[30]. Macaulay.
[31]. Knight’s Pictorial History
[32]. Baxter’s Life and Times.
[33]. Macaulay.
[34]. Ibid.
[35]. Poems by S. Wesley, jun., London, 1736.
[36]. Vol. ii., p. 60.
[37]. The following is John Wesley’s character of King James: “He appears to have been proud, haughty, vindictive, cruel, and unrelenting; and though he approved himself an obedient subject, he certainly became one of the most intolerable sovereigns that ever reigned over a free people. He could have no true religion, at least while in England, as he made no conscience at all of adultery. He is said afterwards to have been a new man. Probably the loss of his crown was the saving of his soul.”—Wesley’s History of England, vol. iii., p. 348.
[38]. About the year 1720, Samuel Annesley, strangely enough, employed his brother-in-law, Samuel Wesley, to act as his agent in England; and the result was a serious quarrel. Annesley charged him with having received sums of money for which he had never accounted, and for having laid out moneys contrary to explicit orders. Mrs Wesley took up the matter, and, in a long letter, defended her husband against the attacks of her brother. She says, Mr Wesley has orders for the money laid out; and that, though his expenses had been great, they were honest. Mr Wesley, in attending to Mr Annesley’s business, had been compelled to be much from home, and, therefore, had been compelled to hire a curate to supply his place. Besides, Annesley had promised him a commission for business done on his account during the three years Wesley sat in Convocation, but the commission had not been paid. Mrs Wesley proposed to refer all their disputes to arbitration; and says, that if Mr Wesley is found to be in Mr Annesley’s debt, both she and her husband are quite willing for him to sequester the Epworth living in payment. Annesley had alleged that the Epworth living was worth £300 a-year, and that, on account of the difference in the cost of maintenance, this was equal to a living of £ 1000 a-year in London and its immediate neighbourhood. Mrs Wesley says, “it may full as truly be said that the Epworth living is £10,000 as £300; and even were it £300, there is no such difference in the price of provision as to justify” Annesley’s computation. In fact, the living did not yield them, in clear money, more than £130 a-year; and, all things considered, it was quite as costly to live at Epworth as it was to live in London. Mrs Wesley then declares that her husband challenges the whole world to prove him a knave; that she conceals the wants of her family from him as much as possible, because, if he were made acquainted with each particular, he would hazard his health, perhaps his life, in riding to borrow money, rather than his wife and his children should be so distressed. She adds—“He hath not deceived you; and, to say the truth, among all his wants sincerity is none. I have not reason to complain of his being deceitful, but have often blamed him for speaking his mind too freely. You think him too zealous for the party he fancies in the right, and that he has unluckily to do with the opposite faction. Mr Wesley is not factious. He is zealous in a good cause, as every one ought to be; but the furthest from being a party man of any man in the world.” The whole of this very long and painfully-interesting letter may be read in the Wesleyan Times for January 15, 1866.
[39]. History of the County of Lincoln.