which would be afforded by the ordinary courts of law. In some of their
publications they went further. They maintained that the council of state
was employed as an experiment on the patience of the nation; that it was
intended to pass from the tyranny of a few to the tyranny of one; and
that Oliver Cromwell was the man who aspired to that high but dangerous
pre-eminence.[2]

A plan of the intended constitution, entitled "the

[Footnote 1: Lilburne in his youth had been a partisan of Bastwick, and had
printed one of his tracts in Holland. Before the Star-chamber he refused
to take the oath _ex officio_, or to answer interrogatories, and in
consequence was condemned to stand in the pillory, was whipped from the
Fleet-prison to Westminster, receiving five hundred lashes with knotted
cords, and was imprisoned with double irons on his hands and legs. Three
years later (1641), the House of Commons voted the punishment illegal,
bloody, barbarous, and tyrannical.--Burton's Diary, iii. 503, note.]

[Footnote 2: See England's New Chains Discovered, and the Hunting of the
Foxes, passim; the King's Pamphlets, No. 411, xxi.; 414, xii. xvi.]

agreement of the people," had been sanctioned by the council of officers,
and presented[a] by Fairfax to the House of Commons, that it might be
transmitted to the several counties, and there receive the approbation of
the inhabitants. As a sop to shut the mouth of Cerberus, the sum of three
thousand pounds, to be raised from the estates of delinquents in the county
of Durham, had been voted[b] to Lilburne; but the moment he returned from
the north, he appeared at the bar of the house, and petitioned against "the
agreement," objecting in particular to one of the provisions by which the
parliament was to sit but six months, every two years, and the government