The Wesley Household

The Wesley family, as we have described it, was a household of strong natures, strongly ruled, and ruled to noble ends. A cluster of bright, vehement, argumentative boys and girls, living by a clean and high code, and on the plainest fare; but drilled to soft tones, to pretty formal courtesies; with learning as an ideal, duty as an atmosphere, and the fear of God as a law. Religion in the home was, as it ought to be in every home, the masterforce; a force that had the close and constant pressure of an atmosphere. It was not, it is true — and as subsequent pages will show — the most intelligent form of religion. It created an atmosphere through which ran no golden sunshine, and in which few birds sang. Still it fulfilled its eternal oflSce of ennobling the lives it touched.

And on the whole, it may be confidently asserted that at that particular period of the eighteenth century, more brains could be found beneath the thatch of Epworth Parsonage than under any other roof in England. The elder Wesley, indeed, suggests — if only by his simplicity, his wrong-headed unpracticality — Dr. Primrose in the “Vicar of Wakefield”; and, it may be added, he must have been a much less comfortable man to live with than Goldsmith’s amiable, if too simple-minded, hero. But he had a clever brain, an energetic will, and courage enough for a grenadier battalion! He was no doubt of a peremptory temper. A will, stubborn by hereditary gift, had been hardened by a perpetual duel with adverse circumstances, till it was almost incapable of yielding. In his house he was a despot, but this was only the fashion of the times. Susannah Wesley, in her letters to her friends, was accustomed to describe her lordly little husband as “My Master,” though, as is often the case in married life, the majestic husband had much less authority than he himself imagined. The children, when they wrote to their father, addressed him as “Honoured Sir.”

Mr. Quiller Couch, in his “Hetty Wesley,” however, draws a portrait of the father of the Wesley honsehold which is sinii)ly a caricature. Saninel Wesley, as he pictures him, with hot, ferret eyes, set close together on either side of his long, obstinate nose, is a sort of eighteenth-century Quilp in a cassock. He is a deeply and justly hated domestic tyrant, the evil genius of his children’s lives. Even the wise, gentle-browed Susannah Wesley is described as fit to shape the lives of her great sons, but as a curiously helpless mother for her daughters. In “Hetty Wesley” is a scene in which Molly, the most timid and shrinking of the Wesley girls, faces her terrible father, and scolds him through whole paragraphs. “Your temper,” she informs her father, in sentences which suggest Dr. Johnson, “makes life a torture. Thwarted abroad, you have drunk of power at home till you have come to persuade yourself that our souls are yours.” And she ends by pointing her finger at her father, and shrieking, “Look at him, a ridiculous little man.”

That scene is false, both in fact and in art. There is no echo of the household speech of the century in that passage, still less of the accent of the Epworth Rectory. Samuel Wesley was not too wise as a father, but few men ever made greater sacrifices for their children, or were more completely bound up in their happiness. And what other wife and mother of that age can be put beside Susannah Wesley? She is one of the famous women of all time. Of her three boys, one was destined to mould to a new type the religious life of the race to which he belonged; a second was to be the greatest hymn-writer in English literature; while the eldest of the group, Samuel, had a strength of will and vigour of intellect equal to his more famous brothers, and a wit even keener. Unfortunately, in his case, no thaw ever came to the benumbing frost of High Church theology which lay ui)on him.

The girls of the rectory had, of course, a tamer and less varied life than their brothers. The sons went early to the noise and stir of a great public school, to the learned atmosphere of the University, and, later still, to the open stage of the great world itself. And, as was natural, the imagination of both father and mother followed the boys into those new realms with keenest interest. Their figures took a new scale in the domestic landscape. For the girls remained nothing but the tameness of home-life; and the life of a country rectory, set, as Ejiworth was, in the desolate fenlands, and in the middle of the eighteenth century, must have been tame. Nature was unkind to it. Life moved slowly, and was filled with connnonplace tasks. They had a preoccupied and impracticable father, an overburdened mother, a half-furnished house, and a very inadequate income. Suitors were scanty; new dresses were an idle dream, hard work was inevitable. The girls did not possess — and could hardly be blamed for not possessing — the wise philosophy of their mother. Emilia, the oldest of the girls, and the least contepted, talks shrewislily and often of the scandalous insufficiency of things upon which they had to live.

The flat, melancholy fenlands, pricked with thin lines of pollard willows and alders, and seamed with dikes through which the sluggish waters crept — dikes which in winter became mere ribbons of ice — all this made a desolate landscape, over which, in winter, the bitter south-east winds raged. Here and there a distant church spire showed like the point of a spear against the sky-line; a low cluster of village roofs, a solitary farmhouse, gave a sharper accent to the desolation of the scene. The stubborn fen-men did not take kindly to those who, like the Wesleys, were not of their stock. Fifty years earlier the surly breed had waged thinly disguised civil war with the Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, whom William of Orange brought over to drain the ancient fens. They broke down his dams, beat his workmen, burnt his crops; and they had something of the same mood towards the Wesleys. They stabbed the little rector’s cows, maimed his sheep, broke the dams at night to flood his little fields. They harried him for his debts, tried, not unsuccessfully, to burn his parsonage over his head. Then they accused him of having set fire to it himself!

He was urged by his friends to leave Epworth, but nobody with the Wesley blood in his veins was capable of being driven .any whither. “It is like a coward,” Samuel Wesley wrote to his bishop, “to desert my post because the enemy fire thick upon me.” He was writing from i)rison, into which he had been cast on account of his debts. It may be frankly admitted that these were not very happy domestic conditions. They meant many cares and a narrow social horizon for the Epworth household.

The family history of the Epworth Parsonage, it may be added, was blackened by not a few tragedies, and these all clustered round the bright, clever girls of the household. There are worse evils than want, sharper ills than poverty, things harder to bear than either pain or death. Few mothers have had keener griefs than Susannah Wesley. The single cry of pain, indeed, audible in all her correspondence is a passage in a letter to her brother Annesley: —

“I am rarely in health; Mr. Wesley declines apace; my dear Emily, who in my present exigencies would exceedingly comfort me, is compelled to go to service in Lincoln, where she is a teacher in a boarding-school; my second daughter, Sukey, a pretty woman, and worthy a better fate, when, by your last unkind letters, she perceived that all her hopes in you were frustrated, rashly threw herself upon a man (if a man he may he called who is little inferior to the apostate angels in wickedness) that is not only her plague, but a constant affliction to the family. Oh, sir! Oh, brother, happy, thrice happy are you, happy is my sister, that buried your children in infancy: secure from temptation, secure from guilt, secure from want or shame, or loss of friends! They are safe beyond the reach of pain or sense of misery; being gone hence, nothing can touch them further. Believe me, sir, it is better to mourn ten children dead than one living; and I have buried many.”

The vague, bitter, nameless reference here is to her daughter Hetty, the keenest spirit, the liveliest, brightest, and most happy of that cluster of fair girls under the roof of the Epworth Parsonage. Hetty had rare gifts of intellect, and it is recorded of her that she could read the Greek Testament by the time she was eight years of age. A brilliant, fascinating girl, with a strain of gay and half impish mischief in her, she was self-willed and masterful in spirit; and yet no girl under any English roof at that moment had a more tender spirit, a quicker intelligence, or perhaps a sadder fate. She was the one daughter who brought shame upon the household.

When her shame was known her father broke into fierce, inexorable anger. For long he would not see his daughter; but for the mother’s patience, she might have been driven from the household roof. Hetty herself, years afterwards, when her father was partially reconciled, wrote: “I would have given at least one of my eyes for the liberty of throwing myself at your feet before I was married at all; yet since it is past, and matrimonial grievances are usually irreparable, I hope you will condescend to be so far of my opinion as to own that, since upon some accounts I am happier than I deserve, it is best to say little of things quite past remedy.”

The only quarrel John Wesley ever had with his father arose out of a sermon he preached on “The Charity Due to Wicked Persons,” which his father held to have been preached on Hetty’s behalf and levelled against himself.

In a reckless mood — a mood half of contrition and half of desperation — Hetty vowed to marry any person her parents wished, and that self-imposed penance was ruthlessly exacted. A journeyman plumber named Wright offered himself, the father’s wrath was still flaming, and the marriage took place. Never, perhaps, was a more unhappy union. Wright, in character, education, habits, and temper, was the exact opposite of his wife. It was the marriage of a clever, refined, high-spirited girl to a drunken and dissolute boor. She was a neglected wife, an exiled daughter, an unhappy mother, for her children died almost at the moment of their birth. One of the most beautiful and pathetic poems of its kind is a piece entitled “A Mother’s Address to Her Dying Infant,” which Hetty wrote by the deathbed of her little infant: —

“Tender softness! infant mild!
Perfect, purest, brightest child!
Transient lustre! Beauteous clayl
Smiling wonder of a day!
Ere the last convulsive start
Rend thy unresisting heart;
Ere the long-enduring swoon
Weigh thy precious eyelids down;
Ah, regard a mother’s moan.
Anguish deeper than thy own!
Fairest eyes! whose dawning light
Late with rapture blest my sight.
Ere your orba extinguished be.
Bend their trembling beams on me!
Drooping sweetness! verdant flower.
Blooming, withering in an hour!
Ere thy gentle breast sustains
Latest, fiercest, mortal pains.
Hear a suppliant! Let me be
Partner in thy destiny.”

If we add to these verses the words — spelt as in the original — which Hetty’s husband wrote to John Wesley enclosing the lines, the interval in mind and education betwixt husband and wife can be understood: —

■“I’ve sen you Sum Verses that my wife maid of Dear Lamb Let me hear from one or both of you as Soon as you think Conveniant.”

Her wedded life, sown thick with every kind of grief, broke the unhappy Hetty’s spirits, and she sought, with pathetic eagerness, for her angry little father’s forgiveness.

“Honoured Sir (she wrote), although you have cast me off, and I know that a determination once taken by you is not easily moved, I must tell you that some word of your forgiving is not only necessary to me, but would make happier the marriage in which, as you compelled it, you must still (I think) feel no small concern. My child, on whose frail help I had counted to make our life more supportable to my husband and myself, is dead. Should God give and take away another, I can never escape the thought that my father’s intercession might have prevailed against His wrath, which I shall then, alas! take to be manifest.

“Forgive me, sir, that I make you a party in such happiness (or unhappiness) as the world generally allows to be, under God, a portion for two. But as you planted my matrimonial bliss, so you cannot run away from my prayer when I beseech you to water it with a little kindness. My brothers will report to you what they have seen of my way of life and my daily struggle to redeem the past. But I have come to a point where I feel your forgiveness to be necessary to me. I beseech you, then, not to withhold it.”

Samuel Wesley, however, listeued with unconvinced ears. He found no true note of sincerity in his unhappy daughter’s letters. He advised hei’, in her next letter, if she wishes to convince him, to “display less wit and more evidence of self-examination.” “What hurt,” he asks, “has matrimony done you? I know only that it has given you your good name.” A mother, of course, would not have replied in such a fashion to such a letter as poor Hetty had written, but then Samuel Wesley had something more than an average man’s inability to understand feminine sensibilities.

But sorrow, poverty, neglect, and loneliness, if they broke the once gay Hetty’s pride, refined her character. She wrote to her brother John in 1743: — “Though I am cut off from all human help or ministry, I am 4iot without assistance; though I have no spiritual friend, nor ever had one yet, except, perhaps, once in a year or two, when I have seen one of my brothers or some other religious person by stealth, yet (no thanks to me) I am enabled to seek Him still, and to be satisfied with nothing else than God, in whose presence I affirm this truth. I dare not desire health, only patience, resignation, and the spirit of a healthful mind. I have been so long weak that I know not how long my trial may last, but I have a firm persuasion and blessed hope (though no full assurance) that In the country I am going to I shall not sing ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Holy, holy, holy!’ without company, as I have done In this.”

Wesley’s last record of his sister is inexpressibly, if unconsciously, touching: “1750, March 5. I prayed by my sister Wright, a gracious, tender, trembling soul; a bruised reed, which the Lord will not break. I had sweet fellowship with her in explaining at the chapel those solemn words: ‘Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself; for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.’”

Let there be set against the background of that record the picture of the high-spirited, bright-witted girl, the sunshine and the pride of the rectory before she was stained by shame or broken by human cruelty, and what a pathetic chapter in the history of the Wesley family becomes visible!

Another datighter, Martha, had a fate almost as cruel as that of Hetty, though, in her case, there was no personal fault to add gall to it. Martha was married to one of Wesley’s Oxford comrades, Westley Hall, a clergj’- man, a man of good family, but whose character had in it unsuspected depths of vileness. Adam Clarke sums up his history: “He was,” he says, “a curate in the Church of England, who became a Moravian, a Quietist, a Deist (if not an Atheist), and a Polygamist, which last he defended in his teaching and illustrated by his practice.” Hall fell in love with Keziah Wesley, and announced that it had been revealed to him that he must marry her. His affection — and his revelations — however, were of a very transferable quality. He presently cast his evil eyes on Martha, and reported a further revelation that he must marry her. The neglected Keziah died broken-hearted; upon Martha fell what proved to be the worse fate of marrying Hall.

Hall had a genius for sustained deceit and for cruelty, which almost suggests diabolical possession. Patty, as a girl, was the most frolicsome of the whole Epworth group. “You will all be more serious some day,” said the wise mother, looking at her laughing children with prophetic eyes. “Shall / be more serious, mum?” asked Patty. “No,” said the mother with a smile. Nothing, she thought, could cloud the bright spirit of that girl! And yet this merriest of girls had to wade through black floods of suffering. She developed a gentle and heroic patience which outshone that of Tennyson’s Griselda. She covered her vile husband’s faults, nursed his mistresses, took into pitying arms his illegitimate children, clung to him with heroic fidelity. When her worthless husband, years afterwards, died, almost his last words were, “I have injured an angel, an angel that never reproached me.”

And yet his wronged wife’s heroic meekness did not represent any want of either courage or strength. She kept her intellect bright, wore a serene face amid all troubles, and by the sheer charm of her mental qualities became one of Dr. Johnson’s most intimate and valued companions. “Evil,” she once said, “was not kept from me, but evil has been kept from harming me.” If her life was a tragedy, her death was marked by a strange peace. Just before she died, her niece asked her if she were in pain? “No,” she said, “but a new feeling. I have the assurance which I have long prayed for. Shout!” she whispered eagerly, and so she died. It would be difficult to find in the records of womanhood another example of a spirit so sorely tried, yet so serenely heroic, as that of Patty Wesley.

Yet another of the Wesley girls, Susanna, wrecked her happiness in marriage. She had the misfortune to choose a husband so atrocious in character that she was compelled to leave him. Marriage for the Wesley household was a curiously perilous experiment. All these tragedies, however, lay as yet, unguessed, in the vague and distant future.