Henry Richard

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Henry Richard (April 3, 1812 – August 20, 1888), Welsh politician, was the son of the Rev. Ebenezer Richard (1781-1837), a Calvinistic Methodist minister and politician.

Educated at Llangeitho grammar school, he also studied at a college at Highbury, and in 1835 he became minister of a Congregational church in the Old Kent Road, London, a position which he retained for fifteen years. Richard is chiefly known as an advocate of peace and international arbitration.

In 1848 he became secretary of the Peace Society and in this capacity he helped to organize a series of congresses in the capitals of Europe, and was partly instrumental in securing the insertion of a declaration in favour of arbitration in the treaty of Paris in 1856. He resigned this post in 1885. In 1868 Richard was elected member of parliament for the Merthyr boroughs, and he remained in the House of Commons until his death at Treborth, near Bangor.

In parliament he was a leading member of the party which advocated the removal of Nonconformist grievances and the disestablishment of the church in Wales; in 1877 he was chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. Among Richard's writings may be mentioned: Defensive War (1846, and again 1890); Memoirs of Joseph Sturge (1864), Letters on the Social and Political Condition of the Principality of Wales (1866, and again 1884); and The Recent Progress of Internationai Arbitration (1884).

He also prepared some of the material for the life of his friend and associate, Richard Cobden, which was written by John Morley, later Lord Morley; and he did some journalistic work in the Morning Star and the Evening Star. See CS Miall, Henry Richard, M.P. (1889); L Appleton, Memoirs of Henry Richard (1889); and articles in Cymru Fydd for 1888.