Samuel Wesley was born on December 17 1662. He was the son of John Westley, or Wesley, who had been the Rector of Winterbourne in Dorset until as a Puritan Minister he was forced out of his position in the Church of England.

The Act of Uniformity prescribed that any minister who refused to conform to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer by St Bartholomew’s Day (August 24) 1662 be ejected from the Church of England.

Thus Samuel was born during the turmoil surrounding the very birth of non-conformism.

Despite being educated in dissenting academies Samuel had a change of heart and walked to Oxford to enroll as an Anglican and ‘poor scholar’ at Exeter College. This meant that he paid his way as an undergraduate by being a ‘servitor’ – a student who worked for the wealthier students.
While at Oxford he published anonymously, a volume of verse, entitled Maggots [Whimsies], or, Poems on Several Subjects Never Before Handled (1685).
In 1688 he completed his degree at Exeter College and married Susanna Annesley. On March 15 1695 Wesley was appointed Rector of Epworth. He and Susannah moved to Epworth in 1697. Already in debt on his arrival, by 1700 he owed £300. Despite efforts to make money, admittedly while supporting his mother, he was a poor manager. He was visited with a series of natural disasters as well as attacks on his property, possibly even arson in the case of the rectory fires of 1702 and 1709.

His enemies engineered Wesley’s imprisonment for debt and in 1705 he spent time in Lincoln Castle Debtors’ Prison, but he was eventually released with the help of a university brief and of government supporters.
Matters became even more serious after a fire at the Rectory in 1709. Wesley’s second son, the five-year-old John, was rescued from an upper-storey window mere moments before the roof collapsed. In later life John Wesley considered this to be divine intervention and viewed himself as a literal ‘brand plucked out of the fire’.

He and his wife Susannah had a large family, probably numbering 17 babies of whom ten, three sons and seven daughters, reached maturity.
Samuel and Susannah’s three sons were Samuel Wesley (1690-1739), John Wesley (1703-1791) and Charles Wesley (1707-1788). All three entered the church, but John and Charles are still renowned today for their part in the founding of the Methodist Movement.

On 4 June 1731 Wesley was injured by a fall from a wagon and never fully recovered. He died at Epworth rectory on 25 April 1735 and was buried three days later in Epworth churchyard. Wesley’s literary works were in part a bid for preferment and a consolation for misfortunes, but some were dedicated to improving clerical standards. Despite his personal ambition to be remembered as a poet he is likely always to be remembered mainly as the father of his famous sons.