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William Cowper 1731-1800

William Cowper 1731-1800 April 2000, sees the two hundredth anniversary of the death of the poet and hymn writer, William Cowper, who had a small but significant connection with our church.

Cowper was a sensitive character and suffered bouts of depression and even madness. As his melancholy increased, in 1763 his brother John, on whom he was dependent, placed him into the care of Dr Nathaniel Cotton of St Albans. Dr Cotton ran a private hospital in his house known as the Collegium Insonorum which stood on the corner of what is now College Street and Lower Dagnall Street. Dr Cotton was a great friend of Dr Samuel Clark, the minister of the chapel in Dagnall Lane where our predecessors met before our present building was erected. Another friend of Dr Cotton was the hymn writer, Philip Doddridge, also a member of the Dagnall Lane Chapel.

William Cowper stayed in St Albans for about eighteen months. His stay must have been profitable, for his biographer William Hayley writes of his time with Dr Cotton, "His ideas of religion were changed from the gloom of terror and despair to the lustre of comfort and delight. This juster and happier view of evangelical truth is said to have arisen in his mind while he was reading Romans chapter 3." Hutchinson's encyclopaedia puts it plainly: "He ... sufffered a mental breakdown in 1763 and entered an asylum where he underwent an evangelical conversion."

In 1891 an elderly member of Spicer Street told the minister, William Urwick, that "...his mother knew Dr Cotton and the poet Cowper. Cowper used to walk out by day alone, but at night with a keeper who led the way with a lamp.This gave Cowper the thought for the hymn 'O for a closer walk with God'." The first verse gives the connection:

O for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame,
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb!

Cowper's great legacy to us is his hymns (Christian Hymns retains ten). In spite of his depression and introspection he has left us the richer as he shares with us his experience. So the last verse of the above hymn revises the first but with full assurance:

So shall my walk be close with God,
Calm and serene my frame;
So purer light shall mark the road
That leads me to the Lamb.

Next time you feel discouraged get a hymn book and read through such gems as 'There is a fountain filled with blood', 'Hark,my soul! it is the Lord', 'Sometimes a light surprises...' You will not be disappointed.