UNIVERSITY CALIFORNIA THE PREFACE OF THE EDITOR. DURING the latter half of the sixteenth century, under the wise but arbitrary civil sway of the Maiden Queen, and the not less arbitrary, but much less wise ecclesiastical rule of Parker, and Grindal, and Whitgift, metropolitans of England, there lived in London a wealthy merchant citizen, Nicolas Culverwel, or, as it is sometimes written, Culverel, who, if we may judge from the history of his family, was, like many of his compeers, a devoted adherent to Puritanism ; a circumstance which, when we consider how much that form of religion was discountenanced both by royal and episcopal authority, and how serious were the dangers and sacrifices to which its rich professors were especially exposed, must be allowed to be a presumption, at least, that Nicolas was a sincere, earnest man.1 Two of his daughters were married to distinguished Puritan ministers; one to Dr. Lawrence Chadderton, who was chosen by Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emanuel College, Cambridge, to be the first master of that 1 Clark's Lives at the end of his Martyrology. a institution, which, under his care, soon took so high a place among its academical sisters. From his modesty, which equalled his learning, Dr. Chadderton was extremely reluctant to accept a situation so high and responsible, and complied only on Sir Walter saying, 'If you will not be the master, sir, I will not be the founder of the college.'1 Another daughter became the wife of a still more celebrated man, Dr. William Whitaker, the nephew of Nowel, Dean of St. Paul's, and, in succession, Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, and Master of St. John's College, in that University, whom Cardinal Bellarmine is said to have pronounced 'the most learned heretic he had ever read;' and of whom Bishop Hall says, 'Who ever saw him without reverence, or heard him without wonder ?'2 A third daughter, the spouse of Mr. Thomas Gouge, a pious gentleman,' was the mother of Dr. William Gouge, for nearly half a century the venerated minister of Blackfriars, in London, author of a Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, in a folio volume of immense size, a member of the Westminster Assembly, and the father of Thomas Gouge, the nonconformist and philanthropist, the memory of whose rare excellence Archbishop Tillotson, so much to his own honour, has embalmed in a funeral sermon, describing him as 'having left far behind him all he ever knew in cheerful, unwearied diligence in acts of pious charity; 1 Brook's Lives of the Puritans, ii. 446 ; Fuller's Hist. of Cambridge, 147. 2 Churton's Life of Nowel, p. 64; Clark's Ecc. Hist., p. 816, and pp. 15-17; Wood's Ath. Ox., vol. i. p. 303; Leigh on Religion and Learning, p. 363. |
