Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth- Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607

In early June 1607 Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, reported that a crowd of approximately one thousand men and women had begun 'busily digging' in enclosures at Newton, three miles north of Kettering in Northamptonshire.¹ Although Shrewsbury personally regarded these 'diggers' as a 'tumultuous rable', he noted that they called themselves – in what may well be one of the earliest uses of that resonant term – 'levellers'.² Their objectives, like those of many enclosure rioters, were to bury the hedges and destroy the fences of a local landlord, in this case those recently erected by Thomas Tresham. The Northamptonshire diggers' activities, however, escalated over the course of several days, eventually culminating in a bloody pitched battle with the local gentry. Contemporaries accordingly felt justified in referring to the participants not only as 'levellers' or 'diggers', but even as 'rebels in the highest degree'.³

Trouble had been brewing in this part of Northamptonshire since the festivities associated with May Day. The county militia were nonetheless ill-prepared, some of the mustered men probably becoming disaffected out of sympathy for the protesters. The local gentry were therefore obliged to assemble a makeshift force from their own household servants and clients. This private army was led by two highly-experienced gentlemen, Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton, one of the deputy-lieutenants of the county, and Sir Anthony Mildmay of Apethorpe, a veteran of the campaign against the Northern Rising of 1569.⁴ It is uncertain how long the levellers had camped themselves at Newton before what proved to be the final confrontation, for some negotiation apparently took place between Montagu and the townsmen of Kettering in particular.⁵

By 8 June, however, Montagu's patience had been exhausted, and after summarily executing two of the diggers' leaders under martial law he and Mildmay were ready to proceed.⁶ They began by reading the royal proclamation of 30 May, which charged the protesters with seditious libel for criticizing the government's failure to prosecute enclosing landlords and threatened to crush them with 'force of arms' if they did not disperse. Montagu and Mildmay apparently used 'all the best persuasions' to encourage the crowd to dissolve, and read the proclamation a second time. 'When nothing would prevail', however, the gentry force 'charged them thoroughly

Fig. 1.

Robert Kett, leader of the East Anglian rising of 1549, costume sketch by Inigo Jones for the masque Britannia Triumphans, performed at Whitehall 17 January 1638. Kett, with Jack Straw and Jack Cade, enters as the sixth and final anti-masque ('rebellious leaders in war') which transforms the serenity of the kingdom into a 'horrid hell'. According to the stage direction the costumes of the rebels 'showed their base professions mixed with some soldier-like accoutrements'. See Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones and the Theatre of the Stuart Court (2 vols, London and Berkeley, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 664, 692. (Photograph: Photographic Survey, Courtauld institute of Art.)

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with both horse and foot.' At first the crowd stood fast and 'fought desperately', but 'at the second charge they ran away', and in the rout 'some 40 or 50 of them' were slain and 'a very great number hurt'. Many more were apprehended, and several were subsequently executed, either after due process at a special judicial commission convened at Northampton on 21 June, or summarily under martial law according to the terms of a second royal proclamation of 28 June. The quartered carcasses of the guilty men were exhibited at Northampton, Oundle, Thrapston 'and other places', a pattern which implies that there had been some sympathy for the Rising in these towns.⁷ Although there were aftershocks, with rumours of conspiracy circulating long after the executions, Montagu was confident that the battle and subsequent hangings had pacified the country north of Kettering which now, he reported, 'stands quiet'.⁸ The carnage at Newton was the culmination of six weeks of disorder across the three counties of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. Contemporaries differed...