The first, Susannah, died in April 1693, when a little more than two years old. Emilia was baptized by her father in South Ormsby church, January 13, 1692. Arriving at womanhood she married a Quaker, an apothecary at Epworth, of the name of Harper, who left her a young widow. Her husband was a violent Whig, and she was an unbending Tory. About five years before her father’s death, she became a teacher at the boarding-school of a Mrs Taylor, in Lincoln, where she received bad treatment and worse wages. In 1735 she set up a school of her own at Gainsborough. For many years before her death, she was maintained entirely by her brothers, and lived at the preachers’ house adjoining the chapel in West Street, Seven Dials, London. She died at nearly eighty years of age, about the year 1770. She is reported to have been beautiful in face and figure, and majestic in her address and carriage, and to have had “strong sense, much wit, a prodigious memory, and a talent for poetry.” She was a good classical scholar, and wrote a beautiful hand. John Wesley said she was the best reader of Milton that he ever heard.
Annesley and Jedidiah were twins. They were baptized December 3, 1694[1694], and both of them died in infancy.
Susannah, the second, was born in 1695[1695], and, at the age of about twenty-six, was married to Richard Ellison, Esq., a man of good family, who farmed his own estate, and had a respectable establishment. She was good-natured, very facetious, and a little romantic, but behaved herself with the strictest moral correctness. She had a mind naturally strong and vivacious, and well refined by a good education. Her husband was little inferior to the apostate angels in wickedness. His mind was common, coarse, and uncultivated. He was the plague of his wife, and a constant affliction to her family. After bearing him several children, she left him, and hid herself in London, where she had considerable helps from her brother John. Henceforth she firmly refused to see her faithless and brutal husband, or to have any intercourse with him. Her son John lived and died an excise-officer in Bristol. Her daughter Ann married Mr Pierre le Lièvre, a French Protestant refugee, whose son Peter was educated at Kingswood school, took orders in the Church of England, and died at Lutterworth, in Leicestershire. Her daughter Deborah married Mr Pierre Collet, another French refugee; and her son, Richard Annesley, died at the age of twenty-seven, leaving two orphan daughters, of whom Mrs Voysey, the excellent wife of a pious dissenting minister, was one. Mrs Ellison’s husband was reduced to a state of poverty, and, through her brother John, obtained alms from Ebenezer Blackwell.[[104]] It is pleasing to relate that, at length, he became a reformed man; and that, on the 11th of April 1760, Charles Wesley writes: “I buried my brother Ellison, and prayed by him in his last moments. He said he was not afraid to die, and believed God, for Christ’s sake, had forgiven him.”[[104]]
Mary Wesley was born in 1696, and, therefore, just about the time that her father left South Ormsby. She was married to John Whitelamb, whom we shall have to notice in a future chapter. Through afflictions, and, probably, through some mismanagement in her nurse, she became considerably deformed, and her growth in consequence was much stinted: but all written and oral testimonies concur in the statement that her face was exquisitely beautiful, and was a fair and legible index to a mind and disposition almost angelic. Her humble, obliging, even, and amiable temper, made her the favourite and delight of the whole Wesley family. She died in early womanhood in becoming the mother of her first child. John Wesley preached her funeral sermon at Wroote; and her sister Mehetabel wrote an elegy, which was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1736, an extract from which, on account of its delineation of character and exquisite poetry, is here subjoined:—
“From earliest dawn of life, through thee alone,
The saint sublime, the finish’d Christian shone;
Yet would not grace one grain of pride allow,
Or cry, “Stand off, I’m holier than thou!”
With business or devotion never cloy’d,
No moment of thy time pass’d unemploy’d;