Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/118

 Presbyterian and Independent were ready to fly at each others’ throats as the struggle with the king neared its crisis. The almost forgotten episode of the Windmill Tavern meeting illustrates the heights to which their mutual suspicion ran. Immediately after the loss of Leicester, two or three hundred citizens of London met at the Windmill Tavern and chose a committee of sixteen members to draw a petition to Parliament. Lilburne, though not the chairman of this committee, as Prynne stated, was a member of it; but Lilburne professed that he did not know at least a third of the other members, so far was the meeting from being a party affair. The committee, by his account, proposed to petition that the members of the AssembyAssembly [sic] be sent home to their respective parishes, to stir up the people to rise en masse against the Royalists. He added that this expedient had been suggested by an assembly divine to Major Salloway of the committee, and was eliminated from the petition at the committee’s second meeting. William Prynne, however, was convinced that Hugh Peters, the bête noir of the Presbyterians, had designed the Windmill Tavern meeting to secure the dissolution of the Assembly and the indefinite postponement of the Presbyterian model