Brontës (5 page)

Patrick's pride was natural and justified. He had worked hard and the prize books were concrete evidence of his achievement. Another tangible result was the awarding of college exhibitions which, though not in themselves very substantial sums, together made an invaluable contribution towards his income. They were paid half-yearly, at the end of June and the end of December, following the college examinations. The most valuable was the Hare exhibition, worth £5 a year, which he was awarded in February 1803 and which was paid to him from June 1803 until December 1807 – a full eighteen months after he had left the college. The Suffolk exhibition,
which should have been worth £3 6s. 8d. annually, was only worth half that amount because Patrick had to share it with a graduate, Dr A. Brown; although awarded it at Christmas 1803, he had to wait till the following June for his first payment, but again it was paid to him up to and including December 1807. Finally, he held the Goodman exhibition for the six months from June to December 1805, receiving the half-yearly payment of 14s. at the end of that time.
⁴⁸
Altogether, the exhibitions would give him an annual income of £6 13s. 4d., rising to £7 7s. 4d. for the short period when he held the Goodman exhibition.

By scrimping and saving, Patrick contrived to make ends meet, but by his own account to Henry Kirke White he needed between twelve and fifteen pounds a year for college bills alone. The shortfall had to be made up somehow – and in a way that would not detract from his studies. The obvious solution was to seek sponsorship of some kind and so, at the beginning of 1804, Patrick sought out Henry Martyn, who, though four years younger than Patrick, was already a fellow of St John's. Martyn, who had been Senior Wrangler (the student with the highest marks) of the university in 1801, was Charles Simeon's curate at Holy Trinity Church and therefore sympathetic towards a young man with Evangelical aspirations.
⁴⁹
He took up Patrick's case immediately, writing first of all to John Sargent:

An Irishman, of the name of Bronte entered at St John's a year & half ago as a sizar. During this time he has received
no
assistance from his friends who are incapable of affording him any – Yet he has been able to get on in general pretty well by help of Exhibitions &c which are given to our sizars. Now however, he finds himself reduced to great straits & applied to me just before I left Cambridge to know if assistance could be procured for him from any of those societies, whose object is to maintain pious young men designed for the ministry.
⁵⁰

Patrick had now taken the plunge and committed himself to a career in the Church of England. Sargent contacted Henry Thornton, patron of one of the Evangelical societies, who, with his more famous cousin, William Wilberforce, himself a graduate of St John's College, agreed personally to sponsor Patrick through university. Martyn wrote to Wilberforce to thank him:

I availed myself as soon as possible of your generous offer to Mr Bronte & left it without hesitation to himself to fix the limits of his request. He says that £20
per annm. will enable him to go on with comfort, but that he could do with less.
⁵¹

Wilberforce himself endorsed the letter ‘Martyn abt Mr Bronte Heny. & I to allow him 10L. each anny.' The fact that Patrick was able to attract the attention of men of the calibre of Martyn, Thornton and Wilberforce is further proof of his commitment to his faith and his outstanding qualities. Henry Martyn himself had no doubts about him, telling Sargent unequivocally, ‘For the character of the man I can safely vouch as I know him to be studious, clever, & pious –'. Recounting Patrick's long struggle to get to Cambridge from Ireland to Wilberforce, Martyn added another unsolicited testimonial: ‘There is reason to hope that he will be an instrument of good to the church, as a desire of usefulness in the ministry seems to have influenced him hitherto in no small degree.'
⁵²

The fact that Patrick was now joining the majority of St John's undergraduates in working towards a career in the Church did not prevent him or them, from taking part in the more secular activities of the university. Most prominent among these were the preparations for an invasion of England by the French which, after the renewal of hostilities by Napoleon and the declaration of war by Great Britain on 18 May 1803, seemed a daily possibility. Throughout the summer of 1803 Napoleon was putting together an invasion flotilla and restructuring the defences of his Channel ports. Volunteers were called for and by December 1803, 463,000 men had enrolled in the local militia of the three kingdoms. Among them was Patrick Brontë, who had a lifelong passion for all things military.
⁵³
By September of that year the gentlemen of the university had obtained leave to drill as a separate volunteer corps from the men of the town. The following month, the heads of colleges and tutors gave reluctant permission for all lay members of the university to be allowed one hour a day for military drill, on condition that none of the officers were to be gazetted so as to be called up into the regular army; those who were already ordained were, of course, excluded from taking any active part in the drilling.
⁵⁴

On 25 February 1804 the
Cambridge Chronicle
published a list of 154 gentlemen of the university who, ‘in the present crisis', had been instructed in the use of arms by Captain Bircham of the 30th Regiment.
⁵⁵
The St John's men were headed by Lord Palmerston, who had been admitted to the college on 4 April 1804.
⁵⁶
Though he was only eighteen, his social standing made him the obvious candidate to be elected as officer in charge of the
fourth division, which was made up of the men of St John's and Peterhouse. Patrick Brontë, with his friend John Nunn, had joined the corps before Christmas and for nine months they trained in the Market Square under the command of Palmerston and under the watchful eye of Captain Bircham. Just before the university volunteer corps was effectively temporarily disbanded with the advent of the long vacation, they gathered to drill at Parker's Piece; after performing a series of manoeuvres, the volunteers formed into a hollow square to witness the presentation to the Captain by Palmerston of a letter containing two hundred guineas as ‘a token of their acknowledgment for his unremitted attention to them … and to express the high sense they entertained of his services'.
⁵⁷
For the rest of his life Patrick was to be inordinately proud of the fact that he had drilled under Lord Palmerston, not least because by 1809, when he was still only a humble curate, Palmerston had been appointed Minister for War, and was already embarking on a long political career which was to make him an outstanding foreign secretary and prime minister.

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 illumination
⁵⁸
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. Bront
ē
. 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.