Introduction
James I died at Theobalds on 27 March 1625 with England already committed to war with Spain. Charles inherited the war, the unfinished argument over how Parliament should pay for it and the political damage left by the failed Spanish Match. In June he married Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France. Charles was Protestant; his queen was Catholic and kept a Catholic chapel and clergy within her household. Their marriage gave Parliament another reason to watch royal religious policy closely while English forces prepared to fight Catholic powers abroad.
The local thread from James’s reign passed directly into the new one. John Ireland’s twenty-one-year lease of Cokkes and Calletts Haw, made in 1612, was due to run until 1633. The chapel trustees appointed in 1615 held the other property attached to St John the Baptist’s chapel. George Carleton governed the Diocese of Chichester, and Alfold lay across the boundary in the Diocese of Winchester. In 1628 Richard Tanner became curate at Loxwood. Nine years later Christopher Butler, Vicar of Wisborough Green, gave the chapel a silver communion chalice. Tanner served the chapel as arguments over Church government sharpened; Butler gave its communion cup in 1637, when the position of the communion table, kneeling and the manner of worship had become national disputes.
The reign moved from failed expeditions and arguments over taxation to eleven years without Parliament, a religious crisis in Scotland and civil war. Sussex then became a military county. Chichester was besieged in December 1642 and Parliamentarian soldiers ransacked the cathedral. Royalists occupied Arundel and William Waller retook the castle in the winter of 1643-44. In 1645 Maurice Rowland was serving as curate at Loxwood when Parliament prohibited the Book of Common Prayer and ordered the Directory for Public Worship. By January 1649 the dispute that Charles had inherited from his father had ended with the king before a court in Westminster Hall.
War, Marriage and Parliament, 1625-1628
Charles was twenty-four when he became king. The expedition against Cadiz in the autumn of 1625 was meant to damage Spanish shipping and support the Protestant cause in Europe. It failed. Commanders disagreed, troops landed without a clear objective and the fleet returned after disease and disorder had reduced its strength. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, carried much of the blame, but Charles protected the favourite who had served both James and his son.
Parliament had already limited the usual grant of tonnage and poundage, the customs duties that normally supplied a new king with revenue for life. Members wanted to examine Buckingham’s conduct before providing more money. Charles dissolved his first Parliament in August 1625 and summoned another in 1626. The second Parliament pursued Buckingham more aggressively. Charles dissolved that Parliament as well and raised money through a Forced Loan. Men assessed as able to contribute were ordered to lend to the Crown; some who refused were imprisoned.
The war spread to France in 1627 when Buckingham led an expedition to help the Huguenots of La Rochelle. The attempt to seize the Ile de Re ended in another costly failure. Men, horses, weapons and food had to reach ports on the Channel coast. Chichester and Arundel stood on routes towards Portsmouth and the sea, while roads from the Western Weald fed into those larger centres. Justices, constables and parish officers collected men and money and arranged the local business needed to move food, horses and equipment towards the coast.
Charles called Parliament again in 1628. The Commons answered with the Petition of Right. It objected to taxation without parliamentary consent, imprisonment without stated cause, compulsory billeting and the use of martial law in peacetime. Charles accepted the petition in June. On 23 August John Felton stabbed Buckingham to death at Portsmouth while the duke prepared another expedition. Buckingham’s death removed the minister who had dominated the opening years of the reign. The dispute over royal finance passed directly into the next session and the Personal Rule.
War Supply, Billeting and the Sussex Roads, 1625-1628
The failed expeditions of the first three years demanded more than votes in Parliament. The Privy Council sent orders into the counties for soldiers, weapons, horses, carts, grain and money. Men selected for service had to be gathered, equipped and moved towards ports. In southern England Portsmouth was the principal naval base, while Chichester and Arundel stood on the roads that connected the coast with the Weald and the inland market towns.
Billeting made royal war policy enter private buildings. Soldiers waiting for transport or orders needed beds, food, ale, fodder and storage. The Petition of Right complained specifically about compulsory billeting because householders in several counties had been required to lodge troops. A military order could place men and horses inside an inn, farmhouse or town house and leave the occupier carrying immediate costs. The Petition of Right turned that household burden into a constitutional grievance.
Farms and woods across the Western Weald supplied the ordinary materials that armies consumed. Kirdford and Wisborough Green inventories record grain, livestock, carts, tools and household stores. Brewhurst Mill ground grain beside the River Lox. Woodland around Loxwood, Rudgwick and Alfold supplied timber and fuel, while smiths repaired shoes, harness fittings, tools and cart iron. Armies bought or requisitioned the same grain, fodder, timber, carts, horses and ironwork that normally served farming, building and local trade.
Roads governed how far and how fast those supplies could move. From Loxwood the southward route crossed the River Lox and reached Wisborough Green before joining roads towards Pulborough and Arundel. Westward routes crossed Kirdford and Plaistow towards Petworth. Northwards, Alfold opened the way to Guildford and the main Surrey roads. Heavy rain turned Wealden clay into deep mud, so a cartload of grain or timber might take much longer to reach a coastal centre than its mileage suggested.
Charles’s early wars failed before the Crown created a stable way to pay for them. Cadiz, La Rochelle, the Forced Loan and the billeting grievance all fed the constitutional dispute of 1628.
Richard Tanner Comes to Loxwood, 1628
In 1628 Richard Tanner was appointed curate of Loxwood Chapel of Ease. Tanner had a wife and thirteen children. An undertaking accompanied his appointment so that his household would not become a charge upon the parish. Wisborough Green’s churchwardens and overseers administered poor relief across the parish, assessing property and raising money for people unable to support themselves.
Tanner’s work was practical. He led services, read Scripture, administered baptism and Holy Communion and served families who otherwise faced the longer journey to Wisborough Green. The chapel used the Book of Common Prayer in the Jacobean form authorised after the Hampton Court Conference. The text had changed little since 1604. Its services gave Tanner the words for Morning and Evening Prayer, communion, baptism, marriage, burial and the thanksgiving of women after childbirth.
The chapel itself was maintained from property held by the trustees. Cokkes and Calletts Haw were producing rent under John Ireland’s 1612 lease, while the 1615 trustee body included men from Loxwood, Kirdford, Wisborough Green and the surrounding district. Tanner’s appointment joined two forms of local responsibility. The Vicar of Wisborough Green and the Bishop of Chichester governed his ministry; the trustees held land and houses whose income supported the chapel.
Beside the chapel stood the former medieval oratory, by then used as a house. During Edward VI’s reign the stone altar had been removed from the chapel and hidden inside that building. Tanner celebrated the Church of England’s communion in the chapel while the older stone altar lay concealed a few yards away. The difference was physical as well as theological: a wooden communion table served the authorised service; the medieval altar stone stayed inside the priest’s house.
The Personal Rule Begins, 1629
The third Parliament of the reign broke down in March 1629. Members attacked the king’s collection of customs duties and the religious direction of the court. When Speaker Sir John Finch tried to adjourn the Commons on Charles’s command, members held him in his chair long enough to pass resolutions condemning taxation without parliamentary authority and innovations in religion. Charles dissolved Parliament on 10 March and did not summon another for eleven years.
Governing without Parliament was lawful in itself; English kings were not required to keep Parliament in permanent session. The difficulty lay in money. Charles could not ask Parliament for subsidies, so the Crown pressed older revenues and prerogatives more heavily. Customs duties were collected, monopolies produced fees, forest boundaries were examined, fines were imposed for failure to take knighthood and wardship brought income from estates. Ship money, once associated with coastal defence, became the most famous levy because Charles extended it to inland counties in 1635.
Sussex had a long coast and already knew demands connected with maritime defence. The wider assessment of ship money brought the tax into inland hundreds and parishes as well. Sheriffs received quotas and local officers divided them among property holders. A yeoman might have to find cash from cattle, crops, woodland, a mill, cottage rents or debts owed by neighbours, turning property and produce into money demanded by the Crown.
Around Loxwood, Brewhurst combined a house, fields, woods and a watermill. The chapel endowment included small holdings and rent-bearing land. Kirdford probate inventories list livestock, grain, tools, household furniture and money due to the deceased. Charles’s financial government met the Western Weald through valuations of such property: livestock, crops, woodland, mills, rents and money due from tenants or neighbours.
Ship Money, John Hampden and the Value of a Household, 1635-1638
Ship money turned the Personal Rule’s financial policy into a national dispute. Coastal towns had long been required in emergencies to provide ships or money for naval defence. In 1635 Charles demanded ship money from every county. The writs named a county sum, sheriffs distributed the burden through hundreds and local officers assessed people according to their ability to pay.
The method mattered in the Western Weald because wealth took many forms. A substantial house might contain several heated rooms, but its owner’s income could come from acres of pasture, timber, a mill, cattle, stored grain, leases or rents. Kirdford probate inventories counted these things after death. The lists record livestock, crops, household vessels, beds, tables, working tools and debts. They show the property against which neighbours and assessors judged status long before a modern income tax existed.
John Hampden’s refusal to pay a ship-money assessment made the dispute famous. His case came before the judges in 1637. A majority found for the Crown, but the narrow decision gave the opposition a powerful argument: even if judges accepted the levy, many property holders believed Charles was imposing a parliamentary tax without Parliament. Payment became a political act as well as a financial demand.
At Loxwood, the chapel endowment gives a smaller example of assessed value. The 1612 lease fixed forty shillings a year for Cokkes and Calletts Haw and required maintenance of the property. The twenty-one-year term reached its stated end in 1633. The deed records the rent-bearing property from which a yeoman could derive income and from which public assessments could be paid.
The tax also made officers enter information about households and land into written schedules. Sheriffs, constables and assessors converted farms, cottages and other holdings into sums due to the Crown. When the Long Parliament met in 1640 it declared ship money illegal and attacked the legal judgments that had supported it. The quarrel had moved from individual assessments to the constitutional authority under which those assessments had been made.
Richard Montagu and the Diocese of Chichester
George Carleton died in 1628 and Richard Montagu became Bishop of Chichester. Montagu was already known for religious controversy. Puritan critics accused him of teaching doctrines too close to Rome; Charles and senior bishops defended him. His appointment placed a bishop identified with the king’s preferred churchmanship over Loxwood at the beginning of the Personal Rule.
Montagu’s visitation articles show what he required churchwardens to inspect and report. They asked whether the communion table stood in the place ordered by authority, whether it was treated reverently, whether communicants knelt, whether the church and chancel were kept in repair and whether clergy used the authorised services. Later articles asked about rails around the communion table and about people who disturbed worship or refused the rites of the Church.
These questions show how royal religious policy reached parish buildings. Montagu instructed clergy and churchwardens, received presentments through visitations and used ecclesiastical courts when officers reported disobedience. Wisborough Green answered within Montagu’s diocese, and the Loxwood chapel depended upon the mother parish for its incumbent and church discipline.
The disputes were visible in wood, cloth, metal and posture. A communion table could stand lengthways in the body of the chancel or be placed altar-wise at the east end. Rails could control access around it. A minister could wear the prescribed surplice. Communicants could be required to kneel. To opponents of the Laudian programme these details suggested a return towards Catholic worship; to Montagu and bishops of similar outlook they expressed order and reverence within the Church of England.
Sunday Worship and the Declaration of Sports, 1633
Sunday supplied another point at which Charles’s religious policy entered ordinary parish life. In 1633 the king reissued the declaration first published by James I and usually called the Book of Sports. It allowed specified recreations after divine service and defended parish wakes and other lawful customs against stricter Sabbatarian teaching. Ministers were ordered to make the royal declaration known in their churches.
The order divided Protestant opinion. Puritan ministers treated Sunday as a day that should be devoted closely to worship, Scripture and religious instruction. Charles and his bishops rejected the attempt to prohibit every customary recreation. Dancing, archery and village festivities became part of the larger argument about the authority of bishops, the Crown and ministers over the weekly pattern of parish life.
At Loxwood, Richard Tanner used the Prayer Book for the services that preceded any lawful recreation. The chapel bell marked worship within a settlement whose households also worked fields, woods and the mill. The Feast of St John the Baptist gave the chapel its principal dedication, while Sundays, Christmas, Easter, baptisms, marriages and funerals divided the year through repeated services. The dispute over Sunday conduct touched time as directly as Montagu’s visitation questions touched tables, rails and kneeling.
Kirdford and Plaistow had the same weekly problem in a different parish arrangement. St John the Baptist at Kirdford was the mother church; St Thomas at Plaistow served the northern part of the parish as a chapel of ease. Royal orders read from pulpits reached people whose working week was governed by farming, timber and seasonal labour. Arguments over Sunday recreation belonged to the lanes and village greens of the Weald as much as to printed controversy in London.
Land, Mills and Houses in the 1630s
Local deeds record ordinary work beside the political quarrel at Westminster. The twenty-one-year lease of Cokkes and Calletts Haw made in 1612 was due to end in 1633. The chapel trustees had to keep title, tenancy and income in order as individual trustees died and property passed between occupiers. Their endowment worked only when fields were used, rents paid and houses repaired.
Brewhurst Mill converted the River Lox into mechanical power. Water was diverted through the head race and millpond, released through the wheel and returned downstream. Grain from surrounding farms had to be carried to the mill and flour or meal taken away. Sluices, banks, gearing and the mill building needed timber, iron and skilled repair. The Myll or Mille family held the Brewhurst property through this period, and a document of 1641 used the forms ‘Bruhurst’ and ‘Mill Hooke’.
Kirdford’s probate inventories give a close view of the same rural economy a few miles west of Loxwood. Executors counted cattle, sheep, pigs, grain in barns, household vessels, beds, tables, tools and debts. Plaistow lay within Kirdford parish and used its own chapel of ease at St Thomas. A farmer north of Kirdford church could live closer to Plaistow chapel or to Loxwood than to the larger parish centres, while tithes, probate, marriage and parish government followed recognised boundaries.
Builders also changed the line of houses along the road through Loxwood during the early seventeenth century. Garton House dates from about 1620. Box and Ryley include an early-seventeenth-century extension and central chimney. The timber-framed building later called the Onslow Arms stood beside Loxwood Bridge. Carpenters enlarged timber frames, brickmakers and masons built chimney stacks, tilers covered roofs and smiths supplied hinges, nails and hearth fittings during the same decades as the Personal Rule.
The Loxwood Chalice, 1637
In 1637 Christopher Butler, Vicar of Wisborough Green, gave Loxwood chapel a silver communion chalice. The cup had been made in 1623. Its inscription named the donor, his office and the place for which he intended it: ‘The gift of Christopher Butler, Vicar of Wisborough Green, given unto this Chappell of Loxwood 1637.’ Few objects bring the national religious argument so close to the village.
The chalice held wine at Holy Communion. Butler served the mother church and supplied the dependent chapel with a vessel required for the sacrament. Richard Tanner was then curate at Loxwood. The gift joined the vicar, curate and chapel through a single object that could be carried to the communion table, filled, handled during the service, washed and locked away with the other church plate.
The date fell in the middle of the dispute over the communion table. William Laud had become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 and backed bishops who pressed for greater uniformity. Montagu’s visitation questions asked about the table, rails and kneeling. Butler’s silver cup belonged to the Church of England’s communion service under the Book of Common Prayer.
Church Cottage held the medieval altar stone that had been removed from the chapel and hidden there almost ninety years earlier. In 1637 the chapel used a silver Protestant communion cup while the stone altar of the medieval foundation lay inside the neighbouring house. The two objects had served different rites in different buildings and both survived into the same generation.
Scotland Rejects the Royal Prayer Book, 1637-1640
The crisis that ended the Personal Rule began in Scotland. Charles had been crowned there in 1633 and wanted the Scottish Church to use a more ordered liturgy. In 1637 his government introduced a new Scottish prayer book. The new book was a Scottish liturgy prepared for the Scottish Church. Its opponents treated it as part of a programme that threatened the Presbyterian government and worship of the Kirk.
The first use at St Giles’ in Edinburgh provoked disorder. Opposition spread rapidly. In February 1638 thousands subscribed the National Covenant, rejecting the king’s ecclesiastical innovations and binding themselves to defend the reformed religion of Scotland. Charles tried to recover control by force. The First Bishops’ War in 1639 ended without a decisive battle, but a second campaign followed in 1640.
The war exposed the weakness of government without parliamentary taxation. Charles summoned the Short Parliament in April 1640 and asked for money. MPs first demanded redress of grievances, and the king dissolved the session within weeks. Covenanter forces then crossed into northern England. The Treaty of Ripon required Charles to pay the Scottish army while negotiations proceeded, creating a bill that ordinary royal revenue could not meet.
Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland and lord of Petworth, had risen high in Charles’s service and held the office of Lord High Admiral. The Scottish crisis helped break that relationship. Ill health kept him from commanding the army in person, and he became increasingly critical of the king’s ministers and religious policy. When Charles summoned another Parliament in November, one of western Sussex’s greatest landowners moved towards the parliamentary opposition.
Petworth and Algernon Percy
Petworth had already been drawn into Stuart politics through Henry Percy and the Gunpowder Plot. Algernon Percy inherited the earldom in 1632. Charles trusted him with naval office and council business, but Northumberland was a Protestant aristocrat with serious doubts about the Personal Rule. By 1640 he had become one of the most important peers prepared to challenge the king while preserving monarchy.
Petworth sat inside national politics through a lord whose allegiance changed as the constitutional crisis deepened. The earl’s estate officers collected rents, supervised woods, farms and tenants and maintained the great house while their lord worked in London. A tenant travelling to Petworth market could encounter the economic power of a family whose head was arguing over the future of the Crown.
Northumberland supported Parliament against Charles, accepted military responsibility and helped the parliamentary cause, yet repeatedly favoured negotiation. In 1648 he sat with Charles at Newport and opposed the path to regicide. Petworth’s principal lord had moved from royal admiral to parliamentary opponent while arguing for a negotiated monarchy.
The roads between Loxwood and Petworth also joined smaller properties to that larger estate centre. Kirdford and Plaistow lay between them; Pulborough and the Arun valley opened routes southwards. Market business, legal transactions and estate administration moved through the same district in which Northumberland’s political choices were discussed.
The Long Parliament, 1640-1641
The Long Parliament met on 3 November 1640. Members attacked the machinery of the Personal Rule. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was imprisoned and later executed after Parliament passed a bill of attainder. Laud was sent to the Tower. Parliament abolished the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission and declared ship money unlawful. The Triennial Act required Parliament to be summoned at least once every three years.
Religion divided the king’s opponents as much as it united them. Some wanted bishops restrained; others wanted episcopacy abolished. Petitions attacked altar-wise communion tables, rails, images and ceremonial practices associated with Laud. Opponents of ship money divided over Church government. Some wanted Presbyterian reform; others disliked Montagu’s theology but defended bishops as part of the constitution.
Brian Duppa, who had succeeded Montagu as Bishop of Chichester in 1638, left the see for Salisbury in 1641. His visitation articles had asked many of the same practical questions about clergy, worship and church buildings that Montagu had raised. Chichester then stood vacant until Henry King became bishop in 1642. The episcopal succession changed at the moment Parliament was preparing to attack the legal power of bishops themselves.
Orders, petitions and oaths carried the argument into parish administration. A churchwarden who had recently been asked whether the communion table was railed could soon receive parliamentary orders against the same ceremonial arrangements. Ministers, churchwardens, carpenters and labourers altered tables, rails, images or books when authority changed.
The Protestation Returns, 1641
In 1641 Parliament required adult men to make the Protestation, an oath to defend the Protestant religion, the king’s person and the rights and liberties of Parliament and subjects. The wording tried to hold royal loyalty and parliamentary resistance together at a moment when many people hoped the dispute could be settled without war.
The Sussex returns put numbers against the communities around Loxwood. The surviving index lists 122 names under Loxwood, 179 under Wisborough Green, 306 under Kirdford, 143 under Rudgwick and 225 under Billingshurst. Plaistow belonged to Kirdford parish and appears within that larger parochial return rather than as a separate list. The figures count the names recorded for the Protestation, mainly adult men, rather than the whole population of each place.
Richard Tanner appears in the Loxwood return. He had served as curate since 1628. William Threele also appears, a surname embedded in the chapel and Drungewick histories. Richard Threele had bought Drungewick Manor in 1605, bringing a former episcopal estate into the landed society around Loxwood. The 1641 return now places William Threele among the men recorded at Loxwood, and William Threel would be named among the chapel trustees in 1652. The list sets the curate beside farmers, craftsmen and other householders when Parliament called for a public statement of allegiance.
The returns also preserve the parish geography around Loxwood. Loxwood worshipped within Wisborough Green parish. Kirdford governed Plaistow’s chapel. Rudgwick supplied families and trustees found in Loxwood records. Billingshurst lay on roads and property networks to the east. In 1641 men from all of them entered the same parliamentary paper trail before armies were raised.
The Protestation lists name adults immediately before the Civil War. Tanner appears as a clergyman among the Loxwood names, while the much larger Kirdford return gathers men from a parish that stretched through farming settlements towards Plaistow. Across England these returns provide the nearest surviving equivalent to a census for 1641-42, fixing thousands of adult names at the moment before military allegiance divided counties and households.
The returns also place the oath beside local government. Parish clergy and officers had to produce lists and certificates for Parliament, just as they already kept registers and handled church and poor-law business. A national promise made at Westminster became a sheet of local names written under Loxwood, Wisborough Green, Kirdford, Rudgwick and Billingshurst. Within months those same counties were receiving orders for arms, assessments and militia.
Ireland, the Five Members and the Road to War, 1641-1642
An uprising began in Ireland in October 1641. Reports of killings and rebellion produced fear in England and opened a new dispute over command of the army raised to suppress it. Parliament distrusted the king with forces that might later be used against his political opponents. Charles rejected Parliament’s attempt to take control of military appointments.
The Commons passed the Grand Remonstrance in November 1641 by a narrow majority. It listed grievances from the beginning of the reign and demanded further religious reform. The close vote exposed the division among MPs. Many men who had attacked ship money and Strafford believed Parliament was now pressing too far against the traditional powers of the Crown.
On 4 January 1642 Charles entered the House of Commons with armed men to arrest five members whom he accused of treason. The five had left before he arrived. Speaker William Lenthall refused to disclose their whereabouts. Charles soon left London. Parliament issued the Militia Ordinance without royal assent; Charles answered with commissions of array calling men to his service.
Henry King became Bishop of Chichester in 1642. He took office after bishops had been excluded from the House of Lords and as parliamentary criticism of episcopacy intensified. Within months the cathedral city would be occupied by armed forces. The bishop who inherited responsibility for Loxwood’s diocese began his episcopate under conditions unlike those faced by Montagu or Duppa.
Civil War and the Western Weald, 1642
Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642. Parliament fielded its own armies in the name of king and Parliament, arguing that it fought against evil counsellors rather than against monarchy itself. The first major battle at Edgehill in October failed to decide the war, and both sides began to hold towns, castles and roads needed for money, food, recruits and movement.
Sussex mattered because it bordered the Channel, approached London from the south and linked Hampshire with Kent. Allegiance varied by household and estate. Algernon Percy supported Parliament. Other gentry supported Charles. Town councils and clergy could divide internally, and a garrison could change a place’s political colour more quickly than its inhabitants changed their convictions.
At Loxwood, Tanner and the men named in the Protestation Return belonged to a district supplying grain, livestock, timber, carts and horses. Brewhurst Mill worked beside the River Lox, the chapel trustees collected rents, and roads led towards Chichester, Arundel, Petworth, Kirdford, Rudgwick and Guildford while larger towns prepared for troops.
The road south through Wisborough Green and the Arun valley brought the war much closer before Christmas. Chichester, the diocesan city, became a Royalist stronghold. Parliament sent Sir William Waller against it in December.
Pallingham lay within Wisborough Green parish at the head of the improved Arun navigation. From there the river ran towards Pulborough and Arundel, while roads from Loxwood and Kirdford reached the same valley. Grain, timber and other bulky goods could move by water once they reached the navigation; carts and packhorses handled the miles between farms, mills, wharves and market towns. When Chichester and Arundel became garrisons, this existing transport network lay behind the armies operating in western Sussex.
Chichester Falls, December 1642
Parliamentary troops reached Chichester on 22 December 1642. Royalist defenders held the city walls while Waller’s forces pressed them with artillery and infantry, and the siege lasted until 27 December. The garrison surrendered after negotiations. The agreement spared Chichester a general sack. Soldiers nevertheless entered the cathedral after the surrender.
Soldiers entered the church and broke monuments, furnishings and images. Lambert Barnard’s Tudor paintings were slashed and defaced. Glass, books and other objects suffered damage or loss. The cathedral contained the monuments, images and episcopal furnishings associated with the Church order that Parliament’s more radical supporters opposed, and the soldiers attacked those objects directly.
Henry King lost property and books during the upheaval and spent much of the war outside effective control of Chichester. Cathedral clergy were displaced or deprived as Parliament established its authority in the county. Orders that once came from the bishop now competed with parliamentary committees and military governors.
St John the Baptist’s chapel belonged to the Diocese of Chichester. While soldiers damaged the bishop’s cathedral, the Loxwood trustees had to maintain their smaller chapel and its property, and local ministry required books, a roof and communion plate.
Arundel, Alton and the Winter War, 1643-1644
The fighting returned to western Sussex in the winter of 1643-44. Royalist forces occupied Arundel late in 1643 during a wider campaign that linked Hampshire with Sussex. Waller moved against them and besieged Arundel Castle. Parliamentarian troops recovered the castle in January 1644 after weeks of cold-weather operations.
Arundel guarded a major crossing of the Arun and routes between the coast, Chichester and the inland Weald. Damage to the castle and town affected the roads and river crossing used beyond the walls. The river ran north towards Pulborough and Pallingham, where the navigation reached Wisborough Green parish. The Arun carried goods in peacetime and now lay behind a contested military route.
Fighting reached Alton in Hampshire in December 1643, on the Winchester side of the diocesan boundary. The campaign placed royal and parliamentary forces on roads north and west of the Loxwood district, close to the route through Alfold and Guildford. Waller then defeated Sir Ralph Hopton at Cheriton on 29 March 1644, weakening the Royalist position across southern England.
Loxwood stood between these larger centres: Arundel to the south, Petworth to the west, Alfold and Guildford to the north. Tanner and later Rowland served the chapel, the trustees managed its land, Brewhurst Mill ground grain and carts used the roads joining Wisborough Green, Kirdford, Plaistow, Billingshurst and the neighbouring Surrey parishes while armies fought around the larger towns.
Waller’s winter campaigning also joined places that had appeared separately in earlier monarch stories. His army fought at Alton in December, moved against Arundel before Christmas and returned west for the campaign that ended at Cheriton in March. The route crossed the Hampshire-Sussex approaches that met the Weald around Guildford, Alfold, Petworth and the Arun valley. News of each siege and battle could travel along the same roads used by carriers, market carts and estate servants.
The river corridor mattered as much as the roads. Pallingham lay within Wisborough Green parish at the head of the improved Arun navigation. Pulborough stood farther down the river, and Arundel controlled the lower crossing and castle. Grain, timber and other heavy goods normally moved along this route towards the coast. During the winter war, control of Arundel placed soldiers and artillery on a transport line directly connected with Loxwood’s mother parish.
Parliament Changes Public Worship, 1643-1645
War accelerated the religious programme at Westminster. Parliament called the Westminster Assembly in 1643 to advise on doctrine and church government. Presbyterian members wanted a national church governed through assemblies of ministers and elders. Independents in Parliament and the army wanted congregations to have greater freedom. Both groups rejected the authority Charles had given bishops such as Montagu and Duppa.
The Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 bound Parliament to the Scottish Covenanters and promised further reformation of religion in England and Ireland. Scottish troops gave Parliament military support; Scottish Presbyterian ideas gained influence in the debates over the English Church. Episcopal government was stripped of power while parliamentary committees examined ministers and benefices.
In January 1645 Parliament prohibited the Book of Common Prayer and ordered the Directory for Public Worship. The Directory replaced a fixed service read word for word with instructions for prayer, Scripture, preaching, baptism, communion, marriage, burial and the Lord’s Day. The familiar set collects and responses of the Prayer Book ceased to be the authorised public form in territory under Parliament’s control.
At Loxwood the change altered the words spoken around the 1637 chalice. Butler had given the cup for Holy Communion under the Prayer Book. Eight years later Maurice Rowland could use the same silver vessel for communion while following Parliament’s Directory in place of the old communion service.
Maurice Rowland at Loxwood, 1645
By 1645 Maurice Rowland was curate of Loxwood chapel. His appointment gives the parliamentary religious settlement a named local minister. Richard Tanner had entered the cure in 1628 under Charles’s bishops and the Book of Common Prayer. Rowland served in the year Parliament ordered ministers to use the Directory.
Sunday worship under the Directory centred on Scripture, preaching and prayer. Baptism and Holy Communion were administered without the old set services. The trustees kept the land attached to the chapel and used its income for the local place of worship while Parliament’s ordinances changed the public service and Church government.
The chapel site held objects from several periods at once. Christopher Butler’s silver chalice belonged to the Caroline Church of England. The medieval altar stone lay hidden in Church Cottage. Timbers from the first oratory survived in the house. Rowland preached and prayed under Parliament’s directions in the adjacent chapel. The site contained objects left by successive forms of worship since the fifteenth century.
A Brewhurst deed of 1641 used the forms ‘Bruhurst’ and ‘Mill Hooke’ for property around the watermill. The mill, fields, woods and house formed a working estate while public authority changed at Westminster and Chichester. The Mills surname entered the next trustee renewal in 1652, linking Brewhurst directly with the chapel’s post-war property body.
Parliamentary Assessments, Sequestration and County Government, 1643-1646
War required both sides to raise money and supplies on a far larger scale. Parliament used weekly and later monthly assessments to pay armies and garrisons. County committees supervised collection, gathered horses and provisions and dealt with local military needs. The assessment machinery adopted methods already familiar from earlier subsidies: named places, rated property and appointed collectors turned parliamentary ordinances into sums demanded from households.
Parliament also sequestered the estates of people judged delinquent for supporting the king and of some recusant Catholics. Committees took rents and profits while owners petitioned, proved claims or later compounded by paying fines to recover their estates. A farm, wood, rent or manor that had supplied a household with income could be diverted towards the finance of the parliamentary war until its owner reached a settlement.
The Western Weald lay behind active garrisons at Chichester and Arundel and within reach of Waller’s campaigns. Roads through Pulborough, Petworth, Kirdford, Billingshurst and Horsham connected farms with those military centres. Grain ground at a mill, hay cut from meadow, a cart, a horse or a stack of firewood could all become useful to an army even when the battlefield stood many miles away.
At Loxwood the 1641 Protestation names inhabitants, Christopher Butler’s 1637 chalice survives, Maurice Rowland is named as curate in 1645 and the chapel property was conveyed to new trustees in 1652.
The new finance also changed the relationship between local officers and central government. Under Charles, sheriffs had collected ship money. Under Parliament, county committees and collectors raised weekly or monthly assessments. After 1649 the Commonwealth retained regular direct assessments to support the army. In the Western Weald the authority demanding money changed from royal sheriffs to parliamentary committees, while assessors valued land, houses, stock and income.
The New Model Army and the Defeat of the King, 1645-1646
Parliament reorganised its principal field army in 1645. Sir Thomas Fairfax became commander-in-chief of the New Model Army, and Oliver Cromwell emerged as its leading cavalry commander. The army was intended to fight as a national force rather than as a collection of county armies tied to local commanders.
At Naseby on 14 June 1645 Fairfax defeated Charles’s main field army. Parliament captured royal baggage and correspondence, including letters about foreign and Irish assistance. The documents were published to damage the king’s reputation. Parliament then reduced the remaining Royalist garrisons and regional armies. Naseby destroyed Charles’s ability to reverse the war in one campaign.
Bristol surrendered in September 1645. Oxford, the king’s wartime capital, became isolated. In May 1646 Charles left Oxford and placed himself in the hands of the Scottish army at Southwell. The first Civil War ended through a sequence of surrenders during 1646 rather than with a final battle in Sussex.
Parliament’s victory opened another struggle over the government of England. The Scots wanted Presbyterian church government. Presbyterians in Parliament wanted the army disbanded and a settlement with Charles. Many soldiers wanted arrears of pay and greater religious liberty. The king believed those divisions might allow him to recover authority if he refused terms that permanently reduced the Crown.
Bishop Henry King and a Broken Diocese
Henry King held the title Bishop of Chichester while Parliament dismantled the legal powers of his office. Bishops lost their seats in the House of Lords in 1642, and Parliament later abolished episcopacy and provided for the sale of bishops’ lands. Chichester Cathedral had been damaged and its chapter disrupted. Episcopal visitation and discipline ceased to operate in the form used under James I and the Personal Rule.
For the first time since Bishop Robert Rede authorised the oratory in 1404, Loxwood’s chapel operated without a Bishop of Chichester exercising the diocesan authority that had governed its clergy. Adam Moleyns had confirmed the chapel in 1447; Tudor and early Stuart bishops had supervised its ministers; Montagu and Duppa had issued detailed questions about communion and church buildings. Parliament now removed bishops from the government of the Church.
The chapel trustees were lay holders of land and houses. Their deeds created a chain of property ownership separate from Henry King’s possession of the bishopric estates. The trustee record crossed the Civil War while Parliament dismantled the episcopal government that had shaped the chapel’s ministry for centuries.
Private farms at Brewhurst, Fletchings, Ifold and Kirdford passed through family and manorial title. Parliament dealt separately with cathedral property, bishops’ estates and clerical benefices, using different legal machinery from the deeds by which local families held houses, mills and fields.
Charles in Captivity, 1646-1648
The Scots handed Charles to the English Parliament in 1647 after negotiations over money and the political settlement. The king was held at several houses while Parliament and the New Model Army argued over his future. In November he escaped from Hampton Court and reached the Isle of Wight, but Colonel Robert Hammond confined him at Carisbrooke Castle.
Charles treated captivity as another field for negotiation. He refused terms that he believed would leave the monarchy permanently subordinate to Parliament. At the same time he negotiated secretly with Scottish leaders. The Engagement promised Scottish military support in return for a period of Presbyterianism in England.
Algernon Percy took the opposite route. Northumberland had fought Charles politically and supported Parliament, but he wanted a negotiated monarchy. He held Petworth while national institutions fractured around the army, Parliament and the imprisoned king. His position gave western Sussex a direct connection to the group trying to build a settlement rather than abolish kingship.
Royalist risings broke out in 1648 and a Scottish army invaded England. The New Model Army crushed the English risings and Cromwell defeated the Scots at Preston in August. Officers who had already fought one war now believed Charles had used negotiation to prepare a second.
Newport, Pride’s Purge and the Trial, 1648-1649
Moderate parliamentarians made one more attempt to settle with Charles at Newport on the Isle of Wight during the autumn of 1648. Algernon Percy was among the commissioners. Northumberland accepted strict limits on the king but wanted government to retain a monarch. The negotiations produced movement on several questions, yet the army no longer trusted Charles to keep an agreement.
On 6 December soldiers under Colonel Thomas Pride excluded or arrested MPs considered willing to accept an unacceptable settlement. The reduced Commons, later called the Rump, approved a High Court of Justice to try Charles. The House of Lords refused to take part. Northumberland opposed the proceedings in the Lords.
Charles appeared before the court in Westminster Hall on 20 January 1649. The charge accused him of using royal power to wage war against Parliament and the people. Charles refused to plead and challenged the court’s authority. He asked by what lawful power an anointed king could be tried without the Lords and without his recognition of the tribunal.
The judges proceeded. Witnesses described the king’s role in the wars, and on 27 January the court found him guilty and sentenced him to death. England had deposed kings before, but Parliament had never created a court that claimed the right to try an English king for treason against his own subjects.
30 January 1649
Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. He spoke from the scaffold, prayed with Bishop William Juxon and was killed with a single blow. His body was taken to Windsor and buried in St George’s Chapel on 9 February.
Parliament then abolished the office of king and the House of Lords. England became a Commonwealth governed without a monarch. Scotland recognised Charles’s eldest son as Charles II and prepared to defend his claim. The political settlement that followed would bring another war, a Scottish coronation, the rise of Oliver Cromwell and more than a decade before Charles entered London as king.
Loxwood’s next major trustee deed came in 1652 under the Commonwealth. It named another group drawn from the King, Threel, Mills, Laker, Shudd, Trower and Ireland families. The monarchy had been abolished; the chapel lands were transferred again by local deed.
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