Chapter Two - Respectable congregations: the second rise of Methodism 1791–1830

Summary

Part 1 Narrative

War and growth 1790–1815

In 1790, a visitor to Everton broke the news to John Berridge that the Countess of Huntingdon had died: ‘“Ah!” said the good man, “is she dead? Then another pillar is gone to glory. Mr Whitfield is gone, Mr Wesley and his brother are gone, and I shall go soon.”’ Less than two years later, on 22 January 1793, he ‘fell asleep in Christ’. An era was ending, and not only for the little world of English Methodism. The whole of Europe was changing; the same year that John Berridge died peacefully in his bed, the King and Queen of France died violently under the guillotine. The fire of revolution flared out of control and none of the anciens régimes of Europe would sleep easily in their beds again until 1815. For Britain as a whole, the decades following 1790 would prove to be years of political anxiety. For Methodism they were to be no less significant.

By the 1790s the term Methodist was becoming increasingly appropriated, in England, to the group who, a generation earlier, would have been described as Mr Wesley's people. This was certainly the case in Bedfordshire where the self-limiting policy of the Moravians ensured that they remained a small, enclosed community, and Berridge's death deprived Calvinistic Methodism of any focal point or organisation. Neither tradition disappeared, and their story will be picked up again in due course, but there is no doubt that it was the Wesleyans who now took centre stage and, after decades of decline, launched Methodism into a new era of dramatic expansion. Nationally, the Wesleyan connexion saw its membership rise from 54,359 in 1789 to 171,179 in 1815 but the rate of growth in and around Bedfordshire was even greater. In 1789 the Bedford circuit, which included societies in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire, had 237 members. By 1815 membership of the circuits covering the same ground totalled in excess of 3,675, a growth rate of over 1,500%, five times the national average (see Table 15).

The growth came in a series of distinct pulses. The first, between midsummer 1789 and midsummer 1793, saw the Bedford circuit's membership rise from 237 to 660.