Thomas King

Thomas King (1754/55-1831) was a grocer and chandler in Birmingham. He succeeded Reynold Hogg as treasurer of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1795. He was a member at Cannon Street in Birmingham for forty-eight years and a deacon for forty years.  He would remain treasurer of the BMS until 1821, when William Burls, a member at Carter Lane, Southwark, succeeded him. King continued to serve on the BMS committee until his death in 1831. In Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge mentions that during his visit to Birmingham in early 1796 to raise funds for his periodical, The Watchman, Coleridge met with many Dissenters who were sympathetic to his political opinions. At one meeting he had an encounter with a Calvinist tallow-chandler who was 'one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty', who 'had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in the Revelations, that spoke like a dragon' (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [London, 1817], Part 1, p. 170). This Calvinist tallow-chandler was none other than the same Thomas King of the Baptist church in Cannon Street, the former business partner of John Harwood (see his entry above), also a member at Cannon Street and the father of James Harwood of Bristol, a friend of Coleridge and attendant at that time at the Baptist meeting in Broadmead. For more on King, see Ernest A. Payne, The First Generation: Early Leaders of the Baptist Missionary Society in England and India (London: Carey Press, [1936], 60-67.