Henry Hickman

Rev Henry Hickman (1629-1692) was an English ejected minister and controversialist, and some time pastor of the English church at Leyden.

Henry Hickman was baptized at Old Swinford in Worcestershire on 19 January 1629, the son of the clothier Richard Hickman and his wife Rose [the Hickman family continued to live in the village of Oldswinford well into the nineteenth century]. He studied at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, with support from his uncle Henry Hickman, graduating BA in 1648. He became a demy of Magdalen College, Oxford, on 29 October 1648, and was made a fellow on 5 March 1649 following the parliamentary visitation of that year; the degree was incorporated at Oxford on 14 March 1650 and he proceeded MA on the same day (Foster, Alumni Oxoniensis, I, 704; Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, II, 366).

He was then employed to teach logic to Nathaniel Crewe at Steane; Crewe was later the bishop of Oxford (1671–4) and Durham (1674–1721). Hickman was a friend of the vicar of Bromsgrove, John Spilsbury, who was also a fellow of Magdalen; on 12 September 1653 he became the vicar of Brackley, where he had been a lecturer since 1648. Nevertheless, he was resident at the university by 1657, when in a disputation he argued that ‘the Church of Rome, for aught he knew, was a true church’; a response was produced by Vavasor Powell, then at All Saints, Oxford, who argued on 15 July 1657 that ‘the Pope would provide him with a mitre and the Devil with a frying–pan’ (Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, II, 345; DWL, Baxter Letters, I, fos. 266–7).

In May 1657 Hickman turned down an invitation to become the pastor at Stoke Newington because it was too far from Oxford; he became rector of St Aldates in the city on 29 July 1657, and was created BD on 29 May 1658 (LPL, COMM. III/6, p. 81; Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, II, 800). After the Restoration, Hickman was ejected from St Aldates in 1660, when the pre–Civil War sequestered rector reclaimed his living; he was also removed from his university fellowship (Mark Burden, A Biographical Dictionary of Tutors at the Dissenters’ Private Academies, 1660–1729 Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, 2013 274 (Matthews, Calamy Revised, 260). At a dinner in Westminster on 21 August 1660 attended by Samuel Pepys, Hickman ‘spoke very much against the height of the now old clergy, for putting out many of the religious fellows of colleges and enveighing against them for their being drunk’ (Pepys, Diary, I, 226–7). Hickman later moved to the Netherlands, becoming a student at Leiden University on 13 July 1663 (Peacock, Leyden, 49). He also assisted Matthew Newcomen at the English church in Leiden, delivering an exhortation to the congregation on 18 June 1664.

On 26 March 1666 his name appeared on a list of English subjects required to return to England to face trial for their activities during the 1650s (TNA, SP29/152, fo. 34). Once home, he became embroiled in a difficult case in the court of chancery against Alice Hickman, concerning the estate of her husband Henry, his uncle. The case grew in complexity when Hickman became a tutor to the family of William Strode of Barrington, a Presbyterian former MP. Hickman’s salary was pitiful: £10 per annum, plus his diet, but when Strode died in December 1666, he left £2,500 and a further £1,000 due on a mortgage to his daughter Joanna. Hickman was licensed to marry her on 30 November 1667. On 24 November 1668 they filed a petition in chancery against her brothers for claims under the father’s will. The Strode family later alleged that Joanna and Henry had removed gold and property from the house, and accused Hickman of marrying for money (TNA, C5/366/55, C5/424/74, C5/426/35, C5/615/106, C9/96/81). During this period, Hickman also presented books to Stourbridge grammar school, now King Edward VI College (AL Reade).

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