# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Nash, Michael

​NASH, MICHAEL (fl. 1796), protestant controversialist, may have been the son of Richard Nash, who married Sarah Joyce on 26 Aug. 1723 at St. James's, Clerkenwell, London (Harl. Soc. Reg. xiii. 248), though a passage in one of his controversial pamphlets (The Windmill Overturned, p. 43) reads like a confession of illegitimate birth. Nash is conjecturally credited with the authorship of ‘Stenography, or the most easy and concise Method of writing Shorthand, on an entire new Plan, adapted to every Capacity, and to the use of Schools,’ Norwich, 1783. In 1784 one ‘Michael Nash of Homerton, Middlesex, gentleman,’ was granted a patent specification for making blacking, No. 1421.
Although often described as a methodist minister, Nash was a member of the church of England. In December 1791 he was ​appointed a collector of subscriptions or canvasser for the Societas Evangelica, a society for the maintenance of itinerant preachers; but he soon embroiled himself with the committee by publishing an attack on the well-known Dr. William Romaine [q.v.] It was entitled 'Gideon's Cake of Barley Meal, a letter to the Rev. William Romaine on his Preaching for the Emigrant Popish Clergy, with some Strictures on Mrs. Hannah More's Remarks, published for their Benefit, 1793,' London, 1793. A second edition of the same year contains 'another letter sent to Mr. Romaine prior to this, and sundry notes and remarks, wherein all the objections and replies of opponents that have come to the author's knowledge, are fully answered.' 'The Barley Cake defended from the Foxes . . . addressed to the editors of the "Evangelical Magazine,"' appeared a few months later. It seems that Nash was also secretary of the Society for the Promotion of the French Protestant Bible, and in that capacity called on Romaine in November 1792, and railed to induce him to preach on behalf of the society. But he found shortly after that Romaine had preached in his own church, and made a collection on behalf of the French catholic refugees.
The committee of the Societas Evangelica, disapproving of Nash's attacks, dismissed him on 17 Jan. 1794. Subsequently one of the committee, a Mr. Parker, 'of the Mews,' denounced Nash in 'A Charitable Morsel of Unleavened Bread for the Author of . . . Gideon's Cake of Barley Meal,' 1793, and Nash retaliated in 'An Answer . . . proving that Pamphlet to be a Beast with Seven Heads, and Thirty Horns or Falsehoods,' London, 1793, and in 'The Windmill Overturned by the Barley Cake . . . with a Faithful Narrative of the Dark Transactions of a Religious Society called Societas Evangelica,' London, 1794. On page 19 Nash claims to be extremely loyal, and to have sent through Lord Salisbury to the king expressions of loyalty in a manuscript which he himself valued at fifty guineas, and which was graciously received. Nash's strong protestant sympathies are revealed in his latest extant tract, 'The Ignis Fatuus or Will o' the Wisp at Providence Chapel Detected and Exposed, with a Seasonable Caution to his infatuated Admirers to avoid the Bogs of his Ambiguous Watch Word and Lying Warning,' London, 1798, an attack on William Huntington [q.v.] Other tracts by Nash of the same kind are extant.
W. A. S.