Brontës (4 page)

In the long term, Tighe's Evangelical sympathies were to be far more important to Patrick than his political and social connections. They were to be the inspiration for the whole of his future career. It has often been suggested that Patrick's choice of the Church was dictated by worldly ambition: the Church or the army, it is argued, were the only means by which talented but poor young men could seek to better themselves. This is singularly unfair to Patrick. Though his ambition cannot be doubted, neither can his personal faith. His writings and his activities are eloquent testimony to the sincerity of his belief, and the fact that he entered the ministry under the aegis of the Evangelicals is further proof of his commitment. By doing so he was effectively curtailing his chances of future promotion, for Evangelical clergymen were, as yet, only a small group within the Church and their progress met with considerable resistance from the all-powerful High Church party. It was difficult to find bishops willing to ordain them or grant them livings, and even the most venerated of all Evangelical clergymen, Charles Simeon, was never anything more than a simple vicar.
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Had Patrick been ambitious for temporal, rather than spiritual glory, he had enlisted under the wrong banner.

There were considerable difficulties to overcome if Patrick was to reach his goal of ordination, not the least being that he could not become a clergyman unless he graduated from one of the universities. To do that, he had first to be proficient in Latin and Greek. As these were not on the syllabus of the ordinary village school in Ireland, it seems likely that Patrick was instructed in the Classics by Thomas Tighe, perhaps in part-payment for his services as a tutor to the family. Interestingly, the story was current as early as 1855 that Patrick adopted the ‘Bronte' spelling of his surname in response to pressure from Thomas Tighe, who disliked the plebeian ‘Brunty' and thought the Greek word for thunder a more appropriate and resonant version of the name.
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Having overcome his first hurdle, acquiring the gentleman's prerequisite, a classical education, Patrick faced the problem of obtaining entrance to
university. Ostensibly there were three choices open to him: Trinity College in Dublin, the natural choice for an Irishman, Oxford or Cambridge.
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In reality, however, Cambridge – and indeed St John's College – was Patrick's only option. It was not simply that Tighe pushed him to go to his own college, which both his half-brothers and, more recently, his nephew, had attended.
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St John's was renowned for its Evangelical connections and, perhaps most important of all as far as Patrick was concerned, it had the largest funds available of any college in any of the universities for assisting poor but able young men to get a university education. Unlike most other college foundations, these scholarships were not all tied to specific schools or particular areas of the country, so if Patrick was to get into any university, St John's at Cambridge offered him the greatest chance of doing so.
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To be admitted, all that he required were letters from Tighe attesting to his ability, confirming that he had reached the necessary standard of education and recommending him for an assisted place as a sizar.

Four long years after taking up the post as tutor to Thomas Tighe's children, Patrick finally achieved his ambition. Leaving behind his family, his friends and his home, he embarked for England with his meagre savings in his pocket and, it would appear, with scarcely a backward glance.

From the moment that he arrived in Cambridge in July 1802
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to the day he graduated in 1806, Patrick Brontë was a distinctive and somewhat eccentric figure. His humble Irish background marked him out immediately, as did the fact that he was one of only four sizars in his year, though fortunately the menial tasks which went with the sizarship, such as waiting on the wealthier undergraduates at table, had recently been abolished.
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Although some of the other men were already graduates of other universities when they came to St John's, Patrick, at twenty-five, was up to ten years older than many of his contemporaries. Most were wealthy young men who had been taught by private tutors or at public school; at worst they had been to long-established grammar schools which had links with the university going back centuries. For some, going to Cambridge was simply an opportunity for indulgence and a pleasant way of passing a few years before returning to the family estates or business.
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A degree was desirable but not essential. For Patrick, it was the passport to a promising future and he had no intention of being distracted from his purpose. He was, in every sense, an outsider and he had only to open his mouth to betray his origins. No doubt he suffered from the snobbery and elitism of some of his contemporaries but, on the other hand, he did not pass unnoticed. At the very least,
the unorthodox and rather romantic circumstances of his arrival at Cambridge made an impression and within a couple of years he was already a legend at the college.

Henry Martyn, for example, a leading Evangelical who was then a fellow of St John's, wrote to William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner, in February 1804, describing Patrick's progress to college as having

[a] singularity [which] has hardly been equalled, I suppose, since the days of Bp Latimer – He left his native Ireland at the age of 22 with seven pounds having been able to lay by no more after superintending a school ten years. He reached Cambridge before that was expended, & there received an unexpected supply of £5 from a distant friend. On this he subsisted some weeks before entering at St John's, & has since had no other assistance than what the college afforded.
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Another contemporary was the poet Henry Kirke White, who is now perhaps best remembered for his hymn ‘Oft in danger, oft in woe'. The son of a Nottingham butcher, he was admitted as a sizar to St John's in April 1804. Beset by financial problems himself, he was filled with admiration for Patrick, who managed to get by on an even lower income than he did. In a letter home, written on 26 October 1805, he told his mother:

I have got the bills of Mr [Brontë], a Sizar of this college, now before me, and from them, and his own account, I will give you a statement of what my college bills will amount to …
12
£
or 15
£ a-year at the most … The Mr [Brontë], whose bills I have borrowed, has been at college three years. He came over from [Ireland], with 10£ in his pocket, and has no friends, or any income or emolument whatever, except what he receives for his Sizarship; yet he does support himself, and that, too, very genteelly.
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Life in the college would certainly be gracious compared to the farmhouse at Ballynaskeagh. Patrick probably shared rooms with John Nunn, a fellow sizar, who was to become his closest friend, in the third storey of the front quadrangle, provided free of charge by the college. Most rooms were already furnished, though Patrick may have been unlucky, like Henry Kirke White, and found himself assigned unfurnished rooms which would have cost him about fifteen pounds to equip. Economies were possible, however, and White got away with spending ‘only' four pounds by sleeping on a horsehair mattress on the floor instead of a proper bed.
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He would also have had
to pay for wood or coals to heat his rooms and candles to enable him to work outside daylight hours, though savings could be made even in this area. His own tutor, James Wood, the son of Lancashire weavers, had also once been a poor sizar at the college. He had lived in a small garret at the top of the turret in the southeast corner of the Second Court called ‘the Tub' where, to save money, he used to study by the light of the rush candles on the staircase, with his feet wrapped in straw.
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All the sizars dined in hall and the provision of food was generous, as White explained:

Our dinners and suppers cost us nothing; and if a man choose to eat milk-breakfasts, and go without tea, he may live absolutely for nothing; for his college emoluments will cover the rest of his expenses. Tea is indeed almost superfluous, since we do not rise from dinner till half past three, and the supper-bell rings a quarter before nine. Our mode of living is not to be complained of, for the table is covered with all possible variety; and on feast-days, which our fellows take care are pretty frequent, we have wine
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St John's was far and away the largest of all the colleges, its closest rival in terms of size being Trinity, next door. Most of the other dozen or so colleges were little more than small halls, lacking the grandeur of their two big brothers, though the magnificent Gothic chapel of King's College dominated the townscape then as now. The libraries offered the opportunity for recreation as well as study to someone like Patrick, for whom the purchase of a book meant considerable financial self-sacrifice. The churches and college chapels, too, with their enviable choirs and organs, provided music of a quality that Patrick could never have heard before. More importantly, they were the platform for the Evangelical preachers who, led by Charles Simeon himself from his pulpit at Holy Trinity Church, were inspiring a new generation of clergymen with the missionary faith of Evangelicalism.
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If Patrick had not already been an Evangelical by the time he left Thomas Tighe in Ireland, he had every opportunity and incentive for conversion at Cambridge. He certainly seems to have been one of those ardent young men who met in Simeon's rooms and were taught the necessity of preaching ‘to humble the sinner, to exalt the Saviour, and to promote holiness'.
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Beyond the insular life of the colleges there was the town of Cambridge, with its bustling markets which served the surrounding countryside and the Cam, which was not the sleepy river of today, but an important and busy waterway.
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By comparison with the rural Ireland of Patrick's earlier years,
the town must have seemed like a metropolis, though the drab Fenlands must have been a poor substitute for the beautiful mountains of Mourne, especially to a great walker like Patrick.

Though his sizarship relieved him of much of the burden of his living expenses at Cambridge, Patrick would still have had a struggle to make ends meet. The biggest expense was the fees payable to his college and the university. These were worked out on a sliding scale, so that where a fellow commoner (a nobleman) would pay £25 on admission and 17s.6d. quarterly for tuition fees to his college, a pensioner (younger sons of the aristocracy, the gentry and professional classes) would pay £15 and 11s.6d., but Patrick, as a sizar, would pay only £10 and 6s.4d. respectively.
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The university, too, demanded fees on matriculation and on graduation so that it was vital to Patrick to maintain an income of some kind. He did this in two ways – both dependent on his academic success. Firstly, he taught pupils in his leisure hours, a practice which might earn him up to fifteen guineas for four months' work in the long vacation. If he was lucky, there might be the additional bonus of gifts from grateful pupils, like the invaluable Lemprière's
Bibliotheca Classica,
presented to him by Mr Toulmen.
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Secondly, he won exhibitions and books through excelling in his college examinations.

Patrick was fortunate in having three outstanding tutors at St John's: James Wood, Joshua Smith and Thomas Catton. All three had held sizarships themselves, so they fully understood the difficulties of and actively encouraged the sizars in their care. James Wood, an Evangelical who later became Master of the college and a Vice-Chancellor of the university, was especially active on Patrick's behalf.
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Under their guidance, Patrick's academic career flourished.

Fortunately, the records of the college examinations still exist, so we can see exactly how well he did in comparison with the rest of his year. It is significant that the lowest he ever came in the order of merit was in his very first attempt, in December 1802, when he came twenty-fifth out of thirty-seven in an examination on the geometry of Euclid and the theology of Beausobre and Doddridge.
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It is a mark of his achievement that, despite lacking the advantages of a public school or private tutor which were available to most of his contemporaries,
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Patrick still managed to scrape into the first class in this examination. James Wood noted against his name and those of the three men immediately above him that they were ‘Inferior to the above but entitled to prizes if in the first class at the next examination'.
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From this moment on, Patrick's academic career never faltered. In each
of the half-yearly exams that followed, Patrick maintained his place in a first class which grew steadily smaller over the years. The set books were alternately in Greek for the June examinations and Latin for the December ones, but all were chosen from the standard classics of the ancient world. In 1803 the set texts were histories: in June the
Anabasis
of Xenophon and in December, Tacitus'
Agricola,
at which point his friend, John Nunn, slipped from the first to the second class. In 1804 the subject was poetry with Euripides' verse tragedy
Iphigenia in Aulis
set for June, and books 1 and 4 of Virgil's
Georgics
set for December, when poor Nunn, whose Latin was obviously not as good as his Greek, dropped even further down into the third class. In June 1805, Patrick's last college examinations, the set book was Mounteney's edition of the speeches of Demosthenes, the Athenian orator and statesman. To crown his college career, Patrick was one of only seven men to get into the first class and, even more impressively, one of only five who had managed to maintain an unbroken record of first-class successes.
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Those who were in the first class in both the annual examinations were entitled to prize books. It is surprising, therefore, that only two of Patrick's are still extant, especially as he clearly regarded them with great pride. They were both standard works: Richard Bentley's 1728 edition of the works of Horace and Samuel Clarke's 1729 edition of Homer's
Iliad
in a dual Greek and Latin text.
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Though both were nearly eighty years old, they had been rebound in stout leather and, as he pointed out in his inscriptions at the beginning, each bore the college arms on the front cover. On the title page of the
Iliad,
Patrick carefully noted: ‘My Prize Book, for having always kept in the
first Class
, at St John's College – Cambridge – P. Brontê, A.B. To be retained – semper—'. A similar statement was inscribed in the Horace. The odd phrase ‘To be retained – semper' (always) was one that Patrick was to use again and again over the years in books and manuscripts and it was a habit he was to pass on to his children.
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