Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/162

 equity the legislative power exercised by the Lords; clearly they had obtained it by grant of the king—and how could the king under contract principles have given them legislative power? Moreover, the author of Regall Tyrannie would have had to account for many things in the law courts and the common law that were tyrannical, and hence could not have originated in popular assent. All these puzzling problems found their answer in what we may call the “conquest theory”—that Englishmen in their government still wore the shameful badges of the Norman conquest.

In a sense, the “conquest theory” is the key to the attitude of the radicals toward the Great Civil War. The war was not to them the prosily and pedantically legal thing that the declarations of Parliament had depicted it to be. It was a crusade of Englishmen for the recovery of liberties which their fathers had held and lost. This spirit, as we have seen, was partly expressed by John Goodwin in Anti-Cavalierisme; but past all question it was still more prominent in the minds of men like Lilburne. In the year 1646 this sentiment found its best expression in A Remonstrance Of Many Thousand Citizens To their owne House of Commons.

The Remonstrance interpreted English history since the Norman conquest to prove that the nation had been held in bondage by the delinquencies of