Lilburn seized the opportunity to attack the council of officers, and Cromwell as its guiding spirit. He and his disciples denounced the Lieutenant-General as a tyrant, an apostate, and a hypocrite. “You shall scarce speak to Cromwell about anything,” says one of their pamphlets, “but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record. He will weep, howl, and repent, even while he doth smite you under the fifth rib.”
Personal abuse had no effect on Cromwell, but he felt the danger with which this agitation threatened the Republic. Tenaciously attached to the existing social order, he regarded the teaching of the Levellers as calculated to overthrow authority and destroy property. In one of his later speeches he sums up his views on the levelling movement. The distinction between class and class was the corner-stone of society. “A nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman, that is a good interest of the land and a great one.” But the “levelling principle” tended to reduce all the orders and ranks of men to an equality. Consciously or unconsciously it aimed at that, “for what was the purport of it but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord?” The preaching of such a doctrine was a danger to the State “because it was a pleasing voice to all poor men, and truly not unwelcome to all bad men.”
When it came to propagating levelling views in the army, and inciting soldiers to disobey their officers, Cromwell’s way with the ringleaders was short and sharp. In March, 1649, Lilburn and three other incendiaries were brought before the Council of State.
“I tell you,” said Cromwell, thumping the council table, “you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them, or they will break you; yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads, and frustrate and make void all that work that, with so many years’ industry, toil, and pains you have done; and therefore I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.”
Lilburn and his friends went to the Tower, but the effervescence amongst the soldiers still continued. At Salisbury, in May, 1649, three of the regiments selected to go to Ireland broke into open mutiny, and declined to march till the liberties of England were secured. Their watchword was “England’s freedom, soldiers’ rights,” and they expected other regiments to join them. But Cromwell and Fairfax left them no time to gather strength. Hurrying from London to Oxfordshire by forced marches, the two generals fell on the mutineers at Burford, took four hundred prisoners, and scattered the rest. Little blood was shed. Three non-commissioned officers were shot; the rest of the mutineers were told that they deserved to be decimated; nevertheless, they were re-embodied in the ranks, and shipped off to Ireland.