English divine
Born 1747 Died 1814
Thomas Coke, the first Methodist bishop, was born at Brecon, where his father was a well-to-do apothecary. He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, taking the degree of M.A. in 1770 and that of D.C.L. in 1775. From 1772 to 1776 he was curate at South Petherton in Somerset, whence his rector dismissed him for adopting the open-air and cottage services introduced by John Wesley, with whom he had become acquainted.
After serving on the London Wesleyan circuit he was in 1782 appointed president of the conference in Ireland, a position which he frequently held, in the intervals of his many voyages to America. He first visited that country in 1784, going to Baltimore as superintendent of the Methodist societies in the new world and, in 1787 the American conference changed his title to bishop, a nomenclature which he tried in vain to introduce into the English conference, of which he was president in 1797 and 1805. Failing this, he asked Lord Liverpool to make him a bishop in India, and he was voyaging to Ceylon when he died on the 3rd of May 1814.
Coke had always been a missionary enthusiast, and was the pioneer of such enterprise in his connection. He was an ardent opponent of slavery, and endeavoured also to heal the breach between the Methodist and Anglican communions. He published a History of the West Indies (3 vols., 1808-1811), several volumes of sermons, and, with Henry Moore, a Life of Wesley (1792).
Being the entry for COKE, THOMAS in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the text of which lies within the public domain.