interferes, and the two go to the house of Master Nicholas at Portisham in Dorset. He judges, they say, many right judgments, and composes and writes much wisdom, and it is lamentable that so learned and worthy a man should gain no preferment from his bishop. The poet, whoever he was, wrote the octosyllabic couplet with ease and smoothness. He borrows something from Alexander of Neckham’s De naturis rerum, and was certainly familiar with contemporary French poetry. The piece is a general allegory of the contest between asceticism and a more cheerful view of religion, and is capable of a particular application to the differences between the regular orders and the secular clergy. The nightingale defends her singing on the ground that heaven is a place of song and mirth, while the owl maintains that much weeping for his many sins is man’s best preparation for the future.
There are two MSS. of the Hule and the Nightingale, MS. Cotton Caligula A ix. (British Museum), dating from the first half of the 13th century, and MS. Arch. I. 29, Jesus College, Oxford, written about half a century later. In the Jesus College MS. the poem is immediately preceded by a religious poem entitled La Passyun Jhu Christ, which, according to a note on it, once possessed an additional quatrain implying that it was written by John of Guildford, perhaps a relation of Nicholas.
The Owl and the Nightingale has been edited from the Cotton MS. chiefly for the Roxburghe Club (1838) by Joseph Stevenson, and for the Percy Society (1843) by T. Wright; the best edition is by F. H. Stratmann (Krefeld, 1868), who collated the two MSS. See also B. Ten Brink, Early English Literature (trans. H. M. Kennedy, pp. 214-218); Courthope, History of English Poetry; and J. W. H. Atkins in the Cambridge History of Literature, vol. i. For some textual criticism see A. E. Egge in Modern Language Notes (Baltimore, January, 1887).
NICHOLAS, SIR EDWARD (1593–1669), English statesman,
eldest son of John Nicholas, a member of an old Wiltshire family,
was born on the 4th of April 1593. He was educated at Salisbury
grammar school, Winchester College and Queen’s College,
Oxford. After studying law at the Middle Temple, Nicholas
became secretary to Lord Zouch, warden and admiral of the
Cinque ports, in 1618, and continued in a similar employment
under the duke of Buckingham. In 1625 he became secretary
to the admiralty; shortly afterwards he was appointed an extra
clerk of the privy council with duties relating to admiralty
business, and from 1635 to 1641 he was one of the clerks in
ordinary to the council. In this situation Nicholas had much
business to transact in connexion with the levy of ship-money;
and in 1641, when Charles I. went to Scotland, a heavy responsibility
rested on the secretary who remained in London to keep
the king informed of the proceedings of the parliament. On
the return of Charles to the capital Nicholas was knighted, and
appointed a privy councillor and a secretary of state, in which
capacity he attended the king while the court was at Oxford,
and carried out the business of the treaty of Uxbridge. Throughout
this troubled period he was one of Charles’s wisest and most
loyal advisers; he it was who arranged the details of the king’s
surrender to the Scots, though he does not appear to have
advised or even to have approved of the step; and to him also
fell the duty of treating for the capitulation of Oxford, which
included permission for Nicholas himself to retire abroad with
his family. He went to France, being recommended by the
king to the confidence of the prince of Wales. After the king’s
death Nicholas remained on the continent concerting measures
on behalf of the exiled Charles II. with Hyde and other royalists,
but the hostility of Queen Henrietta Maria deprived him of any
real influence in the counsels of the young sovereign. He lived
at the Hague and elsewhere in a state of poverty which hampered
his power to serve Charles, but which the latter did nothing
to relieve. He returned to England at the Restoration; but
although Charles had formally appointed him secretary of state
in 1654, this office was now conferred on another, and Nicholas
had to content himself with a grant of money and the offer of
a peerage, which his poverty compelled him to decline. He
retired to a country seat in Surrey which he purchased from a
son of Sir Walter Raleigh, and here he lived till his death in
1669. By his wife Jane, a daughter of Henry Jay, an alderman
of London, he had several sons and daughters; his younger
brother Matthew Nicholas (1594–1661) was successively dean
of Bristol, canon of Westminster and dean of St Paul’s.
See The Nicholas Papers, edited by G. F. Warner (Camden Society, London, 1886–1897), containing Nicholas’s correspondence and some autobiographical memoranda. Private correspondence between Nicholas and Charles I. will be found in the Memoirs of John Evelyn, edited by W. Bray (London, 1827); The Edgerton MSS. and the Ormonde Papers contain many references to Nicholas.
NICHOLAS (or Niclaes), HENRY (or Hendrik) (c. 1501–c. 1580),
founder of the sect called “the Family of Love,” was born
in 1501 or 1502, at Münster, where he was married and carried on
the business of a mercer. As a boy he was subject to visions,
and at the age of twenty-seven charges of heresy led to his
imprisonment. About 1530 he removed with his family to
Amsterdam, where he was again imprisoned on a charge of
complicity in the Munster revolution of 1534–1535. About 1539
he experienced a call to found his “Familia Caritatis.” Removing
to Embden, he lived there and prospered in business for
twenty years, though he travelled with commercial as well as
missionary objects into the Netherlands, England and elsewhere.
The date of his sojourn in England has been placed as early as
1552 and as late as 1569. In 1579 he was living at Cologne,
where probably he died a year or two later. His doctrines seem
to have been derived largely from the Dutch Anabaptist David
Jöris or George, who died in 1556; but they have mainly to be
inferred from the jaundiced accounts of hostile writers. The
outward trappings of his system were merely Anabaptist; but
he anticipated a good many later speculations, and his followers
were accused of asserting that all things were ruled by nature
and not directly by God, of denying the dogma of the Trinity,
and repudiating infant baptism. They held that no man should
be put to death for his opinions, and apparently, like the later
Quakers, they objected to the carrying of arms and to anything
like an oath; and they were quite impartial in their repudiation
of all other churches and sects, including Brownists and
Barrowists.
Nicholas’s principal disciple in England was one Christopher Vitel, and towards 1579 the progress of the sect especially in the eastern counties provoked literary attacks, proclamations and parliamentary bills. But Nicholas’s followers escaped the gallows and the stake, for they combined with some success the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. They would only discuss their doctrines with sympathizers; they showed every respect for authority, and considered outward conformity a duty. This quietist attitude, while it saved them from molestation, hampered propaganda; and though the “Family” existed until the middle of the 17th century, it was then swallowed up by the Quakers, Baptists and Unitarians, all of which denominations may have derived some of their ideas through the “Family” from the Anabaptists.
The list of Nicholas’s works occupies nearly six columns in the Dict. Nat. Biogr. See also Belfort Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, pp. 327-380 (1903); and Strype’s Works, General index. (A. F. P.)
NICHOLS, JOHN (1745–1826), English printer and author,
was born at Islington on the 2nd of February 1745. He edited
the Gentleman’s Magazine from 1788 till his death, and in the
pages of that periodical, and in his numerous volumes of Anecdotes
and Illustrations, he made invaluable contributions to the personal
history of English men of letters in the 18th century. He was
apprenticed in 1757 to “the learned printer,” William Bowyer,
whom he eventually succeeded. On the death of his friend and
master in 1777 he published a brief memoir, which afterwards
grew into the Anecdotes of William Bowyer and his Literary
Friends (1782). As his materials accumulated he compiled a sort
of anecdotical literary history of the century, based on a large
collection of important letters. The Literary Anecdotes of the
18th Century (1812–1815), into which the original work was
expanded, forms only a small part of Nichols’s production. It
was followed by the Illustrations of the Literary History of the
18th Century, consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original
Letters of Eminent Persons, which was begun in 1817 and completed
by his son John Bowyer Nichols (1779–1863) in 1858.
