Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Watkins, Morgan

by Charlotte Fell Smith

WATKINS, MORGAN (fl. 1653–1670), quaker, of Herefordshire, signed a ‘Letter from the People of Herefordshire to the Lord General’ on 7 May 1653 (Nickolls, Original Letters and Papers of State, p. 92), in which was protested ‘we attend you with our persons, petitions, purses, lives, and all that is deere to us.’ In 1660 he was a prisoner in St. Albans gaol. By July 1663 he was in London preaching at the quakers' meeting in Pall Mall and elsewhere. On 12 March 1665 he was sent to Newgate from the Bull and Mouth meeting, St. Martin's-le-Grand. Two other imprisonments followed during the year; the last, of about three months' duration, was on a warrant of 9 Aug. from the Duke of Albemarle for being, with nine others, at an ‘unlawful meeting’ at St. John's, Clerkenwell. His letters to Mary Penington vividly describe the visitation of the plague both inside prisons and out. He afterwards appears to have preached and been imprisoned in Westmoreland and Buckinghamshire, and to have returned to Herefordshire by 1670, when cattle and goods were distrained from his farm.

Watkins was the author of:

1. ‘The Perfect Life of the Son of God Vindicated,’ London, 1659, 4to.
2. ‘The Day manifesting the Night and the Deeds of Darkness reproved by the Light,’ London, 1660, 4to.
3. ‘Swearing denyed in the New Covenant,’ London, n.d., 4to (the preface is dated from St. Albans gaol, 7 Feb. 1660–1).
4. ‘The Children of Abraham's Faith who are Blessed, being found in Abraham's Practise of Burying their Dead in their own purchased Burying Places,’ London, 1663, 4to.
5. ‘A Lamentation over England,’ 1664, 4to.
6. ‘The Things that are Cæsar's rendered unto Cæsar,’ 1666, 4to.
7. ‘The Marks of the True Church’ [1675], 4to.

[Besse's Sufferings, i. 78, 258, ii. 18; Smith's Cat. ii. 862; Barclay's Letters of Early Friends, pp. 120, 122, 148, 154; Brit. Mus. Cat. s.v. ‘Watkins’ and ‘W., M.;’ Penington Manuscripts at Devonshire House.]

C. F. S.