Chapter One - Pious societies: the first rise of Methodism 1736–1790

Summary

Part 1 Narrative

The First Methodists

The first green shoots of the Methodist revival appeared early in Bedfordshire. When Francis Okely formed a society in Bedford in the summer of 1736 ‘to pursue Religion in the greatest Strictness and Purity’, news of the ‘second Pentecost’ in Saxony and of ‘the surprising work of God’ in Massachusetts had not even reached England. A few individuals in other parts of Britain, including Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland and George Whitefield, had already experienced their own religious awakenings during the previous twelve months but even John Wesley's iconic experience, of feeling his heart ‘strangely warmed,’ lay a full two years in the future. Societies like Okely's had, of course, been a feature of Anglican devotional life since the 1670s, but this one was unusual, and in ways that pointed to the future rather than the past, in that it was lay-led and mixed gender. Okely went up to Cambridge later that same year but the Bedford society continued without him, possibly under the leadership of his mother, Ann, and then later of Jacob Rogers, the newly appointed curate of St Paul’s, Bedford.

At Cambridge, Okely met with a number of other young men whose religious ideas and experience were developing in a similar direction, and through them he, and the Bedford society, were brought into contact with other emerging evangelical groups. In particular, in the autumn of 1738, he became friends with William Delamotte, whose older brother Charles had belonged to John Wesley's Holy Club at Oxford and had accompanied the Wesley brothers to the fledgling American colony of Georgia where he had had a profound religious experience, possibly under Moravian influence. It was probably through the Delamottes that the Cambridge circle made contact with Benjamin Ingham, another former Holy Club member, who had been preaching the need for conversion since his own awakening, in Yorkshire, in September 1738. A nineteenth-century manuscript history of Ingham's work, based on diaries that have since been lost, records that he met Okely and Delamotte in Cambridge on 16 December. A fuller account of the visit is preserved in a manuscript life of Ann Okely:

It happened that Mr Ingham in his Way to Yorkshire called at Cambridge to visit William Delamotte, and was by him introduced to the whole Society of serious and awakened Students.