Brontës

by Juliet Barker

  Cartwright was prepared for the attack, with lookouts posted and a number of soldiers and other armed men positioned inside the mill. At 12.30 in the morning, there was a violent assault on the building which broke the windows and showered a volley of shots into the mill. While the Luddites tried repeatedly to force an entrance, to the accompaniment of shouts of ‘Bang up!’, ‘Murder them!’ and ‘Pull down the door!’, the guards fired continuously at them. After about twenty minutes, the attempt was given up and the Luddites withdrew, taking their wounded with them but leaving two behind. Samuel Hartley of Halifax and John Booth of Huddersfield, both mortally wounded, were carried on litters to the Star Inn at Roberttown by Cartwright’s men but died a few hours later: the inquest found judgements of ‘justifiable homicide’. The defeated Luddites fled towards Huddersfield, passing through Hightown and Clifton, where they received food and help for their injuries: it was said that the road was stained with their blood for four miles from Rawfolds. There were no casualties at all among Cartwright’s men, though one soldier, who had refused to fire on the Luddites, was court-martialled and sentenced to 300 lashes, which would probably have proved fatal; when the sentence was about to be carried out at Rawfolds the following Tuesday, the crowd was in such an ugly mood that Cartwright secured its commutation to twenty-five lashes.60

  The Luddites, then as now, attracted both sympathy and hostility. Their appalling living conditions, their unemployment and poverty and the sheer desperation which drove them to violence provoked concern among the more liberal minded; and there is still something inherently romantic about this last-ditch attempt of a doomed band of men fighting the inexorable tide of industrial progress. But violence was no solution and, by causing widespread fear and alarm, did nothing to help the Luddites’ case. Patrick undoubtedly sided with the establishment in condemning the attack, though he did not go as far as Hammond Roberson, who turned up when the alarm sounded at Rawfolds Mill with sword in hand. He probably also approved of the signing of a testimonial to Cartwright and the presentation to him of a subscription which raised £3000 in recognition of his spirited defence of the mill.61

  Given the fact that there was a strong feeling in favour of the Luddites in his parish, Patrick may have feared reprisals. It seems likely that it was in this period that he acquired his lifelong habit of keeping a loaded pistol in the house overnight. The discharging of the bullet out of the window each morning would become a ritual which aroused much future comment.62

  The threat of assassination was real. A week to the day after the attack on Rawfolds Mill, an attempt was made on the life of William Cartwright. As he was returning from Huddersfield, presumably in the vicinity of Hartshead and Clifton, shots were fired at him from behind the hedges on each side of the road; the attack took place in broad daylight but Cartwright escaped unhurt.63 William Horsfall, a woollen manufacturer from Marsden, a village about ten miles away on the other side of Huddersfield, was not so lucky. On 28 April he was ambushed and murdered by four armed working men, presumed to be Luddites. He, too, had been unremitting in his efforts to catch the men who had attacked Rawfolds and had, for some years, employed highly efficient cropping machinery in his mill at Marsden.64

  The murder of Horsfall, and the vigorous prosecution of the search for those responsible, marked the virtual end of active Luddite resistance, though groups of armed men continued to meet and drill in secret on the moors above and around Huddersfield. The following January, a full nine months after the events had taken place, sixty-six Luddites were tried at York Castle under a special commission: seventeen were executed, including three for the murder of Horsfall and five for the attack on Rawfolds.65 The Reverend Thomas Atkinson, Patrick’s successor at Hartshead, later told his servant that some of the bodies of the executed men were brought back to Hartshead and buried secretly at dead of night in the churchyard there. Patrick had seen the disturbed state of the churchyard and discovered that the burial had taken place, but let it pass without comment, seeing that no harm had been done and believing it was wisest not to inflame popular feeling.66 This story is clearly apocryphal as there was no need for secrecy in the burial of any of the Luddites, most of whom received public funerals. Nevertheless, it indicates a belief in Hartshead that Patrick was not totally without sympathy for the Luddite cause.

  Though the excitements and turmoil of the uprisings must have given Patrick worry and work, by the middle of the year he had something else to occupy his mind. He was now thirty-five years old, ‘a man of very retired habits, but attentive to his clerical duties’.67 He had a wide acquaintance among the clergymen of the district and still enjoyed the company of the young men he had taught in the Sunday school at Dewsbury, many of whom, like the Newsome brothers, made the effort to come over regularly to Hartshead to hear him preach.68 There was the pleasant and inspirational company of the Buckworths at the vicarage in Dewsbury and the renewal of friendship with William Morgan in Bradford. But now that he had his own parish and a post as perpetual curate from which he could not be evicted, short of some major catastrophe, Patrick could afford to consider marriage. No doubt Mary Burder sprang instantly to mind, but her faith and the fact that his letters to Wethersfield remained unanswered effectively ruled her out. It was no easy task to find an eligible bride who was capable of inspiring at least affection, if not love, in him. Fortunately, Patrick was to find a woman who possessed all the qualities he held most dear.

  In January 1812, the Wesleyan Methodists had opened a new boarding school for the sons of ministers and preachers at Woodhouse Grove, an elegant, stone-built Georgian mansion at Rawdon, on the northern outskirts of Bradford and Leeds. It was set in seven acres of garden and had a further eight acres of rich parkland running down to the River Aire.69 As their first headmaster and acting ‘Commercial and Mathematical Master’ they had appointed John Fennell, Patrick’s friend from Wellington; he was expected to be resident and his wife, assisted by their daughter, Jane, was to act as matron and housekeeper to the establishment.70 It was only a matter of time till Patrick, a dozen or so miles away at Hartshead, came over to renew his friendship with the family.

  Doubtless there were earlier informal visits, but the first important one was made in July when Fennell, anxious to satisfy his board of governors as to the quality of the teaching at the new school, invited Patrick to come to Woodhouse Grove for a few days to examine the boys in the Classics. Patrick did so and presented his report to the committee; it was an unsatisfactory one and, on his recommendation, Mr Burgess, the ‘Classical Master’, was dismissed shortly afterwards.71 While he was there, Patrick was introduced to Maria Branwell, Fennell’s niece by marriage, who was helping her aunt with the domestic side of running the school.

  Maria was twenty-nine years old, petite and elegant though not pretty; pious and something of a blue-stocking but also of a bright, cheerful and witty disposition. She was the daughter of a successful, property-owning grocer and tea merchant of Penzance, Thomas Branwell, who had died in 1808; her mother, Anne Carne, the daughter of a silversmith in the town, had died a year after her husband. Maria had grown up in a totally different world from Patrick. The eighth of eleven children, at least three of whom had not survived infancy, Maria had enjoyed all the benefits of belonging to a prosperous family in a small town.72

  Penzance at the turn of the nineteenth century was a busy sea port, visited by traders from all over the world. Its position, at almost the southernmost tip of the Cornish peninsula, made it somewhat isolated from the rest of the country but also placed it in the forefront of the war against France. Indeed, the people of Penzance had been the first in England to learn of the victory of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson when two fishermen had intercepted the ship bringing home the news.73 Though the land routes to London were only just being developed, Penzance was a regular port of call for ships passing between the capital, Bristol and Plymouth, so trade was brisk. The townsmen exported local pilchards, tin and copper and imported luxury goods su
ch as tea, brandy, wines and snuff, which had to lie in their bonded warehouses until they had passed through the customs house beside the quay. The Branwell family were heavily involved in the import trade. Maria’s father owned cellars at the quay, retailing and wholesaling the goods through his grocery shop in Market Square. He also owned a substantial amount of property in and around Penzance, including a brewery, the Golden Lion Inn on Market Square and Tremenheere House, the only mansion in the town. Maria’s brother, Benjamin, continued the businesses after his father’s death and, like him, was a prominent member of the town corporation, serving as mayor in 1809.74

  Penzance in Maria’s day was therefore a thriving market town of some three to four thousand inhabitants and, because of its trade, with a far wider outlook than its isolated and provincial position would otherwise have merited. It was the most important banking centre in Cornwall, banks like that of the Bolitho family being founded and funded out of the profits of the local tin smelting industry.75 The Branwells not only had substantial sums invested in this bank but Maria’s cousin, Joseph, who married her sister, joined its staff after abandoning his career as a schoolteacher.76 There was also plenty of intellectual and artistic activity. The town had had its own Ladies’ Book Club, Agricultural, Provident, Humane, Scientific and Literary Societies and a Penzance Institute since before Maria was born. There were concert rooms behind the Old Turk’s Head Inn and Assembly Rooms, funded by public subscription and built in 1791 by Maria’s uncle, Richard Branwell, where balls were held throughout the winter months.77

  Equally important in the life of the town was the Wesleyan Methodist community, of which the Branwells and the Carnes were prominent members. The ubiquitous John Wesley himself had preached regularly in Penzance, including on at least three occasions in the 1780s when, as small children, Maria and her elder sister, Elizabeth, might have joined the crowds to hear him.78 In 1790 Maria’s aunt, Jane Branwell, had married John Fennell, then the headmaster and class leader of the Wesleyan Methodist school in Penzance. Ten years later, Maria’s eldest sister, Jane, had married the Wesleyan minister, John Kingston, and emigrated with him to America. This marriage was not a happy one and, in a bold move extremely rare in those days, Jane left her husband and four older children in 1809 and returned, with only her baby, to Penzance. When the Wesleyan Conference split away from the Church of England in 1812, the Branwells preferred to join the Wesleyans and were largely instrumental in the construction, in 1814, of Penzance’s first purpose-built chapel, only a few yards up the street from Maria’s old home.79

  Visiting Penzance today it is not difficult to see why the place had such a hold on the affections of Maria and Elizabeth. The oldest part of the town is Chapel Street, where the Branwell home lay within a few hundred yards of the sea to front and rear. The street is built along the ridge of a rocky promontory protruding into the vast sweep of Mount’s Bay. Then, as now, the eye was immediately drawn to the spectacular outline of the island castle of St Michael’s Mount a couple of miles away. The long sandy beaches and fertile agricultural land around the bay remain unchanged, but virtually all traces of the tin industry have disappeared. In Maria’s day Penzance was surrounded by smelting works and mines, the most renowned of which was the Wherry Mine, whose main shaft lay thirty fathoms under the sea and half a mile out from the shore. At high tide all that was visible from the shore was the steam engine’s chimney, rising twelve feet above the waves, and the miners had to walk across the sea along a plank bridge to reach the entrance.80

  The old heart of Penzance, centred around Chapel Street and Market Jew Street, is also relatively unchanged though engulfed by the larger modern town. Chapel Street itself is like something out of a picture book, steep, narrow and cobbled, winding up from the quay to the Market Place and lined with higgledy-piggledy eighteenth-century cottages. Most are built of granite though some, like number 25 where the Branwells lived, are faced with brick. Apart from this pretension to gentility, the house is simple and of a kind with its neighbours, having five rooms on each floor, two attic rooms and a south-facing walled garden to the rear. At the front, like its neighbours, it is straight on to the street. Originally, the house backed on to the graveyard of the ancient Chapel of St Mary but now it is dwarfed by the new parish church built on the chapel site in 1835.81 Above it, Chapel Street climbs past the picturesque smugglers’ inn, the Admiral Benbow, and the faded grandeur of the Union Hotel before opening out into the commercial bustle of Market Jew Street.

  With all that the town had to offer and a climate so famously mild that camellias bloom in February, Penzance must have been a very pleasant home for the Branwell family. The impression one gets of life there when Maria and her sisters were young is of a whirl of social entertainment and visiting of the sort so vividly described by Jane Austen. Maria, too, with her ready wit, charming manners and simple piety could have been an Austen heroine, living a comfortably middle-class life in a provincial town. All this was to end, however, when a series of misfortunes struck. After the death of her father in 1808, the ownership of 25 Chapel Street passed to his brother, Richard, the tenant of the Golden Lion Inn. He allowed his brother’s family to continue living in the house, even after the death of his sister-in-law the following year meant that it was only occupied by his three unmarried nieces, Elizabeth, now aged thirty-three, Maria, aged twenty-six, and Charlotte, aged eighteen. They were quite comfortably situated as they each had a life annuity of fifty pounds, secured against the property in their father’s will.82 Then, on Christmas Eve 1811, Richard’s son, Thomas, a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant in the navy, was drowned in the wreck of the St George off the coast of Denmark.83 Within a few months Richard himself was dead and this seems to have precipitated the break-up of the family. Maria’s youngest sister, Charlotte, accepted an offer of marriage from her cousin, Richard’s son, Joseph,84 and Maria herself decided to leave Penzance and travel to Yorkshire to live with her aunt and uncle. John Fennell, like Patrick before him, had been promoted from his schoolmastership in Wellington, Shropshire, to be head of the newly opened boarding school for Methodist ministers’ sons at Woodhouse Grove. The school had expanded so rapidly that Mrs Fennell was unable to manage the domestic arrangements with only her daughter’s assistance. Maria therefore had the opportunity of earning her keep in a genteel manner while still remaining within her own family.

  Elizabeth’s fate is unknown: her annuity was not sufficient to enable her to remain in the family home alone and it seems likely that she moved in with her married sister.85

  From the softness of the Cornish climate and the comfortable, close-knit social world of Penzance, Maria travelled over 400 miles to the comparative austerity and friendlessness of a boys’ boarding school in the heart of a depressed and restless industrial West Riding. Though she soon became close friends with her cousin, Jane Branwell Fennell, who was eight years her junior, she must have felt the change in her circumstances and the loss of her family life. No doubt, therefore, she was more disposed to be receptive towards the courtship of the young minister of Hartshead than she might otherwise have been. The fact that Patrick enjoyed the confidence and esteem of her aunt and uncle, too, allowed him to be admitted into an intimate friendship with a speed which would otherwise have flouted social convention. Another important factor in Patrick’s favour was that he was also the best friend of William Morgan, who was now actively courting her cousin Jane. It was natural for the two clergymen to visit the two cousins and the inevitable pairing off led to an engagement within only a few months.

  Patrick lovingly preserved the series of letters written to him by Maria at this period; his side of the correspondence is unfortunately lost, but hers provides a unique and touching insight into the growing intimacy and affection between them. It is worth quoting extensively from them for this reason alone, but there is an added poignancy in that these letters, written during her engagement, contain virtually all we know about the mother of the Brontës.

  O
n 26 August 1812, Maria wrote her first letter to Patrick, having agreed, at their last meeting, to become his wife.

  My dear Friend,

  This address is sufficient to convince you that I not only permit, but approve of yours to me – I do indeed consider you as my friend; yet, when I consider how short a time I have had the pleasure of knowing you, I start at my own rashness, my heart fails, and did I not think that you would be disappointed and grieved at it, I believe I should be ready to spare myself the task of writing. Do not think that I am so wavering as to repent of what I have already said. No, believe me, this will never be the case, unless you give me cause for it. You need not fear that you have been mistaken in my character. If I know anything of myself, I am incapable of making an ungenerous return to the smallest degree of kindness, much less to you whose attentions and conduct have been so particularly obliging. I will frankly confess that your behaviour and what I have seen and heard of your character has excited my warmest esteem and regard, and be assured that you shall never have cause to repent of any confidence you may think proper to place in me, and that it will always be my endeavour to deserve the good opinion which you have formed, although human weakness may in some instances cause me to fall short. In giving you these assurances I do not depend upon my own strength, but I look to Him who has been my unerring guide through life, and in whose continued protection and assistance I confidently trust.86

  The receipt of a letter from Patrick had caused her some embarrassment as the Fennells had teased her about its contents though they did not, as yet, know of her engagement. Maria felt herself in some difficulty as to the etiquette of her own letter: she wanted to speak her heart but was afraid of appearing too forward: