Edward Hitchin

Edward Hitchin (1726-74) settled in London in 1743 as assistant to Richard Rawlin at the Independent congregation at Fetter Lane.  After the death of Mordecai Andrews, he became pastor of the Independent congregation at Artillery Lane, Bishopsgate.  In 1755, the year Benjamin Flower was born, the congregation built a new chapel in White Row, Spitalfields (at that time the largest Dissenting chapel in London), where Hitchin remained until his death on 11 January 1774 (Congreg­ational Magazine [1826]: 36).  He was a strong evangelical Calvinist, a friend of Whitefield, Gill, Toplady, Romaine and other leading ministers of his day. In his Free Thoughts on the Late Application of some Dissenting Ministers to Parliament (London, 1772), he announced his reasons for not supporting a petition by a group of Dissenting ministers to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts in 1772.  He was comfortable with the toleration that existed and believed the movement was fueled mostly by Unitarians who had problems with subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church.