Thomas Gwatkin

Thomas Gwatkin (1741–1800) was an English cleric and academic. He is known as a Tory and loyalist figure at the College of William & Mary in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.

He was the son of Thomas Gwatkin of Hackney, Middlesex. He matriculated in 1763, at Jesus College, Oxford, but left university without taking a degree. As a student Gwatkin was an opponent of views of Thomas Secker. In 1766 he was a nonconformist minister at Blackley, but then changed his views. In 1767 he was ordained priest in the Church of England by Richard Terrick, Bishop of London, and became a curate at Stebbing. At this period he was a friend and correspondent of Jeremy Bentham. In 1769 Terrick as chancellor of the College of William & Mary appointed Gwatkin a professor there.

At William and Mary, Gwatkin was in a group of clerics, including his associate Samuel Henley, who opposed the project to create Anglican bishops for American dioceses. The Virginia House of Burgesses supported their stand. A controversy followed that drew in William Willie and Thomas Bradbury Chandler, and others. Defending Henley against the burgess Robert Carter Nicholas, Gwatkin used the provocative pseudonym "Hoadleianus", alluding to Benjamin Hoadley whose opposition to the High Church clergy caused the Bangorian Controversy.

The College of William and Mary was a centre of loyalism in the years preceding the American Revolution of 1776, and Gwatkin and Henley remained in post as hardcore Tories, while American patriots attempted to undermine loyalists there. The politics made for unpleasant friction. The battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 brought matters to a head, and Gwatkin refused to preach for the disbanded burgesses on 1 June. He also refused, according to his own account, from Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson, to draw up "memorials in the defense of congress."

...
Wikipedia