This, we shall agree, is a sufficiently large and reasonable programme of reform. Sometimes farther details appear, of a kind which show a curious forecast of modern legislation, such as the establishment of registers of mortgage and the sale of lands. The rational desire for reform, however, which these petitions indicate, was always liable in the army to pass into a spirit of mutiny and disaffection, or into an ecstatic revolt, such as constantly appeared in those times against the clothing, literal and metaphorical, with which custom has covered the nakedness of human life. The grand mover of the mutinous spirit was John Lilburne, the object of Marten’s well-known joke, that if he were the only man left in the world, John would quarrel with Lilburne and Lilburne with John. His obligations to Cromwell were of long standing. In a tract published in 1647 he says to Cromwell, ‘You took compassion on me when I was at death’s door, and in 1640 set me free from the long tyranny of the bishops and the Star chamber.’ (In 1640 no one will suppose that Cromwell’s sympathy was other than disinterested.) ‘I have looked on you,’ he proceeds, ‘as the most absolute, single-hearted great man in England, untainted and unbiassed with ends of your own.’ He did not long continue, however, to use this language. He had made himself useful to Cromwell in the matter of the self-denying ordinance by showing up certain scandals in connection with the earl of Manchester and other officers of the original army. This made him many enemies, one of the obscurer of whom prosecuted him for damaging his character. The case was decided against Lilburne, who was called on for heavy damages. He appealed to the parliament, and its disregard of his appeal was the beginning of a long series of grievances, accumulating in intensity as grievances do, and gradually drawing within the circle of his animosity every one who declined to make his vindication the sole object of political action. Cromwell and Marten seem really to have done what they could to help him, but he would not wait to be helped. From time to {340} time a parliamentary committee was appointed to consider his case, but before anything could be done, there would appear some violent pamphlet of his against parliament and its grandees in general, for which he would be lodged in the tower. ‘Jonah’s cry,’ ‘The oppressed man’s oppression,’ ‘The just man’s justification,’ ‘Jugglers discovered,’ are among the titles of his tracts, all most trenchantly written, that appeared during the military agitation which culminated in the rendezvous at Ware. Because Cromwell would not break on his account with ‘the grandees of the parliament’ and the more worldly-wise of the officers, he became one in Lilburne’s eyes who had bartered his high calling for the glory of the world. His supposed machinations were exhibited in a pamphlet published during the first months of the commonwealth, under