CHAPTER II.
YOUTH AND MARRIAGE.
Whatever accomplishments Susanna Annesley may have lacked, she was perfect mistress of English undefiled, had a ready flow of words, an abundance of common sense, and that gift of letter-writing which is supposed to have vanished out of the world at the introduction of the Penny Post. She probably had sufficient acquaintance with the French language to enable her to read easy authors; but at an age when a girl of her years and capacity ought to have been reading literature, she appears to have been studying the religious questions of the day. It is true that they were uppermost in all minds, but it is equally true that her father, Dr. Annesley, had laid controversy aside and did not add a single pamphlet to the vast army of them which invaded the world at that epoch. He was a liberal and a large-minded man, and no stronger proof of it can be adduced than that his youngest daughter, before she was thirteen, was allowed so much liberty of conscience, that she deliberately chose and preferred attaching herself to the Church of England rather than remaining among the Nonconformists, with whom her father had cast in his lot. Perhaps he sympathised with her, at all events he neither reproached nor hindered her; to the end of his life she remained his favourite child, and it was to her care that he committed the family papers, which, unfortunately, were destroyed in the fire that many years after wrecked the parsonage at Epworth. Among the many visitors to the hospitable house in Spital Yard was Samuel Wesley, the descendant of a long line of "gentlemen and scholars," as they were termed by one of his grandsons. He was an inmate of the Rev. Edward Veal's dissenting academy at Stepney, and was a promising student with a ready pen. The pedigree of his family was traceable to the days of Athelstan, when they were people of some repute, probably the remnants of a good old decayed stock. They were connected with the counties of Devon and Somerset, always intermarrying with the best families; some of them fought in Ireland and acquired property there. It need only be added that Lord Mornington, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Ker Porter and his sisters, the famous novelists, were among their kith and kin, to show that many and rare talents and a vast amount of energy were hereditary gifts. Samuel Wesley was the son of the Rev. John Wesley, sometime vicar of Winterborn, Whitchurch, in Dorsetshire, one of the ejected clergy, and a grandson of the Rev. Bartholomew Wesley, who married Ann Colley of Castle Carbery, Ireland, and was the third son of Sir Herbert Wesley, by his wife and cousin Elizabeth Wesley of Daugan Castle, Ireland. These few facts will probably make clear to most minds the main points respecting the family connections and their proclivities.
Samuel Wesley had been from his youth a hard worker, and as the course of his education did not for many years take the direction he desired, he contrived to earn for himself the University training essential to a scholar. The foundation of a liberal education was laid at the Free School, Dorchester, where he remained till nearly sixteen, when his father died, leaving a widow and family in very poor circumstances. The Dissenting friends of both parents then came forward and obtained for the promising eldest son an exhibition of thirty pounds a year, raised among themselves, and sent him to London, to Mr. Veal's at Stepney, where he remained for a couple of years.
There are two things almost inseparable from a tincture of Irish blood at all events in the upper and cultivated classes a wonderful facility for scribbling and a hot-headed love of engaging in small controversies. Both of them speedily came to light in Samuel Wesley, for he at once became a dabbler in rhyme and faction, and so far pleased his patrons that they printed a good many of his jeux d esprit. Some words of sound advice were given him by Dr. Owen, who was, perhaps, afraid that the intoxication of seeing himself in print might lead to neglect of severer studies. He counselled the youth to apply himself to critical learning, and gilded the pill by a bonus of ten pounds a year as a reward for good conduct and progress. In consequence of continual magisterial prosecutions, Mr. Veal was obliged to give up his establishment, and his clever young pupil was transferred to that of Mr. Charlea Morton, M.A., of Newington Green, which then stood foremost among Dissenting places of education. Samuel Wesley's mother and a maiden aunt appear to have migrated to London, and with them he made his home. Literary work and remuneration opened before him, for he was engaged to translate some of the works of John Biddle, regarded as the father of English Unitarians ; but it is said that as he could not conscientiously approve of their tendency, he threw up the affair.
The passion of writing lampoons, however, remained strong, and was further fanned by his meeting at Dr. Annesley's with John Dunton, the bookseller, who was then wooing Elizabeth Annesley. The two became firm friends, as is not unusual when a wealthy publisher meets with a young man of literary ability, whose peculiar line of talent runs parallel with the taste of the times. From that hour his literary earnings went far towards his support, and he needed them, for he was becoming discontented with the Dissenters and beginning to find fault with their doctrines. Dr. Owen wished him and some others to graduate at one of the English universities, with the notion that the tide might soon turn, and that Dissenters might be allowed to take the ordinary degrees; but the idea that any of them would prove recreant to Nonconformist principles does not appear to have entered the good man's head. It also appears that a e: reverend and worthy" member of the Wesley family came to London from a great distance, and held serious converse with his young kinsman against the "Dissenting schism"; so it is probable that several influences combined to induce Samuel, at the age of one-and-twenty, to quit his non-conforming friends and join the Church of England. He had, moreover, made up his mind to go to Oxford, and, as a young man of spirit, could surely not have wished to be hampered and baulked in his University career by entering that abode of learning without belonging to the Established Church. It was the reaction of the frame of mind in which he had written squibs and lampoons on the opposite side of the question, and the scars of persecution and controversy were still too recent to enable the friends who had hitherto watched his career, to reflect that " our little systems have their day" and ultimately "cease to be."
Hearts are the same in all centuries, and, considering that Susanna Wesley was some years younger than her future husband, one cannot help thinking that Cupid had something to do with the change of views she avowed so early in her teens, and that her kind and warm-hearted father had some suspicion of the truth, and no objection to it.
Samuel Wesley did not care to encounter home opposition; consequently, he rose before dawn one August morning in 1683, and with forty-five shillings in his pocket walked down to Oxford, where he entered himself as a servitor at Exeter College. Here he maintained himself by teaching, by writing exercises, &c. that wealthy undergraduates were too idle to do for themselves (a practice he ought not to have countenanced), by whatever literary employment Dunton could put into his hands, and by collecting and publishing his various scattered rhymes and poems in a volume, which appears to have rather more than paid its own expenses. He passed his various examinations creditably, and in June 1688 took his B.A. degree. The fact that he was the only student of Exeter who obtained that very moderate distinction in that year, does not say much for the abilities or industry of his companions as a body.
Samuel Wesley left Oxford just at the time when James II. had issued his fresh Declaration of Indulgence, which the clergy for the most part refused to read in their churches, while Archbishop Sancroft and six of his suffragans protested, and were in consequence imprisoned in the Tower. Thus it came to pass that, in the enforced absence of the Bishop of London, Samuel Wesley received deacon's orders at the hands of Dr. Sprat, Bishop of Rochester. The curacy that gave him a title was worth only twenty-eight pounds a year ; but he did not remain in it more than twelve months, when he was ordained priest by Dr. Compton, Bishop of London, at St. Andrew's, Holborn, on the 24th of February 1689, exactly twelve days after William and Mary had been declared sove- reigns of Great Britain. It is said that he wrote and printed the first pamphlet that appeared in support of the new government. It is possible that this procured for him the appointment of chaplain on board a man-of-war, where he was comparatively rich with seventy pounds a year, and had leisure for a good deal of writing, most of which he employed in the composition of a curious poem on the Life of Christ.
He was most likely anxious to be in London, for he soon resigned the chaplaincy, and became again a curate in the metropolis, with an income of thirty pounds, which he doubled by his pen. Money was worth much more then than now, yet it was hardly prudent to marry on so small a pittance; but lovers have so much faith in one another, that he and Susanna Annesley seem to have had no misgivings but plighted their troth in the spring of 1689. It is not known in what church they were married, nor who married them, but it is believed that the bride's new home was in apartments near Holborn.