John Wesley's Political World (Routledge Methodist Studies Series) [1 ed.] 1032111488, 9781032111483

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John Wesley’s Political World

This book employs a global history approach to John Wesley’s (1703–​1791) political and social tracts. It stresses the personal element in Wesley’s political thought, focusing on the twin themes of ‘liberty and loyalty’. Wesley’s political writings reflect on the impact of global conflicts on Britain and provide insight into the political responses of the broader religious world of the eighteenth century. They cover such topics as the nature and origin of political power, economy, taxes, trade, opposition to slavery and to smuggling, British rule in Ireland, relaxation of anti-​Catholic Acts, and the American Revolution. Glen O’Brien argues that Wesley’s political foundations were less theological than they were social and personal. Political engagement was exercised as part of a social contract held together by a compact of trust. The book contributes to eighteenth-​ century religious history, and to Wesley Studies in particular, through a fresh engagement with primary sources and recent secondary literature in order to place Wesley’s writings in their global political context. Glen O’Brien is Research Coordinator at Eva Burrows College within the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. He is a Research Fellow of the Australasian Centre for Wesleyan Research and an Honorary Fellow of the Manchester Wesley Research Centre, UK.

Routledge Methodist Studies Series Series Editor: William Gibson, Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University, UK Methodism remains one of the largest denominations in the USA and is growing in South America, Africa, and Asia (especially in Korea and China). This series spans Methodist history and theology, exploring its success as a movement historically and in its global expansion. Books in the series will look particularly at features within Methodism which attract wide interest, including: the unique position of the Wesleys; the prominent role of women and minorities in Methodism; the interaction between Methodism and politics; the ‘Methodist conscience’ and its motivation for temperance and pacifist movements; the wide range of Pentecostal, holiness, and evangelical movements; and the interaction of Methodism with different cultures. Editorial Board: Ted A. Campbell, Professor of Church History, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, USA David N. Hempton, Dean, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, USA Priscilla Pope-​Levison, Associate Dean, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, USA Martin Wellings, Superintendent Minister of Oxford Methodist Circuit and Past President of the World Methodist Historical Society, UK Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, Professor of Worship, Boston University, USA The Monastic Footprint in Post-Reformation Movements The Cloister of the Soul Kenneth C. Carveley Anglican–​Methodist Ecumenism The Search for Church Unity, 1920–​2020 Edited by Jane Platt and Martin Wellings Henry Foxall’s Journals, 1816–​1817 Transatlantic Methodism in Transition Jane Donovan John Wesley’s Political World Glen O’Brien For more information and a full list of titles in the series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​relig​ion/​ser​ies/​AMET​HOD

John Wesley’s Political World Glen O’Brien

First published 2023 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Glen O’Brien The right of Glen O’Brien to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​11148-​3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​13069-​9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​22749-​6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003227496 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

For the Reverend Professor Robert Gribben Uniting Church minister and Methodist ecumenist

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1 Introduction: Liberty and Loyalty in the Atlantic World

viii x 1

2 The Divine Right of Rulers

22

3 Resisting the Patriot Mob

45

4 The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade

73

5 The Work of God in North America

109

6 The State of the Nation and Its People

148

7 Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order

170

8 Conclusion: Politics as a Subset of the Drama of Salvation

200

Index

211

Acknowledgements

There are so many people to be grateful for in the process of writing any book. It is impossible to take note of everyone who deserves mention, but important to try. First, I thank my family, my wife Lynda, and my children, Sarah, Jesse, Sophie, and Ellen for always cheering me on, in what must seem to them to be a rather arcane pursuit. My colleagues in the University of Divinity have provided a richly ecumenical research culture in which to work. Special thanks to Liz Boase, Wendy Mayer, John McDowell, and Suman Kashyap for their outstanding work in the research office. History and theology colleagues, including Peter Sherlock, Katharine Massam, Kerrie Handasyde, Max Vodola, Lisa Agaiby, Geoff Thompson, John Capper, and Frank Rees have offered warm collegiality, advice, and support. The Salvation Army offered me life-​changing opportunities in academic roles at Booth College (Sydney) and Eva Burrows College (Melbourne) for which I will always be grateful. Various line managers and Heads of College at Booth College and Eva Burrows College have been generous in making time and funding available for research, especially more recently, Terry Grey and Deborah Robinson. Arseny Ermakov has been a constant encourager, as have many other faculty colleagues including Adam Couchman, Christine Unicomb, Grant Sandercock-​Brown, and Emma Moore. Robert Gribben, to whom the book is gratefully dedicated, has been the foremost of many in the Uniting Church in Australia who have encouraged me to keep writing about John Wesley. The book was greatly assisted by a six-​week residency as Visiting Research Fellow at the Manchester Wesley Research Centre in 2015, as well as month-​ long periods as a visiting scholar at The Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University (2014), The Wesley Summer Seminar at Asbury Theological Seminary, Kentucky (2013), and The Centre for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition at Duke Divinity School, North Carolina (2011). I was warmly hosted in all these wonderful places by many people, but I would particularly like to acknowledge Geordan Hammond, Howard Snyder, Stephen Wright, Heidi Wright, Peter Forsaith, William Gibson, Kenneth Collins, Randy Maddox, and Russell Richey. Gareth Lloyd and the staff at The John Rylands Library, Manchester, gave me outstanding

Acknowledgements  ix assistance as did librarians and archivists in all these places. Jenny Barrs and Robin McComiskey at Queen’s College, University of Melbourne helped me with access to the treasures of the Sugden Heritage Collections. Susan Clarke and Robyn Fagan at Eva Burrows Library greatly assisted by offering a supportive and professional workspace. I thank Sarah Bacaller for compiling the index, the peer reviewers of this work for offering valuable comment, the editorial team at Routledge, and the Editorial Board of the Routledge Methodist Studies series for welcoming this book.

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Abbreviations

CECB

H.T. Dickinson, ed. A Companion to Eighteenth-​ Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) CHC Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett, eds. The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 7, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660–​ 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Journal (Curnock) Nehemiah Curnock, ed. The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley. 8 volumes (London: Epworth Press, 1938) Letters (Telford) John Telford, ed. The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., 8 volumes (London: Epworth Press, 1931) Works (Jackson) Thomas Jackson, ed. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., 14 volumes (London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1872; reprinted Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979) Published volumes in the critical edition of The Works of John Wesley have been used throughout, but since the volumes have multiple editors, an abbreviation for the series has not been used.

1 Introduction Liberty and Loyalty in the Atlantic World

I am no politician; politics lie quite out of my province. Neither have I any acquaintance, at least no intimacy with any that bear that character. And it is no easy matter to form any judgment concerning things of so complicated a nature.1

John Wesley’s disclaimer, written in 1768 as he was about to pontificate on ‘the Present State of Public Affairs’, belies the fact that he produced a considerable number of political tracts and treatises. Indeed, he produced enough work to justify the dedication of a forthcoming volume 15 in the critical edition of The Works of John Wesley, dedicated to Domestic, Moral, Political, and Economic Writings.2 When it appears, this will add to our store of knowledge, but in the meantime there is a gap in the existing literature on the subject. All of the important political tracts are found in volume 11 of the so-​called ‘Jackson’ edition of Wesley’s Works and eighteenth-​century editions of the tracts, along with the many published responses to them, are also available in online collections. Australian scholar, Graham Maddox, in The Political Writings of John Wesley, provided a brief introductory essay and a set of useful, though not very detailed, notes on a selection of the major political tracts.3 For this study, I have consulted the earliest editions of Wesley’s political tracts available in the John Rylands Library, though I have updated antiquated punctuation styles when quoting eighteenth-​ century sources. Since these sources are not yet available in the critical edition of the Works, I have also provided page numbers to the ‘Jackson’ edition of the Works, many readers only having access to this edition. I have only relied on the Jackson edition, the Telford edition of the Letters, and the Curnock edition of the Journal in the absence of material available in the critical edition.4

Wesley’s Political Philosophy Wesley’s concern for the poor, his defence of liberty, his admiration for the common sense of the ordinary person, and his stress on religious societies dedicated to self-​improvement, might suggest Whig politics. He was DOI: 10.4324/9781003227496-1

2 Introduction in fact, as is well known, a political conservative, passionately committed to the principle of submission to the divinely instituted authority of the crown.5 However, his views of divine right were of a particular kind and it is important to distance ourselves from the present meanings of such terms as ‘conservative’ or ‘Tory’ in order to understand Wesley’s own immediate historical context.6 Wesley was a constitutional loyalist with a deep-​ seated aversion to radical revolution, but he had an ‘amended’ Toryism that was informed by his deep Christian commitment to the poor and what he considered to be their rights under the crown, as well as by a view of the constitutional arrangements established under the Hanoverian monarchy as the surest safeguard of civil and religious liberty. Jason Vickers has set out a very helpful survey of the changing views of Wesley’s political philosophy, from those like Maldwyn Edwards and William Warren Sweet, who saw him as a high church Tory, to those like Bernard Semmel and Leon E. Hynson who saw him, after a second-​stage development in his thinking, as a Whiggish champion of liberty.7 For his own part, Vickers argues for an essential unity to Wesley’s political thought based on what he calls ‘covenantal Arminianism’.8 David Hempton preferred to emphasise ‘principle’, rather than ‘party’, as the key to Wesley’s political philosophy. It was the principle of natural rights and human liberty that was most securely preserved under the Hanoverian dynasty and it was this principle, rather than the idea of divine right, that led Wesley to insist on ‘honouring the king’.9 Theodore Jennings also stresses Wesley’s commitment to principles over party, in portraying him as a champion of human rights, and even as a forerunner to liberation theology.10 Both Theodore Weber and Jason Vickers have convincingly shown that Wesley held a ‘constitutional Toryism’ that supported the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the true beginning of English liberty and made room for the checks and balances placed on the power of the crown by Parliament.11 For Weber, Wesley was an ‘organic constitutionalist’, who stood not in the tradition of individual liberty so much as in the tradition that ran from Richard Hooker to Edmund Burke, of asserting an organic unity between the crown, the Parliament and the people.12 Weber is perhaps the strongest in understanding the complexity of the relationship between the British monarchy and the Church, which is crucial to understanding Wesley’s political theology. Ryan N. Danker has explored Wesley in the context of Anglican ecclesiastical politics, and, in a forthcoming volume, will consider Wesley in the broader political, economic, scientific, intellectual, and social contexts of eighteenth-​century Britain.13 The secondary literature on the period is voluminous and I have been especially helped by those writers who have focused upon the intersection of religion and politics, including David Hempton, J.C.D. Clark, and W. Reginald Ward. Pamela Edwards sees the political philosophy of the eighteenth century changing in three main ways.14 First, it developed as an extension of the debate over human nature so that politics and empiricism came together to consider the nature of the person as an acting, feeling,

Introduction  3 thinking, social being. Second, this discussion took place in terms of a civil discourse over ‘contract’. What were the obligations that existed or ought to exist between a government and its people? Finally, with the creation of Great Britain in 1707, a British national identity emerged, as distinct from a more narrowly English one. Wesley’s political tracts reflect each of these changes, although Wesley is often more parochially ‘English’ in his sentiment. His political tracts are just that, political, not primarily theological, albeit like all his many and varied reflections on the universe, built on a set of theological convictions. They are profoundly social and personal in delineating the obligations of trust that are to exist between the king, the Parliament, and the people. They consistently reject, however, on both historical and pragmatic grounds, John Locke’s social contract theory, with its idea that nations govern only by the consent of the governed.15 Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690) rejected the idea advanced in Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), that the king held a power derived from God to watch over his subjects, as a loving father watches over his children. Locke did not reject the idea that government had a theological foundation, but he linked divine law with natural law to describe an original state of nature in which human beings held certain natural rights, including the right to life, liberty, and property. These were considered gifts of God and hence inalienable. While Locke never argued for the abolition of the monarchy, he did locate sovereignty among the people who offered their consent to be governed by the rule of law. In the extreme circumstance in which this social contract was broken by a tyrant, the people had a right to resist and demand a restoration of the original terms of the contract. Trust between the people and the government was the glue that held this social contract together. Though this model is based on the personal element of ‘trust’, we will see that Wesley’s own political philosophy (if it could be called that), places ‘loyalty’ at the centre of the social contract –​loyalty to God, to the king, to the Parliament, and to that ancient constitution which was the surest guarantee of the people’s liberty. Wesley did not believe the king could act independently of this constitutional arrangement. Loyalty to the king meant loyalty to the ‘king-​in-​Parliament’. Stephen J. Plant has identified ‘liberty and order’ as one of the two ‘base pairs’ of the ‘Methodist genome’ derived from Wesley, along with ‘evangelism and social holiness’, with the latter taking precedence over the former.16 This book accepts the ordering of priority but suggests ‘liberty and loyalty’, rather than ‘liberty and order’, as reflecting the more personal and experiential approach in Wesley’s social and political thought. Wesley would have accepted every point of what Dickinson considers the viewpoint of most eighteenth-​century people, that ‘Britain possessed an ancient, prescriptive constitution; that liberty and stability were secured by Britain’s mixed government and balanced constitution; that the sovereign authority in the state was the combined Legislature of Crown, Lords

4 Introduction and Commons; and that all British subjects possessed the right to justice in the rule of law, and freedom of conscience and expression, but that only a minority deserved the franchise’.17 Three different ideas about the origins of the British constitution (understood as a tradition more than a document) were in place during the long eighteenth century (1688–​1815) –​divine right, original contract (government by consent of the governed) and ancient constitution (the most widespread view). The idea that the authority of monarchs was limited was traced back to the Norman Conquest of 1066. Most of those involved in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 appealed to this ‘ancient constitution’ for the legitimacy of their actions in deposing James II. Wesley consistently took this approach in arguing that the present constitutional arrangement, with its mix of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, secured the benefits of all three of its elements, while avoiding their respective weaknesses. In insisting that this system needed protection against any radical measure to replace it with a more democratic model, he was taking a fairly mainstream position. The terms, ‘Protestant, maritime, commercial, and free’ have emerged as a helpful quadrilateral in defining the British empire during this period.18 With the exception of a single return journey to Georgia and frequent trips across the Irish Sea, Wesley was not nearly as ‘maritime’ a figure as his friend George Whitefield.19 He assumed the greatness of Britain as an Atlantic power, though did not consider its economic prosperity or commercial dominance to be things of ultimate value. Each of the areas that emerge in this study of Wesley’s political tracts, such as trade, commerce, slavery, anti-​Catholicism, disputes over civil and religious liberty, and the American Revolution, form crucial aspects of his political rhetoric, with its two overarching themes of ‘liberty’ and ‘loyalty’, and this book is built around these two mutually supporting themes in Wesley’s political thought. The notion of liberty was a significant theme in the mentalities that dominated the Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century. Wesley understood natural liberty as a divine gift and that, though every person is born free, the protection and maintenance of civil and religious liberty is the responsibility of the state. The surest and safest way to maintain liberty was through loyalty to the crown. Just as natural liberty was a gift of God, so the throne of England was God’s gift; an anointed and benevolent monarch had been bestowed upon a grateful people. Within such a system, armed rebellion against the crown, such as took place in the American colonies and also threatened the home country itself, was an unthinkable horror. Often depicted as an innovator in church life, with his field preaching, class meetings, and delivery of the gospel to the masses, in respect to politics John Wesley was not a revolutionary figure. The moral and spiritual reform of the nation were among his most deeply held passions, but he was not a political reformer in any sense. He saw no need to reform the political system of constitutional monarchy that had been put in place in the Glorious Revolution, since he believed that its finely tuned balance of power

Introduction  5 between king, Parliament, and people needed only to be preserved in order for genuine liberty to prevail.

A Global History This book differs from much existing work on Wesley’s political writings in that it seeks to situate his work historically more than theologically, taking a ‘transnational’ or ‘global history’ approach.20 This differs from ‘international history’ approaches, which tend to deal with the history of diplomatic relations between countries (foreign policy), and focuses instead on the cultural and social features of international relations.21 According to Olstein, global history ‘adopts the interconnected world created by the process of globalization as its larger unit of analysis, providing the ultimate context for the analysis of any historical entity, phenomenon, or process’.22 Themes covered by global history in its attempt to connect the ‘local’ with the ‘global’ have included race relations, colonisation, economic forces, migration, and human rights. A good example is Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ Drawing the Global Colour Line, which examined the ‘White Australia’ policy in the context of other race-​based immigration policies, showing that Australia’s approach was not greatly different from other countries in the British dominions.23 Religion is an area of study that lends itself well to a global history approach because religious movements always depend upon transnational networks of piety for their spread and consolidation. W.R. Ward claimed that ‘the first great Protestant awakenings arose from an interweaving of pietism, revivalism, and politics’.24 This is certainly borne out by this study of Wesley’s political writings, which reflect on the impact of global conflicts on Britain itself and provide insights into the political responses of the broader religious world of the eighteenth century. It was during the long eighteenth century that Britain became a great European power. This came through a combination of its participation in global wars, the creation of a modern financial system (the Bank of England was founded in 1694), industrial innovation and growth, and a series of monarchs (especially in the case of George III) who insisted on taking an active role in foreign affairs in partnership with Parliament. The major global conflicts of the century have been called collectively ‘the Second Hundred Years War’ and included the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–​1713), The Anglo–​Spanish War/​War of the Austrian Succession (1740–​1748), the Seven Years’ War (1756–​1763), the War of American Independence (1775–​ 1783), and the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793–​ 1815). All of this preparation and demobilisation from one war to the next was an expensive business but it transformed Britain’s geopolitical position from a rather insular and provincial kingdom perched on the edge of Europe to a leading global power. The Dutch prince, William of Orange, reigned in Britain as William III from 1689–​1702, establishing a long-​held anti-​French policy, one expression

6 Introduction of which was the Nine Years’ War (1689–​1697). Often considered the first ‘global war’, as it pitted France against a coalition of European powers that included Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, and Britain, its theatres of conflict were as widely spread as Europe, Ireland, North America, and India.25 Britain’s participation in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–​1713) was an attempt to prevent a union of the kingdoms of France and Spain. Queen Anne died in 1714 without an heir and the rush was on to ensure the continuation of a Protestant successor, which would be provided in the Hanoverian succession. The Jacobite uprising of 1715 was a threat to the throne of George I (1714–​1727) who sought alliances with the Dutch and the Austrians. Under George II (1727–​1760), the government of Robert Walpole (from 1721–​1742) occurred within a lengthy period of détente with the French. Though Walpole managed to keep Britain out of the War of the Polish Succession (1733–​1738) (against the wishes of George II and some of his Parliamentary colleagues), Britain was drawn into the War of the Austrian Succession in 1740 and once more declared war on France. After this, hostility toward the Bourbons became the centrepiece of British foreign policy, furthered under the Duke of Newcastle from 1757–​1762, as he attempted to revive and enlarge the Anglo–​Dutch ‘Grand Alliance’ with limited success. British and French aggression extended as far as India where the British East India Company, and the government itself, raised armies to protect its market share of prized commodities, such as tea, spices, and textiles, not only from France but also from the Mogul empire. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–​1763), the emergence of Russia and Prussia as significant European powers weakened British foreign policy and made diplomatic manoeuvring more complex. For one thing, the British defeat of the French in both India and Canada meant that the threat of French hegemony could no longer be used as effectively to secure alliances with other states. The American Revolution, upon which Wesley commented extensively, is now usually studied as a global war, understood as one phase of Britain’s war with France, as well as America’s first civil war. The French entered the war in 1778 on the side of the colonists, followed by Spain in 1779. After the loss of the American colonies, Britain signed a Triple Alliance with the Dutch and the Prussians, heralding an end to a period of isolationist politics and bringing it back into a European orbit. News of the French Revolution, beginning in 1789, was at first received with little alarm, since the descent of the French state into a weakness brought on by internal chaos only seemed to fulfil a long-​held British desire to see France finally disempowered. However, by 1793, with the radicals executing Louis XVI and William Pitt the Younger concerned to defend the Netherlands against French aggression, Britain was ready once again to enter the fray against its traditional enemy. This time, however, its role in continental warfare would be seen by other European powers as a more central and decisive one. Lord Grenville conceived a ‘Grand Alliance’ in 1798, which made

Introduction  7 subsidies and loans available to allied states in exchange for resistance to France. By 1807, this alliance was eclipsed by a Europe dominated by Napoleon’s imperial ambitions. The final defeat of France in 1814–​ 1815 only came after Britain committed astonishing amounts of money, supplies, and troops to support its allies, some of them new allies such as the Spanish who resisted Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula in 1808. The cost was high, but it had brought Britain squarely into the European sphere where it was influential in brokering a peace at the Congress of Vienna (1814–​1815) that followed the outline of its own foreign policy interests. At the end of the long eighteenth century, Britain had reached a high point in its rise to greatness as a European power which would only accelerate into the nineteenth century.

Global Evangelicalism In addition to an understanding of the global nature of Britain’s military conflicts as contributing to its development as a world power, there is a clear trend in the study of the origins of evangelicalism to stress its international dimensions. Britain and America were by no means isolated from the events in central Europe that gave rise to new religious minorities which were focused on personal spiritual renewal, partly as a means of resisting absorption by church and state. As David Hempton observed, ‘Religious identities in the British Isles are not as hermetically sealed as they first appear’ and it is in the ‘tangled web of circulating literature, itinerant revivalists and folk migrations’ of the displaced and persecuted minorities of Habsburg-​dominated central Europe that the international shape of the great awakening is to be found.26 Similarly, W.R. Ward insisted that eighteenth-​century revivalism ‘can only be understood in the widest possible area “between the Russian and American frontiers of the European world” ’.27 That is a very large amount of territory indeed. If ‘evangelicalism’, as Ward maintained, is simply Anglo-​Saxon parlance for ‘Pietism’, then Methodism, emerging as it did largely as a result of such international networks of piety, cannot be understood apart from this global context.28 There has been a tendency in the historical writing on revivals to use the term ‘great awakening’ for the American context and ‘evangelical revival’ for the British context, but the use of separate nomenclature tends to obscure the international nature of the movement. The term ‘transatlantic’ also has its limitations because it refers rather narrowly to Britain on one side of the oceanic divide and America on the other, while the global dimensions of religious revival make the story far more complex than that. Britain and America were overwhelmingly Anglo and Anglo–​Celtic in the eighteenth century, yet both were also sites of significant non-​Anglo people and cultures. Lutherans were expelled from the Catholic diocese of Salzburg in 1731 and Wesley met and was inspired by them in Georgia. Huguenots had been displaced from the German Palatinate during the War of the

8 Introduction Spanish Succession; Anglican Evangelicals from Huguenot backgrounds included William Romaine and Charles Edward de Coetlogon. Both Vincent Perronet and John Fletcher, Anglicans who supported Methodism, were Swiss Protestants.29 The rise of Methodism is inexplicable without reference to European diaspora populations in Britain and America, including Moravians, Palatines, Huguenots, and Swedes. Wesley was connected to the leaders of these movements and his contacts open up insights into the complex web of international networks that created the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century.30 Taking a ‘long eighteenth century’ view allows us to see the early nineteenth-​century missionary expansion into the Southern World as filling out the story of the global religious revival of this period even further.31 Wesley carefully examined life and conditions in West Africa in his Thoughts upon Slavery (1774), an investigation driven by his polemic against the slave trade.32 He showed surprisingly little interest, however, in the Pacific voyages of James Cook, whose account of Tahiti he could barely credit as believable.33 In spite of such incredulity on Wesley’s part, Cook’s journeys would open up new vistas of Methodist expansion in the succeeding century. Methodist religion did not merely have a ‘transatlantic’ dimension, it had a truly global reach. Mark Noll has claimed that John Wesley took a ‘specifically biblical approach’ to the American Revolution, which Noll saw as strangely out of step with loyalist rhetoric and more in keeping with Whig politics.34 However, Wesley rarely appealed to the Bible in setting out his case in support of the king and the Parliament. One may assume that biblical principles, such as the submission to God-​instituted authority urged upon believers by Paul in Romans 13:1–​7, lie behind Wesley’s political conservatism, and he does characteristically end his political tracts with an appeal to the sovereign God who rules the world with wisdom and with a call to repentance before the inevitable judgement arrives. These are, of course, biblical themes but the arguments themselves are based more on political theory and on notions of natural law than on explicitly theological grounds. The absence of explicitly biblical material in Wesley’s political tracts does not mean, however, that there was no theology at all behind Wesley’s politics. Jason Vickers has argued that in the eighteenth-​century context of a ‘confessional state’, Wesley’s ecclesiastical, political, and theological commitments are ‘interrelated, mutually enforcing and generally of a piece with each other’, so that, in interpreting Wesley, every political statement must be ‘monitored… for its theological and ecclesiastical implications’.35 Certainly, for Wesley, human liberty is derived from the natural image of God bestowed at creation rather than from any contingent political condition.36 This would be but one of many possible examples of the way in which Wesley’s political statements are underpinned by theological convictions, notwithstanding the frequent absence of explicit appeals to the Bible.

Introduction  9

Wesley’s Social and Political Tracts Though Wesley’s response to the American Revolution is the most widely known aspect of his political convictions and will be dealt with at length in this book, there is a much wider set of concerns to analyse. Wesley responded to the failed Jacobite uprising of 1745 in his Word in Season or Advice to an Englishman (1745).37 Themes emerge in that early foray into political discourse that will reoccur throughout his other writings, including English patriotism, support for the Hanoverian monarchs, and anti-​Catholicism. An examination of this tract gives an opportunity to consider the evolution of divine right ideology and the disputed question of Jacobite influence on the early John Wesley. Two further ‘Words’ from this early part of Wesley’s career, A Word in Season, or Advice to a Soldier (1745), and A Word to a Freeholder (1747) underscore the personal morality that Wesley always advocated in response to matters of social concern.38 He did not typically call for collective action to address social evils so much as he urged an individual response, involving inward repentance and the reformation of one’s own life. Between 1768 and 1772, Wesley waded into the public discourse on liberty, prompted initially by the disturbances over the jailing of the radical member of Parliament, John Wilkes (1725–​1797). Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs (1768), Thoughts upon Liberty (1772), and Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power (1772) all belong to this period. In these he set out to define the civil and religious liberty already enjoyed by freeborn English subjects and challenged the belief that political agency was derived from ‘the people’.39 Though there is no sophisticated political theory in these tracts, they make it clear that Wesley was not simply a party-​political Tory (recognising, of course, that the term ‘party’ was a much looser term in the eighteenth century than today) so much as he was a defender of the constitutional arrangements set in place in 1688. Wesley’s opposition to the slave trade is well known and his Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) was one of the earliest non-​Quaker arguments against it.40 In it he set out his humanitarian argument against an institution that he saw as contrary to all humane sensibilities. For Wesley, no economic benefit could possibly compensate for what was, in principle a moral evil, supported and defended not only by human governments but also by unseen spiritual powers. The tract uses a natural law argument for the right of every human being to freedom, something to which they had as much right as the very air they breathed. Quite unusually for its time, it argued for the moral superiority of African Muslims over European Christians. His positive description of Muslim religious culture stands in stark contrast to the damning portraits of Islam that pervade today’s media space. The lurid descriptions of the horrors perpetrated on slaves, in their capture, transportation, and servitude on plantations, no doubt shocked and horrified the genteel readers of the

10 Introduction eighteenth-​century Atlantic world and contributed to galvanising the efforts of the newly emerging anti-​slavery movement. The American Revolution attracted the lion’s share of Wesley’s political ruminations and the Calm Address to Our American Colonies (1775) is probably the best known of his political tracts, although it is not a very original piece of work, having been borrowed from Samuel Johnson without the courtesy of crediting the source.41 The oft-​repeated claim that Methodists destroyed copies of the Calm Address when they reached America, in order to protect themselves from the charge of being loyalist, is built on very little evidence and perhaps gained credence because of its appearance in Robert Southey’s influential biography of Wesley.42 No copies of the first edition of the Calm Address could have been burned in America by Methodists or anybody else since none ever reached there. Wesley’s loyalist views did, however, become widely known in colonial newspapers and Wesley drew suspicion and ridicule from some for his loyalist stance. Methodists themselves could show embarrassment over their founder’s strongly worded political opinions. Bishop Francis Asbury, the most respected Methodist itinerant in America, was ‘truly sorry that the venerable man ever dipped into the politics of America’,43 and wrote to Jasper Winscom in 1788, ‘There is not a man in the world so obnoxious to the American politicians as our dear old Daddy, but no matter, we must treat him with all respect we can and that is due to him’.44 Wesley’s word to the rebels of North America to ‘fear God and honour the King’ lest they reap disaster, was not an unusual stance to take in the hotly contested world of eighteenth-​century rhetoric on liberty, but it was a stance from which Methodists would distance themselves on both sides of the Atlantic in the more politically reformist atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Earliest histories of the American Revolution tended to see things from the American perspective. A heroic interpretation of good men overthrowing tyrants eventually gave way to a Whig interpretation that stressed America’s destiny and the inevitability of historical progress. Early twentieth-​century historians soon put paid to what they considered such flights of fancy, leading to a variety of approaches, most focusing on the dimension of social struggle inherent in the events. By the late 1960s, Charles M. Andrews’ interpretation had come to dominate scholarship.45 In this view, the source of the conflict lay in the inability of the colonial assemblies to see themselves as subordinate to the British Parliament. The American legislatures thought of themselves as on equal footing with the House of Commons and equal in powers to the British Parliament. Needless to say, the Parliament did not see the authority of such upstart provincial assemblies in quite the same light. Bernard Bailyn argued persuasively that the American Revolution arose out of a perceived threat to British liberties, occasioned by malevolent forces within the British Parliament. Ironically, the only way to preserve the freedoms originally guaranteed by the crown was to throw off the shackles of a corrupt ministry and start again.46 Recent decades have included a focus

Introduction  11 on previously neglected participants in the revolutionary period, such as native Americans, slaves, and women.47 The international dimensions of the conflict need further exploration, though there have been some recent impressive approaches.48 In addition to the colonists seeing the British administration of the American colonies as a threat to hard-​ won English liberties, there was also what Mark Noll calls ‘a deep vein of religiously charged discourse’ consistently mined by colonists in their move toward independence.49 The connection between Christian theological convictions and the Whig conception of government was very strong, providing fertile soil for revolutionary ideas. Republican ideas flowed from religion into politics and not always the other way around, as is often supposed. As Noll notes, ‘Rather than a rhetoric of republican civic humanism spreading out into the religious backwaters of colonial society, the religious backwaters may have been rising to carry republicanism where its leading theorists had not intended it to go’50 Similarly, Nathan Hatch, in The Sacred Cause of Liberty, has argued that in the ‘civil millennialism’ of New England there existed a link between evangelical religion and the politics of liberty. ‘In picturing the struggle of liberty versus tyranny as nothing less than the conflict between heaven and hell, the clergy found their political commitments energized with the force of a divine imperative and their political goals translated into the very principles which would initiate the kingdom of God on earth’.51 In addition to the Calm Address, a number of other sermons and tracts on the American war will be considered here, including the charity sermon preached at Bethnall Green in 1775 to support widows in the early stage of the war, Some Observations on Liberty (1776) written in response to Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776),52 and the Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England (1777) in which Wesley’s anti-​American rhetoric reached its highest point.53 In An Estimate of the Manners of the Present Times (1782), British losses as the war drew to an end were put down to the English contempt for God, a spiritual attitude that could only lead to defeat in spite of a well-​appointed navy and experienced military leadership.54 Wesley had grown frustrated by the Parliament’s prosecution of the war in America and wished that George III would (like Louis XIV) take a stronger hand in ruling his own country rather than deferring to the Prime Minister.55 In the 1778 sermon Some Account of the Late Work of God in North-​ America, Wesley co-​opted both George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards for use in a historical narrative designed to legitimate Methodism as a genuine work of God as well as to extend his opposition to the democratic spirit that had led to the American Revolution.56 Wesley describes his own work in Georgia, and the awakening in Northampton reported in Edwards’ Faithful Narrative of a Surprising Work of God (1736), as though they were two parts of a continuous and converging stream. In so doing he smoothed over the historical complexities and continuities, rewriting history to serve

12 Introduction his own purposes. It is clear from this sermon that Wesley saw the American Revolution not simply in political terms. God had worked through it to teach the Americans a lesson. British Americans had been blessed by God under the crown. They had known revival in Georgia under both John and Charles Wesley and in Northampton under Edwards. The southern and northern colonies, Arminian and Calvinist, were linked together by George Whitefield, who made a phenomenally successful business out of revival and stood at the centre of what came to be known as ‘the Great Awakening’. But the Americans had grown fat in their prosperity, rebelling against their God and their pious king, George III. So, God had sent war, the ‘besom of destruction’, to reduce them once again to poverty. In this way they would return to their first love. Wesley’s principle source of information on the conduct of the war in America was Joseph Galloway (1731–​1803), a number of whose publications he abridged and published in 1780 and 1781.57 These are not discussed in this work in any detail but they are valuable as background to Wesley’s public stance in opposition to the war, his criticism of the administration’s handling of American affairs, and what he considered the strategic bungling of General Sir William Howe and his brother, the naval commander Admiral Richard Howe. A number of Wesley’s political tracts deal with issues of economy and trade and the impact of these upon the population. A Word to a Smuggler (1762) argued that it was better to starve than sin, a view that may seem to lack empathy for people who often relied on smuggled goods to supplement their meagre incomes.58 His Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions (1773) provides an interesting response to the impact on the poor of a downturn in economic conditions. In A Serious Address to the People of England, With Regard to the State of the Nation (1778) Wesley, in an attempt to encourage the populace, rejected claims that the country was facing financial ruin.59 Both these last tracts show that, while he was no economist, Wesley nonetheless understood the systemic impact of economic and trade practices on the general population. He had no objection to prosperous commercial enterprise (in fact he celebrated it as part of the strength of Protestant Britain’s maritime dominance of the Atlantic world) but he did argue against luxury among the wealthy, along with distilling, which he saw as the leading causes of inflation in prices, the rise in unemployment and the shortage of foodstuffs. His economic advice may have been naïve, but he did at least offer practical solutions designed to ease pressure on the poor, including placing an export tax on horses destined for French chaises and placing a ceiling on the cost of farm leases.60 Often remembered, with some justification, as a proto-​ecumenist and a voice for religious toleration (at least among Protestants) it remains the case that Wesley shared the anti-​Catholic sentiment of his age. Anti-​ Catholic writings surveyed here include A Word to a Protestant (1745), which catalogued the ‘errors’ of the Church of Rome, and Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749) which, though often deservedly set forth as a model

Introduction  13 of irenic discourse, nonetheless presupposes the superiority of Protestant belief.61 His Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland (1778), written partly to quell fears about the growing strength of Washington’s army, was written shortly before Wesley was caught up in the centre of anti-​ Catholic discourse, in the same year as the Catholic Relief Act but before the Appeal from the Protestant Association (1779) and the Gordon Riots of 1780.62 Its anti-​Catholic sentiment is not prominent, yet there is a subtle anti-​Catholicism operating as a sub-​text. The Irish population (predominantly Catholic) should trust in the security of the Protestant British military campaign under General Howe. His defence of Howe and his rejection of the republican cause in America, seen by many Irish as motivated by grievances similar to their own, had the effect of setting him, ‘against the Catholic community, and also against those Anglican and Presbyterian forces that wished to use the wartime embarrassments of the imperial government to free Ireland from at least some of the drawbacks of colonial status’.63 According to Wesley, no heed should be given to such ‘mock patriots’ who spoke of liberty through rebellion against the crown. Nor should any notice be taken of prophecies of doom coming from America to the effect that Washington’s army would soon appear on the coasts of Ireland supported by a Catholic French or Spanish naval force. The greatest security lay in making God one’s friend, a relationship that could be entered at the invitation of Methodist preachers, the effect of whose ministry was spreading further and further throughout the country. In Wesley’s ‘jeremiad in reverse’,64 a ‘compassionate’ voice addressed a restless Irish population and urged a passive submission to Protestant rule.

Taking Account of the Opposition Brett C. McInelly has investigated the manner in which eighteenth-​century Methodist self-​identity was formed in the context of public dispute, and contestation resolved through textual discourse of various kinds.65 McInelly’s work shows how Methodists responded to their many critics in such a way as to construct their own identity as a people.66 Wesley’s political tracts certainly drew many responses from both opponents and supporters and the amount of anti-​Methodist publications in the eighteenth century is voluminous, as evidenced by Clive Field’s extensive 1991 bibliography.67 It has been important in this work to survey a representative sample of the many negative published responses to Wesley’s political writings by his contemporaries (including Caleb Evans, Joseph Towers, and Arthur O’Leary). An examination of these responses can help provide a broader canvas against which to evaluate Wesley’s arguments so that they are not considered in isolation or insulated from alternative views. In considering Wesley’s political writings we should remember that, in eighteenth-​ century Britain, submission to divinely appointed systems of authority was expected and there was little encouragement to move upward

14 Introduction through the ‘ranks’ of society. Everyone was expected to know their place. The Methodist movement opened up a social, if not a political, revolution which gave large numbers of ordinary people a new type of agency based on a filial relationship with God through Jesus Christ. The person known and loved by God, and gifted with the Spirit of God, was not trapped in their circumstances, but, through temperate living, honesty, thrift, and industry, could make an impact on the world for their own and others’ good. This new world would flow into the nineteenth century, a century of both individual and collective action for representative democracy –​‘people power’ –​ and we live today on the other side of those revolutionary impulses. We might admire Wesley’s compassionate response to slavery, and his genuine concern and advocacy for the poor. At the same time his, often unquestioning, support of the king and his opposition to any resistance to rulers were features of his thought that many Methodists would leave behind in the succeeding age of Chartist reforms and labour organisations. Enough was left, however, of Wesley’s submission to constituted authority to ensure that making room for both liberty and loyalty would prove a vexed question for nineteenth-​century Methodists on both sides of the Atlantic divide.

Notes 1 John Wesley, Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs, London, 1768; see also Works (Jackson) 11: 14. 2 ‘Volumes Planned’, in The Wesley Works Editorial Project https://​wes​ley-​works. org/​volu​mes-​plan​ned/​ (accessed 26 November 2021). 3 Graham Maddox, ed. Political Writings of John Wesley (Durham, NC: University of Durham, 1998). 4 Thomas Jackson, ed. The Works of the Rev John Wesley, 14 vols, 3rd ed. (London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1872; reprinted Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979); John Telford, ed. The Letters of the Rev John Wesley, 8 vols (London: Epworth Press, 1931); Nehemiah Curnock, ed. The Journal of the Rev John Wesley. 8 vols (London: Epworth Press, 1938). 5 Several scholars have taken it in hand to describe Wesley’s broad political philosophy. Theodore R. Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics (Nashville, TN: Kingswood, 2001); Leon Hynson, To Reform the Nation: Theological Foundations of Wesley’s Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Francis Asbury Press, 1984); Jason Vickers, Wesley: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 62–​71; Theodore W. Jennings, Good News to the Poor: John Wesley’s Evangelical Economics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990). 6 Maldwyn Edwards’ bald opening sentence, ‘Wesley was a Tory’ needs a good deal of qualification. Maldwyn Edwards, John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century: A Study of His Social and Political Influence (London: Epworth, 1955), 13. 7 Vickers, Guide for the Perplexed, 62–​71. 8 Vickers, Guide for the Perplexed, 108–​110. 9 David Hempton, Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Culture, 1750–​ 1900 (New York: Rutland Press 1996), 80–​82. 10 Jennings, Good News to the Poor, 200.

Introduction  15 11 Vickers, Guide for the Perplexed, 60–​82; Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation, 66–​68, 149–​151. 12 Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation, 30. 13 Ryan N. Danker, Wesley and the Anglicans: Political Division in Early Evangelicalism (Leicester/​Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016). 14 Pamela Edwards, ‘Political Ideas from Locke to Paine’, in CECB, 294, 294–​310. 15 David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 45. 16 Stephen J. Plant, ‘Methodism and Politics: Mapping the Political on the Methodist Genome’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism, eds. William Gibson, Peter Forsaith and Martin Wellings (Farnham, Surrey and Wilmington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 346–​350, 345–​363. 17 H.T. Dickinson, ‘The British Constitution’, in CECB, 12 (3–​18). 18 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 19 Stephen R. Berry, ‘Whitefield and the Atlantic’, in George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy, eds. Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 207–​223. 20 Though ­chapters 2–​5 of Weber’s Politics in the Order of Salvation offer a valuable historical treatment, his approach is that of the theological ethicist not the historian. He is ‘interested more in the theological and moral reasoning –​present, absent, or implied –​in Wesley’s political thought than in the details and impact of his political history’. Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation, 13–​14. Some of the material in the following sections of the chapter previously appeared in a published conference paper, Glen O’Brien ‘Liberty and Loyalty in the Long Eighteenth-​Century: A Global History Approach’, Aldersgate Papers 12 (2020). www.acwr.edu.au/​ald​ersg​ate-​pap​ers. There is also material reproduced, here and there in the present book, from ‘George Whitefield, John Wesley, and the Rhetoric of Liberty’, in New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment, eds. Brett C. McInelly and Paul E. Kerry (Vancouver: Fairley Dickinson University Press, 2018), 105–​128. 21 Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds. Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). The Journal of Global History was established in 2006 and is published by Cambridge University Press. Its first issue included a programmatic essay by Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History’, Journal of Global History 1 (2006): 3–​40. Whether or not ‘global history’ should be distinguished from ‘world history’ is a contested question. A helpful introduction to the latter is Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 22 Diego Olstein, Thinking History Globally (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 24. 23 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 24 W. Reginald Ward, ‘Evangelical Awakenings in the North Atlantic World’, in CHC, 7: 329 (329–​347).

16 Introduction 25 Its American phase, fought between British and French settlers, is often referred to as ‘King William’s War’. 26 David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 151. 27 W. Reginald Ward, ‘Power and Piety: The Origins of Religious Revival in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 63, no. 1 (1980): 231–​253, cited in Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​1850, 24. Hempton has noted elsewhere how it became clear to him that ‘any account of Methodism that failed to take into account its international dimensions was by definition incomplete, perhaps even dangerous’. David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 5. 28 Ward, ‘Evangelical Awakenings in the North Atlantic World’, in CHC, 7: 330. The classic work on the European origins of the Evangelical Awakening is Ward’s masterful treatment in W. Reginald Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 29 G.M. Ditchfield, ‘Methodism and the Evangelical Revival’, in CECB, 252. 30 Keith Robbins stresses the international dimensions of John Wesley’s circle of contacts but also the limitations of his cultural scope. Keith Robbins, ‘Methodism, Globalisation and John Wesley’, in Gibson, Forsaith and Wellings, Ashgate Research Companion, 199–​213. 31 Glen O’Brien and Hilary M. Carey, ‘Introduction: Methodism and the Southern World’, in Methodism in Australia: A History, eds. Glen O’Brien and Hilary M. Carey (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 1–​11. 32 John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (London, 1774). 33 John Wesley, journal entry, 17 December 1773, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 394–​395. 34 Glen O’Brien, ‘John Wesley’s Rebuke to the Rebels of British America: Revisiting the “Calm Address” ’, Methodist Review 4 (2012): 31–​ 55. Mark A. Noll, Christians in the American Revolution (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2006), 116. Noll’s helpful study is strong on Presbyterians and Congregationalists but provides a less detailed analysis of Methodism, considering it in his broader discussion of the Loyalist response. It is also somewhat dated, being a reprint of his dissertation first published in 1977. His later book America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) gives greater attention to Methodism. Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–​1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) is a solid treatment but focuses more on the internal culture of Methodism rather than the broader canvas of the transatlantic political world which is of interest here. 35 Vickers, Guide for the Perplexed, 108; Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation, 147–​149. 36 John Wesley, Sermon 60, ‘The General Deliverance’, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 2 Sermons II, 34–​70, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1985), 439. 37 John Wesley, A Word in Season: Or Advice to an Englishman (London, 1745).

Introduction  17 38 John Wesley, A Word in Season; Or Advice to a Soldier (London, 1745); John Wesley, A Word to a Freeholder (London, 1748). 39 John Wesley, Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1768); Thoughts upon Liberty by an Englishman (London, 1772); Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power (Bristol, 1772). 40 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (London, 1774). 41 John Wesley, A Calm Address to Our American Colonies (London, 1775). 42 Robert Southey, The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism, 2 vols, ed. Maurice Fitzgerald (London, 1925, first edition 1820), 2: 244. Riggs also makes this claim. David Riggs, ‘John Wesley and the American Revolution Reconsidered’, undated (c. 1976) typed manuscript, p. 3. Frank Baker Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Box 7. Riggs is citing T.W. Herbert, John Wesley as Editor and Author (Princeton, NJ, 1940), 106–​107. 43 Elmer T. Clark, The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, 3 vols, ed. Elmer T. Clark (London and Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1958), 1: 181. 44 Francis Asbury to Jasper Winscom, 15 August 1788, Clark, Journal and Letters, 3: 62. 45 Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1924). I have drawn the historiographical analysis from Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage 1970), 3–​13. 46 Bernard Bailyn, Origins of American Politics, 10–​58. See also Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/​Harvard University Press, 1992). 47 These participants are all discussed in Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–​1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Important studies of women’s experiences and contributions include Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–​1800 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996); Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage, 1997); Mary Beth Norton, Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2011). 48 Two examples of the more recent emphasis on global history are David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). 49 Noll, Christians in the American Revolution, 25–​27. 50 Noll, America’s God, 83. 51 Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Political Thought and the Millennium in Pre-​Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 4. 52 Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (London, 1776). 53 John Wesley, A Sermon Preached at St. Matthew’s, Bethnal-​Green, On Sunday, Nov. 12, 1775. For the Benefit of the Widows and Orphans of the Soldiers who

18 Introduction lately fell, near Boston in New England (London, 1775); Some Observations on Liberty, Occasioned by a Late Tract (London, 1776); A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England (London, 1777). 54 John Wesley, ‘An Estimate of the Manners of the Present Times’, in Works (Jackson) 11: 156–​164. 55 John Wesley to Charles Wesley, 4 April 1783, in Letters (Telford) 7: 173–​174. 56 John Wesley, Some Account of the Late Work of God in North-​America, in a Sermon on Ezekiel I.16 (London, 1778). 57 Joseph Galloway, Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion (London, 1780); An Account of the Conduct of the War in the Middle Colonies (London, 1780); An Extract of a Reply to the Observations of Lieut. Gen. Sir William Howe, on a Pamphlet Entitled Letters to a Nobleman (London, 1781), and An Extract of a Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount H[ow]e on his Naval Conduct in the American War (London, 1781). 58 John Wesley, A Word to a Smuggler (London, 1767). 59 John Wesley, A Serious Address to the People of England, with Regard to the State of the Nation (London, 1778); Works (Jackson) 11: 140–​149. 60 John Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions (London, 1773), 17–​20; Works (Jackson) 11: 57–​59. 61 John Wesley, A Word to a Protestant (London, 1745). 62 John Wesley, A Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland (Belfast, 1778). 63 W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, ‘Introduction’, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 18 Journal and Diaries I (1735–​1738), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1988), 78. 64 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 18: 78; The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), 85. 65 Brett C. McInelly, Textual Warfare and the Making of Methodism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 66 McInelly, Textual Warfare, 5. 67 Clive D. Field, ‘Anti-​Methodist Publications of the Eighteenth Century: A Revised Bibliography’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 73, no. 2 (Summer, 1991): 159–​ 280. Also, the supplement, Clive D. Field, ‘Anti-​ Methodist Publications of the Eighteenth Century: A Supplemental Bibliography’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 6 (2014): 154–​186. See also Donald Henry Kirkham, Outside Looking In: Early Methodism as Viewed by its Critics (Nashville, TN: New Room Books, 2019); Simon Lewis, Anti-​Methodism and Theological Controversy in Eighteenth-​Century England: The Struggle for True Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

References Andrews, Charles M. The Colonial Background of the American Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1924. Andrews, Dee E. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–​ 1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Introduction  19 Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Armitage, David. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Bailyn, Bernard. The Origins of American Politics. New York: Vintage, 1970. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/​Harvard University Press, 1992. Clark, Elmer T., ed. The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, 3 vols. London and Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1958. Danker, Ryan N. Wesley and the Anglicans: Political Division in Early Evangelicalism. Leicester/​Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016. Edwards, Maldwyn. John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century: A Study of His Social and Political Influence. London: Epworth, 1955. Field, Clive D. ‘Anti-​Methodist Publications of the Eighteenth Century: A Revised Bibliography’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 73, no. 2 (Summer, 1991): 159–​280. Field, Clive D. ‘Anti-​ Methodist Publications of the Eighteenth Century: A Supplemental Bibliography’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 6 (2014): 154–​186. Galloway, Joseph. Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion. London, 1780. Galloway, Joseph. An Account of the Conduct of the War in the Middle Colonies. London, 1780. Galloway, Joseph. An Extract of a Reply to the Observations of Lieut. Gen. Sir William Howe, on a Pamphlet Entitled Letters to a Nobleman. London, 1781. Galloway, Joseph. An Extract of a Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount H[ow]e on his Naval Conduct in the American War. London, 1781. Gibson, William, Peter Forsaith and Martin Wellings, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism. Farnham, Surrey and Wilmington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Hammond, Geordan and David Ceri Jones, eds. George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Hatch, Nathan O. The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Political Thought and the Millennium in Pre-​Revolutionary New England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Hempton, David. Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984. Hempton, David. Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Culture, 1750–​ 1900. New York: Rutland Press, 1996. Hempton, David. Methodism: Empire of the Spirit. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Hempton, David. Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Hynson, Leon. To Reform the Nation: Theological Foundations of Wesley’s Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Francis Asbury Press, 1984. Iriye, Akira. Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Jennings, Theodore W. Good News to the Poor: John Wesley’s Evangelical Economics. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990.

20 Introduction Kirkham, Donald Henry. Outside Looking In: Early Methodism as Viewed by its Critics. Nashville, TN: New Room Books, 2019. Lake, Marilyn and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lewis, Simon. Anti-​Methodism and Theological Controversy in Eighteenth-​Century England: The Struggle for True Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Maddox, Graham, ed. Political Writings of John Wesley. Durham, NC: University of Durham, 1998. Manning, Patrick. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Mazlish, Bruce and Ralph Buultjens, eds. Conceptualizing Global History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. McInelly, Brett C. Textual Warfare and the Making of Methodism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–​1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Noll, Mark A. Christians in the American Revolution. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2006. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–​1800. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. New York: Vintage, 1997. Norton, Mary Beth. Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2011. O’Brien, Glen. ‘John Wesley’s Rebuke to the Rebels of British America: Revisiting the “Calm Address”’, Methodist Review 4 (2012): 31–​55. O’Brien, Glen. ‘George Whitefield, John Wesley, and the Rhetoric of Liberty’. In New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment, edited by Brett C. McInelly and Paul E. Kerry, 105–​128. Vancouver: Fairley Dickinson University Press, 2018. O’Brien, Glen. ‘Liberty and Loyalty in the Long Eighteenth-​ Century: A Global History Approach’, Aldersgate Papers 12 (2020). www.acwr.edu.au/​ald​ersg​ate-​ pap​ers O’Brien, Glen and Hilary M. Carey, eds. Methodism in Australia: A History. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. O’Brien, Patrick K. ‘Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History’, Journal of Global History 1 (2006): 3–​40. Olstein, Diego. Thinking History Globally. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Outler, Albert C., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 2 Sermons II, 34–​70. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1985. Price, Richard. Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. London, 1776. Riggs, David. ‘John Wesley and the American Revolution Reconsidered’, undated (c. 1976) typed manuscript, 3. Frank Baker Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Box 7. Robbins, Keith. ‘Methodism, Globalisation and John Wesley’. In The Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism, edited by William Gibson, Peter

Introduction  21 Forsaith and Martin Wellings, 199–​ 213. Farnham, Surrey and Wilmington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Southey, Robert. The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism, 2 vols, edited by Maurice Fitzgerald. London, 1925. Vickers, Jason. Wesley: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: T&T Clark, 2009. Ward, W. Reginald. The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 18 Journal and Diaries I (1735–​1738). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1988. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995. Weber, Theodore R. Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics. Nashville, TN: Kingswood, 2001. Wesley, John. A Word in Season: Or Advice to an Englishman. London, 1745. Wesley, John. A Word in Season; Or Advice to a Soldier. London, 1745. Wesley, John. A Word to a Protestant. London 1745. Wesley, John. A Word to a Freeholder. London, 1748. Wesley, John. A Word to a Smuggler. London, 1767. Wesley, John. Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs in a letter to a Friend. London, 1768. Wesley, John. Thoughts upon Liberty by an Englishman. London, 1772. Wesley, John. Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power. Bristol, 1772. Wesley, John. Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions. London, 1773. Wesley, John. Thoughts upon Slavery. London, 1774. Wesley, John. A Calm Address to Our American Colonies. London, 1775. Wesley, John. A Sermon Preached at St. Matthew’s, Bethnal-​Green, On Sunday, Nov. 12, 1775. For the Benefit of the Widows and Orphans of the Soldiers who lately fell, near Boston in New England. London, 1775. Wesley, John. Some Observations on Liberty, Occasioned by a Late Tract. London, 1776 Wesley, John. A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England. London, 1777. Wesley, John. A Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland. Belfast, 1778. Wesley, John. Some Account of the Late Work of God in North-​America, in a Sermon on Ezekiel I.16. London, 1778. Wesley, John. A Serious Address to the People of England, with Regard to the State of the Nation. London, 1778.

2 The Divine Right of Rulers

Recent scholarship on political thought in the eighteenth century has stressed the religious foundations of political discourse rather than such ideas as utility and natural rights.1 Even political radicalism, rooted in Dissent, based the intellectual structure of its opposition to the established social and political order on theological, rather than social or economic, principles. The union between church and state was considered the main provider of social cohesion and the indispensable guardian both of public morality and benevolence. Such an idea belonged not only to high churchmen but was the widely held assumption of both governors and the governed through all strata of society.2 The Church of England permeated every aspect of society through its identification with the political, legal, and social institutions of the state. The concept of the divine right of regents, though appearing in various permutations over time, deeply penetrated popular consciousness in the Hanoverian era.3 It was in such a context, during the Jacobite uprising of 1745, that John Wesley first put pen to paper to express his political opinions. This chapter will consider Wesley’s earliest political pieces, including Word in Season or Advice to an Englishman (1745), Word in Season, or Advice to a Soldier (1745), and the electoral advice given in Word to a Freeholder (1747). These three ‘words’ introduce a number of themes that will reoccur throughout his later, more extended, political writings, including support for the Hanoverian succession, anti-​Catholicism, and the need for submission to all properly constituted authority. They provide an opportunity to discuss the Jacobite influences on Wesley and the nature of his eventual Toryism.

The Young Pretender Wesley wrote his Advice to an Englishman in 1745, at the time of the Jacobite rebellion when ‘the Young Pretender’, Charles Edward Stuart (1720–​1788) led an uprising in defence of his claim to the British throne.4 A rumour entirely without foundation had circulated in 1744 that Wesley had been seen in France with the Pretender.5 Such accusations and suspicions regarding Wesley’s supposed Jacobite sympathies were not uncommon at the time, and indeed, suspicions of Jacobite allegiance permeated English DOI: 10.4324/9781003227496-2

The Divine Right of Rulers  23 society during this entire period. Gathering Scottish highland clan leaders in Glenfinnan, the Young Pretender marched through Edinburgh to Carlisle, England, on 8 November with around six thousand troops eventually reaching as far as Derby.6 Since this took place during the War of the Austrian Succession, when many British troops were deployed on the Continent, there was considerable concern that the nation had been left undefended. Eventually the invading force was turned back to Scotland and defeated by the forces of the Duke of Cumberland, at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746. After eluding capture for several months, Charles eventually fled to France. Earlier, in 1744, he had attempted a French-​backed naval invasion which was thwarted by bad weather. Briefly in 1750, he converted to Protestantism at a secret ceremony in London, reasoning that he could never rule as a Roman Catholic, but would be willing to do so as a Protestant. This was a short-​lived desperate measure and he later returned to the Catholic fold. That at least some Methodists fought on both sides of the conflict of 1745 is evidenced by the case of Sergeant Dunbar, ‘one of Whitefield’s disciples’ who deserted a Hanoverian regiment to join the Jacobite forces at Falkirk and was later executed by Cumberland after the battle of Culloden. He walked to the gallows singing hymns, accompanied by ‘near a dozen Methodists of his own former regiment’. Though he ‘talked much of Jesus Christ, yet he died without acknowledging his treason and the justice of his punishment’.7 Historians have more recently come to emphasise the genuine threat that the ’45 represented to the Hanoverian dynasty. The level of support for the Stuarts was significant both at home and abroad so that, with the exception of the American war, it may be considered the greatest crisis to face Britain in the eighteenth century, though this judgement needs to be tempered by the fact that the ’45 was much smaller in scale than the earlier Jacobite uprising of 1715. The Whig version of history discounted the attempted rebellion as a fool’s errand, supported only by the dupes of foreign Catholic power. Revisionist accounts have stressed the strength of popular support for the movement, and how close the Jacobites came to an overthrow of the Hanoverians.8 There had been earlier Jacobite uprisings in Ireland and in the Scottish Highlands from 1689 to 1691 and these tend to be overshadowed by the events of 1715 and 1745, perhaps because they occurred on the Celtic peripheries without penetrating into England.9 One should keep them in mind, however, when considering the level of threat Jacobitism represented.10 No longer seen as a backward-​looking movement on the fringe of society, it has been reconceived by some as a potent opposition that was more progressive and enlightened than previously thought.11 Adjusting for percentage of population, Daniel Szechi has estimated that if the Jacobite uprisings had taken place in 2002, the Old Pretender would have fielded 250,000 and the Young Pretender 140,000 troops. ‘[N]‌o other ancien régime power, except perhaps Poland, faced anything like such a persistent, dynastic/​ideological challenge from dissident elements in its own population’.12

24  The Divine Right of Rulers John Wesley was in Newcastle in September 1745, where there was anticipation of a Jacobite invasion from the north, and wrote to the mayor of the city, Matthew Ridley, on 21 September pledging Methodist loyalty to George II.13 On 26 October he wrote again, this time offering himself free of charge as a chaplain to George Wade’s troops amassed there. After the Jacobite victory at Prestonpans, Newcastle was in a panic. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, a Scottish Whig refugee described the rich, not only of Newcastle, but also of Durham and York, sending their effects to Holland and Hamburg, and hiding their ‘silver plate, jewels, money and such like’ underground.14 On 4 October the gates of the medieval wall of the city were blocked and cannons were to be removed from ships on the Tyne and placed around the city for defence. Sentry boxes, sandbags, and palisades were all erected in preparation for an assault. Charles was indeed eager to march into Newcastle, believing that, having gained Scotland, a victory in the north of England, followed by a march on London, would threaten the capital from two directions, encouraging a French invasion across the Channel. However, after a council of war held on 30 October it was decided to avoid a direct confrontation with Field-​Marshal George Wade at Newcastle and march instead into Carlisle, where Jacobite support was strong.15 Wesley could not have known of this strategic change of direction, so his fear of an attack upon Newcastle was by no means misplaced. The Young Pretender had entered Edinburgh on 17 September to a cheering crowd of twenty thousand people. The besieged city of Carlisle surrendered by mid-​November and, by 29 November, Charles would enter triumphantly into Manchester, a Jacobite stronghold. The reflection of one volunteer, John Daniel, indicates the almost messianic appeal of the Young Pretender. The first time I saw this loyal army was betwixt Lancaster and Garstang: the brave prince marching on foot at their head like a Cyrus or a Trojan hero, drawing admiration and love from all those who beheld him, raising their long-​dejected hearts and solacing their minds with the prospect of another Golden Age. Struck with this charming sight, and seeming invitation leave your nets and follow me, I felt a paternal ardour pervade my veins.16 Charles’s army had made its furthest incursion into England as far as Derby, but a tactical decision was made on 5 December, proposed by Lord George Murray and accepted with great reluctance on the part of Charles, to retreat to Scotland rather than face three British armies being raised against it. There were in fact only two, as the threat of a third army turned out to be a ruse. It may well be argued that the decision to retreat was a bad one and that the Hanoverian military strength was much less than supposed. For Frank McLynn, ‘There was no serious doubt about the outcome of a battle between 4,000 of Cumberland’s exhausted soldiers and 5,500 eager Scots’.17 Certainly a dispatch from Charles Lennox, the duke of Richmond

The Divine Right of Rulers  25 to Thomas Pelham-​Holles, duke of Newcastle, on 5 December suggests that the English anticipated a fight. Lennox called for 10,000 more troops, ‘be they hessians, Hanoverians or devils’ so long as they would fight. ‘The whole kingdom is asleep. Our cavalry can’t be here before February and the Pretender may be crowned in Westminster by that time’.18 The retreat from Derby has been seen as a defining moment in British history, since the army of the Young Pretender had a good chance of winning and if it had followed its victory with an advance to London a very different kind of state would have been established –​Catholic, autocratic, and pro-​French.19 Charles had been promised support from France and was expecting reinforcements to arrive. Louis XV appointed Louis de Plessay, Duc de Richelieu, to command an invasion force and he arrived at Dunkirk on 17 December with 15,000 men. The weather was good, but Richelieu felt he had insufficient officers and artillery to launch the embarkation. Nonetheless, French troops continued to amass at Channel ports, reaching some 23,000 in number. Voltaire had written a pamphlet reassuring the English that they would be treated well during the French invasion and that the army would leave as soon as England’s rightful king was on the throne. Three thousand copies were planned for distribution to the people by Richelieu’s forces.20 British successes against French convoys in the Channel eventually turned back the planned invasion force but the situation remained uncertain, and Richelieu would not retreat from Dunkirk until 1 February 1746. In A Word to an Englishman (1745), Wesley exhorted his readers to remember, not only the present state of the nation but their own state before God in the face of the impending calamity of a successful French invasion. Popery and slavery would ensue, and the country would once again become a ‘field of blood’ as in the days of Queen Mary. How would the person of conscience escape persecution and death under Catholic rule? How would such a person respond to the dictate: ‘Either turn, or burn. Either go into that fire or into the fire that never shall be quenched’.21 He reminded those who may have cared little for their souls that, under a Catholic ruler, property and liberty would be no safer than conscience. ‘Nothing is plainer than that the Pretender cannot be King of England, unless it be by conquest. But every conqueror may do what he will. The laws of the land are no laws to him. And who can doubt, but one who should conquer England by the assistance of France, would copy after the French rules of Government?’22 In a passage that Thomas Jackson omitted from his edition of Wesley’s Works, Wesley expressed an opinion on the motives of Louis XV. Nay farther; think seriously with yourself; what does the king of France care for the Pretender? No more than he does for you or me. Is not his aim then plainly this? Just to keep him from sinking, till the English on both sides have cut one another in pieces. And then to pour in with a fresh army, and take the kingdom for himself.23

26  The Divine Right of Rulers After describing the nation as ‘on the brink of destruction’, Wesley identified the cause of the situation as such sins as sabbath-​breaking, thieving, lying, injustice, violence, oppression, sodomy, and murder, which he considered common not only to the English but also to their Dutch, French, and German neighbours. This is a common trope in all of Wesley’s political tracts, as indeed it was for most clergy who waded into political commentary. While not hesitating to offer his political views and comments on military strategy and the motives of the leaders of nations, he is always also a preacher and a moralist. He consistently urges a sound personal piety as the best response to the fluctuations of world affairs, and the absence of such piety as the underlying cause of national troubles. He was convinced that the English abounded more than their neighbours in a corrupt justice system, poor management of public charities, and ‘accomplished, bare-​faced wickedness’, in prisons, fleets, and armies. ‘Who in Europe can compare with the sloth, laziness, luxury and effeminacy of the English gentry?’ Add to this, drunkenness, cursing, perjury, and the ‘open and professed Deism and rejection of the Gospel, that public, avowed apostasy from the Christian faith’ on the part of the rich and the great, which had trickled down to the ordinary person, and it was little wonder that the nation was fit for destruction.24 Wesley saw the Jacobite invasion as an expression of God’s judgement upon such a sinful nation but warned that it was not too late to return in repentance and avert God’s wrath. Is there any better way to avert the feared evils ‘than the making God our Friend’?25 In another Word in Season, this time ‘to a Soldier’ (1745), Wesley reminded the king’s men facing Jacobite forces to be ready at a moment’s notice to die and enter into eternity. A soldier lives ‘in the very jaws of death’ and must go either to heaven or to hell.26 He pointed them to Christ as the one who could save not only from a future hell but from the present hell of a tortured conscience. As much as hell may have been designed for a soldier, so too was heaven, and, through repentance and faith, the soldier may secure his salvation.27 George Wade’s polyglot army made up, under treaty arrangements with the United Provinces, of Dutch, Swiss, and German troops, demoralised and in a miserable condition, showed little interest in Wesley’s preaching, though a few Germans seemed grateful to have him preach to them in their own tongue.28 The well trained and highly disciplined Hessian troops exhibited just the sort of qualities Wesley would have admired.29 Such preaching to a polyglot army underscores the transnational nature both of Britain’s military conflicts and of the evangelical revival. Wesley’s rejection of the Stuart claims was part of a larger view of history that saw ‘the struggle between Protestants and Catholics as one battle in the larger war between liberty and arbitrary power’.30 Wesley’s friend and fellow Methodist, George Whitefield, described the Jacobite invasion as backed by a ‘horrid plot first hatched in hell, and afterwards nursed at Rome’, designed to bring Britain into ‘vassalage to the see of Rome’.31 Such

The Divine Right of Rulers  27 views were typical of English Protestants who saw themselves as part of a global struggle to keep Catholicism at bay. To revert to Catholic rule would lead to the loss of both civil and religious liberty. Loyalty to a Protestant monarch, whose ‘sacred head’ was anointed by the Spirit of grace, was seen as an irreducible element in the securing of that liberty. Without discounting the strength of the Whig administration and the Hanoverian dynasty, Szechi points to chronic internal division among Jacobites as largely contributing to the eventual failure of their campaign. The restoration of the Stuart dynasty was the only thing the various factions in England, Scotland, Ireland, and on the Continent could agree upon. Their secondary ambitions were often incompatible, and their mutual ‘prejudices, suspicions, and jealousies’ were as much their undoing as the superior military strength of the Hanoverians.32

Wesley’s ‘Flirtation’ with Jacobitism Wesley had been suspected of Jacobite sympathies during his Oxford days and such accusations reappeared during the ’45. There remains dispute, however, over the idea that his earliest political views were influenced by Jacobite ideas. Wesley’s own immediate family was somewhat politically divided, as his father Samuel supported William of Orange and his mother Susanna supported the Stuart claims.33 On one occasion in the Epworth rectory, when Susanna refused to say ‘Amen’ to Samuel’s prayers for the king, Samuel grew outraged, declaring, ‘If we have two kings we must have two beds!’ and left the house to live in London for a season.34 Augustin Leger argued that it was Tory principles of divine right which led to Samuel Wesley leaving dissent to return to the Church of England and that ‘the memory of the Civil War hung over him as a specter’.35 In his Concise History of England, John Wesley even argued (unconvincingly, it must be said) that his father had written the speech on divine right and passive obedience that Henry Sacheverell (1674–​1724) gave at the time of his impeachment by the House of Commons in 1710.36 David Hempton echoes V.H.H. Green in describing Wesley as having ‘flirted with Jacobitism’ while at Oxford, and notes ‘the surprisingly Jacobite circles in which some of the early leaders of the evangelical revival were situated’.37 Henry Rack also notes some ‘flirtation’ but sees nothing remarkable in an attitude common to many young members of the university.38 Oxford was one of the centres of nonjuring activity and ‘its ancient loyalty to the Stuart cause had found new vigour in the aftermath of the 1714 uprising’.39 Wesley’s fellow Oxford Methodist, John Clayton hailed from Manchester, a centre of Jacobite support, and was an influence on Wesley’s reading habits.40 While at Oxford, John Wesley was friends with known Jacobites, such as John Byrom and Thomas Deacon, and read writers such as John Jackson, John Norris (a particular favourite), and William Higden, who argued the case for passive submission to the Church and the crown

28  The Divine Right of Rulers as divinely instituted bodies.41 Such sentiments, however, did not necessitate an ideological commitment to Jacobitism. All Tories supported some version of divine right ideology (as indeed did most Whigs) but they were not all Jacobites. A more clearly Jacobite writer admired by Wesley was Charles Leslie (1650–​1722), an Irish Nonjuror who had spent time abroad with the Stuarts.42 Wesley’s University sermon in June 1734 was reported by Luke Tyerman to have drawn charges of Jacobitism from Whig-​dominated colleges but there seems to be little basis for such accusations.43 Wesley was certainly shaped by the liturgical and sacramental practices of the ‘Nonjurors’, those Anglican clergy who, out of support for the deposed Stuart monarchy, had refused to sign the Oath of Allegiance and Oath of Supremacy to William and Mary.44 But emulating the spirituality of the Nonjurors did not make Wesley a Nonjuror. This is clear when we consider that, by definition, a Nonjuror was one who refused to take the oath of allegiance to a Hanoverian king in deference to the Stuart line, a stance Wesley never took. There is, however, a sense in which Wesley and the Nonjurors had a shared outlook. According to Paul Monod, ‘The Nonjurors saw divinely sanctioned authority as the only safeguard for preserving the moral order of society, which reflected in microcosm the order of the universe… rule by the people would lead to the confusion of good and evil, the dissolution of fixed meanings and properties, the disintegration of society’.45 Wesley would later follow exactly this same line in resisting the republican voices of his own time. Bernard Semmel’s suggestion, that Wesley had been a Jacobite until the 1745 rebellion had made such a position no longer tenable, is soundly rejected by Ted Weber as wholly ‘without foundation’.46 That Weber’s analysis has not put the older view entirely to rest, however, is clear from the conviction of as eminent an authority as Reginald Ward that Wesley ‘was born into a rabidly Tory circle [and] kept up Jacobite sentiment far down the eighteenth century’.47 Late in life, Wesley explicitly abjured the Jacobite label when, in 1785, he defended his older brother Samuel, in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine, against charges of Jacobitism. Those who accused his brother ‘did not distinguish between a Jacobite and a Tory’. Wesley defined a Tory as ‘one that believes God, not the people, to be the origin of all civil power’. In this sense Wesley declared himself a Tory along with his brother and his father. ‘But I am no more a Jacobite than I am a Turk’.48

Wesley’s Electoral Advice Herbert Butterfield once described Wesley as part of a movement to bring ‘wider classes of Englishmen to intellectual awareness and a realization of the part they might play in politics’, and argued that through the agency of such voices, ‘greater masses of people were being brought by various means to a consciousness of their importance, a sense of their public rights, a habit of local self-​help and an interest in the destiny of

The Divine Right of Rulers  29 their nation’.49 Though Wesley usually advised his preachers to stay out of politics, he did not hesitate himself to canvas for votes for particular candidates. In March 1756, in Bristol, he threw his support behind the king’s candidate rather than a Jacobite rival. When the Jacobite narrowly won, Wesley declared the city to be ‘in confusion…Oh what pity there could not be some way of managing elections of every sort, without this embittering Englishmen against Englishmen, and kindling fires which cannot be quenched in many years?’50 Wesley’s journal entry for 6 October 1774 offered advice for voters in the Bristol Society, who were facing an election on 3 November that year. ‘[I]‌advised them (1) to vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy; (2) to speak no evil of the person they voted against; and (3) to take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side’.51 He was still recommending candidates in 1789, writing to a Methodist leader directing him to ‘advise all our brethren that have votes’ to use them in support of a candidate who was ‘a lover of King George and the present administration’.52 By that time, Wesley had been advising his readers on their participation in the political process for almost forty years, beginning in 1747 with his Word to a Freeholder.53 The term ‘freeholder’ has changed over time, but in Wesley’s day it was used to refer to a person who owned property worth forty shillings a year and thereby entitled to vote in county elections. This rather strict limitation on who had voting rights would not be widened until the nineteenth-​century campaigns to enlarge the franchise. Voters made up a relatively small part of the population and were often assumed to be more independent voters because of their freedom from the graft involved in party politics. That this assumption was misplaced is clear from Wesley’s exhortation against bribery.54 Before the introduction of the secret ballot, voting was public and so the offer of inducements and/​or threats was common. Wealthy landowners could usually ensure that the person they wanted was returned. One reportedly bought up all the voter’s rights in a borough and sold them on to another party for forty thousand guineas.55 Heads of families often wanted their relatives elected MPs so they could provide an income for their families without themselves contributing. Senior members of government handed out pensions and sinecures (nominal posts that drew an income but required little, if any, work). To cite a single example, Henry Fox, a member of George III’s ministry, while serving as ‘Paymaster of the Forces’, bought a house worth £120,000, cleared £200,000 of his sons’ gambling debts as well as providing them with large estates, and upon his death left £2,000 a year to his wife, sinecures worth £3,000 annually to his sons and £30,000 in cash.56 A person’s influence could be measured by the votes he could garner by fair means or foul, and this influence could secure for himself or his family members lucrative posts and positions which were offered as gifts more than on the basis of interview, qualifications, or merit. In such a system, the temptation to graft was always present.57

30  The Divine Right of Rulers Views on the extent of political graft and corruption during the eighteenth century have recently been subjected to some revision. Lewis Namier’s influential Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) dominated historical understanding of the eighteenth century as an age when ‘patronage, clientage and control were the instruments of power and the currency of politics’.58 E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) rehearsed similar themes.59 More recently, scholars have seen the eighteenth century more positively as an era marked by ‘improvement’, especially at the level of local government and local communities. David Eastwood has criticised the negative view of a sycophantic and corrupt local government, arguing that such a reading is an ‘historiographical abuse’ and a ‘parody’ perpetrated by political radicals in the 1780s and 1790s and furthered by nineteenth-​century reformers. ‘Happily guided by Whig and liberal certainties, late Victorian and early twentieth-​century historical orthodoxy found abundant proofs of the eighteenth century’s failings in the great nineteenth-​ century official inquiries, and thus what had begun as a radical critique became a fixed historical orthodoxy’.60 ‘If we understand’, says Eastwood, ‘that the eighteenth century thought of itself as an age of improvement, whilst historians have chosen to afford this accolade to the nineteenth century, we will understand a good deal’.61 Whatever the extent of a culture of graft and corruption, Wesley reminded freeholders that they had taken an oath that they had not received any ‘gift or reward, directly or indirectly, or any promise of any on account of your vote’.62 To take such an oath after receiving any such inducement, including ‘entertainment … meat or drink’, would be to threaten one’s soul by an act of perjury. Wesley urges the freeholder to consider the significance of his decision. ‘Act as if the whole election depended on your single vote: and as if the whole Parliament depended (and therein the whole nation) on that single person whom you now choose to be a member of it’.63 Twenty years later, Wesley was urging the preachers at the 1767 Conference to consider how to eliminate bribery from the electoral process. They were to show ‘the wickedness of thus selling our country in every society [and] in private conversation’, and distribute widely the Word to a Freeholder, a new edition of which had been published in that year.64 Wesley set out clear criteria to help the freeholder decide for whom to vote. The one who deserved the vote was the one who loved God, since such a person must also love their country. If such a person cannot be found, the vote should go to the one who loves the king. Wesley believed that George II (1683–​1760) had been placed in rule by a wise Providence and that he ‘ought to be highly esteemed in love’, for the sake of his office. The second of the four Georges was viewed negatively for two centuries after his death, due in part to dependence on the memoirs of contemporaries such as Horace Walpole. Historians have more recently rehabilitated his reputation to some degree, seeing his rule as a successful one, marked by victory over the Jacobite rebellion and the military and economic successes of the Seven

The Divine Right of Rulers  31 Years’ War (1756–​1763). He was certainly not the devout Anglican that his grandson and successor George III would prove to be, his considerable sexual appetite leading him to take a number of mistresses, although he had a genuine love for his wife, Queen Caroline.65 On one occasion Wesley was in George II’s robe chamber and has left us a characteristic reflection which is a curious mixture of sympathy for the king and a devout Christian delimiting of royal power. I was in the robe-​chamber, adjoining to the House of Lords, when the King put on his robes. His brow was much furrowed with age [he was 72], and quite clouded with care. And this is all the world can give even to a king? All the grandeur it can afford? A blanket of ermine round his shoulders, so heavy and cumbersome he can scarce move under it! A huge heap of borrowed hair, with a few plates of gold and glittering stones on his head! Alas, what bauble is human greatness! And even this will not endure. Cover the head with ever so much hair and gold, yet –​ Scit te Proserpina canum Personam capiti detrahet illa tuo.66 The Latin epigram is translated, ‘Proserpine knows you to be whiteheaded; she will strip off the mask from your head’, and appears to be drawn from a passage in Martial. False-​hair thou wear’st to make thee youthful show, A Swan wer’t yesterday, today a Crow. Thou cheats not all, Proserpine knows thee Grey, Nor will thy Term of Death one Hour delay, But when it comes, snatch Wig and thee away.67 To Wesley, the king’s name was something ‘lovely and sacred’.68 The Scriptures warn against speaking evil against the rulers of the people, and those who do so cannot love the king. The freeholder cannot vote for his country’s interests over the king’s because the love of king and country belong together, and the interests of king and country are co-​extensive.69 It was not that Wesley liked any and all kings. He had little regard for Charles II whom he considered a persecutor for the Conventicles Act (1664) and the Act of Uniformity (1662). ‘Bloody Queen Mary was a lamb, a mere dove, in comparison of him!’70 James II he considered a ‘covetous and bloodthirsty tyrant’.71 With delicious sarcasm, he declared Elizabeth I ‘[a]‌s just and merciful as Nero and as good a Christian as Mahomet’.72 Frederick II of Prussia, far from ‘Great’, was the worst ‘fiend incarnate’ that had ever been…surely so unnatural a brute never disgraced a throne before…A monster that made it a fixed rule that no woman and no priest enter his palace, and that not only gloried in the constant practice of sodomy himself but

32  The Divine Right of Rulers made it free for all his subjects! What a pity that his father had not beheaded him in his youth and saved him from all this sin and shame’.73 After conceding the military and political superiority of Peter the Great he asked, ‘But why was he called a Christian? What has Christianity to do either with deep dissimulation or savage cruelty?’74 It was devout Christian kings whom he admired, George III most of all. He uncritically accepted Horace Walpole’s imaginative revisionist account of Richard III as an innocent man falsely accused,75 and similarly admired Mary Queen of Scots believing her to be ‘altogether innocent of the murder of Lord Darnley and no way privy to it’.76 ‘It was Wesley’s way’, wrote Maldwyn Edwards, ‘to emphasize the beliefs of a [ruler] rather than his [or her] talents. Let a King be good, said Wesley, in effect, and his reign will not be evil’.77 The loyal freeholder might also wish to vote for one who is ‘a true churchman, a lover of the Church [of England]’. Even this criterion, however, was not sufficient in itself. Friend, think a little. What kind of a churchman is he? A whoring churchman? A gaming churchman? A drunken churchman? A lying churchman? A cursing and swearing churchman? Or, a red-​hot, persecuting churchman, that would send all Dissenters to the devil at a clap? For shame! For shame! Do you call a man a churchman, who knows no more of God than a Turk? Call a man a churchman, that does not even pretend to so much religion as would please an honest heathen?78 Wesley’s description of the bad clergyman matches the largely negative view of eighteenth-​century Anglicanism as akin to ‘a Hogarth cartoon of a corpulent clergyman and a snoozing congregation’ which has, until recently, dominated historical study of the period.79 J.H. Plumb’s description of the clergy, for example, if not as strongly worded as Wesley, is just as damning. The vast majority of parish priests and curates were not quite gentlemen. They were betwixt and between. Many of them farmed their glebe, but the custom grew less common as the century grew older. The agricultural prosperity brought leisure to the parish priests, for their clerical duties were light, communion three times a year and sermons seldom. Time hung heavily on their hands. Some took to drink, some to fox hunting, some to local government, some to learning…They devoted themselves to everything but the administrative reform of the institution to which they belonged.80 Plumb’s description does not withstand the current trend among historians of Anglicanism in this period.81 The idea that the eighteenth-​ century Church of England was a moribund institution on its last legs until rescued by the Methodist revival was one of the more egregious missteps of nineteenth-​century Methodists and is still sometimes heard even today. The

The Divine Right of Rulers  33 eighteenth-​century Church of England was in a much healthier spiritual state than many have supposed. Rather than seeing Methodism as a revitalising force alongside of and in competition with the Church of England, it should be seen rather as a sign of the vitality of the established church and one of several such movements of the period.82 Wesley’s polemic against the unconverted clergyman was driven by his evangelical theology with its insistence on the new birth to qualify a godly priest for office. Mere priestly status could not qualify a priest as a Christian, let alone as a holder of political office. For Wesley, no one was a true churchman unless he loved God and all humanity; all others were cheats. He also warned against those who said they loved God and the Church but had no love for the king. Neither love of king and country nor love of king and church should be divided. He urged his reader to act as ‘an honest man, a loyal subject, a true Englishman, a lover of the country, a lover of the Church; in one word, a Christian!’ After this rather patriotic flourish he gives his more well-​remembered definition of a Christian as ‘one that fears nothing but sin, that seeks nothing but heaven, and that desires nothing but God’.83

Divine Right Ideology In each of the political and social tracts discussed in this chapter, Wesley was reflecting a view of the Hanoverian kings as possessing a sacred aura and deserving of an almost unquestioning trust. Such a view of deference to the crown requires some investigation and explanation. It is simplistic to think of Wesley as a Tory who therefore supported the divine right of kings as a matter of course, when in fact both his views and those of the Tories in Parliament had undergone development in such a manner as to allow support for the Hanoverian succession based on more than hereditary succession. Wesley never understood the king to have a right to act in a tyrannical way without regard to the constitutional arrangements set in place in the Glorious Revolution. Loyalty was offered not to the king as an unaccountable and arbitrary tyrant, but to the king-​in-​Parliament.84 Some historical context is necessary to place the concept of the divine right of regents against a broader backdrop. After the collapse of Oliver Cromwell’s short-​lived ‘Protectorate’, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 there followed a tug of war between those who favoured the authority of the king who (at the risk of over simplification) came later to be known as ‘Tories’ and often leaned in a Catholic direction, and those who favoured limiting the king’s power through the checks and balances of the Parliament and the people, who came to be known as ‘Whigs’ and leaned in a more Protestant direction.85 In 1688, the English Parliament forced the Catholic James II to abdicate from the throne and invited the Dutch Protestant William of Orange (William III) and his wife Mary (the daughter of James II) to take his place. In this Glorious

34  The Divine Right of Rulers (and purportedly bloodless) Revolution, Wesley saw the origins of England’s tradition of civil and religious liberty guaranteed by a balance of power between regent, Parliament and people ruled over by a benevolent Protestant crown. After the rule of Queen Anne (the last of the Stuart monarchs) from 1701–​ 1714, the Hanoverian succession was established when the Elector of the German House of Hanover became George I. Jacobites (after James II whose claims they supported) continued to reject the claims of the Hanoverians believing that the Stuart monarchs (in spite of their Catholicism) were the rightful kings by hereditary right.86 While Tories (with qualification) held to the principle that kings ruled by divine right, Whigs, while accepting the divinely given authority of the crown, privileged the idea that the Parliament and the people placed important checks and balances on royal power that made a tyrannical rule less likely. A contract existed between the crown and the people and if the terms of the contract were broken by the crown, the people had a right to resist. When the American colonists began in the 1760s to protest against what they considered unfair taxes and oppressive British rule, the Whigs tended to support them, but the Tories did not. John Wesley is often referred to as a political Tory in the context of his strong opposition to the Americans once their cry for liberty changed to a cry for independence. However, though Wesley rejected the rhetoric of ‘liberty’ as a catchcry of revolutionary mobs, it is important to understand how Tories had come over time to modify their views on divine right by engagement with natural rights and social contract theory in such a way as to support the Hanoverian dynasty as securing civil and religious liberty for all subjects of the crown. Despite the persistent claims of a ‘flirtation’ with Jacobitism discussed earlier, Wesley was a staunch supporter of George II and George III and strongly opposed the Stuart claims to the throne. In this he was following the pattern of Tories who had developed their doctrine of divine right so that it no longer depended solely on hereditary claims but appealed instead to ideas about Providence and social contract. What had begun in 1688 as a claim about divine right established by Providence would develop during the reign of George III as a divine sanction for the whole established order. In the face of the Young Pretender’s army, Wesley took a loyalist stand on the principle of submission to the crown and resistance to armed rebellion. Three decades after the ’45, in 1776, he would reach far back into the mists of antiquity to claim that the marriage of King John to Queen Isabella in 1209 was unlawful, and their children illegitimate so that the Stuarts had no hereditary right to the throne.87 Wesley’s abridgement and recommendation of Henry Brooke’s novel The Fool of Quality, including the declaration that ‘as all others owe allegiance to the king, the King himself oweth allegiance to the Constitution’, might be thought to suggest his support for Whig constitutional theory.88 It should not be forgotten, however, that Whigs and Tories alike had adjusted their views since 1688 to arrive at a degree of consensus on the nature of divine

The Divine Right of Rulers  35 right at least enough to enable the practical functioning of the Parliament. J.C.D. Clark lists Wesley, along with David Hume, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson as among those who ‘[b]‌orn and educated in one political universe…survived into another, labouring to adapt their now-​anachronistic ideas, or to re-​express them in a new form’.89 Clark’s discussion of the transformation of divine right ideology from 1745 to 1760 helps us understand the context of Wesley’s thought, and I have relied heavily on his line of interpretation in what follows.90 Though most of Europe was monarchical in the eighteenth century, many looked with envy at England where the events of 1688 had proven that kings could not act as arbitrary despots or depend solely on hereditary rights to legitimate their rule. Rather, princes entered into a contract to secure the liberty of the people, for which they received proper submission and reverence. This did not mean, however, that the older view was entirely obsolete, and the very real threat of French and/​or Spanish-​backed invasions was a continual reminder that the hereditary claims of the Stuarts could still be reasserted by military means. The military failure of 1745–​1746, which saw the Young Pretender finally put to route, meant an end to theories of indefeasible hereditary rights and, by 1760, the older claims no longer had currency. Since 1688, the Whig ascendancy had worked to replace the concept of indefeasible divine right with that of providential divine right. But many objected that if the people could replace the king when it suited them (or when they thought God was guiding them to do so), the nation would remain under continual threat of chaos and disorder. Conflict between Whig and Tory monarchical theory led to a new configuration in which submission to the divinely appointed king was an obligation upon all, and at the same time, the king’s submission to the God who had appointed him was thought to ensure a just and benevolent rule. For Wesley, this worked very well under the Hanoverians. The Whig concept of the ‘Patriot King’ invested a charismatic quality in the sovereign who could heal the nation by exercising a wise and fatherly rule. According to Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King (1749), a divine right in kings is a divine right ‘to govern well, and conformably to the constitution at the head of which they are placed. A divine right to govern ill, is an absurdity: to assert it, is blasphemy…The office of kings is, then, of right divine, and their persons are to be reputed sacred’.91 Such an idealised view of divine right certainly did not sweep all before it and it faced much criticism and opposition. However, it signalled a way forward so that in the reign of the devout Anglican, George III, self-​ described Tories like Wesley found they could wholeheartedly support the Hanoverian dynasty as an outstanding model of this arrangement. Wesley’s earliest forays into politics in the 1740s display not only a love for the king but also a love of country –​a Protestant country under the threat of an invading Jacobite army whose success on the battlefield would have meant a reversion to Catholic tyranny and the loss of all the gains won in the

36  The Divine Right of Rulers Glorious Revolution. Wesley may have early imbibed some Jacobite ideas, such as support for the Stuart monarchy from his mother, as well as divine right ideology from his years at Oxford, but it is clear from all his writings that he was a supporter of the Hanoverian dynasty and that he had abjured the Pretender as firmly as any suspected recusant was expected to do. No one as invested as Wesley in the leadership of such a growing movement as Methodism, could stay entirely politically neutral. Ostensibly claiming to stay out of politics, Wesley clearly showed a preference for candidates who supported the king, was suspicious of opposition politics, and steered Methodists away from supporting any candidate who was suspected of holding Jacobite views. When these early political tracts are placed against the backdrop of thinking about divine right that had taken place since 1688, we can see that Wesley’s views were part of a widely shared discourse about the prerogatives of power. The king or queen was God’s anointed, standing at the head of an ‘ancient constitution’ that preserved a balance between crown, Parliament, and people.92 Loyalty to the regent was the surest guarantee of liberty. The fusing of hereditary divine right ideology with the concept of providential divine right provided a new basis for moving beyond questions of dynastic title to the throne and broadened to a larger social theory, one that held on to the older views while at the same time appropriating ideas of social contract and the preservation of constitutional arrangements as a check on tyranny. Such a view of the relationship between regent and people, understood as arising out of a divinely appointed natural order, captured the imagination and fired the intellect of many. In that political theorists, such as John Locke (and later Thomas Paine), would go on to assert ‘the right of Man’ over the divine right of regents, they were stepping away from a system that Wesley saw as safeguarding the national peace and keeping faith with the biblical injunction to ‘fear God and honour the king’.93

Notes 1 David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. 2 Hempton, Religion and Political Culture, 4, citing Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–​ 1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 3 J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1660–​1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics in the Ancien Régime, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4 Jeffrey S. Chamberlain,‘The Jacobite Failure to Bridge the Catholic/​Protestant Divide, 1717–​1730’, in Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–​1832, eds. William Gibson and Robert G. Ingram (Aldershot and Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2005), 81–​95. 5 John Wesley, journal entry, 7 April 1744, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journal and Diaries III (1743–​1754), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1991), 22.

The Divine Right of Rulers  37 6 The Prince’s army was about nine-​tenths Highlander complemented by Lowland Scotts and then Franco-​Irish and Franco-​Scottish regulars. Christopher Duffy, Appendix II, ‘The Jacobite Army in Review’, The ’45 (London: Phoenix, 2003), 570–​577. 7 M. Hughes, A Plain Narrative or Journal of the Late Rebellion begun in 1745 (London, 1746), 48, cited in Duffy, The ’45, 52. 8 For this line of interpretation, see Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); John L. Roberts. The Jacobite Wars: Scotland and the Military Campaigns of 1715 and 1745 (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2002); Duffy, The ’45; Jeremy Black, Culloden and the ’45 (Stroud: Phoenix Mill, 2000). 9 For the wider scope of Jacobite activity and influence, see the collection of essays in Paul Monod, Murray Pittock and Daniel Szechi, eds. Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (London: Palgrave, 2010). 10 Szechi calculates that, on average, ‘there was a serious Jacobite-​related “event” in the British Isles every one to two years between 1689 and 1722, and every three to four years between 1740 and 1760’. Daniel Szechi, ‘The Jacobite Movement’, in CECB, 83, 81–​96. 11 Monod, Pittock, and Szechi, Loyalty and Identity, 1–​8. J.C.D. Clark provides a helpful survey history of scholarship on Jacobitism in ‘The Many Restorations of King James: A Short History of Scholarship on Jacobitism, 1688–​2006’, in Monod, Pittock, and Szechi, Loyalty and Identity, 9–​56. 12 Szechi, ‘The Jacobite Movement’, in CECB, 83, 81–​96. 13 Luke Tyerman, The Life and Times of John Wesley, 3 vols (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1870), vol. 1: 491–​492; Theodore R. Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics (Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2001), 69–​85. 14 Sir John Clark of Penicuik, cited by C. Duffy, The ’45, 233–​234. 15 Roberts. The Jacobite Wars, 111–​113. For careful and detailed descriptions of the Jacobite invasion of England, see McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, 182–​200; C. Duffy, The ’45, 208–​325; Black, Culloden and the ’45, 106–​147. 16 McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, 185. 17 McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, 191. 18 Eveline Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the ’45 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 92–​93, cited in McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, 191. 19 Jeremy Black, Eighteenth-​ Century Britain, 1688–​1783 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 283. 20 Roberts, The Jacobite Wars, 125. 21 Wesley, A Word in Season: Or Advice to an Englishman (London, 1745), 2–​3; see also Works (Jackson) 11: 182–​183. 22 Wesley, A Word in Season, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 183. 23 Wesley, A Word in Season, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 183. 24 Wesley, A Word in Season, 3–​4; Works (Jackson) 11: 183–​184. 25 Wesley, A Word in Season, 5; Works (Jackson) 11: 184. 26 J. Wesley, A Word in Season, 6; Works (Jackson) 11: 198–​202. 27 Extracts from Wesley’s Journal related to his interaction with soldiers are collected in C.P., ‘Methodism and the Army in the Last Century: From John Wesley’s Journals’, The Wesleyan-​Methodist Magazine (May, 1865), 429. He

38  The Divine Right of Rulers presented a very negative description of the spiritual state of the army in his Further Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion II (1746), stating that ‘vice and profaneness in every shape reign among them without control’. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 11 The Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion, and Certain other Related Letters, ed. Gerald R. Cragg (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1989), 242. 28 Michael Snape, The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005), 55–​58. 29 Christopher Duffy, ‘Hidden Sympathies: The Hessians in Scotland 1746’, in Monod, Pittock, and Szechi, Loyalty and Identity, 121. 30 Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Political Thought and the Millennium in Pre-​Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1977), 76. For a longer-​range view of how the rhetoric of ‘Catholic conspiracies’ informed political ideas in early America, see Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 31 George Whitefield, ‘Britain’s Mercies and Britain’s Duties’, The Works of the Rev. George Whitefield, Vol. 5 (London: 1771), 82. 32 Szechi, ‘The Jacobite Movement’, in CECB, 93, 81–​96. 33 Samuel Wesley had opposed the Jacobites during the 1715 rebellion. Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation, 71. 34 Donna L. Fowler-​Marchant, Mothers in Israel: Methodist Beginnings through the Eyes of Women (Nashville, TN: Wesley’s Foundry, 2021), 5–​8. 35 Cited in Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London: Heineman, 1974), 57. 36 John Wesley, A Concise History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (London: 1776), IV: 75. Sacheverell had preached a controversial sermon against Dissent in November 1709 in which he likened the English church to the Corinthians, rent by divisions. This led to public rioting and his popularity as the champion of the Church of England over factious Whig Dissent contributed to a landslide victory for the Tories that year. See B. Cowan, ed. The State Trial of Henry Sacheverell (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012). 37 David Hempton, ‘Wesley in Context’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, eds. Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 70. Vivian H. Howard Green, The Young Mr. Wesley: A Study of John Wesley and Oxford (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961), 78. 38 Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 271–​272. 39 Richard Sharp, ‘ “Our Common Mother, the Church of England”: Nonjurors, High Churchmen, and the Evidence of Subscription Lists’, in Monod, Pittock, and Szechi, Loyalty and Identity, 168. 40 Ryan N. Danker, Wesley and the Anglicans: Political Division in Early Evangelicalism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016), 219. G.M. Ditchfield, ‘Methodism and the Evangelical Revival’, in CECB, 255. 41 Green, The Young Mr. Wesley, 28–​29, 274–​277, 306 cited in Clark, English Society, 285–​286. Green surveys Wesley’s reading from 1725–​1734 in Appendix I: 305–​309. Wesley read Higden’s A View of the English Constitution, with

The Divine Right of Rulers  39 Respect to the Sovereign Authority of the Prince, and the Allegiance of the Subject (1709) in 1733. 42 Danker, Wesley and the Anglicans, 218–​219. 43 Tyerman, Life and Times of John Wesley, 1: 99. Weber claims that Richard Heitzenrater identified this sermon as Sermon 146, ‘The One Thing Needful’ (attributed to Charles Wesley but copied by Charles from his brother) which is hardly a Jacobite tract. However, Weber’s reference is not to Heitzenrater but to Albert Outler’s introduction in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 4 Sermons IV, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1987), 115–​151, 351–​352, where I could find no identification of the sermon as ‘Jacobite’. Kelly Yates has a detailed discussion of charges of Jacobitism against Wesley and the Methodists in Kelly Diehl Yates, ‘Testing the Limits of a “Catholic Spirit”: John Wesley, Methodism, and Catholicism’, PhD dissertation (University of Manchester, 2018), 65–​104. See also Kelly Diehl Yates, The Limits of a Catholic Spirit: John Wesley, Methodism and Catholicism (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021), 45–​76. 44 The influence of the ‘Usager’ Non-​Jurors on Wesley’s sacramental and liturgical practice is thoroughly investigated in Geordan Hammond, John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23–​30. 45 Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–​1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19. 46 Semmel, The Methodist Revolution, 58; Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation, 80–​81. 47 W. Reginald Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 296. 48 John Wesley, ‘To the Editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine’, 24 December 1785, Letters (Telford) 7: 305–​306. 49 Herbert Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People, 1779–​ 1780 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949), 9; Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965). 50 John Wesley to Ebenezer Blackwell, 4 March 1756, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 27 Letters III, 1756–​1765, ed. Ted A. Campbell (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2015), 16–​17. 51 John Wesley, Journal, 6 October 1774, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journal and Diaries III (1743–​1754), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1991), 429. 52 John Wesley, letter to John Mason, 1 October 1789, Letters (Telford) 8: 173. For Wesley’s comments on George III as especially protective of Methodism see ‘Letter to Mary Bosanquet’, 9 February 1774, Letters (Telford) 6: 72. 53 First published in 1747, though I have consulted the 1748 edition. John Wesley, A Word to a Freeholder (London, 1748); Works 11: 186–​187. 54 Wesley, Word to a Freeholder, 186. Butterfield described the ‘rivalries and reshufflings’ of the political factions of the era in Herbert Butterfield, ‘England in the Eighteenth Century’, in A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Vol. 1, eds. Rupert Davies and Gordon Rupp (London, 1965) 1: 20, 1–​33. 55 Hyman Shapiro, John Wilkes and Parliament (London, 1972), 26. 56 Shapiro, John Wilkes and Parliament, 28.

40  The Divine Right of Rulers 57 John H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 38. 58 David Eastwood, ‘Local Government and Local Society’, in CECB, 42 (40–​54). 59 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1991, first published in 1963). 60 Eastwood, ‘Local Government and Local Society’, 41–​42. 61 Eastwood, ‘Local Government and Local Society’, 42–​43. 62 Wesley, Word to a Freeholder, 2; Works (Jackson) 11: 196. 63 Wesley, Word to a Freeholder, 2; Works (Jackson) 11: 196. 64 ‘Annual Minutes, 1767’, in The Methodist Societies: The Minutes of Conference, Works of John Wesley, Vol. 10, ed. Henry D. Rack (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2011), 351. 65 For a good biography, see Andrew C. Thompson, George II: King and Elector (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011). 66 John Wesley, journal entry, 23 December 1755, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 21 Journal and Diaries IV (1755–​1765), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1992), 38–​39. 67 Martial Lib 3 Ep 43 on Lentin. Martial, trans. Henry Killigrew (1613–​1700) Epigrams of Martial, Englished with some other pieces, ancient and modern (London, 1695). 68 Exodus 22:28. 69 Wesley, Word to a Freeholder, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 196–​197. 70 Wesley, journal entry, 11 January 1768, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 117–​118. 71 Wesley, journal entry, 23 May 1774, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 409–​410. 72 Wesley, journal entry, 29 April 1768, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 128. 73 John Wesley, journal entry, 7 May 1789, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 24 Journal and Diaries VII (1787–​1791), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003), 132; John Wesley, Journal, 26 August 1784, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), 328–​329. 74 Wesley, journal entry, 30 January 1756, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 21: 40–​41. 75 Horace Walpole, Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III (London, 1768); J. Wesley, journal entry, 17 June 1769, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 188–​189. 76 Wesley, journal entry, 29 April 1768, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 127–​128. 77 Maldwyn Edwards, John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century (London: Epworth, 1955), 45. The survey of Wesley’s opinion of rulers is drawn partly from Edwards, 39–​47, but the sources have also been consulted in the critical edition of the Works in order to enlarge the material and correct inaccuracies. These views are further confirmed by more recent sources. See William Gibson, ‘ “The Past is Another Country”: Wesley’s History of England’, in Wesleyan Communities and the World Beyond Christianity, ed. Ted A. Campbell (Nashville, TN: Upper Room, 2018), 101–​124; Jeremy Black discusses Wesley’s Concise History of

The Divine Right of Rulers  41 England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (1776) in Charting the Past: The Historical Worlds of Eighteenth-​Century England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), 173–​186. See also Jeremy Black, ‘John Wesley and History’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 9, no. 1 (2017): 1–​ 17; Thomas W. Smith, ‘Authority and Liberty: John Wesley’s View of Medieval England’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 7, no. 1 (2015): 1–​26. 78 Wesley, Word to a Freeholder, 4; Works (Jackson) 11: 197. For Wesley’s pessimistic views of Anglican clergy see Randy Maddox, ‘A Zealous but Respected Adversary: John Lewis’s Correspondence with John Wesley’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 7 (2015): 121–​148. 79 The quote is from John Goldie’s historiographical review essay, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (December, 2003): 977–​ 990; J.C.D. Clark, ‘The Many Restorations of King James’, in Monod, Pittock, and Szechi, Loyalty and Identity, 39. 80 Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, 44–​45. 81 Beginning with Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934) and then more recently Clark, English Society; William Gibson, The Achievement of the Anglican Church 1689–​ 1800: The Confessional State in Eighteenth-​ Century England (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995); Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660–​1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 82 William Gibson, The Church of England: Unity and Accord 1688–​ 1832 (London: Routledge, 2000). 83 Wesley, Word to a Freeholder, 4; Works (Jackson) 11: 197–​198. 84 For a discussion of the distinction between divine right and despotism among Nonjurors, see Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 17–​23. 85 ‘The names Tory and Whig originally rose as terms of abuse: meaning, respectively, Catholic Irish outcasts and Presbyterian Scottish outcasts from pre-​ Revolution Anglican society. The two terms were first used at Westminster during the Exclusion crisis of 1679–​1682, when the taunt of Tory was applied to the crown’s supporters and that of Whig to its opponents’. Brian Hill, ‘Parliament, Parties and Elections (1688–​1760)’, in CECB, 58–​59, 55–​68. 86 Of course, not all Jacobites were Catholics. 87 J. Wesley, A Concise History of England, 1: 189. In this he was repeating an argument made by George Ballantyne in 1743. George Ballantyne, A Vindication of the Hereditary Rights of His Present Majesty, King George II, to the Crown of Great Britain…Being a Full Answer to the All the Arguments of the Nonjurors (London, 1743), 2: 10–​11, cited in J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 95. 88 Henry Brooke, [A Fool of Quality; Or] The History of Henry of Earl of Moreland, rev. and ed. John Wesley (Plymouth, 1815), cited in Semmel, The Methodist Revolution, 60; Originally published in 1765, this was the only novel ever published by Wesley. A revised full edition in two volumes was published in 1859 with a biographical preface by Charles Kingsley. Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality: Or the History of Henry Earl of Moreland (London, 1859). 89 J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 95. 90 J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 105–​123. 91 Henry Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King (London, 1749), first written and privately circulated around 1738, cited in J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 115.

42  The Divine Right of Rulers 92 Monod describes this notional Constitution as functioning among Nonjurors as a kind of ‘invisible goddess’ guaranteeing liberty. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 19. 93 1 Peter 2:7.

References Black, Jeremy. Culloden and the ’45. Stroud: Phoenix Mill, 2000. Black, Jeremy. Eighteenth-​Century Britain, 1688–​1783. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Black, Jeremy. ‘John Wesley and History’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 9, no. 1 (2017): 1–​17. Black, Jeremy. Charting the Past: The Historical Worlds of Eighteenth-​ Century England. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019. Brooke, Henry. The Fool of Quality: Or the History of Henry Earl of Moreland. London, 1859. Butterfield, Herbert. George III, Lord North and the People, 1779–​1780. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949. Butterfield, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1965. Butterfield, Herbert. ‘England in the Eighteenth Century’. In A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Vol. 1, edited by Rupert Davies and Gordon Rupp, 1–​33. London, 1965. Campbell, Ted, ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 27 Letters III, 1756–​1765. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2015. Chamberlain, Jeffrey S. ‘The Jacobite Failure to Bridge the Catholic/​ Protestant Divide, 1717–​1730’. In Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–​1832, edited by William Gibson and Robert G. Ingram, 81–​ 95. Aldershot and Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2005. Clark, J.C.D. English Society, 1660–​1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics in the Ancien Régime, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cowan, Brian, ed. The State Trial of Henry Sacheverell. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. C.P., ‘Methodism and the Army in the Last Century: From John Wesley’s Journals’, The Wesleyan-​Methodist Magazine (May 1865): 429. Cragg, Gerald R., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 11 The Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion, and Certain other Related Letters. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1989. Danker, Ryan N. Wesley and the Anglicans: Political Division in Early Evangelicalism. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016. Duffy, Christopher. The ’45. London: Phoenix, 2003. Edwards, Maldwyn. John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century. London: Epworth, 1955. Fowler-​Marchant, Donna L. Mothers in Israel: Methodist Beginnings through the Eyes of Women. Nashville, TN: Wesley’s Foundry, 2021. Gibson, William. The Achievement of the Anglican Church 1689–​ 1800: The Confessional State in Eighteenth-​Century England. Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Gibson, William. The Church of England: Unity and Accord 1688–​ 1832. London: Routledge, 2000.

The Divine Right of Rulers  43 Gibson, William ‘ “The Past is Another Country”: Wesley’s History of England’. In Wesleyan Communities and the World Beyond Christianity, edited by Ted A. Campbell, 101–​124. Nashville, TN: Upper Room, 2018. Goldie, John. ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (December 2003): 977–​990. Green, V.H.H. The Young Mr. Wesley: A Study of John Wesley and Oxford. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961. Gregory, Jeremy. Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660–​1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hammond, Geordan. John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hatch, Nathan O. The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Political Thought and the Millennium in Pre-​Revolutionary New England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1977. Hempton, David. Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hempton, David. ‘Wesley in Context’. In The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, edited by Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers, 60–​77. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Maddox, Randy. ‘A Zealous but Respected Adversary: John Lewis’s Correspondence with John Wesley’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 7 (2015): 121–​148. Martial. Epigrams of Martial, Englished with Some Other Pieces, Ancient and Modern. London, 1695. McLynn, Frank. Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Monod, Paul. Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–​1788. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Monod, Paul, Murray Pittock and Daniel Szechi, eds. Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad. London: Palgrave, 2010. Outler, Albert C., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 4 Sermons IV, 115–​151. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1987. Plumb, John H. England in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Rack, Henry D. Reasonable Enthusiast. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993. Rack, Henry D., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 10 The Methodist Societies: The Minutes of Conference. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2011. Roberts, John L. The Jacobite Wars: Scotland and the Military Campaigns of 1715 and 1745. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2002. Semmel, Bernard. The Methodist Revolution. London: Heineman, 1974. Shapiro, Hyman. John Wilkes and Parliament. London, 1972. Smith, Thomas W. ‘Authority and Liberty: John Wesley’s View of Medieval England’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 7, no. 1 (2015): 1–​26. Snape, Michael. The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005. Stanwood, Owen. The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Sykes, Norman. Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934.

44  The Divine Right of Rulers Szechi, David, ‘The Jacobite Movement’. In A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Britain, edited by H.T. Dickinson, 81–​96, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Thompson, Andrew C. George II: King and Elector. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 2013. Tyerman, Luke. The Life and Times of John Wesley, 3 vols. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1870. Walpole, Horace. Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III. London, 1768. Ward, W. Reginald. The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journal and Diaries III (1743–​1754). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1991. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 21 Journal and Diaries IV (1755–​1765). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1992. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 24 Journal and Diaries VII (1787–​1791). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003. Weber, Theodore R. Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics. Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2001. Wesley, John. A Word in Season: Or Advice to an Englishman. London, 1745. Wesley, John. A Word to a Freeholder. London, 1748. Wesley, John, A Concise History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II. London, 1776. Whitefield, George. The Works of the Rev. George Whitefield, 5 vols. London, 1771. Yates, Kelly Diehl. ‘Testing the Limits of a “Catholic Spirit”: John Wesley, Methodism, and Catholicism’, PhD dissertation. University of Manchester, 2018. Yates, Kelly Diehl. The Limits of a Catholic Spirit: John Wesley, Methodism and Catholicism. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021.

3 Resisting the Patriot Mob

John Wesley’s ministry in the 1740s had taken place during a time of political stability under George II, during the so-​called Whig Supremacy, with relatively harmonious relations between king and Parliament.1 By contrast, the 1760s were a turbulent period, marked by political instability and a corresponding discontent among the population.2 George III adopted a very different policy from his predecessors, breaking with the earlier single-​ party agenda set by the Whigs. Add to this a more well-​informed public, gathering in ale and coffee houses to read, discuss, and argue over government policies reported in an ever-​growing newspaper industry and you have a recipe for broader political engagement that could often erupt into public disturbances. Opposition politics sought to manipulate and stir up a public in which anyone who could read, or have the newspaper read to them in a coffee house, considered themselves an expert in political affairs. Wesley was a contributor to this public discourse through the publication of several widely read tracts including Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs (1768), followed four years later by Thoughts upon Liberty and Thoughts Concerning the Origins of Power (1772).3 This chapter will consider these three tracts, as well as a response to the first by Joseph Towers (1737–​1799) a Presbyterian minister who may be taken as representative of the Whig view of liberty typical of Dissenters of the period. It will draw a contrast between Wesley and the radical Member of Parliament, John Wilkes (1725–​1797), both personally and politically, but also argue that the two men can be seen as alike in several respects, chiefly in their populist appeal to the middling classes.

John Wilkes and Liberty The jailing of John Wilkes in 1768 and the subsequent civil uprising in protest, which led to several deaths and Wilkes’s expulsion from the House of Commons, prompted Wesley to enter into the national public discourse on liberty.4 Wilkes had published a notorious essay in 1763 in which he had accused the king of being a liar and a bumbler. The Earl of Halifax, secretary of state for the north, issued a writ of libel and arrested Wilkes who was DOI: 10.4324/9781003227496-3

46  Resisting the Patriot Mob exonerated on a technicality. Wilkes fled to France but returned in 1768 and was elected member for Middlesex but when Parliament denied him a seat, and he was sent to prison, there were riots in the streets as mobs surrounded the prison, calling for justice and casting the king and Parliament as despots and destroyers of liberty and Wilkes as a champion of civil liberties. Six rioters were killed and 14 badly wounded. The government treatment of Wilkes turned him into something of a martyr for the people’s rights. The Middlesex electors had made their decision and deeply resented the executive and House of Commons, thinking they knew who should represent them better than the people themselves. For all his scurrilous reputation, Wilkes may be thanked for contributing to the securing of a number of civil and political liberties that are now taken for granted, including a free press, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to privacy, and the removal of general warrants that allow any number of persons to be arrested on a charge without proof.5 There is something of a contrast between the genteel Anglican poverty of the Wesley household at Epworth and the wealthy family circle of Wilkes, though both men were the products of a supportive and loving home life, a lasting appreciation for which they both took into adulthood. Wilkes was born in the north London suburb of Clerkenwell, on 17 October 1725 to wealthy parents, Israel and Sarah, who had made their money from a successful gin distillery. Wilkes reacted early against his Dissenting upbringing and would later join the Church of England, rather more for political advantage than out of any religious conviction. Though he once told his daughter Polly that he would remain ‘sound in the faith’ and ‘keep to my good orthodox mother, the Church of England’, this was more the pledge of an English patriot than an expression of religious piety.6 While studying law at the University of Leiden from 1744 to 1746, he spent his money on wild living, as evidenced by his journal entries. ‘[A]‌lways among women at Leyden. My father gave me as much money as I pleased. Three or four whores; drunk every night’.7 Leiden was a favourite destination for Dissenters, since they could not enter Oxford or Cambridge, and in any case, the standard of scholarship was not high in the English universities of the day and some felt they would receive a much better education in the Lowlands.8 Wilkes always considered himself to be a man of letters and his erudition was often commented upon throughout his life. In 1747, at the age of 21, Wilkes married the wealthy heiress Mary Mead, nine years older than he, and like his mother a pious Dissenter.9 Wilkes had no objection to the alliance, which made of him a prosperous country squire, but he showed little respect for the vows of marriage (not an attitude unusual in eighteenth-​century society) and was soon pursuing erotic adventures in the coffee houses and theatres of London as enthusiastically as during his student days. Through connections with Thomas Potter, son of John Potter, Archbishop of Canterbury, Wilkes joined the now infamous (but at the time largely unheard of) ‘Society of the Monks of Medmenham’,

Resisting the Patriot Mob  47 one of several such associations of libertines to be designated ‘the Hellfire Club’). This salacious fellowship mocked religion, followed the creed ‘do what thou wilt’, and indulged in all kinds of sexual excess and faux liturgies that mocked conventional orthodox religion. Taking an interest in politics, Wilkes served as a conscientious justice of the peace and parish constable, becoming high sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1754. His friends, Lord Temple, of the influential Grenville family, and William Pitt, who admired his ‘bawdy repartee’ and his parodying of religion, encouraged him to enter the electoral contest for Berwick-​upon-​Tweed.10 He was not successful and alleged that it had been won by his opponents through corruption, but in 1757 he was elected minister for Aylesbury. By then he had learned that if one wanted votes one had to be prepared to pay for them and spent 250 guineas in doing so.11 Mary had grown increasingly frustrated with her husband’s dissolute lifestyle, perhaps finding it difficult to accept Wilkes’s libertine belief that, ‘erotic freedom could be reconciled with domesticity in a way that was orderly, fulfilling, and benign’.12 She also found his political ambitions a drain on her resources and in conflict with her piety. After the couple separated in 1756, Wilkes could no longer rely on the financial support of his wife and was more determined than ever to make a living by politics. Wilkes began his parliamentary career as a member of Lord Temple’s faction and thus as a supporter of William Pitt and the duke of Newcastle. He had hopes of a lucrative post at the Board of Trade, and was rumoured to be seeking an ambassadorial position in Constantinople, or even to become Governor of Canada, but he lacked either the experience or the family connections to secure such ambitious posts.13 The principal field of his activities would be England where he first grew notorious for his opposition to the government of George III, whose accession to the throne, in October 1760, set the stage for Wilkes to become a thorn in the side of the royal court. The king’s chief minister, John Stuart the Earl of Bute (1713–​ 1792) established the Briton newspaper, along with Scottish editor and novelist, Tobias Smollett, partly to support his proposals for peace with France in opposition to Whig policy. In reply, Lord Temple established The North Briton and Wilkes became its editor, proving to be a contributor of considerable wit and forcefulness. In its pages, Whig notables were defended and eulogised. It championed the liberty of the press as the birthright of every Briton, the ‘firmest bulwark’ of liberty and the ‘terror of all bad ministers’.14 Meanwhile, Bute (and Scots in general) came in for the most scurrilous ridicule as well as the slur of ‘Jacobite’. The North Briton soon outgrew its rival tenfold and the negative attention produced may have contributed eventually to Bute’s resignation in April 1763. Bute had been George’s tutor for three years before the latter ascended to the throne. When he was elevated to the office of chief minister many were shocked, convinced that a vain and bumbling Scot bearing the name of ‘Stuart’ and (so it was alleged) in bed with the king’s mother was an outrage.15 It may have been not so much the

48  Resisting the Patriot Mob dowager who was infatuated with Bute as the king himself.16 The young king had projected idealised virtues onto Bute which the latter probably did not possess.17 William Pitt warned the king in classic understatement, ‘Lord Bute’s advancement to the management of the affairs of the country would not be to His Majesty’s service’.18 Such a change in government presented many challenges for a Britain fighting expensive foreign wars. The Seven Years’ War (1756–​1763) had begun with the Prussian invasion of Saxony on 29 August 1756 and developed into a conflict between Britain and France for possession of Canada in the wake of the French invasion of Minorca in 1756, presaged by the so-​called ‘French and Indian War’ beginning in 1754. Two years later it had developed into a global war when Austria attacked Prussia, backed by France, Spain, and Russia, which drew the British into Prussia’s defence. The conflict spread to the Caribbean and to India where French power would be all but destroyed, securing trade in the precious commodity of tea. Victories at Lagos and Quiberon Bay in 1759 quelled fears of a French invasion of Britain, but there remained lurking fears of a Spanish alliance with France. The Treaty of Paris ceded Canada to the British in 1763. The Seven Years’ War set Britain on a global power trajectory that not even the loss of the American colonies could halt. For a government administering the conflict, however, it was a costly and demanding challenge. Earlier historians have tended to depict Bute as a sinister figure who, along with the dowager, manipulated a weak and inept king into disastrous policies. On this account, George’s tutors were Tories who inculcated the idea that he should take a strong hand as king and refuse to be dictated to by Whig factions, as his grandfather allegedly had been.19 George III and Bute were seen as a ‘pair of greenhorns’ whose bad decisions and poor management had led to the loss of the American colonies until William Pitt the Younger, on principles laid down by Edmund Burke, later pulled the country out of its tailspin.20 J.H. Plumb dismissed such views as ‘distorted nonsense’ yet conceded that George, ‘rowed ineptly and unavailingly against the tide of life’.21 When Wilkes joined the public attack and ridicule against Bute and the king’s mother, the king was determined to defend their honour, and to refuse forgiveness to anyone who attacked them. Wilkes decided to wind up The North Briton but, when he heard that the king was about to present Parliament with a proposal for peace with France, he produced one more fateful issue –​no. 45 (23 April 1763). In addition to attacking the Treaty of Paris, which had been signed on 10 February, it also attacked the king’s ministers and thus by implication the king himself. Though he flattered the king throughout, readers knew it was all thinly veiled sarcasm. In affirming that the king of Prussia had approved a peace treaty, the king had lied (the Prussians signed a separate treaty, the Treaty of Hubertusburg, five days later). The king was furious at language he considered treasonous, and Lord Halifax signed a ‘general warrant’ to

Resisting the Patriot Mob  49 arrest the authors, printers, and publishers, of the ‘seditious and treasonous’ paper.22 Wilkes was arrested on 30 April, charged with libel, and detained in custody at the Tower. Justice Pratt, who had no sympathy for general warrants, dismissed the charges less than a week later, since the only crimes with which a member of Parliament could be charged were treason, felony, or breach of the peace. Wilkes had committed none of these and should therefore go free, which he did on 6 May, eventually being paid £1,000 in damages. The crowds began to cheer for Wilkes, Lloyd’s Evening Post and the St. James Chronicle reporting a crowd of 10,000 accompanying him home, and the connection of his name with the cause of liberty began.23 His popularity skyrocketed and would soon reach a point beyond the imagination of most politicians. His image could be found on tobacco papers, halfpenny ballads, porcelain dishes, punchbowls, teapots, prints, and broadsides. There was hardly a working man who did not believe that Wilkes was the only man who would stand up for him; dissenters almost to a man were ready to serve him; small businessmen, farmers, lawyers, virtually all of the middle classes found hope in his audacious challenges to authority.24 In July 1763, Wilkes took a two-​month trip to Paris to visit his much-​loved and doted-​upon daughter Polly who was studying there,25 but not before printing (ostensibly only for private use and amusement) the satirical and salacious poem, ‘An Essay on Woman’, modelled on Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’. Written with (some argue by) his friend Thomas Potter, and later edited and enlarged by Wilkes, it would cause him a great deal of trouble, including criminal charges and imprisonment.26 He also began to reprint The North Briton (initially without no. 45, though this would soon be added) to sell at half a guinea each. There were theological objections also, with Lord Mansfield declaring in the House of Lords that Veni Creator Paraphrased, printed along with The Essay on Woman, was ‘a most scandalous, obscene, and impious libel; a gross profanation of many parts of Holy Scriptures; and a most wicked and blasphemous attempt to ridicule and vilify the Person of our Blessed Saviour’.27 Wilkes had also attacked the Athanasian Creed and showed not the least remorse for this attack on orthodoxy. In my own closet I had a right to examine and even try by the keen edge of ridicule any opinions I pleased. If I have laughed pretty freely at the glaring absurdities of the most monstrous creed which was ever attempted to be imposed on the credulity of Christians, a creed which our great Tillotson wished the Church of England was fairly rid of, it was in private I laughed. I am not the first good Protestant who has amused himself with the egregious nonsense…of that strange, perplexed, and perplexing mortal…Athanasius.28

50  Resisting the Patriot Mob When Wilkes returned to England in September, the king called again for his arrest. At the next meeting of the House of Commons, it was declared that Wilkes should no longer serve as a member of Parliament and should face fresh charges. Returning to Paris, he was expelled from the House in absentia on 20 January 1764. On 21 February, Wilkes’s trial over his seditious publications took place, Lord Mansfield presiding, and the jury found Wilkes guilty in his absence. The Court of the King’s Bench declared him an outlaw on 1 November 1764, which meant that he no longer possessed any legal rights. Returning finally from exile, via Holland, in February 1768, Wilkes protested his innocence and requested a pardon (which was ignored), and in March contested the seat of London against six other candidates. Though unsuccessful, he had better fortunes in the prestigious seat of Middlesex on 28 March when, as characterised by Watson, ‘the restless and radical’ forty-​shilling freeholders helped him win a clear victory, standing as ‘the independent man, persecuted by an inefficient and expensive government’.29 Thomas highlights the victory as one along class lines, as Wilkes received little support from the ruling class and almost all from the artisans and shopkeepers in the county.30 This is a social contrast found also in Methodism, making Wilkes and Wesley two sides of a coin of the middling sort.31 Cash described Wilkes as having been ‘elected not by squires and clergy, but by shopkeepers, artisans, and journeymen; and they, having found at last a leader and a voice, went wild with joy’.32 It might almost be a description of Methodist devotion to John Wesley. Before Wilkes could take his seat in the Commons, however, he had still to face charges for reprinting the ‘Essay on Woman’ and libelling the king. After trial at the King’s Bench Prison, he was found guilty and spent two years in prison, perceived as a martyr for liberty. From the start of his internment, crowds of supporters had been gathered in St. George’s Fields outside the prison, chanting for Wilkes and liberty. On 10 May 1768, a reported twenty thousand people were gathered when the famous ‘massacre’ took place. The king’s forces, sent to break up the disturbance (including Scots, notorious to the radical crowds as the countrymen of Bute), were resisted by the crowd and, in the soldiers’ pursuit of a young man in a red waistcoat, one William Allen, the innocent son of an innkeeper, was shot dead. Five or six more people were killed and many more wounded. Widespread rioting and looting took place over several days. The inquest found three soldiers guilty of murder and abetting murder but a grand jury in Guildford threw out the charges. The king wrote to Lord North, showing little sympathy for ‘young Allen’. ‘Every man that ventures into a riot, whether a party or spectator, is liable to be killed; that the unhappy young man was of the former can be but little doubted’.33 The king had plenty of other worries to distract him in that year. In 1767, the Townshend Acts had placed a tax on a number of commodities in the American colonies including tea, glass, and paper, which led to a colonial boycott of British goods. Resentment rose further until, in 1768, troops were

Resisting the Patriot Mob  51 deployed to Boston to put down rioters protesting trade regulations. It was also in this same year, on 21 November, that the first of what would prove to be a lengthy series of pamphlets critical of the king was published under the pseudonym ‘Junius’.34 At home and abroad George III was increasingly represented in a despotic light. Troop increases were ordered for Ireland, to protect the Protestant establishment from a republican element. The French purchase of the island of Corsica from the republic of Genoa in May 1768 alarmed some in the ministry but the king showed no signs of wishing to begin any acts of hostility against France.35 During Wilkes’s imprisonment, he was feted royally, receiving many visitors and being lavished with gifts of all kinds. American colonists, seeing in his own struggle a mirror of their own cause, sent him 45 barrels of tobacco (only one of numerous symbolic expressions that made The North Briton no. 45 a potent symbol of all Wilkes represented). The ‘Sons of Liberty of Boston’, including John Adams, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock, eulogised him as their hero, and while Wilkes encouraged them in the cause of liberty, and had sympathy for their plight,36 he would never become a defender of the American revolution. In this, too, we see a similarity to Wesley, whose initial love for the Americans was cooled once they spoke of rebellion. While still in prison, Wilkes was elected a London alderman for the ward of Farringdon Without by an overwhelming majority. A group of leading merchants voted to provide him with an immediate £300, a promise of a further £1,000 a year and cleared £20,000 of his debts. Wilkes was by now well established as a martyr to the cause of liberty and a lightning rod for radical sentiment, his imprisonment having only added to his already considerable celebrity status.

John Wesley’s Response to Wilkes This was the ‘present state of public affairs’ when, in 1768, Wesley offered his Free Thoughts in response.37 Bernard Semmel described this tract as giving Wesley’s theological preoccupations, ‘full, direct, almost hysterical, expression’.38 Wesley could never brook rebellious mobs of popular dissent, as such action ran counter to his deep commitment to passive obedience. In 1770, he would refer to ‘a Sacheverell madness’ that had ‘spread, far and wide’.39 In the same year, visiting the ruins of Arbroath Abbey in Scotland destroyed by Reformers, he declared, ‘God deliver us from reforming mobs!’40 His genuine affection for George III, who shared his devout Anglican faith, along with his in-​principle commitment to love and honour the king as divinely ordained, meant that he was quick to defend the king against one he considered as scurrilous a rake as Wilkes. For Wesley, true liberty could not be found at the cost of loyalty to the crown and Wilkes was most certainly among that seditious element in British society whose radical views needed to be weighed in the balance and found wanting.41

52  Resisting the Patriot Mob Wesley began his Free Thoughts with the disclaimer that politics lay outside his province and that it was not easy to form judgements on such complicated matters.42 The only qualification for commenting on political affairs to which he makes claim is ‘the privilege of an Englishman, to speak my naked thoughts; Setting down just what appears to me to be the truth, till I have better information’.43 In his view the newspapers were mostly one-​sided (pro-​Wilkes and against the king and Parliament) and declared that he had no ill-​will toward either party and stood to receive no personal advantage or gain in taking either side.44 Notwithstanding his mother’s Jacobite sympathies, and the nonjuring spirituality of his earlier career, Wesley was always a warm supporter of the Hanoverian dynasty, believing that, due to their benevolent reign, the British people had been, in respect to their civil and religious liberties, the freest people on earth. In the same year that Free Thoughts appeared, Wesley’s fellow Methodist George Whitefield wrote to the Vice-​Chancellor of the University of Oxford, after six Methodists had been expelled from Edmund Hall on 11 March 1768 for using extemporary prayers and attending Calvinist meeting houses.45 In protesting this action, Whitefield assured the Vice-​Chancellor that ‘every additional proselyte to true Methodism, is an additional loyal subject to King George the Third’ and that Methodists remained what they had always been, ‘steady, invariable friends to the Protestant succession in the illustrious house of Hanover’.46 Wesley shared this same attitude and in his Free Thoughts showed his typical support for the king, defending his reputation against all assaults. Wesley thought that petitions claiming to express ‘the sense of the nation’ were not to be heeded since the vast majority of those who signed them did not even bother to read them.47 The reference to ‘petitions’ may refer to one of several petitioning campaigns in support of Wilkes. In 1769 and 1770, the Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights held meetings all over England to organise local people in the raising of petitions. These typically included the demands that ministerial influence over elections be abolished, and called for tighter control of public monies, for shorter parliaments, the ending of bribery in elections, the abolition of rotten boroughs, and the introduction of the secret ballot.48 For one who is often thought to be a champion of the common sense of ordinary people, Wesley seems quite dismissive when he argues that even supposing they were to read and understand such petitions, one could not assume that ordinary people understood the affairs of state sufficiently to be able to make safe judgements on political questions.49 In regard to the remonstrance of the city of London, the king did no wrong in rejecting it, as he considered it inflammatory.50 Indeed, ‘his whole conduct, both in public and private, ever since he began his reign, the uniform tenor of his behaviour, the general course both of his words and actions, has been worthy of an Englishman, worthy of a Christian, and worthy of a king’.51 To the suggestion that the ‘present commotions’ were due to bad ministers, Wesley replied that, while they were not as blameless as the king, they were

Resisting the Patriot Mob  53 no better nor worse than any others in the previous thirty years.52 He was not willing to defend all the measures that had been taken, including the issuing of general warrants, and certainly not the killing of William Allen at St. George’s Fields, but the tragedy had taken place in efforts to put down a riotous mob and was not a cold blooded murder.53 Neither did he defend ‘the measures that have been taken relative to the Middlesex election’, but reminded his readers that there had been equal violence on both sides and that, in any case, the electoral process that was followed had been quite proper.54 Wesley referred to the speech of Justice Mansfield as satisfactorily clearing up the matter and insisted that the final authority to determine such matters lay with the House of Commons.55 For one House to interfere with the business of the other would be both unprecedented and unconstitutional and result in an outcry that would lead to anarchy and confusion. According to Wesley, those who claimed, in support of Wilkes, that the English people were deprived of their liberty, simply did not know their history. ‘England, from the time of William the Conqueror, yea, of Julius Caesar, never enjoyed such liberty, civil and religious, as it does at this day. Nor do we know of any other kingdom or state in Europe, or in the world, which enjoys the like’.56 As for threats to liberty in America, he wrote, ‘I do not defend the measures which have been taken with regard to America: I doubt whether any man can defend them, either on the foot of law, equity, or prudence’.57 The Townshend Acts of 1767 and the deployment of troops to Boston in 1768 could not be blamed on the present ministry. It is clear from this that Wesley was sympathetic to the American cause at this time and had not yet begun the more strident criticism of their rebellious actions that would commence in 1775 with The Calm Address to Our American Colonies.58 If the present state of unrest was not due to any of the preceding causes, could it perhaps have been the extraordinarily bad conduct of the House of Commons that was to be blamed? Wesley dismissed this claim with a long citation from an anonymous authority and then asserted that the chief cause of the present disturbance was that Wilkes was receiving money from France, where he had lived during his exile, for the purposes of stirring up dissension in England. Adopting a more moralistic tone, he also cited other causes including greed, ambition, pride, envy, and resentment. All of this would lead, if unchecked, to another civil war. ‘First, the land will become a field of blood: many thousands of poor Englishmen will sheath their swords in each other’s bowels, for the diversion of their good neighbours. Then either a commonwealth will ensue, or else a second Cromwell. One must be: but it cannot be determined which, King W[ilkes], or King Mob’.59 According to Brett McInelly, Methodists came to understand themselves as Methodists only in the face of their most vociferous critics. In both public defences and private correspondence, Methodism would be ‘constituted in the controversy it inspired…defined and refined by public attacks and defences of these principles’.60 A consideration of at least a

54  Resisting the Patriot Mob number of the many published responses to Wesley’s political tracts is important in understanding their reception and airing contested views. An extended response to Wesley’s Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs was provided in 1771 by Joseph Towers (1737–​1799), a biographer and Presbyterian minister of Arian sympathies.61 He may be taken as typical of the Whig approach to questions of liberty, with its insistence that the people are the best judges of what constitutes good government. Towers argued that Free Thoughts was filled with unjust insinuations, ‘merits the censure of every friend to freedom and the British constitution; and that it is only calculated to please a corrupt ministry, and their venial partisans’.62 Wesley was taken to task for claiming to have had no bias or anger toward any, yet presenting only one side of the case. Many who had taken the opposite view to Wesley were ‘men of excellent understanding’, who were just as Christian and just as virtuous as Wesley.63 Indeed, argued Towers, Wesley had followed the same methods as those who had written against Christianity itself, committing the straw person fallacy of adopting those representations that were the most ‘absurd, inconsistent, and irrational’, in order to attack it with greater success. In the same way, Wesley had taken the weakest arguments of his opponents and stated them in ways that were easy to reject.64 Towers responded to Wesley’s claim that national affairs were beyond the capacity of ordinary people to meddle in by pointing out that this was just the way arbitrary rulers hoodwinked the people. Though they may lack specialist knowledge, Towers considered ordinary people to be generally good judges of whether their ‘rights and privileges are attacked’. For Towers, liberty could not be preserved for long in any country where the people are encouraged to think it not important whether or not they had good government.65 Wesley was unrealistic in expecting members of Parliament to be perfect before they had a right to serve, and the people did not expect this; they understood that politicians may be perfectly good at their job even if not perfectly good in moral character.66 It is the role of the House of Commons to be a check on the crown and its ministers and to guard the liberties of the people and their interests. When lives are taken by soldiers acting in the king’s name, as in the riots at St. George’s Fields, there is naturally grave concern. A murder perpetrated by a private citizen is subject to prosecution, but when soldiers are protected by the king the people have no redress.67 Towers did not lay blame on the present government alone for violating the rights of the people and squandering the public purse, but believed this had been going on over a ten-​year period.68 A new Parliament would not act with violence toward the king, as Wesley supposed, but would only seek to address and correct grievances. Towers argued that no people would rise up against any good government and that those who warned against abuses did a genuine public service. Finally, Towers expressed sorrow for Wesley who at this stage in his life had gone beyond his proper role as a priest to offer his opinions on politics. Wesley, in spite of his own claims,

Resisting the Patriot Mob  55 had not been impartial or fair in his arguments and should be opposed as an enemy of public freedom and a defender of a tyrannical ministry.69 In February 1769, Wilkes was expelled from Parliament which led to the breaking out of fresh rioting. A new election was called for and Wilkes was again returned only to be expelled from Parliament the very next day. The whole thing was repeated a month later –​election followed by immediate expulsion, on the dubiously legal basis that Wilkes was declared ‘incompetent’ to serve, and then a fourth time on the 13 April with 1,143 votes for Wilkes and only 296 to his rival Henry Lawes Luttrell (1743–​1821). Two days later, Parliament declared that Luttrell ‘ought to have been returned’, and declared him the winner.70 Understandably, this was considered by many to be an aggressive attack upon the people’s right to elect their own representative. Election by parliamentary decree was an affront to liberty. Over a quarter of the country’s voters signed petitions, not only against the treatment of Wilkes but also the use of troops against the people, the waste of public money, and the fumbling of American affairs. One petition called for the dissolving of Parliament, the removal of bad ministers, and a fresh start, to which the king took deep offence. In spite of all this public support, Wilkes himself did not seem interested in leading a revolution or even a broadly based reforming party, seemingly driven more by ambition and self-​interest than lofty idealism.71 He considered the Middlesex fiasco to have been quite fortuitous as it became something of a ‘launching pad’ for his subsequent success.72 During his imprisonment, in 1769, a ‘Society of Gentleman Supporters of the Bill of Rights’ was formed, whose name masked to some extent its purpose of financially supporting Wilkes, including the elimination of his considerable debt which would be needed to gain his release. Debate would later split the Society over the extent to which it existed to prop up Wilkes or to pursue a broader range of ends in support of political liberty.73 Wilkes was finally released from the King’s Bench Prison, on 17 April 1770, to much general merriment on the part of the friends of liberty, and he promptly proceeded to take up his seat as Alderman for Farringdon Without. One result of the controversy over the Middlesex election was that the newspapers began to publish full reports of the speeches in Parliament, despite the Commons attempting to put a stop to such disclosure.74 The Wilkes affair can be seen as heralding a new era in British politics when the actions of politicians became subject to the closer scrutiny of a more demanding public. According to Watson, Wilkes ‘did not propose simply to excite opinion out of doors. He organised it and gave it a lasting shape; in so doing he turned the popular opinion which had been an episodic but normal feature of politics into a force capable of growth which might alter the system’.75 By contrast, Wesley’s opposition to the mobilisation of popular action against the government may strike some readers as naïve in a world where participatory democracy is highly valued and people are suspicious, almost by default, of the motives of those in power. Wesley’s view that civil

56  Resisting the Patriot Mob authorities are instituted by God and ought to be respected is grounded in the teaching of the Bible, an authority to which neither politicians nor people ground their civic responsibilities and duties today, other than in token and ceremonial ways. In July 1771, Wilkes was elected high sheriff of London and, in October 1774, after two previous failed attempts to gain the office, became Lord Mayor. In December 1779, he was elected Chamberlain of the city, a position which he held for the rest of his life. Given his controversial and chequered criminal history, it was a remarkable rise to power for the unsinkable Jack Wilkes. He pursued a compassionate administration, with Thomas considering Wilkes’s mayoralty ‘one of the most splendid in the City’s history’.76 While high sheriff, he insisted that prisoners not appear shackled in court and, as mayor, set up a fund for prisoners in need. He banned military parades at executions, urged the removal of capital punishment for minor offences, and even ordered the City Marshall to eliminate cruelty to cattle in the slaughterhouse. In 1774, he was once again elected to Middlesex, though this time he was accompanied by twelve other ‘Wilkite’ members. He had now become a political party working for the reform of Parliament. His call for widening the franchise, in his Bill for the Just and Equitable Representation of the People, including the redistribution of seats from the rotten and corrupt boroughs to London and the growing industrial centres, is often seen as a pioneering document in democratic reform. In this period of his life he was clearly mellowing, describing himself in 1790 as an ‘extinct volcano’.77 It was probably from this period that the story originates of an old woman calling out to him in the street, ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ only to receive from him the rejoinder, ‘Be quiet, you old fool. That’s all over long ago’.78 Though Wilkes’s style of politics and support for the American colonists are often linked, Wilkes himself did not play a major part in debating the American problem. According to Plumb, the language of tyranny, ‘echoed in the backwoods of America’ and ‘the myth that George III was intent on restoring a Stuart despotism was not the fabrication of later historians but a widespread belief which grew out of the conflict with Wilkes and America’.79 A mutually reinforcing propaganda machine set out the paranoid delusion that George III was leading a conspiracy to overthrow the ancient constitutional arrangements and act the tyrant. The fear of ‘tyranny’ had a global dimension as Wilkite radicals and liberty-​loving Americans saw their cause as a common one. Though sympathy for the American cause came to be an unofficial policy platform of the Wilkites in Parliament, Wilkes had written to his brother from Paris in 1765, during the Stamp Act Crisis, declaring, ‘You are much mistaken as to my ideas of America. I am too well informed of what passes there by some gentlemen I have seen, and there is a spirit little short of rebellion in several of the colonies. If I am to be an exile from my native London, it shall not be in the new world: so far as I can command’.80 Too much the English patriot to support a rebellion in

Resisting the Patriot Mob  57 British America, he resisted any transatlantic cause for liberty and remained focused on the home front, though he did exchange letters with the ‘Boston Sons of Liberty’, beginning in June 1768, during which he showed solidarity with their grievances while advising them to avoid bloodshed.81 The king formally declared the Americans to be in rebellion on 22 August 1775 after which supporting the republican cause in America could be a costly stance and Wilkite support for the Americans put a considerable dent in their popularity and influence. In November 1778, Wilkes declared the American colonies to be ‘irrecoverably lost’ and urged the Parliament to recognise their independence.82 He did not want to lose the American colonies, but he could see earlier than most that their loss was inevitable. Though not religiously inclined, Wilkes was philosophically committed to religious toleration.83 During the anti-​Catholic Gordon Riots of June 1780, he stood before the crowd at the Bank of England to call for law and order, even firing into the crowd and serving on night watches and at the head of militia to quell public rioting. Wilkes had no time for Lord Gordon’s cry of ‘No Popery!’, declaring he ‘would not even persecute an atheist’.84 In a speech to the House of Commons in 1779 he declared, ‘I wish to see rising in the neighbourhood of a Christian cathedral, near its Gothic towers, the minaret of the Turkish mosque, the Chinese pagoda, and the Jewish synagogue, with a temple of the Sun, if any Persian could be found to inhabit this island, and worship in this gloomy climate, the God of their idolatry. The sole business of the magistrates is to take care that they did not persecute one another’.85 On 3 May 1782, Wilkes moved to remove the record of his 1769 expulsion from the House and the voiding of his election as member for Middlesex on the grounds that it had been subversive of the rights of the electors. To his delight the motion was passed by voice without the need of any division of the house.86 In his final years, Wilkes continued to move away from his earlier radical politics, expressing the view on one occasion that, ‘Adversity may be a good thing to breakfast on; nay, a man may dine upon it; but, my good friend, believe me, it makes a confounded bad supper’.87 For all his radical and reforming activity he had never been a republican. The French Revolution alarmed him and in December 1792, a few months after the abolition of the French monarchy, he assured the livery of the Ward of Farringdon that the English remained safe and secure and enjoyed flourishing commerce under the reign of the present monarchy. He had spent time abroad in countries, ‘where the government depended on the caprice of an individual…in a republican government there is a continued struggle who shall be the greatest…But here the line is clearly chalked out by law, no subject can with us be so ambitious, or so mad, as to contend for the sovereign power. We are preserved from all those evils which necessarily attend a republican government’.88 Wilkes died on 26 December 1797, described on his tombstone, by his own direction, as ‘A Friend of Liberty’.

58  Resisting the Patriot Mob Linda Colley sees Wilkes as representing ‘Englishness’ and as a symbol of English rights and privileges. His ‘ostentatious patriotism’ contributed to a ‘cult of England’ and lay behind his opposition to the Scottish Lord Bute, the first non-​Englishman to fill the role of prime minister. In The North Briton he preferred plain English to Scotticisms and used ‘England’ to refer to the whole of ‘Great Britain’ (the latter being a designation he did not like). George III’s relaxing of the restrictions against Tory participation in the government, ending an era of Whig dominance, was seen by Wilkites as putting the nation in reverse. Wilkes and his supporters were able to see his own political trials as exemplifying the centuries-​long struggle for English liberty. Wilkite sentiment could be decidedly loyalist and its songs were sung to the tune of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’, indicating that Wilkes ‘affirmed the traditional canons of Englishness’.89 Wilkes contributed to the enduring idea that England held primacy in Great Britain and that the Celtic fringe remained on the periphery. That John Wesley rejected Wilkes’s style of patriotism has been further reinforced by the identification by Randy Maddox of a previously unattributed letter of John Wesley to Lloyd’s Evening Post, dated 8 January 1774. Who is a patriot then? Not the man who embraces this or that set of political notions. Not one who declaims against wicked ministers and corrupt administration, and who bawls aloud, perhaps curses and swears and gets drunk, for the liberty of ‘Old England’. He that thinks himself a patriot on this ground is ignorant of the whole affair. There is not a grain of patriotism in all this. It is quite another thing. A patriot is only another word for ‘a lover of his country’. One who ardently desires, and by natural consequence uniformly pursues, her real welfare. One who bends all his endeavours to promote virtue, and peace, and plenty among his countrymen. And continues so to do, not only when it may promote his own honour or interest, but even when he knows he shall incur disgrace thereby, and impair or ruin his fortune. This man is a patriot, and this alone.90 It is likely that Wesley’s opposition to Wilkes was based not only on political philosophy but on his deep aversion to the dissolute life of Wilkes, a person who represented the very opposite of ‘the Character of a Methodist’. Linda Colley’s description of Wilkes as ‘the joker in the pack’ and ‘a rake on the make’ underscores how much he diverged from Wesley in character.91 The cultural gap between the son of the Epworth manse who had become an Oxford don and a celibate missionary and the anti-​Trinitarian frequenter of ‘Hellfire Club’ orgies, French cathouses, and corrupt games of political graft, was a significant one. Not only in Methodism but also in the teaching of the Church of England more generally, such ‘national virtues’ as ‘obedience, submission, orderliness, respect for authority, patience in suffering, civility, restraint, and loyalty’ were frequently contrasted with the lifestyles

Resisting the Patriot Mob  59 of ‘bawdy Wilkesite radicals, disloyal colonists and unreliable Dissenters’.92 For Wesley, the member for Middlesex was not only a radical, but also a blasphemer and one whose attacks on the king threatened the stability of the nation by stirring up popular discontent that drove England toward chaos. Wesley was convinced that revolutionary motives were driving the campaign against the king, using literature, oratory, and rhetoric to stir the people to rebellion, the end of which could only be a violent revolution akin to the English Civil War. Whether King Wilkes or King Mob, the result would be a tragic unravelling of the civil and religious liberties safeguarded by the Hanoverian succession.

Defining Civil and Religious Liberty Though ‘liberty’ was a central theme in the political discourse of the eighteenth century, the nature of the liberty that was to be protected and defended was fiercely contested. Great Britain and British America shared a common set of religious convictions and experiences that undergirded their concepts of liberty.93 Yet, from this shared mentality, greatly differing political applications had emerged, with a championing of the finely worked balance between king and Parliament as the best safeguard of liberty on the one hand, and an attack upon that same institution as a tyrannical threat to liberty on the other. Four years after the Wilkes riots, the cry for liberty in England had only increased, and the radical politician at the centre of the controversial Middlesex election remained ‘our great patriot’, widely celebrated due to the apparent ‘inseparable connection between Wilkes and liberty’.94 In Thoughts upon Liberty, first published on 24 February 1772, Wesley set out a natural rights argument, carefully to define both civil and religious liberty, arguing that the British people already enjoyed the utmost liberty under the benevolent reign of George III. One conviction Wesley shared with Wilkes was the belief that it would be hard to find any people more desirous of liberty than Britons who had always resisted foreign invasion.95 But what exactly is liberty? How is to be defined? Wesley facetiously observed how liberty had been defined in ‘many nations in America, those particularly that border on Georgia and Carolina’, where a person is free to step out from behind a tree and shoot you if he doesn’t agree with you or doesn’t like the way you look. Some sought freedom to kill others, rape, loot, and take off the heads of kings, and asked whether these were the kinds of liberties that were being sought.96 He then turned to the task of defining liberty, beginning by dividing it into two basic types –​ religious and civil. Religious liberty is the right of every person endowed, along with reason, by the creator and yet it is a liberty that nations have often laboured to remove from their citizens.97 Wesley set forth a long report on the deprivation of religious liberty in Britain, beginning with the days of Mary Tudor. The Act of Uniformity (1552) and the Conventicle Acts (1664–​1670), along with the Great Ejection (1662), are cited as evidence

60  Resisting the Patriot Mob of English religious intolerance, and Wesley was quick to point out that the situation had been no better in Scotland.98 However, circumstances had been very different under George III who had been true to his word, ‘I tell you, while I sit on the English throne, no man shall be persecuted for conscience sake’.99 Indeed, Wesley was convinced that there was no other nation in the world that enjoyed such religious liberty as England where one was free to choose any religion or none.100 The current cry for liberty cannot then have religious liberty as its object, for no one has been deprived of it. ‘Whoever therefore in England stretches his throat, and bawls for more religious liberty, must be totally void of shame, and can have no excuse but want of understanding’.101 What then of civil liberty defined as ‘[a]‌liberty to enjoy our lives and fortunes in our own way: To use our property, whatever is legally our own, according to our own choice’?102 Foreign kings may demand the life of their subjects without cause, but Wesley believed this could not happen in England where no one was in danger of losing their civil liberty unless they acted contrary to the law. Any English subject was at liberty to use their house, goods, and land as they saw fit. Therefore, those who were crying for their lost liberty had no other fetters than those in their own imagination.103 ‘I am in no more danger of death from King George, than from the Queen of Hungary. And if I study to be quiet and mind my own business, I am in no more danger of losing my liberty than my life. No, nor my property…If this is in any degree invaded, it is not by the king, or his parliament, or army; but by the good patriots’.104 Wesley readily admitted that the ministry had not been without fault in its conduct, but it had certainly not removed either religious or civil liberty.105 In seeking causes for the present unrest and cry for liberty, Wesley dared not attribute it to Satan because in such an enlightened age no one believed in a real devil anymore. In this he was, of course, exercising sarcasm, as his belief in the reality of the devil, in witchcraft, in ghosts, and other supernatural beings was very real. But since a natural cause was sought, Wesley was convinced that the present unrest and cry for liberty lay in the poisonous propaganda of pamphleteers such as ‘Junius’ and others who, in attacking the king’s ministers in the press, attacked the king himself.106 The way Wesley saw it, the Parliament’s support of the king, and a loyal army, were all that were preventing the radicals from having their way. According to Lutnick, referring to a slightly later period, ‘George III and the North ministry had very little trouble managing Parliament between 1775 and 1782. The King’s measures were so certain of passing through the House of Commons with a handsome majority that he could afford to ignore popular opinion’.107 Though Wesley was writing just prior to the period to which Lutnick refers, it is likely that similar conditions prevailed in 1772 (North was Prime Minister from 1770–​1782). Yet, for Wesley, it was a fragile peace; remove the redcoats and the Parliament would soon be set upon by the mob. Once again, as he did four years earlier in his Free Thoughts on the Present

Resisting the Patriot Mob  61 State of Public Affairs, Wesley proposed the rather draconian measure of invoking a law making it a capital crime to perpetrate lies designed to breed dissension between the king and the people.108 Ted Weber has argued that Wesley’s political commitments were not based on any abstract theory but had a personal and communal structure. He points out that individual rights are ‘socially constructed and defended’ and that ‘Wesley thinks in terms of [the] organic connectedness’ between liberty and order, which are not separate political values but interdependent values.109 I would argue that it was the personal element in Wesley’s political world that mattered most to him. It was around the twin themes of liberty and loyalty, rather than liberty and order that Wesley’s thought revolves. Certainly, order was highly prized by Wesley, but the personal element remained central. ‘Order’ itself is an abstract term, but loyalty is deeply personal, whether expressed in affection for the king, love for the people, or aversion to the profligate and disloyal Wilkes. Wesley’s own connexion of preachers was built on loyalty to himself and the doctrines and disciplines he set in place. The organic constitutionalism of Wesley was founded on an understanding of the contractual arrangement between king and people, embedded in the ancient constitution, which he saw as under threat by radical elements. George III came to see the burdens of his office as a kind of sacred responsibility imposed by a just providence. To betray that trust would have dire consequences. The principle of joint sovereignty between the king and the Parliament was grasped by the king with what Plumb called, ‘an almost lunatic intensity’.110 Any compromise with Wilkesite radicals or American rebels would have been the betrayal of a divine trust. If Wesley did not quite exhibit a ‘lunatic intensity’, he may well have shared with his beloved king a similar sense of divine trust in upholding the constitutional arrangements that guaranteed liberty to every free subject of the crown.

Locating the Origin of Power The reign of George III saw a development in ideas about what actually constituted ‘the people’. Earlier in the century, providing for the landless poor had been the moral responsibility of the state (usually through the parish system of benevolence) and the poor were of little political significance. But the rise of the middling sort, and the accompanying increase in literacy and capacity for self-​expression created by newfound wealth, enlarged the concept of ‘the people’ to include a greater number of those formerly marginalised. With the threat of Jacobitism removed after 1746, less repressive measures controlled political dissent. It became possible, for example, for Wilkes publicly to call the king a liar, and for this accusation to receive the imprimatur of the vox populi. In his Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power (1772), Wesley challenged those who believed that political power was derived from ‘the people’.111 The entire essay has an ironic tone as he narrows down the numbers of those who are rightly to be referred to

62  Resisting the Patriot Mob as ‘the people’ (that is, those who have the franchise), to a mere handful of ‘lords and gentlemen’, before concluding that power ultimately is derived from God. Wesley began by defining power as, ‘supreme power, the power over life and death, and consequently over our liberty and property, and all things of an inferior nature’.112 He described how, from the ancient world to the present, power had often been lodged in the monarchy of a single person and in some cases in the aristocracy of a few –​‘chiefly the rich and noble’.113 In the democracy of ancient Greece the people had supreme power but this was ‘scarce now to be found, being everywhere swallowed up either in monarchy or aristocracy’.114 But the question being considered is ‘not in whom this power is lodged, but from whom it is ultimately derived’, a question that had been much debated without any satisfactory solution.115 For Wesley, the Bible made it clear that there is no power but from God who has ordained all authority (Romans 13:1). Any subordinate power in any nation derived its authority from a supreme power. In England this was the king; in the ‘United Provinces’ (the Netherlands) it was the States, but ultimately all power is derived from God.116 Wesley then considered the claim that, in every age and nation, ‘the people’ had possessed the right of disposing of this power as they saw fit, investing power in and taking power away from whomever they chose.117 Those who hold this argument see it as an almost universally held opinion that commands the respect of all reasonable people and that anyone who denied it would be immediately hissed at.118 One gets the impression that Wesley is getting ready to do exactly this –​deny it and be hissed at. Wesley insisted that the term ‘the people’ must be precisely defined. Is it every man, woman and child? If every person is by nature equal and free, with the power to decide for themselves who shall govern over them, why not give this power to women? By what argument do you prove, that women are not naturally as free as men? And if they are, why have they not as good a right as we have to choose their own governors? Who can have any power over free, rational creatures, but by their own consent? And are they not free by nature, as well as we? Are they not rational creatures?… [We] exclude women from using their natural right, by might overcoming right, by main strength; (for it is sure, that we are stronger than they; I mean, that we have stronger limbs, if we have not stronger reason)…119 He then asked, why stop at women? Why not give the franchise to men under the age of 21? One could argue that young men do not have sufficient wisdom or experience in deciding who the best politicians are, but then, so Wesley claimed, neither do 1 in 20 eligible voters in England. The logic of Wesley’s argument here is that if voting were a natural right, inherent in human nature, there would be no just reason why women and minors

Resisting the Patriot Mob  63 should be excluded from voting, yet they are so excluded, therefore voting is not a universal natural right.120 It should be noted that Wesley is not arguing for extending the franchise to women and minors. He is simply pointing out that this would be the necessary result of following what he considers to be a faulty line of reasoning –​that the right to determine who shall rule is the right of the people by nature. He next observed that not even all subjects over the age of 21 were given voting rights in England ‘unless they are freeholders, unless they have forty shillings a year’.121 After depriving half the human species of their natural right, for want of a beard [women]; after depriving myriads more, for want of a stiff beard [young men], for not having lived one-​and-​twenty years; you rob others (probably some hundred thousands) of their birthright, for want of money!…By what right do you exclude a man from being one of the people, because he has not forty shillings a year? Yea, or not a groat? Is he not a man, whether he be rich or poor? Has he not a soul and a body? Has he not the nature of a man? Consequently all the rights of a man, all that flow from human nature? And, among the rest, that of not being controlled by any, but by his own consent?122 Here, for Wesley, lies the defeat of the argument that ‘the people’ may only be ruled by their own consent.123 It turned out that ‘the people of England’ (those who have the right to vote after the vast majority are excluded) were a very small number indeed, ‘scarce a tenth part’ of the population. So, the popular supposition (that the people may only be governed by their own consent) which had been asserted with so much confidence, ‘is not only false, not only contrary to reason, but contradictory to itself’, because the identity of ‘the people’ either could not be determined or was reduced to a very small number.124 Setting aside arguments from reason, Wesley now turned to ‘matters of fact’, drawing many examples from English history to disprove the claim of the natural right of the people to be governed only by their own consent. The people did not choose William the Conqueror, King Stephen, or King John. They did not choose any of the Tudor monarchs. They did not choose James I. They did not choose to depose Charles I. Nor was it the people who gave power to Charles II at the Restoration or William III at the Glorious Revolution, ‘[s]‌o that still we have no single instance, in above seven hundred years, of the people of England’s conveying the supreme power, either to one or more persons’.125 Wesley could recall only one instance in all history when the people had conferred supreme power on their ruler. This was when the people of Naples ‘exerted their natural right’ in elevating Thomas Aniello Masaniello (1622–​ 1647), which led to an uprising in 1647 in which 50,000 people ran riot refusing even the offer of a suppression of taxes. After being in power a

64  Resisting the Patriot Mob week, he was assassinated.126 Wesley had read Buonamici’s Commentaries of the Late War in Italy during a trip to Surrey on 15 February 1773.127 This included a description of the Genoese revolt that took place in 1746, during the War of the Austrian Succession, after the Austrians took possession of the Genoese artillery. After a long Austrian siege and British blockade, which the Genoese successfully withstood, peace and independence were finally restored through the Treaty of Aix-​La-​Chapelle in 1747. Wesley was led by this to draw a comparison between the Genoese revolt of 1746 and Masaniello’s 1647 rebellion. It is significant that Wesley saw in such remarkable victories not the power of the people to replace their rulers but the sovereign hand of God who disposes the affairs of state as God sees fit. ‘That an unarmed rabble without any head should drive a disciplined army under an experienced general, who were in possession of the arms, the forts, and the whole city, not only out of the city and forts, but out of the whole territory of Genoa, is a plain proof that God rules in all the kingdoms of the earth and executes his will by whomsoever it pleaseth him’.128 For Wesley, common sense led to the truth that there is no power but of God. Ted Weber was correct to reject the idea that Wesley’s tracts from this period disclose ‘the remnants of his Jacobite, divine right thinking by attributing political authority ultimately to God’.129 His defence of the king (and, indeed, of the Parliament) was not out of a Tory, much less a Jacobite, ideology. Instead, it was part of his support for the existing constitution as a whole, defended by Whigs and Tories alike, to which both king and Parliament were organically connected through an ancient compact. Taken together his tracts from 1768 to 1772 demonstrate the fault line between the understanding of liberty held by constitutional monarchists like Wesley and, at least the more radical, Whig conception of liberty. Wesley consistently rejected John Locke’s social contract theory, which located the origins of power in the hands of the people so that rulers only exercised their power through the consent of those they governed. To the contrary, Wesley asserted that the origin of power was found in God and that loyalty to a divinely appointed king was the surest way to secure both civil and religious liberty. It was not ideological commitment to a political theory that motivated Wesley but a personal and cultural attachment to stability, order, and loyalty. It is important to note the cultural gap that existed between John Wesley and John Wilkes, a gap which coloured the former’s response to some degree. Both men shared in the ‘cult of England’, exhibiting each in their own way the superiority of the English way of life, and they were both members of the Church of England originally with Dissenting backgrounds. However, Wilkes was a profligate libertine who mocked orthodoxy and delighted in lasciviousness. Wesley, on the other hand, was a devoutly orthodox priest whose life was marked by a monkish asceticism. Yet, both men drew their support from the middling classes; they were each in their own way populist heroes and, as far apart as they were in their morals and personal conduct, it is perhaps fitting that a statue of Wilkes stands today in Fetter Lane, not

Resisting the Patriot Mob  65 far from the first Methodist Society founded by Wesley. Convinced that the only real threat to liberty at home or abroad was that represented by the mob, Wesley prescribed loyalty and passive submission to a devout king as a means of saving the nation from chaos. Many, like Joseph Towers, saw Wesley’s defence of the king as sycophantic and would have preferred him to stay out of politics and stick to preaching. But Wesley wrote out of a patriotic concern both to defend the king’s honour and call the people to recognise the liberties they already enjoyed. There were limits to liberty, of course, but Wesley believed that the freedom to employ oneself and one’s property in whatever way one saw fit was guaranteed by law, both in British America and at home, to an unprecedented degree in history and to an unmatched degree in comparison with other nations. The origins of liberty lay not in the people but in God to whom ultimate loyalty was due and it was to this first allegiance that Wesley was most deeply committed.

Notes 1 David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​ 1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 43. See also Basil Williams and C.H. Stuart, The Whig Supremacy 1714–​1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). 2 Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 44. 3 John Wesley, Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1768); Thoughts upon Liberty by an Englishman (London, 1772); Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power (Bristol, 1772). 4 Black warns against the idea that John Wilkes and his style of radicalism had anything more than ‘a limited impact on ministerial impact and stability in the 1760s’. Jeremy Black, George III: America’s Last King (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 2. For recent biographies of Wilkes see John Sainsbury, John Wilkes: The Lives of a Libertine (London and New York: Routledge, 2016, first published Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006); Peter D.G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). An older, still helpful work is George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social History: 1763–​1774 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). See also, Linda Colley’s provocative discussion of ‘John Wilkes and Englishness’, in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 105–​117. For a classic nineteenth-​century account see W.E.H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 3 (London, 1892), 242–​345. 5 Cash, John Wilkes, 3. 6 The quote is in Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 132. 7 Cited in Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 8. Sainsbury has a chapter (3) on sex in Wilkes’s life, 81–​129. He considers the claim of G.S. Rousseau that Wilkes engaged in same sex relationships while a student at Oxford but is unconvinced by the evidence. Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 83–​86. See G.S. Rousseau, ‘ “In the House of Madam Vander Tasse, on the Long Bridge”: A Homosocial University Club in Early Modern Europe’, in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, eds. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma

66  Resisting the Patriot Mob (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 311–​347. Arthur Cash also rejects Rousseau’s claims in Arthur H. Cash, ‘Wilkes, Baxter, and D’Holbach at Leiden and Utrecht: An Answer to G.S. Rousseau’, The Age of Johnson 7 (1996): 397–​ 426. Wilkes lived during an era when gentlemen generally rejected same sex activity among males as an unbecoming effeminacy, representing a broad cultural shift away from the bisexuality of the earlier Elizabethan and Restoration periods. See Cash, John Wilkes, 35. 8 Cash, John Wilkes, 13. Wilkes’s classmates included such later luminaries as Alexander Carlyle and Charles Townshend. 9 Wilkes exaggerated Mead’s unsuitability in a letter to James Harris in 1763 by declaring she was twenty years older than himself, an uncharitable inflation that has found its way into the work of some historians, including Hyman Shapiro, John Wilkes and Parliament (London: Longmans, 1972). Letter to Harris, cited in Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 10. 10 The quote is from Peter Douglas Brown, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: The Great Commoner (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), 118. 11 Cash, John Wilkes, 46. 12 Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 1. 13 Thomas, John Wilkes, 9–​12. 14 Thomas, John Wilkes, 19. 15 Jeremy Black insists that Augusta was Bute’s key adviser but not, as has been widely alleged, her lover, citing two studies: J. Bullion, ‘The Prince’s Mentor: A New Perspective on the Friendship between George III and Lord Bute during the 1750s’, Albion 21 (1989): 34–​55 and ‘The Origins and Significance of Gossip about Princess Augusta and Lord Bute, 1755–​ 1756’, Studies in Eighteenth-​ Century Culture 21 (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1991): 245–​265. Black, George III, 14. P.D. Brown dismisses talk in The North Briton of an affair between Bute and the king’s mother as ‘the usual silly and untrue innuendos’. P.D. Brown, William Pitt, 283. 16 R. Pares, review of Romney Sedgwick, ed. Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–​1766 (London: Macmillan, 1939) in The English Historical Review, 55: 219 (July 1940), 475, 475–​479. These letters, according to Pares, exhibit ‘the king’s very peculiar personal relationships with Bute’. Pares, review of Romney Sedgwick, 475. 17 J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III 1760–​1815 (Oxford, 1960), 5–​7. Plumb saw George’s dependence on Bute as a symptom of a delayed adolescence. J.H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (London and Glasgow, 1966), 100. Jeremy Black prefers to see Bute more simply as ‘a surrogate father’ to the king. Black, George III, 14. 18 Shapiro, John Wilkes and Parliament, 34. 19 Jonathan Clark has dispelled the idea of the Prince’s covert indoctrination to Jacobitism as a myth, yet concedes that he inherited ideas of kingship that were ‘genetically similar’ to Jacobite ideas and which were the result of a compromise with the Tories on the doctrine of divine right. J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1660–​1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 118. 20 Pares, review of Sedgwick, 475. 21 J.H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 116.

Resisting the Patriot Mob  67 22 General warrants were those that named crimes but did not name individuals and so were a convenient way for the government to apprehend people under suspicion of crimes for which they may have had little actual proof. 23 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 6 May 1763; St. James Chronicle, 7 May 1763, cited in Thomas, John Wilkes, 31. 24 Cash, John Wilkes, 219. 25 Sainsbury provides an interesting and endearing portrait of their remarkably close relationship in Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 20–​33. 26 Wilkes always denied that he was the author of The Essay on Woman. According to Plumb, he provided only a few footnotes. Plumb, The Four Georges, 107. Thomas attributes it to Wilkes, dating the earliest version to 1754. Thomas, John Wilkes, 4. Cash argues that Thomas Potter was the author and Wilkes contributed only a few ‘suggestions and amendments’. Cash, John Wilkes, 31–​ 32. Sainsbury points out the participation of Potter as a co-​writer but argues a strong case for Wilkes as the principal author. Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 249–​252. In any case, Wilkes was certainly responsible for printing it and for inserting the ribald lines about Bute that appeared in the 1763 version –​‘Then in the scale of various Pricks, ’tis plain, Godlike erect, Bute stands the foremost Man’. Hamilton, Essay on Woman, 223, cited in Thomas, John Wilkes, 24. 27 Lord’s Journals XXX: 415, cited in Clark, English Society, 366. 28 Horace Bleakley, The Life of John Wilkes (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1917), 438. In this comment, Wilkes seems to think the Athanasian Creed was actually written by Athanasius, which of course it was not. Even John Wesley damned the Athanasian Creed with faint praise, stating that while he agreed with the substance of its doctrine, he would not force anyone to adhere to it and rejected its damnatory clauses. John Wesley, ‘A Sermon on 1 John v.7’, in The Works of John Wesley, Volume 2, Sermons II: 34–​70, ed. Albert Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1985), 377–​378. He appears to have shared this ambivalence about the Creed with George III who, though devoutly orthodox, refused to recite it and supported an attempt to have it removed from the Prayer Book. John Clarke, The Life and Times of George III (London: Book Club Associates, 1972), 79. 29 Watson, Reign of George III, 132. The reference to ‘forty-​shilling freeholders’ refers to a statute of 1430 that gave the franchise to those whose properties were assessed for the purposes of the land tax as valued at forty shillings per year. 30 Thomas, John Wilkes, 75–​76. 31 Sainsbury makes a similar suggestion. ‘Perhaps the two men came to recognise that they were competing for similar constituencies, and that their methods –​the generation of popular excitement followed by industrious organisation to perpetuate support –​were as similar in technique as they were divergent in goals’. Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 132. 32 Cash, John Wilkes, 212. 33 Correspondence of George III, ed. J. Fortescue (2: 246–​247), cited in Letters (Telford) 5: 370. 34 The identity of ‘Junius’ remains a mystery. Suggestions have included Wilkes himself, Edmund Burke, George Grenville, Henry Grattan, Lord Temple, Chatham, Alexander Wedderburn and Edward Gibbon. Most evidence seems to support either Lord Shelburne or Philip Francis. Watson, Reign of George III, 145; Cash, John Wilkes, 294.

68  Resisting the Patriot Mob 5 Black, George III, 94. 3 36 Cash, John Wilkes, 232–​235. 37 John Wesley, Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1768); Works (Jackson) 11: 14–​33; also published in Letters (Telford) 5: 370–​388. 38 Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1974), 62. Maldwyn Edwards considered that it was ‘written in trenchant, vigorous prose’ and made ‘excellent reading’ yet ‘despite its eloquence, the argument is  halting, and however seeming fair its tone, there is small insight and less  sympathy’. Maldwyn Edwards, John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century: A Study of His Social and Political Influence (London: Epworth Press, 1955), 63. 39 John Wesley, 16 January 1770, in Letters (Telford) 5: 175. 40 John Wesley, journal entry 8 May 1770, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​ 1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993), 228–​229. 41 Black, George III, 108–​143, 185–​208. 42 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 14. 43 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 5; Works (Jackson) 11: 15. 44 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 5–​7; Works (Jackson) 11: 15–​16. 45 Ryan N. Danker, Wesley and the Anglicans: Political Division in Early Evangelicalism (Downers Grove: IVP, 2016), 187–​210. 46 George Whitefield, ‘A Letter to the Reverend Dr. Durell, Vice-​Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Occasioned by the expulsion of Six Students from Edmund Hall’ (12 April 1768), in The Works of the Rev. George Whitefield (London, 1771), 4: 335–​336. 47 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 11–​15; Works (Jackson) 11: 18–​19. 48 Cash, John Wilkes, 257. 49 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 11–​15; Works (Jackson) 11: 18–​19. 50 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 15; Works (Jackson) 11: 19. The ‘remonstrance’ referred to is difficult to identify as there were many such ‘remonstrances’. Junius refers to a ‘remonstrance’ on 14 March 1770 which was a response to the king’s apparent disinterest in a petition received to dissolve the Parliament in light of Wilkes’s expulsion from the House, but this date was two years after Wesley’s Free Thoughts. ‘Junius’, Junius: Including Letters by the Same Writer under other Signatures (now first collected) to which are added his Confidential Correspondence with Mr. Wilkes, etc. (London, 1812), 105. 51 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 16; Works (Jackson) 11: 20. 52 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 16–​17; Works (Jackson) 11: 20. 53 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 17–​18; Works (Jackson) 11: 20–​21. 54 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 18–​20; Works (Jackson) 11: 21. 55 William Murray, 1st Earle of Mansfield (1705–​1793), was the most important jurist of his era. Perhaps his most famous ruling was in the 1772 Somerset case which found that slavery had no basis in English common law. For a biography, see Norman S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2015). 56 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 25; Works (Jackson) 11: 24. 57 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 25; Works (Jackson) 11: 24.

Resisting the Patriot Mob  69 58 John Wesley, A Calm Address to Our American Colonies. A new edition corrected and enlarged. To which is added A Calm Address to Americanus, by a Native of America (London, 1775). 59 Wesley, Free Thoughts, 34–​35; Works (Jackson) 11: 28. 60 Brett C. McInelly, Textual Warfare and the Making of Methodism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5. See also Donald Henry Kirkham, Outside Looking In: Early Methodism as Viewed by its Critics (Nashville, TN: New Room Books, 2019). 61 Joseph Towers, A Letter to the Rev Mr. John Wesley; in Answer to his Late Pamphlet, entitled ‘Free Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs’ (London, 1771). 62 Towers, Letter to John Wesley, 3. 63 Towers, Letter to John Wesley, 6. 64 Towers, Letter to John Wesley, 7. 65 Towers, Letter to John Wesley, 10–​11. 66 Towers, Letter to John Wesley, 19–​20. 67 Towers, Letter to John Wesley, 33–​35. 68 Towers, Letter to John Wesley, 39. 69 Towers, Letter to John Wesley, 45–​46. 70 Cash, John Wilkes, 254. 71 Brown, William Pitt, 363. 72 Thomas, John Wilkes, 107–​108. 73 Thomas, John Wilkes, 109–​124. 74 Cash, John Wilkes, 278–​289. 75 Watson, Reign of George III, 139; see also Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, 123. 76 Thomas, John Wilkes, 155. 77 Shapiro, John Wilkes and Parliament, 106, Cash, John Wilkes, 383. 78 Thomas, John Wilkes, 217. 79 Plumb, The First Four Georges, 115–​116. 80 Cited in Thomas, John Wilkes, 155. 81 Thomas, John Wilkes, 165. 82 Thomas, John Wilkes, 174. 83 Sainsbury, John Wilkes, 163–​174. 84 Shapiro, John Wilkes and Parliament, 101; Thomas, John Wilkes, 184–​189. 85 Thomas, John Wilkes, 186. 86 Cash, John Wilkes, 369–​370. 87 Cited in Cash, John Wilkes, 380. 88 John Almon, Correspondence of the Late John Wilkes…Memoirs of his Life (1805), 5: 156–​159, cited in Cash, John Wilkes, 383. 89 Colley, Britons, 105–​117. 90 Randy L. Maddox, ‘John Wesley on “Patriotism” ’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 9, no. 2 (2017): 188, 184–​188. 91 Colley, Britons, 106. John Sainsbury draws attention to Lord Chesterfield’s distinction between a ‘rake’ and a ‘man of pleasure’ with the suggestion that Wilkes is more the latter than the former, a more benign than ignoble kind of libertine. Sainsbury, John Wilkes, xxiii. Cash rejects the term ‘rake’ as improperly applied to Wilkes, preferring the designation ‘gentleman libertine’. Cash, John

70  Resisting the Patriot Mob Wilkes, 31. Maldwyn Edwards described John Wilkes as seen through Wesley’s eyes as ‘a vulgar demagogue and a political jack-​in-​the-​box…typical of the cause he represented. It was the cry of the child for the moon when he has the solid pleasures of earth’. Edwards, John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century, 66. 92 David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13. 93 J.C.D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–​1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-​American World (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1989). See also J.C.D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Clark, English Society, 1660–​1832. 94 John Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty by an Englishman (London, 1772); Works (Jackson) 11: 34–​46, the quote is from 11: 35. 95 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 5–​7; Works (Jackson) 11: 34. 96 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 7–​10; Works (Jackson) 11: 35–​37. 97 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 10–​11; Works (Jackson) 11: 37–​38. 98 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 11–​13; Works (Jackson) 11: 38–​40. 99 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 14; Works (Jackson) 11: 40. 100 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 14; Works (Jackson) 11: 40–​41. 101 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 14; Works (Jackson) 11: 40–​41. 102 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 15; Works (Jackson) 11: 41. 103 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 15–​17; Works (Jackson) 11: 42. 104 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 15. The Jackson edition has: ‘it is not by the King but by “the patriot mob” led on by Mr Wilkes!’ Works (Jackson) 11: 41. 105 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 17; Works (Jackson) 11: 42–​43. 106 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 17–​19; Works (Jackson) 11: 44. 107 Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press 1775–​1783 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1967), viii. 108 Wesley, Thoughts upon Liberty, 19; Works (Jackson) 11: 43–​45. 109 Theodore R. Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2001), 96. 110 Plumb, The First Four Georges, 117. 111 John Wesley, Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power (Bristol, 1772); Works (Jackson) 11: 46–​53. No publication details are provided in the Jackson edition, not even a date. 112 Wesley, Origin of Power, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 46. 113 Wesley, Origin of Power, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 46–​47. 114 Wesley, Origin of Power, 3–​4; Works (Jackson) 11: 47. 115 Wesley, Origin of Power, 4; Works (Jackson) 11: 47. 116 Wesley, Origin of Power, 5; Works (Jackson) 11: 47. 117 Wesley, Origin of Power, 5; Works (Jackson) 11: 48. 118 Wesley, Origin of Power, 6; Works (Jackson) 11: 48. 119 Wesley, Origin of Power, 6–​7; Works (Jackson) 11: 49. 120 Wesley, Origin of Power, 7–​9; Works (Jackson) 11: 49. 121 Wesley, Origin of Power, 7; Works (Jackson) 11: 49. 122 Wesley, Origin of Power, 7–​8; Works (Jackson) 11: 49–​50. A ‘groat’ was an English silver coin worth four pence. It was in circulation from the time of Edward I (who ruled from 1272 to 1307) until 1856.

Resisting the Patriot Mob  71 23 Wesley, Origin of Power, 8; Works (Jackson) 11: 50. 1 124 Wesley, Origin of Power, 8–​9; Works (Jackson) 11: 50. 125 Wesley, Origin of Power, 10; Works (Jackson) 11: 51–​52. 126 Wesley, Origin of Power, 1–​11; Works (Jackson) 11: 52. 127 Count Buonamici Castrucio, Commentaries of the Late War in Italy, trans. A. Wishart (London, 1767); John Wesley, journal entry 15 February 1773, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993), 359–​360. 128 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 359–​360. 129 Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation, 107–​108.

References Black, Jeremy. George III: America’s Last King. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Bleakley, Horace. The Life of John Wilkes. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1917. Brown, Peter Douglas. William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: The Great Commoner. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978. Cash, Arthur H. ‘Wilkes, Baxter, and D’Holbach at Leiden and Utrecht: An Answer to G.S Rousseau’, The Age of Johnson 7 (1996): 397–​426. Cash, Arthur H. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Castrucio, Count Buonamici. Commentaries of the Late War in Italy, translated by A. Wishart. London, 1767. Clark, J.C.D. Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Clark, J.C.D. The Language of Liberty 1660–​1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-​American World. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1989. Clark, J.C.D. English Society, 1660–​1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Régime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Clarke, John. The Life and Times of George III. London: Book Club Associates, 1972. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​ 1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Danker, Ryan N. Wesley and the Anglicans: Political Division in Early Evangelicalism. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2016. Edwards, Maldwyn. John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century: A Study of His Social and Political Influence. London: Epworth Press, 1955. Hempton, David. Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984. Hempton, David. Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ‘Junius’. Junius: Including Letters by the Same Writer under other Signatures (now first collected) to which are added his Confidential Correspondence with Mr. Wilkes, etc . London, 1812.

72  Resisting the Patriot Mob Kirkham, Donald Henry. Outside Looking In: Early Methodism as Viewed by its Critics. Nashville, TN: New Room Books, 2019. Lecky, W.E.H. A History of England in the Eighteenth Century. London, 1892. Lutnick, Solomon. The American Revolution and the British Press 1775–​ 1783. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1967. Maddox, Randy L. ‘John Wesley on “Patriotism” ’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 9, no. 2 (2017): 184–​188. McInelly, Brett C. Textual Warfare and the Making of Methodism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Outler, Albert C., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 2 Sermons II: 34–​70. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1985. Pares, R. Review of Romney Sedgwick, ed. ‘Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–​1766’, in The English Historical Review 55, no. 219 (July 1940): 475–​479. Plumb, J.H. England in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Plumb, J.H. The First Four Georges. London and Glasgow: Collins Fontana, 1966. Poser, Norman S. Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason. Montreal: McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2015. Rousseau, G.S. ‘  “In the House of Madam Vander Tasse, on the Long Bridge”: A Homosocial University Club in Early Modern Europe’. In The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, edited by Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma, 311–​ 347. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Rudé, George. Wilkes and Liberty: A Social History: 1763–​1774. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Sainsbury, John. John Wilkes: The Lives of a Libertine. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Semmel, Bernard. The Methodist Revolution. London: Heinemann, 1974. Shapiro, Hyman. John Wilkes and Parliament. London: Longmans, 1972. Thomas, Peter D.G. John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Towers, Joseph. A Letter to the Rev. Mr. John Wesley; in Answer to his Late Pamphlet, entitled ‘Free Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs’. London, 1771. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993. Watson, J. Steven. The Reign of George III, 1760–​ 1815. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Weber, Theodore R. Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2001. Wesley, John. Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs in a Letter to a Friend. London, 1768. Wesley, John. Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power. Bristol, 1772. Wesley, John. Thoughts upon Liberty by an Englishman. London, 1772. Wesley, John. A Calm Address to Our American Colonies. A new edition corrected and enlarged. To which is added A Calm Address to Americanus, by a Native of America. London, 1775. Whitefield, George. The Works of the Rev. George Whitefield, 5 vols. London: 1771. Williams, Basil and C.H. Stuart. The Whig Supremacy 1714–​1760. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

4 The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade

The First Cause of Britain’s Prosperity Slavery was a genuinely global institution, as it supported European wars and the economic prosperity and global expansion of European powers.1 It lay at the heart of eighteenth-​century Britain’s commercial prosperity and served as a major support to its Atlantic empire. A booming trans-​oceanic economy, built on human misery, fed the European appetite for consumables such as sugar, coffee, rice, cotton, and tobacco,2 with an estimated 12.5 million Africans being transported to the New World, 10.7 million of whom survived the journey.3 Although Britain was a late starter in the slave trade, it began to dominate the trade in the 1660s until, from 1662 to 1807, around 3.4 million slaves had been carried from Africa to the Americas on British vessels, about 50 per cent of all slave trafficking during the period.4 The British shipped most of their slaves to the West Indies, but they were also ‘employed’ by the British state in the navy and army and as workers on expeditions. A contemporary estimate claimed that, in 1770, 10,000 to 15,000 Africans were resident in England as servants.5 The number of slaves in British America rose from 20,000 in 1700 to over 300,000 by 1763. This was mostly in coastal areas such as South Carolina and Georgia where ship’s captains and plantation owners alike could take advantage of the tidewater environment for both navigation and cultivation.6 The philosopher David Hume, in a footnote in his 1748 essay Of National Characters, wrote about African slaves in ways that suggest the Enlightenment had made little inroads in checking the idea of the superiority of white people. I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about DOI: 10.4324/9781003227496-4

74  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade them in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such uniform and constant differences could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe [sic] slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe [sic] as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.7 Such ideological dehumanisation of Africans no doubt contributed to buttressing the slave trade, but the racial inferiority of Africans did not figure very prominently among eighteenth-​century defences of slavery. Nor did the ‘biblical’ argument that the ‘curse of Ham’ (Genesis 9: 18–​29) condemned Africans to perpetual servitude to Europeans have a great deal of influence on legal or theological arguments for slavery (except in the American south in the final stage of the slave system there).8 Drescher argues that it was the fact that Africans were both Muslims and traders that provided a more convincing justification for their enslavement.9 This is not to deny the significance of racist assumptions of superiority on the part of Europeans that undergirded slavery. Such cultural attitudes can be related to the scientific revolution with its drive toward organised and classified systems of knowledge. The desire to classify the non-​Western world as an object of scientific enquiry occurred in a manner that was driven by social and cultural assumptions that made the interaction of racism and shoddy science, including biologically based theories of race, very significant in the justification for slavery.10 Additionally, the theory of a ‘Great Chain of Being’, which placed everything in a fixed cosmic order, supported the existence of slavery on the basis of a hierarchical law of nature.11 In a 1774 defence of slavery, the Jamaican planter, Edward Long, assigned Africans ‘to the status of an intermediate species between Europeans and [Orangutans] closer to the animal world than whites [ascribing to them] an affinity to nonhuman primates that extended to their intellectual shortcomings, their physical features, and their sexual orientation’.12 Such theories of racial inferiority, however, had little scientific standing after 1800 when, according to Drescher, ‘British racial analysts were less inclined to emphasize the sharpness of racial characteristics, and their writings were more sympathetic to Africans than they had been before 1780’.13 James Cowles Prichard (1786–​ 1848) dominated racial science in the early decades of the 1800s and his views shifted the discourse away from the earlier analyses that had posited the racial inferiority of Africans. In 1813, he argued in his Researches into the Physical History of Man that the first humans created by God were Black. Though he later withdrew this conclusion from subsequent editions, because he was not confident that he

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  75 could garner sufficient evidence to prove the theory, Pritchard consistently rejected any argument for the racial inferiority of Africans. As the dominant racial theorist during the peak decades of abolitionist activity, his arguments for the perfectibility of all human beings and the shared characteristics of the entire human population did much to buttress humanitarian arguments against slavery. Even pro-​slavery advocates moved away from racial theories and argued almost exclusively in economic and political terms to support the slave trade.14 While debates in the United States prior to emancipation were heavily charged with racial theories, these were almost absent from the British parliamentary debates that led to abolition.15 Few voices had been raised against slavery at all before the 1780s and the first national committee to abolish slavery was formed in London in 1787. In 1785, no major parliamentary figure considered the abolition of slavery to be practical, even if some may have had moral scruples concerning it.16 The slave trade could be spoken of in glowing terms as, ‘the foundation of [Britain’s] commerce, the support of our colonies, the life of our navigation and the first cause of our national industry and riches’.17 Even the churches had their theological justifications for it.18 The slave trade created massive wealth for the aristocracy and was usually carried out by private trading partnerships and occasionally joint-​stock companies. It was also supported by ordinary people from the middling class and even working-​class people, who might own only a single slave, yet draw income from that investment.19 Given such economic advantages, it is little wonder that systematic campaigning against slavery, led largely by Quakers (whose Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of 1761 banned Friends from purchasing slaves) did not get under way until the 1780s. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded by William Wilberforce, was not set up until 1787 and nine of the 12 charter members of its London Committee were Quakers. Historians have often seen the anti-​slavery cause as strengthened by a moral argument that privileged humanitarianism and natural rights over the selfishness and greed of market forces, though Adam Smith had argued that the trade was costly and inefficient, part of an outdated mercantile system that needed to be replaced.20 In 1944, Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery set out the more prosaic argument that, once the sugar trade in the West Indies hit a downturn through inefficiency, slavery was set aside as no longer profitable.21 More recent scholarship has tended to the opinion that Williams overstated his case in his ‘decline theory’ and has once again returned to the moral, humanitarian, and theological foundations of the anti-​slavery movement.22 Seymour Drescher has convincingly argued that, far from slavery being a faltering trade, it ended when it was at its peak as an act of ‘Econocide’ on the part of Great Britain. At the end of the eighteenth century, when abolitionism was in the ascendant, slavery was expanding, not declining, leading to the conclusion that factors, other than purely economic ones, were driving the end of slavery.23 Christopher Leslie Brown sees a new moral legitimacy given to the abolitionist cause as an expression of

76  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade the need to recover national virtue in the wake of the loss of the American colonies.24 Anstey has shown how the three overarching eighteenth-​century concepts of liberty, benevolence, and happiness contributed to the anti-​ slavery cause, and that Quakers and evangelicals, ‘produced a new four-​ square, theologically based condemnation of slavery and a dynamic of faith and action which largely created and sustained the abolition campaign’.25 He identifies ‘redemption from bondage’, and ‘the law of love’ as the central theological convictions that informed evangelical opposition to slavery, making it possible to argue against it on a theological basis, even in the face of a less than definitive scriptural condemnation of the institution.26 In 1808, the anti-​slavery movement’s first historian, Thomas Clarkson (1760–​1846) attributed the defeat of the trade to religious progress and ‘to Christianity alone’.27 This was claiming too much; it was, after all, this same Christianity that had invented and sustained the institution for centuries before its eventual abolition in 1807. Brown sees the eventual defeat of slavery on religious grounds as largely due to an alliance between polite society, new secular ideas about economic interests and evangelical revivalism’s insistence that not only personal but also social sins needed to be eradicated.28 Black, while indicating the role of economic and political factors external to slavery itself, also points to providentialism as a major factor in the ending of slavery. The belief that the nation that best served the purposes of God would prosper contributed to the idea that abolition was a step toward Britain’s manifest destiny.29 We will see in this chapter that John Wesley did not develop a distinctively theological argument against slavery but was quite ready for Britain to suffer any amount of economic adversity as a result of the ending of slavery, rather than for the inhumane trade to continue.

Wesley on Slavery Centres of Methodist activity were often also centres of the slave trade, so anti-​slavery preaching in such places often provoked and confronted participants in the trade. Bristol was the headquarters of Methodist activity in the south-​west of the country and was also, after London and Liverpool, the largest slave market in the Atlantic trade in the 1770s.30 In British America, south of Maryland, one-​third of the population was enslaved and the percentage was even higher in South Carolina (61 per cent) and Georgia (46 per cent).31 Wesley and his brother had first met with the cruelty of slave masters in Charleston (then Charlestown), South Carolina as Charles was returning to England in 1736. Charlestown was the port of entry for 40 per cent of all African slaves entering America up to 1808. Even though its slaves were relatively more acculturated and engaged with white society than those further south (even running their own shops and businesses), cruelties were still regularly perpetrated.32 Charles Wesley recorded in his journal detailed and lurid descriptions of the brutality of slave masters and considered the

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  77 lightness of the penalties for such crimes as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘no other than a public act to indemnify murder’.33 He considered it impossible to recount ‘all the shocking instances of diabolical cruelty’ he observed which ‘these men (as they call themselves) daily practice upon their fellow-​creatures; and that on the most trivial of occasions’. They included a slave woman beaten unconscious, revived, beaten again and having hot candle wax poured on her skin for the ‘crime’ of overfilling a teacup.34 The Carolina Slave Act (1696) stipulated that a runaway male slave was to be castrated on a second offence and a runaway female slave was to have her ear cut off. Any slave holder refusing to enact such punishments could lose his slaves to an informer. The death of a slave under such punishments would bring compensation to the ‘owner’, which could function as a motive for mistreatment.35 Though it would be forty years before he would take up his pen to engage in an extended opposition to the institution, throughout John Wesley’s career any and all justifications for slavery made by his fellow Christians, including his friend and fellow Methodist, George Whitefield, were dismissed with a rigorous consistency. There are several early references to Wesley’s hatred of the institution, and he supported the original establishment of Georgia as a non-​slaveholding colony.36 By 1726 or 1727, he had read Aphra Behn’s (1640–​ 1689) fictional work Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave (London, 1688).37 While commenting, in 1755, on 1 Timothy 1:10 in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, Wesley spoke of ‘man stealers’ as ‘the worst of all thieves, in comparison of whom highwaymen and house breakers are innocent! What then are most traders in negroes, procurers of servants for America…?’38 While visiting South Carolina in April 1737, Wesley engaged in a long conversation with a West Indian-​born slave. Though he spoke with her at length about her soul and assured her that heaven was a place where no one would ever beat her, he did not raise, or mention in his journal entry, the institution of slavery.39 He did, however, recoil at the ‘lives…vilely cast away through oppression’, in Purrysburg, South Carolina at that time. ‘O earth! How long wilt thou hide blood? How long wilt thou cover thy slain?’40 Once Wesley did take up his pen to address slavery in a more extended treatment, he did so largely on humanitarian grounds using what we would today call a natural law argument. Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) is recognised as one of the earliest non-​Quaker contributions in the opposition to slavery and thus ‘an important moment in the early history of the anti-​slavery crusade’.41 Drawing upon Anthony Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea, published in 1771, he began by providing a historical overview of the institution of slavery from ancient times.42 Benezet’s account is probably the work to which he refers in his journal entry for Wednesday, 12 February 1772. In returning [from Dorking], I read a…book, published by an honest Quaker, on that execrable sum of all villainies, commonly called the

78  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade ‘slave trade’. I read of nothing like it in the heathen world, whether ancient or modern. And it infinitely exceeds, in every instance of barbarity, whatever Christian slaves suffer in Mahometan countries.43 Granville Sharp (1735–​ 1813) told Benezet, in 1774, that Wesley had informed him that he ‘had a desire to write against the Slave Trade’, and that Sharp had provided him with a ‘large bundle’ of books and papers on the subject. After perusing Wesley’s draft, he considered it, ‘well drawn up’ and that the substance of the argument against the ‘gross iniquity’ of the trade had been effectively summarised and drawn primarily from the authors cited in Benezet’s own publications.44 Wesley defined slavery as, ‘domestic slavery, or that of a servant to a master’.45 Drawing on Francis Hargrave’s Plea for Somerset the Negro (1772) he listed a number of its features.46 It brought an obligation of perpetual service which only the master could dissolve, with some countries even prohibiting the release of slaves without the consent of judges. It gave the master arbitrary power to punish the slave in any way ‘not affecting life or limb’, though even with this exemption the punishments for breaching the rule were so slight that they did not restrain masters of a ‘harsh temper’. Nothing could be acquired by the slave unless it was for the master’s benefit. ‘It allows the master to alienate the slave, in the same manner as his cows and horses’. Finally, it was hereditary, descending from parent to child, through all generations.47 Wesley traced the institution of slavery from ancient times and its fall into decline in Europe through the influence of Christianity, where it had been eliminated by early in the fourteenth century. He described its revival in the sixteenth century with the discovery of the Americas and the east and west coasts of Africa, beginning in 1508, when the Portuguese procured slaves from Africa to sell to the Spanish in America where it had ‘now taken deep root in most of our American colonies’.48 One of the frequently heard arguments in support of slavery was that the country from which slaves had been brought was so inhospitable that it had been a mercy to have been delivered from it.49 Wesley strongly rejected this as a falsehood and countered it with a description of the Guinea and Ivory Coasts as pleasant, rich, and fertile areas abundant in produce of all kinds. Though it may have been unhealthy to European visitors it was perfectly healthy to the local inhabitants.50 He then turned to consider the kind of people who had been forced into slavery, providing a very positive portrait of the ‘Jalof’, ‘Fuli’, and ‘Mandingo’ peoples.51 The Fulis were described as having a fair judicial system, and their rulers ruled with moderation. As strict ‘Mahometans’, they drank no alcohol and had a ‘good and quiet disposition’, well taught in good deeds, and disapproving of those who did evil. They did not procure more land than they could use, and they cultivated the land with industry, treating their aged and infirm as well as their neighbours with compassion.52

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  79 A similarly positive portrait of the Mandingos is given and it is noted that they are devout Muslims with a ‘priest’ (sic) in every village, and that their worship is modest, attentive, and reverent. All three nations practised several trades, including ‘smiths, saddlers, potters, and weavers’.53 Wesley’s argument for the moral superiority of African Muslims over European Christians and his positive description of Muslim religious culture stands in stark contrast to the damning portraits of Islam that pervade today’s media space. Rousseau’s view of the ‘noble savage’ is discernible in Wesley’s citation of Allanson’s portrait, reported to the Royal Academy of Science in Paris from 1749–​1753. Which way soever I turned my eyes, I beheld a perfect image of pure nature: An agreeable solitude, bounded on every side by a charming landscape; the rural situation of cottages, in the midst of trees; the ease and quietness of the Negroes, reclined under the shade of the spreading foliage, with the simplicity of their dress and manners: The whole revived in my mind the idea of our first parents, and I seemed to contemplate the world in its primitive state.54 Allanson even marvelled at the Africans’ knowledge of the heavenly bodies, reckoning them to be excellent astronomers, though in want of ‘proper instruments’.55 The inhabitants of the Gold and Slave Coasts, as well as of the kingdom of Benin, Congo, and Angola are all given a similarly positive description. Far from being ignorant and cruel savages, for John Wesley, more ‘justice, mercy and truth’ were to be found among these people than among Europeans.56 The discussion now turned to the manner in which slaves were procured and transported to America, and the portrait Wesley provides is very confronting and disturbing in its cruelty. Many were procured by fraud, tricked into boarding vessels and then held there against their will. Mostly they had been taken by force, beginning around 1551 when the Englishman, Sir John Hawkins, sailed to Cape Verde and sent 80 men ashore to capture slaves. Though they had little success, other more efficient methods were soon introduced. The slavers persuaded the Africans to wage war with each other and to sell their prisoners. They taught them drunkenness and avarice and persuaded them to sell each other in exchange for goods. Even small children had been kidnapped by rival Africans and sold to slavers. ‘That their own parents sell them is utterly false: whites, not blacks, are without natural affection’.57 ‘Thus the Christians preach the gospel to the heathens!’58 Wesley’s description of the traps set for unsuspecting Africans is confirmed by the account given by Ancona Robin John in a letter to Charles Wesley in August 1774. He and his brothers had been members of a powerful slave

80  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade trading dynasty in ‘Old Calabar’ (today’s Nigeria). In the midst of a dispute with a rival slaving clan, the brothers were betrayed into the hands of English slavers. My brother Ambo upon the first appearance of the fraud which was discovered by the Captain and mate coming in to the cabin with pistols which my brother saw & felt for the Capt. stroke him on the head then my brother seized the Captain & men & threw them on the floor but behind him were those that were cutting him on ye head and neck till he were spent & ‘must all kill’d at which time he cryed out O Capt. Bevans what fashion is this for white men to killed black men so he cryed for mercy but obtained none but was thrown up to the hands of his enemies who cut off his head and on the side of the ship this being done they sunk ye canoes and drowned more than we can tell.59 In becoming slaves, the Robin Johns experienced the horrors to which they had condemned so many others, but the experience also led to their conversion, and they became devout Methodists. While enslaved in Virginia, their owner suddenly died and Ancona took this as God’s judgement upon his cruelties. An apparently sympathetic ship’s captain offered to carry them to Bristol, from where they could make their way home, only to clap them in irons and place them on another transport ship upon arrival. Eventually they were set free on a legal technicality after Ephraim Robin John corresponded with the Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield. Upon their release they met Charles Wesley and became Methodists. Joanna Cruickshank underscores the agency of such slaves. This account reminds us that slaves were not simply victims but people who drew on their own resources and will power to respond to the appalling experience that befell them. Not all of them had Ancona and Ephraim’s opportunities and skills, but many acted in profoundly determined, resourceful and courageous ways to survive the experience of slavery.60 It could take three or four months to reach Africa from Europe and the Atlantic coast was the favoured destination. The British took most of their slaves (1,172,800) from the Bight of Biafra, between the Niger River and Cape Lopez in the country now known as Gabon. Following this were West-​ Central Africa (634,000), the Gold Coast (509,200), Sierra Leone (483,100), the Bight of Benin (359,600) and Senegambia (246,800).61 Slave vessels stayed for many months at a time because they usually purchased slaves in small lots from African traders and middlemen and would need to read the very volatile and fluctuating market until they had accumulated their cargo ready for the voyage to America. It should be noted that many slaves were not transported on large purpose-​built ships but on smaller vessels (50–​100

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  81 tonnage) with a limited number of slaves and without special preparation or provisions for carrying ‘human cargo’.62 Wesley cited Anderson’s History of Trade and Commerce for his estimate that 100,000 slaves were transported to America every year, of which number 30,000 died en route. Slaves were first examined by surgeons, men, women, and children standing naked in full view of all. Those who were approved were separated out from the rest and branded with a hot iron, marked on the breast with a company logo. On board they were crowded, still naked, into tiny spaces where the heat, thirst, and stench were so bad it was little wonder so many perished on the journey.63 The vessel upon which Ancona Robin John was transported provided a mere five square feet per slave and only 272 of the 336 captives survived.64 One of the most powerful and widely distributed images of anti-​slavery propaganda was the depiction of the Liverpool vessel Brookes, published in 1789, which depicted rows and rows of slaves lying in the lower decks of the vessel, ‘dehumanised objects, passively submitting to their fate and being packed onto the ships like herrings in a barrel’.65 As horrific as this was it was an improvement on earlier practice (before the 1680s), when double the number of deaths occurred. A lower mortality rate in the eighteenth century has been attributed to the use of common African food (such as rice, yams, and beans), fewer numbers of slaves per tonnage capacity, and improved methods of ventilation. Still, mortality rates never went below 10 per cent which in any ordinary population would be considered catastrophic.66 Slaves often revolted against their captors and should not be seen as simply passive dupes overcome by superior technology and firearms. Some 493 known slave uprisings have been recorded, both onboard ships and on plantations. These include those in South Carolina (1739), in the French colony of Saint-​Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791, and in the British West Indies from 1735 to 1774.67 More Draconian measures in Virginia and Maryland meant that there were no slave uprisings in those places, but the threat was always in the air. Organised rebellions were only one form of resistance; taking flight was another, more common, method often employed by individuals.68 For all his sympathy for slaves, Wesley never called for or supported their rebelling against their masters. He could never have joined in Samuel Johnson’s toast at Oxford in 1777, ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies!’69 Others who opposed slavery often did call for such insurrections as an appropriate response to the kinds of horrors that Wesley highlighted. A pseudonymous writer in 1760 justified slave violence as an appropriate response to the deprivation of liberty. And so all the black men now in our plantations, who are by unjust force deprived of their liberty, and held in slavery, as they have none upon earth to appeal to, may lawfully repel that force with force, and to recover their liberty, destroy their oppressors; and not only so, but

82  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade it is the duty of others, white as well as blacks, to assist those miserable creatures, if they can, in their attempts to deliver themselves out of slavery, and to rescue them out of the hands of their cruel tyrants.70 When slaves arrived in America, they were again paraded naked before the eyes of their purchasers and then separated to be sent to various plantations never to see each other again. ‘Here you may see mothers hanging over their daughters, bedewing their naked breasts with tears, and daughters clinging to their parents, till the whipper soon obliges them to part. And what can be more wretched than the condition they then enter upon?’71 They are separated forever from their family and country, and fed on only a few roots, yams, or potatoes. Clothed by inadequate rags that offer no real shelter from the cold or the heat, they were deprived of adequate sleep and worked continuously from dawn till dusk and beyond their strength so that their lives were shortened well before their time. Watched over by overseers who whipped them until they were scarred from shoulders to waist, they were often not in their quarters until midnight due to extra duties. Going to bed hungry they returned to their labours in the morning or else felt the lash.72 ‘Did the Creator intend, that the noblest Creatures in the visible world, should live such a life as this!’73 Ancona Robin John wrote that Captain Thomson in Virginia ‘would tie me up & whip me many times for nothing at all then some time because I could not dress his diner [sic] for [h]‌im not understanding how to [do] it and he was excidingly [sic] badly men ever I saw’.74 Sir Hans Sloan (1660–​ 1753), physician and successor to Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society, from 1729–​1741, reported even worse punishments inflicted on slaves: [T]‌hey frequently geld [castrate] them, or chop off half a foot: After they are whipped till they are raw all over, Some put pepper and salt upon them: some drop melted wax upon their skin: Others cut off their ears and constrain them to broil and eat them. For rebellion, (that is, asserting their native liberty, which they have as much right to as to the air they breathe) they fasten them down to the ground with crooked sticks on every limb, and then applying fire by degrees, to the feet and hands, they burn them gradually upward to the head.75 Sloan was a trusted authority who had published widely in natural history and had been the attending physician of both Queen Anne and George II. A trustee of the Georgia colony, he probably had had some contact with Wesley in this capacity. His natural history collection was sold to the nation and in 1753 an act was passed to receive it along with other collections as the foundation of the British Museum.76 Given his public status as a scientist, the description Sloane gives of the treatment of slaves, for all its graphic horror, is likely to have been reliable.

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  83 Wesley pointed out how the laws enacted in plantations were no safeguard against such cruelties. In Virginia, any slave freed by his master was required to be resold to another and anyone was legally permitted to kill a slave in whatever way he saw fit. In Jamaica, a reward of fifty pounds was offered for anyone who killed or brought in a runaway slave. In Barbados, the killer of a slave needed to pay only a fifteen pound penalty.77 Wesley recalled, ‘One gentleman, when I was abroad, thought fit to roast his slave alive! But if the most natural act of “running away” from intolerable tyranny, deserves such relentless severity, what punishment have these lawmakers to expect hereafter, on account of their own enormous offences?’78 These descriptions reflect the cruelty of the Barbados Slave Act of 1661 which describes Africans as a ‘heathenish, brutish and uncertain dangerous pride of people’, deserving therefore harsher laws of punishment than white people. Slaves who committed offences were not tried by a jury of peers but by a ‘slave court’ consisting of five white men. The penalty for a slave striking a white person was a severe whipping on the first offence, and for a second offence the nose was to be slit and the face branded. If the slave died during any such punishment it was not to be considered a crime.79 Wesley stated that he would develop his argument against slavery ‘setting the Bible out of the question’ and proceeding ‘on the principles of heathen honesty’.80 In other words, he used an argument from natural law. Aspects of such an argument had already appeared in the tract, for example that human beings are ‘the noblest creatures in the visible world’ and that, as such, they have as much right to natural liberty as to the air that they breathe. To seek to escape the tyranny of slavery is a ‘most natural act’. In choosing to argue in this way, he may have had in mind that an appeal to the Bible would be futile since the biblical material was often used to defend the institution of slavery as divinely ordained. The discussion of ‘natural liberty’ was an important part of public discourse in the eighteenth century and its adoption here would give Wesley a wider audience than a strictly scriptural argument might have done. In 1751, George Whitefield had drawn upon scriptural texts, not to oppose but to defend the institution of slavery. In this, he was repeating arguments, and indeed partly copying verbatim, from his 1750 letter to the Georgia Trustees upon their finally allowing slavery in the colony. As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves, I have no doubt. Since I hear of some that were bought with Abraham’s money and some that were born in his house. I also cannot help thinking that some of those servants mentioned by the apostles in their epistles were, or had been, slaves. It is plain that the Gibeonites were doomed to perpetual slavery…81 Whitefield’s approach matched that of the Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPG; founded in 1701) which argued for the fair treatment of slaves, yet accepted slavery as part of society and stressed the importance of giving

84  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade slaves Christian instruction.82 The poor treatment of slaves, including public whippings, brandings, and family separations on SPG’s Codrington plantation in Barbados, evidences that this policy was not always followed.83 Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson in his 1727 pastoral letter, argued that converted slaves should seek to remain in their enslaved state as Christian freedom was spiritual, not political, in nature. One should remain in whatever state one was born in, whether slave or free.84 For Wesley, the fact that slavery and the cruel practices associated with it were legal did not make them morally right. No law could make good evil or evil good and slaveholding could never be consistent with any degree of natural justice.85 Wesley then turned to a number of justifications for slavery and rejected each one in turn. Some, including the Liverpool salt merchant Henry Wilckens, writing in a slightly later period, would argue that slaves purchased as prisoners of war were spared death, as if it had been an act of mercy to enslave them. ‘The advantage which the Negroes, the objects of the slave trade, thus derive appear to me sufficient to justify the continuation of it; and…the Europeans, by preserving the lives of the slaves, are very much entitled to their services’.86 Postlethwayt argued in 1746 that slavery ameliorated the condition of Africans by saving them from the ‘inhuman sacrifices, torture and barbarity’ of their previous condition.87 Wesley forthrightly declares the falsity of such arguments and asserts that no slaver ever purchased a slave out of a motive of mercy but only ever to make money.88 The lucrative nature of the trade is highlighted by the blunt economic fact that a slave purchased in the Gold Coast in 1790 for £25 would sell for £50 in the West Indies. After costs, a slave trader could expect 8–​10 per cent profit, which was considered a very good return.89 Others had argued that while slavery may not be consistent with either mercy or justice, it was nonetheless necessary to purchase slaves to furnish plantations which would be economically unviable without them. Such economic arguments formed the cornerstone of the anti-​abolitionist position.90 Wesley replied that while it may be seen as necessary to that end, the end itself is not necessary. It would be better for land to remain uncultivated forever than that it should be worked by slaves. In any case, Europeans were just as well able to work the land as Africans, which Wesley says he himself proved by his and other’s hard manual labour in Georgia. Adam Smith’s argument in Wealth of Nations (1776), that free labour was always more efficient and productive than slave labour so that in the long run slavery would prove an uneconomic practice, had not yet become a proven theory.91 To the prevailing idea that slavery was necessary for the ‘trade, wealth, and glory’ of the nation, Wesley responded that England would be better to have no wealth at all than to procure it through villainy, through the ‘tears, and sweat, and blood, of our fellow-​creatures’.92 There is a sharp difference on this economic point between Wesley and Whitefield, who purchased slaves for pecuniary advantage in the running of the Bethesda orphanage in Georgia, though he was a strong advocate for

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  85 their humane treatment. In his 1740 ‘Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina’, Whitefield issued a plea for the ‘poor negroes’ who were treated worse than dogs. ‘Whether it be lawful for Christians to buy slaves, and thereby encourage the nations from which they are brought, to be at perpetual war with each other, I shall not take it upon me to determine; but sure I am it is sinful; when bought, to use them as bad as, nay worse, than brutes’.93 He urged upon slave masters that they teach their slaves the Christian faith for just as they were as much sinners as free men so they were as much able to be saved.94 In his published sermon The Lord our Righteousness, first preached in Boston in 1740, Whitefield concluded by addressing the slaves among his hearers. I must not forget the poor negroes: no, I must not. Jesus Christ has died for them, as well as for others. Nor do I mention you last, because I despise your souls, but because I would have what I shall say make the deeper impression upon your hearts. O that you would seek the Lord to be your righteousness! Who knows but he may be found of you? For in Jesus Christ there is neither male nor female, bond nor free; even you may be the children of God, if you believe in Jesus. Did you never read of the eunuch belonging to the queen Candace? A negro like yourselves. He believed. The Lord was his righteousness. He was baptized. Do you also believe, and you shall be saved.95 Arnold Dallimore, one of Whitefield’s more hagiographical biographers, while conceding regretfully that Whitefield made no effort to abolish the system of slavery, provided an overwhelmingly positive description of his relationship with slaves.96 In spite of his ownership of slaves, ‘the far greater weight of his influence was exerted for the welfare of the black man…declar[ing] to America the human dignity and spiritual worth of the negro’.97 He closes with the estimate of Charles Maxon, writing in 1920, that Whitefield was ‘the first great friend of the American negro’.98 Boyd Stanley Schlenther provides a less sanguine evaluation, pointing out the role of the Bethesda orphanage in Whitefield’s legitimation of slavery. Bethesda fatefully led to Whitefield’s emerging the most energetic, and conspicuous, evangelical defender and practitioner of black slavery. From the time he first visited Georgia he opposed the Trustees’ prohibition against slavery and proceeded to issue a veiled threat that if it were not legally permitted he would remove Bethesda to South Carolina. When in 1750 the Georgia Trustees finally allowed slavery, he produced a full-​throated defence of the institution: ‘As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves, I have no doubt’, adding: ‘Though liberty is a sweet thing to such as are born free, yet to those who never [k]‌new the sweets of it, slavery perhaps may not be so irksome’. He of course claimed that keeping blacks in slavery meant they could be exposed to

86  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade the Christian gospel; however, Whitefield recorded in his manuscript journal that, while preaching, he vehemently told slaves that ‘their hearts were as black as their faces’.99 Whitefield’s ownership and use of slaves was clearly driven by the financial needs of the Bethesda Orphanage, described rather vividly by Schlenther as ‘an albatross-​like incubus hanging on his person and ministry –​a poorly considered project which thwarted much of his proclaimed prime purpose’.100 In 1747, Josiah Smith wrote from Charleston, South Carolina that Whitefield’s supporters had subscribed two hundred pounds sterling ‘to purchase and improve with Negroes a very good plantation’.101 The colony of Georgia had been originally set up by James Oglethorpe on benevolent grounds so that slavery was disallowed in its original charter. Wesley was of the opinion that it was largely financial expedience that led to the eventual introduction of slavery. Mr. Oglethorpe you know went so far as to begin settling a colony without negroes, but at length the voice of those villains prevailed who sell their country and their God for gold, who laugh at human nature and compassion, and defy all religion, but that of getting money…But I fear [slavery] will not be stopped till all the kingdoms of the earth become the kingdoms of our God.102 Whitefield wrote to the trustees of the Orphan House on 6 December 1748, concerned about its precarious financial condition. ‘Had a negroe [sic] been allowed, I should now have had a sufficiency to support a great many orphans, without spending above half the sum which hath been laid out…Georgia never can or will be a flourishing province without negroes be allowed’.103 Given this pecuniary motive, one wonders what Whitefield would have thought of Wesley’s claim, thirty years later, that no slaver ever purchased a slave out of a motive of mercy, but only ever to make money.104 Along with the architects of American Independence, Whitefield, ‘the forgotten founding father’, failed to see the contradictions between the rhetoric of freedom and the continuance of slavery.105 Wesley on the other hand explicitly pointed out the irony of slave holders crying out for liberty while ‘ten thousand negroes in the American colonies’ were enslaved, echoing Samuel Johnson’s dismissal of the American cry for freedom from British rule as, ‘yelps for liberty’ from ‘drivers of Negroes’.106 Though Whitefield stood at the forefront of those who argued for the humane treatment of slaves, his ownership of slaves and his acceptance of the institution, even arguing for its legalisation in Georgia in order to serve his own pecuniary ends, remains problematic for those who revere his memory. When he died in 1770, he was an active participant in the political culture that birthed a new nation in which neither political nor natural liberty was to be extended to slaves.107

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  87 Frederick Douglass’s experience of being ‘bestialised’ at the hands of the ‘slave-​breaker’ Edward Covey, serves as an example of how violent dislocation and brutal conditioning could lead to the apparent ‘stupor’ of intelligent Africans. Douglas recalls how his ‘intellect languished’, as he lost the desire to read and spent his limited free time in a ‘beast-​like stupor’. ‘The dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!’108 Wesley took note of the claim that it was necessary to treat slaves harshly to prevent them running away and because they would otherwise be idle because of their miserable ‘stupidity’, a term not referring to intelligence but to a lack of verve, motivation, and energy brought on by their captive situation where on the plantations they had not been given any opportunity for education or improvement. ‘The inhabitants of Africa’, he argued, ‘where they have equal motives and equal means of improvement, are not inferior to the inhabitants of Europe: To some of them they are greatly superior… Their stupidity, therefore, in our plantations is not natural; otherwise than it is the natural effect of their condition. Consequently, it is not their fault, but your’s [sic]: You must answer for it, before God and man’.109 As to the idea that cruel punishments are necessary because of the cunning, pilfering, and stubbornness of the slaves, again, these had been brought on by the conditions enforced by their owners. If ‘mildness and gentleness’ were used there might be a different result as is proven in the case of Hugh Bryan from ‘the borders of South Carolina’, who treated his slaves with such kindness that they ‘loved and reverenced him as a father, and cheerfully obeyed him out of love. Yea, they are more afraid of a frown from him, than of many blows from an overseer’.110 Wesley then asked slave owners whether they had taken any trouble to teach their slaves that there was a God to whom they must give an account and about rewards and punishments in the afterlife. If not, what wonder if slaves cut their owner’s throats? Slave owners would have only themselves to thank for it, since they stole or bought the slaves in the first place, treated them cruelly, and gave them no opportunity for moral or intellectual improvement.111 The final section of Thoughts upon Slavery is given to application. It constitutes an appeal, not to the public at large, to the English nation in general, or to the Parliament. Instead, it is a very direct and pointed application aimed at those at the heart of the execrable trade –​‘captains, merchants [and] planters’.112 Captains well knew the fine country the slaves were removed from, the dignity and high moral quality of the Africans, and the cruel manner in which they had treated them when they shipped them to the plantations. These were reminded that there was a just God to whom an account must be given. Wesley asked the captains whether they had any heart, any compassion, or any sympathy at all for the Africans. There was still an opportunity for them to repent of their deeds and quit their horrible trade before the day of judgement came upon them.113 Merchants were in the same situation. If they had any compassion at all, they should follow the example of the Liverpool slaver who was asked by one of his slaves

88  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade how he would feel if his own wife and child were taken away by Africans? Immediately he left the slave business. ‘Be you a man! Not a wolf, a devourer of the human species!’114 As for plantation owners, buyers of slaves were equally as guilty as their sellers. It was not enough for purchasers to say that they had bought their goods honestly, or had inherited slaves as part of their estate, and so be unconcerned about how they were procured. Since the purchasers’ money kept the slavers in their trade, they must share in the guilt of the crimes committed.115 Once again, Wesley returned to the concept of freedom as a natural right. ‘Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature…Away with all whips, all chains, all compulsion!’116

Wesley’s Later Observations Wesley preached at Liverpool on 14 March 1777, ‘where many large ships are now laid up in the docks which had been employed for many years in buying, or stealing, poor Africans’, and noted the impact of the American war on the slave trade. ‘The men-​butchers now have nothing to do at this laudable occupation. Since the American war broke out there is no demand for human cattle. So the men of Africa, as well as Europe, may enjoy their native liberty’.117 In his Serious Address to the People of England (1778), he took note of those who complained that Britain had ‘lost our Negro trade’. As far as Wesley was concerned, good riddance to it. ‘Never was anything such a reproach to England since it was a nation, as the having any hand in this execrable traffic’.118 Drescher points out how abolitionists ‘bemoaned the fact that so much material opulence could maximize so much moral poverty’.119 Wesley was similarly outraged that economic prosperity could be seen as a justification for slavery. In a Postscript at the end of the Serious Address, Wesley noted the decrease in trade in the West Indies but saw this loss as something to be celebrated. The final destruction of slavery there would be cause for rejoicing, even should ‘all our Sugar-​Islands (so [long as] the inhabitants escaped) were swallowed up in the depths of the sea’. England may well prosper without such an evil trade. ‘Certain it is, that England may not only subsist, but abundantly prosper without [the West Indian trade and] may increase in population, agriculture, manufactures, and all other articles above-​mentioned, though we no more suck the blood and devour the flesh of the less barbarous Africans’.120 Upon the formation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, Wesley wrote two letters to express his approval, to warn the Committee to expect staunch opposition from powerful interests in the trade, and to promise to circulate a new edition of Thoughts upon Slavery to further the Committee’s aims.121 In the second of these (30 October 1787) he admitted that arguments that appealed to humanity and justice were less likely to convince than those that appealed to more political and economic considerations.122 Whether or not

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  89 upon Wesley’s advice by January of 1788, the Committee had adopted just such a strategy, reporting that ‘they have more particularly directed their attention to the plea of political necessity which is frequently urged to justify…this traffick’.123 On Thursday 6 March 1788, Wesley preached against slavery at Bristol. His text was Genesis 9:27, a text often used to legitimise slavery as divinely instituted with its prophecy that God would ‘enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant’.124 The account in his journal shows that for Wesley, the controversy over slavery went beyond earthly courts, economies, and politics, but was a war being waged among the principalities and powers in spiritual places. In the middle of the sermon, a sudden and inexplicable noise like thunder was heard, shooting through the crowd like lightning and sending the people into a general panic. People violently climbed over the top of each other, and the benches were broken in the melee until, after about six minutes, the noise ceased and Wesley calmly continued. He considered this strange phenomenon to be a sign that the powers of evil were resisting the effort to end the slave trade. It was the strangest incident of the kind I ever remember and believe none can account for it without supposing some preternatural influence. Satan fought lest his kingdom should be delivered up. We set Friday apart as a day of fasting and prayer, that God would remember these poor outcasts of men and (what seems impossible with men, considering the wealth and power of their oppressors) make a way for them to escape and break their chains in sunder.125 Only a month before this, in February 1788, the parliamentary reformer William Wilberforce (1759–​1833) had given notice of a motion to introduce an abolition bill. Before he could introduce the bill, however, he experienced a breakdown and an attack of colitis. He urged his friend William Pitt to take up the cause and, on 9 May, Pitt moved that the House of Commons investigate the slave trade.126 Wilberforce called upon Wesley on Tuesday 24 February 1789 and the latter described their ‘agreeable and useful conversation’ and considered it a ‘blessing for Mr P[itt] to have such a friend as this’.127 Wilberforce himself noted, ‘I called on John Wesley, a fine old fellow’.128 After this meeting, Wesley wrote his famous letter (a little more than a week before he died) to encourage Wilberforce in his fight to end the slave trade, a portion of which contained the following word of encouragement. Unless the divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum [Athanasius against the world] I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can

90  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.129 A great deal more has been made of this letter than is perhaps justified, partly due to the subsequent fame of Wesley and Wilberforce, and the convenience of linking them together as though they were co-​workers, when in fact their actual engagement with another was quite minimal.130 Though Wesley’s opposition to the institution of slavery was unflagging, he was not an anti-​slavery campaigner to the same degree as William Wilberforce or Thomas Clarkson, since his primary business was as the leader of a large and growing religious movement of itinerant preachers and ordinary Methodists. Nonetheless, his preaching may well have contributed to a change in the tide of opinion against slavery. His anti-​slavery views influenced Methodists and the wider public well into the nineteenth century, contributing to the eventual abolition of British slavery.

Slavery and Methodism The first of several large-​scale, national petition campaigns against slavery was launched in 1788. In 1792, 519 petitions to end the slave trade were presented to the British Parliament with 400,000 signatures (13 per cent of the adult male population) representing every English county.131 The Methodist Conference of that year (the first since Wesley’s death) reported that Methodists forwarded 229,426 signatures (compared to 122,978 of all other Dissenting churches and Roman Catholics combined). Despite this popular wave of support, the interposition of the war with France worked against the anti-​slavery cause as mass petitioning and popular movements were seen as harbingers of revolution, an instance of which some thought they discerned in the slave rebellion on Santo Domingo in 1791. Others feared a loss of West Indian possessions to the French or the Americans. As a result of widely supported petitioning, the House of Commons finally agreed, by a vote of 230 to 85, that it would gradually abolish slavery, setting a date of 1 January 1796 to achieve the goal. The House of Lords did not support this proposition, however, and the eventual abolition of slavery in new British possessions was not enacted until 1806 (to take effect from 1 May 1807). This came partly as a result of a shift in abolitionist strategy away from humanitarian arguments to those made based on national and military interests. For example, Napoleon’s restoration of the slave trade meant that abolition could be seen as an expression of opposition to France. It would not be until the passing of the Abolition Act in 1807, sixteen years after Wesley’s death, that the slave trade was finally declared illegal in Britain, with the bill passing by 100 to 36 in the House of Lords and 283 to 16 in the House of Commons. Anti-​slavery naval patrols were needed to

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  91 check the illegal trade for a further sixty years.132 Though 1807 saw the end of the slave trade, and participation in the trade became a felony in 1811, slavery itself still continued as a working institution in British colonies. The London Anti-​Slavery Society began in 1830 to call for the immediate emancipation of all slaves in British colonial possessions. The Methodist Conference, guided by Thomas Coke, forbade any Methodist preacher in the West Indies to marry a slave owner and directed all who may have come into the possession of slaves immediately to emancipate them. The 1829 and 1830 Conferences called upon Methodists not to be content with the ending of the slave trade but to continue to petition Parliament for the abolition of slavery itself. This was at a time when 24,000 members of the Methodist Society in the West Indies were slaves.133 One of early British Methodism’s most able theologians, Richard Watson (1781–​1833), was a staunch anti-​slavery activist, as was the influential Conference President, Jabez Bunting (1779–​1858). In June 1816, Joseph Foster Barham, Member of Parliament for Stockbridge, stated in the House of Commons that Wesleyan missionaries had inculcated insurrection among the West Indian slaves. Watson ably jumped to the missionaries’ defence in a pamphlet of which Wilberforce spoke highly. It not only praised the work of the missionaries but also pointed out the dignity of the Africans and the cruelty they had received at the hands of planters.134 Upon the formation of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1823, led by Thomas Foxwell Buxton (1786–​1845), Watson was hesitant to involve himself, fearing that it might advocate violent insurrection. However, the support of Bunting, who had ‘fearlessly denounced West Indian slavery in the Wesleyan Magazine’, encouraged him to investigate the Society which he came to support and eventually became a member of its Committee.135 In a sermon preached before the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society at the City Road chapel, London on 28 April 1824, Watson advocated for the religious instruction of West Indian slaves. In it he rejected an attitude that would emerge later in the social Darwinism that relegated the ‘negro’ to a place lower down the evolutionary scale from Europeans. ‘The negro through all his shades; the Hottentot, through all his varieties; the Indians of America, and the natives of New Holland [Indigenous Australians] have all, in our own days been inspired by the love of God through the Gospel…Thus have Missionary operations not only enlarged the sphere of benevolence, but extended the vision of a hoodwinked philosophy’.136 Watson was convinced that there was nothing more certain than that ‘slavery must terminate throughout the British empire’. It should not be terminated by violent means, however, but by the influence of the ‘Gospel of peace’, an influence which could only be made available if slaves were given Christian instruction.137 His memoir lamented the fact that ‘[t]‌he black man, though redeemed by the blood of the Son of God, was regarded merely as a machine in the manufacture of sugar’.138 Nonetheless, he did not call

92  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade for immediate emancipation, fearing, in 1824, the negative impact of such action upon the slaves themselves. Slavery is a national violence, a national threat. The nation could never acquire a moral right of property in slaves; and could therefore never give it by any legislative act to any individuals whatever. National repentance of this evil has been announced; and what then follows, as ‘fruits for repentance’? Not, we grant, emancipation instanter, if that, after calm investigation, can be proved injurious to the slaves; but emancipation as soon as ever it can be beneficial, and the honest and united efforts of Government to remove all present real injuries to the slaves; and to adopt instant means to prepare the slaves for as speedy a relief as possible, from the necessary evils of that bondage to which we have reduced them, in opposition to every law of God.139 In Leeds in 1830, the Conference broke with its usual non-​political stance to urge Methodists to use their power as voters to bring slavery to an end. Watson moved a series of successful resolutions and declared that ‘holding of human beings in a state of slavery is in direct opposition to all the principles of natural right, and to the benign spirit of the religion of Christ’.140 An anti-​slavery petition, presented to Parliament in 1833, carried 224,000 Methodist signatures.141 Watson urged Methodists to vote for TB Macaulay in the Leeds election of 1832, even though he was a Whig and his rival Michael Sadler was a Tory with Methodist connections. ‘The latter has never opened his mouth in Parliament against slavery. Macaulay is trained to abhor it’.142 Shortly before he died in 1833, still active in the anti-​slavery cause, Watson declared, ‘I am now a dying man; but it is a privilege to have lived to see the time when the day of liberty begins to draw upon those poor oppressed people in the West Indies’.143 Aided by the shifts represented by the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Emancipation Act was passed in 1833, emancipating almost 800,000 slaves in colonial possessions from 1 August 1834. Slave owners received twenty million pounds sterling in compensation and former slaves were to continue to work for their former masters as indentured labourers for a further four to six years. This unjust interim arrangement finally ended in 1838. American Methodists found the institution of slavery to be a far more intractable problem and were deeply implicated in its perpetuation, despite the views of its founder. As slavery, especially in the southern colonies, constituted the backbone of the colonial economy, the acceptance of slavery among Methodists was the end result of a gradual accommodation to its American context. Abolitionist sentiment never went away, however, and eventually Methodism and indeed the entire nation would be rent asunder over the industry of human bondage. Davis refers to ‘the central truth that black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomena we call “America” [involving] the profound contradiction of a free society that is

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  93 made possible by black slave labor’.144 Taking the experience of African Americans seriously involves the realisation ‘that tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture’.145 While there is no reference to slavery in the American Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s original draft disparaged England for introducing slavery into the 13 colonies. [George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither… Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.146 The failure to include Jefferson’s anti-​slavery statement in the Declaration would have fateful and tragic consequences for the new republic because it meant that slavery would become a state-​based matter. Prior to the revolution, one-​third of the population of the southern colonies was enslaved and 22 per cent of the enslaved population of the 13 colonies had been born in America. Slaves were less populous north of the Chesapeake, making up less than 10 per cent of the population (from 11 per cent in New York to 0.1 per cent in New Hampshire).147 In newly republican America, between 1777 and 1804, slaves were granted freedom in the northern states from Vermont to New Jersey.148 Even though two-​thirds of the history of American slavery had taken place before the revolutionary war, the situation in the southern states, after the War, developed quite differently. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1783 had made large-​scale cotton milling possible and increased the demand for slave labour. Cotton production rose from 3,000 bales in 1793 to over three million in the 1850s.149 Human bondage became the backbone of the southern economy and, at least by one estimate, ‘no group was more forceful and effective among the ideological and practical defenders of slavery than the clergy’.150 In keeping with Wesley’s views, the Methodist Episcopal Church formed at the inaugural Christmas Conference of 1784, had originally opposed slavery, threatening expulsion to any slave holder. Four years prior, the 1780 Conference had acknowledged slavery as contrary to the law of God and of nature, and hurtful to society. Travelling preachers who held slaves were ordered to release them. The 1784 Discipline ordered every Methodist to release their slaves within a year of receiving notice to do so. No slaveholder was to be admitted to the Society or to the Lord’s Supper. The attitude of local preachers and lay Methodists was quite different to that of the itinerant preachers, and petitions for the relaxation of such rules appeared almost immediately.151 After land value, slaves were the major source of wealth in the south (which at that time meant the large territory from Maryland to

94  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade Georgia where the Methodist constituency was largest) and emancipation meant taking a significant financial loss. By 1860, slaves would have a capital worth higher than 70 billion US dollars in today’s terms, and the gross national product of the entire United States in that year was only about 20 per cent more than the total value of slaves in the southern states.152 But even in the 1780s, attempts by circuit riders to enforce anti-​slavery rules further alienated white southern Methodists who saw it as a threat to their way of life, including their financial prosperity. Within six months, the 1784 anti-​ slavery provisions in the Discipline had been suspended despite protestations from Thomas Coke. Francis Asbury had no love for the institution of slavery and paid a personal visit to George Washington and the Governor of North Carolina to petition for its abolition.153 Methodist growth in the south was so rapid, however, that Asbury eventually took the decision to discontinue opposition to it in order not to slow down such growth, a decision he later came deeply to regret.154 The 1796 Conference allowed some slaveholders in certain cases to be admitted to the Society. Emancipation, it was decided, was to be gradual, rather than immediate. Slaveholders were not to be admitted to Society, until the preacher had first met with them. In 1804, members in the southern states were made exempt from the rules regarding slavery and slaves were counselled to submit to the authority of their masters. In 1808, abolitionists managed to get the above exemption clause removed, but the General Conference gave each Conference the power to decide for itself. A thousand copies of the Discipline were printed in South Carolina that had no reference to slavery at all. A statement in the 1816 Discipline seemed to represent an effort to reverse the spread of slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church, declaring it to be a great evil but past remedy. In 1820, the paragraph which left it up to Annual Conferences to form their own regulations was struck out. It was decided in 1824 that ‘coloured people’ were to be formed into their own District Conferences and all preachers should urge members to teach their slaves to read the Scriptures. By this time slavery had become simply a given.155 Strong Abolitionist sentiment could not be silenced, however, and in 1843, Orange Scott, Luther Lee, La Roy Sunderland, and Adam Crookes were among those who left the Methodist Episcopal Church and founded the Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America in Utica, New York.156 The Methodist Episcopal Church’s inability to deal with the slavery issue would eventually lead to a major schism that divided American Methodism into northern and southern denominations in 1845, a rift that would not be healed for almost a century. The end of slavery in America occurred in a remarkably short period of time. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, welcomed a mutual right of search between British and American vessels, leading to the Senate’s adoption of a new treaty with Britain in 1862. The Confederate States, by now at war with the United States, were not, of course, part of such a treaty, so that within five years, and with the Confederacy defeated, the Atlantic slave trade had ended. The

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  95 Thirteenth Amendment would end slavery on US soil forever, but the racism that supported it would continue in the ‘Jim Crow’ laws that enshrined segregation and were built out of the former slave codes. Despite racism, slavery, and social exclusion, African Americans took up Methodist religion at a very rapid rate. The white Methodist insistence on segregation contributed to the formation of a number of new ‘African Methodist’ churches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.157 The preachers of the ‘African Methodist’ tradition found a new way to read the Bible, not as legitimising the institution of slavery, but as the record of a God who exerted divine power to deliver God’s people from the bondage of their oppressors. It was the Exodus narrative reworked for a new chosen people. It is in this preaching tradition, alongside the Abolitionist activism of some white Methodists, that we see the fullest expression of John Wesley’s original staunch opposition to ‘the execrable villainy’ of slavery.

Notes 1 Jeremy Black, The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 73–​75. 2 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 99; Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 98; Carole Shammas, The Pre-​ industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 3. 3 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 1. 4 John Oldfield, ‘Britain and the Slave Trade’, In A Companion to Eighteenth-​ Century Britain, ed. H.T. Dickinson (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 489, 489–​498. 5 Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Anti-​ Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 98. 6 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 79–​80. 7 David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, Vol. 1 (London, 1758), 125n, cited in Aaron Garrett, ‘Hume’s Revised Racism Revisited’, Hume Studies 26, no. 1 (April 2000): 171–​178. Some parts of this chapter have appeared in Glen O’Brien, ‘Freedom in the Atlantic World: John Wesley and George Whitefield on Slavery’, in Wesley and Whitefield? Wesley versus Whitefield?, ed. Ian Maddock (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 161–​182. 8 Wongi Park, ‘The Blessing of Whiteness in the Curse of Ham: Reading Gen 9:18–​ 29 in the Antebellum South’, Religions 12, no. 928 (2021): 1–​18. https://​doi.org/​ 10.3390/​rel1​2110​928 9 Drescher, Abolition, 84. 10 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 61, 95–​96. 11 Roger Anstey traces the influence of eighteenth-​century philosophy on slavery in The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–​1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975), 91–​125. 12 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 48–​ 56, cited in Samuel Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 75.

96  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade 3 Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, 79. 1 14 This analysis is drawn from Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, 79. Methodist preacher and theologian Richard Watson’s 1825 sermon ‘Religious Instruction of Slaves in the West India Colonies Advanced and Defended’ targeted planters and racial theorists as apologists for racial inequality. Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, 80. 15 Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, 81. 16 Drescher, Econocide, 15. 17 A Treatise upon the Trade from Great Britain to Africa (1772), quoted in Wilfrid Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–​1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 254. 18 The Rev. R. Harris, Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave Trade, Shewing its Conformity with the Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1788), in The Slave Trade Debate: Contemporary Writings For and Against, edited by John Pinfold (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007), 174–​247. 19 James Van Der Pool, dir. Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners: Episode 1. www.bbc. co.uk/​pro​gram​mes/​b063d​b18 (accessed 24 September 2021). See the University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-​ownership website for a database of the names of slave owners at www.ucl.ac.uk/​lbs/​ (accessed 23 September 2021). 20 Oldfield, ‘Britain and the Slave Trade’, 493. For a detailed and nuanced discussion of the impact of Adam Smith’s economic theories on the abolition of slavery, see Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, 19–​35. 21 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). In ­ chapter 11, ‘The “Saints” and Slavery’, 178–​ 196, Williams argued that the role of humanitarianism in abolition had been ‘grossly exaggerated’ (esp. 178). 22 Pinfold, The Slave Trade Debate, 10–​12; Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, 38–​57, 321–​425; Drescher, Econocide; David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 240–​249. 23 The term ‘econocide’ refers to ‘the radical termination of a profitable trade by a newly empowered political movement that finally sentenced the British trans-​ oceanic slave trade to death’. Drescher, Econocide, xxvii. See also Drescher, The Mighty Experiment; Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Anti-​Slavery. 24 Christopher L. Brown. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 25 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 96. 26 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 184–​199. 27 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols (London, 1808), 2: 8, 11. The ‘indefatigable and obsessive’ Clarkson is discussed in Oldfield, ‘Britain and the Slave Trade’, 494–​497. 28 Christopher L. Brown, ‘Christianity and the Campaign against Slavery and the Slave Trade’, in CHC, 7: 518–​519 [517–​535]. The work of David Brion Davis also outlines the moral dimensions of the slavery debate. Davis, Inhuman Bondage; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Vintage, 2015). 29 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 114–​115.

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  97 30 Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145, cited in Manfred Marquardt, ‘Social Ethics in the Methodist Tradition’, in T&T Clark Companion to Methodism, ed. Charles Yrigoyen Jr. (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 294, 292–​ 308. See also Manfred Marquardt, John Wesley’s Social Ethics: Practice and Principles (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991), 67–​75. Though it ends in 1700, David H. Stacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–​ 1700 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991) is a valuable economic history of the city in the early modern period. London merchants financed 63 per cent of slave voyages between 1698 and 1735, but between 1720 and 1749 Bristol had overtaken London. Liverpool eventually overtook both, being responsible for 75 per cent of all slave voyages between 1780 and 1807. Oldfield, ‘Britain and the Slave Trade’, in CECB, 489, 489–​498. 31 Drescher, Abolition, 118–​119. 32 Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 136–​140. 33 Charles Wesley, journal entry for 2 August 1736, The Manuscript Journal of the Rev. Charles Wesley, M.A., eds. S.T. Kimbrough, Jr. and Kenneth G.C. Newport (Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2008), 46–​47. 34 Irv A. Brendlinger, Social Justice through the Eyes of Wesley: John Wesley’s Theological Challenge to Slavery (Peterborough, Ontario: Joshua Press, 2006), 14–​15. 35 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 61. 36 Journal (Curnock) 1: 244, fn. 1. Jeremy Black argues that the prohibition against slavery in the original charter of Georgia was not out of humanitarian concern but from a desire to support small-​scale agrarian farming rather than large aristocratic plantations. There were also defensive concerns as the importation of slaves made ports more vulnerable to attack and to insurrections. Pressure from planters led to the end of the original charter in 1750. Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 97. Davis points out that Governor James Oglethorpe, though founding Georgia as a free colony, owned slaves on a Carolina plantation and was an officer in the slave-​trading Royal African Company. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 136. 37 According to Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 240. 38 John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (Salem, OH: Schmul, 1976, first published, 1754), 539. 39 John Wesley, journal entry 23 April 1737, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 18 Journal and Diaries I (1735–​1738), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1988), 501–​502. 40 John Wesley, journal entry, 27 April 1737, Journal (Curnock) 1: 352–​ 353. These words do not appear in the same entry in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 18: 503–​504. Jeremy Black attributes the long gap between Wesley’s encountering of slavery in South Carolina in 1736 to the publication of Thoughts upon Slavery in 1774 to the intervening influence of the writings of Granville Sharp and Anthony Benezet. Black, Atlantic Slave Trade, 92. 41 John Wesley, journal entry, 12 February 1772, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 24 Journal and Diaries VII (1787–​1791), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2003), 70. John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (London, 1774); Works (Jackson) 11: 59–​79. For the discussion of Wesley’s sources, see Frank Baker, ‘The Origins, Character and Influence of

98  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade John Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery’, in Methodist History 22 (1984): 75–​86. Davis discusses two very early anti-​slavery treatises, a 1688 letter of protest from Dutch Quakers to the Yearly Meeting of Friends in Germantown, Pennsylvania that was relatively unknown until the nineteenth century, and The Selling of Joseph, a 1700 pamphlet by the Massachusetts jurist Samuel Sewall. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 126–​127. 42 Warren T. Smith, John Wesley and Slavery (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986), 92. Benezet’s work was reprinted as Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea: A New Impression of the Edition of 1788 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1968). See also Irv A. Brendlinger, To be Silent…would be Criminal: The Antislavery Influence and Writings of Anthony Benezet (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007). 43 John Wesley, journal entry 12 February 1772, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 307. For a discussion of the relationship between Wesley and Benezet, see Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 239–​241. 44 Granville Sharp to Anthony Benezet, 7 January 1774, cited in Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 240. Benezet’s works are A Short Account of that part of Africa inhabited by Negroes (Philadelphia, PA, 1762); A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies in a Short Representation of the Calamitous State of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominions (Philadelphia, PA, 1766); and Some Historical Account of Guinea, its Produce and the General Disposition of its Inhabitants, with an Enquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, its Nature and Calamitous Effects (Philadelphia, PA, 1771). Ward and Heitzenrater maintain that it is this last which ‘is probably the one referred to’ in Wesley’s journal entry but without giving any evidence. Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 307, fn. 40. Benezet was born in France of Huguenot parents who fled to London. He became a Quaker at the age of fourteen and in 1731 the family moved to America. Leaving business in 1742 to become a teacher in Philadelphia, he first became concerned about slaves in 1750 after which he wrote a series of works on the subject that were influential on the anti-​slavery work of Thomas Clarkson as well as influencing Wesley’s involvement in the anti-​slavery movement. 45 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 59. 46 Francis Hargrave, An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett, a Negro, lately determined by the Court of King’s Bench: wherein it is attempted to demonstrate the present unlawfulness of domestic slavery in England: to which is prefixed a state of the case (London, 1772). For a discussion of the legal case surrounding Somerset, see William M. Wiecek, ‘Somerset: Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-​American World’, University of Chicago Law Review 42, no. 1 (1974): 86–​146. 47 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 4; Works (Jackson) 11: 59–​60. 48 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 4–​6; Works (Jackson) 11: 60. 49 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 7; Works (Jackson) 11: 60. 50 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 7–​9; Works (Jackson) 11: 60–​61. 51 The names used for people groups in historical sources often differ from those in present use. The ‘Jolif’ people are now known as the Wolof people of Senegal and The Gambia. ‘Fuli’ is probably a reference to the Fula or Fulani people of

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  99 several West Africa countries including Sierra Leone, and the Mandingo people are the ‘Mandika’ who currently live mostly in The Gambia and Guinea. I have retained the names used in the source material. 52 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 9–​10; Works (Jackson) 11: 62. 53 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 10–​11; Works (Jackson) 11: 62. 54 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 12; Works (Jackson) 11: 63. 55 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 12–​13; Works (Jackson) 11: 63. 56 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 13–​17 (quotation, 16–​17); Works (Jackson) 11: 64–​65. 57 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 17–​ 20 (quotation, 20); Works (Jackson) 11: 65–​66. 58 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 20–​ 22 (quotation, 22); Works (Jackson) 11: 66–​67. 59 Ancona Robin John to Charles Wesley, 17 August 1774, cited in Joanna Cruickshank, ‘Charles Wesley, The Men of Old Calabar, and the Abolition of Slavery’, Aldersgate Papers 7 (September 2009): 8–​ 16. See also Randy J. Sparks, Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-​Century Odyssey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). John Wesley wrote to Anthony Benezet in 1774 about a case of the kidnapping of Africans from ‘Old Calabar’ by order of ‘Captain Bevan of London’. Anthony Benezet to Granville Sharp, 18 November 1774, cited in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 240. 60 Cruickshank, ‘Charles Wesley, The Men of Old Calabar, and the Abolition of Slavery’, 16. 61 The figures are supplied in Oldfield, ‘Britain and the Slave Trade’, 491. 62 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 83–​84. 63 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 22–​23; Works (Jackson) 11: 67. For a good discussion of the conditions on board slave ships, see Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). 64 Cruickshank, ‘Charles Wesley, The Men of Old Calabar, and the Abolition of Slavery’, 11–​12. 65 Pinfold, ed. The Slave Trade Debate, quotation 12, image 328–​329, reproduced from An Address to the Inhabitants of Glasgow, Paisley, and the Neighbourhood, concerning the African Slave Trade by a Society in Glasgow (Glasgow, 1791), in Pinfold, The Slave Trade Debate, 312–​329. 66 Oldfield, ‘Britain and the Slave Trade’, 492. 67 The French colony ‘Saint-​Domingue’ (today’s Haiti) refers to the western third of the Spanish colony ‘Santo Domingo’, or ‘Hispaniola’, the terms being interchangeable depending upon the colonial powers doing the naming at the time. 68 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 89–​92. 69 James Boswell, Life of Johnson (New York, 1953), 876, cited in Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 205. 70 Philmore [pseudonym], Two Dialogues on the Man-​Trade (London, 1760), 21, cited in Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 205. 71 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 24. 72 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 23–​25; Works (Jackson) 11: 67–​68. 73 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 25; Works (Jackson) 11: 67. 74 Ancona Robin John to Charles Wesley, 17 August 1774, cited in Cruickshank, 12. 75 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 26; Works (Jackson) 11: 68.

100  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade 76 On 12 December 1759, Wesley spent part of the afternoon in the British Museum where he admired the collections of Sloane. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 21 Journal and Diaries IV (1755–​1765), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1992), 236, see fn. 95. Wesley displayed his more typical disdain of collecting for collecting’s sake when he visited, on 22 October 1748, the Botanical Garden near Chelsea Embankment begun by Sloane and donated by him in 1721 to the Society of Apothecaries, and dismissed it as simply ‘gratifying an idle curiosity’. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journal and Diaries III (1743–​1754), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991), 252. 77 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 26–​28; Works (Jackson) 11: 69. 78 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 28–​29; Works (Jackson) 11: 69. 79 Cited in Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 46–​47. 80 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 29; Works (Jackson) 11: 70. For a discussion of Thoughts upon Slavery as a model of public theology, see David N. Field, ‘John Wesley as a Public Theologian: The Case of Thoughts upon Slavery’, Scriptura 114, no. 1 (2015): 1–​13. 81 Irv A. Brendlinger wrongly claims that this letter was written to John Wesley. ‘Wesley, Whitefield, a Philadelphia Quaker, and Slavery’, Wesleyan Theological Journal 36, no. 2 (Fall, 2001): 167 (164–​173). He appeared to be following David Decamp Thompson, John Wesley as a Social Reformer (New York, 1898), 43–​45, who was relying on Luke Tyerman in attributing it to Wesley. This appears to be the source of the confusion. Brendlinger in his 2001 article, and in several other publications, inadvertently perpetuated the error. I am grateful to Geordan Hammond for his careful work on this and for passing his conclusions on to me. Even though the letter was not addressed to Wesley, it is likely that he was not unaware that Whitefield held such views, given the closeness of their (albeit contentious) friendship. 82 Selina, the Countess of Huntingdon was another slave owner within Whitefield’s circle who argued for the legitimacy of slavery on both scriptural and economic grounds. Boyd S. Schlenther, Queen of the Methodists: The Countess of Huntingdon and the Eighteenth-​Century Crisis in Faith and Society (Durham, England: Durham Academic Press, 1997), 90–​91. 83 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 95. 84 Edmund Gibson, Two Letters (London, 1727), 10–​11, cited in Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 95. 85 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 29–​31; Works (Jackson) 11: 70. 86 Henry Wilckens, Letters Concerning the Slave Trade and with Respect to its Intended Abolition (Liverpool, 1793), 4, cited in Pinfold, The Slave Trade Debate, 20. 87 M. Postlethwayt, The National and Private Advantages of the African Trade Considered (1746) cited in Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, 12. 88 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 33–​34; Works (Jackson) 11: 71–​72. 89 Oldfield, ‘Britain and the Slave Trade’, 491. 90 Pinfold, The Slave Trade Debate, 22. 91 Even Smith, however, argued that ‘the constitution of those born in the temperate climate of Europe could not…support the labour of digging the ground under the burning sun of the West Indies’. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1776), 586. Furthermore,

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  101 he considered the average European agricultural labourer to have ‘the habit of sauntering and indolent careless applications’ that rendered them ‘almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application even in the most pressing occasions’. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 19. 92 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 34–​ 39 (quotation, 39); Works (Jackson) 11: 72–​74. 93 George Whitefield, ‘A Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina’, 23 January 1740, in George Whitefield, The Works of the Rev. George Whitefield, Vol. 4 (London, 1771), 37. See also Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 100–​ 101, 258, 272–​ 273; Arnold A. Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1970), ­chapter 30, ‘Whitefield and the American Negro’, 495–​509. 94 Whitefield, ‘A Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina’, 39–​41. 95 Whitefield, ‘The Lord our Righteousness’, in Works 5: 234. This sermon was included among those published in Select Sermons of George Whitefield (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 116–​138. 96 Dallimore, George Whitefield, 495–​509. Dallimore draws an extraordinarily long bow, however, when he suggests that the invention of the ‘negro spiritual’ may be traced to Whitefield’s preaching, 508–​509. 97 Dallimore, George Whitefield, 509. 98 Charles H. Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1920), 57, cited in Dallimore, George Whitefield, 509. 99 George Whitefield to the Georgia Trustees, 6 December 1748; George Whitefield to [Johann] B[oltzius], 22 March 1751, in Whitefield, Works, 2: 208–​209, 404; George Whitefield manuscript journal, 1, 2 May 1748, cited in Boyd S. Schlenther, ‘Whitefield’s Personal Life and Character’, in George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy, eds. Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 25, 12–​28. 100 Schlenther, ‘Whitefield’s Personal Life and Character’, 24. See also Peter Choi, ‘Whitefield, Georgia, and the Quest for Bethesda College’, in Hammond and Jones, George Whitefield, 224–​240. 101 Stout, Divine Dramatist, 198. 102 Smith, John Wesley and Slavery, 53. 103 George Whitefield, Letter to the Honourable Trustees of Georgia, 6 December 1748, in Works 2: 208–​209. 104 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 37; Works (Jackson) 11: 71–​72. 105 Stout, Divine Dramatist, 198–​199. 106 John Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty Occasioned by a Late Tract (London, 1776); Works (Jackson) 11: 90–​ 118; Samuel Johnson, cited in Drescher, Abolition, 119. 107 For Whitefield and early American political culture, see Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Jerome D. Mahaffey, Preaching Politics: The Religious Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007); Jerome D. Mahaffey, The Accidental

102  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade Revolutionary: George Whitefield and the Creation of America (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011). 108 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, ed. John W. Blassingame et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 35–​36, 49, cited in Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 52, 179. 109 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 40–​41; Works (Jackson) 11: 74. 110 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 41–​42; Works (Jackson) 11: 75. Wesley had engaged in ‘necessary talk (religious)’ with Bryan while in Georgia on 22 and 23 November 1736 and wrote to him from Oxford on 28 April 1738 after his return to England. Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 18: 449, 577 (diary entries). 111 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 42–​43; Works (Jackson) 11: 75. 112 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 43; Works (Jackson) 11: 75–​76. Maldwyn Edwards saw this as a weakness of the tract. It did not propose any state intervention in the abolition of the slave trade. ‘He saw no hope beyond a personal appeal to the people directly concerned…in accord with his belief in self-​initiative rather than State help’. Maldwyn Edwards, After Wesley: A Study of the Social and Political Influence of Methodism in the Middle Period (1791–​ 1849) (London: Epworth Press, 1948), 65. 113 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 44–​47; Works (Jackson) 11: 76–​77. 114 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 47–​ 49 (quotation, 49); Works (Jackson) 11: 77–​78. 115 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 49–​51; Works (Jackson) 11: 78–​79. 116 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, 51–​52; Works (Jackson) 11: 79. 117 John Wesley, journal entry 11 April 1777, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries V (1776–​1786), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995), 46. 118 John Wesley, A Serious Address to the People of England, with Regard to the State of the Nation (London, 1778), 14–​15; Works (Jackson) 11: 144–​145. 119 Drescher, Econocide, 166. 120 Wesley, Serious Address to the People of England, 28. 121 Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave-​Trade, 1: 447, cited in Works (Jackson) 13: 153–​154. 122 Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave-​Trade, 1: 451–​452, cited in Works (Jackson) 13: 154. 123 Abolition Committee Minutes of 15 January 1788, cited in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 260. 124 Genesis 9: 27. 125 John Wesley, diary entry for 3 March 1788, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 24 Journal and Diaries VII (1787–​1791), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2003), 70. 126 John Pollock, Wilberforce (London: Constable, 1977), 77–​83. 127 John Wesley, diary entry for 24 February 1789, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 24: 121, 273. Wesley wrote to Walter Churchey on 27 January 1789, ‘I suppose everyone that loves King George, loves Mr. Pitt’. Letters (Telford) 8: 113. 128 Journals (Curnock) 7: 471, note cited in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 24: 121–​122, fn. 60.

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  103 129 John Wesley to William Wilberforce, 24 February 1791, http://​wes​ley.nnu. edu/​john-​wes​ley/​the-​lett​ers-​of-​john-​wes​ley/​wesl​eys-​lett​ers-​1791/​#Eight​een (accessed 26 November 2021). In Jackson, Works 13: 153, the date is given as 26 February and it is addressed simply ‘To a Friend’, Wesley had been prompted to write the letter after reading a tract ‘by a poor African’ (Gustavus Vassa), on 22 February 1791. Born in 1745, Vass was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Barbados, travelled to England in 1757, and was baptized in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, in 1759. 130 Wilberforce’s sons and biographers, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce, rather romantically recorded that their father, ‘received an animating charge traced upon the bed of death by the faltering hand of the venerable Wesley’. R.I. and S. Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), 1: 297, cited in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 240–​241. 131 The figures are from Pinfold, The Slave Trade Debate, 8. 132 Britain spent sixty million pounds attempting to police the trade in international waters between 1816 and 1865. Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 7–​8, 138–​141. 133 Conference Minutes (1829), 514 (1830), 613, cited in Maldwyn Edwards, John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century: A Study of His Social and Political Influence (London: Epworth Press, 1955), 124–​125; Edwards, After Wesley, 67–​74. 134 Richard Watson, A Defence of the Wesleyan-​Methodist Missions in the West Indies (London, 1817). The circumstances surrounding the pamphlet, its content and impact are discussed in Richard Watson, The Works of the Rev. Richard Watson in Thirteen Volumes (London, 1858), 1: 188–​199. 135 Watson, Works 1: 318–​320, 378–​381. 136 Richard Watson, ‘Sermon V, The Religious Instruction of the Slaves in the West India Colonies Advocated and Defended’, in Watson, Works 2: 90. 137 Watson, Works 2: 104–​108. 138 Watson, Works 1: 188. 139 Watson, Works 1: 319–​320. 140 Watson, Works 1: 375. 141 This was the majority of the 354,000 signatures from Dissenters. Edwards, After Wesley, 72. 142 Edwards, After Wesley, 72. 143 Watson, Works 1: 409. 144 Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 102. 145 Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 226, commenting on Winthrop D. Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 146 Thomas Jefferson, cited in Drescher, Abolition, 124–​125. 147 Drescher, Abolition, 118–​119. 148 Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 15, 152. 149 Black, Atlantic Slave Trade in World History, 121. 150 Martin Marty, ‘The American Revolution and Religion, 1765–​1815’, in CHC 7: 514, 497–​516. 151 I am grateful to Rex Matthews whose advice in personal correspondence has informed the trajectory described here. 152 Drescher, Abolition, 296.

104  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade 153 John Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 151–​152. 154 Wigger, American Saint, 148–​157. 155 Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–​1845 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). 156 Ira F. McLeister and Roy S. Nicholson. Conscience and Commitment: The History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America (Marion, IN: Wesley Press, 1976). 157 Reginald F. Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Harry Van Buren Richardson, Dark Salvation: The Story of Methodism as it Developed among Blacks in America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976); Morris L. Davis, ‘Methodists and Race’, The Cambridge Companion to American Methodism, ed. Jason E. Vickers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 281–​ 295; Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770–​1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) esp. ­chapter 3, ‘Slaves and Free Blacks in the Church’, 47–​72; James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); James Walker Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (New York: AME Book Concern, 1895); Othal H. Lakey, The History of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (Memphis, TN: CME Publishing House, 1985); Ore L. Spragen, The History of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (1870–​2009): Faithful to the Vision (Lima, OH: Wyndham Hall Press, 2011); for a helpful study of African American members in a White-​controlled Methodist denomination see J.M. Shropshire, Snr., ‘Black People in the Methodist Protestant Church (1830–​ 1939)’, in The People(s) Called Methodist: Forms and Reforms of their Life, eds. William B. Lawrence, Dennis M. Campbell, and Russell E. Richey, United Methodism and American Culture, Vol. 2 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1998), 193–​216.

References Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–​1810. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1975. Baker, Frank. ‘The Origins, Character and Influence of John Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery’, Methodist History 22 (1984): 75–​86. Benezet, Anthony. A Short Account of that part of Africa inhabited by Negroes. Philadelphia, PA, 1762. Benezet, Anthony. A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies in a Short Representation of the Calamitous State of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominions. Philadelphia, PA, 1766. Benezet, Anthony. Some Historical Account of Guinea, its Produce and the General Disposition of its Inhabitants, with an Enquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, its Nature and Calamitous Effects. Philadelphia, PA, 1771. Benezet, Anthony. Some Historical Account of Guinea: A New Impression of the Edition of 1788. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1968.

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  105 Black, Jeremy. The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. Brendlinger, Irv A. Social Justice through the Eyes of Wesley: John Wesley’s Theological Challenge to Slavery. Peterborough, Ontario: Joshua Press, 2006. Brendlinger, Irv A. To be Silent…would be Criminal: The Antislavery Influence and Writings of Anthony Benezet. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. Brendlinger, Irv A. ‘Wesley, Whitefield, a Philadelphia Quaker, and Slavery’, Wesleyan Theological Journal 36, no. 2 (Fall, 2001): 164–​173. Brown, Christopher L. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Brown, Christopher L. ‘Christianity and the Campaign against Slavery and the Slave Trade’. In The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 7 Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660–​ 1815, edited by Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett, 517–​535. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Campbell, James T. Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Clarkson, Thomas. The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. London, 1808. Cruickshank, Joanna. ‘Charles Wesley, The Men of Old Calabar, and the Abolition of Slavery’, Aldersgate Papers 7 (September 2009): 8–​16. Dallimore, Arnold A. George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1970. Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Vintage, 2015. Davis, Morris L. ‘Methodists and Race’. In The Cambridge Companion to American Methodism, edited by Jason E. Vickers, 281–​ 295. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Drescher, Seymour. The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Anti-​Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd ed. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Edwards, Maldwyn. After Wesley: A Study of the Social and Political Influence of Methodism in the Middle Period (1791–​1849). London: Epworth Press, 1948. Edwards, Maldwyn. John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century: A Study of His Social and Political Influence. London: Epworth Press, 1955. Eltis, David. Economic Growth and the Ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Field, David N. ‘John Wesley as a Public Theologian: The Case of Thoughts upon Slavery’, Scriptura 114 (2015): 1–​13. Garrett, Aaron. ‘Hume’s Revised Racism Revisited’, Hume Studies 26, no. 1 (April, 2000): 171–​178. Hammond, Geordan and David Ceri Jones, eds. George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

106  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade Hargrave, Francis. An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett, a Negro, lately determined by the Court of King’s Bench. London, 1772. Hildebrand, Reginald F. The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Hood, James Walker. One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. New York: AME Book Concern, 1895. Kidd, Thomas S. George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Kimbrough, Jr., S.T. and Kenneth G.C. Newport, eds. The Manuscript Journal of the Rev. Charles Wesley. Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2008. Lakey, Othal H. The History of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Memphis, TN: CME Publishing House, 1985. Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn. Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770–​ 1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mahaffey, Jerome D. Preaching Politics: The Religious Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007. Mahaffey, Jerome D. The Accidental Revolutionary: George Whitefield and the Creation of America. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011. Marquardt, Manfred. John Wesley’s Social Ethics: Practice and Principles. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991. Marquardt, Manfred. ‘Social Ethics in the Methodist Tradition’. In T&T Clark Companion to Methodism, edited by Charles Yrigoyen Jr., 292–​308. London: T&T Clark, 2010. Mathews, Donald G. Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–​1845. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. McLeister, Ira F. and Roy S. Nicholson. Conscience and Commitment: The History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America. Marion, IN: Wesley Press, 1976. O’Brien, Glen. ‘Freedom in the Atlantic World: John Wesley and George Whitefield on Slavery’. In Wesley and Whitefield? Wesley versus Whitefield? edited by Ian Maddock, 161–​182. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017. Oldfield, John. ‘Britain and the Slave Trade’. In A Companion to Eighteenth-​ Century Britain, edited by H.T. Dickinson, 489–​ 498. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Park, Wongi. ‘The Blessing of Whiteness in the Curse of Ham: Reading Gen 9: 18–​29 in the Antebellum South’, Religions 12, no. 928 (2021): 1–​18. https://​doi.org/​ 10.3390/​rel1​2110​928 Pinfold, John, ed. The Slave Trade Debate: Contemporary Writings For and Against. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007. Pollock, John. Wilberforce. London: Constable, 1977. Prest, Wilfrid. Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–​ 1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Richardson, Harry Van Buren. Dark Salvation: The Story of Methodism as it Developed among Blacks in America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Schlenther, Boyd S. Queen of the Methodists: The Countess of Huntingdon and the Eighteenth-​Century Crisis in Faith and Society. Durham, England: Durham Academic Press, 1997.

The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade  107 Schlenther, Boyd S. ‘Whitefield’s Personal Life and Character’. In George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy, edited by Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones, 25 (12–​28). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, Shammas, Carole. The Pre-​ industrial Consumer in England and America. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Shropshire, Snr., J.M. ‘Black People in the Methodist Protestant Church (1830–​ 1939)’. In The People(s) Called Methodist: Forms and Reforms of their Life, edited by William B. Lawrence, Dennis M. Campbell, and Russell E. Richey, 193–​ 216. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1998. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London, 1776. Smith, Warren T. John Wesley and Slavery. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986. Sparks, Randy J. Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-​ Century Odyssey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Spragen, Ore L. The History of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (1870–​ 2009): Faithful to the Vision. Lima: Wyndham Hall Press, 2011. Stacks, David H. The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–​1700. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991. Thompson, David Decamp. John Wesley as a Social Reformer. New York, 1898. University College London. Legacies of British Slave-​ownership, www.ucl.ac.uk/​lbs/​ Van Der Pool, James, dir. Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners (BBC television programme). www.bbc.co.uk/​pro​gram​mes/​b063d​b18 Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 18 Journal and Diaries I (1735–​1738). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1988. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journal and Diaries III (1743–​1754). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 21 Journal and Diaries IV (1755–​1765). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1992. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 24 Journal and Diaries VII (1787–​1791), Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2003. Watson, Richard. A Defence of the Wesleyan-​Methodist Missions in the West Indies. London, 1817. Watson, Richard. The Works of the Rev. Richard Watson in Thirteen Volumes. London, 1858. Wesley, John. Thoughts upon Slavery. London, 1774. Wesley, John. Some Observations on Liberty Occasioned by a Late Tract. London, 1776. Wesley, John. Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament. Salem, OH: Schmul, 1976. Wesley, John. A Serious Address to the People of England, with Regard to the State of the Nation. London, 1778. Whitefield, George. The Works of the Rev. George Whitefield, 5 vols. London, 1771. Whitefield, George. Select Sermons of George Whitefield. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990.

108  The ‘Execrable Villainy’ of the Slave Trade Wiecek, William M. ‘Somerset: Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-​ American World’, University of Chicago Law Review 42, no. 1 (1974): 86–​146. Wigger, John. American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

5 The Work of God in North America

Wesley and the Americans Wesley’s concept of British liberty as something guaranteed by the crown is one factor that lay behind the initial sympathy he demonstrated for the American colonists in their protests over the Townshend Acts and other perceived attacks upon their privileges as British subjects.1 He also had a strong personal affection for America and Americans which can be traced back to his time spent in Georgia from 1735–​1738.2 He welcomed the publication, in 1775, of the anonymous pamphlet An Argument in Defence of the Exclusive Right Claimed by the Colonies to Tax Themselves.3 Wesley’s Baptist opponent, Caleb Evans maintained that Wesley had become convinced by this that, ‘the Americans were an oppressed, injured people, and that Great Britain had no right whatever to tax them’.4 Wesley recommended it to his brother Charles and suggested that his printer William Pine might wish to publish excerpts from it in his newspaper the Bristol Gazette, which the latter did.5 In a rare moment of forgetfulness, and after he had broken with Pine over the publication of what he considered treasonous material, Wesley would later deny having read this booklet, though he later retracted the denial in a letter to Evans.6 In June of 1775, Wesley wrote to William Legge (1731–​1801), the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the American colonies and a friendly evangelical, and the following day essentially the same letter to the Prime Minister Lord (Frederick) North (1732–​1792), outlining his concerns about the American situation and expressing sympathy for the Americans as ‘an oppressed people’ who had ‘asked for nothing more than their legal rights’.7 Wesley felt that the Americans had some cause for complaint but pleaded ignorance on the political matters at the heart of the dispute. He was bound, he admitted, to take a conservative stance, being a high churchman brought up on the notions of ‘passive obedience and non-​resistance’. He warned that a war could not easily be won, since Americans were ‘calm, deliberate enthusiasts’ who fought for liberty not only for themselves, but also for their wives and children. Such a force would always have the advantage over those who fought merely for pay. He concluded his appeal with a warning to DOI: 10.4324/9781003227496-5

110  The Work of God in North America ‘remember King Charles I’, bringing to mind the spectre of the English Civil War, never far beneath the surface of Wesley’s fears over radical politics.8 Wesley’s fear of a Cromwellian-​style plot to overthrow the king was no paranoid stance. Bernard Bailyn made it clear in The Origins of American Politics, that it was difficult in the eighteenth century to conceive of ‘sustained opposition to constituted authority as anything other than the work of parties [which] were believed naturally to degenerate into conspiratorial juntas whose aim in the end could only be the overthrow of the existing government’.9 Wesley’s outlook was certainly not, therefore, unusual. Three days after this correspondence, on 17 June, the Battle of Bunker Hill took place after which Wesley’s conciliatory and sympathetic attitude toward the Americans and their cause, reflected in the Dartmouth–​North correspondence, was soon to be replaced by strong opposition. The American Revolution was the most widely reported-​upon event in the eighteenth-​century British world. The size of the printed output on the subject in newspapers alone can hardly be overestimated. As a civil war within the British colonies, the hunger in England for news of the conflict was insatiable and, by the mid-​eighteenth century, the British people consumed newspapers so voraciously that there existed a wide range of public opinion on every aspect of global politics, and the opposition press in England was the single greatest influence on early American politics.10 For the first time in modern history, ‘a literate public sustained a major, widespread critique of their government’s use of military force as a tool of public policy’.11 Even being illiterate, or unable to afford the relatively expensive threepence for a daily newspaper, was no barrier since newspapers were often read aloud in coffee houses, a service provided for patrons and a practice that contributed to the twentyfold increase in the circulation of ideas and opinions published.12 Differences over the conduct of the war in a newly media-​saturated culture divided households and led to civic unrest and violence at home. John Wesley was only one of many who responded to widespread popular criticism of the government as disloyal and even treasonous. Rather than being seen as an ‘arch-​Tory’ out of step with political realities, Wesley held views typical of a large sector in the wide public debate on the American question. Wesley’s loyalist pamphlet, A Calm Address to Our American Colonies was published in September 1775, a few months after the hostilities at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts that launched the American Revolution. It defended the right of Parliament to tax the American colonies, pointed the Americans to the liberties they already enjoyed under the crown and ended with an exhortation to ‘fear God and honour the king’. Going through up to 19 editions, 100,000 copies were circulated within a year.13 The Calm Address is probably the best known of John Wesley’s political tracts and is usually considered the primary source for ascertaining his views on the revolution. It was chiefly responsible for the suspicion of Methodists in British America as loyalists and traitors to the cause of freedom.14

The Work of God in North America  111 The overall argument of the Calm Address is that the English Parliament had the rightful power to tax the American colonies and that the inhabitants of British America remain obligated to submit to the king’s authority. Everyone is born the subject of some state or other and they are born duty-​bound to accept the laws that exist within that state. If the Americans claimed the rights to liberty guaranteed to English subjects, they must be subject to English laws. Those who form a colony in a faraway land do not forfeit their legal rights under the crown, but they have lost the capacity to exercise the right of representation in Parliament. Since the colonies had been established under royal charters, they had no more right to establish their own legislature than the multitudes in England without access to the franchise had a right to establish their own Parliament. There was no clause in any colonial charter which exempted any colony from paying taxes forever; therefore, they were all obligated to pay them. It was Wesley’s belief that the real cause of discontent in America was the agitation of those in England plotting to overthrow the government and establish in its place a Cromwellian-​style commonwealth. If America were to secede from Britain, these incendiaries would take the opportunity to overturn the government while the military was occupied elsewhere. In Wesley’s view, no advantage could possibly be gained from such a scenario, since there was no greater or more secure liberty, either civil or religious, than that which was then presently guaranteed under the authority of the crown and Parliament and no governments were so despotic as republics and commonwealths. He considered the average American to be unaware of the real plot and surprised to discover it. Colonists should not be deceived by such schemers but should seek peace and unity under the authority of God and the king. The bulk of The Calm Address was borrowed (plagiarised said Wesley’s detractors), from Samuel Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny, published in the same year.15 Wesley reproduced the first 18 pages of this and then to fill it out added a five-​page response by William Smith of the College of Philadelphia to A Sermon on the Present Situation of American Affairs. Raymond suggests that Charles Wesley may have written to his brother after the first edition urging him to write to Johnson and ask him to clear him of the charges of plagiarism.16 For his part, Johnson was not bothered, but only delighted, by this borrowing. On 6 February 1777 he wrote to Wesley, referring to the Calm Address as ‘your important suffrage to my argument on the American question. To have gained such a mind as yours may justly confirm me in my own opinion’.17 In fact Wesley did Johnson a favour by placing his flowery prose into a more readable style, thus more effectively spreading the government’s position to a wider audience. Lord North’s government was also delighted, knowing that Wesley, by this time seventy-​two years of age and one of the best-​known men in England, was heard gladly by many. The government purchased the entire first edition and circulated it to every church in London.18 When asked what

112  The Work of God in North America the government could do to assist Wesley and his people in return for the writing of the Calm Address, he replied that he wanted no favours but finally accepted fifty pounds for the relief of the poor. Later he expressed regret that he had not ‘requested to be made a royal missionary, and to have the privilege of preaching in every church’.19 Mark Noll claimed that John Wesley took a ‘specifically biblical approach’ to the American Revolution and saw this as out of step with loyalist rhetoric and more in keeping with Whig politics.20 In fact, Wesley rarely appealed to the Bible for the arguments laid out in his political tracts, though there are clearly echoes of biblical material. For example, the concluding exhortation in the first edition of the Calm Address echoes Galatians 5:15, Romans 14:19 and 1 Peter 2:7, but explicitly biblical arguments are not made in the body of the work. Ronald H. Stone describes Wesley’s political writings as ‘philosophical’ and as expressing ‘the political work of the intellectual’.21 He agrees with Hempton that Wesley’s political conservatism is based not only on an amended Toryism but also on his appreciation for the liberty enjoyed by ‘the free-​born Englishmen’.22 His tracts are based more on such political theories and on notions of natural law than on biblical exegesis or theological exposition. As was shown in the previous chapter, Wesley developed his argument against slavery ‘setting the Bible out of the question’, and he takes a similar approach here.23 Wesley’s fear of English radicalism undergirds the Calm Address and many of his other political tracts, and also appears in some of Charles Wesley’s hymns.24 Fearful that a revolutionary storm begun in America would soon spread to England, John Wesley wrote, in 1775, to Thomas Rankin, his Assistant in America, that the clouds were black over both places and would soon deliver ‘showers of blood’.25 He considered the American troubles to be fomented by those at home who wanted to overthrow the crown, and the colonists but pawns in a game, unaware that they were being played by malevolent forces of revolution there.26 He wrote to his brother Charles in October 1775 that he found himself in danger of losing his love for Americans, at least for their ‘miserable leaders…Yet it is certain the bulk of the people both in England and America mean no harm; they only follow their leaders, and do as they are bid, without knowing why or wherefore’.27 Wesley would make this conspiracy theory quite explicit in the Calm Address. Be no longer the dupes of designing men. I do not mean any of your countrymen in America; I doubt whether any of these are in the secret. The designing men, the Ahithophels are in England; those who have laid their scheme so deep, and covered it so well, that thousands, who are ripening it, suspect nothing at all of the matter… They love neither England nor America, but play one against the other, in subserviency to their grand design, of overturning the English government.28

The Work of God in North America  113 The suggestion that pro-​American Parliamentarians were playing into the hands of those engaged in a treasonous plot to overthrow the monarchy and establish a Puritan-​style commonwealth, while British troops were occupied in America, was deeply resented by many members of Parliament.29 For their part, the patriots in America also discerned a conspiracy but one of an opposite kind. Robert Middlekauff attributes to ‘the character of their Protestantism’, the view of ‘the children of the awakened’, that ‘an evil plot against their liberties had been hatched in a corrupt and faintly “Catholic” England’.30 This line of interpretation is in keeping with the earlier view of Bailyn that the roots of the conflict lay in the fear of a conspiracy between ministers of state and their supporters to overthrow the British crown both in England and America and thus severely limit, if not annihilate, English liberties.31 On 26 December 1775, Wesley urged the position of Josiah Tucker (1713–​1799) that Britain should set adrift its ungrateful colonies which had been so expensive to maintain. England should ‘let them drop’ and cut off ‘all other connexion with them than we have with Holland or Germany. Four and twenty millions they have cost us to support them since Queen Anne died [in 1714]. Let them cost us no more. Let them have their desire and support themselves’.32 What is to account, then, for Wesley’s change of tune in the Calm Address from sympathy with the Americans to a staunch rejection of their claims? Frank Baker suggested a reaction on Wesley’s part to the increasingly militant pro-​American discourse in Britain.33 Holland saw Wesley’s strengthening support of the king as influenced by the discussions at the Leeds Conference of 1–​3 August 1775, in which a group of preachers urged a separation from the Church of England.34 This, however, can only be a supposition.35 Thomas W. Smith has shown how Wesley’s views on medieval authority and liberty, laid out in his 1776 Concise History of England (1776), provide a context for understanding his sudden shift from supporting to opposing the Americans. While the people had an ancient right to defend their liberties, a line should be drawn at outright rebellion.36 Wesley himself attributed his change of heart to his reading of Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny. ‘[A]‌s soon as I received more light myself I judged it my duty to impart it to others’.37 In any case, the king’s Proclamation of Rebellion, issued on 23 August 1775, declared that anyone aiding or abetting the Americans would be considered treasonous. This tended to put a dampener on the more diverse discussion of the situation that had prevailed earlier. Wesley could not have shown sympathy for the Americans, even if he had wanted to, without the possibility of a charge of treason. Albert M. Lyles has identified over 29 replies to the Calm Address and Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny, not counting the numerous reviews that appeared.38 According to Kirkham, ‘though Wesley was no stranger to pamphlet attack…no single publication he issued created such an intense storm or was attacked with more severity…Opponents of the government

114  The Work of God in North America made every attempt in print to discredit Wesley and weaken his arguments’.39 Wesley defended his motives in writing the Calm Address in a letter to the editor of Lloyd’s Evening Post, claiming that in his travels across Britain, he had heard people crying out over the poor Americans and the cruel King George. ‘[T]‌he flame which rages all over the land’, he wrote, ‘I have more opportunity of observing than any other man in England’.40 He felt the need to set the record straight by rebutting the colonist’s claims and defending the king’s honour. Wesley’s views on the attitudes of ordinary people should be taken seriously, since he was so well travelled and engaged in constant conversation with many of his hearers. He was convinced, whether accurately or not is hard to tell, that his Calm Address was turning the tide of public opinion. ‘The eyes of many people were opened; they saw things in a quite different light. They perceived, and that with the utmost clearness, how they had been hoodwinked before. They found, they had been led unawares into all the wilds of political enthusiasm, as far distant from truth and common sense, as from the real love of their country’.41 The Whig newspaper, the Daily Chronicle, held a different estimate of the impact of the pamphlet. ‘It has been said that a certain Calm Address has been so far from producing the intended serene effect that on the contrary nothing but storms and tempestuous disputations have been the consequence since the publication of that piece of plagiarism’.42 Unfavourable responses appeared in all the major periodicals, including the London Magazine, the Gentleman’s Magazine, Lloyd’s Evening Post, and many others. More significant were the formal replies of foes such as the Calvinist controversialist Augustus Toplady, and a wide range of Dissenters including James Murray, Caleb Evans, and Joseph Towers. It should not be surprising to find Dissenters at the forefront of attack on Wesley’s Tory politics, since eighteenth-​century English Dissent was strongly Whig in politics and generally supportive of the American cause. In A Cool Reply to a Calm Address Lately Published by Mr. John Wesley (1775), the pseudonymous ‘TS’ described Wesley’s religious principles as ‘a species of Popery’ that ‘exactly fall in with a late act of Parliament, which establishes the destructive doctrines of Papalism in so vast a country as Canada’.43 This was a reference to the Quebec Act of 1774, which gave protection to French Catholics to practise their faith and removed references to Protestantism from the oath of allegiance. He would not be surprised if Wesley’s head should be rewarded by being ‘adorned with a mitre’, for his publishing of the Calm Address, but thinks it more fitting that it should be covered in sackcloth and ashes.44 Wesley is accused of being friends with members of a corrupt Parliament, Tories and Jacobites who are, ‘friends to the Pope and Pretender, who hate His Majesty, and are, by a variety of means, endeavouring, and seem determined to overturn the constitution, and lay the crown and dignity of England level with the earth, by opposing, under various pretences, all measures of accommodation with America’.45 In response to Wesley’s reference to the Americans being ‘the dupes of designing

The Work of God in North America  115 men’, TS replied that ‘the principal men, who are enemies to America, are on this side the water, and rather too near his ‘M[ajesty’]s person’.46 He concludes by expressing the view that ‘the remainder of [Wesley’s] harangue’, with its exhortation to fear God and honour the king, ‘savours more of religious cant, than any sincere wish for the welfare of America’.47 The Letter to the Rev. Mr. John Wesley Occasioned by his Calm Address by the Bristol Baptist minister Caleb Evans, writing as ‘Americanus’, was the most successful attack, going through five editions and producing numerous replies from both Wesley and such able supporters as John Fletcher and Thomas Olivers.48 It charged Wesley with performing an about-​face from his former pro-​American sentiments and suggested that he may have only pretended to his earlier views in order to infiltrate the ‘king-​haters’ and expose them. Wesley was charged with having an eye on preferment. ‘You have one eye on a pension’, wrote a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘and the other upon heaven; one hand stretched out to the K[in] g, and the other raised up to God. I pray that the first may reward you, and the last may forgive you’.49 Most responses depended on Evans, or were at least familiar with his arguments and reiterated them. Many used satire and invective. A Cool Reply to a Calm Address was anything but cool and Augustus Toplady’s An Old Fox Tarr’d and Feather’d used ad hominen argumentation to good effect, picturing Wesley on its title page as a grinning fox clothed in clerical garb. Patrick Bull’s A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing sought to unmask Wesley as a Jesuit. Five accusations are repeatedly made in all this literature: Wesley had plagiarised Samuel Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny; he had changed his earlier views; his motivation was personal preferment; his purpose was unclear; and his interference in politics was unwelcome.50 The direct impact of the Calm Address in British America is likely to have been minimal, though Methodist preachers experienced some persecution as a result of their leader being perceived as a government apologist. In Annapolis, Maryland, several preachers were imprisoned, others beaten, tarred, and feathered.51 The oft-​repeated claim that Methodists destroyed copies when they reached America, in order to protect themselves from the charge of being loyalist, is built on very little evidence and has perhaps gained credence because of its appearance in Robert Southey’s influential biography of Wesley.52 Wesley told Thomas Rankin, in October 1775, ‘I had written a little tract upon the subject before I knew the American ports were shut up’.53 He informed Rankin that there were those who, ‘would willingly burn me and it together’.54 It should be remembered, however, that he was referring to people in England, not to those in the American colonies. Apart from this, there appears to be no further evidence for the ‘burning of the pamphlets’ story and in fact the claim is directly refuted by Wesley’s own reference to the closing of the American ports and his inability to ‘send it abroad as I designed’.55 Wesley’s loyalist views did, however, become widely known, through subsequent editions of the Calm Address and through discussion in colonial newspapers. A correspondent to The Pennsylvania Packet

116  The Work of God in North America in March 1776 wrote, ‘The great numbers of this treasonable Essay against the constitution of England, daily sold or given away at the Royal Exchange, ought to alarm every well-​wisher to our civil and religious liberties. The whole is a barefaced and bail attempt towards establishing the doctrines of absolute monarchy’.56 An advertisement in The New Jersey Gazette for 15 July 1778 offered for sale a comic opera in three acts, accompanied by the reply of ‘Junius’ to Wesley’s Calm Address. The cast includes Lord North, Lord Dartmouth, and ‘Canting John’ as John Wesley.57 Life was made more difficult for Methodists in the anti-​loyalist atmosphere after 1775, when oaths of allegiance to the new republic were demanded. In March 1775, just prior to armed hostilities, Wesley wrote to the American itinerants, ‘It is your part to be peace-​makers, to be loving and tender to all, but to addict yourselves to no party…say not a word against one or the other side’.58 Their work was the saving of souls and any other entanglements were distractions at best. Methodist itinerants were usually apolitical and often pacifist before the revolution but increasingly now took sides. Wesley reported in 1776 that, although Thomas Rankin and George Shadford were both in good health, they had been ‘threatened unless they declared in favour of the Republicans’.59 The following year he assured Joseph Benson that ‘[Friends in New York] inform me that all the Methodists were firm for the Government, and on that account persecuted by the rebels, only not to death; that the preachers are still threatened, but not stopped; and the work of God increases much in Maryland and Virginia’.60 George Shadford remembered that, ‘The spirit of the people began…to be agitated with regard to politics. They threatened me with imprisonment when I prayed for the King; took me up, and examined me, and pressed me to take the test oath to renounce him forever’.61 Francis Asbury only avoided arrest as a suspected loyalist by retreating to the home of Thomas White in Delaware.62 Despite this widely held perception, one finds among Methodist preachers the full range of attitudes toward the revolution found in the wider populace, from pacifist to armed loyalist to fighting rebel. In 1775, Freeborn Garrettson was court-​martialled and fined for refusing to enter military service, and in 1777, he had difficulties in Virginia because of his refusal to take the oath of loyalty.63 On the other hand some Methodists, including John Littlejohn, were more than willing to take up arms against what they considered British oppression of their adopted country.64 In spite of the variety of stances taken by Methodists, there was enough loyalist sentiment among them to justify patriots’ concerns. As the Methodist itinerant Martin Rodda made his way to the British fleet on his homeward journey, he was ‘spreading the king’s proclamation’, and the lapsed Methodist Chancey Clowe raised a band of three hundred men and attempted to join the British fleet at Chesapeake Bay.65 Methodist loyalists could also take differing positions on how best to respond to the crisis in the colonies, as illustrated by Thomas Rankin and British military officer, Captain Thomas Webb in their correspondence with

The Work of God in North America  117 Lord Dartmouth. Rankin urged reconciliation with the colonies but Webb counselled coercion through naval force and economic restrictions.66 Webb’s strong Tory politics coupled with his high profile was a contributing factor to Methodists being suspected of disloyalty to the revolutionary cause.67 Webb identified the ‘true cause of all the present disturbance, both in Great Britain and America’ to ‘that restless spirit of independency, which never can be happy under any government’.68 In a November 1775 letter to Lloyd’s Evening Post, Wesley described his motives in writing The Calm Address, stating that the Americans were ‘not contending for liberty’ but for ‘the illegal privilege of being exempt from Parliamentary taxation…a privilege…which no charter ever gave to any American colony yet; which no charter can give…which they never claimed till the present reign, and probably they would not have claimed now had they not been incited thereto by letters from England’.69 At this early stage, the dispute was over the management of the American colonies, and the ongoing significance of the brewing discontent in America for the future reshaping of the Atlantic world was largely unforeseen.70 Wesley also preached a charity sermon in November 1775 on ‘National Sins and Miseries’ at St. Matthew’s Church, Bethnal Green to raise money for the widows and orphans of the early victims of the war.71 In it we find his providential view of history and his conviction that the onset of war was a judgement of God for the sins of the nation.72 The text of the sermon is 2 Samuel 24:17, recounting David’s expostulation before God in the wake of a destroying pestilence among the people, that while he himself had done evil, the people were wholly innocent. Wesley observes, ‘in several respects a remarkable resemblance between the case of Israel and our own…General wickedness then occasioned a general visitation; and does not the same cause now produce the same effect?’73 The troubles in America may only be the ‘beginning of sorrows’ and Wesley raised the spectre of the destroying angel stretching its hand out over England to destroy it also.74 Wesley catalogued the sufferings of the English people beginning with widespread unemployment in the west of England (Cornwall in particular), in the north, and in the midlands. The people had been deprived of even the bare necessities of life and had become ‘wretched creatures…standing in the streets with pale looks, hollow eyes and meagre limbs; or creeping up and down like walking shadows’. Families that had been quite well off a few years ago, now almost naked, scratched for food in the fields, collecting the turnips scorned by cattle and eating them raw in order to survive.75 But there was an even greater affliction than to be deprived of bread, and that was to be deprived of one’s senses, which was how Wesley saw the situation of those who cried out for civil and religious liberty when they already had it in their hands. This calamity had spread throughout England but was even worse in the American colonies where, Wesley claimed, ‘the regular, legal, constitutional form of government is no more…not the shadow of English liberty is left’. There was, in Wesley’s view, no liberty of the press, no liberty of speech,

118  The Work of God in North America and no religious liberty left in America. None could publish a word against ‘our lords the people’, none could speak in favour of the king or against the ‘new, illegal, unconstitutional government’.76 The situation in America had descended into anarchy, with no security of trade, house, property, or life itself for anyone who chose to swim against the republican tide. And as if this were not enough, there loomed ‘the fell monster, war!’77 The cause of all this was ‘a great phantom’ which people have been taught to call ‘liberty’ while genuine liberty was ‘trampled underfoot’. Wesley then reminded his hearers of the greed, heartlessness, lying, gluttony, and luxury that was everywhere to be found. But the vice by which the English exceeded all other nations was ‘profaneness’ –​‘utter contempt of God’.78 Wesley asked his hearers to consider whether they had been guilty of any of these sins and whether they were aware that if they were, they had contributed to the suffering of the victims of war.79 The implication was that personal conduct such as this had brought on the present war. God was punishing the nation for its crimes by letting loose the dogs of war. The only way to stem the tide of war now was through widespread repentance. The particular occasion of the charity offering for war widows and orphans was then brought into focus, as Wesley urged his hearers to give generously toward them in the hope that God may then restore peace and plenty and the people would once again ‘fear God and honour the king’.80 Such linking of global crises with the personal response of individuals was characteristic of Wesley’s political tracts. Wesley’s hopes that widespread national repentance would stem the tide of war were dashed as hostilities escalated until the Thirteen Colonies formally declared their independence on 4 July 1776. By that time, around 90 ‘declarations of independence’ had already been issued not only by colonial legislatures but also private interest groups, such as the New York mechanics, as well as the Pennsylvania militia. The final form of the Declaration of Independence placed the blame for the troubles on the king and the Parliament, but an earlier draft by Thomas Jefferson had, like Wesley, but for different reasons, also blamed the British people themselves. Its bitter spirit underscores the fact that this was indeed America’s first civil war. [The British people] have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity, and when occasions have been given to them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from the councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election re-​established them in power. At this very time too they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us. These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever those unfeeling brethren. We must endeavour to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. We might have been a free and great people

The Work of God in North America  119 together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it. The road to glory and happiness is open to us too. We will climb it in a separate state, and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting Adieu!81 Congress moderated such language and replaced it with the language of a more objective social contract theory. In losing Jefferson’s passionate vision of Americans as already a ‘great people’, a degree of ambiguity was introduced into the American historical narrative. Was the Declaration of Independence a statement of political expedience made on behalf of separate and to some extent self-​interested states, or was it a unifying statement made on behalf of a great people destined for ‘grandeur and freedom’? The presentation of the Declaration was given the highest priority because of the need to secure trade with other nations as well as establish effective diplomacy. Without it, the Americans were simply rebels.82

Pleading the Cause of King and Country One of the many responses to the developing situation in America was Richard Price’s (1723–​1791), Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), which sold 60,000 copies, and to which Wesley responded in Some Observations on Liberty (1776).83 Wesley saw himself in this reply as ‘pleading the cause of my King and country; yea, of every country under heaven, where there is any regular government. I am pleading against those principles which naturally tend toward anarchy and confusion; that directly tend to unhinge all government, and overturn it from the foundation’.84 In the same year, Wesley wrote his sermonic exhortation A Seasonable Address to the More Serious Part of the Inhabitants of Great Britain (1776) which stood in contrast by offering a pious reflection urging repentance on the individual level, rather than entering into the political debates about the rightness or wrongness of the American cause.85 In spite of this pious exhortation, both his response to Price’s views on liberty and the lesser known of his two ‘Calm Addresses’, A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England (1777),86 clearly do take sides on the issue –​urging a loyal submission to the king in Parliament, and a rejection of the claim that ‘the people’ might, if necessary, assert their own political agency through armed rebellion. Price was a Unitarian minister who became a leading figure as a result of the success of his pro-​American pamphlet. Like most leading Dissenters of the period, he was highly critical of the government’s policy toward the Americans. Price declared that ‘all civil government, so long as it can be denominated free, is the vesture of the people. It originates with them. It is conducted under their direction; and has in view nothing but their happiness. All its different forms are no more than so many different modes in which they choose to direct their affairs…And all magistrates are trustees or deputies for carrying regulations into execution’.87

120  The Work of God in North America This clearly reflects a model of government ‘from below’, which contrasts with Wesley’s view that political power originates with God and is exercised through the king in Parliament. Edmund Burke described Price, in 1790, as ‘a man much connected with literary caballers, and intriguing philosophers; with political theologians, and theological politicians, both at home and abroad [who] set him up as a sort of oracle’.88 For his part, Wesley was impressed with Price as ‘a man of uncommon abilities’ who, in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, had produced ‘a masterpiece of its kind’, and had written accurately and with a sincere desire to serve the interests of humanity in general and the subjects of the British empire in particular. Nonetheless, Wesley wished to add a few further thoughts on the subject.89 Wesley’s polite beginning hardly masks the fact that he considered Price’s work a ‘dangerous tract…which if practiced would overturn all government and bring in universal anarchy’.90 The subject of Price’s tract was described by Wesley as ‘the liberty which is now claimed by the confederate colonies in America’.91 Wesley’s stated aim was to determine whether this claim to liberty was just or unjust.92 The independence they were now claiming had torn away their mask to show their real intentions. Wesley distinguished between two types of liberty to which this question related –​religious and civil. Religious liberty is bestowed by the creator upon human beings as rational creatures. It is innate and cannot be taken away. No one could deny that the colonies enjoyed such liberty. With his characteristically dry wit, Wesley evokes the evils of the slave trade by declaring that civil liberty had been enjoyed by all the members of the colonies until part of them had enslaved another part.93 The Americans had defrauded the king by refusing to pay even a quarter of the taxes that were due to the crown, an act shamelessly and openly evidenced by the shiploads of tea that escaped duties by being thrown into Boston Harbour.94 The customs that should have flowed to the government from America to help defray its expenses had dwindled down to a pittance.95 Wesley considered John Hancock (1737–​1793), one of Boston’s wealthiest merchants, to be as much a felon as any common smuggler or pickpocket and he pitied the American people if men of such questionable character were ever to be made President of a Congress.96 Hancock would, in fact, go on to be the President of the Second Continental Congress (1775), to sign the Declaration of Independence in the large and flamboyant manner for which he is still remembered, and to become Governor of the State of Massachusetts in 1780.97 Hancock’s sloop, the Liberty, had sailed into Boston Harbour on 9 May 1768, carrying a shipment of Madeira wine that only amounted to about a quarter of its carrying capacity. When officials suspected that the rest of the cargo had been secretly offloaded to avoid paying import duties, the vessel was impounded. This led to a riot among traders who relied on Hancock for their supply, as well as others who resented what they considered undue interference and restriction upon trade. The Liberty incident was an important event in the lead-​up to the Revolution and may

The Work of God in North America  121 be seen as a preface to the more famous ‘Boston Tea Party’ of 16 December 1773. According to Wesley, the later Tea Party was led by Hancock, who ‘paraded the town at noon-​day with colours flying, and bravely threw the English tea into the sea’ after which the Parliament ordered the Boston ports closed until reparation for this loss should be paid.98 In fact, Hancock was not directly involved in that particular incident, other than to address a crowd earlier in the day, though he was certainly one of the principal figures in the larger dispute over smuggled goods and the avoidance of taxation. The government issued what Wesley considered only mild checks upon this activity (the Boston Port Act of 1774 was the first of the so-​called ‘Coercive’ or ‘Intolerable’ Acts) but, in Wesley’s view, the Americans, who bore such checks with the utmost resentment, ought to have observed their obligation toward all customs duties. Price had argued that the Americans should be given their independence because their population was growing. Wesley’s response was to claim that Price had fudged the numbers by overestimating the size of the American and underestimating the size of the English populations. Wesley claimed there were two million in ‘the Confederated Provinces’ (not Price’s three million) and ten million in England alone. Joseph Galloway estimated the population of the American colonies in 1780 to be 2.5 million people.99 Where Price estimated that the population of London was 600,000, Wesley maintained that this figure was too small and by a recent estimate it turns out he was correct. London had around 750,000 people in 1760 and by 1801, when the first reliable census was taken, it had grown to 1,096,784. According to the records at the Old Bailey, ‘No single decade in this period witnessed less than robust population growth’.100 Wesley drew anecdotally on his own extensive travelling experience to refute Price’s claims about population decline and estimated that major manufacturing towns as well as villages were actually increasing in population, attributing this growth partly to the result of the increase in trade, an indication, for Wesley, of the emptiness of the American boast that the shutting of their ports would ruin English manufacturing and starve England into compliance with their demands.101 The debate between Wesley and Price took place during a period when disputes about population were widespread and heavily contested. Price was prominent among those who argued the case for a decline in population as a sign of Britain’s weakening economy. The widely travelled agriculturalist, Arthur Young (1749–​1820), like Wesley, preferred to rely on anecdote and personal travel experience to support the contrary case.102 A more recent estimate calculates the population of England at 5.2 million in the early 1720s; rising steadily at a rate of 0.5 per cent from 1750 until the last decade of the century when an unprecedented annual growth rate of 1.2 per cent saw the population rise to 8.6 million by 1801.103 The reasons for this are complex and not without dispute among historians of population demographics.104 Factors likely to have contributed include England’s relative prosperity and economic diversity, and the immigration of Irish, Scots, and

122  The Work of God in North America Welsh seeking to improve their lot (though this last needs to be balanced by a migration loss of half a million over the century).105 A ‘marked reduction in the level of crisis mortality’ was a significant factor.106 Better levels of nutrition, inoculation against small pox, and the replacement of hard earth floors with brick and tile significantly improved survival rates.107 Price’s claim that the American population would be twice that of England within a century was dismissed by Wesley as doubtful.108 The settler population in America had grown from 223,000 in 1700 to 2,000,000 in 1776, so Price’s confidence is understandable.109 Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was yet to appear, with its controversial claim that increases in population inevitably led to poverty but that natural disasters, wars, and famines, could be relied upon to correct the imbalance. It would be this later work that would provoke the development of census-​gathering and the more reliable statistical information on economic conditions that were gathered in the nineteenth century.110 What proportion of the population constituted ‘the people’, for political purposes, during this era? Earlier in the century, the landless poor, care of whom was the moral responsibility of the state (usually through the parish system) were of little political significance. But the rise of the middling sort, the accompanying increase in literacy and capacity for self-​expression created by newfound wealth, enlarged the concept of ‘the people’ to include a greater number of those formerly marginalised. By 1776, calls for wider representation of the people in determining their own political destiny had grown even more strident. Wesley swam against this tide, dismissing Price’s claim that all people have a right to be self-​governed and independent, arguing that there had never been a civilised society in all history in which people had not been subject to their governors, but this had not constituted slavery or a removal of natural liberty. Repeating the argument employed in Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power (1772), Wesley sought to determine what was meant by ‘the people’.111 If the right to choose one’s own governors was ‘inseparable from human nature’, and women, children, and landless men have a human nature, why then should they not have the right to elect their rulers? ‘I do not ascribe these rights to the people; therefore, the difficulty affects not me; but, do you get over it how you can, without giving up your principle’.112 Wesley does seem to be more than a little pedantic here. He needed only to accept that Price meant by ‘all persons’, all whom the laws of the land deemed to be of voting age. While accusing Price and others of semantics, he displayed considerable skill at that dubious strategy himself. Wesley argued that the principles espoused by Price tended to, ‘unhinge all government, and to plunge every nation into total anarchy’.113 For Wesley, the greater the share the people had in government, the less liberty existed, there being the most civil and religious liberty under a limited monarchy, the least under an aristocracy, and least of all under a democracy. It is ‘the very quintessence of republicanism’ to say, as does Price, that ‘to be guided by one’s own will, is freedom; to be guided by the will of another, is

The Work of God in North America  123 slavery’. If this is true then all the demons are free since they are guided by their own will and all the angels are slaves since they are guided by the will of another.114 According to Wesley, the original charters of the colonies gave the colonists all the rights of Englishmen but never the right to be exempt from being taxed, having always been subject to Parliament and the crown from their first institution.115 The government had not engaged in the war in order to destroy constitutions in America and replace them with a military force, but only to force American rebels to lay down their arms against their lawful sovereign, to restore to their fellow subjects what they had illegally and violently taken from them, and to return the civil and religious liberty that had been lost.116 The Calvinist controversialist, Augustus Toplady referred to Wesley’s reply to Price as an instance of a ‘low and puny Tadpole in divinity, which proudly seeks to disembowel an high and mighty whale in politics’.117 Wesley and Price had at least one thing in common. ‘Price often concluded his works with exhortations which seem to be appeals to emotion rather than to reason, but, in fact, they come at the conclusion of deliberate arguments influenced by reason’.118 Wesley followed the same well-​ established pattern, closing as usual with an exhortation urging his readers to ‘labour to improve our religious liberty, by practising pure religion, and undefiled; by worshipping God in spirit and in truth’.119 Richard Price was not as much of a dangerous radical as Wesley’s critique might suggest. He insisted that he was an old-​style Whig and, like Wesley, a supporter of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession. His arguments were usually set forth in a cool and rational manner and he was more a reformer than a revolutionary. Like Wesley, he believed that liberty was a natural right and he advocated loyalty, rather than rebellion against the government, while seeking needed reforms.120 In addition to Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Price later extended his arguments in Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (1777) and Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World (1784) all of which criticised the British government’s handling of American affairs. These gained him great popularity in America, and, after the war, he was invited to visit the new republic and advise on the national debt problem. Yet he was not enthusiastic about every aspect of the new nation and he deeply regretted that war had become necessary, believing that American grievances could have been addressed without a complete severance from the crown. Once independence had been gained he supported the United States and worked for the strengthening of commercial links between what were now two separate nations.121 Like Wesley, Price found slavery unacceptable and he advised the new republic to abolish it. ‘The negro trade cannot be censured in words too severe. It is a traffic which…is shocking to humanity, cruel, wicked and diabolical’. Until such

124  The Work of God in North America time as it is abolished, it ‘will not appear [Americans] deserve the liberty for which they have been contending’.122 An ‘apostle of liberty’ to the French and the Americans, Price became, for Edmund Burke, Britain’s most dangerous radical.123 He was not that, but Burke and Wesley both saw in him a threat to the ancient constitution of Britain, which they saw as the surest guarantee of liberty. It may well be that Price’s theological heterodoxy lies, at least partly, behind Wesley’s negative reaction. Though Wesley could be warm toward individual Dissenters, he recoiled at the principles of Dissent which were associated in his thinking with theological heresies such as Socinianism and with the radicalism of the English Civil War. The ideology of the ‘Methodist Revolution’ was of a different sort altogether, being ‘made up of loyalty to king and country, an authoritarian ecclesiology, High Church charity, gospel fervour, unlimited salvation and individual freedom’.124 There is an abrupt shift in tone from Wesley’s other tracts on the American war in A Seasonable Address to the More Serious Part of the Inhabitants of Great Britain (1776), as he leaves behind debates about the nature of political liberty and the causes of the dispute between England and her American possessions to deliver a sermonic exhortation.125 He bemoaned the unhappy state of affairs which now saw the kingdom divided against itself. The small cloud that arose some time ago was now about to burst, not only upon the American colonies, but perhaps even at home as well. Just as one would rush with buckets of water to save a burning house, it was now time for the English to rush to save themselves and their American brethren from disaster, adding no combustible material that would only make the flames leap higher in this (unnatural) ‘civil war’.126 He conceded that it was a very complicated business and that many capable people had tried to identify the causes with little positive result. ‘Argument seems lost in clamour, in confusion of passion and party rage: and the satanic dust of prejudice seems to have put out the eyes of our understanding’.127 Almost everyone thinks he is an expert on the subject but the greater wisdom, unless one has superior understanding of the subject, is to hold one’s peace.128 Wesley was determined to move ‘from the second to the first cause’, believing that, in the present troubles, God was punishing the people by the sword because of the widespread iniquity in the nation, ‘among all ranks and orders’ and that it was ‘not improbable’ that the one principal sin for which the nation was now being punished was slavery, a trade of blood for which the nation was now paying the price of blood.129 Wesley considered England as at ‘the meridian height of its power [and] greatness’, yet the glory would depart, and the nation would be left in total darkness unless there was divine intervention. God had joined together two powerful people –​ the Americans and the English –​and what God had put together no one should put asunder.130 The real cause of the war was ‘the ugly monster universal sin, that subtle, unsuspected serpent that has inflamed our blood, and brought on the malignant fever of contention on our body. Here gaze till

The Work of God in North America  125 its loathsome and hideous deformity makes you loathe her’.131 For Wesley, the present crisis was a ‘divine contention’ even though it may have seemed to be a human one, the human conflict being but the effect of the divine contention. God would remember those who fasted and prayed, sparing them even in the midst of the destruction that would surely come.132 Divine determinism is often identified with Calvinism, but it is clear here, as elsewhere, that Wesley has an almost extreme doctrine of divine sovereignty when it came to God’s purposes for the nations. He rejected the doctrine of absolute predestination in regard to individuals, as it ran contrary to his understanding of all people as grace-​enabled agents. Yet when it came to the broad sweep of historical processes, Wesley seemed a virtual determinist. This Providential view of history was, of course, widely held in the eighteenth century, so it is not something unique to Wesley. It shows, however that he held a soft determinism that linked an Arminian understanding of universally available salvation with the idea of the divine determination of nations. Wesley’s anti-​ American rhetoric rose to its highest point in A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England (written in February 1777) after which a more muted response is evident, in light of the need to calm the fears of the population about French Catholic aggression in the event of an American victory.133 This second ‘Calm Address’ was written only a few days after Wesley had heard that an attempt had been made by arsonists, on 16 January, to burn three ships in Bristol Harbour. Though this attempt failed, there were further attempts to burn down warehouses. Wesley attributed these crimes to ‘men whose tongues were set on fire against the government’ but political points were being attempted in Bristol and London from both sides.134 Eventually a Scot was found guilty of the crime and hanged at Portsmouth. Wesley had used this event on Tuesday 4 February to preach the duty of being subject to divinely constituted authority. The next day he wrote his Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, hoping that God would bless this, as he believed his former ‘Calm Address’ had been, ‘to the quenching of that evil fire’ which was still at large.135 What follows is essentially a repeat of the historical narrative provided in Some Observations on Liberty the previous year, with the claim that the cry for independence extended back to the 1730s during his and his brother’s sojourn in Georgia.136 The king issued a Proclamation for a General Fast in England and while the ‘patrons of independency’ mocked and ridiculed this, Wesley believed that God had heard the cry and the tide began to turn in favour of the king’s forces, which landed without mishap, and took possession of Long Island, New York, Fort Washington, Fort Lee, and Rhode Island. At all these places thousands of prisoners and abundant stores were taken. Rebels were driven before the king’s forces ‘like a flock of sheep’.137 Wesley dismissed the strength of the colonial militia in a rather cavalier fashion by declaring that, even if there had been a million it would have done no good, since they would have run away as soon as the English

126  The Work of God in North America appeared. They would not fight (indeed they could not) because ‘the hand of God [was] upon them’. Instead of putting up a military defence, the militia had resorted to acts of atrocity such as robbing, plundering, torching whole towns, and driving the inhabitants, including the aged and infirm, defenceless into the wilderness in the midst of winter.138 After all the outcry for liberty, Wesley considered there to be not a shadow of it left in the colonies. He asserted that one could more safely publish against the Church in Spain or Italy than against the Congress in New England or Pennsylvania. Nor was there any religious liberty since ministers could no longer urge their congregations to be subject to the powers, to fear God and to honour the king. No one may even pray for the king. There was no civil liberty, either, for a person may have his goods or liberty taken away without any legal redress.139 By comparison, Wesley urges his readers to look at the perfect liberty the English had enjoyed since the Glorious Revolution. God had placed the English ‘under the mildest government upon earth’, for which they should honour the king, ‘looking upon him with a love mixed with reverence’, praying for him, refraining from speaking evil of him, and seeking to ‘lead a quiet and peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty’.140 Wesley then turned to theological concerns, asking how any religious person could do other than submit to the appointed powers. It is inconsistent, he argues, for a Christian ever to side with rebels or speak against the rulers of the people, and supports this claim with a catena of biblical verses to condemn such behaviour.141 Dissenters should be especially cautious since their right to exist depends very much on legal provisions and royal sanction. Wesley raises the spectre of the persecution of Dissenters by the high church party, who would seek any opportunity to be rid of them, in a passage that confirms Hempton’s reflection on the lasting psychological impact of both the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that ‘late eighteenth-​century religious polemicists could still pour their political perceptions through a seventeenth-​century filter’.142 Finally, Wesley addressed the Methodists in particular. He declared that he could no more have fellowship with any Methodist who blasphemed the king than he could with a ‘whoremonger’, a Sabbath-​breaker, a thief, or a drunkard. If this government were overthrown and another put in its place would the new government offer the same degree of liberty the Methodists now enjoy? Wesley considered such a scenario impossible. Those who spoke against the government now may find that when things quietened down, they would be called to account for their disloyalty. The king needed only to lift the restraint he now exerted on those on all sides who would swallow the Methodists up. It would then be too late to follow the wisdom that is now spurned, and the king of kings would only laugh at such calamity.143 The tracts written between 1776 and 1777 were written in defence of king and country at a time when open hostilities between Britain and its American possessions were in full swing. Could he have known, Wesley might have been alarmed that the arc of history was bending in the direction

The Work of God in North America  127 of the ideas espoused by Price and that it would be movements for representative democracies with an accompanying rejection of divinely appointed monarchies that would mark the approaching century. Always the preacher, Wesley’s formal political tracts were accompanied by sermonic exhortations. For Wesley, universal sin was the first cause of the present troubles. Any slave to sin was an enemy to both God and country, so repentance and faith were the best responses to an uncertain political climate. Such pious exhortations to peace and brotherhood ring a little hollow in light of Wesley’s own contentious forays into politics and his forthright accusations of treason against those whose political outlook differed from his own.

The Wheels of Divine Providence As the war in America escalated, political tracts warning against rebellion and the destructive effects of mob rule had neither quelled dissent nor averted open conflict. In the 1778 sermon, Some Account of the Late Work of God in North-​America, written after all his preachers, with the exception of Francis Asbury, had deserted the American field suspected as loyalists, Wesley set out a history designed to defend Methodism as a genuine work of God, but also to interpret the meaning of the revolution.144 It was written after the war’s tipping point when General John Burgoyne had surrendered to the Americans at Saratoga, New York, on 17 October 1777. After this pivotal event a British victory seemed ever more unlikely, yet Wesley still seemed to be hoping for that outcome. The sermon is based on Ezekiel 1:16, which refers to the ecstatic vision of wheels intersecting with other wheels. Wesley notes how the text had been used by Christians in a secondary sense to refer to the mysterious workings of God’s Providence, the purposes of which could not be understood until they had been fulfilled.145 That the sermon primarily served a polemical purpose seems supported by the fact that there is no record of Wesley ever actually preaching this sermon, or any other based on Ezekiel 1:16.146 Like most people of his time, Wesley held a providential view of history, perceiving the hand of God at work behind global events, and this sermon stands as a good example of a type of literature in which the international spread of the Gospel was described in terms of the movement of divine grace through the nations. The historical narrative provided is a hopelessly partisan piece of propaganda which is keen to place Methodism in the centre of God’s purposes for America. In this respect it is not unlike other examples of such literature in the transnational movement of Evangelicals who saw in the outbreak of revival, in such far-​flung places as Georgia, Scotland, Northampton, and Wales, a sign of God’s approbation and the in-​breaking of the millennium.147 In Wesley’s account a spiritual awakening had begun in Georgia in the 1730s with his own and his brother’s ministry, aided by George Whitefield, which had spread to Northampton, Massachusetts and beyond. The Methodist system was then formally established through the

128  The Work of God in North America agency of Wesley’s adjutants, Richard Boardman and Joseph Pilmore, sent to America by the Leeds Conference of 1769. God richly blessed the colonies in this way until its progress was stopped when the Americans grew complacent in their prosperity, and in their laziness and gluttony had forgotten the source of their many blessings. Such dissipation had led to an attitude of contempt for authority and a rebellious spirit soon arose along with the cry for liberty and independence. The consequent war was God’s means of punishing such a rebellious people and calling them back to repentance. Now wartime conditions had once again reduced them to penury, and they were beginning to turn back to God and see the error of their ways.148 Wesley’s tracing of a widespread work of grace in America to Georgia (the ‘first wheel’) is an interesting strategy, given that historians and biographers have often viewed Wesley’s time there from 1736 to 1737 very negatively, usually describing it as marked by personal and professional failure and as something of a spiritual wasteland. This suits the evangelical narrative of the religious seeker who must first reach the bottom of the barrel before finding the ‘glorious liberty’ entailed in the new birth. While the established narrative is not without compelling historical evidence, historians have sometimes found it difficult to see the Georgia sojourn on its own terms, divorced from later developments. Geordan Hammond’s recent study, John Wesley in America, presents a convincing case that Wesley’s time in Georgia was not a failure or a mere prelude to greater things; rather, it provided an opportunity for Wesley to apply the disciplines and practices of primitive Christianity that had fascinated him since his days as a student at Oxford.149 Hammond’s study has helped us see that Georgia should not be seen as a lacuna in Wesley’s spiritual journey so much as a defining period. There in the American wilderness he was given the opportunity to apply pastoral practices that would later be adapted and developed in the Methodist movement. Though this was a personally turbulent time for Wesley (his failed romance with Sophia Hopkey and his unpopularity with some of his parishioners are well known) the greater significance of this period of Wesley’s life is that it enabled him to experiment with the ‘primitive’ Christian practices that shaped the later development of Methodism. Wesley’s linking of awakenings in Savannah and Frederica with the New England awakening in Northampton, Massachusetts and ‘adjoining towns’, an account of which was published by Jonathan Edwards, is an instance of breathtaking hubris on Wesley’s part.150 On Wesley’s account, religion had sunk to a low state after these revivals until Boardman and Pilmore were sent out from the 1769 Leeds Conference.151 From the preaching of these emissaries in Philadelphia and New York, Societies were formed ‘and Christian discipline introduced in all its branches’, after which God also raised up native-​born American preachers ‘till there were two and twenty travelling preachers in America, who kept their circuits as regularly as those in England’.152 The work spread to North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, sinking ‘abundantly deeper than it ever had

The Work of God in North America  129 before’, so that ‘at the beginning of the late troubles’ there were three thousand in the Societies.153 Then ‘a bar appeared in the way, a grand hindrance to the progress of religion’. An increase in trade brought immense wealth to the American colonies and many grew wealthy, which led to pride and luxury. Abundant banquets filled the tables of Americans, up to 20 dishes at a sitting and this was not condemned but praised as generosity and hospitality.154 Idleness and sloth sprung from this luxury. In Wesley’s imaginative world, young people in perfect health could not even put on their own clothes but had to be dressed by slaves. His bounded cultural landscape of racial stereotypes is expressed in counting it a wonder that they did not get slaves to hand feed them as well, as ‘the lordly lubbers in China…are fed by a slave standing on each side’.155 Wesley then traced the second ‘Wheel of Divine Providence’. From the beginning of the American colonies there had been a ‘hankering after’ independence, an attitude Wesley deemed unsurprising, considering the Dissenting connections the colonists had formed before leaving England. Never having been well reconciled to the government, they passed that attitude on to their children in their new setting. ‘Why should these English blockheads rule over us?’ was the general sentiment.156 The fear of the French in Canada held the colonists’ allegiance to Britain while British military power served as a buffer, but once Canada was ceded to Britain (in the Treaty of Paris on 10 February 1763) definite plans for separation began to be drawn up.157 Pitt had been warned by his cabinet that once the ceding of Canada to Britain took place, and the threat of the French was removed, the American colonists might secede. But the Prime Minister insisted that the Canadian climate was well suited to British settlement and its possession would ensure trade between England and America. He wanted the French out of North America altogether but had to concede their retention of the fishing grounds on the island of St. Lawrence in Newfoundland.158 After the Stamp Act was enacted on 22 March 1765, agitators threw off their masks and showed their true intent. Once they had defected from the mother country, nine-​tenths of their trade was cut off so that their fountains of wealth dried up and they were now as poor as the poorest parts of Scotland or Ireland.159 So, the two wheels of Providence had been observed: (1) Trade, wealth, pride, luxury, sloth, and wantonness on the one hand and (2) The spirit of independence spreading north and south on the other. How do these two wheels relate to each other? How did a wise Providence use one to check the other? By blocking British ships from American ports, trade declined and want ensued. The wheel began to move within the wheel. Once trade and wealth failed, so pride failed, luxury was no longer possible, and poverty and want struck at the root of sloth.160 The fierceness of the Americans had turned to the praise of God and they would learn to value not independence but the genuine British liberty that their ancestors in the earliest colonies had enjoyed, as well as that more spiritual and glorious liberty of the children of God.161

130  The Work of God in North America Here we see how Wesley led the way in the ‘textual warfare’ involved in legitimising Methodism, wielding his considerable literary and polemical skills to argue that it was a genuine work of God. In the providential view of history presented here, the revolution is seen not only as a political rebellion against the crown but as a spiritual rebellion against God. The ungrateful Americans, so richly blessed by God and protected by a pious king, had in their prosperity turned to luxury and sloth and thus away from their benefactors. The war was a divinely sent act of retribution, a blessing in disguise, since it had brought want and desolation to the Americans so they would turn back to the God who had given them birth. The entire narrative lacks both subtlety and accuracy. As a thumbnail description of the ‘Great Awakening’, it is hopelessly partisan in failing to account for the Calvinist elements of the revival. It is also quite remarkable that Wesley misread the likely outcome of the war so badly at this late stage in its development. Perhaps it was his characteristic optimism that carried his hopes. For all his denunciation of personal evil, there was always a corresponding belief in the capacity of people to respond to God’s offered grace. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he still clung to the hope that the Americans would see sense and return to the fold. In 1780 and 1781, Wesley published a number of abridgements of the reports of Pennsylvania loyalist Joseph Galloway (1731–​1803) regarding the conduct of British generals in America, and these looked to more natural causes for the unfolding developments in the American war, connecting British defeat with the more prosaic cause of bungled military strategy.162 The conduct of the war in America was the subject of widespread public criticism and included the accusation that a weak and ineffectual army of rebels was gaining the upper hand, through the ineffective command of a much stronger and more experienced British army. Galloway’s status as a disaffected loyalist, his role as an eyewitness to many of the events he describes, and his membership of the first Continental Congress, give his accounts a certain vividness. In tracing the causes of American discontent to the religious principles of the Puritans, he fed Anglican fear of seditious Dissenters and identified strongly with the Established Church into which he had married.163 Galloway had little patience for arguments that the land war was just too difficult to fight because of the topography, or because of an absence of support from local communities on the ground. Instead, he pointed to the strategic bungling of the military command, especially that of General William Howe (1729–​1814) and his brother, the naval commander Richard Howe (1726–​1799), whose favouring of the Americans and their cause made it impossible for them to pursue Washington’s forces with anything like the required ferocity, an attitude which, in Galloway’s eyes, was tantamount to sedition. In broad outlines, Galloway’s account, diagnosis, and suggested actions match perfectly those of John Wesley, when compared with the latter’s other writings, his republication of Galloway’s tracts, and his criticisms of the Howes.164

The Work of God in North America  131 Galloway’s damning indictment of the Howes as military commanders is vindicated to some extent by more recent interpreters of the revolution, who see the British loss of America partly as the result of two different approaches to warfare and partly as a result of poor military commanders, insufficiently supported by a clear strategic objective.165 The British followed the pattern of the ancien régime, one of limited measures, the avoidance of heavy losses, and sensitivity to civilian opposition. The British foot soldier was a professional, who ‘looked to his bayonets’ and marched in rank and file. His commanders were gentlemen with an old world approach to battle that proved insufficient against an army of men who fought not for pay but for principle to defend their homeland, as well as the principle of ‘liberty’ conceived as a universal value worth fighting and dying for. Americans were fighting for a clear objective –​independence. On the British side, on the other hand, there was always a lack of clarity regarding the war’s objective.

Wesley’s Post-​war Reflections In An Estimate of the Manners of the Present Times (1782) Wesley expressed the belief that British losses in the later stages of the war were a result of contempt for God, a spiritual attitude that could only lead to defeat in spite of a well-​appointed navy and experienced military leadership.166 Wesley had grown frustrated by the Parliament’s prosecution of the war in America and felt that should the king ‘be his own Prime Minister’ and take a stronger hand in the affair, ‘the nation would soon feel the difference’.167 When the war finally ended in 1783, Wesley remained somewhat bitter toward American leaders. When Princeton’s John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was invited to England for a fund-​raiser, Wesley could not offer support.168 He omitted the ‘Hymn for the Loyal Americans’ and the ‘Hymn for Congress’ in his 1782 reprint of Hymns for the Nation (1782). The occasional nature of such hymns had bound them to a particular time and place and the flow of events had since made them redundant. Wesley’s view of the situation in America could not help but be negatively affected by the tyranny of distance. There is often value in putting the counterfactual question. How different might Wesley’s approach have been if he had known about the situation on the ground? Might he have taken the position of New Lights such as Samuel Hopkins, who supported the revolution but directed those engaged in the struggle for liberty to grant the same privilege to their slaves?169 Francis Asbury (strangely absent from Wesley’s Late Work of God in America) makes a suggestion that might be seen to support such a theory when he states that ‘[the Calm Address] discovers Mr. Wesley’s conscientious attachment to the government under which he lived. Had he been a subject of America, no doubt but he would have been as zealous an advocate of the American cause’.170 It is interesting to note, in light of this, that once independence from Britain was secured, Wesley urged the Methodists to render due submission to the established government. In 1789, he advised Thomas

132  The Work of God in North America Coke with some degree of wariness, ‘I wish you to obey “the Powers that be” in America; but I wish you to understand them too’.171 Asbury’s conjecture is interesting but Wesley’s commitment to constitutional monarchy as the only safeguard of genuine liberty makes such an alternative universe unlikely. It perhaps says more about Asbury, who was as much American as English, than it does about Wesley. That Wesley came to accept the American government as legitimate and (contrary to his earlier beliefs) as put in place by God, is clear in his letter to ‘Our Brethren in America’, written on 10 September 1784 to respond to the emergence of American Methodism as a strong, viable, and growing religious community. By a very uncommon train of providences many of the Provinces of North America are totally disjoined from their Mother Country and erected into independent States. The English Government has no authority over them, either civil or ecclesiastical, any more than over the States of Holland. A civil authority is exercised over them, partly by the Congress, partly by the Provincial Assemblies…As our American brethren are now totally disentangled both from the State and from the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again either with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and the Primitive church. And we judge it best that they should stand fast in that liberty wherewith God has so strangely made them free.172 Here we find the remarkable admission that the American rebellion had in the end been the will of God. An ‘uncommon train of providences’ had decreed it and God had now, ‘so strangely’, set the Methodists in America at liberty. Though there is no admission from Wesley that his own sustained opposition to this eventuality was misplaced, it is hard not to assume that this was difficult for Wesley to admit. Yet, there is also perhaps a note of envy here. Methodists in America were now freed from the civil and ecclesiastical entanglements of England’s ancien régime to follow what Wesley considered a more scriptural and apostolic model, one which he had found frustrating in his attempts to establish in Britain. On 29 May 1789, Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury signed a letter of congratulations to George Washington upon his election. In it they referred to the ‘civil and religious liberties which have been transmitted to us by the providence of God and the glorious Revolution’, and acknowledged God as, ‘the Source of…the most excellent constitution of these States, which is at present the admiration of the world, and may in future become its great exemplar for imitation’.173 In this, the children had taken leave of the parent, and one may well imagine how Wesley would have cringed at such language. The Leeds Conference in July of that year unanimously censured Coke, who was after all a British subject, for an action they considered to smack of sedition.174 When the United States became a reality, Wesley was forced to concede that an all-​wise Providence had brought it about. He had done all he

The Work of God in North America  133 could to arrest the course of history but had come to believe that a hand lay behind historical forces that was not his to move other than through prayer. Here we see the weakness of all appeals to divine Providence in order to explain historical events. If whatever happens is the will of God, events must be accepted as such, and all activism must finally be resolved in passive acceptance of the divine will. This may seem an odd place for an Arminian like John Wesley to land, but it fits perfectly well into his concept of government.175 If all power derives from God, and not the people, then all rulers and all nations are in God’s hands. Even after his most cherished hopes for the American colonists were lost, he saw himself united to them in a mutual covenant with God. American Christians were part of that transnational community of Christians to which Wesley also belonged, an identity of greater significance to him than any political boundary.

Notes 1 John Wesley, Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1770); Works (Jackson) 11: 24. 2 Adam Scott Zele, ‘John Wesley’s America’, PhD dissertation (Duke University, 2008), 339–​340. But see the important revisionist account of Geordan Hammond, John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 3 Probably written by Thomas Parker, a young lawyer converted to Methodism who became a local preacher and later converted to Swedenborgianism. Frank Baker, ‘The Shaping of Wesley’s “Calm Address” ’, Methodist History 14 (1975): 3–​4, fn. 7. 4 Caleb Evans, A Reply to the Rev. Mr. Fletcher’s Vindication of Mr. Wesley’s Calm Address (Bristol, 1775), 10. 5 Published in three excerpts, 22 September, 29 September and 6 October 1774. 6 The details are discussed in Theodore R. Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2001), 120. 7 John Wesley to the Earl of Dartmouth, 14 June 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 155–​160; John Wesley to Lord North, 15 June 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 160–​164. J.C.D. Clark uses Wesley’s letter to Lord Dartmouth to demonstrate how English politics were polarised around support or rejection of the king’s actions. J.C.D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–​1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-​American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 297. 8 John Wesley to the Earl of Dartmouth, 14 June 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 155–​ 160; John Wesley to Lord North, 15 June 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 160–​164. 9 Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1970), 36. 10 Troy Bickham, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen Through the British Press (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 3–​4, 251–​252; Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press 1775–​1783 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,1967), 1–​3; Jeremy Black, The English Press 1621–​1861 (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), 72–​95, 127–​142; Bailyn, Origins of American Politics, 38–​39; Dora Mae Clark, British Opinion and the American Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930).

134  The Work of God in North America 1 Bickham, Making Headlines, 8. Lutnick, The American Revolution, 2. 1 12 Lutnick, The American Revolution, 2. 13 The Calm Address first appeared in Bristol, but it is the second edition, published in London shortly after, that appears in the ‘Jackson’ edition of Wesley’s Works. I have consulted this second 1775 edition, A Calm Address to Our American Colonies. A new edition corrected and enlarged. To which is added A Calm Address to Americanus, by a Native of America (London, 1775). This second edition carries a slight amendment. The statement ‘Our sovereign has a right to tax me…whether we have votes for Parliament-​men or no’ is softened by the addition of a footnote on page 15 (21 in Jackson), that qualifies the King’s right to tax his subjects –​‘That is in connection with the Lords and Commons’. The circulation figures are drawn from Ellis Sandoz, ed. Political Sermons of the American Founding Era 1730–​1805 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991), 410. Sections of this chapter draw on Glen O’Brien, ‘John Wesley’s Rebuke to the Rebels of British America: Revisiting the “Calm Address” ’, Methodist Review 4 (2012): 31–​55 and Glen O’Brien, ‘George Whitefield, John Wesley, and the Rhetoric of Liberty’, in New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment, eds. Brett C. McInelly and Paul E. Kerry (Vancouver: Fairley Dickinson University Press, 2018), 105–​128. 14 Understandably, along with Methodist responses to the Revolution in general, the Calm Address became the focus of a considerable number of publications around the time that the United States celebrated its Bicentenary in 1976. See, for example, Owen H. Alderfer, ‘British Evangelical Response to the American Revolution: The Wesleyans’, Fides et Historia 8, no. 2 (1976): 7–​34; Stuart Andrews, ‘John Wesley and America’, History Today 26, no. 6 (June, 1976): 353–​ 359; Tremayne J. Coppleston, ‘John Wesley and the American Revolution’, Religion in Life 45, no. 1 (Spring, 1976): 89–​105; Donald H. Kirkham, ‘John Wesley’s “Calm Address”: The Response of the Critics’, Methodist History 14 (1975): 13–​23; James W. May, ‘Francis Asbury and Thomas White: A Refugee Preacher and His Tory Patron’, Methodist History 14, no. 3 (3 April 1976): 141–​ 164; David T. Morgan, ‘The Dupes of Designing Men: John Wesley and the American Revolution’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 44, no. 2 (June, 1975): 121–​131; Alan Raymond, ‘ “I Fear God and Honor the King”: John Wesley and the American Revolution’, Church History 45, no. 3 (September, 1976): 316–​328. 15 Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (London, 1775). 16 Raymond, ‘ “I Fear God and Honor the King” ’, 321. 17 Samuel Johnson to John Wesley, 6 January 1776, cited in Sandoz, Political Sermons, 424. Raymond argues that Johnson probably encouraged Wesley to publish a popular edition and even suggests the pamphlet was ‘produced at the urging of the government’ but admits there is no proof of this. Raymond, ‘ “I Fear God and Honor the King” ’, 321–​322. 18 Sandoz, Political Sermons, 424. 19 Cited in William Warren Sweet, Methodism in American History (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1953), 80. 20 Mark Noll, Christians in the American Revolution (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2006), 116. 21 Ronald H. Stone, John Wesley’s Life and Ethics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2001), 173.

The Work of God in North America  135 22 David Hempton, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Culture, 1750–​1900 (New York: Rutland Press, 1996), 82. 23 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (London, 1774), 4; Works (Jackson) 11: 70. 24 Charles Wesley, ‘Hymns on Patriotism’, 23, lines 67–​72, cited in Donald S. Baker, ‘Charles Wesley and the American War of Independence’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, 34 (1964): 161. 25 John Wesley to Thomas Rankin, 21 April 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 147–​148. 26 John Wesley to Thomas Rankin, 13 August 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 173. 27 John Wesley to Charles Wesley, 17 October 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 179. 28 Wesley, A Calm Address, 13; Works (Jackson) 11: 88. 29 Sandoz, Political Sermons, 422. 30 Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–​ 1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 146. 31 Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics, 10–​13. 32 John Wesley to Christopher Hopper, 26 December 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 199. 33 Baker, ‘Shaping of Wesley’s Calm Address’, 4–​5. 34 Lynwood M. Holland, ‘John Wesley and the American Revolution’, A Journal of Church and State 5 (1963): 201, 199–​213. 35 Allan Raymond believes that Holland confuses dates and ‘should be used with great caution’. Raymond, ‘ “I Fear God and Honor the King” ’, 316. 36 Thomas W. Smith, ‘Authority and Liberty: John Wesley’s View of Medieval England’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 7 (2015): 1–​26. 37 Wesley, Calm Address, 1; Works (Jackson) 11: 80. 38 Albert M. Lyles, ‘The Hostile Reaction to the American Views of Johnson and Wesley’, The Journal of the Rutgers University Library 24 (December, 1960): 1–​ 13. Brief excerpts and commentaries of several of the more influential replies may be found in Richard Green, Anti-​Methodist Publications Issued during the Eighteenth Century (London: C.H. Kelly, 1902), 125–​132. 39 Kirkham, ‘John Wesley’s “Calm Address” ’, 13–​23. 40 John Wesley to the Editor of Lloyds Evening Post, 29 November 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 192–​193. On 23 August 1775, he had also written to the Earl of Dartmouth, expressing concern at the anti-​royal sympathies he encountered during his travels. John Wesley to the Earl of Dartmouth, 23 August 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 175–​176. 41 John Wesley, ‘A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England’, Works (Jackson) 11: 129. 42 Morning Chronicle 2 December 1775, 2, cited in Baker, ‘The Shaping of the Calm Address’, 11–​12. 43 ‘T.S’., A Cool Reply to a Calm Address, Lately Published by Mr. John Wesley (London, 1775), 5. 44 T.S., A Cool Reply, 5–​6. 45 T.S., A Cool Reply, 30. 46 T.S., A Cool Reply, 32–​33. 47 T.S., A Cool Reply, 33. 48 ‘Americanus’, [Caleb Evans], A Letter to the Rev. Mr. John Wesley Occasioned by his Calm Address to the American Colonies (London, 1775); Thomas Olivers, A Full Defence of the Rev John Wesley in answer to the several personal reflections cast on that gentleman by the Rev Caleb Evans in his Observations on Mr Wesley’s late reply prefixed to his Calm Address (London, 1776, but in

136  The Work of God in North America fact, according to Frank Baker published in late December, 1775). See Baker, ‘The Shaping of Wesley’s “Calm Address” ’, 12; John Fletcher, A Vindication of the Rev Mr Wesley’s ‘Calm Address to our American Colonies’: In some letters to Mr Caleb Evans (Dublin, 1776). 49 Gentlemen’s Magazine 45 (December, 1775): 564, cited in Raymond, ‘ “I Fear God and Honor the King” ’, 322. 50 Detailed discussion of the substance of Wesley’s opponents is provided in Kirkham, ‘Wesley’s “Calm Address” ’. See also Donald H. Kirkham, ‘Pamphlet Opposition to the Rise of Methodism’, PhD thesis (Duke University, 1973), 290–​314. Randy Maddox has shown how some pamphlet attacks on Wesley’s Primitive Physick (London, 1747) were motivated by opposition to his political views and to the Calm Address in particular. Randy L. Maddox, ‘Reclaiming the Eccentric Parent: Methodist Reception of John Wesley’s Interest in Medicine’, in ‘Inward and Outward Health’: John Wesley’s Holistic Concept of Medical Science, the Environment, and Holy Living, edited by Deborah Madden (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 15–​50, esp. 23–​28. 51 William Warren Sweet, Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765–​ 1840 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 125. 52 Robert Southey, The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism, 2 vols, ed. Maurice Fitzgerald (London, 1925), 2: 244. David Riggs also makes this claim. David Riggs, ‘John Wesley and the American Revolution Reconsidered’, undated (c. 1976) typed manuscript, 3. Frank Baker Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Box 7. Riggs is citing Thomas W. Herbert, John Wesley as Editor and Author (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940), 106–​107. 53 Richard P. Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), 262. Also, John Wesley, letter to Thomas Rankin, 20 October 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 182. 54 John Wesley to Thomas Rankin, 20 October 1775, Telford, Letters (Telford) 6: 182. 55 Wesley, ‘A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England’, in Works (Jackson) 11: 129. The American ports were closed on 20 July 1775 as a result of a decision of the Continental Congress of 4–​6 July. 56 Letter to the Printer of the Pennsylvania Packet, 4 March 1776, The Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia, PA), published as Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet or, the General Advertiser 5, no. 228: 3. 57 Advertisement in the New Jersey Gazette (Burlington, NJ), 1, no. 32 (15 July 1778), 3. 58 John Wesley to ‘My Dear Brethren’, 1 March 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 142–​143. 59 John Wesley to Mrs. Woodhouse, 3 March 1776, Letters (Telford) 6: 210. 60 John Wesley to Joseph Benson, 11 January 1777, Letters (Telford) 6: 249. 61 George Shadford, ‘A Short Account of George Shadford’, The Arminian Magazine 13 (November, 1790): 350. 62 John Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 97–​104; May, ‘Francis Asbury and Thomas White’, 141–​ 164; See also Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–​1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 51.

The Work of God in North America  137 63 Nathan Bangs, The Life of the Rev. Freeborn Garrettson (New York, 1832), 46–​47, 64, cited in Stephen W. Spellman, ‘The Early Native American Preachers’, Duke Divinity School Review 34 (Autumn, 1969): 177. 64 J. Littlejohn, manuscript journal, Kentucky Wesleyan College, cited in Wigger, American Saint, 93. 65 Bangs, Life of Garrettson, 87, cited in Spellman, ‘Early Native American Preachers’, 178. 66 Thomas Webb to Lord Dartmouth, 21 March 1775, cited in Frederick V. Mills Jr., ‘New Light on Methodists and the Revolutionary War’, Methodist History 28 (1989): 57–​59. 67 John Adams referred to Webb as ‘the old soldier’ and ‘one of the most fluent, eloquent men I ever heard’. Andrews, Methodists and Revolutionary America, 52. 68 Webb informed Lord Dartmouth that he had requested Charles Wesley to correct and publish Webb’s views on the present situation, though no evidence exists that Wesley ever did so. Webb, letter to Lord Dartmouth, 21 March 1775, in Mills Jr., ‘New Light on Methodists’, 59. 69 John Wesley to Lloyd’s Evening Post, 29 November 1775, Letters (Telford) 6: 192–​193. 70 J.H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (London and Glasgow: Fontana, 1966), 110–​111. 71 John Wesley, A Sermon Preached at St. Matthew’s, Bethnal-​Green, On Sunday, Nov. 12, 1775. For the Benefit of the Widows and Orphans of the Soldiers who lately fell, near Boston in New England (London, 1775). Its present title ‘National Sins and Miseries’ was provided by Thomas Jackson in 1825. Though I have consulted the 1775 edition, the references here are to Sermon 111, ‘National Sins and Miseries’ (1775) in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 3 Sermons III (71–​114), ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986), 564–​576. 72 Outler, ed. Works 3: 564–​565; The Works of John Wesley volume 22, Journals and Diaries V (1765–​1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 470–​471. 73 Wesley, ‘National Sins and Miseries’, in Outler, Works, 3: 567–​568. 74 Wesley, ‘National Sins and Miseries’, in Outler, Works, 3: 568. 75 Wesley, ‘National Sins and Miseries’, in Outler, Works, 3: 568–​569. 76 Wesley, ‘National Sins and Miseries’, in Outler, Works, 3: 569–​571. 77 Wesley, ‘National Sins and Miseries’, in Outler, Works, 3: 571. 78 Wesley, ‘National Sins and Miseries’, in Outler, Works, 3: 574–​575. 79 Wesley, ‘National Sins and Miseries’, in Outler, Works, 3: 575. 80 Wesley, ‘National Sins and Miseries’, in Outler, Works, 3: 575–​576. 81 J.P. Boyd, ed. The Thomas Jefferson Papers (Princeton, NJ, 1950), 1: 315–​319, 423–​427, cited in Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 335–​336. 82 Though, David Armitage claims the evidence for this to be ‘at best only circumstantial’. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 42–​43. Often celebrated as a uniquely American contribution to political history, the Declaration was shaped by the European experience found in the Swiss writer, Emir de Vatell’s Law of Nations (1758) and is thought by some to have been modelled on the Dutch Act of Abjuration (1581), which constituted independence from King Phillip II of Spain.

138  The Work of God in North America 83 Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (London, 1776). The sales figure is given in Colin Haydon, ‘Religious Minorities in England’, in CECB, 248 (241–​251); John Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty: Occasioned by a Late Tract (London, 1776); Works (Jackson) 11: 90–​118. 84 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 12; Works (Jackson) 11: 98. 85 John Wesley, A Seasonable Address to the More Serious Part of the Inhabitants of Great Britain, Respecting the Unhappy Contest between Us and Our American Brethren: With an Occasional Word Interspersed to those of a Different Complexion. By a Lover of Peace (Bristol, 1776). 86 John Wesley, A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England (London, 1777). 87 Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, 6–​ 7. For a biography, see David O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). A sympathetic portrait is given in H.T. Dickinson, ‘Richard Price on Reason and Revolution’, in Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–​1832, eds. William Gibson and Robert G. Ingram (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 231–​254. In addition to Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Price extended his arguments in Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (London, 1777) and Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World (London, 1784). 88 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 93–​94. More recently, H.T. Dickinson has described Price as expressing his religious views ‘with charity and candour’ and that such views are ‘fully deserving of respect’. Dickinson, ‘Richard Price on Reason and Revolution’, 236. 89 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 90. 90 Wesley wrote these words on Thursday 4 April 1776, the day he began to write Some Observations on Liberty. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786), eds. W. Reginald Ward, and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995), 8. 91 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 90. 92 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 4; Works (Jackson) 11: 91. 93 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 4–​5; Works (Jackson) 11: 92. 94 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 5–​6; Works (Jackson) 11: 93. 95 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 6–​8; Works (Jackson) 11: 130–​131. 96 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 6–​7; Works (Jackson) 11: 94. 97 For biographical studies see William M. Fowler, Jr., The Baron of Beacon Hill: A Biography of John Hancock (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1980); Harlow Giles Unger, John Hancock: Merchant King and American Patriot (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000). Also, Paul D. Brandes, John Hancock’s Life and Speeches: A Personalized Vision of the American Revolution (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996). The myth that Hancock was a notorious smuggler has largely been dispelled and most now consider his trading activities to have been legitimate for the most part. See Fowler, Jr., The Baron of Beacon Hill, 82. 98 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 8–​10; Works (Jackson) 11: 132–​133.

The Work of God in North America  139 99 Joseph Galloway, Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion (London, 1780), 3. 100 ‘A Population History of London: The Demography of Urban Growth’, The Proceedings of the Old Bailey. Version 8.0, March 2018. www.oldb​aile​yonl​ine. org/​sta​tic/​Pop​ulat​ion-​hist​ory-​of-​lon​don.jsp#a1760-​1815 (accessed 14 October 2021). 101 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 9; Works (Jackson) 11: 95–​96. 102 Arthur Young, cited in J.H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1714–​ 1815) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 145. Young was an advocate for the rights of agricultural workers and published widely the results of his numerous travels into rural areas, including A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales (London, 1769) and The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (London, 1771). See Arthur Young, The Autobiography of Arthur Young with Selections from his Correspondence, ed. M. Betham-​ Edwards (London, 1898). See also Gordon Mingay, ‘Agricultural and Rural Life’, in CECB, 141–​157. 103 The figures are drawn from Wilfred Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–​1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 161. 104 Peter Razzell, ‘The Growth of Population in Eighteenth Century England: A Critical Reappraisal’, The Journal of Economic History 53, no. 4 (December, 1993): 743–​771. 105 E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–​ 1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ­chapters 6–​7; Michael Anderson, Population Change in North-​ Western Europe, 1750–​1850 (London: Palgrave, 1988), ­chapter 2, cited in Prest, Albion Ascendant, 161–​ 162. See also Michael Anderson, ‘Population Change in North-​Western Europe, 1750–​1850’, in British Population History, from the Black Death to the Present Day, ed. Michael Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 191–​280. 106 Anderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, British Population History, 2. 107 Peter Razzell, Essays in English Population History (London: Caliban Books,1994), ­chapters 7–​8. 108 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 9–​10; Works (Jackson) 11: 96. 109 The figure is given in W.A. Speck, ‘Britain and the Atlantic World’, in CECB, 453 (447–​459). 110 For a biography see William Peterson, Malthus: Founder of Modern Demography (London: Routledge, 1998). 111 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 11; Works (Jackson) 11: 98. 112 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 12–​13; Works (Jackson) 11: 99–​100. 113 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 19; Works (Jackson) 11: 104. 114 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 19–​20; Works (Jackson) 11: 105. 115 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 25–​26; Works (Jackson) 11: 110. 116 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 26–​27; Works (Jackson) 11: 110–​111. 117 Augustus M. Toplady, An Old Fox Tarr’d and Feather’d Occasioned by What is Called Mr. John Wesley’s Calm Address to Our American Colonies (London, 1775), in The Works of Augustus Toplady in Six Volumes (London, 1794), 5: 450. 118 William B. Peach, ed. Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), 30–​31, cited in H.T. Dickinson, ‘Richard Price’, 254.

140  The Work of God in North America 19 Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 35–​36; Works (Jackson) 11: 118. 1 120 D.O. Thomas, ed. Richard Price: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 187, cited in Dickinson, ‘Richard Price’, 242. 121 Dickinson, ‘Richard Price’, 247–​251. 122 Richard Price, Political Writings, 150, cited in H.T. Dickinson, ‘Richard Price’, 251. 123 Dickinson, ‘Richard Price’, 251–​252. 124 David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​ 1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 46. 125 John Wesley, A Seasonable Address. Weber discusses the problems associated with the placement of the Seasonable Address in the Jackson edition of the Works, where it appears after Some Observations on Liberty and before other tracts on the American war. Works (Jackson) 11: 119–​128. He thinks Frank Baker’s date of February 1776 is too late, suggesting that the Seasonable Address may even predate the Calm Address of 1775. Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation, 138. 126 Wesley, Seasonable Address, 4–​5; Works (Jackson) 11: 119–​120. 127 Wesley, Seasonable Address, 7–​8; Works (Jackson) 11: 122. 128 Wesley, Seasonable Address, 9–​10; Works (Jackson) 11: 123. 129 Wesley, Seasonable Address, 12–​14; Works (Jackson) 11: 125–​126. 130 Wesley, Seasonable Address, 14–​15; Works (Jackson) 11: 126–​127. 131 Wesley, Seasonable Address, 16; Works (Jackson) 11: 127. 132 Wesley, Seasonable Address, 16–​17; Works (Jackson) 11: 128. 133 John Wesley, A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England (London, 1777); Works (Jackson) 11: 129–​140; A. Raymond, ‘ “I Fear God and Honor the King” ’, 326. 134 Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 426–​428, cited in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 41–​42. 135 John Wesley, journal entry, 10 February 1777, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 42. 136 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 6; Works (Jackson) 11: 130–​133. 137 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 13–​14; Works (Jackson) 11: 134–​135. 138 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 14–​15; Works (Jackson) 11: 135. 139 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 14–​17 (final quotation, 17); Works (Jackson) 11: 136. 140 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 17–​19; Works (Jackson) 11: 137. 141 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 19–​20; Works (Jackson) 11: 137–​138. 142 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 20–​21; Works (Jackson) 11: 138–​139. Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 46. 143 Wesley, Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England, 22–​23; Works (Jackson) 11: 139–​140. 144 Some of the material in this section of the chapter previously appeared in Glen O’Brien, ‘ “A Good and Sensible Man”: John Wesley’s Reading and Use of

The Work of God in North America  141 Jonathan Edwards’, in The Global Edwards, edited by Rhys Bezzant (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017), 247–​260. 145 John Wesley, Some Account of the Late Work of God in North-​America, in a Sermon on Ezekiel I. 16 (London, 1778), 4. A note on the bibliographical listing in the Macclesfield Collection at Asbury University states, ‘probably the fourth edition’. The sermon appears as Sermon 113, ‘The Late Work of God in North America’, in Outler, Works 3: 594–​608. Though I have consulted the 1788 edition I have also provided the page numbers in Outler for convenience. 146 Outler, Works 3: 595. 147 W. Reginald Ward, ‘The Baptists and the Transformation of the Church, 1780–​ 1830’, Baptist Quarterly 25: 170–​171, cited in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 19 Journal and Diaries II (1738–​1743), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990), 75, fn. 85. 148 Wesley, Late Work of God, 4–​12; Outler, Works 3: 595–​598. 149 Hammond, John Wesley in America, 2014. 150 Wesley, Late Work of God, 5; Outler, Works 3: 596. Wesley dates the New England revival three years later (1736) than it actually took place (1733). He also overlooks the revivals under the leadership of William Tennent, Gilbert Tennent, and Theodore Frelinghuysen in the 1720s. Outler, Works 3: 596, fn. 4. 151 Wesley has the incorrect date of 1767 in the original, as pointed out by Outler in Works 3: 598, f. 22. See John Wesley, ‘Annual Minutes of Some Late Conversations, 1769’, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 10 The Methodist Societies, The Minutes of Conference, ed. Henry D. Rack (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2010), 374. 152 Wesley, Late Work of God, 8–​9; Outler, Works 3: 599. 153 Wesley, Late Work of God, 9. 154 Wesley, Late Work of God, 10–​11; Outler, Works 3: 600. 155 Wesley, Late Work of God, 11; Outler, Works 3: 600–​601. 156 Wesley, Late Work of God, 12–​13; Outler, Works 3: 601–​602. 157 Wesley, Late Work of God, 14; Outler, Works 3: 602; Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 1714–​1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 345–​349. 158 Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 345–​346. 159 Wesley, Late Work of God, 16–​17; Outler, Works 3: 604–​605. The Continental Congress had, in response to the Intolerable Acts, ended all imports from Britain from 1 December 1774 and all exports from Britain after 10 September 1775, in an attempt to leverage the removal of the Acts. For a discussion of the Townshend and Coercive Acts in the period from 1766–​1776, see Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, Vol. 1 Prehistory to 1789 (New York: Meridian, 1994), 256–​297. 160 Wesley, Late Work of God, 17–​20; Outler, Works 3: 604–​606. 161 Wesley, Late Work of God, 20–​23; Outler, Works 3: 606–​608. 162 Joseph Galloway, Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion (London, 1780); An Account of the Conduct of the War in the Middle Colonies (London, 1780); An Extract of a Reply to the Observations of Lieut. Gen. Sir William Howe, on a Pamphlet Entitled Letters to a Nobleman (London, 1781), and An Extract of a Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount H[ow]e on his Naval Conduct in the American War (London, 1781).

142  The Work of God in North America 163 For a biography, see John Ferling. The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway and the American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977). See also, Julian P. Boyd, Anglo-​American Union: Joseph Galloway’s Plan to Preserve the British Empire, 1774–​1788 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941). 164 Charles Wesley also composed an account of Howe’s handling of the war in verse which also drew heavily on Galloway in its criticism of Howe’s strategy and motives. Charles Wesley, The American War under the Conduct of Sir William Howe, edited by Donald S. Baker (London: Keepsake Press, 1975); see also Donald S. Baker, ‘Charles Wesley and the American War of Independence’, 159–​ 164; Donald S. Baker, ‘Charles Wesley and the American Loyalists’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 35 (1965): 5–​9. 165 Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 595–​602. 166 John Wesley, An Estimate of the Manners of the Present Times (London, 1782); Works (Jackson) 11: 156–​164. 167 John Wesley to Charles Wesley, 4 April 1783, Letters (Telford) 7: 173–​174. 168 John Wesley to Brian Bury Collins, 11 March 1784, Letters (Telford) 7: 213–​214. 169 Samuel Hopkins, A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans (Newport, 1776). Hopkins is discussed by Mark Noll as an example of those who supported the Revolution but maintained a distinctive Christian voice and did not succumb to the temptation of creating a generically civil religion. Noll, Christians in the American Revolution, 92–​98. 170 Elmer T. Clark, ed. The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury (London/​ Nashville, TN: Epworth/​Abingdon, 1958), 1: 181. 171 John Wesley, letter to Thomas Coke, 5 September 1789, Letters (Telford) 8: 163–​164. It is possible, of course, that ‘the Powers that be’ here refers to the Methodist hierarchy, but in my view unlikely, since Coke and Asbury were officially equal in authority, though clearly Asbury’s actual authority far exceeded that of Coke who was often seen by American itinerants as an inconsistent and bumbling meddler in their affairs. 172 John Wesley, ‘To Our American Brethren’, Letters (Telford) 7: 237–​239. 173 Letters (Telford) 8: 163. For the visit to Washington, see Wigger, American Saint, 181–​182. 174 Letters (Telford) 8: 163. 175 Howard Snyder makes a distinction between Calvin’s view of predestination (with an emphasis on divine sovereignty) and Wesley’s view of Providence (with an emphasis on divine wisdom and love). Howard A. Snyder, ‘Works of Grace and Providence: The Structure of John Wesley’s Theology’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 10, no. 2 (2018), 151–​176.

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144  The Work of God in North America Galloway, Joseph. Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion. London, 1780. Galloway, Joseph. An Extract of a Reply to the Observations of Lieut. Gen. Sir William Howe, on a Pamphlet Entitled Letters to a Nobleman. London, 1781. Galloway, Joseph. An Extract of a Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount H[ow]e on his Naval Conduct in the American War. London, 1781. Green, Richard. Anti-​Methodist Publications Issued during the Eighteenth Century. London: C.H. Kelly, 1902. Hammond, Geordan. John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Heitzenrater, Richard P. Wesley and the People Called Methodists. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995. Hempton, David. Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984. Hempton, David. The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Culture, 1750–​1900. New York: Rutland Press, 1996. Holland, Lynwood M. ‘John Wesley and the American Revolution’, A Journal of Church and State 5 (1963): 199–​213. Hopkins, Samuel. A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans. Newport, 1776. Johnson, Samuel. Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress. London, 1775. Kirkham, Donald H. ‘Pamphlet Opposition to the Rise of Methodism’, PhD thesis. Duke University, 1973. Kirkham, Donald H. ‘John Wesley’s “Calm Address”: The Response of the Critics’, Methodist History 14 (1975): 13–​23. Letter to the Printer of the Pennsylvania Packet, The Pennsylvania Packet [Philadelphia, PA], published as Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet or, the General Advertiser 5, no. 228 (4 March 1776): 3. Lutnick, Solomon. The American Revolution and the British Press 1775–​ 1783. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1967. Lyles, Albert M. ‘The Hostile Reaction to the American Views of Johnson and Wesley’, The Journal of the Rutgers University Library 24 (December, 1960): 1–​13. Maddox, Randy L. ‘Reclaiming the Eccentric Parent: Methodist Reception of John Wesley’s Interest in Medicine’. In ‘Inward and Outward Health’: John Wesley’s Holistic Concept of Medical Science, the Environment, and Holy Living, edited by Deborah Madden, 15–​50. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012. May, James W. ‘Francis Asbury and Thomas White: A Refugee Preacher and His Tory Patron’, Methodist History 14, no. 3 (3 April 1976): 141–​164. Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–​1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Mills, Jr., Frederick V. ‘New Light on Methodists and the Revolutionary War’, Methodist History 28 (1989): 57–​65. Morgan, David T. ‘The Dupes of Designing Men: John Wesley and the American Revolution’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 44, no. 2 (June 1975): 121–​131. Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People, Vol. 1 Prehistory to 1789. New York: Meridian, 1994. Noll, Mark. Christians in the American Revolution. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2006.

The Work of God in North America  145 O’Brien, Glen. ‘John Wesley’s Rebuke to the Rebels of British America: Revisiting the “Calm Address”’, Methodist Review 4 (2012): 31–​55. O’Brien, Glen. ‘ “A Good and Sensible Man”: John Wesley’s Reading and Use of Jonathan Edwards’. In The Global Edwards, edited by Rhys Bezzant, 247–​260. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017. O’Brien, Glen. ‘George Whitefield, John Wesley, and the Rhetoric of Liberty’. In New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment, edited by Brett C. McInelly and Paul E. Kerry, 105–​128. Vancouver: Fairley Dickinson University Press, 2018. Olivers, Thomas. A Full Defence of the Rev. John Wesley in answer to the several personal reflections cast on that gentleman by the Rev. Caleb Evans in his Observations on Mr. Wesley’s late reply prefixed to his Calm Address. London, 1776. Outler, Albert C., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 3 Sermons III (71–​114). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986. Peterson, William. Malthus: Founder of Modern Demography. London: Routledge, 1998. Plumb, John H. England in the Eighteenth Century (1714–​ 1815). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950. Plumb, John H. The First Four Georges. London and Glasgow: Fontana, 1966. Prest, Wilfred. Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–​ 1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Price, Richard. Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. London, 1776. Price, Richard. Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America. London, 1777. Price, Richard. Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World. London, 1784. Rack, Henry D., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 10 The Methodist Societies, The Minutes of Conference. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2010. Raymond, Allan. ‘ “I Fear God and Honor the King”: John Wesley and the American Revolution’, Church History 45, no. 3 (September 1976): 316–​328. Razzell, Peter. ‘The Growth of Population in Eighteenth Century England: A Critical Reappraisal’, The Journal of Economic History 53, no. 4 (December 1993): 743–​771. Razzell, Peter. Essays in English Population History. London: Caliban Books, 1994. Riggs, David. ‘John Wesley and the American Revolution Reconsidered’, undated (c. 1976) typed manuscript, 3. Frank Baker Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Box 7. Sandoz, Ellis, ed. Political Sermons of the American Founding Era 1730–​ 1805. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991. Shadford, George. ‘A Short Account of George Shadford’, The Arminian Magazine 13 (November 1790): 350. Smith, Thomas W. ‘Authority and Liberty: John Wesley’s View of Medieval England’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 7 (2015): 1–​26. Snyder, Howard A. ‘Works of Grace and Providence: The Structure of John Wesley’s Theology’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 10, no. 2 (2018): 151–​176. Southey, Robert. The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism, 2 vols, edited by Maurice Fitzgerald. London, 1925.

146  The Work of God in North America Spellman, Stephen W. ‘The Early Native American Preachers’, Duke Divinity School Review 34 (Autumn, 1969): 177–​178. Stone, Ronald H. John Wesley’s Life and Ethics. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2001. Sweet, William Warren. Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765–​ 1840. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952. Sweet, William Warren. Methodism in American History. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1953. Thomas, David O. The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Toplady, Augustus M. An Old Fox Tarr’d and Feather’d Occasioned by What is Called Mr. John Wesley’s Calm Address to Our American Colonies. London, 1775. Toplady, Augustus M. The Works of Augustus Toplady in Six Volumes. London, 1794. ‘T.S’. A Cool Reply to a Calm Address, Lately Published by Mr. John Wesley. London, 1775. Unger, Harlow Giles. John Hancock: Merchant King and American Patriot. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 19 Journal and Diaries II (1738–​1743). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995. Weber, Theodore R. Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2001. Wesley, Charles. The American War under the Conduct of Sir William Howe, edited by Donald S. Baker. London: Keepsake Press, 1975. Wesley, John. Free Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs in a Letter to a Friend. London, 1770. Wesley, John. Thoughts upon Slavery. London, 1774. Wesley, John. A Calm Address to Our American Colonies. A new edition corrected and enlarged. To which is added A Calm Address to Americanus, by a Native of America. London, 1775. Wesley, John. A Sermon Preached at St. Matthew’s, Bethnal-​Green, On Sunday, Nov. 12, 1775. For the Benefit of the Widows and Orphans of the Soldiers who lately fell, near Boston in New England. London, 1775. Wesley, John. Some Observations on Liberty: Occasioned by a Late Tract. London, 1776. Wesley, John. A Seasonable Address to the More Serious Part of the Inhabitants of Great Britain, Respecting the Unhappy Contest between Us and Our American Brethren: With an Occasional Word Interspersed to those of a Different Complexion. By a Lover of Peace. Bristol, 1776. Wesley, John. A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England. London, 1777. Wesley, John. Some Account of the Late Work of God in North-​America, in a Sermon on Ezekiel I. 16. London, 1778. Wesley, John. An Estimate of the Manners of the Present Times. London, 1782. Wesley, John. The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M, 8 vols, edited by John Telford. London: Epworth Press, 1931.

The Work of God in North America  147 Wesley, John. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, 14 vols, edited by Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed. London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1872; reprinted Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979. Wigger, John. American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Williams, Basil. The Whig Supremacy, 1714–​1760. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Wrigley, E.A. and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–​1871: A Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Young, Arthur. A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales. London, 1769. Young, Arthur. The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England. London, 1771. Young, Arthur. The Autobiography of Arthur Young with Selections from his Correspondence, edited by M. Betham–​Edwards. London, 1898. Zele, Adam Scott. ‘John Wesley’s America’. PhD dissertation. Duke University, 2008.

6 The State of the Nation and Its People

Arnold Toynbee’s influential Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (1884) demonstrated how agrarian enclosures, the invention of steam power, and the factory system, while increasing productivity, also contributed to class antagonism and lower living standards for the poor. Beginning in the 1920s, with the work of Cambridge economic historian J.H. Clapham, Toynbee’s interpretation has been subjected to considerable critique, including the question of just how rapid and ‘revolutionary’ were the changes that were brought about. It remains the general consensus, however, that the period we still refer to as the ‘Industrial Revolution’ brought significant and lasting changes to British society, economics, manufacture, and trade. Population growth in a newly industrialised England, coupled with new modes of agriculture and the enclosure system, put pressure on available food resources, especially in more remote counties, and John Wesley was in a position to observe first-​hand the impact of such shortages on the poor. While those involved in the manufacturing and building trades experienced rising wages in the eighteenth century, especially those in the growing industrial towns in the north, agricultural workers did not, leaving them particularly vulnerable. One calculation states that the average English adult of the 1780s existed on a daily intake of 2,500 to 2,700 calories (mostly starchy carbohydrates) as compared to today’s recommended intake of 3,500 to 4,000 calories for those engaged in physical labour.1 To take Staffordshire as a single example, between 1760 and 1802, 10 per cent of households did not have the earning power to purchase the bread they needed for subsistence and needed to rely on poor relief. This figure rose to 40 per cent in the crisis years of food shortages.2 The price of wheat and other grains rose gradually from around 1760 and then sharply due to bad harvests in 1790.3 Nonetheless, widespread starvation was rare, aided in part by the directing of grains from export markets to home consumption, especially after 1750. While there was nothing like the widespread famines experienced in France during the same period, there were periods of significant want, especially in the latter part of the century. These circumstances sometimes flared up into civic disturbances over inflated prices of bread and corn due DOI: 10.4324/9781003227496-6

The State of the Nation and Its People  149 to crop shortages, and the period 1771–​1773 was particularly marked by such disturbances.4 In this chapter we will consider Wesley’s response to the adverse conditions experienced by the poor, arising from the economic conditions of the country, in his Word to a Smuggler (1767), Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions (1773), and Serious Address to the People of England (1778).

Giving the King His Due On the remote coastlands in the west of England, starvation and want could be staved off by circumventing customs and participating in the illegal smuggling of goods. In his 1767 tract, A Word to a Smuggler, Wesley took the high moral ground in opposing any participation in the illegal trade, regardless of the pressing nature of one’s personal circumstances.5 Smuggling was endemic in the eighteenth century and proved impossible to stamp out. It was so widespread that in some communities it was considered almost a legitimate trade. It particularly flourished during times of war because the navy was too stretched to police the covert import and export of goods. The remote coastal areas of Devon and Cornwall were particularly suited to the trade. At Rye, on 22 November 1773, Wesley remonstrated with the congregation to ‘part with the accursed thing, smuggling’ but to little effect.6 Twenty years earlier, in July 1753 he had met with the stewards of St. Ives, in the west of Cornwall, and upon examining the society was stopped short at the realisation that smuggling was widely accepted among them. ‘I found an accursed thing among them –​wellnigh one and all bought or sold uncustomed goods. I therefore delayed speaking to any more till I had met with them altogether. This I did in the evening and told them plain, either they must put this abomination away or they would see my face no more…They severally promised so to do. So I trust this plague is stayed’.7 In some poorer communities smuggling was considered an important part of the local economy and the goods smuggled found their way into the hands of people at every level of society. A parliamentary committee reported in 1745 that three million pounds of tea a year (three times the legal trade) was being smuggled into the country, including by gangs of Jacobite sympathisers operating in the south-​east.8 Smuggling ran against the prevailing mercantile theory that a nation must produce a surplus in order to prosper, with a corresponding privileging of exported over imported goods as a means of producing revenue. Imports were a drain on revenue and so were tolerated, but discouraged. One problem for this model in the eighteenth century was that the many new products for which the English developed a taste, such as tea, tobacco, and French liquor, were imported goods which attracted taxation. This was an open door for the smuggling trade which, through circumventing the payment of duties, opened up a lucrative supply of such desirable goods. The global wars fought by Britain in the eighteenth century

150  The State of the Nation and Its People were funded at least in part by import duties, so the loss of this revenue was a concern for both the king and the Parliament. Wesley defined smuggling as ‘the importing, selling, or buying of run goods, that is, those which have not paid the duty appointed by law to be paid to the king’.9 He declared four types of people guilty of smuggling: (1) Those who ran smuggling vessels; (2) Ship’s captains, officers, sailors, and passengers who avoid paying import duties on goods brought into the country; (3) Sellers of goods which have escaped import duty; and (4) Buyers of goods which have escaped import duty. Such goods included tea, liquor, linen, and handkerchiefs. The question may be asked what harm there was in this seemingly victimless crime. Wesley insisted that smuggling was just as much stealing as highway robbery. In fact, it was worse, since the highwayman steals from strangers, but the smuggler steals from his father, the king, since in England customs duties were owed to the king. From Wesley’s point of view, to avoid paying such duties was tantamount to stealing. ‘King George is the father of all his subjects: And not only so, but he is a good father. He shows his love to [his subjects] on all occasions and is continually doing all that is in his power to make his subjects happy’. In Wesley’s logic it would be shameful to rob such a father.10 There is a very personal element here, and in so many of Wesley’s exhortations regarding the king, suggesting that for him the monarchy was more than an ideal or an institution (though it was both of those). In considering the king a person, a Christian monarch, and a loving father to the nation, the importance of loyalty to such a person seemed self-​evident to Wesley. Wesley argues that, since the Bible clearly prohibits stealing (Exodus 20:15), Christians should never engage in smuggling and that buying or selling smuggled goods was stealing the king’s property as much as if the king were to steal one’s coat. He appealed to biblical precedents –​both Jesus and Paul taught their followers to pay taxes.11 Robbing the king of his dues also defrauded every honest English subject because the loss of customs duties led to higher taxation, a burden which everyone would be called upon to bear. Buying smuggled goods also impoverished honest sellers who needed to lower their prices in order to compete with ‘run’ goods. Some of these honest traders were themselves forced into stealing in order to feed their families so those who bought smuggled goods had blood on their hands. Clearly smuggling was not, in Wesley’s view, a victimless crime. Dealing with a number of the most commonly found excuses for smuggling, Wesley rejected them one by one. Those who said they must deal in smuggled goods in order to stay in business would do better to find an honest way to make a living. The claim that the king benefited from the smuggling trade by regular seizures was rejected as frivolous; a hundred times the amount of goods was lost through smuggling than was seized. Some were claiming that the king could suppress the trade if he really wanted to do it, but Wesley asked how he could do so when customs house officials had themselves

The State of the Nation and Its People  151 accepted payoffs and those who tried to be honest were threatened by loss of livelihood, and even of life. The king did not have enough soldiers to watch every port and creek in Britain and, in any case, soldiers were as much open to corruption as customs officers. Admittedly, ‘great men and courtiers’ were also involved in the trade, but this only proved them to be greater highway robbers and increased their guilt. Even if it could have been proven that the king somehow benefited from smuggling this would not excuse stealing.12 For Wesley, those who say they engaged in smuggling with a clear conscience had deadened their consciences and needed God to awaken them again. God may have overlooked for a time those who had engaged in smuggling while still feeling ‘happy in the love of God’. However now that they had received light on the subject and knew better, they must cease such activity or the light they had received would be removed from them.13 As for those who said that they only bought a little brandy or tea now and then for their own personal use, these were simply admitting that they only stole a little. To those who said they did not receive smuggled goods themselves, but only sent their child or servant to collect them, Wesley replied, ‘the receiver is as bad as the thief’. Any who claimed they had been forced to receive smuggled goods by their husband, or father, or master, ‘will be hanged nevertheless’. Such a situation might lessen but did not remove the fault. After all, it was better to suffer than to sin. No one could plead ignorance about the nature of the goods they received because the low price made its origin clear. Wesley advised those who could not source tea or wine legally to drink water, ‘for it is better to die than to live by thieving’. He would not even allow for the wife who says that she must have what her husband provided, even if it is smuggled, or have nothing. ‘Undoubtedly to have none is a less evil, than to be a partaker with a thief’.14 There is a distinct lack of grace in Wesley’s approach, which asserted an unbending rule that refused to take any mitigating circumstances into account. Smuggling was wrong; it was stealing from the king, and there could never be any excuse for it. Wesley closed his Word to a Smuggler by exhorting his readers to keep close to the Word of God, even if all around them departed from it. God may reward those who are faithful in this regard with temporal blessings, but if not, they will at least be rewarded with a good conscience. The 1767 Conference asked, ‘how may we put a stop to smuggling?’ and determined to ‘(1) Speak tenderly and frequently of it in every society near the coasts. (2) Carefully dispense the Word to a Smuggler. (3) Expel all who will not leave it off. (4) Silence every local preacher that defends it’.15 Being informed in 1776 that, ‘the scandal of Cornwall, the plundering of wrecked vessels’ still subsisted but that Methodists had sworn off it, Wesley’s solution was that the Cornish gentry stamp it out, making an example of the next plunderers by a firm execution of the law. He also offered the ‘milder way’ of employers sacking all those known to have plundered a wreck and then refusing to re-​hire them.16 Thomas Coke and Henry Moore considered

152  The State of the Nation and Its People wrecking to be ‘practically extinct’ in Cornwall by 1839 but may have expressed more optimism than was warranted. Court reports in a Cornish newspaper gave an account of three men charged with the smuggling of three kegs of spirits and sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour in August 1839.17

Responding to the Conditions of the Poor Wesley rode into Norwich on Monday, 26 October 1772, and noted widespread unemployment with the people ‘consequently in the utmost want (such a general decay of trade having hardly been known in the general history of man)’.18 His response was at first a pious one, urging his hears to seek first the kingdom before seeking other things.19 Noting the unusual size of the congregation, he wondered whether these thousands of people, ‘who when they had fullness of bread never considered whether they had any souls or not, now they are in want begin to think of God’.20 Ward and Heitzenrater describe Wesley’s ‘response to the economic difficulties of this autumn [as] a curious mixture of indignation, practical assistance, and pietism. Here the pietistic note is dominant’.21 Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions written a few months later, in January 1773, offered a more extended, practical response.22 Beginning as a letter to Lloyd’s Evening Post and other newspapers, Wesley laid out his observations on the destitute unemployed, in order to raise a charitable response and considered the impact on the poor of a downturn in economic conditions.23 A shortage of corn and oats had left many without sufficient food. Corn was used in distilleries and oats for feeding the horses that were raised for the pulling of the coaches and chaises of the wealthy. Monopolising of farms led to a rise in the prices of pork, poultry and eggs, and land prices had increased to meet the demand of rising taxes. Wesley claimed that thousands were perishing for lack of food through these three causes alone –​distilling, taxes, and luxury, and his solution to the shortage was to shut down the distilleries, raise fewer horses, reduce the size of farm leases, cut down on luxuries, and reduce taxes, though he doubted that any of this would be done given the nation’s lack of the fear of God. Wesley commended the ‘[m]‌any excellent things’ that had been published on the present scarcity of provisions, with ‘men of experience and reflection’ identifying many of the causes. What had been lacking however was a complete list of all the causes and an explanation of ‘how each particular cause affects the price of each particular sort of provision’.24 Wesley set out, rather ambitiously, to meet this need. First, he noted the thousands of people who were ‘starving…in every part of the nation’.25 As perhaps one of the most widely travelled persons in England, Wesley was well qualified to comment on the circumstances the poor were facing. His itinerant ministry took him constantly out among them, and he took a deep interest in the political, economic, and social circumstances that had a direct impact upon their lives.26 He notes here that

The State of the Nation and Its People  153 he had himself observed people feeding their children ‘stinking sprats’ from a dunghill and making soup from bones taken out of the mouths of dogs. How could this be in a land of such abundance? People had no food because they had no work; and they had no work because those who used to employ them could no longer afford to do so as a result of the inflated price of food. Prices were so dear that sellers could not move their goods in order to make sufficient money to hire help.27 One of the factors often discussed in considering changes to eighteenth-​ century agrarian practices is the impact of the enclosure system. After 1750, enclosure spread rapidly, aided by numerous enclosure acts, and this process contributed to the creation of hungry populations in some areas. The enclosure system replaced the older open-​field model of agriculture in which wastelands and the surrounding fields of a village were a vital source of sustenance to poorer people. Under enclosure, landowners appropriated wastelands and either bought neighbouring strips of land or evicted tenants in order to acquire larger continuous pasturelands which were then enclosed by fences, stone walls and other systems of demarcation. Lands enclosed between 1700 and 1760 equalled about 312,000 acres, but by 1840 this had increased to over 5,500,000 acres.28 Since landownership was the key to both political office and the right to vote, enclosure was often driven by social ambition. The gathering of large tracts of land into the hands of the upwardly mobile was resented by small-​scale agricultural workers who saw the centuries-​old right to cultivate the open fields surrounding the village being destroyed by monopoly. Even though enclosure provided the means of experimenting with the improvement of yields for the large-​scale production of food needed to feed burgeoning populations in urban centres, the social effects of enclosure should not be lost on us. Permission to enclose was set in train by a single signature which led to a bill being read twice in the House of Commons. The committee to approve was usually made up of those who sponsored the bill so there was often a clear conflict of interest which supported wealthy landowners and worked against the interests of small farmers. Cottagers and squatters were even worse off, having lost their right to forage in the wastelands as well as the ancient right of gleaning. Their cottages were demolished, and along with others whose lives had depended on the older village model, they became homeless and indigent. As land was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy a landless proletariat was created.29 Plumb pointed to the ‘large, fat, rubicund, pugnacious figure of John Bull, which graced the patriotic prints and cartoons’ as always depicted as a farmer,30 yet the newfound prosperity brought on by new methods of agriculture was concentrated in the hands of a relative few while most of the poor found themselves in a new kind of feudalism, dependent upon wealthy landowners for their subsistence. The picture just given is moderated to some degree by revisionist accounts of the period after 1760, which have produced more sober estimates of the rate of change and innovation, and the size of yields. The impact of the

154  The State of the Nation and Its People enclosure system is no longer considered to be as influential as once thought. The use, including rotation, of nitrogen-​ enriching crops such as clover, lucerne and turnips benefited the soil but also fed larger runs of cattle. Though the rotation of crops such as the ‘Norfolk’ system is sometimes presented as an example of radical innovation, such methods are traceable to medieval times even if an increase in their use in the eighteenth century is still observable. Similar observations about earlier precedents can be made about farm implements such as Jethro Tull’s seed drill.31 There were three types of enclosure operating: The fencing in of small acreages piece by piece, larger-​scale enclosures by agreement of landowners (these had been operating for several centuries), and compulsory enclosure by private acts of Parliament. It was this latter form that was the new element at work in the eighteenth century and that has often been highlighted as destructive to a former way of life. Unevenly spread, the enclosure acts probably impacted about 24 per cent of England and Wales, concentrated mostly in the English Midlands. The negative social impact of enclosure continues to be debated, but Gordon Mingay draws the following observation. [T]‌here were undoubtedly some small occupiers and cottagers who were deprived of part or all of their livelihood by enclosure, though their numbers are uncertain. Offsetting this to some degree was the compensation that enclosure often meant more intensive agriculture and higher output, which needed more labour for production, processing and transporting. It is a relevant consideration that the worst of the rural poverty of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century was to be found in southern and western counties where there was only limited enclosure, and it is significant that these were also areas lacking the industrial growth which in the heavily enclosed midlands offered increasing employment opportunities.32 In contrast to the luxury and gluttony Wesley had observed among the wealthy, many people struggled to rise above poverty, and resentment over inflated grain prices led to riots and attacks upon corn growers and dealers. New technology undoubtedly benefited crop yields but did not always balance against the needs of the most vulnerable, so that ‘the gap between rich and poor, always huge, widened further, and it was a less stable, less homogeneous rural society that met the intensifying strains of the more rapid industrial growth and eventual decline’.33 While Wesley did not comment directly on the enclosure system in his Thoughts upon the Present Scarcity, he was concerned about the monopolising of farmlands that resulted from it. As noted, the tract was prompted by a visit to Norwich, which lies in the county of Norfolk, the third largest English county in area affected by enclosure.34 He focused much of his attention on the impact of commercial ventures on the pricing of produce and thus on the livelihood of workers. Attributing the rising cost

The State of the Nation and Its People  155 of grain to the immense amounts needed to feed distilleries, Wesley claimed that a little less than half of all the wheat produced in England was being converted into the destructive and ‘deadly poison’ of gin.35 He pointed out that it was impossible to be accurate about how much corn went into distilling by the duty that was paid, because distillers routinely failed to pay the duty, and he cited one distiller who admitted that for every gallon on which he paid duty he made six gallons upon which no duty was paid. In his typical defence of the king’s virtue, Wesley asks whether the king would wish to profit from his subjects in this way. ‘O tell it not in Constantinople, that the English raise the royal revenue, by selling the flesh and blood of their countrymen!’36 Wesley attributed the cause of the rise in the price of oats to the increased trade in coaches and chaises, estimating that there were four times as many horses to feed for the pulling of coaches and chaises as there had been a few years ago. If there were four times as many horses to feed and only twice as many oats produced, the price would, by necessity, be made exorbitant. The dearness of one kind of grain always raises the cost of other types so a high price on wheat and oats means a high price on barley as well.37 Beef and mutton had also become more expensive because so many farmers had given up raising cattle, as well as sheep and oxen, in order to raise horses instead, for which there was a more lucrative market, not only domestically, but to service the thousands of French exports yearly.38 The price of pork, poultry, and eggs had increased because of the monopolising of farmlands. Where once twenty farmers had run small properties, now one farmer would oversee one great farm. Where previously small-​scale farmers had always sold their bacon, pork, chickens, and eggs at the market, now large monopolies could not be bothered with such trade unless to raise a few pigs or poultry for their own use. So, the price of such items had doubled and even tripled.39 For Wesley the most terrible and destructive cause of inflated prices was luxury. ‘Only look into the kitchins [sic] of the great, the nobility and gentry, almost without exception…And when you have observed the amazing waste which is made there, you will no longer wonder at the scarcity, and consequently dearness, of the things which they use so much art to destroy’.40 The need to maintain such a luxurious standard of living had led to the raising of rents. If farmers must pay a higher price for the land they work, they must necessarily raise the price of their produce. This in turn raises the price of the land, setting up a vicious cycle.41 In addition to all these causes, there were rising taxes to deal with, including new taxes ‘which are laid on almost everything that can be named’. There are taxes on earth and fire and water, even on light itself (perhaps a reference to the tax on windows in homes). ‘Yet one element remains: And surely some man of honour will find a way to tax this also. For how long shall the saucy air strike a gentleman on the face, nay a Lord, without paying for it?’42 Wesley attributed the proliferation of taxes to the need to service the growing national debt, estimating that where seventy years ago the

156  The State of the Nation and Its People national expense had been three million pounds a year, now four million pounds a year was being paid on interest alone.43 Wesley then laid out a whole series of practical suggestions designed to address the present scarcity of provisions. At least in his mind they were practical; whether they would have worked is another matter. Wesley was not an economist and he often spoke on this as well as on many other matters, from outside of his expertise, but he did at least attempt solutions.44 He was convinced that work needed to be found for starving people and that, in order for employers to provide work without ruining themselves, the price of provisions needed to be reduced.45 In the case of wheat and barley this could be achieved by prohibiting all distilling, by using rice as an alternative crop for the production of starch, and by importing rice and grains. The price of oats could be reduced by lessening the demand for horses. This could be achieved by levying an export tax of ten pounds for every horse sold to France and by laying an additional tax on gentlemen’s carriages. Beef and mutton prices could be reduced by increasing the breed of sheep and cattle, thus diversifying the market. Pork and poultry prices could be reduced if a ceiling of a hundred pounds a year were set on farm leases. Luxury must also be suppressed either by law, by example, or both. ‘I had almost said’, he offers, ‘by the grace of God. But to mention this has been long out of fashion’.46 The restraining of luxury would also bring down land prices, since it would lessen the expense of housekeeping. The discharge of the national debt would reduce taxes but, ‘all useless pensions’ should also be abolished, ‘as fast as those who now enjoy them die. Especially those ridiculous ones, given to some hundreds of idle men, as governors of forts or castles: which forts have answered no end for above these three hundred years, unless to shelter jackdaws and crows’.47 Wesley closed with his characteristic sarcasm, expressing doubt whether any of this would ever be done, for the nation had no fear of God and, ‘there is such a deep, avowed, thorough contempt of all religion, as I never saw, never heard or read of, in any other nation, whether Christian, Mahometan or Pagan’.48 All that is left is to hope that when God arises to judge, the people will fall into the hands of divine not human hands. Almost three years after the publication of Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions, Wesley wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, expressing ongoing concern for the conditions of the poor. Dartmouth had been assured that trade was plentiful and flourishing in every part of the country and that the people were, ‘well employed and as well satisfied’. Wesley rejected this claim on the evidence of his own eyes and ears. In his wide travels over the previous two years, he had observed decay in trade and high unemployment. Some had starved and others crept around ‘like walking shadows’. The people had turned against the king in large numbers. A merchant with whom Wesley was to dine had had his house repossessed by the bailiffs. Thinking his host had been in good circumstances, he was informed, ‘He was so; but the American war has ruined him’.49 Nine

The State of the Nation and Its People  157 years later Wesley wrote to William Pitt the Younger, who had become Prime Minister at the age of 24, in December 1783. Writing from Bath on 6 September 1784, after requesting an increase in pension for Thomas Webb, a retired Methodist military officer, he offered the Prime Minister advice on taxes. After pointing out the fraudulent tax evasion he had encountered in town and country, he asserts that in Cornwall alone, the king was defrauded half a million pounds a year in customs duties, due to smuggling, suggesting that the national figure was more than five million. Distillers pay less than a fortieth of what they should and furthermore their vile trade takes 20,000 lives in a year. ‘You are a man. You have not lost human feelings. You do not love to drink human blood. You are a son of Lord Chatham. Nay, if I mistake not, you are a Christian. Dare you, then, sustain a sinking nation?’ Not stopping at recommending that distilling of spirits be made a felony, he went on to suggest a rather heartless measure to prevent suicide –​proposing an Act of Parliament ordering that the body of every ‘self-​murderer’ be hanged in chains in the streets as a preventative measure for others. According to Wesley, such measures would make Pitt’s name ‘precious to all true Englishmen as long as England continued a nation’.50 Wesley lived at a time when economic theory was undergoing a massive theoretical shift. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations would be published in 1776 and set out a new theory that laid the groundwork for modern concepts of free market economics.51 Smith spoke of the ‘invisible hand’ which provided social benefit from self-​interest. When the shopkeeper or artisan works hard for their own economic interest, the resulting labour and produce benefit the wider society. This concept has become one of the platforms of laissez-​faire economic models, which argue for minimal if any restrictions on trade and industry, based on the conviction that this will generate prosperity and produce a greater benefit for the greatest number of people. Today’s ‘trickle-​down’ economic theories, however, overlook distinctive features of Smith’s ideas. As a moral philosopher he was concerned with the relationship between individuals and social groups, and his ideas about the social utility of self-​interest were based less on commercial and financial concerns and more on the flourishing of communities. He warned against the dehumanising effects of monopolies and the over-​specialisation of labour, both of which have become features of modern industrial economies.52 Rioting crowds who demanded just food prices were experiencing a shift in the moral economy of the eighteenth century as the paternalistic role of the state toward the poor was being replaced by an open labour market with less sense of responsibility toward the needy. The relationship of ‘master to servant’ was one that entailed personal responsibility and mutual obligation. This came to be replaced by a commodification of labour so that the boss–​worker relationship formed a cash nexus in a developing new economy. In time, pre-​industrial values, such as traditional wisdom, shared experience, and communal morality, no longer guided the new capitalist economy.53

158  The State of the Nation and Its People The traditional concept of a ‘just price’ for goods does appear in Wesley’s sermons. ‘Do you demand, do you receive, no more than the real value of what you sell?’ he asks in the fifth of his thirteen sermons on the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Do you demand no more than the usual price of goods of any who is in pressing want? Who must have, and that without delay, the things which you only can furnish him with?’54 But what is a ‘just price’ in an economy driven by a fluctuating free market economy? On 2 September 1776, en route to Exeter, Wesley read the ‘ingenious tract’ of Charles Smith, A Short Essay on the Corn Trade (1758), which convinced him that a rise in prices could be simply the result of market forces, such as an increase in the cash economy, and need not be seen as extortionate. ‘[If] corn sells for twice as much now as it did at the time of the [Glorious] Revolution, it is in effect no dearer than it was then, because we have now twice as much money…if other things sell now for twice as much as they did then, corn ought to do so too’.55 Smith also argued that forestalling and engrossing (creating local monopolies of food) were necessary in order to provide food for the growing populations in the new industrial centres. No doubt Wesley approved of Smith’s argument that the banning of distilling could be useful in times of want.56 Around the same time, Wesley came under the influence of Josiah Tucker’s writings, which also opened him up to the principles of laissez-​ faire economics.57 To petition the government about such things as rising corn prices would be to ask the impossible, and agitation in that regard only served to foster discontent and insubordination against the government.58 Notwithstanding his Christian moral concern to protect people against extortion, it is clear that Wesley was not simply a backward-​looking traditionalist expecting earlier economic models to meet the needs of changing economic and industrial realities. He was alert to the shifting discourse taking place and was concerned to draw upon it in ways that might ease the suffering of the poor.

The Cult of Commerce In its chapter on trade, the 1718 annual directory, The Present State of Great Britain, claimed that ‘next to the purity of our religion we are the most considerable nation in the world for the vastness and extensiveness of our trade’.59 Statistical analysis of trade was important in eighteenth-​century Britain because it was seen as a marker of the growing strength of the empire. Indeed, as Linda Colley claims, a ‘cult of commerce’ emerged as a shaper of British identity.60 After the Seven Years’ War, Britain’s foreign possessions were so vastly increased that it became difficult to service its commercial, administrative, and military needs. The opportunity for the accumulation of wealth by trade with overseas possessions was eagerly taken advantage of by those adventurous and ambitious enough to accept administrative posts

The State of the Nation and Its People  159 in far flung outposts of empire. This set up a mutually reinforcing cycle of economic growth derived from Britain’s imperial reach and expansion. In A Serious Address to the People of England, With Regard to the State of the Nation (1778), claims that England was facing financial ruin were countered in an attempt to encourage the populace.61 In rejecting the claim that the population had decreased since 1759, Wesley appealed, as he often did, to his own first-​hand acquaintance with the towns and populations of England. ‘I have such opportunities of being informed as few people in England have: As I see almost all the large towns in the kingdom, once in two years at least, and can therefore make these enquiries on the spot, as minutely as I please’.62 Wesley estimated that 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers had been sent abroad to fight and 70,000 or 80,000 had migrated from England and Scotland alone, resulting in a decrease of 100,000 in less than twenty years. Notwithstanding anecdotal references to deserted towns which could just as easily have been met with assertions to the contrary, and that some localities such as Land’s End had indeed seen decreases, losses had been more than made up for in increases. Wesley reported that there had been an increase of 100,000 over that same twenty-​year period in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, and Liverpool alone. The obvious increase in housing, not only in these cities and towns, but all over the country areas as well, must speak of a corresponding increase in population. ‘Or are they inhabited only by rats and mice?’ Wesley had no doubt that he had seen an increase in population of a million people over the previous twenty years.63 It was established in Chapter 5 that the population of England is estimated to have grown from 5.2 million in the 1720s to 8.6 million in 1801, so Wesley’s estimate seems on target. Two years before writing his Serious Address, Wesley had recorded the flourishing of both trade and population that he had observed in the districts he visited. In travelling through Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmorland, and Cumberland, I diligently made two enquiries. The first was concerning the increase or decrease of the people; the second, concerning the increase or decrease of trade. As to the latter, it is, within these last two years, amazingly increased in several branches in such a manner as has not been known in the memory of man –​such is the fruit of the entire civil and religious liberty which all England now enjoys! And as to the former, not only in every city and large town, but in every village and hamlet, there is no decrease, but a very large and swift increase. One sign of this is the swarms of little children which we see in every place. Which then shall we most admire, the ignorance or confidence of those that affirm population decreases in England? I doubt not but it increases full as fast here as in any province of North America.64

160  The State of the Nation and Its People In his journal entry for 17 February 1778, Wesley recorded his motive in writing, ‘with regard to the present state of the nation, so strangely represented both by ignorant and designing men; to remove, if possible, the apprehensions which have been so diligently spread, as if it were on the brink of ruin’.65 Addressed to ‘Friends and Countrymen’, Wesley wished his reader not to make hasty judgements but to weigh carefully his arguments. The American war had, in the end result, proven unavoidable and the time had now come to reassure people that England and Ireland were still safe and secure from their enemies. Even as early as December 1775, Wesley had seemed willing to admit British defeat in the American colonies which had been expensive and was without likelihood of resolve; let the Americans have their independence.66 Wesley was convinced that if an enquiry into the state of the nation were conducted properly it could be of very real benefit; on the other hand if it were conducted badly, in such a way that the nation was described to be in a worse state than it actually was, much harm would result as it could cause people to be disturbed, frightened and discouraged and they might grow bitter toward the king and his ministers, as well as unthankful to God.67 Wesley liberally drew upon ‘some of the most sensible remarks [he has] seen on the subject, with some little variations and additions’.68 Though he did not reveal his source, Wesley may have been drawing on Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester from 1758. Tucker was an economist as well as a theologian, who was well regarded on matters of commerce, and had come to recommend that Britain abandon its colonies. Early in his field-​preaching career, around November 1739, Wesley had received a letter from Tucker in which Tucker, after hearing Wesley preach at Bradford on 23 October 1739, retracted earlier statements he had made about Wesley preaching faith without exhorting to good works. ‘I must confess, sir, that the discourse you made that day…convinced me of a great wrong done you by a public report…that you preach faith without works’.69 This appreciation did not prevent Tucker from writing, in 1742, the anti-​Methodist Brief History of the Principles of Methodism, to which Wesley responded in The Principles of a Methodist (1742). Now, however, he found Tucker’s economic findings a valuable resource in forwarding his own argument that England’s trade and produce were in a stable and flourishing condition.70 Such an important investigation required that the term ‘state of the nation’ be very carefully defined. If this was not done it could lead to long speeches that inflamed discontent. When asking about the state of the nation, it had been stated that the end in view was to discover whether or not the nation was prosperous. But, Wesley asks, prosperous in what sense? It may be prosperous in one sense and not in another. Those who claimed that the nation was ruined were clearly wrong. The Scriptures tell of the destruction of Egypt, but England was not so destroyed. In fact, it still had an abundance of cattle and crops. It had been asked whether the nation was increasing or decreasing. But again, increasing or decreasing in what respects?71 ‘Nine

The State of the Nation and Its People  161 capital articles’ are then examined –​population, agriculture, manufacture, land and freshwater carriage of goods, saltwater carriage of goods, fisheries at home and abroad, taxes, revenue, and debt. On Wesley’s account, agriculture had increased since 1759. Instead of farmhouses, barns, enclosures, and fences tumbling down in ruins, new ones were being erected. Many hundreds of thousands more acres were being cultivated than had been the case twenty years before. Farmers were wealthier than before, and their livestock had increased. On Wesley’s estimate, a few branches of manufacturing, such as weaving, had perhaps seen decreases and this was understandable with the fluctuations of fashion. But decreases in some areas had been adequately compensated by increases in others. Since 1759 there had been a considerable increase in warehouses, magazines, machines, and engines of every kind.72 Wesley saw the increase in wagons, roads, barges, and canals as a clear indicator of an increase in the trading of land and the freshwater carriage of goods. Indeed 1760 to 1830 was a period marked by a rapid increase in road and canal construction in Britain.73 By the early eighteenth-​century, England’s navigable waterways through dredging, straightening, and the creation of locks had doubled in length, providing a much more efficient and cheap mode of transportation of goods. Wagons drawn by horses on iron rails from the 1760s provided an even cheaper mode of goods transport. Through such means, trade was able to flourish in every part of the country, an advantage previously enjoyed only in coastal areas and those traversed by major waterways. Such transport infrastructure not only made goods available for commercial purposes over a wider area, but they were also major feats of civil engineering which further stimulated the economy by employing the engineers and labourers needed to put them in place. Recent reassessment of Joseph Massie’s widely used survey of 1759 has led to the view that Britain had even larger commercial and manufacturing concerns in 1700 than had previously been supposed. By 1759, 36.8 per cent of Britain’s population was engaged in industry, building, and commerce, considerably higher than the European average. Textiles (wool, linen, silk, cotton), coal, iron, and shipbuilding all saw increases. Coal production alone increased fivefold over the century and iron output had doubled by 1780. The ‘Potteries’ around Burslem in the West Midlands were at the leading edge in the production of a highly valued consumer item.74 By 1800, Cornish tin and copper mining alone employed 10,000 people.75 Agricultural life held its own alongside this growth in industry. In 1800, around 36 per cent of the population was employed in agricultural pursuits, smaller in percentage than in 1700 (45 per cent) but a larger raw number.76 Wesley believed that those who cried loudest about a drop in trade were usually reacting to a drop in their own trade, and somewhat mean-​ spiritedly suggested that perhaps their laziness had something to do with this.77 This is not quite as dismissive, however, as William Temple’s declaration in 1758 that the poor are so incorrigibly wicked that ‘the only way to

162  The State of the Nation and Its People make them temperate and industrious is to lay them under a necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from meals and sleep, in order to procure the common necessities of life’.78 As for the saltwater carriage of goods, there were more, not fewer ships, ships-​carpenters, and sail-​makers at work than there had been in 1759. More and larger merchant ships were being constructed. Some had claimed (without proof, ‘for Lloyd’s Catalogue is no sufficient evidence’) that 800 ships had been lost in the war. But 900 enemy ships had been taken so this more than compensated for the loss. Some complained that Britain had lost its ‘Negro trade’ but Wesley spared no sympathy for this particular complaint. ‘Never was anything such a reproach to England since it was a nation, as the having any hand in this execrable traffic’.79 Wesley considered it important that the fisheries industry was in a healthy state because it was from this industry that able-​bodied seamen were drawn for naval service. Fishing was such a healthy industry during the reign of George III that permanent settlement in Newfoundland was forbidden, so that the fishermen of West Country ports would have a stopping off point and safe harbour for the drying of their nets and the packing of their catch.80 Wesley estimated that all the fisheries at home and abroad had hugely increased since 1759, and that there were more than double the number of fishing vessels in Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the coasts of Labrador than there had been in 1759. He estimated that more than twice as many were employed in the whaling and fish oil industries and that the fisheries on the coasts of England and Scotland had also hugely increased to a more flourishing condition than ever before.81 When he turned to taxes, which had consistently risen throughout the eighteenth century, Wesley began with a homespun proverb –​‘the hands of the diligent and frugal are the only hands which make a nation rich’.82 Wesley considered the recent repeal of the tax that inhibited the importing of butter, tallow, and lard from Ireland an excellent measure. Trade had increased between the two nations, leaving no cause for complaint. If one compared the account of all taxes in 1759 with those in 1777 it would be clear that there had been a significant increase in revenue, and this had been in spite of the loss of the tobacco trade in Maryland and Virginia, and the failure of the sugar and cider crops.83 Wesley conceded that undoubtedly the national debt was great but pointed out that it was not as great as it had been in 1759. Since the nation had become richer it was able to carry a greater load of debt, just as was the case with a private trader. A person who owed twenty pounds, but only had a hundred pounds to his name, was in much greater danger than one who owed two hundred pounds but had a thousand pounds in stock. This was not to encourage the nation to go any further into debt but only to show that the supposed distress that was raising such alarm was more imaginary than real.84 Wesley was convinced that any candid observer would see that England was, in 1778, in a much better financial position than had been the case twenty years previously. The fact that nearly as many ships had

The State of the Nation and Its People  163 been lost in the war as had been taken, that there had been disturbances on the banks of Newfoundland, and that slave trafficking to America had been halted did not mean that the nation was in a desperate state or on the brink of ruin. If these were the best arguments to prove such a conclusion, then a strong case had not been put.85 In each of the nine areas surveyed, England was, by Wesley’s estimate, in a more prosperous state than had been the case in the previous eighteen years. He warned his hearers not to be deceived to the contrary by any smooth-​tongued orators. Instead, they should be grateful for the abundant liberty, peace, and plenty they enjoyed.86 There was only one thing the people should fear –​God’s judgement on the nation for its widespread contempt of God, the ‘present characteristic of the English nation’. God will soon be avenged on such a nation. Just as with the inhabitants of Nineveh, only repentance could avert such a visitation.87 There follows a Postscript in the 1778 edition which does not appear in volume 11 of the Jackson edition of Wesley’s Works. Once again it reflects Wesley’s conviction that luxury represented an economic risk since it left people without financial reserves. Two objections to the idea that trade was prospering had been advanced: (1) Bankruptcies had increased in England and (2) trade had decreased in the West Indies. On the first matter, Wesley argued that the inference drawn from the premise is a false one. Yes, there had been an increase in bankruptcies, but this was only because there had also been an increase in trade. More traders entering the market would naturally mean also an increase in bankruptcies. This is especially true since many people live in such luxury that they have little financial reserves. When they then recklessly enter into trade, bankruptcy often results. It is not a drop in trade that leads to an increase in bankruptcy but rather bankruptcies must increase ‘as long as luxury increases, and the epidemic madness of trading without any capital’.88 Wesley’s convictions about the strength of the British economy and its trade markets, matches historians’ understanding of the strength of the empire in the Atlantic world during this period. For all his personal asceticism he shared in the ‘cult of commerce’ that marked this period of British expansion. He seems to have no objection to the strength of England’s trade and industry, with slavery and distilling being the only objectionable elements. It is likely that he saw its economic strength as a bulwark against foreign incursion. The stronger the economy and the healthier the trade the less people needed to be concerned about losing their Protestant liberties. Over time he moved from the older view of a ‘fixed price’ on goods to the more modern view, informed by Adam Smith and Charles Smith, of a fluctuating price that moved on a sliding scale to match the larger economic circumstances. Like Adam Smith, his economic views had a profoundly social dimension and expressed concern about the dehumanising effects of monopolies. He never lost sight of the needs of the poor and the impact of larger economic forces on their livelihoods. His economic theory, such as it was, never lost a humanitarian concern. As lucrative as the slave trade

164  The State of the Nation and Its People was, England was better off without it and its loss would not put an end to the nations’ prosperity.89 Many of the people remained in distressing hunger and poverty, while at the same time the nation’s economic and commercial strength had never been greater. He did not condemn commercial interests, but self-​indulgent luxury came in for sharp criticism, reflecting the personal responsibility and moral demand in all of Wesley’s social and political writings. To live simply and frugally was to make room for the production of a greater degree of wealth that would benefit the greater number of people. It was not socialism, but it was the kind of conviction that would inform the Methodist social conscience in the century that followed.90

Notes 1 Carole Shammas, The Pre-​ Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 121–​156. 2 John Rule, ‘The Labouring Poor’, in CECB, 183, 183–​195. 3 Gordon Mingay, ‘Agriculture and Rural Life’, in CECB, 144–​145, 141–​157. 4 George Rudé identifies riots over ‘the dearness of provisions’ in rural areas in 1768, in 1772 and in 1773. George Rudé, Hanoverian London, 1714–​1808 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 202. Prest records other disturbances in the late 1740s, 1756–​ 1757, 1766 (the worst period), and 1782–​1784. Wilfred Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–​ 1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 164. 5 I have consulted the 1775 edition: John Wesley, A Word to a Smuggler (London, 1775). 6 John Wesley, journal entry 22 November 1773, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journals and Diaries V (1765–​1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 393. 7 John Wesley journal entry 25 July 1753, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journals and Diaries III (1743–​ 1754), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991), 469. 8 Prest, Albion Ascendant, 153. 9 Wesley, Word to a Smuggler, 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 174. 10 Wesley, Word to a Smuggler, 4; Works (Jackson) 11: 174. 11 Matthew 22:21; Romans 13:7. 12 Wesley, Word to a Smuggler, 6–​7; Works (Jackson) 11: 175–​177. 13 Wesley, Word to a Smuggler, 7; Works (Jackson) 11: 177. 14 Wesley, Word to a Smuggler, 8; Works (Jackson) 11: 177–​178. 15 ‘Annual Minutes, 1767’, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 10 The Methodist Societies: The Minutes of Conference, ed. Henry D. Rack (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2011), 351; Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. 3rd ed. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2005), 445. 16 John Wesley, journal entry, 17 August 1776, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journals and Diaries VI (1776–​1786), eds. W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995), 28–​29. 17 West Briton, 23 August 1839. http://​freepa​ges.roots​web.com/​~wbrito​nad/​geneal​ ogy/​cornw​all/​1839/​misc/​aug.html (accessed 21 October 2021).

The State of the Nation and Its People  165 18 John Wesley, journal entry, 26 October 1772, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 350. 19 Matthew 6:33. 20 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 350. 21 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 22: 350, fn. 46. 22 John Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions (London, 1773); Works (Jackson) 11: 53–​59. 23 John Wesley, ‘To the Editor of Lloyd’s Evening Post’, in Letters (Telford) 5: 349–​354. 24 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions, 3–​4; Works (Jackson) 11: 53. 25 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions, 4; Works (Jackson) 11: 53. 26 Outler cites several similar contemporary accounts of the conditions of England’s poor: William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830), William Marshall, A General Survey of the Rural Economy of England (1787–​1798), F.M. Eden, The State of the Poor (1797), T.R. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 3 Sermons III (71–​114), ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986), 569. 27 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions, 4–​6; Works (Jackson) 11: 53. 28 Pauline Gregg, A Social and Economic History of Britain 1760–​ 1972 (London: Harrap, 1973), 23, citing J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–​1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill (London: Longmans Green, 1920), 17. 29 For a less negative view of the impact of enclosure see Dorothy Marshall, English People in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1956), ­chapter 7. 30 J.H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 152. 31 Mingay, ‘Agriculture and Rural Life’, in CECB, 147–​149. 32 Mingay, ‘Agriculture and Rural Life’, in CECB, 150. 33 Mingay, ‘Agriculture and Rural Life’, in CECB, 157. 34 Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History. Studies in Historical Geography (Folkestone, Kent/​ Hamden, CT: Dawson/​Archon, 1980), 33 gives 322 Parliamentary acts resulting in 420,363 acres enclosed. This was over 30 per cent of the total county area. Turner, Parliamentary Enclosure, 45. It should be noted that these figures are provided as totals across all periods, so it is difficult to say how much had been enclosed at the precise time of Wesley’s visit in October 1772. 35 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 6–​7; Works (Jackson) 11: 54–​55. 36 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 8–​9; Works (Jackson) 11: 55. 37 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 9–​10; Works (Jackson) 11: 55. 38 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 10–​11; Works (Jackson) 11: 54–​55. 39 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 11–​13; Works (Jackson) 11: 56. 40 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 13–​14; Works (Jackson) 11: 56–​57. 41 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 14; Works (Jackson) 11: 57. 42 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 14; Works (Jackson) 11: 57. 43 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 14–​16; Works (Jackson) 11: 57.

166  The State of the Nation and Its People 44 Gregory P. Van Buskirk sees Wesley’s economic views as ‘a species of his moral theology of stewardship’. Gregory P. Van Buskirk, ‘Stewardship and Response: The Moral-​Theological Heart of John Wesley’s Economics’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 13, no. 1 (2021): 1–​23; C.R. Haywood, ‘Was John Wesley A Political Economist?’ Church History 33:3 (September 1964): 314–​321. 45 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 17; Works (Jackson) 11: 57. 46 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 17–​ 20 (quotation p. 20); Works (Jackson) 11: 58. 47 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 20–​21; Works (Jackson) 11: 58–​59. 48 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity, 21–​22; Works (Jackson) 11: 59. 49 John Wesley to the Earl of Dartmouth, 23 August 1775, in Letters (Telford) 6: 175–​176. 50 John Wesley to William Pitt, in Letters (Telford) 7: 234–​236. 51 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols (London, 1776). 52 I am indebted to the Rev. Brendan Byrne of Mountview Uniting Church, Melbourne for these insights. 53 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Economic History of Britain since 1750 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 66–​70. 54 John Wesley, ‘Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse the Fifth’, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 1 Sermons I (1–​33), ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1984), 566. 55 John Wesley, journal entry for 2 September 1776, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 31. 56 Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1974), 77. 57 R.M. Kingdon, ‘Laissez-​ faire or Government Control? A Problem for John Wesley’, Church History 26 (December 1957): 342–​354. 58 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 31. 59 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 59. 60 Colley, Britons, 55–​100. 61 John Wesley, A Serious Address to the People of England, With Regard to the State of the Nation (London, 1778); Works (Jackson) 11: 140–​149. Originally the ‘People’ of the title was ‘Inhabitants’, but Wesley later changed it. Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 76. Wesley took a similar approach in A Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland (also early 1778) addressing the fears and rumours of foreign invasion and the growing strength of Washington’s army. John Wesley, A Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland (Belfast, 1778); Works (Jackson) 11: 149–​154. 62 Wesley, Serious Address, 10; Works (Jackson) 11:142. 63 Wesley, Serious Address, 10–​12; Works (Jackson) 11:142–​143. 64 John Wesley, journal entry for 1 May 1776, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 11–​12. 65 John Wesley, journal entry for 17 February 1778, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 76. 66 John Wesley to C. Hopper, 26 December 1775, in Letters (Telford) 6: 199. 67 Wesley, Serious Address, 5–​6; Works (Jackson) 11: 140–​141. 68 Wesley, Serious Address, 9; Works (Jackson) 11: 142.

The State of the Nation and Its People  167 69 Josiah Tucker to John Wesley, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 19 Journal and Diaries II (1738–​1743), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990), 113–​114. 70 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 76, fn. 75; Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 19: 86, fn. 72. See W. George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-​ Century Economic and Political Thought (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981). 71 Wesley, Serious Address, 6–​9; Works (Jackson) 11: 141–​142. 72 Wesley, Serious Address, 12–​13; Works (Jackson) 11: 143–​144. 73 Gregg, Social and Economic History of Britain, 43. 74 Rule, ‘Manufacturing and Commerce’, in CECB, 127 (127–​140). 75 Rule, ‘Manufacturing and Commerce’, in CECB, 136 (127–​140). 76 Mingay, ‘Agriculture and Rural Life’, in CECB, 141 (141–​157). 77 Wesley, Serious Address, 13–​14; Works (Jackson) 11: 144. 78 William Temple, A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts (London, 1758), 56, cited in Prest, Albion Ascendant, 167–​168. 79 Wesley, Serious Address, 14–​15; Works (Jackson) 11: 144–​145. 80 J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–​1815 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), 16. 81 Wesley, Serious Address, 16; Works (Jackson) 11: 145–​146. 82 Wesley, Serious Address, 17; Works (Jackson) 11: 146. 83 Wesley, Serious Address, 17–​18; Works (Jackson) 11: 146. 84 Wesley, Serious Address, 18–​19; Works (Jackson) 11: 146. 85 Wesley, Serious Address, 19–​20; Works (Jackson) 11: 147. 86 Wesley, Serious Address, 20–​21; Works (Jackson) 11: 147–​148. 87 Wesley, Serious Address, 21–​23, Works (Jackson) 11: 148–​149. 88 Wesley, Serious Address, 25–​27. 89 For the manner in which independent traders challenged the Charter granted to the Royal Africa Company in order to obtain their share in the prosperity made available through the slave trade, see William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–​1752 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 90 Much of this chapter was previously published as Glen O’Brien, ‘John Wesley on the State of the Nation and Its People’, in Wesleyan Perspectives on Human Flourishing, eds. Dean G. Smith and Rob A. Fringer (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021), 63–​80.

References Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​ 1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Gregg, Pauline. A Social and Economic History of Britain 1760–​1972. London: Harrap, 1973. Haywood, C. Robert. ‘Was John Wesley a Political Economist?’ Church History 33, no. 3 (September 1964): 314–​321. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Industry and Empire: The Economic History of Britain since 1750. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968. Kingdon, R.M. ‘Laissez-​faire or Government Control? A Problem for John Wesley’, Church History 26 (December 1957): 342–​354.

168  The State of the Nation and Its People Marshall, Dorothy. English People in the Eighteenth Century. London: Longmans, 1956. O’Brien, Glen. ‘John Wesley on the State of the Nation and Its People’. In Wesleyan Perspectives on Human Flourishing, edited by Dean G. Smith and Rob A. Fringer, 63–​80. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021. Outler, Albert C., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 1 Sermons I (1–​33). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1984. Outler, Albert C., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 3 Sermons III (71–​114). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986. Pettigrew, William A. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–​1752. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Plumb, J.H. England in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Prest, Wilfred. Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–​1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Rack, Henry D. Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism, 3rd ed. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2005. Rack, Henry D., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 10 The Methodist Societies: The Minutes of Conference. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2011. Rudé, George. Hanoverian London, 1714–​1808. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. Semmel, Bernard. The Methodist Revolution. London: Heinemann, 1974. Shammas, Carole. The Pre-​ Industrial Consumer in England and America. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Shelton, W. George. Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-​Century Economic and Political Thought. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. London, 1776. Turner, Michael. English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History. Studies in Historical Geography. Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1980. Van Buskirk, Gregory P. ‘Stewardship and Response: The Moral-​ Theological Heart of John Wesley’s Economics’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 13, no. 1 (2021): 1–​23. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 19 Journal and Diaries II (1738–​1743). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journals and Diaries III (1743–​1754). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journals and Diaries V (1765–​1775). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journals and Diaries VI (1776–​1786). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995. Watson, J. Steven. The Reign of George III, 1760–​1815. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960. Wesley, John. Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions. London, 1773. Wesley, John. A Word to a Smuggler. London, 1775. Wesley, John. A Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland. Belfast, 1778.

The State of the Nation and Its People  169 Wesley, John. A Serious Address to the People of England, With Regard to the State of the Nation. London, 1778. Wesley, John. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Vol. 11, edited by Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed. London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1872; reprinted Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979. West Briton, 23 August 1839. http://​freepa​ges.roots​web.com/​~wbrito​nad/​geneal​ogy/​ cornw​all/​1839/​misc/​aug.html (accessed 21 October 2021).

7 Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order

Wesley preached at the New Chapel, Bristol in November 1780, declaring, ‘supposing papists to be heretics, schismatics, wicked men, enemies to us and to our church and nation; yet we ought not to persecute, to kill, hurt, or grieve them, but barely to prevent them from doing hurt’.1 Though this disavowal of persecution may seem to breathe a generous spirit, it rather thinly masks an attitude of strong opposition to the Roman Catholic faith.2 As his many anti-​Catholic tracts evidence, Wesley was implacably opposed to Roman Catholic doctrines and practices and built upon this theological opposition actively to support the maintenance of restrictions on the civil liberties of English and Irish Catholics, restrictions that were being increasingly dismantled through a series of parliamentary Acts throughout the 1770s and 1780s. This chapter will explore John Wesley’s ministry in Ireland, his anti-​Catholic pamphlets, his support for the Protestant Association, and his correspondence with the Irish Capuchin monk Arthur O’Leary. It will argue that Wesley exhibited less of an ecumenical spirit than is often credited to him, and that his reputation as a proto-​ecumenist needs to be significantly moderated. In 1972, prominent Methodist minister and historian John A. Newton described Wesley as ‘a significant ecumenical theologian’. He drew attention to Catholic Cardinal Augustin Bea’s belief that Wesley’s Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749) anticipated the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and was an early expression of the Lund principle (that churches should work together except where deeply held differences compelled them to do otherwise).3 Methodists have often appealed both to the Letter to a Roman Catholic and the sermon, Catholic Spirit (1755) to highlight that their commitment to ecumenism begins with their founder and this has not been without good reason.4 This chapter will not entirely dismiss the genuine contribution to ecumenism that Wesley made. It will be shown, however, that he failed to live fully out of his theological commitment to Christian unity, as a result of his political commitment to a Protestant Britain perceived as a guarantee of the civil and religious liberties of the Atlantic world. In this respect, his politics trumped his deeper religious instincts. DOI: 10.4324/9781003227496-7

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  171 The political troubles between the Irish and the British did not appear to be of great concern to Wesley, who assumed the rightfulness of the British claims to Ireland and relied heavily on contacts from among the landed gentry so that his mission in Ireland can be seen as in keeping with the assumptions of the Irish Protestant gentry.5 This was an entirely different strategy to that which he employed in England and the results were far less spectacular since Wesley could not gain the support of the Catholic majority among the ordinary people. He was far more popular with the bishops of the Church of Ireland than he was with their English counterparts, perhaps because he was less critical of the Church of Ireland which he seemed to have admired.6 The enforcement of English law and order was visible throughout eighteenth-​ century Ireland and Wesley’s frequent preaching among the military garrisons (where he had considerable success) outside courthouses and even, on one occasion, beside a statue of the Duke of Cumberland, the infamous Butcher of Culloden, sent a clear message to the Irish about the Protestant Ascendancy. Building a Methodist chapel beside the courthouse, jail, and excise office probably did not win Wesley many Irish Catholic converts.7

John Wesley and Ireland Wesley first travelled to Ireland in August 1747 landing in Dublin but not travelling inland. He had been preceded a few weeks before by Thomas Williams who had already formed a small Society in Dublin. Wesley’s hearers on this first trip were recent immigrants from England, and he noted in his journal that ‘at least ninety-​nine in an hundred of the native Irish remain in the religion of their forefathers’ and that he was not surprised given that the Protestants could find ‘no better way to convert them than penal laws and Acts of Parliament’.8 Wesley would make a total of 20 trips to Ireland, ending in 1789. At that time a Catholic majority chafed under an established Protestant church and there was a small Anglican and Presbyterian minority mostly concentrated in the north.9 The mostly rural Catholic population did not prove particularly open to the Methodist message, though there were at times crowds of curious onlookers. After Wesley’s death there would be a Catholic revival in Ireland. Methodism would be strongest in Dublin, Cork, and Bandin as well as among the Palatines and remain closely associated with the Church of Ireland. Most of Wesley’s work in the south did not survive. It was difficult to get English Methodist preachers to agree to go to Ireland and there was a serious brain drain with the likes of Henry Moore,10 Adam Clarke, and William M. Myles pursuing their careers in England.11 There was a Methodist revival in the ‘linen triangle’ of south Ulster in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which Hempton sees as demonstrating a strong link between social disruption and religious renewal.12 Overall, Methodist growth in Ireland went from 3,000 in 1770 to over 15,000 by 1795.13 Ward and Heitzenrater observe, in examining

172  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order ‘Wesley’s frame of mind’ in the Journals, that he provided little insight into what he thought he was doing in Ireland, with his journal entries recounting adventurous tours in an old fashioned manner with little general reflection. Catholicism was at something of a low ebb in Ireland during his visits there and it is not surprising that Wesley attracted many Catholics to his meetings. Yet they did not embrace Methodism in large numbers and there was always a distance between Wesley and the Irish whom he considered squalid, fickle, and dishonest.14 Wesley saw William III’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 as a heroic affair, the outcome of which was determined by Providence. William had attacked the 25,000 strong, French-​reinforced army of James II with an army of 37,000 Protestant Dutch, Danish, and Huguenot troops, in a victory which had given him control over the eastern part of Ireland, including Dublin. On the evening of 23 June 1773, he ‘walked to see the place where King William passed the Boyne’ and expressed the view that ‘God was on his side’.15 William’s campaign concluded successfully in 1691, with the surrender of Jacobite forces at Limerick, and this led to massive land transfers from Catholics to Protestants and forty years of penal legislation against Irish Catholics. In 1600, more than 80 per cent of Irish land was owned by Roman Catholics; by 1700 this had fallen to 14 per cent and was continuing to fall. In 1697, the English Parliament gave William authority to maintain a standing army of 12,000 troops in Ireland, a constant visible reminder of British rule. Between 1695 and 1728, a series of ‘popery laws’ were enacted in the Dublin parliament that would severely restrict the rights of Roman Catholics. They could not ‘bear arms, vote, sit in parliament, enter the professions, hold public office, buy land or lease it for longer than thirty-​ one years, establish schools or be educated abroad’.16 The Catholic Church was faced with severe limitations, with bishops and members of religious orders banished from the country and any priest liable to arrest and transportation. But for the fact that these laws were not consistently enforced, it is doubtful that the Catholic Church would have survived in Ireland at all during this period. Such ‘penal legislation’ was something of a paper tiger that had less practical effect than might be imagined since many Protestant authorities were reluctant to enforce what they considered unfair laws. While some Catholics converted to Protestantism for the political and economic benefits incurred, the large, majority Catholic population managed to keep its faith intact despite such legal restrictions. The desire of Irish Protestants to control the country through the sanction of the British state and the social privilege of the Irish landed gentry and the Established Church were driven according to Hempton by ‘a powerful mixture of revenge and self-​defence’.17 The violent conflicts in Ireland were eased to some extent during the earlier part of the Hanoverian rule because of the relative stability of the government and also because (at least in Ulster where division was at its highest pitch) the denominations confined themselves to discreet communities and refrained from proselytism. The late eighteenth

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  173 century saw a less stable situation emerge. A stronger and more direct rule of Ireland came in the wake of the Seven Years’ War and especially after 1760, when the British Parliament felt the pressure of the military needs of its foreign wars. Irish Catholics were illegally enlisted into the British army and the English sought Irish support for their American campaigns. Wartime conditions drove the desire to secure Ireland politically and militarily, for Britain did not want Ireland to be a soft target for its foreign enemies. Yet, with larger and more pressing battles being fought elsewhere, the British Parliament did not really have the time or energy to give Ireland the attention it needed, leading to some degree of mismanagement. The ideological challenge to Britain’s colonial possessions in North America, with all its implication for the empire, for politics, and for trade, brought forth a strong response in Ireland where there were similar complaints about loss of liberty. As a staunch royalist and supporter of the Church of Ireland (though he wished to revive Catholics and Dissenters as well), Wesley often found himself identifying with a certain type of Irish patriotism, welcoming and preaching to the uniformed Volunteers set up to crush Catholic resistance. He recorded ‘a pleasing sight’ on Sunday 26 April 1778, when, ‘At St. Peter’s Church I saw…the Independent Companies, raised by private persons associating together without any expense to the government. They exercised every day and, if they answer no other end, at least keep the Papists in order, who were exceedingly alert ever since the army was removed to America’.18 There had been such local militia companies before, but a new group of Volunteers was set up in Dublin in March 1778, initially to guard against a French invasion. That invasion did not come but when the American colonist John Paul Jones attacked Whitehaven from the Irish Sea, the movement took on a national enlargement. The Dublin ‘armed societies’ were more amenable to government control but the more radical ‘Volunteer companies’ of Belfast declared their independence from the government. Many Protestants took greater assurance from the Volunteer brigades than from the Irish standing army which had been depleted by the needs of the foreign field. By 1778, there were 38 Volunteer Corps in Cork and Tipperary alone. Many American loyalists were Irish and there were two Irish units formed for service in America.19 The British opposition saw the plight of the colonists in America as an extension of their own grievances and Irish patriots like Henry Grattan (1746–​1820) felt the same way. In a powerful speech to the Irish Commons on 19 April 1780 he called for Ireland’s legislative independence, asking how it was that Britain could grant so many legislative concessions to rebellious Americans, yet deny them to the loyal Irish people. Declaring that the British opposition had read the situation correctly, he insisted that ‘a country enlightened as Ireland, chartered as Ireland, armed as Ireland, and injured as Ireland, will be satisfied with nothing less than liberty’.20 By 1793, the ‘penal laws’ had been dismantled and Catholics were admitted to the electoral franchise but not to Parliament itself. The relaxation of anti-​Catholic

174  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order laws led some Protestants to assert their claims more virulently. The Orange Order arose in Armagh in September 1795, opposing the call for the greater Catholic liberties that were being demanded by the United Irishmen (formed in 1791). When a naval force of 15,000 French troops sailed to Ireland and foundered off Bantry Bay, the government was naturally alarmed. A crackdown on the United Irishmen, whose radical leaders were in communication with the French, the Americans, and the British opposition, was aided by the Orangemen. Four brutal local rebellions broke out in 1798, the most violent of which was in County Wexford and involved 30,000 rebels. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a high-​water mark in the eighteenth-​century conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. Despite the attempt to quell divisions through the 1800 Act of Union, it was a tragic signpost to several more centuries of similar conflict. In his Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland, written from Limerick in May 1778, Wesley addressed the fears and rumours over foreign invasion and the growing strength of Washington’s army.21 He stated in his journal that he wrote in response to ‘the mock-​patriots [who] had laboured [through both England and Ireland] to spread the alarm, as though we were all on the very brink of destruction’.22 Ward and Heitzenrater refer to the Compassionate Address as ‘a jeremiad in reverse’.23 Instead of cataloguing the sins of his hearers and calling for repentance, Wesley reassured the Irish that things were not as bad as reported and that there was a revival of godliness spreading more and more through the kingdoms; they need not be afraid so long as they made God their friend. Weber considers it ‘a work of arrogant, self-​assured patriotism…confident, triumphal, and smug’.24 Written less than three months after the Serious Address to the People of England (1778), Wesley referred to the general panic that had prevailed in London before he left, where some had affirmed, and others believed, that the nation was on the brink of ruin. Wesley found this attitude had also spread to Dublin and then to Leinster, Munster, Cork, Bandon, and Limerick.25 Wesley voiced a number of the concerns of the Irish and attempted to answer each one in turn. Washington was said to have 65,000 men. What would happen if France, Spain, and Portugal joined the Americans and hidden domestic enemies rose up and joined them? Wesley aimed to settle such fears and to show that things were not in quite so desperate a state as all that. He referred to a conversation a week previously with reliable witnesses in Cork, who had recently returned from Philadelphia and testified that, in December, Washington had only 17,000 or 18,000 men and that 30 to 40 a day were dying of fever. In one two-​month period, more than 1,500 had deserted to General Howe. Meanwhile 16,000 British troops remained in perfect health and were well provisioned.26 Fears that 20 or 30,000 fresh recruits would join Washington in a month or two were quelled by the reassurance that such raw recruits would be no match for General Howe’s seasoned English troops.27 A report had reached Ireland that a French squadron had sailed to assist the Americans, ‘with four thousand soldiers on board’, but Wesley

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  175 insisted that there was no way of knowing that this was an accurate report and doubted its eventuality. ‘How great then is the odds, against the French ever joining the American army? Although if they did, there is no doubt but General Howe would give a good account of them all’.28 Wesley’s prediction was inaccurate, as Howe retired that same year and the French joined the Continental Army in 1781 to help secure an American victory. For some, hidden domestic enemies, such as the Whiteboys, were a greater concern than Portugal, Spain, or France. An Irish agrarian organisation that, beginning in the 1760s, worked in secret and through violent means to defend tenant farmers’ rights, the Whiteboys derived their name from the white smocks they wore during their raids. They were often referred to as ‘Levellers’ by the authorities. Though their concerns were economic in nature, the Protestant ruling class usually interpreted their activity as part of a popish conspiracy to overthrow Protestant rule.29 These ‘intestine vipers…are always ready to tear out their mother’s bowels. And how should we defend ourselves against these, if they made a general insurrection?’30 Wesley sought to calm such fears by assuring his readers that only if all the king’s subjects were simultaneously put to sleep by a large dose of laudanum would the insurrectionists stand a chance. Until then, ‘you need no more be afraid of ten thousand Whiteboys, than of ten thousand crows’.31 Wesley was writing just after the second of three major outbreaks of Whiteboy activity from 1776 to 1777.32 He was convinced that the standing troops all over the country ensured against the success of any rebellion (there were six companies at Cork alone); any insurrection would be crushed in its infancy.33 The last paragraph is in stark opposition to the conclusion of A Serious Address to the People of England. In the earlier tract, widespread contempt of God was the ‘present characteristic of the English nation’, and he was certain that the great wickedness of the people would soon bring down God’s wrath.34 Here an almost completely opposite view is taken. ‘Religion, true scriptural religion…is continually increasing in every part of the kingdom’.35 Wesley believed that there had never been a time in history when God had destroyed a nation while religion was increasing within it. Such would be inconsistent with God’s wisdom and goodness, and with the manner God had dealt with the nations since the beginning of the world.36

The Pietist Diaspora in Ireland Wesley had his greatest impact in Ireland, not among the majority Catholic population, but among the Pietist diaspora. In 1709, under the reign of Louis XIV, many Protestant refugees in the Palatinate were transported by the Royal Navy, with 800 families settling in Limerick and Cork alone.37 Wesley attracted a strong following among such Pietist communities whom he viewed more favourably than the Irish. ‘These have quite a different look from the natives of the country as well as a different temper. They are a serious, thinking people. And their diligence turns all their land into a garden’.38

176  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order These immigrant Protestants did not curse, swear, break the Sabbath, or get drunk, and their towns had no ale houses. ‘How will these poor foreigners rise up in the judgement against those that are round about them!’39 On 12 May 1749, Wesley preached to Presbyterian troops stationed at the town of Nenagh, 19 miles north-​east of Limerick.40 Thomas Williams had established a Society there in that year which quickly grew to three hundred members, though there was a steep declension when Methodist discipline was enforced. The enthusiasm of the Scottish Highlanders stationed there with their very public support of Methodist worship may have been one reason why Methodist preachers had not been assaulted in Limerick the way they had been in Dublin and Cork.41 Limerick would become the site, on 14–​15 August 1752, of the first Irish Methodist Conference and experienced something of a local revival in 1760.42 Over 100 Palatine families had settled in this area in 1702–​1707, during the reign of Queen Anne. When they heard Wesley, they recognised the style of preaching they used to hear in Germany.43 In June 1756, Wesley described the Palatines of Ballingarrane as ‘plain, artless, serious people’ who ‘walk in the light of God’s countenance’ and had ‘divided themselves into classes in imitation of our brethren, with whom they live in perfect harmony’.44 Wesley also preached, in late June 1758, among the Palatines at Courtmatrix. Here the labours of the carpenter Philip Embury (1729–​ 1775) had led to the opening of a meeting house. Converted under Wesley’s preaching in 1752, Embury became a local preacher and, at the 1752 Conference at Limerick, was proposed for the itinerancy. He was placed on the reserve list but afterwards married and in 1760 became the first Methodist local preacher to immigrate to America, where he became instrumental, along with his cousin Barbara Heck, in establishing Methodism in New York.45 At Ballingarrane, on 14 June 1765, Wesley preached once again to the ‘small remains of the poor Palatines’, marvelling at the heartlessness of their landlords. ‘As they could not get food and raiment here, with all their diligence and frugality, part are scattered up and down the kingdom, and part gone to America. I stand amazed! Have landlords no common sense (whether they have common humanity or no), that they will suffer such tenants as these to be starved away from them?’46 Phillip Guier was Master of the German school at Ballingarrane and in 1752 became Wesley’s first local preacher there. He was a force for moral reformation among the Palatines and could name among his students both Philip Embury and Thomas Walsh. An Irish Methodist legend has it that, a hundred years after Guier’s death, whenever a Methodist preacher was seen passing on his horse both Catholics and Protestants would tip their hat and say, ‘There goes Phillip Guier who drove the devil out of Ballingarrane’.47 Late in his career, in May 1789, Wesley preached to ‘all the remains of the Palatine families’ from Ballingarrane, Courtmatrix, and Rathkeale, ‘in all which places an uncommon flame has lately broke out such as was never seen before. Many in every place have been deeply convinced, many

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  177 converted to God, and some perfected in love. Some societies are doubled in number, some increased six or even tenfold. All the neighbouring gentry were likewise gathered together, so that no house could contain them. But I was obliged to stand abroad. The people, as it were, swallowed every word, and great was our rejoicing in the Lord’.48

Wesley’s Anti-​Catholicism John Wesley is often celebrated as an early ecumenist and his sermon Catholic Spirit (1755) is set forth as a model of ecumenical relations.49 Without discounting the value of the ideals of religious toleration that he drew partly from Pietism and partly from the Enlightenment, it is important also to understand that the founder of Methodism supported and helped perpetuate the anti-​Catholic civil provisions of his era. In this he was not unusual since anti-​Catholicism was a broadly held European ideology throughout the eighteenth century that intersected with ideas about culture, identity formation, and liberal values. Catholicism functioned as a ‘unifying Other’, over against which multiple political identities could be formed.50 As John Wolffe has shown, Protestant anti-​Catholicism picked up pace in the century following Wesley, in religious competition between Roman Catholicism and expansionist Evangelical Protestantism. Ties between church and state were weakened and the strength of religious conflicts furthered the long-​standing hope of religious pluralism. It was not only religious bigots or xenophobes who were anti-​Catholic but also progressive liberals, for whom Catholicism represented an outdated and exclusivist intolerance.51 Toward individual Catholics, Wesley could be quite generous, but he was at the same time insistent that the Catholic religion needed to be subjected to severe civil restrictions and this was a form of bigotry politically expressed, even if accompanied by a ‘Catholic spirit’ on the personal level. According to Linda Colley, anti-​Catholic Protestantism was, ‘the most important shared element in the forging of British national identity in the eighteenth century’. Indeed, ‘Protestantism was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible’.52 Even John Locke’s Letters on Toleration, while arguing for individual liberty and the removal of all state compulsion in religious affairs, exempted Catholics from toleration, on the basis that there should be no fellowship with heretics and that Catholics had allegiance to the papacy, an authority that claimed to override civil government. In such a way, he ‘gave the highest philosophical sanction’ to the ‘traditional prejudice and careless ignorance’ of English anti-​Catholicism.53 Maldwyn Edwards considered it ‘not surprising that Wesley was intolerant towards the Roman Catholics. What does occasion surprise is his total ignorance of the fact. His self-​delusion was amazing’.54 Wesley’s earliest written polemic against Roman Catholicism appears to be his letter, To A Roman Catholic Priest, written around May of 1735, though it cannot be dated with certainty and the recipient is unknown.55

178  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order While he disavows ‘the scurrility and contempt with which the Romanists have often been treated’, he nonetheless charges them with teaching the faithful to bow down before images and adding to the words of Scripture with their distinctive teachings such as seven sacraments, transubstantiation, and the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome.56 In his Word to a Protestant written in 1745 during the invasion of the Young Pretender, Wesley defined the word ‘papist’ as one who believed the Bishop of Rome to be the head of the only truly Christian church. To counter this, Wesley listed a number of ‘errors’ supported by the Council of Trent, including purgatory, veneration of relics, and indulgences, and declared that they not only ‘defile the purity of Christianity’, but ‘strike at its very root, and tend to banish true religion out of the world’.57 Those who sought to be saved by their own best efforts were at heart papists, however much they may have disavowed Romanism. Any who sought a repression of all Christians except those of the Church of England were also ‘persecuting Papists’ at heart. Wesley attributed the troubles brought on by the ’45 to a spirit of religious intolerance on the part of unconverted Protestants who relied more on their own good works than on the merits of Christ. After defining a ‘Papist’, and describing Roman Catholicism’s doctrinal errors, idolatry, and persecuting practices, Wesley exhorted Protestants about their own behaviour. ‘How small preeminence has the money-​worshipper at London, over the image-​worshipper at Rome? Or the idolizer of a living sinner over him that prays to a dead saint?’58 The ‘blind, fiery zeal of Protestantism’ should be replaced by the ‘true zeal…the flame of love. Let this be your truly Protestant zeal…Let your heart burn with love to all mankind’.59 Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749) is perhaps Wesley’s most irenic piece of anti-​Catholic discourse.60 In it he wishes to set aside all malice and ‘unkind affection’ in order to love, even in the face of differing opinions. He admitted that bitterness was to be found on both sides but wished to restore, ‘at least some small degree of love among our neighbours and countrymen’.61 After laying out a summary of ‘true Protestant belief’ which is, in effect, simply a distillation of Christian orthodoxy, he then describes ‘true Protestant practice’, and asks his Catholic reader what could possibly be found objectionable in such a life of devout love.62 He then closes with an exhortation to mutual love between Catholic and Protestant. ‘O dear brethren, let us not still fall out by the way! I hope to see you in heaven. And if I practice the religion above described, you dare not say I shall go to hell. You cannot think so. None can persuade you to it. Your own conscience tells you the contrary. Then if we cannot as yet think alike in all things, at least we may love alike’.63 There is little explicitly anti-​Catholic discourse here, though it is hard to miss the Protestant preaching in the final exhortation, ‘O let you and I…being justified by faith…have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’.64 Wesley borrowed a 1686 work by the seventeenth-​ century Anglican Bishop John Williams, to engage in a lengthy foray into Catholic theology in

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  179 A Roman Catechism, Faithfully Drawn out of the Allowed Writings of the Church of Rome with a Reply Thereto (1756).65 The work attempts to state Catholic belief in a manner that Catholic authors would find acceptable, by drawing only upon Catholic authorities, including Cardinal Bellarmine, the decrees of the Council of Trent, and a number of papal decrees. For each point of the proposed Catechism, a Catholic authority is cited in support and then a Protestant refutation is provided. The stated aim of the work is to, ‘rightly understand and truly represent the doctrine which I profess to censure; for without a faithful and impartial examination of an error, there can be no solid confutation of it’.66 After dealing with 89 questions, Catholic doctrine is declared to be contrary both to Scripture and ‘indubitable tradition’, and a determination is made to follow the Vincentian canon of believing only ‘that which hath been believed everywhere, always and by all’.67 In the rather ambitiously titled, Short Method of Converting all the Roman Catholics in the Kingdom of Ireland Humbly proposed to the Bishops and Clergy of that Kingdom,68 Wesley set out the moral argument that if only the clergy of the Church of Ireland would live like the apostles, the Irish population would soon be converted to the Protestant faith. That the conversion of the Irish to Protestantism is a desirable end seems self-​evident to Wesley and he offers two reasons for making the attempt –​(1) because God desires all to come to a knowledge of the truth and (2) that all the king’s subjects might be united in the same faith.69 All methods to reverse this situation having thus far failed, Wesley proposed a simple method. The ‘grand hindrance’ standing in the way was the ‘strong attachment’ that Catholics had toward their clergy, believing them to be ‘the holiest and wisest of men’, and that only the apostles were greater in holiness and wisdom. ‘Here, therefore, is the short method. Let all the clergy of the [Protestant] Church of Ireland only live like the apostles, and preach like the apostles, and the thing is done…Let every clergyman of our Church live thus, and in a short time there will not be a Papist in the nation’.70 In The Advantage of the Members of the Church of England over those of the Church of Rome (1756) Wesley argued that the Council of Trent erred in giving Scripture and tradition equal authority and that this interpretive model fails, since there are Catholic traditions that are contradicted by the Scriptures.71 The Council further erred by opposing the lay reading of the Scriptures and asserting that the clergy alone, guided by the pope, were the only safe interpreters. Any who preached without a licence were to be punished as criminals. ‘Seeing, therefore, the Church of England contends for the Word of God, and the church of Rome against it, it is easy to discern on which side the advantage lies, with regard to the grand principle of Christianity’.72 He then discussed a number of the promulgations of the Council of Trent showing the error of each and declaring that the Church of England ‘enjoys an unspeakable advantage over the Church of Rome’ since her doctrines are ‘wholly agreeable to, and founded on, the written Word of God’.73 The same strategy is then

180  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order applied to the worship of the Roman Catholic Church, and the primacy of the Bishop of Rome.74 Every member of the Church of England enjoys an, ‘unshaken liberty of conscience’ not allowed to Catholics, who must defer to papal authority. ‘In this liberty…[h]‌e may cheerfully look for a happy death… without any fear either of purgatory or hell…’75 Roman Catholic doctrines and practices were again weighed in the balance and found wanting in Popery Calmly Considered, a revision of the earlier Roman Catechism borrowed from John Williams.76 Wesley sought to demonstrate that there is a natural tendency within Catholic doctrines and practices to, ‘hinder, if not destroy’ the love of God and neighbour, and to banish truth from the earth.77 On 19 February 1762, Wesley responded in the London Chronicle to what he called a ‘Romish tract’, written in 1760 by the Catholic Bishop of Doberus, Richard Challoner (1691–​1781), with the title A Caveat against the Methodists.78 Wesley rejected the claims of the Church of Rome to be one, holy undivided church founded by Christ, since, ‘The generality of its members are no holier than Turks or Heathens. You need not go far for proof of this. Look at the Romanists in London or in Dublin. Are these the “Holy”, the only “Holy” Church? Just such holiness is in the bottomless pit’.79 Hempton groups Wesley’s views about Catholicism into four broad assumptions. First, he believed that the Catholic Church was geographically and chronologically unchanging in its teaching; in persecuting Protestants, it would always do what it had always done. Second, most of Wesley’s hostility was directed at the priesthood, not at the ordinary Catholic layperson, for whom he had more sympathy. Third, Roman Catholicism caused not only the religious and political problems of Ireland but also its economic problems, since Protestants were thrifty and hard-​working while Catholics were indolent and non-​productive. In all this, though ‘undeniably anti-​Catholic, at least…[h]‌is reasoning, if not his prejudice, was based on standard liberal philosophers’.80 Wesley’s attitude to religious toleration fits quite well into (Bernard) Semmel’s chancy ideological interpretation of Methodism as a bridge between a ‘traditional’ society and a more ‘modern’ one. Wesley shared the anti-​Catholic prejudice of his day, but much of his anti-​Catholicism stemmed from his quasi-​liberal impulses. In the economic deprivation of Ireland and in the close ties between Irish Catholics and their priests, Wesley thought he saw a church that did not promote individual self-​ improvement and freedom of choice.81 Wesley believed that Catholics in Ireland would never be loyal to the British crown, and the removal of troops from Ireland to America represented an opportunity for Catholics to overthrow their rulers if they could.82 To some extent disregarding the status of Catholics as British subjects, he argued for the removal of legal toleration for the Catholic religion.83 On 12 January

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  181 1780, he wrote to the Public Advertiser, concerned about the ‘increase of popery’ and feeling it was his duty to raise the alarm. ‘Many were grievously offended’, he reflected, ‘But I cannot help it. I must follow my own conscience’.84 Two letters that do not appear in the Telford collection were addressed to Joseph Berington, who would go on to become a member of the Cisalpine Club, formed in 1792 to support the civil liberties of Roman Catholics. The first letter is written from City Road, dated 11 February 1780, declaring that the decision of the Council of Constance that Catholics cannot ‘keep faith with heretics’, meant that no Catholic could be trusted to take a reliable oath. ‘Protestants ought never to trust Roman Catholics. I would not hurt an hair of their head. I feel a tender goodwill for them. I would do them all the kindness that is in my power. But I cannot trust them’.85 Berington had replied to Wesley that the pope only releases the faithful from ‘rash or unprofitable’ vows, but Wesley’s second letter to Berington (dated 24 February 1780) showed that he remained unmoved from his position.86 Wesley’s anti-​Catholic writings of the 1780s should be read against the background of the perceived threat of a growing and vigorous Catholicism in England. Estimates of the total Catholic population in England under the Hanoverians are difficult to make with any degree of accuracy. Older works pointed to a decline throughout the eighteenth century, but the work of John Bossy, who claimed that numbers began to rise after 1720 and even faster after 1770, reversed the trend.87 By 1790, there were slightly more Catholics in England than there were Methodists.88 A threefold increase in the Catholic population of Manchester, Liverpool, Preston, and Wigan took place between 1783 and 1800.89 This seems a far cry from John Henry Newman’s description of ‘a few adherents of the Old Religion, moving silently and sorrowfully about, as memorials of what had been’.90 While there had been ‘no-​popery’ disturbances in the provinces in 1745, later campaigns were moderated to some extent by the conviction among social elites that English Catholics were a harmless minority who should be granted a greater degree of toleration. Both the Gordon Riots and the later Catholic Relief Act of 1829 highlighted a gap between the more tolerant views of the elite and the still, at times violent, anti-​Catholic sentiment of many in the general population. A greater openness to Catholicism, which would only be accentuated by large-​scale migration of the Irish to other parts of Britain in the nineteenth century, suggests that Wesley’s anti-​Catholicism was going against the tide, if not of popular sentiment, at least of the political elite. The Catholic Relief Act, introduced by Sir George Savile in 1778, lifted some of the restrictions on Catholics that had been established under William III’s Act for Further Preventing the Growth of Popery (1698–​1699). Provided they took an oath of loyalty to the crown, abjured the Pretender, rejected the power of the pope over the temporal jurisdiction, and the doctrine that there should be no faith kept with Protestant heretics, Catholics could now buy and sell land and Catholic schoolmasters were protected from persecution and the threat of life imprisonment. It remained illegal

182  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order under the new Act to convert to Catholicism and Catholics still did not have full freedom of worship or citizenship rights. The Relief Act was humanitarian in motive and an expression of Enlightenment-​era toleration. After all, Catholics only dissented from the existing political order on the grounds of religious conscience. It also had the practical benefit of allowing Catholics to be recruited to fill up the diminishing ranks of the armed forces.91 When an attempt was made in 1779 to extend the Relief Act to Scotland there was strong opposition, riots broke out in protest, and the government backed down. These disturbances were led by Lord George Gordon (1751–​ 1793) who soon took on the leadership of the Protestant Association and launched a petition of 40,000 signatures calling for a repeal of the Catholic Relief Act. Gordon called for a mass demonstration at St. George’s Field to support the petition and the stage was set for a descent into a mad rabble. ‘What!’ cried Samuel Romilly, ‘summon 40,000 fanatics together and expect them to be orderly! What is it but to invite hungry wretches to a banquet, and at the same time enjoin them not to eat?’92 The well-​dressed crowd gathered quietly and respectfully on the morning of 2 June and marched in an orderly manner to the Houses of Parliament. Gordon presented his massive petition to the Commons, dramatically dumping it on the floor and addressing his supporters in the lobby. After a six-​hour debate, it was decided (192 votes to 6) to adjourn the matter until the following Thursday. The news of the defeat of Gordon’s motion set off a series of acts of property destruction, as the crowds targeted private and public buildings they associated with Catholicism, including two West End Roman Catholic chapels attended by upper-​class English Catholics. Rioting continued until, on the evening of Wednesday, 7 June, Gordon appeared before the rioting crowds at the Bank of England and called for law and order, without success. John Wilkes, at this time City Chamberlain, was also present in the melee, calling for order before firing upon the crowd and killing two rioters.93 By the evening of the following day, several hundred rioters had been killed or wounded; the official tally was 300, but one contemporary estimated 700.94 Dead bodies and smoking ruins littered the city of London as the riots finally subsided. Twenty-​five people were hanged for destruction of property and Gordon was arrested by the Privy Council on charges of high treason. After eight months in jail, he would finally be acquitted on 5 February 1781. Wesley visited Gordon in prison on 19 December 1780 after Gordon had requested the visit and Wesley approached the Secretary of State Lord Stormont for permission.95 Receiving no reply, Wesley wrote to the Prime Minister, Lord North, who replied that he had no objection in the world but that the decision lay more properly with Stormont. Wesley was finally successful after his second letter to Stormont, of 15 December 1780, in which he stated that he had, ‘neither inclination nor disinclination’ to speak with Gordon and assured his lordship that he would keep the meeting transparent. ‘I think verily, your Lordship knows my sentiments too well, to apprehend any ill consequence of my conversing with Lord George: especially as

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  183 I should be very willing to communicate to your Lordship, whatever [passes] in our Conversation’.96 Wesley wrote of the visit in a letter to Brian Bury Collins, dated 3 January 1781. I had no great desire to see Lord George Gordon, fearing he wanted to talk to me about political matters…In our whole conversation I did not observe that he had the least anger or resentment to anyone. He appeared to be in a very desirable spirit, entirely calm and composed. He seemed to be much acquainted with the Scripture both as to the letter and the sense of it. Our conversation turned first upon Popery, and then upon experimental religion. I am in great hopes this affliction will be sanctified to him as a means of bringing him nearer to God. The theory of religion he certainly has. May God give him the living experience of it!97 The Gordon Riots have broader implications than the anti-​Catholicism that provided their impetus. Institutions that were targeted included ‘visible symbols of class rule’, such as prisons, houses of magistrates and judges, toll gates, and the Bank of England. They can be seen, therefore, as ‘a spectacular manifestation of everyday discontents that at other times expressed themselves in political radicalism [and] labour disputes’.98 The question of whether the riots were shaped by radical politics or simply unsophisticated anti-​Catholicism has been debated by historians.99 Many of the recreational rioters in the crowd in all likelihood did not know ‘whether Popery be a man or a horse’.100 More significant for a global history analysis is that they can be seen as, ‘a flashpoint within an interlocking and overlapping system of global and domestic political narratives’.101 Rumours circulated in the wake of the Gordon Riots that French agents were behind the disorder in order to weaken Britain’s defences. Nicholas Rogers has noted how historians have overlooked the connections between the Gordon Riots and the Keppel riots of February 1779.102 The earlier riots protested against a ministry that was blamed for dividing Britain’s naval powers and undermining the war effort and both involved criticism of the government and attacks upon symbols of establishment power. The military link is also present since the Catholic Relief Act was in part designed to allow Catholics to serve in the military, so long as they swore an oath of loyalty to the crown. In both cases the government was attacked for establishing measures perceived as threatening Britain’s likely success in international warfare. In Canada, the Quebec Act of 1774 had given freedom of religion to French Canadienes. Government endowments were made to Catholic clergy and the right to collect tithes was protected. In the eyes of many in Britain, this set a dangerous and unwelcome precedent and served only to confirm the conviction of radicals that the government’s authoritarian policies were working against the cause of liberty. The decree that the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes were now part of Quebec further agitated Americans, who

184  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order saw the spectre of popish tyranny threatening their westward expansion, something they were eager to get on with once the Seven Years’ War had concluded. The king noted the people’s discontent as he rode through the crowd. ‘I saw nothing but contempt and indignation in every face; not even a hat pulled off, whilst my ears were burned with…the repeated cry of No French Government! No Popish king! Wilkes and liberty!’103 The response to the Relief Act was similarly related to global politics. Aiding the Catholic cause was particularly troubling at a time when the Bourbon powers had entered the American war and when there was fear of French invasion in the summer of 1779. In such a context the Quebec Act and the Relief Act of 1778 could be considered linked, each ‘an arrow shot from the same quiver’.104 In the eyes of many, an anti-​libertarian government was setting the stage for the introduction of a tyrannous policy. The Appeal from the Protestant Association (1779) catalogued the persecution of Protestants by Catholics to show that their religion was incompatible with religious toleration. Standing in the rather lurid tradition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (which it evoked on its title page) it recounted an incident on the isle of Guernsey in which a woman in the final month of her pregnancy, while being burned at the stake as a heretic, was delivered of her child who was then thrown back into the flames to perish along with its mother. The Relief Act, so it was argued, would open the way for other such horrors.105 The basic injustice of the papal system was illustrated in a footnote by the inconsistency of the penalty for ‘lying with a woman in the church and there committing other enormities’ being nine shillings, that for ‘defiling a virgin’ –​nine shillings, and for ‘committing incest’ –​seven shillings sixpence, but for ‘forging the Pope’s hand writing, 1 pound seven shillings, seven pence’.106 A survey of the laws against popery is given in section II of the Appeal as well as a description of the ‘mildness’ of them in order to show that the Relief Act was unnecessary.107 Further it was argued that the Relief Act was passed through the House at the close of a session, at a time when it was poorly attended, thus avoiding closer scrutiny into its deleterious effects.108 A warning was issued that Catholics are, ‘building, purchasing, and hiring buildings for mass houses: they are setting up schools and seminaries of learning, in different parts of this metropolis and kingdom. They presume on the lenity of government; and use various artifices to ensnare the children of the poor, and to pervert the ignorant to their destructive errors: they even insult Protestant ministers in the discharge of their duty’.109 If the Act could not be repealed through a gathering of petitions let there at least be a qualifying Act that placed greater restrictions on Catholics. ‘Thus the Papists would be curbed, but not crushed’.110 In 1780, Wesley was thrust into the centre of this public anti-​Catholic discourse, through three broad factors –​the enthusiasm with which the Protestant Association received Wesley’s public support of their Appeal from the Protestant Association, a lengthy pen-​and-​ink war between Wesley and the Irish Capuchin, Arthur O’Leary (1729–​1802), and the false attribution

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  185 of Wesley’s involvement with the Gordon Riots. O’Leary claimed that Wesley had been the author of a Defence of the Protestant Association published in Dublin in 1781. Though the claim has no foundation, Catholic scholars continued to accept this attribution for nearly a century and a half. In 1839, Daniel O’Connell, relying on O’Leary’s account, wrote two letters to the Wesleyan Methodist Church, in opposition to its educational policy, stating that Wesley was ‘the great instigator of the Protestant Association’, and that ‘the first page of your political history is stained with the plunderings, the burnings, the destruction of property, the bloodshed and the fearful insurrection of June, 1780’.111 George Cubbitt uncovered O’Leary’s error and published a defence of Wesley in Strictures on Mr O’Connell’s Letters to the Wesleyan Methodists, but the long reach of the Gordon Riots and the myth about Wesley’s involvement in them continued to poison relationships between Catholics and Wesleyans through the nineteenth century.112 Though he did not write the Defence of the Protestant Association, in his Letter to the Printer of the ‘Public Advertiser’ of 21 January 1780, he defended the Appeal from the Protestant Association (1779) against the pronouncement that ‘its style was contemptible, its reasoning futile, and its object malicious’. To the contrary, he thought, ‘the style of it is clear, easy, and natural; the reasoning, in general, strong and conclusive; the object or design, kind and benevolent’.113 He did not intend to discuss the truth or otherwise of the Roman religion but only to show that it should not be tolerated. Catholics were taught by the Council of Constance to have no fellowship with heretics, therefore, argued Wesley, they cannot render allegiance to the government or guarantee their peaceable behaviour. Pope and priests are said to have authority to pardon all sins including high treason, which could be seen as an open invitation to subversive activity. Wesley noted how Catholics were encouraged by the ‘late act’ … ‘to preach openly, to build chapels (at Bath and elsewhere), to raise seminaries, and to make numerous converts, day by day, to their intolerant, persecuting principles’.114 Catholics are even said to be willing to burn alive those acknowledged as real Christians if it should be for the good of the church. ‘If any one please to answer this, and to set his name, I shall probably reply –​but the productions of anonymous writers, I do not promise to take any notice of’.115 It is important to describe the contents of the Defence of the Protestant Association (1781), both because Arthur O’Leary’s reply (below) is based on the claim that Wesley was the author and because (as already noted) it continued to have a negative impact on relations between Catholics and Wesleyans.116 The author of the Defence wondered whether those who opposed the Association were truly Protestant or only Catholics in disguise, believing such opponents must have been either ignorant of the subject or hiding their true identity. The author reminded readers that Protestant ancestors had a very different view of the growth of popish chapels, schools, and books than that presently seen. Had they acted in the same way as some in the present, the country would now be sunk into slavery under papal

186  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order tyranny. It was the writer’s opinion that the toleration of popery was, ‘inconsistent with the safety of a free people, and a Protestant government’.117 Since no Catholic could be loyal to the crown and since Catholicism encouraged rebellion against the state, Protestants should support those strict laws that had been put in place to prohibit its propagation. The author then provided a brief historical sketch from anti-​Catholic laws established under Elizabeth I, to Catholicism gaining some ground under James II, and described the way that opposition to this trend produced the Glorious Revolution. William III’s anti-​Catholic act was established and had now been in large part repealed, leading to legitimate fears about ‘the purple power of Rome advancing’.118 The Protestant Association was only seeking to prevent this unwelcome resurgence of popery. The conduct of those who encouraged the Roman cause, on the other hand, was ‘highly criminal’.119 Had they forgotten the Protestant martyrs? Little wonder that the papists have tried to suppress the views of the Protestant Association, which views the anonymous author intends to defend in a series of forthcoming letters.

Arthur O’Leary’s Reply All these claims were given a Roman Catholic reply by Arthur O’Leary of Cork in his ‘Remarks on the Foregoing Letter and Defence’, published in a collection of Miscellaneous Tracts.120 O’Leary had ministered to British prisoners of war at Saint-​Malo in Brittany during the Seven Years’ War. He supported the British crown and urged Catholics to take loyalty oaths should the French invade. Something of an Enlightenment figure, he looked forward to a time when doctrinal differences would cease to be the cause of conflict among Christians. He supported Henry Grattan in his 1788 attempt to remove the tithe paid by Irish Catholics to the Church of Ireland. From 1789 until his death in 1802 he served as a chaplain to the Spanish Embassy in London during which time he became part of a friendship circle that included Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox. In addition to wrongly attributing the Defence of the Protestant Association to Wesley, O’Leary also accused him of promoting the Gordon Riots. Wesley denied that he was author of the Defence and he was in fact absent from London when the riots took place. His journal entry for 5 November 1780 says that he preached at the New Chapel and ‘showed, that supposing the Papists to be heretics, schismatics, wicked men, enemies to us and to our church and nation, yet we ought not to persecute, to kill, hurt or grieve them, but barely to prevent their doing hurt’.121 In his brief Disavowal of Persecuting Papists, written from Bristol on 18 March 1782, he reasserted the conviction that persecution was wrong, while at the same time arguing for some degree of control. Kindness without trust summarises his attitude. [B]‌e their principles what they will, I will not persecute them. So persecution is utterly out of the question. I know no one that pleads for

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  187 it…I would not hurt a hair of their head. Meantime, I would not put it into their power to hurt me, or any other persons whom they believe to be heretics. I steer the middle way. I would neither kill nor be killed. I would not use the sword against them, nor put it into their hands; lest they should use it against me; I wish them well, but I dare not trust them.122 O’Leary argued that Wesley’s ‘false assertions’ had been set forth ‘in a syllogistical method, and the jargon of the schools’.123 He does not attempt a point-​by-​point refutation of Wesley’s ideas but, rather, endeavours ‘to storm him from his main positions by a steady force of ridicule and satire’.124 O’Leary argues that the days of persecuting those considered heretics are over; why bring them back again? Wesley would do more good for his people if he preached love and unity instead of division. ‘Though divided in speculative opinions, if united in sentiment, we would be happy’.125 Generations of those descended from the English have called Ireland home. Whether singing in Latin or in English they sing the same Psalms, and never quarrel with their Quaker neighbours who sing none at all. [W]‌e never enquire into the butcher’s religion, but into the quality of his meat: we care not whether the ox be fed in the pope’s territories, or on the mountains of Scotland, provided the joint be good: for though there be many heresies in old books, we discover neither heresy nor superstition in beef or claret. We divide them cheerfully with one another, and though of different religions, we sit over the bowl with as much cordiality as if we were at a love feast.126 O’Leary asks whether Wesley intends to arm the Irish against each other. After Methodism had suffered persecution, now that it had been more widely accepted, would Wesley now turn to persecuting Catholics? ‘Thus…a lamb of peace is turned inquisitor’.127 Why ‘ransack old councils’ and ‘disturb the bones of old divines’, lying ‘wrapped up in their parchment blankets…where they would snore forever’, if rabble rousers remembering old conflicts did not ‘rouse them from their slumber’?128 Even if the Councils did teach the ‘violation of faith with heretics’ (which they do not) O’Leary would not believe such a doctrine. ‘For, to form one’s belief, it is not sufficient to read a proposition in a book. Interior conviction must captivate the mind’.129 Wesley is a ‘missionary who has reformed the very reformation; separated from all the Protestant churches’, trimmed the vessel of religion, brought it into a new dock, and suffered persecution for it. This same man now inflames the rabble, divides his Majesty’s subjects, propagates ‘black slander’ and throws down the gauntlet ‘to people who never provoked him’.130 Wesley should have attended to ‘the sentiments implanted in the human breast, and to the conduct of man, not to the rubbish of the schools’ when he set out to write on the toleration of Catholics. Instead, ‘Mr. Wesley blows the dust of [sic]

188  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order an old book, and lo! squadrons of religious warriors engaged in a crusade for the extirpation of the infidels’.131 He has not considered ‘the loyalty, the conduct, the virtues common to all, the natural attachment of man to his interest and country [or] the peaceable behaviour of the Roman Catholics’. Instead, ‘an old council, held four hundred years ago, is ransacked and misconstrued; a Roman Catholic is unworthy of being tolerated amongst the Turks, because Mr. Wesley puts on his spectacles to read old Latin’.132 A second letter follows, dealing mostly with the Council of Constance and the trial of Jan Hus, and refuting Wesley’s claim that the Catholic Church teaches that it is acceptable to swear a false oath in violation of conscience.133 ‘If Mr. Wesley be so credulous as to believe that the pope has horns, must we convene a general council to declare that his forehead is smooth?’134 O’Leary then takes aim at Wesley’s political views. ‘In the beginning of the American War, he published his “Calm Address”, in order to unite the colonies to the mother country. The “balm of Gilead” proved ineffectual beyond the Atlantic, he now has recourse to caustics at home. Three years ago he intended to unite us: now he intends to divide us. Thus we find Penelope’s web in his religious looms: what he wove three years ago, he now unravels’.135 O’Leary has by no means finished with Wesley yet, referring to him in several more of his Miscellaneous Tracts. In ‘An Humble Remonstrance to the Scotch and English Inquisitors by Way of an Apostrophe’, O’Leary answers the charges of ‘Wesley and his associators’ that Catholic doctrine encourages immoral behaviour with impunity by recounting the crimes of many of the Protestant reformers.136 In ‘Rejoinder to Mr. Wesley’s Reply’, Leary responds to both John Locke’s letter on toleration and Wesley’s reply to O’Leary’s earlier writings.137 He engages in a lengthy discussion correcting many of what he considers Wesley’s errors about the relationship between church and state (and clergy and laity) at the time of the trial of Jan Hus, before indulging in a mischievous double entendre at Wesley’s behaviour in Georgia in regard to Sophia Hopkey. ‘When Mr. Wesley refused the sacrament to Mrs. Williamson in Georgia, for opposing the propagation of the gospel, in giving the preference to Mr. Williamson, the layman, at a time when the clergyman intended to light Hymen’s torch with a spark of grace: a conflict of jurisdiction between the clergy and laity was the result’.138 O’Leary’s writings against Wesley had originally appeared in the pages of The Freemans’ Journal and Wesley replied in the same place. He considered his Catholic dialogue partner a ‘wild’ and ‘rambling writer’ whose work was full of inaccuracies and false accusations, finally concluding, ‘if he has only drollery and wit to oppose to argument, I shall concern myself no farther about him’.139 In a touching personal resolution to his dispute with O’Leary, Wesley met his ‘old antagonist’ for breakfast in 1787 and expressed that he ‘was not at all displeased at being disappointed. He is not the stiff, queer man that I expected; but of an easy, genteel carriage, and seems not to be wanting in either sense or learning’.140

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  189 Even when writing in a pastoral and irenic tone, such as in his Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland, there is a subtle subtext that betrays Wesley’s anti-​Catholic writings. The Catholic populations of Ireland and England alike, should entrust themselves to God but also to General Howe’s Protestant Army in America, which would protect them from any rumoured invasion by Washington’s army, conveyed to their shores by a Catholic French or Spanish navy. Wesley’s message for the Irish was that their greatest security lay in making God one’s friend. The restless population of Ireland need only submit passively to its beneficent Protestant king and all would be well. Admiring the simple and guileless English poor, he considered the Irish peasants a superstitious and backward people, dupes of a false religion that kept them mired in medieval superstition. His deep admiration for the Pietist diaspora community in Ireland shows that just as Roman Catholicism was a global religion, centred in Rome but bridging many cultures and peoples, Evangelical Pietism was also a global faith with porous boundaries, centred in the shared experience of the new birth. In this growing international movement Wesley saw the birth pangs of the millennium and the day when ‘the earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’.141 Wesley’s anti-​Catholic writings, while often demonstrating a generous catholicity and an appeal for mutual love to prevail, contain elements that run counter to such sentiments. How warm could Catholics be expected to be toward those who believed them to be untrustworthy, seditious members of a false religion, undeserving of the civil liberties extended to other subjects of the crown? Perhaps Wesley thought that it was possible to separate political ideas from personal sentiment, theological beliefs from ecclesial identity, rational proofs from religious feeling, and civil exclusion from bloody persecution. It is a welcome thing, in many respects, that Wesley should be set forth today as a proto-​ecumenist and that certain of his writings be drawn upon to further ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Protestants.142 Celebrations of this on the part of Methodists, however, deserve less triumphalist strains. As his many anti-​Catholic tracts evidence, Wesley was implacably opposed to Roman Catholic doctrines and practices and built upon this theological opposition to actively support the maintenance of restrictions on the civil liberties of English and Irish Catholics. Though he disavowed persecution of Catholics, he did not seem to consider that his support for civil restrictions upon them was a form of persecution, even if it did not entail physical assaults or violent aggression. While he could have warm friendships with individual Catholics, the Roman Catholic religion remained for Wesley a distortion of true Christianity and a global threat to the liberties guaranteed by Protestant rule. In the 1770s and 1780s, the very civil and religious liberties guaranteed by the king-​in-​parliament were being extended to Catholic subjects of the crown, a direction Wesley ought to have been able to celebrate on theological grounds as well as out of the ‘Catholic spirit’ he had learned both from his Anglican Arminianism, from German

190  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order Pietism, and from the spirit of the Enlightenment. However, his conservative political views overcame his deeper religious instincts and he failed to make the contribution he might have been able to make if he had been less constrained by his commitment to global Protestantism, understood as a bulwark against Catholic tyranny.

Notes 1 John Wesley, journal entry for 5 November 1780, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995), 188–​189. Some of the material in this chapter appeared as Glen O’Brien, ‘ “I Wish Them Well but I Dare Not Trust Them”: John Wesley’s Anti-​Catholicism in Context’, Journal of Religious History 45, no. 2 (June 2021): 185–​210, © 2021, Religious History Association. 2 For a good treatment of Wesley’s attitudes toward Roman Catholicism, see David Butler, Methodists and Papists: John Wesley and the Catholic Church in the Eighteenth Century (London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 1995). For a more recent and very helpful treatment of Wesley’s relationship to Catholicism, see Kelly Diehl Yates, The Limits of a Catholic Spirit: John Wesley, Methodism and Catholicism (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021). 3 John A. Newton, ‘The Ecumenical Wesley’, Ecumenical Review 24, no. 2 (1972): 160–​175. For a wider application of Wesley’s thought to interfaith dialogue, see Tim Macquiban, ed. Pure, Universal Love: Reflections on the Wesleys and Interfaith Dialogue (Oxford: Applied Theology Press, 1999). 4 Geoffrey Wainwright, ‘Methodism and the Ecumenical Movement’, in T&T Clark Companion to World Methodism, ed. C. Yrigoyen Jr. (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 330–​334; David M. Chapman, ‘Methodism, Ecumenism and Interfaith Relations’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism, eds. William Gibson, Peter Forsaith, and Martin Wellings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 121–​122. 5 ‘Introduction’, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 18 Journal and Diaries I (1735–​1738), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1988), 76. 6 T.E. Warner, ‘The Impact of Wesley on Ireland’, PhD dissertation (University of London, 1954), 323–​324, cited in David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 153. 7 John Wesley, journal entry, 26 April 1785, cited in Ward and Heitzenrater, ‘Introduction’, Works 18: 77. The second Limerick chapel built in 1765 stood beside the courthouse. W. Myles, ‘Methodism in Limerick’, Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, Vol. 48 (1825): 598, 596–​599. 8 John Wesley, journal entry, 15 August 1747, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journal and Diaries III (1743–​1754), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991), 189. In 1800, there were 3,150,000 Catholics in Ireland, 450,000 Anglo-​Irish and 900,000 Presbyterians. Catholics paid £500,000 a year in tithes to Protestant clergy. Jeremy Gregory and John Stevenson, The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Eighteenth Century, 1688–​1820 (Abingdon and New York, 2007), 262.

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  191 9 Martin Wellings, ‘Methodism in the UK and Ireland’, in T&T Clark Companion to World Methodism, ed. C. Yrigoyen Jr. (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 73–​88, esp. 84–​86; See also Sean J. Connolly, ‘Religion in Ireland’, in CECB, 271–​280; Charles Henry Crookshank, History of Methodism in Ireland, 3 vols (Belfast, 1885); David Hempton, Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion 1750–​1900 (London: Routledge, 2011), 29–​48, 130–​139; Norman W. Taggart, The Irish in World Methodism 1760–​1900 (London: Epworth, 1986); Dudley Levistone Cooney, The Methodists in Ireland: A Short History (Blackrock, Dublin: The Columba Press, 2001). 10 For a study of Moore, see Rob Clements, ‘Henry Moore (1751–​1844) and the Dynamics of Wesleyan-​Methodist Expansion: A Contextual Study of Pre-​Victorian Methodist Lay Preaching’, PhD thesis (Liverpool Hope University, 2011). 11 Ward and Heitzenrater, ‘Introduction’, in Works 18: 78–​79. 12 David Hempton, ‘The Methodist Crusade in Ireland 1795–​1845’, Irish Historical Studies 22, no. 85 (1980), cited in Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 95. 13 Connolly, ‘Religion in Ireland’, in CECB, 275. 14 John Wesley, journal entries, 26 May 1769, 17 February 1781, 16 March 1748 and 29 May 1778, in Ward and Heitzenrater, ‘Introduction’, Works 18: 72–​79. 15 John Wesley, journal entry, 23 June 1773, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 379. 16 Paddy McNally, ‘Ireland: The Making of the “Protestant Ascendancy”, 1690–​ 1760’, in CECB, 407 (403–​413). 17 Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 72–​73. 18 Wesley, journal entry, 9 April 1778, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 81–​82. 19 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 82, fn 7. See also Robert Brendan McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism, 1760–​1801 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1979), 238–​274. 20 Henry Grattan, ‘Declaration of Irish Rights’, in The Select Speeches of the Right Honourable Henry Grattan (London, 1847), 56, 49–​63. 21 John Wesley, A Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland (Belfast, 1778). See also, Works (Jackson) 11: 149–​154; 10 May is the date given in Jackson, but the journal entry gives 9 May. 22 Wesley, journal entry, 9 April 1778, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 85. 23 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. ‘Introduction’, Works 18: 78; Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 85. 24 Theodore R. Weber, Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics (Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2001), 144. 25 Wesley, Compassionate Address, 3–​4; Works (Jackson) 11: 149. 26 Wesley, Compassionate Address, 4–​5; Works (Jackson) 11: 150. 27 Wesley, Compassionate Address, 5; Works (Jackson) 11: 150–​151. 28 Wesley, Compassionate Address, 7; Works (Jackson) 11: 151–​152. 29 Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 77. 30 Wesley, Compassionate Address, 7; Works (Jackson) 11: 152. 31 Wesley, Compassionate Address, 7–​8; Works (Jackson) 11: 152. 32 W. Augustus Richardson, ‘ “Levellers in their White Uniforms”: Whiteboyism in Southern Ireland, 1760–​1790’, MA thesis (University of Essex, 1979).

192  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order 3 Wesley, Compassionate Address, 8; Works (Jackson) 11: 152. 3 34 John Wesley, A Serious Address to the People of England, With Regard to the State of the Nation (London, 1778), 21–​23; Works (Jackson) 11: 148–​149. 35 Wesley, Compassionate Address,10; Works (Jackson) 11: 154 36 Wesley, Compassionate Address, 10–​11; Works (Jackson) 11: 154. 37 The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 21 Journal and Diaries IV (1755–​1765), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1992), 60–​61, fn. 22. 38 Wesley, journal entry, 4 June 1762, in Ward and Heitzenrater, ‘Introduction’, Works 18: 74. 39 Wesley, journal entry, 9 July 1760, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. ‘Introduction’, Works 18: 74. See Vivien Hick, ‘John Wesley and the Irish Rhinelanders’, Eighteenth-​Century Ireland /​Iris an dá chultúr 5 (1990): 89–​103. Hick shows how Palatine Methodism in Limerick and Cork had dwindled to a handful of Methodist families by 1901. 40 John Wesley, journal entry, 12 May 1749, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 20: 272. 41 Myles, ‘Methodism in Limerick’, 597. 42 Wesley, journal entry, 12 August 1752, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 20: 437; Myles, ‘Methodism in Limerick’, 598, 599. 43 Wesley, journal entry, 12 August 1752, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 20: 272, fn. 75; Myles, ‘Methodism in Limerick’, 597. 44 Wesley, journal entry, 16 June 1756, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 21: 60–​61. 45 Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 21: 155, fn. 6. Heck is pictured clutching her Luther Bible in Emory S. Bucke, ed. The History of American Methodism, Vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1964), 13–​14. 46 Wesley, journal entry, 14 June 1765, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 6; see also journal entry, 21 May 1767, in Works 22: 81. 47 Luke Tyerman, The Life and Times of John Wesley, Vol. 1 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1870), 146; Crookshank, History of Methodism in Ireland, 1: 57, cited in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 85, fn. 20. 48 John Wesley, journal entry, 13 May 1789, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 24 Journal and Diaries VII (1787–​1791), eds. W. Reginal Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2003), 133–​134. 49 John Wesley, Sermon 39 ‘Catholic Spirit’, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 2 Sermons II (34–​70), ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1985), 81–​95. 50 Y.M. Verner and J. Harvard, ‘European Anti-​Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective. The Role of a Unifying Other: An Introduction’, in Y.M. Verner and J. Harvard, eds. European Anti-​Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective. European Studies No. 31 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 13–​22. 51 John Wolffe, ‘North Atlantic Anti-​Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Overview’, in Verner and Harvard, European Anti-​Catholicism, 25–​41. 52 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 147.

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  193 53 P. Hughes, The Catholic Question 1688–​1829 (London, 1840), 1: 77, cited in David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 30. 54 Maldwyn Edwards, John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century: A Study of His Social and Political Influence (London: Epworth Press, 1955), 101. 55 John Wesley, ‘Letter to a Catholic Priest’ (1735), in Frank Baker, ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 25 Letters I (1721–​1739) (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1987), 428–​430. 56 Wesley, ‘Letter to a Catholic Priest’, 429–​430. 57 John Wesley, A Word to a Protestant (London, 1745), 3; Works (Jackson) 11: 188, 187–​195. 58 Wesley, A Word to a Protestant (London, 1745), 4–​5; Works (Jackson) 11: 190. 59 Wesley, A Word to a Protestant, 5; Works (Jackson) 11: 191. 60 John Wesley, ‘A Letter to a Roman Catholic’, written from Dublin, 18 July 1749, in Works (Jackson) 10: 80–​86. 61 Wesley, ‘Letter to a Roman Catholic’, Works (Jackson) 10: 80–​81. 62 Wesley, ‘Letter to a Roman Catholic’, Works (Jackson) 10: 81–​85. 63 Wesley, ‘Letter to a Roman Catholic’, Works (Jackson) 10: 84–​86, 85. 64 Wesley, ‘Letter to a Roman Catholic’, Works (Jackson) 10: 86. 65 John Wesley, ‘A Roman Catechism’ (1756), in Works (Jackson) 10: 86–​128. The original work from which Wesley borrowed is John Williams, A Catechism Truly Representing the Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome, with an Answer Thereunto (London, 1686). 66 Wesley, ‘A Roman Catechism’, Works (Jackson) 10: 87. 67 Wesley, ‘A Roman Catechism’, Works (Jackson) 10: 128. 68 John Wesley, ‘A Short Method of Converting all the Roman Catholics in the Kingdom of Ireland’, Works (Jackson) 10: 129–​133. 69 Wesley, ‘Short Method’, Works (Jackson) 10: 129. 70 Wesley, ‘Short Method’, Works (Jackson) 10: 130–​132. 71 John Wesley, ‘The Advantage of the Members of the Church of England over those of the Church of Rome’, Works (Jackson) 10: 133–​140. 72 Wesley, ‘Advantage of the Members of the Church of England’, Works (Jackson) 10: 135. 73 Wesley, ‘Advantage of the Members of the Church of England’, Works (Jackson) 10: 137. 74 Wesley, ‘Advantage of the Members of the Church of England’, Works (Jackson) 10: 137–​139. 75 Wesley, ‘Advantage of the Members of the Church of England’, Works (Jackson) 10: 139–​40. 76 John Wesley, ‘Popery Calmly Considered’, Works (Jackson) 10: 140–​158. 77 Wesley, ‘Popery Calmly Considered’, Works (Jackson) 10: 155. 78 Richard Challoner, A Caveat against the Methodists, Showing how Unsafe it is for Any Christian to Join Himself to their Society or Adhere to their Teachers (London, 1760), see Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 21: 287–​290, 288 f. 30, 303–​308. 79 John Wesley, journal entry for 19 February 1761, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 21: 305. 80 Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 38.

194  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order 81 Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 42. The work to which Hempton refers here is Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1974). For a summary of the sociology of Methodism see Glen O’Brien, ‘Methodism’, in The Sage Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion, eds. A. Possamai and A.J. Blassi (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2020), 2: 491–​493. 82 Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 36–​37. 83 John Wesley, ‘A Letter to the Printer of the “Public Advertiser” Occasioned by a Late Act Passed in Favour of Popery, to which is Added, a Defence of it in Two Letters to the Editors of the “Freeman’s Journal” ’, Dublin (written from London, Manchester, and Chester, 1780), in Works (Jackson) 10: 159–​73. 84 John Wesley, journal entry for 18 January 1780 in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 159. This is his letter to the Public Advertiser of 12 January 1780. The date given of 1785 in Works 23: 159 appears to be an error. 85 W.L. Doughty, ‘John Wesley’s Letters to Mr. Berington, 1780’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 26, no. 3 (1947): 41, 38–​45. I am grateful to Dr Kelly Diehl Yates for pointing me to this source and for reading and commenting on two early drafts of this chapter. 86 Doughty, ‘John Wesley’s Letters to Mr. Berington’, 41–​42. 87 J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–​1850 (London, 1975) cited in Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 19. Butler, Methodists and Papists, 11–​12. 88 Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 19. 89 Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 19. 90 John Henry Newman, ‘The Second Spring’, cited in Alec R. Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution (London: Pelican, 1990), 42–​43. 91 Nicholas Rogers, ‘The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War’, in The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-​Century Britain, eds. Ian Haywood and John Seed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27. 92 Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 2. Haywood and Seed’s collection of essays aims to bring the Gordon Riots out from under the shadow of the French Revolution (the context in which they are generally considered) and returned to their original context in Georgian politics and culture. Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 12. See also George Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (London: Collins, 1952), esp. ‘The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters, and their Victims’, and John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–​1870 (London: Longman, 1979), 76–​90. 93 Hyman Shapiro, John Wilkes and Parliament (London: Longman, 1972), 104–​106. 94 Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 7. 95 Wesley, journal entry 16 December 1780, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 189–​190; see also footnote 3, in Journal (Curnock) 6: 301. 96 Frank Baker, ‘John Wesley and Lord George Gordon’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 26, no. 3 (1947): 45. 97 John Wesley to Brian Bury Collins, 3 January 1781, in Letters (Telford) 7: 46–​47. 98 Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 7. 99 Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 11. 100 Shapiro, John Wilkes and Parliament, 104.

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  195 01 Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 12. 1 102 Nicholas Rogers, ‘The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War’, in Haywood and Seed, eds. The Gordon Riots, 25f. 103 Cited in Rogers, ‘The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War’, 26. 104 The Rev. Bromley, Minister of the Fitzroy Chapel to a group of Middlesex freeholders, cited in Rogers, ‘The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War’, 27. 105 An Appeal from the Protestant Association to the People of Great Britain; Concerning the Probable Tendency of the Late Act of Parliament in Favour of the Papists (London, 1779), 9. 106 Appeal from the Protestant Association, 17–​18. 107 Appeal from the Protestant Association, 19–​25. 108 Appeal from the Protestant Association, 40–​42. 109 Appeal from the Protestant Association, 49. 110 Appeal from the Protestant Association, 62. 111 Daniel O’Connell, Letters to the Ministers and Office-​Bearers of the Wesleyan Methodist Societies of Manchester, London, 6 July 1839, 1 August 1839, cited in Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 41. 112 W. Reginald Ward, ed. Early Victorian Methodism: The Correspondence of Jabez Bunting 1830–​ 1858 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 229–​ 231, 237. 113 John Wesley, ‘A Letter to the Printer’, Dublin (1780); Works (Jackson) 11: 159 (159–​161). This is given the title, ‘Letter Concerning the Civil Principles of Roman Catholics’, in Arthur O’Leary, Miscellaneous Tracts: ... In which are introduced, the Rev. John Wesley’s Letter, and the Defence of the Protestant Association. 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1781), 191–​196. O’Leary’s collection of tracts also contains ‘A Defence of the Protestant Association’ (197–​203) followed by O’Leary’s ‘Remarks on the Foregoing Letter and Defence’ (207–​223). The Wesley–​O’Leary correspondence is discussed in Letters (Telford) 6: 3, followed by Wesley’s reply to O’Leary written from Manchester 23 March 1780. 114 Wesley, Letter to the Printer of the ‘Public Advertiser’, 161. 115 Wesley, Letter to the Printer of the ‘Public Advertiser’, 161. 116 Kelly Diehl Yates discusses the false attribution of the Defence of the Protestant Association to Wesley in Kelly Diehl Yates, ‘Testing the Limits of a “Catholic Spirit”: John Wesley, Methodism, and Catholicism’, PhD thesis (University of Manchester, 2018), 219–​227. 117 Defence of the Protestant Association, cited in O’Leary (and wrongly attributed to Wesley), Miscellaneous Tracts (Dublin, 1781), 199. 118 Defence of the Protestant Association, 200. 119 Defence of the Protestant Association, 201. 120 O’Leary, ‘Remarks on the Foregoing Letter and Defence’, in Miscellaneous Tracts, 207–​223. 121 John Wesley, journal entry for 5 November 1780, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 23: 188–​189. 122 John Wesley, ‘A Disavowal of Persecuting Papists’ (Bristol, 1782), in Works (Jackson) 10: 173–​175. 123 O’Leary, ‘Remarks on the Foregoing Letter and Defence’, in Miscellaneous Tracts, 208. 124 Edwards, John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century, 108. 125 O’Leary, ‘Remarks’, 212.

196  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order 26 O’Leary, ‘Remarks’, 213–​214. 1 127 O’Leary, ‘Remarks’, 214–​215. 128 O’Leary, ‘Remarks’, 218–​219. 129 O’Leary, ‘Remarks’, 219–​220. 130 O’Leary, ‘Remarks’, 221. 131 O’Leary, ‘Remarks’, 222–​223. 132 O’Leary, ‘Remarks’, 223. 133 O’Leary, ‘Letter II’, in Miscellaneous Tracts, 225–​264. 134 O’Leary, ‘Letter II’, 238. 135 O’Leary, ‘Letter II’, 260. 136 O’Leary, ‘An Humble Remonstrance to the Scotch and English Inquisitors by Way of an Apostrophe’, in Miscellaneous Tracts, 265–​287. 137 O’Leary, ‘Rejoinder to Mr. Wesley’s Reply’, in Miscellaneous Tracts, 290–​312. 138 O’Leary, ‘Rejoinder to Mr. Wesley’s Reply’, in Miscellaneous Tracts, 309–​310. Hymen was the ancient Greek god of marriage. The collection is rounded out by ‘An Essay on Toleration or Mr. O’Leary’s Plea for Liberty of Conscience’, 313–​397. For a good discussion of Wesley’s relationship with Sophia Hopkey, see Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2005), 124–​132. 139 Wesley, Two Letters to the Editors of the ‘Freeman’s Journal’, in Works (Jackson) 10: 162. 140 Wesley, journal entry, 12 May 1787, in Ward and Heitzenrater, eds. Works 24: 25. 141 John Wesley, Sermon 63, ‘The General Spread of the Gospel’, based on Isaiah 11:9, ‘The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea’, in Outler, Works 2: 485–​499. 142 There are at least a dozen references to John Wesley’s writings and several to Charles Wesley’s hymns in The Call to Holiness: From Glory to Glory. Report of the Joint International Commission for Dialogue between the World Methodist Council and the Roman Catholic Church (2016). http://​world​meth​odis​tcon​fere​ nce.com/​wp-​conte​ nt/​uplo​ads/​2016/0 ​ 1/​The-​Call-​to-​Holine​ ss-​Final-​copy-​28062​ 016.pdf (accessed 10 July 2020).

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Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  197 Chapman, David M. ‘Methodism, Ecumenism and Interfaith Relations’. In The Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism, edited by William Gibson, Peter Forsaith, and Martin Wellings, 121–​122. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Clements, Rob. ‘Henry Moore (1751–​ 1844) and the Dynamics of Wesleyan-​ Methodist Expansion: A Contextual Study of Pre-​ Victorian Methodist Lay Preaching’, PhD thesis. Liverpool Hope University, 2011. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Cooney, Dudley Levistone. The Methodists in Ireland: A Short History. Blackrock, Dublin: The Columba Press, 2001. Crookshank, Charles Henry. History of Methodism in Ireland, 3 vols. Belfast, 1885. Doughty, W.L. ‘John Wesley’s Letters to Mr. Berington, 1780’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 26, no. 3 (1947): 38–​45. Edwards, Maldwyn. John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century: A Study of His Social and Political Influence. London: Epworth Press, 1955. Grattan, Henry, ‘Declaration of Irish Rights’. In The Select Speeches of the Right Honourable Henry Grattan, 49–​63. London, 1847. Gregory, Jeremy and John Stevenson, eds. The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Eighteenth Century, 1688–​1820. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. Haywood, Ian and John Seed, eds. The Gordon Riots: Politics. Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-​ Century Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hempton, David. Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–​1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984. Hempton, David. Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hempton, David. Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion 1750–​ 1900. London: Routledge, 2011. Hick, Vivien. ‘John Wesley and the Irish Rhinelanders’, Eighteenth-​Century Ireland/​ Iris an dá chultúr 5 (1990): 89–​103. Macquiban, Tim, ed. Pure, Universal Love: Reflections on the Wesleys and Interfaith Dialogue. Oxford: Applied Theology Press, 1999. McDowell, Robert Brendan. Ireland in the Age of Imperialism, 1760–​1801. New York: Clarendon Press, 1979. Myles, W. ‘Methodism in Limerick’, Wesleyan Methodist Magazine 48 (1825): 596–​599. Newton, John A. ‘The Ecumenical Wesley’, Ecumenical Review 24, no. 2 (1972): 160–​175. O’Brien, Glen. ‘Methodism’. In The Sage Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion, Vol. 2, edited by A. Possamai and A.J. Blassi, 491–​493. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2020. O’Brien, Glen. ‘“I Wish Them Well but I Dare Not Trust Them”: John Wesley’s Anti-​ Catholicism in Context’, Journal of Religious History 45, no. 2 (June 2021): 185–​210. O’Leary, Arthur. Miscellaneous Tracts: … In which are introduced, the Rev. John Wesley’s Letter, and the Defence of the Protestant Association. 2nd ed. Dublin, 1781. Outler, Albert C., ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 2 Sermons II (34–​70). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1985.

198  Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order Rack, Henry D. Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. 3rd ed. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2005. Richardson, W. Augustus. ‘ “Levellers in their White Uniforms”: Whiteboyism in Southern Ireland, 1760–​1790’, MA thesis, University of Essex, 1979. Rogers, Nicholas. ‘The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War’. In The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-​ Century Britain, edited by Ian Haywood and John Seed, 27. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Rudé, George. Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century. London: Collins, 1952. Semmel, Bernard. The Methodist Revolution. London: Heinemann, 1974. Shapiro, Hyman. John Wilkes and Parliament. London: Longman, 1972. Stevenson, John. Popular Disturbances in England 1700–​1870. London: Longman, 1979. Taggart, Norman W. The Irish in World Methodism 1760–​1900. London: Epworth, 1986. The Call to Holiness: From Glory to Glory. Report of the Joint International Commission for Dialogue between the World Methodist Council and the Roman Catholic Church (2016). http://​world​meth​odis​tcon​fere​nce.com/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ ads/​2016/​01/​The-​Call-​to-​Holin​ess-​ Final-​copy-​28062016.pdf Tyerman, Luke. The Life and Times of John Wesley, 3 vols. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1870. Verner, Y.M. and J. Harvard, eds. European Anti-​Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective. European Studies No. 31. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Vidler, Alec R. The Church in an Age of Revolution. London: Pelican, 1990. Wainwright, Geoffrey. ‘Methodism and the Ecumenical Movement’. In T&T Clark Companion to World Methodism, edited by C. Yrigoyen Jr., 330–​334. London: T&T Clark, 2010. Ward, W. Reginald, ed. Early Victorian Methodism: The Correspondence of Jabez Bunting 1830–​1858. London: Oxford University Press, 1976. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 18 Journal and Diaries I (1735–​1738). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1988. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 20 Journal and Diaries III (1743–​1754). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 21 Journal and Diaries IV (1755–​1765). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1992. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1995. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 24 Journal and Diaries VII (1787–​1791). Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2003. Weber, Theodore R. Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics. Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2001. Wellings, Martin. ‘Methodism in the UK and Ireland’. In T&T Clark Companion to World Methodism, edited by C. Yrigoyen Jr., 73–​88 (esp. 84–​86). London: T&T Clark, 2010. Wesley, John. A Word to a Protestant. London, 1745. Wesley, John. A Compassionate Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland. Belfast, 1778.

Keeping ‘the Papists’ in Order  199 Wesley, John. A Serious Address to the People of England, With Regard to the State of the Nation. London, 1778. Wesley, John. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., 14 vols, edited by Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed. London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1872; reprinted Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979. Williams, John. A Catechism Truly Representing the Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome, with an Answer Thereunto. London, 1686. Yates, Kelly Diehl. ‘Testing the Limits of a “Catholic Spirit”: John Wesley, Methodism, and Catholicism’, PhD thesis. University of Manchester, 2018. Yates, Kelly Diehl. The Limits of a Catholic Spirit: John Wesley, Methodism and Catholicism. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021.

8 Conclusion Politics as a Subset of the Drama of Salvation

John Wesley’s political world was a global one, since British politics in the long eighteenth century were entangled in Britain’s development as an imperial power. From a rather insular country far from the centre of European power in the seventeenth century, England had become ‘Britain’ and Britain had become ‘Great’. It is impossible to separate religious vitality from this greatness, since the eighteenth century was an era of religious renewal movements of which Methodism, even if the most conspicuous, was very far from the only participant. Despite frequently claiming that politics was not the business of preachers, Wesley engaged vigorously in the political discourse of his era, just as he engaged his considerable intellectual powers on many other matters besides religion. Such is the tendency of polymaths. Not content to restrict his inquiring mind to a narrow field, he took an interest in the natural sciences, in history, in economics, in languages. Why not, then, politics? Wesley’s final years were relatively quiet ones when it came to political concerns. Though he saw the French Revolution as a sign that the Millennium was at hand,1 he observed, in March 1790, that England was in a remarkably settled and peaceful state.2 In the same year he expressed the view, ‘That if the best of Kings, the most virtuous of Queens –​and the most perfect constitution, could make any nation happy, the people of this country had every reason to think themselves so’.3 Such loyalty to the crown had been the mainstay of all Wesley’s political sentiments and it was an attitude passed on to the Wesleyan Methodists after their founder’s death the following year. James Caudle describes the ‘revolution in political broadcasting’ represented by political sermons in the Hanoverian era and has spoken of English church spires metaphorically prefiguring the radio towers that would later dot the landscape.4 There is no evidence that political sermons functioned as propaganda in the sense of being driven by a centralised authority wanting to disseminate positive portrayals; it is more likely that such sermons reflected, rather than shaped, public opinion. Wesley’s brief tract How Far Is it the Duty of a Minister to Preach Politics? written from Lewisham on 9 January 1782, in part a spirited defence of George III, stands as a good example. It is DOI: 10.4324/9781003227496-8

Conclusion  201 the last of Wesley’s political tracts to be considered in this book before going on to provide a summary of the book’s findings. In his final political tract, Wesley asserted his right as a priest to defend the king’s honour and rebuke any slandering of the royal name.5 The tract was written before 1788, when the king’s illness (the famed ‘madness of King George’) precipitated the Regency Crisis of 1788–​1789 in which the Prince of Wales began preparations to take charge of the country before the king’s sudden recovery in 1789. Jeremy Black has emphasised George’s ‘strong religious faith, belief in the ever-​active role of Divine Providence and powerful sense of moral duty and personal responsibility, all of which are seen as crucial in his life: not only in his policies and practices as king, but also in his character as a man’.6 Black, who has also written biographies of William Pitt the Elder and Sir Robert Walpole, considers that, ‘of the three, George was the most wide-​ranging culturally and intellectually, and also the most considerate as a human being, sensitive to others, with an endearing shy integrity…George was a man, exalted by birth, who never lost his sense of public service or his interest in others. Neither grand nor great but good’.7 This description, which runs counter to the picture often presented, may help explain Wesley’s genuine affection for the king. His positive view of George III seems to have been mutual; the king showed interest in the work of the Methodists and gave tacit support to the movement.8 On 9 February 1774, Wesley wrote to Mary Bosanquet assuring her that while he had been assaulted by a mob in Enniskillen, Ireland he ‘was little troubled at present by English mobs, and probably shall not while King George III lives’.9 Wesley began by declaring the question in order fully to understand it. The Bible had given the plain command, not to speak evil of rulers (Exodus 22: 28) yet many who called themselves religious were constantly doing just that. They spoke many lies such as that the king was a weak man, while others declared the king to be ‘one of the most sensible men in Europe’.10 If a clergyman attempted to set the people straight on this matter by clearing the king’s name, he would be accused of ‘preaching politics’. If that was what was meant by the term ‘preaching politics’, then Wesley believed it to be every Christian preacher’s duty to do so.11 Some were not speaking evil of the king, but only of his ministers, especially in regard to the mismanagement of the war in America. Like Wesley, George III was slow to recognise that America had been irretrievably lost. The older view that the king was responsible for the loss of the American colonies due to mismanagement is no longer widely held, at least not by historians. While the casting of George III as the villain served as helpful propaganda in the early American republic, it is now recognised that the king acted with political integrity throughout the crisis.12 Wesley conceded that it was always difficult and often impossible for private individuals to make judgements about decisions made by those in public office. Without knowing the reasons why decisions are made, and

202 Conclusion actions taken, it was best to be silent and trust that political leaders knew what they were doing. However, whenever there were unjust accusations made against the king and his ministers, Wesley considered it his, and every preacher’s, duty to rebuke such unjust censures. ‘Preaching politics’ in this manner should only rarely be done, and only when the occasion demanded it, as the preacher’s main business remained preaching ‘repentance towards God, and faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ’.13 Wesley’s advice to Methodists to preach Christ and stay out of politics could hardly be followed in a world torn apart by global ructions on the scale of the American and French Revolutions. At the close of the long eighteenth century, Methodist political identity had become variegated. The earlier political conservatism of Wesley was still alive and fears of revolution during the Napoleonic wars had the effect of driving Wesleyans into ever more strident protestations of loyalty to the crown and developing a culture that silenced radical voices and crushed any dissent from the Conference. None of the minor Methodist bodies that were formed as a result of numerous schisms held divergent doctrines from the Wesleyans. All separations were over either a demand for greater representation at Conference or a desire for the freedom to institute irregular means, such as camp meetings or itinerant preaching that was off the Conference plan. These were disputes over agency, both political and ecclesial. Though church and state were separated in the new American republic and the Reign of Terror attempted to replace Christianity with atheistic rites in France, in neither setting was the power of religion over the population neutralised. Evangelical Protestantism would become a kind of de facto state religion in the United States and even Napoleon was forced to take a pragmatic approach to religion, establishing through Concordats its ongoing right to exist in his empire. Meanwhile Methodism on both sides of the Atlantic would enter into its most vigorous period of growth and development until it became arguably the greatest Protestant success story of the nineteenth century. Fearing God and honouring the king was a scriptural injunction British Wesleyans wanted to take seriously, but there emerged sharp differences over what this meant in practical terms. Did one submit to the political, ecclesial, industrial, and economic status quo in the name of passive obedience to instituted authority? Or was it more honouring to God and the Gospel to adopt a prophetic mode in resisting patently unjust systems and calling for radical change? No one single answer emerged but the arc of history was tending toward the latter and over time British and American Methodists alike would adopt and absorb into their system most of the more representative demands of the ‘minor Methodists’. That the labour movement in the age of Chartist Reforms could so readily adopt Methodist machinery toward its own ends and draw so much of its leadership from the Methodist class system suggests a basic compatibility between the two movements. As far removed as this was from some aspects of Wesley’s political sentiment, enough still remained of the ideals of Britain’s ‘ancient constitution’ to avoid both violent revolution and despotic rule.

Conclusion  203 This investigation of Wesley’s political and social tracts uncovers some perhaps unexpected results.14 None would have doubted the loyalty to the crown that is reinforced here, an element well covered in other treatments of Wesley’s politics. It was a loyalty, however, not simply to the king as one having ‘divine right’. Rather, Wesley saw the ‘ancient constitution’, in which king, Parliament, and people inhabited a relationship of trust, as the surest guarantee of religious and civil liberty. This loyalty had a strongly personal element, for, like Jesus, the king was a person. Wesley preached a gospel that offered Christ to the ecclesiastically disenfranchised middling sort –​ shopkeepers, miners, agricultural workers, and artisans. This offer was fully in keeping with the turn toward the person inherent in the Enlightenment project. If it was ‘enthusiasm’ it was an enthusiasm that was both rational and religious. These were people who knew little of the doctrinal and liturgical complexities of the Church of England or any other church, but their instinct for a deeply personal and experiential religious expression was strong. They led the way in the religious expression of the succeeding century which would prove in so many ways to belong to Methodism. When it came to politics, Wesley’s personal approach was of a piece with his religious views. The king was a loving father of his people, put in place by the benevolent rule of the God of love. Republicanism, rioting, avoidance of taxes, and aspersions on the king’s good name were all acts of ingratitude, incompatible with the Methodist quest for perfection. Such Methodist piety, at its best, managed to avoid selfish moralism, because the integrity it called for on both personal and public fronts was held together by a social compact based on trust. Wesley was somewhat discriminating in his support for monarchs. He was not a ‘royalist’ in the sense of giving all monarchs a free pass on their behaviour. Indeed, he considered many monarchs to have been moral degenerates. It was the king or queen who loved God and country who was deserving of unwavering support. No Stuart monarch could fit such a description because such a monarch was obligated by religious ties to papal, and thus foreign, power. Wesley’s views of the king’s sacred aura reflected the discourse about divine right that had been forged out of conflict between Tories and Whigs, opposition parties which eventually came to a considerable degree of common ground about the ideal monarch. Heredity alone was not enough to guarantee succession to the throne. There was a providential hand behind history guiding England to its enlightened status as a Protestant power. The monarch who best fitted into this providential plan was fit to rule, regardless of hereditary claims. The greater freedom given to expressions of political dissent during the reign of George III was alarming for Wesley, partly because of his rejection of mob violence (something with which he had considerable personal experience) and because of the association of opposition politics with Dissenters. Unorthodox theological views such as Arianism and Unitarianism seemed strange bedfellows to one as deeply committed to the Anglican formularies

204 Conclusion as Wesley. It is not that there were no such views to be found in the Church of England, but Wesley had a very distinct and tightly held set of beliefs about the ‘true religion’ that had been entrusted to the state church. For him the religion of the Bible, the religion of the primitive church, and the religion of the Church of England were of a piece.15 Given that so many of the more republican voices of the era, such as Richard Price and Joseph Towers, were Dissenters it is not hard to see how Wesley’s political sentiments were informed by his theological commitments. Being Anglican was by no means a sufficient buffer against seditious ideas, however, as was made clear in the case of John Wilkes, nominally Anglican, but, at least in Wesley’s view, seditious. Here the personal element almost certainly coloured the political response. The morally bankrupt and sexually promiscuous Wilkes could hardly have drawn anything but censure from one as self-​controlled and disciplined as John Wesley. That such a scurrilous rake as Wilkes should impugn the name of a godly king like George III and trumpet ideas that undermined the social contract of loyalty was simply beyond the pale. This is not to say that Wesley failed carefully to weigh up Wilkes’s political ideas before finding them wanting, but it does indicate the personal element in the disagreement. In rejecting the idea that political power originated with the ‘people’, Wesley was attempting to ‘resist the patriot mob’. The origin of all political power lay with God who had delegated it to certain representatives to whom due reverence and submission should be given. Wesley was adept in the ‘language of liberty’ that pervaded his era, even if he took a different approach to John Locke or Thomas Paine. Civil and religious liberty were highly prized for Wesley but cries that these were being withheld from the people by a despotic king and a corrupt and dictatorial ministry simply did not pass his test of veracity. He did not believe that the propaganda about George III had any foundation and thought that the questioning of the king’s motives masked a Cromwellian style plot to overthrow the ancient constitution. Should this happen, all the current civil and religious liberties enjoyed by British subjects both at home and in America would be lost. Indeed, he believed this had already happened in the American colonies where a new form of tyranny had arisen –​the tyranny of Congress, which could brook no dissent and cruelly persecuted all who remained loyal to the crown. Though Wesley had no opposition to trade or commerce, there is a profound social conscience in all his writings on economic conditions. The national wealth should not be pursued as its own end, but in order that there should be plenty of readily available goods to support the basic needs of the population. For the self-​denying Wesley, greed and luxury on the part of the wealthy were the chief causes of want among the poor. No economic benefit could ever justify the existence of slavery and a collapse of the entire British economy would be preferable, in Wesley’s thinking, to the continuation of the trade in human beings, a villainous practice that was contrary to all notions of natural liberty. Though Wesley came late to a formal written

Conclusion  205 opposition to slavery, his arguments, even if (like so many of his other writings) heavily borrowed from others, made an important contribution to the anti-​slavery cause. Coupled with his preaching, his personal correspondence, and his influence as the grand old man of Methodism, Wesley’s shadow was cast well into the nineteenth-​century abolitionist campaign in both Britain and America. Wesley’s opposition to the American Revolution remains the best-​known feature of his political outlook. It was not because he did not share with Americans a concern for civil and religious liberty that he so staunchly opposed republican ideas. Indeed, he initially showed sympathy for Americans who were disadvantaged by the ‘Intolerable Acts’. Americans were, after all, his people –​British, Protestant, and (increasingly) Evangelical. Only when their rhetoric shifted from liberty to independence did Wesley begin to lose his love for the Americans. His accusations of a long-​held plot to throw off the yoke of the British crown were informed by Joseph Galloway who had tried without success to keep the colonies united to George III. Galloway’s claim that the Revolution was rooted in principles of Dissent that could be traced to the original seventeenth-​century establishment of the colonies further fed into Wesley’s suspicion of Dissenters. Global political crises were, in Wesley’s view, opportunities for personal repentance. In virtually all his political tracts there is a call to respond with repentance and faith toward looming international crises. God was at work among the nations to sweep them out with a broom of destruction as an instrument of divine judgement. Should all the liberties enjoyed by British subjects be suddenly swept away what refuge would be left other than to be held in the bosom of a redeeming God? Wesley’s political world was characterised by this personal element, and this should not surprise us, since his field preaching constituted an appeal to ordinary people to see themselves as objects of Christ’s dying love, to seek refuge in his wounds, and, as happy children, to rush to the embrace of a crucified God. This may seem overly individualistic in an age like our own where political change is seen in terms of collective action, but it reflects the emphasis on the agency of the person typical of the eighteenth century. Methodism was the religion of the first-​person personal pronoun, with a stress on personal agency that provided an avenue of individual choice, which would lead in the nineteenth century to a wider participation of the ordinary person in the social sphere, including in the world of politics. Perhaps the most surprising discovery in this book is Wesley’s virtual determinism. More virulent an anti-​Calvinist than any other eighteenth-​century figure, Wesley nonetheless held a providential view of history in which God’s purposes for the nations could not be frustrated by any human action. His rejection of unconditional election and divine decrees of predestination on the personal level sat alongside a doctrine of God’s sovereignty over public affairs as seemingly deterministic as any Calvinist’s. This comes through most clearly in the exhortations to repentance that frequently appear at the

206 Conclusion end of his political tracts and in his eventual admission that the American Revolution (something he opposed for the entire duration of the war) was in the end an event permitted by Providence and thus something to be accepted as a new political reality. One section of the community of the people called Methodist was now also an American people and their theological identity was for Wesley more determinative than the political arrangements under which they now lived. Reverent and passive submission to all constituted authority was the overarching biblical principle that Wesley affirmed. Such a principle would now be lived out for some Methodists under the conditions set in place under the American Constitution and for others under the king-​in-​Parliament. Wesley was one of the most widely travelled people in eighteenth-​century Britain and his published journals are a rollicking ride over hill and dale that provide us with a fascinating portrait of town and country life in the Georgian Age. This first-​hand exposure to the lives and conditions of ordinary people gives Wesley’s reflections on the state of the nation, including its trade, levels of employment, and population demographics, an authenticity and a vividness not always found in estimates made at a cool distance. Though his love for the poor was genuine, and his preference for their company was made clear in his itinerant lifestyle, at the same time there is in Wesley a moralism that can only be described as evincing a lack of sympathy for, and even victim-​blaming of, the troubled poor. Those who bought smuggled goods, even if in order to survive, had better starve than steal.16 Employers should refuse work to anyone convicted of smuggling.17 Some were rebuked who had no thought for God in good times and had now turned to repentance during their time of want, while others were asked whether their laziness might have had anything to do with their present poverty.18 The bodies of suicides should be exposed in the streets as a public warning against others tempted to the sin of self-​murder.19 These are jarring instances of a lack of compassion that stand out in all the more bold relief given Wesley’s usual compassionate stance. When it came to practical solutions, Wesley was not satisfied with individual responsibility alone. He saw a place for government intervention through taxation and trade policies that might alleviate food shortages, and he advised the Prime Minister on such matters. He seemed to approve of the newer economic theories of Adam Smith including that a fixed price on goods was an outmoded approach in the face of market fluctuations, but like Smith he was keenly aware of the social dimensions of economic practices. No economist, he at least offered economic solutions to social problems which, even if deemed impractical, were driven by a genuine concern for struggling people. Again, though practical, systemic solutions were offered, Wesley deemed the chief causes of want to be the gluttony and luxury of the wealthy so individual morality remained an important factor in addressing poverty. Though Wesley was not the same kind of one-​eyed English patriot as John Wilkes, and though he was willing to see Britain’s empire crumble

Conclusion  207 rather than depend on slavery, it is also clear that he had a great love for his country and felt it the best constituted nation on earth. Britain’s free, Protestant, maritime economy exhibited qualities that made it, in Wesley’s mind, a bulwark against tyranny. Though celebrated as a proto-​ecumenist for his Pietist insistence on privileging the religion of the heart over doctrinal agreement, it is impossible to avoid the fact that Wesley shared the anti-​Catholic sentiment that was typical of his era. The German Pietist diaspora in Ireland welcomed Wesley’s message, refracted as it had been through their own tradition as an originating source, and underscoring the global dimensions of Evangelicalism as a community that transcended political boundaries through a shared religious experience. We see the global dimensions of the discourse over liberty in the Irish nationalist identification with American colonists. In resisting what they perceived as a dictatorial ministry and a tyrannical king, the Irish and the Americans shared in the same struggle. For Wesley, rebellion was rebellion whether across the Atlantic or across the Irish Sea. Concerns about a growing Catholic population in England in the 1770s and 1780s led to public disturbances that drew Wesley into the fray. He could not support the lifting of civil restrictions upon Catholics since to do so would threaten Britain’s role as a global Protestant power. Wesley’s political ideas extended well into the nineteenth century as British Wesleyan Methodism developed into a vigorous and growing denomination. Though increasingly situated more in Nonconformity than Anglicanism, it retained a degree of deference toward the Church of England and issued many attestations of loyalty to the crown. Support for the ideals of the French Revolution on the part of many Dissenters was alarming to Wesleyans but such ideas penetrated the ranks of Methodism and cries for a more democratic ecclesial structure began to emerge. Attempts to silence such ‘seditious’ voices led inevitably to Methodist schisms, all of which can be seen as expressions of resentment at the lack of flexibility exhibited by the central Conference authority. The rhetoric of liberty continued also in the American context where ‘Republican’ and ‘Protestant’ Methodists resisted Episcopal power as a betrayal of the ideals that had led to the founding of the United States. The right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness was not extended to slaves, however, and slavery would become the most disruptive element in American Methodism in the nineteenth century as it was indeed in American society more broadly. The abolition of the British slave trade can be seen as a natural extension of John Wesley’s opposition and important Methodist leaders such as Jabez Bunting and Richard Watson played a significant activist role. That British Wesleyans failed to support the various mid-​century industrial and agricultural reform bills underscores their essentially conservative outlook. At the same time the labour movement drew much of its leadership, as well as its organisational machinery, from the minor Methodist churches. Over time, Wesley’s ideal of the ‘catholic spirit’ prevailed among Methodists so that, where the nineteenth century

208 Conclusion had been an era of Methodist splintering, the ecumenical twentieth century would prove to be one of Methodist convergence. Liberty and loyalty are the twin themes that help crystallise John Wesley’s political outlook. Liberty was a divinely given capacity to which every person had as much right as breathing. While the origin of political power lay with God, human governments had the responsibility to provide both civil and religious liberty. The surest guarantee of such liberty was through the ‘ancient constitution’, given its purest embodiment in the constitutional arrangements of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. A devout Protestant king would rule over a grateful people, while being held accountable to God and to the Parliament for his actions as a check on tyranny. This was a form of social contract, and loyalty to that contract would check seditious and rebellious grabs for power. Sentiments expressed by republican voices in America masked more sinister ambitions –​an overthrow of the ancient constitution of Britain to be replaced by a democracy of ‘the people’. In the end, however, the hand of an all-​wise Providence guided historical forces and the best response to political fluctuations was a personal one –​to make God one’s friend through repentance and faith. John Wesley was not a politician or an economist or a military strategist. He was a priest and an evangelist, so that his political world ultimately existed as a subset of a world bounded by the cosmic drama of salvation.

Notes 1 John Wesley to Thomas Morell, 4 February 1790, in Letters (Telford) 8: 199–​ 200. Thomas Morell, who knew George Washington, was one of Wesley’s preachers in America. Along with John Dickins, he had accompanied Coke and Asbury when they presented their Congratulatory Address to Washington. 2 John Wesley to W. Black, March 1790, Letters (Telford) 8: 203–​204. 3 Leeds Intelligencer, 4 May 1790, cited by Robert F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Common People of the Eighteenth Century (London: Epworth, 1945), 257. 4 James J. Caudle, ‘The Origins of Political Broadcasting: The Sermon in the Hanoverian Revolution, 1714–​1716’, in Religion, Loyalty and Sedition: The Hanoverian Succession of 1714, eds. William Gibson, Elaine Chalus, and Roberta Anderson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016), 42–​63. 5 John Wesley, ‘How Far is it the Duty of a Christian Minister to Preach Politics?’, in Works (Jackson) 11: 154–​155. The tract was also published in The Arminian Magazine consisting of extracts and original treatises on universal redemption 5 (March 1782): 151–​152. 6 Jeremy Black, George III: America’s Last King (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006), xii. Black investigates these themes in ­ chapters 7, ‘Character and Behaviour’, 108–​143 and 10, ‘Religion and Morality’, 185–​208. 7 Black, George III, xiii–​xiv. 8 Black, George III, 190. 9 John Wesley to Mary Bosanquet, 9 February 1774, Letters (Telford) 6: 72. 10 Wesley, ‘How Far is it the Duty of a Christian Minister to Preach Politics?’, Works (Jackson) 11: 154–​155.

Conclusion  209 11 Wesley, ‘How Far is it the Duty of a Christian Minister to Preach Politics?’, Works (Jackson) 11: 155. 12 David Wilkinson, ‘George III’, in The Oxford Companion to British History, ed. John Cannon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 409. 13 Wesley, ‘How Far is it the Duty of a Christian Minister to Preach Politics?’ Works (Jackson) 11: 155. 14 Some of the material in the following sections of the chapter previously appeared in a published conference paper, Glen O’Brien, ‘Liberty and Loyalty in the Long Eighteenth-​Century: A Global History Approach’, Aldersgate Papers 12 (2020). See www.acwr.edu.au/​ald​ersg​ate-​pap​ers. 15 John Wesley, Sermon 12, ‘On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel’, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 3 Sermons III, 71–​114, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986), 585, 577–​592. 16 John Wesley, A Word to a Smuggler (London, 1767), 8; see also, Works (Jackson) 11: 177–​178. 17 John Wesley, journal entry, 17 August 1776, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​1786), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), 28–​29. 18 John Wesley, journal entry, 26 October 1772, in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​1775), eds. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993), 350; John Wesley, A Serious Address to the People of England, With Regard to the State of the Nation (London, 1778), 13–​14; see also Works (Jackson) 11: 144. 19 John Wesley to William Pitt, 8 April 1790, Letters (Telford) 7: 234–​236; see also ‘Thoughts on Suicide’, in Works (Jackson) 13: 481.

References Black, Jeremy, George III: America’s Last King. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Caudle, James J. ‘The Origins of Political Broadcasting: The Sermon in the Hanoverian Revolution, 1714–​ 1716’. In Religion, Loyalty and Sedition: The Hanoverian Succession of 1714, edited by William Gibson, Elaine Chalus, and Roberta Anderson, 42–​63. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016. O’Brien, Glen, ‘Liberty and Loyalty in the Long Eighteenth-​ Century: A Global History Approach’, Aldersgate Papers 12 (2020). www.acwr.edu.au/​ald​ersg​ate-​ pap​ers Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 22 Journal and Diaries V (1765–​ 1775). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993. Ward, W. Reginald and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 23 Journal and Diaries VI (1776–​ 1786). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995. Wearmouth, Robert F. Methodism and the Common People of the Eighteenth Century. London: Epworth, 1945. Wesley, John. A Word to a Smuggler. London, 1767. Wesley, John. A Serious Address to the People of England, With Regard to the State of the Nation. London, 1778.

210 Conclusion Wesley, John, ‘How Far Is it the Duty of a Christian Minister to Preach Politics?’, The Arminian Magazine consisting of extracts and original treatises on universal redemption 5 (March 1782): 151–​152. Wesley, John. Sermon 12, ‘On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel’. In The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 3 Sermons III, 71–​114, edited by Albert C. Outler, 577–​592. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986. Wilkinson, David. ‘George III’. In The Oxford Companion to British History, edited by John Cannon, 408–​409. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by ‘n’ and the endnote number e.g., 20n1 refers to endnote 1 on page 20 abolition of: boroughs 52; the monarchy 3, 57; slavery 75–​6, 88–​95, 205, 207; see also anti-​slavery Africa (also African) 73–​5, 78–​9, 83–​4, 87–​8, 91, 103n129; Americans 93, 95; food 81; Methodists 95; Muslims 9, 74, 79; Royal Company 97n36, 167n89; slaves 73–​95, 97n36; traders 80; West (also West-​Central) 8, 80, 99n51 Allen, William 50, 53 American Revolution see war of American Independence Anglican (also Church of England) 8, 13, 22, 27, 31–​3, 35, 38n36, 46, 49, 51, 58, 64, 130, 171, 178–​80, 203–​4, 207; Anglicanism 32, 207; Arminianism 189; clergy 28, 41n78, 178; ecclesiastical politics 2; Evangelicals 8; society 41n85 Anne, Queen 6, 34, 82, 113, 176 anti-​: abolitionist 84; American 11, 125; Calvinist 205; Catholic 4, 9, 12–​13, 22, 57, 170, 173, 177–​8, 180–​1, 183–​4, 186, 189, 207; French 5; libertarian 184; London Anti-​Slavery Society 91; loyalist 116; Methodist 13, 135n38, 160; royal 135n40; slavery 10, 75–​7, 81, 90–​4, 98n41, 98n44, 205; trinitarian 58 aristocracy 4, 62, 75, 122 Arminianism 2, 189 Asbury, Francis 10, 94, 116, 127, 131–​2, 142n171, 208n1 Athanasian Creed 49, 67n28 Austria 6, 48, 64; see also War of the Austrian Succession

authority 10, 28, 53, 82, 113, 142n171, 172, 200, 207; over America 132; challenges to 49; contempt for 128; constituted 14, 22, 110, 206; of the crown (also of the king, of monarchs) 2, 4, 33, 34, 111; divinely instituted 2, 8, 13, 28, 56, 62, 64, 111, 125; of the papacy (also Catholic) 177, 179–​180, 185; respect for 58; sovereign 3; submission to 8, 13, 14, 22, 94, 202, 206 balance of power 4, 34 Ballingarrane 176 Bandin 171 Bank of England 5, 57, 182–​3 Baptist 109, 115 Bath 157, 185 Battle of Culloden 23 Belfast 173 Berkshire 159 Bethnal Green 11, 117 biblical (also scriptural) 8, 36, 74, 76, 83, 100n82, 112, 126, 132, 150, 175, 202, 206 Birmingham 159 Boston 51, 53, 85, 120; Harbour 120; Port Act 121; ‘Sons of Liberty of’ 51, 57; Tea Party 121 Bourbons 6, 184 Bristol 29, 76, 80, 89, 97n30, 115, 125, 134n13, 159, 170, 186; Gazette 109 British East India Company 6 British Isles 7, 37n10 Burke, Edmund 2, 35, 48, 67n34, 120, 124, 138n88, 186

212 Index Bute, John Stuart Earl of 47–​8, 50, 58, 66n15, 67n26 Buxton, Thomas Foxwell 91 Byrom, John 27 Calvinist 12, 52, 114, 123, 125, 130, 205 Cambridge 46, 148 Canada 6, 47–​8, 114, 129, 183 Carlisle 23–​4 Carolina 59: North 85, 94, 97n36, 128; Slave Act 77; South 73, 76–​7, 81, 85–​7, 94, 97n40 Caroline, Queen 31 Catholic 7, 12–​13, 23, 25, 33, 35, 38n30, 39n43, 41n85, 113, 125, 170–​190, 207; anti-​(see anti-​ Catholic); authority 179; clergy 170, 180, 183; Church of Rome 12, 179–​80; doctrine (also theology) 170, 178–​80, 188–​9; population 125, 171–​2, 175, 179, 181, 189, 207; Relief Act 13, 181–​4; rule 23, 25, 27, 33; spirit 170, 177, 189, 207 Charles I 63, 110 Charles II 31, 63 Charleston (also Charlestown) 76, 86 Chartist reforms 14, 202 Chesapeake 93, 116 Cheshire 159 children 3, 34, 79, 81, 109, 113, 122, 129, 132, 153, 159, 184; of God 85, 129, 205 Church of England (see Anglican) Church of Rome (see Catholic) Clark, J.C.D. 35, 37n11 Clerk, Sir John of Penicuik 24 Clowe, Chancey 116 colonies (also colonisation) 5, 74–​5, 91–​3, 96n14, 109–​11, 156, 160, 205; American 4, 6, 10–​12, 48, 50, 53, 56–​7, 76, 78, 86, 91–​3, 110–​33, 160, 188, 201, 204–​5 commerce 4, 57, 75, 81, 93, 158, 160–​1, 163, 204 commodities 6, 48, 50 common sense 1, 52, 64, 114, 176 Confederates 94, 120–​1 Conference: Irish Methodist 176; Methodist Episcopal Church 93–​4; Methodist Society 30, 90–​2, 94, 113, 128, 132, 151, 202, 207; President 91 Congress: in America 119–​20, 126, 132, 204; Continental 120, 130, 136n55, 141n159; of Vienna 7; Hymn for 131

conservative (also conservativism) 2, 8, 109, 112, 190, 202, 207 constitution (also constitutional) 2–​4, 34–​5, 42n92, 53–​4, 61, 64, 100n91, 114, 116–​18, 123, 132; American 117–​8, 123, 132, 206; ancient (also ancien régime) 3–​4, 23, 36, 56, 61, 124, 131–​2, 202–​3, 208; monarchy 4, 64, 132; organic 2, 61; unconstitutional 53, 118; Whig theory 34 contract 3, 4, 34–​5, 61, 208; social 3, 34, 64, 119, 204, 208 de Coetlogon, Charles Edward 8 Cook, James 8 Cork 171, 173–​6, 186, 192n39 Cornwall 117, 149, 151–​2, 157, 161 Council of Trent 178–​9 Courtmatrix 176 Cromwell, Oliver 33, 53, 110–​11, 204 (the) Crown 25, 34, 36, 41n85, 54, 120, 123, 186; authority of (see authority); freedoms (also rights) guaranteed by 2, 10, 34, 61, 109–​11, 189; Legislature of 3; loyalty to 4, 51, 180–​1, 183, 186, 200, 202–​4, 207; power of 2; rebellion against 4, 13, 34, 112–​4, 130, 205; relationship with Parliament 2–​3, 34, 36, 54; submission to 27, 33–​4; under (also subject to) 2, 12, 61, 110–​1, 123, 189 Cumberland 24, 159; Duke of 23, 171 Daniel, John 24 Deacon, Thomas 27 Declaration of Independence 93, 118–​20, 131, 137n82 Deism 26 democratic 4, 11, 14, 55–​6, 62, 122, 127, 207–​8 Devon 149 diaspora 8, 175–​7, 189, 207 dissent 22, 27, 38n36, 51, 61, 127, 182, 202; Dissenters 32, 45–​6, 49, 59, 64, 90, 103n141, 114, 119, 124, 126, 129–​30, 173, 203–​7 divine 4, 11, 34, 61, 124–​5, 127, 133, 156, 187, 205, 208; authority 2, 13, 34, 125; determination 125; gift 4; grace 127; law 3; ordained 51, 83, 89, 127, 130; power 89, 95; right 2, 4, 9, 22–​36, 64, 66n19, 203; Providence 35–​6, 76, 117, 125, 127, 129, 133, 201, 203; sovereignty 124, 142n175

Index  213 Douglass, Frederick 87 Dublin 171–​4, 176, 180, 185 Dunbar, Sergeant 23 dynasty: Stuart 27; Hanoverian 2, 23, 27, 35–​6, 52 economy (also economic, economist) 1–​2, 9, 12, 22, 30, 73, 75–​6, 84, 88–​9, 92–​3, 96n20, 97n30, 117, 121, 148–​9, 152, 156–​61, 163–​4, 166n44, 175, 180, 200, 202, 206–​8; advantages (also benefits) 9, 75, 204; conditions (also circumstances) 12, 122, 149, 152, 204; forces (also factors) 5, 76, 163; prosperity 4, 73, 88; theories 157, 163, 206 ecumenical 170, 177, 189; proto-​ 12, 170, 189, 207 Edwards, Jonathan 11–​12, 16n34, 128 emancipation 75, 91–​6; Act 92 Embury, Philip 176 empiricism 2 enlightenment 73, 177, 182, 186, 190, 203 Epworth 27, 46, 58 Europe 5–​9, 16n28, 26, 35, 53, 73–​4, 78–​80, 84, 87–​8, 91, 100n91, 137n82, 161, 177, 200–​1 evangelical 11, 33, 76, 85, 109, 127–​8, 177, 189, 202, 205; Evangelicalism 7–​8, 207; revival 8, 16n28, 26–​7, 76, 127 evangelism 3, 208 Evans, Caleb 13, 109, 114–​5 evil 2, 29, 32, 57, 78, 89, 92, 94, 113, 117, 125, 130, 151; good and 28, 84; to speak 29, 31, 126, 201; (slave) trade 88, 120 Exeter 158 Fletcher, John 8, 115 Fox: Charles James 186; Henry 29 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 184 France 5–​7, 12–​3, 16n25, 22–​6, 35, 46–​8, 51, 53, 57–​8, 81, 90, 98n44, 99n67, 124, 129, 148–​9, 155–​6, 172–​5, 183–​186, 202; Catholic 114, 125, 189; invasion 24–​5, 48, 173, 184; see also Revolution freedom 10, 29, 46–​7, 54–​5, 59, 65, 86, 110, 119, 183, 202–​3; from British rule 86, 119; of conscience (also of choice) 4, 180; individual 122, 124; right to 9, 65, 88, 182; and slavery

84, 86, 88, 93, 122; spiritual (see spiritual freedom) Galloway, Joseph 12, 121, 130–​1, 205 George I 6, 34 George II 6, 30, 31, 34, 38n36, 40n65, 45, 82 George III 5, 11–​12, 14, 29–​35, 39n52, 45–​65, 66n15–​17, 67n28, 93, 102n127, 114, 116, 119–​127, 130–​1, 149–​151, 155–​7, 160, 162, 184, 189, 200–​5 Georgia Trustees 82–​86 Germany 26, 34, 73, 113, 176, 189, 207 Gloucestershire 159 Gordon: Lord George 182–​3; Riots 13, 57, 181, 185–​6, 194n92 gospel 86, 91, 124, 202; influence of 91; preaching of 4, 79, 203; rejection of 26; spread of (also propagation) 27, 83, 188 Grand Alliance 6–​7 Grattan, Henry 67n34, 173, 186 Great Awakening 7, 12, 130 Grenville, Lord 6, 47 Guier, Phillip 176 Hancock, John 51, 120–​1, 138n97 Hanoverian 2, 6, 9, 22–​8, 33–​6, 172, 181; era 22, 200; succession 6, 22, 33–​4, 59, 123; see also dynasty heaven 11, 26, 33, 77, 79, 115, 119, 178 Heck, Barbara 176 hell (also afterlife) 11, 26, 47, 58, 87, 178, 180 Higden, William 27, 38n41 House of Commons 10, 27, 45–​6, 50, 53–​4, 57, 60, 89–​91, 153 House of Lords 31, 49, 90 Howe, William 12, 13, 130, 142n164, 174–​5; Richard 12, 130 Huguenots 7, 8 humanism 11 Hume, David 35, 73 identity 67n34, 158, 177, 185; British 3, 158, 177; ecclesial 189; Methodist 13, 202, 206 India (also Indian) 6, 48; West 77, 88, 90, 91, 96n14 industrial 202; centres 56, 158; economies 157; growth 154;

214 Index innovation 5; pre-​ 157; reform bills 207; see also Revolution Ireland 6, 13, 23, 27, 51, 129, 160, 162, 170–​7, 179–​80, 187, 189, 201, 207; Church of 171, 173, 179, 186 Irish 13, 28, 37n6, 41n85, 121, 181, 170–​190, 190n8; Catholics 170–​3, 180, 184, 186, 189; Methodists 176; Protestants 171–​2; Rebellion 174 Islam see Muslim Italy 64, 126 ‘Jackson’ edition (of Wesley’s Works) 1, 25, 103n129, 134n14, 137n71, 163 Jacobite 24, 27–​9, 34–​6, 37n6, 39n43, 47, 61, 64, 66n19, 114; forces 23, 26, 172; ideas 27, 36, 66n19; influence 9, 22; invasion (1715) 24, 26; rebellion 22–​3, 28, 30, 34, 38n33; sympathies 22, 27, 52, 149; uprising 6, 9, 22–​3 James I 63 James II 4, 31, 33–​4, 37n11, 172, 186 Jefferson, Thomas 93, 118–​9 Jennings, Theodore 2, 14n5 Jesus Christ 14, 23, 26, 85, 92, 150, 178, 180, 202–​3 Johnson, Samuel 10, 35, 81, 86, 111, 113, 115, 134n17 justice (also Justice) 4, 23, 26, 46–​7, 49, 53, 79, 80, 84, 88, 118, 184 king 3, 5, 8, 10, 14, 25, 27–​8, 30–​6, 45–​65, 110–​1, 113–​120, 124–​6, 130–​1, 150–​1, 155–​7, 160, 184, 189, 201–​8 Lancashire 159 Leeds 92, 113, 128, 132 liberty (also liberties) 1–​5, 8–​14, 25–​7, 34–​6, 42n92, 45–​65, 76, 81–​8, 92–​3, 109–​133, 159, 163, 173–​4, 177, 180, 183–​4, 203–​209; Boston Sons of 57; civil and religious 2, 4, 9, 27, 34, 46, 52–​3, 59–​61, 64, 116–​124, 126, 132, 159, 170, 189, 203–​5; libertine 47, 64, 69n91; and loyalty (see loyalty and liberty); natural (see natural liberty, natural right); of the press 47, 117; and the slave trade 76–​93 Limerick 172, 174–​6, 190n7, 192n39 Lincoln, Abraham 94 Locke, John 3, 36, 64, 177, 188, 204

London 23–​5, 27, 46, 50–​2, 56, 75–​7, 84, 91, 111, 121, 125, 134n13, 159, 174, 178, 180, 182, 186; London Chronical 180; London Magazine 114 long eighteenth century 4–​5, 7–​8, 15n20, 200, 202, 209n14 Louis XIV 11, 175 Louis XV 25 Louis XVI 6 loyal 3, 24, 32–​3, 60–​1, 64–​5, 123, 131, 173, 188; disloyal 59, 61, 110, 117, 126; to God 3, 65, 208; to king (also to crown, monarch, regent) 3, 4, 24, 27, 36, 51–​2, 64, 119, 124, 150, 180–​1, 183, 186, 200, 202–​4, 207–​8; and liberty 3, 4, 14, 15n20, 61, 208; Methodist 24, 34, 52, 124 loyalist 2, 8, 10, 16n34, 58, 110, 112, 115, 127, 130, 173; see also anti-​loyalist Lutherans 7 Manchester 24, 27, 159, 181 Mary, Queen of Scots 32 Mary I (also Bloody Mary) 25, 31, 59 Mary II 33 Maryland 76, 81, 85, 93, 115–​16, 128, 162 Massachusetts 98n41, 110, 120, 127–​8 Mead, Mary 46, 66 Middlesex 46, 50, 53, 55–​7, 59 missionary 58, 91, 112, 171, 187; expansion 8; Wesleyan Methodist Society 91 moral (also morality, moralist, moralistic) 9, 15n20, 22, 26, 53, 64, 75, 84, 87–​8, 92, 96n28, 149, 157–​8, 164, 176, 179, 188, 203–​4, 206; character (also quality) 54, 87; duty 201; order 28; responsibility 61, 122; superiority 9, 79; theology 166n44 Moravians 8 Muslim (also Islam, Mahometan) 9, 31, 74, 78–​9, 156 Napoleon (also Napoleonic) 5, 7, 90, 202 Native Americans 11, 91 natural 87, 185, 188, 207; act 83; affection 79; beings 60; cause 60; consequence 58; history 82; image of God 8; justice 84; law 3, 8–​9, 77, 83,

Index  215 112; liberty 4, 83, 86, 122, 204; order 36; right 62–​3, 88, 92, 123; sciences 200; tendency 180 (the) Netherlands (also Holland, Dutch) 5–6, 24, 26, 33, 50, 62, 98n41, 113, 132, 137n82, 172 New England 11, 126, 128 New York 116, 118, 125, 127–​8 Newcastle 24; Duke of 6, 25, 47 Newfoundland 129, 162–​3 Newton: Isaac 82; John A. 170 Nonjurors 27, 52 Norman Conquest 4 North, Prime Minister Frederick 50, 60, 109–​11, 116, 133n7, 182 Northampton 11–​12, 127–​8 Norwich 152, 154 oath 30, 116, 181, 188; of allegiance 28, 114; of loyalty 116, 181, 183; of supremacy 28 Oglethorpe, James 86, 97n36 Oxford (also Oxfordshire) 27, 36, 46, 52, 58, 81, 128, 159 Palatines 8, 171, 176, 192n39 Paine, Thomas 36, 204 patriot (also patriotic, patriotism) 9, 13, 33, 35, 45–​65, 70n104, 113, 116, 153, 173–​4, 204, 206 Paul the Apostle 8, 150 Philadelphia 75, 98n44, 111, 128, 174 piety (also Pietist) 5, 7, 26, 46–​7, 152, 177, 189–​90, 207; diaspora 175–​7, 189; evangelical 189–​190, 207 Pitt, William: the Elder 47–​8, 129, 201; the Younger 6, 48, 89, 102n127, 157 plagiarism 111, 114–​5 de Plessay, Louis 25 Poland 6, 23 Pope, Alexander 49 popery 25, 57, 114, 172, 180, 181, 183–​4, 186 preaching 4, 11, 13, 26, 29, 30, 38n36, 61, 65, 76, 79, 85–​6, 88–​95, 96n14, 101n96, 112–​3, 115–​7, 125, 127–​8, 133n3, 151, 160, 170–​1, 173, 176–​9, 185–​7, 200–​8; see also gospel, sermons Presbyterian 13, 16n34, 41n85, 45, 54, 171, 176, 190n8 Pretender: the Old 23; the Young 22–​7, 34–​6, 37n8, 114, 178, 181

(the) poor 1, 2, 12, 14, 61, 85, 112, 114, 148–​9, 152–​164, 176, 184, 204, 206 Price, Richard 11, 119–​127, 138n87, 204 Prichard, James Cowles 74 progress (also progressive) 10, 76, 128–​9, 177 providence (also providential) 30, 34, 35–​6, 61, 76, 127, 129, 132–​3, 142n175, 172, 201, 203, 206, 208; view of history 117, 125, 127, 130, 205; see also divine Providence Prussia 6, 31, 48 Puritan 113, 130 Quakers 9, 75–​7, 98n41, 187 race 5, 74 Rankin, Thomas 112, 115–​7 Rathkeale 176 repentance: 8–​9, 26, 92, 118–​9, 127–​8, 174, 202, 205–​6, 208; national 92, 118, 163 republic 51, 93, 116, 123, 201–​2; republican 11, 13, 28, 51, 57, 93, 111, 116, 204–​5, 207–​8; republicanism 11, 122, 203 resistance 7, 14, 34, 81, 173 responsibility: for the needy 157; personal (also individual) 157, 164, 201, 206; sacred 61; of the state 4, 61, 122, 208 revisionist accounts 23, 32, 133n2, 153 revival (also Revivalism, Revivalists) 5, 7–​8, 12, 76, 127–​8, 130, 141n150; Catholic 171, 174, 176; evangelical 7–​8, 26–​7; Methodist 32; of the slave trade 78 revolution 2, 4, 11, 14, 34, 55, 59, 90, 110, 112, 116–​7, 127, 130–​3, 134n14, 200, 202; American (see War of American Independence); French 5–​6, 57, 194n92, 200, 202, 207; Glorious (of 1688) 2, 4, 33–​4, 36, 63, 123, 126, 158, 186, 208; Industrial 148; Methodist 124; scientific 74 Ridley, Matthew 24 rights 3–​4, 28, 33–​4, 46–​7, 49, 54, 58–​9, 61, 82–​3, 84, 93–​4, 109–​11, 113, 122–​3, 126, 134n13, 139n102, 153, 172, 175, 182–​3, 201–​2, 207–​8; Bill of 52, 55; hereditary 34–​5; human 2–​5, 9, 36; legal 50; moral

216 Index 92; natural 2–​3, 9, 22, 59, 62–​3, 75, 83, 88, 92, 123; voting (also voters, electors) 29, 55, 57, 63; see also divine right Robin John, Ancona and Ephraim 79–​82, 99n59 Rodda, Martin 116 Romaine, William 8 Rousseau: G.S. 65n7; Jean Jacques 79 rule of law 3–​4 Russia 6–​7, 48 Sacheverell, Henry 27, 38n36, 51 Scotland 23–​4, 27, 37n6, 41n85, 47, 50–​1, 58, 60, 125, 162, 182, 187; Highlands 23, 37n6, 176; revival in 127; immigration 121, 159; poverty 129 self: assured 174; controlled 204; defence 172; denying 204; described 35; delusion 177; evident 150, 179; expression 61, 122; governed 122; help 28; identity 13; improvement (also initiative) 1, 102n112, 180; indulgent 164; interest 55, 119, 157; murder (also suicide) 157, 206 sermons 11–​12, 32, 39n43, 67n28, 89, 91, 96n14, 124, 141n145, 134n13, 158, 196n141, 200; of George Whitefield 85, 101n95; on political 127, 200; of Sacheverell 38n36; and slavery 89, 91; see also preaching Sheffield 159 sin 12, 26, 32–​3, 76, 85, 117–​8, 124, 127, 137n71, 151, 174, 185, 206 slavery 4, 8–​11, 14, 68n55, 73–​95, 96n28, 97n36, 97n40–​1, 99n63, 100n81, 192n110, 103n129, 112, 120–​4, 129, 131, 162–​3, 167n89, 204–​5, 207; to sin 127; under papal tyranny 25, 185; see also anti-​slavery, abolition, war and slavery, freedom and slavery Smith: Adam 35, 75, 100n91, 157, 163, 206; Charles 158, 163; Josiah 86; William 111 smuggling 12, 120–​1, 138n97, 149–​152, 157, 206 social 2, 3, 5, 9, 14, 22, 36, 50, 61, 74, 76, 152–​4, 157, 163, 171, 181, 205–​6; conscience 164, 204; contract (also compact) 3, 34, 36, 64, 119, 203–​4, 208; Darwinism 91; exclusion

95; privilege 172; struggle 10; tracts (also writings) 9–​13, 33, 164, 203 Spain 6–​7, 13, 35, 48, 78, 99n67, 126, 137n82, 174–​5, 186, 189 spirit 56, 93, 116–​8, 123, 129, 170, 183, 190; of God 14; of grace 27; of rebellion 128, 56; of religious intolerance 178; see also Catholic spirit spiritual (also spirituality) 28, 52, 85, 89, 101n96, 128; attitude 11, 131; freedom (also liberty) 84, 129; journey 128; powers 9; rebellion 130; renewal (also awakening, reform) 4, 7, 127; state 33, 38n27 Staffordshire 148, 159 Toplady, Augustus 114–​5, 123 Tory 2, 9, 14n6, 22, 28, 33–​5, 41n85, 58, 64, 92, 110, 112, 114, 117; Toryism 2, 22, 112 Towers, Joseph 13, 45, 54, 65, 114, 204 trust 3, 13, 149, 181, 186–​7, 189, 190n1, 202–​4 Tudor, Mary of France 59 Ulster 171–​2 unemployment 12, 152, 156 Unitarian 119, 203 unity 2, 111, 170, 187 Virginia 80–​3, 85, 116, 128, 162 Voltaire 25 Wade, George 24 Wales 122, 127, 154; Prince of 201 Walpole: government of 6; Horace 30, 32; Robert, 201 war: American Civil 6, 94; of American Independence 5, 6, 11–​12, 23, 88, 93, 109, 116–​8, 123–​4, 127, 130–​3, 140n125, 142n164, 149, 156, 160–​163, 183–​4, 188, 201, 205–​6; of the Austrian Succession 5, 6, 23, 64; as divine punishment 11, 12, 53, 117–​118, 124, 127–​8, 130–​1, 206; English Civil 27, 59, 110, 124, 126; Nine Years’ War 6; of the Polish Succession 6; of principalities and powers 89; prisoners of 84, 186; as providential 206; Seven Years’ War

Index  217 5, 6, 30–​1, 48, 158, 173, 184, 186; and slavery 79, 85, 89, 90, 93; of the Spanish Succession 5, 6, 8 Warwickshire 159 Washington: Fort 125; George 13, 94, 130, 132, 166n61, 174, 189, 208n1 Wesley, Charles 12, 39n43, 76–​7, 79–​80, 109, 111–​2, 137n68, 142n164, 196n142 Wesley, Samuel 27 Wesley, Susanna 27 Westmorland 159 Whig 1, 2, 8, 10–​11, 23–​4, 27–​8, 30, 33–​5, 38n36, 41n85, 45, 47, 54, 64, 92, 112, 114, 123, 203; dominance 58; factions 48 White Australia policy 5 Whiteboys 175

Whitefield, George 4, 11–​12, 15n20, 23, 26, 52, 77, 83–​6, 95n7, 100n81–​2, 127, 134n13 Wilberforce, William 75, 89–​91, 103n129, 103n130 Wilkes, John 9, 45–​61, 64, 65n4, 65n7, 66n7, 66n8–​9, 67n25–​6, 67n28, 67n31, 67n34, 68n50, 69–​70n91, 182, 184, 204, 206 William III (also William of Orange) 5, 27, 33, 63, 172, 181, 186 William the Conqueror 53, 63 Winscom, Jasper 10 Witherspoon, John 131 women 11, 17n47, 46, 62–​3, 81, 117–​18, 122 Worcestershire 159 Yorkshire 159