https://livesrunning.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/lilburne.webp In May 1641 Parliament killed one of King Charles I’s favourites, the Earl of Stafford; later the same month they abolished the Court of Star Chamber. If you want to grasp today’s slogan “No Kings” and the memory on which it draws here’s the place to start with the tyrant Charles, the dregs of his kind, old, mad, despised and violent too. The Chamber had become a weapon to punish Charles’ Puritan opponents. This is the part of the story that people can’t grasp if they assume that the religious people were sat on one side of the table and those who fought to change the world on the other. It’s better to go back to that quote from Marx, not “the opium of the people”, but what he wrote next. Religion is the general theory of this world, he says, religion is its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic, its point of honour, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement its, universal basis of consolation and justification. The struggles of the 1640s were wars about who would lead services about where altars were situated about the content of sermons. To make sense of them, think of power, authority and wealth, all plaited together in a single weave. The King’s first victim was the clergyman John Bastwick, the second victim the medic Henry Burton, the third the lawyer William Prynne. They’d written books saying the bishops were secret Catholics. The King would never forgive, Prynne who’d said actresses were all whores contaminated by the sin of sex-work – the Queen (another actor) corrupted too. For Bastwick, Charles said it was punishment enough to chop off his ears. Burton lost his too. Prynne lost them and more, Charles insisted on more, so they branded on his cheek the initials “S L” – for seditious libel. Victim four was John Lilburne, 23 years old, from Sunderland. He’d bee prenticed to a cobbler then come back from Holland, he’d smuggled pamphlets from the war there (which was his generation’s Spain in 1936). Chief Justice Banks was on the bench, the King waiting for a guilty verdict. Lilburne was accused of importing into England ten thousand copies of Puritan tracts, Bastwick’s text among them. Banks said, “How do you plead?” The Judge was expecting guilty or not guilty not caring which. Planning already the sentence and thinking of the good meal of beef he had waiting for him at home. At that point, the trial not even started, Lilburne confounded him. He said I won’t swear on the Bible, I won’t blaspheme, no wretch – not for you. Banks had Lilburne flogged down Ludgate Circus. He made the king’s executioner beat him along the Strand, striking him with a knotted chord. They came to Trafalgar Square where Banks ordered the hat removed from Lilburne’s head, the sun beating down. The executioner whipped him on Whitehall. He dashed the weapon against his flesh on Downing Street. Banks assumed Lilburne would obey when they came to the end of Old Palace Yard. But Lilburne never stop asserting his innocence. Placed in the pillory, he pulled from his pocket copies of the banned pamphlets. He distributed them to the crowd. The executioner stuffed a gag so deep in Lilburne’s mouth that he bled. Back to prison he went for more torture, he was jailed, no date set for the trial. I see him now taking up his quill in prison saying the Good Old Cause had martyrs enough what it needed was fighters. He wrote for the London apprentices, imagining a world without tyrants. My God he wrote in whom I did trust was higher and stronger then my selfe who strengthened and enabled me not only to undergo the punishment with cheerfulness but made me Triumph- Lilburne was an alchemist, he had the gift of taking a base metal (pain) and turning it into rebellion’s gold. And he said with a holy disdain to insult over my torments. I wish I’d achieved a tenth of what Lilburne did, the soldier he became in the New Model Army, cursed by the King, by the Judges, by Cromwell. Sky-pilot you said? The curse of autocrats I’d call him, bold even with those on his side too. It was God who gave Lilburne strength. Be like Jesus, his religion said – hadn’t He suffered too?