Contents
John Wickins (c.1645 to 1719), admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, on 17 January 1663, shared chambers with Isaac Newton from the mid-1660s until 1683, copied some of Newton’s early scientific letters in his own hand, and served as rector of Stoke Edith in Herefordshire from 1684 until his death. For family historians the trail is unusually good: a Henley-on-Thames baptism for his father, his will at The National Archives (PROB 11/575/167), entries for three generations in Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses, and his own notebook, now Cambridge University Library MS Add.10345.
The friendship began because both young men disliked the men they were rooming with. Wickins, finding his first chamber-fellow unbearable, walked out into the college grounds and came across another undergraduate, alone and low for exactly the same reason. That undergraduate was Isaac Newton. Search for John Wickins Isaac Newton today, or for the variant spelling Wickens, and you will mostly find that one anecdote, set down by Wickins’s son more than sixty years afterwards. The records say a good deal more.
A Henley family in the City of London
Wickins came from a family that had moved from the Thames valley into the City. His father, also John, was baptised at St Mary’s Church, Henley-on-Thames, on 6 January 1612, the son of Thomas Wickins. A younger brother, Samuel Wickins, baptised in the same church on 29 December 1620, became a haberdasher of London and died in 1691. Both brothers have entries in Woodhead’s The Rulers of London 1660 to 1689, the biographical register of the City’s aldermen and common councilmen.
The younger John was his father’s only son, according to the elder John’s will, and the family went through hard times while he was at Cambridge. Carmichael Wallace and Stephen Snobelen, who reconstructed six generations of the family for a 2025 article in the Royal Society’s journal Notes and Records, trace a recovery in that will. The elder John left his wife Anna two newly built houses in Milk Street, off Cheapside, in the part of the City destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666, and left his son a house in Henley-on-Thames.
Where Wickins went to school is still unknown. He does not appear in the registers of St Paul’s School, London, although his own son Nicholas was later a pupil there.
Two undergraduates and their disorderly companions
Wickins was admitted to Trinity College, Henry VIII’s 1546 foundation, as a pensioner on 17 January 1663, which meant his family paid his fees and his keep. Newton, about two years older, had entered in 1661 as a subsizar, paying his way in part by serving wealthier students.
The account of how they met comes from a letter Nicholas Wickins wrote from Stoke Edith on 16 January 1728 to Robert Smith, then Plumian Professor at Trinity and later its Master, who was collecting material on Newton. Nicholas said his father had retired one day into the college walks and found Newton solitary and dejected. They discovered they had the same complaint, and agreed to “shake off their present disorderly companions and chum together”. David Brewster, who printed the letter in his 1855 Memoirs of Newton, dated the arrangement to 1665 at the latest.
Both men became fellows, Newton in 1667 and Wickins in 1668. Their paths then divided on a point that mattered enormously in Restoration Cambridge. Fellows were expected to take holy orders. Wickins was ordained priest in 1675, the same year Newton obtained Crown permission to keep the Lucasian chair of mathematics without ordination, because his religious opinions could not be squared with the Church’s articles.
Nicholas also passed on what his father had seen at close quarters. Newton forgot to eat when absorbed in a problem, and rose cheerfully after a sleepless night once he had solved something. He was going grey by about thirty, which he blamed, half in jest, on his experiments with quicksilver. When he feared he was sliding into consumption he dosed himself with Leucatello’s balsam, melting down about a quarter of a pint at a time and drinking it.
The copyist in the shared chamber
Wickins was more than a companion. On 27 July 1686, writing to Edmond Halley, Newton mentioned stumbling on a copy of a letter he had sent to the Dutch natural philosopher Christiaan Huygens on 23 June 1673. He vouched for the copy because it was “in ye hand of Mr John Wickins who was then my chamber fellow”.
That remark gave the historians Dmitri Levitin and Scott Mandelbrote a handwriting sample. In a 2023 study they matched it to drafts among Newton’s optical papers in Cambridge University Library (MS Add. 3970), including papers Newton sent to Henry Oldenburg at the Royal Society in December 1675 during his quarrel with critics in Liège, and to the notebook that carries Wickins’s ownership inscription. Some of Newton’s first public arguments about light and colour survive in his room-mate’s handwriting.
The arrangement did not outlast Wickins’s departure. At the end of 1683 Newton engaged Humphrey Newton, a young man from Grantham and no relation, as his assistant for the next five years. Humphrey later recalled that Newton then had no pupils and no chamber-fellow, and that an old bedmaker happily carried off the dinners he left untouched. The servants who kept such rooms left their own traces in bursars’ accounts, as our guide to college servants in Oxford and Cambridge explains.
Letters sent to Monmouth
For much of his later fellowship Wickins was not in Cambridge at all. His son wrote that he spent most of that time at Monmouth, where he held a lectureship at Monmouth School, the grammar school founded under the 1614 will of William Jones and governed by the Haberdashers’ Company of London. Whether his uncle Samuel’s trade helped him to the post is an open question; no document yet connects the two. The Trinity Fellows’ Exit and Redit Book, which logged fellows’ comings and goings, shows him away from the college from 11 January 1678 to 4 January 1679.
Newton looked after his friend’s college money in his absence, collecting his dividends and chamber rent. Nicholas found four or five short notes about these errands among his father’s papers, and a small book into which his father had copied three longer letters from Newton. The originals of those three are lost. The copies, signed “your very loving chamber-fellow”, show Newton in the late 1670s and early 1680s complaining about the Jesuit critics of his optics, discussing the London trade in telescope making, and recommending books on the early Church, several of them recent arrivals in the Trinity library.
In one letter Newton admits he had burnt his papers on the Liège dispute. Levitin and Mandelbrote treat this as fresh evidence of a fire in his rooms, and suggest Newton may have played down its extent to a man whose own belongings were presumably still there.
The notebook’s own history is a small detective story. By 1880 it was in the library of Captain Verney RN at Rhianva on Anglesey, and W. R. Wilson published the three letters in The Athenaeum that year. It later reappeared at auction in London and is now in Cambridge University Library as MS Add.10345.
Parson of Stoke Edith
On 4 April 1684 Paul Foley presented Wickins to the rectory of Stoke Edith, a parish east of Hereford that Foley’s ironmaster father Thomas had bought in 1670 and settled on him. Foley later became Speaker of the House of Commons. Wickins kept his fellowship until after Michaelmas 1684 and resigned the Monmouth lectureship on 28 January 1685.
Newton’s geography was vaguer. Writing to Halley in 1686 he described his old friend as “now Parson of Stoak Edith neare Monmoth”, and some modern catalogue descriptions have gone further and placed the parish in Monmouthshire. Stoke Edith is, and was, in Herefordshire, which is worth knowing before you order searches from the wrong county record office.
The friendship survived the distance. Nicholas described a private charity that passed from Newton through his father and then through himself: “many dozens of bibles” sent by Newton for poor people. He still had a stock of them in 1728, and asked Smith to make the gift public.
The rectory held books too. At least one manuscript from Wickins’s library, now British Library MS Harley 952, was lent from Stoke Edith to Robert Harley, the Herefordshire politician and collector, and never came back.
Later writers have sometimes read a romance or a rupture into the years after 1683. The surviving documents support something plainer: a close friendship that thinned into business notes, shared charity and, eventually, a gift of furniture as two men settled into very different lives.
Death, and the flagon that outlived the friendship
When Newton left Cambridge in 1696 for the Royal Mint, he gave Wickins the whole furniture of his chamber, with other articles including a wooden pint flagon. Wallace and Snobelen think these were probably carried to Stoke Edith at that time.
Wickins died in 1719, but the day is disputed. Brewster, following a letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1802, gave 19 April. The ledger stone in the floor of Stoke Edith church records that he was rector of the parish for 34 years and died on the 19th of December, aged 74, and styles him formerly Fellow of Trinity College and Lecturer at Monmouth.
His son Nicholas succeeded him as rector. Nicholas’s son Thomas followed the same road: admitted to Trinity on 9 April 1747 aged 17 after schooling at Bury St Edmunds, elected a fellow in 1753, chaplain to the dowager Countess of Oxford, and holder of a string of Herefordshire livings that eventually included Stoke Edith itself. He died on 20 January 1787.
The flagon took a longer road. James Wickins, a grandson of Newton’s chamber-fellow, lived at Lichfield, London and Lyndhurst before auctioning his farm stock in 1799 to settle in Salisbury, and described the flagon in his 1802 letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine. It passed through Elizabeth Wickins of the Close in Salisbury to A. D. Hussey of the Hall, Salisbury, and descended in the Hussey-Freke family of Hannington Hall, Wiltshire, until Ambrose Frederick Hussey-Freke (1910 to 1986) left it to his niece. Wallace, whose family now owns it, published its history with Snobelen in 2025, and it went on display at the Royal Society for the first time in about 160 years.
What the archives hold
Wickins left no known portrait and no published work, but his paper trail is wider than his reputation. Cambridge University Library holds his notebook (MS Add.10345) and the optical drafts in his hand (MS Add. 3970). Nicholas’s 1728 letter is at King’s College, Cambridge, as MS Keynes 137. Trinity College Archives hold the Fellows’ Exit and Redit Book for 1662 to 1698, which can reconstruct his movements term by term. The British Library has MS Harley 952, the manuscript that never returned to Stoke Edith.
The printed trail begins with Brewster’s Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855), freely readable through the Newton Project, and runs through Joseph Edleston’s edition of the Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, which records Newton receiving dividends on his friend’s behalf. Two recent studies transform the picture: Levitin and Mandelbrote’s chapter in Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar (2023), and Wallace and Snobelen’s article on the flagon in Notes and Records (2025).
Genealogy research note: tracing the Wickins family
The Wickins line suits a genealogy search because it combines a distinctive surname, three generations of Cambridge men, and clergy who left wills in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. Start with Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses, searchable online through A Cambridge Alumni Database, for John (admitted 1663), his son Nicholas (whose entry is dated 1707), and his grandson Thomas (admitted 1747). Our guide to historic university records explains how to read Venn’s abbreviated entries.
For clergy careers, the Clergy of the Church of England Database records ordinations and appointments up to 1835, including Thomas Wickins’s Herefordshire livings. Stoke Edith parish registers and Hereford diocesan records are held at the Herefordshire Archive and Resource Centre in Hereford. Wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, including John Wickins’s (PROB 11/575/167) and a Thomas Wickins will dated 1780 (PROB 11/1152/265), are held at The National Archives, Kew, and can be downloaded from its Discovery catalogue.
The earlier generations lead back to Oxfordshire and London. The registers of St Mary’s, Henley-on-Thames, which record the elder John Wickins’s baptism on 6 January 1612, are held at the Oxfordshire History Centre, while City of London parish registers and many livery company records are at London Metropolitan Archives. If you are building a tree from those starting points, you can search English parish registers, wills and county records for the Wickins surname across Oxfordshire, London and Herefordshire in one place.
Researchers following the flagon’s later owners should begin at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre for the Hussey-Freke family of Hannington Hall, and at Salisbury Cathedral Archives for the Close, where Elizabeth Wickins lived. More Cambridge sources are gathered on our Cambridge University records hub.
Named individuals in this article on John Wickins Isaac Newton
| Name | Dates | Role |
|---|---|---|
| John Wickins (also Wickens) | c.1645 to 1719 | Trinity College pensioner 1663, fellow 1668; Newton’s chamber-fellow and copyist; lecturer at Monmouth School; rector of Stoke Edith, Herefordshire, from 1684 |
| Isaac Newton | 1642 to 1727 | Fellow of Trinity College, Lucasian Professor, later of the Royal Mint |
| Thomas Wickins | fl. 1612 | Of Henley-on-Thames; grandfather of John Wickins |
| John Wickins the elder | baptised 6 January 1612 | Father; London citizen with houses in Milk Street and Henley-on-Thames |
| Anna Wickins | 17th century | Mother; left two houses in Milk Street by her husband’s will |
| Samuel Wickins | 1620 to 1691 | Uncle; haberdasher of London |
| Nicholas Wickins | fl. 1707 to 1728 | Son; pupil at St Paul’s School; rector of Stoke Edith; wrote the 1728 letter describing Newton |
| Thomas Wickins | c.1730 to 1787 | Grandson; Trinity College fellow 1753; chaplain to the dowager Countess of Oxford; Herefordshire clergyman |
| James Wickins | fl. 1799 to 1802 | Grandson; of Lichfield, London, Lyndhurst and Salisbury; wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1802 |
| Elizabeth Wickins | 19th century | Of the Close, Salisbury; owner of the Newton flagon |
| Humphrey Newton | fl. 1683 to 1728 | Of Grantham; Isaac Newton’s assistant and amanuensis 1683 to 1689 |
| Robert Smith | 1689 to 1768 | Plumian Professor, later Master of Trinity College; recipient of Nicholas Wickins’s letter |
| Paul Foley | c.1645 to 1699 | Owner of Stoke Edith; presented Wickins to the living in 1684; later Speaker of the House of Commons |
| Thomas Foley | 1616 to 1677 | Ironmaster; bought Stoke Edith in 1670 |
| Christiaan Huygens | 1629 to 1695 | Dutch natural philosopher; recipient of Newton’s 1673 letter copied by Wickins |
| Edmond Halley | 1656 to 1742 | Astronomer; recipient of Newton’s 1686 letter naming Wickins |
| Henry Oldenburg | c.1619 to 1677 | Secretary of the Royal Society |
| William Jones | d. 1615 | Haberdasher; founder by will of Monmouth School |
| Robert Harley | 1661 to 1724 | Herefordshire politician and collector; borrower of MS Harley 952 from Stoke Edith |
| Captain Verney RN | fl. 1880 | Of Rhianva, Anglesey; owner of the Wickins notebook in 1880 |
| W. R. Wilson | fl. 1880 | Published the three Newton letters in The Athenaeum |
| A. D. Hussey | 19th century | Of the Hall, Salisbury; received the Newton flagon |
| Ambrose Frederick Hussey-Freke | 1910 to 1986 | Of Hannington Hall, Wiltshire; bequeathed the flagon to his niece |
| David Brewster | 1781 to 1868 | Scottish physicist and Newton biographer |
Further reading for John Wickins Isaac Newton
- The Newton Project: Brewster’s Memoirs, chapter XVI. The 1855 text of Nicholas Wickins’s letter in full, with Humphrey Newton’s recollections of life in Newton’s rooms.
- Cambridge University Library ArchiveSearch: John Wickins. The library’s authority record for Wickins, the route into his notebook, MS Add.10345.
- Wallace and Snobelen, “Isaac Newton’s pint flagon”, Notes and Records. The reconstruction of six generations of the Wickins family and the flagon’s descent to the Hussey-Frekes.
- Levitin and Mandelbrote, “Newton as Theologian, Artisan, and Chamber-Fellow”. The study of the three letters in Wickins’s notebook, covering telescopes, theology and the identification of his handwriting.
- Clergy of the Church of England Database: Thomas Wickins. The career record of Wickins’s grandson, with his Venn entry and Herefordshire livings.
