From his coming of age in 1637 till the near approach of death, when he turned, a dying man, to the peaceful tenets of the Quakers, the life of John Lilburne is a record of twenty years of strife and battle with the rulers of the land. He came of pugnacious stock, for John Lilburne’s father, a well-to-do Durham squire, was the last man to demand the settlement of a lawsuit by the ordeal of battle, and came into court armed accordingly--only to be disappointed by an order from the crown, forbidding the proposed return to such ancient and obsolete methods of deciding the differences of neighbours. Apprenticed to a wholesale cloth-merchant in London, John Lilburne soon became acquainted with Bastwick and Prynne, then busy over anti-episcopal pamphlets, and, keeping such company, naturally fell into the clutches of the Star Chamber. The charge against him was that he had helped to print and circulate unlicensed books, in particular, Prynne’s _News from Ipswich_; and though Lilburne declared the charge to be false, on his refusal to take the usual oath to answer truly all questions put to him, the Star Chamber adjudged him guilty, and passed sentence--Lilburne was to be whipped from the Fleet to Westminster, to stand in the pillory, and to be kept in prison. The sentence was carried out on February 13th, 1638, but Lilburne was not cowed, for he scattered some of Bastwick’s offending pamphlets on the road, and was gagged in the pillory to reduce him to silence. In prison things went hardly with Lilburne, for the authorities had him placed in irons and kept in solitary confinement, and only the compassion of fellow prisoners saved him from actual starvation in the two years and nine months of his imprisonment. It was a rough beginning, and John Lilburne was henceforth an agitator and a rebel. At the end of 1640 one of the first things done by the Long Parliament was to order Lilburne’s release, and in the following May the sentence was pronounced “illegal and against the liberties of the subject.” But illegal or not, the punishment had been inflicted, and with unbroken spirit, passionately resenting the tyranny that could so wrong men, Lilburne flew quickly to the attack on the authors of the injustice. At Edgehill Lilburne held a captain’s commission, and at Brentford he was taken prisoner by the royalists. Only the threat of swift reprisals by the parliamentary army saved him from being shot as “a traitor,” and the following year he was again at liberty on an exchange of prisoners. Again, after fighting at Marston Moor, he fell into the hands of the royalists, and, shot through the arm, was kept in prison at Oxford for six months. Brave soldier as Lilburne was, he left the army in 1645 (with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and with £880 arrears of pay owing to him) rather than take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of Cromwell’s “new model.”