Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/110

 and in prison, he had dared to proclaim himself a soldier against the Lord’s enemies, the bishops, when they sat in high places; as a man he would not be wanting at Armageddon. Furthermore, the same motive that had led him to stand against the bishops and the Star-Chamber process in 1637, and against the king in 1642, led him in the later years of his short life to stand against the arbitrary power of Parliament itself. Without understanding what that motive was, one cannot do justice to his career. Lilburne considered his life dedicated to a crusade against wrong, injustice, lawlessness, and tyranny wherever found. That fact once understood, his seemingly tortuous and capricious political course becomes straight and consistent.

The events of Lilburne’s military career can be briefly told. He enlisted in Lord Brooke’s regiment of foot, fought gallantly at Edgehill, and as the senior officer present commanded the regiment in its desperate defense of Brentford, November 12, 1642. That defense held back the king’s army till the parliamentary train of artillery at Hammersmith could be removed to safety; but Brooke’s and Holles’s regiments, which made the defense unaided, were cut to pieces and Lilburne was carried prisoner to Oxford. There the Royalists, after trying unsuccessfully to gain him over, put him on trial for high treason, and accorded him the treatment of a prisoner of war only as a result of Parliament’s threat of retaliation.