Benjamin Flower (1755 – 17 February 1829) was an English radical journalist and political writer, and a vocal opponent of his country's involvement in the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars.
[5] Attending several schools, from 1766 Flower was at the dissenting academy of John Collett Ryland, an associate of his father, in Northampton.
[9] In 1793 Flower printed William Frend's Peace and Union Recommended in its second edition, and in 1794 The Fall of Robespierre, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.
[13] In 1799 Flower was summoned before the House of Lords, for remarks made in the Intelligencer against Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff, whose political conduct he had censured.
[9] On the other hand, E. P. Thompson identifies the Cambridge circle of Coleridge, Flower, and Frend, with George Dyer, John Prior Estlin and Gilbert Wakefield, as "radical Unitarians".
[18] Flower testified to his own background, stating that his father was a deacon at White's Row Meeting-house in Spitalfields, an Independent congregation.
[19] St Andrew's Street Baptist Church, Cambridge, the 'Stone-Yard Chapel', was noted for the reformers in its congregation;[20] Flower edited the works of Robert Robinson, the pastor there.
It was almost the only provincial newspaper in the country which denounced the war with France, and advocated the removal of the grievances of the English Dissenters on the broad grounds of religious liberty.
His other publications were the Life of Robinson accompanying the works, a preface to his brother Richard's Letters from Illinois, and some pamphlets on family affairs.