First of all, there was the melancholy death of his friend, William Seward—really Methodism’s first martyr—a man of considerable property, but of meagre education and inferior talent; Whitefield’s travelling companion in his second voyage to Georgia, and who, at the time of his being murdered, in Wales, was itinerating with Howel Harris in Glamorganshire. At Newport, the mob had torn Harris’s coat to tatters, stolen his wig, and pelted him and his companion with apples, stones, and dirt. At Caerleon, rotten eggs were thrown in all directions, Seward’s eye was struck, and, a few days after, he was entirely blind. At Monmouth, their treatment was of the same kind as at Newport and Caerleon; but Seward bravely cried, “Better endure this than hell.” At length, on reaching Hay, a villain hit him on the head; the blow was fatal; and William Seward went to inherit a martyr’s crown, at the early age of thirty-eight, on October 22, 1741. Besides the death of Methodism’s protomartyr, there were other troubles which Whitefield had to carry. He had an orphan family of nearly a hundred persons to maintain; was above a thousand pounds in debt for them; and was threatened with arrest on account of a bill for £350, drawn, in favour of the orphan house by his dead friend, William Seward, but which had not been met by him. James Hutton, who had been his publisher, refused to have any further transactions with him. “Many of my spiritual children,” he writes, “who, when I last left England, would have plucked out their own eyes to have given me, are so prejudiced by the dear Messrs. Wesleys’ dressing up of election in such horrible colours, that they will neither hear, see, nor give me the least assistance. Yea, some of them send threatening letters, that God will speedily destroy me. As for the people of the world, they are so embittered by my _injudicious_ and _too severe_ expressions against Archbishop Tillotson, the author of the old Duty of Man, that they fly from me as from a viper; and, what is worst of all, I am now constrained, on account of our differing in principles, publicly to separate from my dear, dear old friends, Messrs. John and Charles Wesley.”[393] During his passage to England, Whitefield wrote to Charles Wesley as follows: “My dear, dear brother, why did you throw out the bone of contention? Why did _you_ print that sermon against predestination? Why did you, in particular, affix your hymn and join in putting out your late hymn-book? How can you say you will not dispute with me about election, and yet print such hymns?” And then he proceeds to state, that he had written an answer to Wesley’s sermon on free grace, and was about to have it printed in Charlestown, Boston, and London.[394]