John
Newton’s biography from Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Newton,
John (1725–1807), slave trader and
Church of England clergyman, was born on 24 July 1725 in Wapping,
London, the only child of John Newton (d. 1750), master mariner in the
Mediterranean trade, and his first wife, Elizabeth (1705?–1732), whose maiden
name was probably Seatliffe. Two days later he was baptized at the Independent
chapel in Old Gravel Lane, Wapping, where his mother attended and where David
Jennings was the minister. He remembered his mother as ‘a pious and experienced
Christian’, and at her knee he learned the hymns and catechisms of Isaac Watts
and was nurtured in the piety of old dissent. She died of tuberculosis when
John was only six. His father remarried after his mother's death, but John's
relationship with both his father and his stepmother was distant, and his
religious training ceased. His stepmother, Thomasina, was the daughter of a
substantial tenant-grazier in the parish of Aveley in Essex, and he lived with
her family while his father was away at sea. Newton eventually had two
half-brothers, William and Harry, and a half-sister, Thomasina. For two years
(1733–5) he was sent to a boarding-school at Stratford in Essex, where he began
to learn Latin. From the age of eleven (1736) he went to sea with his father
and made several voyages with him before 1742. The elder Newton was drowned on
29 June 1750, when he was governor of Fort York under the Hudson's Bay Company.
Newton recounts the
story of his early life in his autobiography, An Authentic
Narrative of some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of —
(1764), in which he weaves together the themes of religious conversion and
romantic love with his seafaring career. Newton's adolescence was a time of
fluctuating passions. On a journey to Kent he visited George and Elizabeth
Catlett, friends of his late mother, and fell immediately in love with their
eldest daughter, Mary Catlett, known as Polly (1729–1790), whom he would later
marry. He prolonged his visit and thereby evaded his father's plans to send him
to a sugar estate in Jamaica to be set up in business. Returning at the close
of 1743 from a voyage to Venice, during which he began his decline into
‘apostasy’, he again evaded his father's plans by a protracted visit to the
Catlett family. Before another business opportunity could be found he was press-ganged
on board HMS Harwich in the tense days just before France formally
declared war on England (during the War of the Austrian Succession, 1739–48).
Newton soon attempted to desert but he was caught, put in irons, whipped, and
degraded from the office of midshipman to common seaman. As he watched the
English coastline recede, at the end of 1744, knowing his ship was bound for a
five-year voyage to the East Indies, he claimed it was only his love for Mary
that kept him from attempting to murder the captain or commit suicide.
The day before his ship was due to leave Madeira he contrived to be transferred
to a merchant vessel in the African slave trade. His behaviour during this
whole period involved ribald and blasphemous language; he also alludes vaguely to
sexual misconduct. After six months trading he determined to stay on the Guinea
coast of Africa to work in the onshore trade, hoping to make his fortune as a
slave factor on one of the Plantanes islands off the coast of Sierra Leone.
Instead during the next two years he suffered illness, starvation, exposure,
and ridicule as his master, a man named Clow, used him brutally. Newton always
marked this point as the nadir of his spiritual journey.
Newton's father had arranged for a fellow captain to look for him on his next
voyage to the Guinea coast, but meanwhile Newton had found a new master under
whom his prospects had so improved that when the captain located him he could
barely be persuaded to leave Africa. The ship, the Greyhound, returned
to England along the triangular Atlantic trade route, via Brazil and
Newfoundland, but encountered a severe north Atlantic storm in the winter of
1748. On 21 March, Newton was awakened in the middle of the night to find that
the ship was breaking apart and filling fast with water, and a man was already
swept overboard. Newton muttered his first prayer for mercy in many years. When
the ordeal was over he and most of the crew had survived the storm but were
left with very little food or water and a ship out of repair. Newton began to
read the Bible and other religious books. By the time
the ship at length reached Ireland he considered himself no longer an
‘infidel’. In his diary he would always thereafter remember 21 March as the
anniversary of his conversion. Indeed the very last entry he made in his diary,
as an eighty-year-old man, was a commemoration of this event.
In terms of his later evangelical theology, however, this was Newton's
awakening of conscience more than his true repentance. He was not yet a ‘true
believer’: that came six months later. On his return to England he was helped
by Joseph Manestay of Liverpool, a friend of his father's, to obtain a position
as first mate on board the Brownlow, a slave-trading ship bound for the
Guinea coast and the West Indies (1748–9). He hoped to return to England having
proved himself worthy to make a proposal of marriage to Mary Catlett. It was on
this voyage, in Africa, that Newton found himself unable to live up to his new
spiritual and moral obligations. Only a violent fever returned him to
seriousness about his soul. Delirious, he crept to an isolated spot on the
island where the ship had stopped and he cast himself before God in an act of
surrender, trusting himself wholly to the atonement of Christ. From this
moment, he claimed, he experienced a new sort of peace and power over sin. He
returned to England and married Mary on 12 February 1750.
After his marriage Newton made three voyages as master of slave-trading ships,
the Duke of Argyle (1750–51) and the African (1752–3 and 1753–4).
On his last voyage he met a fellow captain, Alexander Clunie, who acquainted
him with the progress of evangelical revival in England. Consequently when a
convulsive fit caused Newton to leave the maritime trade, later in 1754, he
frequented religious meetings in London and was soon drawn into the revival
associated with George Whitefield and with John and Charles Wesley. Through his
contact with dissenters and Calvinistic Methodism, and through his personal
study, he became a convinced Calvinist himself.
Newton has sometimes been accused of hypocrisy for holding strong religious
convictions at the same time as being active in the slave trade, praying above
deck while his human cargo was in abject misery below deck. He was not,
however, within the orbit of evangelicals such as John Wesley, who had advanced
views against slavery, until he had already left the sea. He was a typical
European of his time. Later in life he had deep regrets and repented of his
involvement in the traffic, supported William Wilberforce in his abolition
crusade, gave evidence to the privy council, and wrote a tract supporting
abolition, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade
(1787).
In August 1755 Newton
took up a civil service post as tide surveyor at Liverpool, where his duties
included inspecting import cargoes and checking for smuggled goods. The Seven
Years' War meant that traffic dropped off at the port so Newton used all his
spare time to pursue private studies in divinity. Having become proficient in
Latin while at sea he now taught himself Greek, and began to learn Hebrew and
Syriac. Soon he was one of the leading evangelical laymen in the region, widely
acquainted with ‘awakened clergy’ up and down the country. His acquaintance
included Whitefield and Wesley, as well as Yorkshire ministers of all
denominations, such as Henry Venn of Huddersfield, William Grimshaw of Haworth,
Henry Crooke of Hunslet, and John Edwards of Leeds. He was nicknamed locally
Young Whitefield and soon hosted large religious meetings in his own home. It
was natural that he began to have thoughts of entering the ministry himself, in
1757. Branded a Methodist he was unsuccessful, during the winter of 1758–9, in
several applications for orders in the Church of England. The secretary to the
archbishop of York wrote to Newton: ‘His Grace thinks it best for you to
continue in that station which Providence has placed you in’ (Dartmouth MSS, 3.173). It was in fact seven frustrating
years before he achieved ordination. Newton's churchmanship was far from
settled during these years. He contemplated at least three opportunities among
the Independents (serving a locum in Warwick for three months in 1760), one
among the Methodists, and one among the Presbyterians; he also took his application
for orders (in most cases at least twice) to the bishops of Chester and
Lincoln, to two archbishops of York, and to the archbishop of Canterbury. When
he finished writing his autobiography, in 1764, he was still hoping a bishop
would ordain him despite his many disappointments.
In the end that draft of his autobiography acted like a curriculum vitae, which
Thomas Haweis used to introduce Newton's case to the young evangelical nobleman
Lord Dartmouth. In April 1764 the earl provided a letter of introduction that
pacified the bishop of Chester, Edmund Keene, when Newton needed the bishop to
authenticate his letters testimonial. Lord Dartmouth also used his influence to
overcome the remaining obstacles with the archbishop of York, Hay Drummond, and
the bishop of Lincoln, John Green, in whose diocese the living of Olney lay—the
living which Lord Dartmouth intended for Newton. At long last Newton received
deacon's orders, on 29 April 1764, from the bishop of Lincoln; he was priested
several weeks later on 17 June. He could fairly be said to have ended his own
seven years' war. A little later that same year Newton's Authentic
Narrative appeared in print and it immediately established his place as
one of the leading evangelicals in the revival. It went through ten British and
eight American editions before the end of the century and was quickly
translated into several other languages.
In the event Newton became curate-in-charge rather than vicar of Olney in
Buckinghamshire, for Moses Browne (the vicar since 1754) chose not to resign
the living when he moved to take up the chaplaincy of Morden College,
Blackheath. Olney was a market town located in low, open country on the
north-west bank of the River Ouse. The parish included approximately 2000
inhabitants, chiefly artisans and tradesmen. It was well known for its
production of bone lace, a cottage industry which had been important locally
since religious refugees from France and the Low Countries had brought the
trade with them generations earlier. William Cowper described the inhabitants
of Olney in Newton's time as ‘the half-starved and ragged of the Earth’ (Letters and Prose, 2.91). Newton's stipend was only £60 a
year but the wealthy evangelical merchant John Thornton allowed him an
additional £200 a year for hospitality and to help the poor.
Indeed Newton was so successful in helping the poor that he raised the pique of
the local nonconformists. The Independent John Drake found his methods
‘Jesuitical’. There was an important puritan–nonconformist history in the
region but that constituency had been weakened by the earlier preaching of
Whitefield and by the ministry of Moses Browne. Drake claimed that Newton's
preaching and pastoral care gave the dissenting interest a ‘mortal wound’.
During his sixteen years at Olney, Newton established a variety of services and
society meetings, which became very popular; the church became so crowded that
a gallery was added. With Olney as his base Newton made forays into adjacent
parishes to speak at cottage prayer meetings. He also exchanged pulpits with
ministers further away, such as John Berridge of Everton,
or went on preaching tours, visiting evangelical clergy in Yorkshire or in
London. He maintained warm friendships with dissenters locally, such as the
Independent minister William Bull of Newport Pagnell. Though he would not
exchange pulpits with dissenters they would frequently visit each other's
homes, society meetings, and churches. While known for being tolerant of those
with whom he differed he rejected both the Arminianism and the perfectionism of
Wesley as well as the high Calvinism prevalent among some Baptists. He liked to
call himself ‘a sort of middle-man’.
By the end of Newton's ministry in Olney his encouragement of lay religiosity
and his ecumenical spirit caused him problems since several of the laymen in
his parish, such as the carpenter Thomas Raban (d. 1784), who had got a
taste for public speaking, challenged his authority and eventually seceded from
the church. After a serious fire in the town in 1777, Newton tried to restrain
the parish from behaving recklessly on the forthcoming Guy Fawkes night. He
claimed that the Baptists ‘in a body’ set themselves against him, and his own
house was later threatened by mob violence. From that point forward he had
thoughts of leaving Olney.
In 1767 the poet William
Cowper, having recently come to evangelical convictions, settled at Olney to be
near Newton. Cowper shared in the religious life of the parish and in 1771 he
and Newton began to collaborate formally on a project to publish a volume of
their collected hymns. It was to be a sort of mutual Festschrift, celebrating
their friendship and spiritual ideals. With the onset of Cowper's third bout of
serious depression in 1773, however, the whole project was cast into doubt, for
from that point Cowper wrote very few more hymns. In the end Newton decided,
nevertheless, to publish what they had. Many of the Olney
Hymns (1779) addressed specific situations in the parish but the
hymnbook became popular more widely. Newton's most famous contributions are
‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!’,
‘Approach, my soul, the mercy-seat’, and ‘Amazing grace’. The style and tone of
these hymns fit somewhere between the sobriety of old dissent in Isaac Watts's Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) and the exuberance of
Wesleyan Methodism in the standard Collection of Hymns, for
the Use of the People called Methodists (1780).
Soon after Cowper's death in 1800, a long and often bitter debate commenced
over the causes of his dementia and religious melancholy. Some blamed the
emotionalism of evangelicalism for aggravating his mental illness while others
laid the blame specifically on Calvinism. The belief that Newton's influence had
served to undermine Cowper's sanity was long perpetuated by Robert Southey's Life of Cowper (1835). The debate continued throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with very little fresh work in source
criticism and a great deal of parti pris. Newton's life has all too
often functioned as merely an episode in the poet's melancholy. Although there
were temporary breaches in their friendship Newton continued to treat Cowper
with tenderness, acting the part of a spiritual counsellor. He wrote to Cowper
in 1780:
I
know not that I ever saw you for a single day since your calamity came upon
you, in which I could not perceive as clear and satisfactory evidence, that the
grace of God was with you, as I could in your brighter and happier times. (Works, 6.162)
Indeed it was at Olney
that Newton emerged as a well-known spiritual writer, ‘the St. Francis de Sales
of the Evangelical movement, the great spiritual director of souls through the post’
(Balleine, 84). Although Newton published sermons and even a Review of Ecclesiastical History (1770)—which may have
suggested to Joseph Milner the idea of his History of the
Church of Christ—his favourite medium was the familiar letter; he came
virtually to think in quarto sheets folded once. In 1774 he collected and
published twenty-six of his letters on religious subjects, which had earlier
been published in the Gospel Magazine under the pen
name Omicron. His three letters on growth in grace (originally written to John
Thornton in 1772) have frequently been printed from the Omicron series as a
classical statement of evangelical spirituality. Newton's later collection of
more personal letters, Cardiphonia, or, The Utterance of the
Heart (1780), established his place as the gentle casuist of the
evangelical revival. Included in Cardiphonia is
Newton's correspondence with Thomas Scott, the biblical commentator whom Newton
helped to convert, after much debate, from Socinianism. Over 500 of Newton's
letters of spiritual advice were published during his lifetime or shortly
afterwards.
In January 1780 Newton
accepted the offer from John Thornton of the benefice of St Mary Woolnoth with
St Mary Woolchurch, Lombard Street, London. The living was worth just over £260
a year and the church itself had been built by Nicholas Hawksmoor, in 1727, in
a fashionable, baroque style. This was an important city living at a time when
William Romaine was the only other evangelical incumbent in London. Newton took
up residence at Hoxton Square, near Newington Road, in 1780, and then in 1786
at Coleman Street Buildings, just inside London Wall and close to his church.
Unlike his extensive parish ministry at Olney, St Mary Woolnoth was for Newton
chiefly a pulpit since the church looked out on a highly mobile, cosmopolitan
population with little parochial identity. In 1786, during the Handel
commemoration, he preached and published fifty sermons on the libretto of the Messiah. Throughout his ministry in London people came from
afar to hear him, and his congregations were large. However when he was awarded
the degree of DD by the University of New Jersey in 1792 he chose not to
recognize the honour, feeling that his behaviour in Africa as a young man disqualified
him from doing so.
Increasingly Newton gained the status of a patriarch within the emerging
evangelical party, and his home was regularly crowded with younger ministers
eager to glean wisdom from him. Richard Cecil and William Jay were present to
record much of Newton's casual table talk. William Wilberforce called on Newton
for advice during the crisis of his evangelical conversion in 1785; Claudius
Buchanan, who later served as chaplain in India, was converted by a sermon at
St Mary Woolnoth and later became Newton's curate; Newton visited Charles
Simeon at Cambridge and Hannah More at Cowslip Green. He was also involved in
the founding of the Eclectic Society, in 1783, which would become famous as the
matrix of the Church Missionary Society and of the Christian
Observer magazine. He continued to represent an affable, winsome
evangelicalism within the Church of England, and his Calvinism became, if
anything, more moderate as he grew older. He told William Jay that he used
Calvinism in his ministry like sugar in his tea: ‘I do not give it alone and
whole; but mixed and diluted.’ This is also a good example of his epigrammatic
wit and homely anecdotal style of communication, in and out of the pulpit. Yet
in the troubled 1790s he felt the need to defend his churchmanship in an Apologia (1784), where he made clear his reasons for
staying within the Church of England; it satisfied few of his dissenting
friends.
Newton's wife died in
1790 of cancer, and though he was able to preach her funeral sermon his sense
of loss was as deep as his love for her had been devoted. He published his Letters to a Wife in 1793, in which he poignantly traced
the lines of his grief in meditations recorded in his own interleaved copy.
Newton and his wife had no children of their own but they adopted two of their
orphan nieces on the Catlett side of the family. Elizabeth (Eliza) Cunningham,
daughter of James and Elizabeth Cunningham, came into their home in 1783 but
died while still a child, in 1785, and Newton wrote up an account of her
childhood faith. Elizabeth (Betsy or Eliza) Catlett was the daughter of George
Catlett and had been adopted earlier, in 1774. After his wife's death, Newton
depended upon Betsy. In 1801 she experienced a period of derangement and was confined
to Bethlem Hospital, much to Newton's distress. After her recovery she married
an optician named Smith; both remained at Coleman Street Buildings to take care
of Newton as his sight failed and his health deteriorated. He died peacefully
on 21 December 1807 and was buried by the side of his wife in St Mary Woolnoth
on 31 December; both bodies were re-interred at Olney in 1893.
The most famous image of Newton is an engraving by Joseph Collyer the younger,
after a portrait by John Russell. In addition to his published works Newton
left behind many manuscripts, comprising largely spiritual journals, sermons,
and letters. His archive is now divided among several repositories, the chief
of which are the Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney; Lambeth Palace Library,
London; and Firestone Library, Princeton University.
Interpretations of Newton's life have varied. Almost every generation since his
death has seen sympathetic or inspirational biographies and these have largely
affirmed Newton's emblematic sense that his life was a symbol of divine grace
to hardened sinners. Richard Cecil's Memoirs of the Rev.
John Newton (1808) was squarely in the tradition of Newton's own
autobiography; Josiah Bull's more carefully researched John
Newton of Olney and St. Mary Woolnoth (1868) was likewise
filiopietistic. These volumes are also the chief repositories of information
and anecdotes about Newton. In contrast to these interpretations Newton has
often appeared as an unsympathetic foil to William Cowper in biographies of the
poet. On a broader canvas historians, and particularly ecclesiastical
historians, have consistently portrayed Newton as a warm, genial, Christian man
and a devoted minister, one of a number of evangelical clergy who helped to
raise the spiritual tone of the Church of England in the eighteenth century.
D. Bruce Hindmarsh
D.
B. Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English evangelical tradition between the
conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce (1996) [incl. bibliography] · J.
Bull, John Newton of Olney and St. Mary Woolnoth (1868) · R. Cecil, Memoirs
of the Rev. John Newton (1808) · The works of the Rev John Newton, 6
vols. (1808) · B. Martin and M. Spurrell, eds., The journal of a slave
trader (John Newton), 1750–1754 (1962) · D. B. Hindmarsh, ‘The Olney
autobiographers: English conversion narrative in the mid-eighteenth century’, Journal
of Ecclesiastical History, 49 (1998), 61–84 · B. Martin, John Newton: a
biography (1950) · J. Pollock, Amazing grace: John Newton's story
(1981) · Autobiography of William Jay, ed. G. Redford and J. A. James
(1854) · The manuscripts of the earl of Dartmouth, 3 vols., HMC, 20 (1887–96), vol. 3 · The letters and prose
writings of William Cowper, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp, 5 vols. (1979–86) ·
G. R. Balleine, A history of the evangelical party in the Church of England,
new edn (1951) · R. Cecil, The life of John Newton, ed. M. Rouse (2000)
Cowper
and Newton Museum, Olney, Buckinghamshire, corresp., MSS, and notebooks · GL, corresp. and sermon notes · LPL,
corresp. and papers · NMM, log as master of a slaver
· Princeton University Library, Firestone Library, collection and other MSS ·
Princeton University Library, corresp. relating to history of Church of
England, MSS of hymns, and notebook · U. Birm. L.,
letters from wife and sermon notes | BL,
letters to W. Cowper, Egerton MS 3662 · Bodl. Oxf.,
corresp. with William Wilberforce · Bristol Baptist College, letters to John
Ryland jun. · CUL, corresp. with John Thornton · DWL, letters to David Jennings · Hist.
Soc. Penn., letters of Newton · LPL, corresp.
with William Bull · Lpool RO, letters to David Jennings
· McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, MS memoir of William Cowper · Ridley
Hall, Cambridge, letters to John Thornton · U. Birm. L.,
Church Missionary Society archive
engravings,
1781–8, NPG · J. Collyer the younger, line
engraving, 1807 (after J. Russell, 1788), BM, NPG [see illus.] · two engravings, in or before
1809, NPG · oils, Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney,
Buckinghamshire
see
will, 4 Feb 1808, PRO, PROB 11/1474
© Oxford
University Press 2004–5 |
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D. Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘Newton, John (1725–1807)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20062, accessed 19 Nov 2005] John Newton
(1725–1807): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/20062 |
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