Henry Coventry

Henry Coventry (c. 1710–1752) was an English religious writer. Life He was the son of Henry Coventry, younger brother of William Coventry, 5th Earl of Coventry and a landowner of Cowley, Middlesex, and his wife Ann Coles, and was born at Twickenham around 1710; the writer Francis Coventry was a cousin. He was educated at Eton College. He matriculated at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1726, where he graduated B.A. in 1730 and became a Fellow, and M.A. in 1733. Coventry was an associate of Conyers Middleton, Horace Walpole and William Cole. Cole wrote that, as an undergraduate, Coventry was a friend of Thomas Ashton, and they prayed with prisoners; but that later he was an "infidel". He was a correspondent of John Byrom, who had taught him shorthand at Cambridge in 1730; and was on good terms with William Melmoth the younger, a contemporary at Magdalene, who called him "my very ingenious friend, Philemon to Hydaspes", and dedicated to him his first work, Of an Active and Retired Life (1735). He died on 29 December 1752. Works With Charles Bulkley and Richard Fiddes, Coventry was a prominent defender of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. He wrote Philemon to Hydaspes, relating a conversation with Hortensius upon the subject of False Religion, in five parts, 1736–37–38–41–44. After his death, it was republished in 1753 by Francis Coventry, in one volume.