Susannah Wesley
On July 23, 1742, Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles, died. She was one of the most influential women in church history.

She was the twenty-fifth child born to the clergyman Dr Samuel Annesley and his second wife.

She married the clergyman Samuel Wesley when she was nineteen. Their marriage lasted forty-four years. She bore nineteen children, but only ten survived.

She was a woman of determination and strong convictions. Once in 1701 she refused to say “Amen” to her husband’s dinner table prayer for the reigning English sovereign King William. Susannah considered the Stuart heir James II to be the rightful monarch, and she would not support William – even by agreeing with her husband’s prayer. Samuel, a stubborn and determined man himself, refused to share the marriage bed with a woman who would not support his king. He left for London and stayed a year waiting for his wife to recant. She would not, and only when Queen Anne, a monarch they both approved of, acceded to the throne in 1702 did he return. Their reconciliation produced a son, John, who was conceived shortly after.

She was strict in raising her children but always merciful. She educated all her children and made sure that she spent one hour a week individually with each child. After John was miraculously rescued from a fire that destroyed their home, she paid special attention to him, believing him to be a “brand plucked from the burning.

Monument to Susannah Wesley at John's London home

John was profoundly influenced by his mother and from the age of seven regularly stated that he would never marry “because I could never find such a woman as my father had.” (He eventually did marry, but the marriage was a disaster and ended after five painful years.)

After Susannah’s death, John purchased the land across from her grave and built the home he lived in the last twelve years of his life. He positioned his study in the front of the house so that he could see his mother’s tomb from his window.

Susannah once wrote,

“We must know God experientially for unless the heart perceive and know Him to be the supreme good, and our only happiness, unless we feel and acknowledge that we can have no repose, no peace, no joy, but in loving and being loved by Him.”