CHOWNE, Henry (1611-68), of Alfriston and Horsham, Suss.

Minor Kentish merchants in the fifteenth century, the Chownes rose in status following a move to London, and through a connection to the Herbert family. Henry Chowne’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Chowne†, a haberdasher, was elected MP for Wilton in 1553, on the interest of William Herbert†, 1st earl of Pembroke. Two years later he was returned for London, and was sufficiently eminent to effect a marriage between his daughter and Sir John Puckering†, lord keeper and Speaker of the House of Commons.13Renshaw, ‘Chownes of Alfriston’, 73-80; PROB11/51/316; HP Commons 1509-1558. By the end of the century the family were re-established in Kent, and Henry Chowne’s grandfather, Sir George Chowne†, represented Rochester in 1593.14PROB11/128/250; HP Commons 1558-1603.

Henry Chowne’s father, an Oxford-educated Lincoln’s Inn barrister, married into a prominent Kentish family, the Campions of Combwell, and settled at Alfriston in east Sussex.15PROB11/179/662; C54/2821/20. He served assiduously as a justice of the peace until his retirement in 1635.16CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 112, 144, 148, 152, 167, 249, 253, 270. Although he refused the loans in 1621 and 1627, he was a supporter of the ecclesiastical policies of William Laud, publishing in 1635 the Arminian-influenced Collectiones Theologicarum, which he dedicated to the archbishop.17[T. Chowne], Collectiones Theologicarum (1635), sig. A3. By the time he made his will in December 1638, his eldest son George, who had followed him to Lincoln’s Inn, had died childless, and he had already given portions to his next oldest sons, his heir William (recently presented to the rectory of Clayton-cum-Keymer in west Sussex), Henry (evidently abroad) and Edward (recently married locally).18PROB11/179/662; Renshaw, ‘Chownes of Alfriston’, 73-80.

Henry Chowne had been apprenticed to John Cordell (d. 1649), a Mercer and former sheriff of London who was a prominent member of the East India Company. By spring 1639 Chowne was Cordell’s factor at Smyrna in Turkey, where he welcomed George Courthop*, a friend of his uncle Sir William Campion (d. 1639), on his continental tour.19Mems. of Sir George Courthop ed. S.C. Lomas (Cam. Misc. xi), 116; E. Suss. RO, DAN/381. Chowne was apparently still abroad when his brother William made his will in the early summer of 1640, but had returned to England before April 1642, when he married the daughter of Thomas Middleton* of Horsham.20Vis. Suss. (Harl. Soc. lxxxix), 25. He continued to engage in mercantile activities, but it is not clear whether he maintained his connection with Cordell, who was knighted in December 1641 and defeated by the parliamentarian Isaac Penington* in the London mayoral elections of 1642. That November Cordell was briefly imprisoned for refusing to lend money to Parliament, but he later participated in local administration, and it seems likely Chowne followed a somewhat similar path.21HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Robert Cordell’. Unlike his cousin Sir William Campion (d. 1648), who was governor of the royalist garrison at Boarstall House, and his kinsman Henry Campion*, who was a moderate parliamentarian, Chowne apparently played no part in the civil wars.22Supra, ‘Henry Campion’; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘William Campion’. The regular births and baptisms of children (of whom he had at least eight from February 1643) indicate that this cannot be put down to continuous absence abroad on mercantile business.23Vis. Suss. (Harl. Soc. lxxxix), 25.

In 1651 Chowne inherited the family estate from his young nephew, presumably adding it to property he had already acquired through the profits of business, but in the ensuing years he was also involved various disputes.24Renshaw, ‘Chownes of Alfriston’, 73-80. In July 1650 he was summoned before the admiralty committee to respond to a petition objecting to his trading practices in Tetouan, Morocco.25CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 238, 240. In February 1653 the council of state heard complaints relating to the Thomas Bonadventura, a ship which Chowne had leased for a monthly voyage to Scanderoon and Cyprus. Chowne claimed that it had been seized by Captain Richard Badily at Porto Ferraro, for the use of the government at Cyprus; Chowne’s goods, mainly cotton wool, were unloaded and the ship fitted for war. Following his arrest of the owners and captain of the ship, in pursuit of damages of £15,000, in June he was summoned to attend the council, whereupon he petitioned that he had lost over £5,000 worth of goods, and that he and his colleagues had been put to ‘ruinous and excessive charge’.26CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 137, 149, 386, 394, 397. The outcome of this is not recorded, but a few years later Chowne was also engaged in several lawsuits over financial matters.27C5/396/13; C6/132/67; C6/134/169; C7/424/47; C7/426/31; C7/428/29; C7/495/73.

There was evidently a combative spirit in the Chowne family. In 1657 Henry’s brother Edward – who described himself as ‘but a farmer’ – published an attack on the doctrine of ‘absolute reprobation’ (that is, the predestination of unrepentant sinners to damnation) as preached by two local Presbyterian lecturers, Benjamin Pickering of Lewes and Mr Newton of Kingston Bowsey, and others with whom he (and his brothers Bray and John) had had a long-running dispute. Claiming to have ‘discoursed with thousands of people, some of them Doctors of Divinity, and many of them ministers’, Edward invoked a spectrum of respected Church of England clergy in an attempt to refute ‘this most damnable and most blasphemous heresy’.28E. Choune, A Whip for the Lecturers of Lewis (1657), esp. 13, 25. In May 1658 Edward Chowne revealed under questioning that his brother Henry had been approached by participants in the failed plot by John Stapley* and others to effect a restoration of the monarchy, but no action was taken against Henry because, like many others in Sussex, he had declined to commit himself to so risky a venture.29TSP vii. 111.

It was probably as a royalist sympathiser that in 1659 Chowne was returned to Parliament for Horsham, once represented by his father-in-law, Thomas Middleton, who held the seat through family interest. The election was contested, however, on the grounds that the sheriff, Edward Blaker*, had issued a precept to the burgesses without naming the bailiffs, whereupon the borough returned three burgesses for the single seat – William Freeman*, John Fagge* and Chowne – by three separate indentures. On 7 February the House declared the election void and a new writ was issued.30CJ vii. 601a; The Publick Intelligencer no. 161 (24-31 Jan. 1659), 185 (E.761.7); no. 163 (7-14 Feb. 1659), 214-5 (E.761.11); Mercurius Politicus no. 553 (3-10 Feb. 1659), 222-3 (E.761.13). Fagge, an adherent of Harbert Morley*, who had already been returned both for Bramber and as a knight of the shire, chose to represent the latter. Freeman, a protectorate loyalist, was probably the ‘court’ candidate. But it was Chowne who secured the election at Horsham on the second writ, representing an expression of the grievances against both the court and the ‘commonwealthsmen’. His presence in the House was recorded only once, on 1 April, when he was named to a committee to consider the petition of merchant Samuel Vassall*.31CJ vii. 623a.

Despite the availability of two seats at Horsham in the Convention, Chowne did not stand again in the spring elections of 1660, making way instead for Thomas Middleton and another previous MP, Hall Ravenscroft. However, following the retirement of the elderly Middleton in 1661, Chowne returned to the House, although he proved more assiduous in attending sessions as a justice of the peace than in serving the Cavalier Parliament.32E. Suss. RO, QO/EW4, ff. 40-67; QO/EW5, ff. 9, 37, 44, 52v, 62, 81, 85, 88v. In his sole recorded speech he attacked both religious dissent (which he saw as inspired by the devil) and the ‘rebellious Parliament’ which had spilled ‘the blood of his sacred majesty ... enslaved the liberty of the nation, and ... tyrannise[d] over the orthodox clergy’.33HP Commons 1660-1690.

Chowne was more active in business than in Parliament. While his third son Bray became a London Grocer and his youngest, Richard, a Goldsmith, he secured a place for his second son Henry as factor to the East India Company in Surat, under the powerful patronage of Sir George Oxinden, the chief Company merchant there.34Vis. Suss. (Harl. Soc. lxxxix), 25-6; Cal. Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1660-1663, 145, 168; Add. 40696, f. 165; 40711, f. 42; Add. 40700, f. 156; Add. 40713, f. 61v. By the time of his death in 1668, Chowne himself held stock in the company worth £4,500, which he bequeathed to his sons; the eldest, Thomas, and Henry were admitted to the Company soon afterwards.35Cal. Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1664-7, 197, 432; 1668-70, 32, 34, 170, 292, 399; PROB11/328/512. None of Chowne’s seven sons sat in Parliament, although a grandson, Thomas Chowne†, represented Seaford as a tory in 1702 and 1710.36HP Commons 1690-1715.