ABSTRACT
The overwhelmingly dominant image of John Lilburne transmitted from the past is of an ungovernable spirit. Lilburne is pictured as intemperate and constitutionally oppositional, his politics presented as much as a personality disorder as a rational response to the revolutionary crisis of the 1640s. Even an historian as sympathetic as Christopher Hill described Lilburne as 'notoriously volatile'. Lilburne's perpetual opposition to all forms of government that emerged during the English Revolution is well documented. He was actively opposed to every government from Charles I's monarchy, through the years of the Long Parliament, to the administrations of the Rump Parliament and the Cromwellian protectorate. For a man whose natural debating style was confrontational, Lilburne seems to have been able to work in a remarkably constructive way with his close collaborators. He was always generous in recommending the printed material of others.
