2 of 4
George III had suffered repeated ill-health during 1788: first bilious attacks, then irritation, sleeplessness, and garrulity. Never one to desert his post, he held a levee on October 24 in order, he said, "to stop further lies and any fall of the stocks"; J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, 1969), p. 644. When, however, "while driving in Windsor Park, [he] alighted and shook hands with a branch of an oak tree, asserting it to be the King of Prussia," it was clear that his sanity had given way (J. Holland Rose, William Pitt and National Revival [London, 1911], p. 407, n. 2). At the end of November, his physicians moved him by deception to Kew, advising the Privy Council that his disease was not incurable but that it was impossible to forecast how long it would last. The immediate political consequence of the collapse (which was what alarmed JW) was that if the Prince of Wales succeeded to the Regency by unfettered right, he would certainly turn out Pitt's government and bring in Fox. The battle between Pitt and Fox over this issue need not be related here, but Pitt's delaying tactics were supported by the knowledge that the King was now in the charge of Dr. Francis Willis, the most distinguished practitioner of the century in the field of mental illness, who declared an early recovery certain. JW's prayers were planned too late; the chancellor announced the King convalescent on February 19, and he resumed his authority on March 10.
John Henderson (1757-88) had been born in Ireland when his father was an itinerant preacher there, and was educated at Kingswood [school, founded by Wesley]. "At eight years he understood Latin so well as to be able to teach it at the school. At twelve he taught the Greek language in the school of Trevecca," leaving that establishment at the same time as John Fletcher. At the age of 24, he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he acquired a reputation as a polymath, in languages, philosophy, law, and medicine, which attracted the attention of the literary world of that day; and his philanthropy matched his learning. The Wesleyan world attributed his downfall to the study of Boehme's "wild philosophical divinity, and …. the profound nonsense that abounds in the dark regions of mysticism," of Lavater, and of magic and astrology. More immediately, he became addicted to smoking, drinking, and experiments on himself with opium and quicksilver. He had become completely introverted for some time before his death on Nov. 2. He was buried in Kingswood, but "his father, Mr. Richard Henderson, was so strongly affected by the loss of his affectionate and only child, that he caused the corpse to be taken up again, some days after the internment, to be satisfied whether he was really dead"; Arminian Magazine 16 (1793): 140-44. See also Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-64), 4:151, n. 2; 286, n. 3; 289-99.
Along with thousands of other annotations of similarly revealing precision, such exquisite mini-essays open up theological and personal meanings of Wesley's important labors in a most revealing way. They are the work of W. Reginald Ward, professor emeritus at Durham University in England and, taken in the round, the greatest living historian of religion and society for Europe's long eighteenth century.1 In addition to the annotations, Ward also supplied the first volume of the series with a breath-taking introduction to Wesley's journals in the context of 18th-century autobiography.
Work on the journals' texts, which Wesley had published and re-published in short "Extracts" from the early 1740s, as well as on the daily diaries that Wesley used as a memory prompt for preparing the published journals, is also of exceedingly high quality. The reconstruction of those diaries, which involved cracking a shorthand code that had long baffled scholars, is the work of Richard Heitzenrater, professor of Wesley studies at Duke Divinity School, who is also the general editor of the Bicentennial Edition and author of his own helpful books like Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Abingdon, 1995).
share this page
RSS Feed
