Nicholas Ferrar
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Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637) came from a family deeply involved in the London Virginia Company. His niece is said to be the first woman to have received the name 'Virginia'. His family home was often visited by Sir Walter Raleigh, half-brother of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. After studying at Cambridge Nicholas visited Italy. Upon returning to London he found that the family fortunes, primarily invested in Virginia, were under threat. Nicholas entered parliament and worked with Sir Edwin Sandys. They were part of the parliamentary faction (the 'country party' or 'patriot party') which was able to seize control of the finances from a rival group, the 'court faction', grouped around Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick on the one hand and Sir Thomas Smith (or Smythe), also a prominent member of the East India Company.
Ferrar's pamphlet Sir Thomas Smith's Misgovernance of the Virginia Company was only published by the Roxborough Club in 1990. Here he lays charges that that Smith and his son-in-law Robert Johnson, were running a company within a company to cream off the profits from the shareholders. He also alleged that Dr Woodall had bought some Polish settlers as slaves, selling them on to Lord de La Warr. He claimed that Smith was trying to reduce other colonists to slavery by extending their period of indenture indefinitely beyond the seventh year.
The argument ended with the London Virginia Company losing its charter following a court decision in May, 1624.
In 1626 Nicholas Ferrar became involved in setting up a religious community in Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire. The community was centred on the Ferrar family: Nicholas's mother, and his brother John Ferrar (with his wife Bathsheba and their children), and his sister Susannah (and her husband John Collett and their children). They bought the manor of Little Gidding and restored the abandoned little church for their use. The community always had someone at prayer and had a strict religious routine. They tended to the health and education of local children, and Nicholas and his family produce harmonies of the gospels that survive today as some of the finest in Britain. Although Nicholas Ferrar died on 4 December 1637, the Community survived him, before being disbanded in 1657 on the death, within a month, of John Ferrar and Susannah Collett.
King Charles I took refuge at Little Gidding after the Battle of Naseby (1645).
Nicholas Ferrar is commemorated in the calendar of the Church of England on 4 December, the date of his death. In the calendar of the Episcopal Church (in the USA) he is commemorated on 1 December.
T. S. Eliot honoured Nicholas Ferrar in the Four Quartets, naming one of the quartets 'Little Gidding'.
A new community was founded at Little Gidding in the 1970s, inspired by the example of Ferrar, calling itself the Community of Christ the Sower, but that community ended in 1998.
