student in question, though he took the martial fever at the usual period, had pretty thoroughly recovered by the time he became an undergraduate, owing to the fact that he entered at the very mature age of twenty-six.
This incipient warrior was John Oliver, who arrived from England as a youth of sixteen, with his father, Thomas Oliver, in 1632. Two years afterwards he was chosen corporal to Captain Underhill, who commanded the “ward of two kept every day att the ffort att Boston.” He was so proficient that he was soon promoted to sergeant, and was spoken of as “an expert soldier,” who showed much “usefulness through a publick spirit.” As the fort had “divers pieces of ordnance mounted on it,” he was evidently well versed in their use, and may be considered the exemplar and patron saint of the present Harvard Artillery Unit.
But Theology, the overwhelming power of that day, must needs snatch Sergeant Oliver from his culverins and patereros, and nip his military career in the bud. Along with some threescore other early Bostonians, he was suspected of favoring the heresies of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson; and in 1637 the whole group were deprived of their arms and ammunition, lest they, “as others in Germany, in former times, may, upon some revelation, make some suddaine irruption upon those that differ from them in judgment.” (Upon the startlingly modern
