Meet John and Molly Wesley

Most of us don’t need to be introduced to John Wesley, the Methodist movement. We sing the hymns written by John and his brother Charles. We are aware of his Aldergate experience, and the entire world had been affected by John’s concerns for evangelism and personal holiness.

But you have probably never encountered Molly Goldhawk Vazeille Wesly, John’s wife.

Maybe, after I’ve introduced you, you will wish you had never met her.

I can guarantee, however, as you interact with John and Molly, that you will have much cause for thought.

What are the factors that made it such a miserable marriage?

What can we learn from it to avoid in our own marriages?

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One of the early Wesley biographers stated that along with Xanthippe and Job’s wife, Mrs. John Wesley had to be rated as one of the worst wives in all history.

A later biographer responded by saying that if that was so, then surely John Wesley must be regarded as one of the worst husbands in history.

Both allegations seem quite extreme.

But what are you to do with the story that Molly Wesley was seen dragging her husband around the room by his hair?

And what about the correspondence that John Wesley continued to maintain, despite his wife’s objections, with his female admirers?

John Wesley is well known as the intrepid evangelist of Methodism who travelled a quarter of a million miles on horseback, who claimed the world as his parish, and who rose at four each morning for his devotional time. But his home was a shambles. Four years after his marriage, he wrote to his brother Charles, “Love is rot”.

He preached 42,000 sermons, often preaching four to five times a day during his fifty-three year ministry. Crowds of up to 30,000 came to hear him preach. When he died at the age of eighty-eight, Methodism had 153,000 adherents, and the movement had spread to America as well as to Holland, Ireland, and Scotland.

He was a remarkable man and God used him mighty. Yet his marriage was a miserable failure.

He waited for marriage until he was forty-seven; he probably waited too long. (Some would say he didn’t wait long enough.) He had serious romances when he was twenty-five, thirty-five, and forty-five. He retreated from each one at the last minute. Perhaps any one of the three would have provided him a happier marriage than he had with Molly. But had Wesley had a happier marriage, we might not have had the outgrowth of the formidable Methodist movement.

In order to understand John Wesley and his problems in marriage, you have to take a glimpse of the fascinating home in which he grew up.

John Wesley was the fifteenth of the nineteen children born to Samuel and Susanna Wesley. Samuel was a stern, argumentative Anglican cleric who spent most of his ministry in an out-of-the-way parish, trying to exhort a bunch of uneducated ruffians. His biggest joy in life seemed to be when he could get away from Epworth to go to Convocation in London. It had been an honour for him to be named to his top-ranking study commission; it was a joy as well because during the sessions he got to argue theology with eminent theologians.

At home, he argued with his wife, Susanna, a well-educated, well-bred woman who wanted the best for her husband and for her children, and who had a reason for everything she did.

Both Susanna and Samuel were stubborn, and Samuel had a quick temper besides. Once during family prayers, after Samuel had properly prayed for the reigning English monarch, King William of Orange, he noted that his wife had not said her traditional “amen”. In fact, come to think of it, she had not said the appropriate “amen” for several days. The reason was obvious. Susanna did not favour King William of Orange; she thought he was a usurper of the throne. She favoured the Stuart line. So, in Susanna’s words, her husband “immediately knelled down and imprecated the divine vengeance upon himself and all his postering if ever he touched me more or came into bed with me before I had begged God’s pardon and his.”

Whereupon Samuel left for a timely Convocation in London. King William soon died, which was an answer to prayer for Susanna and maybe even for the equally stubborn Samuel, because upon William’s death Queen Anne, a Stuart, came to the throne. Thereafter Susanna could say “amen” when her husband prayed for the reigning monarch.

The story is typical of the marriage. Here are some quotes from Susanna’s writings: “Since I’m willing to let him quietly enjoy his opinions, he ought not to deprive me of my little liberty of conscience.” And “I think we are not likely to live happily together.” Ans another,” It is a misfortune alike.”

A little more than nine months after the coronation of Queen Anne, John Wesley, the fifteenth of the Wesley’ nineteen children, was born. Nine of the children died at birth or in infancy, and that left ten to be raised on the modest income derived from the remote parish of Epworth. When John – or “Jackie” as his mother called him – was only two years old, his father was imprisoned for three months for his inability to pay a thirty pound debt. During his prison term, his biggest concern was his family, but he wrote, “My wife bears it with the courage which becomes her and which I expected from her.”

Later when Samuel was in London attending another of the lengthy Convocations an interim minister preached in his pulpit and made repeated aspersions about the regular minister’s frequent debts and about other foibles that Samuel undeniably had.

When the congregation dwindled, Susanna began holding evening services in her kitchen. Soon her evening flock outnumbered those in the morning congregation at the Epworth church. The interim rector didn’t like it. He wrote to Samuel in London urging him to take immediate action and stop this outrage. Simultaneously, Susanna wrote, justifying her actions. Something needed to be done, she said, and no man in the congregation had as strong a voice as she had; furthermore no one else could read well enough to lead the congregation in the prayer book and the reading of the sermon. She said that although she knew that God approved of what she was doing, she would submit to her husband if he would definitely put his foot down. But he had to say so definitely. Then she asked her husband if he wanted to put his foot down or not. The way she wrote was like this: ”Do not tell me that you desire me not to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience; but send me your positive command in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity of doing good, when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Samuel Wesley decided that since the problem would go away as soon as he returned home in a few weeks, he would take no immediate action.

As if the Wesley didn’t have enough troubles, the old parsonage caught fire one night in 1709. Nearly everything was lost, but fortunately the children all escaped to the garden. All except one. Five-year-old John was missing. The father tried to re-enter the house but the smoke and flames made the stairway impassable. Finally a ladder was brought and was raised to little John’s window. The boy was saved, just before the roof collapsed.

Susanna called it divine intervention and spoke of John as “a brand plucked from the burning. “ After the dramatic rescue, while she was mindful of the spiritual welfare of all her children, she was especially concerned about young John. She had made a resolution to be “particularly careful of the soul of this child, which God has so mercifully provided for.”

Susanna raised her children strictly. At the age of one year, they were instructed to cry softly when they had to cry. She took responsibility for their early education, and her daughters were treated as the educational equals of her sons. She regimented her spiritual activities and expected her children to do accordingly. She assigned a day of the week when she would take time to provide personalised scriptural and moral instruction to her children. Each child was assigned a day; John’s day was Thursday.

Growing up, John was tended by seven sisters. Later most of the sisters, like John himself, experienced unhappy marriages. Where the blame lies for the string of mismatches is hard to tell. Some blame the father who had a knack for crushing his daughters’ promising love affairs, until in rebellion they ran off with totally unsuitable mates. One of the daughters openly spoke of the father’s “unaccountable love of discord”. His paternal concern made him censorious and overly protective.

Samuel Wesley was a man who had never come to terms with himself. His parish was too small and remote. He wasn’t properly appreciated in the community. At home he was frustrated by his inability to cope with Susanna and his children. And at times this frustration erupted irrationally.

Susanna herself was such a dominant force that her influence was indelibly imprinted on her children’s personalities – especially on John’s. She was John’s spiritual advisor until her death when John was thirty-nine. For years they read and discussed the same books. One biographer says: “Hers was the decisive voice that sent her two sons on their ill-starred mission to Georgia; it was to her steadfastness that John looked for reassurance when he returned to England with his faith shaken and his future in jeopardy. As soon as he had a settled home, his mother became its permanent inmate. He himself admitted that in his early youth he put aside all thoughts of marriage through despair of finding any woman her equal.”

John Wesley grew up with his mother’s logical mind. His brother Charles was heir to their father’s poetic flair. But John became a skilled debater with a love for wit and humour. His wit and humour made him quite popular during his youth. One of his sisters said that no one could be sad when John was around.

At seventeen, John went to Oxford University where he studied the classics and had his first serious romance. One of the earliest entires in his diary, which he kept for more than sixty years, asks, “Have I loved a woman or company more than God?” It was a question that plagued him through the years.

There were four young women in a circle of friends, and John had an interest in each of them. He wrote to his mother about Betty Kirkham, describing her as a “religious friend”, but it is obvious from his diary that she was a special kind of religious friend. However, after waiting several years fro John’s expressions of affection to materialize in a proposal of marriage, Betty Kirkham accepted the hand of another suitor. His diary indicates that he had though of marriage, but something had kept him from it.

He kept his friendship with Betty alive for several years – even though her husband was jealous of Wesley’s attention to his wife. John at the same time was beginning his solicitations of another young woman in the circle. When the only way the relationship could progress any further was by proposal of marriage, John backed away again.

Mabel Brailford in her Tale of Two Brothers writes: “The pattern had now been set for all John’s abortive love affairs: the bright beginning, the hesitation and long shilly-shallying: the exasperation of the lady and her ultimatum, quickly rescinded but not quickly enough to forestall his final renunciation. Three times he would be upon the brink of marriage and three times he would extricate himself before the decision word had been spoken. Each time his affections were more deeply involved.”

John was twenty-nine now, had his master’s degree from Oxford, had been appointed a teaching fellow and had, with his brother Charles, started the “Holy Club”, a group that because of its methodical way of attaining spirituality became known as the Methodists.

His seventy-year-old father wanted him to take over his parish at Epworth, but John refused the offer, wanting to stay at Oxford, where he could promote his own holiness. He told his father that only where he himself could be holy could he effectively promote the holiness of others.

At this point in his life, John preferred the role of tutor to that professor. He wanted to disciple those who were earnestly seeking the path of salvation. But he had two problems: (1) he was not sure of his own salvation and (2) he was very naïve about those who pretended to be spiritually minded, especially young spiritually minded women. To be blunt, John was much more attractive to women than he realized.

This was clearly seen in 1735 when he was appointed as a chaplain to accompany James Oglethorpe to the new colony of Georgia in America. John’s job in America would be to assist the motley band of settlers – ex-convicts, Jews, German exiles, and debaters – and to preach to the heathen Indians whom he considered to be “little children, humble, willing to learn”. But Wesley’s main reason for going to America was simply in his own words: “My chief motive, to which all the rest are subordinate, is the hope of saving my own soul.” He was also quite certain that in Georgia he would no longer be tempted by the lusts of the flesh for he would “no longer see any woman, but those which are almost of a different species from me”.

He didn’t realize how wrong he was.

On board ship, John was “in jeopardy every hour,” as he wrote in his diary. He though of asking his brother Charles to pray for him, because of the many young women aboard, some of whom were feigning spiritual interest. He felt he needed prayer that he should “know none of them after the flesh”.

When a storm arose on the Atlantic, he realized he was in jeopardy another way. The German Moravians on board seemed to be the only passengers who were calm in the face of what seemed to John to be a possible grave in the angry deep. When John asked the reason for their serenity, he in return was asked a few questions: “Do you know Jesus Christ?” “Do you know you are a child of God?” “ Do you know you are saved?”

John was perplexed. He was a minister and a son of a minister. He was even a missionary and he was rigorously practicing holiness, elusive though it was, and he was intent on pursuing it even if his chase took him around the world. But he had to admit that he did not possess the calm assurance of salvation that the Moravians had.

After arriving on terra firma in America, things did not improve. Though he attended to his disciplines faithfully – arising at four, services at five, etc. – he was ineffective both as a minister to the settlers and as a missionary to the Indians.

But he was not ineffective in reaching the heart of Sophy Hopkey, the eighteen-year-old niece of Savannah’s chief magistrate. John, now thirty-three, found in Sophy everything he wanted in a woman. She was “all stillness and attention” when he read books of sermons to her. She was quick to learn when he instructed her in French grammar. She was also quite ready for marriage, since she was unhappy at home with her aunt and uncle.

John didn’t know what to do. When he was with her, he confessed that he was under the weight of “an unholy desire”. He admitted to her that he would like to spend the rest of his life with her. Half the colony, it seemed, was urging him to marry the girl, but John pulled away from the flame. “I find, Miss Sophy, I cannot take fire into my bosom and not be burnt. I am therefore retiring for a while to desire the direction of God”.

Getting away from Sophy didn’t solve the problem. So for his definitive answer on whether to get married or not, he decided to draw lots. One slip of paper said, “Marry”; another, “Not this year”; a third, “Think of it no more”. The third slip of paper was drawn.

Though John still found it difficult, he broke up with Sophy. By the end of the year, John had returned to England. In his journal, he described his break with Sophy as an escape, and that once again he was “a brand snatched from the burning”. On his way back to England, he had several weeks to think about his missionary term in America. It had lasted less than two years, and John was realistic enough to assess it as failure.

But six months later, Wesley’s new life began. Depressed, he attended a meeting near Aldersgate Street in London and listened to the reading of Luther’s Commentary on Romans. Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed”. He had been converted. He had discovered “salvation by faith only”. Now he knew Jesus as the German Moravians did.

A year later, in 1739, Wesley began his preaching in the fields. The crowds were huge. Wesley estimated twenty thousands at some of the preaching services. Quickly the work expanded. A school for poor children was started at Kingswood; a new meetinghouse was built in Bristol. An old cannon foundry near Moorfields was transformed into a 1500-seat chapel.

During the next fifty years, he crisscrossed England on horseback over rough roads, preaching the gospel nine months a year, starting Methodist societies all across the British Isles. Wesley became one of the dominant figures of the eighteen-century.

It was during the early years of this itinerant ministry that he met Grace Murray and entered into his most serious love affair. Grace Murray was in her late twenties, the widow of a sailor. Converted by Wesley’s preaching, she soon became the leading woman Methodist, addressing the women’s classes.

In 1748, Wesley, now forty-five, became ill and was tended by the “amiable”, pious and efficient” Mrs. Murray. John didn’t exactly propose to her on the spot, but he did say, “If ever I marry, I think you will be the person.” The widow Murray was flattered by his attention.

When Wesley was well enough to resume his preaching schedule, Grace was asked to join the troupe. A few months later John conducted evangelistic missions in Ireland and Grace was once again a part of his team. In fact, she rode on the same horse behind Wesley. Wesley reported on her ministry, “She examined all the women in the smaller societies, and the believers in every place. She settled all the women bands, visited the sick, and prayed with the mourners.” She was, as one report has stated, the only co-worker with whom John was able to work closely for a long period of time.

John was deeply in love with Grace and he debated the pros and cons of matrimony. As usual, he kept a scorecard. In all seven-marriage areas (housekeeper, nurse, companion, friend, fellow-labourer in the gospel of Christ, spiritual gifts, and spiritual fruit from her labours), he rated Grace as excellent. He concluded, “Therefore all my seven arguments against marriage are totally set aside. Nay some of them seem to prove, both that I ought to marry and that G.M. is the Person.” G.M. was his business-efficient way of referring to Grace Murray.

John realized that there might be some problems. For instance, what about children? His solution would be to place the children in the Methodist school at Kingswood near Bristol, while he and his wife continued their evangelistic ministry. One writer commented: “He was incapable of real domesticity; he wanted a co-adjutor, not a wife.”

But John faced some other obstacles too, the biggest of which was his own procrastination. And then there was the promise that he had made to the Holy Club not to marry without their permission. That meant that he needed to get the approval of his brother Charles, among others.

Grace was not happy with John’s dilly-dallying. One of John’s helpers, John Bennett, was waiting in the wings for Grace, and he was ready to step in whenever John Wesley’s ardour cooled. Prior to Wesley’s coming on the scene, it was Bennett who had been Grace Murray’s suitor. During a lull in the action, Wesley had entered, centre-staged. Bennett was still available.

Some Methodist leaders thought it wouldn’t look right for Wesley to marry Grace Murray. It would look as if she had been his mistress during the past several years of evangelistic forays. Others felt for John to marry someone not of his social class would be a bad mistake. They thought it would split the movement.

That’s when his brother Charles Wesley stepped in. “Jumped in” would be a more accurate phrase. In his opinion, the entire Methodist movement would go down the drain if John married. Any other minister in the movement could marry, but John was a special case. Besides, if John married Grace, Charles thought that half of the leadership would pack their bags. John’s diary records his brother’s feelings this way: “The thought of marrying at all, but especially of my marrying a servant and one so low-born, appeared above measure shocking to him.”

Charles didn’t have a moment to spare. Hurriedly, he jumped on his horse and galloped to see Grace. He convinced her that if she went ahead with marriage to John, it “would destroy himself and the whole work of God”. Two hours later, he took Grace away, brought her to Bennett convinced both of them that for the good of Methodism they should marry each other, and in a few days the marriage took place.

John was irate – understandably so. His brother’s chicanery was inexcusable. The lifelong close relationship between John and Charles was nearly severed. Gradually, forgiveness came, but not much more. “I can forgive, but who can redress the wrong?” John wrote. Soon, however, John was back on his horse, riding his evangelistic circuit again with the words: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

One biographer doubts that Wesley would ever have married Grace Murray, despite what he had told her: “There can be no doubt that John Wesley delighted to dream of Grace Murray as his promised wife, but in view of his past history, the question arises whether even without Charles’ intervention, that promise would never ever have become performance.”

But fifteen months later, John Wesley did get married, and he was determined that no one would ride off wit his bride this time.

One of the few Methodist stalwarts who took John Wesley’s side in his disagreement with his brother was Vincent Perronet. Perronet felt that John needed to be married; in fact, he urged it upon him as a duty. At this point, John probably didn’t need much urging. Perronet consulted with Banker Ebenezer Blackwell and came up with a candidate, Molly Vazeille, the widow of a London merchant who had left her an inheritance of ten thousand pounds.

With Grace, John Wesley had a checklist to see if his bride-to-be measured up. With Molly, there was no checklist. With Grace, John consulted his brother in advance, and that proved to be a mistake.

He didn’t consult with Charles; rather, he told Charles what he intended to do, and he didn’t mention the name of his bride-to-be. Charles wrote in his diary, “ I was thunderstruck.” A few days later when he learnt who the woman was, Charles “retired to mourn”. He “groaned all the day, and several following ones, under my own and for the people’s burden. I could eat no pleasant food, nor preach, nor rest either by night or by day.”

Despite his inner turmoil, he dared not intervene this time. John wasn’t going let a courtship interfere with his preaching schedule, and it didn’t slow him down one bit until a fortuitous accident. Crossing London Bridge in mid-February 1751, he slipped and badly sprained his ankle. Despite the pain, her preached on schedule in the afternoon and then hobbled to the home of Widow Vazeille, his fiancée. Molly acted as his nurse for the rest of the week. At her home, he spent the time “partly in prayer, reading and conversation, partly in writing a Hebrew Grammar and Lessons for Children”.

The conversation with Molly must have settled some things about their marriage. Wesley wanted to make sure that molly knew he would never touch a penny of her fortune. At least one of her four children was strongly opposed to the marriage, and John probably wanted to remove any suspicion that he was marrying her for her money. No doubt, he also informed her about his evangelistic missions, which kept him away from home 75 percent of the time. She would have her choice of accompanying him on his arduous trips or staying home with her family.

John probably told her, as he had told the others, that no Methodist preacher, least of all himself, should “preach one sermon or travel one day less in a married than in a single state”. What this meant, of course, was that John would not be making any adjustments to married life; Molly would have to make the adjustments.

The following Monday, his sprained ankle not withstanding, John & Molly were married. The previous day, Sunday, he had preached on his knees, because he was not able to stand on his sprained ankle. On Tuesday, he was preaching once again on his knees. In between, he sandwiched in the wedding, and presumably was married on his knees. We don’t know much about his wedding, because he neglected to mention it in his journal.

It was a short courtship, perhaps only sixteen days. And undeniably, it was marriage on the rebound, for John was still smarting from the loss of Grace.

Yet at forty-seven, john had a need to be married. He had always enjoyed feminine companionship, and being attractive to women, he usually had it. But as the Methodist movement grew, he had become more and more isolated in his tower of leadership. Even his brother Charles was now separated from him, separated from the happy marriage that Charles had with Sally Gwynne and separated by Charles’ rash action in breaking up John’s relationship with Grace. So although he met thousands of people a year, and knew hundreds as friends, John was a lonely man at times. When illness or accident confined him to bed, he was at his loneliest. It was while he was recuperating that he had fallen in love with Grace. This time he had been confined with a sprained ankle in Molly Vazeille’s home on Threadneedle Street in London. The conversation he enjoyed with Molly in those days of convalescence was delightful. In his words, she gave him “all the assurances words could give, of the most intense an inviolable affection”.

Molly Goldhawk Vazeille Wesley, forty-one had been a servant girl before marrying a London merchant “who had pampered and indulge her”. She had become accustomed to a settled middle –class family life. She had four children, the youngest under five years old. John spoke of her having a “middling understanding”, and one biographer speaks of her as being “no more conventionally religious”. Wesley’s early biographers denigrated Molly and exonerated John, so some of the early comments on Molly’s character may be biased.

Some of these early biographers think that by marrying John, Molly was climbing the social ladder of middle-class respectability and that she inveigled him into marriage. Something that Grace Murray and Sophy Hopkey had been unable to do. That is too crass an assessment. Two of her late husband’s friends had recommended John Wesley to her. She was flattered by his attention, just as he was pleased with hers. Both of them were ripe for marriage.

The marriage started poorly and went downhill from there. The Sunday after the wedding, John felt he had to explain to his fellow Methodists why he had married so suddenly and had not consulted with his brethren in advance. The explanation confused his brethren and incensed Molly. He spoke of marriages as “a cross that he had taken up” for their sakes and that he had married to “break down the prejudice about the world and him”

Molly was dumbfounded. Was this the man that she had married?

A week later John was off to a conference, then home for a week and then off again on a long road trip in the north. His first day our her scribbled in his diary, “In respect of travelling abroad, the Methodist preacher who has a wife should as though he had none.” But as night he wrote a warm letter home to Molly, “You have surely a right to every proof of love I can give, and to all the little help which is in my power. For you have given me even your own self. O how can we praise God enough for making us help meet for each other?”

John even wrote to his friend Blackwell the banker and asked him to look out for Molly in his absence: “She has many trials; but not one more than God knows and knows to be profitable to her.”

Among her trials was John Himself. Molly had already gone to Blackwell and complained about her husband’s lack of sensitivity to her needs. Then she went to Charles Wesley, only four months after the wedding. It took courage for her to approach Charles because she knew how strongly he had disapproved of the wedding. He agreed to talk to John privately about the problems, and then have a meeting among the three of them to engineer reconciliation. The meeting accomplished little. Molly listed all of the faults, not only of John but also of Charles; John insisted that he couldn’t halt his God-given ministry in order to coddle Molly; and Charles felt called upon to recite Latin poetry to calm the waters.

Charles neve got along with his sister-in-law. “I must pray or sink into a spirit of revenge,” he said after enduring one of Molly’s seasons of complaint and insult. Charles’ negative feelings were contagious and infected other Methodist leaders. Molly stand was starting to feel paranoid; she was the wife of the leader of Methodism and yet everyone was against her.

Molly had tried one alternative – staying home while John was on the road – and it hadn’t worked. Now she was ready to try the other. If she travelled with her husband, maybe the marriage bond would be strengthened, and the negative vibes that she was feeling would disappear.

But it didn’t work. Grace Murray had been an ideal travelling companion for John; Molly was not. He didn’t want to make the comparison, but he couldn’t help it. England’s roads were not easy to travel; especially the way John Wesley travelled them. And for one who had a penchant for complaining, Molly found she had plenty to bemoan.

Once again John wrote to his confidant Blackwell: “In my last journey all my patience was put to the proof again and again. I am content with whatever I meet with and this must be the spirit of all who take journeys with me. I never fret. I repine at nothing. I am discontented with nothing. And to have persons at my ear, fretting and murmuring at everything is like tearing the flesh off my bones.”

Besides the constant travelling, Molly had to face pouring rain, driving winds, winter cold, stones thrown by angry mobs, and taunts of jeering antagonists. Once, when she arrived at the site of the next meeting, she and Hone were met by a large group of adoring women all arrayed in “remarkable neatness”. She was conscious of two things: first, that she looked her worst after a fifty mile ride on horseback and second, that the women were gathered around her husband and while John was exulting about spiritual blessings, she was complaining about the hard beds, the itchy blankets that were too small, and the bed bugs.

It was no doubt after circumstances like this, that Molly’s hair-pulling story took place, if needed it did take place. According to one of Methodistm’s travelling preachers: “Once when I was in the north of Ireland, I went into a room and found Mrs. Wesley foaming with fury. Her husband was on the floor, where she had been trailing him by the hair of his head. She herself was still holding in her hand venerable locks which she had plucked up by the roots.“ Allegedly, this took place about a year and a half after their marriage.

Later biographies partially discredit the story, though they don’t discredit it completely. Molly’s temper was legendary, and when she lost it, she became quite irrational. John once wrote, in the impersonal way by which he sometimes referred to his wife, “ Is it a pity. I should be glad if I had to do with reasonable people.”

There were occasional respites, and at first John’s letters show love and affection. He appreciated her assistance with business and financial matters. He even naively encouraged her to open any letters that came to their home while he was travelling. And when Molly opened some of his correspondence, if started her off on another tantrum.

The problem was that John’s intimate counselling of women did not change after his marriage. He was as warm, loving, and solicitous as ever. So after John and Molly mutually agreed that Methodistm’s best interest weren’t served by her travelling with her husband across the British Isles, she stayed at home, read John’s correspondence, and imagined the worst.

Sarah Ryan, a recent convert and only thirty- three years old, had been appointed by John to be matron of the Kingswood School. She had been married three times without benefit of divorce, and was certainly not the people’s choice for the coveted post.

Wesley gave her his pastoral counsel. In his letters to her, he told her his problems with Molly, and the language he used to speak of his spiritual interest in her could easily have been misunderstood. And it was.

In return, Sarah’s letters to John said things like: “I do not know how to steer between extremes, of regarding you too little or too much.” When Molly ripped open one these letters, she obviously thought it was too much. What John viewed as agape love seemed suspiciously like eros love to Molly. She demanded that John stop the correspondence.

“I afterwards found her in such a temper,” John writes, “ as I have not seen her in several years.” And then Molly walked our on him, “vowing she would see me no more.”

The temper tantrum, and Molly’s departure, didn’t stop John from writing to his female lieutenant as Kingswood. A month later however, at a meeting that Wesley had with more than sixty of his Methodist ministers and with Sarah Ryan presiding, Molly burst into the room, waving her finger at Sarah and shouting, “The whore now serving you has three husbands living.”

After that explosion, Molly returned to John, but as you can imagine, life wasn’t any easier. At times, the relationship resembled a pitched battle. Molly was the violent one, John the self-righteous. She accused him of having his brother’s wife as a mistress. He accused her of poisoning the minds of the servants against him.

When she refused to give hi, some of the letters that had arrived in his absence, he broke into her bureau forcibly to retrieve them. When she felt the whole world as on John’s side and no one understood her predicament, she doctored some of John’s letters to cast them in the worst possible light and then gave them to the London newspapers to publish.

Ebenezer Blackwell, who frequently tried to mediate in the marriage, was sometimes caught in the crossfire. He tried to get John to see that all the blame should not be placed upon Molly. John was angry. He responded: “What I am in not the question, but what she is, of which I must needs be a better judge than you.” And “ I certainly will, as long as I can hold a pen, assert my right of conversing with whom I please. Reconciliation or none, let her loot to that.”

In one letter to Molly, John listed ten major complaints, including Molly’s stealing from his bureau, his inability to invite friends in his own house, his having to give an account to Molly of everywhere he went, Molly showing his private papers and letters without his permission, her use of fishwife’s language against the servants, and her continual malicious slander.

He vowed that he would be willing to do anything to keep her “in good humour”, as long as it didn’t hurt his soul or hers or the cause of God. Writing his warm letters to Sarah Ryan and other women was necessary to the “cause of God”

Naturally, John had a problem appearing in public with Molly, because he was never quite sure what she would say. He writes that she “could not refrain from throwing squibs” at him and would speak to him as “no wife ought to speak to a husband.”

“You violently shock my love,” he wrote to her. “You cut yourself off from joint prayer. For how can I pray with one that is daily watching to do me hurt? O Molly, throw the fire out of your bosom,”

Molly’s problems multiplied. Continually, she was put down by others in the Methodist movement; she wasn’t the wife she ought to be for John and she knew it. She was constantly reminded of it. She didn’t have John’s education, social standing, or stamina; she wasn’t suited to be a leader of the Methodist women’s bands.

She knew she had an acid tongue. However, not all the blame for their unhappy marriage was hers, and she wanted the world to know it.

She resented the pastoral letters she received from her husband, as if she were no nearer and dearer to him than Sarah Ryan. John would write her: “How do you look back on your past sins?” And “If you were buried just now, or if you had never lived, what loss would it be to the cause of God?” She didn’t like to be preached as by her husband.

Besides that, her health was poor. She suffered painfully from gout and had a difficult time going through menopause. She had been defrauded of much of her inheritance and her children had been a concern to her. One had died, another was sickly, and tow of her sons proved to be “grievous crossed”. John wrote her about these personal problems, suggesting that perhaps these afflictions had come from God “to break the impetuosity and soften the hardness” of her heart. She admitted to herself that this might be so, but she wished that her husband didn’t have to keep reminding her.

John Wesley pleaded with her, lectured her and, when that didn’t work, he ignored her. John could persuade most women, but he was unable to budge Molly. “One might as well try to convince the north wind,” he said.

For more than twenty years, the Wesleys’ “marital history pursued its thorny cause,” writes Stanley Ayling. “A marriage largely nominal and often almost irrelevant; separation frequent, but never final until 1776; perennial mutual resentment.”

Sometimes there was a short period of togetherness as in 1766 when Wesley, now sixty-three, wrote, “My wife continues in an amazing temper. Miracles are not ceased, Not one jarring string. O let us live now.”

But four years later, in what was almost their twentieth anniversary, Molly walked out again; Wesley’s journal records it: “January 23, For what cause I know not, my wife set out for Newcastle, purposing never to return. ‘Non eam reliqui; non dimisi; non revocabo.’ “ (‘I have not left her; I have nor sent her away; I shall not ask her to come back.’)

A year later she came back on her own. Not only did she come back, but also travelled with him on one of his speaking tours. She was sixty-two at the time.

As they travelled, she felt the strong antagonism of Methodist leadership against her. She felt that they were placing John on a pedestal – and her, in the gutter. In 1744 she wrote to her husband, “For God’s sake, put a stop to this torrent of evil that is poured out against me.”

The torrent did not stop. In 1776 (when he was seventy-three and she sixty-seven) they separated for the last time. “The water is split,” John wrote. “And it cannot be gathered up again.”

Two years later, he wrote her his last letter. It was bitter. “It you were to live a thousand years, you could not undo the mischief you have done.”

In 1781, at the age of seventy-two, Molly Vazeille Wesley died. She bequeathed nothing to John except her ring was left as a “token that I die in love and friendship towards him.”

John continued his almost Herculean labours. He crossed the Irish Sea forty-two times. When he was eighty he conducted a mission tour in Holland. His bitterness against Molly passed away in his final years, and he viewed those stormy years of marriage with the idea that if “Mrs. Wesley had been a better wife”, he might have been unfaithful to the great work to which God had called him.

John Wesley was married to his work, and he felt it would have been a grievous sin to be unfaithful to that divine marriage. But sometimes a servant of God fails to distinguish between loving God and loving God’s work.