John James Manfield

John James Manfield's wife, the former Elizabeth Tezard (d. 1740), was the daughter of the former Elizabeth Froude, sister of Anne Steele’s mother, Anne Froude. Mr. Manfield was a well-to-do lawyer; his son, James, attended Eton and Cambridge University, became King’s Counsel in 1772, MP for Cambridge 1779-84, and was knighted in 1804. The Manfields were most likely attendants at the Particular Baptist Church at Ringwood. Another probable member at that time was James Elcomb, who visited the Manfields often in the late 1730s, developing a romantic interest in AS.  In May 1737, Elcomb drowned.  Despite a long-lived legend, he was never Anne Steele’s fiancé, as Joseph Ivimey contended in his History of the English Baptists (vol. 4, p. 312) and as many scholars have since repeated. Apparently, however, Elcomb and Anne Steele were close enough as friends that his sudden death caused her some distress. A letter from Manfield to William Steele III, dated 25 May 1737, relates Elcomb’s death and suggests that breaking the news to Anne Steele would require ‘prudence’, as Manfield does not know exactly ‘how far he may have prevailed on the [her] affections’ and hopes to lessen ‘any shock that may attend her hearing it in too sudden a manner.’ See John Broome, A Bruised Reed: The Life and Times of Anne Steele. (Harpenden: Gospel Standard Trust Publications, 2007), 106-08; J. R. Watson and N. Cho, ‘Anne Steele’s Drowned Fiancé,’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (2005), 117-21.