On Sunday 19 August 1849, the Rev. John Wesley Button preached his farewell sermon as superintendent minister of the Oxford Wesleyan Circuit. Wesleyan ministers were stationed annually by the Wesleyan Conference and appointments were renewable for a maximum of three years by local agreement. Button had been in Oxford since 1846, thus achieving the maximum term permitted under the Wesleyans’ rules, and for the past two years had also served as chairman of the Oxford District. As he prepared to move to the superintendency of the Bristol (South) Circuit, it might have been inferred that Button was concluding a successful and popular ministry in Oxford. Any such impression, however, was challenged by an anonymous article which appeared in the Oxford Chronicle the following weekend. According to ‘A Looker-On’, although Button was undoubtedly a gifted preacher, with ‘a grasp of intellect and powers of mind beyond the ordinary class’, his ‘tyrannical conduct’ and ‘spirit of domination’ had rendered him obnoxious to many, such that a sermon which would normally have been ‘crowded by an attentive congregation’ was delivered to many empty seats.Footnote 1 A swift rebuttal of the allegation of a poorly attended service came from two of the trustees of the Wesleyans’ New Inn Hall Street chapel, but they acknowledged that Button had been engaged in a dispute with some of the local preachers of the circuit, and that some might have stayed away ‘out of a chivalrous feeling for an individual’.Footnote 2 That individual, not named in the initial correspondence, was the Oxford schoolmaster Josiah Munday Crapper, a longstanding local preacher, who resigned or was removed from the preaching plan in the summer of 1849, prompting the resignation or expulsion of a dozen other local preachers.Footnote 3 This local dispute, focussed on policy and personalities within the Oxford Circuit, was given added significance and impetus by the Reform controversy which gripped the Wesleyan Connexion from the late 1840s into the next decade.Footnote 4 The interplay of local and national events complicated and exacerbated the crisis at both levels, and the quarrel between Button and Crapper offers a case study of this intertwining. Margins and peripheries, moreover, supply a lens through which to examine events, perceptions and protagonists, as all the disputants saw themselves as central to the structure of Methodism and their opponents as peripheral. Before taking up the lens, however, it is necessary to give an account, first of the Reform controversy in mid-nineteenth-century Wesleyanism, and then of the manifestation of the crisis in Oxford.
Wesleyan Reform was the latest in a series of disputes which had racked the Wesleyan Connexion in the half-century following the death of John Wesley in 1791. Although differing in size and detail, all might plausibly be seen as outcomes of the extraordinary growth and evolving ecclesial independence of the Wesleyan movement in these years. Wesley left a Connexion of some 70,000 members and 400 preaching houses, served by 300 travelling preachers;Footnote 5 by 1851, at the time of the National Religious Census undertaken by the government, the membership figure for England and Wales alone had increased to 358,000; the Wesleyans’ claim of 1,544,528 attendances on Census Sunday supports the estimate of three to five adherents for every individual who had accepted the discipline of membership.Footnote 6 Wesley’s 300 travelling preachers had increased to over a thousand ministers, serving 6,579 places of worship.Footnote 7 Expansion required effective governance: mechanisms to raise funds for buildings, stipends and pensions; protocols to ensure orthodoxy in preaching; and prudence to avoid incurring crippling chapel debts by over-extension. The energies of spontaneous evangelism needed to be harnessed, lest revival tip over into religious or political anarchy. Methodism remained a mass movement, but also a movement with upwardly mobile members, seeking to realize their social, educational and political aspirations.Footnote 8
Numerical and institutional growth, moreover, was linked to Methodism’s evolving ecclesiology. The Wesleys’ Methodism had been a renewal movement uncomfortably contained within the Church of England, but expansion after 1791 both pushed and encouraged the Connexion along the road to independence, initially by permitting Methodist worship to take place at the same time as services in the parish church, then by allowing Methodist preachers to administer Holy Communion. Travelling preachers became ‘ministers’ in the 1820s and ordination by the laying on of hands, abandoned after Wesley’s death, was resumed by the Conference in 1836. Although the Wesleyans remained coy about using the word ‘church’, preferring to refer to themselves as a ‘Connexion’, a society or a body, the movement gradually clarified its relationship to the Church of England, becoming a separate denomination.Footnote 9
Managing expansion and developing ecclesiology came together, institutionally and theologically, in the Wesleyan Conference. John Wesley called the first Conference in 1744, meeting with a small number of like-minded clergy and lay preachers to consolidate his movement. The Conference quickly became an annual gathering of Wesley’s itinerant preachers, summoned to confer on policy, doctrines and discipline.Footnote 10 By his 1784 Deed of Declaration, Wesley bequeathed his authority over his Connexion to a named group of one hundred preachers, meeting in Conference, adding the proviso that this self-perpetuating ‘Legal Hundred’ should involve the other travelling preachers in its decisions. Wesley thus placed control of the movement – the interpretation of doctrine; the selection, training and deployment of personnel; the management of property; and the determination of policy – in the hands of a clerical oligarchy. In the early nineteenth century, this practical and legal authority was underpinned by the theology of a ‘collective pastorate’, asserting that the ministers assembled in Conference and appointed to their various stations were called by God to exercise control over the Connexion.Footnote 11 John Bowmer likened the Conference to the chapter-meeting of a religious order,Footnote 12 and its devotional framework, its tone of piety and its inquiries into ministerial character evoked the intimate and sometimes uncomfortable fellowship of the local Methodist class-meeting. However, the sheer size of the assembly offered plentiful scope for grandstanding oratory, political manoeuvring, personal rivalries, and elements of group-think. Managing Methodism therefore meant managing the Conference, and the consummate exponent of this art, from the 1810s until his retirement in 1851, was Jabez Bunting.Footnote 13 In alliance with other ministers and a group of wealthy lay Methodists, Bunting’s achievement was to give structure, coherence and leadership to Wesleyanism. Methodism’s visible success, moreover, meticulously tabulated in quarterly and annual membership statistics, seemed to validate the system and to refute the objections of critics and reformers.
The evolution of Wesleyanism did not go unchallenged. Between the 1790s and the 1830s, different elements of the polity and practice of Methodism were called into question, highlighting strands which came together in the Reform controversy.Footnote 14 A demand for lay representation in the Conference was voiced as early as the 1790s, leading to the expulsion of Alexander Kilham and the formation of the Methodist New Connexion in 1797. Revivalism, impatient of Connexional control, found expression in the Primitive Methodists, founded in 1808, and the Bible Christians, from 1815. The authoritarianism of the Conference, overruling local decision-making, provoked a secession in Leeds in 1826 and the creation of the Protestant Methodists. In 1834, opposition to the creation of a theological institution for the training of ministers coalesced around a senior preacher, Dr Samuel Warren. What may have been thwarted ambition on Warren’s part – Bunting was named as President of the institution – joined with political and social grievances and personality conflicts in Liverpool, Manchester and Rochdale, to give birth to the Wesleyan Methodist Association in 1835.Footnote 15
By the 1840s, then, the ingredients of Wesleyan Reform were in place: the assertion of lay rights, disputes over revivalism, disgruntlement over high-handed behaviour by the Conference, and quarrels within the ministerial elite, especially among those who felt marginalized by Bunting and his friends. These elements were combined in a series of anonymous publications, entitled Fly Sheets from the Private Correspondent, published between 1844 and 1849, and sent by post to all Wesleyan ministers.
The Fly Sheets were unsparing in their denunciation of Bunting and his allies. The first number set the tone:
Dr Bunting’s whole system of government has been opposed to the advice and practice of Mr Wesley; his system being of EXCLUSIVENESS, FAVOURITISM, and SELFISHNESS, as exemplified in the formation and packings of his Committees, his opposition to open, free discussion in the general assembly … and his invariable attempt to confine the knowledge, the power, and privileges of the body to his own chosen few.Footnote 16
Beginning from an attack on ‘location’ (ministers ceasing to be itinerant and taking permanent posts in the Connexional bureaucracy, principally the Mission House), ‘centralization’ (concentrating offices and meetings in London), and ‘secularization’ (exchanging the spiritual work of preaching and pastoral care for administration), the Fly Sheets portrayed a metropolitan clique which was dominating the Connexion, manipulating appointments and committees to cling on to power, sidelining opponents, and ignoring the ethics and values of traditional Methodism. Bunting was described as ‘the Dictator’ and ‘the great Ruler’, and likened to Napoleon.Footnote 17 His allies in the Conference and at the Wesleyan Missionary Society were accused of extravagance and inefficiency, a love of fine living, and a desire for personal prestige: particular scorn was poured on the quest for American honorary degrees.Footnote 18 Critical comparisons were drawn between Bunting’s ally Robert Newton and the American revivalist James Caughey, who had made a controversial tour of Britain in the early 1840s.Footnote 19 Persistent allegations of corruption and tyranny were levelled at ‘the London clique’ and their friends.Footnote 20
The Fly Sheets were not the first anonymous publications to criticize the Wesleyan leadership, and nor were their authors the first itinerants to resent Bunting and his pre-eminence. What gave the Fly Sheets traction was the action of the Conference in response.Footnote 21 In 1847, it was agreed to issue a declaration repudiating any connection with the publications. Some seventy ministers resisted the pressure to sign the declaration and Fly Sheet No. 4 mocked the failure of the ‘Inquisition’.Footnote 22 Two years later, the Conference sought to identify the author or authors by questioning those suspected: James Everett, Samuel Dunn and William Griffith. Everett ignored the summons to attend the Conference; Dunn and Griffith declined to give the undertakings required; and all three were expelled, thus supplying a tailor-made example of tyranny by ‘the Clique’. Widely reported in the religious and secular press, this became a catalyst for an explosion of protest in which ambitions for reform, long-standing grievances and local antagonisms merged. Whatever their specific grievances, disgruntled Wesleyans now had a clear goal: the reinstatement of the ‘Three Expelled’. Supporters organized mass meetings, signed petitions and withheld contributions to Methodist funds. Superintendents responded with expulsions, and rival Reform societies were set up. Until 1856, the reformers continued to petition the Conference; in 1857, most of the reformers joined with the Association to form the United Methodist Free Churches, while the remainder constituted the Wesleyan Reform Union. It has been estimated that the controversy cost Wesleyan Methodism around 100,000 members.Footnote 23
Oxford Wesleyanism escaped largely unscathed from the controversies which troubled the Connexion in the decades after Wesley’s death. The New Connexion, the Bible Christians, the Protestant Methodists, and the Wesleyan Methodist Association made no showing in the Oxford Circuit, and when Primitive Methodism began tentatively to establish itself around Oxford in the 1830s, it did so through pioneer evangelism and not through secessions from the Old Connexion.Footnote 24 Extant records show only two indications of dissent or dissatisfaction within the Wesleyan community in this period. William Ray (1814–84), schoolmaster and local preacher, was questioned by the quarterly local preachers’ meeting in summer 1846 because of ‘peculiar views’ on the doctrine of the Trinity. It became apparent that Ray had been drawn to the teaching of the New Jerusalem Church and, in March 1847, it was resolved that he should be dropped from the preaching plan; by 1851, Ray was leading a small New Jerusalem congregation in east Oxford.Footnote 25 Less dramatic at the time, but more serious for the future, in 1844, Henry Leake (1809–86) resigned from the Wesleyan Connexion ‘on conscientious grounds.’Footnote 26 The grounds were not specified, but speeches at Reform meetings in 1850 and 1851 made it clear that Leake had become dubious of the claims made for the authority of Wesleyan itinerants, and that reading some of the works designed to buttress those claims had served only to increase his disquiet.Footnote 27 Leake had been a local preacher since 1834 and a trustee of the New Inn Hall Street chapel since 1836. He was one of Oxford’s Wesleyan elite: the only local preacher to be styled ‘esquire’ and the only trustee to be designated ‘gentleman’. Leake was affluent enough to build a new chapel at Rose Hill, on the outskirts of Iffley, in 1835 and to donate it to the Connexion.Footnote 28 The parting in December 1844 was amicable: the local preachers’ meeting unanimously passed a resolution affirming ‘undiminished esteem for his private and public character’ and expressing ‘earnest wishes for his prosperity & happiness in whatever sphere of Christian labor [sic] & usefulness he may feel himself called upon to move.’Footnote 29 That sphere was Congregationalism, where Leake was already helping to supply the pulpit at George Street during an interregnum in 1844–5,Footnote 30 while also developing new work in the villages of Frilford and Longworth, to the south-west of Oxford. Leake was ‘set apart to the Christian ministry’ at Frilford in February 1845, but whether he regarded this as Congregational ordination is unclear: he presided at a Wesleyan Reform meeting in Oxford in 1850 as ‘Henry Leake, Esq.’Footnote 31
Porous boundaries between some Wesleyans and other areas of evangelical Nonconformity may help to explain the difficulties which embroiled Button and Crapper in 1849. Crapper (1810–92) was a year younger than Henry Leake, and also part of an Oxford Wesleyan dynasty.Footnote 32 Less affluent than Leake, he built a career as a schoolmaster, running an independent school, first in Brewer Street and then in St John’s Street. He matriculated as a member of the University in 1840, but did not proceed to a degree.Footnote 33 Crapper became a fully accredited local preacher in 1831, and in the mid-1840s served as superintendent and secretary of the New Inn Hall Street Sunday School.Footnote 34 Moreover, in December 1841, he married Charlotte Wilson, daughter of the Wesleyan superintendent minister, the Rev. Maximilian Wilson. Crapper, therefore, was well-connected in Oxford Wesleyanism, and it may well be asked how and why he came to be expelled in summer 1849.
The local preachers’ meeting minutes record that in June 1849 Crapper was questioned by the preachers about his involvement with the Summertown Congregational chapel. It was alleged that Crapper had been supplying the pulpit for the Congregationalists, who were without a pastor from April 1847 until December 1851, and that he had administered Holy Communion there. The Wesleyan preachers resolved: ‘That this meeting does not consider Brother Crapper’s Present Position, in relation to Methodism, a proper one’, and asked him ‘respectfully … to discontinue his connection with the Independents at Summertown, and come among us as a Local Brother, or discontinue his connection as a Local Preacher.’ Button, from the chair, proposed that: ‘If, previous to the plan going to press, Brother Crapper promise to give up his connection with the Summertown Independent Church, his name shall be continued on the plan.’ This was carried unanimously.Footnote 35 By the next meeting, held at the end of September, however, Button had departed for Bristol, and Crapper and other local preachers had resigned or been expelled.
The picture painted by the minutes shows good cause for Button and the assembled Wesleyan Local Preachers to find fault with Josiah Crapper. Although it was not uncommon for Wesleyan preachers to preach occasionally for other denominations, effectively to take charge of a church and to administer the sacraments was a clear breach of Wesleyan discipline. The puzzle here is, first, that Crapper would surely have been well aware of this and, second, that the June resolutions, as recorded in the minutes, offered him a straightforward way out: by ending his connection with the Summertown Independents and resuming his position as a Wesleyan local preacher.
The only clues to resolve the puzzle are to be found in the local preachers’ meeting minutes and in the press coverage of the subsequent dispute from the autumn of 1849. Discrepancies between these sources – particularly the absence from the minutes of any context for a dispute which seemed to erupt without explanation in summer 1849 and escalate thereafter – may be explained partly by the brevity of the minutes and partly by the fact that the minute-taker was William Hopewell, the junior itinerant and Button’s loyal colleague.Footnote 36 Local evidence suggests that Josiah Crapper had a long-standing affinity with Summertown. It is possible that the Crapper family owned property in this growing village,Footnote 37 and it was certainly the case that Crapper was deputed by the Oxford Local Preachers in March 1847 to take the lead in providing afternoon and evening preaching there, and to look for a rented room as a base.Footnote 38 The departure of George Brown, the Independent minister, in April 1847, may have looked like an opportunity for the Wesleyans to realize a long-held ambition to establish a new cause in Summertown.
What, then, led Josiah Crapper from pioneering a new Wesleyan work in Summertown to an entanglement with the Congregationalists and a quarrel with the superintendent? It is possible that Crapper was already sufficiently disgruntled with Button to be considering leaving Wesleyanism for the Congregationalists, as Henry Leake had done several years earlier. It is also possible that Crapper wished to help the Congregationalists and saw no reason not to do so, and that Button saw an opportunity to assert his authority by rebuking an influential local preacher. William Bartlett’s letter to the Oxford Chronicle in September 1849 claimed that Crapper had explained what he was doing in Summertown to the preachers the previous December; that the preachers’ meeting raised no objections, but that Button then omitted Crapper from the preaching plan, declaring his intention of removing him from the list of local preachers, and brought false charges without notice at the June 1849 preachers’ meeting. Another correspondent added that Button expelled Crapper when he declined to answer ‘an insulting and inquisitorial question’.Footnote 39 Although the minutes claim that the assembled preachers supported Button in his actions, it seems that after the June 1849 preachers’ meeting between ten and fifteen local preachers expressed opposition to the proceedings, and they too were summarily dropped from the plan. When Button left the Oxford Circuit in August 1849, half of the local preachers were effectively suspended and feelings were running high.
The case of Josiah Crapper was quickly subsumed into the wider question of Wesleyan Reform. The Oxford newspapers soon picked up and relayed the news from the Manchester Conference of the expulsion of Everett, Dunn and Griffith, and reported the response. Thus, the Oxford University and City Herald reprinted a critical article on ‘The Wesleyan Despotism’ from the Church and State Gazette,Footnote 40 while the conservative Oxford Journal and liberal Oxford Chronicle carried advertisements for the pamphlets on the Conference produced by the Wesleyan Times and verbatim accounts of the first protest meeting addressed by the ‘three expelled’ at Exeter Hall, London, on 31 August.Footnote 41 Letters about Crapper and the Oxford Local Preachers evolved into discussions of ‘arbitrary power’ and ‘priestly absolutism’, extending the criticism from Button to Bunting and the dominant faction in the Wesleyan Conference. The coverage of the controversy was such that non-Methodist readers of the Chronicle began to object to the amount of space devoted to it.Footnote 42
During the autumn of 1849 and through 1850, the Reform crisis continued and deepened. Meetings were held to express support for the ‘three expelled’, to call for their reinstatement, and to raise funds for their support. The Conference was urged to change its rules and to admit lay representatives. In addition to the weekly Wesleyan Times, a new monthly, the Wesleyan Review and Evangelical Record, was launched, to make the case for reform. Meanwhile, the Conference held firm. A declaration of support for ‘Methodism as it is’, issued by the president, was signed by almost every Wesleyan minister.Footnote 43 When the reformers organized a delegate meeting in London in March 1850, the president declined to receive a deputation.Footnote 44 The 1850 Conference refused to consider memorials from circuits, pleading for a change of heart, and the effect was to endorse a hard line in the localities.Footnote 45 Reformers withheld contributions to Connexional funds; superintendents expelled officeholders and members; and, in some places, meetings and services were disrupted by protests or tussles for control of property and pulpits.Footnote 46 Although presented as a stark conflict between Conference loyalists and reformers, the reality was far more nuanced. As Benjamin Gregory observed, the appearance of Conference unanimity was misleading: there were liberal-minded ministers in the Connexion, and their sensitivity and discretion did much to defuse tensions.Footnote 47 Many lay Methodists were not persuaded by the rhetoric of the Wesleyan Times; some who sympathized with the ‘three expelled’ disliked the tone of the Fly Sheets;Footnote 48 many were genuinely undecided and open to persuasion. As circuits sought to weather the ‘ecclesiastical tornado’,Footnote 49 much depended on local issues and local personalities, and not least on the approach taken by the superintendent.
The course of the controversy in the Oxford Circuit tracked developments nationally. Button’s successor, the experienced and emollient Joseph Earnshaw, suffered from poor health, so in autumn 1849 the acting superintendent was the more abrasive Charles Westlake, who inflamed the situation by provocative interventions.Footnote 50 Letters and news items in the local press continued through the autumn of 1849 and into 1850. On 23 October 1849, a public meeting was held at the Adullam Chapel, affirming support for Everett, Dunn and Griffith, and calling for lay representation in the Conference.Footnote 51 By the beginning of 1850, there was a Reform committee in Oxford, making plans for a visit to the city by the ‘three expelled’ and arranging for delegates to be sent to the national ‘Peoples’ Conference’ in London in March.Footnote 52 Local gatherings were held to make the case for Wesleyan Reform and to hear expelled preachers like William Bartlett; while in July 1850, Dunn and Griffith came to address a ‘large meeting’ of Wesleyans from Oxford and adjacent circuits.Footnote 53 With Robert Day, another hardliner, as superintendent from summer 1850, Oxford Wesleyans were forced to choose sides. Some made their peace with the Conference; others resigned or were expelled. William Leggatt, a local preacher, class leader and Woodstock ironmonger, had been kept in membership by Earnshaw, despite his attendance at the March 1850 Reform conference, and had engaged in negotiation with other reformers, but he was expelled by Day for ‘stopping supplies and Agitation’.Footnote 54 G. G. Banbury, another local preacher and class leader, and Reform delegate in 1850, stayed on the preaching plan until spring 1851, when he was told by Day that he must promise not to attend any meetings of the expelled or lose his membership.Footnote 55 As attitudes hardened and options diminished, by the beginning of 1851, the Reform Committee was beginning to set up a parallel structure, with its own prayer meetings, class-meetings and preaching services.Footnote 56 Gradually a separate reformers’ preaching plan developed, and by November 1851, the Oxford reformers reported to a district meeting that they had ninety members, twelve local preachers and seven chapels, and ‘a majority of members on their side’.Footnote 57 By 1856, there were nine preaching places on the reformers’ plan, including villages to the north and east of Oxford.Footnote 58 Numbers of places fluctuated, but during the 1860s, new chapels were built in Combe, Kidlington, Bicester and Woodstock; while Leake’s chapel at Rose Hill, reduced to single-figure membership by Day’s expulsions, was bought from the Wesleyans and presented to the reformers.Footnote 59 The Old Connexion held on, despite losses of members and societies, but when Benjamin Gregory arrived as Wesleyan superintendent in autumn 1857, ‘he found Methodism in a truly pitiable condition … reduced … almost to ruin.’Footnote 60 For the next three-quarters of a century, until Methodist Union in 1932, reformers and Wesleyans maintained a separate existence in Oxford, with parallel and overlapping circuits.
How might the lens of margins and peripheries shed light on the Reform crisis in Oxford Methodism? First, as has already been noted, there was a complex interplay between the reality and perceptions of local and national events. Oxford was by no means unique in this respect: David Bebbington has shown, for example, how local issues were key to the emergence of Free Methodism in Louth in the 1850s.Footnote 61 Wesleyan itinerants, like Button, Charles Westlake and Robert Day came to the troubles of the 1840s schooled by their experiences of the Leeds and Warrenite controversies of the 1820s and 1830s.Footnote 62 They were instinctively wary of ‘agitators’ and predisposed to cling to ‘Methodism as it is’ in the face of challenge and change. Committed to the authority of the ‘pastoral office’ and the ecclesiology of the ‘collective pastorate’, they deployed the disciplinary machinery of the Connexion to quell any suggestion of local irregularity or dissent. Local Wesleyans, on the other hand, brought their knowledge of specific grievances to the interpretation of national issues, so that the injustice apparently done to Josiah Crapper became a local example of the arrogance and tyranny of the Conference. Crapper was a surrogate for the ‘three expelled’, and Button an Oxford equivalent of Jabez Bunting. This may be seen in the description of the June 1849 local preachers’ meeting in the letter from ‘Office-bearer’ to the Oxford Chronicle in the autumn: Crapper, like Everett, Dunn and Griffith, was confronted by unjust accusations and ‘inquisitorial’ questions; like the ‘three expelled’, he declined to answer.Footnote 63
If national events offered a way of understanding local issues, grievances felt locally inspired an engagement with a national campaign for redress. Oxford reformers soon moved beyond sympathy for Josiah Crapper and other local preachers to organizing meetings in support of Everett, Dunn and Griffith, and to subscriptions for funds to help them. Oxford delegates attended the Reform meeting in London in March 1850, and gatherings of Oxford reformers endorsed the demand for the reinstatement of the ‘expelled’ and the rescinding of the ‘laws of 1835’ which codified the ability of the Conference and the district meetings to interfere in the circuits. This constitutional issue reinforces the point that the highly centralized polity of Wesleyan Methodism ensured that local disputes soon became national concerns: there was a rapid route from the periphery to the centre, because all appeals for resolution, redress or reform inevitably ended with the Conference.
It is worth noting that developments in communications in this period assisted the connection of centre and periphery. The first railway line between Oxford and London opened in 1844, with a second line opening in 1851.Footnote 64 Meanwhile, the Oxford Chronicle, launched in 1837, brought a liberal-leaning newspaper to the city.Footnote 65 Although the conservative Oxford Journal and University and City Herald paid some attention to Wesleyan Reform, it was the Chronicle that devoted most space to the controversy, regularly reprinting news and comment from the Wesleyan Times to keep Oxford’s reading public abreast of national developments.
Secondly, it may be suggested that both sides in the Reform controversy saw themselves as central to the life and prosperity of Wesleyan Methodism and felt that their opponents were seeking to push them to the periphery. For the itinerants, the Conference was ‘the living Wesley’,Footnote 66 the embodiment of the whole Connexion. Stationed in their several circuits, they represented the ‘body’ of Methodism and its authority in each place, preaching ‘our doctrines’ and enforcing ‘our discipline’. Pre-eminent in the polity of Methodism, they were physically located in close proximity to the main places of worship: in Oxford, the superintendent’s house was on the same site as the New Inn Hall Street chapel. Their preaching, pastoral care and strategic leadership were crucial to the success of their circuits. Arguably, the itinerants were the epitome of Methodism. And yet, their Connexional identity placed the itinerants at a remove from the circuits. Unlike Baptist and Congregational ministers, their membership was not held locally. They were stationed by the Conference, not chosen by the circuits. They were answerable to the Conference, and not to the circuits. The strict three-year itinerancy made ministers and their families relative strangers in their circuits, certainly by comparison with trustees, class leaders and local preachers, who were rooted in the community. It was easy for an itinerant to feel isolated and vulnerable, vested with formal authority and yet treated with coolness or disrespect – marginalized – by local people.
Although the Reform crisis was sparked by a dispute among ministers, many of the leading advocates of Reform were local preachers, and this was certainly the case in Oxford. The rhetoric of Reform, locally and nationally, emphasized Methodism’s debt to its local preachers. ‘A Wesleyan Methodist’, deploring the refusal of the president to receive a deputation from the Reform meeting in March 1850, observed that many of the delegates were local preachers, ‘men who have travelled some thousands of miles on foot, preached some thousands of sermons, met classes, and performed various other duties in the church, and that gratuitously’.Footnote 67 With two itinerants to cover a circuit of seventeen preaching places, Oxford depended on its local preachers for some twenty-three of its twenty-eight regular Sunday services. Moreover, many of the village societies seldom saw the itinerants: every service was conducted by a local preacher. When the same individual was also a trustee, a class leader, a Sunday school teacher, and perhaps also a freelance evangelist, it may be seen that men like Josiah Crapper, William Leggatt and Gabriel Banbury might well regard themselves as key to the flourishing of Methodism. Nearly half a century after the Reform crisis, Banbury still remembered being threatened because of his Reform sympathies by Robert Day, the itinerant ‘sent by the Conference to Oxford’.Footnote 68 The Oxford Chronicle struck the same note in its description of the preachers expelled by Button as ‘respectable tradesmen of this city … beloved by the Wesleyan Methodist society.’Footnote 69 Time and again, itinerants were accused of treating solid citizens with scorn and contempt, marginalizing them in their own communities.
Both sides sought to use their power to overcome their opponents. Reformers boycotted services, such as Button’s farewell sermon in August 1849, and withheld the voluntary contributions on which Wesleyan finances relied, hoping that ‘stopping the supplies’ would compel concessions by the Conference. Superintendents used their legal and constitutional powers to expel members, sometimes finding that the expelled refused to go quietly. Through the early 1850s, in the Circuit and in local Wesleyan societies and organizations, there was a struggle for control, as competing loyalties were gradually resolved and settled. The outcome was a Pyrrhic victory for the Conference, leaving a vigorous Reform denomination established alongside the Wesleyans.
Thirdly, it has already been noted that village societies were particularly dependent on local preachers, and it may be asked whether this translated into greater support for Wesleyan Reform on the geographical margins of the Circuit. This seems not to have been the case. Some villages took up the cause – Kirtlington and Rose Hill, in particular – but most did not. The influence of William Leggatt and Gabriel Banbury established a sturdy Reform society in the small market town of Woodstock. Most of the reformers, however, were Oxford-based, and the strongest Reform society was in the city centre. In this respect, Wesleyan Reform reflected the demographics of the Old Connexion. Likewise, the leading reformers were mostly master craftsmen and skilled artisans, as were the trustees, leaders and local preachers who eventually decided to stay with the Wesleyans.
Finally, the perspective of those observing the ‘Wesleyan Disruption’Footnote 70 from the sidelines may be considered. The controversy attracted considerable comment from the press, both secular and religious. In Oxford, it was the Chronicle that devoted by far the most space to the issue, to the extent that by November 1849 non-Methodist readers began to object.Footnote 71 The Chronicle sided with the reformers, describing the behaviour of the Conference as a ‘grief to all liberal-minded Christians.’Footnote 72 Although focussing mainly on questions of liberty and justice, the Chronicle also used ‘the baneful results of a clerical convocation’ to warn against Tractarianism, as Oxford high churchmen mobilized in opposition to the Gorham Judgement in summer 1850.Footnote 73 Meanwhile, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, conservative in tone, confined its reporting to the major Reform meetings in October 1849 and July 1850, but did not fill its columns with news from the Wesleyan Times. Equally conservative, and even more devoted to the established church, the University, City, and County Herald also reported the visit of Dunn and Griffith, justifying its coverage as an opportunity to lament the feeble ‘bond of cohesion’ among ‘sectarians’ and ‘dissenters’ and encouraging Wesleyans to seek reconciliation with the Church of England.Footnote 74
Many Wesleyans in this period would have indignantly rejected the identification with Dissent, but a common evangelicalism did connect Methodists with Baptists and Congregationalists. Given this kinship, and given their commitment to religious liberty, Wesleyan Reform posed a dilemma for Oxford’s Nonconformists. Although there was plenty of comment in the wider Nonconformist press, Nonconformists in the city trod carefully. The Summertown Congregationalists clarified that Crapper had not been called to their pastorate in 1849; nor had he been paid a salary, although an ‘acknowledgment’ was made for the services of ‘occasional preachers’.Footnote 75 The deacons of the Adullam Chapel, the largest Nonconformist building in the city, made their premises available for Reform meetings, and eagle-eyed reporters at Dunn and Griffith’s visit in July 1850 spotted two Congregationalist ministers on the platform and one Baptist minister in the audience.Footnote 76 There is no evidence, however, of pulpit references to Wesleyan Reform at New Road Baptist or George Street Congregational chapels, or of an accession of ex-Wesleyan members to either cause in the early 1850s.Footnote 77
Wesleyan Reform began with an attack on a metropolitan clique, but the ‘centre’ resented by the reformers was essentially clerical, rather than geographical. London circuits were among the first to rally to the ‘three expelled’ and it was the pretensions of the Conference that antagonized lay Methodists, in city and countryside. Somehow, the absorbing interplay of personalities and power struggles within the Conference blinded many itinerants – at least while meeting together – to the wider life, concerns and grievances of the Connexion. Turning inwards, the Conference cut itself off from a significant part of the Wesleyan membership. The Reform crisis saw members and lay leaders reassert their centrality to the life of Methodism and reclaim the importance of the localities. In this context, the dispute between John Wesley Button and Josiah Crapper took on significance not only for the development of Methodism in Oxford, but as an emblem of the issues affecting the life of the whole denomination.
