Henry Waymouth

Henry Waymouth (1775-1848) was a reformer and prominent Dissenting Deputy. He was originally from Exeter. He eventually settled in South London (in 1811 he was living in Wandsworth Common), became a successful distiller (in conjunction with Joseph Benwell), and was a long-time attendant (and financial supporter) of Joseph Hughes’s congregation in Battersea; he also maintained ties with the congregation in Little Wild Street. He was a Dissenting Deputy and joined a prominent group of Baptists that included Joseph Hughes, Benjamin Shaw, Samuel Medley, Jr., and F. A. Cox, in the founding of London University in 1825. He worked with Brougham on the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and was a member of the Anti-Slavery Society. He later moved across the Thames to the Marylebone section of London in Bryanston Square. Waymouth was also known to Crabb Robinson, who writes in his Reminiscences for late summer 1809: ‘A few days before . . . I had dined with a city patriot & orator Saml Favell where I met Miles the pamphleteer Weymouth [sic] the dissenter – besides my friend [J. J.] Evans &c &c But in this line I did not make any great progress’ (vol. 2, f. 421, Crabb Robinson Archive, Dr. Williams’s Library, London). J. J. Evans had, like Waymouth, been raised a Particular Baptist, though by 1809 he had become a General Baptist Unitarian.  Favell (1760-1830) was a Baptist from Southwark and was an outspoken member of the London Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information in the late 1780s and early 1790s. My thanks to John Briggs for information relating to Waymouth.