The North Yorkshire Moors Collection of British Coins

V: Original Medals by Simon, The Trial and Acquittal of John Lilburne, London, 1649, a struck silver-gilt medal, unsigned [by D. Ramage after T. Simon], draped bust left, iohn lilborne saved by the power of the lord and the integrity of his ivry who are ivges of law as wel as fact oct 26 1649, rev. myles petty ste iles abr smith ion king, etc around central rose, 34mm, 13.66g (Platt II, p.202, type A; MI I, 385/3; E 177). Good very fine, very rare £900-£1,200

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The North Yorkshire Moors Collection of British Coins.

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Provenance: T.K. Mackenzie Collection, Glendining Auction, 11-12 April 1922, lot 29 (part); R.C. and O.M.W. Warner Collection; R.E. Ockenden Collection [from O.M.W.W. 1964]; bt R.E.O.

John Lilburne (1614-57), a Puritan who converted to the Quaker religion in the year before his death, fought for the Parliamentarians in the Civil War and was present at Edge Hill and Marston Moor, although between these two engagements he had been captured by royalists while in the parliamentary garrison at Brentford. An agitator for the the freeborn rights of Englishmen, he spent most of the later 1640s incarcerated in the Tower for denouncing his former military commander, the Earl of Manchester, as a royalist sympathiser. A campaign to free him spawned a new political party, the Levellers, which had a strong following in the New Model Army although Lilburne had begun to see the reality of life under Cromwell’s diktat and his supporters actively agitated for King Charles’s son, in exile in France, to finance the Leveller movement. Parliament passed a motion for Lilburne to be tried for high treason, as the King had been, but unlike the case of the monarch, a jury of 12 would decide Lilburne’s fate. The trial, which started on 24 October 1649, lasted two days and the jury, whose names are on the reverse of the medal, found him not guilty. For the next two years Lilburne remained politically inactive, but after a dispute concerning the ownership of collieries in his native co Durham, he was sentenced to pay a fine of £3,000 to the state and was banished for life.

These medals were attributed to Simon by Vertue, and the portraiture (bust punch) is certainly Simon’s work. Hawkins was sceptical, rightly so; later studies show that the medal was almost certainly the first major work of David Ramage (cf. DNW 160, 411), incorporating as it does punches for symbols also used on Ramage’s 17th century tokens. This would have been a private commission, probably sponsored by Lilburne himself. It was to commemorate his acquittal at trial for libelling Cromwell and Ireton, and it is illustrated in the frontispiece of the pamphlet Lilburne issued on 28 November 1649, The Triall of Lieut Collonell John Lilburne, by an extraordinary or special Commission of Oyear and Terminer at the Guild-Hall of London, the 24, 25, 26. Of Octob. 1649 (Wing 338).