Henry Martyn Field (minister)

Henry Martyn Field (April 3, 1822 – January 26, 1907) was an American author and clergyman.

Brother of Cyrus West Field, David Dudley Field II, and Stephen Johnson Field, Henry Martyn Field was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He graduated at Williams College in 1838, and was pastor of a Presbyterian church in St Louis, Missouri, from 1842 to 1847, and of a Congregational church in West Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1850 to 1854. The interval between his two pastorates he spent in Europe.

From 1854 to 1898, he was editor and for many years he was also sole proprietor of The Evangelist, a New York periodical devoted to the interests of the Presbyterian church. He spent the last years of his life in retirement at Stockbridge, where he died in 1907.

He was the author of a series of books of travel, which achieved unusual popularity. His two volumes descriptive of a trip round the world in 1875–1876, entitled From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn (1876) and From Egypt to Japan (1877), are almost classic in their way, and have passed through more than twenty editions. Among his other publications are The Irish Confederates and the Rebellion of 1798 (1850), The History of the Atlantic Telegraph (1866), Faith or Agnosticism? the Field-Ingersoll Discussion (1888), On the Desert - Recent Events in Eqypt. (1888), Old Spain and New Spain (1888), Bright Skies and Dark Shadows (1890), and Life of David Dudley Field (1898). Writing about race in Bright Skies and Dark Shadows, Field claimed that segregation was part of human instinct which could not be overcome through legislation.

Although in his day he was known as a member of a remarkable quartet of brothers, today Rev. Field is best recalled because of his marriage in the 1850s to Mlle. Henrietta Deluzy-Desportes, the one-time governess to the ill-fated Charles de Choiseul-Praslin, Duc de Praslin whose murder of his wife Fanny (daughter of Marshal Horace Sebastiani) and apparent suicide help set off the events leading to the overthrow of King Louis Philippe's reign in 1848. The marriage of Henry and Henrietta was a successful one, and she died in the 1870s in New York City.

Henry Martyn Field was portrayed by actor Jeffrey Lynn in the 1940 film of All This and Heaven Too, based on the novel by Field's collateral descendant Rachel Field.