Page:Susanna Wesley (Clarke 1886).djvu/63

Rh was greatly disturbed on account of a contested election, and the street was so noisy one night that the nurse could not get to sleep till between one and two in the morning, and then slept so soundly that she overlaid and killed the child.

It was small wonder that Mrs. Wesley should have been worried both before and after her confinement; for Queen Anne had dissolved Parliament on the 5th of April, and it was well known that the contest between Whigs and Tories would be keen. No Romanist is so zealous or so bigoted as a “convert," and no Churchman is so “high” as one who was born and brought up in the bosom of Dissent. Thus it was perfectly natural that the Rector of Epworth should be a Tory of the first water, and throw all his weight and personal influence into the scale against Colonel Whichcott and Mr. Albert Bertie, the candidates who favoured Presbyterianism and had the Dissenters on their side, and who contested the representation of Lincolnshire with the previous members, Sir John Harold and "Champion Dymoke. No doubt the Tory party, already friendly to him, would have remembered, and in some manner rewarded the zealous clergyman who had espoused their cause with all his might and main, had they been successful; but the Whigs carried the day, and he was consequently insulted by the mob, and was in some danger of maltreatment. His opponents speedily deprived him of his chaplaincy to Colonel Lepelle's regiment, so that he suffered in purse as well as in local popularity and reputation. His own account of the state of affairs is found in a letter he wrote to Archbishop Sharpe as soon as the hubbub had a little subsided.