 Thomas Henson was a zealous evangelical Christian who had renounced the Church of England and joined the Plymouth Brethren.Martha Henson shielded her children from the worst excesses of what the biographer Matthew Grimley describes as Thomas's "bigotry", but in 1870 she died, and, in Henson's words, "with her died our happiness".From an early age the young Henson was a dedicated Christian and felt a vocation for the Anglican priesthood; his father's fundamentalist views were anathema, and left him with what Grimley calls "an enduring hatred of protestant fanaticism".