Mark Wilks

Mark Wilks (1748-1819) was born at Gilbralter, the son of an army officer. He moved with his family back to Birmingham in 1756 and later was apprenticed as a button-maker. In his early twenties he left the Anglican Church and was baptized and admitted to the Baptist church at Cannon Street in Birmingham, under the ministry of James Turner. He was also greatly attracted to the Methodists at this time. He was invited by the Countess of Huntingdon to study at her college at Trevecca, eventually becoming one of her ministers in 1776 at the Tabernacle in Norwich. After he married in 1778, he was forced to leave the Countess’s connexion, and a group pulled out of the Tabernacle and formed St. Paul’s Chapel, a Calvinistic Methodist church, in 1780, with Wilks as founding pastor. In 1788, he constituted the church as a Particular Baptist church, at which time many of his followers deserted him. He would remain at St. Paul’s until his death in 1819. To help support himself, he turned to farming at Costessey for the next ten years, taking no salary from the church. After that, he received £50 per annum. In the early 1790s, Wilks became actively involved in the movement for political reform, an interest that led to two significant publications, The Origin and Stability of the French Revolution. A Sermon Preached at St. Paul’s Chapel, Norwich, July 14, 1791 (Norwich, 1791); and Athaliah, or The Tocsin Sounded by Modern Alarmists. Two Collection Sermons Towards Defraying the Expense of the Defendants in the Late Trials for High Treason, Preached on the 19th of April, 1795 in St. Paul’s Chapel, Norwich (Norwich, 1795). As his daughter notes in her “Memoir” of Wilks, “It is indeed alleged that a Christian minister ought not to interfere with the politics, either of his own or any other nation—that it is his duty to attend to the spiritual instead of the temporal interests of his fellow creatures. But can it be said that the one is not dependent on the other, and that where a nation is enchained by slavery and despotism, religion, if it can at all survive in a soil so unpropitious, will not partake of its sterility, and be feeble and unhealthy?” The church at St. Paul’s grew, and in 1814 they moved into a new chapel in Colegate, St. Clement’s. Wilks was also an early and avid supporter of the BMS throughout his ministry. See Sarah Wilks, Memoirs of Rev. Mark Wilks.  With an Appendix (London: Francis Westley, 1821); Harold F. Oxbury, From St. Paul’s to Unthank Road (Norwich: n.p., 1925), 11-15.