User:Mazzag16/sandbox

Lady Middleton, nee Margaret Gambier 1730-1792, was an influential Artist, Abolitionist & Anti Slavery Campaigner. She was a highly influential figure in the early abolition movement. Together with her husband Charles Middleton, 1st Baron Barham, Lady Middleton was the principal agent in securing William Wilberforce to first offer a motion to Parliament to abolish the slave trade. In addition, she was an accomplished portrait artist and a close friend of Dr Johnson, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and Hannah More;

Early Life
Born Margaret Gambier some time after 1730 into a family who had come to Britain as Huguenot refugees in the 1690s, she was well-educated, clever and artistic. Her parents James Gambier and Mary Mead were evangelical Christians,

Lady Middleton was born Margaret Gambier sometime after 1730. She was the youngest daughter of James Gambier and Mary Mead. The Gambier family were descended from Huguenot émigrés. Margaret was the sister of Vice-Admiral James Gambier (1723–1789) and a niece of Captain Mead, captain of the Sandwich. and the niece of a Navy captain and seems to have been converted at a young age to an active faith under the preaching of George Whitefield. While visiting her uncle, she met Charles Middleton, then a teenage midshipman. The two fell in love, but because her family disapproved of the match (and eventually disinherited her) and Middleton could not support a wife, they did not marry until 1761, nearly twenty years later.