William Burdon

[3] He resigned his fellowship in 1806, on declining to take holy orders, and moved to London; it is thought he had suffered a crisis of faith.

[5] A wealthy man, Burdon owned coalmines at Hartford, near Morpeth, where he lived for part of each year.

His major works were:[1] In 1795 Burdon wrote letters in the Cambridge Intelligencer against Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, the absentee Cambridge Regius Professor of Divinity, claiming his deputy Thomas Kipling was incompetent.

These were then published in book form by Benjamin Flower as Three Letters Addressed to the Bishop of Llandaff, later in the same year.

[4] Burdon wrote pamphlets on political questions of the day, and translated in 1810, from the Spanish of Álvaro Flórez Estrada, A Constitution for the Spanish Nation, and an Introduction to the History of the Revolution in Spain, besides circulating an Examination of the Dispute between Spain and her Colonies.