Anna Braithwaite (born Anna Lloyd; 27 December 1788 – 18 December 1859) was a prominent English Quaker minister. She visited the United States three times in an effort to avoid the schism created by the views of Elias Hicks.
Life
Anna Lloyd was born in 1788 in Edgbaston Street, Birmingham, the daughter of Charles Lloyd and Mary (née Farmer). The Lloyds were an influential Quaker banking family. Anna's brother was the poet Charles Lloyd, and her sister Priscilla married Christopher Wordsworth (brother of William the poet). In 1808, Anna married Isaac Braithwaite (two years earlier, her sister Mary had married Isaac's brother George), thus forging the union of two prominent Quaker dynasties. They had nine children, including the Quaker minister Joseph Bevan Braithwaite.
Doctrinal differences within the Quakers were created by the views of Elias Hicks after 1808; William Forster highlighted the issue in 1820, after the growth of Hicks’ influence. Prominent English evangelical Quakers, including Elizabeth Robson, Forster and Braithwaite, travelled to the United States between 1821 and 1827 to denounce Hicks' views.
The visiting British Quakers exacerbated the differences among American Quakers, differences that echoed the 1819 split between the American Unitarians and Congregationalists. The influence of Anna Braithwaite was especially strong. She visited the United States three times between 1823 and 1827 (the last two journeys accompanied by her husband) and published her Letters and observations relating to the controversy respecting the doctrines of Elias Hicks in 1824. Hicks felt obliged to respond and in the same year published a letter to his ally in the Philadelphia Meeting, Dr. Edwin Atlee, in The Misrepresentations of Anna Braithwaite. This in turn was replied to by Braithwaite in A Letter from Anna Braithwaite to Elias Hicks, On the Nature of his Doctrines in 1825.
Braithwaite's family were affected by doctrinal differences. In 1835, the Beaconites separated from the Quakers and five of Anna's children joined the new group.
Braithwaite died in Kendal in 1859.
N.B. Here Braithwaite's nine children are listed, plus any other descendants that have Wikipedia pages. Most details taken from Robert Seymour Benson (1905). Photographic Pedigree of the Descendants of Isaac and Rachel Wilson. Middlesbrough. William Appleyard & Sons.