Joseph Hughes, Northampton, to John Sutcliff, Olney, 26 February 1798.

Dear Sir

  I feel myself obliged by your invitation but shall probably be in Town before you receive this note – & cannot therefore, at the present season, enjoy the pleasure of an Olney visit – I beg to be respectfully remembered to Mr Horne – & tho unknown to Mrs Sutcliffe – I remain—

                                    yours with esteem

                                                       J Hughes

Northampton

Feb: 26—1798

Text: Timothy Whelan, Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1845 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2009), p. 88-89 (annotated version); also Eng. MS. 370, fol. 67, John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Joseph Hughes (1769-1833) had just left his position as classical tutor at Bristol Baptist Academy and would soon become the Baptist minister at Battersea; within a few years he would become one of the founders and secretaries of the Religious Tract Society (1799) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804). Melville Horne (1761-1841) was an Anglican clergyman who played a prominent role in the beginnings of the missionary movement in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.