Few Christian women have exerted such an influence on their day and generation as Lady Huntingdon. As we trace the progress of the great evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, she stands out as a central figure. She was a kind of pivot around which many of those activities moved. Nearly all the men whom God used in an outstanding way at that period had a link with her. She encouraged the preachers, entertained them, supported them with her means where necessary, built chapels for them to preach in, and gathered people in to listen to them. Her great aim in life was the furtherance of the gospel. Her time and her fortune were devoted to the work, and as her life stretched from the first to the last decade of the century, she saw the birth of the movement and lived to see it reach its climax at the end of the century. Her life, touching at so many points the activities of the principal instruments of the revival, is almost a chronicle of the movement.
Lady Huntingdon was born in 1707 of a noble family and early showed pious inclinations. When twenty-one, she married the ninth Earl of Huntingdon. Their union was happy from first to last. She strove to lead a good life and by prayers and alms to secure the favor of God. Yet, in spite of an exemplary life, she was a stranger to true Christian joy. Like many others, she sought to attain it by self-denial and good works. Having been brought face-to-face with death by a serious illness, she realized she was not fit to meet God. Her sister-in-law had already been converted through the preaching of Benjamin Ingham. She told the Countess that since she had known and believed in the Lord Jesus Christ for life and salvation, she had been “as happy as an angel.” In her despair at the futility of her own efforts to arrive at peace with God, Lady Huntingdon cast herself wholly upon Christ and she too received peace and joy through faith in Him.
When, a little later, John and Charles Wesley came to the neighborhood preaching, she sent a message assuring them she was of the same mind and encouraging them in the work. Thenceforward she devoted herself to the Lord. Her husband, while not sharing her faith, loved and respected her too much to interfere.
Naturally she incurred a good deal of ridicule among the brilliant and aristocratic circle in which she was well-known. One day the Prince of Wales, on inquiring where she was, was told, “I suppose praying with her beggars.” The lady who gave this answer was later converted herself. With her husband, Lady Huntingdon often attended the meetings of the society in Fetter Lane and the preaching of Whitefield. She also persuaded many of the nobility to listen to his preaching. Even men like Lord Chesterfield and Lord Bolingbroke were induced to go and hear. Her drawing rooms in town were crowded with the elite of English society to whom she was not ashamed to make known her faith in Christ.
In the early days of the movement there was in the Fetter Lane society, which she attended with her husband, a young man of some ability named Maxfield, whom Wesley had left to care for the society in his absence. Lady Huntingdon exhorted Maxfield to expound the Scriptures, and under her persuasion, he began to preach. Wesley, to whom the idea of an unordained man preaching seemed quite wrong, was very displeased. He conveyed his alarm to his mother, who replied, “Take care; he is as surely called to preach as you are.” Wesley accepted the admonition and felt it was of the Lord. Lay preaching was thus encouraged and a door opened which resulted in a vast increase of laborers entering the harvest field through the spiritual intuition of two women, Lady Huntingdon and Wesley’s mother.
At her mansion at Donnington Park, the Countess had a servant, David Taylor, who, having been converted, began to witness to his fellow-servants and neighbors. Lady Huntingdon sent him into the villages and hamlets around to preach the gospel. Blessing attending his efforts, she encouraged him to visit the more distant parts of Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. Many were converted and some became themselves preachers of the gospel.
At her Leicestershire home every evangelical clergyman found welcome and encouragement, nor did she confine her interest to those within the Anglican pale. Well-known Dissenters such as Watts and Doddridge were among her friends.
She was bereaved of two sons by smallpox, which was a terrible blow to her, and in 1746 her husband died. Her grief was very great, yet she devoted herself after this more than ever to the Lord’s work.
Taking advantage of her legal right as a peeress, she appointed chaplains, who were thereby free to itinerate as preachers wherever there was an open door. Whitefield was the first of these.
Her devotion to the cause of the gospel led her to become the patroness of all the evangelical preachers of the day. She used her influence at court and with persons in high places to further and protect the gospel cause. We find her helping and stimulating and corresponding not only with Whitefield and Wesley, but with others of the growing band of devout men whom God was using so effectively, such as Ingham, Grimshaw, Berridge, Romaine, Venn, Fletcher of Madeley and Rowland Hill.
Her generosity was unbounded, and her purse ever open to help the cause. She gave away, during her lifetime, about £100,000, a figure which would have a purchasing value, perhaps, of half a million today. Yet she herself lived in comparative austerity.
Owing to the bitter opposition of the clergy, the pulpits of the Church of England were nearly all closed to evangelical preachers. The generality of the clergy neither taught the truth themselves nor allowed others to do it. Companies of converts in many places had nowhere to meet and get spiritual food. Lady Huntingdon decided to do what she could to meet this dire need.
The preaching of Whitefield, Venn, Romaine and Fletcher had, under her auspices, been greatly blessed in Brighton, and a little company had been formed which met for prayer, praise and the reading of the Scriptures. She therefore built a chapel in the town, to meet the expense of which she sold her jewels. This was in 1761. She helped to build many other chapels with the same object all over the country, as a result of which many thousands heard the gospel and received Christian ministry. These chapels were supplied by a rota of preachers, thus maintaining a freshness and power lacking in a fixed ministry.
The opposition of the ecclesiastical authorities compelled the Countess to seek the protection of the Toleration Act. Those who met in these chapels and those who ministered to them were thus forced out of the Church of England and became known as Lady Huntingdon’s Connection.
In 1768 she opened a college at Trevecca in Wales for the training of young men who felt they had a call to preach the gospel. The neighborhood of Trevecca had been the scene of a remarkable revival some time previously in which Griffiths Jones was greatly used of God. There the Countess made her home for a number of years. As patron of the college and trustee of the chapels which were spread about the country, she became a kind of director of operations, and she was criticized for taking a place not normally occupied by a woman, while the ministers who served were contemned for their submission to her directions. Doubtless they viewed it differently, and it is rather to their credit they were willing to work as yokefellows with the noble lady who had given her all in the cause of the gospel. When, in the days of the judges in Israel, leaders were wanting, God raised up Deborah, a mother in Israel, to meet the need, and if, at a time when faithless shepherds were neglecting God’s flock, a woman threw her life, her wealth and all she had to further the kingdom of God and if God was pleased to support and prosper what she did, who shall question His appointments? On one occasion, a bishop complained of her activities to George III. He defended her warmly and said, “I wish there were a Lady Huntingdon in every diocese.”
At one time an attempt was made to inveigle her on to the Continent by pretending there was an opening for the gospel in Belgium. Providentially, she missed the boat which was to take her across. Later a letter arrived with the information that a plot had been hatched to kidnap her and put an end to her life.
During a stay in Brighton in 1757, she visited a poor woman lying in bed in a wretched hovel and, after ministering to her needs, spoke to her of the Saviour. Neighbors overheard the conversation and begged her to speak to them. For a time she repeatedly visited that wretched little home, read the Scriptures and prayed, and spoke to a little company of poor women who gathered to hear her.
Her unselfishness is illustrated by her care of the wife of Charles Wesley when she was dangerously ill with smallpox. For three weeks she attended her, regardless of the great risk to herself from a disease which she had every reason to dread, for it had carried off two of her children.
Lady Huntingdon was the last survivor of that remarkable band of evangelicals who “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:66And when they found them not, they drew Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city, crying, These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also; (Acts 17:6)) in the eighteenth century and, through God’s grace, changed the face of England. She was left to see the rich fruit of the revival spreading over the land. She died triumphantly on June 17, 1791, in her house adjoining the Spa Fields’ Chapel in London, saying, “I shall go to my Father tonight.”