ABSTRACT
On 12 February 1767, the Reverend John Wesley wrote in his diary, ‘I preached at Leytonstone. Oh, what a house of God is here! Not only for decency and order, but for the life and power of religion. I am afraid there are very few such to be found in all the King’s dominions’.1 In November, ‘How good it would be for me to be here, not twice in a year, but in a month’.2 He was referring to an orphanage and Methodist community founded in 1763, by Mary Bosanquet, daughter of an élite Anglican merchant family of Huguenot extraction who settled in Leytonstone, Essex in 1739. Later she became a well-known Methodist preacher and in 1781 married John Fletcher, Wesley’s ‘Designated Successor’, who was vicar of Madeley in Yorkshire, staying there long after his death.3
