Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/106

 Lilburne was sentenced in addition to be whipped from the Fleet Prison to Westminster, and to stand in the pillory.

Lilburne always welcomed an opportunity to stand forth before the people as the champion or the martyr of a cause. On this occasion he met his sufferings under the Star Chamber’s barbarous sentence with his spirit exulting that he was permitted to suffer in the Lord’s cause. It seemed to the boy that the various incidents of his punishment—the sympathy of the bystanders, the regret of the executioner at doing his duty with the whip—all summoned him to testify by his sufferings to the “rottenness” of episcopacy. Therefore, as he stood in the pillory, his back smarting from five hundred lashes, he undertook to prove to the onlookers that the bishops were popish in origin and authority. Until the Lords of the Star Chamber sent word to the warden of the Fleet to gag his prisoner, Lilburne exhorted an audience whose sympathy he had apparently won for his cause.

The Star Chamber savagely testified to its anger at this new defiance of its authority. At a meeting the same day it decreed that Lilburne should be laid with irons on hands and feet in the part of Fleet Prison where the basest prisoners were kept; no one must be allowed to visit him or to supply him with money. Accordingly, even his surgeon on the morning after the punishment was refused admission to him. The boy’s friends were compelled to send him his food through the poor men of the