William Richards (minister)

William Richards (1749 – 13 September 1818) was a Welsh Baptist minister; he spent much of his life in King's Lynn, in Norfolk, and wrote a history of the town.

[1] On the recommendation of Hugh Evans, he was invited to an unsettled congregation in Broad Street, Lynn, Norfolk, and agreed to go for a year, from 7 July 1776.

During this year he succeeded in healing divisions and organising his flock as a Baptist church; his settlement as regular pastor at Lynn dates from 1778.

[1] In 1811 his successor at Broad Street, Thomas Finch, was dismissed for anti-Calvinistic heresy, and Richards interested himself in the erection of a new building, Salem Chapel, opened (1811) on General Baptist principles, but he rarely preached there.

He died at Lynn on 13 September 1818 of angina pectoris, and was buried alongside his wife in the General Baptist Burial Ground at Wisbech.

The collections of Guybon Goddard (d. 1677), the brother-in-law of Sir William Dugdale, freely used by Richards's predecessor, Benjamin Mackerell in his History of King's Lynn (1738), and by Charles Parkin in his Topography of Freebridge Hundred and Half, had been lost before Richards began writing, and he was denied free access to municipal records, so that his materials for the mediæval history of the town were limited.

[1] In addition to pamphlets and single sermons, Richards also published[1][2] These three publications were in controversy with John Carter, independent minister of Mattishall, Norfolk).

A miscellaneous collection, much of it, including an account of Michael Servetus, had originally appeared in the Monthly Repository under the pseudonym "Gwilym Emlyn".