William Baker was perhaps too old to be greatly excited when new prospects opened for Ash with the building, in 1637, of the elegant new manor house next the church. The evening of his life saw the death, in the following year, of his daughter Anne and that may have been a blow from which he never recovered. By 1639, the Ash registers were no longer being properly kept and a sparseness of entries continued during the remainder of Baker’s life. He died in 1642; whether he was buried at Ash does not appear.
   In that same year, the King raised his standard at Nottingham. Not for the first time, a new rector of Ash entered upon his duties at a moment pregnant with difficulty. For much of his long incubency Baker’s successor, Thomas Norris, was to minister against a background of civil strife and ecclesiastical anarchy.⁹
   Early steps had been taken to secure the county of

Kent for the Parliament and its future governance was, as in other counties, entrusted to a Committee. Of necessity, the Committee had mostly to be chosen from the gentry and in consequence the Parliament had been faced with a difficult situation. In general, the county families were of moderate opinion; their sympathies lay predominantly with the King but they were, above all, devoted to their county. They wished to govern it as a close community, as they had been accustomed to do, and to pursue unmolested the even tenor of their lives. The importance of Kent’s strategic position put paid to any hopes that they might be left free to do so. The Parliamentarians could not pack the Committee of Kent with extremists, but when the Committee came under the chairmanship and sway of the much detested Sir Anthony Weldon of