The country continued in a state of constant alarms and invasion scares throughout Patrick’s remaining years at Cambridge and, indeed, for many more years to come. Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 ended the immediate and serious threat, however, and was celebrated in Cambridge with a general illumination58 when candles and lamps were lit in the streets and all the windows of the colleges, shops and houses.
At the beginning of Michaelmas term 1805 Patrick was entering his fourth year at the university, at the end of which he would have completed his minimum residence requirement for taking his degree. His finances would not allow him to continue there any longer and, unless he won a fellowship to one of the colleges, he would have to look for employment as a curate. He therefore gave his name to his tutor so that the proctors could be informed of his decision to proceed to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was important to Patrick to do well, not only to maintain the academic reputation of sizars at his college, but also to justify the sums expended on him by his patrons.
Some time in the Lent term of 1806 Patrick would have been called to appear in the examination schools as a Disputant. He would have been given a fortnight in which to prepare a dissertation, in Latin, upon a Proposition taken from one of the three heads of the course. This gave him a choice of Natural Philosophy (Mathematics), Moral Philosophy (including the works of modern philosophers such as Locke and Hume) or Belles Lettres (Classical literature). He would have read his dissertation aloud and three other men of his year would then have attacked his Proposition, again in Latin, offering their own arguments in syllogistical form. The best men of the year, which, given his college performances, would probably have included Patrick, appeared eight times in Schools in this manner: twice as a Disputant, proposing a thesis, and six times as an Opponent. As if public oral examination in Latin were not enough, the degree candidates then had to undergo a formal written examination with the best candidates being put forward for Honours.59 Patrick did not, apparently, proceed to an Honours degree, which suggests that, at this final hurdle, he failed to reach the required standard.
There was evidently also some sort of minor hitch in the granting of Patrick’s degree, perhaps because he was absent on matters connected with his ordination. In December 1805 he had made arrangements for Thomas Tighe to write certifying his age since he could not produce a certificate of baptism, there being no baptismal registers in Drumballyroney before September 1778.60 On 22 March 1806 he had also obtained a certification from Professor Fawcett to confirm that he had attended forty-seven lectures in Divinity, missing only three: ‘one omission was occasioned by indisposition, two by necessary business in the Country’.61
Perhaps because he was too busy gathering his ordination documentation, Patrick missed the official degree day so that his name appears ‘Post Comm.’, that is, after the usual date for receiving degrees.62 Another anomaly was that he signed the University Subscriptions Register, recording his having taken the oath to abide by the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (a necessity which excluded Dissenters and Catholics from taking degrees), in person, on 22 April 1806 – the day before, instead of after, the conferral of his degree.63 However the confusion arose, Patrick formally graduated as a Bachelor of Arts on St George’s Day, 23 April 1806, and thereafter was entitled to write ‘B.A.’ or, more usually, ‘A.B.’ after his name. St John’s gave him the customary four pounds for obtaining his degree and Patrick, in a moment of uncharacteristic profligacy, celebrated by buying a copy of Walter Scott’s newly published The Lay of the Last Minstrel. He proudly inscribed it ‘P. Brontē. B.A. St John’s College, Cambridge –’ and carefully put it into his tiny collection of books.64
For a little while longer, Patrick remained in his college, sorting out his affairs. He had no need to worry about future employment for he was now within the charmed circle of Cambridge graduates. Perhaps he received reassurance as to his prospects from his tutor, like Henry Kirke White, who was told, ‘We make it a rule … of providing for a clever man, whose fortune is small; & you may therefore rest assured, Mr White, that after you have taken your degree, you will be provided for with a genteel competency by the college.’65 If no fellowship was available at St John’s, White was advised, then he might be recommended to another college or, if all else failed, they could always get him a situation as a private tutor in a gentleman’s family.66
Interestingly, Patrick seems to have had ambitions to become a college fellow. Despite the fact that it meant he had to continue paying tutorage fees and certain college bills, even after he was no longer in residence, Patrick left his name on the boards for a full two years after he had taken his degree.67 This was an accepted method of indicating that a graduate was offering himself as a candidate for a fellowship and it was not incompatible with ordination. In the event, however, no offer was forthcoming, probably because he did not have an Honours degree.
By 28 June Patrick had a sworn document from Joseph Jowett, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, appointing him his curate in the parish of Wethersfield in Essex at a salary of £60 a year.68 Having secured his first curacy, Patrick allowed his name to be put forward for ordination immediately. The very next day, Samuel Chilcote, the curate at All Saints’ Church in Cambridge, gave public notice that ‘Mr Patrick Bronte intended to offer himself a Candidate for Holy Orders.’69 Three days later, on 2 July, the Master and Senior Fellows of St John’s signed letters testimonial on his behalf, attesting to the fact that he had behaved ‘studiously and regularly’ during his residence and that he had never believed or maintained anything contrary to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England.70 Patrick sent the letters, together with the certificates from Samuel Chilcote, Thomas Tighe and Professor Fawcett, to the secretary of the Bishop of London. In his accompanying letter he offered himself as a candidate for holy orders at the next ordination and asked which books he would be examined in by the bishop.71
The next ordination was on 10 August so Patrick had a full month to prepare himself for his bishop’s examination. He made his last farewells in Cambridge and travelled up by coach to London. Perhaps he made his first acquaintance with the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row at this time, but certainly he emerged from Fulham chapel on 10 August 1806 a deacon in holy orders.72 His friend and fellow sizar, John Nunn, had been ordained deacon by the Bishop of Lichfield at the parish church of Eccleshall in Staffordshire on 1 June and was already officiating as a curate at St Chad’s in Shrewsbury,73 so Patrick must have felt some impatience to emulate him and make his own way in the world. In four years he had come a very long way from his humble origins in Ireland. His degree had made him a gentleman, his ordination would make him a clergyman; his future lay in his own hands, make of it what he would.
After his ordination, Patrick had a couple of months in hand before he was required in Wethersfield and it is possible, but unlikely, that he took the opportunity to make what would be his last trip to Ireland. No doubt there were ties of affection and duty to induce his return: the Tighes, as well as his own family, would wish to hear how he had got on at Cambridge and to find out whether he had fulfilled his early promise; Drumballyroney Church, where he had been baptized and where his first benefactor was still the vicar, was undoubtedly the most appropriate place for him to preach his first sermon to a congregation composed of his family, old friends and neighbours.74
Patrick also needed and obtained two letters from his father swearing (mistakenly) that he was twenty-eight years of age; these were required for his ordination as priest since he had no record of his baptism. Though the two letters are almost identical, one of them used the name ‘Bronte’ unaccented, but the other used ‘Brontē’,75 a form which had appeared for the first time on all the letters for Patrick’s ordination as deacon, except that supplied by his college.
If Patrick did go home – and the expense would suggest he did not – it was a brief visit. He seems to have left Ireland with few regrets. Thou
gh he retained a sentimental attachment to the land of his birth, his contacts with his relatives were to be few and far between and confined principally to the sending of occasional sums of money.76 He never expressed any wish to return to Ireland and did not inspire any curiosity in his children to seek out their father’s relatives or his first home.77 Patrick had plainly seen that his future lay in England and he was eager to take up his first curacy there.
Wethersfield was – and still is – a small village in one of the prettiest parts of Essex. Less than thirty-five miles from Cambridge, the countryside between Wethersfield and its nearest neighbour, Finchingfield, rises above the surrounding flat fenlands; the two villages are set in gently rolling hills, large enough to give variety to the landscape but not so steep as to tire the walker. The patchwork of arable fields, divided up by hedgerows, narrow winding roads and small areas of woodland, looks as though it has changed little over the years though hops are no longer the main crop of the rich brown soil. The ancient windmills that dot the landscape are an attractive reminder of the huge amount of grain also grown in this area. The farmhouses, some of such antiquity that they still retain the vestiges of their moats, speak eloquently of the wealth of past and present generations. Patrick could hardly have chosen a more attractive place to launch his clerical career and yet, despite its seeming remoteness, the village was only seven miles from the bustling town of Braintree and about forty-five miles from the heart of London.
Wethersfield itself is still the same cluster of houses, less than half a mile long, built around the village green which also formed the junction of the three roads leading to Braintree, Finchingfield and Sible Hedingham. Just over 1,300 people lived there, most of them employed on the land.78 The village had a windmill and a brewery, with a school somewhat inappropriately placed between them, and several public houses.79 Most of the buildings date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and are an attractive mix of half-timbering and red brick, pargeting and weather-boarding. The most important house in the village, Wethersfield Manor, a huge eighteenth-century mansion, still stands in its own parkland on the approach from the Braintree road.
Close by, at the top of an incline rising from the village green, stands the magnificent church of St Mary Magdalene. There has been a church on this site since before the Norman Conquest and the hotchpotch of buildings reflects the styles of the different periods when additions were made. Built mainly of brick and knapped flint, it is dominated by a massive, square, twelfth-century tower and two huge porches, one to the south door, facing Wethersfield Manor, dating from around 1500, and a more modern one to the north door, giving access to the village, which was rebuilt in brick in 1750. Inside, the church is equally impressive, with a twelfth-century nave, and aisles and arcades added in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.80 The walls and floor are covered with memorials, mainly to the Mott family, and near the altar is the splendid alabaster tomb of the Wentworths, with its recumbent male and female figures in late fifteenth-century dress. Even when Patrick first saw it in 1806 this tomb had already been defaced with graffiti from the two previous centuries.
It was in St George’s House, a pleasant eighteenth-century building opposite the church gate, that Patrick took lodgings on his arrival at Wethersfield. Its frontage is deceptively narrow, for the house extends a long way back from the road and was apparently large enough to provide rooms for not only a clerical lodger but also the local doctor; it belonged to a Miss Mildred Davy.81
A few doors down, facing the green, is one of the biggest houses in the village, a large, three-storey, brick-built manse, standing next to the Congregational chapel. Nonconformity had a long and honourable history in Wethersfield extending back to the Reformation and there had been an independent chapel in the village for almost as long. Richard Rogers, son of the editor of the Matthews Bible, which had been approved by Henry VIII, had been a lecturer at the church for about forty-six years and had been burned at the stake during the Marian persecutions. Stephen Marshall, his successor and a Presbyterian, had been a highly influential chaplain to the Long Parliament which opposed Charles I and waged war on him. John Cole, the minister appointed during the Commonwealth, had been expelled from the living because he refused to use the Book of Common Prayer for his services; imprisoned for eight years, he set up an independent congregation by holding services in his own house after his release.82 During the 1620s, emigrants from Wethersfield had travelled to the New World, founding a town in Connecticut which they named after their own village and, in 1635, establishing the third oldest of the Congregational chapels in America there.83 Unlike the Wesleyans and other Methodists who were, as yet, still within the communion of the Church of England, the Congregationalists were fiercely independent and there was little love lost between the two. This was to be a decisive factor in one of the most important decisions of Patrick’s life.
Joseph Jowett, vicar of Wethersfield, combined his clerical duties with a full-time post as Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge. Or rather, he lived and worked in Cambridge and was part-time vicar of Wethersfield, spending only the three months of the long vacation in residence.84 The living, which was in the gift of his college, Trinity Hall, was, of course, a valuable increment to his salary. For nine months of the year the curate was, in practical terms, in sole charge of the parish – a rather uncomfortable position for a newly ordained clergyman in his first curacy.
Patrick took his first duties on 12 October 1806 with a marriage and a baptism on the same day. Over the next week he performed three more marriages, catching up on a backlog that had built up over the summer, but thereafter there was only an average of just over one marriage a month.85 Similarly, the number of baptisms averaged out at only two a month, though as Patrick seems to have specialized in multiple baptisms and held them, almost without exception, during his Sunday services, they hardly added a great deal to his workload.86 The number of burials fluctuated considerably and Patrick was unfortunate that, soon after his arrival, there was an outbreak of typhus fever, the perennial disease of the poor. A neighbouring hamlet of wretched, damp cottages housing agricultural labourers was particularly badly affected. There was little that the parish doctor could do to ease their condition or prevent the outbreak spreading within the community and out of the forty people who fell ill, a quarter died.87
Despite the typhus outbreak, Patrick’s formal duties at Wethersfield were relatively light, leaving him most of his time free to occupy as he wished. As a conscientious parish priest, he undoubtedly visited the sick, comforted the dying and helped to administer charitable aid to those in need. He may also have taught the Scriptures in the local charity school, where, according to the terms of Dorothy Mott’s foundation, twenty girls were to be taught their catechism and had to attend the parish church regularly, in addition to learning how to sew and knit. Patrick, as the clergyman present in the parish, would have had to distribute the excess funds from Dorothy Mott’s foundation to the poor ‘whether Churchmen or Dissenters’ on 21 December each year but he seems to have been excluded from all the decision-taking, which was dealt with by the vicar, on his brief visits, with the churchwardens.88 Indeed, in the somewhat jaundiced view of the village doctor (a Nonconformist), Patrick was almost totally without influence: ‘I had no acquaintance with him or notice from him, and nobody took any notice of him.’89
The curacy of Wethersfield was hardly a place for a man to make his mark; it was a pleasant and gentle way of breaking Patrick into his new career but he was ambitious, a man with a mission to convert and to minister, so he must have found his position, cut off from the mainstream of Evangelical activity in the depths of Essex, increasingly frustrating. Perhaps this is what took him to Colchester in the summer of 1807. While Jowett was in residence at Wethersfield, Patrick’s presence was no longer needed in the parish and sometime after 9 July, when he performed a marriage, he removed to Colchester, some fifteen miles east of Braintree.
Two consideration
s must have influenced him. The first was the possibility of visiting John Nunn, whose family home was in Colchester.90 The second, and more important, reason was that St Peter’s Church, the largest in the town, was an outstanding centre of Evangelicalism. The right of presentation to the living had been bought with the specific purpose of ensuring that only Evangelicals were appointed and one of the trustees was Charles Simeon of Cambridge. The Reverend Robert Storry, who had been vicar of St Peter’s since 1781, was a staunch Evangelical; he described himself as a ‘gospel clergyman’ and during his ministry had tried to attract Methodists to his church.91 Patrick was drawn to the church like a moth to a flame and for the few weeks he resided in Colchester, though he took no actual duties there, he certainly used the opportunity to cultivate a friendship with Storry. Perhaps he hoped to secure his next curacy at St Peter’s, but even though this was not to be, Storry was prepared to aid his promotion by attaching his all-important name to Patrick’s letters testimonial.92
While he was at Colchester Patrick put the finishing touches to the arrangements for the second stage of his ordination. In his absence, Joseph Jowett gave the required declaration of Patrick’s intention to proceed to the order of priests in the church at Wethersfield on 12, 19 and 26 July and supplied him with a certificate promising to keep him as his curate ‘until he shall be provided with some other place’.93 The rector of Panfield and the vicars of Gosfield and Thaxted, two villages and a small town within a six-mile radius of Wethersfield, who clearly knew Patrick better than Jowett, supplied letters testimonial to his character.94 Although Patrick evidently rushed to put together all the necessary papers, he still appears to have missed the next ordination and had to wait till just before Christmas to become a fully fledged clergyman. He was finally ordained as a priest on 21 December 1807 in the splendid surroundings of the Chapel Royal of St James, Westminster.95
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