William Gibson's decision to treat the ecclesiastical and theological career of Samuel Wesley in isolation from that of his vastly more famous sons is something of a gambit. On the one hand, there is a strong case to be made that the elder Wesley's life is best understood within the ecclesiastical politics of his own revolutionary era, rather than within the genealogy of Methodism. On the other hand, the ecclesiastical career of Samuel Wesley, absent any connection to those of his sons John and Charles, is often that of a bog-standard Anglican country parson—albeit a particularly luckless and improvident one. Over the course of Gibson's Samuel Wesley and the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685–1720, Wesley's cows are stabbed; his dog is maimed; he is jailed for debt; his rectory burns down; he is bitten by a rabid dog; he squabbles constantly with his indomitable wife, Susannah; and his home is haunted by a particularly obnoxious ghost. Wesley's wife sympathetically described him as “one of those who Our Saviour saith are not so wise in their generation as the children of men” (211). (A very different religious tradition might be inclined to label Samuel Wesley something of a schlemiel.) But Gibson does not mine Wesley's serial misfortunes for either laughs or pathos. He relays them all carefully and vividly in the course of a clerical career that Gibson considers illustrative of the fate of the Church of England in the wake of the Revolution of 1688–1689.
Gibson's subtitle, “the crisis of Tory piety,” conscientiously echoes Gareth Bennett's enduring 1976 biography of Francis Atterbury, The Tory Crisis in Church and State. But Samuel Wesley was no Atterbury. His ecclesiastical career never takes him beyond the rectory of the remote Lincolnshire village of Epworth. Nor was he ever really a fire-eater like Henry Sacheverell (although Gibson posits a working relationship between the two men). Wesley's sermonizing and pamphleteering was not a driver of politics during the so-called rage of party. Apart from a consequential stint as proctor in the 1710 Convocation, Wesley's ecclesiastical politics remain overwhelmingly local. He mostly follows the major trends in post-Revolutionary Anglicanism rather than inaugurating any of them. But Gibson assiduously documents the ways national tensions play out in Epworth: the dynastic politics of Jacobite and Williamite (and later, Hanoverian), the legalization of Protestant nonconformity, the reformation of manners movement, the vogue for religious societies, the so-called lay baptism controversy, and the polarization of high and low churchmanship. They are all brought to bear to elucidate the challenges of Wesley's personal life and ministry: his often-fruitless pastoral efforts; his incarceration for debt at the hands of his local Whig enemies; the strain his wife's ardent Jacobitism places on their marriage. Even what Samuel's daughter Sukey Wesley described as the “groans, squeaks, tinglings, and knockings” (201) of the Epworth poltergeist Old Jeffrey were reported as loudest and most aggressive during the family prayers for King George.
One might have hoped Gibson would have used some of these richly detailed episodes to rethink his rather old-fashioned taxonomy of ecclesiastical politics in this period. His insistence on using the term latitudinarian as a virtual synonym for Whig churchman is especially problematic, a fact he seems to acknowledge in his conclusion when confronting the theological orthodoxy of reliably whiggish prelates like Bishop Gibson and Archbishop Wake. And his conflation of royalism and high churchmanship completely overlooks the relentless high-church assault on the doctrine of the royal supremacy throughout the 1690s. Moreover, the belief in the invalidity of non-episcopal baptism (which Samuel Wesley evidently espoused) was a fringe doctrine even among high churchman, associated instead overwhelmingly with non-jurors or men like Roger Laurence and Thomas Brett who would become non-jurors after the Hanoverian succession. Both low and high churchmanship each contained often countervailing theological tendencies in the post-revolutionary era. Rather than deploy these terms as monolithic ecclesiologies, or, worse, mere religious analogues of Whig and Tory parties, a more nuanced account of their internal variety and contradictions would have been most welcome here. Samuel Wesley's seemingly contradictory religious and ideological commitments—his reverence for Archbishop Tillotson, on the one hand, and collaboration with Henry Sacheverell, on the other; his involvement in both the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the lower house of Convocation; his Hanoverianism and his rejection of non-episcopal Protestantism—would seem to provide an ideal set of cases for rethinking the theological politics of the era.
In the end, one is not entirely sure precisely what constituted the titular “crisis of Tory piety” in what Gibson deems the era of the “long Glorious Revolution” (3). Or, indeed, whether that crisis was ever resolved. In Bennett's Tory Crisis Atterbury's mounting alienation from both crown and episcopate in the post-revolutionary era eventually impelled him into Jacobite conspiracy and exile. There was an unmistakably tragic dimension to an Anglicanism that could no longer abide either English miter or scepter, and could only proceed in the service of the Roman Catholic pretender. But Samuel Wesley's story ends in stolid Hanoverianism, at home in Epworth. Gibson finds Wesley, at the end of his life, cheerfully recommending works by both the arch-whig Bishop Burnet alongside those of the traitorous Atterbury. All the contradictions remained intact. Perhaps it was Wesley's ability to carry on his pastoral work amidst the mounting tensions besetting Anglicanism at the beginning of the eighteenth century that offer the strongest case for his representativeness.
