In the midst of this controversy, Wesley and the no-longer-nascent Methodist movement was caught up, suspected of various anti-monarchical positions, not the least of them being Wesley's presence at and service to the "court" of the Pretender. As rumors spread across England of the impending French-financed and inspired invasion by Stuart and his Scots rebels, numbering around 2500, the Methodists were increasingly under threat. Despite Wesley's continued protests that his was a wholly Anglican movement within both the traditions and under the authority of the established Church, many saw the movement as a whole, and Wesley himself, as a dangerous threat to the established order. The Methodists were enthusiasts, did not feel themselves beholden to the Establishment. Several times both John and Charles Wesley were forced in to court to re-swear their allegiance, retaking the oaths they had to take to become Anglican priests. This was never enough, and Wesley himself and various Methodist preachers, already harassed by various locals, became targets for suspicion under the conditions of unrest and social and political threat posed by the Pretender and his rebellion.
What is most striking about the entire incident are the parallels between England under the threat of the Stuart uprising and the current fear-mongering of the right-wingers who see themselves under the threat of "Islamo-fascism". Of course, it wasn't just the political life of the Hanoverian monarchy that was under threat (and do not discount the hatred of the French; the Stuarts would have owed too much to the French had they succeeded, leaving Britain a servant of Paris). The religious life of the moderate, Erastian Anglican Church was threatened by the Roman Catholicism of the Stuarts. Wesley himself recognized this (and why, oh why, did the 18th century wingnuts not understand that Wesley was no less anti-Catholic than the rest of the bulk of the British people?) and wrote the following in reply to those who questioned his loyalty to the Hanovers:
Think what is likely to follow, if an army of French also should blow the trumpet in our land? What desolation may we not then expect? what a wide-spread field of blood? And what can the end of these things be? If they prevail what but Popery and slavery? Do you know what the spirit of Popery is? Did you never hear of that in Queen Mary's reign; and of the holy men who were then burned alive by the Papists, because they did not dare do as they did; to worship angels and saints, to pray to the Virgin Mary, to bow down to images, and the like? If we had a King of this spirit, whose life would be safe? at least, what honest man's? . . .
[E]very conqueror may do what he will; the laws of the land are not laws to him. And who can doubt, but one who should conquer England by the assistance of France, would copy after the French rules of government? (Weber, p. 75, quoting from Wesley's "A Word in Season: or, Advice to an Englishman" of 15 October, 1745)
There have been many comparisons of our current fear-mongering to various red-scares in our own history, going all the way back to the first, in the early-1920's. Yet, it seems that fear-mongering in an anxious social climate is not unique to our own time; scapegoating of the new, the different, the odd is not limited to the "DFH" crowd and their alleged threat to all things American; the right-wingers are wrong when they claim that the existential threat of Muslims is unique in world history. Apparently they hadn't reckoned with 18th century Roman Catholicism!
