Maria De Fleury

Maria De Fleury (fl. 1773–1791) was a London Baptist poet, hymnist and polemicist descended from French Huguenots. Little is known of her private life. The placing of her birth at 1754 and her death at 1794 are highly uncertain.

De Fleury is thought to have been a schoolteacher before moving to 2 City Mews, White Cross Street, Islington, and then to nearby 31 Jewin Street, Cripplegate, in the City of London. However, there are signs in her writings that she felt defensive about her lack of formal education. Her earliest dated poem is an Epithalamium, written to mark her brother's wedding on 25 November 1773.

As a member of the strongly anti-Catholic Protestant Association, De Fleury actively defended Lord George Gordon, who had instigated it and was accused by Charles Wesley and others of inciting the riots over the restoration of civil rights to Catholics. Her pamphlet vindicating Gordon, entitled Unrighteous Abuse Detected and Chastised, appeared in 1781, as did her Poems, Occasioned by the Confinement and Acquittal of the Right Honourable Lord George Gordon, President of the Protestant Association. The pamphlet "depicts her enemies baying against Truth like village curs at the moon."

Despite being a Baptist, Fleury belonged to the Independent Meeting House of John Towers, originally a breakaway from a Presbyterian congregation. The meeting house was moved from Bartholomew Close to new premises in Jewin Street in 1784. Fleury was also on close terms with the Baptist minister and religious writer John Ryland. She went on to dedicate to Gordon a masque-like work in blank verse entitled Henry, or the The Trump of Grace (1782), in which Henry's guardian angels, Religion and Grace, stave off the attacks of Syren. This went into three editions.

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