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CHAPTER VII

THE UPPER CLASSES

LTHOUGH he was a scholar and a gentleman, Wesley was, more than anything else, an apostle to the common people; he seemed to be more in his element when giving his message to the vulgar crowd than when mixing with great and famous personages into whose company he was occasionally thrown. This was simply because his one aim was to get his message accepted, and the lower orders were found to be much more accessible than the upper. His education and good breeding enabled him to maintain an easy manner in any aristocratic society; but a great gulf separated that world from the one which made up Wesley's constituency. When the Methodist Revival commenced, things had come to such a pass in the Established Church, that it was rather fashionable than otherwise not to be a believer in Christianity. There seem to have been certain clergymen who in private even boasted of their infidelity.

Practically, Puritanism went out of fashion at the Revolution of 1688; and although in the age

that followed, Matthew Henry, 'chief among the mighty,' and 'the greatest of commentators,' as he has been called, composed his immortal work, the time was one of religious deterioration. Although the early years of the reign of George II., when the Methodist Revival first broke out, are said to have been the most prosperous time that the nation had ever known.

Because the King still represented the Protestant Succession, which was destined to be once more challenged by the rising under the Young Pretender, on behalf of his father, 'James III.,' he was popular with all who were not Jacobites or Romanists. Wesley was Protestant patriot enough even to admire the 'flighty vapouring little king'; and he was not in a situation to know what Carlyle knew to be the truth, a century later, in regard to Queen Caroline-'Seldom had foolish husband so wise a wife.' George was a man of his time, a German at a time when that meant full licence to a monarch for the most shameless living. If we take such men as Sir Robert Walpole, Chesterfield, and Lord Hervey, as representative of what is called high society, what do we find? The first, as a statesman, served the country with advantage because his policy was for peace; but he was as profligate in private life as he was unprincipled in a political sense. Chesterfield, who came to a miserable old age, wrote a book of advice to his son, which from that day to this has been a curse to all young men who have accepted its teaching. The deistical and effeminate Hervey - Pope's,

'Lord Fanny'-belonged to a family whose members appear to have cut short their lives by excess. He married Mary Lepell, the chief of three beauties who added attraction to the Court of George I. Hervey succeeded his elder brother-whose life was cut short by profligacy, and who was said by Lady Mary Montagu to be the father of Horace Walpole; but he himself showed the symptoms of old age and died at forty-seven. He painted his face to conceal its deadly ghastliness, according to one report; and at last sought to prolong life by a diet of asses' milk and one apple a week. Yet he could engage in the most bitter literary quarrels ; while he fought a duel with Pulteney, the chief of the political party who plotted for the overthrow of Walpole. What was Methodism to such adventurers as these but a craze to be ignored rather than tolerated? Lord Hervey, the jovial, looseliving and foul-mouthed Sir Robert Walpole, as well as the polished cynic, Horace Walpole, were men of their time, whose lives and sympathies seemed to reflect bad times and a degenerate world.

In following Wesley through his extraordinary career, he is found to have been more than anything else a preacher to the common people; but while he may not have felt himself to be at home as it were among those who thronged the haunts of fashion, he still realised that his mission was to all classes. One of his most singular adventures at the outset of the Methodist Revival, was coming in contact with Beau Nash, who was then Master

of the Ceremonies at Bath, that town then being a great centre of fashionable frivolity.

Bath had become popular as a health resort after the memorable visit of Queen Anne at the beginning of her reign; and also because several physicians referred to the efficacy of the waters in certain disorders. Until this time, gambling and its attendant evils had chiefly been confined to London; but when Bath grew in favour, the fashionable crowd craved for the amusements which they had left behind in the Metropolis; so that when Nash, with his genius for organising, had brought some order out of chaos, they found all the accommodation which they required. In his Life of Beau Nash, Oliver Goldsmith thus describes what the city of Bath was like just two hundred years ago:

'The lodgings for visitors were paltry though expensive; the dining-rooms and other chambers were floored with boards, coloured brown with soot and small-beer to hide the dirt; the walls were covered with unpainted wainscot; the furniture corresponded with the meanness of the architecture; a few oak chairs, a small looking-glass, with a fender and tongs, composed the magnificence of these temporary habitations. The city was in itself mean and contemptible; no elegant buildings, no open streets nor uniform squares. The pumphouse was without any director; the chairmen permitted no gentlemen or ladies to walk home by night without insulting them; and to add to all this, one of the greatest physicians of his age con

ceived a design of ruining the city by writing against the efficacy of the waters.'

An acquaintance with Bath and its daily round of dissipation in those times seems indispensable to aid us in understanding the period. By general consent Beau Nash was allowed to reign as Master of the Ceremonies; and having some genius for organisation, he pleased the frivolous votaries of fashion who there sought to diversify the cares or monotony of daily life. The city swarmed with gaming adventurers, and until late in the reign of George I. the licence allowed by the law favoured their fleecing their victims almost at will. The arch-gamester was Beau Nash himself, who depended on such nefarious gains to maintain a pseudo-state little short of ludicrous. As Goldsmith tells us, 'his equipage was sumptuous, and he usually travelled to Tunbridge in a post-chariot and six greys, with outriders, footmen, Frenchhorns, and every other appendage of expensive parade.' Bath and Tunbridge were such centres of gaming that, as Goldsmith also tells us, ' men of that infamous profession from every part of the kingdom, and even other parts of Europe, flocked here to feed on the ruins of each other's fortune.'

Beau Nash showed that he was possessed of a far more generous heart than many of the unprincipled adventurers who were content to grow rich at any hazard, and without troubling themselves about the misery they caused to others. He warned the young and inexperienced of lurking dangers, and desperate players of the ruin which