Wife to Mr Wesley
CHAPTER THREE
Wife to Mr Wesley She was such a helpmate as Mr Wesley required ; and to her, under God, the great eminence of the subsequent Wesley family is to be attributed. Adam Clarke
In 1682, at the wedding of her sister Elizabeth to John Dunton, Susanna Annesley appears to have met for the first time the man who was to be her husband. She was then a girl of twelve, and Samuel Wesley a poor theological student in training for the Dissenting Ministry at Mr Veal's
Academy. Samuel's poetic talents were made to serve the occasion, and at the reception in Dr Annesley's house he presented Dunton and his bride with an Epithalamium.! It was no doubt very much a Nonconformist occasion, and yet young Wesley may not have been entirely at his ease in the gathering. He was ostensibly preparing for the Nonconformist
1 Dunton, Life and Errors, I, 78, describes Wesley as an 'ingenious Gentleman' and 'a Student in the Rev. Mr Veal's house'. For the identification of the poet as Wesley, see Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 88, 118f. For Edward Veal, see D.N.B. and A. G. Matthews, Cage feiss, (1934), s.v. Veal.
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* Ministry, but his studies of the controversy between Dissent and the Establishment were beginning to draw him towards the Anglican position. He described later how the crude political and religious extremism of some of his fellowstudents helped to confirm him in his trend of thought away from Dissent.! At the same time Susanna, bred up in the atmosphere of theological debate, was being led by her reading in a similar direction. Love and theological accord ripened together. Samuel was able to steer Susanna away from the Socinian heresy, which for a time, in her search for her own religious position, she had entertained. Within a year or two of their first meeting, Samuel exchanged Stoke
Newington Dissenting Academy? for Exeter College, Oxford, having walked down to the University with only forty-five shillings in his pocket, and paid his first caution money in the September of 1684.3 By 1688, when he had proceeded
B.A. and been ordained deacon with a curacy of £28 a year, they were able to contemplate marriage. After being ordained priest (24 February 1689), Samuel served for a time as a naval chaplain, with a handsome stipend of £70. He then resigned the service, returned to civilian life and a lower income, and on the strength of a London curacy of £30 a year, married Susanna.4
Susanna's choice of a husband presented her father with another test of character and of grace. She had not only turned Anglican, but had now married a strong HighChurchman and lapsed Dissenter. Whatever Dr Annesley's feelings may have been, there was no discernible sign of resentment on his part against the young couple. Adam
? For examples of extremist opinion among Dissenters, see Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism, p. 464.
* He had removed to Stoke Newington, where Mr Charles Morton had an Academy, when Mr Veal's establishment closed down.
* Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 99, 236.
"The marriage date is uncertain. Clarke, op. cit., II, 2, puts it 'about the year 1689', though earlier (I, 183) he says Samuel had only 'contracted an acquaintance' with Susanna 'about 1690 or 1691'.
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Clarke made his own inquiries on the point from a surviving member of the Wesley family, a granddaughter of Samuel, who assured him: 'I do not find that Dr Annesley or any of his family were prejudiced against my grandfather for leaving the dissenters; but his mind was too enlarged to be pre- — judiced, whatever preference he had to his own community."!
Dr Annesley's own 'preference' (as opposed to 'prejudice'), was Presbyterian; but as he had acquiesced in his young daughter's 'preference of the Church of England',? so he now accepted her husband's, which had led him not only into the Church of England, but into her ministry. Fortunately for the bridegroom, his swingeing attack on the Dissenters and their academies, though already committed to paper at the time of his marriage, was not published until some years later. When Wesley's A Letter from a. Country
Divine ..
. Concerning the Education of the Dissenters in their Private Academies came off the press in 1703, Dr Annesley had been dead for half a dozen years. Otherwise, for all his tolerance and charity, Susanna's father might have been hard put to give his consent and blessing to the match. He would certainly have hesitated had he been able to look ahead for half a century and listen to Samuel Wesley indulging in a bout of self-congratulation at having instilled High
Church principles into all his children. His grandchildren, Dr Annesley would have learned, had been imbued with 'a steady opposition and confederacy against all such as are avowed and declared enemies to God and his clergy; and who deny or disbelieve any articles of natural or revealed religion ; as well as to such as are open or secret friends to the Great Rebellion; or to any such principles as do but squint towards the same practices; so that he hopes they are all staunch high church, and for inviolable passive obedience; from which if any of them should be so wicked as to 1 Clarke, Wesley Family, II, 2.
2 So Susanna herself deggribed it; see above, p. 57.
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degenerate, he can't tell whether he could prevail with himself to give them his blessing'.?
Soon after their marriage, Samuel secured, through the good offices of his friend and benefactor, the Marquis of Normanby, the rectory of South Ormsby in the Lincolnshire
Wolds.? So, in 1690, Susanna left the busy capital where she had spent her girlhood for the provincial backwater of eighteenth-century Lincolnshire. She was not to see London again until 1724, when she made her abortive journey to meet her brother on his return from India.* It was a drastic rustication, for the isolation and insularity of Lincolnshire were proverbial. Geography had of course a good deal to do with its insularity, and Sir Francis Hill has well described the physical features which severed the county from the rest of the country. To the east, the sea; to the north, the Humber; to the west the Trent; and, 'Even when it was not in flood the Trent was a physical and psychological barrier.
It had no bridge below Newark until Gainsborough bridge was built in 1790. There were only ferries, as at Gainsborough, Dunham, Littleborough and Stockwith. No main roads led to them. The county of Lincoln was virtually a peninsula, whose neck to the south was narrowed by the fens.'* A century and a half earlier; Henry VIII had dubbed the county, 'one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm,' and though the king was biased, there was truth in his verdict. The Wesleys were to find it still true in 1690, in the remoter parts of the county at least, and especially after they moved to Epworth, where there was brutality and beastliness in plenty.
For the moment, however, the future for Mr and Mrs Wesley seemed tolerably bright. They brought with them
1 Clarke, Wesley Family, II, 234f.
* The patrons of the living were the Massingberd family. See L. Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, M.A. (1866), p. 467.
* See above, p. 44.
'J. W. F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln, (1956), p. 1.
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to South Ormsby their first child, they were free of debt, and Samuel's living had a nominal value of £50 a year.
The long struggle against poverty and ill-health, which was to tax all Susanna's heroic resources of body and spirit, still lay in the future. As they started their new life together, the country parson and his wife had a great deal to bind them together besides their mutual love. They had a shared background as lapsed Dissenters, uncommon courage and tenacity of purpose, and a real concern for Christianity in earnest.
Yet there were inevitable tensions between two such strong and contrasted personalities. Though Susanna's heart and soul were in the heavenly places, her feet were planted firmly on the earth. She was able to combine, in a quite astonishing way, a firm grasp of all the multifarious activities of a large household, with something of the disciplined devotion of the monastic life. Her husband, on the other hand, lived half his life in a scholarly world of his own, absorbed in his writings, and hopelessly impractical in money matters. Samuel knew his own defect, and when the end of 1700 found him £300 in - debt, he acknowledged that his own incapacity was partly to blame. By this date he had been at Epworth for three years, but he had not yet recovered from the expenses of his seven years at South Ormsby. He wrote a plaintive letter to his benefactor, John Sharp, Archbishop of York, setting out the stages which had led to his parlous financial position:
' *T will be no great wonder that when I had but fifty pounds per annum for six or seven years together, nothing to begin the world with, one child at least per annum, and my wife sick for half that time, that I should run one hundred and fifty pounds behind hand; especially when about a hundred of it had been expended in goods, without doors and within.'
Yet he had the honesty to admit, 'I doubt not but one reason of my being sunk so far is, my not understanding worldly affairs.'?
1 Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 191.
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Samuel was at the time 'of writing thirty-four years old, but when he was over seventy and trying, with only moderate success, to rebut the charge of feckless extravagance which his own brother had brought against him, he had resort to the same excuse. Writing in the third person, as if to emphasize that he was taking a completely detached view of himself, he replied to Matthew Wesley: 'As for his folly, he owns he can hardly demur to the charge; for he fairly acknowledges he never was, nor ever will be, like the children of this world, who are accounted wise in their generation, in doting upon this world, courting this werld, and regarding nothing else: not but that he has all his life laboured truly both with his hands, head, and heart, to provide things honest in the sight of all men...'! No one knew his weakness better than Susanna. Her brother Samuel, the East India merchant, had prevailed on her husband to act as his agent for some business dealings in England. The business apparently failed through Wesley's neglect and incompetence, and Annesley quarrelled with his brother-in-law over the matter. Some years after the breach, Susanna wrote a reasoned letter to her brother, defending her husband from his charges, and saying in effect, that he should have known better than to give Wesley such a commission. To Annesley's charge that Wesley 'is not fit for wordly business', Susanna can, however, do nothing but agree: 'This I likewise assent to, and must own I was mistaken when I did think him fit for it: my own experience hath since convinced me that he is one of those who, our Saviour saith, "'are not so wise in their generation as the children of this world'"'.'? There was no question of Samuel's honesty and integrity, but he had no head for business. His wife, so eminently practical and competent herself, must have found it peculiarly galling to see him floundering in his management of the family's affairs. He
* Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 235.
2 Tbid., I, 392.
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would assuredly have spent more than the few months of 1705 in a debtor's prison if he had not had in Susanna such a helpmate as his needs required.
A further contrast in personality between Susanna and Samuel lay in what the Middle Ages would have called the prevailing 'humour' of their characters. Susanna, though an extremely strong personality, was quiet, restrained, modest, self-possessed. In Samuel, on the other hand, there was not only a choleric temper, but a streak of personal vanity, a tendency to strike a pose and act a part. Here, no doubt,
Susanna's Puritan training had merely reinforced her natural bent; but the same training had not sufficed to purge her husband of his love of self-display. This strain in Samuel comes out in his literary ambitions, his readiness to cast himself in the role of writer and poet. The title of his first published work, written in 1685 while he was an undergraduate at Oxford, sets the tone. It was a collection of,
'Poems on Several Subjects never before Handled', which _he entitled simply, Maggots, a seventeenth century use of the word which can perhaps be best rendered by the modern
'whimsies'. As a man might have a bee in his bonnet, so he might have a maggot in his mind, and Samuel duly showed himself, in the frontispiece of the work, with a maggot curling up from his poetic brow and seeking an outlet in print.
His first printed book consisted of poems, and it was as a poet that he loved to figure himself. Writing to the Archbishop of York in 1702, in the midst of debts and difficulties, he could say of himself and his poverty, "He that's born to be a poet must, I am afraid, live and die so.' He is probably only half-serious here, but his words are still significant, especially when taken with those of an earlier letter, where in all gravity he thanks the Archbishop for his generosity and adds: 'Certainly, never did an archbishop of England write in such a manner to an isle-poet: but it is peculiar to your
1 Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 206. .
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Grace to oblige so as none, besides can do it.'! It is typical of Samuel that even in the midst of acute poverty, he is not simply a poor country clergyman, but an "isle-poet'; and even though the isle is not Lyonnesse or Innisfree, but only
Axholme, the title carries with it an aura of romance which helps to alleviate his condition. His brother-in-law, John
Dunton, reflected on the sales of books of poems he had published, and commented wryly, 'It is something unaccountable, but one would incline to think there is some indispensable Law, whereby Poverty and Disappointment are entailed upon Poets.' Samuel Wesley, accepted the entail as an essential. part of a poet's estate.
It need hardly be said that Samuel was emphatically not a great poet, though he had some excuse for thinking himself one. Had not Nahum Tate, the Poet Laureate, extolled
Samuel's long poem on the Life of Christ, in his preface to the 1697 edition? Samuel's self-esteem had feasted itself upon Tate's opening lines:
As when some prophet, who had long retir'd, Returns from solitude with rapture fired .
So you, great bard, who lay till now concealed, Compiling what your heavenly muse revealed,
No sooner quit the shade, but strike our eyes With wonder, and our minds with ecstacies.®
The rector's son, Samuel, had been more guarded in his praise of this work, acknowledging merely that, 'Whate'er his strains, still glorious was his end'; and to do him justice the author's own estimate of his achievement was a distinctly modest one: "The cuts are good, the notes pretty good, the verses so so.'* In short, despite Adam Clarke's strange judgement on Wesley's poem Eupolis' Hymn to the Creator—
* Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 197.
* Dunton, Life and Errors, I, 183.
® Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 136.
"Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 139.
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'a piece of exquisite merit', and 'the finest in the English language'4—there is little doubt that John Dunton made a much more realistic appraisal of his brother-in-law's poetic talents: 'Mr Wesley had an early inclination to Poetry, but he usually wrote too fast to write well. Two hundred couplets a day are too many by two-thirds to be well-furnished with all the beauties and the graces of that art. He wrote very much for me both in Verse and Prose, though I shall not name over the titles, in regard I am altogether as unwilling to see my name at the bottom of them, as Mr Wesley would be to subscribe his own.'? Before Dunton wrote these words, he and Wesley had quarrelled, but the publisher could still give a reasonably charitable estimate of his author's character. Though Dunton and Wesley fell apart, they had a good deal in common, and notably a love of being in the public eye, a flair for publicity, and a more than average dash of personal vanity. It was not only his fervent royalism which led Samuel to dedicate so many of his writings to _members of the royal family ; it was also an eye to the main
_ chance and to the impressiveness of the title-page. Again, it was not simply devotion to duty and loyal support of the Church, though these motives had their place, which led him to shoulder the burden of acting as a Proctor in Convocation for the Diocese of Lincoln. His three-year term of service cost him £150 in expenses, money which he and his family could ill afford. Yet for Samuel there were real compensations.
The work would take him to London for several months of the year, and open to him the literary world of the capital again. It would give him a chance to play some part in the councils of the Church, and might open to him the road of preferment. Yet preferment or no preferment, the mere opportunity to be at the centre of ecclesiastical affairs would
1 Ibid. (1823 edn.), pp. 129, 149. In the 1836 edition, Clarke moderates his praise, and calls the poem, 'the finest on the subject in the English language'
(I, 231).
2 Dunton, Life and Errors, I, 164. c*
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be reward enough to a man of Samuel's temperament. He would, moreover, have been less than human if he had not welcomed Convocation as a heaven-sent opportunity to get away from the fens of Epworth, from his crude and brutal parishioners, his unending debts, and his houseful of children.
His optimism was of the Micawber calibre, and no doubt it did not take him long to shed his cares as he rode down to London. Despite the £50 expense sheet, "It was a glorious thing to be a Convocation man.'
This same side of Samuel's nature, his desire to cut a public figure and his highly-developed sense of his own importance, appears again in the list of his patrons and benefactors he sent to Archbishop Sharp in 1703. He might be a miserable debtor, the list implies, but at least he could bask in the reflected glory of having been assisted by the highest in the land. The names roll from his pen as if taken from a Court Circular: the Marchioness of Normanby, the Lady Northampton, the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham, the Queen (the names are not in order of precedence !), the Bishop of Salisbury, and the Archbishop of York.! It was almost worth being in debt to be able to claim affinity with all these notabilities. The same trait in Samuel's character appears even in small details, so that when he wished to illustrate his great folio commentary on, Job with an engraving of a war-horse, nothing would content him but he must write to Lord Oxford, asking permission to reproduce a picture of, 'the finest Arab horse in the world', namely his lordship's 'Bloody Arab'.* His lordship was naturally only too ready to grant so innocent and flattering a request. John
Wesley's story of his father's having written Dr Henry Sacheverell's speech at his impeachment for his High Church political pronouncements in 1709, is of the same ilk. It may be an exaggeration, but it is utterly in character, for Samuel
1 Clarke, Wesley Family, Il, 210.
* Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 245.
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could never resist a fight, and always revelled in being at the centre of affairs.
Yet if Samuel liked to see himself in the roles of poet, literary figure, leading churchman, and man of affairs, it was not sheer personal vanity which prompted his aspirations, He was a man of real abilities, and might legitimately have expected to play a larger part in the life of the Church than he was able to do as rector of Epworth. Certainly he was capable of doing so, for he had the scholarly equipment, the integrity of character, and the pastoral and evangelical concern, which might have fitted him for a bishop. It is likely, then, that there was a genuine element of frustration and of inability to find full scope for his gifts, in his desire to escape from Epworth into a wider world. His patron, the Marquis of Normanby, did in fact try to secure his presentation to an Irish bishopric when the sees of Ross and Cloyne fell vacant just before Wesley was appointed to Epworth.
~The Marquis wrote to Archbishop Tillotson, himself a former Puritan associate of Susanna's father, urging Wesley's claims, but when the Archbishop consulted King William,
'His Majesty,' in Tillotson's words, 'according to his true judgement did by no means think fit.' It was this episode which led John Dunton to characterize his brother-in-law, the erstwhile Dissenter and would-be Bishop, as, 'Sam.
Wesley, who fouled his nest in hopes of a bishopric.' It was a racy, but uncharitable epigram, for Samuel Wesley had too much courage and integrity ever to be a mere place-seeker.
Moreover, Susanna herself thought that his gifts were wasted at Epworth, though she did not put it quite so baldly. In one of her rare moments of repining, she exclaimed in a letter to her brother, Samuel Annesley, 'Did I not know that Almighty
Wisdom hath views and ends, in fixing the bounds of our habitation, which are out of our ken, I should think it a thousand pities that a man of his brightness, and rare endowments of learning and useful knowledge, in relation to
SUSANNA WESLEY
the church of God, should be confined to an obscure corner of the country, where his talents are buried, and he determined to a way of life for which he is not so well qualified as I could wish .. ." Susanna penned those words, in 1722, with much feeling, for by then she and Samuel had been 'confined to an obscure corner of the country' for a quarter of a century, and had slight prospect of any release.?
Samuel's genuine theological learning found an early outlet in the pages of the Athenian Mercury, a periodical which from 1691 he edited jointly with John Dunton and Richard
Sault, assisted by 'the ingenious Dr Norris'.? They undertook to answer questions relating to any branch of literature— historical, scientific, theological, philosophical
. —and succeeded in gathering together a distinguished band of contributors, including Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Sir William Temple. In the advertisement for the eighteenth volume of the periodical, the editors promised, with all the rash confidence of youth, to answer, 'all the most nice and curious questions proposed by Ladies and Gentlemen, relating to Divinity, Philosophy, Love, Marriage, History,
Physick, Law, Mathematicks and Trade, &c.' Predictably, the most popular branches of knowledge seem to have been
Love and Marriage, and a fair proportion of the queries submitted in the early numbers were of the kind which still form the staple of the letters to the women's magazines.
Question 4 of the issue of Tuesday, September 5th 1693, is a typical sample of the genre: 'A Friend of mine having a Kindness for a young Gentlewoman, and hath by keeping of her
Company from time to time, so entangled himself...' etc., etc.3
The versatile editors were fully alive to the need for For the low condition, both material and intellectual, of many of the country clergy in the late seventeenth century, when Wesley first came to Lincolnshire, see John Eachard, The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy, (1670).
* Dunton, Life and Errors, 1, 18of.
® Athenian Mercury, II, no. 17.
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'human interest', but neither that nor the genuine learning which adorned its pages could keep the paper in being for much more than a few years. When the Mercury ceased publication, Swift wrote a long and enthusiastic ode in praise of the three anonymous editors, and regretted its disappearance:
I grieve this noble work, so happily begun, So quickly and so wonderfully carried on,
Must fall at last to interest, folly, and abuse.
Wesley's responsibility was to deal with questions on poetry, theology, and church history. Almost forty years after the episode of the short-lived Mercury, Swift was to have the merits of Wesley's theological scholarship brought to his attention once more, in a letter from the poet Pope, canvassing support for Samuel's commentary on Job:
This is a letter extraordinary, to do and to say nothing, but to recommend to you (as a clergyman and a charitable one) a pious and a good work, and for a good and honest man. Moreover,
- he is about seventy, and poor, which you might think included in the word honest. I shall think it a kindness done to myself if you can propagate Mr Wesley's subscription for his "Commentary on Job'' among your divines (bishops excepted, of whom there is no hope), and among such as are believers or readers of the Scriptures. Even the curious may find something to please them, if they scorn to be edified. It has been the labour of eight years of this learned man's life: I call him what he is, a learned man; and I engage you will approve his prose more than you formerly did his poetry. Lord Bolingbroke is a favourer of it, and allows you to do your best to serve an old Tory, and a sufferer for the Church of England, though you are a Whig, as I am.?
Pope was right; Samuel was indeed 'a learned man'. Yet Susanna had married a man who had more than scholarship to his credit, for her husband was possessed of genuine piety and a real pastoral concern. A contemporary character sketch, by Charles Gildon, who had worked with Wesley on 1 Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 126.
2 Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 138. Letter dated April 12th, 1730.
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the Athenian Mercury, sets his learning in the context of his spiritual gifts, and suggests part of the attraction he must have had for the devout and earnest young Susanna:
He was a man of profound knowledge, not only of the Holy Scriptures, of the councils, and of the Fathers, but also of every other art that comes within those called liberal. His zeal and ability in giving spiritual directions were great. With invincible power he confirmed the wavering, and confuted heretics. Beneath the genial warmth of his wit the most barren subject became fertile and divertive. His style was sweet and manly, soft without satiety, and learned without pedantry. His temper and conversation were affable. His compassion for the sufferings of his fellowcreatures was as great as his learning and his parts. Were it possible for any man to act the part of a universal priest, he would certainly deem it his duty to take care of the spiritual good of all mankind. In all his writings and actions he evinced a deep concern for all that bear the glorious image of their Maker, and was so apostolical in his spirit, that pains, labours, watchings, and prayers were far more delightful to him than honours to the ambitious, wealth to the miser, or pleasure to the voluptuous.!
It is an impressive picture, and is corroborated by the evidence of his life. It is also striking in that it might equally well have been written of his son John, with barely a word altered. The skill in spiritual direction, the wit, the manly style, the compassion for the poor,—all these John Wesley shared to the full. The 'part of a universal priest' might well be assigned to John, who looked upon the whole world as his parish, and whose letters to men and women all over the British Isles are full of pastoral counsel and concern. The 'apostolical spirit' of the father bore fruit in the ceaseless missionary labours of the son.
Samuel's compassion and universal humanity were seen in his undergraduate days, when he visited the Oxford prisons, as John and Charles were to do in their turn, as members of the Holy Club.? An incident which sharply focuses Samuel's generosity, however, has come to light
* Cit. Stevenson, Memorials of the Wesley Family, pp. 63-4.
? Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 100.
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only as recently as 1963. The evidence comes, appropriately, from Oxford itself. Two manuscript copies of letters written by Samuel Wesley in 1692 and 1698, discovered in the Bodleian Library by Miss H. A. Beecham of Nottingham
University, have disclosed some new and interesting details of his early life. Samuel describes in the 1692 letter how desperately poor he had become at the end of his first three months in Oxford, when he found himself, 'somdays getting
Meat & others none, all my stock in ye world being only one 8 farthings.' He goes on to tell how, . when I was in the midst of theise Extremitys, we" were rendered sharper by y® season of ye year, it being ye height of winter
& a very severe one, I walkt out in the morning alone, behind y® New Parks, & as I went musing along in an unfrequented path near y® Rivers side I saw a little Boy about som seaven or 8 years old, lying under a Hedg and crying bitterly I went up to him & askt him y® reason, He told me y* two days before his Father died,
His Mother having bin dead severall years, & left none in y® House but himself & a little sister about ten years old, without any victualls or money that they had stayd at home all the next day but none took care of them nor brought them any releif That they resolv'd in y® morning, she should go a begging in their own
Parish, about a mile or two from Oxford and he would go to y® City & try what they could get to keep themselves alive, accordingly he told Me he gott up as soon as 'twas day, & walkt toward
Oxford, but being weak through a long ague & want of meat, was forc'd to lie down there & could go No further; I confess I was toucht w*® ye poor Boys story, I rais'd him from y® ground to wh his cloaths were almost frozen, & rubb'd his limbs, benum'd & almost dead with the cold, till he could Make a shift to go, then I pulld out my 24%, all y® stock I had in the world,
& gave it him, seeing him in greater extremity than I was myself, wth wh he went overjoyd into y® town, & bought a twopenny loaf w°® he carryd home to his sister .
. .?
Samuel's concern for the poor took in their spiritual needs as well, and when he was imprisoned for debt in Lincoln
Castle during three months of 1705, he quickly bestirred 1H. A. Beecham, Samuel Wesley Senior: New Biographical Evidence
(Renaissance and Modern Studies, V1, 1963), p. 104f.
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himself in a pastoral mini&try to his fellow-prisoners. He wrote quite cheerfully from his debtor's prison to the Archbishop of York:
I don't despair of doing some good here (and so long I sha'n't quite lose the end of living), and it may be, do more in this new parish than in my old one; for I have leave to read prayers every morning and afternoon here in the prison, and to preach once a Sunday, which I choose to do in the afternoon, when there is no sermon at the minster. And I'm getting acquainted with my brother jail-birds as fast as I can; and shall write to London next post, to the Society for propagating Christian Knowledge, who, I hope, will send me some books to distribute among them.+ Archbishop Sharp might well have been proud to have such a clergyman in his province. This strain of true religion in the man emerged strongly at his end, when he expressed to his two sons his deepest convictions about the Faith. "The. inward witness, son, the inward witness,' he told John, 'that is the proof, the strongest proof, of Christianity.' As he laid his hands on Charles's head, he spoke in prophetic terms of a revival of Christianity in England: "Be steady. The Christian faith will surely revive in this kingdom; you shall see it, though I shall not.'? Samuel Wesley was not only a man of learning, but a man of faith, and John Dunton, though strongly critical of his brother-in-law, spoke no less than the truth in his final assessment of him: 'I could be very maggoty in the Character of this Conforming Dissenter . . . but, except he further provokes me, I bid him Farewell till we meet in Heaven; and there I hope we shall renew our friendship, for, human frailties excepted, I believe Sam Wesley a pious man.'® There is little doubt that Susanna, though she had to make far greater allowance for her husband's 'human frailties', believed so too.
1 Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 214.
? Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 344ff.
* Dunton, Life and Errors, I, 164f.
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The more attractive side of Samuel's character was not confined to his genuine piety and good works. There was about him also a warmth of feeling, a zest for life, a real humanity, and a strong sense of humour. A number of his choicer quips and comments have come down to us. He was amused at his young son John's careful and logical approach to life, and remarked to Susanna, that he did not believe the child would attend to the most pressing needs of nature, unless he could give a reason for it! When the ghost, or poltergeist, 'Old Jeffrey', disturbed the Epworth household in 1716-17, the rector reflected that the story of the events,
'would make a glorious penny book for Jack Dunton!'! He was not above playing a crude prank on his parish clerk,? and his exuberant outburst when John was elected to a fellowship of Lincoln College, is well known. Shrugging aside momentarily all his debts and troubles, he dilated with pride at his son's distinction, and wrote enthusiastically to the new Fellow, 'Wherever I am, my Jack is Fellow of . Lincoln!'? His resilience, his capacity to rise above his domestic worries and the treadmill of debt repayment, never left him. A short letter to the Archbishop of York, written from Epworth on 18th May 1701, is typical of his hearty cheerfulness in the face of domestic trials:
My Lord, This comes as a rider to the last, by the same post, to bring such news as I presume will not be unwelcome to a person who has so particular a concern for me. Last night my wife brought me a few children. There are but two yet, a boy and a girl, and I think they are all at present : we have had four in two years and a day, three of which are living.
Never came any thing more like a gift from heaven than what the Countess of Northampton sent by your Lordship's charitable offices. Wednesday evening my wife and I clubbed and joined stocks, which came but to stx shillings, to send for coals. 'Thursday
1 Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 2609.
2 Tbid., I, 357f.
8 Tbid., I, 306.
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morning I received the ten' pounds; and at night my wife was delivered. Glory be to God for His unspeakable goodness!
Iam Your Grace's most obliged and most humble servant
S. WESLEY.*
Susanna was married to a man of spirit, who had the capacity to laugh at himself, and so surmount his troubles; but a man too who had the sterner virtue of courage. His career is punctuated with examples of it. As a young clergyman, he heard an army officer swearing obscenely in a London coffee-house, and sent the waiter over with a glass of water to wash the foulness from his mouth,—a challenge which would have led to a fracas if the man's friends had not restrained him. He dealt firmly with his patron's mistress when he found her passing the time of day with his young wife, even though his action lost him the living of South
Ormsby. John Wesley records the incident:
My father's first preferment in the church was a small parish (South Ormsby) obtained for him by the Marquis of Normanby.
This nobleman had a house in the parish, where a woman who lived with him usually resided. This lady would be intimate with my mother, whether she would or not. To such an intercourse my father would not submit. Coming in one day, and finding this obtrusive visitant sitting with my mother, he went up to her, took her by the hand, and very fairly handed her out. The nobleman resented the affront so outrageously as to make it necessary for my father to resign the living.?
He knew too how to stand up to the threats and brutality of the Epworth roughs, when his outspoken preaching or his unpopular political convictions caused him to fall foul of them. They slashed his cows, burned his crops, and menaced his family and his person, but it took more than all that to 1 Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 198.
* Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 107f., and see I, 204f. The nobleman was not in fact the Marquis of Normanby, who continued to use his influence on Samuel
Wesley's behalf, but a member of the local Massingberd family. See L. Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, p. 467.
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make so stubborn a man as Wesley yield. He wrote to the Archbishop of York from Lincoln Castle, where his enemies had had him lodged for debt, Most of my friends advise me to leave Epworth if e'er I should get from hence. I confess I am not of that mind, because I may yet do good there; and 'tis like a coward, to desert my post because the enemy fire thick upon me. They have only wounded me yet, and I believe CAN'T kill me. I hope to be at home by Xmass. God help my poor family! . . .
There was no doubt of Samuel's moral courage, and on an issue of principle he would not budge. As a young man he had refused to read James II's Declaration of Indulgence, because it was intended to advance the interests of the Roman Catholics. He would not read it, 'though strongly solicited by some of the King's friends to do it; and he not only refused to read the Declaration, but, though surrounded with courtiers, soldiers and informers, preached a bold
Discourse pointedly against it, from Dan. iii. 17, 18.'?
Such tenacious holding to principle was admirable, but ' Samuel had the defects of his virtues. He was not only brave and high-principled, he was also hot-tempered and stubborn to a degree. He contended fiercely for points of moral substance, but also for his own preferences and prejudices. He had Irish blood in him, and there was more than a little of the fighting Irishman in his composition. Quick-tempered and quarrelsome, he managed at one time or another to cross most of his friends and associates: John Dunton, the Dissenters, his Epworth parishioners, his brother-in-law Samuel Annesley, John Whitelamb, his amanuenesis, and, of course, his wife, Susanna. His differences with Susanna throw a great deal of light on their temperaments and on their relationship as man and wife. How did two such strong and contrasted characters manage to live together for so long in reasonable harmony? Samuel's own version of their life
1 Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 218. The letter is dated 12 September 1705.
2 Clarke, Wesley Family (1823 edn.), p. 156f.
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together was contained in his poem, the Life of Christ, in which, within a few years of their marriage, he reviewed in complacent couplets his apparently ideal relationship with his young wife:
She graced my humble roof, and blest my life, Blest me by a far greater name than wife ;
Yet still I bore an undisputed sway, Nor was't her task, but pleasure to obey ; Scarce thought, much less could act, what I denied,
In our low house, there was no room for pride ; Nor need I e'er direct what still was right,
Still [sic] studied my convenience and delight . . .?
The unconscious irony of the line, 'In our low house there was no room for pride', is astonishing when it is remembered what a fierce, proud, intolerant little man the rector of Epworth was. When all allowance has been made for poetic licence, it is very difficult to accept this description as an objective account of their married life. For Susanna's side of the story, and a much more credible picture, we may turn to a letter of 1725, in which she confesses to her son John, "Tis an unhappiness almost peculiar to our family, that your father and I seldom think alike'. The impression that the domestic harmony was not quite so perfect as the poetic husband suggests, is confirmed by Samuel Wesley the younger, who in a letter to John includes a passing reference to their parents: 'My wife and I join in love and duty, and beg my father's and mother's blessing. I would to God they were as easy in one another, and as little uneasy in their fortunes, as we are!'3 Both these letters were written after Samuel and Susanna had been married for thirty-five years or more, but the evidence suggests that the tension they describe was of long standing.
1 Samuel Wesley, The Life of our Blessed Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ, (1693), Pp. 40.
? Ms. Letter, Wesley's Chapel, City Road, E.C.1.; Printed in full in Wesley's Chapel Magazine, Jan. 1965.
* Clarke, Wesley Family, I1, 166. Letter dated 18 November 1727.
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The signs of friction which a priori we should expect from their temperamental differences, are certainly' discernible.
How, then, was domestic peace preserved? By outward submission, no doubt, on Susanna's part, for whether or not it was her 'pleasure', she did learn to 'obey', addressing her husband as 'Sir' and referring to him as 'My Master' throughout her married life. At the same time, feminine tact would give her, unobtrusively but no less really, a good deal of her own way. Whether or not Samuel ever became to Susanna, in Mrs Harrison's rather too colourful phrase, no more than,
'the hair-shirt of her cloister',1 she learned how to manage him, and to deal with him as one difficulty among many.
There was, moreover, in the natural division of labour between the rector and his wife, a factor conducive to domestic harmony. Each had his or her own sphere, and while they kept within these, friction was unlikely to be serious. His was the church, the parish, the study; hers, the kitchen, the nursery, the classroom ; and each resented intrusion from the -other. A typical boundary dispute was caused by Susanna's
- system of rules which she had devised for the training and discipline of her children. They included a provision that no child who confessed to a wrong should be beaten for it.
Samuel's quick temper was simply not equal to the strain of keeping such a rule, and Susanna years later ruefully admitted her partial failure in a letter to her son John: "This rule prevented a great deal of lying; and would have done more, if one in the family would have observed it. But he could not be prevailed on, and therefore was often imposed upon by false colours and equivocations, which none would have used but one, had they been kindly dealt with : and some in spite of all would always speak truth plainly.'?
On the other hand, Samuel reacted very sharply when his wife showed the least sign of encroaching upon his clerical
1G, Elsie Harrison, Son to Susanna, p. 25.
2 Clarke, Wesley Family, Il, 14.
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prerogatives. When Susarina took upon her to hold evening services in the rectory—Samuel being in London and his curate-in-charge notoriously negligent—her husband needed a good deal of persuasion before he decided in favour of his wife and against the curate, who had complained bitterly to Samuel of this experience of women in the ministry. Nor was it merely over practical matters of this kind that they failed to see eye to eye. They differed also on some fundamental principles of religion and politics. It was perhaps symptomatic of their deeper differences that they were unable to agree as to the best course of reading for-John to follow when he was contemplating ordination. Samuel advised him to undertake a stiff course of technical theology, laying stress on the study of the biblical languages and the scholarly equipment needed by a clergyman. Susanna, whose Puritan training was far more deeply ingrained, begged to differ, and hoped that John would give his main attention to practical and experimental divinity, that is to moral and pastoral theology, in which the Puritan divines excelled.1
The most celebrated controversy between Samuel and Susanna, however, arose quite suddenly and unexpectedly in the year 1702. There then came to a head a sharp difference of political conviction, which was also a crisis of conscience, on which neither of them was prepared to give way. The matter in dispute touched Samuel at one of his most sensitive points, his fervent loyalty to the reigning sovereign, King
William III. So strong was his attachment to the King that many years later, in his great commentary on Job, he introduced William, in his notes on the well-known passage describing the war-horse (Job 39, 19-25), as 'the fittest hero to have managed the warlike animal just described'.2 The irrelevance of this tribute is obvious, but so too is its sincerity,
1See Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 293ff; and Tyerman, Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, pp. 391-2; also Wesley's Chapel Magazine (Jan. 1965).
? Clarke, Wesley Family, 1, 243.
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for, as Adam Clarke's source adds, 'dead monarchs can give no rewards'. Both Samuel and Susanna were Tory in their politics, but whereas he accepted William III as the lawful sovereign, she held to the House of Stuart and the Divine
Right of Kings. She looked upon William, the 'Prince of Orange', as she insisted on calling him, as a mere usurper.
She made her attitude quite clear in one of her written meditations, in which she reflects on the Revolution of 1688, which had replaced James II by William and Mary:
Whether they did well in driving a prince from his hereditary throne, I leave to their own consciences to determine; though
I cannot tell how to think that a king of England can ever be accountable to his subjects for any maladministrations or abuse of power: but as he derives his power from God, so to Him only must he answer for his using it. But still I make a great difference between those who entered into a confederacy against their prince, and those who, knowing nothing of the contrivance, and so consequently not consenting to it, only submitted to the present government,—which seems to me to be the law of the English
'nation, and the duty of private Christians, and the case of the - generality of this people. But whether the praying for a usurper, and vindicating his usurpations after he has the throne, be not participating his sins, is easily determined.
The clash between Mr and Mrs Wesley turned precisely on this point—Susanna's refusal to pray for 'a usurper', as she persisted in regarding King William. John Wesley's own account of the incident, which happened before he was born, evidently draws on the family tradition of the events:
'Sukey,' said my father to my mother one day after family prayer, 'why did you not say amen this morning to the prayer for the king?' 'Because,' said she, 'I do not believe the Prince of Orange to be king.' 'If that be the case,' said he, 'you and I must part; for if we have two kings, we must have two beds.' My mother was inflexible. My father went immediately to his study; and, after spending some time with himself, set out for London, where,
1 Wesley Banner, (1852), 1V, 283
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being convocation man for the diocese of Lincoln, he remained without visiting his own house for the remainder of the year.
On March 8th in the following year, 1702, King William died; and as both my father and mother were agreed as to the legitimacy of Queen Anne's title, the cause of their misunderstanding ceased.
My father returned to Epworth, and conjugal harmony was restored.!
This family account which John Wesley retails, is extremely vivid and told with admirable economy, but it is inaccurate in a number of important details. Fresh manuscript evidence, in part from the pen of Susanna herself, came to light as recently as 1953, and brings the whole picture into much sharper focus. It shows that Wesley's account has on the one hand exaggerated the length of the quarrel, but on the other has seriously underestimated its gravity. The new material consists of letters which were found in an unpublished MS. book of 257 quarto pages, composed sometime in the eighteenth century, entitled "The Genuine Remains of the Late Pious and Learned George
Hickes, D.D., and Suffragan Bishop of Thetford, consisting of Controversial Letters and Other Discourses'.? The letters show that Susanna, in her distress at being forsaken by her husband, first turned for advice and help to her neighbour and friend, Lady Yarborough of Snaith, Yorkshire, who like herself supported the refusal of the Nonjuring clergy to take the Oath of Allegiance to William and Mary. Lady Yarborough, with Susanna's permission, laid her case of conscience before the prominent Nonjuring divine, Dr George
Hickes.
The new material includes four letters written by Susanna, two to Lady Yarborough and two to Dr Hickes. They
? Clarke, Wesley Family, I, 198-9. This account, given by John Wesley to Adam Clarke, is the fuller of two which he records. For the other, see Arminian
Magazine (1786), p. 606, and Wesley, Works, XIII, 504.
* The material was first published in the Manchester Guardian, on and and grd July, 1953, and then reprinted in Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society
Vol. XXIX, Pt. 3 (Sept. 1953), pp. 50ff.
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movingly reflect her acute distress of mind. Torn between her loyalty to conscience and her feelings as wife and mother, she was by no means so 'inflexible' as John's account suggests. She wrote to Lady Yarborough on March 7th, 1702, soon after the trouble began:
I'm almost ashamed to own what extreme disturbance this accident has given me, yet I value not the world. I value neither reputation, friends, or anything in comparison of the single satisfaction, of preserving a conscience void of offence towards
God and man; and how I can do that if I mock almighty God, by begging pardon for what I think no sin, is past my discerning.
But I am inexpressibly miserable, for I can see no possibility of reconciling these differences, though I would submit to anything in the world to oblige him to live in the house with me. I appeal to your Ladyship if my circumstances are not strangely unhappy.
I believe myself an Original of misery.
The day after Susanna wrote this letter, King William III died, but his death did noft—contrary to John's account— alter the rector's attitude. He had sworn with an oath, and -would not be moved. Susanna graphically recounts his rash oath in her letter to Lady Yarborough:
*Tis but a little while since he one evening observed in our Family prayers I did not say Amen to his prayer for K W [King William] as I usually do to all others; upon which he retired to his study, and calling me to him asked me the reason of my not saying
Amen to the Prayer. I was a little surprised at the question and don't well know what I answered, but too too well I remember what followed: He immediately kneeled down and imprecated the divine Vengeance upon himself and all his posterity if ever he touched me more or came into a bed with me before I had begged God's pardon and his, for not saying Amen to the prayer for the Kg.?
In a second letter to Lady Yarborough, written on March 15th, 1702, Susanna makes clear that the King's death has left the situation unchanged: 'I've represented as long as I could be heard the sin of the Oath and ill consequences of 1 Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, X XIX, Pt. 3, p. 52.
2 Tbid., loc. cit.
SUSANNA WESLEY
it to my Master, but he cannot be convinced he has done ill, nor does the present change in State (the King's death on March 8) make any alteration in his mind; I am persuaded nothing but an omnipotent power can move him and there I leave it. He is for London at Easter where he designs to try if he can get a Chaplain's place in a Man of War.'} How seriously Samuel intended this threat to go back to sea, where he had begun his ministry, it is difficult to say; but Susanna faced up to it as a real possibility, with a resigned faith which shows how deep the difference between them had gone: 'I'm more easy in the thoughts of parting because I think we are not likely to live happily together.
I have six very little children, which though he tells me he will take good care of, yet if anything should befall him at Sea we should be in no very good condition, but still I believe that that charitable Being which feeds the Ravens and cloathes the Lilies will never think me or mine below his care and Providence, though none in the world is more unworthy of either.' She went on to add that she had told
Samuel she would accept the judgement of two referees in the matter, provided she were allowed to choose one of them, but he would not. At Easter, April 5th, Samuel left for London, and shortly after Susanna consulted the Nonjuring
Bishop, Dr George Hickes, with whom she had been put in touch by Lady Yarborough.
The advice of Dr Hickes, who had been deprived of his preferments for his conscientious refusal to take the Oath of Allegiance to William and Mary in 1690, can well be imagined. Yet before examining it in detail, it is well to realize the outstanding calibre of the ecclesiastic whom
Susanna had consulted in her moral dilemma. Professor David Douglas, in a most engaging sketch of his life and learning, calls Hickes, 'probably the most remarkable figure
1 Proceedings of W.H.S., XXIX, Pt. 3, p. 53. go
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among the English historical scholars of his time', who exercised over his fellow-historians an hegemony based not only on profound scholarship, but also on 'the courage which he displayed in adversity .
. as a proscribed rebel and as a hunted fugitive'.t After being dispossessed as Dean of Worcester, Hickes nailed to the gates of his cathedral a defiant protest, in which he claimed, 'I was, and still do continue, the only Rightful and Legal Dean of this Cathedral
Church of Worcester; and that I do not any way relinquish my said Title, but shall, God willing, use all just Means which the Laws of this Realm allow for the Preservation and Recovery thereof. . ."? This act made Hickes a hunted outlaw in constant danger of death. He was a man of immense courage and tenacity in holding to conviction, and Susanna could have found no one better qualified to steel her in her loyalty to her own conscience than George Hickes.
In April 1702, Susanna wrote to Hickes, addressing him as 'the Revd Mr Dean Hickes', and laying her quandary before him. She told him that her husband, is now for referring the whole to the Archbishop of York and Bishop of Lincoln, and says if I will not be determined by them, he will do anything rather than live with a person that is the declared enemy of his country, which he believes himself obliged to love before all the world.
I very well know before such Judges I'm sure to be condemned without a fair hearing; nor can I see any reason I have to ask either God Almighty's or his pardon for acting according to the best knowledge I have of things of that nature. If I thought or could be persuaded I'm in an error I would freely retract it and ask his pardon before the whole world. He accuses me of pride and obstinacy and insists upon my making him satisfaction for the injury he believes I've done him. I dare not plead not guilty to such an Indictment, but yet I hope however I may in other instances be culpable, in this I'm pretty innocent.
.% There is surely a revelation in this letter of the characters of 1 David C. Douglas, English Scholars 1660-1730 (revised edn. 1951), p. 77.
2 Douglas, op. cit., p. 81.
- 3 Proceedings of W.H.S., XXIX, Pt. 3, p. 54. gi
SUSANNA WESLEY
the parties to the dispute. Samuel, with conscious rectitude, 'accuses' Susanna of 'pride and obstinacy'. She in turn does not, as he certainly would have done had the positions been reversed, round on him with a tu quoque, and point to the beam in his own eye. Instead, with disarming humility, she simply acknowledges, 'I dare not plead not guilty to such an Indictment', and will claim no more than that, on the main count, she is 'pretty innocent'. Had she been a person of a different nature, she might well have stood amazed at her own moderation.
Dr Hickes replied on 29th April, giving his judgement decidedly in Susanna's favour. Samuel's oath he held to be inconsistent with his marriage vows, and therefore quite invalid,—'it was perjury in him to make it, and will be a continuance of perjury for him to persist in the performance of it." He advised Susanna to consult the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Lincoln, and request them, if they agreed that the oath was unlawful, to 'charge him to loose himself from the bond of sin, by which he cannot bind himself by the law of God and Man...' He encouraged her, even if this fresh move should fail, to stand firm, at whatever cost, concluding his advice, 'Wherefore good Madam, stick to God and your conscience which are your best friends, whatever you may suffer for adhering to them.' Hickes's own life gave him the moral authority to proffer such counsel, grave as the result of following it might be; and such an appeal would hardly be lost on the daughter of Samuel Annesley, another sufferer for conscience's sake. She replied at the end of July, disclosing how near to submission she had been when Hickes's letter came, and revealing several unexpected turns in the domestic situation :
My Master was then at London and had given me time to consider what to do, whether I would submit to his judgement and implicitly obey him in matters of conscience. I foresaw a great many evils would inevitably befal me if I refused to satisfy his g2
WIFE TO MR WESLEY
desires, and had scarce courage enough to support me in the melancholy prospect when your Letter came, which was the noblest cordial, and gave me the greatest satisfaction of anything in my whole life. When he returned he absolutely refused a reference, and so I thought it unnecessary to write to the Archbishop. He stayed two days and then left me early one morning with a resolution never to see me more, but the infinite Power that disposes and overrules the minds of men as he pleases, and can speak to their wild unreasonable passions as he does to the waves of the sea, hitherto shalt thou go and no farther, so ordered it, that in his way he met a Clergyman to whom he communicated his intentions, and the reason that induced him to leave his
Family: He extremely pitied him and condemned me, but however, he prevailed with him to return.}
Perhaps Samuel, for all his bluster about never seeing his wife again, did not need much persuading to return, but the unknown clergyman's tactful words helped to begin the healing of the breach. Susanna's letter ended with a reference to 'a new misfortune' in the shape of a fire which had destroyed two-thirds of the parsonage house. In view of Samuel's rash oath, she was driven to see in this disaster heaven's rebuke to him, and to say, "This is the finger of God.' Whether or not this was the fire of the Lord, its fall upon his household shook Samuel, and melted the hard stubborn pride which had kept him from his wife. They began life together again in the ruined rectory, and within the following year, on the 17th June 1703, the child of their reconciliation was born: John Benjamin Wesley. It would have been a barren quarrel indeed which had deprived the world of that new life.
This quarrel and its mending have deserved detailed treatment, because of their paramount interest for an understanding of the marital relationship of Samuel and Susanna.
It would be misleading, however, to suggest or imply that their married life was at best a state of armed neutrality or of continual, if subdued, conflict. Samuel's picture of their early married life was ne doubt idealized, but both at the time of 1 Proceedings of W.H.S., XXIX, Pt. 3, p. 55-
a a
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. writing and throughout their union it bore some real relation to the truth. To continue the quotation from his poem where previously it was broken off, we may grant the sincerity of Samuel's claim:
Nor did I for her care ungrateful prove, But only used my power to shew my love:
Whate'er she asked I gave, without reproach or eradge; For still she reason asked,—and I was judge:
All my commands requests at her fair hands, And her requests to me, were all commands:
To others' thresholds rarely she'd incline ; Her house her pleasure was, and she was mine;
Rarely abroad, or never but with me, Or when by pity called, or charity.?
However much his own practical inefficiency added to the burden of his wife's housekeeping, it could not truly be said that Samuel was unaware of her worth. He was sufficiently apprised of the realities of daily living to know that he had married a wife of remarkable courage and competence.
While imprisoned in Lincoln Castle, he confessed in a letter to the Archbishop of York, "One of my biggest concerns was my being forced to leave my poor lambs in the midst of so many wolves. But the great Shepherd is able to provide for them, and to preserve them. My wife bears it with that courage which becomes her, and which I expected from pen For her part, Susanna was fully a of her husband's genuine gifts of piety and devotion. Writing to her schoolboy son, Samuel, in about 1706, she held up his father as a model, in a letter which breathes her characteristic humility, reminding him, 'You had the example of a father that had served God from his youth; and though I cannot commend my own to you, for it is too bad to be imitated, yet surely
1 See above, p. 84.
? Samuel Wesley, The Life of our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1693), Pp. 40.
* Clarke, Wesley Family, II, 213.
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earnest prayers many years, and some little good advice has not been wanting.'! As will appear, what she modestly calls,
'some little good advice', covered a most thorough training in manners, morals, and religion; and she certainly underestimated the importance of her own example for her children. Yet at least her words make quite plain the high regard she had for her husband. We have seen how quickly she sprang to his defence when her brother cast aspersions on his business integrity.2 For all his faults, she remained intensely loyal to him, and was quite distraught when he was overtaken by his last illness. Charles wrote to his elder brother Samuel in March 1735, 'My father declines so fast that before next year he will in all probability be at his journey's end; so that I must see him now, or never more with my bodily eyes. My mother seems more cast down at the apprehension of his death than I thought she could have been; and what is still worse, he seems so too.'® He died in fact the following month, in the full assurance of faith, and in his epitaph Susanna emphasized the one element in their life on which, for all their differences, they had never been divided. She chose to underline as the central fact of her husband's life that Trinitarian faith to which he had brought her, which had become a bond between them at the time of their first love, and which still united them: 'As he lived so he died in the true Catholic Faith of the Holy Trinity in unity, and that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate ; and the only Saviour of Mankind.'
1 The Arminian Magazine, XI (1788), p. 85.
2 See above, p. 70.
3 Frank Baker, Charles Wesley as revealed in his letters, p. 19.