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

Abstract

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