The Coalheaver: William Huntingdon S.S.

Among the portraits of Christian leaders of past times in the Evangelical Library, one constantly caught my eye. It showed a grim-faced, rough looking man, and somehow I knew it would not have been wise to cross him.

My curiosity about this man grew, and I found his biography on the Library shelves. After just a few pages I realised I had found one of the most remarkable Christian biographies I had ever read. This all but forgotten man, William Huntingdon, was in his time one of the most influential and best-known preachers in England. More than that, his ministry had begun in the village of Ewell, near Epsom in Surrey, where I myself live.

Inauspicious start

Few Christian leaders can have had a less auspicious beginning. William Huntingdon was born William Hunt in 1745 at Cranbrook, Kent. His mother was Elizabeth, wife of agricultural labourer William Hunt, but his father was Barnabas Russell, William Hunt’s employer who had forced himself upon Elizabeth.

After minimal education, William drifted from one lowly job to another. He got a girl, Susan Fever, pregnant, and she bore his child in 1766. Threatened with a maintenance order, William offered to marry Susan, but her parents refused him. William absconded towards London, outside the magistrate’s reach, and began to call himself ‘Huntingdon’ to hide his identity.

Saved sinner

In 1769, under his new name of Huntingdon, William married Mary Short, a pious young woman. They settled in Mortlake, Surrey, but in such poverty that their first child froze to death for lack of winter fuel. God used bereavement to awaken William spiritually. Seeking spiritual peace, he heard preacher after preacher, but found no rest. Then in December 1773, while up a ladder pruning a pear tree in Sunbury, God appeared to him in a brilliant light. He heard a voice: ‘Lay by your forms of prayer and go pray to Jesus Christ; do you not see how pitifully he speaks to sinners’.¹ William did just that — and gained the letters after his name that he used ever after: ‘S.S.’ Saved Sinner!

In 1774 William found work as a gardener to a gunpowder manufacturer in Ewell and moved there with his family. In Ewell he met a man who, moved by William’s testimony of God’s dealings with him, asked him to expound the Bible and pray with his family. Soon William was leading a small congregation in Ewell and preaching in nearby chapels. But persecution started too. William’s fellow workers told his employer that he was telling them not to work on Sundays, and William lost his job. In 1775 he found work in nearby Thames Ditton as a labourer to a coal merchant, and acquired his other adopted title: ‘The Coalheaver’.

Continuing persecution

At Thames Ditton, William’s preaching ministry expanded. In 1776 he was ordained into the oversight of a church in Woking. But persecution continued. William was attacked and abused, stones were thrown at him, mobs stormed his meetings, he was burned in effigy, to all of which the magistrates turned a blind eye. His attackers discovered his true identity and the sordid story of Susan Fever, and made it all known. Through hardship William learned to rely upon his God. Facing the dilemma of whether to preach and starve or work and eat, he knew God had called him to preach and he could do no other.

Hanging on his lips

In 1782 a friend brought William to the attention of Margaret Chapel in Cavendish Square, London, and he was asked to preach there. ‘Uncouth and hungry, Huntingdon preached … His earnestness, the even terrible intensity of his convictions, his homely figures drawn from byre and sheep walk, his forceful vocabulary redolent of the Kentish weald, his occasional poetic outburst … made every hearer hang on his lips’.² Appreciative friends decided William needed a chapel of his own, set about raising the money and getting it built, though William ‘trembled at the very thought of such a tremendous undertaking’.³

Why so popular?

The result, Providence Chapel, opened in 1783 in Titchfield Street, London, near modern day Grays Inn Road, seated over 1,000 and was soon filled. It became the seat of William’s preaching ministry for nearly 30 years, during which he became, according to many, by far the most famous preacher of his age.

Why was he so popular? Undoubtedly part of his appeal was that the mere coalheaver turned preacher was a celebrity like a converted pop star would be today. The simple fact is that God powerfully blessed William’s biblical preaching. He has been described as the ‘winnower’⁴ of his age, dividing wheat from chaff. In the years following the 18th-century revival, churches were well filled but, ‘their religion is superficial…. for want of more complete and clear acquaintance with the truth’.⁵ Truth, plainly taught, is what William provided.

His biographer Ella writes: ‘Huntingdon was really the only man of national influence, with a congregation of over 2,000 to support him, and an urge to reform, who was given the courage and ability to stand out against the lax faith of evangelical churches and show them a better and more New Testament way’.⁶

William Huntingdon ministered in writing too. His best remembered work remains The Bank of Faith (1785), recounting his life up to the building of Providence Chapel. In places with pathos, in places with humour, The Bank of Faith details his experiences of God’s providences. In its simple, sincere language the reader feels the burden of William’s seemingly never-ending poverty, debt and anguish, ‘weeping and praying’⁷ over his family’s needs. Never complaining, he tells how again and again as he prayed, God, whose bank never fails, met his needs.

Generous reputation

His position as minister of Providence Chapel finally made him financially comfortable. Though now criticised for his wealth, he gained a reputation for generosity: ‘Magnificent in his liberality, he cast away his wealth as fast as it came … he lived as simply as the poorest of his hearers’.8 Trouble still haunted him.

He was hauled into political controversies and into conflict with fellow evangelicals, accused of being a ‘vile, filthy, stinking Antinomian’9 (teaching that God’s Law does not apply to the saved), as Rowland Hill called him. This unfair accusation arose from William’s evangelical stress on pardon from the law, but has lingered to this day.

Deepest pain

Probably William’s deepest pain was over his wife Mary. Tough William Huntingdon could well handle the limelight of celebrity status, but his wife could not. An ordinary country girl, she could not cope with being the wife of the most famous minister in England. She stagnated mentally and spiritually such that William doubted her salvation. She succumbed to drink and over eating, becoming immensely obese. She died in 1806.

Then William did the most controversial thing he could have done. In 1808, aged 63, he married a titled woman in her 40s, Lady Elizabeth Sanderson, widow of a former Lord Mayor of London. The press outdid itself with malice. Cartoons portrayed imps filling a coal sack with Lady Sanderson’s supposed wealth (in fact William was by then financially better off than Lady Sanderson). Whether it was a happy marriage is difficult to tell. There were tensions between them over William’s poor management of money. Lady Sanderson now wanted every penny accounted for and William felt the pinch.

‘Why is his chariot so long?’

William Huntingdon died in July 1813, aged 68, and troubled to the end. When it became clear that his death was approaching, Lady Sanderson moved him to Tunbridge Wells, away from his friends and family. She pressurised him, even on his deathbed, to make a new will bequeathing Providence Chapel to her. He refused to sign. ‘Why is his chariot so long in coming?’9 were weary William Huntingdon’s all but last words. William Huntingdon lies under a simple monument in the courtyard of Jireh Chapel in Lewes, engraved: ‘Here lies the Coalheaver: beloved of God; but abhorred of men … For England and its Metropolis shall know that there hath been a prophet among them.’

Lessons

What kind of a man was he? A few phrases from his biographers¹⁰ say much. ‘Few men have proved themselves abler or more courageous disputants … but … he marred almost everything of his that falls under that category by a hectoring and rancorous manner’, ‘his countenance was grave, but he was playful and humorous’, ‘he had a hasty temper, with which to do him justice he was constantly wrestling’. Like all men, he had his faults. Nevertheless, ‘holiness was his perpetual aim … the mark of sincerity’.

What can we learn from William Huntingdon? First, low birth, early mistakes, lack of education and a rough-hewn personality need be no impediment in Christ’s service. Second, as Christians we have no guarantee of an easy life. We are called to prove our faith in trials. Thirdly, we must be mindful of the pressures ‘Christian work’ can put on our families. Finally, William’s account of God’s remarkable providences must surely encourage our trust in his God, who is ours too.

Footnotes

1,2,8,9,10 The Life of William Huntingdon, Thomas Wright (1909), the first full biography of Huntingdon
4,5,6 Huntingdon, Pastor of Providence, George. M. Ella, Evangelical Press (1994)
3,7 The Bank Of Faith, William Huntingdon S.S. (1938 edn.)