Eliza Gould, Mr. Gurney’s, Keene’s Row, Walworth, to Benjamin Flower, Newgate, care of Mr. Kirby, Old Bailey, Friday, [23 August 1799].

                                                                     Keene’s Row

Friday  morn’g  7  o clock—

My Kind Friend

   Rather than defer writing till the afternoon post will meerly drop a line now to tell you that I am much better this morning being just awake from a long night of refreshing sleep.

   In the course of a few days I hope to have the pleasure of thanking you personally for those kind and delicate attentions which you have lately rendered me & which I never can forget.  I do not indeed deceive you as to the state of my health—I really am much recovered.

   Miss Jenning[s] gave me but a poor account of you.  I hope soon to hear that you are better—adieu!  I must close as the post is going out—your affectionate Friend

                                             E   Gould

P.S. Go to Bed I pray you at eleven o clock—your last letter was dated at midnight—I am not yet out of Bed.

   Feltham has written so artfully to my father (the copy of which my mother has sent me) as to encline them to think that his motives are honorable & his affection sincere   I have never entered with them into detail from the first, my mother desires information on the subject which I have promised to give her as soon as my health & spirits are sufficiently recruited.

   Benjn Hawes means to pay you a visit.  Should Mr Dore call on you before you see me say something to him on your affair with Mr Hall. I believe he thinks you have been ill used in spite of what Mr Hall’s friends have asserted.  I can tell you why Boswell Beddome has not visited you—make my respects to Miss Jennings.

Text: Timothy Whelan, ed., Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008), pp. 62-63 (a more annotated text than that which appears on this site). 

During Flower’s first seven years in Cambridge, he shared a house in Bridge Street with Frances Jennings (1742-1824), a member of a prominent Dissenting family in Cambridgeshire. By the date of the above letter, Flower and his pastor at St. Andrew's Street in Cambridge, Robert Hall (1764-1831), had parted ways over what Flower considered to be Hall’s political “apostasy” after the publication of his important sermon, Modern Infidelity (1800) and attacks on Godwin and other political radicals Flower still held in high regard. Olinthus Gregory (1774-1841), Hall's biographer, would later write in his Memoir of Hall that Flower "had received in an ill spirit Mr. Hall's advice that he would repress the violent tone of his political disquisitions, and had, from other causes which need not now be developed, become much disposed to misinterpret [Hall’s] motives and depreciate his character.  He, therefore, managed to keep alive the controversy for some months, occasionally aiding, by his own remarks, those of his correspondents who opposed Mr. Hall, and as often casting illiberal insinuations upon the individual who had stepped forward in defence of the sermon and its author” (Gregory, Works, 6.63). John Greene, a member of St. Andrew’s and friend of both Flower and Hall, was closely involved in the “serious quarrel and separation” between the two men.  “Mr. Hall read to me all his letters,” Greene writes in his Reminiscences of Hall, “and I heard all the answers:  the last two letters, I think, filled fourteen pages post, on the part of Mr. Hall, and as many pages foolscap from Mr. Flower.  It became an affair of character; but Mr. Hall, in the opinion of his friends, completely triumphed; yet for a time it affected his tranquillity exceedingly.  After this circumstance he resumed the giving out of hymns himself" (Reminiscences of the Rev. Robert Hall, A. M., late of Bristol, and Sketches of his Sermons preached at Cambridge prior to 1806 [London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 2nd.  ed., 1834], 30). They would never be friends again, as the Flower Correspondence reveals.  For more on the Hawes family, see the entry for William Hawes in the Biographical Index.

Like the Gurneys, Boswell Beddome (d. 1816), son of Benjamin Beddome (1717-95), Baptist minister and hymn writer at Bourton-on-the-Water, was a leading member of the Baptist congregation at Maze Pond. Despite the controversy between Hall and Flower in 1799, Beddome remained close friends with both men. Beddome later appears in Flower’s Statement of Facts (lvi) as a corroborator of Flower’s accusations against the Revd John Clayton, minister of the Independent congregation at the Weigh House, in 1808.