William Walwyn

In October 1645 Walwyn published England's Lamentable Slaverie, his famous rebuke to John Lilburne, in which he criticised his fellow Leveller for a misguided reliance on Magna Carta of 1215 as the foundation for citizens' rights.

He argued that Magna Carta was "more precious in your [Lilburne's] esteem than it deserveth", dismissing it as a small set of concessions "wrestled out of the pawes" of Norman conquerors and describing it as, "a messe of pottage" and, (in the following year), "but a beggerly thing containing many marks of intollerable bondage".

Walwyn's critique of the appeal to Magna Carta was compelling and fundamentally accurate, and he proposed instead a fresh charter, a proto-social contract founded on equity and right reason, rather than on compromised accretions of the law.

[8] This pamphlet was written by seven of the leading London Independent and Baptist preachers and published whilst Walwyn and the other Leveller leaders were held in the tower.

In the ten pages of Wiles Walwyn is variously described as a Jesuit, a bigamist, of having persuaded a woman to commit suicide, and that he would "destroy all government", that he had said "that it would never be well until all things were common", and that he had also said that there would be "no need for judges ... take any other tradesman that is an honest and just man and let him hear the case".