Welsh Journals

THE KING'S DAUGHTER: A REASSESSMENT OF ANNE HARRIS OF TREFECA Geraint Tudur John Berridge, the bachelor vicar of Everton in Bedfordshire, had rather a dim view of marriage. In the early 1760s, having asked God for guidance as to whether he should acquire a wife, a firm denial was given him through one of the sortes Biblical to which he resorted when confronted by an important issue. This clear revelation of God's will hardened his attitude towards women. In 1770 he described them as 'petticoat snares' and declared that no trap was as mischievous to the field-preacher as wedlock. Matrimony had 'quite maimed poor Charles [Wesley]', he said, 'and might have spoiled John and George [Whitefield] if a wise Master had not graciously sent them a brace of ferrets." One of this brace could easily have become Howell Harris's wife.2 Having met Elizabeth James of Abergavenny in the late 1730s, Harris considered the possibility that she was the one that Providence intended for him as a wife. In May 1740 he sought the opinion of Charles Wesley who, after listening to Harris's account of the relationship, advised him to 'drop it' Harris accepted Wesley's counsel without protest but not without some measure of unease, for while his affection for Mrs James was undiminished, he had been reluctant to ask for her hand in marriage A letter from Berridge to the Countess of Huntingdon, dated 23 March 1770; v., A. C. H. Seymour, The Life and Times of Selina Countess of Huntingdon, London, 1844, vol. 1, p. 389. For Berridge, v. DNB; also, The Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, Oxford, 1995 (hereafter DEB). For an account of John Wesley's marriage, v., H. D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, London, 1989, p. 264f. For an account of Whitefield's marriage, v., A. A. Dallimore, George Whitefield, Edinburgh, 1970 and 1980, vol. 2, p. 101f. 2 v., A. A. Dallimore, op.cit., vol. 2, p. 101; Richard Bennett (tr. by Gomer M. Roberts), Howell Harris and the Dawn of Revival, Bridgend, 1987, p. 178; E. Beynon, 'Mrs James, Abergavenny. Her courtship with Howell Harris and her marriage to George Whitefield' in The Journal of the Historical Society of the Presbyterian Church of Wales (hereafter JHS), vol. 32 (1947), p. 48. 3 v., Tom Beynon, Howell Harris's Visits to London, Aberystwyth, 1960, p. 28 (hereafter HHVL).