Edward King Fordham 

Edward King Fordham (1750-1847) was a woolstapler and active political reformer from Royston. He was the brother-in-law of Richard Flower. He and his brothers John (dates unknown), George (1752-1840) and Elias (1762-1838) came from a well-established family of dissenters in Hertfordshire.  In the early to mid-1790s, E. K. Fordham was a regular attendant at the Royston Book Club, once posing the following question, recorded in the Club’s minute book and noted by Alfred Kingston: ‘Whether free Inquiry is not upon the whole beneficial to Society though it may be attended with some ill effects to Individuals?’ The vote was unanimous in favor of free enquiry, which says much about the political attitudes of the Club’s members. As Crabb Robinson writes in his reminiscences, E. K. Fordham was always ‘liberal in religious opinion and zealous for political reform’. Fordham chaired the 25 May 1796 meeting of the Hertford freeholders for the parliamentary election that year (Cambridge Intelligencer, 28 May 1796).  Alfred Kingston describes E. K. Fordham as ‘a courageous reformer in an age when reformers were misunderstood and suspected.  For the right of the people to civil and religious liberty, for Parliamentary reforms, and freedom of speech, he was a courageous champion on many a public platform at Cambridge, Hertford, Bedford, and other centres’. Richard Flower married E. K. Fordham’s only sister, Elizabeth (1764-1846). In 1808, Fordham, his elder brother, John, and Richard Flower established the Royston Bank, under the business name of Fordham, Flower, & Co. E. K. Fordham’s nephew, John Edward Fordham (1799-1881), eventually took control of the bank; he married Harriet Gurney (1800-1874), a daughter of John and Maria Hawes Gurney (John Gurney was a prominent lawyer and friend of HCR during his time as a lawyer on the Norwich circuit). George Fordham, assisted by E. K. Fordham and their younger brother, Elias (a lay Unitarian minister and farmer near Sandon), founded several Dissenting congregations in Hertfordshire in the late 1700s and early 1800s. By the 1790s, however, all three Fordhams had become Unit­arians. For obituaries on George, Elias, and E. K. Fordham, see the Christian Reformer 8 (1841), 187-88; Christian Reformer 5 (1838), p. 800; Christian Reformer 15 (1848),  27, 254-56. For more on the Fordhams, see Thomas Sadler, ed., Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1869), vol. 1, p. 21; Alan Ruston, Unitarianism in Hertfordshire (, 1979), 25; Alfred Kingston, A History of Royston, Hertfordshire, with Biographical Notes of Royston Worthies, Portraits, Plans and Illustrations (London: E. Stock, 1906),  173, 174, 225-29; William Urwick, Nonconformity in Hertfordshire (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1884), 689, 818, 822-23.