' This view was not shared by the jury, which, after three days ’ hearing, acquitted Lilburne — who had defended himself as skilfully as any lawyer could have done — to the great horror of the Judges and the chagrin of the majority of the Council of State.

John Lilburne then began in earnest his campaign of agitation for freeborn rights, the rights that all Englishmen are born with, which are different from privileges bestowed by a monarch or a government.

When Cromwell was convinced that Lilburne really intended to live peaceably, he released him on parole from prison, and seems to have continued till his death the pension of 40s.

A second time ( 18 June 1645 ) Prynne caused Lilburne to be brought before the same committee, on a charge of publishing unlicensed pamphlets, but he was again dismissed unpunished.

At the same time that John Lilburne began his campaign, another group led by Gerrard Winstanley styling themselves True Levellers ( and became known as Diggers ), advocated equality in property as well as political rights.

In 1641, the Long Parliament, led by John Pym and inflamed by the severe treatment of John Lilburne, as well as that of other religious dissenters such as William Prynne, Alexander Leighton, John Bastwick and Henry Burton, abolished the Star Chamber with an Act of Parliament, the Habeas Corpus Act 1640.

Royalists wished to place King Charles II on the throne ; men like Oliver Cromwell wished to govern with a plutocratic Parliament voted in by an electorate based on property, similar to that which was enfranchised before the civil war ; agitators called Levellers, influenced by the writings of John Lilburne, wanted parliamentary government based on an electorate of every male head of a household ; Fifth Monarchy Men advocated a theocracy ; and the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, advocated a more radical solution.

They included the Royalists, who supported King Charles I ; the Parliamentary forces, called " Roundheads ," who later emerged under the name of the New Model Army led by Oliver Cromwell ; the Fifth Monarchy Men, who believed in the establishment of a heavenly theocracy on earth to be led by a returning Jesus as king of kings and lord of lords ; the Agitators for political egalitarian reform of government, who were branded " Levellers " by their foes and who were led by John Lilburne ; and the Christian communists, who called themselves the True Levellers for their beliefs but who were branded " Diggers " because of their actions.

Lilburne, John Wildman and Richard Baxter later thought that Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton had applied the term to Lilburne's group during the Putney Debates of late 1647.

The dispute with Manchester was due to Lilburne's summoning and capturing Tickhill Castle against Manchester's orders, and Lilburne was one of Cromwell's witnesses in his charge against Manchester.

Three months later in Outcry of the Apprentices to the Soldiers Lilburne stated that apprentices and soldiers fought to maintain the fundamental constitution of the Commonwealth and rights of the people in their Parliaments by regulating the Crown not against the person of the King.

Armed with this evidence parliament published a long declaration against the Levellers and passed a motion to try Lilburne for High Treason, using a court similar to that which had tried Charles I.

He next joined with Josiah Primat — the person from whom George Lilburne asserted that he had bought the collieries — and presented to parliament, on 23 December 1651, a petition repeating ; and specifying the charges against Hesilrige.

The Protector offered Lilburne his liberty if he declined to act against the government, but he answered that he would own no way for his liberty but the way of the law.

Almost a century later in 1649, in the first known attempt to argue for jury nullification, a jury likewise acquitted John Lilburne for his part in inciting a rebellion against the Cromwell regime.

" He exposed himself to considerable obloquy by his exactions and appropriations of confiscated landed property though the accusation brought against him by John Lilburne was examined by a parliamentary committee and adjudged to be false.

On 18 January 1648 George Masterson, minister of Shoreditch informed against Wildman and Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne for promoting a seditious petition.

He refused to move against Rupert, or even to besiege Newark, and actually threatened to hang Colonel Lilburne for capturing a Royalist castle without orders.

Bastwick with Colonel Edward King arranged for Lilburne to be arrested on 19 July 1645 for words he had said against the Speaker of the House of Commons ; he was in custody until October.

In 1648 Bastwick published two bitter tracts against the Independents, and in defence of himself against Lilburne.

In July 1646, Lilburne was imprisoned again, this time in the Tower of London, for denouncing his former army commander the Earl of Manchester as a Royalist sympathiser, because he had protected an officer who had been charged with treason.

Lilburne entirely routed a Lancashire detachment of the enemy on their way to join the main Royalist army at the Battle of Wigan Lane on 25 August and as affairs turned out Cromwell merely shifted the area of his concentration two marches to the south-west, to Evesham.

But when Parliament threatened to execute Royalist prisoners in reprisal ( see the Declaration of Lex Talionis ), Lilburne was exchanged for a Royalist officer.

One Royalist contingent from the Isle of Man and Lancashire under the command of Earl of Derby, was heading towards Worcester, and it was the duty of Colonel Robert Lilburne to stop them.

Besides the feuds he had with officers in the Army, Lilburne soon engaged in a quarrel with two of his former fellow sufferers.

The government filled London with troops, but in spite of their officers, the soldiers shouted and sounded their trumpets when they heard that Lilburne was acquitted.

To that end a new Agreement of the People was drawn up by sixteen representatives of different parties, but, after long debates in the Council of Officers, it was so altered by the officers that Lilburne and other leaders of the levellers refused to accept it, and published in May 1649 a rival Agreement, drawn up themselves.

Lilburne called them " Levellers so-called " because he viewed himself as an agitator for freeborn rights.

John Lilburne intervened with a violent attack on Hesilrige and the committee, terming them " unjust and unworthy men, fit to be spewed out of all human society, and deserving worse than to be hanged ".

On the day Charles II arrived in Worcester, Lilburne with a company of foot from Manchester, two more from Chester, and fifty or sixty dragoons marched to Wigan, where the enemy was gathering, hoping to surprise them but found they had moved off to Chorley.

Among them were works by Jeremiah Burroughes, John Goodwin, John Lilburne, John Saltmarsh and William Walwyn.

Lilburne from Lancashire and Major Mercer with the Worcestershire horse were to secure Bewdley Bridge, 20 miles ( 32 km ) north of Worcester and on the enemy's line of retreat.

Colonel Robert Lilburne from Lancashire and Major Mercer with the Worcestershire horse were to secure Bewdley Bridge on the enemy's line of retreat.

Led by John Lilburne, Levellers drew their main support from London and the Army.

After their arrest and imprisonment in 1649, four of the ' Leveller ' leaders — Walwyn, Overton, Lilburne and Thomas Prince — signed a manifesto in which they called themselves Levellers.

Early drafts of the Agreement of the People emanated from army circles and appeared before the Putney Debates of October and November 1647, and a final version, appended and issued in the names of prominent Levellers Lt. Col. Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton and Prince appeared in May 1649.

Lilburne also harked back in his writing to the notion of a Norman yoke that has been imposed on the English people and to some extent argued that the English were simply seeking to reclaim those rights they had enjoyed before the Conquest.

In July 1645, John Lilburne was imprisoned for denouncing Members of Parliament who lived in comfort while the common soldiers fought and died for the Parliamentary cause.

It was the campaigns to free Lilburne from prison which spawned the movement known as the Levellers.

Although Walwyn and Overton were released from the Tower, and Lilburne was tried and acquitted, the Leveller cause had effectively been crushed.

* The Levellers: Overton, Walwyn and Lilburne Note 1 in this link includes an explanation of the origins of the word Levellers.

* August 29 – John Lilburne, English dissenter ( b. c. 1614 )

Cromwell, the lord general, had during his march south thrown out successively two flying columns under Colonel Robert Lilburne to deal with the Lancashire Royalists under the Earl of Derby.

Most of the few thousands of the Royalists who escaped during the night were easily captured by Lilburne and Mercer, or by the militia which watched every road in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Folkestone: Lilburne Press.

John Lilburne ( 1614 – 29 August 1657 ), also known as Freeborn John, was an English political Leveller before, during and after English Civil Wars 1642-1650.

John Lilburne was the son of Richard Lilburne, a landowner of estates at Thickley Punchardon and elsewhere in County Durham.

His father Richard Lilburne was the last man in England to insist that he should be allowed to settle a legal dispute with a trial by combat.

John's elder brother Robert Lilburne also later became active in the Parliamentary cause, but seems not to have shared John's Leveller beliefs.