William Nash

William Nash (1745-1829) of Royston, Hertfordshire, was a country attorney and deacon at the Baptist church in St. Andrew’s Street, Cambridge, and a close friend of HCR, appearing often in his diary, reminiscences, and correspondence. Nash had been a Methodist in his youth, but turned Baptist and eventually became a Unitarian. A devoted Whig throughout his adult life, Nash was active in the reformist politics of Hertfordshire and Cambridge during the 1780s and ’90s, joining the Society for Constitutional Information not long after its founding in 1780. His sole publication was A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Esq. from a Dissenting Country Attorney (1791), in which he criticized Burke’s position on the French Revolution as well as Burke’s disapproval of dissenters who engaged in political discourse. Despite his lengthy association with the congregation at St. Andrew’s Street, by 1790 Nash had become a Unitarian, introducing it to Royston shortly thereafter. Crabb Robinson noted in his obituary for Nash that ‘[f]or the last forty years of his life he was a decided Unitarian, and often expressed to those of his friends who thought with him on the subject, the perfect satisfaction and comfort he derived from that system of opinion.  It was a phrase frequently repeated by him, and now affectionately recollected by one of his nearest connexions, that “since he had become a Unitarian the New Testament had become a book of light and knowledge to him.”’ In 1798 Wedd William Nash (c. 1776- 1858), William Nash’s son, married Ann Hollick (d. 1840), daughter of William Hollick (1752-1817). Hollick, like William Nash, was also a prominent leader and deacon (1790-1817) at St. Andrew’s Street.  Originally a grocer, he moved to the manor house at Hinxton, near Whittlesford, just outside of Cambridge, in 1792 as part of the inheritance he received from his uncle, Ebenezer Hollick, Sr. He later placed stewardship of the house in the hands of Wedd William Nash. Sarah Nash, one of William Nash’s daughters, married John George Fordham, nephew of Edward King Fordham of Royston, another friend of Crabb Robinson. Mary Nash (1778-1866) married Joseph Pattisson Wedd (1783-1843) of Royston on 3 December 1812. Three other daughters remained unmarried, all of whom HCR knew well and whose treatment by their brother Wedd William offended HCR. One of them, Esther, accompanied HCR and Mordecai Andrews III to Paris in 1818 and was the daughter to whom HCR was most attached; the other two were Elizabeth (1777-1861) and Martha (1782-1868), all residing in Royston. Wedd William remarried in 1842 to Sarah Gutteridge (d. 1864), daughter of the wealthy businessman and prominent Baptist layman, Joseph Gutteridge (1752-1844). In his final years Wedd William lived in the fashionable suburb of Denmark Hill. For more on the Nashes and Hollicks, see HCR’s obituary on William Nash, Monthly Repository, New Series 4 (1830), p. 133; ‘Lists of the Members’, in Tracts Published and Distributed Gratis by the Society for Constitutional Information. Volume the First. (London:  W. Richardson, 1783), 4-7; Thomas Sadler, ed., Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1869), vol. 1,  21, 24, 184-5, 253; Alfred Kingston, A History of Royston (London: Elliot Stock, 1908),  230-2; Alan Ruston, Unitarianism in Hertfordshire (Oxhey, Hertfordshire, 1979), p. 17; Church Book: St. Andrew’s Street Baptist Church, Cambridge 1720-1832 (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1991),  132-7; A. P. M. Wright, A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978),  223, 226, 229; and Douglas C. Sparkes,  ‘Baptisms at Whittlesford, Cambs, 1760’, Baptist Quarterly 19 (1961-62),  131-32.