Nelson, ROBERT, was born in London on 22d June 1656, a rich Turkey merchant's son, and, after a brief space at St Paul's school, removed with his widowed mother to Dryfield in Gloucestershire, where he was brought up by Dr George Bull. In 1680, the year of his election to the Royal Society, he set out with Halley on a twenty months' tour in France and Italy, returning from Italy with Lady Theophila Lacy (1654-1705), a widow, and daughter to the Earl of Berkeley, who in 1683 became his wife, and who soon after was converted to Catholicism by Cardinal Howard and Bossuet. Her ill-health had taken them again to Italy at the time of the Revolution; but Nelson was from the first a (passive) Jacobite, and on his return to England in 1691 he joined the Nonjurs. He was received back into the Established Church in 1710, though he still would not join in the prayers for Queen Anne; and he died at Kensington on 16th January 1714. A man whose whole life was devoted to doing good, one of the earliest members of both the S.P.C.K. and S.P.G., the 'pious' Robert Nelson was the author of five devotional works, of one of which, the Festivals and Fasts (1703), 10,000 copies were sold in four and a half years.
See the Lives by W. H. Teale (2 vols. 1840-46) and C. F. Secretan (1860); also Abbey's English Church in the Eighteenth Century (new ed. 1887).