, of Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, a quaker, came to London, and settled
, of Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, a
quaker, came to London, and settled there as a stationer
between the years 1600 and 162.5. He married a daughter
of Mr. William Plat, of Highgate, by whom he had a son,
Hilkiah, a mathematical instrument maker in Hosier-lane,
near West-Smithfield. In this house (which was afterwards burnt in the great fire of London, 1666), was born
the famous Hilkiah, July 23, 1663; who was educated at
Bradley, in Suffolk, and in 1679 was admitted of St. John’s
college, Cambridge, the first scholar on the foundation of
his maternal grandfather, William Plat. Hilkiah was afterwards elected fellow of his college, and patronized by
Heneage Finch earl of Winchelsea, but deprived of his
preferment (which was in Lincolnshire), for refusing to
take the oaths at the revolution, and afterwards kept a
boarding-house for the Westminster scholars. In 1714,
being tried in the court of king’s-bench, he was fined
1000 marks, and imprisoned three years, for writing,
printing, and publishing “The hereditary Right of the
Crown of England asserted,
” An answer to Fontenelle’s History
of Oracles,
” and the translation of the life of Dr. Barvvick,
as noticed in the life of that gentleman. He died Nov. 26,
1724, and was buried in the church-yard of St. Margaret’s
Westminster, with an epitaph.