The Killing of Robert Coggan
Friday, 15 August 1628: Armed Men at Haxey Carr
Two days after the stoning of John Kitchen, and the wider violence of Wednesday 13 August, the situation at Haxey Carr had not calmed. It had hardened. Vermuyden’s work crew had spent Thursday recovering, regrouping — and rearming. When they returned to the carr on Friday morning to resume the damming of the River Idle, they did not come unarmed.
They came with three muskets, one firelock, two pistols, a quarter-pike staff, two pitchforks, and seven swords between them. The muskets, it later emerged, had been brought from Yorkshire to the drainers’ base at Misson the day before.[1] This was not improvisation. Someone had made a decision.
Liens and His Men
The work crew was led by a man the documents call ‘Mr Laynes’ — almost certainly Johan (John) Liens, Vermuyden’s cousin and close engineering lieutenant. Liens came from the same Zeeland drainage dynasty as Vermuyden himself, had worked alongside him in the Netherlands before coming to England, and was by 1628 deeply involved in the Axholme drainage works. In England, the two cousins had reversed the hierarchy of their Dutch years: Liens had become Vermuyden’s trusted lieutenant.[2]
As Liens and his men approached Haxey Carr and saw the Haxey crowd gathering once more on the far bank, Liens ordered his crew to cross the river together. ‘Come, come,’ he reportedly told them, ‘make haste and let us get over the river to save our men, or else they will be killed.’ The fear was real. Two days earlier, his workers had been beaten, stoned, and thrown into the drains.
Two Accounts, One Death
What happened next cannot be definitively established, because the surviving testimonies flatly contradict each other.[3]
According to the drainers’ account, three Haxey men — Hezekiah Browne, Richard Taylor, and John Newland — approached the armed crew seeking to parley. The Dutch fired a single warning shot to halt their advance, then talked. Meanwhile, the main body of armed Dutchmen moved towards the larger crowd to persuade them to stand back.
According to the inhabitants’ account, no parley was ever offered. The drainers had fired in earnest even as the crowd approached. They pursued those who fled, declaring they would ‘send them home singing with bullets in their tails.’
On one thing both accounts agreed: ‘when the affray began betwixt them,’ several shots were fired — and a Haxey commoner named Robert Coggan was killed.[4]
Robert Coggan of Haxey
Robert Coggan was a member of one of Haxey’s established yeoman families. The Coggans appear throughout the parish records of the Isle of Axholme — in wills, church court records, property transactions, and later in the lists of rioters and commoner activists stretching from the 1620s to the 1680s. Edmund Coggan was a gentleman of Haxey; his family had standing in the community. The name would recur in the resistance to the drainage for generations.[5]
Robert Coggan was not a marginal figure caught up in someone else’s quarrel. He was a commoner of Haxey, on Haxey Carr, defending what his community believed to be their ancient and inalienable right. He was shot dead for it.
The Letter That Named It Murder
Within a week of the killing, Sir Ralph Hansby, an Exchequer commissioner with local knowledge of the Isle, wrote urgently to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham — the King’s chief favourite. He enclosed all the witness testimonies gathered by Portington. Coggan’s death, Hansby wrote plainly, was murder: ‘it is clear that great riots hath been committed by the people, and a man slain by the Dutch party, the killing of whom (as I conceive) is in all that were present or gave direction for them to go so armed… that day for that purpose, murder.’[6]
But Hansby’s letter contained something colder still. He speculated that the killing might ‘p[ro]duce a good effecte of an evill cause’: overt force, he suggested, would ‘p[ro]cure conformitie in the people.’ And moreover, he noted, Vermuyden’s culpability for the death might give Buckingham tactical leverage over Vermuyden in Buckingham’s own struggle to acquire the grant of Hatfield Manor.[7]
A man had been shot dead on the bank of a drain in Lincolnshire. Within days, a court official was writing to calculate how his death could be turned to political advantage in a property dispute among great men.
The Crown Responds
The Privy Council’s letter to the Lincolnshire justices of the peace, dated 27 August, showed which calculation had prevailed. The councillors expressed their concern about ‘the great disorders and riots committed lately in that country… in grievous wounding and beating of the workmen,’ and ordered the justices to ensure ‘that no interruption be given to the proceeding of the works.’ The inhabitants were to be offered justice, they were told — but only after the works had proceeded. The Council sent warrants to bind eighteen named inhabitants over for prosecution: seventeen men and women of Haxey, and one from Wildsworth.[8]
The letter made no mention of Robert Coggan. His death does not appear in any royal order, Chancery decree, or Privy Council instruction. The Crown’s formal response to a man being shot dead by Vermuyden’s armed men was to pursue the people who had thrown stones.
By October, the Privy Council had ordered a royal proclamation ‘mingled with threats of fire and vengeance’ to be read in the parishes of the Isle. Sir Philibert Vernatti — one of the Participants — reported that it had forced the ‘mutinous people’ into temporary quiescence.[9]
Temporary. That is the word that matters. The killing of Robert Coggan was not the end of the commoners’ resistance. It was, in the eyes of the community that watched him fall, one more reason why that resistance could never be abandoned.
The Crown’s legal and political response to the August riots — the Exchequer proceedings, the Star Chamber, the Attorney General’s manoeuvre around the Mowbray Deed — will be the subject of the next post in this series.
Vermuyden was knighted by Charles I on 6 January 1629, four months after the killing of Robert Coggan and the Privy Council’s silence about his death. The Crown’s response to the killing was not just silence in a letter, it was a knighthood for the man who employed the killers.
Sources: Eric H. Ash, The Draining of the Fens (2017); Eleanor Dezateux Robson, ‘Improvement and environmental conflict in the northern fens’, PhD thesis, Cambridge, 2018; Joy Lloyd, ‘The Communities of the Manor of Epworth’, PhD thesis, 1998; Piet van Cruyningen, ‘Dutch investors’, AgHR 64, I (2016); TNA SP 16/113 and PC 2/38 (August–October 1628).
[1]On the muskets: TNA SP16/113 fol. 65, Examination of John Warren (18 August 1628), cited in Robson, p. 211. The weapons inventory: TNA SP 16/113/38.III, Examination of John Warren (19 August 1628), cited in Ash, p. 143.
[2]On Liens: Piet van Cruyningen, ‘Dutch investors and the drainage of Hatfield Chase, 1626 to 1656’, Agricultural History Review 64, I (2016), p. 21; Ash, p. 341 n. 8. Van Cruyningen notes that Liens was Vermuyden’s cousin through the Werckendet family and his ‘faithful lieutenant’ throughout the English drainage projects.
[3]Drainers’ account: TNA SP 16/113/38.III, Examination of Baldwyn Vanwarmon (20 August 1628), cited in Ash, p. 143. Inhabitants’ account: TNA SP 16/113/38.II, Information of Richard Stockwell (18 August 1628), cited in Ash, p. 143.
[4]TNA SP 16/113/38.III, Examination of John Warren (19 August 1628), cited in Ash, p. 143. Both Lloyd (‘The Communities of the Manor of Epworth’, p. 244) and Robson (p. 211) confirm Coggan’s identification as a Haxey commoner.
[5]On the Coggan family: Joy Lloyd, ‘The Communities of the Manor of Epworth in the Seventeenth Century’, PhD thesis, 1998, pp. 244, 3395. Lloyd notes the Coggans as among the families with ‘frequently recurring names’ in successive lists of rioters across the century. On Edmund and John Coggan as Haxey gentlemen: Lloyd, p. 10022. Note: the later Robert Coggan of Epworth who appears in the 1691 Exchequer settlement negotiations is a distinct person: Lloyd, pp. 288–9.
[6]TNA SP 16/113/38 (21 August 1628), Sir Ralph Hansby to the Duke of Buckingham, cited in Ash, p. 143; Robson, p. 211, citing TNA SP16/113 fol. 60.
[7]Robson, p. 211. Hansby’s speculation about the political uses of the killing: TNA SP16/113 fol. 60.
[8]APC 44:114–15 (27 August 1628), cited in Ash, pp. 143–4. On the warrant for eighteen named inhabitants: TNA PC 2/38, fols. 491, 418, cited in Lloyd, p. 244.
[9]TNA PC 2/38 fols 479–80 (26 September 1628) and fol. 485 (28 September 1628), cited in Robson, pp. 211–12. On Vernatti’s report: TNA PC 2/38 fol. 419; SP 16/117 fol. 100, cited in Robson, p. 212.
