Chapter 3 Matthew Henry: Minister and Preacher (continued)
Clyde Binfield
1. Introduction
My theme is the shaping of attitudes. My intent is to explore the shaping of a mind-set, built on Protestant foundations, that was determinative for the evolution of national attitudes from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. ‘Determinative’ is a strong word, since the mind-set to be explored is a dissenting one and how can dissent be determinative? That, however, is not how it began. For the briefest of mid-seventeenth-century moments it had seemed that what was to be built on those Protestant foundations would be accepted as the nation’s ecclesiastical shape, a natural home for the nation’s spirit. That did not happen. Instead, it shivered into the multiple shadings of dissent, sufficiently distinctive to suggest a deviant sub-culture (to adopt the sociologists’ provocatively neutral phrase) or, better, an ‘educated underworld’, retaining enough shape and surviving for long enough to be legally accommodated. Once within the pale of the constitution, these shadings became an establishment, second-rate rather than alternative but, at that level, determinative. Religious dissent had become Dissent.
This sounds bloodless but its narrative depends on flesh, blood, and personality. Its prime focus is Matthew Henry, pastor and minister in the fullest sense, locally rooted, nationally known, and his engagement with Bible, prayer, and piety. Dissent is largely incidental to that engagement, yet it determined his life. This narrative enlarges the focus to encompass his family and their later posterity, a layering of establishments with social and political as well as ecclesiological implications, from educated underworld to the queen’s first knight.
2. A Familial Continuity
It is 1804, perhaps 1805. Thomas English, a middle-aged parson from Buckinghamshire, is travelling from Birmingham in the company of a ‘Miss W’, ‘very providentially put under our care to Wem’.1 At West Bromwich, Miss W introduces Mr English to two kinswomen of hers, Mrs Bulkley and Mrs Brett. Mrs Bulkley strikes him as:
a fine, venerable, delicate lady, of eighty-five years of age, genteel in her appearance, and of the most unaffected manners. I never beheld one like her; ease and heaven in her aspect, though as pale as a corpse, and her hair like snow.2
Mrs Brett who ‘lives with her … appears to have a mind congenial with herself – a person of very pleasing appearance, sixty-five years of age’.3 Esther Bulkley died a year or so later. Her obituary confirms the parson’s recollection:
Her person was interesting. Diminutive, delicate, and valetudinary; yet indicative of charming vivacity. Her countenance exhibited a set of striking features, illuminated by intelligence and benevolence, … Her manners, though not without a mixture of that punctilious precision which is thought to characterize those of her sex who are less connected than others by social and domestic affinities … were yet highly engaging.4
She was manifestly a gentlewoman. Her father, Thomas Bulkley, a London silk mercer from Hampshire, had died before she was ten and her mother died when Esther was fifteen. Her girlhood was passed in Epsom with the family of a fourth baronet who had added a city fortune to Leicestershire land. She approached womanhood with three maternal aunts, first in Chester until two of them married, then in Wem, and finally in West Bromwich, her home from 1748. There a cousin had married a parson, a great-aunt had settled, and two aunts had married brothers, ‘respectable gentlemen’, called Brett.5 Making due allowance for differences of generation and topography, Esther Bulkley’s Hill Top, West Bromwich, was like Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village.6 It was Jane Austen’s world, the novel she did not write about the heroine who did not marry, and like Jane Austen’s world it was landed, mercantile, and clerical, with a long reach; in Esther Bulkley’s case from London, Hampshire, and the Home Counties, to the East and West Midlands, and the Welsh Borders.
Her world, however, differed from theirs in one key respect. It was a dissenting world. Thomas English, the Buckinghamshire parson making his way to Wem, was an Independent whose ministerial career had begun in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion.7 He was a product of the Evangelical Revival and its spirit informed his conversation with Mrs Bulkley:
I observed to her, that the Lord had greatly favoured her with a life unusually lengthened; she replied, with much feeling, ‘I am the Lord’s waiting servant, to go whenever he shall call’. I said, ‘you have been his working servant, as you are now his waiting servant’. She with great modesty declined the idea of having any thing to plead in this view.… She expressed her confidence in Christ, to whom she had often committed her soul. I asked her if she was not at any time under the influence of fear respecting her state? Her reply was, ‘I am often attacked, but not overcome’. I said, you have, then, the privilege of taking your station near the cross; and on my repeating this there appeared a singular pleasure in her eyes.8
What gave this encounter a singular interest in Thomas English’s eyes was Esther Bulkley’s ancestry. Her obituary enlarged on this. She was Matthew Henry’s last surviving grandchild:
Devotion was her element … Her Bible was her companion, her friend, and her counsellor. Her grandfather’s Exposition, and the manuscript notes of sermons, &c. which had been preserved in the family, were in her constant perusal.9
Thomas English had touched on that while they were conversing:
I remarked, ‘you are of a highly favoured family’; she replied, ‘we have cause to lament among many of us, much departure into the world; grace (added she) is not entailed as an inheritance: there are some of us, however, that still retain our religion’.10
I will return to what lies behind that elegantly wistful note. For present purposes it should be noted that Mrs Bulkley’s obituary was published in the Evangelical Magazine, which was largely read by Congregationalists, and that her meeting with Thomas English was recounted in a lengthy endnote to J.B. Williams’ Memoirs of Matthew Henry, a painstakingly compiled biography aptly published in the year of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828; Williams completed his preface a week before the repeal received royal assent) and careful to indicate the essential continuity between seventeenth-century Protestant Dissent and nineteenth-century Evangelical Dissent.11 Mrs Bulkley exemplified such continuity. The baronet’s household which had nurtured her in the 1730s was that of Sir John Hartopp (ca. 1680–1762), an Independent of impeccable Puritan descent, whose maternal grandfather was Charles Fleetwood (d. 1692), Cromwellian major-general, son-in-law and close associate of the Lord Protector himself.12 This was not at all the Henry family’s own background but it fitted that of the Independent, originally Presbyterian, Old Meeting in West Bromwich with which several of the Henry family were associated in the eighteenth century. The Old Meeting’s origins were seventeenth-century, its first resident minister married a niece of Matthew Henry’s and their son was trained by Philip Doddridge.13 A few years earlier, Doddridge had charmed the family, especially Sarah Savage who was the young man’s grandmother, the minister’s mother-in-law, and Matthew Henry’s favourite sister.14 With the exception of one brief pastorate (1776–78), the Old Meeting’s lengthening threads of memory and experience were largely orthodox.
Such continuity was not unique. It was carefully cherished and retrospectively treasured. In fact it took several sometimes contradictory forms, not least in the Henry family. For them all, however, the foundational facts were the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the re-shaping of the national church in the decade which followed, their exclusion from that church, and the consequences for their churchmanship and its re-thinking. When Esther Bulkley gave her Presbyterian grandfather’s celebrated commentary (the issue of constant pastoral exposition and application in Chester) to her Independent church in West Bromwich and left £60 (the equivalent of a year’s stipend for a journeyman minister) to its people, she encompassed that re-thinking.15
3. The Implications of ‘Black Bartholomew’
On 19 May 1662 an Act of Uniformity became law.16 On 24 August, St Bartholomew’s Day, it took effect. Such Acts were not new. In the middle of the previous century, between 1549 and 1559, there had been three of them. Each enforced the use of a Book of Common Prayer; each marked a stage in the evolution of a reformed Church of England. There was more, however, to the Act of 1662 than administrative updating and clarification. The date when it took effect, 24 August, made that clear. The timing was at best unfortunate, at worst vindictive. It was certainly effective. It was vindictive because those, chiefly parsons, who could not conform to its provisions would lose out on the tithes due to them at Michaelmas, a month later; those were inflationary times and parsons relied on tithes. It was unfortunate because no Protestant could easily forget the massacre of Huguenots in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Eve and Day, 24 August 1572. By 1662 that had passed living memory but those most affected by the Act of 1662 included those likeliest to be most conscious of the Continent’s Reformed religion. For them St Bartholomew’s Day was of hallowed memory and now ‘Black Bartholomew’ was further entrenched in their lengthening historical view. As to its effectiveness, that was disconcertingly confirmed over successive generations by families like the Henrys.
The Act of 1662 required more than assent to the exclusive use in parish churches of a resurrected and revised Book of Common Prayer. That book was steadily recognized as a shaping glory of the English language. It still resonates in the worship even of those who have reacted against it. Its small print, however, was irksome to scrupulous and scholarly contemporaries. The sign of the cross in baptism, the prescription of godparents at baptism, the requirement to kneel for communion, the recitation of lessons from the Apocrypha and of certain clauses from the Athanasian Creed, were all irksome and there were other provisions which were more than irksome.
Politics as well as liturgical propriety lay behind this Act. It came in the wake of the Restoration of the monarchy, two years earlier. It marked the righting of wrongs, the settling of scores, and the reversal of trends. In particular, it sought to counteract legislation of the previous two decades. A restoration of monarchy was an egregiously political act. It had national significance. For most people a nation and its religion, the nature of its religious establishment, were as inseparable as education and religion. An Act of Uniformity was desirable for the security and well-being of the body politic in a dysfunctional world of radicalized activists. English and Welsh history from the 1530s testified to that, even if it made immediate political sense to focus on the past twenty years. Those years had seen the Prayer Book replaced, the Christian year disparaged, and episcopacy abolished. First the Primate of All England and then the Church’s Supreme Governor had been executed, and large numbers of protesting incumbents in parish churches, cathedrals, and universities had been deprived of their livings. The propertied and material structure which sustained episcopacy and cathedral foundations was in dissolution. There was a great deal to put right.
Consequently the Act also required ministers and schoolmasters to abjure the Solemn League and Covenant which had committed them to Presbyterianism; and abjuring an oath, breaking a pledge, was not a light matter for a scrupulous conscience. It required them to declare the illegality of taking arms against the monarch, and it required all who had not been episcopally ordained – and they were bound to be among the younger ministers – to seek such ordination or forfeit their livings. This was only one of a package of Acts between 1661 and 1665, unfairly called the Clarendon Code (after Lord Clarendon, the leading Government minister), designed to ensure religious conformity across the body politic and to penalize nonconformity. These Acts were varyingly enforced but their temper informed public life for generations and nothing did more to institutionalize that temper than the Act of Uniformity.
Its results were immediate. Nearly a thousand men gave up their livings. In fact between 1660 (the Restoration of the monarchy) and 1662 (Black Bartholomew’s Day), just over 2,000 were deprived of their posts. That is better seen in terms of households rather than individuals: 2,000 households were affected. Most were in England but 120 were in Wales; of the rest, 60 were in Cheshire, 70 in Lancashire, 7 in Bedfordshire.17 Most are best described as unsectarianly Puritan, indeed they were very variably Puritan. There was no uniformity there. Perhaps 194 were Independents, 19 were Baptists; Presbyterians were considerably more numerous but at this point denominational structure was not uppermost in their minds.18 Not surprisingly, and not too inaccurately, most of these Dissenters, or Nonconformists as they now had to be called, were lumped together as ‘Presbyterians’. All contributed to a mind-set that was forced to express itself institutionally as the years passed and the new establishment became rooted, yet most found little difficulty with the concept of a national Church. After all, until 24 August 1662 the parish church had been their church, its hours of public worship had been their hours. Avowed Presbyterians had their own views as to how that church should be ordered, and how, where, and in whom authority should be expressed. Avowed Independents (Congregationalists) and Baptists had more natural links with scattered congregations that had already separated; they were closer to an already existing and more radical and sectarian Dissent. Now all minds were concentrated, and attitudes crystallized accordingly.
Thus it was that, at last, the Church of England, as by law established and episcopalian in polity, became truly rooted in national life. Thus, paradoxically, it also was that Dissent became an established fact of national life. That cannot have been wholly what the lawmakers intended.
4. The Accommodation of Dissent
There was a price to be paid. Given the place of religion in society, religious Dissenters must expect to suffer political, educational, professional, and social discrimination as well as religious discrimination. Their spiritual obstinacy determined their civil inferiority. The harmful implications of this are clear enough. Discrimination breeds persecution, pettiness, deviousness, bitterness, disruption. A nation’s DNA is infected.
Yet this could not be the whole story, if only because the ejected, those who protected them, and many who followed them, belonged to the political nation. They were men who, with and through their households, had a stake in the nation. Many of them were county voters: their freehold property gave them the right to vote. More of them had the borough vote, perhaps because they were freemen of their borough, perhaps because they possessed one of the many forms of property ownership that conferred the vote in their particular parliamentary borough. Religion was the nation’s cement but property was the nation’s foundation. Property conferred citizenship. The likely leaders among them never wholly lost the attitudes or expectations of propertied people accustomed to exercise authority. They were not, on the whole, natural dissidents, although enough of them belonged by birth, temperament, and training to nature’s awkward squad. Now, deprived by law of civic opportunities, yet never wholly so deprived, and deprived of the educational undergirding which furthered and consolidated those opportunities, many found economic opportunities in what was becoming the world’s first urban and industrial nation. The political structure, from which they were now largely, but never entirely, excluded, was based on property. Relationships were based on property; that is why legitimacy was so important. Now capital, and new forms of it, played its part in sustaining Dissent, for Dissent was sustained locally and nationwide by networks of family and fellowship. It was a paradoxically dynamic situation. To the extent to which the bedrock of the constitution was property, it was also property which allowed for the accommodation of Dissent. God and mammon were entangled in the fallen world of paradise lost.
A measure of accommodation was achieved. Slowly, unevenly, but cumulatively, religious Dissent was recognized in law; and to discern the providence in that, England’s Protestants had only to look across the Channel to see how vulnerable the French Protestants were when the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 swept away their long recognized status. The Toleration Act of 1689 was both landmark and starting point in the English accommodation as the establishment learned to live with Dissent, and the threat of full apartheid was diminished into the constant irritation and occasional exasperation of petty apartheid. The political implications of such toleration as there now was were immense. The limited toleration was of critical importance in politicizing all sections of society, especially those at the edge of the political nation, for they – those of them who knew where and why they stood and who retained their principles – had most to gain from making the politics open to them work. The legal, but limited, establishment of religious Dissent contributed signally to the emergence, recognition, and – to some degree – acceptance of a plural society.
That is to leap ahead. By the earlier eighteenth century, Dissent had become institutionalized. If society had been static, Dissent would no doubt have faded naturally away, but economic, political, and religious factors ensured that Dissent’s institutions never remained static. In the eighteenth century, the Evangelical and Methodist revivals transformed the National Church and Dissent alike and brought into being a new religious force which, when shaped into Methodism, was effectively if unwillingly dissenting. One aspect of that new force had boundless implications: to the Evangelical no individual was unreachable. Spiritually there must be no residuum. Given that, where did the responsibilities of true citizenship end? Where this missionary dynamic reinvigorated existing Dissent there were bound to be results, and in a nineteenth century fully energized by an industrial revolution which brought secular opportunities to many Dissenters, agitations for civil and religious parity marked municipal and parliamentary life. Their aim was to complete what the Toleration Act had begun in 1689, and to a considerable degree they succeeded. In the process the mechanisms and reach of government, the law, and the professions, were revolutionized, and for Dissenters a mix of inherited grievance, political opportunity, and widening social horizons gave birth to that ‘Nonconformist conscience’ which played its own part in the continued enlargement of society and the outworking of the implications of 1662.
5. Indicative Meeting-Places
The Henry posterity, ancestors replaced by sons (or, with the Henrys, more tellingly by daughters), illuminates every aspect of this dissenting evolution: local, regional, national; London and provincial; social mobility and political nation; change and assimilation; network, family, and fellowship; faith, intellect, and reason; myth interwoven with history, structured into meeting-places. Meeting-places can be indicative. Our focus should turn to them.
Matthew Henry (1662–1714), Nonconformist divine and commentator, ministered in Chester from 1687 to 1712, and then in London from 1712 to 1714.19 In Chester his congregation was Presbyterian, influential, and numerous; perhaps 250 communicants. In 1700, a capacious meeting-house was opened for him in Crook Lane (see figure 1.3) and in 1707 a gallery was inserted to accommodate a neighbouring congregation which had united with his people; now there were 350 communicants. In 1768, Crook Lane’s Trinitarians seceded. Those who remained in Crook Lane were now Unitarians, and in 1956 they left the old but much altered meeting-house for a new building in a housing estate (Blacon Point), taking with them Matthew Henry’s pulpit and communion table and commemorating him in stained glass. Since 1988 an evangelical congregation has occupied that building, reclaiming his pulpit and his table for orthodoxy. As for the Trinitarian seceders of 1768, they became Congregationalists, built handsomely in Queen Street, and are today (2017) represented in the Upton and Hoole Road United Reformed Churches. They too are Matthew Henry’s spiritual descendants.20
In London’s northernmost suburban reaches, Henry’s congregation was influential but less numerous (under a hundred communicants in 1712, meeting in ‘an old irregular building, originally formed out of dwelling-houses’ in Mare Street, Hackney).21 That congregation’s Presbyterians moved in 1716 to successive ‘Gravel Pit’ chapels. They became progressively Unitarian, sustaining a uniformly distinguished ministry. Those who stayed in Mare Street became increasingly Congregational. They remained orthodox and moved in 1772 to the corner of Mare Street and St. Thomas’s Square. Two of their ministers merit inclusion here. The impeccably orthodox, impressively dry, Henry Forster Burder (1783–1864; minister 1814–1852) was the son of George Burder (1752–1832), who in 1811 collaborated in a seven-volume edition of Matthew Henry’s Works.22 P.T. Forsyth (1848–1921; minister 1879–1885), now regarded as the weightiest of contemporary Free Church theologians, essayed at St Thomas’s Square his passionate balance between radicalism and conservatism.23 There he nurtured an intellectually select congregation; a medical student drawn by Forsyth’s lectures on the origins of the Gospels was gripped by his method.24 Like his distant predecessor Matthew Henry, Forsyth was exhilarated by London’s opportunities. In Forsyth’s case, these included Dr Williams’s Library, then in Grafton Street, where he borrowed books and debated with a daring assortment of ministers.25 Here too a tradition was tested, extended, consolidated.
Daniel Williams (1643–1716), Presbyterian minister in Bishopsgate from 1688, left his fortune in trust and named his friend, Matthew Henry, as a trustee, but Henry died before the trust took effect.26 Nonetheless that Trust, embodied in Dr Williams’s Library (today in Gordon Square), possesses Matthew Henry’s portrait and several of his descendants have been trustees. The Trust has been largely but not essentially Unitarian; its most recent trustees have included Baptists, Quakers, and members of the United Reformed Church, but its deed precludes Anglicans and Roman Catholics. That would have pained yet satisfied Matthew Henry.
Secessions are an occupational hazard of gathered fellowships with scrupulous consciences. The later history of Matthew Henry’s two devoted congregations demonstrates that, as does the later history of the congregation originally gathered by his father, Philip Henry, settled at Whitchurch from 1707; here too the residuary legatees were Congregationalists. It is time to turn to the Henrys, father and son.
6. Philip Henry: Puritan and Gentleman
The Henrys were socially consolidating, upwardly mobile, and intellectually alert. They were credible, dependable, engaging, gregarious, and public spirited. Given sufficient health, sensible marriages, and sympathetic patronage, they were unlikely to return to the anonymity of their origins.
They came from South Wales, where their name was Williams. The first Henry, John Henry (1590–1652), moved to London with the proverbial groat in his pocket, secured the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke, married judiciously, and became Keeper of the King’s Orchard at Whitehall and Page of the Backstairs to the young Duke of York, later James II. This was hardly a copybook Puritan background but it was the context for Philip Henry (John Henry’s son and Matthew Henry’s father), born Whitehall, 24 August 1631, died Broad Oak, Flintshire, of colic and stone, 24 June 1696.27
Philip Henry (see figure 1.2) was a man with few critics. He enjoyed a golden youth, however turbulent the times. Philip, 4th Earl of Pembroke, was his godfather; he attracted the attention of the Archbishop of Canterbury; as a boy he played with two future kings, the young princes Charles and James, and to the end of his days he is said to have treasured a book given to him by the future James II.28 Westminster School was followed by a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford; in both cases his way was eased by the patronage of Lord Pembroke. Oxford overlapped with Flintshire, and more patronage, this time as tutor to the sons of the Chief Justice of Common Pleas, John Puleston, at Emral Hall.29 Pulestons had been at Emral since the thirteenth century. When Philip Henry was there the mansion was new, famous for the intricately plastered vault of its Hercules Hall. Although he came to blows with his pupil, the Puleston heir, Philip Henry benefited greatly from Judge Puleston’s patronage. It secured him a modestly promising living close to Emral, it encouraged him to decline two better livings, one near London, and it facilitated his marriage to a local heiress whose property remains with their descendants. His was now the world of the Justice of the Peace and county voter, solid, broad-bottomed men prospering in a settled society.
Society, however, was not settled, least of all for those reared in Whitehall and Westminster. The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose attention young Philip Henry had attracted, was William Laud; John and Philip Henry visited him in prison.30 In January 1649 Philip was back in Whitehall, on vacation from Oxford. The king went daily by river from Whitehall to Westminster Hall for his trial, passing the Henrys’ lodging to reach the Garden Stairs, on one occasion recognizing John Henry; ‘Art thou alive yet?’ the king asked. On 30 January, Philip Henry was with the crowds outside the Banqueting House to witness what he long regarded as the king’s ‘horrid murder’.31 Eleven years later he greeted the Restoration of Charles II as one of ‘our publick national mercies’.32 That king returned in May 1660.
Philip Henry preached for the last time in Worthenbury’s Whitewell Chapel on 27 October 1661 and at Michaelmas 1662 he left the parsonage for Broad Oak, the property which had come with his marriage in April 1660. What had led to this? The short answer is that it had little directly to do with the Clarendon Code (although that became entangled with it) and more to do with the parsonage which Judge Puleston had built for Philip Henry, the terms of its lease, and the annuity which the Judge had also provided. Roger Puleston, Emral’s new squire, was keen to reclaim John Puleston’s generosity. Philip Henry’s ecclesiastical integrity was nonetheless increasingly at stake.
He was a man – possibly humourless – of courtly manners, a polished turn of phrase, and transparent principle. Whitehall marked his address as indelibly as Westminster School and Abbey formed his faith. His Puritan mother, the first of a line of Henry women to mediate the family’s religion to successive generations, began what his schoolmaster, Richard Busby, continued.33 That formidable man prepared Philip for communion; Philip dated his decisive spiritual moment to 14 April 1647, a month before he went up to Oxford.
He was, therefore, an ordinand of the 1650s. His ordination, 16 September 1657, four years after his engagement to preach weekly for the Pulestons at Worthenbury, was an impressively ordered, spiritually searching, wholly Presbyterian occasion, confirming what was from the first a meticulously pastoral as well as teaching ministry.34 The extent to which Philip Henry’s flock was to be nurtured daily in the faith, whether in the parish or, in more difficult times, in the household, was celebrated in Matthew Henry’s Life of his father and extended in Matthew Henry’s own practice. The example of father and son, locally experienced but regionally and even nationally known from the 1650s to 1714, and celebrated thereafter in their widely read Lives, provided a pattern of being the church from Cromwellian England to the New Genevan architects of the United Reformed Church.
Even so, Philip Henry did not have firm views about church government and order in the 1650s and there is no evidence that he subscribed to the Solemn League and Covenant. If anything he favoured a ‘modified episcopacy’. If any man of scrupulous intellect could have slipped decently into the nest of uniformity it was Philip Henry. Years later his old headmaster, Busby, asked him why he had become a Nonconformist. Philip had replied with the alarming clarity of the possibly humourless man of principle: ‘Truly, Sir, … you made me one; for you taught me those things that hindered me from conforming’.35
From the autumn of 1660, this instinctive royalist and loyalist was a marked man. He was no longer welcome at Emral. His position at Worthenbury, the focus of his preaching and teaching ministry since 1653, was increasingly insecure save in the affections of his flock and the respect of his neighbours. Worthenbury was a Cromwellian parish, newly carved from a larger parish whose rector had been ejected in 1646.36 Philip was on gentlemanly terms with that rector and on friendly terms with his successor, but the old rector returned in 1660 and Philip reverted to being his curate when Worthenbury was again subsumed in his parish. In September 1660, Philip was presented for failing to read Common Prayer; the case dropped. Difficulties mounted over the Worthenbury parsonage, lease, and annuity, and when they were grudgingly resolved the Henrys retreated to Broad Oak.
Philip Henry was not, therefore, a Black Bartholomew man, although he would have found episcopal ordination inconceivable if applied to him. Episcopal ordination would be re-ordination, morally, logically, and intellectually a nonsense, indeed a sin. It savoured of simony. There was a more personal reason why the 24 August could not be ignored: it was his birthday. He was thirty-one in August 1662, that ‘day of the year on which I was born, … and also the day of the year on which, by law, I died’.37
For the rest of his life Philip Henry was chiefly at Broad Oak. There he was a respected country gentleman. That side of the Henrys’ life needs stressing. They were steadily sustained by the family connections and social sympathies encompassed by a confederation of Puritan manor houses from Flintshire, Staffordshire, and Shropshire, through Cheshire to Lancashire, and across to Derbyshire and Yorkshire: the Hunts of Boreatton, the Hardwares of Moldsworth and Bromborough, the Bagshawes of Ford, the Richs of Bullhouse, the Warburtons of Grange, Ashursts, Hoghtons, Pagets, and Wards, a growing multiplicity of Milneses. There were unbroken links with London combined with an alertness to political currents, to what Matthew Henry years later referred to as ‘the honest interest’.38 Such social and familial connections approximated to the ecclesiastical conciliarity which Presbyterians found increasingly hard to maintain.
Ecclesiastically their lives were steadily punctuated by legal irritants. In October 1663 Philip Henry was briefly imprisoned on suspicion of plotting insurrection.39 This transparently law-abiding man had stereotyped himself as an extremist. In March 1665 he was cited for baptizing one of his own children, a daughter.40 Later that year, the Five Mile Act disrupted the household. Was Broad Oak, where Philip Henry now lived, within five miles of Worthenbury, where he had ministered? Until it was proved beyond peradventure that Broad Oak was sixty yards beyond the five-mile limit, the Henrys withdrew to Whitchurch. They could never take life wholly for granted. In 1681 Philip was fined for keeping conventicles, which he had done unhindered for nine years.41 In 1685 he was imprisoned in Chester Castle; Monmouth’s rebellion in Somerset had made authority everywhere thoroughly jittery.42 For the rest, on Sundays he was to be found at public worship in the parish church, standing throughout the service and refusing to take communion, since that meant kneeling and it was neither scriptural nor appropriate to kneel when sharing the Lord’s Supper.43 Outside church hours he preached increasingly at Broad Oak, but although he had some reputation for debate (a consequence of his Oxford days) and debated with Quakers and (on ordination) with the congenial Bishop Lloyd of St Asaph, he published little. His reputation, resting on ‘purity of spirit and transparency of character’, was nurtured and then published abroad by a proud and numerous posterity.44
7. Matthew Henry: Child of the Great Ejectment
Before returning to that, we should first return to Philip Henry’s second but only surviving son. Matthew Henry was a child of the Great Ejectment.45 He was born prematurely at Broad Oak, 18 October 1662, less than two months after Black Bartholomew’s Day. He died of apoplexy (he was latterly a very corpulent man) at Nantwich, 22 June 1714, six weeks before the death of Queen Anne lifted the threat of the Schism Act. That Act, which Matthew had actively opposed, was to take effect on the day the queen died. The new king ignored it and in due course it was quietly repealed. If it had come into permanent effect, it would have killed all education outside a specifically Anglican structure, since by its provisions no teacher could be licensed unless he had taken the Anglican sacrament in the past year, sworn the oaths of allegiance, abjuration, and supremacy, and taken the declaration against transubstantiation. Any licensed teacher who then attended non-Anglican worship would lose his license. If it had taken effect, that Act would have been as vindictive as any in the Clarendon Code. The phrase ‘Queen Anne’s dead’ had a special meaning for Dissenters.
Matthew Henry’s life as a Dissenter could no more be taken for granted than his father’s. In November 1685, while pursuing his legal studies in London, he visited Richard Baxter, imprisoned in Southwark until he had paid the fine of 500 marks levied by Judge Jeffreys. He reported to his father that Baxter was ‘in pretty comfortable circumstances, though a prisoner, in a private house near the prison, attended on by his own man, and maid’.46 Matthew was accompanied by his intimate friend and near contemporary, Samuel Lawrence. Lawrence came from Wem but he was already embarked on his ministerial career in London and was soon to commence the sort of ministry in Nantwich that Matthew was to exercise in Chester. Matthew commented with a surprised, almost fearful, relief that Lawrence (who sent his ‘affectionate respects’) ‘and some others of them, walk the streets with freedom’.47
There was, nonetheless, a more even tenor to Matthew’s life than to Philip’s. For a start, he inherited Bronington from his mother’s father when he was twenty-one, Broad Oak from his father when he was thirty-four, and he married the prospect of more since his wife stood to inherit the desirable Hefferstone Grange. Here was a young man of good prospects, tailor-made for a legal career, perfect for a country gentleman. He had survived a sickly childhood, he was companionable, even lively, and possessed undoubted forensic intelligence. Aged twenty-two he was admitted to Gray’s Inn, London.48
The alternative career for such a man was the church, and that is the path he took except that he was a Presbyterian. Oxford was out of the question; his father increasingly feared its insistent influences. Matthew was educated at Broad Oak, followed by Dr Doolittle in Islington (master and pupil fed the myth and stoked the actuality of the ‘Dissenting Academy’).49 He began to preach the year after he entered Gray’s Inn and his stated ministry in Chester began in June 1687, a few weeks after his prudently domestic Presbyterian ordination in London. (Richard Steel, who had assisted at Philip Henry’s ordination, assisted at Matthew Henry’s thirty years on; ordered continuity marched alongside due caution and discretion.)50 Later that summer, James II visited Chester and received a carefully worded loyal address at the Bishop’s Palace, presented by local Dissenters with Matthew Henry to the fore.51 At Whitchurch, where the king stopped on 26 August on his way to Chester, Philip Henry played a similar role. He wrote about it to Henry Ashurst in London. It is clear that the king had been graciously emollient.52
Matthew Henry was in all respects a model pastor and citizen. He preached indefatigably in city and county; he sustained ailing causes; within a thirty-mile radius he exercised an itinerant ministry that was Wesleyan before its time. His fame spread, for he belonged to the riding classes at a time when serious affairs were conducted at a horse’s pace. He turned down repeated invitations from London, also from Manchester. Only in 1712 did he move (and then slowly) to London, and although at his death four funeral sermons were preached in London (one of them by Daniel Williams), and each of them was published, it was in Chester that he was buried, in the chancel of Trinity Church. Six dissenting ministers were pall-bearers; eight city clergymen, churchmen all, met the procession, which had included ten coaches. This was a representative city and county occasion.53
At the time of his death, Matthew Henry had a national reputation. Unlike his father, he had published widely. Some of his work was the product of his pastoral genius. Family Hymns (1702), The Communicant’s Companion (1704), and A Method for Prayer (1710) reflected the man who in twenty-four years had only once missed a Sacrament Sunday in Chester. The enduring bulk of his work, however, was the product of his forensic skills. His Exposition of the Old and New Testament, which began to appear in 1707, was largely completed by 1710 but took fourteen dissenting divines to complete after his death.54 It held the expository field for years to come but the project’s genesis lay in his systematic preaching of the Word. Matthew Henry was beyond all things a minister of Word and Sacrament.
8. The Henry Posterity
That phrase, ‘minister of Word and Sacrament’, was appropriated by high church Congregationalists from the 1930s onwards. Those twentieth-century men and women, some of them resurrecting the term ‘Orthodox Dissenter’, shaped their history carefully. It is time to turn to myth and its making, for the Henrys illuminate the myth. Perhaps they are central to it.
Theirs is a story of family in society. Philip Henry had one son and four daughters who lived to adulthood. Matthew Henry had one son and five daughters who lived to adulthood. Philip Henry’s elder son and three of Matthew Henry’s daughters died in childhood or infancy; their deaths cannot be dismissed as incidents. The households of those who survived have become models for women’s historians, historians of gender, and social historians more generally. They exemplified, it has been argued, the evolution of a family ideology at a time of civic exclusion. His family (that ‘little Church, and … little common-wealth’) provided ‘the minister with an identity and individuals with valuable roles: it also offered family members a future … the family could provide for the time to come, becoming that “arrow through time” ’.55 It has been argued, with the Henrys as examples, that in this way ‘the godly Protestant family contributed to the maintenance of a patriarchal society’.56 That undervalues the variable nature of the political exclusion, the mutuality of relationships, and the individuality of serious women, but it explains some apparent inconsistencies, even if it does not wholly account for Mrs Bulkley and Mrs Brett of Hill Top, West Bromwich.
Esther Bulkley’s lament for ‘much [family] departure into the world’ might have referred to her uncle (the last male Henry), or perhaps to her brother and a host of increasingly heterodox kin.57 Her uncle, Matthew Henry’s only son, Philip Henry II (1700–1760), became all that a secular Matthew Henry might have been. Aged fourteen he inherited Broad Oak; aged thirty-one he inherited Hefferstone and added his mother’s family name to his, becoming Philip Henry Warburton. In between he opted for law, attending Lincoln’s Inn as opposed to Gray’s Inn. He was called to the bar in 1727. He never married but he made some mark in an apparently desultory career. In 1741, perhaps earlier, he rebuilt Hefferstone Grange. It was now a modish country house, red brick, stone quoins, good stable, the best of Georgian outside, rococo tendencies within.58 A year later he entered Parliament for Chester, and remained there for a dozen years.59
One of the oddities of unreformed England was that while a Dissenter could not be a member of a municipal corporation, he could be a Member of Parliament. A town councillor was supposed to take communion regularly at his parish church. A Member of Parliament, provided he held no office under the Crown, need only take the Oath of Allegiance, which in Hanoverian England most Dissenters were prepared to do. Throughout the eighteenth century there were dissenting MPs. Philip Henry Warburton was not one of them. He has been called a Tory; when he voted, it was with the opposition.60 He ‘forsook, it is to be feared, the Lord God of his fathers’.61
After his death his property went to the family of his youngest sister, Theodosia Keay, whose descendants (Keay, Parsons, Lee, and Warburton Lee) were country clergymen and county JPs, unweighted by Dissent beyond the persistence of Philip Henry and Matthew Henry as Christian names.62 Dissent was longer lived in other branches. Esther Bulkley’s brother, Charles (1719–1797), was an instructive case in point.63 He trained under Doddridge, ministered briefly among Presbyterians (who became Congregationalists) in Northamptonshire, before moving (via Colchester) to London as a General Baptist. There he exercised an initially successful, learnedly disputatious, increasingly heterodox ministry; the writing of books encroached upon the cure of souls. The Charles Bulkleys were childless but they had a host of more distant cousins, descendants of Matthew Henry’s sisters. Many of these too were increasingly heterodox, from Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), the sharp-tongued (‘backbiting’ Maria Edgeworth called him) banker poet, to Philip Henry Wicksteed (1844–1928), minister and Labour churchman, described as Unitarianism’s leading socialist.64 Descent from Philip Henry had become a mark of Unitarian authenticity.
This Anglican and Unitarian posterity, united in piam memoriam, does not mean that Orthodox Dissent lost all claim to them. George Burder has already been mentioned as a key player in Matthew Henry’s early nineteenth-century revival. His ministerial record in the provinces before 1803 and in London thereafter proclaimed an Evangelical Dissenter of purest essence. His Village Sermons (1797–1816) crowned a publishing career which encouraged a Methodist historian to call him ‘a literary hack only less productive than John Wesley’.65 The Religious Tract Society, which he had helped to found in 1799, was a searchingly successful Evangelical enterprise; from 1803 to 1826 he edited the Evangelical Magazine. This promoter of vital religion was equally conscious of a tradition to be refreshed. His London church was Fetter Lane, where the Thomas Goodwins (father and son) and Thomas Bradbury (prime opponent of the Schism Act) once ministered.66 Their successor, Burder, published editions of John Owen, John Bunyan, and Isaac Watts. There was nothing antiquarian in his promotion of Matthew Henry. This takes us to a contributor to Burder’s Evangelical Magazine, John Bickerton Williams (1792–1855).
9. John Bickerton Williams: The Queen’s First Knight
Williams consolidates my themes. He was the dedicated antiquarian whose entrepreneurial enthusiasm ensured that Philip and Matthew Henry, their wives and daughters, came into their own between 1816 and the 1850s. Williams (Knight Bachelor, Justice of the Peace, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the American Antiquarian Society, Doctor of Laws [Middleburg College, Vermont]), was by secular profession a successful solicitor and by religious profession an evangelical Congregationalist.67 For thirty-five years he was treasurer of the Shropshire Congregational Union, a pillar of its churches in Shrewsbury and Wem, deacon in both.68 He retired to Wem and the comfort of Wem Hall. In Shrewsbury he was burgess, alderman, and mayor. His portrait was painted (the very model of early Victorian civic bustle and benevolence) by James Pardon, who painted Charles Darwin’s father.69 Williams epitomized civic-minded Dissent reinvigorated by the Evangelical Revival. He was Shrewsbury’s second Reform mayor and the first man to be knighted by Queen Victoria.70
Those two honours were quite separate, even though they overlapped. Williams’s correspondence glows with uncontainable pride as he describes his gracious reception by William IV, to whom he presented a loyal address, whose hand he kissed, whose features (he noted) were warmed by his red field officer’s uniform, and then as he describes an equally gracious reception a year later by Queen Victoria, whose hand he also kissed, this time standing, at the queen’s insistence.71 Indeed, she had knighted him standing, ‘to the great surprise of the Court’.72 Williams owed his knighthood to the good offices of the most likeable of the queen’s impossible uncles, the wackily radical Duke of Sussex, with whom he enjoyed antiquarian larks. He assured an antiquarian Congregational friend that Sussex (that ‘illustrious Prince’) saw this mark of royal favour ‘not as kindness to me individually, but a compliment to the English Nonconformists as a body’.73 Shades of Philip Henry kissing hands with James II at Whitchurch and Matthew Henry kissing hands at Chester, 150 years earlier; shades of Philip’s playtimes with the young Stuart princes 50 years before that.
That is not an entirely fanciful association. The Henrys were Williams’s passion. His antiquarian pursuit of them began in his late teens, when he was articled to a Wem attorney and saw some papers in the window of ‘a huckster’s shop’. They were manuscript sermons, some of them inscribed ‘Uncle Henry’.74 They turned out to have belonged to Katharine Tylston, niece of ‘the great commentator’, all that remained of material ‘handed over for destruction by some descendants of the family, who had renounced the orthodoxy of their illustrious ancestors’.75 Did those salvaged sermons include the three to which Williams had referred in his application for membership of Wem’s Congregational Church?76
Williams collected everything that he could about the Henrys – every letter, diary, and manuscript. From January 1816, now in his early twenties and established in Shrewsbury, he ensured that his Henry publications marched in successful tandem with his practice: Eighteen Sermons, by the Rev. Philip Henry … from his Original Manuscripts (1816); Memoirs of the Life and Character of Mrs. Sarah Savage, eldest daughter of the Rev. Philip Henry (1818); Memoirs of the Life and Character of Mrs. Anne Hulton, youngest daughter of the Rev. Philip Henry (1820). To these he added a carefully structured version of Matthew Henry’s classic Life of his father (1825) and a Life of Matthew himself (1828), each running to several editions. That left Matthew Henry’s Miscellaneous Works (1830), Philip Henry’s Remains (1848), and The Henry Family Memorialized (1849). A Christian family had been reconstituted.
It was done with antiquarian efficiency and evangelical intent. It was also done at a time when antiquarians were becoming historians and when urban Dissenters were taking stock of their history and had the leisure and skills to do so. Williams corresponded with likeminded friends, Thomas Raffles, Joshua Wilson, Robert Vaughan, incorrigibly inquisitive men with database minds, commandingly moderate but evangelically fired.77 Thanks to Williams, the Henry family played their part in this shaping of tradition, this celebration and consolidation of myth, this linking of Old, New, and renewed Dissent.
Williams had his own justification in all this. It lay in his name, John Bickerton Williams. He claimed to be ‘collaterally related’ to the Henry family.78 That is a weasel phrase but two late-eighteenth-century Bickerton sisters married two brothers, great-grandsons of Sarah Savage (Matthew Henry’s sister, Philip Henry’s daughter). The brothers’ grandfather ministered at Wem, three uncles were educated by Doddridge, and a granddaughter of one of the brothers married a Bickerton.79 Theirs was the far-ranging provincial society that we should by now have come to expect, inter-related county-voting property owners, agricultural tradesmen, country attorneys, clustered here at Wem, there at Whitchurch, West Bromwich, or Chester. John Bickerton Williams’s boyhood was passed in Wem. As it happens, the chapel in which he grounded his faith was not the one with which those Henry connections were associated. Their chapel had a prolonged Unitarian phase, his chapel was a Countess of Huntingdon-inspired foundation, but both had become Congregational by 1817 when he was embarked on his professional practice and his parallel life with the Henrys in Shrewsbury, and Wem’s two causes united nearly twenty years after his death.
Such stories seldom end but this one might be allowed two endings. The first is political, the second social.
Fifty years after Williams’s death there promised a new dawn in national and parliamentary life. The Commons was already under thrall to the most compelling dissenting politician since Cromwell’s time, David Lloyd George. He had entered Westminster having defeated Sir John Henry Puleston, Tory and Anglican, but a man with whom the Henrys would have had more sympathy.80 By the time of Lloyd George’s front bench pomp as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pulestons had ceased to live at Emral, which now belonged to the Summers family from industrial Lancashire and Cheshire. They owned the great steelworks at Shotton in Flintshire, and at that point they were still Congregationalists with their own connection of Liberal MPs.81 The past never repeats itself but it most certainly spirals.
And there are also collaterals. Bickertons were everywhere to be found, from Cheshire to Shropshire; their connections, too frequently called Evans, extended from Birkenhead to Worcester, and of course to London, and thence to Essex and Suffolk.82 They provided a laterally enlarged network (chiefly Congregational, but with Baptists and Unitarians as well as Anglicans) of industrialists, farmers, professional men, some of them landowners, more of them ministers, several of them MPs, many more of them town councillors, county councillors, and aldermen, straddling the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They include, for example (and twice over on his mother’s and his wife’s side), Aston Webb, who created the present façade of Buckingham Palace and imposed the present façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum on Kensington’s Brompton Road.83 The familial thread in this instance is an Evans one, but a Bickerton thread helps to explain it. Moreover, the dissenting element which informs its mind-set at several points, in several parts of the country, pushes back to the mental, spiritual, and familial worlds of the Henrys and their varied yet related (or, as Philip Henry would have put it, ‘relative’) outworking.
1. John Griffin, Memoirs of the Rev. Thomas English (Portsmouth: n.p., 1812), 88, quoted in J.B. Williams, Memoirs of the Life, Character, and Writings of the Rev. Matthew Henry (London: B.J. Holdsworth, 1828), 300.
2. Williams, Memoirs, 300. Note that Williams and his source use the spelling ‘Bulkeley’, though I have adopted the more usual ‘Bulkley’.
3. Williams, Memoirs, 300.
4. Anon., ‘Obituary: Mrs. Bulkley’, The Evangelical Magazine 15 (1807): 316–318 (316).
5. Anon., ‘Obituary’, 317.
6. Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855), novelist and dramatist, achieved popular fame with Our Village (1824–1832), sketches of life at Three Mile Cross, near Reading.
7. For Thomas English (1751–1809), see W.H. Summers, History of the Congregational Churches in the Berks, South Oxon and South Bucks Association (Newbury: W.J. Blacket, 1905), 84–86.
8. Williams, Memoirs, 300.
9. Anon., ‘Obituary’, 317.
10. Williams, Memoirs, 300.
11. See above, n. 1.
12. For the Hartopp-Fleetwood connection, see Toby Barnard, ‘Fleetwood, Charles (c.1618–1692)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/9684.
13. Isabel Rivers, ‘Doddridge, Philip (1702–1751)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/7746; Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ed., Calendar of the Correspondence of Philip Doddridge DD (1702–1751) (London: HMSO, 1979), Letter 500.
14. Nuttall, Calendar, Letter 458.
15. A.G. Matthews, The Congregational Churches of Staffordshire (London: Congregational Union of England and Wales, 1924), 121–23.
16. This section and the next owe much to: Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 221 ff.; Robert S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (London: Dacre Press, 1957); R. Tudur Jones, Arthur Long, and Rosemary Moore, eds., Protestant Nonconformist Texts, Volume 1: 1550–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Alan P.F. Sell, David J. Hall, and Ian Sellers, eds., Protestant Nonconformist Texts, Volume 2: The Eighteenth Century (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006).
17. For Cheshire, see Frederick James Powicke, A History of the Cheshire County Union of Congregational Churches (Manchester: Thomas Griffiths and Co., 1907), 273–75.
18. Watts, The Dissenters, 219.
19. David L. Wykes, ‘Henry, Matthew (1662–1714)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12975; Williams, Memoirs.
20. Williams, Memoirs, 135–37; Powicke, History of the Cheshire County Union, 127–31; Graham Hague and Judy Hague, The Unitarian Heritage: An Architectural Survey of Chapels and Churches in the Unitarian Tradition in the British Isles (Sheffield: Unitarian Heritage Society, 1986), 106.
21. Williams, Memoirs, 155.
22. George Burder, Joseph Hughes, and Samuel Palmer, eds., An Entire Collection of Matthew Henry’s Works, 7 vols. (London: S. Bagster, 1811). See further: A.F. Munden, ‘Burder, George (1752–1832)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/3958; Arthur H. Grant and Alan Argent, ‘Burder, Henry Forster (1783–1864)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/3959.
23. John Huxtable, ‘Forsyth, Peter Taylor (1848–1921)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37424.
24. Cutting from British Weekly, 1 December 1921, in Album of Cuttings Relating to P.T. Forsyth (Dr Williams’s Library, MS 134.4j).
25. Cutting from The Inquirer, 19 November 1921, in Album of Cuttings Relating to P.T. Forsyth (Dr Williams’s Library, MS 134.4j).
26. David L. Wykes, ‘Williams, Daniel (c.1643–1716)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29491; Walter D. Jeremy, The Presbyterian Fund and Dr. Daniel Williams’s Trust (London: Williams and Norgate, 1885), 81–83, 108.
27. Richard L. Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip (1631–1696)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12976.
28. Matthew Henry, The Life of the Rev. Philip Henry, A.M., corrected and enlarged by J.B. Williams (London: Holdsworth, 1825), 4.
29. D.A. Orr, ‘Puleston, John (1583?–1659)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/22873. For Emral Hall, see Thomas Lloyd, The Lost Houses of Wales: A Survey of Country Houses in Wales Demolished Since c.1900 (London: SAVE Britain’s Heritage, 1986), 32.
30. Henry, The Life, 4; Anthony Milton, ‘Laud, William (1573–1645)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/16112.
31. Henry, The Life, 18–19.
32. Henry, The Life, 58.
33. Henry, The Life, 9–11; C.S. Knighton, ‘Busby, Richard (1606–1695)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4157.
34. Henry, The Life, 31–37.
35. Henry, The Life, 11.
36. Henry, The Life, 22, 30; Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’.
37. Henry, The Life, 2, 103. Philip Henry’s diary for 1662, to which Williams did not have access, has been published: Raymond Brown, ed., The 1662 Diary of Philip Henry (1631–1696) (London: Dr. Williams’s Trust, 2014).
38. Williams, Memoirs, 199.
39. Henry, The Life, 105; Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’.
40. Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’.
41. Henry, The Life, 147–49.
42. Henry, The Life, 158.
43. Henry, The Life, 111; Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’.
44. Alexander Gordon, ‘Henry, Philip (1631–1696)’, in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1891), 26:124–26 (126).
45. Wykes, ‘Henry, Matthew’; Williams, Memoirs.
46. Williams, Memoirs, 22. For Baxter, see N.H. Keeble, ‘Baxter, Richard (1615–1691)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/1734.
47. Williams, Memoirs, 22. For Lawrence, see C.W. Sutton and M.J. Mercer, ‘Lawrence, Samuel (bap. 1661, d. 1712)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/16185.
48. Williams, Memoirs, 18.
49. Williams, Memoirs, 9–13. For Doolittle, see J. William Black, ‘Doolittle, Thomas (1630/1633?–1707)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/7826.
50. Williams, Memoirs, 48–51.
51. Williams, Memoirs, 198.
52. Henry, The Life, 173, 181–82. For the Ashursts, see Perry Gauci, ‘Ashurst, Henry (1616?–1680)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/782; Gary S. De Krey, ‘Ashurst, Sir Henry, first baronet (1645–1711)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/74440. Also Henry, The Life, 433.
53. Williams, Memoirs, 164.
54. Williams, Memoirs, 308.
55. Patricia Crawford, ‘Katharine and Philip Henry and their Children: A Case Study in Family Ideology’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 134 (1984): 39–73 (41, 44).
56. Crawford, ‘Katharine and Philip Henry’, 62.
57. Williams, Memoirs, 300.
58. John Martin Robinson, A Guide to the Country Houses of the North West (London: Constable, 1991), 42.
59. Eveline Cruickshanks, ‘Henry Warburton, Philip (1700–60), of Hefferstone Grange, Cheshire’, in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715–1754, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1970), 2:128.
60. Cruickshanks, ‘Henry Warburton, Philip’, 2:128.
61. Williams, Memoirs, 299.
62. H. Pirie-Gordon, ed., ‘Lee (now Warburton Lee) of Broad Oak’, in Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry, 15th ed. (London: Shaw, 1937), 1341–42.
63. Alexander Gordon and M.J. Mercer, ‘Bulkley, Charles (1719–1797)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/3900.
64. Richard Garnett and Paul Baines, ‘Rogers, Samuel (1763–1855)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23997; Ian Steedman, ‘Wicksteed, Philip Henry (1844–1927)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/38802; Peter d’Alroy Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 46.
65. W.R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London: Batsford, 1972), 300.
66. T.M. Lawrence, ‘Goodwin, Thomas (1600–1680)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10996; T.M. Lawrence, ‘Goodwin, Thomas (c.1650–1708?)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10997; John Handby Thompson, ‘Bradbury, Thomas (1676/7–1759)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/3169.
67. W.G.D. Fletcher and K.D. Reynolds, ‘Williams, Sir John Bickerton (1792–1855)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29526.
68. Ernest Elliot, A History of Congregationalism in Shropshire (Oswestry: Woodall, Minshall, and Co, 1898), 11, 60–68.
69. For James Pardon (ca. 1794–1862), see Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten, The Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1997), 358.
70. Fletcher and Reynolds, ‘Williams, Sir John Bickerton’.
71. ‘Letter from Sir John Bickerton Williams to Joshua Wilson, 12 March 1836’ (Dr Williams’s Library, Joshua Wilson Correspondence, CL/II.c.23); ‘Letter from Sir John Bickerton Williams to Joshua Wilson, 6 February 1838’ (Dr Williams’s Library, Joshua Wilson Correspondence, CL/II.c.11/24).
72. ‘Williams to Wilson, 6 February 1838’.
73. ‘Williams to Wilson, 6 February 1838’. See further, T.F. Henderson and John Van der Kiste, ‘Augustus Frederick, Prince, duke of Sussex (1773–1843)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/900.
74. Anon., ‘Memoir of the Late Sir John Bickerton Williams, Knt., LL.D., F.S.A.’, The Evangelical Magazine 34 (1856): 1–7 (2).
75. Anon., ‘Memoir’, 2.
76. Anon., ‘Memoir’, 2.
77. Alexander Gordon and Ian Sellers, ‘Raffles, Thomas (1788–1863)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23009; Alexander Gordon and R. Tudur Jones, ‘Vaughan, Robert (1795–1868)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/28142. For Joshua Wilson (1795–1874), see Alexander Gordon and Mark Clement, ‘Wilson, Thomas (1764–1843)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29694.
78. Anon., ‘Memoir’, 1.
79. The link is through Thomas Holland (1690–1753), minister at Wem from 1716 to 1753. See Elliot, A History, 62–64.
80. John Grigg, The Young Lloyd George (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), 83–84, 116–17. For Sir John Henry Puleston (1830–1908), see Anon., ed., Who Was Who: A Companion to ‘Who’s Who’ Containing the Biographies of Those who Died during the Period 1897–1916 (London: A&C Black, 1920), 579.
81. The Summers family were active at Stalybridge Congregational Church. For James Woolley Summers (1849–1913), see Anon., Who Was Who, 690. He bought Emral from the Pulestons; Lloyd, Lost Houses, 32.
82. For the Bickerton/Evans connection, see John Reed Appleton and Morris Charles Jones, Evans, 1865: A Genealogical History of the Family of Evans of Montgomeryshire (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: J.G. Forster, 1865).
83. Ian Dungavell, ‘Webb, Sir Aston (1849–1930)’, in Cannadine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36795. I am indebted to Dr Ian Dungavell for further information on Webb/Evans links.