neither time nor
inclination to attend to social reform. Democracy had its witnesses;
Lilburne and the Levellers made their protest against military rule, and
were overpowered; Winstanley and his Diggers endeavoured to persuade the
country that the common land should be occupied by dispossessed peasants,
and were quickly suppressed.

Lilburne was concerned with the establishment of a political democracy,
Winstanley with a social democracy, and in both cases the propaganda was
offensive to the Protector.

Had Cromwell listened to Lilburne, and made concessions towards democracy,
the reaction against Puritanism and the Commonwealth might have been
averted.[58]

John Lilburne had been a brave soldier in the army of the Parliament in the
early years of the Civil War, and he left the army in 1645 with the rank of
Lieutenant-Colonel (and with L880 arrears of pay due to him) rather than
take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of the "new model."

The monarchy having fallen, Lilburne saw the possibilities of tyranny in
the Parliamentary government, and at once spoke out. With considerable
legal knowledge, a passion for liberty, clear views on democracy, an
enormous capacity for work, and great skill as a pamphleteer, Lilburne was
not to be ignored. The Government might have had him for a supporter; it
unwisely decided to treat him as an enemy, and for ten years he was an
unsparing critic, his popularity increasing with every fresh pamphlet he
issued--and at every fresh imprisonment.

Lilburne urged a radical reform of Parliament and a general manhood
suffrage in 1647, and the "Case for the Army," published by the Levellers
in the same year, on the proposal of the Presbyterian majority in
Parliament that the army should be disbanded, demanded the abolition of
monopolies, freedom of trade and religion, restoration of enclosed common
lands, and abolition of sinecures.

Both Cromwell and Ireton were strongly opposed to manhood suffrage, and
Cromwell--to whom the immediate danger was a royalist reaction--had no
patience for men who would embark on democratic experiments at such a
season.

Lilburne and the Levellers were equally distrustful of Cromwell's new
Council of State. "We were ruled before by King, Lords, and Commons, now by
a General, Court-martial, and Commons; and, we pray you, what is the
difference?" So they put the question in 1648.

To Cromwell the one safety for the Commonwealth was in the loyalty