Russell Scott (minister)

The younger brother of Mary Scott, he was the son of the linen merchant John Scott of Milborne Port. He was educated at Daventry Academy and the Independent College, Homerton, and trained as a minister at Hoxton Academy.^[1][2] He then sought medical training, as useful for a minister in a place where medical help was hard to find.^[3] He studied medicine under William Hawes. In all, this student period was a decade, to 1785.^[4]

During his period in London, Scott met Theophilus Lindsey, who already knew his sister Mary.^[3] A 1782 letter from Lindsey, to his friend William Tayleur, mentions Scott as attending the Essex Street Chapel, and having moved from the orthodox Homerton to the liberal Hoxton in line with a change of views. He described the Scott family background as strict Calvinist. Lindsey at this point thought of him as a "good Unitarian".^[5]

Scott began as a dissenting minister informally at Milborne Port. He was at Wrington, also in Somerset, from 1783 to 1788, being ordained there in 1787.^[6]

The High Street Chapel in Portsmouth was associated with Sir John Carter and his son John Bonham-Carter MP.^[7] Scott was pastor there from 1788.^[8] By 1819 the congregation, some years after the Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813 legalised Unitarian views, was self-described as Unitarian.^[9]

In the period leading up to the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act 1794, Scott became associated with four of the five radical reformers often known as the "Scottish Martyrs" (a misnomer since three were English), who were sentenced to transportation to Australia. Their trials were high-profile confrontations of reformers with the authorities.^[10]

For three of them, it was a result of their involvement in the Edinburgh conventions held in 1792, and in 1793 after the start of the French Revolutionary Wars, run by the London Corresponding Society. Thomas Fyshe Palmer was a Unitarian minister in Dundee who saw a pamphlet by George Mealmaker through the press.^[11]

Theophilus Lindsey was concerned about the repression, particularly as it also affected Joseph Priestley, victim of the Priestley Riots of 1791, and younger Unitarians such as Jeremiah Joyce, and his numerous letters for 1794 document related events.^[12] Russell V. Holt, Principal of the Unitarian College, Manchester wrote of the period, its mobs and treason trials:

These outrages on justice and on liberty made a lasting impression on many minds which bore fruit later in life-long devotion to the cause of freedom. Such was the effect on the mind of the Rev. Russell Scott.^[13]

In early February 1794 Thomas Muir was a convict on the transport ship Surprize lying off Portsmouth, where he was joined by Palmer from the prison hulk Stanislaus moored on the River Thames off Woolwich.^[14][15] The pair had been in Newgate Gaol, London, where the Unitarian group of Lindsey, Priestley and William Russell had tried to visit them, but had been too late. Lindsey asked Scott to visit them on the Surprize, which he did, bringing money and books.^[14] In March, when Maurice Margarot and William Skirving were also on the Surprize with Muir and Palmer, Scott visited again.^[16]

Scott similarly supported Joseph Gerrald in 1795, the fifth "Martyr", who was transported on the Sovereign.^[17]