Samuel Wesley and the Tory Crisis of Piety, 1685–1720

Abstract

William Gibson is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History at Oxford Brookes University and a prolific scholar of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English religious history. This study of Samuel Wesley, father of John and Charles, sets him in the context of the tumultuous forty years of what Gibson describes as ‘the long Glorious Revolution’. These years saw the Roman Catholic James II's removal, a first step away from an English Anglican confessional state by granting toleration to Dissenters, a failed attempt to ‘comprehend’ moderate Dissenters in the Church of England, initiatives to improve that Church's pastoral effectiveness and the nation's godliness, and the succession of a German Lutheran king, all against the background of war against France and political unrest at home. They were challenging times for High Church Anglicans like Samuel Wesley senior.Treating Samuel Wesley as a significant figure in his own right, Gibson illustrates how an early eighteenth-century small-town clergyman, apparently far from centres of power, might be caught up in national issues that powerfully impacted on his beliefs and religious practice, his daily and family life, and political allegiances. Gibson's familiarity with the period has enabled him to find new manuscript sources illustrating Wesley's close involvement with these issues, and throwing new light on his well-known difficulties with his Epworth parishioners, his imprisonment for debt, and the vicissitudes of his marriage to Susanna. This helps us to appreciate Wesley in a broader context.Gibson depicts Samuel Wesley's life as a series of crises, for others as well as himself. After discussing why this son and grandson of Dissenters conformed to the Church of England in 1684, he considers the personal complexities for Wesley of the national events of the years 1688–95. His Oxford college, Exeter, was threatened with a Roman Catholic takeover. When ordained deacon in August 1688, his oath of allegiance was to James II, but five months later when ordained priest, he rejected his oath to James in favour of William and Mary, while Susanna, his wife of three months, remained loyal to James. He was dismissed from his curacy, disliked being a naval chaplain, and, with a growing family, was short of money. Aristocratic influence and royal patronage secured his appointment in 1695 as rector of the remote Lincolnshire town of Epworth. He became a reforming incumbent, implementing, in consultation with the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the then leading Anglican ginger group, contemporary strategies to raise moral standards and deepen lay piety. Unfortunately, he alienated many of Epworth's leading residents. Additionally, he was a poor financial manager, and his High Church Tory political sympathies alienated Whig opponents, contributing to his imprisonment for debt, and raised the suspicions of his new Whig-sympathizing bishop, William Wake. However, he had a strong local and national Tory High Church support network, which rallied to handsomely pay his debts. Wesley regretted Wake's eirenic attitude to Dissenters, and lack of support for his initiatives to enforce moral and spiritual discipline in Epworth. Nationally, Wesley emerged briefly as a leading figure in the tumultuous events of Dr Sacheverell's impeachment and the Church's 1710 Convocation, which sought to exclude Dissenters from public life and close their academies and strengthen the Church's spiritual and moral discipline. Alongside this Gibson also explores the vicissitudes of Samuel and Susanna's tempestuous marriage in terms of contemporary understandings of ‘passive obedience’, duty, family government, and rights of conscience, as well as their experience of a poltergeist at the rectory in 1716–17 in the context of contemporary understanding of the supernatural and George I's recent succession.This is an excellent and sympathetic study of Samuel Wesley's High Church world. However, it perhaps oversimplifies the polarity of High Church and Low Church Anglicans and their respective identification with Tories and Whigs. Some Whig bishops, including William Wake, were High Churchmen, if not as high as Samuel Wesley. Gibson himself notes that the leading Whig bishop, Gilbert Burnet, loaned Wesley £100 to assist with his financial embarrassment, and that Wesley commended Burnet's reforming Discourse of the Pastoral Care and the sermons of the leading Dissenter, Richard Baxter.Eleven pertinent contemporary illustrations are included and a short appendix by Peter Forsaith discusses images of Samuel Wesley, including that featured on the book's cover, identified as an unknown artist's portrait of Wesley now in the Wrotham Park Collection. There is also an extensive bibliography and index.