Brontës (24 page)

Aunt Branwell's arrival was a godsend: she was not only an affectionate relative who could truly sympathize but also a competent and efficient manager. The nurse, Martha Wright, could be dismissed and Maria given over to her sister's loving care; for Patrick particularly, there was relief in having someone who loved his wife to tend her and an adult to whom he could talk. Elizabeth's presence ‘afforded great comfort to my mind, which has been the case ever since, by sharing my labours and sorrows, and behaving as an affectionate mother to my children'.
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The sense of impending doom cannot have been helped by the death of Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, on 7 August; the paraphernalia of public mourning were everywhere to be seen and even Patrick's pulpit had to be draped in funereal black as if in preparation for the death that had to come. At the end of the month there came further sad news: his old friend and first patron, Thomas Tighe, had died in Ireland on 21 August.
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Maria's own condition was fast deteriorating:

Death pursued her unrelentingly. Her constitution was enfeebled, and her frame wasted daily; and after above seven months of more agonizing pain than I ever saw anyone endure, she fell asleep in Jesus, and her soul took its flight to the mansions of glory. During many years, she had walked with God; but the great enemy, envying her life of holiness, often disturbed her mind in the last conflict. Still, in general, she had peace and joy in believing; and died, if not triumphantly, at least calmly, and with a holy, yet humble confidence, that Christ was her Saviour, and heaven her eternal home.
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It must have added considerably to Patrick's mental anguish that the gentle and pious woman he loved so much was unable to die ‘triumphantly' as a good Evangelical should. In one of her love letters she had
once told him that her heart was more ready to attach itself to earth than to heaven. As she lay dying it was the thought of her soon-to-be motherless children which tormented her, rather than her own spiritual plight. The nurse had heard her crying out continually, ‘Oh God my poor children – oh God my poor children!'
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On 15 September 1821, Maria died, as she had lived, in the midst of her family. Patrick and her sister sat on either side of her bed and the children, the eldest of whom was only seven years old, the youngest not yet two, stood at the foot of the bed with Sarah Garrs, their nursemaid.
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For two weeks Patrick was prostrate with grief and unable to perform his duties. William Anderton, who had officiated during the vacancy at Haworth, stepped into the breach again but Patrick called on his old friend, William Morgan, who, in happier times, had married Patrick and Maria and christened four of their six children, to officiate at Maria's funeral. On Saturday, 22 September, Maria was buried in the vault near the altar under Haworth Church. She was thirty-eight years old.
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And when my dear wife was dead, and buried, and gone, and when I missed her at every corner, and when her memory was hourly revived by the innocent, yet distressing prattle, of my children, I do assure you, my dear Sir, from what I felt, I was happy in the recollection, that to sorrow, not as those without hope, was no sin; that our Lord himself had wept over his departed friend; and that he had promised us grace and strength sufficient for such a day.
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Whatever may have been his personal inclination, Patrick could not afford the indulgence of shutting himself away to mourn his loss. Within a week of his wife's funeral he was again performing all the official duties required of him, even though there were moments when the tide of grief threatened to overwhelm him. He had serious financial problems, too, for Maria's illness, the medication, the doctors and the nurse, had all required a large expenditure which Patrick had given unstintingly and, in the process, left himself deeply in debt. Maria's annuity, which had provided the comfortable sum of fifty pounds per annum, ceased on her death and was not transferable to her children.
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Patrick, totally dependent on his salary of £170 a year, had no savings and nothing of value which he could capitalize to pay his debts.

Too proud to seek help, he felt it was an answer to prayer when his old friends in Bradford rallied round and held a subscription on his behalf.
Elizabeth Firth contributed two guineas and doubtless wealthy clerical friends like Buckworth and Redhead gave more: the total sum raised was £15O.
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In addition, ‘my old and very kind friend at B[radford]', presumably Morgan, sent a few pounds and one of the church charities sent him a donation of fifty pounds. A few days later he received a bank post bill for a further fifty pounds from ‘a benevolent individual, a wealthy lady, in the West Riding of Yorkshire'. Though the benefactress's name is not known, it seems more than likely that this was Patrick's first encounter with Miss Currer, of Eshton Hall, who was the patron of Morgan's former living at Bierley. She was renowned for her generosity to all kinds of charities and a gift to a widowed clergyman with six small children was entirely in character for her.
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Characteristically, Patrick was scrupulous in paying back that portion of the money which had been loaned to him; as soon as possible – but probably several years later – he paid a personal visit to William Tetley, the Bradford parish clerk, and repaid him the fifty pounds he had received through his hands.
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The generosity of his friends relieved Patrick of his most pressing debts and ensured that the family did not go in need, but he was still left with the major problem of how he was to provide for the care of his children. For the moment Aunt Branwell was prepared to stay, but her home was in Penzance, where all her friends were and where she had other responsibilities to the families of her brothers and sisters. Her residence at the parsonage could only be a temporary arrangement and then what was Patrick to do? Nancy and Sarah Garrs were good and loyal servants, but they could not take the place of a parent or guardian. Driven half out of his mind with worry about the future and his judgement still clouded by grief, Patrick made the mistake of taking decisive action.

On 8 December he went to stay at Kipping House for a couple of nights, presumably because he had business to transact in Bradford. Elizabeth Firth was no doubt sympathetic and understanding: she had known and loved Maria, taken an interest in the children and was godmother to at least two of them. In the midst of his despair, Patrick suddenly saw a glimmer of hope. Although she was only twenty-four, Elizabeth Firth could supply virtually everything the Brontës needed. She was quite capable of running the household as she had already proved by successfully managing her father's house until his remarriage; she was every inch a lady and would therefore be an ideal model and instructress to his daughters; since her father's death she had been a wealthy woman in her
own right and her money would provide for his children in a way that Patrick could not; and, perhaps most important of all, she was already known and liked by the children themselves. On his return home he wrote to Elizabeth Firth and asked her to marry him.
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Always an honest man, Patrick no doubt set out the practical advantages to his family which she could bring as his wife as well as expressing his personal esteem for her. She received his letter on 12 December and was appalled. Maria had been dead for scarcely three months and here was her widower, a penniless clergyman with six small children, asking her to throw herself away on him. Her anger was probably compounded by the fact that she was at the same time being courted by an eminently more eligible clergyman, James Clarke Franks. Two days later, she wrote a decided entry in her diary: ‘I wrote my last letter to Mr Bronte.' She kept her word for nearly two years, refusing to have anything more to do with the Brontës.
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By this disastrous proposal Patrick had succeeded only in alienating one of his few female friends and thereby lost his daughters the chance of being taken under their godmother's wing. He could not even take the obvious step of proposing to Elizabeth Branwell, despite the fact that she decided to stay on at Haworth until the children were old enough to go to school, because marriage to a deceased wife's sister was then against the law. Any idea of a second marriage would have to be abandoned, at least for the foreseeable future.

But what of the children themselves? Most of the biographers would have us believe that their childhood was no childhood: no toys, no children's books, no playmates; only newspapers to read and their own precocious, vivid imaginations to amuse them. Mrs Gaskell set the trend when she described them as ‘grave and silent beyond their years' and quoted their mother's nurse: ‘You would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures … I used to think them spiritless, they were so different to any children I had ever seen.'
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Martha Wright, however, as Nancy and Sarah Garrs were quick to point out, seems to have borne a grudge about her dismissal. Though she may have left simply because Aunt Branwell arrived, the Garrs sisters said that she was ‘sent away by Mr Bronte for reasons which he thought sufficient'. Perhaps, like Mrs Gamp, she had helped herself too frequently to the beer which Aunt Branwell kept under lock and key in the cellar.
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It was certainly Patrick who bore the brunt of her vitriolic accounts of life in the parsonage during Maria's illness. She blamed him for the supposed listlessness of his children:

I set it down to a fancy Mr Brontë had of not letting them have flesh-meat to eat. It was from no wish for saving, for there was plenty and even waste in the house, with young servants and no mistress to see after them; but he thought that children should be brought up simply and hardily: so they had nothing but potatoes for their dinner.
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Patrick, in a letter to Mrs Gaskell, called this ‘the principal mistake in the memoir' and flatly denied that he restricted his children to a vegetable diet. He was backed up by his cook, Nancy Garrs, who pointed out to visitors the meat jack from the parsonage which Patrick had requested should be sent to her on his death and stated categorically that the children had had meat to eat every day of their lives.
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References in the Brontës' letters and diary notes to cooking meals confirm that their diet consisted of oatmeal porridge for breakfast, meat, vegetables and a milk pudding or fruit pie for dinner and bread and butter, with fruit preserve, for tea.
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If the children were at all pale and subdued while the nurse was at the Parsonage it was probably because they were just recovering from scarlet fever; they must have been anxious about their mother, too. Even so, Patrick's reference to ‘the innocent, yet distressing prattle of my children' in the couple of months following Maria's death suggests that the young Brontës were perfectly normal, noisy young children.

Mrs Gaskell explained her inclusion of the sensational stories about Patrick's ‘eccentricities' by saying, ‘I hold the knowledge of them to be necessary for a right understanding of the life of his daughter.'
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Yet those who knew Patrick well, including his friends and his servants, did not recognize him in Mrs Gaskell's portrait: the words they used to describe him were uniformly ‘kind', ‘affable', ‘considerate' and ‘genial'. Like her picture of ‘barbaric' Haworth, Mrs Gaskell's portrayal of Patrick as a half-mad recluse who wanted nothing to do with his children was intended to explain away those characteristics of his daughter's writings which the Victorians found unacceptable.

Most of the stories were completely untrue, including those illustrative of Patrick's supposedly explosive temperament. Again, they came from Martha Wright, the nurse who had been dismissed, embellished, no doubt, by Lady Kay Shuttleworth, who knew her and reported back to Mrs Gaskell with all the malicious glee of a sitting-room gossip. Both Patrick and Nancy Garrs denied that there was any foundation in fact to the ‘Eccentrick Movements' of sawing the backs off chairs and burning hearth rugs in the
heat of his Irish temper and Mrs Gaskell was compelled, albeit reluctantly, to remove the accounts from her third edition of
The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
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Nancy also declared that the story of Patrick's burning the coloured boots put out by the nurse for his children to wear because they were ‘too gay and luxurious for his children, and would foster a love of dress' was simply untrue: the incident could not have happened without Nancy's knowledge as she was seldom absent from the kitchen for more than five minutes. She also denied that Patrick ‘worked off his volcanic wrath by firing pistols out of the back-door in rapid succession'. Patrick only carried loaded pistols when he took the long and lonely walk across the moors from Thornton to Haworth during periods of popular unrest and, since the bullets could not be removed any other way, would discharge them before entering the house simply to make them safe.
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The only story to which Nancy gave any credence at all – and its tone she hotly denied – was that Patrick had cut one of his wife's dresses into ribbons because it was ‘not according to his consistent notions of propriety'. Nancy's version of the story was that Patrick had bantered his wife good-humouredly on a new dress, ‘commenting with special awe and wonder on the marvellous expanse of sleeves'. Maria took the dress off, but when she later returned to her room she found that Patrick had been there before her and cut off the sleeves. Maria gave the dress to Nancy and, soon afterwards, Patrick came into the kitchen bearing a new silk dress which he had gone to Keighley to buy for his wife.
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If Patrick was not the half-mad and violent eccentric described by Mrs Gaskell, neither was he a weird recluse who ‘did not require companionship, therefore he did not seek it'.
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Though this has again become part of Brontë mythology, it was not true that, during his wife's illness, Patrick shut himself away in his study and began a lifelong habit of taking his meals in there alone. A schoolmaster friend of Patrick and Branwell, William Dearden, interviewed Nancy on the point and was roundly informed ‘Whether Mr Bronté was troubled with indigestion or not, Nancy says she cannot tell, as she never heard him complain on that score; but, up to the time of her leaving his service, she declares that he dined with his family every day.'
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