Ashton, Thomas

, a clergyman in the time of the usurpation, was the son of Thomas Ashton, and born at Teuerdly in Lancashire, in 1631. At sixteen years of age, he was admitted a servitor of Brazen-nose college in Oxford, and took the degree of B. A. February 7, 1650. He was chosen fellow of his college, and took holy orders. Mr. Wood tells us, he was a “forward and conceited scholar,” and “became a malapert preacher in and near | Oxford.” Being appointed to preach at St. Mary’s, on Tuesday (a lecture-day) July 25, 1654, he gave so great effence by a very indecent sermon, that he was in a fair way of expulsion but, by the intercession of friends, the matter was compromised yet he was obliged, about two years after, to quit his fellowship upon some quarrel which he had with Dr. Greenwood, principal of his house. In 1656, he was intrusted with a commission from the protector to be chaplain to the English forces in the island of Jersey, but was soon after displaced upon the arrival of a new governor. After the king’s restoration, he was beneficed somewhere near Hertford in Hertfordshire; where, Mr. Wood says, “he soon after finished his restless course. 111 He published, 1.” Blood-thirsty Cyrus unsatisfied with blood; or, the boundless cruelty of an Anabaptist’s tyranny, manifested in a letter of colonel John Mason, governor of Jersey, 3d Nov. 1659; wherein he exhibits seven false, ridiculous, and scandalous articles against quartermaster William Swan," &c. London, 1659, in one sheet 4to. 2. “Satan in Samuel’s Mantle, or, the cruelty of Germany, acted in Jersey; containing the arbitrary, bloody, and tyrannical proceedings of John Mason, of a baptised church, commissionated to be a colonel, and sent over into the island of Jersey, governor, in July 1656, against several officers and soldiers in that small place,” &c. London, 1659, in four sheets in 4to. ¹