Patrick Brunty’s career as a teenaged schoolmaster was not very rewarding, as he had little empathy with children (despite coming from a large family) and was unwilling to stagnate at what seemed the furthest boundary of self-improvement. His wages were so small that in five or six years he managed to save only a few pounds and his future opportunities must have seemed rather bleak—worse than those of his siblings, who carried on the labouring life that was all his family had known thus far. But Patrick held out for something more cerebral.
This was a time of violence and upheaval in the country and abroad, of Levellers and small insurgent groups stalking the countryside at night with revolutionary hopes kindled by the dramatic example of what had just taken place in France. The Brunty family was divided dramatically on the issue of independence from English rule, and, one has to assume, along religious lines too, as Patrick’s next youngest brother, William, was a United Irishman, one of Wolfe Tone’s revolutionaries pressing violently for Catholic and Nonconformist emancipation. William fought at the Battle of Ballynahinch in 1798, which ended in a rout of Tone’s supporters and marked the end of the rebellion in Ulster. No wonder Patrick kept his distance from this brother; Catholic agitators were, in his view, “insidious, And Malignant enemies” of the Protestant status quo, and mass movements inherently dangerous. “I am a true friend to liberty of conscience and political liberty,” he once said, “but…of all kinds of tyranny I dread most that of the multitude.”
Patrick’s restlessness and loneliness in these formative years might be reflected in the story that he eventually left Glascar school under a cloud, having been “complained of” for some sort of romantic entanglement with a local farmer’s daughter. But by that time (his early twenties) he had come to the attention of one of the most influential men in the district, Thomas Tighe, JP, vicar of the newly built Church of Ireland church at Drumballyroney. Tighe offered Patrick a position as tutor to his two sons and began to direct the young man’s thoughts to a life in holy orders, encouraging him to participate in the powerful movement to regenerate the Established Church, spearheaded by John Wesley and clerics such as Charles Simeon, Tighe’s mentor at Cambridge. In return for tutoring the minister’s sons, Patrick received lessons in Latin and Greek, the essential subjects for anyone aspiring to a university place, so that by the age of twenty-five—an advanced age, by any standards—and after years of dogged application and hard work, he was ready to apply for admission to Tighe’s alma mater to study for the priesthood. Thus he left home and family ties behind him in 1802 and made his way across the Irish Sea, via the great and strange cities of Liverpool and London, to the cool splendour of Cambridge, the dizzying riches of the college libraries and the demanding company of a lot of clever, confident, privileged young men. It was a remarkable transition from one kind of life to another, the details of which Patrick never tired of relating and which never failed to impress.
Having no resources apart from a few pounds in his pocket, Patrick was admitted to St. John’s as a “sizar,” a student whose education was subsidised by domestic work, placing him in a distinctly different social stratum from the main body of commoners. His pride was in no way piqued by this lower status (unlike his daughter Charlotte when she found herself isolated socially as a governess), and he strove successfully for college prizes to help support himself, studying as hard as possible to justify the faith in him that Tighe and others had shown. In his second year Brunty received a grant of £20 from the Evangelical philanthropists William Wilberforce and Henry Thornton: a good use of funds, for the candidate was unusually frugal and focused, managing to live “very genteelly” on a fraction of what the other undergraduates had, as fellow sizar Henry Kirke White noted with admiration when he arrived at the college three years later.
Patrick’s time at Cambridge was marked by a very significant change. His first known signatures date from 1791, when he wrote his name five times over in a book, four times as “Prunty” and once as “Brunty,” and when he matriculated at St. John’s, in 1802, it was under the name “Patrick Branty,” written down by a college official, and probably reflecting the new student’s strong Irish accent. But the name he now wished to go by was Bronte, a more genteel and elegant rendition of his variable patronymic, with splendid associations ever since the award of the title Duke of Bronte to Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson in 1799. Nelson’s Bronte was a site on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, divertingly exotic and un-Irish—the word is Greek, in fact, meaning “thunder” (a pun Charlotte would later make hay with). Patrick tried out many variant spellings over the next few years—Bronté, Bronte, Brontë—eventually settling on the diaeresis and “Brontë,” probably to indicate how to pronounce it correctly. Nelson adopted the signature “Bronte Nelson” or “Nelson & Bronte,” and in the years following the Battle of Trafalgar, in 1805, it can have done Patrick no harm to suggest a connection between himself and the demi-god who had saved the nation from invasion. Even in the 1840s his daughter Charlotte was assumed to be the hero’s kin. Becoming “Brontë” was a powerful act of refashioning on the part of Patrick Brunty, and, although his invented name sprang up and flourished for only one generation, it went far in fame.
A brief return to Drumballyroney in 1806 between graduation from Cambridge and taking holy orders seems to have been the last time Patrick Brontë set foot in his native land. He was there to secure the written proof of his birth, which was necessary for ordination, and during his visit preached his first sermon at Tighe’s church, where his family worshipped, and where his parents and some of his siblings were later buried. He never went home again—despite an apparent disinclination “to live & rot in old England.” In later life Patrick was surrounded by Irish clergymen in Yorkshire who thought nothing of travelling home once or twice a year, a journey that, after the establishment of the railways, was neither difficult nor prohibitively expensive. But Brontë stayed put. There seems to have been little love lost between him and his siblings, and he scarcely mentions his mother at all. He kept in touch with his family sporadically, mostly through the third eldest, Hugh, but his letters were not affectionate, and there’s more than a touch of resentment in his reference, as late as 1855 (in his will), to having given them “considerable sums in times past.”
Patrick took up his first curacy in Wethersfield, Essex, in the autumn of 1806 and was ordained priest the following year, at the age of thirty. At this point in his life he was more than ready to look for a wife, and thought he had found one in his landlady’s niece, Mary Burder, an attractive nineteen-year-old who lived with her widowed mother and siblings. Patrick’s ardent, eccentric manner and handsome person won Mary’s heart, and he in turn seems to have been animated by her youthful simplicity and affection, sharing with her his hopes and ambitions for the future, and writing some wordy verses in her praise. By 1808 he had proposed and been accepted, albeit without her family’s approval and possibly without their knowledge.
In the end, the engagement to Mary Burder foundered, it seems, because Brontë began to think he had “violated both the dictates of my conscience and my judgment” by seeking to ally himself with a member of a non-conformist church. If so, it shows him as both a reckless and rather chilly lover. After a brief time away in Leicestershire, assessing what his prospects for promotion there might be, he returned to Wethersfield in a mood of “peace & contentment,” as he reported complacently to a Cambridge friend. He fully expected Mary Burder to be equally mellow about their recent severance, and, even when she made a succession of trips away to avoid having to see him in the parish, the curate interpreted this as pragmatism rather than pique: “The Lady I mentioned, is always in exile,” he wrote; “her Guardians can scarcely believe me, that I have given the affair entirely up forever.”
Mary Burder was soon relieved of his presence. Patrick moved from Wethersfield to Wellington in Shropshire at the start of 1809 to take up a curacy under Reverend John Eyton, another of Charles Simeon’s followers. Wellingto
n was a growing centre of Methodism, and Brontë met a group of very like-minded men there, making lifelong friends with his fellow curate William Morgan, a strong-minded and talkative Welshman, and the local schoolmaster John Fennell. One of the areas being targeted by the evangelical movement was Yorkshire, so it was with the pleasure of champions entering the fray that all three young men, Brontë, Morgan and Fennell, found themselves posted to the West Riding. Morgan took a curacy, and Fennell was head of a new boarding school for the sons of Methodist preachers at Woodhouse Grove in Apperley Bridge near Leeds. Patrick himself went first to Dewsbury, where he was assistant to another inspirational vicar, John Buckworth, and in July 1810 took up his most responsible post to date, as perpetual curate of Hartshead-cum-Clifton, a village near Huddersfield.
Brontë’s reputation for being an eccentric outsider seems to have originated in these early bachelor curacies. He is said not to have got on very well with his wealthier parishioners in Dewsbury, who cavilled at his Irish background and accent. Irishness also told against him at Hartshead, where he was called “Old Staff” on account of the shillelagh that was his usual accessory and that he once used to drive some bell-ringers out of church when they broke the Sabbath by attempting a competition practice. There were other, more heroic stories about him too: rescuing a simpleton whom bullies had thrown into the flooded River Calder and fighting off a man threatening a parish school procession. His landlord’s daughter later said that he was thought “clever and good-hearted, but hot-tempered, and in fact, a little queer.”
One of the curate’s reported peculiarities was that he had been seen pacing up and down the Dewsbury vicarage garden, pencil and paper in hand, writing. Patrick Brontë had in fact been composing poetry for at least three years and had high hopes for himself in the field, publishing, in 1810, at his own expense, a slim volume called Winter-Evening Thoughts: A Miscellaneous Poem. Cottage Poems followed the next year, a much longer production, with very fine paper, design and type for a volume, as the preface declared, aimed at “the labouring poor.” What was the minister trying to achieve: literary fame, a novel way of spreading the gospel, or both? Or did he consider these self-published books as elaborate calling-cards, to advertise his talents abroad? The poems in his second publication were as undistinguished as the first; the rhymes and metres often risible (one poem, “The Cottage Maid,” sounding unfortunately like a series of limericks), his address to a highly sentimentalised common man doomed to miss its mark. And the message he wished to convey, in a period of extreme hardship and distress after fifteen years of war, was both anxiously reactionary and inhumanely pious: essentially, the poor should rejoice in their lot and not seek to change it. But the most revealing part of Cottage Poems is perhaps its introduction, in which Patrick Brontë admits, a little guiltily, how addictively enjoyable writing could be: “from morning till noon, and from noon till night, [the author’s] employment was full of real, indescribable pleasure, such as he could wish to taste as long as life lasts.”
Very few copies of this book survive, but one, in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, is bound in vellum and has a beautifully written inscription: “To Miss Fennell,/By the Author,/as a Token of his/purest Friendship,/and Christian/Love.” The copy is missing its raciest page (a passage from “Winter-Night Meditations” about rakes and prostitutes in “sin-polluted” cities) and contains a number of corrections and annotations in ink that can have been made only by the author. Strangest of these is the adjustment of two lines in “Verses Sent to a Lady on her Birth-Day,” from “Full soon your eyes of sparkling blue/And velvet lips of scarlet hue,/Discoloured, may decay” to “Full soon your sparkling hazle eye/And velvet lips, of scarlet dye” etc. This was a poem written in the Mary Burder era, but in his adjustments it looks as if Patrick was customising his book for a new “Lady,” in a way that could seem familiar and jocular if the sentiments of the poems weren’t so severe. “But hark, fair maid! whate’er they say/You’re but a breathing mass of clay/Fast ripening for the grave” are lines unlikely to delight a twenty-year-old girl, and if Brontë hoped they would draw Miss Fennell’s hazel eye his way, he was mistaken. His friend William Morgan was about to take that prize.
Brontë had moved to Hartshead at a time of “unhappy disturbance” in the West Riding, as more and more workers in the cloth industry were finding themselves replaced by machines, predominantly the cloth-dressers, or “Croppers,” who performed the most specialised and highly paid part of production, the trimming of wool fibres from finished material. The secret society known as the Luddites had formed in defence of the croppers and others like them, appearing under cover of darkness, armed, masked and, like their leader “General Ludd,” under false names. Hundreds of men, calling themselves armies, could be mustered in this way, their faces blackened, staves, pikes and hammers at the ready to damage or destroy the hated shearing-frames and gig-mills. In February 1812 there were nightly attacks of varying degrees of violence on mills in the West Riding and Spen Valley. Some owners were champing at the bit to fight back: William Horsfall of Ottiwells went as far as acquiring a cannon, while in Patrick Brontë’s own parish William Cartwright of Rawfolds Mill armed his workmen with stones, guns and vitriol to protect his property at night.
Cartwright was ready and waiting for the Luddites when over a hundred of them mustered at a nearby inn on the night of 11 April 1812 and proceeded in silence to the mill. The attack on the building lasted twenty minutes, but, with so many guns and men on Cartwright’s side, there was little doubt who would prevail, and the would-be machine-breakers had to retreat in disarray, leaving two of their number wounded. A detachment of the Queen’s Bays arrived within the hour and the two captives were taken to an inn in nearby Roberttown and kept under arrest until they died, interrogated to the last by the vicar of Liversedge, Hammond Roberson, Patrick Brontë’s predecessor at Hartshead.
Where was Patrick Brontë while the attack on Rawfolds Mill was going on? The rioters included many Hartshead parishioners, and there must have been widespread intelligence locally of the plan in preparation; even the sentinels at the mill were suspicious for the two preceding nights. As a clergyman of the Established Church, Patrick Brontë belonged ostensibly to the ruling class under attack, but he was conspicuously not of the group who helped Cartwright defend his property and if he signed the testimonial later condemning the action, we cannot know, as the ink has faded too much to read. None of the rioters was betrayed to the authorities, despite the presence of 4,000 troops in the region and many government spies, and despite the posting of vast rewards for information leading to the conviction of participants. Brontë’s position was a difficult one: as a working cleric he fully understood the plight of his unemployed and desperate parishioners, but as a man, he had little confidence in his social power among his superiors. Legend has it that he secretly buried in unmarked graves at Hartshead fatally injured rioters, or some of the seventeen Luddites sentenced to death for their part in the Rawfolds attack following their show trial in York nine months later. Neither of these stories is likely to be true, but they reflect people’s sense of where Patrick Brontë’s sympathies lay, and when she chose to set her third novel, Shirley, during the Luddite riots in the Spen Valley, Charlotte Brontë was in a way expressing her own, and her father’s, delayed shock reactions to this bloody chapter in local and national history.
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ONE OF PATRICK BRONTË’S RESPONSIBILITIES was to act as an examiner at Woodhouse Grove, and it was on a visit there in the summer of 1812 that he met Mrs. Fennell’s niece from Cornwall, 29-year-old Maria Branwell. Maria had come to help in the school, be a companion to her cousin Jane (an only child) and perhaps replace her in the Fennell household after Jane’s marriage to William Morgan, planned for the end of the year.
The family Maria came from in Penzance was cultured and prosperous. Her father, Thomas Branwell, dead since 1808, had been an importer of luxury goods with a grocery shop in the Market Squa
re; he had also had investments in a local brewery and bank, and had been a member of the town council. There was a sizeable family presence in the town, since Thomas had eleven children and his brother Richard, who was responsible for building the popular Assembly Rooms in the 1790s, was the father of ten, one of whom went on to have twelve children. They were a staunchly Methodist clan.
Maria was the eighth of her family, which was widely spread out in age (Mrs. Branwell had been forty-seven when she had her last baby). A picture of Maria aged about fifteen shows a girl with a very lively and intelligent expression casting a quizzical look at the artist, a first and last glance from this enigmatic figure, since the only other images of her—an anonymous amateur profile and an enhanced copy of it lovingly made by Charlotte some years after her mother’s death—show little more than a conventionally neat and modest matron. When Thomas Branwell died, he bequeathed each of his four daughters a £50 annuity, the generosity of which can be measured against the £20 a year that Charlotte Brontë earned as a governess thirty years later. This gave them a considerable degree of independence, and the three unmarried sisters, Elizabeth, Maria and Charlotte (aged thirty-two, twenty-five and seventeen respectively), stayed on at the family home with their mother, and then, after her death in 1809, on their own. “For some years now I have been perfectly my own mistress,” Maria told Patrick Brontë when they were courting, “subject to no control whatever—so far from it, that my sisters who are many years older than myself, and even my dear mother, used to consult me in every case of importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my opinions and actions.” Maria told her fiancé frankly that she felt she could have done with a little less of that freedom, and the responsibilities that went with it: “I thank God, it never led me into error, yet, in circumstances of perplexity and doubt, I have deeply felt the want of a guide and instructor.” Her deference was conventional for a bride-to-be, but Maria was also communicating to Patrick a history of management and independence.
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