Background
He was the son of Matthew Aspinwall, of Trumflet, Kirk Sandall, Yorkshire.
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William Aspinwall
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Magdalene College.
Career
Aspinwall was one of the nonconforming ministers ejected in 1662, was of the Lancashire Aspinwalls, and so has a gleam on his name in relation to Edmund Spenser"s Rosalind. He matriculated at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1654, and had for tutor Joseph Hill. He proceeded Bachelor of Arts in 1657, but having obtained orders, went no further.
His first living was Maghull, in Lancashire.
In the Lancashire "Harmonious Consent" of 1648, which denounces "endeavours used for the establishing a universal toleration," his name appears ("William Aspinwal, preacher of God"s word at Mayhall") in a long list of signatories, headed by "Richard Heyricke, warden of Christ Colledg in Manchester," and including Hollingworth, Alexander Horrocks, John Angier, and indeed the foremost ministers of the county and time. These men had come to persuade themselves that "the establishing of a toleration would make us become the abhorring and loathing of all nations."
Aspinwall left his cure in 1655-1656 to be ordained at Mattersey, Nottinghamshire, and was in that year inducted to Mattersey, in the church at Clayworth, in the same county, along with John Cromwell, Bachelor of Arts, and two others
He was ejected by the Acting of Uniformity in 1662. Upon his ejection he turned farmer at Thurnscoe, in Yorkshire.
There was "a good house," and it became a nonconformist meeting-place.
Two other ejected ministers, Tricket and Grant, sojourned with him. Whether farming did not prosper, or the usual persecution drove him away, is uncertain, but in a short time he is traced once more in his native Lancashire. There Calamy states he died.
But Samuel Palmer (Nonconformist"s Memorial iii 99) corrects this, and gives extracts from a letter dated Cockermouth, 16 April 1724, by which it would seem that he became minister of a "dissenting congregation" in that town.
The date of his death is not given.
