Susannah was last of the 25 children born to Dr. Samuel Annesley on the 20th January 1669. Dr. Annesley was a man of fifty when Susannah was born to his second wife, at their house in Spital Yard off Bishopsgate Street London. Susannah's mother, whose Christian name is unknown, was the daughter of John White, a Puritan lawyer who had a seat in Cromwell's Long Parliament.

Much more is known of Dr. Annesley whose life spans much of the 17th century (1620 - 96), as his grandson, John does the 18th century (1703 - 91). He was born at Kenilworth, the son of  John Annesley whose father had been granted an Irish peerage by Charles I. John's elder brother succeeded to the peerage as the first Earl of Anglesey. After graduating at Queen's College, Oxford, in 1639 Samuel was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and served briefly as a naval chaplain but by 1645 had become the Rector of Cliffe, a wealthy living in Kent worth £300 a year. His own connexion with the Long Parliament gained him a Doctor of Civil Laws from Oxford University, and he had the honour of preaching from Job 27 vv.5-6 to the Parliament in 1648. His message was fiery and probing, without flattery and in the best Puritan tradition.

Dr. Annesley though critical of Charles I, opposed his execution and sympathised with Charles II when the king was defeated by Cromwell in 1651 at Worcester. His outspoken criticism of Cromwell, whom he described as the arrantest hypocrite that ever the Church of Christ was pestered with lost him his living at Cliffe and he was appointed to a much poorer living of St John the Evangelist in London. Later he transferred to become Vicar of the Parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate where he continued to preach powerful sermons to large crowds of people. Then under the Restoration came the cruel year of 1662 when along with many of the finest Puritan ministers he was ejected from his living for refusing to take the Oath of Obedience which would have meant him, as a Presbyterian minister, submitting to re-ordination at the hands of a bishop.

Though he had to surrender his living he refused to give up his ministry and after a turbulent period he was officially licensed as Presbyterian teacher in 1672 where he ministered at a meeting house in Spitalfields, built specially for him and where he exercised a long and fruitful ministry until his death in 1696. He was a learned and powerful evangelist and a humble and devout pastor. In his deeply biblical style he expounded holiness, saying, remember these two words though you may forget the rest of the sermon, namely Christ and holiness, holiness and Christ and in this he was anticipating the message which his famous grandson would proclaim many decades later.

So one can imagine the deeply spiritual yet practical Christian atmosphere in which Susannah and her siblings were reared in that vibrant centre of Puritan nonconformity. Although Susannah and her many brothers and sisters who survived infancy were brought up in a home where prayer, Bible reading and spiritual instruction were uppermost there was still room for wit, laughter and disciplined recreation to take place. There was much tolerant love and even at times of stress, when, for example, Susannah herself returned at the age of 13 to the Anglican Church from which her father had been ejected. This was  probably due to the fact that all the Annesley children received a good education in the academies which had been set up by dissenting ministers and their people. Susannah was a highly intelligent and spiritually mature young lady and very attractive to boot. She was well-read in the works of Richard Baxter and other Puritan divines. All making a thoroughly sound spiritual and practical foundation for her ultimate calling as a clergyman's wife and caring and loving mother to a family of nineteen children.

Susannah first met the man who was to become her husband as a girl of twelve at the wedding of her sister Elizabeth to a John Dunton in 1682. Samuel Wesley was then a poor theological student in training for the Dissenting Ministry at Mr. Veal's Academy. He read a poem at the wedding reception which was held at the home of Dr. Annesley.

However Samuel growing tired of the growing controversies between Dissent and the Establishment and sickened by the religious extremism of his dissenting colleagues went over to the Anglican cause and exchanged Stoke Newington Dissenting Academy for Exeter College, Oxford.  He entered the University with only forty-five shillings in his pocket - a precursor of a life-long struggle to stay solvent. He was eventually ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1689, served briefly as a naval chaplain, then resigned the navy and returned to civilian life, taking up a London curacy of £30 a year and on the strength of this married Susannah Annesley. (The actual date of their marriage is uncertain but thought to be around 1689).

Susannah's choice of husband would have proved a test of her father's character and grace. She herself had not only turned Anglican but had married a strong High-Churchman and a lapsed Dissenter. There is every sign that Dr. Annesley acquiesced in his favourite daughter's choice of husband, though he remained firmly committed to Presbyterianism. It is perhaps fortunate that Samuel Wesley's swingeing attacks upon Dissenting Academies were only published much later after dear Dr. Annesley had been dead for half a dozen years.

Soon after his marriage Samuel, through the patronage of the Marquis of Normanby, secured the living of South Ormsby in the Lincolnshire Wolds. So in 1690 Susannah left the busy London where she had spent her girlhood for a provincial backwater of Lincolnshire.  It was an insular place surrounded either by sea or rivers and often accessible only by ferries.

Samuel and Susannah Wesley remained at South Ormsby for the next seven years until Samuel's outspokenness towards his influential patron meant a move in 1697 to the even more bleak parish of Epworth on the Isle of Axholme, with a salary not much different from the meagre £50 a year at South Ormsby. Samuel had a rapidly growing family and unfortunately a life-long inability to manage successfully his meagre income. By the close of 1700 he had debts of over £300 which forced him to write a plaintive letter to his benefactor, John Sharp, the Archbishop of York, pleading for support.

Part of Samuel's fiscal and other domestic difficulties arose from his, at times, almost total absorption in academic and literary studies. Although a very forceful man, his mind and heart were often in the clouds and as Susannah's brother, another Samuel said,  your husband is not fit for worldly business. On the other hand Susannah, along with her own undoubted academic and spiritual interests, was immensely practical, self-controlled and able to manage a growing and lively family. Samuel was highly-strung, quick-tempered and impatient especially with less poetic and exotic minds than his own. He managed to fall out with senior members of his family and his High-Church, conservative views rapidly put him at loggerheads with many of his rustic and ill-educated parishioners.

Eventually Samuel's debts landed him in prison for three months in Lincoln Castle in 1705, until  Archbishop Sharp's willingness to pay off his debts ( or some of them) secured his release. Susannah had in his absence to virtually run both household and parish which she did with great competence. Fortunately Samuel had a more attractive side to his character that was not confined to his genuine piety and good works and which was a real humanity and a strong sense of humour. Even in the debtors' prison he sought to redeem the time by both preaching to and morally supporting his fellow-prisoners. Unlike  his sense of humour, these were qualities that were to reappear in the life and ministry of his son, John Wesley. Charles Wesley by contrast had a better grip on the lighter and more humorous side of life.

However Samuel had exceedingly strong views and could be totally obstinate in his behaviour and nowhere in his life is this more clearly evident than in the argument with Susannah in the year 1702. The occasion was seemingly trivial, for whilst leading family prayers, Susannah refused to say Amen to Samuel's prayer for the well-being of William Prince of Orange, who had become king following the flight of James II in 1688 (the Glorious Revolution).  Susannah, with Jacobite tendencies, regarded William III as a usurper with no real right to the throne. Samuel with his still strong Nonconformist background took the opposite view. John Wesley later records the incident where his father on demanding why she had refused to say amen to his prayers for the monarch received the reply:  I do not believe the Prince of Orange to be the king.  Samuel replied :  if that be the case, you and I must part, for if we have two kings, we must have two beds.  Samuel then took himself off to London where he lodged for many months until King William died, to be replaced by Queen Anne upon whose legitimacy both Samuel and Susannah could agree. However they must have made things up because Samuel had not been back three months before Susannah was pregnant with John in 1703.

Whether this was as serious a rift as it sounds, John Wesley's mother had a very trying time with her devout but also drama-prone husband. Of course not all the difficulties sprang from within the home, probably one of the most dramatic, and what could have been the most tragic for the family, was the fire which totally destroyed the Epworth rectory in 1709. The story is well-known - the blaze broke out during the night and the Rector and his wife hurriedly got all the family out of the house , when it was realised that little John or 'Jackie' as he was known was still in his bedroom. Fortunately the child wakened and had the presence of mind to stand on a chest by the window where he was spotted by a villager - quickly a ladder was thrown up to the casement and John was rescued minutes before the whole roof caved in with a mighty shower of sparks. It was the grown-up John who later described himself, quoting from the Book of Amos as: a brand plucked from the burning. The immediate effect upon his mother was to see this special providence as a sign from God that she must take special care of this little one, as God had some great purpose for him.   

This leads to the devout yet practical manner in which Susannah Wesley brought up her extensive brood - her child-rearing and educational methods. These methods found their roots in her own home background where her father saw the family unit, expressed in modern terms as a microcosm of the church - to quote Dr. Annesley's actual words: should not families be as well-ordered (little) Common-wealths, well-disciplined Churches ? For Susannah this meant firm discipline, good education,  spiritual maturity and an unselfish concern for the well-being of others. In other words the development of a godly and gracious life-style.
(The picture shows her kitchen at Epworth where she held lessons)

To achieve these ends Susannah Wesley firmly believed that the self-will of the child should be broken or conquered as early as possible so that they can learn the importance of obedience to God's will. She didn't mean by this the destruction of a child's will-power so that they are cowed into a fearful submission, and the fact that most of her children developed into fairly spirited and strong-willed men and women, not least John Wesley, bears out her principle. She also believed in having a systematic and well-ordered routine of eating and sleeping, of learning and exercise, of spiritual instruction including prayer and Bible study. In the spirit of the age she didn't shrink from using corporal punishment but insisted in fairness, honesty and that no child should be punished twice for the same misdemeanour. In contrast to Samuel who, though basically a kind man could lose his temper, Susannah was herself extremely self-controlled and insisted that  we must correct with kind severity. Whilst she was light-years away from the modern educational philosophy of total self-expressionism, Susannah Wesley a true spirit of independent thought and action in her children. But above all, while she cared both for the physical and moral welfare of her children, she wanted in their hearts a true knowledge of and commitment to the redeeming love of God in Jesus Christ.

This brings us to the depth and quality of Susannah's own spirituality which certainly had a decisive influence upon both John and Charles and found more than a faint echo in the life of the Methodist Movement which her sons under God would be privileged to initiate. From being a very young girl she had read deeply in the devotional works of some of the great Puritan writers like Bunyan and Baxter and also some of the Catholic mystical writers like St. Teresa, Lorenzo Scupoli (an Italian monk), Thomas- a- Kempis and others. She had also read the great theological works of Anglican divines like Bishop Beveridge and Dr. Rust - she quotes from the writings of Henry More and John Norris (the Cambridge Platonists) and also Pascal in both her theological writings and private correspondence. Only in recent times has scholarly research unearthed much more of the religious writings of the mother of John Wesley.

This is a deep area, but it helps to explain more clearly the already well-known fact that John Wesley, whilst a young graduate and right up to and beyond his Aldersgate experience, should place a great deal of reliance upon the spiritual advice and guidance of his mother. Also clearly, the self-conscious disciplined atmosphere of the Epworth rectory eventually percolated into the life of the early Methodist Societies - for this reason Susannah Wesley has been described as The Mother of Methodism.

Susannah Wesley whilst strongly holding to the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide) was strongly influenced by forces already mentioned to explore the importance of the twin and related doctrines of assurance and holiness. We should not be misled by John Wesley's repeated claims that he was no complete or real Christian until his so-called conversion experience on the 24th May, 1738, and that the religion he had learned at his mother's knee was only the dutiful religion of a servant and not of a son of God. Whilst we should not dispute Wesley's own claims, one is increasingly convinced that what Wesley received in 1738 was an overwhelming assurance of that salvation which gave him both the confidence and power to declare Christ to each and to all.

Susannah was nurtured in a strong Puritan tradition of deep scriptural and prayerful meditation and self-examination, of conscientious duty and service and also with its overwhelming majesty of the preached word. But this didn't preclude a heartfelt desire to know and feel the equally mighty love of God in one's own personal experience and in that of others.  It would be wrong to suppose that Susannah, at the time of Wesley's conversion in 1738 an elderly lady of 69, necessarily shared her son's pessimistic view of his previous Christian life. She rejoiced with her son in that experience but knew, probably better than John himself, where the roots of that experience lay, even though she had confessed to John that  until an experience of hers in September 1739, she herself had been a stranger both to the doctrine and experience of assurance. By now, having lost her husband Samuel in 1735 she had, after a period in Salisbury, come to live in London in rooms at John Wesley's headquarters. In spite of her iron will and toughness Susannah had always had poor health and suffered much pain of which she made light. She died on 30th July 1742, with great peace and calm with most of her remaining children around her. One of her daughters Anne, recorded in a letter to Charles  that her mother said, My dear Saviour, are you come to help me in my extremity at last. Anne continues, We stood round her bed and fulfilled her last request, uttered a little before she lost her speech, 'Children as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God'. She had lived a good life and as a true Puritan made also a good death.

Finally whilst never claiming perfection in any sense of that word for Susannah Wesley there can be no doubt that from a spiritual point of view she was the most decisive and inspiring influence in the lives of the Wesley brothers and not least John himself. If on the other hand her influence made it difficult for John to have a happy and positive relationship with a good woman as his wife, then that was largely John's fault and also perhaps that of an interfering brother Charles. But all that is another story.

Douglas Graham

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