St Mary Woolnoth — Newton & the abolitionist church
John Newton — former slave-ship captain turned abolitionist and author of ‘Amazing Grace’ — was rector here from 1780 to 1807, publishing his ‘Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade’ (1788) and mentoring William Wilberforce. St Mary Woolnoth, a Nicholas Hawksmoor church at the junction of Lombard Street and King William Street, became one of the unlikeliest pulpits of the British abolitionist movement. John Newton (1725–1807) — a former captain of slave-trading voyages whose conversion produced the hymn Amazing Grace (1779) — was rector here from 1780 until his death.
In 1788 Newton published Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, an unsparing first-hand account of the trade’s atrocities written from this parish; it was distributed to every Member of Parliament. In 1785–86 he met privately with William Wilberforce, then a young MP wrestling with whether to leave politics; Newton’s counsel kept Wilberforce in Parliament and pointed him at slavery.
Newton and his wife Mary were originally buried in the crypt; their bodies were reinterred at Olney in 1893 when the Bank Underground station was built beneath the church. The church remains a working parish and a quiet anchor of the City walk.
People
Themes
Place
Sources
- Lombard Churches — ‘John Newton and Amazing Grace’ — https://www.lombardchurches.org/amazing-grace
- Lombard Churches — ‘The abolitionist movement’ — https://www.lombardchurches.org/abolitionist-movement
- Wikipedia — St Mary Woolnoth — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary_Woolnoth
- Cecil, Richard. Memoirs of the Rev. John Newton, late rector of the United Parishes of St. Mary Woolnoth, and St. Mary Woolchurch Haw. Lombard Street. London, 1808. — https://archive.org/details/memoirsofrevjohn00ceci