Author: Towers, John
Biography:
TOWERS, John (1747-1804: ancestry.co.uk)
He is said to have been born in Southwark but he was baptised on 31 Aug. 1747 at the Poultry Chapel (Independent), Camomile Street, City of London, the son of Joseph Towers, secondhand bookseller, and his wife Sarah Cousins, both from Newington Butts, south London, who had married at the Mint in a clandestine marriage on 24 Jan. 1736. He went to sea but after two voyages was apprenticed to a packer in Turnwheel Lane, Cannon Street, City of London. He taught himself Greek and Hebrew and began to preach as an independent minister. He was chosen by a congregation which had left Jewin Street Independent to be their minister at the Presbyterian meeting-house in Bartholomew Close, West Smithfield, where he was ordained in 1769. He was the younger brother of the dissenting minister and political pamphleteer Joseph Towers (1737-99). They ran a bookshop at Fore Street, Barbican, in addition to being ministers. (His birth registration of 1747 at Dr. Williams’ Library contains a later annotation describing it as a “Pamphlet-shop.”) In 1784 he became minister of the Barbican Chapel at Cripplegate. Maria de Fleury (q.v.) was a member of his congregation and he wrote a commendatory preface to her Divine Poems (1791). A staunch Calvinist, he acquired a reputation as a defender of the 1688 settlement and was a fierce opponent of Catholicism, as in his sermon, The Church of Rome proved to be the Mother of Harlots (1799). In the 1790s he “was of great service to the Government when the wild, confused publications of Paine were distributed, in small tracts, among the lower classes. He attacked them with great success” (GM, 697). His brother’s political pamphlets are well known but his remain unidentified. He married Elizabeth Minn on 25 Feb. 1771 at St. Alban Wood Street, London. They had two children. After her death in 1781, he married Elizabeth Reynolds on 10 Oct. 1782 at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street. They went on to have four children. He died on 9 Jul. 1804 and was buried in Bunhill Fields. (ancestry.co.uk 7 Jul. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 7 Jul. 2022; “Towers, Joseph” [includes John], ODNB 7 Jul. 2022; GM Oct. 1782, 502, and Jul. 1804, 697; J. A. Jones, Bunhill Memorials [1849]; Gayle Trusdel Pendleton, “Towards a Bibliography of the Reflections and The Rights of Man Controversy,” BRH 85 [1982], 65-103) AA