Brontës (10 page)

Another example of Patrick's muscular Christianity occurred during the Whit walk of 1810, when all the scholars and teachers of the Sunday school walked in procession through Dewsbury to nearby Earlsheaton. The vicar, who should have led the procession, was away in Oxford, taking his Master of Arts degree,
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so Patrick had to take his place. Suddenly, a drunk obstructed their path, threatening them and refusing to let them pass. Seeing no other option, Patrick apparently seized the man by the collar and threw him into the ditch, much to the delight of the Sunday school children, who remembered the incident (and probably embroidered it) for years to come.
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A curious tale is also told on the authority of Joseph Tolson, a young man who sometimes officiated informally as parish clerk. It had been agreed that Patrick would take the morning and afternoon services at Hartshead for the Reverend William Lucas, who was ill. John Buckworth wanted to spend the evening at the Aldams, home of his wife's family, the Hallileys, so Patrick had agreed to take that service for him in Dewsbury. While returning from Hartshead, he and Tolson were caught in a thunderstorm and soaked to the skin, so they rode on to the Aldams to ask Buckworth to take the evening service while Patrick got changed. They were met by John Halliley, owner of the town's largest mill, who on hearing that Patrick wanted his son-in-law to take the service declared, ‘What! keep a dog and bark himself!' Deeply insulted, Patrick turned on his heel and walked off; he performed the evening service, as arranged, but before giving his sermon declared publicly that he had been grievously insulted (without indicating by whom) and would not preach again from the pulpit at Dewsbury. According to Tolson Patrick kept his word.
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Though there may be some truth in the story, Patrick was in no position to withdraw from the pulpit: had he done so, Buckworth could have terminated his curacy and would certainly not have promoted him to the living of Hartshead when it came vacant, or maintained his friendship with Patrick afterwards. Nor is it likely that Patrick would have continued on good terms with John Halliley, junior,
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if he had quarrelled with his father and brother-in-law. It is possible, however, that Patrick took offence at what was meant to be a jocular remark and, in the heat of the moment, threatened never to preach again. His promotion to Hartshead soon afterwards might have been construed by Tolson as a fulfilment of his threat.

Patrick was later described by one of his parishioners as ‘a very earnest man, but a little peculiar in his manner'.
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He was, like his vicar, a strict Sabbatarian and once angered the parish bell-ringing team by stopping them practising on a Sunday in preparation for a competition. Other personal habits were attributed to his Irishness and his poverty: his carrying a stick (magnified, in the light of later knowledge, into a shillelagh) led to him being called jokingly ‘Old Staff' by some of his clerical friends; his frugal meals, too, were evidently a matter for comment in the parish.
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Fortunately, at least for the first few months of his curacy, Patrick was able to live at the vicarage, thus saving the cost of renting a house; later he is said to have moved into lodgings nearby, possibly because Buckworth had
opened ‘a sort of college in his house' to prepare young men for ordination and train them for missionary work in India.
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There certainly seems to have been an unexplained hiatus in Patrick's curacy, which may have coincided with his departure from the vicarage. Within six months of his arrival, Patrick started making plans for promotion to his first full ministerial post. On 6 June 1810 he wrote to the Archbishop of York's secretary to confirm that he had certificates for the last three years of his ministry but explaining that he was not ‘at present' licensed to the curacy of Dewsbury.
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This may simply have been yet another administrative muddle of the kind which seems to have affected Patrick at every step in his career. On the other hand it is possible that Patrick had not been licensed to the curacy at Dewsbury because he was expecting an imminent promotion to Hartshead-cum-Clifton. The incumbent there, William Lucas, had been seriously ill for some time and the constant need to provide deputies to take his duties had been a severe strain on the already overworked clergy of Dewsbury. The living was in Buckworth's gift and it is likely that he had promised it to Patrick when trying to persuade him to leave Wellington; certainly he needed a fairly major incentive to leave the Madeley circle. Having brought Patrick to Dewsbury, Buckworth may then have discovered that his action was premature: as a ‘perpetual curate', nothing short of death or resignation could make Lucas vacate his living. This would explain Patrick's lack of a formal position for the first seven months of his curacy.

In his letter, Patrick explained that he wanted to secure the licence to the curacy of Dewsbury, be inducted to the living of Hartshead and also obtain a licence for non-residence so that he did not have to remove to his new parish. With a rather touching naivety, he crossed out the references to Dewsbury in his letters testimonial from Wethersfield and Wellington and entered ‘Hartshead' in its place. These, together with letters testimonial from Dewsbury, signed by John Buckworth, the curate of Batley and the ministers of Ossett and Woodkirk, Patrick sent off to the Archbishop of York on 28 June.
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In the event, William Lucas did resign the living and Buckworth was able to write the nomination papers on 19 July.
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The following day, the archbishop formally licensed Patrick to Hartshead-cum-Clifton. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Patrick continued to sign the registers at Dewsbury as ‘curate' (he would have been entitled to write ‘Officiating Minister') and that he did not appear in the registers at Hartshead as ‘minister' till the end of March 1811.
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The
appointment seems to have made no difference to his life at all; he apparently continued to live and work in Dewsbury just as before. What is even stranger is that, until he actively took over the ministry eight months later, his duties at Hartshead appear to have been taken by David Jenkins, the new curate who had been appointed to replace him at Dewsbury.
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Whatever the cause of the delay in Patrick's removal to Hartshead, the result was that he was still in Dewsbury on 25 September when a young man, William Nowell, of Daw Green, was arrested as an army deserter and taken from his parents for committal to Wakefield prison. The only prosecution witness was James Thackray, the soldier who said he had enlisted Nowell eight days before at one of the annual fairs in the Dewsbury area. Though Nowell's parents had been to Lee Fair, Nowell himself had stayed behind in Dewsbury and, though he had a number of witnesses to prove this alibi, the magistrate at the committal refused to accept their evidence or allow time for more witnesses to be gathered. Nowell was sent to prison as a deserter and stayed there for ten weeks.
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There was an immediate outcry in Dewsbury and Patrick took a leading role in the events that followed.

On the Friday after Nowell's committal, four gentlemen from Dewsbury, including Patrick, called upon the magistrate in Wakefield with two witnesses who were prepared to swear that they had been with Thackray all afternoon and that he had not enlisted any new recruits at Lee Fair; Mr Dawson, the magistrate, again refused to examine the new witnesses. A memorial signed by Patrick, the churchwardens and the principal inhabitants of Dewsbury was then sent to the commander-in-chief of the army asking him to set Nowell free or, at least, to investigate the facts of the case. The letter was referred to the Office of the Secretary at War, which responded asking ‘The Clergyman' to state whether the facts in the memorial were true to his own knowledge or whether he only believed them to be true. Patrick called a vestry meeting and took signed depositions from all the witnesses; he sent them to his old commander of the volunteers, Lord Palmerston, who was now the Secretary at War. Palmerston, however, felt that he could not interfere in the decision of a civil magistrate so impasse had been reached again.

Patrick did not despair: he called into action on Nowell's behalf another of his Cambridge connections, William Wilberforce, who was also one of the members of Parliament for Yorkshire. John Halliley, the vicar's father-in-law, who was in London at the time, was despatched with a letter to
Wilberforce and accompanied him to the War Office. Palmerston was out of town so all that could be done was to request Dawson, through Wilberforce, to re-examine the evidence. Again he refused. Frustrated once more, Patrick and his allies sent the news to Wilberforce and asked him to seek an urgent personal interview with Palmerston. At last, Wilberforce succeeded and an ‘imperative order' was sent to Dawson to review the case.
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On 27 November, Patrick, Mr Hague (a banker from Dewsbury), John Halliley, junior, and Mr Rylah (their solicitor) went to Wakefield for the third time, bringing fifteen witnesses to be examined. The depositions, together with an unexpected one from a Wakefield hairdresser who swore on oath that Thackray had told him the whole story was a pack of lies, were sent off to London and five days later, William Nowell was set free. Patrick had the satisfaction of not only co-ordinating the campaign to free an innocent man, but also of calling in on his behalf those ‘great and affluent friends' of whom Mary Burder complained.
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There was further gratification on seeing a detailed account of the whole story printed in the
Leeds Mercury
of 15 December 1810 but nothing, surely, could have given him as much pleasure as the appending, at the end of the report, of a letter from Palmerston addressed to Patrick himself:

War-Office, 5th Dec. 1810.

No 22,429.

SIR,

Referring to the correspondence relative to William Nowell, I am to acquaint you, that I feel so strongly the injury that is likely to arise to the service from an unfair mode of recruiting, that if by the indictment which the lad's friends are about to prefer against James Thackray they shall establish the fact of his having been guilty of perjury, I shall be ready to indemnify them for the reasonable and proper expences which they shall incur on the occasion.

I am, Sir, Yours, &c.

PALMERSTON.

The Rev. P. Bronte,

Dewsbury, near Leeds.
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William Nowell's case ended triumphantly nearly a year later, on 7 August 1811, when James Thackray was found guilty of wilful and corrupt perjury at the York Assizes and sentenced to transportation for the term of seven
years.
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It is worth pointing out that Patrick had pursued this case throughout one of the most difficult periods of his ministry so far: Nowell's imprisonment and the campaign coincided with the heaviest casualties in the epidemic which struck Dewsbury in the winter months of 1810–11.
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Patrick must have felt a genuine sense of relief when he finally exchanged his curacy at Dewsbury for the living at Hartshead. Leaving behind the muck, smoke, poverty and disease of Dewsbury, he travelled the four miles up hill to Hartshead, a journey familiar to him from the many times he had gone over to take services there during the previous incumbent's illness. Unlike most of the nearby churches, built in a more confident age, which defy the elements on the skylines and hill tops of Yorkshire, the church of St Peter at Hartshead lies huddled into the hill top as though sheltering from the wind. Low and squat, with a stubby, square Norman tower and a roof that comes unusually low down, giving only room for a single storey at the north and south elevations, the church was ancient and unpretentious. When Patrick came there, it had sash windows, wooden pillars, a Norman chancel arch and a flat ceiling to the nave. There was a double-decker pulpit for the preacher and, at the lower level, the parish clerk, high box pews which would almost conceal the congregation, and a gallery at the west end for the musicians and singers. It was already in a state of disrepair and had been for many years; the churchyard was cluttered with the box tombs which Mrs Gaskell found so unusual at Haworth but which are typical of the area and was dominated by a gigantic and very ancient yew tree.
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Patrick found convenient lodgings just opposite the church at a farm, then known as Lousy Thorn, a peculiarly appropriate name for its windswept and bleak aspect. The church stands in glorious isolation some distance from the village of Hartshead which even then was only a cluster of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century farmhouses. Just over a mile or so away, but seeming much further as it is down one steep hill and up another, was the village of Clifton. Today, the gulf is accentuated by the M62 motorway, which has sliced the old parish in half and made the two parts almost completely inaccessible to each other. Clifton, like Hartshead, is perched on the top of an immense escarpment and enjoys panoramic views over the hills in all directions; Dewsbury to the southeast and Brighouse, with Halifax beyond, to the southwest are clearly visible in the valleys below, Bradford lies to the northwest and Leeds to the northeast. The parish was ideally placed for Patrick to become involved in the affairs of the major industrial towns of the West Riding.

Though there was no church at Clifton, the village would have occupied more of Patrick's time as it had a population of 1,181, compared with Hartshead's 547. It was wealthier, too, with several magnificent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stone-built farms and a large number of public houses. Men, women and children from Hartshead and Clifton, and from nearby Hightown and Roberttown, which also fell within Patrick's parish, worked in both the cottage woollen industry and the mills in neighbouring towns. There appears to have been only one large mill within the parish, the Little John Mill on the outskirts of Clifton which, by 1802, had already installed six carding machines. Open-cast coal mining, stone-hewing and wiredrawing, the last based at Clifton, were the other main occupations.
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