John Audley

John Audley (1750-1827) was a prosperous woolstapler and Cambridge solicitor who resided in Impington, just outside Cambridge. He attended the Green Street (Independent) Meeting in Cambridge under John Stettle, who pastored there from 1781 to 1813.  Though an Independent, Audley had close ties with a number of Baptists who attended at St. Andrew’s Street; in 1792 Audley subscribed to Robert Robinson’s Ecclesiastical Researches and was a friend of Benjamin Flower, who attended there under Robert Hall in the 1790s.  Like Flower, Audley was a political reformer during the 1780s and ‘90s, joining Flower and Robert Robinson in the Cambridge chapter of the Society of Constitutional Information in 1780. Audley was an active lay preacher for many years in both Baptist and Independent churches in Cambridgeshire and surrounding counties, working with Flower and others in the formation of a Dissenting congregation at Waterbeach, the same congregation from which Charles Hadden Spurgeon would emerge a few decades later. After Stettle’s death, Audley supplied as pastor at Green Street from July 1813 to June 1815.  He also served as secretary of the Cambridge Benevolent Society in 1820. Audley preached funeral sermons for several ministers, including one for William Bond (pastor of the combined Independent congregations at Barrington and Great Eversden) in April 1794.  After Bond’s death, the two congregations were frequently divided, and for a time a Rev. Jennings ministered at Barrington. Audley’s sister married the Revd John Houseman, evangelical Calvinist vicar of St. Anne’s Church, Lancaster, and through him Audley met Elizabeth Coltman of Leicester. They were briefly engaged but then she broke off the engagement, probably c. 1785. After Mrs. Houseman’s death in 1786, John Houseman remarried, this time to Jane Adams of Langton, the village where he was ministering at that time. She would later become a close friend as well of Elizabeth Coltman. Audley continued to remain friends with Coltman and the Housemans long after his sister’s death and his break up with Coltman. See George Dyer, Memoirs of the life and writings of Robert Robinson, late minister of the Dissenting Congregation, in Saint Andrew’s Parish, Cambridge (London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1796), x; “Statistical View of Dissenters in England and Wales,”  London Christian Instructor, or Congregational Magazine 2 (1819), 172, 185, 373-74; Audley Papers, 132/B. 72, Cambridgeshire Record Office, Cambridge; and Timothy Whelan, ed., Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008), 242-43. For Coltman's life and writings, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vols. 4 and 7.