Humphrey Edwin

Edwin was a nonconformist; James II was anxious to conciliate the dissenters, and on 11 October 1687 he was sworn in as alderman of Tower ward, on the direct appointment of the king, in the place of Sir John Chapman, discharged by the royal mandate.

Besides being an officer of the Honourable Artillery Company, he became captain of the regiment of horse volunteers, a corps of four hundred citizens, established in July 1689 and maintained at their own expense, with the king as their colonel and the Earl of Monmouth as lieutenant-colonel.

He was also colonel of a regiment of the trained bands; but in March 1690, on the churchmen becoming a majority in the court of lieutenancy, Edwin and five other aldermen who held nonconformist opinions, were turned out, and five others belonging to the church party chosen in their places.

In a contemporary pamphlet the prosecution is described as 'so unjust that the L. C. J. Holt, seeing it proceeded from the depth of malice, would not suffer Sir Humphry to swear all his witnesses, there being no need of any further proofs at his trial'.

In September 1697 Samuel, the eldest son of Sir Humphrey, was married to Lady Catherine Montague, daughter of the Earl of Manchester, and on the 30th of the same month Edwin was elected Lord Mayor of London, the customary mayoralty pageant being omitted, owing perhaps to his religious principles.

Shortly after his accession to office (6 November 1697) William III, who returned home after the treaty of Ryswick, made a magnificent public entry into London.

A young clergyman named Edward Oliver, preaching before Edwin in St. Paul's Cathedral towards the close of his mayoralty (22 October 1698), declaimed against the nonconformist mode of worship.

The sermon soon appeared in print and was answered by a pamphlet, of which two editions were published, entitled 'A Rowland for an Oliver, or a Sharp Rebuke for a Saucy Levite.... By a Lover of Unity.'

William Penkethman, in his comedy of Love without Interest, 1699, made the following allusion: 'If you'll compound for a catch, I'll sing you one of my Lord Mayor's going to Pin-makers Hall to hear a sniveling non-conseparatist divine divide and subdivide into the two and thirty points of the compass.'

Daniel Defoe wrote a pamphlet bearing the title 'An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters in Cases of Preferment; with a Preface to the Lord Mayor, occasioned by his carrying the Sword to a Conventicle,' London, 1697.

In the longer run, William Nicholls attacked nonconformism in his Apparatus for the Defensio Ecclesiae Anglicanae, and was answered by James Peirce (Vindication of the Dissenters, pt.

Of his two sisters, Mary, the younger, became the wife of Sir Edward Dering, who in 1701 wrote a book bewailing her death entitled 'The most excellent Maria, in a brief character of her incomparable virtues and goodness.'