Matthew Wilks

Matthew Wilks (1746-1829) was the brother of Mark Wilks (see previous entry). He was an Independent minister for most of his life, first at the Moorfields (built by George Whitefield) and later at the Tottenham Court Road Chapel. He was also involved in the creation of the Evangelical Magazine (1793), the London Missionary Society (1795), the Religious Tract Society (1799), the Irish Evangelical Society, and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804). He was an active supporter of itinerant preaching, serving for twenty-five years as the honorary secretary of the Village Itinerancy. He vehemently opposed Lord Sidmouth’s bill in 1811 for the licensing of non-conformist chapels. His son, John (a radical MP for Boston in the 1830s), was the first secretary of The Protestant Society for the Protection of Religious Liberty, an organization that fought for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828. His other son, Mark, was a Congregational minister in London.