Professor Michael Braddick looks at the political life of John Lilburne (1615-1657), concentrating on how his religious conscience led him to propose radical secular reform, including that the House of Commons should be the sovereign power and made fully representative of the will of the people through universal manhood suffrage and the equal distribution of parliamentary representation. These were remarkable ideas for seventeenth-century Europe and, for example, anticipated by two hundred years some of the central demands of the Chartists. Lilburne was far from unusual in feeling an intense and religiously-inspired desire for political change, but was very unusual in deriving wholly secular political demands from his religious conscience. His example offers a way to understand how seventeenth-century Christians viewed the relationship between religious conscience and their civic obligations, but also on how understandings of that relationship have changed over time.
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