'It is quite extraordinary that he is now largely forgotten.’ Photo: Image: John Lilburne, reading from Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England,1649
Level headed: Simon Webb on the ‘Gentleman, Leveller, Quaker’ John Lilburne
‘He became, and remained, one of the most influential voices in the England of his time.’
We’re not exactly the 1652 Country, but up here in County Durham we do have quite a lot of Quaker history, and in better times it’s not unknown for Quaker pilgrims to visit us to see the sights.
George Fox was often in the county, which he refers to as ‘Bishoprick’ in his Journal, due to its unique status as a County Palatine, where the bishop ruled supreme between Tyne and Tees. Fox was generally safer in ‘Bishoprick’ than elsewhere in the north thanks to the protection offered by Anthony Pearson of Ramshaw Hall, a local Quaker bigwig who was convinced by James Nayler in 1653. In fact Fox felt safe enough to travel to Durham to try to dissuade officials from setting up a university there. This had been a pet project of Oliver Cromwell’s, but unfortunately it died with the Lord Protector.
Durham had to wait until 1832 for its university, which now owns the prominent seventeenth-century almshouse paid for by John Cosin, then bishop of Durham. This counts as a Quaker attraction because, although Cosin financed it, it was actually put up by John Langstaff, a local Quaker builder. That Cosin should have employed Langstaff is curious, given that the bishop was also an enthusiastic persecutor of Friends.
Across the green from Cosin’s almshouse is the university’s Palace Green Library, currently firmly shut due to Covid-19, which among other treasures houses a collection donated by the Sunderland Quakers, and another relating to the Quaker poet Basil Bunting (1900-1985).
A short drive from Durham City is the village of Cockfield, birthplace of Jeremiah Dixon, the Quaker surveyor who, together with Charles Mason, drew the Mason-Dixon Line between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1760s. Another noted Quaker who was born in County Durham was the civil war soldier, Leveller, author and agitator John Lilburne (1614-1657). Friends who object that Lilburne was probably born at Sunderland should remember that at that time the city on the Wear was still included in County Durham, and had to answer to the bishop.
John was born into a minor gentry family and grew up on the Lilburne estate at Thickley Punchardon, near Bishop Auckland where he went to school. As a younger son, he had to shift for himself, and was apprenticed to a London clothier called Thomas Hewson. Hewson introduced the young northerner to his network of Puritan contacts, some of whom were concerned with printing illegal pamphlets and otherwise promoting religious and political ideas that were anathema to King Charles I and his equally ill-fated archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.
Lilburne’s involvement with the illegal printing of Puritan tracts saw him subjected to a similar punishment to that suffered by the Quaker pioneer James Nayler. In April 1638 John was dragged behind a cart from the Fleet Prison to Westminster and whipped on his bare back all the way. At Westminster he was put in the stocks and gagged, but he did not have to suffer branding or boring through the tongue, as Nayler would nearly twenty years later.
Lilburne’s brutal flogging, and the defiant way he had borne it, won him many admirers, particularly in London. He became, and remained, one of the most influential voices in the England of his time; it is quite extraordinary that he is now largely forgotten.
For the rest of his life John Lilburne put out a stream of often inflammatory books and pamphlets on controversial religious and political subjects, and as a result he was repeatedly tried and imprisoned. He became a leader of the Leveller movement, a group that was and is misunderstood because of its name, which is a misleading misnomer. Even Clarendon, the great historian of the period, took the Levellers to be a sort of communist group whose members wanted everyone to be equal.
In fact the primary concern of the Levellers, at least from Lilburne’s point of view, was to fight for legal rights – the right to a fair trial in particular. It seems that they envisaged a time when many of the abuses suffered by ordinary people at the hands of the rich and powerful in their own day would simply not happen because they were not legally possible. In my new book on John Lilburne, I use the example of Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament in 2019: it proved to be legally impossible and was overruled by the Supreme Court.
I open the book with an account of the trial of Ernesto Miranda in 1963. Because of sloppy work by the Arizona police, Miranda’s case was referred to the US Supreme Court. In response to the case, it introduced the celebrated ‘Miranda rights’ whereby suspects must be warned of their right to remain silent, and to legal representation, among other things. Commenting on the case, the chief justice Earl Warren referred to John Lilburne, who had fought for similar rights in England over three hundred years earlier.
When he was not fighting injustice, Lilburne tried his hand at several professions, including civil war officer on the Roundhead side, brewer, and even soap-maker. At last he decided to cash in on his experience with the legal system to work for hire in the law. His involvement in a complex case concerning the ownership of a coal mine in Durham ended with his being sent into exile in 1652. When he returned to England without permission he was imprisoned on Jersey, and then at Dover Castle.
It was at Dover (where he was allowed to visit his wife and children, who had settled in the town) that John Lilburne encountered Luke Howard, a saintly Quaker shoemaker, in 1656 (this Luke Howard should not be confused with the other Quaker Luke Howard, the nineteenth-century chemist and meteorologist). Howard convinced Lilburne of the truths of Quakerism, and the tireless agitator was welcomed into the Quaker fold. Soon he had written a pamphlet called ‘The Resurrection of John Lilburne’, in which he gave an account of a new mystical connection with God who ‘caused my soul to be awake with himself and to be really exercised in an interchange of divine conference, contemplation or parley with him’. But Lilburne was not to live long as a calm, contented Quaker: he died in August 1657.
There is no doubt that if the rights the Levellers had agitated for had been enshrined in law, the persecution Quakers suffered could have been mitigated. As it was, even Durham saw anti-Quaker atrocities, once Anthony Pearson had reverted to Anglicanism.
Although he became a Quaker late in life, Friends can still claim John Lilburne as one of their own. Until he was nearly forty, Quakerism was not a prominent feature of the British scene in any case. The heirs of Lilburne are those who continue to campaign for human rights: for instance in Hong Kong and elsewhere in China, and on the streets of western cities where rights are sometimes denied to individuals on the basis of race. Lilburne would be proud to know that many of these are Quakers.
John Lilburne: Gentleman, Leveller, Quaker by Simon Webb is available now from Langley Press.
