page_title: Samuel Chidley
section_title: Separation and advancement in London
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Chidley / Separation and advancement in London
caption_attribution_description: English: This plaque is at Garrard House, 31-45 Gresham Street, City of London, EC2V 7QA, England. Formerly the site of Haberdashers' Hall, this building is currently occupied by Schroders Bank. The new Haberdashers' Hall is located in West Smithfield Street. Nrf: Pliaque à Londres
context_page_description: Samuel Chidley was an English Puritan activist and controversialist. A radical separatist in London before and during the English Civil War, he became a leading Leveller, a treasurer of the movement. A public servant and land speculator under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, he became rich and campaigned for social, moral and financial reform. He was ruined by the Restoration and returned to live in relative poverty in his native Shrewsbury.
context_section_description: The decision of the Chidley's to move to London has been attributed to both religious persecution. and a desire for relative anonymity. In 1630 Daniel Chidley, described as the Elder, together with John Dupper or Duppa and Thomas Dye, helped to form a separatist church in London. Frequently referred to by historians as the Duppa church, this splinter group rejected the baptism of Anglican parish churches and on these grounds broke away from an Independent church led by John Lothropp. The initiative seems originally to have stemmed from Duppa's demand that Lothropp's church, in renewing its covenant, should "Detest & Protest against yᵉ Parish Churches." The splinter group were lucky to avoid the wave of arrests that struck the more visible parent body in 1632. Samuel Chidley lived with his parents as an adult in London, and with his mother until at least 1652. He seems to have been active with his parents in their separatist group, supporting John Lilburne from the 1630s, during the period of Thorough, the attempt by Charles I to practise absolute monarchy. David Brown, a veteran of the group led by Duppa and the Chidleys reminisced about tearing a surplice as a deliberate act of iconoclasm one St Luke's Day (18 October) at Greenwich, a place made notorious in their eyes for the Catholic chapel that Queen Henrietta Maria had installed in her house there.
  The Chidleys seem also to have been very open to the economic opportunities afforded by the capital. Daniel became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers in 1632. Samuel, was admitted to the Company as an apprentice in 1634.
  The Chidleys' anonymity was decisively ended with the collapse of Thorough and the king's reluctant decision to call Parliaments. The Scottish Covenanters had defeated the king in the  Bishops' Wars and when Parliament entered into negotiations for an alliance, pressed for a Presbyterian reformation of the Church of England. At this juncture, Thomas Edwards, an irascible English Presbyterian controversialist,  published Reasons Against the Independent Government of Particular Congregations, an attack on the Congregational polity. In October 1641, Katherine Chidley issued a counterblast: The Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ. Being an Answer to Mr. Edwards his Booke. The Biblical texts she placed on the title page both attested her preference for thinking through the experience of the Judges and the early Israelite monarchy, tending to confirm the significance of Samuel's name. 1 Samuel 17:45, allowed her to take on the role of David, while Judges 4:21allowed her to be Jael.
  Samuel had begun his pamphleting career by 1643/4, when he released A Christian plea for Christians baptisme, a defence of infant baptism against the Particular Baptist Andrew Ritor's A Treatise of the Vanity of Childish Baptism, which had also strongly upheld baptism by immersion.
caption: An 1831 heraldic property mark of the Haberdashers' Company.
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