Matthew Sylvester

Matthew Sylvester (Southwell, c. 1636– London, 1708) was an English nonconformist cleric.

Matthew Sylvester, son of Robert Sylvester, mercer, was born at Southwell, Nottinghamshire, about 1636. From Southwell grammar school, on 4 May 1654, at the age of seventeen, he was admitted at St. John's College, Cambridge. He was too poor to stay long at college, but as he kept up his studies while supporting himself in various places, probably by teaching, he became a good linguist and well read in philosophy.

About 1659 Sylvester obtained the vicarage of Great Gonerby, Lincolnshire. He was a distant relative of Robert Sanderson, who became bishop of Lincoln in 1660. In consequence of the Act of Uniformity of 1662, he resigned his living in that year, rejecting Sanderson's offer of further preferment. He now became domestic chaplain to Sir John Bright, 1st Baronet, and subsequently to John White, a Nottinghamshire presbyterian. In 1667 he was living at Mansfield with Joseph Truman, but in that year he came to London, and became pastor of a congregation at Rutland House, Charterhouse Yard. He was on good terms with many of the London clergy, particularly Benjamin Whichcote and John Tillotson. Richard Baxter, who remained to the last in communion with the Church of England, and declined to be pastor of any separated congregation, nevertheless became, from 1687, Sylvester's unpaid assistant. He valued Sylvester for his meekness, temper, sound principles, and great pastoral ability. Baxter's eloquence as a preacher supplied what was lacking to Sylvester, whose delivery was poor, though in prayer he had a remarkable gift, as Oliver Heywood notes. After Baxter's death in 1691 the congregation declined. Early in 1692 it was removed to a building in Meeting House Court, Knightrider Street. Edmund Calamy, who was Sylvester's assistant from 1692 to 1695, describes him as ‘a very meek spirited, silent, and inactive man,’ in straitened circumstances. After Calamy left him Sylvester plodded on by himself till his death. He died suddenly on Sunday evening, 25 January 1708. Calamy preached his funeral sermon on 1 February.

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