John Lilburne was the most public and persistent habeas corpus litigant of any age. He was also a constant irritant in the side of every government, royal or republican, under which he lived. He was imprisoned by each in turn. A leading member of the radical sect known as Levellers, a passionate and idealistic rabble-rouser, an inveterate pamphleteer, and a self-taught lawyer, he was unstoppable and unquenchable. It was one of his friends who said of him: ‘if the world were emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and John with Lilburne’.

He had been inspired into – rather than deterred from – spirited opposition to the government of Charles I by witnessing the savage treatment meted out to William Prynne and the others in 1637. The following year Lilburne was arrested for smuggling their proscribed books into the country. He refused to answer his Star Chamber interrogators, standing on habeas corpus and claiming that as a free-born Englishman he had a right against self-incrimination. The Court found him in contempt and ordered him to a public whipping followed by imprisonment. This placed Lilburne centre stage, the position he loved. He became a celebrity, the crowds cheering the youth they indelibly dubbed ‘Free-born John’. So much for the power of deterrent punishments. Two years later a member of parliament called Oliver Cromwell demanded and secured his release. It was, however, out of the frying pan, as at the outbreak of the civil war Lilburne enlisted as an officer in the parliamentary army, survived the battle of Edgehill, only to be taken prisoner by his old enemies. He was tried on a charge of high treason in the royalist headquarters of Oxford and condemned to death. Parliament again intervened on his behalf. When the House of Commons declared they would treat royalist prisoners in the same way, Lilburne was reprieved and later exchanged.