Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Ogden, Samuel (1626?-1697)

1406074Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 42 — Ogden, Samuel (1626?-1697)1895Alexander Gordon

OGDEN, SAMUEL (1626?–1697), presbyterian divine, born at Oldham, Lancashire, about 1626, was educated at Oldham grammar school and Christ's College, Cambridge. After graduating B. A., he was for some time master of Oldham grammar school. In 1652, having married, he was put in charge of Buxton Chapel, Derbyshire. He applied on 19 July 1653 to the Wirksworth classis for ordination, and was ordained on 27 Sept. 1663. Next year he was presented by the Earl of Rutland to the donative curacy of Fairfield, a mile from Buxton. No meeting of Wirksworth classis is recorded between 21 Feb. 1654 and 16 Jan. 1655 (the minute-book has twelve blank leaves). For admission to Fairfield, Ogden went up to London to the 'triers,' and obtained an approbation, 23 Oct. 1654, under their seal. He held Buxton and Fairfield Chapels till 1657, when he obtained the vicarage of Mackworth, Derbyshire, from which he was ejected by the Uniformity Act of 1662. During the whole of his ministry he kept a boarding school.

He did not at once continue his ministry, and was an occasional communicant, though not a 'fixed member,' of the established church. Till the Five Mile Act came into force, 25 March 1666, he kept on his school at Mackworth. He then went into Yorkshire, but returned and had a flourishing school at Derby. Under the indulgence of 1672 he took out a license on 8 May as a presbyterian teacher in the house of Thomas Saunders, at Little Ireton, Derbyshire. In 1085 the master of the Derby grammar school began a suit against him for competing with his school; Ogden took the case to the court of arches, and spent 100l. on it, urging that there was room for two schools; he lost his case in 1686. Sir John Gell of Hopton, Derbyshire, at once put him into the Wirksworth grammar school, of which he remained master till his death. After the Toleration Act, 1689, he preached regularly to nonconformist congregations. He was seized with paralysis in the pulpit, and died on 25 May 1697, 'aged upward of seventy; 'he was buried on 27 May in Wirksworth Church. He married a daughter of Burnet, perpetual curate of Oldham. Samuel Ogden, D.D. [q. v.], was his great-grandson.

Ogden was a good hebraist, conversed in Greek with 'the pretended archbishop of Samos,' and wrote Latin verse in his old age. He delighted in mathematics, and maintained that 'very few good mathematicians were lewd and scandalous.' He was versed also in physics, and an excellent practical botanist, and was fond of music. He seems to have published nothing except, perhaps, a political pamphlet which he wrote at the time of the Rye-house plot, but of which no copy is known to be extant; he left manuscript treatises on predestination and the intermediate state.

[Calamy's Account, 1713, pp. 189 seq., and Continuation, 1727, i. 234 (the certificates of his augmentation, ordination, approbation, and license are given in full, a nearly unique collection); Minute-Book of Wirksworth Classis, in Journal of Derbyshire Archæol. and Nat. Hist. Soc. January 1880. pp. 174 seq.]

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