Thomas Sheraton

Thomas Sheraton (1751–1806), a Baptist minister for a short time in his later years, initially gained fame as a furniture designer in London (he was by trade a cabinet maker). In fact, Sheraton shares honours with Thomas Chippendale and George Hepplewhite as one of the three most prominent practitioners of the craft during the eighteenth century. Sheraton’s four-volume set, The Cabinet Maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book (1791), garnered more than six hundred subscriptions, mostly from cabinet-makers and joiners. During his time in London, Sheraton worshipped in Abraham Booth’s congregation in Little Prescot Street, Goodman's Fields, London, at one point proposing a scheme for evangelising surrounding villages though open-air preaching and the education of young children (see Ernest Kevan, London’s Oldest Baptist Church [London: Kingsgate Press, 1933], 102. According to the Goodman's Fields Membership Book for 1772-1833 (Evangelical Library, London), Sheraton was admitted to the church on 1 November 1795 and dismissed from the church on 23 July 1800. In the Church Book for the meeting on that day (Goodman's Fields Church Book 1784-1832, Evangelical Library, London), the entry reads as follows:

Mr Sheraton having, by Letter, informed our Pastor, that he has been recently ordained to the pastoral office in a Church of the same faith & order at Darlington, in the Bishopric of Durham; it was moved & resolved, that his membership with us be entirely dissolved. NB. We presume that it was merely through inadvertency, that application to us for his dismission was not made, previously to his Ordination. 

Sheraton may not have stayed long at Darlington, for in 1800 he also began ministering to a small joint congregation of members living in Stockton-on-Tees and Marton. It appears that by 1804, or possibly earlier, Sheraton had returned to London, in poor health and without a sufficient means of income. He died there in 1806 after a short illness. See David Douglas, History of the Baptist Churches in the North of England [London, 1846], pp. 242-3, 245; Gentleman's Magazine, 1806, Part 2, p. 1082. My thanks to David Boydell for information on Sheraton's life after 1800 in County Durham and London.

During his time in London in the 1790s, Sheraton contributed to the heated political climate of the 1790s with his pamphlet, Scriptural Subjection to Civil Government; in an Address to Real Christians (1795), a defence of Baptist loyalty to the British crown coupled with a critique of needed political reforms. In In “To the Reader” (he was living at that time at 106 Wardour Street) he writes, “Should the writer’s motives for publishing on this subject be inquired into--- he has to say, that at a time when the loyalty of Dissenters in general was doubted, he accepted an invitation and opportunity of announcing openly that he was not amongst that class of non-conformists, who scruple not to revile the good constitution under which Divine Providence has happily placed them; reserving at the same time the important distinction between a good constitution, and those corruptions that may exist in its administration, to point out which he conceives would be as much beyond his ability as foreign to his duty to attempt it” (2).  

In some areas, however, he contends tht we are not to honour the king above all others--the area of conscience.  “The sovereign of the conscience is God alone” (29).  Thus, “if a modern monarch should establish a national religion, and insist upon all without distinction to worship in hisway, however contrary to the word of God, should we honour him in this case with our compliance?  Surely not” (30).  “It is ungrateful as well as unreasonable, for kings to insnare the consciences of Christ’s subjects with their institutions and sentiments, because that he has been careful to enjoin upon all his followers universal subjection to them in those things which relate to civil government” (33).  

As a result, Sheraton argues that “christians are not to honour the king by complying with his appointed fasts; particularly, when such a day is connected with praying for the succss of destructive arms” (34).  “How vain, then, are the attempts of earthly monarchs, when they exert the feeble arm of civil authority to promote the interests of an invisible, spiritual, and heavenly kingdom, which can only be supported by the omnipotent hand of God!  How unjust their claims, and incompetent their wisdom, to be head over his church, and to share any part of the [government over her, in appointing her fasts, her solemn prayers, and the bounds of her religious liberty! (39-40).