1660-1685: Charles II, Restoration, the Loxwood Trustees and the Western Weald

Between Kings: Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1660

The Commonwealth that followed Charles I’s death inherited wars in Ireland and Scotland as well as political division in England. Scotland proclaimed Charles II, but required him to accept the Covenant and Presbyterian settlement. He was crowned at Scone in January 1651. Cromwell’s army had already defeated the Scots at Dunbar; later that year Charles led a Scottish army into England in the hope of attracting Royalist support.

The campaign ended at Worcester on 3 September 1651. Cromwell’s army defeated Charles decisively. The young king escaped through a chain of houses and hiding places before reaching the Continent. His defeat removed the immediate Royalist military challenge inside England. The republic then faced its own struggle over Parliament and the army.

Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector in 1653 under the Instrument of Government. Parliament, the army and the Protector disputed taxation, religious liberty and the shape of the constitution. Cromwell died on 3 September 1658. His son Richard succeeded him but lacked the army support and political authority needed to hold the Protectorate together. During 1659 governments rose and fell rapidly as officers and politicians tried to avoid both military dictatorship and renewed civil war.

The Loxwood trustee renewal of 1652 belongs inside this unsettled decade. The list joins families already present in earlier deeds with men from Brewhurst, Headsfoldwood and the roads east of the chapel. John Mills of Brewhurst carried the mill estate into the trustee body. William Threel joined a surname already connected with Drungewick. Robert Trower of Wood House on Drungewick Lane placed another local property inside the group. John Ireland the elder of Headsfoldwood and his son extended the Ireland name that had run through the chapel history since the Naldrett-Irlond descent of the fifteenth century.

The trustees held property, received rent, preserved title and kept the chapel usable under Commonwealth law. The Interregnum altered public worship and Church government, while the 1652 deed records named men carrying out a practical property transaction under the republic rather than under a king.

The 1652 Trustees across Loxwood, Brewhurst and Headsfoldwood

The 1652 conveyance deserves a closer place in the Restoration story because several of its names lead directly into Charles II’s reign. The new body included George King and Robert King; William Threel; John Mills of Brewhurst and a younger John Mills; William and Richard Laker; George Shudd the elder and younger; Robert Trower of Wood House and a younger Robert Trower; and John Ireland the elder of Headsfoldwood with his son John.

Brewhurst gave the trustee body a miller and landholder from the River Lox. The watermill stood within an estate recorded since the sixteenth century and supplied flour and meal to the surrounding countryside. Headsfoldwood carried the Ireland name through land that had descended from the Naldrett family. Margery Naldrett and John Irlond had carried that property line through the fifteenth century, and John Ireland of Headsfoldwood entered the trustee body in 1652.

William Threel joined another old Loxwood surname. A member of the Threele family had acquired Drungewick in 1605, and the manor’s property reached into Wisborough Green, Kirdford, Rudgwick and Billingshurst. Robert Trower’s address at Wood House on Drungewick Lane places another trustee on the road leading east from Loxwood towards that former episcopal manor.

The Shudd and Laker names also recur in the longer trustee history. The 1652 list names trustees from houses, farms and estates around the chapel, Brewhurst, Headsfoldwood, Kirdford and Wisborough Green.

By 1660 that deed was only eight years old. Landowners across England held leases, inheritances and conveyances made under the republic. The chapel trustees brought their Commonwealth deed into a restored monarchy.

Monck, the Convention and the Return of Charles II, 1660

The political opening came from the army. General George Monck marched south from Scotland at the beginning of 1660. He entered London, supported the restoration of members excluded from Parliament and helped bring about elections for a Convention Parliament. Charles issued the Declaration of Breda from the Netherlands, promising a general pardon, settlement of property disputes through Parliament, payment of the army and a measure of liberty for tender consciences subject to parliamentary decision.

Parliament invited Charles to return. He landed at Dover on 25 May and entered London on 29 May, his thirtieth birthday. Crowds, bells, bonfires and civic ceremony replaced the military guard that had surrounded his father’s execution eleven years earlier. The House of Lords met again, royal government was restored and the Convention dealt with the legal consequences of the republic.

The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion pardoned many acts committed during the conflicts but excluded the regicides and a smaller number of others. Some men who had signed Charles I’s death warrant were executed. Others escaped abroad or died before trial. Property questions were resolved case by case, and the Crown recovered estates that had been sold under the Commonwealth.

The 1652 holders already held Loxwood’s chapel property when Charles returned. Monarchy changed the law governing Church and state around them; the fields, houses and rents stayed under the existing conveyance until deaths made another renewal necessary.

Henry King and the Restoration of Chichester

Henry King resumed effective office as Bishop of Chichester after the Restoration. He had been appointed in 1642 just before parliamentary forces took the city, ransacked the cathedral and dismantled episcopal government. In 1660 he returned to a diocese whose churches had spent fifteen years without the legal authority of bishops and whose cathedral carried the damage of war.

Chichester Cathedral began a programme of repair after the monarchy returned. Stonework, fittings and the fabric damaged during the 1642 occupation had to be repaired or replaced. Lambert Barnard’s Tudor paintings survived in mutilated condition. Cathedral worship had to be organised again under dean, chapter and bishop, and clergy had to answer once more to episcopal visitation and ecclesiastical courts.

King also refounded the cathedral library. Books that had been dispersed or lost were gathered again, and his own collection contributed to the restored library. The work placed books and scholarship back inside the cathedral at the same time that Parliament was deciding which service book every parish church would be required to use.

After 1660 Loxwood’s curate again answered through Wisborough Green to a Bishop of Chichester. The trustees held the chapel property, while Henry King and his diocesan officers governed the clergy and authorised worship under the restored Church of England.

A Crown Recreated, 1661

Charles’s English coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661. The ceremony had to be supplied with new regalia. Parliament had ordered the medieval crown jewels broken up or sold after 1649. Goldsmith Robert Vyner and other craftsmen made replacements from surviving descriptions. St Edward’s Crown, new sceptres and other objects gave physical form to a monarchy that had been abolished only twelve years earlier.

The crown made for Charles is the St Edward’s Crown used in later coronations. The Commonwealth had destroyed or dispersed the former regalia, so craftsmen made new royal objects for the coronation. Gold, jewels and skilled metalwork gave the restored monarchy a new physical set of symbols.

The Cavalier Parliament first met in May 1661 and sat, with adjournments and prorogations, until 1679. Bishops returned to the House of Lords. Royalists and Anglicans dominated the early sessions and passed laws that rebuilt the established Church and placed sharp limits on religious meetings outside it.

At Loxwood, ministers, churchwardens and parish officers soon received Parliament’s new laws on worship, oaths and attendance. In 1662 those requirements were gathered around a revised Book of Common Prayer.

The Prayer Book Settlement, 1662

Parliament and the restored bishops revised the Book of Common Prayer in 1661-62. The Act of Uniformity required the revised book to be used in the Church of England. Clergy holding benefices had to declare their assent to the book and meet the Act’s requirements. Ministers who refused lost their livings at the settlement usually associated with St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1662.

The 1662 book was recognisably descended from the Prayer Books used before the Civil War, but it contained revisions made after the experiences of the 1640s and 1650s. Morning and Evening Prayer, Holy Communion, baptism, marriage and burial again had set authorised forms. Bishops ordained and disciplined clergy. Parish churches and dependent chapels were expected to use the same book.

St John the Baptist’s chapel at Loxwood used the revised Prayer Book after the period of the parliamentary Directory. Christopher Butler’s chalice of 1637 was a Church of England communion vessel again under a set liturgy. The medieval altar stone stayed hidden in Church Cottage; the 1662 service used the communion table and the cup belonging to the post-Reformation chapel.

After 1662 the Vicar of Wisborough Green and the Bishop of Chichester governed Loxwood’s ministry, while the 1652 trustees held the chapel property. Parish registers, poor relief and church discipline ran through Wisborough Green, and Loxwood households used their nearer chapel for worship.

Prayer Book Worship at Loxwood after 1662

The revised Prayer Book set the weekly rhythm heard at St John the Baptist’s chapel. Morning Prayer brought psalms, Scripture, collects and responses into the building; Evening Prayer used the same ordered pattern later in the day. Sundays and holy days carried appointed lessons and prayers, and the catechism supplied questions and answers for the instruction of children and young people. The book had been revised in 1662, but much of its language came from the Tudor Prayer Books that had shaped English worship for more than a century.

Holy Communion joined the service book to an object already in Loxwood. Christopher Butler’s silver chalice, given in 1637, provided the cup for wine at the communion table. The authorised arrangement used the communion table, while the medieval altar stone lay hidden in Church Cottage. Bread, wine, table, cup and spoken liturgy gave the chapel a recognisably Anglican form after the years of the parliamentary Directory.

Baptism brought infants and godparents to the font or vessel used for the rite; marriage placed couples before the minister; the thanksgiving of women after childbirth gave families another reason to use the chapel. Burials followed the older parochial right of Wisborough Green, where the dead from Loxwood were taken to the mother churchyard. The same parish register recorded baptisms, marriages and burials across the wider parish.

The 1662 book also appointed Scripture in English. The King James Bible had been in print for half a century and was increasingly dominant in church use, while other English Bibles could survive in private hands. The service required biblical lessons to be read aloud, allowing the Loxwood congregation to hear Scripture whether or not individual households owned a large printed Bible.

The building needed ordinary maintenance for this worship: roof tiles, glazing, seats, bell, books and communion vessels. The 1652 trustees held the land and houses whose rents supported those costs. The restored bishop and the Vicar of Wisborough Green governed the service; the trustees supplied the property from which the local chapel could be repaired and furnished.

Catherine of Braganza and a Wider Maritime Kingdom, 1662

Catherine of Braganza reached Portsmouth in May 1662, and Charles married her there on 21 May. She was the daughter of John IV of Portugal, whose dynasty had restored Portuguese independence from Spain. The royal wedding brought the Portuguese alliance to the southern naval base reached from the Western Weald through the roads towards Chichester and Hampshire, while English merchants and naval officers were competing more aggressively in Atlantic and Asian trade.

Catherine’s dowry was exceptionally valuable. It included a large cash payment and the ports of Tangier and Bombay. Tangier placed an English garrison on the North African coast; Bombay gave the Crown a base that was later transferred to the East India Company. The marriage joined court ceremony to shipping, military expenditure and the expansion of English overseas commerce.

The queen was Catholic. Her household worship was protected by the marriage arrangements, while the Act of Uniformity was imposing the revised Anglican Prayer Book on parish clergy in the same year. Charles’s court could contain a Catholic queen and chaplains while John Beaton lost Kirdford and Anglican worship was enforced through bishops and parish officers. The contrast fed the religious suspicion that followed the king throughout his reign.

Portsmouth supplied the navy, Chichester and Arundel stood behind the Channel coast, and roads from the Western Weald carried produce towards larger towns and ports. Loxwood’s timber, grain, horses and road traffic belonged to the inland economy on which naval counties depended.

Kirdford, Plaistow and the Ejected Clergy

At Kirdford, John Beaton had been appointed vicar during the Commonwealth. He was among the Presbyterian clergy who lost their livings in the settlement of 1662. His removal changed the incumbent responsible for Kirdford church and for the parish that included Plaistow’s chapel of ease.

Plaistow had possessed a dependent chapel dedicated to St Thomas since the early sixteenth century. It stood in a relationship to Kirdford that resembled Loxwood’s older dependence upon Wisborough Green: a nearer chapel served dispersed households, while the mother parish held the benefice and wider parochial rights. A change of vicar at Kirdford reached the chapel at Plaistow through ordinary parish government.

Ministers appointed during the Commonwealth had preached, baptised, married and buried parishioners for years before the Restoration settlement changed many livings. When the Act of Uniformity required conformity to the restored Church, some accepted the terms and others left. Families who had heard a Presbyterian minister could then find a new conforming incumbent in the same church.

The religious map around Loxwood became more varied. Anglican worship was enforced by law in Wisborough Green, Loxwood, Kirdford and Plaistow, while displaced ministers and lay supporters created or strengthened meetings outside parish churches.

The Clarendon Settlement in Parish Life, 1661-1665

The Act of Uniformity was one part of a wider group of Restoration laws associated with the Cavalier Parliament. The Corporation Act of 1661 required officeholders in towns to meet Anglican tests. The Conventicle Act of 1664 penalised religious meetings outside the established Church, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 restricted many ejected ministers from approaching incorporated towns and places where they had previously served. Together these laws narrowed the legal space available to Protestant Nonconformists.

The laws acted through identifiable local offices. Justices of the peace issued warrants and heard cases. Constables could break up prohibited meetings or bring people before magistrates. Churchwardens reported absence and parish conduct. Bishops licensed and supervised Anglican clergy. The Restoration Church depended on county and parish officers as well as on the wording of statutes passed at Westminster.

Around Loxwood, the pattern could be seen in Kirdford and Horsham. John Beaton lost the Kirdford living after the 1662 settlement. Ambrose Rigge was sent to Horsham gaol in May 1662 after a Quaker meeting and refusal of the oath. Plaistow’s chapel lay within Kirdford parish, so the minister appointed at the mother church affected the chapel as well.

Loxwood chapel belonged to the established Church through Wisborough Green. Its minister used the revised Prayer Book under the authority of the Vicar of Wisborough Green and the Bishop of Chichester. The trustees’ job was different: they held the land and houses attached to the chapel. A churchwarden could present absence from worship while a trustee collected rent from chapel property; both duties existed in the same settlement without being the same office.

Religious disagreement persisted across the district. The settlement defined which worship was lawful in parish churches and what penalties could be used against separate meetings. The later licence granted to Peter Draper’s house at Billingshurst in 1672 would open a short legal space for Presbyterian worship, showing how quickly royal policy could alter the position created by the laws of the 1660s.

Horsham Gaol and Religious Dissent, 1662

The restored Church faced dissent from Quakers as well as Presbyterians and Independents. The Quaker preacher Ambrose Rigge was arrested in Sussex in May 1662 after a meeting at Hurstpierpoint. Magistrates tendered the oath of allegiance. Rigge refused to swear because Quaker teaching rejected oaths, although he declared loyalty to the king. He was committed to the county gaol at Horsham.

Rigge wrote from prison. In 1663 he and fellow prisoners addressed a printed appeal to magistrates, clergy and people in Sussex. He also petitioned Charles II and argued that he had never borne arms against the king. A royal pardon was prepared for him in 1671-72 after years of confinement.

Horsham was one of the principal market and administrative towns used by people from the Loxwood district. The imprisonment of a religious dissenter there gave the new Restoration laws a local physical setting: a gaol, magistrates, oaths and printed appeals rather than a distant parliamentary statute alone.

Parliament added further penalties. The Conventicle Act of 1664 attacked unauthorised religious meetings, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 restricted many ejected ministers from living near towns or former parishes unless they took prescribed oaths. Meetings survived in houses, barns and market towns across Sussex despite the penalties.

Drungewick and the Onslow Family, 1664

In 1664 Richard Threele married Margaret Onslow, sister of Sir Edward Onslow. In the same year Sir Henry Onslow was described as ‘of Drungewick’. The Onslow name had reached the former episcopal manor less than sixty years after Richard Threele acquired it in 1605.

The Threele surname also stood inside the Loxwood chapel trust. William Threel was one of the trustees named in the 1652 renewal. A Threele marriage joined the family to the Onslows while William Threel held chapel property, placing the same surname in the Drungewick and Loxwood records of 1664.

Under Charles II Drungewick was a private landed estate with the moated manor house, farms and local tenancies around it. The Bishop of Chichester governed Loxwood through the diocese and Wisborough Green rather than through a household at Drungewick.

Sir Henry’s description ‘of Drungewick’ placed the Onslow family at the manor in 1664, while Richard Threele’s marriage to Margaret Onslow joined two families already prominent in the district. Later reigns would bring the Onslows into wider Loxwood property and trustee records.

Plague, 1665

The Great Plague reached its terrible height in London during 1665. It was the worst English outbreak since the Black Death. Parish clerks and the weekly bills of mortality recorded rising deaths through the summer. In one week 7,165 Londoners were reported dead from plague. Houses were shut, trade was disrupted and those able to leave the capital sought safety elsewhere.

Charles moved his court away from London, eventually to Oxford. Government orders tried to control movement, burial and infected houses. The Gazette, first printed at Oxford while the court was away, provided official news. By the winter the epidemic was easing, but London had lost a large part of its population.

London’s epidemic disrupted the traffic of goods, letters and people between the capital and southern counties. Carriers, merchants and landowners using London markets had to reckon with infected districts, closed houses and the flight of people from the city. News of weekly deaths travelled along the same roads that connected Sussex with London, while the king and court moved away from the worst danger.

Charles’s government was also fighting the Dutch. Warships required crews, victuals and money at the same time plague reduced manpower in London and the ports. The pressure of disease and war carried into the following year, when another disaster struck the capital.

The Great Fire and the Rebuilding of London, 1666

Fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane early on 2 September 1666. Driven by wind through densely packed timber buildings, it spread across the City of London. Charles and the Duke of York took an active part in the response. The king ordered houses and shops pulled down to create firebreaks when ordinary attempts to contain the flames failed.

By the time the fire was brought under control, more than 13,000 houses and scores of churches had been destroyed, together with the old St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange and other public buildings. Thousands of people lost homes and businesses. The legal and physical work of rebuilding began almost at once.

London’s reconstruction demanded brick, stone, timber, lime, glass, ironwork and skilled labour on a huge scale. New regulations required greater use of brick and stone and wider streets in the rebuilt City. Christopher Wren and other designers would reshape churches and public buildings over the following decades. The foundation stone of the new St Paul’s was laid in the 1670s.

London’s rebuilding created heavy demand for brick, timber, stone, lime, glass and skilled labour. The Western Weald worked many of the same materials through carpentry, brickmaking, woodland management and transport. The strongest dated local building work from this generation stands on Brewhurst Lane, where a stone bridge carries the date 1672.

The Dutch Raid and the Royal Charles, 1665-1667

England fought the Dutch Republic in the Second Anglo-Dutch War from 1665 to 1667. Large fleet battles brought victories and losses to both sides, but money and supply became serious problems. By 1667 many major English ships lay in the Medway with reduced crews because the government could not afford to keep the whole fleet at sea.

In June a Dutch force under Michiel de Ruyter entered the Thames and Medway. The Dutch captured Sheerness, broke through English defences and burned or captured warships at Chatham. They took the Royal Charles, an eighty-six-gun ship, back to the Netherlands.

The humiliation had an added sting. The ship had originally been the Commonwealth warship Naseby. In 1660 it had carried Charles II home from the Netherlands and was renamed Royal Charles at the Restoration. Seven years later the Dutch towed that same symbol of the restored monarchy away as a prize.

The raid exposed the weakness created by war finance and administrative failure. Peace at Breda followed in 1667. For Sussex, the war kept the Channel coast and naval supply routes important. Chichester, Arundel and Portsmouth connected the inland Weald to a southern maritime world, even though the fighting itself took place far to the east on the Thames and Medway.

Hearths, Houses and the Sussex Tax Roll, 1670

A tax assessment made for the year ending Lady Day 1670 provides one of the most detailed surviving views of Restoration households in Sussex. The Hearth Tax charged one shilling twice a year for every taxable fire, hearth or stove. Officials used the number of hearths as a practical measure of the size and wealth of a house, although poorer households could qualify for exemption.

The Sussex return names Loxwood as a separate tithing in the Rotherbridge area of Arundel rape. It then lists Kirdford tithing and smaller places within Kirdford parish, including Plaistow township. The completed return was presented at Petworth quarter sessions in October 1671.

Hearth tax was intensely physical. A collector counted fireplaces and stoves inside houses. Larger buildings with several heated rooms paid more; the poorest could be certified as non-chargeable. The 1670 Sussex roll also distinguished people discharged by poverty and required certificates involving ministers, churchwardens or overseers and justices of the peace. Taxation brought royal revenue officers into the same network of parish officials that administered poor relief and church business.

The return belongs directly beside Loxwood’s surviving seventeenth-century houses. Garton House, the long Box and Ryley range, the building later called the Onslow Arms and other framed houses contained hearths whose number reflected their internal arrangement. The tax records government measuring households by the fireplaces around which cooking, heating and much domestic work took place.

Hall House on Guildford Road is dated locally to around 1670, while its statutory listing gives the broader date of eighteenth century or earlier. The house stands beside a narrow green lane that follows the older route towards Alfold and Guildford before the turnpike was built. Hall House later became the Drovers Arms. Its precise construction year is unresolved, but the site belongs to the roadside development that gathered houses and traffic along the northern approach to Loxwood.

A cast-iron fireback recorded in the kitchen at Hall House carried the date 1606, the initials E.F., an eagle above a crown and a shield bearing three eagles. The plate was already more than half a century old by the time of Charles II. A fireback stood behind an open hearth to protect the wall and throw heat back into the room. The object adds a domestic detail to the houses counted by the hearth tax: rooms were organised around fireplaces used for cooking and warmth, and durable iron fittings could pass from one generation of occupants to another.

Brewhurst adds another dimension. The mill and farmhouse needed domestic hearths, while the mill itself depended on water for its main mechanical power. Kirdford inventories valued movable goods such as pots, bedding, grain and livestock after death; the Hearth Tax assessed the fixed fires inside houses during life.

Loxwood Farthings and Everyday Trade

Two seventeenth-century farthing tokens name Loxwood. One bears a blazing star and the words ‘GEORGE BILLINGHVRST’ and ‘OF LOXWOOD’. The other carries the Grocers’ Arms and the name ‘HENERIE IERLAND’, with ‘LOOXWOOD’ on the reverse. Neither token carries a date.

Private trade tokens solved a practical problem. England lacked enough low-value official coin for everyday purchases. Merchants, innkeepers, shopkeepers and corporations issued small copper or brass pieces that customers could accept locally and return in trade. The main English token series belongs to the years 1649-1672, and two known types carry the name Loxwood.

A token worked because customers recognised the issuer. A grocer, innkeeper or other trader could give one as change and accept it later against another purchase. Its usefulness depended on reputation within a small area rather than on the intrinsic value of the metal. A piece naming Loxwood belonged to repeated face-to-face trade among households, shops, mills and carriers who knew where the token could be spent again.

George Billinghurst’s token names its issuer and Loxwood without naming a trade. Henerie Ierland used the Grocers’ Arms on his piece. Both issuers treated ‘Loxwood’ as sufficient identification on money intended to pass from hand to hand.

John Ireland the elder of Headsfoldwood and his son had entered the 1652 trustee body. A Loxwood farthing from the same broad period bears the name Henerie Ierland, placing the Ireland surname in both the chapel deeds and the village’s small-change economy.

In 1672 Charles II’s government issued official copper halfpennies and farthings for circulation. The royal coinage supplied small change on a national basis and closed the short period in which Loxwood itself appeared on privately issued farthings.

Brewhurst Bridge, 1672

The year 1672 is cut into the stone curb of Brewhurst Bridge. The Grade II listed bridge carries Brewhurst Lane across the stream north of Brewhurst House and Mill. It has two elliptical stone arches, a square central pier and a cutwater on the upstream side. The date and the initials J.M. are carved on the downstream curb.

The initials J.M. are probably those of John Mills. The 1652 Loxwood chapel trustee renewal had named John Mills of Brewhurst, yeoman, and John Mills the younger. The initials could belong to either man; the bridge itself places the Mills name on a substantial new structure beside the Brewhurst estate.

The bridge served an established mill and farm. Brewhurst watermill had been named in 1554. The mill required access for grain, flour, timber, livestock and repairs. A stone bridge on Brewhurst Lane improved the crossing of the stream used by carts, riders and people moving between the mill, the farms and the roads towards Loxwood and Drungewick.

The two arches and central pier divided the waterway into separate openings, while the upstream cutwater reduced the force of floodwater against the masonry. For the mill estate, a reliable crossing mattered through every season: grain had to reach the mill before grinding, meal and flour had to leave again, and sacks, tools, timber and livestock used the same lane. The dated stonework fixes that investment to Charles II’s reign.

Brewhurst Bridge survives where carts and riders needed to cross the stream. Its arches, pier, cutwater, date and initials give Charles II’s reign a local object that can be read directly on the ground.

Indulgence, Billingshurst and the Test Act, 1672-1673

Charles tried a different religious policy in 1672. His Declaration of Indulgence suspended the penal laws against Protestant Nonconformists and Catholics by royal prerogative. Ministers and meeting places could apply for licences. For a short period people who had worshipped under threat of fines or arrest could meet with official permission.

At Billingshurst, Peter Draper’s house was licensed for Presbyterian worship. The village lay only a few miles east of Loxwood on the road and property networks already used by local families. In 1672 a named house there became a lawful meeting place for worship outside the parish church.

Parliament objected to the king’s claim that he could suspend statutes by prerogative. Charles withdrew the Declaration in March 1673. Parliament then passed the Test Act, requiring holders of public office to take the oaths and receive Anglican communion while rejecting Catholic doctrine specified by the statute. James, Duke of York, the king’s brother and heir, resigned his offices rather than comply, making his Catholicism unmistakable.

The movement from punishment to licence and back to restriction could be measured locally in doors opening and closing. Peter Draper’s house at Billingshurst had received a licence in 1672. Horsham gaol held Quakers who had refused oaths. Kirdford had lost a Presbyterian vicar after 1660. The national law acted through houses, parish livings, magistrates and prisons across the same part of Sussex.

Burial in Woollen, 1666-1679

Parliament also reached parish life through the clothes placed around the dead. An Act of 1666, strengthened by later legislation in 1678 and 1679, required bodies to be buried in woollen cloth. The purpose was economic: Parliament wanted burial to consume English wool and support the domestic woollen industry.

The law relied on parish burial records and sworn evidence. Families had to arrange a woollen shroud and provide the required declaration. Failure could bring a financial penalty. A national attempt to support the woollen industry entered the final preparations for a funeral, when clergy and relatives were already dealing with death, burial and the parish register.

Burials for Loxwood went to the mother church at Wisborough Green under the old parochial arrangement. A Loxwood household arranging a burial met the woollen law through the same parish register and churchyard that had served the chapelry for centuries.

The legislation also belonged naturally to a region of sheep, cloth and market exchange. Kirdford inventories list livestock and household textiles; Horsham, Petworth and Guildford connected rural producers with wider trade. Every lawful burial had to use a material chosen by Parliament for the benefit of the woollen economy.

The Secret Treaty of Dover and French Money, 1670-1674

Behind the public religious settlement Charles had made a secret agreement with Louis XIV of France in 1670. The Treaty of Dover promised French subsidies and included Charles’s commitment to convert to Catholicism at a suitable time. The arrangement gave the king money that could reduce his immediate dependence on Parliament and tied English foreign policy more closely to France.

England joined France against the Dutch in 1672, beginning the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The alliance was unpopular with many English Protestants, who saw the Dutch Republic as a Protestant state and France as the strongest Catholic monarchy in Europe. The war added to suspicion already sharpened by James’s conversion and the Declaration of Indulgence.

Charles’s finances broke down before the war began. In January 1672 the Crown stopped repayment of some Exchequer debts in the Stop of the Exchequer. Bankers and creditors suffered losses. The episode damaged confidence in royal finance. French subsidies helped Charles temporarily, but the Crown required parliamentary revenue for larger expenses.

Taxation, credit and political news carried the financial consequences into the Western Weald. Government borrowing and war affected creditors and large landowners at Petworth, Arundel and Drungewick, while smaller tenants dealt with rents and markets in pounds, shillings and pence.

Peter Gunning, Ralph Brideoake and the Chichester Diocese

Henry King died in 1669. Peter Gunning became Bishop of Chichester in 1670, followed by Ralph Brideoake in 1675. Both inherited a diocese shaped by the 1662 Prayer Book and the laws against Nonconformity. Clergy were licensed and visited through episcopal authority; churchwardens presented defects and offences; parish churches used the authorised liturgy.

The cathedral itself had moved from emergency repair into a longer Restoration programme. Worship, the chapter and the library had been rebuilt after the destruction of the 1640s. By the 1670s bishops again exercised the offices that Parliament had abolished during Charles I’s war.

Loxwood’s place in that structure was simple in law and important in practice. The chapel belonged to Wisborough Green parish. A minister serving Loxwood did so under the parish incumbent and Bishop of Chichester. The parish incumbent and bishop governed doctrine and worship; the trustees held the property that supported the building.

Across the boundary, Alfold answered to Winchester. The old diocesan line separated Chichester from Winchester just as it had in 1404 and under the Tudors. A farmer could cross from Sussex into Surrey in a short ride while moving from one bishop’s jurisdiction to another.

Ifold and the Petworth Connection, 1678

The Manor of Ifold changed hands during the later years of Charles II. By 1678 it had passed to John Cooke of Petworth and then to Henry Barnard, also of Petworth. The transaction tied a manor between Loxwood and Plaistow to owners identified with the larger market and estate centre to the west.

Ifold had passed out of Browne ownership before James I’s reign, when William Browne sold it to John Gratwicke of Wisborough Green in 1596. By the Restoration its ownership had moved again. The road through Ifold linked Loxwood with Plaistow and Kirdford, making the manor part of the same network of farms and property routes rather than an isolated estate.

Petworth itself was under Algernon Percy until his death in 1668 and then under the next generation of the Percy family. The political role of the tenth earl belonged chiefly to Charles I’s reign, but the estate was one of the largest centres of landholding and employment in western Sussex.

In the same year Parliament tightened the Test laws against Catholics. While MPs argued over religion at court, John Cooke and Henry Barnard were dealing with a manor on the Loxwood-Plaistow road through the ordinary law of property.

Mary, William of Orange and the Protestant Succession, 1677

The succession problem became sharper because Charles and Catherine had no legitimate children. James, Duke of York, stood next in line and his Catholicism was public after the Test Act. In 1677 James’s elder daughter Mary married William of Orange, Stadholder of the Dutch Republic and one of the leading Protestant princes in Europe.

The marriage joined two branches of the Stuart family to a former enemy only ten years after the Dutch raid on the Medway. It also gave English Protestants a possible future in which James’s Protestant daughter and her husband might stand close to the throne. Charles supported the marriage while resisting parliamentary attempts to determine the succession.

News of the marriage reached a Western Weald already divided by the legal categories of Anglican, Presbyterian, Quaker and Catholic. At Kirdford an ejected Presbyterian minister was part of recent memory; Billingshurst had received a Presbyterian licence in 1672; the established churches at Wisborough Green, Loxwood and Plaistow used the Prayer Book. The religion of the royal heir belonged to the same public argument in which religious identity affected office, worship and punishment.

The following year the Popish Plot panic made James’s position more dangerous. The Test Act had already forced James from public office. Parliament now moved to the larger question of whether he could inherit the Crown at all. Mary’s marriage to William gave that argument a Protestant dynastic alternative that would become decisive after Charles’s death.

The Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-1681

In 1678 Titus Oates claimed that a Catholic conspiracy planned to murder Charles and place James, Duke of York, on the throne. The story was false, but fear of Catholic plots was already rooted in memories of 1605, the Civil War and recent conflict with France. Oates’s allegations produced arrests, trials and executions before his credibility collapsed.

Parliament passed a second Test Act in 1678 excluding Catholics from the Lords and Commons, with an exception for James. The larger question was now succession. James, the king’s Catholic brother, stood next in line because Charles and Catherine had produced no legitimate heir. MPs who wanted to exclude James argued that a Catholic king would endanger the Church of England and parliamentary government.

In 1679 Parliament also passed the Habeas Corpus Act, tightening the procedure by which prisoners could require gaolers to bring them before a court and justify detention. A gaoler receiving the writ had to produce the prisoner and state the legal cause of confinement within prescribed time limits; judges could then deal with bail where the offence allowed it. The Act imposed penalties for evasion and strengthened judicial scrutiny of imprisonment. Its machinery of warrants, gaolers and justices belonged to the same legal world already visible at Horsham.

Charles dissolved the long Cavalier Parliament in January 1679. Three short Parliaments between 1679 and 1681 were dominated by exclusion. Bills to bar James advanced in the Commons but failed to become law. The labels Whig and Tory emerged from the dispute: Whigs favoured exclusion; Tories defended hereditary succession and the established Church.

The argument mattered in Sussex because religion was already visible in parish discipline, licensed meeting houses and gaols. A Billingshurst Presbyterian, a Horsham Quaker prisoner, an Anglican churchwarden at Wisborough Green and the Catholic heir to the throne occupied very different positions, but all were affected by the same question of how much religious difference the state would permit.

Guy Carleton and the Last Years of the Reign, 1679-1685

Guy Carleton became Bishop of Chichester in 1679. His episcopate coincided with the Exclusion Crisis and the political reaction that followed it. Clergy were expected to use the 1662 Prayer Book, enforce parish discipline and report unlawful religious meetings, while the Crown and magistrates pressed harder against opponents after 1681.

The Oxford Parliament met in March 1681 because Charles feared disorder in London. It lasted only days. When the Commons again pursued exclusion, Charles dissolved Parliament. No Parliament met again before his death. French subsidies and improved royal finances allowed Charles to govern for the final four years without asking Parliament for new supply.

The political reaction brought prosecutions against leading Whigs and tighter pressure on dissent. The Rye House Plot of 1683, a scheme associated with plans to attack Charles and James as they returned from Newmarket, intensified the government’s campaign. Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney were executed after trials for treason. James’s succession became more secure as the exclusion movement collapsed.

Brewhurst Bridge, the Loxwood trade tokens, the Drungewick-Onslow connection, the Ifold conveyances and Peter Draper’s licensed house at Billingshurst all date from the same two decades in which exclusion and succession dominated Parliament.

Charles II Dies and James II Succeeds, 1685

Charles II suffered a sudden illness at Whitehall in February 1685. During his final illness he was received into the Catholic Church. He died on 6 February without a legitimate child. His brother James, Duke of York, succeeded as James II of England and Ireland and James VII of Scotland. The private conversion closed a reign repeatedly troubled by Parliament’s fear of Catholic influence and the Catholic succession; James now took the crowns openly as a Catholic king.

John Lake became Bishop of Chichester in 1685 after Guy Carleton. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer was the authorised service book in the diocese, and the laws that Charles’s Parliaments had made against dissent were in force. James now inherited those laws as a Catholic king who wanted greater freedom for Catholics and a larger use of royal prerogative.

The next recorded Loxwood trustee renewal would come in 1693. George Shudd the elder and George Shudd the younger from the 1652 body survived to make that conveyance. Brewhurst Bridge had carried Brewhurst Lane since 1672, and the private farthings bearing Loxwood’s name belonged to the small-change economy that Charles’s copper coinage had replaced. The next reign would test the Restoration settlement far more quickly than Charles’s twenty-five years on the throne.