The only person who did not rush out the door was John, who was still sound asleep in the attic bedroom, unaware that anything was wrong. Although John shared this room with others, he had a curtain around his bed, and no one had noticed that he was still sleeping as the nursemaid and the other children rushed from the room screaming. It was not until everyone had left the house that John finally awoke. By this time the rest of the family had lost hope for him, and they knelt down to pray to commit him to the Lord.
Thankfully for John, not everyone at the scene had the same idea. One of the neighbors who had come to watch the spectacle spotted John at the window and yelled out. The Wesleys looked up and saw John, and everyone set frantically to work to save him. Since no ladders were available nearby, several men stood on each other’s shoulders until they were able to get high enough to reach John’s window. The man at the top of the stacked-up men stretched out, pulled the shutters aside, and grabbed John by the neck, wrenching the boy out the window. Moments later John found himself on the ground, now safely part of the scene he had been watching from above.
John’s mother hugged her son tightly, and his father shook his head in amazement. “This boy is a brand plucked from the burning fire!” he exclaimed. “Let us give thanks to God! He has given me my eight children. Let the house go. I am rich enough.”
As the Wesley family watched their home burn, the Reverend Wesley concluded that someone had deliberately set the house on fire. The fire had started in the dead of night and in the thatched roof, which was not the normal way a house fire started. Samuel decided that some disgruntled parishioner had started it.
The fire smoldered until dawn, and by then everything in the house had been destroyed, including Samuel Wesley’s manuscript for his commentary on the book of Job, which was ready for the printer, his library of Greek and Latin books, and a set of valuable papers by Dr. John Annesley, along with all of the family’s clothes and food and the money from the last flax harvest.
Relief at surviving the fire soon gave way to the reality of the new situation. The Wesley family—a minister, his eight-months-pregnant wife, and eight children ranging in age from a little over a year to seventeen years old—were homeless and penniless. The situation was dire, and Samuel Wesley could see no way that his family could all stay together, at least for the foreseeable future. He and Susanna set about dividing their children among family members, friends, and parishioners who were willing to take them in. Two girls, Susanna and Hetty, were sent to London to stay with their uncle Matthew Wesley, while John and others were farmed out to local families. Emilia, the oldest daughter, was needed to help prepare for the arrival of the new baby, so Samuel and Susanna, Emilia, and little Charles boarded in a nearby house.
Within twenty-four hours of the fire, the Wesley family had scattered, and John was left alone with a family that just a day before his mother would have forbidden him to even talk to. He could hardly believe the lax life this family lived.
Chapter 3
Reforming the Family
At first John was shocked at what the sons of his adoptive family were allowed to do. It was unbelievable to him. The boys ran in and out of the house as they pleased, wrestled in the yard, ate snacks between meals, and called each other by their first names without using the term brother first. But as time went by, John grew used to his new life. He hunted for frogs and eels on the fens and visited his new friends in their homes at any time of the day or night.
The only time John’s family, minus Susanna and Hetty who were in London, were together was at church on Sunday mornings. During the service the Wesley children had to sit in the front pew under the stern glare of their father. Their mother attended the services too, though she left the latest addition to the family, baby Kezziah, at home with Emilia. Kezziah was named after one of the daughters of Job, a man in the Old Testament who underwent all sorts of terrible trials. No doubt Samuel and Susanna Wesley felt that the name suited the situation they found themselves in.
A new rectory was being constructed using bricks so that it would not burn down quite so easily. Each day John watched the progress on the family’s replacement home. He found it difficult to imagine his entire family living happily together again under its roof. The life the family had lived in the old rectory seemed so far away to him now.
Finally, one year after the fire, work on the new rectory was finished, and the Wesley family were reunited. Samuel and Susanna, new baby Kezziah, and two-year-old Charles moved in first. Samuel and Susanna then collected their other children from the families they had been staying with on the fens, and finally Susanna and Hetty returned from London, full of ideas about becoming governesses.
Susanna Wesley was appalled when she realized the extent of the influence that others had had on her children. The children ran around at will, yelled in the house, recited rude ditties, and spoke with the thick accent of those who lived on the fens, an accent their mother described as “clownish.” Reformation of her children’s character was needed, and Susanna was just the person to do it. In her methodical way she made up a list of rules by which her children’s behavior would be measured. Violators of the new rules would be punished as a warning to the rest of the children that they must fall into line.
The rules included rewards for positive behavior as well as punishment for negative actions. If one of the children was guilty of a character fault and confessed it before he or she was caught, the child would not be punished. And as long as a child was trying his or her hardest to do the right thing, he or she would be encouraged and guided to do so. However, if any of the children were caught in a sinful act, such as lying, dishonoring the Lord’s Day, being disobedient, or quarrelling, they would receive the rod as punishment. In addition, if anyone made a promise to give away something to another person, the item became that person’s property permanently; the one who had given it had no right to ask for it back under any circumstances. Another rule was that no girl should be made to do household chores until she could read well.
Other changes were implemented in the family as well. The children learned to sing psalms and chanted them four times a day, and they were permanently paired up, the oldest with the youngest, the second oldest with the second youngest, and so on. John and Hetty became a pair, and Hetty read John a chapter from the New Testament and a psalm before school started each day and a chapter from the Old Testament and another psalm at the end of class.
Soon Susanna decided that more steps were needed to bring her wayward children back into line. She started taking one child aside for an hour each night of the week to quiz the child on his or her spiritual progress and answer any questions he or she might have about the Bible or theology. John’s evening for this individual attention was Thursday, and John asked more questions than any of the other children. His mother noted his logical way of looking at things and answered her seven-year-old’s concerns with dignity and respect.
Eventually the rules and Susanna’s force of will helped restore a sense of unity to the family, but the children were never as insulated from the life of the community around them as they had been before the fire. As a result of their having been scattered among so many different families, all of the children had been exposed to other ways of life, and at times they fought against the life they were being forced to resume. Years later, in a letter to John, Susanna Wesley wrote about the effects of the fire upon her family.
For some years we went on very well. Never were children in better order. Never were children better disposed to piety, or in more subjection to their parents, till that fatal dispersion of them, after the fire, into several families.
Two years after the reunification of the family, Samuel Wesley set out for an extended visit to London. He had been chosen to represent his church district at a convocation (a large, formal assembly) of Anglican leaders. What Samuel could not have known as he set out was that while he was gone, his wife would hold a convocation of her own at Epworth—a situation that would severely test his ideas about the role of women in church leadership.
At the time of the Reverend Wesley’s departure for London at New Year 1712, about twenty-five parishioners could be nudged or persuaded to attend church on any given Sunday. Later, however, when Samuel returned, two to three hundred people, all of them as a direct result of Susanna’s efforts, willingly attended service.
The whole affair began when Emilia noticed a book that had been donated to her father to help restock his library after the fire. This book told the story of two Danish men, Ziegenbalg and Pluteshau, who had responded to an urgent request from the king of Denmark for missionaries. In September 1706 these two men had arrived in Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India, becoming the first Protestant (non–Roman Catholic) missionaries to that country. The pair began preaching the gospel and baptized their first converts about ten months after arriving in Tranquebar. But Hindus and the local Danish authorities both opposed their work, and in 1707–08 Ziegenbalg spent four months in prison on a charge that by converting the locals to Christianity, he was encouraging rebellion.
Emilia was so intrigued with the story of the two men and the selections of their powerful sermons contained in the book that she began reading aloud from it to her mother. Soon the whole family wanted to listen, and Susanna took to reading passages aloud from the book following the children’s afternoon prayer and Bible-reading time.
The dramatic story of the two missionaries even attracted the attention of the servants in the house, and within two weeks of Samuel Wesley’s departure for London, the servants had spread word of the story around Epworth and across the fens. Soon neighbors began inquiring as to when and whether Mrs. Wesley might hold public readings from the book.
Ordinarily Susanna might have shied away from such a suggestion, but she was spurred on by the behavior of the Reverend Inman, the minister that the archbishop had sent to Epworth as a substitute in Samuel Wesley’s absence. Like so many others before him, Mr. Inman used the pulpit as a means to communicate his pet peeves, chief among which was the unrighteousness of being in debt. Week after week he would bombard the Wesley family and other occasional visitors to the church with threats of God’s wrath on all who did not pay their bills. Apart from the fact that it was very boring to hear the same sermon over and over, the topic enraged Susanna Wesley. Everyone in the village knew that her husband had been locked up in debtors’ prison for a time and that he still struggled to be financially responsible, especially since the family had lost everything in the fire. She felt sure that Mr. Inman intended to rub salt in the wound.
Susanna contrasted the Reverend Inman’s repetitive, droning sermons against the lively accounts of the two Danish missionaries recorded in the book and decided in favor of the missionaries. She opened the rectory on Sunday afternoons to a public meeting, which was held in the kitchen. Within a month two hundred people were attending the meetings. As many people as possible crammed into the kitchen, and the overflow spread into the hallway while others stood outside and listened through the open window.
Of course, Mr. Inman took these unauthorized meetings seriously, especially since they were much more popular than his own church meetings. He wrote a letter of complaint to Samuel Wesley in London, pointing out the obvious. Susanna could be getting herself into legal trouble because her meetings were not registered with the state as a Dissenter meeting, nor were they officially approved by the Church of England. In short, Susanna Wesley, the wife of an Anglican minister, was holding illegal meetings.
