over his dominions and reduce the power of representative institutions such as the Cortes and locally controlled city councils. Had Emperor Charles V been able to forego summoning the Cortes, he would have done so. But he needed the revenues only the cities could provide. The cities, on the other hand, depended on the monarchy for protection against unruly aristocrats.
Avila's delegates, while claiming to uphold the old laws and traditions, were also developing new social policy as lawmakers frequently do. They wanted the Cortes to meet regularly so that they could initiate laws and gain the king's support and protection against the unruly barons in return for taxes. They gestured toward a form of parliamentary democracy that took hundreds of years to achieve.
Like Guru Nanak and Juan de Padilla and Maria Pacheco, the English reformers John and Elisabeth Lilburne fought to establish equal justice and freedom from torture as tenets of national law in the early part of the seventeenth century. The Lilburnes challenged the Church of England, the monarchy, Parliament, Puritans, and ultimately Oliver Cromwell, the virtual dictator of England, in their uncompromising insistence on gaining the civil and political rights that have become the bedrock of democracy. The Levellers, the political party John and Elisabeth Lilburne helped launch along with their friends Richard Overton and William Walvyn, were among the earliest groups to express belief in civil as well as political rights. A pamphleteer and a prophet, John Lilburne used his writing to call for trial by jury, the right of a person accused of a crime to confront his or her accusers, rights against self-incrimination, universal male suffrage, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the end to censorship, abolition of the Monarchy and the House of Lords, annual elections to the House of Commons, term limitations for delegates, and an end to torture as an instrument of government.6
John and Elisabeth Lilburne grew up in times of relative economic insecurity. Born in 1615, John Lilburne came from a small landowning family in the north of England, near Durham. His father sent him to London in 1630 to learn the woolen cloth trade. London, like the Spanish, Indian, and Middle Eastern cities of the time, was bustling with commercial activity. Strangers mixed with householders, as they exchanged products and ideas. Indeed, the cities of the world were hotbeds of struggle over individual and collective rights.
The Hapsburgs, the French monarchs, and Henry VIII and his successors on the English throne tried to increase their religious as well as their secular power. In the early sixteenth century, King Henry VIII had broken with the Catholic Church over his wish to divorce Charles V's aunt, Catherine of Aragon, and Henry established the Church of England in which the king and the archbishop of Canterbury replaced the pope as arbiters of religious doctrine. Since the king became the head of the state church, disputes about religious doctrine permeated politics.7 For instance, the attempt of Protestants to read the Christian Bible and interpret scripture led some of them to dispense with ministers to create a congregation of equals who interpreted scripture for themselves. This communitarian ideal, the notion of a group of equal individuals capable of coming to terms with doctrinal matters, gave many like John Lilburne the sense that matters of the highest import could be decided by individuals reflecting on sacred and profane law.
For rulers like King Henry VIII and Emperor Charles V, religious order dovetailed with maintaining political order, and using torture to maintain the monarchy was no more reprehensible than the Church using torture allegedly to save a person's soul. Some seventeenth-century English radicals like John Lilburne countered by calling for the equality of all to think as they liked, write and publish what they thought, worship without the supervision of priests or ministers, avoid self-incrimination, be free of torture, and generally speak their minds and listen to others who participated in public or in religious centers. Equality before the law, including freedom of speech and rights to publish their ideas, became commitments worth fighting for.
John Lilburne was a popular pamphleteer who promoted the interests of an emerging group of urban artisans, small merchants, and skilled workers who began demanding rights that Lilburne labeled those of freeborn Englishmen. Like many of them, Lilburne put his own body forward in defense of his political ideals. After violating the 1559 law that empowered the Stationers' Guild to confiscate publications that challenged religious doctrine and bring their authors up on charges, the physician John Bastwick and two other activists were arrested for circulating a critique of bishops and other members of the Church of England. The ecclesiastical court, with jurisdiction over them, ordered their ears removed and branded another of the prisoners, William Prynne, on his cheek with an "S" and an "L" for seditious libel.
Lilburne, who had published Bastwick's work in Holland, was also held accountable for distributing incendiary material, and was forced to appear in a secret court known as the Star Chamber. In 1638, when he refused to speak until authorities told him the charges against him and permitted him to confront his accusers, he was tied naked to a cart and beaten as the guards drove him to government headquarters. There he was placed in a wooden frame that held his legs parallel to the ground to shame him and force him to confess to violating the law. When he refused, he was gagged and taken by cart, followed by a crowd of supporters among whom were apprentice artisans, wool workers, the unemployed, pamphleteers, hawkers, and others who walked the city streets. They bore witness to what the torturers were doing to Lilburne and the others and tried to shame them in the court of public opinion. Despite, or even because of their support, Lilburne was taken to prison, where he remained until 1640.
Oliver Cromwell, a member of Parliament, who later became one of the leaders of the English Revolution (1642-51) and then the head of the military government known as the Protectorate (1653-59), helped get Lilburne released. Lilburne immediately joined Cromwell's side in the growing struggle against the king. But Lilburne, loyal to principles rather than people, refused to allow personal relations to interfere with action. Jailed again under Cromwell in 1645 and 1646, he used his time in prison to write more pamphlets and letters railing against those who ignored what he considered democratic rights of free speech and freedom of religious thought.
Like Guru Nanak, Lilburne found supporters among craftsmen and artisans, who promoted hand industry in the cities. He also appealed to urban immigrants, who had their hopes aroused by the political rhetoric of the contending political forces unleashed during the English Revolution. Unlike many of the political activists of the time, Lilburne embraced these new people for whom the old political traditions held no attraction. He organized meetings of apprentices, at which they expressed their anger against their employers, the guild masters, as well as against the government. These apprentices were forced to submit to constraints on their freedom during their long apprenticeships. But their skills in production and trade translated into self-confidence that led them to think that they could generate ideas and turn them into reality. This new generation of men (and some women) believed in the doctrines of equality that Lilburne and others helped formulate.