Philip Furneaux 

Philip Furneaux (1726-83) was for many years a friend and correspondent of Anne Steelel He helped see her Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional through the press in 1759. Furneaux came from an Independent family in Devon, a family that was apparently known to the Wakefords. He studied in London at the Moorfields Academy under John Eames and David Jenings from 1743 to 1749, after which he became the assistant to Henry Read and the Presbyterian congregation at St. Thomas’s, Southwark. In 1753 he became minister to the Independent congregation at Clapham, Surrey, where he would remain until 1777, when he was struck by mental illness. He died in an insane asylum in Hoxton, London, in 1783. He may have been an orthodox Calvinist in his early years, but by the 1750s had most probably become an Arian, sitting ‘lightly on the Independent and Presbyterian divide,’ according to Alan Ruston. His Arianism may not have been known to the congregation at Broughton when he preached there in 1755, most likely by that time a friend and correspondent of Anne Steele. In any case, the Baptist meeting at Broughton, like many Particular Baptist congregations at that time, did not exclude Arians as members nor did they always discourage Arian ministers (see Anne Steele to William Steele, 16 May 1755, in Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. [London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011], vol. 2, pp. 284-85).

Furneaux, along with Joseph Wakeford, was instrumental in the London publication of Anne Steele's Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional in 1760. Joseph Wakeford took her manuscript poems to London in November 1757, with Furneaux ultimately seeing them through the publication process. Furneaux gained considerable recognition for his work on behalf of the rights of nonconformists and his opposition to the continuation of penal laws against nonconformists. Most of his ideas on this subject appeared in Letters to the Honorable Mr. Justice Blackstone (1770). Furneaux also supported the Feathers tavern petition for relief from subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles by the clergy of the established church, which led to a similar petition on behalf of dissenting clergy that same year, which provoked Furneaux’s Essay on Toleration (1773), his most famous work. Like the Steeles and Attwaters in the West Country, Furneaux’s Whig politics during the 1770s reflected an antagonism toward religious tests, a desire for parliamentary reform, and support for the American colonies against the policies of George III. See Alan Ruston, ‘Philip Furneaux’, ODNB; for his interactions with Anne Steele, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vols. 1 and 2, ed. Julia B. Griffin.