In January 1652, for printing and publishing a petition against Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the Haberdashers’ Hall for what he conceived to have been an injury done to his uncle George Lilburne in 1649, he was sentenced to pay fines amounting to £7000, and to be banished the Commonwealth, with prohibition of return under the pain of death. In June 1653 he nevertheless came back from the Low Countries, where he had busied himself in pamphleteering and such other agitation as was possible, and was immediately arrested; the trial, which was protracted from the 13th of July to the 20th of August, issued in his acquittal, to the great joy of London, but it was nevertheless thought proper to keep him in captivity for “the peace of the nation.” He was detained successively in the Tower, in Jersey, in Guernsey and in Dover Castle. At Dover he came under Quaker influence, and signified his readiness at last to be done with “carnal sword fightings and fleshly bustlings and contests”; and in 1655, on giving security for his good behaviour, he was set free. He now settled at Eltham in Kent, frequently preaching at Quaker meetings in the neighbourhood during the brief remainder of his troubled life. He died on the 29th of August 1657.
His brother, Colonel Robert Lilburne, was among those who signed the death-warrant of Charles I. In 1656 he was M.P. for the East Riding of Yorkshire, and at the restoration was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment.
See D. Masson, Life of Milton (iv. 120); Clement Walker (History of Independency, ii. 247); W. Godwin (Commonwealth, iii. 163-177), and Robert Bisset (Omitted Chapters of the History of England, 191-251).
LILIACEAE, in botany, a natural order of Monocotyledons belonging to the series Liliiflorae, and generally regarded as representing the typical order of Monocotyledons. The plants are generally perennial herbs growing from a bulb or rhizome, sometimes shrubby as in butcher’s broom (Ruscus) or tree-like as in species of Dracaena, Yucca or Aloe. The flowers are with few exceptions hermaphrodite, and regular with parts in threes (fig. 5), the perianth which is generally petaloid occupying the two outer whorls, followed by two whorls of stamens, with a superior ovary of three carpels in the centre of the flower; the ovary is generally three-chambered and contains an indefinite number of anatropous ovules on axile placentas (see fig. 2). The fruit is a capsule splitting along the septa (septicidal) (fig. 1), or between them (loculicidal), or a berry (fig. 6, 3); the seeds contain a small embryo in a copious fleshy or cartilaginous endosperm. Liliaceae is one of the larger orders of flowering plants containing about 2500 species in 200 genera; it is of world-wide distribution. The plants show great diversity in vegetative structure, which together with the character and mode of dehiscence of the fruit afford a basis for the subdivision of the order into tribes, eleven of which are recognized. The following are the most important tribes.
| Fig. 1.—Fruit or Capsule of Meadow Saffron (Colchicum autumnale) dehiscing along the septa. | Fig. 2.—Same cut across showing the three chambers with the seeds attached along the middle line—axile placentation. |
| Fig. 3.—Corm of Meadow Saffron (Colchicum autumnale). a, Old corm shrivelling; b, young corm produced laterally from the old one. | Fig. 4.—Corm of Colchicum autumnale in autumn when the plant is in flower. |
| k, Present corm. h, h, Brown scales covering it. w, Its roots. st, Its withered flowering stem. k′, Younger corm produced from k. wh, Roots from k′, which grows at expense of k. s, s′, s″, Sheathing leaves. l′, l″, Foliage leaves. b, b′, Flowers. k″, Young corm produced from k′, in autumn, which in succeeding autumn will produce flowers. |
Melanthoideae.—The plants have a rhizome or corm, and the fruit is a capsule. It contains 36 genera, many of which are north temperate and three are represented in Britain, viz. Tofieldia, an arctic and alpine genus of small herbs with a slender scape springing from a tuft of narrow ensiform leaves and bearing a raceme of small green flowers; Narthecium (bog-asphodel), herbs with a habit similar to Tofieldia, but with larger golden-yellow flowers; and Colchicum, a genus with about 30 species including the meadow saffron or autumn crocus (C. autumnale). Colchicum illustrates the corm-development which is rare in Liliaceae though common in the allied order Iridaceae; a corm is formed by swelling at the base of the axis (figs. 3, 4) and persists after the flowers and leaves, bearing next season’s plant as a lateral shoot in the axil of a scale-leaf at its base. Gloriosa, well known in cultivation, climbs by means of its tendril-like leaf-tips; it has handsome flowers with decurved orange-red or yellow petals; it is a native of tropical Asia and Africa. Veratrum is an alpine genus of the north temperate zone.
Asphodeloideae.—The plants generally have a rhizome bearing radical leaves, as in asphodel, rarely a stem with a tuft of leaves as in Aloe, very rarely a tuber (Eriospermum) or bulb (Bowiea). The flowers are borne in a terminal raceme, the anthers open introrsely and the fruit is a capsule, very rarely, as in Dianella, a berry. It contains 64 genera. Asphodelus (asphodel) is a Mediterranean genus; Simethis, a slender herb with grassy radical leaves, is a native of west and southern Europe extending into south Ireland. Anthericum and Chlorophytum, herbs with radical often grass-like leaves and scapes bearing a more or less branched inflorescence of small generally white flowers, are widely spread in the tropics. Other genera are Funkia, native of China and Japan, cultivated in the open air in Britain; Hemerocallis, a small genus of central Europe and temperate Asia—H. flava is known in gardens as the day lily; Phormium, a New Zealand genus to which belongs New Zealand flax, P. tenax, a useful fibre-plant; Kniphofia, South and East Africa, several species of which are cultivated; and Aloe. A small group of Australian genera closely approach the order Juncaceae in having small crowded flowers with a scarious or membranous perianth; they include Xanthorrhoea (grass-tree or black-boy) and Kingia, arborescent plants with an erect woody stem crowned with a tuft of long stiff narrow leaves, from the centre of which rises a tall dense flower-spike or a number of stalked flower-heads; this group has been included in Juncaceae, from which it is doubtfully distinguished only by the absence of the long twisted stigmas which characterize the true rushes.