Coventry was an associate of Conyers Middleton, Horace Walpole and William Cole.[3] 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".[4] He was a correspondent of John Byrom, who had taught him shorthand at Cambridge in 1730;[5][6] 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).[7][8] He died on 29 December 1752.[3]
Works
With Charles Bulkley and Richard Fiddes, Coventry was a prominent defender of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.[9] 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.[3]
This work has been taken as deist;[10] and it is replete with positive references to Shaftesbury.[11]John Mackinnon Robertson listed it as a "freethinking treatise".[12] Coventry is taken to have innovated in using the term "mysticism" against fanaticism of a sectarian nature.[13] In questioning the language and "luscious images" used in devotional literature, he cited The Fire of the Altar of Anthony Horneck, and wrote of the "wild extravagances of frantic enthusiasm".[14]
Coventry incurred the displeasure of William Warburton: who accused him of plagiarism in this work. That was in relation to Warburton's Hieroglyphics;[5] also of making unfair use of information communicated in confidence, which was to be published in the second volume of The Divine Legation of Moses.[3]John Brown, a Warburton ally, implied that Henry Coventry was a slavish disciple of Shaftesbury, and Francis Coventry rebutted the allegation.[11][15]
Coventry was one of the authors of the Athenian Letters. A pamphlet entitled Future Rewards and Punishments believed by the Antients, 1740, has been attributed to him.[3]
^Timothy Underhill, John Byrom and Shorthand in Early Eighteenth-Century Cambridge, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society Vol. 15, No. 2 (2013), pp. 229–277, at p. 253. Published by: Cambridge Bibliographical Society JSTOR24391728
^ abAlfred Owen Aldridge, Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 41, No. 2 (1951), pp. 297–382, at p. 376. Published by: American Philosophical Society. JSTOR1005651
^Leigh Eric Schmidt, The Making of Modern "Mysticism", Journal of the American Academy of Religion Vol. 71, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 273–302, at p. 277. Published by: Oxford University Press JSTOR1466552