Mrs. Peter Evans

Evans, Mrs. Peter – Revd Henry Phillips, Baptist minister at Salisbury, after the death of his first wife, pursued Mrs. Peter Evans of Yeovil, the widow of the former Baptist minister at Yeovil (the brother of Hugh Evans of Bristol) who had died in 1771. Mrs. Evans would become Revd Phillips’s second wife. She was known to the Steeles of Broughton through their relationship with the Bullocks and the Baptist church at Yeovil. It may be that Revd Phillips was originally from Yeovil. Philips’s second wife brought a substantial income to the marriage, enough to enable Phillips to open an academy for boys at Salisbury. A 1781 advertisement for the school in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal notes that Revd Phillips had recently married a ‘most agreeable lady with a handsome fortune’. Many years later, Mary Steele addressed a poem to Mrs. Phillips, then living at Muswell Hill, London. For the 1781 advertisement, see Seymour J. Price, ‘Dissenting Academies, 1662-1820’, Baptist Quarterly 6 (1932-33), p. 133. For Steele's poem, see Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 3.164. Numerous references to Rev. Phillips can also be found in the Diary of Jane Attwater, substantial excerpts of which can be found at Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, 8.105-306.