Henry Philips

Henry Philips [Phillips] (1719-1789) was minister of the Baptist congregation at Brown Street, Salisbury, 1766-89, and a close friend of both the Attwater and Steele families of Broughton and Bodenahm. His was married five times, an unusual total even for the eighteenth century. Philips's first wife died at the end of January 1769 and was buried in the church burial grounds at Salisbury. He was remarried by 1773, but in 1774 the second Mrs Philips became ill. Jane Attwater writes to Mary Steele on 18 July 1774: “Poor Mrs Phillips is very poorly. Her disorder is much altered, her appetite is mended, her Stomach better, & she does not find so much of yt Inward weakness wch she used to complain of but her Legs & Stomach swells very much wch we imagine to be something of ye dropsy. Her blood must be extreemly poor – they say its common for people in a consumption thus to swell a little before they die but what may be ye result of this alteration is not to be determined by us finite creatures none but him yt ordereth all things can absolutely determine what the Event will be & with him all things are possible. That power that spoke us into being is Sufficient to raise from ye borders of ye grave – Mrs Philips’s spirits are much better I went to see her yesterday.  She very much affected me by her discourse by telling me she thought yt morning very much of our family particularly my dear & hond mother & was preposess’d with a notion she was Ill & would not live Long” (Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 3, p. 246).  After her death, Rev. Philips proposed to a Mrs. Evans of Yeovil in November 1775 (ibid., p. 271). and both Philips and his new wife are mentioned in a letter by William Steele to Mary Steele, dated 3 September 1776 (ibid., p. 272). This wife also died, resulting in his fourth marriage in December 1781 to a Miss Williams of London, who, according to the Salisbury & Winchester Journal on 10 December, possessed “a handsome fortune.”  After her death in 1784, he remarried one last time. A letter from his last wife to Jane Attwater, dated 17 August 1789 (just prior to the death of Revd Philips), can be found in Whelan, Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 8, pp. 160-61. See also G. A. Moore and R. J. Huckle, in The Story of Salisbury Baptist Church (Salisbury: Salisbury Baptist Church, 2000), pp. 19-20.