Matthew Hawkes

Matthew Hawkes was a maltster who resided at Campions, an impressive estate on the edge of Harlow, Essex.  The Hawkeses had been a leading family in the Baptist church at Fore Street throughout the eighteenth century. His ancestor, Thomas Hawkes, along with the ejected minister William Woodward, was instrumental in the founding of both Particular Baptist meetings at Harlow-at Fore Street, where the Flowers attended, and Parndon, which later became Potter Street.  Matthew Hawkes’s daughter will form a brief romantic attachment with Eliza Flower's youngest brother, John, in c. 1805-06. A number of Wrights from Harlow were likewise associated with the congregations at Potter Street and Fore Street in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  A Joseph Wright (d. 1806) operated The King’s Head tavern in Potter Street for many years.   John Wright (d. 1797), most likely Joseph’s brother and also a maltster, was a trustee o/f the church at Potter Street.  John’s nephew, also named John, was, like his father and uncle, a maltster (UBD 3.359).  See Linley H. Bateman,  History of Harlow (Harlow, UK:  Harlow Development Corp., 1969), 97-98, 110; also Timothy Whelan, ed., Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008).