A quarto pamphlet of 12 pages, of which there is a copy in the British Museum Library.
176.
The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England, Revived, Asserted, and Vindicated. Or an Epistle written the eighth day of June 1649, by Lieut. Colonel John Lilburn (Arbitrary and Aristocratical prisoner in the Tower of London) to Mr. William Lenthall, Speaker to the remainder of those few Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses that Col. Thomas Pride at his late purge thought convenient to leave sitting at Westminster (as most fit for his and his Masters designes, to serve their ambitious and tyrannical ends, to destroy the good old Laws, Liberties, and Customs of England, the badges of our freedom (as the Declaration against the King, of the 17. of March 1648, pag. 23. calls them) and by force of arms to rob the people of their lives, estates, and properties, and subject them to perfect vassalage and slavery, as he cleerly evinceth in his present case &c. they have done) who (and in truth no otherwise) pretendedly stile themselves (the Conservators of the peace of England, or) the Parliament of England, intrusted and authorised by the consent of all the people thereof, whose Representatives by election (in their Declaration last mentioned, pag. 27. they say) they are; although they are never able to produce one bit of a Law, or any piece of a Commission to prove, that all the people of England, or one quarter, tenth, hundred, or thousand part of them authorised Thomas Pride, with his Regiment of Souldiers, to chuse them a Parliament, as indeed he hath de facto done by this pretended mock-Parliament: And therefore it cannot properly be called the Nations or Peoples Parliament, but Col. Pride's and his associates, whose really it is; who although they have beheaded the King for a Tyrant, yet walk in his oppressingest steps, if not worse and higher. London, Printed in the grand yeer of hypocriticall and abominable dissimulation. 1649.
A tract of 75 pages, of which there is a copy in the British Museum Library. It was written by Lilburn, while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and is thus dated by him:—
"From my close, unjust, and causelesse captivity without allowance (the legall right of all men in my case) in the Tower of London this 8. of June 1649. The first yeer of England's declared Freedom, by the lying and false pretended Conservators thereof, that never intended it." At the end is this note.
"The Printer to the Reader.
"Reader, As thou the faults herein dost spy,
"I pray thee to correct them with thy Pen:
"The Author in Close Prisonn, knows not why;