Sadly forgotten today, the Baptist writer Anne Steele (1717–1778), has been rightly called the ‘mother of the English hymn’, and at the close of the 19th century she was as famous as Isaac Watts, John Newton or William Cowper.
Anne was the daughter of William Steele, the Pastor of the Particular Baptist Chapel in Broughton, Hampshire, a village situated roughly mid-way between Salisbury and Winchester. Converted in 1732 and baptised the same year, she grew to be a woman of deep piety, genuine cheerfulness, and blessed with a mind hungry for knowledge. Her piety was wrought in the furnace of affliction. She wrestled most of her adult life, it appears, with ongoing bouts of tertian malaria and terrible stomach pain.
She never married, although there were two proposals of marriage – one from none other than the Baptist pastor and hymnwrit-er Benjamin Beddome (1717–1795). Anne, however, made a conscious choice to remain single. In a letter she wrote to her stepsister after refusing one of these proposals, she said that the suitor had offered his hand to help her over the stile, that is, get married. But when she looked over into the meadow of marriage, she wrote the following words. ‘I looked over and saw no flowers, but observ’d a great many thorns, and I suppose there are more hid under the leaves, but as there is not verdure enough to cover half of ‘em it must be near winter, as I think it generally happens when I look into the said Meadow.’
