William Law - Early Life

Early Life

Law was born at Kings Cliffe, Northamptonshire in 1686. In 1705 he entered as a sizar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge; in 1711 he was elected fellow of his college and was ordained. He resided at Cambridge, teaching and taking occasional duty until the accession of George I, when his conscience forbade him to take the oaths of allegiance to the new government and of abjuration of the Stuarts. His Jacobitism had already been betrayed in a tripos speech. This brought him trouble: he was deprived of his fellowship and became a non-juror.

For the next few years he is said to have been a curate in London. By 1727 he lived with Edward Gibbon (1666–1736) at Putney as tutor to his son Edward, father of the historian, who says that Law became the much-honoured friend and spiritual director of the whole family. In the same year he accompanied his pupil to Cambridge and lived with him as governor, in term time, for the next four years. His pupil then went abroad but Law was left at Putney, where he remained in Gibbon's house for more than 10 years, acting as a religious guide not only to the family but to a number of earnest-minded people who came to consult him. The most eminent of these were the two brothers John and Charles Wesley, John Byrom the poet, George Cheyne the physician and Archibald Hutcheson, MP for Hastings.

The household was dispersed in 1737. Law was parted from his friends and in 1740 retired to Kings Cliffe, where he had inherited from his father a house and a small property. There he was presently joined by two women, a Mrs Hutcheson, the rich widow of his old friend, who recommended her on his death-bed to place herself under Law's spiritual guidance, and Hester Gibbon, sister to his late pupil. This curious trio lived for 21 years a life wholly given to devotion, study and charity, until the death of Law on the 9 April 1761.