John Oxenbridge

John Oxenbridge (30 January 1608 – 28 December 1674) was an English Nonconformist divine, who emigrated to New England.

Life

He was born at Daventry, Northamptonshire, and was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Magdalen Hall, Oxford (B.A. 1628, M.A. 1631). As tutor of Magdalen Hall he drew up a new code of articles referring to the government of the college. He was, as a consequence, deprived of his office in May 1634, by William Laud. After leaving the Hall, Oxenbridge married his first wife, Jane Butler.

He began to preach, with a similar disregard for constituted authority. His wife being a scholar in the profound points of theology, he commonly got her opinion upon a text before he preached it. He was minister at Berwick-on-Tweed when in October 1652 he was appointed a fellow of Eton College.

In 1653 he was made a commissioner with responsibility for the Bermudas. At Eton in 1658 he preached the funeral sermon of Francis Rous, the provost. In 1658, his first wife died. Andrew Marvell, who was their friend, wrote an epitaph Janae Oxenbrigiae Epitaphium for her tomb at Eton. It was defaced at the Restoration. Less than a year after his first wife's death, Oxenbridge married Frances Woodward, daughter of Hezekiah Woodward, ejected vicar of Bray. Frances died in childbed in the first year of their marriage. and Barbados. He married his third wife, Susanna, after November 1666, and probably at Barbados, where he had met her. Oxenbridge died in 1674 near the end of one of his sermons,

Family

His sister Elizabeth married Oliver St John, as his second wife.