Thomas Morgan

Thomas Morgan (1752-1821), was born at Laugharne. 26 December 1752, to Thomas Morgan the elder, from Dyffryn Uchaf near Groeswen, Glamorgan. Originally a Methodist, his father was a member of the Watford Independent Church in 1739, later renouncing Methodism to (in 1746) be ordained as minister at the large Independent church of Henllan Amgoed.

Thomas (the younger) was educated at Batley School (Hargrave), Leeds Grammar School (Brook), and (from 1867) at the Coward Trust's Hoxton Academy (where he was taught by Andrew Kippis and the cyclopædist Abraham Rees, 1743–1825). This circle of Welsh dissenters meant that Morgan was connected with Welsh independency, and the broader dissenting world, at a high level. Rees was a trustee of Dr. Williams's foundations, secretary of the presbyterian board in 1778 and from 1806 distributor of the English regium donum to Nonconformist clergy. A leading educationalist in dissenting academies, Rees was ‘long the acknowledged head of the body of ministers of the ‘three denominations.”’ It was with Rees and Kippis that, in 1795, Morgan brought out A Collection of Hymns and Psalms, the first attempt to supply, for general use among liberal dissenters, a hymnal to take the place of Watts's. It would go through many editions.

Unlike his father 'no Calvinist', Morgan was made assistant Minister to Rev. Moore at the Presbyterian church in Abingdon, from whom he took over when the latter retired. Morgan then succeeded William Prior at the Aliffe Street congregation in Goodman Fields, London, and succeeded Rees as a Sunday evening lecturer in Salters' Hall. Several of his discourses and sermons there were later published. In addition, he wrote extensively for Aikin's General Biography, reviewed for the New Annual Register. He then ministered in various churches in London: from 1777-99 he was a member of the Presbyterian Fund Board, and in 1783 was elected a Trustee of Dr Daniel Williams's Library, of which he was (from 1804) made Librarian.

Sitting as his did at the crossroads of liberal Protestant and unitarian thought, Morgan took up various causes, particularly those in defence of freedom of conscience. Having been alerted the condition of the Waldensians in northern Italy, and no doubt having read Thomas Sims' account (published first in 1812), in 1816, Morgan published his own Sketch of the past and present state of the Vaudois or Waldenses, inhabiting the Valleys of Piedmont, translated from the original Italian manuscript (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown). Morgan had, he noted in the Monthly Register, a friend living in Turin, with whose family he had 'been acquainted many years', who had sent to him a number of pieces written in Vaudois patois and French. It is also clear that he was in touch, either directly or indirectly, with Pierre Geymet and Pierre Bert. Paul J. D. Appia and Rev. J. H. Ferdinand Peyran had been delegated to take up their case with Lord Bentinck, then commanding British forces in Genoa at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The Restoration of the House of Savoy threatened, and then realized, the fear that all the restrictions which had been the lot of the Waldensians prior to the French occupation would again be imposed. The foiling of the 'new St Bartholomew's Day' plot of 1794 remained strong in local memory, and so the Tavola sought to energize liberal and Protestant support abroad in their defense, and they sought the 'status quo of January 1813' as their starting point. Bert, Geymet, Peyran and others were not passive in this - they took to their international networks to agitate for support, and these efforts drew the attention of both magisterial and dissenting Protestants across Europe. Nor were the connections purely Church-related. The pastor/ gentleman/ scientist was still a dominant form in the early 19th century, and the publications of the francophone world included the scientific and literary circles in Turin. For Morgan and the liberal Protestants, who were still fighting their own domestic fights for liberty of conscience, and championing the Enlightenment's vision of a 'rational religion', such international causes pointed out the disconnect between Britain's domestic reality as opposed to its international image.

While somewhat stiff and 'formal', Morgan won a wide friendship among dissenting thinkers and writers - it was this circle which gained for him, in 1819, the honour of an LLD granted by the University of Aberdeen.

His obituary notice in the Monthly Repository suggests he died on 21 July 1821, actually at the Library. He had been preceded in death by his close friend, the eminent Dr. Lindsay [by which his obituary perhaps means the leading unitarian, Rev. Theophilus Lindsey]. After the service, at which the 'father of organised Unitarianism in Great Britain' Robert Aspland preached, Morgan was buried at Bunhill Fields, in Dr Williams' vault.

Sources:

Appia, Beatrice. (1970). 'Une famille vaudoise du Piémont du XIV e au XIX e siècle: 2nd partie: les Appia du XIII au XIXe siècle', Bollettino della Società di studi valdesi XCI.127 (June): 3-39.

DWB. (1959). 'MORGAN, THOMAS (1720-1799), Independent minister', Dictionary of Welsh Biography, https://biography.wales/article/s-MORG-THO-1720, accessed 7 May 2021.

Gordon, Alexander. (1896). 'REES, ABRAHAM, D.D. (1743–1825)', Dictionary of National Biography 47 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1896), pp. 397-98.

Morgan, Thomas. (1816a). ‘Memoir Relative to the Vaudois’, Williams’s Library, April 1816, reprinted in The Monthly Repository, xi.cxxv (May 1816): 253-256.