He was the grandfather of pioneer nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale and educationalist Barbara Bodichon, a founder of Girton College, Cambridge.

Brought up by parents who worshipped at an Independent chapel, he was educated at the dissenting academy at Daventry until 1772, where he began to come under the influence of Unitarians.

In 1796 he was again returned for Sudbury, but in 1802 accepted the invitation of radicals to stand for Norwich, although he was defeated in the election of 1806, which was fought on a local issue.

William Smith held strong dissenting Christian convictions – he was a Unitarian, and was thus prevented from attaining the Great Offices of State.

He nevertheless played a leading role in most of the great contemporary parliamentary issues, including the Dissenters' demands for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (for the first time since the 1730s).

[1] While he had been out of parliament he had given his support to Abolitionism by writing a pamphlet entitled A Letter to William Wilberforce (1807), in which he cogently and convincingly summarised the abolitionists' arguments for abolition.

In 1792 he arranged several meetings between William Pitt and Hugues-Bernard Maret, later Napoleon's foreign minister, in an attempt to avoid war.

[2] As an MP, Smith witnessed the assassination of prime minister Spencer Perceval who fell close by him.