Brontës (19 page)

Most of the expenditure went on work on the fabric of the building, repairing and making good the neglect of many years. On 10 November Elizabeth Firth made a special visit to the chapel to see ‘the angel', presumably a new or
at least newly restored statue or painting.
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On completion of the work a new board was installed at the entrance to the chapel which declared to all: ‘This Chapel was repaired and beautified, A.D. 1818. The Rev. P. Brontë, B. A., Minister. Joseph Robertshaw, Joseph Foster, John Hill, John Lockwood and Tim Riley, churchwardens.' Under the names was painted a royal coat of arms, surmounted by the letters ‘G.R.', and at the very bottom, in small lettering, ‘Painted by Thomas Rembrandt Driver'.
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Perhaps the death of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, on 17 November, after a long illness, inspired this gesture of loyalty, particularly as the chapel was closed on the day of her funeral when Patrick should have preached a funeral sermon on her behalf.
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The new year, 1819, began quietly enough with an invitation to tea on 8 January at Kipping House for the three oldest Brontë children, Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte.
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In March there was an important occasion for the chapelry: a large party of about sixty young people was taken to Bradford to be confirmed in the parish church. As they reached Bradford – a distance of some four miles – the weather turned against them. Patrick was concerned, particularly as they still had to walk back to Thornton after the ceremony. He therefore went into the Talbot Hotel, just off the top of Darley Street, and ordered hot dinners to be prepared and waiting for the whole party as they came out of church. Thus fortified, and having sheltered from the worst of the storm, the young people returned safely to Thornton. This unexpected act of kindness was long remembered in the parish.
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Not long afterwards there was a parting of the ways for the Brontës and their family. John Fennell who, since leaving Woodhouse Grove School, had lived and worked in Bradford as a curate to John Crosse and then to his son-in-law at Christ Church, was appointed by the vicar of Halifax to the parish of Cross Stone, which lay between Hebden Bridge and Todmorden.
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Though only some ten or eleven miles away from Thornton as the crow flies, it was actually much further because many miles of untracked moorland lay between; its inaccessibility was increased during the winter months as it stood high up in the Pennines and was almost invariably cut off by snow.

By an extraordinary coincidence, Patrick was almost immediately offered a new post which would take him into the same area. On 25 May, the Reverend James Charnock, perpetual curate of Haworth since 1791, died after a long illness.
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Henry Heap, the vicar of Bradford, no doubt foreseeing the contest that was to come, acted with almost unseemly haste.
Knowing that Patrick was an Evangelical, which would appeal to the inhabitants of Haworth, that he had had experience of similar chapelries at Thornton and Hartshead and that he was struggling to make ends meet in his present, less valuable post, Henry Heap offered him the incumbency. Patrick was taken by surprise but accepted the nomination as ‘a gift and a call of Providence'.
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Unaware of the poisoned chalice he had been handed, Patrick set about securing the necessary papers. On 1 June, Michael Stocks, a friend who was a well-known and respected magistrate in the Halifax area, wrote to Mr Greenwood, one of
the church trustees at Haworth, recommending Patrick as a successor to James Charnock. Though only a short letter, it contained an ominous phrase which foreshadowed the troubles to come: ‘I trust that you will feel no objection to him on account of his possessing the confidence of the vicar of Bradford.'
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Unfortunately for Patrick, the trustees did object and on precisely this ground. What Patrick does not appear to have known, or perhaps failed to appreciate, was that the church trustees at Haworth did not simply exercise the usual powers of recommendation or approval but claimed an absolute right to appoint their own minister. The church at Haworth was a medieval foundation and, like Thornton, was originally a chapel-of-ease built to provide services for the remoter districts and manned by a perpetual curate who remained subject to Bradford. The vicars of Bradford had always had the right to nominate and appoint to the living of Haworth but, since at least 1559, this had effectively been in the hands of the church trustees. When Elizabeth I re-established the Protestant Church in England, after Queen Mary's attempt to restore Catholicism, the inhabitants of Haworth had raised the sum of thirty-six pounds which they then handed over to a trust. In an indenture, made on 18 December 1559, the trustees were empowered to purchase land at Stanbury and use the income from it to pay the salary of the ‘lawfully licensed and admitted minister' of Haworth. The trustees were under an obligation to hand over the rents, dues and profits unless – and this was the crucial phrase – the trustees, their heirs or successors or a major part of them ‘shall at any time hereafter be debarred in their choice or in the nomination of a minister'. An incumbent minister who was negligent in his duties, of infamous character or litigious could similarly be deprived of the income from the church lands, in which case the money had to be distributed among the poor of the parish.
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While the vicar of Bradford claimed the right to nominate and appoint a minister at Haworth, the church trustees could make or break that appointment by declining to pay his salary.

The trust deed had been invoked before. In 1741, the then vicar of Bradford had declined to nominate the most famous of all Haworth's previous clergymen, William Grimshaw, but the trustees were determined to have him and succeeded in securing his appointment by refusing to pay the salary to anyone else. Even John Crosse, that mildest of men, had crossed swords with the trustees over his nomination of James Charnock in 1791 though, typically, he avoided a public conflict by obtaining their full consent before the appointment went forward.
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It was therefore inevitable that there would be a dispute over Charnock's successor, which is why Henry Heap acted so quickly in nominating his replacement.

Perhaps hoping to complete his coup and ensure victory for Bradford before the trustees had had time to meet and rally opposition, Heap made the mistake of going over to Haworth himself. On Whit Sunday, one of the most important festivals in the church calendar, which happened to fall between the death of Charnock and Patrick's nomination, the vicar arrived at Haworth Church to take the day's services. The trustees actually shut the church doors in his face ‘& told him they would have nothing to do with any Person he might nominate,
without their Consent previously
obtained – They claim the ancient Privilege of
chusing their own Minister
–'.
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Heap's response was equally belligerent: on 2 June, still only nine days after Charnock's death, he wrote to the Archbishop of York requesting a licence for Patrick to the perpetual curacy of Haworth which ‘doth of Right belong to my Nomination'.
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The very wording of the nomination was calculated to antagonize the Haworth trustees whose rights, real or assumed, he had completely ignored in the hope of forestalling a reaction. He should have known better. On 14 June the
Leeds Intelligencer
carried this report:

We hear that the Rev. P. Bronte, curate of Thornton, has been nominated by the vicar of Bradford, to the valuable perpetual curacy of Haworth, vacant by the death of the Rev. James Charnock; but that the inhabitants of the chapelry intend to resist the
presentation,
and have entered a caveat at York accordingly.
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At this stage, Patrick decided to invoke the aid of the one Haworth church trustee with whom he had personal contact: Stephen Taylor, a gentleman farmer living at the Manor House in Stanbury, who was the father of Mercy Kaye of Allerton Hall.
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Patrick had probably met him on the numerous
occasions when he called at Allerton Hall, the Kayes being his friends as well as among the more prominent of his parishioners at Thornton.

Patrick paid a visit to Haworth and learnt from Stephen Taylor and some of the other trustees what the facts of the case were and what was the basis of their opposition to him. They had nothing against him personally, but would resist his appointment to the bitter end if it was forced upon them by the vicar of Bradford. Caught in the middle, Patrick evidently felt that it was beneath his dignity to get involved in such a sordid squabble for power, and decided to resign. Perhaps this was seen as an act of betrayal by the vicar who had looked for a sterner stance from his colleague; Patrick was told in no uncertain terms that he could not withdraw ‘in honour, and with propriety' and was threatened with incurring the archbishop's displeasure. The latter offered to allow him to hold both Thornton and Haworth until the matter was satisfactorily settled, so Patrick had no choice but ‘with the help of God, to go on till I see the conclusion'.
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He wrote on 8 July to explain his decision to Stephen Taylor and seek his support:

I have resided for many years in the neighbourhood, where I am well known – I am a good deal conversant with the affairs of mankind – and I do humbly trust that it is my unvarying practice to preach Christ faithfully, as the only Way, the Truth, and the Life. From considerations such as these, I do think that Providence has called me to labour in His vineyard at Haworth, where so many great and good men have gone before me. I therefore request your kindness, and your prayers, and that when I come to preach amongst you, you will use your endeavours to prevent people from leaving the Church, and will exhort them to hear with candour and attention, in order that God's name may be glorified, and sinners saved …
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It is possible that Patrick went to Haworth on 12 July, the Sunday following this letter, in order to take the services and that, despite his request to Stephen Taylor, the congregation walked out or drowned his sermon with shouting and cat-calls; exactly the same thing was to happen to Samuel Redhead soon afterwards. This seems the likeliest explanation for Patrick's sudden change of heart, for on 14 July, two days later, he wrote again to Stephen Taylor and told him that he had written to both the vicar of Bradford and the Archbishop of York to resign Haworth.
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The trustees had won the first round and got their own way once more. They were now prepared to be gracious and sent to Patrick saying that they
might be prepared to consider nominating him themselves if he would come over to Haworth and give them a sample of his preaching. The cool impudence of the suggestion, particularly if Patrick had indeed been driven from their pulpit the week before, deserved the repudiation it got. Patrick's response, however angry he must have felt, was a masterpiece of tact and contained only the most veiled of reprimands: ‘through divine grace my aim has been, and I trust, always will be, to preach Christ and not myself and I have been more desirous of being made the instrument of benefit rather than pleasure to my own congregation'. If they wanted to hear him preach, let them come to him and hear him preach at a time when he did not expect them: ‘It is an easy matter to compose a fine sermon or two for a particular occasion, but no easy thing always to give satisfaction.' They might then take the opportunity to learn about him from his parishioners in Thornton, for, ‘believe me, the character and conduct of a man out of the pulpit is as much to be considered as his character and conduct in, and we are most likely to know those best who live nearest to us –'.
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Whether or not the trustees made the effort to come and hear him preach, matters remained at an impasse for several months. Other clergymen took the duties at Haworth so that Patrick was not drawn into the fray again. He did take care to let the trustees know that, if they so wished, they could hear him preaching on behalf of the Church Missionary Society at both the morning and afternoon services at Keighley on 1 August.
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The ugly mood at Haworth was more than matched by what was going on in the country as a whole. The summer of 1819 had added bad harvests to industrial depression, leading to political discontent which had manifested itself in increasingly violent agitation for reform. The culmination of weeks of popular unrest was the great Manchester meeting on 16 August, when over 50,000 people gathered to hear the Radical, Henry Hunt; the magistrates, terrified of violence, ordered Hunt's arrest and then turned the attendant soldiers on the crowd. The result was the ‘Manchester Massacre' or the ‘Battle of Peterloo' in which one man was killed and forty were wounded. Instead of condemning the outrage, the government sent messages of support to the magistrates and reacted with extraordinary severity, clamping down on all forms of meetings and empowering magistrates to seize arms and prevent the publication of seditious pamphlets. Radicalism was temporarily and brutally suppressed; criticism was silenced by repression.

The events of the previous months were serious enough to merit comment at the eighth annual meeting of the Bible Society, held in the Friends'
Meeting House in Bradford on 15 October; there were ‘very animated' speeches from a number of clergymen, including Patrick, Morgan, Samuel Redhead and Robinson Pool, the Dissenting minister of Thornton.

All these speakers alluded, more or less, to the crisis of the times, as loudly calling upon every Christian to join in disseminating the Word of God, as the only sure guide in life, the sole support of the soul in death, and as alone capable of raising us, through a Saviour's merits to everlasting happiness.
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Though Patrick had wished to keep out of the quarrel at Haworth, too much was at stake for him to be allowed to do so. The stalemate had to be broken somehow and on 8 October the Archbishop of York wrote to him, ordering him to take the duty at Haworth the following Sunday. Patrick reluctantly preached there on 10 October, having forewarned the trustees that he was acting ‘very contrary to my inclination' but pointing out that he could not disobey his archbishop.
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Things cannot have gone too well, for eleven days later his formal resignation was finally accepted, and Patrick was at last free to resume his ministry at Thornton.
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