Thomas Coke

Thomas Coke (1747-1814) completed his B.A. at Jesus College, Oxford, in 1768 and an M.A. in 1770 before serving as curate at South Petherton, Somerset.  He met John Wesley in 1776 and decided to become a Methodist; bofore long he had become Wesley’s chief assistant.  He was instrumental in the creation of the Deed of Declaration (1784) that gave legal status to the Methodist Conference after Wesley’s death.  In 1784 he was set apart by Wesley as the Superintendent of American Methodism and was soon joined as “Bishop” by Francis Asbury.  After Wesley’s death, Coke was actively involved in the transformation of Methodists into a separate denomination, being elected President of the Methodist Conference in 1797 and in 1805.  Beginning in the 1780s, he was instrumental in creating a Methodist mission overseas, from the West Indies to Sierra Leone to India in 1813.  After the renewal of the East India Charter in 1813 and its greater acceptance of missionaries, Coke led the first group of Methodist missionaries to India, but he died at sea enroute. Some Methodists, both in England and America, however, resented Coke for his sense of superiority and his ambition to control the Conference.  He authored A Plan of the Society for the Establishment of Missions Among the Heathens (1783-4); The Life of John Wesley [with Henry Moore] (1792); A Commentary on the Holy Bible (6 vols; 1801-03); and A History of the West Indies (3 vols; 1808-11).