Family Life
William Allen married Mary Hamilton in 1796. They had a daughter, who bore the same name. Unfortunately, the mother did not recover from the childbirth, and died just two days later.
In 1806 Allen married for the second time. His new wife, Charlotte Hanbury of Stoke Newington, was the daughter of a similarly affluent Quaker family. The marriage led to a long-standing association between Allen and her home village, a few miles north of London. The couple visited the continent in 1816, but Charlotte died during their travels, leaving him to bring up his adolescent daughter Mary. Tragedy struck again in 1823, when Mary (recently married to Cornelius Hanbury) gave birth to a son but died just nine days later.
William Allen married for the third time in 1827. Grizell was the eldest sister of another family of well-off Stoke Newington Quakers, of whom the best-known is Samuel Hoare Jr (1751 – 1825), one of the twelve founding members of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. She had stayed at home as nurse and companion to her father, a merchant in the City of London, and only married Wilson Birkbeck in 1801. As a wealthy widow, she contributed to the 1824 foundation of Newington Academy for Girls, and three years later she and William Allen, both co-founders of this novel educational establishment, married. She was 72, and their elderly marriage was greeted by a satirical cartoon entitled "Sweet William & Grizzell-or- Newington nunnery in an uproar!!!" by Robert Cruikshank (brother of the more famous George).
This marriage was as tragic as his first two, for Allen's wife Grizell died in 1835, leaving him a widower for a third time. However, he had a large circle of friends, and was able to afford to travel extensively. In 1840, for example, he travelled for five months across Europe with Elizabeth Fry and Samuel Gurney.
Read more about this topic: William Allen (Quaker)
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