Philip Furneaux 

Philip Furneaux (1726-83) was for many years a friend and correspondent of Anne Steelel He helped see her Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional through the press in 1759. Furneaux came from an Independent family in Devon, a family that was apparently known to the Wakefords. He studied in London at the Moorfields Academy under John Eames and David Jenings from 1743 to 1749, after which he became the assistant to Henry Read and the Presbyterian congregation at St. Thomas’s, Southwark. In 1753 he became minister to the Independent congregation at Clapham, Surrey, where he would remain until 1777, when he was struck by mental illness. He died in an insane asylum in Hoxton, London, in 1783. He may have been an orthodox Calvinist in his early years, but by the 1750s had most probably become an Arian, sitting ‘lightly on the Independent and Presbyterian divide,’ according to Alan Ruston. His Arianism may not have been known to the congregation at Broughton in 1755, but in any case the Baptist meeting at Broughton, like many Particular Baptist congregations at that time, did not exclude Arians as members nor did they always discourage Arian ministers, as this letter makes clear.

Furneaux never married, but he did meet Anne Steele on several occasions at Broughton, and along with Joseph Wakeford, was instrumental in getting her first two volumes of poems into print in Lonodn. Joseph Wakeford took the manuscript poems that would comprise the first volume of her Poems with him to London in November 1757, with Furneaux seeing them through the publication process. Furneaux gained much recognition for his work on behalf of the rights of nonconformists and his opposition to the continuation of penal laws against nonconformists. Most of his ideas on this subject appeared in Letters to the Honorable Mr. Justice Blackstone (1770). Furneaux also supported the Feathers tavern petition for relief from subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles by the clergy of the established church, which led to a similar petition on behalf of dissenting clergy that same year, which provoked Furneaux’s Essay on Toleration (1773), his most famous work. Like the Steeles and Attwaters in the West Country, Furneaux’s Whig politics during the 1770s reflected an antagonism toward religious tests, a desire for parliamentary reform, and support for the American colonies against the policies of George III. See Alan Ruston, ‘Philip Furneaux’, ODNB; for his interactions with Anne Steele, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vols. 1 and 2, ed. Julia B. Griffin.