Southey, in his Life of John Wesley, tells us that Charles Wesley,
the brother of John, and father of the great organist, had the offer from
Garret Wellesley of those same estates which eventually were left to
Richard Cowley. This argues a recognition of near consanguinity. Why the
offer was declined, is not distinctly explained. But if it had been
accepted, Southey thinks that then we should have had no storming of
Seringapatam, no Waterloo, and no Arminian Methodists. All that is not
quite clear. Tippoo was booked for a desperate British vengeance by his
own desperate enmity to our name, though no Lord Wellesley had been
Governor-General. Napoleon, by the same fury of hatred to us, was booked
for the same fate, though the scene of it might not have been Waterloo.
And, as to John Wesley, why should he not have made the same schism with
the English Church, because his brother Charles had become unexpectedly
rich?
The Marquess Wellesley was of the same standing, as to age, or nearly so,
as Mr. Pitt; though he outlived Pitt by almost forty years. Born in 1760,
three or four months before the accession of George III., he was sent to
Eton, at the age of eleven; and from Eton, in his eighteenth year, he was
sent to Christ Church, Oxford, where he matriculated as a nobleman. He
then bore the courtesy title of Viscount Wellesley; but in 1781, when he
had reached his twenty-first year, he was summoned away from Oxford by the
death of his father, the second Earl of Mornington.
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