Benjamin Ryland

Benjamin Ryland (d. 1832) was originally from London and associated in his early days with the Baptist meeting at Cripplegate (under John Reynolds) and the Independent congregation at White Row, Spitalfields (under Edward Hitchin). At some point in the 1780s, he moved to Cambridge and attended St. Andrew’s Street, under the ministry of Robert Robinson. In 1791 he removed to Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, where his brother-in-law, James Bowers, had become pastor of the Baptist congregation in November 1786. Robert Robinson delivered Bower’s ordination sermon; one of Robinson’s members, Richard Foster, had become involved, along with some of his relations, with the Baptist church in Biggleswade the previous year. After settling in Biggleswade, Ryland developed a successful business of general stores (mostly drapery and tailoring) and within a short time became a trustee of the Baptist church. He apparently had absorbed the reform-minded politics of Cambridge associated with St. Andrew’s Street for Ryland became a distributor of Benjamin Flower’s radical newspaper, TheCambridge Intelligencer, in 1793 (Ryland may have known Flower previously, for both would have attended at White Row, Spitalfields, in the 1770s). Apparently, Ryland and Bowers did not agree, and eventually Ryland left the Biggleswade meeting and began attending the church at Potton, under the Rev. R. Whittingham, a curate of the evangelical vicar, John Berridge. Bowers left Biggleswade in 1794 to pastor an Independent congregation in Haverhill, Essex. He was succeeded at Biggleswade by Thomas Mabbott. Ryland may have eventually moved toward Unitarianism, for he subscribed to Mrs. Alice Flowerdew’s Poems in 1803 (Flowerdew was a member of John Evans’s General Baptist congregation at Worship Street). Whether he was a relation of John Ryland, Jr., is unknown. His descendant, Henry Ryland (1856-1924), gained fame as a Pre-Raphaelite painter. See Universal British Directory, 2:379; John Rippon, ed., Baptist Annual Register, vol. 2 (1794-97), p. 1; C. H. Chaplin, History of the Old Meeting Baptist Church, Biggleswade (Biggleswade: C. Elphick, 1909), 20-25.