Author: Horne, William Wales
Biography:
HORNE, William Wales (1773-1826: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 6 Aug. 1773 at Gissing, Norfolk, one of at least six children of William Horne and his wife Mary (possibly Walpole). His father may have been a blacksmith. Nothing is known of his education. He began a long career in the Baptist church as an unordained minister at Tibenham and Shelfanger, near Diss, Norfolk, around 1793. He then moved to Yarmouth in 1797 and was ordained there. Around 1802 he moved to Leicester where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in Mar. 1804 for sedition for political remarks made at a wedding: “We may as well pay Buonaparte a million a year as to his present Majesty . . . [drinking a toast] . . . To our friends on the other side of the water.” He gave his version of events in The Defendant (1804), listed here. He moved to London around 1806 and spent some time in the Fleet for debt 1813-14. He preached first at the City Chapel, Grub Street, and later at Trinity Hall, Aldersgate Street, and the Hephzibah Chapel, Three Colt Street, Limehouse. When these last two chapels merged to form the Ebenezer Chapel in Commercial Road, he continued as minister until his death at his house in Bethnal Green Road on 27 July 1826. He was buried at Bunhill Fields on 2 Aug. He married Amy Adams on 19 May 1791 at Gissing, near Diss. They had a son, Wales, who in 1854 reissued his father’s most admired work, Biblical Criticisms (2 vols 1825-6). Another work, Consolations for Bereaved Parents (1807), was also well received. His sermons and other theological works are staunchly Calvinist and are no longer read but his editing of collections of hymns (to which he contributed his own rather ordinary work) are still of historic interest: The New Songs of Zion (1795), A Selection of Hymns for Public Worship (1802), Sion’s Harmony (1806), Sion’s Harmony of Praise (1823). (ancestry.co.uk 13 May 2022; findmypast.co.uk 13 May 2022; London Courier 27 Mar. 1804; Monthly Repository 21 [Sept. 1826], 565; A Companion to Gadsby’s Selection of Hymns, ed. John Gadsby [1851], 106; John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology [1892], 535; hymnary.org) AA
Other Names:
- W. W. Horne