Popular insurrection failed, but over and over again violence has been resorted to in the resistance to tyranny, and has been justified by its victory.

If Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, and Robert Ket are known as beaten revolutionaries, Stephen Langton, Simon of Montfort, and John Hampden are acclaimed as patriots for not disdaining the use of armed resistance.
The conclusion is that a democratic revolution was not to be accomplished in England by a rising of the people, but that forcible resistance even to the point of civil war was necessary to guard liberties already won, or to save the land from gross misgovernment.

But always the forcible resistance, when successful, has been made not by revolutionaries but by the strong champions of constitutional government.

The fruit of the resistance to John was the Great Charter; of Simon of Montfort's war against Henry III., the beginning of a representative Parliament; of the war against Charles, the establishment of Parliamentary government.

Lilburne and his friends hoped that the civil war and the abolition of monarchy would bring in democracy, though democracy was never in the mind of men like Hampden, who made the war, and was utterly uncongenial to Cromwell and the Commonwealth men.