Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/134

 God and the law of reason. Now he was told that the people’s liberties guaranteed by those two laws were far wider than the narrow scope of the parchment charter in the Tower. But the author reassuringly told Lilburne that only so much the more was he on solid ground when standing on Magna Charta. True, some things in it as, for example, the constitution of the church, could be altered; it was always in the Parliament’s power to make the people freer. But on the popular rights guaranteed by Magna Charta, Parliament could not encroach. There was in Englands Lamentable Slaverie the promise of a radicalism far beyond Lilburne’s.

Englands Lamentable Slaverie foreshadowed the transformation through which Lilburne’s ideas were to pass in the next twelvemonth; but meanwhile his thinking, if slower, had led him to important results. Formerly a loyal servant of the Long Parliament, he had begun to criticise its policy. In particular, he had criticised that policy as permitting intolerance and injustice to flourish in the nation; more generally, he had demanded that Parliament make its own actions accord with the known law of the kingdom. In criticising also the policy by which the war had been carried on, he had implied his own faith, and the faith of those for whom he spoke, in the nation’s capacity for a measure of democratic government.

In view of Lilburne’s repeated attacks on the Merchant Adventurers’ monopoly and on Parliament for supporting it, a word of explanation is