The importance of women in the development of early Wesleyanism has emerged in previous chapters, and a small group of personal testimonies, all written by Bristol women for Charles Wesley in 1742, survives to illustrate it. It was actually George Whitefield, as a young, ordained Anglican minister turned itinerant preacher and fundraiser, who had first stimulated Bristol's Protestantism when he preached there in 1739, but he soon withdrew. At this point, with his agreement, two more Oxford-educated parsons who were well known to him, approaching forty years of age, unmarried, and, like Whitefield, had avoided the parochial ministry, were willing, without much reference to the existing parochial structure in Bristol, to involve themselves in the religious activities of those whom Whitefield had stirred up. Most of these people seem to have belonged to the small-business element of the city rather than to the very poor, though among the female adherents there were always widows, some of whom were not well off. From the beginning the Wesleys insisted on a tight personal relationship with those who listened to them. John Wesley's anxiety to have a kingdom of his own was crucial to the way in which the movement developed: there was to be no question of a brief preaching ‘revival’. The new Wesleyan meetings separated those who attended them regularly from the rest of the city's religious culture. People found themselves living changed emotional lives; sometimes they enjoyed the fresh situations, sometimes they were upset.