Author: Way, Lewis
Biography:
WAY, Lewis (1772-1840: ODNB)
He was born on 11 Feb. 1772 at Sackville Street, Piccadilly, Westminster, London, and was baptised on 29 Feb. at St. James’s, Piccadilly, the second son of Benjamin Way (1740-1808) of Denham Park, near Uxbridge, and Elizabeth Anne Cooke (1746-1825), who had married in 1767. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford (matric. 1790) but migrated to Merton College (BA 1794, MA 1796, Fellow 1795-1803). He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1788 and called to the bar in 1797. He was early attracted to evangelicalism and the Clapham House Sect. In 1801 an elderly stranger, fellow lawyer, and namesake, John Way (1732-1804), sometime Chief Clerk to the King’s Bench, offered him over £20,000 if he would marry a distant relation. Despite having no fortune, Lewis Way declined and declared his love for Mary Drewe (1780-1848), whom he married on 31 Dec. 1801 at St. Mary, Totnes, Devon. (They had six children, including the noted antiquary Albert Way [1805-74].) Impressed by his moral character, John Way gave him £1000 to facilitate the marriage and bequeathed a further £300,000 at his death in 1804. With that money Way acquired a large estate at Stansted Park, Sussex, and used the rest of the money to promote evangelical causes, primarily the conversion of the Jews prior to the Second Coming. He rescued the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (LSPCJ) from bankruptcy in 1815. Jewish convert missionaries were trained on his estate with mixed success; some went abroad, others stole his silver. He was ordained deacon (1816) and priest (1817) and in 1817-18 travelled extensively in northern Europe visiting many Jewish communities. In Russia he had four audiences with Tsar Alexander I. In 1823 he travelled to the Levant and Holy Land. He held increasingly apocalyptic and millenarian views, expressed in Millenium (1822), Thoughts on the Scriptural Expectations of the Christian Church (1823), and the long poem Palingenesia (1826). In 1829 his health deteriorated and he returned to England. On 28 Nov. 1833 he was placed in the Barford Mental Asylum where he would remain until his death on 23 Jan. 1840, aged 67. (ODNB 19 Sept. 2023; Lewis, 2: 1164; Geoffrey Henderson, Lewis Way: A Biography [2014]; OJ 23 Jan. 1802; GM June 1840, 663) AA