Hastings, Selina (Countess of Huntingdon)

(1707–91)

   Denomination Founder.

   Hastings had been attracted first to the Moravian Church and she joined John wesley’s Society of Methodists in 1739. On the death of her husband in 1746, she dedicated herself to the evangelical cause. Although she retained her links with the Church of England, she made it her aim to convert the British upper classes to renewed religious enthusiasm.

   To this end, she opened chapels in Bath, Brighton, London and Tunbridge Wells. Then, in 1768, she set up Trevecca House in Talgarth, Wales, as a training college for clergy, near the community of the eminent Welsh missionary Howel harris. In order to encourage the evangelical party, she appointed several clergymen, including George whitefield, as personal chaplains, but this practice was outlawed by the consistory courts. In consequence, she was compelled to register her chapels as dissenting places of worship and thus founded what was known as the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. She also took an interest in missions in America and, on the death of Whitefield, she became trustee of his orphanage in Georgia. She also corresponded with George Washington about the American Indians. The Connexion still survives in Britain today.

   F.F. Bretherton, The Countess of Huntingdon (1940);

   S.C. Carpenter, Eighteenth-Century Church and People (1959).