CHADWELL, William (1614-80), of Broadwell, Glos.

The Chadwells were a family of Gloucestershire yeomen with aspirations to be gentlemen. The MP’s great-grandfather held lands in Burford and Great and Little Rissington on his death in the late 1570s, but his will suggests that he was a prosperous farmer, not a member of the minor gentry.11Glos RO, GDR will 1577/57. The MP’s grandfather went further, buying the freehold of his copyhold lands in Broadwell parish (next to the market town of Stow-on-the-Wold) in 1597 and in 1602, he acquired the freehold of the parish mill. On his death in 1613, the grandfather had minor holdings at Donington, Stow-on-the-Wold parish, and a scattering of lands in Broadwell, including a share of the rectory and part of the old manor demesne.12C142/335/28. The manor lands, including the old manor house, were bought up by the MP’s father in 1621.13Glos. RO, D610/T2/10, 13, 15. This was not a large estate – in 1647 Parliament’s Committee for Compounding rated it as worth £300 – but it did include a substantial house of nine hearths, and in the seventeenth century the Chadwells sported a coat of arms, and erected elaborate tombs in the Broadwell churchyard.14Bigland, Collections ed. Frith, i. 255; VCH Glos. vi. 49, 51-2, 55, 58. Having said that, the family did not receive its own entry in the heralds’ visitations in 1623 or 1682-3, and for all their insistence on the title ‘gentleman’ in written records, they may still have been regarded locally as little more than wealthy farmers. By the end of the seventeenth century even this status may have slipped, as parcels of land were sold off, including (by the early eighteenth century) the main estate at Broadwell.15VCH Glos. vi. 52; Bigland, Collections ed. Frith, i. 255; iii. 1226

The exception to this general family obscurity was William Chadwell, who received a good (and expensive) education, matriculating at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1631, graduating as BA the following year, and in January 1633 being admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. The rapidity of Chadwell’s progress suggests that his education was funded by a patron, although there is no obvious candidate. In later years he may have benefited from the support of the outspoken royalist Dr John Allibond, who became rector of Broadwell in 1636, and was a close friend of Chadwell.16Oxford DNB; E134/29Chas2/Mich4. Chadwell’s manucaptors (or sureties) on admission to Lincoln’s Inn were William Randoll and John Hale, the former being an associate of a group of godly lawyers, including Gabriel Becke*, Henry Parker and Richard Fiennes.17LIL, Admiss. Bks. 6. f. 69v. Chadwell took chambers in the Field Gate Court, and was called to the bar (in company with Lislebone Long*, among others) on 4 February 1640.18LI Black Bks. ii. 307, 354. While training as a lawyer, Chadwell came in contact with the Arundells of Trerice in Cornwall. He was admitted in the same year as John Arundell I* and Richard Arundell*, and may have been friends with the latter, who was also called to the bar in 1640. When their father, John Arundell†, drew up his will in 1654, his list of trustees for the estates to pass to Richard included Chadwell, and it is probable that the connection between them had been established some two decades before.19PROB11/254/568. It was this association with the Arundells that no doubt explains the 26-year-old Chadwell’s election for the Cornish borough of Mitchell in April 1640, alongside a local landowner, Peter Courtney* of Trethurffe. He had already taken his seat and been named to the committee for privileges when election was challenged in the Commons on 24 April, but after a debate it was ‘agreed lawful’, and his right to sit was duly confirmed.20Aston’s Diary, 46, 156; CJ ii. 4a, 10a-b.

Chadwell was again elected for Mitchell in the Long Parliament elections, and, despite his youth and inexperience, in 1640-1 he achieved some notoriety as an opponent of the crown. On 12 November he was among a number of lawyers chosen to consider how to bring across Sir George Radcliffe and other witnesses against Sir Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, without overriding the privileges of the Irish Parliament.21CJ ii. 27b. On 23 November he was named to the committee to receive petitions sent to the high constable and the earl marshal’s court.22CJ ii. 34b. When the Laudian Canons were debated on 26 November 1640, Chadwell opposed them, not because they contravened parliamentary privileges, but because ‘the bishops cannot make canons against the law of the land’, and the common law must not be challenged.23D’Ewes (N), 71-2. It was presumably his legal expertise, as well as his local connections, that led to him being added to the committee to consider William Coryton’s* misdemeanours as a duchy official in Cornwall early in December.24CJ ii. 47a. On 22 December, when charges were levelled against the lord keeper and other judges, Chadwell attacked Baron Trevor, saying that he had been influenced by George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, in 1627 to omit a clause in the Forced Loan ‘that it should not be drawn into precedent’, and that he had opposed the other judges on the same matter.25Northcote Note Bk. 101.

In the spring of 1641, Chadwell’s position began to shift. He seems to have been uncomfortable with attacks on the bishops in February, and opposed the appointment of a committee to discuss the petition against their sitting in the Lords. Instead, he called for ‘a committee of the whole House’, whence the business was unlikely to emerge.26D’Ewes (N), 338. On 21 April, when the vote on Strafford’s attainder was passed, Chadwell was one of those ‘whose good will was known for my Lord Strafford’ who absented himself from the Commons.27Procs. LP iv. 42. As it had with the Arundells, the Strafford trial prompted Chadwell to distance himself from the opposition, and he seems to have allied with the king’s supporters instead. Although he took the Protestation without demur on 3 May, he did not agree with its paranoid tone, and in June he defended a Gloucestershire Catholic, Sir John Winter, from charges of concealing weapons.28CJ ii. 133b. Winter, he protested, had made arrangements to surrender his arms, and that these were not new weapons but ‘arms that were anciently belonging to his house and hung in public in his hall’.29Procs. LP iv. 723-4. During the summer of 1641 Chadwell was much less active. He made occasional appearances in legal cases, as on 23 July, when he and his fellow MP for Mitchell, Robert Holborne, represented Sir Peter Vanlore in his case in the House of Lords, and on 31 August, when he delivered a petition on behalf of those who had suffered at the hands of the authorities in Virginia.30Procs. LP vi. 70, 627; CJ ii. 221b. There is no record of his attendance after the recess until 1 April 1642, when he returned to the House to join another Cornish MP, Henry Killigrew*, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Parliament from levying money against the king. Chadwell argued that it had been the practice from the reign of Edward III ‘that they [the knights of the shire] durst not yield to the great tax or levy of money that was proposed to them without first acquainting the counties with it’. Sir Henry Vane I* and other MPs violently disagreed with this, and Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, checking the original rolls, soon discovered that Chadwell was mistaken. This led to a humiliating climb-down, as Chadwell was forced to admit that he had merely consulted notes made by another Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, Robert Mason, late recorder of London.31PJ ii. 116-7.

The April 1642 debate may have been the last straw. By early June Chadwell had withdrawn from Parliament, and had decided to travel with Robert Holborne to join the king at York, where (on 3 June) they were ‘every day looked for’.32Yorks. Arch. Jnl. vii. 66-7. As a result he was suspended from sitting on 2 September 1642, an order for his arrest was issued to the serjeant-at-arms on 12 November, and on 22 January 1644 he was disabled from sitting in the House.33CJ ii. 750a, 845b; iii. 374a. Following a parliamentary order of June 1644, in February 1646 Chadwell’s chamber at Lincoln’s Inn was seized.34LI Black Bks. ii. 368. He seems to have been a strong supporter of the crown during the civil war. In 1643 he lent money to the king under the Oxford Engagement, and on 1 or 2 November 1644, he was made a doctor of civil law by Oxford University.35CCAM 996; Al. Ox. He seems to have attracted important patrons at the royalist capital, including John Ashburnham*, who, in March 1643, procured a patent to give Chadwell a reversionary interest in the post of custos brevium in the court of common pleas36Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 352.. On 30 March 1644 he was pardoned by the king, presumably for his earlier attendance at the Westminster Parliament.37Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 213.

Chadwell was in Oxford when the city surrendered in 1646, and he took advantage of the Oxford Articles to compound for delinquency in the following November, begging for clemency on the grounds that his father had disapproved of his decision to support the king. He was fined £30 on 7 January 1647.38CCC 1565. Thereafter, Chadwell went into retirement. He was living at Broadwell in 1649 – the same year as he inherited the estate from his father – and he seems to have remained there until his death in 1680.39Glos. RO, D2957/57/4; VCH Glos. vi. 52. In the summer of 1677 he became involved in a dispute over the tithes of Broadwell, which he had withheld from the new rector, Richard Johnson, apparently because he opposed his installation to the living after the death of Dr Allibond. Chadwell’s financial position had improved little in the years since his father’s death, and he was described by deponents in the case as ‘a man unskilful in his husbandry’ with land ‘but weakly stocked’.40E134/29Chas2/Mich4. It is uncertain that Chadwell ever married, and the dispersal of the family estates shortly after his death may indicate that he died without heirs.