Nicholas Ferrar

English religious leader

• Born: February 22, 1592
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: December 4, 1637
• Place of death: Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, England

Turning away from his worldly success in London society, business, and politics, Ferrar found a richer life on the borders of the Fen country at Little Gidding, in a tiny Christian community that he designed for his extended family. Although he performed no great deeds, Ferrar’s example of religious everyday family life had an impact on future generations.

Early Life

Nicholas Ferrar’s (FUR-uhr) father was a wealthy and prominent London merchant, a business associate of the Elizabethan adventurers Sir John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir Walter Ralegh, and director of the Virginia Company. His mother, Mary Woodnoth Ferrar, a deeply religious woman, was the daughter of Cheshire gentry, but she found her vocation in homemaking and child rearing. Nicholas was their third son and fifth child.

From infancy, Nicholas displayed a remarkable aptitude for learning and religious sensitivity. The Ferrar family nicknamed the boy “Saint Nicholas” and told tales about his piety. For example, at age five Nicholas was so taken with his confirmation ceremony that afterward he slipped into another group of candidates and had the bishop confirm him a second time. Before he was six and went away to grammar school, Nicholas had read the Bible and John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563). He attended grammar school in Newbury and when he was fourteen matriculated at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself through learning, temperance, and piety. In 1610, when he graduated at the age of eighteen, he was elected to a fellowship and as a fellow of Clare Hall began the study of medicine.

Ill health interrupted Ferrar’s medical studies. He had never been robust and now suffered from malaria or some other form of ague. In 1612, his physician advised him to travel abroad, and in 1613, on the recommendation of the master of Clare, he was placed in the entourage of the daughter of James I , Princess Elizabeth Stuart , who was then starting her ill-fated career as the Winter Queen by going to the Continent to join her husband, the Palatine elector Frederick V . Ferrar traveled with her party to Holland and there departed on his own grand tour, which took him through Germany, Italy, France, and Spain between 1613 and 1618. He mastered the languages of these countries and studied their religious practices, but his travels overtaxed his strength, and at Marseilles in 1616, he nearly died of a severe fever.

In 1618, he came home to London, where his father was dying, and the resulting disarray of the family firm required Ferrar to enter business and take charge of the firm. He would have preferred to return to Cambridge or to accept the academic post that was offered to him at Gresham College, but he dutifully agreed to manage the Ferrar business interests. He tried energetically to save the Virginia Company, but it was dissolved in 1623 despite his efforts and largely for political reasons. In 1624, he was elected a member of Parliament. In the House of Commons he was active in the impeachment of Lionel Cranfield, first earl of Middlesex, who had led the attack on the Virginia Company.

By 1625, Ferrar had distinguished himself in business, politics, and London society, but his many successes seemed only to disillusion him deeply. A wealthy young bachelor, he was offered in marriage many rich city heiresses and blue-blooded daughters of gentry and nobility, but he had decided never to marry. Years later, he would explain his disillusionment by saying that in worldly callings there were diverse perplexities, distractions, and utter ruin. Knowing Scripture as he did, he might have cited Luke 10:38-42 to the point: He had been anxious and troubled about many things and yet in his eyes one thing only was needful, to serve the Lord by heeding his word.

Ferrar’s father had died in 1620, and his widowed mother was unhappy in the city and wished for a religious retreat and retirement in the country. During the mid-1620’s, Ferrar liquidated the family business interests. Ferrar and his mother looked for a suitable refuge in the country. The manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire had come on the market in 1620 after the suicide in the Tower of London of Gervase, first Baron Clifton. Clifton had neglected his properties, and Little Gidding was in a state of ruin. The manor house was dilapidated, the church was used for a hay barn and pigsty, and a sole shepherd’s hut stood where many cottages had once been. Mary Ferrar bought the manor in 1625. The London plague of 1625 provided the occasion for the move of the whole Ferrar family from London to Little Gidding in 1626.

Life’s Work

Ferrar’s most important work occurred during the eleven years between his arrival at Little Gidding in 1626 and his death there in 1637. His accomplishment was the religious community of Little Gidding, and it was his legacy to the Church of England and to humanity. Many contemporary Englishmen misunderstood Little Gidding, and the community has puzzled historians as well. Puritan critics attacked it as a Protestant nunnery. Modern historians have described it variously as papist, Puritan, Platonic, familial, Utopian, and Anglo-Catholic. Ferrar was neither a Puritan nor a crypto-Roman Catholic: He was an Anglican. A well-informed contemporary described the residents of Little Gidding correctly as “orthodox, regular, puritanical protestants.”

Upon their arrival, the members of the new community first repaired the fabric of Little Gidding, giving the church priority. Next, Ferrar designed a rule for religious living, a regime of continual prayer, day and night, and wide community service, providing education and medical care for the neighborhood. Ferrar believed that everyone ought to have a trade, and so the community took up bookbinding and produced handsome volumes of religious works. They followed the old Benedictine principle of ora et labora: Everyone was occupied in meaningful prayer and labor for the greater good and greater glory of God.

Ferrar took neither side in the great religious, political, and social conflicts that would result, in 1642, in the English Civil War. He had been brought up on Foxe’s Actes and Monuments to believe that the pope was the Antichrist. He was a Royalist, because he loved King Charles I , and he was a high churchman, because he espoused Archbishop William Laud’s religious aesthetics of “the decency of divine worship” and “the beauty of holiness.” Yet he allowed both Roman Catholics and Puritans to visit Little Gidding and join in its devotions. He befriended both Laud and Laud’s enemy, Bishop John Williams of Lincoln.

Visitors were welcome at Little Gidding, so long as they neither interfered in nor interrupted the community’s religious activities. Ferrar became accustomed to harmonizing the discordant interests of members of the three-generational extended family that formed the community. Far from homogenous, the community included not only his two saintly virgin nieces but also the black sheep, his younger brother Richard, not to mention everyone from the holy to the rakehell. The family of Little Gidding had the problems that any family has, exacerbated by its size of thirty to forty members.

Ferrar did not rule as a tyrant, nor was he the pseudo-messiah of a cult. He scorned worldly success, political power, ecclesiastical preferment, and academic honors. In the wider world, he was content to remain a deacon of the Church of England. At Little Gidding, he was content to obey his aged mother, and until her death in 1634, she was matriarch of the community. In his many literary endeavors, Ferrar always sought anonymity. His published works were all printed without his name. Most of his works remained unpublished, because he wrote them for the instruction and entertainment of his community or of particular friends outside Little Gidding. These works were either manuscripts or editions privately printed at Little Gidding.

In fact, Ferrar’s literary modesty was such that he considered his works to be those of community, and he made no distinction between the art of authorship and the craft of book production. Ferrar never traveled to court to curry favor of the great; instead, he was happy to permit the great, including King Charles I himself, to visit Little Gidding and participate in community religious life. In his attitude there was no perverse pride, reverse snobbery, or false humility. He started no religious movement, no Anglican monastic order, no school of Ferrarian theology. Rather, his monument was the example of his life, which has endured long after 1646, when Puritan fanatics destroyed Little Gidding and scattered the surviving members of the religious community.

Ferrar’s life at Little Gidding was not uneventful. The Metaphysical poets George Herbert and Richard Crashaw visited and corresponded with him. He designed the rule for the community and coordinated community activities. He studied and wrote, worked and prayed, and suffered from his chronic fevers. Ferrar profoundly influenced Herbert, other Metaphysical poets, many Anglican churchmen, King Charles I, and many others, neither by what he wrote nor by his great deeds but by how he lived.

Indeed, Ferrar was so self-effacing that his biographers write not about his personality but about his “impersonality.” Few of his contemporaries seem even to have noticed his appearance. It was as if Ferrar really existed only insofar as he was in the Little Gidding community and had no existence apart from it. His portrait as a young man, which hangs in Magdalene College, Cambridge, shows an intense and very Italianate, unshaven Englishman with dark hair and large, wide-set, dark eyes. Like the anonymity of his writings, his impersonality reflected humility and his merging identity with the Little Gidding community. Ferrar’s variety of religious experience resembles that of another merchant’s son who felt himself unworthy to take Holy Orders, Saint Francis of Assisi, but Saint Francis’s medium was nature, while Ferrar’s was family life. His biographer A. L. Maycock rightly called Ferrar “one of the most saintly men that has ever adorned the Church of England.”

Significance

Ferrar achieved rapid success in academic life, business, politics, and social life, but at the age of thirty-two, he renounced worldly callings and retired to Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, where he established a religious community for his extended family. Ferrar’s example had tremendous impact on his age and has continued to influence Christian spiritually for centuries, especially in the Church of England, Anglo-Catholicism, and the works of English poets from Herbert to T. S. Eliot.

Bibliography

Ferrar, John. Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar: A Reconstruction of John Ferrar’s Account of His Brother’s Life Based on All the Surviving Copies. Edited with an introduction by Lynette R. Muir and John A. White. Leeds, West Yorkshire, England: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996. A modern edition of John Ferrar’s biography of his brother, Nicholas.

Ferrar, Nicholas. The Ferrar Papers. Edited by B. Blackstone. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1938. Important primary source materials including an early biography of Ferrar. Contains useful commentary.

Maycock, A. L. Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1938. Reprint. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1980. The standard biography; workmanlike and scholarly, but with a literary flair. Maycock also wrote the Chronicles of Little Gidding (1954).

Moore, William W. The Little Church That Refused to Die. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 35. Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick, 1993. A history of the Little Gidding community.

“Nicholas Ferrar and George Herbert.” In The Criterion, 1922-1939, edited by T. S. Eliot, 18 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. The fourth of Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) is titled “Little Gidding” and was inspired by Ferrar’s theology and a pilgrimage that Eliot had made one winter in the 1930’s to Little Gidding. Several of Eliot’s essays, such as “George Herbert” and “The Metaphysical Poets,” are also pertinent.

Ransome, Joyce. “Prelude to Piety: Nicholas Ferrar’s Grand Tour.” Seventeenth Century 18, no. 1 (Spring, 2003): 1. Describes Ferrar’s travels in Europe while he was a fellow at Clare College and the impact of these travels upon his later life.

Summers, Joseph H. George Herbert: His Religion and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. Important study of the complexity of early Stuart religion.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Indispensable and brilliant discussion of systems of belief current in Tudor and Stuart England.

Trevor-Roper, H. R. Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645. 2d ed. London: Macmillan, 1963. Reprint. London: Phoenix Press, 2000. Important for background and for some fascinating comments on Ferrar, especially on pages 137-139.