POPULAR INSURRECTION IN ENGLAND GENERAL RESULTS OF POPULAR RISINGS Popular insurrection has never been successful in England; a violent death and a traitor's doom have been the lot of every leader of the common people who took up arms against the Government.

The Civil War that brought Charles I.to the scaffold, and the Revolution that deposed James II.

and set William of Orange on the throne, were the work of country gentlemen and Whig statesmen, not of the labouring people.
But if England has never seen popular revolution triumphant and democracy set up by force of arms, the earlier centuries witnessed more than one effort to gain by open insurrection some measure of freedom for the working people of the land.
No other way than violent resistance seemed possible to peasants and artisans in the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, if their wrongs were to be mitigated and their rulers to be called to account.
Langton and Simon of Montfort had placed some check on the power of the Crown, had laid the foundations of political liberty, and marked the road to be travelled; but the lot of the labouring people remained unheeded and voiceless in the councils of the nation.

What could they do but take up arms to end an intolerable oppression?
WILLIAM FITZOSBERT, CALLED LONGBEARD, 1196 The first serious protest came from the London workmen in the reign of Richard I.; and FitzOsbert, known as Longbeard, was the spokesman of the popular discontent.
The King wanted money, chiefly for his crusades in Palestine.

He had no inclination to personal government, and the business of ruling England was in the hands of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, the justiciar or King's lieutenant.