1688 – 1702 William III & Queen Mary – Loxwood during the Restoration

The Coronation and the New Oaths, April 1689

William III and Mary II were crowned together at Westminster Abbey on 11 April. William used the ancient Coronation Chair and another chair was provided for Mary. Both received the Crown because both were sovereigns. The coronation oath required them to govern according to law and to maintain the Protestant religion established in England.

Joint sovereignty also changed the form of royal government. Writs, commissions and proclamations ran in the names of both monarchs, and the royal prayers named both. When William later left England to campaign, Mary’s status as queen regnant allowed Parliament to place the executive government directly in her hands. The unusual coronation therefore anticipated a practical division of work between the two sovereigns.

The change of sovereign entered parish worship through the royal prayers. Clergy named William and Mary in Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer and Holy Communion, and proclamations and writs carried the new royal style through civil government. At Chichester the more difficult question concerned the oath required from clergy and officeholders. A bishop who had resisted James’s religious policy now had to decide whether Parliament could release him from the allegiance he had sworn to James.

John Lake had signed the petition against James’s Declaration of Indulgence, spent a week in the Tower and stood trial with the other six bishops. His opposition had been directed against the king’s use of prerogative, not against James’s title to the Crown. The oath to William and Mary forced Lake to separate those two questions.

For a bishop the decision carried consequences beyond personal conscience. Lake could ordain clergy, institute incumbents, conduct visitations and exercise discipline only while he lawfully held and exercised the see. Suspension therefore affected the diocesan machinery that connected Chichester with parish clergy across Sussex. The problem reached much farther than the bishop’s own household.

John Lake Refuses the New Oath, 1689

Parliament required clergy and public officeholders to swear allegiance to William and Mary. John Lake refused. He regarded the oath already sworn to James as binding while James lived, even though he had opposed the king’s attempt to compel publication of the Declaration of Indulgence. The statutory deadline suspended Lake from the exercise of his bishopric.

Lake left Chichester and retired to London. He died on 30 August 1689 before the later deadline that would have brought formal deprivation. His death ended the dispute over his own see, but the question survived among the clergy who shared his view.

The cathedral chapter and diocesan officers had to conduct business through the vacancy until a new bishop was appointed. That vacancy came at the same time that clergy were taking the new oaths and parishes were learning how the Revolution settlement would affect worship, officeholding and dissent. Chichester therefore entered the new reign through an actual change of bishop rather than through a theoretical argument about allegiance.

The Chichester diocesan history identifies a small body of Sussex nonjurors. Jenkyns, Precentor of Chichester Cathedral and Lake’s chaplain and biographer, refused the oaths, as did incumbents at Cuckfield, Sompting, Blatchington, West Firle, Tarring Neville with South Heighton, Seaford, West Dean, Jevington, Icklesham and Chiddingly. Their refusals scattered the nonjuring dispute across the diocese.

No surviving record used for this article names the minister at Loxwood or the vicar of Wisborough Green among the nonjurors. The direct local consequence was higher in the chain of church government: the Bishop of Chichester had ceased to exercise his office, and a successor willing to take the oaths would have to be appointed.

Parliament Passes the Toleration Act, May 1689

Parliament changed the law governing Protestant worship in May 1689. The Toleration Act allowed most Protestant Nonconformists to meet publicly if they made the required declarations and took the prescribed oaths. Roman Catholics received no equivalent freedom, and dissenters remained excluded from several civil offices by other statutes.

The Western Weald already contained the recent history that gave the new law practical meaning. Kirdford had lost a nonconforming minister at the Restoration, Quakers had been imprisoned at Horsham, and a Billingshurst house had been licensed for Presbyterian worship in 1672. Those episodes had already shown how statutes on worship could reach ministers, households and magistrates.

The new Act placed qualified Protestant dissent on a parliamentary footing. A meeting no longer depended on a temporary royal licence or on a monarch’s claim to suspend the law. Dissenting congregations could register their places of worship under the statute, while the Church of England kept its parish churches, bishops, clergy and ecclesiastical courts.

The Act required dissenters to qualify under the law; it did not give unrestricted religious liberty. Those who met the conditions gained protection for worship, but the established Church retained tithes, parish organisation and public status. A family could attend a lawful dissenting meeting and still live within the civil parish, pay rates and deal with Anglican parish officers over matters such as poor relief.

Loxwood’s chapel property was untouched by the Act. The trustees continued to hold it for St John the Baptist’s chapel within Wisborough Green parish, and the minister serving the chapel remained within the established Church. A dissenting meeting established elsewhere in the district would have required its own legal registration and its own place of worship.

The Act therefore altered the conditions under which neighbouring congregations could meet without changing the map of parishes. Alfold remained in the Diocese of Winchester; Wisborough Green, Loxwood, Kirdford, Plaistow, Billingshurst and Chichester remained within their existing ecclesiastical arrangements. What changed was the ability of magistrates to prosecute qualified Protestant dissenting worship under the old Restoration statutes.

That distinction mattered in the countryside because religious identity did not redraw roads, farms or market relationships. An Anglican farmer, a Presbyterian tradesman and a Quaker neighbour could use the same market at Horsham, the same roads through Billingshurst or Kirdford and the same local craftsmen while attending different places of worship. The statute altered legal exposure without separating everyday economic life.

Parliament Abolishes the Hearth Tax, 1689

William and Mary’s first Parliament also abolished hearth money. The tax had charged households according to the number of taxable fireplaces and had required collectors to inspect domestic hearths. A surviving Sussex return for Lady Day 1670 had recorded Loxwood as a tithing within Wisborough Green and listed householders according to liability or exemption.

The 1689 statute ended that charge. Loxwood householders no longer paid a recurring national tax calculated from the hearths inside their houses, and collectors no longer used the fireplace itself as the unit of assessment. The repeal removed one of the most intrusive taxes associated with the later Stuart monarchy.

The change did not reduce the government’s demand for revenue. War with France began within months, and Parliament increasingly raised money through assessments on land and income, customs, excise and borrowing secured on parliamentary taxes. The Loxwood names preserved in the 1670 hearth return therefore belong to the closing phase of one fiscal system; the 1690s brought another.

The 1670 return had counted households through fireplaces because a hearth offered a visible feature that collectors could check. Its abolition shifted national taxation away from that repeated domestic inspection. The change would have been obvious to anyone who had previously answered a hearth-money collector even though the replacement taxes were no lighter once William’s war expenditure increased.

That change matters because national taxation now appeared more frequently in the same years that local land, rents and chapel property were being recorded in private deeds. The government assessed wealth for war, parish officers raised local rates for statutory duties, and private landlords or trustees collected rents. Each payment had a different legal source.

The Declaration Becomes the Bill of Rights, December 1689

Parliament returned to the February settlement before the year ended and enacted the Bill of Rights in December 1689. The statute placed the principal claims made in the Declaration of Rights into law and fixed the joint Crown on William and Mary, followed by the Protestant succession defined by Parliament.

The Act declared the suspending power illegal without parliamentary consent and condemned the use of dispensing power in the form claimed by James. It prohibited taxation for the Crown without parliamentary grant, protected free elections and parliamentary speech, affirmed the right to petition and rejected a standing army in peacetime without Parliament’s consent.

Those rules changed the setting in which orders reached Sussex. A sheriff, justice or tax commissioner still acted in the king’s name, but money for the Crown now depended upon parliamentary authority and statutes could not simply be set aside by royal declaration. William’s need to finance war made that division of authority part of ordinary government almost immediately.

The Bill of Rights did not settle every constitutional question. The Crown still appointed ministers, conducted diplomacy and commanded the armed forces, while Parliament did not yet sit continuously. Its importance lay in the legal limits it placed around several powers that James had claimed. The next decade would test those limits through repeated sessions, taxation, borrowing and elections.

The statute also tied the Crown to Protestant succession. James and his Catholic son were excluded from the settlement, while Mary, Anne and their Protestant descendants stood within it. The same question would return with greater force after Mary died and Anne’s only surviving child died before reaching adulthood.

Simon Patrick Comes to Chichester, 1689-1691

Simon Patrick succeeded John Lake at Chichester in 1689 and took the oaths that Lake had refused. He entered office while the cathedral and parish clergy were adjusting to the new allegiance and while the Toleration Act had changed the legal position of Protestant dissent.

Patrick also brought a substantial record of biblical scholarship to the see. His commentaries formed part of the late seventeenth-century Anglican culture of printed exposition and preaching. His diocesan work, however, was brief; Chichester would receive another bishop within two years.

Patrick’s appointment also showed that the Crown and Church had resumed the ordinary process of filling sees after the crisis of 1688-89. A bishop willing to swear allegiance could take up diocesan authority, and clergy who accepted the settlement could continue their ministries without joining the nonjuring separation. By 1691 Chichester’s problem had moved from Lake’s refusal to the routine succession of another bishop.

In 1691 Patrick was translated to Ely. Robert Grove then took the Chichester see and inherited the ordinary work of ordination, discipline, visitation and cathedral government.

Parliament Declares War on France, May 1689

In May 1689 England declared war on France. Louis XIV supported the exiled James II and France threatened the Dutch Republic and the European balance on which William’s own power rested. The English war therefore joined the disputed succession to a much larger conflict later known as the Nine Years’ War.

War forced the new constitutional arrangements into regular use. Parliament voted money for fleets, armies and allies; merchants and contractors supplied food, clothing, weapons and shipping; county officers assessed the grants authorised at Westminster. William could not sustain a long continental war without repeated parliamentary sessions and repeated grants of supply.

The material scale was large. Fleets consumed timber, rope, canvas, iron, gunpowder, beer, meat and grain; armies needed clothing, weapons, horses and transport. Contractors bought from regional markets, and taxes collected from counties helped pay those suppliers. The Western Weald did not become a military depot, but its farms and woods formed part of the southern economy from which men and goods could be purchased.

Sussex met that demand through property, markets and transport. Farms produced grain and livestock, woodland supplied timber and fuel, and mills converted grain into flour and meal. The roads through Horsham, Petworth, Pulborough, Arundel and Chichester connected the Western Weald with larger markets and the coast. No surviving Loxwood warrant names a cart or horse requisitioned for the war, so the local story rests on taxation and the resources that could be sold into the wider market.

The war also brought England into direct conflict with the power sheltering James. A French victory or a successful Jacobite landing could overturn the settlement made in Westminster; every parliamentary grant for ships and soldiers therefore served both William’s European strategy and the defence of the new Crown.

France also threatened English trade in the Channel and Atlantic. Merchant losses, insurance costs and naval protection therefore joined invasion fears to the war’s economic burden. Sussex stood on the Channel coast, so a conflict centred on the Low Countries and Ireland could still affect the county through shipping, coastal defence and the movement of military information.

Mary Governs during William’s Absence, 1690

Parliament made the joint monarchy practical when William prepared to leave England for the Irish campaign. An Act passed in May 1690 authorised Mary to exercise the government during the king’s absence. William left for Ireland in June, and Mary then headed the government in England while he commanded troops across the Irish Sea.

Mary attended the councils through which ministers handled royal business, signed papers and answered reports sent to the government. The arrangement placed one joint sovereign at the centre of administration while the other led an army, and it depended on statutory authority rather than the informal position of a queen consort.

Her first summer in charge brought danger on two fronts. The allied fleet fought the French off Beachy Head on 30 June, and William fought James at the Boyne on 1 July by the English calendar then in use. Within two days Mary’s ministers faced a serious naval defeat off Sussex and news of William’s victory in Ireland.

Orders and intelligence continued to pass through the Privy Council, county officers and the established administrative routes while William was abroad. In Sussex, sheriffs, justices and coastal authorities received government business from a Crown being exercised in England by Mary.

Mary’s regency also prevented any pause in the ordinary issue of commissions, warrants and correspondence. The king’s absence did not suspend county administration. That continuity mattered in a year when the government had to respond quickly to a naval defeat and to the continuing possibility of French intervention on James’s behalf.

The French Fleet Wins off Beachy Head, June 1690

A French fleet under the Comte de Tourville met the combined English and Dutch fleet off Beachy Head on 30 June 1690 and inflicted a serious defeat. The battle placed the naval war off the Sussex coast while William was already committed to the Irish campaign.

The allied fleet withdrew and the Channel appeared exposed. Coastal authorities had to consider invasion, shipping and defence, while Chichester and Arundel stood on inland routes leading towards the coast. The French did not turn the victory into an invasion of Sussex, but the battle made the security of the county an immediate government concern.

Beachy Head also exposed the limits of a newly assembled alliance. English and Dutch commanders had to coordinate fleets while political critics at home questioned decisions made before and during the battle. The defeat added pressure for stronger naval performance and more expenditure, helping to keep parliamentary supply at the centre of government.

Loxwood lay well inland, yet the same roads that carried farm produce south could also carry military stores, horses and government correspondence. No surviving local record names a Loxwood load sent after Beachy Head, and no such movement should be invented.

William Goes to Ireland and Wins at the Boyne, 1690

James II tried to recover his kingdoms through Ireland with French support. William went there in 1690 and on 1 July defeated James’s army at the Battle of the Boyne. James withdrew to Dublin and then returned to France, leaving his Irish supporters to continue the war without him.

The victory strengthened William’s position but did not end the campaign. Fighting continued until 1691, while the wider war with France went on at sea and in the Low Countries. Ships, soldiers, transport and taxation were required through more than one campaigning season.

No Loxwood diary or parish account used here records bells, a sermon or a public celebration after the Boyne. The battle belongs in the local story because it secured the monarchs named in parish prayers and reduced the immediate prospect that James would return to govern through a successful Irish campaign.

The Irish war continued into 1691 and ended only after further campaigning and settlement. William’s absence in 1690 had shown how the joint monarchy could function during war; the continuation of fighting showed why one victory could not end the government’s financial demands. Parliament had to keep paying for forces after the news of the Boyne had faded.

Robert Grove Becomes Bishop of Chichester, 1691

Robert Grove became Bishop of Chichester in 1691 after Simon Patrick moved to Ely. He took charge of ordinations, clergy discipline, visitations and cathedral business in a diocese that had just lost several clergy to the nonjuring dispute.

Grove’s episcopate coincided with the most important surviving Loxwood deed of the reign. In 1693 the remaining trustees transferred the chapel property to a new body, placing the local foundation under a renewed legal title while Grove held the see.

Grove’s episcopate therefore overlaps the point at which Loxwood’s own documentary record becomes unusually clear again. The bishop’s register and the chapel deed served different purposes, yet together they place named ecclesiastical and lay officeholders in the same years: Grove at Chichester and the Shudd, Laker, Butler, Handsher and Trower families in the local trust.

Parliament Places a Heavy Assessment on Property, 1692

War expenditure brought a heavy parliamentary assessment in 1692, commonly described as four shillings in the pound on the annual value of land and other taxable income. Commissioners and local assessors converted the statutory grant into demands on owners and occupiers. From these wartime measures developed the annual land tax that became a major source of government revenue in the following century.

The assessment reached Sussex through valuation. Fields, houses, mills, rents and other sources of income gave assessors the basis from which to judge liability. A working farm could hold much of its wealth in crops, animals and land rather than in cash, but the collector still required money when the assessment fell due.

Assessment forced that wealth into a money figure. An owner might sell livestock, grain or timber, collect rent from a tenant or call in a debt to meet the sum demanded. The tax collector did not receive a cow, a load of hay or a stand of coppice; rural property had to be converted into cash through sale, rent or credit.

Parliament named county commissioners to supervise the process. They relied on local knowledge to identify property and value, and subordinate officers collected the sums apportioned within the county. Repeated wartime grants made this work a recurring feature of the 1690s rather than an exceptional demand.

The commissioners themselves came from county society and often knew the estates, families and relative standing of the people being assessed. That local knowledge made the system workable, but it also meant that national taxation depended on gentlemen and officers embedded in the same regional networks as the taxpayers.

The Loxwood chapel trust faced a different kind of accounting in the same years. Trustees needed to know who occupied trust property, what rent was due and when title had to be renewed after deaths. Their rents did not finance William’s war, but they came from the same land-based economy on which parliamentary assessments also depended.

Kirdford Inventories Show the Wealth behind the Assessments

Probate inventories from Kirdford, covering households from 1611 into the eighteenth century, show what rural wealth looked like in this part of the Weald. Appraisers recorded the contents of the dwelling house, corn and hay stored in barns, crops growing in the fields, cattle, swine and poultry, tools, stock in trade and money owed to the deceased.

The Kirdford study notes that earlier inventories were often compiled by two or three friends or neighbours soon after the funeral. They moved through rooms, barns and yards, attaching values to goods before the estate could be distributed. The documents therefore preserve the material contents of ordinary prosperity and hardship at a level that national tax statutes cannot show.

Those inventories were made after death to protect executors and heirs; they were not land-tax assessments. Their value here is more direct. They show the property from which a household could earn, sell or borrow when taxes, rent, wages or parish charges had to be paid.

Kirdford lay on heavy Weald clay and covered a large agricultural area. Grain, hay and livestock appear repeatedly because mixed farming had to support households on difficult soil, while woodland and associated trades supplied additional income. The inventories record a working economy in goods and animals rather than a countryside measured only by acres.

Beds, tables, cooking vessels and clothing sat beside plough gear, stored corn and animals because the farmhouse joined residence and production. A household’s ability to pay depended on the success of fields, animals, timber and debts owed by neighbours. A poor harvest, animal disease or delayed payment could reduce available cash even when land values remained unchanged.

Brewhurst Mill belonged to the same regional economy. Grain brought from farms could be ground into flour or meal, and the miller earned from the process. Carts then carried the product back along the lanes or onward towards markets. The mill, farmyards and probate inventories place William’s taxes beside the work that generated the money to meet them.

A household could therefore meet several claims from the same year’s production: rent to a landlord or trust, poor rate to parish officers, wages to servants and labourers, and parliamentary assessment to the Crown. The records name the separate institutions and the property from which those payments were made.

Barfleur and La Hogue Reverse the Naval Balance, 1692

The naval balance changed in 1692. French plans for another Jacobite invasion required command of the Channel, but English and Dutch squadrons fought Tourville’s fleet off Barfleur in May and pursued the damaged French ships to La Hogue, where vessels were destroyed.

La Hogue removed the immediate prospect of a large French fleet escorting James back to England. Coastal defence and naval supply continued, but Sussex no longer faced the temporary naval superiority that had followed Beachy Head.

The victory had been purchased through two years of sustained expenditure. Ships had to be built, repaired, armed, victualled and manned; Parliament continued to raise the money that kept them at sea.

The land war remained costly. William’s allies lost Namur in 1692 and William was defeated at Landen in 1693. Naval success in the Channel therefore did not bring an end to taxation or military expenditure. The Loxwood trustee transfer of 1693 took place while the king’s armies were still fighting and while Parliament was still searching for money.

George Shudd and George Shudd Renew the Loxwood Trust, 1693

The clearest direct Loxwood event in the reign came in 1693. George Shudd the elder and George Shudd the younger, the surviving trustees from the 1652 body, transferred the chapel property to a renewed group.

The new trustees were John Shudd the elder, John Shudd the younger, Richard Shudd, John Laker, Richard Laker, Edward Laker, John Butler the elder, John Butler the younger, Robert Handsher and Richard Trower. Three Shudds, three Lakers and two Butlers entered together, with Handsher and Trower completing the body.

The concentration of surnames suggests the practical value of kin and neighbourhood in a trust that depended on long service. Relatives could know where deeds were kept, which tenants occupied holdings and which members of the older body had died. The trust did not require a professional corporation in London; it required local men able to act together when legal title had to be renewed.

Collective trusteeship protected the title against the death of any one holder. As trustees died, survivors could convey the property to a larger new group before too few legal owners remained to manage leases and deeds safely. The 1693 transfer performed that practical task and placed the chapel property in ten new hands.

The deed also fixed a new generation into the history of the chapel. Earlier trustee lists had included Kings, Irelands, Lakers, Mills and Threels; the 1693 body gave the Shudd and Laker families particular weight. Those names would reappear when the trust was renewed again in the eighteenth century, showing how legal continuity depended on people rather than on an impersonal institution.

The later 1730 renewal identifies John Shudd of Loxwood, Richard Trower of Loxwood and John Butler of Warnham among the survivors from 1693. Their service stretched across the rest of William’s reign and the whole reign of Queen Anne before another transfer became necessary.

The surviving trustee chronology does not supply a complete 1693 inventory of every field and building. Earlier deeds name Cokkes, Calletts Haw and the house and garden associated with Willetts among the longer endowment history, but those earlier descriptions cannot be treated as a verbatim schedule of the 1693 deed.

What the 1693 evidence proves is the transfer of legal responsibility for the property that supported the chapel. The trustees could lease, receive rent, preserve deeds and arrange the property business from which the foundation derived income.

The deed belongs to the middle of the Nine Years’ War, between the land assessments of 1692 and the financial innovations of 1694. While Parliament found new ways to tax and borrow for William’s armies, ten men from Loxwood and the surrounding district received a much smaller body of land and rents for a local religious purpose.

The transfer required no alteration to the national Church settlement. It dealt with property, not doctrine. Yet the timing joins two scales of government in one year: Parliament and the Crown were financing armies abroad, while local trustees were preserving the title that paid for a dependent chapel in a Sussex hamlet.

Petworth House Is Rebuilt during the 1690s

At Petworth another transfer of wealth took physical form in stone, brick, timber and gardens. Elizabeth Percy had married Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset, in 1682, and her inheritance brought the great Percy estates into their household. The rebuilding of Petworth House began in 1688 and continued through the opening years of William and Mary’s reign.

The main body of the present house is dated broadly to 1688-1696, with further work continuing towards 1702. George London received payments for formal gardens north of the house between 1688 and 1693. The old seat was being transformed into one of the great houses of the region while the country was at war.

A building campaign on that scale required estate income, labour, carts, horses and large quantities of material. Petworth’s lands and tenancies extended across a wide part of western Sussex. No surviving account used here identifies Loxwood timber or a Loxwood craftsman in the works, so the supply chain cannot be carried farther than the evidence allows.

Roads from Loxwood through Kirdford and Plaistow led towards Petworth, and estate, market and legal business moved between the same communities. The rebuilding therefore formed part of the visible 1690s landscape around Loxwood without becoming a Loxwood building project.

Somerset’s political influence gave the estate another role. Elections at Chichester and in western Sussex took place within a world of patronage in which great landowners could recommend candidates, mobilise friends and use office and estate connections. Petworth therefore joined architecture, landed wealth and politics during the same decade that the Triennial Act increased the frequency of elections.

The Bank of England Raises War Money, 1694

The French war drove Parliament and the government towards new forms of borrowing. In 1694 subscribers provided £1.2 million to a new Bank of England, which lent the same sum to the government. Parliament assigned revenue to service the loan, giving lenders a security that depended on statute and future taxation.

William and Mary subscribed £10,000 to the original stock. More than a thousand other subscribers supplied the remainder. The arrangement allowed the government to spend before all wartime revenue had been collected and tied public credit more closely to Parliament’s power to tax.

No Loxwood subscriber has been identified in the material used for this article. The local effect came through the taxes and economic demand that supported government credit. A farmer, miller or landholder met the new financial system through assessments, prices, rents and the need for acceptable coin.

Public credit changed the timing of government expenditure. The state could borrow large sums at the beginning of a campaign and use future tax revenue to repay lenders. That arrangement allowed war to continue even when the current year’s taxes had not yet produced enough cash. It also made the credibility of parliamentary revenue central to military power.

The Triennial Act Brings Frequent Elections, 1694-1701

Parliament also passed the Triennial Act in 1694. It required frequent Parliaments and prevented one Parliament from sitting for longer than three years. General elections followed in 1695, 1698 and twice in 1701, after the election of 1690.

Whigs and Tories carried arguments over war, taxation, the Church, dissent and the royal court into repeated elections. Candidates depended on local landowners, officeholders and electors, and great estates could exert political influence without any return to the direct royal management of elections attempted under James II.

Charles Seymour at Petworth provides a Western Sussex example. Parliamentary research records the Duke of Somerset exercising influence at Chichester and in west Sussex during the 1690s, at the same time that his household was financing the rebuilding of Petworth House.

Loxwood had no parliamentary borough of its own. Qualified county or borough electors travelled according to the franchise that applied to them, while many inhabitants had no vote. No Loxwood poll list used here records individual choices in these elections.

The consequences of elections reached beyond the franchise because each new House of Commons could vote supply, alter taxes and legislate on religion and war. Repeated elections and repeated wartime grants made Parliament more visible in the political life of the 1690s.

Elections also forced county and borough interests to organise more often. Petworth’s influence at Chichester, the interests of other Sussex landowners and the competing claims of Whig and Tory candidates brought national arguments into local patronage networks. The surviving Loxwood sources do not identify a voter, but the political traffic around the village increased in a decade of repeated contests.

Mary II Dies of Smallpox, December 1694

Mary contracted smallpox at Kensington and died on 28 December 1694, aged thirty-two. She and William had no surviving children. Her death ended the joint monarchy and left William to reign alone.

Mary had governed during William’s absences and had carried part of the executive burden of the war. Her death therefore removed a working sovereign as well as the king’s wife. William could no longer leave the English government in the hands of a co-monarch with an equal title to the Crown.

Clergy altered the royal prayers again, naming William without Mary. The change was small in wording but immediate in public worship: the queen who had exercised government during the Irish campaign disappeared from the prayers heard in churches and chapels.

Mary’s sister Anne now stood next in the Protestant succession. Anne’s only surviving child, William, Duke of Gloucester, was still alive, but his death in 1700 would force Parliament to decide who should inherit beyond Anne.

William Rules Alone while the War Continues, 1695

William continued the war after Mary’s death. Armies campaigned in the Low Countries while English and Dutch fleets protected trade and supported the alliance against France. Parliament voted money for troops, ships and allies in successive sessions.

The repeated grants kept commissioners and collectors returning to property values. Farms around Loxwood had to support household expenses, rent, poor rate and national taxation from the same year’s agricultural and trading income.

The burden was cumulative rather than dramatic. No army marched through Loxwood in 1695, but repeated assessments and excise charges could draw cash from households whose wealth lay largely in land, grain, livestock, woodland and credit.

The war also affected prices and credit through government demand. Grain, fodder, horses, shipping and imported goods could all respond to wartime conditions. The surviving local sources do not provide a Loxwood price series, so no precise rise should be assigned to the village, but the economic pressure was wider than the tax collector’s demand alone.

John Williams Comes to Chichester as the Silver Coinage Is Rebuilt, 1696

Robert Grove died in 1696 and John Williams succeeded him as Bishop of Chichester. Williams entered the see three years after the Loxwood trustee renewal and would remain bishop through William’s final years and into the reign of Anne.

The same year brought the Great Recoinage. England’s old hammered silver had been clipped around the edges until many coins contained much less silver than their face value implied. Parliament and the government called in the hammered money and replaced it with milled coin struck to a more reliable standard. Isaac Newton became Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 and joined the administration of the operation.

Clipping had created a practical problem in every cash payment. A coin could carry the king’s image and face value while containing too little silver to pass freely at that value. Merchants weighed money, people discounted damaged coins and uncertainty obstructed trade. The government tried to end that disorder by replacing the hammered stock rather than merely punishing individual clippers.

The recoinage disrupted ordinary payment because old silver was withdrawn faster than replacement coin could always be supplied. Rents, wages and larger purchases depended on acceptable silver, so a shortage at national level could reach a rural tenant or trader without any special Loxwood order being issued.

The 1693 chapel trustees also depended on money that tenants could pay and that legal transactions would recognise. The recoinage therefore mattered to the same world of rent, wages, market exchange and property dealing recorded in local deeds, even though no surviving Loxwood account describes a particular clipped coin.

The recoinage coincided with continuing parliamentary taxation. A tenant could owe a fixed money rent while acceptable silver was scarce, and a collector could demand a statutory sum at the same moment. Rural communities therefore experienced the reform through the practical problem of finding usable money for obligations already expressed in cash.

The Treaty of Ryswick Ends the Nine Years’ War, 1697

Negotiators ended the Nine Years’ War with the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. Louis XIV recognised William as king, reducing the immediate French support for a military restoration of James II.

Peace allowed some wartime pressure to ease, but the financial system created during the conflict did not disappear. Government debts still had to be serviced, the Bank of England continued to operate and the land tax remained available to Parliament.

The Western Weald entered the peace with Petworth still under improvement, the 1693 Loxwood trustees holding their new title and John Williams governing the Diocese of Chichester.

Peace also gave the Crown an opportunity to reduce some military commitments, but rivalry with France remained unresolved. The Spanish succession was already approaching crisis, and William’s government kept the diplomatic and financial capacity created during the war rather than dismantling it completely.

Brewhurst House Is Reworked around 1700

A surviving building phase at Brewhurst belongs close to the end of William’s reign. The estate deeds had recorded the house and watermill for centuries, and a 2016 building assessment dated the principal surviving two-storey timber-framed ranges of Brewhurst House to about 1700. Older timbers were reused within the work.

The date is valuable because so few Loxwood buildings can be assigned to a narrow phase around 1700. The surviving frame records carpentry rather than a written contract: posts, braces and roof members show how a substantial farmhouse was renewed at the end of the seventeenth century while the adjoining mill estate continued to work.

Carpenters set new posts, beams, floors and roof timbers around a working farmstead. A large brick inglenook at the south end heated the rebuilt range. The reused oak came from earlier structures, although the assessment cannot identify the original position of every timber.

Brewhurst Bridge, dated 1672 and marked with the initials J.M., carried the lane across the stream north of the house. Carts serving the farm and watermill used that approach, and the same road would have carried timber, brick and other building materials to the c.1700 works.

Large oak sections had to be felled, converted and moved before carpenters could assemble them. Reusing earlier timbers reduced the need for new heavy oak and preserved useful pieces already seasoned by decades of service. The work joined woodland resources, skilled carpentry and the transport routes around Brewhurst.

No account names the carpenters or masons employed at Brewhurst. The standing frame itself supplies the evidence: heavy timber work was being assembled beside the River Lox during the closing years of William’s reign.

Abraham Mills Holds the Farmhouse beside Loxwood Bridge, 1700

Another local record names a Loxwood householder in 1700. Abraham Mills, described as a husbandman, and his wife Sarah dealt with property that Abraham had inherited from his brother John Mills. Later documents connect Abraham with the timber-framed house beside Loxwood Bridge.

The surviving wings of that house have been dated broadly to 1575-1625. In 1700 it stood beside the road climbing from the River Lox towards the village centre. The building acquired the name Onslow Arms only in a later period, so Abraham’s property belongs here as a house or farmhouse by the bridge.

The Mills name also occurs in the Brewhurst estate records, where Myll, Mille and Mills families had held the watermill property. John Mills and a younger John Mills had entered the chapel trustee body in 1652, and the 1672 Brewhurst Bridge carries the initials J.M. The surviving documents do not establish the exact kinship between Abraham and those earlier Mills.

As a husbandman, Abraham occupied the broad social ground between a substantial yeoman and a landless wage labourer. He could cultivate land, keep animals and deal with property, and his house stood on one of the road approaches used by carts moving between Loxwood farms and the wider district.

His property record also places another household close to the bridge before the site became an inn. The later commercial importance of the crossing should not be projected backwards; in 1700 the evidence is for a husbandman and a house beside a route already used by local traffic.

The Duke of Gloucester Dies and Parliament Reopens the Succession, 1700-1701

The death of William, Duke of Gloucester, in July 1700 reopened the succession. He was Anne’s only surviving child. William III had no children, Mary was dead and Anne now had no surviving heir, while James II and his son remained Catholic and excluded from the Revolution settlement.

Parliament answered with the Act of Settlement in 1701. After Anne and William, the Crown was directed to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, a Protestant granddaughter of James I, and to her Protestant heirs. Catholics and people married to Catholics were excluded from the succession.

The Act of Settlement also reinforced the constitutional principle that Parliament could determine the succession when religion and hereditary descent conflicted. The decision reached back to the descendants of James I to find an acceptable Protestant line. That choice would eventually bring the Hanoverians to the throne after Anne.

The statute carried the religious settlement beyond the immediate family of James II. It ensured that the monarch following Anne would be Protestant even if that required the Crown to pass to a more distant branch of the dynasty.

James II Dies in Exile and Louis XIV Recognises His Son, 1701

James II died at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in September 1701. Louis XIV immediately recognised James Francis Edward Stuart as king of England, Scotland and Ireland, challenging both William’s title and Parliament’s new succession law.

Louis’s decision hardened English opinion because France was now openly treating the exiled prince as king after previously recognising William at Ryswick. The succession question therefore returned at the exact moment when Europe was moving towards another major war.

At the same time Europe moved towards war over the Spanish succession. Charles II of Spain had died without children, and rival dynasties claimed his monarchy and territories. William negotiated a Grand Alliance to resist French and Bourbon expansion.

The diplomatic work placed another European war in the hands of the next monarch. The taxes, parliamentary supply and public credit developed during the 1690s were ready to finance it.

William III Dies and Anne Succeeds, March 1702

William suffered a riding accident at Hampton Court early in 1702 after his horse stumbled. His health deteriorated and he died on 8 March. Anne succeeded immediately.

John Williams was Bishop of Chichester when the new royal writs and prayers adopted Anne’s name. The Loxwood trustees appointed in 1693 still held the chapel property, while John Shudd, Richard Trower and John Butler would survive into the next recorded renewal in 1730.

William had already committed England diplomatically to the alliance against France. Anne’s ministers inherited that commitment and, within two months, declared war on France and Spain. The next Loxwood chapter therefore opens with the same bishop and the same trustee body, but with a new queen and a much larger European war beginning almost at once.

Nothing in Loxwood required a fresh constitutional settlement when Anne succeeded. The unresolved business lay elsewhere: the European alliance was ready for war, the Protestant succession beyond Anne had been fixed by statute, and the 1693 trustees still had years of service ahead of them. The story could therefore move forward immediately from William’s death into Anne’s first wartime Parliament.

Queen Anne would govern through the parliamentary and financial machinery that had expanded during the 1690s, while arguments over conformity, party, Scotland and the succession moved the Church and Crown towards the final years of Stuart rule.