Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon

Selina Hastings was a countess who lost her husband in 1746 and decided the family money now belonged to God. Aristocrats could not be dragged to a field meeting, so she brought the field meetings to them: she appointed George Whitefield her chaplain and invited London's titled families to her drawing room to hear him, where they came out of curiosity and some of them stayed. She sold her jewels and spent something like a hundred thousand pounds building chapels — around sixty of them, in spa towns and cities where the fashionable went. In 1768 she founded a college at Trevecca in Wales so that poor men called to preach could be trained without the fees Oxford demanded. In 1781 the courts forced her to register her chapels as Dissenting, pushing her out of the Church of England she had wanted to renew; the congregations became the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, and some of them are still going.