Dissenting Origins

Abstract

In the closing weeks of 1760 at the time of the death of George II a young newly-trained bookseller started up in business at a shop, the ‘Golden Anchor’, on Fenchurch Street in the heart of the City of London. The same age as the old king’s successor, he immediately brought out a sixpenny sermon which lamented the end of ‘so eminently glorious’ a reign but welcomed the peaceful accession of George III, delivered on 2 November to a local Presbyterian congregation by its minister, John Palmer. After a brief but unproductive stint a few hundred yards west on Lombard Street during the spring, by August he had settled into premises just north of London Bridge on Fish Street Hill. Among the first works he published from this new address was another sermon, preached on the day of George III’s coronation (22 September 1761) by a Baptist minister, John Johnson, in Liverpool. Like Palmer’s, this stressed that kings were wholly subordinate to the command of God and hoped that those ‘blessings’ which Britain had enjoyed for ‘above seventy years past’, especially the ‘full liberty’ of assembling together for worship, would continue.¹ The cause of religious freedom was being trumpeted in the bookseller’s output even at the start, albeit humbly and respectfully by those who still in such matters had to crave a prince’s indulgence. It was the interests of this diverse group, above all, to which he was already most firmly and personally attached and which would go on to shape the entire future course of his activities.

[A]s long as there is a Protestant Dissenter in England, there will be a firm and intrepid friend to the Protestant Succession, to the liberty, and to the present happy constitution of this country.

Joseph Priestley, A View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (1769)