Featley, John

, nephew to the preceding, son of John Fairclough, was a native of Northamptonshire, and educated at All Souls’ college, Oxford, which he is said to have left after taking his first degree in arts, probably to become his uncle’s assistant at Lambeth or Acton. During the rebellion he went to St. Christopher’s in the West Indies, where he arrived in 1643, and had the honour of being the first preacher of the gospel in the infancy of that colony. It appears that he returned about the time of the restoration, and was appointed chaplain to the king, who also in August 1660 presented him to the precentorship of Lincoln, and in September following to the prebend of Milton Ross, in that cathedral. In 1662, he was created D. D. and had from the dean and chapter of Lincoln the vicarage of Edwinton in Nottinghamshire, worth about sixty pounds a year. He died at Lincoln in 1666, and was interred in a chapel in the cathedral. He published one or two of his uncle’s tracts, particularly “Dr. Featley revived, &c.” in which, as already noticed, there is a life of his uncle. Of his own were only published two occasional sermons, and “A divine antidote against the Plague, contained in Soliloquies and Prayers,” London, 1660. ¹