Henry Newman was born on November 20, 1670 in Rehoboth, Massachussets, United States, the town founded by his grandfather, the Reverend Samuel Newman. He was the son of the Reverend Noah and Joanna (Flynt) Newman. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother after the death of both parents in his early youth.
Education
Newman prepared for college in the grammar schools at Dorchester, Roxbury, and Braintree. He graduated from Harvard with the degree of Master of Arts in 1690.
Career
Newman's preference for other things, notably mathematics, and his Anglican leanings, which soon carried him over to the Church of England, led him to abandon his original intention of entering the Congregational ministry. Instead, after graduating he engaged for the time being in a variety of occupations, ranging from librarian at Harvard to merchant at St. John's, Newfoundland.
About 1703 he moved to London, where he was to spend the rest of his life. Early contact with the Reverend Thomas Bray and members of his philanthropic circle shaped the main outlines of Newman's career. For some years he was the secretary of Bray's Trustees for Erecting Parochial Librarys: and Promoting Other Charitable Designs. He was also one of the Commissioners for the Relief of Poor Proselytes, a body formed to administer relief to needy converts from the Roman Church among the French Protestant population in England.
A New Englander with his qualifications and connections, resident in London, was a likely man for a colonial agent. Hence it was that, sponsored at the outset by Governor Dudley, he was occasionally employed in that capacity by New Hampshire from 1709 to 1720 and permanently from the latter date until the Belcher administration.
He always considered himself a loyal New Englander, though he was an ardent prerogative man, and his interest in affairs at home was further fostered by his work as agent for Harvard College, the more formal side of which he supplemented by zealous endeavors to procure money and books for his alma mater.
His early liking for mathematics and astronomy had led him to prepare and publish two almanacs, Harvard's Ephemeris (1690) and News from the Stars (1691). Throughout his life this field remained something of an avocation for him. Because of this fact his services were frequently sought by friends at home, whether to get communications from New Englanders like Cotton Mather before the Royal Society, with many of the members of which he had an acquaintance, or to select astronomical apparatus for Yale College. It is in his work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, however, that the man himself is most clearly revealed, his deep but unobtrusive piety, his broad tolerance, and his joy in giving himself for the welfare of others. All of these qualities made him deeply sympathetic with that movement of reform which, slowly gaining momentum in the later seventeenth century, branched out into a wide variety of humanitarian endeavor during the years of his London life.