The Wesleys at Lewisham

Yes, and here is the date

The question is asked often enough to deserve a plain answer. John Wesley preached in this church on Sunday 23 November 1777. He wrote it down himself:

I preached in Lewisham church for the benefit of the Humane Society, instituted for the sake of those who seem to be drowned, strangled, or killed by any sudden stroke. It is a glorious design; in consequence of which many have been recovered that must otherwise have inevitably perished.

It was a charity sermon for what is now the Royal Humane Society, founded three years earlier to promote the resuscitation of the apparently drowned. He had written it two days before, on the Friday, on the text Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world — Matthew 25:34. It was published as a pamphlet, survives as Sermon 99, The Reward of the Righteous, and the Society thought well enough of it to reprint it in 1830 alongside Bishop Horsley’s, noting that two men who differed on much had “united in the labours of love and humanity”.

You can read the whole thing: The Reward of the Righteous.

The building he preached in was eleven weeks old. The rebuilt church had opened on 7 September 1777, and on the second Sunday part of the east side had fallen down and hurt a woman. Wesley stood in it that November all the same.

And Charles?

Not established. Charles Wesley was certainly in this parish, often, for decades — the last visit of August 1782 is recorded as “my brother and I” — and it was Charles who knew Blackwell first. But no record found for this page puts Charles Wesley in the pulpit of St Mary’s, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to let his brother’s sermon cover them both. If evidence turns up, this page will be glad to change.

Ebenezer Blackwell

He was born at Tewkesbury, on a date nobody has recovered, and in 1731 he joined the banking house of Martin’s in Lombard Street, where he became a partner. Tyerman’s life of Wesley gives him a nickname and a character in one sentence: “though, for his plain honesty, he was often called the rough diamond, he was one of Wesley’s kindest and most valuable friends”.

He met Charles Wesley in 1739 and financed a great deal of what the brothers did. Money went the other way too: Blackwell would hand Wesley considerable sums to distribute among the poor, which is a particular kind of trust for a banker to place in a travelling preacher.

His house was The Limes, one of the largest on the High Street, with a garden and a meadow behind it. It was demolished in 1894 and St Saviour’s Roman Catholic church was built on the site in 1909.

He was treasurer of this church through the rebuilding of 1774–77 — so the man who kept the accounts for the Georgian church was Methodism’s banker, and the building Wesley preached in that November was one Blackwell had helped pay for. He died in 1782 and lies under the obelisk in the churchyard; the copper inscriptions were stolen in the nineteenth century and never replaced.

A note on his dates. The parish history gives 1731–1782 and this site followed it until August 2026. 1731 is the year he joined the bank. His birth year is not recorded, and it cannot be 1731, because he met Charles Wesley in 1739.

The knot of families

Blackwell’s first wife, Elizabeth Mowland, died in 1772 and is on the obelisk with him. Later the same year he married Mary Eden, and that marriage tied the bank, the vicarage and the see of London together.

Mary Eden was the daughter of Robert Eden, Archdeacon of Winchester, and of Martha Lowth — which made her the niece of William Lowth, Vicar of Lewisham for fifty-five years, the longest incumbency this parish has had, and equally the niece of his brother Robert Lowth, Bishop of London. Lysons, writing in 1796, records the vicar on his monument as “brother of the late Bishop of London”.

Which explains the entry in the Journal for the day after the sermon. Monday 24 November 1777: “I spent the afternoon at Mr. Blackwell’s with the B[ishop] of [London]. His whole behaviour was worthy of a Christian bishop — easy, affable, courteous; and yet all his conversation spoke the dignity which was suitable to his character.” The bishop was Robert Lowth, in his first year in the see, sitting in his niece’s drawing room in Lewisham with the founder of Methodism.

Where he came to write

The preaching is the answer to the question, but it is not the main thing that happened here. For upwards of forty years Lewisham was Wesley’s retreat. He said so plainly on his last visit, on 24 August 1782, after Blackwell had died:

My brother and I paid our last visit to Lewisham, and spent a few pensive hours with the relict of our good friend Mr. Blackwell. We took one more walk round the garden and meadow, which he took so much pains to improve. Upwards of forty years this has been my place of retirement when I could spare two or three days from London.

He went there to work, and the Journal keeps saying so: I retired to Lewisham and wrote. What he wrote there includes:

• The preface to The Doctrine of Original Sin in November 1756; the second part of it is signed “Lewisham” and dated 25 January 1757.
• A Preservative against Unsettled Notions in Religion, finished there in December 1757.
• The assize sermon for Bedford, February 1758.
• Farther Thoughts on Christian Perfection, December 1761.
• His answer to Dr Horne on justification by works, March 1762.
• The sermon before the Society for Reformation of Manners, January 1763 — on the text his own father had used before the same society sixty-five years earlier.
• The sermon on “Sin in Believers”, March 1763.
• His notes on the book of Job, finished there.
• George Whitefield’s funeral sermon, October 1770. He went to Lewisham specifically to write it.
• And in January 1780, the plan for a monthly magazine — the Arminian Magazine. His own aside is the best line in the sequence: “I retired to Lewisham, to prepare matter (who would believe it?) for a Monthly Magazine.”

The epitaph he wrote here

On 26 November 1753 Wesley was gravely ill and believed he was dying. His doctor told him to leave London that day. Not being able to sit a horse, he took a coach to Lewisham, and that evening, at Blackwell’s house and in his own words to prevent vile panegyric, he wrote his own epitaph:

Here lieth the body of John Wesley, a brand plucked out of the burning: who died of a consumption in the fifty-first year of his age, not leaving, after his debts are paid, ten pounds behind him: praying, God be merciful to me, an unprofitable servant!

He directed that this, if any inscription, should go on his tombstone. He then lived another thirty-seven years. The illness is the one that sent him on to Bristol to convalesce, where he began the Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament — still a doctrinal standard of Methodism — and wrote to Blackwell in January full of gratitude, contrasting the fine air of Lewisham with the cold, bleak place he had ended up in.

The water

One more entry, because it is Lewisham to the life. Setting out for Blackwell’s on a Tuesday in January, Wesley was left to walk in his boots and greatcoat when the man bringing his horse took the wrong road:

When I came within a quarter of a mile of Lewisham Bridge a coach drove swiftly by me. I wondered why the coachman stopped, till he called, and desired me to come up to him. The reason then appeared — the low grounds were quite covered with water, so that I could not have attempted to reach the bridge without hazarding my life.

The Ravensbourne and the Quaggy have always done that. Twenty-odd years later he stood in the church a few hundred yards away and preached for a society that existed to bring back the drowned.

Elsewhere on this site

Blackwell’s obelisk and the rest of the churchyard are on the monuments. William Lowth and the other fifty-four men who have held this living are on the vicars of Lewisham. The rebuilding Blackwell was treasurer of — how it was decided, and how it was paid for by selling annuities to nineteen women — is on the history pages, and the tower that survived it is on the tower and the bells.