4 October 1745 – 10 October 1745

In the evening I came to Leeds and found the town full of bonfires, and people shouting, firing guns, cursing and swearing, as the English manner of keeping holidays is. I immediately sent word to some of the magistrates of what I had heard on the road. This ran through the town, as it were, in an instant: and I hope it was a token for good. The hurry in the streets was quashed at once—some of the bonfires indeed remained; but scarcely anyone was to be seen about them but a few children warming their hands.

I rode to Stayley Hall, in Cheshire, after many interruptions in the way by those poor tools of watchmen, who stood with great solemnity at the end of almost every village. I preached there on Mark 1:15, and rode on to Bradbury Green.

Understanding that a neighboring gentleman, Dr. C., had affirmed to many that Mr. Wesley was now with the Pretender, near Edinburgh, I wrote him a few lines. It may be he will have a little more regard to truth, or shame, for the time to come.

I wrote to general Husk as follows: “A surly man came to me this evening, as he said, from you. He would not deign to come upstairs to me, nor so much as into the house; but stood in the yard till I came, and then obliged me to go with him into the street, where he said, ‘You must pull down the battlements of your house, or tomorrow the General will pull them down for you.’ “Sir, to me this is nothing. But I humbly conceive it would not be proper for this man, whoever he is, to behave in such a manner to any other of his Majesty’s subjects, at so critical a time as this. “I am ready, if it may be for his Majesty’s service, to pull not only the battlements, but the house down; or to give up any part of it, or the whole, into your Excellency’s hands.”