Lady Mary Fitzgerald wished to visit Fletcher at Madeley, and to her he wrote the following:—
“Madeley, September 3, 1781.
“My Much-honoured Lady,—Two days ago I came here, after an absence of above a month; and yesterday I received your letter, without date, which has been, I am told, waiting here some time.
“What a pity I did not rejoice sooner in the good news you send me,—that you desire to be entirely devoted to God. Indeed, complaints follow; but heaven is in that holy desire. If you cultivate it, it will produce all that conformity to a holy God, which love can bring to a human soul. As for your complaints, they are the natural expressions of that repentance which precedes the coming of the Comforter, who is to abide with us for ever. I am ready to rejoice, or to mourn with my honoured friend; and I have abundant cause to do both with respect to myself, my ministrations, the Church, and my people.
“And will you, indeed, find it in your heart to honour my house with your presence, and perfume also with your prayers the plain apartment occupied by your friend Johnson?[[523]] I wonder at nothing on earth, when I consider the condescension with which Emmanuel came down from heaven and filled a stable with His glory. Your time, my condescending friend, will suit me best. You will be queen in my hermitage; the Lord will rule in our hearts; and you will command, under Him, within our walls. You smile, perhaps, at the vastness of your new empire; but if you can be content and happy in God in my homely solitude, you will make greater advances towards bliss than if you obtained the Principality of Wales. But if you cannot be happy with Jesus, prayer, praise, godly conversation, and retirement, expect a disappointment. However, my honoured friend, if you come, come as the serious Catholics go on a pilgrimage, as French noblemen go to the Carthusian Convent at La Trappe, as the French king’s aunts went to the Carmelites,—come and do evangelical penance. Our good friend Johnson will tell you of an upper room where we crucify our old man, and have had many a visit from the new. If you do not bring her with you, bring her faith, which brought Him down, and then you shall not pine for the company of earthly princes. The Prince of Peace Himself will keep His court in our cottage, and your heart shall be one of His favourite thrones.”[[524]]
From these Christian ladies, the reader’s attention must now be directed to another.
Mary Bosanquet, oddly enough, was born in the same month, and on the same day of the month, as Fletcher; but there was this difference—she was ten years younger than he. Her birth took place in 1739, the year in which Methodism was cradled. Her father was “one of the chief merchants in London,”[[525]] and “lord of the manor of Leytonstone, in Essex.”[[526]] The place of her nativity was Forest House, a fine old mansion, three stories high, still standing in its own beautiful and spacious grounds, about a mile from Leyton, and still owned by a member of the Bosanquet family (S. R. Bosanquet, Esq.), who has recently given a plot of ground in the main street of the town on which to build the “Mary Fletcher Memorial Chapel.”
By means of a Methodist servant, Mary Bosanquet found peace with God, through faith in Jesus Christ, when she was only eight years old. At the age of thirteen, she became acquainted with Mrs. Lefevre, whose admirable “Letters on Religious Subjects” used to be one of the favourite books of the early Methodists; and concerning which Wesley himself testified: “The ‘Letters’ are patterns of truly polite epistolary correspondence; expressing the noblest sentiments in the most elegant manner, in the purest, yea, and finest language.”[[527]] At the house of Mrs. Lefevre, Miss Bosanquet was introduced to a number of godly people, many of them Methodists. When fourteen years of age, she was confirmed in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and began to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
Soon after this, her father and mother thought her “righteous over much,” and great uneasiness, on both sides, followed. The parents were members of the Church of England; but, like many other professedly Christian people, they loved gaiety and worldly pleasure. Their daughter grieved them, because she attired herself plainly, and objected to go to balls and theatres. In the midst of this unpleasantness, she became acquainted with Sarah Ryan and Sarah Crosby, and, at their humble dwelling, in Christopher Alley, Moorfields, was accustomed to meet companies of the Old Foundery Methodists. Meanwhile, the unhappiness at home increased.
At the age of twenty-one, Miss Bosanquet came into possession of “a small fortune;” and, for her own comfort and that of her family, she left the parental home, and rented two unfurnished rooms in the house of Mrs. Gold, in Hoxton Square. She “hired a sober girl;” her mother gave her two beds; and she was driven to her lodgings in her father’s coach. She reached her new home about eight o’clock at night. She had no candle. The people of the house she had never seen. She borrowed a table; and the window seat served her as a chair. Her supper consisted of bread, “rank salt butter, and water;” but she says, she “could truly say, ‘I eat my meat with gladness and singleness of heart.’ The bedstead was not, as yet, put up, and, therefore, she laid upon the floor; “and the windows” of the bedless bedroom “having no shutters, and it being a bright moonlight night,” she remarks, “the sweet solemnity thereof well agreed with the tranquillity of my spirit.”[spirit.”]