A political agitator and Puritan pamphleteer from apprenticeship days, he was brought before Star Chamber in 1638 and demanded his right to take the oath in English, rather than French. Flogged through the streets, pilloried and imprisoned, he was confirmed in his lifelong determination to fight for the ‘freeborn rights’ of every human being: among them, freedom of religion and equality before the law.
Rising to Lieutenant Colonel in the Civil War, he left the parliamentary army in 1645, refusing to sign the Presbyterian Covenant, and was imprisoned in the Tower for denouncing the Earl of Manchester as a Royalist. Labelled a ‘Leveller’ by his enemies, he preferred the term ‘Agitators’ for his thousands of supporters, who struck a medal celebrating ‘Freeborn John’ in 1649.
During the years in the Tower, he collaborated on three editions of An Agreement of the Free People of England, which demanded regular elections, universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts and an end to conscription, along with religious freedom and equality before the law. He strongly supported women’s equality, if not universal suffrage.
Most significantly, the Agreement also made the first formal demand for the adoption of a written constitution and the reform of the House of Lords: issues which still prove contentious today, over 350 years later.
Red Letter Day A column which recalls the birthday or death day of people who have made a notable contribution to humanity. Mary Lloyd presents John Lilburne.
John Lilburne 1614 – 29 August 1657 On 26th March 2011, the day of the great TUC March, Christians concerned about the cuts planned to hold an ecumenical service in Barclays Bank on 16-17 Tottenham Court Road, London at 2pm. People were invited to be in the store at 2pm and ‘join in when you hear “O Come All Ye Faithful” start: ‘The British taxpayer bailed-out the banks with £1 trillion of public money and they haven’t paid us back.
So now we are bailing-in and transforming this Barclays into a church... We want to show the millionaires in cabinet that we know what their cuts are doing to our communities and they should be making the banks pay, not our communities and congregations. Barclays was founded by Christians – Quakers to be precise… But just last month Barclays paid £3.5bn in bonuses, with average pay per employee in the investment banking division rising to £236,000 – that’s ten times the UK’s average salary. It was this greed, and the recklessness of the banks, that caused the economic crisis. Yet the government are making ordinary people pay the price. David Cameron himself has said that the cuts will change Britain’s “whole way of life”.’ When people arrived to attend the service, Barclay’s Bank had closed early. Christians planning to join in the worship included Chris Howson, a Church of England priest and author from Bradford, and Symon Hill, associate director of the Christian thinktank Ekklesia.
Source: http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2011/03/ christians-bail-in-against-cuts.html TUC March, London, March 26th 2011. Half a million or more marched.
March 26th 2011 Christians Bail-In Against the Cuts The Fountain is dedicated to ‘To the members of the Sea of Faith with my gratitude’. Even the very word SOF is delightfully slipped into the text.