1685-1688: James II, Bishop John Lake, the Loxwood Chapel and the Revolution in the Western Weald

James II Takes the Crown, February-April 1685

James addressed the Privy Council on the day of his accession and promised to preserve the government in Church and State as established by law. The promise mattered because the legal Church of England required royal supremacy, episcopal government and the Prayer Book, while the new sovereign worshipped as a Catholic. James could appoint bishops and other senior officers of the Crown, but statutes excluded Catholics from many offices unless the king could dispense with the statutory tests. His first months joined a conventional hereditary succession to a constitutional problem already formed before Charles II died.

The royal name changed immediately in prayers, proclamations, writs and public business. Clergy who had prayed for Charles now prayed for James. Sheriffs, justices of the peace, mayors and constables received commissions and exercised royal authority under the new sovereign. In Sussex, Charles Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset, was confirmed as lord lieutenant in March. The office placed him above the county militia and made him an important channel between the Crown and the gentlemen who served as deputy lieutenants and justices. Royal instructions about security, militia and county government passed into Sussex through this named officer and his deputies.

James and Mary of Modena were crowned in Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1685. Archbishop William Sancroft conducted the coronation. The ceremony placed a Catholic king inside the traditional English coronation church and used the regalia remade for Charles II after the Commonwealth. James entered the coronation as a practising Catholic and left it as one. The distinction between the monarch’s private religion and the public religion established by statute now stood at the centre of government.

At Loxwood, the minister used the 1662 Prayer Book under the new king. The chapel congregation heard Scripture in English and received communion according to the Church of England. The local evidence places the medieval altar in concealment and the chapel in Anglican use. The king’s Catholicism entered village life through law, appointments, oaths and the dispute over who could hold office.

Guy Carleton, the 1685 Election and Chichester

Guy Carleton occupied the see of Chichester when James succeeded. Carleton had spent the closing years of Charles II’s reign fighting political and religious opponents in the cathedral city. He had denounced the enthusiastic reception given to the Duke of Monmouth at Chichester in 1680, when cathedral clergy welcomed the duke with bells, bonfires, music and a prominent seat in the cathedral. Carleton refused to join the celebration. A crowd later demanded wood for bonfires from the bishop’s house, called him an old popish rogue, fired shots into the house and threw stones. The episode had made Chichester’s divisions visible before Monmouth became an armed rebel.

The surrender of Chichester’s old civic charter in August 1684 gave the Crown an opportunity to reshape the corporation. Negotiations over a replacement ran into 1685 and involved Carleton because he wanted the cathedral precinct protected from civic jurisdiction and wanted the bishop and chapter to keep electoral influence. James granted a new charter to Chichester during the opening year of his reign. The document placed the city’s offices and privileges under a royal grant at the same time that the Crown was taking a close interest in corporations throughout England.

A general election in March brought the contest directly into Sussex. Carleton worked for candidates who supported the court and later told Archbishop Sancroft that clerical influence over parish freeholders had helped decide the county election. Sir Henry Goring and Sir Thomas Dyke were returned for Sussex, while Sir Richard May and George Gounter represented Chichester. Carleton’s own account identifies the method rather than individual Loxwood votes: clergy could speak to freeholders in their parishes and the bishop could coordinate that interest across the diocese.

The route from episcopal influence to Loxwood passed through Wisborough Green. The vicar and parish officers served the parish in which Loxwood chapel stood, and the Bishop of Chichester supervised the clergy. The chapel trustees held land and houses for the support of the local building; their office concerned property rather than parliamentary or ecclesiastical jurisdiction. A trustee could manage rent from chapel land while living under the same county elections, parish administration and episcopal authority as other freeholders.

Parliament Meets and Gives James a Strong Opening, May 1685

James’s first Parliament met on 19 May. Its Commons contained a large Tory and Anglican majority, and the opening session gave the king substantial financial support. Many members who had opposed exclusion accepted hereditary succession and expected James to honour the established Church. The early relationship between king and Parliament rested on that exchange: Parliament recognised and financed the new monarchy; James had publicly promised to protect the Church and law.

Guy Carleton attended the House of Lords during the opening session. His presence connected the Bishop of Chichester directly with the Parliament that began the reign. He sat through much of the session and attended for the last time on 2 July. Four days later, on 6 July, he died. The date coincided with the battle that destroyed the most serious armed challenge James faced in England.

Before Carleton’s death, the threat had already forced county officers to turn from elections to security. James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, crossed from the Continent and landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset on 11 June. He was Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, a Protestant and the political figure whose popularity had alarmed Carleton five years earlier. Monmouth now claimed the throne and tried to raise support in the West Country.

Monmouth Lands and Sussex Goes on Guard, June-July 1685

Monmouth’s rising developed west of Sussex, and county officers treated it as a security threat. Dorset, as lord lieutenant, had to keep the militia and deputy lieutenants ready and maintain public order. At the beginning of July he asked permission to leave the county. The government allowed him to go only if his deputies took particular care over Chichester, which officials regarded as politically unreliable because of its earlier support for Monmouth and exclusionist candidates.

Chichester’s position explains why a rebellion centred in Dorset and Somerset mattered to the Western Weald. The city stood south of Loxwood at the head of the diocese and on the road network joining western Sussex to the coast. Arundel and Petworth lay between the northern Weald and the coastal plain. Horsham, Billingshurst, Pulborough and Guildford carried traffic inland. County lieutenancy, justices and local officers could watch roads, arms, travellers and political meetings across Sussex while the rebel army operated farther west.

Monmouth attracted artisans, farmers, cloth workers, miners and dissenters in the western counties, but his army failed to draw enough gentry and trained soldiers. He moved through Dorset and Somerset while royal forces concentrated against him. The Crown had already begun to keep a larger standing force after years of concern about war and rebellion. James now used professional troops, militia and loyal local officers against a claimant who had once entered Chichester to bells and bonfires.

The Battle of Sedgemoor was fought near Bridgwater during the night of 5-6 July 1685. Monmouth attempted a surprise attack on the royal camp but his force was detected before it could achieve the intended shock. Royal troops defeated the rebels. Monmouth fled, was captured and taken to London. He was executed on Tower Hill on 15 July.

The military campaign stayed west of Sussex. In Loxwood, its effects arrived through the same machinery that had watched Chichester: county lieutenants, deputy lieutenants, magistrates, clergy and news travelling on the roads. The earlier Chichester reception gave the government a reason to watch the city closely, while Loxwood households worked in a district linked by ordinary travel to Chichester, Petworth and Horsham.

Sedgemoor, the Bloody Assizes and the Power of the Courts

After the victory, special commissions and assizes prosecuted hundreds of people accused of taking part in the rising or helping rebels. Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys presided over the proceedings later called the Bloody Assizes. Courts sentenced many defendants to death and transported many others to the Caribbean. The punishments were intended to destroy the rebel network and deter another attempt against the Crown.

The assizes displayed a form of royal power familiar in structure to rural Sussex even when the sentences were unusually severe. Sheriffs summoned juries; magistrates gathered evidence; gaolers held prisoners; judges travelled on commission; written warrants moved between officers. Horsham served Sussex as a place of county justice and imprisonment. Local inhabitants already knew that religion and loyalty could lead to arrest through the experience of Quakers such as Ambrose Rigge under Charles II.

The Monmouth rising also strengthened James’s argument for a larger standing army. He expanded the forces maintained in peacetime and appointed Catholic officers to some commands. Parliament had accepted strong action against rebellion but objected when the king sought to exempt Catholics from the Test Acts by royal authority. The dispute opened in the autumn of 1685 because the same army that had defeated Monmouth now became part of a constitutional argument over statute, office and religion.

For farms around Loxwood, an army was measured through men, horses, fodder, carts, taxation and markets. The surviving local sources record the farms, woods, mills and roads from which county society drew transport and provisions rather than a named 1685 military requisition from a Loxwood holding. The stone bridge at Brewhurst carried carts to and from the mill while national government argued over the soldiers who had crushed the rebellion.

Guy Carleton Dies and John Lake Comes to Chichester

Guy Carleton died on 6 July 1685, the day of Sedgemoor. His death ended an episcopate shaped by the Exclusion Crisis, disputes with Chichester corporation and determined opposition to Protestant dissent. James filled the vacancy with John Lake, who was translated to Chichester in October after serving as Bishop of Bristol. Lake had fought for Charles I as a young Royalist before entering holy orders. His career tied the restored episcopate to the Civil War generation already present throughout the Loxwood story.

Lake entered a diocese in which loyalty to the Stuart monarchy and loyalty to the Church of England could initially be treated as the same political cause. He had supported hereditary monarchy and episcopal government. The king who appointed him was the lawful Stuart successor. Yet Lake also belonged to an Anglican hierarchy governed by statutes and the Prayer Book. During the next three years James would ask bishops to accept uses of the prerogative that Lake judged incompatible with the law and his duty as a bishop.

The change at Chichester reached Loxwood through ordinary diocesan authority. Lake could ordain clergy, issue visitation orders, supervise church discipline and require information about parish buildings and worship. Wisborough Green supplied the parochial link to the Loxwood chapel. The chapel’s trustees managed its endowed property, while the bishop, vicar and parish officers dealt with ministry and authorised services.

Across the nearby diocesan boundary, Alfold answered to the Bishop of Winchester. That boundary had mattered since the medieval period and had survived every Tudor and Stuart religious settlement. James’s policies were national, but bishops implemented or resisted them within their own dioceses. A resident at Loxwood and a resident at Alfold could receive the same royal policy through different episcopal chains only a few miles apart.

An Anglican Chapel under a Catholic King

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer ordered the worship heard at Loxwood in 1685. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer used English psalms, lessons, collects and responses. Holy Communion used bread and wine at a communion table. Baptism, marriage and the thanksgiving of women after childbirth also followed the Prayer Book. Loxwood burials used the parochial rights of Wisborough Green and its churchyard.

The English Bible formed part of this worship. The translation published in 1611 had become the dominant Bible for church reading during the seventeenth century, although other English versions could circulate in private hands. The surviving Loxwood material identifies a working Anglican chapel, a silver communion cup and a trust that supported the building rather than a particular Bible volume. Public reading made Scripture available beyond households that owned large printed Bibles.

The chapel’s dedication to St John the Baptist also carried its older name into a Protestant service. The Prayer Book calendar appointed the Nativity of St John the Baptist on 24 June and provided biblical lessons connected with him. The dedication now operated within a Protestant calendar after Tudor legislation had removed the medieval lights, images and intercessory Masses once associated with saints. The congregation could hear the story of John in English while using a building named for him.

A few yards away, Church Cottage contained the surviving fabric of the first oratory authorised in 1404 and built in the early fifteenth century. Its chancel arch, medieval timbers and other reused elements belonged to the building from which the later chapel developed. The original altar stone had been removed from worship during Edward VI’s reign and concealed inside the house. James’s accession placed a Catholic sovereign above an Anglican Church, but the local object associated with the medieval Mass stayed in its hiding place in every surviving record used for this project.

Christopher Butler’s Chalice and the Communion Table

The silver chalice given by Christopher Butler in 1637 was one of the clearest religious objects in Loxwood during James II’s reign. Its inscription named Butler as Vicar of Wisborough Green and named the Chapel of Loxwood as the recipient. The vessel had been made in 1623 and survived the Civil War, the parliamentary abolition of the Prayer Book, the Restoration and the accession of a Catholic king.

At Holy Communion the minister used a cup for the wine. The 1662 rite required communicants to receive according to the Church of England’s form, and the chalice supplied the physical vessel for that service. The stone altar in Church Cottage belonged to an earlier sacramental arrangement; the seventeenth-century chapel used a communion table. These two objects put several phases of English religious change within a few yards of one another without requiring a speculative story about their use.

The trustees paid for the material needs of the chapel from property and rents. Roofs, glazing, seats, books, bell fittings and repairs cost money. Willetts, beside the chapel site, had developed from property supplied for the chaplain and was described in earlier conveyances through successive occupants. Cokkes, Calletts Haw and other holdings had also entered the chapel’s property history. The 1652 trustees carried responsibility for title and income into James’s reign; the next recorded collective renewal came in 1693 after the Revolution.

George Shudd the elder and George Shudd the younger give that continuity named people. Both men were members of the 1652 trustee body and both survived to take part in the 1693 transfer. Their lives crossed Charles II, James II and the accession of William and Mary. During James’s three-year reign they belonged to a larger group whose legal title preserved the chapel property while Parliament and Crown fought over the legal limits of religious policy.

Lake Orders an Inspection of Sussex Churches, 1686

John Lake appointed commissioners in 1686 to inquire into the condition of parish churches and their furniture. Surviving returns from other parts of the diocese provide concrete examples of what his officers found. At Poynings the church and chancel were structurally sound, but pigeons fouled the chancel and the communion table was poor. At Portslade the communion cup was battered and cracked. At Old Shoreham officers found a weak pulpit, decayed steeple floor, ruined out-chapel, cracked cup, decayed church wall and ruined vicarage buildings.

Other returns recorded more serious failures. At Ovingdean the respondents reported no communion within living memory; the small steeple had no bell because the bell lay without a clapper in a private house. At Fairlight the steeple was dangerous, one bell lay on the ground and another had been broken. At Winchelsea only one bell survived, communion linen and a surplice were lacking, pigs entered the churchyard and the parsonage house had been demolished and its materials sold.

These returns concern other parishes in the Diocese of Chichester. Lake’s commissioners examined communion tables and cups, pulpits, bells, church walls, roofs, clergy houses, linen, surplices and the regular celebration of communion. At Loxwood, the evidence for the same period comes from the surviving chalice, chapel property, trustee history and the physical fabric of the chapel site.

The commission also gives James II’s first full year a local ecclesiastical setting independent of the later conflict over the Declaration of Indulgence. Lake was governing his diocese through ordinary episcopal work before he became one of the king’s most famous opponents. He appointed men to examine buildings, objects and services because those were the practical means by which the Church of England functioned in a parish.

The Western Weald at Work during James’s Short Reign

The political crises of 1685-1688 occupied London, Chichester and county offices, while farms and mills around Loxwood followed the agricultural year. Grain had to be sown, harvested, carted and ground. Cattle and pigs needed pasture and fodder. Woods supplied oak, underwood, fencing material and fuel. Smiths repaired ironwork; carpenters worked on timber frames, carts and farm equipment; millers maintained wheels, sluices and gears.

Brewhurst gives the clearest physical example. The watermill had appeared in sixteenth-century records and formed part of an estate held by the Myll or Mills family during the seventeenth century. The 1672 stone bridge carried Brewhurst Lane across the stream with two elliptical arches, a central pier and an upstream cutwater. The initials J.M. on the bridge probably refer to one of the John Mills named in the 1652 chapel trustee body; the evidence identifies the family but cannot distinguish between the two men.

A cart carrying sacks to the mill used the same local route network that linked houses, farms and villages. Brewhurst Lane ran towards Loxwood and Drungewick. The river crossing at Loxwood joined routes towards Wisborough Green, Alfold and the Surrey side. Roads led east towards Billingshurst and Horsham and south-west towards Petworth and Pulborough. Government orders, legal notices, market news and accounts of rebellion could travel along the same roads used for ordinary work; individual messengers rarely entered the surviving local record.

The surviving houses give the reign a recognisable physical setting. Garton House had been built about 1620. Fletchings had been recorded under a very long sixteenth-century lease and appeared as Flitchfold alias Flitchings in a 1614 record. Box and Ryley included a timber range from around 1500 with early-seventeenth-century enlargement. Spy Farm contained an older open-hall core and had appeared under the name Spicers and later Spye Lands. The farmhouse later called the Onslow Arms stood near Loxwood Bridge. The Onslow Arms name belongs to 1801 and later; during James II’s reign the building was a farmhouse beside the crossing.

Loxwood Place also carried earlier occupation into the reign. Archaeological and building research places medieval and early post-medieval activity on the site, while later descriptions record the older farmhouse, timber framing and moat. The granary associated with Loxwood Place belongs to the eighteenth century and enters a later reign. In 1685 the relevant object is the established house and holding beside the chapel.

The occupants and tenants of these buildings paid rent, worked land, travelled to markets and church, served in parish offices when chosen and lived under county law. The Crown’s policies reached a society organised through such households. A justice of the peace, constable, churchwarden or freeholder dealt with national orders through the same local economy that kept the mill turning and the chapel roof repaired.

Parliament Refuses James’s Exemptions, November 1685

The political agreement of the opening session broke down when Parliament met again in November 1685. James wanted Catholic officers who had served during the Monmouth crisis to keep their commissions without complying with the Test Acts. Many Tory MPs supported hereditary monarchy and the established Church but refused to give the king a general power to set aside statutory religious qualifications. The dispute separated loyalty to James’s title from agreement with his policy.

James adjourned Parliament in November and then kept it away through repeated prorogations. He eventually dissolved it in July 1687. No new English Parliament met during the rest of his reign. The king increasingly relied on the royal dispensing power to excuse named individuals from statutes and on prerogative government to advance religious changes that Parliament had refused to enact.

The legal issue had a direct counterpart in parish life. A statute gave a rule that local officeholders and courts were expected to apply. A royal dispensation instructed an officer or court to treat a named person as exempt. Arguments in Westminster about the boundary between statute and prerogative could change who held a commission, who served as a justice and which religious tests an officeholder had to take. County government depended on those appointments.

In Sussex, Lord Lieutenant Dorset began the reign as a court supporter but moved into opposition as James pushed for repeal of the Test Acts and penal laws. The shift is important because it identifies a county officer who first served James and then resisted the king’s programme. The same man who had supervised Sussex security during Monmouth’s rebellion lost the lieutenancy after his effort to obtain the answers James wanted from the county failed.

The Ecclesiastical Commission and the Use of Royal Prerogative, 1686

James also created a Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes in 1686. The body exercised powers over clergy and institutions of the Church and gave the Crown an alternative to ordinary episcopal discipline for enforcing royal policy. One of its best-known actions was the suspension of Henry Compton, Bishop of London, after he refused to suspend a clergyman at the king’s command. The conflict warned other bishops that royal pressure could reach their offices directly.

John Lake’s own 1686 church inspection belonged to ordinary diocesan government; the royal ecclesiastical commission belonged to James’s prerogative policy. The distinction mattered. Lake could send commissioners to report a cracked cup or ruined steeple because a bishop had long supervised church fabric and worship. James’s new commission claimed authority to discipline bishops and churchmen in support of royal religious policy. The later clash between James and Lake grew from this question of who could lawfully command the Church and by what legal power.

The king’s Catholic worship at court also became more public. Catholic chapels, clergy and ceremonies appeared close to the royal household, and Catholics received appointments under royal dispensations. English Catholics who had lived under penal statutes saw opportunities that had been closed for generations. Many Anglicans interpreted the same appointments through the memory of the Marian restoration, the Gunpowder Plot and the recent Popish Plot panic.

Sussex itself contained several religious experiences. The established churches at Wisborough Green, Loxwood, Kirdford, Plaistow and neighbouring parishes used the Prayer Book. John Beaton had lost the Kirdford living after the Restoration settlement after refusing conformity. Quakers had faced imprisonment at Horsham. Peter Draper’s house at Billingshurst had received a Presbyterian licence under Charles II’s short Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. James governed a district where Anglican worship, Protestant dissent and the memory of religious prosecution already existed within a few miles of one another.

The Declaration of Indulgence, 1687

In April 1687 James issued a Declaration of Indulgence for England. He suspended the operation of penal laws that restricted both Roman Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists and declared that conscience should be free from religious coercion. The policy offered real relief to people who had been fined, excluded from office or prevented from worshipping openly. It also depended on the king’s claim that his prerogative allowed him to suspend statutes by royal authority rather than parliamentary enactment.

The Declaration brought together two questions that should be kept distinct. One concerned religious liberty. Catholics, Quakers, Presbyterians, Independents and other Dissenters could welcome freedom from penalties. The other concerned legal authority. Many Anglicans and some Protestant Dissenters feared that a king who could suspend one statute at will could suspend other laws as well. Their objection addressed the mechanism used by James as well as the religious beneficiaries of his policy.

Around Loxwood, the Declaration could change the legal position of worship outside the parish church. A Presbyterian family at Billingshurst or a Quaker meeting elsewhere in Sussex could gain protection from laws used against separate worship. Inside St John the Baptist’s chapel, the minister used the 1662 Prayer Book under Bishop Lake. The two forms of worship could now operate under different parts of the king’s religious policy.

The surviving local material identifies the earlier Billingshurst licence and other evidence of Protestant dissent rather than a new 1687 Loxwood meeting place. Those records supply the local context: separate Protestant worship had existed, magistrates had enforced penal laws, and the king now suspended those laws by proclamation. The change concerned identifiable houses and congregations even where the later meeting records are incomplete.

Refugees, Trade and the Argument for Toleration

James’s Declaration referred to peace of conscience and also to the encouragement of trade and strangers. The language belonged to a Europe in which governments could drive skilled families across borders by religious persecution. Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in France in 1685, ending the legal protections that had allowed French Protestants to worship under restrictions. Huguenot refugees left France for England, the Dutch Republic and other Protestant states.

The older history of the Diocese of Chichester records an increase in French Protestant settlement in the eastern part of Sussex after 1685, especially around Rye. The record concerns eastern Sussex and supplies county context rather than a Loxwood household. Religious persecution and migration had direct Sussex examples. Refugees entered the same county in which James was asking Catholics and Protestant Dissenters to support his programme of legal toleration.

Trade provided another practical connection. Refugees brought labour, craft knowledge and commercial contacts; rural producers sold grain, livestock, timber and other goods through market networks. James presented toleration partly as a policy that would allow subjects and newcomers to live and work free from religious coercion. His opponents could support wider toleration while rejecting the unilateral suspension of statutes. The arguments could overlap without being identical.

The Duke of Somerset Refuses the Papal Nuncio, 1687

Petworth brought the conflict at court unusually close to the Western Weald. Elizabeth Percy, heiress of the great Percy estates, had married Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset, in 1682. The marriage placed Petworth and other Percy properties in the household of one of the highest-ranking peers in the kingdom. Somerset held court office under James and served as first lord of the bedchamber.

In July 1687 James ordered Somerset to take part in the formal reception of Ferdinando d’Adda, the papal nuncio. Public reception of a papal representative carried exceptional political meaning in a kingdom whose laws rejected papal jurisdiction. Somerset refused the duty. James dismissed him from his court offices. The dispute turned a national question about Catholic diplomacy and law into an event involving the lord of Petworth.

Petworth stood within a day’s regional movement of Loxwood through Pulborough and the roads of the Western Weald. Estate stewards, tenants, craftsmen and suppliers dealt with the great house regardless of a court quarrel, but the owner had now lost office after refusing a royal command connected with the papal nuncio. The same reign that placed John Lake at Chichester placed Charles Seymour in conflict with the king over Catholic policy.

The careers of Somerset, Dorset and Lake cut across a simple division between Catholics and Protestants. Somerset had served James and held royal office; Dorset began as lord lieutenant under the new king; Lake owed his translation to the Stuart monarchy. Each later resisted a different part of James’s programme. Their opposition developed from questions of law, Church, office and command rather than from opposition to hereditary monarchy at the moment of accession.

James Tests the County Gentry, 1687-1688

By late 1687 James wanted a Parliament that would repeal the Test Acts and penal laws. His government began asking leading men in the counties whether they would support repeal, whether they would vote for candidates who supported it and whether they would assist the king’s electoral programme. The questions turned private opinion into a test for public office.

Justices of the peace and lord lieutenants mattered because county government depended on them. A justice heard cases, licensed or punished aspects of local conduct, dealt with poor-law and highway matters and helped enforce statutes. A lord lieutenant organized the militia and coordinated county defence. Removing a man from a commission could change the personnel through whom ordinary government reached parishes.

Dorset tried in January 1687 to prevent some local justices from being removed. Later lists placed him among opponents of repealing the Test. In January 1688 James dismissed him as lord lieutenant of Sussex after he failed to persuade county opinion towards repeal. The surviving account states that Dorset himself shared the opposition he encountered. Support for religious legislation now affected who commanded the Sussex militia.

James appointed Francis Browne, fourth Viscount Montagu, to replace Dorset. The Brownes of Cowdray were one of Sussex’s prominent Catholic families. A Catholic peer now held the county lieutenancy while the king pressed for the removal of legal disabilities affecting Catholics. Montagu’s appointment changed the county’s senior military office while the Loxwood minister used the Anglican Prayer Book. James’s religious and political strategy now had a named Sussex officer.

Chichester, County Office and Local Government

The changes in the lieutenancy accompanied the Crown’s wider effort to influence corporations and commissions. Chichester had already received its new royal charter in 1685. The city contained a mayor and corporation, cathedral chapter, clergy, traders, craftsmen and a history of bitter political division. The government could act there through civic officers, the bishop, county magistrates and the lord lieutenant, each with a different legal responsibility.

Loxwood lay outside the city corporation but inside the same county and diocese. Parish officers at Wisborough Green handled poor relief, churchwardens’ duties and other parochial business; local constables dealt with warrants and order; justices sat above them in county administration. The chapel trustees occupied another legal role by holding property for St John the Baptist’s chapel. The structure mattered because one royal policy could engage several offices without making them interchangeable.

A command about militia readiness passed through the lord lieutenant and deputies. A church order passed through bishops and clergy. A poor rate was raised through parish officers. A chapel rent was collected by trustees. A corporation charter governed Chichester rather than Loxwood. James’s reign repeatedly tested these lines of authority because he sought to use royal appointment and prerogative to alter the people administering statutory religious restrictions.

The Declaration Is Reissued and Ordered into Churches, 1688

James reissued his Declaration of Indulgence in April 1688. On 4 May the government ordered clergy to read it publicly in churches. The order made the conflict immediate for the Church of England because ministers were now expected to use the pulpit and service setting to publish a royal declaration founded on a suspending power many churchmen considered unlawful.

The reading dates were arranged differently for London and the rest of the country. Outside London the Declaration was appointed to be read on Sundays 3 and 10 June. In the Diocese of Chichester, John Lake had to decide whether a bishop should assist a royal policy that offered toleration but claimed a prerogative power over statutes. His decision placed the Western Weald’s diocesan bishop at the centre of the national crisis.

For Loxwood, the command concerned the same chapel in which the minister ordinarily read the Prayer Book and Scripture. A royal declaration read during worship would have entered a space normally organized by the liturgy. The surviving Loxwood record for those Sundays is silent about an actual reading. The diocesan response is explicit: Lake joined other bishops in asking James to withdraw the order.

The difference between the Declaration and the Prayer Book is important. The Prayer Book had statutory authority under the Act of Uniformity. James’s Declaration claimed the royal right to suspend statutes. The minister at Loxwood could obey the Prayer Book as established law while his bishop challenged the separate command to read the Declaration. The dispute concerned the legal authority behind words spoken inside a church.

John Lake Joins the Seven Bishops, May 1688

Archbishop Sancroft met with bishops at Lambeth as opposition among clergy grew. On 18 May Sancroft and six bishops signed a petition to James asking to be excused from publishing the Declaration. The signatories were the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of St Asaph, Ely, Chichester, Peterborough, Bristol, and Bath and Wells. John Lake signed as Bishop of Chichester.

The petition addressed legal authority rather than asking for renewed persecution of Dissenters. The bishops stated that the dispensing and suspending power used for the Declaration had been declared illegal in Parliament and that ordering the text read would make them parties to the disputed power. They presented the petition personally to the king.

James treated the petition as a challenge to royal authority. He summoned the bishops before the Council. On 8 June the government committed all seven to the Tower on a charge that led to prosecution for seditious libel. Their journey to prison turned a dispute over prerogative into a public spectacle. Crowds showed sympathy to bishops who had strong records of loyalty to monarchy and the established Church.

Lake’s imprisonment supplied the documented diocesan event available for the Western Weald. The Bishop of Chichester had been sent to the Tower by the king who appointed him. Clergy in Sussex knew why. A minister at Wisborough Green or Loxwood belonged to a diocese whose bishop was facing prosecution after refusing the ordered reading.

Dorset, dismissed from the Sussex lieutenancy earlier that year, was proposed as one of the peers willing to stand surety for a bishop when the seven sought bail. The former lord lieutenant had now moved from maintaining order for James during Monmouth’s rebellion to supporting bishops prosecuted by James. Sussex’s secular and ecclesiastical leadership had both entered opposition to the king’s later policy.

A Prince Is Born, 10 June 1688

While the bishops were under arrest, Mary of Modena gave birth to a son at St James’s Palace on 10 June. The child, James Francis Edward, displaced his Protestant half-sisters Mary and Anne in the immediate line of hereditary succession. Until that morning many opponents of James expected the crown eventually to pass to one of his Protestant daughters. A healthy son raised the prospect of another Catholic king.

The date fell on the second Sunday appointed for reading the Declaration outside London. Across England clergy and congregations were dealing with the royal order as the birth changed the dynastic future. In Chichester diocese, Lake was in custody. At Loxwood, the Prayer Book services took place in a chapel whose bishop had refused the reading order while news of a male heir began to travel through the kingdom.

Opponents of James quickly spread stories that the baby was not the queen’s child and had been smuggled into the birth chamber. The warming-pan story became one of the most famous pieces of political propaganda associated with the reign. The birth itself was genuine; the rumours show how little trust survived between the king and his opponents by June 1688.

The succession question that had dominated the Exclusion Crisis had returned in a different form. Parliament had refused to exclude James in Charles II’s reign because hereditary right and Anglican loyalty supported him. Three years later James had a Catholic son, a prosecuted group of Anglican bishops and no sitting Parliament. The coalition that had protected his succession was breaking apart.

The Seven Bishops Are Acquitted, 30 June 1688

The bishops were brought before the Court of King’s Bench. Their trial began at the end of June and attracted intense public attention. The prosecution argued that their petition was a seditious libel against the king’s authority. The defence challenged the charge and the legal basis of the suspending power. On 30 June the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

Celebration followed the acquittal in London and elsewhere. Bells, crowds and public rejoicing turned the legal decision into a political defeat for James. The older diocesan history records that Lake received warm demonstrations from Sussex gentlemen after his release. His reputation as a Royalist who had fought for Charles I made the conflict harder for James to dismiss as ordinary republican or dissenting opposition.

Lake had resisted James while affirming the monarchy and the Church of England. His position could be understood in parishes where the Prayer Book linked prayers for the king with obedience to bishops and law. The prosecution had forced those loyalties against one another. The acquittal allowed Lake to return to diocesan work with enhanced public authority among supporters of the established Church.

On the same day, 30 June, seven leading opponents of James signed an invitation asking William of Orange to come to England with armed support. Henry Compton, Bishop of London, was among the signatories. William was James’s nephew and the husband of James’s elder daughter Mary. The invitation joined Protestant succession, parliamentary government and foreign military intervention within hours of the bishops’ acquittal.

Petworth Begins a Great Rebuilding, 1688

The year of the Revolution also opened a major physical change at Petworth. Elizabeth Percy and Charles Seymour used the Percy inheritance to begin the grand rebuilding of Petworth House in the period starting in 1688. The work transformed the older house into a large Baroque residence over the following years. It brought masons, carpenters, carvers, painters, suppliers and estate labour into a project on the western side of the Loxwood district.

Somerset had lost royal office in 1687 after refusing to introduce the papal nuncio. Petworth nevertheless commanded extensive private wealth through Elizabeth Percy’s inheritance. Court dismissal and estate building moved in opposite directions: James removed a duke from office while the Petworth household used landed resources to employ craftsmen and reconstruct its principal house.

The building campaign also widened the local economic story. Timber, stone, lime, ironwork, transport, food and accommodation were needed by a great construction site. Loxwood’s chapel trust operated on a far smaller scale, paying for ordinary maintenance from rents, while Petworth spent aristocratic wealth on a palatial rebuilding. Both depended on deeds, land, labour and material supply in the same regional economy.

William Prepares an Invasion

William of Orange already governed the Dutch Republic and had fought Louis XIV of France. English political and religious opponents of James corresponded with him as the crisis deepened. The invitation of 30 June gave him formal encouragement from a group of English peers and political leaders, but his decision also served Dutch strategic interests by removing England from a position that might assist France.

Preparations required ships, soldiers, horses, arms, money and secrecy. James received warnings during the summer and autumn. He began reversing some unpopular measures, restored men to offices and promised a Parliament, but the changes came after years of distrust. The king also had to judge the loyalty of an army whose officers included men with close ties to his family and to Protestant political networks.

Sussex faced the Channel, while William chose a western landing at Brixham. Francis Browne, Viscount Montagu, held the Sussex lieutenancy while the government prepared against invasion. Chichester’s earlier reputation for political division and Monmouth sympathy gave county officers reason to watch public order even though the main military movement developed farther west.

Before the fleet sailed, the full diplomatic plan belonged to a small political network. News reached Loxwood in stages through markets, clergy, travellers, official notices and printed material. The district’s roads connected it with Guildford and London to the north, Horsham to the east, Petworth and Pulborough to the west and Chichester to the south. The political crisis travelled through a landscape already built for work and worship.

William Lands on 5 November 1688

William’s fleet reached the English coast and his army landed at Brixham on 5 November 1688. The date was the annual Protestant thanksgiving for the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. James I’s Parliament had placed that anniversary into public worship, and churches had observed it for more than eighty years. William’s landing on the same date gave his supporters a powerful Protestant association. The political symbolism accompanied a military fact: he had arrived with a foreign army.

William advanced through the south-west and towards London. James took command of forces assembled against him, but defections weakened the royal position. Officers and peers who had served the king judged that his government could no longer command their confidence. John Churchill, one of James’s senior officers, left the royal army and joined William. Prince George of Denmark, husband of Princess Anne, also defected.

Dorset joined the political pressure for a free Parliament. On 16 November he signed a petition asking James to call one. The former Sussex lord lieutenant now opposed the policy that had cost him office and sought a parliamentary settlement. His actions provide a county connection with the final weeks of the reign while William’s military columns advanced elsewhere.

Princess Anne then left her father’s court. Dorset and Bishop Compton helped arrange her escape from London. The king now faced opposition from his elder daughter Mary in the Netherlands, her husband William at the head of an invading army, and Anne outside his control. The royal family itself had divided along the same fault line of religion and government that divided Parliament and the bishops.

James’s Government Breaks Apart, November-December 1688

James tried to recover support by promising elections and restoring dismissed officeholders, but the military and political balance had shifted. William’s army advanced while English peers met and negotiated. The king withdrew from Salisbury and returned towards London as defections spread. The collapse came through defections and political negotiation rather than one national battle. Officers changed sides, corporations and counties assessed the new balance, and royal commands lost force as fewer people believed the government could survive.

Sussex escaped a major battlefield during the invasion. Its earlier political tensions nevertheless mattered because men such as Dorset were now participating in the opposition and because Chichester had a long record of exclusionist and dissenting activity. Montagu’s appointment as lord lieutenant had represented James’s effort to control county government; by December authority was shifting towards peers who could negotiate with William.

At Loxwood, the chapel opened for its ordinary services as the national government fractured. The Prayer Book named the king in its public prayers until authority changed. The chalice, communion table, bell, books and chapel building placed the constitutional crisis inside the weekly practice of a Church whose bishops had recently faced trial by the monarch named in those prayers.

The trustees also possessed legal title created under earlier governments. Their 1652 deed had been made under the Commonwealth and had survived the Restoration. George Shudd the elder and younger carried chapel property through another change of sovereign under English private law and local conveyancing.

James Leaves England, December 1688

James left London on 11 December and tried to escape. He threw the Great Seal into the Thames before travelling east, but fishermen and townsmen at Faversham detained him. He was brought back to London. William preferred James away from the capital and allowed circumstances in which the king could make another departure.

On 23 December James left England successfully and sailed for France. Louis XIV received him and Mary of Modena at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. James regarded himself as the lawful king and later tried to recover his kingdoms. In England, however, his departure left the practical question of government to William, peers and the Parliament that would be summoned as a Convention.

The events of 1688 are often called the Glorious Revolution. The name came from a later political interpretation and can conceal the violence that followed in Ireland and Scotland. In England the transfer involved invasion, military desertion, political negotiation and James’s flight rather than a large pitched battle between William and the royal army. The next constitutional settlement would define the legal consequences in 1689.

Loxwood Crosses into the Revolution Settlement

John Lake ended 1688 as Bishop of Chichester after resisting James’s order and surviving prosecution. His next decision would create a different conflict. When William and Mary required oaths of allegiance, Lake judged himself bound by the oath he had already sworn to James. The bishop who had opposed James’s use of prerogative would refuse the new oath and lose his see. That episode belongs to the next monarch article, but Lake carries the diocesan story directly across the change of regime.

The Loxwood chapel also crossed into the next reign with named trustees and physical objects already in place. George Shudd the elder and George Shudd the younger survived from the 1652 body. In 1693 they would convey the chapel property to a renewed group including John Shudd the elder and younger, Richard Shudd, John, Richard and Edward Laker, John Butler the elder and younger, Robert Handsher and Richard Trower. The transfer would take place under William and Mary, using the same method of collective title that had carried the foundation through the Commonwealth and Restoration.

Brewhurst Bridge carried the lane to the mill. Garton House, Fletchings, Box and Ryley, Spy Farm, Loxwood Place, Willetts and the farmhouse by Loxwood Bridge stood in a district that had passed through another change of monarch. Petworth had begun its great rebuilding. Chichester had a new royal charter and a bishop whose oath would soon be tested. Billingshurst and Kirdford carried the recent history of Protestant dissent into a settlement that would alter the law of worship again.

The Convention Parliament assembled in January 1689 to decide what James’s departure had done to the Crown and what conditions should govern the next monarchy. William and Mary would be offered the throne together. For Loxwood, the next article begins with Bishop Lake facing the oath, Parliament preparing a new religious and constitutional settlement, and the Shudd trustees approaching the 1693 renewal of the property that supported St John the Baptist’s chapel.