ST NICHOLAS, John (1604-98), of Stretton-under-Fosse, Monks Kirby and Knowle, Warws. and Lutterworth, Leics.

The St Nicholas family was settled permanently at Ash, near Sandwich, by 1462, but before that the name was to be found elsewhere in Kent, on the Isle of Thanet, from the first half of the fourteenth century. The first St Nicholas to hold a manor in Ash did so around 1379, before his heiress conveyed Goshall to her Worcestershire husband.15Planché, Corner of Kent, 67, 362, 367, 370. This connection between the family of St Nicholas and the midlands was to be refashioned in the seventeenth century. After an education at Cambridge, in the most fiercely puritan college, Emmanuel, to which he was admitted at the same time as his elder brother, Thomas St Nicholas*, John stayed in East Anglia for some years, living in 1625 at Chettisham, a short distance from Ely.16Kent Archives, PRC32/48/32. By January 1627, John St Nicholas had married the heir of a minor gentleman of Stretton-under-Fosse, in north-east Warwickshire. John St Nicholas was a younger son, and his marriage to Audrey Good could not have provided him with more than an adequate estate. The manor of Stretton, in Monks Kirby parish, was owned by Edward Boughton, kinsman of the Feildings, earls of Denbigh, and the earl himself owned the more important adjacent manor of Monks Kirby.17Dugdale, Warws. i. 77, 80.

St Nicholas needed to build up an estate of his own, to augment the inheritance of his wife, and took a lease of a property at Knowle, near Solihull, from the 2nd Baron Brooke.18Nichols, Leics. iv. 269, VCH Warws. iv. 99. From around 1640, he added to his holdings an estate of around 320 acres at Cesterover, a manor of Lord Brooke’s in Monks Kirby, where he had held smaller parcels since 1634.19Warws. RO, CR 2026/110/1; CR 1886/box 606/bdle. 3. Thus, St Nicholas's removal to Warwickshire, on his marriage, brought him within the orbit of two of the county's most important landlords and aristocratic patrons. Furthermore, by 1641 he had bought an estate at Windsor, Connecticut, encouraged no doubt by the prominence of Lord Brooke and his relatives and associates Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, Godfrey Bossevile* and George Wyllys, who had in 1633 bought a grant of lands on the Piscataqua River in New England. Wyllys, from Fenny Compton, near Warwick, became governor of Connecticut in 1642 after emigrating in 1638.20Wyllys Pprs. xxii - xxvii, St Nicholas bought lands near Stratford-upon-Avon from Wyllys prior to his departure, for £1,700.21Wyllys Pprs. 14. Although it is possible he contemplated emigration seriously, it is clear that in fact he never visited New England. It was this association with Wyllys, his approval of the Connecticut experiment, and his own land purchases there that lay behind his dedication, in 1678, of his History of Baptism, to the governors and ministers of New England, especially to any original planters still living. In this sense did St Nicholas consider himself ‘an adventurer in the first plantation’, ‘a spectator and observer of their actions’.22J. St Nicholas, Hist. of Baptism (1678), dedication.

Before the civil wars, there was nothing to associate St Nicholas with any life other than that of a quiet country gentleman, and he played no part in county administration. He was, however, among the circle of godly gentry who corresponded with, and visited, the puritan schoolmaster of Warwick, Thomas Dugard, during the 1630s. Dugard himself was often in attendance at gatherings of the godly at Warwick Castle, and so St Nicholas was in spiritual, as well as in economic matters as a tenant, a member of Brooke’s network, albeit rather on the fringes.23Add. 23146, ff. 25v, 26v, 30, 39. At the outbreak of war, St Nicholas took up no obvious role in civil or military activity, though there is no doubt on which side his loyalties lay. Indeed, William Dugdale went so far as to include him in a list of those who ‘appeared in’ the Militia Ordinance with Brooke, although St Nicholas’s forename escaped the antiquary: probably less an unwonted lapse by Dugdale than an indication of St Nicholas’s genuine lack of local standing at this point.24Northants. RO, FH4284. He was never a member of the county committee or ever had a military commission, though in August 1643 from his house in Knowle he contributed 66 ounces of plate for the use of the garrison at Warwick castle.25LJ vi. 197b.

In 1642, on the order of Parliament, the first English translation of The Marrow of English Divinity, by the puritan divine, William Ames, was published: a translation apparently accomplished by John St Nicholas. One printing of this work took place in 1642, and two more in 1643, with no textual evidence about the process of translation.26W. Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642). The only source for St Nicholas’s involvement is the second edition of Edmund Calamy’s account of ministers ejected by the restored monarchy in 1662, published in 1713.27E. Calamy, An Account, ii. 426. It is quite plausible that St Nicholas did indeed translate Ames, despite the slenderness of the evidence. Ames had died in 1633, and his papers had passed to the radical puritan minister and supporter of Parliament, Hugh Peter, who was active in New England at the time that St Nicholas was involving himself in developments there. Ames’s widow sailed to Massachusetts in 1637, so that by 1640 the centre of Ames scholarship was in colonial America.28K. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor Ames (Urbana, Illinois, 1972), 128, 247, 251. Peter’s return to England in 1641, to lobby Parliament vociferously on behalf of the Massachusetts Bay colony, and Lord Brooke’s oversight of New England affairs were two other factors which may have accounted for St Nicholas as the choice of translator, if indeed he was responsible.29R.P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan (Urbana, Ill. 1954), 159, 163. The translation was a polished work of genuine popularising, which included a table of ‘words explained … not intended for the learned but for the unlearned’, and the translator evidently had considerable intellectual resources at his disposal. St Nicholas’s later career provides ample evidence of his scholarly interests, and so it is perfectly plausible to think of his early years in Warwickshire spent in academic and theological pursuits, albeit at a distance from the academy.

By 1644, St Nicholas was in financial difficulty as a result of the disruption of the local economy. Although his part of east Warwickshire had not been plundered, military taxation fell heavily on the estate he had bought from Wyllys, apparently in instalments, and after pressure from Wyllys’s son, St Nicholas was forced to write to Governor Wyllys asking for relief from his due payments, and commented somewhat acerbically that he hoped friends in New England ‘need not be put in mind of the good they have received whilst their friends were in prosperity here’. He wished that the doctrine of usury were better explained on both sides of the Atlantic and finally avowed defiantly: ‘I shall rather go to prison than see my family perish for want of bread’.30Wyllys Pprs. 63. His relationship with the Wyllys family survived this crisis, however, and in 1646 he was engaged in further conveyancing of the Stratford estate he had bought from the family.31Warws. RO, CR 1886/4885. Two months before his importunate letter to Wyllys, St Nicholas was in trouble at Knowle, for refusing the office of constable, after having been selected by the court leet. He was fined £5.32Warws. RO, CR 1886/2333. This is further evidence of St Nicholas’s somewhat precarious circumstances through most of the 1640s, and it was not until April 1649, when he was first named to an assessment commission for Warwickshire, and the following June, when he was elevated to the commission of the peace, that he achieved prominence in the county.33A. and O.; C231/6, p. 160. It is hard not to read his advancement as a product of the reduced pool of men willing to serve the state after the execution of the king, and a spin-off from the steady rise to prominence of his brother, Thomas.

St Nicholas was relatively slow to begin to contribute to the work of the Warwickshire bench, but by the Epiphany sessions of 1651 he was beginning to act in the north east of the county. By October 1651, he was among the most active of justices, collaborating with the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding), his neighbour.34Warwick County Records, iii, pp. xxi, 34, 43, 121. After the death of Lord Brooke in 1643, Denbigh was the leading peer in Warwickshire, and as a Rumper, was a crucial influence in advancing St Nicholas’s public profile. Indeed, the patronage of Denbigh may account for St Nicholas’s career as both magistrate and clergyman. The living of Lutterworth was in Denbigh’s gift, and the Leicestershire town itself was under the peer’s control. From 1647, the Committee for Plundered Ministers supported the townsmen’s nomination of a successor to the sequestered minister there, but deferred to Denbigh, whose rights of nomination were not to be violated.35Nichols, Leics. iv. 264.

The earliest mention of St Nicholas as a minister seems to be in July 1649, a month after his nomination as a magistrate. His was the first name in a list of nine east Warwickshire ministers who certified William Swayne of Coventry as fit for the ministry. All of the nine except St Nicholas are recorded as ministering in particular parishes. The subsequent procedure in Swayne’s case was that he should ‘put himself on a classis for ordination when chosen by a congregation’.36Warws. RO, CR 2026/462/2. It is not known whether St Nicholas was ever ordained, but from the process of approbation adopted for Swayne, in which the former evidently was a credible participant, it seems likely that he was: at some point before 1649, and by a Presbyterian classis. Even so, he was a minister without a living, and his more obvious public actions were as a magistrate. He was living at Lutterworth by November 1653, when both his son and daughter were buried there, but continued to be active as a Warwickshire magistrate.37Nichols, Leics. iv. 258, 271; Warwick County Records, iii. 163, 175, 203, 226. It seems unlikely that he had begun a ministry there by the time he was named to the Parliament of 1653. His connections with Denbigh and with the Greville family at Warwick Castle, and his reputation for godliness, would account for his inclusion among the MPs for Warwickshire in the Nominated Assembly.

St Nicholas was far from being an active Member. He was named to two important standing committees, that for Scotland, and for the advancement of learning, in which, as an orthodox puritan, he would have striven to retain a ministry supported by tithes, against the assaults of the radicals.38CJ vii. 286b; A List of the Names (1653, 669 f. 17.45); A New List of all the Members (1653, 669 f. 17.57). He was completely overshadowed in the assembly by his brother, however, who was a legal reformer, and to whom most of the Commons Journals references to ‘Mr St Nicholas’ apply.39‘Thomas St Nicholas’, infra. It is likely that John was the brother given leave of absence from the House on 13 August and 5 October: probably because of the ill-health in his family that led to his children’s deaths that year.40CJ vii. 304a, 330b. The only activity with which John St Nicholas can be confidently associated is the report from the committee of the whole House on 23 November, on amendments to the bill for the union of Scotland and England: a product of his nomination to the committee for Scotland back in July.41CJ vii. 355a. In reports of this Parliament after it had surrendered its authority back to Oliver Cromwell in December, St Nicholas was noted as one who was ‘for a learned, godly ministry’: in other words, a moderate reformer, committed to preserving a state church and, in the context of the collapse of that assembly, one of the majority who despaired of the radicals.42A Catalogue of the Names (1654, 669 f. 19.3). He would have had no qualms about accepting the Cromwellian protectorate, and returned to his dual career of magistrate and minister in Warwickshire and Leicestershire.

St Nicholas remained busy in and out of quarter sessions as a magistrate until the spring of 1656, suggesting that he still had no clerical appointment.43Warwick County Records, iii, pp. xxi, 247, 268, 285, 290, 296, 300, 320. From November 1653, he and Denbigh performed marriages at Monk’s Kirby under the provisions of the new act for marriages, but these were as a magistrate, not as a minister. The last of St Nicholas’s dozen or so ceremonies was conducted on 3 December 1656.44Monk’s Kirby par. reg. By the summer of 1656, he was identified in a lawsuit as minister of Lutterworth, and although he continued to act as a Warwickshire magistrate until the autumn of 1657, there was a sharp decline in his interest in this work, presumably as his pastoral duties increased.45Warws. RO, CR 2026/110/1; Warwick County Records, iii. 344, iv. 4,20. It was St Nicholas who in 1656 was identified as the leading figure among those tenants of Trinity College, Cambridge, who were refusing to pay the college its tithes at Cesterover: allegedly with the encouragement of the 3rd Baron Brooke.46Warws, RO, CR 2026/110/1. His failure to meet the financial demands of the college should not be interpreted as a deliberate challenge by St Nicholas to the principle of tithes, however. He was no sectary, and fully supported the tithe-supported state ministry. In March 1659, he compounded for the first fruits of Lutterworth: his brother Thomas was one of his sureties.47E334/22. In September, he signed the Humble Representation of Leicestershire ministers, which affirmed their loyalty to the restored Rump, and their hope that Parliament would be able to continue building a national preaching ministry.48Dugdale, Short View of the Late Troubles in Eng. (1681), 471.

St Nicholas’s tenure of the living was short. By 1 August 1660, his successor was instituted to Lutterworth, presented not by Denbigh but by the crown.49Calamy Revised, 424. Thereafter, he continued to minister informally outside the Church of England, offering refuge at Knowle, the house he kept but did not occupy, to a minister ejected from Wetton, Staffordshire, by reason of the Five Mile Act.50E. Calamy, A Continuation of the Account (2 vols. 1727), ii. 862; Records of Knowle ed. T. W. Downing (privately printed, 1914), 390, 430; Warwick County Records, vi. 175. He left Lutterworth for Burbage, the home of his second wife, Priscilla, daughter of Anthony Grey, 9th earl of Kent, a noted puritan minister, who before his death in 1643 declined to renounce his vocation when he inherited his title.51Calamy, Continuation, ii. 591-2; CP vii. 175. At Burbage in 1663 St Nicholas produced another publication, An Help to Beginners in the Faith, and followed it up 15 years later with his most substantial work, the History of Baptism, in which he demonstrated again his support for orthodox (i.e. non-Baptist) positions on paedobaptism.52Calamy, Continuation, ii. 591-2; J. St Nicholas, Hist. of Baptism (1678). He was an occasional poet, offering lines of sympathy to his brother, Thomas, who was caught in a dangerous flash flood en route to visit John, in 1663. A close relationship evidently existed between them: ‘Are not our comforts much bound up in yours?/ As your afflictions much involv’d in ours?’53Birmingham Univ. Lib. mss 5/iv/23, pp. 104-7. In July 1672, his house at Burbage was licensed as a meeting place for nonconformists, although he himself was reconciled sufficiently with the Church of England that in his last days ‘he went to the public church as long as he was able to go abroad, notwithstanding that he was for many years so thick of hearing, that he could not hear a word that was said’.54G. Lyon Turner, Original Records of Early Nonconformity (3 vols. 1911) ii. 760; Calamy, An Account, ii. 426. His last work, The Widow’s Mite, he published as he noted on the title page, in his 91st year, and described himself then as ‘a student in St Paul’s Epistles’.55J. St Nicholas, The Widow’s Mite Cast into the Treasury (1695), title page. He died on 27 May 1698 and was buried at Burbage; none of his descendants are thought to have sat in Parliament.56Nichols, Leics. iv. 271.