Historically, one resonant use of “equal” has been “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” The Declaration of Independence also calls on American colonies to “assume among the powers of the earth” a “separate and equal station.” When its author, Thomas Jefferson, reflected in 1826, fifty years after its signing, what stood out for him was the Declaration's passion for equality: ten days before his death he wrote, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately.” He must have been thinking of the seventeenth century as he lay dying, for he borrowed these words from a New Model Army radical, Richard Rumbold, who affirmed on the scaffold that “no man [was] born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him” (3). Helping to hatch the Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II and finally executed for plotting a revolt against James II, Rumbold was once an army dissident, petitioning General Fairfax to reinstate soldiers' elected representatives.