Reverend Walter Rosewell (c. 1610 – 20 May 1658) was the Vicar of Doulting, Somerset and later became a Presbyterian Minister at Chatham, Kent.
[5] He was severely persecuted[6] by Bishop Pierce of Bath & Wells and by 1640 he was Puritan minister at St Mathews Friday Street, Cheapside, London.
In July 1650 Rosewell was charged with ‘refusing to take the Engagement and for bitter invecting against the proceedings of the Parliament and Army’.
He was accused of ‘seditious practises against the State both in the pulpit and elsewhere...’ and was ‘sequestered from that [his] living by the Committee for Plundered Ministers, and by order of the Council committed to the Gatehouse, and prohibited from preaching any more at Chatham’.
However, by 1653 most Chatham dockyard workers were keen to have Adderley removed as both sea chaplain and parish minister and in January 1654 the Council of State received a petition from ‘the officers and others relating to the navy, and inhabitants of the parish of Chatham’ to have their former minister, Walter Rosewell, reinstated, which they passed to the Admiralty.
The Admiralty issued an order in February proposing that Rosewell and Adderley should jointly serve as parish ministers.
Rosewell challenged Coppin's erroneous religious views in a series of weekly lectures at Rochester Cathedral in October 1655.
‘His tomb bears a coat of arms, and the names of many descendants: the last being those of Benjamin Rosewell, of Clapton, Esq., and Ann Alleyne, his daughter, who died in 1782 and 1797, respectively’.
He noted ‘that the black adult humour of choler, held the predominancy in his individual Constitution, which many times gave a tincture to his discourse & action: and which standers-by, more censorious then candid, interpreted to his unjust prejudice’.
[7] Many Chatham parishioners were aware of the hardships Rosewell had endured for his beliefs and were prepared to overlook his bluntness, as he did not direct his venom at the dockyard.
Case spoke of there being ‘many living monuments of the power of God, in his Ministry’, referring to Rosewell's ability to draw men and convince them to his view.
Case considered Rosewell a ‘faithful servant of Christ … no intruder, or up-start of the times, who like the false Prophets of old, run before they are sent, and speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord’.