Brontës (44 page)

My Lords Can the workman mean his master harm when after having done that Masters Bidding he comes to receive his rightful wages … how can Arthur Wellesly mean the country Harm when after having caste himself as a sheild before his country in her hour of peril he but – the hour of defeat averted – turns round to beg from her one kiss of love and gratitude … My lords you believe that the Duke of Zamorna has done you service you believe that he deserves reward for that service you believe that he is the son of a King and that thus he is qualified to receive a Kingdom and as in this case these are the only true grounds to proceed upon you would you would readily give to him a Kingdom.
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Despite the Earl of St Clair's claim that the proposal was putting ‘a premium upon insubordination rebellion and immorality' and despite a foolishly arrogant and tactless speech from Zamorna himself,
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Northangerland's oratory won the day. Zamorna was created King of Angria, though the new kingdom was to remain part of the Glasstown union.

While Branwell advanced the political career of the newly avaricious Zamorna, Charlotte decided to develop his personal life. It was quite clear from the profound changes that had taken place in his own character that
Zamorna had outgrown his child-bride, Marian Hume, whose sweet innocence was entirely out of place in the brave new world of Angria. Charlotte therefore disposed of her, writing her last will and testament on 5 January 1834 and having her die of a broken heart caused by her husband's neglect. Free now to marry a woman of more spirit and better suited to his new character, Charlotte married him to Branwell's new creation, Mary Percy, daughter of Northangerland. Branwell had originally intended her for one of his politicians, the slippery Sir Robert Pelham, but for once Charlotte took the initiative, hijacked his heroine and married her off before her brother could object.
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The marriage was to be fundamental to the future development of the juvenilia as Mary, beloved by both Zamorna and Northangerland, became a pawn in, and victim of, their ever-deepening rivalry.

Not content with simply providing Zamorna with a new wife, Charlotte gave him an increasingly complex and immoral love-life, reflecting the twist Branwell had given to his character and political career. He acquires a bastard child, an evil and misshapen dwarf called Finic, by a Negress with whom he had an adulterous affair when he was eighteen. A first wife, Helen Victorine, is revealed, by whom he has a son of doubtful legitimacy: like her successor, Marian Hume, Helen Victorine was neglected by her husband and died of a broken heart.
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It is also announced that Zamorna transferred his attentions to Mary Percy while Marian was still alive and that he actually courted her in his wife's presence. Within three months of his marriage to Mary he was already blatantly flirting with other women. There is even a suggestion that Mina Laury, his first love who has become the nurse of his children by previous marriages and affairs, is being kept as his mistress in the seclusion of Grassmere Manor.
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No doubt Zamorna's exotic and Byronic style of life was a powerful antidote to the enforced piety and chaste normality of life at Haworth Parsonage.

Similarly, the idea of depicting real life in Haworth as she knew it had no attraction for Charlotte. In ‘High Life in Verdopolis', written between 20 February and 20 March 1834, she opened her story with a defence of her love of the aristocratic way of life:

I like high life, I like its manners, its splendors, its luxuries, the beings which move in its enchanted sphere. I like to consider the habits of those beings, their way of thinking, speaking acting. Let fools talk about the artificial, voluptuous, idle existences spun out by Dukes, Lords Ladies, Knights & Squires of high
degree. Such cant is not for me, I despise it, what is there artificial in the lifeves of our Verdopolitan Aristocracy? what is there of idle? Voluptuous they are to a proverb, splendidly, magnificently voluptuous, but not inactive, not unnatural.
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If Charlotte was unwilling to leave the glittering social world she had created in Verdopolis for the bleaker provincialism of Angria, Branwell had no such reluctance. He countered her obsession with the higher echelons of society by introducing the more familiar and mundane world of the woollen industry to the juvenilia. Mills had always been present on the Verdopolitan scene, but ‘The Wool is Rising', which Branwell completed on his seventeenth birthday, was the first story to chart the rise of a mill owner and be set, in part at least, in the counting house of a mill. Edward Percy is the eldest son of Northangerland by his second wife Mary Henrietta. He and his younger brother, William, were supposed to have been killed at birth on Northangerland's orders but, for reasons best known to himself, had been preserved by Sdeath. Left to their own devices, they had lived in abject poverty until the driving ambition of Edward had set them up as working wool-combers. Such was his success in the trade that he soon became a mill owner, employing workmen in his mills and his brother and a clerk in the counting house and earning himself a fortune. His business methods were as underhand as his father's political machinations, but the profits enabled him to buy land in Adrianopolis, the new city Zamorna was building as his capital in Angria, and to set up mills in the kingdom. Having made his fortune he becomes a member of the Verdopolitan Parliament as a member of the Angrian party and sets up in grand style at Edwardston Hall in Angria. In sharp contrast to Charlotte's effete and wordy lovers, Edward Percy is both passionate and decisive: his successful wooing of the princess, Maria Sneachie, is almost brutal in its directness and he has no qualms about clasping his lover in his arms and ‘imprinting on her lips one ardent kiss'.
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The scenes in the counting house, in which Edward Percy bullies his ‘spirited but weak' brother and his ‘grovelling' clerk, who are respectively reading a novel and Wesley's hymns instead of working at their ledgers, were later to be lifted by Charlotte to form the opening chapters of her first novel,
The Professor
.
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Her conversion to the less glamorous world of her own experience was some way off, however, and her next venture, ‘The Spell', was a violent reaction against Branwell's attempts to tone down her extravagances. The story is a reversion to the old world of magic, omens and mysterious strangers. Zamorna nearly dies as the result of a curse put on
him at birth and it is revealed that he has an identical twin brother, Valdacella, who is really responsible for all the arbitrary and cruel deeds and the sudden change in character of Charlotte's great hero. Here again, the influence of James Hogg's
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
is very evident, the devil-like figure of Valdacella assuming Zamorna's persona.

their past lives are inextricably interwoven, the achievements of one cannot now be distinguished from the achievements of the other, their writings, their military actions their political manoeuvres, are all blended, all twisted into the same cord, a cord which none but themselves can unravel & which they will not.

If the story set out to restore Zamorna back to his former good character and extricate him from all the consequences of his pride and ambition by attributing them to his twin, it failed. Branwell had pushed the story on too far and Charlotte was too completely seduced by Zamorna's Byronic incarnation to allow him to revert to his former self. As Charlotte ruefully acknowledged in a tail-piece to the story:

If the young King of Angria has no alter Ego he ought to have such a convenient representative, For no single man having one corporeal & one spiritual nature … should in right reason & in the ordinance [of] common sense & decency, speak & act in that capricious, double-dealing, unfathomable, incomprehensible, torturing, Sphinx-like manner which he constantly assumes for reasons known only to himself.
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If Charlotte rather regretted the way Zamorna was turning out, Branwell had no such doubts about Northangerland. During the spring of 1834 he wrote the first volume of ‘The Life of feild Marshal the Right Honourable Alexander Percy. Earl of Northangerland' under the alias of John Bud. The story developed Northangerland's descent from the Northumbrian Percy family which Charlotte had first outlined some six months previously in ‘The Green Dwarf'. His father, a crude, violent and dissipated man, sold his family estates to gratify his profligate habits, fled to Ireland after fighting a duel and carrying off a lady and ended up in Africa attempting to escape justice.

the birth of Northangerland was marked by a rough and stormy day. certai[nly th]eir appeared no prodigy either on heaven or earth. But clouds and wind and
rain beat rou[nd th]e ancient Hall when its Young lord first opened his eyes upon that life whic[h for] him [h]as seldom been one of happiness
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The young Alexander Percy has a powerful mind and quickly masters Greek, Latin, modern languages and mathematics; when he is sent to St Patrick's College on the Philosopher's Isle, he applies himself so single-mindedly to his studies that he becomes Senior Wrangler. Already he has proved himself to be driven by that ambition which will not permit him to be anything but the first in everything he does. In addition to his intellectual gifts, Percy is extraordinarily sensitive to music, bursting into tears as a child when he hears an Italian flute player and seeing visions of angels when he plays on the organ. Pious in the extreme, he spends hours reading his Bible and questions his tutor, John Bud, endlessly: ‘Mr Bud where shall we go when we die', ‘What are our spirits like Sir', ‘Why doesnt the judgement day come now when men are so wicked'. As a result of this ‘overmuch unassisted thinking of an Impassioned melancholy and unbridled mind', young Percy came to a crisis of faith and then lapsed into that ‘fixed and hopeless and rayless Atheism' which was to blight the rest of his days with melancholia and fear of death.
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Percy's atheism, which had gradually become more explicit in the juvenilia, is one of the few indications of rebellion among the Brontë children against the religious atmosphere in which they were brought up. It is often cited as proof that Branwell himself was an atheist, but this is no more true than to suggest that Charlotte's obsession with the adulterous affairs of her hero is an indication that she indulged in liaisons with married men.
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In both cases, the attraction of such piquantly shocking characteristics in their creations was that they were so alien to the conventionality of life at the parsonage.

On the other hand, the juvenilia also provided a useful outlet for Branwell's deepening sense of disgust at religious hypocrisy. Interestingly, he seems to depict this as being almost exclusively the preserve of those outside the Established Church, in particular the inspirational sects. In ‘An Historical Narrative of the War of Aggression', he had made Percy himself deliver an ironical impromptu prayer, aided by his wicked confederates, Sdeath and Montmorenci. Kneeling beside a chair, his eyes raised to heaven, his hands clasped, ‘a heavenly pensiveness' diffused over his countenance, he prays:

Oh – may we be saved. – may we all be saved. (Sdeath – may we be saved). Saved to life everlasting saved to ever lasting life. (Mont. just so) Oh Grace. – Ohy
Grace. come down upon us (S. come) (Mont, come) … oh. save us. save thy lambs save thy sheep. save thy lambs (Thornton. ‘It would be better If he told you how to save your Hams')
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Timothy Steaton, too, the clerk in ‘The Wool is Rising', conceals his villainy under a cloak of pretended piety.

while thanking the Lord for his abundant loving kindness a light as that which fell upon Saul of Tarshish broke in upon my mind. I bethought me at a venture upon the Lost Sheep of the house of Israel and I said to my soul Truely it hath pleased the Lord to send rain upon the earth whereby perchance many of his creatures have been delectated and many damaged But as his mercy endureth for ever he hath so ordered it that none of this damage shall if we use the sense he has given us fall upon the head of sinful and erring man. now peradventure there shall have been in this wet season a plenitude of sheep and lambs of his fold found upon the pasturage seized with the rot. and that to them frail mortals death shall have come thereby[.] now greedy and lucre loving mortals may at first sight on this case feel cause to mourn but thou a ministering angel flys and chases misery from their soul. I said to my soul oh frail tenant of a frail clay, why art thou not awake to sing thy Creators praise. Lo may not my master perchance sojourn into the far country and gather together as sheaves into a garner all the fleeces of sheep fallen through the rot these fleeces can he take at a small trifle and resell at an enlarged sum.
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The association between evil and a façade of religion is developed most fully in the character of Sdeath in ‘The Life of feild Marshal the Right Honourable Alexander Percy'. Despite being the faithful servant of Edward Percy for thirty years, his attitude towards father and son is ambivalent, encouraging each to plot against the other. After one quarrel between them, Sdeath urges Alexander to kill his father, justifying the murder on scriptural grounds.

thaw mun look to the lord man and abide by his will. Theres a Providence ower were heads which alluss provides for the best and what says the Scripture – come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give you rest – and agean though your Sins be as scarlet yet they shall be as white as wool. Naw them texts were never intended for ought but the help of the needy and Aw hev often and often thought on Em as aw read that blessed book …
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The powerful combination of religious cant and Yorkshire dialect, which Emily was later to use as her model for Joseph in
Wuthering Heights
, was probably derived as much from the servants John Barnet in James Hogg's
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
, and Andrew Fairservice in Walter Scott's
Rob Roy
, as from personal observation of Haworth Methodists.
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